Shinji Mikami, founder of Tango Gameworks, thought the studio would be "safe as long as they continued to make Hi-Fi Rush games." Mikami was asked about the studio's closure by Microsoft earlier this year, and its revival under new owners Krafton at Gamescom last month.
]]>Tango Gameworks are back from the dead. The Hi-Fi Rush studio have been acquired - alongside the IP for future games in the rhythm action series - by South Korean company Krafton, who also own PUBG Studios and Striking Distance, among others. “This strategic move will include the rights to Tango Gameworks’ acclaimed IP, Hi-Fi Rush,” Krafton said in a statement today. I particularly enjoy the hand-rubbing, grinning use of the word ‘strategic’ here. Great news though.
]]>Ah, it feels like only yesterday that Microsoft shut down Tango Gameworks, creators of Hi-Fi Rush, and now here's Matt Booty, head of Xbox Game Studios, telling Microsoft staff at an internal townhall meeting that "we need smaller games that give us prestige and awards" - a sentence we might plausibly lengthen to "...like Hi-Fi Rush".
See, these are the kinds of glacial changes of focus and ponderous shifts of strategy you often get at very large videogame publishers such as Microsoft. Trends are cyclical and corporations are sort of just these massive, sleepy hamsters, trundling around the wheel to rediscover practices and projects they once deemed bad for business. Hang on, let me go look up "yesterday" in the dictionary and fetch some sellotape - my brain appears to have exploded.
]]>When I asked Tango Gameworks creative director John Johanas whom he'd give Hi-Fi Rush's Best Audio trophy away to at this year's GDC Awards, he said he'd split it between the game's audio team and "the person who taught me everything I know" - Shinji Mikami, Tango's founder and one of the erstwhile Capcom and Platinum big brains behind Resident Evil, Vanquish and much more besides. I confess, I found this response annoying - partly because I was hoping Johanas would bring up some obscure indie composer I could then namecheck at parties, and partly, because I have spent years waiting for Tango to escape Mikami's shadow after essentially announcing themselves as a Mikami fan project back in 2010.
]]>Microsoft are shutting down multiple game studios including Redfall developers Arkane Austin and the creators of Hi-Fi Rush, Tango Gameworks. The news was delivered via an email to staff from Xbox boss Matt Booty which has since been seen by IGN. Booty calls the decision a "consolidation of our Bethesda studio teams, so that we can invest more deeply in our portfolio of games and new IP."
]]>Just over a year ago, Shinji Mikami - he of directing the original Resident Evil and Resident Evil 4 fame - was confirmed to be leaving Tango Gameworks, the studio that he had co-founded over a decade earlier to create a modern successor to his survival-horror classics, The Evil Within.
]]>At last, every door on the RPS Advent Calendar has been ripped open, leaving nothing but foil wrapper remnants, and the odd pixel crumb of the digital delights once contained within them. But that doesn't festivities are over! Like a Boxing Day bubble and squeak, we've gathered together all of our favourite games of the year once again, this time in one handy location. If you've been following along with our Advent goings-on, you'll already know what our game of the year picks are for 2023, but just in case you missed them, here's the list in full. Enjoy!
]]>What's that I hear behind today's Advent Calendar door? A sweet guitar riff and a sick drum beat that makes me want to snap my fingers forevermore? Man, I'm tapping my toes just thinking about it!
]]>Don't look now, but we're almost halfway through 2023. How is that even possible? I hear you cry. Well, I'm not entirely sure either. The last time I checked it was freezing cold outside and the sun went down at 3pm, but here we are with long, sunlit evenings and that sticky sheen of an early, muggy summer. Or at least it's been quite clammy in the RPS Treehouse this month, as we've all been sweating over our favourite games of the year so far.
]]>Hi-Fi Rush is a rocking good time, and the party hasn't stopped yet, baby. Developers Tango Gameworks are adding two new modes to their rhythm slasher in next month's Arcade Challenge update: one where the beat gets faster the longer you survive, and another you could tentatively call roguelike-like where you start off stripped of your abilities.
The update trailer also also shows off some new special attacks, starring distinguished robot CNMN and Smidge the tutorial fridge. It's out July 5th, and there's definitely enough to make me want to pop back in.
]]>Summer Games Done Quick is coming back for its annual speedrunning charity event. Like previous years, SGDQ will be raising money for Doctors Without Borders, an NGO that provides medical care to those affected by disease, disasters, and conflicts. An Elden Ring double bill closed last year’s event - which managed to raise more than $3 million for charity - and FromSoftware’s juggernaut is once again featured at 2023’s SGDQ.
]]>The inaugural RPS Game Club liveblog session is here! From 4pm BST today, March 30th, we'll be chatting all things Hi-Fi Rush, which the RPS Treehouse has been playing throughout the month of March. We hope you've been playing along too, so why not come and join in the discussion with us? See you at 4pm sharp!
]]>Man, do I love the feeling of jamming out a guitar riff in games. Sure, in reality, I’m slumped on my couch in a position that my body will give me payback for when I’m thirty, but in my fantasy, I’m a musical prodigy whose guitar licks are so epic it would make Slash cry. My joy for virtual jamming came as a direct result of playing hours and hours of Guitar Hero. Harmonix held my music taste in its death grip, and almost breaking my fingers on those flimsy plastic buttons trying to conquer Through The Fire And Flames is a precious memory of mine.
So yeah, I love a good guitar sesh, so when I saw that Hi-Fi Rush was about a wannabe rockstar that smacks evil megacorp robots with his guitar to a catchy rock OST, Tango Gameworks had my attention.
]]>Come one, come all to our very first RPS Game Club liveblog session about this month's chosen pick, Hi-Fi Rush. We'll be piling into a liveblog on Thursday March 30th at 4pm BST (that's 8am PDT / 11am EDT), so please do come and join us to talk about what you loved most about Tango Gameworks' infectious rhythm action brawler.
]]>I like to think I have rhythm, in the same way that a wobbly air dancer lunging about sporadically has rhythm. That is to say I have none at all, and that any time spent dancing turns me into an uncontrollable set of limbs flailing in the wrong directions. Think Octodad in a night club and you’d be on the right track (although the disastrous limb flailing is enough to keep me out of the clubs).
That lack of rhythm isn’t just native to the dance floor of an awkward family party, though. Even nuzzled into my chair with a controller in hand, I simply can’t stick to the beat. My eyes glued to notes floating across the screen, trying to hit them at just the right time, you’d probably see Time hiding in a corner to my left, giggling at my repeated failure. A barrage of borked bleeps and bungled notes tend to leave me with spirits sunk.
In Hi-Fi Rush, though, I always leave with my head held high.
]]>Hi-Fi Rush, our inaugural RPS Game Club game, sets its on-the-beat beatdowns in some pretty interesting places. Glistening sci-fi skyscrapers. An underground volcano lair. A Smaug-pleasing gold hoard, conveniently adjacent to a finance executive’s office. Who’d have guessed, then, that its absolute best fight – not just a thrilling brawl in itself, but the point at which a stumbling adventure plants its feet back in greatness – would take place in a canteen?
]]>When Tango GameWorks announced Hi-Fi Rush was getting a photo mode, I knew I was in trouble. You know I have a tendency to get emotionally invested in games with photo modes (one might say too invested, in the case of my Death Stranding BB Boys road trip diary), and yep, you couldn't have predicted a more likely turn of events if you tried. Because yes, instead of bopping along to its excellent, punchy rhythm action combat and, you know, actually playing the damn thing, I've spent most of my early hours with Hi-Fi Rush fiddling about with image sliders and lining up Chai and best video game cat bot 808 into daft, stupid poses for the sake of a good screenshot. But hot damn, what a great game it is all the same.
]]>A new thing for RPS in 2023 is the RPS Game Club, a kind of monthly book club for games where we pick a game to play each month, write some cool things about it, and have a big all liveblog discussion with you lot, our readers, at the end of it. It's a project I've been wanting to get off the ground for some time now, and finally, the Treehouse Game Club doors have been busted open... and there's some toe-tapping guitar music coming from inside? That's right, we're playing Hi-Fi Rush as our first RPS Game Club game, and we hope you'll join us on this month-long musical journey.
]]>UPDATE: Bethesda have now confirmed the news in a statement posted on Twitter, saying, "We thank him for his work as a creative mentor to young developers." They continued to say, "We wish Mikami-san well in the future and are excited by what lies ahead fpr the talented developers of Tango."
Original story: Tango GameWork’s co-founder and studio head Shinji Mikami is reportedly leaving the Evil Within company “in the coming months.” This comes courtesy of TrueAchievements who saw and verified a company-wide email sent to employees by Bethesda’s VP of development Todd Vaughn. "I am writing today to let you know that studio head Shinji Mikami has decided to leave Tango Gameworks in the coming months," Vaughn said. "Mikami-san has been a creative leader and supportive mentor to young developers at Tango for 12 years through his work.”
]]>Sometimes I want to describe games in the most high-brow way possible. I might smugly write something like “it elevates the genre” while sipping wine and eating cheese, musing on how a game pushes the media forward as an art form. Other times I just want to write that a game is really bloody good, actually, and I like it lots.
Hi-Fi Rush falls into the latter category. Developer Tango Gameworks shadow-dropped the rhythm-action game out of nowhere shortly after an Xbox presentation, jettisoning The Evil Within’s murky mental hospitals and Ghostwire: Tokyo's supernatural shinanigans for something markedly different: bright pulsating neon colours and a gang of loveable anime ruffians, where every whack and dodge is underscored by a beat.
Hi-Fi Rush is an action-adventure game with a mechanical core fuelled by musical beats. Protagonist Chai has undergone a risky medical procedure and emerged from the other side with a robot arm and an iPod accidentally implanted in his chest meaning his every waking moment is punctuated by a catchy beat. We too see these rhythmic motions, as Hi-Fi Rush's soda pop-infused world moves to this steady pulse - platforms move in time with the music, lights flash in pleasing rhythmic patterns, and enemies attack to the beat of the drum.
]]>After a mysterious delay from December, arcade racing game Hot Wheels Unleashed will finally arrive on PC Game Pass in early February. I hear it's pretty good! It's one of the small handful of games Microsoft have confirmed as coming to PC Game Pass in the next fortnight, which also include the JoJo's Bizarre Adventure fighting game and a return to the subscription service for Darkest Dungeon. Alas, games coming mean games going. Do check out Donut County before it's swallowed by the abyss.
]]>So those Tango Gameworks leaks turned out to be true. After repeatedly stating that this evening's Xbox Developer Direct would feature just four games, it turned out to contain four. Hi-Fi Rush is a new third-person rhythm action brawler from the makers of Evil Within and Ghostwhire: Tokyo. It's a substantial departure from their previous games in terms of style - although there's an even bigger surprse.
The bigger surprise is it's out now, so you can play it via Game Pass right away.
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