KARAOKE (YAKUZA 0)

Anyone who’s spent a decent amount of time with iYakuza 0 (or most other Yakuza games, really) has most likely given its karaoke minigame a go as well. A rhythm game in all but name, these visits to karaoke bars are always a blast. Regardless of which difficulty you pick or even which song you pick, developer Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio has a talent for musical timing in QTEs. So much so that we’d almost like to see them make an entire rhythm game.

Last year, the team at Supermassive Games and publisher Bandai Namco embarked on an ambitious journey with an anthology series, dubbed The Dark Pictures Anthology, of multiple smaller titles, with each spanning a different setting and genre of horror. They would follow the same format and gameplay structure of the developer’s very successful Until Dawn, of a narrative-driven choose-your-own-adventure game. Well, it seems at least the first entry in the series, Man of Medan, managed to make a mark.

As reported by GamesIndustry, Bandai Namco have confirmed that Man of Medan has managed to sell over 1 million copies. No breakdowns were given for platforms or digital vs physical, but it seems a respectable number and a nice start for the series. Bandai Namco’s Hervé Hoerdt spoke well of the game, saying that they think it will become more successful with time as more volumes of the anthology come, such as the upcoming Little Hope, the second game in the franchise.

“It’s tricky to make people understand it’s an anthology when you have only one volume,” he said. “This is why we’re looking so much forward to the release of the second one and then be able to start discussing potential new volumes, because you need to ground this ‘anthology’ wording. Anthology doesn’t mean anything when you have only one box on your shelf, or one digital game in your library. Each volume will grow the audience.

“There’s a lot of ambition for us in this series. There are some regions where we think we can please some more fans, namely in the US and in Asia. I think there’s room for growth. The quality of the execution and the experience, [as well as] the genre, make us think that there is more potential.”

Man of Medan is available now for PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC. It also became available on Xbox Game Pass for Xbox One this month. The next game, Little Hope, will release on October 30th for all the same platforms.

Song of Horror

What if you faced a terrifying being that could also learn from your actions and plan accordingly? That’s The Presence, the antagonistic force of Song of Horror. The title features a number of characters, each exploring the house of Sebastian P. Husher and facing off against the terrifying Presence. When one character dies, the next continues the story, investigating in their own way. However, The Presence will learn from each incursion and hunt you down.

Until Dawn – Everyone Dies

Make all the wrong decisions in Until Dawn and everyone dies. Who would have thought? Most everyone turn into Wendigos and it’s on Sam and Mike to survive by destroying the lodge when a gas leak breaks out. Of course, this can also be botched, causing the two to die in the explosion as well. Even if Josh somehow survives the whole ordeal, he’s seen in the post-credits turning into a Wendigo.

Amnesia Collection

Frictional Games was no stranger to the horror gaming scene thanks to the Penumbra series. However, Amnesia: The Dark Descent completely blew away expectations. Its tale of confusion and mystery, highlighted by the protagonist’s amnesia, clashed with the oppressive shadow that constantly sought out players. Amnesia: The Dark Descent delivered a compelling psychological horror experience that was simple but still wholly terrifying. The Amnesia Collection features the first game, Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs (developed by The Chinese Room) and Amnesia: Justine. While the latter two range from above average to good, the entire collection is a steal for the amount of scares it provides.

Mass Effect 2

BioWare made it pretty clear that the final mission of Mass Effect 2 was “The Suicide Mission” so it’s a given that bringing everyone back alive would be tough. However, actually accomplishing this meant recruiting all possible companions, completing their Loyalty missions and getting all of the ship upgrades. Oh and when you’re actually at the Collector Base? You need to choose the right person for each task, lest death take them. Do all of that and you’ll get the happiest ending…which is everyone finding out that the Reapers are coming to kill them all. Speaking of which…

It ran on Decima, the same engine that underpins Death Stranding, Killzone Shadowfall, and Horizon: Zero Dawn. Decima has a range of features that allowed Decima-powered games to stand head and shoulders above the competition on the PS4. We looked at both Horizon Zero Dawn and Death Stranding in separate analyses.

Man of Medan is not built on the Decima platform. It’s built on the Unreal 4 engine. However, Supermassive’s considerable experience with Decima mean that there are a lot of parallels between what they’ve accomplished in Until Dawn and what’s going on in Man of Medan at technical level.

Performance and Scaling across PC And console Versions: 

How does the game perform and look across platforms? On our PC rig with a Ryzen 5 1600 at 3.6 GHz, an RTX 2070 Super, and 16 GB of RAM, Man of Medan positively zipped along. At 1440p, we were looking at a framerate that remained consistently above 100 FPS, though with occasional dips below. This is a very GPU-bound game. With the framerate unlocked, we were hitting GPU utilization upwards of 94 percent.

Performance on the consoles is obviously not in the same class, but the game is very playable nonetheless. Before we proceed ahead we wanted to make a note. On the console front, we analyzed the game’s performance by taking some sample scenes from the game and running it through trdrop, an open source software. Note that this tool gives us a mere demonstration of the game’s performance, because an exact 1:1 representation of performance can only be provided by the developers themselves since they have access to vast of array of tools and profilers.

Both consoles run at very steady 30 FPS, but use dynamic resolution scaling to get there. The Xbox One X wins hands down in terms of image quality: in best-case situations One X output is nearly indistinguishable from native 4K. The PS4 Pro delivers a notably softer presentation. Nevertheless, the consistent framerate on both consoles mean that the game feels just as good to play, whichever one you’re on.

In-depth Engine Analysis:

Unreal 4 has had something of a rocky history. Epic’s Unreal 3 engine dominated the seventh-gen. Epic made a lot of money simply by licensing out the Unreal 3 platform to other third-party developers. The end result is that the engine was made use of in a wide range of seventh-gen titles: Everything from Infinity Blade on iOS to Borderlands to Arkham Knight leveraged Epic’s supremely adaptable toolset. The engine played a big role in shaping the AAA seventh-gen look with techniques like HDR lighting, normal-mapping, and soft-shadows.

Early tech demos circa-2013, such as Infiltrator and Elemental made it seem for while like Unreal 4 would carry the baton into the eighth-gen. However, the engine has had a rocky history. Far fewer AAA studios licensed Unreal 4 from Epic. Many of them, as a matter of fact, opted instead to design their own tools in-house. Unreal 4 had a friendlier business model than Unreal 3 and this ironically led to it becoming an engine of choice for AA and indie efforts. This is almost the polar opposite of Epic’s intentions with the engine. Nevertheless, it’s consumers who benefited in the end: Unreal 4’s allowed smaller studios to bring out visually stunning titles that look and perform just as well as AAA titles, without the limitations of an engine like Unity.

While Supermassive aren’t exactly small fish anymore, they’re still an indie studio, so they don’t necessarily have the resources to build their own engine from scratch. The move from Decima to Unreal 4 was likely triggered by licensing issues. Decima was built by Guerilla Games, a first-party Sony studio. While Sony has something of a gentleman’s agreement with Kojima Productions about its use of Decima in Death Stranding (and the possibility of that game arriving on PC), it’s unlikely that any other studio would get a free pass, especially to bring Decima to the Xbox One, a platform Man of Medan runs on. But Unreal 4 is no graphical slouch and we’ve found that Supermassive were able to bring over all the visual highlights of their work on Until Dawn to the new engine and then leverage Unreal 4’s strengths to build on top of that. Man of Medan is a very technically accomplished title and a great showcase for any platform. What exactly does it bring to the Unreal 4 table? Let’s find out.

Lighting and materials have always been Unreal’s strong suit. Unreal 3 was one of the early pioneers of deferred rendering. This is an approach to lighting that allowed for far more dynamic light sources onscreen at one time than conventional forward rendering allows for. Deferred rendering plays a big role in Man of Medan’s aesthetic. The interplay of light and shadow are a key way in which horror games convey immediate jump scares and general feelings of unease. The huge number of light sources deferred rendering enables are in full effect right from Man of Medan’s intro. In the China market area, you see numerous Chinese lanterns, each of which is an individual light-casting source. When the camera pans to the inside of the ship, (we’re not going to spoil any more), the harsh, high-contrast light of a single fluorescent lightsource makes for a very unsettling moment. 

Materials are a bit of a mixed bag in Man of Medan, at least when compared to the great results we see with the lighting. Physically-based material rendering is in use here, but surfaces aren’t quite as convincing as we’ve seen in other titles that use PBR. One of the reasons behind this is something that’s not related to the materials per se. Unreal 4 has a very robust temporal anti-aliasing solution. Temporal AA in Unreal 4 goes a long way towards eliminating jaggies. At 1440p with temporal AA turned off on our desktop, we saw very little in the way of aliasing. However, the trade-off is a significant amount of “vaseline blur.” This doesn’t just impact high frequency detail. On certain surfaces like polished wood–which are supposed to have a certain amount (but not more) glossiness, the TAA implementation results in the material itself looking a bit off. The impact is less pronounced on high-gloss and reflective surfaces. Turning off AA does help a little in this respect, but that just goes to show how many jaggies TAA is eliminating. And of course, this isn’t an option on console.

Where material quality shines is with respect to characters. Character rendering in this game is, simply put, phenomenal. A big part of this is down to how Man of Medan handles skin. Subsurface scattering is used in combination with very high resolution, normal-mapped skin textures to create skin surfaces that simply look alive. This, together with the high quality of the animation work results in characters that act and talk very realistically. A high quality shader and texture work also result in Man of Medan having some of the most convincing eye rendering we’ve seen in a while. Much was made of an enhanced eye shader in Gears 5–another Unreal 4 title. Man of Medan bring similar results to the table. Eyes play a huge role in non-verbal communication and it can be very difficult to nail down the look of a human eye, without it appearing either lifeless or cartoony. Man of Medan strikes a fine balance here with great results.

Model quality is excellent. Because Man of Medan is tightly scripted, Supermassive can afford to budget more polygons towards higher-fidelity models, as opposed to rendering wider spaces. This means that both characters and objects in the game have a very high degree of geometric complexity. Character models look to have poly counts in the high five figures. Heads and fingers are rounded with blockiness almost unnoticeable. Incidental features like rumples on a character’s shirt are also made up of polygons as opposed to being textured on. Object quality is excellent, too. Incidental details are lavished with a care and attention that are rare in other titles.

Man of Medan features great post-process work, making full use of Unreal 4’s extensive post-process capabilities. Cutscenes make good use of bokeh depth of field. The effect is accurate, with a high sample count–again something that the limited scale of the game makes possible. A high quality per-object motion blur implementation is also used. Motion blur in this game in imparting life to jump scares and action sequences. Bloom is toned down but visible, particularly with high-intensity light sources and specular reflections: the cold glint of the moonlight off the ship in the opening section makes great use of the effect.

Conclusion:

All in all, man of Man of Medan is a great showcase for the Unreal 4 engine. Supermassive took expertise in creating tightly-bound narrative experiences like Until Dawn, and transferred it to an entirely new engine, creating a title that looks and plays better than their earlier work. That’s no mean feat. While we’re still on the fence about the Dark Picture Anthology model (you might want to wait a while til all the titles come out), Man of Medan is an excellent–and visually compelling–slice of high seas horror.

August 2019 was the worst August in terms of software sales in the United States, as per the NPD Group (via GamesBeat). Dollar sales fell 22 per cent year-on-year to $257 million, which is the lowest recorded for the month of August since the August of 1998, with the slowdown of hardware sales resulting in the same. That said, year-to-date software sales for 2019 stand at $3.1 billion, which is a 1 per cent increase over last year- driven by growing software sales on the Nintendo Switch.

It’s been a pretty slow month for software sales in the United States all around. Madden NFL 20, which topped software charts last month, has done so yet again. It’s the third best-selling game of 2019 in the US, and this is the seventh consecutive August to see a Madden game topping the software charts. The other two games in the top 3 are considerably older, with Minecraft occupying second place – the highest the game has ever charted on NPD charts – while the evergreen Grand Theft Auto 5 refuses to slow down in third place.

The entire top 10 has only one new August release charting, in fact, which is Astral Chain. Considering the fact that the game’s sales were only tracked for two days for these charts, placing tenth is not too bad. Another game that only tracked for two days is Man of Medan, which comes in at No. 19- though that’s a $30 game, which affects its placement in the software charts, which are based on revenue, and not the number of units sold.

Control was yet another major release in August, but it’s seen a disappointing debut. Charting for five days, it did not even crack the top 20. Meanwhile, Triumph Studios’ Age of Wonders: Planetfall comes in at No. 15, generating the highest launch month sales in the series’ history.

You can check out the full software charts below.

1. Madden NFL 20**
2. Minecraft***
3. Grand Theft Auto V
4. Fire Emblem: Three Houses*
5. Super Smash Bros. Ultimate*
6. Super Mario Maker 2*
7. Mario Kart 8*
8. Mortal Kombat 11
9. Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six: Siege
10. Astral Chain*
11. Marvel’s Spider-Man
12. The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild*
13. Red Dead Redemption II
14. Call of Duty: Black Ops IIII**
15. Age of Wonders: Planetfall
16. Super Mario Party*
17. Marvel: Ultimate Alliance 3: The Black Order*
18. New Super Mario Bros. U Deluxe*
19. The Dark Pictures: Man of Medan
20. Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey

*Does not include digital sales
**Does not include PC digital sales
***Minecraft digital sales include Xbox One and PlayStation 4, but not other digital sales.

NBA 2K20, a simulation title of a decidedly American sport, has debuted on top of weekly sales charts in the UK. GamesIndustry reports that in spite of the game’s chart-topping debut, its first-week sales are still almost a third lower than concurrent figures for last year’s NBA 2K19. 

Much of the top 5 has changed, in fact. While last week’s top 5 saw four debutants, only one of those remains in the top 5, and only two in the top 10. Astral Chain topped charts last week, but has dropped down to 11th place. Control, which debuted in fourth place, is now at No. 14. Wreckfest, which occupied second place last week, has dropped down to the 10th spot. Only Man of Medan has retained its place from last week, coming in at No. 3.

In second place is Spyro Reignited Trilogy, which has seen a significant jump owing to its Switch release, with the Switch version making up 92 per cent of last week’s sales for the game. However, its Switch debut has managed to sell less than 10 per cent of what it did when it debuted on the PS4 and Xbox One last year.

You check check out the full top 10 for the week ending September 7 below, via UKIE/Gfk Chart-Track.

1. NBA 2K20
2. Spyro Reignited Trilogy
3. The Dark Pictures Anthology: Man of Medan
4. Mario Kart 8 Deluxe
5. Crash Team Racing Nitro-Fueled
6. Marvel’s Spider-Man
7. Super Mario Maker 2
8. FIFA 19
9. Catherine: Full Body
10. Wreckfest

UKIE / Gfk Chart-Track have released the newest weekly charts for video game sales in the UK, and last week was dominated a bunch of older releases taking the top positions, the week ending August 31st sees a bunch of new releases claiming these top spots.

On the very top of Astral Chain, PlatinumGames’ new Nintendo Switch-exclusive IP, which, after solid reviews all around, has sold the most throughout the week- impressively enough, with just two days on the market. Wreckfest, which saw its console release last week, is in second place.

Man of Medan, Supermassive Games’ new horror adventure title, debuts in third place. Meanwhile, Remedy Entertainment’s Control takes the fourth spot in its debut week. Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, which topped sales charts last week, has dropped down to fifth place, followed by consistently well-performing titles such as Crash Team Racing Nitro-Fueled and Super Mario Maker 2.

Marvel’s Spider-Man, thanks to a price drop (and possibly thanks to its new Game of the Year Edition), has seen a massive boost in sales, jumping up from thirty-fourth place last week to the eight spot this week. It’s followed by Grand Theft Auto 5 and The Division 2 to round out the rest of the top 10.

You can check out the full top 10 below.

1. Astral Chain
2. Wreckfest
3. The Dark Pictures: Man of Medan
4. Control
5. Mario Kart 8 Deluxe
6. Crash Team Racing Nitro-Fueled
7. Super Mario Maker 2
8. Marvel’s Spider-Man
9. Grand Theft Auto 5
10. The Division 2