Samurai Shodown hits Steam 14th June with a new DLC character, SNK has announced.
The fighting game arrives on Steam a year after it launched on PC via the Epic Games Store.
On the same day, new DLC character Shiro Tokisada Amakusa comes out.
An ambitious modder is building an audio tour of the entire virtual world - inside Microsoft Flight Simulator.
Bushtalk Radio is a community-driven project that adds audio descriptions to over 8000 points of interest in the sim. These audio descriptions are played automatically as you arrive at one of the supported POIs.
Some of the most-visited POIs with accompanying audio tours include a raft of UK landmarks, such as The O2, Tower Bridge, Hyde Park, The Shard and Big Ben.
Mass Effect Legendary Edition seems to be going down well on Steam, where its launch racked up EA's second-highest concurrent player total, behind Apex Legends.
Its current peak concurrent total of 59,650 (via Steam Charts and BenjiSales) is the highest for any Mass Effect or indeed BioWare game on Steam.
The average user review rating is "Very Positive", though there are a number of complaints over the game's lack of an FOV slider outside of photo mode, and its insistence on launching Origin to launch the Legendary Edition launcher, to then launch a specific game.
This week, while a lot of you will be (re)exploring the galaxy of the original Mass Effect trilogy, we thought it would be fun to revisit some of our own favourite video game planets. First up, Oli remembers the glory of Halo. Halo's a planet right? It isn't? Oh well, nobody said this stuff was simple - just ask Pluto.
Halo, the series, owes a lot more than just its name to its original setting. The name is a pretty good start, though, with its evocation of holy reverence, of refracted glory, of encircled perfection. It is the name the religious zealots of the Covenant have bestowed upon a mysterious celestial body: a ringworld orbiting a gas giant, and an artificial paradise harbouring a dark purpose. Its creators, a long-lost race known as the Forerunners, called it, rather prosaically, Installation 04.
Whichever angle you approach it from, the Halo inspires awe. Lore first: the Halo is both ancient, a hundred thousand years old, and futuristic, created by a society far more advanced than either the humans or aliens of the game's nearish future. Over the course of Halo: Combat Evolved, you discover that it is both a research station and a terrifying weapon. The Forerunners created an array of such Halos that, when triggered together, would destroy all sentient life in the galaxy, to prevent it being overrun by the parasitic Flood. It's terrifying!
BioWare has changed a Mass Effect character's race from human to turian - fixing a long-standing issue many (correctly) assumed was a bug.
THERE MAY BE MASS EFFECT 1 SPOILERS AHEAD.
Elanos Haliat, a human-hating pirate and previous leader of the Terminus Systems, appears in Mass Effect 1 on the world of Agebinium. Shepard encounters him when investigating a mysterious nuclear probe which needs to be defused.
I heard a strange story a while back about a DOS game passed around California decades ago. And that unlike any of those wild and sometimes sinister adventure games from that era, someone had traced out its instructions towards something unspeakable. This title was allegedly lost forever in a floppy disc.
And it reminded me of an era when games felt steeped in mystery and madness, before guides and trailers and press releases. When starting a new game felt like entering another world and how occasionally you'd find something nestled at the bottom of a bargain bin that gave you nightmares, and no one else had ever heard of it.
Named Pale Luna, this enigmatic game followed '80s text adventure conventions: blank screen, crisp white text characters, in the vein of Zork and The Lurking Horror. You began in a moonlit room containing gold, a shovel, and a rope, then set off to "reap your reward". You then trundled through an incoherent text-based woodland using compass directions.
Players have hit back at plans to introduce a premium currency shop in Amazon's upcoming MMORPG, New World.
The leak - which comes via the game's current alpha-test and was shared on Reddit - alleges that New World is introducing in-game purchases for "special cosmetic items for players and their in-game homes" and "may sell quality-of-life items or boosts that will help players improve their time spent levelling up their character and trade skill experience".
In response, the official Twitter account for the studio developing the game posted a statement, insisting that "all store items at launch will be exclusively cosmetic in nature" and that the storefront was introduced in the Alpha test "to test these items and their value".
A vinyl collection of music taken from Final Fantasy 14 will release on 31st August 2021.
The bundle - which includes tracks across A Realm Reborn, Heavenwards, Stormblood and Shadowbringers - is available to pre-order now for £87 / $100, although custom duties and shipping costs are not included.
Each LP jacket features "gorgeous illustrations" by Kuroimori and the "vinyl cutting was done in Los Angeles by mastering virtuoso, Bernie Grundman". Purchases of the vinyl boxset will also receive a MP3 download code, too.
Metro Exodus's Enhanced Edition is a very important game - it's the first triple-A game we know of that's built on technology that demands the inclusion of hardware-accelerated ray tracing hardware. To be clear, the new Metro is not a fully path-traced game built entirely on RT, but rather a hybrid renderer where global illumination, lighting and shadows are handled by ray tracing, while other elements of the game still use traditional rasterisation techniques. The bottom line though is that this is the foundation for developer 4A Games going forward: its games will require a PC with hardware RT graphics capabilities, while their console versions will tap into the same acceleration features found on the ninth generation consoles. And while 4A is the first developer to push this far into next generation graphics features, it's clearly not going to be the last.
We've already reviewed the PC version of Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition and will be following up in due course with detailed analysis of the PS5, Xbox Series X and Series S renditions of the game. However, in putting together our initial coverage of the game, 4A Games were extremely helpful and collaborative in ensuring the depth and accuracy of our work. If you've seen our video breakdown of the title, you'll have seen the behind the scenes editor shots showing level design workflow before and after the transition to ray tracing - but that's just the tip of the iceberg. 4A were also very helpful in going deep - really deep - in explaining how their RT implementation works. On top of that, the developer gave us an excellent overview of the project: why it was time to move their engine to RT, how so many new technologies made their way into Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition, and why we need to wait a little while until the console versions are released.
It's a wealth of in-depth information we're going to be splitting into two deep-dive interviews. This week, we begin with a discussion with Metro Exodus executive producer, Jon Bloch, covering the general approach to developing the game and its new features. Next week, we're catering to the hardcore graphics audience as 4A's CTO Oles Shishkovstov and senior rendering programmer Ben Archard go into extreme depth on the development of the 4A Engine's brand new ray tracing features.
Over half a million Call of Duty: Warzone accounts have now been banned for cheating.
After banning a further 30,000 unscrupulous players yesterday, Warzone co-developer Raven Software confirmed that that brings the total of banned accounts to a staggering 500,000.
Raven didn't elaborate on whether or not this was on a single platform or shared across all of them, nor what the cheaters were actually doing to warrant the ban hammer - but at least it shows that the studio takes cheating seriously, and is holding cheaters to account.