March 2021

Epic Games has added Fall Guys developer Mediatonic, and its parent Tonic Games Group, to its slowly expanding list of subsidiary game development studios. ...

There are plenty of uses for a camera system in your home. First and most importantly, they’re powerful tools for home security. That’s especially useful in the work from home era when we’re cooped up inside all day. If anything suspicious is happening, you’ll want to know right away. But home cameras can also be used…

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The Fortnite crossovers are about to get out of control

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Fall Guys developer Mediatonic has been scooped up Epic Games, as part of the Fortnite and Unreal Engine developer's acquisition of the Tonic Games Group.

Announcing the deal on its website, Mediatonic called the move a "huge win for Fall Guys", claiming that joining Epic "will accelerate our plans to improve the game and bring Fall Guys to as many players as possible, while continuing to support the community."

According to the developer, it'll be business as usual for Fall Guys following the acquisition - "each season, we'll continue to expand...with new content, features, rounds, and costumes", it writes - and the game will remain available on Steam and the PlayStation Store. Fall Guys' recently announced Switch and Xbox editions will also still go ahead this summer.

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Apex Legends is making its long-awaited Switch debut next Tuesday, 9th March, and, in the run up to release, developer Respawn Entertainment has shared a brand-new trailer offering a closer look at the free-to-play shooter running on Nintendo's console.

Apex Legends was originally expected to launch on the platform last autumn, but complications caused by the coronavirus pandemic saw its release pushed into this year. The port is finally poised for its public debut, however, and Switch owners will be able to enjoy cross-platform play, all seasonal content, and full feature parity with other versions when it launches next week.

And if you're wondering how the Switch edition is shaping up, the answer appears to be (and, granted, I'm no Douglas Foundry) 'very nicely indeed', with the port - developed in conjunction with Panic Button, which also brought the likes of Doom Eternal, Warframe, and Wolfenstein: The New Colossus to Nintendo's console - getting a fresh airing in the trailer below.

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Mondo, an online retailer that has become a beloved pop culture haven through the years, has just announced that the previously sold-out Silent Hill and The Last of Us vinyl soundtracks are back in stock come Wednesday. 

This site has offered a ton of gaming soundtracks in vinyl form but with all of the reboot rumors afoot regarding a possible new Silent Hill, it's easy to see why so many fans would be looking for anything to grab onto. I missed out myself on the first round of Silent Hill vinyl grabs, so when the company shared its latest restock alert, we just had to share: 

This Wednesday.

Restocks of our best selling videogame soundtracks – THE LAST OF US PART II, THE LAST OF US (Vol 1 & Vol 2), SILENT HILL, SILENT HILL 2, and more. https://t.co/w97sKwoH9x pic.twitter.com/DyjgoMjys3

Today the publishers of The Dark Pictures Anthology: Little Hope, announced that all owners of the most recent game in the series of short story horror games will receive a single free Friend’s Pass.

What the Friend’s Pass does is allow a non-owner of the game to experience one playthrough of the game via Shared Story mode in Little Hope.

Little Hope at this point is well past the spooky season, so it probably doesn’t hurt the bottom line too much to let a few new people give the game a try and prime them for the next game in the anthology, House of Ashes, due out later in the year.

In addition, Little Hope players will get access to the Curator’s Cut which unlock some new exclusive scenes after their initial playthrough.

All of this should be available to players starting today.

We reviewed The Dark Pictures Anthology: Little Hope last year when it released and while flawed, we still found its scares to be worth the price of admission, especially if you’re playing with a friend. I’m more of a Man of Medan fan myself, though.

The post Little Hope Owners Are Getting Access to a Free Friend’s Pass & New Curator’s Cut Features appeared first on Twinfinite.

Attack on Titan continues to be a classic in the making, and its titular Titans have played a big part in that. In particular, its Nine Titans have captured the imagination of the series’ fans, with at least one’s design and personality resonating with them on a personal level.

However, you may be struggling to pick which of these gargantuan characters you most relate to, and that’s why we’ve compiled this quiz to help you figure out which Titan you would be based on your personality.

Now, without further ado, let’s get to the questions.

In a few short days, we’ve managed to learn quite a bit about Square Enix’s new co-op RPG. The Outriders demo went live just last week, and it allows players to go through the entire first chapter of the game with friends.

We managed to sink a couple of hours into the demo and came away with a few big takeaways. Here are the six things we learned from playing the Outriders demo.

Today Aerosoft finally announced the release date of its Bombardier CRJ package for Microsoft Flight Simulator.

The much-anticipated add-on will launch on March 16. The release will happen at the same time on Aerosoft’s own store and on the Microsoft Flight Simulator official marketplace at the same time.

On top of the announcement, we get two new videos showcasing the aircraft’s procedures.

To be more specific, we see the engine startup and the taxi and take-off, as usual, narrated by TheDude, a very experienced real-world CRJ pilot.

We already know that the pricing will be as follows:

• The CRJ 550/700 will cost €42 (plus your local vat when applicable).
• The CRJ 900/100 will cost €16.75 (plus your local vat when applicable).
• The CRJ 900/1000 will require the CRJ 550/700 to be installed on the system.

The second package should come approximately 6-12 weeks after the first.

Incidentally, if you’d like to read more, you can take a look at our extensive interview with project manager Mathijs Kok.

Bungie announced today on Twitter that a developer deep dive of the Deep Stone raid would be scheduled for tomorrow at 10am PT.

In the past, these deep dives are a run-through of the entire event from developers and Bungie team members and are filled with developer insight, lore tidbits, and other interesting commentaries.

Like just about every raid in Destiny 2’s existence, Deep Stone Crypt is jam-packed with interesting encounters, lore implications, and gorgeous graphical detail.

If you’re a big raider, or just a fan of Destiny 2 in general, the event should definitely be worth checking out.

For more Destiny 2, check out our recent rankings of the best Destiny raids, and also our review of Beyond Light.

Third-party add-on developers have released more assets showcasing new aricraft coming to Microsoft Flight Simulator as add-ons.

Just Flight released new screenshots of the Hawk T1 & T1A package showing the exterior model and its details, on top of a few beautiful liveries.

Cozy Grove has shades of Animal Crossing and Story of Seasons to it, as it encourages you to visit each day and live alongside ghosts.

The post Preview: Cozy Grove Might Raise Your Spirits appeared first on Siliconera.

PlayStation and Nintendo fans waiting to get eyeballs-deep in the grim 'n' gross world of The Binding of Isaac: Repentance have, at the very least, a release window with which to mark their calendars. Described by creator Ed McMillen as "the best version" of the twin-stick roguelike, Repentance will hit PS4, PS5, and Switch in the third quarter of 2021.

The supposed "final" chapter sees The Binding of Isaac fine-tuned to perfection, adding new playable characters, alternate paths and chapters, over 100 new enemies, a new final boss character, seven extra challenges, and multiple surprises. Nicalis Games suggests that Repentance brings with it "thousands of hours" of gameplay, ensuring that both newcomers and The Binding of Isaac's most fanatical followers will find plenty of dark deviance within.

The Binding of Isaac: Repentance launches on PC via Steam March 31 and on PS4, PS5, and Nintendo Switch later this year. In addition, pre-orders for PS5 and Nintendo Switch physical editions are now open on the Nicalis store, retailing for $59.99 USD.

Aniplex, in association with developer CyberConnect2, has released the new trailer for its upcoming video game adaptation of popular manga/anime series Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba - Hinokami Keppuutan, which launches on PlayStation, Xbox, and PC platforms later in 2021.

The new video focuses on one of the franchise's major demon slayers, Giyu Tomioka, who is the current Water Hashima, (essentially a posse of element-based swordmasters) as he lays waste to his hapless opponent. Barely breaking a sweat nor his stoic nature, Tomioka demonstrates his graceful and devastating sword skills, before winding up the battle by calling upon the very waves themselves. Better bring an umbrella.

Aniplex has restricted the trailer to specific territories, but you can check out a re-up of the video below, courtesy of Gematsu. Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba - Hinokami Keppuutan will launch in Japan on PS4, PS5, PC, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X later in 2021. The anime fighter is yet to receive official confirmation of a western release.

Lionsgate has added Ariana Greenblatt to its star-studded adaptation of Gearbox's Borderlands, with the young star having bagged the wild-eyed role of demolition expert Tiny Tina.

Greenblatt has worked in numerous Disney productions, and recently finished shooting drama 65 alongside Adam Driver. Most moviegoers, however, will know Greenblatt from Marvel's 2018 comic-book epic Avengers: Infinity War, where she portrayed a younger version of galaxy guardian Gamora.

Speaking to The Hollywood Reporter, Borderlands director Eli Roth expressed his excitement in Greenblatt's casting. "Ariana is a spectacular new talent in cinema," said Roth. "She has already worked with many of my close collaborators and everyone raves about her. She blew us all away in her audition, and I cannot wait to see her bring the wild, insane and unpredictable Tiny Tina to the big screen. She’s going to blow up on screen like one of Tina’s grenades."

Making her debut in 2012's Borderlands 2, Tiny Tina is an NPC known for her unstable nature and love of all things explosive. Tina came into her own in DLC expansion Tiny Tina's Assault on Dragon's Keep, where she took the mantle of Dungeon Master for a particularly over-the-top session of Pandora's favorite RPG "Bunkers and Badasses".

There are a couple of caveats to keep in mind, but boy, this is a well-rounded month for a lot of PlayStation Plus subscribers. We've got a super-high-profile RPG, a pretty decent PlayStation VR shooter, a Souls-like co-op shooter, and the day-one debut of a promising puzzle-solving adventure.

It's time to claim the March 2021 PS Plus games:

• Final Fantasy VII Remake (PS4)
• Farpoint (PlayStation VR)
• Remnant: From the Ashes (PS4)
• Maquette (PS5)

About those caveats: Square Enix is letting people who buy FFVII Remake upgrade to the enhanced PS5 version of the game for free, however, that's not the case with this free PS Plus edition. Something to keep in mind if you're dead set on playing FFVII Remake Intergrade or the Yuffie DLC in June.

"With Fall Guys, one thing that's fun is that we actually want inconsistent difficulty between stages -- we want players to have that 'oh shit' moment when Slime Climb turns up." ...

Tuesday’s Best Deals | Kinja Deals

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Today, Twitch released its first-ever transparency report, a lengthy, stat-based look at the platform’s safety initiatives over the past year. It contains some interesting, albeit granular, information about Twitch’s efforts to cut down on hateful conduct, sexual harassment, and even terrorist propaganda. But it also…

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Bravely Default 2, the new Nintendo Switch game about watching numbers go up, isn’t easy. The boss fights in particular are guaranteed to mess up your day. If you’ve been playing the game since it launched last week, you’ve likely found yourself banging your head against a wall on more than one occasion.

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Fantasian, the next game from Mistwalker, the studio founded by Final Fantasy creator, Hironobu Sakaguchi, is coming to Apple Aracde later this year. Now we’ve a new trailer finally showing off gameplay of the diorama-based JRPG, including its unique take on random encounters, called the “Dimengeon system.”

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An interview with Girls Guts Glory’s Kelly Lynne D’Angelo

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It’s useful AND cool

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What happens when nostalgia, fashion, gossip, and trend-chasing collide

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Beautiful, awful randomly generated poetry is coming to Medieval grand strategy game Crusader Kings 3 as part of its next update, and players will even be able to torture enemies into submission with the very worst of their verse.

Expanding substantially on Crusader Kings 2's Poet trait, Crusader Kings 3's attempt will bring reworked stats, character interactions, and, most importantly, randomised poetry generation, meaning you can bask in the digital ditties conjured by rhyme-loving computer-folk all day long.

Poetry will be generated in-game by combining a particular subject with one of five overarching themes - romance, legacy, mourning, strife, and incompetence - enabling characters to influence events with a catchy rhyming couplet or two. Here's one of several randomly assembled examples provided as part of Paradox's latest blog post.

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Hironobu Sakaguchi and Mistwalker are back with another JRPG title, Fantasian, coming to Apple Arcade sometime in 2021. Mistwalker's last few releases on mobile, including Terra Wars (Wow, I reviewed this one!) and Terra Wars 2, were gacha grinders with a lot of style, so we'll see where Fantasian lands on the cool scale after it releases.

For now, there's some really coot art and assets to gawk at while we wait, including handmade dioramas that form the background for big environments. Based on some of the characters we can see in the trailer, one could very easily take a peek and say "Yep. That's definitely a JRPG." Why not give it a watch below?

Apparently the story takes place in a multi-dimensional universe where the balance of Chaos and Order is in flux. You begin as a character who has lost his memories and must set off on a journey to discover them. These memories along with other finds like notes and journals along the way as you explore become a sort of storytelling device that flesh out the characters, realms, and more. Along the way you'll probably save the world or something, maybe end up battling a deity while you're floating in the cosmos. Hey, I'm just guessing here.

Final Fantasy VII Remake for PS5 includes a special, exclusive Yuffie episode that features a beloved party member from the 1997 original game. Yuffie is an adorable powerhouse that offers her own unique spin on combat and now that she's making her way to the PlayStation 5-specific title with Intergrade, Square Enix is teasing a few new screenshots of this character alongside some new details. 

Square Enix took to the game's official Twitter to share off three adorable new images of Yuffie, fully equipped with the cheeky grin we all fell in love with: 

▪️ A ravishing beauty
▪️ A world-class materia hunter

Yuffie Kisaragi styles herself as both, but she'll need to use all of her skills as a member of Wutai's elite corp of ninja operatives to sneak into Midgar... pic.twitter.com/R8yLw1lzY0

— FINAL FANTASY VII REMAKE (@finalfantasyvii) March 2, 2021

We here at Game Informer also have a few more images to share from Final Fantasy VII Remake Intergrade, showing off even more enhancements made to the game: 

Click image thumbnails to view larger version

A new Destiny 2 hotfix has been pushed through for Season of the Chosen, and while it tackles much-needed fixes for Battlegrounds and the Dead Man's Tale Presage exotic quest, it also — thankfully — leaves the hilariously awesome 12-player raid bug intact. 

Bungie took to the game's official blog once more to detail what sort of changes the latest hotfix brings to the table. While some of the tweaks are minuscule, others tackle the more prominent problems, such as the spawn points in Presage and the lack of pinnacle drops. 

Battlegrounds changes

The latest update tackles Battlegrounds, a new activity introduced in Season of the Chosen. One highly reported issue centers around beneficial modifiers not working the way they are supposed to when taking on the different phases within the PvE instance. Hotfix 3.1.0.2 addressed the issue that prevented specific modifiers from functioning properly during the Battlegrounds-specific activities.

Trapping you in a vast field of space wreckage with nothing more than an immortal chicken for company, Breathedge is a survival-adventure game with an undeniably novel setup. Instead of punching trees, you'll navigate a three-dimensional, zero-gravity environment in order to snag supplies, craft tools, and avoid suffocation, all while trying to uncover the twisting plot behind the crash of the largest space liner in history – which happened with you on it. Despite the fresh setting, you'll only get a taste of some rudimentary survival gameplay before a scripted story takes over and drives you out of the survival mechanics entirely. The sense that another wondrous discovery is just around the corner is what drives these games... and Breathedge doesn't have it.

Breathedge is desperate to please with its jokes, slapstick humor, and goofy concepts like corpse-powered coffin robots. It's self-aware that it's a single-player, story-driven survival game and makes references to tropes of the genre (as well as other sci-fi games like Alien: Isolation and Mass Effect), including gags about shoehorned plot contrivances, artificially extended wait times, stale gameplay, and fetch quests. Unfortunately, Breathedge is guilty of the things it makes jokes about, full of the most tedious, repetitive kinds of survival game clichés. Even when I was laughing, its awareness of these issues doesn't make them any less of a problem, and humor isn’t a substitute for innovative gameplay.

[ignvideo url="https://www.ign.com/videos/the-first-20-minutes-of-breathedge-10-gameplay"]

The Mario and Luigi costumes truly creep me out in Animal Crossing: New Horizons, to the point where I've avoided checking in with my island since the late-February update went out. Actually, no... I've just been too busy with Stardew Valley split-screen co-op hogging 100 percent of my Switch time lately.

If you're more interested in the Mushroom Kingdom items than the costumes, same – and there's a trick for the Warp Pipe that'll come in handy if you find yourself running back and forth all the time.

Well, "trick" is probably overselling it a bit. Players have taken to using the Warp Pipes (known in-game as "Pipes") as a way to quickly hop back home to deposit spare items or redecorate. All you need to do is find a spot in your home (or wherever you frequently travel) for the first Warp Pipe and then hang onto the other one. If you ever need to fast-travel, just pull out the secondary pipe right there and pop in.

Here's a demonstration from Reddit user VictoryRoles. Before you ask: yes, there's a loading screen.

It's rare for me to want to play a game just to appreciate its environmental artwork, doubly so when it's stranded on a less-than-ideal platform like Apple Arcade. But that's where I'm at with Fantasian, a new RPG from Mistwalker (Terra Battle, Lost Odyssey) that's set in a painstaking world of miniatures.

I can't get over the craftsmanship that went into creating "over 150 handmade dioramas" for this game. Creators from Godzilla, Attack on Titan, and Ultraman helped establish the miniaturized look.

Hironobu Sakaguchi and co. know what they're dealing with here: there's a built-in way to postpone the random JRPG battles in Fantasian so that you can breezily take in the sights and sounds "uninterrupted."

A so-called Dimengeon Battle mechanic lets you push "previously encountered" foes into a "separate dimensional dungeon," at which point you can square off with the creeps when you're good and ready.

Arkane Studios has released a lighthearted video looking at its upcoming chrono-shooter Deathloop, which will launch on PS5 and PC May 21. The trailer sees the stylish title's designer, Dinga Bakaba, walk the viewer through the clock-warping concepts of Blackreef.

Deathloop concerns one single day of destruction for our protagonist, Colt, a professional hitman who awakens on Blackreef with a pocket full of targets and a mind full of holes. Cursed to live out the same day over and over again until he gets it right, Colt must efficiently strategize the use of his time in order to eliminate his targets: a band of merciless killers known as "The Visionaries." Not helping matters is Julianna, another expert assassin and every bit Colt's equal. Before this misadventure is through, Colt will find himself lined in chalk again and again, until he finally makes it to the top of the hit-list.

While time-looping very much seems to be the "in vogue" mechanic for gaming right now, Deathloop looks to stand apart with its charismatic cast, opulent style, and sharpshooting action. Check out Bakaba's video below if you want to know more about Deathloop's odd premise. Oh, and don't forget to check out the recent slick, 007-style theme song right here.