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Beat the Beats VR lets you groove like a boxing champ on PS VR2 February 27

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Hello! I’m Josef, one of the creators of Beat the Beats VR, coming out February 27 on PlayStation VR2. It is a rhythm VR game you play with your fists and all about learning actual boxing moves like jab, dodge, and uppercut.

In this article I would like to share with you how the natural feeling boxing moves in our game came to fruition.

At Parallel Circles, we’re huge rhythm game fans. And VR? We love it. It immerses you like nothing else. I’ve always been captivated by the agility, coordination, and precision of boxers. So, blending these passions felt like a no-brainer. Thus, Beat the Beats VR was born.

Boxing greenhorn to boxing champion

Pulling off energetic boxing moves in real life takes years of training. But in Beat the Beats VR, we wanted players to feel like pros from the get-go. Jabs, hooks, uppercuts — they should all flow naturally. 

After lots of experimentation, we realized the traditional rhythm game approach didn’t quite fit boxing’s fluidity. So we switched it up. Instead of the “notes” (we call them beats) coming straight at you, they come from different directions in arcs challenging you to move exactly in the same way you would in a boxing fight.

You can’t help but make perfect jabs for beats from the front, hooks from the side, and uppercuts for ones coming from above.

Punching through the whole game

As soon as we nailed the boxing punches we brought other aspects of the sport into the game. You can also evade (called a “roll”) and block beats.

You can also unlock new levels/albums by punching them.

Mix all of the boxing action with some exhilarating music and you have a rhythm game that’s the best of both worlds: a fun experience for casual players and a full-throttle workout for the ones that want to go the extra mile.

We hope you have as much fun with our game as we had creating it. Maybe you’ll sweat as much as we did, too. Beat the Beats comes to PS VR2 on February 27!

How a toxic world inspired Forever Skies, a first-person sci-fi survival game

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A state-of-the-art airship hovers above a vast toxic dust cloud, shrouding an ecologically devastated Earth. That’s what most people notice when they see Forever Skies for the first time. And while this creates an interesting and unique premise to explore, it’s one that was inspired by rather somber real-world circumstances.

Read on to learn about the inspiration behind this first-person post-apocalyptic survival game, coming to PS5 this year.

How a toxic world inspired Forever Skies, a first-person sci-fi survival game

While our team is from around the world, a significant portion of us are based in Poland. For decades now, our country has been notorious for its poor air quality, particularly during the winter months. Iconic Polish cities such as Krakow or Wroclaw are frequently ranked alongside massive megacities like Beijing, Delhi, or Lahore. But these are massive metropolises with 10 or even 20+ million people living in them. Cracow or Wroclaw don’t even exceed 700,000 people and yet we regularly get public warning announcements to stay indoors because of the current air pollution levels.

Some studies even suggest that to breathe clean, unpolluted air, people would need to go 100 meters above the cities. And so the first spark of inspiration that kicked off our entire world design was found.

We envisioned a scenario where humanity confronts an irreversible ecological catastrophe of its own making by erecting towering highrises above the toxic dust clouds as a last-ditch effort to survive. But all this did was delay the inevitable societal collapse. Decades later, a select group of humans who fled into orbit dispatch a research team back to Earth to rediscover the world, marking the beginning of the story in Forever Skies.

At your side will be a high-tech airship that you

No Man’s Sky universe opens to newcomers for limited time with new Omega expedition, launching today

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Hello! Last year was a busy one for the small team at Hello Games, with lots of No Man’s Sky updates and the announce of Light No Fire.

We have big plans for 2024, and we’re starting the year off with a very different kind of update. We’re calling it Omega, and for the first time No Man’s Sky will be available to play for free!

No Man’s Sky universe opens to newcomers for limited time with new Omega expedition, launching today

For the first time, we are inviting every PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, and PlayStation VR and VR2 owner into our universe to play the latest No Man’s Sky expedition, even if they don’t own the full game, no purchase necessary. There are no microtransactions, no free-to-play mechanics, just a huge universe to explore for free with your friends.

Expeditions in No Man’s Sky have become one of the most popular ways to play the game. They bring all players together to the same planet for an interstellar, shared experience. This weekend we are allowing everyone, whether you own the game or not, to join the Omega Expedition.

This represents a moment for new players to try No Man’s Sky, and existing players to welcome them into the community. 

The Omega update also brings a complete overhaul of expeditions, new on-planet missions, a new pirate dreadnought to own, and much more.

Until now expeditions have been their own game mode, but we wanted to fully integrate them into our main game. Now, our new expedition system allows travellers to join expeditions with bespoke provisions, bring along their favourite starships or custom multi-tools and return to their main save with loot and exciting rewards.

We have revisited the Atlas Path, allowing players to commune with the Atlas and honor it with a new Atlas staff, jetpack and helmet.

On planets we have introduced a huge array of procedurally generated quests. Talking to alien lifeforms results in quests specific to an alien lifeforms locale, climate and personality.

For the first time, take on the universe with a fleet of frigates led by a dreadnought capital ship. If players can defeat pirate freighters in combat, travellers can board the dreadnought to demand control.

At the co

PlayStation Plus Game Catalog for February: Need for Speed Unbound, The Outer Worlds, Tales of Arise, Assassin’s Creed Valhalla and more 

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February’s Game Catalog lineup for PlayStation Plus brings together racing thrills, sci-fi adventure and a selection of entries from a classic RPG series. Take to the streets in Need for Speed Unbound, blast off into space in The Outer Worlds: Spacer’s Choice Edition, then experience some acclaimed RPG fantasy action in the Tales of… series. These and many more titles are playable from February 20. Let’s take a closer look at each game in turn. 

PlayStation Plus Extra and Premium | Game Catalog

Need for Speed Unbound | PS5

With separate single and multiplayer campaigns, this latest edition in the Need for Speed franchise from Criterion Games delivers hours of electric, adrenaline-pumping racing action. Race against time, outsmart the cops, and take on weekly qualifiers to reach The Grand, Lakeshore’s ultimate street racing challenge. Pack your garage with precision-tuned, custom rides and light up the streets with your style, exclusive fits, and a vibrant global soundtrack that bumps in every corner

MLB The Show 24 unveils Storylines: The Negro Leagues Season 2

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Get ready to experience another slice of history in the playable micro-documentary, Storylines: The Negro Leagues Season 2, narrated by Negro Leagues Baseball Museum President Bob Kendrick. Season 2 continues our multiyear partnership with the NLBM and our shared mission to educate, enlighten, and inspire by celebrating the rich history of the Negro Leagues. We are so grateful and excited to introduce ten new Negro League legends to MLB The Show 24. Storylines combine immersive gameplay moments, historical footage, and more as we bring these incredible true stories to life.

MLB The Show 24 unveils Storylines: The Negro Leagues Season 2

The Season 2 roster for MLB  The Show 24 at launch includes:

Josh Gibson – The Black Babe Ruth

Buck Leonard – Baseball’s Greatest Fastball Hitter

Hank Aaron – The Hammer

Toni Stone – The Trailblazer

We will reveal additional players included in Storylines: Negro Leagues Season 2 at a later date. The next set of three Negro Leagues players will arrive in a content drop in early April, and the last three players will arrive in an additional content drop at the end of May. These will all be available via a free download. An internet connection is required to download and play content at launch and obtain updates after launch. In addition, all the players from Season 1 of Storylines will be included in MLB The Show 24 at launch.

To learn more about Storylines: Negro Leagues Season 2 and additional details on the mode, be sure to tune into our upcoming Feature Premiere livestream on theshow.com on February 15, 2024 at 3 pm PST / 6 pm EST. If you can’t make it live, catch the recap video afterward to keep up with t

PlayStation Store: January 2024’s top downloads

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It’s time to see which PS5, PS4, PS VR2, PS VR, and free-to-play games topped the download charts last month. New release blockbusters and vintage fan favorites are included in January’s PS5 list with Tekken 8 and Grand Theft Auto V both breaking the top five. The PS VR2 list saw Beat Saber rock and roll to the top of the list with the most downloads in both US and EU regions.

Check out the full listings below. What titles are you playing this month?

PS5 Games

US/CanadaEU
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare IIIGrand Theft Auto V
Grand Theft Auto VEA SPORTS FC 24
Madden NFL 24Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III
TEKKEN 8Hogwarts Legacy
NBA 2K24TEKKEN 8
Baldur’s Gate 3Baldur’s Gate 3
EA SPORTS FC 24Gran Turismo 7
Hogwarts LegacyMarvel’s Spider-Man 2
Gran Turismo 7Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora
Marvel’s Spider-Man 2The Last of Us Part II
The Last of Us Part II RemasteredUFC 5
Hell Let LooseIt Takes Two
UFC 5Prince of Persia The Lost Crown
Like a Dragon: Infinite WealthNBA 2K24
Mortal Kombat 1ARK: Survival Ascended
God of War RagnarökCyberpunk 2077
Avatar: Frontiers of PandoraThe Crew Motorfest
Granblue Fantasy: RelinkELDEN RING
Prince of Persia The Lost CrownNeed For Speed Unbound
ARK: Survival AscendedAssassin’s Creed Mirage

*Naming of products may differ between regions
*Upgrades not included

PS4 Games

US/CanadaEU
MinecraftEA SPORTS FC 24
Red Dead Redemption 2Minecraft
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare IIINeed for Speed Heat
Need for Speed HeatRed Dead Redemption 2
Batman: Arkham KnightA Way Out
Grand Theft Auto VGrand Theft Auto V
theHunter: Call of the WildHogwarts Legacy
Mortal Kombat XNeed for Speed Payback

Ultros dev interview: Karmic cycles in a demonic space labyrinth, out tomorrow

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Indie games are known for their daring and often groundbreaking approaches to visuals and storytelling. Ultros is a new indie title coming to PS4 and PS5 on February 13. The game is a twisted, time-looping sci-fi adventure. It’s packed with high-stakes action, clever twists on classic game design ideas, intriguing, and often unsettling environmental storytelling, and crazy-colorful pop-psychedelic visuals that makes you wonder if the game came with its own built-in blacklight. 

This eye- and mind-dazzling adventure comes to PlayStation courtesy of Sweden-based developer Hadoque. It tells the story of a spacefarer trapped in a nightmare time-cycle within a bizarre, seemingly demonic black-hole acting as a womb for an unspeakable cosmic horror–the titular Ultros. 

In the words of game director Mårten Brüggeman, “It’s a psychedelic sci-fi platforming adventure, a combat- and gardening-driven experience. It also asks a lot of existential questions if you dive into it, as you explore the  sarcophagus spaceship and try to understand what it is a metaphor for and what is dwelling inside.” 

Fight or foster

Ultros is fundamentally a search-action game where you explore an ever-expanding map that opens up further and further as you acquire more abilities for navigation and combat. It’s a popular indie game genre, and Ultros expands on it with some unique gameplay twists centered around the ideas of karmic cycles: creation and destruction, nurture and killing. 

“It’s a game about choices,” explains Brüggeman, “where you can choose to play in a destructive or constructive way, and  the choices you make change your interpretation of your in-game actions.”

The environment oozes with otherworldly threats, requiring skillful combat to neutralize the assorted hostile lifeforms. Variety is a big emphasis here. Ultros encourages you to use a diverse arsenal of moves in fun and creative ways to dispatch foes: dodge-and-strike attacks, jumping strikes, and even launching foes into the air to turn them into a living projectile weapon. 

“We want to combat to feel intimate and visceral to emphasize destruction, ruining the balance of disruption and construction within the current cycle. We focused on movements, forcing you to be near them to fight them are integral to what we wanted to do, the intensity and intimacy of one-on-one combat.”

As your foes fall before you, they drop all manner of edible offal–which varies in quality depending on how skillful your killing blow was. Eating these remains isn’t just a health restore: it provides you with valuable nutrients, which allow you to access skill tree upgrades at save pods, which enhance your movement, fighting, and navigational abilities. 

But if eating mystery meat makes you feel a bit queasy, there’s another way to obtain sustenance: raising the seeds you find scattered around in gardens, then partaking of that plant’s fruit. Aiding you in your horticultural pursuits is your Extractor, a special device that gains numerous abilities throughout the game. 

The plants that grow over time will leave behind assorted benefits, like creating platforms to alternate routes and making planning and tending to your gardens

Foamstars: the tech that made its dynamic, persistent foam possible

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Hello, I’m Chikara Saito (a.k.a. Rickey), director of Foamstars. As the name suggests, Foamstars is a game that features copious amounts of soft, fluffy foam. However, the path that we took to actually represent that foam in digital space was much longer and tougher than we initially thought it would be.

Our experience of bringing the foam in Foamstars to life was anything but soft and fluffy, and today, I would like to tell you the tale of our trials and tribulations in the world of foam!

The first obstacle that we ran into when we started developing Foamstars was the processing power required.

In Foamstars, players can fire off as much foam as they like, and that foam flies off as fluffy bubbles throughout the whole space.

This is a huge part of what makes the game so unique, but bear in mind that up to 8 players playing together online can fire off foam at the same time – some of them in separate places, quite far away from one another – so we had to be able to sync up each instance of foam in real time.

This alone accounted for a considerable amount of load on the CPU, but on top of that, we also realised another game mechanic that is crucial to Foamstars’ gameplay: foam remaining in place and piling up to change the stage’s topography. These things together put an enormous burden on the CPU.

This meant that in the first test build of the game, we could only make about 10 shots worth of foam remain on the ground, and I can still clearly remember the feeling of disappointment as I thought to myself, “This isn’t enough to make a fun game.”

But just as I was facing this pressure to alter the direction of the game to account for these limitations, the programming team stepped in and showed me a better way!

They had the fantastic idea to dynamically alter Unreal Engine 4’s Landscape tool!

This system was originally designed for sculpting rugged terrain ahead of time, but thanks to the ingenuity and hard work of the programming team, we were able to dynamically alter the Landscape tool so that it could be influenced by player interactions during actual gameplay.

Thanks to this system, we didn’t have to manage and express each instance of foam on an object-by-object basis, but rather, we could handle the foam as vertex data instead.

This significantly reduced the load on the CPU, and made it feel much more thrilling as an actual game as well.

The test map began as a single, flat plane stretching out ahead of you. As I watched it transform dynamically due

Official PlayStation Podcast Episode 478: What We’ve Been Playing

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Email us at PSPodcast@sony.com!

Subscribe via Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or RSS.


Hey y’all! With nasty colds circulatin’, bomb cyclones droppin’, and 2024 kicking off with a bang, the PlayStation Podcast crew has struggled to record a show for a few weeks now. Today, they get off their keisters to review some key details from the recent State(s) of Play and then talk about what they’ve been playing….

  • Tekken 8 – PS5
  • God of War Ragnarök: Valhalla – PS5
  • Alan Wake 2 – PS5
  • Cocoon – PS5
  • Jusant – PS5
  • Tchia – PS5

Thanks to Dormilón for our rad theme song and show music.

[Editor’s note: PlayStation game release dates are subject to change without notice. Game details are gathered from press releases from their individual publishers and/or ESRB rating descriptions.

Share of the Week: Cool

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Last week, we asked to see the coolest characters from the game of your choice using #PSshare #PSBlog. Here are this week’s extremely cool highlights:

wingsforsmiles shares Johnny Silverhand sitting back with one leg up in Cyberpunk 2077

BitarHector shares Aloy smiling in the morning sunlight in Horizon Forbidden West

Taser9001 shares Tifa rushing forward with a sparking attack in Final Fantasy VII Remake

sorathluna shares Sam side-eyeing the camera wearing futuristic sunglasses in Death Stranding

juniaxe shares Ada taking deathly aim in the rain in Resident Evil 4

FrameCaptureVP shares Jin looking out from a broken kitsune mask in this black and white portrait from Ghost of Tsushima

Search #PSshare #PSBlog on Twitter or Instagram to see more entries to this week’s theme. Want to be featured in the next Share of the Week?

THEME:  Romantic

SUBMIT BY: 11:59 PM PT on February 14, 2024

Next week, we’re feeling the love. Share romantic moments or characters from the game of your choice using #PSshare #PSBlog for a chance to be featured.

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