Against The Storm left early access late last year, but has just now received its first major post-release patch. Update 1.1 “isn’t as spectacular” as its developers had first hoped, but it does buff the roguelite citybuilder with som new art, UI improvements and quality-of-life tweaks, as well as new orders to make early stage settlement building “a little more interesting.”
Peanut Butter & Gyromite.
Peanut Butter the Shiba Inu is officially the best boy in the world. This adorable pup has made history by completing a speedrun on the world stage at Games Done Quick’s bi-annual speedrunning event, AGDQ 2024.
With the help of his owner and human speedrunner JSR_, Peanut Butter has been training to wow the world with a speedrun of Gyromite. You know, one of only two games that are officially compatible with R.O.B., that NES toy robot accessory. JSR_ has been chronicling the journey over on his YouTube channel (in an amusingly titled ‘PB & J‘ playlist). And since getting into AGDQ 2024 last October, the hype for this run has been building.
Read the full article on nintendolife.com
Hey Xbox Insiders! We have a new Xbox Update Preview releasing to the Beta ring today.
It’s important we note that some updates made in these preview OS builds include background improvements that ensure a quality and stable build for Xbox consoles. We will continue to post these release notes, even when the noticeable changes to the UI are minimal or behind the scenes, so you’re aware when updates are coming to your device.
Details can be found below!
We have exciting news! Beta users can expect something new coming to their Xbox Update Preview.
Xbox Wireless Controller – Thumbstick Calibration
For users in the US who have independently replaced the circuit board on their Xbox Wireless Controller and Xbox Elite Wireless Controller Series 2 or users in all regions experiencing minor thumbstick issues, we now offer a user-guided self-calibration tool for thumbsticks through the Xbox Accessories App.
Please be aware this Xbox Update Preview includes the following experience or feature updates.
Capture & Share
Thanks to all the great feedback Xbox Insiders provide and the hard work of Xbox engineers, we are happy to announce the following fixes have been implemented with this build:
Games
System
While known issues may have been listed in previous Xbox Insider Release Notes, they are not being ignored! However, it may take Xbox engineers more time to find a solution. If you experience any of these issues, we ask that you please follow any guidance provided and file feedback with Report a Problem.
Audio
Networking
System – Profiles
As always, be sure to use Report a problem to keep us informed of any issues you encounter. We may not be able to respond to everyone, but the data we’ll gather is crucial to finding a resolution.
If you’re an Xbox Insider looking for support, please visit the community subreddit. Official Xbox staff, moderators, and fellow Xbox Insiders are there to help with your concerns.
When posting to the subreddit, please look through the most recent posts to see if your issue has already been posted or addressed. We always recommend adding to existing threads with the same issue before posting a new one. This helps us support you the best we can! Also, don’t forget to use “Report a Problem” before posting – the information shared in both places helps us understand your issue better.
Thank you to every Xbox Insider in the subreddit today and welcome to the community if you’re just joining us! We love that it has become such a friendly and community-driven hub of conversation and support.
For more information regarding the Xbox Insider Program follow us on Twitter. Keep an eye on future Xbox Insider Release Notes for more information regarding your Xbox Update Preview ring!
The post Xbox Insider Release Notes – Beta (2402.240111-2200) appeared first on Xbox Wire.
AMD’s flagship RDNA 2 graphics card, the RX 6900 XT, continues to drop in price over in the US. Right now you can pick this once-fastest-ever Radeon GPU for just $500 when you buy an open box model from Newegg. That’s outstanding, given that this card cost twice as much when it debuted in 2020.
This is the fancy AsRock Phantom Gaming D model too, which brings a snazzy design and a faster 2340MHz boost clock (versus 2250MHz on the vanilla spec).
Blizzard has revealed the next chapter in its live-service ARPG, Diablo 4, and it revolves around a really handy mechanical spider.
Dubbed the Season of the Construct, the upcoming update will send players into the perilous and trap-riddled vaults of the legendary Zoltun Kulle in search of treasure, battling demonically possessed mechanical constructs in the process.
The main power grind will center on your new robotic companion, a spider-like friend called the Seneschal who comes with its own management UI and can be customized with magical stones of different rarities and power levels to alter its behaviors and abilities to your liking. With nearly 40 different stones to collect, there will be a wide variety of options for how your multi-legged buddy can complement your playstyle.
“You can make a build on the utility side that’s there to suppot and healing you. You can also build out one that does a little more defense and get a combination of stones that intercept any incoming projectiles and further modify that to pull all enemies in for a big hit,” lead designer on Diablo 4 season 3 Dan Tanguay told IGN. “We’ve tried to bake in a lot of possibilities there for players to discover.”
Season 3 also brings some hotly anticipated quality of life changes, the most noticable of which is WASD key control support for more direct control over your heroes on PC — seemingly a necessity in a season that will feature so many deadly traps that you would really be best off avoiding.
There will also be a plethora of competitive leaderboards driven by ladder-based trials called The Gauntlet, where players compete for a high score, the mightest of which will be greanted “a permanent home in the Hall of the Ancients,” and medals to show off on their profiles.
Other notable additions include an extra stash tab to store your ever-increasing pile of loot, and a reworking of Helltide events so that you don’t have to wait for short windows to engage in one of the Diablo 4 endgame’s most profitable events.
Diablo 4: Season of the Construct will launch on January 23rd.
Travis Northup is a writer for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter @TieGuyTravis and read his games coverage here.
Houston, we have a new obsession.
Soapbox features enable our individual writers and contributors to voice their opinions on hot topics and random stuff they’ve been chewing over. Today, Kate looks back on a 2023 game from Rocket Rat that very nearly slipped through our net…
Hey, you. If I’ve pitched this title correctly, you’re here because, like me, you are a thrall to the roguelike/lite deckbuilding genre. You’re in the right place, my friend, and I won’t waste your time: Today, we’re here to talk about Cobalt Core, one of the most underrated games of last year.
Read the full article on nintendolife.com
Back in December, Creative Assembly posted a lengthy apology to players for their recent handling of the Total War strategy series, in particular Total War: Warhammer 3 and Total War: Pharoah. Seeking to smooth down feathers ruffled by overpricing and buggy launches, to pick out two of the biggest fan complaints, the developers offered to – amongst other things – make Pharoah’s first paid DLC pack a free update.
That free update is now upon us, miladies and milords. Available January 25th, it’s called High Tides, and introduces two new playable factions with their own units and gods and some additional campaign mechanics. Here’s a trailer.
It’s been almost 30 years since Lara Croft took her first snowy steps in the mountains of Peru. In about 30 days, PlayStation players will get to re-experience Lara’s first three globe-trotting adventures, with a fresh look and feel in Tomb Raider I-III Remastered on PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5.
How did we get here? That story takes us to Austin, TX in 1998.
A burgeoning video game company, Aspyr, launches Tomb Raider II on Macintosh computers. Aspyr continued with the Tomb Raider franchise until 2003, launching Tomb Raider, Tomb Raider III, Tomb Raider: The Last Revelation, Tomb Raider: Chronicles, and Tomb Raider: The Angel of Darkness.
We’ve always wanted to revisit these titles, but we always debated the right approach. For years, we worked through the right balance of preservation and modernization. And once we felt we nailed it, we got in touch with our friends at Crystal Dynamics.
As Crystal Dynamics continues to expand the Tomb Raider Franchise, the timing seemed perfect to reintroduce audiences to the games that started it all. We wanted to both honor the foundations of the franchise and make accessible to modern audiences the original games in all their glory.
What would the balance of preservation and modernization look like? We call it Tomb Raider I-III Remastered Starring Lara Croft.
Within pre-production, we divided the conversation into three buckets: engineering, gameplay, and art. With these categories in mind, we led our conversations in the same order.
At the outset, we knew we would use the original source code and engine. Magic can’t simply be rebuilt. A critical feature for any updates we made was to allow the users to toggle back to the original look and feel for Tomb Raider I, II, and III.
It’s a love letter to all of our memories of these games, but it’s also truly fascinating to see how far hardware pushed in the ‘90s to make Tomb Raider work. Preserving that experience will continue to inspire engineers of today and tomorrow to push games to be more immersive and memorable.
We had a firm belief that the gameplay of Tomb Raider I, II, and III is timeless, and with our use of the existing source code, we had every jump, secret, enemy, and puzzle exactly as the original development team designed and intended.
So the conversation evolved into: how do we surprise and delight these fans? And that’s where we started brainstorming additions instead of revisions.
For our modern controller settings, we take inspiration from the Legend, Anniversary, and Underworld era of Tomb Raider. These changes are felt mostly in the way Lara moves – the right stick has full camera control and Lara moves directionally based on camera position.
Just like our approach to the graphical presentation, the original tank-style controls are still available to players via a menu toggle.
One of Tomb Raider’s strengths was the minimal UI. However, this can be frustrating for tougher bosses with massive amounts of health. We added a health bar to let you know if you should swap to the grenade launcher or if you should keep soaking pistol damage.
While the menus in Tomb Raider used 3D models for the health kit and ammo, the in-game assets were flat 2D sprites. This was a legacy compromise that we’ve adjusted to give a little more umph to item pick-ups.
This is a big moment for the Tomb Raider community, so we made sure to pack in as much content as possible. We’re excited to say there are over 200 trophies to earn including (my personal favorite) locking the Butler in the freezer. Sorry, Winston! See below for a sneak peak of a few you can look forward to discovering!
Exploring environments in Tomb Raider is magical. We want you to be able to share these environments and iconic moments, so we’ve added a robust photo mode to pose Lara, freeze gameplay, toggle between classic and modern graphics, and showcase these environments. We’re super excited to see what the community puts together with these modes.
So much of what we love about Tomb Raider is discovery, and we don’t want to spoil that.
Once we finalized the engineering and gameplay intent, it was time to move on to our biggest challenge and changes for the project—the art.
Our philosophy here was rather straightforward; we want the games to look the way they did in your mind. We knew we were on the right track in our early playtests because some play testers didn’t even know they were playing with the modern art toggled on.
We’ve worked hand-in-hand with Crystal Dynamics on the following modern art updates:
We send our admiration and thanks to the Tomb Raider community for inspiring us to work on this lovingly restored edition of Tomb Raider I-III. We’ll see you on February 14.
Pre-orders are available now on PlayStation Store.
Developer MGP Studios and publisher Red Deer.Games have announced that Project Downfall, their upcoming retro-themed cyberpunk first-person shooter, will be released on Nintendo Switch, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X|S on February 2. Watch the release date trailer above, and check out screenshots in the gallery below.
MGP describes Project Downfall as such: “Project Downfall is an action-filled, pixelated shooter set in a cyberpunk world, where the present is drastically different from ours. The players will be thrown into the life of Johnny Wick’s lookalike and smashed with gunfights left and right, where both reflexes and tactical thinking will be of the essence.”
The developers also promise a “non-linear plot that reacts with the players choices and moral decisions.” It’s already available on PC if you’d like to check it out there.
Ryan McCaffrey is IGN’s executive editor of previews and host of both IGN’s weekly Xbox show, Podcast Unlocked, as well as our monthly(-ish) interview show, IGN Unfiltered. He’s a North Jersey guy, so it’s “Taylor ham,” not “pork roll.” Debate it with him on Twitter at @DMC_Ryan.
After teasing a 3D sequel when Prison Architect received its final update last May, developers Double Eleven and publishers Paradox Interactive have announced that, yep, Prison Architect 2 is indeed a thing that is happening – and in 3D, no less. Prisons will now have multiple floors to police, as well as a whole new inmate behaviour system to navigate along the way that will feed into gang warfare, escapes and other budding management problems. It’s coming out surprisingly soon, too, with its reveal trailer dating it for March 26th.
