‘Mass Effect Legendary Edition’ shows off graphical updates

A new Mass Effect Legendary Edition trailer has showcased the various graphical changes made to the games.

The latest trailer, which you can watch below, shows off side-by-side character comparisons, improved beauty passes for environments, and new post-processing effects. All of these improvements combine to create greater visual fidelity for the Legendary Edition remasters, which can run at 4K.

EA has explained how all of the 10,000+ textures across all three Mass Effect games were improved using batch processing, with artists taking care to hand-tailor certain more important textures such as characters.

The GUI for the game has been rebuilt to support 4K resolutions, and all of the game cinematics have been improved. The game’s pre-rendered cutscenes have been re-rendered in 4K, and bugs in certain cutscenes have been cut out – though EA promises certain Easter Eggs will call back to old Mass Effect bugs.

Mass Effect: Legendary Edition Eden Prime
Mass Effect: Legendary Edition. Credit: EA

EA also says that many of the world designs have also been updated by “comparing levels we shipped to their original concept art, design intentions, and artistic inspiration”. This gives a lot of the levels a brand new look in screenshots, with higher contrast and often completely different colour palettes.

EA have detailed all of the changes that have been made in a blog post from EA, which also shows comparison images between the original games and their remaster.

Last week, gameplay changes to the Legendary Edition were confirmed, including an update to combat, and the handling of the infamous Mako ground vehicle in the original Mass Effect.

Recently, actor Henry Cavill teased a potential future Mass Effect project in a post he made on Instagram. “Secret project? Or just a handful of paper with random words on it….,” he said in the caption. “Guess you’ll have to wait and see”.

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Don’t Break The Balls – Bubble popping C64 game coming via Double Sided Games, Pre-Orders open

Double Sided Games have published some very good games these last few years, games such as Vegetables Deluxe, Black Dawn Rebirth and Hired Sword 2 are just some of the ones worthy of another mention. Thankfully the fun doesn’t stop there, as Double Sided Games has recently contacted us through Twitter, that as from the end of may 2021 they will be launching a new game for the C64 called Don’t Break The Balls; an action / puzzle game for 1 or 2 players in co-operation or duel!

Designed and coded by Emiliano Paglia, graphics, music and sound by Saul Cross, with box art by Ten Chu, Don’t Break The Balls is an up to 2 player game, in which controlling a fan, you need to blow the bubbles up and prevent them from bursting while also keeping an eye on your energy levels or the fan will stop working and you wont be able to blow those bubbles! The main game features 30 levels of great two player duel and co-op fun, with full joystick and paddle support via Cartridge, Floppy or Digital Download this May through Double Sided Games!

Links :1) Pre-Order
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Shadow Warrior – Classic MS-DOS FPS making its way on to the Amiga via BSZili

Another great heads up by Solo Kazuki is the MS-DOS first person shooter ‘ Shadow Warrior ‘, which is being ported over to the Amiga by BSzili. Originally developed by 3D Realms and published by GT Interactive back in 1997, Shadow Warrior had an improved engine from the one used in Duke Nukem 3D and featured 3D voxels instead of 2D sprites, usable inventory items, and violent head slicing katanas, Uzi’s and many more to make this a bloody fine game! 

Currently this Amiga build is in a work in progress state with a number of bugs still to be fixed, and testers needed for 68040 accelerators. But according to the creator of this port, Shadow Warrior is being planned to require a 68040 or 68060 processor with FPU, Kickstart 3.0, AGA chipset or RTG card, 16 MB FastRAM, 50 MB disk space and recommendations is a fast 68060 and 32MB of FastRAM. Other than that we don’t have a release date or more information, but you can follow the discussions via the link below.
If you’ve seen this port mentioned before in another article, that’s because originally it was meant to be released by Modern Vintage Gamer, but that project seemed to have died.
Links :1) Source
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Lotus Esprit Turbo Challenge STe – Retro Racing fans will love this enhanced version on the Atari STe!

For me, Lotus released during the 90’s was one of the best racing games on the Amiga, it was so much fun, with great graphics and the ability to race your friend(s) in split screen. It gave a true speed feeling, whizzing past other cars on the road or through tunnels trying to come first place. What’s more, it even had weather affects and incredible music. Thankfully for those of you who enjoyed this game and want the pleasure of playing an enhanced version on the Atari, can now do so! As Jonathan Thomas, Jamie Hamshere and Grazey/PHFs has just released “Lotus Esprit Turbo Challenge STe”.

According to the team behind this brilliant version of Lotus on the Atari STe, Lotus STE is an adaptation of the original Lotus 1 game that makes use of the additional hardware in the Atari STE. Not only is it a major graphical upgrade such as the road being rendered by the Blitter chip and features much more graphical detail than the original. But the scenery and cars move more smoothly (Blitter chip), the background mountains scroll smoothly from side to side (Blitter chip), the sky features a more colourful gradient, and there’s much much more improvements made including far better music and sound effects.

“Put simply, it’s a major graphics and sound upgrade from the original game!”

Credits : 
– Graphics: Jonathan Thomas (chicane on Atari-Forum, @RetroRacing on Twitter)
– Sound: Jamie Hamshere (junosix on Atari-Forum)
– Loader: Grazey/PHF (@Grazeyphf on Twitter)
– Masteries on Atari-Forum for the initial version of the PCM sound mixer;
– Defence Force/Dbug for code reviews and performance improvement suggestions;
– Steve of AtariCrypt for relentless enthusiasm;
– Metalages on Atari-Forum for discussion around engine noise;
– Marko Latvanen (@maraka77i on Twitter) for extensive and exhaustive beta testing.
System requirements
——————-
The game requires a minimum of 1 Meg of memory, and either an STE, or an STFM equipped with the Blitter chip.

Links :1) Source

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‘Diablo II: Resurrected’ fan creates graphics comparison video

A fan of Diablo II: Resurrected has created a comparison video between the original game and the remaster’s technical Alpha test graphics.

Players who opted in for the Alpha were inducted into their first glimpse of Diablo II: Resurrected this week, giving them a chance to experience the remaster first-hand.

Focusing mainly on single-player Barbarian, Amazon, and Sorceress classes, the Alpha will test the game’s readiness to launch, so that a launch date can be established. The Diablo II: Resurrected Alpha includes the 4K resolution, upgraded graphics, and 27 minutes of fully remade cinematics – all of which have made their way into this comparison video.

The characters remain similar to their former selves, with a few upgrades here and there, but the environments appear to have been given the most attention. You can select to play Diablo II: Resurrected in either the new graphics or the legacy graphics.

Any progress made on the Diablo Alpha will be discarded upon the game’s launch, and players are encouraged to “livestream, capture, and publish gameplay footage, or take and publish as many screenshots as you like from anywhere in the game.”

Diablo II: Resurrected will retain the original game’s playstyle, but will introduce enhanced graphics, including up to Ultra High Definition 4K (2160p) support on PC. Resurrected will include the base game and its expansion, Lord Of Destruction.

The game will release on PC – and for the first time, consoles including the PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X, Xbox Series S and Nintendo Switch. Cross-progression support is also being planned.

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Inviyya – A seriously cool Amiga Shoot Em Up by Tigerskunk gets a release – Exclusive Screenshots too!

Here on Indie Retro News we try our utmost to give you the best in Amiga updates, and thus as of today we’ve just been informed by the team of TIGERSKUNK, that the eagerly awaited Amiga game of ‘Inviyya’ published via poly.play, is finally here and ready to be played by Amiga owners across the globe. This game of which we have featured many many times since its first announcement in October 2016. Looks to be an incredible game, with not just amazing scrolling graphics, but super action, great sound effects, and a real hark back to days of R-Type or Project-X!

Although the game has been teased many times now and some of you have had the chance to play the demo. Inviyya is a fabulous Amiga Shoot ‘Em Up that features not just 3 layer parallax scrolling and wicked music and sound effects, but also unique organic levels, multiple enemy types, bosses, special weapons, and all of this working on every existing Amiga with at least 512k Chip and any other form of 512kb extra RAM (chip, slow or fast), PAL or NTSC ( for NTSC ).. Although faster spec’d Amiga’s are recommended for smooth play. So yes if you love Shoot em ups, and seriously can’t get enough of them, you owe it to yourself to buy this game right now!

Links :1) Download  2) Live Stream via AmigaBill! 3) Review

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