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Tag - Culture
PlayStation 5; Team Asobi/Sony
Fun-packed and brimming with personality, this full-length Astro Bot outing pays
tribute to PlayStation history while pushing the console’s capabilities
When I say that Astro Bot reminds me of Super Mario Galaxy, I could pay it no
higher compliment. It’s not that it’s derivative: indeed it’s the very abundance
of new ideas that places it up there with Nintendo’s best 3D platformers. It has
taken me around its own small galaxy of planetoid-style levels, from bathhouses
to diorama-sized jungle temples to rainy islands, each host to a brilliant
one-shot idea, such as a pair of frog boxing gloves or a backpack monkey or a
time-stopping watch that lets you freeze giant zooming darts in place so you can
jump on them. It is splendid to witness this development team’s creativity let
loose.
Team Asobi has previously made a couple of short-form Astro Bot games – one for
the PSVR, Rescue Mission, and another that came packaged with the PS5 at launch,
Astro’s Playroom – but this one is full-length, complete with challenging bonus
levels that play out like electrified skill-check gauntlets for the generation
raised on 3D platformers. It is supremely funny and characterful, thanks to the
titular chibi blue-and-white robot and his crowd of friends, many of whom are
dressed up as characters from the most obscure crevices of PlayStation history.
The attention paid to these bots – their animation, their mannerisms, their
dance moves and little cries for help when they’re stuck up a tree being menaced
by malevolent octopuses – fills them to the brim with personality.
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Transmissions, which plots the story of Joy Division and New Order, returns for
a second run. Plus: five of the best sci-fi podcasts
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In case you missed it, Serial’s Sarah Koenig was recently interviewed by Fiona
Sturges for the Guardian, on 10 years of Serial. It was an intriguing interview
about how web sleuths had changed Koenig’s own view of the Adnan Syed case that
made her podcast such a huge hit back in 2014. But one section struck me as
pretty surprising, if not totally shocking. Good friends and family, Koenig said
– “like, even my siblings” – had asked her whether its fourth series, on
Guantánamo Bay, had been released yet (it came out in March). “We can speculate
about the topic and the quality of it, but I think it’s also just the [pod]
universe is completely different,” she added. “There are so many choices. We are
in a sea of podcasts.”
Serial season four isn’t a whodunnit – Serial hasn’t really done that since its
inception, and that first series that hinged on whether Syed had killed his
high-school sweetheart Hae Min Lee. Successive outings have also leaned less on
the serialisation you might assume from the title, with the Guantánamo series
focusing instead on somewhat interlinked stories of life at the notorious US
prison camp, rather than one overarching, unfurling narrative. In many ways,
it’s kind of become a podcast Ship of Theseus, its elements slowly changing with
each season. Still, it’s slightly sad to think that some people may have
abandoned it just because it isn’t that same show it was at that very specific
moment in time, pre-true crime boom, rather than something that has changed and
evolved over a decade. Plus, the Guantánamo series is pretty solid (although,
beware – episode eight in particular comes with some deeply upsetting details of
sexual assault).
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In this week’s newsletter: Fuelled by a backdrop of sexist culture, alarming
censorship guidelines and ‘anti-woke’ ire, the summer’s biggest hit has become a
lightning rod in the video game culture wars
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A Chinese game called Black Myth: Wukong has been the biggest hit of the summer,
selling 10m copies in just three days, according to its developer Game Science,
with over 1 million people playing it every day on games marketplace Steam.
China’s homegrown games industry is absolutely massive, but concentrated almost
entirely on mobile phones: this is the country’s first successful blockbuster
console and PC game, which makes it very interesting in itself. It’s also a
massively successful single-player game arriving on the back of a few
high-profile multiplayer flops, which suggests there is still more of a market
for this kind of adventure than video game execs like to believe.
But Wukong has been grabbing headlines for other reasons, too. Back in November,
IGN put together a report compiling crude, vulgar public comments from a number
of Game Science staff, some of whom are very well-known in China’s games
industry. IGN also spoke to several women who expressed their disappointment and
despair over omnipresent sexism in games and in China more broadly. It is a very
interesting and well-researched article that doesn’t so much point the finger at
Game Science specifically as set it within the context of a bigger Chinese
feminist struggle. But of course, it attracted the ire of an increasingly vocal
swathe of “anti-woke” gamers that has found a gathering-place on YouTube and
social media, some of whom accused IGN of trying to sabotage Black Myth: Wukong
by making things up.
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This seemingly minor addition allows players to sprint and dive in every
direction so crunch moments can feel like a ridiculously fun John Woo shootout
Here is a statement of fact that I am not entirely proud of: I have played every
Call of Duty game since the series launched in 2003. I’ve been there through the
extremely good times (Call of Duty 4) and the extremely not good (Call of Duty:
Roads to Victory). And while I may have cringed at some of the narrative
decisions, the casual bigotry rife on the online multiplayer servers, and the
general “America, fuck yeah!” mentality of the entire series, I have always come
back.
In that time, I’ve seen all the many attempts to tweak the core feel of the
games – from perks to jetpacks (thanks Advanced Warfare!) – but having spent a
weekend in the multiplayer beta test for Call of Duty: Black Ops 6, I think
developer Treyarch may have stumbled on the best so far. It is called
omni-movement.
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Following extraordinarily low sales and player counts, Sony has removed its
latest shooter from sale on PC and PS5
Sony has announced that new PlayStation 5 shooter Concord, which released on 23
August, is to be taken offline just two weeks later, with refunds issued to
every player who bought it.
The game is a team-based hero shooter in the vein of Activision-Blizzard’s hit
Overwatch, pitting teams of five against each other in tight combat arenas, and
its launch has been one of the most high-profile flops of the gaming year. It
has recorded player counts in the mere hundreds on Steam, the most popular PC
marketplace, and is estimated to have sold fewer than 25,000 copies, according
to analysts at GameDiscoverCo.
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Autumn and winter are the best time for gamers, and if your set-up is looking a
little stale, here are the key ingredients for a serious seasonal upgrade
With summer gone and the skies already greying over in preparation for six
months of uncontested rain, you may well be thinking more seriously about video
games. September and October tend to see the biggest releases of the year, so
you can expect many evenings spent hiding from the world while playing Call of
Duty: Black Ops 6 or Mario Party Jamboree. If your gaming set-up is looking a
little tired and you want to treat yourself to a serious seasonal upgrade, here
are some suggestions.
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Marking the anniversary, the creators of the rap beef beat-em-up sequel share
memories of transforming Flavor Flav and Snoop Dogg into legendary video game
characters
‘I remember we visited Ghostface Killah [of the Wu-Tang Clan] and he was mad at
us!” recalls Daryl Anselmo, former EA employee and art director for 2004’s
landmark hip-hop-fused beat-em-up, Def Jam: Fight for NY. “Ghostface had a
four-pound solid gold eagle bracelet and he insisted his character’s finishing
move should be this bird coming to life and pecking out all the other rappers’
eyeballs. The limitations of the PlayStation 2 technology and our violence
restrictions meant we couldn’t pull it off. It was impossible.”
The game’s producer Josh Holmes interjects: “When Ghostface first asked me about
the eagle, Lauren [Wirtzer Seawood, another one of the game’s producers] told me
just to nod along and smile. When we saw him again in the studio for the sequel,
I apologised [for misleading him] and we quickly moved on to recording his
character’s expanded insults for the new game. I remember one was: ‘Go home and
cry to your momma. And, while you’re at it, tell her I’m hungry!’”
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Contemplating the end of the summer
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(KeelWorks; Konami; PC, PlayStation 5, Xbox)
The Scottish studio’s debut game is a fiendishly innovative take on the classic
space battle genre
Years before Star Wars, video game designers had begun to explore galactic
dogfighting. In 1962, Spacewar!, the first formal computer game, was a
rudimentary but influential attempt: two narrow triangles swirled around the
gravity well of a star, launching torpedoes at each other. Having established
the medium’s first principles, hundreds of developers attempted to refine and
perfect the genre, which rose and dived in fashion but never fully warped away.
Cygni is, perhaps, the highest production attempt yet, a debut from a tiny
Scottish studio that answers the improbable question: what if Steven Spielberg
had directed Space Invaders?
A lone fighter, you streak across an alien planet attacking swirling flocks of
UFOs and purplish space jellyfish as they pipette across the screen.
Stylistically reminiscent of the polarity-swapping arcade classic Ikaruga, Cygni
is a technological masterclass, your spaceship sweeping over distant robot
battlefields, buffeted in the blast of a thousand fireworks. An orchestra, one
moment frantic, the next melancholic, provides complementary backing to the
action, which ebbs and flows with moments of respite between the flurries of
activity.
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