Category: Video Gaming

Kirby’s Return to Dream Land Deluxe finally arrives on Nintendo Switch in late February. Not only has the game been in receipt of a Switch-friendly overhaul, but pink puffball Kirby has secured itself some all-new Copy abilities to play with.

I coined Kirby’s Return to Dream Land Deluxe as the Kirby co-op game for Switch that we both need and deserve, and while I likely won’t jump into it right away, it is a game that I’m excited to pull out whenever I have friends over. With new Copy abilities to experiment with, I’m even more excited to know that when I do pick up the game, there’ll be something new for me to rejoice over.

Announced on the Nintendo UK Twitter account, Kirby will receive a new Sand Copy ability (cue The Chordette’s Mr. Sandman, please). When under the influence of sand, Kirby can mould a variety of shapes to combat foes, with Nintendo’s images showing off Kirby manipulating sand into a castle, and a fist.

This isn’t all, either, with Nintendo soon following up that Kirby will be granted the Festival Copy ability too. This one is a particular treat for long-standing Kirby fans, with the Festival ability being borrowed from previous Kirby game, Kirby Star Allies. This ability will allow Kirby to do a little dancing with friend, Minna, and turn its enemies into useful items!

Now, here’s to hoping that some of Kirby’s cool Copy abilities from Kirby and the Forgotten Land somehow make their way into Kirby’s Return to Dream Land Deluxe. We already have the likes of Sleep, Crash, Sword, and many more of Kirby’s key Copy abilities, but wouldn’t it be nice to see Ranger and Drill Kirby appear too?

Kirby’s Return to Dream Land Deluxe releases for Nintendo Switch on February 24. Let us know what you think, and more importantly, which of Kirby’s Copy abilities is your favourite?

Whether you’re looking for a helpful clue to set you on the path to the Wordle answer, hoping to find the solution to the January 11 (571) Wordle in one easily accessible place, or you’d like to read some tips and guides to improve your daily game, you’ll find all of that and more right here.

After yesterday’s messy win, it was a real relief to see a green show up in the very first slot on my first guess alongside one key yellow vowel that soon found its rightful place. Those two gave me something useful to focus on and made unearthing today’s Wordle answer relatively quick and painless.

Wordle hint

A Wordle hint for Wednesday, January 11

Valkyrie and Bast will finally become more accessible.

Marvel Snap introduced the Token Shop back in December, allowing players to accumulate Collector’s Tokens, which would then allow them to pin and target cards that they didn’t have in the Token Shop and purchase the ones they wanted. This update also introduced Series 4 and 5, which consisted of new cards that were harder and more expensive to acquire.

However, Second Dinner had promised that as new cards get added to Series 5, older cards would get downgraded to lower Series, which meant that it should be cheaper and easier to acquire them as time went on. It’s been over a month since Series 5 got introduced to Marvel Snap, and we’ll finally be getting our first Series downgrade at the end of January.

The following cards will be getting downgraded from Series 5 to Series 4:

• Valkyrie
• Super-Skrull
• Bast
• Shuri
• Black Panther

And the following cards will be getting downgraded from Series 4 to Series 3:

• Luke Cage
• Absorbing Man
• She-Hulk
• Titania

Generally, older cards will be the first to get downgraded to a lower Series, with the exception of Thanos and Galactus, who will remain in Series 5 indefinitely. In addition to that, Marvel Snap will also be getting First Edition badges, which will be displayed on cards that you obtained while they were still in Series 5. This is just a cosmetic addition that’s meant to incentivize players to try to get a Series 5 card while it’s still new.

Currently, the series downgrade is planned for Jan. 31, where we’ll see another patch.

Marvel Snap is now available on PC and mobile devices.

A new speedrunning world record has been established in Super Mario Galaxy 2, with Twitch streamer Jhay managing to beat their own record by just over four seconds.

In case you missed it or want to see it again (who wouldn’t??), BIG GGs to @NotImJhay for getting the WR in Super Mario Galaxy 2! GGs to HardcoreGaming, @SuperT302, and MutantsAbyss for the great race as well, whew! #AGDQ2023 pic.twitter.com/vQgCluJ9rP

— Games Done Quick (@GamesDoneQuick) January 10, 2023

The new record was set during the Awesome Games Done Quick stream, which saw Jhay take on Mutantsabyss, Hardcoregaming, and Supervipert302 in a speedrunning race. Jhay’s Any% with Bank run — a reference to the Bank Toad who is required to unlock the game’s final galaxy — was completed at 2:54:51.33, which was 4.4 seconds faster than his previous record of 2:54:55.

In what’s become a string of shocking pieces of news, current WWE co-CEO Stephanie McMahon has stepped down from her position and has resigned from the company. Shortly after a report broke, Stephanie McMahon made her official announcement on Twitter.

“Dear WWE Universe, about 8 months ago, I took a leave of absence and within a few weeks, unexpectedly had the opportunity of a lifetime,” McMahon wrote on Twitter. “I had the privilege to return as the Co-CEO and Chairwoman of the Board of WWE. I cannot put into words how proud I am to have led what I consider to be the greatest company in the world, working alongside a remarkable leadership team and one of the strongest executives I have known in my Co-CEO, Nick Khan.”

McMahon went on to say that Vince McMahon has returned to the company–he voted himself back onto WWE’s board of directors on January 6–and Stephanie believes that the company is in a “strong position,” so she’s going back on leave and resigning.

The elder McMahon stepped down from WWE back in July, announcing his retirement at 77 years old. This happened in the middle of an investigation into the company due to a report that Vince paid more than $12 million in hush money to four women over sexual misconduct claims that spanned 16 years.

GameSpot has reached out to WWE for further comment.

It feels like Duelyst spent several years trying to find a business model that worked, before it finally shut down for good back in 2020. Well now the whole thing – code and art – is open source and available for use in others projects, royalty-free.

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Bungie just did WHAT??

The Lightfall DLC is a little over a month away from dropping in Destiny 2. With that in mind, players have been anxiously waiting to receive any new information regarding it since its release date was revealed last August. The official Destiny 2 Twitter page just announced some major changes happening as soon as tomorrow, as a preview of things to come in Lightfall.

Here’s the official tweet:

In addition to all Armor Mods being unlocked for everyone, the price for focusing Legendary Armor and Weapons from vendors has been significantly reduced. This is a massive change that nobody was expecting to see, as in the past, Bungie wanted players to put the effort in to really buildcraft.

However, with these changes, everyone, including new players, now have full access to powerful Armor Mods such as Elemental Wells, Charged with Light, and more. This list does not include Raid or Artifact Mods though, so keep in that mind.

The vendors having their prices reduced is also an excellent change for the economy, as some players would spend thousands of Glimmer and Legendary shards looking for the God Roll they wanted. Now, you should be able to find God Rolls of Armor and Weapons more efficiently, without having to go broke in the process.

If this is just a sample of what to expect in the Lightfall DLC, then we better make sure to buckle up ahead of time, as it’s safe to say we haven’t seen anything yet. Be sure to check out our latest Destiny 2 news, like how one player achieves an impossible task or how a fan animation become too realistic to be true.

If you ever use OBS to record footage or stream to Twitch, odds are you’re using H.264, a video codec that’s been in use for most of the last two decades. H.264 is everywhere. If you’re streaming a show from Netflix or another service, it’s probably H.264, too. It’s basically the JPEG of video: there are now far more efficient and better quality compression methods available, but it’s hard to dislodge a format that’s so entrenched. Streaming video is starting to do just that, though, with an open source codec called AV1. Netflix has been dabbling with it for a couple years, and now OBS Studio version 29.0 has jumped in with native support for AV1 encoding on AMD and Intel GPUs.

It’s an exciting step, though not one that we’re all going to be able to take advantage of right away. There are two basic types of video encoding: software (which fully relies on your CPU, and is very CPU intensive) and hardware, which uses your GPU to accelerate the encoding process. Hardware encoding is way faster and more efficient and won’t spike your CPU to 100% usage, and is how most of us record footage or stream to platforms like Twitch today. But it’s also typically lower quality. 

EA Sports will pull a touchdown celebration from Madden NFL 23 that, in light of the frightening collapse of the Buffalo Bills defensive back Damar Hamlin last week, is now highly inappropriate.

In the video game cutscene, which is one of the “team” celebration options that players have been able to trigger with the right thumbstick for the past three years, one player on the scoring team lies on the ground while another teammate pretends to revive him with CPR. A third appears to jolt him with a defibrillator.

All of that was really funny until Hamlin fell to the ground after tackling the Cincinnati Bengals’ Tee Higgins on Monday Night Football on Jan. 2, and trainers and emergency personnel sprinted out to the field to perform the real thing. They very literally saved Hamlin’s life after he suffered a cardiac arrest on the field; the second-year safety was discharged from the University of Cincinnati Medical Center on Monday, and he has returned to the Buffalo area for ongoing care and recovery.

But over the past week, Madden NFL fans recalled the celebration animation and posted clips of it online. It prompted a statement from an EA Sports representative, who told CBS Sports that the company is “taking steps to remove the celebration from Madden NFL 23.”

CBS Sports noted that Pittsburgh Steelers linebacker Alex Highsmith pantomimed CPR compressions on a teammate after sacking the Cleveland Browns’ Deshaun Watson in their season finale on Sunday. So it’s not like EA Sports invented this scenario for laughs without any real-life inspiration. Highsmith apologized for his actions on Monday.

On Sunday, Buffalo’s Nyheim Hines returned two kickoffs for touchdowns, ushering the rival New England Patriots out of playoff contention in a 35-23 victory that solidified the Bills as the AFC’s No. 2 seed. “The truth is, it was spiritual,” Buffalo quarterback Josh Allen said. “I can’t remember a play that touched me like that.”

For Jan. 10, 2023, Swirlix will be in the spotlight, and you’ll get double Stardust for catching Pokémon. And yes, Swirlix can be shiny in Pokémon Go!

This is a great chance to work on your fairy badge if you don’t already have it maxed out. Fairy-type Pokémon are typically less common, so catch as many as you can to max out the “Fairy Tale Girl” badge and increase your fairy-type catch rate.

Swirlix also has special evolution requirements. You’ll need to feed it many treats before you can evolve it.

Pokémon is about catching ’em all, and in Pokémon Go, that means catching every variant, including rare shiny versions of Pokémon. Every Tuesday in Pokémon Go, players will see a specific Pokémon spawning more frequently during Spotlight Hour, which runs from 6 p.m. to 6:59 p.m. local time. Spotlight Hour is your chance to load up on candy, a chance for high CP Pokémon, and, if you’re lucky, a shiny Pokémon.

Are shiny rates boosted during Spotlight Hour?

Shiny rates do not appear to be boosted during Spotlight Hours, based on data gathered by Pokémon community The Silph Road. However, the sheer number of Pokémon that spawn during the hourlong weekly event will give you an improved chance of clicking on a random shiny. The more Pokémon you click on, the more opportunity you have to catch a shiny Pokémon.

What can I do to attract more shiny Pokémon?

Not much, unfortunately. It appears to be random chance. Shiny Pokémon catch rates are set by developer Niantic, and they are typically only boosted during special events like Community Days or Safari Zones, or in Legendary Raids. There are no consumable items that boost shiny Pokémon rates.

Where can I find a list of available shiny Pokémon?

LeekDuck keeps a list of currently available shiny Pokémon. It’s a helpful visual guide that illustrates what all of the existing shiny Pokémon look like.

For more tips, check out Polygon’s Pokémon Go guides.

One Piece Odyssey’s release is just around the corner and to give everyone a head start, a demo of this new turn-based RPG is available now on Xbox Series X|S.

When you begin, you’ll see our main cast, known as the Straw Hat Pirates, get sucked into a storm, thrown onto a mysterious island, and separated. They must find each other, meet the locals, and fight off the new enemies they meet along the way. That means we get to see our heroes in action and get hands-on experience with the turn-based combat.

Your favorite pirate crew is all here

• Luffy – The captain who ate a Devil Fruit, which made him able to bend and stretch his body as if he was made of rubber.
• Zoro – The master swordsman who uses a three-sword fighting style.
• Nami – The ship’s navigator and skilled con artist who uses her “Clima-Tact” to fight by controlling the weather.
• Usopp – A sharp shooting slingshot user, afraid of most conflict.
• Sanji – A skilled cook who reserves his hands just for cooking and fights only with his feet.
• Chopper – Part reindeer, part human, full-time doctor on the ship.
• Robin – The ship’s archaeologist who ate a Devil Fruit which gave her the ability to create duplicate limbs from any surface.
• Franky – The shipwright and cyborg with super-human strength and weapons built into his body.
• Brook – Musician and skeleton whose soul can separate from his body… or what’s left of it.

Each Straw Hat has their own combat specialty, which are often their iconic moves from the One Piece series. You’ll get to utilize everyone’s unique abilities not only to fight, but to get around the map. During dungeon exploration, use Luffy and his stretchable limbs to pull yourself across the map with Gum Gum Slingshot, or take advantage of Chopper’s small size to crawl through tight spaces.

In each fight, your party members and enemies occupy different positions on the battlefield. This allows you to land close-range, long-range, and group attacks depending on your location, so you’ll have to make sure each Straw Hat is in the right spot to take advantage of their abilities. Thankfully, the game lets you swap party members positions throughout the fight. You can even pull party members into the fight who weren’t on the field. Usopp too close to a group of enemies? Switch him out with Sanji. No healing items available? Have Chopper tap in to take care of damaged friends. Later in the game, you can even harness the power of friendship with “Bond Arts,” a powerful ability that Straw Hats execute together, which you can unlock through side quests.

During battle there’s a chance you’ll trigger a “Dramatic Scene,” which is an extra task to complete in exchange for bonus experience and loot. In a “Dramatic Scene,” you might be tasked with defeating an enemy with a particular member or in a certain number of turns. Completing these gives you a huge boost in leveling and helps you quickly progress through the game. Another way to get ahead in big fights is to eat food items that give you a buff. While you can’t get Sanji’s ability-buffing food in the demo, you can still pick up ingredients that can help you during smaller fights and can be used for cooking better recipes once you transfer your demo save into the main game.

Fans of the series get the chance to jump into an adventure with their favorite crew and and fight iconic enemies from some of the team’s biggest battles. You also get to experience a new world with new characters, some designed by One Piece creator Eiichiro Oda himself! Even if you’ve never seen the One Piece anime or manga, the game will be a great first introduction as you get to discover what it means to be a Straw Hat Pirate and get a taste of life on the Grand Line.

If you’re curious to try out the first One Piece turn-based RPG, you can download the One Piece Odyssey demo today! Your progress in the demo transfers to the full game, but make sure to pre-order to secure even more bonuses for when it’s released on January 13.

ONE PIECE ODYSSEY

Bandai Namco Entertainment America Inc.

☆☆☆☆☆

★★★★★

$59.99

This set features useful items and the additional costume Traveling Outfit Set, all of which can be used in-game.

Includes:
• Energy Apple x 10
• Excite Apple x 10
• Golden Jelly x 3
• 100,000 Berries
• Traveling Outfit Set (Luffy, Zoro, Sanji, Usopp, Nami, Chopper, Robin)

*Full game is is required. Please update to the latest version before use.
*Please note that bonuses may be distributed at a later date.
*Contents and specifications are subject to change without notice.
*Some scenes and performances in the game may not reflect the costume changes.
*Bonuses can be obtained from the start of the game.

A new RPG from the hugely popular manga and anime series ONE PIECE, commemorating the 25th anniversary of the series!

The famed pirate, Monkey.D.Luffy, better known as Straw Hat Luffy, and his Straw Hat Crew, are sailing across the New World in search of the next island and the next adventure that awaits them.
But during their voyage they are caught in a storm and shipwrecked. They find themselves washed up on a lush tropical island surrounded by constantly raging storms…

Separated from his crew, Luffy sets off on a grand, new adventure to find his friends and escape the island!
Dangerous new enemies, terrifying forces of nature, and more await them!

Play as various members of the Straw Hat Crew in a classic RPG set in the world of the popular ONE PIECE anime!

*In addition to this product, ONE PIECE ODYSSEY Deluxe Edition and other digital content is also available. Take care to not make duplicate purchases.

Released 27 months after the original game – back when development cycles weren’t absurdly long – Dead Space 2 found success in early 2011, but history and online discussion haven’t elevated it to cult status like they did with the 2008 classic. Going back to it, ahead of this month’s shiny remake of the original, to confirm my suspicions, I can now proudly declare it’s the best installment of Visceral’s trilogy. Come at me.

I vividly remember Dead Space being a huge sleeper hit in late 2008, automatically becoming one of the scariest games ever, and with such a big cliffhanger wrapping up the first chapter of Isaac Clarke’s story, talk of a sequel quickly heated up. That second entry materialized a little over two years later in Dead Space 2, a more action-oriented take on space-based horror. If Dead Space, despite its bigger scale, could be compared structurally to Alien, then Dead Space 2 was clearly borrowing some notes from its explosive sequel, Aliens.

Perhaps it was Visceral’s plan all along, but Resident Evil 5’s more action-heavy take on its material arrived shortly after the first Dead Space and got people talking, so maybe that was factored into the sequel’s development. We know that EA has always liked to chase down trends and rework formulas to hopefully broaden its player bases, so it’s not a big leap to consider this Resi-flavoured gear change, especially when Dead Space 3 doubled down on that direction and ended up losing sight of what made the first two games work so well.

I also went back to interviews that seem to support the line of thought that Visceral always intended to expand the canvas and try new things with Dead Space 2. The thing is that most of the changes and additions affected the narrative and setting first and foremost, which in turn brought new opportunities to the game’s overall design (and not the other way around). It mostly plays and feels like a more polished version of its predecessor, yet the pace and flow of both exploration and enemy encounters was shaped by the huge change of scenery and a more ambitious plot.

Swapping a derelict ship for a massive space station, Titan, that’s collapsing as you shut down a government-made clusterfuck paid off immediately; players were no longer just roaming ruinous areas looking to tinker with systems and machinery while fighting off Necromorphs. You were instead guided by a more active story which had a now fully-voiced Isaac questioning other characters’ motivations and dealing with his mental deterioration caused by the Marker. Mind you, the original Dead Space knew what it wanted to tell – it just felt constrained by survival horror conventions.

As a direct result of dropping the Metroid-ish structure of exploring different areas of a ship that we knew we’d have to explore in full because chapters were built around that idea, Dead Space 2 is much more of an unpredictable rollercoaster ride, one that can be both relentless (that first hour is a lot) and as dread-inducing as the original’s scariest sections.

Many purists have claimed over the years this installment already felt a bit too Uncharted-ish in places, but revisiting it more than 10 years later, it remains a largely unnerving game even when the action is amped up for a few minutes. And on most occasions, it’s just a breezier, less repetitive evolution of the original. That’s not a knock on the original Dead Space, but a compliment to Visceral’s willingness to spice things up and avoid retreading old ground.

Another marked improvement which is immediately noticeable is the enemy variety. While the first game also adopted the “Metroidvania pace” to add new elements and challenges into the mix, Dead Space 2 hits the ground running with several enemy types coming at you, as the dev team knew full well the element of surprise (at least with an initial reveal of the Necromorphs) simply wasn’t there anymore. In fact, the game’s first hour already features a brief boss encounter after a huge set piece. The heart-pounding tension is all there – but it comes in doses of varying sizes and isn’t always tied to “oh, so now I’m entering a big unexplored area of the map where something bad will surely happen.”

I already mentioned how Dead Space 2 opened up the series’ world and overarching storyline in a big way, and that brings us to a slightly deeper cast of supporting characters. After giving Isaac a voice and making him a chatty working-class dude, this was a no-brainer. Ellie is a likable ally and meshes well with Isaac’s worst fears and regrets as he keeps being haunted by hair-rising visions of Nicole, and Administrator Tiedemann’s menace feels like a perfect riff on Weyland-Yutani’s nefarious plans in the Alien series. Look, I liked working with all-around decent guy Zach Hammond and hating Kendra Daniels’ guts, but most of the time they were “the people giving me orders on comms” and little else. Dead Space 2 expanded on that.

When it comes to the areas Isaac must traverse, the Unitologist Church level deserves a special mention; it plays out like a big revelation after reading and hearing so much about those dogmatic fundamentalists in the first game and a good chunk of the second one, and the atmosphere is absolutely on point. With gothic architectural elements that feel unlike anything else in the games and create an entirely different type of “haunted house” before the terrifying Necromorph stalkers are revealed, I so wish that vibe had lasted a while longer.

And yes, no good Dead Space 2 think piece can end without applauding one of the most disturbing moments in all of gaming: the damn “needle in your eye” scene. As gory as these games are, nothing could’ve prepared us for such a cringe-inducing bit. The bad outcome is only the icing on the cake, as the close-up of Isaac almost losing his shit while controlling the machine plus the twitchy controls make the sequence a hard one to sit through without clenching all of your orifices.

We’ve yet to see whether Motive’s Dead Space remake is ultimately as good as it looks, but if they’ve managed to successfully upgrade the classic without diluting its strongest chunks, I’ll be first in line campaigning for a return to the superior installment.

Subnautica sees you play as the lone survivor of a space crew whose ship has crash-landed in the middle of a vast alien ocean. To survive, you’ll need to dip into the sea and use your trusty knife to carve kelp and mine rocks to slowly kit yourself out in gear that’ll help you survive betterer. But most importantly, dip furtherer.

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An estimated 20 developers who worked on The Callisto Protocol were reportedly left out of the game’s credits by Striking Distance Studios.

According to GI.biz article, the individuals omitted from the end game credits included senior developers, directors, team leads, and a number of employees who worked on the project for over a year and contributed heavily to the game.

“I understand if a contractor does a small amount of work for a few months and is left off, but we’re talking full-time employees with over a year invested in the title, and had a hand in significant parts of the product,” said one unnamed developer. “That’s where the surprise has come from for a lot of us.”

The Callisto Protocol Review Screens