September 2020

Sony has announced the latest PlayStation Plus lineup, and prepare to be "whelmed."

Starting on October 6, you can pick up Need for Speed Payback and Vampyr on the service, both of which are PS4 releases. You have until November 2 to claim them, at which point they'll be cycled out for something else.

Need for Speed Payback came out in 2017 and is currently the second-most-recent Need for Speed title, preceding Need for Speed Heat. Vampyr is from 2018, where the Dontnod action RPG was released on PC, PS4 and Xbox One. It's slated to arrive on Switch late next month. Both of them were released to a semi-middling reception, so I understand if folks aren't super jazzed about PS Plus next month.

As a reminder, you have until October 5 to log in and claim PUBG and Street Fighter V. I suggest you do that! Street Fighter V has come a long way since launch, and even the base version is worth trying.

PlayStation [Twitter]

Jump Rope Challenge was all set to go "poof" today, just like Super Mario All-Stars 3D will in 2021. It is...the Nintendo way.

Except this time, a game was spared from the "vault" treatment, at least for now. Announced on Twitter in the dead of night last night, Nintendo of America explained that they had a change of heart. Jump Rope Challenge, having reached a "2.5 billion jump" milestone, will remain on the eShop.

How long is it staying? Well, it seems like a threat. Nintendo notes: "As new jumpers are joining, the free download will be available until further notice and will not be removed from the Nintendo eShop on 9/30." Until further notice eh? Well if you haven't picked up this free app yet, you may as well do it now.

No reason was given for the change of heart, but it could have been a marketing stunt all along. I'm just the messenger!

Nintendo of America [Twitter]

Ever since I first spent a month with Train Sim World, I've had a hankering for more games featuring trains. They're just so serene, and in 2020, serenity is something we all could use a bit more of. The Train Sim games are great, but the title I've really had my eyes on for the past two years has been Tracks.

This wooden train sandbox game doesn't have the sim elements of those Dovetail Games titles. Instead, it taps into those early-childhood Thomas the Tank Engine train sets, allowing players to construct their own tracks and the villages, towns, and cities that sprout up around them.

The game released last year on Steam, but in just a couple of weeks, it's making the jump to Switch, and it's bringing along all of its DLC for Tracks: Toybox Edition.

[Update: It's Steve/Alex from Minecraft!]

Thanks random retail advertisement! You were right.

As fans speculated, a retailer display that showcased the Super Smash Bros. Ultimate Fighter's Pass had an interesting proviso: it would be changed out on October 4 for a new leaflet. Hey! That could mean an imminent Smash DLC reveal. And so it is.

This morning Nintendo spilled the beans and gave us a heads-up for yet another surprise "Direct-like" stream: they will announce the next DLC fighter on October 1 at 10AM ET. Typically, this involves Sakurai giving us a dramatic reveal trailer, followed by in-depth gameplay footage and developer commentary. This video will allegedly be "three minutes long, followed by a brief message from Sakurai."

As Sakurai showed off back when Min-Min was announced, he has a full setup to 'cast from his home, so everything should be good to go. As far as a release date goes, Smash DLC typically is released a week-ish away from the reveal. So the new fighter could enter the fray as soon as October 8.

I hope it's not another Fire Emblem character! Just joking, I won't jinx it.

Nintendo of America [Twitter]

Today Eagle Dynamics released a new trailer of the new package for the realistic combat flight simulator DCS World A-10C II Tank Killer.

The trailer is of the launch variety to celebrate the release, which is today.

DCS: A-10C II Tank Killer is basically a paid update for the previously released module DCS: A-10C Warthog, and brings new weapons and systems, on top of new features and fixes.

Those who already own DCS: A-10C Warthog can upgrade for  $9.99 for a limited time. After one month, that price will go up to $19.99.

Those who don’t own the previous incarnation of the Warthog have to pay the full $79.99 price to get the whole package including the update.

You can check the trailer out below and hear that majestic “BRRRT!”

Here are the main features of the package. You can also check out the previous videos showing some of the new weapon systems.

Sony has today announced October’s two “free” PS Plus games and it’s a lineup that offers two very different gameplay experiences. Dontnod’s action-RPG Vampyr and EA’s Need for Speed Payback are available from Oct. 6 for subscribers.

Vampyr was one of 2018’s standout games from a smaller studio according to yours truly; I scored the game 4/5 in Twinfinite’s review, concluding:

“Vampyr cleverly repackages familiar gameplay mechanics and design in a way that makes it feel fresh and compelling.

The moral dilemma of nursing or feeding on London’s population is a terrific video game premise, combined with the ability to actually harvest XP from them and use in exchange for new abilities. The manner in which the world reacts to those decisions, too, and how those knock-on effects shape the outcome of the story is really well done.”

So much was my excitement for Vampyr, in fact, that it’s a constant source of amusement for the rest of the Twinfinite staff who weren’t as enamored with the game and find my enthusiasm over the top. But nobody cares what they think.

As for Need for Speed Payback, it’s more of the same dumb, silly open-world arcade racing series that you’ve played before. We scored it 2.5/5 in our review, so yeah, just download Vampyr instead and save yourself the bother! No, only kidding — you do you.

Remember, you have until Oct. 5 to download September’s PS Plus games.

It’s that time of year already, and the Tokyo Game Show has come and gone again. As usual, TGS served up a bevy of announcements and new trailers for some of the hottest games coming out of Japan in the not-too-distant future.

TGS 2020 was a little different, being presented as a series of live streams and showcases instead of a physical event due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The games themselves, however, did not disappoint. Let’s take a look at some of the very best titles shown, in no particular order.

Publisher Bushiroad revealed a new trailer of the upcoming mobile rhythm game D4DJ Groovy Mix.

The trailer shows both rhythm gameplay and the narrative part of the game, animated via Live2D.

On top of the game, we also get to take a look at the opening video of the anime series D4DJ First Mix, which will air in Japan on October 30.

You can watch it below.

D4DJ Groovy Mix will release in Japan on October 25 for iOS and Android.

It’s part of a mixed media project by Bushiroad that includes games, anime, and live concert. You may be familiar with Busiroad mostly due to another rhythm mobile game, BanG Dream!.

That being said, English-speaking fans need not worry, as we already know that the game is also coming to the west, even if we’re not yet aware of a specific release date.

I should probably clarify that our second RPG is in the infancy of pre production.

The word is out that some publishers are changing that once-sacrosanct price point of $60 to $70 for the next-generation. The waters since the days of pulling a paper slip off the wall at a retailer and walking it up to the cash register have been muddied quite a bit. Often you're not even getting the "full game" anymore with that initial price tag, as DLCs, battle passes, and other cash-gated experiences are part of a full-price title.

So where does it end? If you could know for sure that you could get an "entire game" for $100, would that be a good price? How about $150? Is it better that the initial cost of the game is kept down under the $100 price tag to keep them affordable, keeping addons and additional content available for purchase? The future is rife with possibilities where technology becomes its own arbiter of content and control, so perhaps there are other alternatives to simple price increases.

In 2017, we saw the release of blockbuster titles like The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and Horizon Zero Dawn. Because of this, Nier: Automata flew under my radar. Nevertheless, last spring (2020) was the perfect time for me to finally traverse Automata’s desolate and beautiful open world. If someone had told me four years ago that Platinum Games’ thought-provoking action/RPG would play a large role in influencing my decision to pursue a master’s degree in game design, I wouldn't have believed them. And yet, here I am – back in school, and discovering all the ways Automata continues to influence my creative process.

In Blightbound, players form parties in the classic trinity (Tank, DPS, Healer) to take on a variety of dungeon delves. Until today, that meant using matchmaking or asking your friends to come with you to take on bosses and battles.

Now, if you can't find anyone else to play with, A.I. fills those positions and lets you keep crawling. The Helping Hands update also includes a variety of smaller enhancements. Blightbound is currently available in Early Access on Steam. Check out the trailer below for more details.

With each new season of Call of Duty Warzone the previously new guns are taken out of the Battle Pass, meaning there are new requirements for unlocking them. The AN-94 took season 5 by storm, proving itself to be one of the best assault rifles in the game, but with the arrival of a new season it’s a little harder to get hold of. If you didn’t unlock it as part of the Battle Pass, fret not! In this guide we’ll detail how to unlock the AN-94 in Warzone Season 6, and give you some tips on the best way to do so.

In this Warzone Season 6 guide:

• How to unlock the AN-94 in Warzone Season 6
• Best way to get seven hipfire kills using an assault rifle

How to unlock the AN-94 in Warzone Season 6

Now that the AN-94 is no longer in the Battle Pass you’ll need to complete a specific challenge to unlock it if you haven’t already. The challenge tasks you with getting 2 hipfire kills using an assault rifle, in seven different matches. As challenges go, this is pretty do-able, so we’ll go into some tips on completing it below.

A new Assault Rifle seems to be pretty much par for the course at this point, with the AS VAL being the 13th, by my estimation. Still, the Warzone team are finding interesting things to do with the gun class, and the AS VAL is a solid addition to the pantheon. With its integral suppressor a default part of the gun’s kit, our in-depth AS VAL loadout guide will help you make the most of the rest of the weapon’s attachment slots.

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If you’re invested in the competitive side of Valorant, you probably know how it feels to be dropped by an Operator time and time again. If a player was good enough with the sniper rifle, they could nab it early on and effectively dominate a match singlehandedly. When it came to countering them, it felt like there just weren’t enough options. Well, Valorant’s latest patch has nerfed it heavily to help alleviate this problem.

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The SP-R 208 is the newest piece of gear added to the Marksman Rifle category in Call of Duty: Warzone, and it’s an absolute treat. Fans of the Kar98k will immediately fall in love with this weapon, as it boasts massive damage at pretty much all ranges, as well as a great deal of customisation potential. For this reason, it can be tough to kit it out optimally, so here’s our in-depth SP-R 208 loadout guide to help you get the best possible kit on this exciting new marksman rifle.

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The 1.5.0 Animal Crossing: New Horizons patch notes are here and bring Halloween stuff and Dream Island and Nook Shopping changes.

The post Animal Crossing: New Horizons Patch Notes Share Dream Island and Nook Shopping Changes appeared first on Siliconera.

Next year, people will see both Breakers and Breakers Revenge return in QUByte and Visco's Breakers Collection.

The post Breakers Collection Brings Back Breakers and Breakers Revenge appeared first on Siliconera.

Make some time tomorrow morning! Nintendo will announce the next Super Smash Bros Ultimate fighter.

The post Super Smash Bros Ultimate Fighter Will Be Revealed October 1, 2020 appeared first on Siliconera.

I'm working on a new website called GameDataCrunch.com, a new way to understand the game industry by looking at metrics and slicing them up in a bunch of different ways. ...

Cyberpunk 2077 developer CD Projekt Red has regained on its promise to avoid mandatory crunch on the long-gestating RPG. ...

One year after the launch of Remnant: From the Ashes, creative director David Adams discusses what Gunfire Games has learned getting into the world of live games. ...

Spider-Man Remastered puts players back in the latex suit of the arachnid superhero, but this time around civilian-mode Peter Parker is going to look a little different thanks to a new facial capture for the PlayStation 5 upgrade.

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Last night’s presidential debate was an abomination by just about any standard. The sitting president told white supremacists to “stand by,” took no responsibility for the deaths of more than 200,000 Americans killed by covid-19, refused to back a peaceful transfer of power, and generally lied with reckless abandon…

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Switch Lite Carrying Case | $15 | Best Buy
Switch Hard Case | $27 | Best Buy

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I’ve been flying regional jets and in general aviation for 12 years. But your flying job will always restrict you to the type of flying and destinations that your employer needs, and unless you’re Bezos or Zuck, you can’t own every genre of airplane and fly everywhere. With Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020, I got a…

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October’s PS Plus games are a weird combination, but not a bad one: I’m totally charmed by Vampyr, despite its stumbles. As always, these games are only “free” if you have an active PlayStation Plus membership.

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An LG 8K TV and AuraGlow Teeth Whitening Kit lead Wednesday’s best deals.

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'Tis almost October, and to celebrate the onset of this most sinister of seasons, Sony is giving PlayStation Plus subscribers a touch of the gothic in the form of Life is Strange developer Dontnod's action-RPG Vampyr. Less spookily, Need for Speed: Payback is option number two.

Vampyr drops players onto the fog-shrouded, open-world streets of Edwardian London to take control of Doctor Jonathan E. Reid, a man struggling to reconcile his Hippocratic Oath with his vampiric need to slurp on the pulsating life-force of innocents and not-so-innocents.

What follows is a game of grimy fisticuffs and investigative exploration as players scour the streets in search of folk that might be a little more deserving of an icky death than others. It's an interesting concept, but Eurogamer's Aoife Wilson wasn't entirely convinced by its execution when she reviewed it on release back in 2018.

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Developer Whoop Group's ridiculously charming wooden train set builder Tracks will be tooting its whistle and trundling onto Switch this November.

Tracks: The Train Set Game, as it's more formally known, takes its cue from the classic wooden train sets created by the likes of Brio; as such, it's not a game in the traditional sense, with goal and objectives to complete, but a delightfully genteel, yet entirely engrossing sandbox experience, focussed on the simple pleasures of laying down track then theming it up to the nines using a wealth of beautifully designed props.

The core game, as originally released last year, is a largely rural affair, featuring everything from quaint village shops to farmyard props, enabling players to plop down the likes of cars, roads, bridges, trees, bushes, hedges, rocks, rivers, and animals in their quest for aesthetic perfection.

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Blizzard’s free Overwatch promotion ends early

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The fire-type starter returns for another Community Day

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The next-gen Spider-Man is literally a whole new Peter Parker

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Cross-gen cross-play will make it easy to find a four-player squad

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Treyarch is bringing Zombies mode back for Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War, and along with a first look at the mode's 1980s Dark Aether storyline (that conveniently involves a World War II bunker), the studio also confirmed that Zombies will support cross-platform co-op. That's what we like to see.

"We finished a story [in Black Ops 4], but we're still in that same universe, and this is the next chapter," said game designer Kevin Drew. The new Zombies crew in Cold War is a CIA-backed team, Requiem, that's led by Grigori Weaver from Black Ops. A rival Soviet squad, Omega Group, is also in the mix.

One of the bigger structural changes is that you won't have to start hunting undead hordes with a pistol this time – player progression in Zombies is hooked into the wider Black Ops Cold War multiplayer experience (including the Battle Pass), and you can bring your Gunsmith weaponry over "via loadout."

Treyarch says that "any weapon in the game" can be "sustainable in later rounds" through a new weapon rarity system. More than anything else, I like the sound of an exfiltration option that lets players get to a chopper if things are looking grim. If you escape, you'll come away with "some rewards."

We'll see how these changes go over with long-time players. Perks, including Juggernog, are coming back (without a usage limit), and Treyarch also plainly teased Dead Ops Arcade 3 on Twitter.

Still holding out on checking out the most popular hero shooter in the world? Sometimes the late bird gets the worm.

Overwatch League team Boston Uprising is giving away copies of Overwatch on PC. All you have to do is fill out this form. Then you should get a code to redeem on Battle.net within a few days. Overwatch is still priced at $20, so this deal is hardly something to thumb your nose at.

Maybe more interesting is that this promotion has been running for nearly a month. The rules page indicates that the Boston Uprising have been giving away Overwatch since September 4. It just seems that the internet at-large hadn't noticed until today.

Anyway, go get yourself Overwatch if you don't already have it. You have plenty of time in the sense that this giveaway runs until January 31, 2021. However, you don't have plenty of time in the sense that supplies are limited and awarded on a first come, first served basis. So, these will probably go quickly. Blink like Tracer and they'll be gone.

Get a Digital Copy of Overwatch for PC! [Boston Uprising]

What are some of my favorite moments in any game, ever? Well, Devil May Cry 3 steals away multiple slots for me.

The rush of figuring out that a second player can pick up and play Vergil alongside of Dante in that pivotal moment near the end of the game? Priceless. The humanoid confrontation with Vergil at the very end that showcases some of the best aspects of Devil May Cry's combat? Also classic.

So when Vergil shows up in any Devil May Cry as a playable character, I perk my head up. He was a blast to play in the third game's special edition, and epitomized the "stylish" mentality of the series. He was also arguably the best part of DmC: Devil May Cry when he entered the fray via DLC, and the combo videos for Devil May Cry 4's Vergil appearance can get pretty crazy.

We now know that he's set to re-appear in the special edition of Devil May Cry 5. At that time, we also got a brief glimpse of his new theme: "Bury the Light." Since then the song has been widely released on multiple marketplaces, including Spotify. Give it a listen!

Although Vergil is coming to the current generation in the form of DLC, the special edition is one of the few "next-gen console exclusives" in terms of visual fidelity and mechanical enhancements. I'm stoked to play it.

Insomniac shared more details about Spider-Man Remastered today, and apart from visual upgrades across the board and a Performance Mode targeting 60FPS, there's a big surprise: Peter has a new face!

People liked how he looked before, so why go to the trouble of changing his appearance now for PS5? According to community director James Stevenson, the team "loved working with John Bubniak on the original game; however, to get a better match to Peter Parker/Spider-Man actor Yuri Lowenthal's facial capture, we have cast Ben Jordan to be the face model for Peter Parker on the PS5 console."

It'll take some adjustment, but it's doable. For a direct comparison, check the gallery.

"It's my face's fault," said Lowenthal. "The stupid stupid bones in my face. Blame my bones."

Here's some extra fluid footage of Spider-Man Remastered running in Performance Mode.

As far as specific remaster enhancements, this version has improved models and materials, ray-traced reflections, ambient shadows, spatial 3D audio, photo mode quality-of-life features like swapping your suit mid-shot and placing lights in the environment, and "higher fidelity skin, eye, and teeth shaders" along with "individually-rendered strands of hair." This is Insomniac Games, after all. They're going for it.

In surprising but thoroughly welcome news, developer QuByte Interactive has announced that obscure '90s fighter Breakers is getting set to see re-release on PC and consoles in 2021.

Developed by Visco Corporation and originally released in 1996 and 1998 respectively, Breakers and Breakers' Revenge are 2D fighting titles which captured the audio/visual and gameplay style of SNK's classic one-on-one fighting games such as Fatal Fury and King of Fighters. The new Breakers Collection will include both titles along with new content such as the all-important Online VS. mode.