Ok, I’ll kick off this review by admitting I’m actually pretty bad at this game, I spent a couple of weeks trying and honestly, I’m just bad 😀

So, onto the review…

Bow we’ve been following Ironcast on PC since it was released on STEAM March 2015, roll on a year later and the XBox One version was released on the 9th of March.

At it’s heart, IronCast is a turn based gem collecting game, but calling it just that does it an incredible disservice. This is a roguelike tactical RPG if ever there was one.

Inspired by Victorian era science fiction writers such as H.G. Wells and Jules Verne. Ironcast is set in an exciting alternative history; a time when refined men and women in top hats and bonnets commanded gigantic walking war machines, laying waste to the enemies of the British Empire.

Take control of a 7 meter tall walking vehicle called an Ironcast and face off against an invading force of enemy Ironcast in order to defend 1880’s Victorian England. Battles are fought by generating resource nodes which in turn drive the Ironcast’s various weapons and systems. You must choose how to spend these nodes wisely, either offensively in order to cripple and destroy your opponents, or defensively, if they suspect a barrage of incoming weapons fire is due.

As the blurb says, you are the commander of an 1800’s era steampunk inspired steam tank/walker. You have to collect gems in your turn the correspond to ammo, coolant, etc, which you then use to move your mech, fire your weapons and/or raise your shields, but you never really have enough to do all of it.

The game is simple in idea, but in the execution, its easy to forget what you’ve done and as you’ll see in my twitch playthrough below, I regularly forgot to do something or simply ran out of what I needed to keep myself alive or attack the enemy. Now this could just be me, watching other streams, people are gettign the hang of it, but i also wonder if for me, the transistion from keyboard and mouse, to a single controller system is, for me, the downfall. Everything in the controller layout makes sense, and on screen the items are marked with the button that makes them work, but maybe it was too much for this old senile head to master.

That aside, I really enjoyed playing Ironcast and I love the steampunk vibe of the game.

The sound is also great too, the voice acting is a wonderful cockney British that makes me feel like I’m part of the game (it is my natural accent anyway) and the force feedback of the controller suited the sounds of the gun fire and moving mech perfectly too.

The leveling up and skill system seemed a little tricky to get to grips with and my main gripe while playing it on stream was some of the text is too small to read, even on my rather large tv in teh front room, something that would be less of a issue on a pc monitor you’d usually sit closer to.

As I said though, I enjoyed Ironcast and I will play it a lot more and it’s definitely worth £10, so head over to xbox.com or check your Xbox One’s store page!

~Lone

A Steam powered 6.5 out of 10!

Almost three years after its announcement, development has stopped on the next iteration of the long-lived MMO franchise.

Daybreak Studios’ president Russ Shanks announced the news on the game’s official site:

I’m writing today to let you know that, after much review and consideration, Daybreak is discontinuing development of EverQuest Next.

 

For the past 20 years EverQuest has been a labor of love. What started as a deep passion of ours, as game creators, grew into a much larger passion shared by you, millions of players and Daybreakers alike. Watching EverQuest’s ability to entertain and bring people together has inspired and humbled us. It’s shaped our culture and has emboldened us to take aggressive risks with our game ideas and products. When we decided to create the next chapter in the EverQuest journey, we didn’t aim low. We set out to make something revolutionary.

 

For those familiar with the internals of game development, you know that cancellations are a reality we must face from time to time. Inherent to the creative process are dreaming big, pushing hard and being brutally honest with where you land. In the case of EverQuest Next, we accomplished incredible feats that astonished industry insiders. Unfortunately, as we put together the pieces, we found that it wasn’t fun. We know you have high standards when it comes to Norrath and we do too. In final review, we had to face the fact that EverQuest Nextwould not meet the expectations we – and all of you – have for the worlds of Norrath.

 

The future of the EverQuest franchise as a whole is important to us here at Daybreak.  EverQuest in all its forms is near and dear to our hearts.  EverQuest and EverQuest II are going strong.  Rest assured that our passion to grow the world of EverQuest remains undiminished.

EverQuest Next was an ambitious attempt to evolve the franchise. The first phase of that evolution was EverQuest Next Landmark, which was released as a beta in 2013. Landmark was focused on player creation, letting users craft huge structures and then sell the blueprints to each other.

EverQuest Next began development at Sony Online Entertainment, a corporate cousin to the PlayStation brand that was sold off last year to investment firm Columbus Nova and rebranded as Daybreak Studios.

In an interview with MMORPG, Shanks says that EverQuest and EverQuest II are still in active development. He also says that Daybreak will continue to explore ways to modernize EverQuest and notes the company’s current priorities:

The future of the EverQuest franchise is important to our company and you have not seen the last of Norrath by any means. It’s just as engrained in our hearts as it is for our players. We helped usher in the era of MMOs because we loved the idea of bringing gamers together within the game worlds in massive numbers, and we’ve continued to build on that over our 20-year history. The adventures within the worlds of EQ and EQII continue unabated today, and there is plenty of room for more.

 

Right now, we are focused on launching Landmark, advancing H1Z1: Just Survive, bringing DC Universe Online to Xbox One players, and launching H1Z1: King of the Kill on PC, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One.

Nintendo rose a fair few eyebrows in technology circles, as well as here at Sanitarium Towers, when it announced the 3D Classics line – classic games from older consoles such as the NES and Game Boy with a 3D graphic upgrade, offering a unique way to show of the power of the Nintendo 3DS handheld. While the idea has its merits, with a number of classic Nintendo titles getting the 3D Treatment – and persuading SEGA to join in and do the same to some classic SEGA titles – it has to be said that there are actually very few titles that have had the 3D Classic treatment.

Wouldn’t it be cool if you could take a NES game of your own choosing, and add 3D? If you’ve found yourself thinking that, you may want to check out Geod Studio’s new project, 3DNes – a work-in-progress Unity-based emulator that, as the name suggests, converts NES games into 3D.

Considering the simplicity of NES games, translating them into 3D is actually a difficult task. Unlike SNES games, which have four background layers, NES games have a single layer for the entire background. Imagine a diorama or a board game – everything in the background is printed on one board, while all the sprites – like your character the ground, enemies, items – are all just pieces on top. To allow the entire game to look 3D, 3DNes uses an algorithm that analyses the flat background and cuts it up into the pieces that make it up, then attempts to turn each piece into a 3D Object. The software is even clever enough to turn round objects into spheres or tubes, so for example, a ball will actually look like a ball instead of just a circle.

Exactly how well this works depends on the game in question, with things getting messier as the backgrounds get more complex. Games like my favourite franchise, Mega Man are translated well and benefit greatly from the effect, but games such as Contra or Castlevania somewhat struggle. Perhaps the best-emulated game is the original Super Mario Bros., which the developer admits was the main focus of the emulator and the most tested, which may explain the gap in quality between it and other games.

This having been said, Geod Studio hopes to improve the number of games that work well through subsequent beta releases, with head of the project Trần Vũ Trúc aiming for one-tenth of the entire NES library as his marker for success. He also suggests that there might be the potential for users to individually tailor the emulator for certain games, but is quick to state this is not currently the case, as he wants to ensure there’s “a strong emulation engine as the backbone” first.

At the moment, the emulator exists only online, as a WebGL game playable through the Unity Player. This means it only properly supports Mozilla-based browsers, such as Firefox or Seamonkey. It’s also extremely unstable, particularly when not using a AMD Graphics card, and may fail to go beyond loading the ROM, or even fail to work at all. However, Trần states that future releases of the emulator will be made available as software downloads, so it should only be a matter of time before we all get to try it properly.

This article originally appeared on Technically Motivated.

This week, Microsoft has touted a new initiative that they’ve said will unify platforms, making it easier to for developers to release games on both PC and Xbox One. But at least one major developer isn’t thrilled with Microsoft’s plans.

In an opinion piece published in The Guardian this morning, Epic Games co-founder Tim Sweeney absolutely railed against Microsoft, calling upon other developers to fight against the corporation for “moving against the entire PC industry.” Specifically, Sweeney criticized Microsoft’s new Universal Windows Platform, which allows developers to build games and apps that can run across all of Microsoft’s hardware including Windows 10, Xbox One, and any Windows-branded tablets and phones.

The problem, Sweeney wrote, is that with UWP, Microsoft has created a closed ecosystem where developers must use the Windows Store and go through Microsoft’s certification processes to release games on that platform. Sweeney said he sees this as contrary to the spirit of PC development—a huge blow for Microsoft, as Epic is one of the biggest companies in the space. Epic is best known not just for their developer toolset, the Unreal Engine, but for creating the popular Xbox franchise Gears of War, which Microsoft purchased in 2014.

“They’re curtailing users’ freedom to install full-featured PC software, and subverting the rights of developers and publishers to maintain a direct relationship with their customers,” Sweeney wrote.

Microsoft disagrees with this assessment. Windows vice president Kevin Gallo told The Guardian in a response to Sweeney’s op-ed that Microsoft is not, in fact, building a closed platform. “The Universal Windows Platform is a fully open ecosystem, available to every developer, that can be supported by any store,” he said. “We continue to make improvements for developers; for example, in the Windows 10 November Update, we enabled people to easily side-load apps by default, with no UX required.”

Sweeney had criticized Microsoft for making it difficult and confusing to install UWP-developed apps outside of the Windows Store, pointing out that any user who wants to do so would have to dig through a series of convoluted menus and options. “It’s true that if you dig far enough into Microsoft’s settings-burying UI, you can find a way to install these apps by enabling ‘side-loading,’” Sweeney wrote. “But in turning this off by default, Microsoft is unfairly disadvantaging the competition. Bigger-picture, this is a feature Microsoft can revoke at any time using Windows 10’s forced-update process.”

The whole op-ed is brutal and worth reading, encouraging developers and customers to fight against Microsoft’s new initiative.

“As the founder of a major Windows game developer and technology supplier, this is an op-ed I hoped I would never feel compelled to write,” Sweeney wrote. “But Epic has prided itself on providing software directly to customers ever since I started mailing floppy disks in 1991. We wouldn’t let Microsoft close down the PC platform overnight without a fight, and therefore we won’t sit silently by while Microsoft embarks on a series of sneaky manoeuvre aimed at achieving this over a period of several years.”

Of course, all of Epic Games otehr games, the new Unreal Tournament, Paragon, etc are ONLY available through Epic’s own launcher, which also make you wonder if this is a case of pot and kettle…

What do you think?

The Skylanders franchise is teaming up with the advocacy group Autism Speaks for a series of toys-to-life figures. The centerpiece of the Light it Up Blue campaign is a series of blue and white Skylanders Superchargers figures launching today, a joint press release states.

Four toys — including two characters named Splat and Trigger Happy, as well as two vehicles called Splatter Splasher and Gold Rush — are available for sale now in the United States and Europe. Toys will go on sale in Canada on April 1.

“Since the debut of the franchise, we’ve heard from parents that Skylanders plays a special role in the lives of their kids on the autism spectrum,” said Activision’s Josh Taub, senior vice president of Skylanders product management. “The entire Skylanders team was deeply committed and proud to bring these special toys to life. If they can put a smile on a child’s face, then we know we’ve done our job right.”

“Autism affects one in every 42 boys and one in 68 children in the United States,” said Peter Morton, Autism Speaks’ vice president of corporate development. “We’re proud to work with Skylanders, an iconic franchise that’s known for bringing joy and magic to kids and families.”