Bridget

We get a lot of people pitching their indie games to us here at Kotaku. Some of these pitches are dreadful, others tolerable, but sometimes you get one that just nails it.

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"Ugh, that's gross. Show me more."

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[body_image width='1920' height='1080' path='images/content-images/2015/02/05/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/02/05/' filename='dont-bet-on-evolve-being-another-left-4-dead-body-image-1423124272.jpg' id='24568']

Evolve should be a hit in the making—but it could just fall flat on its face.

It's a great concept, a brand new game from a company with form—Turtle Rock, creators of Left 4 Dead—and a fusion of two of the most popular genres around right now: shooters and MOBA. (Replace that with whatever term you prefer to use, in the certain knowledge that not one shit is given about what that is.)

On the face of it, it's not a game whose name should be said while shuffling awkwardly, or coming on a wave of pre-order bonuses and DLC that smacks less of a title with a long bright future stretching ahead of it than a fire sale being run out of a building that is actually, literally on fire. An Evolve-themed Match-3 game on mobile devices, anyone? With microtransactions?

[youtube src='//www.youtube.com/embed/d_mcGUZGQZQ' width='560' height='315']

Evolve – Wraith interactive trailer

But not all Evolve's problems are down to anything it's doing wrong. It's likely, for instance, that everyone would be much more excited for it had EA's Titanfall not burned out so quickly—and that was an easily picked-up game with mechs and jetpacks and big explosions. The history of online games has rarely been particularly kind to those that tried to offer something radically different, and even less that demands as much from its players as Evolve does.

Any multiplayer game lives and dies based on its community, and communities are fickle. Not for nothing have most recent successes been in the free-to-play world, rather than full $50+ games with no real solo content to fall back on if the online side doesn't take off.

The basic premise of Evolve is a four-against-one battle between hunters and a monster, all player controlled. The monster begins weak and has to avoid the Hunters early on while it levels up and unlocks its ability, while the hunters have to track it, catch it in a force-field dome, and combine their skills and weapons to take it out. There's more to it than that, including dangerous flora and fauna that forces the hunters to stick together (much like Left 4 Dead used Smokers and other super zombies to punish lone wolves) and the monster getting a choice of skills to power up, but that's the gist—a fast-paced game of hunter becoming hunted.

When everything clicks, it's great fun. The hunters each have special skills to deploy, and the choice of who to take into the field radically shifts the battle. Pick the human character Val as your medic and you get a powerful healing ray for keeping allies alive at the expense of being very visible, while Lazarus prefers to hide in an invisibility cloak and pop-up to revive the dead when they fall. Robot support Bucket can fly his head around the map to track the monster, while Hank can slap shields on the party and call in orbital strikes. Skills are built around character synergies and only come into their own when properly combined—much like a MOBA (see earlier comment about the genre's name), even being a heavy hitter only gets you so far.

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The hunters come face to face with one of Evolve's monsters, the Kraken

The catch is that, before you get a handle on the game's singular selling points, Evolve is a thoroughly miserable experience. It's not just that it feels like a weak shooter—it's that it feels like a bland trudge through a map before a straight-up scrum against a monster that, being piloted by another new player, is likely just thrashing around. To appreciate what the game actually is requires either proper tuition or much slogging through, and more importantly, four other players willing to do the same.

This is very unlikely to ever be a PuG-friendly game you can just jump in and play for an hour. Its reliance on everyone pulling together—hunters and monster alike—to make things fun as well is a recipe for hostility, with the specific character classes and load-outs both helping and exacerbating that. Your job isn't to come up with clever ideas and schemes and feints and tactics, but to play your character as designed and draw variety primarily from the team composition and developer-designed synergies and tactics. It's all very mechanical, making the overall game more interesting, but not without cost.

With friends it's inevitably a far, far better game. At that point though, the risk becomes one of simply getting tired. Evolve's monster-hunting concept doesn't have the raw kick of Left 4 Dead's zombie apocalypse, or the expertise curve of something like Dota 2. It's one thing to be hooked on it, but you really need a full team of friends on voice comms and a competent monster player to go up against before it becomes interesting.

[youtube src='//www.youtube.com/embed/emCP7fxvX9E' width='560' height='315']

Evolve – Evacuation Story trailer

Having played a few rounds though, it's hard to see Evolve holding its interest. Changing the characters will certainly switch things up, but as yet and from beta reports, you're still functionally doing the same things—a limited strategy hunt, and a boss fight. The monster type Goliath especially suffers here, despite being the game's mascot. It's a bullet-sponge bore that quickly stops being scary to fight.

The result of all this is a game that it's hard to get too optimistic about. It's easy to imagine getting hooked on it for a couple of weeks, playing the maps and modes, trying out the new characters, learning the rhythms and teaming up with friends. It just doesn't feel like something most people will be playing a couple of months from now, when the community has hardened up and learned how to dominate their games, and new players just farting about are no longer welcome.

What made Left 4 Dead such a great co-op game was that it was easy to pick up and, for the most part, intuitive. There were painful lessons to learn, like not bothering the Witch, but they were one-time things and to at least some extent having a complete arse on the four-player team felt appropriate to the zombie apocalypse setting.

[body_image width='1920' height='1080' path='images/content-images/2015/02/05/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/02/05/' filename='dont-bet-on-evolve-being-another-left-4-dead-body-image-1423132482.jpg' id='24642']

The Wraith was the third monster to be revealed by Turtle Rock

Evolve, meanwhile, is a game that looks simple on the surface, whose complexity could—with enough additions, like new maps, monsters and mutations—be what keeps it interesting, but not without being a real barrier to entry. Its rules will either be what makes it more than simply a scrum, or completely suffocates the fun in its crib. It's also unfortunate that despite the DLC and special editions being sold, there isn't a cheap four-player pack that would make it possible for friends to play for less than $200.

However it turns out, right now Evolve is one of the year's biggest, yet most intriguing gambles. The frustration of it is that, in most ways, it's exactly the kind of game that we should want to succeed—something brand new, something that dares to go its own way, something with a cool core concept that deserves to succeed. It's maddening to doubt its chances while less-ambitious games like the latest Call of Duty dance happily into the sales charts, and that's made worse by the fact that Evolve is genuinely a good game when everything clicks.

While such a big question mark hangs over its longevity and players' willingness to play by its rules and take such a huge chunk of the responsibility for making the hunt worth going on, though, it's hard not feel The Fear for its chances. It's just unfortunate that even if Evolve has what it takes to succeed, this could end up a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Evolve is released for Windows, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One on February 10.

Follow Richard Cobbett on Twitter.

To be fair, perhaps we as a nation karmically brought this upon ourselves by naming the place “Yellowstone.”

Once upon a time, the Morning Glory hot spring was deep blue in color, much like the flower it was originally named after. Over the decades, however, tourists visiting the natural attraction have changed its hue by tossing in coins, charms, rocks, and other foreign objects, which have partially blocked Morning Glory’s underground heat source and created an opportunity for new photosynthetic microorganisms that wouldn’t have been able to withstand the temperature before to now inhabit its waters.

Thanks to these pigmented “microbial mats,” Morning Glory is now a vibrant blend of greens and yellows, depending on how the heat is displaced throughout the spring—the orange outer rim, for example, is where the water is at its lowest temperature.

It would be really easy to walk with the assumption that this foreign interference into nature is fundamentally a bad thing. However, scientists at Montana State University were inspired by the spring’s new hue to create a mathematical model which predicts the way the color gradient is influenced by both microbes and the light hitting the water. They believe this model might even have far reaching effects for the future of microbiology. From Science Friday:

Using this initial model as a starting point, the authors hope to pursue collaborations with biologists to develop tools which incorporate chemical and optical data to monitor the microbial composition of pools like Morning Glory from afar, thus eliminating the need for costly on-site sampling. Indeed, for years, biologists from around the world have flocked to Yellowstone, where a new discovery could reveal a bacterium with pharmaceutical applications, an enzyme for renewable energy, or even shed light on the origins of life on our planet.

What do you know? That penny you threw on a summer vacation one time might have inadvertently revealed the origin of life.

(via BoingBoing)

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Remember how there were maybe going to be some phones that ran Ubuntu ? They're coming! With a list of caveats approximately one mile long!

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For most of the poor, debt is debilitating. When the cost of living consistently outpaces what one makes for a living, attempting to pay off debts is as demoralizing as it is financially punishing. During harsh economic times, the U.S. has chosen a path of abandonment or prison for those trapped by insurmountable debt.

Amid its own crisis, Croatia is exploring another option: canceling debt for tens of thousands of its poorest citizens.

Under Croatia's new "Fresh Start" program, about 60,000 citizens are eligible to have their debts canceled and their bank accounts unfrozen. 

The details: In order to have debt written off, a Croatian must make less than 1,250 kuna ($138) a month, must not own any property or savings and must have a debt lower than 35,000 kuna ($5,100), according to the Washington Post. Read More

sixpenceee:

Here are some more of the creepiest things kids have said. I have a few more posts like this on my blog. Here they are.

• Creepy Things Said by Kids Part 1
  
• Creepy Things Said by Kids Part 2
  
• Kid’s Imaginary Friends
  

Today, in missed opportunities: A large coalition of anti-fun activists are calling for a boycott of the forthcoming ’50 Shades of Grey’ movie on the grounds that it glamorizes a depraved, anything goes, “stick and stones may break my bones but chains and whips excite me” type of lifestyle. In an effort to combat its pernicious influence, they are using the hashtags #50dollarsnot50shades and #50shadesisabuse to plead with horny soccer moms across the nation to donate $50 to a women’s shelter instead of donating $12.50 to a naughty night out with their girlfriends. Because those two things are totally mutually exclusive. (Believe it or not, you can go see a movie about two people indulging in completely mutually consensual kink and make a donation to a worthy organization that helps abused women, like this one.)

“[Real women] don’t end up like Anastasia; they often end up in a women’s shelter, on the run for years or dead,” anti-sex work organization The National Center for Sexual Exploitation wrote on its Facebook page. “The money you would have spent on movie tickets and a baby-sitter or movie tickets, popcorn and drinks will go towards serving victims of abusive relationships like the one glamorized in the 50 Shades series.”

To which I say: Um, have they even seen Glamour’s iPad Q+A? Or any of the press tour, for that matter? Between the two main characters’ utter lack of chemistry, the film’s clunky dialogue and the stars’ unambiguous distaste for each other, the film, and everything said film stands for, it’s the most convincing anti-BDSM PSA to come along in years. Dakota Johnson–who presumably enjoys being paid to pretend she’s someone who likes different things than the things Dakota Johnson likes–has described the film’s sex scenes as “emotionally taxing” and a “technical” “task” to get through. Jamie Dornan literally said he had to take a long shower after doing “research” for his role at BDSM clubs, so traumatized was he by the things he saw there. Not since Andrea Dworkin has anyone quite so thoroughly disavowed both the practice and depiction of kinky sex.

One need only look at the BDSM community’s response to the poorly-written bodice ripper to see that these pearl clutching culture warriors have nothing to fear from it. “All the work that has been done to establish that BDSM is not a pathological symptom, but one of a wide range of normative human erotic interests, is in danger of being undermined by the success of Fifty Shades,” writes BDSM activist and researcher Pamela Stephenson Connolly at The Guardian. “Let’s hope we do not return to the days when people were discriminated against – losing children, property, jobs – for their interest in BDSM.”

Plus, let’s not gloss over the fact that BDSM activity is kink mutually agreed upon by both participants and not the infliction of abuse of one party on the other. It seems insulting to both victims of abuse and members of the BDSM community to assume otherwise.

See, missionary sex brigade? If you really want to convince people that power play is scary and wrong (not to mention patently un-sexy), you should be supporting this schlock with everything you’ve got.

h/t Washington Post; Image

 

I don’t want you to think I am neglecting the cats. Here is one trying to heave itself onto a ledge. It’s not very graceful like other kinds of cat.

The next episode of NBC's Law & Order SVU features a "ripped-from-the-headlines" story about a game developer who is the target of harassment from the male-dominated video game community. Inspired by the harassment and threats surrounding GamerGate, the episode centers on game developer Raina Punjabi, who's harassed, doxxed and swatted by gamers.

In the episode "Intimidation Game," the Special Victims Unit deal with the rape and death threats lobbed at Punjabi and her employees. After her game company's website is hacked and Punjabi is swatted, she becomes "the face of women in gaming." On the eve of the launch of an international game rollout, the promo explains, SVU must contend with a flood of online harassment that looks like it...

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If you've already bought a box of valentines to give out to your friends, dump it in the trash and set the entire thing on fire, because there's only one type of valentine that's okay to hand to your special chum this year and it's the one that has a picture of Katy Perry's dancing shark on it. All other cards exit to the left.

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Do you live in Santa Monica, CA? If so you really MUST get to Copro Gallery and see the AWESOME ‘Conjoined V’ group exhibition!!
Including this amazing piece by Emi Slade, “Cerberus” Rogue taxidermy/mixed Media, 30” × 24” × 20”

Check out all the work here http://www.copronason.com/conjoinv/

This is a terrible unicorn

Sometimes you have to do what you have to do for your career. For Ian Ziering, it's handing out ice cream samples at Baskin Robbins. [ more › ]

Ah, the sensuous feeling of plastic on plastic. [ more › ]

omelettethecorgi:

Those are some funny-looking alligators.

Caption killed me.

After many delays, The Broad museum in downtown Los Angeles has finally set an opening date and announced a sneak peak. [ more › ]

Lightning in a bottle is like Coachella-meets-Burning-Man. Here's what we're most excited about. [ more › ]

Here are 20 of the coolest events happening in L.A. this weekend. [ more › ]

We're gonna need a cigarette. [ more › ]

Apple announced last year that it was pulling the plug on its two main photo editing and management programs: iPhoto, which is aimed at consumers, and Aperture, which is geared toward pros. Both products would be replaced with a single app called “Photos for Mac.”

Here’s a look at what we can expect when the app arrives later this year.

It’s a clean app with four main tabbed sections: Photos, Shared, Albums, and Projects. The interface is clean and intuitive, borrowing many visual elements from how photos are experienced through iOS. Apple is working hard to make OS X and iOS uniform and play well with each other.

Images in your iCloud Photo Library are automatically synced across your computer and mobile devices. Changes you make on one device are also automatically reflected on the others. If you don’t want to use iCloud — which costs $20 for the max capacity of 1TB — you can choose to use the Photos app as a standalone tool.

The desktop app will now have Moments, Collections, and Years views for automatic organization of your photos and videos based on time and place. These views provide you with different levels of organization, from an individual photo all the way up to a high-level view of everything you’ve shot.

Moments groups your photos based on events by examining timestamp and location. A hangout with friends or hike in the mountains, for example.

Collections are groups of moments that are all around the same time and place. This lets you quickly locate larger chunks of your life, such as vacations or family gatherings.

The Years view shows a mosaic of all the photographs you’ve taken in a year. Clicking any of the thumbnails will bring up a preview of that photo.

Under the Shared tab, you’ll be able to see an overview of photos you’ve shared and images others have shared with you. This screen will also allow you to Like and Comment on photos.

The Albums tab shows the different albums you’ve created, along with some automatic ones that group your files into things like Favorites, Videos, and Panoramas.

Projects are things like books, cards, calendars, prints, and slideshows. There are new tools that make creating these products a breeze. Once you start one of these projects with your photos, you can find and manage them through the Projects tab.

In addition to sleek methods of browsing and viewing photos, the software is filled with powerful editing tools that help take your images to the next level.

If you don’t want to spend too much time on a photo, an Enhance feature lets you make auto-adjustments with one click. Need to improve the composition of a photo? A new Auto Crop feature can try to help by correcting your horizon line and attempting to create a crop that satisfies the Rule of Thirds.

There are also a number of tools that allow you to adjust things like lighting, color, definition, noise, vignetting, levels, and white balance.

Want photo filters? The app has those too. They include: Mono, Tonal, Noir, Fade, Chrome, Process, Transfer, and Instant. Here’s a look at a few of them:

Unfortunately for more serious photographers, this app appears to offer a middle ground between iPhoto and Aperture instead of the best of both worlds. While there is an adjustment brush using the retouching tool, it only allows you to change its size and not its intensity. There’s also no way to assign star ratings to photos — the closest thing is the ability to “favorite” your best shots.

The lack of some of Aperture’s more powerful tools may be a turn off to photographers who need a program for more serious editing (but there are plenty of options out there for that).

For ordinary consumers though, Photos for Mac may be a fantastic new option for organizing and touching up their everyday snapshots. It’s free, after all, and will come bundled with Apple’s operating system.

Apple will be officially launching Photos for Mac through a free Yosemite update sometime this spring.

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Update: Here’s a nice hands-on look at Photos for Mac by The Verge:

50 Shades of [Sigh]: The Disastrous 50 Shades of Grey Press Tour:

According to its publisher, at the spike of its popularity, two copies of E.L. James’ 50 Shades of Grey trilogy were being sold every second. In accessible terms, that works out to more than one hundred million copies sold, to date.

Let’s undertake a thought experiment. Imagine that — rather than paper and ink — each of those books were composed of: a look of unabashed contempt; a single embittered sigh; an explicit request that audiences not see the film adaptation of 50 Shades of Grey, vocalized by one of the movie’s main stars. Imagine one hundred million pained expressions, one hundred million eyes rolled, one hundred million uncomfortable pauses that peter out into one hundred million dead silences.

You have imagined the press tour for the upcoming film 50 Shades of Grey — by now firmly established as among the most disastrous of the past decade, if not so far this century.

Read this. It will give you life.

It's that time again Scenestar readers! Lightning In A Bottle has released their lineup for this year's edition of the festival. Taking place once again at San Antonio Recreation Area in Bradley, Calif., Lightning In A Bottle will be held...

How close are we to living in Blade Runner's dark and moody dystopia of 2019? Pretty damn close, if you follow the Instagram account bladerunnerreality. At least aesthetically.

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Joshua Lambus


Joshua Lambus


Joshua Lambus


Joshua Lambus


Joshua Lambus


Joshua Lambus


Joshua Lambus


Joshua Lambus


Joshua Lambus

Monsters of the deep, Joshua Lambus