Month: December 2020

The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit film trilogies are now available in 4K UHD, and director Peter Jackson has spoken about the process of updating the movies and some of the issues that came along with it.

In a new video promoting the 4K release, Jackson said the six movies lacked consistency in their coloring and other elements, due to the evolving way in which the movies were shot. Updating them for 4K gave the team an opportunity to go back and address this.

“It was interesting going back and revisiting these films because I realised how inconsistent they were,” he said. “And that’s really due to the way in which the Lord of the Rings trilogy was shot first, about 20 years ago. The lord of the rings was shot on 35mm. The color timing was done on an old-fashioned mechanical way for the first Lord of the Rings movie. Then we switched to digital color timing for the 35mm negative for the next two,” he said.

For The Hobbit series, the movies lacked consistency for a variety of reasons, including how scenes on outdoor sets were filmed at different stages in the day. With the 4K re-releases, they were able to weak individual colors.

Jackson also said that the process was not solely about increasing the crispness of the picture–the director said it was important to preserve the “cinematic look” of the films, while also boosting the overall fidelity.

“Great to be able to have all the films looking like they were shot at the same time, finally,” Jackson said.

When updating the Lord of the Rings for 4K, the team noticed that imperfections in the visual effects were more pronounced. Some of the shots did not hold up, Jackson admitted. So with the re-release, the team went back and removed or painted out some of these oddities and imperfections.

To be clear, however, the VFX are not upgraded or enhanced. But Jackson said of them, “They look like they were done today, not 20 years ago” as was the case for the first Lord of the Rings movie.

And speaking about the entire process of updating The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit for 4K UHD, Jackson said, “This process, the way I see it, it’s not about making the film different. It’s simply taking a 20 year old movie and making it feel like it’s a modern film.”

The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit trilogies are currently available to buy separately, for $90 USD each. Each box contains the theatrical and extended edits, as well as a code to get the 4K movies on Movies Anywhere service.

Warner Bros. is releasing an Ultimate Collector’s Edition in 2021 that comes with all six movies and “new bonus content.”

In other Lord of the Rings news, Harper Collins is releasing a new Middle-earth book that will, among other things, explain who can grow beards.

Amazon is currently filming a very expensive TV show based on the fantasy series in New Zealand, while there are multiple Lord of the Rings video games in the works, including an MMO and a title featuring Gollum.

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With Twin Mirror, Dontnod abandons the episodic model it has experimented with since 2015’s Life is Strange in favor of a six-hour standalone release. The result is a focused crime thriller with some great character work. However, Twin Mirror’s exploration of its story and mechanics suffers somewhat from its brevity, relative to Dontnod’s recent work. It’s longer than an episode of Dontnod’s serialized games but still shorter than what it needed to be to explore characters with depth and tackle the heavier subject matter and themes its narrative alludes to. Twin Mirror comes to a conclusion just as the plot and gameplay are really beginning to gain momentum.

In Twin Mirror, players take on the role of Sam Higgs, a tenacious investigative reporter returning to his hometown of Basswood, West Virginia, after a period of self-imposed exile. Two years prior, Sam published a damning investigative piece on unsafe practices at the Basswood mine, which employed a huge portion of the town. As a result, the mine closed, putting a huge swath of Basswood out of work and pushing the town into an economic depression. In the midst of this firestorm, Sam proposed to his girlfriend Anna, another writer at the paper. She turned him down and, struggling with the personal and professional devastation, Sam left town without a word. In the time since, Anna has started dating Sam’s longtime best friend, Nick.

The pain of all this is still fresh for Sam. But, when Nick dies in a car accident, he finally feels he must return to Basswood. Though the local police have ruled the death an accident, Nick’s preteen daughter, Bug, suspects foul play, and Sam agrees to investigate. In classic Dontnod fashion, that investigation mostly plays out via dialogue with the locals–some of whom hate Sam for the problems his reporting caused, and some of whom are old friends. You’ll investigate densely packed areas, read documents, and analyze objects to get to know the cast of characters and uncover clues to the cause of Nick’s death. Dontnod is great at this kind of environmental storytelling, and Twin Mirror is no exception. Discovering objects evoke memories of Sam’s past, and hearing his thoughts on the people that he once called neighbors is especially enjoyable. There’s even some fun Bandai Namco brand synergy in Sam recalling his and Nick’s childhood Pac Man competitions.

The traits that made Sam a talented journalist are tools in the player’s toolbelt, too. Sam’s gift for rational thought results in the Mind Palace. It’s an ancient technique (also referred to as the Method of Loci), which Cicero discussed in his De Oratore. It allows the practitioner to create a space in their mind that they can imaginatively navigate. Rather than attempting to recall abstract facts, the inhabitant of the Mind Palace simply strolls by the object they need to remember, perusing thoughts as if they’re cereal options at the grocery store. The Mind Palace’s purpose, primarily, is to aid memory, though in recent depictions such as the BBC’s Sherlock, it has become a method for superhuman feats of detective work.

At several moments, Sam must piece together the events of the past or look ahead to the future to formulate a plan. At first, you need to pace around an area, gather information, and look for clues. Sam doesn’t just automatically reach a conclusion once you’ve examined every object, however. Instead, you need to adjust the variables for each element of the crime scene to make sure it fits with the rest of your conclusions. In an early scene when Sam is attempting to figure out who he got into a barroom brawl with the night before, you may need to replay the scene multiple times to make sure the parts that you have selected are coming together correctly. If Sam was fighting with Dennis by the liquor counter, then why is Dennis’ bracelet across the room instead of by the bar? If Sam was, instead, fighting with the angry miner by the seating area, does that change anything? Getting each element to come together correctly isn’t especially difficult, but the troubleshooting process is really satisfying. It’s Detective Vision with a Rube Goldberg machine twist, and it’s a great evolution of a familiar mechanic.

Though Sam has a handle on this kind of methodical, rational thought, he’s less adept at dealing with people. For this, he needs to rely on his “Inner Voice.” Basically, the Inner Voice is another version of Sam, albeit with floppier hair and dark-rimmed glasses, who pops up to offer advice in social situations. In certain conversations, Sam can stop and talk things over with his Inner Voice, but it may result in him delaying his response for too long. While it often feels like ignoring the Inner Voice is the more expedient thing to do, I found conversations went better when I took the time to pause and listen. Mechanizing this conflict between the rational and the relational is one of Twin Mirror’s most interesting ambitions, but this is also one area where its awkward length hurts the experience. Just as this conflict between logic and love felt like it was beginning to come to a head, the game began to wrap up.

Twin Mirror is about solving a mystery, but it’s also about Sam picking up the pieces he left behind when he abruptly left town. Sam’s relationship with Bug was one of my favorite parts of the game. There’s a palpable melancholy to her character, expertly brought to life by 15-year-old actress Ruby Jay. Bug’s sadness over her father’s death, her anger with Sam for leaving, her irritation with her mother’s busyness and emotional distance from her –these all come through in Jay’s performance. I similarly enjoyed seeing Sam hash out his unfinished business with Anna and reconnect with his warm and loquacious former boss, Walter. Dontnod’s dialogue is still occasionally corny, but they’ve come a long way since Life Is Strange’s “Go f**k your selfie.”

That said, Twin Mirror’s character development is hampered by the game’s awkward length. While the character work that Dontnod does here is good, I felt like the game was just getting started when it came to a conclusion. The character arcs aren’t necessarily incomplete; there are beginnings, middles, and ends for all the key players. Nevertheless, it does at times feel like the moments in between–the ones that would really help us get to know each character on a deeper level–are missing or truncated. Similarly, the game gestures at major issues like police corruption and opioid addiction but doesn’t really commit to fully exploring them. This, once again, feels like it is the result of not having the room to unpack the issues meaningfully in its six-hour runtime.

Still, Twin Mirror is a good next step from Dontnod, a studio that has stepped up to fill the adventure game-shaped hole left when Telltale went under. Episodic games have struggled to sell well after the first episode and also suffered from protracted release schedules, and Twin Mirror shows that the studio has a willingness to explore new territory. Twin Mirror has interesting new mechanics, well-realized characters, and a good understanding of what makes exploration rewarding. It’s just a shame that the pacing undercuts so much of what makes it work.

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Sonic the Hedgehog launched in cinemas back in February 2020–before the COVID-19 pandemic shut screens around the world–and became the highest-grossing game adaptation ever in the US, overtaking Detective Pikachu. Now, a new movie is in the works, and production dates have been revealed.

Gamesindustry.biz has pointed towards a listing on Creative BC, showing a film with the codename “Emerald Hill” in production. This is the first zone from the Sonic 2 game, and Jeff Fowler–director of the first movie–is listed as this film’s director, too. There’s no question that this listing is for the Sonic the Hedgehog 2 movie.

According to the listing, the movie is due to begin filming in British Columbia, Canada, on March 15, 2021. Filming is set to end on May 10, 2021.

No firm details about the plot have been announced yet, but a post-credits scene in the original review revealed that Tails has gone looking for Sonic–presumably, he’ll feature in the sequel.

The movie is due to release on April 8, 2022, assuming that it’s able to shoot without incident. The first movie initially looked like a disaster, thanks to Sonic’s weird design, but it ended up being decent enough to earn an 8/10 in GameSpot’s review.

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The farming/life-sim genre is an increasingly crowded field these days. There is no shortage of games that offer the experience of building a small farm, raising crops and livestock, and making friends and relationships along the way. But every so often, a game in this genre comes along that really turns things on their head, taking well-worn tropes and expectations and making them feel fresh and new. Sakuna: of Rice and Ruin is such a game. It combines an in-depth rice-farming simulation with excellent 2D platforming action and a wonderful atmosphere to make a delightful, fulfilling experience.

Sakuna is a haughty, bratty harvest goddess of the old-timey Japan-inspired world of Yanato. She lives comfortably with her divine peers in the Lofty Realm away from the suffering of mortals below. When a group of hungry mortals stumble into the Lofty Realm looking for food on her watch, she discovers to her horror that they’ve destroyed the offering to the great deity Lady Kamuhitsuki. As punishment, she and the mortals are banished to the Isle of Demons, where she is tasked with cleansing the land of evil forces while eking out a meager subsistence living with her newfound companions. Now, the goddess Sakuna needs to get her hands dirty–and bond with the humans that have lived beneath her–in order to survive.

The base gameplay of Sakuna is split into two parts: exploration and simulation. The exploration sections have you traversing 2D environments to hunt enemies, collect materials needed for combat and survival, and discover new areas for gathering. The simulation sections task Sakuna with managing the day-to-day labor involved in harvesting a rice crop needed to sustain a family. Engaging in both of these activities is necessary for progress, but you need to decide how to best invest your time. A day-and-night cycle means there’s a constant march onwards through the quite truncated seasons, which affect many things, such as when collected materials spoil, enemies’ strength, which materials can be gathered, what farmwork can be done, and so on. The need to balance activities and manage both item and time resources makes for a gameplay loop that’s interesting and challenging without being too punishing. It also allows for the gradual introduction of new elements as you progress, like additional farming tools and more exploration abilities.

But what makes Sakuna such a unique and memorable experience is just how well-made and in-depth its two core gameplay systems are. If you don’t know the first thing about cultivating and harvesting rice, you will learn a lot about just how intricate and labor-intensive the process is simply from playing Sakuna. Everything about the rice-farming process is detailed and represented in gameplay, starting from tilling the soil to finding ideal kernels, moving on to planting seedlings, managing water levels, pest control, and weeding, to the eventual harvest, threshing, and hulling, all of which Sakuna is directly involved with (and yes, you’ll have to make fertilizer the old-fashioned way, so prepare for lots of poop-scooping and waste compounding). It’s an accurate representation of the entire process and really hammers home the amount of work it takes to make a quality rice crop. And you will want to make quality crops, because the quality of the rice harvest directly impacts Sakuna’s level and stats–plus, additional food eaten during meals gives her beneficial boons during exploration.

The exploration sequences are also superbly done. Sakuna can run, jump, and use her Divine Raiment to grapple onto surfaces and past obstacles and enemies, deftly swinging around the screen to reach gathering and mining spots and hidden treasure chests filled with rare artifacts and soil additives. As you progress, these areas introduce new and interesting obstacles, like wind storms, jagged spikes, rolling rocks, and floating water platforms that require you to use your platforming skills to the fullest to reach hidden nooks and crannies.

But this island is a demonic stronghold teeming with enemies, so Sakuna will often have to put up a fight using her farming implements and Raiment to smack some enemies around. And when we say “smack them around,” we mean it; Sakuna’s combat has a very fun physics system that lets you launch, juggle, and fling enemies around with combinations of normal, special, and Raiment attacks. For example, with a mighty swing of her plough, Sakuna can send one enemy flying into a big group of foes like a bowling ball knocking down pins. Using her Raiment she can grab a large downed enemy and smash them into a wall of spikes or flying enemies. To follow-up, she can then smack a target a few more times with basic combos before they hit the ground, hopefully eliminating them entirely.

Pulling off these big combat plays is a ton of fun, and sending enemies crashing into each other for big damage never stops feeling satisfying. Plus, as Sakuna’s skills on the farm improve, she also learns new combat skills that can be equipped and independently strengthened, giving you a growing supply of fresh moves to add to your fighting repertoire. While the big enemy groups and high-health, high-damage bosses might be intimidating to players who aren’t a deft hand at action games, Sakuna is quite merciful on this front as losing all of your health simply resets you back to when you first entered the area. And if things are simply too hard for you, you can opt to focus more on the rice-farming part of the game instead since the next crop you harvest will also raise Sakuna’s stats, making exploration a fair bit easier.

Great gameplay would be enough to warrant a recommendation, but Sakuna’s visual style and overall pleasant mood gives the game a warmth and beauty that really helps it stand out from the crowd. The visuals evoke a fantasy historical Japan that is filled with awe-inspiring beauty–I would frequently find myself sitting in my rice field at night, staring up at the starry sky as the wind blew through the trees, or admiring the detail of raindrops splashing on water bubbles as I went to explore in the midst of a storm. The story and characters also add greatly to Sakuna’s charm, as this ragtag group of peasants-and-divine-beings grows into a close family that helps each other out. Listening to dinner conversations where foreign missionary woman Myrthe describes her hardships as a trial from God, or Tauemon describing his upbringing and misadventures adds a lot of life and connection to these characters.

That isn’t to say that Sakuna is flawless, however. As in any game where you have separate, very distinct gameplay styles, finding a balance between them can be tough at times, and Sakuna doesn’t always succeed in that regard. There will be times when a bunch of new areas open up that you want to explore, but you’re restricted by the necessity to tend to the farm’s needs at a particular season. Likewise, there will be times like mid-winter when there’s not much to do on the farm, which is a more ideal time for exploration–though because gathering items change with seasons, what you get from exploring in winter might not be what you want for your farming and tool-making endeavors. And sometimes you just have to wait for things to happen on the farm while there isn’t anything particularly interesting going on in exploration, either–perhaps you’re stymied on a tough area you want to get a stat boost to help clear–and you just have to replay old areas and kill time gathering random stuff until the harvest comes due. The worst is when the clock creeps up on you; enemies gain a massive strength boost at night, so seeing the sun set just as you’re on the cusp of clearing a stage mission or reaching the exit can be a massive bummer, as can having half your spoils get spoiled.

Even if it’s a little rough around the edges, Sakuna is a genuine gem. Its rewarding and engaging sim gameplay, exciting freeform combat, and just the way it feels like a warm and comforting experience while you play it are what makes it one of the best life-sim style games to release in quite some time. Whether you’re big into action, simulation, or both, Sakuna’s journey of redemption is one well worth taking.

GameSpot may get a commission from retail offers.

GameSpot may get a commission from retail offers.