Author: seo

I discovered Piepacker, a retro cloud gaming platform that was originally meant for the elderly through a WhatsApp conversation. A friend shared it with me and asked me to join. Although the name seemed a bit silly to me, my friend told me that it offered some old SNK games. It looked great!

The pitch is simple. Classic games are available instantly from your browser with integrated video chat and multiplayer. It’s cloud gaming and a virtual hangout rolled into one, it’s free to play, and inviting a friend is as easy as pinging them a link.

There were a few aspects that I found immediately appealing about the concept. Cloud gaming services all share the same immediacy. The social aspect was also important. This resonated well with the games, which were largely multiplayer games from arcades and old home consoles. These games are simple, straight games, that can be shared with anyone nearby. Piepacker’s prominent video chat feature and simple game-switching puts the social experience above the actual games. It creates an online space for relaxed, chatty, informal gaming sessions with friends — and, almost as a byproduct of this, it gets a lot closer to the original multiplayer experience of some of these old games than even online-enabled reissues can. It’s a couch in the cloud.

The lineup of games isn’t stellar, to be honest; you won’t find anything from the heydays of Capcom, Sega, Konami, or Midway here. There are a handful of true gems, like Metal Slug X, Windjammers, and King of Fighters ’98, while a deal with veteran UK outfit Team 17 has brought a few vintage Britsoft social-gaming classics like Worms World Party and Sensible Soccer. Piepacker has also experimented with developing and publishing new indie titles for the platform, including the Bomberman-style Arsene Bomber.

But that’s not the point. The fun of Piepacker, once you’re in and chatting, is to poke around its archive and try some of the random esoterica you might find there, such as the extremely fun Neo Geo fighter Real Bout Fatal Fury, or the modern NES game Micro Mages, or the entertainingly dumb zombie brawler Night Slashers. Because you’re with friends, it can even be fun to play something as objectively terrible as the PlayStation kart racer SCARS for a few minutes. As a rule, on Piepacker, the more mindless the game, the more easily conversation will flow — so you don’t necessarily want to be too engaged anyway.

Piepacker has yet to really make a name for itself, although it has attracted support from the retro community with a successful Kickstarter campaign, as well as investment from the Lego Group, among others. It’s not necessarily the future, but whether it succeeds or not, there is something there: a different way to conceive of cloud gaming, contrasting with the high-tech approach of the likes of Google Stadia and Xbox Cloud Gaming.

“When I was a kid, I used to have the Game Boy, and I was dreaming about another device, which was the Game Gear by Sega,” co-founder and CEO Benjamin Devienne says over Zoom from Bordeaux in Southwestern France. Devienne is a handsome, enthusiastic entrepreneur type, and he’s about to invoke the legendary Nintendo engineer Gunpei Yokoi’s “lateral thinking with withered technology” approach to explain the thinking behind Piepacker.

” The contrast between the two handheld devices was quite interesting, says Devienne. Devienne says that the Game Gear had a better color screen and a better sound chip. It also offered better games. It was also more costly. Also you needed a lot of batteries to go through the day. On the other side, the Game Boy was much lower tech, like, black-and-white screen, pretty bad sound, and you could barely see what was happening on the screen. It was still cheaper and had a much stronger battery.

“In hindsight, [Nintendo] won this battle with accessibility and low tech. And when we started to look at the cloud gaming space, we were like, Hey, every service is awesome, like Google Stadia, PlayStation Now, but they’re designed for a world where you have fiber, where it’s 4K, 60 frames per second. This is a world where you have a lot of Game Gears, and we’re like, Hey, can we build the first Game Boy of the cloud gaming space — something that is much lower tech, but with a much lower footprint? “

The result is a cloud gaming service that uses 60 times less bandwidth than Google Stadia. This is good news for Piepacker as it lowers its costs and makes its free-to play business model feasible. It’s good news for the environment — cloud gaming services that require high bandwidth and lots of computing power at the server end can be very energy-intensive over long play sessions, as Eurogamer has reported. It’s also great news for those who don’t have the best internet access at home in countries like Southwest France (“We have good wine, cheese and internet!” Devienne jokes) and in developing markets such as Brazil, India and Southeast Asia where infrastructure is still improving.

Piepacker is lean because of its proprietary technology. This is where the company gets its curious and soon-to-be changed name. “Packing”, which is a method of compressing server processes to reduce bandwidth usage, is what Devienne and his cofounder used to test this technology. The processes they were using happened to be “pies”. Part of it is in its philosophy, where visual fidelity can take a back seat to the social interactions that are the real draw; competing with the home console experience is not the point. And part of it is the choice of retro games, which are of course technologically undemanding and much easier to optimize around.

Retro has been the place where Piepacker established its market niche. But for Devienne it was a way to get the service started. He’s not interested in creating a licensing-based retro streaming catalog like Antstream‘s (which has a much deeper game selection than Piepacker, but lacks its social features). There’s no intention to start charging a subscription or anything of the sort. Rather, Devienne is hoping to host more modern indie titles and turn Piepacker into a marketplace where developers can monetize their games how they like (with Piepacker taking a cut, of course). He suggests Team 17’s frantic co-op cooking game Overcooked as an example of a title that would work exceptionally well on Piepacker, and he’s right — but Stadia has shown players might be unwilling to pay to own games only in the cloud.

In the meantime, Piepacker is making decent money selling custom 3D filters for its video chat windows. (Devienne used to do analysis and research for Facebook and Twitch, and as such he’s unfazed that players are willing to spend up to $1,500 on animated virtual masks.) Further off in the future, there’s also a scheme for Twitch integration that will allow viewers to pay to jump into streamers’ games if they’re hosted on Piepacker, with streamers taking 70% of the revenue and Piepacker the rest.

“Something that really blew my mind when I was at Twitch was Twitch Plays Pokemon,” he says. I was amazed that no one is making games with this type of mechanic, where the viewers can be involved. We should make one!” That’s where Arsene Bomber started out, as a prototype that allowed viewers of a charity stream on Twitch to vote to control a UFO that could disrupt the Bomberman-style action. He imagines viewers paying to challenge their favorite streamer at Street Fighter, or to influence a single-player game with items, cheats, or extra enemies, in the same way they tip streamers now.

Human connection is the key to all of it. Before Piepacker had video chat, Devienne noticed in an early test that almost all players had Zoom or Hangouts open at the same time. When the feature was integrated, habits changed. “We realized that people started to consume games very differently than they consume games on other platforms. For instance, 70% of the time, they touch the gamepad, but 30% of the time, they don’t touch anything. They chat. To me, Piepacker resembles a lot the kind of experience you have when you invite friends, you’re around the table playing, like, a board game or D&D, and the game almost becomes an excuse [for] conversation. “It’s a way for people to get to know each other.” To test if the players would return to the service again, he separated groups and made sure they had access to only the best games. They did.

None of this is to say that Piepacker is bound to become a profitable, mass-market platform. But what it does is demonstrate, quite clearly, the potential of cloud gaming to differ from or expand the gaming experiences we know, rather than just provide a convenient way to access them. (Google Stadia had a more grandiose version of this idea, but with the closure of its first-party development studios, it seems we won’t get to see that future realized.) Devienne and his team are focusing on cloud gaming’s social benefits. This is something that larger cloud gamers would be wise to take note of.

Nintendo Switch Online subscribers who pay for the premium Expansion Pack tier got three additional Sega Genesis games as part of their subscription on Thursday: Sonic The Hedgehog Spinball, Shining Force 2, and Space Harrier 2. That fresh injection of 16-bit Sega software brings the number of Genesis games available through a Nintendo Switch Online + Expansion Pack subscription to 25.

Sonic The Hedgehog Spinball — colloquially known as Sonic Spinball — is an adventure in which Sonic flips, bounces, and launches through Dr. Robotnik’s pinball table-themed fortress as he collects the Chaos Emeralds and saves the people of planet Mobius from enslavement. Sonic The Hedgehog Spinball was developed by the American arm of Sega, at Sega Technical Institute, and was inspired by the popular casino-style levels of earlier Sonic the Hedgehog games.

Shining Force 2 is a fantasy-themed tactical RPG adventure, in which players, as the squire Bowie, lead the team known as Shining Force against a group of powerful demons known as … Gizmos. It’s better than it sounds. Released stateside in 1994, the events of Shining Force 2 are largely disconnected from the original Shining Force, which is also available on Nintendo Switch Online + Expansion Pack.

Finally, Space Harrier 2 is the Genesis sequel to Yu Suzuki’s classic arcade third-person shooter and was a launch title for Sega’s 16-bit console. It boasts some sick music from composer Tokuhiko Uwabo, who also composed Phantasy Star 2 and Columns for Sega, so check out that BGM Test menu if you have access to it.

Nintendo Switch Online + Expansion Pack costs $49. 99 annually for an individual user, and $79. 99 annually for a family plan (for up to eight users). The higher-priced tier of Nintendo Switch Online also grants access to Nintendo 64 games, the Happy Home Paradise add-on for Animal Crossing: New Horizons, DLC courses for Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, and as of Friday, Splatoon 2‘s Octo Expansion.

Apple cash allows you to send and receive money via iMessage. Stored in your Wallet, you can make secure and contactless payments with Apple Pay from your iPhone or Apple Watch. Apple Card users can also receive cash back every day. Previously a Discover card, your Apple Cash card is now Visa.

Spotted by user @Kanjo on Twitter, it’s easy to notice the card has a visible Visa logo in the bottom right corner. The card had no Discover logo before this update. Although not all will love the new logo, they’ll be able to remember that it is a Visa.

This change is likely to open up the option to use the Apple Cash card at more places. For instance, major US retailer Costco has an exclusive relationship with Visa. This is good news for Apple, as Visa is a well-known method of payment. Apple Pay will expand to many more countries so users can use Apple Cash in more places.

You can use the Apple Cash card where Apple Pay is accepted.

More on Apple Pay:

• Apple Pay upgrading fraud prevention features based on device, location, and more
• iOS 15. 5 beta 2 hints at Apple Pay support for Bancomat and Bancontact networks
• Apple Pay surpasses Venmo and PayPal as teens’ favorite payment app, shows Piper Sandler survey

Murder mystery tabletop game company Hunt A Killer, which grabbed headlines and saw record-setting financial success during the pandemic, laid off a significant portion of its staff in late March, former employees told Polygon. Ryan Hogan, Hunt A Killer’s co-founder and chief executive, confirmed the layoffs in an emailed statement, but declined to share the exact number of workers let go. Multiple former employees told Polygon the dismissals accounted for at least 40% of the staff.

Hunt a Killer was estimated to have had 80 to 100 employees before the March layoffs. Some product teams have been almost completely wiped out, former workers said, with priorities now shifting between projects.

“We are currently shifting our efforts to the most growth-oriented aspects of our business,” Hogan told Polygon. “Part of that process is, unfortunately, a temporary reduction in force to allow focus on our thriving retail distribution and soon-to-launch live event business.”

He continued: “In the near future, we will be announcing new content partnerships and new retail partnerships as we continue to grow and evolve our business.”

Layoffs of this size aren’t new for Hunt A Killer; former employees told Polygon there have been at least three rounds of large-scale layoffs since 2020. Two workers told Polygon they received a few days’ worth of severance pay.

Hunt A Killer’s subscription-based murder mystery games took off during the pandemic. The games unravel over multiple boxes, which cost $30 per month, as players compile clues and put together the story. Boxes contain items like newspaper clippings, notes, little trinkets, and police reports, all curated to tell a story. In 2020, Hunt A Killer boasted $50 million in revenue — “nearly doubling” revenue from the previous year, the company said in a 2021 news release. Earning the No. 6 spot on Inc.’s 2020 top 5000 list, Hunt A Killer reported a revenue growth of 20,484.9% in three years.

Attempting to build on that success, Hunt A Killer pushed its staff to continuously release new material and games. Some workers told Polygon this led to extensive crunch for the company, often focused on the creative teams.

Though former workers said they enjoyed their work and teams, they said the pace at which it was conducted was often untenable. Some workers told Polygon that Hunt A Killer was not selling as many games as it expected in 2022, which led to the company’s massive layoffs.

British publisher Modiphius Entertainment is expanding the world of its flagship tabletop role-playing game Achtung! Cthulhu by bringing the Lovecraftian mythos from the battlefields of World War II to the height of the Roman Empire. The publisher plans to launch Cohors Cthulhu in early 2023, providing rules for Roman legions and Germanic tribes to clash with each other — and with horrors from beyond the stars.

“I’ve loved movies about Roman times since I was a kid, from the classic Spartacus to the more recent Gladiator, Barbarians on Netflix, and Centurion,” said Modiphius founder and CEO Chris Birch. “I think Rome is in our blood if you grew up in Europe. You look around and really so much of our everyday life is based on ancient Rome, and there’s something that appeals about the final days of the empire.”

The first Cohors Cthulhu publication is set in Laurium, the Roman frontier town in Northern Europe. It’s surrounded by dense forests and a walled fort. Vagabonds gather in its smoky taverns to share stories about haunted forests, terrifying creatures, and strange ruins. The game will be divided into a RPG using the same 2d20 system as Achtung! Cthulhu is a story-based wargame. Players can play alone or together against fearsome Lovecraftian forces.

“The wargame itself is set during a huge conflagration, as mythos-backed forces wreak havoc along the Roman border in a plot to destroy the empire,” Birch said. Birch said that the RPG was set months earlier than this. Dark clouds hover over the empire and you will see a mixture of adventure, action and social encounters. We envisage some groups playing out the stories of brave Roman legions fighting on the frontiers, others pursuing devious cults in the backstreets of town, balancing political ideals and the needs of your people with nobles or simple dungeon crawls in ancient ruins.”

Modiphius will be supporting the release with a complete miniatures line, 3D printable miniature designs, a Cohors Cthulhu novel, and an anthology of short stories featuring signature characters from the game. Publisher is looking at television and video game licensing options.

The primary plot of the Cohors games involves the myths of Atlantis and Hyperborea, following a priestess who has roamed the universe for millions of years influencing the development of various human civilizations in her quest to destroy the Outer Gods. That arc will link Cohors Cthulhu to Achtung! Cthulhu, which established a precedent for heroes jumping through time with the Shadows of Atlantis campaign.

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“It’s quite possible your [Achtung! Cthulhu] heroes might find themselves facing the Roman Empire, or vice versa, your Cohors Cthulhu heroes could be dropped into the chaos of World War II,” Birch said. “We always envisioned Achtung! Cthulhu is part of an ongoing storyline in which heroes from all ages wage a secret battle against the old gods. Cohors Cthulhu “This is the next step to bring that universe to life, and it opens up new possibilities for players to play and create amazing stories that span all of human history.”

As in Achtung! Cthulhu, Cohors Cthulhu characters will be built using archetypes like mystic, scoundrel, or warrior, paired with backgrounds such as merchant, politician, or nomad. Players can build characters who are part of an ancient Atlantean bloodline or have closer ties to the Cthulhu mythos, but you won’t actually be able to play on the side of the Outer Gods.

” I like small-scale heroes who rise above the storm to take on bigger-than-life companies,” Birch stated. “It’s something you see time and again in the real world, from wars to legal battles against big business. The best parts of the Cthulhu mythos have been adapted to our world. It’s not just a world where all hope is pointless and you’re destined to die, but where tiny actions can have consequences across the cosmos. A group of heroic heroes could endanger the existence of age-old creatures. They must still fight and sacrifice, but hope is inextricably mixed in with our story, and your sacrifice is on your terms.”

Birch stated that he created the first Cohors Cthulhu game for Germania. This was to create the feeling of classic fantasy stories. The characters live in small towns in the middle, and have to explore the area. But he plans to expand the game (which is set around A.D. 160-180 during the age of Marcus Aurelius) to other sections of the Roman Empire, including Egypt, Britannia, and the Eternal City of Rome itself. Every area will also see the influence of the Outer Gods, and heroes will need to fight them with powerful magic, ancient lost technology, and eldritch powers.