Another month, another big video game publisher puts a great big dollop of video game music online for zero pennies. This time, it's Bandai Namco, who have just uploaded every single Tekken soundtrack onto Spotify because, well, apparently everyone loves Tekken. I've never partaken in a Tekken, but with track names like "Massive Stunner" and "Lonesome City Jazz Party 1st", I'm already 100% convinced the music must be great.
However, given my rather lacking expertise in all things Tekken-related, I thought that instead of doing a big Tekken musical breakdown like I did for Capcom and all the Final Fantasy games, I'd take this opportunity to celebrate some of the other great gaming soundtracks you can currently listen to for free right now, because boy howdy are there loads of 'em. So bang on those headphones and turn up the volume, folks. It's head-banging time.
]]>Google held another one of their Stadia Connect conferences today, and this one was meant to be all about what games you'll be playing in the "scary" cloud come November. Sure enough, there were new Stadia games aplenty announced this evening, with the biggest addition being Cyberpunk 2077.
To help keep track of them all, here's a list of every Google Stadia game confirmed so far, as well as which games are coming at launch, which ones will be arriving a little bit later, and which games you'll only be able to play by subscribing to one of the special Stadia publisher subscriptions.
]]>We already chose 13 of our favourite games in the current Summer Steam sale, but more games have been discounted since. So, based on the entirely correct hypothesis that you all have completed every single one of our first round games and are now thirsting for more, here are 18 more to throw your spare change at. Everyone on the RPS team has picked three stone-cold personal favourites, making for a grand old set of excellent PC games: here's what we chose and why.
]]>Do you remember Child of Light [official site]? It was a painterly platformer/JRPG which Ubisoft billed as a playable poem. Well, it's clearly done well enough that Ubisoft have a number of "very cool projects" in the works which will be set in the same universe.
]]>Painted in watercolour and written in verse, Child of Light is a charming, if superficially childish, fairytale RPG. Beneath this breezy fable of lost princesses and talking mice, however, is a complicated combat system that calls back to Final Fantasy’s Active Time Battles - a dense interplay of buffs, interrupts and attacks that injects a realtime element to otherwise turnbased fights. You might call it a platformer too, but given that the heroine quickly sprouts wings, your exploration of the sidescrolling overworld is more aerobatic than acrobatic. I like all these things and yet it’s left me struggling to be enthused. Here’s wot I think.
The one good thing about uPlay misplacing my save file several hours into Child of Light is that it helped bring my feelings about the game into sharper focus. One feeling being a reluctance to play more of it than I really needed to. Another being that, since I had to, I’d have preferred the cutscenes to be skippable.
]]>Now that John is on sabbatical, where will RPS turn when they need someone who understands emotions? Child of Light is about a young girl exploring a twinkling world of wonder and danger, and probably its story will require descriptors like "tender" and "heartfelt". The rest of us aren't equipped to deal with such things. Case in point: the plinky-plonky video tour of the game's world, Lemuria, which can be found below. I'm too scared to watch it myself, but I showed it to Adam and he hasn't stopped screaming since. He seems so confused and angry.
]]>Rufus Wainwright once drawled, "Pretty things, so what if I like pretty things?" Which I think is the perfect reason for me to post this Child Of Light trailer. If Rufus can like pretty things, then so can I. And Ubisoft's platform puzzle game is an entrée for eyelashes, a pie for the pupil, a roast for the retina, a quiet lunch by the river on a sunny day for the orbit. It is a feast for the eyes.
]]>I was at the UbiSoft event where Child Of Light was revealed. It's the first time I've ever been at a press event where an informal queue formed, and the press were ignoring other demos to wait in line to play it. They waited for hours: friends who joined the queue would accost me as I passed* by, begging me to go on a buffet run for them. I'm honestly not exaggerating. Whatever held them in place that day wasn't the game, really. It looks like a 2D platformer thing: there's wandering, it has puzzles, and it has co-op; but the art and atmosphere seemed to reach out like the aroma of a cartoon pie, beckoning people in.
The new dev diary below explains a little about how that came to be, with Ubisoft attempting to capture the essence of a living painting by creating development tools that supported their artists and animators.
]]>Nathan has written about Child Of Light, extensively. I just went back and read all of his words and those of the developers, but I'm still confused. Along with the release date announcement (April 30th), Ubi have released a dazzling trailer and it keeps telling me that the game is an RPG, with crafting and skill trees and turn-based combat. I see that occasionally. But I also see a platformer starring the scarf from Journey. Baffling.
]]>Ubisoft's treatment of PC gamers has vacillated between utter garbage and lightly pine-scented garbage in the past few years, but it's impossible to deny that the publisher's put its considerable weight behind some interesting stuff in recent times. Its most recent two cannon-ball superman dives off the beaten path are Valiant Hearts and Child of Light, and I've written at length about both of them. Now, though, you can watch a quick overview of the CoL section I played in video form. Unfortunately, the game's most important feature - a room full of so many murders of drunken crows that it probably counts as a massacre (or a really weird goth party) - is sadly absent. Priorities, Ubisoft. Priorities.
]]>I'm quite fascinated by Ubisoft's epic poem JRPG melting pot of madness Child of Light, and I think you should be too. It's an entirely bonkers concept, and - good or bad - it at least promises to be a thunderous step off the beaten path for a fee-fi-fo-fummingly gigantic publisher. I recently had the chance to chat with creative director Patrick Plourde and lead writer Jeffrey Yohalem, and you can find the first part of our conversation here. Today we pick up right where we left off: with guns and shootymen. Actually, that's not where we left off at all, but sometimes natural transitions are hard. So read on to see what Plourde and Yohalem learned from creating Far Cry 3, fielding controversy that arose from it, and now, working within constraints more commonly associated with indie developers.
]]>Ubisoft is making an art game. Or at least, Child of Light is as close to an art game as any major publisher is likely to get for quite some time. It's being put together by a tiny team (headed up by Far Cry 3's directors, of all people, because we are living in Bizarro Land) with incredibly little in the way of bellowing blasts from Ubisoft brass. The result? A gorgeously painterly JRPG Metroidvania with a story that takes the form of a 120-page epic poem. The yarn itself, meanwhile, is a highly metaphorical spin on a young girl's struggles growing up. I sat down with creative director Patrick Plourde and lead writer Jeffrey Yohalem to discuss poetry, influence from both JRPGs and classic PC adventure games, creating a female character who's not defined by her search for a "Prince Charming," choices that cut off large chunks of content, and more.
]]>Say what you will about Ubisoft, but you can't deny that it's significantly less risk-averse than triple-A publishing kin like EA and Activision. Assassin's Creed III's alternate history Washington DLCs weren't the best, but that didn't stop them from being patently insane. Call of Juarez: Gunslinger, meanwhile, was a quirky, out-of-nowhere gem. And then of course, there was Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon, which Papa Ubi has apparently taken quite a neon-tinged, cyber-eyed shine to. But Child of Light might just be its biggest leap of faith yet. Inspired by the massive success of Journey on PS3, the publisher has let two of Far Cry 3's leads run wild on a co-op coming-of-age JRPG epic poem about a young girl and also there are drunken crow people for some reason. I recently got to play a small section of it, and I must say that I found it quite enchanting.
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