Category: Game

Go download ’em Bully is the latest game to join PlayStation 4’s line-up of PlayStation 2 classics. It’s now available for download on the PlayStation Store for $14.99, and offers trophy support, remote play and 1080p upscaling.
Also available for download today is XCOM: Enemy Unknown for PlayStation Vita. Owners of the portable can now purchase the strategy game — rebranded as XCOM: Enemy Unknown Plus — for $19.99.
Bully first launched on PS2 in 2006. Rockstar Games’ high school-set title lets players run amok inside a private school setting.
XCOM is Firaxis Games’ popular strategy series. A sequel, XCOM 2, launched earlier this year.

Legendary series celebrates a big birthday Capcom released the first Resident Evil game in Japan 20 years ago today — Biohazard, as its known in its home country, made its PlayStation debut on March 22, 1996. To commemorate the big birthday, the company uploaded an interview with longtime series staff member Hiroyuki Kobayashi, in which he recounts Resident Evil’s first two decades.
The video above reminds fans of the series’ lasting impact on gaming over the years, from its popularization of the survival horror genre to the critical acclaim of games like Resident Evil 4. Since its release 20 years ago, the very first Resident Evil has made its way onto various other consoles — including, just last year, PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, Windows PC, Xbox 360 and Xbox One, in the form of a high-definition remake.
Capcom hasn’t announced much in the way of other anniversary plans for the franchise’s 20th year. In a press release, the company said it would upload more developer interviews in celebration of the anniversary throughout the coming months.
The developer will also launch remastered versions of Resident Evil 4, Resident Evil 5 and Resident Evil 6 on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One later this year. Resident Evil 6, the first of the ports — Capcom is releasing them in reverse chronological order — will arrive next week on March 29.
Also in the pipeline is Umbrella Corps, a team-based shooter. That game will be out on PlayStation 4 and Windows PC sometime in May.

The biggest differentiator between the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive VR headsets seems to be the Vive’s ability to allow gamers to walk around inside an entire room as they play.
But Oculus could deliver that option as well if it wanted to, the company says.
“Some people will really want room scale," said Oculus head of worldwide studios Jason Rubin. "It’s definitely cool. We have the tech ability to provide room scale. Our tech doesn’t preclude that.
"At some point we’ll demo that."

Oculus Rift ships on March 28 with a single sensor designed to track the head and upper body movements of the user. When the Oculus Touch controllers ship sometime in the second half of the year, it will include a second sensor. Those two sensors could be used to deliver a more confined version of the Vive’s room scale VR. Where the Vive’s two Lighthouse sensors can track movement in a 15-foot-by-15-foot area, the Rift’s sensors are designed for tracking a smaller space, about 5-feet-by-11-feet.
While at least one game — Fantastic Contraption — supports room scale on the Rift, Oculus doesn’t believe that room scale VR is in big demand.
"We don’t believe that the consumer has the space in general," Rubin said. "Has the commercial viable space of the 15-by-15 foot square."

The wasteland’s about to get hardcore Fallout 4’s revamped Survival Mode will be available in beta on Steam next week, Bethesda Game Studios announced. The company confirmed the news on Twitter, asking fans to “please stand by" for further details.
Players of the Windows PC version of Fallout 4 will receive the updated Survival Mode before those on consoles, vice president of marketing and PR Pete Hines tweeted. Following the beta period, it will launch in full on Steam and, later, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One.
Bethesda said last month that it would be overhauling Fallout 4’s highest difficulty level to include new features like disease and other challenges. Following that announcement, players found and shared more information as to what the new Survival Mode entails on the game’s subreddit.
Fallout 4’s first expansion pack launched today. The Automatron add-on is available to players across all versions of the game and is available with or without the season pass.

A hand-made hidden object game, with a few tricks up its sleeve Indie game designer Adriaan de Jongh is known for his unusual collaborations, including Bounden, an cooperative dancing game for mobile devices produced in cooperation with the Dutch National Ballet. De Jongh’s next game is a take on the hidden-object genre, and he’s partnered with a pen-and-ink artist to elevate his unique, hand-drawn style for mobile and Steam devices.
It’s called Hidden Folks, and de Jongh says he wouldn’t be making it right now if not for the fateful day two years ago when he met a young man named Sylvain Tegroeg.
“I first met Sylvain at his graduation expo," de Jongh said at this year’s Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. "He made some sort of installation with globes that showed his vision on product design; glass globes, with objects in them.
"But in the background of those globes he had these little drawings. And these little drawings, they kind of intrigued me way more than the actual globes. It really had this effect on me. I was looking at them and I was like, "Whoa what is happening in here!" I brought my face close to it and I was staring at it for 10 minutes."
Two weeks later, de Jongh says he had a working prototype for the game. Tegroeg was in, and for the last two years the pair have been working on fleshing the title out.

Hidden Folks A2 Poster, coming soon! #illustration #art #miniatures #folks #drawings #forest #level #paper pic.twitter.com/TKiRvQY6fA
— sylvain Tegroeg (@box6l20) March 17, 2016

De Jongh says that critics have called Hidden Folks many things. Some see it as a kind of modern-day Where’s Waldo? or compare it to the fad of adult coloring books. Whatever players see in the game, de Jongh says that people are entranced by Tegroeg’s pictures and are eager to spend hours hunting through them for the "targets" to unlock the next level.
The challenge for de Jongh has been to create tools fast enough, and stable enough, to handle the detail of Tegroeg’s work on a mobile device. The largest level yet completed — a detailed factory scene filled with tiny little workers toiling away along an assembly line — is much, much larger than even the screen of a PC can display all at once.

I saw what de Jongh meant, when I played an early build of Hidden Folks on his iPad Pro, sliding the page around through the keyhole of its screen to see the details in it. There’s a mermaid, a birthday party, an interactive button, a man with a thought bubble.
In all, de Jongh says, this one scene has 1,300 characters in it.

"We’ve already spent probably a year and a half of our time trying to figure out how to make this game," de Jongh says. "Tegroeg doesn’t draw on computers. He draws on paper with FineLiners. So everything that you see here was hand-drawn at some point. Eventually, I taught him how to make sprite sheets. … I helped him digitize his work in a way we could easily use in the game. After that, he could just pick all those small images that we put in on the computer and he could literally drag and drop everything into the game."
The process is painstaking. Once a physical drawing is finished, Tegroeg goes back using digital tools to create each individual part of it. Those parts are broken down into layers, and those layers sorted one atop the other inside Unity using custom tools de Jongh built especially for the game.

"He’s been drawing characters digitally with individual body parts — their little heads are separate, their legs are separate, arms separate — so that we can animate it. He’s been drawing the buildings separately, and he’s been drawing the windows separately. And then we put it all together in the game."
It harkens back to the kind of animation work that made Walt Disney famous — layering transparent sheets on top of one another and moving the camera relative to the stack — but at in a much more complex way. All this work, de Jongh says, is worth it to make a premium, for-pay title that will stand out on the crowded Apple and Steam marketplaces.
With luck, he says, the game will be ready to play in around six months.

Wherein the space dragon you’ve been waiting for finally arrives.
Riot released patch notes for soon-to-hit Patch 6.6 for League of Legends today. Lots of small changes around, especially some notable nerfs to champions dominating the pro and amateur scenes. Also, there’s a badass space dragon coming. Consider yourself warned.
You can read the full notes here, but here’s the important stuff:
1. Jungle nerfs!
Last patch, we saw buffs to some rarely played junglers like Vi, Hecarim and Jarvan IV. This week, some solo queue and pro play terrors have been taken down a notch.
The big one for solo queue players is Shyvana, who occupied the top spot among junglers as far as win rate is concerned in Patch 6.5. The attack damage ratio on Twin Bite (her “Q" ability) has been reduced significantly in the early game, and Titanic Hydra, one of her core items, received an attack damage nerf.
On the professional side, Nidalee has been one of the top contested picks in recent weeks. This patch nerfed her a little bit as well, removing the root on monsters from her Hunt mechanic and removing the auto attack reset on Pounce (her "W"). Runic Echoes, a core item on Nidalee, also saw a damage reduction, so you’re less likely to see that item on tanky junglers now.
2. Aurelion Sol is arriving
Yesssss! Read more about the new champion here, or just watch this video over and over again in anticipation (some NSFW language, so mute if you’re not into that).

3. Kalista is more support-dependent
As Scarizard pointed out in the patch notes, Kalista was in a strange place as a marksman of being very strong in both 2 vs. 2 and 1 vs. 1 situations. With her passive and ult making her literally tied to another champion, it makes a bunch of sense to try and sway her more towards being a strong 2 vs. 2 champion.
As a result, there are some general nerfs to Kalista’s kit (most notably her base attack speed). But now Kalista passively gains attack speed when her buddy is nearby.

4. Nerfs to top-tier supports
Alistar is seemingly always present in the pro scene and Janna’s been on top of the support win rate chart for some time now. Now, they’re each a little more focused on their specialties — for Alistar, his peel and engage; for Janna, her disengage.
Alistar’s Triumphant Roar (his "E") heals allies for significantly less now. Janna’s Eye of the Storm (her "E") gives less bonus attack damage to shielded allies, while Monsoon (her ultimate) disables for less time.
5. Buffs to some old friends
Despite the proliferation of tanky top laners in Season 6, ultra tanky Maokai has been absent. His base magic resistance has been buffed and he now has scaling magic resistance (he was the last tank in the game without it, per the patch notes). His saplings also last longer.
Elsewhere, Cho’Gath now gets more health each time he Feasts, Kha’Zix has reduced cooldowns on Taste Their Fear ("Q") and Void Spike ("W") and Karma’s Mantra’d Defiance is just a flat out stronger shield.
League of Legends Patch 6.5 should be live either later today or later this week.

Make way for Nintendo NX Nintendo will end production on its Wii U console sometime in 2016, according to a report from Japan’s Nikkei. The console, which has sold poorly compared to its wildly successful predecessor, debuted in 2012.
According to Nikkei’s report, Nintendo has already stopped manufacturing certain Wii U accessories. The outlet, which has a good record of reporting on Nintendo’s unannounced plans, reports that while Wii U hardware is being discontinued, a launch of the company’s next platform — codenamed NX — is not guaranteed this year.
Nintendo plans to unveil its next-generation console sometime in 2016. The company launched its first mobile app, Miitomo, last week.
Nintendo has sold more than 12.6 million Wii U consoles since 2012. Its previous home console, Wii, went on to sell more than 100 million units.
We’ve reached out to Nintendo for comment on the Nikkei’s report and will update with any new information the company provides.

Expect the ‘unexpected’ this time around The third season of Telltale Games’ The Walking Dead series will arrive later this year, according to the developer. CEO Kevin Bruner nailed down the release window in an interview with Mashable, during which he hinted at what to expect from the next entry in the choice-driven, episodic adventure series.
The interview is light on details, but Bruner said that the goal of Season 3 is to bring in new fans to the series. How this affects the storyline — which, based on the ending(s) of Season 2, might be hard to keep following — is still anyone’s guess, although Bruner said it will take an “unexpected" turn.
More details are expected out of this year’s San-Diego Comic-Con, according to Bruner.
The Walking Dead’s second season finished back in 2014. In 2015, the studio confirmed it wouldn’t release a follow-up that year, instead focusing on other titles. Telltale has kept busy since then with games like Minecraft: Story Mode and a three-part miniseries focused on Michonne, a character from Robert Kirkman’s The Walking Dead comic book series.

All hail your film revival queen Star Wars actress Daisy Ridley’s next big role might be as Lara Croft in a new Tomb Raider film, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
Last week, reports circulated that suggested Ridley was in the running for the role of Lara Croft. But the movie doesn’t have a script yet, Ridley told THR, nor has she locked down the part. “I’m waiting for someone to say ‘I want you, let’s do it’," she said at the Empire Awards in London on Sunday.
The planned Tomb Raider movie reboot will be directed by Roar Ulthaug; it will be his first Hollywood feature. In 2013, Evan Daughtery (Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Divergent) was attached to write the script based on the revived game franchise by Crystal Dynamics. GK Films bought the film rights to the series in 2011; the movie has been in development since 2013.
No release date has been set yet for the movie, which will be the Tomb Raider franchise’s first since 2003’s Cradle of Life.
While Ridley is best known as Rey in Star Wars: The Force Awakens, the actress also has a voice acting credit on her resume. Starting in January, she could be heard in the English adaptation of Only Yesterday by famed animation company Studio Ghibli.
How Lara Croft is changing

Director’s Cut version of Tequila Works’ sidescrolling adventure coming soon Publisher Deep Silver is bringing Deadlight, Tequila Works’ platforming adventure first released on Xbox 360 and Windows PC in 2012, to current consoles. Dubbed Deadlight: Director’s Cut, the new version of the zombie survival game will add “superior controls, new animations and full 1080p resolution" to the game.
Deadlight: Director’s Cut will also introduce Survival Arena, a new mode that promises "one of the toughest zombie challenges yet."
Deep Silver and Tequila Works are working with Abstraction Games, which has adapted a long list of well-known titles, to bring the new version of Deadlight to PlayStation 4, Windows PC and Xbox One. Deadlight: Director’s Cut will be released June 21 and cost $19.99.
For more on the original Deadlight, read Polygon’s review.