Do you still think Sucker Punchwas just shy of being a truly great work? If so, Zack Snyder agrees with you—and he’s ready to make its Snyder Cut a reality.
Spoilers of the Week April 11-15
Talking to Empire earlier in the week, the director was asked about what he’d change from any of his movies. (Other than the one he already did that with, of couse.) He picked his 2011 action flick, which he says “never really got finished correctly. […] If I had the chance, I would fix that movie.” What’s stopping him from whipping up those changes is, accoring to him, both the resources and explicit permission to do it.
“They have to let me put it together,” he explained, presumably referring to Warner Bros. or Legendary Pictures. “I have the footage already shot. […] We ask every now and then, [and] we have to ask again. I think there has to be a window when no one’s got the movie.” He further implied that fans could help get the ball rolling faster, saying “if they want to start a campaign, that’s alright.”
Sucker Punch originally released in 2011 and starred Emily Browing as Babydoll, who gets sent to a mental hospital after accidentally shooting her sister while trying to fight off her abusive stepfather. Upon learning she’ll be lobotomized, Babydoll and her fellow patients—played by Jena Malone, Vanessa Hudgens, Abbie Cornish, and Jamie Chung—enter a number of fantasy worlds to find items that’ll help them escape in the real world. With negative reviews and an $89.8 million box office (on an $82M budget), it wasn’t really well-liked at the time, not helped by the flak it caught for its elevator pitch of girls fantasizing about killing monsters with swords and guns as they do erotic dances IRL.
Times have changed, though, and it’s possible the film would be better (or just more interesting?) if it’s been retooled. But would fans want to will that one into existence like they did with Justice League? That may be a little harder to determmine, since it’s yet to receive a widespread reappraisal like other movies lately.
Epic Games’ battle royale shooter Fortnite has some new characters joining in on the quest for the W: The Witcher 3’s Ciri, Geralt of Rivia’s adopted daughter, and his love interest Yennefer of Vengerberg are now available in the game’s item shop.
The Witcher 3 Meets Tense Roguelike PvE Card-Battling In Rogue Mage
The popular ladies of The Witcher franchise storm Fortnite with two islands of their own: Ciri’s Escape and Yennefer’s Battleground, both of which can be accessed through the game’s Discover tab. Or, if you’d rather land on the islands immediately, you can enter code 2776-4034-8400 for Ciri’s and 2862-9616-5689 for Yennefer’s. Completing either Ciri’s or Yennefer’s islands will net you emoticons of each, while finishing both of them will reward you with a fancy banner to show off. The two islands will be live until July 4.
The real draw here are the equippable skins, though you’ll have to shell out some V-Bucks for them. Currently Yennefer can be bought either on her own for 1,500 V-Bucks (approximately $12 USD) or in a bundle with her Megascope pickaxe, bird skull back bling, and Black Wings emote in which she summons her magical raven for 1,800. Ciri, meanwhile, is only available in a pack for 2,000 V-Bucks, and comes with both back bling and a pickaxe of her silver sword Zireael, as well as a basilisk glider. There are some cool touches to these skins, as well. Ciri’s hands, for example, will glow green when holding her Zireael Sword Pickaxe. And Yennefer’s just a badass. Who wouldn’t want to embody her essence?
Unfortunately, Geralt isn’t joining Ciri and Yennefer to duke it out for the win this time around, as the White Wolf was previously an unlockable skin Battle Pass owners were able to acquire back in Chapter 4 Season 1. As a result, he probably won’t be for sale at any point, though those who unlocked him can, of course, use him any time. Ah well, if we can’t have him back, then replacing him with two of the most powerful women in The Witcher seems like a fair trade.
During Wednesday’s Nintendo Direct, Konami showed off a new trailer for Metal Gear Solid: Master Collection Vol.1. The upcoming collection of past Metal Gear games includes some of the earliest and biggest games from the popular stealth series. However,2008’s Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots isn’t included, and I’m worried Konami isn’t going to include it in a future, theoretical Vol. 2.
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Metal Gear Solid: Master Collection Vol. 1 was first announced in May. The collection contains the first seven games of the series and will be released on Xbox Series X/S, Xbox One, PlayStation 4 and 5, and (just announced earlier today) Nintendo Switch. These games aren’t being remastered and they aren’t remakes. Instead, this is a new collection of classic MGS games that will make it easier to play these older titles on newer platforms. The collection will also include screenplay books of each game and some other goodies, too.
However, not included in this collection is the PS3-exclusive Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots, which is a shame as the game is currently only playable via emulation or on original PS3 hardware. At one point, MGS4 was available to stream via PS Now, but that is no longer the case. While most other MGS games have been ported to multiple platforms, MGS4 remains locked to the PS3. Why? What is the reason for never porting MGS4 to any other platform?
Why is Metal Gear Solid 4 only on PS3?
If you ask the internet about this, and you’ll not doubt see some of this in the comments, a popular theory that is often spouted off as if it’s a fact is that MGS4 is incapable of running on anything but a PS3. But that’s not true. You can, right now, download an emulator and play MGS4 at 60fps without much trouble.
And assistant producer of the game Ryan Payton suggests in Steven L. Kent’s book The Ultimate History of Video Games, Volume 2 that, at one point, MGS4 was actually running on an Xbox 360 and looked and played fine. Reportedly, that version never happened due to Microsoft’s console using DVDs and not Blurays. Konami didn’t want to spend the extra money on shipping multiple discs for the Xbox 360 version. This is more than likely the main reason MGS4 remained a PS3 exclusive and was even alluded to by former PlayStation boss Jack Tretton in 2008. Konami also said this was the reason in 2014.
Now, in 2023, most consoles use Bluray discs and all of them support digital games—which can be as large or small as you want. So that problem is solved. Yet, I’m still not convinced Konami will actually bring MGS4 to modern machines or to PC. It’s certainly not easy to port a game to new hardware, especially one that exists natively on just one platform. Plus, this whole process wouldn’t be cheap, would involve a good deal of resources, and would likely require tweaks to how the game plays as it heavily relied on the Dualshock 3/Sixaxis controller.
Reports indicate MGS4 isn’t coming to more consoles
Sadly, it seems Konami isn’t going to do the necessary work to help preserve this entry in the Metal Gear franchise. A previous report from Windows Central, which correctly revealed information about the Metal Gear Solid Collection and the MGS3 remake before release also stated that a potential Vol. 2 would not include MGS4, but instead would feature Peace Walker, Portable Ops, Metal Gear Rising: Revegance, and a few other spin-offs.
Sadly, it seems Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots—with all its long cutscenes, weird live-action bits, creepy monkey, and cool stealth camo—will remain a PS3 exclusive. Likely due to technical issues, but also, maybe Konami just forgot about it. There are a lot of games in the series. It’s easy to forget one or two of them. I get it. I forget Metal Gear Acid exists.
Still, I hope that one day, someone over at Konami remembers this game exists and that it deserves a second life on new hardware.
Authorities are investigating nearly 100 letters containing a mysterious white powder that were addressed to several Republican lawmakers in Kansas, with the sender referring to themselves in the letters as “your secret despirer.” What do you think?
“Do they want us to reach out to our representatives or not?”
Brett Gaines, Panda Tagger
What Makes Anna So Beautiful In The Moonlight?
“There’s something so quaint and personal about a hand-written threat these days.”
Bella Augusto, Automat Manager
“Relax, maybe it’s a good suspicious white powder.”
In a recent interview with IGN, three Final Fantasy XVI directors revealed their top three Final Fantasy games of all time. Surprisingly, none of the directors’ picks included mainstream fan favorites titles like mega-popular Final Fantasy VII. Instead, the devs earmarked deep-cut Final Fantasy entries not often discussed online among fans as the best game in the long-running fantasy roleplaying game series.
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Final Fantasy XVI creative director Kazutoyo Maehiro’s favorite FF games are (in ascending order) Final Fantasy XII, Final Fantasy Tactics, and Final Fantasy V.
Maehiro recounted playing FFV as a student and being awestruck by its battle system and the “incredible expressiveness” Square Enix was able to pull off with the game’s pixel art back on the Super NES. But what forever sold him on FFV being his all-time favorite FF game was a scene toward the end of the game where he witnessed doves flying across the landscape when he first beat the game.
“You could even say I decided to make games because I saw that scene,” Maehiro told IGN. “It made a huge impression on me, along with the rest of the polished game. It’s a solid No. 1 for me.”
Square Enix / Stormspirit 86
Since FFV isn’t really a fave in the same way over here as it was in Japan, here’s a bit of a refresher on the game. FFV follows a vagabond named Bartz who, upon investigating the crash site of a fallen meteor, joins a party of heroes. The crew try to prevent the corruption of all-powerful elemental crystals from the game’s antagonist, Exdeath. FFV Pixel Remaster, which was released in 2021 on PC and in April on the Nintendo Switch, earned a Metacritic score of 82 and a user score of 7.7.
With this in mind, Ryota Suzuki, FFXVI combat director, said his favorite games are Final Fantasy V, Final Fantasy X, and Final Fantasy III. When Suzuki was in grade school, he said he couldn’t wait to get home from grade school each day just so he could play more Final Fantasy.
“[FFIII] was the first game I experienced in the final fantasy series. Playing [FFIII] made me understand the appeal of RPGs as a genre,” Suzuki said. “With aspects like the ability to change jobs, Final Fantasy III is synonymous with RPGs to me.”
When asked which Final Fantasy games were his favorite, FFXVI director Hiroshi Takai replied saying his top three favorites in ascending order are Final Fantasy X, Final Fantasy VI, and Final Fantasy V.
“No. 1 is Final Fantasy V,” Takai told IGN. “This is in part because it was the first Final Fantasy I was involved in as a developer. But I love the game for its battle system. It’s a solid No. 1 for me within the FF series.”
Takai said that he loves FFX, and FFVI for their respective high levels of polish and the heights Square Enix was able to take “the final pixel art Final Fantasy” on the Super NES, respectively.
“As far as how this might be reflected in XVI, I’ve played every FF game, so I’m sure there may be some influences in there,” Takai said. “I think that XVI shares something in common with V in the way players can freely assign abilities to create their own main character.”
Final Fantasy fans’ reactions to FFV’s high ranking
IGN’s YouTube video comment section is full of responses from fans big-upping the devs for including FFV as their top-ranked game in the series.
“The fact all three included FFV in their top 3 says a lot about it. Had the game released overseas back in ‘92, it would’ve probably been a fan favourite for many,” Mizu 64 commented.
“Glad to see all the love for V. People gotta stop sleeping on V, it’s one of the best RPGs ever made,” Anthony wrote.
“Love seeing FFV getting so much love, it is so underrated, but honestly is just as great as VI imo,” PK Starstorm replied.
Final Fantasy XVI officially releases on June 22 on PlayStation 5.
For 15 years now, people in Hollywood have been trying to get a live-action Robotech movie made. Specifically, a movie based on Robotech’s first and most popular season, which was a Western repackaging of Japanese masterpiece Macross.
Robotech’s original animated intro
In 2007 it was Tobey Maguire leading the charge for a Warner Bros. production that ultimately went nowhere. Eight years later Sony took a swing, with Aquaman director James Wan attached, but it too would eventually wind up cancelled. Now we’re getting a third and more recent attempt, with Sony trying once again, announcing in 2022 that Hawkeye director Rhys Thomas will be trying to get the adventures of Rick Hunter and friends on the big screen.
This third try might have a better chance of actually getting made; aside from regular Hollywood politics and economics, previous attempts were also plagued by a long-running legal standoff that had stymied Western releases of Macross products for decades. They were largely resolved in 2021, clearly paving the way for Sony’s renewed attempts at getting a Robotech movie made.
Anyway, enough background! This is an art feature, not a history lesson. But I needed to spell all that out so that we’re clear about what’s being showcased tonight: a collection of art from that middle project, Sony’s aborted first attempt that, after suffering a big setback in 2018 when Wan bailed to make Aquaman, was quietly cancelled in 2019.
Most illustrations focus on the SDF-1, Macross Island (whose vibes Price absolutely nails here) and redesigned Veritech fighters, though there are also some works showcasing original plot elements (like the oil rigs) that would have been new for this particular film.
Developed alongside Anshar Studios, which previously assisted Bloober in expanding its sci-fi horror Observerin 2020, this new version of Layers of Fear compounds the original 2016 game, its DLC, Layers of Fear 2, a new DLC, and a new story meant to fill the gaps into one beautifully complex, decayed rose. But while the series has never looked better—Layers of Fear was made with Unreal Engine 5—its narrative is contrived, choking sometimes on its own ambitious intricacies.
My disappointment is poetic. Most of the characters the game lets you choose—The Painter, his wife The Musician, The Actor, and The Writer, who is introduced to the series for the first time in this game—suffer from the same sickness: getting squished under impractical aspirations. Through Layers of Fear’s divided chapters, I play each of them in first-person and piece together their distressing pasts through notes and their own commentary.
Letters with scratched-out names, found sentimental objects like a cracked conch shell, and a barrage of enigmatic voiceover tell me that the Layers of Fear cast has been successful in art before, and so they’re determined to keep striving, however unreasonable their goals start to feel in the game’s morphing, pitch-black houses. Only boring things can hold them back, earthly things, like the brown liquor The Artist depends on, or the marred skin stretched painfully over The Musician’s burnt fingers.
But these are temporary setbacks—the splendor of their art and genius can’t be contained by something as small and imperfect as a body, the characters suggest. So they turn to the Rat Queen, the series’ villain formally introduced in 2019’s Layers of Fear 2, with her long teeth and black marble eyes, and she forces them to take her supernatural path to greatness.
Screenshot: Bloober Team / Kotaku
Layers of Fear is my favorite walking simulator
With its emphasis on piece-by-piece discovery and exploration, there isn’t much typical “gameplay” in Layers of Fear, so I spend the majority of my time in it digesting this information. The series frequently has been called, with a little bit of a scoff, a “spooky walking simulator,” and that’s what I spend over 10 hours doing—walking, and, sometimes, screaming at sudden sounds, like dissonant, echoing piano chords.
There aren’t options to do a lot more. Aside from walking, I can run—or, more accurately, walk with more DualSense feedback—and pick items up by hitting right trigger. I can zoom in on secret codes and puzzle solutions since they’ve all been changed from their original iterations, and in the Layers of Fear 2 section, I can crouch into vents.
Screenshot: Bloober Team / Kotaku
The most significant gameplay adjustment between this Layers of Fear and previous titles is the introduction of a handheld light source. It isn’t particularly shocking, but it breaks the series’ passivity tradition, since the lights are not only practical, they’re violent. By hitting both triggers, my beam becomes incendiary, and I use it to singe a fresh puzzle type—it appears like a blurry blob and obscures exits and key items—as well as approaching enemies. For The Artist, who has shunned electricity in his palatial 1920’s home, this means pointing a glowing gas lantern at visions of my dead wife, who may or may not have deserved it, but other characters get to use flashlights to illuminate the rot around them.
Anyway, I don’t mind just walking. The game’s level and puzzle designs are immaculately unpredictable. They shift when I’m not looking, and I get a nervous thrill from not knowing what will happen if I turn back around. Will I find a film photo? A chopped-up finger? Am I about to get trapped in a looping hallway, or locked closet, or bedroom with no windows, or keys, or air to breathe?
That is what makes Layers of Fear scary, and therefore entertaining. With its rebuilt graphics, the game shapeshifts as convincingly as a terrified chameleon. If I look behind this empty picture frame, a door will appear. If I begin to play this roll of film, a big, white moon will descend and enrapture me. It’s scary to move with determination toward uncertainty, and Layers of Fear exploits that, diffusing in me a tumbling ocean wave of unease.
But, oh, God, the story.
Layers of convoluted lore
This is what makes the game both aggravating and appealing: If Layers of Fear were a person, it would live its whole life with its head up its ass. It wants, somewhere in its shifting staircases and infinite basements, to discover the psychology behind great art.
Since this is a horror game we’re talking about, its interpretation of that psychology is insufferable. I understand quickly that the environments I’m in are physical manifestations of artists’ looping thoughts and cobwebbed instincts, knotted with metal chains and wet candle wax. A creative mind is an uncomfortable and unsatisfying place, the game tells me, and really lays on the metaphor.
Layers of Fear routinely makes references to legendary creative work like The Picture of Dorian Gray, Faust, The Shining, and so on, and I am hit on the head with how important art is; “Great art carries a heavy cost,” a note says, “To create is to reach into chaos,” a voiceover instructs. “Chaos is darkness. Warm. Soft. Swarming. He understood it in the end. Will you?”
Um, not really, TBH.
Taking cues from its influences, Layers of Fear’s demon is the Rat Queen, who is featured more prominently in the added Writer and Musician content. But Unlike Dorian Gray or Faust, in which men knowingly give up their souls in exchange for sex and knowledge, the characters in Layers of Fear are traumatized people the Rat Queen coerces into pursuing unattainable perfection. As a result, Layers of Fear isn’t a cautionary tale about selfishness.
I don’t really know what it is. It points out things it wants me to feel without letting me feel them. The most egregious case of this happening is in The Musician’s DLC, where found diary entries describe her house as a “prison.” Eventually, I place a dead songbird back into its cage. Yeah, I get it.
Whereas something like Faust satirizes the tortured artist, conveying that creative people aren’t necessarily special people, that they can be as bad as anyone, Layers of Fear seems to say that art is uncontrollable. It’s a hungry, magical force, and if a wife, or a sister, or a daughter are caught and bloodied in its insatiable mouth then, well. So be it.
I find that difficult to accept. I think it’s damaging, too, to contextualize art as something dangerous and wild, however reverentially Layers of Fear phrases it. Art isn’t the boogeyman. It’s not the problem—people are, usually. Blaming a monster, like the Rat Queen, feels too easy to me. That’s a narrative issue I’ve had with Layers of Fear since the beginning, and the new Writer and Musician stories have unfortunately made it snowball.
Still, I am impressed with Bloober’s ground-up transformation of its series into a compact nightmare with white rats. The game is a show of strength, despite fans’ reservations for the studio’s upcoming Silent Hill 2 remake, and I admire a game that cares about art as deeply as its characters do. I only wish that it weren’t so annoying about it.
When the original Max Payne was ported to consoles in late 2001, I couldn’t get a copy fast enough. I wasn’t a PC gamer at the time, and so for a while I could only enjoy Max Payne through the internet and TechTV at the time. I was transfixed by the graphics and luscious time-slowing bullet time gameplay on display. And when I finally played it on my original Xbox, it did not disappoint. Now, having played a select portion of El Paso, Elsewhere, a modern spin on this classic, third-person shooter, I am delighted to have experienced the classic vibes of the original Max Payne once more.
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And, honestly, El Paso, Elsewhere is close to making them better than the original.
Expected to release in late 2023, El Paso, Elsewhere comes courtesy of Strange Scaffold, whose previous games have included Hypnospace Outlaw, a Strand-like (?), An Airport For Aliens Currently Run By Dogs(that’s the title, also an apt description), and most recently, Sunshine Shuffle, which got the dev in a little bit of trouble with Nintendo over jokes about child gambling (as one does). El Paso, Elsewhere also follows El Paso, Nightmare, a first-person shooter with similar retro vibes. But instead of aiming for head-mounted perspectives and center-positioned guns of yesteryear, El Paso, Elsewhere is a gritty shooter with the narrative and gameplay vibes of the first Max Payne, meaning you can slow down time to a crawl, upping your reaction time to increase your aim and take out multiple enemies at once But this time you’re going after friggin’ vampires instead of the mob. Though, six in one, really.
My preview of El Paso, Elsewhere went through the game’s first four chapters and, god damn it, I was sad when it stopped. Not only did it spark my nostalgic love of the first Max Payne, it did so with some genuinely great additions to this formula and a killer hip hop soundtrack that had me vibing the whole ride through.
In El Paso, Elsewhere, you’re taking on vampires and other hellish manifestations in a trippy, otherworldly motel. And in doing so, El Paso, Elsewhere, thus far, improves on one of the shortcomings of Max Payne and many other shooters that demand high bullet output but take place in otherwise realistic settings.
Game Design In Bullet Time
As fun as Max Payne is, one of the problems I always had was that, since your enemies are just mobsters and well-armed human beings, each gun battle is more or less the same—fun as though the loop is, there’s a lack of variety in terms of enemies. And on top of that, the amount of bullets you spit out tends to dilute the realistic premise to a certain degree.
Gif: Strange Scaffold / Kotaku
That’s not a problem for El Paso, Elsewhere. Since the bad guys are evil things that go bump in the night, I’m more than happy to suspend my disbelief as to how many bullets are required to take these things down. That does come at the cost of Max Payne’s fantasy of two-way bullet exchanges rippling through the slowmosphere, but the trade off is that it makes the gun battles far more interesting as enemy types are more varied thus far.
The aesthetic shift of paranormal hostiles immediately makes a difference. Simply having more interesting-looking enemies coming at you instead of Max Payne’s endless hordes of dudes-with-guns™ breaks up the monotony. But it’s not just Max Payne set in Party City during Halloween season here.
Gif: Strange Scaffold / Kotaku
By having foes with different kinds of attacks, you have to react differently, and thus make use of bullet time in more varied ways, be that dodging werewolves that leap at you, vampiric ghouls that burst out from behind crates, or from other unworldly begins that fire down large purple orbs at you, injecting a sense of verticality to the gameplay that isn’t always present in Max Payne. The pace of gameplay becomes more varied; I’m not just running from room to room trading fire with yet another nameless dude firing a gun at me.
Gif: Strange Scaffold / Kotaku
Sure, Max Payne’s task of taking down the mob by the dozens, and dozens, and dozens, (or in the case of Max Payne 3, dozens and dozens and dozens and dozens….) is fun, but it’s a breath of fresh air to have something new to engage with.
Also, I never felt too overpowered. In this preview, El Paso, Elsewhere managed to strike a nice balance between giving me the player the power to slow down time and unload tons of bullets while also holding me to account for what I’d over indulge in, be that bullets, time stopping power, or, yes, painkillers.
Gif: Strange Scaffold / Kotaku
I did find that I would run out of ammo and my bullet time meter if I wasn’t careful, meaning that while I had an edge over the hordes of evil creatures coming my way, I had to be strategic in how I used it. Do I use bullet time to be more accurate? Or do I use it to get a sense of my surroundings and determine just how bad the threat I’m facing is? I liked that delicate balance and it made the game feel alive beyond just the initial “oh, nostalgia! Let’s slow down time” feeling that I instantly felt. Managing my powers against ongoing threats was a rush I was eager to continue when the preview came to an end.
El Paso, Elsewhere is also very faithful to the narrative tone of Max Payne. As you use painkillers to heal yourself, the protagonist reflects on his diminishing sense of sanity as he continues to take drug after drug to keep pushing through. There is an ongoing narration from the protagonist that mirrors that of Max Payne’s own style of speaking and storytelling. And maybe because it’s about vampires, it doesn’t feel as campy as the original Max Payne somewhat feels in hindsight. And when you enter new areas, you’re hit with that delightful bass drum pulse and big title screen in bold white lettering ala Control.
Screenshot: Strange Scaffold / Kotaku
While some environments did have me running around a bit guessing as to where I supposed to go, the ride through this preview was genuine fun and I was quite bummed to hit the end of the preview.
And you know, I can talk all day about how I think the enemy variety mixes things up pleasantly, or how there seems to be a nice balance of resource management, but feeling like I don’t want to put the gamepad down? That’s a feeling I like in a game.
El Paso, Elsewhere is expected to launch later this year, 2023, on PC and Xbox.
Activision has pulled a Call of Duty skin based on the hugely-popular Nickmercs after he made an anti-LGBTQ comment on Twitter.
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Earlier this week broadcaster Chris Puckett tweeted about a local clash between “Pro-LGBT protestors” and bigots near his apartment, to which Nickmercs—referencing a popular rallying cry of the increasingly unhinged right wing media machine, which baselessly asserts that trans people and drag performers are somehow child abusers—replied “They should leave little children alone”.
Nickmercs was swiftly condemned. As this Dexerto roundup summarises, he was rightly rounded on by many notable members of the Call of Duty and wider esports community, including broadcaster Goldenboy, who said “I’m disappointed in you Nick. Teaching acceptance and tolerance for EVERYONE is a valuable life skill for all ages.”
Loopy, a coach at Vexed Gaming, had even stronger words, saying:
I will never work/watch a MFAM event again. I cannot in good conscience work for a bigot. I am a Marine and swore to uphold and protect the constitution which protects protests and demands equality for all.
“Peace and love” unless you’re gay or trans? What a loser.
Due to recent events, we have removed the “NICKMERCS Operator” bundle from the Modern Warfare II and Warzone store. We are focused on celebrating PRIDE with our employees and our community.
If you were wondering if Nickmercs ever apologised for his comment, that process went about as apologetically as you would expect:
During Summer Game Fest, host Geoff Keighley debuted a new Lies of P trailer that came with some gorgeous classic music. There was a treat in it, though: the Bloodborne-inspired Soulslike is not only coming to most platforms on September 19. But you can play the action RPG right now if you wanted to.
Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic 2 on Switch was a mess from the start. Like the original game’s buggy and incomplete release back in 2004, last year’s port to Nintendo’s handheld hybrid launched with a bug that made the game impossible to beat for some players. Subsequent patches added other issues. And now players will no longer be getting the free Restoration Content DLC they were previously promised.
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The studio behind the port, Aspyr, delivered the bad news late Friday night, telling Switch owners of the game that the update to add support for a series of fan-made mods that fix certain bugs and round out KOTOR 2‘s characters and rough ending had unfortunately been canceled. It’s basically the unofficial “final cut” of Obsidian Entertainment’s excellent RPG, and Switch players will now essentially miss out on it, despite the fact it was previously marketed alongside the port’s 2022 release.
“Sadly, today we are announcing that the Restoration Content DLC for the Nintendo Switch version of Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II – The Sith Lords will not be moving forward for release,” the studio tweeted on June 2. “We’d like to thank everyone for their continued support by providing a complimentary video game key to players that purchased Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II – The Sith Lords on Nintendo Switch before this announcement.”
The games impacted players can choose from include the following list of other Star Wars ports Aspyr has worked on:
Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II – The Sith Lords (PC)
The first game on the list is the PC version of KOTOR 2 which does include the Restoration Content DLC, though if you only own a Switch that’s not going to help you much. And as some players have pointed out, it’s not clear how the studio will make it up to those who might already own all of these games already, which when it comes to Star Wars fans isn’t an entirely unlikely scenario.
Things just aren’t going Aspyr’s way at the moment, it seems. The Austin-based studio behind a bunch of otherwise decent Star Wars ports and remasters was purchased by Embracer for $450 million in 2021. That same year it announced a remake of the first Knights of the Old Republic at a PS5 showcase that immediately generated tons of excitement. A year later Bloomberg reported that the project was already running into trouble and would be moved to a completely new studio under the Embracer umbrella.
Asked about the status of the game at the parent company’s recent earnings presentation, CEO Lars Wingefors responded with an exasperated “no comment.”
Beware, Diablo IVadventurers, for dark whispers speak of a horrific beast of great power that can spawn ungodly numbers of clones and totally fuck you up. It’s not a lie! I’ve seen it happen to many folks, and not all have returned to tell the tale.
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Diablo IV’s launch has been pretty damn uneventful and smooth, which in 2023 is actually impressive and newsworthy. But no game, especially not a game as fresh out of the oven and massive as Diablo IV, can launch in a perfect state. So of course there are some bugs and other issues in Blizzard’s latest action-RPG. And perhaps the funniest involves an enemy named Darcel who can—and seems to often—spawn dozens and dozens of himself.
In Diablo IV there’s a fairly simple, not-too-exciting side-quest called “Stolen Artifice” in the region of Scosglen. The short side-quest asks you to hunt down a big baddie, kill him, take his runic charm, and bring it back to someone. This is your bog-standard video game fetch quest, of the sort you’ve likely done variations of more times than you can remember at this point. However, there’s currently a bug with “Stolen Artifice” that leads to clones of the quest’s boss—Darcel—spawning almost endlessly, causing problems.
Some players are reporting that Darcel will just spawn forever, causing crashes or making it impossible to finish the quest. Some have had luck defeating Darcel, the neverending monster, by killing the original Darcel before he can spawn far too many copies of himself.
While this bug is pretty damn funny to watch, I can imagine someone playing a hardcore-mode character (which has only one chance at life, and is gone forever upon death) finding this bugged quest and screaming in terror as they realize, far too late, that they are about to get wrecked by a clone army of Darcels. RIP to those poor souls.
The official reveal of a Metal Gear Solid 3 remake was one of the headliners of Sony’s recent PlayStation 5 showcase, but it likely won’t be finished for some time. Fortunately, a collection of Metal Gear classics is coming to modern platforms this fall and it will actually include more games than originally expected.
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Announced alongside Metal Gear Solid 3 Delta, Konami’s Metal Gear Solid: Master Collection Vol. 1 will come to PS5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC by way of Steam in just a few months, and the PlayStation store page (via Eurogamer) now shows that the original Metal Gear 1 and 2 will also be a part of the package, both of which laid the groundwork for a sprawling framework of political intrigue, Cold War paranoia, and a super complex family tree of guys named Snake.
That means the entire thing will house the first give games in the espionage stealth series:
Metal Gear
Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake
Metal Gear Solid (Including VR Missions/Special Missions)
Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty (HD Collection version)
Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater (HD Collection version)
The first two games were on the MSX2, Solid was on PS1, and Sons of Liberty and Snake Eater were on PS2. This is essentially the 2012 Metal Gear Solid HD Collection which brought these same games (minus Peace Walker on the PSP) to PS3 and Xbox 360, but which isn’t currently accessible on modern platforms. The only game not included from Metal Gear’s initial 20 year run is Snake’s Revenge, the first follow-up to the original game that wasn’t actually directed by writer and creator Hideo Kojima.
All of these games were previously delisted from older storefronts in 2021 over issues around “licenses for select historical archive footage used in-game.” Konami says the new collection will contain the original versions of the games with “minimal edits to copyrighted contents.”
In either case, it’s a lot of Metal Gear, and if it’s on par with Konami’s other classic collections, will hopefully be a decent tribute to and preservation of the franchise. We don’t have an exact price or a specific release date yet, but it should keep fans occupied until the Snake Eater remake, for better or worse, finally arrives.
Correction 5/26/2023 6:03 p.m. ET: Fixed the original platform for the first and second Metal Gear.
SAINT PETER PORT, UK—Indicating that the passenger liner was unlikely to ever sail again, a full 3D scan conducted by deepwater seabed mapping company Magellan revealed Friday that the Titanic was completely ruined. “Unfortunately, after several exhaustive high-resolution, 360-degree scans of the famous ship, it’s clear that the Titanic is absolutely trashed,” said Magellan director Richard Parkinson, whose submersibles had yielded evidence that there was extensive structural damage to the bow and stern that would affect the ill-fated vessel’s seaworthiness. “The rust on the surface was not as superficial as we expected, and it appears to have penetrated deep into the hull. We were hoping we could get away with installing a new engine and updating the paint job, but the damage seems too great. That’s not even to mention that the boat is full of skeletons.” At press time, the completely totaled Titanic was sold for scrap.
Prince Harry, his wife Meghan, and her mother were involved in a “near catastrophic” car chase with paparazzi photographers in New York after an event, drawing some parallels with the high-speed Paris car chase that killed his mother Princess Diana in 1997. What do you think?
“At least we’ll finally see a photo of the elusive Harry And Meghan.”
Dion Hudson, Plastic Bag Lobbyist
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“You’d think after Princess Diana’s tragic death, they’d know to just give the paparazzi what they want.”
Carl Kasperson, Style Coach
“What’s it going to take for them to finally leave the paparazzi alone?”
I was on board with Lego 2K Drive the moment I learned we were getting an open-world Lego racing game, complete with the ability to build your own vehicles. And having played nearly 12 hours so far, I’m still having a lot of fun with the game. But it’s impossible to ignore a nagging feeling that it really wants me to spend money in its in-game store.
Announced in March, Lego 2K Drive is the first game to come from a deal struck between 2K and Lego back in 2022. The two companies apparently decided to glue their names together and add “drive” to the end to create what might be the most boring video game title of 2023. Thankfully, the video game itself is much, much more fun than its drab title, which sounds less like a wacky open-world racer filled with cool power-ups and more like a bad sports game featuring a sport I’ve never heard of but which is nonetheless popular.
Bland name, but fun Lego racing
Get past the bland name and Lego 2K Drive comes right out of the gate firing on all cylinders with an exciting CG cutscene and a fairly short but fun tutorial. It makes a good first impression. And the moment the game gave me full control, I was in awe of what I saw. Lego 2K Drive is set in a brick-built world filled with side missions, mini-games, collectibles, and so, so many Lego vehicles. It’s very colorful and gorgeous. And massive! The open world of 2K Drive is split into a few different biomes, each with its own theme, characters, missions, and vehicles. Playing this game is like getting to play in the basement of the rich kid you knew in elementary school who had every Lego set. Lucky bastard. But now I, Zack, have all the bricks and cool sets to play with!
The basic setup behind the main story mode is that an evil racer hates you—for reasons the game jokingly doesn’t elaborate on—and you have to win the big trophy to prove yourself the better driver. To get a chance at that big win you’ll have to earn a bunch of flags by beating rivals, leveling up to unlock new races, rank up, and eventually gain access to the big final tournament. There’s not much to the actual story, but the writing is similar to the recent Lego movies, occasionally making me smile and rarely annoying. And I think kids will enjoy the zanier moments.
Screenshot: 2K Games / Lego / Kotaku
But to win the big trophy and prove yourself to your evil rival, you’ll need to do more than race Lego-built cars around various tracks, as piloting boats and mastering off-road vehicles are on your agenda, too. And like the cars, all of these are brick-built. However, you don’t actively choose between each type of vehicle. Instead, as you race around, the game auto-swaps between either your car, boat, or off-road ride of choice. This streamlines what could have been an annoying part of 2K Drive, and also means that you can explore the entire Lego-filled world of Bricklandia as you please.
Driving real fast and reach a river? Keep driving and you’ll just turn into a boat! Take a sharp turn off a paved road and onto some dunes? Don’t worry, the game will swap your car out for a jeep without missing a beat. It takes the open-world driving of Forza Horizon and makes it even more arcadey and exciting as you can literally go anywhere at any time.
All the bricks and cool stuff in the world can’t save a racing game with bad driving physics or poor controls, and luckily, Lego 2K Drive avoids those pitfalls and is a blast to play. Once I mastered the drifting and jumping controls, I was masterfully swooping, swinging, and gliding around the world like a Lego pro. And on Xbox Series X performance was smooth as butter, making it easy to enjoy all the high-speed action.
Lego 2K Drive’s disappointing microtransactions
The moment bricks start to fall off this creation is when you start to dig around the menus, where you’ll encounter a store complete with a season pass. While the game does feature an amazing, in-depth, and easy-to-use vehicle builder—letting you make nearly anything you can imagine—it also features some disappointing microtransactions.
Technically, you can just drive around, have some fun, unlock some cars, build your own creations, and never really interact with the in-game store. But, if you don’t want to (or can’t) build something like an ambulance or a giant hamburger car, the store offers official Lego builds that you can buy and use in-game. However, all of these cars cost $10,000 Lego Bux. And after playing for 12 hours I’ve only reached around $8,000.
This is the part where 2K Games would, while twirling its mustache, likely say: Don’t worry, you can buy some Bux if you want to. This is true, sure, but it’s so out of place in this otherwise colorful romp of creativity and wackiness.
And the way the economy is balanced, it really feels like you’ll need to fork over some cash if you want to buy more than one of these pre-made cars without grinding for hours. It’s also sad that the in-game store contains Lego part packs for sale. These are cheaper than the cars (thankfully) and the builder in-game does come with a lot of parts available for free (and you earn more by completing missions), but the fact that some bricks and bits are locked behind a paywall—even one that you can bypass via grinding—is frustrating.
Screenshot: 2K Games / Lego / Kotaku
The other big part of Lego 2K Drive is multiplayer, which I’ve only barely poked as there weren’t many other players online while I played the game before release. The online races play similarly to the single-player races, but with the added wrinkle that your opponents might have spent hours figuring out how to build the ideal, perfect race car. Or a giant dick. Or maybe they just spent some real cash and bought a car using Bux. Until the game is out in the wild, it will be hard to say how multiplayer will shake out, but I have some concerns.
It’s really a shame that such a lovely and fun open-world sandbox is tied to stuff like a season pass, premium currencies, and expensive in-game purchases. Perhaps 2K will tweak some levers to make it easier to earn and unlock new cars—which would be nice—but until then the specter of greed will always be there, nagging at me as I build, smash, and race.
For the second time in two years, things in the Battlefield community—or at least the worst elements of it—have gotten so toxic that it has led to some pretty stern requests for people to get a grip and cut it out.
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It’s an understatement when we say that this subreddit has grown incredibly toxic. It’s near impossible to have a simple discussion without insults being flung around at each other—and it’s really starting to harm the entire Battlefield community, and each of us that are part of it. […] The mods have an obligation to follow the rules set out by Reddit, and if we are found to be in breach of not enforcing them, or doing a poor job at enforcing them, we risk the community getting banned altogether.
Now, a year later, the developers of the games themselves have taken to social media with a statement—co-signed by all four Battlefield studios—saying “we have witnessed increased harassment towards members of our development team”, and that “we will take appropriate action” against players found to not be adhering to the series’ community guidelines:
Recently we have witnessed increased harassment towards members of our development team.
Across all of our Battlefield Studios we are open to constructive feedback and criticism about our games.
But to maintain a healthy and open dialogue with our community, we will protect our teams and people from toxicity and harassment. We believe this has no place inside our game or within the Battlefield community.
We want to remind our players that through our EA User Agreement and Battlefield Community Guidelines we will take appropriate action to uphold these values.
As a community, we play the objective, together.
I get it, Battlefield fans have been through the wringer in recent years! Every time the series changes direction parts of the fanbase get upset, and I don’t think anyone would say that Battlefield 2042 launched in a fit and proper state.
That should be a good thing! But no, this is the internet, and this is the video games corner of the internet, so of course there must be people who are angry, all the time, and like always they’re getting angry at the wrong people. Battlefield 2042 was rushed out the door to hit a fiscal objective in the middle of a pandemic by the people running EA, not the level designers and artists and community managers working at DICE.
I’m glad this statement uses such supportive (of their teams) and forceful language; if someone is dumb and hateful enough to be harassing the developers of a video game, for whatever reason, then that person isn’t going to be fun to play multiplayer video games with, or against.
I haven’t seen The Pope’s Exorcist, the horror movie starring Gladiator and Beautiful Mind actor Russell Crowe out in theaters right now, but it sounds like the film is pretty middling, and that Crowe can’t elevate the poor take on supernatural demons in the Catholic church. Frankly, I hadn’t heard of it before today, and the reason I finally did is actually pretty hysterical. See, the film, which incidentally is billed as being “inspired by the actual files” of the Vatican’s chief exorcist, sees Crowe’s character learning some chilling things about a founder of the Spanish Inquisition. And according to people who have seen the film, ituses art from Dragon Age: Inquisition when referring to the real-world, Spanish one.
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The Inquisition in BioWare’s fantasy series is the faction the player commands in the 2014 RPG, and it has a symbol it uses to represent the group throughout. It shows an eye with a sword behind it, which is a reference to two in-universe constellations called Visus and Judex. You see the sigil on armor sets, flags, and other props throughout Dragon Age: Inquisition. On top of showing up in the game and on merchandise, it also shows up if you search “Inquisition symbol” on Google, and it seems like that’s what the Pope’s Exorcist team did for a scene in the film, because they use the Dragon Age iconography in a scene where it’s talking about the Tribunal of the Holy Office of the Inquisition, the real-world religious institution that was responsible for centuries of violence against non-Catholics from the 1400s to the 1800s in Spain.
I laugh through the pain because it sounds like we won’t get Dragon Age: Dreadwolfanytime soon, since publisher EA’s earnings report earlier this week said the game wouldn’t be out in 2023. It’s been almost a decade since Dragon Age: Inquisition launched in 2014, so fans have been waiting a long while to see the conclusion to the Solas storyline introduced at the end of that game’s Trespasser DLC. Though the series has had some signs of life through projects like Netflix’s anime series Dragon Age: Absolution, now the most recent thing I’ve seen of Dragon Age has been in a religious horror movie slapping its iconography into a scene without a second thought. Dorian Pavus, I miss you. Call me.
Every year, around about now, indie Japanese games retailer/shopfront Meteor holds an exhibition called Famicase. The goal? Showcase the design and illustration of cartridge art for games that do not exist. Artists from all over the world take part, sending in their submissions, and every year Meteor pick the best and display them live in their store.
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Given the exhibition is in Tokyo, however, most of you reading aren’t able to go check it out. No matter! Meteor are also kind enough to post the submissions every year on their website, leaving us free to take a look at just how incredible every single one of them are
Like I have ever year for what feels like 1000 years, this post is going to highlight some of my favourite entries for the year, some of them from local artists, some of them from international ones, and some of them even from Kotaku readers who were kind enough to send in their own successful submissions.
