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Apple launches Back to School promotion with free Beats headphones offer
Octopath Traveler: The Kotaku Review
Fortnite Season 5: Couldn't Care Less, Watching 'Friends'

Apple launches Back to School promotion with free Beats headphones offer

Posted: 12 Jul 2018 08:04 AM PDT

Apple has commenced its summer back-to-school promotion, offering its education customers free Beats headphones on top of existing savings for select Mac desktops and iPad Pro models, as well as discounts on other related products.

An annual sales event, the Back To School promotions are open to anyone who qualifies for Apple education pricing, which includes students, teachers, and college and university employees, among other people eligible to buy from the store.

The promotion applies to purchases made through Apple's online Education store, Apple's retail outlets, over the phone via 1-800-MY-APPLE in the United States, and a limited number of campus stores.

For qualifying Mac purchases, Apple will provide free Beats Solo 3 Wireless headphones, in the new Beats Pop Collection colors. The Macs are also available discounted at up to $200 off normal consumer pricing, with AppleCare offered at 20 percent off the usual retail price.

The deals include MacBooks starting from $1,249, the MacBook Air from $849, and the just-updated MacBook Pro from $1,249. For the desktop models, the iMac is available from $1,049, the iMac Pro from $4,599, and the Mac Pro from $2,799.

A similar Beats offer is being provided for the iPad Pro, with a pair of Powerbeats 3 Wireless offered with participating purchases, again using the Beats Pop Collection colors. The 20 percent AppleCare discount and educational pricing also applies to the iPad Pro in the sale, which is available from $629.

Under education pricing, the Apple Pencil is also offered at a discounted $89, instead of $99.

Apple's Back To School page also promotes other discount programs offered by the company, including the Pro Apps Bundle for $199.99, and Apple Music's student pricing of $4.99 per month. A College Essentials page takes visitors to other items that could be useful in higher education, including HomePods, AirPods, the Apple TV 4K, and assorted accessories.

The promotion is running in a wide number of countries, including the United States, Canada, and Mexico, as well as markets in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. In Europe, this includes the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Belgium, Hungary, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Poland, Austria, Switzerland, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Spain, Portugal, and Turkey, with the promotion also available in Singapore and the United Arab Emirates.

Buying from an Apple authorized reseller may save you even more

There are several other ways to save even more without having to go through Apple's education verification process. Apple authorized resellers are currently discounting Mid 2017 MacBook Pros by up to $350 with exclusive coupons. Closeout iMac and MacBook Pro models are also on sale with markdowns of up to $1,300 off. Many resellers will not collect sales tax on most orders as well — and some offer 0% financing.

To compare prices across all Mac lines, please visit AppleInsider's Mac Price Guide to find up-to-date deals and special offers.</span>

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Octopath Traveler: The Kotaku Review

Posted: 12 Jul 2018 06:00 AM PDT

Eight people gather in a tavern, swapping stories and preparing for adventure. It’s not clear why they’re traveling together—there’s a pious cleric and a murderous dancer in this odd crew—but they’ve united nonetheless.

As they wander across the world, each of these people gets their turn to take the reins. In one city the hunter will continue her desperate quest to save her master; in another, the merchant will hustle her wares. Urgency is irrelevant. It doesn’t matter that one woman is racing against time to rescue a kidnapped family member. When the scholar wants to hunt down a missing book, she’ll happily come along. She won’t complain. She’s just there for the ride.

Some of these stories are entertaining, others trite, but they’re always independent. They never intersect or share common ground. To buy that these eight adventurers would team up, putting aside their own motives to help each other out, requires a suspension of disbelief well beyond what most video games ask of the people who play them. Why would a hardened thief spend so much of his time hanging out with a goody-two-shoes healer? It’s never quite explained.

Octopath Traveler feels disparate and unsettling, like someone took out pieces from eight different Lego sets and stuck them all together. The game is not elegant enough to make up for that.

Octopath Traveler, out Friday for Nintendo Switch, is designed to be a callback to old-school role-playing games. With sprites inspired by Final Fantasy VI and a structure reminiscent of SaGa Frontier and Live-A-Live, this game has been eyed as a holy grail for anyone who misses the golden age, the days when developer Square Enix pumped out classic after classic. Indeed, it’s got everything you might expect from a turn-based JRPG: levels, side quests, character classes, a variety of items and equipment, and so on.

The first thing you’ll notice is the production values, and there, Octopath Traveler never stops impressing. The soundtrack is stellar, full of piano and horns and pennywhistles, and it all looks gorgeous, as if Square’s artists from the 1990s had never stopped sharpening their pixels. Plastering two-dimensional sprites on three-dimensional backgrounds, the game is full of eye candy, from endless deserts to snowy fields to one very familar-looking opera house.

Yet Octopath Traveler is shallow, disjointed, and unbelievably repetitive. The combat system is excellent, which helps keep the game enjoyable even through its grindiest moments, but even that can’t mask the game’s many structural flaws.

The game consists of eight standalone stories about eight different characters (hence: “Octopath Traveler”). Each of these stories is four chapters long, making for a total of 32 chapters. Thirty-one of these chapters follow the same pattern. You enter a town, watch some cut-scenes, talk to people in the town using your character’s Path Action (more on that later), watch some more cut-scenes, go into a dungeon, and fight a boss. Then the chapter ends.

All of these dungeons also follow a pattern. There are around 50 dungeons in the game, some optional, and every single one is identical: There’s one main path, and then there are branches that lead to treasure chests. Sure, the aesthetics will change—maybe you’ll descend the depths of a sewer, fight through a haunted forest, or explore a mansion—but every dungeon in the game has the same structure. Once you’ve played through one of these dungeons, you’ve seen them all.

Even some of the bosses feel like clones. Each of the eight Chapter 2 bosses, for example, stands next to a pair of minions who must be destroyed before you can damage the boss’s weaknesses. This is less interesting the sixth time it happens.

What makes this structure even more tedious is the grind. Every chapter has a “recommended level,” gating you off until your party is strong enough, which essentially stops you from powering through each story one at a time. You’ll probably need to grind a little bit no matter what. Problem is, only your four active party members get experience. Anyone you’ve recruited who’s not in your party will just sit in the tavern, unleveled, waiting until you’re ready to help them find treasure or save their loved ones or whatever else. And they won’t quickly gain levels to catch up to the rest of the party when you beat a tough enemy, like characters might in a Suikoden game. Leveling from the 20s to the 40s will always be a sluggish process. Thanks to these level gates, finishing all eight stories is a chore.

You also can’t feasibly play each story in linear order because of the level requirements, so you’ll likely switch off as you go, which means you lurch from one storyline to another. It’s not that Octopath Traveler’s stories are particularly hard to follow, as packed with clichés as they are, but each chapter of the game introduces a handful of new non-player characters. Many of those NPCs look the same, thanks to the game’s wonderful but indistinguishable sprite work. The game offers a story refresher at the beginning of each new chapter, which is helpful, but it’s hard to even remember everything that’s happened in all eight stories, let alone stay emotionally invested.

Really, it’s hard to stay emotionally invested for a lot of reasons. The characters’ stories are too shallow and trite to make much of an impact. They have their good and bad moments. The merchant Tressa’s story of salesmanship is a delight, and the apothecary Alfyn’s tale asks some interesting questions—are you obligated to heal a man you know is a murderer? Less appealing is the hunter Ha’anit’s tale thanks to her story’s incomprehensible word soup of olde English. (Sample dialogue: “Comen now, girl! Thou’rt too young by half for such world-weary sighs. Must thou makest our parting so gloomy?”)

NOTE: There’s been a lot of confusion over whether Octopath Traveler’s eight stories overlap or lead to some sort of epilogue. After finishing all eight, we’ve seen nothing like that. It’s not clear whether the game contains any sort of bonus endgame content—Nintendo says that it does, but the publisher could not tell us before publication what that content is or how to access it, only saying that it was “a matter of completing the storylines and some side quests.”

During each of these stories, the game pretends that nobody else is around. You’ll only see the hero of any given story in cut-scenes, which is jarring when you know they’ve got a full party with them. One late chapter’s scene, for example, features a dramatic turnaround where a villain escapes after gravely injuring the main character. For Octopath Traveler to ignore the three other characters—who are following that main character around and participating in every battle—is hard to get over. Why couldn’t one of them stopped the villain? Your party members can interact during optional Tales-style vignettes between cut-scenes, but they’re insignificant, just there for flavor. As you’re progressing through each main story, the party won’t talk.

Most JRPGs ask you to suspend your disbelief in some way—sure, you can fly around the world raising chocobos even though a meteor is about to destroy the world—but Octopath Traveler takes it to an extreme. You have to spend the entire game not only buying that a noble cleric and honorable swordsman would hang out with a nasty thief, but that they’d participate in his heists. You have to buy into a whole lot of narrative decisions that simply don’t make sense.

It may sound at this point like I hated Octopath Traveler, but in fact, I enjoyed most of my time with it, for a simple reason: The moment-to-moment gameplay is actually pretty great. That’s all because of this game’s strongest element—the combat system.

Every fight in Octopath Traveler takes place on a turn-based battlefield, with your party on the right and enemies on the left. You’ll see the turn order on top of the screen, while underneath each bad guy you’ll see a row of weaknesses, displayed at first as question marks, alongside a shield with a number on it. Every time you attack an enemy’s weakness, be it a weapon type (swords, staves, bows) or an element (fire, water, darkness), you’ll knock that number down. When it hits 0, you’ll get a “Break” and that enemy will be stunned, costing it a round in combat and making it vulnerable to all of your attacks.

You can also use Bonus Points, sort of like the Brave ability in Bravely Default, to give each character multiple physical attacks or augment their skills’ strength. Every character will gain BP on every new round—except for the round directly after they’ve used a boost. This leads to a constant stream of interesting decisions. Do you want to use your two bonus points this turn to finish off one enemy or wait until the next turn, risking that you’ll get hit, in order to have three bonus points and use an uber-powerful special attack?

The system gets more complicated as the game goes on, and in action, it feels fantastic, adding strategy to even the most insignificant battles. You can’t just mash A and call it a day; enemies with their shields up are strong to most of your attacks. You have to guess their weaknesses and act accordingly.

Octopath Traveler’s many bosses add more wrinkles to this system, sometimes locking off their own weaknesses, boosting their shields, and doing other fun things I won’t spoil. The key to beating the game is figuring out optimal strategies for each one, taking advantage of your characters’ skills, boosts, and buffs and debuffs to do as much damage as possible. As you reach the fourth and final boss in each character’s story, you have to know the system cold. If you waste a turn or make a wrong move, you’ll probably lose.

Tressa’s story is the best of the eight tales, although none of them are particularly great.

There’s also a light job system that allows you to equip each character with one of 12 jobs (eight based on the main characters, and four optional super-jobs that are guarded by uber-tough bosses). These dozen jobs allow your characters to equip additional weapons and skills. So if you’re leaving Therion the thief on the bench, you can stick the thief job on the warrior Olberic so he can use those powerful debuffs. Or you can transform the apothecary Alfyn into a way better healer by giving him Ophilia’s cleric job. Experimenting with these combos is fun and rewarding.

Octopath Traveler’s other systems are also fun, if shallow. There are tons of side activities, though most of them are tedious fetch quests that offer little reward. (Inexplicably, these side quests don’t offer experience, only gold and items, which is too bad—they could have been a nice way to mitigate the grind.) Almost all of them require you to use one of the eight characters’ Path Actions, which are abilities they can use outside of combat. For example, Therion the thief can steal items from NPCs. Ophilia the priest can use “Guide” to recruit an NPC to the party, allowing you to summon him or her for temporary help during combat. Olberic the knight can challenge NPCs to one-on-one duels, knocking them out if he wins.

Despite the side quests’ tedium and lack of reward, it’s fun figuring out which of the characters’ Path Actions can solve them. Most side quests don’t give you direction—they just give you a problem and then expect you to figure out the answer. To rescue a helpless woman from a harassing scoundrel, you might challenge him to a duel. To assuage the fears of a worrywart who’s feeling anxious about rising water levels, you might go find a scholar and then use Alfyn’s “Inquire” ability to learn that the water is simply rising due to melting snow. (Hmm.)

The developers of Octopath Traveler clearly looked to role-playing games of the 1990s for inspiration. I wish they’d taken a closer look at SaGa Frontier, the game that appears to have inspired them most. Whereas that game also told a compilation of unrelated stories (seven instead of eight), it did a far better job, in large part because they all felt different. You’d play one at a time rather than zipping around, and they were diverse enough to avoid too much repetition. Lute’s open world quest to avenge his parents felt drastically different than Red’s linear superhero journey, even though you’d visit many of the same locations, because SaGa Frontier constantly switched up its structure. In Octopath Traveler, all eight stories are so repetitive that they blend together, forming one big bland stew.

Octopath Traveler is a beautiful game with one of the best soundtracks I’ve heard. The combat system rocks and will hopefully be used in more Square Enix games to come. There are plenty of good ideas in here. But the game is too grindy, too repetitive, too full of structural problems to be viewed as much more than another botched JRPG experiment.

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Fortnite Season 5: Couldn't Care Less, Watching 'Friends'

Posted: 12 Jul 2018 06:41 AM PDT

The new skins for Fortnite?Epic Games/NBC

Fortnite season five launched today and while it's the biggest patch ever for the game, I stopped playing the game right around the point everyone started losing their collective minds over a meteor in the sky. Then there was a rocket launch but before that, an Avengers tie-in and something about a playground recently and now its an esport — it is exhausting trying to keep up. But now you can drive golf carts now, so, game on?

Not so fast. Since I haven't been playing Fortnite I've been re-watching Friends on Netflix, because getting merc'ed a dozen or so times on a near nightly basis was starting to wear on my nerves. I needed some comfort food for the brain. Sure, there are relaxing games, like Trials: Fusion, but to truly step away from the frustration of being terrible at Fortnite, I had to silence the Xbox One. Like season five of Fortnite, season five of Friends was one of the biggest of the show's history.

Also see: Hinge Rolls Out ‘Most Compatible’ Feature To Expedite The IRL Experience

The biggest change you'll notice on the Fortnite season five map is a bright, sandy spot occupying a large chunk of the map where the swamp used to be. That'll be a desert with a new location, Paradise Palms. No doubt a trendy resort community full of elderly retirees. In season five of Friends, some of the biggest surprises came in the final episode, which took place in the middle of the desert as well. The finale, taking place in Vegas, appears to show Ross and Rachel getting married (they do not) while Chandler and Monica ponder doing the same. Of course, like you when you finish in 3rd place in Battle Royale, the group is unable to express their emotions in a healthy manner and nothing is resolved.

Just like the one where Ross, Joey and Chandler go on a ride-along with Phoebe's cop boyfriend Gary, you can now go on a ride-along with your friends in Fortnite thanks to the addition of All Terrain Kart (ATK). Unlike the cop car, the roof of the cart is a bounce pad. This is a great addition to the game, if you play with a squad. Since I had generally been playing solo, losing solo and getting angry solo, this isn't a big enough change to drag me back into the battle. Like when Joey found out about Monica and Chandler, I'm still a little blown away by the scope of what this game has become.

Fortnite has become a behemoth. When it finally landed on the Nintendo Switch, it was pretty clear that Fortnite would be dominating the gaming conversation for a long time. While some folk are concentrating hard on solving those season five challenges or hunting treasure, I'm happy watching the "The One Where Phoebe Hates PBS", another episode that highlights the bumbling emotional instability of the oft-poorly dressed Ross.

I haven't completely given up on the game, but considering I'll be purchasing a Sony PS4 later this year, the lack of cross-progression with Sony is a detriment to really continuing with the seasons. I'm not the only one leaving behind past progressions, as whatever rewards I've earned mean little if I can't take them with me.

There are two updates that mean a lot to some people, one of which I never noticed because my dexterity was never as good as the teenagers wasting me game after game. That would be the update to the shotgun dynamics, with consistent spread patterns and the removal of the ability to be able to fire one shotgun, quickly switch to another and fire almost immediately. Now there is a delay, but I was never quick enough to make that move anyway. Like when Ross said Rachel's name at the altar instead of Emily's. My brain just doesn't work that quick in-game.

Like Ross being essentially homeless throughout part of the season, the storm circle in Fortnite now moves around a bit as it closes in. It was hard enough trying to get to that circle with players at my back just playing for kills, now it can shift while it shrinks. The center of storm circles 7, 8 and 9 will move around randomly while it shrinks. While this might serve to even the field a little bit, it's still not enough for me to give up the warm and fuzzy 90s nostalgia I get from watching 'Friends'.

Yet, like "The One with All the Resolutions" I feel like I'm making promises I can't keep. These updates to Fortnite (full list here) are pretty comprehensive and might be enough to eventually get me back into the battle. While I'm hoping Sony comes around on the cross-progression, Epic Games is moving forward quickly with enhancing and optimizing Fortnite, creating something that even us casual gamers just can't ignore. Plus, I've always wanted to die in the desert.

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