Author: Sam Machkovech

Forget latex suits and white ping-pong balls. Motion-capture sessions for video games and films have only gotten more intense over the years, thanks to advances like improved, LED-loaded motion-capture outfits and the ability to see robust TV-screen renders of an actor's performance as soon as a take is complete.

Of course, not every studio has a Peter Jackson-caliber budget for motion capture facilities, but the small development team behind upcoming VR game The Gallery: Call of the Starseed found an affordable path to capturing a human actor's performance—and then remembered they already had one cutting-edge gadget handy: the dev kit for the upcoming HTC Vive virtual reality system. The result, shown off in the studio's latest development diary on Tuesday, may very well be the world's first documented use of VR in a motion capture session.

"We wanted the actor to feel as if they were acting on a stage," Cloudhead Games staffer Mike Wilson wrote at the company's blog. As such, after making actor and motion-capture veteran Adrian Hough (Rise of the Planet of the Apes) put on a suit made by mo-cap company Noitom, the designers also asked him to wear a Vive headset. HTC's system enables room-scale tracking, so that users can walk around up to roughly 15 square feet of real space, which means Cloudhead was able to virtually transport Hough into the shoes of his in-game character, the Watcher.

(credit: EA)

EA is shaking up the market for downloadable PC games with a new subscription-based service that apes some of the most popular features of console offerings like PlayStation Plus and Xbox Live Gold. On Tuesday, the company made a surprise announcement of EA Origin Access for PC—not to be confused with the similarly named, entirely different offering on Xbox One consoles.

The new PC service will set players back $5 per month in exchange for access to full-game downloads from the "EA Vault," which currently includes 15 games, so long as they maintain a paid EA Origin Access subscription. Only one of those Vault titles, Battlefield Hardline, came out last year; the rest are "legacy" titles from the past few years, including Dragon Age: Inquisition, Battlefield 3 and 4, and the 2013 reboot of SimCity (all sans DLC). EA promises to add more Vault games on a monthly basis, including third-party offerings.

The service's FAQ claims that "some" EA Vault games will work offline, so long as players "periodically reconnect to Origin," but it doesn't clarify which games or how long "periodic" means. More troubling is the site's lack of confirmation about whether or not Vault games ever expire for paying members; on the comparable PlayStation Plus and Xbox Live Games with Gold services, members receive permanent access to unlocked games, so long as they maintain paid subscriptions. We have asked EA representatives to clarify this point, and we will update this report if we receive a response.

Ryan drowns in the game, surrounded by the black, cancerous bulbs that frequently appear throughout That Dragon, Cancer.

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Death happens a lot in video games, but how often do games stop to reflect upon it, or upon grief? Most games cloak death in hit points, energy bars, and infinite respawns—death is reduced to a gameplay mechanic, a thing that can, with skill, be avoided or defeated. Even when games permanently remove warriors from a quest's adventuring party or force troubled virtual soldiers to question their motivations and press "X" to pay respects, death is not an end. So long as we hold a controller, the bodies are buried, the emotions are overcome, and the battle rages on.

That Dragon, Cancer is the form's rare exception: a game that follows a family's suffering through cancer therapy for their year-old son. The game dares to attach grief and tragedy to its core interactivity, and as such, it has grabbed a lot of pre-release attention. While it's not new for indie and experimental games take on ambitious, emotional concepts and existential crises, never has one come along that has been so frank, so nakedly autobiographical, and so imbued with its creators' spiritual identities.

The game is difficult, but not because of hard-to-solve puzzles or combat. Its most touching moments made me pause to reflect, to collect myself, and, quite frankly, to sob uncontrollably. But this is a video game, not a book or film or TV series, and that means That Dragon, Cancer is difficult for reasons beyond empathy and triggered memories. Video games have the unique power to put players in control of a narrative and then steal that control away, and That Dragon, Cancer employs that power to incredible emotional effect—after all, what can render a parent as powerless as facing an unkillable cancer in your infant child?

Bethesda Softworks

Cacodemon time!

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Until we get our hands on a video game's preview build, we know better than to fully trust a screenshot gallery, but if the final version of this year's Doom reboot—formerly known as Doom 4—looks anywhere near as good as its latest screenshot tease suggests, then we're in for quite the demonically charged visual treat.

Game Informer scored the latest exclusive look at the upcoming first-person shooter's solo campaign, and its feature calls out an apparent back-to-Doom's-roots system of gameplay, including color key cards and a lack of gun reloading or "sprint" button. New features include a "weapon wheel" that slows time down, a la Fallout 4's VATS system, to let players pick weapons—though longtime series weapons the BFG and the chainsaw each get a dedicated button (a d-pad arrow and the X button, respectively) as a sort of "panic" option; also, the game's weapons will now be bolstered by way of hidden, collectible "mods," including shotgun attachments that turn the weapon into a chargeable, buckshot-powered grenade launcher.

The preview seemed pretty scant on details, including vague hints about an "upgrade" system that will let players pick perks like running speed and weapon-swapping speed, and it didn't come with any new video reveals. In very good news, the screenshots above include a lot more color and a lot less of the unbecoming, overly brown filter from the game's E3 2015 reveal, and they include stunning now-gen interpretations of series baddies like the cacodemon. Game Informer promises more Doom information throughout the month of January at its dedicated portal page. Hopefully, that will include a solid release date, which we still don't have beyond a vague "2016" window.

Marc Laidlaw helped write these Half-Life characters into existence; should they return to video games, it won't be under his guidance. (credit: Valve)

It's almost like clockwork, the semi-annual chirping of non-news related to the never-announced, never-canceled notion of a new Half-Life video game. Instead of a vague statement or a weird, hidden file, Friday's update comes from a Valve staffer's surprisingly long response to a fan's e-mailed question.

A series fan exchanged e-mails with longtime series scribe Marc Laidlaw, and the messages were copied to reddit then confirmed by Gamasutra as legitimate. The e-mail began with a charged question: "Why can't you just publicly announce that Valve will never release the infamous Half-Life 3?" Laidlaw, a Valve designer and writer responsible for both major Half-Life games' stories, then responded with a lengthy, Q&A-styled announcement of his retirement from Valve. He led off by expressing hope that "this will explain why I cannot answer your questions."

Laidlaw's e-mail includes nine answers to a fictitious interviewer, including why he retired ("an outwardly obvious reason is that I'm old") and what he's going to do now ("I will almost certainly get back to writing stories of my own"). Of most interest to series fans is his answer to the question, "What does this mean for Half-Life?" which, admittedly, is open to wild interpretation.

Thanks to today's announcement, future English-language copies of Settlers of Catan will probably have that giant "M" for Mayfair removed or changed to reflect Asmodee's acquisition. (credit: Sam Machkovech)

The modern board game renaissance can trace many of its origins to the nation of Germany—whose annual Spiel des Jahres awards are arguably as big there as the Oscars are in the United States—but one major tabletop gaming producer has begun an aggressive push to get France in the conversation.

In addition to putting out critically acclaimed games of its own, French game producer Asmodee has been on a game and company acquisition tear for the past two years. On Thursday, the company pulled off its biggest acquisition yet: the English-language rights to the German board gaming sensation that is Catan. A press release from Asmodee North America clarified that the deal with current publisher Mayfair Games will transfer "publishing, commercial, and brand rights" for all English-language Catan products to Asmodee—and specifically, its new Catan Studio, Inc. imprint, headed by former Mayfair CEO Peter Fenlon—after an undefined "transitional period." (Asmodee did not publicly publish its press release, but Mayfair posted its own similar one shortly afterward.)

This follows Asmodee's acquisition of major North American game publishers Days of Wonder and Fantasy Flight in 2014, along with the Spot-It! casual games series in 2015, meaning one company now controls the rights to critical darlings Ticket to Ride, Dixit, Citadels, Talisman, Small World, 7 Wonders, and the monster that is Catan's ever-expanding presence in English-speaking countries. In Catan terms, that means the company is pretty much steeped in a figurative surplus of wood, sheep, ore, brick, and grain.

Double Fine founder Tim Schafer celebrates a $3.3 million crowdfunding success for Psychonauts 2. (credit: Fig)

Nearly four years after gaming studio Double Fine Productions broke Kickstarter records with its first crowdfunding campaign, the company announced on Wednesday that its latest, nostalgia-fueled cash request had proven successful.

Production on a sequel to cult classic platforming game Psychonauts will now officially commence thanks to the game maker raising over $3.3 million from fans. That amount matches how much Double Fine raised in March 2012 to create the point-and-click adventure game Broken Age—though anybody familiar with that game's beleaguered, cash-strapped creation (which was chronicled at length by way of a Two Player Productions documentary) will be heartened to hear that the crowdfunded amount is only one part of the game's minimum budget.

As Double Fine founder Tim Schafer announced last month, following Psychonauts 2's reveal at The Game Awards 2015, the new game's development budget will be propped up by three major pillars: crowdfunding, "an external partner" (who has yet to be publicly identified, but is almost certainly not Marcus "notch" Persson), and Double Fine's own coffers. This follows other major gaming crowdfunding requests, particularly Yu Suzuki's Shenmue 3, acknowledging their own private investors and admitting that crowdfunding alone hasn't covered the game's production costs.

Don't expect to see such a splash screen on a TV series for a while—at least, certainly not through the Yahoo Screen portal, which has now been officially shuttered. (credit: Yahoo)

Yahoo's push to host exclusive TV and video content appears to have hit a major speed bump, as the company confirmed it had closed its dedicated Yahoo Screen hub site on Monday. Visitors to the Yahoo Screen site, which had hosted archival Saturday Night Live clips, a single NFL online broadcast, and the company's line of 2015 "original" series, are currently being bounced to the vanilla URL of http://yahoo.com.

iOS and Android app shoppers will no longer find the Yahoo Screen app as of today, as well, though Ars was still able to stream episodes of all three original Yahoo series—Community's sixth season and the pilot seasons of Sin City Saints and Other Space—on devices that already had the app installed. As of right now, those series are not promoted at any of Yahoo's major portals in an obvious way; we had to dig around before finding them buried in the Yahoo TV site at an inelegant "originals" URL.

The development follows Yahoo executives specifically citing the company's three TV series projects as money-losers to the tune of a $42 million write-down during a Q3 earnings call in October. At the time, Yahoo CFO Ken Goldman told investors that with "certain of our original video content, we couldn't see our way to make money over time." That call came before Yahoo had aired the NFL's first-ever, online-only regular season game, which drew an international audience of 15 million; the broadcast's rights cost Yahoo an additional $10 million.

Oculus' latest Touch controller image doesn't look much different than the model we tried out in June. (credit: Oculus)

Want to simulate waving your hands around in virtual space? 2016 should be a very good year for you, with burgeoning VR hardware makers HTC, Oculus, and Sony all gearing up to launch motion-tracked VR options by way of handheld controllers. However, in the case of Oculus, their offering received a delay on Thursday, just before this year's New Year's Eve ball drop.

The Oculus Touch system, which will add two handheld controllers and an additional motion-tracking camera to the upcoming Oculus VR headset, will now launch in "the second half of 2016," according to an official announcement. This news pushes back the controllers' originally announced—and equally vague—window of 2016's "first half."

Oculus' announcement says the delay will enable "advances in ergonomics" and "improved hand-pose recognition." Ars got the chance to try out an early Touch controller demo in June, which showed off the system's ability to notice whether our fingers within the controller were extended or clenched, enabling poses such as fists and finger points, but the recognition did feel somewhat wonky in the system's early state.

If you keep tabs on the Internet's largest depositories for pirated music, films, and TV series, you're used to an annual deluge of major films appearing in illicit fashion a month or so before the Academy Awards—typically sourced from DVD screeners sent to longtime Academy voters. Thanks to a major leak of award-season screeners, however, 2015 marks the first year that a massive dump of DVD screeners hit the Internet before the eligible nominating year had even concluded—and perhaps calling into question the old way of getting advance-release films into voters' hands.

In particular, a few of this award season's leaked films found their way to the Internet before they'd enjoyed either limited or national theatrical release, including Christmas-premiere films like Quentin Tarantino's The Hateful Eight, David O. Russell's Joy, the Leonardo DiCaprio film Revenant, and the Will Smith vehicle Concussion. The release notes attached to many of these leaks are linked to a group known as "Hive-CM8," and most of those have included threats of a grand total of 40 leaks this season.

That high number doesn't sound like hot air; we've already confirmed leaks of quite a few other Oscar contenders sourced from DVD screeners, including the Aaron Sorkin-penned Steve Jobs. The release group Hive-CM8 was also linked to a few substantial leaks from the 2014 screener season, particularly the final chapter in the Hobbit trilogy, which included lengthy boasts about defeating watermarks and other potentially identifying bits in the films they released. This season's slew includes similar brags, including a copy-pasted note on most releases stating that "all digital watermarks are removed."