Team 17, the mob who make Worms as well as publishing games like Yooka-Laylee and Overcooked, have bought games studio Yippee Entertainment in a £1.4 million deal.
If you haven't heard of Yippee before, they predominantly work on licensed games for companies like Cartoon Network, Nickelodeon and the BBC. They've also made a platformer series of their own, Chimpact, which is mostly for mobile but has jumped on PC too.
]]>After looking back to ye oldene dayes with N64-style collect-o-jumper Yooka-Laylee, developers Playtonic Games are now leaping back another generation with its follow-up. Today they announced Yooka-Laylee And The Impossible Lair, a side-scrolling platformer linked by a top-down overworld with mild puzzling. After more years and maybe they'll go through Super Mario, then back through Donkey Kong, Pong, and oscilloscope games, ending with unidentifiable games played with knucklebones and entrails. That can wait. Before then, Yooka and Laylee will go 2.5D later this year. Come see the trailer.
]]>Interested in how the games sausage gets made? Yes? Then you need to be following Blocktober. No? Then you need to be following Blocktober. It's a hashtag - no, come back - on Twitter this month, at which level designers on games big, small and yowza, really big are showing off what their creations looked like before artists and graphics programmers went and covered up all the cleverness with prettiness. In other words, take a look at the component parts some of your favourite games are made of, and get a real sense of how much of what we take for granted as background scenery and pathing is meticulously built.
Also: some of these unclothed visions of games such Star Citizen, Titanfall, Homefront, Yooka-Laylee, Vermintide, Bulletstorm, Dead Space, Uncharted and many more look like escapees from a beautifully minimalist alt-dimension of games that I would love to visit.
]]>It looks like Rare-esque 3D platformer Yooka-Laylee [official site] has had one of those quality-of-life patches that might be of interest if you've been holding off the game thanks to reports of batty camera angles and tedious cut scene repetition.
The update caught my attention when it was flagged up alongside a price cut over on GOG which is now over*. The update was actually applied far earlier on Steam in accordance with the Summer Sale but got lost in the general "OH GOSH IT IS THE STEAM SALE" maelstrom for me. Why flag it up late? Because I had a lovely time with the game in so many ways but really bashed my head against its flaws so any update that tries to rectify those is worth a mention.
]]>Update: The year is finished, which means you can now read the final list of our favourite games of 2017.
2017 has already been an extraordinary year for PC games, from both big-name AAA successes to no-name surprise indie smashes. Keeping up with so much that's worth playing is a tough job, but we've got your back. Here is a collection of the games that have rocked the RPS Treehouse so far this year.
We've all picked our favourites, and present them here in alphabetical order so as not to start any fights. You're bound to have a game you'd have wanted to see on the list, so please do add it to the comments below.
]]>Rarelike 3D platformer Yooka-Laylee [official site] is now out, recreating that old N64 style of adventuring - both the good and the bad. It's bright and cheery and DID YOU KNOW that the game's title, formed by combining the names of its chameleon and bat protagonists, sounds like "ukulele"? I only spotted that last week. Attentive. Anyway! The Yooka-Laylee team at Playtonic Games included a number of key folks from Rare's Banjo-Kazooie games and the game's utterly, proudly going for that sort of thing. See for yourself in the launch trailer:
]]>One of the criticisms I had of Yooka-Laylee [official site] - the crowdfunded 3D platforming sequel-to-the-N64-Banjo-Kazooie-games-in-all-but-name-and-animal-duo - was that the camera was a persistent problem. It wasn't a constantly bad experience, more that it was a low level irritant which kept rearing its head throughout. It looks like the team are endeavouring to improve the situation with a day-one patch for PC which aims to fix specific problems as well as general camera movement performance improvements.
]]>Yooka-Laylee [official site], the crowdfunded colourful 3D platformer, is essentially a sequel to Banjo-Kazooie and Banjo-Tooie just wearing different pyjamas. Where Nuts & Bolts took the franchise in a slightly different direction, Yooka-Laylee is an unapologetic return to the N64 formula of cheeky humour, bright playgrounds and collectibles coming out the wazoo. Playing it is like discovering there's an episode of a favourite TV show you somehow missed at the time. Here's Wot I Think:
]]>Yooka-Laylee [official site] is designed to feel like getting into a warm, foamy bath of nostalgia. The characters and world are new but the industry veterans behind this 3D open-world platformer know exactly which buttons to hit to ease you into comforting familiarity. Everything from the colours to the font transports you back to the 1990s. While playing I half-expected the Spice Girls to break down the door and throw a Tamagotchi into my hands.
Nostalgia is a tricky thing, however. Although the wildly successful Kickstarter (raising £2.1 million from 80,000 backers) shows that there is obviously a huge appetite for it, many people won’t have familiarity with games like Banjo-Kazooie. I have a strange third-person nostalgia for these games, as I never had the consoles growing up but did watch friends play them. Because of this, I wondered if Yooka-Laylee would grab me when I played it in the same way the mere idea of it had grabbed others.
]]>Yooka-Laylee [official site] - the Rare-esque 3D platformer with the chamaeleon and bat odd couple pairing - will be getting a bunch of multiplayer minigames alongside its single player story mode.
If you're at all familiar with the games upon which Yooka-Laylee is based this won't actually be a surprise. In fact, it would have been more of a surprise if there were no minigames, but this is the first I've read about said minigames so here is your confirmation that they exist.
]]>As Old Father Time grabs his sickle and prepares to take ailing 2016 around the back of the barn for a big sleep, we're looking to the future. The mewling pup that goes by the name 2017 will come into the world soon and we must prepare ourselves for its arrival. Here at RPS, our preparations come in the form of this enormous preview feature, which contains details on more than a hundred of the exciting games that are coming our way over the next twelve months. 2016 was a good one - in the world of games at least - but, ever the optimists, we're hoping next year will be even better.
]]>Yooka-Laylee [official site], the crowdfunded Banjo-Kazooie-y 3D platformer, now has a release date. Come April 11th, 2017, we'll get to do all those late-nineties jumping things with two new cute animal friends. Our Pip played a few minutes earlier this year and reported back, "the impression I currently have is that rather than this being a new game it's very much like finding an alternate universe's version of Banjo-Kazooie and playing that." I've no love lost for 3D collect-o-platformers myself but hey, that is exactly what some want from Yooka-Laylee. Here, have a peek in this new gameplay trailer:
]]>While at EGX I had a few minutes of hands-on time with Yooka-Laylee [official site], Playtonic's love letter to older 3D platformers like Banjo-Kazooie. It even shares team members with those older games. It was a strange experience, if I'm honest. Bright and daft and instantly evoking those hundreds of hours of play as a child in Rare's worlds. But at the same time I found myself not really playing so much as constantly drawing the parallels with the older games - oh, that's this game's version of a Jinjo, oh, that's this game's version of a Mumbo Jumbo transformation, oh, that's what Banjo and Kazooie would look like if you had to use a chameleon and a bat instead of a bird and a bear...
]]>Playtonic Games released a new trailer for their upcoming platformer Yooka-Laylee [official site] at this year's Gamescom, granting us another look at the game's quirky and colorful gameplay. The charming, cartoon-y platformer stars a chameleon named Yooka, and his bat friend Laylee. Judging by the trailer, they'll be taking players on an epic journey of mischief and clever jumpy and swimmy action.
]]>Yooka-Laylee [official site] raised over £2 million on Kickstarter in 2015 for the dream of a new '90s-style 3D platformer made by a team including folks who worked on Banjo-Kazooie and Donkey Kong Country. Playtonic Games hoped at the time that they'd release the game in October 2016, but the makers today announced it'll be a little late. A new trailer reveals the game's due in early 2017 but hey, the trailer also shows more of the game in motion. If you've waited a decade for the nineties to return, what difference does a few more months make?
]]>It was around this time last year that a group of ex-Rare fellows asked the world for £175,000 in crowdfunding cash to create nostalgia-driven Yooka-Laylee [official site] - a "spiritual successor" to the classic N64 3D platform 'em up Banjo-Kazooie. Evidently some folk thought this was reasonable, for its Kickstarter campaign concluded with over two million smackeroos. Fast forward 12 months and, if you chipped in at the £20 tier or higher, you can soon look forward to getting to grips with a prototype that's due out in July.
Developers Playtonic Games have also released a batch of new screens and story tidbits, which you can cast your eyes over after the drop.
]]>You may have thought we'd run out of nostalgia to mine for Kickstarter but good gravy no! A group of folks formerly of Banjo-Kazooie and Donkey Kong Country developers Rare, now at their own studio Playtonic Games, launched a crowdfunding campaign for a ye olde 3D N64-stylee platformer on Friday and have already blown past their goal.
They were looking for £175,000 to make Yooka-Laylee [official site], billing it as a "spiritual successor" to Banjo-Kazooie. With 42 days still to go they already have over £1.3 million in pledges. Lawks!
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