Virtual reality. Like the internet, it's something that mankind conceived of in the earliest days of modern technology, even if it wouldn't be realized until much later. For the internet, 'later' came a solid thirty years ago, although it wouldn't reach mainstream popularity for another ten. With the advent of the Oculus Rift, that's where we are again: the dark ages of something world-changing in its formative stages, impressive for where it is now, but most exciting for where it's going to be.
The 5th-gen Amazon Fire is an interesting little device, simultaneously ambitious and barebones. While the prospect of a $50 tablet is itself nothing new, in the past this price point was exclusively the domain of Chinese knockoffs and barely-functional toys for small children. But when a name like Amazon steps in, things are immediately a bit different. Amazon has already proven itself as a budget hardware manufacturer with its excellent Amazon Basics lineup, and now the Fire brings the same spirit into the tablet space, and with some pretty impressive results...considering the price.
It's a bit hard to believe that what began as a formerly Japan-exclusive low-budget PSP title has now become an annualized multi-platform series for all regions, but here we are: Sword Art Online is just that popular, whether or not you are of the opinion that it deserves to be. And truth be told, following a painfully mediocre second anime season and two pretty 'meh' ports of the pretty 'meh' game that was Sword Art Online: Hollow Fragment, it was something of a mystery as to how Bandai Namco felt it could guarantee indefinitely more titles moving forward. As a result, the recently-released Sword Art Online: Lost Song for the Playstation 4 and PS Vita almost flew under my radar.
Almost.
Instead, now I'm the one doing the flying, and honestly enjoying every minute of it.
Though it's not available in the west and Square Enix has not announced any intentions to make it so (though it probably will—just look at Chaos Rings 3), yesterday I had the opportunity to go hands-on with Mobius Final Fantasy, recently released in Japan on iOS and Android. The game was pushed as a full-scale console RPG on smartphones, but in the end it looks and plays more like a tech demo for the new Unity 5 engine than a direct companion to previous entries in the Final Fantasy series. The combat is fun enough—the controls are simple enough to execute with one hand (which is the intention—the entire game is designed in portrait orientation) and yet it doesn't sacrifice depth in being easy to maneuver. Of the Final Fantasy series it's most like Final Fantasy XIII's battle system, except it actually feels quite at home on a smartphone. The problem is...that's about all there is to the game. Despite its pretty visuals, Mobius Final Fantasy is more akin to Record Keeper than a console experience. At times it does try to convince you otherwise with excellent cutscenes, but the illusion is only ever very short-lived. Most of the time you'll just be watching Wol (or whatever you name the protagonist) walk from checkpoint to checkpoint, only to be interrupted by waves of enemies each time.
Then again, this is a free-to-play title; the base mechanics are designed to leave you wishing for more so that you will shell out some cash (yen, in particular) on in-game goodies that range from purely optional to completely essential. To be fair, you can play Mobius without spending a dime (err, yen), but the in-app purchases run deep enough to actually limit your daily time with the game if you don't pay up sooner or later.
The question is: will anyone even hit that limit? Yes, probably—this is Final Fantasy we're talking about—but it's abundantly clear Mobius was designed with a Japanese audience in mind. Despite the Final Fantasy XIII analogy, Mobius is heavily based on card battling and social features as well (which grants the player their actual abilities and equipment sets), and number systems abound, all appealing to that "gotta catch 'em all" style of mindless addictiveness.
That's not to say Mobius isn't engaging at all, though. It does have a story that is delivered at a reasonable pace in episodic form, but from what I grasped in my basic understanding of the Japanese language it's nothing very deep. Final Fantasy XIV's main plot came to mind on more than one occasion—which is good, but not the real reason anyone plays and loves Final Fantasy XIV. Does Mobius have that certain other element somewhere in being a combat simulator? It's hard to say. What I can say for sure is that this is the most wildly divergent game to grace the Final Fantasy series yet. It's surprisingly unfriendly to a western audience, and is the sort of game I only see myself playing on occasion to kill some time, not make a concentrated effort to actually clear. Again, this is an episodic game, so it could certainly get 'better' with time...but does it need to? This isn't exactly a case of a bad game in need of improvement. Rather, Mobius knows exactly what it's trying to be, and it plays the role well. It just isn't the Final Fantasy adventure most gamers probably had in mind. Coming off a strictly first-impressions basis, my recommendation is to anticipate Puzzle and Dragons and you won't be disappointed. Otherwise there's not much reason to give Mobius a go other than as a benchmark for your smartphone.
While TV sets slowly limp from 1080p to 4k and by and large have yet to come down to equilibrium pricing, projectors have also gained popularity as TV alternatives, but with one caveat: most affordable projectors aren't even up to full HD yet, if HD at all. In recent years cheap LED projectors have given projectors new life on the home user market, but at the cost of brightness, pixels, and most advanced features considered standard on higher-end models. Not to mention that while these days practically all projectors brag about being HD, most only accept a 1080p input and then project it at 720p or 480p instead. The BenQ MH630 falls in neither the high-end nor deceptively low-end category, instead offering an affordable set of compromises without sacrificing image quality. And if you're a home user looking to watch movies or play games on the largest display possible, it may just be the best option for you currently out there.
Well, it's that time of year again: Google I/O time, where one of the most important companies of the 21st century takes to the stage to talk about what's next for their many properties—most importantly to some, Android. While rumors have circulated predicting the cessation of Google-branded Nexus devices and it's unlikely we'll see any new entries to the product line over the next few days, there's still plenty to love about the most recent Nexus products, specifically the Nexus 6. Following a troubled launch and Android 5.0 bugs that had to be patched out, it seemed at first this giant-screened phone (I refuse to use the word 'phablet') was just not destined for greatness. But time has passed, the Nexus 6 is now readily available, and Android 5.1 has mostly solved the performance issues of its predecessor. Even with new Nexus devices potentially on the horizon later this year, is it finally the Nexus 6's time to shine? I say yes.
It's a testament to the prevalence and progress of mobile devices: our smartphones and tablets have reached the point where they aren't merely stand-ins for 'real' computers on-the-go, but are actually so elegant and useful that sometimes we wish 'real' computers imitated them and even ran the same software. In fact, the notion of running Android apps on desktop PCs is nothing new. Bluestacks, Andy, Genymotion—all have made valiant attempts at achieving this dream, but unfortunately have also suffered from a variety of issues ranging from performance to complexity to compatibility. Needless to say, there hasn't been any one solution that stands out as more than a mere novelty, but with AMIDuOS, all that has changed in a big, big way.
It’s been some time since we last saw a major step forward for laptops in the 12-13″ range. Initially the form factor was the sole territory of low-powered netbooks, but then in 2009 Intel and NVIDIA teamed up for a one-two punch with the Atom and ION chips, offering then-unparallelled performance for such small packages, and soon after Intel joined the graphics game with their own Intel HD chipsets. In the years since we’ve seen upgrades only trickle in, with each successive model being an appreciable step up from the last, but never enough to justify the cost of upgrading from similar products. While netbooks stopped being called netbooks, the product category remained and simply fell into a new niche as super cheap ultraportables without substantially more grunt than their original predecessors.
When it comes to choosing a pair of headphones of any form factor, it can be difficult to sort through product opinions to come to any solid conclusion about the product at hand. Some audiophiles base their purchasing decisions solely on brand or just assume that higher price equals better sound, while less knowledgeable customers will struggle to find any noticeable difference between the audio quality of a $30 pair of cans and a $300 pair.
In other words, both the high-end and low-end camps have their own rampant forms of skewed opinions, which can make it tough to make an informed purchasing decision when you don’t commit to either camp hardcore yourself.
Ok, quick history lesson: the date is May 8, 2006. The event: the annual Electronic Entertainment Expo, or E3. In many ways, it was a different world from the one in which we live to day. Tablets were just a failing experiment of Microsoft’s, the iPhone wouldn’t be released for another year, and high-definition TV was a new concept for consumers. YouTube was only just learning to crawl, and Facebook wouldn’t open to the public for another four months. Yes, it’s hard to believe, but we’ve very much stepped into a new decade since then. But even so, it was this world, not our own, that planted one particular seed we are only just beginning to see budding this spring.
With each new console generation it’s pretty much a given that a certain few titles will arise early on that, while certainly fun in their own right, are more or less designed purely to show off what the new hardware can do. What isn’t so normal is for one of these kinds of games to much later be backported to the previous generation, and even rarer is seeing a handheld even get in on the action. But as of December 23, that’s exactly what’s happened with Resogun, the flashy arcade shoot ‘em up from Finnish indie developer studio Housemarque. Even better, it’s a participant in Sony’s cross-buy program too, meaning if you already own the game on the Playstation 4, you already own the new PS3 and Vita versions too, available to download at your convenience. But is a scaled-back next-gen game really worth your time and hard disk space, or your $15 if you’re a complete newcomer to the title?
Although it’s been a while, I was a bit surprised by the popularity of past reviews on points-for-cash smartphone apps and services like FreeMyApps, AppBounty, and FeaturePoints. I suppose I shouldn’t have been—the prospect of earning a little cash on the side for performing simple tasks on a smartphone or tablet is certainly enticing, and considering there’s usually the most money to be made in simply referring other people to use these services, it makes sense that word would get around. Now, back when I first started reviewing these types of things, the apps I chose to review (or—full disclosure—was approached by a company to review), were basically the only options out there. Today the Android and iOS app stores are flooded with them, most promising high and delivering very, very low. There’s no easier way to scam people than to promise money for little to no effort, and while most of these points-for-cash apps genuinely do offer redeemable gift cards or direct payouts, you’d be hard-pressed to earn $5 in any reasonable amount of time and effort with them. In fact, if you’ve got a PC handy, you might be better off using a slightly different service, Amazon Mechanical Turk, to pad your wallet a bit.
After a long season of silence and dismissal, Sony has finally kicked the Playstation Vita back into high-gear thanks to the release of the Playstation TV—a mini-home-console-slash-streaming-box variant of the system—and the development efforts of Sony-owned Japan Studio, the same that graced us with Gravity Rush a couple of years ago. While it may be too early to call the Vita’s future secure just yet Sony is at least making another effort, and spearheading the charge is none other than the hotly-anticipated Freedom Wars. Originally planned as a PS3/PS4 title called ‘Panopticon’, Freedom Wars is a 3rd-person action/shooter game in the style of Monster Hunter, but with enough twists of its own to make it stand out as much more than just a clone of a popular genre. But is it the killer app Vita owners have been hoping for? Let’s find out.
In recent years it seems monitor product announcements and reviews have grown increasingly rare. Occasionally at events like CES we’ll see a company or two bring an interesting display with them, but these are typically ultra-widescreen or ultra-HD affairs that don’t make it to market—at least, not in a timely fashion or at a consumer price level. In the meantime more and more devices are coming with integrated screens, meaning you settle for whatever you get and don’t really consider the display separately from the rest of the product. But on the desktop PC side of technology, monitors remain a very important investment for everyone to make, whether you’re into creative productivity or gaming or really anything else. While the monitor we’re here to take a look at today is by no means the best and fanciest out on the market (and it doesn’t claim to be), all things considered HP has struck a pretty great balance with the Pavilion 22bw/25bw, addressing a wide variety of needs in a single, affordable package.
Feeling a little tired this fine Tuesday afternoon? Chances are good that’s because you were up at midnight (or much later) playing Bungie’s hotly-anticipated new shooter-slash-MMO, Destiny. After a very long wait that technically began all the way back in 2009 Destiny is finally live and officially available at retail wherever you may live in the world. It’s the most pre-ordered game in history, with figures surging up somewhere around five million copies (we haven’t seen official numbers in a while, so for now take that as an estimate). To be fair, whenever a product is this hyped it is a good idea to temper your expectations. After all, it is only a video game. It may be the latest and greatest now, but Bungie has already told us in no uncertain terms that Destiny 2 is on its way, and in only a few short years Destiny 1 will be obsolete (though no less fun for what it is, I might add). The thing is, when hype levels hit 100% it’s not necessarily about the hyped product anymore. Five million people is an event. Gamer culture hasn’t had a big holiday in a long time, and Destiny was the perfect subject to become one.
Customizing devices of all sorts to look like other devices is nothing new. Heck, I used to be fairly active on a forum board that specialized in theming a modified version of Windows 98, oftentimes to mimic other operating systems. As time has gone on software developers have grown increasingly unfriendly towards this kind of customization, and in general the latest technology looks pretty decent to begin with, but one bastion of personalization that practically everyone is familiar with is Android. And yet, while Google’s ubiquitous platform is ripe as can be for some pretty radical modifications it can be rather difficult to find any significant change of pace that isn’t a joke app or a step down from the spartan usability of the default Android launcher.
With the videogame industry generally settled on a few select genres that like to reiterate the same style and mechanics over and over it’s easy to forget just how artful, creative, and unique the medium can be, but even two years after its original release Gravity Rush (aka Gravity Daze in the east) does an excellent job reminding us just how much more games can be than the accepted norm.
Inspired by the style of French comic artists Moebius and Hergé, Gravity Rush takes place in the cel-shaded floating city of Hekseville. Though the busy streets feature no actual French text or dialogue and the story and content are distinctly Japanese there is a persistent European feel to the setting that, honestly, far too few games explore. But this is only one of many ways Gravity Rush doesn’t adhere to the standard. In fact, it doesn’t seem to care about pandering to any particular audience at all—and that’s the best decision the creators could have made.
Portable gaming consoles got off to a rough start this generation. With smartphone gaming on the rise Nintendo and Sony weren’t entirely sure how to compete and draw gamers’ attentions. Furthermore the last generation of handhelds sold incredibly well and boasted libraries of games that are tough to one-up even today.
But that was the scenario a few years ago. Since then we’ve had time to realize that smartphone gaming can’t compare to dedicated hardware with physical buttons, and we’ve mostly moved on from our DSs and PSPs.
Well, it’s official: Microsoft has pushed out the door what is likely the last build for Windows 8.1 Update 1, set to hit the public on April 8 (whatever could have made them choose that day?). The name may imply that not much has changed—and truly that is the case on the system level—but Update 1 actually brings a fair amount of UI tweaks particularly targeted at keyboard and mouse users. Yes, Microsoft is still designing Windows 8 for you. But is Update 1 the patch that will finally let desktop users breathe a sigh of relief, or will it only contribute to their woes? Unfortunately, the answer is: both.
They say the third time’s the charm, and the adage has an uncanny way of ringing true. While Crysis has been a staple of the gaming industry since the first series title hit back in 2007, most of its popularity has stemmed from being famously taxing for gaming machines to run due to its intense, realistic visuals, not for actually being remarkably fun to play. Though the main draw of Crysis 3 is still to prove the worth of your gaming hardware, this time around Crytek has made a game actually worth playing and not merely seeing.
