Rainbow 6 Siege: Operation Void Edge

Recently, Montreal hosted the 2020 Rainbow 6 Siege invitational and it went down swimmingly.

Jumpstart

There are people out there that like limited Magic and there are people out there that like constructed Magic. That’s how Magic goes and why there are different formats and styles of format, everyone has a prefered way to play.

Magic in the year 2020

We’re not even a full two months through the year and already we have enough Magic releases this year to break even the most reinforced of banks.

Banned and Restricted update

It’s official, Oko is no longer a threat to none powered formats. No longer will he terrorise the battlefield, Elks everywhere, making every game gradually more and more tedious. He’s gone. End of. 

MTG Arena Updates

You've all probably come across Magic Arena by now, be that because you actually play the game or because of the many, many adverts all over Youtube or websites like Kotaku or Gamespot.

For those of you that somehow don't know what Magic Arena is: Arena is a digital platform version of the very popular Trading Card Game, Magic: The Gathering. Some of you might be saying "but wasn't there already a digital version of Magic: The Gathering?" to which you may be referring to Magic Online - or possibly Duels of the Planeswalkers, but forget about that one. Magic Online was an earlier digital version of the TCG yes but one that had a dodgy interface, slow loading times and a very warped economy. Arena has a much more user friendly interface and even includes animations of the card art when you cast them, adding to the immersion somewhat, oh and it's also free.

Core Set 2019 Primer

The Core Sets are back! For you recent starters to Magic you might not know about the Core Sets,
once every year Wizards would put out a set that was a nice mix of old and news cards, this gave
them the design space to print silver bullet cards that could help tame a certain deck in standard or
modern. The key part of the Core Sets were to give newer players a good experience getting into the
game without being intimidated by super swingy, complicated cards.

Why play games?

I have been playing games for as long as I can remember, since the day my brother put a controller in my hands at the age of 3 and I was able to hold it on my own, games have been a massive part of my life. That was a long time ago now but still the love for games holds strong and I do often get asked why I play games: is it the entertainment? The bright colours? Well today I’m going to explain why I game and why I think others should too, not because I want to feel better than everyone else - though that could well be an incidental bonus - but because there are aspects of gaming that I think can provide a genuine advantage for people.

E3 2018

The gigantic, great, gaming expo has graced us with its generous presence once again. Over the last week Los Angeles has been host to E3, the worlds premier video game reveal event and I think enough time has passed to digest what was dropped and take a look back over it all to see if it was all worth a million press conferences a day and a screwed up sleep pattern (if you live in the UK like I do), so without further ado let’s just jump right in!

UK Games Expo 2018

Some of you may have heard that there was some sort of Games Expo that happened over this last
weekend. It’s no big deal or anything but it was the premier event for board and card gaming
representation in the UK, so yeah there’s that.
Some of you may have even been lucky enough to have attended UKGE this year and if you were,
I feel safe in saying that you probably weren’t disappointed.

Dominaria Primer

 

Magic is turning 25 this year, and yours truly isn’t far behind. 25 long glorious years of spell slinging, creature casting and mana flooding. To celebrate this incredible anniversary Wizards have decided to go back to where it all began with Dominaria.

Pro Tour Rivals Of Ixalan

This weekend players from all over the world traveled to Bilbao, Spain for Pro Tour Rivals Of Ixalan. 

Nintendo Labo

Over the years Nintendo have come under fire for not being a serious competitor in the mainstream console race. In recent years Nintendo products have been seen as more for casual gamers, despite the fact that the NES was one of the original consoles that brought video games into the mass home market. The good days of the N64 and GameCube have come and gone. I would never try to argue the mainstreamity of those consoles, though they are some of my favourites, as there’s always something, let’s say, “unique” about a Nintendo console.

Standard Bannings

Both Ramunap Red and Temur Energy have been dominant for a long time in standard. Temur and Ramunap Red combined made up roughly 40% of the meta-game appearing at most tournaments, with both decks having massively positive win rates against the rest of the format. Temur has easily been dominant for 5+ months now (depending on the colour and energy variants) and any attempt at weakening the archetype with rotation/new set introduction hasn’t worked. In the past it is within this time that other decks are given opportunities to try and find answers to the top tier decks, unfortunately Temur has rolled over all of them.

World Magic Cup 2017 Part 2

73 countries, 13 rounds, 1 City.

World Magic Cup 2017 Primer

2017 World Magic Cup

The Young Mage

Do you remember your first game of Magic? The experience of this new card game, intrigued by the images, words and iconography. The feeling of entering this new world full of mythical beings, spells and enchantments waiting for you to explore to your hearts content.

Magic Worlds 2017

24 players, 3 days of Magic, only one winner. Over the weekend of the 6th-8th of October the worlds best 24 Magic players battled it out in the Magic The Gathering World Championship to see who would lift that coveted World Champion Trophy and walk away with a cool $100,000. Players qualified from all corners of the world to play the best of the best in Boston Massachusetts over 14 rounds of Swiss. It would be a grueling weekend for all 24 players testing there adaptability and quick thinking with the total of six rounds of draft along with their stamina and metal while playing at least eight rounds of standard constructed over these three days, culminating in the top four players competing for the title.

Ixalan Primer

A lush, verdant plane filled with wonder and terror alike. A place where Dinosaurs roam tearing through the colourfully appealing yet dangerous jungle environment, Pirates command the winds sailing on top of the sea's crashing, distorting waves unknowing of the Merfolk who dive to unfathomable depths beneath. Vampires silently drift through the land of Ixalan, seductively recruiting as they venture creating an ever growing army of the undead.

When Gabe met Reddit

Gabe Newell, boss at Valve, one of the best game companies ever!, held an AMA on Reddit this week to discuss some questions put to him by fans. It was relatively short but when given the opportunity to talk almost face to face with someone at Valve it's always an enjoyable experience. Here are a few of the questions Gabe answered, some more technical than others and some just fun questions.

Some questions about Gabe's personal life and interests, like;

Q- What sparked your interest in video games?

A- Playing Trek on a mainframe using punch cards.

Q- Do people recognize you in public often? 

A- Yes.

Q- How do you like your steak? 

A- Medium Rare.

Q- If you could go back in time, what would you change about Steam? 

A- The biggest issue has been how we structured support.

A couple of fun questions;

Q- Wasn't there a movie (or set of 2 movies) coming in that universe be Valve and JJ Abrams?

A- Yep, they're coming.

Q- What is the status of Half-Life 3/Half-Life 2: Episode 3? Is Valve still working on any fully fledged single player games? An I identified anonymous source at Valve has said that HL3 has been cancelled, is this source legitimate?

A- The number 3 must not be said! Yes, I personally believe all unidentified anonymous sources on the internet.

Q- What are your favorite Steam games?

A- I think Portal 2 is our best single player game, I play DOTA 2 the most of our multiplayer games.

And some questions that are more business related;

Q- Do people often ask "When's Half-Life 3 coming?" Or similar things? 

A- Yes.

Q- What's going on with Half-Life 3?

A- The issue with Half-Life for me is that I was involved in a much higher percentage of the decisions about the games, so it's hard for me to look at them as anything other than a series of things I regret. There's no information in my response about the what we'll do in the future. It's simply easier for me to be a fan of things that I was less directive.

Q- What do you regret about Half-Life then? That's an interesting thing to say, regarding that the Half-Life series is one of the most critically acclaimed of all time.

A- if you're involved in a game, everything ends up being a set of trade-offs. Anything in a game is a sacrifice of things not in the game. I just feel those more personally about Half-Life for a bunch of reasons.

Q- Why does Valve not talk to its community about the games/apps it's developing as much as other companies? 

A- Because our decision making is way more conditional than most other companies. The one thing we won't do is waste our customers time and money, which means we will cancel or change stuff much later in development. Tracking out choices would be annoying and frustrating.

Another way to think about this, and the way we talk about this internally, is that we prefer to communicate through our products. We are all pretty devoted to reading and listening to the community - everyone here believes it is an integral part of their job to do so. And when it comes time to respond, we generally use Steam - shipping update that address issues or add functionality, obviously this doesn't work for everything. Working this way imposes latency on our communication - It takes long to ship and update than to do a blog post. This can lead to the feeling of an echo chamber, where it seems like Valve isn't listening. We're always listening. So sometimes the latency is rough for everyone, including us when we want to address issues quickly. On balance we things it's usually worth the trade off.

 Q- Does Valve plan on doing anything with Source 2 in the coming year? If so, what?
A- We are continuing  to use Source 2 as our primary game development environment. Aside from moving DOTA 2 to the engine recently, we are using it as the foundation of some unannounced products. We would like to have everyone working on games here at Valve to eventually be using the same engine. We also intend to continue to make the Source 2 engine work available to the broad developer community as we go, and to make it available free of charge.

Q- Any chance that there will be a new IP set in the Half-Life/Portal Universe? I feel like there's a lot of story left to explore there.
A- Yep

And finally...

Q- What is your view on the direction Valve as a company should take in the future? Such as what would you like to see the company achieve/what improvements would you like to see Valve undergo/ what role would you like to see Valve serve/undertake in the industry as it evolves etc, and if any, have you made any past decisions that you look back on now with regret/could've handled differently?
A- The big thing right no is broadening the range of options we have in creating experiences and we think investing in hardware will give us those options. The knuckles controller is being designed at the same time as were designing our own VR games. Much more narrowly, some of us are thinking about some of the AI work that is being hyped  right now. Simplistically we have lots of data and compute capability that looks like the kind of areas where machine learning should work well.
Personally I'm looking at research in brain computing interfaces.


 These have been a selection of questions from the AMA held by Gabe Newell on Reddit, hopefully we'll be hearing from the guys from Valve again soon, but until then keep checking back to Game Changers for more news and updates

Nintendo Switch Update

Nintendo Switch Update

 

Recently, there has been a slight leak if you will about the Nintendo Switch's price point.

GameSeek put up the upcoming console on their website for pre-order at £198.50 (probably to be rounded up to £200), also stating that the prices are guaranteed so if you pre-order and the price increases, you don't pay anymore than the pre-order price. However, if the price decreases you will still have to pay the pre-order price, but I think it's safe to say that it wont be decreasing based on every console that has come before it.

As odd as this looks, and with no comment from Nintendo, it only seemed right when GameSeek revealed that every customer that has pre-ordered the switch has been refunded.  

I think someone jumped the gun here, maybe due to over excitement or maybe due to marketing "slipping up" and subtly dropping a price on us, my monies on the second one.

Keep checking back to Game Changers for more updates on the Nintendo Switch as they happen and more gaming news.