Well, it’s here – the Super NES Classic Edition / SNES Mini has arrived, bringing with it 21 games including the first official release of Star Fox 2. It’s pretty much exactly what you’d expect – a cute and utterly charming little gadget that does a great job emulating iconic SNES games.
Nintendo, pleasingly, has also stated on multiple occasions that it’s learnt from the stock problems that blighted the NES Mini. It’s claimed that launch stock allocation (in North America, at least) for the SNES Classic is greater than the entire original run of its predecessor. On top of that it’s stated that manufacturing will continue into 2018, and then the NES will make a comeback next summer. It helps that both systems use practically identical hardware, a clever logistical move by the big N.
Of course, companies (including Nintendo) make promises all the time that don’t quite come to bear in reality. Initial pre-ordering in the UK was a bit of a farce due to stock disappearing seemingly minutes after unannounced listings appeared, and even this week a major retailer had issues with its website when buyers rushed to secure a fresh batch of pre-orders. Most that were very determined in the UK seemed to be able to nab a unit based upon our conversations with friends and colleagues, though anyone looking more casually may have been baffled by the absence of available orders outside of those brief, chaotic pre-order windows through the Summer.
In North America it’s been a bit different. Online pre-orders were rare and very brief, with more of a focus on launch day purchases. Plenty jumped into queues early at stores or watched websites closely yesterday (29th September); the question is, was there stock to satisfy the most eager of buyers? The NES Mini’s release was such a mess (in terms of distribution) that many were left disappointed; hopefully it’s been better this time.
Well, we want to know how it’s been for you trying to buy a SNES Mini. Has there been enough stock to reward patience and persistence, or have units been too elusive and small in number? Have you been able to set yourself up for a weekend of 16-bit gaming bliss?
Let us know how your quest for a SNES Mini has gone in the polls and comments below.
Taiwanese developer Rayark may best be known for its music games on mobile platforms, but it was also responsible for one of the best surprises in the Switch’s launch lineup with VOEZ. Brought to the Switch by publisher Flyhigh Works, this colourful title showed how well once-free-to-play rhythm games could work on Nintendo’s handheld wonder, and now Flyhigh Works is back to bring another well-respected Rayark rhythm game to the eShop: DEEMO. Stylish and fun, with a wonderful soundtrack and compelling narrative, Deemo is every bit the hit that VOEZ was — and this Switch port is the best version yet.
Our story begins with a young girl named Alice who falls, Wonderland-like, through a trapdoor in the sky, and down into the castle home of a mysterious pianist named Deemo. With an indistinct face and long, slender limbs, Deemo seems like something out of a hazy dream, and he may well be — everything’s delightfully surreal this side of the rabbit hole, including the large tree stump on which his piano rests. As Deemo plays, the tree suddenly springs to life and begins to grow around the piano, higher and higher, and towards Alice’s entry point in the sky. So the two set to making music, in the hopes of growing her a way to get back home.
It’s a lovely, melancholy tale, and to help them on their way and watch it unfold all you have to do is pick a song and get playing. Deemo opens with only a few tracks to choose from, but as the tree shoots up — encouraged ever upward as you play —you’ll quickly unlock many, many more. Songs are organized into different ‘packs’, and you’ll earn new ones by nudging the tree to certain meter milestones or by clearing specific songs — there are even a few to be found by searching point-and-click-style in Deemo’s ethereal treehouse.
There are over 200 tracks in all, and if music is the heart of a rhythm game, Deemo has a great, big, wonderful heart. The selection is fantastic, and leans heavily on indie composers and producers from Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, and Hong Kong; this isn’t the kind of rhythm game where you’ll know the songs ahead of time, but you’ll absolutely find plenty to fall in love with along the way.
Deemo’s instrument of choice means there’s a strong focus on piano in the instrumentation, but the genres go well beyond what you might expect. There’s instrumental and vocal J-pop, rock, and dance; cabaret, lounge, and light jazz; classical, Asian folk, and dubstep; bossa nova, ragtime, and club bangers. The variety is wonderful, and aside from a tiny number of exceptions — there’s a bit of generic-sounding electronica — it’s top quality, memorable music.
It’s also a blast to play along to. Deemo’s touchscreen-only rhythm gameplay is simple and straightforward: notes fall from the top of the screen, and when they reach the horizontal line stretched along the bottom, you’ll tap where they hit. There aren’t any predefined ‘lanes’ in Deemo; rather, notes of varying widths trickle down from the top at angles, and you’ll move your fingers to meet them wherever they may fall on the line. Aside from the basic black ‘tap notes’, there are also yellow ‘slide notes’, which come in rhythmically-tight-knit groups; you can either treat these as taps or — as is pretty much essential in faster songs — slide a finger across the line to catch them all in quick succession.
For both types of notes the closer you are to perfect in your timing the better grade (and visual feedback) you’ll get for the hit, from “Charming” (orange) down to “Non-Charming” (green) and a “Miss” (blue). You’ll earn a percentage score at the end for how well you did, with higher scores sending the tree skyward faster.
Each song can be played in Easy, Normal, or Hard difficulties (with individual 1-10 challenge ratings for each song), and the charts themselves are well thought out and fun to learn. The piano basis for most songs means you won’t see many crazy kinetics or screen-hopping acrobatics à la VOEZ — Deemo charts actually mirror real-life piano fingerings quite closely, so if you’ve ever played a keyboard instrument the chord rolls, parallel thirds, and hand-over-hands you practiced will come in handy here — but it does really feel like you’re playing the song, and there are plenty of intricate passages to master.
The difficulty scales well too; easy charts generally pick out the most salient anchor points of a melody to follow, and should be accessible for rhythm newcomers while still providing a sense of accomplishment. Normal charts are tough-but-fun runs with chords and arpeggios, and Hard is a good challenge for rhythm aficionados, with plenty of parallel movement and every syncopation, trill, and grace note intact. The only issue we had was with the Hard mode charts for certain solo piano pieces; the more expressive of these can involve lots of micro-variations in tempo, all of which are reflected in the note patterns, and it seems unreasonable to ask players to essentially sightread the rubato.
No matter the tempo of the piece, however, you can also control the speed at which the notes fall independently of the difficulty, and this makes a huge difference. Speeding up the charts can make otherwise dense patterns easier to read on harder songs, and also means more tolerant timing — if you’re finding things harder than you’d expect, we recommend revving the speed up a few notches.
One of the reasons Deemo is so much fun to play on Switch is that it’s such a great fit for the system, and we mean that literally. Having spent time with the mobile and PlayStation Vita versions as well, the Switch’s touchscreen feels like the best way to play — the screen is perfectly sized to comfortably accommodate two hands side-by-side, letting you put two or three fingers from each one in charge of a different side of the chart. In comparison to the sometimes cramped finger-athletics on other devices, playing Deemo like this on Switch feels effortless and smooth, and more like playing an instrument than plunking away at a screen. Our preferred way to play is with the Switch lying flat on a table, but we also found it comfortable in tablet mode in the lap; button play is planned in a future update, but for now, this in an exclusively undocked experience.
The screen size isn’t the only improvement Deemo’s Switch port can boast over its brethren; this version also has our favourite progression system of the bunch. The mobile and Vita versions are both quite grindy, doling out new songs at a slow enough drip that you’ll find yourself replaying the same tracks several times on different difficulties to make progress on the tree. While replaying songs is certainly part of the fun of rhythm games, it’s less fun to have to flounder your way through Hard Mode charts before you’re ready just to progress, and happily the Switch version drops these free-to-play gatings in favour of a much more generous model. New songs and packs are unlocked faster than you can play through them, and we reached the end credits — though far from the end of the adventure! — without playing a single song twice. This also means you’ll be able to see the story through to the end even if you can’t hack Hard mode, which is a nice improvement over VOEZ.
Comparison with VOEZ also brings up one of Deemo’s few shortcomings to the forefront, however: the presentation in the music game itself is quite drab. That’s not to say that Deemo’s a dull game; on the contrary, the backdrops to the point-and-click adventure portion are gorgeous, and the key art that accompanies each song in the selection menu is fun and fantastically varied — we loved seeing Deemo and Alice in all different sorts of art styles and adventures. The problem is that once you get into the actual rhythm gameplay, that personality disappears, replaced by a sepia-tone score with the song title written out matter-of-factly in between the staves. There are admittedly some nice touches within that frame — like the second piano part accompanying your own floating out from the rhythm line in small shadowy notes — but when you play more than a few charts in a row, the lack of colour and visual variety becomes readily apparent.
Other than that, however, we don’t have any real complaints with Deemo. While this Switch port lacks the animated cutscenes and extra epilogue of the Vita version, for us, the hundred-odd extra tracks and much-improved progression system here easily eclipse the omissions. Audio quality is excellent, and there are ample options to calibrate input timing and adjust response sound volume — we found turning it off entirely made solo piano pieces much more pleasant. We’d love the ability to mark songs as favourites and sort by difficulty, but that’s a minor nitpick, and the current pack-based arrangement is much better for thematic browsing than a single massive tracklist.
It could be argued that the Splatoon 2 Splatfests have been a little hit and miss in terms of themes, but we’d suggest the next in line is rather from the bottom of the barrel – or the bowl, to be more precise.
Next weekend’s Splatfest is all about Toilet Roll positioning, at least in Europe (we’re waiting for Nintendo of America to confirm its theme, but it’ll likely be the same). No, really, it is.
Amazingly, some are pointing out an illustration from in the game that may have inspired it.
Is this whimsical and quirky or just a bit of a sh… bad idea? Let us know what you think in the comments.
One would not think that an RPG centered around golf would really make a whole lot of sense, but Camelot managed to nail the idea back in the ’90s when it released Mario Golf on the Game Boy Color. Though it’s a rather niche release in the plumber’s past, it clearly inspired the developers of Golf Story to expand on the concept, and honestly, there’s a whole lot to love here.
Golf Story picks up with your main character being taught how to golf by his dad, with an audience of geese to watch his performance, and this works as a nice way of introducing the main mechanics to you. The story then jumps ahead twenty years and sees your character looking to achieve his dream of becoming a professional golfer. The story then takes you on a journey through an increasingly ridiculous array of golf courses in a quest to be the best and to prove yourself to everyone.
One thing that Golf Story absolutely gets right is the charming and witty writing of the characters. Not only does everyone appreciate a good underdog story like this, but there’s a very dry tongue-in-cheek kind of humour that runs through the whole thing that calls to mind the style of EarthBound. Whether it be one of your rivals early on who refuses to actually golf in favor of the “simulator”, or a caveman that repeatedly mistakes your character for a small child, the narrative has a wry, lighthearted style that’ll keep you playing just for the characters, not to mention the great gameplay.
Though golf is central to the whole experience, gameplay is not simply a matter of hitting the green; that’s only a fraction of the experience. The overworld is riddled with things like secret buttons and holes that you can hit with your golf ball which can award you experience points or money, or unlock a secret area. Along with this, NPCs with sidequests are everywhere, and they have a vast array of requests. One might see you trying to land a certain number of balls inside a ring by bouncing the ball at least once off of a turtle, while another might ask you to run around the course under a certain time limit. You never know what’s coming next, and it’s rather impressive how creative the developers can get with quest objectives.
Experience earned from doing activities can be spent on improving various facets of your character’s swing, such as the length or how drastically you can shape the shot. In addition to this, money earned from winning games can be spent on new equipment pieces that add to your stats or bestow special abilities, like increased proficiency in bunkers. It all feeds into a rewarding gameplay loop that keeps you hooked and always wanting more. You explore and do quests so you can improve your character, which then allows you to do more exploration and questing.
Aside from all the RPG trappings, there’s a great golf game in here, too. The mechanics of the golfing itself are simple to pick up and quite arcade-like in nature. You play a little minigame every time you take a shot where you need to stop a slider on a bar in the right place. It gets more nuanced, however, when you use mechanics that allow you to specifically place the ball. You can choose how much power you want to put into the shot on the same trajectory and can also decide where the club connects with the ball, allowing you to add spin. Take into account the slope of terrain and wind, and you’ve got a golfing experience that’s got plenty of depth, but boasts easy-to-pick-up mechanics.
Presentation is nearly as stellar as the gameplay. Sprite work is exactly what you’d expect out of a 16-bit game and there are plenty of colours used in the environments, but there’s little here that will wow you in terms of visuals. Much the same could be said of the soundtrack, which goes for a low-key, jazzy vibe. It goes well with the general atmosphere of Golf Story and is unobtrusive, but there’s not much on offer in the way of catchy or memorable tunes.
Multiplayer also gets some representation here, and its utilized to great effect. Though there isn’t online, you can play with a friend locally in Quick Play — a mode which strips away the story and RPG elements and has you play on the game’s main courses, which are unlocked by progressing the story. Fortunately, split JoyCon multiplayer is supported, and the control scheme translates perfectly to the decreased real estate. Sure, it’s a much less feature-rich mode than the main story, but it’s fun for some quick rounds of golf with a friend and goes well with the broader idea of the Switch. It also illustrates perfectly the depth of the game’s golfing mechanics; even with the RPG side removed, Golf Story is a lot of fun.
Conclusion
All told, Golf Story is a surprisingly gripping game, hooking you with fantastic gameplay, loads of content, and a well-written script. This is one that’ll have you coming back for many hours in the story mode alone, and the multiplayer does a good job of expanding on this with even more replayability. We would highly recommend Golf Story to anyone looking for something a little different. There’s a whole lot to love here, and if you’re a fan of RPGs or golf games, this is a must buy.
That last bit is what makes this update worth noting: according to Amazon, Lumberyard’s new EMotion FX animation system and Script Canvas visual scripting toolset (seen below) are meant to fully replace the CryAnimation and Flow Graph (respectively) toolsets Lumberyard devs have been using thus far.
It’s another bit of distance Lumberyard is putting between itself and Crytek’s CryEngine, upon which Amazon’s own engine is built. Earlier this month Amazon made clear plans to depreciate a lot of the bits and bobs of CryEngine that are hanging around Lumberyard, and this latest update includes a “CryEngine Converter Tool” meant to help devs convert old CryEntities into Lumberyard’s new Component Entity format.
There’s a few hundred more little updates and changes in beta v. 1.11, and you can read about them all in greater depth over on the Lumberyard blog.
Within Xbox Customer Experience and Support, our goal is to make gamers happy and to help them get the most out of their Xbox experience. Whether it’s discovering new ways to play, learning tips for maximizing the features you already use, or finding help when something goes wrong, the new Xbox Assist app has you covered.
Xbox Assist is personalized to help you optimize your Xbox experience for the games you play and the way you play them. You’ll find guides to new features, how-to videos, suggestions for features that might be valuable to you and a lot more. You already know there are many ways to play with Xbox, and Xbox Assist will help you find and take advantage of even more.
On top of getting the most out of your Xbox, Xbox Assist will provide personalized notifications and tips based on system, service and account status. For example, Xbox Assist can prompt you to take advantage of unclaimed benefits such as free game downloads; explain how to automatically download games so you can start playing as quickly as possible; remap buttons on your Elite controller so that you get the most out of it; and notify you if you are running out of storage space. Xbox Assist also enables you to easily browse support content and launch troubleshooters for common issues, directly from your console. And you’ll be able to check the status of Xbox Live services and know what’s going on with the features and services that matter to you.
Xbox Assist is currently available in preview for select Xbox Insider rings and releasing broadly later this Fall as a replacement for Xbox Help. With the upcoming release of Xbox Assist on the Xbox One family of devices, including Xbox One X, you will have personalized help content and tools on a console-friendly experience, right at your fingertips.
Outside of Xbox Assist, we’re also happy to share that, in partnership with the Microsoft Disability Answer Desk, Xbox support for Accounts and Billing is now available in American Sign Language (ASL) for Xbox gamers in the United States with hearing loss or who are deaf. This new offering is integral to the spirt of Xbox in that it displays our dedication to all Xbox customers and helps ensure we’re making Xbox a place where all gamers can have fun and enjoy their Xbox experience. To learn more about ASL support, check out this video starring Oscar-winning actress Marlee Matlin and visit the Microsoft Disability Answer Desk. To videophone us for American Sign Language support in the United States, call 1-503-427-1234 Monday to Friday from 8:30am to 5pm (PST).
These are just a few of the projects our customer support teams have been working on to improve our fans’ experiences, and we’re looking forward to sharing more new features with you in the coming months.
It looks like the remarkable success of Nintendo’s nostalgic plug-and-play mini-consoles has inspired UK-based Retro Games to try the same trick with the Commodore 64, as the company has announced plans to produce an unofficial C64 Mini console.
These sorts of unofficial plug-and-play retro game consoles are not a new phenomenoon in the game industry, but this one is worth paying attention to because Retro claims that in addition to coming pre-loaded with 64 “licensed classic pre-installed games”, the C64 Mini can be used to actually create new (C64) games.
According to the company, curious devs will be able to plug a USB keyboard into the (already keyboard-shaped) C64 Mini and use it to code new C64 games, presumably in BASIC.
It’s very similar to functionality advertised for The64, a similar (but smaller) C64 retro console that the same development team pitched on Indiegogo in an (apparently unsuccesful) effort to secure funding.
However, it appears as though they managed to find a retail partner in German firm Koch Media, which owns well-known game pubilsher Deep Silver. With the backing of Koch, Retro says it plans to release the C64 Mini in early 2018 for $70.
It’s worth pointing out that Retro repeatedly refers to the planned mini-console as “TheC64 Mini”, presumably because the company hasn’t licensed the rights to use the Commodore name. While it’s not made clear what software the C64 Mini uses to emulate the C64, that earlier Indiegogo campaign for The64 notes that (in that case, at least) Retro licensed the Commodore 64 BIOS, game ROMs, and more from a company called Cloanto.
If you want to brush up on the C64 and how it changed the game industry after its 1982 debut, take a moment to look back at Gamasura’s classic historical profile of the Commodore 64.
Veteran game dev Dylan Cuthbert appeared today in the latest episode of Double Fine’s ongoing “Devs Play” series of design-focused Let’s Plays videos to share game dev trivia about the making of the 1993 Super Nintendo game Star Fox.
It’s worth watching because while Cuthbert is now well-known as the founder of Q-Games (The Tomorrow Children), in the ’90s he was working at Argonaut Software as one of the core programmers on Star Fox and its canned sequel.
This week Nintendo released its SNES Classic mini-console, which counts both Star Fox and the never-released (before now) Star Fox 2 among its library of 21 SNES games. To mark the occasion, Double Fine (in conjunction with 2 Player Productions) published the video of Cuthbert telling stories about his time working on Star Fox and Star Fox 2 as someone else played through the original game.
Devs who enjoy the video might want to check out its companion piece, another Devs Play video published today in which Cuthbert chats about working on the (Japan-only) 1992 Game Boy shooter game X, which is much akin to Star Fox. You can find both videos and many more like them over on the Double Fine YouTube channel.
If you’d like to hear more from Cuthbert about what it was like to work on a Star Fox sequel and see it mothballed until this week, check out our recent chat with him about Star Fox 2.
It all began at the Stunfest Festival, an arcade gaming event for which a lot of players, fighting game pros and speedrunners, save the date each year. It was not only the perfect place to organize a massive playtest session, but we also met the godfathers of the French speedrun scene: speedrunners Realmyop and Prospere. So we asked them to talk about their collaboration with the Splashteam for making Splasher a speedrun friendly title.
Realmyop: I met Romain during a French video game festival. We played the demo a lot, talked about Splasher and we agreed on the great opportunity provided by the game in terms of speedrunning.
Prospere: Splasher is made of the best 2D platformers, and for me it was very natural to work on integrating a whole speedrun system inside the game. It’s simple: today I can’t imagine a good arcade platformer coming up without any descent “competitive” features.
Realmyop, the “88 miles per hour” guy, has built a team with speedrun experts Prospere, Twyn and Kilaye. These dudes speedrun games for more than a decade, and incarnated the perfect crew to help us. Some of them even made a lot of speedrun on the last Rayman Origins and Legends platformers, games I’ve worked on too!
Realmyop: Our main goal was to make the game “Speedrun Friendly”, we were not there to tell how to build the levels, the gameplay mechanics, or the graphics and sounds. We wanted the speedrunners to feel at home but also welcome newcomers to the genre.
Prospere: Speedrunning games have always been a niche thing, with their own patterns, dedicated websites and unofficial leaderboards … it’s an underground community. But I think It’s about time that a wider audience get introduced to this very cool kind of eSport.
It’s not easy to achieve this goal, and there is a lot of parameters to work with. First because the speedrun is a way of playing that requires special tools. Realmyop and the runners shared a lot of precious advices during our collaboration.
Realmyop: In many games, there is no timer and most speedrunners are using external tools to time their runs. Even worse, sometimes the timer is buggy and can’t be used as what the speedrunners call the “in-game time.” So, our first work was to build an accurate stopwatch, useful for speedrunners which provides rigorous information at the right time. We took our inspiration for the stopwatch from metrics used by the speedrunning community such as “splits.”
Prospere: Splasher is our second speedrun design mission, right after last year’s indie hit Furi. It was a great experience to work with Romain, and seeing our features integrated in the game a couple of days right after our meetings. The cool thing is that we took time to iterate a lot, with a very reactive and passionate developer, and the results were there.
As long as we’re adding and tweaking these speedrun essentials into the game, we also started to design different modes, or let say different ways of speedrunning Splasher. We had to ask ourselves this question: What are speedrunners used to see?
Realmyop: We worked on what speedrunners call “categories.” For example: most games can be played in two main categories, “Any%” and “100%”. There is way more categories, every game can be different and the categories are made by the speedrun community. In Splasher, we tried to anticipate the categories that could be played, and we implemented 3 of them directly in the game.
Prospere: As our knowledge of the game was increasing with time, we were able to tell “this path is slightly better than this one”, “here you can optimize by doing this or that” etc. We were the high end playtesters, haha.
What speedrunners are used to see, and comfortable with, was not our only concern because attracting neophytes was part of the plan too.
Realmyop: All racing games are using Time Attack to record best times and some are even using medals as a reward to get the players to play again and again the same track to improve their time. Using this mechanic, we pioneered a full run of the game, and coupled it with the more typical achievements.
And building a community around the game was also something we were willing to do.
Realmyop: One important thing is the community, you need to follow it, to listen to it and stimulate it. We’re still following the runners and their progression, we’re always surprised by the performances and seeing gamers being so dedicated.
