About Nick Santangelo

Capcom will release a remastered version of 2002’s Resident Evil 0 in 2016, the publisher has announced. The game is a prequel to the first Resident Evil game and was originally released on the Nintendo GameCube.

Koji Oda, the original release’s director, has returned to the helm for the remaster and has additional original team members working under him on the project. Oda and Producer Tsukasa Takenaka appeared in the above video to introduce the remaster. The two men don’t really share anything of substance in the video, but they do joke that they could not make it through the project without the help of a green herb. So there’s that. Green herbs, of course, are used as healing items in the Resident Evil series.

A single screenshot, which you can view after the jump, was released alongside the announcement.

This will be the second instance of a recent Resident Evil remaster, as Capcom released an HD version of the GameCube’s Resident Evil earlier this year, itself a remake of the 1996 PlayStation One original. In our review, XBLA Fans awarded the game a “Buy It” rating.

Read More

UK developer Playtonic, which is primarily comprised of former Rare developers, is currently sitting on more than $2.5 million of Kickstarter investments to spend developing Yooka-Laylee, a spiritual successor …
Read More

For one month at least, Microsoft got a break from being Sony’s punching bag in the console sales race. GamesBeat reports that NPD’s April sales numbers show the Xbox One outselling the PlayStation 4 last month for the first time since January.

“As the best-selling console in the U.S. in April, fans set record April sales and engagement for Xbox One last month,” Xbox marketing boss Mike Nichols told GamesBeat in response to the April figures. “Xbox One console sales in the U.S. increased 63 percent in April 2015 compared to April 2014, and Xbox Live comparisons showed the number of active global users [Xbox One and Xbox 360] grew 24 percent. We are grateful to our fans for their passion and support and are looking forward to sharing more on the best game lineup in Xbox history at E3.”

Last month’s sales results mean that Microsoft’s next-gen console has outsold Sony’s in the United States for half of the first four months of 2015. No doubt as a result of a temporary price cut, the Xbox One also dominated the hardware sales charts during the crucial retail months of November and December in 2014.

Read More

There was once a time we now call the “Good Old Days.” In those days, instant classics spewed forth from every developer’s spicket at such a torrid pace that there was nary an excuse to ever emerge from your parents’ basement and absorb so much as a single UV ray.

Ah yes, they were glorious, those days, weren’t they? Every game was a masterpiece of innovation and craftsmanship, and there wasn’t a single rushed sequel or licensed shovelware release in sight. Replay values were always near infinite, color palettes were consistently varied and vibrant and every single game featured stellar multiplayer and single-player modes.

There’s just one problem with the Good Old Days – they weren’t really that perfect. Certainly it was exciting to grow up during the days of gaming’s so-called Golden Age – sometime between the late ‘70s and mid ‘90s, depending on whom you ask. Everything was new and exciting back then, but not everything was necessarily better. There were good games and bad, just like today. One thing that was almost universally true, though, is that every game was much harder than modern games are. But that doesn’t mean today’s developers should rush to emulate that difficulty – at least not without providing some conceits.

Read More

Microsoft will hold its annual E3 media briefing at 9:00 AM PST on June 15 at Los Angeles’ Galen Center, the company announced via email invitations today. In what …
Read More

Masochistic Xbox gamers who want their families to suffer as much as they do won’t have to wait much longer to make it happen. Cellar Door Games’ Rogue Legacy …
Read More

Adventures of Pip‘s release date has slipped into summer, developer Tic Toc Games has announced. Prior to this delay, the pixelized platformer was originally planned for a release later …
Read More

Lifeless Planet will release May 13 on Xbox One, Stage 2 Studio’s David Board announced on Twitter yesterday. The puzzle-platformer first released on PC in June of last year …
Read More

Like most worlds The Behemoth has created, that of Game 4 is a little outrageous and more than a little deranged. If you know anything at all about the studio’s fourth game, it’s probably that a gargantuan, six-limbed, space-faring bear has slammed into the planet and unleashed all manner of chaos. So comically massive is this Goro-like animal that it’s a wonder anything on the hapless planet it strikes survives the impact. But survive some inhabitants do; after all, it would be more than a bit tricky to build a turn-based strategy game without a plethora of units to conscript and command.

Though the early section of Game 4 on display at PAX East is brief, we see or hear about units as varied as humans, trolls, robots and some sort of living cupcake creatures. Yeah, cupcakes. Playes are given control of Horatio, a simple blueberry farmer and father of one. The extravagantly mustachioed Horatio is forced to take up arms when a band of “Child Eaters” threatening to — what else? — eat his child show up alongside an unseen narrator hurling threats at him. Before you know it, green bear blood pours down from the sky and destroys Horatio’s house, killing his son in the process. It’s as dark as it sounds.

At least, it would be if not for the fact that Game 4 is also utterly goofy. In a repeat performance from his turn in The Behemoth’s BattleBlock Theater, narrator Will Stamper uses his absurd, tangent-filled rants to bring the funnies while also making you question whether or not it’s appropriate to chuckle after witnessing a child being disintegrated by caustic alien bear blood. Of course, this sort of irreverence is nothing new for The Behemoth. Castle Crashers had poop-propelled deer mounts, a literal catfish that coughed up hairball projectiles and princess make-out sessions. Then there was BattleBlock Theater, for which the setup was a group of anthropomorphic cat overlords forcing shipwrecked sailors to perform in a deadly game show. Game 4 is clearly being made from the same mold.

Dan Paladin has served as the main art director for all of The Behemoth’s games, and it shows. But you get the sense that even were Game 4 bereft of Paladin’s bright and charming visuals, you’d still pick up on the connection to the studio’s other games, despite the fact that they are all set in different genres. Production Coordinator Ian Moreno agrees that The Behemoth’s titles all carry a similar tone, but he’s not entirely sure how that happens. Or even whether or not it’s on purpose.

“It’s very much…” he says before pausing a few seconds to search for the answer, “there’s an overall feel and vibe. It’s not just a platformer or a shooter or a turn-based strategy [game]. There’s always more to it, and, yeah, that’s a really tough question. I think it’s just in our DNA, whether it’s the humor and the way we present things, we like to present things very differently.

“When you look at say, how we design our HUD or something, it has to have a little more nuance to it, whether the nuance is just humor or is just offbeat or different.”

Read More

“This is Adam Orth, creator of Adr1ft,” a PR man states matter-of-factly.

Orth is the game developer best known for causing a 2013 internet riot with his infamous #dealwithit tweet. Here at an AMC Loews theater in Boston the weekend of PAX East, he stands up in front of a handful of media members to talk briefly about his game. The whole scene feels pleasantly at odds with the commotion and excitement (real and feigned) back at the convention center I’ve just left. Orth is soft-spoken and unassuming, and aside from just showing the game, there is scarcely any attempt made to hype up the audience. None is needed, because when I pull on an Oculus Rift moments later, I am immediately impressed by Adr1ft.

The added immersion of the VR headset helps, to be sure. But Orth insists that his game was designed to captivate players with or without another reality strapped to their faces. Certainly some of the enveloping feeling of space’s vastness is lost when the headset comes off. After it does, however, watching XBLA Fans’ John Laster and Jill Randolph play on a regular old TV screen is still a treat. Spectating their non-VR play sessions makes me want to get back into this game that is somehow being built by the small team at Three One Zero.

Adr1ft doesn’t seem like something that a diminutive indie developer could create in short order — but that’s exactly what it is. After less than a year in development at Three One Zero, the game’s Gravity-like take on space exploration mission turned disaster is moving. Floating aimlessly through the wreckage of a space station, I take in the little things, like a single leaf escaping from the station’s garden as it collides softly with my helmet. Turning to watch this green speck drift away, I’m dumbstruck and a little frightened by the vast emptiness of space engulfing it. Turning again, I find myself confronted with a familiar, comforting image that I have to assume has left many real-world astronauts breathing a little easier: Earth.

Later, Orth will ask what we think this sort of experience is worth and what games we think it’s in the same class with; he seems sincerely interested in knowing what value others place on his project. It’s a degree of humbleness his many detractors from two years ago might not expect from him.

Read More