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If you’ve been playing games for almost any length of time, chances are you know about the Castlevania series. Even if you haven’t played any of the games yourself, the influence that Castlevania has had on gaming is tremendous. There’s a reason we call games with an emphasis on exploration and upgrading your skills “Metroidvania”.
Koji Igarashi is best known for his work on many of those same games. Of course, like many other developers he has moved on from Konami. And he’s taken his love for the 2.5D action genre with him. Enter Bloodstained: Ritual of The Night. While the game is still very early, it seems to be the same situation that led to Mighty No. 9. In fact, Inti Creates is helping with the game. For those that don’t know, Inti Creates made Mega Man 9 and are also doing Mighty No. 9. Even Michiru Yamane is set to compose the score for the game, as he has done for countless other Castlevania games.
The setup for Ritual of the Night is rather familiar. At the end of the 18th century, some alchemists made a guild called….wait for it…the Alchemist’s Guild. Being a guild, naturally they got way to power hungry and started trying to combat the rise of science. Apparently, they thought that using children to lure demons to Earth would be a good way to accomplish this. To nobody’s surprise, the Guild vanishes, a castle filled with demons appear and its up to you to go kick some ass.
While this might not be the most unique setup for a game, I don’t care. Bloodstained looks to bring back the traditional Castlevania style in a gorgeous new package. Since being crowdfunded to the tuned of $500,000 the game has been confirmed for PS4, Xbox One and PC. Now, which will you choose when you pick up the game?
Seems that I underestimated just how much we’ve wanted a proper Banjo-Kazooie Threeie, or some equivalent when I wrote about Yooka-Laylee’s funding in just 40 minutes yesterday. Six hours after the launch of the Kickstarter Yooka-Laylee became the fastest video game project ever to reach $1 million, beating out the seven hours previously reached by Tormer: Tides of Numenera. Today, shortly before I began to write this article, they just hit £1 million which was the threshold of the stretch goals set out.
The game will now have a simultaneous Day One release on all platforms (PC, Mac, Linux, Xbox One, Playstation 4 and Wii U), some weird and unusual transformations, local co-op games, boss battles, exclusive character designs from other ex-Rare artists and professionally translated French, German, Italian and Spanish language options; along with much, much more because the stretch goals have all been met. That’s just amazing.
Posting in an update on the Kickstarter Playtonic expressed their gratitude by jokingly saying “We can’t take our eyes off you for a minute, can we?” regarding the quick funding. They then offered “sincere thanks” to everyone who has backed the game so far, stating that as always the Kickstarter was just to help them improve a game that they always were going to make and that because of the support “you’ve helped us shape it into one fine specimen”.
However they haven’t run out of ideas yet, and have now announced a further two stretch goals, one at £1,100,000 and then other at £1,200,000. The £1.1 mil is for an N64 shader mode option as well as a credits ‘GK rap and video’ from Grant Kirkhope who is responsible for the music for this game as well as many previous Rare games; and the £1.2 mil will get a series of the developers giving a walkthrough and commentary.
The speed that this game has funded is staggering, even for someone like me who completely understands how much everyone wanted a new and good Banjo-Kazooie game (I backed Y-L in the first hour after all). I truly hope that it turns out to be the one that we’ve wanted for so long and that Yooka and Laylee can truly carry the torch and carry on the tradition of buddy-duo platforming that Banjo and Kazooie made so popular.
Yooka-Laylee KS: “1 Million & More Stretch Goals!”: [x]
So, those of you who’ve been with us for a bit might remember this article I did for Playtonic Games’ presentation at EGX Rezzed. They said that they were hoping to bring back the 3D platformer similar to how Rare once did with Donkey Kong and Banjo-Kazooie back in the 90s. Now the game has its official name: Yooka-Laylee and more besides.
The game is very similar to Banjo-Kazookie’s set-up; two animal friends of differing species travel and work together to traverse a colourful landscape full of enemies and collectables. Yooka is a green chameleon with a tongue that can be used as a grapple and Laylee is the purple bat who can carry Yooka short distances through the air and uses sonar as a weapon. The main collectable are the Pagies and Playtonic have already said that there’ll be a lot of inanimate objects with eyes and the same artist is doing the music in the same style as the original Banjo-Kazooie games. This game really is being set up as a spiritual successor to those games.
And it’s working. The Kickstarter has only been up for less than a day and it already has over 3,900 backers and has made more than £170,000 of its £175,000 target. It’s increasing even further as I write. There’s a range of stretch goals that go all the way up to £1 million and they involve such things as releases onto consoles being timed with each other and the computer releases and boss and level design extras and all sorts. Not sure if they’ll make it all the way to the 1 million marker but I expect to see some of the stretch goals being met at this rate.
Say what you will about it being a ‘copy’ of Banjo-Kazooie, but so far it seems that Playtonic are using the nostalgic love for their old games as a sure-fire marketing strategy to ensure that the next generation of buddy-duo platformers are off to a strong start.
Robot Entertainment’s new spin on the MOBA is in closed beta, and we were lucky enough to get our hands on a key. Here are Digmbot’s first impressions of the new game.
Okay, he didn’t exactly say that – but close enough!
Mighty No.9, often seen as Keiji Inafune’s spiritual successor to Mega Man – a franchise he originally created, but no longer controls as a result of leaving Capcom – was a phenomenal success on Kickstarter, smashing its original $900,000 target fourfold; and funding campaigns outside Kickstarter have only put more cash into the kitty. As a result of the huge fan base, the game has quickly grown from its original concept, growing from six to eight stages in the main story mode, introducing Japanese and French voiceovers, extra subtitle languages, an extra level, boss and playable character – not to mention it’s now planned to hit almost every current and previous-gen console under the sun!
With the game growing to such a massive extent, Keiji’s team, Comcept, have now teamed up with a secondary publisher, Deep Silver — the publisher behind Saints Row, Homefront and Dead Island – to get the game released on to all the supported platforms as quickly as possible. However, in order to allow all the cool stuff to be added, Comcept have been forced to admit – via a Kickstarter update – that they will miss the original planned launch window of “Spring 2015”; and instead, will be delaying the game’s release until September.
“Before you despair, please, hear us out first!” Comcept writes. “The reason for the delay, and the reason we are so excited about this new partnership in the first place, is all the cool stuff it will allow us to add to the game.” The deal with Deep Silver will not impact any Kickstarter backer rewards, Comcept says.
We’ll leave you with the promotional imagery they published to excite you while you wait:
