Daily Archives: June 1, 2017

Early on in Tokyo 42, I found myself being chased through a busy thoroughfare by gun-wielding thugs. Civilians rushed off in every direction as bullets whizzed past, and flickering electronic billboards only added to the visual madness. I managed to blend in for a brief period using a holographic projector to change my appearance, but I knew it wouldnt last for long. I had to get away. I jumped over a large concrete staircase and was surprised when I landed with a soft thud on some picturesque green grass. Amid the games futuristic urban sprawl, I found myself in a quaint zen garden.

Its definitely cyberpunk with its dystopic premise, Maciek Strychalski, one half of developer Smac Games, says of the game, but aesthetically its slightly off.

Rather than wallow in seedy alleys and overcrowded streets, Tokyo 42 opts to lighten things up. The isometric game features a zoomed-out perspective, providing wide view of near-future Tokyo. The action is set on the citys surprisingly bustling rooftops against its beautiful, cloudy sky. There are still plenty of flying cars and electronic billboards, and Tokyo 42 takes on plenty of gritty sci-fi subject matter. But its also bright, colorful, and charming, with a toy-like sense of style a cross between Ghost in the Shell and Monument Valley.

Tokyo 42 follows a man framed for a crime he didnt commit. He sets about clearing his name by taking on murder-for-hire jobs in order to delve deeper into the citys criminal underbelly, and find the actual responsible party. Its typical genre stuff, loaded with corporate intrigue and violent criminal organizations. The real standout is the city itself, and how its experienced through the top-down isometric perspective.

Tokyo 42s version of the Japanese capital looks like an immaculately detailed model. Because the camera is so far from the action, everything looks tiny from the minuscule citizens milling about, to the Lego-like stacks of modular apartment buildings. You explore the twee city as you take on different jobs, which mostly revolve around the not-so-twee act of killing people. Sometimes youll need to find an ideal spot to plant a sniper rifle and take out a mark from afar. Other times youll need to wield a blade and silently infiltrate a criminal stronghold.

We wanted to get that feeling of being able to stand on top of a building and look out at the city.

The isometric perspective has its roots in much older games it was originally used in games as a way to fake 3D graphics but in Tokyo 42 it feels fresh and modern. You can rotate the camera around to view the urban landscape from multiple angles, and the city itself is almost like a diminutive take on the open-world genre. Though its not especially massive, its surprisingly open, offering the freedom to try different routes and tactics to complete missions.

The place is simply a joy to walk around. In addition to seedy hideouts and busy transportation hubs, the rooftop city is home to relaxing zen gardens and serene urban waterfalls. Tokyo 42 is primarily a game about murder, yet the experience is often peaceful and playful. The perspective makes it feel more detached than more visceral 3D shooters, so I never felt especially guilty when Id accidentally lob a grenade into a busy crowd or take out an innocent bystander with an errant sword swing. And so the city feels more like a playground. There are plenty of areas to hide from pursuing enemies or sneak up on a target, and the games floaty, exaggerated jump adds a touch of urban parkour as you find new ways to get about.

Strychalski and his brother Sean Wright originally decided with Tokyo 42 to make a game together inspired by the titles they grew up playing, in particular the original Grand Theft Auto and Syndicate. One of the goals was to take the ideas in those games namely the idea of a large isometric world and expand on them. There was the kind of promise of this open city, which [Rockstar] fulfilled with the later games in three dimensions, but they never did it from the god-view, top-down, explains Strychalski. I personally wanted to take that idea: What if GTA III wasnt a third-person thing, but it kept the same perspective as the original ones?

The world of Tokyo 42 is larger and offers more freedom than its inspirations. Its also noticeably more vertical: instead of moving through city streets, youre constantly shifting up and down the rooftops of buildings, navigating twisting staircases and perilous drops. This had a practical benefit, as it allowed the two-man team to create a plausibly small slice of a huge metropolis. We didnt want to have invisible walls, says Wright. Our solution to that was to put it all on rooftops you can believe theres a whole ground level as well. But it also helped them create a very specific kind of moment, one inspired in part by Assassins Creed. We wanted to get that feeling of being able to stand on top of a building and look out at the city, Strychalski says.

I cant think of any other place that it could be.

For all of its new features and ideas, Tokyo 42s influences are clear when you play. And thats not something the developers were trying to avoid. In the process of making our own thing, its so comforting to be able to look at games like that and draw on one of their mechanics and just be like Well I know that works because I loved using it there, says Wright.

The end result is a game that blurs multiple lines, both in how it plays and the themes it explores. Playing Tokyo 42 is like experiencing a modern open-world shooter in the body of an old-school isometric game. Meanwhile, its take on cyberpunk calls to mind classics like Akira or Neuromancer, but with a distinct, much lighter tone and feel. That said, while Tokyo 42 plays with the themes of cyberpunk in a number of ways, there was one area where the team was sure it didnt want to change things up.

It has to be Tokyo, says Strychalski. Theres no other place for us I cant think of any other place that it could be.

Tokyo 42 launches today on PC and Xbox One. A PS4 version is coming later on.

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Inside the stylish, cyberpunk future of Tokyo 42 - The Verge

Back in 1993, 26-year-old author Yukito Kishiro could have scarcely imagined the success that his first long-form manga series would achieve in his home country, let alone on an international scale. Initially published as a serial in the manga anthology Business Jump before being quickly adapted into English, Spanish and Italian, Battle Angel Alita (or Gunnm, as its known in Japan) was Kishiros breakout and quickly earned him his status as one of mangas rising talents. Speaking in an interview with Animerica, Kushiro expressed reservations and doubt over Gunnms viability as an overseas success. [Its a very] introspective story [...] when I was first approached about allowing it to be published in foreign-language editions, I wasnt sure it was a good idea. It was an experimental work for me and I didnt think it could be popular, especially not in the United States. To me, its a never-ending wonder that my work is being translated and read by all sorts of different people.

22 years following the series conclusion, Battle Angel Alitas popularity has only grown, with a persistent legacy among fans and a new live-action adaptation slated for release next year from director Robert Rodriguez. In the lead-up to its release, publisher Kodansha will reissue the series in a collection of deluxe hardcovers this fall, following a now-available digital release of the first three volumes on comiXology that restores the manga to its pre-Americanized glory. Set in a dystopian metropolis dubbed the Scrapyard in some dark, undetermined future, Battle Angel Alita follows the series namesake, a mysterious cyborg woman whose chassis is discovered half-buried in a massive landfill by a benevolent surgeon named Ido. Ido adopts the memory-less mech woman, names her Alita (Gally in the Japanese original) and sets about finding pieces to restore her body. Through the course of their daily adventures, Alita discovers that her mind possesses a long-buried aptitude for the Panzer Kunst, a legendary cyborg fighting style thought to be one of the strongest martial art forms in the known world. Armed with a new body, Alita and Ido team up as bounty hunters to protect the Scrapyards denizens from a rogues gallery of serial killers, organ harvesters and psychopathic cyborgs.

Battle Angel Alita Vol. 1 Interior Art by Yukito Kishiro

Even in its earliest chapters, Kishiros aptitude for choreography and dynamic perspective layouts is unmistakable; a time-capsule of a young storyteller whose nascent talents, impressive as they were, only hint at the mastery of kineticism and detail he would later go on to exhibit. Though fledgling, his grasp for dialogue, foreshadowing and pacing, not to mention his sensibility for intellectually and visually mature subject matter, was already on full display from Battle Angel Alitas outset, flirting with the astuteness the series would later grow into.

Alita poses the question, What good is happiness if its only given to you? Thats no life Moments like these elevate the series above its contemporaries and solidify Battle Angel Alitas enduring appeal to this day. In a similar vein to Ghost in the Shells Masamune Shirow, Kishio is well-known for his exhaustive footnotes that add to the speculative heft and reality of his characters universe, freewheeling capably between biochemistry, neuroscience and even western folklore and philosophy. Moreover, the characters, in particular Alita, are full-fledged personalities who escape the rigidity of early anime tropes, and instead grow and fumble as flawed, yet deeply aspirational, human beings.

Battle Angel Alita Vol. 1 Interior Art by Yukito Kishiro

This is a summary of what long-time admirers of the manga have already come to expect from Kishiro since Battle Angel Alitas early publication. The real draw of this particular edition is how its both translated and preserved. Gone are the unnecessary exposition bubbles and clunky sound effects of the series initial english editions; Kodansha has restored the manga to its intended right-to-left panel format and Japanese katakana, making this new edition an essential read for purists. Full-page color splashes that were previously reduced to crude monochromatic scans are now fully restored to their original glory. Worthy of note is this editions handling of translations, renaming the floating city of Tiphares back to its original title, Zalem, while retaining the main characters name as Alita out of respect for the series popular presence in the West.

Succinctly, Battle Angel Alita is a major accomplishment not only as a Japanese comic, but for its erudite contributions to the cyberpunk genre as a whole. For those who have grown to love the adventures of Alita and her dogged quest for meaning in a world of apocalyptic nihilism, these new editions are a more than ample excuse to jump back into this world and experience it anew from the start. For those new to the series, you couldnt ask for a better time or means to get to know this character and discover for yourselves what all the fuss is about.

Battle Angel Alita Vol. 1 Interior Art by Yukito Kishiro

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New Digital Editions Reintroduce Battle Angel Alita's Cyberpunk Iconoclasm - Paste Magazine

The year is 2042. You blink on your heads-up display that appears everywhere you go, and turn your eyes toward a news video that keeps annoyingly popping up in the corner. It's apparently a huge political gaffe caught on tape. But before you can angrily respond, you feel a cooling sensation on the back of your neck. It's your Anti AI AI, warning you that this videoas real as it lookswasn't taken from an actual event. It's a simulation, created using super-advanced AI that can mimic a human's voice and facial movements.

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"FAKE," you blink out into the comments section.

This future may seems improbable right now, but some of the technology that would allow such simulacra of life already exists. Neural networks are capable of creating convincing sounding replicas of human speech, like this robot Barack Obama.

Combine this with real-time motion capture that makes famous faces look like they're saying different words, and you have all the needed ingredients for spreading misinformation.

To combat this future confusion, DT R&D, a research and development arm of the Australian creative technology agency DT, created a device they call Anti AI AI, a wearable that sits on your ear like a Bluetooth device and contains a neural network trained to tell the difference between human speech and robot speech. The wearable, hooked up to a small thermoelectric plate, cools the back of your neck when it senses a robotic voice. Ironically, the device uses its own AI to foil the robots it encounters in the wild. The wearable is hooked up to an iOS app that uses a Tensorflow neural network that's been trained with thousands of samples of real voices versus robotic voices. The war between the good AIs and bad AIs is already beginning.

"One improvement would be to continually improve the network based on new input it receives 'in the wild', but that was a little beyond our five-day timeframe," the creators wrote in a blog post.

The Anti AI AI is just a prototype, but as we journey farther into the future of fake news, tools like this are going to be necessary to sift through the increasingly untrustworthy world.

Source: DT R&D

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An Anti-AI Wearable for Our Dystopian Cyberpunk Future - Popular Mechanics

Cyberpunk 2077 was a much-anticipated game long before The Witcher 3s rampant success. Following the worldwide love-in for CD Projekt Reds masterpiece, however, the hype levels for what the Polish developers could do with their next big project have gone through the roof.

As is customary for the developer, they have flatly refused to talk about the game until theyre good and ready, so any news has usually come from internet trawlers and detectives. We dont know exactly what kind of game it will end up looking like, but that hasnt stopped everyone from putting Cyberpunk 2077 on a pedestal as arguably the most exciting game still to come.

Heres what we know so far.

What is Cyberpunk 2077s release date? Coming: when its ready.

The closing line from the games teaser trailer shows that they wont be rushed into releasing Cyberpunk 2077, but rumours abound that we might find out more at E3 2017.

However, an interesting point to note is that the game was given millions in Polish government funding to work towards a 2019 release.

Where can I play Cyberpunk 2077? Nothing confirmed, but you can bet your house that it will come to all modern consoles and PC. It worked wonders for them for TW3, so expect the confirmation alongside its release date.

What genre does Cyberpunk 2077 belong to? Now thats a question.

Its going to be an RPG in the same way Geralts last hurrah was, but as for exactly how it will play, your guess is as good as ours.

It can, however, be played either in first or third-person, and will feature multiplayer elements.

Strap in, CDPR went into a lot of detail:

In Cyberpunk 2077, the player will be thrown into a dark future. The metropolis of Night City is a stage set to tell the tale of one individual, raised on the streets, who tries to lift himself up from the gutter and find a way to survive amongst boostergangs and megacorporations in a city of filth and sin. Drugs, violence, poverty and exclusion havent disappeared by 2077, as people stayed they were for centuries greedy, closed-minded and weak. But not only ghosts of the past trouble mankind, but new issues have appeared. Psychos go on rampages and the streets are filled with junkies addicted to a new form of entertainment the braindance, a cheap way to experience the emotions and stimuli of someone else, someone living a more exciting life.

Braindances are digital recordings of a persons experience. The viewer can stream a braindance directly into his neural system via special brain augmentations, called a BD player. Braindances allow the viewer to experience all brain processes registered, including emotions, muscle movements and all stimuli perceived by the recording person.

The range of themes of these recordings varies from simple braindances made by mega-corporations, which e.g. allow the viewer to feel the full experience of an explorer with all its thrills, sweats, smells, views, sounds and the real feeling of curiosity that pushes men to go beyond the horizon against fear and physical weakness. But there are also more controversial sides of braindance, because some recordings are created illegally in the underground. Entering the mind of a serial killer means not only seeing the monstrosity he performs, but also living his lust to kill and fulfillment.

You havent experienced the latest New Hollywood recording? Youre nobody! The streets live with braindances, everyone just got crazy and wants to be a part of this new entertainment fad. Some people push it even too far and they cannot stop living other peoples lives. If youre not linked to a braindance right now, you are probably discussing what happened to you during your last session. Of course, just like every great new cultural movement, BDs have people who criticize them.

The development was granted $7million from the Polish government in December 2016. The song in its teaser trailer is Bullets by British band Archive. It will be built on RedEngine4. Sandboxes will feature, as a job listing by CDPR confirms. This means that it will be open-world. It will feature Seamless Multiplayer, which might be Ubisoft-style multiplayer or that it just works smoothly. Humans will be augmented. Cyberpunk 2077 will be far bigger than anything the developers have done before. Its based on the role-playing game Cyberpunk 2020 by Mike Pondsmith, who will also act as a consultant for 2077. Marcin Przybyowicz returns from TW3 to take charge of the music. Cyberpunk 2077 will take place in Night City, a futuristic city that looks dangerous close to being dystopic.

Of course. Thats a silly question.

CDPR have a mighty high mountain of hype to climb over and are probably going to disappoint plenty of people when it isnt the exact game they imagined it would be, but its a safe bet to say that its going to be better than most stuff out there.

As long as we get blade arms, were cool.

Sometimes I think I only started this site so I could make up important sounding positions for myself.

Email: jim@culturedvultures.com

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Cyberpunk 2077 Release Date, Trailers And Latest News - Cultured Vultures