Merry Newsmas

Death Stranding Movie

Hideo Kojima, hot on the heels of his announcement of Death Stranding 2 at the Game Awards has announced that his studio Kojima Productions will be teaming up with Hammerstone Studios to develop a Death Stranding film. Hammerstone Studio head Alex Lebovici, who recently produced the horror hit Barbarian, has stated the film “will be something far more intimate and grounded” which may be Kojima’s greatest challenge yet!

Announcements at the Game Awards

Last week’s game awards brought with it a slew of new game announcements. Some of the bigger titles included Ken Levine’s first game since Bioshock Infinite titled Judas. A new IP that very much follows in the vein of Bioshock but now it’s about comic space cowboys.

A sequel to the 2018 indie juggernaut Hades was revealed. Hades II is planned for an early access release next year featuring a new protagonist Melinoe, the daughter of Hades and Persephone. The game will deal with the dawn of witchcraft in a battle against the titan Chronos.

With Bayonetta 3 still fresh Platinum Games have announced a new game in the series. This time taking part before the trilogy. With a new fixed perspective and art style Bayonetta Origins: Cereza and the Lost Demon will be out on March 17 2023.

The Celeste team Extremely OK Games have announced their next game, Earthsword. Playing to their strengths you can look forward to the exploration heavy, pixel art platformer in 2024.

Many other new games were shown off. Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, Armoured Core VI: Fires of Rubicon, Crash Team Rumble, Hellboy: Web of Wyrd, Remnant 2 and Transformers: Reactivate just to name a few. We’ll be posting many of the trailers over on the Zed Games Facebook page.

The upcoming Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League was also revealed to have one last performance from voice actor Kevin Conroy who passed away on November 10^th this year. He has been voicing Batman for the last 30 years

Epic’s half a billion fine

In a dispute with the US Federal Trade Commission, Epic games agreed to pay $520 million dollars to settle violations of the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act and deceptive practices that tricked players into purchases in the videogame Fortnite.  The COPPA violation at $275 million is the largest penalty ever levied by the FTC for such a violation and Epic will need to change default settings in game to better protect children and teens along with policies for their protection. The second settlement will be used to refund players that were affected by unintended purchases due to Epic’s practices.

The majority of these issues were resolved in 2018 but if you believe you’re eligible for a refund you can find information of the FTC website and Epic’s statement on the settlement.

This year Fortnite has generated $5.8 billion in revenue.

Duke Nukem lives again! (Oh wait that’s Blood)

Did you remember to bet on Duke? Fallen 90’s video game icon sees two unofficial releases this week.  The Duke Nukem Forever 2001 Restoration Project has released the first slice of their mod for the leaked development copy of the abandoned 2001 version of Duke Nukem Forever. The project aims to complete the game and make it fully playable. You can find the project on Mod DB.

The other surprise Duke release is that of the cancelled Duke Nukem: Endangered Species which put the blonde action star into a game-hunting style title. The game by Action Forms Ltd was cancelled in 2001 and many of the assets were then used to develop Vivisector: Beast Within. A prototype of Endangered Species has been released online and can be found at thedatadungeon.com.

Nintendo celebrates Christmas with Indies!

Nintendo has been running a Christmas YouTube advent event where they announce 4 indie titles a day for 5 days with each day so far containing an instant release.  We have seen announcements for Risk of Rain Returns (a rework of the original Risk of Rain), The Punchuin (a platformer about a boxing penguin from the team that brought us Fast RMX and The Tourist) and Potion Craft among others. It is heavily rumored that the final two days will include a release of the hotly anticipated Queensland developed Golf Story follow up, Sports Story. Will it make it out for Christmas? Let’s find out.

Carmack Leaves Meta

The legendary coder and founder of id software John Carmack has left his position at Oculus, I mean Facebook, I mean Meta. His internal farewell message was leaked in part to the media so he posted it publicly in response.

“This is the end of my decade in VR, I have mixed feelings.”

“Quest 2 almost exactly what I wanted to see from the beginning”

“We have a ridiculous amount of people and resources, but we constantly self-sabotage and squander effort. There is no way to sugar coat this; I think our organization is operating at half the effectiveness that would make me happy.”

“VR can bring value to most of the people in the world, and no company is better positioned to do it than Meta. Maybe it actually is possible to get there by just plowing ahead with current practices, but there is plenty of room for improvement.

You can read his full statement on John Carmack’s Facebook page.

Carmack has moved onto his own startup Keen Technologies, which is working on artificial intelligence.