Whereas reboots of its contemporaries have chosen to move with the times (think Metal Gear Solid or Street Fighter), Neon looks to celebrate its birth in the golden years of Van Halen, Ronald Reagan, ninjas and skyrocketing urban crimerates. The colors are loud, the snares are gated, and the inner-city youth are skipping class and packing switchblades. Developer WayForward Technologies has previously performed similar don’t-call-it-a-reboot duties for franchises including A Boy and his Blob, Centipede, Bloodrayne and Contra, as well as its current work on Silent Hill: Book of Memories.

Double Dragon Neon is headed for XBLA and PSN this July. Smoky, greasy arcade cabinets and dodgy strangers watching over your shoulder will cost extra (but should be listed as mandatory). For a taste of what the game’ll be striving to live up to, here’s our loving remembrance of the Game Music of the Day: Double Dragon (opens in new tab). Game music of every day, more like.

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Journey is long because it’s long-lasting. It’s a game that we will remember for years to come – one whose themes and imagery have already embedded themselves deep in our psyche. We remember, more than anything, how we felt after completing each chapter, and we recall (with fondness, melancholy and joy) our sense of accomplishment at finishing this singular quest.

In short, Journey succeeds because it takes so many of the conventions of contemporary games and turns them on their heads.

Journey’s story is deceptively simple: It’s told with no dialogue (though we began to analyze its many symbols after we completed it). We begin as a robed humanoid creature in the middle of a rolling desert. Almost immediately we saw our objective: a shining beacon of light atop a mountain.

Thatgamecompany, Journey’s developer, is now well-known for producing titles that encourage a sense of awe and bliss through self-guided discovery. And just like Flow and Flower before it, Journey put us in the midst of wilderness and gave us just enough tools to poke and prod around it until we slowly formed an idea of how to navigate. We have a button that functions as a beacon. It takes little time to understand how useful the beacon is to unlocking the other crucial ability, that of jumping. These simple features beget even larger ones as we continued playing, since players can jump and glide only for a limited time.

By the time we navigated through Journey’s initial sections, we felt just familiar enough with its controls to play alongside another wanderer. And that’s when it happened to us: another wanderer (just one) appeared in the distance. The game’s approach to co-op gameplay is utterly unique. When another player appears – seemingly at random, and at different points in any playthrough – all we have to work with is the limited vocabulary of the game. We had no idea who that person is until we completed our Journey – there is no PSN ID indicator, nor any voice chat. Our only communication is via the beacon, or by jumping around, or however else we choose to try to reach out to our fellow wanderer. And if we choose, we can simply ignore each other and wander off in different directions. The best part: it’s almost impossible to grief your partner, because the game is designed so that the limited resources can’t be hogged or stolen from each other.

By the end of the game, we felt an amazing sense of accomplishment and – dare we say it – affectionate camaraderie for our fellow traveler. We helped each other through some tough challenges. We communicated via a language we created ourselves: a series of chirps and jumps and circling around each other. Thatgamecompany should be applauded for the incredible technical achievement of subversively giving us a warm, human connection by providing the most anonymous gameplay experience in some time.

Journey works so wonderfully because it has the courage to restrict elements that we’ve come to take for granted in other games. One can make a granular argument that it’s a game that consists of jumping and Morse Code. And while that person would be right, that person is also missing the point and playing the wrong game. The execution on these simple gameplay ideas is so exact and precise that it’s ultimately more than sufficient to keep us in its thrall up until the heart-wrenching finale. Indeed, we didn’t need anything other than that which was provided for our Journey. It also helps that the soundtrack truly augments both the emotion and, at points, the tension of the experience. It’s an outstanding score.

Caveats here are minor. Journey is a calming, relaxing game, so you might not want to start it late at night, lest you find yourself a tad too hypnotized and dozing off with controller in-hand. However, by the time you stumble upon a co-op partner, you’ll have the pressure of co-dependency to keep you engaged and alert. Also, like other Thatgamecompany titles, it’s an experience that’s at its best in the first playthrough, because the magic comes through discovery. We plan to play it again, but armed with the knowledge of what’s to come, it won’t be quite the same. Don’t let that stop you from playing it, though. There’s new magic to be discovered as we find new partners to join us on this trip.

Journey is an unforgettable experience. Even when the details fade, the emotions that it evoked will stay with us for years. The pacing, the sense of scale, and the feeling of awe are all razor sharp. It all merged together as we discovered another player in our traversal. We won’t play another game like it, and frankly, we won’t need to, either. If you’re a gamer, it’s an outstanding reminder of why love this medium. Do not hesitate to embark.

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The online-heavy game features to up to 32 players at once in a battle, though Sony also promises a full single player campaign, as opposed to Warhawk PS3’s online-only offering. You can find out all the details on the beta here (opens in new tab) and it’s planned to last for about a month. No Europe or UK release date was revealed, though Sony normally has those the following Friday. We’ll let you know as soon as Sony announces international dates.

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Now that you’re all firmly divided into “glowing with nostalgia” or “squinting with confusion,” maybe the more refined among you can tell the young folks about how Voltron was a pretty big deal in the 1980s. The cartoon and game alike focus on a team of young pilots and their color-coded spacecraft, all of which are also robotic lions, and which can be combined into one gigantic fighting robot, the titular Voltron. So it’s essentially Transformers plus Power Rangers by way of Macross, all bathed in a 1980s neon glow and suffused with some sort of message about teamwork and/or the brutal annihilation of interplanetary evil.

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The game, which features clips and key moments from the cartoon, looks to follow the show’s formula pretty faithfully: rove about shooting things in your lions for a while, then join up to form Voltron and smack some skyscraper-sized monsters about. The challenge of five-player co-op play as Voltron ought to add a unique element to the title. If nothing else, it’ll answer the question of, “how was Voltron controlled anyway?” (Turns out the answer’s likely to be “clumsily, with swearing.”)

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“When we played the old Sly Cooper games,” explains Sanzaru head Glen Egan (opens in new tab), “we loved the stories about the Cooper clan ancestors and their various thieving abilities.” Which is why, when Sanzaru took over the series from Sucker Punch, it immediately set to work developing those ancestors into playable characters. The first to be revealed is Rioichi Cooper, Sly’s ninja ancestor, who Egan describes as “not only an uber-Ninja but is also the inventor of sushi.” Really? Sushi was invented in Japan? This game about time-traveling talking raccoon thieves is historically inaccurate (opens in new tab)! For shame.

Above: Gaze upon the profile of a falsifier of culinary history. Also he steals peoples’ stuff, but whatever

Anywho, the HD Collection will apparently hit PSN fairly soon, which should tide fans over until the 2012 release of Sly 4.

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Sony hasn’t yet released exact sales figures for the spooky standalone adventure, which squeezes around five hours’ playtime into a $10 package. However, you don’t get to be a platform’s fastest-selling title since 2006 by doing okay at your job. Of course, we’d expect nothing less from a game that combines the pop-culture infatuations of superheroes and the undead – particularly when it does it all well enough to pull in review scores higher than those for the original InFamous (opens in new tab). Here’s hoping future titles follow Sucker Punch’s lead, if only to see what an InFamous Holiday Special would look like.

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On the official PlayStation blog today, Jenova Chen from Journey developer thatgamecompany let expectant players know that they still had about six more months of waiting for the gorgeous, mysterious title. After thanking the lucky group of closed beta testers for their support, he revealed the release window, writing, “Like all our games, Journey is an experiment. In the end, it’s what you think that matters. We are happy to announce Journey will be released Spring 2012, so you can experience the adventure for yourself.”

Though we hate having to wait even longer for this precious PSN downloadable, we’ll just have to comfort ourselves with the approximately 8,000 games coming out between now and December 7.

Sep 27, 2011

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