September 2022

When it comes down to it, EA doesn’t make their menu experience a friendly one. And while navigating them has never been too difficult, sometimes it does feel like a needlessly tedious affair. That can all be applied to the changing the settings, and as it happens, this guide is going to discuss how to change difficulty in FIFA 23.

Difficulty Settings Guide For FIFA 23

While changing the settings may only take a moment, it is inexplicably a four-step affair. Here’s how to go about it in the most clear way possible:

Don’t be toxic! But then again, sometimes the urge to rub in your superior gameplay is too much to resist, right? Once again, this year, EA Games has included the perfect goal celebration for just that very situation. Here’s everything you need to know about how to do the Mbappe Crying Celebration in FIFA 23.

As one of the most popular and talented players in the game, it should come as no surprise that Mbappe has a few celebrations in FIFA 23. The crying celebration is perhaps his most iconic, though, and it’s completely unique to him in the game.

FIFA 23 Mbappe Crying Celebration Control Input

To perform the celebration, you actually don’t need to press a single button! Instead, after having scored a goal simply run towards the cameraman on the side of the pitch and he’ll do it automatically.

Keep in mind that you can’t perform the crying celebration in combination with any other celebrations, so don’t run to the camera if you want to do something like a flip or the Little Brother.

Can You Do Crying Celebration with Other Players?

Unfortunately, no, it appears as though this signature celebration is exclusive to Mbappe. No matter what inputs you do after scoring with another player, you won’t be able to cause them to do the crying celebration. The same goes for running towards the camera on the sidelines, as you would do to trigger it for Mbappe.

Begin your Wordle challenge of the day with a tad more confidence when it comes to guesses.

‘Moments’ are a new game mode in FIFA 23’s Ultimate Team, allowing players to earn ’FUT Stars’ by completing gameplay challenges with your squad. Once you’ve earned enough FUT Stars, you can spend them on rewards from the Star Gallery. In this guide, we’ll run you through all FIFA 23 Moments rewards you can purchase with FUT Stars.

All FUT Moments Star Gallery Rewards in FIFA 23 Ultimate Team

There are two sets of rewards that you can choose from within the Star Gallery — the Browse and Seasonal menus. Browse appears as though it’ll remain the same throughout the year, while the ’Seasonal’ list looks set to refresh with each in-game season.

We’ve listed all of the rewards you can get from each below, along with how many FUT Stars they’ll cost to buy.

Serial Cleaners is Draw Distance's follow-up to the singular Serial Cleaner, a stylish 2D stealth action game where you clean up crime scenes without getting caught. Where the original offers a more traditional top-down view where you're avoiding cops' attention by dodging cones of vision, Serial Cleaners sprinkles different characters and abilities into the mix, alongside a visual revamp that ups more than just the aesthetics. And it works! Making the act of evidence disposal an action-packed affair that makes it a great game to play in bursts.

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Assassin’s Creed Valhalla might be winding down before the series heads to Baghdad with Mirage next year, but today’s free 1.6.1 update lets your friendly neighbourhood viking tackle one last set of puzzle tombs. There’s also a new building that lets you craft runes, along with the usual bug fixes and performance tweaks. The village of Ravensthorpe’s Oskoreia festival returns for one last bash next month too.

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When Grounded released into early access a little over two years ago, it immediately became a personal favourite. The story wasn't complete and the garden was rather basic, but one encounter with the wolf spider proved that this was far more than a pile of mulch. With two years of updates layering new enemies, items, biomes, dungeons, and quests onto that healthy foundation, Grounded has blossomed into a perennial survival game that sits comfortably among the very best of the genre.

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Early access roguelike Darkest Dungeon 2 is getting a major update which reworks the game's progression system - and also resets some player stats, developer Red Hook Games has warned.

The Altar of Hope update adds a new type of reward - Candles of Hope - which you can earn and then spend on various attributes which should make future missions safer for your party.

As you'd expect, the bigger the danger, the bigger reward in terms of Candles bagged at the end. Missions will offer more Candles the further you manage to progress, but suffer a wipe and you'll see your Candle hoard penalised.

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Tactics Ogre Reborn producer Hiroaki Kato didn't consider the HD-2D style for the remake, despite its use in this year's Triangle Strategy and Live A Live.

Speaking to IGN, Kato admitted he likes the style but the 2D pixel art of the original has been retained instead.

"No, we didn't think about making it HD-2D," he said. "We kind of played with the idea of making it 3D, but what we were really thinking about was, 'What are the major parts about this game that are really appealing to everybody?' And in the 2D original, it was really well done pixel art, so we realised that we couldn't have a Tactics Ogre game without this really high-quality, awesome looking 2D pixel art. So to bring that sort of resolution and that sort of fidelity to new hardware and new technology was a lot of effort. But yeah, I think we did it."

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FIFA 23 is out in the wild after the EA Play trial went live a day early, and so new features are emerging.

One nice to have but unexpected new feature is the ability to disable critical commentary. Here's the option in the main game settings:

Checking this box means the commentators won't point out how bad you're doing during gameplay, but will say all the other normal stuff they say during a match.

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Atlus is suing fans who recreated its defunct MMO Shin Megami Tensei: Imagine.

ReImagine, as the unofficial fan server was known, has since been shut down.

Atlus's MMO was first released in Japan in 2007 and had players exploring a post-apocalyptic Tokyo. North American (2008) and European (2009) releases followed, but the game was officially shut down in 2016.

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There may be a shiny new FIFA out this week, but something with a bit more nostalgia is on the horizon.

1997 football classic Actua Soccer 2 is set to launch for Steam on 10th October, and take you back to the days when Alan Shearer wasn't just stuck in the commentary booth.

After that, Actua Tennis will then follow on to Steam on 12th October. Ace!

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The latest Nintendo Switch Online app update has added Splatoon 3 widgets.

The widgets, which display information about upcoming stages, player progression, and more, can be added to a device's home screen for easier access.

The information can also be viewed in Splatnet 3, a complementary online service to Splatoon 3 which was made available through the Switch Online app at the game's launch.

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It is the final week before the Armed Fantasia and Penny Blood Kickstarter closes, and the last Mechanics Monday gave us a look at Armed Fantasia's Modules and Penny Blood's Jewel Alchemy. As a reminder, major additions are only possible due to the games reaching their individual stretch goals. There are also some new stretch goals, both hidden and revealed.

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Armed Fantasia will have a Treasure Map mini-game, Battle Arena, and achievement system. You will use the Treasure Map’s hints in order to find hidden items, with some of them being ones that can help you in exploring the map. As for the Battle Arena, you can fight against stronger variants of monsters from the story. Some battles may put special conditions on you, though it is unknown what those conditions are. Finally, the achievement system shows statistics such as how much of the map you’ve explored. The higher your stats, the more rewards you can get.

In a rather unexpected turn of events, Ted Lasso’s AFC Richmond has made it into FIFA 23. That means players can dive into crunching tackles with Roy Kent, speed down the wing with Obisanya, bang in a screamer from the edge of the box with Tartt, and scream “Football is life!” with the GOAT, Dani Rojas. In this guide, we’ll be running you through all of the AFC Richmond player ratings in FIFA 23, so you know exactly what you’re working with before starting a Career mode with Ted Lasso’s team.

All FIFA 23 AFC Richmond Player Ratings

AFC Richmond have an Attacking rating of 81, a Midfield rating of 79 and a Defensive rating of 77.

Custom Tactics in FIFA 23 are just as important as they have been in the previous few years. They can be the difference between your team playing exactly as you want it to, and them running out of position or making questionable decisions on the pitch for seemingly no reason. In this guide, we’ll run you through how to change custom tactics in FIFA 23, so you can get your team playing beautiful football.

Changing Custom Tactics in FIFA 23

To access Custom Tactics, you’ll first need to go to the ‘Squad’ screen from the ‘Club’ tab in Ultimate Team. This can be accessed by pressing down on the left analog stick from the main FUT menu.

When you’re here, press LT on Xbox One/ Xbox Series X|S or L2 on PS4/ PS5 to open the ‘Squad Actions’ menu. Now select ‘Custom Tactics’ from the dropdown menu that appears on the left side of the screen.

Genshin Impact’s second anniversary is right around the corner, and HoYoverse is celebrating this huge occasion via exciting in-game events and concerts. Quite recently, the company announced the upcoming Genshin Impact Concert 2022 – Melodies of an Endless Journey. To present this year’s Genshin Impact global online concert, HoYoverse has invited the world-famous music artist Shiro SAGISU, in partnership with the Hollywood Chamber Orchestra.

Genshin Impact Concert 2022 – Date and Time

HoYoverse is hosting the GENSHIN CONCERT 2022 -Melodies of an Endless Journey on October 2, 2022. The concert will begin at 12:00 pm (UTC+8) and will be approximately 75 minutes long, featuring authentic renditions and creative adaptations of iconic Genshin Impact soundtracks.

Everyone’s most tolerated science grandpa Rick Sanchez steps into MultiVersus today as the Warner Bros. licensed brawler’s latest fighter, arriving alongside the game’s 1.03 patch. There’s a few notable tweaks to MultiVersus in the patch, including a major change to XP between levels 3 and 15. You’ll need twice as much now. Developers Player First Games have tried to rein in infinite combos, too. You can get a look at Rick by watching the trailer below.

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Developer People Can Fly has just received another blow of bad news. After learning earlier this year that the studio didn’t see a penny of profit from Outriders during 2021, it’s now been revealed that Rockstar and 2K Games parent company Take-Two has made clear its intent to abandon publishing PCF’s follow-up game,…

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During our recent interview with Overwatch's Vice President, Jon Spector, we asked the executive a few additional questions about developing sustainable revenue streams for free-to-play games. Titles like Fortnite and Warzone have popularized collaborations with major brands like Dragon Ball Super, Attack On Titan, and Snoop Dogg, so I was curious if the Overwatch team would consider it. 

"We've seen some really fun examples out there of games working with other brands or other games," Spector says. "I'm a big anime nerd myself. I think it's super cool when I see Naruto appear in Fortnite. I don't even play Fortnite, but that's awesome. And as we look at the Overwatch 2 space, those are things that we're interested in exploring. If and when we do that, one of our key values is to do it in a way that feels like a great fit for the Overwatch franchise." 

He continues, "So we've been more focused on those collaborations as the stuff we might be interested in doing. And less on the ads-in-our-game type stuff."

Project Lumina has announced that (as of September 24, 2022) it has sold over 330,000 copies of Melty Blood: Type Lumina worldwide. This includes sales on all of its platforms. This announcement came a few days before the game’s one-year anniversary on September 30, 2022. [Thanks, 4Gamer!]

In commemoration of its first anniversary, it will add ten songs from 2008's Melty Blood: Actress Again. These remastered tracks will appear for free on September 30, 2022. There is no announcement as of yet in regards to the two DLC characters who will appear in Winter 2022. However, they will be free updates, like the previous ones. According to Type-Moon’s Takashi Takeuchi, one of them will be a “surprising character.”

The tracklist from Melty Blood: Actress Again is:

Yves Guillemot, boss and co-founder of Ubisoft, has raised eyebrows for his comments on the need for "a little friction" in game development.

Discussing his company's troubles with harassment and workplace toxicity, as highlighted by a number of employees since the summer of 2020, Guillemot told La Presse that Ubisoft had been "progressing at a good pace" in dealing with its issues - but that "creating a video game is not easy" and sometimes created "a lot of tension".

"Techniques must be put in place to ensure that everyone succeeds in finding their place," Guillemot continued, now discussing the games industry in general. "To create, you need a little friction, because everyone has to succeed in getting their idea across. It's a job that brings a lot of rewards when you succeed, but it's difficult."

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It looks like Team Ninja's Nioh games won't be heading to Xbox anytime soon.

Both Nioh games were originally released on PS4 and PC, but never on Microsoft's console.

Speaking to VGC, Nioh director Fumihiko Yasuda downplayed any possibility of the game coming to Xbox.

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Yesterday, as part of The Last of Us day, we were treated to the first full trailer for the franchise's upcoming HBO adaptation, starring Pedro Pascal as Joel and Bella Ramsey as Ellie.

This trailer didn't have any real dialogue between the characters (there were plenty of tense looks and some furtive Shh-ing), but it still offered an evocative picture of the world that HBO has created for its TV audience. You can see this trailer for yourself below.

Right off the bat, it is clear HBO has taken this adaptation seriously, with several scenes looking like they have been pulled straight from Naughty Dog's video game series. There is a lot to unpack in the minute and half or so of footage, so let's dive on in.

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One GTA Online player has become a billionaire in-game, nine years after the game released.

Reddit user jamcar70 shared their impressive milestone on the game's subreddit, to a stunned response.

The feat took jamcar70 two years, 34 days and four hours of playtime to achieve, as shown on their screenshot to prove their in-game savings.

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Pro Clubs is back in FIFA 23, and it brings with it the same chaotic and compelling co-op multiplayer gameplay we’ve come to know and love from the game mode. With cross-play coming to a number of modes in FIFA 23, that’s got a lot of fans wondering if Pro Clubs is also receiving the cross-platform multiplayer feature this year, too.

What Is Cross-Platform Play/ Cross-Play?

Cross-platform play or cross-play is the ability for those on different platforms to play online with one another. For example, say you’re on Xbox but your friend plays on PlayStation. When a game is cross-play compatible, it means you could both join a game and play together.

Not only does this mean you can play with friends on other platforms, but it generally makes the pool of online players you can be matchmade against much larger, and in turn improves the quality of online gameplay and the longevity of online game modes (as the servers are likely to remain more populated for everyone for longer).

Is Pro Clubs Cross-Platform Compatible in FIFA 23?

Unfortunately, no, Pro Clubs isn’t cross-play compatible in FIFA 23. While this will definitely come as disappointing news to fans of the game mode, EA has stated that only 1v1 multiplayer modes will be cross-play for the time being.

In other words, cross-play is exclusively available in Ultimate Team’s various online modes (excluding co-op), Online Seasons and Online Friendlies.

Kena: Bridge of Spirits on PC

2021 was a rather interesting year for gaming and the industry. New World was released on PC, blowing up a few graphics cards along the way, GameStop had that strange stock rise for a few minutes, and a few big-name games saw hefty delays as teams adjusted to working from home. On a more positive spin, after the scary rise of live service titles, 2021 also proved that single-player games still reigned supreme as we saw the likes of Psychonauts 2, Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy, and Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart make pushes for Game of the Year.

However, there’s one game that was released in September 2021 that I feel flew relatively under the radar, despite winning awards such as Best Independent Game and Best Indie Game at 2021’s The Game Awards. That game is Kena: Bridge of Spirits, and after its release on PS5 and PC via Epic Games Store last year, it’s finally heading to Steam; while I played the game when it first launched on PS5, I was super excited to give it a go on PC as well.

Kena: Bridge of Spirits puts players in the role of a young girl, Kena, who serves as a guide to spirits of the deceased who remain trapped between the physical and spiritual world, a lot of which hold on to great pain or have unresolved business in the world of the living, which in turn causes problems for those still alive.

As a spirit guide, Kena’s role is to help spirits reach the resolution they deserve to move on. Her journey leads her to a village in the mountains where a masked man has unleashed a nasty corruption on the land full of monsters and decay. You must stop him before the corruption claims more lives and consumes the world.

As players of Image & Form's excellent SteamWorld Dig games will know, there is something innately calming about chiselling your way through a hunk of rock. In both of those western-themed platformers, you were hunting for gem-like treasures to take back to the surface so you could get bigger and better equipment to begin the dig cycle anew. Now imagine that surface is constantly under threat from waves of alien attacks and that's pretty much Dome Keeper in a nutshell, a moreish, meditative mining game that sees you balance digging for resources and hunting for all-important relics while defending your eponymous dome from being smashed to smithereens.

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Genshin Impact fans in the UK take note, because the fantasy action RPG’s mascot Paimon is heading to London this Sunday in massive, inflatable form. The character will be floating down the River Thames, and HoYoVerse are staging an opportunity to get up close at Tower Bridge. Oh, and they’ve chosen the date of the extremely busy London Marathon as the start of Paimon’s journey along the Thames. What a time to be alive.

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The RPS squad has once again made the trek to London for EGX 2022. There was plenty to see at this year’s show and, as always, we ran some of our own booths. The first was the Steam Deck Zone filled with thirty of Valve’s handhelds full of games for anyone to pull up a chair and play. The second was a showcase of weird and wonderful controllers including an incredibly inconvenient pool table, a digital plant that would grow by controlling light, and a game where you use a keyboard as a tie.

Alongside those, the RPS gang were exploring the show floor and here you’ll find highlights of what we saw, who we chatted to, what we played, and just general show shenanigans. Enjoy!

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Cyberpunk 2077’s launch has been one of the messiest in recent history. Praised in many initial reviews on PC, so broken on last-gen consoles it was pulled from the PlayStation Store, and then saddled with post-launch delays as players waited for promised fixes and new content. Now, nearly two years later, the…

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Are you a FIFA fan? Are you also a little baby-human who sometimes just doesn’t want to hear it? Then does EA have the new feature for you! FIFA 23, out for pre-orderers today, will let you turn off commentary that’s critical of how you’re playing. Alternative idea: play better?

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Art generated by AI is proving a very contentious issue, raising enormous amounts of concern among artists about their potential replacement by machine learning, let alone the ethical questions about whether an algorithm studying thousands of other people’s creations is fair to the original creators. But put all that…

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Netflix will form its first in-house game studio based in Helsinki, Finland. Marko Lastikka, who used to work at Zynga and EA, will be its director. According to Engadget, Netflix’s game studio will create “world class” games that will not have ads or in-app purchases. However, there is no news as to when to expect its first game. [Thanks, Eurogamer!]

While Netflix is mostly a streaming service, it hosts a number of games on its platforms, mostly developed by third-party studios. It has also acquired studios in the past, such as Night School Studio in 2021 and Boss Fight Entertainment in March 2022. This will be the first time that Netflix will develop games internally. Gaming on Netflix means being able to access a library of free games that have no advertisements or microtransactions.

After writing about Trombone Champ in VR yesterday, modders are bringing everything full circle and making my dreams come true.

People are sharing their attempts at playing Trombone Champ with trombones.

Custom-made trombones? Check. An actual brass trombone? Check.

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There is now another camo controller to add to your Xbox collection.

Following the release of the Night Ops Camo, Arctic Camo, and Daystrike Camo controllers, this Mineral Camo Xbox controller comes in a "bold mineral blue, bright purple, aqua, and dark purple camouflage pattern". Microsoft says this controller is inspired by "geode crystals", and that it "finds the perfect balance between striking and subdued."

You can see it in all its glory below.

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