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Amazon Luna adds a Jackbox subscription and retro classics

By Giovanni Colantonio March 1, 2022

Amazon Luna is now available for all customers in the mainland United States. To celebrate the launch, the platform has added new gaming channels, including a retro game service featuring gaming classics and a Jackbox Party Pack subscription service.

Luna is Amazon’s cloud gaming platform. It features several channels that players can subscribe to, giving them access to different games. Amazon is expanding that selection with three enticing new channels.

The new Retro Channel will feature classic games for $5 a month. It’ll include games like Castlevania Anniversary Collection, Metal Slug 3, Street Fighter II Turbo: Hyper Fighting, Shadowman: Remastered and more. Atari will play a big role in the channel’s launch as well. The historic game company is releasing seven of its iconic games on the channel. Here’s the full list of Atari games coming to the platform.

Centipede
Asteroids
Missile Command
Crystal Castles
Tempest
Pong
Super Breakout

The most intriguing new addition is the Jackbox Games Channel. For $5 a month, players will gain access to every Jackbox Party Pack game. Players usually have to purchase eight different packs to play them, making this the only available way to get them all for a monthly fee. The games will include Luna Couch support, which lets Luna subscribers invite friends to play even if they don’t have a subscription.

Finally, Luna will add a Prime Gaming Channel. That allows Amazon Prime members to access a rotating selection of games free of charge. To kick it off, Prime members can play Devil May Cry V, Observer: System Redux, Phogs!, and Flashback. From March 8 to 14, they’ll also get a chance to play Ubisoft’s Immortals Fenyx Rising.

The new channels are the most promising signs of life we’ve seen from Luna since its launch. Rather than trying to hook players with a scattershot library of games, the channel approach allows players to customize their subscription. At the very least, the Jackbox channel is a valuable addition that isn’t currently available by any other means.

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Skull and Bones: release date speculation, trailers, gameplay, and more

Two ships fire cannons at each other other a small island in Skull & Bones.

Ubisoft has a few notoriously troubled games in development that have left fans scratching their heads for years now. Aside from Beyond Good and Evil 2, the most curious game that has managed to avoid cancellation despite years of delays, restarts, and who knows what else behind the scenes is the pirate game Skull and Bones. It was first announced in 2017, and we've gotten almost nothing but bad news regarding this title in the years since. Despite having a playable build in 2018, for press only, the game has undergone major, if not complete overhauls.

Promised as a fully fleshed-out game built around the incredibly popular ship combat featured in Assassin's Creed 4: Black Flag, Skull and Bones was poised to make a big splash following that game's success. Gamers loved all the pirate activities seen in that game, so expanding on that should've been an easy move. However, public statements about the game have almost completely vanished, leaving many gamers high and dry regarding the status of this pirate epic. We pulled out our compass, plotted our course, and dug up all the details on Skull and Bones that you need to know.
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Gaming

Atlas Fallen unexpectedly gives Forspoken some real competition

Two Atlas Fallen characters stand together in key art.

Atlas Fallen has the potential to surprise a lot of people. Although it's launching in just two months, we haven't seen much about this new game from The Surge developer Deck13 and publisher Focus Entertainment since its reveal at Gamescom Opening Night Live 2022. That's a shame because after going hands-on with an early build of it, I've found that Atlas Fallen has the potential to appeal to people who didn't like one of the year's most divisive titles: Forspoken.
Atlas Fallen - World Premiere Reveal Trailer | Gamescom Opening Night Live 2022
Square Enix's open-world action RPG featured some neat ideas with its fast-paced magical combat and freeing traversal abilities, but many people couldn't get into it. While more focused on melee combat than magic, Atlas Fallen is a similarly ambitious open-world game that delivers satisfying movement and action that's different from the norm. That makes it a game that might scratch some itches that Forspoken didn't fully reach due to its heavily criticized writing. If it's not on your radar yet, you might want to know what Atlas Fallen has to offer.
Encouraged exploration
Based on my demo, I'm not fully sure what to expect from Atlas Fallen's mysterious story yet. The basic premise is that player was a person from the lowest caste in this world's society who was bonded with an ancient gauntlet. That gauntlet has an amnesic spirit named Nyaal living inside it and is now trying to save the world from gods that have left it in desert-filled ruins. The narrative wasn't a big focus in my preview build, though, and the script is full of jargon that probably will only make sense once I play more of the game.
A talking companion bonded to the player's arm and hand is already an unexpected narrative coincidence between Forspoken and Atlas Fallen. But neither game's story is the appeal of either to me: It's their fun traversal and combat that interest me. The few seconds of Atlas Fallen's sand-surfing and fighting in its Gamescom trailer caught my eye last year, and both lived up to the hype.

As I worked my way out of a cave at the start of the demo, I learned how to raise large structures out of the ground, surf across large patches of sand, and dash through the air with the help of my gauntlet. After I entered the game's open world, I could play around with all my movement options and found them to be a treat. Open-ended games with large worlds like Atlas Fallen can live or die on how satisfying they are to explore, and making movement fun is a crucial way developers can make traversal enjoyable.
Forspoken was able to capture some of that magic despite its problems, and it looks like Atlas Fallen has too. Of course, that's only one part of the game, as players will run into many enemy Wraiths and need to fight them. That's where Atlas Fallen's engaging combat system comes into play.
Satisfying combat
Deck13 and Focus Entertainment had yet to go into much detail about Atlas Fallen's combat before now, so I was shocked by how unique it was. The core combat revolves around attacking, dodging, and parrying, with weapons shapeshifting as you use them in different ways. It's faster-paced than I expected from a developer who previously made Souslikes, but it's the Ascension system that really caught my attention.
In between fights, players can equip their character with Essence Stones that buff or add abilities, assigning them to one of three tiers in the process. Once they are in a fight, attacking and defeating enemies causes players to gain momentum, which fills a bar at the bottom left of the screen. As this bar fills, or "ascends," players gradually gain those Essence Stone abilities, getting more powerful the more aggressive they are.
Ascending does come with a catch: The more momentum you build, the more damage you take. Players can counteract this by equipping defensive or health-related Essence Stones or using "Shatter" once an Ascension tier is filled to deal lots of damage and crystalize enemies for a short while. To succeed in Atlas Fallen, I needed to fight aggressively, but fights would quickly turn in the enemy's favor if I missed a crucial parry or dodge when I had lots of momentum.

This system gives each fight a push-and-pull feeling not common in action games. Most of the time, games like to make players feel significantly more powerful or weaker than everything around them; Atlas Fallen does both. This unique system hasn't gotten more attention and promotion, but it ultimately is what makes Atlas Fallen stand out the most at the moment.
There's something exciting about how mysterious this game still is to me, as that means there could be lots of surprises when players finally get to try the whole thing in a couple of months. It's shaping up to be an unexpected, almost accidental alternative to Forspoken. If you're still looking for an action-heavy RPG with innovative movement and combat gameplay ideas, Atlas Fallen should be on your radar.
Atlas Fallen will launch for PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X/S on May 16.

Gaming

5 features we’d need from a PS5 Pro to justify an upgrade

The Playstation 5 system standing upright.

A new version of the PlayStation 5 may be on the horizon – at least if you believe the leaks. Earlier this week, Insider Gaming reported that a PS5 Pro is in development and is scheduled for a late 2024 launch. Considering that the rumor site previously claimed that a PS5 with a detachable drive would launch this year, you might want to take the claim with some skepticism. Insider Gaming provided no actual details on specs or what a Pro model would entail, only claiming that a source says it's in the works.

There’s not a lot to go on there, but just about any educated gamer could predict that a PS5 Pro is coming in the next year or two. Sony previously followed the PlayStation 4 with a PS4 Pro, which would improve the system’s power three years after its launch. It’s reasonable to think that PS5 would get the same treatment four years later -- which would likely be near the halfway point of its life span.