Key Note Gaming

In keeping with HAL Laboratory’s philosophy, Kirby games have gained a reputation as fun and approachable for the entire family. They’re full of cleverly hidden collectibles and the occasional biblically-accurate angel of a final boss to challenge folks who want something tricky, but you can also finish them easily enough with a kid riding shotgun as Waddle Dee. But maintaining the challenge and the approachability can be a difficult balance, perhaps as demonstrated in Kirby and the Forgotten Land. Kirby franchise director Shinya Kumazaki tells me at the Game Developers Conference last week that he himself of a player of difficult games, and has his own personal standards of what’s fun and what’s not in terms of difficulty. But Kumazaki isn’t working with his own standards when designing Kirby games: Kirby is fundamentally intended to be extremely approachable for everyone , so you can’t expect it to be like a Dark Souls game. But that doesn’t mean they’re devoid of challenge, Kum...

Need to know What is it? A first person puzzler/stealth game where you're the last human worker left at a far-future Amazon-style warehouse. Expect to pay  $20/£16 Release date  March 30, 2023 Developer  Oiffy, Wolf & Wood Publisher  Wired Productions Reviewed on  Core i5 12600K, RTX 3070, 32 GB RAM Multiplayer? No Link   https://www.thelastworker.com/   I went into The Last Worker expecting some kind of deeply political, capital-'I' Important game. Best case scenario: something really pressing or moving for the current moment, a daring artistic statement like Disco Elysium or Norco. Worst case: a preachy polemic about this "late capitalism" thing people are always posting about then patting themselves on the back for having noticed. I instead found a forbidden, third thing: a breezy, charming caper with a broad anti-corporate theme, anchored by stealth and puzzle solving gameplay centered around a six degrees of freedom hove...

Just under three years after its release, support for Marvel's Avengers is winding down. Today, Crystal Dynamics released Patch 2.8 for Marvel's Avengers, which adds some final features and bug fixes to the game before it gets delisted later this year. Crystal Dynamics revealed the patch via a blog post , which thanks players for their support. The patch focuses on introducing some final features to the game and includes a host of new bug fixes. Patch 2.8 makes many of the game's cosmetics more accessible, fully removing the Shipments and Hero Challenge Cards systems from the game and instead putting their rewards in the Marketplace. The update also automatically converts players' Credits balances into in-game resources and turns Hero's Catalysts and Fragment Extractors into a permanent 1.5x multiplier on earned Fragments and XP. Additionally, players who earned at least one Trophy before April 1 will receive Iron Man's Variable Threat Response Battle Suit...

Farewell then, E3. Yesterday's announcement that E3 2023 has been cancelled is, make no mistake, the final act for what was until very recently gaming's showpiece event: The big summer extravaganza, the royal rumble where all the major platform-holders and publishers were crammed into the same space for a few days and had to directly compete with one another. This cannot be overstated: These companies alternately loved and hated the annual totting up of who had 'won', as well they might after having paid millions for the privilege. It's an event that changed vastly from its early days as a mostly B2B conference into a shop window for the world, becoming the marquee moment for any given gaming year and the single most exciting time to be a gamer. And in the end it didn't change enough or, arguably more the case, the industry no longer wanted what it had to offer. The first E3 set the tone and, while in 2023 some context is necessary, 1995's stage presenta...

Kirby fans have been feasting lately, between the critical and fan success of Kirby and the Forgotten Land, the silliness of Kirby’s Dream Buffet, Kirby’s Dream Land 2 arriving on Nintendo Switch Online earlier this year, and recent remake Kirby’s Return to Dream Land: Deluxe. It seems like there’s more Kirby than ever, both new and old. But does this mean fans of classic Kirby might see even more remakes and ports in the future alongside brand new Kirby games? Speaking to IGN at the Game Developers Conference, Kirby director Shinya Kumazaki told us that while he couldn’t share any concrete plans for the future of Kirby, HAL Laboratory’s goal is always to “provide a new gameplay experience.” The developers won’t just remake Kirby games for the sake of it – only if there’s something new they can add. In Return to Dream Land Deluxe, that new experience is the Merry Magolor theme park with mini-games, as well as the extra Magolor Epilogue at the end of the game. I also asked Kumazaki...

The final update for Marvel's Avengers is now live, meaning players now have full access to "nearly all" of the game's content, including outfits, emotes, takedowns, and nameplates, plus a special "Founder's Gift" for everyone who's earned at least one achievement or trophy by April 1. The end for Marvel's Avengers came in January, when Crystal Dynamics threw in the towel after more than two years of trying and failing to find a sustainable audience. The game stumbled right out of the gate—we said it "didn't exactly look superheroic" in our first preview in 2019—and it didn't get much better from there: Fans were confused by platform-exclusive content releases , a 2020 beta test left us cold , and by the end of 2021, Square Enix conceded that it was a " disappointing " release. Marvel's Avengers soldiered on from there, but in January of this year Crystal Dynamics surrendered to the inevitable , announcing tha...

When Nintendo retired the 3DS shortly after the release of the Nintendo Switch, one of the first questions fans asked was whether this meant the end for Etrian Odyssey. A popular dungeon crawling series that originally made its debut on the Nintendo DS, Etrian Odyssey was built around the dual touchscreen design that defined that platform. Technically, it could be replicated on the Switch, but it was apt to be far more unwieldy. In February, Atlus put some of those fears to rest with the Etrian Odyssey Origins Collection, a remastered collection that will bring the first three games to PC and Switch . In an exclusive new interview with IGN, Etrian Odyssey HD’s devs – who preferred to be identified as a team rather than individually – expanded on the challenge of bringing the franchise’s unique touchscreen controls to new platforms. They also talked about how it will be tackling difficulty, why they chose the games they did, and its somewhat controversial $80 price point. You can re...

Seasoned PC gamers are used to dealing with the wonderful world of very buggy ports. Sometimes they're infuriating game-breaking issues, but more often than not they're just dumb, or annoying. The PC port for Naughty Dog's hit The Last of Us had fans very excited when it was announced last year , but it seems we've been offered helpings of both kinds of bugs in equal measure. While this has left many fans upset with their experience, the good news is Naughty Dog is aware and already at work investigating many common problems. Naughty Dog has listed the known issues for the PC version of TLoU P1 on the official PC support page . They range from shader problems—which likely just lead to weird visuals—to the game not booting at all. The post comes with the promise that these bugs are all being investigated and worked on, with the promise of future patches coming to the rescue.  The first two problems in the list both refer to shadings, with one highlighting load times ...

A lot of Magic: The Gathering sets are themed around a specific location in its multiverse. Somewhere with a distinct identity like Innistrad, where it's all Hammer horror movie all the time, or Eldraine, a land of fairytales and legends. The next set is not one of those. March of the Machine is an event set, which is something we haven't seen since War of the Spark back in 2019. It's taking place on a bigger scale, representing the climax of a storyline that's run over the last three expansion sets. Where things left off in the previous set, which took place in the biomechanical hellscape of Phyrexia , the Mother of Machines seemed to have won. Elesh Norn's plan to launch an invasion across multiple planes simultaneously using a corrupted cosmic tree called the Realmbreaker was successful, and her Machine Legion was poised to conquer and convert the multiverse, borg-ing the inhabitants of world after world, turning them into porcelain-and-metal Phyrexians to con...

Having played a bunch of Theme Park back in the '90s, I feel well-qualified to say that running a real life theme park would suck . It might be lucrative, but it would not be fun, because there's a lot of vomit involved, and thrill seekers have a great propensity to whinge. But I feel like I could get used to the vomit and whinging if the theme park were more like the ones in Park Beyond , which are not anchored by the tyrannical laws of gravity.  Originally set to release earlier this year, Park Beyond now has a firm release date: June 16. Ahead of that, there's a closed beta running May 9 to May 19. You can register for the closed beta test here . Park Beyond is a management sim, yes, but actually building the rides is what I'm most interested in. The idea is to "Impossify" them, and interestingly, the ability to make things weird isn't exclusive to rides: you can Impossify shops and staff members too. You'll also need to manage visitor Nausea, an...

Horizon Forbidden West: Burning Shores is right around the corner, but Guerilla rendered the expansion a PS5-exclusive because of clouds — literally. Senior community manager Narae Lee wrote on the PlayStation Blog that the developers upgraded the clouds system so that the game's open-world cloudscape would look more realistic — but only as much as the PS5 can handle. Principal FX artist Andrew Schneider and tech programmer Nathan Vos expanded on the cloud system they developed for Horizon Zero Dawn in 2015 with voxel technology, which supports not only changes to the time of day and realistic animations, but now in Horizon Forbidden West: Burning Shores it will allow players to fly through the clouds and complete side quests on their Sunwing as if they're on Cloud 9. "The cloud systems that we developed for Horizon Zero Dawn and Horizon Forbidden West were fast because they didn’t store clouds as 3D objects, but rather instructions on creating 3D clouds from limited...

In January, gamers in China lost access to Blizzard games , including World of Warcraft, Hearthstone, Diablo 3, and Overwatch, as a result of a falling out between Activision and its Chinese partner, NetEase, a few months earlier. But a New York Times report says that while the relationship between the two had been strained for some time, the incident that finally ended it may have been a misunderstanding.  The relationship between Activision and NetEase had been under strain for some time, according to the report. For one thing, Activision CEO Bobby Kotick was unhappy with NetEase's $100 million investment in Bungie in 2018 , because Bungie was behind schedule on Destiny 2 content and Kotick worried the investment, which was to help Bungie become a "multi-franchise entertainment studio," would slow down the work even further. Kotick was also reportedly unhappy with another NetEase investment into a studio founded by a former senior employee at Activision; that resulte...

There are a lot of reasons to love Resident Evil 4, but something that jumped out at me while playing through the remake is how it feels like a medley of homages to some of the greatest horror movie monsters and antagonists of all time. There’s no way of telling how many of these actually are deliberate nods to other fiction, and how much it’s my own brain jumping to conclusions, but it’s still fun to dissect the many weird parts that make up this masterpiece of a game. It’s pretty safe to say The chainsaw-wielding burlap sack-wearing Dr. Salvador takes some inspiration from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre’s Leatherface, and quite possibly Jason Voorhees’ baggier, less athletic look from Friday The 13th Part 2. Del Lago might be more salamander than shark, but that whole boss fight would be right at home in the third act of a Jaws movie. The lumbering El Gigante bears a striking resemblance to the cave troll in The Fellowship of the Ring. This seems even more apparent in the remake, a...

Electronic Arts has become the latest tech-related company to make significant cuts to its workforce, as it announced today that it is laying off roughly six percent of its workforce . As usual, the layoffs come amidst what sounds like a pretty solid situation for the company.  "Even amidst macro uncertainty, EA is operating from a position of strength," Electronic Arts CEO Andrew Wilson said. "Our business is gaining momentum as we continue to deliver high quality games and amazing content across some of the largest, most beloved franchises in the world."  Citing the continued success and growth of games including FIFA 23, Apex Legends, and The Sims, Wilson said Electronic Arts "are leaders in a dynamic industry with new audiences, new technology, and new media trends fundamentally reshaping the world around us." But success comes with a price, and in this case that price is the jobs of several hundred people who work at EA. "As we drive greate...

I'm meeting with Brendan "PlayerUnknown" Greene in San Francisco at the Game Developers Conference, where he's showing me an early build of the digital planet he and his team are creating. Project Artemis, as it's currently called, is not quite what I expected from the originator of battle royale institution PUBG, but it's hard not to be intrigued by the idea of a virtual world the size of the actual world. Originally, Greene wanted to build a map that was 100 by 100 km. But making a map that big meant using procedural generation, so why stop there? "I just let myself go wild," he says. "Let's see how big we can go." When Greene loads the build on his laptop (it's sporting a 3080 and running at 35 fps) we begin by looking at the planet from orbit. But then he flies the camera in closer. A second later, seamlessly, the camera is hovering over the planet's surface looking at mountains, valleys, and hills, all procedurally gene...