Microsoft has delayed the much-anticipated heroic brawler Crackdown 3 until Spring 2018. The sandbox brawler was previously scheduled to come out this November alongside the launch of the Xbox One X, but the tech titan pushed back the game's release date for both console and PC versions to give the three teams working on it time to refine.
Source: Polygon
In a recent interview with the Daily Sports newspaper in Japan, Yoshikazu Yasuhiko said he was open to a remake of the original 1979 anime. The response came after being questioned whether or not the current ongoing Mobile Suit Gundam: The Origin anime would continue into the story of the first anime. Yoshikazu replied that he'd be lying if he said no, but also that there are other staff who feel the same way.
Daily Sports reported that there is is at least one big project underway for the 40th anniversary of the franchise in 2019. However, they did not clarify if the project was something new or if it was a remake.
Tonight on The GTFOMLG show, we'll be playing something a bit newer than most titles that we've played on the show: the ever-popular The Simpsons: Hit & Run. It's arguably the best Simpsons game out there due to its Crazy Taxi-like gameplay, the ability to freely explore most of Springfield, and a slew of Easter eggs and fan service.
I'll be taking this game for a drive for the first time in damn near ten years (holy crap, has it been THAT long already?!), so don't expect any miracles when it comes to how far we'll make it in the game tonight. As well, I'm playing the PS2 version, so, it's a tad ugly, but hey, it's what we got. See you tonight at 7pm PST on Dtoid.TV!
[The GTFOMLG Show airs Monday through Thursday at 7p.m. Pacific on Dtoid.TV. Watch Rick 'King Foom' Olson play a variety of retro games, chosen by the viewers. With a heavy focus on community interaction, you can be as much a part of the show as anything else.]
You might still know it as Keystone or "that other game Digital Extremes is working on with the damn good art." Scratch all that (well, not the art part). It's now named The Amazing Eternals, and while that might sound unwieldy at first, the name makes sense given the deck-building hero shooter's premise: you and your teammates are fighting in a mystical board game, Jumanji style.
The developers have been running a closed alpha test, and they're now gearing up for a closed beta phase, with keys going out in batches beginning Friday, September 1. (You can sign up here.) A few days earlier, on August 29, folks who buy into the Founders Program will get instant access.
The deck building aspect pushes me away a little bit, and I've got my hands full with hero shooters as is, but I do like the pulp-inspired setup. I could see The Amazing Eternals breaking through the noise.
I thought this looked familiar! Ink is a world-coloring platformer with a Super Meat Boy vibe going for it. You hop off walls, avoid spikes and other patience-testing obstacles, and flesh out the world with colorful goo. The game first released on Steam, but it's getting a round of console ports next month.
Ink is coming to PlayStation 4 on September 19, then Xbox One on September 22. It'll go for $10, but Xbox One pre-orders come at a 25 percent discount. A quick glance at the Steam user reviews shows that folks are torn. (It sounds like the game gets needlessly tough, due in part to floaty or otherwise unreliable controls.) That's disappointing, but I do like the fill-in-the-world concept.
Despite being released long after the point-and-click game genre's heyday, 2003's The Black Mirror became a gothic horror hit long before the unrelated British sci-fi anthology show. THQ Nordic tapped German developer King Art Games to revive the original game into modern adventure title, which is due for release on November 28th for Xbox One, PS4 and PC.
My least favorite thing in PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds is being the last person standing in my squad. A solo run is one thing; you signed up for it. You know the score. But to play on your own and have ghostly teammates inspect your every move for the remainder of your short existence? It's stressful!
That's the situation I found myself in during this run. Against all odds, it wasn't a total disaster.
I'm not sure how many of you were out there waiting for a Prey trial on PC, but that's a thing now!
As of today, players can get a feel for the first hour on PC, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One. In the latter two cases, there already was a demo, but now it's a trial, meaning your progress and Trophies/Achievements are stored should you like what you play and decide to spring for the full version.
On that note, Arkane Studios and Bethesda are also holding a 50% off sale for Prey on all platforms. Wait a few months and get the game for $30? Not a bad tactic. I initially held off because of issues with the PS4 port, but now I have a capable-enough PC to do this game justice. Hmm.
Today King Art Games showed off a teaser trailer for their upcoming game Iron Harvest. The real-time strategy game is set for release in 2019, and will be coming to PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC. It's set in the alternate reality of 1920+, which was created by Polish artist Jakub Różalski.
I will say I'm liking what I'm seeing so far in the pre-alpha trailer.
The PlayStation Experience, Sony's attempt in recent years at an annual gaming convention, will be returning this December. The event itself will be once again hosted at the Anaheim Convention Center in Anaheim, California and will run from December 9-10.
PSX 2017 will also be featuring the 2017 Capcom Cup. The event will have a special dedicated tournament stage for Street Fighter V on Sunday, December 10, with the top qualifying players from the 2017 Capcom Pro Tour competing for large amounts of cash-money and to be considered world champion.
The Cleaner who bears Serial Cleaner's namesake is not very good at his job. Throughout 20 levels (and 10 more bonus contracts), he'll seem perfectly adept. The 20 individual successes that are necessary for a consistent narrative paint him as a consummate professional -- always making bodies and evidence disappear right under the noses of patrolling policemen.
But, consider this: Shouldn't a murder-cover-upper get there before the cops? Take a quick look to other mediums. John Wick's cleaning crew? There before the cops. Pulp Fiction's Winston Wolf? There before the cops. Maybe the guy who hired the Cleaner should've let him know earlier; then again, maybe the Cleaner should stop taking such risky jobs.
It feels a bit over-serious to put Serial Cleaner this far under the microscope. After all, it's a very-not-serious slapstick stealth puzzler about vacuuming up blood and throwing corpses off cliffs. But, this game's inconsistencies pile up and create a dissonance that all the Formula 409 in the world couldn't clean up.
Crackdown 3 couldn't quite make the leap to hit its release date. Rather than launching on November 7, Microsoft has just pushed it back to spring 2018.
The news of Crackdown 3's delay has just been confirmed by Polygon, who received word from Shannon Loftis, the publishing general manager at Microsoft Studios. In a statement to Polygon, Loftis said:
A standalone video game adaptation of Planet of the Apes is in the works at Imaginati for a fall release on PC, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One. I was expecting to want to immediately write it off -- we've been burned so many times before -- but it sounds far more genuine than your average tie-in game.
"The roots of what we've done is built on the heritage of Quantic Dreams' or Telltale Games' products," Imaginati founder Martin Alltimes tells IGN. "But we have a very specific angle. I saw the opportunity here was pure, cinematic-style storytelling, rather than traditional console storytelling."
Set in between the events of 2014's Dawn of the Planet of the Apes and 2017's War for the Planet of the Apes, the game revolves around both humans and apes struggling to survive near the Rocky Mountains.
"The pace of the storytelling is just super-intense compared to any of these other games," he elaborated. "There's no opening and closing drawers, no searching through inventories. It's all about you making choices that affect relationships with other characters and, in the long term, how those relationships play out, and how the story plays out."
According to IGN, Planet of the Apes: Last Frontier will run a few hours, "with no exploration sections or puzzles, nor any direct control over characters." I'm willing to give that format a chance, and as a fan of the Apes reboot series, I'm glad this is its own thing, separate from Caesar's story.
Planet of the Apes: Last Frontier Aims to Bring the Spirit of the Movies to Gaming [IGN]
Darkwood is a game of gnarled roots and things that go bump in the night. Savages and mutated creatures hide just out of view, obscured by the heavy shadows cast from thick foliage and impossibly high trees. The forest looms overhead. It's a natural enemy of sorts, an endless and oppressive force that plays host to a collection of monsters and macabre sites. Under the canopy of an ever-growing forest, Darkwood forces players to confront the unknown.
It's fitting that developer Acid Wizard Studio describes Darkwood as "a new perspective on survival horror." The game takes a different approach than other entries in the genre, opting for a top-down perspective with a view cone that represents what's immediately in front of you. Everything else is desaturated and obscured, meaning that you're never really safe from the things that hide in the woods unless you're constantly scanning every possible direction.
And even then, it's rare that anyone will come out of Darkwood unscathed.
Pony Island is a masterpiece in creative storytelling that consistently upends player expectations. As the trailer will tell you, this is not a game about ponies. This is a game about escaping the clutches of Satan himself.
Destructoid rated this beauty a 9.5 when it originally released, and you can now find out what all the fuss is about for the low, low price of free. Humble Bundle has it packed in as part of the microJUMBO Bundle, but all you have to do is enter your email here, at the bottom of the page, to score DRM-free copies of both Pony Island and Space Pilgrim Episode 1 without paying a single dime. You won't receive a Steam key, but both titles are available at the "pay what you want" tier of the bundle if that's something you're interested in.
Sebastian Castellanos is barreling toward a head-on collision with a new type of foe. As we saw in the original Evil Within, he's accustomed to dealing with the grotesque, the supernatural, and the horrifying. The sequel pits him against something different: a still-living serial killer.
Bethesda released this new character trailer that introduces Stefano Valentini, a photographer who gets off on capturing his subjects in the few seconds that they accept that death is imminent. He's very BioShock Sander Cohen in the egocentric and eccentric way that others' suffering is his art.
Here's the description and backstory of Valentini that Bethesda sent along in a press release:
The next free Pokémon giveaway for Sun and Moon is happening right now. If you live in the United States, just visit a participating GameStop to receive the free code.
The Pokemon in question is a "battle-ready" Salazzle, as Chris previously reported. The Salazzle is level 50 and holds a Focus Sash, an item that lets the Pokémon endure an attack that would normally kill it in one hit. The item only has one use.
It's been about a month since I dipped my toes into PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds and, frankly, I didn't think it would hold my interest this long. But the lust for chicken dinners is still going strong! I'm loving it as a few-hours-a-week social experience. It can be fun, funny, scary, and thrilling -- you never quite know what you're going to get. No other game right now makes me feel the way PUBG does.
That said, sooner than later, I'm bound to want more maps and new mechanics. An important note on that front: Bluehole is slowing its pace. "Until the official release of the game, we will not have our scheduled weekly or monthly patches rolling out as often as before," wrote the studio.
"We've found internally that being rushed to finish certain features, and having shorter QA test time between pushing updates caused more issues than it solved in regards to maintaining a high standard of quality. We want to put our best content out, and ensure that everything we do is making the game more enjoyable with every update."
Continuing, the developer said, "Although we may not release a weekly patch, we will utilize the test servers for significantly longer periods of time and deploy patches and hotfixes when necessary. This way, when we have a new feature that we'd like to roll-out it will be more thoroughly polished thanks to extensive community feedback. This will result in our live build being more exciting for everyone and drastically reduce the amount of unforeseen issues. We want to thoroughly and truthfully emphasize that this will have absolutely no bearing on how much content we deliver, or how much we work on the development of the game."
Bluehole maintains that it is "still on-track to release our game as per our updated timeline."
Changes to Scheduled Patch Rollouts [PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds]
The final playable race for Total War: Warhammer II has been revealed as the rodent based Skaven. Fans speculated this from the initial trailer, which showed a rat biting at the corpse of a fallen warrior, but now the cat is officially out of the bag. Or, rat, perhaps.
As Sega so delicately puts it, "Their motives obscured, the devious Skaven are a highly numerous species who inhabit vast subterranean lairs. Now, their time of prophecy is upon us, and this verminous Race have emerged to spread pestilence and mayhem across the face of the New World." Sounds disease ridden.
Creative Assembly also unleashed a cinematic trailer for the Skaven, which is honestly pretty cool looking. It doesn't show much actual gameplay, but you can took a look at a couple of screenshots to see in-game models.
It was revealed in Namco's quarterly summary that Tekken 7s console sales have already exceeded 1.66 million units, with an expectation of 2.1 million units by the end of the year. For reference, Tekken 6 sold 3.5 million over the course of roughly a year and a half. In comparison, Street Fighter V has sold 1.7 million copies as of June across PC and PlayStation 4, however it was supposed to hit 2 million at the end of March 2016. For reference here, the original version of Street Fighter IV sold 3.4 million before the Super version came out the next year.
So if the two are usually neck in neck in sales, why is Tekken 7 outpacing Street Fighter V? Why have Street Fighter V's sales slowed so much?
Seeing as how Night Trap: 25th Anniversary Edition released yesterday for digital platforms, you'd think the announcement of a delay for different regions would have happened sometime last week. Sadly, that isn't the case for Europe, as Night Trap was quietly not uploaded to the PSN (it released globally on Steam). How do you miss a release date for a digital game? It's not like you can run out of copies.
Turns out this is due to translation requests that came in at the last minute. For those unaware, a lot of European game releases contain multiple language options for the vast array of countries that encompass Europe. While there is only one product, you can't just slap English in and call it a day when people in Germany, France or Poland don't speak English. While I don't think anyone necessarily is worried about not experiencing Night Trap in Italian, Sony's European division is still waiting on approval for the game.
Over at Capcom Unity, it was announced that new costumes would be coming for select cast members of Street Fighter V. The costumes are being pushed as part of the 30th anniversary for the Street Fighter franchise and will arrive on August 29 for both PlayStation 4 and PC. Each costume will run prospective buyers $3.99/€3.99 each, which is standard pricing for the premium costumes.
That being said the costumes, and some of the characters selected for them, don't really appear to be related to the anniversary? They feel like random costumes that claim to be for the anniversary because they needed something for it. I haven't followed the costume DLC too closely, but wouldn't something like Chun-Li's costume in the Alpha series have been a better choice for instance?
Street Fighter V 30th Anniversary Costumes coming August 29th [Capcom Unity]
I still don't know why Theatrhythm didn't catch on. The 3DS has a massive installbase, Square Enix has a massive library of great songs, and the gameplay was there. Sadly, we only got two Final Fantasy themed Theatrhythm games in the west, as the Dragon Quest version was relegated to Japan-only. I couldn't resist importing it, but there's no way I can get my hands on the third Theatrhythm Final Fantasy unless I physically go to Japan.
Yep, the arcade edition has been trucking along for roughly a year now, and Square Enix is still adding new content to it on a steady basis. The latest bits include The Last Hunter and Crazy Chocobo from XIII-2, and wait for it, the main theme from Chrono Trigger.
Square, alongside of Capcom, is the king of mining nostalgia. Based on how good the gameplay looks (check out the mock-up of the physical play area in the lower right hand corner here), this is a "must play" situation the next time I make it out to Japan.
We Happy Few is set to face a new reality, one where it's a multi-console game. After spending two years as an Xbox One console exclusive (and also on PC), developer Compulsion Games announced today that it's branching out to PlayStation 4.
The platform hopping is just one of many significant We Happy Few developments to come to light today. It has also been revealed that Gearbox Publishing has signed the game. This is just the sixth title that Gearbox has published; its other five games are: Homeworld Remastered Collection, Homeworld: Deserts of Kharak, Duke Nukem 3D: 20th Anniversary World Tour, Bulletstorm: Full Clip Edition, and Fortnite (which it's co-publishing with Epic).
Gearbox's role in all of this, besides marketing We Happy Few, will likely be to help bring the game to the finish line. The "Life in Technicolour" update launched today for the early access versions on PC and Xbox One. After this, there won't be anymore updates until We Happy Few releases on April 13, 2018.
It sounds as if there's still a significant amount of work to do because Compulsion has increased the scope of We Happy Few. The developer says the full version of the game will contain three playable characters and more than 250 encounters. In a press release, Compulsion calls this "a much grander vision."
Somewhat buried among all this news is that today marks the moment when We Happy Few is hit with a sizable price hike. Previously, people could purchase the early access/preview program version for $30; that's gone now, as the price has increased to $60 for both digital and physical editions. A silver lining is that most pre-orders are subject to a 15 percent discount, which drops it to $51.
Much like the story it's telling, We Happy Few has kind of existed in an optimistic state where the safety net of early access made for wishful thinking. Things got real today. We Happy Few is set to release in eight months and that's when we'll get an uninhibited look at what this game is made of.
It's back to school season in full swing and the retailers across the web are running concurrent promotions to get you to buy junk. As of writing eBay is running a "20% off" coupon code that works with select retailers for select items. The 20% off is sort of a moot point because savings are capped at a maximum of $50, but interestingly enough there are plenty of gems among the flurry of garage sales junk.
In this wide swat of "back to school" deals, we're spotting some decent pricing on Xbox One S bundle, PlayStation VR Core headset, and even some sweet CPU deals (many of them of the AMD Ryzen variant).
If you must have an Xbox One S before you're off to college, the $249 Xbox One S Battlefield 1 bundle with an extra control is a pretty swell deal. Conversely, while we've all spotted a PlayStation VR for cheaper before - the $350 price tag is still better than list price.
PC gamers thinking of building their own rig can now choose from AMD Ryzen 3, 5, and 7 at a reduced price (about 15% off in savings compared to usual discount). Our top pick out of the batch below would be the refurbished HP Omen 32, which is one of the most popular QHD display in the 27-inch+ size category.
Use Coupon Code: PSCHOOL20
Gaming Hardware Deals
CPU Discounts
Deal ends soon tonight at 11:59pm Pacific as the coupon will be expired. The code must be used with a PayPal account during checkout and can only be used once per account.
In case you haven't heard, Sonic Mania is pretty great. Although I initially reviewed it on PS4 I've also been playing the Switch version, which still feels weird to me as a '90s kid to see a 2D Sonic on a Nintendo system.
Alas, there's a small bug that's exclusive to the Switch edition. Some users have been noting that while playing the game in portable mode, there's a delay (or in some cases, no response) sometimes when using the screen capture feature or pressing the home button. Developer Christian Whitehead and his team are thankfully on it already though, noting on Twitter that they're aware of the bugs, accompanied by a cute cartoon.
As far as bugs go this one is pretty tame. Meta-UI features should absolutely work as intended, but I'm glad that the actual game isn't completely busted or houses a massive disparity between other versions like several Switch port have done.
Christian Whitehead [Twitter]
