February 2021

Call of Duty players got a rough surprise this week when Black Ops Cold War and Modern Warfare/Warzone received a new set of large updates, prompting Activision to say that 500GB PS4 owners may need to "make room" if they want both games. As you would expect, players with base storage configurations and slow internet connections cried out in unison. Which raises the question: why are games so freaking big these days?

To start, let's state the obvious: games always get bigger. They have since the dawn of gaming, and will continue to do so when we're all just living in a simulation. The original Doom came on four floppy disks in 1993, while 2020's Doom Eternal takes up around 40GB on a modern PC. This shouldn't come as a shock, nor is it alone an outrage: that's part of the price we pay for better-looking and sounding games with more content.

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With the recent confirmation from Sony Interactive Entertainment head Jim Ryan stating that more PlayStation games will be making the jump to PC, starting with Days Gone this Spring, it got us thinking: what other PlayStation adventures would we want to see make the leap onto the mod-friendly platform? While we could easily just say Bloodborne across the board (which we are very tempted to, mind you), here is an actual list of 10 PlayStation games we'd like to see on PC. 

While there is always the PlayStation Now service, it's not quite the same as an actual PC port. Modding Horizon Zero Dawn and Death Stranding when both games made their way to PC was so much fun, and to have that freedom with more titles in addition to an excuse for another playthrough would be amazing. 

Let's get started with our first pick: Bloodborne. 

Stonefly the eye-catching new project from Flight School Studios, makers behind the 2019 indie title Creature in the Well. The game blends two disparate yet inherently fun elements, armored mech suits and giant bugs, to create a neat looking adventure coming this summer. 

Stonefly centers Annika, a young but brilliant inventor who is on a quest to recover her father’s lost mech armor. To do so, Annika will have to do her best Tony Stark impersonation and craft an insect-like suit of armor of her own. Doing so involves gathering materials to craft into parts, which you’ll find scattered through the beautiful, hand-crafted forest. The sense of scale gives a sense that Annika is a small human in a big world, as she walks over street-sized branches and soars over leaves at least twice the size of her mech.  Or maybe she’s a normally proportioned human and the environment is just really, really huge. 

The reveal of Pokémon Legends: Arceus stole the show during this morning's Pokémon Presents presentation. The upcoming open-world game launches on Switch early next year and transports players back in time to the feudal period of the Sinnoh region. Trainers are let loose to explore a seemingly vast open-world teeming with Pokémon across several generations. Per the title, the game is headlined by the legendary Arceus who, from what I understand, is basically God? So far Pokémon Legends Arceus looks great (if not a bit choppy) but what does it actually entail, and most importantly, what do we as players want to see from it?

Fortnite and DC Comics have crossed over in the past, including giving players a chance to live out those fantasies of becoming key icons like the Joker, Cat Woman, and Batman himself, but now the two universes will meet again for a new adventure: a new comic series. The latest Fortnite x DC crossover is a new Batman comic series that will feature the battle royale title in an entirely different way. 

While a crossover in itself isn't at all surprising (seriously, the list of mashups is almost too long to count at this point), the fact that it's via a new comic series is a little unexpected. The new comic series is called Batman/Fortnite: Zero Point and will offer six issues for a new storyline centering around yet another tear in reality. 

A new rift rips Gotham's sky asunder in the new miniseries and drops Batman dead center into an unfamiliar world. Batman invaded the game, now he's invading the entire universe, as he tries to escape an endless loop of nonsensical chaos while meeting other characters from the Fortnite-verse like Renegade Raider, Fishstick, and more. 

Billie Eilish: The World’s A Little Blurry isn’t as interesting as its subject

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Frogwares’ dispute with its publisher continues

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Oscar underdogs, animated comedies, musical biopics and more among this week’s VOD picks

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They should have sent a poet

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Lord Shaxx should be pleased

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Most Anticipated: Monster Hunter Rise | $60 | Amazon

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Friday’s Best Deals | Kinja Deals

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Studio Ghibli and Miyazaki's Spirited Away will be adapted into a stage play by a Les Miserables director in 2022.

The post Studio Ghibli’s Spirited Away’s First Stage Play to Debut in 2022 appeared first on Siliconera.

It's a rainy Friday afternoon, it's somehow almost March, and the weekend feels just out of reach. I want to shut off my brain and zone out to the wonderful Final Fantasy VII Remake soundtrack without bouncing around YouTube – doubly so in the aftermath of Intergrade. Anyone else in the mood?

Yesterday was overflowing with FFVII news and here's one more nugget: the Remake soundtrack is streaming on Spotify today. It's also on Amazon Music Unlimited and Apple Music if you prefer.

The tracks aren't the easiest to follow out of order – their titles are currently listed in Japanese by Square Enix – but you can use your intuition if you're pretty familiar with the flow of Remake.

Take us away, Uematsu. We're in your hands now.

Sad, funny story: I recently dropped my Spotify Premium because "I don't use it that much anymore." Less than 24 hours later, after trying out the free version once in my car, I was back. They got me. It had been many years since I used non-Premium and I didn't realize what I was in for; good timing, I guess.

Tensions over a confusing in-game character trait’s effects have left at least one State of Decay 2 fan feeling burned by developer Undead Labs, who has now issued an apology and clarification, PC Gamer reports.

Steam Marines developer James Seow had been innocuously tweeting about their experience playing State of Decay 2 for the past month, until they discovered one of their characters possessed the “punched nazis” trait. The gist of the trait is that the character is quick to resolve conflicts with physical violence, particularly when arguments arise from strongly held convictions.

Materially, the trait just adds a damage bonus and makes your character more irritable to others and was flagged as a negative trait.

As Undead Labs refined State of Decay 2 post-release, that trait became less and less nuanced. All arguments between characters had ended up being categorized under one umbrella, making any strongly held belief, no matter how ideologically different, penalized the same.

Noticing this, Seow tweeted at both the Undead Labs and State of Decay 2 Twitter accounts asking why the game had “Nazi shit” in it. Seow was soon blocked by both Undead Labs' and the State of Decay 2 Twitter accounts.

Undead Labs tweeted Thursday that the blocking of Seow was the result of auto-blocking software that was inflamed by negative comments regarding Black History Month.

Undead Labs continued by saying the “punched nazis” trait was created long before State of Decay 2’s 2018 release date and was never intended to be a negative trait.

Because of our fans, Mortal Kombat became the most viewed red band trailer of all time. #MortalKombatMovie pic.twitter.com/JTrRGorb8N

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Sans is unique in that he’s the most popular character in Undertale while also providing one of the most frustrating boss fights the game has to offer.

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Now that I’ve had time to fully blast my way through Outriders, it’s time for our final review – we appreciate your patience! Now, People Can Fly’s gritty, blood-and-guts take on the co-op looter-shooter RPG genre definitely delivers great action that’s kicked up a notch by impressive sci-fi super powers, some cool world design, and a pretty satisfying loot grind. At the same time, an occasionally clunky interface, some persistent bugs, and a messy story make it seem less like a big-budget science-fiction epic and more like a guilty pleasure Sy-Fy Channel™ original series.

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That’s not necessarily a bad thing, of course - sure, SyFy might be responsible for Defiance and Hunters, but it also gave us modern classics like Battlestar Galactica and... The Expanse is pretty good, too! (It had to be saved from cancelation by Amazon Prime Video, but that’s beside the point!) Outriders would definitely fall somewhere in between those extremes if it were a TV show – its story makes decent use of its recognizable sci-fi tropes for when deep-space colonization goes wrong, but the script often takes its grim/dark self too seriously.

A lot of the voice acting falls flat – particularly for the leads, who mostly just dutifully grunt their way through accepting quests – and the script careens back and forth between being so hardboiled that it borders on camp, to downright cringeworthy takes on the ugliness of humankind. While there are a few moments throughout that could have evoked some believable empathy, they’re all undermined as a result. That said, the overarching story and unexpectedly hostile alien world is interesting enough to keep things moving, and there are some genuinely intriguing twists as it progresses, even if (without getting into spoiler territory) their payoffs are somewhat underwhelming.

A new Genshin Impact trailer is here, and it introduces Hu Tao. She's here to talk about butterflies, spirits, and Zhongli.

The post Genshin Impact Hu Tao Trailer Asks If People Are ‘Scared Yet’ appeared first on Siliconera.

The Poke-Lid mania in Japan keeps growing, and it’s especially strong today that marks the 25th anniversary of the popular Pokemon franchise.

As a consequence, another town installed a few unique Pokemon-themed manholes.

This time around it’s Ogasawara village’s turn to install the unique pieces of urban art. The village is formally part of Tokyo but is actually 1,000 km south of the capital, in the Bonin archipelago.

Usually, cities install manholes portraying the same Pokemon, that is also associated with the city itself, but this is a special occasion, so the Poke-lid portray four very special critters, Mew, Charizard, Blastoise, and Venusaur.

In the pictures below coming straight from the press release you can see what they look like.

Interestingly, the Poke-lids will mark locations for PokeStops compatible with Pokemon GO.

Today Genshin Impact developer MiHoYo released another new trailer for the super-popular free-to-play RPG.

This time around, we get to take a look at the next character joining the game, the cute Hu Tao, who certainly tries to be a bit spooky, likely without much success.

Incidentally, she is the 77th Director of the Wangsheng Funeral Parlor.

You can check her out below, including both English and Japanese voice acting, depending on your preference.

“Hee-hee, did I scare you? Eh? My appearance is less of a shock, and more of a pleasant surprise? Mm… Then, should I call this a farcical failure — or a splendid success?”

The first time the Asylum Demon came crashing down to greet me in Dark Souls, I actually made a noise: the kind of pathetic mewl of protest you might let out after decanting a mug of hot coffee onto your keyboard. Really, can you blame me? The timing is divine, holding back just long enough to let you feel safe, beckoned in further by those inviting double doors. And then BAM. Corpse pancake.

Of course, if I'd been a little more observant, I wouldn't have been taken by surprise. Pause in the doorway just after the first bonfire and you can spot the big pot-bellied bastard squatting right there on the rooftop, poised like an acrobat in the rafters, waiting for his queue to drop. It's a fantastically ballsy bit of theatre. Glance the wrong way and the whole moment is ruined. It reminded me of something Jeep Barnett said in the developer's commentary for Portal: 'One bizarre fact of game design is that, without some serious prompting, players will rarely look up.' Jeep and his team had to find a workaround - in that case, a crumbling ladder - to guide people towards the solution.

Under normal circumstances, developers desperately want people to buy their games from Steam.

But when it comes to The Sinking City, these are very much not normal circumstances.

The H. P. Lovecraft-inspired horror adventure returned to Steam yesterday - and it didn't take long for the developer to warn potential customers not to buy the game.

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Welcome to the weekend, folks! May I be the first to wish you a very happy Pokémon Day... PokéDay? Well, whatever it is, I hope for all of you budding trainers out there it's a fun one. Pokémon is such a social game, but has somehow managed to survive the difficulties of these socially distanced times. Then again, given that Pokémon as a brand has been going for some 25 years, the lil' critters are pretty much bulletproof at this point.

I have to admit, it all kind of passed me by. I was already a little old and the weight of the world had already crushed my youthful spirit, (I was 16), but I do remember the flurry of excitement for various releases from my years working in gaming retail - Pokémon Stadium's release on N64 was a particularly a nightmare time to be a shop worker. Oh, and I also hit someone with a plush Pikachu in a wrestling match... There was half a brick inside it. That part's important. I choose you.

But this article doesn't have to be about Pokémon, (you'll get some fun articles on that later today). For now, toss your (Poké)balls into the comments and let us know what games you've been hitting this past week, or have lined up for your weekend. Old or new, good or bad, Pearl or Diamond - it's all valid here. Fill us in on the action and then get on with enjoying your day. As always, thanks for stopping by, y'all!

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

343 hid an audio log in its latest Halo Infinite blog post that has certainly caught the attention of Halo story fans.

In the Inside Infinite blog post over at Halo Waypoint, 343 linked to a .wav whose file name begins with "halsey_journal_01". The easy to miss link in the text "stories to be found" reveals a conversation between Master Chief, Catherine Halsey and an unnamed man.

THERE MAY BE SPOILERS AHEAD.

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The Viking game that’s taking the world by storm

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From Easy A and Face/Off to Ghost in the Shell and Master and Commander, here are the top films to binge this weekend

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Back in middle school, I remember my classmates saying Pokémon was just a fad. It was 1998, school had just started up again, and the anime had just started up in preparation for the arrival of Pokémon Red and Blue in North America. I didn't have a Game Boy at the time and couldn't stand anime, so I didn't really pay attention. But one of my classmates fell hard for the series, being the only guy I knew who carried a Game Boy Pocket in his backpack at high school so he could be Gold and Silver. He didn't think it was a fad, and today, 25 years after Pokémon first debuted, he's been proven right.

Pokémon has been nothing short of a cultural phenomenon since 1996. While the popularity of some franchises can wane over time, it seems to only be getting stronger with each passing year. Twenty twenty-one is already looking good for the series with New Pokémon Snap and the remakes of Pokémon Diamond and Pearl. And then there is that whole Pokémon Legends: Arceus launching next year.

Today, I'm a pretty decent fan of the series, but I didn't play a proper entry in the franchise until Pokémon Emerald. Before that, my only experience with it came a few years earlier with Super Smash Bros. I couldn't control Pikachu worth a damn and wouldn't pick Jigglypuff because my friends might have thought I was gay...or, you know, figured out what should have been so obvious to them. But I loved the Saffron City stage and how Pokémon were implemented as random summons.

I gave up on Emerald around Fortree City. The next few games I bought (Pearl, HeartGold, and White) shared a similar fate, and I seemed destined to never understand the appeal of this global sensation. Then I played Pokémon Rumble for WiiWare, and everything changed.

This week on Morning Checkpoint we learn about the next terrible thing involving Cyberpunk 2077, learn the future of Anthem, check out a new trailer for more Hot Wheels in Forza, talk about some good dads and watch Destiny 2 players jump off a cliff over and over.

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Tom Holland has spoken about his role as Nathan Drake in the upcoming Uncharted movie - and it doesn't sound like he's particularly thrilled with his performance.

In a new interview with GQ, the Spider-Man star from South London said playing Drake in the film was sometimes "less about land a mark and go through this scene and more about land a mark, stand like this and see my bulging biceps...

"It was a mistake and is something that I will probably never do again."

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A trio of new reports on Stadia's demise has revealed Google's missteps and a raft of cancelled projects.

Earlier in February, Google shut down its first-party development operation, impacting around 150 people.

According to Bloomberg, Stadia missed sales targets for its controller, and targets for monthly active users by hundreds of thousands.

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Also in the patch notes: "Sharp-Eye now pees from the correct bodily area (previously too high up)."

The post Baldur’s Gate Druid Update Goes Live With Nearly 1,500 Game Changes appeared first on Siliconera.

British publisher PQube and developer Dual Effect announced that the survival horror Tormented Souls is coming physically and digitally to a bunch of platforms in 2021.

To be more precise, it’ll be released on PC, PS5, Xbox Series X|S, and Nintendo Switch. Only the PS5 and Switch versions will have physical releases.

When it was originally announced a while ago, it was targeting old-gen consoles and apparently that has now shifted.

The physical release will come with an exclusive in-game item, the “Sun and Moon’ coin.”

Below you can catch a bunch of screenshots, a trailer (from the original reveal, so that’s not new and is there just for reference), and an official description.