Eurogamer

Stardew Valley creator Eric "ConcernedApe" Barone has shared a little more information on what players can expect from the game's 1.6 update.

Barone confirmed the update was in development back in June 2022, though at the time described it as largely a "modding-focused update". While suggesting update 1.6 will have some new content, Barone was clear it would not have as much as 1.5, added back in December 2020.

Now, Barone has shared a fresh update on what's coming to Stardew Valley in 1.6 that sounds more promising - prompting excitment from fans at what's in store.

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"You can change your wife, your politics, your religion. But never, never can you change your favourite football team," goes the old Eric Cantona quote - but over time that sentiment has started to change.

Younger fans, particularly the group broadly defined as Gen Z, are now more inclined to support individual players throughout their careers, as opposed to the usual method of one club 'til death do us part, according to one much-discussed study by Copa90, and the change in younger fans' approach has some of the game's older members a little worried.

Generally, the argument goes, young people aren't following football in the traditional way - not watching full 90-minute matches, not following clubs as religiously as today's influencer-style players, and generally not being as invested in the sport - and so therefore the sport had become "ill," in the words of Real Madrid president Florentino Pérez, and therefore needed saving. "By 2024 we're dead."

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With the imminent arrival of Disney Dreamlight Valley's DreamSnaps update, developer Gameloft has shared its full patch notes.

From tomorrow, 19th July, players can expect to see Wreck-It Ralph's own Vanellope racing into the valley. She will bring some new Friendship Quests with her, along with new items for players to earn.

In addition to Vanellope's sweeter than candy arrival, players will also be able to try their hand at DreamSnaps. This is essentially the game's first multiplayer feature, and will see players taking part in weekly photo challenges with fellow members of the Disney Dreamlight community.

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The Wingman game mode and two maps have been added to the limited test of Counter-Strike 2.

The free upgrade to CS:GO promises to be the "largest technical leap forward in Counter-Strike's history" and is gradually adding new features ahead of its launch this summer.

Wingman was originally added to CS:GO in 2017 as a 2vs2 event mode; now it's part of the upgrade.

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Microsoft and the UK's Competition and Markets Authority have been provisionally granted two further months to reach a new agreement over Activision Blizzard following a joint request to the Competition Appeal Tribunal.

The CMA officially blocked Microsoft's proposed $69bn acquisition of Activision Blizzard back in April, highlighting concerns relating to the fledgling cloud gaming sector and arguing the deal would risk "stifling competition in this growing market".

However, following the US Federal Trade Commission's failure to secure a temporarily halt on the deal in court last week, the CMA indicated it would be open to a "new merger investigation" if Microsoft was willing to restructure its Activision Blizzard deal.

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Payday 3 developer Starbreeze Studios has released a new trailer showcasing its upcoming heist shooter's stealth gameplay. Unfortunately, it released it so sneakily, it went undiscovered for five days and the studio ended up having to tell everyone where it'd hidden it.

In a moment of perhaps misguided whimsy, someone at Starbreeze (thanks PC Gamer) thought it would be a fun idea to hide its new trailer in appropriately stealthy fashion by squirrelling it behind the existing trailer on the Payday 3 website - so that it only popped into view when the volume slider was turned all the way down or when the site was visited in Incognito mode.

Starbreeze began to realise it might have been a bit too sneaky when, some five days later, the trailer still lay undiscovered. And so - after an initial, ultimately failed prompt on Twitter - the studio turned, somewhat inexplicably, to the medium of exceptionally bad poetry in a desperate bid to nudge fans in the right direction.

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Assassin's Creed: Codename Jade, the Ancient-China-set free-to-play mobile game from Tencent's Level Infinite, will start its first closed beta on 3rd August, Ubisoft has confirmed.

Announced last September, Codename Jade is a fully fledged open-world Assassin's Creed game set in second century BC China (placing it chronologically between Assassin's Creed Odyssey and Origins) and featuring the Qin dynasty.

Players create their own character - the adopted child of master Wei Yu - in Codename Jade, eventually embarking on a quest for revenge after their close friend is betrayed. "But as they delve deeper into their mission," Ubisoft teases, "they will uncover secrets about the past and a powerful force that threatens to destroy everything they hold dear."

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Death Stranding, one of video gaming's finest stomping-through-a-damp-valley sim, will be shoving a baby in a jar and walking grumpily into Fall Guys tomorrow, 18th July.

More specifically, developer Mediatonic's knockabout free-to-play battle royale game welcomes Death Stranding protagonist Sam Porter Bridges into its heaving dayglo bean orgy in the guise of a new costume styled after the Standard-Issue Bridges SDT Suit.

It features exactly the kind of gear you'd want if you had plans to march through rain capable of instantly withering you into an aged husk, complete with Odradek Terrain Scanner, and your very own Bridge-Baby-in-a-jar which is also bean shaped, naturally.

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I think it's obvious when something has been created out of love. Maybe it's in the garnish delicately placed atop fluffy, steaming rice. Maybe it's in the subtle differences you see on a living room wall as it reflects the passage of time.

In the case of Venba, it's both. If you've played the demo, the care and attention to detail of the game's opening level is clear. Now I've seen more, courtesy of a preview presentation and roundtable interview with game designer and creative director Abhi. I came away appreciating how Venba wears its heart on its sleeve, regardless of whether or not you pick up on every single reference.

Venba takes place across three decades, and follows the story of a couple - Venba and her husband Paavalan - after they've emigrated from South India to Canada. Venba touches on themes of immigration, family, culture and assimilation, and food is the language it uses to navigate these conversations.

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A while back, I wrote a DF Direct Weekly blog explaining why Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart's PC port is crucial for the future of the platform, and last week's official specs reveal is validation of sorts for that initial article. The game remains a highly important release for the PC format because it's the first game built from the ground up around PlayStation 5's solid-state storage and hardware decompression capabilities - and we now have confirmation that the port will be using DirectStorage, the Microsoft API designed to bring current-gen console-level storage performance to the PC platform.

What's interesting is how it's going to be deployed. GPU-driven DirectStorage is supported on Ratchet and Clank, the idea being that the decompressing the data from storage is handled by the graphics hardware rather than the CPU. However, it seems that the port will carry out internal bandwidth and compute benches on the fly - and then decide which PC component works best for the decompression tasks. So, for example, let's say you have a highly performant CPU like a Core i9 13900K, but you have a less capable graphics card. The game may decide that instead of using GPU resources, it'll switch to the thread-heavy CPU instead.

Microsoft has officially killed off its long-running Xbox Games with Gold offering, and lifted the lid on its replacement: Xbox Game Pass Core.

Xbox Game Pass Core will make its debut on 14th September, and is described by Microsoft as "the evolution of Xbox Live Gold".

For the same price of £7 / $10 a month (or £40 / $60 a year), Game Pass Core includes online gaming and a "select collection of over 25 games to play with friends around the world" that will grow over time.

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UK supermarket giant Tesco will end its sale of boxed video games.

That's according to a report from GamesIndustry.biz, which states that shelf space dedicated to video games will be dropped from all of the chain's 2800 stores.

The firm is blaming the rise of digital game sales, and will continue to stock digital points cards.

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The first episode of the second season of The Last of Us has been written.

Showrunner and series co-creator Craig Mazin confirmed work on the second season of the Emmy-nominated adaptation had begun, although production was halted due to the ongoing writers strike.

Please note, some points below could be considered spoilers for The Last of Us (both TV series and games).

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As a VR veteran and self-confessed Far Cry fan, a fully VR version of a Far Cry game is always near the top of my wishlist when someone asks me which games I'd love to play in VR.

And now, thanks once again to the Flatscreen to VR modding community, my dreams have been made a reality. Talented modder Cabalistic who previously released a flatscreen to VR mod for Crysis has used that framework to bring 6DoF VR to the very first Far Cry game from 2004 and putting my face inside it has been an excellently nostalgic trip down memory lane.

Check out the video above these words if you'd like to see me put the first portion of the game through its paces in my latest VR Corner episode. It features a look at how the cutscenes play out in VR and there's a couple of big action segments in there too, including an explosive vehicular shootout on some of Far Cry's gloriously golden sand dunes.

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A missing girl was found last year when the FBI used her Nintendo Switch to locate her.

The unidentified 15-year-old girl went missing last summer, 3rd August 2022, when she befriended 28-year-old Ethan Roberts, who forced her into making child sex abuse images.

Roberts travelled from Arizona to Virginia to abduct her, reported ABC 15 (via GoNintendo), but allowed the teen to bring her Switch console, according to federal court records.

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Viewfinder is a puzzle game built around a single moment that I will simply never tire of. Here's how it works. You see a bridge. You lift your camera and take a picture of the bridge. You take the picture you now have in your hand - the bridge - and then hold it up elsewhere in the world, maybe where there's a gap in the ground between you and the spot you want to get to. Choose the location, the angle, and commit. Voila! The picture of the bridge is now an actual bridge that you can walk across. Gap? What gap.

This is magical. And it's magical I think because it brings together 2D and 3D worlds and encourages you to mess around with their inherent conflicts. You take a 2D picture of a 3D object, but you can then transport that 2D picture somewhere else and turn it back into a 3D object. There's also something really lovely about walking out into the picture - something Lewis Carroll would have built a book around. Your 2D/3D imprint on the world is never entirely neat. You will have eaten into the existing 3D surroundings, sometimes catastrophically. You will have sliced up the ground. You will have imprinted a new grayscale horizon across part of the Technicolor sky.

I love all this. Viewfinder loves all this. And it uses this idea to power a bunch of complex yet compact puzzle levels that you wander through, one epiphany at a time. There's a wider narrative, but it didn't grab me to be honest. Maybe it will grab you! For me, I was too busy chasing the next moment where I hold up a picture and change everything.

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New handheld gaming consoles, such as future versions of the Nintendo Switch and Steam Deck, will need to have replaceable batteries by 2027, the EU has said.

This comes as part of new regulation laid out by the Council of the European Union which aims to "regulate the entire life cycle of batteries" to ensure they are "safe, sustainable and competitive".

The idea is batteries are easier to replace and recycle, with a guarantee that "portable batteries incorporated into appliances should be removable and replaceable by the end-user" within new devices from 2027 onwards.

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The planets in Star Wars Outlaws will be hand-crafted rather than procedurally generated, and equivalent in size to two "zones" in Assassin's Creed: Odyssey.

Developer Massive Entertainment - with publisher Ubisoft - proudly claimed the game was the "first ever open-world Star Wars game" on its reveal at last month's Xbox and Ubisoft showcases.

Since then, fans have speculated just how big and open this world will be.

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Andrew Witts, former lead multiplayer designer on Halo Infinite, has rejoined former Halo developer Bungie to work on new project Marathon.

Witts has a strong track record in multiplayer design, having previously also served a year at Epic Games on Fortnite, and over two years at Ubisoft on Rainbow Six Siege.

During his time at Halo Infinite developer 343 Industries, Witts led the multiplayer design of all the game's modes and systems, sheparding the studio's push to take Master Chief and co into a free-to-play future.

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The creator of standout PSP rhythm game Patapon has revealed a spiritual successor is in development called Ratatan.

The game was announced at BitSummit and is being helmed by Patapon creator Hiroyuki Kotani, with audio by original Patapon musician Kemmei Adachi.

Not much is known about Ratatan just yet (including release platforms), though it will include roguelike elements and up to four player multiplayer.

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Fable's narrative lead, Anna Megill, has moved on from Playground Games.

Megill - whose impressive CV includes story-rich games such as Control, for which she was also narrative lead, Dishonored: Death of the Outsider, and Ubisoft's upcoming Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora – announced they had joined the project back in July 2022 but says "the time feels right for new challenges".

"Friends, I have news. In August, I'm stepping away from my role as Narrative Lead on Fable," Megill tweeted. "I've had several wonderful years scribbling away in my fairytale cottage, but the time feels right for new challenges.

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Sonic the Hedgehog maker Sega plans to remake and reboot more of its classic Sonic titles.

That's according to Sega president and COO Yukio Sugino, who, in a new interview with Famitsu, acknowledged that "in parallel" with new projects, the developer is also considering rebooting and remaking older instalments in Sega's "flagship IP".

"Of course we have to do new things, but not all IPs are the same for new releases and reboots," Sugino said, according to Google Translate and my rusty GCSE Japanese.

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Legendary castle sim, Stronghold, is getting a definitive edition that will include an "entirely new" 14-mission campaign.

The game will be "carefully rebuilt using the source artwork, remastered music, [and] returning voice talent" and is being developed by the "veteran developers of the first entry in this legendary series".

You can check out the new look in the video teaser below:

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Xbox boss Phil Spencer has confirmed that Microsoft has reached an agreement to "keep Call of Duty on PlayStation".

In a tweet, Spencer said: "We are pleased to announce that Microsoft and PlayStation have signed a binding agreement to keep Call of Duty on PlayStation following the acquisition of Activision Blizzard."

Eurogamer understands this deal has been offered for 10 years - the same as had previously been offered to PlayStation, and had also been accepted by Nintendo.

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Team Fortress 2 has beaten its own concurrent user record, clocking up 258,997 players earlier this week.

Whilst that may not sound impressive given the PUBG: Battlegrounds' record-breaking peak currently sits at a hefty 3.2m players, it's important to note that even though TF2 is widely considered one of the greatest shooters of all time, it's just about to turn 16 years old.

According to SteamDB, the game has never been more popular, not even when it switched from a premium to a free-to-play model in 2011. And the most recent record of 253,997 concurrent players more than doubles the prior record of 167,591, which was set back in December 2022.

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Star Citizen developer Cloud Imperium Group has acquired the Montreal-based studio, Turbulent.

Turbulent and Cloud Imperium have been collaborating together on Star Citizen since 2012.

The acquisition means that Cloud Imperium now has over 1100 people "around the world working on its ambitious projects", including Austin, Frankfurt, Los Angeles, Manchester, and Montreal, and all 189 Turbulent employees will "remain in place". The studio's current management team will also remain in situ.

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The Tomb Raider 2013 reboot trilogy by Crystal Dynamics was a statement of intent - a shot aimed directly at Nathan Drake and the Uncharted series. Whilst Lara Croft was hibernating, Naughty Dog may have had free reign to set a new standard for creating cinematic action-adventure narratives, but maybe true legends like Lara will always endure?

Crystal Dynamics reboot made the smart decision to present us with a pre-iconic Lara Croft. This was a Lara without her signature dual pistols and rock-solid confidence. Lara began her journey in Tomb Raider 2013 as a young archaeology student on an expedition to find the ancient kingdom of Yamatai and uncover evidence of its supposedly immortal queen, Himiko.

Lara's narrative arc was tough and put her through the ringer but travelling along with her, we experienced her growth, and came to understand the origins of her grit and her determination to survive. We also see her selflessness to save other people. In the earlier Tomb Raiders Lara has no qualms dispatching henchmen, T.rexes and even dragons. In the reboot, we see her first kill and witness the trauma it inflicts. There are multiple layers to this trauma: she first had to watch her mentor Roth die and then had to protect her friend Sam from becoming a sacrifice. Awful as they are, these events were the catalyst that unlocked the potential for Lara to flourish and grow into the Tomb Raider we all know and love.

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Video game mental health charity, Safe in Our World, has released a new interactive journal designed to help people track their mental health and engage with self-care.

Entitled Sidekick – and created specifically for people in the gaming community – the journal aims to be "a physical resource for mental well-being" and includes 140 pages containing a variety of free journaling pages and "games-themed activities and prompts, designed to be a low-pressure way to get people thinking about their mental health".

With one in five players reporting that they feel uncomfortable or upset after playing, one in seven feeling isolated or alone, and one in ten left with depressive or suicidal thoughts in a 2021 survey, the journal hopes to provide resources and advice on how to manage your own wellbeing and "offer a safe place to look after yourself and write what's on your mind".

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Payday 3 requires an always-online game connection, even if you're playing alone.

That's according to a recent Payday 2 livestream with Almir Listo, Starbreeze's global brand director, who confirmed the news whilst fielding questions from fans about the upcoming shooter. You can watch the answer yourself at the 9m 17s point in the video below:

When asked if Payday 3 will have "an offline mode, like playing solo", Almir replied: "No. You will be able to play it by yourself, but I do believe you will have to have a connection in order to play because it's made in the Unreal Engine, it's using cross-progression, [and] cross-play. I do believe we need you to be online."

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Bethesda Studios' studio design director, Emil Pagliarulo, has revealed that they "simply can't" give away any details about Starfield, confirming that only Bethesda boss Todd Howard "is authorised to talk publicly about unreleased game information".

In a Twitter thread, Pagliarulo acknowledged that while fans "have tons of questions" and they were "humbled" by the interest in the highly-anticipated title, neither they nor anyone else on the team is able to speak about the game – including its content or performance – because they signed an NDA and "don't want to get fired".

"I know this isn't what any Starfield fan wants to hear from me, but I feel like I need to make this clear: no one other than Todd Howard himself is authorised to talk publicly about unreleased game info. That's the job of of our PR/marketing/community folks," Pagliarulo said in the thread, which was also shared with the game's subreddit.

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Cyberpunk 2077 is sitting at a "very positive" aggregate score on Steam for the first time.

Courtesy of a recent run of "very positive" reviews from Steam users – around 8000 or so – 79 per cent of 550,000+ Steam players who have stopped by to rate it since the RPG released back in December 2020 have left a thumbs-up.

"Cyberpunk 2077 Steam reviews are now sitting at "Very Positive" with 80% of all scores being favourable," tweeted CD Projekt Red's global community director, Marcin Momot, as spotted by PC Gamer.

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Dragon Quest Treasures is now available on PC via Steam, including Steam Deck.

Up until now, this latest instalment of the long-running RPG series – which boasts "improved graphical fidelity and framerate" – had been available exclusively on Nintendo Steam.

Check out the action in the newly-released trailer below:

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The teenager charged with hacking and then blackmailing a string of companies, including Uber, Nvidia, and GTA 6 developer Rockstar, has been deemed unfit to stand trial.

18-year-old Arion Kurtaj – who was 17 when, as part of the Lapsus$ hacking group, they leaked dozens of assets taken from the then-unannounced Grand Theft Auto 6 – is standing trial for 12 offences, including three counts of blackmail, two counts of fraud, and six counts under the Computer Misuse Act.

According to Reuters, the teenager hacked Rockstar and sent a Slack message to all Rockstar staff, threatening to release the source code.

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The US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has had what may be its final attempt to block Microsoft's acquisition of Activision Blizzard denied.

Just hours after US District Judge Jacqueline Scott Corley, who presided over the main case, rejected the FTC's initial motion to appeal against this week's Microsoft and Activision Blizzard ruling, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals had similarly shut down a request for emergency relief.

"The motion for injunctive relief is denied," the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals filing states. "The existing briefing schedule remains in effect."

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It took Geometric Interactive a while to find the insect in Cocoon, though it's perhaps more accurate to say that the insect found Cocoon, pupating of its own accord from the texture of this delightful but oh so eerie top-down puzzle-platformer. "When I joined the studio, the demo was just like, 2D pixels with blocks," says Erwin Kho, art director. "The little character that you're moving around was a white box with sort of a brown basket on their back. And I think we all gravitated towards sci-fi, so I just immediately started doing things with astronauts or robots.

"And at some point, I had this little astronaut character that I thought was a bit disappointing, because, you know - it's just a person with a helmet and a golden visor. So I gave him a little cape, because capes are cool. But a lot of videogame characters have a cape, so I thought, maybe I'll just split it in two or something. And with the cape split in two, it suddenly looks like wings."

"Your choice with the character eventually sparked the idea for what this entire thing is about, kind of?" interjects game director and designer Jeppe Carlson, otherwise known as the lead gameplay designer for PlayDead's Limbo - a game which, it only now occurs to me, starts in a forest prowled by an enormous spider. "That's not something we knew from the get-go. It's an exploratory process for us to figure out the story of this game? I think that put us on a good track." Kho pushes back on this claim modestly. "It started with the gameplay that Jeppe came up with. All the lore that we sort of had for ourselves, it just developed over time."

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Alex Nichiporchik, CEO of Hello Neighbor publisher TinyBuild, has raised eyebrows during a keynote in which he outlined potential uses of AI tools in the workplace, including the monitoring of employee Slack messages and meeting transcriptions to help identify "potential problematic players" - a discussion he has since insisted was "hypothetical".

Nichiporchik (as reported by WhyNowGaming) was speaking at this week's Develop: Brighton conference, in a talk titled 'AI in Gamedev: Is My Job Safe?' which promised an "in-depth [look] into how [TinyBuild] adopted AI in daily practices to exponentially increase efficiency".

One part of the presentation in particular, focusing on "AI for HR", has proved especially contentious since news of its contents began to spread around the internet. Here, Nichiporchik discussed how AI could be used by HR to spot burnout (later described as being synonymous with "toxicity") among employees by first identifying "potential problematic team members" then collating and running their Slack messages and automatic transcriptions from the likes of Google Meet and Zoom through Chat GPT, in a process he terms "I, Me Analysis".

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If you've ever had the overwhelming desire to feel exactly what it would be like to shimmy up a wall in 9th-century Baghdad, help is at hand; a company has just announced a "haptic gaming suit" that'll be compatible with - and themed around - the upcoming Assassin's Creed Mirage.

Haptics firm Owo's Mirage-themed tie-in has been created in partnership with Ubisoft and looks something like an extremely snug short-sleeved shirt, albeit packaged alongside various bits of hardware. While wearing one, players can experience "multiple different sensations" that reflect those of Assassin's Creed Mirage's protagonist Basim.

Owo says these "sensations" will include the likes of "impacts and parkour", with the standard version of the haptic suit able to mimic 30 different sensations, including "axe", "insect bites", "severe abdominal wound", and "ball".

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Larry "Major Nelson" Hryb, long one of the most recognisable presences on the Xbox team, has announced his departure from Microsoft after 22 years.

Hryb has been with Microsoft since early 2001, initially serving as editor-in-chief for MSN Music before joining the company's Xbox division two years later. As a senior product manager for Xbox, Hryb was focused on helping shape the Xbox Live community experience - he credits himself as being a key contributor in features such as Xbox's Achievement system and party chat - and would go on to become senior director of corporate communications in 2012.

Over the years, Major Nelson - a name derived form Hryb's Gamertag - has been something of a figurehead for Xbox, relaying Xbox-Live-related information to the community and having a prominent presence in its various community focused blogs, livestreams, podcasts, and shows.

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Atari's 1979 arcade classic Lunar Lander is being reimagined by Dreams Uncorporated, the studio behind last year's striking Cris Tales, for release in early 2024.

The original Lunar Lander (perhaps the most famous entry in a sub-genre that can be traced back as far as 1969) was exquisite in its compelling simplicity, requiring players to do nothing more than carefully park their lunar landing module at a fixed point on the Moon's rugged terrain - by manipulating their craft's thrusters and controlling its orientation.

Dream Uncorporated's reimagining, though, which will be known as Lunar Lander: Beyond, is looking to do something a little bit different, taking the moon landing premise of the arcade original and infusing it with a "rich back story" and "deep narrative". There's also talk of "simulation" and "precision gravity flier mechanics" in the studio's announcement.

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Microsoft's Xbox Game Pass Friends and Family preview will come to a close next month, on 15th August.

Xbox Game Pass Friends and Family - which launched as a limited preview last September after months of speculation and rumours - gives up to five people access to all Game Pass Ultimate benefits at a significant discount compared to individual memberships.

Sharing news of the preview's end with Eurogamer, a Microsoft spokesperson said: "We're excited about how the Friends and Family plan has resonated with gamers and will be evaluating the learnings to help create an offer that we can bring to more players worldwide in the future.

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