The Lunar Remastered Collection was announced at PlayStation State of Play this week, finally bringing a pair of beloved JRPGs back to modern audiences after a 25-year gap. Fans of the series had begun to give up hope that these games would ever get a modern remaster, and it all comes back to the controversial English localization that brought them to Western audiences in the first place.Lunar: The Silver Star and Lunar: Eternal Blue were both originally developed for Sega CD by Japanese studio Game Arts. Later, Game Arts remade both games for PS1 as Lunar: Silver Star Story Complete and Lunar 2: Eternal Blue Complete. All four of these versions were translated by a localization studio known as Working Designs.Fans of Japanese obscurities tended to have a love-and-hate relationship with Working Designs in the ’90s. The studio picked up the torch for JRPGs in an era before they had become mainstream, and gave English translations to many notable games that may otherwise never have been …
Blizzard is reportedly once again “incubating” a shooter based on its seminal sci-fi strategy series StarCraft.The tidbit comes from Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier and his upcoming book about the company called Play Nice, which was discussed at length on Podcast Unlocked. “Yes, that is a project that, as far as I know, is in development,” Schreier says at the 44-minute mark, “or at least as of the time I wrote this book, it was in development – so, yes, they are working on a StarCraft shooter. StarCraft is not dead at Blizzard.”
Crazy Blizzard Stories With Jason Schreier – Unlocked 661 – YouTube
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Not much is known about the project, aside from the fact that former Far Cry lead Dan Hay is reportedly at the helm. Hay was supposedly overseeing the publisher’s first new series since Overwatch – the fairytale survival game Odyssey, which was unceremoniously canceled amid layoffs – but transitioned to StarCraft shortly after.The third time might just be a charm…
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We know that Astro Bot DLC is on the way to expand the cute PlayStation mascot’s adventures further, so even if you’ve already managed to cross the universe to rebuild the Mothership and rescue all of your little bot chums, this isn’t the end of the story. There are fresh features, new collectibles, plus much more on the way, and the best news is that the first big content drop will be completely free! For the lowdown on what’s to come with the Astro Bot DLC, here’s everything we know so far.What can we expect from Astro Bot DLC Astro Bot guidesAstro Bot outfits
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Astro’s Playroom Special BotsThanks to a recent interview given by Astro Bot studio director Nicolas Doucet, we already have some details about what will feature in the first Astro Bot DLC. This is going to be free DLC including more VIP bots to rescue and speedrun levels, along with online leaderboards so players can…
Super Smash Bros Ultimate and Kirby creator Masahiro Sakurai says sorry to the players who have spent thousands of hours in his games.The apology comes courtesy of the famed director’s most recent Creating Games episode, in which he reconciles with the idea that a game’s playtime is basically a cost that players need to weigh. “Play time – especially how it’s conceived before starting a game – is better thought of as a cost of sorts,” he explains. “In the modern world, you’re constantly competing with everything else,” Sakurai continues. “It’s a battle for people’s time. Even if someone has lots of free time on their hands, that means something different now than it did in the past. There are always things to do. The question is: how do people choose to spend the time?”
Be Mindful of the Time Players are Giving You [Planning & Game Design] – YouTube
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I find it funny that footage from infamous timesinks Vampire Survivors and Powerwash Simulator play in the backgr…
The PS5 Pro is launching this November for the low, low price of $700 – and Sony has shown what the souped up console can do by updating some of its back catalogue.During the PS5 Pro Technical presentation below, lead architect Mark Cerny began by demoing The Last of Us Part 2 running on the upcoming console. “It has huge amounts of detail and targets a super smooth 60 frames per second,” he said, while Ellie runs through an overgrown city. The same scene is then shown running on a normal PS5 at 30fps, which Cerny reckons is “therefore much choppier.”
PS5 Pro Technical Presentation hosted by Mark Cerny – YouTube
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Cerny then shows how Sony has reached “this goal of delivering almost fidelity-like graphics and performance frame rate” by doing the same side-by-side comparisons for Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 and Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart. “We can see that the PS5 Pro is close to doubling the power of the PlayStation 5,” Cerny continues as dual-screened Ratchet causes some m…
We’ve officially hit the endgame of big damage numbers in Diablo 4, folks. Thanks to a busted combo in the action RPG’s latest PTR server, one dedicated player cooked up the biggest number the game can feasibly handle, and then blew straight past it into the realm of literal infinity. The game just throws out the symbol for infinity instead of an actual damage number, like a white flag in the face of unfathomable DPS.Regular Diablo scientist Rob2628 shared this mathematical breakthrough this week, after a Chinese player shared it via bilibili, and I’m knowingly breaking the laws of news writing just to express these unholy numbers to you in full. Rob reckons the biggest number that Diablo 4 can register, on account of this being the limit for what “can be represented by a 128-bit unsigned integer,” is this:340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,455The largest single number he was able to capture on camera was this:333,515,323,498,366,500,000,000,000,000,000,000,000
HIGH…
Do you believe in life after love? What about love after life? As it turns out, that’s what all the cool spirits are up to beyond the veil. Ghostina tells us as much early on in Love, Ghostie when I first appear before her as a newly-departed soul, set to pay my dues to humanity from the beyond. I’ll be doing so from my very own manor house, mine to haunt for all eternity – or at least, until I run out of new tenants to match up and watch as they fall in love with a little phantasmic help.Love, Ghostie is part dating sim, part management sim, and part muli-ended visual novel, but it’s all heart. There’s something so calming about watching love blossom between two strangers, seemingly from nothing at all, while having had a hand in the proceedings all along. Some might call it a thankless task, stealing little items and “gifting” them to residents while crediting it to a would-be admirer, but that’s kind of the point. This is not just a game about making others fall in love. Love,…
Indiana Jones and the Great Circle developer MachineGames has a specific design philosophy when it comes to crafting villains. Speaking to Edge magazine, lead writer Tommy Tordsson-Bjork explained how the studio – responsible for both The Great Circle and the Wolfenstein games – brought its bad guys to life.”We’ve gone into every project with the philosophy that a properly characterized villain is what makes the hero shine. I always try to find some characteristics that make the villains feel more real, whether it’s giving them some quirk or flaws that they try to compensate for – even a sliver of humanity or empathy.”Grounding a villain with relatable flaws helps players connect with the character, but it’s also used to prop the hero up and bring out their best qualities. When writing Emmerich Voss, the calculating main antagonist of Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, Tordsson-Bjork mentioned that “his personality has been incredibly fun to write. But also, since I am not hyper-…
Anyone who’s played Like A Dragon: Infinite Wealth probably remembers its outrageous Sicko Snap minigame – a spin on Pokemon Snap that has our protags taking pictures of muscly half-naked men – but it wasn’t included purely for the shock value.According to the game’s director Ryosuke Horii and game design supervisor Hirotaka Chiba who spoke to Automaton about the minigame, Sicko Snap actually fixed a very real problem elsewhere in the Yakuza RPG, even if it made the producers ask, “What the hell is this?” “Sicko Snap was not originally planned, as opposed to minigames like Crazy Delivery and Dondoko Island, which were a part of the original proposal,” Horii explains. “Sicko Snap was the result of our attempts to solve a problem that arose during development.”When developer RGG began implementing trolleys, a common form of public transport in the game’s real-life Hawaii counterpart, the team soon discovered that the rides “felt kind of boring” because the sluggish v…
Video game combat has a lot of components that need to work in tandem for players to feel the satisfaction of a visceral hit, and that’s why Indiana Jones and the Great Circle developer MachineGames has set out to ensure that everything comes together to make the fist-fighting feel impactful.Speaking to Edge magazine, design director Jens Andersson recalls how the team at MachineGames worked on first-person fist-fighting 20 years ago. “This isn’t the first time this team has entered the arena of first-person fist-fighting. Back when the foundational core of MachineGames worked at Starbreeze, they won acclaim doing the same with The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay.” He goes on to say “It’s really hard.” Harder than they felt it should have been, in fact. “We’ve done this before – we should know how to do it.” Yet in the two decades since that game, “the bar has been raised considerably.”Technology has evolved rapidly in the two decades since MachineGames attempted th…