Category Archives: Gaming

Klonoa Phantasy Reverie Series: Asian region cosmetic DLC sees Klonoa wearing Bandai-Namco headgear

Image: Klonoa Phantasy Reverie Series. © BANDAI NAMCO Entertainment Inc.

Today is the day: The Klonoa Collection with the name Klonoa Phantasy Reverie Series appears in stores and lets the titles Klonoa: Door to Phantomile and Klonoa 2: Lunatea’s Veil shine in new splendor. DLCs ​​or other external content were not announced, so the following listings surprise the fan community. A DLC pack with cosmetic items is shown in the Microsoft store in Singapore, but also on the title ‘s official Japanese website . This allows Klonoa to wear various headgear from Bandai Namco Entertainment’s history. These include a Pac Man hat , a Taiko no Tatsujin mask and a katamari headgear   . Please take a look at the following picture:

Image: Klonoa Phantasy Reverie Headgear © Bandai Namco Entertainment

The DLC should currently cost 400 yen in Japan – that’s the equivalent of around 3$. However, a western release is not yet confirmed.

Now.gg introduces new Fungible Games Platform

Mobile cloud company Now.gg recently launched its Now.gg Fungible Games (NFG) mobile gaming platform. The NFG platform allows for “unbundling” of game assets such as game code, game events and game graphics, meaning that each asset can be owned by different people. The games are later reassembled via the cloud using “dynamic recomposition” and then delivered to the user.

Reasons for introducing NFG

“Games today are like movies. What if you could link them to matter, avatars, space and time,” says Now.gg Founder and CEO Rosen Sharma.

Matter means elements such as weapons in a game, avatars are the heroes we know, maps with portals act as space, for example, and time means the player’s time. With the computing power of the mobile cloud and the dynamic compositing of games, this is possible today.

Yang Guo, Founder and CEO of Heya added, “NFG is a groundbreaking new platform. It will change the way games are developed in the future and how games interact with their players. It also offers existing mobile developers a path to Web 3.0 that builds on their existing business. This would not have been possible without the mobile cloud.”

What does NFG bring to game developers?

Basically, NFG offers completely new possibilities in the development of games. For example, it becomes possible to split a game into different sectors such as code, events and graphics, whereby the ownership of these sectors can be divided among different people. In this way, existing games can be changed as desired, with the software querying individual sectors and reintegrating them in a modified form, supplementing them, or replacing them completely. The modified sectors can come from many different developers. In the end, it becomes the so-called fungible game.

There is also the possibility of a variety of new interactions between developers and players. For the latter it can e.g. For example, it can be very exciting to find new segments in games and integrate them into their gaming experience.

The mobile simulation game Heya is a current example of the use of NFG . The software can query the user’s wallet and in this context registers which assets he owns. He can then place these assets on the walls of a room and share the completely personalised, digital room with others. Experts view this merging of the real and virtual world with great fascination, as it offers undreamt-of possibilities for the future in the development of games that clearly stand out from what has been known and widespread up to now. In the future, the player will delve even deeper into the virtual world and the line between fiction and reality will continue to blur.

Recently, Yahaha Games secured a $50 million investment to build a metaverse with user-generated content that requires no programming skills from the user. So the future for gamer is going to be exciting.

Twilight Princess HD Remaster for Switch

Did you know that both the HD remaster of the Zelda classic Twilight Princess and Skyward Sword were not developed in Japan but in Australia ? At that time, Tantalus Media was commissioned by Nintendo to refresh the games and publish them for Wii U or, in the case of Skyward Sword , for Nintendo Switch . Almost all Wii U exclusive games have now been ported to the hybrid console, but the two Zelda HD remasters are still missing.

© Nintendo

Tantalus CEO Tom Crago has now confirmed in an interview that the studio has not received a request from Nintendo to port The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess HD to Nintendo Switch. However, the Australian developers would jump at the opportunity if the Japanese company placed the order.Citation

No [we weren’t asked about porting the game], and of course we would, but that’s not a priority for Nintendo – at least not in the conversations they’ve had with us.

The way we work with our friends there is that we take every opportunity to work on one of their titles. There is a constant dialogue between our two companies. Oftentimes, a little time elapses between games and other ideas are discussed, but in the case of Skyward Sword, some time passed and then the email came: “Would you be interested in bringing Skyward Sword to the [Nintendo] Switch ?’ The answer, of course, was, ‘Yes, we would be.’ And then we talked to Nintendo about what that might look like, and finally we got going. So it was similar in many ways to how Twilight Princess (on Wii U) came about.

Activision Blizzard sold

Stockholders of Activision Blizzard voted to sale for $68.7 Billion sale to Microsoft

At a special meeting, the stockholders of Activision Blizzard approved Microsoft’s proposal to sell the gaming company for $68.7 billion.

This all-cash transaction values the creator of games like Call of Duty, World of Warcraft and Candy Crush at $95 per share.

“Today’s overwhelmingly supportive vote by our stockholders confirms our shared belief that, combined with Microsoft, we will be even better positioned to create great value for our players,” said Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick.

He added that the deal would provide “even greater opportunities for our employees, and to continue our focus on becoming an inspiring example of a welcoming, respectful and inclusive workplace.” The company is facing numerous lawsuits for sexual harassment, retaliation and discriminatory workplace practices. Kotick himself has been accused of knowing for years about sexual misconduct and rape allegations at his company but not doing anything about it.

In light of these conflicts, Kotick announced a zero-tolerance policy against harassment and $250 million investment in recruiting gender diverse talent. At that time, only 23% of employees are identifying as women or non-binary people. But employee dissatisfaction has prevailed.

When the acquisition was announced in January, quality assurance testers at Raven Software, a division of Activision, had been on strike for five weeks. They protested the layoffs of 12 contractors, which came after over a month of consistent overtime work.

“We realized in that moment that our day-to-day work and our crucial role in the games industry as QA was not being taken into consideration,” Onah Rongstad, a QA tester at Raven Software, told TechCrunch at the time.

Game Boy Demake of Elden Ring

Elden Ring gets Game Boy Makeover in 8-bit

The colossal open world game Elden Ring full of unique bosses, quests, and secrets gets a 8-bit makeover version as a demake for the oldschool Game Boy in a fan project.

TouTube Screenshot,Elden Ring GB Demake- First Teaser, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zKBcFXEL7Wk

ShintendoTV, a Twitch user, announced the intention with a recent teaser trailer that blew up on the Elden Ring subreddit. It shows Tarnished rolling through 8-bit recreations of the early part of the game.

The demake is being made in GB Studio 3.0, something Shintendo calls “a really impressive and brand new piece of software” that’s still in development itself.

This means that certain features such as enemy pathfinding (enemies chasing after the player) aren’t available yet, but Shintendo is hoping to have a playable version of Limgrave completed, alongside a demo, by the end of May.

The demake is set to feature iconic locations and characters from Elden Ring including the Church of Elleh, where players will encounter Melina.

Shintendo said on stream that there’s “no real plan” behind development but they’re just going to make one tile after another, each featuring pixel-art versions of various parts of Elden Ring.

 IGN said: “Elden Ring is a massive iteration on what FromSoftware began with the Souls series, bringing its relentlessly challenging combat to an incredible open world that gives us the freedom to choose our own path.”