Street Fighter X Tekken‘s roster is already bursting with fan favorites from both sides, and today we can add two more iconic characters to the list – and in this case, they’re exclusive to PS3 and PS Vita players…
Two iconic mascots, Pac-Man and Mega Man, join the fray with existing PlayStation exclusives Cole, Kuro and Toro. However, both mascots arrive in altered forms to create battles unique to Street Fighter X Tekken; Pac-Man rides Tekken’s Mokujin, while Mega Man references the “classic” bad box art from the original US Mega Man.
Street Fighter X Tekken for the PS3 launches March 6, with the PS Vita to follow!
After last week’s discussion on video game production with SCEA Senior Producer Kyle Shubel, we wanted to shed some light on the other side of the digital curtain — video game media. In this week’s five-way free-for-all, we’re joined by Joystiq’sLudwig Kietzmann, who recently moved to San Francisco from South Africa (lekker!). In his new role as Editor-in-Chief of Joystiq, Ludwig now sits astride one of the biggest, most influential videogame blogs on the ‘net. In today’s episode, Ludwig gives some tips for would-be video game journalists, describes the South African gaming scene, names some of his most anticipated upcoming PlayStation titles, and even graces us with a new PSN Gem of the Week.
In addition to debuting the new PSN game releases for next Tuesday, January 31st (including a mysterious new demo…), we also highlight some of your most-anticipated 2012 games, answer a new batch of user questions, and serve up another farm-fresh user tip. Jeff, Rey and I also chat about our recent experiences at the PS Vita social clubs (now open for hands-on gameplay in eight US cities through late February) and why PlayStation fans are the best in the business. Seriously!
How’s our driving? We want your feedback, comments, questions, and suggestions, so leave ‘em in the comments below!
[Editor’s note: PSN game release dates are subject to change without notice. Game details are gathered from press releases from their individual publishers and/or ESRB rating descriptions.]
There are a number of reasons why young adult rehab need to be targeted to a specific age group. This population is generally defined as young men and women between the ages of 18 and 25. The human brain does not become fully developed before the age of 30.
Permanent Damage
Becoming addicted to alcohol or drugs while the brain is still developing can lead to irreversible damage. The scale of the problem is massive. In the United States at the beginning of the 21st Century, 115,000 young adults were enrolled into rehabilitation programs. The actual number of young addicts would have been considerably higher, given that only a small proportion of them have access to rehabilitation facilities.
The Three Priorities
Experts agree that we face three essential tasks during our formative years. These are separating from our parents, deciding what our life’s work is to be and finding a mate. Distractions of living a life consumed by addiction severely disrupts this process.
12 Steps
Many rehabilitation programs employ the now-familiar Twelve-Step program. This was established originally to help alcoholics overcome their addiction and its associated problems. First, they admit that they are powerless over their addictions. Next, they acknowledge that there is a higher power in whom they can find strength to overcome their problems. Finally, they are encouraged to make a list of those who have been damaged by their actions and to find them and make amends.
Gender
Young women have very different needs from those of men and their rehabilitation must be structured accordingly. Their treatment needs to be planned with their age and gender in mind. Women are more easily addicted. Alcohol or drug dependence can force them into harmful relationships with people who manipulate them for their own gain.Men, too, have needs that are specific to their gender. These are the years when they establish their own identity. They require understanding as they metamorphose from adolescence to becoming an adult.
Religious Convictions
Many intensive outpatient programs utilize the Twelve Steps. The Twelve Steps recognize a higher power who figures prominently in this approach to mental therapy. This begs the question of what approaches are available for atheists who require rehabilitation. They do not acknowledge the presence of a higher power and if they did, they would not blame Him for their problems. At this sensitive age, they certainly do not need to be made to feel like failures for not believing. Atheists respond best to approaches that are not based on a deity or a faith but on scientific principles. Motivation Enhancement Therapy, Behavior Therapy and Cognitive Behavior Therapy have all been used with good results in this population.
If you want to travel outside the United States or want an unassailable personal identity document, you’ll want to get an official US travel document. The procedure how to get a pass port is simple but must be followed precisely. The details below are for an adult applying for a new one, not getting one renewed.
Process
The definition for a “new” passport is actually a fairly broad category. Obviously, if you’ve never had one and this is your first application, this procedure applies to you. However, you are also considered to be getting a new passport if yours has been stolen, damaged or lost. “New” also applies to you if your old one was issued more than 15 years ago or if you’ve changed your name since your current passport was issued, but you can’t legally document your name change.
Documents
You will have to fill out federal from DS-11, which you can download off a variety of government websites. You’ll find the instructions for filling it out directly on the form. This is an application, so if you want yours to be accepted, it’s probably best to fill out this form and fully and accurately as possible. Of course, you also want to be completely truthful on it as well. There’s a different form for renewing US online passport.
ID
With your DS-11 form, you’ll have to show proof of your identity. While you’ll be able to use this travel document as ID once you get it, you can’t use this process to establish your identity. You’ll have to show the government first that you are exactly who you say you are before you can get further additional documentation. The easiest way to prove your identity is by including a copy of what’s called primary proof of identity. This category includes a current military ID, driver’s license, naturalization certificate, or any current government issued identification.
Certificates Of Citizenship
You will also have to include proof that you’re a US citizen. Anyone with a naturalization certificate can use that as proof of both citizenship and identity. If you were born an American citizen, then you’ll have to provide either a long form, certified birth certificate, citizenship certificate, or consular report of birth abroad.
Fees
The last two pieces you’ll need are a color photo, sized exactly at two by two inches. The photo can’t be more than six months old and your face must be fully visible. You’ll also need to include a check for the passport fees. The exact fee you’ll have to pay can vary based on your application, so you should check the online schedule of relevant fees.
Sending Application
Now that you have all the required pieces of your application packet, you’ll need to deliver it to an authorized US passport office. Don’t worry, there are so many all over the country that you doubtlessly have one near you. You can find full listing of these offices online. They are most often located in popular public buildings, such as libraries, post offices or courthouses. Once you know which office you’ll visit, call it before just walking through the door. Some offices will only accept applications by appointment.
The previous two seasons of PlayStation Network’s original reality show The Tester offered the winner the chance to work among Sony’s brightest minds as a game tester at Sony Computer Entertainment America. As you’ve probably heard, for season 3, the ultimate prize is truly the chance of a lifetime: the winner of The Tester 3 will become a production associate at Sony’s world-famous Santa Monica Studio.
We thought you might like to take a peek behind the scenes of this state-of-the-art studio to meet some of the talented folks involved in the biggest titles on the platform: Shannon Studstill (senior director), Stig Asmussen (director of God of War III), Todd Papy (design director), Whitney Wade (senior producer), and Deborah Mars (executive producer). You might remember Deborah and Stig appeared as guest panelists in season 2 of The Tester. Check out this exclusive inside look at Santa Monica Studio.
As you can see, Santa Monica Studio is filled with some of the best talent in the games industry, and the very people who make PlayStation’s top games will be teaching and guiding the winner of The Tester 3 in their new role as a production associate on their next big AAA title.
As an added bonus this week, we have a behind the scenes look inside the PlayStation Loft where the cast will be living this season. It’s filled with tons of great games and gadgets, so we know this season’s contestants will feel right at home. Take a look at the redesigned PlayStation Loft in the “extras” section of our main site.
With only 2 weeks until the season premiere on Tuesday, February 7th, we hope you’re as exited for The Tester 3 as we are. Be sure to check out our main site to meet all the contestants, panelists, and guests you’ll be seeing this season, and check back here next Tuesday for a sneak peek at the first episode of The Tester 3.
When applying for passports, it is important to remember that your children need one as well. However this can be easy to forget. What you may not know is that same day US kids pass port are available. If you want your children to be able to travel with you, be sure they are equipped with their own travel document.
24-Hour Time Frame
The main benefit of this is being able to complete the process at short notice. Often when you are travelling, there is a lot of preparation and even important details can be forgotten until the last minute. Applying for a 24-hour passport for your child is a real time saver. However in order to make sure the process is successful, you need to provide the right information and have the right forms.
Parental Consent
First, ensure you have the right application form. When you fill it out, be sure you obey all the stated requirements regarding the color of ink you are to use and complete all requests for information. For example you should not sign it until you have been instructed to do so in the presence of the passport agent who must witness your signature. Also be sure you have the requested identification documents.
Identification
The best form of identification is a birth certificate. The agency will copy your original document and return it to you. If the birth certificate is not available or cannot be found, you can use an expired passport as an alternative as long as it is in good condition. Both parents or guardians must provide acceptable identification during this process and if one parent can’t be present, a notarized authorization letter must be presented giving permission for the child’s travel.
Parental Consent
The problem of an absentee parent is easily overcome by providing written consent allowing the child to travel. Remember that this letter must be notarized. It is also vital to have two passport photos. These must be taken in accordance with all government rules and regulations for passport photos. You also need to present proof of the departure date. This can be in the form of a ticket or travel itinerary.
Photos
After all your documents are together and completed, you can submit them with the appropriate fee. There will most likely be an additional fee for expedited service but in an emergency, this service is well worth the price paid. Submission can occur at your local passport agency, your local post office or at a courthouse. After they have processed your paperwork, they will return the documents to you in a sealed envelope. You need to keep it sealed or the documents will be voided.
Receipt of Your Completed Documents
Once all expedited US passport forms have been filled out and photos have been taken, it is time to present your documentation and pay the applicable fees. This can be done at a passport agency, courthouse or post office. You will be advised how long the process will take and when to expect your travel document but remember that these passports can be available on the same day as your application.
Stick Man Rescue was born of a conversation with my 12-year old son, Colin. He had just discovered the freeware Pivot Stick Figure Animator and, like any 12-year-old boy would, he was using it to make hilarious death animations. Given that game designers are perpetual 12-year-olds at heart, I joined in. This prompted visits to various stick man death websites which provided a surprisingly long-lasting source of giggles that attracted my younger son. Soon the three of us were pondering how to make stick deaths into a video game.
Dusting off my rusty programming and non-existent art skills, I co-opted my kids to start making animated gifs of stick deaths and created a prototype game bent on seeing how many of our most ridiculous ideas could be worked into it. So, I had a prototype as you can see, but had a long way to go to turn it into something that could be useful for a real game design.
Working at a publisher and developer like TikGames has its advantages. First, there are a bunch of talented people around to help hone ideas into something that works. I enlisted the help of Adrian Ludley, our Creative Director, who gave the game its look. He drew this for us to get the art team started:
Key to the fun factor of the game was how to get levels built and put into the game engine without having to write a bunch of custom tools. Custom tools are nice, but require significant dedicated engineering resources. We opted to use a modified version of “Tile Studio.” Straight-forward as this tool is, it covered our needs and learning to use it didn’t require too much time up front. It served us well. Its output looks like this… not super WYSIWYG, but really easy to use and quick when corrections need to be made.
The 30 deadly levels came about thanks to this tool and the help of colleagues like Allen Widner and Bob Goad. I enlisted my family to help not just with the concept, but also with more of the game. All those voices of stick men yelling “help” or “thank you” or “Aaaaaahhhh” are just recordings of my wife, my kids and me that were sped up using “Audacity.”
Nothing gets fun by itself. In the end, you have to play your game. When you’re done playing your game, you tweak it, tune it, polish it, and then do the whole process over and over and over. This is where game developers find out just how much they actually LOVE games.
Tuning can’t happen properly without a very important set of people… friends, family and random strangers who you can con into playing your game. These people are needed because by the time a game is getting ready to be tuned, every member of the team has played it for literally thousands of hours. If we tune the game to our own skill level, no player on earth, no matter how talented they may be, can hope to play the game and have fun. Now that the tuning is done, I hope everyone whose so inclined will laugh, swear and scream their way through this irreverent homage to the art of stick man murder.
Welcome to the second blog on Doctor Who: The Eternity Clock. I’m Simon Harris and I am the Executive Producer for BBC Worldwide on the game, which means the project is my overall responsibility. I need to ensure that all aspects come together to make a great game that stays true to the Doctor Who brand. This means working with our developer, Supermassive Games, across areas such as design, art and programming. It also extends to working with the Doctor Who teams in London and Cardiff to ensure that everything looks and feels as it should.
For this blog post, I thought I would give you some insight into the monsters which will be appearing in the game. This goes alongside our first gameplay trailer, released today, which showcases them.
Choosing the monsters for the game turned out to be a more of a complicated process than you would imagine. Initially, when Supermassive put in their design pitch for the game, they had chosen the four monsters they would like to see, both as Doctor Who fans and from a gameplay point of view. However, at that time they weren’t aware of the new monsters that were going to be shown in the new series, which was just about to start on the BBC. Given the high level of security we place on information about the show, there were some great discussions where we had to talk very cryptically about a specific monster. We had to balance this with trying to understand what the design team at Supermassive wanted to achieve – we didn’t want to include new monster if it completely broke the gameplay plans. Thankfully the design change felt good and The Silence was added to the monster line up. I’m not going to tell you which one got cut, but I can promise it will make appearance in a future game.
Having settled on our monster line up — the Silence, Cybermen, Silurians and the Daleks — work started on the detailed game design on how they would challenge the Doctor and River. We also had to start modelling the characters for the in-game graphics. Accuracy is vital, and it was essential to have the models looking like they do in the show. It was great to start working with the Doctor Who teams in London and Cardiff to ensure our dimensions, the shaders (the technical term for an aspect of the graphics which give a texture a look and feel to it such as steel or cloth) and the colours were all entirely correct.
It was during this process that something slightly surprising happened. The art team at Supermassive were getting really positive feedback on how the monsters looked, which was great, and the Doctor Who team then asked if we could make some changes that deviated from the reference photos. It turns out that there were a number of small tweaks which the team would have loved to make to the designs of the monsters on the show, but had been unable to for various reasons. At this point they saw the opportunity to make these tweaks in our monster designs. Of course, we were more than happy to include these amendments. So, whilst your watching the trailers or playing the game, send a tweet to @DoctorWhoTEC if you think you know what the tweaks we have made are… We would love to see how eagle eyed the fans are!
Having got our standard monsters all approved and looking great, we turned our attention to the game “bosses.” As all Doctor Who fans know, there is always a leader or central character driving the troops forward and so we wanted to see if we could create some monster leaders which really utilised the technology and visuals we have at our disposal working on PS3 and PS Vita.
The team at Supermassive spent a huge amount of time looking at all of the reference of the monsters from previous shows, games, as well as the massive amount of books, webisodes and other content available. The team then proposed two new versions of existing monsters which would become the finales for our monsters. This was a pretty nervous time; we wanted monsters that felt as scary as they do in the show and matched the scale of the locations and environments we were creating for the game. Creating a new version of a classic Doctor Who monster is a big ask – they have to be carefully detailed and you must establish exactly where they sit within the canon of the show. Thankfully, the Doctor Who team loved what we were suggesting and both of our new monster versions were approved and are in the game. There is a tiny sight of one of them in our new monster trailer; again, tweet @DoctorWhoTEC if you think you know which one it is…
So, just an insight into some of the thinking and things that happened to get our monsters into Doctor Who: The Eternity Clock. I’ll be back soon with another blog detailing more information on what goes on behind the scenes of making our game.
The residential care homes and other drug treatment facilities that are found in sober living Florida offer a safe haven for individuals who are going through early rehabilitation from drug, alcohol or other addiction. The cost of living is surprisingly reasonable here, perhaps because of the yearly threat of hurricanes. The standard of living is very high and you enjoy warm climate most of the year as well as gorgeous sandy beaches.
Community Living
One advantage of living in a communal environment with people in the same boat is the support structure available to help keep you from relapsing. The first 90 days of rehabilitation are the hardest and the first month is the most difficult. Living among people who are all aiming at the same goal, complete sobriety, provides a better chance for success.
12-Step Program
While the environment is not obsessively about addiction recovery, residents are encouraged to stay straight and sober. Sometimes, residence is dependent upon enrolling in a 12-step program. This program was founded in the early half of the twentieth century to offer support and guidance to recovering alcoholics. Many of the principles apply to any form of addiction, such as acknowledging that the individual is powerless over their compulsion, that there is a Supreme Being in whom they can trust to guide them and making amends to those have been hurt in the wake of an addicts drug-using lifestyle.
Accommodations
The living accommodations are very comfortable and attractive. They are equipped to a high standard and provide an important sense of worthiness. They have private kitchens, bedrooms, bathrooms and living areas. Often, each apartment has its own large-screen television, free Internet access and laundry facilities. Soft furnishings and cookware are often provided. Counseling, relapse prevention workshops and recovery support groups are available. These facilities offer a good range of pastimes that don’t involve harmful addictive substances.
Activities
Social activities may include volleyball, swimming pool and exercise rooms. Sports, leisure and community activities are essential to any recovery program. They give the residents a choice of non-drug using activities as well as the chance to interact with other people and form drug-free relationships.
Convenience
Most apartments are within easy walking distance of public transportation, shopping and 12-step meetings. Alcohol and drug screening as well as private guidance counseling may also be included in the package. If meetings are not actually held on site, you can be sure they are within easy striking distance.
Off-Site Living
Some meth detox facilities offer off-site homes as an intermediate step in the recovery process. Residents here are graduates of an early recovery program. These residences have similar facilities to the early recovery programs but with more independence. All necessary counseling and support services are available.
