Upcoming indie games showcase Guerrilla Collective already has the likes of 11 bit Studios, Coffee Stain Studios, Funcom and more showcasing their games next month. It even has Larian Studios ready to showcase Baldur’s Gate 3 and something related to the Divinity franchise. Even so, more studios have been confirmed to be joining the roster.

The 14 studios in question include Nightdive Studios, which is developing the System Shock Remake; Sega of America; New Blood Interactive which developed Amid Evil and Dusk; and many more. Check out the full list below:

• Batterystaple Games
• Beyond Fun Studio
• Interabang Entertainment
• Kitfox Games
• MidBoss
• New Blood Interactive
• Nightdive Studios
• Ninja Garage
• Nito Souji
• Sam Eng
• Sega of America
• Serenity Forge
• Team Coreupt
• The Molasses Flood

The Guerrilla Collective will be keeping off its showcase on June 6th at 10 AM PT on Twitch. We’ll see Paradox Insider, consisting of announcements from Paradox Interactive, The PC Gaming and The Future Game Show taking place in that span. On June 7th, there will be more reveals. June 8th will see interviews with various developers and live gameplay demos.

Plenty of other announcements are also planned for June including Cyberpunk 2077’s Night City Wire. There’s also Sony’s rumored PS5 games showcase on June 3rd. Stay tuned for more details and updates as they arrive.

Back in August, Ian Curran was appointed as the new Chief Operating Officer and President of Sega of America. Now, Sega has announced some changes regarding its sister company, Atlus USA.

Basically, Curran will perform the same role  for Atlus USA that he already does for Sega. Furthermore, Sega West Chief Executive Officer Tatsuyuki Miyazaki will now take on the role of CEO of Atlus USA. This is certainly some interesting news, and it should be interesting to see how this will affect Atlus’ future projects (looking at you, Persona 6). 

As for the former CEO of Atlus USA, Naoto Hiraoka, he will be the company’s brand owner, and will be in charge leading its many creative projects. In a press release sent out by Sega, he expressed his faith in the new appointments, and also expressed his best wishes for the company’s future. He stated, “I’m so proud of the work we’ve done at Atlus U.S.A., Inc. and Mr. Miyazaki and Mr. Curran will continue to guide the company to even greater success. I look forward to creating more exciting projects with the creative team at Atlus in Japan, and wish my colleagues the best of luck growing the business in the Americas and EMEA.”

Regarding his new appointment, Curran stated, “I’m eager to grow my role as the new President and COO of Atlus U.S.A., Inc. and greatly appreciate the support that Mr. Hiraoka has given me up to this point. Across the SEGA and Atlus families, we’ve had an incredibly successful year, and there is still so much to look forward to.”

Finally, Miyazaki-san also provided a statement regarding the recent changes. He stated, “We wish Mr. Hiraoka the very best of luck in his role and are thankful that he’ll still be a valuable asset to the Atlus team I’m thrilled to play a greater role in the continued success of Atlus U.S.A., Inc. and work alongside Ian, who has done an incredible job in just a couple of short months in his role as President and COO of SEGA of America.”

Let’s hope for the best for Atlus USA, and that we’ll be seeing some exciting new things from them in the coming days.

Sega of America and Atlus U.S.A have just announced the appointment of Ian Curran as the new Chief Operating Officer and President of Sega of America. He will begin performing his duties from today onward. Curran has previously worked with quite a few notable video game companies, in case you didn’t know, such as THQ Nordic and Acclaim Entertainment.

Curran has many years’ experience working in video games publishing, and he’s had a pretty god track record in achieving greater revenue and efficiency at places he’s worked. Most recently, Curran had also worked with Gioteck, which designed and supplied gaming accessories and he accomplished great results with the company. In his new role at Sega of America, he’ll be responsible for maximizing profitability for the publishing sector of the company. He will also be in charge of handling Sonic the Hedgehog business units in the Americas, the Middle East, Europe, and Africa.

Regarding his role, Curran stated, “My thanks and gratitude to Mr. Miyazaki and the entire company leadership for this opportunity to lead our operations and executions in the Americas and EMEA. I appreciate all of the incredible efforts Mr. Hiraoka has made to lay the groundwork for our operations in the Americas. Coming off the success of Persona 5, Sonic Forces, Sonic Mania Plus, and the Yakuza series, and with so much more on the horizon, including Valkyria Chronicles 4, it is an incredible time to join the team. As part of the Sega family, we are inheritors of an expansive body of work and opportunity which I plan to help reach its full potential.”

We will have to wait and see what the future holds for Sega and Ian Curran. Here’s to hoping for the best in all their future endeavours, and of course, also for some great Sonic games in the future.

Former Sega of America chief executive Tom Kalinske, who left the company in 1996 and went on to work at Mattel before finally becoming vice chairman of LeapFrog, recently spoke to Games Industry International about the horrible decisions Sega has made over the years. This was in light of the closure of Sega of America’s San Francisco office recently.

“It was not inevitable. It could have been avoided if they had made the right decisions going back literally 20 years ago. But they seem to have made the wrong decisions for 20 years.”

Kalinske touched briefly on his proposal for a joint Sega-Sony console that was rejected by the company’s board in 1996. “We went to Sony and they agreed, ‘Great idea.’ Whether we called it Sega-Sony or Sony-Sega, who cared? We go to Sega and the board turned it down, which I thought was the stupidest decision ever made in the history of business. And from that moment on, I didn’t feel they were capable of making the correct decisions in Japan any longer.”

The company won’t suffer the same fate as Atari just yet though. “You have to really make a lot of mistakes to kill a strong brand. I do think some great brands obviously have been destroyed, Atari being one of them. Why didn’t that survive? I think there’s a lot of bad decision making involved in killing brands like that. I hope Sega isn’t the same thing.”

We hope that too but games like Sonic Boom aren’t exactly shining beacons of hope right now. Your thoughts? Let us know below.

Alien: Isolation starts off with the player taking the role of Amanda Ripley, daughter of series heroine Ellen Ripley. Set fifteen years after the original 1979 classic, Amanda has never stopped searching for her mother, who was on the Nostromo when it went missing. One day she is approached by a Weyland-Yutani representative told that the crew of the Sevastopol space station has found the Nostromo’s flight recorder. Amanda wastes no time in traveling to the Sevastopol to potentially hear the final moments of her mother’s life. Unfortunately for her, the Sevastopol has been set upon by the same life form that caused the terrible events of the Nostromo.

"Amanda wastes no time in traveling to the Sevastopol to potentially hear the final moments of her mother’s life. "

First and foremost, Isolation is a stealth game. There are segments where you may need to use your pistol to combat android and human enemies, but most of the time it will benefit you more to just sneak around them. Human enemies are easily dispatched using your various weapons and crafted items, but the androids are much more resilient. And the Xenomorph? Well, the Xenomorph is invincible. The only recourse you have with it is fire, so when you eventually get the flamethrower or molotovs, you can use them to scare it off momentarily (and I mean momentarily). However, if you use them too much, the creature will only be stunned for a few seconds before pouncing on you.

There aren’t many encounters in the game that pit you against human/android enemies, most of the time you will be making your way through the station avoiding the Xenomorph. Thankfully this is the case, because I felt like the parts where you are pitted against the other enemies, especially the androids, were among the weakest in the game. Human encounters are mostly fine, they are usually circumvented easily, and in some cases you can lure the Xenomorph to kill them with a well placed distraction. This isn’t the case with the androids though, as the Xenomorph will not attack them. Add to that the fact that they will swarm your position when alerted and take entirely too much damage to kill, and you have yourself a recipe for frustration. The saving grace here is that these encounters are few and far between.

I’m kind of a chicken when it comes to horror games. I deplore when a game uses a large amount of cheap jump scares to startle the player. It’s lazy and there’s no craftsmanship to it. I’ve been turned off on a lot of horror games due to this. And while this trope is in Isolation, the game knows it has to earn those moments, and it never puts you into that situation deliberately. What I mean by this is that whenever the game has a jump scare, it is something dynamic, and could often have been avoided by careful observations of one’s surroundings. For instance, you could round a corner and find the Xenomorph right there staring at you. It isn’t because the Xenomorph suddenly appeared there, it is because you weren’t using your motion tracker and peeking around corners.

"Whenever the game has a jump scare, it is something dynamic, and could often have been avoided by careful observations of one’s surroundings."

Isolation is a game where you need to be careful of your surroundings. Being careless will always lead to a quick impaling by the Xenomorph. To aid in your endeavor you are given a motion tracker, and the ability to craft items. Among these items are noisemakers, emp grenades, medpacks, and molotov cocktails. You’ll need to collect blueprints for each item before you can craft it, and they are easily missed if you are just speeding through areas trying to get away from the alien as fast as possible. Exploring areas to find these blueprints is key, as you will find later segments much easier when you have them.

The Xenomorph is the most impressive thing about Alien: Isolation. I don’t say that lightly either, I could write an essay on it’s dynamic AI alone. The Xenomorph is a one hit kill when it finds you, forcing players to avoid detection at all cost. He’s going to follow you throughout the game, and when you don’t see him you will always feel his presence. You’ll wander down corridors, and through rooms trying to complete your objective, all the while picking up the odd blip on your tracker, to remind you that you’re never truly isolated. You can hide under desks, in cabinets, and in lockers, but if you aren’t holding your breath the Xenomorph will hear you and rip you from safety. The creature is dangerous, and it demands you respect that fact if you want to make it to the end.

"The Xenomorph is the most impressive thing about Alien: Isolation. "

The attention to detail in this game is staggering. It is a faithful recreation of the technology from the first film. Computers use old DOS prompts, handheld devices are big and bulky with mechanical button inputs instead of our now modern touch screens. On top of this everything uses rudimentary graphic design reminiscent of the Atari 2600. In fact, one of the small hacking minigames uses designs from the Alien Pac-Man clone for the 2600. Its not just the technology though, the designers have gone through painstaking measures to create the look and feel of the 1979 classic in the design of the ship’s interior. I recently watched the first movie again in preparation for this review and I was amazed by how accurate everything turned out to be.

I normally don’t acknowledge sound design in games. A lot of the time it is pretty negligible to my experience with them. I play a lot of games wearing headphones, but I feel like developers very rarely put a lot of effort into designing their sound around that type of immersion. It’s clear that this wasn’t the case with Alien: Isolation. Busted pipes hiss, vents creak, computer hard drives write, and the loudspeakers blare announcements. These small things go far in giving ambient sound to the environment and bring it to life. Add to this the recut score from the original film during sequences with the Xenomorph and you have some of the best sound design in recent years.

"The attention to detail in this game is staggering. It is a faithful recreation of the technology from the first film."

I’ve seen some people say that they thought the game was too long, I don’t share this opinion. I definitely understand where they are coming from, but for me it was more of an issue with pacing. There are at least two points where the game seems to ramp up to a climax, but doesn’t end. Honestly this didn’t bother me. To me, this is part of the Alien experience with the movie franchise also sharing the “False end” trope. I appreciated this game’s 18+ hour length as a fan of the movies and can’t get enough. In fact, I will probably play all of the DLC just to get more time with it.

Overall Alien: Isolation is the game Alien fans have been waiting for. In spite of the numerous broken promises in the last 35 years, Creative Assembly has successfully formatted a love letter to fans of the franchise, one that has taken far too long to get here. A golden standard has been set for all future titles in the Alien universe. Simply put, Isolation is the definitive Alien game that no fan should miss out on.

This game was reviewed on the Playstation 4.

By pre-ordering the Captain America: Super Soldier game at Game Stop you will receive the Ultimates 1942 Captain America costume with the Weaponize Ability and Challenge Mode Map.  The game has 3D capabilities and will be out this July 19th for the Xbox 360, Playstation 3, Wii, 3DS and DS.  It’s 3Ddepends on the platform you purchase it on.