Month: August 2016

Enlarge (credit: Okan Ozer/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images)

Japan might just have stolen the show at the closing ceremony of the Rio 2016 Olympic Games on Sunday night, after its prime minister Shinzo Abe made a surprise appearance during the handover—dressed as Mario.

It's traditional, at the end of each Olympics, for the departing host nation to give space for the next city to strut its stuff, and with Tokyo to host in 2020, people might have expected a spectacle, but not this.

Abe, the country's buttoned-down and conservative leader, made his cameo in the Rio arena, appearing from one of the Mario games' iconic green warp pipes, dressed in the blue overalls and red shirt and cap (though these quickly fell away to reveal a suit, presumably to maintain some shred of dignity for the leader of the country with the third-largest GDP in the world).

Enlarge (credit: NeoGAF)

Sony will have not one, but two consoles on show at its upcoming PlayStation Meeting event on September 7—and the first appears to have leaked online. A thinner, rounder PlayStation 4 Slim was spotted for sale on classified listings site Gumtree (now removed) via local retailer, which claimed it was due for release in three weeks. Twitter user shortman82 has since purchased the unit, unboxed it, and slapped a load of photos online.

The purported PS4 Slim looks considerably thinner than the original PS4, which was already a small console. The same cleaved-rhombus aesthetic remains, but the corners have been rounded off, while the glossy plastic section that covered the hard drive on the original PS4 has been removed entirely. While that's good for fans of fingerprint-free gadgets, it does raise questions as to whether the hard drive will be replaceable in the PS4 Slim, particularly as the listed model (CUH-2016A) only sports 500GB of storage.

Sony has typically removed features from its consoles to make them cheaper to manufacture and thus cheaper to sell to consumers (remember all the media card slots on the original PlayStation 3?), so such a move wouldn't be unprecedented.

COLOGNE, Germany—When you're a child, everything is terrifying. Shadows under the bed hide monsters, the light peeking through the window creating a world of stark whites and blacks. Tarsier Studios' Little Nightmares (formally known as Hunger) brings you straight back to this world, filling you with that inflated sense of wonder and horror only a child can feel. It's impressive stuff.

Boil it down and Little Nightmares is a simple platformer with stealth elements and puzzle solving. In a short Gamescom demo, I traversed an area, trying not to be seen by an overwhelmingly powerful enemy, while also figuring out how to gain enough platforming height to reach an elevated air vent. Philosophically and artistically, though, it's so much more.

"Even though we've got this solid core of a game idea, everyone in the studio has a different take on what’s going on," explains senior narrative director Dave Merkiv. "It would depend on who you talk to as to what the game means, but for me I see the cruelty of being a vulnerable kid caught in the middle of absolute grotesquery and trapped within these things that don't make sense."