The Winter E3, aka The Game Awards, is airing next week and people are getting excited about what will be revealed during the three-hour montage of trailers and awards. But if you were excited about a new Mortal Kombat or Injustice 3 making a surprise appearance, well, you might want to sit down. I’ve got some bad news to share.
During the 2018 Game Awards, NetherRealm revealed Mortal Kombat 11 to the world via a splashy cinematic trailer. Now, four unfathomably long years later, fans are left wondering where the studio’s next game is. In the past, studio creative director Ed Boon would pop up every two years or so to announce its next big game. But that hasn’t happened yet, and it has some players getting very anxious as the longest-ever wait between NetherRealm projects grows day after day. So, of course, many began looking toward December 8’s Game Awards for hope. Some theorized that like in 2018, Boon and co. would use the annual show to reveal their next big thing. But straight from Boon himself, that ain’t happening.
Earlier today, Boon tweeted that while he appreciates the excitement fans have for the studio’s next game, they aren’t ready to announce anything yet.
“Four years ago at the Game Awards we managed to pull off a surprise announcement of MK11, which turned out great,” tweeted Boon. “Perhaps too great, as many assumed we’d repeat that trick for our next game. Thank you for the anticipation, but we’re not ready to announce the next NRS game yet.”
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Of course, even with such a clear and blunt message saying “No, we aren’t announcing the next Injustice or Mortal Kombat next week, sorry,” some folks are still hoping he’s not telling the whole truth. And in their defense, Ed Boon has been known to troll his online fans and mess with them using memes or teases. But here, it does seem like he really, super duper doesn’t want people to get excited over nothing.
If you really wanted you could read into his tweet and find some wiggle room that would allow for, like, the studio isn’t ready to announce its next game…but it is ready to release it! And then NetherRealm and WB stealth-drop MK12 or Injustice 3. But I wouldn’t buy into that wild theory because it will only end with you depressed and bummed when it doesn’t happen. Still, if you resolve to sit through The Game Awards anyway, you could end up winning a free Steam Deck for your trouble. It’s no MK12, but what is?
If you’ve been wanting Valve’s portable PC console, the Steam Deck, but lack the spare cash, Valve will be giving away a ton of them for free during next week’s annual broadcast of The Game Awards. All you have to do is watch The Game Awards through Valve’s streaming site. Oh, yeah: Remember when Valve launched a streaming site?
Yes, the annual montage of trailers and ads dressed up as a gaming show in a desperate effort to hide its true nature is back. The “award show” will air on December 8 to toss out a few awards as quickly as possible between dozens of trailers, ads, and commercials for DLC and expansion passes. But if you decide to watch the whole thing this year—which can often run nearly three hours—you might at least be able to win a Steam Deck for your troubles.
As announced November 30, Valve is celebrating The Game Awards with a massive Steam Deck giveaway. The company will be giving out a free handheld PC to a single person every minute for the entire run of The Game Awards. (Never in history has someone wanted The Game Awards to run long, until now…) To have a chance, you’ll need to first register for the drawing, which you can do now, then watch The Game Awards via Valve’s Steam.TV website.
What’s that, you ask? It’s a half-baked Steam-ified take on Twitch that the company basically abandoned not long after launch. But like so many Valve products it lingers on, like a zombie.
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As with any giveaway or contest of this nature, it has some extra rules and restrictions to be aware of, such that it’s only open to folks in the United States, Canada, the UK, or the EU. You also need to have bought something on Steam in the last 12 months, and your account must be in good standing. If you check all those boxes you can register now at this link. And when you register, you also get a cute animated Steam Deck emoji sticker. So really, aren’t we all winners in the end?
Well, I guess you’ll be less of a winner if you have to sit through The Game Awards.
There’s a corruption controversy rocking The Game Awards, and it’s about…Genshin Impact? Apparently, there are a lot of Sonic Frontiers fans and TGA fans who think the gacha game’s ascent in the Players’ Voice award category has been suspicious, and they’re loud about their displeasure. Things got so heated that TGA host Geoff Keighley addressed bribery and botting accusations in today’s Reddit AMA.
Genshin Impact has a premium currency called primogems, which is used to roll for limited time gacha characters. Primogems are distributed sparingly compared to other gacha games, so the community likes to joke that Genshin players will do anything for them.
You probably see where I’m going with this. Rather than organic popularity and interest, there’s been speculation that Genshin players are instead motivated by primogems. Last year, Genshin Impact won the “Best Mobile Game” award at TGA. After the show, HoYoverse gave 10 gacha rolls to all of its players. Kotaku reached out to HoYoverse to ask whether or not it plans to distribute free primogems after TGA this year but did not receive a response by the time of publication.
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One redditor went on Keighley’s Reddit AMA to ask what he was going to do about “bribery” and “botting” in the player’s choice awards.
“I think it’s fan bases activating to support a game, or a game promoting its nomination to its fan base,” Keighley wrote. “This is part of the reason we don’t have 100 percent fan voting in the main categories.” However, he promised that TGA would be “looking into this now.”
It’s been interesting to see which games players believe should win over Genshin. Some were upset that it might win over God of War Ragnarök or Sonic Frontiers. God of War, I understand. The blockbuster action-adventure game was beloved by critics across the board. On the other hand, critics panned Sonic for being tedious. Maybe it’s more accurate to say that both Sonic and Genshin are benefitting from having a high profile IP. Except one series is considered more institutionally legitimate than the other.
To those who are genuinely upset about the possibility of HoYoverse utilizing its fanbase to push Genshin to the top: You know that The Game Awards is a marketing engine, right? I promise you that this is not a corruption scandal on par with the Panama Papers or Watergate. Personally, I prefer to rely on friends or certain video game bloggers to tell me what games are good.
As of writing, Sonic Frontiers is at the top of the Players’ Voice category with 17 percent of the vote.
Bizarrely, after a biophage mutant, limbs falling off it as easily as scooping into a pudding, puts its hands into my mouth and rips my jaw from my face for the fifth time, it comes to me: Oh, this is a transportation game.
The Callisto Protocol takes place on a moon run by tentacled enemies with loose limbs, but Dead Space game designer Glen Schofield’s so-called spiritual successor would rather lead you by the hand through its squishy, wet, visually impressive labyrinth than let you revel in killing those enemies. Killing is never really the point, getting to the next location so that you can escape is. It’s more Death Stranding than Dead Space.
As cargo ship pilot Jacob—who I thought really looked like soap opera star Josh Duhamel before realizing it was soap opera star Josh Duhamel replicated in sweaty, heroic detail—you need all the help you can get in order to escape the Black Iron Prison on Jupiter’s moon, Callisto. You don’t know why you were thrown into one of its inhospitable cells to begin with, why something called a CORE device has been jammed into your neck, syncing to your thoughts and health, why there are monsters everywhere, or if you should trust inmates Elias (Zeke Alton) or Dani (Karen Fukuhara), the latter of whom crashed your ship and got you into this shit.
Screenshot: Striking Distance Studios / Kotaku
But when they tell you to meet them at the tram, or take an intimidatingly tall ladder underground, or activate this or that control panel, you listen, and you start running. What else are you going to do? You’re trapped, there’s blood everywhere, do you have a better idea?
No, not really. You do what Elias and Dani tell you, their voices crackling through your DualSense controller (or your CORE device) while the prison creaks and falls apart. The sound design is impressively meticulous—Black Iron is filled with an ambient whine, pieces of metal crashing and clanging, while your zombified enemies, or biophages, take on the low notes, the scuttling, screaming, and gurgling all around you.
I don’t think Callisto is a particularly scary horror game—watching Jacob’s neck get twisted around and cracked like a knuckle is entertaining the first time, then an inconvenience once I realize this death scene repeats and is unskippable—but its multilayered audio keeps me at a giddy low-level anxiety. Like waiting for a text, or looking at the sun and realizing you can’t see, for a moment, after you look away.
More hit or miss but still often admirable is the getting there, which the game is most interested in—fighting a biophage is a temporary distraction. Your plan to escape Black Iron sends you flying down sewer drains, trudging through a snowstorm, and through dim hallways glossed in organic matter, fleshy pods, sinuous tendrils, and slime. It sends you everywhere, in front of gorgeous lunar vistas and lit-up desktop screens and hurtling through space. Pristine white walls. Sticky floors. Air vents smeared with blood and loaves of glistening pink flesh. It makes you want to see more. And on the PS5, Callisto is able to deliver every high-shine, nitty-gritty detail with zero issues. Or, close to zero—sometimes my gun would mysteriously vanish before reappearing.
The CallistoProtocol also plays with the pace of this journey, often forcing Jacob to crawl quietly through tight cave walls or around blind biophages or thud his large, spacesuited body into a heavy sprint. Confronting so many different textures at so many different speeds feels great with haptic feedback—even grabbing an ammunition box or in-game currency, Callisto Credits, triggers a satisfying, unique thwack. Callisto is like tangible cinema in this way, slow and steady, which might require readjusting some expectations if you were hoping for on-your-toes horror.
But as varied and masterful as the getting there often looks and physically feels, I eventually tire of hearing my companions tell me I’m getting close only to fall through a collapsed walkway, or finally reach Callisto’s cold surface just to be immediately instructed back inside by the Herculean zombies. At these points, the game feels aimless, and I have no sense of the progress I’ve made. My frustration only heightens when I’m stuck in a room full of unrelenting zombies.
Nothing a little concealer can’t help.Screenshot: Striking Distance Studios / Kotaku
The zombies might be the least enjoyable part of Callisto’s journey, which is not ideal, considering they’re Jacob’s motivation for getting out, and presumably your motivation to be curious and find out where they came from. As I learn by dying so, so, so many times—so many times, that around halfway through the game, I turn on the easiest setting, which still inexplicably lets some enemies kill you in two lazy hits—the zombies are coming from everywhere.
I love Dark Souls, the famous benchmark for difficult games, but unlike a FromSoftware boss fight, you can’t “learn” how to progress past Callisto Protocol’s vitriolic biophage hordes because they seem to spawn randomly and out of nowhere. “Are they invisible now?!” I scream at my PS5, either before or after I screamed, “I hate this fucking game!!!”
Biophages will pop out suddenly from rattling vents or from an otherwise empty room. They will look like they’re frozen, encased in ice, and then suddenly be very alive, warm, and murderous. They come in many different shapes: standard decaying, decaying with armor on, decaying and projectile vomiting, wriggling at you with with snowball-sized, erupting pustules on their backs, coming at you looking like evil mutant axolotl and then turning invisible (?!).
You are given an arsenal to deal with them, primarily a sizzling stun baton for close combat, a hand cannon pistol and brain-blasting riot gun, and a gravity restraint projector (GRP) sleeve that bends gravity to hold enemies captive in the air until you throw them into a spiked wall, or spinning fan blade, or off a ledge.
In the game’s early stages, only the baton and its characteristic whack feel like they’re actually doing anything useful—enemies soak up your shrimpy default bullets like you’re flicking marbles into a funeral pyre, which also makes it impossible to efficiently manage hordes. But as you progress, you can find the blueprints for additional weapons like an assault rifle and skunk gun, and use Callisto Credits to buy upgrades from Reforge locations throughout the game which, much to my amusement, doesn’t let you buy more than one thing at a time. Before every boss fight, I’d spend five minutes individually buying ten ammo boxes.
Callisto wastes your time in small, unnecessary ways like that. Audio logs you collect from corpses throughout the game should help you unravel the story’s secrets, but they don’t play automatically—you have to enter your menu manually, select them, and stay in the menu. If you exit, they’ll stop playing.
But the most irritating waste of time that made me consider, at my lowest moments, throwing my PS5 controller into the sludgy depths of the Gowanus Canal, is Callisto’s sometimes faulty dodge mechanic.
When you confront any enemy, you are expected to dodge their attacks by holding your left stick in the opposite direction of their swing, or down if you’re blocking it. The game tells you that there is no timing window, just get it done, but I dodge so many times and get yet another long, unskippable death animation—Jacob’s skull getting stamped on and turned into an ocean spray of blood, Jacob’s eyes getting gouged by fat zombie thumbs, Jacob’s nose turning concave from all the fat zombie hits to the face—to know that can’t be true.
Callisto’s two-headed bosses are the worst at fumbling your dodge mechanic. So much as thinking about hitting them with your stun baton instead of staying far away and shooting them will lead to an immediate skewer through the chest. Make sure you spend five minutes collecting bullets or health top-ups from the Reforge, too. Found resources are limited, and manually saving the game starts you from your last checkpoint, so if you start a fight with low health and an unloaded gun, consider your fate sealed.
But for all these momentary irritations, I finish the game on a high. “There’s always a price to pay,” a villain repeats throughout The Callisto Protocol, reminding Jacob that making fallible, flabby humans great necessitates sacrifice. And in pursuit of video game greatness, I loved what I saw, so much so that I was willing to pay the price in faulty dodge mechanics. But as far as actual price goes, I don’t think anyone should buy a $60 game, full stop, but especially not one that currently seems to be running abysmally on PC and won’t get PlayStation’s New Game Plus until a free update lands on February 7, 2023. But.
I consider The Callisto Protocol one of the most ambitious games I played this year, maybe even the most next to Elden Ring (though I think Elden Ring is in a league of its own—I don’t know if anything will be able to approach its depth and sophistication for a long time). Its thoughtful attention to environment, sound, and touch is what, I think, next-gen gaming should be like: an experiment with the senses and with story. The game has its issues, too, which can’t be ignored. But at least it feels human.
Neon White was one of 2022’s most pleasant surprised when it landed earlier this year, somehow managing to combine old-school shooters with speed-running, a card game, and Persona’s social links. Now, having been out since June on other platforms, PlayStation owners will finally be able to play the game.
Having originally released on PC and Switch, Neon White is out on both PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5 on December 13. And while the PS4 version is going to be a fairly straight port, the PS5 edition will be taking advantage of the superior hardware to run at a constant 120hz, and use the SSD drives to speed up load times (which will make a big difference when you need to restart a level for the 97th time).
Most interestingly, though, and in a move that will set the PS5 version apart from all the others, is that it’ll be using the console’s adaptive triggers. As director Ben Esposito says on the PlayStation Blog:
Neon White also makes use of PS5’s adaptive triggers to make each Soul Card feel unique when you fire them as well as when you discard. Controller Haptics provide an extra level of feedback on top of that. You’ll feel it when you’re moving faster on water and you’ll get a subtle confirmation when you successfully snipe a distant demon. Our goal wasn’t just to make you feel cool, but for you to develop a sixth sense. To turn you into a speedrunning freak.
I’ve spent the past few days trying to figure out why this bizarre concoction of elements clicks, and I think I have it. Last summer, during Neon White’s initial marketing push, Esposito told me, “The energy that powers this game is teen energy. This is what I would have thought was the coolest thing ever when I was a teenager inspired by, like, Y2K era-anime and The Matrix and all this stuff.” Now that the game’s actually in my hands, this ethos is plainly evident—right down to the anime-inspired intro.
Earlier today Wizards of the Coast made an announcement that a lot of people have been waiting a long time for: Dungeons & Dragons is going to stop using the word “race” in the rulebook for One D&D (the upcoming major revision of the game), and would instead prefer to use the term “species” instead.
It’s understandable why the word was used in the first place. It was the 1970s, times were different, and the game had been made by some guys, not a team of qualified anthropologists. But as the decades have gone on, and the game has grown more popular and been exposed to the winds of time, that word—race—has become increasingly anachronistic.
For starters, it’s not even accurate! Race, as it’s most commonly defined, is a term humans have used to categorise ourselves based mostly on common physical traits, like skin colour. A black and white human, then, are from different races. A human and an orc are not. They are from different species.
More importantly, though, it has allowed the series to perpetuate long-standing stereotypes that are, essentially, racist. In 2020, for example, the D&D team wrote about how the way the game assigns traits based on a character’s genetics was “painfully reminiscent of how real-world ethnic groups have been and continue to be denigrated. That’s just not right, and it’s not something we believe in.”
Which brings us to today’s announcement, which says (emphasis mine):
Dungeons & Dragons has a history of evolving to meet the needs of our players and foster an inviting space for everyone.
With that in mind, we understand “race” is a problematic term that has had prejudiced links between real world people and the fantasy peoples of D&D worlds. The usage of the term across D&D and other popular IP has evolved over time. Now it’s time for the next evolution.
Since the release of the fifth edition of D&D in 2014, we have made the conscious decision to reduce usage of the term “race” to only apply to the game mechanic. We took this a step further with the release of Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything in 2020 when we presented an alternative to character creation that untangled ability score improvements from your choice of playable people. We have also evolved the lore of the peoples throughout the D&D multiverse to be more diligent in extracting past prejudices, stereotypes, and unconscious biases.
One D&D (the codename for the next generation of D&D) gives us an opportunity to go deeper into every component of Dungeons & Dragons. The immense interest and level of feedback across the first few playtest material releases shows us the value in having an open dialogue with our community about everything related to the game.
In the next Unearthed Arcana containing playtest materials for One D&D, we are presenting a replacement for the term “race.” That new term is “species.”
We know this is an important change to D&D—one that requires an open conversation with our community. And we want to be clear about a few things as we playtest the new term.
– We have made the decision to move on from using the term “race” everywhere in One D&D, and we do not intend to return to that term.
– The term “species” was chosen in close coordination with multiple outside cultural consultants.
– In the survey for this Unearthed Arcana playtest, which will go live on December 21, players will be able to give feedback on the term “species” along with everything else present in the playtest materials.
Having an open conversation around the term “race” is both important and challenging. That is why it’s vital we foster a positive, open, and understanding dialogue with one another. We welcome your constructive feedback on this evolution and the many more evolutions to One D&D that make this game exciting, open, and accessible to everyone. Dragons and elves belong in our world, and so do you.
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While they go to great lengths to say this is a process, one that will involve dialogue with the fanbase, this also seems like an absolute no-brainer? They’re simply swapping out an inaccurate term for an accurate one, and in doing so also removing from its flanks one of the series’ biggest, most long-standing cultural thorns.
If the news here is that they’re definitely ditching “race”, and need to replace it with something else, then “species” is about as perfect a word as they’re going to get!
Maybe you’re the type of person who would like to avoid that at all costs, and leave as much of the movie for your actual viewing of the movie as possible. If that’s you, go away, you should have never have clicked/tapped this far into the post, what could you have possibly have been expecting.
If, however, you do not care, and realise that there will be 90-120 minutes of Mario movie and what difference does seeing another few seconds make, then welcome.
As spotted by Go Nintendo, this Dutch TV commercial—it’s subtitled, all the dialogue is in English—that runs for 31 seconds is pretty much all new footage, showing Mario getting introduced to life in the Mushroom Kingdom, particularly their public transport system, which seems incredibly efficient:
The Super Mario Bros. Movie Trailer (NEW FOOTAGE!)
The Super Mario Bros. Movie – TV Spot (Spanish, NEW footage as of Nov. 30)
I don’t know how many more of these are going to come out between now and the film’s release in 2023, but there can’t be too many, otherwise like I alluded to above, we’ll be getting close to actually having seen large parts of the movie by then.
Donkey Kong’s bootay don’t jiggle jiggle. It folds. Image: Nintendo / Illumination Studios / Kotaku
When Nintendo uploaded the first promotional image for The Super Mario Bros. Movie, fans were quick to clown on the plumber for his concave ass. The looming question on everyone’s mind was whether or not Mario’s one-time nemesis Donkey Kong would have his ass nerfed too. Thankfully, DK has enough junk in the trunk to make up for Mario’s shortcomings. Yes, it’s going to be that kind of blog.
Yesterday, Nintendo premiered the second Super Mario Bros.Movie trailer. Outside of being a better trailer than the first one by virtue of it featuring a girlboss Princess Peach and a cavalcade of easter egg references for fans to comb over, it also came with the added bonus of Donkey Kong doing to Mario what a majority of viewers want to do to Chris Pratt’s voice: beating the daylights out of it. But we’re not here to talk about Chris Pratt’s voice, I already did that. We’re here to talk about Donkey Kong’s badonkadonk.
If you weren’t too busy cheering for Donkey Kong straight jobbing Mario in a bout of fisticuffs, chances are your curious eyes wandered toward the derrière of the caked-up barrel-throwing ape. Truly, any and all crimes Illumination Studios committed by unleashing the Minions upon humanity hath been redeemed thanks to the authenticity it brought to Kong’s glorious ass. Illumination even gave Kong a snatched waist to boot, so you know old boy can throw that thang back around in a circle like the best of them. But don’t just take my word for it. Here’s what fans had to say about DK’s ass online.
The jury is still out on there being a twerking scene in TheSuper Mario Bros. Movie but if the Minions presenting their TicTac asses for their promotional material is anything to go by, chances are we’re at least gonna get more than a cheeky side angle of Kong’s booty meat when the movie finally hits theaters on April 7.
The organisers of the Smash World Tour have today announced that they are being shut down after Nintendo, “without any warning”, told them they could “no longer operate”.
The Tour, which is run by a third party (since Nintendo has been so traditionally bad at this), had grown over the years to become one of the biggest in the esports and fighting game scene. As the SWT team say:
In 2022 alone, we connected over 6,400 live events worldwide, with over 325,000 in-person entrants, making the Smash World Tour (SWT, or the Tour) the largest esports tour in history, for any game title. The Championships would also have had the largest prize pool in Smash history at over $250,000. The 2023 Smash World Tour planned to have a prize pool of over $350,000.
While this will be a disappointment to SWT’s organisers, fans and players, it has also placed the team in a huge financial hole, since so many bookings and plans for the events had already been made. As they say in the cancellation announcement:
We don’t know where everything will land quite yet with contracts, sponsor obligations, etc — in short, we will be losing hundreds of thousands of dollars due to Nintendo’s actions. That being said, we are taking steps to remedy many issues that have arisen from canceling the upcoming Smash World Tour Championships — Especially for the players. Please keep an eye out in the coming days for help with travel arrangements. Given the timeline that we were forced into, we had to publish this statement before we could iron out all of the details. All attendees will be issued full refunds.
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The move blindsided the SWT team who had believed, after years of friction, they were starting to make some progress with Nintendo:
In November 2021, after the Panda Cup was first announced, Nintendo contacted us to jump on a call with a few folks on their team, including a representative from their legal team. We truly thought we might be getting shut down given the fact that they now had a licensed competing circuit and partner in Panda.
Once we joined the call, we were very surprised to hear just the opposite.
Nintendo reached out to us to let us know that they had been watching us build over the years, and wanted to see if we were interested in working with them and pursuing a license as well. They made it clear that Panda’s partnership was not exclusive, and they said it had “not gone unnoticed” that we had not infringed on their IP regarding game modifications and had represented Nintendo’s values well. They made it clear that game modifications were their primary concern in regards to “coming down on events”, which also made sense to us given their enforcement over the past few years in that regard.
That lengthy conversation changed our perspective on Nintendo at a macro level; it was incredibly refreshing to talk to multiple senior team members and clear the air on a lot of miscommunications and misgivings in the years prior. We explained why so many in the community were hesitant to reach out to Nintendo to work together, and we truly believed Nintendo was taking a hard look at their relationship with the community, and ways to get involved in a positive manner.
Guess not! In addition to Nintendo now stipulating that tournaments could only run with an official license—something SWT had not been successful applying for—the team also allege that Panda went around undermining them to the organisers of individual events (the World Tour would have been an umbrella linking these together), and that while Nintendo continued saying nice things to their faces, Panda had told these grassroost organisers that the Smash World Tour was definitely getting shut down, which made them reluctant to come onboard.
You can read the full announcement here, which goes into a lot more detail, and closes with an appeal “that Nintendo reconsiders how it is currently proceeding with their relationship with the Smash community, as well as its partners”.
Image: Experiment 101 / EA / Hi-Rez Studios / Kotaku
A reliable leaker has revealed that Mass Effect Legendary Edition, Biomutant, and DKO: Divine Knockout will be next month’s trio of free games for PlayStation Plus subscribers. These games will be available on both the PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5. So if you purchased Sony’s games subscription service at any tier, make sure you hold off on buying those titles.
The PlayStation Plus subscription service lost 2 million members since its recent revamp, which is a drop in the bucket compared to the overall number of people (45 million) who find good value in the service. And Sony is still raking in high profits since the service’s various tiers are more expensive than Xbox’s Game Pass subscriptions. But one of the true drawbacks ofPlayStation Plus is Sony’s unwillingness to offer its own first-party titles to subscribers. That trend continues in December, as all of the leaked games are from third-party studios.
Mind, Mass Effect Legendary Edition is still a great game if you’ve never played BioWare’s critically acclaimed RPG series. Or if you want to re-experience it with better graphics. Meanwhile Biomutant remains rather experimental and strange as an action-RPG, but has seen some fixes and improvement over time. And Divine Knockout is an entirely new 3D fighting game with PvP elements, and will launch on December 6.
These games are fine. They just aren’t God of War: Ragnarökor Horizon Forbidden West, in case you were looking to play some of the biggest PlayStation exclusives this year. To be fair, Game Pass subscribers didn’t end up playing the much-delayed Starfield on Xbox either. The difference is that Microsoft intends to eventually let its subscribers have access to AAA blockbusters on launch day. Right now, it just doesn’t seem like part of Sony’s member retention strategy at all.
If these leaks are accurate, these three games will be hitting your PlayStation Plus account in early December. That’s only days away, so you won’t have to wait for long.
Mystery Flesh Pit National Park is a fictional project by Trevor Roberts, who having started on Reddit has for the past few years has been posting stories and artwork to his website, fleshing (sorry) out the tale of a huge creature that is discovered underground in Texas and…turned into a tourist attraction.
It’s a very cool pitch, like some kind of Lovecraftian Jurassic Park, full of absurdity but also abject horror, and it has slowly been picking up enough fans that it has been covered on sites like USA Today. Given the success of the project, and the fact that Roberts has built more of a detailed diorama of a world than a linear story, a video game adaptation must have seemed to a lot of people like a really good idea.
So last week Roberts announced that, courtesy of Village Fox Media, a Mystery Flesh Pit video game would be going into development, and would be seeking its funding on Kickstarter. Billed as a “survival horror video game for PC”, it would centre around the efforts of a crew tasked with helping the Park recover from a disaster—remember, it’s inside a giant beast—that kills 750 people.
A week later the Kickstarter—which was very light on demonstrations or detailed information on development—has been binned, with Roberts saying the decision was made after a combination of “fan feedback, a fumbled marketing push, internal disputes, and some deep introspection”. Specifically, it seems the process of handing off work on the game to other people…did not go well, with Roberts since writing (emphasis mine):
To those who were looking forward to a videogame, I apologize. Most people do not fully appreciate what a substantial undertaking it is to produce even a modest videogame. I have personally and carefully created each and every piece of the Mystery Flesh Pit project, but something as large as a videogame is wholly beyond my scope as an individual artist. When I am not the one directly responsible for overseeing its creation, I cannot ensure its quality. After this experience I can firmly state that there will be no endorsed videogame adaptions of the Mystery Flesh Pit as long as I am alive.
I sincerely hope that by cancelling this overly-ambitious Kickstarter campaign I have avoided what could have been a rushed and inferior gaming experience at best, and an unmitigated disaster at worst. It is also my hope that my decision to endorse this particular Kickstarter does not harm or hinder the superior work of other credible, talented creators that are and have been working hard behind-the-scenes to bring you a Mystery Flesh Pit Tabletop Gaming Experience late in 2023.
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“I have no hard feelings towards the developers”, Roberts tells me. “It was a mutual decision in the end to cancel it. I think they were a little bit too ambitious, and I had a moment of clarity where I saw the disaster this was going to become for all involved. I think I did the right thing. And, for the record, I have always been and continue to be wholly supportive of fan games. My statement about there not being a Mystery Flesh Pit videogame ever was, admittedly, a little overzealous. Fan games are awesome. I just think there are already too many games/movies/series that are poorly planned cash grabs by burnt-out creators, and I’m not about that.”
It’s refreshing to see Roberts see the writing on the wall and pull the plug like this now, and not months/years down the line—having already taken the money—like so many other doomed campaigns have done on the platform.
The tabletop adaptation, which as Roberts says is still coming, should be out early next year.
Federal politician Andrew Wilkie, an independent, introduced the bill into parliament yesterday. He proposes that loot box mechanics—where players use actual money to buy random in-game items—prey upon the same impulses that gambling does, and that they can serve as a pathway to get kids hooked. He suggests that any game with loot boxes (or similar systems) should not only be restricted to those over the age of 18 (the legal gambling age in Australia), but should also carry warning labels specifying the reason for the rating as well.
While Australia has a reputation for being incredibly heavy-handed with its classification of video games—mostly down to a broken old system from decades past that has since been overhauled (but which still has some drug-related kinks in the pipe)—I think this is a no-brainer?
Here’s the full outline of the bill, which in some cases wouldn’t just restrict the sale of these games, but in some situations just straight up ban them (“RC” means Refused Classification, and games without classification can’t legally be sold here):
Loot boxes are features of interactive games containing undisclosed items that can be purchased with real currency. They can take the form of a virtual box, crate, prize wheel or similar mechanism and contain a prize or item which may or may not benefit the player. For example, a loot box might contain a particular character, additional play time or access to levels and game maps. As the rewards contained within these loot boxes can offer competitive advantages within the game, they carry significant value for players and may hold resale value.
By tempting players with the potential to win game-changing items, encouraging risk-taking for possible reward, delivering random prizes on an intermittent basis, and encouraging players to keep spending money, loot boxes give rise to many of the same emotions and experiences associated with poker machines and traditional gambling activities. This is especially concerning as many games which contain these features are popular with adolescents and young adults. Despite this, loot boxes are not currently required to be considered in classification decisions nor are games required to advertise when they contain this feature.
This bill remedies this by requiring the Classification Board to consider loot boxes when classifying a game. Further, the Board must set a minimum classification of R18+ or RC for games containing this feature, which will restrict children from purchasing and playing these games.
The amendments also require a warning to be displayed when games contain loot boxes or similar features, so that they can be easily identified by parents and guardians.
The Xbox Series S is one of my favorite purchases. It’s the little machine that could, a less powerful version of a next-gen console, that somehow is able to run everything anyway. Today you can get one for under $200, the cheapest it’s ever been—even cheaper than last week’s cheapest ever. You know, if you don’t mind being part of the evils of corporate America.
I know this reads like one of those posts where Kotaku gets a giant wad of cash for every purchase, but honestly, I’m writing this up because it’s so damned cheap. The catch is you need to buy it through Amazon, and Amazon is awful.
So, you know, having $40 on your Amazon account is the same as having $40 in your bank account that you’d have spent on Amazon anyway. In fact, the next $40-worth of stuff you buy from Amazon will feel like it’s free! It doesn’t matter that you put the money there yourself, it’ll still feel like a free thing when you order, and the checkout says it’s covered. We’re so stupid.
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However, you do end up getting a really awesome console, while giving Microsoft, that already sells it at a loss, far less money. Sure, you’ll end up spending a fortune more on expanded storage for it, because the S comes with a ludicrous 364GB free on its puny SSD. And yeah, you’re going to pay a monthly tithe to Game Pass for there to be any point in owning it. And then you’ll need that second controller…
Capitalism is evil! But we still want games consoles, and this is the cheapest way you’re going to get a brand new one. Now, who wants to give me a job in advertorial?
Cyber Monday Deals Start Now Of the three major consoles on the market today, the Nintendo Switch remains the most approachable and appealing to a wide range of gamers. From casual to more serious players, there is something for everyone.
Vampire Survivors, 2022’s break-out game—nay—genre, released its complete 1.0 edition just over a month ago, near the end of October. But if you were worried that meant developer poncle was done, put your worry back in its worry-case, close the lid, clip the clasps, and update your edition to the freshly released 1.10 version. Along with a few smaller details, the patch called The Tiny One adds a fascinating new Challenge Stage, and it’s a very narrow bridge.
poncle
The Tiny Bridge Stage is unlocked by having reached level 80 in Inverse Gallo Tower, and once opened, it provides the most ridiculous challenge: A single lane, in which you have to do some very specific ability tweaking to stand a chance of survival.
Capturing that moment in the regular game when you realize you’re hopelessly trapped, and then scrambling to do anything at all to somehow survive it, the entire concept sounds ghastly. And thus, fantastic.
Also added in this post-release update is Seal Power Up. According to the update information:
When Sealing a weapon, it will be automatically added to the list of banished weapons at the start of a run. When Sealing an item, the item will not be removed from the loot table, but will turn into a Gold Coin instead, which means this does not affect standard drop rates.
It comes with 10 ranks, a base price of 10,000, and is gained by “banishing 1o or more items in a single run.” Goodness me, Vampire Survivor got more complicated while I was looking out this window.
There are also two new achievements, for which poncle nervously apologizes. “Sorry for the extra achievements ruining your completion rate,” he says in his notes. “Most players seem to be in favor of having them so I took the opportunity to add more. The best I could come up with to make them feel less of a “must have” is to tag them as EXTRA achievements.”
And there’s a new secret too. Shhhhhh.
Vampire Survivor is very firmly in Kotaku’s favorite games of 2022 (and yes, you, we know it came out in December 2021, but no one noticed for a few weeks), and it’s going to be riding high in a lot of GOTY lists across the internet. Right now you can get it on Steam for just $4.24, or find it included in Game Pass for Xbox. Although be prepared to see nothing but blue crystals when you close your eyes for the next few weeks.
It’s Black Friday, the day on which the entirety of planet Earth entirely takes leaves of its senses and spends all its money on stuff it doesn’t need for 5 percent less than it would have cost yesterday. Planet Earth this year has bought itself an entirely new moon, even though the old one’s fine, just because this one has Bluetooth. So let’s distract ourselves from all that by discovering 12 amazing new games.
As is ever the case with Indiegeddon, I am not vouching for these games, as I’ve not played any of them. Instead, I just think they look interesting, exciting, frightening, or so damned weird I couldn’t not write about them. Most of them aren’t out yet, but the most useful thing you can do for the developers is give them a wishlist on Steam: it makes a big difference.
There’s bound to be at least one game here that has you checking its release date and wishing it were sooner, unless you’re that one person in the greys who feels the need to tell the whole universe that he actually thinks they all look terrible. We feel sorry for you, that one person. Just pity, really. For everyone else, woo-hoo, let’s get going!
Stuffer Fox
Falling Frontier
Every time I see a space-based RTS that looks as cool as Falling Frontier, I think, “This will be the one! This will be the game where I conquer my fear of menus!” And then I fail. But maybe it will be this one, because damn, it looks brilliant. Four years in the making already, by only one human, this looks like it came from a team of 100 at Paradox. Just watch those spaceships asplode! It’s all about taking over a procedurally generated star system, with intel and logic as its primary factors. But then you can also design your ships, raid enemies, and do all that amazing space-strat stuff I wish I’d grown a brain for.
You, a squirrel called Bill who’s great at crafting, stumble upon an alien baby in your garden who needs your help! It’s a tale as old as time itself. The result, Bill, is a simulation game in which you must craft, farm and organize everything the baby alien needs to survive. And it’s all to explore the concepts of recycling. Which is the weirdest elevator pitch, and yet looks like it could be adorable.
Get your head around this one: A 1 to 4-player couch co-op game about attempting to maintain a spaceship in calamitous circumstances, but also in splitscreen where you see both the inside and outside of your ship at the same time. Yikes. People will be able to take on different roles on the ship, from captain to janitor, as everything goes wrong on board while trying to defend yourself from enemies. It’s all about chaos and multitasking, or as I prefer to describe it, failing as a team.
Quartet looks like an incredibly faithful classic-style JRPG, but with a new twist on its turn-based battle system. Indeed, there are eight characters in that thumbnail above, but you battle with four at a time, able to tag characters in and out as appropriate. It’s also a quartet of stories, four to choose from, played in any order you wish, and of course in an Octotraveller way, they intertwine as you play through them all. It’s an ambitious project for a five-person indie team, but it sure looks like they’re doing it.
That man has a very tiny head. That said, this is Dreambound, a visual novel that’s just had a successful Kickstarter (raising over $30,000), affording everyone the opportunity to watch handsome young men stare wistfully at one another. It’s booooy looooove. As well as that, there are also mysterious deaths, dreams that invade reality, and demons from the past to deal with, for main character Noah, in what’s already looking like a very pleasingly drawn and written adventure.
Coo, look at this! It looks like that all-too-rarely explored sweet spot between point-and-click adventure and RPG. Sky Of Tides is a sci-fi story in a civilization on the brink of war, telling the personal tale of Rin, searching for her missing father, and, you know, saving the planet Numen. (NUMEN!) It promises that your decisions will determine your character, as you explore the isometric world, and honestly, I want to be playing it already.
Elsewhere in space… Terra Invicta is another super-deep space sim, this one immediately reminding me of Stellaris, but with a far more specific focus: Earth. This is from a group of modders, best known for XCOM: Long War. The success of that mod sent them pro, and Terra Invicta is their first commercial game, a geopolitical space exploration sim, where you’re preventing (or even aiding) an alien invasion of our home planet. The game’s been out in early access for a couple of months, and is proving very popular with Steam reviewers, thanks to its complexity and scale.
An Arkanoid-like, but the blocks you hit shoot back at you! How is this not already a thing. (I think you’ll find, actually, that there was an example of this on the Amiga Rupture 3400 in Germany, in the parallel dimension of Raaaaaaa – That Guy.) The Blocks Shoot At You looks like such an obvious idea, but I’ve never seen it before: Bullet Hell Breakout. This looks like it could be my new obsession, at which I am endlessly terrible.
I love it when I can’t quite tell if it’s a video-nasty trailer or a retro FPS trailer. That’s a whole scene right now. Phobolis fits right in, its scratchy trailer at first looking like a ruined VHS video that will curse your grandchildren, then cutting to a grimy, old-school shooter. You can pick up the alpha test build of the game via Itch for a buck, or wait until the year after next when they plan to release.
Call me a sucker, but I can’t resist a game about a space cat detective who investigates a crime on an interstellar cruise ship populated by sentient carpets. As Domino, said detective cat, you explore the ship in third-person, attempting to catch a jewel thief. It’s presented so superbly down-to-earth, given the ridiculous premise, as you’ll see in that full half hour of the game in the video above.
I can’t write one of these without including a card game—there are laws. Zero Division is a cyberpunk approach, that promises to mix Magic: The Gathering with Slay The Spire. You pick three characters from a selection of nine, each of which has their own deck of 40 cards. And set deck sizes mean no deck thinning! Woo! What grabs me is the combination of cards and epic 3D monsters and robots flinging their arms and weapons around on the other side of the board. There’s a demo due in spring ‘23, and I’m definitely going to be playing it.
Always finish on an existential non-linear psychedelic platformer, that’s what my grandmother taught me. Not one to refuse sage advice, here’s Extreme Evolution: Drive to Divinity by Sam Atlas, creator of the 2022 IGF Nuovo nomination, Space Hole 2020. Extreme Evolution looks just so spectacularly fucked up, like if David Lynch had made The Lawnmower Man, and I think I’m going to be dreaming this brief trailer for the rest of my life. Oh god that spider virus thing.
Unlike previous games in the Pokémon mainline series, Scarlet and Violet have made fan-favorite Eevee pretty tricky to catch. Only popping up in a scant few tiny areas, and with very low spawn rates, trying to evolve the octet of Eeveelutions has never been harder. But this weekend, the games’ first Tera Raid Battle Event should make catching the blighter a lot easier.
At any other time, if you want an Eevee you’ll need to head to Area 3 of the West Province, Area 2 of the South Province, or the path on the way to the Pokémon league. But this post-Thanksgiving weekend, it’s been announced that the Tera Raid Battle Event will feature an Eevee Spotlight.
Taking place from today, Friday 25th from 11 a.m. through Monday 28th at 10.59 a.m., Eevee will be much more likely to show up in Tera Raid Battles—those ones triggered by approaching the large glowing crystals that shoot vast beams of light up into the sky. Which means not only will Eevee be easier to find, but you’ll have the chance to collect a bunch of them with various Tera Types—meaning they’ll shift from Normal-type to any of 19 others.
There’s one tiny caveat, but not a significant one. In order for the Raid Battle Event to trigger in your game, you’ll need to have your Switch be connected to the internet long enough to download the latest “Poké Portal News,” which should download automagically if you’re already online. And no, that has nothing to do with the paid online Switch subscription, so don’t worry about that. All free.
With a clutch of Eevee under your belt, you’ll likely want to start thinking about evolving them into their eight different forms. (All my hopes of a ninth Paldean Eevee appear to have been dashed.) Here are some handy hints for getting all eight eeveelutions:
Flareon: Give your Eevee a Fire Stone.
Glaceon: Give your Eevee an Ice Stone.
Jolteon: Give your Eevee a Thunder Stone.
Leafeon: Give your Eevee a Leaf Stone.
Vaporeon: Give your Eevee a Water Stone.
Espeon: You need your Eevee at a high friendship level, make sure it doesn’t know any Fairy moves, and then have it evolve during the day.
Umbreon: High friendship again, don’t let it learn any Fairy moves, and then have it evolve at night.
Sylveon: Once more, a high friendship level, but this time make sure it does know a Fairy move, then evolve it day or night.
Combined with Tera Types from the Tera Battles, this is going to get incredibly complicated! Good luck!
Ever since mankind figured out various pigments could be smeared on cave walls, humans have drawn cocks on stuff. From the Cerne Abbas Giant to your mom’s bathroom wall, winky and winky-shaped creations appear anywhere anything can be crafted. So it is that the Sims 4 Gallery has been as replete with dicks as the underside of any bridge. Until now.
“We are aware of and have seen some select instances of wholly unacceptable content that has been uploaded to The Sims 4 Gallery,” begins the post, like a disappointed principal speaking to the whole school. “Our team has reviewed, and made critical updates to, the profanity filter to help prevent this from happening again in the future.” They’re not asking for pupils to put up hands, but if anyone would like to come forward and confess before they’re caught, it’ll make life easier for all involved.
The Sims 4 Gallery is a place where players of the recently made free-to-play game can share their creations, allowing others to download them and add them to their own game. This might be beautiful pieces of hand-crafted architecture, a specific room to add to a house, or a Sims lady with big boobs and a nice suit. And where creativity is allowed to flourish, rude stuff will appear.
My favorite example of this was when another Will Wright game, Spore, released its free character creator, and immediately “Sporn” was born. Sims creator, Wright, even praised such endeavors, calling them “amazingly explicit.” However, that’s not something The Sims, with its family-friendly image, could ever lean into. No matter how depraved you might be when you play it in the comfort of your own hovel.
Cyber Monday Deals Start Now Of the three major consoles on the market today, the Nintendo Switch remains the most approachable and appealing to a wide range of gamers. From casual to more serious players, there is something for everyone.
So it is that Sims 4‘s profanity filters have been given an overhaul, in an attempt to make its Gallery a safe place for kids to browse. EA continues to call on the community for help in policing this, flagging naughty uploads, while the promise “to do our part by quickly taking down objectionable content that surfaces.” They also say they’ll “remove” repeat offenders, and keep “regularly reviewing the profanity filter in case any updates need to be made.”
