Fortnite's new mode, The Spy Within, recreates Among Us in the third-person shooter. It's now available in-game as a special limited-time mode. A Twitch stream featuring Sarah Silverman will showcase the mode and Fortnite's Houseparty video chat system today.

The mode is featured in a playlist with several different takes on the murder mystery formula, each made by a different Fortnite creator. The playlist will feature maps from DolphinDom, KKSlider, Bunni_, Wert, Blanky, jstKamui, MackJack, Ritual and Snownymous.

The mode has 10 players broken up into two teams: eight agents and two spies. The agents must try and complete their objectives before getting killed by the spies. The spies need to eliminate agents while remaining undetected. Sound familiar?

Fortnite Houseparty is bringing together eight of Twitch's top streamers and a few celebs are joining in on the fun to celebrate the new Spy Within game with video chat. 

Streamers like Dr Lupo, Pokimane, Ninja, itsHafu, and more are going to be joined by Sarah Silverman and David Dobrik for a special Fortnite Houseparty video chat session getting down on the online game's new experience with Spy Within. 

What? 

But what is Spy Within? This new feature is a new limited-time-only Fortnite event that will have players teaming up to root out one suspicious player in a whodunnit experience. With Among Us being so popular and taking home a few awards this year, this mode isn't that far-fetched, but to bring it in this holiday season, this rag-tag group of entertainers are airing out all of their tells for the world to see. 

This new experience was named after the Fortnite Creative Map 'Spy Within', which was created by KKslider and DolphinDom. It's similar to games like Werewolf, basically giving players free rein to essentially call all of their friends liars without any real reprocussions. So, if you've got any beef with anybody in your circle, here's a good excuse to let it all out there (kidding, don't do that, actually just talk to them). 

Our ideal teammates are thoughtful, humble, and passionate professionals who can both zoom into the details and zoom out to embrace the big picture ...

Set for Aug. 5-8 in Indianapolis, Indiana

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Unlike the rest of the treehouse, I haven’t been playing that Cyberpunk 2077. Even still, I’ve already heard from many folks that the game is absolutely overflowing with dildos, phallic sex toys of all shapes and sizes erupting from every cyber-nook and hacker-cranny across Night City’s urban futurescape. Well, it seems even CD Project may admit it’s all a bit much, with the developers planning to rein in the “distracting” propagation of plastic dongers.

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Fortnite is widening its reach by making the already-massive battle royale more appealing to players with lower-end tech and higher-end consoles. ...

Fortnite has turned into a social platform, so it makes sense that it’s borrowing Facebook’s best tricks

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[ignvideo url="https://www.ign.com/videos/2020/12/15/cyberpunk-2077-for-xbox-one-and-playstation-4-review"]

The RPG isn’t just an on-rails experience

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Back in May, the upcoming Dungeons & Dragons movie landed Marvel exec Jeremy Latcham as its producer and while the film has been hit with some COVID-related delays, it looks like the studio is eyeing Star Trek star Chris Pine for a major role. 

Chris Pine has been in a plethora of movies but to me, he's the Star Trek cutie always looking for booty (OK, so he has a lot more nuanced than that, but let me have this one). Deadline reports that the actor is in talks with Paramount to take part in the upcoming D&D adventure, though for which role, in particular, we don't know. 

Additionally, we now know that John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein have been tapped to both write and direct the latest adaptation alongside Latcham as the movie's producer. 

As for the named producer, Latcham is the former Senior Vice President of Production and Development but now he's moving onto a very different scene: D&D. Latcham was confirmed to be attached to the upcoming Dungeons & Dragons movie as producer thanks to a recent agreement made with Hasbro's Entertainment One back in May of this year. 

Switch and PC owners will be able to become a professional friend and make their frog bosses proud in Here Comes Niko.

The post Here Comes Niko Makes You a ‘Professional Friend’ appeared first on Siliconera.

Over the next week, we will be posting features for what we've nominated to be the best games of 2020. Then, on December 17, we will crown one of the nominees as GameSpot's Best Game of 2020, so join us as we celebrate these 10 games on the road to the big announcement. Be sure to check out our other end-of-the-year coverage collected in our Best Games of 2020 hub.

Spiritfarer is a cozy resource management and farming sim with a dreamy, colorful art style and adorable talking animals. It's also a game about death, grief, and the process of letting go. Though these two aspects may seem at odds, Spiritfarer finds a delicate balance between its lighthearted adventure gameplay and the heavier themes woven throughout, offering a large, intriguing world to explore and characters you'll come to love along the way.

The Strong has added another treasure trove of game development artifacts to its museum, this time through a partnership with the LGBTQ Game Archive. ...

In this 2017 GDC session, developers Jenny Gottstein, Lucas Johnson, Jeff Macpherson, Rob Morgan and Steve Peters explore the most interesting questions surrounding location-based storytelling. ...

Amanita Design - the acclaimed developer behind such treats as Samorost, Machinarium, and this year's wonderfully gloomy puzzler Creaks - has unveiled its latest project for Switch and PC, psychedelic horror adventure Happy Game.

Happy Game is the brainchild of artist, animator, and designer Jaromír Plachý - previously responsible for Amanita's whimsical garden adventure Botanicula and last year's delightfully brash comedy caper Chuchel - and tells the story of a young boy trapped in his nightmares.

"Endure and escape three unforgettable nightmares," explains Amanita of its latest off-kilter endeavour, "solve deeply disturbing puzzles in (not so) charming environments", and "deal with suspicious smiley faces and pink bunnies".

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Look, I’ve covered a lot of videogame museums in my time with RPS. It’s fitting, then, that I’d eventually cover a virtual art gallery of literally everything. Released for free this weekend, The Anything Gallery is exactly that – an exhibition of anything you want, curating from any phrase you enter before its wings skew off into weird and wild tangents stretching infinitely in every direction.

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Just a few days ago, The Game Awards 2020 revealed a battery of trailers for highly-anticipated games, like a new Perfect Dark, the Left 4 Dead-like Back 4 Blood, and the dreamy Open Roads. However, for some, the most notable game barely made an appearance at all. Despite receiving the Most Anticipated Game award, From Software's latest project, Elden Ring, didn't receive any new details or trailers, which caused the game's community to explode in a memetic meltdown that still shows no signs of stopping.

To be clear, the Elden Ring subreddit is a surprisingly non-toxic environment compared to other video game spaces on the internet, and most of the memes and posts in the community are all in good fun. Still, there was definitely a sense of deflation in the subreddit when The Game Awards ended without an update on the game. One of the top posts all-time on the subreddit came just moments after the event ended, and it speaks for itself:

My son is too young to know if he likes Bumkins Mario-themed accessories but that’s fine

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The first time I stepped out of my character’s apartment in Cyberpunk 2077, I expected to be greeted by a vast world of machine-powered possibility. Instead, I found a dildo. It was sitting next to a random NPC’s foot in my apartment building, near a discarded magazine and some other trash. “That’s weird,” I thought.…

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Last week, during an investor conference call masquerading as entertaining content (or vice versa) Disney announced an exhausting number of new Disney+ series and films arriving over the next few years, most of them having something to do with the Marvel or Star Wars franchises. The majority of those are a long way…

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From Netflix to Amazon to networks to cable, what not to miss from an exceptional year in TV

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Fresh single-player experiences for every skill level

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Korean developer and publisher Joycity has teamed up with Tilting Point, landing the studio as much as $40 million to use for user acquisition in the process. ...

Spoilers for Shadowlands and, uh, Warcraft 3

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A Neptunia Virtual Stars PC version will be available through Steam in 2021 worldwide, alongside the game's upcoming PS4 debut.

The post Take the Stage in Neptunia Virtual Stars’ PC Version in 2021 appeared first on Siliconera.

The thing that interested me the most about Cyberpunk 2077 was its character creator. I’m someone who’s spent a lot of her time thinking about character creators and how they work for people who are not cis, white, able bodied, or male. I had hope that Cyberpunk’s creator would meaningfully include the wealth of human…

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Tuesday’s Best Deals | Kinja Deals

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As much a part of the season as indoor trees and mysterious boxes, Overwatch‘s annual Winter Wonderland has rolled back in for another year. 2020’s edition of Christmas in Blizzardland introduces new 4v4 freeze-tag brawl “Freezethaw Elimination”, brings back limited modes from the ghosts of Overwatch past, and once again adds a bundle of wonderfully strange festive outfits for our far-future superfriends.

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You and your squad can start planning your Rebirth Island drops now

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Writer Donny Cates on the biggest Venom event in Marvel history

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Very Very Valet is a new cooperative game about parking cars in zany ways. The game, developed by Los Angeles-based studio Toyful Games, debuted during Nintendo's Indie World broadcast on Tuesday.

"One to four players control an 'elite' team of puppet valets, working together to overcome any and all valet-related challenges," reads Toyful Games' official site. "It's going to take teamwork and a certain 'just park it anywhere' mentality to save the world from a severe parking crisis! It's not enough to just be a valet - be a VERY VERY VALET."

Very Very Valet will include more than 20 levels, including city streets, cliffsides, bowling alleys, airports, and trainyards. Toyful Games will also offer "accessible driving controls" for easy pick-up-and-play fun.

Whether you're an avid fan or not, Fortnite continues to be an intrinsic part of contemporary video game culture. With a plethora of popular events - like the recent Galactus battle - to bonus cosmetics, Fortnite's playerbase always has new content to explore and enjoy. A new update, however, optimized the popular battle royale's framerate on next-gen consoles. Fortnite already runs in 4K and 60 FPS on the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X, but now the 120FPS Mode, which can be enabled in the video settings tab, enhances the moment-to-moment action that the game is known for.

120FPS Mode, however, takes a toll on Fortnite's resolution. If you've been enjoying the game in 4K, you'll have to make due with 1440p if you plan on amplifying the framerate. Additionally, shadows, post-processing, and streaming distances will be noticeably reduced. According to The Verge, the Xbox Series S locks in at 1080p if the 120FPS Mode is switched on. And if you're playing Fortnite on a monitor - the best way to play competitive shooters in my honest opinion! - 120FPS Mode will only be compatible with 120Hz displays. 

Cyberpunk 2077

is without doubt one of the biggest ray tracing games that’s ever been released on PC, and it should come as no surprise that it’s also one of the most demanding. Like Metro Exodus before it, CD Projekt Red have gone all in on this ultra-realistic lighting technology to make Night City look and feel like a living, breathing city, using everything from ray traced reflections and shadows to three separate ray traced illumination techniques. Indeed, if you’ve been searching for an excuse to show off your new Nvidia RTX card, this is definitely the game you’ve been waiting for. Or is it? Night City can look spectacular with all of its ray traced bells and whistles switched on, but only a select few GPUs are really capable of depicting this futuristic cityscape at playable frame rates.

During the December 2020 Nintendo Indie World livestream, developer Playfellow Studio and publisher Rogue Games revealed the very cute and very vicious cat brawler Fisti-Fluffs

The game is a 3D action-brawler with up to four-player local and online multiplayer featuring fighting cats. Players can create their feline fighter and dress them with an assortment of accessories while clawing at their friends. There are six fully-destructible stages to play on with five different game types, including a cat food defense mode called Kibble Defense.

A demo of Fisti-Fluffs is available on both itch.io and Steam for Windows PCs, with a release planned for early next year. The game hits Nintendo Switch early next year as well. It's also coming to Android and iOS devices, though a release date for those has not been specified. Check out some screenshots, as well as the system requirements for Fisti-Fluffs, down below.

There are many engineers out there who solve problems that the vast majority of people can't even properly comprehend, and there are others who go the extra mile to find problems that most of us aren't even aware of. A software engineer and game developer named Ben Carter has figured out a way to get ray tracing working on an SNES, and the results are pretty incredible.

As any hardcore SNES fan knows, several of the console's most popular games relied on a chipset that was included as part of the cartridge itself in order to help the SNES achieve certain technological goals. The best-known example of this is the Super FX chip that powered the original Star Fox. Carter has designed a chip in that mold that he calls the SuperRT that allows the SNES to perform ray tracing.

Carter's video shows off what the SuperRT is capable of, and it includes all of the very finicky details on how he got it to work. Essentially, however, it works on the same principle as the Super FX chip: the SuperRT constructs the scene and feeds it to the SNES's processor in language it can understand. The nest of cables shown in the video isn't due to any particular technical wizardry on Carter's part; most of them are level shifter cables that allow the SuperRT's field-programmable gate array board and the SNES to run at the same voltage.

A look back at the 5-year development of Eastshade, the open-world adventure where you play as a traveling painter. ...

Yashahime is not only a chance to see what happened after Inuyasha. It's a chance to see how Towa and Setsuna grow as individuals and accept themselves.

The post Yashahime Feels Like a Story About Its Heroines’ Identities appeared first on Siliconera.

Over the next week, we will be posting features for what we've nominated to be the best games of 2020. Then, on December 17, we will crown one of the nominees as GameSpot's Best Game of 2020, so join us as we celebrate these 10 games on the road to the big announcement. Be sure to check out our other end-of-the-year coverage collected in our Best Games of 2020 hub.

Your first trip through Hades, like most, will end in death. But that first run is an exciting one, revealing an evolution of the isometric action-RPG combat that Supergiant has been mastering since 2011's Bastion. You'll see how you can utilize your dash to avoid danger or press the attack; discover how positioning matters due to dangerous traps littered throughout levels and the bonus damage you can deal to enemies from behind or by knocking them into walls; and get a taste of the upgrades that you'll be able to encounter and equip to ensure each run feels distinct.

It all makes for an immediately satisfying combat system. Then you die, maybe after encountering a boss or, more likely in those early runs, by falling prey to a seemingly innocuous foe or a trap you set off. Whatever the case, you head back to the House of Hades, chat up some of the residents--including your father, Hades--and set out again. You'll die once again, maybe after making it a bit further, or perhaps even sooner due to overconfidence or sheer bad luck. However you earn your trip back to home, you'll again speak with Hades and others, and the true core of the game will begin to reveal itself.