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A few Reddit users have datamined the Overwatch PTR and found some very interesting sound files. They seem to hint at a few new maps and possibly a new game mode, as well as some interesting seasonal things.
Ubisoft’s team up with Red Lynx for Trials of the Blood Dragon gave us a very unexpected game, mashing the popular bike track game with one of Far Cry’s more fabulous spin-offs. Your opinions may vary on how well it works, but now Ubisoft are putting out quite the offer.
There’s a demo for the game available and Ubisoft have laid down the challenge: beat the demo and you get the entire game. 30-missions worth of $15 game. For free.
Of course, there is a slight catch – you need to complete the demo in less than 15 faults and if you’ve ever played a Trials game you know that the game’s tracks and those created by the community love to trip you up by having something move that you don’t expect. So you’d better be good if you wish to own the 80s neon-filled experience without paying out for it. Thank god that the respawn mechanic in Trials is actually pretty quick and uncomplicated.
If you want to take up the mantle and attempt this challenge, you’ve until July 31st to beat the demo and bag a copy. So you’d better get practicing.
Gears of War 4 is going to be the first game that will supposedly benefit from Microsoft’s newly announced Xbox Play Anywhere initiative, allowing for the ability to cross-buy and cross-play the game on either Xbox or PC. However, to be sure that the PC version doesn’t lose out, it’ll come with a few extra options to make us of the greater option of graphical power and processing speed a PC could offer the game.
Speaking in an interview, The Coalition’s technical director Mike Rayner explained the benefits of Gears on PC for players.
“Support for v-sync tearing has recently come to UWP and we will be able to offer proper unlocked frame-rate support that gamers expect on day one. With Unreal Engine 4 and our own custom modifications, we can take much better advantage of multiple CPU cores, alleviating the game from being CPU-bound and allowing more room for the GPU to shine with enhanced visual quality or higher framerates. Single-player will not be locked to 30fps on PC.”
This means that with the range of tasty settings on offer, you might even be able to fit 60FPS provided everything with UWP works properly with the new support for various options players have been asking for. Among things offered will be a benchmarking tool to help measure FPS, higher resolution textures that could go up to 4K if your machine can handle it and dynamic resolution support and scaling.
Gears of War 4 is planned to release on October 11th of this year, with a beta planned to happen some time before that.
Grow Home was quite a successful little game. For those of you who missed out, Grow Home saw one little droid’s quest to grow as much green as possible to reoxygenate his homeworld, mainly through the use of giant, ever branching beanstalk vines that he rode to climb ever higher. Now the sequel game has an announced release date and it’s pretty soon.
Grow Home’s sequel Grow Up was announced at E3 last month, and will see the Botonical Utility Droid journeying ever higher through a “new open-world” as he tries to recover the parts of his lost spacecraft MOM (and I would assume reassemble it too. In a blog post about the game Ubisoft Reflections reveals that BUD will be accompanied by a new flying companion named POD and will also have access to a new device called the Floradex 3000, a device that will allow for BUD’s cloning of the game’s 24 different plant species to allow for easier passage as BUD makes his way to his ultimate target destination of the homeworld’s moon.
Grow Up will be coming to PC and the Xbox One and PS4 on August 16th.
Check out the game’s E3 announcement trailer below:
Summer Games Done Quick has come to an end now, having shown off some great speedrunning from some of the best in the speedrunning community. Now we wait another six months for the Winter event, but until then it’s worth talking about the event and its tally.
It’s likely that you didn’t manage to catch all of the event but all of the speedruns have been backed up onto the event’s Youtube channel so you’ll be able to catch up on the games that interest you at your own leisure. Of course, one part that everyone seems to have watched is when Bl00d_Thunder’s Bioshock run seemed to be taken over by an inopportune Windows 10 update; really a fairly clever little prank that allowed the livestream to not suffer consequences from the game’s cutscenes later causing copyright issues when uploaded onto Youtube.
The main point of any Games Done Quick event though is that these speedrunners are gaming quickly for the sake of charity and fundraising and this event saw them raising for Doctors Without Borders, and their current amount as of time of writing is almost $1.3 million – $1,298,479.44 if you want to be precise about it. The average donation was about $42.10 with the single largest donation being more than $59.5k.
As always it’s great to see people gaming for charity and giving something to those organisations that deserve the help and support.
