Epic have won a victory in their attempt to argue that Google violates antitrust laws, as a jury has agreed that the Google Play app store and Google Play Billing service constitute an illegal monopoly. The decision comes three years after Epic first attempted to bypass Apple and Google when selling in-app purchases within Fortnite, leading to the game being yoinked from both the Apple and Google app stores and Epic filing lawsuits against both tech giants.

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It's been five years since David Szymanski and New Blood Interactive's critically acclaimed retro FPS Dusk first emerged - effectively heralding start of the 'boomer shooter' resurgence as it did so - and to celebrate the occasion, a special "HD remaster" has been released as free DLC.

Dusk, with its furiously paced action and unapologetically chunky polygons, draws inspiration from the first-person shooter legends of the mid-90s - Quake being an obvious influence - taking players on a hellish Lovecraftian adventure deep beneath the Earth's surface. It's got cultists, a metal soundtrack, three campaign episodes, and a varied arsenal ranging from shotguns to crossbows and swords. It is a good time!

And now, five years after its release, Dusk is ready to careen into the modern era (assuming that modern era is circa the early 2000s) with an HD remaster that features remade assets for all existing visual elements - including enemy and weapon models - alongside a few new ones.

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Whelp, it’s official: Baldur’s Gate 3 is the game of the year, and you’ve likely got a super fan in your life who would appreciate some merch tied to the game this holiday season.

Luckily for you, we’ve got a plethora of suggestions that can make for great stocking stuffers and big gifts alike.

New plush toys of the legendary Pokemon Terapagos will become available at Pokemon Center locations in Japan and the online store beginning on December 14, 2023 to coincide with the release of The Indigo Disk DLC for Pokemon Scarlet and Violet. The two toys are of the character in its normal and terastal forms and will be sold at the price of 2,970 yen ($20.40) and 5,500 yen ($37.76), respectively.

Terapagos is the newest legendary Pokemon to debut in the Pokemon Scarlet and Violet DLC The Indigo Disk. Though small in its normal form, Terapagos has the ability to transform itself into a sturdier, more defensive form similar to how a turtle retreats to seek shelter inside of its shell. The Pokemon Center is continuing to grow its large selection of available Pokemon toys by making both Terapagos forms available in plush form.

See the Pokemon Center Terapagos plushies in the gallery below:

Hatoful Boyfriend creator Moa stated that she received the unpaid royalties owed to her by Epic Games. The developer previously stated that she had not received royalties for over 2 years since Epic took over the game's publisher Mediatonic.

As well as reporting that the royalties had been paid, Moa took time to thank supporters, whose "buzz" she says was helpful and meaningful in solving the issue. She also stated that she believes that Epic Games will now send her regular sales reports.

Hatoful Boyfriend is a 2011 romantic visual novel set in a world in which humans co-exist with sentient birds. Taking on the role of a sophomore student at a school for birds, the player attempts to woo a number of avian suitors. The game also inspired a Christmas-themed sequel called Hatoful Boyfriend: Holiday Star, as well as well as a complete edition including both games and several extras.

You can find Moa's Twitter statement below:

A new gameplay trailer for upcoming indie shooter Mouse shows off the game’s cartoon action and awesome 1930s-inspired visuals, while also revealing a release window.

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E3 is dead, long live E3. What was once the biggest event in gaming is now a thing of the past, with the president of the Entertainment Software Association confirming on December 12 that it is no more.

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Although the Nintendo Switch can be played in handheld mode to become a portable console, it is an electronic device prone to damages that should be treated with care. Nintendo Support released a public reminder of what not to do in order to prolong the life of your Nintendo Switch console and not break it on the company’s Japanese website.

Below is a list of what not to do in order to keep your Nintendo Switch from being damaged, collected from previous cases:

• Internal damage to the system by dropping it on the ground or against a hard surface (examples: buttons and/or sticks malfunction, touch screen damage)
• Accidentally sitting on the console on a sofa or chair (please put the Nintendo Switch away properly after use)
• Putting the Nintendo Switch in a full bag without a protective case (even if you use a case, leaning on the backpack may damage the console)
• Forcibly plugging the wrong cable into the console (causes damage to the charging port)
• Forcibly inserting or removing a Joy-Con from the console (always be sure to press the removal button on the back of the Joy-Con before removing)

Taito announced that it will hold the grand opening for the first-ever Taito Station arcade center in Hong Kong in mid-December 2023. It is working with the local company Hitek Amusement Limited to establish the franchise at Nina Mall 1 in Tsuen Wan. The facility will feature crane games containing prize items based on popular Japanese anime and game titles at launch. It will also include the rainbow coin toss game that is popular locally in Hong Kong.

Taito cited the Japan Tourism Agency's data about visitors from Hong Kong to Japan as a background for opening a new branch in the region. Over two million people from Hong Kong visited Japan between 2017 and 2019. 88 percent of them were repeat visitors who also enjoy Japanese subcultures like anime very much.

While the new Hong Kong branch would not be Taito's first-ever overseas facility, it will mark the company's return to the international scene after eleven years of domestic focus. Yomiuri noted that Taito used to have subsidiaries managing arcade game centers in mainland China and South Korea. However, it withdrew in 2012 to focus entirely on its domestic market.

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Want a titanic 45-inch gaming monitor? Of course you do - and this 5120x1440 super-ultrawide model is down to £699 at Currys in the UK following a rare £100 price drop. That's a great price for a 165Hz gaming monitor with DisplayHDR 400 certification, HDMI 2.1 support and even a KVM switch.

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Welp, that’s it. The casket’s shut, the nails hammered, the grave dug. The Entertainment Electronic Expo (E3) is dead, and the Entertainment Software Association (ESA) is issuing a do-not-resuscitate order for its once-annual convention. Since E3 is done for real this time, now’s as good a time as any to look back at…

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It's awesome that you can get a great high refresh rate gaming monitor for not much over $100 these days. Take this Acer Nitro XF243Y M3bmiiprx - it's a 24-inch 1080p 180Hz display, yours for a very reasonable $100 after a $90 discount at Best Buy in the US.

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HoYoVerse revealed how the new Honkai: Star Rail Tears of Dream Trace and Light Cone material will work. This is a new, “universal” sort of item that will debut after the 1.6 update at the end of December 2023.

The Tears of Dream is designed to be used as an item if you don’t have the exact Path materials needed to ascend a Light Cone or to level up a character’s Traces. So instead of, say, needing teh Shattered Blade, Lifeless Blade, or Worldbreaker Blade to level up a Destruction Light Cone or Trace, you could use a Tears of Dream. HoYoVerse also seemed to suggest that there will be an exchange option for these items.

In addition to Tears of Dream, HoYoVerse teased that the 2.0 Penacony update will add more Path materials via Crimson Calyxes. It didn’t name them, but noted that these items will be needed for new characters and Light Cones on existing Paths. 

It's all a bit Doom-y at the moment, what with the seminal first-person shooter having just celebrated its 30th anniversary this past weekend. And with perfect timing, original Doom designer John Romero has released Sigil 2, the follow-up to his 2019 unofficial Doom episode, which is available now as a free download for consoles and PC.

The original Sigil, which was announced to mark Doom's 25th back in 2018, served as the unofficial fifth episode in the Doom saga, picking up after the events of Ultimate Doom's Thy Flesh Consumed; Sigil 2 - as you might very well imagine - serves as unofficial episode number six, spanning nine new maps that lead into the story of Doom 2.

"Upon breaching the pentagram of invulnerability in the final moments of Sigil, Episode Five," goes Romero's official description, "you find yourself not on a victorious journey back to save Earth, but caught in Baphomet's cunning snare, catapulted into a new, grotesque domain of relentless torment, unending demon hordes, and an onslaught of heavy metal mayhem!"

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Sony kicked off its yearly PlayStation 2023 Wrap-Up, which is a site people can visit to discover their most-played PS4 and PS5 games of the year. As usual, you also get digital rewards for checking in on your progress.

Seeing what your stats are is fairly easy. After visiting the official site, log into your PlayStation Network account. If you’re already logged in, clicking the “let’s find out” button automatically takes you to your stats. Things will start out by explaining how many games you played in 2023. It’s on this page that it will share your first game played in this year. (So for example, in my case it said my first game of 2023 was Genshin Impact and played on January 1, 2023.)

If you were hoping for new ways to bounce about Bethesda’s jumbo-sized galaxy in space RPG Starfield, you might be in luck. In a recent Reddit response on Reddit t, the developer appears to have teased an upcoming feature update that will add “new ways of traveling” and that fans should expect regular updates moving…

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Insomniac Games, the PlayStation-owned developer behind Marvel’s Spider-Man and the upcoming Marvel’s Wolverine, was reportedly breached by a ransomware gang that claims to have stolen employees’ personal data and unreleased information about its upcoming X-Men action game.

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Mouse, an upcoming classic first-person shooter sporting a vintage rubber hose animation style, turned heads in May with its first look at gameplay. Although that initial showing was very much a work in progress, today’s video offers a more polished look at what’s to come.

The noir game stars a private-eye rodent cleaning up his corruption-riddled city by using his trusty tommy gun to mow down scores of mouse gangsters in cartoonishly violent fashion. Additionally, we get a look at other lethal methods, such as tossing dynamite, shooting down pianos to crash on top of foes, or just knocking goons' heads off with a good punch. Between all of that, the mouse protagonist consumes spinach and tea for presumably health while engaging in other activities such as collecting baseball cards and chatting with characters.

Mouse is the debut title from developer Fumi Games, and the trailer ends with the reveal of a 2025 release window. 

The videogame union ZeniMax Workers United have come to a "tentative", "first of its kind" agreement with ZeniMax parent company Microsoft over the company's usage of the latest "artificial intelligence" tools in the workplace. As part of the agreement, ZeniMax will "provide notice to the union in cases where AI implementation may impact the work of union members" and the union will be able to "bargain those impacts" where they feel it necessary. It seems genuinely historic, to me: a tech company formally giving their workforce a say on the adoption of tools that continue to feel like a pretext for efficiency-minded "restructuring".

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HoYoVerse shared Zenless Zone Zero closed beta test stats based on data collected between November 24, 2023 and December 5, 2023. It went over how quickly some people completed certain missions, how much in-game money people earned, and when people tended to play.

Some of the more fascinating stats pertained to specific Zenless Zone Zero commissions going over how people did on certain quests. For example, one person beat one called “An Everyday Occurrence” in one minute. It also noted about 79% of players did go for the harder fight in “No Guts No Glory.”

Here’s a list of notable Zenless Zone Zero closed beta test stats shared in the pamphlet. 

• Players’ video store earned 614,506,545 Dennies
• People earned 19,509,529,487 Dennies from commissions.
• Players recommended videos for 34,506 customers, with 33% of them restocking based on their preferences.
• 1,134 people beat “Earlybird Ticket to Safety” without getting hurt.
• Players earned 3,244,076,925 Gear Coins in “Expiring Treasure.”

‘Tis the season, once again, for Rockstar Games to drop another massive (and free) Grand Theft Auto Online update. And this time, not only has the company added a whole new chop shop business, but it’s also added drift races, new cars, and animals, too. Yes, it took a decade and three console generations, but finally, …

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Apple has announced its App Store winners, honoured the best games and apps available for its various platforms.

The company named MiHoYo's Honkai: Star Rail, the sci-fi sister title to Genshin Impact, as the iPhone Game of the Year thanks to its "incredible visuals, tactically rich combat [and] mind-blowing worlds."

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"After more than two decades of E3, each one bigger than the last, the time has come to say goodbye. Thanks for the memories." So says the official E3 website this afternoon, as the Entertainment Software Association (ESA) confirm that E3 is officially dead.

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Some recent horror games like Phasmophobia and Lethal Company take advantage of microphone functionality to allow monsters to locate players based on any real-life sounds they make. Taking that mechanic and making it central is the recently released Shhh, a horror game that completely ends if it detects the player's screams.

Developed by 616 Games, Shhh is a game with a simple premise: players explore sinister locations and experience unsettling events, with the threat that if they scream the game will end. Whether that end comes in the form of a hard cut-to-black or a monster noticing you remains to be seen. The game currently contains only a single scenario, but 616 promise more will be added in free updates.

The developer released a short preview on Youtube that you can watch below. While nothing really "happens," the visuals and especially the sound are actually very effective at building the increasingly tense atmosphere that a horror title relies on.

As part of the gradual flow of announcements, Square Enix shared insight into the FFVII Rebirth Summons Bahamut Arisen, Phoenix, and Titan. Screenshots of each one appeared alongside details about how they fight. 

Titan was the first of the three FFVII Rebirth “allies” to be showcased. First, we got a better glamor shot look at how the summon will look in the game. After that, we got to see it fighting alongside Cloud, Aerith, and Red XIII in the middle of the fight. As in past entries, this is an earth elemental creature, with ground-based attacks shown in Square Enix’s official images.

Othercide from French developer Lightbulb Crew is one of my favourite recent tactics RPGs. It's an atmospheric and rewardingly meticulous experience that typically pits you against overwhelming numbers, where victory comes about by carefully exploiting reaction abilities, positioning units just-so, and manipulating the initiative bar. At times, for me, it's up there with Into The Breach.

But I do acknowledge that it's an acquired taste, not least because the story and setting are relentlessly unpleasant, a terrible soup of mother metaphors and Penny Dreadful imagery, in which you pit clones against Silent Hill monsters, then liquefy the survivors to fuel new characters. What's the appropriate way to follow up a game like that? Ah yes, with an episodic dating sim.

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Disney has spoken about Knights of the Old Republic Remake as the fate of the game remains unclear.

Development on the KOTOR remake has been rocky since it was first announced, with recent reports suggesting it isn't in active development.

Speaking to Axios, Disney head of gaming Sean Shoptaw said he couldn't say much on the status of the game "for some hopefully obvious reasons".

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Everything going on with failed Steam zombie shooter The Day Before continues to shock and amaze. The latest wild development is studio Fntastic’s response to the entire self-inflicted debacle: “shit happens.”

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Metaphor: ReFantazio is an upcoming fantasy RPG from the team behind the Persona series, and it looks like it’s taking all the best parts from the wildly popular series. A new 14-minute-long breakdown trailer shows how it’s adapting different Persona games’ social and time management systems to tell a political story…

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Bandai Namco announced a demo for Tekken 8 will be releasing soon, allowing players to try out the game ahead of its January launch. The trial will be releasing for the PS5 on December 14, 2023, and it will show up for PC and Xbox Series X players on December 21, 2023.

The Tekken 8 demo will allow players to try out the opening chapter of the game’s story mode, which has now been named as The Dark Awakens. Details of the story are scarce, although the official website states it will involve Jin Kazama facing off against his father, Kazuya, in a battle across the globe. This main story will also feature a series of character episodes for other characters.

The demo will also contain a versus fighting mode, allowing players to try out the new mechanics. Unlike the previous Closed Network Test and Closed Beta Test that allowed players to experience the game ahead of release, the Tekken 8 demo will be a purely offline experience.

These are the only details Bandai Namco have provided about the demo. It’s unknown which of the game’s 32 playable characters will be available to play.

During The Game Awards 2023, HoYoVerse offered a closer look at the upcoming Honkai: Star Rail character Black Swan and we heard her English voice actress. Now we know more about her rank, path, element, and voice actors in other languages.

First, Black Swan is a Nihility character in the game. This means that her primary function in the party is to debuff the enemy, break it, and inflict DOT status effects. Other five-star characters on this same path include Kafka, Silver Wolf, and Welt. Her element is Wind, meaning she’ll be the second Wind Nihility character in Honkai: Star Rail. The first is Sampo, who is a four-star unit that has been a part of the game since launch. 

As for the Black Swan Honkai: Star Rail voice actress, we heard Arryn Zech as her English one during the TGA 2023 trailer. Zech also played Blake Belladonna in RWBY. Hitomi Nabatame plays her in the Japanese dub. Nabatame also played Symmetra in the Japanese dub of Overwatch, Amy in Soulcalibur games, Nanao in Bleach, and Cure Heart in Precure.

A ransomware group named Rhysida has claimed it hacked Marvel's Spider-Man 2 developer Insomniac Games, and posted files it managed to gain access to as proof. Sony has since told Eurogamer it's investigating the situation.

Earlier today, Cyber Daily reported Rhysida had posted proof-of-hack documents. This included details of Insomniac's Wolverine game, which is rumoured to be out in 2025, as well as internal emails, files, and personal documents of Insomniac employees. One document reportedly belongs to Peter Parker voice actor Yuri Lowenthal.

Rhysida has given Insomniac seven days before it publishes everything it stole, Cyber Daily reports, but the group also has the data up for auction, with a starting price of 50 bitcoins (just over $2m).

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Two years ago, developers Fntastic debuted their "open world survival MMO" The Day Before with a fairly lengthy trailer (which has since been scrubbed from their official YouTube channel, but it's been preserved by IGN and Gamespot). It shows a couple of players scavenging a post-pandemic American city slick with detailed lighting effects and reactive zombie hordes. There's crafting, cracked glass, and even a horror tease as a player peers around a corridor with a torch. It was an MMO that promised a mixture of The Last Of Us and The Division, and it quickly became the most wishlisted game on Steam.

Now, days after releasing into early access, developers Fntastic have shut down and you can't purchase the game anymore. Does it come as a surprise? Not really, considering the final product wasn't what they promised - not even close. Instead of an MMO, it was barely an extraction shooter. Consider my words below a record of a rancid time had across its short-lived early access release, then. A time when I would've rather handed a stinging nettle £40 to line my socks than spend another minute in this empty husk.

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Platform: PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Switch, PC
Publisher: Capcom
Developer: Capcom
Release: January 25, 2024
Rating: Teen

There's never been a better time to get into Ace Attorney. Developer-publisher Capcom has spent the last few years remastering and re-releasing every game in the series, and with the Apollo Justice trilogy, you can now play every mainline game on modern consoles. And even though the three games in this collection are unchanged story-wise, after going hands-on, we can comfortably say that they've never felt better.

Epic Games sued Google over anti-competitive practices and won. A jury in the in the Epic v. Google case delivered a swift verdict, concluding that the giant tech firm was operating an illegal monopoly on Android devices in the form of the Google Play storefront.

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E3 is officially dead, the Entertainment Software Association confirmed. In an interview with Washington Post, CEO of the ESA Stanley Pierre-Louis confirmed that the event was coming to a close after attempts to revive the convention. [Thanks, Washington Post!]

E3 had been the premiere gaming news event of the year. This annual trade event covered the latest announcements from companies across the industry and marked one of the most important dates on the gaming calendar. However, following E3’s cancelation during COVID-19 lockdowns, the show has struggled to return. Most recently, a 2023 event in collaboration with PAX and EGX organizers ReedPop was announced then canceled. A 2024 event was also looking unlikely, according to the LA Convention Center.

E3 had been in trouble before this, however. The event had been seeing dwindling numbers prior to the pandemic. In 2018, Sony declined to attend the event, which led to other attendees gradually following suit. The final in-person E3 was held in 2019, although a virtual event was held in 2021.

The Pokemon Company announced that it established a new joint venture with companies under the Yomiuri Shimbun Holdings to establish a new Pokemon-themed zone inside Yomiuriland. The joint venture produced a limited liability company named Pokepark Kanto, and it will set up a new zone with the same name inside the theme park.

The name Pokepark Kanto will also tie closely to both the theme park and the Pokemon franchise. Yomiuriland is situated on the outskirts of Tokyo, which is part of Japan's Kanto region. The Pokemon franchise also based the map for its first-ever games—Pokemon Red and Blue (or Red and Green in Japan)—on the same real-life region.

This will not be the first time The Pokemon Company is collaborating with Yomiuriland. The theme park had previously hosted Pokemon Wonder, a temporary outdoor attraction that opened from July 2021 to April 2022.

Microsoft could expand to new markets with ad-supported game streaming.

As reported by TweakTown, the comments were made by Xbox chief financial officer Tim Stuart during the Wells Fargo TMT Summit, held near the end of November.

"You can subscribe to Game Pass Ultimate, and you can stream hundreds of games to really any endpoint that has a browser experience."

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Update, 12/12/23: 

After reports in November indicated that Free Radical Design, the team behind the TimeSplitters franchise that had been reformed in 2021 to create a new entry in the series, was facing a complete shutdown, the studio closure happened yesterday. Game Informer reached out to Free Radical Design parent company Embracer Group for a comment on the closure – it pointed us to the following LinkedIn post by Plaion, which owns Free Radical Design. 

"It's with a heavy heart that we must announce yet another difficult decision," the post reads. "Today, we have to confirm the official closure of Free Radical Design, and say goodbye to many remarkable, talented, and hard-working people. We are beyond grateful for their incredible contributions to Plaion and wish them the best of luck and success on their professional journey from here on out." 

The original story continues below...

Update, 12/11/23: