Posts

It’s once again how you access Chaos Emeralds - a bonus challenge that unlocks the game’s best ending - while the return of Blue Sphere provides additional attractions to be toyed around with elsewhere in the game - which we explain more of in our Sonic Mania unlocks and cheats page. Blue Sphere stages - If you have 25 rings and hit a mid-level signpost, a ring will appear above that you can leap through, taking you to a special stage....

The announcement of Destroy All Humans 2 Reprobed was made on the official PlayStation Twitter account, before it was deleted. The trailer is still available, though. Whoops! The existence of Destroy All Humans 2 Reprobed comes as no surprise given publisher THQ Nordic teased it in February. The trailer confirms Black Forest Games, developer of the Destroy All Humans remake, is behind Destroy All Humans 2 Reprobed. Expect a launch on PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One....

To accompany this trailer’s reveal, president of Sony Pictures Motion Picture Group Sanford Panitch, along with the film’s director Neill Blomkamp and PlayStation productions head Asad Qizilbash, gave a small presentation about their work. Here, Panitch stated the company currently has “more than 10 projects in development and production between the film and television groups”. Many of these we know already, having had some form of confirmation for 10 of them....

The brief statement, issued to the Wall St Journal, is Sony’s first comment on the deal. “We expect that Microsoft will abide by contractual agreements and continue to ensure Activision games are multiplatform,” a Sony spokesperson said. PlayStation has long held a close relationship with Activision, and has had the marketing rights to Call of Duty for years. It currently pays for various timed bonuses, boosts and other bits of exclusive content, while PlayStation branding appears in Call of Duty advertising....

More and more developers are turning to music to put a fun twist on action gameplay, from Crypt of the NecroDancer (and its Zelda follow-up Cadence of Hyrule), to FPS Bullets per Minute and platformer No Straight Roads. These aren’t games about making music, but saving the world to the beat. That’s your task in Soundfall. Taking its cue from NecroDancer, a metronome pulses at the bottom of the screen and it’s your job to shoot-shoot-dodge-repeat your way through each level sticking to the tempo....

Clearing Bases is one of the more long-winded, but also one of the most rewarding, ways you can farm for special Resources in Spider-Man, and they’re integral to plenty of purchases you can make to get Spidey looking and feeling cool as you go, too. With that in mind, here’s a quick guide to explaining what Base Tokens are, and some tips for how to earn Base Tokens quickly and clear Enemy Bases....

Three-way fights come as part of the returning Splatfests, with matches during the special timed events being split into two halves, with the first part a traditional 4v4 face-off while the second sees a 4v2v2 fight for territory. There’ll be a chance to sample this particular new flavour of Splatoon during a Splatfest World Premiere that’s taking place on 27th August - effectively a free demo where players can sample Splatoon 3 for a limited period, choosing to fight for rock, paper or scissors (it’s worth noting that the demo will be playable from 25th August , giving a small window for practice before the Splatfest World Premiere itself)....

Details published by Kotaku include allegations of sexism and mismanagement at the Microsoft-owned studio, and paint a picture of a game project which is still struggling to get off the ground years after its official reveal. State of Decay 3 began pre-production in late 2018, though developers at Undead Labs were reportedly poorly-managed and the project took several team re-organisations to get off the ground. Staff have claimed the game’s public announcement in 2020 was too early, and at that point Undead Labs “didn’t even know what it was”....

Given how much of a sucker I am for a swashbuckling pirate yarn, there was a certain inevitability to my love affair with Sea of Thieves, but pretending it was a foregone conclusion would do a huge disservice to developer Rare’s astonishing work imbuing its game with such distinctive charms. Even at launch - when, for all its fancy pirate dressing, its endless roiling oceans and multitude of beautifully wrought islands, it was, at heart, a pretty simple game of tug of war - there was a special kind of magic to Sea of Thieves that made it so much more than its component parts....

Let’s tackle the disappointment first and that’s the addition of variable rate shading. At a basic level, VRS reduces the internal resolution of objects, but keeps their silhouettes crisp. Apply that variable rate of shading to elements on-screen where you’re unlikely to be able to tell the difference (eg darker areas) and you have a simple way to improve performance - and/or improve battery life for a device like Steam Deck....

Yuzu is open-source and, crucially, legal, but as PC Gamer points out, emulation is a sticky topic for some, prompting Valve to upload an emulator-free version of the same video a short while later, which you can see below: “Valve’s new official video for the Steam Deck has a very interesting game icon in it,” industry insider Nibel tweeted yesterday, before following up with: “Update: Valve has removed the original video and reuploaded a new one with a small difference....

Oh, this is lovely. Lost in Fantaland is a turned-base tactics roguelite made by a team of just two. It’s wonderfully compact to play. You pick a path through the overworld menu and then play out your encounters in a series of 8x8 checkboards. The basics are straightforward. You have three movement points and three action points per turn. Move around and then select cards to either attack your enemies or build your own armour....

This can’t just be boiled down to the worst protagonist created by Tetsuya Nomura in a long time. As much as the developers may cringe at the memes that have been going around since the game’s reveal, it’s not an exaggeration when I say most of what comes out of Jack’s mouth can be summed up as “I have to kill Chaos” and “Where is Chaos?” with nary a hint of humour or charisma to compensate....

Capcom revealed the feature via a short clip posted to Twitter, below, that shows Luke and Ryu change their facial expression a couple of times with the camera up close and personal. “Show your attitude with the Game Face Feature in #StreetFighter6 by pressing directional buttons during the versus screen,” reads the tweet. “Scowl at your opponent, act all smug, or confuse them with a mixture of rapid emotions!” It’s a somewhat bizarre-looking feature I imagine I’ll have fun with for a bit, but will ditch once the novelty wears off… unless - and I apologise profusely for even suggesting such a thing: DLC facial expressions?...

Techland said it had added over a thousand fixes and improvements via updates over past two weeks, and that another thousand “tweaks” would be included in the day one patch due to go live on consoles “within the next few days”. The PC version, meanwhile, is being kept up to date in “real-time”. “Techland’s vast blockbuster buckles under its own ambition and lacks in innovation, but makes up for it with outstanding parkour and combat,” Martin wrote in Eurogamer’s Dying Light 2 review, which just went live....

To put it frankly, The Callisto Protocol is seriously downgraded on last-gen consoles in a way we rarely see in cross-gen games. There’s a clear generational divide, and putting the best version up against worst - PlayStation 5 vs Xbox One S - there’s a vast gulf between them. The first and most obvious difference lies in texture quality. Across the board, the artwork has been hugely simplified. Texture resolution is much lower on just about any surface in the game and it’s not just resolution that’s been cut back - a lot of overlaid textures are simply missing....

A fresh trailer also includes a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it reveal of the game’s monster big bad (it’s right at the very end, if you want to avoid spoilers). Last month I sat down with House of Ashes director Will Doyle to discuss the game’s Iraq War setting, horror influences and historical horror. The snippets of gameplay which I’ve seen - longer versions of the sequences in that above trailer - looked promising, a kind of The Descent by way of Zero Dark Thirty, though a big departure from the previous entries in the series....

Blackwood, the Oblivion-themed chapter due out for The Elder Scrolls Online in June, includes Gideon as a hub city. Gideon is an Imperial-based city built on Ayleid ruins but run by the argonians. It’s situated on the eastern portion of the new zone, and borders the Black Marsh area. Gideon appeared in Arena as one of several possible locations the player could discover. But it was only mentioned in subsequent The Elder Scrolls games, such as Oblivion and Skyrim....

It was, of course, a not-so-thinly veiled nod at the current and very much ongoing situation at Activision Blizzard, which Keighley had been called out on whether he would acknowledge. “We can’t ignore the headlines that are out there,” Keighley began, after introducing the show. “Game creators need to be supported by the companies that employ them,” he continued, to applause from the audience. “So let me just say this, before we get to any of the news, or announcements or awards....

Please be aware, the below article contains story spoilers for The Last of Us. Read at your own discretion. A series of shots showing off the remake’s Trophy list has been shared by Twitter account Naughty Dog Central. A key difference appears to be that the new “No Matter What” Trophy, earned by compeleting the game, does not have different Trophy tiers depending on which difficulty the game is played on....