Last time we checked in on Rock Band VR, Brett told you about three songs that had made the cut for the set list: "Walk This Way," "When You Were Young," and "Ain't It Fun." Good times. Simpler times.
He's down in San Francisco doing Very Important Things at the Game Developers Conference, so here I am, ready and willing to inform you of even more tracks that will launch with Rock Band VR.
The list so far:
With the latest update for Shantae: Half-Genie Hero due out on March 6, WayForward is tidying up some bugs, adding PlayStation TV support, and introducing a free new "tough-as-nails" Hard Core Mode.
The mode isn't solely about making enemy attacks more punishing and giving you less margin for error, though that is part of the "charm." These bullet points paint a fuller, more pain-filled picture:
So it'll be harder, yes, but in ways that'll make the game feel fresh. Looking ahead, Risky Boots Mode is still in production -- "we're creating custom level content for her, and we expect to be working on this mode through Spring" -- and there's this intriguing note: "The team over here is excited for Switch, and WayForward is a Switch developer. And yet, we haven't announced… anything at all? It makes you think we're up to something. It's all so suspicious! Don't worry - we'll have more info for you soon."
Update 1.01 is Ready! Hard Core Mode and More! [Kickstarter]
I wasn't expecting to start my day using a bow and arrow to shoot ice cream cones at kids, or riding on the back of a pickup truck slinging newspapers in a suburban neighborhood. But thanks to #Archery, a virtual reality game from indie studio VRUnicorns, I was able to do just that through an HTC Vive headset. The title, which will hit Steam Early Access on March 30th for $10, features a handful of main levels and mini games within each one of those. My experience consisted of scenarios like what I mentioned above, where I took charge of a digital bow and arrow to fire different objects at characters around the environment.
Source: VRUnicorns
Overwatch's newest member Orisa hit Blizzard's public test realm earlier this morning. I've been testing out the bot, and it seems like she'll be a great addition to the team. Read on and I'll go over her loadout and abilities.
There is a man in front of me, and he is in rough shape. He's bleeding all over the place, slumped up against a wall. His apartment is kind of a dump but not "dying guy on the floor fits right in" levels of bad. Rather than call for help, I essentially sign his death certificate by jacking into his brain. "All I need is consent," I say; he gurgles something that doesn't sound like "yes" and I enter his mind.
This is Observer, the follow-up effort from the Layers of Fear developers. It's about a dystopian cyberpunk Poland in 2084. You play as a detective in a police unit called the Observers. These people are able to physically plug into peoples' brains (everyone has a port on the back of their head) and explore their minds. Observers can relive those people's memories.
It's easy to immediately see how this may be problematic. Sure, it may help solve some crimes, but rummaging around someone's thoughts may be a step too far. The commentary isn't subtle.
The impetus behind Dandara was to create a mobile metroidvania that didn't use a virtual keyboard. Thus, a character that doesn't run around, but instead aims jumps, ping-ponging between platforms. And as it turns out, that method of getting around doesn't just work on mobile -- it's a fine fit for both PC and the Nintendo Switch.
I played Dandara two different ways; the first was on a TV, using the the puppy dog controller (the Joy-Con pair slid into a controller housing). There, you use the left stick to aim your jumps, hopping around a rotating world with a disregard for gravity. The portion of the game I played only included one basic attack, which needs to be charged, but there are other items planned in metroidvania style as certain areas will be inaccessible until you come back with the right gear.
It takes a few seconds to get used to jumping about (and not jumping too close to enemies, given the couple seconds it takes to charge your attack), but eventually I felt like a stray bullet, ricocheting around the environment. There are campsites to save your progress and spend gold on new things like health potions (you start with just three hearts and losing them is easy), and there are various items to discover in the environment, from extra hearts to maps. Dark Souls was name dropped by the developers in addition to the metroidvania inspiration.
We also unsheathed the Switch and played on the tablet screen without the Joy-Con. The left half of the screen is dedicated to aiming where the character jumps, while the right half is responsible for attacks. It was totally intuitive from go -- very obvious that this started as a touch-controlled project -- though one of the developers noted that, while the touch controls are easier when you're starting out, he's come to prefer playing with the controller. Still, given how few games work tablet-only on the Switch at launch it's cool to see one coming down the pipe. Dandara's gorgeous art could make Switch owners happy when it launches on the new console, as well as PC and mobile, later this year.
[Disclosure: Hamza Aziz, whom I worked with here at Destructoid for many years, works for Dandara publisher Raw Fury. This does not affect my opinion of Kingdom (good) or Hamza (handsome, but bad).]
Microsoft's ID@Xbox showcase is a staple of GDC, packing a ton of independent video games into a single room and letting players go wild. This year, ID@Xbox featured 20 games across a range of genres, from shoot-em-ups and RPGs to first-person cyberpunk horror. It's impossible to play every game, so we picked four at random: Full Metal Furies, Observer, Moonlighter and Ruiner. And we had a blast.
Ghost Recon Wildlands is about a week away from launching, so naturally Ubisoft has to detail all of the season pass specifics. To its credit, Ubisoft showed some restraint and waited until one week before release, unlike some other big-budget game announced this week. Seeing as how you can't currently go out and buy Wildlands and some of this content sounds really pointless, I'm not going to give them too much benefit of the doubt.
Contained in this season pass is one-week early access to two "major" expansions, the Unidad Conspiracy mission, the Peruvian Connection pack, faction-themed equipment packs, an "exclusive" vehicle, and some XP boosts (one permanent, one timed). Given there is no price, I'm guessing Ubisoft is trying to make the pass sound more appealing before telling us it's charging $40 for it.
Last year, word got out that Image & Form was working on something called SteamWorld Quest. It was a curious name that got fans imagining the possibilities, and that was the whole idea, it turns out.
As discussed in this video with CEO Brjánn Sigurgeirsson, the leaked listing for the game was a red herring. The team was applying for funding from the EU to make SteamWorld Dig 2, and to keep that a surprise, it jotted down the "SteamWorld Quest" name instead because "that was just as fluffy as anything we could think up. [It] could be just about any game out there." Nice moves.
I know some of you were relatively disappointed to learn that the studio is going back to SteamWorld Dig instead of doing a follow-up to 2015's SteamWorld Heist, but I sure am happy. I'm eager to see what this team can do with that game concept when it isn't held back by a dwindling bank account.
SteamWorld Dig 2 is headed to Nintendo Switch "and more" later this year.
It won't be much longer now before we can stop looking at Battlefield 1's first expansion and start playing it. They Shall Not Pass debuts this month, adding the French army, four maps, a tug-of-war control point mode called Frontlines, some nasty new vehicles, and the Trench Raider Elite Class.
They Shall Not Pass is out first on March 14 for folks who ponied up for the Battlefield 1 Premium Pass, which grants early access to the expansion. It'll then be available for separate purchase two weeks later.
I'm still weighing whether I want to commit to the whole season pass now or just test the waters with this first expansion, but I'm fond of the map designs here. Between the horrific scorched-earth look and the flower-filled fields, they're hitting both ends of the spectrum, visually speaking.
I'll always appreciate Dead Rising 2: Case Zero for renewing my interest in the series and getting me to go back and spend more time with the original Dead Rising, a game I wanted to love but just wasn't fully clicking with. The standalone lead-in game is nice and digestible, and alongside Dead Rising 2: Case West, it is now playable on Xbox One through the backward compatibility program.
I somehow didn't play Case West (or maybe I did and I've gone full amnesiac), but it's another standalone adventure that has Chuck Greene and Frank West teaming up in a Phenotrans facility near Fortune City following the events of Dead Rising 2. Let's hope more games in the series join the list.
And because this wouldn't be a backward compatibility news story without a random title or two slipping in as well, Meet the Robinsons and Cars 2: The Video Game are also playable on Xbox One.
Major Nelson [Twitter]
So uh, you kind of buried the lede here, BioWare.
Inside of their PAX East plans for Mass Effect: Andromeda, the developer has announced that the game's at-home/public multiplayer beta has been eliminated. They had signups and everything, and it's no more -- instead, the post simply states "we look forward to seeing you in Andromeda."
Uh, so that can't be good. While people regard betas as demos more and more, they're actually valuable tests for developers to ensure balance and gauge the stress of their server reliability. Granted Andromeda is confirmed to utilize P2P play rather than dedicated servers, but this doesn't bode well for the multiplayer element.
I just hope it's as optional as they're saying it is -- the contained meta-story for multiplayer should help.
BioWare at PAX East 2017 [BioWare]
With Pokémon now twenty years old (I'm older every day, enjoy your youth kids!), the newest, and 20th, movie celebrates by going back to anime series roots. As this first trailer showcases (in Japanese), this film is a retelling of Ash and Pikachu's trials during the first couple of episodes in the anime series.
There's plenty of Jerkachu, the Sparrow incident, and even a fancier version of Ash's Ho-Oh sighting. Just seeing all of this nostalgic stuff through a new lens is enough to hook me, and I'm sure it's going to be great for the kids who've never seen the early episodes of the series.
Pokémon the Movie 20: I Choose You! opens in Japan July 15th. There's no word on a Western release yet, but I'm sure we're going to get it too.
The Nintendo Switch can't do much out of the box. It can play game cards (the system's tiny cartridges), but that's pretty much it. If you're getting a Switch tomorrow, you'll want to make sure you've got internet access to snag its day-one update, which adds support for the eShop, friends list and social network posting. They're all things we couldn't use while reviewing the Switch, so I spent a bit of time with the new features today to see how they actually work.
The second season of Street Fighter V began with Akuma, and the newcomer (who was present in the series in the past, but not playable) Kolin is keeping the party going. Naturally, pro players have already taken her to the lab and are finding some promising results.
The key seems to be her V-Trigger, which shoots out ice that can bait and punish. She also has three parries (the EX version can implement a stun), and a lot of OTG (off-the-ground) potential. As soon as I'm done with all of this Switch launch coverage I'm trying her out.
It's sad that Capcom didn't provide enough content at launch and lost a lot of good faith, because V is a really great fighter that I'm still playing over a year later.
Blizzard has unveiled the 24th addition to its popular online shooter Overwatch, and no it's not Doomfist (Sorry, Terry Crews!). Overwatch's new hero is Orisa, a four-legged robot built by an 11-year-old engineering prodigy to protect the people of Numbani, and she looks pretty badass.
Source: Blizzard
At the Google Developer Day conference within GDC, Niantic Labs, developer of Pokemon Go, announced that they had hit 650 million downloads as of this week. More updates are planned, and according to CTO Phil Keslin, players have walked from the Earth to Pluto, with 5.4 billion miles earned.
What's important to takeaway from this number is that we can see just how much the game has grown within the past six months. Although it's still a big money-maker (more than most of us can dream of in our lifetimes), Niantic had 500 million downloads in September, two months after the game's launch.
Since then it's rolled out in more territories, and they've slowed, earning 150 million more downloads in the past six months. It's still a massive hit, but Niantic is going to have to keep up the pace if it wants to retain users. Just how many of those people were active was not shared.
Google Developer Day [YouTube via Game Informer]
Cue Professor Farnsworth: Good news everyone! The special edition of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild is back in stock gain -- this time over at Walmart. The Dell stock that we mentioned last week was limited and apparently quickly out-of-stock, partly due to a crappy stock/inventory system.
Walmart has no such issue and they are available as of writing. If you click through and you don't see it at the regular list price of $99, that means you're looking at third-party marketplace sellers at Walmart. Let us know and we'll mark the "deal" as out-of-stock again.
In terms of the standard edition of the game, most online retailers are surprisingly out of stock (Amazon included). If you want a copy of the Standard Edition, Dell and Best Buy both have confirmed stock.
Walmart, of course, now carries a speedy free shipping option and you can also choose a free store pickup at your nearby location. We're rather surprised stock is so plentiful, so it looks like Walmart may have done the smart thing and held back inventory for release week.
Check out Dtoid's review here if you need more decision-making assistance. We're pretty sure Walmart's stock will go kaput soon, so if you've been looking for one and don't want to pay silly scalper price of $150 ~ $400 on eBay, this is a good chance to pick up a copy from Walmart.
Now all we need to do is find a retailer with a Nintendo Switch in-stock to play the damn game. No biggie, right?
Compared to the drawn-out reveal for Sombra, Blizzard's unveil for Overwatch's 24th hero, Orisa, is a pleasant surprise. We were only just trying to piece together her place in the fiction, and here she is!
Orisa was created by Efi Oladele using one of Numbani's decommissioned security robots that unsuccessfully went up against Doomfist. "She believed that Numbani needed a protector and that an upgraded OR15 could do just that," reads Blizzard's backstory for the new tank hero. "Efi repaired and reconfigured the robot and installed a personality core that she had designed herself."
You can see Orisa's kit right here with helpful video demonstrations. To quickly sum it up, she has a projectile cannon for sustained damage but moves slower when firing, she can fortify herself to take less damage and block "action-impairing effects," she can throw down a stationary barrier, and she can launch an explosive graviton charge and (for her Ultimate) place a destructible device that increases the damage inflicted by teammates that fall in her line of sight.
Locomotion and speed are two of the hardest problems to solve in virtual reality -- get either one wrong, and players are going to get sick. That's why so many VR experiences use teleportation as their primary movement mechanic. It's a safe, slow ways to let players explore large game worlds. It's become a bit of a standard, but you won't find it anywhere in Survios' next title. Sprint Vector is a fast-paced racing game that lets players sprint through obstacle courses at super-human speeds. The idea balks at the idea of the safe, slow VR environment, but somehow avoids inflicting simulator sickness on the player. The key? Turns out it was making hands the new feet.
Fans of the upcoming System Shock remake should find this trailer enjoyable. Nightdive Studios is making steady progress on the title and this trailer gives us a small glimpse of some of the new technology in play (Unreal Engine 4).
SHODAN also narrates over some gameplay and her voice is just as creepy as ever.
One of the most annoying things about region free systems, to risk looking a gift horse in the mouth, is how difficult it can be to actually log into different accounts or access your content. Even on the PS4, a region-free system, you need to follow certain parameters to play your games with specific accounts.
But on the Switch, basically all of those restrictions are gone (at least at launch). Just today I got a European code for the rhythm game Voez, which launches in Europe tomorrow, and next week in the US. I went from not having an EU Nintendo account to creating one, to downloading Voez in less than five minutes.
It's also important to note how easy it is to actually cross-regional games. On the Switch homescreen all of your profiles show up in the top left corner, and none of them are "logged in" necessarily. You choose who is logged in after you launch a game, and that can be in any region without locking you out. I tested my Japanese account (imported from my 3DS) on a US game, and so on. It all works.
Here's how you can do it.
The day has finally come! I don't have to write these, biding time for the Switch's launch, as Nintendo's newest system is arriving tonight at midnight.
On the US Switch eShop you'll find Zelda: Breath of the Wild (also on Wii U), along with the $20 season pass, followed by 1-2 Switch, Snipperclips, Shovel Knight: Specter of Torment, Shovel Knight: Treasure Trove, Just Dance 2017, Super Bomberman R, I Am Setsuna, and Fast RMX.
On 3DS you'll find Story of Seasons: Trio of Towns, and the Wii U Virtual Console is getting Dungeon Explorer and Neutopia.
As recently as January, we were told that Nintendo's awful friend code system for finding and adding buddies for multiplayer games would be no more. That made us hope a better system for adding Switch contacts was on the way. Nintendo of America President Reggie Fils-Aime even told CNET, "There are no friend codes within what we're doing." It turns out that's not true at all, as the company revealed that friend codes are very much alive and well.
Via: Polygon
Source: Nintendo
Lately I've been on a racing binge, trying to lighten up my backlog. Off-road games like MotorStorm and FlatOut jumped out at me more than most, and Gravel seems to be ride up that alley. Simply named, it comes by way of Italian racing game developer Milestone who also father the Ride, MotoGP, and WRC series' and will release sometime this summer on PC, Xbox One, and PS4.
Gravel will run on Unreal Engine 4 and have a variety of game modes including Wild Rush, Cross Country, and Stadium Circuit. Stadium Circuit consists of "Arenas filled with spectacular jumps: feel the roar of the crowd and launch your vehicle in extreme acrobatics!"
Loot Rascals first caught my eye at Pax South. I had heard nothing of it beforehand, yet its art drew me to its booth. The few minutes I spent diving into its charming world left me wanting more, so naturally I jumped at the chance to review the full game.
I don't have much experience with roguelikes as the idea of permadeath scares me away most of the time, but this is a gateway game to the entire genre. Loot Rascals is so good at what it does, it's inspired me to explore its depths as much as I could.
Last week photos revealing Eddy Gordo leaked from an event in Brazil where Katsuhiro Harada was presenting Tekken 7 to a small crowd. Media approached the blurry, yet visible shots cautiously, as fake images are all too common and convincing lately. Now, Bandai Namco have officially announced Gordo as a playable character.
I'm still deciding whether to start with Tekken 7 or try an earlier entry like Tekken 5 first. In any case, I think Gordo will be one of the first characters I try out. If for no other reason, Capoeira just looks wild and unpredictable like drunken fighting styles. Or I might try Kuma on the grounds that he's a bear.
It wasn't too long ago that Microsoft released an update that turned every Xbox One into a software development kit. Now, hobbyist developers will have a platform for publishing their wares on the console. It's called the Xbox Live Creator's Program.
Source: Windows Developer
Nintendo must be rubbing their brow right about now. Or laughing. The company had a hard enough time trying to convince people not to blow on cartridges; now people like Giant Bomb's Jeff Gerstmann and Kotaku's Mike Fahey are trying to eat them. They along with many others discovered that the cartridges taste absolutely rancid.
Turn's out Nintendo has decided to intentionally apply a bittering agent called denatonium benzoate to cartridges. This is safety measure to deter people, specifically children, and perhaps pets from chewing on or eating the bite-sized carts. Although denatonium benzoate is "the most bitter compound known," it is non-toxic. Still, you might want to rinse your mouth out afterwards.
