BitSummit, Japan’s leading indie games event, was held over the weekend in Kyoto, and among the games showcased was one called Tokyo Stories that you have really got my attention.
Developed by Drecom, who are normally in the business of making phone games, it’s a moody adventure game set in Tokyo where, cryptically, “The city continues to tell her story, even after her disappearance.”
The game’s trailer looks fantasticwith an art style that builds its world in 3D, then gives everything a gritty pixel art effect, before smothering it all in some incredibly moody lighting:
Tokyo Stories [1st Promotion]
Looks amazing, right? By now though, you might also be wondering how the game actually plays, since that trailer was almost entirely made up of cinematic sequences. IGN Japan were at BitSummit, and after a hands-on demo with Tokyo Stories say that it’s built very much like a traditional PS1 game, with a fixed camera perspective that your 3D character walks around in, with most of your time spent simply wandering the city’s streets (you’re locked to a walking speed), exploring and learning about the world around you.
This might be a long shot for older heads here, but if anyone remembers the 2013 PS3 exclusive Rain, you might see some similarities here, and with good reason. Lead development on Tokyo Stories is Yuki Ikeda, who was also director on Rainand having been working on various projects at Drecom, this is his first all-new game in a decade.
Tokyo Stories is currently slated for PC and “consoles,” with a release date planned for sometime in 2023. If you want to see more on the game, its official Instagram account has some smaller clipsincluding one that shows how the game’s unique look is achieved:
EVO, the year’s biggest fighting games event, went down over the weekend, and in terms of news perhaps the biggest announcement was that not one but two games will be getting Rollback Netcode improvements over the next 12 months. Don’t know what that means, or why it’s important? I got you!
So in online multiplayer games, a large part of allowing everyone to play together is the way the game registers everyone’s actions at the same time. when a person in Canada is playing someone in Germany they’ll both be pressing buttons in their own homes, and the game needs to pick up those inputs, apply them to the game and have them play out in a way that makes the whole thing look as seamless as though they they were playing with (or against) each other in the same room.
Different games (and different genres) handle this differently, depending on how important speed and accuracy is to the player’s experience, but one type of input recognition that’s especially important to anyone playing a fighting game—where every frame and millisecond can mean the difference between victory and defeat—is called Rollback Netcode.
Rollback Netcode doesn’t rely on waiting for everyone’s input before registering actions; instead it lets both players press their buttons and see the action play out instantly without lag or delay, as though they were playing offline, and in the downtime between that and the opponent’s action arriving the game basically guesses what was going to happen next. If it guessed right the game continues with nobody noticing, and if it was wrong, it checks down to play out the action that the other player actually made, which sometimes involves a little “teleporting”.
The very helpful video below, by Coby Mystics, explains how Rollback Netcode works, and how in fighting games it’s speed and accuracy make it so superior to the more traditional Input Delay:
Code Mystics Explains Netcode: Input Delay vs. roll-back
OKAY! So now that we’re all up to speed on Rollback Netcode, you can understand why such a seemingly minor announcement is actually a huge deal for fighting game fans, and why these two announcements made at EVO went down so well with fans.
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First up, producer Tomoko Hiroki took to the stage to announce that the upcoming versions of dragon ball fighter z on PS5 and Xbox Series X|S will be getting Rollback Netcode, as will the PC version, though on the latter players will get the option whether to use Rollback Netcode (which will carry a slightly steeper system requirement) or stick with Input Delay.
It doesn’t look like the upgrade will be coming to the PS4, Xbox One or Switch versions of the game, though the last-gen PlayStation and Xbox versions will have upgrade paths made available for anyone who upgrades to newer systems.
As for when this is actually coming, it doesn’t sound like it will be soon, with the announcement saying “It will take some time until the system is implemented, but we sincerely hope you will enjoy it as soon as possible. More information will be released at a later date. Please wait for further details.”
The 2019 reboot of samurai showdown got the same announcement, with SNK teaming up with Code Mystics—creators of the vid above—to implement the upgrade. It’ll be coming to the PC, PS4, Xbox One and Xbox Series X|S versions of the game (again leaving the Switch behind), and is “planned” for Spring 2023.
While a big deal has been made about someone former PlayStation exclusives coming to the PC—like Horizon and God of War—no deal was made last week whatsoever about a game with a much lower profile, but which I love regardless.
That game is Hohokumwhich was first released on the PlayStation 4 (and PS3, and Vita) in 2014, and which remains one of the most chill video game experiences available. A collaborative work between artist Richard Hogg, developers Honeyslug and the record label Ghostly, Hohokum is to beautiful 2D adventure where you play as a worm…kite…thing that just floats around its various levels, poking around a colorful landscape just to see what happens.
HOHOKUM | Now Available On Steam
It’s magic. I love this game so much that amidst all the hardware drama and blockbuster releases making up our roundup of the last console generation I wrote a whole thing just about this little game, which I described as being—in terms of meeting its ambitions—perfect.
You move a big snake thing around a floating landscape, and sometimes you run into things, and sometimes you fly through things. You’re never fighting, talking, not really doing much of anything.
Yet for Hohokum these aren’t limitations. They’re a canvas.
It’s a game that understands the links between interaction, visuals and soundtrack to a terrifyingly perfect degree. Each is inspired by and reliant on the other two, to the point where once it gets going Hohokum is almost synaesthesic.
one thing Hohokum is now providing to also be is timeless. Eight years on from its original release its art style hasn’t aged a day, and technically looks as though it could have been released yesterday. The heavyweight soundtrack accompanying it also sounds as good in 2022 as it did in 2014, no doubt helped by the fact that many of the artists involved—like Tycho—are still killing it today.
So if you haven’t owned a PlayStation in a while and never got to check this out, I cannot recommend it highly enough. Annapurna has published this PC version (which, admittedly, is probably why less of a fuss was made than if Sony had released it), and it’s out on Steam now.
While it’s not the most powerful console out there, the smaller and more affordable Xbox Series S has been a big hit for Xbox. But reportedly, some devs have felt the strain of getting bigger, more advanced games to work on the console and in response, Microsoft is freeing up some memory to help improve the tiny console’s performance.
As spotted by TheVergeMicrosoft is hoping to make the Xbox Series S a bit more powerful by freeing up some memory and letting developers access that extra memory if needed. In a video explaining this new developer-focused update, Microsoft says that it is unlocking “hundreds of additional megabytes of memory” and that this will, in theory, give studies more control over how to use the console’s limited memory. Microsoft says this “can improve graphics performance in memory-constrained conditions.”
The June Game Development Kit (GDK) is Available Now
To be clear, this isn’t like Microsoft quadrupling the power of the Series S. Nor is this Microsoft flipping some secret switch to let the console start running games at 8K and 240hz or anything wild like that. Instead, the amount of memory dedicated to non-gaming functions in the $300 Series S is being tweaked.
While the more powerful xbox series x console has 16GB of RAM the cheaper Xbox Series S has only 10GB. But before this update, devs only had access to 8GB of that memory as Microsoft reserved around 2GB for the console’s OS. Now devs will have a few hundred extra megabytes of memory, which could help some games run a bit better moving forward.
The Xbox Series S has always been positioned by Microsoft as a cheaper, less-powerful, but still capable next-gen console option. and it’s proven to be a very popular piece of hardware since releasing alongside the beefier Xbox Series X in 2020. Hell, I already had an xbox series x and I ended up buying one. It’s become the main way we play games in our living room, perfect for Fall Guys and Fortnite. But for more intense games it can struggle, requiring cutting down on framerate or resolution. This has reportedly led to some issues and frustration from devs trying to get certain games running on the lesser machine.
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A recent example of a game performing differently on Series S is the Evil Dead game, which launched without a 60fps performance mode on the cheaper machine. Resident Evil Village also limits the game to only 45fps at 1440p and 30fps if you turn ray tracing on.
Hopefully, a few extra bits and bobs of memory can help devs working on Xbox ports not feel as hamstrung by the weaker Xbox Series S.
