Mar 18
Today amongst announcements of the first full-scale virtual reality headset – Project Morpheus for the PlayStation 4 – Sony announced a bevy of software partners. Amongst them were Wwise, Unity … Continue reading
Mar 18
Sony is working with NASA to turn Project Morpheus, its new virtual reality headset for PlayStation 4, into both a science and an entertainment tool. The collaboration, revealed at GDC … Continue reading
Mar 18
With all eyes on Google’s new Android Wear program for smartwatches, what better time for the Glass team to show off a little of its wearable history, revealing an early … Continue reading
Mar 18
The gaming developer action has begun this week in San Francisco, California, as we descend upon the 2014 version of GDC, the Game Developers Conference. This conference is held at … Continue reading
Mar 17
Today at GDC 2014, Pebble has announced an expansion in its wrist-centric mobile game offerings, rolling out the red carpet for three new games now available in the Pebble appstore: … Continue reading
Mar 17
Google has updated its Google Play Game services to add multiplayer support to iOS, just as on Android, in addition to game gifts for sending in-game objects to other players. … Continue reading
Aug 19
Nintendo first shared details of its Wii U Web Framework at GDC in March, which it hoped would encourage more apps and games to be ported over, and facilitate quicker Wii U game prototyping. Fast-forward to GDC Europe and Martin Buchholz, manager of developer relations at Nintendo, confirmed that the framework has now been updated to include eCommerce support — such as DLC purchases. Something of a significant lure for those with existing games that have yet to be convinced to move them over to Wii U. It’s not quite in-app purchases, but it will certainly ease the worries of those game makers who prefer to monetize their titles after the initial transaction.
Aug 19
We’re live from Gamescom 2013!
Posted in: Today's Chili
Gamescom is once more upon us, and a quartet of Engadget’s finest are here in Cologne, Germany to cover all the major game happenings live from the (enormous) show floor at the Koelnmesse. We’ll be at Sony’s big event tomorrow afternoon bringing you liveblog coverage, and from Microsoft’s “showcase” event — Nintendo isn’t holding anything formal, though we’d love to see a surprise Wii U price drop this week. Also, Valve and Epic are notoriously absent from 2013’s proceedings.
This year’s show promises the first big European news assault on Microsoft and Sony’s next-gen game boxes, not to mention a more specific date for PlayStation 4’s launch. Our friends at Oculus Rift are also milling about, and we’re always hoping to hear more about their upcoming consumer-grade Oculus headset. First up this week we’ve got the Euro version of the Game Developers Conference — should you wish to follow along with our intrepid team as the week progresses, we’ve put together a convenient Twitter list right here. Willkommen!
Filed under: Gaming, Software, HD, Sony, Microsoft, Nintendo
Apr 02
When the Wikipad went from 10.1-inches to just 7-inches earlier this year, subsequently cutting its price in half alongside the size reduction, the gaming-centric Android tablet went from riskily priced potential failure to affordable item of interest in one swift move. $500 for a 10.1-inch tablet with a proprietary gaming controller peripheral? With a Tegra 3, no less? That already sounds outdated, and at $500, it sounds outright crazy. Though Wikipad promises a 10.-1-inch version is still in the works, the 7-incher is headed for retail in the coming weeks, with the aforementioned Tegra 3 quad-core SoC, a 1,280 x 800 IPS screen, Jellybean 4.1, and that enormous detachable game controller (12 buttons in all!). At last week’s Game Developers Conference, we had a chance to check out the latest version of the Wikipad just ahead of its retail launch — for more on that meeting, join us beyond the break.
Gallery: Wikipad hands-on (7-inch, GDC 2013)
Filed under: Gaming, Peripherals, Tablets
Mar 30
Just a couple days after we got our hands on Tenya Wanya Teen‘s crazy 16-button arcade stick, we were treated to its polar opposite; Divekick‘s two-button controller. Created by Iron Galaxy Studios just to show off the game at PAX East, the controller consists of two buttons slightly larger than the palms of our hands; the yellow one denotes a jump or dive, while the blue corresponds to a kick. As a parody of the fighting genre, Divekick‘s gameplay avoids complicated combo moves, is incredibly simple and immensely enjoyable, if we do say so ourselves.
Unlike traditional fighting games, the health bars are essentially meaningless, as a single power hit can take down your rival. Therefore you’re focused on just the most basic movements — a common one involves jumping in the air, tapping the other button for the downward kick, and then tapping it again to fly backwards. As for moving your character about, a jump and kick combo will get you charging towards your foe. Some characters let you fly when jumping, while others reward pressing buttons simultaneously. From our few minutes mashing the controller, it seems that timing and position are more important than ever with such fundamental mechanics, and ones that we picked up pretty quickly. We especially enjoyed kicking our adversary in the head to make them dazed and vulnerable in the early seconds of the next round.
Gallery: Divekick’s two-button controller
Filed under: Gaming
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