Category: Video Games

Xbox Insider Release Notes – Omega (2311.240104-1615)

Hey Xbox Insiders! We have a new Xbox Update Preview coming to the Omega ring. 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 continue to post these release notes, even when the noticeable changes to the UI are minimal, so you’re aware when updates are coming to your device. Details can be found below!

Xbox Insider Release Notes

System Update Details:

  • OS Version: XB_FLT_2311ZN25398.2922.240104-1615
  • Available: 4 p.m. PT – January 9, 2024
  • Mandatory: 4 p.m. PT – January 10, 2024

Note: This update may not occur automatically before it has already become mandatory. You can always find the most current update as soon as it is available by opening the Guide > Profile & system > Settings > System > Updates.

Remember: Newly enrolled users in this ring are not guaranteed to receive all early updates, but they’ll receive the update prior to the GA release. Additionally, a small subset of users may remain on their current GA build once they enroll until the next system update becomes mandatory for the public. Visit the Xbox Insider Program FAQ to learn more.

Fixes Implemented

Thanks to the hard work of Xbox engineers, we are happy to announce the following fixes have been implemented for this build:

Capture & Share

  • Fixed an issue where capturing screenshots or game clips immediately after launching a title could prevent subsequent captures from completing as expected until the console was restarted.

Games

  • Additional fixes to address unexpected loss of saved game progress in various titles.

System

  • Various stability and performance fixes.

Known Issues

We understand some issues have been listed in previous Xbox Insider Release Notes. These items aren’t being ignored, but it will take Xbox engineers more time to find a solution.

Audio

  • We have received reports of users experiencing intermittent issues with audio across the dashboard, games, and apps. If you have experienced issues, be sure you have the latest firmware updates for your TV and other equipment. If you’re unsure, you may need to contact the manufacturer for assistance.
    • Note: If you continue to experience issues after applying the latest firmware updates, please submit feedback via Report a Problem immediately with the “Reproduce with advanced diagnostics” option, then select the category “Console experiences” and “Console Audio Output Issues”. Be sure to include as much information as possible:
      • When did the issue start?
      • Did you lose audio just in the game/app or system audio as well?
      • Does changing the audio format resolve the issue? If yes, what was the format before and after?
      • Does rebooting resolve the issue?
      • What does your setup include? Equipment, layout, etc.
      • And any additional information you can provide to reproduce the problem.

Networking

  • We are investigating reports of an issue where the console may not connect to their network as expected on boot. If you experience this, be sure to report the issue via Report a Problem as soon as you’re able.

Make sure to use Report a problem to keep us informed of your issue. We may not be able to respond to everyone, but the data we’ll gather is crucial to finding a resolution.

What Happens to Your Feedback

If you’re an Xbox Insider looking for support, please reach out to 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 most recent posts to see if your issue has already been posted or addressed. We always recommend adding to threads with the same issue before posting a brand new one. This helps us support you the best we can! 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. 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 – Omega (2311.240104-1615) appeared first on Xbox Wire.

Succession Star Brian Cox Recapped the Story of Tekken and the Internet Is Delighted

Succession star Brian Cox partnered with Bandai Namco to retell the events of the Tekken series ahead of Tekken 8’s launch later this month – and the internet is both confused and delighted by it.

Basically, eight mainline installments might scare players who are looking to hop into the legendary fighting game franchise this late into its existence. It’s a lot of required reading, but thankfully, Cox has us covered with five minutes of storytelling that explains why these characters can’t stop throwing each other off cliffs.

It’s best if you don’t ask why or how this collaboration came to be and instead just take it for what it is as Logan Roy himself recounts the highlights from various iconic locations. That’s what most of the internet has done, at least.

“So surreal to see an actor like Brian Cox say things like ‘the devil gene’ and ‘the king of iron fist tournament,’” Matt McMuscles said on X/Twitter, “but I kinda love it.”

“I thought they made Brian Cox a playable fighter and almost lost my fucking mind,” Matt Post said.

“This is the best kind of video game marketing, where it’s like word association to come up with an idea,” GameSpot’s Tamoor Hussain joked. “Tekken. Bad dads. Succession. Logan Roy. BRIAN COX. OH MY GOD WE’VE GOT IT.”

Suffice it to say, the internet is have a good time with the extremely unlikely combination of classically trained Shakespearean actor Brian Cox and Tekken. See more delighted reactions below.

Cox’s bout in the world of Tekken is far from the first time a celebrity showed up to promote a video game. Some recent examples include Supernatural and The Boys star Jensen Ackles’ promotional trailer for 2023’s Atomic Heart. There’s also the time Mark Hamill returned to his sci-fi home with a trailer for Star Wars Jedi: Survivor. The Boys’ Karl Urban also helped promote Armored Core IV: Fires of Rubicon with his own video last year.

Tekken 8 launches for PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X | S on January 26.

Michael Cripe is a freelance contributor with IGN. He started writing in the industry in 2017 and is best known for his work at outlets such as The Pitch, The Escapist, OnlySP, and Gameranx.

Be sure to give him a follow on Twitter @MikeCripe.

Super Smash Bros. Chief Masahiro Sakurai Quitting YouTube in 2024

Super Smash Bros. creator Masahiro Sakurai is quitting YouTube sometime in 2024 despite just starting his Masahiro Sakurai on Creating Games channel in August 2022.

Sakurai quietly announced the end of his YouTube career in a belated New Year’s message. “It’s a bit late to be saying this, but Happy New Year,” Sakurai said. “I’m planning to wrap up Masahiro Sakurai on Creating Games sometime this year. Until then, I hope you’ll stay tuned.”

Sakurai began his YouTube channel less than 18 months ago as a developer diary of sorts, where he discussed the ins and outs of video game design and development.

He didn’t offer any reason for ending the channel, but fans are already speculating its related to the next Super Smash Bros. game at Nintendo.

Nothing has been announced, however, and Sakurai said previously he doesn’t know how the franchise can get any bigger or better than this entry, which even includes characters from beyond Nintendo like Sephiroth from Final Fantasy 7, Sora from Kingdom Hearts, Joker from Persona 5, Steve and Alex from Minecraft, and many more.

Sakurai offered some hope to fans earlier in January 2024 though, saying he’s still focused on creating games. Whether or not this means another Super Smash Bros. remains to be seen, but he’s made one thing clear: “I can’t imagine a Smash Bros. title without me.”

Image Credit: Masahiro Sakurai on Creating Games on YouTube

Ryan Dinsdale is an IGN freelance reporter. He’ll talk about The Witcher all day.

Talking Point: What Game Do You Wish You Could Forget?

(But in a good way).

Stop right there! We know what you’re thinking. You’re expecting a long list of games that we wish we had never played. The stinkers that took up 20 hours we’ll never get back. Well, you’re wrong!

We are not about to be a negative Nancy and dunk on some bad games just because we wish we could wipe them from our minds. This is about positively forgetting games.

Read the full article on nintendolife.com

Helldivers 2 PC specifications and crossplay support details revealed

We know it’s been a long wait but it’s finally time to reveal more about the PC release of Helldivers 2. We know what’s on your mind, first and foremost: Is it crossplay?

And we’re pleased to announce that Helldivers 2 supports crossplay! That means your teammates on PC can play with you on PS5 and vice versa. Community and teamwork are the most important pillars of Helldivers 2, and so it is essential to ensure players can work together regardless of the system they choose to use. Together we can celebrate victories, mourn losses, and liberate the galaxy without platform boundaries.


Helldivers 2 PC specifications and crossplay support details revealed

As part of this announcement, we’re also finally able to provide you with the minimum, recommended, performance, and ultra system specifications for PC players to ensure that no matter what kind of equipment your squad uses to play – PS5 or PC with a broad range of supported PC hardware – you’ll be able to spread Managed Democracy together.

Wondering if your PC can handle Helldivers 2? Here are our PC system specifications:

 MINIMUMRECOMMENDEDPERFORMANCEULTRA
AVG PERFORMANCE1080p @ 30 FPS1080p @ 60 FPS1440p @ 60FPS4K @ 60 FPS
GRAPHIC PRESETSLowMediumHighVery High
GPUNVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 Ti or AMD Radeon RX 470NVIDIA GeForce GTX 2060 or AMD Radeon RX 6600 XTNVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 or AMD Radeon RX 6800NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 Ti or AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX
CPUIntel Core i7-4790K or AMD Ryzen 5 1500XIntel Core i7-9700K or AMD Ryzen 7 3700XIntel Core i5-12600K or AMD Ryzen 7 5800X3DIntel Core i5-12600K or AMD Ryzen 7 5800X3D
RAM8GB DDR416GB DDR416GB DDR416GB DDR4
OSWindows 10 64-bitWindows 10 64-bitWindows 10 64-bitWindows 10 64-bit
STORAGE100GB HDD (7200rpm)100 GB SSD100 GB SSD100 GB SSD

Now you’re armed with crossplay and the required specs to go on your very first dive. It’s not much longer to wait, recruits: Helldivers 2 is launching on February 8, and pre-orders are open now. We can’t wait to see you on the battlefield!

PlayStation Network Account Required. Gameplay requires internet access and paid for PlayStation Plus membership (sold separately) for PS5. PlayStation Plus membership subject to recurring subscription fee taken automatically until cancellation. Age restrictions apply. Full terms: play.st/psplus-usageterms.

Microsoft Snaps Up ‘Pokémon-With-Guns’ Game Palworld for Game Pass, Release Date Confirmed

Palworld, the hotly anticipated monster-collecting RPG dubbed “Pokémon with guns”, finally has a release date as well as confirmation it’s coming to Game Pass.

In Palworld, players can capture over 100 “Pals”, fight bosses, and build bases. You use your Pals to do tasks for you so you can automate entire production lines. There’s open-world survival and crafting gameplay in there, too, for up to 32 players.

Palworld, developed by Craftopia maker Pocketpair, launches on Friday, January 19 on PC via Steam and the Microsoft Store, Xbox Series X and S, and Xbox One in early access form. According to its new trailer, Palworld is coming to Game Pass day-and-date across Xbox Series X and S, Xbox One, and Windows PC.

Palworld was originally revealed in a trailer in 2022, and immediately caught people’s attention with its familiar but very different take on a monster collecting game. Pocketpair said it expects Palworld to remain in early access for at least a year as it adds to the game and makes improvements.

Wesley is the UK News Editor for IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.

The Ryzen 9 5950X remains a productivity monster – and now it’s 52% off in the UK

When the Ryzen 9 5950X debuted in 2020, it was a staggeringly strong productivity and gaming CPU, with 16 cores and 32 threads of Zen 3 power for a princely £750. A little over three years later and next-gen Zen 4 CPUs are firmly here, but the 5950X remains the most powerful productivity CPU for the venerable AM4 platform.

That makes the 5950X a tempting upgrade option for anyone using an older Ryzen processor that wants to keep using their existing motherboard and RAM, and today this CPU has breached a new low-water mark: £360 on Amazon UK, 52% off its original recommended retail price. (It’s also a nearly-as-good 50% off at the US.)

Read more

Horrified: Greek Monsters Board Game Review

Back in 2019 the original Horrified gave families a frightfully good time at Halloween as well as putting design house Prospero Hall on the collective board gaming map. Its recipe of players cooperating to send various monsters from classic Universal movies back to their graves was enough of a hit to spawn a sequel, Horrified: American Monsters. Now it’s back for a third scary season running, with a move to the ancient world with Horrified: Greek Monsters (see it at Target).

What’s in the Box

Like all Prospero Hall games, Horrified: Greek Monsters has a quote printed on the back of the board to greet players when they first open the box. It’s a lovely touch that hasn’t been spoiled through familiarity. For this game, it’s more a scene-setting exercise, explaining that you’ve been chosen by the gods to rid the world of mythological monsters.

Beneath the fold-out board are the rest of the components. These consist of several punch-out sprues of cardboard tokens and character sheets, tracking sheets, and plastic figures for each of the game’s six monsters in various lurid colors, some nice dice in marbled blue, plastic stands for the cardboard standee figures and two decks of cards. There’s also a bag to store and draw the item chips from which, in contrast to the usual drawstring pouch supplied for this purpose, is a much more utilitarian self-standing affair.

Art-wise, these are solid, with an interesting style that mixes the classical art of the game’s theme with a comic-book vibe that’s common to the whole series. It doesn’t always work: the Hoplite character in particular looks bizarre, an armored punk rocker with a mohawk in place of a crested helmet. And in terms of quality, the card decks and monster sheets are a real disappointment. They’re very thin and flimsy to the point of being hard to handle, and they won’t stand up to repeat plays without some plastic protection, although that is in line with previous entries in the series.

Rules and How it Plays

Horrified: Greek Monsters retains the core of its predecessor and will be instantly familiar to anyone who’s played the original Horrified. Players must work together, spending actions to move across the board and collect items, in the hope of defeating monsters released from Pandora’s Box. Items can be spent either to protect yourself from monster attacks or to work toward banishing a monster from the board. One new addition in this version is the concept of lairs, four tokens you place face-down on the board and spend an item to flip face-up, and which are integral to defeating some of the foes.

The monsters all have very different methods required to destroy them, which are again different from those in the original, and this is where the game gets much of its charm. To defeat Medusa, for example, you must ensure that she sees her reflection in each of four mirrors placed on the board. You can force her to move by going to her location and spending an orange item, which lets you move her a number of spaces equal to the number printed on the item counter. After being reflected in all four mirrors, using further orange items to move her to her lair, she can then be defeated there by spending green items.

Monsters can also move after a player’s turn, which requires them to flip over the top card of the monster deck, place a specified number of items on the board, resolve an event, and move one or more monsters. They move toward the closest target, so as well as spending items to move Medusa, you can also try and lure her towards mirrors by offering a tempting target. This is typical of the way the game offers you interesting dilemmas to solve that revolve around the most efficient way to pick up and use items.

While that sounds like a rather dry exercise, in practice it’s anything but. The whole board hums with activity, not only monsters attacking but also legends, non-player standees that are introduced by event cards. Legends want to get back to their home space and can be moved with actions from adjacent players. They will reward you with a helpful card if you get them there. But in the meantime they’re defenseless monster meat that need protecting. Monsters attack players or legends via a die roll which can hit, miss, or trigger a special ability: Medusa sends players to the furthest temple space. Between rolls and cards, it’s a thrill-ride game that feels very much alive even without the cunning of a human opponent.

The whole board hums with activity.

What makes things really interesting, however, is that you’re playing against multiple foes at once. This means you’ve got to prioritize a number of different threats, and each monster’s specific pathway to defeat can dovetail in all sorts of interesting ways. The Siren’s has a memory element. The Minotaur requires you to solve a simple puzzle. The others involve different combinations of item spending and dice rolls but, as an example, the Basilisk needs a lot of orange items so if you’re playing against it and the Medusa demands difficult trade-offs.

While none of the mechanical concepts behind the monsters are especially imaginative, they’re good examples of the way the game gets lots of variety out of simple mechanics. This isn’t a difficult game to learn — it plays in less than an hour, and it requires players to work together, making it fantastic family fare. Although it has the common issue in cooperative games that a particularly experienced, or loud, player can boss the others around, everyone has an independent character to control and their own hand of perk cards, so they can do their own thing.

Compared with the original, Horrified: Greek Monsters feels slightly more difficult to beat, largely because of the lairs. They suck actions and items out of the game while you hunt for the ones you need to defeat the enemies, which is a bit of a crapshoot. This adds some excitement, but it can make the difficulty a bit uneven, depending on whether you find what you need early on. It’s also hard not to feel that the monsters themselves are less interesting than the original foes, both thematically and mechanically. The puzzle to beat The Minotaur is just less interesting than the puzzle to beat The Mummy, for example. And there’s nothing like the cool double-header of Frankenstein and his Wife.

Where to Buy

Baldur’s Gate 3 designer says Act 3 tone shift criticisms are “valid”, will try to be “less drastic” in future

Acts! It used to be just those old-timey theatre productions that had them, but as in many respects, videogames have nipped through a stage exit and stolen theatre’s underpants. One act isn’t the same as another, however: take the third act of Baldur’s Gate 3, which many players feel isn’t a patch, or indeed a hotfix changelog, on the thunderously well-received RPG‘s first two acts. According to senior RPG designer Anna Guxens, Larian have been following the reaction and are thinking about how they can handle act three’s “drastic” tone shift better in future releases. It’s a timely observation, because in separate news, Larian’s CEO Swen Vincke has posted that he’s “figured out” the first act of Larian’s next unannounced project.

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Diablo 4 Drops to Just $44.99 in the New Year Sales

Diablo 4 has dropped down to just $44.99 on PS5, PS4, and Xbox in the New Year sales, a reasonable $25 off the MSRP of $69.99. That’s a better offer than what we saw over the Black Friday sales, marking this as one of the best gaming deals at the start of 2024.

If you haven’t had the chance to pay the incredible ARPG just yet, well this is the perfect opportunity. We gave the game a 9/10 in our review – stating: “Diablo 4 is a stunning sequel with near-perfect endgame and progression design that makes it absolutely excruciating to put down.”

Diablo IV was released last July and became a mega-hit for Blizzard despite some controversy regarding updates and monetization. But, the game is still Blizzard’s fastest-selling game of all time with more than 10 million players.

Blizzard has pushed through any troubles and continues to regularly update Diablo 4 with patches and new content via seasons. Diablo 4’s first expansion, called Vessel of Hatred, is also due out late 2024, and it was also recently announced that it would be coming to GeForce Now alongside Overwatch 2.

Other gaming deals to consider right now include 2023 Game of the Year nominee Resident Evil 4 dropping to just $30 on PS5, PS4, and Xbox. This is a return to the stellar price point we saw over the Black Friday sales last year.

The ASUS ROG Ally Z1 Gaming Handheld is also down to just $399 right now, and incredibly appealing price for anyone looking to play Game Pass on the go.

Robert Anderson is a deals expert and Commerce Editor for IGN. You can follow him @robertliam21 on Twitter.