April Fools' Day typically brings a veritable deluge of joke announcements, silly updates and other pranks for games media to wade through, from Animal Crossing's playful whoopee cushion items to Overwatch giving all its characters googly eyes for a day. Bayonetta developer PlatinumGames also got in on the fun, rehashing one of its gags from last year about releasing a new entry in the Cresta series of arcade shooters. But it turns out Platinum was playing the long con all along, as the announcement was no joke after all.
Platinum took to social media yesterday to announce the development of Sol Cresta, and plenty of fans of the classic arcade shooter series fell for what appeared to be the same April Fools' joke as last year. Some canny consumers, however, noted the similarity to the previous year with suspicion, along with the filing of a trademark by Hamster Corporation, the company that owns the Cresta series, and speculated that there might be more to this than a quick laugh.
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These cynics proved to be right on the money when PlatinumGames returned to Twitter today to announce that the game was indeed in development. With a slightly tweaked trailer, the company triumphantly extinguished any lingering doubts, writing: "It's not an April Fool's joke anymore, it's really happening!" Sol Cresta is described in the Tweet as being part of Platinum's "NeoClassic Arcade series," suggesting that there will be more classic arcade titles coming out in the future.
The game is set to release some time in 2021, but Xbox fans look to be out of luck if they want to get in on the retro goodness. Sol Cresta only appears to be releasing on PS4, Switch and Steam, so for now any Microsoft aficionados will need to resort to a PC or another console for their share of old-school vertical shooter action. Still, this isn't the first time Platinum has left Xbox owners wanting more, only to then eventually give it to them: Nier: Automata took an extra year to find its way onto Xbox One but when it did, it was with DLC included and various updates and improvements rolled in.
Those with more of a penchant for Platinum's other franchises haven't got quite as much news to get stuck into, sadly. Bayonetta 3 development remains quiet, with Creative Director Hideki Kamiya even encouraging fans to forget about the game for the time being, and the developer's next superhero game, Project GG, appears to be staying out of the limelight for now as well.
Nevertheless, the non-joke announcement of Sol Cresta is something to be happy about, even for those less enamored with retro shooters. It seems as though every year some companies reveal a few ideas as April Fools' jokes that actually seem quite good, so it's heartening to see one of them actually come to fruition. Perhaps fans will eventually see Among Us' backwards Skeld map coming back permanently too.
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