To 2022 and Beyond
To 2022 and Beyond
Edition 43 - September 27th to October 3rd
Good morning gamers. With the start of October we’ve entered into Spooky Season.
Last week, the Tokyo Game Show 2021 took place but was quickly overshadowed by some breaking Konami news. PlayStation continued to prove their resilience by refusing to remain stagnant. Let’s also take a look at the awesome new games being released in October.
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Konami - Where art thou?
Konami is a Japanese entertainment company with multiple well established IPs. They’ve been relatively quiet over the past few years and they even pulled out of this year's E3 Showcase due to “timing issues”. Breaking the silence last week was gaming insider Andy Robinson who reported that after a restructuring of Konami’s internal game development divisions, they’re planning to ramp up their premium game development with “new instalments and remakes” for their biggest IPs. Here’s what we know so far.
Metal Gear Solid is set to get a remake centered around the critically acclaimed Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater game. The project is reportedly in early development by Virtuos, an external studio that specializes in supporting AAA games. Additionally, Konami plans to release remasters of the original Metal Gear games on modern consoles.
Silent Hill has multiple games currently in development by various external studios including a prominent Japanese one. The title has floated around the rumour mill quite consistently over the past year and fans were convinced that the “Abandoned” game by Blue Box Studios was a secret Silent Hill 2 project.
Castlevania is finally getting some well needed attention with a new title entry being developed internally at Konami. The game is described as a “reimagining” of the series and we should see more details about it during next year's game showcase season.
eFootball (aka PES), Konami’s European Football game recently underwent a major rebranding and launched for free last week. The game has since been heavily criticized for its poor graphics and gameplay, and is now Steam's worst-rated game ever.
PlayStation - Bluepoint Games Acquisition
Bluepoint Games was officially acquired by PlayStation Studios last week. The developer is based out of Texas, United States and specializes in video game remakes and remasters. They are best known for the PS4 remake of Shadow of the Colossus, the PS5 remake of Demon’s Souls and the remaster of the Uncharted: The Nathan Drake Collection.
Marvel’s Avengers Spider-Man expansion will have it’s own cutscenes and story. The Spider-Man DLC is still expected to release sometime in 2021 and it will remain a PlayStation exclusive despite the games recent launch on the Xbox Game Pass.
Twisted Metal is reportedly in development at Lucid Games, the United Kingdom based game developer. According to VGC, the game launch is expected to coincide with the release of the TV series by the writers of Deadpool and starring Anthony Mackie.
IGN’s Best Video Game of All Time Award has been won by God of War (2018). After passing through a 64 game bracket the Santa Monica Studios PlayStation Exclusive beat Grand Theft Auto V in the finals with roughly a 60% vote rate across Twitter, YouTube and Instagram.
October Game Releases
October is officially here and with it comes tons of new games to play. This month was always slated to be a big month for game releases and despite Battlefield 2042 being pushed to November, there’s still a ton of games to be excited for. Here’s some of our most anticipated games of the month.
Weekly Recon Picks of the Month
Far Cry 6 - October 7th
Metroid Dread - October 8th
Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy - October 26th
Other Notable Releases
Alan Wake Remastered - October 5th
Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl - October 5th
Back 4 Blood - October 12th
Crysis Remastered Trilogy - October 15th
Solar Ash - October 26th
Riders Republic - October 28th
Mario Party Superstars - October 29th
Esports Corner
The New Faces of XSET!
XSET is a North American gaming organization founded in 2020 by a group of former FaZe Clan executives. Despite being the new kids on the block, the organization has wasted no time competing in a wide variety of games including Fortnite, Valorant, Rocket League, Rainbow Six Siege, PUBG: Mobile, Counter Strike and many others. Last week the team announced the signing of the NOTHING2LOSE female Valorant roster who will represent the organization in major competitions moving forward. The organization also revealed that NFL superstar Ezekiel Elliott has joined them as an investor and creator.
Esports Franchise Spots
The franchise business model has become tremendously popular in esports over the past few years. Call of Duty League and Overwatch League spots cost around $20 million to acquire while the League of Legends spots reportedly start at $10 million. Spanish Organization DUX Gaming recently announced that they’re committing $25 million towards a franchise spot in the 2022 NBA 2K League. This makes DUX Gaming and Gen.G the only two non-NBA funded and non-North American teams competing in the league.
BIG Money On The Line
The International 10, Dota 2’s flagship event is once again making esports history. According to the recently released prize pool distribution breakdown, the grand prize for the first place team is $18.2 million (a $2 million increase from the previous event). This sum represents 45.5% of the total prize pool where any top-8 placing team will walk away with at least $1 million in winnings. The International 10 kicks off on October 7th in Bucharest, Romania with the Grand Finals being played on October 17th.
Game Review - FIFA 22
As a football fan, purchasing a copy of FIFA has become a yearly tradition. The year over year change has often been minimal but this year there have been several improvements to a variety of game modes. FIFA Ultimate Team (FUT) gameplay has changed drastically, as it has slowed down and the physics have been improved due to the addition of Hyper Motion technology. FUT, the most popular game mode now has better rewards, squad building challenges, a shorter weekend league and daily preview packs. As for Career mode, there have been several improvements and you can now create your own team and guide them to glory. Should you buy it? If you’re a fan of football and you buy it every year, yes you should. We give FIFA 22 a score of B-.
Gaming Roundup
On Tuesday, Amazon Games launched New World, an open world MMO RPG. The game surpassed 1 million players on the first day and Amazon doubled the servers to prevent long queue times, with more improvements to come.
Battlefield 2042 will have an Open Beta running from October 6th to 10th. Despite the rumours that the game will be susceptible to hackers, this will be the first real test for the game. DICE says their anti-cheat is ready and they will show no mercy to cheaters.
Call of Duty Season Six will arrive on October 7th and feature a Halloween seasonal event called “The Haunting”. The update will feature new points of interest, weapons, operators and the return of the original Gulag. This is the last major content update prior to the release of Call of Duty: Vanguard and the new Warzone map.
The announcement of the Nintendo Switch OLED was a surprise to many Nintendo fans. According to Bloomberg, there are 11 companies that have 4K development kits provided by Nintendo. Nintendo tweeted that the article was inaccurate and there are “no plans” for another Switch console besides the OLED version.
Twitch will be experimenting with a new feature called “Boost This Stream”. This new feature will allow for viewers to pay to promote their favourite streamers to the front page of Twitch.
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