Rockstar Games has released twelve new screenshots for the upcoming Grand Theft Auto V, entitled “The Fast Life”. This time we are treated to a glimpse of how our three protagonists Michael, Franklin and Trevor spend their days.
The images also remind us of the variety of activities and locales available in GTA V. Franklin is seen with overlooking Los Santos with Chop by his side, the scuba gear can be glimpsed on the Dignity and one protagonist decides it’s time for a little base jumping.
GTA V will release worldwide on September 17th. Stay tuned in August, when the proper unveiling of GTA Online is set to occur. Until then, enjoy the screenshots below to get you in the mood for some Grand Theft Auto. The game, not the crime…stealing is wrong.
Japanese KFC customers will be getting a little extra treat when they next order their chicken. For the past five days the fast food chain have been giving out free hand held ice-cream makers themed around One Piece; one maker has Luffy, the second has Chopper (with a special hoof handle) and the third contains the entire straw hat gang.
The makers will be offered to customers who purchase one of three combo packs, each containing original recipe and crispy chicken pieces with a small side of chips. The three prices for each combo are 980 yen (9.80USD), 1,290 yen (12.90USD) and 1,430 yen (14.30USD).Ice cream can be produced by putting sugar, ice, eggs, milk and flavorings into the canister and by stirring vigorously for a few minutes using the fist shaped handle on the lid.
KFC have also incorporated other Shonen Jump characters into their food, such promotion was used when Dragon Ball Z: Battle of Gods was being premiered. Although this is one of the weirder anime/food crossover that has been promoted, the idea of making your own ice cream does sound exciting (and could be the perfect complement to Sanji’s cake).
Not your regular legendary creatures of time, space and dimensions
In celebration of the upcomingrelease of Pokemon X and Y for the Nintendo 3DS, Game stores across the UK will give players the opportunity to add the legendary Creation Trio to their teams.
Back from the days of Diamond, Pearl and Platinum, Dialga, Palkia and Giratina make their shining return. The version mascots will all be given away in their shiny forms, which players will know are not easy to obtain, usually appearing with a probability of 1 in 8192! The giveaway will be broken up into segments, with each legendary receiving a two week run. Players will need a copy of Pokemon Black, White, Black 2 or White 2 and, as with other giveaways, must possess the Pokedex in game and must not be carrying no more than 11 Wonder Cards. Players will be able to receive the Trio on the following dates:
Shiny Dialga: Friday August 30th, 2013 – Thursday September 12th, 2013
Shiny Palkia: Friday September 13th, 2013 – Thursday September 26th, 2013
Shiny Giratina: Friday September 27th, 2013 – Friday October 11th 2013
There is no word as of yet to what level the Trio will be or what moves they will know when distributed. For more information, visit the Facebook page. Plan wisely and add the masters of time, space and beyond to your Pokemon team.
Microsoft has finally released the official pricing for the Xbox One controllers and headsets.
Xbox Ones come bundled with a single wireless controller, however the system doesn’t come with a headset. A headset doesn’t come bundled because Microsoft reasons that Kinect is able to handle voice chat for Xbox One players. Existing Xbox 360 controllers and headsets are not compatible with Xbox One.
Xbox One controllers allow the player to experience gameplay action like never before. New built in Impulse Triggers deliver vibration feedback, allowing players to feel every jolt and crash in high definition. The new redesigned joysticks and all new D-pad provide greater precision. Single Xbox One controllers, , complete with two AA batteries, are available for pre-order for $US59.99 here, and controllers with the Play and Charge Kit are available for $US74.99 here.
The Play and Charge Kit comes complete with a charging cable and a rechargeable battery pack. The lithium-iron battery packs fully charge in under four hours and are allow players to recharge while they are playing, as well as afterwards, even when their Xbox is in standby. Play and Charge kits are available for pre-order for $US24.99 here.
Headsets, purchased separately from the console bundle, are designed for comfort during long game sessions and allow users to hear their friends and foes in crystal-clear digital wideband audio. Players are able to adjust mute and volume settings without taking their hands off the controllers. Chat Headsets are available for pre-order for $US24.99 here.
Nintendo have been hard at work lately trying to add some major first party releases to the Wii U‘s lineup and this could help see another big push in sales especailly with fans of the Mother (Earthbound outside of Japan) series.
Nintendo has opened a Miiverse community named the Onett Times: Earthbound Announcement community which has the description “official source for the latest EarthBound news and information.” For those less Earthbound savvy, Onett is the home town of Ness, the main character of the series. Only official Nintendo reps can post but all are allowed to comment. If this sounds too good to be true you can visit the Miiverse community here if you have a Wii U account.
We don’t know what this news is yet but it could be a new game or maybe an official translated release of Mother 3, another game fans have been clamouring for. After the release of Mother 3 for the GameBoy Advance, the series creator Shigesato Itoi said there are no plans to create a fourth Mother game and there will not be another installment. However, that being said, it is unlikely Nintendo would use this type of announcement for a virtual console game game.
After much fan petition, Nintendo finally agreed to translate Earthbound and release it on the Wii U virtual console. The game is available for download now for anyone that would like to check out this amazing cult series.
Swedish developer Image & Form, the folks behind SteamWorld Tower Defense, have announced today that their newest title, SteamWorld Dig: A Fistful of Dirt will be making its way to the Nintendo 3DS via eShop on August 8. This will be the second game in the SteamWorld series.
It’s the turn of the 19th century and mankind has blown itself to bits. Steam-powered robots have taken control of the Wild West. You’ll take on the role of Rusty, a lone-wolf, steam-powered cowbot who accidentally awakens an ancient evil as he’s digging for riches.
In this mining platformer, you’ll dig tunnels, collect rare minerals, and sell them for bigger and better equipment. With around a dozen hours or so of gameplay, you can expect to stay busy underground. The game will be 8.99 USD / 8.99 EUR / 11.99 AUD.
For more information, you can check out their official website here and like them on Facebook here.
The Cloud is the future… we’ve been hearing that for a while now with both Microsoft and Sony pushing its utilisation for next-gen. Now, Nvidia has revealed its CloudLight tech, enabling lighting rendering and computing for games using the power of the Cloud.
Details can be extracted from a technical report released by the company, but quite honestly, my brain is too puny to be able to comprehend how it all works. The diagram below shows the process from the Cloud to your display in a more simplified manner, although you can read through the report if you have the patience, understanding and/or interest that doing so would require. In summary, however;
We introduce CloudLight, a system for computing indirect lighting in the Cloud to support real-time rendering for interactive 3D applications on a user’s local device. CloudLight maps the traditional graphics pipeline onto a distributed system. That differs from a single-machine renderer in three fundamental ways.
First, the mapping introduces potential asymmetry between computational resources available at the Cloud and local device sides of the pipeline. Second, compared to a hardware memory bus, the network introduces relatively large latency and low bandwidth between certain pipeline stages. Third, for multi-user virtual environments, a Cloud solution can amortize expensive global illumination costs across users.
Our new CloudLight framework explores tradeoffs in different partitions of the global illumination workload between Cloud and local devices, with an eye to how available network and computational power influence design decisions and image quality. We describe the tradeoffs and characteristics of mapping three known lighting algorithms to our system and demonstrate scaling for up to 50 simultaneous CloudLight users.
Basically, this should be a cheaper solution for developers and take some of the strain off of hardware. Check out the 5-minute tech demo video embedded below for a look at its handy work.
EA have just unveiled the cover art for the upcoming basketball game NBA LIVE 14. The cover for the game will feature NBA star Kyrie Irving. He is the man who was first overall pick in the NBA Draft of 2011, the 2011-12 NBA Rookie of the Year and was just named an NBA All-Star for 2013. It is an impressive pedigree for Irving and being on the cover of NBA LIVE 14 adds to that.
NBA LIVE 14 will be released on the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 consoles later this year. You can check out the cover art featuring Kyrie Irving above in all its glory. Stay tuned for further updates on NBA LIVE 14 as they comes to light.
505 Games has announced today it is delaying Ashes Cricket 2013, originally scheduled to coincide with the first Ashes series, to November 13 when the return series starts in Australia. This marks the second time the game has been delayed within months, as a similar announcement was made in June.
Tim Woodley, Senior Vice President Global Brand & Marketing for 505 Games said, “We all had high hopes of bringing out a stellar cricket game during the first leg of this unprecedented Ashes year. But the fact of the matter is, we took a long hard look at the game as it stands and decided it simply wasn’t good enough in its current state.”
Although the series in the UK has just wrapped up, developer Trickstar Games has “the benefit of a second Ashes series in this unique cricketing year which affords us further time to work on the game and get it right for the return leg.”
A brand new trailer has just made its way online from Namco Bandai for the upcoming anime fighting game J-Stars Victory VS. The new trailer highlights the game’s impressive line-up of playable characters all of which feature many of the greatest Shonen Jump stars of the past 45 years of the magazine’s run.
So far it has been confirmed that Naruto, Goku, Ichigo, Kenshin, Gintoki, Toriko, Luffy and Ryotsu will be playable characters in the fighting game. You can check out the exciting action-packed trailer for J-Stars Victory VS below.
The game is slated for release on PlayStation 3 and PlayStation VITA later this year. More characters are set to be revealed in Weekly Jump magazine in the coming weeks.
