June 2023

Yup, it's another DDR4 deal post - but this time, it's for the US market and covers a 64GB dual-channel kit, for all of you video creators, game server operators and high-number-likers out there. Newegg is offering a 64GB kit of Mushkin Enhanced Redline Stiletto DDR4-3200 CL16 for $99.99, a great price considering the same RAM kit cost $169.99 for Black Friday last year.

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Sony has had its exhibits pulled from court after failing to properly redact financial information.

As part of the ongoing Microsoft vs FTC court case, Sony provided documentation detailing confidential information about its PlayStation business. As is custom, key details in this documentation were redacted. At least, they were meant to be.

Thanks to the retrospectively poor choice of using a Sharpie marker to redact the key information, it's easy to see the contents of these redactions now the document has been scanned.

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Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has said he'd love to get rid of console exclusives.

Nadella took to the witness stand during yesterday's court proceedings for the Xbox FTC hearing, and stated he has "no love" for the world of exclusives, reported IGN.

"If it was up to me, I would love to get rid of the entire sort of exclusives on consoles, but that's not up to me to define," said Nadella.

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Bloober Team is moving on from the psychological horror games it is known for, with the recent Layers of Fear remaster being its last game of the genre.

That said, it's still sticking with horror. Instead, Bloober is now making "mass-market horror".

What does that mean? Bloober says it will result in a renewed focus on gameplay over atmosphere, owing to its games being described as "walking simulators".

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Cassette Beasts developer Bytten Studios held a showcase yesterday discuss the future of its spin on the Pokémon-like monster battler formula.

As well as sharing details on update 1.2, which is now live, Bytten also announced features in development and new merchandise, including a multiplayer offering, an expansion DLC, and plushies.

Update 1.2, called Catacombs, adds a new hidden location, three alternate remastered forms of existing monsters, four brand new monsters, a secret unique monster, and 10 new moves.

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I've got good news! We're letting everyone have a month of being a Eurogamer Supporter for free. Think of it as a free trial, if you like. And it can start today, if you want it to.

We're doing it because we want to show off what we offer. We want you to experience the site without adverts and all that peaceful white space you'll suddenly see. We want you to read Emma's memorable adventures she writes each month for supporters (and there's a new one arriving today). We want you to get involved in the weekly discussions around Five of the Best, and to snuggle up for Donlan's weekly thoughts in Game of the Week, which are usually about much more than the game of the week itself.

You'll also be able to listen to the Inside Eurogamer podcast, which is a new monthly show for subs. There have only been a couple of episodes but the first one - the one where we hear from new editor-in-chief Tom Phillips about his vision for Eurogamer going forward, and about why we moved to a five-star rating system - will probably be of interest to you.

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Don't look now, but we're almost halfway through 2023. How is that even possible? I hear you cry. Well, I'm not entirely sure either. The last time I checked it was freezing cold outside and the sun went down at 3pm, but here we are with long, sunlit evenings and that sticky sheen of an early, muggy summer. Or at least it's been quite clammy in the RPS Treehouse this month, as we've all been sweating over our favourite games of the year so far.

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Emma's Adventures is a monthly column exclusively for Eurogamer supporters, written by Emma Kent, who has an uncanny knack for finding strange adventures in games. You can support Eurogamer for £3/€3/$3 a month and gain access to a whole variety of things. Better yet, we're currently offering a free trial so you can get a month's subscription for nothing!

We're also doing something slightly different with this instalment. This adventure took such an unexpected turn, and became so much longer than originally envisaged, that we decided to make it into two pieces. We also decided to make part one available to everyone, to highlight the incredible work Emma does, while keeping part two for supporters only. Part two will go live this Saturday, 1st July.

All player names have been changed for this article.

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Pikmin 4's time rewind feature is a big addition to the series, though I admit being apprehensive at first around how it might be deployed. After a week with the game - and you can read some of my early thoughts here - I've come to use it sparingly, but appreciate its existence.

As its name suggests, the feature allows you to skip backwards and undo any sudden calamity. Though in doing so, my initial fear was it risked devaluing the Pikmin series' usual high stakes.

After all, the frequent likelihood of imminent Pikmin death - their agonising squeals, the sad sight of their soul floating slowly upwards - acts to ensure you approach each situation with care.

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Among the many, many claims and discoveries flying around in the wake of Microsoft's ongoing FTC lawsuit over the attempted purchase of Activision Blizzard, one particular quote stands out: PlayStation boss Jim Ryan's accusation that Xbox Game Pass and other subscription-based services are "value destructive" to video games.

Ryan, speaking in pre-recorded video testimony, also claimed other publishers "unanimously do not like Game Pass" for that reason. When pressed by Microsoft's lawyer, he added: "I talk to publishers all the time, and this is a very commonly-held view over many years by the publishers."

Talking to Eurogamer yesterday, Miles Jacobson, studio head of Sports Interactive, the Sega-owned developer of the ever-popular Football Manager series, disagreed with that quite directly.

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Ubisoft has announced its first ever Web3 game, Champions Tactics: Grimoria Chronicles, which will launch on the Oasys blockchain.

Oasys is a blockchain which was established in February 2022 and is backed by multiple companies, including Bandai Namco, Sega, Ubisoft, and Square Enix. It is marketed as a specialist blockchain for games.

Ubisoft describes Champions Tactics: Grimoria Chronicles is a "PvP tactical RPG experimental game" and is currently in development for PC. You can take a look at a trailer below:

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The Sims 5 looks set to be free-to-play, going by a description of the game as "free to enter" by EA spotted on a job listing seen on the publisher's careers website.

EA has since removed the advert from its website - though not before it was spotted by Sims fans. (You can still see it now thanks to the Wayback Machine.)

The listing, first spotted by fans on Sims Community, described a Head of Monetisation and Marketplace for Maxis' "newest entry to The Sims franchise (code named Project Rene)".

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Sports Interactive boss Miles Jacobson has announced a range of major shifts coming to the Football Manager series, dubbed "one of the biggest changes in our history."

In an extensive developer blog, Jacobson apologised for the relative lack of new features in FM23, announced save game transfers coming in FM24, and the long-awaited arrival of women's football in FM25 - first announced back in 2021. Alongside all that is a shift from the studio's own in-house game development engine to the ubiquitous Unity.

All this makes this year's FM24 a "closing of this chapter in our history", Jacobson said, with a major revamp of everything from graphics, to UI, to underlying systems coming next year in FM25 - something Jacobson said will be, "for the first time in decades, a true sequel."

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Aniplex uploaded another short teaser for Fate/strange Fake -Whispers of Dawn-, with a focus on Berserker this time. Though the teaser focuses on Berserker and his Master, Lord El-Melloi II (Waver Velvet) also makes a short appearance. Daisuke Namikawa will reprise his role as Lord El-Melloi II.

Due to the nature of this particular Berserker’s true identity, he does not actually make an appearance in the Fate/strange Fake teaser, though you can hear him talking. His Master is Flat Escardos, who is one of El-Melloi’s students at the Clock Tower. He has a peppy manner of speech, but since he seems to want to rule the world, there's more to him that it seems.

You can watch the Berserker trailer from Fate/strange Fake here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2__XBqdYZ0w

Yoshitsugu Matsuoka will voice Flat Escardos. Matsuoka has had many major roles in the past, such as Kirito in Sword Art Online, Soma in Food Wars, and Xiao in Genshin Impact. Kenyu Horiuchi will voice Berserker. Horiuchi is a veteran voice actor whose career started in 1983. Horiuchi portrayed Mashymre in Mobile Suit Gundam ZZ, Raiden and Raikov in the Metal Gear Solid series, and Fourchenault in Final Fantasy XIV.

Bang Dream will get a crossover with Chainsaw Man starting on June 30, 2023. Like other Bang Dream events in the past, the actual characters from the show will not appear as cards or in the event story. Instead, the girls will get new outfits and cards that are based on the Chainsaw Man characters.

There will be five characters with Chainsaw Man cards in Bang Dream. Three of them will be 5-stars that you have to gacha for. Two of them will be 4-stars that the game will award you as you complete event missions. The characters are:

Certified PC gamers tend to think they are the best of the pack, but our superior hardware comes at a price. Sure, part of that is the hundreds of dollars of upfront cost which can sometimes make console gaming look simpler and more appealing , but mostly I’m talking about how the community treats PC gamers like…

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Non-linear friend ‘em up Mythwrecked: Ambrosia Island is now coming out next summer after a slight delay, and the team have debuted a new trailer to mark the news. Mythwrecked comes from Polygon Treehouse, the studio behind 2020’s gorgeous adventure Röki, only this time the Norse mythology has been switched for some Greek dressing, and the snow has all melted away into sand. Come take a look at the friendly/ethereal/hot deities below.

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Earlier this year, Volker Wertich announced that he was returning to the citybuilding genre 30 years after he headed up The Settlers. We now have our first in-game look at his new project Pioneers Of Pagonia, which seems to dial up the economic management and actual building-of-towns side of the formula, rather than the RTS combat machinations. Take a look at the lush fields and construction down below.

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Following the lush card battling of last year’s Foretales, developers Alkemi are now trying their hand at an entirely different genre with An Ankou. The top-down roguelike casts you as the titular servant of Death, reborn and forced to continue working in the afterlife, mainly through killing demons and helping lost souls. Capitalism, eh? Lay your eyes on the reveal trailer below.

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Pikmin 2 is one of those games that I dreamed of playing for the last nearly 20 years. As a young kid, I remember seeing its demo on a GameCube at the local game store and always being intrigued by its colorful space adventure. Finally checking it out for several hours for the first time, I’m convinced it is a one-of-a-kind gem, flaws and all.

The remastered Nintendo Switch game kicks off with Captain Olimar finding out his company is in deep dirt. To help the it out, he has to return to the home of the adorable Pikmin to find weirdly-named, everyday treasures like batteries and oranges to sell for cash.

This simple premise allows for some radical changes from the first game, such as new Pikmin creatures like the white and purple ones, the ability to control Louie, and the stress-free nature of its daily cycle. Even though this was my first foray in the series, I quickly settled into the rhythm of defeating enemies, adding new colorful critters to my army, and digging up treasure.

[caption id="attachment_970598" align="aligncenter" width="1200"] Screenshot by Siliconera[/caption]

To celebrate the 20th anniversary of the Naruto anime airing on TV, a Naruto Shippuden fair with various characters dressed in Japanese clothing will be held at select Animate stores throughout Japan. The event will be held throughout September 9-24, 2023. Exclusive Naruto merchandise with newly drawn illustrations will be available for purchase as part of the event.

Pre-orders for some of the items are available until July 16, 2023 from the Animate online store. For every pre-order over 1,100 JPY (~$8), a character postcard will be included as a bonus. For purchases over 1,100 JPY at stores, the bonus will be an instant camera-style character illustration.

Here is a list of the Naruto merchandise available for the Animate event:

Making the first jade video game controller in the world came with difficulties, of course. Chi separated the controller's shell into eight pieces, but after spending almost a week cutting two of them, he discovered cracks. "From my mistake I started many, many times," he said.

Chi also had to make sure the jade surface was still comfortable for players to use and allowed for all the normal functionality one would expect from a gamepad. "When you press these directional buttons, we ensured the buttons do not come into contact with jade, but instead come into contact with plastic, so that it will not damage the jade during prolonged gameplay," Chi said.

Xbox has revealed its Games with Gold titles for July.

A big draw this month is Darkwood, the nightmarish survival horror game from Acid Wizard Studio, which will be available between 1st July until 31st July.

Darkwood, which originally released on PC in 2017, is a frightening horror experience that combines exploration, combat, scavenging, crafting and survival into an extremely unusual whole. Our Donlan called it "a masterclass in how to undermine the audience in tiny, gnat-bite ways" when he played it back in 2019.

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This week on the Eurogamer Newscast, we look back at a week of headlines from Microsoft's time in court arguing its case to buy Activision Blizzard with the FTC.

In the video game industry, courtroom drama does not get much bigger than this. Microsoft's Phil Spencer and Satya Nadella, Sony's Jim Ryan and Activision boss Bobby Kotick have all given evidence as the US weighs up whether to allow Xbox's enormous Call of Duty buyout to procede.

The week has brought us some eye-opening opinions from these top industry execs, as well as a treasure trove of emails to pore through - and some badly-redacted documentation. Today, we recap the biggest stories of the week, including who else was on Microsoft's studio shopping list, and why Bethesda is upset at Call of Duty not being platform exclusive. Joining me this week are Ed Nightingale, Victoria Kennedy and Liv Ngan.

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Amazon has announced the line-up of games for Prime Gaming members in July.

As a reminder, Prime Gaming members can claim four bonus games, including Prey (2017) and Baldur's Gate 2: Enhanced Edition, until 11th July as part of Amazon Prime Day celebrations.

The regular Prime Gaming monthly freebies for July includes four games, with the first available from 6th July.

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Regularly topping the Steam hardware survey as the most popular graphics cards, Nvidia's 60-class products are often the 'go to' product for the mainstream gamer, with the green team usually dominating, even when rival products can be just as good or even better. With 60-class, the power of the GeForce brand comes into its own and to be fair, Nvidia has delivered some excellent GPUs. The GTX 1060 is still supremely popular, while last-gen's RTX 3060 is currently the cheapest GPU you can buy with 12GB of VRAM - an increasingly important spec point. You can think of the RTX 4060 as broadly on par with the old RTX 2070 Super - a $499 product back in 2019 - so it's generally faster than the 3060, but it does ship with just 8GB of RAM.

That's clearly a challenge for the new card, even though its suggested retail price is actually lower than its predecessor, the issue being that discounting means RTX 3060 can be a lot cheaper - and capable of superior price vs performance ratios in some scenarios while stocks last. The fact is that VRAM is becoming increasingly more important and Nvidia cutting it by a third gen-on-gen is problematic. That's a shame because the inherent advantages of the Ada Lovelace architecture are all present and correct on the RTX 4060 and, in the case of DLSS 3 in particular, we're seeing gaming feats on this £289/$299 product that nothing else can get close to.

It starts with a squeeze of the trigger and a flick of my left wrist. Where once stood an enemy, gun raised and pointed in my direction, there's now an empty space. Looking up I follow the body as it arcs through the air, and there I catch it with my telekinesis powers and slam it into the ground below where it smashes into digital shards on jagged, monochromatic rocks.

Spotting a group of enemies hiding behind cover I reach out with my telekinetic powers and use them to lift an explosive barrel into position above their heads. Then, with a simple clench of my fist, the barrel explodes sending rocks and bodies flying in all directions.

Later, while holding an SMG in my right hand, I use my psychic powers to snatch a flying Sentinel enemy out of the air and pin it to the floor before peppering its body with bullets until it explodes and melts away.

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Mojang is ending official support for the Minecraft subreddit, due to current issues with reddit.

The subreddit, at the time of writing, has 7.4m subscribers making it one of the largest on the platform.

However, a post from Mojang developer Mikael Hedberg stated that official support will now cease, though it will remain a place of unofficial discussion.

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Baldur's Gate 3 will now launch on 3rd August for PC, nearly a month earlier than previously planned.

Meanwhile, the game's PlayStation 5 version will launch slightly later - directly up against Starfield on 6th September.

Discussing this release reshuffle, Larian Studios exec Michael Douse explained that while the PC version was ready to go, the PS5 edition needed slightly more time, and it did not make sense to delay the former just to release at he same time as the latter.

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Amazon Prime Gaming subscribers once again can claim a Honkai: Star Rail bonus. This is the third one so far. The imagery surrounding note it is in honor of Luocha, a five-star Imaginary character who follows the Abundance path, making his debut on the game. As usual, people get a few Stellar Jades and other in-game items.

The number of items people can claim isn’t huge. However, they do get people a little closer to a pull on the Luocha banner and to improving Light Cones. All of us who subscribe to Prime will get 60 Stellar Jades. (You need 160 for a single banner pull.) People also get 40,000 Credits and five Refined Aethers. The latter lets you level up your Light Cones. This bundle is only available until July 18, 2023.

The first round of these Amazon Prime Gaming Honkai: Star Rail bundles first showed up in May 2023. The second showed up in June 2023. It is unknown if this will remain a monthly offer. Each bundle so far consisted of the same items, so people would always get Credits, Refined Aethers, and Stellar Jades.

Honkai: Star Rail is available for PCs and mobile devices, and the latest Amazon Prime Gaming reward for it is available until July 18, 2023.

Square Enix took to Twitter to offer more details on how the Final Fantasy VII Ever Crisis closed beta test will work. People had until June 28, 2023 to sign up. However, demand is so high that not everyone will get into it. Instead, the company will randomly pick who gets to participate from everyone who applied. The current plan is for people who were picked to be alerted on July 5, 2023.

As a reminder, this closed beta test is only for Android users. Registrations opened during Summer Game Fest 2023, when Square Enix released a new trailer for the game. Those who get in will get to play through some of the original Crisis Core and Final Fantasy VII storylines, though the game will touch on new stories as well.

There’s also an update on pre-registration rewards. Over 400,000 people committed to playing the game. That means we’ll all get 10 Draw Tickets and 1,000 Blue Crystals. There are still five more tiers to possibly hit, with those rewards being a Jumpstart Item Set, five more Draw Tickets, 500 more Blue Crystals, and a Zweihander sword. There will need to be 1,000,000 pre-registrations hit to get every item.

In the 21st century, fans of the NFL have had minimal choices when it comes to their officially licensed football games. Ever since 2004, EA Sports' annualized Madden NFL series has been the exclusive franchise for the NFL, its teams, stadiums, and players. The result was the closure of other franchises, such as the competitive NFL 2K series, as well as the arcade-focused NFL Blitz franchise (which was later acquired by EA in 2011). The recently announced Wild Card Football from Saber Interactive, part of the Playgrounds franchise, hopes to smash through the established line to give players a fresh 7-on-7 arcade-facing take on the sport starring their favorite players.

Wild Card Football doesn't possess the NFL license, but rather the NFLPA license. This means the teams and stadiums of the National Football League aren't present, but many of its biggest stars are. I witness this firsthand as I scroll through the teams available. The in-game teams are centered around the quarterbacks, with Team Mahomes, Team Burrow, and a squad built around this game's cover star, Team Kaepernick. If you'd rather create your own team, you can enter Dream Squad mode, customize your roster, playbook, and uniforms, and advance through challenges to unlock rewards. 

While game delays have become commonplace, the opposite is extremely rare. Today, we learned Baldur's Gate 3 is somehow doing both at the same time. Initially planned for August 31, developer Larian Studios is advancing the PC release date to August 3 while delaying the PS5 version to September 6. According to the most recent community update, the change was done to prioritize release in order of platform readiness. More specifically, the team needed a little more time to get the PS5 version up to 60 frames per second.

"The PlayStation 5 version will be released roughly a week later than its originally scheduled date of August 31st," the community update reads. "Baldur’s Gate 3 is targeting 60 frames-per-second and we’re close to achieving that on the platform but need a bit more extra time. We don’t want to compromise on quality, and feel it would be a shame to downscale to 30fps or make other compromises to hit an arbitrary date."

Polish horror game developer Bloober Team told Engadget it’s leaving the psychological horror subset—a genre that defined all of its biggest titles, like Layers of Fear and the cyberpunk title Observer—far behind. The studio is currently responsible for the (impossible, diehard fans say) task to remake Silent Hill 2…

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Niantic is shuttering its Los Angeles studio and is moving away from in-house game development. As such, the Pokémon Go studio is laying off 230 employees, shuttering NBA All-World and cancelling its upcoming Marvel: World of Heroes.

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