The Humble Bundle is back with its sixth sale instalment. For those that don’t know, the Humble Bundle is an initiative for developers and gamers to give back and support a charitable cause. The developers make their games available to the bundle for a limited time and customers pay whatever they can or want to and receive a package of 5 games. If you opt to pay more than the average amount, you get another two games in this bundle. At the time of writing, the average donation was $4.67, which is chump change for 7 games. Check out the games in their promo video below:
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The next generation of consoles will be among us by the end of this year, with the Xbox One and the PS4 both being released in the holiday season of 2013. The new Xbox has been confirmed as a November release, whereas we don’t yet have the exact date for the PS4.

Gaming has truly evolved since the previous generation of consoles though, and these giants of the gaming world are also now becoming all-encompassing entertainment systems rather than just a vehicle for big budget games.

E3 (Electronic Entertainment Expo) 2013 started on Monday, 10 June and we finally saw what the PS4 looks like, with many other morsels of news being announced for both the consoles. Both Microsoft and Sony are preparing for a mammoth battle, so let’s see how things are shaping up. (more…)

Microsoft finally announced the new XBOX One yesterday (21^st of May) in Redmond, Washington. There was a lot of hype surrounding the announcement as Microsoft promised to show the actual console in action (*cough*cough* Sony…). There were many online sites covering the event live and I decided to hop on to GameSpot.com to see the reveal for myself.

The previous XBOX 360 made its debut 8 years ago, which is a long time in the world of technology. The new XBOX One will most probably be around for the next decade, so for buyers the ONE (or PS4 – which ever you support) will be their longest-term consumer electronics “investment”. Thus this reveal will kind of set the tone for the next few years in console gaming. Therefore Microsoft had to pull out all the stops, and that they did! The reveal took on a Samsung Galaxy type of vibe, with feature after feature being thrown at the crowd. Will the new XBOX be the ONE? (more…)

In order to increase user engagement, Angry Birds creator Rovio has introduced Rovio Accounts which allows users to save games and continue to play them across various devices.

As a result, users will no longer have to replay levels of their favourite Rovio game when switching between different devices and logging into different accounts.

Rovio introduced Accounts on its blog saying, “Our fans have been asking for a way to play their game on different phones or tablets without losing their progress when changing the device. This is exactly what Rovio Account lets you do!”

While Rovio says that it will gradually be making Accounts available across all titles worldwide and add new features, for the moment it is available through The Croods as well as the original Angry Birds for iOS in Finland and Poland.

When Disney bought the Star Wars franchise from George Lucas and LucasArts, a lot of fans were grieved as the announcement came that all games currently being developed by LucasArts would be cancelled with immediate effect. While not all the Star Wars games were great, there were some standouts that really immersed you in the complex fantasy world of The Force. (more…)

Having unveiled this innovative project at the 2013 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in January, Microsoft is even closer to providing gamers with a fully immersive experience with its Illumiroom concept.

According to Mashable, a document released on Microsoft’s Research Hub website has indicated that Illumiroom has now moved beyond the “proof-of-concept stage” and is on its way to eventually becoming available for the public.

The Illumiroom uses a Xbox Kinect for Windows and a projector to augment the area surrounding a television, extending the gaming experience beyond the screen’s borders to enhance the living room entertainment experience and ultimately blur the lines between the physical environment  and the virtual world of on-screen content.

It is also entirely self-calibrating and designed to work in almost any room.

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MWEB Gaming is running a Team Fortress 2 (TF2) ladder competition in May where the winner will walk away with a full size 355 game arcade machine.

In a ladder tournament, players are listed as if on the rungs of a ladder and the objective is to reach the highest rung. The tournament proceeds via a system of challenges and any player can challenge a player above him or her on the ladder. If the lower-placed player wins the match, then the two swap places on the ladder. If the lower-placed player loses, then he or she may not challenge the same person again without challenging someone else first.

“We decided on the Soldier class for our first ladder,” says Desmond Kurz, Online Gaming Manager at MWEB. “The Soldier class is exciting to watch and extremely fun and easy, especially for new players. Hopefully the easy class and simple tournament mechanics will encourage new players to try out the game and compete. If the TF2 community shows enough interest we will look at hosting other competition formats.” (more…)

While 3D graphics in video games continues to advance, looking more realistic over time, the one element it seems that has not quite been perfected is that of water, with it not looking much like the real thing.

Well, that is all about to change with the development of a new fluid simulation algorithm called “Position Based Fluids” (PBD).

NVIDIA’s Miles Macklin and Matthias Müller-Fischer explain ”In fluid simulation, enforcing incompressibility is crucial for realism; it is also computationally expensive. (…) By formulating and solving a set of positional constraints that enforce constant density, our method allows similar incompressibility and convergence to modern smoothed particle hydrodynamic (SPH) solvers, but inherits the stability of the geometric, position based dynamics method, allowing large time steps suitable for real-time applications.”

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