Given the immense popularity of Balatro since its launch last year, it was really only a matter of time before it was unofficially ported over to other systems via homebrew modding.
Well, that time is upon us, folks. Thanks to Haynster over on Github (via GBATemp), Balatro is now available to play on the Nintendo DS. Installation instructions are available, and you’ll need to make sure you have the MicroLUA homebrew development software.
The Burglar, a familiar sight for those of us who’ve spent time with any of the older Sims games, is sneaking back into your life as part of the latest update for The Sims 4.
Rolling out across PC and console, the update (re)introduces Robin Banks, which means it’s time to hide your valuables well out of sight. She only strikes at night, usually only sneaking into homes when everyone’s asleep, but she has been known to attempt a daring heist even when Sims are awake… so be alert.
To combat the thief, Sims can make use of the handy burglar alarm. If Banks trips it, the police are guaranteed to turn up in time to arrest her and recover your goods. But even homes without an alarm can call the police, you just have to be quick about it. Or there’s vigilante justice, of course. It’s your call.
By design, burglar events are fairly unusual, but if you live for chaos, activate Lot Challenge Heist Havoc to boost your odds.
“We are so thrilled to finally bring the Burglar back into The Sims universe,” The Sims’ team wrote. “Sending a special shout out to our full team for making this a reality. Robin Banks isn’t just ready to rob your Sims’ houses — she’s here to steal your hearts too! What better way to celebrate The Sims 25th Birthday than with this nostalgic yet fresh addition? We hope you’re as excited as we are to see what kind of chaos Robin Banks will bring to your households.”
In EA’s Q2 earning report, published towards the end of last year, we learned that The Sims 4, then a premium game, took four years to reach 20 million unique players. When it first went free-to-play in 2022, however, it gained a whopping 31 million new players out of the gate and reached a total of 85 million as of May 2024. And no, there’s currently still no plans for The Sims 5 at this time… Plum!
Vikki Blake is a reporter, critic, columnist, and consultant. She’s also a Guardian, Spartan, Silent Hillian, Legend, and perpetually High Chaos. Find her at BlueSky.
The upcoming reboot for Fable, the fantasy role-playing game of British chortles ‘n’ chuckles, has been delayed until next year, says head of Xbox Game Studios Craig Duncan. Developers Playground Games need “more time” to create the world of Albion, it turns out, but Xbox has offered a sparse sprinking of of game footage as compensation for the delay. There’s nothing particularly mind-blowing among it. Some combat, some vistas. But it’s something.
Tekken 8 veteran Anna Williams is returning to the roster, and while her redesign seems to be going down well with most fans, some aren’t so sure and are even comparing her new look to Santa Claus.
When one fan asked Tekken game director and chief producer Katsuhiro Harada if the development team could bring back the “old Anna design,” Harada slammed the criticism, saying: “If you prefer the old design, I am not taking those away from you.”
“While 98% of the fans are welcoming this, there will always be people like you,” Harada wrote. “I understand and sympathize that it may not suit your personal taste, but if you prefer the old design, past works already exist. I am not taking those away from you.
“Also, you refer to yourself as ‘Anna fans,’ as if you represent all Anna fans, but you should express your opinion as an individual.
“You threaten to quit if she isn’t brought back. You complain the moment she is brought back. You demand that she be reverted after she has been completely redesigned from scratch, including her model and framework,” he added. “And if she actually were reverted, you’d just say, ‘That’s recycling!’
“Either way, your method of expressing your opinion and the content of your argument are entirely unconstructive, utterly pointless, and, above all, disrespectful to the other Anna fans who are genuinely looking forward to her.”
When another commenter pointed out that Tekken “hasn’t rereleased one of [its] older games into modern systems with functional netcode” and summarized Harada’s response as “a joke,” the director said: “Thank you for POINTLESS reply. You yourself are the joke. MUTED.”
As mentioned, reaction to Anna’s new design is largely positive, although there are some complaints, mostly around her outfit. “Before she was announced I was hoping for an edgier, angry, violent Anna out for revenge for her fiance’s death and so I’m quit happy with this design!” said redditor AngryBreadRevolution.
“The hair is growing on me. It really suits the outfit and personality well. It wont look good on all her outfits naturally, but her original bob will still be available.
“Coat was ruined for me when it was pointed out the resemblance to Christmas. The leotard, tights, boots and gloves all look fantastic though so looking forward to being able to take off the coat.”
“Love everything but the white feathers,” said troonpins. “It’s giving Santa Clause.”
“Aside from looking like Santa Claus, she looks a lot younger than she did in Tekken 7 and before,” added Cheap_Ad4756. “She looks like less of a ‘woman’ now and more like a girl. I don’t get the dominatrix vibe from her at all anymore.”
“Horrible,” declared spiralqq. “It’s another overdesigned T8 look, feels like almost every costume in this game lacks a real focal point and everyone is just decked out in 100 bulky accessories from head to toe. I’d like it a lot more without the coat, or at the very least if the whole outfit didn’t look like Santa cosplay. You can’t have a bright red coat with white fur trims and a black belt and read as anything other than Santa.”
Tekken 8 has sold 3 million copies a year from release, achieving the sales milestone at a faster pace than Tekken 7, which took 10 years to sell 12 million copies worldwide.
“Tekken 8 is an amazing new entry in the long-running series,” we wrote in IGN’s Tekken 8 review, awarding it 9/10. “Interesting tweaks to its classic fighting systems, a full suite of fun offline modes, great new characters, incredible training tools, and a vastly improved online experience all add up to a fighting game I will be playing for many years to come. By honoring its legacy, but continuing to move forward, Tekken 8 manages to stand out as something special.”
Vikki Blake is a reporter, critic, columnist, and consultant. She’s also a Guardian, Spartan, Silent Hillian, Legend, and perpetually High Chaos. Find her at BlueSky.
I can’t be certain, but the music for Castle V Castle sounds very much like it was made on an old Roland TR-808 drum machine or equivalent plug-in. Your ears will be familiar with the 808 even if your brain isn’t – it’s about as ubiquitous in hip hop as the Amen break. That’s actually quite fitting, because this minimalist strategy game has the rhythms of a call-and-response rap battle. That’s something you could say for all I-go-you-gos to an extent, but the bellicose back and forth here is especially sizzling, snappy, and scintillating.
(The game music is very different from the trailer music.)
In first-person stealth game Skin Deep you are a “deep freeze insurance commando” who gets defrosted whenever pirates board the space vessel you’re aboard. The ships you work are crewed by talking house cats with big personalities and a poor track record in information security. It’s your job, when things go wrong, to save them from their captors. We’ve seen a couple of trailers for this sci-fi Die Hard homage before but now we have a full demo to blast through, in which you can throw fishbones at elevator switches and overflow an entire laundry room with soap suds, useful if you want your enemies slip up and donk their heads. Just be careful, because it’ll do the same to you. The demo takes about 90 minutes (if you’re taking your time like me), but it already feels like Blendo Games at their most playful.
Warner Bros are closing three video game development studios as they seek “to get back to a ‘fewer but bigger franchises’ strategy”, according to a leaked staff memo from Warner Bros head of games and streaming JB Perrette. The three studios in question are MultiVersus developer Player First Games, free-to-play specialists Warner Bros Games San Diego, and Monolith, the 30-year-old studio behind No One Lives Forever, F.E.A.R., Condemned: Criminal Origins, Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor, and a troubled forthcoming Wonder Woman adaptation that has now been cancelled.
The Switch has a growing library of Game Boy Advance titles and Konami has expanded this with its latest eShop release.
It’s the GBA action-platformer Ninja Five-O (also known as Ninja Cop). This Switch version was originally announced last month and you can download the title right now for USD $24.99/GBP £19.99 (or your regional equivalent). Physical copies were also announced, but have already sold out.
Hot on the heels of the global success of Marvel Rivals and with other popular live-service games like Naraka: Bladepoint and Once Human under its belt, NetEase has turned its attention to the hero shooter genre with FragPunk. New internal development team Bad Guitar Studio is made up of young, hardcore FPS fans, and after joining them for a one-hour play session where we tried a new character and map revealed exclusively in this preview, the team’s eye for detail is clear to see.
FragPunk’s main game mode is the 5v5 Shard Clash mode. On its surface, this mode resembles your typical Overwatch-like hero shooter skirmish, but it also pulls from a variety of influences to mix up the gameplay. The rounds in this mode are closer to the bomb-defusal objectives of Counter Strike, with one team planting bombs at specified locations and the other defending, with relatively small arenas that keep rounds tight and focused.
As with any hero shooter, players can choose from a selection of characters – named Lancers – who each have a selection of unique skills, meaning plenty to learn in terms of individual character preferences and team makeup. For our session, we tried the newly unveiled character Chum, a stone robot who is accompanied by a mechanical pet angler fish named Chomper. In addition to using the game’s arsenal of satisfying guns, Chum can toss projectiles similar to sticky mines and smoke grenades, as well as sending Chomper out as support. Chomper can track and bite enemies for multiple low-damage attacks, essentially like a walking turret, or can be modified with pet treats that make it explode on contact or trail a thick smokescreen in its wake, adding several strategic layers that felt fun to mix up.
Chum is a stone robot who is accompanied by a mechanical pet angler fish named Chomper.
And being made of stone, Chum is also a strong defence character, making him a great all-round option for newcomers.
Many other Lancer abilities are not only offensive but defensive or tactical – walls for cover, traps, speed boosts, skills that highlight enemies on the map, and so on. We tried several Lancers, and found a varied effect on gameplay. Using Nitro, with her directly-controllable four-legged drone and gun turrets, we were able to rack up multiple assists; while Axon was another favourite thanks to his more aggressive selection of skills, including projectile bombs and a cool guitar-gun. In the Lancer selection screen, you can watch a short video clip for each ability to help you quickly grasp what they do.
But what really sets FragPunk apart is its Shard Cards system. At the start of each round, each team is randomly assigned a set of three cards, which they can swap in and out, each of which changes the rules of the round for your entire team. Some are simple stat percentage boosts or buffs, while others do things like increasing the size of your enemies’ heads, decreasing your own or equipping helmets, affecting the difficulty of headshots for that round. Others still are much more unusual, and completely change the gameplay.
For example, one Shard Card gave our team a kind of proximity detector so that we got an aural and visual signal whenever an enemy was nearby, while another slowly regenerated our health gauge, both of which gave us a welcome advantage. Some cards affect the environment, such as shrouding the map in fog that adds tension as enemies are harder to spot. Others have active effects – press the Z key to swap health bars with an enemy, or to swap gear with them, or to jump into a parallel world where you can essentially run unseen to a new location and then pop back into the fight to ambush your foes.
It’s a lot to take in. You only have around 30 seconds to finalise your hand for each round, and at first each of the 150+ cards will be new to you. “We deliberately made the rule for each card as simple as possible so that they can be quick to understand,” Creative Director Xin Chang told us. “We also made the description text for each card as short as possible, and used visual design to make its effects more obvious.”
The ruleset-shuffling Shard Cards were inspired not only by other videogames, but also by sports.
After a few rounds, the Shard Cards system began to make sense, and really paid off in terms of making each round feel different. We were forced to engage differently with every round, rethinking strategies and responding not only to our team’s current hand but also the enemy team’s.
Interestingly, the ruleset-shuffling Shard Cards were inspired not only by other videogames, but also by sports. The development team’s building has a large gymnasium with facilities for activities such as basketball, table tennis and badminton, its walls adorned with photos of the developers in competition.
Chang explained, “I play soccer and basketball, so I like games with a two-team system. I also watch a lot of NBA, and they often make changes to the rules to keep the sport interesting. Based on that idea, I also wanted to have a system of tweaking the rules in our game.”
Sports also influenced the team’s approach to FragPunk’s maps. Level Designer An Yuan added, “In level design, we divide the map into areas that are good for attack or defence phases, so that the player has to keep moving. It’s kind of like basketball, where you have different spatial design around the court that suits the different roles of the players. We applied that concept in our game, and also in the Shard Cards, which can turn a good hiding place into a bad one.”
FragPunk also features a Duel mode. When a match ends in a tie, it changes to a one-on-one showdown, a little bit like the mano a mano face-offs in Call of Duty: Warzone’s Gulag, but inspired by soccer’s penalty shootouts. Each player takes their turn in the queue for a series of short and sharp winner-stays-on rounds in small but vertically layered arenas. With all our teammates spectating during our turn, we totally felt the pressure, making for a fun and different tie-breaker mini-game. It’s so cool, the devs even added it as a separate standalone mode called Duel Master.
Each map has interactive gimmicks that players can use strategically to gain the upper hand. First, we tried the newly unveiled map Dongtian. This is the Hangzhou, China-based dev team’s stab at an Asian-flavoured map, and its two bomb sites can be rotated by players for tactical advantage. When the switch in the middle of the map is activated by a player, the core cover at the bomb site rotates, altering strategies for both the offensive and defensive teams.
Each map has interactive gimmicks that players can use strategically to gain the upper hand.
“We want to use these rotating walls to switch the edge between the attack team and the defence team,” explained Yuan. “So we encourage players to fight for that core area to maintain their edge or get the edge for themselves.”
Other maps have their own gimmicks – BlackMarket’s manually controlled bridge allows players to change the map’s layout and even pull the ground from under their opponents’ feet; Akhet has an underground river that allows sneaky players to move directly from the middle area to a bomb site; and Tundra has magic portals that instantly zap players between gates to outmanoeuvre the other team. It was fun to explore these maps, and clearly players who take the time to learn them properly will gain an advantage.
Dongtian is the home setting for the Lancer Kismet. Narrative Director Wenhe Fu explained, “The game has a multiverse concept, which allows us to have each character come from quite a different universe. We’ll take some time in future phases to introduce those background details to players.”
Built into a mountain and dotted with ancient wooden temple buildings, mystical statues and wizened trees with gracefully warped trunks, Dongtian’s Eastern aesthetic brings a smart visual twist to FragPunks’ colourful world.
Art Director Yiming Li told us, “We wanted to blend ancient buildings that look like they could come from China with near-future science and technology elements, as well as some religious elements. While each map will have its own distinctive cultural features, we want them all to fit into the game’s overall sci-fi feeling. It’s like in Star Wars: Each of the civilisations are very different, but when they are viewed as a whole, they also exist under a harmonious sci-fi setting.”
And that brings us to FragPunk’s visuals. This is a really gorgeous game. The punk-influenced and sci-fi-tinged fluorescent aesthetic is rich and appealing, and its kill animations are punctuated by dazzling bursts of colour. Its maps are extremely readable, and player characters pop, making it easy to follow the action. Even its menus are pretty to look at, with the flashy presentation you’d expect from a Persona game or Street Fighter 6, with bold layouts accented by graffiti scribbles. It really stands out in the hero shooter space.
FragPunk will be free to play, with a small selection of Lancers available at the start so that players can learn them gradually, unlocking more as they go through in-game currency accrued through play or paid microtransactions. Other optional purchases will be strictly cosmetic. We’ll have to wait until launch to see how the service side pans out – other NetEase games like Marvel Rivals and Naraka: Bladepoint have seen complaints about pricing, but that aside they have managed to keep players satisfied, so hopefully that’s a good sign.
In addition to the Shard Clash and Duel modes we tried, FragPunk will feature a mix of modes at or after launch that are targeted at both hardcore and casual players, including one where all players are forced to use the same Lancer, or melee weapons only, and so on. The development team is apparently largely made up of pro-level players, but it’s clear they have also taken steps to make the game accessible to newbies and even streamers and their viewers.
Xbox has shifted to a new strategy where it’s now bringing more first-party IP to other platforms including Nintendo’s devices.
We’ve already heard from Phil Spencer how the plan is to support the ‘Switch 2’ when it arrives, and now Xbox Game Studios’ head Craig Duncan has elaborated on the company’s “multiplatform” approach going forward.
