Call of Duty: Black Ops 3 reveal trailer feels familiar
If you got a strong sense of déjà vu from the first teaser for this year's Call of Duty game, Call of Duty: Black Ops 3, we can't blame you – the 'augmented soldier' premise for the game sounds an awful lot like Deus Ex: Human Revolution and its recently announced follow-up, Deus Ex: Mankind Divided.
Now, the full reveal trailer is here, and we can also add a number of other titles to the list of games it obviously takes inspiration from, such as Titanfall, Metal Gear Solid, Mass Effect and more.
Set to The Rolling Stones classic 'Paint it Black' (add Guitar Hero to the list?), the trailer gives us a good look at Black Ops 3's futuristic gameplay, which involves boosting, wall running, power sliding, drones, robotic appendages and special augment-related abilities.
Robot dogs not yet confirmed
As always, developer Treyarch will be kicking things into high gear when it comes to multiplayer, with a confirmed four-player co-op mode, a Zombies mode, and the introduction of Specialists.Rather than play as a standard soldier, you now choose a Specialist character that comes equipped with a unique weapon, such as a killer robot or a massive 'one shot kill' revolver (Destiny?), and a unique ability, like being able to travel back in time for a few seconds, or the power to see through walls.
Watch the trailer below, which confirms Call of Duty: Black Ops 3's release date as November 6, 2015.
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Hands-on review: Acer Iconia One 8
The tablet category is decelerating, which is possibly down to a number of factors: a lack of innovation; the fact that people aren't so inclined to refresh their tablet as frequently as their phone; and, of course, the rise of the phablet.
Acer's trying to solve at least the first of those problems with the Iconia One 8, the cheap and cheerful new slate that wants to appeal to artists and education types. Its big selling point is its super-sensitive touchscreen, which comes about due to Acer's Precision Plus technology.
Every tablet manufacturer wants their slates to appeal to designers and artists, but technological barriers too often prevent a touchscreen from being a real replacement for a bit of paper or a canvas. Precision Plus uses smaller sensors than most other tablets, meaning that your sketches and lines are much more accurate.
In fact, you can even use a pencil if you don't have a stylus lying about. While I thought that this might go for any pointed object, and Acer rep told me that the screen actually detects the led material - and it works pretty nicely.
This added precision is also useful for cutting and editing pictures. A three-finger swipe gesture on the the display will take a screen grab that you can then chop and manipulate in Acer's editing suite.
Speaking of the interface, the Iconia One 8 is the first Acer tablet to run Android 5.0 Lollipop, and Acer has actually left it largely untouched aside from the small suite of its own app offerings. The result is a UI that's surprisingly nimble for a budget tablet, even with just 1GB of RAM.
As someone who prefers Android to be as close to stock as possible, I'd be happy using Acer's take on Lollipop.
Design
At £139.99 ($149, about AU$190) you wouldn't expect the One 8 to look like the most premium tablet on the market, but it's not bad. The bezel is just small enough and the body is only 9.55mm thick, making it comfortable in the hand.Another display feature Acer is singing about is "zero air gap" technology. It sounds like marketing spiel, but what it actually means is that everything is a bit more readable and less prone to reflections - it was actually a feature on the Iconia W4.
Following in the footsteps of its predecessors, the One 8 comes in a range of colourful options - 10, to be exact - and with the option of some fun cases too.
Ticking off some of the other boxes, the One 8 also comes with a microSD slot on the left hand side which will accept cards up to 32GBs in size. The tablet has 16GB of internal storage to start with.
There's a 5MP rear camera and a 0.3MP front-facer too. I always feel like a tablet's front-facing camera should be the better of the two considering that you're more likely going to use it for something like Skype than you are for taking pictures out in the wild.
But anyone who knows me will be aware I generally despise the idea of people using their tablet as a camera. Not that I'm judging you if you're that person. But I totally am.
Still, 0.3MP is quite poor in this day in age, so this aspect is a bit of a letdown.
Early verdict
The Iconia One 8 feels like a good tablet for its low asking price, but it's mostly down to Acer's Precision Plus technology. It's the sort of slate that would be perfect in a classroom or for any budding artists who wants something better for sketching.Acer has done a good thing in leaving Lollipop alone for the most part, and while there might not be too much to get excited about here, the superior touchscreen accuracy on offer could separate this from its other budget rivals when it arrives in the next couple of months.
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The PC Gamer: Why the VR waiting game is great for those who dare to dream
Introduction
How's that Steam Machine under your TV doing? The wait for virtual reality to become the future is proving quite torturous really, especially since it's already been 25 years.And it's been delayed once again, with the Oculus Rift looking like it's even further away than we thought.
Maybe it'll scrape in this year, but don't put money on it. As for the competition, yes, the HTC Vive is still scheduled for a few months time, but… well, two words: Valve Time.
But maybe the wait for VR to arrive isn't a bad thing. With technology, this is often the best part - getting to dream, imagining how great things are going to be, without pesky realities getting in the way.
Imagination game
What was the best Wii game? Some might say Mario Galaxy, others Smash Bros, but secretly, none of them had half the playtime of Imagining How Awesome This Will Be When They Make A Lightsaber Game.That lasted pretty much the entire period from release to realising the importance of haptic feedback to do anything but thrash around wildly and terrify the cat. Virtual Reality has no shortage of similar hold-ups to take the shine off it.
That's not to bash VR, not at all. I'm really looking forward to it getting its shot. I have an Oculus DK2 myself. I've enjoyed playing with it and absolutely plan to get the consumer version, or the Vive, or whatever one seems the most interesting and I can plug into my PC.
Headset for change
Using it though reinforces how quickly the miraculous fades, and how frustratingly fast the minor flaws get in the way. The foul smell of the foam around your eyes and the heat of it.The screen door effect (being able to see the gaps between pixels, which on the DK2 makes it look like you're seeing the world through a veil). The need to retrain your eyes so that you move your head to look around instead of glancing over to the side and seeing the edge of the screen or chromatic aberration added to help turn a 2D screen into 3D. Little things like that.
Over time, yes, they'll be fixed. Wrap-around views, eye-tracking, lighter equipment, all that. But there'll always be something, something to get in the way - some little niggle that takes the result from magic to merely a cool toy, and then keeps clipping away.
Magic faded
It's perhaps the most frustrating part of human psychology; to always want more, and to so quickly stop seeing the magic in a thing. I remember feeling that when playing Planetside 2 for the first time, which finally created the massively-multiplayer war that players had been craving for decades, offered it up pretty much for free, and had that marvel completely over-written by arguments about the price of sniper rifles or whatever.
Or going back a bit further, the Metaverse concept, popularised by the novel Snow Crash. From pretty much the start of the internet, that was the Dream - the Holy Grail of interactions.
One day, promised early technologies like VRML (Virtual Reality Modelling Language), we would no longer merely click upon flat screens to order our VHS tapes and Pogs, but stride as digitally perfect avatars through realms of Cyberspace, pausing our shopping sprees only to fight black ICE and try not to die in a game (for to do so would mean to die in real life).
Disc world
Even magazine cover discs got into the action, with 3D towns as menus and similar. Whole virtual worlds like There and Second Life sprouted up to offer that democratised future… and, ah, I'm willing to bet five virtual pounds that you got here by clicking/tapping on a web browser several generations more advanced, but functionally little removed from Mosaic/Netscape/Web Explorer.Second Life especially, while full of amazing user generated creations, is now pretty much synonymous in the public consciousness with weird porn, with all the original ideas of people attending virtual rock concerts and symposiums and otherwise merging the boundaries between worlds a long, long distant memory.
Reality is such a buzzkill like that, so often. And yet at the same time, when things do work, we never really appreciate them. Look at GTA V for instance - to be more exact, the city, and how quickly it goes from being a stunning artistic achievement to simply the background for mediocre shooty-bangs.
Or the internet itself, where 'has democratised and liberated the entirety of human knowledge' is a bulletpoint located somewhere between "Free porn!" and long arguments over who would win in a fight, Optimus Prime or Arya Stark.
It's only really before we get our hands on things that they can reach their full potential; a thing to idolise and pour hope into, to imagine and to salivate over. In the case of virtual reality, I suspect it's largely helped by the fact that even in the 90s, when the first machines started appearing in arcades, it only ever felt like the tip of the iceberg. Games like VTOL and Legend Quest weren't The Future, just an exciting glimpse of it that cost a few pound (or dollars) a go if you were lucky enough to stumble into them.
The dream was having that experience in the home, on real games like Doom (okay, technically, that came two years later, but sssh) and being immersed in our favourite games that weren't being run off a crappy Amiga. Sure, you could buy the equipment that would let you do that, but only in the sense that technically you can buy a tank on eBay - you can, but you're not going to.
Older and wiser
25 years later, we're older, wiser and more cynical, but still secretly still holding those childish excitements born of being given only tantalising glimpses of what could have been, never enough to get bored and dissatisfied.With the possible exception of anyone unfortunate enough to remember CyberZone, the futuristic gameshow that introduced itself with cyberpunk flourishes only to set a third of its games in a crap 3D recreation of a boring English town. With duck-shooting mini-games. What were they thinking?
And yet despite having spent several hundred quid to get hold of it, my Oculus DK2 is still sitting idle most of the time, unless I want to impress people with a demo like Sightline or Shufflepuck Cantina or Radial-G. The future is exciting, the present… by its nature, it just is. The magic trick loses its power when you've seen it done before. A moment of revelation can only come once. The first bite of cake is always the sweetest.
At least by recognising that, we can enjoy the waiting game for what it is - technology unencumbered by reality, just like we secretly want. And when it's out, there's always going to be something else impossible to lust after, isn't there?
It wouldn't be any fun otherwise…
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How to turn your PC or Mac into a lean, mean retro gaming machine
Introduction and choice of platforms
Before the IBM PC changed the computer world forever, for many the pinnacle of personal computing was the Sinclair ZX Spectrum, Commodore 64 and the BBC Micro. For gamers these computers defined the first screen generation. As an object of desire the ZX81 may not have won any design awards, but for many it was their first true computer.Anyone who would love a trip down 8-bit memory lane can take one thanks to a range of emulators that have been developing for several years. The rise of virtualisation has also heralded a new era of emulation with powerful desktop PCs from Apple and Windows offering platforms for the retro gamer to exploit.
There are a number of options to consider when attempting to run retro games on your Windows PC or Mac…
If you're Windows-centric, then DOSBox is certainly the way to go, and has become somewhat of an unofficial standard when running DOS-based games. Getting your games to run will mean acquainting yourself with the terminal and the C: prompt, but you will be able to play all of your favourite games once again.
Another option is MAME (Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator). Again, MAME is a command line emulator. If you want something a bit more user friendly, Turbo MAME offers just that.
Mac users have a similar application called Boxer that offers a drag-and-drop approach to classic gameplay. In essence Boxer takes DOS games and makes them behave like an app.
Of course you can already get Android and iOS versions of many classic arcade games. However, if you want to run your existing games this is possible with a DOSBox. Apple users who don't want to jailbreak their devices should check out iDOS. The app comes with a set of classic games including Duke Nukem. The file manager iFunBox also enables you to add new games.
And it is possible to use the very latest in low cost computing to get your retro gaming fix. The Raspberry Pi computer together with Emulation Station is a great way to get into low-cost retro gaming. You can read a detailed tutorial on how to create your games console with the Pi here.
Choose your platform
If want to play specific games, there are a number of resources to choose from: Atari aficionados have AtariAge, Hatari is an Atari ST/STE/TT/Falcon emulator for GNU/Linux, BSD, Mac OS X, Windows and other systems which are supported by the SDL (Simple DirectMedia Layer) library, and Emuparadise.For ZX Spectrum games you have a number of options – developed using the Microsoft .Net framework, there's the zxspectrum4, Spectaculator, and Fuse ZX Spectrum Emulator, all of which offer great emulations of this classic computer.
The Commodore 64 was also a highly popular gaming machine with hundreds of classic games available during its heyday. Emulators include: CCS64, Zzap64, VICE and Micro64.
When visiting emulation websites you'll often hear ROMs mentioned. This is especially true of games emulation. Many of the classic games that you may want to play – Atari games are a good example – are still copyrighted so getting hold of their ROMs in order to play the games is a matter that has to be approached carefully. A website like CoolROM is a great place to start as they have legal ROMs that you can use with your emulator, including Atari game ROMs. ROM World has a host of ROMs, too.
Another term that you'll need to understand in your emulator vocabulary is 'disk image'. These tend to apply to emulators of computers such as the Amiga – they aren't real disks in the sense that you can pick them up and slot them into your floppy drive. They are virtual copies of the drives that the original computer had, such as its floppy disk drive. These are created on the host PC's hard drive and then used by the emulator to read and write data to, and are usually created automatically by the emulator itself. But check before you install the emulator you want to use just in case you have to manually create this drive for the emulator to work properly.
Virtual machines
If you can't locate the ROM of the game you want to play for your emulator, but happen to have the original game's cartridge, there is a handy device you can use to connect the cartridge. Retrode is an adapter that supports a number of game consoles including Super NES, Sega Master, Nintendo 64 and Genesis. The adapter is available from DragonBox.
Some of the games you may want to play could have been written for a specific operating system. Windows is a classic example where many retro games were written when Windows 95 was cutting edge technology. If you need to emulate a number of different versions of Windows on your PC or Mac this is possible via virtualisation. VMWare Workstation enables you to create a number of virtual installations of Windows that can then be used to run your games.
Your existing Windows installation acts as a host for the other operating systems you have installed via VMware's application. And the installed copy of Windows 98, for instance, is a complete installation and not a cut-down version that lacks many of its features.
When running in emulation mode, you will feel you have actually travelled back in time to when you were using Windows 98. Virtualisation is so good these days you can install multiple versions of Windows without any problems, just make sure the host PC has a fast processor and plenty of RAM. Once you have your chosen version of Windows running, it's just a case of running the game you want to play, as the game thinks it is running on a Windows 98 machine (or whatever version of Windows you have installed).
Using emulation and virtualisation offers everyone a chance to play retro games on the latest desktop and mobile devices. The interest in the early days of gaming hasn't diminished with old Atari games long since consigned to landfill being exhumed with an original copy of ET for the Atari 2600 selling for $1,537 (around £1,025, or AU$1,985).
If you're a gamer who laments the early pioneering days of computer gaming, the tools you need to play an array of classic games are readily available. It's not game over for 8-bit gaming, but game on!
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