May 2020

Note: This article contains spoilers for Final Fantasy 7 Remake and the original FF7, so read on at your own risk if you haven't finished them!

Even though Final Fantasy 7 Remake has the word "remake" in the title, it's more of an adaptation of the Midgar portion of the original FF7 story than it is a straight retelling. Because the new game takes some liberties with the old one, it's full of moments that reimagine elements of the original, while creating new jokes, references, and Easter eggs based on the 1997 game. The result is a game that's slightly different from what fans remember, but which is lovingly paying homage to a classic.

We've compiled a whole host of Easter eggs, references, callbacks, and jokes found in Final Fantasy 7 Remake below, but there are many, many more. Drop your favorites in the comments below.

Star Wars: Battlefront--the one from 2004, not DICE's 2015 Star Wars Battlefront reimagining--received a new update on Steam that turns the online multiplayer servers on.

"Online multiplayer on Steam has been added to the game," the update reads. It also adds several language options to the menu--including French, German, Italian, and Spanish--implements "additional audio support," and makes some quality-of-life adjustments for "a number of different screen sizes." Check below the video for the game's PC system requirements.

Star Wars: Battlefront PC System Requirements

• OS: Windows XP/Vista/7/8/10
• Processor: 1.8 GHz
• Memory: 1 GB RAM
• Graphics: 3D graphics card compatible with DirectX 9 and 256 MB VRAM
• DirectX: Version 9.0
• Storage: 3 GB available space
• Sound Card: 16-bit sound card
• Additional Notes: Mouse, Keyboard

The patch comes nearly a year after developer Pandemic Studios released a hotfix update. Star Wars: Battlefront is currently 50 percent off on Steam, dropping its price from $10 to $5. A bunch of other Star Wars games, such as Jedi: Fallen Order and 2017's Battlefront 2, are also discounted at various retailers.

The Nintendo Switch Eshop's huge spring sale may be over, but that doesn't mean there aren't any worthwhile game deals to be had. The latest round of Eshop deals spans a variety of genres, from the action-adventure platforming of Star Wars Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast to the quirky survival horror of Deadly Premonition Origins and family-friendly multiplayer of the Lego games franchise.

Notably, a first-party Nintendo game is on sale for a rare price: Splatoon 2 is down to $42 alongside a free, limited-time demo for the game running until May 6. The first "Splatfest" event in nearly a year is happening later this month, so it's the perfect time to pick up Splatoon 2 if you haven't already.

Star Wars Day is this coming Monday (May the 4th, wink wink), so the Nintendo Switch Eshop is offering discounts on a few Star Wars games. You can snag Star Wars Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast for just $7.49; meanwhile, the new port of Star Wars Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy is available for $17. While the Switch port for Jedi Outcast only includes the story campaign, the Switch release of Jedi Academy comes with classic multiplayer modes for up to 16 online players, including Siege and Capture the Flag. You can also snag Star Wars Pinball for $21, which features 19 different tables inspired by various Star Wars locations and movies. (While the Eshop only has a few Star Wars deals, see our full list of Star Wars Day game deals for more discounts on other platforms.)

The Evo 2020 fighting game tournament is now the latest event to cancel over coronavirus concerns. Event organizers announced the cancellation with a promise of ticket refunds and some form of online event to happen instead. The tournament had been planned to start in late July in Las Vegas and is considered the most prestigious fighting game event in the world.

"Due to COVID-19, we are sadly canceling Evo 2020 at Mandalay Bay and refunding all purchased tickets," the statement reads. "But to keep the Evo spirit alive, we're bringing the event online this summer. More information coming soon! The health and well-being of our community is our highest priority. We hope everyone stays safe during this time."

The announcement didn't note specifics about the summer event or how it will be scored. Since Evo is a high-level fighting tournament for professionals, face-to-face play is usually preferred to reduce lag and ensure competitive matchups. The rules may need to shift this year to account for players participating from home with their own internet connections.

This article, originally posted on May 11, 2020, has been republished to amplify black voices in GameSpot's support of Black Lives Matter. Donate to the effort to fight systemic racism here.

In 2013, I was a high schooler with way too much free time on my hands. It was the last few weeks of school and a bunch of my friends and I would routinely skip class to play video games in the back of the library. It was a forbidden gamer paradise. Animal Crossing: New Leaf just dropped and we were all desperate to play it. There was a game where you could go to a town with your friends, become a home makeover demi-god, talk to animal neighbours, and be the mayor? Why wasn't every video game built exactly like that?

Self-expression is the core element of ACNL; it's a feature embedded into every aspect of the game. You choose the colour and style of your clothes and the location and architecture of your dream house, and since there are no pressing time constraints like other social simulators, you even choose what you do all day, every day. It's a game about freedom. I was so incredibly excited when I picked it up, but that feeling dwindled fast. There were no options to have black skin colour or any black hairstyles. A game all about freedom and customization refused to let me be me. It was beyond alienating; out of all the things that could have been excluded, why those things?

Ubisoft has provided a brief roadmap that outlines what's coming to Ghost Recon: Breakpoint. Players on PC, PlayStation 4, Stadia, and Xbox One can expect a big update and some new content sometime this summer.

The studio said Title Update 2.0.5 is currently in development and will primarily focus on "bug fixing to help improve the player experience." Ubisoft didn't specify what's in the update, but the team did confirm that it's looking at the DMR exploit. The bug allowed players to trick Breakpoint into granting high-level DMR damage to any primary weapon as long as a DMR was in the secondary weapon slot. Title Update 2.0.5 will "address the current reproduction steps of the exploit" while Ubisoft continues searching for a solution that "resolves the problem permanently." The update is slated to drop sometime this June.

Ubisoft also confirmed when some highly-requested features will get added. The long-expected AI squadmates update will come out sometime this summer, alongside the looter-shooter's second live event. Summer this year falls between June 20 and September 22. The first live event, which tasked you with hunting down a Terminator T-800, ran from January 29 to February 6.

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused a number of events to be either postponed or completely canceled this year. Frankly, it was only a matter of time before Evo 2020 would follow suit. Evo 2020 has now officially been canceled, but there are still plans to hold the tournament online.

The Evo team provided an update in mid March regarding the status of the huge fighting game tournament. At the time, the event held to its July 31 start date. The situation has changed since then, and the following update has been provided via the official Evo Twitter account:

In a follow-up tweet, it has also been stated that all arena tickets and hotel room reservations will be fully refunded. These refunds will happen automatically, so there’s no need to call in to request them.

Geoff Keighley, of Geoff Keighley's The Game Awards fame, has unveiled the Summer Game Fest, a four-month-long "all-digital consumer celebration" of video games featuring "breaking news, in-game events, and free playable content" from the likes of CD Projekt Red, Sony, Microsoft, Riot Games, Digital Extremes, and Valve.


It's not entirely clear how the disparate elements making up the inaugural Summer Game Fest will be tied together (although there's a website, which seems like a good place to keep a watchful eye on), but the event is scheduled to run from May through August this year.

At present, 2K, Activision, Bandai Namco, Bethesda, Blizzard, Bungie, CD Projekt Red, Digital Extremes, EA, Microsoft, Sony, Square Enix, Private Division, Riot Games, Steam, and Warner Bros. are confirmed to be involved, and the official announcement says additional publishers will be revealed in the coming weeks.

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Alice Wu’s new film takes pleasure in the details

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Dangerous Lies and The Half of It are also now on Netfilx

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As much as the Evo 2020 cancelled news isn't a surprise, it's still a major event in gaming. An online event is planned, however.

The post Evo 2020 Cancelled; Online Event Details Forthcoming appeared first on Siliconera.

The announcement of a new Assassin’s Creed has inspired people to prove their  taste and expertise by ranking the series’ main games. That’s nice, but how about we rank the most important parts of each Assassin’s Creed game, shall we?

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In today's contest you can win this awesome EPOS | SENNHEISER GSP 670 Wireless Headset, compatible with PS4 and PC!

I know some places are making an attempt to get back to something resembling normal, but for the rest of us the current reality is sitting around at home all day in our underwear hoping for something exciting to happen. Lucky for you guys, that something just came up!

Our friends at EPOS have given us their brand-new wireless headset, the GSP 670. This thing is packed with features, compatible with your PC or PS4, and best of all, free if you win it in our contest!

Going into Predator: Hunting Grounds, you might expect the fireteam soldiers – the de facto prey – to be at a distinct disadvantage. They should be no match for a cloaked, heat-tracking, trap-laying Predator unless they really stay in a well-coordinated formation, act fast, and don't deviate from their objectives.

That hasn't necessarily been the case since the game launched last Friday. The humans are cleaning up.

When the four fireteam players can form a hit squad that actively pursues the lone Predator player and their gambit prevails more often than not, you know something is up, balance-wise. I want to be afraid again. I want to second-guess every second I waste searching for glowing currency in the jungle.

IllFonic is trying to balance out both sides of Predator: Hunting Grounds with update 1.06. It's a good start, and while some changes might go too far (a max-charge Plasma Caster blast can no longer take down a fireteam member with full health), other tweaks (like toning down the 2XL, ABR-Z, and 7EN damage at close range) were sorely needed. Those weapons had some insane stopping power.

Another big one: the fireteam can't wildly slash their knives to parry the Predator's physical attacks – they'll run out of stamina. On the Predator side, we should see less mindless Combistick builds.

There's no doubt in my mind that players will find new ways to obliterate each other even with these balance changes, but at a glance, I like where IllFonic's head is at with this patch. Keep it up.

I'll probably stick with Hunting Grounds for a few more weeks before I need new content.

Patch Notes 1.06 [IllFonic]

As a long-time Animal Crossing fan who's over the moon about New Horizons, it's heartwarming to see the game dominate the sales charts worldwide. People are eating it up. Not just the AC faithful, or curious Nintendo Switch owners who need something to sink their time into at home, but all-new players who are trying – and struggling – to buy the console for this one special hangout game.

A new weekly estimate from Famitsu (via Gematsu) indicates that Animal Crossing: New Horizons sold 283,913 physical copies in Japan from April 20 to 26, and New Horizons' running total in Japan has now topped 3.89 million physical units sold since the game's March 20 launch. When will the streak end?

To put that in perspective, the lighthearted island-life sim is toppling Super Smash Bros. Ultimate and Pokémon Sword/Shield, Japan's two biggest best-sellers on Switch. (They've reached an estimated 3.66 million and 3.57 million, respectively.) Add in a presumably massive pile of digital sales that aren't accounted for yet, and Animal Crossing's release sure seems like a textbook perfect storm.

While the core Warcraft III experience was somewhat intact, the Reforged edition of the game opened to a thud earlier this year in late January.

Numerous issues were abound, most notably the unfortunate decision to morph the original Warcraft III client into the buggier and less feature-prone Reforged one. Slowly but surely Blizzard has been clawing its way back from the depths of that launch, which includes a new patch that just launched this week.

Titled 1.32.5, it seeks to fix a bunch of problems mostly of the aesthetic variety. Units and buildings have gotten a "color polish pass," models have been changed to add consistency and visibility and some visuals have even changed to "match Classic"; which seems to go against the entire point of Reforged, but ended up being what players wanted in the end.

On the other side of the spectrum, units now have unique footprints, many portrait animations have been updated, and single-player mode for custom games is now back in, much to the delight of the community. You can find the full patch notes below. Progress! But there's still plenty of work to do.

Warcraft III: Reforged Version 1.32.5 patch notes [Battle.net]

Learn about the sound design of A Plague Tale: Innocence in this rat-tacular GDC talk. ...

Following the delay of The Last of Us Part II, Sony Interactive Entertainment had taken down digital pre-orders for the game. Now they’re back.

The house of PlayStation removed the ability to pre-order the game digitally on its online storefront in early April, and Naughty Dog just announced that the floodgates have been reopened.

You can find the standard edition here for $59.99 and the Digital Deluxe edition here for $69.99.

If you’re in Europe, you can find the standard edition here and the Digital Deluxe edition here.

You can find the announcement below.

Our mission to bring you the most wholesome and uplifting content of the week continues with another episode of Good News Gaming. We've scoured the internet and put together a little showcase of things happening in the wonderful world of video games.

This week we have an unbelievable achievement from one Guitar Hero 3 player, who has managed to hit every single note on Through the Fire and Flames on expert. That alone is something to be proud of, but this lad did it with the song running at 165% speed--unreal.

In the UK, an initiative is offering games to NHS workers. A variety of developers and publishers are on board, including ZA/UM, Xbox Game Studios, SEGA, Bungie, Deep Silver, and more. If you're an NHS worker in the UK, click this link and grab a game. And thanks for everything you do.

Streets of Rage 4 is a fantastic throwback to the classic era of side-scrolling brawlers. While this revisit to one of the Sega Genesis' most iconic franchises introduces a brand new look and revamped gameplay, its roots are firmly planted in the retro-era, making it a faithful sequel. SOR4 also includes some hidden easter eggs that take the references to the classic games. These include the original soundtracks and the entire cast of unlockable characters from the first three games, but there's also another set of secrets that take the retro element even further.

Throughout the game, you'll come across arcade cabinets for Bare Knuckle--the international title for the Streets of Rage series. While you may feel inclined to bash open these cabinets to receive some precious cash to score extra points, these are the gateway to hidden challenge stages that take you back to familiar locales from Streets of Rage 2. To access these stages, you'll need to pick up a taser weapon and strike the arcade cabinet, taking you to a special battle that you'll need to clear with only one life. For many reasons, however, this can be tough to pull off, so we've broken down how to find each cabinet and what sort of challenge you'll face in each retro fight.

Scorpions and tarantulas are pretty identical in Animal Crossing: New Horizons. If you have a Northern Hemisphere island, you'll notice that the arrival of new May fish and bugs also marks the departure of tarantulas, which have been replaced with scorpions until October. How you catch scorpions is pretty similar to its eight-legged counterpart, and you'll want to do so in order to rack up as many bells as possible. We'll break it down below.

When Do Scorpions Spawn?

Scorpions spawn on the ground between 7 PM and 4 AM. They will not spawn if you have guests on your island. They can appear on your own island or a deserted island. Like most creatures in New Horizons, scorpions are seasonal, so they will only appear a few months out of the year. Here's when scorpions spawn, depending on what kind of island you have:

Northern Hemisphere

It's time for another seasonal event in Animal Crossing: New Horizons! This time it's May Day, which runs from May 1 through 7. Unlike Bunny Day, May Day doesn't actually last the whole week--you instead have the week to go on a one-time May Day Tour at your leisure. This tour will take you to a special island unlike the regular Mystery Tour islands you normally go to.

How To Get Your May Day Ticket

To kick off May Day, talk to Tom Nook at Resident Services. He'll tell you he appreciates your hard work and would like to reward you with a May Day Ticket, which will be ready at the airport counter for you. You have to use the May Day Ticket before the end of the day on May 7, and you can only use it once. The May Day Tour takes around 15 minutes to complete, so make sure you have enough time.

When you're ready to do the May Day Tour, head to the airport, talk to Orville, and select "I wanna fly!" and then "Use May Day Ticket." Don't worry about what's in your pockets--everything you're carrying will be held for you at the airport, so you don't need to empty your inventory before leaving like you might do before going on a Mystery Tour.

With the weekend upon us, Google Shopping has kicked off a brand-new flash sale that's going all weekend. The sale discounts a number of gaming laptops that are capable of running the vast majority of modern PC games at modest settings or higher, depending on the title. There's also a great deal on the Xbox One wireless adapter for using controllers on your PC, in addition to a couple of external hard drives, which are perfect for plugging into your console and increasing your storage space for games. The sale runs from now until Monday, May 4.

May the 4th is also Star Wars Day, and a lot of different retailers are holding Star Wars-themed sales full of awesome figures, games, and other merchandise. The best Star Wars Day deals run through the weekend. There's also an excellent Steam Golden Week sale full of great discounts on games like Monster Hunter: World, Final Fantasy XV, and more.

Fortnite's Travis Scott concert was a huge success and, now, more big-name music acts are about to host their very own gigs in Epic Games' absurdly successful game. This time it's Diplo, who will be available to watch in the game's Party Royale mode. The show is set to begin at 6 PM PT/9 PM ET/2 AM BST. Along with the musical show, the Major Lazer skin pack is on sale for $25.

The Party Royale mode was recently added to Fortnite and is described as a place where developer Epic Games will experiment with experiences. It is being presented as a social space first, which means there's no building or combat, just hanging out with friends.

During a stream today, Guy “Dr Disrespect” Beahm, whose 4 million followers make him one of the most popular streamers on Twitch, shared two pieces of widely debunked coronavirus-related media with his viewers. Many viewers reacted with shock and disappointment. Others cheered him on. He never dropped his facade—never…

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I did mention yesterday that Sherman Crabs were horribly vulnerable while mine flailing, didn’t I? I’m fairly sure I probably pointed out that, in order to protect their relatively vulnerable main guns from flying debris, they reversed their turrets before venturing into devil’s gardens.

(Colonel Croesus is an open-to-all game of Combat Mission: Fortress Italy in which Allied forces are orchestrated by commenters while German units are computer controlled. Each daily turn covers one minute of action. For a scenario outline, click here) (more…)

Up Close is a new, occasional and informal series here on Eurogamer, looking at the smaller points in games in greater amounts of depth. Covering anything from a single mechanic to a reoccurring theme, in praise or criticism, the aim is simply to look a little closer at the things that deserve our attention.

Increasingly, games are looking to the environment to tell their stories. It's easy enough to see why. On one side the natural world is moving closer and closer to the centre of our thought, as the climate crisis becomes more urgent and less easy to ignore. On the other, it becomes a great device for telling a story of impending, existential disaster - or indeed one of the hope to be found in the aftermath. And, above all, pretty environments sell.

But alongside the rise of environmentally aware games is a little micro-surge of environmentally conscious ones. Which is to say, games that are less about the environment as they are about that way you think about it, the connection that forms between your mind and the world around you. Metaphysics, basically, or mindfulness, if we want to narrow it down further. In particular I'm thinking of a couple of mindfulness games from the end of last year, Lonely Mountains: Downhill and A Short Hike, which both look to use the natural world to turn your own gaze inwards, and both happen to use mountains - specifically going either up a mountain or down one, although there aren't many other things to do with mountains in fairness - to achieve the kind of effect I think they're after.

Today Muv-Luv developer âge is hosting a special event to help fill the void left by the canceled Comiket 98, and they released the first trailer of the new game code-named Project Mikhail.

The trailer provides a look at the game including TSF customization, the adventure (visual novel) part in an “AGES compatible engine,” and of course action battles against the beta.

If you’re wondering, the AGES engine is what powers all of Muv-Luv’s visual novels. 

We get the confirmation that the game is coming in 2021 for PC, iOS, and Android. 

Below you can see a recording of the trailer. Unfortunately, the quality of the stream was really bad, but we’ll update it with the official upload as soon as it’s available. This should be enough to see the features and visual quality.

Incidedntally, We already know that the game won’t have a gacha business model to weigh it down.

Valve has added a tribute to Rick May, the voice of the Soldier, inside Team Fortress 2.

May, who was also the voice actor behind Star Fox's Peppy and his iconic "Do a barrel roll" line in Star Fox 64, passed away aged 79 earlier in April after contracting coronavirus. In February of this year May suffered a stroke and entered a nursing home.

Valve's understated patch notes for its Team Fortress 2 update stated: "Added a tribute to Rick May, voice of the Soldier." But players have found this tribute is fairly extensive, with the main menu given over to Soldier, and memorial statues in the maps. Additionally, players have reported that players near these statues will hear various Soldier lines.

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When you’re cooped up inside all day long (for forty-five days and counting), making a game can make for a good distraction. There have been more than a few quarantine-related game jams, each with their own themes and concepts. Isolation, social-solidarity, and “stay home” are common, and when the historians look back at the prolific game dev output of 2020 it won’t be too hard to sniff out the symbolism. Here, I’ve taken a quick look at games from two month(ish)-long Coronavirus 2020 jams. Some are from the Portland Indie Games Scene jam (do I mostly just love that the acronym is PIGS? Who is to say. Not me.) and the others are from the House and Home Jam.

We’ve got some games about forts, some games about thinking too much, and a call to break out your craft supplies. Jam on.

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If you’ve not already said goodbye to Alice Liguori, please do! She’s leaving us after almost two years rocking our YouTube channel (and Rezzed and that), off to an exciting new opportunity she can’t reveal just yet. Don’t worry, she’ll always be part of the Council of Alices: keeping the bumbling Congress of Matthews in place is a duty.

What are you playing this weekend? Here’s what we’re clicking on!

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The Dark side is defeated. Star Wars Battlefront – the 2004 one, not the 2015 one – finally has online multiplayer again. After over a half-decade of awkward workarounds and shuttered servers, a small update to the Steam and GOG copies of Pandemic Studios’ galactic toybox lets us finally return to Star Wars’ low-poly 64-player battlefields, assuming there are even enough players to fill a match these days.

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I'm here to tell you that it is Saturday, even though I almost had to check the calendar to make sure. It almost feels like 2020 is one day, a day we just keep taking power naps through. I hope you're all keeping well and finding your own sense of routine, whatever it may be. But still, it is the weekend, and I hope that you all have a good one.

This week, I've been bouncing between several games. I've been breaking ribs in the excellent Streets of Rage 4, hoping to come across new secrets. Really, I just want to keep seeing amazing combat cop Estel Aguirre, who I basically want to "be." Not just in SoR 4, but in real life. I've also been searching for missing "Bromides" (that's photographs to you and I) in Sakura Wars, and I also ran through Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 Remastered on Veteran. Still got it.

But enough about me. What are you playing right now? After a few dry weeks, we're almost spoiled for choice with SoR 4, Sakura Wars, XCOM, Predator: Hunting Grounds, Final Fantasy VII Remake, Gears Tactics, and other recent hits such as Resident Evil 3 and Animal Crossing: New Horizons. A lot of fun times there, that's for sure. So fill us in on the action. You are always among friends here.

Have a safe and restful weekend, from all of us at Destructoid.

_{Please keep major spoilers for recent games out of the comments, thanks!}

A Call of Duty: Modern Warfare player encountered a glitch that let them play in third-person.

The first-person shooter series never normally lets players change the player's camera perspective. But redditor Tkade14 found themselves playing in third-person after a glitch of some sort during a revive.

The video below shows Tkade14 running around the Shoot House map on the PlayStation 4-exclusive Survival mode, in third-person, slicing up AI enemies with a knife. While the character runs about unrealistically fast, movement looks fluid, and the camera position grants a decent view of the action, trailing the character neatly even with slides and knife attacks. We see the soldier fire a pistol in third-person, too, after being downed. There's no reticle, but we do see the red hit marker when Tkade14 lands a killing shot.

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We all know about Creative Assembly's wonderful Total War: Warhammer strategy games. Now, Frontier Developments has quietly announced it's making a Warhammer Age of Sigmar real-time strategy game.

Buried within the investor relations portion of its website is a note that the Cambridge-based maker of Elite: Dangerous, Planet Coaster, Planet Zoo and Jurassic World Evolution has signed an intellectual property licence with Games Workshop to develop and publish an RTS for PC, consoles and streaming platforms for release in the financial year 2023 (the year ending 31st May 2023). This game is based on the popular fantasy tabletop Warhammer, specifically the popular Age of Sigmar era.

The Age of Sigmar tabletop game first released in 2015, and is the successor to the discontinued game Warhammer. Frontier's game will be the first RTS set in the Age of Sigmar. Creative Assembly's Total War: Warhammer games are based on the "Old World", which is now replaced by the Age of Sigmar.

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Lots of us are coming together through online games

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Last month, the voice behind Team Fortress 2‘s Soldier, Rick May, passed away at 79, after contracting Covid-19 during rehabilitation from a February stroke. This week, Valve’s vibrant battlefields grew a little sombre, as an update brought official tributes to the voice actor across TF2’s farms, forts and fighting pits.

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