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Guitar Hero Live aims to reshape a beloved rhythm game for a new generation

Guitar Hero is back, but almost nothing that made the plastic-guitar rhythm game familiar remains untouched. The trademark plastic guitar has been overhauled, the campaign now takes place in a responsive, first-person-perspective live-action video, and an always-online music video jukebox powers the game's multiplayer. Perhaps the biggest shift is that while all modern consoles support Guitar Hero Live, it won't require a console or a television. While the game is coming to PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, Wii U, Xbox 360 and Xbox One, the full experience (including the same guitar) is also coming to tablets and smartphones. The mobile version of the game can either be played on the device or a television. Guitar Hero Live doesn't have a firm release date, just this fall, but it does...
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U.S. Department of Education: The future of education includes video games in classrooms

A lot of modern students spend as much time playing video games as they do attending school, according to research by University of Indiana.Some may view that as a shocking affirmation that video games are eroding the education of an entire generation, but the U.S. Department of Education sees it as an opportunity; a chance to reinvent education in a way that makes it more relevant to today's student. "If you look at the life of a student ... a lot of students play on average about 10,000 hours of video games by the time they are graduating high school. That is almost the same amount they are spending in schools," said Erik Martin, the U.S. Department of Education's Games for Learning lead. "You can imagine a lot of the time which of the two activities they might feel more engaged in...
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Obsidian's CEO on Pillars of Eternity backer's hateful joke (correction)

More than 77,000 people contributed money to Pillars of Eternity's Kickstarter campaign in 2012. Some of them — 579 to be exact — gave $500 or more. Their reward, among other things, was the privilege of having a memorial stone mounted in the game world with a custom message on it.About two weeks ago the text of one of those stones turned into a social media firestorm, derailing an otherwise fairly successful game launch. Feargus Urquhart, along with his team at Obsidian Entertainment, had a real crisis on his hands. One of the Kickstarter's backers had used their in-game memorial stone to print what many consider to be a hateful, transphobic joke. By making it part of the final game, Obsidian was seen by many to be supporting the abuse of the trans community. The memorial...
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The legal battle for gaming's past

A feud blew up this week between two major tech organizations: the Entertainment Software Association, a Washington, D.C.-based group that defends game industry interests, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a non-profit digital rights group best known for providing legal funds and support in events related to digital freedoms. The first blow was struck when the EFF reached out to United States Copyright Office asking for "legal protection to game enthusiasts, museums, and academics who preserve older games and keep them playable." The EFF says that the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, a copyright law passed in 1998, specifically "creates legal difficulty" for "those who modify games to keep them working after the servers they need are shut down." "the primary motivation for...
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Is Exploding Kittens, the most heavily funded game in Kickstarter history, any good?

It arrived on my doorstep in a plain FedEx envelope. I jiggled the contents to the bottom like a packet of sugar, sliced off the top with my pocket knife, and then upended it on my kitchen table. There, in a little orange box, was the most heavily funded game in Kickstarter's short history — Exploding Kittens, the $8.78 million titan. Must Read No one is getting rich from Exploding Kittens' $8.7 million Kickstarter It landed with a small thud. A deck of 50-some cards along with a handful of yellow and orange paper scraps. "Whelp," I wrote co-creator Elan Lee via email that afternoon, "the confetti was a very nice touch." "It's fire colored!" he wrote back. Indeed it was. But how does his game play? Lee is himself a game designer, famous in some circles for...
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Making your own visual novel is becoming so much easier

From Unity to Twine, tools that allow individuals to create personal games are becoming more accessible and useful. Last week saw the launch on Steam of a simple program that allows just about anyone to create their own visual novels.I have no programming ability and no great desire to make games. But I do enjoy writing novels in my spare time, so the lure of creating a visual novel is easy for me to take. TyranoBuilder costs $14.99 (Windows PC and Mac) and sells itself as a simple click-and-drop user-interface. Following the program's straightforward tutorial, I was able to create simple scenes in which characters exchanged text dialog, and the player was invited to make choices that led to branching narratives. This is a really easy piece of creative software. The only downside is...
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Take a shower with PewDiePie, like a Bossa

Video games allow us to open doors to fantasy adventures that the gates of real life cruelly slam in our face. This is their great gift to humanity.For example ... until this week, I thought I might never get the chance to take a shower with a famous 25-year-old man from Sweden, to soap the grime from his torso and to towel him dry. It had never occurred to me that one day I might enjoy the thrill of dressing that same man, none other than YouTuber PewDiePie, in a rah-rah skirt and bunny ears. This is the basic premise of GOTY IDST (Game of the Year If Deleted Still True) in which players can take a shower with various social media and YouTube personalities, including PewDiePie, Nerdcubed, Emma Blackery and Ashens. Created by London-based Bossa Studios, the developer of Surgeon...
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This Mega Man rejection letter from 1991 tells the story of a generation's love of Nintendo

Back in 1991, 12-year-old Kyle Rechsteiner was nuts about Nintendo games.He was less enthusiastic about his school project, an anti-drug campaign that involved watching educational films and drawing posters. But he was an imaginative child. In a moment of inspiration and clarity, he pulled the school lessons and his love of NES together and created a killer game idea, in which Mega Men takes on the evil of addiction. He believed the idea was so good, Nintendo would be fools to let it pass by. He created a story and some artwork. He found a company address in Nintendo Power magazine and sent his bundle off the the great company. A few weeks later he received a reply. Kyle, now in his mid-30s, recently married and decided to sort through the massive collection of junk he...
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Microsoft is ignoring Xbox One's biggest energy issue

Why is Microsoft seemingly determined to avoid addressing Xbox One's energy-wasteful default mode, which is costing consumers millions of dollars a year in electricity bills?That's the question raised by the Natural Resources Defense Council, a U.S. environmental action group. The New York-based non-profit has repeatedly requested that Microsoft review its current policy of supplying Xbox Ones with highest energy setting as default, without an obvious option to reduce power consumption on initial set-up. In a report last year, the NRDC highlighted the high amount of energy used by current generation consoles in standby mode. This week, NRDC senior scientist Noah Horowitz published a blistering blog post attack on Microsoft's policy calling it "a waste" and describing Xbox One's...
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Spotify launches today on PS4 and PS3 with PlayStation Music (update)

Music playback on PlayStation consoles gets a boost today with the arrival of PlayStation Music featuring Spotify, which replaces Sony's Music Unlimited service. The app is launching in 41 markets worldwide, allowing most of Spotify's 60 million users — three-fourths of whom use the ad-supported free version of the service — to stream music while they play games on their PlayStation 4. You can use PlayStation Music completely for free: It doesn't require a PlayStation Plus membership, and you can use it with a free Spotify account or Spotify Premium, which costs $9.99 per month. Representatives for Sony and Spotify told Polygon during a demo of the PS4 app last week that the two companies worked together closely on PlayStation Music, and it shows: "Seamless" is the best word we can...
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How Pillars of Eternity rewrites the rules for role-playing

You shouldn't have to put in hours of study to roll up a great character, and games shouldn't hinge on your ability to guess what combination of skills designers thought make the most powerful archetypes. The team behind Pillars of Eternity knew they could do better. So they threw out the rules, and built their game from the ground up to be something better.The first time I hit a dead end in a role-playing game came while playing the original Fallout. I forget where exactly, but it was after dozens of hours of play that my party ended up in the bowels of a dilapidated building somewhere in the wasteland trying to bust through a locked door. It was at that moment, in that dirty digital basement, that I realized no one in my party had the right mix of stats or skills to move on. There...
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Windward is a welcome return to the Age of Sail

When Windward creator Michael Lyashenko played Ubisoft's Assassin's Creed 4: Black Flag, he spent most of his game aboard ship."I was just sailing around the whole time," he recalls. "I didn't do assassin things." Subsequently, he made his own game about the Age of Sail. Called Windward, it eschews any landlubbin' activities and is almost entirely about sailing. Lyashenko is a fan of all things piratey, and says Windward is inspired by games he loved. While many of those games included land-based action and non-sailing mechanics, he's sticking strictly to the ocean wave. "I was inspired by Sid Meier's Pirates," he says. "I really liked the game but there were certain elements that I found were missing like multiplayer and procedural generation, which would allow the player to play...
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Gaming's space race puts one manufacturer's joysticks front and center

Before Richard Neville went to work for peripherals manufacturer Saitek he worked behind the counter of UK-based retailer PC World. Even before Saitek's senior product development manager helped to design them, Neville was selling joysticks faster than he could keep them in stock."Whenever you sold a PC," Neville told Polygon, "pretty much everyone bought a joystick to take home with it, because that was what they felt they should be doing." In the '90s any computer worth its salt had to be able to run the latest flight sims, including Microsoft Flight Simulator but also games like Wing Commander and TIE Fighter. That meant that just about every PC gamer owned a joystick. Even adventure games used to come with joystick controls baked right in The controller was so ubiquitous that...
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Austin Wintory's new score is stand-up gaming comedy

If you're in the least bit interested in video game music, you'll know that Austin Wintory is the composer behind the Grammy-nominated soundtrack for Journey as well as the scores for games like The Banner Saga and Monaco.He's currently working on a live project that incorporates music, games and comedy. On April 17 and 18 he'll be conducting the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra along with Tripod (pictured above), a popular Australian comedy trio with a lot of funny lines on relationships, personality, geek culture and video games. Tripod have been together for two decades. Their work often explores the intersection between relationships and entertainment, such as this decade-old skit about a couple and a video game, that's been viewed over 720,000 times on YouTube. More recently, they...
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The story of Yars' Revenge is a journey back to a lost world of video games

Classic game post-mortems at GDC follow a certain pattern. There is always a moment when the presenter will look back at the time when their particular classic game was made and say something along the lines of "crazy, crazy days." We all know that, in the past, they do things differently. But there is one section of game-making history that is so outlandishly different from everything that came after that it takes on the quality of fantasy. The age of the Atari 2600 is a such foreign country to us, it makes later "golden eras" seem positively humdrum. Howard Scott Warshaw's GDC look back at his 1982 hit Yars' Revenge offered a window into a lost world of gaming that glows for us, like a daguerreotype in moonlight. This single-screen game of his is not some daffy adventure beloved of...
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For Final Fantasy 14 director Naoki Yoshida, only one direction to go: Heavensward

Final Fantasy 14: A Realm Reborn director Naoki Yoshida has, for all intents and purposes, already conquered the world.In 2010, he found himself placed in charge of one of Square Enix's greatest failures — the original version of Final Fantasy 14. This is like being placed in charge of a runaway train after it had already gone off the tracks. His solution was as outrageous and it was impossible: While keeping the original version of Final Fantasy 14 running, he built a new MMO to replace it from the ground up. Against all odds, he succeeded in creating something wonderful. Even as Yoshida has explained the process multiple times, it's still one of the most unbelievable underdog stories in the modern game industry. Yoshida brought Final Fantasy 14: A Realm Reborn to PlayStation 4,...
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