Eurogamer

It wouldn't be Christmas without a bit of bickering between us all, and in time-honoured fashion we're letting you have it out as put together your top 50 games of the year.

We'll be compiling the results and your comments for publication over the Christmas break, with submissions open until 5pm GMT on Wednesday 16th December. Have fun with it, and thanks for being with us throughout the year!

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There are seven new levels, 30+ new skins and "many more festive surprises" on the way to Fall Guys' upcoming season 3 update.

Developer Mediatonic tweeted the news over the weekend, adding that it had partnered with IGN for more exclusive season 3 reveals - which launches on 15th December - later this week.

Mediatonic recently dropped a tweet revealing four new upcoming costumes for Fall Guys. Unlike its last reveal - which showed a teeny, tiny peek of Fall Guys' all-new season 3 that hardly told us anything - this one displays the new costumes in their full glory, some of which boast a decidedly festive theme.

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There's no doubt about it - Cyberpunk 2077 is a demanding game, heavy on both CPU and GPU, while solid-state storage is also recommended for an optimal experience. It's perhaps a game geared towards the computers of the future, but in the here and now, it's still possible to get a fantastic PC experience - a process we hope to aid with our optimised settings. Put simply, we tested every graphics setting in Cyberpunk 2077, measured the performance cost and judged the overall quality you get at each preset. The idea here is straightforward: to retain everything that makes the game 'next-gen' from a visual perspective, but to deliver the best 'bang for the buck'.

The test rig we used is hardly mainstream - we paired Intel's Core i9 10900K with a RTX 3090 and 32GB of 3200MHz DDR4, and we ran the game from an NVMe drive. However, all of our measurements were taken at 4K resolution, meaning that as you move down the resolution ladder back to 1080p, the requirements of the graphics card you'll need scale back considerably. To put all of this into perspective, our chosen settings allow an RTX 2060 to run the game without ray tracing at 4K30 resolution using the balanced version of DLSS, or to hit 1440p60 (with just minor dips in the busiest parts of the city). Interestingly, native 1080p actually seems a touch heavier than DLSS 1440p - and certainly looks a significantly less impressive.

Sony is reportedly refunding Cyberpunk 2077 players unhappy with the game's performance on PS4 even past the typical two-hour playtime limit.

A quick glance at the hashtag "Cyberbug2077" exemplifies the type of performance issues and crashes players are experiencing, but base PS4 users, in particular, seem most affected, as detailed in Digital Foundry's analysis that discusses the "exceptionally poor performance" on PS4 and Xbox One.

"I had to file a support claim online and sit on hold for over an hour to speak with someone, however they were quick to issue the refund and then delete the game off my library," a player revealed on Reddit (thanks, VGC).

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Super Mario Manga Mania is now available in English for the very first time.

Mario fans will likely know that a Japanese-language manga has been around of years, but this is the first time a volume has been translated for Western audiences.

The book takes the best stories from across the full Japanese collection, compiling them into a single volume.

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Nintendo fans have hit back at a recent decision to block the soundtracks of a number of its biggest games, including The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, Super Mario 64, and Mario Kart Wii, by trolling the company on social media.

As spotted by Screenrant (thanks, Nintendo Life), fans noticed the soundtracks had been pulled a few days back. Whilst absolutely entitled to do this, Nintendo hasn't explained why it's forcibly removing the music from YouTube, nor offered an alternative place for fans to listen to their favourite tracks.

In response, players have dug up an old Nintendo UK tweet from last year which asks players to let them know which is their favourite piece of music from the Legend of Zelda series and they've been... Well, see for yourself:

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Insomniac Games has just deployed an update that adds Performance RT mode to Marvel's Spider-Man Remastered.

Update 1.002's new mode offers an alternate version of the 60 frames per second (fps) Performance mode, and adds ray-tracing by adjusting "the scene resolution, reflection quality, and pedestrian density".

It joins existing modes Fidelity, which offers ray-traced effects at 4K/30fps, and Performance, which focuses on 60fps at the cost of ray-tracing.

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For the sixth time this year, Steam has broken its own record for the highest number of concurrent players ever recorded on Steam.

Steam saw an unprecedented number of players concurrently online back when the pandemic first surged, resulting in millions of people going into lockdown. Before today, the highest concurrent player count seen on Steam was 22 million users.

Now, according to SteamDB (thanks, PC Gamer), Valve's PC platform has hit another record high, with 24,776,635 concurrent users on the service yesterday.

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Henry Cavill has reportedly been injured on the set for The Witcher.

The Sun reports that Cavill has been advised to rest after he injured himself on an assault course "involving swinging axes" where he'd been "20ft high in trees and on a safety harness" at Arborfield Studios where the show is filmed.

"The filming has been hit because of what happened to Henry. He was on an assault course and injured his leg," a source reportedly told The Sun. "He just suddenly pulled up and was clearly in a lot of pain. It wasn't clear if an object had hit his leg or it was some sort of hamstring or muscle injury.

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By early 1985, Liverpool pop band Frankie Goes To Hollywood could do no wrong. Having just released the fourth cut from their debut album, Welcome To The Pleasuredome in March, and with a new album incoming, the future of this stylish and overtly sexual group seemed assured. While the world of videogames was grasping the promotional power of riding on another property's coat tails, a game focused on this most idiosyncratic of bands was hardly a natural fit. But that didn't appear to worry Manchester software house Ocean.

At this time, Ocean was still using its favoured developers, Denton Designs, for many of its projects. Forged from the fallout of the collapse of Imagine Software the previous year, Denton Designs was swiftly establishing a reputation for original and inventive games. Everybody knew the band, and working on the Spectrum version was veteran coder John Gibson.

"[Frankie Goes To Hollywood] were famous at the time, so you'd have to have been a Martian not to have heard of them," he says. For Liverpudlian Ally Noble, Gibson's partner on Frankie, there was a bigger empathy for the group. "I'd seen them play at Larks in the Park in 1982," she remembers. "They were the band to see, and I slightly knew two of the members from my old art school days. We also went to the same clubs - I remember dancing with Paul Rutherford at Jody's."

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Genshin Impact gets a new update this month that adds the game's first map expansion, developer miHoYo has announced.

The 1.2 update, due out on 23rd December 2020 on all versions of the free-to-download action RPG, is dubbed The Chalk Prince and the Dragon. The trailer is below:

The new map area is called Dragonspine, a frozen mountain range set south of Mondstadt. Expect unique creatures, a lost ancient civilisation and recipes for multiple four-star weapons.

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Remember Granblue Fantasy: Relink? It's an action RPG announced in August 2016 as a co-production between PlatinumGames and Cygames for PlayStation 4. In February 2019 Cygames announced PlatinumGames had been ditched and it would handle the rest of the game's development. Now, in December 2020, Cygames has announced it's due out at some point in 2022 for the PlayStation 5 as well as the PS4.

Cygames announced the far out release window during Granblue Fantasy Fes 2020, a livestream that included a new 23-minute gameplay demo showing off four-player co-op. Skip to the six hours and six minutes mark in the video below to see the relevant part of the livestream.

Cygames said the game is currently in alpha, which means it is, in its entirety, generally in a playable state. The livestream was impressively transparent about what has obviously been a troubled development, with a number of slides in English as well as Japanese. The company noted the need to reassure fans that despite the radio silence, work was being done since Cygames took the game away from Platinum.

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Cyberpunk 2077 covered all its development and marketing costs before it even came out, CD Projekt has said.

In a note titled "Information regarding the estimated return on the Company's investments related to development and promotion of Cyberpunk 2077" published on its website, CD Projekt said licensing royalties received by the company from pre-orders alone exceeded the sum of its development and marketing costs.

Earlier this week, CD Projekt said it had shifted an astonishing eight million pre-orders ahead of its 10th December 2020 launch. The game was announced eight years ago, in 2012.

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Medal of Honor VR surprise-launched a day early - and it's been met with negative reviews on Steam.

The £54.99 Medal of Honor: Above and Beyond, developed by Apex Legends and Titanfall studio Respawn and seen by many as the most high-profile VR game since Half-Life: Alyx, currently has a "mostly negative" user review label on Steam after 330 reviews.

There are a raft of issues players have with the game, including performance problems, frustrating object selection and reloading, and long loading times for those playing on an HDD instead of an SSD.

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It's no secret that Cyberpunk 2077 has launched in a bit of a state on the last generation consoles - with the base PlayStation 4 and Xbox One in particular suffering from exceptionally poor performance. We will have the full story on how all the last-gen systems compare soon, but for owners of PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series consoles, the story is somewhat more positive. Despite leaning on backwards compatibility - and not specifically addressing the capabilities of the new hardware - it's clear that next-gen offers the core technological building blocks to provide a much more solid experience. And while we've not looked at it in too much depth yet, the outlook on Stadia is much brighter too.

The key to Cyberpunk 2077's huge improvement on the new wave of machines isn't just down to teraflops as such - it's more the combination of new technologies provided. On this page, you'll see a video detailing our first impressions of the PlayStation 4 and PS4 Pro versions of the game and it seems as if there are two key technological weaknesses that fundamentally impact the experience: the lack of CPU horsepower, plus slow storage. Graphics performance is also a key component, but mitigating measure can (and have) been taken here. Solid state storage and CPU power seem to be the key components here, demonstrated by Xbox Series S - the junior-level next-gen console that easily provides a level of performance that exceeds its 4TF GPU counterpart, PlayStation 4 Pro.

CD Projekt bosses have reportedly told staff they will get their full bonuses despite Cyberpunk 2077's buggy launch.

According to a report by Bloomberg, executives at CD Projekt have taken responsibility for the launch of Cyberpunk 2077, which suffers from bugs, glitches and, particularly on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, performance problems.

Bloomberg said it had seen an email sent by CD Projekt studio head Adam Badowski to staff on Friday that announced bonuses would be paid out no matter what Cyberpunk's review rating ends up at. They had been told extra pay would be tied to the game's critical performance. CD Projekt has yet to comment on the report.

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Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War developer Treyarch has said it's "time to shake the meta up" in advance of a significant gameplay tuning pass.

The launch of Season One, set for 16th December, includes gameplay changes for weapons and more, Treyarch game designer Tony Flame confirmed on Twitter.

"After all, it's been nearly a month since launch," he said. "Time to shake the meta up for the holidays."

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CD Projekt has issued a patch to Cyberpunk 2077 that modifies the braindances following an epilepsy warning.

This week, Eurogamer reported on UK charity Epilepsy Action's call for an urgent update to Cyberpunk 2077 in response to a warning the game could be a trigger to those with epilepsy.

CD Projekt RPG was branded a potential epilepsy risk in a high-profile PSA article published by Game Informer based on a pre-release copy of the game.

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Until the End begins with a wonderfully intriguing splash screen. It's there for a long moment, as if it's very important what you're reading. And it reads:

"Until the End is different. Set aside any expectations or assumptions. Combat is deliberate. You can lose your sword, run out of supplies, and bleed to death. Reading, reacting, and staying calm are vital."

All those things sounded quite exciting to me. And it's no lie. Unto the End certainly isn't the platformer it looks like in the screenshots. It's slow, it's bleak, and it's bloody hard. It's more like a Souls game, side-on.

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Following its somewhat truncated appearance at last night's Game Awards show, Capcom has dropped the full version of its wonderful new - and surprisingly revealing - gameplay trailer for Monster Hunter Rise, which launches on Switch in March next year.

This time around, we're introduced to Rise's marshy new Flooded Forest locale - clearly heavily inspired be the Monster Hunter 3 area of the same name, although obviously shorn of its loading screens in Rise - which plays host to monsters both new and old.

In the 'new' category are the sleep-inducing Somnacanth and the Bishaten, described as the "omnivorous trickster", while returning monsters include the Royal Ludroth and Great Wroggi.

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Developer Housemarque is trying something a bit different with its new PS5-exclusive sci-fi shooter Returnal; while it's earlier output favoured small but pristinely formed arcade experiences - think Resogun and Nex Machina - this time, the developer is going in a decidedly more blockbuster direction, and the result of its toils, we now know, arrives on 19th March.

Returnal, which was initially unveiled back in June, blends third-person action and platform elements with a great big dollop of moody narrative to create a game Housemarque calls its "most ambitious project to date". The resulting adventure unfolds on the very edge of the galaxy, with players taking on the role of Selene, an Astra space scout who finds herself trapped in hellish loop of endless resurrection while stranded on a deadly planet.

It's something of a rogue-like then, and the ensuing action promises "volleys of bullet-hell projectiles along the way" (clearly Housemarque isn't entirely ready to wave goodbye to its arcade roots just yet), with players able to respond using an arsenal of weapons armed with rechargeable alt-fire modes activated by half-pressing the PS5 controller's adaptive triggers.

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Wow! What a week it's been. Not only have we had the launch of Cyberpunk 2077 but we had The Game Awards and all the good, bad and downright ugly it brings. So, absolutely bucketloads for Eurogamer reporter Emma Kent and news editor Tom Phillips to discuss in this week's next-gen news cast!

We start with the behemoth that is Cyberpunk, which finally came out this week eight years after it was announced. It's a mega hit - that kind of rare, all-encompassing video game hit that dominates all before it. But it has launched with some remarkable issues. Glitches here, hilarious bugs there, and on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One a mess of low framerates and resolutions. We ask, should CD Projekt have cancelled Cyberpunk 2077 on last-gen consoles, and waited to launch on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X in 2021?

Digixart, the developer behind acclaimed World War 1 narrative adventure 11-11: Memories Retold, has offered a first look at its "crazy, beautiful" procedural road trip game, Road 96.

Road 96 is a story about journeying toward freedom during a long, hot summer in the mid-90s, and sets players off on an adventure across the authoritarian nation of Petria (giving off some distinct Route 66 vibes) as they attempt to reach the border and start a new life.

"On this risky road trip to the border," explains Digixart on Road 96's newly launched Steam page, "you'll meet incredible characters, and discover their intertwined stories and secrets in an ever-evolving adventure. But every mile opens up a choice to make. Your decisions will change your adventure, change the people you meet, maybe even change the world."

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Elite Dangerous' eagerly awaited Odyssey expansion - the one that gives you feet, among other things - isn't too far off now, and developer Frontier has cranked its hype handle a little tighter with the release of a new gameplay trailer, debuting some first-person shooty combat.

When the paid Odyssey expansion arrives, Commanders will, for the first time, be able to leave the confines of their star ships, stretching their legs to roam around the likes of outposts, planetports, spaceports, even dustbowl-like settlements.

Here, they'll find NPCs only to happy to dole out missions that reward credits, and at least some of those will require players to draw their weapon and indulge in a spot of laser-spewing on-foot action. Previously, Frontier explained commanders will be able to don gear, equip different munitions, and team up with fellow space adventurers as they get stuck into combat scenarios.

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After the massive event that is the Game Awards yesterday, all the major consoles have taken the opportunity to start online sales highlighting the biggest games involved. Whichever of the two new consoles you subscribe to, there's a range of sales open to you right now.

If you've been looking for Nintendo game sales, then there's good news and bad news - there is a sale for Nintendo games, but it's currently only in the US. You can find it all here, but for now it's exclusive to American accounts. For the time being, here's all the best sales on the other two consoles.

You can also browse through the full lists on the PSN Store and Xbox Store.

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If you're finding Cyberpunk 2077 a little blurry, it's not just you, as a lot of players are complaining about smudgy visuals. Thankfully this is something that can be easily changed, and players are now tinkering with the game's default graphics settings to solve the problem. Although don't go expecting this to solve all the texture pop-in and resolution problems on base consoles - you'll be waiting for a CDPR patch for that.

On reddit and Twitter, players complained that some of the settings automatically enabled in Cyberpunk 2077 - there to make the game feel more cinematic - are also making it look blurry. On my Xbox Series S I found the game had enabled motion blur, film grain, depth of field, lens flare and chromatic aberration (which blurs the edges of the screen like an old lens), which when combined can give the game a smudgy look.

With the Oculus Rift S soon to be discontinued at some point the new year, you can now save £100/$100 off the usual price of the popular VR headset.

Normally priced at £399/$399, this discount brings the Rift S in line with its more modern replacement: the Oculus Quest 2. That makes one of the best VR headsets the cheapest it's ever been.

Before we get too ahead of ourselves though, I've had a word with Will Judd over on Digital Foundry and there are a couple of points you should consider before picking it up at this price.

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By now, you have hopefully reached at least one of Assassin's Creed Valhalla's many endings, depending how far and wide you have ventured through the game's various intricately-woven narrative threads.

As with Odyssey, you'll see different endings at different points as you polish off Valhalla's main Viking campaign, delve into its dreamlike mythical worlds of Asgard and Jotunheim, and hunt down every Order of Ancient target to unlock the game's final epilogue.

Valhalla arguably does a better job than Odyssey of tying all these various strands together, but there's still much to discuss, and further secrets to be found by hunting down collectibles such as the video pieces gleaned from the game's Animus glitch puzzles. So, here, we'll try and tie everything together. There's a lot going on.

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A brand new Perfect Dark game from Microsoft, a first look at the next Mass Effect and a prehistoric take on Fast & Furious all featured in last night's announcement-packed The Game Awards 2020, which I'm still telling myself wasn't all just some 2020-induced dream.

If you're catching up today, or would just like a reminder of all the weird reveals that really did actually happen, here's everything unveiled in last night's show.

Perhaps the biggest surprise of the night was of a big return for Perfect Dark, now in development at the recently-founded Microsoft studio The Initiative. We saw an early concept video for the game, which looks to be set in the near future, and got confirmation that agent Jo Dark would be back for the first time in over decade:

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The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim - Special Edition hits Xbox Game Pass for console and mobile on 15th December, Microsoft has announced.

It's the latest Bethesda-owned game to hit the subscription service since Microsoft bought Bethesda for $7.5bn. id Software's Doom Eternal is already available as part of Xbox Game Pass.

Coming soon to Xbox Game Pass on PC is Steam hit Among Us, and a raft of Yakuza games are coming soon to console and PC via the service.

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Oddworld: Soulstorm comes out spring 2021, Oddworld Inhabitants has announced.

The action adventure platformer is due out then on PC via the Epic Games Store and PlayStation 4 and 5.

Oddworld: Soulstorm is the second game in a quintology, the first being 2014's Oddworld: New 'n' Tasty. Here's the new trailer:

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The Elder Scrolls Online's next big adventure is all about Oblivion.

The Gates of Oblivion was revealed during The Game Awards last night with a teaser video, below.

The video reveals Mehrunes Dagon, the main antagonist of The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion. Bethesda called Gates of Oblivion The Elder Scrolls Online's "next big year-long adventure". There's a reveal event set for 21st January 2021 to get a first look at this new storyline.

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Hood: Outlaws & Legends comes out 10th May 2021. If you pre-order you get early access from 7th May.

Hood: Outlaws & Legends is the next game from Sumo Digital, the British studio behind PlayStation 5 launch title Sackboy: A Big Adventure, Team Sonic Racing, Crackdown 3 and Snake Pass. It's due out on PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, Xbox Series X and S, Xbox One and PC.

Hood is a co-op focused medieval heist game. You join a team of outlaws and try to steal treasure from the oppressive government. Publisher Focus Home Interactive released a video, below, for The Game Awards last night and it includes snippets of gameplay.

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Restore. Every now and then I pluck the watch apart and fix it. It only takes a few minutes. The backplate with its four screws and engraving that reads, "Love always." The cracked movement with its gold and silver. The face, untouched, and the shattered crystal. It's a brisk business, and very easy on the ear. The busy whir of the screwdriver, the dance of screws in the china cup that keeps them from getting away, the rushing, back-and-forth tick of the watch itself springing to life, so many parts meshing to create something entirely whole. Restore, the game says, and in some quiet way... This is the pleasure and the privilege of fixing things.

In Ustwo's Assemble with Care, the watch is not simply a watch - it's also a key to the watch's owner and the relationship they had with the person who gave it to them. In UsTwo's next game, Alba: A Wildlife Adventure, you go bird-spotting on a beautiful Catalonian island, and the birds are not simply birds. They are the first interaction with nature, the start of a journey that leads to tidying the place up and starting to understand it. There's a story here, in which you collect signatures to stop a posh hotel being built on a nature reserve, but the real narrative is one of re-engagement. You start to notice the natural world and uncover its various pieces. You seek to restore. Again, the pleasure and the privilege of fixing things.

Nintendo knows about the constant demand for the Ring Fit Adventure, and have decided to match that with a brand new bundle for prospective Switch buyers - a Nintendo Switch console that comes with a discounted Ring Fit game.

The Ring Fit has been the game of choice for many this year, as it doubles as both entertainment and workout, coming with a rubber/plastic ring peripheral and played solely through hard-hitting exercise routines. Your character on-screen only runs when you run (or do squats, if you're feeling ambitious). They jump when you jump. And they attack when you - well, when you perform the right exercises, because you shouldn't attack things in your living room. It's a way to burn calories as you blast goblins, finally facing off against the most aggressively buff dragon you ever saw. We've outlined the lowest prices we've seen it going for just below.

We'll be sure to update this page or create a new one if we find better prices later on, but it's probably not worth waiting for much better prices short-term - Nintendo don't like putting significant discounts on their games if they can help it, especially the major first-party releases. Still, we'll let you know if the unexpected does happen.

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Riot has released gameplay of Ruined King, the single-player League of Legends spin-off.

Ruined King: A League of Legends Story, to give it its full title, is developed by Airship Syndicate (Battle Chasers: Nightwar, Darksiders Genesis), and published under Riot's Forge label. It's due out on PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X and S, Nintendo Switch and PC via Steam and the Epic Games Store at some point in 2021.

The video below reveals Ruined King to be a turn-based RPG that revolves around Bilgewater and the Shadow Isles. Announced Champions include Miss Fortune, Illaoi, Braum, Pyke, Ahri, and Yasuo.

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Super Meat Boy Forever comes out on the Epic Games Store this month, Team Meat has announced.

The sequel to the brutal but brilliant Super Meat Boy launches on 23rd December on Epic's digital store. There's no word on other platforms - Epic has timed exclusivity on this one. The new trailer is below:

Super Meat Boy has Meat Boy, his partner Bandage Girl and new characters. Meat Boy has an oversized right fist for punching, a new slide and plummet manoeuvres.

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BioWare has dropped a surprise teaser for its next Mass Effect game, which is still in the early stages of development.

The trailer isn't subtle. It begins with a long zoom from outer space back into a familiar-looking galaxy - while another, presumably Andromeda, is left on the horizon.

We hear radio messages from Earth, audio clips from the original Mass Effect trilogy, see wreckage of Mass Relays destroyed in the Reaper war.

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Sega has confirmed RGG Studio's entire Kiryu Yakuza saga will finally be available on PC - via Steam, the Windows 10 Store, and Xbox Game Pass - starting early next year.

Currently, PC players can slide into the series' heady world of high-stakes crime drama and ludicrous side-activities, courtesy of Yakuza 0, Yakuza Kiwami, and Yakuza Kiwami 2 - all focussing on the decades-spanning adventures of Kazuma Kiryu - as well as Yakuza: Like a Dragon, which follows the story of an entirely new protagonist.

From 28th January, however, Yakuza 3, 4, and 5 will also be getting their long-awaited release on the platform, and will be available individually or as part of the Yakuza Remastered Collection, which initially debuted on PlayStation 4 last year.

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After previously giving us a cheeky glimpse of its new free map, developer InnerSloth has finally peeled back the curtain on its fourth map for Among Us, The Airship.

Based on another game series published by InnerSloth called the Henry Stickmin Collection, this map boasts new tasks, rooms and ways to move around. The trailer shown at the Game Awards appears to show a gem-polishing task in a room called vault, and another task which involves taking out trash bags - not quite so glamorous.

The map also promises ladders and floating platforms, which should add some variety to how you move between rooms. Players will also be able to pick their starting room, selecting between the engine room, records or main hall, rather than starting all clumped together. Oh, and some new skins are also on their way. Might as well look nice while you get murdered by your friends.

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