firehose

Razer's wearable smartband, Nabu, is entering an open beta, and the company is asking gamers to help test it out.

Five hundred "hardcore Razer fans" will get a chance to test the Nabu for $1 prior to launch, according to the Razer website. The beta units will start shipping on July 10.

"With your help, the Nabu aims to become everything you want in a wearable and more," according to the site. "As a Nabu Beta tester, you'll provide feedback on the device and companion software directly to the Razer Nabu engineering team — all towards readying the Nabu for launch."

Those interested are asked to sign up for the test on their page. The site warns that they're only selecting the "most hardcore fans" for the program, people who actively use hardware and software and are highly active on social media channels.

If you're selected, you're expected to provide detailed written reports and feedback to Razer.

Nabu was announced at the Consumer Electronics Show at the beginning of the year. In a March interview, Razer CEO Min-Liang Tan told Polygon that the idea for a smartband was spurred by the company's bigger, broader intentions as a company.

"We don't view ourselves as a gaming company," Tan said at the time. "We view ourselves as a company for gamers. What we literally are is a brand that works with gamers, that designs products for gamers. That's where things like Nabu will come from. It's an extension of a platform for gamers to really make use of and that's a real premise for us and for future product lines.

"Given that there are 1.4 billion gamers today, that's a massive customer base that we're looking at."

While the Nabu, like most smartbands, has a slew of non-gamer applications including telling time, tracking movement and sending messages from a phone, the company is also thinking about how to incorporate the device into gaming sessions and tie it to other Razer products.

You can read that full interview here.

Goat Simulator, the hit PC game that lets you play the part of a rampaging barnyard animal capable of donning jetpacks and riding skateboards (in addition to more conventional goat attributes), has been available for download on Steam since April. But as of this week, Mac and Linux owners can get their hooves on a full copy as well, now that the official port has exited beta. And for all those herders/hoarders of physical media out there, the game will be coming to US store shelves sometime in July for the same $9.99 price as the Steam download, with additional goats and vehicles from the 1.1 patch, according to distributor Deep Silver. All in all, it's never been a better time to be a four-legged, bearded ball of bury.

An anti-graffiti crusader has painted over parts of the Philadelphia mural that graced the cover of Kurt Vile’s 2013 record Wakin On A Pretty Daze. The mural was commissioned and painted by Steve “ESPO” Powers, on the outside of a business that totally supported the piece. But Lee Mayjahs, a local DJ and “Burning Man enthusiast,” apparently thought the piece was “attracting graffiti to the neighborhood,” so he covered parts of it with white paint. After outcry from locals and fans, Mayjahs now says he has apologized to both ESPO and Vile for his “mental breakdown,” and has said he will pay to have the mural repainted.

Source

OtherSide Entertainment is resurrecting the Underworld series of dungeon crawling role-playing games with Underworld Ascension, the newly formed studio revealed today.

Paul Neurath, a veteran of games like Ultima Underworld and the former co-founder of System Shock and Thief developer Looking Glass Studios, founded the independent development studio, which acquired the Underworld brand and is looking to hire developers.

“With Underworld Ascension, we are excited to be bringing back the Underworld franchise, making it more vital than ever before," Neurath said.

Developer Blue Sky Productions' Ultima Underworld: The Stygian Abyss was released in 1992. Neurath served as the game's designer, while Richard Garriott directed and Warren Spector produced the RPG. OtherSide's Underworld game is headed to PC at an unannounced date.

"As producer on the original Ultima Underworld games, I'll never forget the first time I saw a working prototype of the game — I felt as if the world had just changed," Warren Spector said. "As the first fully-textured, real-time, first-person game, Underworld paved the way for every other first-person game that followed. If that doesn't qualify as 'changing the world,' I don't know what does!"

By Nathan Grayson on July 1st, 2014 at 10:00 am.

When procedurally-generated wonderverse No Man’s Sky was first announced, we thought a PC version was a no brainer/manner/sky-er. Ever since Sony became the wind beneath its promotional wings, however, there’s been some confusion around when a PC version will happen, if ever. Thankfully, I metaphorically (and also literally sometimes shhhh don’t tell) live under developers’ floorboards and subsist on whatever info-scraps might trickle down, so I snatched some clarification on the E3 “winner” from developer Hello Games. Here’s what’s going on.

During E3 managing director Sean Murray told me the following:

“Basically we’re doing a console debut on PS4. That’s all we’re saying right now. But that leaves open a PC version, which we really want to do.”

He was, however, cagey on when a PC version might happen, and he stressed that one hasn’t been formally announced yet. In the wake of that I contacted Hello Games in hopes of getting a response with a little more meat on its bones, a why to accompany the (rather puzzling) what.

The response I received was basically thus: there’s nothing locking Hello Games into only making a PS4 version, but the team is purposefully small and they don’t want to balloon it out so big that it pops, letting out creative potential with a sad “pffffffftheeep.” Given that the game is still a ways off, the studio isn’t entirely sure how much that will limit its ability to do two versions at the same time. For now, then, they don’t want to announce anything. Not until they’re sure.

Assuming a PC version does happen, though, there are a few features that could really make it stand out. The most obvious, of course, is mod support. Pairing No Man’s Sky’s procedural generation tech with player-created ideas, creatures, and assets could make the allegedly limitless game even more limitless, redefining the concept of limitlessness and making (oxy)morons out of us all. Will it happen, though? The team’s not sure yet, but the potential is definitely there.

“We don’t know yet whether we’ll allow mods or provide tools to support them,” said Hello’s Alex Wiltshire. “Our focus, though, is on features that support what for us the game is about – exploring a vast universe. That might inherently involve mods – we’ll know more as we continue making the game.”

He added that, really, that’s the main priority, despite all the seemingly endless tech talk. The goal, Wiltshire insisted, is to design a truly cohesive, interesting game. The whizzbang tech is only a foundation.

“Though it looks like No Man’s Sky is all about tech, for the team it’s actually the opposite,” he said. “It’s always been about the idea first, and then creating the tech it requires. That’s the case for all of its features – they’re about iterating and what fits the concept best rather than fitting the game to certain ways of doing things.”

A fun videogame? Madness. Mark my words: it’ll almost certainly never catch on.