News Bites – Friday 6th of March
So much news to share in so little time. That is where the Player2 News Bites comes in. All the hot topics in small easy to chew pieces.
– It is happening! Rock Band 4 is official. Harmonix is working with Mad Catz to bring Rock Band 4 to the PS4 and Xbox One by the end of the year and what’s even better is they are ensuring that all purchases made on the Rock Band store previously will work with the new game! They are also working so as the old Plastic instruments collecting dust in garage’s every where will work with the new version. Rock on!
– Xbox One and PS4 are getting some great PC ports in the wake of GDC. Both ineXile’s Wasteland 2 and Frontier’s Elite: Dangerous will be coming to consoles. In the case of Elite it will be a time exclusive for Microsoft’s system but will eventually make its way to PS4. Two great games that should both do well on console.
– In sad news EA has closed down veteran development studio Maxis. The house of Sim has shut its doors after a long lifetime of adding the word Sim to other random words. They got so lazy in the end they didn’t even add extra words, they just added an “s”. But in all seriousness it is sad to see a company with such a long history of great games go. I guess my dreams of SimGolf 2 are finally dead.
– Valve let loose with some hardware announcements at GDC. They announced pricing for a range of Steam machines, which start from around $400 US. They also introduced a new product called the Steam Link which is sure to be a popular choice. For $50 US games will be able to use it to stream Steam games directly to their TV without having to connect a computer to it. Knowing how well Steam Streaming already works this is sure to be a great buy. Finally they announced a move into VR with the help of HTC. Gabe Newell even boldly stated that their VR system has solved the age old problem of Motion Sickness. I guess only time will tell. Valve also talked about the next version of their Source game engine. Sadly there was no mention of any game titles that end with the number 3.
– Speaking of VR, Sony’s Project Morpheus is one step closer to release with Sony stating that the core technology has been finalised. Morpheus is set for release in the first half of 2016 so it could actually be the first VR kit out of the gate at a mass market level. It will be very interesting to see how it fares.
