A cloud version of Aliens: Fireteam Elite is headed to the Switch later this month.
The release comes courtesy of Ubitus, the company behind the likes of Hitman 3, A Plague Tale: Innocence, and Control on Switch via the cloud.
Available from 26th April, the Switch version will feature cross-play with previously released versions on PlayStation and Xbox consoles, as well as PC (Steam).
Super Mario is video games to a lot of people, but behind the brand awareness - and the blockbuster animated movie that is currently breaking records in the cinemas - is a series that never settles into a rut. Mario always weighs the same - he's always that lovely piece of elastic to fling around colourful levels - but even before you get to kart racing and golf games, each Mario adventure always takes him somewhere new.
So to celebrate the success of the Mario movie, we've tried to bring together a list of our favourite Mario games - not including the many, many spinoffs. And it's hard - really, really hard. See what you think of our choices.
Wii U, Nintendo Switch.
PC Game Pass has now officially become available in 40 more countries, including many more in Europe.
If you're reading this in Luxembourg, Iceland, Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Moldova, Romania, Slovenia, Serbia or Ukraine, your time to sign up to PC Game Pass has finally come.
The same goes for a further list of countries in Central and South America, as well as the Middle East.
The International Game Developers Association (IGDA) is updating its game crediting policy to improve the standard across the industry.
The organisation's Game Credits Special Interest Group (SIG) aims to promote "inclusivity and best practices for how credits are attributed, affecting career and awards prospects".
As well as full guidelines, it's published a Crediting Quick Guide including advice such as "when in doubt, give credit", not removing a name if a staff member leaves the company before launch, and including all contract and full time studio employees.
A new update for The Last of Us Part 1 on PlayStation 5 adds new HBO-themed cosmetics for Ellie, along with a host of bug fixes and general improvements.
This patch, which is live now, adds two T-shirts for players to dress Ellie up in. The first of these shirts is a blue number themed on HBO's The Wire. You can see how it looks in the header image above.
The second, meanwhile, is a tribute to The Last of Us' recent TV adaptation. Please note, if you have not watched the show yet, there is a minor spoiler ahead.
Pokémon Go has begun selling its in-game PokéCoin currency cheaper online via a web store in certain countries.
It's the first time you've been able to buy PokéCoins outside of the Pokémon Go app itself.
This method of acquiring PokéCoins also seemingly circumvents the 33 percent cut typically taken by app store owners Apple and Google - a thorny subject which previously got Fortnite in hot water.
Five of the Best is a weekly series for supporters. It's a series about highlighting some of the features in games that are often overlooked. It's also a series about you having your say, so don't be shy, use the comments below and join in!
Oh and you can find our entire Five of the Best archive elsewhere on the site.
I've been trying to think of the first enchanted forest I can remember. I thought it was Mirkwood from The Hobbit, a magical place that disorientated people. A place that was more than a forest - a place that was alive. But I don't think it was. I played Secret of Mana before that, and that whole game revolved around a tree in a magical forest, so maybe it was that? I feel bad I haven't mentioned that game properly now.
Sony has announced it's airing a new PlayStation State of Play showcase this Thursday, 13th April, this one focusing on Square Enix's upcoming Final Fantasy 16.
Square has, of course, been rapidly ramping up the pre-release promotion of Final Fantasy 16 as its PlayStation 5 launch on 22nd June draws nearer, and this latest State of Play showcase - which airs on Thursday, 13th April, at 10pm BST/11pm CEST/2pm PT - promises over 20 minutes of new gameplay footage.
More specifically, Sony says the stream - viewable via Twitch and YouTube - will shed more light on Final Fantasy 16's "dark fantasy setting, the powerful Eikons and the Dominants who house them, and the flashy battle system teased in those early trailers."
Rare co-founder Tim Stamper has been digging into his archive again of late, promising to reveal "more secrets" from the studio's vault, and his latest helping of retro treasure comes in the form of new footage from Rare's cancelled N64 game, Dream.
Announced back in 1995, Dream was to be Rare's take on the role-playing genre, with a dash of LucasArts thrown in, following the fairy-tale-inspired adventures of a boy named Edson as he battled the nefarious Captain Blackeye and his band of pirates.
Originally planned for release on the SNES, Dream was later retooled for the N64, switching from isometric visuals to more ambitious full 3D. As time went on, however, technical issues and several rethinks caused some dramatic changes in direction, with Edson eventually being dropped in favour of new protagonist Banjo and the original RPG elements making way for a more straightforward Donkey Kong Country-esque platformer.
If your animal splicing experiments are starting to feel a bit stale, there's some good news; park management sim Let's Build a Zoo is getting some aquarium-themed DLC later this year, opening up the potential for even more adorable/terrifying creature hybrids in your life.
Let's Build a Zoo, if you've not yet had the pleasure, melds familiar zoo tycoon gameplay - in which the aim is to build and manage an appealing (and hopefully lucrative) park, importing and breeding animals, managing staff, and so on - with a couple of unique twists.
There's a morality system - giving players the choice between maintaining a happy, ethical zoo or turning it into something considerably more dubious - as well as a compelling DNA splicing hook, enabling fearless tinkerers to combine any animals they've acquired into more exotic specimens, like crocoducks, giraffephants, and chickow.
QuakeCon returns this August with its first in-person event in three years.
QuakeCon 2023 runs from Thursday, 10th August until Sunday, 13th August and will be held at Texas' Gaylord Texan Resort & Convention Center. This marks the first time QuakeCon has featured an in-person event since 2019, with the show having switched to a digital-only schedule in 2020, in response to the coronavirus pandemic.
There are, however, some notable changes for this year's in-person return; Bethesda has announced it's ditching QuakeCon's usual General Admission entry and exhibit hall set-up in favour of a ticket-only event - requiring pre-registration - that'll emphasise the show's bring-your-own-computer LAN party experience.
The blockbuster success of Nintendo's new Super Mario Bros. Movie has likely guaranteed a galaxy of spin-offs and sequels will follow - and that's on top of the end-credits tease already sitting at the film.
There are several moments where the Super Mario Bros. Movie seems to set up characters and plot elements for future film entries - while the lack of story in this initial movie has come under criticism.
Join us as we take a look beyond this rather safe - albeit still enjoyable - new step by Nintendo into the world of cinema, and consider where the Super Mario Bros. Movie series will most likely head next... as well as where we hope it doesn't.
Ten months after its initial reveal, Konami's Super Bomberman R sequel has a release date, and is launching digitally for PlayStation, Xbox, Switch, and PC on 13th September.
Like its 2017 predecessor, Super Bomberman R 2 serves up a sizeable mix of single-player and multiplayer modes inspired by Konami's classic bomb-dropping arcade series.
This time around, lone players can test their mettle in the appropriately titled Solo-Bomb mode, which takes them on a story driven jaunt through space as they explore planets, using their bombs to destroy objects and annihilate enemies.
Ashley breaks the fourth wall in Resident Evil 4 Remake when players try to look up her skirt.
The original game included lines of dialogue if Leon attempted to look under her clothes, including calling him a pervert.
In the remake, she remains silent but will bend down and stare directly into the camera and at the player to scold them.
You can now make your way through Half-Life: Alyx from start to finish without a VR headset to your name. This is thanks to the appropriately named NoVR mod, which has been in the works for a while now.
But even though this may be the case, this is the first time the mod has allowed the full campaign to be completed without a VR headset.
"This is our biggest update yet and we have no plans on slowing down," the NoVR team shared earlier. "With thousands playing Half-Life Alyx NoVR we are happy to announce our largest update yet! As the titles state the entire game can now be played from start to finish, with the Gravity Gloves fully implemented along with combine fabricators providing weapon upgrades."
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Back in February, a new Resident Evil animated film was revealed called Death Island that teased the inclusion of series favourites Leon Kennedy and Jill Valentine.
Now, a new trailer shows them on-screen together for the first time in Resident Evil history.
The trailer also features Chris and Claire Redfield, Rebecca Chambers, and a whole load of zombies. Check it out below.
With the box well and truly checked on EA Motive's brilliant Dead Space Remake, you may be wondering what's next for the revived franchise.
Well, as fans eagerly await confirmation of a new Dead Space 2, here's something to keep your appetite whetted: a free fan-made demake of the original.
Ever wondered what Dead Space might look like on PlayStation 1? Well, now you know, courtesy of indie game designer Fraser Brumley. This 15-minute playable demo shows off a retro version of the survival horror shooter, complete with shootable limbs and holographic HUD elements.
Warhammer 40,000: Boltgun - basically old-school Doom in a Warhammer 40,000 skin - comes out on PC, PlayStation, Xbox and Nintendo Switch on 23rd May.
The new trailer for Auroch Digital's upcoming shooter is below:
Boltgun sees you play a Space Marine who goes up against the hordes of Chaos. Expect all the favours of daemons, from Nurgle to Tzeentch, exploding in a shower of pixels. English actor Rahul Kohli voices the main character, Ultramarines veteran Malum Caedo.
Sonic Frontiers didn't include the hedgehog's signature Spin Dash move, but that's set to change in the next free update.
Sonic Team provided a load of alternative moves in Frontiers to expand Sonic's combat options - presumably the Spin Dash just didn't fit.
Now a dataminer has found references to the Spin Dash in the latest update, which has seemingly been corroborated by the game's director Morio Kishimoto.
The New York Times has lifted the lid on Digits, a daily maths-based puzzle game.
Digits is in its beta, and is essentially Countdown's numbers-based segment. Those of you who enjoy a bit of early afternoon brain stimulation will know exactly what I mean.
In Digits, players are given a number that they need to reach through mathematical manipulation.
If playing Minecraft has ever made you peckish, there's now an official cookbook.
Gather, Cook, Eat! is available now in the US (with a release date of 18th May in the UK) and includes over 40 recipes based on Mojang's blockbuster game.
It caters for all skill levels too, from those looking to make a Baked Potato Bite, to Buried Treasure Pie or even Suspicious Stew.
Nintendo is seeking to subpoena Discord to obtain details of the individual who leaked 200 pages of details regarding the upcoming Legends of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom via an unpublished art book.
Lawyers for Nintendo of America filed the subpoena on 4th April, Torrentfreak reported. In it, Nintendo seeks to order Discord to disclose the "identity, including the name(s), address(es), telephone number(s) and email address(es) of the user" in question.
Nintendo already knows their Discord alias. Now it wants to know who they really are.
In its ongoing bid to acquire Activision Blizzard, Microsoft has announced another 10-year commitment. This time it's with mobile and internet service provider EE.
Sharing the news on Twitter, Xbox head Phil Spencer said Microsoft and EE were "expanding [their] partnership" with this 10-year agreement to bring Xbox and Activision Blizzard PC games to EE customers should the buyout go through.
"We are committed to bring more games to more people, however they choose to play," Spencer wrote, although he stopped short of sharing any details on how this partnership would be presented to customers.
Sensitive US military documents pertaining to the war in Ukraine were leaked in a Minecraft Discord server.
The leak contained information about the types of weapons used by Ukrainian and US forces, details on Ukraine's air defence systems and offensive capabilities, battlefield fatality statistics, and communication about US military allies.
As The Wall Street Journal reports (via Kotaku), the documents were uploaded to a small Discord server of American users, but later spread to a Minecraft Discord server in March before appearing on 4chan, Twitter, and Telegram.
Tekken 8 director Katsuhiro Harada has confirmed in an oh-so-casual way on Twitter that the upcoming fighter will feature crossplay and rollback.
In addition to this, Harada has also seemingly confirmed there will be a beta for the game.
Harada seemed to be having a rather nice time replying to fans on the social media platform over the weekend, confirming that "of course" crossplay would be included on Tekken 8's release (which is slated to be some time next year, although a firm date is yet to be announced).
Media Molecule is set to discontinue live support for its game-making Dreams after 1st September 2023.
The "difficult decision" has been made as it shifts focus to "an exciting new project", according to a new blog post.
Players will still be able to play, create and share Dreams with others, but no new updates will be released, or game events like DreamsCom, All Hallows' Dreams or the Impy awards. The game will remain available for purchase after 1st September.
Often all you really need in a video game is the world itself and some basic encouragement to explore it. So it proves for Chasing the Unseen, which casts you as a little boy gadding about tapering, airborne islands of rock, soil and vegetation, wrapped around each other in a silty underwater haze. It's an exercise in unhurried curiosity with just a touch of eeriness and threat. Playing through a Steam demo, I was reminded by turns of Journey's sand dunes, Halo's loopy Forerunner skyboxes and the sinewy architecture of the recent Scorn.
Chasing the Unseen's landscapes are based on fractals – briefly, mathematical shapes whose parts look the same as the whole, however far you zoom in. Montreal, Quebec-based solo developer Matthieu Fiorilli is fascinated by them. "You have these surprisingly short math formulas that yield these complex and infinite shapes," he enthuses. "You rarely see this level of complexity coming out of something so simple." Endlessly self-similar geometry may not lend itself to easy navigation, of course, so these generated archipelagoes have been carefully sculpted, their eccentricities reined in and segmented to form digestible platforming routes. Slicks of grass denote securely walkable surfaces, while patches of dense sunlight serve as end-of-level teleporters.
You have no other objective here than to ascend, using sticky, stamina-based climbing mechanics familiar from Shadow of the Colossus to haul yourself up textured surfaces such as scaly, glowing trees. You can also pop out a Breath of the Wildy parachute to glide, which again consumes stamina, and save your progress at stone cairns, which can be topped up with collectible stones for extra continues.
The brilliant animated series Arcane will not return to our screens this year.
Season 2 of Arcane is just "not ready yet", Riot Games boss Nicolo Laurent has said, when asked when the League of Legends spin-off show would be back.
The first season of Arcane debuted back in November 2021 to critical acclaim and an Emmy for Outstanding Animated Program. A second season was quickly confirmed by Netflix - though we've been waiting for more news ever since.
A new update for Hi-Fi Rush has been released that adds new accessibility options to make parrying easier.
That's alongside a new costume pack available to purchase and a number of bug fixes.
The stage select screen will also now display the number of collectibles found in each stage, with fully completed levels displaying a green checkmark.
Epic Games and Activision Blizzard have both received damning grades from the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) in its 2023 Holocaust Denial Report Card.
The ADL published its online Holocaust Denial Report Card earlier this week. Here, the ADL lists the 10 most popular gaming and social media platforms and rates them based on the degree to which they aid the spread of Holocaust denial content.
Epic Games and Fortnite received an F grade, the lowest score reported by the ADL. The ADL noted the game does not have an explicit Holocaust denial policy. Additionally, Epic took more than 24 hours to respond whenever an incident was reported to it, and also failed to take action on reports made by average users.
Nintendo's Super Mario Bros. Movie is a monster success, and has broken the record for the largest-ever opening weekend of any animated movie.
The Mario brothers brought in $377m in ticket sales worldwide since their debut last week, beating previous record holder Frozen 2's $358m.
As you might expect, this also gives Mario the best opening for any video game adaptation ever, animated or otherwise. Indeed, Mario has already almost caught Sonic the Hedgehog 2's $405m total gross in just a few days.
Lily Gao, the voice actor behind Resident Evil 4 Remake's Ada Wong, has hit back at critics in a new Instagram post.
The actor deactivated her account at the start of the month following thousands of vitriolic messages complaining about her performance and claiming she "ruined the remake".
"My Ada is a survivor," said Gao in the new post, which also included images of Asian women in cinema who inspired her portrayal of the character.
Forget about about the Force, the only thing I can feel flowing through the galaxy right now is the power of nostalgia. This is all thanks to the recent release of Team Beef's JK XR mod, a standalone OpenXR port of Star Wars Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast.
If you played the original game, you'll be right at home here because this out of this world port puts the entirety of Kyle Katarn's 2002 adventure into first person VR, with motion controls. That's right, you can shoot blasters, swing lightsabers and use Force powers all with the power of your upper body. Just like a real Jedi!
There are a couple of things to bear in mind though. The first is that JK XR is currently only available on the SideQuest app for the Quest II and Pico4, something that PC VR and OG Quest owners may feel is a bit Bantha poodoo. Secondly, although JK XR is free to download you will need to own a copy of the original game on Steam in order to play, which is currently about £7.19.
Update: We've just added to our Cyberpunk 2077 RT Overdrive video coverage with a new Night City tour captured entirely with the new upgrade at 4K, 60 frames per second, using an RTX 4090 at 4K resolution with DLSS performance mode. Check it out!
We've opted not to use frame generation here, mainly because it requires v-sync to be disabled, which would add some ugly tearing to the captures. V-sync can be forced at the control panel level, but the RT Overdrive upgrade really doesn't like it. Thankfully, for much of the game - especially the exteriors - the RTX 4090 has enough brute force grunt to sustain 60 frames per second.
We'll be adding further reporting based on in-depth testing of the new upgrade, along with a range of graphics card benchmarks, but what I can share now is that while the game obviously runs best on RTX 40-series cards, 30-series GPUs can still produce a decent experience. For example, the RTX 3080 10GB can run it at between 40-60 frames per second at 1440p resolution using the DLSS balanced mode. More to come then, but in the meantime, we hope you enjoy the new video.
My favourite Zelda moments generally don't have much to do with Zelda. They're not moments of heroism or even action, to be honest. If anything, they tend towards the opposite: a little change in the world that comes unannounced, an accidental glimpse of something from just the right angle in a quiet moment when I think I'm busy doing something else.
I'm talking about moments like the one in Link to the Past where you climb the mountain and the lovely plump, rounded trees of Hyrule which you've spent so much time with up-close are suddenly seen from a distance, far below you. Still plump, still rounded, but coming together to form something larger than their individual selves - a forest!
There's another moment, from Wind-Waker, that I love just as much. It's Dragon Roost Island, an early part of the game, and I guess I'm climbing towards a boss. Outside, hopping around on the wind-cleaned rock, I'm messing about with the eyeglass and I see a distant part of the same island, the same cliff, where one of those Kargaroc birds is sat in their straw nest. Simultaneously goofy and rather regal, this is a creature I haven't seen up close yet, so this is a glorious fortuitous sneak at what's ahead.
Behaviour Interactive is reverting Dead By Daylight's healing system change following player feedback.
Behaviour figured that the change – which saw the time to heal slowed from 16 to 24 seconds – would be contentious, and said that it would keep "an extra close eye on this change to see how it would play out".
"After reviewing player feedback, we found that many of you agreed that the speed which you heal others was already in a good spot prior to the update," the team explained in an update. "This change also had knock-on effects elsewhere in the game, making effects like Mangled and Hemorrhage stronger and making ‘slugging’ (leaving Survivors in the dying state) even more effective.
Physical copies of Castle of Shikigami 2 on Switch will release later this year in the US and Europe.
Whilst Red Art Games stopped short of revealing when, exactly, the physical editions will be ready, in a press release the studio said that the "reworked" scrolling shooter – the 2021 PC version of which sits on a "positive" score on Steam – is set to come in 2023.
"Castle of Shikigami 2 is a "story-driven bullet-hell shooting game that first appeared in arcades in 2003 and was later ported to home video game consoles such as the SEGA Dreamcast and Nintendo GameCube," the publisher teases.
EA has dropped a new – and final – gameplay trailer for Star Wars Jedi: Survivor.
The teaser, which was released alongside the weekend's Star War Celebration extravaganza, gives us our final two minutes of footage before the game releases at the end of the month.
You can check it out below:
DF Direct Weekly goes live a day early this week, not because of any particular urge to liven up your holiday weekend (assuming you have one) but rather to make way for a raft of embargoed content we're expecting to deliver next week. In this week's show, I'm joined by my #FriendAndColleagues John Linneman and Oliver Mackenzie, with the main points of discussion covering off mooted rumours of a PlayStation handheld based on Remote Play, the not-an-April-Fool-after-all Asus ROG Ally - and to express a degree of disappointment that Microsoft has banned access to emulation for Xbox Series consoles.
Let's tackle the PlayStation handheld story first of all. It's worth pointing out that Sony has made no official confirmation, and we're talking about a rumour here - but an interesting one nonetheless. First of all, the idea is that this would be a relatively cheap device, tapping into the PS5's local streaming capabilities as opposed to some kind of Steam Deck-like device, built around local gaming and using a low-power AMD SoC. From a Digital Foundry perspective, the latter option is certainly more interesting and from a viability perspective, there's much to commend it - assuming that Sony were to tap into the latest 4nm process technology. Perhaps not coincidentally, that's exactly what the Asus ROG Ally does.
The Super Mario Bros. Movie is off to a rip-roaring start and looks set to hit a record-breaking £296m ($368m) over the Easter weekend, making it the second-best global debut ever for an animated movie at the domestic box office.
According to The Hollywood Reporter, the Mario movie is projected to take £110m ($137m) over the three-day weekend, making it the US' second-best animated movie start after Incredibles 2, taking the silver from Finding Dory.
THR reports that this is Illumination's best-ever start – besting both Minions and Despicable Me – and is currently the top movie opening of the year, and the second-biggest five-day launch ever after Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, which also debuted over the Easter bank holiday.