Even more new Pokemon are joining the trading card game, as the Pokemon TCG Scarlet and Violet Paldea Evolved expansion arrives on June 9, 2023. As the name suggests, people can expect cards to feature characters from the region. The booster packs even show art of Chien-Pao and Ting-Lu. The Pokemon Center is already taking pre-orders. This follows the first Scarlet and Violet expansion, which releases on March 31, 2023 and adds the new starters and characters like Fidough.

This will mark the appearance of new ex and Tera ex cards. There will 15 of the former and three of the latter. Special illustration and ultra rare cards will appear too. There will also be “hyper rare, gold etched” ones of certain characters.

Here's a look at the new Pokemon TCG Scarlet and Violet Paldea Evolved expansion Elite Trainer Box.
[gallery columns="1" size="full" ids="956812" link="file"]

And here are the details for the four booster packs. The final evolutions of Sprigatito and Quaxly, Meowscarada and Quaquaval, show up on two. The legendaries Chien-Pao and Ting-Lu also appear on the other ones.
[gallery columns="4" size="full" ids="956816,956817,956818,956819" link="file"]

Between Amazon's recent Rings of Power series and no less than five games on the way from Embracer, there's a wealth of Lord of the Rings stuff for fans to enjoy. But then, is Tolkien ever really out of fashion?

That includes The Lord of the Rings: Gollum from German studio Daedalic. It's been in development for some time and is due out later this year - I recently visited the Hamburg studio to go hands-on with the game.

Despite inspiring countless video games, only a couple based directly on Tolkien's work have truly stood out. After playing the game, I'm not so sure Gollum will reach the heights of Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor and its innovative Nemesis system, but it's certainly shaping up to be an authentic take on the original source material that lore enthusiasts will pore over.

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Theatrhythm Final Bar Line is already home to more than 380 songs, but soon, five more, this time from the Nier series, will be added to the game's playable soundtrack. 

The Nier: Automata tracks "Dependent Weakling," "Weight of the World Kowaretasekainouta – Marina Kawano," "Amusement Park," "A Beautiful Song," And "Emil's Shop," will be added to the game on March 29. That's next Wednesday, so you don't have to wait long. Check out Square Enix's trailer showcasing these songs in the Tweet below: 

The wait is NieRly over!

The @NieRGame Series pack for Theatrhythm Final Bar Line will launch on March 29th with the following songs:

- Dependent Weakling
- Weight of the World Kowaretasekainouta - Marina Kawano
- Amusement Park
- A Beautiful Song
- Emil’s Shop pic.twitter.com/4c52rjztKl

— FINAL FANTASY (@FinalFantasy) March 23, 2023

These five songs will join the recently-added six songs from The World Ends With You series. That DLC pack added "Someday," "Your Ocean," "World is Yours," "Breaking Free," "Twister," and "Calling." Song packs typically cost $3 to $6 depending on the pack, but you'll get all of these NEO songs and all of these Nier songs if you've purchased Season Pass 1. 

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Playtika's negotiations to purchase Rovio have come to an end.

As reported by MobileGamer.Biz, the news comes two months after the mobile firm attempted to acquire the Angry Birds maker.

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UPDATE 4.00pm UK: An official trailer for Sonic Origins Plus has now been released, confirming the information in the previous report.

You can check out the trailer below to see Amy in action and more. I'm personally excited to play the Game Gear games - their Master System equivalents were my introduction to Sonic and gaming all those years ago!

The expansion will cost £7.99 in the UK, or £34.99 for the whole package.

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Epic Games held their State Of Unreal presentation last night, where they talked about the new tech coming to Unreal Engine 5.2, unveiled Fortnite’s Creative 2.0 mode, and debuted new looks at upcoming UE5-developed games such as Senua’s Saga: Hellblade 2. The first hack-and-slashing adventure already had pretty lifelike faces, but the spooky sequel is taking things a step further with some frighteningly realistic tech.

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Ahead of the release of the Resident Evil 4 remake, Capcom shared the first episode of a Resident Evil Masterpiece Theater promotional anime. Now that the game is about to release, there are two more episodes to watch. These once again follow Leon S. Kennedy and Ashley Graham in the Mysterious Village.

First, here’s the second episode of the show. In the first one, we saw Leon looking for Ashley. That didn't go so well for him. The second sees him finding her. Now that he has, It focuses on what happens after Ashley “promises” to stay with Leon.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q99mSnhXbtM&ab_channel=capcomasia

In the third Resident Evil Masterpiece Theater anime episode, Leon and Ashley turn to a visitor for help. They ask if he can build them a vehicle to get out of town. The gentleman then grabs a chainsaw. Those who played the original game or the chainsaw demo will know where this is going.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EgDgKfauShw&ab_channel=capcomasia

All three of the episodes so far continue a running gag. It is unknown how many more installments there could be in this series of promotional videos.

The Resident Evil 4 remake will appear on the PS4, Ps5, Xbox Series X, and PC on March 24, 2023.

During Summer Game Fest last June, Alien fans were treated to the reveal of a new title called Aliens: Dark Descent. The real-time tactical shooter pits a squad of marines against dozens of deadly xenomorphs, though we hadn't seen any gameplay footage until the release of a new video today.

A gameplay commentary video walks players through the basics, in which players command a team of marines to investigate a xenomorph outbreak on Moon Lethe. You’ll issue commands for teammates to attack or execute skills and can also slow time during firefights to select orders. However, your squadmates can perish permanently, but you can raise your survival odds by outfitting soldiers with various weapons and upgrades to ensure the best team composition.

Aliens: Dark Descent is being devleoped by Tindalos Interactive, makers of the Battlefleet Gothic: Armada series, and will be published by Focus Entertainment. It arrives on June 20 for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC.

Jason Mai landed a job as VP of creative with Big Fish about six months ago, and while his history in casual and mobile games is extensive, he had never actually made a merge game along the lines of his new employer's hit EverMerge.

In a 'Game Designer's Notebook' session at the Game Developers Conference Tuesday, Mai acknowledged he landed the job without actually knowing much about the genre specifically.

"Once I got the job, I had to dive in and do what you always do: dig in, deconstruct the game, build some spreadsheets, read all the studies, the player surveys, talk to the designers and talk to the players," Mai said.

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While toys already started appearing for the Super Mario Bros Movie, Lush cosmetics announced it will also sell items like a bath bomb, body wash, soap, and body spray. The company opened up its official landing page for the products ahead of their March 24, 2023 debut. However, people who use the Lush app can already begin getting the various items. As of 9:30am ET on March 23, 2023, it seemed the products were already sold out in the app. [Thanks, Vooks!]

All of the initial Super Mario Bros Movie Lush items tend to be items to help people clean up like soap. Some of the items were already announced. For example, there will be shower gels based on both Mario and Luigi. Bars of soap shaped like a Gold Coin will appear. Lush also offers a line of shower jellies, and there will be ones inspired by Bowser and Princess Peach. There is also a Super Mario question block bath bomb that will contain a random soap that looks like a power-up, like a Fire Flower, inside after dissolving in the bath. The most expensive item will be a body spray perfume inspired by Princess Peach.

This sort of collaboration isn't uncommon. For example, Nintendo and ColourPop had a line of Animal Crossing: New Horizons makeup.

Something terrible lurks beneath the waves in Dredge. Actually, scratch that. There are a lot of terrible things that call the oceans of The Marrows home in this melancholy fishing adventure, but what they are, I couldn't possibly tell you. In all my hours sailing these cursed waters, I've only ever seen brief flashes of them - their ungodly, slippery masses, long spiny fins, and a dozen different combinations of glowing eyes, teeth and tentacles. They're forever fading in and out of view, cloaked by the thick fog that blankets the sea every evening. Sometimes your ship lights will catch them for a split second before they slip away, or maybe you'll only hear them hurtling toward you, with a scream of a jet engine and a maw that's white hot, ready for gnashing your flimsy wooden carcass into sawdust.

It's unnerving, being out at sea after dark, but that's the time when the rarest and most vile catches raise their scaly heads. So the question becomes: are you willing to risk your own sanity for the sake of a quick buck? Or are you too afraid of what you'll find in Davy Jones' locker? In Dredge, the answer is always yes. Yes, you will be frightened of what's out there, whether it's real or born from your own fearful imaginings, but you'll sputter out into the darkness regardless, because the allure of this supernatural fishing sim is just too good to resist.

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In a former casino on the outskirts of Edinburgh, ex-Grand Theft Auto producer Leslie Benzies is readying his next big gamble: a creation-fuelled game platform with blockbuster experiences built in. It's called Everywhere, and seems almost too ambitious; a constructed attempt to beat the likes of Fortnite and Roblox at their own game, with the horsepower of big budget game development under its hood.

The stakes are high. Everywhere is the long-awaited debut from Build a Rocket Boy, the company Benzies set up six years ago after his acrimonious exit from Rockstar, and the project he and other GTA veterans have been quietly building ever since. Fuelled by investment from NetEase, Build a Rocket Boy now has more than 400 staff building various bits of Everywhere, housed in multiple sites across Edinburgh, Budapest, Montpellier and in China. The current plan is to have Everywhere publicly playable at some point later this year.

You may remember Everywhere from its rather nebulous unveiling at Gamescom last year - when it was teased via a brief trailer that did little to explain what it actually was. Following that, rumours swirled suggesting it would contain cryptocurrency and NFTs - something Benzies and his team now flatly denies. So what exactly is Everywhere? After a day inside the studio, I still have questions. Lots and lots of questions. But they are different questions now - more hopeful ones, I think - than those I went in there with.

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Among the critters you'll draw from the deepest depths of direful fishing sim Dredge is the snailfish, an unhappy sea sausage which, as the game's encyclopaedia explains, starts to implode as it's reeled up into a tortuously low-pressure world. It's a fleeting reminder that being transported from abyss to surface is always a transformation. Beautiful aquatic creatures become abominations, crushed and deformed by the vicious operating parameters of a reality they aren't built for.

In Dredge's case, they acquire right angles, each lush 2D fish illustration the core of a clump of blocks, which must be slotted into a cargo hold represented as an expandable grid. It's a bloodless short-cutting of real-world commercial fish processing, where creatures are hacked up into tradeable morsels on the deck before they've even finished suffocating. Smaller critters like the snailfish (which doesn't in fact implode here, despite the description) fill a couple of squares, and are easily plugged into gaps between your ship's engine or headlamps and the hull. Chunkier hauls like sharks form awkward, rectilinear Christmas trees of fins and jaws: cramming in more than one is always a challenge, but perhaps if you reshuffle your mackerels a bit, you'll magically make room.

This touch of spatial puzzling lends Dredge's fishing expeditions their difficulty curve as much as the threats that roam the game's 19th century archipelago by night. Each voyage is sort of like deliberately filling up the board in Tetris, risking a game-over only to clear multiple lines in one fell swoop when you drop your catch off at the market. It's the One Clever Mechanic at the heart of a 10-hour game of fishquests and upgrading, which is disquieting in many ways but seldom as actively, rewardingly horrific as it might seem at first.

The Lords of the Fallen is now going to be known as Lords of the Fallen, and we just got a fresh look at the upcoming dark fantasy RPG thanks to last night's State of Unreal technical showcase.

As you may have guessed given where this latest footage comes from, Lords of the Fallen will run on Unreal Engine 5. Developer Hexworks explained the goal has "always been to create the most immersive game experience possible", and Unreal Engine 5 will help make this a reality.

And, I have to say, what has been shown so far certainly does look impressive. In the words of Eurogamer's Ed Nightingale: "This is how fans wanted Elden Ring to look".

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The Sims 4’s Growing Together Expansion Pack DLC is exactly what fans have been waiting for. If you’re a discerning Sims 4 fan wading through the massive amounts of Expansion Packs, Game Packs, Stuff Packs, and now the extra bite-sized Kits, searching for only the most crucial offerings, you’ll want to add Growing…

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It seems the next HoYoVerse game could get a release date soon. The company announced a Honkai: Star Rail Boarding Preparation Special Program stream with news for March 24, 2023. It will begin at 4:30am PT/7:30am ET/12:30pm CET.

The showcase will appear on the official Twitch channel. HoYoVerse also noted its official YouTube page. If it follows the same pattern as Genshin Impact updates, then the full presentation should appear there after the fact.

HoYoVerse didn't mention what will appear during this Honkai: Star Rail Boarding Preparation Special Program stream, beyond the assumed news. Given it is known as "boarding preparation," this could offer a release date, details about launch characters and initial banners, and insight into changes following the game's multiple betas.

Genshin Impact released their most broken character earlier this month. She’s no longer available in the seasonal rotation, but fans are still upset at her lackluster abilities. While some players have been submitting reports and airing their grievances on Twitter, others have gone a step further. Players who have…

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The Lego Group and 2K Games have today announced their long-rumoured multi-title partnership – and both firms tells GamesIndustry.biz that debut title Lego 2K Drive not only represents what to expect from this deal, but also the true potential for Lego in the realm of video games.

Reports that the two companies have been working together first emerged February last year, with leaks in recent weeks of Lego 2K Drive – which has officially been unveiled today – giving the industry and consumers alike a taste of what's to come.

We sat down with Lego Games' head of licensing Kate Bryant and 2K's vice president of global marketing Alison Bakunowich to find out more about how this partnership came to be.

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Besto Games revealed a release window and new details about Idol Showdown, its fighting game starring Hololive Vtubers. The title will debut in Spring 2023. It will be a free game available through Steam, according to the new trailer. It will also be entirely free and feature eight playable characters.

At the moment, only part of the Idol Showdown Hololive fighting game’s cast of playable Vtubers is available. The trailer shows off Inugami Korone, Nakiri Ayame, Shirakami Fubuki, and Tokino Sora. A-chan does make a cameo, however, as she appears for one of Sora’s attacks. The other four are still a mystery, and there are no details as to their identities yet.

Here’s the first trailer.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ChT2Cdveii0&ab_channel=IdolShowdown%7CBestoGameTeam

The Twitter announcements also revealed more details about its development. Besto worked on the title for over two years now. It will also use rollback netcode.

It isn't uncommon for fans to make free games inspired by Hololive Vtubers. For example, one of the more notable titles is Holocure. It is a Vampire Survivors-like that involves various performers. It also gets regularly updates. For example, in February 2023 that game was updated to add more first and second generation characters from the Japanese branch of the company.

Idol Showdown will appear on PCs in Spring 2023.

The Lego Group and 2K have revealed Lego 2K Drive, a new open-world racing game launching this May. 

More specifically, Lego 2K Drive hits PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Switch, and PC on May 19. The game is being developed by WWE 2K and NBA 2K studio, Visual Concepts, and is reminiscent of Forza Horizon's open-world exploration mixed with Mario Kart-like racing. If you're wondering how we know that, it's because we went hands-on with it for a few hours recently, and you can read our preview of the game right now. 

Check out the game in action below: 

Lego 2K Drive is the first collaboration between the Lego Group and 2K but not the last because it is the start of "a multi-title partnership between 2K and the Lego Group to develop AAA Lego games."

Lego 2K Drive has now been officially announced, and Eurogamer has gone hands-on with the colourful kid-friendly mix of Forza Horizon and Mario Kart.

Publisher 2K has also now unveiled the game's three editions, including the eye-popping £100 Lego 2K Drive Awesome Rivals Edition, which costs $120/€120 elsewhere.

This version includes the game's Year 1 Drive Pass, which adds a new biome to explore, plus "four individual post-launch seasons of Drive Pass content, each with new vehicles and themes". In addition to that, there's multiple new vehicles, a vehicle flair, and in-game Lego minifigures.

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From the days of dodging giant pizzas on Lego Island, to Forza Horizon 4's full-on Lego-themed expansion, racing has long felt a part of the Lego video game brand. And why not? Some of the simplest Lego sets feature cars and truck parts as core components. Lego itself, famously, holds the world record for being the biggest toy tyre manufacturer on the planet. It's almost surprising there hasn't been a proper full-on Lego racing game for so long.

But that's one of the interesting things about Lego 2K Drive, a seemingly polished and suitably colourful racing game which has been smartly constructed using building instructions borrowed from other top titles in its genre. This isn't just the first Lego racing game in decades, but also the first Lego game from publisher 2K ever, and the beginning of a big new partnership. Its imminent arrival - set for 19th May on PC, PlayStation 4, PS5, Nintendo Switch, Xbox One and Xbox Series X/S - follows years of Lego games largely limited to those based on big franchises, as Lego now looks to broaden its scope and work with a wider pool of developers.

Lego 2K Drive is being developed by Visual Concepts, the team behind 2K's NBA and WWE titles, but in a presentation to press attended by Eurogamer, the studio mentioned this title as only the first in a series of Lego collaborations being published by 2K. There are some partially outdated rumours as to what some of these other games might be - but for now, 2K itself is officially staying schtum.

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Square Enix has begun sharing short videos of Final Fantasy 16 to tease more gameplay, but one in particular has sparked debate.

As posted on the Japanese Twitter account for the game, a short video was shared on 21st March showing off more footage of Torgal the dog in battle, flipping an enemy into the air ready for Clive to juggle. Earlier today another video of Torgal was shown, proving you can indeed pet the dog.

But it's the video from 22nd March that's got fans in a spin. The clip is set in a forest area and shows - shock horror - Clive shimmying through a gap from one area to the next.

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The latest wave of gaming laptops has hit the (virtual) shelves, and it's now possible to pick up an RTX 4060 gaming laptop for just over a grand.

The Asus Tuf A15 is down to £1099 at Amazon, a great value for a machine that includes the aforementioned GPU rated up to a 140W TDP, a Ryzen 7735HS CPU, 16GB of DDR5 RAM, 512GB NVMe SSD, a 15-inch 1080p 144Hz IPS display and a 90Wh battery with fast charging.

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Atari has announced that it has entered into an agreement to acquire Night Dive Studios, the team behind the upcoming remake of System Shock, for roughly $10 million. 

Night Dive Studios is currently led by Stephen Kick and Larry Kuperman and is both a development studio and a publisher. It has published more than 100 games, and will add its remake of System Shock to that list on May 30 (on PC). Atari says a key to the success of Night Dive Studios is its proprietary KEX engine that makes classic games playable on modern hardware. Considering Atari is a retro company, and one that just acquired 12 classic retro games, it's easy to see what Night Dive Studios can do for it. 

"In addition, Atari, SA also announced that it intends to proceed in the near-term with a €30 million bond issue convertible into new shares of Atari in order to meet with its capital needs in the context of the implementation of its new growth strategy and refinancing of its debt," the press release reads. 

Epic Games have married their two money makers, creating holy matrimony between battle-royale mainstay Fortnite and Unreal Engine 5. As part of the company’s State Of Unreal presentation, Epic unveiled Unreal Editor For Fortnite (UEFN), a UE5-powered version of the game’s Creative mode which the community has been referring to as Creative 2.0 for the past few months. UEFN is out right now in beta form, and some of what’s possible with these tools are downright wild.

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AMD's Ryzen 7000 "Zen 4" CPUs are brilliant performers, but as they use a new AM5 socket, upgrading to the new CPU means picking up a new motherboard - and DDR5 RAM. Thankfully, we've started to see a host of discounts on CPU and motherboard combos, including this one from Newegg that bundles a Ryzen 5 7600 CPU and MSI Pro B650M-A WiFi motherboard for $324.99, an $84 savings compared to buying both separately.

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Arkane was developing a PlayStation 5 version of its upcoming first-person vampire shooter, Redfall, before Microsoft acquired Bethesda in 2020. However, following the acquisition, the PS5 version of the game was canceled by Microsoft, according to Arkane director Harvey Smith in an interview with IGN France (translated by IGN). 

Discussing this with IGN France, Smith said, "We got bought by Microsoft and that was a huge sea change. They said, 'No PlayStation 5. Now we're gonna do Game Pass, Xbox and PC.'"

Smith said Arkane didn't mind the decision, even if Redfall was originally meant to release on PlayStation, Xbox, and PC. 

"Support from Game Pass and having to worry about one less platform, one less complexity," Smith told IGN France. "And Game Pass has a ton of people that can play. It could be our biggest game ever because of the 30 million Game Pass [members] or whatever that number is." 

Like a Dragon: Ishin is one of several spin-offs in the Yakuza (or Like a Dragon) series. However, what makes this entry so unique is that it takes place in the 1800s and features prominent historical figures of that time period. We had the opportunity to sit down with the Like a Dragon: Ishin! localization team members Senior Localization Producer Marilyn Lee, Editor Jason Gallop, Editor Josh Malone, Translator Shun Fukuda, and Translator Tom Bayles to ask them how they managed to tackle this historical drama, and what advice they would give to aspiring editors and translators.

Kazuma Hashimoto, Siliconera: What were some challenges when localizing Like a Dragon: Ishin, given it takes place in the 1800’s were there any colloquialisms or language unique to that time period that you wanted to make sure came across clearly in the text?

Marilyn Lee: One of the highest priorities of the localization team was to ensure we keep the characterization and tone of the Yakuza series characters but also bring in elements of Edo period Japan into their dialogue. The dialects for Kyo and Tosa were a certainly a challenge. Multiple meetings were had before the team finally decided on the direction to take. Another topic that often came up during the process was what term to localize and what to keep in romanization form as we wanted to keep as much flavor of that time period as we could.

Atari has entered into an agreement to acquire 100 percent of Nightdive Studios, the company behind the upcoming System Shock remake.

In a press release, Atari stated the purchase price of Nightdive will consist of an initial consideration of $10m. This will be payable half in cash and half in Atari shares at the closing of the acquisition. As for that closure, the acquisition is expected to be completed sometime in April.

Atari additionally noted there will be an earn-out of up to $10m, payable in cash over the next three years based on the future performance of Nightdive.

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Justin Roiland, co-creator of Rick and Morty and founder of High on Life developer Squanch Games, has finally spoken publicly about the allegations of domestic abuse which surfaced earlier this year.

The allegations led Roiland to resign from High on Life developer Squanch Games. Rick and Morty's US network Adult Swim also cut ties, and said the series would continue without Roiland attached.

At the time, Roiland pled not guilty to charges of battery and false imprisonment, filed by a former partner.

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A new update has been released for Elden Ring adding ray-tracing across PC, Xbox Series X, and PlayStation 5.

This can be activated in the game's settings menu.

The patch notes do state that performance - such as frame rate and resolution - may be impacted while playing with ray-tracing on.

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As the prophecy foretold (and by prophecy I mean weeks of teases and a bucket of rumours) Counter-Strike 2 is real, coming this summer, and a limited test is available right now for select Counter-Strike: Global Offensive players. The sort-of-sequel is being built on Valve’s Source 2 engine and will launch as a free upgrade to CS:GO, carrying over all of your unlocks and purchased items.

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