Mission: Hitman Changes

Fans of the Hitman series are undergoing some changes in order to create an “ever-expanding” world that could evolve over time. And this next step is set to allow IO Interactive realise the vision they’ve set out to achieve.

Hitman 3 will become HITMAN World of Assassination, and will include access to Hitman 1 and Hitman 2. Those who already own Hitman 3 will get a free upgrade to HITMAN World of Assassination. This also means that World of Assassination will be the only single option to start playing.

“There will be no more confusion over which edition to buy, what content you own, how to redeem Legacy packs or import locations, etc. We’re done with that,” says IO Interactive.

These changes will come into effect on the 26th of January, 2023.

Sonic’s Dad Indicted for Insider Trading

The blue hedgehog’s co-creator, Yuji Naka, along with a former Square Enix employee, Taisuke Sasaki, have both been formally indicted after their arrest in November for alleged insider trading.

Naka has been determined to have confidential information about Square Enix’s plans to develop a Final Fantasy spin-off, and used this information to buy ¥144.7 million yen of company stock, or $1.6 million AUD, knowing that the announcement would cause the stock value to rise.

Square Enix has stated that they are fully committed to working with authorities as the investigation continues. It is unclear when Naka and Sasaki will stand trial.

What’s This? It’s Sephiroth with the Chair!

Kenny Omega, a famous wrestler joined the fray at Japan’s Wrestle Kingdom event in a Sephiroth cosplay, even walking out to his theme song, “One Winged Angel ”.

Kenny Omega has spent a few years in America in AEW, a newer competitor to WWE. Omega however returned to Wrestle Kingdom, which is exactly what it sounds like. And yes, his walk was exactly as cool as you imagine it would be, featuring Sephiroth’s wing, giant screens, and pyrotechnics. Omega also won the match.

Logan’s NFTs

YouTuber Logan Paul had developed a “really fun game that makes you money”, CryptoZoo, where you buy currency to spend on egg NFTs that hatch. You can breed these animals to make hybrids, and eventually you’re supposed to be able to cash out money. Members of Paul’s team ended up selling their currency early to make millions, while fans ended up losing thousands.

Logan Paul did address accusations of CryptoZoo being a scam by attempting to discredit his critics, such as investigative YouTuber Stephen “Coffeezilla” Findeisen, who had spent a year looking into CryptoZoo, as well as a slew of scams in the crypto space.

I don’t want to talk about this anymore.

And now for some upcoming games!

January 10

• Flash Party (PC)

January 11

• Children of Silentown (PC, PS4, XBO, Switch)
• Kandria (PC)

January 12

• Gatewalkers (PC)
• One Piece Odyssey (PC)
• Rogue AI Simulator (PC)
• Terror of Hemasaurus (Switch)
• Vengeful Guardian: Moonrider (PC, PS4, Switch)

That’s it this week in gaming news

Join Zed Games in the chaos that is New Years Game Resolutions and a Triple Threat review from Paul where he reviews, not one but THREE games! Plus the last in Gaming News for 2022.

Goat’s stepping on toes, or going for the viral takedown?
Developers of Goat Simulator 3, Coffee Stain Studios, have been slapped with a takedown notice from Rockstar Games for using footage from the September GTA 6 leaks. The now-removed video featured an interview with Shaun, a professional NPC, where he talked about his many experiences as an NPC in games, including in the leaked GTA 6 footage. After being removed from Twitter, it was replaced with a tweet from the company with the following gif…

Act of stupidity or marketing genius? You decide.

Why all the Updates Nintendo?
You may have noticed the recent slew of updates hitting some old and new favourites from Nintendo, coming with the patch notes;

“Several issues have been addressed to improve the gameplay experience.”

These patches have been pushed for many games such as Mario Kart 7 for 3DS, Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, Animal Crossing: New Horizons, Splatoon 2&3, ARMS, Super Mario Maker 2, Nintendo Switch Sports and are probably needed for many more. This patch is actually to prevent an exploit called “ENLBufferPwn” which allowed full takeover of the system without detection through security holes in online play, allowing access to saved payment information, as well as in-built peripherals such as cameras and microphones. The worst part? While the issue is relatively easy to patch on the Switch, the Wii U and 3DS eShops’ ability to roll out patches for this and future exploits will close in Feb 2023, leaving any vulnerability open for future exploitation.

Aurora taking Sky: Children of Light into the Stratosphere.
In a recent interview Jenova Chen, founder and CEO of Thatgamecompany, creators of Sky: Children of Light, revealed that more than 1.6 million players have attended the Aurora Concert that first occurred on December 8. This has been achieved through the intense work of the programmers and servers to maintain instances of around 4000 players, each with emote interactivity to the entire instance and a text based proximal chat with players in their row. Contrasted to other games’ concerts, such as Fortnite with only 40 people per room, highlights the near year of work of the team at Thatgamecompany to make it happen. The show officially called “The Musical Voyage” contains several performances from Aurora where players are collectively involved in the visual space. The performance has been playing every 4 hours since, with the last show to play January 1^st.

Now, normally I’d do games coming out… but since there are none, I thought I’d list some of the games that Shutdown this year.

Long standing tactical shooter America’s Army
Released 4^th July 2002,
Shutdown 5^th May 2022.

MOBA that couldn’t break League of Legends’ hold Heroes of Newerth
Released 12^th May 2010,
Shutdown 20^th June 2022.

Fantasy MMO Tera, who’s developers just wanted to move on,
Released 25^th January 2011,
Shutdown 30^th June 2022.

Car sim Project Cars 1 & 2 succumbed to car and track licence expiry date blues,
With one released 6^th May 2015,
Shutdown 3^rd October 2022

And two released 21^st September 2017,
Shutdown 21^st September 2022

Overwatch
Released 3^rd May 2016,
Shutdown 3^rd October 2022

Just a year and a bit of life, the MMO Crowfall fell,
Released 6^th July 2021,
Shutdown 22^nd November 2022

Free-2-Play Super Bomberman R Online bombed out
Released 1^st September 2020,
Shutdown 1^st December 2022

Fuser, the Harmonix successor to Guitar Hero and Rock Band and reviewed by our own Paul, just didn’t hit the bigtime
Released 10^th November 2020,
Shutdown 19^th December 2022

Square Enix’s Final Fantasy kart game, Chocobo GP… not quite gone, but the store and purchased mithril will be worthless past the shutdown date
Released 12^th January 2022,
Last Update 21^st December 2022,
Shutdown 1^st June 2023

Literally every game that was released for Google Stadia
Released 19^th November 2019,
Slated to be shutdown 18^th January 2023.

That’s all this week in gaming news.

This week Zed Games brings you the chaos of Shiny Friends for your holiday season! With Gaming News and the team’s Games of the Year! Brought to you from the mouth holes of Hazel, Zahra, & Caroline and beamed directly into your government mandated mind control chips.

Death Stranding Movie

Hideo Kojima, hot on the heels of his announcement of Death Stranding 2 at the Game Awards has announced that his studio Kojima Productions will be teaming up with Hammerstone Studios to develop a Death Stranding film. Hammerstone Studio head Alex Lebovici, who recently produced the horror hit Barbarian, has stated the film “will be something far more intimate and grounded” which may be Kojima’s greatest challenge yet!

Announcements at the Game Awards

Last week’s game awards brought with it a slew of new game announcements. Some of the bigger titles included Ken Levine’s first game since Bioshock Infinite titled Judas. A new IP that very much follows in the vein of Bioshock but now it’s about comic space cowboys.

A sequel to the 2018 indie juggernaut Hades was revealed. Hades II is planned for an early access release next year featuring a new protagonist Melinoe, the daughter of Hades and Persephone. The game will deal with the dawn of witchcraft in a battle against the titan Chronos.

With Bayonetta 3 still fresh Platinum Games have announced a new game in the series. This time taking part before the trilogy. With a new fixed perspective and art style Bayonetta Origins: Cereza and the Lost Demon will be out on March 17 2023.

The Celeste team Extremely OK Games have announced their next game, Earthsword. Playing to their strengths you can look forward to the exploration heavy, pixel art platformer in 2024.

Many other new games were shown off. Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, Armoured Core VI: Fires of Rubicon, Crash Team Rumble, Hellboy: Web of Wyrd, Remnant 2 and Transformers: Reactivate just to name a few. We’ll be posting many of the trailers over on the Zed Games Facebook page.

The upcoming Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League was also revealed to have one last performance from voice actor Kevin Conroy who passed away on November 10^th this year. He has been voicing Batman for the last 30 years

Epic’s half a billion fine

In a dispute with the US Federal Trade Commission, Epic games agreed to pay $520 million dollars to settle violations of the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act and deceptive practices that tricked players into purchases in the videogame Fortnite.  The COPPA violation at $275 million is the largest penalty ever levied by the FTC for such a violation and Epic will need to change default settings in game to better protect children and teens along with policies for their protection. The second settlement will be used to refund players that were affected by unintended purchases due to Epic’s practices.

The majority of these issues were resolved in 2018 but if you believe you’re eligible for a refund you can find information of the FTC website and Epic’s statement on the settlement.

This year Fortnite has generated $5.8 billion in revenue.

Duke Nukem lives again! (Oh wait that’s Blood)

Did you remember to bet on Duke? Fallen 90’s video game icon sees two unofficial releases this week.  The Duke Nukem Forever 2001 Restoration Project has released the first slice of their mod for the leaked development copy of the abandoned 2001 version of Duke Nukem Forever. The project aims to complete the game and make it fully playable. You can find the project on Mod DB.

The other surprise Duke release is that of the cancelled Duke Nukem: Endangered Species which put the blonde action star into a game-hunting style title. The game by Action Forms Ltd was cancelled in 2001 and many of the assets were then used to develop Vivisector: Beast Within. A prototype of Endangered Species has been released online and can be found at thedatadungeon.com.

Nintendo celebrates Christmas with Indies!

Nintendo has been running a Christmas YouTube advent event where they announce 4 indie titles a day for 5 days with each day so far containing an instant release.  We have seen announcements for Risk of Rain Returns (a rework of the original Risk of Rain), The Punchuin (a platformer about a boxing penguin from the team that brought us Fast RMX and The Tourist) and Potion Craft among others. It is heavily rumored that the final two days will include a release of the hotly anticipated Queensland developed Golf Story follow up, Sports Story. Will it make it out for Christmas? Let’s find out.

Carmack Leaves Meta

The legendary coder and founder of id software John Carmack has left his position at Oculus, I mean Facebook, I mean Meta. His internal farewell message was leaked in part to the media so he posted it publicly in response.

“This is the end of my decade in VR, I have mixed feelings.”

“Quest 2 almost exactly what I wanted to see from the beginning”

“We have a ridiculous amount of people and resources, but we constantly self-sabotage and squander effort. There is no way to sugar coat this; I think our organization is operating at half the effectiveness that would make me happy.”

“VR can bring value to most of the people in the world, and no company is better positioned to do it than Meta. Maybe it actually is possible to get there by just plowing ahead with current practices, but there is plenty of room for improvement.

You can read his full statement on John Carmack’s Facebook page.

Carmack has moved onto his own startup Keen Technologies, which is working on artificial intelligence.

This week Maylee leads the charge on Zed Games, with Cameron taking over the airwaves for this weeks gaming news! Then Caroline leads the way with their totally impartial review/rant/discussion of the recently bug filled release of Pokemon Scarlet & Violet.

The Not Last of Us

In news that will come as a shock to absolutely nobody on Earth, reliable rumour sources indicate that The Last of Us Part III is under early development.

Naughty Dog are currently working on Factions, a stand-alone massive open world multiplayer shooter based on the world of The Last of Us.

For those who were fans of Naughty Dog’s Uncharted series, word is that the IP is being handled by a different developer.

No news on the potential release date of The Last of Us Part III, or the release date of its inevitable re-release on PlayStation 6, has been made official.

Microsoft’s Call of Lawyers

The long-awaited acquisition of Activision Blizzard by Microsoft is facing more legal wrangles, with antitrust lawsuits from the U.S. Government standing in the way.

Central to the issue is Call of Duty, Activision’s annual war-loving military shooter.

The concern is that if Microsoft were to make Call of Duty exclusive to the Xbox platform, it would seriously damage Sony’s position in the market.

Xbox boss Phil Spencer has pledged that Call of Duty will remain available on Sony’s platforms for at least 10 years, and even come out on Nintendo platforms.

He didn’t say Switch specifically, just Nintendo platforms, so we’re just going to assume that the next Call of Duty is coming out for the original Game Boy.

Dwarf Fortress Finally Comes To Steam

Massively popular indie hit Dwarf Fortress has finally made the move to Steam on PC.

What makes this story special is that the original version of the rogue-like fortress building game has been in active development for 20 years, and has been a free download for all this time.

But what do you get on Steam that you couldn’t previously? How about modern innovations like “mouse controls” “tutorials” or even “graphics”?

Already the game has been a huge hit on the sales charts, with many long-time players buying the game just to say thanks to the developers for working on the game for so long.

Now that’s commitment.

Game Awards Gave Some Games Game Awards Awards

The Game Awards, the industry’s favourite three hour festival of new ads for upcoming games, was held last week in Los Angeles.

Some of the big winners include Mario + Rabbids: Sparks of Hope for best Strategy Game, Stray for Best Independent Game, and Elden Ring picking up a slew of awards including Game of the Year.

Congratulations to former Zedgames host Alanah Pearce for her writing in God of War Ragnarok getting the Best Narrative award, which just goes to show there’s hope for all of us.

Upcoming releases:

December 15:
Resident Evil 7 – Switch
River City Girls 2 – PlayStation 5 ,Xbox Series X/S, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Switch, PC
The Crackpet Show – Switch, PC

December 17:
Terrestrial – Commodore 64

December 20:
Turnip Boy Commits Tax Evasion – PS4

On Zed Games this week Rani unexpectedly takes the hotseat and runs the show while Caroline gives us the week in gaming news, Zahra tells us all about The Entropy Centre, and our dynamic duo also regales us with tales of GO423!

Games Awards!

The 2022 Game awards will be held on Friday December 9 at 10.30am – 1.30pm Australian Eastern Standard Time.  There are 31 award categories including Game of the Year, Best Indie, Most Anticipated Game, Innovation in Accessibility and Best Art Direction.

In addition to this there is the game awards future class, ‘50 inspiring individuals who represent the bright, bold and inclusive future of video games’.

Composer Maize Wallen and designer Chantal Ryan are two Australians that have been included in the 2022 Game Awards Future class list.

Chantal Ryan is the Director of the game development studio ‘We have always lived in the Forest’ and produces ‘experimental narrative games and systems built upon disruptive language technologies’.

Maize Wallen has produced audio for games such as God Fall, Receiver 2, Wayward Strand and Cosmic Express.  Their focus is 3D spatialised audio and dynamic music.

https://thegameawards.com/future-class

Pokemon scarlet and violet get patched

A whopping 1GB patch was made available on the 1st of December – Nintendo’s support website stating that the patch includes season 1 of ranked battles, fixing an issue that caused music to not play correctly during the elite four and top champion battle and lastly, other select bug fixes.

They have also acknowledged that many players may encounter issues that affect the games performance.  Given that this has been the buggiest pokemon game ever released, this is an understatement.

https://en-americas-support.nintendo.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/60277/p/989#v110

VR Showcase Winter 2022

The Upload Gaming Showcase 2022 steamed this morning and showcased ‘exciting game updates, announcements and exclusive reveals’.  Some of these are:

Call of the Sea VR, by Out of the Blue, a mysterious adventure game where you solve puzzles and maybe become some sort of sea monster? Intriguing!

Across the Valley, by FusionPlay is a VR farming simulator for those who want their cow milking to be more immersive.

Maskmaker by Innerspace VR is a puzzle game where you play a mask maker’s apprentice.

Survival Nation by Wenkly Studio is an outdoor adventure sim with added zombies.

And The Signifier by Playmestudio is a detective thriller that has you using victims’ dreams to solve crimes.

https://uploadvr.com/upload-vr-showcase-winter-2022/

And now for the releases!

December 8

Chained Echoes for the PC, Playstation, Xbox and Switch, NecroBouncer on PC, The Rumble Fish 2 for PC Playstation, Xbox and Switch, Witch On The Holy Night for Playstation 4 and Switch.

December 9

Dragon Quest Treasures for the Switch, Jitsu Squad for Playstation and the Switch.

December 12

Wavetale on PC, Playstation, Xbox and Switch

December 13

Crisis Core –Final Fantasy 7– Reunion on PC, Playstation, Xbox and Switch, High on Life for the PC and Xbox Series X.

December 14

The Witcher 3 comes to Playstation 5 and the Xbox Series X.

And that’s all this week in gaming news!

On Zed Games tonight, Maylee brings the week in gaming news while Rani and Cameron expresses concern about Zahra’s review of Sonic Frontiers, with Paul adding his thoughts on the blue blur as well as telling us all about Evil West!