| TG |

- Ape Out is Hotline Miami on an intense diet of bananas and Buddy Rich records; a top-down simian splatterfest set to a superb soundtrack of jazzy drums and crashing cymbals, bundled into an extremely elegant and cool package. Blending elements of old-timey film and vinyl with a sharp, bold 2D aesthetic and bucketloads of blood, Ape Out is striking to look at and properly addictive to play. The premise is simple: The apes are in, and they need to be out. That’s where we come in, steering these simians to an exciting escape through four short but regularly tough chapters, plus a fun epilogue with a slight twist. The location might be a shady research lab or a labyrinthine container ship and its nearby port, but the objective is constant: sprint to the exit, smash anything you can, and slaughter everyone in the way. - The controls are simple, too, a perfect match for Ape Out’s striking, minimalist art style. Outside of movement, there are just two actions in Ape Out – shove and grab. Shoving enemies will send them sailing until they drop to their deaths, smash into pulp against a wall, or slam into another person, liquefying both in a bloody explosion. Shove is also how the apes blow through plate glass and pound their way through some doors. The grab, meanwhile, is useful for procuring human shields, making use of their panicked trigger fingers to blast their comrades and to direct where exactly to throw your victims for maximum devastation. The occasional steel door will also need to be wrenched from its hinges. These two moves were all I needed to feel like a big hairy piledriver of primate rage, flinging hapless humans around as though they’re weightless. So yes, Ape Out is uncomplicated. But that doesn’t mean it’s a pushover. - I also like the way Ape Out’s huge walls stretch all the way out of screen, looming high over the vibrant orange apes and bright-red blood splatters, adding depth along the Z-axis and obscuring the level ahead. It adds a layer of pressure you don’t necessarily get in other top-down games like Hotline Miami or The Hong Kong Massacre, where you can see into upcoming rooms and spaces and prepare to deal with enemies who can’t see you yet. I like everything about the presentation, to be honest, from the cue marks that flicker in the right-hand upper corner at the halfway point in each chapter, like I have some kind of personal projectionist changing film reels in the background for me, to the way the level names burst onto the screen in time with the music. - Ape Out is an intoxicating fusion of percussion and destruction that oozes style from every angle. Its procedurally built levels tend to blend into one another a bit but its bloody rampages are filled with nuance. Beneath the simple controls is depth that’s kept me returning for days after successfully completing the epilogue. Gorgeous and compulsive, if this ’50s-inspired, jazz-fueled jaunt is the future of gorilla warfare, the team behind Ape Out can make a monkey out of me anytime.

- We haven’t seen many games like Darksiders III in the past decade or so. It’s a third-person action game that isn’t afraid to grind your progress to a halt for an hour or more until you figure out how to beat a seemingly-impossible boss. It doesn’t seem to aspire to match the visual polish of this year’s biggest blockbusters, and its design philosophy completely disregards all the hand-holding and coddling that has become the norm outside of Dark Souls and its brethren. But the combat is satisfying – and, you know, maybe not every game needs to be a giant open world with a million things to collect and a never-ending supply of side quests. Darksiders III fits comfortably in that spot. - Your appreciation of the characters and stakes of this roughly 20-hour story will get a boost if you’ve played at least the first Darksiders. Each game puts you in control of a different Horseman of the Apocalypse in a unique and interesting setting: a ravaged Earth where a war between angels and demons has pretty much left humans extinct. Your Horseman this time around is Fury – the only female Horseman – but her debut isn’t especially memorable due to some cheesy dialogue and forgettable voice acting. - As for the graphics, while there have been games this year that have truly stunned me with their beauty, Darksiders III is not one of them. The stylized, cartoonish characters are plopped into a pretty generic-looking world that lacks detail. A couple of the Deadly Sin designs are cool, though: Sloth, for example, is a giant, beyond-morbidly obese slime bug who is carried around on a throne of slave beetles. - The bosses in Darksiders III are not messing around. While the first couple might not pose much of a threat, eventually you’ll encounter one that doesn’t seem to respond to any trick or attack you’ve learned up to that point. Not to ruin any surprises, but don’t be shocked if a boss doesn’t go down as easily as it seems they will. It can be frustrating to suddenly have the tables turned on you, to be sure, but with persistence success eventually (mercifully) comes. In this way, Darksiders III feels like it’s of another time – a time when designers weren’t afraid of scaring you away with difficulty. Boss checkpoints could have been tweaked to better respect our time, though. In one case, losing to a boss sends you all the way back to a checkpoint with all sorts of enemies blocking your path back to round two (and, if we’re being honest, for me it was rounds three and four and so on). In another, you’re sent back to an area that’s far away but with no enemies in your path, so you just have to spend a few minutes running back to the fight. The bosses here are tough enough that these inconveniences add up after a few failures. - Instead of open world, I’d describe Darksiders III as a connected-world game. It’s a series of smallish rooms connected by hallways and tunnels, and the nearest Deadly Sin is always marked with a skull on your radar at the top of the screen. So playing Darksiders III means running down hallways from room to room, keeping that skull centered, and fighting any monsters in your way. - That’s 90 percent of it, with environmental puzzles making up the remaining 10 percent. These puzzles are a nice break from the action, and one or two were tough enough to stump me for more than a few minutes. - That doesn’t leave much room for rewarding exploration, but I did enjoy hunting down the upgrade items that are hidden all over the place behind corners and just off the beaten path. There is a bit of backtracking to previous areas, and you’re bound to notice opportunities that weren’t previously available to you because you didn’t have the right ability yet. Those moments flesh Darksiders III out a bit and make it feel like more than just a simple action game. - The straightforward simplicity of Darksiders III is a refreshing change of pace after exploring so many dense open-world games. That simplicity doesn’t refer to the combat or boss battles, though, which are complex and almost startlingly unforgiving. Its throwback philosophy is comfort food for action gamers of a certain age, but it would’ve been nice to see the third game in the series introduce some new concepts to relaunch Darksiders in the modern age.

- To keep your typical sequel expectations in check, it's probably best to think of Hitman 2 as season 2 of the 2016 revival; it doesn’t have many new features, but it does deliver all six of its clever murder sandboxes at once. The huge variety of options for pulling off stealthy kills makes playing and replaying them a majorly satisfying draw. Beyond that, though, Agent 47 barely gets any new toys to play with and the story around it is just embarrassing on multiple levels. - Unlike most games, which love to send you to outlandish and exotic places, the Hitman series works best when you’re taking down targets in the most relatable, everyday environments possible. Everyone remembers Hitman: Blood Money’s classic clown-at-the-birthday-party mission, for example. Similarly, Hitman 2’s mundane suburban Vermont and dense Mumbai slums missions are the standouts in this new set. The former has you doing a bit of home invasion in between wandering the quiet neighborhood, while the latter’s three objectives are so spread out that it really feels like you’re wandering a packed city with a wealth of ways to accomplish your mission. By contrast, the finale takes place on a ludicrous Bond-meets-Eyes-Wide-Shut island of cultists, which borders on the comical. It’s still a challenging and complex mission but isn’t quite as memorable. - Like any good stealth game, Hitman 2 doesn’t just ask for your patience – it demands it. The slightest failure can completely ruin your entire mission (or turn it into a big, loud shootout, which isn’t really the point of this game) but smartly deployed autosaves and the ability to do a manual save anywhere mean you never lose too much progress unless you’re on the highest difficulty, which limits you to one save per mission. It can still get frustrating to fail over and over, but you have to remember that there are so many choices in any given level that you can completely change your approach if something isn’t working. When I wanted to pick off one specific guy in a room first but had no luck luring him over with a tossed coin without someone else noticing the kill, I simply went into an adjacent room, found a radio, and turned it on in order to distract the guy who was noticing my illicit shenanigans. Problem solved! There is always another way in this game. - That said, Hitman 2, as smart as it usually is, can sometimes be really stupid when the AI goes wonky. In Vermont, I hid in the bathroom of a heavily guarded house, overflowed the sink, and then cleaned out a dozen or so dimwitted goons who just kept coming to investigate the distraction, one at a time. It was funny, but it’s hard to feel good about winning that way. What good is being a master assassin when your targets literally line up to be murdered? - Hitman 2 doesn’t add much of note to the structure of its predecessor and thus feels more like Hitman 1.5 than a full-blown sequel. But that’s not a bad thing. By offering more of the deepest, fullest stealth sandboxes in gaming in one single package rather than six episodic ones, it earns its keep. The inclusion of Hitman (2016) is a bonus for those that didn’t catch the reboot initially. Here’s hoping they put more effort into the plot next time. Release Date : Nov. 13, 2018

V2 Text and Effect

- God Eater 3 is one of those cases where, thankfully, stellar gameplay makes up for a generic and boring story with bad writing. You might have to dig a bit to figure out how to do some of the coolest moves and learn to live with some between-battles inconveniences, but once you get the hang of it there’s nothing else like it – even the otherwise comparable Monster Hunter series. Sure, you can just button mash and get through most battles okay, but understanding the intricacies and nuances of how to chain together your explosive Burst Arts, soaring Dives, special attacks, and various combos to defeat inventively designed monsters is where the real thrill is at. - Structurally, God Eater 3 is a lot like Monster Hunter, and I mean that in the best way possible. You embark on missions to track down giant, dangerous beasts and kill them with oversized ridiculous weapons, then do that over and over again across a small variety of maps as you constantly seek to make better gear and incrementally increase your power. Plus, you can bring friends along if you want. But it’s also streamlined experience with faster combat, less focus on sometimes-tedious tracking, hunting, and trapping from its rival series, and the inclusion of NPC allies that can be customized to join you on every mission. - God Eater 3 marks a big shift for the franchise as its the first game designed for home consoles and PC rather than the PSP or Vita. Not only do character models look great, but because it’s built for a full-sized gamepad you have more control over your character than ever before, which is good because you now have more weapons to choose from, more types of enemies to fight, and more abilities to give you an edge in battle. The gameplay remains mostly unchanged, but there’s more meat on its bones. - Each mission is designated as either Story, which means it’s required to progress the plot and unlock higher ranks, or Optional, which means it’s purely for getting loot and blueprints. All of the loot drops are percentage-chance based, and the menu thoughtfully shows you exactly what potential rewards there are for every mission, including blueprints and items. That allows you to plan out which missions you’ll need to replay in order to farm the materials you need, without wasting time on things you don’t want. The real bulk of the content is after you finish the campaign, where you’ll be rewarded for spending time going through missions again with better loot. - God Eater 3 also introduces mini-raid-type missions called Assaults that are multiplayer-only and can pack as many as eight players into a single map together. Most other missions give you about 40 minutes to complete them, but Assaults have to be finished in about five minutes or less, putting a ton of pressure on speed and efficiency. It’s delightfully chaotic and full of action, but doesn’t really add much to make it feel like it’s capitalizing on getting that many people together. I would have liked to have seen larger and longer levels, like true raids that require lots of coordination, rather than shorter and more cramped speed runs. - Monster designs are fantastic across the board. There aren’t quite as many here as you might have hoped for, coming fresh off of Monster Hunter: World as many of us are, but designs are not bound by the constraints of trying to make things look like actual animals, increasing their diversity and creativity. In God Eater 3 you’ve got everything from lions to tank-bull hybrids to floating, godly cocoons that radiate energy and sound like a singing choir when they move. There are even giant bird creatures that can fly and zip across the battlefield like Falco, and their look and behaviors are all changed in later Ranks to create new versions that aren’t as repetitive to fight as up-leveled clones would be. - What God Eater 3 lacks in its story and varied content it more than makes up for with excellent pulse-pounding action, great enemy designs, and some of the most exciting combat this entire genre has seen to date. In between those battles are a lot of dull and mandatory NPC interactions, load screens, menus, and the unambitious world design, and short, simple eight-player raids leave a lot of room for improvement, but it’s a relief to see this series make the mostly successful jump from handhelds to consoles and PCs where it has the opportunity to grow in those areas. RELEASE DATE: 8 Feb, 2019

- A lot has happened to the Assassin’s Creed series in the seven years since Assassin's Creed 3 first came out. It was quickly overshadowed in 2013 by the follow-up, Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag, which remains one of my all-time favorites – but that’s in part because of how well AC4 built upon the naval combat concepts introduced by its Colonial predecessor. Since then, our expectations for the series have been changed yet again by the RPG-influenced Assassin’s Creed Origins and Odyssey, which revamped combat control in a way that’s hard to go back from. So while I'm glad to say Assassin's Creed 3 Remastered does do a great job bringing the appearance of this 18th-century world and its characters of this 2012 game up to 2019 standards, there's a lot of creakiness to it that even the gameplay tweaks it makes can’t entirely smooth out. - The whole package includes all the DLC (including the Tyranny of King George trilogy about an evil George Washington), as well as Assassin’s Creed 3: Liberation HD (originally for the Vita) and extra behind-the-scenes content. It’s a nice touch by Ubisoft that everyone who bought the season pass for the excellent Assassin's Creed Odyssey gets AC3 Remastered for free. -The first and most obvious upgrade comes by way of the graphics. Assassin's Creed 3 and Liberation are both available in 4K, provided you have an Xbox One X or PS4 Pro, though only at 30fps. On PC, with an EVGA GeForce GTX 1080 8GB FTW and Intel i7-7700K CPU, I was able to crank all the settings to Ultra and run in 1440p at a steady 60fps (where it appears Ubisoft has locked it), and wow: What a difference it makes. - Outside the cities, the wilderness, too, has a new life about it. The forests in the spring and summer are teeming with plant life, and the snow in the winter sparkles like its real-life counterpart. The frontier isn't nearly as breathtaking as the one Rockstar crafted for Red Dead Redemption 2, but it's almost on par with Ubisoft’s two most recent Far Cry games. - With Assassin’s Creed 3 Remastered, Ubisoft does everything in its power to bring one of the weaker games in the series up to modern standards, and it’s full of sights worth seeing. The main improvement is graphical, and the scenery of 18th-century Colonial America looks fantastic. There are even some meaningful tweaks made to stealth mechanics to make it feel a little more up to date and less aggravating. Where this remaster falters are places where AC3 can't be changed without fundamentally remaking the entire game from the ground up, namely a stiff animation style, repetitive mission structure, and that goddamn final sequence.

How to Make a Backup of Your Mac Using Time Machine The feature was introduced with OS X 10.5 Leopard and has been there since then. If you've never used it, Time Machine is one of the easiest ways to back up your Mac and is great for recovering individual files that you've deleted or for restoring your entire hard drive in case catastrophe. How Does Time Machine Work? Time Machine works with any hard disk connected to your computer via USB, FireWire or Thunderbolt; also supports Time Capsules and backup disks connected ove How to Make a Backup of Your Mac Using Time Machine The feature was introduced with OS X 10.5 Leopard and has been there since then. If you've never used it, Time Machine is one of the easiest ways to back up your Mac and is great for recovering individual files that you've deleted or for restoring your entire hard drive in case catastrophe. How Does Time Machine Work? Time Machine works with any hard disk connected to your computer via USB, FireWire or Thunderbolt; also supports Time Capsules and backup disks connected over a network, provided discs support file sharing with File File Protocol (AFP). As long as the disk is available for your Mac, you can use it for a backup of a Time Machine. When enabled, Apple's backup software contains periodic snapshots of all files and catalogs them on an external hard drive you've connected or a Time Capsule you've connected to your network. Copies all the hard contents your disk per hour, daily and weekly; While the drive is getting full, Time Machine will delete the oldest backups and replace them with newer versions. This is better than the traditional "copy a bunch of files into a cloud service" or "clone a disk on an external hard drive" because you do not have to restore your hard drive if you lose a single file can recover some images, folders, and backup projects because of its instantly stratified system. If you use OS X Yosemite or later on a laptop and activate Time Machine, you will also automatically get a feature called Local Snapshots; this allows your laptop to backup one time a day (and once a week) while away from your Time Machine. Local snapshots remove part of your hard drive by backing up, but if you start running, it will automatically remove old backups so you have at least 20% free space on your drive. Can I exclude backup data? Yes. You can selectively exclude files from your backups by adding them to a list in your Time Machine preferences. We have more information on how to proceed below. r a network, provided discs support file sharing with File File Protocol (AFP). As long as the disk is available for your Mac, you can use it for a backup of a Time Machine. When enabled, Apple's backup software contains periodic snapshots of all files and catalogs them on an external hard drive you've connected or a Time Capsule you've connected to your network. Copies all the hard contents your disk per hour, daily and weekly; While the drive is getting full, Time Machine will delete the oldest backups and replace them with newer versions. This is better than the traditional "copy a bunch of files into a cloud service" or "clone a disk on an external hard drive" because you do not have to restore your hard drive if you lose a single file can recover some images, folders, and backup projects because of its instantly stratified system. If you use OS X Yosemite or later on a laptop and activate Time Machine, you will also automatically get a feature called Local Snapshots; this allows your laptop to backup one time a day (and once a week) while away from your Time Machine. Local snapshots remove part of your hard drive by backing up, but if you start running, it will automatically remove old backups so you have at least 20% free space on your drive. Can I exclude backup data? Yes. You can selectively exclude files from your backups by adding them to a list in your Time Machine preferences. We have more information on how to proceed below. How to Enable Back Time Machine on Mac Select System Preferences from the Apple menu. Choose the Time Machine icon. Time Machine SetupTime Machine Setup 3. Click Select Backup Disk. 4. Select the disc you want to use as a backup for Time Machine. 5. Check the Back Up Automatically to automatically backup your Mac to your selected disks. How to Restore Files from a Time Machine Backup 1. Select System Preferences from the Apple menu. 2. Choose the Time Machine icon. 3. Check the box next to Show Time Machine in the menu bar. 4. Click Enter Machine Time after clicking the Time Machine icon on the menu bar. 5. Locate the file or folder in question and click Restore. How to exclude files from Time Machine Time Machine will automatically make a backup of most of your Mac, but you may want to exclude certain files. Open System Preferences on your Mac. Click Time Machine. Click Options .... Click the + button. Choose the files or folders you want to exclude. Click Exclude. Click Save. How to Restore the Hard Drive from a Time Machine Backup Whether you're experiencing major issues with your current hard drive or upgrading to a new Mac, Machine Time can help you get back to business. Start the Mac and hold down the Command and R keys to enter the macOS recovery partition. Your Mac should start on a screen that displays MacOS Utilities. Select Restore from Time Machine Backup and click Continue. Read the information on the Restore Your System page and click Continue. Select Back Time Machine and click Continue. Select the most recent hard disk backup and click Continue. Your Mac will then restore the Time Machine backup; once it's over, it will restart. If you had to replace it with a stock unit that has nothing on it, you will not be able to boot from the macOS recovery partition. Do not be afraid, however, you can get recovery from the Time Machine backup disk itself: just hold down the Option key when you turn on your Mac; you will be able to select the Time Machine as the starting unit and you will go there.

- How long has it been since we’ve had a chance to jump into a cool fighter jet, get into an intense dogfight, and just blow up stuff up without having to memorize a thick flight manual? Ace Combat 7: Skies Unknown brings the welcome return of a series – and a genre – that’s been long absent from gaming’s mainstream. - The exciting, arcadey flying and dogfighting gameplay that kept Ace Combat going from 1995 to 2014 is still present and a lot of fun. You’ll blow up bombers, chase down ace enemy pilots, and dismantle enemy bases one missile at a time across a wide array of scenarios and landscapes. - You can pick it up and play at a basic level, but dogfighting in Ace Combat is, and has always been, surprisingly complex: there are tricks and advanced maneuvers to figure out using the advanced turning controls that bring lots of nuance to the combat. Figuring out tilting your nose up can slow your forward movement down without losing speed, integrating advanced pitch and yaw controls to tighten up your turns, or simply fine-tuning your sense of the ideal angle from which to approach an enemy fighter to get a quick, decisive shot at them take practice and knowhow. - Ace Combat 7: Unknown Skies is a great-looking arcade flight combat game, and zipping over high-quality terrain trying to establish missile locks and evade pursuers can be a lot of fun. But the experience often gets weighed down by its weird and convoluted but persistent story and poor communication of objectives. It’s enough to prove that there’s room for the series to make a comeback, though this game will be not the one to jumpstart it. - RELEASE DATE: 31 Jan, 2019

- The Occupation is a story-driven stealth-adventure game that rewards repeat plays even if it can also, at times, feel hostile to the idea of enabling you to delve into its narrative nooks and crannies. It tells a mature, challenging story that is both overtly political and ambiguous enough to leave plenty to interpretation, while its core stealth mechanics deliver a suitably tense experience. For most of the game you play as an investigative journalist who is reporting on a terrorist attack at the stately campus of a prominent IT company. An immigrant employee of the company has been arrested in connection with the alleged bombing, but you've received a tip-off that not all is quite so simple. There's also the matter of the company's work on a personal data harvesting project that seems worryingly linked to the British government's proposed Union Act, an anti-immigrant and anti-civil liberty bill about to face a crucial vote in parliament. It may well be set in the 1980s, but the issues tackled feel all too relevant today. It's a smart story that's told with a deft, delicate touch. - It's essentially a detective story in which you investigate scenes, gather clues, compile evidence, and interrogate eye-witnesses. You have arranged interviews with three key players at the company, and in between your appointments, you are able to explore the offices. The catch: you're on a time limit during each of the three main investigative periods. When that time is up--and it varies between 30 and 60 minutes of real-ish time--your interview starts regardless of how much incriminating information you've managed to obtain, and your line of questioning is limited to what you can actually prove. - Navigating the office space is in itself a challenge. These buildings are a maze of corridors, security checks, staff-only areas, ventilation shafts, crawlspaces, and temporary construction sites. Remembering how to get from one room to another when you have to travel to another floor, in and out of restricted areas, stealing an ID card here, shutting off the mains power there, is a stern memory test even once you're familiar with the basic layout. But the environments have a real tactile feel that makes you want to keep exploring them. RELEASE DATE: 5 Mar, 2019

- After more than 20 years, five mainline games, and plenty of special editions and spinoffs, the Dead or Alive series of fighting games is very much a known quantity. Women (and some men) in suggestive costumes beat each other up and down in a fast-paced 3D fighter built on a basic but sound tactical framework. Dead or Alive 6 does not deviate from that top-level formula at all, but manages to spice things up with some interesting changes spread throughout its gameplay and modes. It’s polished, it’s fun, and it’s keeping the series alive and active without rocking the boat too much. - Viewed through that lens, Dead or Alive 6 deftly blends fresh and familiar to appease long-standing fans while offering an interesting array of single-player modes that serves as an onramp to competitive play online. Its single-player modes are predisposed to training you up past what you’ll learn by simply fighting AI opponents. Its storytelling, while not as expansive or novel as a Mortal Kombat or Injustice, gives its roster an essential sense of character. From determined tournament fighters in training to lovably foolish drunken masters and melodramatic ninja warriors and assassins, every contestant has a strong vibe and is itching to fight, which makes it easy and fun to hop in and wail on somebody. - While the story never really gels, the individual scenes are effective as intense hits of worldbuilding. The best of them, which often feel random in the larger context of Dead or Alive 6, give their starring characters plenty of time to shine, cultivating a wider understanding of them and their relationships.

Rejected

Accepted