Runbow has been a successful game on everything from the Wii U to the XBox One and now it is scheduled for PS4 and Switch - July 3rd. It's a fun, exciting party game where the object of the game is to win the race at ALL costs. Whether you knock someone into a rolling spike ball or make them fall helplessly to their demise, the run ends with getting to the finish line.

All multiplayer modes can be played by up-to 9 players simultaneously online, while it features 8-player local multiplayer madness on Nintendo Switch as well as 4-player local chaos on PlayStation 4.

Dig or Die, a survival game in the vein of Terraria and Starbound, has been in development for three years. Through constant iteration and a strong focus on implementing community feedback, the game has managed a 91% positive rating on Steam, with over 160,000 units sold. Now, Gaddy Games, the French development team behind Dig or Die, have announced that the project will be moving out of Early Access on July 10.

According to the press release, “As employee of CRAFT & Co., a space exploration agency, your latest contract has gone awry and you find yourself stranded on a distant planet. Your objective is to establish a base and accumulate resources in order to build a spaceship and find your way back home. When the daylight fades, however, you’ll have to fight back massive hordes of monsters who just like you, don’t take kindly to unwanted intruders. You will build your defenses, create barricades and turrets to protect yourself against your opponents.”

The list of Early Access features is robust, to say the least. I never do this, but I’m afraid I have to put some of this “under the jump” or “past the leap” or whatever you want to call it. Click the thing to see the features:

I have excellent racing and flight sim controllers, with one notable exception: my rudder pedals are junk. The reason for that is that until recently, junky rudder pedals were all you could get. Their motion is not smooth, they slide around on the floor, the pedals are too close together - the list of faults goes on and on.

Some of the best stuff I own comes from Thrustmaster. It used to be just about everything, but I happened across a good price on a used Fanatec wheel and bought new Fanatec pedals to go with it.  There was nothing wrong with the Thrustmaster racing setup at all, except that Fanatec is a bit better. When I heard the announcement that they had a new set of rudder pedals coming out, I knew two things right away: they were going to cost more then I really want to spend, and that I will eventually buy them anyway.

This is what they announced:

TPR Rudder System

Essentially ripped from the fuselage of an aircraft and made compatible for gaming systems, the TPR Rudder system is a 15-pound steel & aluminum marvel whose precision engineering and use of Thrustmaster’s proprietary PENDUL_R™ technology makes it the first-ever, mass-market pendular rudder systems and instantly becomes one of the most advanced products ever offered to fans of flight sims and flying games.

The TPR Rudder’s unique suspended pendular mechanics combine with minute HEART™* magnetic readings to provide unprecedented precision and fluidity on each of the three axes. In all, no detail has been spared from the chassis to the toe brake, so whether you’re dog-fighting for top gun honors in modern combat jets or warbirds, landing commercial airliners or private jets, or exploring outer space, the TPR Rudder system helps provide total control of your craft right down to the smallest details and adjustments.

I'm sold! Even with a projected street price of $500, I am sold! Thrustmaster will have them on display at the EAA Airventure gathering in Oshokosh, WI in late July and I will be there bright, early, and often trying them out.

Nathan Rowe, the founder of SculptrVR, announced the release of SculptrVR in a post last week on the PlayStation Blog. This new art/creation/3D modeling tool allows user to build objects and sculptures in VR, but with an unheard of level of detail. With the ability to zoom to 10,000x and make fine adjustments, patient users will feasibly be able to create some amazing stuff. I, of course, will be drawing my typical tree and stick figure dog.

“Drawing recognizable objects in 2D requires training and understanding of things like perspective, outlines, and shading. In SculptrVR, you directly lay out 3D shapes, not their lines, and the graphics engine handles perspective and shading. Humans understand the world as objects, not outlines. This means even a 4-year-old can sculpt a recognizable apple, dog, television, tree, or flower,” Rowe says in his post.

Some of the examples of the zoom feature are pretty extreme. There is a great .gif on the blog post where a user zooms in below a giant alien creature to find a tiny astronaut on the ground beneath the creature. Then, zooming in further, a second, even tinier astronaut is revealed nestled in the chest plate of the first astronaut. It’s a pretty stunning visual, and it tells you all you need to know about the capabilities of SculptrVR.

Creations can be uploaded to a shared area for the world to peruse and play with, and a new patch will be coming soon, allowing users to export the objects as .obj and .fbx files.

I love seeing more powerful creative tools coming to PS VR. The ability for VR to unlock creativity in players is only starting to be explored, and I’m fully on board for taking bigger and bigger steps in this direction. My wife has most of the creative juice in our family, so I’m going to try to get her onboard to see what she could come up with. Whatever it is, I’m sure it will be better than a tree and stick figure dog.

SculptrVR is releasing today on the PlayStation Store for $19.99, with a 10% discount for PlayStation Plus members.

It is no secret that I am a fan of both racing sims and last year's F1 game, so hearing about the release of August 24th for the sequel has me already putting on my helmet. F1 2018 should already be a contender for racing sim of the year and from the previews and trailers looks to be a sweet game altogether. However, to sweeten the deal, Codemasters have just announced a pre-order 'Headline Edition' where you can get two championship winning cars. They are the 2009 Brawn BGP-001, and the 2003 Williams FW25. The two cars will also be available as a DLC purchase at a later date.

“The inclusion of classic cars in last year’s game was a huge hit with our players and fans of the sport so we wanted to build on that with the inclusion of more classics in F1 2018,” commented Paul Jeal, Franchise Director for Formula 1 at Codemasters.

F1 2018 is set to green-light on August 24th for PC, PS4, and XBox One and the pre-order is available now. Here is the reveal trailer:

Last week, Epic Games announced at E3 2018 that Fortnite would be expanding its platform presence to include the Nintendo Switch. An important detail in this expansion is that the Nintendo Switch version of Fortnite would have in-game chat available to players. This is a fantastic feature, particularly on the Switch, where players would otherwise have to use Nintendo's mobile-app based chat.

Turtle Beach, a provider of headset and audio accessories, has announced that "it now offers 25 headsets in its current product lineup (not including prior legacy models) that are fully compatible with Fortnite’s in-game chat system on Switch." Even more importantly, those 25 headsets offer a mix of wired and wireless options, so players should have options available to them no matter how they choose to play.

Overall, I think this is a great move for Turtle Beach. They've seen a great deal of success from the rising popularity of the battle royale genre, and the strong balance of quality and affordability their headsets strike should be enticing to Fortnite players on the Switch looking to pick up a headset to improve their game.

If you were looking forward to MechWarrior 5 you're unfortunately going to be waiting a bit longer.  Piranha president Rus Bullock announced today that the game will be slipping into 2019 so that they can deliver the best single player experience possible.

The company is expecting to announce when in 2019 the game will be released at it's MechCon convention in December.  While this is certainly frustrating news for those of us who were looking forward to playing the game this year I'm hopeful that the wait will be worth it. 

The trailer shows it better than I can describe it, but the latest update to Fishing: Barents Sea seems to be very close to being a complete rebuild. While a lot of the new features are visual improvements, that does not make them trivial. The atmosphere of the game was already pretty good, but with more rooms on your boat to explore and more AI activity on the water, the feeling of actually "being there" is even more profound.

I also have to say that I, for one, am firmly in favor of an improved fish gutting process. I could never figure out what was expected of me, so I simply gave up on collecting the additional revenue to be gained by delivering pre-gutted fish to market. I am also tremendously grateful for the addition of a pair of binoculars - it was pretty hard to find my marker buoys at times. That said, I never really liked fishing in the fog, so any changes there really don't matter to me. 

A full list of the changes and improvements can be seen below.

Bandai Namco Entertainment dropped an expanded E3 trailer late last week, and I really want to hear the music that they use in the trailer without the dialog and sound effects. Very interesting mix of Gregorian chants and the Danger Zone. And just when it sounds like its about to kick into overdrive, someone starts talking.  Boo!  Hush up, fool!

Beyond the cool song, the trailer offers a tantalizing glimpse of Ace Combat’s signature stunning visuals. The brief trailer also hints that player characters are not military, but are actually prisoners being forced to fly missions to work off their crimes. Interesting story hook. If I were a prisoner and this were an option, I would probably jump at the chance. While I would quickly be blown out of the sky in real life, I would still opt for the whole “fighter pilot” option over rotting in a jail cell. Do I get training? Do I gain skills? Would a career as a fighter pilot be waiting for me upon release? I have questions!

No release date yet, but Ace Combat 7: Skies Unknown is being developed for the PlayStation 4, Xbox One and Steam. I haven’t heard much about the PS VR functionality lately, but I’m assuming that Bandai Namco have not completely cancelled the feature. Time will tell, but I'm pretty interested in checking this one out. It's been a while since we got an Ace Combat title, and it will be cool to see what the dev team can do with the power of modern consoles.

Heliborne was an addiction that I went through last winter. You can read about it here.

With the latest update, a new map has been added: the map is called Binomo Islands, and the accompanying mission is named Operation Fznamznon. The hallmark of the unpronounceable mission as compared to the legacy missions is that the players are not based on land, as they have been in all previous missions, but are based on new aircraft carriers that are also included in the update. The goal of the missions are generally troop support, which can include softening up shore-based defenses and providing cover for dock landing ships, hovercrafts, and light armored vehicles. 

I had moved on from Heliborne as new addictions were discovered, but it looks like I'm going to have to go back to it - carrier-based helicopter missions are irresistible to me.

Heliborne is available on Steam for $19.99.