L U C Y

72

1998

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Black Green/Blue

Trigger

No @Ayane.

An uninterruptible power supply (UPS) might not be something you think about very often, because it doesn't affect your frame rates or otherwise make your PC run faster. However, if there's a power outage, you'll be glad you have one. And if you don't already have one, check out CyberPower's CP1500PFCLCD model, our pick as the best battery backup for PC gaming—it's on sale at Newegg for $219.95 right now. That's not a deep discount by any stretch, but to sweeten the deal, Newegg is also tossing in a $30 gift card with the purchase, which arrives via email four days after the invoice date. It's good for up to a year, and there's no dormancy fee—maybe by then GPUs will be more plentiful. A good UPS is like an insurance policy for your hardware, and not just during power outages. Higher-end models like this one feature pure sine wave output to deliver energy that is identical or even cleaner than the utility company's power grid, which is great for sensitive equipment, as found in a PC. Active voltage regulation (AVR) is part of the package too, which wrestles with unstable voltage from the power grid to extend the life of the battery. There are 12 outlets on this model. Half of them offer both surge protection and battery backup duties, while the others offer just surge protection (fairly typical for a UPS). You'll also find a pair of USB charging ports (1x USB-C, 1x USB-A) on the front for external devices, so even if the power goes out, you can charge your smartphone. You can route your LAN cable through this backup as well.

Epic Games launched MetaHuman Creator this week. It's a videogame character creation tool, essentially, but it's free, it isn't followed by a 140-hour RPG, it runs in your browser (actually in the omnipresent "cloud"), and it can export ready-to-use character models for Unreal Engine projects. To try it, you have to sign up here, and it might take a little while to get your invite. I'm probably never going to use one of my "MetaHumans" for an Unreal Engine project (which is all you're allowed to use them for), because that seems hard, but MetaHuman Creator itself is easy to use. And fun. Who doesn't love a good character creator? You can sculpt features by clicking and dragging parts of the face, as well as blend the features of included faces together, which is so effortless that it seems obvious—I'm sure the trigonometry under the hood is no big deal, right? There are also granular options for eyes (how do you feel about sclera vascularity?) and teeth (plaque slider confirmed), skin and makeup options, a handful of hairstyles to choose from, and a few facial hair options. MetaHuman Creator isn't a fully-featured 3D modeling tool, and doesn't interpret your inputs literally, say, by moving the tip of the nose wherever you drag it. It morphs features according to your input while keeping the face within certain face-like parameters; there are constraints, and you can't use it to make any kind of person. It includes 60 face presets, though, which is more than enough to blend and sculpt unique characters. After tinkering for under an hour I'd created someone who doesn't really look like anyone else, but who does look like a real person. It's pretty wild. And there's something even wilder to discover. MetaHumans Creator was built by a pair of Epic-owned studios, 3Lateral and Cubic Motion, the latter of which does facial animation. The software includes three built-in animation sequences. Hit one, and your made-up human starts realistically yawning and puffing up their cheeks. The animations are nuanced enough that you can tell that the character is only pretending to smile at one point—smiling for a camera. But this character, or at least their facial structure, didn't exist an hour ago. Sometimes I have to shake myself out of a sort of technology numbness. 10 years ago, I did not imagine that I'd have free access to something like this. I was playing Skyrim and thought it looked really good. The limited hairstyle options and minimal hair customization will give away that a character was made with MetaHuman Creator, and I suspect after a while you might notice recurring nose and ear shapes and skin textures and so on. But 3D artists can export their MetaHuman characters and edit them in Autodesk Maya or other applications, making them as unique as they want, and then animate them by hand or with their own performance capture, using something like FaceWare. The one rule is that you can only publish characters you make with MetaHuman Creator in Unreal Engine projects, binding them to Epic's Unreal license. That license is quite permissive for small projects: You can use the Unreal development kit free, and if you publish a game made with it, you don't pay Epic any royalties until you've made at least $1 million in revenue. After that, the royalty is five percent. To use this early access release of MetaHuman Creator, you have to sign up on a registration page. There are no requirements to register, but it did take me a day to get the email saying I could jump in. I hadn't used this kind of cloud-based software before, and I am reluctantly impressed. I've been using it via Chrome, and it reacts very near instantly to my input. Sessions are limited to one hour right now, but you can start a new session right after you get booted, and it automatically saves your work. I had to briefly queue to get back in once, but not for more than a minute. MetaHuman Creator might be considered one aspect of Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney's long term vision for a gaming "metaverse," a vision that just helped Epic pull in another $1 billion in funding. That vision encompasses lots of different ideas, including stuff like crossplay, but part of the plan is to produce technology that allows more people to make more stuff—growing the "creator economy," in tech industry speak. (We used to call it "indie game development.") Valve and Unity have been big players in making powerful development tools more accessible, too. I'm sure I can hardly imagine what small development teams will be able to produce in the future using the powerful technology of big companies like this. At the same time, it feels inevitable that a low-fi, hand-coded and modeled game development scene will continue to exist, and perhaps grow as a countermovement.

Excalibur is a 2D mobile action MMORPG (Massively multiplayer online game) developed by R2Games for iOS and Android devices. The game allows player to choose from 3 unique character classes and send them on a medieval adventure alone or with friends, battling Knights, Goblins and Dragons in order to retrieve the legendary sword of heroes, Excalibur. Story Set in Medieval Europe, Excalibur lets players to set out on an original adventure in search of the legendary sword Excalibur, in order to rid the land of the evil that transpires to pillage and corrupt it. Players will receive help and quests from a number of characters, such as the legendary wizard Merlin, and will do battling Knights, Wizards and a myriad of mythical creatures in order to save the land from ruin. The story is simple to grasp and open enough for personal interpretation, allowing players to create their own unique experience whilst they play. Gameplay Upon starting Excalibur, players will be able to choose from 3 distinct character classes、ranging from a powerful Knight, a speedy Assassin, and Wizard who specialises in long range attacks. You control your character of choice on a 2D field, but will also be able to move them on a 3D plain, this allows you to move up, down, left, right and diagonally. The first area you encounter is the castle, which is essentially the games hub world. Here you’ll be able to customise your character with items and equipment they have brought, or received while on a quest. You can also upgrade your equipment through the use of special blue gems, and can upgrade special skills that you acquire when you achieve a predetermined level. Players can access quests in the hub by talking to certain key NPCs, these quests are then made accessible on the map.Once you’ve set out on a quest you’ll be thrown into battle with multiple opponents, here you’ll need to make use of your unique characters special abilities in order to succeed, but be warned, each of your attacks have a cool down timer meaning that if you over use one you will need to wait a few seconds before you can use that skill again. Enemies grow in strength and variety as you progress through each section, meaning that you will often need to grind for levels and occasionally return to the hub to equip new armour and weapons, as well as assigning new special skills.If you should ever grow tired of the the story section of the game, the hub area provides an Arena, where players can battle one another online, with up to 2 on 2. A Multiplayer Crusade is also available where you can fight alongside a friend, as well as a Slot Machine and Legion Battle, to name just a few. Excalibur Review – Conclusion Excalibur is a online mobile adventure game done right. It’s short mission based level structure, timed events and cool down timers for level ups, all help highlight the fact that the game was built from the ground up with short, pick-up-and-play sessions in mind. Hardcore gamers may be put off with the the more slow paced and restrictive experience, but mobile gamers are sure to find plenty to do and enjoy, in the the world of Excalibur. Positives Easy to pick up and play Fun and engaging Battle area difficulty can be increased for those looking for a challenge Negatives The game can become repetitive Some menu screens and status upgrades could be better explained

I can remember the last time I felt excited for a Metroidvania. It was Axiom Verge, a game inspired more by the original Metroid than the other half of the equation, Symphony of the Night. Like Metroid, Axiom was set in a dark, mysterious world that felt particularly open to investigation, in part thanks to a device called the Axiom Disruptor. This was a gun that let you ‘hack’ parts of the game world, turning foes into friends or clearing glitched-out obstacles. Never mind that it was really another disguised key in a genre crammed with overt and covert locks, it gave the illusion of letting the player mess rebelliously with the game code. I mention the Disruptor—such an iconic element of the original game—because it’s absent from this daring sequel, replaced by a similar hacking tool that’s perhaps more versatile, but less exciting to use. It’s emblematic of a game that has changed almost every aspect of its predecessor, while still somehow retaining its soul. Once again, you play as a human transported to an alien world: a land full of killer drones, where two civilizations once fought a devastating war. It’s a philosophical story that touches on artificial intelligence and a theory of multiple worlds, but told so lightly it can be difficult to follow. The heavier ruminations are delegated to collectable documents, which do fill in many of the gaps. The storytelling is so restrained it doesn’t even tell you who you are, or why you’ve come to Antarctica—or so I thought before I discovered the intro sequence, which only plays if you don’t press anything on the main menu. By the way, you’re Indra Chaudhari, a billionaire CEO who has been summoned to Antarctica—and ultimately the alien world—to locate her daughter. Where Axiom Verge was largely subterranean—full of stark black backgrounds and pulsating alien flora and fungi—its sequel is set on a more conventional overworld. Its backdrops suggest a vastness beyond the 2D playing area, while even its underground is rendered in greater detail. If the original evoked Metroid’s sense of subterranean dread, then Axiom Verge 2 leans more into the Symphony side of things, offering a sumptuous, detailed environment that’s still rewarding to hack and slash your way around. Notice I didn’t say ‘shoot’. The many guns of the original have been excised completely, leaving only melee weapons and a Zelda-style boomerang. It’s a huge change—imagine Samus swapping her arm-cannon for an ice axe and a bit of wood—but, thankfully, the melee combat is fine. It’s good enough, if slightly less satisfying than the bullet cacophony of the previous game. There’s just as much fighting here, with one key exception: there are no boss fights in Axiom Verge 2. Oh, there’s a perfunctory final battle, and some optional scraps against unique enemies. But there are no locked-off boss arenas—two encounters with the villain excluded—and no giant health bars to whittle down before you can progress. Axiom Verge 2 doesn’t want to interrupt the flow of exploration. As someone who dreads the bosses in Hollow Knight, for that very reason, I’m very much in favour of this change. It feels weird to say that combat is downplayed, in a game brimming with diverse enemies, but that’s only because the exploration side has received such a significant rework. The newly fleshed-out world encompasses several distinct biomes, linking together in a more organic way than its boxy predecessor. However, its standout feature is actually borrowed from The Legend of Zelda: there’s another world running parallel to this one. You’ve seen the feature before in games, probably in other Metroidvanias, where the two dimensions are just reskinned versions of each other. Not so here. The Breach is a separate map—laid atop, or below, the primary one—but with a mostly different layout, and a wildly different visual style: super low-res and with a colour palette that hasn’t been seen since '70s sci-fi. In the more cramped setting of the Breach, you control your adorable drone sidekick, bashing enemies and dodging traps while listening to synth prog-rock cover versions of an already extraordinary soundtrack. It’s an intoxicating place, contrasting nicely with the more grounded nature of the overworld. The Breach really blows open the game, particularly when you gain more freedom in travelling between the worlds. Axiom Verge 2—more so than its predecessor—is a game where unexplored map sections are actually devious navigation puzzles. Which ability do I need here, and which part of the map should I approach this obstacle from? Can I even get around this barrier yet, or should I come back later? Discovering the solution is usually more satisfying than finding whatever trinket lies in wait as a reward, because you’ve been entrusted to discover it for yourself. There are times when the game could be more accommodating. Several platforming leaps where success finally, mercifully came after about a dozen failed attempts, made while I wrestled with the world’s most fiddly grappling hook. Unless there was an ability I missed (and I managed to explore most of the map and finish the game without it), these half-dozen jumps really do require unforgiving, almost pixel-perfect precision, in a way that stands out from the rest of the game. I should probably also mention that I got totally stuck at one point—as I did in the first game—but here it took much less time to fathom my way out. Almost from the start, you can sprawl in multiple directions and butt your head against multiple brick walls. However, this sequel is a little better at offering guidance. There’s a new on-screen compass to offer (reassuringly vague) assistance, but it’s also easier to orient yourself inside these more organic worlds. I can’t decide if it’s a better game—it’s certainly a vastly different, more ambitious one. Axiom Verge 2 builds on the work of its predecessor, but also Symphony of the Night and A Link to the Past, to create one beautifully intricate space to explore. Review Video: