Julius

Some pre-order goodies if you pay a bit extra from the Nintendo Store (keyring available as a bonus item for standard pre-orders):

Pre-orders have started going up – only Amazon so far (where it's £49.99), but imagine others will be following suit sooner rather than later. PS4 - Amazon link Switch - Amazon link Going to put a pre-order in with Amazon myself for now just to be safe I think, just because we have no idea what volumes are going to be like.

Three new titles added to the service today: Fatal Fury 2, Super Ninja Boy, and Sutte Hakkun. That Super Ninja Boy track is groovy Reading into Sutte Hakkun some more as it's not ringing any bells whatsoever for me, and it sounds like it's got quite the interesting background to it. It was developed by Indieszero and Nintendo's R&D2 – Indieszero have been collaborating with Nintendo stretching way back to the SNES days, originally developing this game (amongst others) for Satellaview on Super Famicom, and going on to develop Electroplankton for DS, collaborated with Square Enix on Theatrhythm Final Fantasy for 3DS (and have since been collaborating with them on later Theatrhythm games), helped Nintendo with the 3DS Louvre Guide, collaborated with them in Sushi Striker, and also on NES Remix and last year's NES World Championships. Quite the storied history to this dev! As for the game itself, stolen from its Wikipedia page for pure accuracy and journalistic merit: It was Indieszero's debut title. Notably, ROMs for unreleased GB and GBC versions of this game also turned up during that Nintendo leak back in 2020 (the one with the Pokémon Gold & Silver Space World demos!). Love a random Wikipedia rabbit hole for a relatively obscure dev I'd never heard of before

NG+ is done, and second ending got! Got so, so close to having 0 deaths against all of the bosses throughout this playthrough...and then crashed out on this run against the penultimate boss, which I think then knocked my confidence going into the last pulled a bit of a Leverkusen! Though that's by far the best run I've had in a playthrough of ACVI so far. Death Counter vs Bosses: NG+ Approx. 19 hours in now, even if that number of hours seems...off, all of a sudden. NG+ certainly didn't feel like it took 7-8 hours, but I mean, hey, I guess it might have definitely a couple of missions I started up in NG+ where I couldn't help but think to myself "argh, this one suuuuuuucks" – not the mission itself necessarily, it's just a step up in challenge in some way from so many of the other missions. Didn't really feel that too much in NG apart from a couple of bosses I was anticipating well ahead of getting to them. Anyways, some choice pics from this playthrough: I mean, I kind of have to at this point, right? Someone's gotta look into all this weirdness

My point was more that you could see all three pieces of info I listed at once when scrolling through the threads: Like this: vs this: Eh, like I said, so long as the date's still there I think it's obvious it was made available on that day after being announced that same day [23rd Jan], it's like taking issue with a newspaper headline which says "a vote is expected today" – obviously there's the context of the newspaper being dated so you know when "today" was anyways

Thread fixed, weird merge Ah of course, the prequel to the DS game Ninja Town

Nope Maybe it's just me and because I go back to old threads to read them from time to time (and also occasionally to revive them), but I don't really see the need to update thread titles post-launch and quite like having the release date stick around, as that way you can easily read when the thread was made, when the game released (so I can look for a specific date in the thread to find early impressions from people playing it rather than randomly jumping around and potentially stumbling on spoilers if it's a bit of an older game), and when the last post in the thread was, all in one go. Otherwise I need to go Googling around for game release dates while going back to old threads, which is a bit of a pain? Unless you were referring to 'AVAILABLE TODAY', which I don't mind seeing post-launch, as I can then tell at a quick glance that it was a shadow-drop, and those are always cool, so long as the actual release date is still there too for some context

Can't see anything from official channels on this yet, but this has turned up on PS5 and on the PS Store -- so PS5 confirmed too, I guess?

Some lovely new art to promote the PC release: 30% off on PC at launch – Square Enix are pushing this game HARD

Genuinely good showing from Xbox with today's Developer_Direct. Well-paced, a shadow-drop, super informative, every game getting a release date in the first half of the year. Continued trading in a "one more thing" to have it upfront and then focus on a devs blooper at the end, it's a unique but fun way to keep stakes a bit lower. Solid 8/10 showing for me. Don't think any of these games are Day 1 pick-ups for me, but again, just a really well-communicated and well-rounded show. Could've been an 8.5 with a PS5 release date for Indy, just saying...

I...am very surprised that I didn't already make a thread for this one! Announced last summer with a vague release window of '2025', and now given a release date with today's trailer and footage: First trailer: Seems much more accessible than what I heard about Eternal around its release, what with the granular difficulty sliders. A lot more cutscenes and story to it, it seems, too.

Another one without a thread despite being announced a while back – but no more! I'll grab some of the older trailers whenever I get around to it A French JRPG could be so interesting - if nothing else the seemingly ever-present accordion in the trailers will be - though some of those menu screens...yikes, seems like a lot to take in! Love the airship solution and world map in particular

This doesn't have a thread yet that I can find? I'll come back and add older trailers to the post.

Damn, shadow drop!

Ninja Raiden, more like Announced during today's Xbox Developer_Direct!

Story trailer: Previews: So much riding on this now...curious to see how it's turned out.

Reminder that the Developer_Direct is today, streaming from 18:00 GMT. Link to the presentation: These have kind of sucked to watch live in the past, so I might watch along with someone reacting to it or just catch the highlights after the fact

Director Hamaguchi and Producer Kitase were speaking to Famitsu, and it seems things are going very smoothly with the sequel to Rebirth – with the scenario now being complete! Per Eurogamer: Sounds to me like 2027 in time for the 30th anniversary of the original VII is well and truly on the cards – I think the big question, especially with recent rumours of Remake and Rebirth coming to Switch 2 and Xbox across 2025 and 2026, is the game's plans for launch: will it be a PS5 launch exclusive? Will S-E push like crazy for the game to launch simultaneously across all platforms in the wake of them needing to play catch-up and adapt to Rebirth's limited launch on PS5, which sounds like the potential makings of a development nightmare? And that's without even getting into speculating about what was agreed when the Remake Project clearly was signed off as being PlayStation exclusive at launch: did S-E think to include terms for what would happen if entries did not sell a certain number of units? It would make some sense to me with what we've heard recently and Rebirth coming to PC within 12 months of its PS5 launch, rather than taking as long as Remake did (albeit that did have DLC in the works, whereas Rebirth seemingly won't). Super interesting times. If they're aiming for 2027 then there's a real chance we see the game in some form this year, considering Rebirth was shown off some 20 months or so before launch.

Was hesitant about posting this as it only seems to be announced for a Japanese release so far, but there's an English translation and trailer so...it's inevitable, right? Coming to Switch, PS5 and PC: Fingers crossed, eh?

Cancelled. Holy smokes. (Source) Massive respect to them for communicating this as clearly as they have, unfortunately we've seen other successful indie studios have similar splits go down in a much messier and much more public way. Gutting to read, and a sudden reminder I still need to make time for Celeste, but damn, that wasn't at all the next update I was expecting for this game. Kudos to them for trusting their guts and stepping out when they have, because this could've easily gone on another 2 years before they stepped away; we've all seen it before. Like they said, could've just kept grinding it out but they've lost a sense of direction, and, I imagine, passion for the project, and so it sounds like the right move. Wishing them luck on their next project, in any case

Chapter 3 of NG+ completed, as well as the β and γ Analysis courses. Still no deaths to bosses on this run so far, the end of Chapter 3 boss was probably the closest purely because of some crazy bad luck, but man are some of the AC duels tougher this time out with some of the missions you get handed! Not had to make any further changes to Thebes so far (yet) besides one quick mandatory swap-out for a certain mission.

New trailer for Mickey 17:

Insomniac CEO Ted Price has announced his retirement after three decades since founding the company in 1994 (Ted's SIE post here; the link in the below tweet is to the PS Blog entry by the new Insomniac co-heads!). Chad Dezern, Ryan Schneider and Jen Huang will be taking over as co-studio heads.

This shouldn't be right... ...but Majima is inarguably pulling off the Kiryu look with aplomb!

So, update on this: apparently this isn't the case? Someone on Korean gaming forum Ruliweb apparently asked NCSoft reporter SEO Jeong-geun if Project H is related to the Horizon MMO -- which it apparently isn't? From reading around a bit more on this, my understanding is that it seems like NCSoft graduate their projects out of their initial project names once they begin production, so, in this instance, the Horizon MMO was labelled as Project H and then graduated to become Project Skyline. The confusion seems to stem from the fact that they then labelled another upcoming project as Project H following this, and it is this game which got cancelled. I can kind of see why they're having problems now... Anyways, see y'all in 3-6 months when it actually does almost inevitably get cancelled, I guess!