Sony will broadcast its next PlayStation Showcase next Wednesday, 24th May.

Viewers can watch on YouTube and Twitch from 9pm UK time.

The show will last for an hour and focus on PlayStation 5 and PS VR2 games from PlayStation Studios, third-party partners, and indie creators from around the world.

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The Korok seeds make a return in The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, but after you’re gifted these golden turds collectibles after gently and humanely returning a Korok to their friend across a body of water or other obstacles, where do you take them? Hestu, the lovable, maraca-playing Korok is your go-to for…

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A PlayStation Showcase presentation is set to premiere on Wednesday, May 24, the company announced on the official PlayStation Blog today.

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When Square Enix releases a new Final Fantasy XIV expansions and patches, it also shares an updated fan kit with wallpapers and imagery from it. In May 2023, we’ll see the 6.4 patch. Ahead of that, the new drop appeared. This time, the focus is on The Voidcast Dais Final Fantasy XIV trial star Golbez.

As is common with Final Fantasy XIV, Golbez is a character from Final Fantasy IV making a cameo in the MMORPG. There are desktop and mobile wallpaper options. One of the Final Fantasy XIV wallpapers features the name of the 6.4 patch, “The Dark Throne,” while the other shows the Final Fantasy XIV Endwalker logo. Likewise, the two social media banners offer the same options.

As confirmed during the Letter from the Producer Live Part LXXVII, both The Voidcast Dais and The Voidcast Dais (Extreme) will bring Golbez to Final Fantasy XIV in patch 6.4. Those will be added alongside the new The Aetherfont Dungeon and Pandaemonium: Anabaseios Raid. There will also be a Pandaemonium: Anabaseios (Savage) option, though it will appear a week after 6.4’s debut.

Final Fantasy XIV is immediately available on PC, PS4, and PS5, and patch 6.4 will release on May 23, 2023.

Bandai Namco announced a Blue Protocol Live Broadcast #7 will take place on May 23, 2023 at 4am PT/7am ET. In addition, the website will be down for maintenance from 9-9:30pm PT/12-12:30am ET on May 22, 2023. This will likely be a fairly major broadcast, so we might get important information such as a release date.

The sixth Blue Protocol actually consisted of three separate parts. While the first one was almost two hours long, 6.1 to 6.3 were both under an hour. These livestreams still provided big information for the game. For example, they informed us about the benchmark program where you could play with the character creator, as well detailed character classes to us. But since this will be #7 and not #6.4, we might be able to get a long stream once again.

In an upcoming interview with Famitsu, Bandai Namco Entertainment CEO Nao Udagawa expressed that the company plans to focus on Armored Core 6, Elden Ring, and Tekken 8 for the time being. It is also considering implementing games in its Gundam Metaverse. It wants to make more content for the Idolmaster franchise too. [Thanks, ryokutya2089!]

Both Armored Core 6 and Tekken 8 are still in development. However, they will be the two major releases that Bandai Namco publishes in the near future, fiscal year 2023, and going into next year. So the company will put a lot of time and money into promoting them. This also goes for the Elden Ring DLC, Shadow of the Erdtree, which is the award-winning game’s first major expansion.

One of the ways HoYoVerse introduces new and upcoming Honkai: Star Rail characters is via talk show-like video segments. Given a new five-star debuts on May 17, 2023, there's a new "Keeping up with Star Rail" to go with it. As usual, it means a chance to see some in-game footage while hearing about a new additional. For this installment of the Honkai: Star Rail show, Fu Xuan shares what she knows about Jing Yuan.

Initially, this Honkai: Star Rail video begins by showing Jing Yuan with his troops, before showing in-battle footage that analyzes his normal attack, Skill, and Ultimate. Both the host and Fu Xuan explain how the attacks affect his in-battle performance, as well as how his Technique works when used ahead of a fight.

Here’s the full video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Shonzh8EgNk&ab_channel=Honkai%3AStarRail

Dead By Daylight has a tantalizing new content update that involves…Nicolas Cage?

Developer Behaviour Interactive released a teaser for an announcement on July 5 regarding the massively talented actor's mysterious involvement. As for what Cage's role entails, an in-game version of the Renfield star only offers this nugget:

“There’s nothing more powerful than imagination. One can shape the fabric of reality, transforming everything you think you may know.”

Who knows what that means, but it looks like Cage is joining the game in some capacity. Is he a killer? Will he appear in one of his many, many film roles? Or is it scary enough to just have Nicolas Cage as himself running around trying to murder players? We’ll get our answers in July.

What do you want to see from Nicolas Cage in Dead by Daylight? Let us know in the comments!

A PlayStation Showcase will air next week, ostensibly serving as the publisher’s big summer showcase.

It airs on Wednesday, May 24, at 1 p.m. Pacific/4 p.m. Eastern. A PlayStation Blog post states the event will run a little over an hour and will feature new titles for PS5 and PS VR2. In addition to showcasing first-party PlayStation Studios titles, the event will also highlight third-party and indie games. 

Universal Pictures have dropped the first teaser for their Five Nights At Freddy’s film adaptation, based on the hit horror series. Ten years ago, I’d hear schoolmates chatting about the games’ ghosts, purple people, and dismembered heads stuck in animatronics. Now, we’re old enough to buy R-rated cinema tickets, and Hollywood’s ready to capitalise on some teen nostalgia - essentially the film industry’s version of min-maxing. Check out the first teaser here:

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After a month of teases, it looks like tomorrow's the day the next Mortal Kombat game - not Mortal Kombat 12, according to reports - will get its official reveal.

Series developer NetherRealm has now released a short video teasing some unspecified announcement tomorrow, 18th May, at 2pm BST/6am PT. And given its title - "Tomorrow is a new dawn" - and its arrival after a bunch of teases hinting at a reveal for the next Mortal Kombat, it doesn't seem too farfetched to assume that's exactly what we'll get.

As you'll no doubt have noticed if you've been riding the hype train so far, NetherRealm's latest video features the same time-based imagery seen in its previous trailers - the most recent of which saw a ticking clock gradually approach '12' before leapfrogging it entirely to land on '1'.

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If you’ve been using Zonai items in your Tears of the Kingdom creations, you’re undoubtedly familiar with the battery icon representing your Energy Cell’s power. You’re also probably familiar with how quickly it whittles down to nothing, sending your fan-powered planes crashing down to the Hyrule surface. If you want…

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Yesterday, Blizzard held a livestream in which it announced that, yes, a new tank hero, map, and cinematic are coming to Overwatch 2. It also announced that its PvE story mode, y’know, the whole reason it said it was making Overwatch 2 in the first place, is getting nerfed into the ground. Deep in mourning, Kotaku’s…

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Everybody was expecting The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom to be a big success. The follow-up to Breath of the Wild was destined to sell a lot and likely end up as one of the biggest games of 2023. Still, it’s surprising and impressive to see the latest Zelda game selling over 10 million copies in just three…

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Graphics in video games are kind of a big deal: “Video” is right there in the medium’s name, after all. A game’s graphics can greatly contribute to our first impressions, sometimes memorably so. And visual creatures that we are, sometimes it just feels nice to be newly dazzled by the pixel-shader conjurations of the…

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Behaviour Interactive confirmed their latest addition to Dead by Daylight will be Hollywood actor Nicolas Cage. This is not a character played by Nicolas Cage. It’s the actor himself who will become a playable character. More details will appear on July 5, 2023.

The announcement was made on the official Dead by Daylight Twitter account. In a moody trailer, we hear him whispering about the power of imagination before a CGI version of him walks out of the fog and looks at the camera. Behaviour confirmed that Nicolas Cage will be a Survivor in Dead by Daylight, summoned by The Entity while filming “the role of a lifetime.”

https://twitter.com/DeadbyDaylight/status/1658850169218015234

Dead by Daylight featured the likenesses of many real-life actors before, but usually we see them in the form of characters they’ve played. It’s not been Bruce Campbell showing up. It’s been Ash Williams from The Evil Dead, for example. This is the first time an actor has shown up as themselves.

While this marks his first appearance in a horror game, Nicolas Cage is no stranger to horror in his movie roles. He has appeared in films such as the H.P. Lovecraft adaptation Color Out of Space and the Five Nights at Freddy’s inspired Willy’s Wonderland. He also infamously appeared in the remake of folk horror movie The Wicker Man. More recently, he has played Dracula in Renfield.

Square Enix shared some trivia on Tseng as he appears in Final Fantasy VII Remake via its Twitter account. To be more specific, it has to do with Tseng’s character design and his suit. There are also pictures in the Tweet with close-ups so you can see all the details.

There are four buttons on Tseng’s cuff, and they are so close together they’re actually stacking on top of each other. Apparently, this is a very difficult thing to accomplish, which shows off the tailor’s technique. This makes it a very popular design choice in custom suits. In real life, this particular style is called “waterfall” or “kissing” buttons. According to Square Enix, Tseng’s choice in his suit makes his dedication to work very clear. This is likely due to the fact that he has a fairly expensive custom suit as his work outfit.

Here's a closer look at Tseng in Final Fantasy VII Remake.
https://twitter.com/FFVIIR_CLOUD/status/1658759263291076608

Nintendo revealed details about the new Splatoon 3 Challenges mode added as part of the Sizzle Season. This will be a new online event mode. Challenges will be similar to Splatoon 2’s League Battles, where different game modes were rotated on a schedule.

The modes in Challenges will offer new twists on the Splatoon formula beyond the usual match formats. In the Sizzle Season announcement trailer, Nintendo named a few of the challenges, but now the company provided further details. Too Many Trizookas gives everyone access to an unlimited Trizooka special weapon. Foggy Notion drowns the entire stage in fog, making it harder to see your opponents. Finally, Extreme Jump Battle beefs up the jumping physics. We will see more Challenges in future updates.

The first Challenge in Splatoon 3 will be the New Season Challenge, which will take place on June 2-4, 2023, depending on your time zone. According to Nintendo, there will be three time windows across the weekend, each lasting two hours.

This is the latest time-limited event added to Splatoon 3. Other events have included the Eggstra Work and Big Run variants on the Salmon Run mode, as well as the regular Splatfest events. The most recent Splatfest was based on The Legend of Zelda and saw victory for Team Power, representing Ganondorf.

Splatoon 3 is out now for the Nintendo Switch. Sizzle Season kicks off on June 1, 2023.

The Oshi no Ko anime’s English dub is about to debut next week, and HIDIVE revealed all of its voice actors. On May 24, 2023, we will see both the English dub of episode one and the English simulcast of episode 7. The seventh episode will air at 8am PT/11am ET. After that, the English version of the first episode will appear at 9am PT/12pm ET.

Here’s the full list of English voice actors who will appear in the Oshi no Ko anime dub.

• Ai Hoshino: Donna Bella Litton
• Aqua (as a child): Chaney Moore
• Aqua (as a teenager): Jack Stansbury
• Gorou: Jeremy Gee
• Ichigo: Brandon Hearnsberger
• Kana: Natalie Rial
• Miyako: Christina Kelly
• Ruby (as a teenager and child): Alyssa Marek
• Sarina: Savanna Menzel
• Taishi: Ty Mahany

Some of the English voice actors already began sharing their thoughts about their roles on Twitter. For example, Aqua voice actor Stansbury and Kana actress Natalie Rial both spoke up about their performances.

After co-creator Ed Boon teased Mortal Kombat 12 news last week, we have confirmation that a formal reveal will happen tomorrow, May 18.

A new tweet from the official Mortal Kombat Twitter account reads, "Tomorrow is a new dawn" and contains a teaser styled after the previous video, featuring a clock hand that skips past 12 and strikes 1, followed by the text “It Is Time” with a start time of 6 a.m. PT/9 a.m. ET.

Tomorrow is a new dawn. #MortalKombat pic.twitter.com/VAxjF1rFdj

— Mortal Kombat 30 (@MortalKombat) May 17, 2023

Fans have speculated that the clock landing on "1" may signify the next game is a reboot of sorts. Although 2011’s MK 9 already did that, the wild ending of MK 11 (and its Aftermath expansion) certainly paved the runway for Netherrealm to essentially start fresh and do whatever it wants with the fiction going forward. As such, this 12th entry has the potential to be pretty nuts, even by MK standards. 

Sky: Children of the Light, the acclaimed free-to-play "social adventure" from Journey and Flower developer ThatGameCompany, is making the jump to PC.

First released for iOS in 2019 - and later for Android, Switch, and PlayStation - Sky: Children of the Light is a bit of an unusual thing, blending all sorts of elements to create a delicate adventure spanning the seven realms of a beautiful kingdom located among the clouds.

There are puzzley-platformy bits, story vignettes, as well as live-service staples like a season pass, and it's all build around a gently collaborative multiplayer core, designed to encourage "compassion, friendship, and altruism".

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BlizzCon is back this November, with its first in-person event since 2019 following several years of digital-only events and no-shows as Blizzard navigated a pandemic and workplace controversy.

As announced on the Blizzard website, BlizzCon 2023 will take place from 3rd-4th November at California's Anaheim Convention Center. Beyond that, details are fairly non-existent at present, but the studio says it'll have news on "ticketing information, cosplay and other competition details, and more" next month.

BlizzCon 2023 will mark the show's first in-person event in four years, following two highly controversial showings in 2018 and 2019 - the first playing host to Blizzard's infamously bungled reveal of free-to-play mobile game Diablo Immortal and the second featuring a limp non-apology from then-CEO J. Allen Brack, who failed to offer much in the way of a convincing response after Blizzard suspended a Hearthstone player for expressing pro-Hong Kong views.

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Twitch is today launching a new Alerts feature, to help creators personalise their streams.

Most streamers will have alerts for new followers, subscribers, and more, but these are usually created using third-party apps like Streamlabs.

Twitch's Alerts feature will allow streamers to create and edit alerts directly within Twitch, to acknowledge key interactions including hype trains, goals, raids, charity donations, and more.

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Overwatch players, it’s been a rough few years. When the hero shooter first debuted in 2016, it offered one of the best multiplayer experiences of all time: tight, focused combat centered on team compositions, an impressive hero pool with options for every kind of player, solid matchmaking, and a ranking system that…

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Remember when the gamers were upset about the OG Mass Effect 3 using a stock photo of an attractive human woman to reveal what fan-favorite Quarian Tali looks like unmasked? Well, apparently developer BioWare wants you to forget about all that because, alongside patching Tali’s portrait into something less Getty in…

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The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild’s weapon degradation system was bullshit. Things got better in the back half of the game, but early on it was a pain in the ass and demoralizing to get a hot new sword only for it to break a few dozen hits later. Tears of the Kingdom fixes this. Weapons still break, but it’s now…

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Square Enix has opened up pre-orders for the Switch version of Ketsugou Danshi, or Bonding Boys: Elements with Emotions. It will come out in Japan on June 29, 2023 and it’ll cost 3,300 JPY ($24.15). The iOS and Android version of the game has a release window of Summer 2023. [Thanks, Game Watch!]

If you pre-order the game before August 31, 2023, you can get a data book containing information on all of the characters. There will also be a premium Collectors’ Edition of the game that’ll come out on June 29, 2023. This will cost 27,500 JPY ($200) and will come with a nui doll, posters, can badges, clear cards, the soundtrack, art book, drama CD, and data book. All of it will come in a special box.

[gallery columns="1" link="file" ids="963890"]

As a reminder, Ketsugou Danshi will come with four boys by default. You will get Saku (Hydrogen), Eito (Oxygen), Rikka (Carbon), and Shiki (Beryllium) in the base game. The other six boys who are in the game are paid DLC characters. They cost 1,100 JPY each. After June 29, 2023, an all-in-pack costing 9900 JPY ($72) containing the base game and DLC will be available as well.

Asahina Akane, a VTuber with the Japanese branch of Nijisanji, will graduate from the company on May 24, 2023. In an announcement via Anycolor’s Twitter account, it stated that Akane will leave both Nijisanji and Nornis in order to focus on her school and studies. Her YouTube channel, fan club, and social media will go private on May 26, 2023.

Official goods of Akane will no longer be produced. As well, fans will have until June 30, 2023 to send in their letters to her. Anycolor deeply thanked fans and employees for supporting Asahina Akane throughout her career. She debuted in August 2020 as part of the Selene Girls’ Academy Drama Club group. She is also in Nornis with Inui Toko and Machita Chima, which is a singer unit. As of the time of writing, Asahina Akane reached 239k subscribers on YouTube.

Pac-Man 99 will be delisted soon, as confirmed by Bandai Namco and Nintendo. The free multiplayer title will be removed as a bonus for Nintendo Switch Online members later in 2023. October 8, 2023 is the last day to get it and play online.

Pac-Man 99 players still have a few months left to play the online modes before the game is delisted. Bandai Namco will remove paid custom themes on August 8, 2023. This will be followed by the Pac-Man 99 Deluxe Pack and Mode Unlock DLCs being pulled on September 8, 2023. Finally, the online modes will be shut down and the game will be removed from the eShop on October 8, 2023.

Despite the delisting, Bandai Namco confirmed that previously purchased Pac-Man 99 DLC will allow the game to remain playable. This means that anyone who already has the Deluxe Pack and Mode Unlock DLCs will be able to access the offline modes indefinitely. Previously purchased custom themes will also remain accessible. These DLC packs can also be re-downloaded after the game goes offline.

Pac-Man 99 released in 2021, following the similar battle royale titles Tetris 99 and Super Mario Bros 35. Like those games, players compete to play a variation of Pac-Man, with the goal of surviving longest out of 99 players.

Pac-Man 99 is out now as part of the Nintendo Switch Online service. It will be delisted on October 8, 2023.

Last time, you decided that petting the dog is better than entering cyberspace. I'm not angry, I'm just disappointed. And you probably don't even notice me sulking here in cyberspace because you're so busy tickling some lousy stinkbag with the mind of a toddler. Fine, fine, whatever. This week, it's all about self-imposed challenges. What's better: fighting your double, or optional challenges giving rewards upfront?

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