Eurogamer

Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga is off to a superb start in the UK, judging by boxed sales figures from its launch week provided by numbers company GSD.

TT Games' epic compilation of all nine films is the UK's second-biggest boxed launch of the year so far, behind Pokémon Legends Arceus.

This means The Skywalker Saga sold more physical copies in its launch week than Elden Ring and Gran Turismo 7, though it's worth putting all that in context.

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Sony has invested $1bn in Fortnite maker Epic Games. This latest investment follows on from the $200m Sony put towards Epic last April.

"As a creative entertainment company, we are thrilled to invest in Epic to deepen our relationship in the metaverse field, a space where creators and users share their time," Kenichiro Yoshida, Chairman, President and CEO of Sony Group Corporation, said today.

"We are also confident that Epic's expertise, including their powerful game engine, combined with Sony's technologies, will accelerate our various efforts such as the development of new digital fan experiences in sports and our virtual production initiatives.”

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If you go down to Mos Espa today, you're in for a creepy droid surprise. Yes, despite its family-friendly focus, Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga holds a surprising nod to one of Star Wars' creepiest background characters.

Wander around Mos Espa's back alleys and you may encounter Nobot, an odd-looking C-3PO lookalike, who shuffles off into a hovel. Follow him at your peril.

Once inside the area - labelled as "Haunted Hovel" - you're treated to a weird one-off moment with Nobot himself - and likely left wondering what the heck just happened.

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Another day, another Elden Ring speed running record to be left in awe by. And this time, it is a sub-10-minute run. In fact, it is so good, it is actually a sub-nine run, but that didn't sound quite as catchy.

This new record was achieved by Distortion 2, who has previously achieved and broken many other Elden Ring speed running records. This included the game's first sub-20 run in March.

20 minutes now seems like eons for the streamer, as their new record is an impressive 8 minutes and 56 seconds. This was achieved by using a Zip Glitch, which YouTube commentor Sketchy explains as being performed by "guarding and then walking at a specific time afterward for a specific number of frames. These are frame perfect.

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Just before Laser Dog Games released Catchee on iOS and Android, it shared a wonderful video of the game design process. Sadly - and we'll get to this - the gist of the video was that the studio might be about to go bankrupt. But yes, we'll get to that.

What stood out at the time, aside from the looming financial threat, was the way the team worked. Laser Dog is two people, Simon Renshaw and Rob Allison. Since 2013 they've been making astonishingly brisk and playable arcade games, generally for smartphones. Two people made all these games? How? Watch the video and you sense a partnership where the individuals are starting to blend a bit. Who does what? It's hard to tell.

"Well that’s nice, and great that it comes across, cause it’s true." Who said that? Simon or Rob? Fittingly I can't tell you that either. Due to everyone being busy - we'll get to this - I had to interview Laser Dog over a Google Doc. And very quickly it became impossible to tell the duo apart. So for most of the time I was talking to the Laser Dog hivemind. I suspect it would have felt like this over Skype anyway, tbh. These games are clearly made by people who finish each others' sentences.

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Metal Gear Solid on PS1 originally had Solid Snake befriending rats.

According to a new video by YouTube channel Did You Know Gaming (narrated by David Hayter no less), game director Hideo Kojima wanted to add more rats into the game, allowing the player to assign them names and raise them as pets.

Rats were apparently the first life forms Snake encounters in the cold of Alaska, and would play an important role in the game.

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UPDATE 14/4/22: Killtheth, the Twitter user who gained access to Advance Wars 1+2: Re-Boot Camp on their Switch Lite despite Nintendo officially delaying its release, has now had her order cancelled. Nintendo will be providing Killtheth with a refund for her purchase (although she is yet to receive it).

Following her original posts sharing pictures from her copy of Advance Wars 1+2 Re-Boot Camp, Killtheth shared this update on her blog:

"I woke up on Sunday morning to an influx of social interaction on Twitter which gave me a mild panic attack. People were suggesting I turn on flight mode on my Switch, so I did, after having been playing the game normally with my internet on for a while.

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Fresh from its BAFTA Games win for Music, PlayStation has released a new video detailing the music of Returnal's Ascension DLC.

Presented by Glen Andrew Brown from PlayStation Studios Creative Arts Music team, the video highlights how composer Bobby Krlic and the team heighten tension the higher Selene climbs in the endless Tower of Sisyphus.

Specifically, every music track has been composed and edited into all twelve musical keys so that every time Selene moves up a floor of the tower the music rises by a semitone.

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If you’re unfortunate enough to know me reasonably well, you’ll know that I’ve become a little more insufferable than usual lately thanks to returning to my love of photography. It’s been interesting to see how much of what I love about photography - and the way photography affects memory and nostalgia - is visible in Tunic.

Of course, I don’t mean that there are cameras in the game as with Beyond Good & Evil or anything like that. But seeing certain features in the game that are also present in so many favourite photographs I’ve seen on the web was quite a jarring experience.

Firstly, the water. The water in Tunic is such a glorious, vivid blue that it almost looks like flowing silk. It’s been obvious for a while that the most realistic looking waves in a video game are probably those you dance across in Sea of Thieves. Yet I think this heavenly blue in Tunic is how we sometimes remember idyllic lakes from holidays and days out. Maybe it’s the euphoric feelings of such memories that make the colours in our minds much more saturated than they actually were, because we can’t all visit the true-blue water near the Canadian Rockies or Attabad Lake.

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What's next for Watch Dogs? While we wait to hear if the London-set Legion will get a full game follow-up, Ubisoft will keep fans busy with a Tokyo-set manga.

The near-future hacktivist saga has so far visited Chicago, San Francisco and a post-Brexit Britain. Here's hoping this latest storyline is a little less bleak.

Watch Dogs Tokyo's first installment launches tomorrow, 12th April, and involves series' usual evil megacorp Bloom up to no good again.

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Elden Ring once had a feature that allowed players to collect dreams from sleeping enemies.

The news comes courtesy of Soulsborne fan, modder and streamer Lance McDonald, who has delved into Elden Ring to discover content cut from the final build.

The network test build of the game from last year included a number of sleeping enemies that were cut from the final game. McDonald uses this version to test out the mechanic.

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Elden Ring has been out a month, but From Software's latest still "welcomes" hordes of newcomers every day. And while Eurogamer has a world class beginner's guide to Elden Ring in written form, sometimes a video is just what you need.

The video above, expertly put together by Aoife from the Eurogamer YouTube team, runs through the most basic systems that aren't obvious in-game. Aoife covers everything from attributes to levelling, weapon scaling to equipment loads, magic use and even invincibility frames.

The video also includes valuable information on Spirit Summons, the HUD, flasks, item crafting and more. It's a wonderful starting point for your adventure in Elden Ring!

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Much like the cute and fluffy (pre-Gremlin) Mogwai of Chris Columbus fame, it turns out Elden Ring bosses have a weakness to water.

PSA: the following article contains spoilers for Elden Ring, so if you are still making your way through the Lands Between and have yet to get to Wailing Dunes, this is your cue to find a different article to while away the time with.

So, to the matter in hand. It turns out you can actually cheese the boss fight with Elden Ring's mighty General Radahn. At least, you can cheese it once you get his health whittled down to 50 percent, which is admittedly still a task in its own right.

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A blink-and-you'll-miss-it tease in the newly-announced Kingdom Hearts 4 reveal trailer seems to hint at a Star Wars crossover.

Eagle-eyed fans have found what they think is the foot of an AT-ST walker - the chicken-legged tanks most famous from their appearance in Return of the Jedi.

Fittingly, this scene appears to be placed in a forest area - which looks very like the forest moon of Endor. Hey! Maybe this means Kingdom Hearts 4 will get Ewoks too?

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The game getting a lot of buzz at the WASD game show in London this past weekend was Card Shark, by Nerial and Devolver. And having spent a bit of time with it, it's easy to see why. It's gorgeous, charming, and different.

Card Shark is a game about learning card tricks, or cons, in 18th Century France. You, a young mute man, unexpectedly find yourself on an adventure after being semi-willingly roped into a ruse at a restaurant you serve in.

The Comte de Germain reveals to you a con he intends to play on someone later that evening - with your help. This involves your looking at the other person's hand while pouring their wine and then signalling to the Comte which of the card-suits the person has most of.

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Sonic the Hedgehog 2 has allegedly enjoyed the greatest opening weekend for any video-game based movie. Ever.

According to Comicbook, the sequel has clocked up an impressive $71 million - that's £54.4m - since its premier on Friday; for context, the first Sonic the Hedgehog movie grossed $58m (£44m) on its opening weekend.

Interestingly, this makes it Jim Carrey's biggest domestic opener ever, eclipsing 2003's Bruce Almighty which grossed $68m during it's opening weekend in the States. It also marks Paramount's fifth number-one movie of the pandemic, too.

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Last month's patch might not have brought any new content to Cyberpunk 2077, but that doesn't mean the development team has given up on "working on stuff" just yet.

In a livestream, CD Projekt Red's quest director, Pawel Sasko, confirmed that the team was aware that there is still "work to be done", and said he was reviewing possible new review quests "daily".

"We're still improving the game, because we are all aware that there is work to be done", Sasko said in response to a question in the chat (thanks, Reddit via TheGamer).

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A new Subnautica game is in "early development".

With so little to go on right now it's unclear if this is a full sequel, a spin-off, or something different altogether, but a recent job advertisement from development studio Unknown Worlds hinted that the studio was seeking a narrative designer to "shape the next game in the Subnautica universe".

"We're seeking a Senior Narrative Designer to work with us to help shape the next game in the Subnautica universe!" developer Unknown Worlds tweeted earlier this week. "Come and join our fully remote studio and let's make great games together."

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Phasmophobia's latest big update launched earlier this week, giving everyone's favourite jump-scare simulator a major VR overhaul and some much needed quality of life improvements.

In this week's episode of VR Corner (above), you can watch me put Phasmophobia's new and improved VR gameplay to the test as I try out a trio of terrifying hunts.

Along with support for all major headsets and various bug fixes, update v0.6.00 also makes playing in VR a much less clumsy experience than it was before. One of the most noticable changes is that the walkie-talkie and ghost hunting journal now have dedicated slots on your belt, which is something that removes a lot of the issues players had in the past when it came to grabbing them from their shoulders.

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Square Enix has confirmed that Kingdom Hearts 4 is officially on the way.

In the final video released as part of the series' 20th-anniversary celebrations - dubbed a complication of all trailers revealed during today's event - we unexpectedly catch sight of Sora and the statement: "The heart resides within the soul, which in turn is guided by fate to its rightful place".

But let's not talk about it when you can see it for yourself (jump to 4.09 to get straight into the Kingdom Hearts 4 action):

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Sega has opened up on its secretive "Super Game" initiative, and rather than one game, it looks to be encapsulating to several different games, some of which will include cloud and NFT technology.

In an interview with Sega Japan’s recruitment website and translated by our friends at VGC, several Sega executives explained that to qualify under the Super Game banner, the new projects must be "multi-platform, global multi-language development, simultaneous worldwide release, and AAA titles".

"In other words, you can imagine that the scale of game development will be that of a global blockbuster," Sega explained.

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The Australian Classification Board has agreed to review its decision to ban RimWorld from sale.

RimWorld, developer Ludeon Studios' widely acclaimed sci-fi colony sim, was refused classification in Australia last month, preventing its release and effectively banning it from sale.

As Matt posited at the time it wasn't a particularly surprising decision given the Australian Classification Board is notoriously sensitive around certain issues in games, and RimWorld is, after all, a simulation whose incredibly deep systems make drug-fuelled cannibalism an entirely legitimate pastime for colonist.

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Hit Points, in case you haven't come across it before, is an incredible free newsletter from friend of Eurogamer and former Edge editor Nathan Brown, delivering insight and commentary on the videogame industry. We're delighted to be partnering with Nathan to provide a platform for some of his pieces, continuing with this from earlier this week on Elden Ring and the question of balance. If you like what you've read, do head over and subscribe!

Many years ago, I spent an evening in the pub with a cohort of fellow game journalists. Among them was the wonderful Graham Smith, who these days is doing audience-development stuff I shan’t pretend to understand at Rock Paper Shotgun, but I believe at the time was editor of PC Gamer. I was stressing about something I had to write: a post script for the Edge review of the PS4 launch title Killzone Shadow Fall. I knew I wanted to talk about AI, both in the game and in shooters more broadly, but wasn’t entirely sure what to say or how to say it (I was a fraud, and still am). Graham said something that helped it all click into place, and which I have never forgotten. “People say they want good AI in shooters, but they don’t. If FPS AI was perfect then it would be just like playing online against the people at the top of the leaderboard. It would be awful. When people say they want good AI, what they mean is they want to fight enemies that make them feel smart when they beat them.”

London Games Festival's Virtual Photographer of the Year competition has been won by the striking Red Dead Redemption 2 screenshot you can see above.

Joe Meizies from the UK scooped top prize in the competition that "challenged aspiring artists to capture the most striking images taken from within a video game to bring those worlds and characters to life".

Applicants could choose from three categories - landscape, portrait and abstract - and the screenshot could be taken from any video game played on any platform.

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Classic PlayStation games like Chrono Cross are seemingly "expiring" on PS3 and PlayStation Vita, even for players who had legitimately bought the games through Sony's own storefronts.

As reported by Kotaku, PlayStations users have taken to social media on discovering that the hitherto unknown "expiration dates" on their digital games have reportedly expired.

When trying to re-download the classic version of Chrono Cross, one user reports he received a noticed telling him that his licence to play the game had expired on 31st December, 1969.

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Konami has recognised that "multiple factors" contributed to eFootball's disasterous launch last year, but says it has "prioritised improvements and corrections based on the feedback and opinions we received".

As Tom summarised for us earlier this week, eFootball - the new name for PES - arrived in a disastrous state late last year, even though Konami warned players it would arrive in extremely limited form akin to a demo.

Now, however, the beleaguered publisher has acknowledged the "incompletion" of the game to our sister site VGC, pointing the finger to several factors it believes contributed to the game's dreadful reception on release.

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23 years on from its original release, Chrono Cross: The Radical Dreamers Edition revives one of the true gems of the PS1 era with upgraded visuals and a handful of extras. It's out on last-gen PS4 and Xbox One machines, plus Switch and PC, with back-compat allowing the game to run on PS5 and Xbox Series X/S as well. Regardless of platform though, it's a pleasure to see one of Squaresoft's great JRPGs remastered, but it's certainly not a perfect package. Stark changes have been made to 2D pre-rendered backdrops, changing the look significantly, while the frame-rate is far less consistent than you'd expect from a remaster of a game made four generations ago.

So is the Radical Dreamers Edition the best way to play Chrono Cross, despite these issues, or is it still better to enjoy the original - perhaps augmented with a CRT or an HDMI scaler like a Retrotink 5X Pro?

Before answering that question, let's take a brief look at what changes have been made. The first thing you'll notice is that select character models have been upgraded, character art has been redrawn, and backgrounds have been processed with a form of AI upscale. All of these changes can be toggled with a single option in a front-end launcher, between a new and classic modes - but alas, none of them can be toggled individually. It's all or nothing.

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Mudkip is the focus of April’s Community Day Classic event - a Pokémon Go event which increases the spawn rate for a Pokémon highlighted in past Community Day events.

Since Mudkip is a starter Pokémon - giving it the potential to evolve into a powerful Pokémon and making it quite hard to find in the wild - this event is useful for both experienced trainers and newcomers.

This event offers you the chance to find a shiny Mudkip and one with 100% perfect IV stats; if you do find such a Mudkip, we’ve also included Swampert’s best moveset.

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It's been a month since Valve started shipping its sought-after handheld system, Steam Deck, and to celebrate, the company wants you to know exactly how far the system - and its games - have come, including updates on its Deck Verified program and ongoing efforts with Microsoft to bring Xbox Cloud Gaming to the mobile platform, too.

"We started shipping Steam Deck just one month ago, and it’s been a huge thrill seeing it out in the wild in players’ hands," Valve explained in a new blog. An accompanying video can be viewed below, too:

"One of our favourite things about that is finally getting to hear from you about your experience using Steam Deck. This first month has given us a chance to start collecting your feedback as we continue our work to make Deck better in the months and years to come."

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Content creator Ali-A has partnered with YouTube to create uTure, a "global talent show to find the next big gaming content creator".

Alongside Ali-A - who himself boasts 25 million subscribers - other judges like LilSimsie and Lachlan will together decide which contestant will secure the $76k / $100k top prize after a series of nine weekly tournaments.

"YouTube is home to tens of thousands of brilliant gaming creators that haven’t yet been discovered. It's my hope that uTure will give all these creative individuals their moment to shine and learn from gaming veterans in the space in front of YouTube’s millions-strong global audience,” said Ali-A. “Thank you to YouTube for supporting this idea and best of luck to everyone who enters!"

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Someone has completed Elden Ring in less than 13 minutes - and even took out a boss along the way.

In a "world's first" under 13-minute run, YouTuber Mitchriz uses "zips", peculiar techniques that let you catapult across the Lands Between, essentially skipping whole areas.

Here, you can check out the full run below:

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Crytek has issued a "quick update" and an apology for the problems plaguing Hunt: Showdown's recent event, Traitor's Moon.

In a statement posted to the company's social media channels, the developer acknowledged that "several issues have prevented some of you from comfortably participating in the event" following "server issues, bugs, and for console, sensitivity issues".

"These have all been very frustrating and we understand the impact that the downtimes and issues have had for many of you," the statement admitted.

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Immersion is easily virtual reality’s biggest strength over what you might call flat gaming. When done well, VR can whisk us away to familiar worlds, storybook fantasies, a galaxy far far away, even the mountainside for a quick spot of climbing. Putting players directly inside these 360 degree spaces, there’s an utter joy to the medium that can’t be recreated on a TV or PC monitor. Often, that hinges on intuitive use of motion controls - and in VR, hand movement is integral.

Some VR games support traditional controllers but, honestly, they’ve never done the format justice. Direct hand and finger tracking is promising yet limited, making motion controls an adaptable middle ground. While they can’t replicate our exact hand, grip and trigger buttons add significant physicality when holding objects. But this poses another problem. With games using the same controllers for object interaction, how do you convey object weights differently? Picking up items is one thing, throwing them accurately is another.

Digital Extremes has finally set a date for Warframe's Angels of the Zariman expansion, with the free-to-play sci-fi shooter's first big update of 2022 coming to all platforms on 27th April.

Angels of the Zariman focuses its multitude of new additions around the lore-critical Zariman Ten Zero, an Orokin ship that vanished during a Void-Jump accident. Front and centre of the update is a new instalment in Warframe's single-player, story driven Cinematic Quest saga, which this time sets the scene by taking Tenno aboard the Zariman Ten Zero.

Then, once the mission is complete, players will gain access to Chrysalith, a new social hub onboard the Zariman, which introduces a range of new NPC, side missions, and objectives.

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Tired of those infernal video games, always insisting on being so darned interactive? Well, developer Supermassive Games (Until Dawn, The Dark Pictures Anthology) has you covered in its next horror title The Quarry, which comes with its very own Movie Mode.

Movie Mode, just as it sounds, lets players (or rather viewers, in this instance) watch the entirety of The Quarry's summer-camp-flavoured horror in linear, non-interactive fashion - meaning you can simply plop your bot on the sofa, grab your popcorn with two controller-free hands, and soak up its scares with only minimal exertions from yourself.

As detailed in a new IGN preview (thanks PC Gamer), The Quarry's Movie Mode will come in three different flavours: Everybody Lives, Everybody Dies, and Director's Chair. The first two are pretty self-explanatory, determining whether The Quarry's cast members - including the likes of Lance Henriksen, Grace Zabriskie, David Arquette, Ted Raimi, Justice Smith, and Skyler Gisondo - manage to survive their experience at Hackett's Quarry summer camp to live another day.

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This week's big Unreal Engine event brought word of a new Tomb Raider game set to made using Unreal Engine 5, and saw Epic Games' powerful game toolkit made freely available to all.

There wasn't a lot of news for Fortnite players - at least, not on the surface.

But eagle-eyed Fishstick fans did subsequently spot something: a brief glimpse at a list of Fortnite file names left open on a strategically-placed Epic Games computer. Zoom in and you can make out references to "Vader" and "Family Guy".

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Criterion's new Need for Speed game, which was delayed at the start of last year while the studio assisted the development of Battlefield 2042, will reportedly launch this November, skipping previous game consoles to instead focus on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S.

EA confirmed a new Criterion-developed Need for Speed game was in the works at the tail-end of 2020, slapping it with a vague release window of somewhere between April 2021 and the end of March this year. However, that launch was later delayed to EA's fiscal year 2023, with the publisher announcing it had made the decision to move Criterion away from Need for Speed to help DICE "deliver the best [Battlefield] experience possible to our players".

With Battlefield 2042 now launched, Criterion's attention has reportedly returned to Need for Speed, with EA said to be looking to release its long-awaited racer this November. That's according to VentureBeat's Jeff Grubb who, speaking in the latest episode his GrubbSnax show (thanks WCCF Tech), also claimed this latest series instalment will forego a console release on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, instead targeting PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S.

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Last year, Eidos Montreal released Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy - its own, original take on Marvel's oddball spacefaring family - to largely positive reviews which praised its single-player focus, character work and humour. But it remained unclear how well the game had performed commercially, and in February, publisher Square Enix said the title had "undershot expectations".

Ahead of the BAFTA video game awards last night, I sat down with members of the Guardians of the Galaxy team to discuss the game's emotional storytelling, where the series could go next - and some unexpected tussles with racoons.

But first, the issue of those sales - on which, the team said it had "no regrets".

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Doom is the ultimate game. It runs on pregnancy tests, it runs in cars, and now it runs on RTX - with hardware-accelerated ray tracing, of course. Sultim Tsyrendashiev, creator of the Serious Sam path tracing mod delivered this new RT-infused rendition of Doom on April 1st this year, but make no mistake, this is no joke. It's a visual revamp of the original game, creating a clever path-traced RT aesthetic for a title that essentially has no real-time lighting model as we'd understand it in a modern game. The results are excellent overall and the processes required to make it happen are often ingenious.

First up, let's talk requirements: what do you need to get going? A copy of Doom itself is essential, obviously - specifically for the WAD file that contains the bulk of the game data. You'll also need the RT version of prboom, available here. Therein, you'll note that there are optional downloads for higher quality music, plus the DLSS .dll plugin, required to drastically improve performance. The final requirement is an Nvidia RTX GPU. For reasons that are not clear, AMD RDNA 2 graphics cards are not supported - maybe it's simply the case that the developer doesn't own one.

Ms. Pac-Man has been transformed into Pac-Mom in Bandai Namco’s Arcade Archives: Pac-Land game, likely due to an ongoing dispute over rights.

Ms. Pac-Man is known for her red bow and boots, but in this new game Pac-Mom has taken over - sporting pink stilettos, hat and gloves. Huh?!

Twitter user Nick C spotted the change and shared it online. Looks like Baby Pac has also been changed.

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