The latest Pokemon Masters event, Summer Superstars, is underway. The mobile title’s event is live now through August 16, giving players a chance to earn items through event battles and daily log-ins.
Pokemon Masters players can earn travel tokens by beating event battles. These in turn can be used to move around an event map, which has different rewards in each map location. After completing a map you advance to a checkpoint, which gives more event story and advances you to another event map. During the event, the maps are unlimited so players can stockpile as many items as they want.
The Steven Seasonal Scout is now live! 5★ Steven (Summer 2020) & Sandslash are featured in the seasonal sync pair scout! You can get Steven (Summer 2020) & Sandslash’s sync orbs from the Summer Superstars event map!#PokemonMasterspic.twitter.com/uXrBNoWhek
Players can also earn 100 Gems each day for logging in, for up to a total of 1400 Gems. Additional travel tokens can be earned for using specific sync pairs during combat, including fan favorite Steven.
Applicable Sync Pairs
Steven (Summer 2020) and Sandslash: X1.6 tokens
Lyra (Summer 2020) and Jigglypuff: X1.6 tokens
Steven and Metagross: X1.4 tokens
Lyra and Chikorita: X1.4 tokens
Player character and Pikachu: X1.2 tokens
Player character and Torchic: X1.2 tokens
The sync pair bonuses also work with the evolved versions of the listed Pokemon.
It is important to note that you must have completed Main Story Chapter 1: The More the Merrier to participate in the event. Some of the sync pairs you will battle may have different abilities than those that are obtainable for players and at the end of the event all leftover travel tokens will be converted into coins at a rate of 10 coins per token.
Update (7/31/20) – As reported by CNBC, President Trump told reporters that he will ban TikTok from the United States as early as Saturday, August 1.
“As far as TikTok is concerned, we’re banning them from the United States,” Trump said.
This move will come through an executive order of another method, although Trump did not specify what course of action he would take.
As far as the reports stating the Microsoft is interested in purchasing TikTok from parent company ByteDance, Trump said “he didn’t support the reported spinoff deal.”
Original story follows.
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TikTok, the Chinese-owned social media video app that is under scrutiny from the Trump administration, is reportedly in talks with Microsoft and other companies to sell itself and part from its parent company ByteDance.
As reported by The New York Times, the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, or Cfius, has been looking into ByteDance’s 2017 purchase of Musical.ly, which would become TikTok. It has decided to “order ByteDance to divest TikTok, and the government is currently discussing the terms of its separation. White House officials have further said that “TikTok may post a national security threat because of its Chinese ownership.”
It is unclear if President Trump, who has been informed of the investigation, will focus the divestment order on TikTok’s American operations or if it would include its more global business as well.
Another option Trump could exercise would be using “the vast powers of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act to bar certain foreign apps from American app stores.” Furthermore, the Trump Administration is also considering if it should add ByteDance to the “entity list,” which would bar it from purchasing American products and services without a special license.
TikTok has explores other options to avoid a sell, including having a non-Chinese investor, like Sequoia Capital, SoftBank, and General Atlantic, purchase a majority stake from ByteDance.
ByteDance’s current valuation is around “$100 billion,” according to research firm PitchBook, so any deal would indeed be a big one.
TikTok’s issues have been going on for months at this point, as lawmakers and the Trump administration have “questioned whether the app is susceptible to influence from the Chinese government, including potential requests to censor material shared on the platform or to share American user data with Chinese officials.”
“It is well established at this point that apps that have granular access to user data and location and other sensitive personal data are very much on the radar of Cfius and can cause significant national security concerns,” said John P. Kabaelo, a lawyer who represents companies in Cfius reviews.
TikTok is currently used by more than 800 million people worldwide, and TikTok’s Chinese offices have “swollen to thousands of employees.” TikTok also has offices in New York and Los Angeles.
TikTok has tried to fight these accusations and change its course, and has taken such action as hiring a top Disney executive, Kevin Mayer, to be its chief executive and pledging to publicly reveal the “algorithm that powers its app.”
Editor’s note: This review evaluates Grounded based on its early access state. We plan on reviewing Grounded again once it gets a full release.
Think about your favourite survival games. Think back to how they launched. Think of their initial public showing. If your favourites are like mine, you’ll notice a trend: None of them were very good when they first launched to the general public.
Subnautica had me on the edge of my seat at launch, but it ran terribly. Four years later and its 1.0 build was one of my favourite games in a year that included God of War and Red Dead Redemption 2. The Forest, similarly, launched a mere shadow of the terrifying adventure it would eventually become. No Man’s Sky was near-universally criticised at launch, but it eventually reached its potential and went beyond. Grounded, from Obsidian Entertainment, is currently in the early part of the aforementioned Early Access phase, and is lacking in many respects. But, like the games mentioned above, it has what feels like the potential to grow into something much, much greater.
A co-op survival game like many others, Grounded puts you in the shoes of one of four tween explorers and challenges you to live. Instead of sending you to a stranded island or an ocean-covered planet, Grounded plonks you in a suburban backyard. The twist? You’re one two-thousandth your regular size. You get to live out a situation that is pulled straight out of things like Honey I Shrunk The Kids, The Magic School Bus, or Anatomy Park, and if you have any affinity for those things, getting to take part in the situation is very cool.
You awaken with no memory of how you landed in this situation, and your goals are twofold: work out how to return to your normal size (maybe even a little bigger, for basketball reasons) and, more pressingly, to survive. Neither objective is all that simple.
In its current state you can actually wrap up the story content of Grounded in under 30 minutes. Once you know what you’re doing and where to go, there’s little stopping you from completing the steps necessary to “‘finish” the game. From there, you’re able to complete rudimentary quests, and you can continue to explore and build within the backyard world, but you won’t be achieving any story goals.
Of course, the story is far from finished in its current form. You aren’t “big” again after you finish what’s available; the rest of it simply hasn’t been implemented yet. That’s not surprising–other story-focussed survival games like Subnautica and The Forest were the same when they launched. After a short period, then, you’re left with really just one goal: survival.
Survival games are about priority management. The good ones are a series of checklists, vital tasks for you to tick off each in-game day in order to eagerly start the list anew tomorrow. But the thrill of playing an outstanding survival game comes from the way that priority management leads to unexpected storylines.
Grounded starts out deceptively easy–you need food and water or you will perish. Day one involves working out what is edible and what isn’t. You can eat mushrooms and you can reliably find water dew dangling from blades of grass. Unfortunately, because you’re the size of a Lego figure’s hand, you discover that mites will try to eat you.
Suddenly, your priorities change. Now you need food, water, and something to defend yourself. Grounded features a great system in the form of SCA.B OS, which helpfully details crafting recipes. Unluckily, while hunting for the Pebblet, Sprigs, and Plant Fibres you need to make a spear, you might get stuck in a spider web. And again, your priorities change. Grounded has those compelling survival game hooks.
While progression is superficially tied to the “scanning” mechanism, wherein you feed objects into a computer to learn new recipes, the real growth comes from your own internalisation. The better you understand the world, the better you’re able to manage your wants and needs. And that knowledge leads to the ability to alter your management strategies. Even in its larval form, Grounded provides you with an array of methods for negating the pressures of survival. You can build canteens to carry water and tanks to store it. You can cook food, build walls, and craft armour, weapons, and more.
And knowing these things allows you to adjust your task list further to enhance efficiency. Even when you’re a miniature Bear Grylls, the second-to-second narrative is continuously changing because there’s always something you can’t account for just around the corner (thankfully, the game features a mode to cater to arachnophobes). While the map layout is fixed in each run, much of the resource and enemy placement is not. So even when you know exactly what you’re doing, there’s an air of inevitability in the knowledge that things are always just moments away from going terribly wrong.
At one point in a successful run, two giant Wolf Spiders–nasty jumping beasts about the size of a Range Rover compared to the player character–decided to leave their homes and destroy my group’s base. We’d done nothing to provoke the attack, and being unable to defeat two Wolf Spiders at once, we were forced to simply sit and watch as our base was demolished. Or so we thought. We were saved from certain death when two lady beetles showed up and started attacking the spiders.
What makes survival games special is that nobody else will have that exact same story. And Grounded nails that emergent element in a way that’s natural and consequential. It’s the same feeling you get when mutants raid your base in The Forest, or when Leviathans attack your Cyclops in Subnautica. These are common occurrences, but the circumstances surrounding them make them endearingly personal.
What brings Grounded back to earth is the sheer lack of depth in its priorities. The survival loop in the game as it is right now is simply too short, too easy to manage and get a complete hold of. And apart from doing quests for BURG-L–the helpful grilling robot who marks the end of the game’s current story content–there’s little reason to extend your reach beyond their grasp.
In fact, in its current form, building giant bases in anything but Creative mode is a Sisyphean effort. While the dual Wolf Spider attack story is my own, it’s not exactly a rare occurrence and many players in the community have spoken about the overly hostile wildlife and its base-wrecking desires. The tapes you find–yes, audiotapes are a primary narrative device–hint at the wildlife suddenly becoming unusually hostile, so we might eventually find out why the insects are so aggro. Until that can be dealt with, though, you’re generally better off building your base into a permanent structure, like a soda can–and even then, you’re only keeping out the biggest of baddies.
And while Grounded definitely has plans to expand–there is “under construction” tape in some areas of the map–the world feels, overall, a little small in early access. Puns aside, the map doesn’t feel like it has square footage to feel vast. You move around it quickly, you jump high and suffer little fall damage, and you can even get a dandelion to allow you to glide. The game has a cartoon adventure vibe, so the arcade-style movement makes sense, but the extra speed effectively shrinks the map once you come to understand it fully.
Strangely, there’s no radial compass in the game, which initially makes finding your way around difficult. It’s easy to get turned around in the grass stalk forests of some litterbug’s backyard because it can be tricky to spot any landmarks. And until you get your bearings (and add some trail markers) the only thing that really slows you down as you bunny-hop across the map is the need to tap M to work out where you’re going.
Grounded has the foundation needed to turn into a great survival game, but it has a long way to go yet. The titular term comes from aviation–when a pilot finds themselves, for whatever reason, unable to fly, they are Grounded. It’s a pretty apt name for the current state of Obsidian’s foray into the co-op survival genre. But like a balsa wood airplane, Grounded sits at the outstretched tension point of a strong rubber band. It is pure, unadulterated potential energy, and all we can do is sit back and wait to see if that rubber band snaps or if the game achieves take off. I think it’s gonna fly.
Star Renegades‘ calling card is its reactive turn-based combat, which encourages the strategic use of well-timed interrupts and counters to paralyze your opponents’ defenses and overwhelm them with powerful combo attacks. It’s a battle system that I love but don’t often see in many games–there’s a more approachable version in Child of Light and a tactical variation in Othercide, but that’s all that I’ve experienced so far.
Star Renegades’ spin on the formula adds an interesting relationship-focused twist, both in terms of the friendships and connections between the characters in your party, as well as your squads’ relationship to enemies they’ve fought before. Your squad can grow stronger through their deepening connection to each other, and just as easily, your squad’s actions will have an impact on the makeup of the opposing army you face.
In Star Renegades, you oversee the members of an elite squad that’s a part of a rebellion against a technologically advanced alien army that’s controlled by an AI only referred to as Mother. You can only commit to a certain number of actions before your squad has to rest for the day, and while camping out for the night, each character can do something for themselves or someone else–choosing to do the latter will deepen the relationship between the two characters. Squadmates can become close acquaintances before becoming friends and then eventually something more.
“It depends on the hero pairing, but many of our relationships can proceed well past the platonic level and into the physical,” Star Renegades lead game designer Peter McLaren told me. “And, it being the future, polyamory has no stigma whatsoever. If the player can swing it with the resources they have, there are no limits to the number of partners a hero can take on. After all, they might all die in the next fight, right?”
McLaren’s comment refers to the roguelike influences on Star Renegades. There’s no permadeath in regards to individual characters during a playthrough (McLaren said the team “found that it didn’t bring a ton to the gameplay loop”), but you do have a timetable for objectives you need to hit. Your band of heroes is led by J5T-1N, a robot that carries knowledge from an alternate reality that has already lost to the alien invasion. So you know about certain world-ending events before they happen. Fail to stop them in time and J5T-1N will travel to the next reality where you can once again tackle the invasion. Each reality isn’t an exact match, though, and this translates into procedurally generated levels. So even if previous realities provide you a rough idea of what to expect, you’ll still have to be prepared for small changes.
This means it’s in your best interest to spend your time wisely, whether that’s moving towards stopping each world-ending threat, picking your battles, or pairing up compatible squadmates. And yes, there’s more to a deepening relationship than some cute banter between two friends with benefits–characters who are close to one another will develop special partner-based attacks and lead to you further expanding your squad.
“I don’t think I’m spoiling anything, but many of our heroes are only unlockable by the relationship pairing between two other heroes,” McLaren said. “The, uh, ‘science’ behind it is complicated, but let’s just say that their bodies unite to, uh, produce another hero in another quantum reality. It’s pretty gross, if you think about it.”
And there are the relationships you forge with enemies to consider, too. Star Renegades includes a Nemesis-like system where the make-up of the enemy hierarchy will change over time depending on which leaders are killed (and possibly resurrected by Mother), which ones defeat your current squad and are thus promoted, and which flee from a fight and are demoted for their cowardice. And when you run into an enemy you’ve met before, they’ll remember how the last confrontation went down and react accordingly.
“[Your] adversaries will often, if the combat isn’t going their way, attempt to weasel their way out via emergency teleportation extraction, which acts as a bit of a black mark against them in the eyes of [Mother],” McLaren said. “This act of cowardice won’t aid them in their ultimate quest to get promoted up to their max possible rank, so they’ll seek restitution. The next time you run into them, they’ll remember their ignominious retreat the last time they encountered you. This will lead the adversary to aggressively attempt to redress that embarrassment, including being much less willing to retreat a second time.”
He continued: “Similarly, enemies chosen for resurrection by Mother will also be more aggressive in attempting to kill you–they’ll remember being ignominiously snuffed out by you in their previous life, naturally. Additionally, enemies that have succeeded in killing you get promoted, giving them new powers, behaviors, and lackeys, which collectively influence their decision-making.”
This ultimately all results in a turn-based RPG where you’re encouraged to not only consider which classes will pair up nicely when going into battle, but also think about which heroes can forge strong partnerships and how enemies pose different threats based on your history. It seems like a fun system to play around with and I’m intrigued to see how long-term relationships, developed over the course of hours, might impact my team composition and combat strategies. Star Renegades is set to release for PC on September 8, with console ports for Xbox One, PS4, and Switch scheduled for later this year.
If you are working at home, or just gaming at home, a spacious, comfortable setup is absolutely essential. Right now you can save some serious cash at Newegg when you pick up the OFM Essentials gaming chair and the Vitesse 55″ gaming desk, and you can get free shipping.
The desk comes with a $10 promotional gift card and a large (waterproof) mouse pad, so you’ll be able to hit the ground running with your new setup.
Brian Barnett writes wiki guides, deals posts, features, and much more for IGN. You can get your fix of Brian’s antics on Twitter and Instagram (@Ribnax).
Rob Letterman, the director of Detective Pikachu, has been tapped to direct a Beyond Good & Evil movie for Netflix, the streaming company confirmed. Originally reported by The Hollywood Reporter, Letterman will helm a hybrid live-action animated feature of the 2003 game, produced by Jason Altman and Margaret Boykin for Ubisoft Film and Television.
The movie is early in development and is currently looking for writers to adapt the game’s story. Beyond Good & Evil became a cult classic in the years following its release, leading up to Ubisoft resurfacing the property with Beyond Good & Evil 2 in 2017 after it had previously been announced in 2008. The game currently has no release date, but won’t be released prior to April 2021.
☠️☠️☠️ Some good news for Beyond Good & Evil fans ☠️☠️☠️ A Netflix feature film adaptation of @Ubisoft‘s epic space pirate adventure is in development! pic.twitter.com/H5uMIXhir6
Netflix has a slew of video game adaptations both in development or currently available on its service, including Castlevania, the Witcher, and the recently announced Splinter Cell animated series–another Ubisoft IP–helmed by the John Wick writer Derek Kolstad.
Last month Twitch streamers found themselves hit with a wave of DMCA takedown requests for clips that feature licensed music. For creators with hundreds of clips saved featuring various music in the background, this became a huge headache as they were asked to manually remove violating clips, which for some could be as many as hundreds of videos saved.
What Is DMCA?
The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) is a federal law that’s become quite infamous with the rise of social media services, particularly YouTube. Essentially, it gives the copyright owners the ability to call out unlicensed use of its products and request they be taken down.
While YouTube creators are familiar with the DMCA Twitch’s situation is unique in that the requests seem to come all at once, very quickly. Twitch’s official Support account acknowledged the takedown requests, but simply advised users to remove those clips. For users with large archives, Twitch says it’s “working to make this easier.”
Twitch’s DMCA Guidelines
Twitch’s guidelines on DMCA states that “It is our policy to respond to clear notices of claimed copyright infringement that fully comply with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. In addition, we will promptly terminate without notice the accounts of those determined by us to be “repeat infringers”.”
The DMCA is infamous, but it’s also misunderstood. The Act primarily protects the interests of the copyright holder while also giving protections to digital platforms that would previously be liable for hosting copyrighted content that was uploaded without their knowledge.
“Most people think of the DMCA as something used against infringers,” says David Hoppe, Managing Partner at SF-based Media/Tech law firm Gamma Law. “But actually DMCA takedown requests are not sent to infringers. DMCA takedown requests are sent by copyright owners to sites that have content posted by users, and that content infringes the copyright. This could be a product review on Amazon, an essay posted on Medium or a YouTube video, for example.”
The purpose of the DMCA is to protect those platform owners, like YouTube or Twitch, from liability from the copyright holder, in case a user on the platform posts infringing content. “Any legitimate site will take a takedown request seriously and notify the user to take the content down so that the site will not have the risk of being sued by the copyright owner,” Hoppe says.”
Is there Free Music Twitch Streamers Can Use?
Owning an iTunes MP3 file or a Spotify Premium subscription doesn’t grant you the license to songs from those services. Streamers hoping to avoid a DMCA takedown may have better luck using royalty-free licenses through Creative Commons, or a variety of services that offer royalty-free music for generic use. Some streamers may look into commissioning custom tracks from musicians for exclusive use on their channel.
What Can Content Creators Do If They’re Hit With a DMCA Takedown Request?
Hoppe says that creators, like streamers, can send a counter-notice through the platform and their content will be put back up. “The copyright owner then has a limited time within which to file a lawsuit against the user. So if the creator gets a counter-notice back, they have to decide quickly whether it’s worth escalating to a lawsuit. Otherwise, the content could just stay up indefinitely.”
While platform holders will followthrough with DMCA takedown requests, there are steps creators can take if their content is taken down. However, these extra steps could lead to further litigation.
“The [content creator] will have to evaluate the legitimacy of the takedown request. If there is a credible claim that the creator’s content infringes on the other party’s copyright? If there is no credible basis, then the creator should file a counter-notice, and the site will be required to put the content back up. If it’s a closer call and there could be infringement, then the creator should consult a copyright lawyer and make the decision whether to file the counter-notice and possibly wind up in court.”
August 2020 has plenty of new streaming options. Here are our top 8 choices of new releases to check out on Netflix, HBO Max, Hulu, Disney+ and Prime Video this month, including The Legend of Korra: Books 1-4, Muppets Now and Project Power.
Check out GameSpot for our full lists of what is coming to each streaming service in August on Netflix, Disney+, and Amazon Prime Video.
QuakeCon is one of gaming’s longest-running conventions, and while you might have to watch the festivities from home this year, you’ll at least get something for your troubles.
Starting August 7, if you have a Bethesda.net account and you watch QuakeCon, you’ll get the PC version of Quake on the Bethesda launcher for free, according to reputable Twitter user Wario64. Additionally, if QuakeCon hits its first fundraising goal of $10,000–which seems fairly likely–you’ll also receive a free copy of Quake II, the misleadingly-named sci-fi follow-up to Quake.
QuakeCon was confirmed to be a digital-only event back in late June, and it runs from August 7 to 9. You can check the rest of the schedule on the event’s website, which includes a Representation in Video Games panel, a Doom Eternal panel, a look at the upcoming Dishonored tabletop RPG, and, of course, the grand finals of the Quake World Championship. There will probably be game announcements too, perhaps related to upcoming Bethesda games like Ghostwire: Tokyo and Deathloop. Don’t expect too many details on Starfield, though.
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