Plus we could have had a Matrix game by Kojima if Konami didn't knock it back and game companies going all in on AI
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SIFTER is produced by Kyle Pauletto, Fiona Bartholomaeus, Courtney Smith, Adam Christou, Chris Button and Naomi Jackson. Cat Jahne is Social Producer, Mitch Loh is Senior Producer and Gianni Di Giovanni is our Executive Producer. Thanks to Audio Technica Australia and Apple for their support of SIFTER.
FIONA: Hi I’m Fiona Bartholomaeus
NOM: and I’m Naomi Jackson
FIONA: Welcome to Walkthrough, SIFTER’s weekly recap on the biggest news in video games.
NOM: This week Animal Crossing New Horizons gets a massive update for the Switch next year, our favourite spinning marsupial Crash Bandicoot could be getting a TV series, and AI shenanigans come to both PUBG publisher Krafton and the open source Doom modding community.
Here is the news for Sunday 2 of November. Let’s go!
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FIONA: Animal Crossing is getting a huge update early next year and it’s collaborating with a bunch of other games including Zelda and Lego.
It’s the biggest update we’ve had in a while and the Zelda content looks so good.
The Breath of the Wild themed items will include an inactive Guardian, which I can’t wait to cover my island with, a Goddess statue, the Master Sword, Majora’s Mask, a Zonai device, outfits and so much more.
These items are available by using Zelda Amiibos but so are new visitors. With the Amiibos you can actually have Tulin and Mineru come visit your island and then you can ask them to stay.
BRB I have to figure out who to eject from my island now.
NOM: You can also use Splatoon Amiibos to unlock some super colourful furniture and clothing, as well as allow you to get Cece and Viche to come visit, and maybe stay, on your island.
Lego is making an appearance in the game with some fun new items in the Nook shop. You can get tables, sofas, an arcade game and even lego flowers.
But that’s not all. After helping out at the hotel you’ll unlock the ability to buy old Nintendo products from the new seaside hotel shop, including old consoles such as the Game Boy, Super Famicom and the NES.
If you have an online Nintendo subscription you can play a classic game on each system, which is super cool. It’s a game within a game.
There is so much coming to the game, including a Nintendo Switch 2 Edition, so make sure you keep an eye out on the Switch and Switch 2 when it arrives on January 15 next year.
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NOM: After the success of Arcane we’ve been waiting to see what Netflix will do next and it looks like it’ll be Crash Bandicoot.
Reported by What’s on Netflix, it looks like it’ll be an animated series and it’s quietly been in the works for a bit of time already.
We don’t know much about who is involved and what the story will be but it’ll be the first time Crash will have his own series.
For a period of time there was a series in development by Amazon and Activision but it was cancelled allegedly due to disputes over the script.
FIONA: Continuing the gaming news for Netflix, it was announced this week that the company was partnering with Don’t Nod, the team behind Life is Strange.
Together they will be developing a new narrative-focussed game based on major IP and developed at Don’t Nod’s Montreal studio. No hints on what it will be yet but I’m sure we will find out soon enough.
This does, however, come after Boss Fight Entertainment, a Netflix subsidiary and developer of Squid Game: Unleashed, closed down.
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FIONA: The publisher behind PUBG and Subnautica 2 Krafton announced this week that it is an ‘AI-first company’ and plans to 'place AI at the centre of problem solving'.
They’ve earmarked around $69.7 million USD or about $106 million AUD to invest in a GPU cluster which will serve as a foundation for accelerating its AI tech that they hope to have up and running by the second half of next year. Another $31 million AUD is to be used to train staff to use those AI tools.
It’s clear a lot of these major companies are pushing in this direction, but declaring your company AI first definitely seems like a lot.
NOM: That’s not the only AI news for this week as fans are split over AI-generated code being used in GZDoom.
GZDoom is an open source Doom port which adds modern graphics rendering, quality-of-life additions, and lots of modding features to the original Doom source code.
The creator and maintainer of GZDoom,Cristoph Oelckers aka Graf Zahl, recently admitted that he had been inputting untested AI-generated code into the GZDoom database and this has caused a split, with many developers uniting behind a new fork called UZDoom in protest.
FIONA: One dev in particular said they didn’t want to see the GZDoom legacy die which is why the best thing for them to do is continue development through a fork, which takes existing open source code and allows developers to build their own version.
Developers said it was stolen code that they have no way of verifying if it’s compatible with GPL, an open source licence with strict rules, but Zahl has defended saying the use of AI-generated snippets was for “boilerplate code” that aren’t key to underlying game features.
AI is such a tricky conversation in general but there is a lot of scrutiny when it comes to video games, so we will see what people’s reactions to this are.
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NOM: Here is something that could have been, back in the late nineties the Wachowski Sisters who wrote and directed the Matrix series apparently asked Konami if Hideo Kojima could make a Matrix game, but sadly it was shot down immediately.
Christopher Bergstresser, a former vice president of licensing at Konami Digital Entertainment in a recent interview with Time Extension said that the Wachowskis were in Japan for the launch of the Matrix films and met with Konami at the time.
Apparently they proposed the Matrix game adaptation to Konami’s Kazumi Kitaue who pretty much knocked that on the head right away.
Kojima was working on Metal Gear Solid 2 at the time, and Kituae wanted to keep him focused on that.
FIONA: Kojima himself took to Twitter to say he met with the Wachowskis three times over their trip, it was clear that they were fans of each other, but he wasn’t ever made aware of the request.
He said that he even met producer Joel Silver and there was no mention of an offer, and said that even though he was busy with Metal Gear Solid that if someone had told him about the offer, there might have been a way that it could work.
With Kojima such a fan of cinema it’s fun to imagine what if!
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FIONA: That’s it for the headlines…Here are the games coming out this week.
NOM: Out on the 3rd is Devil Jam, a new action roguelite that’s all about music and surviving a gig from hell, well more like a gig in hell. After signing a cursed contract with the Devil, you're dragged to the underworld and forced to perform. Fight off hordes of monsters in this beat-driven combat. That’s out on PC on Monday.
FIONA: The long-awaited Dead Static Drive from Aussie studio Reuben Games is finally here. In a lovecraftian inspired world the developers describe as Grand Theft Cthulhu, you search for your missing parents while travelling through small towns and eerie highways in this nightmarish road trip across 1980s Americana. Dodge monsters, humans and scavenge what you can in order to survive. Grab the game on PC and Xbox Game Pass when it launches on the 5th.
NOM: The next installment of the Hyrule Warriors series is finally here with Hyrule Warriors Age of Imprisonment. Join forces with Zelda, Raru, Mineru and the rest of the legendary heroes to fight off Demon King Ganondorf’s invasion. We got a look at this at PAXAus and it was awesome. Who knew we needed Zelda running around with a flamethrower. You can play through that epic battle when it lands on the Switch 2 on the 6th.
FIONA: Also out on the 6th is Dinocop. After dinosaurs were brought back to life, none of them wanted to be a cop so you were made. Use your investigating skills, magnifying glass and trusty dino nose to uncover who brought human meat to the dinosaur rights convention. This game looks pretty fun and you can grab it on PC on Thursday.
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PROMO: Articles to read, videos to watch and podcasts to listen to on sifter.com.au
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FIONA: This has been Walkthrough by SIFTER, my name is Fiona Bartholomaeus
NOM: And my name is Naomi Jackson, thank you so much for listening.
FIONA: This week I want you to head to sifter.com.au and check out our double reviews of Pokemon Legends Z-A. Nom you covered the game itself and how it plays, but Cat took a deep dive into the lack of fashionable choices available in the fashion capital Lumiose. You can find lots of written reviews on our website sifter.com.au, that address again is sifter.com.au
NOM: SIFTER is produced by myself, Fiona Bartholomaeus, Cat Jahne, Kyle Pauletto, Adam Christou and Chris Button. Mitch Loh is Senior Producer and Gianni Di Giovanni is SIFTER’s Executive Producer and script editor.
FIONA: Thanks to Brian Fairbanks from Salty Dog Sounds for composing the Walkthrough theme tune, and Audio Technica Australia and Apple for their support of SIFTER’s podcasts.
NOM: We’ll be back with more news next Sunday, see you then.
