Braid: Anniversary Edition has "sold like dog shit", according to its creator Jonathan Blow.

Blow regularly streams on Twitch and has discussed the sales performance of the Braid re-release on a number of occasions since its release in May.

YouTube channel Blow Fan has pieced together a montage of clips from Blow's streams (spotted by VGC), in which he bluntly shares his thoughts on the sales of Braid: Anniversary Edition.

Read more

Braid: Anniversary Edition has "sold like dog shit", according to its creator Jonathan Blow.

Blow regularly streams on Twitch and has discussed the sales performance of the Braid re-release on a number of occasions since its release in May.

YouTube channel Blow Fan has pieced together a montage of clips from Blow's streams (spotted by VGC), in which he bluntly shares his thoughts on the sales of Braid: Anniversary Edition.

Read more

Braid: Anniversary Edition "sold like dog shit" according to creator Jonathan Blow.

Blow discussed the remasters sales performance across several Twitch streams since its release back in May, going so far as to suggest that the studio's "future is uncertain" as a result of low sales.

Read more

Braid: Anniversary Edition "sold like dog shit" according to creator Jonathan Blow.

Blow discussed the remasters sales performance across several Twitch streams since its release back in May, going so far as to suggest that the studio's "future is uncertain" as a result of low sales.

Read more

Perfect Dark has been in the news quite a lot recently. First there was the impressive gameplay reveal for the upcoming reboot at this month's Xbox Showcase and, literally yesterday, Nintendo announced that the original Perfect Dark is now available to play on Switch.

All of this Perfect Dark news got me perfectly nostalgic, so I jumped back into the original three games and put together a little list video based on some of the most bizarre (and naughty) Easter Eggs and features that Rare's series has to offer.

Give it a watch on the player above or there's the YouTube version embedded below if you'd prefer to push that one into your peepers. Enjoy!

Read more

Navzdory očekávání, že půjde o pokračování, je další díl série Gears of War od společnosti The Coalition prequelem. Děj hry Gears of War: E-Day se odehrává 14 let před událostmi první hry a pojednává o Marcusu Fenixovi a Dominicu Santiagovi, kteří se potýkají s náhlým výskytem hordy Locustů.

Nenechte se však zaskočit slovem „den“ ve slově „E-Day“ – příběh se odehrává v průběhu více dní, jak uvedl kreativní ředitel Matt Searcy pro GamesRadar na Summer Game Fest 2024. Hráči budou vše prožívat svýma očima, od okamžiku invaze až po pád města a jeho obyvatel.

„Není to jeden den, je to více dní. Ale je to o události, jako by šlo o to, zůstat s těmi postavami od okamžiku, víte, nastavení okamžiku, kdy se to stane, a být s nimi každou minutu, po celé dny, které se odehrávají ve městě, a skutečně to prožívat jejich očima, jak to, co se děje s nimi, tak i to, co se děje s městem kolem nich, s lidmi kolem nich, s ostatními postavami.“

Ačkoli se Gears of War: E-Day vrací k hororovým kořenům série, věrnost je mnohem lepší než v první hře. Obsahuje destrukci nové generace, nové animační technologie, a dokonce i hardwarové raytraced osvětlení, odrazy a stíny. Technická ředitelka studia Kate Rayner také uvedla, že ve srovnání s Gears 5 mohou hráči očekávat „více než stokrát více detailů prostředí a postav“.

Hra Gears of War: E-Day vyjde na konzole Xbox řady X/S a PC, datum vydání však není známo. Více se možná dozvíme na veletrhu Gamescom, kde prý Microsoft představí další tituly. Do té doby zůstaňte naladěni na další aktualizace.

Článek Gears of War: E-Day se odehrává během několika dní, říká kreativní ředitel se nejdříve objevil na GAME PRESS.

This piece contains spoilers for Halo: Reach.

In the pantheon of platform exclusives, few loom so large as Halo. Since it was launched by Bungie in 2001, Microsoft's first-person shooter series has spawned no less than 15 games, alongside endless volumes of novels, comics, art books and a TV adaptation. It's also provided the world with one of the most iconic characters in science fiction: John-117, aka the Master Chief. To many people, the Chief is Halo. But what happens when you leave him out?

To put this another way: typically you'd expect that the first entry would be the best place to start when looking to dive into the series, and Halo: Combat Evolved remains a fantastic jumping off point. But I'd argue that it's the sixth mainline game, and Bungie's swansong, 2010's Halo: Reach, that provides one of the most complete and rewarding gaming experiences in all of Halo - and all without the Master Chief himself.

Read more

Microsoft is adding the ability to pre-download game updates before their scheduled release.

The feature, which is already available on PlayStation, allows you to download hefty game updates days before their release. Then, when the update is formally released, the update simply installs - meaning less wait time to get playing.

Microsoft has begun rolling out the feature to those in the Alpha ring of Xbox Insider testers, before it filters down to more people and eventually becomes public in the coming weeks.

Read more

Look, you've had 15 years to play that well-regarded time-bending puzzler sitting in your Steam library, staring at you this whole time. Well, now you can have another 15 years. Braid Anniversary Edition is out on Steam now, a high definition remastering of a classic indie. It got stuck in time following a few delays but it's finally defrosted now. The sharper look will appeal to pixel perfectionists, but there are also 40 new levels for serial rewinders. And - for those interested in the thought processes of designer Jonathan Blow - a bunch of developer commentary.

Read more

Marathon, the 1994 video game that marked Halo and Destiny developer Bungie's first foray into the world of first-person sci-fi shooters, is - as Bungie previously said it would be - now available on Steam for free. And the remaining two titles in the series are due at a later date.

Marathon Classic, as the Steam release is known, has been developed by the team behind Aleph One - a fan-created engine based on the Marathon 2 source code - and promises "authentic gameplay using the original [Marathon] data files". However, it also features optional widescreen HUD support, 3D filtering/perspective, positional audio, and 60+ fps interpolation, "just in case," as the team puts it, "the original is too authentic."

"Alien forces have boarded the colony ship UESC Marathon in the Tau Ceti system, in orbit around humanity’s first interstellar colony," reads the scene-setting blurb for Marathon Classic. "The situation is dire, and as a security officer assigned to the Marathon, your duty is to defend the ship and its crew from the alien threat."

Read more

Sea of Thieves, the piratical live-service romp from Rare, just topped the PS5 download charts in Europe following its debut on Sony's console.

The Xbox Games Studios-published title recently made the jump from Xbox to PlayStation, as part of Microsoft's plans to make more of its games multiplatform. Outside of Europe, it was also the third most downloaded PS5 game in the US and Canada for April.

Not bad, considering it only arrived on PlayStation towards the end of the month!

Read more

Recently, because I hate myself, I was browsing Twitter (I’m not calling it X) and I stumbled across an incredible conceptual video from an artist named DEVINK that shows what they imagine a potential Fortnite X Fallout crossover could look like.

This crossover seems like a bit of a no-brainer to me and I wouldn't be surprised if something like this happened in the future, but what about Fallout crossovers from the past? Well that's what I'm exploring in today's video (above) so please do give it a click and see if you remember any of the seven forgotten Fallout crossovers that feature within.

These crossovers range from an excellent and highly detailed Minecraft mash-up and some fairly fancy, but almost definitely forgotten cosmetics for Brink, through to what can only be described as one of the most haunting pieces of headwear for the Xbox 360 Avatars that I ever did see.

Read more

It was Digital Foundry's John Linneman who first made me see the truth. The truth, in this case, being that Crackdown, the deliriously great open-world blaster, is not a platform game so much as it's a climbing game. Crackdown casts you as a supercop in a city in which you can race up skyscrapers as easily as if you're tooling down the street in a sportscar. Crackdown is all about the window-ledge grip, followed by the boost, followed by the grip and so on until you hit the troposphere. When you scan the side of a building in Crackdown's Pacific City, you're not really looking for platforms, but handholds.

Funny it should take me so long to realise this. I've always been a fan of climbing - not doing it, although I have dabbled, skill-lessly, in my youth, but following it, reading about it, dreaming about it. I have friends who are climbers and I am always full of questions. I've read the complete works of people like Alex Honnold and Chris Bonington. Bonington was my mum's childhood - and adulthood - hero, incidentally. I'm named after him, and on my desk at home I have a postcard of him as a young man, wearing a dark, surprisingly formal jacket, up somewhere high, and with a thick cord of ropes over his shoulder. It's a picture of pure adventure. What a disappointment to him I must be.

At that desk, though, I do quite a bit of climbing. I climbed through Crackdown, without realising it, and recently I climbed through Jusant. With the release of a new climbing game this week, I've been thinking about how it all fits together. Climbing feels, of all activities, uniquely physical to me, because it's about rock and about hands and about clasping. It's about connections, points of contact, cleaving to a part of the natural world and holding on tight. How do games do that?

Read more

Marathon, the 1994 video game that marked Halo and Destiny developer Bungie's first foray into the world of first-person sci-fi shooters, is - as Bungie previously said it would be - now available on Steam for free. And the remaining two titles in the series are due at a later date.

Marathon Classic, as the Steam release is known, has been developed by the team behind Aleph One - a fan-created engine based on the Marathon 2 source code - and promises "authentic gameplay using the original [Marathon] data files". However, it also features optional widescreen HUD support, 3D filtering/perspective, positional audio, and 60+ fps interpolation, "just in case," as the team puts it, "the original is too authentic."

"Alien forces have boarded the colony ship UESC Marathon in the Tau Ceti system, in orbit around humanity’s first interstellar colony," reads the scene-setting blurb for Marathon Classic. "The situation is dire, and as a security officer assigned to the Marathon, your duty is to defend the ship and its crew from the alien threat."

Read more

Sea of Thieves, the piratical live-service romp from Rare, just topped the PS5 download charts in Europe following its debut on Sony's console.

The Xbox Games Studios-published title recently made the jump from Xbox to PlayStation, as part of Microsoft's plans to make more of its games multiplatform. Outside of Europe, it was also the third most downloaded PS5 game in the US and Canada for April.

Not bad, considering it only arrived on PlayStation towards the end of the month!

Read more

Recently, because I hate myself, I was browsing Twitter (I’m not calling it X) and I stumbled across an incredible conceptual video from an artist named DEVINK that shows what they imagine a potential Fortnite X Fallout crossover could look like.

This crossover seems like a bit of a no-brainer to me and I wouldn't be surprised if something like this happened in the future, but what about Fallout crossovers from the past? Well that's what I'm exploring in today's video (above) so please do give it a click and see if you remember any of the seven forgotten Fallout crossovers that feature within.

These crossovers range from an excellent and highly detailed Minecraft mash-up and some fairly fancy, but almost definitely forgotten cosmetics for Brink, through to what can only be described as one of the most haunting pieces of headwear for the Xbox 360 Avatars that I ever did see.

Read more

It was Digital Foundry's John Linneman who first made me see the truth. The truth, in this case, being that Crackdown, the deliriously great open-world blaster, is not a platform game so much as it's a climbing game. Crackdown casts you as a supercop in a city in which you can race up skyscrapers as easily as if you're tooling down the street in a sportscar. Crackdown is all about the window-ledge grip, followed by the boost, followed by the grip and so on until you hit the troposphere. When you scan the side of a building in Crackdown's Pacific City, you're not really looking for platforms, but handholds.

Funny it should take me so long to realise this. I've always been a fan of climbing - not doing it, although I have dabbled, skill-lessly, in my youth, but following it, reading about it, dreaming about it. I have friends who are climbers and I am always full of questions. I've read the complete works of people like Alex Honnold and Chris Bonington. Bonington was my mum's childhood - and adulthood - hero, incidentally. I'm named after him, and on my desk at home I have a postcard of him as a young man, wearing a dark, surprisingly formal jacket, up somewhere high, and with a thick cord of ropes over his shoulder. It's a picture of pure adventure. What a disappointment to him I must be.

At that desk, though, I do quite a bit of climbing. I climbed through Crackdown, without realising it, and recently I climbed through Jusant. With the release of a new climbing game this week, I've been thinking about how it all fits together. Climbing feels, of all activities, uniquely physical to me, because it's about rock and about hands and about clasping. It's about connections, points of contact, cleaving to a part of the natural world and holding on tight. How do games do that?

Read more

Marathon, the 1994 video game that marked Halo and Destiny developer Bungie's first foray into the world of first-person sci-fi shooters, is - as Bungie previously said it would be - now available on Steam for free. And the remaining two titles in the series are due at a later date.

Marathon Classic, as the Steam release is known, has been developed by the team behind Aleph One - a fan-created engine based on the Marathon 2 source code - and promises "authentic gameplay using the original [Marathon] data files". However, it also features optional widescreen HUD support, 3D filtering/perspective, positional audio, and 60+ fps interpolation, "just in case," as the team puts it, "the original is too authentic."

"Alien forces have boarded the colony ship UESC Marathon in the Tau Ceti system, in orbit around humanity’s first interstellar colony," reads the scene-setting blurb for Marathon Classic. "The situation is dire, and as a security officer assigned to the Marathon, your duty is to defend the ship and its crew from the alien threat."

Read more

Sea of Thieves, the piratical live-service romp from Rare, just topped the PS5 download charts in Europe following its debut on Sony's console.

The Xbox Games Studios-published title recently made the jump from Xbox to PlayStation, as part of Microsoft's plans to make more of its games multiplatform. Outside of Europe, it was also the third most downloaded PS5 game in the US and Canada for April.

Not bad, considering it only arrived on PlayStation towards the end of the month!

Read more

Recently, because I hate myself, I was browsing Twitter (I’m not calling it X) and I stumbled across an incredible conceptual video from an artist named DEVINK that shows what they imagine a potential Fortnite X Fallout crossover could look like.

This crossover seems like a bit of a no-brainer to me and I wouldn't be surprised if something like this happened in the future, but what about Fallout crossovers from the past? Well that's what I'm exploring in today's video (above) so please do give it a click and see if you remember any of the seven forgotten Fallout crossovers that feature within.

These crossovers range from an excellent and highly detailed Minecraft mash-up and some fairly fancy, but almost definitely forgotten cosmetics for Brink, through to what can only be described as one of the most haunting pieces of headwear for the Xbox 360 Avatars that I ever did see.

Read more

It was Digital Foundry's John Linneman who first made me see the truth. The truth, in this case, being that Crackdown, the deliriously great open-world blaster, is not a platform game so much as it's a climbing game. Crackdown casts you as a supercop in a city in which you can race up skyscrapers as easily as if you're tooling down the street in a sportscar. Crackdown is all about the window-ledge grip, followed by the boost, followed by the grip and so on until you hit the troposphere. When you scan the side of a building in Crackdown's Pacific City, you're not really looking for platforms, but handholds.

Funny it should take me so long to realise this. I've always been a fan of climbing - not doing it, although I have dabbled, skill-lessly, in my youth, but following it, reading about it, dreaming about it. I have friends who are climbers and I am always full of questions. I've read the complete works of people like Alex Honnold and Chris Bonington. Bonington was my mum's childhood - and adulthood - hero, incidentally. I'm named after him, and on my desk at home I have a postcard of him as a young man, wearing a dark, surprisingly formal jacket, up somewhere high, and with a thick cord of ropes over his shoulder. It's a picture of pure adventure. What a disappointment to him I must be.

At that desk, though, I do quite a bit of climbing. I climbed through Crackdown, without realising it, and recently I climbed through Jusant. With the release of a new climbing game this week, I've been thinking about how it all fits together. Climbing feels, of all activities, uniquely physical to me, because it's about rock and about hands and about clasping. It's about connections, points of contact, cleaving to a part of the natural world and holding on tight. How do games do that?

Read more

Halo and Destiny developers Bungie have released their classic shooter Marathon for free on Steam, with sequels Marathon 2 and Marathon Infinity to follow. The Steam ports are the work of the celebrated Aleph One community developers, who've kept Bungie's old Marathon 2 game engine going as an open source project - and who still have PC ports of all three games available on their own site, if you'd rather not truck with Steam.

Read more

So you want to be a pirate, eh? Well, what with today's double whammy of a PlayStation 5 release and the launch of Season 12 – bringing with it, among other things, the first new weapons since 2018 – now seems as good a time as any to discover (or rediscover, if you're a lapsed player) Rare's swashbuckling multiplayer pirate game.

And to mark Sea of Thieves crossing the murky waters of console exclusivity toward new egalitarian horizons, it has come down to me – someone who has spent so many hours in Sea of Thieves over the last six years that I may as well be a real pirate at this point – to take you by the hook and guide you through these stranger tides.

This isn't a guide, as such, so don't go expecting all your piratical questions to be answered here; instead, it's a more of a relaxed tour of some of Sea of Thieves' niftier, lesser-remarked features – the stuff the game doesn't really tell you about – that you might find useful and/or intriguing on your first few days inside the Devil’s Shroud. Here we go!

Read more

One of Xbox's greatest treasures, Sea of Thieves has finally launching on PS5 and I, Iyaaaaarrrn Higton, have swabbed my poop deck and spliced my mainbrace in anticipation for this momentous occasion.

Sea of Thieves has actually been in open beta on PS5 for the past week and, according to Digital Foundry's Oliver Mackenzie, "Sea of Thieves retains its signature charm - and should go down well with PlayStation players." Although he also noted that there were some networking issues that he hopes will get (eye) patched out for launch.

Thankfully, I experience exactly 'zero' network issues with the PS5 launch version of Sea of Thieves in today's stream (above) and, in answer to the question I posed in the headline, it handles really well! The game looks absolutely stunning on PS5, with special shoutouts going to Rare's magnificent water tech that constantly blew me away with how beautiful it was. Sunlight bouncing across slowly undulating water never looked this good!

Read more

Remember that bit in that Guy Ritchie film where Dexter Fletcher shoot a guy and then throws a glowing jar over his soldier that summons a bunch of skeletons to help him out? Me too! Must have been the direct influence for Sea Of Thieves' new Season 12, which launched earlier this week with a bang - from two smoking barrels! Among the additions in this season of the ever popular salty sea-dog open-world adventure are double barrel pistols. They deal less damage per shot but have higher rate of fire, and you can charge them up to fire both barrels at once.

On the other end of the weapon scale are new throwing knives, capable of sneak attacks, light slashes, or, you know, throwing. You can nab any throwing knives you see lying around, too, which is fun. But honestly, the Bone Caller tool (the aforementioned jar of skeletons, which has a great Jason and The Argonauts vibe) and the Horn Of Fair Winds are are probably more useful. The winds from said horn can make your ship go faster, but can also put out fires or crowd control enemies, or for some reason make you swim faster? I don't think that makes sense, to be honest, but the horn has limited uses so as not to make you an unstoppable wind machine.

Read more

I don't tend to do a lot of videogame discount posts because I have a mortal fear of enriching my backlog, but when I see the entire Mass Effect trilogy and all of its expansions for around the price of a slightly aristocratic sandwich, I am compelled to share. The Legendary Edition of BioWare's ravishing sci-fi RPG series is 90% off on Steam until 13th May. That translates to 6€, $6 or £5 for all three main games and 40 DLC packs, plus bells and whistles such as 4K Ultra HD and beefed-up character models. If you haven't played a Mass Effect game before, this is a pretty good place to start.

Read more

If you’re holding out hope for another Ori and the Blind Forest sequel after Will of the Wisps, bad news: it’s probably going to be a while. Developers Moon Studios have said they’re all-in on Soulslike action-RPG No Rest for the Wicked, suggesting that their “magnum opus” will be their focus for up to a decade.

Read more

Sea of Thieves stared off life as an Xbox exclusive, growing over time into a genuine hit with a large, committed community. Now, in an effort to increase its audience still futher, it's become a key part of Microsoft's multi-platform push. Yes, Rare's pirate co-op title is headed to PlayStation 5, kicking off with an open beta last weekend. So just how good is the port and to what extent does the experience vary between PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series hardware? This has been an interesting project for Digital Foundry, not just because of the new version - but also because we missed out on covering the game in its transition to current-gen hardware, so we also took a look at the game to see how it has evolved up against Xbox One X.

The most interesting place to start is with a look at the brand-new PS5 version. To reiterate, we looked at beta code, and there may be changes when the game launches on April 30th, but it does seem quite polished at the moment. First impressions suggest a game that is very similar to its Series X counterpart - but when we look a bit closer, there are some differences. Shadows look quite a bit different on PS5, with a sharper outline and more visible detail. This holds true both up-close and at a distance, with far away shadows resolving more softly on the Series machine. This is definitely an odd change, and falls in line with a similar tweak found in the PS5 version of Hi-Fi Rush.

If we boot up the PC version at max settings, the PS5 version more closely resembles the highest shadow quality option, though neither console is a perfect fit. The PS5 and PC exhibit similar looking shadow detail, with slightly stronger filtering on PC, but if we step down to the legendary setting, both consoles clearly offer better and cleaner shadow rendering. I can't quite tell if this just comes down to a difference in shadow filtering or if the PS5's shadow resolution has been upgraded relative to Series X, but it is very curious for sure. I tended to prefer the PS5's shadow rendering for what it's worth, though it's not a difference I'd fixate on outside of head-to-heads.

Read more

There's something quietly quite exciting happening, and I wonder where it's going to lead. Earlier this week, Grounded - the Honey I Shrunk the Kids backyard survival game - arrived on PlayStation, and at the end of the month (30th April) pirating game Sea of Thieves arrives on PlayStation too. It's a momentous occasion, even though it might not sound it, because we've never had games conceived as Xbox exclusives arrive on PlayStation before. It's an unprecedented new approach by Microsoft and, should it work, it could open a whole Mary Poppins bag of possibility.

I don't want to talk about the colder business case for it, because that's not what excites me. What excites me is what it means for players and, I suppose, for the games themselves. How wonderful it feels to be excited about these games again, which are now a number of years old. We first played Sea of Thieves in early 2018, and Grounded in mid-2020, and they were terrifically exciting then, but now they're not. They've been with us so long they've become familiar. No one's pulling you aside and asking you, raw enthusiasm in their eyes, if you've played them yet.

Well, not yet.

Read more

Booty called, and boy did we answer. Earlier this week, the Sea of Thieves team revealed that 40 million of us had embraced our inner pirate and set sail since the game's debut across Xbox and PC. We seas-ed the day, if you will.

Sharing this "amazing milestone", Sea of Thieves executive producer Joe 'Three Sheets' Neate acknowledged the game's "brilliant, positive and welcoming community, who continue to surprise and impress us with your creativity and antics out on the waves".

A lot of credit and thanks for this milestone also had to go to Sea of Thieves' development team, Neate added, "who've worked so hard to deliver over a hundred free updates since launch and have plenty more excitement and innovation on the horizon".

Read more

Braid: Anniversary Edition (or Braid, Anniversary Edition as it's officially styled) has been delayed by two weeks. The remake is now set to launch for PlayStation, Switch, and PC on 15th May, with Xbox Series X/S and Xbox One versions arriving a day later, on 16th May.

Developer Jonathan Blow revealed his time-manipulating platform-puzzler would be getting an enhanced Anniversary Edition all the way back in 2020, and a release of 30th April 2024 was finally confirmed last November, placing its launch squarely in the original's 15th birthday year.

News of a brief delay for Braid: Anniversary Edition was shared today in a press release, but no reason for its later-than-expected arrival has been given. On the upside, the announcement brings news of a previously undisclosed feature: 40 new levels. These consist of 14 commentary index levels (15 in the mobile version), used to navigate the game's 15+ hours of commentary, 12 alternate design levels with explanatory commentary, plus 13 new full puzzle levels, featuring 16 puzzle pieces that'll combine to form a new frame.

Read more

Five of the Best is a weekly series for supporters of Eurogamer. It's a series that highlights some of the features in games that are often overlooked. It's also about having your say, so don't be shy, use the comments below and join in!

Oh and if you want to read more, you can - you can find our entire Five of the Best archive elsewhere on the site.

There's a hole in your bucket, dear Liza, dear Liza, there's a hole in your bucket, dear Liza, a hole. Thank you, thank you, what a lovely rendition. The humble bucket, a stalwart of our day-to-day lives. We use them to slosh dirty water around in, and we use them to wee in if we're going camping and don't want to venture out during the night. No, don't you? We all have a bucket, I'd venture to say, and we all use them, so it's only fitting that games should include them too. But which games have made them feel like more than just props? In which game are buckets the best?

Read more

Sea of Thieves stared off life as an Xbox exclusive, growing over time into a genuine hit with a large, committed community. Now, in an effort to increase its audience still futher, it's become a key part of Microsoft's multi-platform push. Yes, Rare's pirate co-op title is headed to PlayStation 5, kicking off with an open beta last weekend. So just how good is the port and to what extent does the experience vary between PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series hardware? This has been an interesting project for Digital Foundry, not just because of the new version - but also because we missed out on covering the game in its transition to current-gen hardware, so we also took a look at the game to see how it has evolved up against Xbox One X.

The most interesting place to start is with a look at the brand-new PS5 version. To reiterate, we looked at beta code, and there may be changes when the game launches on April 30th, but it does seem quite polished at the moment. First impressions suggest a game that is very similar to its Series X counterpart - but when we look a bit closer, there are some differences. Shadows look quite a bit different on PS5, with a sharper outline and more visible detail. This holds true both up-close and at a distance, with far away shadows resolving more softly on the Series machine. This is definitely an odd change, and falls in line with a similar tweak found in the PS5 version of Hi-Fi Rush.

If we boot up the PC version at max settings, the PS5 version more closely resembles the highest shadow quality option, though neither console is a perfect fit. The PS5 and PC exhibit similar looking shadow detail, with slightly stronger filtering on PC, but if we step down to the legendary setting, both consoles clearly offer better and cleaner shadow rendering. I can't quite tell if this just comes down to a difference in shadow filtering or if the PS5's shadow resolution has been upgraded relative to Series X, but it is very curious for sure. I tended to prefer the PS5's shadow rendering for what it's worth, though it's not a difference I'd fixate on outside of head-to-heads.

Read more

There's something quietly quite exciting happening, and I wonder where it's going to lead. Earlier this week, Grounded - the Honey I Shrunk the Kids backyard survival game - arrived on PlayStation, and at the end of the month (30th April) pirating game Sea of Thieves arrives on PlayStation too. It's a momentous occasion, even though it might not sound it, because we've never had games conceived as Xbox exclusives arrive on PlayStation before. It's an unprecedented new approach by Microsoft and, should it work, it could open a whole Mary Poppins bag of possibility.

I don't want to talk about the colder business case for it, because that's not what excites me. What excites me is what it means for players and, I suppose, for the games themselves. How wonderful it feels to be excited about these games again, which are now a number of years old. We first played Sea of Thieves in early 2018, and Grounded in mid-2020, and they were terrifically exciting then, but now they're not. They've been with us so long they've become familiar. No one's pulling you aside and asking you, raw enthusiasm in their eyes, if you've played them yet.

Well, not yet.

Read more

Booty called, and boy did we answer. Earlier this week, the Sea of Thieves team revealed that 40 million of us had embraced our inner pirate and set sail since the game's debut across Xbox and PC. We seas-ed the day, if you will.

Sharing this "amazing milestone", Sea of Thieves executive producer Joe 'Three Sheets' Neate acknowledged the game's "brilliant, positive and welcoming community, who continue to surprise and impress us with your creativity and antics out on the waves".

A lot of credit and thanks for this milestone also had to go to Sea of Thieves' development team, Neate added, "who've worked so hard to deliver over a hundred free updates since launch and have plenty more excitement and innovation on the horizon".

Read more

Braid: Anniversary Edition (or Braid, Anniversary Edition as it's officially styled) has been delayed by two weeks. The remake is now set to launch for PlayStation, Switch, and PC on 15th May, with Xbox Series X/S and Xbox One versions arriving a day later, on 16th May.

Developer Jonathan Blow revealed his time-manipulating platform-puzzler would be getting an enhanced Anniversary Edition all the way back in 2020, and a release of 30th April 2024 was finally confirmed last November, placing its launch squarely in the original's 15th birthday year.

News of a brief delay for Braid: Anniversary Edition was shared today in a press release, but no reason for its later-than-expected arrival has been given. On the upside, the announcement brings news of a previously undisclosed feature: 40 new levels. These consist of 14 commentary index levels (15 in the mobile version), used to navigate the game's 15+ hours of commentary, 12 alternate design levels with explanatory commentary, plus 13 new full puzzle levels, featuring 16 puzzle pieces that'll combine to form a new frame.

Read more

Five of the Best is a weekly series for supporters of Eurogamer. It's a series that highlights some of the features in games that are often overlooked. It's also about having your say, so don't be shy, use the comments below and join in!

Oh and if you want to read more, you can - you can find our entire Five of the Best archive elsewhere on the site.

There's a hole in your bucket, dear Liza, dear Liza, there's a hole in your bucket, dear Liza, a hole. Thank you, thank you, what a lovely rendition. The humble bucket, a stalwart of our day-to-day lives. We use them to slosh dirty water around in, and we use them to wee in if we're going camping and don't want to venture out during the night. No, don't you? We all have a bucket, I'd venture to say, and we all use them, so it's only fitting that games should include them too. But which games have made them feel like more than just props? In which game are buckets the best?

Read more

The Anniversary Edition of Braid was originally announced almost four years ago, and originally meant to be out sometime in 2021. As such, the latest delay to Jonathan Blow’s time-rewinding puzzle-platformer - which sees its date pushed back two weeks into the middle of next month - feels like a relative drop in the hourglass.

Read more

Last time, you decided that gliding powers are better than Dragon's Dogma 2's Unmaking Arrow. Honestly I'm surprised it was that close (66% vs 33%—don't sweat the rounding), and I'm proud of your ability to weigh a whole concept against a single-game implementation. We are so good at this. Onwards! This week, I ask you to choose between placing things in two very different ways. What's better: a 'put back' action, or standing atop another player's head in an FPS?

Read more

Sea of Thieves, you might have heard, is heading to PlayStation 5 next month. It's a significant moment for all sorts of reasons – it's perhaps the biggest of the four Microsoft first-party titles recently confirmed for Sony's console, and it's also the first time developer Rare has released a PlayStation title in its nearly 40-year history – but it's also an opportunity for a whole new group of players to experience (and I say this as a huge Sea of Thieves fan) a wonderful, genuinely unique game. And with the multiplayer pirate adventure's 30th April launch on PS5 looming, I spoke to creative director Mike Chapman and executive producer Joe Neate about this latest milestone, the state of the game, and the team's big sandbox focus for 2024.

"We've had [the PlayStation 5 version] running really since late last year," Neate explains of Sea of Thieves' journey to a new console. "We've been testing internally and we're getting into the 'take home' stage, where we're playing at home with our little hands on the [PlayStation] controllers, and kind of going, 'This is insane!'". But how did the pair react when they first learned a PlayStation version was happening? "I think it's such a surreal moment we have this opportunity," Chapman responds. "Sea of Thieves at its core is about taking barriers away, allowing crews of would-be pirates to sail together on the waves, to share ships, and the fact we're now adding one more platform so people can create their ideal crew and enjoy the game, it's monumental, absolutely monumental - if you'd told me this back in 2018, I don't think I would have believed you. It's amazing."

"And having this new influx of players," Neate adds, "this new influx of feedback and perspective, for the strength and health of Sea of Thieves as an ongoing, evolving game, it's just a great moment… It's a really good time for Sea of Thieves."

Read more

Alan Wake developer Remedy Entertainment has announced it's acquired the full rights to its Control series from publisher 505 Games for €17m.

As detailed in an investor announcement on Remedy's website, the rights acquisition - which includes those for publishing, distribution, and marketing - cover the full Control franchise, including the supernatural third-person shooter's 2019 debut game, the upcoming Control 2 and multiplayer spin-off codenamed Condor, and all future titles in the series.

Remedy's publishing agreement with 505 Games for Control 2 and Condor terminates immediately, and 505 will continue to serve as the publisher of Control until 31st December this year, when the transition period ends.

Read more

It's been over seven years since Limbo and Inside developer Playdead first began teasing its mysterious third project, and now - nearly five years since Eurogamer last had cause to write about a sneaky bit of concept art for the game - the studio has shared a handful of new images, confirming (in case there was any doubt) the project is still alive and well.

A first enigmatic bit of concept art for Playdead's untitled third game was shared by the developer in 2017, around six months after Inside launched to critical acclaim. At the time, the studio confirmed work was underway on its "next adventure", with the accompanying artwork suggesting it would take players on a lonely journey with sci-fi undertones.

Since then, further bits of atmospheric concept art have sporadically surfaced - first on social media in 2018, then buried in some online job listings in 2019, then on LinkedIn last year - all seemingly pointing to an adventure in which a lone space traveller wanders a desolate planet strewn with abandoned tech. About all we've conclusively learned of the mysterious project in that time, again thanks to Playdead's jobs page, is that it's a "third-person science fiction adventure set in a remote corner of the universe."

Read more

When I did my undergrad degree in the nowadays-blissful-seeming early noughties, I swore off videogames entirely. I sternly and sorrowfully turned my back on such hit releases as Shadow of the Colossus, Far Cry and yes, even, that PC gaming essential Half-Life 2, so as to spend 11-hour days boning up on Aeschylus and Samuel Johnson. Then, two weeks before my final exams, I somehow went out and bought Ensemble's Age Of Mythology.

I'm not sure why - blame the devil on my shoulder, I guess. It wasn't even a new release at that point. I managed to get good marks in the exams despite several nights of binge-playing, but what direction, in general, would my life have taken if I hadn't bought Age Of Mythology at such a fateful hour? Better or worse? Could I have been some kind of billionaire don with a Pulitzer by now, if it weren't for Age Of Mythology? These things keep me awake at night. Anyway, here's a little more info about the forthcoming reboot Age of Mythology: Retold, which broadly aims to turn this wrinkled titan of the strategy genre into a proper modern esport.

Read more

Age of Mythology Retold, the latest remaster of the god-battling Age of Empires spin-off, will finally see a release in 2024, having been revealed back in October 2022.

Read more

Xbox has announced a PlayStation release date for Sea of Thieves, its popular pirate live service game from British studio Rare.

PlayStation 5 players will be able to wishlist the game beginning tomorrow, 22nd February, ahead of its launch on Sony's console on 30th April.

A blog post from Microsoft tonight also confirms PlayStation dates for Pentiment (tomorrow, 22nd February) and Grounded (16th April) - the same as the dates confirmed for Switch in the Nintendo Direct earlier.

Read more

Nintendo will add five classic Rare games to Nintendo Switch today, including SNES hit Killer Instinct and N64 great Blast Corps.

In Japan, Nintendo Switch Online subscribers will also get Mother 3 - the third entry in the legendary Earthbound series which has never made it to the West.

All of these games were announced in this afternoon's Nintendo Direct broadcast - though Mother 3 was only mentioned in the show's Japanese version. Sorry, rest of the world.

Read more

This week on the Eurogamer Newscast, we discuss Microsoft's business update that brought us confirmation Xbox will launch four console exclusives - for now - on PlayStation and Nintendo Switch.

But why did Microsoft choose not to name those four games (even though Hi-Fi Rush, Pentiment, Grounded and Sea of Thieves were immediately reported to be the titles in question)? What happened to the previously-reported plans to include larger games such as Starfield? And where will Microsoft draw the line for what to launch elsewhere? Right now, these four feel like something of a soft launch for Microsoft's multiplatform strategy,

As well as all that, we also discuss the news nuggets Microsoft dropped for the Xbox faithful - including mention of new Xbox console hardware this year and the proper next-gen Xbox that's still years away. With me this week are Eurogamer's Ed Nightingale, Victoria Kennedy and Liv Ngan.

Read more

Following mounting reports Xbox is preparing for some kind of multiplatform future, Microsoft has confirmed it'll be bringing four previously Xbox-exclusive first-party titles to PlayStation 5 and Switch later this year, with more likely to come in the future.

Reports that Microsoft was preparing to release a number of first-party games on competing consoles - namely Sea of Thieves and Hi-Fi Rush - first surfaced at the start of this year, but it wasn't until last week's claims high-profile exclusives such as Starfield and Indiana Jones and the Great Circle would also be going multiplatform that Microsoft broke its silence, promising to reveal more in a podcast this week.

And now, as reported by The Verge - which was pre-briefed by Microsoft ahead of tonight's reveal - Xbox gaming boss Phil Spencer has confirmed the company has "made the decision that we're going to take four games to the other consoles". Bafflingly, Spencer does not name the games directly, only saying two are community-driven titles and two are smaller games.

Read more

Welcome to our live coverage of the big Xbox business update, where Microsoft laid out its plan to launch four first-party Xbox games on Nintendo and PlayStation platforms.

Microsoft gaming boss Phil Spencer, Xbox president Sarah Bond and head of Xbox game studios Matt Booty - the company's Triforce of gaming top brass - stopped short of officially confirming the quartet of titles set to go multiplatform, but reports online suggest those titles will be Hi-Fi Rush, Pentiment, Sea of Thieves and Grounded.

The podcast also included a brief mention of new Xbox hardware launching later this year, and a tease for the proper next-gen Xbox - you can read all of that below.

Read more

Xbox has rolled out a new update for February, adding touch controls in remote play and more.

With this update in action, users will be able to play games without being tied to their console even if they don't have a wireless controller to hand. This is as Xbox remote play now supports custom touch control layouts on the Xbox app (via iOS, Android and Windows devices) for over 100 games.

"The same custom touch layouts available through Xbox Cloud Gaming (Beta) will now be available when remotely playing games from your personal console," Microsoft said. "This includes games like Minecraft Dungeons, Psychonauts 2, Sea of Thieves, and many more. Additionally, a basic touch control layout can now be used for most other games."

Read more