 |
|
|
|||||
Skate City was an Apple Arcade launch title way back in 2019, developed by Agens and published by Snowman, a company well-known for its mobile-first games like Alto's Adventure, the "sequel" Alto's Odyssey, When Cards Fall and a handful of other intriguing titles. It's been over five years since Skate City first arrived, but the Snowman / Agens team is back with Skate City: New York, which is out on Apple Arcade today. There have been a number of content updates to the original game over the years, but this is a full-fledged new title that feels quite familiar but also has a number of improvements and updates. I had a chance to try Skate City: New York a few days before its launch, and I also spoke with Snowman's Ryan Cash and Andrew Schimmel about the new game, which they said has been in the works for a good three years now. As with the first Skate City, you're rolling left-to-right in classic side-scrolling format here. To make things accessible, you can pull off tricks by swiping in one of eight directions on the lower half of the screen; the left side is for ollie-based tricks while the right shifts you to nollie. You don't have to do anything precise to land, just launch the trick and the game will make sure you hit the ground rolling (unless you land on stairs or an obstacle, of course). That's the basic starting point, but you can also do spins, manuals, grinds and more. It's simpler than a game like the classic Tony Hawk's Pro Skater series or the recent OlliOlli World, but there's still a lot of timing and dexterity involved in really nailing your runs. As you'd expect, the visuals are more dynamic and the backgrounds are much-improved over the original (which was still a lovely game). But what sets this one apart the most, according to Schimmel, is the fact the "Pro Skate" mode, which is the most involved part of the game, uses procedurally-generated levels. "We didn't want to limit ourselves to the original [game's] loops through the city, but instead make something that was more adaptive and dynamic," Schimmel said. "Procedural generation was the answer and the biggest technical challenge." It's not something that I was able to pick up on immediately, since I've only played the game for a couple hours, but Schimmel's confident it'll make Skate City: New York have even more replay-ability than the original. Snowman / Agens Pro Skate reminds me a lot of Snowman's Alto's Adventure, but translated to skating the goal is to go as far as you can and rack up as many points as possible while completing three objectives to level your progress up. Objectives are things like "land three 180-degree spins" or "grind for 100 meters." But with levels more unpredictable than in the prior game, you'll need to be better at reacting on-the-fly to new obstacles, which can end your run but also give you an opportunity for a good grind or trick. As with all of Snowman's games, there are no in-app purchases here; instead, you'll get points for completing challenges and leveling up in Pro Skate. You can then use those to customize your character with the much more flexible and expanded Skate Shop. You can tweak your character's body, hair, facial characteristics, clothes, skateboard and so forth. I haven't played around with it a ton yet but it's obviously right off the bat that there's a lot more personalization here. As with Skate City, Snowman promises that there will be a steady stream of fresh challenges and more parts of the city to explore over the next year and beyond. Schimmel referred to it as a "live services" game even though there's no monetization aspect to it. I also asked how the team decided to release Skate City: New York through Apple Arcade versus having it be a one-time payment or even including paid updates in the game Cash called it an "easy choice." "We havent done a paid up-front game since Alto's Odyssey in 2018," Cash said. "Apple Arcade and Netflix Games are where we're at right now. And it was an easy choice when talking about Skate City: New York, because the first game was a launch title and found a lot of success there. It just made sense to bring it back to Apple Arcade." The first Skate City eventually came to consoles and PC, as well, and Cash said that was definitely under consideration for the future, but the goal is to make a mobile-first title as good as it can be. While the game doesn't feel wildly different than its predecessor, Skate City: New York still feels like a premium mobile game at a time when those can be hard to find. And Snowman and Agens have done a great job of balancing the pick-up-and-play aspects of a good mobile game with a deeper experience, at least from what I've seen so far. "We want a seven-year-old who's excited about skateboarding to have fun," Cash said, "as well as people like us who grew up loving skateboarding and really want a challenge." Skate City: New York is out today exclusively on Apple Arcade. This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/skate-city-new-york-is-a-mobile-game-that-manuals-the-line-between-casual-and-deep-play-191526652.html?src=rss
Category:
Marketing and Advertising
The long-awaited streaming service Venu Sports is no longer happening, according to The Hollywood Reporter and others. The sports-focused streaming service was to be a joint offering by Disney, Warner Bros. Discovery and Fox. There was no concrete reason given, other than corporate-speak. In an ever-changing marketplace, we determined that it was best to meet the evolving demands of sports fans by focusing on existing products and distribution channels, the companies wrote in a statement. We assume this move will also involve some serious layoffs, as Venu has been percolating for a while. To that end, the companies said they are proud of the work that has been done on Venu to date and grateful to the Venu staff, whom we will support through this transition period. There are no details as to what this support will entail. Venu Sports, the proposed virtual MVPD service from ESPN, FOX & Warner Bros. Discovery, will be discontinuedThe collective decision by the three companies not to move forward with the contemplated joint venture is effective immediatelyMore: https://t.co/Cvwv2h601G pic.twitter.com/lylDeHDy9p ESPN PR (@ESPNPR) January 10, 2025 The real reason for the shutdown is likely due to ongoing legal woes. Just as one threat disappeared this week, with Fubo dropping an antitrust lawsuit and joining forces with Disney, another popped up in its place. Days after Disney announced a deal to merge Hulu + Live TV with Fubo, a pair of satellite TV companies argued against lifting a pre-existing injunction that delayed the launch of Venu. DirecTV and EchoStar suggested that Fubo and Disneys newfound friendship doesnt resolve alleged antitrust issues surrounding Venu Sports. DirecTV wrote to a judge, saying that the joint venture restores an anticompetitive runway for the companies to control the future of the live pay TV market. EchoStar wrote a similar letter. An unnamed source familiar with Venu Sports told The Hollywood Reporter that the move to cancel the streaming service was made in the past few days and that the aforementioned legal snafu played a role.This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/entertainment/streaming/rip-to-the-entirely-hypothetical-streaming-service-venu-sports-180532990.html?src=rss
Category:
Marketing and Advertising
Life for Sleepers is fraught. They gain consciousness in a state of indentured servitude, an emulated human mind inside an android body, forced to work until theyre discarded. Those who escape dont last long due to trackers in their bodies, and their hardcoded dependence on a drug known as Stabilizer. Without it, a Sleepers body will eventually reject its biosynthetic organs. If this sounds like tech's worst excesses of the present taken to their most extreme, you're grasping what Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector's creator, Gareth Damian Martin, is driving at. Citizen Sleeper was me drawing on things from when I was in my early 20s, they tell me. In the past, Martin has spoken extensively about how the time they spent as a gig economy worker informed the alienation and atomization of labor that ran through the original game, which they released to widespread critical acclaim in 2022. With Citizen Sleeper 2, Im no longer looking at things from that perspective, Im thinking a little more about how do we continue to build a future when we know that its going to fall apart. We know that theres an inevitable entropy to everything, not just political systems and structures, but our lives and our physical bodies. We know its going to fall apart, and yet each day, we keep getting up and we keep doing things. For story reasons I wont spoil, the protagonist of the upcoming Citizen Sleeper 2 has managed to deactivate their tracker and no longer needs Stabilizer, but that hasnt made their existence any less precarious. Where Citizen Sleeper took place exclusively on a single space station, Citizen Sleeper 2 lets the player explore the Starward Belt, a location thats referenced frequently in the first game. With the change of locale comes a ship and crew for the player to manage, and a dramatic increase in scope. At approximately 250,000 words long, Citizen Sleeper 2s script is nearly double the length of the original games. The stakes are higher too, with a corporate proxy war threatening to engulf the Starward Belt. Jump Over the Age Martin has been working on Citizen Sleeper 2 for nearly two years, or about the same amount of time it took them to complete the original game. All essential systems were already in place, allowing Martin to spend more time on gameplay experimentation and story writing, drawing in particular on two of the most beloved (and deeply human) space operas. You know, Cowboy Bebop is a really good story about the gig economy, Martin says, laughing. And people forget how little the characters in Firefly like each other, right? Theyre more colleagues than friends, so theres something really relatable in that. During their days as a gig economy worker, Martin notes they met many people from different walks of life and places, and while the work pulls people apart almost by design, workers still find solidarity and human connection. The new game inherits many of its predecessors gameplay systems. Each day or cycle, the player has up to five dice to assign to actions that can earn them money or advance the story. The likelihood of completing an action successfully depends on the die the player assigns to it. A five, for instance, has a 50-50 chance of producing either a neutral or positive outcome, while a six guarantees success. Each task also carries with it a risk factor, with negative dice rolls resulting in more severe results on risky and dangerous actions. Then there are what the game calls clocks, the system that binds everything together. Most story objectives require the player to chip away at a task across multiple cycles. At the same time, theres often a competing clock counting down the amount of time before a story deadline. On the surface, all of Citizen Sleepers systems are simple, but they come together in a way that reinforces the games narrative. At least they did at the start. On my first playthrough of Citizen Sleeper, my character eventually earned enough money that securing Stabilizer for them was not an issue. Martin tells me that was by design. I knew I needed to have players on my side, they say of the first game. I needed to win people over. If the game was too harsh, I felt like players wouldnt give it the time that I wanted them to give to it. This time around, I feel in a very different position. Jump Over the Age Citizen Sleeper 2, by contrast, is a more confident game in itself, and in its players to accept a certain degree of suffering. There are story beats and content the players can miss, which was mostly not true in the first game. It also features multiple difficulty settings, and on the hardest one, the players Sleeper can experience permadeath. (If you want to continue that save file, you need to lower the difficulty, but your Sleeper will be forever changed.) I didn't know how Citizen Sleeper 2 was going to end when I started making it, Martin tells me, describing that as a dangerous game for a developer to play. But because I'd made the first one, I felt confident that I could play that game, and that it would come to something really exciting. The intended effect of Citizen Sleeper 2 is for the player to feel like Martin is leading them through a tabletop RPG experience, like Dungeons & Dragons or Blades in the Dark. The story should feel improvised, surprising and moving. Nowhere is that newfound confidence and TTRPG inspiration more apparent than with Contracts, Citizen Sleepers 2 signature new gameplay feature. Contracts take the Sleeper and up to two companions on jobs away from the safety of the Starward Belts population centers. An early one tasks the Sleepers crew with diffusing a damaged corporate battle drone. In practice, that meant deactivating two separate systems on the spacecraft, with the catch being that as soon as I gained access to one system, the timer for both started ticking. Each Contract is a miniature pressure cooker, with self-contained risks that can't be relieved until the Contract is over or the player fails. Jump Over the Age Contracts also allowed Martin to explore one of Citizen Sleepers less fully realized ideas, that the dice are the Sleepers body. During Contracts, negative and neutral rolls made during risky and dangerous actions will cause the Sleepers stress gauge to increase a system reminiscent of the need to obtain Stabilizer in the first game. As the gauge fills, specific rolls will begin damaging the players dice. Each of the Sleepers five dice can sustain three hits before they break; they can't be repaired until fully broken, and not until a Contract is over. Crewmates also have stress gauges, and filling them will leave them out of commission for the remainder of a Contract. Further complicating things is that even after fixing the Sleepers dice, they dont work as expected right away, due to another new mechanic called Glitch. Depending on the components the player uses to fix the Sleepers body, they will fill more or less of the Sleepers Glitch gauge. In turn, that means theres a greater chance of a regular die being converted into a glitched one, which has an innate 80-20 chance of producing either a negative or positive outcome, and skill points do nothing to change those odds. At first getting a glitched die feels punishing, but I think it is one of the smartest systems Martin has added to the game. The fact that glitched dice arent impacted by skills means they also ignore negative modifiers, which made them great for attempting tasks my Sleeper wasnt good at, and it really felt like I was pushing my luck. In a nice touch, theres even an achievement players can earn, an apt nod to Cowboy Bebop named Whatever happens, happens, when they score a positive outcome with a glitched die. Jump Over the Age I never felt comfortable playing Citizen Sleeper 2 the way I did with its predecessor. The game's constant surprises meant I often had to push my Sleepers body to its breaking point to complete some of its more challenging scenarios. In that way, Citizen Sleeper 2 is far more successful at bringing together its narrative and gameplay ambitions. I also found the story profound and essential at a time when it feels like the world isnt moving in the right direction. The characters of Citizen Sleeper 2 are surrounded by endless hardship, and yet they find a way to move forward. Is it pointless that we continue to strive to have human, meaningful relationships and build lives when we know that there are structures bigger than us that might crush us at any moment? Martin asks me. Or is it that, even though those structures are so big and powerful, we still live and work with a sense that we can build something and have meaningful relationships because our realities are very personal, real and direct?" Like any good GM, Martin isnt interested in handing anyone the answer to that question but hopes Citizen Sleeper 2 might lead them to their own. Citizen Sleeper 2 arrives on January 31 on Nintendo Switch, Xbox Series X/S, PlayStation 5 and PC.This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/citizen-sleeper-2-asks-how-we-stay-human-in-a-hopeless-future-180050858.html?src=rss
Category:
Marketing and Advertising
All news |
||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||