January 2022

Today third-party developers have provided new information about upcoming aircraft and an airport for Microsoft Flight Simulator.

We start with MilViz, which hosted an extensive livestream talking about its upcoming roadmap of aircraft for the sim. At the moment, they have 5-6 teams at work on them.

We learn that Stage 2 of the Pilatus PC-6 Porter with analog gauges, the floatplane version, and more will be released in Q2 2022. The developer hopes that Asobo will have fixed water dynamics by then and pictures will be showcased fairly soon. It’ll include Tundra tires, regular tires, and amphibian floats. It won’t have straight wheel-less floats.

The DHC-2 Beaver, the DHC-2-T Turbo Beaver, and shortly after The DHC-3 Otter, and the DHC-3-T Turbo Otter will all hopefully come in the same quarter in 2022. MilViz won’t say which quarter for now, and isn’t going to reproduce any of the refits by Viking.

The A-1H Skyraider is in final approach. As usual, the official marketplace version won’t have visible weapons. A release date has not been decided, but it should be in Q1 2022.

Microsoft hosted its quarterly financial conference call for investors and analysts and chief executive officer Satya Nadella and chief financial officer Amy Hood talked about the Xbox business.

Nadella talked about the success of the investments made by the company in gaming, boasting 18 million users for Forza Horizon 5 and over 20 million for Halo Infinite, defined “the biggest Halo launch in history.”

About gaming, the bets we have made across content, community, and cloud over the past few years are paying off. We saw record engagement as well as revenue this quarter.

Game Pass has more than 25 million subscribers across PC and consoles. Our differentiated content is diving the service’s growth and we released new triple-A titles this Holiday Season to rave reviews and record usage.

18 million have played Forza Horizon 5 to date and more than 20 million have played Halo Infinite making it the biggest Halo launch in history.

And with our planned acquisition of Activision Blizzard announced last week, we’re investing to make it easier for people to play games wherever, whenever, and however they want, and also shape what comes next for gaming as platforms like the Metaverse develop.

Hood mentioned that the supply of Xbox hardware (Xbox series X and S) during the Holiday season was higher than expected.

We also hear that the expectation for Q3 (between January and March) for the gaming segment involves revenue growth year on year in the mid-single digits. Console sales will continue to be impacted by supply chain uncertainties.

With Microsoft's impending purchase of Activision Blizzard announced last week, little has been said about which currently planned multiplatform games like Diablo or the immensely popular Call of Duty will see the light of day on non-Xbox consoles in the future. Now might be the time to breathe a sigh of relief for fans of the prolific shooter franchise who own PlayStation hardware. According to a report from Bloomberg's Jason Schreier, PlayStation will still be a place to play at least three more Call of Duty titles.

We got our first real look at the upcoming Halo TV series The Game Awards in December, and we’re set to get a presumably bigger sample this week. Paramount has announced that a new trailer for the show will premiere this Sunday during the halftime show of the NFL’s AFC Championship.

If you’re planning to catch it live, the AFC Championship Game, which pits the Cinncinati Bengals against the Kansas City Chiefs, begins at 3:05 p.m. Eastern on CBS. 

Suit up Spartans, the wait is almost over. The official trailer for @HaloTheSeries lands this Sunday during halftime of the AFC Championship Game on @CBS and @ParamountPlus. #HaloTheSeries pic.twitter.com/8He8fqUjQN

Even in a franchise as full of brilliant characters as Guilty Gear, Baiken rules. The fucked-up samurai, despite missing both an eye and an arm, is canonically one of the strongest people in the fighting game’s universe, and it’s hard not to be charmed by the brash swagger she brings to every battle. But one thing…

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Call of Duty's next three titles will reportedly still be making their way to PlayStation consoles, despite Microsoft's recent acquisition of series publisher Activision Blizzard.

Following last week's buyout news, many questions still remain - not least how Activision Blizzard's current roster of multi-platform titles will be affected by the purchase, with many predicting that Xbox exclusivity might soon be on the cards for the publisher's biggest franchises under Microsoft's stewardship.

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Amazon Game Studios has just released a new update for New World, and it’s a pretty hefty one. This update brings some big changes to the endgame content, with the highlight being an expedition modifier called Mutators.

A Mutated expedition will allow players to face off against augmented versions of the enemies they’d faced before in the regular version of the expedition, and will be forced to come up with new strategies to face them. Of course, completing a Mutated expedition will gift players with plenty of new and better rewards as well. AGS states that this will be a new way for players to farm resources and get loot that will help increase their gear score.

Scores will be awarded to teams based on how well they perform in the expedition. Things like time taken to beat the dungeon, number of team wipes, and number of enemy kills will be taken into consideration, and teams will be ranked Bronze, Silver, or Gold. Performing well will allow teams to progress to the next level of Mutation difficulty, which leads to better rewards.

You can check out some gameplay footage of a Mutated expedition down below:

Dead by Daylight is a 4v1 multiplayer game where four survivors need to work together to activate generators in order to escape, while a killer hunts them down mercilessly to try to stop them. Its popularity certainly hasn’t waned despite being out for quite a few years now, and Behaviour Interactive has continued to put out more content updates for the game.

The latest update sees the release of the Modern Tales collection, which is a selection of new outfits that you can purchase from the in-game store. You can check out a preview of the outfits in the video down below:

Modern Tales puts a bit of a contemporary spin on classic fairytale characters like Gretel and the Red Riding Hood. For instance, Meg Thomas is getting a Gretel-inspired outfit, while Feng Min gets a stylish salmon-colored hoodie with a wolf logo to rep Red herself. The Huntress also gets a new look with a terrifying Baba Yaga costume.

Dead by Daylight is now available on PC and consoles.

The post Dead By Daylight Puts a Modern Spin on Classic Fairytale Icons With New Outfits Available Now appeared first on Twinfinite.

Quality assurance testers at Call of Duty: Warzone studio Raven Software gave management until today, January 25, to voluntarily recognize their newly formed union, Game Workers Alliance. Instead, embattled publisher Activision Blizzard announced tonight it would be forcing a vote with the National Labor Review Board,…

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Today Spike Chunsoft had a reveal in store for its upcoming game AI: The Somnium Files – nirvanA Initiative.

This time around, we learn about the fact that the game has two protagonists as teased with the recent reveal of the key art.

Both are introduced with new art by Yusuke Kozak, ithe character designer of the series. If you’re unfamiliar with the name, he’s well-known for his work on No More Heroes, Demon X Machina, a bunch of Fire Emblem games, and more.

The female heroine will be Mizuki Okiura returning from the first game alongside her AI-Ball assistant Aiba (Aibo on Japanse, which means “Partner.” For some reason, they had to change her name in English).

The male hero is another ABIS Investigator named Ryuki. he’s a rookie with a strong sense of justice and a gentle and modest personality. He has an AI-Ball as well, named Tama. Funnily, she has an “S” personality and she likes to spank Ryuki to “motivate” him.

You can check out the artwork below.

In the last few years, representations of disabilities in video games have been on the rise. However, with representations of deafness, everything is usually represented with the common stereotypes: characters are always shown using American Sign Language and are unable to hear at all. So far, we've not really had a game that spotlights a main character with deafness - and no, we don't want to talk about the abysmal The Quiet Man.

So, what if we had a game with RPG elements where the main character is deaf and just living their life?

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Halo Infinite has enjoyed the biggest launch in the series' history with over 20 million players, Microsoft has announced.

Confirmation came from Microsoft boss Satya Nadella in an investor-focused financial call last night.

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For a genre defined by unpredictability, roguelikes often sound staggeringly boring. These are games for initiates, cast in the image of celebrated forebears - you at least have to know what Rogue is, whereas a first-person shooter speaks for itself. They are also firmly systems-led to the point of dryness. As such, their marketing materials tend to read like anatomical checklists, the same vital organs passed from developer to developer.

Vagante's Steam feature sheet certainly didn't set my world on fire: procedural generation, "choose how you play", "tough but fair", some unabashed debts to Spelunky plus a dollop of RPG-style levelling. I probably don't need to tell you that it's a pixelart affair. But then I played for 15 minutes, got sat on by a Baby Dragon and realised that Vagante is a game of quiet originality and verve. With apologies to developer Nuke Nine for being a cocky arsehole, here are a few bulletpoints of my own creation.

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The first issue of the new JoJo Magazine is now open for preorders in Japan. Starting January 26, 2022, the magazine will be available for preorder on select Japanese online retailers such as Amazon JP, Rakuten, and Tsutaya. Furthermore, the new issue bought at select stores will come with a special illustrated post card to celebrate the magazine's launch. The Spring 2022 issue will cost ¥1,650 (about $15.50) and release on March 19, 2022.

https://twitter.com/JOJO_magazine/status/1486174936171376642?s=20

The magazine is open for preorders at 13 online storefronts. It's important to note that online preorders of the magazine will not come with the special illustrated postcard. The official JoJo Magazine Twitter account shared a list of stores at which the postcard will be available.

Below is the list of online retailer chains with preorders open:

Today Capcom announced its financial results for the first nine months of the fiscal year 2021, which is related to the period that ended on December 31, 2021.

Sales were 88,163 million (up 35.9% year on year) and operating income was 35,096 million yen (up 43.9% year on year).

Sales of video games for the fiscal year reached 25.8 million units (up 30.3% year on year)

While the company did not release major new games during the third quarter (between September and December), they continued to promote sales of catalog titles released in previous quarters and still achieved record-breaking sales and profit for a third quarter.

Below you can check out all the figures, including breakdowns by business segments, and the forecast for the full fiscal year (ending in March), which remains unchanged from previous announcements.

I know exactly which game Vampire Survivors reminds me of and it's Geometry Wars, which is a wonderful thing. And yes, I know it doesn't look like it, and yes there's a crucial difference in that, here, you're not in control of your own attacks - and I'll come onto that in a moment. But it's absolutely Geometry Wars in the way that really matters to me. In that screen-filling spectacle of being utterly overrun by an endless wave of enemies while you scrabble to find any gap to escape through. That thrilling, never-ending headlong pelt while fireworks go off around you. Vampire Survivors packs that thrill.

Now, the not-being-in-control-of-your-attacks bit. This is the game's quirky ingredient, the part you notice early on and maybe wrinkle your nose at. I did; I honestly thought the game was broken and restarted it, silly sausage. But what happens here is the game attacks for you. Say you're equipped with a whip, which you will be, then every so often, the whip flashes out and hits. It goes something a bit like whip, beat, beat, whip - it's not a long wait (although it's agonising later on if you don't improve it).

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A release date has been announced for a Resident Evil 4 fan-made remaster eight years in the making.

Titled Resident Evil 4 HD Project, the aim of the project is to upscale the textures using the original sources collected by Capcom during the original game's development.

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UPDATE 12.10pm UK: Following this morning's leak, Crytek has now officially confirmed Crysis 4.

The developer released the short CGI trailer below just after midday UK time, less than an hour after a social media post spoiled the surprise.

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Aztech Forgotten Gods from developer Lienzo now has a release date.

First shown at Nintendo's Indie World Showcase in April last year, the game is due out across Switch, Xbox and PlayStation consoles, and PC (Steam, Epic) on 10th March

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A unionisation bid by QA staff at Call of Duty studio Raven Software will continue, despite Activision Blizzard missing last night's 11pm deadline to respond and voluntarily recognise the group.

The bid will now be filed with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), an independent government agency.

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UPDATE 24/02/22: Sony is officially rolling out its update to the PS App to allow PS5 players to auto-upload screenshots to their mobile device.

A tweet from the official account includes a video explaining the feature. It should now be available in the Americas, with other countries due next month.

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Sega will release a second series of Yakuza acrylic standees. This second set will come with 12 standees. This will include acrylic standees featuring Yakuza characters from Yakuza 4, Yakuza 5, and renders of characters as they appear in Yakuza 6: The Song of Life. All twelve standees are available to pre-order. Each standee will cost 1,650 yen (~$15), with the expected release date set for March 23, 2022. [Thanks, Famitsu!]

The line-up of characters includes:

• Kazuma Kiryu
• Goro Majima
• Taiga Saejima
• Haruka Sawamura
• Shun Akiyama
• Masayoshi Tanimura
• Tatsuo Shinada
• Masaru Watase
• Ono Michio

The version of Tanimura that consumers can purchase is based on his new render from the Yakuza 4 re-release. Additionally, two versions of Akiyama will be available to purchase through this set. This includes his Yakuza 4 and Yakuza 6 appearance.

You can take a look at the standees below.

[gallery columns="6" ids="914126,914125,914124,914123,914122,914121,914120,914119,914118,914117,914116,914115" link="file"]

The Home World Transfer service in Final Fantasy XIV is currently congested due to the high volume of players requesting to have their Home World changed. Square Enix asks players to remain patient, as the process will take longer than usual. Additionally, if players are receiving an error message while applying for their free Home World Transfer, they should wait and try to apply again.

Square Enix also acknowledges that there is currently a very large amount of errors for those applying to transfer to the Oceania Data Center. The developer notes that this could in part be that players have not accessed the Data Center they wish to transfer to. Accessing the Data Center players wish to transfer to is a requirement for the transfer. However, players only need to access the Data Center once for the transfer to process correctly. In order to do this, players need to go to the start screen and change their Data Center to the Oceania Data Center. After that, the transfer should work, outside of the on-going issue with congestion.

Additionally, players will receive an e-mail once the application for the transfer processes. However, players are advised to avoid logging in to that specific character before the transfer is complete, as it will result in an error. It is unclear as to how long the Home World Transfer service in Final Fantasy XIV will remain congested.

Square Enix announced a Final Fantasy VII The First Soldier and Final Fantasy VII commemorative broadcast. The FFVII The First Soldier and FFVII commemorative broadcast will be held on January 31, 2022. It will begin at 7pm JST/2am PT/5am ET/11am CET. Several members of the development team will appear, including Tetsuya Nomura. Final Fantasy VII Director, and Final Fantasy VII Remake Producer, Yoshinori Kitase will also be present as a special guest. [Thanks, Gamer!]

The FFVII The First Soldier broadcast will coincide with the 25th anniversary of Final Fantasy VII in Japan. It will feature new information regarding upcoming developments for the mobile title. Additionally, the broadcast will feature a segment about Final Fantasy VII that will delve into memories of Final Fantasy VII. The FFVII The First Soldier and FFVII commemorative broadcast will be available to watch on YouTube and Japanese streaming platform NicoNico. It is unclear if English subtitles will be available.

Sega announced a Sin Chronicle broadcast, set to air on February 2, 2022. The broadcast will cover various gameplay elements, including a multiplayer mode. Additionally, the broadcast will include more information about the main scenario of Sin Chronicle. A new piece of key artwork and a new promotional video will also be reveled during the broadcast. The broadcast will begin at 9pm JST/4am PT/7am ET/1pm CET. [Thanks, Game Watch!]

The mentioned multiplayer mode will allow players to take on events together. However, those interested will have to wait for the broadcast to learn more about Sin Chronicle's multiplayer. Game Director Hisashi Kobayashi and the General Director Jun Matsunaga will host the broadcast. Viewers can immediately set an alarm for the broadcast through YouTube. As it stands, the broadcast will only be available in Japanese. There will be no English subtitle option.

Originally set to receive a December 2021 release, in November 2021, Sega announced Sin Chronicle would be delayed to a Spring 2022. More specifically, Matsunaga revealed that the team is now aiming to release the game in late March 2022. That said, the game does not have a concrete date of release as of yet.

Sin Chronicle will release for Android and iOS devices in Spring 2022.

Few movies in recent memory left filmgoers with such a sense of nostalgic satisfaction as Jon Watts’ multiverse-spanning action-adventure pic, Spider-Man: No Way Home, and amazingly, it’s still – over five weeks after its initial theatrical release, no less – absolutely smashing it at the box office. One question that’s been buzzing around fans’ collective consciousness, however, is: how did Sam Raimi – the OG director behind the Tobey Maguire trilogy – feel about the Web-Head’s latest outing?

Well, in a recent interview with Variety, the 62-year-old writer-director revealed his thoughts regarding Spider-Man: No Way Home, and it seems that he – like the majority of cinemagoers – really enjoyed his time with the flick. Quick warning, though – be wary before reading on, as there may be some spoilers for those who haven’t had a chance to watch the film yet.

“It was so much fun,” Raimi said. “I love ‘No Way Home’ and the audience I was with went crazy. It was delightful to watch Alfred play his role, and Willem Dafoe, just seeing these guys take it to the next level. And Tobey was awesome as always. The best word I can say is it was refreshing for me.”

The £239/$249 Nvidia GeForce RTX 3050 is the long-awaited desktop equivalent of the RTX 3050 that debuted in laptops last year, bringing with it a massively expanded power envelope and double the VRAM of the mobile version. That ought to allow for much better performance on the desktop, but how much can Nvidia wring out of the GA106 die? To find out, we've paired the new GPU with a high-end PC system and tested it in all of our favourite games.

Normally, we'd expect a next-generation GPU to perform within the same ballpark as the previous-gen part from the same tier. So for the RTX 3050, the hope is that we see performance in line with the outgoing RTX 2060, which remains a pretty strong choice for 1080p to 1440p gaming - and has the ability to use DLSS to boost performance significantly, often compensating for the extra strain caused by enabling ray tracing. If the RTX 3050 can bring those features down to a lower price point without compromising performance, then Nvidia would be on to a winner.

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It's a strange kind of punishment, being a long-term player of Game Freak's collective Pokémon works. To have played all these games as they came out is to be forever tormented by the series high of Pokémon's early gems. For many these are all-time video game highs: deep, vast, iconic giants, games that launched and subsequently bottled the lightning of a generational craze. Continuing on beyond them means suffering a kind of constant haunting by the hypothetical, the what-if world where the studio is given the time and budget and technical talent it so obviously needs - and that the Pokémon Company, owner of the highest-grossing media franchise of all time, can so obviously afford.

But it's also to be dragged along still by the series' superlative, enchanting, uber-compelling core: battle, trade, collect. Yes, there's a lingering sense of austerity and belt-tightening, of a kind of savage, self-inflicted economisation and distillation of Pokémon games into the absolute barest necessities for existence. Of a publisher with a fondness for ever-tougher rounds of development-budget limbo. But this is just what it means to enjoy Pokémon, now. You want more, you feel you really should want more, but by some twist of dark magic you're left feeling grateful for what you've got.

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Well hi, hello and how do you do? I'm new here, so please don't bite.

Okay, so I'm not exactly new around these parts - my 11th anniversary is going to quickly roll around later this year, and I'm sure a fair few of us will have crossed paths in the past - but I'm still relatively new at all this editor lark. Seeing as this is the first time I've had the privilege of writing one of these letters, I thought I might as well try and sketch out what some of that might all mean.

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Zelda creator Shigeru Miyamoto has admitted to disliking Navi, calling Ocarina of Time's fairy companion the "biggest weakpoint" of the game.

The comments come from a 1999 interview with Miyamoto originally printed in a Japanese strategy guide and now published online.

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