Buy 'Destiny' on PS3 or Xbox 360 and upgrade to new-gen for free

   

The wait is almost over: Destiny, former Halo-developer Bungie's ambitious shooter, releases this coming Tuesday. If you're holding out on it because you don't have aPlayStation 4 or Xbox One, though, there's no reason. Bungie has announced that should you purchase the game for PlayStation 3 or Xbox 360, until next January 15th you're eligible for a free upgrade to a current-gen digital copy. That's as long as you within the console family you bought the game for originally. Meaning, if you buy the game for PS3 you'll get a download of it on PS4, gratis. Any extra content like season passes will carry over too -- just like your character's progress and gear.

This goes way beyond what we saw a handful of titles offer around this time last year in a few different ways. For starters, this costs 100 percent less than the upgrade program for, say, Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag or Call of Duty: Ghosts did. The other thing is that you won't have to start from scratch (regardless of how many hours you've invested) when you jump to new hardware; Bungie is making the transition as painless as possible.

Speaking of transitions, Bungie hopes to make Remote Playing its latest effort on the PS Vita simple too. Sony's handheld may be a capable piece of kit but it's lacking total parity with the PlayStation 4's DualShock 4 when it comes to controls. To make up for the handheld's shortage of buttons, Bungie designed a control scheme specifically for playingDestiny on the portable. While the DualShock 4 has a touchpad, the Vita has an entire touch-friendly screen. Bungie has assigned ancillary tasks like tossing grenades, summoning the floating and robotic Peter Dinklage and executing wicked melee attacks to the left, center and right portions of the Vita's display. And, as Eurogamer noticed, since the portable's analog sticks don't click in like their PS4 counterparts, running in-game is handled by pressing down on the system's D-pad.

Why the extra effort? Well, according to the PlayStation Blog, the short-lived Destiny betawas the number one game Remote Played of any PS4 games for all of this past July. Excited? Well, NeoGAF has noticed you can start pre-loading right now.

'Summer Lesson' is the questionable Project Morpheus VR title from the 'Tekken' team

   

Teasing its forthcoming appearance at the Tokyo Game Show later this month, Sony Computer Entertainment Japan revealed a new demo for its prototype VR hardware -- with assistance from the creative forces behind the Tekken fighter series. You should probably put all ideas of a first-person punch-em-up aside though, this is very different. Summer Lesson puts the user inside a typical Japanese schoolgirl's room, where it looks like you just seem to.. chill, interact and hang around, which sounds innocent enough, although there's certainly a creepy element there just by the premise. The teaser didn't explain much else, although the Tekken team's Harada-san was happy to praise the interactivity element of the demo, and the preview video also added some comments about how it felt like someone was really there. We're expecting to feel suitably embarrassed and awkward when we get to test it out at TGS 2014 in a few weeks -- but we're also hoping to get a better grasp of why the team decided to go with something that could easily be so misconstrued for a very conspicuous, very early Project Morpheus showcase. Take a look for yourself: we've posted the entire SCEJ PlayStation press event after the break, and even thoughtfully skipped to the Summer Lesson part, because we're nice like that.

'Destiny' on PS3 is like the PS4 version but blurrier

  
While a bunch of the hype surrounding the Destiny beta is how great developer Bungie's latest shooter looks running on the PlayStation 4, gamers on last-gen hardware have been playing through the weekend too. Based on the video that Digital Foundry put together (embedded below), the PlayStation 3 version expectedly doesn't stack up next to its current-gen counterpart, but it doesn't look terrible, either. If I were to describe it in one word, it'd be "softer." The tech-centric outlet notes that while the levels themselves remain the same the overall shape and size, set dressing like foliage and rocks are less dense (and in some cases, completely missing), and lighting is less complex as well. Most impactful, possibly, is the PS3 game's native resolution. While the PS4 version runs at a native 1920x1080, or 1080p, Destiny on Sony's previous console is running at 1024x624 (sub-720p) -- roughly 30 percent the total pixel count of its current-gen cousin.
The biggest victim? Shadow detail, as evidenced in this thread on NeoGAF. The amount of enemies onscreen, however, apparently doesn't drop so there should be parity between the two versions in terms of how the game actually plays.
Considering that the PS3 is almost eight years old at this point, however, it's kind of a miracle that it's even capable of playing something like Destiny to begin with. And given that there are likely well over 80 million PS3s in the wild at this point and, as of April, only seven million PS4s, it makes sense for developers to continue supporting previous hardware. Take this April's Watch Dogs and next year's Mortal Kombat X, for example.
What about you: is Destiny the game you're upgrading to a new console for (maybe even a white PS4), or hasn't anything on Sony's latest or the Xbox One caught your eye yet? The beta is down for maintenance now anyway, so you should have plenty of time to leave us a note!

Amazon's new games show what only the Fire Phone can do

  

Looks like Amazon plans to take advantage of the Fire phone's head-tracking tech at every turn, so it put its Game Studio to work developing two new titles especially for the device. The first one called Saber's Edge is a strategic pirate puzzle game, while the other, called To-Fu Fury, is a puzzle platformer (think 'Splosion Man) that stars a tofu martial artist. They sound like funny, typical mobile games, other than the fact that they support the Fire phone's "Dynamic Perspective" feature that tracks the movements of a user's head. Sadly, you can't exactly control the games by moving your noggin (that might sound silly, but at least that'll make the games truly unique), but you can peek around the corners to see hidden obstacles or bonuses. Of course, you can always just tilt the phone if you don't want to look silly in public. If you don't mind the games' limited support for the feature, you can grab em for $1.99 each -- but only if you're also getting the Fire Phone, which starts shipping this week.

Microsoft closing Xbox Entertainment Studios

   

As part of its massive round of layoffs, Microsoft is closing Xbox Entertainment Studios (XES), the wing dedicated to producing original video content for the Xbox platform. All is not lost however, as Halo: Nightfall , the Spielberg-produced Halo TV series and Signal to Noise (whose first episode chronicles Atari's rise and fall) will all still continue as planned. We were also told that the studio's Nancy Tellem along with Jordan Levin and "some" of the XES team will remain on staff and working on the aforementioned in-production programming. In an email today (pasted in full after the break) Xbox head Phil Spencer notes that change is never easy, but he believes the studio closure will help the company "better align with longterm goals." We've reached out to the affected studios about what this means for them and will update this post should we hear back.

Recode's sources paint a different picture, however, saying that the studio was disorganized and lacked a fully established business model. Both of which turned off any studio partners and thusly complicating securing any more premium content.

"I hope you have had a chance to read today's mails from Satya. I wanted to take a moment to share a few thoughts on what this means for our team and some of the changes we are making as a result.

In last week's mail outlining some of the steps towards creating the culture and organization to bring our ambitions to life, Satya called out the strategic importance of Xbox as a strong consumer brand, a creative center for gaming and a leader in bold innovation. Every member of Team Xbox should be incredibly proud of the impact and reach your work has within the walls of Microsoft, with our developer community and most importantly, with consumers.

Microsoft is the productivity and platform company for a mobile-first and cloud-first world, and games are the single biggest digital life category in a mobile-first world. Success in this category, by growing a robust Xbox business, brings additional value to Microsoft. I have stated this before, but for Xbox to be successful, we must remain committed to being a consumer-driven organization with the mission of meeting the high expectations of a passionate fan base, to create the best games and to drive technical innovation.

As part of the planned reduction to our overall workforce announced today and in light of our organization's mission, we plan to streamline a handful of portfolio and engineering development efforts across Xbox. One such plan is that, in the coming months, we expect to close Xbox Entertainment Studios. I would like to take this opportunity to recognize the accomplishments from the entire team in XES. They have built an impressive slate of original programming and pioneered interactive entertainment on Xbox, such as the innovative reality series 'Every Street United' that succeeded in uniting audiences around the globe during the recent World Cup.

I am pleased that Nancy, Jordan and members of the XES team remain committed to new, original programming already in production like the upcoming documentary series 'Signal to Noise' whose first installment takes on the rise and fall of gaming icon Atari and of course, the upcoming game franchise series 'Halo: Nightfall,' and the 'Halo' Television series which will continue as planned with 343 Industries. Xbox will continue to support and deliver interactive sports content like 'NFL on Xbox,' and we will continue toenhance our entertainment offering on console by innovating the TV experience through the monthly console updates. Additionally, our app partnerships with world-class content providers bringing entertainment, sports and TV content to Xbox customers around the world are not impacted by this organizational change in any way and remain an important component of our Xbox strategy.

Change is never easy, but I believe the changes announced today help us better align with our long-term goals. We have an incredible opportunity ahead of us to define what the next generation of gaming looks like for the growing Xbox community. I have a great deal of confidence in this team and know that with clarity of focus on our mission and our customers we can accomplish great things together. We already have.

Thank you again for all you do for Xbox.

Phil