Month: July 2020

The Dungeons & Dragons team has revealed Curse of Strahd: Revamped, an updated collector’s edition of the 2016 adventure module.

We got an early look at the set from D&D’s Principal Narrative Designer Chris Perkins, which you can check out in the video and image gallery below.

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“We don’t do a tremendous number of box sets,” Perkins said. “And we don’t always have the luxury of time or money to really test ourselves… You’d think that we’re just taking something that exists, we’re putting it in a fancy package and ‘Whoop!’ it’s done, but actually so much thought and so many people were involved in the concepting and the packaging and the design, the cards, the DM screen, and everything. It was actually a very time consuming – but fun – process.”

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The set retails for $99.99USD, comes in a coffin-shaped box with Ravenloft-inspired etchings and contains…

• 224-page softcover printing of the most up-to-date edition of Curse of Strahd, complete with all errata published since 2016.
• 20-page Creatures of Horror booklet, serving as an easily-accessible compendium for Strahd-specific monsters.
• A double-sided poster map featuring the realm of Barovia on one side and a detailed plan of Castle Ravenloft on the other.
• A new foil-stamped version of Gale Force Nine’s Tarokka deck to draw the Fortunes of Ravenloft from.
• 8-page Tarokka Deck booklet for reference when using the deck
• Physical handouts for DMs to provide their players.
• 12 illustrated postcards “from” Barovia for DMs to use when inviting players to their game.
• Dungeon Master’s screen with helpful information for running adventures in this gothic horror setting featuring postcard illustrations from CoupleOfKooks.

“It was always my wish that at some point we could put a version of the adventure together that actually had the cards with it, and it’s out of that idea that this boxed set emerged,” Perkins says. “We did want to make sure that if Beadle and Grimm [a company that specializes in high-end D&D box sets like this one or this one], for instance, were doing their own version of it, we wouldn’t eventually be duplicating what they would do. They tend to go, with their Platinum Editions, in the hundreds of dollars. So this is kind of filling in middle space between what they would normally do and what we would normally sell.”

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The updates to the adventure itself mostly consist of previously-published amendments to the book, such as tweaks to an additional character option or corrections of printing errors, but the most notable updates are to some items that were deemed insensitive or offensive after the original publishing, particularly in regard to a disabled character and the depiction of a group of nomadic NPCs known as Vistani. A recent post on the D&D website explains that, “regrettably, their depiction echoes some stereotypes associated with the Romani people in the real world,” and that the team wanted to avoid depicting them in a way that relied on “reductive tropes.”

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As such, several sections of explicitly problematic text have been removed and/or altered*. “Curse of Strahd [Revamped] specifically address pain points around the Vistani and around this disabled character, and there were small other issues to resolve as well,” Perkins said. “We wanted to clean that up a bit and remove some stuff that the fans didn’t particularly like in terms of representation and how they were depicted – it’s that sort of very granular-but-important change. More like surgical changes to the adventure than some sort of grand sweeping change.”

Perkins says this is something the entire D&D team is focused on, particularly in light of recent discussions centered around diversity in the tabletop roleplaying community. “I think every product that we do is trying to march us forward a step, as far as that goes,” he says. “We started this product in late or the middle of last year, so a lot of what Curse of Strahd Revamped addresses are issues that we saw long before the recent discussions on social media and stuff like that. The recent stuff is going to translate to changes to other products down the road past this one.”

Such projects, like the upcoming Rime of the Frostmaiden adventure and another still-to-be-revealed title, see constant iteration. Chris and the team were making tweaks and edits to the entries for how the book handles formerly “evil” races like Orcs and Drow right up until the book was recently sent off for printing. “Every product is an opportunity for us to get (A) more sensitive and more aware,” Perkins said. “And (B) to get more voices involved in our products and our product making in our product planning. And that means working with a broader range of freelancers, that means bringing people on staff who have different perspectives, different backgrounds and voices, and bigger, more fundamental steps than, you know, a change to a word here or a page there.”

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For more D&D on IGN, why not check out our guide to moving your game online during the time of social distancing, or if you’re just getting into the hobby have a look at our picks for the best Dungeons & Dragons starter sets or how to play D&D for free. Of course, if you’re thinking about giving tabletop role-playing a try but aren’t sure if D&D is the right fit, check out our guide to finding the right TRPG for you and your group.

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JR is a Senior Editor at IGN who really misses playing D&D in person and constantly pines for it on Twitter.

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* It’s worth noting that the book’s illustrations of the Vistani still evoke Romani culture, and some players may still associate certain abilities (such as their ability to cast curses or hypnotize players using an “Evil Eye”) with outdated cultural stereotypes.

Whether it’s 2005 or 2020, there’s something cathartic about running amok in an idyllic 1950s world as an angry gray alien and slurping up human brains by the gallon. This upgraded remaster of the original Destroy All Humans! recaptures that simple joy, and does a respectable job of updating the look and feel. It was never a masterpiece of open-world third-person action, but it still knows how to have some fun.

All things considered, the completely remade graphics look pretty good – you probably wouldn’t mistake it for the latest and greatest, but it certainly doesn’t look ancient. There’s plenty of detail on the perpetually sneering face of our alien protagonist, Crypto, and the world looks colorful, if a little sparse. Human characters are much more cartoonish than they were originally, which works well enough even though their animations aren’t great. The redone cutscenes are certainly a big improvement.

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All of the voice acting is straight out of the 2005 version, so we get the good with the bad. The main character, Crypto, still seems miscast – he sounds like some kind of weird alien hybrid of Jack Nicholson and Duke Nukem, and his lines usually aren’t very funny. On the other hand, you hear much more chatter from your alien overlord, who’s played by Invader Zim’s Richard Horvitz, and he’s always amusingly over the top as he screams orders at you. (“As I suspected: the humans are just elaborately evolved meat!”) And the main villain, the leader of the Men in Black-style organization Majestic, sounds like a sassier Kylo Ren.

[poilib element=”quoteBox” parameters=”excerpt=Playing%20as%20a%20rampaging%20monster%20definitely%20hasn%E2%80%99t%20gone%20out%20of%20style.”]The moment-to-moment gameplay of Destroy All Humans! holds up reasonably well, which is no surprise since playing as a rampaging monster is a concept that definitely hasn’t gone out of style in the past 15 years. (Just look at this year’s Maneater, for instance.) Almost immediately you wield a wide range of alien powers, like a jetpack, the ability to throw people around with your mind, pop people’s heads so that you can steal their brains, and disguise yourself as any human you see for some very simple stealth. You start out feeling overpowered in fights with small groups of enemies and it only grows from there with new abilities and upgrades, so you have lots of options to mess around with.

Of course, enemy AI is extremely basic and the hordes of easily swatted bad (good?) guys spawn in all around you, so it’s a simple but fun style of action as you bounce around zapping 1950s-era police, soldiers, and G-men, tossing grenades and rockets back at them and blasting tanks. The controls feel snappy and most of the weapons are good fun to use – it’s hard to go wrong with a chain lightning gun, a plasma blaster that reduces victims to skeletons, and a grenade launcher. The anal probe is fairly useless, though – it’s all in service of a joke that’s instantly played out. All of it’s heavy on auto-aim so you basically just have to fire in the general direction of a target, which makes the new target lock feel pretty unnecessary. Success is much more about staying on the move than it is about precision accuracy.

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To keep that type of action from getting too monotonous, every so often you jump into your flying saucer and wreak havoc from above with your death ray. The controls are a little wonky in that you have no control over your altitude and you can’t aim as far ahead as it seems like you should be able to, but it’s quite satisfying to be able to blow up nearly any building even though the explosion effect is kind of weird and blobby. There’s some skill involved in the more intense battles since you have to block incoming missiles with carefully timed shields, but it’s generally an even lighter type of combat than what you see on foot. Because of that it’s easy to forget to pump upgrade points into the saucer as opposed to Crypto’s personal abilities, but you’ll probably need both to get through the final boss.

[poilib element=”quoteBox” parameters=”excerpt=What%20feels%20a%20little%20old%20is%20the%20structure%20of%20the%20levels.”]What feels a little old is the structure of the levels, which are a series of modestly sized, self-contained open worlds, and they’re sparsely populated relative to what we’ve become accustomed to over the past decade. Still, the settings are decently diverse – there’s farmland, a beachside community, a military base, and more, all of which are visually distinctive. And of course there are plenty of civilians strolling around with brains ripe for the picking, and there are some amusing gags when you use your mind-reading powers on them.

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What gives Destroy All Humans! a little more depth than meets the eye is that each mission has optional side objectives, such as scoring kills with explosives, reaching a goal undetected, or killing a target in a very specific way, which adds some good replayability. On top of that, all of the maps include gradually unlocked challenges like rampages, races, and abductions (where you have to toss people or things into a beam that sucks them up) and you can duck into those between missions to farm brain-cash for weapon upgrades. Between those side activities and the campaign missions, Destroy All Humans! kept me busy for about 15 hours – including grinding a bit to buff up my UFO to handle the final boss fights.

Nearly all of the missions are effectively identical to the original game, though there’s one new mission chain in the Area 42 map in which you infiltrate and sabotage the Air Force’s attempt to make its own version of a flying saucer. It fits in well, to the point where I wouldn’t have known it was new if it hadn’t been pointed out, which is both good and bad. It’s a lot of very similar light stealth gameplay, which isn’t the strongest part of Destroy All Humans!, but the story contains some of the better moments in the entire campaign and there are some almost Hitman-like assassinations I’d have liked to have seen more of.

The Analogue Pocket – a modern reimagining of classic handheld consoles that can play cartridges from the Game Boy family as well as other cart-based handhelds – has finalised its design and features in preparation for release in 2021.

The design, which still looks like a classic Game Boy as designed by Sony’s PS4 concept artists, has had its start/select/home button cluster moved from the right-hand edge to the bottom centre of the console for ease of reach. The power button on the side of the unit can be used to sleep and wake the console, providing the ability to pause and resume games.

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While the 1600×1440 resolution screen offers 10x the resolution of the original Game Boy and has display rotation and a variable refresh rate, the Pocket also has an Original Display mode that replicates an original Game Boy, Game Boy Colour, or Game Boy Advance screen as it was, “quirks and all”.

The Pocket’s dock – which works akin to a Switch dock for HDMI-out to TV functionality – has had its USB C connector recessed to provide extra stability when the console is attached. It also supports up to 4 controllers via Bluetooth, 2.4g, and USB.

Much like classic Game Boy consoles, multiplayer between Analogue Pockets can be done with the use of link cables, which will be sold separately.

Talking of cables, Analogue has also developed new MIDI and Analog sync cables for use with Nanoloop, the Pocket’s music creation software. Nanoloop is built into the Pocket, and cables can be used to bring your chiptune creations into a Mac, PC, or other music hardware.

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The Pocket isn’t just a music creation tool, though. Analogue has partnered with GB Studio to allow users to create retro-style games for the system. The ‘drag and drop’ interface allows game development with no coding experience, and created games can be played on the Pocket from an SD card. Analogue is launching a FPGA developer program to support this.

Alongside the Pocket, Analogue will launch a series of accessories, including screen protectors, a hard case, and the all-important cartridge adaptors to allow Game Gear, Neo Geo Pocket Colour, and Atari Lynx games to be played on the console.

If you find the idea of a Game Boy for the year 2020 appealing, the Analogue Pocket will be available to pre-order from August 3 at 8am PT. The console will ship in May 2021.

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Matt Purslow is IGN’s UK News and Entertainment Writer. 

Announced last year, the Analogue Pocket has finally gotten a release date. Analogue’s FPGA-based handheld is capable of playing games from several libraries, including the Game Boy, Game Boy Color, and Game Boy Advance. The handheld starts shipping May 2021, while pre-orders open starting August 3 at 8 AM PT / 11 AM ET. The Analogue Pocket is $200 USD and comes in both white and black, while the Analogue Dock is $99.

A number of new details were also revealed. The Analogue Pocket boasts a 4300mAh battery that allows for 6 to 10 hours of play time (or 10+ hours of sleep time). It can be put into sleep mode and awakened by pressing the power button. This allows you to pause your games whenever you like and resume them as such–no GBA Sleep Mode compatibility required.

Continue Reading at GameSpot

I love two types of sci-fi stories: the ones that are very dark and heavy with themes about humanity’s failures, and the ones that are corny and feel like the product of someone who thinks space is a playground for fun. Destroy All Humans is firmly in the second category, embracing its cheesy story and dialogue, creating an entertaining sandbox for destruction that’s still satisfying 15 years after its first release, even if it’s bogged down by poor audio quality and shallow stealth mechanics.

The story plays out as a B-grade sci-fi movie set in the late ’50s/early ’60s. Over the six hours of campaign missions you’ll laugh (or groan) at the majority of jokes and bad one-liners, making for an overall enjoyable experience. The premise of two aliens completely taking over America because humans are wildly incompetent is too ridiculous to take seriously, and the game embraces the absurdity well.

The voice work from the original release helps up the camp level, but the reused dialogue raises a few issues. The audio quality is flat-out bad by modern standards; its low-fidelity really sticks out when paired with the updated graphics. The characters don’t have very many lines, either, resulting in annoying repetition very early on. Be prepared to hear about communists hundreds of times before you’re done.

Continue Reading at GameSpot

World of Warcraft: Shadowlands has been rated for Xbox Series X in Brazil.

As spotted by Gematsu, the Brazilian ratings board has classified the upcoming World of Warcraft expansion Shadowlands for both PC and Xbox Series X. This would suggest that the game could come to Microsoft’s next-gen console in the future.

Not sure if this is an error, but World of Warcraft: Shadowlands was rated in Brazil today for Xbox Series X + PC. https://t.co/PVcoSIn1ii@Blizzard_Ent @Warcraft Can you provide some insight? pic.twitter.com/h1n1lLUXIY

— Gematsu (@gematsucom) July 27, 2020

If that rating is accurate, this would be the first time World of Warcraft would be playable on a console. Since its launch in 2004, the game has only ever been available on PC and Mac. IGN has reached out to Blizzard for comment about the listing.

In other Shadowlands news, we learned earlier this month that the upcoming expansion will drop the fee necessary to change your gender in-game, which used to cost players $15. World of Warcraft director Ion Hazzikostas also told IGN recently that Shadowlands is the perfect expansion for returning players.

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Jordan Oloman is a freelance writer for IGN. Follow him on Twitter.

The Medium, the next game from Layers of Fear and Blair Witch studio Bloober Team, was shown off in new detail during last week’s Xbox Series X showcase. Skipping the current Xbox generation entirely, The Medium will make use of the next-generation increase in power to render two worlds simultaneously, a feature that Bloober refers to as “Dual-reality” gameplay. On Xbox Series X, The Medium will run at 4K and 30fps which the studio says will provide a more cinematic approach on console.

Curiously, the list below makes no mention of a solid-state drive, technology which Bloober said was essential for realising their game on the Xbox Series X. “For the immersion that is crucial in our games, it was the best feature and it was delivered by Microsoft,” lead game designer Wojciech Piejko said back in May after The Medium made its debut.

“And of course the raw house power is great. So we are now able to deliver our vision of The Medium for the first time just how we imagined it.” The Medium is currently scheduled for a Holiday 2020 release.

Continue Reading at GameSpot