Elite Dangerous

Frontier Developments has announced that space sim Elite Dangerous' next big update, known as Beyond - Chapter Two, will arrive on June 28th.

This new free update, which launches simultaneously on PC, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One, is the second instalment in Beyond, Elite Dangerous' third season. Beyond is a bit different to previous seasons in that it's less concerned with introducing massive game-changing features, and more about offering much-needed and long-overdue quality of life improvements to the core Elite experience.

Beyond - Chapter One, for instance, which released back in February, overhauled Elite's crime and punishment system, in order to make the game generally more welcoming for new players. It also made long-requested changes to Engineers, improved trading, and added the brilliant Galnet Audio feature, multi-crew Wing Missions, and more.

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Assassin's Creed 2

UPDATE 1.00AM: Ubisoft has confirmed Assassin's Creed Odyssey via a brief teaser clip posted on Twitter, and said it will show more of the game at E3.

The confirmation comes just hours after the Assassin's Creed Odyssey keyring image below leaked online.

The video tease appears to confirm its Ancient Greece setting, and the game's logo also includes the Spartan helmet from the keyring on it.

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Eurogamer


The original Borderlands looks like it will get a new lease of life for PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One via a new Game of the Year Edition.

Originally launched for PC, PS3 and Xbox 360 in 2009, a new rating for Borderlands: Game of the Year Edition has now popped up on the regularly leaky Korean Ratings Board (thanks, Gamasutra).

A relaunch of the first Borderlands game makes sense. It would act as a warm-up to an all-new Borderlands 3, which developer Gearbox said would be its next game more than two years ago.

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Team Sonic Racing™


James Marsden will star in Sega's yes-it's-really-happening Sonic the Hedgehog film, Variety reports.

Currently appearing in Westworld, you may also know Marsden as Cyclops in X-Men. And he once appeared in an episode of Saved by the Bell: The New Class.

Paramount has already dated the Sonic the Hedgehog film - it's coming 15th September 2019, mark your calendars - although we know nothing of the plot, or who might be playing the 'hog himself.

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DARK SOULS™: REMASTERED

With release code in hand, we finally have a complete picture of how Dark Souls Remastered runs on consoles and PC - and while the notorious Blighttown was our first port of call for performance testing, it turns out that there are much better ways to push developer QLOC's refined version of the Dark Souls engine. The title's CPU issues are by and large resolved in the final product, but it turns out that it's the GPU that is now our primary bottleneck. All versions of the game target 60fps, though only one console gives us an absolute lock, while the PC release rights many wrongs - but is a remarkably unambitious effort overall.

Let's kick off by re-confirming the basics we established in our network test coverage. The standard Xbox One and PlayStation 4 each target 1080p, while their enhanced counterparts both strive for the same experience at a higher 1800p pixel count. For perspective, that's a 2.7x increase over both regular machines - with temporal anti-aliasing smoothing off the image and allowing for a graceful upscale for ultra HD displays. And of course, most of the HUD and text elements are a true 4K too, which duly helps with the presentation.

On the surface, it's frustrating that Xbox One X delivers the same resolution as PS4 Pro, bearing in mind the big increases in GPU compute, memory bandwidth and available RAM. Potentially, a push to a native 4K would be in-step with that leap in power - as we've seen in games like Resident Evil 7 - but 1800p is where it's fixed. In theory, a dynamic resolution could have been a much better fit here, optimising the resolution of each frame based on whether 60fps is sustainable. As it stands though, there is a performance overhead on both machines - especially Xbox One X - that isn't tapped into at points, which is a shame.

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Eurogamer

Now this is more like it. Last May, still uncertain about the prospects of Nintendo's Switch, Capcom tentatively tested the waters with Ultra Street Fighter 2: The Final Challengers. The end result, though, felt more like a kick in the face; a bastardised version of Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo HD Remix, Capcom filled out the package with a suite of unwelcome extras in a clumsy attempt to justify the full-fat pricetag. People were upset at the unconvincing results, and you can understand perfectly well why. Street Fighter is more than just a game. It's a cult at times, a worldwide cultural phenomenon at others; a cornerstone of communities that bring people from around the globe together, or just the best place to play with a friend for an evening of bawdy brawling. Street Fighter matters.


Street Fighter 30th Anniversary Collection gets that, and gives the series the respect it deserves. It does a more effective job than any harsh words online could in proving just how bad The Final Challengers was; for around the same price as that game, here you're getting some 12 complete, perfectly ported games culled from the series in its pixel art prime, taking you on a journey from 1987's slightly unconvincing original Street Fighter all the way through to 1999's Street Fighter 3: Third Strike - the end of one particular, fascinating path Capcom elected to take the series, and a high watermark for 2D pixel art as a whole.


They're great games - the creaky original Street Fighter aside, of course, though its presence as a curio is more than welcome - but you knew that anyway. No-one really needs reminding of the brilliance of Street Fighter 2, which remains just as vital today as it was upon its release in 1991, of the mastery and hard-edged challenge of Street Fighter 3 Third Strike or of the generosity and the vibrancy of the Alpha series which climaxed with Street Fighter Alpha 3's vast roster of playable characters (which is capped at 28 fighters here, sadly, seeing as it's the vanilla version that's offered rather than the Upper update which added the likes of Fei Long, Dee Jay and T.Hawk). 30th Anniversary Collection presents near-flawless versions of the arcade originals, and while they're fantastic to play, it proves just as fascinating charting the evolution of the series throughout its 90s pomp.

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Cultist Simulator

Cultist Simulator is about forbidden knowledge, forgotten histories and ill-advised pacts with entities who aren't so much gods as unsettling cosmic frequencies, felt rather than understood, but it would be nothing without its monotony. Starting the game, you are confronted not with a squiggle of eldritch geometry but a wooden table covered by a worn leather mat, its scratches picked out by a strange cobalt light. An hourglass timer begins to drain away, sucking Fund cards out of your hand with every revolution; you counter by plugging Reason, Passion or Health cards into a Work timer to generate more. This mundane rhythm keeps up throughout the ensuing 20 or 30 hours, as cards and timers of all kinds slowly cover the tabletop, each accompanied by a gravid yet delicate prose snippet about the game's curious, alternate-1920s England. It's the bassline for an experience that is as much an investigation of mind-killing drudgery as it is a homage to the wayward imagination - indeed, an experience that derives much of its mystery and threat from their inseparability.

Many of the challenges and setbacks you'll face during your career as a cultist will be crushingly ordinary: injuries in the workplace, humiliating demotions, a fatigue mechanic which renders certain cards briefly unusable, periods of bleakness or dissociation that may doom your character if you let them fester for too long. You'll deal with bullying superiors as an underpaid bank clerk, paint rapturous vistas in your spare hours that nobody buys, push paper as a police inspector, haul cargo as a labourer.

Sometimes you'll dream of endless roads, locked doors or being trapped under wormy floorboards. Often, you'll dream of nothing whatsoever. And eventually, if you're tenacious enough, you'll break through to a comfortable plateau, with a sustainable income, robust health and a little time for hobbies such as walking and reading. One of the endgame options lets you commit fully to this existence, to a blameless everyday world of graft, rest and idle recreation, a world without either light or shadow. Of all Cultist Simulator's deadly temptations, this could be the most seductive. It is, perhaps, the closest thing the game offers to happiness.

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Eurogamer

TT Games is taking its long-running Lego series down a dark path with the announcement of Lego DC Super Villains, coming to PS4, Xbox One, PC and Switch on October 16th.

As its name makes clear, Lego DC Super Villains ditches superheroes and focusses its attention - in typically flamboyant, slapstick style - on the ever-appealing miscreants that make their lives a constant misery.

"Justice League has disappeared," explains publisher Warner Bros, "leaving Earth's protection to a newcomer group of heroes from a parallel universe, proclaiming themselves as the 'Justice Syndicate'. Renowned DC Super-Villains from the 'Legion Of Doom' discover Earth's newest heroes may not be the heroes they claim to be."

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Eurogamer

UPDATE: A new report suggests that Bethesda's freshly unveiled Fallout 76 is an online survival RPG, heavily inspired by the likes of DayZ and Rust.

These latest details comes via Kotaku's Jason Schreier, whose sources describe Fallout 76 as "an experimental new entry" in Bethesda's long-running franchise. The game was seemingly conceived as a prototype for a multiplayer version of Fallout 4, although much has apparently changed since then.

Fallout 76 is said to retain Fallout 4's base-building - a staple of many online survival games - and will feature a range of other, currently unspecified, multiplayer mechanics. It's reportedly being developed by Bethesda's main Maryland team, responsible for the likes of Fallout 4 and Skyrim, and at the company's new Austin branch, formerly BattleCry Studios.

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PixelJunk™ Monsters 2

Tower defence games are tricky things, I reckon. At their worst - and their worst is generally still pretty entertaining - they can feel a bit like clicker games. You buy stuff and place stuff and the enemies obligingly shuffle on through your maze, but the challenge has been eaten away by the sheer overwhelming force on your side and so you're left just watching the numbers change - one side's health being whittled down, another side's loot slowly pooling. You get a hint of the hidden life of maths, sure - the way that one enemy, placed in the middle of a line of troops, will make it much further on their health than those in front or behind do - but it's an empty, sugary sort of game when the designer's attention starts to slide.


In PixelJunk Monsters the designer's attention never did, however, and in PixelJunk Monsters 2 it still doesn't. This is an odd sequel - many things are completely unchanged, while a handful of the tweaks can initially feel a little arbitrary - but there is beauty in it nonetheless. Some of the beauty lies with the original design, but there's one big addition that, for my money, makes things surprisingly fresh.

Superficially, it is business as usual. You're Tikiman, running around in a series of cheery environments, protecting your village and its inhabitants from wave after wave of invaders. The art style has moved on, from flat cartoons in the first game to something claylike and chunky here - an old children's animation perhaps, not quite as weird and Soviet as the aesthetic employed in Q-Games' glorious oddity The Tomorrow Children, perhaps, but still something that invokes stop-motion handicraft with its harshly-lit sets and plasticine models with pipe-cleaner skeletons tucked inside.

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