Everybody’s favorite Bandicoot spins onto PlayStation 5 today with Crash Bandicoot 4: It’s About Time. The dev team at Toys for Bob is thrilled about the improved graphics and performance, DualSense controller features, and all the other enhancements on the way. Of course, Crash and Coco also have a host of colorful skins fans can unlock by playing. To mark the occasion, I run down my favorite outfits from Crash 4, in no particular order. 

Also, in celebration of Crash Bandicoot’s 25^th anniversary, with the franchise’s original entry launching all the way back on the original PlayStation in 1996, players can enjoy the Bare Bones skins in Crash Bandicoot 4, available for free upon completion of the game’s second level.

That, of course, is in addition to the Time Shattering skins that players can get first on PlayStation (pictured at the top of this article).*

Through the Ringer Crash

The inspiration for this one was how at the end of every Jackie Chan movie, there were always out takes and bloopers where you would get to see how injured Jackie would get pulling off these incredible stunts.  So, we thought it would be fun to award a skin upon completion of the main story, showing that Crash and Coco “went through the ringer” and came out the other end of this adventure a little worse for wear.  I think this one is hilarious, and the stickers the art team added to the casts push it over the top for me.

General Rule Coco

This Skin is one of the many skins we added in the game that touch on a reference or idea from previous Crash Bandicoot games, but with a fun, unique Toys for Bob spin.  The idea behind this one was a fun “what if” scenario – What If Neo Cortex Successfully trained Crash and Coco to lead his mutant armies? What would they look like?  The concept for this is just so much fun with the old-school evil villain details all over – I especially love the Neo Cortex “N” on the brim of the hat and Coco’s boots here.

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What is up PlayStation fans!  We are very excited to be back on the blog, this time with the announcement of a new map that is near and dear to many skateboarder’s hearts. Skater XL has always been about giving access to skateboarding to as many people as possible, including the mechanics, culture, and history that makes skateboarding so special to so many.

When it comes to landmarks in skateboard history, you’d be hard pressed to find more hallowed ground than San Francisco’s Embarcadero Plaza during the 1990’s era. Everyday, SF locals and skaters from across the globe would come to EMB to write new pages in the book of skate history daily on the red bricks, stairs, blocks, ledges to the infamous ‘Gonz’ Gap.

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Our ode to this era, is a tribute to this iconic location packed full of all of the features that made it famous. Created by the Easy Day team, this all new map is now available for download in the Mod Browser on PlayStation 4 consoles.

While we have added DIY elements around the map to include new lines and additional gameplay options, Embarcadero’s most notable features are true to the time and ready for you to make your mark.

The ‘Gonz’ Gap

Ollied for the first time and made famous by skateboard legend Mark ‘Gonz’ Gonzales in 1986, the ‘Gonz’ Gap became the proving ground for early ‘90s skateboarding.  From 1990 through 1996 there was almost no surer way of gaining legitimacy in skateboarding than to successfully land a trick over ‘The Gonz.’ Find the ‘Gonz’ Gap above the “wave” wall, and put your name into the digital skate history books.

The Fountain

Easily one of the most recognizable features of the Embarcadero Plaza, the Vaillancourt Fountain is appealing both for its aesthetics and its skateability.  Grind the surrounding ledges, or skate them as manual pads. We have also added a skateable brick bank and a little surprise coming out of the pond.

Hello PlayStation fans! Today, we’re happy to announce that The Outer Worlds: Murder on Eridanos will be launching next week on March 17. This is the second and final expansion to our critically acclaimed sci-fi role-playing game, and we hope you are excited to check it out. I wanted to give you a bit of a sneak peek into the expansion as well share some interesting details about our journey in making this DLC.

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In The Outer Worlds you awake from hibernation on a colonist ship lost in transit to the edge of the galaxy. Early on, you assume the role of captain of the infamous ship, The Unreliable, and as you traverse through the corporate-owned Halcyon colony you discover it is your job to either ultimately save or doom the system. You determine if you will be the hero, the villain, or just an uncontrolled maniac. 

We’ve always felt that a core component of Obsidian RPG’s is this element of putting you in control of the story. In Murder on Eridanos you remain in the driver seat of the narrative, but now you must solve who killed the renowned actress Halcyon Helen.

When creating this expansion, we knew we wanted to put our own unique spin on a murder mystery, but it also presented some singular challenges. For example, in The Outer Worlds, your freedom of choice means we must account for many details while you are playing. What skills have you improved? What perks and flaws do you have? Which companions are accompanying you? What clues do you find and what suspects do you interrogate, and in what order? Play anyway you like, and we will unfold the mystery before you.

Like we mentioned, the core of Murder on Eridanos is to solve a crime… and murder is just the beginning of what you will find. You will have to interrogate witnesses, learn about potential alibis, and argue who you believe is responsible. This also leads to some entertaining outcomes as it is up to you to decide what to do. Do you falsely accuse an innocent spectator? Do you present a poor case with lack of evidence? How will others respond? What happens if you try to convince people that you somehow are responsible for the murder? Yes, even that is possible!

On February 25, the Outriders demo landed on PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5. The demo is a huge slice of the full Outriders game, offering the opening chapter and first three hours or so of the game, with all four classes available to try out, single-player, co-op, and the option to transfer progress to the full game. It’s a hefty appetiser for the full course, which arrived on April 1.

As it’s the start of the game, there’s a good focus on story, as the world of Enoch – and humanity’s struggle to colonise it – is introduced to the world. But what were the events that lead to the start of the game?

In a brand-new animated trailer, we can see how the Outriders journey began, as we follow their expedition to Enoch from Earth.

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And this is where the demo – and start of the game – picks up.

The Outriders demo is tremendous in terms of its scale and scope, and so we wanted to talk to Bartek Kmita, Creative Director at People Can Fly, about how it went down and how it’s helping in the run up to the game’s full release on April 1. 

Toby Palm: At the time of writing, the Outriders Demo has had over two million downloads. What’s been your reaction to the reception of the demo?

Bartek Kmita: It was a real rollercoaster of emotions to be honest. At first, I was excited that so many people wanted to play as soon as the demo was live, but this was followed by a brief panic-moment when servers were not scaling fast enough. When the server situation was resolved we started to see first impressions of the game itself, and the whole team has been watching as many streams, Let’s Plays and think-pieces as we can – it’s been amazing to see what everybody thinks so far. In the end, I’m extremely happy that so many people played the demo and that they are enjoying it.

TP: Some players have managed to rack up, 20+ hours in the game. Several players on the Outriders Discord have played for over 100 hours! Does this surprise you, and what does it say about the size of the full game?

BK: It’s very encouraging for us because a huge, sprawling RPG journey was in essence of our designs. To give people a game with almost endless possibilities around how to build your character and make the whole process of character development as satisfying as possible. And looking now at how people are playing the demo, and how they experiment with all the loot they found gives us a lot of satisfaction. I hope that after the full release, when our players get their hands on all our toys, they will stay

Hi folks! To mark the release of the official digital soundtrack for Astro’s Playroom later this week, I thought it’d be fun to take a wee “behind the scenes” look at the creative process for the track that players have responded to the most enthusiastically – the GPU song.

Most of the music featured in this post doesn’t actually appear in the game or on the soundtrack – it consists of excerpts from top secret, slightly embarrassing sketch material that was never intended to be heard by anyone’s ears other than those of my Team Asobi collaborators. But hopefully that’s also what makes them interesting!

The GPU Jungle was the first area of the game that I tackled – whilst it was still a work-in-progress at that point, the gameplay felt the furthest along so it seemed like a sensible place to start. My first attempt was quite a traditional approach to scoring a jungle stage, complete with the requisite panpipes:

The feedback from the team was that this was a little too predictable. However, it did have a catchy melody, which is something we strive for in the Astro Bot games because they are, at their heart, ‘old-skool’ platforming experiences. So, before moving on, I had a go at making it a little more “digital” or synthetic sounding:

That certainly felt more appropriate for Astro, but we were still concerned that folks unfamiliar with video game music culture might not “get it.” So, I started exploring something a little more contemporary sounding and began playing around with the idea of writing a song.

Before I’d even started working on the game I had been thinking about personifying the PlayStation 5 console by giving it a voice. This tapped into the idea that perhaps you’ve always known PS5 or somehow encountered it before, as if it were your true love. But I had been saving this idea for the CPU Plaza area as it felt like the most appropriate spot. But now that I was starting again on the music for the GPU Jungle, I saw an opportunity to introduce this concept to the team. Here’s my first sketch:

Worlds of Sound

The first version of the theme was a simple collection of melodies, inspired by previous Sackboy adventures, which we shared with the team of composers. We really wanted the theme to represent the cornucopia of musical sounds that were explored in the game, so we took elements from each of the worlds to help create a musical jamboree. We came up with a general music palette for each of the worlds, which also helped inspire our choice of composer that would look after that world . These included:

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