Koei Tecmo is well-known for a few things: Team Ninja's Dead or Alive and Ninja Gaiden, Omega Force's Dynasty Warriors series and its many spin-offs, and most recently, the Dark Souls-inspired Nioh. But most famous, at least in Japan, is its long-running series of strategy games based on Romance of the the Three Kingdoms, which debuted on Japanese PCs in 1985(!). It turns out that same development team that makes Romance has recently been busy with a different strategy series, doing most of the work for Nintendo on its newest Fire Emblem game for the Switch.
"Intelligent Systems provided Koei Tecmo with a minimum crew of several designers, a music composer, and an adviser to the programmers... we then left Koei Tecmo in charge of basic game development," said director Toshiyuki Kusakihara (Intelligent Systems is the studio behind Fire Emblem and Advance Wars).
In a Famitsu interview translated by Nintendo Everything, Kusakihara said that the Romance of the Three Kingdoms team were "well-renowned" for making strategy RPGs. "They're the best of the best," he said, and it was only after Intelligent Systems decided to give the Romance team the project that they "considered their sense of world-building with three balanced kingdoms." That's how Fire Emblem: Three Houses came to be.
It seems safe to say that the new Fire Emblem's structure would have turned out quite differently without Koei Tecmo's involvement. And taken longer to finish, according to the interview. Judging by overwhelmingly positive reviews of Fire Emblem: Three Houses, which note how effectively it changes up the Fire Emblem formula, the partnership paid off.
Sadly we can't play the new Fire Emblem on PC, though as Tom points out, it'd make for a great PC series. But if the Fire Emblem buzz has you curious, you can play Romance of the Three Kingdoms on PC. While many of the older games in the series were only released in the west on the PlayStation, Romance of the Three Kingdoms 13 is available on Steam.
Elias Toufexis has performed a lot of roles over the years—here he is in a 2005 episode of the Canadian crime drama Da Vinci's Inquest—but one of his biggest has to be that of Adam Jensen, the lead character of Deus Ex: Human Revolution and Mankind Divided. His roughed-edged voice is a hallmark of the series: "I never asked for this" is one of the most famous videogame utterances to come along in years.
Toufexis has worked on other big-name series since then, including Assassin's Creed, Splinter Cell, and Call of Duty, but he said in an interview with VG247 that Jensen is still the role he's mostly closely associated with. "You can go look at my Twitter, no matter what I tweet, inevitably somebody is saying, 'Did you ask for this? I bet you didn’t ask for this'," he said. "It’s the craziest thing, the fact that Jensen got pumped into this top tier of videogame characters was very surprising."
But even though Jensen is now more recognizable as the "face" of Deus Ex than original lead Paul Denton (who was also shown the door after just one game), Square Enix had originally intended the character to be a one-and-done, so the sequel would be an entirely separate game, about someone else entirely.
"They called me for the sequel, and it was a great thing to hear because initially—and I don’t know if anybody knows this, I think it’s OK to say this now—initially they were going to make the sequel without Jensen. They were just going to make another Deus Ex game," Toufexis said.
"And from what I remember when I was told, the marketing team said, 'No, you can’t do that. Jensen has just bumped into this,' like I said, this discussion of top videogame characters ever. 'You can’t just not make a game without him, when you have him ready to go.' And they agreed, and they continued the story of Human Revolution."
The full interview is a lot of fun, particularly if you're a Deus Ex fan, but unfortunately it also confirms that there's still no action on a sequel to Mankind Divided. Toufexis acknowledged that the game's story ended abruptly and didn't quite meet expectations, and while there's no explicit connection made to its relatively lackluster reception, plans to move directly into making a third game in the rebooted series never materialized.
"We were going to, as far as I know, finish up where we finished up in Mankind Divided, and continue into whatever the next game was going to be. And I don’t think that Mankind Divided shipped their goal in terms of sales that they wanted to hit. So it immediately back-burnered," he said. "But I know that they said, I knew we were going to go right into it. In my mind, I had said, ‘OK, we’re doing this one, and then we’re doing the next one.’ And then suddenly I stopped getting phone calls."
Despite that, he implied that there is a plan in place to wrap things up properly: "Everyone’s pissed off about it now, and that makes sense, but once we finish it, you’ll see why [Mankind Divided] ended where it ended," he said. "We just have to fucking get on it."
Frontier is returning to the world of zoo sims, and it’s truly a beautiful sight. After the success of Planet Coaster, the studio has moved on to Planet Zoo, a modern take on the classic Zoo Tycoon series. Frontier is putting its best foot forward with Planet Zoo: The animals and environments look gorgeous, and it's encouraging to hear that conservation is a big focus this time around. Just around the corner from release and there's plenty to know about all the animals available in Planet Zoo.
A rhino is on the loose in the latest Planet Zoo gameplay
Frontier showed off new gameplay that simulates a day in the life of a zoo owner, and the many problems that come with it. In the video, the player is challenged by a Rhino that escaped from its habitat and other animals that are unhappy with their current digs. Andy recently went hands-on with this build, so read the full story to see how he dealt with these problems.
Planet Zoo's Gamescom 2019 demo is full of cute tigers
The latest gameplay for Planet Zoo walks viewers through the process of building habitats for a few different animals. It's particularly interesting to consider the balance between a habitat with plenty of vision for guests and privacy areas for animals. Frontier also showed off a chunk of gameplay at E3 2019, which was more of a guided tour than a real example of day-to-day zoo management. It’s a great showcase of what areas Planet Zoo is focusing on: Management, creativity, and conservation.
During E3 2019, Frontier released a video version of the meaty gameplay walkthrough from the show.
Planet Zoo animal list: every animal in the game so far
Here’s every animal we know of so far in Planet Zoo, according to the game’s Fandom wiki and Reddit.
African Buffalo
African Bush Elephant
African Wild Dog
Aldabra Giant Tortoise
Baird's Tapir
Bengal Tiger
Black Wildebeest
Boa Constrictor
Bornean Orangutan
Brazilian Wandering Spider
Cheetah
Common Ostrich
Common Warthog
Galapagos Giant Tortoise
Gemsbok
Gharial
Giant Forest Scorpion
Goliath Bird-Eating Tarantula
Goliath Frog
Green Iguana
Grizzly Bear
Himalayan Brown Bear
Hippopotamus
Indian Elephant
Indian Peafowl
Indian Rhinoceros
Lehmann's Poison Dart Frog
Lesser Antillean Iguana
Mandrill
Okapi
Plains Zebra
Pronghorn Antelope
Red Panda
Reticulated Giraffe
Ring-tailed Lemur
Saltwater Crocodile
Snow Leopard
Timber Wolf
Titan Beetle
West African Lion
Western Chimpanzee
Western Lowland Gorilla
Yellow Anaconda
There’s also the Pygmy Hippopotamus, Thompson's Gazelle, and the Komodo Dragon, but these animals are exclusive to the Deluxe Edition.
Planet Zoo is about management, but also conservation
Whereas other zoo simulation games, including ones that Frontier developed in the past, treat animal exhibits like products, Planet Zoo is about caring about (and caring for) the animals themselves. Frontier has built systems that encourage players to care equally about animal comfort as they do customer enjoyment.
Andy went hands-on with Planet Zoo in June and was incredibly impressed by the work Frontier has done to make the animals feel alive. “They’re probably the most convincing, lifelike creatures I’ve seen in a game, with incredible fidelity and nuance of animation. When they move they have weight and presence, and you can see the muscles and bones moving under their skin. Zoom the camera in and you’ll see their noses twitch and their ears flap.”
Husbandry plays a big role too. Building the ideal environments and keeping the animals happy affects their ability to reproduce. Not only does that have financial implications for your zoo, but proper conservation is a built-in goal that requires consideration.
Go behind the scenes on Planet Zoo's complex simulations
Behind the simple presentation of Planet Zoo are complicated simulations that determine an animals needs and comforts in the habitat you build. This delightful developer video goes behind the scenes on those systems, explained by people who really seem to love the game they're making.
In his recent hands-on with the Planet Zoo beta, Fraser found out the hard way that animals won't always like the enclosure you design for them. Through research you can unlock additional enrichment items to keep them happy and adjust the design of the exhibit to give them the right style environment. You'll also handle escape attempts, as Fraser found out with his enormous brood of tiny warthogs.
Planet Zoo has dynamic weather
Depending on the biome you choose to build your zoo in, habitats will need to be designed to protect animals from the elements. Animals will dynamically react to the weather conditions. In the E3 2019 gameplay video above, you can watch chimpanzees retreat under a canopy during rain.
Planet Zoo habitat building is open-ended
One of the most difficult challenges players will face in Planet Zoo is constructing the perfect environment for your animals. Instead of dropping large copy/paste modules in the park, habitats are constructed piece-by-piece. Andy touched on this in his hands-on:
“You have total freedom when it comes to designing your zoo, building habitats, decorating it, and filling it with animals. Like Planet Coaster there’s a vast Lego set of bits-and- pieces to slot together, letting you create any zoo you can imagine.”
Players will have to strike a balance between building the most comfortable habitats and keeping the zoo financially stable. Frontier used elephants as an example. You can spend extra on one-way glass to relieve the animal of the stress of so many prying eyes. This also leads to an improved mood for the elephant, which in turn makes it more likely to have crowd-pleasing behavior like playing with a ball.
Habitat layouts also have to be designed with visitors in mind. The park needs to have a nice flow with clear views of the animals, but visitors also don’t want to see employee buildings and other behind-the-scenes action. Frontier implemented employee paths for this reason, which let you designate areas where only employees can go. With smart planning, your zoo can look like a natural paradise.
Planet Zoo animals will look like their parents
Speaking of husbandry, animal offspring is procedurally generated to look and act different than its parents. Frontier used the example of zebras, who can have vastly different striping depending on the patterns of the parents.
But that’s not the only way Frontier is distinguishing animals. If animals are injured, their wounds will slowly heal and form scars that stay with them for the rest of their life. I love the idea of distinguishing my favorite animals by the details in their fur or blemishes earned over a long life.
Check out some of the props that Planet Zoo developers use to make sound effects
Foley recording rooms where audio engineers use props to make sounds are often one of the silliest and most interesting parts of game development. Checking out what kinds of materials different developers have in their toolkit never gets old. In Planet Zoo, you might have an African Elephant living in a snowy enclosure. In the wild, elephants don't get much snow exposure so making giant snowy footsteps is a bit tricky. Frontier goes over some of the props seen here in more detail as part of its October catch up post.
Meet Walter, my son
That's Walter
I’d like you to meet Walter, my son. He’s a saltwater crocodile and, despite his numerous sharp teeth, he mostly likes to slither in the water and play "who can stand still the longest." He wins every time.
Planet Zoo’s system requirements are light, but incomplete
Planet Zoo’s system requirements aren't yet set in stone, but here’s the minimum requirements listed on the game’s Steam page.
AMD is pushing out an incremental GPU driver update that is supposed to fix an issue that is causing Grand Theft Auto 5 to crash or hang on systems with a Radeon RX 5700 graphics card.
That is the main order of business for the Radeon Software Adrenalin 2019 Edition 19.7.4 driver release. Beyond being a better driver for GTA V, however, it also introduces more than a dozen other bug fixes. Here's the list:
Some system configurations may experience green color corruption after install of Radeon Software when running Windows 10 May 2019 update.
Stutter may be experienced when Radeon FreeSync is enabled on 240hz refresh displays with Radeon RX 5700 series graphics products.
Radeon Performance Metrics may report incorrect VRAM utilization.
AMD Radeon VII may experience elevated memory clocks at idle or on desktop.
Radeon Overlay may intermittently fail to appear when toggled in game.
Audio for clips captured by Radeon ReLive may be corrupted or garbled when desktop recording is enabled.
Radeon RX 5700 Series Graphics may experience a black screen during uninstall on Windows7 system configurations. A work around is to perform uninstall in safe mode.
Recording clips with Radeon ReLive may result in blank clips on Radeon RX 5700 Series Graphics with Windows 7 system configurations.
Enabling Enhanced Sync may cause game, application or system crashes on Radeon RX 5700 series graphics products.
This is AMD's second Radeon driver in less than a week. Just a few days ago, AMD started pushing out its 19.7.3 release that was tuned for Wolfenstein: Youngblood. According to AMD, users can expect to see up to a 13 percent performance boost in that game.
That presumably applies to the 19.7.4 release, when comparing against the 19.7.2 driver as well.
AMD has a habit of announcing driver updates before they are actually available to download. So it goes with the 19.7.4 release—at the time of this writing, it's not showing up on AMD's website, but is supposed to be there within the hour (and perhaps by the time you're reading this). You can check for (and download) the latest driver here.
Rockstar North has received 19 percent of all tax credits paid to the games industry by the UK government and paid nothing in corporation tax for nearly a decade, according to a report from TaxWatch. The UK tax think tank estimates that the Grand Theft Auto developer has claimed around £42 million /$51 million over the last few years through the Video Games Tax Relief scheme.
While GTA 5 is one of the most profitable entertainment products of all time, with TaxWatch estimating total sales of around £5 billion/$6 billion, it's able to apply for Video Games Tax Credits because it's been given the "culturally British" stamp by the British Film Institute. While the vast majority of Rockstar's games are set in the US, Rockstar North is based in Edinburgh, Scotland.
"Our analysis shows that the amount claimed by Rockstar North is the equivalent of 19% of the total relief paid to the entire video games industry in the UK since the programme came into effect," reads the report. "This raises serious questions as to whether the relief is being properly targeted, at a time when the industry is lobbying for the relief to be expanded and made more generous."
Rockstar North is eligible for tax credits because it, in combination with the six other UK studios under the Take-Two and Rockstar umbrella, declared just £47.3 million/$57 million in profit between 2013 and 2018, which is comparatively tiny compared to the operating profit of Rockstar's games, estimated by TaxWatch to be $4 billion/$5 billion. Most of the profit is reported by the US side, despite the contributions the UK studios make to the games.
Rockstar North started receiving Video Game Tax Credits around three years ago and it's received almost six times its operating profit since then, according to TaxWatch.
"How is it possible that a game made in the UK," asks the report, "generating billions of dollars in profit for its parent companies and senior management, makes a loss for tax purposes in the UK and is able to claim tax back from the government?"
The think tank is calling in HMRC to investigate Rockstar Games and Take-Two's UK tax situation, with its director calling it "outrageous" that tax payers are subsidising Rockstar when GTA 5 was already generating billions in profits for the publisher.
I've reached out to Rockstar and will update the article if I get a response.
Hitman 2 has a cure for this hot, hot summer: Agent 47 is going to Siberia. It's a new Sniper Assassin map set in a private prison. The trailer calls it the most inhospitable environment on Earth, but obviously IO Interactive wasn't in my flat last week, where even the air was on fire.
The targets for this chilly mission are the prison's warden, who you'll recognise because he's got a really big hat, and a Russian mobster with a penchant for battering people to death. You'll need to take out both of them. Beyond simply killing this naughty pair, expect new challenges to bump up your Hitman score and improve your mastery with the Druzhina 34 Arctic Sniper Rifle.
Siberia is available with the expansion pass, but everyone else gets Hawke's Bay added to Contracts and three new disguises from other IO Interactive games. The July update, along with Siberia, will launch on July 30 at 5pm UTC.
Layers of Fear developer Bloober Team is taking us back to Blair Witch's horrible woods next month, but you can get a taste of some of the scares now with the official gameplay trailer, above. It's not as dense as the Blair Witch footage we saw last week, but it does get quite a bit weirder.
Like last week's footage, there's some traipsing around the woods with a handy canine companion, Bullet, but it's not just a nature hike. There's weird stuff going down in the woods—dilapidated houses to investigate, found footage to freak out over and, of course, monsters.
In the trailer's last sequence, Blair Witch really starts to look like a Bloober Team game. An old building that seems to have a life of its own is more than a bit evocative of Layers of Fear. The first Blair Witch movie—don't ask me to remember the others—was a slow burner that would have been pretty dull without the extremely clever found footage conceit, so I'm down for this mind-bending take on the series.
I don't know if I fancy a horror game with a dog in it, though. I don't want to keep seeing a pooch in peril. Hopefully I'll be able to get him to stay outside while I explore obviously haunted houses. But what if one of the monsters in the woods gets him while I'm rummaging around in cupboards? I'm already getting stressed.
Great moments in PC gaming are bite-sized celebrations of some of our favorite gaming memories.
Horror's great when it's contrasted with not-horror. If it's all spooks all the time that can get tiring, but when you aren't constantly being frightened until your bones climb out your mouth and run away, you start to relax—and that makes the eventual explosion into real horror work even better. That's how it is with the Ocean House Hotel in Bloodlines, and that's how it is with the Shalebridge Cradle in Thief: Deadly Shadows.
By this third game in the series you feel like a proper master thief, able to slide into any building and immediately start taking it over, one unconscious guard at a time. When you break into the Cradle, a former orphanage turned asylum turned abandoned haunted house, that feeling gets turned on its head. The building itself has become a living malevolent being, a witness to so many nightmares that it's stuck repeating them forever. You're not breaking into a building, but entering the psychic landscape created by everyone who ever lived there.
Asylums are normally cheap creeps in videogames, but the Shalebridge Cradle avoids some of the cliches. "The doctors are just as scary as the patients" as one of the notes hidden there reads, and it's the discovery of how those patients were mistreated that provides a significant part of the horror. Lobotomized, branded, heads and hands encased in protective wire cages, subjected to something called "the wet-wraps treatment", they've now been transformed into puppets. The staff also persist as shadowy figures, nonchalantly going about their business as the memory of the fire that eventually led to the Cradle being closed down burns in perpetuity around them.
Thief: Deadly Shadows is a stealth game, but the greatest act of stealth in it is the way it sneaks this horror show in unexpectedly, even though the series is famous for its scary levels. Like a bottle episode of a TV show, the Cradle level focuses on a single location to get all the drama it can out of the situation, but it's a bottle that's slowly filling and you're liable to drown.
From 2010 to 2014 Richard Cobbett wrote Crapshoot, a column about bringing random obscure games back into the light. This time it was one of Indy's most unfortunate misadventures this side of Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.
Where to begin? Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis is a godawful mess of a game by anyone's standards. It's ugly. It's boring. It's barely playable. What little plot there is gets buried instantly under the bad controls and embarrassingly poor puzzles. The interesting idea of being able to control two characters at once is utterly squandered by the fact that you won't want to spend a single second more than you have to in their company. And yet despite all this, when you mention Fate of Atlantis, you'll struggle to find anyone who doesn't have warm memories of it. They'll tell you it's one of Lucasarts' best adventures, with a great story and characters that deserved to be immortalised in an actual movie.
So what's going on? Simple. We're not thinking of that Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, which is indeed fantastic. No, we're playing Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis: The Action Game.
Fate of Atlantis: The Action Game is an odd one—a cheap movie cash-in, only without the movie. It owe its existence to one, though. Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade was also split into two games—a SCUMM0based adventure by Noah Falstein, David Fox, and Ron Gilbert that wasn't great but did some interesting things, and a fairly generic cash-in platformer that didn't.
The Fate of Atlantis version took the form of an isometric action-adventure hybrid, but otherwise stuck to the stripped-down nature of movie ports at the time. The original adventure version was huge. The Action Game offered just six levels. The adventure featured a fun plot, with three paths designed around wits, fists, and Indy's new partner, feisty psychic Sophia Hapgood. The action game relies on the manual to tell you what you're doing and why. Most notably of all, at least on first glance, the adventure game actually has Harrison Ford's face on the cover, while the action game had to make do with a random guy in a fedora, plus a huge INDY logo to draw your eye away from the hideous artwork.
It's quite clear which of the two games Lucasarts gave a damn about. And in case you're wondering, yes, the Action Game does admit that it's based on the adventure, rather than pretending the two were equals.
You know you're in trouble from the start of the first level, which drops you into a Monte Carlo casino and promptly washes its hands of you. A few enemies wander around, occasionally shuffling over to punch you in the face for a bit, but just as quickly losing interest and getting back to more important daydreaming. If you punch them, sometimes they drop sweets. You can switch between Indy and Sophia at will, with the other in either 'stop' or 'go' mode, which lets them amble around on their own random walking and face-punching adventures. Indy starts off with his whip and his fists, while Sophia gets to gently kick people in the shins until they feign death in the hope that she goes away. If either character runs out of health, they get transported into a cell without even a door to stop them simply walking out, but of course they don't do that because that would be naughty and the Nazis might tell on them.
The best part of the game comes when a character talks to you. Instead of a line of dialogue, it just shows you a symbol - which you then have to look up on the grounds that Indiana Jones doesn't speak the local language and has no idea what they're saying to him. Hit a hotel guest for instance, and they scream "/" You promptly reach for your travel guide, flip to the relevant page, run your finger down the translations provided and discover to your amazement that "/" means "Do not hit the hotel guests." Genius.
Want to learn more Programmer Language? Here are some other handy phrases:
Circle Three-Bars - You can't leave without both a map and the Lost Dialogue
Triangle Hourglass - Tread not upon the Great Machine!
Circle Hourglass - Enough haggling! I have lost patience with you; go away for now
If you both survive and stay awake throughout the casino level, the next levels take you to a naval base, a submarine bay and an actual submarine. As with many arcade games of the era, the manual completely gives away everything that happens in the game. My favourite bit is this section, taken verbatim from the submarine level's description. Fun fact: the developers were called "Attention To Detail"...
"Find the periscope so you can steer the submarine to the islands... one of them has to be Atlantis!"
The greatest irony of Fate of Atlantis: The Action Game is that it's a million times duller than its supposedly non-exciting adventure version. What the real Fate of Atlantis lacked in tedious isometric face punching, it more than made up for with snarling enemies, its own arcade style fighting, funny situations, death-defying escapes and more. Its casino level involved tracking down your contact and having Indy dress up as a ghost to scare his pants off during a fake seance. Doesn't that sound like much more fun than punching easily distracted goons until they poo chocolate? The answer is yes.
Many of the problems with the game can no doubt be attributed to the number of platforms it was aimed at. The adventure game was fairly advanced for its time, and restricted to PC and Amiga. The Action Game on the other hand was ported over to Atari ST, Commodore 64 and ZX Spectrum as well, with the lack of text strings (not to mention capital letters) and input buttons smacking of developing for the lowest common denominator. That's still no excuse though. It's one thing to make a bad game to sucker people into spending money on something crap, but so much worse to distract them from the genuinely good game of the same name sitting only a couple of spaces away on the next shelf.
Needless to say, Lucasarts learned its lesson. Fate of Atlantis put an end to the "The Action Game" idea before it could infect the likes of Monkey Island or Grim Fandango, with future adventure games simply containing their own arcade sequences where necessary—from Full Throttle's fighting to Sam and Max's gimmicky asides. The real Fate of Atlantis went on to become a genuine classic of the genre, as well as the last dedicated Indiana Jones adventure. Future games took the Tomb Raider route instead, which seems only fair, even if they weren't necessarily what the original fans wanted.
You may know indie designer Terry Cavanagh for his bastard-hard antigravity platformer VVVVVV, or you may have cursed his name while playing the twitch-reflex avoid-em-up Super Hexagon. Either way, he's a designer worth watching.
His latest game is Dicey Dungeons, in which heroes have been transformed into cute walking dice by Lady Luck, then trapped in her mutating dungeon full of monsters. It plays kind of like a cross between Yahtzee and Tharsis.
Your attacks and abilities all require certain dice rolls to activate—for instance, one of the characters is a thief who can use even numbers to pickpocket enemies, and stab them with a dagger using any die that comes up 1, 2, or 3. But you've got a number of rerolls, splits, and other tweaks you can apply to your dice to mitigate the pure randomness.
It looks pretty neat, and it'll be out August 13 on Steam and itch.
