Bust out the hankies and get crying, its the Tears of the Kingdom episode. Scott’s got thoughts on TOT-Kuh, the new Legend of Zelda game. But you don’t come to the Gamesline podcast to hear about one game, right? No way. That’s why John’s here to talk about Endless Monday: Dreams and Deadlines as well as some Banjo-Kazooie.

Plus: Hollow Knight: Silksong gets delayed again, Game Freak is collabin’, Under Night In-Birth 2 might be more than a waning dream, Mortal Kombat‘s getting rebooted… again, taking a look at the Asus ROG Ally, Open Roads splits from Fullbright, and games for moms.

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Edited by Lorelai

The post The Gamesline Podcast Ep. 3: Talkin’ TOTK appeared first on Gamesline.

New Games Coming Down The Track:

Zelda is out! The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom (Breath Of The Wild 2 if you’re nasty) is real and in folks’ hands. Immediate reviews are glowing as you’d expect, but it’s hard to tell what that really means this early in. Press around it has been highly guarded and handled by Nintendo as well as by deliriously ebullient fans whose identity depends on this game being a massive success. Luckily for you, Scott is live tonight playing it for the first time on GameslineTV. Come in tonight and see the Takes of a Gamer.

Hollow Knight: Silksong has been delayed once again to… later this year? It’s unclear currently when it will be released but there is still much to be done to prepare for a release way larger in scale than the original Hollow Knight. Will they be able to meet the lofty demands of fans? The pressure is clearly on and this is a sign they are taking it seriously.

Growing up, I played a TON of games on Kongregate and FlashGames. Some were regrettable, and some were jmtb02’s Achievement Unlocked series. A fun lampoon of the burgeoning design trope of the era. Now, Armor Games announced the blue platforming elephant has returned after a decade of absence in The Elephant Collection. And somewhere deep inside my soul, a younger me has lit up again for the first time in a decade.

Private Division is officially publishing a new action-adventure game by Game Freak. It’s not Pokémon though. Project Bloom is the codename for this new IP they have just started development on. While that may sound exciting, Game Freak’s track record has been shaky outside of Pokémon‘s unflappable IP with the lackluster Little Town Hero (2019). Private Division also has struggled as a publisher through many of its releases leading to a lackluster library, especially the recent Kerbal Space Program 2. So we’ll see if they can turn out anything from this vaguely potent combination.

“We’re thrilled to have the opportunity to create new IP that is bold and tonally different from our prior work,”

Kota Furushima, Director at Game Freak. 

Is French-Bread cooking again? The Korean Ratings Board seems to have rated what could be a sequel to Under Night In-Birth. There is a lot of speculation surrounding a sequel to clearly the greatest fighting game ever made but it may be titled Under Night In-Birth 2: Systacelles based on Gematsu’s report. Either way, your Eltnum loops better not be caught lacking anytime soon or my scrub ass Merkava will eat you.

Finally, Mortal Kombat co-creator Ed Boon teased a new Mortal Kombat-related project on the way. Is this Mortal Kombat 12? The clock’s second-hand stops before striking twelve. Perhaps we’re moving past a twelfth entry and returning to another reboot of the franchise, but that’s the only heads or tails I can make of whatever this is suggesting. If you have ideas, let us know on your favorite social media, Discord, or in the comments below!

Merging The Green and Blue Lodge

Outside of new games announcements, we continue to follow Microsoft’s efforts in the acquisition of Activision-Blizzard. The EU’s European Commission may be finalizing it’s decision as soon as next week to allow the merger of the two corporations to happen. If that were to happen, it would make the current score Yes from China, Japan, and the EU’s trade commissions and a No from the UK and the US’s federal commissions. What does this mean for the $69B acquisition? It’s still too early to say, but Microsoft and Activision are exhausting all possible avenues before they finalize a deal. One thing is for certain, both corporations are so desperately hungry for this merger.

ASUS has revealed all the details to their Steam Deck competitor: The ROG Ally. The base price $599 version features an AMD Ryzen Z1 processor, 7-inch 150hz display, and 512GB Storage. This makes it stronger than the Steam Deck for a very comparable price. Pre-orders are up now (I won’t affiliate link you here, I promise) and it sounds like other than a very short battery life that this will be some substantial competition for the previously unchallenged mobile PC gaming space.

The developers of narrative game Open Roads has officially removed any recognition of the Fullbright name from their game. This follows reports of employee mistreatment from Fullbright’s co-founder Steve Gaynor in 2021. Gaynor was removed from development shortly after the reports were published, but Open Roads is now pushing forward with less baggage. The team is currently referred to as “The Open Roads team”.

In lighter news, Mark Frost confirms he did consulting on The Legend Of Zelda: Link’s Awakening while working on Twin Peaks?? In an Iwata Asks blog posted on Nintendo’s website around 2006, Zelda-series director Takashi Tezuka spoke about how he was inspired to make a followup to A Link To The Past by the runaway success of the surreal serial drama. I don’t know how Collider found this old blog post or how Mark Frost found the Collider piece, but he quickly tweeted out his collaboration on the project which confirms this whole story. This is a fascinating new wrinkle that somehow ties the beach-loving Marin to the beach-lying Laura Palmer.

The post The Bulletin: Games That Aren’t Zelda? appeared first on Gamesline.

It’s been a big news week with Super Mario Brothers selling for over 2 million, Capcom showing off the final Street Fighter V DLC character, and Player Unknown’s Battlegrounds adding BattleGrounds to their name to become PUBG: BattleGrounds. We also dig into the deeper stuff with Steve Gaynor’s abusive behavior at Fullbright, J. Allen Brack stepping down from Blizzard, and Unity making it a whole lot more expensive if developers want to put their game on console.

As always, you can support us on our Patreon, and follow us on Twitter @VGChooChoo, @john_michonski, @solonface, and @Scottblah.

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You can also join our Discord channel at thegamezone.zone!

Our theme song is “Crush” by Melt Channel, from the album Magic is Real.

Subscribe via iTunes, hipcast, direct download, or listen below!

The post VGCC Episode 367: Gotta Love the Glove appeared first on Gamesline.

Scott and Trex visit a space station and run into the worst thing of all: human interaction. Make sure to subscribe to us on YouTube to check out more of our videos!

The post Ride The Rails: Tacoma appeared first on Gamesline.

It’s 2088, and Amy Ferrier has been contracted to board the recently-abandoned space station Tacoma, in order to retrieve the ship’s sentient AI, Odin, and collect whatever data remains on the station’s corrupted systems. It’s as simple a setup as it gets, and, mechanically, Tacoma is equally straightforward. Players venture between various areas of the Tacoma space station downloading video files, recovering corrupted data here and there, and once in awhile, interacting with Odin. There’s nothing especially revelatory about any of this, but being able to scrub back and forth along the timeline of a recording to follow it from different character’s viewpoints is a cool concept, and while the majority of the corrupted data is not recoverable, the strong writing pulls you along into wanting to  get everything you possibly can.

I really can’t stress enough just how well Tacoma builds its world and characters. It’s a short game, taking about two hours to get through, and yet, by the end of it, I felt like I knew exactly what the state of the world was, and like I’d spent much longer with the crew of the station than I actually had. It’s a future very different from our present; items you pick up around the station bear different languages on their packaging, the crew hails from countries that mostly don’t exist yet, and the overwhelming feeling you get is that, in this world, Singapore is the world’s number one superpower. Indeed, the political landscape of Earth in 2088 is alluded to multiple times throughout the course of the game, and for the most part, it’s woven into the narrative with great subtlety.

Each of the six crew members feels like a distinct person, and what’s more, they’re all people you wish you could spend more time with. You have no physical interactions with these characters, rather you’re tasked with downloading what’s left of the station’s largely corrupted data recordings to piece together just what exactly happened on board. You never actually interact with anyone other than Odin, and yet, by the end you know exactly who they are, how they look, where they come from, what their relationships are, and generally, what they hope to achieve. You know all about Nat and Bert’s history, their recent marriage, and their ability to tackle the impending doom with which they are faced. Sareh, the ship’s medic, is also a standout character, as you follow her agonizing over whether to adhere to safety protocols, despite knowing at least one crewmember is unlikely to survive such a procedure. It’s fantastic character writing from the team at Fullbright. We’ve seen enough games in recent years force-feed us characters who don’t speak or feel anything like real people, even after spending many, many hours with them, so for Tacoma to flesh its cast out so well in such a short space is incredibly impressive.

As good as all that is, though, the writing also happened to be the source of the game’s biggest failing in my eyes. While the narrative is told brilliantly well for 95% of the experience, and seems to come together really nicely towards the conclusion, it’s the very end that threw me for a loop. Maybe that’s partly my fault; I only picked up the most tertiary awareness of what the final moment of the game addresses. Without getting too far into spoiler territory here, it seems somewhat likely that players who don’t go around examining every little thing as I did could be left slightly blindsided by the game’s wrap-up. Even so, it’s by no means a moment that completely ruins the game, it’s just something that perhaps could have been handled slightly better than it actually is. Considering how tight just about every other aspect of the storytelling is, for Tacoma to just throw something out there that has been otherwise treated as superfluous worldbuilding seems a little misguided. It surely wouldn’t have taken all that much effort to tie things together a little better; and it would certainly have added some gravitas to Tacoma’s ending in the process.

There’s nothing really noteworthy about Tacoma from a technical standpoint. It runs well, and maintains a steady framerate throughout, although the game did hard-crash on me the first time I walked through the final door, and struggled on a subsequent attempt at the same point. It autosaves constantly, so I didn’t lose any progress, and it’s a bug that will almost definitely be ironed out by release, but it’s still worth noting. Tacoma’s not an especially great looking game either. Don’t get me wrong here, it looks totally acceptable, with some decent textures and a pretty slick sci-fi aesthetic that complements the writing admirably to help flesh out the world, but there’s nothing about the way the game looks that especially wowed me, either.

What really matters though, is that Tacoma tells its story with near-faultless nuance and skill. Save for a slight blemish at the end, it’s a consistently engaging near-future sci-fi drama with a likeable cast of characters and tremendously well fleshed-out and refined sense of place and time. Is it as good as Gone Home? No, probably not. Is it going to win detractors of Fullbright’s previous work over? Incredibly unlikely. Is it still a must-play for anyone who enjoyed the company’s preceding output, or who just wants a damn good story? Absolutely.

The post Tacoma (PC) Review appeared first on Gamesline.