And we’re back!

Since the world seems to have started melting while we were off, there’s no better time to introduce Shredders. The new snowboarding game by our proud member I-Illusions and LetItRoll was unveiled last month during Microsoft’s next gen games showcase. A snowy mountain range rarely looked more inviting, and the look of all that fresh powder makes us want to jump in immediately and, for lack of any real snowboarding skill, start making snow angels.

While that probably won’t be a feature, players can look forward to a next generation snowboarding experience inspired by the classic Amped series. Those games always found a good balance between simulation and fun and that’s exactly what the developers are going for here. You’ll be able to tackle the mountain on your own, but the game will have multiplayer baked into its core to make a trip with friends all the more memorable.

Being an avid snowboarder himself, creating this type of game has been a longtime passion of I-Illusions founder Dirk Van Welden, and it’s great to see his team’s hard work and talent finally turning that dream into a reality. Shredders will be coming first to Xbox Series X somewhere down the slope in 2021.

Simply the thought of playing Space Pirate Trainer in this heat is exhausting – we can barely roll our chair to the coffee machine without drowning in our own sweat right now – but if you’re more of a warm up than a cool down kind of person, the team’s also working on the next Space Pirate chapter. And it’s shaping up to make you burn more calories than you ever did zapping droids.

Space Pirate Arena will unshackle players from the platform in front of their space ship and bring the battlefield to bigger areas. Described as a glimpse into the future of lasertag, the game is a multiplayer hall-scale VR game designed to get players off their couches and onto basketball courts, halls, and tennis courts – zapping with friends in a multiplayer frenzied game of hide and seek, all based in the Space Pirate Trainer universe.

There’s a beta in development for Oculus Quest and though a lot of SPT fans are anxiously waiting to take the fight outside, there’s no date set in stone yet. While testing the game, the team found that with the current max trackable space of 10×10 meters the best experience is with intense one-on-one zapping fights. Of course, they’re looking to up the player count once the size of trackable areas goes up in the future.

Still a relatively small company, the success of Space Pirate Trainer, which is still one of the most succesful VR games to date, has allowed I-Illusions the freedom to keep creating the cool game experiences they want with the cool people they want. If you want to keep track of their exciting new projects, you can sign up for their mailing list or follow them on Twitter.