ArduinoMania

At some point in the not-too-distant future, you'll be able to experience the Resident Evil 4 remake in virtual reality. Capcom revealed during today's PlayStation Showcase that PS VR2 support is on the way. The VR mode will be a free update for the PS5 version of Resident Evil 4, though Capcom didn't say when it will be available. One thing the company has confirmed: you'll be able to wield Leon's knife more freely.

This is not a massive surprise given that several other Resident Evil games have VR support (Resident Evil Village can be played on PS VR2) and the RE4 remake is one of the most widely acclaimed games of the year so far. Still, if you've been looking for a reason to revisit Resident Evil 4 — or perhaps to pick up a PS VR2 headset in the first place — the news may be music to your ears.

Elsewhere, Sony showed off more PS VR2 games during the stream, including Arizona Sunshine 2. The zombie-splattering sequel will arrive later this year. Synapse, an action shooter from nDreams Studio, will hit PS VR2 on July 4th.

Meanwhile, those who have been waiting for Beat Saber to land on PS VR2 won't have to wait much longer. The rhythm game is coming to the platform today, along with a new pack of Queen songs. 

Alan Wake II, the sequel to Remedy Entertainment's 2010 cult hit, is scheduled to come out on October 17th, 2023, for Xbox Series X and S, PlayStation 5 and PC. There are two playable protagonists in Alan Wake II: Wake himself and FBI agent Saga Anderson. The sequel is a single-player psychological horror experience, just like the original.

In the new game, Anderson is investigating a rash of ritualistic murders plaguing the small town of Bright Falls in the Pacific Northwest. She connects the incidents to the disappearance of horror writer Alan Wake (who vanished 13 years ago, appropriately), and things get spooky very quickly from there. Meanwhile, Wake is trapped in the Dark Place, attempting to write his way out of a hellish, surreal prison. Wake's world is full of shifting spaces and looping realities, while Bright Falls is a picturesque canvas ripe for hidden horrors.

"After certain events have transpired, fans can play Wake and Anderson’s respective stories in any order they choose," a Remedy Entertainment spokesperson said on the PlayStation Blog. "Their journeys echo and foreshadow each other, in this intense atmospheric story, taking players on two separate dark and disturbing paths."

If you've been waiting for a game that takes the Assassin's Creed franchise back to its roots, you won't have to wait long: The May PlayStation Showcase just revealed that Assassin's Creed Mirage will release on October 12.

Set two decades before Assassin's Creed Valhalla, Mirage will put players in the robes of Basim Ibn in the city of Baghdad, 861 CE, and will have a stronger focus on stealth mechanics and parkour-based movement than its predecessor. That makes it look a lot like older games in the series from the trailers we've seen so far, but it hasn't completely abandoned Valhalla's innovations: Basim's pet eagle can scout ahead to spot threats and targets, just like the bird companions in the previous game.

Naturally, the PlayStation Showcase highlighted the game's release for PS4 and PS5 consoles, but Assassin's Creed Mirage will also be available on Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, Amazon Luna and PC when it launches later this year.

Most board sports games revolve around racking up high scores, but Giant Squid is trying something decidedly different. The Abzû and The Pathless developer has unveiledSword of the Sea, a fantasy action adventure about much more than showing off. You play a resurrected Wraith who has to revive a wasted world while navigating with a "Hoversword" that serves as a combo skateboard, snowboard and surfboard. Naturally, giant monsters (leviathans) stand in your way.

The exact mechanics aren't yet clear. However, Giant Squid promises the "speed and flow" of a skateboard game combined with the exploration the creators are known for. It should be at once "meditative" and exciting, the studio claims, and the visuals back that up — Sword of the Sea is as much about soaking in the visuals as it is shredding ramps.

There's no release date for Sword of the Sea, but it should be available for both PC (via Steam) and PS5. If nothing else, the setting is a refreshing break from the usual competition arenas of the extreme sports genre. You're saving the planet, not focusing on bragging rights.

Sony revealed The Talos Principle 2 at its PlayStation Games Showcase today. The sequel to the 2015 first-person puzzler promises a greatly expanded scope with “more mind-bending puzzles to solve, more surreal environments to explore, more secrets to uncover, a deeper story to lose yourself in, and bigger questions to boggle your brain.” Developer Croteam describes the sequel as simultaneously familiar and fresh.

The game takes place “in an era where humanity as we know it has long gone extinct, but our culture lives on in a world inhabited by robots made in our image.” As you investigate a mysterious structure, the game will challenge you not only with puzzles, but also “questions about the nature of the cosmos, faith versus reason, and the fear of repeating humankind’s mistakes.” It appears the team hasn’t pulled back one bit from the philosophical depths plumbed in its predecessor.

As for gameplay, Croteam says the sequel will add gravity manipulation and mind transference as new mechanics. The developer also teases that it’s holding other new gameplay elements up its sleeve, including optional Gold puzzles that will “melt your brain.” Additionally, it says you’ll be “directly involved in its complex, character-driven story,” while teasing multiple endings defined by player choice. “The Talos Principle 2’s narrative is itself a puzzle to be solved, and any player who dedicates themselves to digging up its deepest, darkest secrets will have their inquisitiveness rewarded,” the developer wrote wrote.

“The Talos Principle 2 is a giant leap forward for the series — particularly the world design,” Croteam wrote. “These are the biggest, strangest, and most beautiful environments Croteam has ever made, taking full advantage of the latest in graphics tech. You’ll visit several all-new locations including a city on the brink of a paradigm shift and the varied landscapes of an island that holds the keys to the future.”

The game will launch on PlayStation 5 “later this year.”

Gris developer Nomada Studio revealed its next game during today's PlayStation Showcase. It's called Neva and it's scheduled to hit the PS5, Nintendo Switch, Xbox Series X/S and PC in 2024.

The game tells the story of a young woman who forges a bond with a wolf cub that grows and matures over time. The pair will help each other on a journey through a decaying world. Neva features platforming, puzzles and combat, along with handcrafted cinematics, "haunting music" and a minimalist user interface. Based on the trailer and Nomada's track record, it should be a feast for the eyes too. 

In the meantime, you can check out Gris (one of the most visually arresting games of the last few years) on a number of platforms, including Apple Arcade.

The rumors were true, Konami is remaking Hideo Kojima's Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater. On Wednesday, Sony shared a cinematic trailer for the upcoming game during its PlayStation Showcase. The teaser didn't offer any gameplay footage, but it did show protagonist Naked Snake before the events that transform him into Big Boss. No word yet if Hideo Kojima is involved in the project. Kojima famously had a very public split from Konami after the release of Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain. The "coming to PS5" card at the end of the trailer makes clear the game will be a multiplatform release. Metal Gear Solid Δ: Snake Eater does not have a release date.

Separately, Konami announced Metal Gear Solid: Master Collection Vol. 1, a collection that will bring together Metal Gear Solid, Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty and Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater in the fall of 2023. Konami released the original Snake Eater on PlayStation 2 in the fall of 2004. One year later, the company released an expanded version of the game, known as Metal Gear Solid 3: Subsistence. That version of the game added a third-person camera to the game and the first iteration of Metal Gear Online.      

The PlayStation 5's 2023 release slate is taking shape, and one of the upcoming titles is a sequel to 2015's Helldivers. It emerged during today's PlayStation Showcase that Arrowhead Game Studios is working on Helldivers 2. The follow up is slated to arrive on PS5 and PC later this year.

A reveal trailer evoked both the irreverent tone of Starship Troopers and the desolate landscapes of Death Stranding while tossing in a whole bunch of aliens. Arrowhead has switched from the original game's top-down perspective to third-person, over-the-shoulder gameplay. You'll have access to overpowered weapons to help you take down hordes of enemies, according to the PlayStation Blog. You'll need to be careful around your squad, though, as friendly fire will be active.

The first project out of Haven Studios is Fairgame$, and it looks like it packs plenty of neon-tinged, anarchist multiplayer action. Fairgame$ is an online, competitive heist game about classism and rebelling against billionaires, and it's heading to PlayStation 5 and PC. There's no release date at the moment. 

Haven is the new studio headed up by veteran producer Jade Raymond, who's best known for her work on the Assassin's Creed franchise in the early aughts.

The reveal video for Fairgame$ shows a trio of young adults in stylish accessories blasting, sliding and shooting their way past high-tech security systems and corporate agents. On the PlayStation Blog, creative director Mathieu Leduc describes the game as "a thrilling competitive heist game where you join an underground movement to rob the ultra-rich and rebalance the scales.... Trespass inside forbidden locations around the world, fill your pockets like a kid in a candy store and unravel the nefarious plans of untouchable billionaires."

Fairgame$ is a PvP experience with emergent sandbox gameplay, according to Leduc.

Raymond spent nearly a decade at Ubisoft as an executive producer and managing director on the Assassin's Creed, Far Cry and Watch Dogs franchises. She joined Google in early 2019 as the head of game development for Stadia, the company's new cloud gaming platform. Stadia was a short-lived experiment for Google, and Raymond left in February 2021 amid a broader shutdown of the service. She opened Haven just a month later and announced her team was building a PlayStation-exclusive original IP, and Sony purchased the studio outright in 2022.

There was a time not that long ago when every tool was cordless. But now, cordless power tools have proliferated to the point where the mere thought of using a plain old wrist-twisting screwdriver is enough to trigger a bout of sympathetic repetitive injury. And the only thing worse than that is to discover that the batteries for your tools are all dead.

As [Lance] from the “Sparks and Code” channel freely admits, the fact that his impressive collection of batteries is always dead is entirely his fault, and that’s what inspired his automatic battery charging robot. The design is pretty clever; depleted batteries go into a hopper, under which is a 3D-printed sled. Batteries drop down into the sled, which runs the battery out from under the hopper to the charging station, which is just the guts of an old manual charger attached to a lead screw to adjust the height of the charging terminals for different size batteries. When the battery is charged, the sled pushes it a little further into an outfeed hopper before going back to get another battery from the infeed side.

Of course, that all vastly understates the amount of work [Lance] had to put into this. He suffered through a lot of “integration hell” problems, like getting the charger properly connected to the Arduino running the automation. But with a lot of tweaking, he can now just dump in a bunch of depleted packs and let the battery bot handle everything. The video after the break shows all the gory details.

Of course, there’s another completely different and much simpler solution to the dead battery problem.