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Anyone can punch trees long enough to build a house, but can you also take down a teleporting necromancer and eat an entire bear in one sitting? These questions and more will be answered in your time with V Rising, Stunlock Studios’ survival/crafting/action-RPG hybrid that’s finally out of Early Access. I’ve been…
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Nigel Lowrie, the co-founder of indie publisher Devolver Digital (Hotline Miami, Cult of the Lamb), says that indie games do much better on Switch than on other consoles because Nintendo has cultivated a playerbase that is more “open to interesting concepts” and smaller games.
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Hades 2, Supergiant Games’ highly anticipated sequel, has several gameplay features that are new to the franchise. One of these new features has you chasing materials in the Underworld and elsewhere, from Psyche to Fate Fabric. Some resources appear as requirements to unlock important tools and upgrades early on,…
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Nintendo, founded in 1889, is perhaps the longest running gaming company around and, perhaps due to this fact, it has largely remained a boys’ club. This began to change for the better in 2020, when it nominated its first woman to the board of directors. Since then, the company has vowed to hire more women, who make…
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Hades 2 is jam-packed with places to discover, and not all of them start at Erebus. If you’ve already unlocked the ward at the Crossroads, you’ll know that the surface is available as an alternative path to take, filled with its own vistas, rewards, and challenges. Sadly, protagonist Melinoë won’t be able to stay…
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One of my biggest gaming regrets was not playing Vanillaware’s time-travel narrative adventure 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim when it was released in 2019. Everybody around me kept telling me to just pick up the damn game and give it a try because they knew I would like it. I didn’t play it until 2023, at which point I…
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With the release of the Metal Gear Solid: Master Collection in 2023, games like 2004’s Metal Gear Solid 3 are more freely available (albeit in a very compromised and feature-lacking collection) than they have been before. But as MGS3in the Master Collection is secretly a repackaged version of its follow-up expansion, S…
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Hades 2, even in its current Early Access state, has plenty to offer. So much, in fact, that there are alternate paths you can take before starting a run. The first path on the opposite side of the entrance to Erebus is one you’ll notice right away, but won’t be able to open. You need to complete some some tasks…
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Before you can begin your adventure in Final Fantasy XIV, you’ll need to create your own player character (which is fun) and decide which server you’re going to play on (which is less fun). For those totally new to MMORPGs, your server (also known as a “world”) dictates who you’ll interact with when you play the game.…
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A new Lord of the Rings film is officially in the works, and it will feature some key personnel from both the original trilogy and the Hobbit trilogy. However, it won’t be original director Peter Jackson in the chair, but rather Gollum actor Andy Serkis.
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Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer is taking a lot of heat online for recent decisions to close beloved studios like Arkane Austin and Tango Gameworks. Last night the long-time gaming exec was apparently exploring the wasteland in Fallout 76 when another player nuked his entire campsite.
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Elon Musk continues to run X (formerly Twitter) in a variety of questionable ways, and surely one of the oddest is the decision to charge vast amounts of money for access to the site’s API. As such, major firms are dropping integration with the hellsite, the latest being Nintendo. From June 10, you will no longer be…
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It doesn’t take long for Hades 2 to introduce Tarot Arcana cards to you, a new mechanic that allows protagonist Melinoë to become stronger in many ways. Each card requires a specific amount of Grasp, a resource unique to this system, which can fill up pretty fast.
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I can’t tell you about Animal Well’s best moments. That’s because doing so would spoil the magic of discovering them for yourself, and because I still haven’t uncovered all of them yet either. I went into Animal Well hoping for a fun, evocative trip through a beautiful, lo-fi underground labyrinth. What I got was so…
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After shutting down multiple Bethesda studios, Xbox and Bethesda leadership held a town hall meeting with staff to discuss the closures, explaining that the company’s studios had been spread too thin and that it wanted to focus on fewer projects moving forward.
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Hades 2 arrived via Early Access on Steam and the Epic Games Store on May 6 and already it’s been stirring up a ton of excitement. If you’re looking to take its Greek-mythos-inspired roguelike action-RPG gameplay on the go with the Steam Deck, there are a few settings you may wish to tweak.
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Earlier this week, Xbox announced that it would be shuttering several studios it had attained as part of its $7.5 billion purchase of Bethesda, including Arkane Austin, Tango Gameworks, Alpha Dog Games, and Roundhouse Studios, the last of which is being absorbed into another team. Collectively, the studios’ produced…
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WB’s multi-franchise fighting game, MultiVersus,returns later this month and it’s adding Batman’s archnemesis, The Joker, to the game’s large roster of characters. And the iconic character is once again being voiced by Luke Skywalker himself, Mark Hamill.
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On May 7, Microsoft closed down four first-party development studios it had acquired from Zenimax Media in 2021 including Tango Gameworks, developer of The Evil Within series and 2023’s surprise hit Hi-Fi Rush. It’s the latest round of layoffs and closures that the gaming industry, and Xbox specifically, has seen in…
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There’s really no gentle way to ease you into this situation so I’ll just be blunt: Yoda got removed from Fortnite because an emote inspired by Zoidberg from Futurama was turning the little Jedi master into a nasty monster that crashed people’s games. What a world we live in?
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Electronic Arts, the publisher of most sports games on the market, Battlefield, Mass Effect, and plenty of other huge franchises, is considering putting ads inside its video games as another source of revenue. This isn’t the first time the company has done this, but given how poorly it’s gone in the past, I’m…
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One of Metal Gear Solid’s ultimate bosses is the massive walking battle tank known as Metal Gear Rex. Rex is one of the tougher boss fights of the game, and little else is more frustrating than repeatedly dying to a late-game boss when you’re so, so close to wrapping up.
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Hades 2 tasks you an array of bite-sized crafting mechanics. As we mentioned in our tips guide, these tasks don’t demand as much busywork as you might think. That said, you’re bound to find certain materials, like Fate Fabric, to be frustratingly elusive if you don’t know where to look. We know where to look!
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The first step to a video game becoming a success is finding the right audience. And while that’s easier for AAA games backed by big companies with equally big marketing budgets, indie games have a harder time getting the word out to the right players. This is why a new trend on X (formerly Twitter) is already being…
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Sometimes, you get blatant reminders of how much disregard big tech has for, well, everything. Whether that’s exorbitant spending on acquisitions, layoffs of hundreds to thousands of people, and refusing to release or delist its employees’ hard work for a tax write-off. But now and then, you get all that callousness…
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Hades 2 has an array of additions to discover, from incantations to new bosses to take down. Tarot Arcana cards are part of this wave of features, basically repurposing the Mirror of Night from the first game into an entirely new system.
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Harvey Smith, the now-former studio director at Arkane Austin, has taken to X/Twitter to express his feelings about Microsoft’s sudden and shocking closure of the beloved developer, alongside three other Bethesda-adjacent studios, Tango Gameworks, Alpha Dog Games, and Roundhouse Games. The team that brought us Dishonor…
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An original prototype of Nintendo’s Super Famicom, Japan’s (superior) version of the SNES, is currently up for auction and recent bids have already pushed the grey piece of gaming history north of $3.2 million. The “god-tier” nostalgia bait shows the market for retro collectibles can still be all over the place.
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In 2011, Warner Bros. and WaterTower Music put together a compilation album for Rocksteady’s open-world superhero game Batman: Arkham City. The album featured some pretty big names like Panic! at the Disco, Blaqk Audio, and Serj Tankian, all contributing original songs meant to pay tribute to the caped crusader. Among…