Thank you, Toriyama.
This week the world of manga and gaming bids farewell to a creative luminary. Akira Toriyama, the writer and illustrator most known for his beloved Dragon Ball series, has passed away. However, Toriyama’s legacy extends far beyond the pages of this iconic manga. His artistic genius also leaves an indelible mark on the gaming industry. From the legendary Dragon Quest series where he worked on every instalment of the series, to the time-traveling epic Chrono Trigger. Toriyama’s character designs breathed life into the pixelated heroes we have grown with and love.
On the 8^th of March Toriyama’s production company, Bird Studio, published the sad news that he had suffered a subdural hematoma earlier this month that claimed his life. Fans worldwide will remember Toriyama for his boundless creativity, his iconic art style, his Saiyan warriors, and the Dragon Quest slime.

Layoffs and Shutdowns
This week Deviation Games, a company which was working on a new AAA IP in partnership with PlayStation, has been caught in the wake of SIE’s downsizing. The company is trying to find jobs for the roughly 130 employees who are now added to the 900 odd employees searching for work that were cut late last month by PlayStation. In stranger news, Warner Bros. Discovery has reached out to developers of their Adult Swim Games to tell them that their Adult Swim titles will be removed from digital services. While the developers desperately search for ways to keep their games online, Warner reps state they are unable to transfer ownership to the developers due to “logistical and resource constraints.” Developers of games such as Soundodger+ and First Puncher have been advised that the games will be removed from sale within the next 60 days. For a full list of games that may be affected, click here.

And now for the Gaming Bytes
In the wake of the monetarily successful release of The Super Mario Bros. Movie, it would behove Nintendo to do another one. So, they are. On March 10, or MarIO day, Miyamoto announced on Nintendo’s X account that a new “bright and fun” Mario movie will be coming to the big screens April 3^rd, 2026.

Earlier this week Dragon’s Dogman 2 released its character creator ahead of its March 22^nd release date, and it’s got more sliders than sense… in a good way. People have moulded characters in their own likeness and some more famous ones, such as; Emo Spiderman Tobey Maguire, Walter White, Scooby’s Shaggy , William Dafoe, Handsome Squidward, and even a cursed Pikachu. Click through to see them… if you dare.
In an interview with GAME FILE, CD Projekt RED’s Game Director Gabe Amatangelo confirmed that Cyberpunk 2077’s development cycle after the disastrous 2020 release is finally over with the recent 2.12 patch. And now the team is ready to move onto bigger and better things.

And now finally, some upcoming game releases.
Friday March 15, save some future aliens in Outcast: A New Beginning coming to PC and next gen consoles.
Tuesday March 19, farm the future in Lightyear Frontier on PC, and Xbox Series S & X, or alternatively, play and manage a baseball team in MLB The Show 24 coming to consoles.
Wednesday March 20, play as your favourite horror daddy (David Harbour) in a Lovecraftian horror love letter to the original Alone in the Dark, coming to PC and next gen consoles
And Thursday, March 21^st, grab your mobile because Call of Duty Warzone: Mobile is coming to iOS and Android, and speaking of ports, Horizon Forbidden West: Complete Edition is coming to PC.
Midnight Ghost Hunt for PC is coming out of early access. And lastly, facing horror with a faithful doggo Shines Over: The Damned is coming to PS5.

This week on Zed Games, Hazel, Zahra, and Paul talk Gaming News and the Yuzu fallout, Paul takes the historian approach with Cricket Through the Ages developed by Free Lives, Zahra brings in actual pages of the book Legends & Lattes by Travis Baldree, then Paul jumps in before the final roll call with a review of The Mobius Machine from Madruga Works.

Helldivers 2 Players Scammed by Fake Steam Listings:

On the 2nd of March, a warning was sent out on discord from the Helldivers 2 team. Several steam games had been imitating Helldivers 2 to trick unlucky shoppers. This included changing
their name, the game art, and even the developer/publisher tags. Similar fakes have popped up for Palworld and Last Epoch – so it seems popular multiplayer games are the best target for this scam. Buyer beware. All of the games involved in this have been removed, but the developers behind them are still operating on steam, which is…questionable.

Australian Studio Torus Games ceases production

On the second of March journalist Jack Ryan reported that Torus Games would be ceasing production and had laid off eight staff members. Torus Games is a Melbourne studio founded in 1994. Their website boasts of producing or contributing to 146 video games over its 28 years of operation. They’ve worked on franchises like Duke Nukem, Doom, Barbie, and Sonic. Studios closing their doors has become awfully common in the past year, but it’s particularly sad to see another Australian studio fall victim, especially one with such a long history. Thankfully, founder Bill McIntosh says it isn’t for good. In a statement to Game Developer he said “Torus isn’t being wound up. We’re basically hibernating until we work out what our next opportunity will be. It’s a good chance for us to rethink what we should focus on.”

Switch emulator creator settles Nintendo lawsuit for $2.4m

At the end of February, Nintendo sued the developer of Switch emulator “Yuzu” for facilitating piracy. Yuzu doesn’t actually provide pirated games, but it is the most common way people will
access them. For example, Nintendo claims that more than 1 million people used Yuzu to access Tears of the Kingdom illegally and before its release date. On March 4th, we found out that Tropic Haze, the company behind Yuzu, reached a settlement with Nintendo, and now owes them $2.4 million. Additionally, Yuzu is being discontinued and they must surrender information about its development to Nintendo. They announced this on their discord server, saying: “Yuzu and its team have always been against piracy. We started the projects in good faith, out of passion for Nintendo and its consoles and games, and were not intending to cause harm. But we see now that because our projects can circumvent Nintendo’s technological protection measures and allow users to play games outside of authorized hardware, they have led to extensive piracy.” This post also said they would be shutting down their related Patreon, Discord server, and websites.

Balatro removed from sale over ratings mistake:

Popular, poker-inspired game Balatro was temporarily removed from the switch store in several countries including Australia and New Zealand. A statement from Playstack Games attributed
this to an overnight change in rating from 3+ to 18+ due to a mistaken belief that the game promotes and provides instruction about gambling. They state emphatically that “Balatro does
not allow or encourage gambling. Balatro was developed by someone who is staunchly antigambling, and painstaking care has been taken to ensure that the game does not feature
gambling mechanics of any kind.” They have been working hard to resolve this issue and expect the game will return to all stores by the 9th of March.

Upcoming Game Releases:

•March 8: WWE 2K24 comes to PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, PC
•March 8: Unicorn Overlord comes to PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, Nintendo
Switch
•March 12: Contra: Operation Galuga comes to PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Xbox
Series X/S, PC, Nintendo Switch
•March 13: Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story comes to PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One,
Xbox Series X/S, PC, Nintendo Switch

This week in gaming news, more layoffs hit developers, Nintendo Announcements, and the week in published tech science headlines.

Layoffs: More of them.

The trend continues with more layoffs and studio closures hitting game developers this week.
Deck Nine, the developer of Life Is Strange: Before the Storm and True Colors, have laid off 20% of its staff due to “…worsening market conditions.”
Cloud Imperium Games, developer of Star Citizen currently in ‘alpha’, are also reportedly undergoing “mass layoffs” under the banner of relocating to its new UK office.
Disruptive Games, the team behind bringing Diablo 2 to Battle.net and Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1+2 to everything, has laid off an undisclosed number of staff, even after advertising for new staff only a month ago via LinkedIn.
Thunderful Games, creators of Steamworld games, the more recent Planet of Lana and others, have announced a restructuring program with a 20% cutback in staff – over 100 people.
Supermassive Games, developers of The Dark Pictures Anthology, announced layoffs with 150 at-risk employees lined up for the chopping block.
Indie developers Die Gute Fabrik, makers of Saltsea Chronicles, have made the hard choice to close their doors.
Electronic Arts is also restructuring, putting about 670 people or around 5% of its workforce on notice. EA’s CEO Andrew Wilson stated this due to the companies move away from licensed intellectual property.
And finally, Sony Interactive Entertainment CEO Jim Ryan has penned a letter to the company (and a media release) announcing that 8% or around 900 employees will be laid off. This includes all the London Studio, and some of Firesprite Studio (cancelling the Twisted Metal Live-service game in development), as well as others around the world. But hey, at least you might be able to use that PSVR2 with your PC later this year.

Nintendo Announcements.
This week’s Pokémon Direct in honour of Pokémon Day started soft with several basic updates and events planned over a range of Android and iOS Pokémon games. Then came the big two announcements. Firstly, Pokémon Trading Card Game is getting an Android and iOS app under the original name Pokémon Trading Card Game Pocket. Pocket is being developed by DeNA Co. Ltd., makers of Fire Emblem Heros, Pokemon Masters, Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp, and many others, and features trading, card pack opening, and duelling. But it manages to maintain the most important part of the franchise, exclusive foils, which will now be reproduced and expanded upon as immersive visual effects. And second, the next Pokémon game has been tentatively announced with the teaser displaying little to no visuals and only exposing few details. Those being the place name, Lumoise City in Kalos of X & Y fame, the game’s name, Pokémon Legends: Z-A, the game’s power system, mega evolutions, and a tentative release year, 2025. Interestingly the same release year as the Switch 2.
In other news, Tropic Haze LLC, the developer of Switch emulator Yuzu, is being sued by Nintendo. The company is claiming that Tropic Haze “…facilitates (sic) piracy at a colossal scale.“ and “…is thus secondarily liable for the infringement committed by the users…”

(Insert Last Post Music Clip)

And now for some industry, science and technology.
In tiktok viral science, Doom can now be played on cellular technology. And by that I don’t mean apps on your phone, rather a 32 by 48 pixel display lit up by fluorescent Escherichia Coli cells. The display was developed by MIT biotech PhD student Lauren “Ren“ Ramlan, inspired by the numerical displays of Shin et al. 2020. The cells were induced with plasmid BBa_K3893028 which respond to stimuli to essentially display fluorescence. Utilising this on off difference Ren was able to create a very simple 1bit (black -off or white-on) display. However, the frame rate is lacking, with it taking 70 minutes to display a frame, and eight hours and 20 minutes to go back to its resting state. Making the 5-hour game last approximately just under 600 years.
On the other hand the “big boy” in storage science has been designed by professor Min Gu from the University of Shanghai for Science and Technology. The technology packs 100 layers of data in 54 nanometers on a DVD sized disc. Effectively replacing a 2 meter stack of Blu-rays with a single disc that can fit up to a petabit or 125,000 gigabytes of data. The 3D writing system uses dye-doped photoresist with aggregation-induced emission luminogens with nanoparticle scale resolution lasers on the optical disc, which essentially allows the possibility of stacking the technology into exobit-level data storage facilities.

Now for some upcoming games.
Tuesday March 5^th brings us The Outlast Trials and WWE 2K24 both coming to PC, PlayStation and Xbox. And on Thursday March 7^th As Dusk Falls comes to Playstation and Snufkin: Melody of Moominvalley comes to PC, Switch and both next gen consoles.

And that’s all this week in gaming news.

This week Maylee presses the buttons while Zahra and Peter delve deep in this weeks Gaming News and the difference between physical and digital. Zahra then takes it easy in visual masterpiece puzzle game Boxes: Lost Fragments, Maylee tries to love Roller Drama, and then team talks their recent TTRPG gaming and experiences.

Come join Zahra, Cam, and Peter busting full of reviews and gaming chatter.
This week after Paul brings us our weekly gaming rumours/news, the team talk gaming self care for the Elden Ring Fans prepping for the DLC coming soon. Peter goes deep, blowing up friends and foes in a review of Helldivers 2. Zahra gets over and under the blanket in a review of Awake from Team Awake. The team then talks the upcoming Borderlands movie.

The Xbox Section

The future of Xbox is here! After weeks of speculation on the future of the Xbox we got our answer on a special Xbox podcast featuring CEO of Microsoft Gaming, Phil Spencer.  Rumours were triggered by leaks indicating several Xbox games coming to competing platforms including Hi-Fi Rush, Pentiment, Grounded and Sea of thieves.  During the podcast Mr Spencer revealed that Microsoft would be releasing 4 games on the Switch and Playstation. Two games would be community focussed multiplayer games and the others would be smaller, well received titles that have been released for over a year. Starfield and the upcoming Indianna Jones and the Great Circle are not currently being considered for cross platform release but could in future.  And that was it. The four games in question were not revealed during the podcast and would be left for their partners to reveal.

In other news Nintendo hosted a Nintendo Direct Partner Showcase which began with the reveal Grounded was coming to the switch and later included Pentiment.

Additionally, Sony Revealed Sea of Thieves, Hi Fi Rush, Grounded and Pentiment would be coming to their platforms.

Phil also announced that Activision/Blizzard/King games will start coming to Game Pass starting with Diablo 4 on March 28.

The Nintendo Section

We’re you were looking forward to buying a still unannounced and pretty-much-confirmed-for-a-2024-release Switch 2 you may want to prepare yourself for the very real possibility of a pretty-much-confirmed-for-a-2025-release after a number of high profile leaks. This is all still rumour, as officially the unannounced switch follow up has no release date.

This week’s Nintendo Direct held a few surprises including Kit Fisto!

That’s right!  Kit Fisto, everyone’s favourite Star Wars will be a playable character in Kit Fisto Presents STAR WARS: Battlefront Classic Collection featuring Kit Fisto. This rerelease of the original two battlefront games includes local multiplayer, 64 player online, it’s available on all platforms and Kit Fisto.

Epic Mikey Rebrushed is an updated version of the 2010 Wii game. Epic Mikey was a 3^rd person Mickey Mouse platformer designed by Warren Spector who is most known as the designer behind the Deus Ex Series.

The cult classic World of Goo is releasing its squelchy, slimy puzzle building sequel, World of Goo 2 as a Switch console exclusive on May 28.

One of the few games that was totally lost when the 3DS eshop closed is coming to switch. The surprisingly captivating Pocket Card Jockey, a horse racing crossed with solitaire game is returning as Pocket Card Jockey: Ride On! And is available… NOW!

And much more!

The Sony Section

If you’re disappointed about the rumoured delay of the rumoured release of the rumoured Switch 2 then you may be interested in filling that consumer void with the rumoured release of the rumoured PS5 Pro, rumoured to be scheduled for later this year. According to several Sony executives the PS5 has entered the “later stage of its life cycle” and that thoughts will “inevitably turn to the next-generation and the PS6”.

In Sony’s latest fiscal report the President Hiroki Totoki also revealed that there will not be “any new major existing franchise titles” released on the platform before April 2025. There will be major releases just not from any existing IP.

The FromSoftware Section

FromSoftware has managed to secure the rights to the Elden Ring IP from publisher Bandai Namco and now is sole owner of their own creation. As if to celebrate this fact fans were finally given a trailer and details on long awaited DLC for Elden Ring entitled Shadow of the Erdtree. It will be FromSoftware’s largest DLC ever and takes place in an entirely new area of Limgrave.

The DLC will release on June 21^st.

Game Release Schedule

Penny’s Big Breakaway (PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, Switch, PC), Pocket Card Jockey: Ride On! (Switch), Slave Zero X (PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, PC) – February 22

Inkulinati (PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Switch, PC), Pacific Drive (PlayStation 5, PC), Pentiment (Switch), Sons of the Forest (PC), Splatoon 3: Expansion Pass – Side Order (Switch) – February 23

Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons Remake (PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, PC) – February 29

Developers; Progress Knight: ihtasham42, Progress Knight Quest: Symb1 & indomit
Publisher: Github.com
Platform: Browser Games
Created Dates; Progress Knight: 26/12/20, Progress Knight Quest: 11/11/22
Genre: Idle Game

This isn’t so much a review of Progress Knight from ihtashham42 and the evolution, Progress Knight Quest developed by Symb1 and modified by indomit, all of which are available to play on github, but rather a write up of my experience when a month ago I searched for something to afk play while editing podcasts and playing other games. I was looking for something to put in the background and play in the corner of my screen. And on screenrant.com I found it, lurking under the title “10 Best Idle Games On PC, Ranked”. It was everything I was looking for, simple visuals, nothing but text, moving bars, and buttons, nothing too flashy to take my attention from other things, no sound, no distraction, just simplicity… it was perfect. So, I google searched Progress Knight and found it in github. Not even a program. Just something running in a browser. I tucked it into the far left of my left monitor, out of my direct eyesight and started playing. The window taking up no more than an eighth of my side screen, and there it lurked waiting for my eye to catch it.

Progress Knight in its simplest form is an idle game with the hook that you’re living the life of a peasant and climbing the ranks of society. You start homeless, able to hire a book for 10 copper a day, or a tent for 15 all while you beg for change on a street corner earning only 10 copper a day. Each of these gain you bonuses to help you skill up in life, be it the concentration to learn skills faster, the strength to help increase certain jobs incomes, the ability to be more productive and gain job experience faster, or even the ability to meditate to increase your happiness and multiply your life experience bonuses. However, choose wisely as you can only do one thing at a time, and there’s only so many days in a year, and so many years in a life… So, as you gain more money, you can get a shack, small house, some dumbbells, even a personal squire and you balance all of these with your earnings.

As you age from youth (the game starts you at 14 years of age), to adulthood, you stumble upon an amulet on your 25^th birthday, the groundhog day token to the game’s loop. At 45 it shivers and changes gaining a symbol that is never described. And just before you rest your head on your deathbed at 70 a living eye emerges from the centre. Do you dare touch it? If you do each level you earned in skills and jobs gain you multipliers to aid in the speed of leveling of the same. And that’s kind of it, well, except for the change in form it gains again at 200 years, and again at a millennia.

And I blinked… Now the game took up half the screen on my second monitor.

Now I’m jumping between strength, battle tactics, and mana control, something you gain through excelling in mediation and concentration… It doesn’t seem to do anything yet but it hints of the possibility that maybe you could be the Merlin of this story.

And then I blinked again…

Weeks have passed and after finding the discord link in the settings, I went looking for spoilers as progress has slowed down. Not only have I realised that I’m starting to become the villain through my need to extend my life through magical means, but once I hit 200 years of age, I may have started to invest in Evil. Nothing like some Dark influence, Demon Training, and Blood meditation to sooth the desire for more flashing numbers and the slow accumulation of power, palaces, and a personal need for perfection… So, I went searching as I wanted to know if I was nearing the end of the game… But instead, I found the games most recent successor. Progress Knight Quest.

Suddenly instead of training one thing at a time, I train everything… So much progression so quickly, I outpace my previous evolution in mere hours. My mind sparkles as endorphins flood the synapses, family duty fades to mere nuisances, other games and responsibilities become the background tasks to watching the life of this unnamed character trapped in a time loop of progression.

The soul crushed from me, eyes dry and sore… I blinked again…

More weeks have passed, and the game dominates my second monitor. The computer left on overnight to grind the millennia of life needed to progress. But not before I lie exhausted in my chair, mind blank in the faint blue glow emanating from the flashing bars moving across my screen. The browser window the only open program on my desktop, house guests visit, family sick, yet still I am drawn to the screen and it’s pulsing, beating litany of indicator bars. I’m now a chronomancer before the age of 15, the evil now coursing through my veins, my research completely focused on the all seeing eye but yet something else drives me further. My reach for the void, it’s servitude and compounding evil gain driving my focus as the clock clicks forever closer to midnight. My eyes dry, my dry tongue desperately trying to convince the last remaining neurons in my brain that I need a drink, and the last feeble attempt of my consciousness frantically urging me to bed and the sleep I so desperately need. But my back curls and my head inches closer to the flashing lights, and maybe if I wait a little longer I’ll hit the millennium lived years marker and can one again reach into the void.

And you want to know the worst part? For the month that this has lived on my screen, and the 2 to 3 weeks of gameplay I’ve invested I haven’t even touched a thing called “essence” or something I’ve only seen in patch notes…Transcendence.

Progress Knight really is what an idle game would be if you removed the major distractions, boiled it down to just the basics and just focussed on a story hook. No visuals but the text, bars, and buttons feel totally adequate to convey what you want when you want it. The resetting, so far, never feels like you’ve taken two steps back for one step forward, something I’ve felt seems to be quite common in some other idle games where the sacrifice for progress loop can feel mediocre and disheartening. In Progress Knight the only time I’ve felt this is when I got my first point of evil. While it gave me a small modicum of compounded progression, it did not feel like enough to really strive for. Since then, every sacrifice has felt impactful and earned, so kudos to the developers. Mind you when I started to feel that the original game began to slow down (after reading more it was the end of the base game), I moved to Progress Knight Quest which is a hands-off mod of Progress Knight 2.0 and included more evolutions, buffs, and overall content. So if you found joy in Cookie Clicker or AdVenture Capitalist give Progress Knight Quest a shot. And if, like me, these kinds of games take over your life, make you avoid social event, eating, and job deadlines… maybe just load up Animal Crossing again, your villagers miss you.

Hmmm, maybe I should just play one more life, I’ll go to bed once I hit the next milestone…

This week the Paul leads the team with Maylee, & Caroline and Special Guest Tom from Netherworld while they talk natures ‘buss-aloes’ during the weeks rundown of Gaming News. Our Special Guest Tom from Netherworld talks aussie 2D post-modern RPG, Knuckle Sandwich from Andy Brophy. Then Paul talks VR interactivity in a review of Pond Scum: A Gothic Swamp Tale, then chats with Ben, Ben, & Oliver from Universal Weebs Unlimited.

Remember The Game Discworld?

The point-and-click adventure game released in 1995, and adapted from the Discworld novels, might get a re-release within our lifetimes! But it could potentially be dependent on the King of England being pretty cool.

The simplified explanation: Discworld (the game) utilises a story written by Terry Prachett for the game, so developers could work with a cohesive plot. However, studios coming and going, and the IP changing hands over the years has made understanding who has IP rights a bit complicated.

Intellectual property rights suggests that King Charles might actually own 50% of the IP, with the other 50% reverting to the original creator.

“Who knows what might happen if that’s really the case. Maybe he’s a fan…We still own the IP rights…no one has spoken to us about any re-release” says Rhianna Prachett.

She also previously clarified in 2012 that the company only has ‘rights to the characters’, and not the games themselves.

Yeah… Someone Played Doom On Soundwaves

Here’s what it sounds like:

The visuals of the game are represented in a spectrogram, while the inputs are a range of high frequency notes mapped to specific keys. Instead of a controller or keyboard you use a microphone.

Technically the game doesn’t run on an unintended device, it’s just displayed and played in a weird and unintended way. But if you have a spectrogram you can give it a try yourself as the creator has uploaded the source code, complete with instructions.

Texas Chain Saw Romance

One of the playable characters in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Johnny, has a fresh new look. Introducing Shirtless Johnny, and don’t you worry, he’s a free cosmetic for everyone. So open a bottle of wine, get comfortable, and then murder video game people. Happy Late Valentine’s!

News Nibbles!

Taco Bell held an E3 style event called Taco Bell’s 2024 Live Mas Event. Complete with hyping up chicken tenders, as well as live performances, all with that ‘gamer pizazz’. This isn’t really gaming related, but it was uncanny.

XBOX will be announcing their new business updates on February 16th at 6am for those of you in Queensland. The announcement will be through their official podcast, and will feature Phil Spencer, Sarah Bond, and Matt Booty.

And now for some upcoming games!

February 16

• Mario vs. Donkey Kong – Nintendo Switch

February 20

• Skull and Bones – PC, PS5, Xbox Series X
• Nightingale – PC

February 21

• Bandle Tale: A League of Legends story – PC, Nintendo Switch
• Last Epoch – PC

February 22

• Pacific Drive – PC, PS5
• Sons of the Forest – PC

That’s it this week in gaming news!