Cronos: The New Dawn is coming out on September 5, and there's a version announced for Nintendo Switch 2. The Bloober Team, after giving us a decent Silent Hill 2 Remake, is back with this one. I guess it might be worth checking out if you’re into that sort of thing. Not super excited, but it’s something. #Cronos #NintendoSwitch2 #BlooberTeam #GameRelease #GamingNews

Dans une obscurité qui semble sans fin, je me retrouve à contempler les ombres de mes espoirs brisés. Bloober Team, avec son remake de Silent Hill 2, a prouvé que même dans les moments les plus sombres, la créativité peut triompher des doutes. Pourtant, pour moi, chaque succès des autres ne fait qu'accentuer ma solitude. Les mots du réalisateur de Cronos: The New Dawn résonnent comme un écho lointain, mais dans mon cœur, il n'y a que le vide. Qui peut apprécier la lumière quand on est perdu dans ses propres ténèbres ? 🌧️💔 #SilentHill #BlooberTeam #JeSuisSe

As a former Xbox 360 owner I don’t understand Xbox today – Reader’s Feature GameCentral Published June 15, 2025 1:00am Xbox 360 is coming up to its 20th anniversaryA reader looks back on the Xbox 360 era and is frustrated at how things have evolved since then, with ROG Xbox Ally and the move towards multiformat releases. I though the Xbox Games Showcase on Sunday was pretty good. Like Sony’s State of Play, it was mostly third party games but there was some interesting stuff there and I think overall the vibe was better than from Sony. I liked the look of High On Life 2, There Are No Ghosts At The Grand, and Cronos: The New Dawn the best but there was a lot of potentially cool games – I’d include Keeper, because it looked interestingly weird, but I don’t feel Double Fine are ever very good at gameplay. The biggest news out of the event was the new portable with the terrible name: Asus ROG Xbox Ally. I bet you can just imagine some parent asking that for that at shop at Christmas, to buy their kid? Not that that would ever happen because the thing’s going to be stupidly expensive. It seemed like a distraction, a small experiment at best, and I didn’t really pay much attention to it, especially as I already have a Steam Deck. But then today I read that Microsoft has cancelled its plans for their next gen portable and that actually this ridiculously named non-Xbox device may end up being the future of gaming for Microsoft. I’ve always preferred Xbox as my console as choice, probably because I was always a PC gamer before that. Although now I look back at things I have to admit that I only got the Xbox One out of brand loyalty and I wouldn’t have if I’d been thinking about it more clearly. By that point I was in too deep and so I bought the Xbox Series X/S out of muscle memory more than anything, wasn’t I proven to be a chump? What frustrates me most about Xbox at the moment is how indecisive it seems. I almost didn’t watch the Xbox Games Showcase because I knew I’d have to see Phil Spencer, or one of his goons, grinning into the camera, as if nothing is wrong. And, of course, that’s exactly what he did, ‘hinting’ about the return of Halo, as if everyone was going to be pumping the air to hear about that. Expert, exclusive gaming analysis Sign up to the GameCentral newsletter for a unique take on the week in gaming, alongside the latest reviews and more. Delivered to your inbox every Saturday morning. News flash, Phil: no one cares. You’ve run that series into the ground, like all the other Xbox exclusives, to the point where they just feel old fashioned and tired. Old school fans don’t care and newer ones definitely don’t. It may sell okay at first on PlayStation 5, but only out of curiosity and as a kind of celebration that Sony has finally defeated Microsoft. To all extents and purposes, Xbox is now third party. The only thing that makes them not is that they still make their own console hardware but how long is that going to last? The ROG Ally is made by Asus and if Microsoft don’t make a handheld are they really going to put out a home console instead? That’s going to cost a lot of money in R&D and marketing and everything else, and I don’t know who could argue that it’s got a chance of selling more than the Xbox Series X/S. Phil Spencer has been talking about making a handheld for years and yet suddenly it’s not going to happen? Is there anything that is set in stone? I even heard people talking about them going back to having exclusives with the next generation, if it seemed like things were working out. I loved my Xbox 360, it’s still my favourite console of all time – the perfect balance between modern and retro games – but its golden era is a long time ago now, well over a decade. Xbox at the time was the new kid on the block, full of new ideas and daring to what Sony wouldn’t or couldn’t. When was the last time Xbox did anything like that? Game Pass probably, and that hasn’t worked out at all well. More Trending Nothing has, ever since that disastrous Xbox One reveal, and I just don’t understand how a company with basically infinite resources, and which already owns half the games industry, can be such a hopeless mess. I’m just sticking with PC from now and in the future, I’m going to pretend the Xbox 360 was my one and only console. By reader Cramersauce Xbox One – not a good follow-up to the Xbox 360The reader’s features do not necessarily represent the views of GameCentral or Metro. You can submit your own 500 to 600-word reader feature at any time, which if used will be published in the next appropriate weekend slot. Just contact us at gamecentral@metro.co.uk or use our Submit Stuff page and you won’t need to send an email. GameCentral Sign up for exclusive analysis, latest releases, and bonus community content. This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. Your information will be used in line with our Privacy Policy #former #xbox #owner #dont #understand

If its trailer at the Xbox Games Showcase wasn’t enough, Bloober Team’s Cronos: The New Dawn has received another gameplay trailer. It starts slowly enough, with the player, known as the Traveler, steadily walking through a quiet environment. Of course, an Orphan suddenly comes alive, prompting a quick extermination. They’re not all so easy to deal with, as exemplified by a larger Orphan that appears inside an abandoned hardware shop. Shrugging off hits and attacking with a root-like arm, it eventually begins to merge with a corpse, becoming stronger in the process. Any encounter with the Orphans means not giving them a chance to merge, which is likely easier said than done. Cronos: The New Dawn launches this Fall for Xbox Series X/S, PS5, and PC. Resident Evil and Dead Space serve as inspirations, though the storyline revolves around traveling to the past at the behest of the Collective and extracting the Essence of important individuals. Check out the dev diary here for more details. Bloober Team has also recently announced its development of Silent Hill 1 remake with Konami. You can learn more about that here. #cronos #new #dawn #receives #fresh

Guillermo del Toro recently spoke at the Cannes Film Festival, sharing some details about his upcoming film Frankenstein, set to release on Netflix later this year. As reported by Variety, he said he’s been asked whether his movie will have “really scary scenes.” That prompted the Academy Award-winning director to ponder how people would receive the movie made: “For the first time, I considered that. It’s an emotional story for me. It’s as personal as anything. I’m asking a question about being a father, being a son… I’m not doing a horror movie — ever. I’m not trying to do that.” While it can be confusing to hear a man with story and producer credits on a film literally called Scary Stories to Tell in the Darksay he’s “not trying to do” horror, that mindset aligns with most of his career. Del Toro’s early movies, like Cronos and The Devil’s Backbone, can certainly be classified as horror. While his later films feature frightening elements, though, they break away from conventional horror and lean more into gothic fantasies and dark fairy tales. I was as scared as anyone by the Pale Man in Pan’s Labyrinth, perhaps his most famous film, but that doesn’t make it a horror movie. It’s more of a fantasy and a parable, examining the realities of war through the eyes and imaginative reinterpretations of a young girl. Though Crimson Peak tells a ghost story, it features romance at its core. And The Shape of Water continues a focus on romance, as well as telling a story centered around embracing the Other. With an ending that sees protagonist Elisabecoming a mythical creature herself, it’s more of a fairy tale than a horror film. Emphasizing with the ostracized is at the core of plenty of del Toro’s work, whether its Elisa and The Amphibian Man’s fairy-tale-esque love story or Hellboy’s pursuit of normalcy in del Toro’s adaptation of Mike Mignola’s comics. “The first time I thought I was going to avenge the creature was when Marilyn Monroe is coming outin The Seven Year Itch with Tom Ewell, and she says the creature just needed somebody to like him,” del Toro said at Cannes. “I fell in love with Marilyn, and I fell in love with the creature in that scene at a very early age. And I thought, you know, all we have is people that look at people the wrong way. That’s what we have in this world.” Don’t expect Frankenstein to be any different. “or me, it’s an incredibly emotional movie,” del Toro said. With its focus on the parental relationship between Victor Frankenstein and his creation, Frankenstein sounds similar to del Toro’s last film, the stop-motion Pinocchio. “has asked, almost like in a horror tale: ‘I want my child back.’ And the child comes back in a way that he doesn’t recognize,” del Toro told Polygon about Pinocchio in 2022. It marked his return to animation after a pooping burglar destroyed his first attempt at the medium. Now that’s what I’d consider a horror story. #dont #surprised #guillermo #del #toro

For 25 years the logo of middleware tech company Havok has graced the loading screens of big-budget games from across the industry. Its plugins drive the ragdoll and particle physics of games like Helldivers 2, its cloth simulation technology makes the capes of Destiny 2 flap in the wind, and its pathfinding tech helps the monstrosities of Elden Ring wander the The Lands Between.Despite how far its name has traveled, the company's kept a low profile in that time, letting its clients take the bulk of the credit for the boundary-pushing physics. But economic shifts in the industry seemed to drive the company to surface at the 2025 Game Developers Conference.At the event, Havok announced a new pricing model for developers working on budgets under $20 million. The company's normally high-end offerings haven't been affordable for many developers, and while they aren't ready to support low budget indies just yet, general manager David Cochrane told Game Developer that the company now wants to work with studios with "tens" of employees, not necessarily "hundreds."Developers on those lower budgets can now license tools like Havok Physics and Havok Navigation for the low low price of $50,000 per Havok product. There's no royalty fee, and studios can also use plug-in versions of the tools for Unreal Engine.Related:To see a company known for selling premium tools for big-budget games open up to the lower-tier market is quite a phenomenon—especially in an era where the biggest hits of 2025 include Clair Obscure: Expedition 33 and RuneScape Dragonwilds. Small games are becoming bigger hits—and to hear Cochrane tell it, Havok seems to be following the trend.Havok is the rare middleware company to last 25 yearsCochrane explained to Game Developer that Havok began planning the new pricing scheme after studying how many mid-sized studios were planning more ambitious games using Unreal Engine. Havok is a "good fit" for Unreal he said, and to see developers embracing the kinds of solutions Havok offers—but not being able to afford its offerings—began to shift their thinking.It's the kind of adaptation Havok has made repeatedly over the last 25 years, following what Cochrane described as the "creativity" of developers. But it's not the kind of creativity you might think of at first glance. Cochrane praised the gameplay advancements and new kinds of ideas that emerged from the last two-and-a-half decades, but the company's primary focus has been the creativity of technical problem-solving the industry has produced. "The industry has always found creative ways to deliver games that make the most of the of their chosen platform," he said, alluding to the ways developers adapt to online networking or "diversity of hardware." Most recently, he said Havok has paid close attention to the rise of powerful handheld devices like the Nintendo Switch and Steam Deck—and how developers are making "new kinds of games" suited for those devices.Related:But not every trend Havok's been around for has stuck. He recalled the rise of early Facebook games around 2009-2012. If that trend had stayed around, Havok would have been in a tough spot since Facebook games don't need expensive physics or cloth simulation technology. "There was almost a sense of 'was the whole industry gonna have to pivot hard toward this?'" he recalled.It didn't. "There can be a new style of game that comes along—whether that's a live service, or whether it's a social game, or whatever—when MAU numbers are high, the whole industry will take notice, but the game industry always tends to drift back toward an equilibrium which involves many different types of games across many different platforms."So even with the surge of fast-followers for UGC games like Roblox and Minecraft—few of which need Havok's high-end physics and cloth technology—Cochrane said there will still be an audience for games gushing with plentiful particles.Related:The next space for innovation: AI navigationLike everyone else at GDC, Cochrane had a lot to say about AI—but not the same kind of AI that had everyone else aflutter.Cochrane explained that Havok's most overlooked product its its AI navigation tech—but it's also one the most quietly groundbreaking pieces in the company's portfolio. "What we're really seeing now is an increased diversity in the the scale of different characters that [players] come across in a game," he said. Games have had enormous enemies for years, but newer pathfinding tech allows gigantic creatures to share space with smaller in-game characters instead of having their own dedicated areas.Image via Havok.He referenced FromSoftware's Elden Ring here, a game where players can be fighting twisted knights in ruins one minute, then be ambushed by a dragon the next, often in the same area. It's not the only game in 2025 we've seen playing with new ideas of what NPCs should be doing in a game. Just hours later the folks at Bloober Team showed us the ambitious combat system of Cronos: The New Dawn, and earlier this year we were surprised by how the massive monsters of Eternal Strands were able to smoothly navigate through the game's open environments.He called this evolution a "common theme" across the industry—one that makes for a fascinating pairing with Havok's decision to chase smaller studios. "The reality is...the sizes of worlds that people are dealing with at the moment are stressing some of the historic techniques that would have been used to build [methods] for navigation," he said. "Some of the things we're doing is showing ways in which we can have very memory-efficient representations for navigation. We can allow characters to navigate across large worlds that might include streamed geometry in and out.""Now you won't actually hold the whole game world in memory at one point in time, but you still want NPCs that can actually navigate naturally through those larger environments. That's an area we're investing a lot in."Game Developer and GDC are sibling organizations under Informa Tech. Source: https://www.gamedeveloper.com/programming/25-years-in-havok-unveils-royalty-free-pricing-for-budgets-up-to-20-million #years #havok #unveils #royaltyfree #pricing #for #budgets #million