January 2021

The new year is already kicking off with its first game showcase: Demospree, a five hour celebration of 21 upcoming indie games being shown off live on Twitch by five different streamers.

Spearheaded by the developers of the upcoming puzzle game Seasonspree, Demospree is focused on showcasing "adorable, wholesome games," all of which are set to release in 2021. These games will be played live on Twitch by five streamers: SeriouslyClara, Wanderbot, Retromation, ReeRee, and Adriosa, so viewers can get a look at what these titles are bringing to the table firsthand.

The event will start January 5 at 2 PM PT/5 PM ET on Twitch and will feature several highly anticipated indie games including the colorful painting game Chicory (formerly known as Draw Dog), farm-to-table bakery sim Lemon Cake, animal arcade adventure Button City, and food-physics playground Nour.

Developer Rockfish Games is launching Everspace 2 in both Steam Early Access and the GOG Games in Development program later this month. Starting on January 18, you can dive into the space loot shooter for $40 USD / £32 / €37 and experience what looks to be a pretty substantial chunk of the game.

"After multiple rounds of community testing by some 2,000 players, and great feedback from various gaming outlets and content creators on the closed beta, Everspace 2 is ready for early access," Rockfish Games CEO and co-founder Michael Schade said in a press release. "We can't wait to receive feedback on the initial release version from space game enthusiasts on Steam and GOG."

This early access version of the game will be good for about 25 hours of gameplay, composed of a story-driven campaign that lasts for a little over 12 hours and then several side quests. Everspace 2 is scheduled to remain in early access for the rest of the year, officially launching for PC in 2022 at an increased price.

The Xbox Series X|S consoles released in November with no major issues, but it hasn't been entirely smooth sailing for the next-generation machines. Some portion of the audience has reported issues with the controller, and specifically how it can disconnect during gameplay.

A spokesperson for Microsoft acknowledged the issue in a statement to The Verge, saying a fix is being worked on and will be delivered in a future update. For now, Microsoft said it recommends players who are experiencing the issue to ensure their controller is updated.

Microsoft's website has a step-by-step rundown of how to update your Xbox controller.

Cyberpunk 2077 launched in rough shape, and even though developer CD Projekt Red has addressed some issues with various hotfix patches the reality is that the open-world RPG still has numerous issues. One such issue allows you to propel yourself across the highways faster than any vehicle, and it's already being put to good use.

Bunnyhopping shouldn't be unfamiliar to you if you've watch a speedrun or two. With careful input and care for momentum conservation, players can turn a simple forward hop into a cascade of acceleration that sometimes never hits a ceiling. Cyberpunk 2077 doesn't go that far, but it's clear from some videos (via Rock Paper Shotgun) that you can build up a ridiculous amount of speed on foot as V.

In a city filled with cybernetic limbs, having characters move this fast doesn't seem as out of the ordinary as it might in other games. Yet it's clearly not a method of movement the game was designed for. Despite that, it's become a big part of the blossoming speedrunning scene the game has already fostered, with improvements allowing for the technique to be used without any special augmentations required.

2020 saw large streamers take the relatively obscure hidden role game Among Us and turn it into one of the biggest games of the year, breaking records in the process. Now it seems that Rust is the latest multiplayer game to receive a massive boost from the Twitch audience.

As one of the earliest hits in the free-for-all survival genre, Rust has always enjoyed a sizable audience, despite first emerging in Early Access in 2013. However, over the past two weeks, streamers with large audiences like Shroud, Pokimane, Myth, and many others have all joined the same server provided by Offline TV. This led to over a million Twitch viewers for the game on January 3, as well as a new peak of 135,000 concurrent players on Steam.

Rust received Twitch drops shortly after this resurgence. They became available on January 7.

The AR game Minecraft Earth will be shutting down this summer, Mojang has announced. In a statement, the studio explained that the coronavirus pandemic had hampered key components of the game, forcing it to move its resources to other projects.

"Minecraft Earth was designed around free movement and collaborative play--two things that have become near impossible in the current global situation," Mojang said on the Minecraft blog. "As a result, we have made the difficult decision to re-allocate our resources to other areas that provide value to the Minecraft community and to end support for Minecraft Earth in June 2021."

A final update to the game, releasing today, will make some changes to facilitate playing indoors, while also removing monetization hooks. The update will remove all real-money transactions, grant some free character creator items, drastically reduce ruby costs, and reduce the time and resources needed for crafting items.

Pokemon Go's first Community Day of 2021 is just around the corner. January's Community Day takes place next Saturday, January 16, and it'll give players around the world a chance to catch a new featured Pokemon, learn a new event-exclusive move, and take advantage of other in-game bonuses. To help you prepare for the event, we've rounded up everything you need to know about January 2021's Community Day below.

January 2021 Featured Pokemon: Machop

This month's featured Pokemon is the Fighting-type monster Machop. Throughout the Community Day, Machop will spawn in the wild much more frequently than it normally does, making this a good opportunity to stock up on enough Machop Candy to evolve it. Shiny Machop will be appearing throughout the event as well. This will be much rarer to find, but you should be able to encounter one with a little persistence.

It is rare for a game like Super Meat Boy Forever to be so well done after a wait like this.

The post Review: Super Meat Boy Forever Is a Well Done Twist on the Original Recipe appeared first on Siliconera.

The game vanished off most storefronts in August

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Developers said they’re not ‘able to predict the server performance in these kinds of situations’

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Microsoft revealed several games coming to the Xbox Game Pass catalog for PC, console, and Android through the first half of January.

Coming later this week on Thursday, Jan. 7 are Konami’s soccer game eFootball PES 2021 Season Update for Android and console, DC Universe fighting game Injustice 2 available on all three platforms, and adventure game taking place in 1950s Ireland The Little Acre for Android and console.

Another four games will be coming next week on Thursday, Jan. 14. Deck-building, action, and rogue-lite game Neoverse, 2017 adventure game What Remains of Edith Finch, and JRPG-styled game set in 1999 YIIK: A Postmodern RPG will be available on PC. Action RPG and dungeon crawler Torchlight III will also be available on Android and console.

Microsoft also announced four games will be leaving Xbox Game Pass on Friday, Jan 15 with real-time strategy game FTL: Faster Than Light on PC, Sword Art Online: Fatal Bullet and Tekken 7 on console, and shoot ’em up My Friend Pedro for both PC and console.

The company is still offering a discount on Xbox Game Pass Ultimate for new subscribers at $1 for the first three months. The service includes Xbox Live Gold, Game Pass for console, and Game Pass for PC at a price of $14.99 per month.

Call of Duty: Black Ops – Cold War’s Season One update and its combining with Warzone was advertised as an “unprecedented free content drop.” In terms of the number of actual changes, I guess that’s correct, but the battle royale’s current state suggests that those changes have only seen it take a step backwards.

The combining of progression systems is a great idea, allowing anyone who plays both Cold War and Warzone to work towards unlock goals, no matter what they’re playing. It’s a streamlining of the system that’s very welcome.

That’s pretty much where the positives end and bring me on to the big controversy in Warzone right now: the Cold War weapons’ affect on the battle royale’s meta.

Warzone’s not a stranger to balance issues. The Bruen, Grau, and Fire Shotguns have all been horribly overpowered since the game’s launch, but the balance has never been worse than it is now.

Between the rapid fire MAC-10, almost insta-kill dual Diamatti pistols, and two hit kill DMR, you’re pigeon-holed into a select few weapons if you want to have any chance of winning.

There’s no point using any of the other assault rifles or SMGs because you’ll lose if you come up against someone with the DMR. Just take a quick look at the video below to see how devastating it is.

It's nice to have one last gut-feeling look at The Medium before its January 28 launch.

Bloober Team released 14 minutes of gameplay footage today, and while I've seen the split-reality horror game on a bunch of occasions, in some ways, this is the first time I'm really seeing it as it truly is. That might sound like the setup for a backhanded compliment, but it's not – I knew the central split-screen hook, and honestly, that's all that sunk in. This footage paints a more comprehensive picture.

I won't go through the video beat by beat, but I had a few – okay, more than a few – takeaways:

Take a look at these tips from the Spelunky, Shovel Knight, Crypt of the Necrodancer, and Axiom Verge devs on making speedrunable games. ...

You might remember The Sinking City, a Lovecraftian horror game that launched in June 2019 to middling reviews (read ours here). The game was delisted in August 2020 due to a nasty contract dispute between developer Frogwares and publisher BigBen Interactive/Nacon. After months of litigation, the French court has ruled in favor of Nacon, and The Sinking City is back on sale on the Microsoft Store and will return to PlayStation and PC storefronts “at a later date”.

The original dispute centers on an agreement made between Frogwares and Nacon two years after production began on The Sinking City. According to Frogwares, it gave Nacon the right to sell/commercialize the game in exchange for their funding. The Sinking City IP rights would still belong to Frogwares, however. The deal also stipulated that Frogwares would receive payments from Nacon for each development milestone hit.

Remember how sleek and modern the PlayStation 2 looked when it first came out? A third-party store, called SUP3R5, is releasing black PlayStation 5's as a call-back to the classic PS2 console. That means that the white plating that accompanies the day-one PS5 and DualSense controller will be black instead. Additionally, the age-old PlayStation logo will make an appearance and the colored circle, square, triangle, and cross (or "X" button for all you blasphemers out there) will be on the controller. Awesome, right? Well, there's a catch: The black PS5 stock will be very limited. 

According to GameSpot, the store is only providing 304 custom consoles so you'll have to secure your own black PS5 quickly. Of course, buying a regular PS5 console is already close to impossible, so good luck if the black version suits your fancy. You'll also be paying for the recolor as black PS5 packages (the black DualSense is included) are priced at $650 for digital editions and $750 for disc editions. The standalone black controllers are also more expensive at $100 rather than the normal $70. 

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The incredibly deep roguelike deck-building RPG Slay the Spire will get the tabletop treatment, board game makers Contention Games recently announced, letting people explore the game’s inventive card battles together in real life.

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When I think about diversity in last year’s crop of big-budget games I can see the bright spots. Some of PlayStation’s marquee games, for example, featured some of the most diverse casts I’ve seen with men of color and queer women front and center as main characters. But there’s still work to be done in the games…

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Time the dash just right, and zoom around Night City

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Microsoft Flight Simulator is a young platform, so developers are continuing to find impressive ways to break new ground.

Aerosoft is preparing to release Brussels Airport (EBBR) and developer Jo Erlend posted a small but very interesting preview on the publisher’s forum.

You can see what I mean below.

At first sight, it may seem difficult to understand exactly what you’re looking at, but this is very impressive.

First of all, we see that the visual dock guidance system has been at least modeled. While we don’t see it in action, it does show an animated display.

Normally, the VDGS isn’t even modeled in Microsoft Flight Simulator add-ons, but this is certainly a step forward. It’ll be interesting to see if Aerosoft will manage to actually make it functional.

Perhaps equally impressive is what we see behind the VDGS and beyond the iconic curved glass of Brussels’ terminal. We can see that the people inside are actually subtly animated, providing a much more dynamic environment compared to what is in most airports nowadays.

At the moment, Brussels’ Airport doesn’t have a release date just yet. It has been pretty much a meme among the community with the first tease for previous simulators dating all the way back to 2013.

The latest weekly reset in Destiny 2 has brought a new quest, Coup de Grâce, where you kill High Celebrant, capping off an ongoing story thread in Season 12. However, Bungie has alerted players that rewards may not be dropping as they should.

"We are investigating an issue where some rewards are not dropping from completion of the High Celebrant mission," Bungie said in a tweet. It didn't offer any further specifics, but players on the Destiny subreddit have reported possibly related issues. That includes not receiving the promised Exotic ship, although that may be due to further, as-of-yet unavailable steps that still need to be completed.

Whatever the case, you may want to hold off on completing High Celebrant, though Bungie will hopefully be able to retroactively hand out the correct rewards to those who finish it in the meantime. If you want to try your hand at it anyway--and who can blame you, with Destiny 2's story being in such an interesting place--you can talk to Crow on Tangled Shores to get started.

Fight Night, a new limited-time event, is now live in Apex Legends, adding a new town takeover and making welcome quality-of-life changes to the game. As a collection event, Fight Night also introduces a ton of new epic and legendary cosmetics to purchase from Apex Legends' in-game store. We've compiled images of them below.

It's a pretty excellent roundup of cosmetics this time around. In terms of legendary skins, the collection includes seven new character skins and five new weapon skins. In keeping in line with the theme of the event, everything is getting a shiny, Olympus-looking makeover.

Co-developer Treyarch is moving its Call of Duty playlist update notifications for Black Ops Cold War to Thursdays, the studio announced on Twitter. The next one lands on January 7.

The playlist updates for the latest Call of Duty games--particularly Modern Warfare and Warzone--are sent out relatively spontaneously, though they land on various Tuesdays throughout the year. From now on, however, playlist updates will start trickling out on Thursdays. The next update for Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War arrives this Thursday and features Raid and Crossroads Strike 24/7, Gunfight Blueprints, and Dirty Bomb Duos.

Treyarch only mentioned Black Ops Cold War. However, it's likely that this change in when playlist updates are sent out extends to Call of Duty: Warzone as well.