September 2022

A new, free artificial intelligence program called Lambdal is currently taking over the Internet. By typing in a prompt, the AI can generate a Pokemon design based on the words you fed to it. It takes about a minute or so to generate the results, but people are using it to create all sorts of unique Pokemon designs.

We had some fun generating our own Pokemon designs using Lambdal, each of which are based on the names of different video game characters. Some of them work extremely well as Pokemon that we would actually want to have in our games. Others… not so much.

Take a look below at 20 of the video game characters that the Lambdal program turned into Pokemon designs based on their names.

There have been a fair number of complaints about Destiny 2’s Season of Plunder, but for the most part I’ve been having a blast. So it’s a major bummer that one of the main reasons to play right now appears bugged for the second week in a row. An upgrade that’s key to overcoming Destiny’s terrible crafting system…

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Dragon Age is an immensely popular fantasy roleplaying series that has spawned several main entries, spin-off games, novels, comics books, a tabletop game, an animated film, and a web series. Yet the first entry in the series was relatively modest: Origins is a single-player game with a main story campaign that…

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Electronic Arts and Koei Tecmo have revealed Wild Hearts, a new Monster Hunter-like game coming to PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC next year. 

More specifically, this EA Originals title will be released on February 17, 2023. This news comes by way of the game's reveal trailer released today. In it, we see a lot of monster hunting action. The game seems to take place in a mythological land filled with large and dangerous beasts. You'll need to craft better gear to take on tougher monsters, eventually taming the otherwise wild area. 

Check out the reveal trailer below: 

As you can see, Wild Hearts looks great, especially if you're someone who's a fan of Capcom's long-running Monster Hunter series. 

Reviewed on: Switch
Platform: Switch, PC
Publisher: Devolver Digital, Lucasfilm Games
Developer: Terrible Toybox
Release: September 17, 2022

"I'm Guybrush Threepwood, mighty pirate!"

Between the moment Guybrush uttered this iconic line in Return to Monkey Island and our reintroduction to familiar characters like used ship salesman Stan S. Stanman and Cobb, with his "Ask me about Loom" badge, I was already shrouded in a haze of nostalgia. And you would be eating all these up, too, if you're a Monkey Island fan. The thing about Monkey Island enthusiasts is that we can talk your ears off about what makes the series so unique. It's the earnest naivety of its pirate hero Guybrush Threepwood and the series' whimsical and self-referential humor. But most of all, it's that one absurd puzzle you'll need to crack within the original Secret of Monkey Island: the sheer hilarity of transporting an ultra tart blend of a pirate beverage called grog across an island without melting its mug and incinerating your hands along the way.

HoYoVerse has released a second trailer for the upcoming Genshin Concert 2022: Melodies of an Endless Journey. This concert will take place on October 2, 2022. People will be able to watch it from the official Genshin Impact YouTube channel for free. Shiro Sagisu, who composed for works like Neon Genesis Evangelion, His and Her Circumstances, Bleach, and more, is the music director. Musicians and musical artists from around the world helped to work on the tracks that will play.

Genshin Concert 2022: Melodies of an Endless Journey will have music from the four current regions: Mondstadt, Liyue, Inazuma, and Sumeru. It will have a re-imagined score that is different from the version you can hear in the game. The Hollywood Chamber Orchestra will perform the music, with Eímear Noone as the conductor.

Here is the trailer for Genshin Concert 2022.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gwaZ-uRJdRM

The concert will be around 75 minutes long. Genshin Impact has always used traditional instruments and real-life inspirations in its soundtracks. For example, the music in Inazuma uses the koto and shamisen. HOYO-MiX and Shiro Sagisu have worked with folk musicians and other musical artists to create contemporary re-imaginations of the game’s tracks.

PlayStation has announced the three free PS Plus monthly games for October.

Hot Wheels Unleashed (PS4, PS5), Injustice 2 (PS4), and Superhot (PS4) will all be available on the subscription service from 4th October.

As a reminder, these games will be available to all subscribers across the Essential, Extra, and Premium tiers.

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Lion King villain Scar will join Disney Dreamlight Valley in October, as part of the game's first major content update.

In a Twitter thread, developer Gameloft said it expected the update to launch "in around three weeks", and fix several priority bugs such as issues with lost progress, missing founder's pack rewards, and general console crashes.

October's update will also add new features, such as an improved photo mode and new poses for your character avatar.

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A pre-alpha gameplay trailer for The Finals has been released ahead of a closed alpha test which will begin on Friday.

The Finals, which is being developed by Embark Studios, was codenamed Project Discovery.

Last month, former EA executive turned CEO of Embark Studios Patrick Söderlund revealed the decision to ship The Finals as the developer's first game was the reason Arc Raiders was delayed.

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Players new to the Overwatch series will slowly unlock its character roster over the course of 100 Overwatch 2 matches, Blizzard has revealed.

The upcoming sequel's First Time User Experience (FTUE) will also see players "rapidly" unlock game modes and the ability to chat in-game.

Blizzard has said this FTUE has been designed to introduce newcomers to the game's many characters, systems and modes in an approachable way - without disadvantaging those who have played already.

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Wild Hearts, a collaboration between Koei Tecmo's Omega Force and EA Originals, has been officially revealed with a new gameplay trailer.

Inspired by the Monster Hunter series, it's set in feudal Japan and features hunters battling some beautifully designed creatures known as Kemono that have fused bizarrely with nature, flora and fauna combined.

If you've ever wanted to battle a giant pig with a paper umbrella, this is for you.

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PC Building Simulator 2's release date has just been revealed - and it'll arrive on 12th October.

The sequel to the popular simulator game was announced back in March and was said to include an upgraded career mode, new customisation features, and over 40 real-life hardware brands.

Developer Spiral House has shared more details of what can be expected from PC Building Simulator 2, alongside its release date, when it becomes available later this year.

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Turns out early access isn’t just for games. The Amazon Prime Early Access Sale is taking place this October 11th-12th, a full six weeks before Black Friday 2022, and from a PC gaming standpoint will offer the same kinds of component and peripheral deals as that annual pre-Christmas shoppingfest. Just earlier.

That said, the Prime Early Access Sale isn’t purely a prelude to the anything-goes chaos of Black Friday. It’s more like a Prime Day 2, in that it’s an Amazon-only event, with all the best deals set to be require Amazon Prime membership to access. That’s right, it’s one of those.

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EA and Koei Tecmo's co-op beastie-botherer Wild Hearts will mix katanas, massive animals, and wacky crafted weapons when it launches in February. The Dynasty Warriors studio revealed their collaboration as part of the EA Originals label today, and it’s certainly channelling some of that there Monster Hunter energy. Watch the first trailer below and tell me you don’t want a handheld helicopter.

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What appears to be an announcer pack voiced by Mark Hamill and leaked from Warner Bros licensed brawler MultiVersus indicates that The Joker might be arriving in a future update. Twitter user Laisul shared a recording of what they claimed are lines from an unreleased Joker pack, and they do sound like Hamill’s classic rendition of the Batman villain. Why so serious? Well, announcer packs replace the default MultiVersus announcer with the voice of one of the game’s fighters, so Joker’s addition to the roster seems legit.

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Every time Team Ninja announces a new game that isn’t Ninja Gaiden, it feels like the studio will never get around making another adventure for Ryu Hayabusa. Yet, not all hope is lost.

At Tokyo Game Show, Twinfinite interviewed Team Ninja president and Wo Long director Fumihiko Yasuda, and we had to ask him if we can still hope to see a new Ninja Gaiden one day.

Yasuda-san explained that this is a time in which Team Ninja is taking on many different challenges and trying new things, and players are perhaps looking at it and wondering when the new Ninja Gaiden will come out.

He’s aware of that and understands that. He’s listening to the fans and at some point, he wants to make a new Ninja Gaiden himself as well. It’s definitely something he wants to turn into a reality.

He hopes fans will be patient a bit longer and hopefully, good news will come. While there’s nothing else to say at this point, Yasuda-san would “definitely want to make a new Ninja Gaiden at some point.”

Incidentally, Yasuda-san is certainly no stranger to the Ninja Gaiden franchise. He worked as a level designer on Ninja Gaiden II, and directed Ninja Gaiden 3, Sigma 2, and 3: Razor’s Edge.

That would certainly be a great resume to bring into the development of a new Ninja Gaiden.

Yet, for now we have to wait and see.

Incidentally, if you feel yourself starving for some Ninja Gaiden before Team Ninja actually gets ariund making one, you could play the Ninja Gaiden: Master Collection, which realeased in2021 fir PS4, Xbox, PC, aad Nintendo Switch.

Streamers have been a prominent source of Entertainment for the last decade now, with the rise of big genres like video games and more. Twitch has overwhelmingly been the most popular platform to stream on, with millions of active Streamers per day. Although, it does beg the question, how much money can a Streamer earn? So today, let’s discuss how much Streamers make on Twitch.

Breaking Down How Much Streamers Earn on Twitch

There are multiple factors that go into how Streamers can earn money. Subscriptions, Advertisements, Twitch bits, a form of digital currency that people can use to donate to you during your stream through cheering or extensions all play a factor in it. But before that, you must become a Twitch Partner or Affiliate to begin earning money. From the Twitch support page, these are the requirements to become a Twitch Affiliate:

“At least 500 total minutes broadcast in the last 30 days. At least 7 unique broadcast days in the last 30 days. An average of 3 concurrent viewers or more over the last 30 days. At least 50 Followers.”

In what has been a rather turbulent journey on the open seas, Skull and Bones will receive yet another delay. The news of the delay surfaced on the internet earlier this afternoon before Ubisoft officially confirmed the rumor in an official blog post. Skull and Bones will officially launch on March 9, 2023.

You can find the official announcement Tweet below.

Per the announcement, the delay comes from the development team looking to polish the game after receiving “invaluable feedback” received during the game’s technical test and insider program. Feedback noted, the team is looking to ensure fans get the “best experience” possible with a delay being a result of that desire. More insider program sessions are set to happen, and an open beta is scheduled in the near future to help iron out kinks before the new launch date.

Sony picked this fine Wednesday to announce the PlayStation Plus games coming to subscribers starting on Oct. 4. There are some good picks for October, between a great first-person shooter and a fun superhero fighting game.

Subscribers will be getting Hot Wheels Unleashed for the PS4 and PS5, Injustice 2 for PS4, and Superhot for PS4.

If you are unfamiliar with the games, here are the official descriptions given by the PlayStation Blog:

Hot Wheels Unleashed

Collect, build and race in this fantastic arcade sim based on the Hot Wheels universe. Earn new vehicles then take them to the track to race side by side with friends in two-player split-screen, or face up to 12 opponents in online challenges. One you’ve raced, why not try and build your own course? Create amazing layout inside and outside the track editor. Ad loops, special boosters, obstacles and special elements to make an incredible amusement park for your races, then share your creation online for other players to try. 

Injustice 2

Sony Interactive Entertainment and Polyphony Digital announced the coming of update 1.23.

The update will be released tomorrow, September 29, and it will include three new cars and more.

The cars made available are the futuristic Volkswagen ID. R ’19, the classic Nissan Silvia K’s Type S(S14) ’94, and the sleek Porsche Vision Gran Turismo Spyder.

We’re also getting two new Scapes categories set in California and Tokyo as featured curations.

If you’d like to see the new cars in action, you can enjoy the trailer below.

Gran Turismo 7 has been receiving monthly updates with new cars (and often more) since its launch, and this will be the update for September.

For instance, in August we got the McLaren MP4/4 ’88, the Porsche Cayman GT4 ’16, and the Pontiac GTO “The Judge” ’69.

 in July we got the Porsche 918 Spyder ’13, the Nissan Skyline Super Silhouette Group 5 ’84, and the Maserati A6GCS/53 Spyder ’54.

Fortnite has started a new event that will use your Discord account. Unlike most events in Fortnite, this one will be completely through Discord, with no challenge page in your quest menu. Here’s how to start the Fortnite Paradise Discord event as well as all challenges and rewards.

How to Start Paradise Discord Event

An image found on the backend of the Xbox online store seems to reveal that Ubisoft is gearing up to launch a “Game Of The Year Upgrade Pass” for Far Cry 6. That’s…fine, I guess, but it raises the question: Which site out there thought it was the best game of 2021 and awarded it such an accolade?

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Pokémon TCG fansite PokéBeach has secured quite the find. It’s an internal video from The Pokémon Company that shows, in never-before-seen detail, exactly how a Western Pokémon card is created, from their initial design to proofing and printing. And if you love those factory shots of items getting mass produced,…

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At its highest levels, chess is a male-dominated activity. There are currently only 39 women who hold the International Chess Federation (FIDE)’s highest title of Grandmaster, compared to over a thousand male Grandmasters. Even “Woman Grandmaster,” a sort of consolation prize title from FIDE that requires a 2,300…

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Ubisoft faces another massive delay. Earlier this year it was Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora. Now it’s Skull and Bones, the Assassin’s Creed publisher’s only major fall blockbuster. Previously set to come out in November, two sources familiar with the game’s development now tell Kotaku it’s been delayed again. Ubisoft…

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Skull and Bones has been delayed again, this time to March of next year. 

It was originally due out in 2018 but then delayed to 2019. It was delayed to at least March 2020 after that, but things went quiet and the game missed that window. Then, in May of last year, Ubisoft announced that Skull and Bones would release sometime between April 1, 2022, and March 31, 2023. And now, it's slipping out of its November 8 release date, which was only just announced back in July, into a new March 9, 2023 date. As for why, the team cites a need for more polish and balancing.

Kotaku's Ethan Gach says sources say the teams working on Skull and Bones are burnt out. According to Gach in his Kotaku story, the latest technical test for the game ended on September 19. One source involved with the test told Kotaku that gameplay was more refined than in previous tests but that progression needed work as it still felt too shallow. Gach writes that this is a concern shared by multiple sources close to the game's development. 

Here's what Ubisoft has to say about the delay: 

During Aniplex’s Online Fest which took place on September 23, 2022, Aniplex uploaded a new trailer for Berserk: The Golden Age Memorial Edition. As the title implies, this is a remade version of Berserk: The Golden Age, which originally had film adaptations. Kendo Kobayashi, who voices Bazuso, confirmed in a presentation at Online Fest that this version will add new scenes that were absent from the films.

You can watch the trailer for Berserk: The Golden Age Memorial Edition here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6QkMrXodGQQ

The original The Golden Age movies aired around ten years ago, from 2012 to 2013. The “Memorial” part of the anime is not just to commemorate the 10-year anniversary of the movies. It is also to honor the late Kentaro Miura, who is the creator of the Berserk manga. He passed away in 2021 from an acute aortic dissection.

Two key PC technologies started to emerge towards the end of 2018 - hardware-accelerated ray tracing and machine learning based super-sampling. Forming the basis of Nvidia's brand change from GTX to RTX, the technologies have continued to be refined across the years. With the arrival of the new RTX 4000 graphics line, we have a new innovation in performance-boosting technology. DLSS 3 adds AI frame generation to its existing DLSS 2-based spatial upscaling. We've been putting the technology through its paces for the last ten days and we're impressed by the results.

Nvidia supplied us with a GeForce RTX 4090 ahead of time, along with incomplete preview builds of three DLSS 3-enabled titles: the path-traced Portal RTX, Marvel's Spider-Man and Cyberpunk 2077. The latter shouldn't be confused with the new RT Overdrive version and has more in common with the existing retail version, just with DLSS 3 added. Even running maxed, RTX 4090 and DLSS 3 allows these games to run nigh-on flawlessly on a 4K 120Hz screen. Nvidia is talking about DLSS 3 as an enabler for next generation experiences, showing its highly impressive Racer RTX, Portal RTX and the Overdrive RT version of Cyberpunk - which, believe it or not, is effectively a path-traced rendition of the game. Marvel's Spider-Man? Nvidia has shown a promotion video with RTX 4090 running the game at 200fps. Unfortunately, we are not able to show our own frame-rate numbers in this content - only performance multipliers.

Ubisoft has delayed its long-awaited pirate game Skull and Bones yet again - this time until 9th March 2023.

Originally revealed back in 2017 and in development since 2013, the project's launch has been repeatedly pushed back - and was most recently expected to arrive in November this year.

In a press release this afternoon, Ubisoft said it had made the decision to delay Skull and Bones once again following player feedback from its recent testing programme.

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Call of Duty: Warzone's final major update has landed - two-and-a-half years after the phenomenally-popular battle royale launched and changed the series forever.

Warzone, which launched as a standalone free-to-play battle royale in March 2020 following the successful launch of 2019's Modern Warfare soft reboot, was an overnight phenomenon fuelled by lockdowns that made billions of dollars for Activision.

It's seen three major maps: Verdansk, Rebirth and Caldera, sometimes awkward integration with Call of Duty Black Ops Cold War and Vanguard, and crossovers with some of the biggest names in popular culture.

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