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Rumours that Halle Berry may be off the next X-Men film appear to have been kiboshed, but also given a small grain of truth, judging by a newly-released trailer for X-Men: Days of Future Past, which shows her character Storm being killed after just one scene – and in a way very similar to that in the original source material, it appears.
Ostensibly based on the two-book saga of the same name from the 1980s, the latest trailer for X-Men: Days of Future Past gives a clear nod to some of the more key moments of the graphic novels for inclusion in the film. We also get to see The Sentinels — the robots created by the United States government to control the mutants. Here however, they’ve been given a modern appearance more reminiscent of Terminator than their original 1980s design.
Hit up the trailer below, and feel free to leave your opinions in the comments:
This week I tried a recent addition to Steam. The Puzzle game called Eets Munchies. Eets Munchies is about a little creature that looks much like a mix between a rabbit and a piranha, who always seems to be hungry for sweets.
At first when I looked up screenshots of the game I thought it may be a platformer game where you control the little creature. But actually it is quite the opposite. The little guy moves on his own and you need to influence what he does and where he goes by placing items and environmental pieces, as well as interacting with the different things in the level to help him get to the 3 treats and lastly the cake at the end.
But as the game reminds you at times, it’s easy to get 1 or 2 of the treats, but getting all 3 before going to the cake is supposed to be the challenge. Because if you don’t do the right things, the little creature could end up going after the cake before you get all the treats in the area.
So this is how the game works. You start a level where everything, including the creature, is frozen in place. In this time you need to place the items they give you some place in the level where it could help the little guy go where it needs to go. These items include wood boards that can bridge gaps or block areas off, a flying whale that can inhale the little creature or other items and launch them in the direction its facing, bombs that explode when they come in contact with something, arrows that can dictate what direction certain items go, and many more items that you unlock as you go. There are also items that the creature can eat as well that affects how it moves. Like an onion that makes it unable to jump, a pepper that allows it to jump further and a cupcake that changes him back to normal.
Once you have the items where you want them you can then hit a button which puts everything, including the creature, in motion. While you can’t move the little guy around yourself, you can use some of the items in the environment that you either placed or were already there to move it or items around. While things are in motion you can click items like a spring flower which bounces things around, or click the flying whale to inhale the creature and items to shoot it in a certain direction.
Quite often you will fail a level, but don’t worry. This could happen if the creature jumps off into the void or if it doesn’t get all the treats before the cakes. You can restart the level anytime, no problem. In this game you practically need to experiment sometimes to see what works. This can take many tries. But all in all the puzzles aren’t too complicated. Once in a while you will get stuck on a puzzle or two but when you figure them out it feels good.
If puzzle solving is not enough for you, the game also has a built in level creator which allows you to make and share your own puzzles on steam.
One thing I do like about this game is the art style. It has a nice hand drawn cartoon look to it and the animation is really nice. Even the music supports that style. I can’t help but love the look of the main character. It looks cute but it also looks like it will bite your hand off if you got to close to it. 😉
Another thing that you would notice with this game when you first open it is that it is locked to a certain screen resolution. The resolution makes it look like it is more fit to play on an iPad then a computer. But then this game is also available on iTunes as well as Steam, so that may explain it. And while it would be nice to be able to change it, how the levels are laid out, it’s not too big of a problem.
So all in all I would recommend this game to anyone who loves puzzle games and who wants a game that they can jump in and out off quite easily. It’s a nice game to pick up if you want to spend a few moments figuring out things in a constructive mode where everything affects everything else. Otherwise this may not be the game for you.
You can get Eets Munchies on Steam and iTunes. (Steam currently has a deal where you get 20% off if you own any other Klei Entertainment games on Steam including: Don’t Starve, Shank, and the original Eets)
VR fans take note! Oculus have announced today at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco that they are working on a second-generation version of their hardware the Oculus Rift, currently available only as a developer kit (called the DK2) for the moment.
The Oculus Rift has recently been making waves in the gaming community for actually being a fairly decent step forward in the process of developing Virtual Reality gaming into something that is actually feasible and attractive to both developers and customers. The apparatus is worn across the eyes and actually does a decent job in throwing the player into the middle of the gaming environment of the number of games that have support for it built in. However, there were still some issues experienced, chief of which was ‘simulation sickness’ which although mostly absent couldn’t be fully removed from the first-generation version of the hardware as well as still being somewhat bulky and wired up. The second-generation Oculus Rift is being developed with the feedback in mind.
For a start the resolution of each of the two fields of vision in the Rift have been upped to 960×1080 and includes a custom built camera that faces the player to track motion depth, which also reduces the number of wires required. There is only the one cable connected to the apparatus now which splits into a HDMI cable and a USB cable to provide both video and power through the one wire. The DK2 reduces the motion blur and judder that were pinpointed as the two main causes of simulation sickness by Oculus by employing low-persistence OLED. It will also ship with a built-in latency tester and an SDK with engine integrations available for the Unreal Development Kit, Unity 4 and Unreal Engine 4, which Epic Games has just made available to more developers through a subscription system.
Oculus say that the DK2 isn’t identical to the consumer version of the Rift that’s coming, but it is similar enough and has all the important pieces, so games that get developed using the DK2 will still play the same on the consumer version later, although Oculus is hoping to make the VR experience even better for the consumer Rift. Although there is no announced release date for the actual second-generation Rift, there’s a possibility that development might be sped up a little with the recent announcement from Sony that they are planning to make their own competing VR headset called ‘Project Morpheus’ although it too is still in development with no price or release date available.
Oculus are making the DK2 available to people who pre-order the developer kit for $350 and plan to start shipping it out to those people in July.
Epic Games has announced at the Game Developers Conference that they are planning to make the popular next-generation version of their game engine, the Unreal Engine 4, available to the public in a subscription-based model that will involved a 5 percent royalty agreement in gross sales that come from games made using it.
AAA devs have had access to Unreal Engine for a while now but now Epic Games have decided to make it available for smaller developers to use too, with the subscription set to be around $19 a month. The agreement to take 5 percent gross sale royalties also applies to free-to-play games that include micro-transactions but not to games that are totally free and for fun. Previously larger devs would be in negotiations that took weeks or even months and involved many millions of dollars but Epic’s desire to make their engine more accessible to all has required them to draft the entirely new business model they have presented at the GDC.
“You get access to everything: the unreal editor, for PC and Mac, and on those platforms you can then deploy to iOS and Android. All those platforms stay and more are coming in the future,” Tim Sweeney, the founder of Epic Games said during the presentation.
The source code of the Unreal Engine 4 is also being released in the hopes that it will encourage tinkering and optimisation of the code by the gaming community to further improve the engine’s performance and use for better, smaller games made within it. Already it’s been demonstrated that changes to a game can be made in real-time either during test play or simulation mode.
It seems with the face of the gaming industry steadily becoming one where free-to-play, mobile and indie gaming is quickly becoming a very profitable and notable market, Epic’s bold move could be seen as their attempt to get a piece of the action through their simple but all-encompassing royalty agreement tied to the new public licensing of their engine. It is also their attempt to stay relevant in an industry where competitors such as Unity offer multi-platform engines that cover everything from HTML5 browser games all the way up to AAA titles.
Sweeney described the new business model as a “bold, new move” for Epic Games, and it’s certainly one that will get the attention and praise of many a small developer looking to make their ideas a reality.
