The highly anticipated game is due out next month, with fans eager to learn more about The Lands Between. We won’t be including any story spoilers here, but what follows are details of the map analysis. Files extracted from the beta test include a map of the Limgrave and Weeping Peninsula areas. It’s similar to the map in-game, but with additional details. These include various runes scattered in key areas....

Mario has, of course, been voiced by Charles Martinet since 1992, and his video game performance has become inseparable from Nintendo’s flagship character. As such, Mario fans were somewhat aghast last year when Mario creator Shigeru Miyamoto announced Pratt would be replacing Martinet as the voice of Mario in the upcoming film. It’s a casting decision that few seemed to have warmed to even ten months on, despite the best efforts of Chris Meledandri, producer of the Super Mario film, who insisted Pratt’s performance as Mario was “phenomenal” last November....

Cities: Skylines is hardly a spring chicken at this point, of course, having originally laid its urban foundations on PC back in 2015, but it still delivers an enormously enjoyable spin on the classic city-building formula, alongside ample tools catering to a range of different players - from aesthetics-obsessed urban planners to those more interested in logistical optimisation. And if you happen to enjoy the base game, there is plenty more where that came from....

Thanks to some good old fashioned mathematics from the community however, there is now, at last, enough information to put together a proper guide on how to win the Culture Victory, how to earn Foreign and Domestic Tourists, plus explaining how Tourism works, and how Culture affects it. We’ve assembled this guide based on a combination of in-game info, our own testing, and conversations we’ve held with Firaxis confirming some of the details....

Financial details for the two companies have been made public as part of Square Enix’s sale. The Final Fantasy publisher is offloading both for just $300m - a figure which seems miniscule compared to other recent games industry mergers and acquisitions. “We firmly believe that the studios will excel under Embracer’s operating model and ownership,” Embracer wrote in a note to press, adding that the studios would continue to “breakeven” for the “the upcoming two financial years driven mainly by sales of the back-catalogue titles”....

The expansion pack sold 1m copies in July, just a week after it released. As we’ve previously reported, by 2020 the base game sold 6m copies, so it looks like the DLC is selling extremely well to its fans. Ed loved The Delicious Last Course when he dug into it at release, which delivered on the recipe of success nailed by the original. Cuphead has been serving up plenty of content for fans alongside The Delicious Last Course....

Whether you’re after a new 4K TV, gaming laptop or monitor, Currys has a wide selection to choose from this Cyber Monday, alongside gaming accessories and smart tech. There are plenty of games on sale plus bundles for Xbox Series X/S consoles, PS5 disc and digital consoles and Nintendo Switch consoles. Today’s best Currys Cyber Monday deals Xbox Series S console - £189 from Currys (was £249) HP Victus 16 gaming laptop, 144Hz display, RTX 3060 - £849 from Currys (was £1,249) Corsair HS70 Pro Wireless 7....

In an interview with Famitsu (via VGC), Honma stated that a second season was not in the works. “I personally would like to continue to work with Japanese studios to produce more anime in the future, partly because we have received very good feedback. However, just to be clear, Cyberpunk: Edgerunners was planned as a standalone work, so there’s no such thing as ‘we are actually working on Season 2 in the background’,” he said....

In case this is new to you, FSR2 is a smart upscaling technique designed by AMD, the ideal being to render a good-looking 4K output image using just an internal 1080p image, drastically improving performance in the process. With the move to FSR2, there’s an opportunity to adjust the native rendering resolutions on every console. However, in my tests, native resolution targets on consoles generally seem unchanged and dynamic resolution scaling is still in effect....

All three Dark Pictures Anthology titles - Man of Medan, Little Hope, and House of Ashes - are eligible this time around, and players that own any of them on Steam, Xbox, or PlayStation can invite one friend to complete one full playthrough of the co-operative Shared Story mode for free per game. Own all three games and that’s three full playthroughs. If you’ve yet to experience developer Supermassive Games’ Dark Pictures Anthology in online co-op mode, it’s bit of a spooky treat, giving players the chance to experience the same narrative together, with each controlling different characters and making different choices that influence the story’s direction - and, ultimately, who lives and who dies....

You’ll be able to buy a copy of the game in its version 1.0 launch build via Steam from 10pm UK time. It’s normally priced £23.79, though there’s a 10 percent discount for the next two weeks. The launch follows seven beta weekends where various aspects of the game were unlocked, bug-fixed and optimised. This period “worked really well for our team and the health of the game”, developer RocketWerkz said today....

A follow-up to last year’s first Everyone is Here update - which featured crossovers with Hollow Knight, Hyper Light Drifter, Blasphemous, Guacamelee, Curse of the Dead Gods, and Skul: The Hero Slayer - Vol. 2 features guest appearances from another six titles. Up first is Yacht Club Games’ beloved retro platformer Shovel Knight - no stranger to crossovers and cameos - whose Dead Cells appearance takes the form of a new outfit and an accompanying Brutality weapon known as the King Scepter....

The thing is - and I’m sorry Arkane, I know you tried your best to dissuade me, but this is just what we do - I don’t know how else you pin down this curious chimera of a game. Partly because so much of the pleasure of those first five hours is seeing how Deathloop assembles itself from all those disparate parts as its loop winds around itself, partly because by the time you’ve taken down a couple of the visionaries that are your marks and earnt some of their powers there’s so much in play that it’s something of a tangle....

Yes, tests suggest that Microsoft consoles benefit from a small overall performance boost of around seven percent in the open world, while frame-rates on PlayStation 5 remain static (seemingly all consoles benefit on the initial cutscene, however). On the face of it, it’s not a big deal as such as a variable refresh rate display for Xbox is still the best option, but what it does mean is that in areas where the game may have previously fallen beneath the VRR range of a particular screen, it should now be more stable....

The series was set to be directed and developed by Seth Kearsley, whose other credits include Eight Crazy Nights and The Looney Tunes Show. In 2002, the same year as the release of the original Kingdom Hearts game, Kearsley was hired by Disney TV for the series. Although the pilot tested “exceptionally well”, it was canned due to Square Enix’s future plans for “many more games” in the series. The existence of the series has been known for several years....

Developed by Gameloft, it’s a free-to-play Disney farming sim that has players harvesting crops and meeting a variety of Disney characters. The character creator is available on Steam and Epic and gives players a chance to fiddle around with their own character. Kingdom Hearts fans will surely be happy. Watch on YouTube Disney Dreamlight Valley – Gameplay Overview Trailer I was keen to give the character creator a go to see for myself how far it can be pushed....

Developer Nicholas John Leonhard Groissen took it upon himself to use his game as a platform to spout these comments in a recent ‘update’ announcing Domina’s new name - Dominus. “We’re Out of Ideas, Mentally Unstable, Totally Degenerate, & Desperate for Clout - Let’s Pretend We’re A Completely Different Game to Regain Relevance!” the post began. The developer then went on to say that Domina was to be considered the game’s deadname, before asking people not to mention it anymore....

EA Sports PGA Tour - which marks the publisher’s first foray into golfing sims since 2015’s Rory McIlroy PGA Tour - was officially unveiled back in March last year, promising to deliver world famous golf courses and professional golfers as part of a long-term deal with the PGA Tour. Although no release date was shared at the time, EA stamped the game with a “spring 2022” launch window a little later in the year....

Speaking to GamesIndustry.biz, D’Astous criticised Square Enix’s past management of its various Western studios and suggested the recent sale of Eidos Montreal and Crystal Dynamics could have been motivated by a desire to court a buyout by PlayStation. “It was a trajectory that could be predicted,” D’Astous said, discussing the decline of Square Enix’s Western studios, and Eidos Montreal in particular. “I left because things were missing at head office....

At the time of writing, even with the US player base mostly asleep, it’s currently the biggest game on Steam, clocking up more players than CS:GO, PUBG, or Destiny 2. Yesterday, Bandai Namco has acknowledged a problem with saving Elden Ring to the Steam Cloud “under certain conditions”. If this happens to you, Bandai expects you’ll see an error message at game launch stating “that your local save files conflict with the ones stored in the Steam Cloud”....