Bungie will open the doors to Destiny 2's next raid activity the same week as its upcoming DLC, Warmind.
This hasn't always been the case - sometimes, raids have been left to unlock at a much later point. Instead, Warmind's Spire of Stars raid lair will arrive next Friday, 11th May. The race to be first to complete it will begin at 6pm UK time.
The rest of Warmind will arrive just a couple of days beforehand, on Tuesday 8th.
To say I bounced off SpyParty after a morning might make it sound like I did not enjoy myself, or that the game's many pleasures failed to have much effect on me. In truth, I found those pleasures astonishingly effective. SpyParty, for me, is the sweetest torture imaginable. I played a morning's worth of matches if that, even so, I felt myself teetering on the very edge of terrifying depths, and so I fled.
I have never played a game quite like this, and yet it is so simple. SpyParty requires just two players, one of whom plays the spy while the other plays a distant sniper trying to kill the spy. The spy must mingle with a crowd of AI characters and pull off a series of simple missions within a set amount of time. The sniper must scan the faces, the wash of moving bodies and fluttering hands, and work out which of the people they can see is controlled by the first human player and must therefore be killed.
Each role offers a handful of complications. There are the missions that the spy must carry out, for example, each of which affords them ample opportunity to betray themselves. They might be spotted switching over a statue, for example, or bugging the ambassador, which involves getting close to the clearly signposted character in question and doing a certain hand gesture. But beyond those tasks and others, they might just give themselves away by not behaving like an AI character. They might stop in the wrong place. They might walk without the right kind of purpose. Or they might find themselves low on time and check their watch to add a few seconds to the clock - and get plugged while they're at it.
Ever since the original Life is Strange concluded with that choice, fans have debated which of the game's two endings was canon. Now, Life is Strange's upcoming comic series will explore what happened next after one ending in particular.
(If for some reason you're reading this and haven't finished Life is Strange - full spoilers follow.)
Did you choose bae or bay? The game's final decision saw you either save or (incorrectly) sacrifice your best friend/girlfriend Chloe at the expense of your town, Arcadia Bay. Life is Strange developer Dontnod has been careful not to confirm either ending as canon, and its upcoming sequel series is believed to be entirely unrelated.
Valve has announced official Steam support for Nintendo's Switch Pro Controller, which you can tinker around with right now, provided that you opt in to the latest Steam beta.
"We think it is a great device with a feature set that pairs nicely with your Steam catalog," says Valve in its latest blog post, "The d-pad is ideal for fighting games and platformers and the gyro enhances aim in your action/FPS titles."
There's certainly a lot to like about the pleasingly chunky, supremely comfortable Pro Controller (although its lack of analogue triggers might be an occasional issue); however, its big strength is its excellent gyroscope, which should work a treat for precision aiming in shooters and the like - making for a welcome alternative to the similarly featured PS4 DualShock or Steam Controller.
Hi-Rez Studios has announced that its free-to-play hero shooter will, after a year and a half in early access development, leave beta and launch on PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One next Tuesday, May 8th.
Despite arriving in the wake of Overwatch - and having weathered accusations of copying thanks to its broadly similar art style (with the occasional opportunity for reverse-shade arising) - Paladins has done alright for itself. Since its beta launch in September 2016, its mix of blasting and deck-building has attracted over 25 million players on PC, PS4, and Xbox One.
To mark the game's departure from early access, Hi-Rez will be giving 200 free premium currency Crystals to everyone that played in the beta. To claim them, players simply need to log into their accounts between May 8th and May 31st. A special Beta Avatar will also be included.
There's great news for fans of cats, dogs, murder mysteries, village life sims, photojournalism, and, possibly, Hitchin today: developer Hidetaka "Swery" Suehiro's delightful looking The Good Life has reached its Kickstarter goal.
The Good Life, in case you haven't been following along, is a "daily life RPG" in which players take on the role of New York photojournalist Naomi, who "moves to a backwoods British town called Rainy Woods in order to pay off her massive debt".
Once in Rainy Woods, according to The Good Life's Kickstarter page, you can make money by taking photos, or you can "shear sheep, deliver milk, make jam and hay, do some gardening, or work as a bartender, a casino dealer, a miner, or even mine for cryptocurrency".
Lumines Remastered, the spruced up refresh of Tetsuya Mizuguchi's wonderful rhythm-puzzler Lumines, is now scheduled to launch on Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC, on June 26th.
That's somewhat later than the originally announced "May" release window given back in March, which might disappoint those who've been eagerly anticipating a return to Mizuguchi's musical classic - which, incidentally, first released on PSP a mildly terrifying 14 years ago.
Lumines Remastered, which you can see in all its pulsating glory below, is being handled by Enhance Games - the company that Mizuguchi himself formed a few years after parting ways with original Lumines developer Q Entertainment back in 2012.
Update 09/05/2018: While the Amazon UK listing of this controller has been updated with some packaging images, it seems to be drifting in and out of availability. With that in mind, you can also pre-order the controller from Funstock Retro, while stock lasts.
Original story 02/05/2018: You may remember, all the way back in January of this year, peripheral manufacturer Hyperkin joined forces with Seamus Blackley, the creator of the very first Xbox controller to bring back history's greatest monster - the Xbox Duke controller.
The time has come for the newly revived Duke to be unleashed upon the world; Hyperkin has announced that it'll be arriving a little sooner than expected. Releasing on Tuesday, 8th May in the UK, the 'Hyperkin Duke Controller' is already up for pre-order at Amazon, costing a cool 69.99.
Dark Souls Remastered is fast approaching its May 25th launch and based on our recent look at work-in-progress PS4 Pro code, there's the sense that we're looking at a refined, optimised port rather than a fuller, top-to-bottom refresh of the whole game. So where does that leave the original 'Prepare to Die' PC version, already improved significantly via some heaving community modding? Namco Bandai is actually withdrawing that version of the game to new buyers and offering a 50 per cent discount to coax existing users into purchasing the remaster, but with mods like DSFix and SweetFX already enhancing the game significantly, the official game has a lot to match.
Disregarding the game's mods for a moment, the Prepare to Die edition is clearly not fit for purpose in the modern era. Notoriously, it lets you change the output resolution, while natively it's still only running at 1024x720 - the same as on the last-gen consoles. Add in the fact that it's capped at 30fps with poorly implemented mouse and keyboard support, and the dismay back in 2012 is understandable. Compared to Dark Souls 3, where From Software's proficiency in PC conversions has grown hugely, the first outing was a massive disappointment for fans.
Coming to the rescue, Durante's DSFix smartly worked around its limits to let you play at any resolution, while also liberating the game from its 30fps limit. Eventually, this injector mod added options for anti-aliasing, depth of field, anisotropic filtering and screen-space ambient occlusion. Factor in the numerous fan-made texture mods for Dark Souls on PC since, and it's a transformed experience to the one the developer originally intended. The catch is that not everything is perfectly optimised with these mods: to this day the game still struggles to run at a smooth 1080p at 60fps, even on the most powerful hardware.
Taki's back for Soulcalibur 6, Bandai Namco has announced.
Taki wasn't in Soulcalibur 5, so here appearance in 6 marks a return of sorts. Based on the video, below, the fast-moving ninja's design from previous games hasn't changed much at all. Her terrible voice acting is present and correct, too.
Here's the official blurb: