Fifteen months ago, the Internet, and more specifically, reddit, gave usThe Eternal War. Reddit user Lycerius had been playing the same game ofCiv IIfor ten years, and he’d been fighting the same nuclear war for 1700 in-game years. But even after the puzzle was solved, Lycerius kept fighting.
When Lycerius originally posted about the game, it spawned its own subreddit,r/TheEternalWar, with an audience of thousands of redditors trying to solve Lycerius’ frustrating and seemingly impassable military conflict with their own approach. One redditorput together a solutiononly days after the original post, advising the construction of an army of Howitzers that would first take out the Vikings and then the Americans (once their alliance with the player dissolved).
Lycerius acknowledged the solution, but also decided to continue playing the game on his own time. As he played on, the subreddit spawned new pursuits:r/theeternalwarstorieswas an early venture where players wrote fiction in the universe of the war’s constant nuclear holocaust. Later, readers banded together to try to make anEternal War RPGset in the same universe.
Once a year had passed, Lyceriuschecked inwith his game’s progress. Having seen how other redditors were able to effect peace, he wanted to explore the opportunities of yet more war. Thus, after 11 years of on-and-off play (and 1900 years in the game), Lycerius’s Celts are still embroiled in war.
“Rather than destroy the Vikings, my largest operation of the 41st century was a massive naval and land offensive to capture the new Viking capital of Piza,” he wrote, hoping to instigate a Viking civil war. He keeps the war going to see if there's a case to be made for an Orwellian communist government; a regime that can survive in a perpetual state of war (True, Orwell's1984 featured war with a made-up foe, but in the ironically reality-boundCiv II, there’s no option to construct imaginary enemies).
Instead of descending into civil war, though, the Vikings ended up rebelling against him. In fact, Lycerius’ attempt at putting up with more war for its own sake eventually resulted in his own culture staging a number of uprisings and rebellions.
Lycerius promises to check back into the subreddit, which just barely misses the cut for the top thousand subreddits (above r/HalfLife but below r/BeardPorn), by the end of the year. In the meantime, parties still interested in taking up the helm can fight on.
Certification could give Steam Machines more appeal through easily grasped internals. by Kyle Orland
Which one should I choose? The one with the highest certification, I guess...
Valve
Talking over Valve's announcement of its Steam Machine prototype specs with a few people online (including Ars' own Andrew Cunningham), I've come to the conclusion that Valve might need more than its own free, standardized gaming OS (and, ideally,an exclusive killer app) to make PC gaming appealing for the living room console consumer. To really put up a fight, they should do something to simplify the dizzying variety of architectures and performance points that are inherent in parcel with PC gaming.
Just look at the range of hardware configurations that Valve is including in the roll out of itsSteam Machine prototypes. They range from machines with parts totaling $600 or so to Nvidia Titan-powered beasts that would cost upwards of $1500 to build. Valve is also quick to mention that plenty of other companies will be rolling their own systems to market, some of which may deviate "substantially" from the prototype. Yet all of these different configurations are falling under a single "Steam Machines" label.
PC gamers are used to the fact that the term "PC" covers everything from $200 budget machines to $3,500 beasts. Valve is explicitly targeting the living room-based, console-playing audience with its SteamOS boxes though. If this audience is used to one thing, it's having a single standard that provides consistent, measurable hardware power levels and compatibility.
There are plenty of advantages and disadvantages to both sides of the great console/PC gaming divide, but this consistency is one of the console side's enduring pluses. You can be sure that any Xbox 360 will run any game that has come out for the system between 2005 and this holiday season, regardless of slight differences in the internal hardware. With the PC side on the other hand, you have to worry about everything from what APIs your graphics card supports and how much RAM the game requires to how many cores and per-second cycles your CPU can handle. Not only that, but you have to juggle minimum, recommended, and optimum system requirements for every single game.
The advantage of this setup, of course, is flexibility. You know exactly what piece (or pieces) of hardware you'll need to replace to get your system up to snuff for the latest game. But the console gamers Valve is newly targeting, by and large, just want to know that anything made for that particular system will run. They don't want to possess deep knowledge of their system's innards and API calls.
Valve doesn't have to compromise on SteamOS' open, freely upgradeable promise to reach out to these gamers. It just has to offer up some sort of standardized system for separating marketable Steam Machines from a variety of vendors into different power tiers that developers and consumers can easily target.
Under this system, Valve would set different levels of minimum performance that a SteamOS-machine would have to meet to earn a Valve-endorsed certification at Level 1, Level 2, and so on. Game developers, in turn, could optimize and advertise their SteamOS-powered games with a specific level in mind. Maybe the game runs best on a level-4-or-better system but can still run acceptably on any level 2 system.
This setup would lose some of the granularity associated with the current "system requirements" regime common in PC gaming (a game that had the RAM requirements of level 5 but the GPU requirements of level 2, for instance, would be forced to simply "require" level 5 under this setup). But it has the advantage of being much simpler than the lists of system requirements and the wide variety of components that PC gamers have to deal with today.
If a game is tuned for Level 5 Steam Machines and you have a level 6 Steam Machine, that's really all you need to know. No need to squint at the side of a box or go hunting around the Web for details. If your machine is below the minimum level of most of the new games you're interested in, then it's time to upgrade. For an audience used to simple, plug-and-play, "it just works" compatibility across an entire hardware generation, this kind of simplicity could be key to adoption.
Valve would ideally set the standard for each of these tiers by releasing its own Steam machines at various levels (its prototype plan already shows a willingness to support many different hardware configurations). This would give outside Steam Machine makers a good reference to shoot for in developing their own hardware, much as Google's Nexus line helps set the standard for the Android market. Having discrete tiers would also help consumers comparison shopping for a Steam Machine determine how much power they're getting for their comparative dollar.
System makers could opt out of this certification of course, but if Valve starts including it on its own hardware and promoting it on Steam itself, consumers may well start looking for that Valve-endorsed certification sticker on other Steam Machines. Do-it-yourself Steam Machine builders could use a website to determine their hardware's current certification level and to measure the potential impact of upgrading one piece or another.
Microsoft has tried something similar with its Windows Experience Index scores, which were meant to give people some idea of which components in their PCs were fastest and slowest. Those numbers never really ended up catching on, but Valve is in a unique position to use its launch of a brand new gaming platform to roll out a standard that could be widely adopted across the industry.
There's a lot we don't know about Valve's SteamOS plans, and they might have something like this in the works already. Regardless, this kind of centralized standardization would go a long way towards getting console gamers used to the idea of a PC-based system—without giving up any of the flexibility and upgradeability inherent in the SteamOS design.
Expect your grandpa to sit down, thinking there's a Manchester United match on. by Kaamil Ahmed, wired.co.uk
FIFA 14 is the result of a massive amount of tinkering. Instead of introducing any major features in this latest iteration of the soccer franchise, EA Sports has focused solely on making the gameplay more realistic.
This focus has been a consistent feature of FIFA's development in recent years and has helped it become dominant in a market where its only rival, Konami's Pro Evolution Soccer (PES), has suffered precisely because it made a sharp and surprising turn toward unchallenging and comically unrealistic gameplay.
FIFA 14 isn't radically different from EA Sports' previous offerings, but it does give players a game where every detail, from how a player runs, jumps, and passes to where their leg breaks, has been obsessed over. Expect grandfathers to sit down, thinking they're watching Manchester United's weekly game.
“It’s slower”
I instantly recognized a difference between FIFA 14 and its predecessor. It was slower. That made sense; previous games in the franchise had all delivered obvious reductions to the gameplay's tempo. Almost immediately, I realized I was wrong.
Large portions of a match can be incredibly slow, complicated, and even frustrating, but at other times, the game bursts into life, letting you execute incisive, precise attacking moves and rapid counterattacks. Matches no longer consist of players constantly running very quickly from one end to another; the tempo ebbs and flows like a real match.
The reason it can feel very slow is that EA Sports' new Precision Movement mechanics mean players move more realistically. Sprinting with the ball means longer stopping distances and less balance when crossing or shooting. How a player passes or shoots depends on their balance and the position of their feet when attempting the move.
It means you have to be more methodical, executing moves depending on the conditions surrounding your player instead of doing what you want, when you want. It also means successful attacking moves are so much more satisfying.
The best attacking players in the game can adjust and improvise with unorthodox touches, passes, and shots more easily than the defenders they're up against, giving them an advantage that can leave the opposition bamboozled. I was oddly excited by one player's ability to jump into the air to control a ball that would have sped past him if he'd let it bounce. It was such a simple, ordinary movement, but it was like nothing I've ever seen in FIFA or any other soccer game.
Artificial intelligence
A massive evolution in the AI also contributes to the game's new, more interesting, tempo. Instead of aimlessly running around, your players try to occupy free space, and opposition defenders react by trying to occupy the same areas. Building a sustained attack means your whole team pushes forward, pressuring the opposition and hemming them into their own defensive area. This mostly makes attacking more exciting, but on a few occasions half of my team were playing like they were strikers in a way that would be extremely unlikely in a real game. That was frustrating, because you can't actually force those players to get back into position unless you stop attacking. Why would you do that?
Speed has always been so vital to success in FIFA games, but FIFA 14 massively re-balances the gameplay. Now control, intelligence, and improvisation are just as important. This will make the game frustrating for a lot of people, but it will help others build into the FIFA fantasy. If you're going to try to build the best football club in the world, it should be a bit harder than running in a straight line with your fastest player.
Conclusion
If you're looking for a casual pick-up game to fill 15 minutes of your time now and again, then the difficulty you'll have building attacks in FIFA 14 will probably strip most of the fun out of the game. But if you're planning to stick with the game throughout the year, more varied and challenging gameplay should keep you interested—even when you've won everything.
FIFA 14 is out now for Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and many other platforms.
PopCap-funded physiology studies lead to potential military applications. by Dennis Scimeca
Playing a casual game could let a researcher know whether this soldier is prepared to be in this position.
LCPL Alicia M. Anderson USMC, via Wikimedia Commons
When PopCap underwrote studies on the cognitive benefits of playing casual games with East Carolina University, it never imagined that the research would inspire the exploration of casual game projects for military use. But the principles PopCap helped examine in those studies are the basis for several projects which could lead to the development of new training aids and in-theater medical diagnostic tools for the United States Armed Forces. And it all began with a bit of fan appreciation.
Back in 2006, PopCap Senior Director of Public Relations Garth Chouteau decided to conduct an informal survey on why fans enjoyed PopCap games. “I started to receive the occasional e-mail or call from customers, and being the inquisitive PR person that I am, I would generally take that opportunity to ask them why they liked the games, what they liked about the games,” Chouteau told Ars. “After getting enough of those comments to the effect of ‘These games, they help me relax,’ ‘They seem to make my mind sharper,’ or ‘They provide some type of mental exercise,’ I said to myself, 'We need to understand if this is broadly true. We need a bigger sample.'”
So PopCap hired a company called Information Solutions Group to conduct a formal survey of just over 1,000 customers, asking if they derived any benefits aside from entertainment out of playing PopCap games. "Stress relief was something that three-quarters or more, I think it was 77 percent specifically, chose,” said Chouteau. “And I believe it was 81 percent who cited cognitive exercise.”
PopCap then reached out to departments at multiple universities in the hopes of sponsoring a more rigorous study to understand these effects. Dr. Carmen Russoniello, professor and director of the Psychophysiology and Biofeedback Lab at East Carolina University (ECU), gave the most enthusiastic response. “He had a lot of experience in various types of recreational therapy, and he was intrigued by the idea,” said Chouteau.
Having fun is healthy
Russoniello’s research is inspired by his experience asa recreational therapist. His dissertation was conducted at an inpatient alcoholic treatment facility, where he tested the hypothesis that stress-reduction ought to be measurable physiologically. To prove that hypothesis, experimental groups were assigned tasks that required different amounts of oxygen to perform.
“What we found was, not only psychologically did these people report that they felt better, but we could see biochemical changes that were significant between the groups,” he said. For example, the groups that conducted less strenuous activity had lower levels of cortisol, a hormone released in response to stress.
“I was looking for ways to measure these same kinds of activities, which led me to biofeedback, and it turns out that I could use it for intervention as well as to measure the effects of other things on people, which is one of its real benefits,” said Dr. Russoniello. “I can hook you up and see if it works. It really has an advantage of being able to quantify an outcome of a stimulus, like an activity.”
An activity like playing casual video games, for example.
Less stress, better mood
Take two games ofPeggleand call me in the morning.
The first PopCap-sponsored study at ECU was titled “A Randomized, Controlled Study of the Effectiveness of PopCap Video Games in Reducing Stress and Improving Mood.” The researchers measured the heart rate variability (HRV) and alpha wave activity among experimental subjects who were given a choice of playingPeggle,Bejeweled, orBookworm.
“HRV tells you about a thousand times more than your pulse,” said Russoniello. “One of the first things the students notice when someone’s hooked up to HRV is that their heart rate vacillates. Like when a nurse takes [a pulse] and says that it’s 72, it’s actually 72, 68, 80, 69, and that’s important, that variability.” According to Russoniello, heart rate variability can be predictive of depression, anorexia nervosa, and diabetes, among other conditions, and it can also be used to measure stress levels.
As for alpha waves, measuring their strength in both the left and right sides of the brain and measuring the level of synchrony between the hemispheres can measure mood variances such as depression or mania.
Analysis of alpha wave and HRV data from the experiment indicated that the experimental group that played the games exhibited fewer signs of depression or anxiety than a control group. Some of these variances were dependent upon the subject's gender or which game was chosen, suggesting to Russoniello the idea of prescribing specific games to specific patients in order to achieve desired results. The researchers determined that more study was needed.
Casual games as mental health prescription
In addition to another set of lab sessions, the experimental group was instructed to play a casual video game of their choice at home for at least 30 minutes three times per week, with at least 24 hours between each session, for a month. Their post-study scores on the standard nine-item depression scale of the Patient Health Questionnaire demonstrated statistically meaningful reductions in depression symptoms.
Subjects also took a self-administered psychological assessment of mood called the Profile of Mood States, which showed that anger, depression, fatigue, and confusion were all reduced by at least 50 percent in the experimental group. Anxiety levels were also reduced.
The third study being underwritten by PopCap is currently underway and will drill down further into the results of the second study by looking at how casual games might be used in combination with other therapies to combat clinical depression. ECU is also conducting studies into the effects of casual games that are separate from the PopCap-sponsored research. The preliminary results of one of these offshoot studies suggest that playing casual video games can improve a person’s ability to make decisions and respond quickly to a stimulus.
The sum total of the experimental results from all of these studies convinced Russoniello to move forward with proposals to the Department of Defense for military applications of casual game play (though he stressed that these are still just proposals and that there are no projects currently underway with the DOD).
The concept of using casual games for military training purposes is not new. One of Russoniello’s research partners, Dr. Vadim Pougatchev, was involved in just such an initiative in the Soviet Union.
“In the late 80s I was part of the project to develop a special computer program to provide neurocognitive assessment and training for high-risk operators,” Pougatchev told Ars. “This program was implemented in the form of a simple game calledCaptain Nemo. It appeared that this program was also used to train Soviet Air Force and Navy personnel. Later we found out that besides military pilots, candidates to cosmonauts were trained with it.”
Company says it simply "couldn't achieve" larger city sizes, however. by Kyle Orland
This kind of pollution-filled city may no longer have to impact other cities in an online "region."
Maxis / EA
Electronic Arts says that it has "a team specifically focused on exploring the possibility of an offline mode" for the latest version of SimCity, nearly seven months after the online-only game launched to widespread server congestion and connectivity problems.
Ina blog post discussing the "State of SimCity," Maxis Emeryville General Manager Patrick Buechner notes that while server stability and connectivity issues are "behind us," the company "would like to give our players the ability to play even if they choose not to connect." While he says he "can't make any promises" regarding a possible offline mode, Buechner noted that offline play would provide a safe space for players touse upcoming mod toolswithout impacting the experience of other players.
Following the game's troubled launch, EA said that it would take "significant engineering work" to transformSimCityfrom an always-connected, mostly passively multiplayer game to an offline single-player experience due to the simulation work done on the server side. That official line started to look a little thin as fans uncoveredthe ability to play for up to 20 minuteswithout a server connection alongside reports from insiders that the gameplay servers didn't contribute significantly to the underlying simulation. Hackers later managed toturn off the periodic server checksin the game with seemingly no effect on the game's simulation.
The possibility of an offline mode comes as EA is denying the feasibility of another feature heavily requested bySimCityplayers: larger cities. After what Buechner calls "months of investigation" into the issue, he says that the feature will not be coming to the game at any point. "The system performance challenges we encountered would mean that the vast majority of our players wouldn’t be able to load, much less play with bigger cities," he said.
That's likely to be a major disappointment to people (includingpeople here at Ars) who enjoyed the massive, sprawling metropolises and regions ofSimCity 4, but Buechner said "we just couldn’t achieve [an expansion] within the confines of the [new] engine." Some of the work on trying to make those larger cities function will be "rolled into future updates to improve overall game performance," he added.
"My dream in this area is that, someday, when we put human boots on the surface of Mars, I want there to be millions of people in attendance for that event," Jeff Norris, Mission Operations Innovations lead at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory told Ars in a recent interview. "I want them not just sitting in their living room watching a television screen; I want them standing on Mars in their own holodecks right there beside the astronauts."
That might seem like a pretty ambitious goal, even given how much time we have until a manned mission to the red planet is likely to happen. Still, it seems much more realistic when you see the fully navigable, 3D virtual reality version of Mars that Norris and other JPL researchers have already created using funding from NASA's Game Changing Development program and some technology originally designed for more realistic gaming.
While it's pretty awe-inspiring to be able to look at the surface of another world throughpanoramic photosorIMAX movies, a flat image is not exactly the best way to study the surface of another planet. "If you're looking at a panoramic image on a flat monitor... you might think that something's to your right that's actually behind you, because you're looking at a rolled out picture," Norris pointed out. "Or you might zoom in on something and think 'Oh, that's significantly to the right of me.' But because you're zoomed in so far, it might just be a couple of degrees to your right, because you don't have the reference points on Mars."
That's part of why JPL has been looking into ways to let researchers and members of the public experience the data it's getting from Mars more naturally. In the past, the team has looked into room-sized "surround theaters" that project images from the Martian surface on the floors, walls, and ceilings, ensconcing users in a Martian environment. These installations are comfortable, but also quite expensive. They also require users to make a special trip to use them.
He's not really on Mars... but in a way, he kind of is.
For a more portable home or office-based simulation, the team turned to gaming technologies to make navigating more intuitive and effective. "We're always watching the market for new devices that are potentially useful for work," Norris said. "We like working with video game technologies because they're designed to be very accessible for people. They also tend to be very low cost."
Norris seems particularly excited about the team's current research, which combines an HD prototype of the Oculus Rift head-mounted display withVicon's Bonita position tracking system. Users can actually walk and look around a simulation of the Martian surface, as shown in a video the team released today.
The people behind the Oculus are excited as well. “Virtual reality is immediately useful as a way to get people excited about space again, and as the hardware advances, it will become a powerful tool for real research and exploration," Oculus CEO Palmer Luckey told Ars. "In particular, virtual reality based telepresence could allow human operators to perform tasks in hostile environments without actually going there themselves. For many use scenarios, the dexterity and locomotion capabilities of a human piloted robot will surpass what a real person in a spacesuit can do. JPL has some amazing stuff in the pipeline that is going to have a big impact on mankind. It makes me very happy to see people using virtual reality and the Rift for the greater good."
Virtual Mars
JPL's simulation of the Martian surface is put together by taking a panoramic parallax image sent by a Martian rover and stitching it together onto the surface of a virtual cylinder about 50 square meters (164 square feet) in base area. Researchers then superimpose 3D point cloud data gathered by the rover on top of the scene, creating a series of meshes called "surflets" that give the impression of depth.
The result, as you see in the video, is a fully explorable, accurate 3D slice of the Martian surface sent to Earth from hundreds of thousands of miles away. "When you consider all of the data that Curiosity has acquired, plus Opportunity and Spirit, we have hundreds of these sites," JPL Human Interfaces Software Engineer Victor Luo told Ars.
Being inside a 3D virtual Mars is undoubtedly cool, but it also has important applications as a research tool, Norris said. Using the Oculus Rift, researchers can study the data sent by Curiosity just as they would view the world around them—by moving their heads and walking around. Norris said that using these natural human abilities to engage with different environments is key to making them more effective explorers in a strange world.
"Think about how amazing of an ability every human has to extract vast amount of information from the environment just by being present in it," Norris said. "Then you consider that geologists and other scientists build on those abilities with specialized training and field work and things like that. But then we ask them to go and explore the planet by peering at flat images on ordinary computer monitors and so on. We have some evidence that this makes our natural abilities work against us rather than for us. This project is about correcting that."
Adding the Vicon motion tracker to the setup gives researchers another ability they don't easily have with flat pictures of the Martian surface: the ability to walk around and examine bits that interest them up close. "If you're looking at pictures taken by the robot, you're kind of frozen where the robot is," Norris said. "We want people to be able to get up and move around in that space."
More than just locomotion, though, Norris said the motion tracker adds verisimilitude via the "little motions" humans make when looking around, such as shifting a shoulder or leaning the neck to one side. This kind of parallax motion is a key way that humans and other animals assess depth and distance in their environment, and it allows for a much more accurate impression of the user's virtual Martian surroundings.
This might not look that impressive on your flat computer screen, but just wait until you can experience it on an HD head-mounted display.
This is all useful for researchers on the ground trying to form scientific hypotheses about the Martian landscape, of course. But Norris sees this kind of technology being used by the operators navigating Martian rovers, letting them "be more informed and better aware of the environment of the robot, what we call the morphology of the environment—what's it shaped like, where are the rocks, what orientation are they, how are they arranged. When you're driving a robot around on another planet, it's important to know what the environment right around it is..." he said.
The future
As impressive as the working prototype JPL has up and running is, it's very much a first draft of the kind of virtual reality environments the lab hopes to create. In the future, JPL researchers are looking to integrate other data to make the virtual Martian environment more detailed, including data from lower-resolution orbital photos and true-color rover "Mastcams" that generate much higher spatial resolution when zoomed in. The model may even eventually integrate data from wide-field, close-mounted "hazard cameras" that were designed to monitor the area immediately surrounding the rovers' treads and robotic arm for safety.
Researchers are also looking to increase immersion by adding Martian audio to the simulation, despite a lack of direct sound measurement on the planet itself. "We don't have a microphone on Mars, so we don't know exactly what it sounds like, but we can model it," Norris said. "Curiosity has a weather station. We know how hard the wind is blowing, we know the atmospheric pressure, we could render the audio in a very convincing way... It should sound like a high whistling."
As for the user interface, the researchers are looking into adding some kind of accurate hand-tracking to let users reach out and interact with the virtual Martian soil. "The interaction language inside of a virtual reality environment is kind of non-defined," Luo said. "Using a joystick really doesn't make that much sense when you're on Mars. How would you navigate in that environment? ... Is there some other kind of hardware that could be attached or installed to help with that?"
Norris said the JPL team has experimented with hand-tracking solutions ranging from the LeapMotion and Kinect to the Razer Hydra and accelerometer-based gloves, but no option has really provided the perfect combination of accurate tracking, mobility, and light encumbrance on the hands. Still, he's hopeful that the game industry might help him out on this score in the near future. "One of the things we love about working in this area is that there are a lot of companies that are attacking these problems for a lot of reasons—video games, entertainment—but we'll benefit as well," he said.
While JPL is still long way off from releasing its virtual Mars in a way that the public can enjoy, Norris said that "making it possible for the public to join us on the surface of these distant worlds in a way that feels much more real than looking at a picture on a screen we think is of great importance and really exciting."
And there's always that eventual goal of letting the world experience the first steps on Martian soil in a holodeck-like environment, of course. "I think those kinds of events, those kinds of explorations in the future, need to be experienced by our whole civilization, and these technologies are how we can make that happen," Norris said. "It's how we can be a part of that in a way that's so much more real than anything that's ever been available to us before."
In a mobile world run byAngry BirdsandCandy Crush Saga, the fantasy role-playing epic Infinity Blade has served as a champion to the video game enthusiast.
The Chair Entertainment adventure blends the simple touchscreen mechanics found on your smartphone or tablet with an impressive level of depth.
The arrival ofInfinity Blade III($6.99; 4 stars out of 4) continues that journey toward creating a powerful "hardcore" video game experience that is easily accessible and difficult to stop.
Infinity Bladestarted out with a basic premise: fight through an army of enemies inside a massive castle to reach the God King.
For the game's third installment, players are greeted with a larger universe to explore, more gear to collect and a second, stealthier fighter to master. What hasn't changed is the incredible visuals, arguably among the best available on any mobile game.
Siris, the knight players have used throughout theInfinity Bladeseries, returns to battle an army of Deathless titans. However, he's joined by the warrior-thief Isa, who embarks on her own set of quests to assist Siris.
Each character can choose between three weapon sets: dual blades, a sword or a heavier weapon like an axe or staff. Weapons and gear vary based on the character. Isa is much quicker than Siris, so her weapon options are tailored to that speed. Also, while Siris uses a shield and tougher armor, Isa uses lighter equipment such as wrist braces.
As with earlierInfinity Bladegames, players encounter enemies one-on-one. Attacks are performed using a series of swipes, while on-screen taps dodge or block strikes. Players can also perform Super moves to stun enemies or Magic spells to heal, defend or incinerate opponents.
Enemies are smart, and in some fights, they may even switch weapon types, forcing players to shift strategies. Performing smooth gestures between combat and defense feels nearly effortless.
Throughout their journey, players earn experience points to boost their health and other skills. Gold coins earned in battle and found in treasure chests go toward upgrading gear. Players can snag new weapons, shields, helmets, armor and magic rings, each of which boast special properties. For example, some swords can deal fire damage while armor can carry special gems that increase the odds of finding additional gold.
Along with an open world where players can explore more freely, there's a lab where players take collected herbs to create potions and a ship that sells gear at discounted prices.
Infinity Blade IIIis certainly pricier than the average game for your iPhone or iPad, but it's well worth the cost. It's a game that will occupy players' time for months.
Game developers will be able to use that GPU time in the future, though.
by Kyle Orland
The Xbox One's ability to run up to four apps in the background (or on the side via Snap mode) during gameplay and to switch from a game to those apps almost instantaneously obviously comes at some cost to the system's maximum theoretical gaming performance. Now, thanks to an interview with Xbox technical fellow Andrew Goossenover at Digital Foundrywe have some idea of the scale of that performance cost.
"Xbox One has a conservative 10 percent time-sliced reservation on the GPU for system processing," Goossen told the site. "This is used both for the GPGPU processing for Kinect and for the rendering of concurrent system content such as snap mode."
It's important to note that additional processing time for the next-generation Kinect sensor is included in that 10 percent number. Still, setting aside nearly a tenth of the GPU's processing time to support background execution of non-gaming apps is a bit surprising.
During a recent demonstration of the Xbox One interface, Microsoft Director of Product Planning Albert Penelloshowed mehow running multiple apps on the side or behind a concurrent game didn't lead to any noticeable degradation in gaming performance. Indeed, setting aside a good chunk of GPU processing to explicitly handle nongaming apps ensures that gaming performance doesn't bounce up and down depending on what may or may not be running in the background.
The downside, of course, is that developers are unable to use that reserved chunk of processing power. Not to worry, though; Goossen says that Microsoft plans to open up this power to developers in the future in a way that doesn't impact the system's background functions.
"The GPU hardware scheduler is designed to maximize throughput and automatically fills 'holes' in the high-priority processing," Goossen said. "This can allow the system rendering to make use of the ROPs for fill, for example, while the title is simultaneously doing synchronous compute operations on the compute units."
Sony's PlayStation 4 also allows for non-gaming apps to run in the background while games are playing and for instant switching between these apps, but the company has not gone into detail about what kind of impact this functionality has on the system's processing load.
Digital Foundry also has more froma wide-ranging interviewwith Goossen and Xbox hardware architect Nick Baker, touching on everything from RAM bandwidth and pixel shading to compute units andclock speed. It's well worth a read for anyone looking for a deep dive into the raw hardware power of Microsoft's next system.
