Month: July 2020

Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater made its PlayStation debut more than 20 years ago, and for skateboarding legends such as Rodney Mullen and Chad Muska, they can still recall just how influential the Neversoft game series was on their careers at the time.

“They had to put me on top of a van because it was so intense,” Rodney Mullen said to The Verge about the fan response that he received after appearing in Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 2. “It was a sea of people — around me. And although I had a strong name from all of those years prior, this was unlike anything I had ever seen. That was my first taste of it, and it just went on. I could not believe the exposure the game gave to me.”

Mullen wasn’t the only skateboarder whose profile received a massive boost after appearing in one of the first two games, as icons of the era such as Chad Muska and Bucky Lasek also commented on how their lives changed after the original game became a pop culture phenomenon.

“I just remember initially it sounding surreal to me, especially then, that skateboarding was going to be in a video game that would be available on consoles across the world,” said Muska.

“I can’t say I imagined it blowing up as big as it did,” Lasek added. “But I could definitely see that we were on to something. Overnight, it was a household name. I was a household name. And everybody else in that game became household names because of that.”

Mullen, Muska and Lasek will be just some of the skateboarding superstars who’ll be shredding up a storm when Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1 + 2 launches on September 4 for PS4, Xbox One, and PC. Not just a faithful remaster of the original two games, Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1 + 2 includes its original soundtracks, which is further enhanced by 37 new songs that feature rap, punk rock and ska heavyweights.

Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater wasn’t Mullen’s only starring role in a video game, as he also appeared in Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon: Breakpoint as tech entrepreneur Jace Skell.

If you feel like popping a 1080 Nostalgia heelflip, you can listen to these tracks on Spotify right now.

Slowly but surely, the Epic Games Store is attaining feature parity with its direct competitors. Achievement support is on the way next, and an early form of the feature has already been implemented in one game.

There is now a notification and pop-out menu that appears when you unlock achievements in Ark: Survival Evolved. Epic says this is an early version of the feature that will change and evolve over time before eventually making its way into other games. For now, achievements will be tracked in the background while Epic fine-tunes the interface.

The fledgeling storefront has introduced a number of new features this year, such as wishlists, download throttling, self-service refunds, and support for more currencies. Mod support, gifting, and additional social features top the list of upcoming additions.

Back in June, Epic announced that the store had hit a peak of 61 million monthly users. This followed a promotion where several major games were given to users for free, including Grand Theft Auto V, Civilization VI, and Borderlands: The Handsome Collection. Of course, the Epic Games Store is also the only way to play the immensely popular Fortnite on PC, which saw over 12 million concurrent logins across all devices for its “The Device” event. The store is continuing to give away free games every week, too.

Valve has recently made changing your store country more strict, which requires completing a purchase using a payment method from that country.
This should hinder the ability of using VPNs to buy games cheaper. pic.twitter.com/IozwoO6gsi

— Steam Database (@SteamDB) July 29, 2020

Samurai Shodown is getting a new character on August 5, and they’ll be completely free. The new fighter is Gongsun Li, a character from the Tencent game Honor of Kings, and they look pretty powerful.

If you’ve never heard of Honor of Kings, there’s a good reason for that–the game has never been released outside of China, where it’s massively popular. It’s an interesting choice for a free character, and Gongsun Li will be available worldwide.

It’s not quite Banjo-Kazooie in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, but hey, it’s free–and she looks like a great character in the video below, with a varied, interesting moveset.

You’ll be able to fight as Gongsun Li in the Switch, PS4, Xbox One, and PC versions of the game. It seems like she’ll be available for free indefinitely, too.

The last crossover character to join the game was For Honor‘s Warden–but you had to pay $6 to get the character, or buy Season Pass 2.

Following the success of the Samurai Shodown reboot, the game’s director would like to reboot more SNK franchises.

One of Bethesda’s upcoming games is the PlayStation 5 game Ghostwire: Tokyo from developer Tango Gameworks. Game director Kenji Kimura recently spoke about some of the game’s PlayStation 5-exclusive features such as its use of the DualSense controller, 3D audio, and more.

Kimura told IGN that it’s difficult to explain why Ghostwire’s use of the DualSense controller is so special without giving people the opportunity to try it for themselves. Kimura hopes that might be possible before launch, but the best he can do that is tell you why it’s going to be great.

“You need to experience it directly because this is very difficult to explain both verbally and in text, but the DualSense haptics and adaptive triggers felt so good that it made us, the developers, say, ‘Woah!’ because they allowed for us to feel and experience the various actions and attacks like never before,” Kimura said.

Regarding Ghostwire’s use of 3D audio, Kimura said sound is a very important element of setting the mood and the scene, and 3D audio helps with this.

“To feel like you’re actually there, to feel the objects and beings that are actually there, sound is extremely important,” Kimura said. “You’ll be able to feel like you are there and ‘feel’ the things that are there with 3D audio.”

Kimura went on to say that the overall power of the PS5 has allowed the studio to make a more realistic-looking Tokyo.

“There was some risk that making a unique, original version of Tokyo may make the city feel weird–or just strange–but with the power of the PlayStation 5, we were able to create our vision: an original version of Tokyo that you can realistically feel and be immersed in,” Kimura said.

Ghostwire is action-adventure game taking place in Tokyo that incorporates horror elements, but won’t be a survival horror game like Tango’s previous game, The Evil Within. In the reveal trailer, citizens disappear as a spooky atmosphere envelops the city before supernatural entities start to surface. From what we gathered, you’ll be investigating the nature of the disappearances and come in contact with many spirits, some peaceful and some dangerous. You can watch the latest trailer above.

If you haven’t noticed, opportunities for air travel have been a little bit scarce as of late. Sure, it’s still possible to fly from here to there, but it’s much less desirable than it used to be for obvious pandemic-related reasons. And I definitely miss it. Playing the new Microsoft Flight Simulator has done a lot to fill that gap, and then some, offering up the chance to not only see the Earth from thousands of feet up, but also the opportunity to take control of one of 20 different planes to chart my own courses.

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The great thing about Microsoft Flight Simulator and its real-time Bing maps integration is you can hop into a plane and take off from basically any airport in the entire world. At last count, over 37,000 airports, airfields, and even tiny dirt airstrips were available to you. The 30 airports available with the base game are hand-crafted to resemble the actual airports on which they’re based as accurately as possible. If you’ve ever flown into LAX or JFK, you’ll probably be astonished at how well they’ve been recreated here by Asobo Studios. But the 36,970 other airfields are also impressive, even if they aren’t modeled on actual architectural blueprints like the hand-crafted ones. For example, my local airport in midcoast Maine is absolutely tiny, with two runways: one just over 1,500 meters and the other just over 1,200 meters.

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The algorithm used to fill in the three-dimensional structures from real-world Bing maps data recreated my local airport to a level such that I wasn’t sure if it was generated or built by a programmer. Sure, there are a few smaller buildings missing, and the signage isn’t in place, but it’s close enough I could actually recognize it when I was taxiing to park.

But that’s just my small rural airport. The real joy of Microsoft Flight Simulator has been visiting places I’ve never been before. I watched a short YouTube video on Hong Kong the other day and when it was over I thought, “It would be cool to fly over Hong Kong at night, I bet.” And so I fired up Flight Sim and I did. And it looked incredible. I was able to fly around the city and see the towering skyscrapers lit up with the warm orange hues of halogen and cool blues of mercury streetlights on the patchwork of city streets below. Couple that with the half-moon reflecting off the ocean and a few low-clouds and it was sublime, almost like a low-fi hip-hop beat come to life.

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Beyond Hong Kong at night, I visited other places on my bucket list, flying lower and closer than real-life would ever allow. I took off from Galeão International Airport in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil and immediately pointed the nose toward Christ the Redeemer, the massive granite statue looking over the city. After circling around, I radioed the tower and went back in for a landing. The level of detail in the model of the statue is incredible.

I flew a similar sight-seeing tour of the Great Pyramids, coming in lower and closer than any real-life plane would be allowed. I also took a tour of the Grand Canyon, dropping down inside and carefully maneuvering my plane between its foreboding walls.

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I have to say, Microsoft Flight Simulator is scratching my travel itch while letting me explore and experience more than I ever could simply sitting in seat 24C on a commercial jet. It’s almost an addiction at this point. If I’m watching a YouTube video or something on Netflix and I see an interesting location, I make a note to visit it later in Flight Simulator. With no clear end in sight to the stay-at-home and quarantine orders still covering so much of the country and much of the world, Microsoft Flight Simulator let me escape the confines of my small town and explore the world anyway, and for that I absolutely cannot wait for its full release on PC on August 18

 

Animal Crossing: New Horizons update 1.4.0, also known as the Summer Update part 2, is now live, and its headlining features are the additions of the Dream Suite, a new fireworks feature, and the ability to back up your save data. But it’s also added back in a feature that has was patched out of the game earlier.

A glitch in earlier versions of the game allowed you to remove the UI when using your Nook Phone to take a photo, letting you get clean footage of your character’s movements from a fixed angle. As Polygon notes, this glitch, which was patched out earlier this month, is now back–but this time it’s a feature, included on purpose.

As you can see in the tweet below from Animal Crossing World, the game will now let you remove UI elements when taking a photo by clicking the right stick. This isn’t possible if you’re playing using just the left Joy-Con in horizontal mode, but it’s possible in all other control variants.

This should make it easier to get that perfect, clean footage of your character ominously running around with a gold-plated axe.

The first Summer update for Animal Crossing: New Horizons added plenty of new content too, including swimming–here’s how to hunt down pearls every day.

Resident Evil 3 is getting new DLC for both its single-player campaign and its multiplayer Resident Evil Resistance mode, although one pack is more substantial than the other. In August, you’ll be able to purchase two new costumes for the cast of Resistance, and a code to unlock everything in the campaign.

The Resistance DLC is the more exciting of the two, because it lets you dress up the whole game’s cast in the outfits from Resident Evil 2. You’ll be able to dress them up as either Claire Redfield, with her red jacket, or Leon Kennedy with his STARS outfit.

Unfortunately, you can’t just play as Leon and Claire, but this is the next best thing.

The DLC for the campaign will let you buy all the unlockables that could be purchased with points earned in-game. This includes Jill’s STARS outfit, which she wore back in the original Resident Evil. You’ll also be able to equip her with an infinite rocket launcher, if you want to run through the game with a reduced challenge.

The prices for both pieces of DLC have not been announced yet. Previous classic costume packs for Resistance have cost $3.

GameSpot gave Resident Evil 3 a 6/10 in its review. One of the cons listed in the review focused on the multiplayer: “Resistance has some interesting ideas, but it’s often clunky and lacks personality.”