BlueSuburbia takes you to a place that is filled with a lonely kind of menace – an oppressive fear that crushes you as it tells you that no one will come save...
The post ‘BlueSuburbia’ Stirs Up a Deep, Solitary Fear appeared first on Indie Games Plus.
Tchia takes us on a stunning tropical open world adventure where you play as a young, imaginative girl who can turn into animals and objects to explore. Tchia, our protagonist, is looking to...
The post ‘Tchia’ Turns Into Animals & Objects to Explore a Tropical Island appeared first on Indie Games Plus.
Moonstone Island is a slice of life adventure game where you can fly to dozens of islands to gather local oddball creatures, grow gardens, and romance the locals. Moonstone Island is a...
The post ‘Moonstone Island’ is a Creature-Collecting Life Sim appeared first on Indie Games Plus.
Gamescom Opening Night Live 2024 is done and dusted for another year, but it's certainly kicked off this year's Gamescom with a bang - and we've got all the news, trailers and announcements right here in one handy summary. Whether you missed the show itself or just want a handy reminder of everything announced at Gamescom Opening Night Live this year, read on below.
Of course, alongside the main show, this year's ONL also had a 30-minute pre-show that was stuffed with announcements as well, which we'll quickly run through here before getting into the detail of the main show announcements below. Here, we got new trailers for Dave the Diver's latest crossovers, spooky co-op adventure Begone Beast and construction sim Roadcraft, alongside Italian Soulslike Enotria: The Last Song, Cairn (that shouty, but lovely looking climbing game from Summer Game Fest), life sim Inzoi from PUBG publishers Krafton, as well as a Terry showcase for Street Fighter 6.
There were also new game announcements in the pre-show in the form of Sniper Elite Resistance (coming 2025), the Donkey Kong-esque platformer Nikoderiko: The Magical World (with music from David Wise, no less), "first person farming horror allegory" We Harvest Shadows, the also quite spooky-looking Aila, a tease for the sequel to Journey to the Savage Planet (aptly named Revenge of the Savage Planet), action RPG Tribe Nine from the creators of Danganronpa, and the Lashana Lynch-led Directive 8020: A Dark Pictures Game.
Indiana Jones and the Great Circle - the Microsoft-owned-Bethesda-release set to arrive on Xbox and PC this year - is also coming to PlayStation 5.
At this evening's Gamescom Opening Night Live event, host Geoff Keighley revealed that everyone's favourite fedora sporting professor will be cracking his whip on Sony's platform as well.
In addition to this news, Bethesda announced a release date for the game. Indiana Jones and the Great Circle will release across Xbox Series X/S and PC on 9th December. Its PS5 release will then follow a few months later, during the spring of 2025.
To this day, I still hold Indy responsible for my penchant for hats. I have been enthralled by Indiana Jones ever since I was a little girl - but despite this deep affection, coming away from a hands-off preview of MachineGames' Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, I just can't let myself get overly excited about the upcoming release just yet.
While I'm still looking forward to playing another narrative-driven adventure game, with that fun 'afternoon popcorn flick' energy Great Circle undoubtedly has, my immediate reaction from this first extended demo is to worry this is all it will be, leaning just a little too heavily on fan nostalgia and a tried and tested formula, but without the innovation to truly set it apart from the rest. (And, given the game is currently set to release this year, I really hoped to see more gameplay than I did.)
The demo, which is also being shown at this year's Gamescom, begins with Indy entering a large room within the Sunsparker Chamber, a mysterious underground temple and one of "several well guarded secrets and hidden ruins" you can expect to discover. With the camera in first-person, our archaeologist - gamely brought to life by a still-recognisable Troy Baker - looks around the ancient room before gameplay switches to a cutscene. Indy approaches a statue set upon a plinth at the back of the room, in a scene immediately reminiscent of Raiders of the Lost Ark - which is fitting, given the Great Circle is set between the events of this film and The Last Crusade.
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Just when Geoff Keighley had started to fade from your memory, he comes rubber-banding back with a vengeance - snap! It's Gamescom week and it kicks off with Opening Night Live this evening from 7pm UK time (other Opening Night Live timings here). A pre-show with additional announcements will begin at 6.30pm UK. We'll be watching and reporting on it live, as always, right here, so you can either keep abreast of announcements while you do something else, or you can join in with your thoughtful and amusing comments. Please keep us company. Please.
What do we expect to see today? Well, probably Geoff Keighley, but also the new Indiana Jones game, Monster Hunter Wilds, and Dune Awakening. We're also expecting Little Nightmares creator Tarsier to unveil its new project, which could be exciting. On top of that: Diablo 4 expansion Vessel of Hatred, Civilization 7, hero shooter Marvel Rivals, Lost Records (the project made by the creators of Life is Strange), Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 (which was recently delayed), and Black Ops 6. Keighley's best pal Hideo Kojima has also been tweeting enigmatic silhouetted pictures of actors who are presumably playing roles in Death Stranding 2.
And before you ask, "Yes, there will be new game announcements," Keighley said on X.
MachineGames' Indiana Jones and the Great Circle will reportedly launch for PlayStation 5 in the early half of 2025, following an Xbox Series X/S and PC release at the end of this year.
That's according to industry insider Nate the Hate (one of the first people to break the news of Microsoft's multi-platform plans at the start of this year) who made the claim on social media. "MachineGames' Indiana Jones and the Great Circle will release on Xbox & PC this holiday (Dec) as a timed console exclusive," they wrote. "After this timed-exclusive window expires, Indiana Jones & the Great Circle is planned to come to PlayStation 5 in the first half of 2025."
Nate the Hate's claim tallies with a report by The Verge back in February, which said Microsoft was planning to go beyond its initial slate of comparatively low-key multi-platform releases by launching some of its flagship games on competing consoles. These were said to include Starfield and MachineGames' Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, with the latter supposedly due to arrive on PS5 "some months" after its Xbox and PC release.
The scorching surface of Venus, where temperatures can climb to 480 degrees Celsius (hot enough to melt lead), is an inhospitable place for humans and machines alike. One reason scientists have not yet been able to send a rover to the planet’s surface is because silicon-based electronics can’t operate in such extreme temperatures for an extended period of time.
For high-temperature applications like Venus exploration, researchers have recently turned to gallium nitride, a unique material that can withstand temperatures of 500 degrees or more.
The material is already used in some terrestrial electronics, like phone chargers and cell phone towers, but scientists don’t have a good grasp of how gallium nitride devices would behave at temperatures beyond 300 degrees, which is the operational limit of conventional silicon electronics.
In a new paper published in Applied Physics Letters, which is part of a multiyear research effort, a team of scientists from MIT and elsewhere sought to answer key questions about the material’s properties and performance at extremely high temperatures.
They studied the impact of temperature on the ohmic contacts in a gallium nitride device. Ohmic contacts are key components that connect a semiconductor device with the outside world.
The researchers found that extreme temperatures didn’t cause significant degradation to the gallium nitride material or contacts. They were surprised to see that the contacts remained structurally intact even when held at 500 degrees Celsius for 48 hours.
Understanding how contacts perform at extreme temperatures is an important step toward the group’s next goal of developing high-performance transistors that could operate on the surface of Venus. Such transistors could also be used on Earth in electronics for applications like extracting geothermal energy or monitoring the inside of jet engines.
“Transistors are the heart of most modern electronics, but we didn’t want to jump straight to making a gallium nitride transistor because so much could go wrong. We first wanted to make sure the material and contacts could survive, and figure out how much they change as you increase the temperature. We’ll design our transistor from these basic material building blocks,” says John Niroula, an electrical engineering and computer science (EECS) graduate student and lead author of the paper.
His co-authors include Qingyun Xie PhD ’24; Mengyang Yuan PhD ’22; EECS graduate students Patrick K. Darmawi-Iskandar and Pradyot Yadav; Gillian K. Micale, a graduate student in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering; senior author Tomás Palacios, the Clarence J. LeBel Professor of EECS, director of the Microsystems Technology Laboratories, and a member of the Research Laboratory of Electronics; as well as collaborators Nitul S. Rajput of the Technology Innovation Institute of the United Arab Emirates; Siddharth Rajan of Ohio State University; Yuji Zhao of Rice University; and Nadim Chowdhury of Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology.
Turning up the heat
While gallium nitride has recently attracted much attention, the material is still decades behind silicon when it comes to scientists’ understanding of how its properties change under different conditions. One such property is resistance, the flow of electrical current through a material.
A device’s overall resistance is inversely proportional to its size. But devices like semiconductors have contacts that connect them to other electronics. Contact resistance, which is caused by these electrical connections, remains fixed no matter the size of the device. Too much contact resistance can lead to higher power dissipation and slower operating frequencies for electronic circuits.
“Especially when you go to smaller dimensions, a device’s performance often ends up being limited by contact resistance. People have a relatively good understanding of contact resistance at room temperature, but no one has really studied what happens when you go all the way up to 500 degrees,” Niroula says.
For their study, the researchers used facilities at MIT.nano to build gallium nitride devices known as transfer length method structures, which are composed of a series of resistors. These devices enable them to measure the resistance of both the material and the contacts.
They added ohmic contacts to these devices using the two most common methods. The first involves depositing metal onto gallium nitride and heating it to 825 degrees Celsius for about 30 seconds, a process called annealing.
The second method involves removing chunks of gallium nitride and using a high-temperature technology to regrow highly doped gallium nitride in its place, a process led by Rajan and his team at Ohio State. The highly doped material contains extra electrons that can contribute to current conduction.
“The regrowth method typically leads to lower contact resistance at room temperature, but we wanted to see if these methods still work well at high temperatures,” Niroula says.
A comprehensive approach
They tested devices in two ways. Their collaborators at Rice University, led by Zhao, conducted short-term tests by placing devices on a hot chuck that reached 500 degrees Celsius and taking immediate resistance measurements.
At MIT, they conducted longer-term experiments by placing devices into a specialized furnace the group previously developed. They left devices inside for up to 72 hours to measure how resistance changes as a function of temperature and time.
Microscopy experts at MIT.nano (Aubrey N. Penn) and the Technology Innovation Institute (Nitul S. Rajput) used state-of-the-art transmission electron microscopes to see how such high temperatures affect gallium nitride and the ohmic contacts at the atomic level.
“We went in thinking the contacts or the gallium nitride material itself would degrade significantly, but we found the opposite. Contacts made with both methods seemed to be remarkably stable,” says Niroula.
While it is difficult to measure resistance at such high temperatures, their results indicate that contact resistance seems to remain constant even at temperatures of 500 degrees, for around 48 hours. And just like at room temperature, the regrowth process led to better performance.
The material did start to degrade after being in the furnace for 48 hours, but the researchers are already working to boost long-term performance. One strategy involves adding protective insulators to keep the material from being directly exposed to the high-temperature environment.
Moving forward, the researchers plan to use what they learned in these experiments to develop high-temperature gallium nitride transistors.
“In our group, we focus on innovative, device-level research to advance the frontiers of microelectronics, while adopting a systematic approach across the hierarchy, from the material level to the circuit level. Here, we have gone all the way down to the material level to understand things in depth. In other words, we have translated device-level advancements to circuit-level impact for high-temperature electronics, through design, modeling and complex fabrication. We are also immensely fortunate to have forged close partnerships with our longtime collaborators in this journey,” Xie says.
This work was funded, in part, by the U.S. Air Force Office of Scientific Research, Lockheed Martin Corporation, the Semiconductor Research Corporation through the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the U.S. Department of Energy, Intel Corporation, and the Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology.
Fabrication and microscopy were conducted at MIT.nano, the Semiconductor Epitaxy and Analysis Laboratory at Ohio State University, the Center for Advanced Materials Characterization at the University of Oregon, and the Technology Innovation Institute of the United Arab Emirates.
© Image: MIT News; iStock
In a world with no set path, you'll have to forge your own! Hone your exploration skills in The Pathless with this handy guide.
The post Forging Your Path in a Pathless World first appeared on Two Average Gamers.
The post Forging Your Path in a Pathless World appeared first on Two Average Gamers.
Oh, and new Indiana Jones And The Great Circle trailer! Great. I’ve been looking forward to a nice, juicy chunk of extended gameplay. You know, something to really convey the flow of the game, rather than the admittedly impressive but nonetheless very fragmented snippets we’ve gotten so far. Now to sit back and…oh, wait. Hang on. It’s just actor Troy Baker telling me about all the great acting he’ll be doing. It is great, by the way. He’s doing a fantastic job. Maybe just, you know, a crumb of acknowledgement or elucidation over the whole ‘interactivity’ part?
Anyway, don’t mind me. I’m just an old fool who likes to press buttons. And, to be fair, it's not like Machinegames don't have a great track record. Anyway, here’s some good news: The game releases December 9th this year. Have a release date trailer.
MachineGames have made a decent living as the creators of satirical alternate histories in which you messily murder Nazis using mighty double-handfuls of shotgun. There are Nazis to fight in Indiana Jones And The Great Circle - a globe-trotting, tomb-robbing adventure featuring a Lost Ark-era Harrison Ford - but as you'd expect from a Lucasfilm adaptation, there's rather less of the bloodshed.
Good job, everyone! The cat talk in the comments has never been stronger. I miss my cats back in England very much. Though I did visit a cat cafe recently, and I got to boop some sphinx kittens on the nose. Life pretty much peaked then, so I'm in a bit of a slump right now. So do me a favour and sound off even more than usual about what your fur babies have been up to lately! And also, if you feel like it, let us know what you're playing this weekend too. Here's what we're clicking on!
The search for the cheapest and yet best quality supermarket drink-as-you-go coffee continues. I know it's the first time I've made you aware of this project, but it's been going on since I moved to Glasgow. So far, Lidl's own brand remains the clear winner, a solid 8 on the taste meter at just 59p. But while writing this, I'm sipping an "Intenso" Arctic Coffee from Morrisons, which is giving the Lidl frontrunners some stiff competition at last, albeit at 145% the cost. Will one true victor emerge? Find out next week! For now, here's what we're all clicking on this weekend!
Oh, and new Indiana Jones And The Great Circle trailer! Great. I’ve been looking forward to a nice, juicy chunk of extended gameplay. You know, something to really convey the flow of the game, rather than the admittedly impressive but nonetheless very fragmented snippets we’ve gotten so far. Now to sit back and…oh, wait. Hang on. It’s just actor Troy Baker telling me about all the great acting he’ll be doing. It is great, by the way. He’s doing a fantastic job. Maybe just, you know, a crumb of acknowledgement or elucidation over the whole ‘interactivity’ part?
Anyway, don’t mind me. I’m just an old fool who likes to press buttons. And, to be fair, it's not like Machinegames don't have a great track record. Anyway, here’s some good news: The game releases December 9th this year. Have a release date trailer.
MachineGames have made a decent living as the creators of satirical alternate histories in which you messily murder Nazis using mighty double-handfuls of shotgun. There are Nazis to fight in Indiana Jones And The Great Circle - a globe-trotting, tomb-robbing adventure featuring a Lost Ark-era Harrison Ford - but as you'd expect from a Lucasfilm adaptation, rather less of the bloodshed.
Good job, everyone! The cat talk in the comments has never been stronger. I miss my cats back in England very much. Though I did visit a cat cafe recently, and I got to boop some sphinx kittens on the nose. Life pretty much peaked then, so I'm in a bit of a slump right now. So do me a favour and sound off even more than usual about what your fur babies have been up to lately! And also, if you feel like it, let us know what you're playing this weekend too. Here's what we're clicking on!
The search for the cheapest and yet best quality supermarket drink-as-you-go coffee continues. I know it's the first time I've made you aware of this project, but it's been going on since I moved to Glasgow. So far, Lidl's own brand remains the clear winner, a solid 8 on the taste meter at just 59p. But while writing this, I'm sipping an "Intenso" Arctic Coffee from Morrisons, which is giving the Lidl frontrunners some stiff competition at last, albeit at 145% the cost. Will one true victor emerge? Find out next week! For now, here's what we're all clicking on this weekend!
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Read the full article on GamingOnLinux.
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Read the full article on GamingOnLinux.
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Read the full article on GamingOnLinux.
BlueSuburbia takes you to a place that is filled with a lonely kind of menace – an oppressive fear that crushes you as it tells you that no one will come save...
The post ‘BlueSuburbia’ Stirs Up a Deep, Solitary Fear appeared first on Indie Games Plus.
Tchia takes us on a stunning tropical open world adventure where you play as a young, imaginative girl who can turn into animals and objects to explore. Tchia, our protagonist, is looking to...
The post ‘Tchia’ Turns Into Animals & Objects to Explore a Tropical Island appeared first on Indie Games Plus.
Moonstone Island is a slice of life adventure game where you can fly to dozens of islands to gather local oddball creatures, grow gardens, and romance the locals. Moonstone Island is a...
The post ‘Moonstone Island’ is a Creature-Collecting Life Sim appeared first on Indie Games Plus.
Sand Land (2024), the latest action-adventure game from ILCA and Bandai Namco Entertainment, has caused some debate among manga readers that can be summarized this way: some consider it to be an independent story-arc adventure, others contend it acts both as a continuation of an original manga published back in 2000 (carrying the same title). So, which side has it right? Is Sand Land the solution or just more smokescreen that makes things look through the fog? A definite answer is impossible to get (like many things in life, like philosophy) but, in any event, it is worth investigating and learning about it. The journey is many times better than the destination, so let us navigate this fascinating desert journey that Sand Land offers us and find out together its connections to the source material at the beginning of the millennium, as well as what it may signify for potential newcomers.
Sand Land's inconsistency stems from its source material because why else would the game have the same name as the Manga book? Akira Toriyama himself (known to players through Dragon Ball and Dragon Ball Z: Kakarot) created one short manga series in 2000 titled Sand Land that took place after an apocalyptic desert event and featured Beelzebub and other unlikely allies working together (attempting to locate water sources, and more). Similar to Cowa, another of Toriyama's comics, Sand Land was collected in a tankobon manga and it is 14 chapters long. The game is inspired by this book, so here is the link to the past. However, the video game is not a 1 to 1 representation of the book, how could be, after all, it is a short comic that tells a story, whereas the video game does more.
Sand Land the video game is an adaptation and in a way, a sequel of its respective manga counterpart, keeping much of what makes it special - among those, themes, characters, and plot elements - intact while expanding upon these in a manner the limited manga could never do. Sand Land is clearly one ideal entry point for newcomers to the universe. Sand Land's world of quirky characters and fantastical creatures features familiar elements from both media (including characters from the Dragon Ball series), so it is worth starting here. If you have the chance to buy Sand Land and play it, and at the same time enjoy the Manga book, you will experience both sides with rich narrative tapestries to explore.
So, who will get the most value out of Sand Land? This desert adventure is perfect for:
Sand Land is a delightful, visually striking open-world adventure that makes it possible to admire once more the art of Akira Toriyama. It is simply enjoyable and adds a fresh breath to the genre via its distinct art style. The engaging story, exploration focus, and quirky characters are among its key strengths that enhance, in my opinion, the work of Akira Toriyama. Some purists might find similarities with its source manga disappointing but they are missing the point: the game is not the book. Its expanded narrative options and accessible entry points make this game great for newcomers who should be appreciative of the entire work.
Stellar Blade's planet Earth lies ravaged and abandoned; skyscrapers puncture its murky sky like monuments of fallen civilization; humankind now struggles for survival on distant space stations ejected by monstrous entities known as Naytiba; however there remains one spark of hope as Eve, an individual wielding an iconic Stellar Blade sword, descends upon it determined to recover what's been taken.
Stellar Blade's post-apocalyptic setting, where remnants of civilization struggle for survival amidst monstrous threats, may recall The Last of Us' dark and atmospheric world-building. (Just in case you did not played it - and I do not think there are too many real gamers who did not do it already - you must buy The Last of Us.) Both games feature an earth that has become hostile against humanity's efforts at survival - with abandoned skyscrapers contributing to feelings of desolation and despair that is present throughout both games.
Stellar Blade adds its own special twist by including elements of space travel and cosmic entities known as Naytiba into its sci-fi post-apocalyptic narrative, further creating an engaging experience for viewers. Eve's presence wielding Stellar Blade sword sets in motion an extraordinary journey focused on recovering what has been lost against impossible odds. The combat is very different between the games (and we will talk about it soon).
Stellar Blade creats its own identity in the action-adventure genre by mixing elements of post-apocalyptic survival with cosmic exploration, creating a compelling story around Eve's quest for redemption. Is the story engaging? It is engaging enough but quite linear, lacking any depth or mistery, pretty commercial if you ask me. (Check other games with similar combat in our article about exclsuive PS4 and PS5 games.) The Last of Us is a clear masterpiece where Stellar Blade is nothing of this kind, just a slightly above average single-player game that has superlative elements but also minuses in so many ways.
So the question stands: is Stellar Blade worth spending space-bucks on? The answer will depend entirely on what appeals to you in a videogame experience.
Stellar Blade will offer an engaging combat system, rewarding skill and mastery through parries, evasions and Beta/Burst Gauges to unleash devastating attacks - providing gamers with an immensely enjoyable gameplay experience. Without a doubt, the main reason why someone will buy Stellar Blade is to experience the Sekiro-like challanging combat, the diversity of enemies and tough bosses. Of course, in a totally different setting, however, recognizable in the defense-driven approach of the award-winning Sekiro: Shaddow Die Twice.
Stellar Blade offers an intriguing post-apocalyptic world just begging to be explored, perfect for anyone seeking adventure. Vast landscapes filled with crumbling cities and treacherous terrain offer ample thrills and spillover. For the truly daring spirit, this game may provide more than enough excitement!
Stellar Blade may leave some gamers wanting more, especially if narrative innovation is your top priority because this is a very linear tale lacking deepness, character development, and more. While its worldbuilding is exceptional, predictable plot points and character depth may cause them to disengage with it quickly, so these players are better served if they are looking elsewhere.
The story develops as Eve attempts to connect with what remains of human civilization while searching for four hypercores guarded by powerful bosses, each unlocking another piece of the puzzle: its secrets behind an apocalyptic event, exodus to space, and Naytiba origins. Combat is the main dish when it comes to Stellar Blade, and even if derivative, it is recognizable and similar to that of Sekiro: Shaddow Die Twice. After all, if you copy someone, choose that someone carefully. Although somewhat predictable in plot development and execution, its narrative doesn't lack charm and Eve is quite an attractive picture - exploring forgotten settlements while discovering stories about past inhabitants add emotional depth - creating a realistic world with crumbling buildings and abandoned street corners feeling lived-in rather than felt during tragedy's heavy weight.
Forspoken is the inaugural AAA release of 2019, as well as an exclusive PlayStation 5 console exclusive, garnering considerable anticipation due to its anticipated impact. As players learn the controls for Athia's vast open-world environment and engaging in combat becomes an adventure full of thrills; reaping rewards by mastering its intricate systems can prove lucrative indeed. However, Forspoken's narrative trajectory remains uneven. While buoyed by an amazing lead performance and memorable plot twists, the overall experience was marred by suboptimal pacing and delivery; similar to watching an expertly executed play where key moments stand out but its glory fades due to uneven pace or delivery; ultimately preventing its full potential from being realized.
Forspoken stands out in the gaming landscape by creating an expansive world and thrilling combat dynamics that engage its player base, yet sometimes experience moments of brilliance being overshadowed by pacing issues - this story of two dimensions where gameplay excels in providing an adventurous and exhilarating experience while storytelling struggles to keep up a steady cadence is told through forspoken. Fospoken orchestrates gameplay to another level, so what I've got is as fluid as a serenade, if you know what I mean. Of course, this entices players to discover and buy PS5 games of the same kind once they finish Forspoken because they get the taste of adventure and miracle worlds.
Forspoken is an enjoyable fantasy-world RPG when exploited properly; yet patience must be exercised during its slow, somewhat cumbersome initial phase. Unfortunately, lengthy story interludes that lean toward verbosity fall short of communicating its true potential; these imperfections prevent Forspoken from rising to be the next great open-world game; though fans of fantasy realms should find plenty of enjoyable moments while traveling across its sprawling world as formidable sorceresss.
Beginning Forspoken is like entering an intimidating maze - initially slow-paced but ultimately rewarding once explored fully. Unfortunately, its narrative sometimes succumbs to long-winded passages which overshadow its core strengths; similar to an engaging stage performance where brilliant moments fail to shine amidst less impactful dialogues. Fospoken's gameplay is a marvel, like a tapestry interwoven with finesse and ingenuity, if you allow me the comparison, simply beckoning players of all ages and levels of experience to harmonize their gaming journey into Athia, far from everyday problems, a means to escape and enjoy a different reality. With an assortment of tantalizing cheap PS5 games, there is the slight chance to overlook Forspoken - my advice: don't!
Forspoken is an immersive fantasy world full of charm, challenges, and moments of pure delight that are sure to enthrall fantasy fans of any kind. Though not among the elite open-world games, Forspoken offers fantasy enthusiasts a fantastical gaming experience where magic collides with exploration for an unparalleled gaming adventure, yet beneath these early obstacles lies an amazing fantasy world to be explored. Fantasy enthusiasts will take immense delight in traversing vast landscapes as a powerful sorceress - it's an exhilarating journey with plenty of magical prowess and open-world exploration, eventually showing its strengths despite initial missteps.
"Assassin's Creed Mirage" invites me into its meticulously designed world where every sensation is amplified, moments are art forms unto themselves and stealthy visuals form an adventure lasting far after my controller has been put aside.
Under the moonlit sky of Baghdad, I found my sense of adventure through "Assassin's Creed Mirage." In these intimate nighttime moments of playback, visuals, and gameplay combined harmoniously for an incredible gaming experience that left an imprintful memory behind. Baghdad comes alive when illuminated by its soft moonlight at nightfall. From street corners and rooftops alike, I enjoy exploring this fascinating dreamscape, where architectural masterpieces light up beautifully against each building's historical importance.
Stealth takes on new meaning during moonlit pursuits. Following my targets through narrow alleyways and alleys becomes like hunting prey at night - my shadowy presence becomes like that of an invisible predator of the night! Buy new PS5 games and experience the grandeur of Assassin's Creed Mirage. Visuals capture all the tension and thrill associated with encounters such as this; making every leap or rooftop confrontation a sensory delight that further immerses me into "Assassin's Creed Mirage!"
At the center of Baghdad's history and mystery lies "Assassin's Creed Mirage," I find myself involved in a web of conspiracies as I play Basim in "Assassin's Creed Mirage." Visuals blend seamlessly between past and present time periods creating an unforgettable tapestry as time is warped to my benefit as Basim manipulates time to his benefit.
Stealth becomes my specialty as I navigate this mysterious landscape. I become an unseen observer, peering around corners while listening in on conversations or following leads through winding alleyways. Much like the intricate web of conspiracies in Assassin's Creed Mirage, your gaming experience becomes more enthralling when you buy cheap PS5 games. Blending seamlessly with this vibrant crowd becomes essential, with my hooded figure seemingly dissolving into its chaos almost imperceptibly.
The sensory richness of this experience was truly stunning. From tantalizing spices wafting through the air, tantalizing my senses and transporting me right back into Baghdad; merchant chatter ranging from haggling and friendly bantering all the way through haggling; cacophonous merchant traffic providing depth and dimension into this virtual reality world; even distant calls to prayer sending haunting melodies across cityscapes enveloped me completely, blurring reality from virtuality altogether.
Exploring Baghdad as Basim from "Assassin's Creed Mirage", I find myself drawn deeper into its ancient beauty and history. Assassin's Creed Mirage is a masterpiece that deserves its place among the best PS4 games, offering unparalleled storytelling and captivating gameplay.
Baghdad comes to life vividly as I explore its historic landmarks with unparalleled detail, their intricate details reflecting all of the hard work gone into recreating this remarkable city. Walking the streets I feel immersed in an active, evolving world where every artifact or relic I encounter provides another treasure chest of history to uncover.
Experience something beyond simple gameplay by becoming immersed in an atmosphere in which every sense is amplified and every moment charged with significance. I am so happy I've bought Assassin's Creed Mirage! I no longer play but inhabit Baghdad itself through Basim; being part of its intricate tapestry will leave an unforgettable memory on your mind long after putting away your controller!
One of my favorite activities in Minecraft is going deep inside the caves and just exploring them. A few years ago, the developers behind Cave Digger reached out to me and asked me to review their game. Not too long after, the sequel got released and looked like it would be a VR exclusive. Until I noticed that it appeared on the Nintendo Switch eShop. So, I thought, maybe it also released on Steam, since after playing the Switch version, I felt like this game was better played with keyboard and mouse. Now, a non VR version is on Steam now… But is it worth it? Well, after playing the first sections of this game, I want to talk about it. The latest update was on May 28th, 2024 when writing this article. Now, before we dive right into it, I want to invite to you leave a comment in the comment section with your thoughts and/or opinions on this game and/or the content of this article.
Risk of Staleness
In this game, we play as an unnamed miner who is throwing into the deep end, when his digger broke. You arrive at a mysterious valley. In this valley, a hardy explorer once did his research. But why? Which secrets are in these valleys and the accompanying mines? That’s for our miner to figure out. Now, the story is being told by various comic book pages you can uncover and, according to the Steam store page, has multiple endings. I’m quite curious where it’s going to go.
So far, I haven’t gotten too deep into the story. But, from what I can read on the Steam store page, I think it has potential. I have my doubts on how the multiple endings will work. Since comic books mostly have one ending, right? Unless, it all depends on which page(s) you find or in which order or where. That’s something I’ll discover when I’m deeper into the game.
If this game is like the original game, the story overall will take a backseat for the gameplay. And after 5 hours in, that’s the case. The original game didn’t have a lot of story to begin with, but more story in a game like this can be interesting.
There is one voice actor in this game. He does a pretty fine job and brings some life to the atmosphere. I replayed a bit of the first game and I have to be honest, I appreciate the small voice lines during the exploration. Even when you quickly hear every different line, it’s a nice break since they aren’t spammed and don’t appear that often.
One of the biggest changes in this game is that the cave this time around is randomly generated each time you enter. So, this game becomes a rouge like to a degree. But, you can always exit via the lifts to safety. Since, dying in the caves means that at least half of your obtained loot is dropped. The atmosphere this time around is very cohesive. This game presents itself as a sci-fi western game, and it really feels like that. Something I really like in this game is that it doesn’t go overboard in the sci-fi genre and stays grounded. The technology could realistically exist today, apart from the unique enemies in the cave, that is.
With the story taking more of a backseat, it’s quite important that the gameplay loop is enjoyable. The gameplay loop is simple, you have to explore the caves with 4 chosen tools. The three slots above the entrance give you a hint on which tools you will need to bring to gather the most loot. You take the lift down and gather loot, while fighting enemies and avoiding pitfalls to survive. The goal is also to find the other elevator that takes you down to the next level to gather even more valuable ores to bring to the top. You have to fill in the ores you gathered into the grinder to buy upgrades to your tools and environment to progress.
The big risk with this kind of gameplay loop is that this is just a different numbers game. What I mean by that is that, apart from maybe the visuals changing, the core concept is always the same. This risks that the game becomes stale and repetitive. It’s possible that it is just a “me thing”, but I enjoy games like this more when there are some variations on the gameplay or some different puzzles. Thankfully, this game has that. There are a lot of things you can upgrade and improve to make each run feel rewarding, and each type of cave you can visit has different enemies types and unique lay-outs to keep you on your toes. In a way, I dare to compare the idea a bit to Cult of the Lamb in a degree.
The music in this game is also a blast. It fits the atmosphere of each area like a glove. My favorite track is the track that plays in the lake caves. It sounds like you image a typical track like that to sound. And it gets more intense while you are fighting enemies down there. Now, the silent moments when the music doesn’t play feel a bit long, but I always know that there is more music coming and that it fits the atmosphere perfectly and draws me more into the game. Sadly enough, this isn’t the only problem with this game, and I’d like to talk about them.
No feedback
This game has an addictive gameplay loop, and I’m really curious how the multiplayer works. I haven’t tested the multiplayer in this game, but it looks like fun. Now, this game can be played solo perfectly fine.
Now, I don’t know if VRKiwi took the VR version as a base for the non VR version, since I have the impression, that is the case. I especially notice that with the controls in this game. It feels a bit floaty, like you aren’t really connected to the ground. It also feels a bit stiff, like you have to move your mouse like you would a VR headset. You really have to play with the settings until you hit that sweetspot that feels right for you. For me, I had to lower the sensitivity to 80, amongst other things. I highly recommend that you tweak the settings to your liking, since on the Nintendo Switch version, I had to lower the sensitivity to 40 before it felt right.
Still, the character control doesn’t feel right. At first, I thought it was because the controls felt floaty… But, after some testing, I think I found a few other problems with the character control that might cause it to not feel quite right. First, the jump in this game is just silly. You can’t really rely on it, since it doesn’t always trigger when you hit the spacebar, and it’s just a pathetic jump. You can’t even jump out of ankle high water sometimes.
Secondly, there are no sound effects for walking on most floors. You feel like you are floating, and it’s jarring when you suddenly hear a sound effect when you walk over a table or a railway. Thirdly, climbing on ropes amongst other things is just insanely picky. There is also no real feedback or sound to show you grabbed the rope. Fourthly, the scroll order between tools is extremely weird. You get numbers on the wheel counter clock wise. But you go down, right, left, up. Which still confuses me after 6 hours of playing this game.
And finally, some things are extremely picky. For example, there are safe riddles you can solve down in the caves. But to rotate the letter wheels to make pick the right letter is more difficult to do. All of these things give you a feeling that you aren’t always in control of your character and that you don’t get the feedback as a player on what’s happening. Making you unsure what’s happening and doubt if you are doing the right thing.
Prompts like “Use W/S to use the crank” should be “Hold W/S to use the crank”. Since, you need to hold the key instead of pressing it. Small things like that could also improve this game and it’s controls quite a lot. Overall, the controls are good, but they lack feedback to the player sometimes. Either with sound effects or with some visual effects. Like with the hammer, you barely have any sound effects when you use it, and it has some wind up animation, making you unsure if you are using it or not.
That is one of the biggest flaws in this game. The lack of feedback on your actions. Things like not knowing how many bullets are still left in your revolver or a sound effect when you hit an actual enemy. I think if there is one thing I’d use the built-in feedback tool is to report various cases/moments when I expect feedback from the game, like a sound effect or visual effect. Maybe they appear in the form of rumble effects… But, I’m not playing this game with a controller.
When you read this section of the article, I wouldn’t blame you if you think that this game isn’t good. Small bugs like the text of “Press R to reload” when your gun isn’t equipped or the bullets not leaving from the gun but from the player model don’t improve things either. Yet, I find myself looking past these problems since the core gameplay still works. I find myself getting used to the jank in this game and finding a very rough diamond. If the developers keep up with their promise of improving this game, I think that more action feedback will bring a lot to the game and maybe fixing the small bugs like in this paragraph as well.
Things like the animation of the shovel looking weird sometimes. The animation looks like the arms go through each other after a dig. Speaking of the shovel, the last dig is annoying since you have to move a pixel or two for it to count and give you your goodies. But the bug I’d love to see fixed most is the freeze for several seconds when you pick up something new or get a new codec entry. The game locks up like it’s about the crash, but it doesn’t.
What’s next for us?
Usually, I’m not really picky when it comes to the visuals of a game. As long as a game looks consistent, I’m quite happy. It needs to have a certain style so that you can quickly identify what’s what and enjoy the game.
Yet, for this game, I do have some things that I not really like in terms of the visuals. Firstly, the contrast of some ores and the floor isn’t clear enough. Sometimes I was passing up on ores since I wasn’t able to notice them on the ground.
There are also a lot of objects to give more details to the cave, but you can barely interact with them. I’d love to see lilly pads in lakes to move a bit when you walk past them or something more than just being able to clip through them. As well, a sound effect when you hit a wall you can’t mine. You get shouted at when you use the wrong or a too weak tool on something, so when not for the rest?
I think the biggest mistake that the visuals make is that it has an identity crisis. What I mean by that is that it isn’t a cohesive style. There is a lot of shell shading going on, but there is also a lot of details that give off a more realistic vibe. Some textures aren’t detailed enough and strechted too wide giving wrong impression the rest of the visuals that look more modern. The floor textures sometimes suffer most from this issue.
Looking back at this article, I think I’m being very critical for this game. I have played a lot worse and broken games for 15€. But, in this game you even have customisation options for your character and thee developers are extremely open for feedback. This game has a lot going for it. Fun achievements to hunt for, bosses at the end of runs and an amazing auto save system.
Apart from improving the character controls and adding some feedback on actions, I think this game is pretty decent. Yes, there is some polish missing like not having a tooltip with the lever at the cave entrance on what that lever does. I personally feel less conflicted about this game compared to the original. The growth in this title is immense and brings me a lot of hope for either some amazing updates, DLC or a new entry in the series.
The basis of for an amazing title is here and if you look past it’s short comings, this game is a blast to play. Maybe it’s a bit too repetitive for some and can be more fun in short bursts. But, when this game sinks it’s hooks into you, it really clicks. There is some polishing left to do and for a rather new VR focused developer, this is amazing. It’s their second non VR game and it shows a lot of promise.
The game is a perfect relaxing game to wind down, since it isn’t too difficult. The game is rather forgiving. I wouldn’t be surprised that I play this game after work to wind down and try and finish it slowly. Then again, while I’m writing this, I have summer holidays and I wouldn’t be surprised that I finish most of this game during my summer break.
Like I said earlier, I feel less conflicted about this game compared to the previous title. This game has a lot more going for it compared to the original. It’s less repetitive and it has a lot more going for it. It has it’s problems, yes. But, if you enjoy games like Minecraft, Steamworld Dig or Cave Digger, give the demo of this game a chance. The demo gives a very good idea on what you can expect from this game and if you enjoy it, buy the game. I’m enjoying myself quite a lot with this game and I’m happy that I have chosen the PC version over the Switch version since I feel like it just plays better. But maybe, if I get used to the Switch controls, I might enjoy it on Switch as well.
With that said, I have said everything I wanted to say about this game for now. Maybe when I finish this game, I might write a full review with the final thoughts and opinions on this game. But for now, I think the best conclusion for this game is that it’s an amazing step up from the original and besides some unpolished things… It’s a great game and comes recommend from me.
So, it’s time to wrap up this article with my usual outro. I hope you enjoyed reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it. I hope to be able to welcome you in another article, but until then have a great rest of your day and take care.
BlueSuburbia takes you to a place that is filled with a lonely kind of menace – an oppressive fear that crushes you as it tells you that no one will come save...
The post ‘BlueSuburbia’ Stirs Up a Deep, Solitary Fear appeared first on Indie Games Plus.
Tchia takes us on a stunning tropical open world adventure where you play as a young, imaginative girl who can turn into animals and objects to explore. Tchia, our protagonist, is looking to...
The post ‘Tchia’ Turns Into Animals & Objects to Explore a Tropical Island appeared first on Indie Games Plus.
Moonstone Island is a slice of life adventure game where you can fly to dozens of islands to gather local oddball creatures, grow gardens, and romance the locals. Moonstone Island is a...
The post ‘Moonstone Island’ is a Creature-Collecting Life Sim appeared first on Indie Games Plus.
Hello! Welcome back to our regular feature where we write a little bit about some of the games we've been playing over the past few days. This week we push through to get to better times in a game, which we hope are coming; we change our perception of a game after talking to the people who made it; and we find the familiar in a game that also manages to feel completely new.
What have you been playing?
Catch up with the older editions of this column in our What We've Been Playing archive.
It barely feels like five minutes since the last one, but, somehow, Gamescom is almost upon us again. Which means publishers are starting to detail their plans for the show - and in Microsoft's case, we now know that'll include daily livestreams for those at home, plus over 50 playable games for anyone wandering the Koelnmesse's halls.
Attendees visiting Microsoft's Hall 7 Gamescom booth in person will find 50 games from Xbox Game Studios, Blizzard, Bethesda, and third-party partners, playable across 240 gaming stations. These include Age of Mythology: Retold, Ara: History Untold, Diablo 4: Vessel of Hatred, Fallout 76: Milepost Zero, The Elder Scrolls Online: Gold Road, and Towerborne.
Playable third-party games, meanwhile, include Star Wars Outlaws, Space Marine 2, and the long-awaited Stalker 2: Heart of Chornobyl. A full list of games at the booth can be found here.
The scorching surface of Venus, where temperatures can climb to 480 degrees Celsius (hot enough to melt lead), is an inhospitable place for humans and machines alike. One reason scientists have not yet been able to send a rover to the planet’s surface is because silicon-based electronics can’t operate in such extreme temperatures for an extended period of time.
For high-temperature applications like Venus exploration, researchers have recently turned to gallium nitride, a unique material that can withstand temperatures of 500 degrees or more.
The material is already used in some terrestrial electronics, like phone chargers and cell phone towers, but scientists don’t have a good grasp of how gallium nitride devices would behave at temperatures beyond 300 degrees, which is the operational limit of conventional silicon electronics.
In a new paper published in Applied Physics Letters, which is part of a multiyear research effort, a team of scientists from MIT and elsewhere sought to answer key questions about the material’s properties and performance at extremely high temperatures.
They studied the impact of temperature on the ohmic contacts in a gallium nitride device. Ohmic contacts are key components that connect a semiconductor device with the outside world.
The researchers found that extreme temperatures didn’t cause significant degradation to the gallium nitride material or contacts. They were surprised to see that the contacts remained structurally intact even when held at 500 degrees Celsius for 48 hours.
Understanding how contacts perform at extreme temperatures is an important step toward the group’s next goal of developing high-performance transistors that could operate on the surface of Venus. Such transistors could also be used on Earth in electronics for applications like extracting geothermal energy or monitoring the inside of jet engines.
“Transistors are the heart of most modern electronics, but we didn’t want to jump straight to making a gallium nitride transistor because so much could go wrong. We first wanted to make sure the material and contacts could survive, and figure out how much they change as you increase the temperature. We’ll design our transistor from these basic material building blocks,” says John Niroula, an electrical engineering and computer science (EECS) graduate student and lead author of the paper.
His co-authors include Qingyun Xie PhD ’24; Mengyang Yuan PhD ’22; EECS graduate students Patrick K. Darmawi-Iskandar and Pradyot Yadav; Gillian K. Micale, a graduate student in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering; senior author Tomás Palacios, the Clarence J. LeBel Professor of EECS, director of the Microsystems Technology Laboratories, and a member of the Research Laboratory of Electronics; as well as collaborators Nitul S. Rajput of the Technology Innovation Institute of the United Arab Emirates; Siddharth Rajan of Ohio State University; Yuji Zhao of Rice University; and Nadim Chowdhury of Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology.
Turning up the heat
While gallium nitride has recently attracted much attention, the material is still decades behind silicon when it comes to scientists’ understanding of how its properties change under different conditions. One such property is resistance, the flow of electrical current through a material.
A device’s overall resistance is inversely proportional to its size. But devices like semiconductors have contacts that connect them to other electronics. Contact resistance, which is caused by these electrical connections, remains fixed no matter the size of the device. Too much contact resistance can lead to higher power dissipation and slower operating frequencies for electronic circuits.
“Especially when you go to smaller dimensions, a device’s performance often ends up being limited by contact resistance. People have a relatively good understanding of contact resistance at room temperature, but no one has really studied what happens when you go all the way up to 500 degrees,” Niroula says.
For their study, the researchers used facilities at MIT.nano to build gallium nitride devices known as transfer length method structures, which are composed of a series of resistors. These devices enable them to measure the resistance of both the material and the contacts.
They added ohmic contacts to these devices using the two most common methods. The first involves depositing metal onto gallium nitride and heating it to 825 degrees Celsius for about 30 seconds, a process called annealing.
The second method involves removing chunks of gallium nitride and using a high-temperature technology to regrow highly doped gallium nitride in its place, a process led by Rajan and his team at Ohio State. The highly doped material contains extra electrons that can contribute to current conduction.
“The regrowth method typically leads to lower contact resistance at room temperature, but we wanted to see if these methods still work well at high temperatures,” Niroula says.
A comprehensive approach
They tested devices in two ways. Their collaborators at Rice University, led by Zhao, conducted short-term tests by placing devices on a hot chuck that reached 500 degrees Celsius and taking immediate resistance measurements.
At MIT, they conducted longer-term experiments by placing devices into a specialized furnace the group previously developed. They left devices inside for up to 72 hours to measure how resistance changes as a function of temperature and time.
Microscopy experts at MIT.nano (Aubrey N. Penn) and the Technology Innovation Institute (Nitul S. Rajput) used state-of-the-art transmission electron microscopes to see how such high temperatures affect gallium nitride and the ohmic contacts at the atomic level.
“We went in thinking the contacts or the gallium nitride material itself would degrade significantly, but we found the opposite. Contacts made with both methods seemed to be remarkably stable,” says Niroula.
While it is difficult to measure resistance at such high temperatures, their results indicate that contact resistance seems to remain constant even at temperatures of 500 degrees, for around 48 hours. And just like at room temperature, the regrowth process led to better performance.
The material did start to degrade after being in the furnace for 48 hours, but the researchers are already working to boost long-term performance. One strategy involves adding protective insulators to keep the material from being directly exposed to the high-temperature environment.
Moving forward, the researchers plan to use what they learned in these experiments to develop high-temperature gallium nitride transistors.
“In our group, we focus on innovative, device-level research to advance the frontiers of microelectronics, while adopting a systematic approach across the hierarchy, from the material level to the circuit level. Here, we have gone all the way down to the material level to understand things in depth. In other words, we have translated device-level advancements to circuit-level impact for high-temperature electronics, through design, modeling and complex fabrication. We are also immensely fortunate to have forged close partnerships with our longtime collaborators in this journey,” Xie says.
This work was funded, in part, by the U.S. Air Force Office of Scientific Research, Lockheed Martin Corporation, the Semiconductor Research Corporation through the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the U.S. Department of Energy, Intel Corporation, and the Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology.
Fabrication and microscopy were conducted at MIT.nano, the Semiconductor Epitaxy and Analysis Laboratory at Ohio State University, the Center for Advanced Materials Characterization at the University of Oregon, and the Technology Innovation Institute of the United Arab Emirates.
© Image: MIT News; iStock
Hello! Welcome back to our regular feature where we write a little bit about some of the games we've been playing over the past few days. This week we push through to get to better times in a game, which we hope are coming; we change our perception of a game after talking to the people who made it; and we find the familiar in a game that also manages to feel completely new.
What have you been playing?
Catch up with the older editions of this column in our What We've Been Playing archive.
It barely feels like five minutes since the last one, but, somehow, Gamescom is almost upon us again. Which means publishers are starting to detail their plans for the show - and in Microsoft's case, we now know that'll include daily livestreams for those at home, plus over 50 playable games for anyone wandering the Koelnmesse's halls.
Attendees visiting Microsoft's Hall 7 Gamescom booth in person will find 50 games from Xbox Game Studios, Blizzard, Bethesda, and third-party partners, playable across 240 gaming stations. These include Age of Mythology: Retold, Ara: History Untold, Diablo 4: Vessel of Hatred, Fallout 76: Milepost Zero, The Elder Scrolls Online: Gold Road, and Towerborne.
Playable third-party games, meanwhile, include Star Wars Outlaws, Space Marine 2, and the long-awaited Stalker 2: Heart of Chornobyl. A full list of games at the booth can be found here.
No Rest for the Wicked developer Moon Studios has released its first new content update for the early access release.
Known as The Crucible update, it brings a "whole new Crucible" (seems fitting), as well as a new fungal enemy faction known as the Gloam, a new Exalted item status, the promise of "more visceral" combat and more.
You can check out a little teaser for the update in the video below.
The Garden Path begins with a message asking you to be careful when foraging plants in the real world and, as someone who spent their teenage years living in the middle of nowhere, trust me when I say this is good advice. (Sometimes you have to make your own fun, but eating too much marsh samphire can churn your stomach.) It's also fitting advice from a game where foraging plays a major role in cultivating your garden. You'll venture out into the storybook-styled wildness, snipping plant cuttings or collecting flower buds, before finding the right place to plant your seedlings and watch them grow.
Though, even with this knowledge in mind, the first hours of The Garden Path do feel a little directionless. Sure a tutorial will pop up occasionally and there's a hint about a mysterious note, but neither provide much overall guidance; the tutorial only appears when you encounter a relevant mechanic and the note being, well, a mystery. Due to this, I felt more like I was lost in the woods rather than exploring them when I first arrived in the garden, so I decided to craft my own path. In my inventory lay a pair of broken secateurs and on my map sat three question marks, making my quest one of investigating these three locations to see if any held the answer to fixing my tool.
It didn't take long to reach my first location where I met Augustus - a bear who happens to be a park ranger, which is odd considering I always thought bears like to eat those. Maybe Augustus is a vegetarian. Thankfully, it was a good thing I ran into Augustus because he had the other half of my secateurs and, for the price of some bracken sprigs, he helpfully fixed them! From there I ventured further into the garden where I met Larto, a buffalo who taught me how to fish, and Thom (strong Tom Bombadil vibes here) who sells seeds.
Sometimes a game comes along and sucker punches you right in the gut. You can be completely aware of the premise going in, but some element of the setting or the mechanics takes a broader theme or commentary and makes it deeply, intensely personal. Papers, Please got me like that. My job at the time involved identity verification and, while it was nowhere near as life or death as the game, it still made it all too real, too visceral. Dragon Age: Inquisition completely caught me off guard, with NPC reactions to my Qunari Inquisitor feeling way too close to my experiences as a very visible trans woman.
Nobody Wants to Die is a work of dystopian science fiction, so I was expecting some hard hitting moments. I'm hardly the first person to point out that the last few years have felt increasingly like living in a cyberpunk novel - only without the ability to get shiny chrome replacements for my ageing knees. As a disabled person with a veritable laundry list of health conditions forced to rely on the underfunded NHS, the games' medical themes hit way too close to home.
Nobody Wants to Die is set in New York circa 2329, which, in a completely shocking and surprising twist, looks a lot like New York circa 1929, complete with tommy guns and prohibition. The sci-fi angle brings flying cars, 500+ story high apartment blocks and, most importantly, immortality. The discovery of a substance called ichorite allows brains to be encoded and transferred to new bodies, making death little more than an inconvenience, other than on the rare occasions that ichorite is completely destroyed. It's all very Altered Carbon, really.
The scorching surface of Venus, where temperatures can climb to 480 degrees Celsius (hot enough to melt lead), is an inhospitable place for humans and machines alike. One reason scientists have not yet been able to send a rover to the planet’s surface is because silicon-based electronics can’t operate in such extreme temperatures for an extended period of time.
For high-temperature applications like Venus exploration, researchers have recently turned to gallium nitride, a unique material that can withstand temperatures of 500 degrees or more.
The material is already used in some terrestrial electronics, like phone chargers and cell phone towers, but scientists don’t have a good grasp of how gallium nitride devices would behave at temperatures beyond 300 degrees, which is the operational limit of conventional silicon electronics.
In a new paper published in Applied Physics Letters, which is part of a multiyear research effort, a team of scientists from MIT and elsewhere sought to answer key questions about the material’s properties and performance at extremely high temperatures.
They studied the impact of temperature on the ohmic contacts in a gallium nitride device. Ohmic contacts are key components that connect a semiconductor device with the outside world.
The researchers found that extreme temperatures didn’t cause significant degradation to the gallium nitride material or contacts. They were surprised to see that the contacts remained structurally intact even when held at 500 degrees Celsius for 48 hours.
Understanding how contacts perform at extreme temperatures is an important step toward the group’s next goal of developing high-performance transistors that could operate on the surface of Venus. Such transistors could also be used on Earth in electronics for applications like extracting geothermal energy or monitoring the inside of jet engines.
“Transistors are the heart of most modern electronics, but we didn’t want to jump straight to making a gallium nitride transistor because so much could go wrong. We first wanted to make sure the material and contacts could survive, and figure out how much they change as you increase the temperature. We’ll design our transistor from these basic material building blocks,” says John Niroula, an electrical engineering and computer science (EECS) graduate student and lead author of the paper.
His co-authors include Qingyun Xie PhD ’24; Mengyang Yuan PhD ’22; EECS graduate students Patrick K. Darmawi-Iskandar and Pradyot Yadav; Gillian K. Micale, a graduate student in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering; senior author Tomás Palacios, the Clarence J. LeBel Professor of EECS, director of the Microsystems Technology Laboratories, and a member of the Research Laboratory of Electronics; as well as collaborators Nitul S. Rajput of the Technology Innovation Institute of the United Arab Emirates; Siddharth Rajan of Ohio State University; Yuji Zhao of Rice University; and Nadim Chowdhury of Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology.
Turning up the heat
While gallium nitride has recently attracted much attention, the material is still decades behind silicon when it comes to scientists’ understanding of how its properties change under different conditions. One such property is resistance, the flow of electrical current through a material.
A device’s overall resistance is inversely proportional to its size. But devices like semiconductors have contacts that connect them to other electronics. Contact resistance, which is caused by these electrical connections, remains fixed no matter the size of the device. Too much contact resistance can lead to higher power dissipation and slower operating frequencies for electronic circuits.
“Especially when you go to smaller dimensions, a device’s performance often ends up being limited by contact resistance. People have a relatively good understanding of contact resistance at room temperature, but no one has really studied what happens when you go all the way up to 500 degrees,” Niroula says.
For their study, the researchers used facilities at MIT.nano to build gallium nitride devices known as transfer length method structures, which are composed of a series of resistors. These devices enable them to measure the resistance of both the material and the contacts.
They added ohmic contacts to these devices using the two most common methods. The first involves depositing metal onto gallium nitride and heating it to 825 degrees Celsius for about 30 seconds, a process called annealing.
The second method involves removing chunks of gallium nitride and using a high-temperature technology to regrow highly doped gallium nitride in its place, a process led by Rajan and his team at Ohio State. The highly doped material contains extra electrons that can contribute to current conduction.
“The regrowth method typically leads to lower contact resistance at room temperature, but we wanted to see if these methods still work well at high temperatures,” Niroula says.
A comprehensive approach
They tested devices in two ways. Their collaborators at Rice University, led by Zhao, conducted short-term tests by placing devices on a hot chuck that reached 500 degrees Celsius and taking immediate resistance measurements.
At MIT, they conducted longer-term experiments by placing devices into a specialized furnace the group previously developed. They left devices inside for up to 72 hours to measure how resistance changes as a function of temperature and time.
Microscopy experts at MIT.nano (Aubrey N. Penn) and the Technology Innovation Institute (Nitul S. Rajput) used state-of-the-art transmission electron microscopes to see how such high temperatures affect gallium nitride and the ohmic contacts at the atomic level.
“We went in thinking the contacts or the gallium nitride material itself would degrade significantly, but we found the opposite. Contacts made with both methods seemed to be remarkably stable,” says Niroula.
While it is difficult to measure resistance at such high temperatures, their results indicate that contact resistance seems to remain constant even at temperatures of 500 degrees, for around 48 hours. And just like at room temperature, the regrowth process led to better performance.
The material did start to degrade after being in the furnace for 48 hours, but the researchers are already working to boost long-term performance. One strategy involves adding protective insulators to keep the material from being directly exposed to the high-temperature environment.
Moving forward, the researchers plan to use what they learned in these experiments to develop high-temperature gallium nitride transistors.
“In our group, we focus on innovative, device-level research to advance the frontiers of microelectronics, while adopting a systematic approach across the hierarchy, from the material level to the circuit level. Here, we have gone all the way down to the material level to understand things in depth. In other words, we have translated device-level advancements to circuit-level impact for high-temperature electronics, through design, modeling and complex fabrication. We are also immensely fortunate to have forged close partnerships with our longtime collaborators in this journey,” Xie says.
This work was funded, in part, by the U.S. Air Force Office of Scientific Research, Lockheed Martin Corporation, the Semiconductor Research Corporation through the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the U.S. Department of Energy, Intel Corporation, and the Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology.
Fabrication and microscopy were conducted at MIT.nano, the Semiconductor Epitaxy and Analysis Laboratory at Ohio State University, the Center for Advanced Materials Characterization at the University of Oregon, and the Technology Innovation Institute of the United Arab Emirates.
© Image: MIT News; iStock
It's Saturday morning, everyone! Birds are swaying, the trees are singing. Time to celebrate all the ways in which we'll be staying indoors staring at screens. I've given the outside world a go, but it feels a bit unbalanced, a bit glitchy. I think I'll wait until they've added a bit more content. So here's what we'll all be clicking on this weekend!
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Edwin spotted this game called Beta Decay that's not got a release date yet or anything, but looks very cool. It's being developed by Rotoscope Studios and it's a low-poly, 90s-inspired mix of dystopian RPG, survival, third and first-person shooter, with some roguelike bits slapped in there, as well. Whew, that's a lot. Potentially too much. But hey, I am here for something ambitious and interesting, of which it ticks both boxes.
How do you like your survival games? A nice bit of wood chopping while the birds chirp? Gathering some mushrooms while you deflect a little goblin's swings? Stumbling parched through a desert as a bed of scorpions prick your ankles with deadly venom? Well, Enshrouded may provide some or none of these experiences, but what its latest update does is capture their spirit. You'll now be able to choose from several difficulty presets to dampen or spice up the game's challenge. Otherwise, there's new customisation options and some quality of life tweaks, too.
At ten past nine every evening he sends you out into the darkening world. He's the presenter of Krypta FM - pronounced with the chopped staccato of every good radio announcer as Kryp! Ta! FM! - and you are his eager listener and hopeful protege. Sniff the evening air. Breathe deep! The small town world that lies sleeping all around you is just teeming with cryptids, surely. Anyone seen a mothman lately? A werewolf? Grab a camera and get out there - but be safe, okay?
Grimdark hack-and-slasher No Rest For The Wicked has received its first major update - or the first that isn't focused on bug fixes and performance improvements, anyway. It focuses on revamping the Crucible, the endgame's repeatable roguelite, adding more randomisation to arenas and a new system of player buffs.
Wrong answers only please: how did I slice open my finger earlier this week? Bystander in a climactic shinobi duel? Fell afoul of the local mantis shrimp? Got out of bed too quickly? Whatever the case, typing is painful for me at the moment, so let's get straight to it. Here's what we're all clicking on this lovely weekend!
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