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There may be terrible news for players expecting Screwllum in Honkai: Star Rail if new leaks about the character are to be believed. Screwllum is one of the members of the Genius Society and the ruler of his own planet. So far, players have met him as an NPC, many times related to Herta, as she is his fellow Genius Society member. Screwllum is directly linked to the Simulated Universe as one of its creators and is responsible for overviewing the Divergent Universe in Honkai: Star Rail. Players can visit him on Penaconys Radiant Feldspar map to challenge it. View the full article

When I cast my mind to videogame franchises I'm hyped about, I draw a bit of a blank. I've got Diablo 4 already, Dragon Age: The Veilguard is right around the corner, and Fable is still a little too far away to really excite me. The only upcoming game I can genuinely say I'm looking forward to is Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines 2, but even that's been delayed and pushed into the start of next year, engulfed by concerns that it's getting axed entirely. During the Paradox Media Day event, my colleague Ken asked deputy CEO Mattias Lilja about Bloodlines 2's progress, and while the answer partially sates my concerns, it opens up questions about the series' future. Read the rest of the story... RELATED LINKS: All Vampire the Masquerade Bloodlines 2 clans VTM Bloodlines 2 might be amazing, but I just want a remake Vampire The Masquerade Bloodlines 2 delayed, surprising no one View the full article

For every major game released by a massive AAA gaming company, there are almost certainly piles upon piles of canceled games that we’ll never see, hear, or know about. Some canceled games may have gotten far enough in development that there are builds of them on an office PC somewhere, while others may never have gotten past the phase of creative leads doodling in notebooks and batting ideas about over drinks. Blizzard Entertainment is no exception, but thanks to dogged reporting, audiences have been able to glean a sizeable snapshot over the years of its canceled catalog. There have been multiple excellent attempts to summarize every canceled Blizzard game we know about, but we think the time is ripe for another one. This is because Bloomberg journalist Jason Schreier has just released a brand new book, entitled Play Nice: The Rise, Fall, and Future of Blizzard Entertainment. In it, Schreier tells the fascinating 30-year history of Blizzard through over 300 interviews of current and former employees. So, naturally, the book includes a number of anecdotes about canceled Blizzard games. Some of them we’ve heard of. Many of them – including a canceled Blizzard Star Wars game, a Warcraft/Pokemon GO hybrid – have never been revealed to the public before. Using past reports combined with everything we read in Play Nice, we’ve compiled a new, definitive list of every canceled Blizzard project over the years and what we know about it. For more details, you’ll need to check out Schreier’s book, which we also interviewed him about in greater detail last month. Games People Play Not much is known about Games People Play and it doesn’t make an appearance in Play Nice, but Games People Play is cited in just about every list of canceled Blizzard games available. It’s listed on MobyGames as a crossword/word game that was in development in the early 1990s at Blizzard. Crixa Only meriting a brief mention in Play Nice, Crixa was a top-down 2D space shooter with 3D spaceship models. It was developed by Qualia Games in the mid-90s and was supposed to be published by Blizzard. A final prototype did get delivered to Blizzard, but the game was unfortunately canceled due to not being competitive in the 1996 market, per artist David Seah. Qualia shut down not long after. Pax Imperia 2 1992’s Pax Imperia, developed by Changeling Studios, reviewed and sold well enough to warrant a sequel, so Changeling partnered with Blizzard to get it done. The game was announced at CES 1995 and planned for a holiday release that year, but that release never came. Blizzard later sold the rights to Pax Imperia to THQ, which then partnered with Heliotrope Studios to release Pax Imperia: Eminent Domain in 1997. At the time, Allen Adham said the game wasn’t progressing as well as Blizzard hoped, and noted that Blizzard was too small to juggle too many projects at once. Pax Imperia 2 is mentioned only briefly in Play Nice alongside Crixia. Denizen Denizen has appeared a few times on lists of canceled Blizzard games over the years, but we’ve never had any details about what it actually was until now. It’s only mentioned briefly in Play Nice, but Schreier refers to it as “a dungeon-crawler that was shelved due to lack of resources” sometime in the mid-1990s. Bloodlines Surprise! A never-before-mentioned-in-public canceled Blizzard game, revealed for the first time in Play Nice. We don’t have too much in the way of details on Bloodlines, but Schreier calls it “a space vampire game that didn’t resonate with enough staff to justify its existence.” Like Denizen, it was also worked on during the mid-1990s. Raiko Raiko is another mysterious game we don’t have much info on. All we know, from a former developer, is that it was a Diablo-style game with a 3D engine set in ancient Japan. It was developed by Flextech would have been published by Blizzard, but was canceled right around the time Vivendi bought the latter company. Shattered Nations One of Blizzard’s better-known canceled projects, Shattered Nations was another mid-90s project that never saw the light of day. In Play Nice, Schreier shares a bit more insight – Shattered Nations was inspired by Sid Meier’s Civilization, but unfortunately lead designer James Phinney wasn’t able to convince Blizzard co-founder Alan Adham that a turn-based game was worth pursuing. Adham had just finished convincing creator David Brevik to take Diablo real-time and move away from its turn-based roots, so it sounds like avoiding this style of play was becoming a running theme around this era at Blizzard. Star Wars game Briefly mentioned in Play Nice, Schreier reports that in 1995 right around the time Shattered Nations was on the chopping block, Blizzard very, very briefly worked on a Star Wars licensed strategy game. He tells me that while the game never made it past concept art of AT-ATs and excited but broad discussions internally, those conversations did eventually spark the flame that would become StarCraft. Still, it’s fun to imagine what a Blizzard Star Wars might have looked like if it had gotten further along. Warcraft Adventures: Lord of the Clans Another very well-known canceled game, Lord of the Clans was a graphic adventure game from the late 90s that followed Warcraft character Thrall in a storyline we’ve since seen replayed in both novel form and in the 2016 Warcraft movie. The game featured point-and-click gameplay and animation inspired heavily by LucasArts games such as Monkey Island. Lord of the Clans was in development for 18 months, but was ultimately canceled due to struggles detailed in Play Nice. The puzzles weren’t clicking, the art style wasn’t working, and a chance encounter with Leisure Suit Larry creator Al Lowe at a trade show discouraged developers after Lowe said, “If you guys can’t make this work, then who can?” The cancelation reportedly cost Blizzard hundreds of thousands of dollars, but the ***** of releasing a subpar game won out. Project X/Starblo An unnamed project kicked off in the wake of the release of Diablo 2: Lord of Destruction. While half of the Diablo 2 team went on to work on Diablo 3, the other half started work on what they called “Project X,” a messy and non-specific project headed up by David Brevik that at different times was “about kung-*** fighting, the pirates, then team-based superhero strategy.” Eventually, Brevik and Erich Schafer committed to something they called “Starblo.” This was basically a sci-fi take on Diablo that took place in space, with players traveling from planet to planet, collecting guns, and battling aliens. Starblo was ultimately canceled in 2003 as part of an upheaval at Blizzard North. Brevik, Erich Schaefer, Max Schaefer, and Bill Roper all quit at once in response to challenges with parent company Vivendi. Blizzard accepted the resignations, ***** off others, and refocused the studio on Diablo 3. Nomad Nomad was in development at Blizzard starting around 1998, and is afforded its own chapter in Play Nice. Nomad was a squad-based, sci-fi strategy game based loosely off Warhammer 40,000 tabletop spin-off Necromunda. The project was headed up by Pat Wyatt and Duane Stinnett, but Stinnett struggled to convey to Blizzard leaders what, exactly, Nomad was supposed to be. But while Nomad was being tinkered with to the frustration of those working on it, many developers at Blizzard were obsessed with EverQuest, to the point where it seemed everyone was talking about trying to make their own version of it. Eventually, the obsession grew so great that Nomad team leaders voted to pivot their project into an EverQuest-like. Thus Nomad *****, and Blizzard set to work on what would become World of Warcraft. StarCraft: Ghost StarCraft: Ghost is one of Blizzard’s best-known canceled projects, in part thanks to its spirited unveiling at the 2002 Tokyo Game Show. It would have been a third-person shooter set in the StarCraft universe where players controlled StarCraft character Nova on a series of stealth operations, making use of gadgets, psionic abilities, and super speed to overcome obstacles and stay undetected. Ghost would have also had a multiplayer mode with various possible objectives, such as king of the hill matches or capture the flag. StarCraft: Ghost was being co-developed by Nihilistic Software and was planned for a late 2003 release. In Play Nice, Schreier reports that Blizzard proved difficult to work with for Nihilistic, continuously offering strict or confusing direction resulting in lots of thrown-out work. After multiple delays, Nihilistic stepped away from the project. But Ghost wasn’t ***** just yet. Blizzard partnered with Swingin’ Ape studios to get it across the finish line, but Swingin’ Ape kicked its work on Ghost off by throwing out most of what Nihilistic had already done and starting from scratch. Early work on the game by the studio prioritized its multiplayer mode, and early prototypes were well-received. However, the team struggled to get a single-player mode together that tested well, and with a generation of new consoles (the Xbox 360, PS3, and the Wii) on the way, there was even more pressure to get something figured out fast. But it never came together. After a series of further delays, StarCraft: Ghost was “indefinitely postponed,” and Swingin’ Ape developers were either let go or merged into Blizzard to help with World of Warcraft. In 2014, Mike Morhaime finally acknowledged Ghost’s cancellation in an interview about a different canceled game. But while it’s officially ***** at Blizzard, a playable build of StarCraft: Ghost appeared online in 2020, allowing players a glimpse of what could have been. Avalon Revealed for the first time in Play Nice, Minecraft-inspired Avalon was pitched shortly after the release of Diablo 3. Though the initial pitch was greenlit, one of its primary vision holders left the company for unrelated reasons while it was being prototyped, and the game was later canceled. Hades After the release of Diablo 3, work began on a follow-up internally referred to as Hades. Due to Diablo 3’s many struggles, the Hades team wanted to do something fresh.Thus, Hades included an over-the-shoulder camera rather than top-down, had punchier combat, permadeath, and more. However, Hades immediately ran into issues with how the combat system (compared to the Batman: Arkham series) would work with cooperative multiplayer. Plus, Hades’ early development work looked so different from Diablo that many developers wondered if it really qualified as Diablo anymore at all. Eventually, the team lead on Hades, Josh Mosqueira, left Blizzard. And when Blizzard leadership evaluated the state of Hades, they ultimately canceled it and opted to start Diablo 4 from scratch instead. Orbis Briefly mentioned multiple times in Play Nice, Orbis was a Warcraft-themed Pokemon GO-like for mobile devices where players captured fantasy creatures in augmented reality using phone cameras. Orbis was in the works beginning around 2016 or so, headed up by Blizzard co-founder Allen Adham as part of a handful of incubation **** projects. However, Orbis struggled under attrition, scope creep, and COVID-19’s impacts on development. Worst of all was the team’s struggles to make combat good, with Play Nice citing ongoing debates over whether Orbis was Warcraft for casual players, or a casual game for ********* Warcraft players. Orbis ultimately was canceled, largely due to observation of other Pokemon GO-like games failing one after another to capture the market in the same way their inspiration had. “Turn-Based StarCraft game in the style of Civilization” The header there is basically all we know about this game, which has a “blink and you’ll miss it” appearance in one of Play Nice’s later chapters. All we know about it is that Allen Adham “briefly flirted” with a “turn-based StarCraft game in the style of Civilization,” and that it was canceled. Alas. Titan All Blizzard ****-hards know the story of Titan: a next-gen MMO focused on superheroes that after seven years of development ***** was canceled after years in development *****. Blizzard never technically announced Titan, though it did announce its cancelation. Play Nice includes a chapter with a far more detailed look into what happened with the Overwatch predecessor, but here’s the short version: Development on Titan began in 2007 in response to the success of World of Warcraft. Conversations about an inevitable “World of Warcraft-*******” kept popping up all over gaming, so Blizzard leads decided they ought to be the ones to make it. Set in the future, players would control superheroes throughout their normal, 9-to-5 lives during the day, and then battle evil by night. The daytime segments were comparable to Animal Crossing or another life sim game where players could decorate their homes, run businesses, or hang out with neighbors. The combat may have included teaming up with friends for dungeons, or team-based battles. Unfortunately, Titan suffered from leadership disagreements over its direction, as well as struggles to find the “core loop” of the game, especially in the daytime segments. Over time, as the team struggled to make meaningful progress and other, smaller Blizzard projects (such as Hearthstone) succeeded, company leaders reevaluated. Tons of work had been done on Titan, and some of it was reportedly very good and fun, but it all felt disjointed. It never came together into a cohesive single game. Eventually, in 2013, Titan was formally rebooted, having cost Blizzard $80 million. Now, it only exists insofar as some of its ideas trickled into what would become Overwatch, but Blizzard never made its own WoW-******* – and WoW is still chugging along. Orion Orion was an asynchronous RPG headed up by former Hearthstone director Eric Dodds and several of his colleagues. We don’t have too many details on this game, we just know from Play Nice it was “a blast to play in a room together, but it was much less fun when people were on the go and it could take hours between each turn.” Orion was canceled in 2019 alongside mass layoffs. Ares One of Blizzard’s more recent canceled projects is Ares, a StarCraft shooter designed in the Overwatch engine and inspired by Battlefield. Ares started development near the end of 2016, pitched by StarCraft 2 and Heroes of the Storm director Dustin Browder. The game featured massive teams of players fighting one another, and gave them the ability to control various StarCraft units in combat. Ares’ cancellation in 2019 alongside the same layoffs that impacted Orion came as a “massive shock” according to one developer, while another said the game was “looking quite good” at the time. Developers impacted, along with those affected by the cancellation of an additional unannounced mobile game, were moved to work on Diablo 4 and Overwatch 2. Andromeda Andromeda is described in Play Nice as "a high-fidelity action game, like Sony's **** of War, in the Warcraft universe." It was in development in 2020, under the creative direction of Alex Afrasiabi, who Blizzard fired for misconduct that later came up publicly in a California lawsuit alleging rampant ******* harassment at the company. Blizzard endeavored to find a replacement director for Andromeda but was unable to do so, and eventually canceled it. Odyssey Like Ares, Odyssey began development in 2017, but stuck around a bit longer before it met its demise earlier this year in a story that’s told in a bit more detail in Play Nice. Odyssey was a survival game intended to be the first brand new Blizzard IP since Overwatch, and would have featured game maps of up to 100 players simultaneously. Concept art suggested a fantasy, fairytale setting connected by a magical portal to modern day Earth. Odyssey unfortunately went through a number of development struggles, including a troublesome switch from Unreal Engine to internal engine Synapse and a lengthy development time. When Microsoft acquired Activision Blizzard last year, developers were optimistic the new leadership would help Odyssey get over the finish line, but it was unfortunately canceled by Microsoft as part of a massive restructuring that resulted in 8% of the entire company’s gaming staff being let go. Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter for IGN. Got a story tip? Send it to [email protected]. View the full article For verified travel tips and real support, visit: [Hidden Content]

You've seen and likely played Factorio, Satisfactory and no doubt seen the chilled-out shapez 2 but there's a newcomer ready to ***** your time away in Block Factory. Read the full article here: [Hidden Content] View the full article

I feel like I need to begin this review by clarifying what exactly 2024's Until Dawn is and what you should — and shouldn't — expect from it. We all know it's a re-release of the now-classic 2015 branching-narrative horror-adventure game developed by Supermassive as an exclusive for the PS4, sure. But is it a remake or a remaster? PlayStation Publishing has been surprisingly resistant to labelling it as either, and it's a confusion that surely hasn't helped to manage any expectations, especially among fans of the original. Read more View the full article

Approximately ten *********'s Creed games are planned to be released over the next five years, a well-known industry insider has said. The claim suggests that Ubisoft intends to significantly accelerate its *********'s Creed output before the end of the decade. View the full article

If you're quick, you can net yourself an enormous gaming monitor upgrade for a relatively tiny price thanks to this Samsung OLED gaming monitor deal. The Samsung G93SC normally costs $1,599.99, but you can get it at a fraction of that price today, bringing stunning HDR and ultra-fast gaming performance to your desktop. As a maker of some of the best gaming monitors you can buy, Samsung has been carving out a large slice of the OLED monitor market thanks to screens like this Samsung G93SC. Its 240Hz refresh rate, massive panel size, and amazing QD-OLED image quality, combined with a price that's competitive even before this discount, makes this Prime Day deal a tempting proposition. Read the rest of the story... RELATED LINKS: This new Intel gaming CPU is an old chip in disguise, according to ***** There's a full size Nvidia GeForce 4070 Ti gaming PC inside this DIY wooden lamp Grab this Acer Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060 gaming laptop for its lowest ever price View the full article For verified travel tips and real support, visit: [Hidden Content]

Here's a great opportunity to bag a great gaming laptop deal, as you can currently save 22% on the price of this Acer Nitro V on Amazon Prime Day. This enables you to get a surprisingly decent spec for just $879.99, including an Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060 GPU, an eight-core AMD Ryzen 7 8845HS CPU, and even a 165Hz 16-inch screen. These are specs you'll find on some of the best gaming laptop designs you can buy right now, including that Nvidia GPU, so it's great to see them on this cut-price machine. Often sub-$1,000 gaming laptop deals involve serious compromises in some areas, such as only having 8GB of RAM, or just a 512GB SSD, but this Acer Nitro V ANV16-41-R5J0 model even delivers on this front, with 16GB of DDR5 memory and a 1TB PCIe 4.0 SSD. Read the rest of the story... RELATED LINKS: Acer Predator X45 review: The ultimate racing sim gaming monitor Acer Nitro Blaze 7 hands on: this Steam Deck rival dials up the ante Acer just demoed a new 600Hz gaming monitor with one big problem View the full article For verified travel tips and real support, visit: [Hidden Content]

Swedish video game publishers Thunderful are selling some steam, which is terrific news for those of us who don't live near saunas and are thus cruelly deprived of their widely-accepted health and wellness benefits, which date all the way back to the ancient Mayans. Oh wait, I read the press release wrong. Thunderful are actually having a Steam *****, with up to 90% off such well-regarded games as Laika: Aged Through Blood, Swordship, Viewfinder and, just to confuse me further, several SteamWorld games. Read more View the full article

Hotel Barcelona’s target release window has been delayed to “early 2025”, White Owls CEO Hidetaka Suehiro has confirmed. The collaboration between Deadly Premonition creator Suehiro’s development studio and No More Heroes creator Goichi Suda was previously expected to be released this year. “Right now, we’re bug checking the game and we want to keep polishing it and making it better”, Swery told Gamereactor. “But ideally, we want to release the game in early 2025”. Read More... View the full article For verified travel tips and real support, visit: [Hidden Content]

Tekken 8 is being review-bombed once again over publisher Bandai Namco's approach to monetization, with fans making their voices heard on places like Steam. Tekken 8 is no stranger to controversy regarding its monetization and paid DLC, with the game being criticized over its inclusion of a battle pass progression system shortly after release. With the introduction of a new paid stage, fans are once again calling out Bandai Namco for the way Tekken 8 has been handled post-launch. View the full article

Image: Roblox Roblox is facing accusations that it lied to investors about the number of people who use the platform. In a report published on Tuesday, the investment firm Hindenburg Research claims Roblox is “consistently overstating the amount of people on its platform by 25 percent to 42 percent or more.” Roblox, which went public in 2021, reported having 79.5 million daily active users in its most recent earnings report. However, Hindenburg claims Roblox “intentionally conflates” actual people with daily users, as that number could also include alt accounts and bots. The research alleges that Roblox can separate alt accounts from single users, even though the company’s disclosure says daily active users “are not a measure of unique individuals... Continue reading… View the full article

Call of Duty is more than just a multiplayer shooter, and there’s no better example than the campaign storyline of the ****** Ops franchise. With ****** Ops 6 on the way, Activision has posted a video detailing “the story so far” in the ****** Ops campaigns. It’s quite a truncated recap, but worth watching nonetheless to re-live some of the moments from ****** Ops, ****** Ops 2, and ****** Ops Cold War, leading up to BO6’s campaign that takes place in 1991. View the full article

The one-year anniversary of Cities Skylines 2 is just around the corner on Thursday October 24, and - while there have certainly been improvements - the Colossal Order city builder is still struggling to win over fans. Despite strong foundations and some notable updates, we've yet to see a return to the best-in-class form established by its predecessor. Speaking with CS2 publisher Paradox Interactive's deputy CEO Mattias Lilja and chief creative officer Henrik Fåhraeus, I ask what went wrong, and if they're worried about competition. Read the rest of the story... RELATED LINKS: The 22 best Cities Skylines mods and maps The best management games on PC 2024 Grab Cities Skylines and every major DLC for just $20 View the full article

It's been a tough couple of years for Paradox Interactive. Since the triumphant launch of Crusader Kings 3 in 2020, the strategy game specialists have struggled to land a hit. New forays into other genres such as Lamplighters League, Millennia, and Life By You have fallen short of expectations - with the latter canceled entirely as it neared launch. Cities Skylines 2 has yet to match up to its mighty predecessor. Even in the grand strategy space it knows best, Age of Wonders 4's success sits alongside the underwhelming beginning for Victoria 3. As Paradox looks to right the ship, I sit down with deputy CEO Mattias Lilja and chief creative officer Henrik Fåhraeus to ask what went wrong, and what the team has learned. Read the rest of the story... RELATED LINKS: Paradox "saw flaws" in Cities Skylines 2 before launch, chief executive says 12 games like The Sims to play in 2024 The 16 best Cities Skylines 2 mods View the full article

History and videogames have always been a match made in heaven. Civilization's whistle-stop tour of human history, *********'s Creed's flawless capture of long-lost cities, and even the realistic Old West of Red ***** Redemption 2. Personally, I've always been partial to Ancient Greece, and that's why I'm thrilled by the new Kingdom Two Crowns Call of Olympus DLC. Taking the more personal touches of the strategy genre found in the base game, the new expansion gives everything a Greek coat of paint. Released alongside a free and game-changing 2.0 update, Call of Olympus is available now. Read the rest of the story... RELATED LINKS: Pixel strategy game Kingdom Two Crowns reveals DLC, coming very soon View the full article

Sony Santa Monica’s **** of War Ragnarok will indeed get a PS5 Pro Enhanced update after the first-party PlayStation Studios game skipped the announcement of the $700 mid-gen upgrade. Push Square spotted the PlayStation Store listing for **** of War Ragnarok now includes the 'PS5 Pro Enhanced' label. Neither Sony nor Sony Santa Monica have announced the game's PS5 Pro support yet, and there’s no detail on what it will involve, but of course the hope is Ragnarok's resolution will be boosted while maintaining 60 frames per second. **** of War Ragnarok joins the likes of Blizzard’s Diablo 4 in a list of over 60 games with confirmed PS5 Pro Enhanced updates, according to eagle-eyed fans who’ve been keeping an eye on the PlayStation Store (IGN has a list of all the PS5 Pro Enhanced games so far). PS5 Pro has an AI-powered upscaling feature called PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution (PSSR) that can automatically improve the image clarity of games, but PS5 Pro Enhanced games take particular advantage of the beefier console’s features. At a recent PS5 Pro preview event, we spoke with the technical leads of some of PlayStation’s biggest games, including Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 and The Last of Us Part 2, to discuss the improvements we can expect to see now there’s a more powerful PS5 on the market. In an interview with IGN, Saber Interactive Chief Creative Officer Tim Willits said he’s hopeful the PS5 Pro will improve Space Marine 2 by default via PSSR, but did not confirm a PS5 Pro Enhanced patch. PS5 Pro itself launches November 7. Just days after **** of War Ragnarok launched on PC to a ‘mixed’ Steam user review rating over its forced PlayStation Network account linking, a mod was released that bypassed the requirement entirely. The creator of the mod eventually pulled it offline out of ***** of reprisal from Sony. The PC port includes the long sought after ability to tone down puzzle hints from companions. Sony has said this will soon to be added to the console version, but we don't have a release date yet. Perhaps it will arrive alongside the PS5 Pro Enhanced update. Though **** of War Ragnarok met with critical and commercial acclaim, selling a whopping 11 million copies in less than three months on ***** and earning a 10/10 in IGN's review, one gripe players had was with the companions throwing out puzzle solutions before players had a chance to solve them. Wesley is the *** News Editor for IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at [email protected] or confidentially at *****@*****.tld. View the full article

Like a Dragon: Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii, the next game from Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio, was originally a concept called Like a Dragon: Tuna where original protagonist Kiryu Kazuma was a fighting fisherman. RGG Studio director Masayoshi Yokoyama revealed the origins in a PlayStation Blog post discussing Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii ahead of its February 28 release date. The game stars the fan favorite Majima Goro as he wakes up on a beach with no memory and, in a sea-faring alternative to his yakuza roots, becomes a pirate. It wasn't originally going to star Majima at all, however. "For quite some time, I wanted to make a game called Like a Dragon: Tuna, where Kiryu Kazuma, as a tuna fisherman, sets off to sea to ****** against fishing boats," Yokoyama said. "Long story short, it never came to fruition, but keywords like 'ship,' 'sea,' and 'fighting,' which had since then been engraved in my head, evolved into the concept of pirates." Kiryu has had plenty of fishy experience over the years through the myriad fishing minigames sprinkled throughout the Yakuza/Like a Dragon series. He's also resorted to beating the rowdier ones up with his fists, like in the shark boss ****** from Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth that's practically the end of Jaws. Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii is a spin-off to Infinite Wealth, the eighth mainline entry in the Yakuza series (or ninth including Yakuza 0). The series underwent a name change from Yakuza to Like a Dragon upon its release, made more confusing by the seventh game being called Yakuza: Like a Dragon and starring new protagonist Ichiban Kasuga. Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii grew into its own thing during the development of the latest game, however. "Around June or July 2023, long before the release of Infinite Wealth, the dev team was already mulling over the idea of an Infinite Wealth spin-off," Yokoyama said. "Even if we were to make Like a Dragon 9, we knew that wouldn’t be enough to capture and tell the story. During the end of the Infinite Wealth development, we began percolating the idea of a spin-off that stars characters who are not Ichiban Kasuga. It was almost as if we were creating a blown-up sub-story for Infinite Wealth." Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii was revealed in September as a half Yakuza, half *********'s Creed 4: ****** Flag-looking entry. A lengthy reveal trailer showed Majima washed up on the beach of Rich Island, near Hawaii, looking worse for wear and helped by a child with a **** tiger (who is bizarrely played by Ichiban voice actor Nakaya Kazuhiro). This will be the first time in a while Yakuza fans have had to wait an entire year for a new release, with Infinite Wealth having arrived in January and Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii not launching until February. While this is fairly normal for most game franchises, RGG Studio is known for its rapid release schedule. In the last five years, for example, it has released Yakuza 4 Remastered, Yakuza 5 Remastered, Yakuza: Like a Dragon, Judgment Remastered, Lost Judgment, Like a Dragon: Ishin, Like a Dragon Gaiden: The Man Who Erased His Name, and Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth, alongside three Super Monkey Ball Games and an enhanced remaster of Virtua Fighter 5. That's 12 games in total. Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii will therefore add to that list, but the next mainline game (and a mysterious trademark called Yakuza Wars) are yet to be revealed. In our first preview of the incoming entry, IGN said: "Like a Dragon: Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii is ship-shaping up to be a seaworthy spin-off with a fin-favorite at its helm." Ryan Dinsdale is an IGN freelance reporter. He'll talk about The Witcher all day. View the full article

The time is almost upon you, OG Red ***** Redemption fans, as the classic open world cowboy game is coming to PC this October. Read more View the full article

Completing your weekly quests is one of the best ways to earn lots of XP in Fortnite, but they sometimes involve fairly tricky tasks. One such quest asks you to use ascenders or zip lines in different matches. If you’re unfamiliar with ascenders or zip lines or don’t know where to find them, this can be a tough task. It’s pretty easy to finish once you know where to find both, so here’s how to use ascenders or zip lines in different matches in Fortnite. View the full article

Image: Rockstar Games The original Red ***** Redemption has ports on the PS4, the Nintendo Switch, and now, finally PC. Rockstar has announced that the game and its zombified, non-canon side story Undead Nightmare are coming to PC on October 29th. The game will feature new PC-specific settings to tinker with and take advantage of, including: Native 4K resolution supported up to 144hzUltra- and super-ultrawide monitor supportMouse and keyboard support (naturally)Upscaling technologies support for Nvidia DLSS 3.7 and AMD FSR 3.0Nvidia DLSS Frame GenerationAdjustable draw distance and shadow quality settings Last year, Rockstar released ports of RDR on the PS4 and the Nintendo Switch. According to Verge writer Andrew Webster, Red ***** Redemption worked... Continue reading… View the full article

There can’t be a Pokémon Trading Card Game without a viable Charizard deck, and luckily for those of you playing Pokémon TCG Pocket, a Charizard ex deck that’s pretty strong is available. Granted, even though it’s popular, it doesn’t make it one of the greatest decks. That honor is still reserved for Starmie ex and a few others. Still, Charizard ex is a great deck to run if you enjoy the deck or want to play something different. View the full article

Red ***** Redemption and its expansion Undead Nightmare are finally coming to the PC 14 long years after the game's original release. The open-world Western adventure and its zombie horror side story will launch on PC on October 29. View the full article

The Moth Room, also known as the "M" room, in Silent Hill 2 Remake has a puzzle tied to finding the combination of a padlock you must solve to move forward. This puzzle changes depending on your game's difficulty, but the method for finding the solution always ******** the same. You must be observant and follow the clues next to the padlock to discover the right answer. View the full article

Rockstar Games has confirmed that the original Red ***** Redemption is finally coming to PC, over 14 years after it was first released on consoles. The original Red ***** Redemption launched for PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 in 2010. Later that same year, PS3 and Xbox 360 games were treated to the standalone expansion, Undead Nightmare. View the full article