Month: January 2021

Developer Bloober Team has revealed an extended look at its upcoming game The Medium, showcasing the psychological horror experience and its environments in 14 minutes of gameplay on the Xbox Series X. The Medium’s story is told across a journey that allows players to explore both the world of the living and the realm of the afterlife.

The main draw here is that players will be able to venture into both worlds simultaneously using a split-screen dual reality gameplay system. The Medium also has its own fair share of danger as players will have to deal with The Maw, a malevolent entity that can travel between realities but manifests as a blind and invisible foe in the living world who stalks the protagonist Marianne.

In GameSpot’s preview of The Medium, critic Alessandro Fillari noted how Bloober Team has built on the atmospheric horror of its previous games to create a tale that is both terrifying and surprisingly emotional.

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2020 has come to a close, but we’re not yet finished celebrating last year’s games. The New York Game Awards has announced the nominees for this year’s awards show, which marks the event’s 10th anniversary.

Former Nintendo boss Reggie Fils-Aime is the host of the New York Game Awards, which will be held as a virtual-only event due to the health crisis. The show takes place on January 26.

The nominees for the top prize, the Big Apple award for Best Game of the Year, include Animal Crossing: New Horizons, The Last of Us Part II, Final Fantasy VII Remake, Doom Eternal, Yakuza: Like a Dragon, and Hades.

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Avatar: The Last Airbender was a show that defined an era of animation and defined what could be accomplished within that world. Throughout its three seasons it originally aired on Nickelodeon, Avatar would win numerous awards–including Emmys and a Peabody and even have a sequel, Legend of Korra.

This week, some of the original cast members are coming together for a live stream to talk about the show, its influence on a generation of animators, and the “special place in animation history even 15 years later.”

Dante Basco, who provided the voice of Prince Zuko, announced on his Instagram that Zachary Elsen (Aang), Grey Griffin (Azula), Jack De Sena (Sokka), Jennie Kwan (Suki), Olivia Hack (Ty Lee), Cricket Leigh (Mai), and Michaela Murphy (Toph) have all been announced as participants, with “more to be revealed.”

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The PlayStation 5 represents a pretty bold design choice, with a curved space-age design and white fins along the sides. Fans have naturally assumed that an all-black model would be coming, matching the look of the last few PlayStation consoles, but Sony hasn’t introduced one so far. A third-party is offering custom systems this week that do just that, but they’re extremely limited in supply.

The store SUP3R5 is selling black consoles inspired by the design of the PS2. That means the white parts of the console and DualSense controller have been converted to black, and it sports retro coloring with the old PlayStation logo and the colors on the face buttons. The custom consoles are set to go on sale this Friday, January 8, at 3 PM ET. They’re expected to ship in the late spring.

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After a successful crowdfunding campaign, years of development, and multiple delays, Double Fine’s Psychonauts 2 is finally slated for release this year.

Double Fine boss Tim Schafer recently gave an update on the project, stressing that the game is indeed on track to launch in 2021. All the levels are in the game and no more features are being added, so the team is now working on getting the game polished and ready to release.

Schafer went on to say that Double Fine is refusing to crunch on Psychonauts 2 as it enters its final stage of development. The period of crunch on the first Psychonauts was brutal, Schafer said, and with that in mind, the studio is unwilling to do that again.

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Cyberpunk 2077 has set a number of impressive sales feats since it launched last year, such as selling 13 million copies at launch and breaking records on Steam for the most concurrent users ever in a single-player game. Cyberpunk 2077 also has several other achievements that CD Projekt Red likely doesn’t want to celebrate, such as Sony and Microsoft offering full refunds to customers due to multiple performance issues within the game, with Sony even going so far as to pull the game from the PlayStation Store.

Better optimized on PC than on console, Cyberpunk 2077 has had a more positive reception on that platform but has failed to maintain its playerbase since launch. Cyberpunk 2077 has lost 79% of its players since launch according to GitHyp’s data, with its current peak being over 200,000 players in comparison to its December peak of over a million players.

By contrast, it took CD Projekt Red’s previous game, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, three months to lose that percentage. However, The Witcher 3 started from a much lower peak of around 92,000 at launch in 2015.

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Microsoft has revealed the first new batch of Xbox Game Pass titles being added to the catalog this month, and there are some great games coming.

New additions for January 2021 include the fighting game Injustice 2 (January 7), along with Giant Sparrow’s acclaimed What Remains of Edith Finch (January 14) for PC. That game is already included with Xbox Game Pass on console.

Also coming to Game Pass in January is the PES 2021 Season Update for console and Android (January 7), which is an updated version of PES 2020 with new rosters. Game Pass subscribers can also look forward to the dungeon-crawler Torchlight III (January 14) and the 1950s-set adventure game The Little Acre (January 7).

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