What were the highlights from Sony’s March State of Play? | Team Talk

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PlayStation surprised us with a new State of Play this week, with a “special focus” on games coming from Japanese publishers. There were a flurry of new announcements and updates in the show’s 20-minute runtime.

Square Enix in particular showed off lots of games, giving Japanese gaming fans plenty to chew on. We’ve put our heads together to pick out our favourites. What was your highlight from the show?

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by James
Michael Parry

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@James_Parry

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by Team PTC

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@pass_controller

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TMNT: The Cowabunga Collection | Liam

I was a little underwhelmed by the most recent State of Play. Most of the games looked fine and well put together, but there wasn’t anything that really grabbed me.

Coop battles with dinosaurs sounds like a great concept, but the footage shared of Exoprimal left me a little cold. Rather than some tense scrap with a giant predator, the dinos seem to have been reduced to waves of cannon fodder, which seems a bit of a waste.
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Trek to Yomi looks very stylish, and is one I’ll be keeping an eye on, but I think the main highlight was The Cowabunga Collection, mostly because it contains Turtles in Time. This was one of my favourite games on the SNES, so I’m looking forward to giving it another try with modern conveniences such as save points. Completing the original game in one sitting was a bit of an ask and I don’t think I’d have the patience to try it again!

It'd also be nice to check out some of the other Turtles games included, as there’s apparently a bunch I was unaware of. It could be nice to sample the franchise history ahead of the latest offering, Shredder’s Revenge, which is due out later this year.

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Returnal Ascension and Forspoken | James

With a Japanese focus, it wasn’t a surprise to see Square Enix crop up at this show, but the sheer number of titles the publisher is working on is impressive, even outside its usual wheelhouse.

Since I picked Forspoken as my most anticipated game this year, I was excited for an update, and we were treated to a short trailer, interestingly with “some camera angles adjusted for trailer use” – a disclaimer I haven’t noticed before.

It certainly shows off some more of the scale you’d expect from the Final Fantasy XV developer, and while it wasn’t a gameplay trailer, the traversal animations and magic effects are still looking very cool.

A few other things looked worthy of an interested eyebrow raise, such as the intrigue of zombie-game-with-dinosaurs-instead-of-zombies Exoprimal, but largely the genres touched on aren’t necessarily my bag.

To my surprise though, the most exciting bit of news was actually an update to an existing release - Returnal.

When Returnal first debuted it grabbed my attention immediately, but with its high difficulty I’ve been too timid to jump into the haunting sci-fi adventure. The State of Play brought news of co-op being added with the Ascension update, which could bring in me and others who’ve been wanting to try it out.

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What was your State of Play highlight?