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(10/25/15 5:18pm)
We give a late happy birthday to BYTE's very own Aidan Hall, Disney is starting a new streaming service, and there is a real life Pokemon Gym in Japan.
Hosts: Andi Tolentino & Aidan Kearney
Camera: Julia Parobek
Teleprompter: Michael Robb
Editing: Michael Robb
Graphics: Meghan Duffy, Lauren Lucas, & Sam Noble
Music: Lex Bravary
Producer: Dalton Martin
(10/09/15 10:01pm)
Dr. Who gets its very own Lego set, Bethesda's Battlecry BETA gets pushed back, and Marvel studios announces their updated lineup for Phase 3.Hosts: Andi Tolentino & Aidan KearneyCamera: Julia ParobekTeleprompter: Darby SiscoeGraphics: Meghan Duffy, Lauren Lucas, and Sam NobleMusic: Lex BravaryProducer: Dalton Martin
(10/07/15 9:02pm)
This week the gang talks about the Mass Effect Theme Park, eSports, and so much more. Check it out!Hosts: Julia Parobek, Dalton Martin, Aidan KearneyEdited by: Matt Turner
(09/28/15 9:22pm)
The Star Wars: Battlefront BETA gets a release date, 'Wolfenstein'
voice actress hints at a sequel, and Wasteland 2 is coming to consoles.
Hosts: Andi Tolentino & Aidan Kearney
Camera: Julia Parobek
Teleprompter: Spencer Smith
Editing: Michael Robb
Music: Lex Bravary
Graphics: Megan Duffy, Sam Noble, & Lauren Lucas
Producers: Dalton Martin & Andi Tolentino
(09/17/15 3:33pm)
This review was based off of the PC version on Steam.
It’s been seven years since a main-series Metal Gear game was released on consoles. With every side-game in-between, such as
Peace Walker and Ground Zeroes, Kojima Productions has taken the best aspects and wrapped them all into one, revenge-filled package. Kojima Production brings down the house with their swan song: Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain.
(04/04/15 12:49am)
We talk "Deadpool" getting an R rating, Super Smash Bros taking character suggestions, and Binding of Isaac coming to the Wii U and 3DS.
(03/10/15 1:01pm)
We talk about the new XBOX One bundle, the Officer killed at Gamestop, Star Wars' new canon character, and more.
(02/11/15 5:29pm)
by Aidan Kearney
Denuvo is the latest in anti-tampering digital rights management software. It has prevented the cracking of multiple games released in 2014 including FIFA 15, Lords of the Fallen, and Dragon Age: Inquisition. No longer will pirates blight PC gaming and cause “millions of dollars” to be lost in profit revenue. Additionally, famed torrenting website “The Pirate Bay” was temporarily taken down in December of 2014 after police raided a server room located in Stockholm, Sweden.
At last, the gaming industry has been saved.
But how much are pirates really harming developers? Or are developers and publishers hurting consumers?
As mentioned, Denuvo is proving to be frustrating to hackers. The process itself is attached to the executable file of the game, checking if the game is connected to the company’s servers. Denuvo also prevents any reverse engineering of any other digital rights management software, such as EA Origins. This means that it prevents pirates from extracting certain files that allow the game to run independently from other clients such as Origins. These files commonly end in a “.dll” format and are found in programs that launch on both Origins and Steam.
According to Denuvo’s website, their anti-tamper measure product has no affect on consumers’ hardware and game performance. A Russian gaming website, however, begs to differ. GameMag claims that Lords of the Fallen writes and rewrites onto the hard drive 150,000 times during the course of forty minutes. While only measured in kilobytes, each copy operation record is written onto the same memory block, which can grow enormously in size. A commenter on the site viewed that within one hour approximately 30 gigabytes of information was written to the hard drive. What this means for consumers is that if anyone is using a solid state hard drive that has a limited amount of read/write processes, this can drastically lower the lifespan of the hard drive.
Even if this data provided by GameMag isn’t investigated by other sources stateside, the company behind Denuvo has had a less than stellar history with consumer rights and DRM. Sony Digital Audio Disk Corporation developed the SecuROM protection product and it was attached to the video game Spore, released in 2008. SecuROM installed a small program at the same time as Spore that checked for legitimate disc copies were installed on the computer once the software ran. Consumers first ran into issues when they realized that upon uninstallation of Spore, SecuROM stayed installed to the computer, preventing full removal of its DRM.
Class-action lawsuits were filed involving the use of this software as consumers claimed that SecuROM damaged their computer and could not be removed without a full-reboot. The issue was not resolved until EA released a special program solely to remove the software from systems. Despite this anti-piracy software, Spore was still the most-pirated game in in 2008, with more 1.7 million downloads recorded from BitTorrent.
EA isn’t the only publisher guilty of this. Other companies such as Activision-Blizzard have implemented DRM software that hinder customers experiences. Blizzard’s most anticipated game in more than 10 years, Diablo III, has a particularly egregious form of always-online DRM. Diablo III uses the same form of DRM as Blizzard’s flagship game: World of Warcraft. Diablo III demands that players sign on with their Battle.net account, requiring an Internet connection, even if you play alone.
Now for a game that’s multiplayer by default like World of Warcraft, this is no issue. But what about Diablo III? What if by some catastrophe Blizzard closes down or shuts off their servers? Plenty of studios have closed down but their games can still be played.
What about games that are always online? If their servers closed players can never access those games again. Attempting to sign in will only be met with an error code. Consumers found problems of their own in Diablo III by claiming they had been wrongfully banned from the game.
Tracey Lien described in a Polygon article how Linux OS users were banned from the game and were accused of cheating by Blizzard’s community manager Barishok. Blizzard had permanently banned Linux users, providing them only with an email claiming that they had used unauthorized, third-party software. The software in question? WINE, a program on Linux that allows users to run Windows programs on the operating system. Interviewed Linux users were appropriately insulted and infuriated with Blizzard’s quick dismissal and labeling as cheaters.
In a way, this DRM is a way for developers to tell consumers that they can only play the game when and how the developer wants them to. This has happened outside of a hypothetical scenario with Darkspore, a more action-oriented sequel to Spore. The game is available on EA’s Origin although their servers are no longer maintained and multiple bugs have been reported that prevent players from logging in and saving their characters.
With all of these efforts to combat piracy, developers have spoken up. SuperMeatBoy developer, Tommy Refenes, argued on his tumblr that sales lost due to piracy is unquantifiable. Hypothesizing sales based on the intentions of a customer can’t be used to calculate revenue compared to the purchase of a physical item, which is how retailers quantify profit loss.
“In the digital world, you don’t have a set inventory. Your game is infinitely replicable at a negligible or zero cost. Digital inventory has no value.” Tommy argues that the money spent researching for more effective DRM can be more effectively quantified into a loss from sales as it is a physical process that a game budget has to be deferred to.
In 2011, site representative of GoodOldGames, Guillaume Rambourg, spoke against DRM at the London Games Conference. Rambourg stated that DRM acts against loyal consumers, breaking down trust between the developer and consumer. Without this essence of trust between the two parties, Rambourg says that “consumers are free to buy a game one day and then the next day go to the competition.” Ironically, Rambourg states that the piracy industry understands their consumers better as they know it has to be simple and easy.
How much have developers listened to their consumers over these events? For years, players have expressed disdain with anti-piracy measures and slowly certain developers have come to understand their plight. Some developers understand that a consumer would rather pirate a game first as a demo, rather than pay full price on release and return it in less than a week after an unsatisfactory experience. Time can only tell to what extent developers and publishers will go for the sake of protecting copyrights.
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Image: Wired UK
(11/07/14 8:11pm)
Cost: $9.99 and 20+ hours
(11/07/14 3:08pm)
(10/29/14 7:09pm)
In the foggy woods within Red Creek Valley, a child goes missing. Before he disappears, Prospero receives a letter from the child asking for help with disturbing information on supernatural phenomena. Paul Prospero, the game’s protagonist, is a detective with paranormal abilities who travels to Red Creek Valley to find this boy, Ethan Carter.
(10/29/14 2:17pm)
By Aidan KearneyIn the foggy woods within Red Creek Valley, a child goes missing. Before he disappears, Prospero receives a letter from the child asking for help with disturbing information on supernatural phenomena. Paul Prospero, the game’s protagonist, is a detective with paranormal abilities who travels to Red Creek Valley to find this boy, Ethan Carter. The Vanishing of Ethan Carter was just recently released on September 26, 2014 as the first game developed by Polish indie developer The Astronauts. The Astronauts are a team of eight people, three of which originally branched off of Epic Games Poland, the makers of Painkiller, and co-developers of the Gears of War series. The Vanishing of Ethan Carter is an incredibly impressive project that is very different from their usual action style. This explorative mystery is an open-world adventure game with gameplay mechanics that harken back to point and click games such as the Monkey Island series and Dracula: Resurrection, but in a first-person perspective. You solve various puzzles throughout the game by inspecting items and the utterly gorgeous environment around them. Refreshingly, the game informs you that it won’t hold your hand as you solve these puzzles. The first one can be missed entirely if the player decides to stay on the path they start off on rather than exploring the area around it. I am totally, definitely not speaking from experience.The influence, and overall atmosphere of the game, is that of twentieth-century tales of the macabre. Mystery, murder, and the unknown await you in Red Creek Valley, with secrets waiting to be uncovered using Prospero’s paranormal ability to see through the spectral realm and locate puzzle pieces and piece together timelines that will reveal how Ethan disappeared.The woods within Red Creek valley are beautiful and mysterious, with an ominous air about them. The atmosphere is greatly enhanced by the game’s absolutely beautiful soundtrack and audio design. To fully hear every single layered piece of music within the soundtrack, the developers recommend on their website to play with headphones, and hearing every aspect of the beautiful soundtrack produces an amazingly immersive effect.Where the game really shines, and encourages the player to explore, is the detail of the environment within The Vanishing of Ethan Carter. Dense foliage covers the ground and sways in the wind. Dust within the crumbling, decaying buildings hangs in the air and clouds the decrepit rooms. Tiles on a church located in the game are more worn than others, chipped off on certain sides and mold settles in. This is due to the developer’s use of photogrammetry.Photogrammetry uses a specific algorithm that allows designers to create photorealistic 3D models from real world objects. Developer The Astronauts took the time to capture photos of every piece of rock, tree, grass, and building at nearly every angle possible and used them to create their autumn woods of Red Creek Valley. The results are breathtaking to say the least.Between the breathtaking visuals, ominous but beautiful soundtrack, and story that plays out similar to a Stephen King or macabre novel, The Vanishing of Ethan Carter gives you a sense of progression as you solve different pieces of the mystery and explore more areas of Red Creek ValleyThe Vanishing of Ethan Carter is currently available on Steam for $20, and set for a release on the PlayStation Store for the PlayStation 4 sometime in 2015. The Astronauts deliver an impressive, next-gen adventure game with a quality story that is definitely worth experiencing.
(10/17/14 7:26pm)
Cost: $5.00 and 10+ hours (In one playthrough)
(10/17/14 2:22pm)
(10/10/14 2:50pm)
by Aidan KearneyCost: 20+ Hours and $10-12Year: 2010Have you ever wanted to be an ex-football player turned military research assistant who fights Russian space robots in a colony orbiting the moon while sliding around on his knees using rocket boosters?If you happen to have such strangely specific interests then Vanquish is the game for you.
Directed by Shinji Mikami (known for Resident Evil 4, Shadows of the Damned, and the upcoming The Evil Within) and developed by Platinum Games in October 2010, Vanquish is a third person shooter that emphasizes fast mobility to stand out in the cover-based shooter genre.
You take control of Sam Gideon. He is employed by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency on a search and rescue mission with a prototype Augmented Reaction Suit.The plot of the game is rather simple, harkening back to the early 1990’s anime in which a hot-blooded protagonist uses a power suit to fight against a totalitarian superpower by cutting down its robotic armies. Sam Gideon is attached to a task force composed of marines, special forces, and defense forces on a responsive attack against a sect of Russian forces who seized the colony orbiting the moon. From this colony, the Russian forces improvised a microwave emitter to vaporize San Francisco from orbit. But the real motivation for playing isn’t to learn how this story unfolds; it’s in the intense, fast-paced gameplay. Shinji Mikami, being a master of developing third-person shooters, brings players an action-packed, bullet filled-romp with speed that a racing game would envy.
The game’s unique movement system is what really makes it shine today. Although there are cover mechanics, you’re actively encouraged to use a set of rocket thrusters built into Sam’s Augmented Reaction Suit, allowing you to speed around the battlefield and avoid enemy fire. Even in cover, you can still do some incredibly cool things. Leaping out of cover and aiming at the same time allows you to activate the augmented reaction: a mechanic that slows down time to allow for increased accuracy.
Long story short, bullet time can be activated any time the player is falling through the air, allowing for some incredibly stylish skills.
Vanquish’s awesome gameplay earned it multiple awards such as “Best Shooter” award from X360, and my personal favorite: GamesRadar’s “Most Oh S**t Moments Per Minute” award.
Aesthetically, Vanquish can be rather dull, because the game’s palette seems to consist of gray, white, black, and some red here and there.
Despite the rather bleak colors, Vanquish makes up for it by rendering an incredible amount of objects on the screen at once. Particles, enemies, geometry, and smooth animations are all brought on screen in 1044x720p HD. A rather impressive feat considering its 2010 release, and Platinum’s not-so-grandiose budget compared to the average AAA blockbuster produced in the west.
However, thanks to clever development tricks like screen distortion and per-object motion blur, fast movements and large explosions don’t hinder the frame rate, even on the now-aging last-gen consoles.A common criticism is that the campaign is too short as it can easily be completed in under eight hours. If you play it on an easy difficulty, or if you figure out how to effectively utilize the gameplay mechanics, you can beat the game in less time than that.
Even though the game has a rather short campaign, it still offers lots of replay value, just like Platinum Games’ other titles like Bayonetta and Metal Gear Rising.
Multiple levels of difficulty add for more challenging gameplay, in which an extensive understanding of game mechanics is necessary for survival. There are additional trial missions available aside from the main campaign, with intense challenges where you can test for multiple solutions. Each mission, you’re evaluated by a multiple factors. These factors include: completion time, accuracy, kills, damage taken, time out of cover, allied soldiers protected, and number of kills during augmented reaction.
Despite the short campaign, the trial missions and added difficulties of the campaign provides almost endless replay value. This high-octane shooter will cost you about ten dollars and is available for Playstation 3 and Xbox 360.Images: Vanquish Wiki, NeoGaf
(09/25/14 9:33pm)
By Aidan KearneyJust last month 4A games and publisher Deep Silver released Metro Redux, a remastered combo package of Metro 2033 and Metro: Last Light. These games were hailed for their unique environments, excellent visuals, and tense combat deep in the tunnels of the Moscow Metro. The decrepit apartment blocks and dens of mutants the player wanders through leaves you chilled but always wanting more.
But what other games take place in a similar environment? Besides the Fallout series, what can give the player a feeling of desolation and survival?
Look no further than S.T.A.L.K.E.R.series, developed by GSC Gameworld.
S.T.A.L.K.E.R. is an acronym for Scavenger, Trespasser, Adventurer, Loner, Killer, Explorer, and Robber. The game takes place in the Zone, located near the nuclear power plant Chernobyl in the European country of Ukraine. The Zone was created 20 years after the original Chernobyl meltdown by another radioactive anomaly which mutated much of the wildlife and spawned anomalous artifacts.The eponymous Stalkers are attracted to the Zone by the artifacts, and attempt to return them to the outside world to be analyzed for profit.
The twist? The outside world is still perfectly normal. However, it is experiencing amazing scientific advances due to the stalkers and sanctioned military scientists retrieving the artifacts from inside the zone. The story is loosely based off of an art film in 1979 that shares the same name, directed by Andrei Tarkovsky, which is in turn an adaptation of the novel Roadside Picnic written by Boris and Arkady Strugatsky
In the game, you are one of the many Stalkers, but you find yourself in the Zone with no memory of how you got there, or who you are, and your PDA only has one note on it: “Kill Strelok.” You, labeled as “The Marked One” have to find out who you are and who Strelok is, all while exploring the mysteries of this cruel Zone.You are not alone though. Stalkers survive by helping each other, exchanging supplies and favors. Different factions will ask for your help as well, and it’s your choice to assist the hostile Bandits, the Free Stalkers, the militarized Duty Faction, or the lawless Freedom.
S.T.A.L.K.E.R. is an open world, explorative FPS with elements of horror and role-playing-games. There are quests, factions, and various stats that you can increase. Progression is primarily tracked through your gear. You start off in the Zone as a rookie, with nothing but a thin jacket and a hand-me-down pistol to your name. As you work your way through the Stalker food chain, you acquire better weapons and armor and make a name for yourself in the Zone, if you can survive.
If you enjoy modding, the S.T.A.L.K.E.R.community has developed various mods that enhance the game, add new content, and can make your experience in the Zone even more dangerous. The first game, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Shadows of Chernobyl, was released in 2007, is capable of running on an affordable laptop or computer. There are compatibility issues with newer operating systems, but solutions can be easily found thanks to the game’s community. Thanks to the game’s fantastic gunplay, uniquely gripping atmosphere, and lively modding community, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. remains relevant today and a fantastic entry in any gamer’s library.