May 2023

Star Wars Jedi: Survivor is a pretty great game that, unfortunately, isn’t running as well as it could be for some players. The PC version has been especially problematic, and Respawn is addressing these issues with a performance update. 

The PC version of the game has reportedly been plagued with a variety of bugs and glitches, notably affecting frame rate. Today’s update, which is now live, is only stated as being “performance improvements for non-raytraced rendering" in the patch notes. 

That doesn’t seem like the most helpful update on the surface, but it's worth noting that the multiple improvements coming to the console versions, which are listed below, have already been implemented on PC:

If you’ve played Rockstar’s iconic PS2-era open-world crime simulator Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, you likely know about the infamously awful train mission. Hell, even if you haven’t played the game that mission has become popular online as a meme. And now someone has created a video showing it play out from the…

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In a recent interview with Famitsu, Naoki “Yoshi-P” Yoshida, producer and director of Final Fantasy XIV, talked about some of the new content included in the upcoming patch 6.4. He wants players to think about the meaning of the The Dark Throne in Japanese. He also talked about the new Pandaemonium: Anabaseios raids and the new variant and criterion dungeon Mount Rokkon. [Thanks, Famitsu!]

Patch 6.4 of Final Fantasy XIV is titled The Dark Throne in English, and its Japanese title roughly translates to “The Throne of the Offender” or “Throne of the Criminal.” Yoshi-P said that he wants people to imagine what the “Throne” in the title references to, as well as who the “offender” in the Japanese title might be.

The main story of the 6.X series of patches and the Pandaemonium raids are entering its climax with Patch 6.4. Pandaemonium: Anabaseios is the new series of 8-player raids that will be introduced with 6.4. Yoshi-P apologized for the mistakes in balance made for the previous Pandaemonium: Abyssos raids, particularly for the last level of its Savage version. He also added that the clear rate for this series of raids has been increasing steadily since the 4.X patches, and since raising item level.

After just three days, The Super Mario Bros. Movie pulled in more than 1.9 billion yen at the Japanese box office. This equates to $14.3 million USD. The movie, which topped the charts in the US for four weeks straight, earned over $1 billion worldwide. [Thanks, Oricon!]

Coinciding with the Japanese release, which happened on April 28, 2023, several North American theaters began holding special screenings of the movie's Japanese dub. A total of 10 theaters in the US and Canada offered showings, with initial times requiring knowledge of the language, as they did not have subtitles. That has since changed, however, as some theaters are still offering the Japanese dub but now with English subtitles.

Since its opening in over 60 markets on April 5, 2023, The Super Mario Bros. Movie has been breaking box office records. It earned over $377 million worldwide in its first five days, giving it the most successful global opening for an animated movie ever. Additionally, it had the biggest Wednesday-Sunday opening in US/Canada history, earning more than $204 million domestically in that time. As far as international releases go, it had the best opening day for a Universal movie in Mexico, and for animated movies as a whole in Spain.

Back in the 1990s, Philips tried to break into the video game market with its doomed-to-fail, multimedia set-top box standard called CD-i. Many brands and models of CD-i players were released but all of them were flops and mostly forgotten in 2023. However, Philips did acquire the rights to develop three Zelda games…

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The Ukrainian army has a new weapon in the fight against Russian invaders: Valve’s Steam Deck handheld.

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Welcome to Redfall, where the town motto is "Calm seas and sunny skies." Today, the seas are unnaturally calm. It's quietly horrific, actually. Go down to the dock and the ocean is frozen mid-tsunami - a giant sculpted wave caught in all its Hokusai curves and froth, the whole thing locked in space, with the soft matte edges giving it the likeness of old sea glass. There are ships caught forever in its tumble and swell - small fishers, but also a huge container ship, stopped mid-catastrophe, its cargo stuck in the silent spray.

You see this sea very early on in the game, and it's stayed with me. I should say here, I'm still quite early on in Redfall myself. This isn't a review, even though the embargo is just up. I haven't had time to play enough, and since this is a co-op game at heart - Arkane is calling it an open-world co-op FPS or words to that effect - I really need a good sense of it with other players. But there's more too. I'm playing on an Xbox Series X and the game is rather rough - rough in a way that I wonder if a day one patch might fix. So I'll give you some basic impressions today with the caveat that they may change - change once I've finished the whole game, and also if any patches are released. (Full disclosure - a patch from this afternoon locked me out of the build for a few hours, and while I'm back in I can't yet tell if it's improved much.)

As technology advances, and online communities shift to adapt, we take it as a kind of default proposition that new sites and platforms should be better than old ones. Reality, of course, has different plans.

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Redfall is now available for players worldwide, but unfortunately, I’ve only been playing for a few days and cannot provide a full review yet.

Writing this Redfall review-in-progress is painful because Arkane Studios is one of my favorite game developers, and its new game is largely disappointing. While the open world is beautifully sculpted with intriguing vistas, it’s weirdly empty, often implying that the harbor town’s vampire usurpers invaded during the offseason. 

As a whole, Redfall’s gameplay is unbalanced. Several puzzling decisions, like a lack of stealth takedowns or the inability to pause the game in single-player mode, are far from what I’d expect from an Arkane game. Rampant technical issues hinder the brighter moments of the experience, including frequent server crashes, inputs failing to work, NPCs and enemies spawning duplicate versions of themselves, and one very frustrating bug which prevents me from closing the world map and main menu in cooperative play. 

On a positive note, I like the four launch protagonists, each with unique skills you can upgrade via a straightforward-but-effective skill tree. Also, a handful of weapons are neat, like the heavy-hitting stake launcher or ultra-violet raygun that turns vampires to stone. A few locations, like a deranged scientist’s mansion, a cliffside lighthouse, and a hangar repurposed as a prison quarter, provide enough challenge to incentivize intelligent pathfinding. Unfortunately, most locations and enemy placements feel haphazardly designed – certainly a byproduct of creating two open-world maps. 

Humans are going back to the Moon! NASA’s Artemis program is going to send a bunch of astronauts to the Lunar surface in the coming years, initially for Moon business, but later to start work on the eventual journey to Mars. It’s exciting stuff, but as this art series shows, it can’t hurt to pack a few extra pieces of…

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Join Marcus Stewart, Wesley LeBlanc, and Brian Shea as we take a lengthy look at Street Fighter 6's World Tour! Marcus recently visited Capcom's office in San Francisco and spent 90 mins playing the single-player open world mode, and we'll take a look at the game's second chapter (set beyond the public demo). Expect to see plenty of fighting, shenanigans, weird superheroes, and box-headed gang members as we explore the mean streets of Metro City. 

Platform: PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, PlayStation 4, PC
Publisher: Capcom
Developer: Capcom
Release: June 2, 2023
Rating: Teen

Street Fighter 6 may feature thrilling 1v1 fights, but one of its most exciting features is its World Tour mode. This single-player sandbox story mode is a dramatic shift in what the series has offered, and players recently got to sample a small slice in a recent demo. On a trip to Capcom’s U.S. headquarters in San Francisco, I ventured beyond the demo for a more comprehensive look at what World Tour has to offer.  

World Tour gives players robust tools to craft a custom fighter, then take them to the streets of Metro City and other locations on a journey to create the ultimate world warrior. The demo stopped at the end of Chapter 1, but I was allowed to play up to the beginning of Chapter 3. 

In the incredibly rare circumstance that you might have had a Kinder Egg as a kid, was the toy ever your favourite part? It sure wasn’t for me. I was all about the chocolate. Sure, I’d crack open the yellow canister inside, let out some variation of, “Oh, an elephant!”, and promptly toss it in the bin and walk away, its destiny consigned to landfill. In the landfill of my brain, I’m currently carving out new space for Street Fighter 6’s World Tour mode. It's available to try now in demo form on PC and consoles, but I've been able to play a larger build of it that covered the first two chapters. Sadly, I can't say it left much of impression.

In case you're equally bemused by what SF6's World Tour actually is, this is a new, open world, RPG-style mode in which you make a custom fighter, run around small areas of Metro City and other locations around the globe, and level up. There are moves to learn, side quests to complete, and you can even do mini-game activities such as making pizza. Between all of that, you fight people. Other fighters, unruly gang members, random folk making their way to work in the morning. You can punch almost all of ‘em! There’s a glimpse of the Street Fighter you know and love here with its side-on 1v1 bouts, but everything else around it is unnecessary fluff. In other words, World Tour is the token toy inside the more delicious Street Fighter chocolate.

Nintendo Switch blockbuster The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom has been ripped and uploaded to the internet, with pirated copies now passed around, and extensive sections of footage streamed and uploaded.

Yesterday, Twitch and Discord streams showing footage of the game were available to view, two weeks ahead of the game's official launch date, before eventually being pulled offline.

It's unclar where the leak originated, or how many copies have been made available. But while a small number of physical copies appearing in the wild may be a headache for Nintendo, the fact the game has been pirated to share and play on PC is much more of a nightmare.

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Cadence of Hyrule: Crypt of the NecroDancer is the next game to be made available as a free trial on Nintendo Switch Online.

The game is available from now until 7th May.

If you're interested in the Zelda series and love the rhythm genre, then this game is absolutely for you. Check out some gameplay in the trailer below.

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Microsoft has begun rolling out its latest dashboard update, this time with a redesigned home screen that gives your background far more room to breathe.

The update is available already to Xbox owners in the Alpha and Alpha Skip-Ahead test rings, and will filter out to everyone else in the coming days.

I have the new version myself, and it's a real upgrade. Not only is there more room to see your background, the number of game and app tiles immediately available has also been increased.

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Microsoft has revealed the latest batch of titles set to leave Xbox Game Pass, all of which are due to depart the subscription service on Monday, 15th May.

The list includes indie action hit My Friend Pedro and cosy tile-based city-builder Before We Leave, as well as popular high school murder adventure series Danganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair Anniversary Edition. Goodbye despair, indeed.

First-person photography game Umurangi Generation is also getting the chop, so enjoy its retro future while you can.

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Game developer Colopl announced that Neko GOLF (also known as Shironeko Golf in Japan) will receive a collaboration event with Evangelion in Japan. A new key visual has been created for the occasion, depicting characters from the game wearing plug suits alongside Asuka Langley Shikinami, Rei Ayanami, Unit-02, and the upgraded Unit-00. The collaboration will start on May 8, 2023.

Asuka and Rei will appear as playable characters in Neko GOLF. There will be three outfits available for both, one wearing a golf outfit, another one with their regular school clothes, and a final one wearing their Evangelion plug suits.

You can take a better look at Asuka and Rei’s outfits in the gallery below.

[gallery columns="2" link="file" ids="961453,961454"]

In addition, game developer Colopl announced a giveaway on Twitter of official Evangelion goods and original QUO cards for Neko GOLF. Users that participate will receive a wallpaper with the key visual, created exclusively for the collaboration event. The way to enter the giveaway is tweeting by clicking the button included in the tweet below. Only people located in Japan can participate in the giveaway. The giveaway will be available until May 7, 2023.

https://twitter.com/wcat_golf/status/1652930860767928321

Additionally, Colopl revealed that new Evangelion collaboration-only channels have been created in the official Shironeko GOLF Japanese Discord server.

It's almost May 4, otherwise known as Star Wars Day on May the 4th (be with you), and like every year, Fortnite has a special event happening in-game to celebrate. 

This year, the focus is on the Star Wars prequels and the characters within them, like Anakin Skywalker, Padme Amidala, Darth Maul, various Clonetroopers, and more. Some of these skins will be available to earn by completing in-game Star Wars quests while others are available for purchase from the Fortnite Item Shop. 

Let's break down everything going on in this year's Fortnite x Star Wars event: 

The underwater scares of Dredge are about to run even deeper. Developer Black Salt Games have revealed a roadmap for their spooky fishing game, promising four new bits of content coming over the next year including a chiller passive mode, nice quality-of-life additions, and a larger paid DLC pack with a new non-eldritch horror threat.

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The people behind Skywind have released an impressive new gameplay video.

Skywind is the ambitious mod project that rebuilds Bethesda's much-loved 2002 role-playing game The Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind in the Skyrim engine.

Work on Skywind has gone on for years now, but this latest video, below, shows the project is coming along nicely. It shows 20 minutes of new footage, including new world spaces, creatures, environment assets, voice lines, item descriptions, user interface improvements and spells, and revolves around a quest from the original game called Necromancer in Mawia.

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Dredge, the sinister fishing game from Black Salt Games and publisher Team 17, is about to get a lot less sinister (only for those who want it to, of course).

Thanks to an upcoming passive mode, those who simply want to take to the seas and bob around on the beautiful blue without having to worry about the denizens of the deep interrupting their serenity will be able to do just that. In short, when this free update goes live, "monsters that usually attack fishing boats will no longer be aggressive".

As well as this new feature, Dredge players can also expect a new photo mode (that comes with a new in-game character) and the addition of map markers in the future.

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Fortnite has launched a major new Star Wars crossover event timed to coincide with the franchise's annual May 4th celebrations.

The event focuses on the Star Wars saga's Prequel trilogy, and features numerous free and paid-for skins to let you play as Anakin Skywalker, Padme Amidala, Darth Maul and a battalion of Clone Troopers.

This collaboration also sees Fortnite debut a premium mini battle pass for the first time, offering access to some of the above skins as rewards for completing in-game challenges.

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EA has started releasing the first of its many promised post-launch patches for Star Wars Jedi: Survivor.

Following a fairly glitchy release - particularly on PC - and an initial day one update, EA is now in the process of fixing its game. (Digital Foundry went so far as to call Star Wars Jedi: Survivor "the worst triple-A PC port of 2023 so far".) PC players will likely have already noticed a new patch, while those on consoles can expect to see this wave of fixes going live at some point today (2nd May).

EA says this particular patch will fix multiple crashes, including those tied to skipping cinematics. It will also address various collision issues within the game, and enemy AI should no longer T-pose when players take a spin with Jedi: Survivor's photo mode.

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NetherRealm has released what looks like the first tease for the upcoming Mortal Kombat 12.

At the end of a video, below, in which Mortal Kombat developers thank fans for their support over the past 30 years, is a brief clip showing what looks like grains of sand falling from an hourglass. One of these grains of sand, perhaps the last, explodes.

What does it mean? As you'd expect, Mortal Kombat fans are having their say. The consensus is the tease relates to Kronika's Hourglass. Kronika, the antagonist of Mortal Kombat 11 and the self-styled Keeper of Time and Architect of History, used the Hourglass to alter time and space, which led to the fun interactions between young and old versions of the same character in Mortal Kombat 11.

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Ahead of Capcom's 40th anniversary on June 11, 2023, Famitsu conducted an interview with Capcom President Haruhiro Tsujimoto. During it he talked about the company’s current business model, developing classic and new IPs as Games as a Service (GaaS,) Capcom’s push for classic games and remasters, and the future of the company. Previous tips also noted he discussed the future of crossplay games. [Thanks, Famitsu!]

For the past few years, Capcom focused on Games as a Service (GaaS) titles that the company can continue to support long after release, either through continuous free updates or DLC and content expansions. Some of these recent GaaS titles we've seen include Monster Hunter World and Monster Hunter Rise. Throughout fiscal year 2022, Monster Hunter Rise: Sunbreak and Resident Evil Village Gold Edition were two titles to receive constant support and spearhead Capcom’s current business model.

Tsujimoto also shared that two years ago, Capcom made a major shift on focusing on distributing new and classic games digitally. Because of this, approximately 80% of Capcom’s annual sales were digital versions of their titles. Tsujimoto pointed to this shift as responsible for being able to develop remasters and re-releases like Mega Man Battle Network Legacy Collection and the upcoming Ghost Trick.

We got our first sneak peek at the upcoming Gran Turismo movie back in January, and now the film's first full-length trailer provides a better look at PlayStation's latest cinematic adaptation. 

Unlike other many video game movies, Gran Turismo is actually based on real events. The film tells the true story of Jann Mardenborough, a British professional race car driver who began his career by winning GT Academy, a European televised contest that pitted the best Gran Turismo players against each other for a chance to earn an actual racing career with Nissan. The film follows the teenage Mardenborough's ascension from, as the poster below puts it, gamer to racer and all the trials that come with it. 

Mardenorough is portrayed by Archie Madekwe and the film also stars David Harbour, Orlando Bloom, and Djimon Hounsou. Neil Blomkamp sits in the director’s chair. 

Gran Turismo premieres exclusively in theaters on August 11.

In Second Dinner’s mobile card game Marvel Snap, one card seems to draw curiosity more than any other: Agatha Harkness. Part of this may be due to the character’s growth in popularity stemming from her role in the Disney Plus series WandaVision, which led to the creation of spin-off series Agatha: Coven of Chaos, set…

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Dokapon Kingdom, as a series, always seemed to be judged as the meaner cousin to Mario Party. After all, it’s a competitive board game pitting you against your friends with the ability to ruin them while bettering yourself. It just is more blatant about doing your best to devastate your opponents and, since it has the RPG elements, drags out the “pain” while it happens. The good news is for people like the series, Dokapon Kingdom: Connect continues the tradition and makes it easy to engage in colorful masochistic fun with other players. The bad news is that it is still a slog to get through a single game, feels incredibly mean-spirited, and gets downright difficult to play due to RNG and the way healing is handled.

Every time you start a Dokapon Kingdom: Connect game, the world is in danger. Monsters conquered every town. Everyone’s broke. So much so that the king is offering to make the person who saves the day and makes the most money the new ruler and spouse of the princess. This means going around seven continents saving the way. Or, if you chose other modes, being the first person to kill the most other players, buy an item and bring it to the king, or restore peace to a designated town.

Nijisanji announced the VTuber Fulgur Ovid will be taking a hiatus for health reasons. His break will begin on May 2, 2023. We don't know a return date window yet, as the company and performer will offer one later in his recovery. However, the company did note he will still appear on Twitter when he feels up to it.

Here is Nijisanji's official statement regarding Fulgar Ovid's hiatus for his health. He didn't release his own one yet.

【Notice: Fulgur Ovid Activity Hiatus】

Thank you so much for supporting NIJISANJI EN as always.

We are sorry to announce that Fulgur Ovid will be going on hiatus due to health reasons from May 2nd.
However, he will still be updating Twitter whenever he is possible.
We will…

— NIJISANJI EN Official (@NIJISANJI_World) May 2, 2023

At the end of April 2023, the Nijisanji VTuber canceled two zatsudan streams. For those unaware, these are the sorts of streams in which a VTuber chats with their audience.

Monolith Soft announced through its website that the company implemented a regular salary raise, as well as a base salary raise to their employees from April 2023. This raise comes as a response to inflation. Monolith Soft are a well-known Japanese video game development studio responsible for the creation of Xenogears, the Xenosaga series, and more recently the Xenoblade Chronicles series. The studio has been a property of Nintendo since 2007.

In the announcement made through the Monolith Soft website, the company briefly detailed that they have implemented a substantial raise in base salary, as well as regular salary increase in line with rising places and inflation. The increases in salary have been effective since April 2023.

In addition, the starting salary for new graduates increased by approximately 22% to 250,000 JPY (or roughly $1,819 USD).

Additionally, Monolith Soft recently released some interview with some of their developers working. On of them talked about the process of animating cutscenes and scripted events for their games, while the other one delved into the lightning techniques used in Xenoblade Chronicles 3.

I first played co-op third-person shooter Glitch Busters: Stuck On You at Summer Games Fest last year, and came away really impressed. I played with couch co-op with two members of developers Toy Logic, which was lighthearted, slightly chaotic fun; everything couch co-op should be, right?

So, I thought I'd give the game a whirl but as a solo player. How would a game built for up to four players cope when there's just one person taking the reins? Well, sort of fine for a bit, then quite agonising, actually. That's not to say it can't be a fun time, but bots definitely aren't a substitute for real people.

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Every weekend, indie devs show off current work on Twitter's #screenshotsaturday tag. And every Monday (or Tuesday, after a holiday weekend like this), I bring you a selection of these snaps and clips. This week, my eye has been caught by weird musical contraptions, a quiet moment on the balcony with a cup of coffee, chill building, frozen sledding, and the ability to skip a game's tutorial so hard that it sinks to the bottom of the sea. Come admire all these interesting and attractive indies with me!

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