Julius

Yeah, I can definitely see that, and I'd add it to the list of reasons for having this mode. I think you're right in that it could probably be the primary motivator behind including the mode, but there are reasons across the board to make a move like this. I can't help but wonder if in some regions which are a bit (read: way) more on the extreme end of what can and can't be shown, if Nintendo would consider releasing the game there with the game only presented in Naive Angel Mode. It might seem like a stretch but this definitely seems like it could make the game more palatable to those regions. Adding options is always a case of more upsides - for business and consumer - than it is downsides, so I think it's the smart move; if anything it's just a funny sounding mode. Not to comment on Bayonetta in particular (because I haven't played any), but there are definitely times where characters in all mediums are oversexualised to all hell and back, and that goes for male, female, and non-binary characters, and it's not always in great taste. I mean, where are these people complaining about boobs and asses when Kiryu is ripping off his shirt just to show off his back tattoo and throw down Yakuza style with his new friends, huh?! I'd agree with you in that shaming or defending things like this can definitely go overboard very easily in either direction (unfortunately that's the case for pretty much everything these days, so nothing new there), which never achieves anything like, if Bayonetta being dressed a certain way isn't for someone and causes offence to them in some way or another, awesome, you do you and just play whatever else you want to play, however you want to play it!

Well there you have it, July's games: Also being added but not pictured:

No, I'm on about the name of the mode in particular (which is what I said in my post); they certainly have a tendency across their many forms of entertainment to lean into things with some sense of purity/naiveté and play it up, and so the title of the mode just seems like a fun, tongue-in-cheek way of doing that. I'm probably doing a poor job of explaining this though so just ignore me The move is clearly one to sell a normally mature game to audiences who might come up against some resistance when trying to play it (parents, religion, whatever), as well as to just make it less awkward for some blokes and lasses who don't want someone walking in and seeing them play this for whatever reason. Though, I'm sure that applies to some Japanese folk as much as it does elsewhere in the world

Next issue of Famitsu will have a focus on XVI:

Well I'm not proud of it, but I found it this but Realistic Gun Lady instead of Anime Sword Girls:

Yeah, "Naive Angel Mode" is definitely a name where they knew what they were doing, sounds like anything but got to sell those copies in Japan I guess! Wonder what the obvious Labo tie-in will end up looking like...

On that topic of showing way too much, Platinum have shared that there will be a "Naive Angel Mode" for those who like their video games a little less risqué: A hilarious but neat addition, wouldn't mind seeing this crop up elsewhere if it means more people getting to try new games out. On the other hand, now I'm sure people will be asking for less risqué games to have a more risqué option

Yeah, I just meant in general towards the back end of the year Nintendo has had a good year with frequent releases, but the last few months (across the entire industry) has seemed a little quiet in terms of major releases, but of course Nintendo are definitely a big part of the upcoming period I'm referring to. There's a period of around a month from October 20th which sees the releases of Mario + Rabbids Sparks of Hope, Persona 5 Royal on new platforms (which is going to do bonkers, throw that on the list of "who knows what else!" for Switch), Gotham Knights, Bayonetta 3 (same day as the new CoD), God of War Ragnarök and Pokémon Scarlet & Violet. It's definitely been a year where, thanks to the longer quiet stretches, I feel it's been kind on backlogs, but still, we're going to hopefully be seeing a great and exciting wrap-up to the year with all of the new games on the way

Buried in the onslaught of Bayonetta 3 news which just dropped, it was just announced that a physical edition of the first Bayonetta will also be coming later this year: EDIT: According to Business Wire, this seems to have a release date of September 30th in North America, but based on the above tweet I'm not sure if that also applies over here. EDIT 2: okay, looks like it's coming to Japan on September 30th too. I'd imagine it's the same story for the rest of the world then? Which makes how vague the above Nintendo UK tweet is a little confusing.

Bayonetta 3 releases October 28th! The game is now available to preorder digitally through the eShop for £49.99, also got some really nice art going on too: There will also be a special Trinity Masquerade Edition of the game, also available October 28th: Man, the back end of this year is looking stacked

Physical retail edition will be landing September 20th: And an Exclusive Edition will be made available in Q4 with some small extras:

MinnMax continues their journey of interviewing everyone to move around or retire in the gaming industry, this time with a focus on Brandon Jones: Fingers crossed they do something with Ben Moore! They also recently put out a great video on the GameStop/Game Informer situation, which has seen something like half (?) of Game Informer be sacked: Man, Ben Hanson does such a great job over there.

Humanity sometimes sucks, but other times how much we're capable of when we work together can make my jaw drop; I feel like these images come at a good time to give a refreshing and much-needed perspective on our place in the universe. I've been staring at the new photo of the Cosmic Cliffs of the Carina Nebula a lot since it came out; it's absolutely stunning! The older version was very wispy and dreamlike, beautiful to look at its own way, but the resolution here from just 12 hours of exposure for these images vs the two weeks the Hubble needed is remarkable. Really excited to see the new findings and discoveries made off the back of this The highest resolution versions of these images (for wallpaper purposes, of course!) are available for viewing here.

English trailer is up, confirming September 22nd as the game's release date worldwide:

The game's gone gold! And we've still yet to see any actual gameplay. Which is pretty nuts to think about, hopefully we get to see something sooner or later, lord knows some of the AI needs it Oh yeah, this comparison definitely works Sidebar: sometimes I do wonder if the universal love for Empire compared with A New Hope and Return of the Jedi is somewhat skewed today by it escaping the awful Special Edition seppuku George committed with those films, whereas Empire came away virtually unscathed. I kind of like to see it as one final display of gratitude to his teacher, Kershner, by gutting those other two films to make Empire shine just that bit brighter EDIT: also, this looks to be good news – apparently the first time in 13 years this dev (an environmental artist) hasn't had to crunch at Naughty Dog.

The ink has dried and PlayStation have now officially acquired Haven: Interesting piece from GamesIndustry.biz on Haven: And I give it all of four seconds before we see responses to the tweet about Xbox not yet getting Activision-Blizzard over the line

I started a Grounded playthrough on Saturday, with the caveat that, as somewhere along the way this became a Platinum run, I used a little workaround to just jump straight into Grounded+ (well, more like Grounded+++ at this stage); while Grounded isn't necessary for the Platinum, having two Grounded trophies (a Grounded and Grounded+ playthrough) be the only outstanding trophies in the way of getting 100% would have bugged me, and I think I've only got the energy for one last playthrough of Remastered with Part I just a month and a half away. Over the last few weeks I've put nearly 100 hours into the game, having played through the story twice (Normal+ and Easy++ for collectibles - we'll get into that another time, but good lord was that a bit of a pain and boy was I freaking out for a moment when I thought I'd missed a pendant before realising that NG+ means that the progress kind of carries over!), Left Behind twice (Easy - collectibles - and Survivor), and Factions essentially three times, so yeah, just this one last playthrough for me of Remastered I think; I'll be saving a pure Grounded run for Part I if I'm not fully TLOU'd out at that point What I will say though, is that it's tough as balls, which I've loved but definitely been left frustrated by once or twice, and I actually think being fully upgraded after playing Left Behind on Survivor has left me needing to readjust (the lack of sway using a bow, for example, is throwing me way off my headshot game). I'll dive into some specifics of my Grounded+ adventure in the spoiler tag - I've just finished up in the suburbs - but generally this run is both shining a light on brilliant things the dumbed down AI in lower difficulties simply make you take for granted about the game, I've noticed some awesome details which I didn't in earlier playthroughs; I actually made it up to Bill's Town without firing a single non-mandatory bullet, which felt great. But good lord, is the ally AI dumb as rocks. I mean, seriously: kick rocks Henry. Overall, despite a few frustrations, I'm really enjoying this run through of the game. Supplies are severely limited (I had 15 bullets in my starting pistol at one point...and have hovered between 0 and 2 for about 3 or 4 hours now), I'm finding a lot more gears and pills than I am bullets, but all praise the brick I guess, it's proving very useful. This game is absolutely worth playing at any difficulty for the story alone, but if you've already played through on Normal or Easy, I'd really recommend giving a higher difficulty a try if you ever replay Remastered or cough up some coin for Part I. Grounded is a little extreme, but it showcases the game's stealth mechanics far better and works better for me in terms of the world's narrative, where supplies aren't abundant - the AI and having to depend on sneaking through areas honestly feels like it was closer to the original vision of the game, and having played the game a few times these last few weeks, it feels like dumbing down the enemy AI a bit and adding Listening Mode as an ability was something which came about later in the development process. It reminds me a lot of Metal Gear Solid in a weird way, and actually feels like good training for it. Which is all to say: I'm having a blast

Tony Sirico, aka Paulie Walnuts in The Sopranos, has passed away: Another wise guy gone

Decided to go with the Hunter Journey in Factions after the little mishap I had with my first Firefly Journey, which I ended up completing on Monday night. After that, I got around to going back through the Firefly Journey, which I finished off this evening. Man, Factions is such good fun! Just the mechanics - crafting, listening mode, etc. - coming over from the main game and using a lot of areas from the main game (maybe tweaked or made wider with some returning assets) seems so simple, I know it's something which was much more common at the time (hamfisted multiplayer modes in single player games), but it went so far for me, I had an absolute blast. A lot of moments of chaos, glee, courage, and me in fits of laughter when things happen like myself and an opponent just fist fighting in the middle of a shootout. Can't believe I nearly missed out on it through thinking it had been closed down, and again, I was pleasantly surprised by just how active it still is today. Very much hoping the next Factions can recapture even half of the fun with such lean mechanics that this game managed. Anyways, I still found that I couldn't put The Last of Us down...so I booted up Left Behind again. I played through it a few weeks ago, but this time I wanted to focus less on revisiting the story and more focusing on the gameplay and setting myself a challenge: completing it on Survivor difficulty. It's rare that I play things outside of Normal/the default difficulty for a game, but I've found it happening increasingly over the last few years, so thought I'd give it a shot – it's not like I can find it in me to put the game down anyways! And, well, isn't it crazy what a change of difficulty can do for a game? Left Behind is a very lean bit of DLC which doesn't have too much available in the way of supplies compared to the base game, even at Normal difficulty, and Survivor just kind of hides it all away from you. It takes away Listening Mode, too, and the AI is much more robust and reactive (for example: enemies I didn't even notice could react to my flashlight being on before I very much noticed this time!), which means a lot more sneaking around is required. Well, that and keeping a trusty brick to hand...you know, just in case! And, as Ellie puts it: I AM BRICKMASTER Anyways, long story short: managed to beat it. That final section...took some trial and error, that's for sure! It's a drawn out fight with two phases, and considering just how much opposition you come up against in both, having so little ammunition to hand really meant I had to make every shot count, and so repeating the same section over and over again really forced me to key into a side of gaming I haven't really toyed with since I got addicted to speedrunning in Astro's Playroom, which is really getting to grips with a level, it's layout, any AI, and just playing around with the order you tackle things in, and which direction you tackle them from. This was the end result (kindly ignore me not finishing on a headshot ): Honestly, I loved The Last of Us before - it's story is fantastic and it's gameplay is very accessible and fun - but playing through Left Behind on Survivor showed me a whole level of depth to the game that I didn't even realise was there. As soon as I completed the first encounter, the reason for there being an absurd abundance of bricks and bottles lying around: it was for these higher difficulties. I'm sure there are some other changes in terms of supplies beyond there being less at higher difficulties (maybe different supply configurations?), but at least on a surface level, that seems like a really smart way to not have to completely rework every encounter for every difficulty when it comes to the level's environmental design, available supplies, etc. And, well, I still find that I don't want to put the game down (RIP my backlog). I'm kind of toying with the idea of playing through the main story again on Survivor - hell, maybe even Grounded - off the back of my experience with Left Behind, I really enjoyed that last section that much. Definitely one or two encounters I won't be looking forward to...but I doubt that'll be enough to put me off

Ooooo nice get @Dcubed, perfectly timed for the weekend – enjoy! Anything in particular you're looking forward to giving a whirl on it? Hoping this means I get an update on mine soon...

Just going to leave this here

James Caan has passed away at 82

The rest of this afternoon's indie announcements/updates: Haven't played it but I've heard and seen a lot of love for The Messenger, so yeah, fingers crossed – I'm certainly rooting they can pull it off, it seems like a lot of love and passion has gone into this! It's just one of those things where you see how the game looks, and that Yasunori Mitsuda is composing, and it's like making a space fantasy today and getting John Williams to score it. Don't get me wrong, I absolutely applaud them for going for it (Square Enix and Tokyo RPG Factory, if this is good, you better be taking notes!), but that definitely invites a lot of pressure and immediately starts the conversation around the game with a very direct and obvious comparison to one of the greats. Even if the game itself turns out great, with gaming media being what it is today, I think we could see a lot of incredibly reductive downplaying (i.e. "it's a fun time, but it's not Chrono Trigger"), I guess that's my concern (maybe "concern" is a bit strong) – that it won't be fairly judged on its own merit?

Light & Magic, the six-part docuseries about ILM, starts streaming 27th July!

E3 is returning in-person and in full force next year, and will be organised by PAX and Star Wars Celebration organisers ReedPop. From VGC: I don't think E3 will ever get back to where it was just 5 or 6 years ago, especially with so many companies now doing their own thing, but if this means Nintendo actually turns up with a proper Direct in mid-June, I'm all for it this means that both E3 and Summer Game Fest will be in-person next year (assuming plans don't change). Christopher Dring, Head of GamesIndustry.biz, will be involved in the Elsa's plans for E3, and has written a piece well worth reading, because he at least seems excited by the possibilities: We'll see how it develops, but hopefully the competition between E3 and SGF is good and leads to better events than we've had in the summers since COVID started.