The Sims 4 Glitch Is Making Horses Horrifying

If it isn’t riddled with a bunch of off-putting glitches, did publisher EA even release a new The Sims 4 expansion pack? The latest pack, Horse Ranch, which came out on July 20, appears to be crawling with a number of bizarre bugs players have been drawing attention to since the add-on was in previews.

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On July 19, for example, YouTuber onlyabidoang noticed that aging up a just-born foal seems to fuse it to its human rider, prompting it to start walking on two legs while facing the opposite direction, like some kind of glued-together, equine cryptid. To the mutated horse’s credit, it seemed relaxed, despite its head being on backwards.

“She’s just trying her best to blend in,” the YouTuber said.

Despite onlyabidoang’s bringing attention to it, the haunting glitch apparently made it through to the expansion pack’s actual release, and players on TikTok were disappointed to find that their Horse Ranch pets weren’t as cute as they’d expected them to be. That’s because their adorable horse heads were still, regrettably, on backwards, and, in some cases, another set of hooves seemed to protrude from the legs laying limp at their sides.

“The fact that this bug was discussed during preview, and they STILL left it in,” one incredulous commenter said on TikTok. “Unbelievable.”

“I feel like Sims crew lets [issues] slide for a while just for the hilarious videos it gets, and then it fixes [them] in updates,” said another popular comment.

The Sims 4 released in 2014, but nearly a decade of modifications and official add-ons from developer Maxis still haven’t guaranteed its perfection. Before horses started walking backwards, blocking and teleporting players who attempted to mount them, and occasionally forcing players to T-pose in Horse Ranch, other Sims glitches this year turned babies into Slenderman and made hot people ugly.

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EA has not yet publicly commented on the majority of Horse Ranch bugs, though it did recently fix an issue causing missing text strings in the expansion. Kotaku reached out for more information.

 

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by pbnbigesdi Posted on

Microsoft Is Finally Done Making Kinect (For Real This Time)

Don Mattrick shows off the Xbox One on a stage.

Photo: Bloomberg / Contributor (Getty Images)

It finally happened. Microsoft has fully ended production of Kinect hardware. And no, you didn’t stumble upon an article from 2014. Yes, it’s 2023 and Microsoft, in case you didn’t know, has been still trying to make Kinect work, just not in the gaming space. Well, today Microsoft has thrown in the towel.

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A sophisticated motion sensing camera, Kinect first premiered on the Xbox 360 in 2010. While the tech was rather neat, Kinect arguably struggled to appeal to many gamers and gained a reputation for necessitating various shovelware games such as Fable: The Journey. In 2013, Microsoft revealed that the Kinect would ship with each Xbox One. While the new Kinect unit was technically impressive, it once again failed to gain a foothold with, well, just about anyone. Microsoft later stopped bundling the Kinect with Xbox One, and the device moved on to Microsoft’s mixed reality and enterprise solutions. Keeping the Kinect name, Microsoft offered the Azure Kinect Developer Kit in 2019 to those looking to implement its depth-sensing technology in various business environments. And today, that chapter of the Kinect’s life comes to a close.

“As the needs of our customers and partners evolve, we regularly update our products to best support them,” a Microsoft blog announcing the death of the Azure Kinect Developer Kit opens.

But while Azure Kinect Developer Kit has now ended production, the tech seems like it will continue to live on. Microsoft shouted out Orbbec’s new Femto Bolt, a device very similar to the Azure Kinect DK, as providing the hardware necessary for those still interested in working with 3D depth camera technology. Via a dedicated software pipeline, developers will be able to use Azure Kinect DK software on the Femto Bolt. Meanwhile, Microsoft states that it plans to continue providing the necessary software tools to work with Azure Kinect DKs still out there in the wild.

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The Final Shape Takes Players Inside The Traveler For A Fight 10 Years In The Making

Ikora Rey and Cayde-6 prepare for The Final Shape.

Image: Bungie

Today we got our first look at The Final Shape, the last expansion in Destiny 2‘s “Light and Darkness” saga that was first set in motion back in 2014. It arrives February 27, 2024, and it’s looking great so far.

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As revealed during Destiny 2‘s annual showcase, The Final Shape will take players inside The Traveler, the giant space ball they’ve spent almost a decade staring at, as they try to prevent a nefarious cosmic entity known as The Witness from using The Traveler’s Light to do terrible things. The source of the power it’s after is a location called the Pale Heart, which Bungie is calling Destiny’s first linear adventure.

Here’s the teaser trailer:

The game’s developers describe the Pale Heart as a shape-shifting labyrinth that begins at the ruins of Destiny 1‘s Tower, and eventually shifts to deadly locales where things get turned upside down and the rules of physics get twisted. The Pale Heart will also be full of a new enemy type called Enforcers. These Witness henchmen will wield Darkness powers like Stasis and Strand, and in practice they look like a mashup of The Witch Queen’s Light-powered Hive and Lightfall’s scyth-carrying Tormentors.

Players will also get access to new Solar, Void, and Arc supers for each class. Void Titans will throw magic axes that get lodged in the ground and explode. Arc Hunters will get an electric quarter staff that lets it blink forward, buff nearby allies, and perform fighting game-like moves on enemies.

And or course there are new Exotic weapons, including returning gear from Destiny 1 like the Dragon’s Breath rocket launcher and Red Death pulse rifle. New Exotics include a gun you can suck your grenade into and one that can swap between dealing damage and healing allies.

            

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The Best Retro Console Creators Are Making A Nintendo 64

A silhouette shows Analogue's new N64 compatible console.

Image: Analgoue

Analogue, maker of retro consoles for games from the SNES to the Game Boy, are back with their most ambitious project yet: a Nintendo 64-compatible machine called the Analogue 3D.

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The company hasn’t announced a price point or release date beyond “2024,” but with no official N64 Mini from Nintendo and the pitfalls of emulated N64 games ported to Switch Online, it could end up being Analogue’s biggest launch ever. That’s bad news for anyone who remembers the painful wait to try and get a pre-order for the Analogue Pocket, but great news for everyone with a collection of old N64 games who wants to be able to play them at the best quality possible.

The Analogue 3D promises to output video at 4K resolution and support a wireless controller made by 8BitDo via Bluetooth. Because Analogue’s devices are FPGA-based, the games are played at the hardware level, reducing the lag and output issues from emulated solutions most people are familiar with on PC, smartphones, and even Nintendo’s own products.

“Even Nintendo can’t get it right with ports, software emulation is about 90 percent compatible with tons of issues,” Analogue founder Christopher Taber wrote in an email. “This is where emulation takes a real cliff dive. Analogue 3D solves all of it.”

Because Analogue’s devices are only intended to play original cartridges, there’s no official support for copyrighted ROMs. That’s something the company has always been very emphatic about, even as fans have found ways to jailbreak the devices and eventually side-load games without using the original cartridges.

Instead, the Analogue 3D is, on paper at least, aimed at players with an existing library of N64 games who want to be able to experience them again in a more perfect format. Given the timelessness of the console’s multiplayer games, including Mario Kart 64, Super Smash Bros. 64, GoldenEye 007, and Wave Race 64, I’m sure there are plenty of retro connoisseurs out there who would jump at the chance to see their nostalgic couch-coop sessions looking good on 4K displays with no compromises on performance.

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