Warp Zoned Presents
Video Game Canon- Angry Birds, Dragon Quest, FIFA Soccer, and Silent Hill are the World Video Game Hall of Fame’s Class of 2026
- BAFTA Games Awards: All the Winners from 2003 to Today
- Clair Obscur Completes the Sweep by Winning “Best Game” at 2025-2026 BAFTA Games Awards
- Boss Fight Books to Get a New Look for Richard Moss’s “Age of Empires”
- GDC Awards: All the Winners from 1996 to Today
Warp Zoned Presents
- Video Game Research Library
- Spore: An oral history – Design Room (2026)
- We Pitched a Museum a 1993 Game Hint Line (And They Actually Said Yes) – Yarn Spinner (2026)
- The History Of The Word “Metroidvania” And How It Spread – A Critical Hit (2025)
- Creator of Hit Game Shovel Knight Is at a ‘Make or Break’ Moment – Bloomberg (2025)
- Shadow of the Colossus: An oral history – Design Room (2025)
Most Recent: News
Yacht Club Games is asking their fans to help choose their next project
Yacht Club Games is busy adding King Knight and Specter Knight to Shovel Knight, but the team is also brainstorming their next project… and they need your help.
Listing a few specific titles (a single-player Shovel Knight 2, a Shovel Knight & Shield Knight multiplayer platformer) alongside a number of different gameplay styles in an online poll, the developer wants their fans to help them decide where they should focus their energy in the future.
In a previous life, many of Yacht Club’s developers worked for WayForward, and they actually have real experience with many of these genres. The team tackled “A Contra” in 2007 when they partnered with Konami to create Contra 4. They also developed “A Metroid” and “A Mario” after working on 2011’s Aliens: Infestation and the long-running Shantae series (which began in 2002).
Yacht Club isn’t sharing the results of the survey just yet, but the company’s “Captain,” Sean Velasco, is happily telling everyone on Twitter that Shovel Knight 64 (a Shovel Knight done in the blocky polygonal style of N64-era games) is “a lock.” This isn’t the first time that Velasco has joked about Shovel Knight 64, and Nintendo themselves even hinted at a second game in the series back in 2015.
I’m on board for whatever Yacht Club is up to next, but I’d really like to see what Shovel Kart looks like.
Posted in News
Tagged Shovel Knight Dig
Force yourself to watch this Lego Star Wars: Force Awakens Character Trailer starring Rey
Lego Star Wars: The Force Awakens will be released in less than 48 hours, but WB Games and TT Games are still cutting together new Character Trailers for the title, including the newest one starring Rey (with new dialogue from Daisy Ridley).
We still don’t know if her last name is Skywalker or Kenobi or Solo, but we do know that Rey has natural Force abilities, and you can see them all in this trailer. Watch as she uses her staff to disable a foe, blasts away at a few Stormtroopers, and gives Kylo Ren something to cry about.
Lego Star Wars: Force Awakens will be released for the 3DS, PC, PS3, PS4, Vita, Wii U, Xbox 360, and Xbox One on June 28.
A quartet of new novels will fill in the story between Mass Effect 3 and Andromeda
EA and BioWare will help produce a quartet of novels that will bridge the gap between the events of Mass Effect 3, and those of its upcoming sequel, Mass Effect: Andromeda.
The novels were outed by a “Rights Guide” from Titan Books, and the first, Mass Effect Andromeda: Initiation, will be written by N.K. Jemisin and released this August. Jemisin is an award-winning fantasy author, and her first novel, The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, was nominated for a Hugo, a Nebula, and a World Fantasy Award.
Titan plans to sell the novel series to readers by promising to “answer the many questions fans have been asking”:
While earlier Mass Effect games focused on the defense of the Milky Way galaxy, with humans pitted against a race of ruthless mechanical invaders known as the Reapers, the new story will take the game in a dramatic new direction and is set in a new region of space, with a new and deadly enemy.
The novels will act as prequel and sequels to the events in the games and will become part of the overarching Mass Effect saga. They will focus on key characters and answer the many questions fans have been asking.
The series will continue with Novel 2 in March 2017 and Novel 3 in September 2017, though an author wasn’t announced for either book. The concluding volume, Novel 4, will be written by BioWare’s Mac Walters, and will be published in March 2018.
Team Bondi’s followup to L.A. Noire, Whore of the Orient, has likely been canceled
Show of hands… who remembers Whore of the Orient, Team Bondi’s proposed followup to L.A. Noire? I think I see a few hands in the air, but not too many.
That’s because we haven’t heard a peep out of Team Bondi (which is part of George “Mad Max” Miller’s Kennedy Miller Mitchell these days) in more than three years. And the last bit of news to emerge from the studio was a rumor that progress on Whore of the Orient had stopped.
So here we are in 2016… and that rumor was probably true. The GameHugs podcast recently caught up with Derek Proud, a Producer formerly employed by Kennedy Miller Mitchell, and he confirmed that Whore of the Orient is most likely dead:
“Well Whore of the Orient was the spiritual successor to L.A. Noire. We were going to use that tech and we were going to create a game set in the 1930s, maybe 1940s, of Shanghai. Shanghai was the only place in the world you could go to in the 1930s and 1940s if you didn’t have a passport. So everybody who was running from something went to Shanghai. The whole city was run by a gangster called Big-Eared Du and it’s just the most fascinating time, place, and setting.”
Proud later admitted that even though Whore of the Orient had plenty of support from Team Bondi’s senior management, it was wasn’t enough to keep it alive. And while there’s a chance the game could be revived someday, when asked if we’ll ever see it, he responded, “I don’t think so.”
At this point, I guess you could say that Whore of the Orient needs another hero.
Posted in News
Tagged Whore of the Orient
Sonic Team’s new Sonic the Hedgehog game will be announced at Comic-Con and released in 2017
Takashi Iizuka, the Head of Sonic Team, confirmed the existence of a brand new Sonic the Hedgehog game a few days ago. Since then, fans have began counting down the days until July 22, as the game is expected to be officially announced during a special 25th Anniversary Party for Sonic at Comic-Con.
Yesterday, during a 25th Anniversary Party for Sonic in Tokyo (and translated by Gematsu), Iizuka confirmed that the next Sonic the Hedgehog game will indeed be unveiled during the Comic-Con event on July 22. The developer also revealed that the game is currently on track for a 2017 release.
Naturally, this news has lead to rampant speculation the next Sonic the Hedgehog game will be a Nintendo NX exclusive… but as of right now, we don’t know anything about which platform, or platforms, its in development for.
Posted in News
Tagged Comic-Con 2016, Sonic Forces
Weekly Warp-Up: E3 2016 Aftermath
No, that’s not a typo. Welcome to the Weekly Warp-Up, your weekly wrap-up of the biggest and the best articles posted at Warp Zoned this week…
The 2016 E3 Expo closed up shop last week, but many of gaming’s biggest names were still eager to talk about their upcoming projects.
Nintendo was the most talkative of all as Eiji Aonuma revealed that players can go straight to the final boss in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and Shigeru Miyamoto hinted at a Legend of Zelda spinoff game he wants to make starring Sheik.
Elsewhere on the show floor, NetherRealm’s Ed Boon revealed that he still wants to do a fighting game starring “horror icons.” And an executive from Marvel confirmed the comics company has “quite a few” unannounced console games in the works. Finally, Platinum Games and Hideki Kamiya would like to make another Bayonetta game. Maybe Nintendo can help.
Also this week, we reviewed Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutants in Manhattan, and Andrew Rainnie filed another edition of his Kickstart This! column, this time focusing on Transmission, a sci-fi RPG for the PC, PS4, and Xbox One from developer Paper Unicorn.
More news from the past seven days can be found after the break. (more…)
Posted in News
New Retail Releases: Lego Star Wars: Force Awakens, Star Ocean 5, Grand Kingdom, More
We’re closing out the month of June with a big batch of new releases…
The biggest is most definitely the game with the planet-sized laser gun, Lego Star Wars: The Force Awakens, which will be available this week for the 3DS, PC, PS3, PS4, Vita, Wii U, Xbox 360, and Xbox One. Players will be able to relive all the action from the 2015 space opera, as well as “New Adventures” that fill in details you may have been wondering about. (Just how did C-3PO get that red arm?).
A pair of RPGs will also be available this week to fans of the genre busy for a long time. Square Enix will launch the fifth game in the Star Ocean franchise, Star Ocean: Integrity and Faithlessness, exclusively for the PS4, while NIS America has strategized a plan to release tactical RPG Grand Kingdom for the PS4 and Vita.
Players looking for something a bit off the beaten path may want to explore Zero Time Dilemma, the third and final entry in the Zero Escape franchise. The adventure game will be released for the 3DS, PC, and Vita, and takes place between the events of Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors and Zero Escape: Virtue’s Last Reward.
Finally this week, Wii U owners will finally get the chance to try out Terraria, the side-scrolling crafting and exploration title from Re-Logic.
A complete list of this week’s new releases can be found after the break. (more…)
Posted in 3DS, News, PC, PS3, PS4, Vita, Wii U, Xbox 360, Xbox One
Tagged Grand Kingdom, Lego Star Wars: The Force Awakens, Prison Architect, Star Ocean: Integrity and Faithlessness, Terraria, Zero Escape Volume 3
MachineGames created a new episode for Quake and John Romero shared an historical FAQ on the game’s 20th anniversary
It’s a good week for video game anniversaries.
Sonic the Hedgehog grabbed the silver ring yesterday, marking 25 years since his North American debut on the Sega Genesis. But nostalgia-minded gamer also stared down the barrel of Quake‘s 20th anniversary this week, and everyone seems like they’re doing something to celebrate.
The revelers include the developers at MachineGames, one of Bethesda’s internal studios and the team behind Wolfenstein: The New Order, who wowed fans by creating a brand new episode for Quake in honor of the game’s anniversary. They shared the free download on Twitter this morning, while also congratulating id Software, Quake’s developer…
Happy 20th to Quake @idsoftware! As a gift to the fans, we created a new episode of the game https://t.co/BTgju8tLuI pic.twitter.com/gHlxBgjcBU
— machinegames (@machinegames) June 24, 2016
Meanwhile, designer John Romero was also in a celebratory mood on Wednesday. He shared some early screenshots from Quake on his official blog, along with a fascinating pre-release FAQ that explored the game’s origins as a fantasy game that would’ve starred a god-like warrior who wields Thor’s Hammer.
Yeah… Once upon a time, Quake was a very different game.