From pixel artists Paul Robertson and Ivan Dixon comes a new Simpsons intro, a remake that’s so good you might think it’s actually official. It’s not, but wow–even the culminating couch gag is great.
The video features music from Jeremy Dower, doing his best to re-imagine Danny Elfman’s classic theme with a new chip-tune sound.
Robertson and Dixon didn’t just remake the well-known intro, they added to it with even more Simpsons references. You’ll notice that Frank Grimes (with a halo over his head) makes an appearance, along with Poochie and Stampy the elephant, among others.
You’ll definitely want to watch the whole thing. And after you’re done, click through the names to find more from the very-talented artists: Robertson, Dixon, and Dower.
A selection of new Just Cause 3 images have emerged online, showcasing some of the crazier methods of traversing the game’s fictional Mediterranean archipelago, Medici.
Publisher Square Enix has yet to issue these images to the press, but they have been discovered ahead of embargo and circulated on a NeoGAF thread.
In the gallery below, hero Rico Rodriguez can be seen skydiving with a wingsuit, tethering himself to an attack chopper, and commandeering a fighter jet. The images also flaunt the game’s sun-kissed locations and depth of explosion effects. Take a closer look in the gallery below, along with a selection of older images.
It is said that the game features a 400 square-mile map, with all three main areas available to explore from the onset. Throughout the game, you encounter enemy bases, propaganda billboards, and loudspeakers, which you must destroy in order to “capture” the area. Doing so means you’re able to fast travel and save vehicles there.
Click on the Thumbnails below to view in full screen
More footage of Street Fighter V has emerged online, this time from a public exhibition involving two of the highest ranked players in the world.
Daigo Umehara, still best known for his electrifying Daigo comeback video, and his current worldwide number two rank on Street Fighter IV (according to Shoryuken), took on Bruce “GamerBee” Hsiang (ranked eighth) at the Taipei Game Show over the weekend.
The footage is somewhat familiar, with both Ryu and Chun-Li facing off against each other in the same city and noodles restaurant stage as in the reveal trailer. However it nevertheless offers more insight into how the game differs from Street Fighter 4, showing that Chun Li can now air-juggle with sweeps, and Ryu has an anti-air attack that can combo into a Dragon Punch.
Meanwhile, GamerBee is shown spending all three blocks of his EX gauge to enter a limited-time heightened state, where he streams out a succession of fireballs. Whether this can be used by all characters is still unclear.
Street Fighter 5 is a PlayStation 4 and PC exclusive, and publisher Capcom says owners of both copies can play each other online.
Now two months since the last major game entered the UK market, familiar faces continue to hold the top spots despite their collective slowdown in sales.
Grand Theft Auto V falls to second with a seven percent reduction in sales from last week, FIFA 15 drops five percent and falls to third, while Deep Silver’s Saints Row IV remaster holds forth after a 38 percent sales slump.
Activision’s Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare is one of the only games in the top ten that has increased in sales, climbing up 27 percent and entering first place.
A new game was scheduled to enter the UK market this week, in the form of the zombie survival FPS Dying Light, but due to distribution problems it has been delayed to February 27. the game is available via digital stores, however these are not counted in the UK charts.
Over the last few days we’ve looked at all of the leading games consoles and platforms out right now and tried to convince you why you should spend your hard-earned cash. Today, Mark Walton tells you why it’s time for you to bring a dedicated PC for gaming into your living room.
More so than consoles, the gaming PC really can be all things to all people. You can choose to dive into the deepest of strategy and simulation games, or turn competitive and take on eSports’ finest. You can play all the big cross platform console exclusives with the highest visual fidelity, or you can explore the depths of the internet to find the latest 8-bit inspired indie gem. And even if you aren’t into what you might consider “core” games, there’s a plethora of social titles to discover.
As an open platform, the freedom to play however you choose is the PC’s greatest asset; it also used to be its greatest burden. But, thanks to much improved driver support, download services like Steam, and an abundance of great value hardware, getting into PC gaming is easier than ever before. With sleek gaming hardware on offer, great couch-friendly co-op games, and controller-friendly interfaces like Steam Big Picture, these days it’s easy to move the PC out of the office or bedroom, and enjoy its unmatched library of games from the comfort of your living room.
An Amazing Library of Games
What a library it is too. The entire history of video games, from the first text-based adventures, to the latest and greatest big-budget blockbusters, is there for the playing. The sheer diversity of games on offer is staggering. For starters, the PC is the natural home for strategy games like Total War: Rome II, Civilization: Beyond Earth, and The Sims. It’s also the home of eSports and free-to-play, with League Of Legends (arguably the world’s biggest game at this point), being played exclusively on PC. And let’s not forget the shooters, with games like Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, DayZ, and Team Fortress 2 (or at least, the best version of it), only available on PC.
Because the PC is an open platform, you can find games that simply wouldn’t have a home anywhere else. Can you imagine something as daft, yet as brilliant as the horrifying Five Nights at Freddy’s originating anywhere but on PC? Even if you never touched a mainstream release again, the PC’s army of indie developers and multiple methods of distribution mean that you’re never stuck for something to play. In 2014 we got the likes of stellar exclusives like The Talos Principle, Elite: Dangerous, and Star Citizen, while this year there are games like Fortnite and Heroes of the Storm on the way, to name but a few.
Naturally, all the mega-blockbuster cross platform games like Far Cry 4, Call Of Duty: Advanced Warfare, and Shadow Of Mordor are on PC too, but they’re cheaper than their console counterparts at standard retail prices–and when there’s a Steam sale on, you can pick up games for a fraction of the cost on console. If you do decide to stick your PC in the living room, there are plenty of couch co-op games to choose from too, including Nidhogg, 8-bit Commando, and The Binding Of Isaac: Rebirth. Oh, and paying to play online? That one’s for the consoles only.
PC is the Only Place to Play in 4K
2014 was the year that 4K (or UHD as it’s otherwise known) finally became an affordable prospect for many, with TV and monitor prices falling well below the $1000 mark, and that trend looks set to continue in 2015. If you’ve splurged, or are planning to splurge, on a 4K TV for the living room, the only way to play games at such a high resolution is with a PC. Once you’ve seen how stunning games look, it’s hard to go back to lower resolutions. But if you don’t feel like jumping on the 4K bandwagon just yet, even a PC equipped with a mid-range graphics card can pump out true 1080p60 visuals with a market-leading level of visual fidelity. If looks are what you’re after, there’s no better choice than a PC.
It’s Also the Best Place for VR
Thanks to the likes of Samsung’s Galaxy Gear (and the upcoming Project Morpheus from Sony), you don’t need a PC to experience VR, but it’s by far the most developed platform. Despite it not yet being a full retail product, anyone is free to buy an Oculus Rift DK2 and check out some VR games. Those range from full retail releases like Alien: Isolation and Elite: Dangerous, right through to weird and wonderful indie games like Affected and Radial-G over on share.oculus.com. And, if you partner the Oculus with a Leap Motion, you can even ditch the pad altogether and go for full-on motion-controlled immersion.
PC Hardware is Sleeker and Cheaper Than Ever
Gaming PCs used to be confined to tall, ugly towers full of sparkling LEDs and obnoxious fans. Thankfully, that’s no longer the case. Huge advancements in CPU and GPU technology mean that today’s gaming PCs can be small, quiet, and power conscious: just the qualities you need to tuck one away discreetly in your living room next to the rest of your AV equipment. Even if you use a tiny mini-ITX motherboard and a console-sized case like the Silverstone Raven RVZ01, you can fill it with desktop-class components like Intel’s Core i7 processors and Nvidia’s GTX 980 GPU, which’ll help make your games look beautiful.
But you don’t have to spend anywhere near as much money to get excellent performance and console-beating visuals at 1080p. Even the budget-minded GTX 750 Ti puts in some impressive performance, while stepping up to mid-range cards like the GTX 960 and Radeon R9 will give you all the power you need for 1080p, and for under $1000. If all you want to play are the likes of League of Legends, Hearthstone, or Team Fortress 2, you can even get by with a laptop sporting integrated graphics. Plus, you get your pick of peripherals. Xbox controllers, PS4 pads, and a huge array of gaming keyboards, mice, steering wheels, joysticks, work on PC, so there’s an option out there no matter how you like to game.
If you’re still not convinced about buying a gaming PC, don’t forget that it’s not just an investment in gaming. PCs are also the best media players, with unfettered access to every kind of streaming service the internet has to offer. A PC is also good for editing videos, audio, and photos, as well as churning out term papers and job applications, so in theory, you’d be more productive with one than without.
Ah, who am I kidding? It’s all about the games. Solitaire or Starcraft, Farmville or Far Cry, the PC is the ultimate gaming machine. Long may its reign continue.
Mario Maker, the Wii U game that will allow players to create their own Mario levels, may arrive later than we’ve expected.
The game was scheduled to release in the first half of 2015 when it was first announced at E3 2014, and is still listed with that release window on Nintendo’s site. However, Nintendo’s recent earnings release for the nine-month period that ended on December 2014 includes a list of the company’s upcoming games and launch dates, which now shows Mario Maker with the less specific release date of “2015.”
Project Guard, legendary Nintendo designer Shigeru Miyamoto’s experimental tower-defense game that relies heavily on the Wii U gamepad, which was also scheduled to release in the first half of 2015, no has a “2015” release date as well.
Last year, Twitch hit the impressive milestone of 100 million unique viewers per month, the games streaming service has announced.
Twitch launched a little website yesterday highlighting that impressive number and other stats from 2014. Last year, the site also hit a peak of 1 million concurrent viewers, 11 million total videos broadcast per month, and 1.5 million unique broadcasters per month.
You can see the most impressive milestones in the image above, and check out the full 2014 report on Twitch’s website. If nothing else, it help to explain why Amazon, which bought the company in August of last year, thought it was worth $1 billion.
Earlier this month, Twitch introduced Twitch Music, a library of 500 of pre-cleared, mostly EDM songs that streamers can use without having to worry about copyright infringement.
Last week, Star Citizen developer Cloud Imperium Games held its 2015 Town Hall presentation at PAX South, where it discussed various aspects of the space sim at length. Yesterday, Cloud Imperium uploaded videos of the presentation to YouTube, where you can watch the developers discuss the game’s wormholes, persistent universe, and much more.
In the first part of the persistent universe presentation (above), you can see some early NPC character models, and early concept footage of what jump point navigation will look like. It also includes footage of Star Citizen’s in-game AR, MobiGlas. It’s a functional, contextual interface solution for shopping, accessing information, and any other part of the game where you’d need a menu or head-up display (HUD). You can read an exhaustive explanation of the team’s plan for MobiGlass on Star Citizen’s website.
Overall there’s around six hours Star Citizen talk, which you can find in the links below
A new Spelunker game, Minna de Spelunker Z, is coming exclusively to the PlayStation 4, publisher Square Enix has announced.
Earlier this week, the Final Fantasy and Tomb Raider publisher launched a teaser website for an upcoming game with the working title “Project Code Z.” Today, during the Tokaigi 2015 event in Japan, the company revealed that game is based on the original Spelunker, which was first released in 1983.
These days, you might better recognize Spelunker’s gameplay from a more recent popular game it inspired, Spelunky. As you can see in the trailer above, much like Spelunky, Spelunker is a 2D platformer, where you venture into a cave, jump around, climb ropes, and collect treasure.
Minna de Spelunker Z is being developed by Tozai Games and will release in Japan on March 19. It will be free-to-play, and while it’s not yet clear how Square Enix plans to monetize it, we can see an inventory system in the trailer where you can equip your character with different items and outfits.
Numerous Steam machines debuted at CES 2014, but Alienware’s solution, the Alpha, stood out from the pack. It wasn’t an underpowered or rebranded product, and it also wasn’t sitting next to a four figure price tag. Alienware’s little box looked to be the most viable looking console-sized and console-priced offering of the lot.
Alienware started shipping the Alpha late last year for $549 (the high-end version with a faster CPU, more RAM, and an SSD costs $849), but it recently cut that price down to $499. The Alpha is still more expensive than consoles, but also fairly cheap as far as gaming PCs go. Obviously it’s not as powerful as the quintessential PC gaming tower, but it may give Sony and Microsoft’s latest consoles a run for their money.
With a slightly overclocked 860M GPU based on Nvidia’s GM107 chip (the same one that’s found in Nvidia’s 750 Ti desktop GPU), 4GB of RAM, and Intel’s Core i3, the Alpha has all the makings of a good, entry level gaming PC. The 5400 RPM hard drive is a slight disappointment, and it’s likely the source of the Alpha’s occasionally long loading times. Otherwise, the rest of the components make for a surprisingly capable gaming PC given the Alpha’s relatively low cost.
System Specs
Hardware
Alienware Alpha
CPU
Intel Core i3-4130T @2.9GHz
GPU
Modified Nvidia GTX 860M
RAM
4GB DDR3L
Storage
500GB 5400 RPM 2.5″ Hard drive, 6Gb/s
Performance
While the Alpha simply can’t fulfill the desires of every PC gamer who dreams of pushing graphics settings to ultra, that doesn’t mean that medium or high settings are out of reach. While you can get away with these settings at 1080p in most cases, you may need to kick the Alpha down to 720p if you want to inch closer to 60 frames per second and take advantage of greater lighting and post processing effects. Although Alpha’s GPU supports 4K output, it can’t realistically play games at such a demanding resolution. Despite its PC roots, the primary appeal of the Alpha is like that of a console, such as PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. In the interest of competition, let’s see how the Alpha fares against Sony and Microsoft’s latest consoles.
Tomb Raider,45-70 FPS: high settings, 1080p, FXAA, TressFX off, tessellation off The Alpha can’t handle advanced hair found in the PlayStation 4 version of Tomb Raider, but it still handles the game quite well with high settings at 1080p, staying well above 30 frames per second.
Titanfall, 45-60 FPS, high settings, 1080p, 2x MSAA, bilinear texture filtering Though the difference is only noticeable on occasion, the Alpha stands above the xbox One so far as Titanfall is concerned, one of the system’s flagship games,
Watch Dogs, 35-50 FPS, medium settings, 1080p, texture quality high, antialiasing off, ambient occlusion off The Alpha struggled a bit with Watch Dogs on high settings, so we had to dial the effects down a bit to hit a reasonable frame rate at 1080p. Still, next to the PlayStation 4 version, it’s hard to notice any major differences.
Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor, 35-45 FPS: High setings, 1080p, ambient occlusion on, tesselation on Middle-earth Shadow of Mordor could have ran closer to 60 FPS on the Alpha with more conservative settings, but Alienware’s little box stayed above 30 FPS when we turned on advanced settings like ambient occlusion and tessellation, remaining totally playable while looking good, too.
Game
Alienware Alpha
Xbox One
PlayStation 4
Tomb Raider
1080p, 45-70 FPS
1080p, 30 FPS
1080p, 30-60 FPS
Titanfall
1080p, 45-60 FPS
792p, 40-60 FPS
n/a
Watch Dogs
1080p, 35-50 FPS
792p, 30 FPS
900p, 30 FPS
Middle-earth:Shadow of Mordor
1080p, 34-45 FPS
900p, 30 FPS
1080p, 30 FPS
These tests make it clear that the Alpha is, on average, as capable as PS4 and Xbox One when it comes to sheer in-game performance. Unlike those systems, the Alpha’s RAM and CPU are upgradeable. If you spend a little more money, you can push the Alpha further than we have in our tests, but at that point, $850, it may be worth investing in a traditional PC with a stronger GPU.
Is it a PC or a console?
Although some people refer to the Alpha as a console, it’s driven by Microsoft Windows, a PC operating system, and with that the Alpha exhibits the same general capabilities and limitations as any other Windows gaming PC. What is unique about the Alpha, and why some consider it to be a console, is Alienware’s custom user interface, which boots up on top of Windows and is 100% controller friendly.
Currently, the Alpha has only integrated Valve’s Steam service within its UI, because Steam’s Big Picture Mode makes it easy to access its marketplace your own library of games with only a controller. Neither EA’s Origin nor Ubisoft’s Uplay touts a controller friendly interface, and while they are still accessible through the Alpha’s windows 8.1 desktop mode, there’s no way to properly and seamlessly access games purchased through those services within Alienware’s custom UI. In most cases, Ubisoft and EA games purchased directly through Steam will work without any problems. The only caveat: you may need to make use of the Alpha’s virtual mouse mode.
Every Alpha comes with a wireless Xbox 360 controller that, with a simple hotkey combo, can function as a mouse using the left analog stick. It’s handy when you need it, such as the initial setup when you power on the Alpha for the first time, but the need for such a feature reminds you that you are indeed using a PC and not a system that’s completely controller friendly 100% of the time. The virtual mouse suffices, but it’s not an elegant system.
Apart from the backlit Alienware logo, the Alpha is rather unassuming and less ostentatious than most of Alienware’s other systems. If you don’t like the color of the default backlight, or you want to turn off the lights completely, you only need to hop into the Alpha’s settings menu and adjust the color to your liking.
The Alpha has the basics covered when it comes to connectivity. There are two USB 2.0 ports on the front of the box and two USB 3.0 ports on the back, right next to the ethernet, optical audio, and HDMI in and HDMI out ports. The HDMI in port is an unusual feature, but similar to the Xbox One, it lets the Alpha handle video passthrough from another device, such as a gaming console or Blu-ray player. Alienware hasn’t invested in this feature as much as Microsoft–you won’t find guide apps and the like that sync with your cable provider–, but its a handy feature to have just in case you run out of HDMI ports on your TV.
The Alpha doesn’t offer an experience that’s as composed or seamless as a console, but Alienware has done a decent job of consolizing the PC, outpacing the competition in some meaningful ways. The UI creates the illusion that using a console, and it’s a disappearing act that almost works 100% of the time. Though you can’t tap into Origin or Uplay within the Alpha’s console mode, you can if you boot into the Window’s desktop. Though the Alpha isn’t quite a console, it offers so much more as a PC than the Xbone One or PlayStation 4 ever could. Taking the Alpha out of the home theater and putting it on a desk with a mouse and keyboard open a wealth of functionality that cannot be overlooked. Apart from being able to upgrade the GPU and motherboard, you can do anything with the Alpha that you could with an equally powerful, traditional desktop computer.
With this in mind, the Alpha is a great value. It may be more expensive than consoles, but the difference of $100 is a small price to pay for a console-like gaming device that doubles as a Windows PC. If you like the convenience of the console experience, are interested in the hundreds of excellent games available on Steam, and could benefit from a new desktop PC, $500 is a very reasonable asking price. It may not blow consoles out of the water when it comes to performance, but it comes close. Manage your expectations accordingly and you won’t be disappointed by the Alienware Alpha.
