TECH AWARE

Square Enix’s  Kingdom Hearts 3  has been in the works for more than 12 years, and now we’ve finally  got a release date in January of next year . To celebrate the final stretch, the publisher brought not one or even two, but  three  distinct trailers to E3 this year. It showed off one at each of the big press conferences, including one at Sony’s this evening that confirmed a  Pirates of the Caribbean  world with Johnny Depp’s Jack Sparrow and Orlando Bloom’s Will Turner. Another  confirmed a world based on Disney’s  Frozen . That said, we still have no idea what’s happening here.  Kingdom Hearts 3  looks chaotic, colorful, and a ton of fun, but as far as plot goes, it’s anybody’s guess. The world of  Kingdom Hearts  is one of the  most confounding fantasy plots in the history of gaming , and it’s looking like Square Enix isn’t pulling any punches when it comes to its signature blend of bizarre role-playing fantasy pl...

Sony just showed off the first trailer for Capcom's remake of  Resident Evil 2 , which sees Leon Kennedy and Claire Redfield struggle to survive into a zombie-overrun Raccoon City. The trailer doesn't feature live gameplay, but it's entirely 3D-rendered; the game apparently moves away from the pre-rendered backdrops of the original game as well as the lauded remake of the first  Resident Evil . Capcom says it features a “new over-the-shoulder camera mode and modernized control scheme,” suggesting it'll play more like  Resident Evil 4  than  2 . Capcom announced that it was developing a  Resident Evil 2  remake nearly three years ago, and nothing has been heard since. The game is coming earlier than you might have expected, though: the release date is set for January 25th, 2019. It'll be coming to PS4, of course, as well as Xbox One and PC; Capcom says the visuals will be in 4K but hasn't gotten any more specific.

Exclusive to Sony’s PS VR platform Dark Souls  and  Bloodborne  creator From Software is making an exclusive virtual reality game for Sony’s PlayStation VR platform called  Déraciné . The game was officially unveiled at Sony’s PlayStation E3 keynote this evening in Los Angeles with a  teaser trailer . From the admittedly short glimpses of it,  Déraciné  looks like a will be a substantial departure away from the action-oriented and horror approach of From Software’s more recent and celebrated titles in the  Soulsborne  series. Here’s how Sony describes it: As a spirit summoned by a young girl in a secluded boarding school, the player must prove its existence and build a unique bond with the students through clever interactions. As the mystery of the story unfolds, the spirit must use its ability to manipulate the forces of life and time to change the fate of the pupils. The game is slated to come out in 2018, so we’ll hopefully get more detail...

For 2018, Sony decided to keep its E3 keynote very focused. The show was almost entirely dedicated to four upcoming games that we already know about:  The Last of Us Part II ,  Death Stranding ,  Ghost of Tsushima , and Insomniac’s  Spider-Man . But while it wasn’t as packed as in year’s past, it did offer some deep looks at some excellent games. It was also pretty damn gruesome, and Sony managed to sneak in a couple of surprises as well. If you missed the show, you can check it all out right here. DEATH STRANDING ’S GRUESOME NEW TRAILER HAS BABIES, TOENAILS, ACTUAL GAMEPLAY It’s hard to believe, but the latest trailer for Hideo Kojima’s mysterious  Death Stranding shows the actual game for the first time. But don’t worry: it’s still plenty weird, and there’s no shortage of babies. WATCH THE VERY FIRST GAMEPLAY TRAILER FOR  THE LAST OF US PART II We’ve known that a sequel to  The Last of Us  has been in the works for some time, but at E3 Sony fina...

Sony took a slightly different approach than its peers at E3 2018. Instead of packing as many games as possible into its conference,  à la Microsoft , it made room for a smaller number of titles to lovingly chew the scenery, showing off with extended gameplay footage — and a surprising number of stomach-turning moments. Naughty Dog’s  The Last of Us Part  II   kicked off  the conference with a  quiet, tender moment between Ellie and a new love interest. The moment of romance was short-lived; as the camera turns away from the warmly-lit, close-up smooch, it bleeds (literally) into Ellie brutally sinking her knife into a man’s neck. As the camera spins, she pulls her knife out, ignoring the blood spray, to plunge it right back in. From there, Ellie slinks through a dark, dystopian forest full of dead bodies hanging from trees or impaled on whatever’s handy. A man approaches one captive, strung up by his neck, then guts him by stabbing him and ripping out his ...

Hideo Kojima and Norman Reedus are back to break our brains with an outlandish new trailer for  Death Stranding . It’s still hard to make sense of what  Death Stranding  actually  is,  but the imagery sure is evocative. You’ve got babies, terrifying invisible monsters, and maybe something about environmental collapse? Oh, and there are a couple of new faces here, too: Léa Seydoux, of  Blue is the Warmest Color  fame, and Lindsay Wagner, who you might know from  The Bionic Woman . Better yet, this E3 trailer showed what appeared to be actual gameplay, which feels huge for a game that has largely relied on cinematic trailers.  While the PlayStation Blog notes  that the camera here will be slightly different than what players experience, “The first half and the last sequence in particular are most representative of the actual gameplay.” We also get a slightly better sense of what  Death Stranding  is about: apparently Sam, the cha...

I’ve been writing and editing military science fiction for years. In that time, robots, drones, and artificial intelligence have been slipping onto real-world battlefields. When people think about robots on the battlefield, they often envision something like the Terminator or the Cylons from  Battlestar Galactica . But the reality is far more nuanced than pop culture would have us believe. That reality is laid out in  Army of None: Autonomous Weapons and the Future of War   by Paul Scharre, who my  colleague James Vincent’s recently interviewed . I recently picked up  Army of None , and Scharre takes readers through how militaries are using autonomous tech in 2018 and the ethical and practical considerations that have cropped up along the way. Back in the world of fiction, here are 13 science fiction, fantasy, and horror novels coming out this month that you should check out. JUNE 5TH The Memory of Fire  by Callie Bates Callie Bates released her debut fanta...