Welcome to Morning Music,
Kotaku’s ongoing hangout for folks who love video games and the cool-ass sounds they make. Today’s pick comes from the dawn of the 32-bit era, when makin’ “
Virtua Fighter, but with robots” just seemed like a natural thing to do.
Advertisement
Upon its September 1995 American launch the PlayStation had no shortage of flashy 3D fighters, polygonal fisticuffs having quickly become the hardware demo format de rigueur. I personally ended up with
Tekken, and managed to avoid ensnarement by the kusoge-adjacent
Toshinden. But lurking in the shadows was a lesser-known contender, which the guileless enthusiasm monsters at
Minari star Alan Kim went viral because when Kim was asked who his favorite actor is, he replied saying “I like Sonic the Hedgehog.” Kim is a top contender for a Best Supporting Actor Oscar nomination, so who are we to argue with the wunderkind? Sonic rules.
Screenshots of the Q&A quickly made the rounds on Twitter, with
Minari distributor A24 sharing it, too. Soon enough, it caught the attention of Sonic voice actor, Ben Schwartz, who tweeted at A24, saying, “Sonic would love to send Alan a voice note.”
Today, that message arrived:
List slides
Photo: IO Interactive
Hitman. Remember, 2016’s
Hitman was released in episodes. So after the first episode, Showstopper, we had to wait for this follow-up. I was concerned. Would IOI be able to pull off a level as good as Paris? Turns out, it could.
Sapienza is a gorgeous map, filled to the brim with secrets and hidden details. Setting a map in a quiet coastal Italian village is a marvelous choice. It makes it so easy to spend hours and hours walking around the world, taking in the sights. Sapienza features some great kills, including an option that lets 47 seduce one of his targets as a golf instructor. This level is soooo good-looking, so cool to explore, and filled with so many great moments that I can overlook the fact that its two main targets are kinda boring. Doesn’t matter. You can kill someone with an exploding golf ball dressed as a priest.
Warzone take up north of 170GB on PS4.
Black Ops Cold War, meanwhile, is around 100GB. Throw in the approximately 100GB the PS4 keeps for its OS, and the extra space needed to download new updates, and its easy to see why base consoles need to become dedicated
Call of Duty machines for the series’ biggest fans.
To get around this, Activision has broken up the latest
Call of Duty games into a bunch of smaller packs depending on what content players actually care about. Even that solution though requires managing tons of add-ons and constantly deleting and re-downloading dozens of GBs of data. You might think that upgrading to a PS5 or Xbox Series X would fix this, but costs of the SSD technology in those next-gen consoles means they don’t have much more storage.
Apart from the sacking of about 150 developers, the throttling of Google Stadia has left a ton of early adopters well and truly in the lurch. Stadia was maligned from the start, and if the latest experience of Stadia users is any indication, it’s sure as hell not leaving a positive impression on the way out.