March 2020

Growing up with Arc System Works, it's been a treat to see them evolve to the point where they basically run EVO alongside of giants like Capcom and Nintendo.

With humble beginnings as a brawler and platformer developer, Arc crashed onto the fighter scene with Guilty Gear in 1998 and never looked back. As one of the first fighters I started to truly pore over, I can attest to its impact, and the studio has gone on to create more industry titans like BlazBlue and co-developed Under Night In-Birth.

Now we can add another game to that plucky pantheon: Granblue Fantasy: Versus. Although, it lives a floor below them.

Will Burns is an artist at Hi-Rez Studios, the developers of games like Smite and Paladins.

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It seems like everything is getting a fighting game adaptation these days. Dragon Ball Z, RWBY, Power Rangers, League of Legends, you name it. Granblue Fantasy, one of many mobile role-playing gacha games that asks players to spend real money on virtual slot machines, is the latest to jump aboard the train. While I…

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When I move back to Brooklyn in a few months, the Nebula Mars II Pro will take the place of my once-beloved 4K LG TV.

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This fantastic, 10-minute video by Mr Sunday Movies takes the end of Rise of Skywalker and turns it into something that looks like it came from Lucasarts’ Super Star Wars series on the SNES.

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Today there’s news for Granblue Fantasy Versus fans ahead of the North American release coming soon. 

First of all, we get the reveal of the fifth DLC character who will join the roster as the fifth of the first season pass. 

Many (yours truly included) have already purchased the Asian version of the game, and when today we went to purchase the three color pack DLCs for the character pass, we found out that the PlayStation Store in Hong Kong had Zoey listed as the fifth character, as you can see below.

If you’re not familiar with Zoey, you can check out her artwork at the top of the post.

She was already rumored as an upcoming DLC, but it’s nice to have confirmation.

Of course, Zoey has not been announced officially yet, but there are very few doubts left.

Granblue Fantasy Versus' 5th DLC fighter was leaked as Zooey in a PlayStation Store listing.

The post Granblue Fantasy Versus Zooey DLC Fighter Leaked appeared first on Siliconera.

The bleak, plague-themed survival game Pathologic 2 will be available for PS4 players from Friday March 6, after initially releasing for PC and Xbox One last year.

Despite the '2' in the name, Pathologic 2 is less of a sequel and more of a reimagining of the original game. Made by Russian developer Ice-Pick Lodge, the game is set on the Russian Steppe, with all the bleakness you might imagine from that setting.

You play as a doctor striving, and usually failing, to save others and even yourself from the grips of a deadly plague. The game is designed to be a punishing, disorienting experience, rather than a typical game where playing well is rewarded with success.

Today, Famitsu published interview with Final Fantasy VII Remake director Tetsuya Nomura, who talked about the comparison with the original.

Nomura-san mentioned that the release of the Final Fantasy VII Remake won’t overwrite the original, which is simply the origin. 

He hopes that fans can think of the Final Fantasy VII Remake as a new Final Fantasy VII that exists thanks to the original.

As for the original fans, he would like them to be able to enjoy both the new and the nostalgic parts of the game, and to feel the same way of those who play Final Fantasy VII for the first time. 

Speaking of differences with the original, Nomura-san mentioned that there are lots of conversations during battles, which made recording challenging. At the peak, there were nine recording sessions a week. 

Asked how that is possible since there are only seven days a week, Nimyra-san explained that they had to record in two studios at the same time. The amount of lines they had to record was unprecedented. 

If you’d like to see and learn more about the game, you can play the demo released today. The full game has gone gold, and we have an extensive hands-on-preview for your perusal.

While concerns about the coronavirus have led to GDC 2020's postponement and canceled events, E3 2020 is apparently proceeding as planned.

The post The ESA Says E3 2020 Planning Is ‘on Track’ appeared first on Siliconera.

Famous jeans company Levi's is teasing some kind of partnership with Nintendo. The San Francisco-based apparel giant on Monday tweeted a three-second teaser that appears to signal that Nintendo-branded pants are on the way.

What a time to be alive.

Nintendo would be just the latest massive entertainment brand that Levi's partners with. The company previously made officially licensed Star Wars and Disney clothing.

There’s a handful of films at home that the family and I very rarely end up watching. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. The Revenant. The Imitation Game. Her. The Judge. Absolutely outstanding films, but they’re also what we call “heavy” – and we seldom have the emotional energy to sit through two hours of “heaviness” at the end of a long day. So we pretty much never bite the bullet and say “You know what? Let’s finally do this.”

Today, I’m biting the bullet. I’m gonna talk about something that makes me very sad to think about. It’s a game called Steel Circus, and last month the developers bit their own bullet, shut down the servers, and pulled the plug on their dying game. Which is such a gruelling shame, because Steel Circus was probably the most fun I’ve had in any competitive game since Rocket League.

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"In [Chan's] movies, he uses everything around him. He'll put his foot in a pot and smash it on someone's head and then grab a ladder and spin it. We wanted to capture that feeling of going from enemy to enemy." ...

In Coffee Talk, a visual novel from Toge Productions, you're the proprietor of a Seattle cafe in an alternate universe where vampires, succubi, and all manner of fantasy races inhabit our world. They drop into your late-night coffee shop and talk things out. Regular problems. Relationship troubles, job struggles, all that stuff. Over time though, a theme becomes clear. A lot of Coffee Talk's cast touch on the issue of overwork and the marketing of passions. None encapsulate this more than your first ever patron and one of the only human characters you meet - Freya.

Who is Freya? She's a struggling writer, working day-to-day on whatever will pay her bills. There are some lovely short stories on her outlet's website, often based on the other customers who pop up throughout the course of the Coffee Talk. After work, though, she'll drop by as the sun starts to set and work on her original fiction. You're there, serving her espressos and chatting about her attempts fulfil her dream of publishing a book.

Freya's not okay. Her life is a tangle of various stresses, from the realisation that her daily job just isn't as inspiring anymore, to the ever-encroaching creative burnout that comes with monetising your passions.

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Today Konami updated the official website of Yu-Gi-Oh! Legacy of the Duelist: Link Evolution announcing a release date for the port for PS4, Xbox One, and PC.

The game will launch worldwide on these platforms on March 24, 2020. 

It will support the latest version of the official rules revised on April 1, 2020.

Players will be able to collect over 10,000 cards and face off against 150 Duelists including Yami Yugi, Seto Kaiba, Yami Marik, Yubel, and Soulburner.

Competing in ranked matches will require PlayStation Plus and Xbox Live Gold on PS4 and Xbox One. Of course, there is no requirement on PC.

If you already purchased the Nintendo Switch version, you still have a reason to be excited as it’s going to get a free update including the additional content.

On top of the announcement, Konami also released a brand new trailer showcasing the new content coming with the game and the update. 

You can watch it below and see if it gets you excited about the release. 

If you want to learn more about the game you can enjoy the first screenshots in Japanese, more localized in English, and a trailer in Japanese, and the first promotion video in English.

The nominations for the BAFTA Games 2020 Awards have been revealed. IGN's Game of the Year winner Control has the joint-most number of nominations at 11, alongside Death Stranding, which is IGN's Best PS4 Exclusive of 2019. Disco Elysium, which is IGN's Best PC Game of 2019, has been nominated for seven awards.

11 is the highest number of nominations any single game has received since the standalone BAFTA Game awards began in 2004. That high number is helped along by the new award categories this year, which are Animation, Technical Achievement, Best Performer in a Leading Role, and Best Performer in a Supporting Role.

[ignvideo url="https://www.ign.com/videos/2019/08/26/control-review"]

The winner of the EE Mobile Games of the Year award is decided by the public. So if you want to, cast your vote for either Assemble with Care, Call of Duty: Mobile, Dead Man’s Phone, Pokémon Go, Tangle Tower, or What the Golf?.

The winners will be announced on April 2, 2020, and you'll be able to tune into BAFTA's Facebook, Twitch, and YouTube channel to watch it all happen live. As previously announced, Hideo Kojima will receive the BAFTA Fellowship on the night.

The full list of nominations for the BAFTA Games 2020 Awards are below.

Epic Games has just concluded the downtime for the Fortnite 12.10 update and the patch is now available to download on all platforms.

The news came via a tweet from the Fortnite Status Twitter account. Here, Epic shared that the downtime would take place at 4am ET, and has since concluded.

While the trend of no patch notes continues for the Battle Royale game mode. Epic Games has shared patch notes for both Save the World and Creative Modes that you can check on the respective links.

In terms of Fortnite’s headline Battle Royale mode, there are some new gameplay additions.

First and foremost the Loot Llama has returned to all normal Battle Royale modes.

The Sims 4 liker has logged on again. This week she (I) was poking around for some nice potted plants to download for some ongoing build projects, and found a list of recommended custom content makers by Ravasheen, the creator from my first ‘custom content of the week’ post. Ravasheen recommended NynaeveDesign for great plant work, and lo – Nynaeve does great plants. I was cooing over them in pigeon-y delight when, a few pages deeper in Nynaeve’s creations on archive site The Sims Resource, I stumbled across a bunch of great pokémon crap.

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It's not easy being green, so can you blame Baby Yoda for wanting to let off steam on some stormtroopers once in a while?

As spotted by PC Gamer, the Baby Yoda mod (which was first teased back in November) has now been publicly released, meaning anyone can take The Child for a drive in Star Wars Battlefront 2. It works as a reskin of BB-8, so you can roll around killing imps left, right and centre. Serves those stormtroopers right for hitting him.

As explained by nanobuds, it's not entirely perfect: BB-8's arm and wires couldn't be removed, and the latter occasionally fly out of Baby Yoda's space pram. It also leads to a rather strange animation where the pod spins around and slices all surrounding enemies. Which, to be honest, looks kind of terrifying.

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There’s simply no stopping the SSD deals train this week, as today there are more great savings to be had on a bunch of really rather good WD Black and Blue SSDs and HDDs over on Amazon US at the moment, including almost 50% off the heatsink version of their excellent WD Black SN750 drive. Normally $150 for the 500GB model, you can now bag one for $80, which is the cheapest it’s ever been. So come inside and do the SSD deals dance with me, because there are some right tasty deals to be had here.

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SanDisk and WD Storage Gold Box | Amazon

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For two decades, the artist known as Maggi has worked in South Korea’s game industry as an illustrator and art director. Now, she finally quit her day job and is focusing on her new love: tattoos.

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It makes sense that Apple Arcade's Mini Motorways asks different things of me than Mini Metro, because cars are very different from trains. Still, it took me a while to understand quite how I had to approach things, and it took even longer to let all my Mini Metro instincts fall silent.

Mini Metro is a game about making underground systems, creating various coloured lines that link together stations marked by a variety of shapes. The point, I think, is to encourage diversity. You want a line that can take any traveller to its intended station, which means a line that covers all the shapes for all the different shapes of traveller. It's wonderfully positive in this regard: it sees cities as places where diversity is a strength, and there's a certain understanding that if you're using public transport you're not going to go directly to your destination anyway - everyone is in it together, which means you can all expect to go around the houses.

Cars though! Mini Motorway initially looks kind of similar to Mini Metro. You have stores and you have houses, and you have to lay down roads to connect the stores to the houses. Basically, the stores make requests and people in the houses have to fulfil them, by sending cars out to the stores and then back to the houses. Rather than dividing things up by shapes, the game sorts by colour. Pink houses to pink stores! Orange houses to orange stores.

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Missile Command: Recharged is a neon-colored reimagining

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Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night won't be getting the Roguelike Dungeon mode that was promised after it was unlocked as a stretch goal during its Kickstarter campaign.

In a Kickstarter update, the game's director Koji Igarashi said a Roguelike mode will not be possible as "the code that was created early in the game’s development is not currently compatible with this type of gameplay (especially a procedurally generated castle)."

[ignvideo url="https://www.ign.com/videos/2019/06/26/bloodstained-ritual-of-the-night-review"]

The Roguelike Dungeon mode was a $5,000,000 stretch goal that was reached in June 2015 during Bloodstained's Kickstarter campaign. The mode would have used procedural generation to create a new castle for players to beat each time they played. "Once you’ve explored its passages and defeated its boss, you’ll get a code that will enable you to share your randomly generated dungeon with a friend," reads the official description of the mode.

Igarashi and his development team at ArtPlay have apologised for not fulfilling the planned feature but will be replacing it with a Randomizer mode. "Before starting a game, players can choose up to eight different game parameters to be randomized during the playthrough," the developer explains.

Players can choose to shuffle around items, chests, quests, shops, enemy drops, save and warp rooms, crafting results, and which boss ends the game. ArtPlay says that there will be safeguards on certain items, however, so that players don't encounter a situation in which they are unable to complete the game.

Pulsating with irrepressible energy, Sayonara Wild Hearts is a music-based arcade game which lets you ride motorcycles and riposte teddy girls, all while balancing on a massive aerial sword that sails through the air at 200mph. It’s a euphoric and unexpectedly emotive experience, brimming with explicitly queer and feminine energy fortified by its bisexual lighting filter of pink, purple and blue, and an electropop soundtrack influenced by the likes of Charli XCX and Chvrches. Given that the game is made up of an eclectic mix of genres from side-scrolling shooter to bullet hell, it’s a marvel how much the music is in sync to the movement on screen.

When I spoke to Daniel Olsén, one of the soundtrack’s composers, he shared that Swedish developer Simogo didn’t intentionally give Sayonara Wild Hearts such a distinct queer vibe. Instead, they were motivated to make a game that’s just more inclusive.

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There’s a lot of Half-Life: Alyx to coo over in those three gameplay videos Valve released yesterday. Googheads might be smitten with catching grenades in mid-air, opening a car door to take cover behind, or lifting the lid on a portaloo then reaching in deep with your digiarm. Me, I have simple pleasures: I am well into the needlessly extravagant reload animation on what I believe to be a sci-fi shotgun. Who wants the fiddly task of manually loading shells when you can have a little mechanical arm do it at terrifying speed? Not me.

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Are you finding the Champion of Stormfall mode in Wolcen a bit slow going? If so, you may want to look into giving Expeditions a go. These are small gauntlets where you explore dungeons and grab lots of loot. It’s worth playing this mode a few times to try and get the most production out of it. (more…)

Today’s selection of articles from Kotaku’s reader-run community: Spacemon: Frontier - Chapter 73: Ghosts Of The Frontier, Pt. 5 • EASTSHADE Is A Mini-Morrowind With No Combat [Video] • TAY Retro: Nintendo Entertainment System- Castlevania II: Simon’s Quest [TV Commercial, NA]

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A selection of SanDisk memory cards and WD external NVMe SSDs are on sale at Amazon UK today. If you're looking to upgrade the storage in your Switch, smartphone, action cam or mirrorless camera then check out the Micro SD card deals; otherwise for PC and console upgrades check out the WD external SSDs further on down the page!

Let's hit the SanDisk Micro SD cards first. One regular speed SanDisk Ultra card (rated up to 100MB/s reads) and three speedy SanDisk Extreme cards (rated up to 160MB/s reads) are on sale. Here's how they break down in terms of value, with the biggest reductions on the larger 512GB and 1TB capacities:

The recently developed 512GB and 1TB drives still hold a premium over their older 200GB and 400GB counterparts, but the price per gigabyte has dropped steadily over the past months and now going for a very high capacity card has become more reasonable. 200GB and 256GB Micro SD cards remain the sweet spot, I think, with a similar 256GB card from Integral costing £28 at present - just 11p per gigabyte.

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