November 2023

Disney Dreamlight Valley’s first-ever showcase unveiled a ton of new features for the game, from the latest update on multiplayer to a sizable map expansion.

To kick things off, everyone’s favorite Pumpkin King, Jack Skellington, will be arriving in the Valley on Dec. 5, 2023, along with the addition of the ValleyVerse. The ValleyVerse will be a part of DDV’s new multiplayer content, where players can visit each other’s magical worlds. You can show off your creations to your friends and family, similar to Animal Crossing, and visit Scrooge McDuck’s shop to access a different inventory selection.

WarioWare: Move It! on Switch

WarioWare has long stood as one of Nintendo’s wildcards. It’s a series that thrives on the unpredictable and the rapid-fire, quick-wit challenges that keep players on the edge of their seats. The previous installment for the Nintendo Switch, Get It Together, took a step away from the series’ traditional gameplay mechanics, leaving a void that avid fans were eager to fill. 

WarioWare: Move It! not only revisits the franchise’s foundational elements but also firmly establishes itself as a worthy successor to the highly acclaimed Smooth Moves, a title from the Wii that marked a high point for the series.

Cost manipulation is a powerful tool in competitive card games, and Marvel Snap is no different. For months, Wave dominated the meta in Marvel Snap by setting all cards costs to four, often preventing unsuspecting players from doing anything meaningful on turn six. However, that all changed with the release of Mobius M. Mobius.

Now, we had a card that prevented your own costs from increasing, while also preventing your opponent’s costs from decreasing. While this ultimately helped to provide an answer to Wave, it also completely shut out other deck archetypes like Zabu and Mr. Negative, which isn’t great for the meta either. Second Dinner has now pushed out another huge patch to address these issues, and to make cost manipulation a little less polarizing.

It’s time for Bungie to look at Halo Infinite’s recent growth and success born from its ever-evolving Forge mode. While we wait, here’s 5 reasons Bungie should invest in a Forge mode for Destiny 2.

Good parenting is a lot like being a solid player two. You want to be supportive, curious, and competent. You’re there to have a good time, and understand going with the flow is key to harmony. This can be a challenge with kids and video games when you’re actually, literally, player two, especially if you’re a gamer…

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Modern Warfare 3 players with early access to Call of Duty's latest instalment have taken to social media to share their dismay – and outrage – about the shooter's campaign.

Although the first-person shooter doesn't formally release until 10th November, some players who've forked out for the shooter's pricier digital editions can play the campaign early via "early access".

"I played one hour of campaign and got my refund," announced one player. "And I think you should too if you feel the same way I felt. This was a couple lacklustre raid episodes out together; having just finished COD Remastered recently this game failed to capture what it means to be in a campaign, and if this is how it all begins then I’m sorry, MW3 does not redeem itself from the shitshow MW2 caused at launch and somehow continues to make fun of my wallet. I’ll be holding off on touching this game until something positive comes back from this community. Peace."

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Ubisoft is officially winding down support for Far Cry 6.

In a post shared on Twitter/X, the publisher/developer thanked the "millions of players" who'd taken on Yara's fight so far, adding that whilst there would be no "interruption to online services" of Far Cry 6, the team would "no longer be making updates" for the open world adventure.

"Thanks to the millions of players who joined the fight!" the message said. "Your adventures can continue in Yara [without] interruption of online services, however, the dev team will no longer be making updates to Far Cry 6.

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Toei Animation is back with another more mature movie about the older DigiDestined, this time for the members of the Digimon Adventure 02 anime. As a fan of the original anime growing up (and not just because one of the members is named Cody in the English dub version), I was excited to check out this film and see if it could hold up to the hype of the Digimon tri movies. Oddly enough Digimon Adventure 02 The Beginning t did, but not in the way I expected.

To make it clear from the start without any spoilers, if you go into this wanting to see a lot of story about Davis, Ken, and the like, you might be disappointed. Digimon Adventure 02 The Beginning takes a surprising approach to its story. It focuses more on the new character, Lui, than anyone else.

Outside of a couple of action sequences, this is Lui’s story; not the second group of DigiDestined. The vast majority of the film centers around his life, Digimon partner, and backstory. This may seem like a poor choice, but it works extremely well. Lui’s story broke me in a way I didn’t expect from a Digimon movie.

Remember remember the fifth of November, when either we celebrate someone being stopped from bursting the king or we celebrate someone trying. Sometimes I'm still not sure which. My head says thwarting, my heart says attempting. You wrap up warm, keep your pets safe, and enjoy the shmup particle effects. But what are you playing this weekend? Here's what we're clicking on!

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"The game is called Bloodthyrster X," the nerd-coded detective explains, twisting in their ill-fitting suit and furiously shaking an upside-down Xbox controller while their colleagues stare aghast at a TV screen looping a three-second clip of shoddy CGI ultraviolence. "The objective is to run over babies in your minivan while shooting cops and other players. It's taking over the dark web... and IRL."

You don't need me to tell you that fake video games appearing in TV shows and movies are typically absurd and terrible. But just because something is bad, doesn't mean it's uninteresting. Having watched dozens of movies and episodes with fake video games, I'm going to celebrate a few over the coming weeks. Some daft fake games have neat ideas, some shows portray their fake games in an interesting way, and some fake games are even quite good. Let's start now with Deadware, an unknown horror movie which does a great job recreating something a bit bad: a spOooky haunted browser game from 1999.

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What a great little thing. You've surely seen a hundred post-Minecraft games about building a base to smelt iron to build a base, and probably even thought to yourself that they look entirely fine but kind of... redundant? There's only so many times you can walk back and forth from a cave to a forge.

But what if instead of trudging around a grey cave, you were driving a big drilling machine instead? It's so simple, and yet it makes all the difference in GeoDepths.

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Hello folks. It's time for the next gathering of the RPS Game Club! This month, we've been playing Bethesda's mega space RPG Starfield, and we'll be chatting about all your favourite/worst/merely mediocre moments, quests and stories from it later on today, Friday November 3rd, starting at 4pm GMT / 9am PT / 12pm ET. We're looking forward to it! So see you later on at 4pm sharp.

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If you've ever gazed out across a landscape of misty spires and vast machines and thought "ah, if only I could explore and savour all that without getting my head kicked in by walking skeletons every five minutes", The Silent Swan from Basque Country, Spain-based developer Praenaris might be the game for you. Released today, it gives you a massive, gloomy map full of towering, greeny-black Gothic structures that are packed with backstory documents, but contain absolutely no enemies. The only thing separating you from all that winding, lore-drenched architecture is distance. Check out the trailer below.

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Is it a bird? Is it a plane? Is it a FLASHBANG COMING RIGHT AT YOUR FACE - QUICK, LOOK AWAY oh wait it's just a bird after all. That's not just me hallucinating after one too many cups of Joe - it's a description of recent events in Valve's bomb-fiddling FPS Counter-Strike 2, where players keep mistaking the avian decorations on certain maps for bouncing balls of death.

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I have a confession to make, readers. I'm mildly obsessed with Starfield's cuboid food brand Chunks. In all honesty, I'm kinda obsessed with Starfield's food in a more general sense, and I have almost as many screenshots of its tube-like meal boxes, stale toast slices, vacuum-packed sachets of rice balls, steak slabs and spiced worms - and, of course, Chunks - as I do its planets and NPCs. I'm weirdly fascinated by what Bethesda think our future meals will look like when we eventually start travelling across the stars, and not just because I like ragging on their somewhat plastic-looking textures and marvelling at how everything from orange juice to beer and wine comes in kid's size cartons with a little straw on the side.

Chunks are my favourite food of the lot, though. These cubes of faintly glistening organic matter are bite-sized monstrosities that are quite possibly some of the most unholy things I've ever seen. How this became the dominating foodstuff across the known galaxy is a mystery worthy of its own sidequest, because let's be honest, I'm all for eating wonky fruit and vegetables, but would you truly go to shop, sit down at a table and order an apple that's been squeezed into a perfect cube? Or a cube with yellow skin that professes to call itself grilled chicken? I would probably try them once for curiosity's sake (it's the food of the future, of course I want to know what that tastes like!), but it's also exactly the kind of thing I'd swear off immediately because nope, nuh uh, I just can't even contemplate it anymore. And then it dawned on me: this is exactly how I feel about Starfield as a whole.

Activision-Blizzard's Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 remake is a bit of a mammoth on all platforms, with the Steam page requiring that you set aside 149 GB of SSD space unless you have Call of Duty HQ and Warzone already installed, which drives the total down to a relatively svelte 78 GB. Activision have now posted an explanation for the heavier footprint of this year's Call of Duty, while pointing out that you can customise your install to lighten the load.

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Mobile-based interactive drama Silent Hill: Ascension is quite the thing, and is getting quite the reception. The cleanest summary I can manage is that developer Genvid and publisher Konami have launched a very bad streaming service dedicated to dunking on Silent Hill, with microtransaction-fuelled voting mechanics and a chatbox awash with 10 years of pent-up fan resentment and confusing references to James Sunderland's genitals.

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I played a demo of Scene Investigators over the most recent Steam Next Fest, and was interested enough that I wanted to have a go with the full release. It's billed as a detective game for true crime fans, but it reminds me of those puzzle books you used to get, where you are shown an illustration of a crime scene and, if you stare at it long enough, can figure out the assigned solution. Scene Investigators is like that but the scene is a big 3D one you can walk around. A crime has happened and you need to figure out what, mostly by peering at the dates in a diary to cross reference them with the time and day a phone message was left. This is why I wouldn't recommend it to everyone. It's quite hard. But! Some people will really like it.

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There comes a point when adding yet another behemothic RPG to your collection of unfinished, behemothic RPGs ceases to be a mark of eccentricity and becomes an act of manifest self-hatred. I, for instance, have just activated a beta code for 100-hour levelling fest Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader even as I make a mental note that really, I've got to make some proper headway in Baldur's Gate 3 this evening.

For The King 2, at least, seems pretty trim and digestible at a reported 30 hours in length. Released out of early access today, it's a blend of fantasy table-top gaming and roguelite, in which you lead a party of adventurers across a hexagonal map to quash an evil Queen in grid, dice and turn-based combat.

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What kind of game does the label “survival horror” denote? Since its inconspicuous first appearance in the original Resident Evil’s loading screen (functioning first and foremost, lest we forget, as a handy marketing catchphrase), the term has been so enthusiastically embraced and haphazardly applied as to be rendered almost meaningless in 2023. Horror gaming has witnessed multiple seismic shifts since 1996, most notably the turn to action-oriented design with the likes of The Suffering and Resident Evil 4 in the mid-2000s, as well as the rise of spooky almost-walking-simulators like SOMA in the mid-2010s.

Yet the term survival horror has expanded to such a degree that it now seems to stand in, albeit rather awkwardly, for the entirety of video game horror. Even with the caveat that borders for these kinds of labels are notoriously hard to define, survival horror remains an unusually amorphous realm, one that (as a quick search of the relevant tag on Steam will reveal) lays claim as much to first-person bloodbaths like Zombie Army Trilogy as it does moody, combat-free adventures like Visage. Still, old distinctions linger, and a clutch of recent indie survival horrors qualify their work with the word “classic”. I interviewed some of the developers to find out why - and, more importantly, what classic survival horror means.

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First there was JASON!, a martyred child whose name cracked a thousand lips, rawed a thousand throats, blistered a thousand fingers. Then came FENTON!, a hunter-trickster spirit forsaken by Christ. Perhaps next will be ROY! The upcoming first-person survival horror game Rotten Flesh will invite you to shout the name of your lost dog into your microphone, hoping that Roy will bark back to let you know where he is. Fun fact: other, nondog things will hear you shouting too. Have a peek in the announcement trailer below.

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Last time, you decided that blink teleports are better than summoning spectral animals. I'm wholly unsurprised but I am glad that the fleeting beasties still earned a respectable share of science votes. This Halloween week, with eggs drying on your house and Snickers-sweet vomit running in the gutters, let's consider death. What's better: ghosts walking through walls, or soulslike bloodstains?

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Modding Resident Evil with Thomas the Tank Engine in place of Mr. X/Lady Dimitrescu/Nemesis/the monster of your choosing is so much a tradition at this point that Capcom may as well set the inevitable Resident Evil Zero remake aboard the interior of the chirpy children’s TV character. While players might be having fun modding Thomas, Shrek and Barney the Dinosaur into its survival-horror series, Capcom has expressed concern that some mods may cause "reputational damage" to the company and their games.

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Mortal Kombat 1 players have hit out at NetherRealm's "disgusting" decision not to bundle DLC skins in with DLC packs any more.

The fighting community is currently making its views very known on the series' subreddit community, generating thousands of upvotes.

Although neither the developer nor publisher Warner Bros. have expressly said that alternate skins would not be available, players noted that at the end of the recent Omni-Man gameplay trailer, there was no mention of any additional skins bundled in with premium DLC characters.

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Welcome to the latest edition of the Giant Bomb Community Spotlight! I, @zombiepie am once again honored to be your host as we look back at the best community efforts from the previous week.

However, before we get into that, there's no denying that the big news this week is that Giant Bomb's Extra Life 2023 programming has BEGUN! For those of you interested on what's being streamed, when, and where, check out the AMAZING article TurboShawn published on the site! The biggest question that many of you have is when the staff Extra Life streams will take place, so here's the plan:

Honkai: Star Rail has dropped a release date and details for its 1.5 update, taking the anime sci-fi RPG to a spooky new region with new events and three new characters along for the ride.

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Greg ‘Ghostcrawler’ Street, the influential developer with credits on both World of Warcraft and League of Legends - including the MOBA’s unreleased MMO - is working on a new MMORPG under his own studio.

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Fortnite’s nostalgic latest season has kicked off, bringing back a slew of weapons, vehicles, items and cosmetics from the battle royale game’s first chapter. The truncated Fortnite Chapter 4 Season OG - which will last just four weeks, rather than the usual three months - has also restored the game’s original map as seen in Chapter 1, meaning the return of places like Tilted Towers, Loot Lake and Greasy Grove.

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This year’s Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 remake will no longer feature Weapon Tuning, a feature introduced by last year’s Modern Warfare 2 remake, which lots of people appear to despise. Unlocked by levelling up a weapon to the max, Weapon Tuning is an extra layer of the game’s Gunsmith weapon-building editor that lets you tweak individual attachment stats such as weight and length of grip, as displayed on a radar graph.

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Surprise! Diablo 4 only came out a few months ago, but there’s already a brand new Diablo game in the works. Two, in fact! The twist? These will be tabletop adaptations of Blizzard’s action-RPG series, taking Diablo into the realm occupied by Dungeons & Dragons and Catan.

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Vampire Survivors is getting an Adventures update that will add "self-contained miniature story modes that reset and remix the game's content, following the Survivor's cast on a series of wacky sidequests". That's according to developer Poncle, who are clearly in a whimsical mood this week. After all, if there's one thing this game about auto-massacring ever larger crowds of kamikaze night creatures has been lacking, it's some proper narrative context.

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Final Fantasy XIV’s world of Eorzea is a utopia. Sure, there’s the looming threat of Garlean invasion and/or the possibility of world destruction throughout A Realm Reborn and its expansions - but on the plus side, almost everyone you meet is up for a round of cards.

Over the last quarter-century, Triple Triad has managed to escape its origins as a fun side minigame in Final Fantasy VIII to become a fully-fledged phenomenon in XIV. The Gold Saucer runs regular tournaments, random strangers are happy to be challenged to a match - often throwing in one or more of the game’s many variant rules (though Chaos can do one) - and might even give up one of their prized cards when defeated, with almost 400 to collect as of the game’s latest patches. Emphasis on the “might”: I dread to think of the hours spent replaying NPCs in the hope of a random drop as I filled out my collection.

I headed along to Final Fantasy’s London Fan Fest last month with a fetching deck of Triple Triad cards in hand. (Square Enix provided entrance and accommodation for the event.) Where better to try and live the dream of challenging random strangers to a card game, and learn more about the community that has fallen in love with the MMO in the 10 years since A Realm Reborn released?

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Pull switches, press buttons, unscrew panels, mix chemicals, switch broken parts, and pray that following procedure is enough to save you from impossible horrors. That's the fun of Unsorted Horror, a cracking free collection of short first-person horror games with dramatic, doomful scenarios and big, weird machines. No, absolutely you do not get a gun. If you enjoy figuring out how doodads work while feeling like the world has possibly already ended and everyone just kept on going, do play!

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"Star Ocean" is a fantastic name, evoking a sense of adventure, 16-bit blue skies, the majesty of space. "The Second Story R" is a terrible subtitle, evoking WhatsApp messages where I accidentally press 'send' too soon. Combined they produce Star Ocean: The Second Story R, a beautiful-seeming 2.5D remake of a Square Enix PlayStation JRPG. It's out on Steam now and there's a demo.

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The Sims 4 has long offered millennials the unattainable fantasy of owning their own home. On December 7th, it'll instead offer something much closer to reality. That's when the For Rent expansion will launch, adding multi-family lots so you can construct apartment buildings, rent out your spare basement, or have an authentically terrible time as a tenant.

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Payday 3's launch was rough, with long queues awaiting would-be heisters in the always-online game, and issues with progression and absent systems awaiting those who could login. Starbreeze Studios have now begun the process of making good on promised fixes to those criticisms, with patch 1.0.1 live now. It mostly includes "minor fixes", but lots of them.

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Radiant Silvergun is a little less well known than its successor Ikaruga, but it remains a shmup classic from Treasure, the masters of the genre. It was released in Japanese arcades in 1998 and it arrives on Steam today.

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Owlcat Games have whisked the wrappers off Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader's co-op functionality, explaining how you and up to five other players can team up to navigate the Games Workshop RPG's 100-plus hours of grid-based combat, violent religious differences and unrepentant planetary colonisation.

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Like when Sir Alex Ferguson oversaw his final game at Old Trafford, there’s a complicated atmosphere surrounding this year’s Football Manager. Football Manager 2024 is the last iterative game in the series before Project Dragonfly arrives next year, through which Sports Interactive plan the most radical overhaul of the game since the introduction of the 3D match engine in FM 09. This includes a complete rebuild of Football Manager in Unity, implementing brand new animation technology, and the inclusion of women’s football. But there is a reason why the studio has stuck with this tried and tested formula for so long. Big changes come with big risks, and as any Man Utd fan will know, those changes don’t always pay off.

But such concerns are for the future. FM24 is with us right now, and while it may be swapping the dugout for the stands ninety minutes from now, this isn’t some ceremonial exhibition match. It’s business as usual, and in mostly good ways. Sports Interactive have made meaningful changes to the management game both on and off the pitch, all built on top of fundamentals that remain as complex and compulsive as they have for years. That said, FM24 also demonstrates why a change is welcome, as in its current form it can struggle to strike the balance between authenticity and fun.

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I've many a Halloweeny game to recommend to you (Saturnalia, Hob's Barrow, Wytchwood, World Of Horror and even, I suppose, Alan Wake 2, although I'm sort of enjoying it in the wrong way to think of it as a Halloween apropos game) but I'm short on recommendations for myself. I rarely replay games, let alone horror games, which are often one-and-done sorts of things - though I do, of course, enter the Pumpkin Carving Festival every year.

I want something that has a general air of spookiness without being a jumpscare frightfest. If I hadn't played The Tartarus Key already I'd be playing that, is what I'm saying. But the other day I played the demo for An English Haunting and it's exactly what I want. It's just not going to be out for a while. Rats!

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