- Even in demo form, PS5 action-RPG Stellar Blade draws high praise in tech analysis for excellent 60 FPS performance and 4K resolution modes Gamesradar
- Stellar Blade Director Reveals New Game Plus Mode, Says No Microtransactions With One Exception Game Informer
- ‘We don’t see a place for microtransactions in singleplayer games’, says CD Projekt Red following Dragon’s Dogma 2’s DLC fiasco PC Gamer
- Stellar Blade tech preview: what can we learn from the impressive PS5 demo? Eurogamer.net
- Free Skins and New Game+ for Stellar Blade After PS5 Launch Push Square
Tag Archives: Demo
The Return of Gibson Amps: Falcon 5 & Falcon 20 – Full Demo – Gibson Gear Guide
- The Return of Gibson Amps: Falcon 5 & Falcon 20 – Full Demo Gibson Gear Guide
- “Gibson is back in the amp business”: Gibson’s Falcon amps have landed – can the Mesa-made combos get their claws into the boutique amp market? Guitar World
- NAMM 2024: “Harmonically rich American tone in a compact and easily portable package”: Gibson’s relaunched guitar amplifier line takes flight with the Randall Smith-designed Falcon tube combos MusicRadar
- Gibson Amps Are Back! The Falcon 5 & Falcon 20 Demos | First Look Premier Guitar
- Gibson Amplifiers Falcon 5 and Falcon 20 revealed gearnews.com
Granblue Fantasy: Relink Game Reveals Theme Song, Boss Videos; Gets Demo in January – Anime News Network
- Granblue Fantasy: Relink Game Reveals Theme Song, Boss Videos; Gets Demo in January Anime News Network
- Granblue Fantasy: Relink PS5 and PS4 demo launches in January 2024; playable characters Cagliostro, Seofon, and Tweyen announced Gematsu
- Granblue Fantasy: Relink Soundtrack Announced For Pre-Order; 140 Songs, March 2024 Release Noisy Pixel
- Cygames Reveals New Character and Demo Details for Granblue Fantasy: Relink BNN Breaking
- Geek Preview – ‘Granblue Fantasy: Relink’ Delivers Gran(d) Combo Of Action RPG Flair & Multiplayer Fun Geek Culture
Theatrhythm: Final Bar Line demo launches February 1
Publisher Square Enix [5,097 articles]” href=”https://www.gematsu.com/companies/square-enix”>Square Enix and developer indieszero [10 articles]” href=”https://www.gematsu.com/companies/indieszero”>indieszero will release a demo for Theatrhythm: Final Bar Line [5 articles]” href=”https://www.gematsu.com/games/theatrhythm-final-bar-line”>Theatrhythm: Final Bar Line for PS4 [24,550 articles]” href=”https://www.gematsu.com/platforms/playstation/ps4″>PlayStation 4 and Switch [12,906 articles]” href=”https://www.gematsu.com/platforms/nintendo/switch”>Switch on February 1, the companies announced.
Here is an overview of the demo, via Square Enix:
Theatrhythm: Final Bar Line is the biggest rhythm Action [876 articles]” href=”https://www.gematsu.com/genres/action”>action game in the series, with a massive 385 Final Fantasy [52 articles]” href=”https://www.gematsu.com/series/final-fantasy”>Final Fantasy tracks in the standard edition alone – plus 27 more in the Deluxe Editions. Plus, there will be multiple downloadable content packs featuring music from other Square Enix series, like NieR, Octopath Traveler [22 articles]” href=”https://www.gematsu.com/games/octopath-traveler”>Octopath Traveler, LIVE A LIVE [12 articles]” href=”https://www.gematsu.com/games/live-a-live”>LIVE A LIVE, Mana, SaGa, and more.
That’s a lot of music, and the demo gives you a generous selection of 30 tracks from that massive playlist.
Music Stages in the game fall into three types:
- Battle Music Stage (BMS) – Defeat waves of enemies in time to up-tempo battle themes.
- Field Music Stage (FMS) – Journey forth with a party across themed landscapes with relaxing field music.
- Event Music Stage (EMS) – Play to the beat against the backdrop of unforgettable scenes from each title.
Here’s which tracks are included in the demo – and the type of stage you’ll play through:
- Final Fantasy II (Pixel Remaster) [5 articles]” href=”https://www.gematsu.com/games/final-fantasy-ii-pixel-remaster”>Final Fantasy II
- “The Rebel Army” (BMS)
- “Battle 1” (BMS)
- “Town” (FMS)
- “Main Theme” (FMS)
- Final Fantasy V (Pixel Remaster) [5 articles]” href=”https://www.gematsu.com/games/final-fantasy-v-pixel-remaster”>Final Fantasy V
- “Main Theme of Final Fantasy V” (BMS)
- “Four Hearts” (FMS)
- “Battle 1” (BMS)
- “Battle 2” (BMS)
- “Mambo de Chocobo” (FMS)
- “Harvest” (FMS)
- Final Fantasy VII [68 articles]” href=”https://www.gematsu.com/games/final-fantasy-vii”>Final Fantasy VII
- “Opening – Bombing Mission” (BMS)
- “Let the Battles Begin!” (BMS)
- “Fight On!” (BMS)
- “The Chase” (FMS)
- “Main Theme of Final Fantasy VII” (FMS)
- Final Fantasy XIII
- “Defiers of Fate [36 articles]” href=”https://www.gematsu.com/series/fate”>Fate” (BMS)
- “Saber’s Edge” (BMS)
- “Blinded by Light” (BMS)
- “March of the Dreadnoughts” (FMS)
- “Desperate Struggle” (BMS)
- Final Fantasy XIV Online [2 articles]” href=”https://www.gematsu.com/games/final-fantasy-xiv-online”>Final Fantasy XIV
- “Hard to Miss” (BMS)
- “On Westerly Winds” (FMS)
- “The Land Breathes” (BMS)
- “Serenity” (FMS)
- “Torn from the Heavens” (BMS)
- “To the Sun” (FMS)
- “Nemesis” (BMS)
- Final Fantasy XV
- “Stand Your Ground” (BMS)
- “The Fight Is On!” (BMS)
- “APOCALYPSIS NOCTIS (Uncovered Trailer)” (BMS)
Theatrhythm: Final Bar Line is due out for PlayStation 4 and Switch on February 16 worldwide. Read more about the game here, here, here, here, and here.
Adventure Academia: The Fractured Continent launches December 9 in the west, demo now available
In Japan, Adventure Academia: The Fractured Continent launched for PlayStation 4 and Switch on September 8.
Adventure Academia: The Fractured Continent is a strategy JRPG [634 articles]” href=”https://www.gematsu.com/genres/rpg/jrpg”>Japanese RPG that will test your ability to manage a party of students against the hordes of monsters that block your way. With a unique “pinch, drag, and drop” real-time battle mechanic, customize your own party of students in a fantasy realm with over 10 different races to choose from! Manage their armor, weapons and accessories as you tactically guide them to victory.
- Follow Alex and his friends in this charming strategy Japanese RPG full of cute, fun, loveable characters
- Pinch, drag and drop your team to victory with a uniquely intuitive real-time battle system
- Build a dream team of students by managing their stats, weapons, abilities and personalities!
- A charming narrative guides you along the way, with optional side quests and fun Visual Novel [193 articles]” href=”https://www.gematsu.com/genres/visual-novel”>visual novel slices that progress with each quest
- Traverse a range of diverse environments with unique monster bosses to fight and different battle mechanics to learn!
Join Alex and His Friends in a Gripping Narrative Adventure [578 articles]” href=”https://www.gematsu.com/genres/adventure”>Adventure
The Continent of Pedra is in the midst of a serious crisis. The entire nation is slowly transforming into a labyrinthine dungeon teeming with monsters. When Alex’s father—the principal of “Obsidian High”—goes missing, it’s up to Alex and his party of academy friends to find him! Armed with the ancient Ruler Orb, summon your party to defeat monsters and forge a path towards victory!
Follow the story, working together with fellow classmates and teachers as you learn the truth behind the fractured continent. Meet unique characters of different species and specialties along your journey and take part in side quests to aid those that only you can help!
Drag, Drop, and Battle in Real-Time
Strategically guide your team to victory on a grid based, real-time movement system. Pick up and reorder your party to protect the main character, Alex, as you traverse around the map.
Recruit up to sox students for your party! Persona [9 articles]” href=”https://www.gematsu.com/series/persona”>Personalize them and choose from ten different races—Human, Khaluz, Felpurr, Bahamoon, Gnome, Diabolos, Fairy, Celestia, Dwarf, and Elf!
Meet 10 Unique Races
Recruit up to six students for your party! Give them names, choose their gender, manage their equipment, and customize their stats to suit your play style!
There are 10 different races available: Human, Khaluz, Felpurr, Bahamoon, Gnome, Diabolos, Fairy, Celestia, Dwarf, and Elf!
Face Gargantuan Monster Bosses
Each stage features gargantuan boss monsters with varying abilities and attacks! You’ll have to guide your party properly… or face being wiped out completely!
Equip, Upgrade, and Manage Your Party [21 articles]” href=”https://www.gematsu.com/genres/party”>Party
Manage and customize weapons, armor, and accessory slots for each of your teammates. Save up enough gold by completing levels and take weapons down to the laboratory for special, custom enhancements!
Watch a trailer below.
New Meta AI demo writes racist and inaccurate scientific literature, gets pulled
Enlarge / An AI-generated illustration of robots making science.
Ars Technica
On Tuesday, Meta AI unveiled a demo of Galactica, a large language model designed to “store, combine and reason about scientific knowledge.” While intended to accelerate writing scientific literature, adversarial users running tests found it could also generate realistic nonsense. After several days of ethical criticism, Meta took the demo offline, reports MIT Technology Review.
Large language models (LLMs), such as OpenAI’s GPT-3, learn to write text by studying millions of examples and understanding the statistical relationships between words. As a result, they can author convincing-sounding documents, but those works can also be riddled with falsehoods and potentially harmful stereotypes. Some critics call LLMs “stochastic parrots” for their ability to convincingly spit out text without understanding its meaning.
Enter Galactica, an LLM aimed at writing scientific literature. Its authors trained Galactica on “a large and curated corpus of humanity’s scientific knowledge,” including over 48 million papers, textbooks and lecture notes, scientific websites, and encyclopedias. According to Galactica’s paper, Meta AI researchers believed this purported high-quality data would lead to high-quality output.
Enlarge / A screenshot of Meta AI’s Galactica website before the demo ended.
Meta AI
Starting on Tuesday, visitors to the Galactica website could type in prompts to generate documents such as literature reviews, wiki articles, lecture notes, and answers to questions, according to examples provided by the website. The site presented the model as “a new interface to access and manipulate what we know about the universe.”
While some people found the demo promising and useful, others soon discovered that anyone could type in racist or potentially offensive prompts, generating authoritative-sounding content on those topics just as easily. For example, someone used it to author a wiki entry about a fictional research paper titled “The benefits of eating crushed glass.”
Even when Galactica’s output wasn’t offensive to social norms, the model could assault well-understood scientific facts, spitting out inaccuracies such as incorrect dates or animal names, requiring deep knowledge of the subject to catch.
I asked #Galactica about some things I know about and I’m troubled. In all cases, it was wrong or biased but sounded right and authoritative. I think it’s dangerous. Here are a few of my experiments and my analysis of my concerns. (1/9)
— Michael Black (@Michael_J_Black) November 17, 2022
As a result, Meta pulled the Galactica demo Thursday. Afterward, Meta’s Chief AI Scientist Yann LeCun tweeted, “Galactica demo is off line for now. It’s no longer possible to have some fun by casually misusing it. Happy?”
The episode recalls a common ethical dilemma with AI: When it comes to potentially harmful generative models, is it up to the general public to use them responsibly, or for the publishers of the models to prevent misuse?
Where the industry practice falls between those two extremes will likely vary between cultures and as deep learning models mature. Ultimately, government regulation may end up playing a large role in shaping the answer.
Resident Evil Village Third-Person Mode Demo Available Today
Capcom has announced that a demo for Resident Evil Village’s upcoming third-person mode will be available tonight, October 20, and will include 60 minutes of gameplay to try out in the new mode or in first-person for comparison.
Announced during the latest Resident Evil Showcase, this demo will be released at 4pm PT/7pm ET. If you live in the BST or AEST timezone, that translates to October 21 at 12am BST/9am AEST.
Included will be a small glimpse of what owners of the Resident Evil Village’s Gold Edition or Winters’ Expansion DLC can look forward to when both are released on October 28, 2022. And yes, the entire game will be playable in third-person. For those worried about a simple rework, Capcom had previously stated that creating this new perspective for Resident Evil: Village took “about as much effort as creating a new game.”
Those who choose to purchase the Gold Edition or Winters’ Expansion will get access to the third-person mode alongside The Mercenaries: Additional Orders and the story expansion Shadows of Rose.
The Mercenaries: Additional Orders will allow players to become Chris Redfield, Karl Heisenberg, and even Lady Alcina Dimitrescu, and each will have their own unique abilities.
Shadows of Rose takes place 16 years after the events of Resident Evil Village and follows Ethan Winters’ daughter Rosemary, who finds herself “struggling with terrifying powers.” To cure herself of this curse that has befallen her, she will have to enter the “consciousness of the Megamycete” and face her past, as well as new horrible nightmares.
Furthermore, it was revealed that this DLC will “conclude the Winters family saga.”
Have a tip for us? Want to discuss a possible story? Please send an email to newstips@ign.com.
Adam Bankhurst is a news writer for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter @AdamBankhurst and on Twitch.
Unreleased Mario Kart XXL Tech Demo For Game Boy Advance Surfaces Online
DNF
Nintendo preservation website Forest of Illusion has acquired the “infamous” Mario Kart XXL tech demo – a pitch by Denaris Entertainment Software for the Game Boy Advance, dating back to April 2004. It’s now been made available to download.
The German development studio (founded by Turrican creator Manfred Trenz) originally showcased the game and its “dynamic and adjustable perspective view engine featuring dual playfields” to Nintendo of Europe. The demo is made up of a single track using Mario Kart assets and features BGM from a PlayStation racer called Moorhuhn Kart, which Denaris also helped develop.
Interestingly, this Mario Kart demo began life as a racing game called ‘R3D-Demo‘. The same developer eventually went on to release a Game Boy Advance kart racer based on the CGI-animated character Crazy Frog. Yikes!
You can get a more detailed history and look at Mario Kart XXL along with the R3D-Demo on the Hard4Games YouTube:
What do you think of this slice of kart racing history for Game Boy Advance? Comment below.
[source forestillusion.com, via youtu.be]
Astronauts fly Einstein doll to demo physicist’s ‘happiest thought’
Albert Einstein’s “happiest thought” has been proven again by four international astronauts and a small doll made in his likeness (opens in new tab).
Upon entering Earth orbit on Wednesday (Oct. 5), the crew members onboard SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft “Endurance” (opens in new tab) revealed their chosen “zero-g indicator,” a plush toy of the late theoretical physicist. Floating at the end of a tether, the doll not only confirmed that the Crew-5 astronauts were safely on their way to the International Space Station, but that one of Einstein’s ponderings was indeed true.
“A couple of years after he came up with his groundbreaking theory of special relativity, Einstein, in his mind, still had a couple of loose ends to tie up,” Crew-5 pilot Josh Cassada, a NASA astronaut, U.S. Navy captain and physicist, radioed back to SpaceX’s mission control in Hawthorne, California. “While he was sitting [at his job] in the patent office because he wasn’t famous yet — [though he] definitely should have been — Einstein had what he said was one of his happiest thoughts of his entire life … that a person in free fall could not feel his own weight.”
“That thought, along with some others that he built upon, led to the general relativity and our understanding of gravitation and the curvature of space-time,” said Cassada.
Related: SpaceX launches Crew-5 astronauts on historic flight to space station for NASA
A tradition first started by Soviet-era cosmonauts and later adopted for SpaceX crewed spaceflights, zero-g indicators signal to the still strapped-into-their-seats crew members that they have entered orbit — or are in free fall around Earth — such that they experience weightlessness. Einstein had his “happiest thought” in 1907, more than 50 years before the first human launched into space.
“We’re experiencing Einstein’s happiest thought continuously, as the International Space Station has been doing for over 20 years,” said Cassada. “On Crew-5, we call this little guy our ‘free-fall indicator.’ We’re here to tell you that there’s plenty of gravity up here. In fact, that is what keeping us in orbit right now and preventing this trip on Crew Dragon from being a one-way trip.”
Crew-5’s free-fall indicator was made by The Unemployed Philosophers Guild, a specialty shop offering “thoughtful gifts for thinking people,” as part of its “Little Thinker” line of dolls (opens in new tab). The 11-inch-tall (28-cm) Albert Einstein plush, dressed in a gray sweater and black pants, features the physicist’s trademark unruly white hair.
Einstein has now joined a small but growing collection of dolls that have flown on SpaceX missions to the space station. Previous zero-g indicators have included a plush Earth globe (opens in new tab), a sequined dinosaur (opens in new tab), a toy Grogu (“Star Wars”‘ “baby Yoda (opens in new tab)“), a baby penguin (opens in new tab), a couple of turtles (opens in new tab), a stuffed dog (opens in new tab) and a monkey (opens in new tab).
The Einstein doll, together with Cassada, Crew-5 commander and first Native American woman in space Nicole Mann, Japanese astronaut Koichi Wakata and Anna Kikina, Russia’s only active female cosmonaut, are scheduled to arrive at the space station on Thursday evening.
“A little bit like life, we live in the same world, we live in the same universe,” said Cassada. “Sometimes we experience it in a very different way from our neighbors. If we can all keep that in mind, we can all continue to do absolutely amazing things and do it together.”
SpaceX’s flight controllers thanked Cassada for sharing his sentiments, as well as the meaning behind the Crew-5 “stowaway.”
“My crewmates are just happy that we didn’t break out a dry erase board and get into more detail,” replied Cassada with a smile.
Follow collectSPACE.com (opens in new tab) on Facebook (opens in new tab) and on Twitter at @collectSPACE (opens in new tab). Copyright 2022 collectSPACE.com. All rights reserved.
FlawlessDeku pulls off an impressive 60% damage combo with Jamie during a real Street Fighter 6 demo match
FlawlessDeku has been releasing plenty of footage from his time with the Street Fighter 6 demo that’s been available to the public at specific events. It’s quite evident that he’s developed a real interest in maining Jamie, one of the newcomers revealed for Street Fighter 6.
Needless to say, FlawlessDeku’s time investment has seemingly paid off in a big way as he’s dominating the competition. In his latest video, FlawlessDeku is able to pull off a combo that deletes around 60% of Ryu’s health bar.
What’s particularly scary about this sequence is how FlawlessDeku begins the combo by transitioning from Jamie’s “Rekka” special into the level 3. Of course, it’s very important to understand that level 1 and level 2 supers can’t be canceled into from special moves in this game (unless meter is spent for the Overdrive special variant).
From here, FlawlessDeku is actually able to continue the combo after landing Jamie’s level 3. Even though Ryu had over half his health remaining before he got hit, the damage that followed after the level 3 was enough to finish the round.
The 60% damage combo happens at the very end of the video. Before then, there’s actually plenty of match footage that has FlawlessDeku facing off with a Ryu player.
Check it all out below:
