And to finish, here’s the least likely Ubisoft game to see released in 2023, or perhaps, ever. Which is incredibly sad.
The original 2003 Prince of Persia: Sands of Time was revelatory. An exceptional game that reinvented how all third-person action games should be played, with its astonishing rewinding time mechanic, and fabulous 3D platforming. Sadly, no one else ever had the sense to copy it, and 20 years later we remain stuck in a mire of action games that endlessly kill us, rather than let us keep going. Oh, and there was that Jake Gyllenyhaal film to rub salt in the wound.
A remake was announced in 2020, with the ambitious release date of January, 2021. Spoiler alert: that didn’t happen, and it was maybe for the best, given just how awful it looked in the trailer above. It was then rather optimistically delayed until just March ‘21, before they seemingly admitted to themselves that it looked like a PS3 game, and kicked it down the road. Later that year Ubisoft said it’d appear in the 2022-2023 fiscal year, then took it from Indian developers Ubisoft Mumbai and gave it to Ubisoft Montreal, before announcing yet another delay last May, without even guessing at a fiscal year.
Come last November, things looked even worse when Ubisoft cancelled all pre-orders and returned everyone’s money. Perhaps a useful lesson on why you probably shouldn’t pre-order games that don’t exist yet. The publisher insists the game isn’t cancelled, but has yet to suggest a new release date, meaning this is unlikely perhaps even in 2024.
But hey, it’ll still probably come out before Beyond Good & Evil 2.
It’s difficult to overstate how influential the original Gran Turismo was upon its global release in 1998. Sony was aware of this, as you can tell from that grandiose marketing claim you see above, from a print ad in the run-up to the game’s release that, yeah — actually turned out to be entirely valid.
Recently Digital Foundry’s John Linneman explored the series’ past with a two-part retrospective focused on the franchise’s PlayStation and PlayStation 2 entries. It explains, from studio Polyphony Digital’s inception to the game’s release and beyond, how the team was dedicated to pushing the capabilities of the original PlayStation, hardware that would be considered extremely rudimentary by today’s standards. They succeeded, realizing a quality of driving simulation that wasn’t thought possible in the late ’90s.
This two-part YouTube deep dive is a combined two hours exploring the games that made Gran Turismo a household name, as well as a number of titles that tried to capitalize on the attention — like Sega GT 2002 and Forza Motorsport. If you’re nerdy about these things, it’s a must-watch. It also ends with a comparison of the Nürburgring Nordschleife as recreated in four different titles — an especially interesting segment, because Forza’s Green Hell isn’t green at all, and the rendition of the famed circuit in Enthusia: Professional Racing is profoundly upsetting if you suffer from seasonal depression.
Watch ’em both and reminisce on those halcyon days before microtransactions and game-breaking updates.
For the last few years, a Guitar Hero player called Schmooey was widely believed to be the best in the world, having racked up achievements and displayed feats that other players thought impossible. A discovery made last year, however, shows there was a very good reason for that.
In a detailed 27-minute report, Karl Jobst explains in the video below how Schmooey, whose exploits had long attracted a pinch of suspicion, was torn down in January 2022 when a couple of glaring issues were discovered in his uploads, which opened the floodgates and ended up seeing every single one of his records and achievements tossed out.
Schmooey, who had come to the attention of the community as a teenager, was for many years regarded as the best in the world because not only was he clearing songs that others had immense difficulty with, he was doing them at faster speeds. He was so good, in fact, that he made a few thousand bucks over the years claiming bounties that the community had placed on clearing advanced tracks.
Sure, some of his videos had the odd questionable moment—a video lag here, some dark footage there—but for the most part these queries were far from conclusive proof that he had been cheating, and so nothing ever came of them.
Until December 2021, when Schmooey uploaded a run of the song 9 Patterns Of Eternal Pain. While initially incredibly impressive, given the complexity and speed of the song’s latter sections, fellow expert players watching along soon found a few inconsistencies with the run.
For starters, there were sections where Schmooey’s hands weren’t hitting the notes on the guitar that were being played on screen, which strongly suggested that the video of his guitar didn’t match the song being played on the game overlay. Then there was a weird moment at the very end of the video, where a Windows Media Player overlay appears, which led other players to accuse him of faking the video by using pre-recorded video in a livestream.
Some leading players and members of the community confronted Schmooey over this, and after initially trying to defend himself, he eventually confessed last month that a few of his videos had been faked, though the rest of them were real.
Other players weren’t convinced, though, and now they knew what to look for, they went back through all of Schmooey’s uploads and found that nearly all of them—around 100 clips—had been faked using numerous techniques, from “splicing” in footage to playing the game at a slower pace then speeding the video up.
Exposed, Schmooey posted an apology video on January 15, after which he deleted all his uploads, locked his social accounts and disappeared from the community. He also paid back all the bounties he had received over the years.
What’s wild here is that Schmooey was a really good Guitar Hero player! This wasn’t a case of some kid sitting alone in his room faking his way to the top through video alone. Schmooey had been an active member of the community, and had even attended live events and played alongside fellow players like CarneyJared (whose exploits we featured last year).
If you’ve got 27 minutes you should definitely watch the whole video. Like the Trackmania expose from last year, it’s the details of the cheating, and the work involved in its ultimate discovery, that are even more interesting than the story’s broader brushstrokes.
Before Hello Games made a name for itself with the procedurally generated space adventure No Man’s Sky, its developer was all about Joe Danger, a cartoonish motorcycle stuntman racing through an eponymous series of console and mobile games. After years of being defunct due to iOS updates, the Joe Danger mobile games are back in the App Store today, thanks in part to a father’s emailed plea on behalf of his autistic, Joe Danger-loving son.
In an official announcement heralding the newly restored and updated iOS versions of Joe Danger Touch and Joe Danger Infinity, Hello Games’ Sean Murray revealed that letting the stunt-driving hero fall to the wayside following the success of No Man’s Sky was a source of shame for his UK-based studio.
“Joe holds a special place in our hearts. It was our first game when we were still four guys in a shed, trying to get noticed,” Murray writes. “We sold over a million copies of Joe Danger, and every week we still get emails from fans. Sadly since iOS culled older games, it no longer worked on [the] latest Apple devices. It’s always been a secret shame of ours that the success of No Man’s Sky left Joe Danger unloved.”
While the console and Android Joe Danger games are still perfectly playable, fans who fell in love with the character’s motorcycle maneuvers on iOS were left in the dirt. While some players were happy to go play with Joe on another platform, an eight-year-old autistic fan named Jack would accept no substitute. In a letter to Hello Games shared by Sean Murray on Twitter this morning, Jack’s father talked about his child’s touching relationship with the series.
“As you probably know, children with autism deal with a great many struggles, chief among them are great difficulty with social interactions,” Jack’s father wrote. “However, one of the things that has enabled Jack and I to bond is our shared love of video games, specifically Joe Danger. Jack loves Joe. He loves everything about him. He has a collection of toy motorcycles that are his ‘Joe Dangers;’ every motorcycle we see on the street is ‘Joe Danger.’ One of the first things I hear when I walk in the door after a long day at work is ‘Come on, daddy, let’s go play Joe Danger!’”
Jack’s father goes on to talk about how playing the game has allowed the child to have fun with friends and family and experience what he calls “normal kid stuff”. His connection also helps him cope with difficult situations. “There have been times too innumerous to count where I know Jack is uneasy with a given situation, because he will look at me and say ‘Then I get Joe Danger?’ It’s his way of saying ‘this is going to suck for me for a bit, but I known I can get through it.’”
Unfortunately, iOS upgrades rendered both Joe Danger Touch and Joe Danger Infinity unplayable, leaving Jack and his father despondent. As a child with autism, Jack was used to playing his games on a certain type of device, so simply switching was out of the question. And so Jack’s father emailed Hello Games and, according to Sean Murray, those words helped drive the studio to remaster both Joe Dangers for iOS 15. Both are now available on iOS for two dollars apiece, with previous owners getting the new versions for free.
As the father of a pair of children on the autism scale, the story of Jack hits home. While every autistic child is different, Jack’s experience sounds similar to some that I’ve experienced with my 10-year-old son Archer. He likes his games a certain way, and uses them to help soothe himself in difficult situations. He’s also a big Joe Danger fan, but he plays on Xbox. I’ve got both iOS versions downloaded to his gaming phone for when he gets home from school today.
Forza Horizon 5has a ton of cars, and the most impressive ones all cost a ton of money, so players have been eagerly looking for the fastest ways to grind for credits and XP. The answer? A course called Goliath, which players can complete without ever touching their controller.
As first reported by IGN, the exploit revolves around the game’s auto-steering mechanic, which can be taken advantage of to effectively turn your vehicle of choice into a self-driving car. Combine that with an extremely long race like the 50 lap Goliath course, and you can rack up XP, credits, car mastery points, and accolades, while you’re at work during the day or asleep overnight.
Here are the precise steps:
Turn on full drive assist including assisted braking, auto-steering, traction control, and stability control.
Pick a car with great handling and braking that’s too heavy to fly off the track, like the BMW X5 FE.
Select a Goliath race from the Creative Hub trending section.
Choose one with no AI drivatars and play it solo.
Make sure you’re using an Xbox One controller. Xbox Series X/S controllers will automatically turn off after a short while.
Put a rubber band around your Xbox One controller to pull the right trigger back so you’re constantly accelerating.
Grab yourself a cookie to wash away the shame.
The longer the Eventlab blueprint race is, the more you’ll earn. At over 15 minutes a lap, the Goliath course is a perfect fit, which is why players have been filling up the Creative Hub with them. A few days of the AFK farming can earn more credits and XP than most players would get in weeks of playing normally.
The hardest part of this exploit, however, is affording a car with good enough stats to complete the course without repeatedly crashing. The Lamborghini Sesto does the job, for example, but costs roughly 6 million credits. Some players have also had an easier time preventing cars from crashing by selecting wet Goliath maps and tuning their vehicles accordingly. Still, many will have to save up a decent number of credits before Goliath AFK even becomes a viable trick.
As games add an increasingly impressive number of accessibility options, it seems inevitable that players will take advantage of them to discover new exploits. The question is whether it ultimately matters in a game with no shared economy.
Not everyone is in favor of breaking the game this way, and the ethics around Goliath AFK farming have been the subject of much debate on the Forza Horizon 5 subreddit. That’s at least in part because it can be used to purchase the rarest cars sooner, and then leverage them in online races. Until Playground Games patches the exploit, it’ll be every driver for themselves.
Forza Horizon 5 is fantastic. If you look up fun in the dictionary you’ll see a gif of someone hitting a massive ramp in Forza Horizon 5 in a car covered in anime at like 200 MPH while listening to the Beastie Boys. What I’m saying is, it’s really, really good. And Forza Horizon 5 also contains some of the best, dumbest and wildest car horns I’ve ever heard before. Want your car’s horn to just be the Killer Instinct theme song? Well, Forza has got you covered. And then some.
Forza Horizon 5 was released last week for Xbox consoles and PC. Since then, critics, like Kotaku’s own Ari Notis, have shared ample amounts of praise for the colorful open-world racer. And millions of players love it too. According to Xbox boss Phil Spencer, Forza Horizon 5 is the biggest launch for an Xbox Game Studios release in the company’s history and it already has over 4.5 million active players across PC and console. And while I know most of those people are playing the game for all the cool jumps and sweet cars, I have to imagine the awesome list of novelty car horns is helping to bring in a few people too. (Like at least 40 of those 4.5 million, right?)
Within Forza Horizon 5 you’ll find a huge list of custom horns within the garage tab of within the home menu. This is also where you can upgrade and tune your cars, buy some new ones or sell some stinkers.
Check out the video below for a nice overview of every horn in the game.
Some of these horns are your boring, run-of-the-mill honks and beeps. Who cares! More interesting horns are found in the musical and sound effect sections. Here you can find stuff like “Ride Of The Valkyries,” “Jingle Bells,” and uh… the Halo theme. Or the Sea of Thieves theme song. Or more specific stuff, like the song from Banjo-Kazooie’s Spiral Mountain level. Or, one of my personal faves, the Doom E1M1 song.
G/O Media may get a commission
Beyond some wild song choices, you can find a huge (HUGE) list of sound effects ranging from laser blasts, whistles, wolf howling, doorbells, dial-up modems, and more. And because Forza is a Microsoft-owned product, someone decided to stick some Microsoft noises in here. For example, you can have a horn that is just the call noise from Microsoft’s Slack-alternative, Teams. Or the Windows 10 notification noise. Or even the Windows XP shutdown jingle. Oh and because Microsoft/Xbox own Halo, yes you can get the sound effect from the Grunt Birthday Party Skull as your horn. Or weirder, the sound of the Chief’s shield recharging.
(And yes, I know some of these were in Horizon 4, but I barely played that one because driving around England was boring.)
The only thing I hate about these horns is that I have none of these cool horns. On my last wheel spin, I almost got the Halo theme car horn, but instead, I got a stupid supercar. I have like 20 of those. Give me the silly horns, please. I also think the horns need an easy-to-access in-game weapon-wheel-like system to instantly swap between the various stupid horns.
Also, Mircosoft if you are looking for good horns to add to this already massive list, may I suggest the Fus-Ro-Dah dragon shout from Skyrim. Oh and maybe the death noise from Minecraft.
Now, if you excuse me, I’m going to go back to farming wheel spins in Forza Horizon 5 so I can get some more silly horns.
The latest game in the open world spin-off series, and the 13th Forza game over all, Forza Horizon 5 is a mostly known quantity. But nearly a decade after the Horizon series started, it feels like many are encountering it for the first time. And they’re loving it, in a way that’s sucking up all the oxygen in the room in a way that racing games rarely do.
Forza Horizon 5 had nearly a million players across console and PC over the weekend. The game wasn’t even officially out yet, but that’s how many people had decided to pre-order, or pick up the post-launch DLC bundle, in order to unlock early access. Since launching for real yesterday, the game has seen over 4.5 million players get behind the wheel and kick up dust in its lovely Mexico landscapes.
Xbox boss Phil Spencer called it the biggest launch for an Xbox Game Studios release ever, and revealed it had three times the number of concurrent players as 2018’s Forza Horizon 4. “We’ve invested for years in Xbox so more people can play…Forza Horizon 5 shows that promise coming to life,” he wrote on Twitter.
“Forza Horizon 5 is fucking awesome because everyone in game is perfectly okay with my character being named Count Driftula and I can launch off a ramp at 200mph while slamming on a car horn that’s just the Windows XP shutdown noise,” SomeGoodShows podcast host, Kam Konek, tweeted.
G/O Media may get a commission
$13 off
New Pokémon Snap – Nintendo Switch
The delightful sequel we never thought we’d see 20 years later, we finally have more content to explore and 171 more Pokémon to take cute little pictures of as they dance around and eat apples.
“Forza Horizon 5 is the nuts,” tweeted Hammeredcast co-host Matt Felsenthal. “It’s a video game that understands that it’s a video game, doesn’t make you sit through 75 hours of bullshit to start, you just…Go. You drive. Car go vroom, legitimate 10/10 cannot recommend enough.”
Kotaku’s Ari Notis similarly praised it in his review, despite the fact that it isn’t all that different from the last game or the one before that. “Forza Horizon 5 doesn’t reinvent the wheel. It doesn’t need to,” he wrote. “There are few true thrills in gaming that come without a catch, and Forza’s core is still, all these years later, one of them.”
Elsewhere players are reporting that Forza Horizon 5 is lighting up their Xbox friends list in a way not other recent games have. So far, it’s the highest rated game of the year on Metacritic.
Micorosft has released plenty of great games in recent years, but none of them feel like they’ve so suddenly and completely taken over the conversation the way Playground Games’ latest has. After all the trials and tribulations of the Xbox One years, and a mergers and acquisitions spending spree to load up on new studios, Microsoft has a certified hit on its hands, one you can recommend without hesitation or caveats. On the one-year anniversary of the Xbox Series X/S launch, the new-gen consoles finally have their first must-have blockbuster.
It’s much harder to say why now, and why ForzaHorizon 5, though I obviously have my theories. Game Pass is in full gear, with day-one access on both console and PC. It also launched day-and-date on Steam. You can even stream it to your phone.
Screenshot: Microsoft / Kotaku
It also seems reflective of the greater success the Series X and S are having over the Xbox One. Microsoft called the new hardware its biggest console launch ever back in January, and Niko Partners senior analyst Daniel Ahmad estimated last month that the company had sold 8 million units and had 20 million active Game Pass subscribers. More anecdotally, my Series S has become my go-to device for playing everything that’s not a platform exclusive elsewhere, not least because it’s cheap, works great, and fits snugly into my living room media setup.
Then there’s the irregular fall 2021 release calendar. It feels like a particularly weird time due in part to pandemic-fueled delays and the usual downtime that comes as players transition from one console cycle to another. Nintendo’s biggest holiday release was a free 2.0 update for Animal Crossing: New Horizons. Sony is basically MIA. And the hype around big third-party blockbusters, like Call of Duty: Vanguard and Far Cry 6, regardless of actual merit, feels muted this year.
A perfect opening, in other words, for a colorful, exuberant shared-world racer that looks gorgeous in every screenshot shared on social media, and stupidly fun in every viral video clip. It probably helps too that Mexico’s diverse biomes and topography has captured people’s imaginations in a way that the English countryside from Forza Horizon 4 did not. That game felt like driving home for the holidays. The new one feels like embarking on your new infinitely instagramable dream life.
I can’t drive for shit and I’m still having a blast. Clearly I’m not alone.
Nintendo’s famous Mario has a brother named Luigi and for some reason, the taller of the bros has been found in a prototype build of the Sega Dreamcast racing gameSega GT. Luigi was found in a prototype that’s part of a massive release of over 40o Xbox and Dreamcast prototypes and unreleased games.
This odd Luigi was discovered by video game preservationist CombyLaurent1 and then shared on Twitter. They found Luigi in a secret race inside the unreleased prototype. CombyLaurent1 told Kotaku that this build of the game was not intended for retails release and they theorize that Luigi is in here as a joke.
Yesterday, CombyLaurent1 shared with The Hidden Palace website two Dreamcast prototypes as part of the site’s ongoing “Project Deluge.” This project looks to catalog, preserve, and released video game prototypes, early builds, canceled projects, and more. The team had previously released over 700 PS2 prototypes and unseen builds back in March 2021. Yesterday, the group released its latest Deluge dump containing 349 Xbox and 135 Dreamcast prototypes.
However, CombyLaurent1 had yet to analyze the prototypes they sent to Hidden Palace. They usually do this beforehand. Instead, during a Hidden Palace live stream announcing the latest dump of games as part of Project Deluge, CombyLaurent1 stumbled upon the secret Luigi in Sega GT. He’s hidden in a race named “SonyGT2″ which appears to be a reference to the PlayStation racing game Gran Turismo, which Sega GT was directly competing against.
G/O Media may get a commission
“When I discovered Luigi yesterday, I was laughing out loud,” CombyLaurent1 told Kotaku. “I knew that this kind of thing existed from old dev’s anecdotes. I never thought I would come across it on one of my prototypes.”
As far as anyone can tell, Luigi isn’t in the final retail release of Sega GT or its Xbox sequel Sega GT 2002. CombyLaurent1 believes it was an inside joke among the devs working on the game, something to make them laugh as they toiled away on the racer. It was never intended to be found or seen by players.
You can read up on more discoveries by CombyLaurenT1 over on the Sega Dreamcast Info website or by following them on Twitter. And you can check out the full details about Project Deluge on the Hidden Palace website.
Do you know you can hit yourself with a Blue Shell in Mario Kart 8 Deluxe? Speedrunners do, and they’re going all out to blow themselves up with the first place-targeting item as quickly as possible.
Skilloz, the current world record-holder for the hilariously named “Blue Yourself” category, uploaded a video yesterday (h/t Polygon) showing that it’s possible to go from the beginning of the race to spinning out in a Blue Shell blast in just under 38 seconds. If you’re a fan of Baby Daisy—there’s got to be at least one of you out there—you might want to look away.
Here’s how Skilloz did it, according to the man himself:
The items you get depend how far away you are from first place. Knowing this, I sandbag at the start to get a good chance of getting a Star. Then I rush to the next set of items and I’m at the point where getting Triple Mushrooms is also a pretty decent chance. These aren’t too terribly difficult to get if you’re able to correctly position yourself.
The toughest part is getting the Blue Shell. There’s no real way to manipulate it. You can only get a Blue Shell if you’re at least 2000 units behind first place. Since that’s the closest you can be, it’s about a 5% chance of receiving a Blue Shell. You can also only get a Blue Shell once 30 seconds have passed in game.
So when I hesitate in front of those item boxes, I’m waiting on those two things: the first-place CPU to get at least 2000 units ahead of me and 30 seconds of in-game time [to pass]. A member in our community, GsFlint, found that these two conditions can basically line up with each other at the same [time] in Mario Circuit.
My favorite speedruns are those that see players take a small, preferably ridiculous part of a game and get very serious about learning how to do it fast. It’s hard to say how low folks will be able to get “Blue Yourself” times in Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, but you can bet I’ll be watching with bated breath.