January 2021

With the Yakuza Remastered Collection hitting Game Pass this week, we thought it'd be a great time to revisit the story that starts it all: Yakuza 0! Developed by Ryu Ga Gotoku Studios and published by Sega, Yakuza 0 is an action-adventure JRPG that follows the story of Kazuma Kiryu, a young crime family member who is framed and suspected of murder in a contested part of Tokyo. Being the sixth title in the main series, the game serves as a prequel to Yakuza Kiwami, which was a remake of the first game.

If all of that sounds exciting to you, then be sure to watch this live episode of Replay, wherein the Game Informer crew explores all that 80s-style Kamurocho has to offer. If you can't get enough of our live shows, remember to subscribe on YouTube and Twitch to get notified when we go live each week! Thanks and enjoy the show!

Turrican Flashback hits PlayStation 4 (also playable on PS5) and Switch today, and it’s a project well worth a look. The new collection includes four full games: Turrican, Turrican II, Mega Turrican, and Super Turrican. It includes updated visuals with numerous options to tweak things to a more nostalgic look, as well as save states and a rewind feature. It’s an ideal way to play these games, whether you’re excited about a return to an old favorite, or if you never got the chance to play these awesome games back in the day.

Developer Factor 5 would later be strongly identified with its work on Star Wars: Rogue Squadron, but the studio’s early work on Turrican (and its many sequels) is a big part of how it came to prominence.

As a side-scrolling action game, the Turrican series is lesser known than many of its contemporaries, but even a few minutes playing one of these games offers ample proof that quality was not the problem. These are stellar games that were (and are) a ton of fun. 

Matt Miller: Jeff, I’m excited to chat with you about these games. We both spent some time looking at the new collection. I was surprised how much I’d forgotten about these games, and how smart they are. What was your initial impression? 

Niantic wasn't messing around when it raised Pokémon Go's level cap from 40 to 50 late last year. When the game launched in 2016, trainers were able to ascend through the first 40 levels with determined playing, leaving many to wonder if Niantic would create additional endgame content for them, other than the steady drip of new Pokémon to catch.

I was one of the trainers that made "short" work of the old level cap. I believe I reached 40 in my third year of playing, which required 20 million total experience points to advance from 1 to 40. That took some playing and grinding. I didn't mind; I thoroughly enjoyed getting outside to raid and meet up with friends to hit up Pokémon Go hotspots on Community Days.

When news hit that Niantic was raising the level cap to 50, I was giddy. As someone who still plays the game daily, I liked the sound of having another thing to do. Niantic has done a tremendous job of supporting Pokémon Go in the last couple of years, and while there isn't a shortage of new content or events to participate in, more is always better. I didn't put much thought into the requirements needed to hit each of the new levels. I just thought it was cool that each of these new levels came with new tasks.

When Biomutant was announced in 2017, we were impressed by the wonderfully weird world Experiment 101, which was founded by ex-Avalanche Studios employees, was pitching. That game was originally set to release in 2018, but that year came and went with not much info from the Swedish development studio. Now that we're in 2021, Experiment 101 and publisher THQ Nordic have finally announced a release date for Biomutant: May 25. But what took so long, and why did the developer stay so quiet for much of that span?

In a recent interview with IGN, studio head Stefan Ljungqvist said that much of it had to do with the scope of the project contrasting with the size of the team. The game features a dense map full of NPCs, outposts, and bizarre creatures to encounter, as well as a mutating protagonist, so even if the world itself isn't massive when compared to the size of other open-world maps, it's an ambitious project. "It's a big game, a big bite for 20 people to chew off," Ljungqvist said.

As part of an effort to promote the NFL's virtual Pro Bowl this year, EA Sports' professional football game Madden NFL 21 is now free for a limited time.

The free play weekend started on January 28 and it runs through January 31. During this time, anyone on Xbox One or PS4, as well as PC, can download and play the full game until January 31. In addition, Madden 21's Superstar Edition is 60% off.

EA historically discounts the newest Madden game around this time, hoping to piggyback on the increased level of interest in football in general due to the forthcoming Super Bowl.

We're nearing the end of Destiny 2's current content season, the Season of the Hunt, which means a bunch of new changes are on the way. Bungie is adjusting how it'll dish out weekly rewards in the next season and returning some weapons and armor to the rotation to make past destinations and activities more enticing. And now we know that Destiny's toughest multiplayer challenge, the Trials of Osiris, will get new rewards with the next season as well.

Bungie showed off new Trials of Osiris armor on Twitter with a few slick-looking teaser shots. It's tough to get too good a look at it--there's a lot of shadow in each of the shots to add some mystery--but it looks like the armor will be very different (and perhaps a lot darker) than the current armor offered in Trials of Osiris. The Trials event carries an Egypt theme (it's all about the Destiny character Osiris, who's named after the Egyptian god of the underworld), so expect that to continue with this armor. Take a look at the shots below.

McDonald's appears to be preparing another round of Pokemon Happy Meals, just in time for the pocket monsters' 25th anniversary celebration. The promotion hasn't been formally announced but fans appear to have snapped photos of a leaked display.

The fan account PokeJungle shared the photo from Twitter user PkmnTrainerAbel, which shows a display with some of the collectibles. According to PkmnTrainerAbel, the Happy Meal promotion begins on February 9. With your meal you'll get four collectible cards (out of a possible 25) along with some other goodies like card sleeves and stickers.

McDonald's has teamed up with Nintendo for themed Happy Meals before, including Pokemon. The most recent set in 2019 also included cards, along with backpack clips of classic Pokemon like Pikachu, Eevee, and Lapras. McDonald's has also offered toy sets revolving around Mario games.

From February 3-9, Steam will be showing off hundreds of demos for upcoming games as it brings back the Steam Game Festival for another round in 2021.

Starting at 10 AM PT/1 PM ET on February 3, players will be able to check out demos of upcoming games, along with livestreams and developer panels. There will be over 500 playable demos for fans to experience, and some developers will be available to chat as well. Those who participated in the Game Festival Steam held last summer should be familiar with this format, but now those who missed out will have another chance.

The long-in-development Fallout: New Vegas PC mod that recently launched, The Frontier, has been taken offline due to "deeply disturbing" content shared by a member of the team.

According to the team's project lead Thomas "tgspy," who delivered a message on the mod's Discord server, the artist in question had "posted animated pedophilic content on their personal artist accounts." The artist has been removed from the team and the developers went to work removing the various inflammatory content used in the game by that person.

"We have received requests to remove some content provided to us by artists and voice actors, so we will be complying with these requests," tgspy told Eurogamer. "I will be pushing a final build to [Nexus Mods] and waiting for the [Steam] build to be accepted."

If you live in Texas, you might be able to try being a conductor in an English version of Densha de Go.

The post Densha de Go English Version Appears at Dave & Buster’s appeared first on Siliconera.

Apex Legends' eighth season, Mayhem, is now mere days away from its Tuesday, 2nd February launch, and developer Respawn is continuing to feverishly crank the hype handle in anticipation, this time delivering a full run-down of the abilities employed by new hero Fuse.

Walter "Fuse" Fitzroy, a former mercenary and a "true connoisseur of explosives", is the 16th hero to join Apex Legends' ever-growing line-up, and, following on from his initial unveiling earlier this month, has now been given the full reveal treatment in a new video.

Fuse, who can rain-down destruction from an "exceptional range", comes equipped with the passive Grenadier ability. This enables him to stack one more grenade per inventory slot than any other hero, and throw them "farther, faster, and more accurately" using his mechanical arm.

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The Boss Designer will work with the design leadership to implement compelling boss encounters from conceptualization to implementation utilizing Unreal 4. ...

Bloomberg offers an inside look at the management missteps that led to retconned releases like Crucible and a number of high-profile departures while games endured development hell. ...

Now that you’ve gotten a handle on the GameStop stock madness, it’s time to learn about Dogecoin. Why is the retail investor hivemind pumping up the obscure cryptocurrency with a Shiba dog for a mascot? Why, for the Lolz. With the help of Reddit and Elon Musk, Dogecoin has increased in value by 600% in the last 24…

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One of the best parts of Assassin’s Creed Valhalla does not take place in England. Where you go is a spoiler. It’s also one of the best parts of the game. We recently asked the people who made it to explain its origins

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Valve announced Thursday that, after more than a decade, Germany has decided to allow folks to play an uncensored version of Left 4 Dead 2.

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Hitman 3 has finally launched, bringing IO Interactive’s trilogy to a close. As a series, it sends Agent 47 all around the world, from New Zealand to India, and all of the locations are impressive and varied. Now that we’ve seen everything the series has to offer, we’ve ranked all of the best Hitman locations.

Frost Giant Studios, the dev team made up of many ex-Blizzard and StarCraft/WarCraft vets, provided their first monthly update as to how the development of their planned RTS is going.

While most of the update is focused on community and housekeeping notes, there is a bit of juicy information about where the team’s head is at when it comes to the actual RTS they are making.

They spent a bit of time talking about their affinity towards asymmetry when it comes to unit design between the different races they are planning. In layman’s terms, they seem to prefer it when every race has their own suite of units that behave very differently than the others.

The example they gave was how in StarCraft the Zerg’s Zergling and the Protoss’ Zealot have very different behavior and resource costs, but they are still both a tier 1 ground units at the end of the day.

They also seem to like how in StarCraft even basic units retain their value because of their uniqueness. Again, the example they used is how in StarCraft the Ultralisk isn’t just better Zergling.

However, an area where they seem like they might be deviating from StarCraft is how worker/miner units work. In StarCraft the workers all operate effectively the same, deviating in very small ways.

Frost Giant Studios wants to explore asymmetrical design for workers as well and stated WarCraft was an inspiration there. Here’s what they had to say on that front:

And Alan Tudyk makes it hilarious, mostly by being weird

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If you have a soft spot for 2012's Thomas Was Alone – or you think you'd be into a cozy, minimalist puzzle-platformer about a cast of blocks making their way through the world with full narration helping to tell an honest-to-goodness worthwhile story – the game is resurfacing soon on Switch.

As relayed by creator Mike Bithell today, the Nintendo Switch version of Thomas Was Alone will be out on February 19, 2021, with a 20 percent early-bird discount pushing the regular price down to $7.99. There's also a Switch demo, and it's playable now on the eShop. I love to see it.

So much has changed in the indie scene over the past decade, to say nothing of Bithell himself, whose career has only grown. Many games have come and gone, but Thomas Was Alone still resonates.

As for the Switch port, it's only right. This game was on Wii U. Nothing can be left behind.

[Update: The Silent Hill chapter for Monsters & Mortals will be out on February 24, and the DLC includes several familiar faces: Heather, Cybil, Robbie the Rabbit, the Nurse, and of course, Pyramid Head.]

Silent Hill is reaching new audiences with crossover DLC in multiplayer horror games, and the longer this goes on, the more impatient fans will become. I hope it's all building to something more substantial.

Konami's next cross-game collaboration for Silent Hill is with Dark Deception: Monsters & Mortals, a maze-chase horror game on Steam that's popular in the Let's Play circuit. This afternoon, Glowstick Entertainment shared a teaser video with audio and visuals plucked from the hibernating horror giant.

Toshihiro Nagoshi, one of the leading creative forces behind the Yakuza series, will soon take on a new role within Sega, the company announced today (via Gamasutra). As of April 1, 2021, Nagoshi will serve as the company's creative director. Since 2012, Nagoshi had been working as Sega's chief creative officer, a title he will no longer carry. 

How this will affect Nagoshi's day-to-day work remains to be seen. Currently, alongside working as Sega's CCO, Nagoshi is a member of both Sega and its subsidiary Atlus' board of directors. He has also served as executive director on the last several Yakuza games – a series he helped create – and is the founder of Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio, which handles development on that series.

Nagoshi's tenure within Sega goes back more than 30 years, when he was brought on board to work at Sega AM2, a development studio within the company known for its arcade and fighting games, headed by legendary developer Yu Suzuki. Alongside Yakuza, Nagoshi has had a hand in making Shenmue, Virtua Fighter, Daytona Racing, and Super Monkey Ball. 

A few days ago, I sat down on my phone ready to explore a brave new world of Dragon Quest. Dragon Quest Tact is a mobile tactical strategy game set in the universe of Square Enix's iconic RPG franchise. I was ready to dive into a magical, mystical world full of adorable little slimes, massive dragons, and cool sound effects drawn from decades of the legendary and genre-defining Dragon Quest series – a property I’ve been into since I was first annihilated by a green dragon back on the NES. Remember when you had to buy like, door keys for stuff? And finding Erdrick’s armor in that one zone full of deadly monsters and poison? Ahead of its time, I tell you.

Anyway, instead of diving into a new gaming experience with any value whatsoever, I once again found more of the same trend that we’ve been enduring and tolerating over the last decade. Dragon Quest Tact is the fall guy for this piece, but it’s absolutely not the only offender; over the last few years I've noticed this with everything from Disney to Star Wars to Final Fantasy, and every time it happens I go in bright-eyed and bushy-tailed only to be bewildered when reality rears its ugly head. 

Riot Games is taking its ongoing gender discrimination dispute with former employees out of the courtroom and back into private arbitration after a court granted its motion to compel earlier this week. ...

History is the study of literally everything that has ever happened, and by that measure, it is objectively the most interesting of all fields. It’s also just totally, categorically wrong, like, 90 percent of the time. Case in point: You’ve probably heard that E.T. for the Atari 2600 was so bad that it crashed the…

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A week after its logic-defying surge began, GameStop stock is still holding strong, despite more shenanigans and goofy twists, closing at $325 today. That’s higher than Facebook, Apple, and Microsoft. The bubble seems destined to burst any day now, but boosters on the WallStreetBets subreddit are continuing to hype…

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Maybe the real treasure was the estrangements we fixed along the way

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In today's contest you can win a Switch copy of Project Warlock from Super Rare Games!

If you slept on picking up a super limited edition of Project Warlock from Super Rare Games, I've got some bad news -- that shit sold out, yo! It's gone. Donezo. Fin. Adios.

Good thing we snuck Mr. Destructoid into their offices (he went up through the toilet like a shitty, reverse Santa) and stole a copy to give away! Win it here, since you can't buy it anymore!

Monster Hunter Rise is now a video game about crafting the best-looking armor for my Palamute.

Forget my Switch Axe, forget the grind, forget the thrill of hunting with strangers – my dog needs to look fresh. Just one problem: there are too many good choices and I'm never going to settle on a single look. I eventually got over that analysis paralysis with my Palico in World, but this will be even tougher.

A Palamute armor round-up surfaced on my Twitter feed this week, and I haven't been able to shake it. Capcom posted a similar recap last November – it didn't wow me. This gear, on the other hand...

This is what it's all about. This is worthy of a half-covered Do it For Her plaque. Eye on the prize.

The greatest trick I repeatedly pull is convincing myself I’ll play the latest Pokémon title, but then never actually doing it. Like many kids of the ‘90s, I fell in love with Game Freak's lovable Pocket Monsters when they initially took the U.S. by storm. I lost countless hours playing Red, Blue, and Yellow multiple times, invested just as much time in the anime, and collected way too many cards. I was a certified Poké-maniac. 

When Generation 2 rolled around, I was eager catch some new monsters, but a series of unfortunate events pushed me away from the series for good. First, my Game Boy Advance was stolen with my copy of Pokémon Gold inside (which I’ve never completed to this day). Then the anime let me down for the final time when Ash lost the Johto League finals even after defeating Gary, cementing Ash as a choke artist I could no longer get behind. My enthusiasm for the franchise simply vanished after that. Outside of a brief, random return with Pokémon Platinum and partaking in the beautiful phenomenon of Pokémon Go’s early days, I haven’t touched the series since. Still, I kept an ear to the ground for every subsequent release, secretly hoping for an irresistible new feature that would lure me back. 

Earlier this year, CD Projekt Red banned a Cyberpunk 2077 mod that allowed players to retexturize in-game assets to virtually have sex with Keanu Reeves' character, Johnny Silverhand. The reason behind the ban was because the studio felt it was inappropriate to recreate explicit sexual encounters with a real person who did not give their permission (despite the character himself having numerous scenes throughout the game that were graphically sexual in nature). Today, we covered that this very reasoning could be the nail in the Yakuza spinoff series Judgement's coffin. The conversation surrounding that previous coverage, and similar instances when a recognizable name is used in a game, prompted a desire to explore this topic further. For as long as I've been covering mods in my career, the ethical debate of fiction vs. reality has always been a subject that has two clear and opposing stances. But to understand the Great Debate Of Modding, we have to dive a bit deeper into the conversation surrounding this community. 

What is rule 34? 

First, let's talk about the ever-present rule 34.

January is almost over, and as usual, the big releases slowed down after the busy holiday season. Hitman 3 was excellent, but other anticipated games like The Medium and Cyber Shadow didn't totally deliver. But sometimes a game can come out of nowhere and impress you, and that's why I'm excited about Olija by Skeleton Crew Studios. It just launched this week, and I’ve had a great time with it so far; it blends fast-paced combat, an atmospheric and alluring world, and engaging settlement-building to create one of the year's first big surprises. Here's why you should check it out.

Midway’s NBA Jam and NFL Blitz are two of the greatest sports game franchises thanks to how they both provide fun, over-the-top experiences that require little knowledge of the pastime in question. The company would eventually set its sights on hockey, boxing, and even professional wrestling, but it never quite got…

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Samsung Galaxy S21 | $800 | Best Buy
Samsung Galaxy S21 Plus | $1,000 | Best Buy
Samsung Galaxy S21 Ultra | $1,200 | Best Buy

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Last night, after just over a week of daily playing, I finished Final Fantasy XV. And I realize now why I stopped so near the end during my first run some five years ago. It was a defense mechanism, my body’s way of protecting itself from the emotions that are going to utterly ravage me from now until whenever we are…

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Today Aerosoft revealed new information and screenshots about its upcoming lineup for Microsoft Flight Simulator.

All the info were shared on the official forums of the developer (Sources: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5).

First of all, we get to take a brand new look at the upcoming Bombardier CRJ package, showcasing the cockpit and the extensive functionality of the electronic flight bag (EFB):

If you don’t know what an EFB is, it’s a tablet airline that helps pilots with a lot of tasks while preparing and executing a flight. Add-on developers also often it to include settings that don’t fit the default simulator’s UI.

The Promised Neverland is a strange beast of an anime. For all of its cat-and-mouse mind games and deception, there are adventures through demon-infested terrain and horror-esque battles for survival with massive monsters. This can make finding shows that scratch the same itch difficult, but worry not: We’ve done some research and found five anime like The Promised Neverland if you’re looking for something similar.

Higurashi: When They Cry

Anime Like Promised Neverland

In the secluded village of Hinamizawa, Keiichi Maebara finds what he believes to be an ideal life.

Shortly after moving to the town, he quickly befriends the other children who live there and settles into a rhythm of hanging out, exploring the countryside and ingratiating himself into the local culture.