PlayStation
- On March 29th, 2018, after more than six years of operation and countless battles between the ISA and the Helghast, the online servers for Killzone 2 and Killzone 3 will be decommissioned. The single player campaign for both games will remain accessible, but online play and related functionality will no longer work.
Nintendo
- Nintendo hands out full dot releases like candy on Halloween and the latest recipient is Arms. The game has now hit version 5.0 with additional bug fixes as well as introducing us to a new fighter.
-
Bandai Namco revealed that Pac-Man Championship Edition 2 Plus will be making its way to Nintendo Switch early next year.
-
Nintendo’s Eiji Aonuma confirmed to Famitsu that The Champions’ Ballad is the final content for Breath of the Wild. That’s not to say that support for the game has ended — there will still be patches, but the main development team has moved on to the next game in the series.
-
Thanks to Super Mario Odyssey’s wonderful original soundtrack, and the possibly even more wonderful ‘Jump Up, Super Star!’, it can be pretty difficult to stop yourself from humming along to the game as you play. Well, fans can now download the ‘Super Mario Odyssey Sound Selection’ – a collection of 12 songs available on iTunes. If the 12 song collection isn’t enough for you, you may want to hold off until early next year. An official Super Mario Odyssey soundtrack will be released in Japan on 28th February 2018 containing a whopping 136 tracks spread over four discs. You’ll also get a couple of stickers thrown in for good measure, as well as a booklet featuring comments from the game’s developers and Aimi Mukohara who voiced Pauline in the game.
-
Super Mario Odyssey has surpassed 1 million copies sold in Japan, making it the best selling 3D Mario game after 8 weeks on the market.
-
Panic Button has already worked with Bethesda to bring Doom to Switch. Unsurprisingly, the company has been brought back to help out Wolfenstein II on the console as well.
Xbox
-
Xbox Play Anywhere and Cross Play support is now available for Ark Survival Evolved which, if you haven’t played it, you probably should.
-
The long-awaited Xbox One X patch for The Witcher 3 is out today and it’s a treat. You’ll be able to choose between two new graphical modes, both of which support HDR. The game’s 4K Mode will run 4K resolution at 30 frames per second with “enhanced shadows, ambient occlusion, and texture filtering.” This mode will also supersample if, say, you’re playing on a 1080p display. Performance Mode, on the other hand, uses dynamic resolution scaling from 1080p up to 4K while (rather impressively) “targeting 60 frames per second.” Of the two options, I’d lean toward the latter.
Industry News
-
A new game based on Adventure Time called Adventure Time: Pirates of the Enchiridion is in the works for PS4, Switch, PC, and Xbox One. Developer Outright Games is promising an original story, voiced by the show’s cast along with the ability to play as Finn, Jake, BMO and Marceline.
-
While Psychonauts 2 didn’t have a firm release date, it now won’t be making the originally planned 2018 window. Confirmed on an update over on Fig, Double Fine has stated that,
”we know a lot more about the size and scope of the game we are going to make…from those projections we know that Psychonauts 2 will not be shipping in 2018.”
Sad news, indeed. -
Following in the wake of the “Star Wars: Battlefront II” debacle about “loot boxes,” the new guidelines require vendors to disclose the odds of receiving each possible item as a “drop” both for paid boxes, and for unpaid post-game rewards.
-
PUBG has finally matured to the big version 1.0 release on Steam.
-
Pokémon GO gaining iPhone exclusive AR+ mode powered by Apple’s ARKit for more realistic visuals and behavior in 3D space.
-
Sega Dreamcast, Saturn And Mega Drive Hardware Coming From Retro-Bit in 2018
-
The reality TV genre has pretty much got all bases covered, but now live-gaming is making its way into the fold with Stream On, by Twitch Studios. The brand’s first-ever game show features creators who have made it as far as Twitch’s Partnership program but still need a boost to make streaming a full-time career. The show pits them against one another Hunger Games-style in a series of challenges, for the grand prize of $5,000 a month for a year.
