Playtonic Games are a fairly new game studio formed of old hands in the gaming industry. Ex-Rare employees responsible for parts of some of the N64 90s lineup of fondly remembered games, they set out to create a modern game that harkened back to those golden days. They chose to give Banjo and Kazooie successors in the form of lizard Yooka and bat Laylee.

And it paid off massively.

The Kickstarter reached its target in under an hour, it reached £1 million in a matter of days. Now almost 50 days later the Kickstarter has finally closed with every stretch goal met comfortably, pulling in a staggering £2,090,104 together. And the Paypal donation link is still open.

Posting their thanks on the Kickstarter page the team spoke to their backers:

“47 days ago we started this Kickstarter campaign – our first Kickstarter – with little idea of what we were letting ourselves in for… Through these past 47 days we’ve felt an incredible level of positive support from everyone, whether they opted to back us or not. For that, we are extremely grateful!”

The post concluded by saying that the game was aimed for a rough release time of the end of 2016 and that they hoped it would be a game we could “look back and be proud to be involved with.”

I know I’m looking forward to going on my adventure with a new buddy-duo. Just as I did with Banjo-Kazooie as a child.

Square Enix took to the stage at E3 today with news on games both known and unknown, as well as announcing two mysterious ‘in-progress’ projects.

The press conference kicked off with a trailer for Just Cause 3, and between it and the one shown a few minutes later we’re certainly not going to be short on video game explosions when it releases. Avalanche Studios were there to speak about the game and how they want to make it the best of the series up to date, listing the addition of a wingsuit and improvements to the grappling hook as things they’d done to work towards that. The second trailer also showed off a bunch of crazy stuff you can supposedly do that looked amazingly fun. The game will release globally on December 1st for Playstation 4, Xbox One and PC.

Rise of the Tomb Raider also had a trailer shown during the conference, with a behind-the-scenes section on how they worked to make Lara as lifelike as possible also being shown. Not to everyone’s interest, but damn that detail was pretty. Tomb Raider also showed up in a new mobile game announced for phones and tablets – Lara Croft Go.

Deux Ex: Mankind Divided was also there, with a release time of somewhere around the early part of 2016 being announced as well as the platforms of Playstation 4, Xbox One and PC again. There was a reveal of what they called the first “in-game” trailer and we were informed that the game was built in a new game engine and focused around the ‘evolution’ of the main character.

One franchise I hadn’t expected to see make an appearance was the Hitman series, and a new digital game was announced. The new Hitman game will release on December 8th and will feature new quests added regularly that have a time limit before the target vanishes and even if you do kill the target the way you do it will effect what new options become available in future. The game will apparently be updated depending on player feedback as well, which is interesting.

The two mystery projects both looked interesting, with one being announced as a new original RPG and the other showing nothing but a short trailer. The one with just a trailer was by Platinum Games Inc. and called “NieR New Project”. The game itself was stated to be in a very early state of development so we didn’t get many details about it during the conference. The other project was called “Project Setsuna” and was being handled by a newly formed studio – Tokyo RPG Factory. Again, details were sparse. Platinum did choose to make their presentation memorable in quite a unique way though…

… Dear lord. o.0;;

Obviously as one of Square Enix’s biggest franchises Final Fantasy was incredibly visible. As well as showing off the Final Fantasy VII remake that was announced last night at Sony’s conference again (with a promise of more details coming this winter), a ‘Final Fantasy Portal App’ was announced to be coming to devices this summer. It apparently acts as an information database for all things Final Fantasy. Finally the Final Fantasy game that had the most time given to it was World of Final Fantasy, a game with cutesy style characters (which can convert to ‘proper’ sizes too) that was intended as a way to help new players get used to the Final Fantasy universe without overloading them with the history of it. That’ll also be releasing sometime in 2016.

Kingdom Hearts was also there, much to the happiness of the crowd (you could hear the “YES”es on the stream!). Two games were announced, for Kingdom Hearts Unchained Key, a mobile platform game that will be released in North America (no mention of Europe) and will link into the story of the other game: Kingdom Hearts 3. The trailer for that game was full of colourful scenes, fights, ridiculous moves (they included a train and TEACUPS for god’s sake) and a game of chess. Really.

A new Star Ocean game was also announced, Star Ocean: Integrity and Faithlessness. Trailers were shown that included actual gameplay footage and a lot was made of the fact that everything was programmed to be seamless – no loading, no jumping from the action. There will also be two types of cutscene, the traditional one and ‘dynamic’ cutscenes. The game will release in North America and Europe next year.

The conference ended with a trailer listing all we had just seen with the creators coming back on stage to take one last bow. All in all, the conference contained a few surprises but was pretty much what was expected and because there was so much squeezed in, nothing really got a lot of focus which seemed a bit of a shame.

Watch it below:

EA’s conference is done. We got new Mass Effect, Mirror’s Edge: Catalyst gameplay, some Star Wars Battlefront…and a  crap ton of sports. Oh, and apparently Plants vs. Zombies: Garden Warfare 2 is a thing. Because we all needed more of that, right?

Lets start off with Mass Effect. It has been confirmed that the game is coming Holiday 2016. It has a distinctly more Western (western movie) style feel to it than previous Mass Effect games. As someone who isn’t a fan of the series I found myself rather meh about the whole thing, but plenty of people are super hyped.

Need For Speed is back, and it looks like more of the same “edgy  and gritty” story telling. What was different though was that the driving actually looked good. Smooth framerate, great lighting and dynamic racing. Hopefully this is a return to form, before Need For Speed became an every year franchise release.”

Next, we got to meet…Hoop Gawd….the…Gawd of Hoops? Seriously, this may have been the dumbest way ever to show off face scanning tech in a game. EA promises tons of new animations and realistic physics in its new basketball game. Maybe it will actually make basketball entertaining to watch when the physics engine inevitably breaks in hilarious ways. There was some fantasy mod stuff for madden NFL 16 as well, and a bunch of soccer stuff. MOVING ON.

Unravel looks amazing. Possibly the one game that wasn’t a sequel or a reboot, the puzzle platformer about a ball of yarn looks amazing, adorable and a ton of fun.

Oh, and there was a card game as well. Is everyone making one of those damn things?

And…thats about it for the EA conference. It was pretty lackluster. I’m not gonna lie, I had trouble staying awake for the whole thing. Even when I went back and watched it again to see what I missed and discovered I had missed…nothing. Except a mind numbingly boring Pele interview.

Xbox One is getting a completely redesigned dashboard later this year, featuring a vertical design separated into four different tabs, including a new Quick Menu, Home, Community and Store.

Cortana will also be introduced with the new dashboard, allowing players to find friends and start parties using their voice and if you are interested, Avatars are also coming back with a new modernised look for Xbox One.

Check out the video below for more details.

Ubisoft took their turn on the stage for their turn at hyping up the crowd at E3 2015, and they showed off details and reveals for games in their most loved franchises as well as revealing a few surprises. Mostly it was made of games we expected, although the rumours about Watch_Dogs 2 being there were proven not to be true.

The press conference started off with a trailer for a game no one saw coming – South Park: The Fractured But Whole. The sequel to the Stick of Truth game that the creators said they’d never make (but decided to do anyway), this time we see the characters playing through a superhero themed game. I’m not a fan of South Park, but I did get a laugh when they realised that they were no longer doing an RPG and paused the action to change costumes.

Next we had another new and unexpected game announcement: For Honor, a team game for up to 8 players (2 teams of 4 players) involving a lot of melee combat. It was shown off with a beautifully animated trailer that followed a common thread of combat across several different battlefields with a different fighter for each. There was also a live demo and it seems that hits will be given more emphasis through camera shake on screen, in an attempt to better immerse players in the game. It certainly looks as if it’ll have promise and players can sign up at forhonor.com to get more information about the game.

Onto the titles and franchises we did expect to see the first up was The Crew’s new expansion announcement. Wild Run will come with loads of new content such as vehicles, maps and gatherings and will be released on November 17th.

The Division was also featured, with news on a Beta coming on Xbox One, Playstation 4 and PC early next year and the release date being announced as March 18th. They also talked about an area in the game called the Dark Zone – a quarantined area of the world which you can enter and showed a clip of gameplay that showcased the multiplayer elements, how you can choose to work together or not, finding loot and towards the end became a really good lesson on why you should never trust your best friends in a video game.

Games were announced for the Anno series, with Anno 2205 showcasing a nearish-future version of the city building game and Trackmania with Trackmania Turbo taking the series to consoles with a colourful and interesting set of racetracks with loops, twists and turns; as well as the ability to do your own tracks. Trials Fusion also announced Awesome Levels Max expansion with a perfect trailer that involved rainbows, a gun-toting ginger cat and a fire-breathing unicorn. Brilliant.

Just Dance 2016 was of course there, with the news that a camera is no longer needed to play the game and that you can use your smartphone as a controller for the game. More tracks, more dancing, more colour, more wonderfully danced avatars of course. The big news announced though was that a streaming service for the game called Just Dance Unlimited was going to be launched to allow users to get updates of fresh tracks to play, through a monthly subscription fee. The game will release in October for all platforms, with Xbox One, PS4 and WiiU getting access to the Just Dance Unlimited service.

There was more information on Rainbow Six: Siege including a rather awesome trailer that ramped up the tension and emphasised the importance of mission completion. Terrohunt was also announced to be making a return in this game, with a live demonstration of a mission on-stage which showcased some beautiful teamwork and co-optional play. Beta access will start from September 24th and it will include both the PvP and Terrohunt gamemodes for players to try out.

Another one of the big games we expected to see there was Assassin’s Creed: Syndicate and the idea of twin assassins with a gang of people backing them up set in Victorian London sounds amazing. We got a nice little trailer which included a Victorian horse-drawn carriage chase. Shame that it featured just one twin and it was the male one. Maybe I’m being a bit harsh but this is the same franchise that once talked about how it was too difficult to animate female assassins and got flack for it. I’d have loved to see her in action, but at least they did make a trailer for her even if it was shown during Sony’s press conference instead. If you’re interested, sign up at assassinscreed.com.

Finally they wrapped up with one last surprise game reveal: a new Ghost Recon game that emphasised the open-world possibilities and that there are many different ways of completing a mission. The trailer for Ghost Recon Wildlands showed the way that three different methods could result in a mission complete. Also, there was a lot of talk of not fearing death and quite a bit of blood. We’ve already talked about what position we’d take if we played, and I’m going to be causing havoc.

All in all, Ubisoft’s press conference was a lot how we expected it to be. Most of what was expected made a showing in some form and with big showy trailers too. There were some surprises though and I do look forward to seeing if games like For Honor become a success.

Also, Trials Fusion’s trailer was the highlight. Because it was ridiculous.