Tag: ‘bullet
Move over Returnal, Luna Abyss is your next favourite bullet hell shooter
Take one look at Luna Abyss and you’ll probably go, ‘Wait a minute, this looks like first-person Returnal!’ And having played the first mission of the game at GDC, I can confirm that yes, this is very much in the vein of first-person Returnal. It’s a fast-paced, bullet hell shooter set on a strange alien moon where everything’s out to get you, but the shift in perspective makes everything in its titular abyss feel closer and more intimate, calling to mind the frantic, confined gun fights of Doom and Quake more than Housemarque’s seminal roguelike – games that creative director Benni Hill tells me were formative experiences for him growing up.
There’s also a greater emphasis on story-telling in Luna Abyss, with Hill also citing Nier: Automata and Bioshock as other key influences. It’s a compelling mix, based on the first chunk I played, and arguably one of my surprise GDC favourite demos alongside The Thaumaturge and The Lamplighters League. Indeed, Hill tells me they started working on Luna Abyss a year before Returnal was even announced, and when they first saw it during Sony’s PlayStation 5 reveal stream in the summer of 2020, he and his team did a collective double-take.
You can play all of Jedi: Survivor in bullet time
Ahead of Star Wars Jedi: Survivor’s launch in a few days, the developers at Respawn Entertainment are showing off some of the accessibility features they’ve added to the game. There is, of course, the typical subtitle size toggle and visual options including a colorblind mode and field of vision options. You can see more details on the settings here. But there was one accessibility feature that stood out among the rest: slow mode. I’ll let the developers explain.
One of the options that we’re most excited for our players to discover is our Slow Mode toggle, which allows players to slow down the action of the world in order to ease the challenge of both combat and platforming.
Simply put, Jedi: Survivor has an option that will let you…
Luna Abyss is a brutalist bullet hell that mixes Bioshock with Nier Automata
Sometimes you see a game, and it grabs you immediately. There’s a lot to be said about the importance of that first audio visual impression a game can have, how a slick art style paired with a booming voice or sweeping soundtrack can steal your heart. Roughly two weeks ago, on the GDC expo floor, Luna Abyss may of well been just that.
To learn more about the game, I sat down and talked to creative director Benni Hill (don’t hum the tune) about the upcoming first-person bullet-hell shooter from Bonsai Collection. Where does that art style come from, and how exactly do you transfer a traditionally 2D genre effectively into a 3D game?
The game is a striking clash of dark concrete and metal, peppered with pipes, stairs, and mechanical horror. You as a convict with mysterious crimson eyes have been sent to the Red Moon, a strange orbital boy that appeared over earth 250 years ago. While there, you must serve a prison sentence, ordered by the loud everpresent voice of your mechanical warden to discover relics hidden in the megastructure.
California’s Rain Slows Construction for Its High-Speed Bullet Train
But while standing water at some locations has prevented work crews from reaching their job sites, the Central Valley director for the Cailfornia High-Speed Rail Authority said it’s the prospects for a lengthy summer run of water in local irrigation canals that present a greater potential disruption to construction later this year….
At the Tule River viaduct near Highway 43 and Avenue 144 south of Corcoran, drone video posted to social media on March 22 by the Tulare County Sheriff’s Office shows vehicles stranded in floodwaters and support columns for the structure sticking out of the water. “There’s a lot of work we can’t get to,” Garth Fernandez, who heads up the rail agency’s Central Valley region, told The Fresno Bee in a telephone interview this week. “So at Tule River and Deer Creek, right now we are not working. … We don’t even have access to that (Deer Creek) site right now because it’s all under water.” Fernandez added that in the meantime, the rail agency and its contractor have turned their attention to providing what help they can to nearby communities that are being affected by flooding….
While some construction locations are facing delays because of standing flood water, crews have been able to continue working at other sites in Madera, Fresno, Kings and Kern counties — a 119-mile stretch covered by three separate construction contracts…. So far, no significant damage has been reported on any of the high-speed rail structures that have been completed or are in various stages of construction. “From north to south, water is flowing underneath all of our completed structures,” Fernandez said. “All of our structures are on piles and deep foundations, so I don’t believe we’ll have an issue with damage to our structures… We may have some areas of erosion, some embankments washed out in a couple of places, but that minor damage can be resolved rather easily,” he added. “But for all of our major structures, the current reporting is that we are holding good.”
The rail line has been designed to cope with major floods; viaducts and a railbed that will elevated above the level of the surrounding land are expected to minimize the risk of damage from future floods, Fernandez said. “Our facilities are designed for a 100-year flood, so (the current events are) showing that our design is actually working,” he said. “It’s designed in a way that even though it’s a large system north to south, it’s able to convey all the flood water past our embankments and our alignment.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Tech industry dodges a financial bullet after SVB crash
Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) in Santa Clara, CA, billed itself as “the financial partner of the innovation economy” and had more than $342 billion in deposits — including money from many influential venture capitalists, start-ups and tech firms.
That was before last week happened, when a sudden run on the bank opened the door to the prospect of a larger meltdown in the financial system. After a weekend scramble, the Biden Administration, the US Treasury, the Federal Reserve, and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. (FDIC) devised a way to back up the full value of SVB deposits beyond the federally insured ceiling of $250,000. (The same is true for Signature Bank, which also failed.)
Is Patch Quest a roguelike, Metroidvania, bullet hell, or Pokémon-like? Yes
Patch Quest performs an impressive juggling act
Economic Report: U.S. and global economies may have dodged a bullet, IMF says, but they’re still in a danger zone
Cool Water Alert: Watch water drain from fish tank bullet holes in Phantom Fury
What keeping a bullet journal taught me about using to-do list apps
On July 6th of this year, I officially ended my three-year-long experiment with trying to organize my life using a physical bullet journal. I know the exact date because I’m looking at my discontinued notebook as I write this. Apparently, five months ago, I needed to take photos of the Corsair K70 keyboard for a then-forthcoming review and follow up with a quote I’d received to insulate my roof. I took the photos. I did not end up insulating my roof.
Since then, I’ve used the notebook for jotting down things to remember here and there, but when it comes to keeping track of daily tasks and chores, I’ve switched back to the same hodgepodge of different note-taking and to-do list apps that I used three years ago. These include Notion for…