Fully Charged: Samsung makes a Waffle (social network), plus new Oddworld game revealed
Grab the morning's top tech news tidbits
Samsung’s new Waffle
Samsung makes a whole bunch of different gadgets and apps, but we never really thought the company would make… a Waffle. Actually, in this case, it’s not the breakfast favourite, but rather a new social network for Android phones. We can see why you might be confused, though.
The name is inspired by the square grid interface, which shows an array of photos and images, and Waffle is all about collaborative publishing: sharing photos with friends and other users and altering and drawing on them as desired. You can catch a look in the video above, and Waffle is available now on the Play Store in beta.
[Source: Play Store via Samsung]
New Oddworld game announced
It’s been more than a decade since the last totally new Oddworld game, with 2005’s Oddworld: Stranger’s Wrath being critically acclaimed but commercially flat. However, publisher Oddworld Inhabitants has spent the last few years remaking and re-releasing past entries to build a bit of momentum for something more. And it’s a proper sequel.
Oddworld: Soulstrom takes place after the recent Oddworld: New ‘n’ Tasty (shown), a remake of the original game, and is said to be a "deeper, darker, and more sinister story" that we’ve seen from the quirky platform-action series. The publisher promises a brand new version of hero Abe, which will be revealed via social media soon, and the game should debut in the second half of 2017.
[Source: Oddworld via Engadget]
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Tacoma delayed into 2017
PlayStation 4 and Xbox One players just recently got the opportunity to check out Gone Home, the acclaimed indie adventure, but it will be a while before The Fullbright Company’s next game is released.
Tacoma, a deep space game first announced at E3 2015, was originally scheduled to debut later this year, but the team revealed yesterday that they’ve decided to rework the experience and take another six months. That means the Xbox One and PC game is now slated to release in Spring 2017 instead.
"[We] decided to reexamine and rework a number of the core assumptions we’d held about the game," they wrote. "How would gravity really work on a deep-space facility like Tacoma? What are we trying to say about the function and implications of Augmented Reality – and how does the player interact meaningfully with the story content in the game, in a fundamentally different way than anything we’ve worked on before?"
[Source: Fullbright Company]
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No-install Android game demos
Curious about an Android game, but don’t want to commit to a potentially large download? No sweat: Google is about to roll out streaming, playable demos that will come to your phone when connected to Wi-Fi. You’ll be able to start playing right away straight from a Google search, and experience the first 10 minutes of the game without a big download. From there, you’ll be prompted to download the full game if desired.
Google will also release an API that lets developers implement live streaming and video recording features to any Android game via Google Play Games, along with an Indie Games section to the typically cluttered Play Store.
[Source: Android Developers via The Verge]
Andrew Hayward
Freelance Writer 
