Warp Zoned Presents
Video Game Canon- Silent Hill, Dragon Quest, Skyrim, and More Announced as Finalists for the World Video Game Hall of Fame’s Class of 2026
- Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 Has Another Big Night and Wins “Game of the Year” at the 2025-2026 DICE Awards
- 2025 GOTY Scoreboard: In Progress
- The Game Awards: All the Winners from 2003 to Today
- Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 Racks Up Nine Wins, Including “Game of the Year”, at the 2025 Game Awards
Warp Zoned Presents
- Video Game Research Library
- 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)
- In 2005, games started rewiring our brains – The AV Club (2025)
Most Recent: Etcetera
GameStop is creating a line of Amiibo-like figures without the NFC features
It looks like GameStop is getting into the collectible figure game with the Totaku Collection.
Similar in size and shape to Nintendo’s Amiibo collection (but without any of their game-enhancing NFC features), the Totaku Collection’s first wave will be available exclusively through GameStop on March 23. According to the retailer’s website, each Totaku figure has been priced at $9.99 and seven different figures will be available as part of the first wave:
- The Hunter from Bloodborne
- Crash Bandicoot from Crash Bandicoot
- Kratos from God of War
- Sackboy from LittleBigPlanet
- Parappa the Rapper from Parappa the Rapper
- Heihachi Mishima from Tekken 7
- Feisar FX350 from Wipeout
It’s unknown how often new figures will be added to the Totaku Collection, but GameStop wants to create “a unique series of highly detailed figurines from video game franchises past and present,” so if they’re a success, the line could grow very large in the future.
Warp Zoned’s 2017 Golden Pixel Awards: A New Beginning for Video Games
When we looked over the gaming landscape at the beginning of 2017, we opined that game publishers had done their best to wipe the slate clean throughout all of 2016. Many of gaming’s most mysterious projects were finally released, Nintendo closed the door on the Wii U, the VR revolution was in full swing, and upgraded versions of the PS4 and Xbox One were on the horizon.
In these first few days of 2018, I think it’s safe to say the last 12 months definitely fulfilled that promise. Nintendo’s Switch roared out of the gate in March and the consolemaker filled the calendar with big titles on “Day One” and throughout the rest of the year. Night in the Woods, Persona 5, and Golf Story told new kinds of stories that gamers had never seen before. Cuphead delivered a decidedly retro side-scroller packaged within a unique visual playground packaged. And someone even managed to create a fun Friday the 13th game.
It was quite a year, and you can find more of our favorites from 2017 after the break. (more…)
Posted in Etcetera, Features, PC, PS4, Switch, Top Story, Wii U, Xbox One
Tagged Crash Bandicoot, Cuphead, Friday the 13th, Horizon: Zero Dawn, Injustice 2, Mario Kart 8, Night in the Woods, Persona 5, Shovel Knight: Specter of Torment, Splatoon 2, Super Mario Odyssey, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, Xenoblade Chronicles 2
Someone recreated the last five minutes of Star Wars: The Last Jedi using 16-bit graphics
Taking a blockbuster movie and recreating it in the style of a Super NES is a popular pastime for animators and artists, but this adaptation of the last five minutes of Star Wars: The Last Jedi is quite literally out of this world.
If you haven’t seen Star Wars: The Last Jedi, I implore you, don’t press that Play button.
But if you have, give it a watch and be sure to congratulate animator John Stratman and the Mr. Sunday Movies YouTube channel on a job well done.
First Ready Player One trailer makes its debut during Comic-Con 2017
One of the biggest surprises during this year’s San Diego Comic-Con was our first look at Steven Spielberg’s Ready Player One. Based on the novel by Ernest Cline, Ready Player One is a mashup of massively nerdy pop culture from the 70s, 80s, and 90s told within the digital landscape of a futuristic virtual reality platform known as OASIS.
With the film adaptation clearly playing to his strengths, Spielberg was able to create a world with some truly unique visuals, which you can see in the trailer embedded above. Keep your eyes peeled for a ton of Easter Eggs including Harley Quinn, the DeLorean from Back to the Future, The Iron Giant, Freddy Krueger, and a lot more.
Ready Player One stars Tye Sheridan and Olivia Cooke and it’ll open in theaters on March 30, 2018.
The Catfish directors are in “final negotiations” to work on a Mega Man movie for Fox
If this story didn’t appear in The Hollywood Reporter, I would have assumed it was a hoax…
The reliable entertainment magazine is reporting that 20th Century Fox will team up with the directors of Catfish, Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman, to create a movie based on Mega Man. The pair are said to be in “final negotiations” with the studio, and will both write and direct the film.
The Mega Man movie will be produced by Chernin Entertainment and Masi Oka, the actor best known for playing Hiro Nakamura on Heroes.
While we await official confirmation from 20th Century Fox, we can set back and speculate what a Mega Man movie might look like. Joost and Schulman’s previous experience makes it likely that Fox wants to produce a live-action adaptation, but will the movie take its cues from the classic NES series or the more modern Mega Man X games? Who knows… maybe it’ll end up being a mix of both.
In addition to Catfish, Joost and Schulman have also directed Paranormal Activity 3, Paranormal Activity 4, and last year’s well-reviewed Nerve. A Mega Man movie adaptation would be their first big-budget project.
Max Brooks’s Minecraft: The Island novel is now available at bookstores everywhere
Mojang teamed up with Max Brooks (the author of World War Z and The Zombie Survival Guide) to create the first official tie-in novel based on Minecraft. Titled Minecraft: The Island, the book is targeted at a younger audience and it’s available on store shelves today.
When writing Minecraft: The Island, Brooks found inspiration in classics like Treasure Island and Robinson Crusoe to tell his own tale of survival and mystery:
Washed up on a beach, the lone castaway looks around the shore. Where am I? Who am I? And why is everything made of blocks? But there isn’t much time to soak up the sun. It’s getting dark, and there’s a strange new world to explore!
The top priority is finding food. The next is not becoming food. Because there are others out there on the island… like the horde of zombies that appear after night falls. Crafting a way out of this mess is a challenge like no other. Who could build a home while running from exploding creepers, armed skeletons, and an unstoppable tide of hot lava? Especially with no help except for a few makeshift tools and sage advice from an unlikely friend: a cow.
In this world, the rules don’t always make sense, but courage and creativity go a long way. There are forests to explore, hidden underground tunnels to loot, and undead mobs to defeat. Only then will the secrets of the island be revealed.
You can read the first chapter right now at the novel’s official website.
Producer behind Netflix’s Castlevania series has begun work on an Assassin’s Creed animated series
An animated series based on Castlevania III: Dracula’s Curse will make its Netflix debut this Friday, July 7. The Castlevania series was produced by Adi Shankar, and earlier today, he popped up on Facebook to announce his project… an animated series set within the world of Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed.
Unlike Castlevania, Shankar’s next series won’t be a direct adaptation, and will tell an original tale in the Assassin’s Creed universe:
I’m happy to let you guys know that I’ve selected my next project! I played the first edition of Assassin’s Creed the year I moved to Los Angeles to pursue my dream. At that moment I knew absolutely no one in the industry and could never have imagined that one day Ubisoft would ask me to take the world of Assassin’s Creed and create an original story set in it as an anime series. If anyone tells you not to follow your passion in life they are wrong.
As of now, there’s no release date for Shankar’s Assassin’s Creed series, but it’s probably still quite a ways out. And that’s because Shankar will next be shepherding the secibd season of Castlevania, which will be available on Netflix sometime in 2018.
Posted in Etcetera, News
Tagged Assassin's Creed
Kickstart This! The Return of Way of the Rodent
I keep promising the people of France that I will cover a French game, and I will, but not in this edition. I stumbled across a project here in the UK that I though was worth this segment. Imagine that you run a cool, semi-retro online gaming magazine. You have been doing so for 12 years, and have managed to produce 94 issues, just six away from the big 100. Then, hackers decide to corrupt your system beyond repair, erasing all that work and effort.
This is the story of Rodent. (more…)