Aaron Souppouris
We finally have a release date for Ninja Theory's Hellblade sequel: May 21, 2024. It's been over four years since Senua's Saga was announced at the 2019 Game Awards alongside Microsoft's (then next-gen) Xbox Series X console.
The first game in the series, Senua's Sacrifice, focused on the main character's journey to the realm of the dead, and her battle with mental health issues. Saga will focus on Senua traveling through Iceland to track down the Vikings who have been raiding her home town. According to Ninja Theory you should expect "perception puzzles led by her experiences of psychosis," which were a high point of the first game. There'll also be some pretty standard video game combat, but this time, in Iceland!
As you'd expect for a first-party title, Senua's Saga will arrive on Microsoft's Game Pass service for Xbox consoles and PC on day one. For those without Game Pass, it'll be a digital-only release priced at $50. PC users will be able to buy it on either the Xbox store or Steam.
Senua returns in a brutal journey of survival. Senua's Saga: Hellblade II, coming May 21 | #DeveloperDirect pic.twitter.com/Rt7BHZ4OgS
— Xbox (@Xbox) January 18, 2024
Senua’s Saga: Hellblade II finally arrives on May 21
Sega promised a new era at The Game Awards, and it gave us five games to look forward to. Well, "new" is doing a lot of heavy lifting: The storied developer announced that fresh titles are coming based on Crazy Taxi, Jet Set Radio, Shinobi, Golden Axe and Streets of Rage.
Depending on your age, those titles may mean various things to you. Golden Axe and Shinobi have their roots in the arcades of the '80s, while Streets of Rage is a Genesis classic. Crazy Taxi and Jet Set Radio were both released in the Dreamcast era (with Crazy Taxi making its debut in arcades first).
Several prominent fighting game creators received physical invites from Sega to tune into The Game Awards, fueling speculation that a Virtua Fighter revival was part of the company's plans for the event. Unless Sega is holding another trailer back, it looks like those folks will be leaving a little disappointed.
Sega’s parent company SegaSammy has been awkwardly talking about a "Super Game" project since 2021. The term was only really defined as a game capable of making hundreds of millions of dollars for Sega. Super! In the same investor presentation, the company openly contemplated reviving “dormant” properties like Virtua Fighter, Jet Set Radio and Crazy Taxi by way of remasters, remakes and reboots.
Other game series listed for revival, such as Space Channel 5, Panzer Dragoon and Streets of Rage, have seen some action. Space Channel 5 got a remastered VR port, Panzer Dragoon got a remake and Streets of Rage got an excellent new numbered release, Streets of Rage 4, developed and published by third parties under license from Sega.
Four of the new titles appear from the tiny glimpses in Sega's trailer to be high-budget 3D affairs. The Crazy Taxi and Jet Set Radio revivals seem to be glossy HD takes on the games they're based on, while the Golden Axe reboot in particular is unrecognizable from the 2D scroller it's based on. Streets of Rage also appears to be going all-3D. Only Shinobi looks somewhat familiar, using a 2D style close to Dotemu's Windjammers 2 and Streets of Rage 4.
The Sega of today is very different to the one that made the originals. The turn of the century saw Sega battle through a multi-stage midlife crisis in search of a new identity; The Dreamcast was in the process of being thoroughly outsold by Sony’s PlayStation 2, leading Sega to exit the console business in 2001. At the same time, the ‘90s arcade revival that saw Sega become a technology leader was fading fast.
After some missteps in the early days of third-party publishing, and an acquisition by pachinko manufacturer Sammy, Sega began to find its feet. The mid ‘00s saw the debut of the Yakuza series, and the company has made several key acquisitions since, such as Sports Interactive (Football Manager), Creative Assembly (Total War), Relic Entertainment (Warhammer), Atlus, (Megami Tensei/Persona) and, most recently, Angry Birds maker Rovio. It’s also seen success in cinemas with its Sonic the Hedgehog movies.
And here I am just waiting on a new Seaman game.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/sega-is-resurrecting-its-classics-including-jet-set-radio-crazy-taxi-and-golden-axe-022041470.html?src=rssSega is resurrecting its classics including Jet Set Radio, Crazy ...
Netflix’s new prestige sci-fi show is delayed until March 22, 2024. 3 Body Problem was originally scheduled to debut in 2023, before being pushed back to January 2024, and now March. Just as the initial delay was accompanied by a teaser trailer, so too is this one:
3 Body Problem is being adapted by David Benioff and D.B. Weiss (who created HBO's Game of Thrones) alongside screenwriter Alexander Woo. The new trailer gives us our first look at the series’ key “video game,” Three-Body, which involves a nebulous and extremely shiny VR headset. According to John Bradley’s character Jack Rooney, the headset has "no screen... no headphone jack... not even a charging port." Donning the headset transports Rooney to a hyper-realistic world, before he’s swiftly ejected and the trailer ends.
The show's source material is The Three-Body Problem, the first novel in Liu Cixin’s Remembrance of Earth's Past series. Originally released in the mid ’00s in China, it gained international recognition and a Hugo award when Tor Books published an English-language translation in 2014. Netflix’s ill-grammared take on the book was announced in 2020, and stars Benedict Wong, Eiza González and several Game of Thrones alums including Jonathan Pryce and the aforementioned Bradley.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/netflixs-new-3-body-problem-trailer-reveals-a-delay-to-march-2024-004430208.html?src=rssNetflix’s new 3 Body Problem trailer reveals a delay to ...
With shipments of its Pocket handheld console finally under control, Analogue is turning its attention to a whole new retro machine. The Analogue 3D aims to be the ultimate Nintendo 64, playing original cartridges on modern 4K displays. I’d love to show it to you, but Analogue is only releasing a teaser image and a few key specs today.
The Analogue 3D is the latest in a line of consoles from the company that emulate retro hardware. All of Analogue’s machines use field-programmable gate arrays (FPGA) that are coded to mimic original hardware. Rather than playing ROM files like most software emulators, Analogue consoles play original media — in this case N64 carts — without the downsides that software emulation often brings, such as increased input lag or visual imperfections.
Analogue started out with boutique recreations of Neo Geo and NES hardware, before targeting a more casual audience with systems that mimicked the SNES and Genesis. Its most splashy release to date is the Pocket, which emulates a variety of handhelds. There’s also the TurboGrafx-like Analogue Duo, which was announced in 2020 and, after some delays, will apparently ship this year.
That may seem like a disparate group of consoles, but there is one thing that ties them together: they’re all pretty primitive. If you’ve been around a while, you’ll remember consoles being referred to as 8-bit, 16-bit, 32-bit and so on. A lot of that was marketing, but the hardware of 8-bit systems is broadly less complex to recreate than that of 16-bit systems, and so on. As the first true “64-bit” console on the market, the N64 is by far the most complex system Analogue has tackled to date. Its 64-bit 93.75MHz CPU was wild for a $200 console — even if most developers still wrote 32-bit code for it — and its Silicon Graphics “reality coprocessor” was the stuff of (extremely nerdy) playground legend. They made the T-rex from Jurassic Park with (better versions of) that thing!
The Analogue 3D is described as a “reimagining” of Nintendo’s console, and the company is promising 100 percent compatibility with carts from all regions. It will output at 4K resolution with Original Display Modes that target “reference quality recreations” of specific CRTs and PVMs. To translate, that means Analogue is building filters that might, for example, make a modern OLED or LCD display feel more like a dope mid-'90s Sony Trinitron TV. No word on whether they’re baking in a recreation of the weird LG TV with legs I played on for most of the ’00s.
Internals aside, the N64 has a small library of games and a mistake of a controller, but there are some classics in there. On the first-party side, The Legand of Zelda: Ocarina of Time and Majora’s Mask have both held up to decades of scrutiny, and Mario 64, some camera issues aside, is as fun to play in 2023 as it was in 1996. Then there’s Paper Mario, Mario Kart 64, F-Zero X, Star Fox 64, Super Smash Bros. and countless others. Rare also did some fantastic work on the N64 with the likes of GoldenEye 007, Perfect Dark, Banjo-Kazooie, Diddy Kong Racing and Conker's Bad Fur Day.
Quality third-party titles were harder to come by, but Star Wars: Rogue Squadron, Mischief Makers, Harvest Moon 64 and the Turok games are all worth checking out. (I personally spent more time playing Horse in an average port of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater than any of these, but there’s no accounting for taste.)
One thing very few people remember fondly is the N64’s three-paddled controller, which at the time felt fine but boy was it not. The Analogue 3D will have four controller ports, just like the original N64, but it thankfully also supports Bluetooth and 2.4G wireless connectivity. 8BitDo will be releasing a companion controller for the console, which is all-but invisible in the picture above. After some toying around in Photoshop, it appears to be very similar to the company’s Ultimate controller, but with C-buttons where the regular face buttons would be, the A+B buttons replacing the right analog stick and a big ol' start button in the middle.
There’s no word yet on price — early Analogue machines cost a lot, but its more recent efforts have been more palatable. The Analogue Duo, which has a CD drive inside, cost $250 when pre-orders went live, so it seems a fair guess to say it’d be in the same price range — though you’ll need to budget for a couple of controllers no matter the price, as Analogue doesn't supply them with any of its systems.
The Analogue 3D is currently slated to ship in 2024, and knowing Analogue, pre-orders will open some time in the next few months and sell out almost immediately.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/the-analogue-3d-is-a-nintendo-64-for-modern-times-150020872.html?src=rssThe Analogue 3D is a Nintendo 64 for modern times
Cocoon is a near-perfect puzzle game that everyone should play
Cocoon is a game that makes perfect sense while you're playing it. That would be an unremarkable achievement if it wasn't also a game that forces you to use its levels to solve themselves. At Summer Game Fest 2023 I had around half an hour to play through the game’s opening, and it has stuck with me more than anything else I saw at the show.
Cocoon is the debut game from Geometric Interactive, a studio founded by former Playdead employees Jeppe Carlsen and Jakob Schmid. Carlsen was the lead gameplay designer of the award-winning puzzle platformers Limbo and Inside, and Schmid the audio programmer of Inside. The pair also collaborated on 140, a minimalistic indie platformer, and have been working on Cocoon with a small team in Denmark for over five years.
As in Limbo, Inside and 140, controls and interactivity in general are pared back to a minimum. On an Xbox controller, that means movement with an analog stick and interactions confined to a single button. The complexity comes from the environment, the narrative from exploration. It’s reminiscent of Tunic or Hyper Light Drifter in its lack of dialogue and tutorials.
Orbs are everything in Cocoon. They're assets that open doors, trigger switches, reveal hidden paths and solve puzzles, but they’re also levels themselves. Remember that scene in Men In Black where there’s an entire galaxy in a little marble on a cat's collar? Geometric Interactive has taken that idea and made it a core mechanic. Each orb is a distinct world with its own vibe, original puzzle mechanics and a boss fight. You can hop in and out of these worlds by placing an orb into sockets dotted around the game, and can even bring orbs into other orbs, which, given the abilities they unlock, will likely be critical to finding paths forward.
I say there’s a “boss fight” in every orb, but there is no conventional combat in Cocoon – there is just a single interaction button, after all. You defeat bosses by using something in the environment like a water spout or an exploding mine. These fights are also forgiving: I took a “hit” once, and it revealed a delightful mechanic: Instead of dealing damage or killing me, the boss booted me out of its world. I then had to traverse back to the fight to finish it off. Defeating the two bosses I found granted new powers of sorts, in classic Metroidvania style, which allowed progression to new areas and the discovery of more orbs.
There were other simple environmental puzzles to solve. One involved ascertaining the order in which to hit some switches, another had me pulling towers around to open a door. A slightly trickier one involved some doubling back to navigate a hidden path. Given this was the very start of the game, I’m sure the complexity will ramp up significantly. By the end of my playthrough, I was already jumping in and out of worlds in order to get orbs to where they needed to be.
A colleague who was watching my demo said that they could tell I’ve "played a lot of these types of games” — thing is, I haven’t. Cocoon is a game where everything makes sense, but you can’t explain why. I'm sure, as in other puzzle adventures, I'll get stumped in some places, but exploring this world felt completely natural. After a while I stopped being surprised that everything I tried just worked. Solving puzzles became a flow state as I giddily wandered around carrying my precious orbs.
Cocoon is firmly at the top of my wishlist already, and it’s tough imagining anything overtaking it. It’s being published by Annapurna Interactive, and will come to Nintendo Switch, PC, PlayStation and Xbox consoles later this year.
Catch up on all of the news from Summer Game Fest right here!
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/cocoon-is-worth-getting-excited-about-181529189.html?src=rss