Happy Pokémon Day, You Freaks

The latest Pokémon Presents happened on the 27th, with most of the shown updates focusing on mobile titles.

• Pokémon Go will get a crossover event with the latest season of the anime to coincide with its release outside Japan.
• Pokémon Sleep adds the Legendary Beasts to the roster of napping monsters, starting with Raikou in March, with Entei and Suicune coming later.
• Pokémon Masters will add two new pairs: Silver and Shiny Mega Tyranitar and Geeta and Glimmora, plus reruns of older powerful characters and a new photo editor.
• Pokémon Cafe Remix gives the Paldean starters new outfits, new chances to add either Koraidon or Miraidon to your cafe, and the ability to collect Gimmighoul coins for a chance to get Gimmighoul and Gholdengo on your team.
• Pokémon Unite adds Miraidon to its roster, with Falinks and Ceruledge debuting in the coming months.

The final two announcements were the big ones: First, Pokémon TCG Online game gets a new mobile client. They swear it is not going to be NFT-related.

Finally, the next mainline Pokémon title, Pokémon Legends: Z-A, was announced. Players return to Generation 6’s Kalos region for a game supposedly all set in Lumiose City, X/Y‘s central hub. Mega Evolution will also return. Z-A is scheduled to launch in 2025.

So Back to the Bad

Playstation plans to lay off around 900 people. These cuts include staff at Naughty Dog, Insomniac, Guerilla Games, and the complete shuttering of their London studio. Firesprite, another subsidiary of Playstation that saw cuts, cancelled the production of live service Twisted Metal game.

EA has also laid off a large swath of their employees: five percent of their workforce in total. Battlefield studio Ridgeline Games folded into another Battlefield focused team, Ripple Effect, and a rumored Mandalorian game from Respawn was cancelled.

Embracer Group continues to shed weight across their properties. Saber Interactive, developers of the continuously in question Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic remake, reportedly will be sold to private investors for $500 million. There is also talk that Gearbox will be sold as well, with an official announcement due in the coming days. Gearbox recently shifted focus purely to Borderlands games, with a fourth mainline entry and a sequel to Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands still in development.

Maybe Some Good?

Toys for Bob, previously downsized by Microsoft after the Activision acquisition, is going independent. No reports on what this fully entails, but they are attempting to keep an active relationship with Microsoft, potentially meaning they will continue to work on Crash, Spyro, and potentially Tony Hawk titles.

Alan Wake creators Remedy have acquired full control of…Control. The studio purchased the rights to the franchise from 505 Games ahead of the eventual sequel that is still in development. as well as another project codenamed “Condor“, which is a multiplayer PvE spin-off of Control.

In other news…

Stardew Valley also has its own anniversary to celebrate, and ConcernedApe confirm that a 1.6 update to the PC version of the game will be coming March 16.

Critical Role is holding a public open beta playtest of their tabletop roleplaying game, Daggerheart, and playtest packets will be available on March 12.

Terminator: Survivors, an open-world survival game, is set to release this fall.

Nintendo sues the creators of Yuzu, a popular Switch emulator. While emulators have been proven to be legal, Nintendo’s case focuses on Yuzu’s circumvention of Switch game encryption as well as promotion of piracy, as the emulator’s Patreon saw a doubling of profits once Tears of the Kingdom leaked online.

Jen Cohn, the voice actor for Overwatch character Pharah, came under hot water when she called for Palestine to be “freed from Hamas” on a livestream. Her statement, which sidelines the very real genocide being perpetrated by Israel, has led to Overwatch fans calling for the character’s recasting.

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The Dragon Duo continue traveling through Dream Weavers! Fairy kisses, poorly laid out glides, and gnorcs tricked into dying for their country bring us ever closer to the final confrontation with Gnasty Gnorc.

Check out new videos every Friday at youtube.com/videogamechoochoo. You can get each episode of John and Rose Play Spyro one week early at patreon.com/vgcc.

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John and Rose go back to the first world to, sigh, do a flying level (by the skin of our teeth!) on this episode of Spyro! After, we take on another boss, and say goodbye to Magic Crafters world.

Check out new videos every Friday at youtube.com/videogamechoochoo. You can get each episode of John and Rose Play Spyro one week early at patreon.com/vgcc.

The post John and Rose Play Spyro the Dragon: Episode 8 appeared first on Gamesline.

We’ve now entered the Peace Keeper’s realm, and we’re already having to see someone’s ass.

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Spyro Reignited is releasing on Switch on September 3rd. There’s not really any bonus involved, but look, it’s cool that they’re gonna be more portable than before.

Get ready, because here comes Spyro! Spyro Reignited Trilogy is coming to Nintendo Switch and PC September 3, 2019. pic.twitter.com/nm1iyP4Xsp

— Spyro (@SpyroTheDragon) June 11, 2019

The Trilogy will also be coming to PC on that day.

The post Spyro Reignited Coming to Switch in September appeared first on Gamesline.

Spyro the Dragon is a series that personally resonates with me, so a remaster was an exciting prospect. I’ve run through Spyro’s first title multiple times over the years, 100% completing it each time. This remaster emulates the feeling of playing Spyro well, with enhanced graphics and re-recorded voice-over to bring our purple friend into the current age. For the most part, Reignited succeeds in its goal, presenting the first three games, Spyro the Dragon, Ripto’s Rage, and Year of the Dragon, with gorgeous visuals. Every enemy gets a redesign to properly convey them, and it’s funny seeing the standard green gnorcs as fully modeled characters instead of the collection of rhombuses a PS1 could handle.

Every other character besides Spyro has a design upgrade as well, most surprisingly the dragons from Spyro 1, who each have a delightful new design instead of the bland bog-standard designs they had originally. There’s far more life in the worlds with these new dragon designs, and I know a ton of scalies are going to fall in love with these big guys, for good reason. The environments can be described as “how you remember them in your mind’s eye”, faithful to the original games but brought forward to today’s standards. The layouts are exactly the same, but far more visually striking. The skyboxes are even a joy to look at, maybe not as much as the PS1-era’s oil painting backgrounds that gave the series its mystique, but you can tell the developers remembered how pretty they were back then.

The music also got a remaster, with original composer Stewart Copeland reprising his role by retouching his original pieces. You can choose between these new versions and the original tracks, but admittedly, it was hard to tell the difference at times, as the remixes sound very similar, just with perhaps a few more instruments or a nicer sound quality. Either way, these songs are incredible no matter how you listen to them, and it’s good that there’s a far easier, cheaper way to play through these stages with such glorious music. (My personal favorite is Ice Cavern, for the record.)

The new voice acting is all solid, but nobody’s putting in an award-winning performance. Tom Kenny recorded all of Spyro’s lines in the remaster, as he took over as Spyro’s voice after the first game’s VA Carlos Alazraqui was swapped out for making Spyro sound too cocky, which fans disliked. Now the dragon sounds playful, chipper, and cute, which matches perfectly with new idle animations and cute tricks Spyro can do in loading screens, which aren’t as pastel as before. Said loading screens are also quite long, about as long as they were in the old days. If there’s one thing I’d expect to be upgraded, it’d be load times, but maybe they’re artificially inflated for that historical feel.

Gameplay is where Reignited differs from the originals the most, and even then it’s extremely slight. Spyro feels ever so subtly floatier than in the original games, with turns having a wider berth and gliding acting a bit more finicky. I tested Spyro Reignited and Spyro 1 side by side, and I was able to perform tighter turns and made jumps in the Playstation version a bit more easily. However, Reignited also adds a small grace hover to your glide if you’d miss the jump by a fraction of an inch, so that evens it out a tad. This isn’t a full-on complaint, just a heads up to those who have played these games to death: You’ll have to get used to the new physics, but it’s not as wildly different like Crash in the N. Sane Trilogy.

It’s overall impressive how well the Spyro games hold up in 2018. The first game is a lean, well paced collect-a-thon, the second begins to spread out to a variety of tasks, and the third is a multi-character romp through minigames and trials. It’s hard to point at any recent contemporaries that do these things as well as Spyro did (or does, I guess we can say). A reason why games like Super Mario 64, Banjo-Kazooie, and more recent standouts like A Hat in Time are so fondly regarded is just how delightful simply moving can be, and Spyro is no slouch there. Spyro can glide across large gaps by pressing jump after jumping, and can charge to run incredibly fast and bowl over smaller enemies. As the series progressed, more abilities such as swimming, climbing ladders, and skateboarding were added, but gliding and charging are the backbone of what makes Spyro such a joy to control.

Directly porting the games does highlight what negatives the classics had back in the day, such as a few lousy levels and frustrating mini-games. I always hated the hockey game in Spyro 2 as a kid, and even with more than a decade of gaming under my belt, it’s still a slog! Worst of all are the flying levels, which continue to be the bane of my existence. Spyro isn’t exactly a tight flyer, as his banking and diving often sway further than you’d like. No matter how well you map out the arenas, you’re going to end up careening into the water or slamming into a wall from an errant twitch of your control stick. That’s how it was in the originals, and you’ll fail these missions far more than any other in all three games, but at least there’s only one per home world, and they’re over soon.

While the Spyro Reignited Trilogy was made as a nostalgia cash-grab (we’re not talking about the nearly charitable work done to keep a bunch of SNK arcade games away from bit rot here), it’s still worth your time and a fantastic way to keep the spirit of a great franchise alive. My personal experience with Spyro is mostly associated with the first game, as I often run through it during depressive episodes, scoring the full 120% clear each time and clearing my head of self doubt. While I touched both Spyros 2 and 3 for this review, I completed Spyro 1 120%, exactly as I usually do, and had just as much of a rewarding experience as I always have. If you’ve played these games before, this is a solid way to revisit the games without having to set up an older console or emulator. If you’re new to the series, Reignited is a real treat, and all three games have something to offer.

The post Spyro Reignited Trilogy (PS4) Review appeared first on Gamesline.

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The included games, Spyro the Dragon, Spyro 2: Ripto’s Rage, and Spyro: Year of the Dragon will all get the Crash Bandicoot N. Sane Trilogy treatment, with upgraded graphics, sound, and gameplay. The collection will also support PS4 Pro upgrades out of the box. Dale mentions ” the tantalizing promise of some content cut from the original releases of those games,” which is especially enticing.

Dale also mentions that Spyro will have a one year exclusivity deal with the PS4. It will be ported to other consoles in 2019, and she mentions that Crash is also in this boat, seemingly confirming the rumors of a PC and Switch port of N. Sane Trilogy.

My personal hope for this remaster is that they don’t mess with the physics at all, as Spyro the Dragon is one of my favorite games and I just want a nicer looking version of it. It’d also be a wonderful bonus if Stewart Copeland, former drummer of The Police and composer of the first four Spyro soundtracks, would make a return to remaster his old tracks. We’ll see in March!

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It is unknown at the time how Sony procured the rights to distribute the games on Vita. I have emailed Sony about this, and will update the page when more is known.

UPDATE: According to NeoGAF, a bunch of other PSP games and demos that were previously removed from the store are now able to be downloaded again, such as the Dragonball Z Budokai game for PSP. It is unconfirmed exactly how many games are being made available again, but it’s starting to look like…all of them.

UPDATE 2: The availability of deleted and unavailable games seems to have been a fluke. Any games that you downloaded onto your Vita still work, but if you didn’t download them yet, they’re gone again. Damn shame.

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