April 2021

Class-based shooter romp Outriders has been on a ride this month, tackling bugs and issues since its April 1 launch date. People Can Fly solved crossplay issues earlier this month but have still been struggling with an inventory bug that's been snatching the loot out of players' pockets. They're still working on that one, they say, but their biggest patch to date solves other problems like crashes, a sign in issue, and a long list of other improvements.

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Well well, looks like it's casual Friday over in the village. The deadly baddies of upcoming horror sequel Resident Evil Village have all cast off their spooky faces and transformed into puppets. Yes, including your favorite large lady Alcina Dimitrescu. She's joined by the felty faces of Mother Miranda's other lords for a silly little skit. Actually, one of them's a puppet twice over, somehow. They do look quite cute this way though, even when they're murdering each other.

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Hook up with anthro aliens in Tender: Creature Comforts

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Sony’s PS5 exclusive doesn’t feature a traditional save system

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What if we kissed in the manga section of Barnes & Noble

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There’s a lot more to it than the show reveals, and the comics fill in the blanks

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The new Netflix movie gets the internet generation right

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It’s like PUBG from 2 BC

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Returnal, the PS5-exclusive action game about pretending you’re in the Tom Cruise film Edge of Tomorrow, is no cakewalk. The rank-and-file enemies are one thing, what with their tentacle laser beams and relentless volleys of neon death basketballs. But it’s the boss fights that will really give you a run for your…

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A self-professed Rainbow Six cheater is allegedly a suspect in last November’s Ubisoft Montreal hostage situation hoax, but he denies any involvement.

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LOCALIZE MOTHER 3!

— terry crews (@terrycrews) April 30, 2021

I hope @NintendoAmerica is hearing this!!

In its prior incarnation, Miitopia was an RPG where all the characters were Miis, and not just any Miis. In the 3DS version players were able to assign their friend’s Miis as party members or critical NPCs, while smaller roles were cast automatically from a pool of random Miis, meaning you got weird combinations like a romance between Princess Birdo and Nigel Thornberry, or Dr. Mario guarding the royal King Dr. Zoidberg. These assignments were played out to hilarious effect as the characters had both scripted and random interactions throughout your journey.

Now, it's being ported to the Nintendo Switch, but without the same robust Mii sharing features that the 3DS had, it’s taking a different approach by introducing more robust Mii creation tools. This has inspired the Nintendo community, who are using the surprisingly detailed wig and makeup tools in the demo to get real wild with their creations.

The expressions are pretty hilarious! pic.twitter.com/3vMbqtnzDA

Housemarque's ambitious PS5-exclusive roguelike shooter Returnal is out today, and while it's received plenty of praise (including from us) for its haunting atmosphere, clever story, and shooter action, it's also sparking discussion about its considerable difficulty. And now, the game's director has weighed in too.

On Next-Gen Console Watch, game director Harry Krueger and marketing and business development director Mikael Haveri both affirmed that Returnal's challenge stems from Housemarque's "arcade roots." Housemarque has historically incorporated arcade systems and styles in its games since its origins in the 90s, and while it declared years ago after Nex Machina that "arcade is dead," Housemarque clearly isn't abandoning that spirit in its newer titles.

[ignvideo url="https://www.ign.com/videos/2021/04/30/returnal-is-a-showcase-for-the-ps5s-power-next-gen-console-watch"]

"We started development four years ago, and I don't think the vision has changed that much. Housemarque games are known for their, let's say... challenge... there's usually a difficulty to them," Haveri said. "Nex Machina for example, you can go through the game on Easy, but you'll never get to the last level, and then there's other unlockables, and so on. So there's an 'easy to learn, but hard to master' mentality at work there."

Krueger agreed. "Without a challenge we don't feel like you can have that strong sense of accomplishment, you know? The closer to the verge of frustration you get, the bigger the feeling of triumph when you do eventually prevail."

The hostage hoax that saw armed police rush to the offices of Ubisoft Montreal while dozens of employees barricaded themselves on the rooftop for safety was the work of a notorious Rainbow Six cheater, says a new report by Canadian newspaper La Presse.

According to court documents obtained by La Presse, the catalyst for last year's police response was a hoax call from an individual claiming that five men had taken 40 employees hostage at Ubisoft - and that they would "blow up everything" if demands for a $2m ransom weren't met. Employees were later safely escorted off the premises as police continued to investigate the scene, but La Presse reports the incident didn't mark the end of the caller's malicious campaign.

In December, for instance, an individual allegedly claimed to have placed a bomb near the daycare facility within Ubisoft Montreal's offices, while another call in January claimed a senior Ubisoft employee had been shot in the head following another hostage incident. In both cases, the police are said to have made more "discreet" checks instead of immediately launching a major operation such as the one seen in November.

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English Dub anime fans rejoice! Demon Slayer: Mugen Train is finally in theaters, celebrating its launch with an official release trailer staring everyone’s favorite Flame Hashira, Kyojuro Rengoku

While brief, the trailer shows off the fantastic visuals and combat fans can expect from Demon Slayer’s newest movie, as Rengoku’s flames rough in a battle with Upper Moon Three demon Akaza. Tanjiro, Zenitsu, and Inosuke also have their work cut out for them in the trailer, as they’re seen duking it out with Lower Moon One demon Enmu and his creepy flesh detachment abilities.

North American Demon Slayer Sub and Dub fans have been waiting a while for the movie to finally make its way overseas, as it has been out in Japan since Oct. 2020. In that time, the movie grossed over US$459 million worldwide, becoming the highest-grossing film of 2020 and making it the first Japanese film and first anime film to reach the milestone of US$400 million worldwide box office proceeds.

Demon Slayer: Mugen Train Subbed and Dubbed versions are both out now, though only in select theaters.

It wouldn’t be Steam if there wasn’t another crazy sale going on to start the month. This week, PC gamers can look forward to a slew of amazing titles that will be discounted on the platform, as its Golden Week sale celebrates games from Japan from April 29 – May 6.

In order to save you some time, we’ve compiled the best deals for you right here. These are four Golden Week Steam sale games you’d be crazy not to pick up.

NieR:Automata

Best Golden Week Steam Sale Games

Original Price: $39.99 – Sale Price: $19.99

Occurring thousands of years after the original game’s fourth ending, NieR: Automata follows a group of resistance androids tasked with exploring human societies and concepts following an apocalypse. Amidst their journey, they find Earth overrun with the machines that originally drove out humanity.

The latest TWAB has arrived and Bungie spends most of it doing a deep dive into the weapon buffs and changes that you can expect heading into next season, which is still Season of the [Redacted] as of now.

Before diving into that, speaking of next season, while we all know Vault of Glass is coming, Bungie put a dagger into hopes of some players that were pulling for Venus being surprise added as a destination as well. Unlike the original Vault of Glass which spawned players at the entrance which was located in a public space, Destiny 2’s Vault of Glass will be a private instanced area that is closed off. Don’t expect random players to show up and help you open the gate, nor should you expect to be able to run off and explore Venus.

With that pipe dream dashed, the TWAB moves on to deep diving into weapon archetype buffs. The focus is primarily on explaining their thought process for heavy weapons. It’s a quite long-winded explanation on their philosophy of each heavy weapon and role they believe it serves that you can read here if you’re interested in their thought process. All of it leads to the point that Linear Fusion Rifles are not really good for anything right now.

Pretty for nearly the entire existence of Destiny 2, Linear Fusion Rifles have been overshadowed in PvE. The only exceptions were pre-nerf Sleeper Simulant and Arbalest (to an extent), and both of those weapons are exotics. Line in the Sand, a great Linear Fusion Rifle on paper, never saw any meaningful usage since, well, the weapon in general just sucks.

With the release of New Pokemon Snap, we've been revisiting and appreciating our favorite photo modes in games. Here are our top picks!

The post What Are The Best In-Game Photo Modes? appeared first on Siliconera.

I'm actually enjoying the relaxed and fireside manner in which Microsoft is giving us Halo Infinite updates.

They took the memes to heart when it was shown off that fateful afternoon, and the Halo Waypoint blog has been a font of information for the game. That goes double for the update this week, as 343 is really going hard on the PC version of the game.

343 producer Jeff Guy calls this a "native first-class PC experience," with options for 21:9 ultrawide views, as well as 32:9 and a 120 FOV slider (by default it's set at 78). Guy also muses: "There’s also a TON of preventative problem solving. Things like making sure our game plays nice with specific families of hardware or fighting hard to ensure we don’t add intrusive DRM to our game. The problem with preventative problem solving though is you never see the crisis averted."

The official release date of the Nintendo Entertainment System was October 1985, but in truth, that was a test launch. Most people in North America didn’t have a chance to buy the console until Autumn of ‘86. At that point, the Famicom had been on the market for three years in Japan.

Three years is a lot of time to build up a catalog of games, and the Famicom certainly did that. Most of the important titles would find their way to North American shores, but many during these lost years of the 8-bit platform fell by the wayside, regardless of their relevance. Take Door Door, for example. It’s a game that’s ingrained in the Japanese console player’s mindset, but it’s practically unknown here. It was the title that helped launch Enix into a position as a major player that would be solidified by the release of Dragon Quest.

If that doesn’t tell you how significant this title is, let’s take a closer look.

Look at that timing! New Pokemon Snap is out today on Switch and someone went ahead and posted about remote Joy-Con picture taking. Life just kind of works out like that sometimes.

Redditor Byotan showed us this neat little trick, where you can pair your Joy-Con to your phone to take pictures remotely, with the controller serving as a shutter button. It'll work for pretty much any Bluetooth device, including some headphones, Bluetooth remote shutter devices, and Bluetooth controllers: but the Switch Joy-Con just feels right.

Remote picture taking has myriad uses, including framing up a perfect shot without moving the camera, or capturing a subject that you may not be able to get close to. Having picked up bird watching recently, I can relate to the natter necessity!

Note that it works on Android devices, as standard iOS ones don't play nice with Switch controllers. Also, and this is very important: the Pikachu toy is from the 2012 Latin America McDonalds Pokemon set.

TIL you can pair a joycon with your phone and use it as a shutter button to take photos remotely [Reddit]

Very recently we discovered that Monolith Soft has been expanding year after year, but now we have some idea of just how big that expansion is straight from the company itself.

As we know, the studio is working on whatever projects they have under their belt, as well as ancillary support on first-party Nintendo titles, including Zelda: Breath of the Wild 2. So a ramp-up is definitely warranted!

The platform-royale Fall Guys was set to make both its Nintendo Switch and Xbox console debut this summer. That goal's been delayed, but the move has opened Mediatonic up to work on another much-requested feature: crossplay.

In a blog today, Mediatonic confirmed Fall Guys won't make its previously announced summer 2021 window for Xbox and Switch, as it's "unfortunately just too soon" to include all the features it wanted to. The delay does open up some new possibilities, though; the delay means that crossplay can be added, so when Fall Guys comes to new platforms they'll be able to play with everyone else.

Epic Games recently picked up the Tonic Games Group, which includes Mediatonic. In a statement at the time, the Fall Guys developer said joining Epic would "accelerate our plans to improve the game and bring Fall Guys to as many players as possible, while continuing to support the community."

Alongside the Switch and Xbox versions, Mediatonic is also working on the upcoming Season 4.5 update, which will add two new rounds alongside some new options for your Fall Guys wardrobe. No date has been set for that yet.

If you couldn't tell already, I love everything about cosplay and adore being able to share some of the incredible fan creations made within the cosplaying community. With that in mind, being a massive Destiny fan has made one particular Petra Venj cosplay stick out in the best way possible as she effectively brings the character to life in stunning detail. 

The cosplayer in question is Karin Olava and her portfolio is beyond incredible. For those that may be unfamiliar with who Petra is in the Destiny universe, she's an Awoken warrior that was in service of Queen Mara Sov until her disappearance during the Battle of Saturn. In Destiny 2, players can find her in the Dreaming City (and sometimes the Tangled Shore) as a vendor. 

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A post shared by Karin Olava (@karinolava)

A shift in policy means that Riot Games will now record snippets of voice chat in Valorant, but only in cases where a report is filed against a player over behavior in in-game voice channels. ...

Downpour Interactive is joining Oculus Studios by way of acquisition. ...

Official PlayStation Magazine is no more, ending the publication's decades-long run as it relaunches (with the same staff and focus) simply as Play Magazine. ...

In this 2019 GDC talk, Unity's Natasha Tatarchuk share the lessons, tips and tricks from the integration of real-time ray tracing into a modern unified PBR rendering pipeline. ...

You may know Deconstructeam from their cyberpunk bartending story game The Red Strings Club, but they've made other games. Several other games, actually, which they're pulling into a colleciton called Essays On Empathy. Essays includes a bunch of previously released Deconstructeam story romps along with their new game De Tres Al Cuarto about a couple comedians trying to make it big together. Essays On Empathy is launching on May 18th, and you can snag a peek at what it includes in a new trailer.

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Michael B. Jordan is duckin’, dodgin’, and murkin’ mercenaries

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The fighting game adaptation of Hokuto no Ken (known as Fist of the North Star in the west) has provided some of the most over-the-top competitive moments of all time. But when a Twitter acquaintance shared a screenshot of its continue screen a week ago, I still wasn’t psychologically prepared for just how hard it…

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I don’t like bugs. Never have. Flies, bees, wasps, crickets, I hate ‘em all. The bigger they are the more I can’t stand them. So the giant insect-like Silt Striders, first seen in The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, are my worst nightmare and I want them all to die. I mean, if no one minds.

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Humans are fucked up, anxiety-ridden apes and there is absolutely no telling what causes our brains to light up with feel good juice. But one thing that does it for me is a good pressure washer video. Since being a millennial means I will likely never own a home, the magic of using a pressure washer will forever be…

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Rebekah Valentine, Reporter

Casey Defreitas, Guides Editor

Konami Just announced via Twitter that it won’t be at E3 2021, but the publisher isn’t staying idle.

According to the announcement, the publisher won’t be able to present new games at the digital version of the Electronic Entertainment Expo that will be hosted in June, but is “in deep development on a number of key projects.”

Konami confirmed its support from the ESA (which organizes E3 every year) and teased reveals “in the coming months,” encouraging fans to stay tuned for updates.

Among those “key projects” should be the two Edens Zero games revealed at Tokyo Games Show 2020 (one being for consoles and one for mobile), inspired by the manga and anime series by Fairy Tail creator Hiro Mashima.

There's only one thing putting me off playing Returnal right now — okay, two. Three, tops.

This will potentially be the second time I've spent $70 on a PS5 game (the first being Demon's Souls), and honestly, I'm still adjusting to the sticker shock. As someone who already was willing to wait to avoid paying $60 at launch, I now feel even pickier about what's worth getting and when.

I also don't necessarily have a lot of time to sink into Returnal right now, and from everything I know and love about Housemarque games, it takes a while to get into the groove. That was true of shorter arcade romps like Resogun and Nex Machina, and it's definitely true of Returnal given its bigger-budget scope and potentially very drawn-out roguelike runs. I'm expecting to put in dozens of hours, all told.

But really, those are mental barriers I can work through — the thing about saving, though, that's still weighing on me. As Chris explained in his review (and as other players have since complained about on Reddit), Returnal doesn't have a good option for temporary mid-run saves. Basically, you can't — not really. If you're in a run and you need to take a break, you've got to put your PS5 in rest mode.

This is legit folks, I missed it.

Just like I missed that you could see all four divine beasts from the top of Link's house in Zelda: Breath of the Wild. XprtGamer44 of Reddit (apt name) discovered something else a lot of folks had completely missed too: barrel riding. Ah a fellow barrel rider!

Succinctly put, after nearly 1000 hours with the game, they finally discovered this oddity and decided to share it. And like all 1000 other clips, it makes me want to immediately boot up the game and go do it myself.

In case you're curious, you can find one in the Great Plateau near "the Old Man's Hut!" Lanayru Wetlands or Eventide Island are also options. And the barrels do float!

Oh, and in what has become a tradition for a lot of Breath of the Wild clip sharers, XprtGamer44 notes that the outfit in the video is "the Hylian Hood, Climbing Gear, chest, and Royal Guard Boots, dyed white."

975+ hours into the game and I just realized, this is a thing... [Reddit]

Seriously, if you haven't checked out Titanfall 2 yet, here's your opportunity to do so. Respawn Entertainment is making its 2016 sci-fi FPS temporarily free-to-play from now until May 3 at 10 a.m. PT on Steam.

We heard people want to play Titanfall 2 this weekend? So do we!

Join us on Steam when we make TF2 temporarily free-to-play starting RIGHT NOW through May 3rd @ 10am PT.

Get it here: https://t.co/rn4rUSF0RG

Your journey begins here, Pilots. pic.twitter.com/SQ9eAIAWka

— Respawn (@Respawn) April 30, 2021

Titanfall 2 has been having a bit of a moment, thanks to Apex Legends' new season dredging up a lot of Titanfall 2 lore with its new Legend, Valkyrie. And while the new Arenas mode for Apex Legends doesn't hit until next week, a free weekend to play Titanfall 2 seems like a nice way to gear up for it.

Also, if you haven't played Titanfall 2 yet, go do it! You can probably knock the campaign out in an afternoon, and then there's plenty of multiplayer action to hop into. I know I'll probably set aside some time to squad up again this weekend. See y'all during Happy Hour!

TikTok, Enthusiast Gaming, and e.l.f. Cosmetics are hosting a big talent hunt with a head-turning grand prize up for grabs, and — wait. Hold up. For once, the competition is laser-focused on gamers.

TikTok Gamers Got Talent is a seven-week live series (complete with celebrity judges) that kicks off Sunday, May 9 at 7:00 p.m. Eastern — but first, auditions. For a crack at the $25,000 prize, you'll have until May 2 at 11:59 p.m. ET to send in a TikTok video showcasing your talent. Open-ended, we know.

@luminosity

Got a talent? Show us what you got for your chance to be featured in our live show. Powered by: @elfyeah ##TikTokGGT ##Contest

♬ original sound - Luminosity Gaming

What exactly are the judges looking for? TikTok Gamers Got Talent submissions will be scored based on "entertainment value," "quality of presentation," and "level of skill demonstrated."