Gaming
‘Dearest Hollow Knight…’ An Epistolary of the Highest Admiration
This letter was found buried amongst the private letters of Sir Benjamin McNeill the first, amateur gamer of not-so-great renown and gaming opinion-giver of modest baring. It is believed that it was penned just before he suffered from one of the most severe cases of thumb blistering ever recorded, due to over usage of the D-pad while obsessively playing Team Cherry’s Metroidvania game: Hollow Knight. Hence, rendering him inept at gaming for days. It is a truly tragic tale.
*
June 23rd, 2017 ahk (after Hollow Knight)
Dearest Hollow Knight,
I pen these words with the utmost respect and admiration, to bare my soul to you, with regards to how I feel having basked in your presence for 50 glorious hours.
It has been merely three months since I last played you, yet it feels like your presence is ever at my side. Understand, dear Hollow Knight, that I have never been quite the same after having played you. I am as giddy as a school boy, who has just experienced his first video game and cannot help but cajole in reverie at being by your side, always.
Whenever I commence my laptop, I am graced with an image of you, your gracious and subtle art style, forever captured as my desktop background. Hollow Knight, my Dearest, you must understand, never have I been so completely enraptured in a games world, characters, music and gameplay, since Final Fantasy VII! Please pardon my outburst, but I never imagined, not in my wildest dreams, that a video game could ever affect me in this way, ever again. Yet you, Hollow Knight, have made it so.
Even attempting the most mundane of tasks from everyday life, such as acquiring goods from my local grocery store or walking along the London city streets to partake in the services offered by public bus, have become a constant reminder of you, Hollow Knight. While on these frivolous errands, via my earphones, I am graced by the majesty of your soundtrack. I have never been one for video game soundtracks outside of the act of gaming itself, yet yours has utterly enraptured me in its beautiful orchestral symphonies.
You see, Hollow Knight, I have forever been a fan of Metroidvania games. They have often served me as a wonderful distraction, hours spent exploring, discovering, upgrading and progressing throughout countless worlds such as: extra-terrestrial planets with Metroid, Arabian inspired magical worlds with the half Genie hero Shantae, enchanted blind forests with Ori or haunted demon filled castles in Castlevania. Yet, as truly great as these worlds are, none of them come close to the hours upon hours I spent within your mysterious, underground, insectoid kingdom, all but abandoned to madness and decay.
But Hollow Knight, I need to apologise to you. It has come to my understanding that I wronged you. Not so long ago, I penned together a list of my own making, grading and placing you on a top 10 list of best Metroidvania games, to be published within the World Wide Web. It hurts to say it now, but I only placed you as third. You must understand however, that I felt I couldn’t possibly place you ahead of Super Metroid, the game for which you quite possibly wouldn’t even exist! I also felt it strongly deplorable of me to even consider placing you ahead of Castlevania Symphony of the Night! A game that almost single handily solidified the genre from which you were born, not to mention one of my utmost favourite games of all time! Utter madness! Oh, Hollow Knight, what a fool I have been.
You see, Dearest Hollow Knight, I did not understand the importance you would come to have for me at the time. I was too blinded by the classics and past loves to understand that you truly deserved to be crowned as my number one. Over the months since penning that infamous list, you climbed your way up and engrained yourself in my brain as top of the list. Your stubbornness and refusal to let me go, got to me in the end! But you earned it Hollow Knight. By Jove, you earned it, goddammit!
I will be returning to you once more, fairest Hollow Knight, and surely, I will be forever after. You have come to be a must-have and must-play, that I will forever recommend to anyone who wants to listen. You will always be, now and forever, my GotY.
Yours Sincerely,
Sir Benjamin McNeill
Post Scriptum: Seriously though, Hollow Knight is f***ing awesome!
As Assassin’s Creed Shadows is about to sneak up on people in November, Ubisoft says that the time between developing games needs to be longer to find the “right balance.” Shadows has been in development for four years, longer than any other game in the series up to this point. That includes the huge open-world epics Assassin’s Creed Odyssey and Assassin’s Creed Valhalla.
Shadows lead producer Karl Onnée (thanks, GamesIndustry.biz) says that the latest AC game took 25% longer to make than Valhalla. He says this is necessary to keep the quality of the series that it is known for: “It’s always a balance between time and costs, but the more time you have, the more you can iterate.” You can speed up a project by adding more people to it, but that doesn’t give you more time to make changes.
Onnée says this has as much to do with immersion and aesthetics as it does with fixing bugs and smoothing out pixels. This is because the development team needs time to learn about each new historical setting: “We are trying to make a game that is as real as possible.” We’re proud of it, and the process took a long time. In feudal Japan, building a house is very different from building a house in France or England in the Middle Ages. As an artist, you need to learn where to put things in a feudal Japanese home. For example, food might not belong there. Get all the information you need and learn it. That process takes a long time.”
You’ll have to wait a little longer for Ubisoft to work on each game. Are you okay with that? In what part of Shadows are you now? Is it interesting to you? Leave a comment below and let us know.
You can now pre-order Lollipop Chainsaw RePOP, a remaster that Dragami Games and Capcom both created. You can now pre-order the PS5 game on the PS Store for $44.99 or £39.99. If you have PS Plus, you can get an extra 10% off the price.
The company put out a new trailer with about three minutes of gameplay to mark the start of the pre-order period. Lollipop Chainsaw RePOP is a remaster of Grasshopper Manufacture’s crazy action game from 2012. You play as Juliet, a high school student who fights off waves of zombies.
The remaster adds RePOP mode, an alternative mode that swaps out the blood and gore for fun visual effects. It also adds a bunch of other features and improvements that make the game better overall. You can expect the graphics and sound to be better as well.
The game will now come out on September 12, 2024, instead of September 12, 2024. Are you excited to get back to this? Please cheer us on in the section below.
Is there really anyone who is following the story of Call of Duty’s zombie mode? We’ve known about the story in a vague way for a while, but we couldn’t tell you anything about it. It looks like the “Dark Aether” story will continue in Black Ops 6, but we don’t really know what that means.
For those of you who care, here is the official blurb with some background: “Requiem, led by the CIA, finally closed the last-dimensional portal, sending its inhabitants back to the nightmare world known as the Dark Aether, after two years of fighting zombie outbreaks around the world during the Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War timeline.”
Wait, there’s more! “Agent Samantha Maxis gave her life to seal this weird dimension from the inside out.” Even worse things were to come: senior staff members of Requiem were arrested without a reason by the Project Director, who turned out to be Edward Richtofen.
Black Ops 6 will take place about five years later, and it looks like it will show more about Richtofen’s goals and motivations. The most important thing is that you will probably be shooting an unimaginable number of zombies in the head. This week, on August 8, there will be a full reveal of the gameplay, so keep an eye out for that.
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