Tag Archives: Android

Train2Game News: Pokémon TV app for mobile devices

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Pokémon TV appToday Train2Game brings more great news for Pokémon fans around the globe! You can now watch Pokémon episodes on your iOS or Android device.

The Pokémon Company International launched the official Pokémon TV application earlier this week, it is available now for free on iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch—and Android devices. The Pokémon TV app helps fans follow the many adventures of Ash, Pikachu, and their friends in fan-favourite episodes from the animated television series that will be updated weekly from a library of more than 700 episodes spanning fifteen seasons. In addition, Pokémon fans can catch special features, trailers, and Pokémon movie events using the Pokémon TV app.

Also, Pokémon fans can catch the debut of the animated short Meloetta’s Moonlight Serenade on February 15—available only through the Pokémon TV app and on www.pokemon.co.uk. This special event will be the first time Meloetta’s Moonlight Serenade is shown in English, and fans who watch can expect a sneak peek at the magic of Meloetta’s Pirouette Forme! Stay tuned—further exciting Meloetta news for video game fans will follow shortly!

Standard data charges will apply when using the Pokémon TV app. The Pokémon TV app is available in countries outside of Asia and can be downloaded from the App Store here:
https://itunes.apple.com/uk/app/pokemon-tv/id594261405?mt=8

Or from the Google Play Store here:https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.pokemontv&hl=en_GB
.
Be sure to visit Pokemon.co.uk, Like the official Pokémon Facebook page at Facebook.com/Pokemon, and follow Pokémon on Twitter @Pokemon to receive the latest Pokémon news.

Train2Game News: End of week round up – 08.02.13

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Call of Duty Modern Warfare 3's does it look dated to you?Train2Game are this week bringing you an end of the week round up of news.

A new Call Of Duty has been confirmed for the fourth quarter of this year. “The Call of Duty franchise continues to set the bar for innovation and we expect a new Call of Duty game in development for 2013 to raise that bar even higher,” said CFO Dennis Durkin during a financials conference call today. Historical trends indicate this year’s title is likely to be a new entry in the ‘Modern Warfare’ line, developed by Infinity Ward. Expect an early November release.

Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot told investors on Thursday that Ubisoft plans to publish a new Assassin’s Creed game during the 2014 financial year. The game, developed across several of Ubisoft’s global games development studios, will likely be introduced at E3 this year. Although Guillemot didn’t go into too much detail, it was confirmed the game will take place in a new time period and star a new character. In further Assassin’s Creed news, Assassin’s Creed 3 sales have reached 12 million across the globe.

Yet another big game sequel that surfaced this week was that of Little Big Planet 3. The game is being developed by Sumo Digital who were the company behind the cross controller pack for Little Big Planet 2. Sony have yet to comment on this but VG247 was told that the independent, Sheffield-based studio has been working on the project for unknown platforms for “well over a year”.

The first trailer has been released for the up coming Activision Walking Dead game, The Walking Dead: Survival Instinct. The game features the Dixon brothers, Daryl and Merle. In addition, Activision announced that those who pre-order The Walking Dead: Survival Instinct on Xbox 360 or PS3 at GAME or GameStop Ireland will receive the Walker Herd Survival Pack, which contains Herd Mode where you stave off endless waves of the undead. The add-on will also grant new weapons in the story mode including a survival knife, sawtoothed machete, kukri, reinforced hatchet and advanced machete. If you do get the add-on, be sure to install it before starting the game as you won’t be able to access the new weapons in a game already in progress. You can watch the trailer here.

The developers of the OUYA android console have said that they want to release a new OUYA every year. Ouya company founder Julie Uhrman said “There will be a new Ouya every year. There will be an Ouya 2 and an Ouya 3. We’ll take advantage of faster, better processors, take advantage of prices falling. So if we can get more than 8GB of Flash in our box, we will.” By the end of last year, 1200 Ouya dev kits had been sent out. By the end of January, the software development package had been downloaded 22,000 times.

Train2Game News: GameStick Kickstarter earns over $600k

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GameStickThe Android based GameStick has now finished its Kickstarter and it has made over 6 times more than it needed.

The GameStick is a new portable console that runs the android operating system. It is a very small stick, similar to that of a USB stick, with a HDMI connection so it can plug straight in to your HD TV. The stick can be stored inside of it’s specially made Bluetooth controller to keep it safe and compact. The GameStick will also work with other Bluetooth controllers.

GameStick´s purpose-built game store will be powered by PlayJam´s built-for-TV technology enabling users to browse, download content and interact with the wider GameStick community.

The campaign to fund the production of GameStick, which is set to ship in April 2013, closed on Friday with pledges coming in right up to the last second finishing at 648% of the original target with a total of $648k. Those that missed out on the Kickstarter campaign will be able to pre-order via the GameStick website at www.gamestick.tv.

Anthony Johnson, CMO, PlayJam said “We are overwhelmed, excited, grateful, thrilled and everything in between. The campaign has been an incredible success with support from thousands of backers worldwide but this is just the beginning. The feedback from the Kickstarter community has been invaluable in shaping the final product and we will continue to seek input from those that supported us to ensure continued innovation ahead of a global retail launch.”

Throughout the campaign the team responded to thousands of comments and suggestions from Kickstarter backers that saw the product evolve in real-time as the team scrambled to incorporate a number of requested features from additional memory capacity to support for peripheral hardware via a docking station.

GameStick, described as ‘The Most Portable TV games Console Ever Created’ has been hailed by many supporters as the console to disrupt the games industry. The device has gathered high profile supporters throughout the campaign such as; Jason Kingsley, (Founder of Rebellion), Jason Bradbury (Gadget Show host) Jermaine Dupri (Record producer) and Shaquille O’Neal (Basketball Legend).

You can download a SDK for the new device at www.gamestick.tv and start developing for a new consoling experience.

Train2Game News: Mid-week round up – 30.01.13

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It’s time for another Train2Game mid-week round up!

As the Kickstarter draws to a close for the Gamestick console, images of the android gaming machine have been released. You can visit the Kickstarter site to view the console and add to the cause if it takes your interest. http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/872297630/gamestick-the-most-portable-tv-games-console-ever

In previous Bioshock games, the moral decisions have been to choose whether the Little Sisters lived or died. In Bioshock Infinite, the decisions you have to make are more powerful and less commonplace. BioShock Infinite will still present plenty of moral quandaries, but these are not tied to a specific system that in turn determines what ending you’ll get.

Google is to provide UK schools with 15,000 free Raspberry Pi Model B computers. Qualifications awarding body OCR will also create free teaching and learning packs to go with each Raspberry Pi. Responding to the news, games industry veteran Ian Livingstone said: “Putting Raspberry Pis into the hands of children on this scale is potentially the most positive initiative to spur digital creativity since the advent of the BBC Micro in the 1980s.”

Lifetime Xbox 360 sales look certain to overtake those of current-gen leader Nintendo Wii in the UK. Microsoft’s console was less than 200,000 sales behind Wii at the end of December, having sold over four times more units than Wii in 2012. Nintendo UK confirmed before Christmas that around 8 million Wii consoles had been sold in the UK. Despite a reported 33% decline in video game console sales last year, Xbox 360 is said to have outsold its current-gen rivals by a “significant margin” in Britain during 2012. Nintendo DS and PlayStation 2 remain the UK’s first and second best selling games consoles respectively, with Wii and Xbox 360 currently in third and fourth spots.

Temple Run 2 has been released for iOS and now Android. The sequel to the hit game has hit 20,000 downloads on iOS alone. Developed by Imangi Studios, the app rushed to the top of the free App charts on iOS in just eight hours, and also hit number three in the Top Grossing chart. In its first week on sale, Temple Run 2 racked up 210 million sessions and 1,775 years of gameplay.

Train2Game News: A round up of tech from CES

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The Consumers Electronics Show is coming to a close and Train2Game are bringing you the news of some of the most interesting technology to come out of the show.

Steam BoxValves media named Steam Box was finally confirmed at the show after much speculation through 2012.  Valve has invested in computer manufacture Xi3 who will be developing a special customised PC designed to bring Steam to the living room.

The box, codenamed Piston, will offer up to 1TB of internal storage and the ability to upgrade components like the RAM and CPU in the future, a spokesperson told Polygon. Valve will also be making its own Steam Box in-house, and they’ll be a few more from other PC manufacturers too.

It is currently rumored to have 4-8 GB of DDR3 RAM and a quad-core 64-bit, x86-based 32nm processor running at up to 3.2GHz with 4MB of Level2 Cache.

Asus Transformer AiOA new tablet from Asus was announced at the show but this is a tablet with a difference.

The Asus Transformer AiO is a standard tablet running Android 4.1 (Jelly Bean) from an Nvidia Tegra 3 processor but you can take it home and connect it to its stand and it becomes a desktop PC running Windows 8 running on a Core i3 processor and Nvidia GT 730M GPU.

The trick is the stand, which has its own array of USB ports and a built-in 1TB hard disk. The tablet itself has 16GB flash memory.

RAZER GROUP EDGE GAMING TABLETAnother exciting tablet that was announced this year was the Razer Edge which is optimised for gaming.

The Razer Edge is a Windows 8 tablet, but a ferociously powerful one with the sort of tech you would expect to find in a gaming laptop. The standard model has a Core i5 processor, an NVidia GT640M LE GPU, 4GB of RAM and a 64GB solid state drive, while the Edge Pro has a Core i7 processor instead, 8GB of RAM and either a 128GB or 256GB solid state drive.

The tablet can also be plugged into a Gamepad Controller, which comes complete with two Wii Nunchuk-style handles featuring two analogue sticks, a D-Pad and a variety of face buttons.

Xperia ZSony Xperia Z was the smart phone announcement to look at for gamers. It’s only 7mm thin, has a 1080p 5-inch screen and is packing a beast of a quad-core Qualcomm processor with 2GB of RAM.

According to Sony, the Xperia Z is the most powerful phone it’s ever made and the first it’s had a strong say in since it took over manufacturing from Ericsson, and it also claims that while it’s running Android 4.1 instead of 4.2, its own “skin” is very minimal and it should be easy to upgrade the OS in the future.

It is set to be an incredibly powerful phone with a good battery life thanks to Sony’s new technology that apparently draws very little power while in sleep mode.

Train2Game News: New Nvidia hand-held console announced

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Project ShieldTrain2Game has discovered that Nvidia just announced Project Shield, a new gaming console that looks like a controller attached to a 5 inch HD screen.

The new hand held console runs on the Android operating system but what sets it apart from the other android platforms is that it has a controller similar to a current console controller for ease of use.

Project Shield is powered by a custom 72-core Nvidia A15 GeForce GPU and features a 5-inch 720p retinal multi-touch display, integrated speakers, wi-fi connectivity and the Android operating system. It’s also designed to interface as a controller with an Nvidia GPU-equipped PC, allowing you to play games from your couch.

Jen-Hsun Huang, co-founder and CEO of Nvidia said “Project Shield was created by Nvidia engineers who love to game and imagined a new way to play. We were inspired by a vision that the rise of mobile and cloud technologies will free us from our boxes, letting us game anywhere, on any screen. We imagined a device that would do for games what the iPod and Kindle have done for music and books, letting us play in a cool new way”

No word yet on what the device will cost. A post on the official GeForce website lists a tentative release window of Q2 2013. The site states “It will first launch in the US and Canada, with a worldwide rollout to follow. Pricing and final specs will be unveiled closer to availability.”

The Android gaming platform seems to be a big player in 2013 with the OUYA games console, the recently announced GameStick and now Project Shield from Nvidia.

Train2Game News: Student Diaries – 13.12.11

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There are a few Train2Game students on work placement at DR Studios. Below is some diaries of how they are getting on.

Amanda Blatch week 12

Soooooo…. Diary this week. You know.. I think it’s kind of slipped my mind what I did last week, it passed by so quickly! There was a lot of work to do and that got done as we are sticking more strictly to our deadlines of getting  a new build out every Friday so we had a game to play over the weekend. With the latest build you can really tell the game is starting to come together and a couple of new features have been added into the game that helps move the game along at a speed that would be enjoyable for the player without being too easy. Overall, it’s looking very good atm with all the updates and changes to the game.

On top of that I have had more of a break in my usual UI making process, creating a couple new characters for the game which will form part of an exclusive content pack on release date. The splash screen itself has also had an almost completely new do-over and is much more polished and finalised, ready for promotion.

But apart from that there is not much more I can say, the game is close to being finished, we just need to keep pushing that little bit further to make the game the best we can make it! So, again, till next week.

Craig Moore Student Diary Week 55

What day is it?

It’s been a pretty intensive week here, trying to ensure that two builds go out a week while constantly improving and bug fixing is certainly akin to juggling cars. It’s been a smooth one though with very few hiccups and the build is going from strength to strength, I think our big focus next week will be to crush some of the gameplay blocking bugs that are really getting in the way of heavy play testing.

As with previous weeks I have been working closely with Tim to ensure new features get in to the game, it’s a really effective approach that ensures we are working on the same thing but each to our own abilities and insures rapid iteration and turnaround of features.

It feels like we have had this game under wraps for ages now, and in reality it is, it’s been a good six months and I cannot wait to show it to the world! I feel like we have taken everything that made My Sea Park cool and turned it up to 11 while adding some cool little features that I genuinely have never seen before in games of this genre.

Also don’t fret! This one is coming to both iOS and Android.

Getting this kind of experience and exposure is something I could never dreamed of getting 18 months ago, but here I am. It’s a lot of hard work but I would not change it for the world.

Craig

Matty WS week 53

This week has been quite busy again as usual; I’ve been remaking a few assets here and there and redoing some older animations that weren’t up to scratch. Over the weekends I’ve been playtesting the game as well as other games for ‘market research’. I’m finding Hayday pretty fun annoyingly. I’ve also been playing chess more lately because of Social Chess on the iPad, but before that I used to play a game a day or more sometimes, so now it’s just a case of playing multiple games each day over time. I also caved and bought things on the iPad, Red alert and LSAW (land sea air warfare, tis an RTS). The store is so expensive though! Everything on android is cheap or free, cannot see why it’s not the same for iDevices.

The next project (although still up in the air) is starting to sound pretty awesome now and I really cannot wait for it to start!

MattyWS

Train2Game News: Mid-week round up – 06.12.12

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The Train2Game team has searched around and found some of the exciting news from this week.

343 Industries, who recently released Halo 4, have said that they are in early stages of developing a new Halo. Frank O’Connor, the franchise development director for Halo, said that “a lot of people at 343 are already prototyping ideas and software and art for future Halo products”. Many within the 343 Industries studio are still working on post launch content for Halo 4.

Sega has revealed a new partnership with Games Workshop which will see Total War developer Creative Assembly making multiple titles set in the Warhammer fantasy universe. Creative Assembly studio director Tim Heaton said: “With this year being our 25th anniversary, it seems fitting for us to embark on such a dream project with such a well-established partner. The incredibly rich and detailed Warhammer world is something we grew up with, and has left an indelible imprint on us as both designers and gamers.”

Sony Pictures Consumer Products has teamed up with Capcom-owned developer Beeline Interactive to produce an Android and iOS Ghostbusters game, targeting an ‘early 2013’ release. The new Ghostbusters will be a ‘freemium’ title based on the popular eighties movies. The players will play the role of “a fledgling Ghostbuster. Who ya gunna call?

UK celebrity, chat show host and film critic Jonathan Ross has opened a new game development studio named Hotsauce Interactive, based in Candem, North London. The outfit is part of Ross’ TV production company Hotsauce, and has already released its debut game, Cacha Cacha Aliens for iOS. It is understood that Hotsauce Interactive is staffed by a number of experienced developers and the studio may look into releasing games on hand-held and console in the future.

Customers of Valve’s Steam digital distribution service can now play their PC games on a TV. The much anticipated Big Picture mode has been in beta for some time, but has only now seen public release. Big Picture is designed to be compatible with gamepads, but also supports the use of a Mouse and Keyboard. To celebrate, Valve has placed over thirty “controller-friendly” games on sale.

Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 made $1 billion a day quicker than Modern Warfare 3, Activision has announced. That’s $1 billion in worldwide retail sales in 15 days since launch, based on Chart-Track and internal figures. Modern Warfare 3 took 16 days to cross the $1 billion mark. For comparison, James Cameron’s Avatar made $1 billion in 17 days. Since launch, more than 150 million hours have been logged online playing the game on Xbox Live and PlayStation Network.

Kickstarter’s United Kingdom operation has reached £2,069,164 in pledges since its launch late in October. 45,799 backers contributed to the £2 million, with 30 projects having successfully ended their funding drive out of 407 launched. Of those backers, 39 percent came from the UK.

Train2Game News: OUYA developer consoles being released this month

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OUYA ConsoleThe kick started, Android console, OUYA inches ever closer to release as developer units are being shipped by the end of the month.

The team behind the Android-powered console has announced that they will be shipping the OUYA to anyone who pledged over $699 dollars to the $8.5 million kickstart goal that was reached back in August. The console will be sent out for developers to start testing on December 28.

The idea behind the console is that it will be a $99 console, built on Android, where all the games are free to play.

OUYA was created in 2012 by Julie Uhrman, a video game industry veteran who saw an opportunity to open up the last closed game platform — the TV. Julie and an initial team of game developers and advisors brought the concept to life, with the help of Yves Behar and fuseproject, and took OUYA to Kickstarter in July of 2012. OUYA’s first consoles will ship in early 2013.

“Yes, we are shipping these to you on time, as promised,” the company said in a recent update. “The dev consoles are an early version of the OUYA console and controller designed for developers to test their games on OUYA. Our Kickstarter developers are the first to get a crack at ’em! We’re psyched to have you on board, and we can’t wait to see what pours from your brain!”

For backers of any tier of the Kickstarter, OUYA chief executive officer Julie Uhrman also announced that usernames can be claimed on December 25.

“By December 25, we’ll email each of you a link to activate your account. For those of you who responded to our survey about preferred usernames, you’ll be able to confirm your choice. For the handful of popular names that had conflicts, we broke the tie(s) by honoring whomever backed OUYA first on Kickstarter. And, if any of you didn’t respond-or didn’t get your preferred username, you can choose a name when December 25 rolls around,” said Uhrman in the announcement.

You can read a basic fact sheet about what the OUYA is and what is designed for in the document below. It looks to be good for developers and gamers a like.

OUYA Basic Facts

Train2Game News: Train2Game Radio talks to Amy Methven

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Amy MethvenTrain2Game radio spoke to Amy Methven today about what inspires her art and how she got involved with Road Hog Game studios.

You can listen to part 1 here: http://audioboo.fm/boos/1087762-train2game-student-amy-methven-on-train2game-student-radio-part-1

And part 2 here: http://audioboo.fm/boos/1087758-train2game-student-amy-methven-on-train2game-student-radio-part-2

or read the transcript below

My name is Amy Methven, I live in Elgin, Scotland and I’m doing the Art & Animation course.

Hi Amy, What’s your story? What are the past experiences that have shaped your life and made you who you are now?

Well all the way through High School, the only thing I really enjoyed doing was drawing and I would get in to all sorts of trouble for doodling and I only ever enjoyed doing art at school, it was the only thing I was ever really good at. It was all I thought about, the first thing I thought about when I woke up and the last thing I thought about before I went to bed. Just enjoying playing Video Games and various movies just inspired me to sit and draw my favourite characters. As I grew older I developed more of a passion for it and started to research the people who actually created these characters that inspired me and being very passionate about wanting to create things. Whether it’s through traditional painting or building sculptures is what I am all about really.

So what are some of the artist that inspire you to get into the Video Game industry?

There are a lot of concept artist that I love but the actual artists that got me in to the Video Games industry wasn’t actually anything to do with Video Games to be honest with you. I love surrealism, like Salvador Dali and all that kind of stuff. Looking at that kind of stuff and obviously because Salvador Dali did a little bit of animation as well, looking at the stuff and seeing it brought to life, that inspires me. Just being able to characterize and any form of animation and being able to interact with it through Video Games really inspires me.

So I know you are also working as part of a studio, with other Train2Game students, how did that studio form?

Well basically it started when I joined Train2Game, I started to put my artwork on to the forums and added a link to my online portfolio, just to let other students see what I was up to and then, through that I got various people messaging me to just chat about art in general and then I got a message from Gareth Brook asking if I would be interested in joining his team and I said yes, for definite. So that was quite out of the blue only been doing the course for 2 months and I am already involved in an up and coming studio, it’s just brilliant.

Did you get more offers from people other than Gareth or was it just Gareth that offered you?

It was just Gareth, the other people that got in touch were just other students who were just getting to know each other through the forums. But yeah he was the only one who got in touch with me about working together.

Tell me about the project you are working on at the minute with the studio?

The studio is called Road Hog and at the moment we have currently just started work on our first project and we are getting through it quite quickly actually. It’s called Little Green Dude or LGD and its basically based on the Video Game, Pong, from the 1970’s but with a modern twist on it and that is what this studio is aiming to do. Take retro gaming and modernise them. It’s going really well, I’m really enjoying it.

Why do you think you’ve taken the retro thing and taken it to the modern thing? Is that something you have all been passionate about?

We are really passionate gamers anyway but retro gaming is definitely my background, I played a lot of retro games. We had an Atari system so the very first game I played was one of the very first games ever released which was Pong but I did also play games like Pacman and Space Invaders and all that. That’s where it all started so it is really good to take those games and modernise them for both casual gamers and hardcore gamers.

What are you aiming to release Little Green Dude on? What Platform are you aiming for?

It’s aimed for Android and PC as well.

Yeah, is it going for a Windows 8 release?

Yeah.

Are you going to enter in to the competition that Windows are doing, do you know?

Yeah we are doing that, yeah, for definite.

What is the most dramatic or exciting thing you have done in your life?

Probably joining the Train2Game course! Before that I went to art school for 5 years studying contemporary, fine art. I am passionate about both traditional and digital stuff it wasn’t quite what I wanted to do with my life, just exhibiting art work in galleries and things like that, I really wanted to work in the gaming industry or film industry doing concept art and things like that. So I have to say up to this point, joining the Train2Game course is probably the biggest thing to happen, for the art side anyway.

What is your greatest ambition, where do you want to go with your career?

I want to go as far as I can. I want to just keep creating things for the industry and just have an outlet for my art work because for such a long time I didn’t really have a proper outlet. With various jobs that I’ve had it was quite boring jobs that had nothing to do with art, house keeping and cleaning and things like that. My life in general is to make sure I have some sort of outlet for my art work, I don’t really want to settle. So I just really want to go as far as I can with this. Just to see where it takes me really.

Is there any studio in particular that you would love to work for?

Well I have just started working with Road Hog so I would like to keep working with them for as long as I can!

Finally, where can people keep up to date with Road Hog Game news? Have you got a Facebook site?

Yeah we have a Facebook page set up, it’s: www.Facebook.com/RoadHogGames we will be uploading all sorts of updates on to that shortly.

Thank you very much for your time Amy, its been great!

No problem, thanks very much.