Grave Gamer News & Views — gaming

My Time with, and Departure from, No Man’s Sky

I’ve jumped into a new system. Depleted my Hyperdrive reserves doing it. I’m going to have to craft a warp cell. Which means I’m going to have to craft Antimatter. Which means I’d need… Electron Vapors? Easy. Where the hell do I get Electron Vapors again…?

The screen’s flashing. There’s pirates nearby. They scanned my ship as soon as I leaped into this...

Resident Evil VII - New Screens, New Trailer, New Deranged Family Member

Capcom has pulled back a little more of the veil on their dying-in-a-farmhouse simulator, Resident Evil VII, at Gamescom.

In addition to the screens above – which shows us even more of the Baker homestead’s untidy charm – a new gameplay trailer depicts an unknown female protagonist desperately fleeing one Marguerite Baker (you know, Jack’s wife). The gameplay appears to be another playable VHS recording like the one found in the demo – RE7′s modern spin on discovering files.

Who is the woman behind this tape? Just how many people have broken into the Dulvey mansion and filmed their own demises? Will the VR version keep making players sick? We’ll find out in January.

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.

NERF TH!S by Jason Chan

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