Pixelated platformer Shovel Knight has made its way to nearly every system available, but at its heart it's still a Nintendo game. The blue burrower's game looks and feels like a vintage NES game, and he got his start on Nintendo's platforms as a timed exclusive. It's little wonder Shovel Knight was the first non-first party Nintendo game to get the amiibo treatment.
The Shovel Knight amiibo has some special functions already, but when the Specter of Torment campaign is added, it'll do even more. The amiibo's main draw is probably the ability to create a custom Knight that gets saved to the NFC chip. Previously, buying the amiibo was the only way to unlock simultaneous multiplayer on the Wii U, but Specter of Torment will make that feature available for everyone. The newest bonus unlocked by the amiibo is a cosmetic upgrade, and I have to admit it's pretty cute.
Speaking to the new character Madame Meeber will allow you to scan your amiibo to summon the Fairy of Shovelry, a miniature version of Shovel Knight that will flit around your character regardless of which of the three campaigns you're playing. It's a cute little sprite in both senses of the word, and it reminds me of the fairy familiar Alucard befriends in Castlevania: Symphony of the Night.
The Fairy of Shovelry will be available in all three Nintendo versions of Shovel Knight once the Specter of Torment DLC becomes available. The Switch version is a launch title, but the 3DS and Wii U versions will have to wait until April.
During an Unreal Engine 4 presentation at this week's Game Developers Conference, Gearbox CEO Randy Pitchford came on-stage for some tech talk about what's powering "the next Borderlands game."
As you can see in the archived footage, he's quick to point out that the work being shown "is not a video game, it's a technology demonstration," but the Borderlands name came up throughout.
They may not be on the same scale as the Oscars, but the Game Developers Choice Awards and Independent Games Festival Awards are happening tonight in San Francisco. The events are going to be hosted by Double Fine CEO Tim Schaefer and Tacoma Games' Nina Freeman, respectively, in an evening where the best AAA and indie developers will be recognized for their work. Will Super Mario Run win the award for Best Mobile/Handheld Game? Tune in to find out at 6:30PM PT/9:30PM ET; there's a livestream below, otherwise you can go to the GDC's Twitch or YouTube page.
This year's Game Developer's Conference (GDC) is happening in San Francisco right now, and the team behind the upcoming The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild gave a talk where they showed off some of the work that went into making the game. Three of the title's developers spoke for an hour about the concepts and tools they used to build Breath of the Wild, and it looks like nothing was off the table when ideas were first being discussed.
Zelda games tend to tell a similar story: a hero explores dungeons and faces monsters to collect equipment so that he can defeat a greater evil that is threatening his homeland. We've seen the formula refined in the 30 years since The Legend of Zelda first released on the NES. And as much fun as the formula is, eventually it can't help but feel, well, formulaic.
For Breath of the Wild, the developers wanted to break away from the conventions the Zelda series had become known for. In their GDC talk, Hidemaro Fujibayashi, Takuhiro Dohta, and Satoru Takizawa spoke about some of the ways they tried to move away from Zelda traditions, and showed off some concept art from the early days of Breath of the Wild's development.
As you can see, some of the concepts the team came up with would have put Link into a more modern setting. I suspect that the motorcycle Link is riding may have been seen by the DLC team forMario Kart 8. You can also see a version of Link wearing a windbreaker, and another holding a flying V guitar. A later photo taken by USGamer shows concept art of Link in a spacesuit, facing off with a Metroid.
We've already seen Zelda cross over with another type of game in Hyrule Warriors, but it looks like the team was exploring this avenue on their own before being approached by Koei.
This is perhaps the most interesting slide shown at the conference. The art style looks similar to what we've seen of Breath of the Wild, but there's an alien mothership launching dozens of smaller craft over a smoking landscape as a hooded Link looks on. The title card reads The Legend of Zelda: Invasion, and brings to mind the scene in Majora's Mask where young Link has to help keep a similar ship from stealing cows from the Romani farm. It's harder to see, but on the right of this slide you can see artwork of what looks like an alien autopsy about to begin, with someone who looks an awful lot like Ganon in a Metallica T-shirt arguing with a coroner about how to proceed.
It sounds like the talk was well-received by everyone who attended, so hopefully it'll be archived and posted online soon. I've always enjoyed the Zelda series' high fantasy setting, but I can't help but wonder what some of these other ideas might have played like. That final slide's alien ship is just begging for a Star Fox crossover.
That $199 price tag on a pair of Touch controllers for the Oculus Rift felt like total sticker shock, and I say that as someone who was impressed with the tech after trying games like Wilson's Heart leading up to the December launch. Thankfully, it hasn't taken Oculus long at all to issue a price cut.
Instead of going all in with the Oculus Rift and Touch for $798, you're now looking at spending $598 for the lot. Or, purchased individually, that's $499 for the Rift itself, $99 for a pair of Touch controllers, and $59 for the standalone Oculus Sensor if you're interested in getting another one for room-scale tracking. This new pricing is already reflected on Oculus' own site and online retailers like Amazon.
Not coincidentally, Epic Games' Touch-exclusive Robo Recall released today. Looks neat!
Now let's see if Oculus bringing down the price of entry will light a fire under HTC.
Some of the best Virtual Reality games are also the most simple, and it doesn't get much simpler than NES launch title Duck Hunt. You have a gun, your dog flushes out ducks, you shoot them. It's simple. To the point. Easy to understand.
It's also over thirty years old, and VR programmers Distraction Lab thought it might need a little kick in the ass. Their version plays on the Oculus Touch setup, and it starts as a faithful recreation, similar to the fan-made version for the Vive we told you about last year. Things quickly escalate, with hordes of ducks flying in every direction and multiple jerkass dogs holding up your trophies. To deal with all the careening canards, you can even up the odds by picking up a pair of pistols or tossing a frag grenade at the whole mess.
Duck Hunt is sort of an oddity among Nintendo intellectual property. I'd heard that the company lost the IP because "Duck Hunt" is too generic to copyright, and there hadn't been any Nintendo Duck Hunt games created since the original in 1984. For a few years there were website ads everywhere inviting you to take out some frustration on pixelated ducks. That all seems to have changed when the Duck Hunt dog became a character in the most recent versions of Super Smash Brothers.
The VR version whipped up by Distraction Lab looks like a lot of fun, though I didn't see if you could shoot the dog. That's an urban legend that has a bit of truth behind it, though. It was never possible in the home port, but you had the chance to dispense canine retribution in the arcade version, as seen below.
Game development takes a long time, so it isn't uncommon for games to change styles dramatically over the course of pre-release life. Zelda games, in particular, have a history of this, with Twilight Princessoriginally being envisioned as a sequel to Wind Waker and even Ocarina of Timestarting life as a 3D version of Zelda 2. What is neat to learn is that this week's Breath of the Wild actually began life in the vein of the original NES classic.
Revealed in a talk at GDC 2017, Nintendo discussed how the concept of a more open-ended Zelda led them to start developing the game with NES aesthetics. The goal was to create puzzles that had multiple solutions instead of the "traditional" style where one answer is the key. This was also an effort to prevent people from getting stumped and looking up walkthroughs online.
In order to test the pitch out, Nintendo created a 2D Zelda that bares a lot more resemblance to the first game in the series. Even though it was functioning on a 2D plane, the game world was 3D and still carried all of the physics systems that Breath of the Wild eventually employed, including the ability to chop down trees for lumber.
After ironing out those details, the development team decided they wanted to test out a system based on chemistry for the items. Things like setting a field on fire or torching an enemy were brought into the picture, even if it meant eschewing realistic physics and going more for video game logic. This final bit is what got them to settle on the art style that Breath of the Wild would utilize, since going for a more realistic approach would result in a discrepancy between player expectations and the game's reality.
While this is all really great insight into how Nintendo tackles different mechanics in its games, I can't be the only person who is saddened that Breath of the Wild doesn't resemble the NES original. I would kill to have a more polished and updated version of that iconic adventure, or possibly even a Zelda Maker like Super Mario Maker with an NES option. Even if I don't care much for the first game, one cannot deny the charm of those 8-bit visuals.
Epic Games still has plans to release Fortnite, its co-op sandbox survival title that was originally announced back in 2011. Folks have been participating in alpha builds for some time now, but as far as a full, honest-to-god release, there hasn't been much movement. The game still exists, though!
This week at the Game Developers Conference, Epic's Tim Sweeny confirmed that Fortnite will be playable this year and follow an iterative process similar to Paragon, according to Polygon.
The production has taken long enough that I'm seriously starting to wonder how the game will fare when it does become widely available. There's no shortage of these types of open-ended, base-building survival games, so it clearly has to do something special to stand above the rest, but even then there are no guarantees that it'll resonate with a large audience. This is a curious one indeed.
Rain Games gave us an exclusive demo for its upcoming action-adventure title World to the West. Set within the same world as its previous game, Teslagrad, it looks to tackle a different classic style of gameplay similar to how its predecessor worked within the confines of a metroidvania.
We may all be going crazy with Zelda fever since Breath of the Wild is releasing at the end of the week, but any fans of Nintendo’s legendary series would be crazy to ignore World to the West. Not only does it emanate charm with its beautiful visuals and quirky characters, but it is clear that the inspiration behind this title is the highly revered Link to the Past.
Fans of the more “traditional” style of Zelda titles are pretty rightfully scared that the future of the series may forego 2D gameplay and focus solely on the 3D formula. Not only has there not been a console-based 2D Zelda game since Link to the Past, but with the Switch being a portable console, we may never receive another 2D Zelda from Nintendo in the future. While World to the West doesn’t strictly follow the Zelda formula, it has enough of the puzzles and exploration that fans have come to expect while also tackling some different ideas (like multiple characters).
If you've seen any one episode of toco toco, you know that the documentary series is worth keeping tabs on. Maybe this'll be your first! It follows Persona 5 director Katsura Hashino to a few of his favorite spots, some of which have served as direct inspirations for his games, and he shares his thought process for crafting stories. Also, delightfully, he plays Game Boy Advance SP atop Carrot Tower.
As with the rest of the video series, even if you don't have a personal connection to the creator's work -- animators, illustrators, and musicians are also featured aside from the familiar game-making faces -- you can still get something positive out of this. If you dig Atlus games, even better.
Toward the end, we're shown bits and pieces of Project Re Fantasy, the far-off new game from Hashino and Studio Zero. "When creating a game that takes place in the real world, at some point we start to face limitations," he says. "I wanted to distance myself from this and take on core human themes [...] which is why I started to work on an RPG that takes place in an imaginary world."
The countdown for the Nintendo Switch is officially on. In the meantime, people in Japan have flocked to new titles Super Robot Wars V and NieR: Automata while they wait. On the hardware side there was a significant 16,000 unit surge by the PS4, perhaps for NieR: Automata.
Good news for Xbox One as well! It's no longer in last place, beating out the Wii U by five sales. Just don't tell the little guy what's happening on March 3.
The latest Shovel Knight expansion is just about ready to launch. While it will be a timed Switch exclusive for around a month, that doesn't mean you have to wait on buying the main title. If you're interested in Specter of Torment, why not grab the original title and prepare yourself?
For the last week, Shovel Knight has been 33% off on all digital platforms. That includes PC, PS3, PS4, Vita, Xbox One, 3DS and Wii U. For some odd reason, the PS3 and Vita PSN Store entries are not listed as being on sale, but the game supports Cross-Buy between every Sony platform.
After tomorrow, the game will be going up in price to compensate for the addition of the new content. Previous owners don't need to worry since Specter of Torment and the eventual King Knight expansion will still be free, but anyone who doesn't bite on this sale will need to shell out $24.99 for Shovel Knight in the future.
Honestly, though, with the amount of content that Shovel Knight has, $25 isn't even that bad.
Wipeout HD was amazingly well-optimized, able to run at 1080p and 60fps on the PlayStation 3. Excluding the Fury DLC, it was only one gigabyte. Shin'en has been similarly impressive, by optimizing Fast RMX to run at 1080p/60fps on Nintendo Switch, where it will be 900 MB. It will even feature touch controls for the menus. Can a game with such polish really be considered "indie"?
Shin'en seems very proud of this 900 MB which seems to be standard size for this kind of game. To me the story here is they will have 47 music tracks to listen to, more than doubling Fast Racing Neo's 19. Wipeout HD and Fury together only had about 15, which you could get a sense of by playing enough to hear the same songs repeating over and over.
I hope that Square Enix is saving its PS4 port of Dissidia Final Fantasy for when the roster is mostly complete, so they can avoid patching it every month or so. That's how often they'd have to do it to keep up with the arcade edition, which is getting new levels, tweaks, and characters on a regular basis. The next reveal is going to be on March 7 at 9:00PM JST by way of a NicoNico Live stream, so tune in if you're interested.
Speaking of waiting on console ports for continuously updated arcade games, Bandai Namco and Nintendo kind of screwed the pooch on Pokken Tournament. It's a widely successful and celebrated game, and it's not getting any form of DLC. I mean, there has to be some sort of Switch port in the cards -- but that would just be another case of leaving Wii U fans high and dry (you bet your sweet ass there isn't going to be a discount).
As I climbed stairs to the top of a blinding white pyramid with The Simpsons' elevator to nowhere on my mind I finally reached a narrow lookout point and triggered my mission: kill three targets from on high. All three congregated beneath the peak and fanned out in different directions when the mission started. There was a 10 or 15 second window to off all three. I didn't think sniping would be this exciting in a pulled back, isometric view, but Tokyo 42 seems like a purer shooter than your average twin-stick.
While making these shots would likely be a bit easier on a mouse and keyboard, the gamepad controls emphasize that Tokyo 42 is a shooter from afar more than a bullet hell or twin-stick, though it uses the big projectiles from the former and basic control scheme from the latter. Clicking the right stick in locks your character -- an assassin navigating a seedier world than its bright color belies -- into a strafing mode easier for aiming long instances, almost as if the right stick turns into a mouse pointer. I definitely needed it to make those three shots, and I also had to carefully lead targets to make sure they crumpled into a satisfying clump of physics.
Shootouts were just as intense. One bullet kills you, sending you to respawn at the last vending machine you hit up. So opening up on a local gang to earn some gold isn't an easy grind. On one hand, the somewhat slow-moving projectiles evoke the zoned-out dodging and weaving of a bullet hell, but it also feels grimier, less abstract. While a lot of twin-stick games stick to one plane, Tokyo 42's vertical architecture means an enemy on a roof can keep you pinned down. Crouching or sliding behind cover is key when you could easily get airholed by a stray bullet.
The minimalist style and isometric point of view similarly belie Tokyo 42's enormous open world. While the inspirations are early Grand Theft Auto and Syndicate, the full map is impressive as the likes of Mirror's Edge: Catalyst or any Ubisoft game. It's even more impressive when you consider it comes from a two-person team
Like any modern open-world game, there is a main narrative thread (about assassins, with large pixel portraiture to offer some detailed characters to go with the text) as well as smaller side missions, puzzles, and secrets to discover.
Take your katana to too many citizens, you'll also trigger an [extremely "Bad and Boujee" voice] Cop Drop, where increasing waves of police airdrop in to dispense state justice (I've seen but didn't reach later levels that include devastating robots). I also got an alert to be on the lookout for a rival assassin when an unassuming NPC turned out to be a cloaked killer who diced me up before I could react. There are stealth opportunities throughout the main story for your character as well; you can even ditch gangs you've aggro'd and change clothes to help lose them. Plus there is another button dedicated to putting on your jacket, a long brown duster. And the flailing-arms running animation for spooked NPCs is hilarious.
Little touches like that amid the emergent gameplay are what have me most excited for Tokyo 42, in addition to its austere world with bold blocks of color and dashes of en vogue pink-cyan pop of neon. That look is backed up with straightforward, but intense shooting that feels grounded and dangerous.
The original QUBE came out in 2012, making a name for itself as a clever spatial-puzzle game. Nearly five years later, the developers at Toxic Games have unveiled QUBE 2, a sequel that takes the best aspects of the original and throws them all in a beautiful new 3D environment.
That leak from a few days ago was correct! Tearaway Unfolded and Disc Jam will be headlining the free games on offer for PS Plus members this month. While I've never heard of Disc Jam, I did 100% the Vita version of Tearaway and really enjoyed it. It is a fun little game with a lot of charm and some excellent music, so I'm definitely looking forward to hearing that score on my surround setup.
Along with those titles for PS4 players come Earth Defense Force 2025 and Under Night: In-Birth for PS3 owners. I have no idea what that second title is, but it has a cool name. Vita members get the excellent Severed and the Cross-Buy enabled title Lumo. I guess it could be better, but Severed isn't to be missed.
Last year, Microsoft revealed that it would be opening up its Windows Holographic Platform to other hardware manufacturers, and at CES, we got to take a look at a few different Windows VRheadsets. At GDC 2017, Microsoft revealed yet more plans for its mixed reality platform. While its headsets are strictly for the PC for now, they would soon be coming to the Xbox -- as well as Project Scorpio -- in 2018.
With a press of the PS4's touchpad, I quickly switched between Full Throttle's visuals from 1995 and what it looks like in the remaster. It's not a new trick -- both Grim Fandango and Day of the Tentacle had remasters with the same feature -- but it's a powerful one. It's a good and constant reminder of how far things have come.
But, Full Throttle was no slouch in its day. After the brief demo, I sat down with creator Tim Schafer to talk about the remaster. "It was also the most ambitious game we had done back then as far being really cinematic and moving a lot, a lot of pixels on the screen," he tells us. I believe him; I can see all the pixels and that's indisputable proof.
That ambition was paid back in full. Most of the LucasArts adventure games aimed for the 100,000 sales mark. Full Throttle cleared a million. Schafer muses as to why it did really well, eventually settling on "maybe because it had explosions on the front of the box or maybe because it was about bikers."
When the dust settled on the Nintendo Switch's reveal event, fans started to crunch the numbers, and they didn't like what they found. Despite launching with a new Legend of Zelda game and padding out the spring and summer months with Mario Kart 8 Deluxe and Splatoon 2, the fledgling console's launch lineup looked bleak. Today, they can breathe a sigh of relief: The company tells Engadget that more than 60 indie titles are heading to the eShop before the end of the year, and more than a few of them are Nintendo Switch exclusives. In fact, I played a bunch of them at Nintendo's GDC 2017 software showcase. Spoiler alert: They're all kind of great.
Puyo Puyo Tetris is actually a crossover of the popular Puyo Puyo series and the...you guessed it, Tetris franchise. It's coming to a heap of platforms in the west this year following the 2014 Japanese release, including the Nintendo Switch.
For those of you who are rusty at either game, you can get a quick refresher from this feature overview video. All told, the multiplayer modes with the side-by-side boards are going to be great in portable mode on the Switch. There's just enough going on where it won't be too hectic to play on the go.
We're just a few weeks away from the one-year anniversary of Oculus shipping the Rift to consumers, so now would be a good time for the company to drop some news. And here it is. Starting today, Oculus will begin selling Rift and Touch bundles on its store for $598 -- about a $200 price cut. On their own, the Rift headset is now $499 while the Touch controllers are $99, meaning that each saw a price drop of $100. Oh, and the cost of an extra Oculus sensor is now $59, which is $20 less than before.
It was easy to miss the booth for Snipperclips: Cut it Out, Together at Sunday’s Switch Preview Tour event in San Francisco. It was just one table, and to its right was a Mario Odyssey video screen while to its left was the line for Arms. I’m a bit peeved I didn’t get a chance to play Arms, but I would have given it up for the opportunity to play Snipperclips a second time.
Snipperclips: Cut it Out, Together is a co-op puzzle game that has each player using one of the Joy-Con as they work together to figure out each solution. The gimmick here is the snip feature. With a press of a button, you can cut away at your bullet-shaped partner. To do this, simply overlap your body with the part of theirs you want to cut and then snip away like you’re at a bris.
Epic Games has a reputation for bringing bizarre demos to its GDC keynotes. The company loves to show developers what Unreal Engine can do, not just in gaming but other genres as well. As such, Epic Games has now demoed "Project Raven," which makes it possible for content creators to blend real-time visual effects with live-action shots. The technology, created in partnership with Chevrolet and video production company The Mill, was designed to convey the promise of high-end augmented reality.
Ultra Street Fighter II was revealed right alongside of the Switch, but nearly every detail about it at that time was unknown. Big things like the release date and the price were kept secret, which wasn't great when Capcom hinted that it would be priced like a full retail game. Well, we have a final release date and pricing scheme for Japan, and that price point was fairly accurate.
Street Fighter producer Yoshinori Ono confirmed on Twitter that it'll be released on May 26 both at retail and digitally, priced at 4,990 yen and 4,620 yen respectively (that's roughly $45 and $40 in USD). While we still don't have a western confirmation we can probably expect it to hit around that time, and for at least $40.
From what I played, and knowing how much I'll play this with friends, I think I'll get my money's worth. The real question is how much effort did Capcom put into the final build.
