Developer Sucker Punch has slipped a few fun Easter eggs into the huge open world of Ghost of Tsushima, if you know where to look for them. A few are tied to finding collectibles and completing missions, but one big one shows up at the end of the game, paying homage to a bunch of PlayStation exclusive games that have helped define Sony’s influence on the video gaming landscape.
You can find the Easter egg after you complete Act 3 of the main quest. When you’re finished with Jin’s Tale, you’ll awaken at Tradition’s End, a small shack where Jin keeps a whole bunch of keepsakes regarding the people he meets throughout the game and the events that take place as part of the story.
Look on the table in the shack, however, and you’ll see something else: a bunch of papercraft characters and objects referencing other PlayStation exclusive games. There are quite a few, in fact, and it’s easy to miss some of them. Here’s the full list and what they’re calling out.
The table at Tradition’s End has a whole mess of callbacks to PlayStation exclusives on it, but
Microsoft has reportedly indicated that the Xbox Series X release date is in November, according to tech reporter Dina Bass. In an interview with Microsoft CFO Amy Hood, Bass asked if the “new console” was still on track for the “November holidays,” to which Hood responded yes. [Update: A Microsoft spokesperson told GameSpot that it has not yet announced an official release date for the console.]
Microsoft CFO Amy Hood says new Xbox is still on track for the November holidays launch.
Not entirely explicit, this response indicates that the Xbox Series X release date is sometime in November. Previously, the Xbox Series X has been announced to launch during Holiday 2020, but no specific release date has been officially announced. Back in March, an official product page in some regions listed the console as “Thanksgiving 2020.” However, Microsoft said that listing was a mistake. The original Xbox, Xbox 360, and Xbox One released in November of their launch years.
A Microsoft spokesperson told GameSpot, “We’re excited to launch Xbox Series X, which will set a new bar for power, speed and compatibility when it launches Holiday 2020, alongside Halo Infinite. We have nothing further to share at this time.”
Microsoft will be having its Xbox Games Showcase tomorrow, July 23. News on the Xbox Series X hardware, including a release date, is not expected, as Microsoft has already stated that the showcase will focus exclusively on games.
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While horror movies from Japan, Hong Kong, and South Korea have been popular with fans for a long time, in more recent years, great examples of scary films from other Asian countries have found appreciative audiences in the west. Indonesia has produced some particularly impressive horror movies, including Timo Tjahjanto’s wild Evil Dead homage May the Devil Take You and Joko Anwar’s Satan’s Slaves, which stands as the most successful ever produced in that country. The need for streaming services to find content has really helped these movies breakthrough internationally, with Netflix and Shudder respectively giving these two films high profile US releases. Anwar’s latest movie, Impetigore, is set to join them, and hits Shudder this week.
Impetigore hits the ground running with a seriously scary opening sequence. Two women, Maya (Tara Basro) and Dini (Marissa Anita), are working in toll booths on either side of a road at night. Maya mentions that she is scared of one regular driver she sees, who–of course–turns up minutes later. Without spoiling anything, this encounter leads Maya to find out that she was born in a remote woodland village, and she might have inherited a large house there. So the two friends head into the countryside to find the village. But inevitably something is very wrong there–the locals believe a terrible curse has been placed upon the village by Maya’s relatives, and her return starts a disturbing sequence of events.
Viewers going into Impetigore expecting non-stop shocks like the opening scene suggests might be initially disappointed. Anwar is a filmmaker who puts atmosphere ahead of obvious scares, and there’s a slow build to the next big fright, as Maya and Dini head to the village to find the potential inheritance. But the director’s skill at building tension and mystery establishes a mood that quickly makes up for any lack of blade-wielding mayhem like in the first 10 minutes. Basro and Anita are both very engaging as the likeable but ill-prepared city girls, who believe they are simply going to find an expensive house then return with a lawyer to force the locals to hand it over. There’s quite a bit of humor early on between the pair, but as the situation gets serious, the laughs gradually disappear.
Although Anwar throws in a lot of familiar horror content–curses, machetes, black magic, evil puppets–he never falls back on lazy cliché. The villagers are not the insane backwoods locals of movies such as The Hills Have Eyes or The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. The curse that they believe afflicts their village is a deeply disturbing one for the whole community, affecting new-born children, and the dark decisions they take when they realise Maya has returned to her home are driven by this pain. There are a couple of more obvious villains–the elderly woman (a menacing Christine Hakim), who runs the village, and her son, played by Ario Bayu–but for the most part the villagers are portrayed sympathetically as normal people forced to deal with a terrible situation.
Like many of the best Asian horror movies, Anwar uses traditional and folklore to great effect. As well as superstitious belief in curses, the traditional Indonesian art of Wayang Kulit–a type of shadow puppetry–is used as a main plot point. Not only does this allow for some ghoulish horror (hint: these puppets aren’t made from the traditional animal skin), it also proved some incredibly striking imagery. One particularly gory sequence takes place behind the linen screen used in Wayang Kulit, with the spraying blood and butchered bodies strikingly silhouetted. The whole movie is beautifully shot, with the location photography and stylish camerawork making it one of the best looking horror films for some time.
But while Impetigore is visually striking throughout, it does fall down on a story level. As with all films of this type, there comes a point where the director needs to reveal to the main character–and by extension, the audience–the truth of the main mystery. In this case it’s what the curse is and what the villagers want with Maya. Unfortunately this information is dumped via two lengthy flashback sequences, that kills some of the momentum that Anwar has been building. And ultimately it’s not that important, this is a horror movie dealing with familiar themes, and with so much tension and atmosphere created in the first hour, a bit more ambiguity might have helped the movie’s narrative flow.
This is a relatively small misep however, and Impetigore remains one of the strongest horror films of the year so far. Horror is often at its best when it combines the familiar and the new, and Anwar is adept at this. While fans love to be scared, disturbed, and challenged, there is also something impressive and strangely comforting about a filmmaker that understands the conventions of the genre, and can confidently deliver original ideas within a tried-and-tested format. With mainstream US horror entirely absent from the big screen, there’s never been a better time to seek out some great genre movies from other corners of the globe, of which Impetigore is an impressive example.
Someone with a lot of money and (presumably) a deep love for Pokemon has just beaten the record for the most money spent on a Pokemon card at auction. The card, called Pikachu Illustrator, sold for $233,000 (25 million yen), Zen Market has reported.
The card, which was bought by an American, is a foil card picturing Pikachu with a paintbrush and a picture of a Charmander. You can check it out the card, in its sale condition, below. It’s in “Mint 9” condition, meaning that it has only one small flaw compared to a pristine copy.
The card is extremely rare, having been given only to winners of an illustration contest hosted across four contests in the Japanese magazine CoroCoro Comic, according to Bulbapedia. The contests, held across 1997 and 1998, handed out under 100 copies of this card in total. The card has no actual viable use in the Pokemon Trading Card game, as the text congratulates the owner for their illustration.
Another huge auction, featuring three different trainer cards, is currently running. At the time of writing, it’s up to $284,528 (28 million yen).
Unfortunately, no cards in your old Pokemon card collection is likely to be worth quite this much–even a series 1 holo Charizard. Meanwhile, the Pokemon Trading Card Game is adding Raid Battles to its digital version.
Mafia: Definitive Edition is coming to PS4, Xbox One, and PC on September 25, and once it’s out, developer Hanger 13 is going to move on to something entirely new–their own IP. GameSpot has a full interview with Haden Blackman, the game’s director, and he talks about the studio’s plans for the future.
Blackman says that after finishing the DLC for Mafia III, the team began work on a new IP. This could be a reference to Rhapsody, a Berlin-set spy game that was reportedly in the works at the developer (the game’s map was found inside Mafia III: Definitive Edition). It’s unclear whether Rhapsody is still being worked on, but something other than Mafia is definitely in the works.
While work was going on this IP, the team started to think about what to do next with Mafia, and eventually settled on a remake of the original. This came about because it was clear they were not ready to start on an entirely new project just yet. “When we started to wind down on Mafia III, we had already started kicking around ideas for our original IP,” Blackman recalls. “We knew that we were going to have a team, especially on the art and kind of media team side, that we wouldn’t be able to leverage right away.”
Asked if this new version of Mafia was a way of “putting a neat bow” on the franchise before moving onto this new IP, Blackman said that this is the case. ” I mean, I wouldn’t say that it’s a goal in the sense that we’re not going to return to the franchise,” he clarifies. “As you know, a lot of it will really depend on how successful the Definitive Edition is and what the reception is.”
Work on a new IP is happening right now, he says, calling Hanger 13 a “multi-project studio”. Beyond this, he says, “we’ve got a couple of other things in the works as well.”
“I wouldn’t say that Mafia: Definitive Edition means that we’re done with the franchise,” he continues. “I think that we’ve got some ideas kicking around, but a lot of it’s just really going to depend on what the reception is like and how well it does in the market.”
You can watch the Mafia: Definitive Edition extended gameplay reveal trailer above.
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Perry Mason will be returning for Season 2 on HBO. The show, which has so far aired five of the eight episodes in its first season, has evidently been a success for the network, with Variety reporting that the season premiere was viewed 1.7 million times across all platforms at debut.
The show, which stars Matthew Rhys as the titular character, has done well critically. It follows Mason, a private investigator living through the Great Depression in 1932 Los Angeles, as he lives paycheck to paycheck and deals with PTSD from his service in World War I. It also features actors John Lithgow, Juliet Rylance, and Tatiana Maslany.
It’s not clear yet when Perry Mason Season 2 will release, or how many episodes it will consist of.
The character of Perry Mason has been around since the 1930s, and was created by author Erle Stanley Gardner. This version is executive produced by Robert Downey Jr. and his wife Susan Downey.
HBO recently launched HBO Max, a new streaming service that features HBO’s original programming and several other shows and movies. It’s currently only available in the US.
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EA Sports UFC 4 will not feature the commentating talents of Joe Rogan, who is one of the league’s main commentators in real life. Creative director Brian Hayes tells GameSpot that Rogan has never enjoyed doing voiceover for the franchise, but this is the first time he won’t be in the series at all.
“He hasn’t been shy about saying this on his own podcast; like, he hates doing it,” Hayes said. “If you’re not a person that [can] mentally get into that space, then I can see how it could be a very, you know, challenging, potentially mind-numbing experience for a certain type of individual.”
Hayes said the developers knew since the first EA Sports UFC game that Rogan felt this way about doing voiceover, because he expressed similar opinions about the work he did for other UFC games.
“He was open with us from from the very beginning that he hated his experience of doing voiceover on previous iterations of other UFC games, and things were no different for us,” Hayes said. “He hated doing voiceover on these games as well. That has nothing to do with with us in particular, or, you know, our games versus other games. He just does not like sitting in a booth reading lines for hours at a time.”
With Rogan out, the new commentary team in EA Sports UFC 4 is comprised of former light heavyweight and heavyweight champion Daniel “DC” Cormier and UFC’s Jon Anik.
EA Sports UFC 4 launches in August for PS4 and Xbox One. The game makes a number of major changes to the formula, and you can see some of the gameplay improvements in the video above. Check back soon with GameSpot for more from our conversation with Hayes.
While EA Sports UFC 4 will no longer feature the Ultimate Team mode, those who pre-order will be able to play as heavyweight boxing champions Anthony Joshua and Tyson Fury.
Crysis Remastered is coming to Switch very soon–its release date is set for July 23, despite the other versions being delayed–and many fans have been curious about how the game will run on the system. Crysis is a famously CPU-intensive game, and this represents the first mobile or handheld port the game has received. Considering that “Can It Run Crysis?” has become a meme in games culture, it’s more than reasonable to be curious.
Thankfully, tech specialists Digital Foundry are here with a tech review on the latest in a line of what they are calling the Switch’s “impossible” ports (previous examples include The Witcher 3 and Wolfenstein II). The verdict is in, and it’s mostly good news–the game looks and performs very well on the system.
The port has been handled by Saber Interactive, who previously handled the ports of The Witcher 3 and Vampyr. They’ve been very upfront about the tech running the game on Switch, and released a tech trailer showing off what it could do–and now Digital Foundry has dug in even deeper into what they call “a remarkable, fascinating port.”
The port is based on the Xbox 360 and PS3 versions of the game, albeit with enough improvements for Digital Foundry to declare this “undoubtedly the best console port” (upcoming PS4 and Xbox One versions notwithstanding). The game runs at 720P most of the time in docked mode, sometimes dropping to 540P or lower in “busy situations”, and the full dynamic resolution scaling ranges from 540P to 900P docked, and 400P to 700P undocked. “The main takeaway is that image quality isn’t bad,” the report states. “It’s not pristine, but it’s significantly better than the heavily blurred presentations seen in the likes of the id Tech 6 ports, The Witcher 3 and Warframe.”
The game also boasts significantly improved lighting, surpassing even the PC version in some places, thanks to the use of sparse voxel-based global illumination. This “delivers a real-time global illumination system that offers both ambient occlusion and indirect light bounce, delivering a standard of realism that easily eclipses the last-gen ports and indeed the lighting found in the PC original.”
The game’s frame rate is locked at 30, with occasional dips into the low-20s when there’s a lot of action on screen. There are some compromises in the vegetation destruction, too: “when you unload on a tree, it appears somewhat choppy,” the report says.
Here’s the full 27-minute video from Digital Foundry, digging into every aspect of the Switch port.
Crysis Remastered marks the first appearance of the Crysis series on a Nintendo system. Thankfully, we can put aside our fears for this port–it is not a Potato Mode situation.
Robert Handlery got to play 2 hours of the upcoming flight combat game, Star Wars: Squadrons, developed by EA Motive. He played the prologue of the single player campaign, and both the Dogfight and Fleet Battle multiplayer modes–Dogfight is a 5v5 battle against other players, and Fleet Battle tasks you with taking down your enemies massive flagship.
The game features different ships like the X-Wing, TIE Fighter, and Y-Wing, which fit into different classes like Fighter, Interceptor, Bomber, and Support. The ships also sport a robust collection of loadouts and customization options. Rob was impressed with how the game alleviates some of the problems with the “death loop” (where you and your opponent are constantly chasing each other in never-ending circles) and how it utilizes a Power Management system that allows you to focus power into things like lasers, engines, and shields while taking power away from other abilities.
Star Wars: Squadrons is set to be released on October 2, 2020 for PS4, Xbox One, and PC. The game will be cross-platform and have VR support.
Microsoft’s Xbox division is enjoying very strong results lately, due in part to the COVID-19 pandemic that’s keeping people at home playing games. Microsoft reported earnings on Wednesday, and the Xbox division saw its revenue rise by a massive 64 percent (up $1.3 billion).
The sales uptick was led by “growth in Xbox content and services.” Content and services revenue jumped by $1.2 billion (up 65 percent) due in part to “record engagement” as stay-at-home measures remain in place. Additionally, Microsoft said it enjoyed “strength” from third-party games, which pay Microsoft to be on their store.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said “it was simply a breakthrough quarter for gaming,” adding that Xbox Game Pass is seeing “record subscriber growth” on console and PC. However, he did not provide a new figure beyond the 10 million subscriber number that Microsoft announced earlier.
Microsoft CEO @satyanadella says “it was simply a breakthrough quarter for gaming” for Microsoft. “Xbox Game Pass is seeing record subscriber growth across console and PC.” No update on the 10 million subscribers disclosed in Q3.
Not only did content and services revenue rise, but hardware also posted gains, rising by 49 percent thanks to more consoles sold than before. Microsoft just recently discontinued some Xbox models.
These results put Microsoft on a strong footing ahead of the Xbox Series X launch later this year, possibly in November. As you can see in the chart below, Xbox dominated all of Microsoft’s other major business categories when it comes to year-over-year revenue growth.
Xbox is dominating at Microsoft right now
Xbox’s fortunes are due to grow further still with the release of the Xbox Series X and Halo Infinite this holiday. Microsoft will showcase Halo Infinite and other Xbox exclusives during an event on Thursday.
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