Grave Gamer News & Views — news

The Rumor Mill Points to Early September Reveal for “PS4 Neo”

Sony has already gone on the record the week before E3, confirming the existence of a higher-end PlayStation 4 unit decked out with 4K support and more powerful specs. But the buck stopped there when it came to official details on the impending console called “Neo.”

According to reports from both Vice Gaming and Gameblog, however, we’re less than a month away from an unveiling. Rather than getting an information lowdown at next month’s Tokyo Game Show as some have expected – Sony’s domestic home of Japan, if you needed reminding, dad – the company is said to be hosting an announcement event in New York City on September 7th.

The upgraded PS4′s potential specs have been some of the very first rumors tossed about the internet. Purportedly equipped with an improved GPU, higher clock speed, and boosted memory bandwidth, this PS4K is Tim “The Tool Man” Taylor’s dream rendition of the console (”MORE POWER!”). With PlayStation VR ready to drop onto consumers’ heads this Fall, the required framerate and stability needed to foster a non-projectile vomiting environment would call for a hardware improvement exactly like the Neo – makes one wonder if we’ll see a Neo/PSVR bundle announced at the event.

How it stacks up against Microsoft’s own souped up version of their Xbox One, Project Scorpio, is to be determined. With Sony seemingly hitting the market first, many have speculated the Scorpio will be more powerful than the Neo. If the date holds true, we’ve only a month to keep slinging speculation into the ether.

Nintendo Shuts Down Fan Remake of Metroid II (Happy 30th Anniversary!)

Coinciding Samus Aran’s 30th birthday, a fan made remake of Metroid II was released for download hereabouts under the name AM2R: Return of Samus. Project AM2R lovingly remastered the 1991 Game Boy classic with graphics closer to the SNES’ Super Metroid while infusing it with the snappy gameplay of latter-day sequel Metroid: Zero Mission. Featuring redrawn sprites, updated enemy AI, brand new areas to explore, and a better interface than the colorless Game Boy could house, AM2R is a better remake than some of the tepid “remasterings” publishers shit out into stores these days. 

Naturally, Nintendo responded to this fan celebration of their renown, yet dormant, franchise the only sensible way they could: they slapped the remake’s web host with a DMCA takedown notice.

Now, Nintendo absolutely has every right to protect their brand in any way they see fit. I’m not contesting that. (As Game Informer points out, the company is, in fact, still selling the original Metroid II on 3DS to this very day.)

But fans have grown impatient with the series. The outstanding Metroid Prime games have been quiet since 2007, and despite big league developers like Double Fine and Insomniac releasing their own brilliant renditions of the “Metroidvania” genre very recently – Headlander and Song of the Deep respectively – Nintendo, bewilderingly, has not. Just look at the upcoming Metroid Prime Federation Force – a title that shares no visual semblance with the series at large and focuses on gunplay instead of exploration.

Nintendo, we’re hungry for a game like AM2R and this shutdown will only continue to starve us out. If you won’t let us satiate ourselves on fan projects then it’s about time you fed us yourselves.

(Note: a torrent link is provided on the site as well. The DMCA is filed against the web host but anyone that downloads the torrent can serve as the host. Get it while you can. Pretty doubtful it’ll stay up indefinitely).

Here’s the First Gameplay Trailer from Arkane’s Prey Reboot

And it’s looking incredibly promising. I was on the fence about a complete reworking of the franchise. All right, “franchise” may be loftier a word than this IP deserves considering it has one 2006 release and a completely scrapped sequel to its name. But I dug the original Prey’s premise of a modern Native American falling on his ancestry’s ancient powers to battle a threat from the stars. It had style, a Quake-y atmosphere and physics-bending fuckery even before Portal became a household name.

But Arkane’s on to something here. A giant space station, an invading alien species akin to a “living ecology,” a mix-up of upgradable future tech and Plasmid-like extraterrestrial powers… This is a reimagining with serious imagination. Sure, we’re not getting the “alien bounty hunter” successor Prey 2 was proposed to be – and my heart still breaks each time I look upon the stars and wonder what could have been – but this? This might do just fine.

Arkane Studios’ Prey is slated for a 2017 release on PS4, PC, and Xbox One.

Holy shit. That’s the best way to sum up the night. Not wanting to break their streak of conquering E3, Sony did what it does best and let the games take center stage. In that pursuit, they literally just let game after fucking game drop on our heads. We were bombarded by games. I have the bruises to prove it. It was magical. It was “Hideo Kojima dropping a new game” magical.

Sony, once again, made...

Capcom Reveals Resident Evil 7: A First-Person Survival Horror Game (in VR!)

Sony’s E3 conference was such a whirlwind, it’s hard to keep my thoughts straight. They essentially shoved a funnel down our throats and didn’t stop feeding us game after amazing game.

In the deluge of video game delights, Sony slyly announced Resident Evil 7, a brand new chapter in the storied horror series that reinvents itself from the ground up. Not only are we back to hard horror, our perspective has shifted to the first-person just to shove our noses in all the photo-realistic creepiness – brought to you by Capcom’s own RE Engine, tailor-made for the game.

You can even immerse yourself in the horror on a whole ‘nother level with full PlayStation VR integration. Sony fans will also be treated to first dibs on the game’s demo, Resident Evil 7: Beginning Hour, where you navigate a real fixer-upper of a cottage (to put it lightly) in events that lead into the main game. PS Plus members can access the demo now, apparently (as of this writing, on the East Coast, it hasn’t populated on the PlayStation Store… goddamnit).

Now this might just be the all out horror game we’ve been clamoring for since things took a boulder-punching turn in 2008. Either way, we don’t have too long of a wait to find out: Resident Evil 7 releases for PS4, Xbox One, and Windows PC January 24th, 2017.