Eurogamer

We've already seen some pretty funky physics from Valheim's abyssal harpoon, but beyond NASA space programs Valheim players have now found a more practical use for the weapon: as a way of transporting heavy goods by waterski. Or maybe it's more like those inflatable tubes you can tow behind boats - but close enough.

Over on reddit, user LostYugen yesterday posted a video showing that a player can be harpooned while holding a cart, then towed by boat, allowing for the transportation of a huge number of items. The maximum number of slots in a Valheim longship is 18, and by towing a cart you can double this amount to 36. Previously, some players had attempted to balance upturned carts on their boats to haul massive amounts of ore, but this technique can easily be scuppered by a storm - or simply some bad sailing. In fact, LostYugen explained they discovered the waterskiing method after one of their carts was knocked out of their longship by a wave. Others have found that placing a heavy cart on a boat can also make it much harder to steer. Could the cart-towing method actually be more reliable?

Last year's best Nintendo Switch Black Friday bundle is back and at an all-new low price - thanks to yet another eBay voucher code.

Over on the ShopTo eBay store, you can get a Nintendo Switch Lite with Animal Crossing New Horizons and a 3-month Switch Online membership for £190.39.

That's much less than the usual price of £240 and nearly £20 less than the discount it received over Black Friday.

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UPDATE 15/3/21: Former WB Games developer Troy Leavitt has now, as promised, released his own video discussing his departure from Hogwarts Legacy studio Avalanche Software. It's an edited recording of a farewell Zoom call to former colleagues, in which he also shared his resignation letter.

In the letter, Leavitt wrote that he left the studio largely due to a family matter which WB Games had been helping him manage over the past year. "Unfortunately, things on that front have seriously deteriorated since the beginning of February," Leavitt said, "I now see the situation as chronic and likely to be high maintenance into the foreseeable future."

Discussing the timeline of events leading up to his resignation, Leavitt explained that articles about his YouTube channel were published after "family matters took a sharp turn at [the] beginning of February" and that after "reflecting upon the situation, I decided to prioritise family over work concerns... The articles were a catalyst in this - but not the cause. I decided to re-retire at [the] beginning of March."

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Loop Hero is nothing like Monopoly. What is it like? It's kind of an RPG, and kind of an idle game. But it's not as much of an RPG as it seems, and really it's nothing like an idle game to play half the time.

In Loop Hero you look after a little adventurer as they walk in loops, battling monsters. The monsters and the loops, the walking and the battling, most of this is automated. Off your adventure goes and when they meet a blob they whack it. When they meet a spider they whack it. When they - you get it.

Enemies when defeated drop armour and weapons, which make the adventurer better at whacking things. You have to choose between the items you get and build the best ever-changing loadout. But enemies also drop cards, and cards are where it gets interesting. The cards allow you to build up the landscape around the loop. Rocks and mountains and treasuries all give you resources. Placement is a bit of a game - you're trying to slot the cards where they most want to be in order to maximise the resource payout. But there are also cards that you can put on the loop that your adventurer walks. Maybe these will give you a graveyard, which will grant you skeletons to fight, or they might give you a spooky house, which will grant you vampires.

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The PlayStation 4 communities feature shuts down in April, Sony has confirmed.

You will, however, be able to stay connected and use messaging features on your PS4 and the PlayStation App, Sony said in an update on PlayStation.com.

The communities feature, added to PS4 with the 3.00 update in September 2015, lets you create communities based around shared interests, such as games and genres. Communities include a message board with general discussion, screenshots shared by players, and the ability to join parties / games.

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Controversial PC space game Star Citizen has shot through the $350m raised mark.

The game's official website reveals Star Citizen has now raised a whopping $351,026,475 from over three million customers. Star Citizen hit $300m in June last year.

Over eight years after its initial crowdfunding effort began, Star Citizen is still without a release date, although parts of the game have been released in early access form. Squadron 42, the single-player portion of the game, is still in development but does not have a release date.

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At first, you're having a fine old time.

PixelJunk Raiders' combat, if a touch inelegant, is enjoyable enough, your colourful planetary exploration accompanied by the silky strains of otherworldly synth soundscapes. Jewels shimmer in the distance - their ruby glow is hard to miss, particularly at night - and you already hope that the crumbling columns jutting up into the sky over there will have some tasty treasure secreted amongst ruins.

Plus, you're a rescuer, and who doesn't want to be the hero that swoops in and saves a doomed civilisation from certain death? As the saviour here to liberate the trapped Tantallians, you're such a welcome sight to the poor hostages that they'll delight in your arrival by joyously waving their arms in the air.

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A trio of top Fortnite players was kicked from the game's $3m Fortnite Champion Series (FNCS) tournament after one of the team tagged the game's boss Donald Mustard in an aggressive tweet.

"Like literally fucking k!ll your$elf @DonaldMustard," Fortnite player Wrigley wrote on Twitter. Both the post and Wrigley's entire account are no longer accessible.

Wrigley and his teammates Dictate and Userz had just finished their sixth game in the tournament and were bottom of the table. Still, even finishing last would have guaranteed them some prize money after spending countless hours over the past season ensuring they would qualify.

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Superb horror game Devotion is back on sale digitally two years after it was delisted.

Taiwanese developer Red Candle Games tweeted to say Devotion and its predecessor Detention were now available DRM-free from its own online store. All the studio's future projects will be sold there, too, the studio added.

"We hope to provide a direct and simple purchasing channel for players who're interested in our games," Red Candle said.

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I have a theory, sweetly unburdened by any kind of evidence, that argues that developers sometimes try to recreate the power and pleasures of using actual game-creation tools for their players, but without the attendant need to understand maths or architecture or much in the way of technology. To put it another way, I suspect they take what they love about a tool or a bit of software, and they transform it into something the player can love too.

I feel that very strongly while moving about on Disintegration's Gravcycle, a beautiful machine, all but invisible to the first-person player during main missions, but constantly present in the way it ghosts over the rock and dirt and concrete of the game's levels, directed, it seems, more by impulse and desire than the things I'm doing with the sticks and triggers of the pad. It seems to know where I want to go. Physically, the Gravcycle borrows its iconography from motorbikes - all those beautiful pipes and vents and exhausts. But what it really feels like is the "freecam" movement you get from the debug viewers in a game engine. It feels like a dream.

Ubisoft has confirmed that crossplay and cross-generation-play is on the way to Watch Dogs Legion's Online Modes.

While there's no firm schedule for release just yet, the official Watch Dogs Twitter account has recently begun responding to requests for the feature by stating that "the development team is working on adding this feature to the game with a later update".

"While crossplay and cross-generation-play is currently not available for the Watch Dogs: Legion Online Mode, the development team is working on adding this feature to the game with a later update," a Ubisoft representative said in just one of several tweets made by the official social media account over the last few days.

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The sublime soundtrack accompanying one of the PS5's best titles to date, Astro's Playroom, is available to stream now.

The full soundtrack - composed by Kenneth Young - is available now on pretty much every music streaming service, including YouTube Music, Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music, and Tidal (thanks, Kotaku).

It boasts all your favourites, such as I'm Your GPU, Memories of Play, and all variants of CPU Plaza.

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Xbox is teasing Outriders may be coming to its Xbox Game Pass subscription service.

The official social media channels for Xbox Game Pass have never been afraid to drop cheeky hints and teases on their feeds, and the latest seems to imply that Square Enix's upcoming co-op RPG might be available to play for free as part of its subscription game library.

While the tease stops short of definitively confirming the news, it shared a screenshot of a faux email from "Melissa McGamepass" that asks if "anyone else has noticed a mysterious signal appearing in the distance lately".

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Apex Legends developer Respawn has acknowledged there's a problem with Legends Bangalore and Caustic after a recent patch essentially nerfed the soldiers' smoke abilities.

When Chaos Theory was rolled out, the team made changes to the particle FX count for Legends that obscure the battlefield with smoke, making it easier for players to see through - and, perhaps more importantly, shoot - their enemies.

It's a big issue for Bangalore, Caustic, and Gibraltar in particular, as these characters rely on the cover of smoke to support their teammates.

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Haley Bennett is joining the cast for Eli Roth's upcoming Borderlands movie.

While we don't yet know what character she will portray, a report by IGN intimates the figure will be "key to the past of Cate Blanchett's character, Lilith".

Bennett - who's previous work includes Hillbilly Elegy and The Devil All the Time - joins the star-studded Borderlands cast alongside Florian Munteanu (Krieg), Cate Blanchett (Lilith), Kevin Hart (Roland), Jamie Lee Curtis (Dr. Tannis), Jack Black (Claptrap), and Young Gamora actress Ariana Greenblatt (Tiny Tina).

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Someone has discovered a glitch that allows players to explore The Lgend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild in first-person mode.

While glitches are often, by their very nature, complex things to replicate, this particular exploit discovered by Twitterer Axk_000 is actually pretty easy to reproduce.

You can do it yourself by pulling out the in-game camera, holding an item from the menu, and then cancel the item hold (thanks, Gamespot).

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Dying Light 2 developer Techland has admitted it announced the sequel "too early".

The admission came after the developer teased it had "a few words to share with [fans] about the Dying Light 2 development process", promising more information would follow on Wednesday, 17th March.

In a follow-up tweet further down the chain, however, the official Dying Light Twitter account responded to a fan who admitted they were "shocked" and wondered if the game was in "development hell".

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Creative Assembly has announced a new legendary lord for the dark elf faction is coming to Total War: Warhammer 2 from 18th March.

According to PC Gamer, Beastlord Rakarth of Karond Kar has armour that buffs his defences whilst swarmed by enemies, and boasts a Whip of Agony, a weapon that "can temporarily remove [enemies'] ability to cause the fear and terror statuses".

Rakarth also sports three mounts: a scourgerunner chariot, a manticore, and Bracchus the black dragon.

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It's going from bad to worse of Destiny 2's troubled Trials of Osiris mode, which has been hauled offline yet again.

In a tweet issued today, developer Bungie said Trials of Osiris - Destiny 2's most hardcore competitive multiplayer mode - had been disabled for the rest of the weekend "due to an issue with fireteam rejoin functionality".

And it sounds like Trials may not return until the weekend after next.

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Developer Paradox's superb Medieval grand strategy game Crusader Kings 3 will be getting its first chunk of paid DLC - the Norse-themed Northern Lords Flavour Pack - this Tuesday, 16th March, and it'll be accompanied by a significant free update on the same day.

As its name implies, the Northern Lords Flavour Pack is a smaller-scale offering rather than a fully fledged Crusader Kings 3 expansion, and is designed to make the era's northern kingdoms - and the characters within - feel more distinct.

It will, for instance, introduce a range of new Viking-themed cosmetics, including new clothes and hairstyles for characters, plus new ships, units, and holding models for the map.

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Empire of Sin, Brenda and John Romero's mobster-themed strategy game, will be making its way to Xbox and PC Game Pass on 18th March.

Empire of Sin, if you're unfamiliar, drops players into the seedy side of 1920s Prohibition-era Chicago and tasks them with building a formidable crime empire from the ground up. The ultimate goal is to become mob king or queen of the city - a climb that'll require a blend of business savvy, intimidation, and, inevitably, violence.

Bribery and black market trading are perfectly valid tools in your quest for criminal supremacy, and you'll also want to establish protection rackets or set up respectable fronts for all your dodgy business ventures - including speakeasies, breweries, casinos, and brothels.

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Paradox Interactive's colony builder Surviving Mars has resumed development and will expand this Monday, 15th March, with a free new tourism update and the In-Dome Buildings Pack.

Surviving Mars - which challenges players to rejuvenate the wastes of the red planet, eventually transforming the world into a thriving colony of shimmering domes - initially launched in 2018, and received its last major expansion, Green Planet, the following year.

All's been quiet since then, but development has now resumed under the watchful eye of Abstraction, which is taking over from Surviving Mars' original creator Haemimont Games.

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Sci-fi strategy game Stellaris' latest expansion, Nemesis, will be making its way to PC on 15th April, and the Lithoids Species Pack is coming to PS4 and Xbox One on 25th March.

Nemesis, as its name suggests, finally lets Stellaris players properly embrace their dark side by giving them the opportunity to initiate a crisis. Usually these are late-stage events that mark the arrival of powerful AI forces who'll either perish in bloody battle or eradicate all known life, but Nemesis will let human players mastermind the galaxy's devastating denouement themselves.

First, however, they'll need to perform nefarious deeds and accrue Menace, which is used to ascend through the ranks of evil, eventually unlocking the Aetherophasic Engine - a doomsday device powered with the dark energy created by consuming the stars.

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Neymar in Fortnite? Why not. Anything goes in Epic's battle royale, after all.

Epic today teased the arrival of Fortnite Season 6 with a short clip on Twitter that shows a number 10 jersey and what looks like the football from the 2014 World Cup, which was held in Brazil.

And here's the kicker from Neymar himself on Twitter:

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Rockstar Leeds founder Gordon Hall has died aged 51.

In 1997 Hall launched Game Boy Advance developer Möbius Entertainment, which became Rockstar Leeds after Take-Two purchased the studio in 2004. Rockstar Leeds went on to make PlayStation Portable games Grand Theft Auto: Liberty City Stories and Vice City Stories, and Nintendo DS classic Chinatown Wars.

In 2009 Hall worked at Rockstar San Diego on Red Dead Redemption. After a sabbatical, he returned to games in 2012 to lead The Blast Furnace (what was once Activision Leeds), becoming chief creative officer at Activision Mobile in the process. Hall left The Blast Furnace and the games industry in 2015.

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Ninja Gaiden: Master Collection runs at a 4K resolution and 60fps+, according to the Microsoft Store.

The mention of 60fps+ for the collection, which includes 2007's Ninja Gaiden Sigma, 2009's Ninja Gaiden Sigma 2 and 2012's Ninja Gaiden 3: Razor's Edge with most of the previously-released game modes and DLC costumes, suggests the much-loved action games could push to 120fps on current-gen consoles.

The trailer is below:

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EA has suspended all discretionary content granting indefinitely amid the ongoing "EA Gate" scandal that has rocked the FIFA series.

Earlier this week Eurogamer reported on how the FIFA community had unearthed direct messages that appeared to show an EA employee selling coveted Ultimate Team cards for thousands of pounds on the black market.

These direct messages mentioned FUT Icon cards in packages priced 750-1000 euros. In one WhatsApp message, three Prime Icon Moments cards were offered for 1700 euros.

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Leon and Claire fight a zombie outbreak at the White House in Netflix's upcoming Resident Evil CG anime series.

Netflix released a full plot description for Resident Evil: Infinite Darkness, which is due out at some point this year.

"In 2006, there were traces of improper access to secret Presidential files found in the White House's network. American federal agent Leon S. Kennedy is among the group invited to the White House to investigate this incident, but when the lights suddenly go out, Leon and the SWAT team are forced to take down a horde of mysterious zombies.

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Two Call of Duty: Warzone cheaters were banned on Twitch after the actress behind in-game character Mara called them out on Twitter.

Mara is a Warcom operator character in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare and Warzone who was released as part of the battle pass during the first season of Infinity Ward's shooter in December 2019.

The actress behind Mara is Alex Zedra, who took to Twitter to expose two cheaters - a boyfriend and girlfriend couple - who were using aimbots in a Warzone tournament played on Friday, 12th March.

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Someone played the Outriders demo for an eye-watering 254 hours so far.

The demo, which has been played by over two million people, went live on 25th February. Developer People Can Fly made the announcement about this player's feat yesterday, 12th March. That means this mystery player clocked 254 hours in just 15 days.

That also means someone has played the demo for an average of just under 17 hours a day since it came out.

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A little while ago, I suddenly found myself caring about Max Raid Battles in Pokémon Sword and Shield. Pokémon has a knack for this: you play, you finish the story and the afters, and for a while that's it. But then a long weekend appears. A bit of time in lieu needs using up. You catch yourself thinking, actually, why not? Why not finish the Pokédex? Why not get into competitive training? I'll do it - and this time I'll mean it. And down the rabbit hole you go.

The problem is, raids are important for doing those things in Sword and Shield - and raiding is not enormously fun. For one, much the same as the raids of Pokémon Go, when it comes to actually finding a proper group and coordinating a session, most of the work is left to communities outside of the game itself, the slack picked up by fans on Twitter, or reddit, or Discord. More than that, however, raids are painfully time-consuming - when you're in the raid itself, but more so when you're actually trying to find something specific. (As I found out the hard way, amateurishly working through the 'dex).

In other words then, raids might be a neat idea, designed in that typically Pokémon way to get fans playing together - but in that other typically Pokémon way, they're no fun without the community's help.

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Crash Bandicoot 4: It's About Time, the latest entry in Activision's long-running platform series, will be making its way to PC on 26th March.

As the '4' in the title indicates, It's About Time is a direct continuation of 1998's Crash Bandicoot 3: Warped - a game that got a gorgeous remake as one third of 2017's Crash Bandicoot N. Sane Trilogy - and very much takes inspiration from the early series' brand of platform action.

There are wrinkles to the formula, of course, including masks that slow time, flip gravity, and phase objects in and out of existence, as well as various new modes and playable characters - each with their own unique abilities and stages - but it should all be immediately familiar to Crash fans. It's About Time even leans into the early games' brutal difficulty - although a choice between Modern and Retro modes help ease the sometimes immense challenge.

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Immortals Fenyx Rising, Ubisoft's greek mythology inspired open-world adventure, will be getting its second helping of paid post-launch DLC on 25th March.

Myths of the Eastern Realm, as it's known, moves away from Immortals' usual Olympian action, instead following a new hero, Ku, on a journey - taking place long before events of the main game - across a new open-world map inspired by Chinese mythology.

"When a brutal war breaks out between Heaven and Earth," explains Ubisoft, "humanity is turned back into the clay that the Goddess Nuwa formed them from. But...Ku, escapes the curse of the broken heavens and emerges into the fallen world."

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It's been over six months since Crysis Remastered launched on PC and it's fair to say that as a gigantic fan of the original game, I was left disappointed by its re-emergence - while there was much to praise, legacy baggage from the Xbox 360 and PS3 ports effectively saw aspects of the game lacking compared to the 2007 original, while CPU performance was not where it should have been. Today's 2.1 patch is a good jumping on point though: there are genuine improvements, missing content has been restored, and for owners of GeForce RTX cards, the inclusion of DLSS AI upscaling dramatically boosts performance in graphics-limited scenarios.

There's not much to say about the DLSS implementation, except to say that it's just as impressive as other recent outings and a great addition to the game. Once again, elements of the visual presentation are actually improved over native rendering and while there is some TAA-style ghosting, it's hardly noticeable in the thick of the action. What I particularly enjoyed about this particular use of DLSS is that post-process sharpening can be manually tweaked within the command console - access to which I'd dearly like to see as a standard in all DLSS-supported titles. Ultimately, the lower down the RTX power ladder you go, the more impressive the boost given by DLSS, to the point where even in a GPU-heavy scene, the relatively lowly RTX 2060 should be comfortably capable of exceeding 60 frames per second at 1440p resolution. It even makes a reasonably good stab of 4K output too - meaning that higher-end RTX cards should deliver this with minimal issues.

PlayStation has detailed a Japanese livestream which will debut new gameplay from Final Fantasy 7 Remake Intergrade and Resident Evil Village.

Both games are due out on PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5 this year, and of course Resident Evil Village will also launch for PC and Xbox consoles too.

Sony's broadcast will be held via PlayStation Japan's YouTube channel on 21st March at 11am UK time, and is expected to last about an hour. Capcom director Morimasa Sato and Square Enix producer Yoshinori Kitase will also be on hand to chat about the projects.

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Well, now we know: future Bethesda games will be exclusive to "platforms where Game Pass exists". That's how Xbox boss Phil Spencer put it this week, confirming the likes of Starfield and The Elder Scrolls 6 will not come out on PlayStation 5.

What does this mean for the future of Bethesda games? The Dooms and Fallout of this world? And what about that Indiana Jones game Bethesda is working on? Eurogamer news editor Tom Phillips, reporter Emma Kent and me discuss all this and more in this week's Eurogamer News Cast, below.

Elsewhere, we run through next week's Square Enix Presents event, which promises to reveal the new Life is Strange game as well as the future of the embattled Marvel's Avengers. And what's in store for Tomb Raider's 25th anniversary?

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You can knock things off the edge of the ring in Halo Infinite, developer 343 has confirmed.

You've never been able to do this in a Halo game before.

In a video Q&A, below, gameplay director Troy Mashburn was asked if the player can knock things off the edge of Zeta Halo, the ring on which Halo Infinite is set.

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Music can make a game, but sometimes it is the game. OutRun without Hiroshi Kawaguchi's selection of iconic tracks is like a country drive without any tunes on the stereo; it's a journey robbed of its heart and soul. Few other game series feel as dependent on their score as Darius, but rather than the sun-kissed, summer breeze of OutRun the mood summoned by Taito's in-house band Zuntata here is... Well, it's something else entirely.

I used to have it down as otherworldly, which is perhaps an overly literal reading of all that dissonance you'll find during Darius' late 90s pomp - listening to the soundtracks for Darius Gaiden or G-Darius, where the strangeness is maxed-out, it feels like you've chanced upon some transmission from a distant star. Earlier entries chimed with alien melodies, sampled voices that sound like they're reaching out to you from another dimension while beats skitter in and out of time - a realisation of composer Hisayoshi Ogura's desire to break free from soundtrack convention.

"At the time, it was pretty adventurous to use avant-garde rhythms and irregular meter in game music," Ogura said in a remarkable interview a few years back. "I remember telling one of my juniors at the company that a few years from now, this kind of thing will be everywhere, so... I mean, I think I just wanted to destroy something, and saw Darius as an opportunity to wipe out what was considered common sense in game music at the time and recreate things from the ground up."

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Hello! Welcome back to our regular feature where we write a little bit about some of the games we've found ourselves playing over the last few days. This time: a Music Week special.

I have a stack of about four DDR Wii games at home, and having mastered the tracks on Hottest Party Three, I've started working my way through the other titles. Going back to the early learning stages has reminded me just how much DDR reminds me of sight-reading music on clarinet or piano. Unless you want to get your legs in a tangle, or set yourself badly off-balance (creating problems further down the line), you have to read several beats ahead and anticipate both the rhythm and footwork required. That includes jumping height, speed of movement, and how to angle your body. Playing guitar in Rock Band feels similar, but moving your whole body means you really have to commit to what you think is the right combination of footwork. On top of all that, DDR can sometimes present you with incredibly dense and slow-moving arrows, something which can be tricky to parse. Not to mention some sneaky off-beat rhythms are thrown in on harder tracks.

Eventually, once you've practiced the hard sections long enough, you'll develop the muscle memory to automatically know the footwork for a song. But practice will also make you better at sight-reading new tracks: I can now bring up a video of DDR on Youtube, and read the arrows as if I were actually dancing it. When you finally crack the code, that's a pretty cool feeling to have.

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What better game to look at during Music Week than a narrative rhythm action adventure?

Look at that font. 70s poster font. Gig font. A font with flares. Lurid and a bit goofy, it tells you so much about the game. More, even, than the title: A Musical Story.

No, that's probably not fair. A Musical Story is a musical story. A musician lies in a hospital bed with no memories. So you use music to recreate them. It's a narrative rhythm action game and it's already pretty special.

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