Two Legacy of Kain games are being re-released, but for the Evercade retro handheld console.
The Legacy of Kain Collection will include both Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain and Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver on one giga cart priced £22.49.
The collection will release next month and will be available to pre-order from 30th August. It's compatible with all Evercade and Super Pocket devices.
When Bloober and Konami announced that they were remaking Silent Hill 2 as part of a comprehensive series reboot, it made immediate if slightly deflating sense to me. Silent Hill 2 is the more feted of the Hills - if I were a calculating franchise custodian tasked with 'bringing back' one of the acclaimed original trilogy, that's probably the instalment I and my spreadsheets would fix upon. I mean, it's the game with Pyramid Head in it - the nearest thing Silent Hill has to a mascot, and it's not like there's an issue of cutting out plot material: each game in the Silent Hill series is, on some level, a distinct story with a distinct protagonist.
Still, the decision to 'skip' the first game in the series, whose world, narrative themes, music and art direction set the parameters for all the rest, made my brain itch a bit, and when I ran into Bloober's creative director Mateusz Lenart and lead producer Maciej Głomb at a Konami event, I had to ask about it.
When Bloober and Konami announced that they were remaking Silent Hill 2 as part of a comprehensive series reboot, it made immediate if slightly deflating sense to me. Silent Hill 2 is the more feted of the Hills - if I were a calculating franchise custodian tasked with 'bringing back' one of the acclaimed original trilogy, that's probably the instalment I and my spreadsheets would fix upon. I mean, it's the game with Pyramid Head in it - the nearest thing Silent Hill has to a mascot, and it's not like there's an issue of cutting out plot material: each game in the Silent Hill series is, on some level, a distinct story with a distinct protagonist.
Still, the decision to 'skip' the first game in the series, whose world, narrative themes, music and art direction set the parameters for all the rest, made my brain itch a bit, and when I ran into Bloober's creative director Mateusz Lenart and lead producer Maciej Głomb at a Konami event, I had to ask about it.
Crystal Dynamics' beloved dark fantasy action-adventure series Legacy of Kain could be poised to receive the remaster treatment, if newly sighted branding at Comic-Con is to be believed.
As spotted by a user on Resetera, logos for an unannounced "Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver 1 & 2 Remastered" were included on display plaques accompanying statues of game characters Kain and Raziel at this week's Comic-Con San Diego show.
A Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver graphic novel prequel, The Dead Shall Rise, was recently announced by Dark Horse Comics, and GameSpot has now received confirmation from the publisher's VP of product development and sales that this is due to release in August.
It looks like the Legacy Of Kain: Soul Reaver games could be getting the remaster treatment. An attendee at San Diego Comic-Con was looking at a set of figures based on characters from the series when they saw that the plaque accompanying the figures was labelled with the words "Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver 1 & 2 Remastered" alongside the logo for Crystal Dynamics. I suppose if you throw a coin enough times, one day it will land on the side with the head of a jawless vampire on it.
It looks like the Legacy Of Kain: Soul Reaver games could be getting the remaster treatment. An attendee at San Diego Comic-Con was looking at a set of figures based on characters from the series when they saw that the plaque accompanying the figures was labelled with the words "Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver 1 & 2 Remastered" alongside the logo for Crystal Dynamics. I suppose if you throw a coin enough times, one day it will land on the side with the head of a jawless vampire on it.
Limited Run Games has announced that 20 new-old games will be released in physical form, including Fear Effect, Lollipop Chainsaw RePOP, Starship Troopers: Extermination, and Wolfenstein 2: The New Colossus.
As part of its LRG3 2024 showcase, the distributor confirmed not only the 20th anniversary edition of Beyond Good & Evil, but also physical releases of classic PS1 games Gex Trilogy, Tomba Special Edition and Tomba 2, Fear Effect, and more – much, much more.
In true LRG style, the Limited Run Games editions of the following games will be released in physical form only, including:
Fear Effect, a horror action PS1 game from the year 2000 that I have incredibly fond memories of, is getting a Steam release next year, by Limited Run Games in collaboration with Square Enix. The news comes as part of the controversial (more on this in a bit) company’s digital LRG3 event. You can watch the full thing here, and the Fear Effect trailer below.
The original Resident Evil might be returning to PC - and soon! - if recent signs hold true. An age rating for the 1996 survival-horror classic was recently confirmed by European suitability judges PEGI, hinting at an impending (re-)release for the almost three-decade-old zombie game.
A remaster of Final Fantasy Tactics, the grid-based strategy spin-off from the RPG series that easily ranks as one of the best Final Fantasy games ever made, is reportedly in the works - giving hope of its first official PC release.
Fear Effect, a horror action PS1 game from the year 2000 that I have incredibly fond memories of, is getting a Steam release next year, by Limited Run Games in collaboration with Square Enix. The news comes as part of the controversial (more on this in a bit) company’s digital LRG3 event. You can watch the full thing here, and the Fear Effect trailer below.
The original Resident Evil might be returning to PC - and soon! - if recent signs hold true. An age rating for the 1996 survival-horror classic was recently confirmed by European suitability judges PEGI, hinting at an impending (re-)release for the almost three-decade-old zombie game.
A remaster of Final Fantasy Tactics, the grid-based strategy spin-off from the RPG series that easily ranks as one of the best Final Fantasy games ever made, is reportedly in the works - giving hope of its first official PC release.
Capcom is once again remaking Resident Evil 1.
That's according to noted horror genre leaker Dusk Golem and survival horror YouTuber Biohazard Declassified, both of whom have stepped up this weekend with rumours that Capcom is looking to breathe new life into the game that started it all, the very first Resident Evil.
Biohazard Declassified says they received an anonymous email that claims the game – with the working title, Biohazard: Resident Evil 1 – will be slower paced than RE2 Remake, feature a "different this person camera", and explore RE1's lore "further".
A month on from a Nintendo game emulator topping the iPhone App Store charts, a newly-released PS1 emulator now looks set to do similar.
Gamma, a free PS1 emulator for iPhone and iPad, was released this week. And, just as with the Delta emulator for Nintendo consoles and handhelds, it is taking advantage of Apple's recent change in App Store policy that officially greenlights game emulator apps for the first time.
The Gamma app is the work of developer ZodTTD, and like Delta had previously existed for years as a download for those who jailbreak their iPhones. Now, due to Apple's policy change, it has been released for general use - and it's currently the second-most poular entertainment app on the App Store (behind TikTok).
Deep in my heart I know that Hall of Fame-type accolades are largely just a way of dressing up a way of marketing your awards show/museum/whatever, but I also like to occasionally cast away the cynic in me and imagine a world in which this industry’s most important games and creators are rightly recognised, celebrated and preserved rather than being locked away in the vault of billion-dollar companies and left to rot. Imagine!
The dinky yellow Playdate handheld has plenty of odd games already - but here's an even odder proposition we thought we'd never see: WipEout.
Yes, that WipEout, of PlayStation fame. Except not quite.
For starters, this version of Psygnosis' classic retro racer is based on rewritten code that has been floating around the internet since at least last year for PC, Mac and Linux. This version, in turn, was written based on the original WipEout's leaked source code, posted online by Forest of Illusion in 2002.
There are 25 games leaving the PlayStation Plus subscription service next month, including some of the best Final Fantasy games.
They are: Final Fantasy 7, Final Fantasy 8, Final Fantasy 9, Final Fantasy 10 and 10-2, Final Fantasy 12: The Zodiac Age, and Final Fantasy 15: Royal Edition. There's also spin-off World of Final Fantasy.
The 25 games will all leave on 21st May and includes the brilliant Abzu, The Artful Escape, The Messenger, Jotun, and more.
In 1997, Diablo was everything to me; I thought about it at school, at family dinners, netball practice, recess. Even when I was allowed to play it on my dad's Gateway 2000, I wanted more. And the only place to get more Diablo, back then, was on the Diablo website. Yes, there were fan sites packed with cheats and the same gifs - but what I wanted was a pure unadulterated hit from the official webpage, its message boards filled with poetry and oddly civil flame wars and passive-aggressive posts titled "SUGGESTIONS for Blizzard to Read." There was no YouTube or Discord or Twitch, and certainly no influencer/streaming ecosystem. Sure, there was IRC and usenet and bulletin boards, which formed the backbone of social networks back then - and were the foundation for more accessible World Wide Web experiences that followed. But in the late 90s, there was something truly special going on for fans who wanted a direct connection to their games: the short-lived but holy institution of the official forum-based website.
Around the same time as my Diablo mania, a teenaged Dana Nightingale was asked to do her first professional web design job. She'd been a fan of Looking Glass Studios since Ultima Underworld came out in 1992; when she heard rumours of System Shock 2, a new shooter by ex-Looking Glass devs under the banner of Irrational Games, she and a friend made a fan site in anticipation of its existence. Nightingale was also waiting for Looking Glass to unveil Thief: The Dark Project. "[Thief] at the time was my most anticipated game by a long shot, and if you look at the landscape of 1998, that's saying a lot," she says. "So together with some other folks, we made a hub for fans of these games, and we called it Through the Looking Glass."
Irrational got in touch with Nightingale to make their sites. "I definitely wasn't even 20 at the time. I barely knew what I was doing," she says on a Zoom call. "I threw some HTML on there, took the copy they sent me - didn't know back then that it was called copy - and put it all together." For System Shock 2, the only visual she was given was a picture of Shodan's face. "I [had] to make everything based on just one image, that's all I had," she laughs, pointing to the website's splash page while sharing her screen. Today, Nightingale is level design director at Arkane Lyon, where she's worked for the past 13 years; a week before our chat, she'd unearthed the original Irrational website files by accident on an old hard drive. "I don't even remember how much [Irrational] paid me," she grins, "but it probably wasn't very much."
There are 25 games leaving the PlayStation Plus subscription service next month, including some of the best Final Fantasy games.
They are: Final Fantasy 7, Final Fantasy 8, Final Fantasy 9, Final Fantasy 10 and 10-2, Final Fantasy 12: The Zodiac Age, and Final Fantasy 15: Royal Edition. There's also spin-off World of Final Fantasy.
The 25 games will all leave on 21st May and includes the brilliant Abzu, The Artful Escape, The Messenger, Jotun, and more.
In 1997, Diablo was everything to me; I thought about it at school, at family dinners, netball practice, recess. Even when I was allowed to play it on my dad's Gateway 2000, I wanted more. And the only place to get more Diablo, back then, was on the Diablo website. Yes, there were fan sites packed with cheats and the same gifs - but what I wanted was a pure unadulterated hit from the official webpage, its message boards filled with poetry and oddly civil flame wars and passive-aggressive posts titled "SUGGESTIONS for Blizzard to Read." There was no YouTube or Discord or Twitch, and certainly no influencer/streaming ecosystem. Sure, there was IRC and usenet and bulletin boards, which formed the backbone of social networks back then - and were the foundation for more accessible World Wide Web experiences that followed. But in the late 90s, there was something truly special going on for fans who wanted a direct connection to their games: the short-lived but holy institution of the official forum-based website.
Around the same time as my Diablo mania, a teenaged Dana Nightingale was asked to do her first professional web design job. She'd been a fan of Looking Glass Studios since Ultima Underworld came out in 1992; when she heard rumours of System Shock 2, a new shooter by ex-Looking Glass devs under the banner of Irrational Games, she and a friend made a fan site in anticipation of its existence. Nightingale was also waiting for Looking Glass to unveil Thief: The Dark Project. "[Thief] at the time was my most anticipated game by a long shot, and if you look at the landscape of 1998, that's saying a lot," she says. "So together with some other folks, we made a hub for fans of these games, and we called it Through the Looking Glass."
Irrational got in touch with Nightingale to make their sites. "I definitely wasn't even 20 at the time. I barely knew what I was doing," she says on a Zoom call. "I threw some HTML on there, took the copy they sent me - didn't know back then that it was called copy - and put it all together." For System Shock 2, the only visual she was given was a picture of Shodan's face. "I [had] to make everything based on just one image, that's all I had," she laughs, pointing to the website's splash page while sharing her screen. Today, Nightingale is level design director at Arkane Lyon, where she's worked for the past 13 years; a week before our chat, she'd unearthed the original Irrational website files by accident on an old hard drive. "I don't even remember how much [Irrational] paid me," she grins, "but it probably wasn't very much."
Eiyuden Chronicles, the RPG series that’s effectively a sequel-slash-spiritual successor to nineties and early noughties JRPG classic Suikoden, will continue with a sequel despite the death of its creator earlier this year.
It's evident in one of the very early scenes, a flashback where two children (the central character, Cloud, and another main character, Tifa) sit by their village well at night and make a promise together as stars shine overhead. A woman named Elmyra cries at her kitchen table, reading a letter that tells her that her husband has died in a war. Two former friends, Barret and Dyne, try to talk over the trauma of their loss in a prison. A serene gondola ride during a date, fireworks exploding outside while Cloud and a flower girl, Aerith, peer out through the window. 'I want to meet...you,' she tells him, even though they have already travelled together for a while. He doesn't understand, and he won't until it's too late.
There's the death of a main character too, one that resonated to the point of almost defining the legacy of the entire game in itself. Tetsuya Nomura (the character and battle visual director, and the person who made the call to kill said character) explained that he wanted to convey how it feels to hurt, to suffer loss. As a nine-year old watching the scene at night while my older sister played the game, I don't think I really grasped that hurt completely, even though I still found it saddening. Perhaps, like Cloud on the gondola, I wasn't ready to understand.
Final Fantasy 7, which was made by Square before their merge with Enix, is still a masterpiece. The surprisingly deft storytelling contains one of the best examples of unreliable narration in the video game medium. The music resounds with character, tender and soft in 'Flowers Blooming in the Church', exhilarating in 'Still More Fighting', while 'You Can Hear the Cry of the Planet' is somehow both ominous and soothing. The pre-rendered backgrounds have a real sense of atmosphere and character; there is the honeycomb warmth of Costa del Sol, for example, and Cosmo Canyon is the colour of autumn leaves.
Yoshitaka Murayama, creator of the Suikoden RPG series and scenario writer for Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes, has passed away.
The news was shared by Rabbit & Bear Studios, which Murayama founded to produce the Eiyuden Chronicle games.
"It's with a heavy heart and deep sadness we must inform you that the scenario writer and head of Rabbit & Bear Studios, Yoshitaka Murayama, has passed away on February 6th due to complications with an ongoing illness," reads the statement.
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