November 2023

This past weekend, TikTok creators ByteDance revealed that they were winding down Nuverse and retreat from the mainstream gaming space. According to a report from Reuters, ByteDance is restructuring their gaming business, and employees will be told to stop working on unreleased games, while the company looks to divest from titles that have already been launched.

As the publisher of Marvel Snap, Nuverse’s dissolution may come as a source of concern for fans, many of whom have likely already spent a significant amount of money on the digital card battler. However, Second Dinner has since taken to Discord to reassure fans that this will not affect the game in any way, shape, or form.

Mario gave a healthy injection of life to the gaming industry in 1985 with the first Super Mario Bros. on the Famicom (NES) in Japan. Since then, Mario has introduced many new consoles and has pushed tech-forward into the 3D space and even jumped into space itself.

There’s hardly a more rich and historically significant legacy than Mario in gaming, so collectors have naturally held great interest in the storied franchise. Here are 10 of the rarest and most expensive Mario games that will empty your pockets.

Lethal Company is a popular horror multiplayer game from Zeekerss that took the internet by storm when it first released via early access. It quickly surpassed Phasmophobia in terms of peak concurrent players, which is nothing to scoff at. If you’re looking for more games like Lethal Company, we’ve got you covered.

The holiday season is upon us, which also means that things are finally slowing down a little in the video game world. Marvel Snap usually has a pretty regular patch and update schedule, with one major patch and two smaller OTA updates planned for each month. However, with Thanksgiving week, and Christmas holidays and the new year coming up soon, that schedule has been adjusted a little.

Over on the official Marvel Snap Discord server, Second Dinner stated that their next two patches are set to be released on Dec. 5, and Jan. 9, 2024 respectively. In addition to that, there will be no OTA updates in-between those patches.

If there’s one thing you can count on, it’s for Roblox to have a myriad of One Piece inspired games like Become Pirate King and Prove Mom Wrong. It’s certainly one of the most unique experiences, as you’ll be building an empire from scratch creating One Piece memorabilia for profit. With the latest Become Pirate King and Prove Mom Wrong codes, you can net yourself some good starter cash!

All Become Pirate King and Prove Mom Wrong Roblox Codes

As of Nov. 24, 2023, Become Pirate King and Prove Mom Wrong only has a handful of freebies, but it’s a decent sum of cash for new players:

Pokemon designs are often indicative of their Typings through name, color, shape, and other visual attributes. However, there are a few Pokemon who may look like a certain Type, but are something completely different entirely, or appear to have colors linked to a secondary Type not incorporated in their species.

Here are ten Pokemon whose typings caught us all off guard at some point.

The Call of Duty franchise is packed with Easter Eggs and secrets. The Zombies mode has even built questlines around finding objects and solving complex multi-step puzzles. Unfortunately, the urgency of missions and the chaos of gunfights can lead players to miss some of Call of Duty’s best Easter Eggs.

This is for all the Hunters out there who appreciate the sneaker side of Destiny 2’s combat sandbox. From overshields, to invisibility, to Volatile Rounds, the Exotic armors found in this ranked list should give plenty of insight into many varied build choices for your Void Hunter.

With that said, here is Destiny 2: the top 10 Exotic armor for Void Hunters in Destiny 2.

Ask any Marvel Snap player what they think about Series drops, and it’ll quickly become clear that this is a pretty contentious topic within the community. When Series 4 and 5 were first introduced to the game, Second Dinner had stated that Series 5 cards would drop to Series 4 after a set amount of time.

However, they quickly reneged on this statement and implemented a flexible Series drop system, where new cards would occasionally release in Series 4, and Series drops would happen as and when it made sense. With that in mind, we haven’t seen a proper Series drop in more than half a year, and naturally, the community is getting pretty pissed off about it.

If you’re a fairly new Lethal Company player, chances are good you’ve only just explored some of the more basic Moons like Vow and Experimentation. You don’t quite yet have enough Credits to go to the more dangerous ones like Dine, Rend, or — god forbid — Titan.

And you know what? Take your time. Enjoy the expeditions on Experimentation, because once you start hitting up Titan, you’ll quickly see how insane Lethal Company can get.

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 on PC

Call of Duty is a household franchise that has spanned the course of two decades and has often breached into the mainstream like no other video game. Its highest highs are matched with some lowest of lows but with the brand new release of Modern Warfare 3, we want to see if it can match juggernauts like Black Ops 1 or flounder with Vanguard.

So first let’s talk about the Campaign. At the risk of sounding dramatic or hyperbolic, the Modern Warfare 3 Campaign may just be the one of, if not the worst Campaigns in the history of the series.

Baldur's Gate 3's next update, Patch 5, will address various performance issues caused by the bountiful fantasy RPG's previous patch. The source of the lag? No, it's got nothing to do with teeth. According to Larian, the slowdowns are actually connected to the game's understanding of crime and morality: Patch 4 left it unable to "forget" player thefts and acts of vandalism that haven't been detected by NPCs, meaning that BG3 players who break the rules often and get away with it have been saddling their simulations with unfinished tasks. That's right, the game's latest technical crisis is in fact a crisis of conscience. Oh the humanity!

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Some of the material which will feature in The Last of Us Part 2 Remastered's Lost Levels is also planned to appear in the second season of HBO's show, Naughty Dog's Neil Druckmann has teased.

Earlier this month, Naughty Dog announced a remastered and native PlayStation 5 version of The Last of Us Part 2. Along with souped up visuals for the base game, this upcoming release will also have a few other bells and whistles including cut content in the form of 'Lost Levels' for players to experience. These Lost Levels will be Sewers, Jackson Party and Boar Hunt.

Meanwhile, almost in tandem with The Last of Us Part 2's remastered release, production on the second season of HBO's adaptation is set to kick off early next year. While we know the second season of the show will not encompass the entirety of The Last of Us Part 2's narrative, the series' creator has said "at least one element" of the previously mentioned cut content is "planned for the show".

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There is a well-worn story about the late Iain Banks and his relationship to video games. In the 1990s, the puckish, prolific Scottish author - who cheerfully hopscotched between publishing mainstream literary best-sellers as Iain Banks and science fiction novels as Iain M Banks - became so addicted to Sid Meier's Civilization that it threatened to short-circuit his writing career. Ultimately, he deleted the game from his hard drive in order to resist temptation. But the spirit of Civ - and other games - clearly bled into his work.

In Banks' bleak 1993 whodunnit Complicity, a speed-dabbing journalist juggles deadlines and sleuthing to maximise the hours he can pour into empire-building PC sim Despot, a "stunningly Machiavellian turbo-screamer of a game". In a novel not short on gut-punch moments, a particularly sneaky one arrives when the stressed hack gets his confiscated laptop back from the cops. Some plod has unwittingly left the Despot campaign running, and with no guiding hand on the trackpad our rumpled hero's once-thriving civilisation is ruined and beyond repair. (The book's capable killer also takes time out from staging baroque murders to share a nifty cheat for an aerial combat sim entitled Xerium that involves surfing the shockwave of a nuclear explosion.)

Bethesda's customer support team has been responding to negative Starfield reviews on Steam.

Starfield had a strong start, becoming the "biggest Bethesda game launch" of all time. Those numbers rose over the first few days of release, with Starfield's concurrent player count previously beating Skyrim's concurrent player record on Steam.

But despite these initial player numbers, Starfield currently sits with a 'Mixed' review status on Steam. At the time of writing, 69 percent of the game's 80,365 reviews on the platform are positive. The rest are, obviously, less generous.

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Larian Studios says it's aiming to release Patch 5 for Baldur's Gate 3 later this week. The update will include a fix for performance issues in Act 3, Astarion's kisses, and more.

Since Patch 4 was released at the beginning of the month, Baldur's Gate 3 players have experienced slowdown in Act 3. The performance issues were introduced in the patch, Larian stated on X (née Twitter), and resulted in tag crimes like theft and violence being tagged as "eternally-active", regardless of whether or not players were spotted by NPCs.

Larian director of publishing Michael Douse revealed the slowdown is caused by a specific bug in Moonrise Towers during Act 2. Patch 5 will address this and "so much more," Douse wrote, when it hopefully drops later this week. Mostly I'm just looking forward to being able to ask Astarion for a kiss and actually receive one.

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Bethesda's heaping plateful of space-spaghetti Starfield presently rejoices in the status of a Mixed Steam user review rating, with over 80,000 such reviews posted to date. Bethesda High Command are clearly displeased with this, and several unnamed but platform-verified developers have begun replying to and rebutting individual Steam reviewers, giving apparent priority to complaints about the game's loading breaks during fast travel and when moving between maps.

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Gawr Gura will appear in Sendai, Japan in early 2024 to help promote tourism, and this will involve a Gurarium at the .city's aquarium. The Hololive English VTuber first talked about the plans in her own live stream. Shortly afterward, Cover published a Japanese press release that provided more details on Gura's upcoming activities.

The announcements revealed that Gurarium in Sendai Umino-Mori Aquarium will be the primary event. Gawr Gura will make numerous audio and image appearances in Sendai City's landmark aquarium.

Once the event begins on January 20, 2024, a welcoming movie starring Gawr Gura and a life-sized panel of the VTuber will greet visitors at the aquarium's entrance. Gura will also provide audio commentary and narration for each performance show and creature exhibit. The aquarium's regular shows, such as the Pilchard show "Sparkling of Life" and the Dolphin-Sealion show "STADIUM LIFE ~We Are One~," will also play Gawr Gura's songs during the collaboration event. Finally, exclusive merchandise with new illustrations of the VTuber will be available for sale both physically in the aquarium and online via e-commerce sites.

AMD's current-generation Ryzen 7000 processors have proven to be some of the fastest gaming CPUs on the planet, but even the entry-level Ryzen 5 7600 and Ryzen 5 7600X CPUs are still a fairly big investment at $225/~£220 and $245/£240. Happily, there's now an even cheaper model - the Ryzen 5 7500F - which cuts frequencies by a fairly insignificant 100MHz and drops the integrated graphics in exchange for a lower purchase price: $200 in the US or £255 in the UK with an A620 motherboard worth £80, working out to around £175 for the CPU itself.

British system builder AWD-IT is one of only a handful of retailers offering the chip - in a range of Ryzen 5 7500F plus motherboard bundles and pre-built systems - and they've graciously sent it over with its bundled AMD Wraith CPU cooler for us to test. We've now run it through our battery of game benchmarks and content creation workloads to see how it compares to a wide range of competitors, from the similarly-affordable Ryzen 5 7600X and Core i5 13400F to the high-end Ryzen 9 7950X3D, Ryzen 7 7800X3D and Core i9 14900K.

A patent filed by EA reveals the company is looking into ways to implement player-voiced characters into its games.

The patent, which was spotted by veryaligaming and reshared on social media by NextGenPlayer, aims to allow players to make their in-game characters communicate by using their own voices.

The patent was submitted back in 2020, but recently made available to view publicaly.

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DF Direct Weekly typically focuses on the week's gaming and technology news, but the latest episode actually kicks off with a story we missed from seven days prior: the announcement of The Last of Us Part 2 Remastered. Rumours have circled this project for months now and we've often wondered why Sony and Naughty Dog would embark on a remaster for a game that doesn't need remastering - and already has 60 frames per second support for PlayStation 5. Now, everything has come into focus but is it a worthwhile endeavour?

Well, with the details we now have in terms of features and pricing, I don't think there are any significant concerns remaining - just that perhaps that the term 'remastered' in the title is a little misplaced. Essentially, what we're dealing with here is broadly equivalent to a release along the lines of Death Stranding: Director's Cut. It's the original game with a dash of extra content and additional visual modes that tap into the power of PlayStation 5. Yes, Sony is likely to release this with a premium price, but there's a £10/$10 upgrade fee for owners of the original PS4 release - and of course, there's nothing stopping anyone from procuring a used disc and upgrading from there. A free upgrade for PS5 would have been welcome, of course, but similar to Ghosts of Tsushima, there's already a 60fps patch available that doesn't cost anything at all.

I assume most of you reading this have played at least a few video game sequels in your life and while you might have enjoyed them all, this week at Kotaku we want to know: What do you think is the best video game sequel of all time?

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New Game+ is a stock and standard feature in RPGs for decades. It allows for players to experience a fresh take on the game with their over-powered characters to leisurely progress through the story or even take on more challenging enemies, depending on what New Game+ actually entails. So it was a surprise to me that Baldur's Gate 3 didn't have New Game+, and that's largely because this feature was present in previous games. But maybe not in the way you'd expect.

Yes, that's right. New Game+ has always kind of existed in Baldur's Gate. At least, it did in Baldur's Gate and Baldur's Gate II: Shadows of Amn (and the Throne of Bhaal expansion). The feature just appeared in a not very conventional way. Baldur's Gate allowed for players to export and import their character data, which wasn't limited to use in multiplayer games. You could effectively load a character into a new save file with all of your items, levels, and spells with this function. It made playing the game a second time around a lot easier, as a true easy difficulty wasn't introduced until the Enhanced Edition version of the games.

Good Smile Company opened pre-orders for its upcoming Pop Up Parade figure of Hajime Hinata from Danganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair. People residing in the US and Canada can place orders on Good Smile Online Shop US.

The non-scaled figure will stand at around 17 centimeters (6.69 inches) tall. The item will be available worldwide in 2024 at ¥4,800 / $30.99.

The meta-narrative around Starfield just took a very weird turn. Steam reviews for the sprawling sci-fi RPG recently fell to “mixed” on Valve’s storefront, and now Bethesda employees are arguing with players in the comments about why the game isn’t as boring and soulless as some of them claim.

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After a series of vague teasers and press releases, we finally have a first real look at what Amazon Prime's Fallout TV series is going to look like, courtesy of Vanity Fair. The images showcase all the classic iconography you'd expect from the series, including vaults, ghouls, and power armor.

The Vanity Fair article goes on to give us the first concrete details of the show, thanks to an interview with co-creators Lisa Joy and Jonathan Nolan, who also created Westworld. The series will star Ella Purnell as Lucy, a "doe-eyed" woman who emerges from her vault with naivete and optimism but is forced to face the horrors of the wasteland. 

The Fashion Dreamer first free update will arrive on December 5, 2023, and it will introduce the Online Mode Limited Time Fair feature. This involves completing challenges to collect rewards.

The first one is the Limited Time Fantasy Fair, and there seem to be least 14 “volumes” of content. All of these will feature a “butterfly dream” fairy theme. You get stamps for finishing challenges, and this earns you new avatar customization options, clothing, and Photo Egg elements, as well as things like keys, gacha tickets, and E-points to create items in the Item Creator. Some of these new items will be patterns you can customize in that creator, so you can have them in different colors and designs.

There’s also a trailer that goes over some of the updates and shows what people can expect to see in-game. It does clarify that you need to be in online mode, which doesn’t require Nintendo Switch Online, to take part in the limited time fair. It doesn’t show the Ciao manga magazine series Naisho No Lily or Shining.

Atlus and Sega released another new trailer for the upcoming Persona 3 Reload, this time featuring party member Ken Amada and his persona Nemesis. The trailer shows some snippets of Ken in social settings, as well as how some of his special attacks will look in combat.

As shown in the trailer, Ken is a Persona user and one of the youngest members of S.E.E.S, which is why he uses a long-handled weapon to make up for his lack of reach. His Persona Nemesis is based on the Greek goddess of retribution. In the original Persona 3, Ken was a flexible party member who was able to use electric, physical, light and and healing skills. He represented the Justice card from the Major Arcana and was also a romance option for the female protagonist in Persona 3 Portable. Originally he was voiced by Carolyn Hennesy, while in Persona 3 Reload he is voiced by Justine Lee.

You can watch the Persona 3 Reload Ken trailer below:

As Vtubers get more famous or busy, this means their schedules can become irregular. This has happened with Hololive English Vtuber Gawr Gura, who discussed her streaming habits and reasons for her recent infrequent appearances in her November 27, 2023 stream.

At about one hour and six minutes into the stream, Gura talked about her absence from streaming and explained what she’s been doing lately. It’s then that she discussed feeling burned out and taking time to deal with that, while also continuing working on other Hololive projects.

Other than just working on stuff in Hololive, I’ve been… I’ll be honest with you. I’ve been a little burnt out. Trying to get over that. I’ve been watching Hololive stuff. Working on Hololive stuff. Working on… life stuff I guess? Kinda just everything, you know? But thank you guys for welcoming me back again. So sweet! I was thinking about how I was going to address you, because I wanted to show my affection in words without being gross, so I was saying, like, thank you. I said it earlier! I said, “my darlings.” And then my tongue curled, because I thought, “No no no, that’s too weird. They’re gonna be like, “Ew, Gura, ew! Excuse me?”

She then continued to express her thanks to her viewers.

Sega announced more new crossover content for Phantasy Star Online 2: New Genesis in the November 2023 NGS Headline program. Players of the new PSO2 online game can look forward to obtaining avatar parts and other content from The Seven Deadly Sins: Dragon's Judgement in early 2024.

Sega has yet to reveal details about the crossover content that will come from the final season of The Seven Deadly Sins anime series. However, It did share a new artwork featuring Meliodas, Elizabeth, and Hawk with New Genesis heroine Aina and the Phantasy Star series mascot Rappy.

Sony and Guild Wars publisher NCsoft have today announced a strategic partnership, which aims to "expand beyond console and broaden PlayStation's reach to a wider audience".

NCsoft head Taekjin Kim and Sony's Jim Ryan signed this partnership, with the companies now set to "collaborate in various global business fields, including mobile" together.

While no specifics were mentioned, the two companies stated they are "evaluating a range of potential opportunities with an aim to foster strategic synergy". This will include leveraging NCsoft's "technological prowess" as well as Sony's "global leadership in the entertainment field".

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Take-Two Interactive and 2K Games are facing a class-action lawsuit over the removal of purchased in-game currencies from accounts when a game's online features are taken offline.

The lawsuit (as spotted by Axios) was filed by J.A., a minor, and his mother, acting as his representative and next friend, to the federal court of Northern District of California on 17th November.

In the lawsuit, Take-Two and 2K's annual sports franchises NBA 2K, WWE 2K, and PGA Tour 2K are named for offering in-game upgrades which require in-game (virtual) currency. The virtual currency can be bought with real-world money.

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UPDATE 5.30pm UK: Today's layoffs at Fishlabs have now been publicly confirmed, following our report earlier this afternoon.

In a statement, Fishlabs parent company Plaion (itself owned by Embracer) confirmed a "restructuring" at the studio "expected to impact around 50 positions".

"Despite exhaustive efforts to avoid downsizing, the lack of approval and therefore financing for the studio's unannounced project (also referred to as "Project Black") has made this step unavoidable," a spokesperson said today. "The remaining team will continue to work on the existing co-development projects in partnership with other Plaion and Embracer Group studios.

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Ghoul Blimey! A new set of images have been released for Amazon Prime's Fallout series.

The images, which were shared by Vanity Fair, give us a closer look at characters such as Ella Purnell's Lucy, as well as soldiers from The Brotherhood of Steel in their Power Armour Suits and Aaron Moten as Maximus.

Maximus is the new squire for a Power Suit knight who has been dispatched on behalf of The Brotherhood of Steel. Curious.

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In the grim darkness of the far future, there is only... compromise, calculation and license to misbehave. In Owlcat's forthcoming RPG Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader, you play the free-wheeling head of an interstellar merchant's dynasty. Operating on the fringes of uncharted space, you're the owner of a Warrant of Trade that essentially lets you run your own miniature empire within the Imperium, deciding the fates of planets, amassing vast wealth and recruiting a motley crew of xenos, heretics and assorted weirdos. It's the kind of behaviour that'd get you vaporised if you were some run-of-the-mill Space Marine Chaplain, but out here on the frontier, you're allowed to act with impunity, providing you fulfil your overall mandate of adding to the God Emperor's glory and kicking the odd Eldar's head in.

Rogue Traders are arguably the only characters in Games Workshop's brutal and decrepit table-top setting that lend themselves to the role of CRPG protagonist, because they are the only characters in Warhammer 40K's Imperium who enjoy anything like the plot agency of a Commander Shepard. And with that, I think, comes an interesting transformation of the character alignment systems the game shares with other CRPGs such as Baldur's Gate 3.

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Destiny 2's Season of the Wish has arrived. In addition to a new patch, battle pass, and story content about finding dragon eggs to earn a wish, the update has also brought Witcher 3 armor and Easter eggs into Bungie’s loot shooter, including an emote for Geralt’s famous bath scene.

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When you think of Ganondorf, the villainous entity that plagues The Legend of Zelda’s Hyrule, what comes to mind? Despicable, evil, heinous, repulsive, vile—all good adjectives for the Demon King. “Robust and sexy” might not cross your brain, but those two words were purposeful descriptors to sketch his appearance in T…

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