Game News

Popular Call Of Duty Warzone Theory Debunked

An enduring fan theory about Call of Duty: Warzone is that the battle royale mode is populated in part by bots. However, Activision has now come out to say this is a bunch of baloney.

In a blog post, the company set the record straight. The only bots in Warzone are in the Bootcamp training mode, which goes live with the Season 3 launch in April. Activision said Bootcamp is Warzone’s only mode that has bots. If the company does decide to add bots to other Warzone modes, it’ll only be after informing fans of this.

“We’ll ensure the community is informed ahead of time,” Activision said.

Fans have long theorized that both Warzone and Modern Warfare III include AI bots in some instances, but this is the first time Activision is debunking that rumor for Warzone specifically. The belief amongst fans is that bots are infiltrating matches so players can easily pound them and have a better experience that encourages them to come back and play more.

Not every Warzone match begins with a full roster of players, and some fans have suggested it would be nice to see bots added to matches in these instances to round things out. Whether or not Warzone ever officially adds bots to the main modes remains to be seen.

Epic’s battle royale game Fortnite features bots in its standard modes, and has for years.

For more, check out GameSpot’s rundown of everything coming to Call of Duty in the Season 3 update, including a bunch of 4/20-themed content, a mode that turns fallen foes into mines, and the newest BlackCell DLC.

Take-Two Buys Gearbox Entertainment From Embracer For $460M

After months of rumors that Embracer Group was looking for buyers for Borderlands developer Gearbox Entertainment, the studio is now officially being sold to 2K parent company Take-Two Interactive in a deal worth $460 million.

Gearbox was one of Embracer Group’s biggest acquisitions when it bought the company in 2021, in a deal worth up to $1.3 billion. As the deal was based on Gearbox reaching certain milestones, it’s unclear how much of that $1.3 billion Embracer ended up paying out beyond $363 million in guaranteed upfront payments.

Now, as reported by Brian Crecente on X, Take-Two Interactive has purchased Gearbox for $460 million, which will be paid out in Take-Two shares. The purchase includes Gearbox Software in Texas, Gearbox Montreal, and Gearbox Studio Quebec, and will cover Gearbox IP including Borderlands and Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands, Risk of Rain, Brothers in Arms, and Duke Nukem.

The sale doesn’t include Gearbox’s publishing arm in San Francisco, which published Remnant 2, and has publishing rights to the upcoming Hyper Light Breaker and other upcoming titles. The sale also excludes a number of studios purchased by Embracer through Gearbox Software, including Cryptic Studios, Lost Boys Interactive, and Captured Dimensions.

Take-Two has said that Gearbox will operate as a studio within 2K, which has a long history of partnering with Gearbox on the Borderlands series. Gearbox will continue to be led by its founder and CEO Randy Pitchford and his management team.

“My primary interest is always Gearbox, including our talent and our customers,” Pitchford said in a statement. “I want to personally ensure fans of our games that this arrangement will ensure that the experiences we have in development at Gearbox will be the best it can possibly be.”

“We are thrilled to welcome Randy Pitchford and his team of passionate, talented developers to 2K and we look forward to releasing numerous projects in the future as colleagues,” said David Ismailer, president of 2K. “We have loved partnering with Gearbox on every iteration of the Borderlands franchise and are excited to be in active development on the next installment in the series.”

In its own statement, Embracer co-founder and CEO Lars Wingefors refers to the divestment as part of a “transition to becoming a leaner and more focused company,” saying the transaction will “lower business risk and improve profitability.”

After a spree of large-scale acquisitions in the last few years, Embracer has now started downsizing, resulting in company-wide layoffs, cancelled games, and divestment of some of its assets. Last month it was revealed that Saber Interactive, which is currently working on the Star Wars: KOTOR remake, would split off to become an independent company, following a sale to private investors worth $500 million.

Dragon’s Dogma 2 Buying Guide: All Editions, Delivery Estimates, And More

Dragon’s Dogma 2 is finally here, and it’s living up to the lofty expectations set by its predecessor. If you’re a fan of open-world RPGs, Dragon’s Dogma 2 offers a wonderful sense of adventure and a deep combat system that improves on the original. Before you pick up a copy, it is worth noting that the PC version has technical issues that Capcom is working on fixing, including steep drops in frame rate. With that in mind, we put together a roundup of where to buy physical and digital versions of Dragon’s Dogma 2, including details on shipping times, pickup in store options, and more. It’s also possible to get the game for less than retail price, if you know where to shop.

If you want to read more about the game before you buy, check out our Dragon’s Dogma 2 review, which awarded Capcom’s new RPG a 9/10.

Disclosure: GameSpot and Fanatical are both owned by Fandom.

Some Of Samsung’s Most Popular Monitors Get Big Price Cuts In Amazon’s Big Spring Sale

A bunch of great computer monitors are on sale during Amazon’s Big Spring Sale, including 20 monitors from Samsung’s impressive catalog. Whether you’re shopping for a monitor for your home office, gaming PC., or anything in between, there’s a good chance it’s currently discounted at Amazon.

If you’re just looking for a nice all-around monitor for general productivity, the Samsung 23.5-Inch Curved Gaming Monitor, which boasts a 1080p resolution and 60Hz refresh rate, is now just $110. Typically sold for $140, that’s the lowest price ever for the popular monitor at Amazon. Along with its curved display, it gets you a fast 4ms response time and ultra slim design that’s great for even the most crowded desktop.

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Looking for something more premium? Consider the Samsung 27-Inch ViewFinity S80PB Series Monitor (4K, 60Hz) for $400 (down from $580) or the Samsung 34-Inch ViewFinity S65TC Series Ultra-Wide Monitor (2K, 100Hz) for $450 (down from $800). Both get you a great refresh rate that’s ideal for gaming, while the S65TC gets you a nice 2K resolution.

There are plenty of other Samsung monitors on sale, including the Samsung 49-Inch Odyssey G9 Series Curved Gaming Monitor (2K, 240Hz), which is getting a big $500 price cut. So if you’re not sold on anything above, you’ll find even more options below.

Amazon Big Spring Sale – Samsung monitor deals

Game Reviews

Pepper Grinder Review – Short And Spicy

It only takes a glance to understand Pepper Grinder’s inventive gimmick. A small girl named Pepper–a pirate by trade–wields a drill named Grinder that’s roughly the size of her entire body. The gear allows her to grind through soft surfaces with ease, complete with the ability to launch out of the surface with a leap. That might have been enough to carry the game by itself, but what’s most surprising about Pepper Grinder is its sheer variety. Though it’s short, that brevity helps to make the campaign a no-filler thrill ride that continuously pushes the boundaries of its central mechanic.

It turns out Grinder is a pretty versatile tool, even regarding its most basic function. You can burrow through the ground, which immediately feels natural and smooth. At the same time, you can’t simply turn on a dime with an instant about-face like a typical platformer–you have to handle turns by curving an arc out of your drilling path. Additionally, when you pop out of the surface of the dirt, you won’t gain much distance unless you jump just before breaking through. Those little touches give the core mechanic a sense of finesse, imitating the feeling of a playful dolphin–or at least, a dolphin video game like the classic Ecco.

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Now Playing: Pepper Grinder GameSpot Video Review

Once you get the hang of it, drilling through soil and leaping out of the surface in a perfect arc, only to catch another piece of soft ground in the distance and continue your digging, feels thrilling and acrobatic. The drillable surfaces are nicely differentiated from hard environmental pieces, so you quickly learn to read a level and see the path through it, evoking a feeling similar to performing a great run in Tony Hawk. Collectibles like gems are scattered strategically throughout the stages to both subtly guide your eye along the path, while also sometimes setting traps for your greed.

Aside from being a traversal tool, Grinder is also your primary and often only weapon. It’s not enough to simply run into most enemies with a spinning drill, though–they often have their own specific approach to defeat them, like beetles with a hard upper carapace who need to be stabbed from the underside by burrowing underground. The main enemies, a breed of vicious narwhal-like creatures with horns on their head, are just as capable of hurting you with a head-on collision as you are of hurting them. None of the regular enemies are terribly tough by themselves, but they introduce new ways of approaching stages and obstacles as you need to get around them or through them to continue on your path.

A platformer with a standout hook like this one probably could have coasted on it, but Pepper Grinder doesn’t rest on its laurels. Instead, it consistently introduces new elements to master. These either integrate with your balletic burrowing or provide a change of pace from it. Grabbing a key with your drill will make it turn a lock, and you can use the kinetic energy to power machines. You’ll also shoot from cannons, drill holes into the bottoms of ships to make them take on water, carve through skyscrapers to make them collapse as you traverse through, and even pilot a giant mech. What appears at first to be a simple tool gives way to constant delightful little surprises.

A series of boss battles ramp up the difficulty nicely, taking the skills you’ve learned and putting them to the test. The first is relatively straightforward, as you dodge projectiles by moving through the soil and wait for the opportune moment to attack from the underside, while the second severely limits the amount of soft ground available and challenges you to leap high into the air to do damage. They progress from there, including one tough encounter with another human-like character that has roughly your size and agility. All this leads to a final boss encounter that is one of the most tense and difficult retro platformer bosses I’ve seen in a long time, which felt satisfying to overcome.

And on top of all this, Pepper Grinder carries itself with a cute, pixel-punk personality. Pepper’s diminutive sprite artwork has a charm to it, like how she revs up her trusty drill threateningly when coming face-to-face with a boss, or how she raises her pirate flag to declare victory in an area. The enemies can sometimes be seen doing their own pirate duties before you crash their party. And though story sequences are few and far between, they were just enough to explain what was going on with mimed, dialogue-free action. A short story sequence just before the final boss even made me laugh out loud.

This gentle giant is one of the fantastical creatures in Pepper Grinder.

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At such a breakneck pace of new ideas, Pepper Grinder doesn’t last very long, which is to its credit. I finished the campaign in roughly four hours, which is a relatively short playtime. Every stage also has a time-trial option, and there are still collectibles and cosmetics to unlock like stickers and hairstyles. The most important collectibles are Skull Coins, a limited resource–five per stage–that can be used to unlock special bonus stages in each of the four worlds. These are used to further explore gameplay concepts that had been introduced in the main stages. The first one, for example, takes the cannon mechanic to its logical conclusion with an entire stage built around ping-ponging from cannon to cannon, which felt pleasanlty reminiscent of Donkey Kong Country’s famous barrel stages.

Perhaps because of its brevity, I enjoyed every minute, and I appreciate the rare instance of a game that doesn’t overstay its welcome. Rather than slog through filler stages to pad its length, Pepper Grinder is bursting with new ideas for exactly as long as it can sustain that momentum. There’s something admirable about approaching its length with that level of confidence. I would have loved to play even more, if it could have sustained that pace, but this felt like a conscious choice to let the best ideas shine.

Pepper Grinder is here for a good time, not for a long time. Every piece, from the core drilling mechanic itself to the various ways it manifests with cannons and mechs and more, feels meticulously engineered to teach you a new concept, wring the fun out of it, and then move on to the next. That sense of propulsion makes every moment fun and engaging. It’s a great little gem of a game which, like its heroine, may be small in size but makes every bit count.

MLB The Show 24 Review – Base Hit

A lot of people will tell you that Hank Aaron is the greatest to ever play the game of baseball. Bob Kendrick, President of the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum, is one of those people, and it’s easy to see why. You only have to look at Hammerin’ Hank’s stats–755 home runs and 3,771 hits in Major League Baseball–his outstanding consistency across 23 big league seasons, or the fact that he achieved all of this after such humble beginnings. Growing up, Aaron had few opportunities to play organized baseball. In fact, he had few opportunities to even use the right equipment. Instead, a young Henry Aaron would take his mom’s broomstick and use it as a makeshift bat to hit bottlecaps–it’s no wonder he ended up being so good.

I knew of Hank Aaron’s incredible career, but supplemental details like this are part of what makes Storylines such a captivating and enlightening experience. If last year’s game was all about introducing this brilliant and groundbreaking new mode, then MLB The Show 24 is more about fine-tuning the existing framework. This isn’t an uncommon approach for annual sports games, and while Sony San Diego’s latest baseball sim might not seem as fresh or exciting as last year’s offering, it still plays an excellent game of baseball while possessing a tangible reverence for the sport’s rich history and inherent romanticism. Players are more than just stats and numbers, after all.

This is where Storylines comes in, and it’s once again the highlight of the whole package. Like any good TV series, MLB The Show 24 returns with a second season of The Negro Leagues, exploring an era of baseball that has often been overlooked and forgotten. At launch, there are four stories to play through, shining a spotlight on the aforementioned Henry “Hank” Aaron, as well as Josh Gibson, Walter “Buck” Leonard, and Toni Stone, with more set to arrive in forthcoming updates.

MLB The Show 24

Bob Kendrick’s charismatic and insightful narration brings these tales to life, aided by slickly produced videos that weave in historical photographs, original artwork, and archival footage to paint a portrait of these players and their profound impact on baseball and American culture. In between these video packages, you’ll play through pivotal moments from each player’s career, from Aaron’s first hit as a member of the Milwaukee Braves to Josh Gibson’s decimation of MLB pitching in exhibition games–where he batted a ridiculous .426. Perhaps the most interesting collection of episodes focuses on the career of Toni Stone, a true trailblazer who became the first woman to play for a professional baseball team when she took Hank Aaron’s roster spot after he departed the Negro Leagues for the MLB.

Alongside these eye-opening tales, MLB The Show 24 also expands on the Storylines concept by adding a series on legendary New York Yankees shortstop Derek Jeter. By using a New York subway motif as the backdrop for Jeter’s story, the former captain recounts important moments from the first few years of his storied career as you travel along the tracks from 1996 to 2000. Starting with his first steps as an unheralded rookie to achieving legendary status as the Yankees won three consecutive World Series titles, Jeter gives you an insight into his and the team’s mindset during this monumental run. There are also three side stories that center on the other members of the Yankees’ Core Four: Mariano Rivera, Jorge Posada, and Andy Pettitte. These stories are brief, consisting of a single video package, but completing each additional mission unlocks their player cards for use in Diamond Dynasty.

As a Yankees fan, I enjoyed Jeter’s retelling of the era’s events, along with being able to recreate moments like his iconic jump-throw and a number of his clutch hits. Admittedly, however, it’s not the most interesting collection of stories. This is a team and player that won four championships in five years with little to no adversity, while Jeter himself was relatively drama-free off the field. It doesn’t make for the most compelling narrative, but the inclusion of Jeter’s Storylines does at least set a precedent for the series where we’ll hopefully see more engrossing tales in the future, whether the focal point is on a single Hall of Fame player or an entire team.

MLB The Show 24

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Road to the Show, meanwhile, lets you create and play as a woman for the first time. There are specific video packages that differ from those in the male career, with MLB Network analysts embracing the historical significance of a woman being drafted by an MLB team. A separate narrative based around you getting drafted alongside a childhood friend also differentiates the female career from the male side–which lacks any kind of story–while considerations like a private dressing room add an element of authenticity. The majority of cutscenes play out via text message, however, replacing the series’ previous narration with a hackneyed alternative.

The only other new addition to Road to the Show is the return of the Draft Combine, which gives you three games to improve your draft ranking by playing well against other prospects. While it’s good to see the combine back, it’s a fairly superfluous addition for those who simply want to choose which team to play for rather than leaving it up to fate. It also doesn’t take into account starting pitchers, dropping your draft stock because you’re only able to play in one of the three available games. The inclusion of women is a positive one, but Road to the Show is still in desperate need of an overhaul to its tired loadout system and bland presentation.

Franchise remains mostly the same, aside from one new addition with the potential to completely alter how you engage with the mode. Custom Game Entry Conditions is a setting that lets you simulate games until certain conditions are met, at which point you’re able to take control. You can customize these conditions based on how critical the situation is by tinkering with a situation-importance slider that ranges from low to very high.

You’re able to pick the earliest inning you’re willing to enter games, and can also ensure that you’ll always jump into player-highlight moments, such as finishing off a potential no-hitter or extending a batter’s hitting streak. With this setting, you might decide you only want to enter games during high-leverage situations in the ninth inning or play from the seventh inning onwards in tight games. This alleviates the grind of a full 162-game season while keeping you invested and making sure you have an impact on games that might mean the difference between making the playoffs or missing out on October baseball. The one side-effect of this addition is that Road to October and its truncated seasons now feel obsolete, but improving Franchise makes this a worthy trade-off.

Diamond Dynasty, the card-collecting and squad-building mode, is also not too dissimilar from last year’s game. The implementation of Sets and Seasons has been tweaked, with longer seasons giving you more playing time with season-limited cards. The amount of top-rated cards attainable at the beginning of a season has also been reduced to give you something to build towards.

Cards will now gradually escalate in power over the course of a single season so you won’t be rocking a 99-rated team after a single week. These are positive changes in what remains the most approachable of the many card-collecting modes in sports games, such is the ease with which you’re able to acquire great players without spending a dime. The plethora of single and multiplayer modes is also a feather in its cap.

MLB The Show 24’s on-field action remains stellar. For the first time, new rules like the pitch clock, slightly larger bases, and limited pick-off attempts have been implemented. Impact Plays, a new addition that emphasizes great defense, are also new, reinforcing the impact of spectacular diving catches and difficult throws. Impact Plays are possible anytime you’re player-locked, such as in Road to the Show. If there’s a possibility for a highlight-reel play, the game will slow down and task you with completing a quick-time event. How you perform here determines how successful the play will be. It feels great each time you’re able to rob a batter of a base hit by plucking the ball out of the air moments before it touches the ground or firing a laser beam to first base to beat a runner. I only wish Impact Plays were more frequent and were included as an option when controlling a full team.

The continued absence of an online Franchise mode and the stale nature of Road to the Show are disappointing aspects of this release, but MLB The Show 24 still maintains the series’ commendable output with fantastic gameplay and another collection of fascinating stories exploring The Negro Leagues and its players. A journey through the exalted career of Derek Jeter might not be quite as gripping, but it builds on Storyline’s established framework and lays down an exciting blueprint for the mode’s future. The addition of women in Road to the Show is another positive step, further reinforcing the overarching theme that baseball is for everyone, while the ability to customize how you play Franchise mode makes it a much more palatable proposition for those embarking on a 162-game season. MLB The Show 24 might not swing for the fences, but it’s still a great way to spend the looming summer months.

Princess Peach Showtime Review – Drama Teacher

Princess Peach, the prototypical video game damsel in distress, has had limited success with her own solo adventures. On the rare occasion that she’s playable, she has typically been a sidekick in a larger adventure, like Super Mario RPG. Though she did land a starring role in Super Princess Peach, the game and its core mechanic—in which her powers were defined by wild mood swings—were a miss. Princess Peach Showtime is the latest attempt to make her own story, with nary a Mario or Luigi in sight, and this time she has come more into her own as an adventurer. More importantly, this solo outing seems primed at introducing new players to a wide variety of game genres. While veteran gamers will likely find the pacing too lethargic, it’s nice that Nintendo is making such a clear overture to welcome new players.

And when I say that there’s no Mario or Luigi, I mean at all. Nintendo’s most iconic characters aren’t even present in the intro, when Peach receives an invitation to come see the Sparkle Theater in a land occupied by Theets, little yellow creatures with bulbous noses. Upon arrival, the theater is taken over by a sorceress named Grape and her Sour Bunch goons, who kick out Peach’s loyal Toad companions, misplacing her crown in the process, and proceed to corrupt all the plays. Peach finds a guardian of the playhouse, a fairy named Stella, who accompanies peach by taking the form of a ribbon in her hair. (When Peach puts her hair up into a ponytail, you know it’s getting serious.) Stella is Peach’s default weapon, letting you use a whip-like motion to magically change objects and enemies in the environment, and it’s also the enabler for Peach’s various transformations.

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Now Playing: Princess Peach: Showtime! – Transformation Trailer

When Peach steps into a corrupted play, she finds a spark that lets her take on the role of its hero. These are broad archetypes like Swordfighter, Cowgirl, and Detective, and the 10 costume types allow for a broad range of different gameplay types. Once you’ve found your costumes in the first version of a stage, future stages of that type will start you with it already equipped. Each floor has four plays to conquer, after which you’ll fight a boss and gain access to the next floor. It’s all very easily understandable and flows nicely.

Since every stage is a sidescroller, I found that the plays felt most natural and familiar when they hewed closest to familiar sidescrolling action game mechanics. But even within those, there was some variety at play. The Swordfighter plays are modeled after a very traditional action game, light parry system included. The Cowgirl, on the other hand, is focused more on ranged attacks with your lasso, and the Kung-Fu stages included some lightly rhythmic fighting game mechanics. My personal favorite was Mighty Peach, a cute take on the henshin hero genre like Ultraman, in which Peach gets a robotic-looking power suit that she uses to fly through the air, take out invading UFOs, and lift buses over her head to throw at enemies or use as makeshift bridges. Those stages played almost like a shoot-em-up, with a unique focus on ricocheting ships and aliens into each other.

Some stages are less combat-focused but still handle like simplified platformers. The Ninja stages are centered on stealth, letting you hold up set dressing to blend in with the grass, or duck underwater and breathe through a reed while sneaking up on enemies. The Dashing Thief is focused mostly on a grappling hook as you run across rooftops. Other stages stray further from the platformer formula, like the Figure Skater stages that let you glide gracefully across the ice as you hit icon-coded stunt points to grab collectibles and ultimately defeat the evil Sour Bunch figure skater rival. The Mermaid stages take place almost entirely underwater and consist mostly of directing your siren singing voice–either to direct a group of fish where to go for solving puzzles, Pikmin-style, or to collect special singing-note fish to compose a song. They’re all variations on a theme to some extent, but they have enough slight differences to act as a rudimentary introduction to disparate game genres.

Then there are the costumes that stray furthest from traditional platforming mechanics, to mixed results. The Patissiere (pastry chef) stages are modeled after timing-based cooking games, as you bake batches of cookies or carefully apply frosting to cakes. These are a nice change of pace that really show the flexibility of the concept. The same can’t be said for the Detective stages, which are the weakest of the bunch. These consist almost entirely of walking around, talking to Theets, and then holding a button to point out an inconsistency with some object in the relatively small room. Even keeping in mind that these mysteries are aimed at younger children, the pace of these segments is particularly dull. From your movement speed to tracking something with your magnifying glass to holding the button to call out an inconsistency, everything feels just a little slower than it should be.

That said, the Detective stages, like all of the stages, carry an excellent eye for set design. Princess Peach Showtime works on two levels, as you have to both visually understand the goals and mechanics of the stage itself, while also taking notice that these are ultimately supposed to be stage plays. Many of the props and backgrounds are designed to look like stagecraft, and moving parts like Mighty Peach’s alien enemies or your Cowgirl’s trusty steed are made to look like puppetry, with seams and barely-visible strings. It’s a lovely, subtle touch that really sells the worldbuilding of the Sparkle Theater. The boss designs are equally inventive, as they’re built to look like pieces of behind-the-scenes stage pieces that have been cursed into fearsome beasts, like a massive snake made out lighting rigging to make up its segmented body.

Purrjector Cat is one of the stylized bosses based on stagecraft.

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As you proceed through each stage, you’ll find coins, as well as sparks that are ultimately used to gate access to each boss. These are plentiful enough that I never had to backtrack for more, which is a welcome change from other recent Nintendo games with similar gating structures. Your coins, meanwhile, can be used to purchase additional dress designs for Peach and ribbon colors for Stella. This isn’t very impactful, given that most of your time is spent in plays where Peach will be changed into her stage-appropriate costume, but it’s nice to see your customized Peach when she’s exploring the main floors of the theater at least. As you progress, you’ll also unlock special stages to rescue Sparklas, the Theet embodiment of each of the play’s characters, as well as elements like timed challenge stages. These serve as the culmination of the individual stories, and while they still aren’t very difficult, they are among the most challenging parts of the game. That should be enough to give the target audience the sense of a difficulty ramp. Plus, all of these collectibles means there’s plenty to do for completionists, but the gating isn’t so aggressive that it’s likely to frustrate players–especially the younger players who seem to be the target.

And just as Mario games have never been known for their strong stories, Princess Peach doesn’t escape that issue in her own solo outing. Grape is a typical evil cackling villain with a barely-stated plan or motivations. We never even get a clear idea of whether she intended to attack the theater while Peach was there, or if that was happenstance. This is too bad because the final confrontation is a gameplay highlight, ending on a high note that would be even better if we’d been given a more compelling villain to defeat. If anything, the stories in the individual plays themselves are often more interesting, thanks in part to some great, so-goofy-it’s-fun writing and animation work.

Princess Peach Showtime is a friendly, inviting game that’s made to be easy to digest. Some of the genres work better than others in this format, but none of them are too tricky or off-putting, and most of it will come down to personal taste. None of these stages are fleshed out enough to support their own game, but they’re an invitation for novice gamers to explore a bunch of different game types, with a charming (and apparently polymath) princess offering her gloved hand to welcome them in.

Rise Of The Ronin Review – Long-Term Investment

If someone tells me a game takes several hours to “get good,” my immediate feeling is that I will never play that game. Who has hours to waste waiting for the good part of anything when there are so many other games to play? But my opinion of Rise of the Ronin changed drastically over the course of my 50 hours of playtime–in the first five or 10 hours, I didn’t really like it. By the end, I was planning to dive back in to clear out side quests and replay key moments to see how the story might change. It’s a game that takes its time getting good, but once it finds its footing in samurai-sword duels and character-focused missions, your investment pays off.

The thing that turned the tide for me is the way Rise of the Ronin focuses on telling small, character-driven stories that weave together into a large, history-shaping narrative. The entire game is built on its “Bond” system, where doing side quests big and small builds your relationships with everyone, from the different provinces of Ronin’s massive open-world Japan, to the many characters you meet throughout the course of the game.

Though the Bond system isn’t particularly different from building up faction reputation, liberating map segments, or growing relationship stats with characters like you might see in other games, the focus on investing in all those things and people is illustrative of Team Ninja’s approach to the entire game. Your personal connection to everything in Rise of the Ronin is what makes it work, and the reason it’s worth it to power through its learning curve and less remarkable opening hours.

Rise of the Ronin puts you into the role of a samurai trained alongside another warrior from childhood to be an unstoppable, sword-wielding fighting duo for a group called the Veiled Edge. It’s the 1860s and Japan is opening itself to foreign powers, including the United States and England, creating political strife. On a mission to assassinate a powerful American, your “blade twin” sacrifices themselves so you can escape. Soon after, the rest of the Veiled Edge is wiped out for rebelling against Japan’s government, the shogunate. You set out alone, a ronin warrior without a clan, but soon discover your blade twin is rumored to have survived. What ensues is a lot of politics, intrigue, and adventure.

With no clan to serve, you essentially become a sword for hire and lots of people want your help, which you exchange for leads in finding your blade twin. The main part of Rise of the Ronin’s gameplay is stealthily sneaking up on enemies to assassinate them, and fighting duels. Combat has a similar fast-paced feel to games like Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice and Ghost of Tsushima, with an emphasis on parrying enemies at the right moment and using different fighting styles to counter your opponents. Fights are frenetic, but for that early portion, they’re also frustrating thanks to a combination of weird controls and enemies who will often deploy intense, overwhelming force against you.

Rise of the Ronin

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You and every fighter you come across have both a health bar and a Ki gauge, which is akin to a stamina meter. Ki powers every blow, dodge, and block, and if you run out of Ki and are struck while blocking, you’ll be dazed for a few seconds, opening you up to more punishment. Your goal in every fight–especially with tougher opponents–is to strike blows while parrying their attacks, breaking their rhythm and whittling down their Ki to stagger them. When staggered, most normal enemies can be executed, while tougher foes and bosses take a big hit, then get their Ki back to go another round. It sounds pretty standard, especially with the ubiquity of Souls-likes and similar styles of swordplay focused on parrying, stamina, and breaking an enemy’s posture. Rise of the Ronin has its own take on the approach, though, and it took me a while to build up the skill to actually enjoy it.

The main two elements of sword fights are Martial attacks, which are powerful special moves, and Countersparks, which are flowery parry moves. Like Sekiro and its posture system, your main goal in Rise of the Ronin is to parry enemy blows until you can stagger them. But Countersparks are kind of weird, especially at first. They’re not just straight parries; they’re fast, short-range attacks with their own forward momentum. Missing the timing on a parry usually means you still hit the opponent and the opponent hits you, but there are plenty of times when a Counterspark can move you past the enemy altogether. It creates a strange flow to your fight movements that takes a lot of getting used to.

Rise of the Ronin borrows a bit from Souls-like combat in that enemies will sometimes power through your strikes with their own attack animations, so you need to recognize when to attack and when to hold back. Yet Ronin wants fights to be fast and aggressive, so if you Counterspark certain attacks, you’ll knock the enemy off-balance and open up a brief counter-strike opportunity. This also creates an unusual rhythm–you can Counterspark most of a combo chain from an enemy to no benefit, because the only attack that truly matters for parrying is the last or strongest in the chain. That means your strategy should actually be to safely block your way through a series of attacks, and Counterspark only the final move.

That requirement makes Countersparks unintuitive because the urge to parry has to be strategically resisted. Sometimes you can skillfully parry a bunch of moves in a row and wind up being punished for it anyway; other times, you may be rewarded just for hammering the button against a tough opponent. Mostly, though, you’re spending the first few battles against any tough enemy trying to figure out when the correct time to parry is and getting demolished by quick, relentless strikes in the meantime. It’s not a bad parry system–I came to enjoy Rise of the Ronin’s approach quite a bit once I understood how it worked and could start to read its enemies and their attacks–but the extra motion and timing are at odds with similar games, so you’ll have to unlearn a few things to acclimate yourself.

Enemy Martial attacks are marked by a red glow that indicates you can’t just block them like you can with normal strikes. That means you have to avoid them with a well-timed dodge, or knock them down with a perfectly timed Counterspark for big Ki damage. You have Martial attacks of your own that are great as counterattacks when you successfully knock an enemy off-balance, but they’re not unblockable like enemy ones are and cost extra Ki to execute.

Martial attacks are cool additions to your repertoire, but in enemy hands, they add to the learning curve and pile on some frustration in the early game, as fighting in Rise of the Ronin is usually very fast. You’ll often get hit with a series of attacks you have to block your way through, taking a ton of damage to your Ki, only to get blasted by a devastating Martial attack that cuts your defenses and hurts you even more. Then you get staggered, leaving you open to further walloping, or knocked off your feet and subject to a standing-up animation that lasts just long enough for the enemy to lay into you again with no defenses. One screw-up can lead to a beatdown that’s tough to recover from.

Especially early on, this combat pacing is annoyingly brutal–one particular early boss fight had a massive difficulty spike that held me up for a couple hours. For a game that easily lasts more than 50 hours and has a similar fight at the end of every single mission, being stuck on the same boss for that long was grueling. Fortunately, Rise of the Ronin lets you change the difficulty whenever you want, so you can drop to its easier mode if a fight is giving you trouble, then increase the challenge once you’re over the hump.

It was only later that I started to appreciate the combat system’s combination of elements. That includes the timing of Countersparks, as well as things like the ability to change your fighting style on the fly once you’ve learned new ones. When you approach an enemy, an icon will appear next to their name that indicates both how tough a fight they’ll be and whether their fighting style is strong or weak to your own. You can have two main weapons equipped at any time–which include katanas, odachis, European-style sabers and greatswords, and spears–and three styles for each one, which can be quickly swapped to deal with just about any opponent. Picking the right style to deal with an enemy greatly enhances the effectiveness of your Counterspark, so once I got the hang of parrying and using the right styles and weapons for certain enemies, battles started to click, becoming intense, hard-fought duels that also made me feel like a legendary swordsman.

Rise of the Ronin

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Against the toughest of enemies, it also pays to make use of your allies. You’ll meander through the open world alone, but just about every major story mission or side quest is an instanced level where you have one or two computer-controlled allies backing you up, playing into the Twin Blade concept. You can play cooperatively with other humans in the place of AI buddies, but when you play alone, you’re able to swap between characters on the fly. The AI characters all have their own styles and moves that you can learn and take advantage of, but the best part is the way they enable you to overwhelm an enemy, quickly swapping around to get behind their guard and take advantage of their divided attention. It’s another aspect that takes a while to get good at using, but which sets apart Rise of the Ronin’s combat and makes it intense and chaotic in a good way–most of the time.

What makes fighting a bit wonky is Rise of the Ronin’s control scheme, which is convoluted and unintuitive. Blocking attacks is done by holding the left bumper, but parrying is done with the triangle button. The separation of your defensive moves requires specific training for your brain: Hold this button for this kind of attack, tap this other button for another kind, but mix the two together as well. It’s enough to jumble you up until you’ve spent time getting used to this specific approach.

The same is true of the swapping controls, which require various bumper holds combined with control stick movements or d-pad presses. Changing between loadout items, like healing pills and status-removing salves, is done while holding the left bumper, and so is swapping between characters. Holding the right bumper, on the other hand, lets you change your main weapons, your sub-weapons (like pistols, bows, and rifles), and your fighting styles. Again, it’s just a lot of really specific, esoteric controls to hold in your mind at once, and tough to mentally page through while a guy with a sword is slicing away at your face. Eventually all these controls became natural for me–but it took a while to get there.

The blade twin story isn’t a particularly compelling one, and while it’s the framing device that’s supposed to drive your character, it doesn’t get a lot of screen time. But Rise of the Ronin picks up quite a bit as your investigation pushes you to start making friends with various people, who either support the stability of the shogunate or think the country needs a new government. As time goes on, those different people develop into separate factions that will require your help, and which you can choose to aid.

However, it all leads to an open-world setup that’s somewhat unremarkable. A lot of the open-world content in Rise of the Ronin feels set to the standard of 2010s-era games, with some repetitive activities that will pop up randomly in front of you, some collectibles to chase down, and some side quests to complete that tend to end up with you killing some random baddies.

The more minor activities you do and collectibles you find in each of the small provinces in an area, the higher your bond with that location, which unlocks various minor bonuses. Later, completing these same activities will increase or decrease a faction’s hold on that location, which can have a bearing on story missions as you take them on–although that exact effect is somewhat opaque, especially because you change allegiances multiple times through the course of the story. Generally, though, the open-world activities of Rise of the Ronin are somewhat uninspired. It’s not particularly engaging to clear out yet another group of five bandits, two of which are mini-boss-like “formidable opponents,” to lower a faction’s hold on a province, but Rise of the Ronin will give you a ton of these activities to knock down, alongside small side missions and random activities like muggings. It’s a lot of stuff that seems like filler content in a game that’s already brimming with things to do.

Story missions and side quests are more interesting and involved, although they also get repetitive. Most of these put you into a level where you infiltrate a location, sneak around assassinating rank-and-file soldiers, get seen and fight some guys, and then defeat a boss. These missions suffer in part because Rise of the Ronin’s stealth is a bit undercooked. It can be unreliable, with enemies sometimes spotting you from far off with little issue, and other times being totally oblivious as you fight pitched, protracted battles with their friends 10 feet behind them.

Missions always end with excellent, challenging boss fights, though, and once you get good at Rise of the Ronin’s dueling system, every fight becomes a combat puzzle mixing twitch-reactions and strategic responses that continually make them exciting. Stealth breaks up the fighting just enough to help mission pacing, while rewarding you for analyzing the environment and planning your approach, even if it’ll sometimes annoy you by failing at key moments. Stealth is more a nice-to-have addition than essential to the formula.

The best of Rise of the Ronin’s levels are its Bond missions. You’ll meet a ton of samurai and join many of them in missions as allies, creating ongoing relationships. You can then enhance your friendship with those folks by completing side missions that flesh out their stories and engaging in conversations or giving them gifts. Building stronger Bonds unlocks new fighting styles as well as passive bonuses when you bring them on missions, but the most interesting part is the way each character’s individual stories expand across missions and add to the overall narrative. The characters are all well-drawn, dealing with their own principles and motivations, and their stories are worth experiencing on their own.

Having personal ties to all these characters makes the overall story a lot deeper. Rise of the Ronin tells a fictionalized version of the historical end of the shogunate and the samurai lifestyle in the 1860s, with the characters and events you’re engaged with eventually pushing Japan toward civil war, and your own principles and relationships causing you to switch sides numerous times. That means a character you brought as an ally on one mission might be a boss you have to face down in another, and your connection to all Rise of the Ronin’s characters does a lot to raise the stakes and make the entire narrative feel personally important.

So while Rise of the Ronin has some elements that can frustrate or require some investment to make sense of, and weaker elements like some open-world design that comes off as dated or some repetition in level design, it does a great job of getting you invested in what’s going on and the people involved. Bond missions in particular are a standout, but a mix of personal stakes and large-scale politics make the historical story compelling all the way through. The longer you play Rise of the Ronin, the more characters you meet and spend time with, and the more you learn about its combat and its world, the better it becomes.

It’s not without some flaws, but I finished Rise of the Ronin with much more left to do, and even after 50 hours, I want to head back in to see what I’d missed and attempt to change history. The parts of the game that work more than balance out its weaker elements. And while it took a while to find the rhythm of Rise of the Ronin’s combat, its speed, complexity, and intensity make for some phenomenal fights that always feel great to win. Rise of the Ronin is a game that might take a bit to get good, but the commitment is worth it.

Dragon’s Dogma 2 Review – Pawn Stars

Dragon’s Dogma 2 doesn’t have a traditional fast-travel system. For most open-world games, this would be a death sentence–an affront to the player’s valuable time. Yet somehow, Capcom has turned the absence of this quality-of-life feature into a resounding strength. It’s the game’s tremendous sense of adventure and discovery that accomplishes this. Every time you leave the relative safety of a village or city, there’s no telling what will happen; you just know it has the potential to be spellbinding and will be well worth your time.

As a sequel, Dragon’s Dogma 2 is an extension of everything the first game achieved 12 years ago. It’s an enchanting open-world RPG with varied, exciting combat and a player-created companion system that’s still unlike anything else. It doesn’t do much beyond what the original did, but advancements in technology have enhanced its anomalous strengths, breathing new life into its massive open world and the ways in which you and everything around you can interact with it. New ideas and innovation might not be at the forefront, but the things it does are still relatively distinct.

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Now Playing: Dragon’s Dogma 2 GameSpot Video Review

After a brief but intriguing prologue, your adventure begins in the country of Vermund, a land of lush green forests, alpine peaks, and the flowing currents of its many winding rivers. The royalty and noblemen of Vermund reside behind the fortified walls of its capital city, and it’s from this bustling location that you can board an oxcart to a small village in the north or a checkpoint city in the west. The latter sits on the border with Battahl, an arid land, home to the humanoid cat-like beastren, where gondolas provide an occasional route over the craggy canyons below. Beyond traveling via oxcart or climbing aboard one of these sky lifts, you’re left to explore this sprawling world on foot, traversing dense forests blanketed by canopies that blot out the sun, elven ruins carved into the sides of mountains, and shifting sands bathed in harsh sunlight and circled by deadly harpies.

There is a method of instant fast travel available, but it works in much the same way as it did in the first game. You can exhaust a costly resource known as Ferrystones to travel to any Portcrystal in the world, but these fast-travel points are few and far between–either as a permanent fixture or an item you can pick up and place anywhere you desire. You’ll use them sparingly and spend the vast majority of your time covering large swathes of land on your own two feet. Considering the 12-year gap between the original game and its sequel, this approach to fast travel and seamless exploration feels like an even bolder decision now than it did in 2012. The open-world genre has become more codified in the interim, yet Dragon’s Dogma 2 makes a concerted effort to ensure that the journey is just as important as the destination.

This is a game defined as much by the trek through an undulating gorge as it is the battle you encounter when you reach the bottom. The quests you embark on are diverse, tasking you with venturing off to rescue a boy who’s been taken by a pack of wolves or accompanying an elf on their rite of passage. These quests are sometimes generic but the way they play out is anything but. You’re never just engaging with one singular objective at a time; Dragon’s Dogma 2 is filled to the brim with emergent moments that consistently dazzle and surprise. I could regale you with myriad tales from my 40-hour adventure without even mentioning an actual scripted questline. Defined objectives might give you the impetus to head in a particular direction, but this then unravels a thread of distinct events that occur naturally, challenging you with enormous beasts to topple or piquing your curiosity with a cave tucked away to the side of the main pathway.

I once embarked on a lengthy journey that began with the usual ambushes from resourceful goblins and roadside bandits. I thought a first encounter with the three-headed, magic-wielding chimera would be the most noteworthy part of this venture, only for a monstrous griffin to swoop down and introduce an entirely new set of problems. After hacking at the chimera’s wailing goat head until it eventually collapsed in defeat, I focused all of my attention on the fearsome griffin. The immense force of this mighty creature made the nearby foliage rustle and shake every time it reared back and flapped its wings, but I managed to clamber on top of the beast and dig my sword into the back of its skull before it launched into the air and sent me spiraling to the floor.

After a time, the griffin made its escape, retreating back to the skies above, so I spent the night camping to recuperate my depleted health bar. I set out again in the morning, only to be interrupted by the same griffin, presumably with a newly formed vendetta against me. This time, after much hardship, I defeated the mythical creature before it could flee again, yet my journey was far from over. A pair of colossi sprang an unpredictable attack in the tight confines between two rocky outcrops, while the next night brought about a horde of undead skeletons whose glowing blue eyes pierced the suffocating darkness.

[Dragon’s Dogma 2 is] an enchanting open-world RPG with varied, exciting combat and a player-created companion system that’s still unlike anything else

None of these encounters related to one another or pertained to the quest I initially set out on, but that’s the magic of Dragon’s Dogma 2’s open world. You’re constantly pulled in numerous directions at once and it’s up to you to decide which avenues to pursue. It might be a quest given to you by a villager in need, an enticing structure looming on the horizon, or a locked gate and the potential to find an alternative way inside. Backtracking is fairly common, but no one journey is exactly the same as another, so it never feels like a chore when you’re retreading familiar ground.

Of course, none of this would work nearly as well if the game’s other elements weren’t up to snuff. Fortunately, combat is excellent across the board, providing you with a variety of unique vocations to choose from. These classes range from the sword and shield-wielding Fighter and long-range Archer, to new additions like the Mystic Spearhand–a melee/magic combo build–and the jack-of-all-trades Warfarer. It’s entirely viable to pick a vocation and play the entire game as that class, but you’re also rewarded for experimenting. Each vocation has special Augmentations to unlock which grant passive buffs that you can apply regardless of what class you’re currently using. This means you can make a Mage sturdier, or give a Warrior greater stamina usually reserved for the Thief.

Whichever vocation you choose, there’s a fantastic sense of impact behind your attacks. Axes and greatswords meet flesh with a glorious crunch–the game slowing down to let you bask in your most impactful strikes–while enemies burst into flames and tumble off cliffsides behind the power of a Sorcerer’s stave. There’s a hint of Devil May Cry to its most stylish and over-the-top moves, and hacking away at colossal beasts with slow but purposeful blows can’t help but bring to mind the protracted battles of Monster Hunter.

Even when you’re swirling through the air and conjuring piercing ice shards, the combat still feels grounded thanks to the world reacting realistically to everything that occurs within it. When I toppled a colossus and it stumbled towards a small chasm, it didn’t just fall down the gap, but grabbed onto the other side, creating a desperate, makeshift bridge. Only after hacking at its fingers did it lose its grip and tumble to its demise. The camera sometimes has trouble keeping up with all of this explosive action, usually because a mage has filled the screen with fire or ice. In that sense, it’s a somewhat acceptable trade-off. What’s not quite as forgivable is when the camera becomes unwieldy in tight interiors or when you’re clinging to the back of a terrifying beast, but at least these instances aren’t too frequent and are only a minor inconvenience when you consider the ensuing thrills of Dragon’s Dogma 2’s fantastic combat.

In terms of story, you’re once again cast as the Arisen, repeating a cycle that has occurred for generations. A fearsome dragon rules over the land and chooses you as a worthy challenger to its reign by plucking out your still-beating heart and consuming it. Your ultimate goal is to take up arms and slay the dragon, but before that can happen you need to build up your strength and contend with the disparate politics of both Vermund and Battahl. In Vermund, the Arisen is revered as a sovereign and champion of the people, tasked with protecting the land from the ominous shadow of the dragon. An imposter sits on your throne, however: a False Arisen, put in place by a queen who doesn’t want to lose her power. In attempting to claim what’s rightfully yours, you’ll gradually unravel a mystery that threatens to impact the fate of the whole world.

It’s a decent tale that propels your adventure forward, although it’s light on characterization, which contributes to a persistent feeling of detachment. This makes it difficult to care about the overarching narrative, aside from an interest in unraveling the core mystery. The awe-inspiring scale of its later moments somewhat makes up for its shortcomings, while exploring the differences between the cultures of Vermund and Battahl is also compelling. The beastren nation casts the Arisen as an outsider, fearful as they are of your entourage of pawns and the misfortune they portend.

Much like the first game, these user-created companions are the game’s most exceptional feature. Up to three pawns can join you on your journey, though one is a permanent fixture and your own creation. You can set their vocation and change it as you see fit, equipping skills and upgrades for them just as you would your own character. The other two members of your party are hirelings you can recruit and replace on a whim and are typically created by other players. Choosing which pawns to hire primarily comes down to a matter of party composition. Whether they’re leading from the front, imbuing your weapon with magic, or blanketing the battlefield in meteors, it’s hard not to love the impact they have on combat. But there’s also more to them than simply being hired guns.

The time a pawn spends with other players is retained in their memory. They might recall a treasure chest they opened in another Arisen’s world and then lead you to it, and they do the same when it comes to navigating quests as well. If you prioritize an objective and one of your pawns has completed it before, they’ll offer to lead you to wherever it is you need to go. Rather than being weighed down by having to constantly revisit the map, you can let a pawn naturally guide you, creating an ebb and flow to your adventure that removes the need for menu screens and waypoints. They can sometimes lose their way when you’re interrupted by combat, but I found that hitting the “Go” command would reset them back on the right path.

Pawns perform a similar function after defeating a certain number of a particular enemy type, too. If a pawn has sufficient experience beating, say, an ogre, they’ll relay pertinent information on weak points and the nature of their attacks. You can also find and then equip different specializations for your pawn, maybe granting them the ability to translate Elvish, or forage for materials so you don’t have to bother. They can still be overly loquacious at times, expressing child-like wonder at the world with a barrage of Ye Olde English dialogue. Their remarks are nowhere near as repetitive as before, though, and they’re much more personable this time around, chatting among themselves about other players they’ve traveled with and creating a palpable sense of teamwork and camaraderie.

Gallery

The most noticeable misstep derives from Dragon’s Dogma 2’s performance on PC. My current rig exceeds the recommended specifications (aside from the CPU), and the game generally runs at around 60fps using the game’s “High” preset. Sometimes it dips into the 40s and drops even lower inside villages and cities, but it’s certainly playable, if a little unstable. The problem is that this performance is consistent across all visual settings, which leads me to believe it’s a matter of poor optimization. I could’ve used the performance bump from lowering shadow quality and the like, but doing so has no effect. Ideally, this will be rectified with a day-one patch and driver updates, but it’s not ideal at the time of writing.

Even so, these performance issues did little to deter my love for this game. It’s not often that a cult classic gets the green light for a sequel, especially 12 years after the original game was released. Capcom hasn’t tried to make Dragon’s Dogma 2 more palatable to potentially attract a wider audience, either. It stuck to the first game’s core values and expanded upon them to create a bigger and better game that consistently delights in its approach to seamless exploration and the thrill of adventure. This means it feels very familiar in a lot of ways, but it’s a game for those who fell in love with the original, despite its flaws, and will hopefully find an entirely new audience who perhaps never gave the first game a chance. Even after 40 hours, my heart continues to grow fonder for this special game. It’s an exceptional achievement that’s quite unlike anything else, and I wouldn’t hesitate to place it amongst the pantheon of Capcom’s very best.

Alone In The Dark Review – Dimly Lit

When I think of the survival-horror genre’s best games, I often wonder if they were made better by their frequently unwieldy combat mechanics. The inability to reliably defend yourself heightened the terror in anti-power fantasies like Silent Hill, and the awkwardness of taking on the undead in Resident Evil became core to its tension. With that in mind, could a modern horror game benefit from having similarly janky self-defense systems? Alone in the Dark, the 2024 reboot project from THQ Nordic and Pieces Interactive, emphatically resolves this question for me; as it turns out, the answer is no–it’s certainly worse off.

Alone in the Dark centers on characters and a haunted house all named the same as they were in the original 1992 game, but it mostly ditches that game’s original story and old-school adventure game leanings in favor of a third-person, over-the-shoulder horror experience in line with modern counterparts. The game’s writing pedigree flaunts Soma and Amnesia: The Dark Descent’s Mikael Hedberg, and the story even plays out like an Amnesia game at times, to its credit. Much of what it does well is also derivative, but a larger issue is that it can’t do these aspects of the game well consistently. And all the while its worst parts are ceaselessly unenjoyable.

Chief among the blemishes is the aforementioned shoddy combat. There are three guns in total, and though wielding them feels cumbersome in the way a horror game wants to, so much else about dispatching monsters in the Derceto mansion’s hallways and bedrooms is a chore. Many enemies feel uniform in their behaviors and are often comically unaware or incapable of reaching you due to getting stuck on geometry or even each other when they show up in groups.

Even the few that do behave differently, like a monster that lurks on all fours and pounces or flying bug-like creatures that swarm down onto you, are so easily killed off that I quickly felt like the game might’ve been more enjoyable if there weren’t any combat at all.

Melee combat feels worse than gunplay, with a swinging mechanic that behaves more like a directionless flail. I found that for best results I had to button-mash the melee weapon and just hope that I took down the enemy I was targeting before they got to me first, and I wasn’t always successful.

But neither guns nor melee can outdo the confounding use of throwable weapons. Scattered around environments are bottles and Molotovs that can be thrown at the many monsters in your path. But you can’t add them to your inventory: You have to throw them from where you find them, and the game’s way of telling you this is to prompt you to pick one up (RT/R2) and watch as your character immediately tosses it without a care. That teaches you that the next time you want to use one, you should instead hold the button down, thereby allowing yourself to aim the throw. But you still aren’t meant to actually move with the object in your hand, and if you try, the character will slowly walk in the direction you point, all while the throwing arc still sits on your screen. It’s easily one of the most undercooked combat mechanics I can recall in a horror game.

Alone in the Dark’s combat moments don’t bring much to the game since they’re not scary–and sometimes not even functional.

It’s also odd and distracting how the first shot of any round of gunfire suffers an unmissable audio delay of a second or two. Whenever I’d fire a gun, the enemy would react to the damage, and a moment later, I’d hear the gunshot. It was always the first shot and never any subsequent shots in a series of them. It didn’t break the game but it was jarring for all 15 hours I played. I should mention that this occurred on Xbox for me, but not for a colleague playing on PC, though they did report other issues such as game crashes.

Alone in the Dark also features the other gameplay tentpole of the genre, as the elaborate home it takes place in is littered with puzzles. This is actually an area where the game sometimes shines, but not consistently. Some early puzzles in the mansion-turned-rest-home are fun to piece together and offer a sense of reward not just for advancing the story, but for letting you piece it together and feel like an investigator, like one of the two playable characters is.

I enjoyed exploring the mansion and opening up new avenues through which to solve its roundabout puzzles, and it was great to mix in a few otherworldly sections that pulled me out of Derceto and into various nightmarishly twisted memories. The transitions between the mansion and these other places were mostly done smoothly and caught me by surprise, albeit not without an occasional stutter, but I never found this as distracting as the gunfire audio delay.

But other puzzles were obnoxiously obtuse, with solutions that didn’t feel like they were available in the game’s context clues. Many of these revolve around determining safe codes or piecing broken objects back together. In one example, I had to infer a three-digit code from a letter I’d found, and the eventual solution didn’t feel logically telegraphed. Alone in the Dark is sometimes more of a headache than it needs to be.

Thankfully, the doom jazz soundtrack is a nice cure for what ails you. I loved the game’s atmosphere, strongly aided by the great music and good performances by Jodie Comer (Killing Eve) and David Harbour (Stranger Things). Ultimately, however, I never felt like the familiar faces from Hollywood raised the game’s quality level to a degree that justifies their inclusion beyond the marketability of star power. They aren’t bad in their roles by any means, but I didn’t feel like they brought an element to the game that couldn’t have been granted by other talented folks, making their involvement feel like simple stunt casting.

Exploring the mansion and its rich history is a highlight of the game.

You can choose either character–Comer’s Emily Hartwood or Harbour’s Detective Carnby–and play the full campaign as either. For large swaths of the story, these campaigns are the same, but they each involve gameplay and story moments unique to them, like puzzle sections and some hauntings unique to each of their backstories, along with a true ending for players who finish both versions. These alternate pathways feel like a fun added wrinkle to the full story, but the allure of playing the game a second time is dampened by its issues. I liked the game’s story for the most part, but I did witness a jarring sequence near the end where it so plainly and brazenly pulls a plot detail from another major horror game that I found it hard to imagine how it got through editing. You can’t just repeat another game’s twist, can you? Alone in the Dark suggests you can.

I found that to be such a perplexing choice, given how much else Hedberg has done well in the horror world and even does well here. Whenever the combat bored me or the puzzles left me totally stumped, I persevered, in part, because I wanted to see how the story shook out.

Led by the game’s mysterious Dark Man, an entity resembling a Pharaoh, Alone in the Dark mixes in the same kind of ancient history element that the Amnesia series has done so well. It initially feels so out-of-place that it actually serves the game better in the end. You think you’re getting a period-piece haunted house story, and suddenly the game is making nods to much greater supernatural oddities and blending reality and fiction in ways that make it hard to trust anything you’re seeing. It makes the world of Alone in the Dark feel more uncertain, and thus, less safe. Save for the story beat that feels too close to another game’s big moment, I found the story to be Alone in the Dark’s best, most consistent quality.

With its reality-bending story, parade of puzzles, and unwieldy combat, Alone in the Dark is, in some ways, more faithful to some turn-of-the-century horror games than their own revitalized modern remakes. I enjoyed the game’s story, setting, and abundant lore, and I felt smart when I’d overcome some of its puzzles. But others proved so obtuse as to be frustrating, and nothing about the combat even climbs to a level I’d call serviceable–it’s consistently poor. This isn’t Alone in the Dark’s first revival attempt, and it’s probably not its last, but it isn’t the one that will put the series’ name in the same breath as the all-time greats it originally helped inspire.

Anime News

Dragon’s Dogma 2 – How To Complete Till Death Do Us Part

Some quests in Dragon’s Dogma 2 take you to far-flung regions. Still, there’s one in particular that leads you to an area that’s crawling with the undead. Our guide discusses how to complete Till Death Do Us Part in Dragon’s Dogma 2. Likewise, please be reminded that this article contains minor spoilers.

Table of Contents [hide]

How to complete Till Death Do Us Part in Dragon’s Dogma 2

Till Death Do Us Part is a side quest that comes from an NPC in the capital city of Vernworth. First, you’ll have to talk to an NPC named Oswald, who usually strolls around near the fountain. He’ll tell you about a tyrannical fella named Ser Ludolph.

Next, speak with a woman named Margit, who’s in front of the Watchhead’s Home. Don’t worry–she’s not the Margit that you’re thinking of, so no “fell omen” would occur.

Margit claims that Ser Ludolph has been visiting her home often since her husband, Ser Gregor, was tasked to go to the Illdoers’ Resting Place. She then realizes Ludolph’s nefarious plot and implores you to save her husband.

Gallery

Left: A map showing the locations of Oswald and Margit; Right: Speak with Margit to start the quest.

How to go to the Misty Marshes

To complete the Dragon’s Dogma 2 Till Death Do Us Part quest, you must go to the Misty Marshes. There are three ways to get there.

A map showing the paths that lead to the Misty Marshes and Illdoers’ Resting Place.

From Harve Village: If you’ve only been exploring the northern part of the world map, you can follow the roads that lead north of Harve Village. Then, go across the stone bridge to the west. A narrow path takes you to a section that’s shrouded in a dark fog.

From Checkpoint Rest Town/Ancient Battleground: The second method has you following the path east of the Ancient Battleground (which is also close to where you meet the Sphinx). The gate that leads north is barred, but you can climb on rock formations or the Cenotaph’s ramparts to bypass it. You should be able to destroy the wooden plank to unlock the gate once you’re behind it.

From the Sphinx Mountain Shrine: The third option is for those who are already tackling the Sphinx’s riddles at the Mountain Shrine (note that you should have a Portcrystal placed at the Mountain Shrine for fast travel purposes). Turn around at the steps and you should see a campsite. From that spot, there’s a narrow pass that takes you to an abandoned village close to the Illdoers’ Resting Place.

Gallery

From left to right: Heading to the Misty Marshes by way of the stone bridge north of Harve Village, the Ancient Battleground, and the hidden path along the Mountain Shrine.

Exploring the Misty Marshes to reach the Illdoers’ Resting Place

If you picked the first two options, you’ll find yourself in a wide area that’s completely covered in fog. Not only is visibility low, but you’ll also have to contend with Bandits, Skeleton Warriors, Zombies, and Phantoms–yes, the undead will spawn regardless of the time of day. The minimap also won’t show you the roads, so you’ll need to rely on torches/braziers to light the way.

Your goal is to reach the abandoned village, which has a campsite and a Riftstone. If you look slightly to the east, you should see a small island in the middle of the lake. There, you’ll find Ser Gregor and his troops battling a creature known as the Dullahan, also known as the Headless Horseman.

Note: If you follow the braziers going to the south, you’ll eventually reach a Griffin’s nest. Defeat the beast and pick up an extremely rare reusable Portcrystal.

Gallery

Left: The Misty Marshes is a dark and dreary area that’s crawling with undead; Right: Ser Gregor’s squad and the Dullahan are fighting on an island.

How to defeat the Dullahan and rescue Ser Gregor

The Dragon’s Dogma 2 Dullahan is a monster boss, and it’s also fairly rare. In fact, the creature you face as part of this quest is the only one we encountered in our playthrough.

The Dullahan uses its scythe to carve up foes. Moreover, its disembodied head can call on lost souls that fly toward its opponents. Likewise, it can “Force Choke” characters, then toss them away like nothing. It even teleports periodically.

Perhaps the most dangerous aspect of this battle is that Ser Gregor can die permanently. This occurs if the Dullahan does any of its knockback attacks and Ser Gregor is thrown into the lake. The quest log will even tell you that you failed to save him. As such, we suggest battling the Dullahan close to the center of the island. If it goes near the lake, you might want to pick up and carry Gregor away from it just to be safe.

The Dullahan’s shriek causes nearby characters to collapse.

In any case, there are two ways to successfully complete the Dragon’s Dogma 2 Till Death Do Us Part quest:

  • Make the Dullahan teleport away – If the Dullahan has taken enough damage, it will enrage. Its spectral head will attach to its body, and it will periodically shriek and cause characters to collapse. If you’re unable to deal a lot of damage to it within a minute or so, it will teleport and escape.
  • Defeat the Dullahan – Of course, if you can manage to defeat it, then it will drop 300 RC, as well as several Cursed Dullahan Bone materials. You’ll also receive the “Before Dawn Breaks” achievement.
Avoid fighting the Dullahan if it moves close to the lake’s waters.

Till Death Do Us Part rewards

Regardless of what happens to the Dullahan, you should return to Margit in Vernworth. If you managed to save Ser Gregor, you’ll receive 2,800 XP, 5,000 gold, the Steeled Virtue (sword), and the Lustrous Targe (shield). Likewise, you’ll learn of how Ser Ludolph met a fitting end.

However, if Ser Gregor perished in the battle, you won’t receive the Lustrous Targe at all, and Margit will feel distraught at her husband’s death.

Saving Ser Gregor nets you a bunch of rewards.

In any case, this is everything you need to know about the Dragon’s Dogma 2 Till Death Do Us Part quest and Dullahan boss fight. To learn about other terrifying foes, you can check our monster bosses guide.

Fierce foes and loyal companions await you as you journey onward in Dragon’s Dogma 2. For other tips and strategies, you can visit our guides hub.

Scream 6 Directors Say Leaving Franchise Wasn’t Their Choice

It’s been a season of turmoil for the Scream franchise. Earlier this month, Neve Campbell confirmed that she will star in Scream 7, which will be directed by Kevin Williamson, the screenwriter who created the franchise and produced the six previous films. That followed the news that director Christopher Landon left Scream 7 in December after his star, Melissa Barrera, was fired from the franchise in November. And it turns out that Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett–who collectively go by Radio Silence–were also forced to step down as directors of the franchise’s next chapter.

While speaking to The Hollywood Reporter, Radio Silence said that their intention was to finish a trilogy of Scream movies featuring Barrera and Jenna Ortega’s Sam and Tara Carpenter. However, Spyglass’ demanding schedule for Scream 7 ultimately meant that they couldn’t helm their new horror movie, Abigail, and close out their third film in the franchise.

“We got exited,” noted Gillett. “We’ll be sad that there’s not going to be an end to the Sam Carpenter story, but in our minds, we designed Scream VI so that the story feels complete,” added Bettinelli-Olpin.

Barrera’s exit from the franchise came over her posts on social media about the war in Gaza, which Spyglass characterized as antisemitic. Shortly thereafter, it was announced that Barrera’s co-star, Ortega, had already left Scream 7 over filming conflicts with Wednesday Season 2. Barrera is starring in Abigail, which will hit theaters next month. And she isn’t entirely ruling out a return to the Scream franchise down the line.

“I’ve learned to never say never, but also a lot of things would have to happen for Sam to come back,” said Barrera. “For now, next page, next chapter, and then we’ll see what the future holds.”

Helldivers 2 Just Got Two New Stratagems, And One Is A Giant Laser Cannon

Helldivers 2 just received two new stratagems for players to employ against the enemies of managed democracy, and they look to pack quite a punch.

The two stratagems are support weapons: the MG-101 Heavy Machine Gun and the LAS-99 Quasar Cannon. Both weapons have a three-second call-in time by default and a 480-second cooldown timer on call-ins, but can technically be called into battle as many times during a mission as needed (as long as they aren’t on cooldown). The Heavy Machine Gun costs 6,000 Requisition to unlock while the Quasar Cannon costs 7,500.

In-game, the MG-101 Heavy Machine Gun is described as a “very powerful but difficult-to-wield” weapon, and joins the ranks of two other similar weapons, the Machine Gun and the Stalwart. It’s the Quasar Cannon that definitely looks to be the more interesting of the two, as it’s a massive shoulder-mounted weapon that after a charge-up time “fires a powerful, explosive energy burst” but features a long cooldown before it can be fired again. The Quasar Cannon looks to be particularly useful against the heavily armored Automatons, and is even capable of shooting Automaton dropships out of the sky.

Developer Arrowhead Studios has continued to keep Helldivers 2 fresh with the introduction of new Major Orders, Stratagems, and weapons following the game’s launch in early February 2024. Players recently unlocked pilotable mechs after liberating important factories from the Automaton threat, and some players are convinced that the arrival of a third enemy faction is imminent. Arrowhead recently introduced the new Cutting Edge Warbond (battle pass) to the game, which features new weapons, armor, and cosmetics for players to earn.

Helldivers 2 was the best-selling game of February in the US, dethroning Call of Duty Modern Warfare 3, according to Circana. It has continually been among the top-selling and top-played games on Steam since launch, making it the biggest launch ever for a Sony-published game on PC. In GameSpot’s Helldivers 2 review, we said Arrowhead’s shooter manages to carve out a space for itself in a crowded live-service landscape thanks to its “fun narrative tone, punchy combat, intense firefights, and rewarding progression track,” calling it “just a really good time.”

One Of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre’s Scariest Parts Is Easily Overlooked

In my The Texas Chain Saw Massacre review, I called it one of the scariest games I’ve ever played. I’ve since put over 100 hours into the game, and that remains true to this day. A horror game can rarely be affecting for that long. Usually, exposure should desensitize you to even the genre’s all-time greats. But the unpredictable nature of the PvP game makes each round feel like a new horror story unfolding around me.

Beyond the famous family and their taunting dialogue, the maps arranged like dizzying death traps, and the final girl (or guy) music that pulsates like an encroaching cacophony of violence, there’s another layer that adds to the haunting atmosphere of the game–but it’s easily missed. At the start of each round, brief excerpts of radio broadcasts can be heard. These range from seemingly innocuous baseball recaps to reports of murder and mayhem alluding to the game’s playable cabal of killers. GameSpot recently spoke to Gun Media creative director Ronnie Hobbs about why and how the Texas Chain Saw Massacre news feed came to be, and how giving the game a sense of place creates a terrifying reality for the players.

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Now Playing: The Texas Chain Saw Massacre – Unrated Gameplay Trailer

“I think there was one point in development where we wanted the initial radio broadcast, the one talking about Maria Flores, to play. So for a while, that’s the only one we had.” Hobbs told me. “It talks about her disappearance, just to set the tone for the match as you load in. And even though you only hear like 10 seconds of it, it grounded the game in reality. And then when we heard it, we were like, ‘Wow, okay, this is actually really cool.’ And we’re like, ‘This is so cool that we should fill it in with other things.’ We just didn’t know what those were. So that was really how it got started. Myself and my assistant, Rob Fox, wrote these. Once we figured out that we wanted more of those, he and I started down the journey of doing that.”

Hobbs said the team, and even he alone at times, went to Texas while doing research for the game, visiting “100 different small towns” and sleeping in his SUV to get a better sense of the setting. The team would stumble upon odd shops selling artwork for thousands of dollars in the middle of the desert, talk their way into a mill for a tour–which would go on to inspire today’s new map in the game–and chat with locals to learn the backstories of these places that aren’t often notable enough to appear on maps. Many of these encounters inspired broadcasts in the game, like one that speaks of the Marfa Ghost Lights in Marfa, Texas, a decades-old phenomenon that some locals attribute to aliens.

Since I’ve played so much TCM, I’ve become familiar with many of the broadcasts, and I’ve loved how they come in a few flavors. There are 29 news report broadcasts in the game according to the full list Hobbs provided me, each of them delivered in an authentic Kronkite-like style that suits the game’s 1970s setting. While some hint at other unseen crimes of the family–Hobbs confirmed with me that Sissy is the “Terror of I-40” you can hear about at the start of some rounds–others feel so out of place that it’s their juxtaposition that winds up being most haunting.

A round of TCM can be nauseatingly scary when you’re facing an adept group of killers. To sit through the introduction of a match featuring the grotesque kill room and other torturous setups to the tune of the Texas Rangers’ roster acquisitions has the unexpected effect of making it all worse. There’s a world beyond the oppressive maps on which the game is played, and sometimes it’s the blissful ignorance of that world that haunts me–how can they be playing baseball right now? Don’t they know I’m running for my life?

Other times, it’s a more direct and obvious scare that colors in the world. In my opinion, the most unsettling of all the two-dozen-plus radio broadcasts relates to the scene of a gruesome cult suicide: 13 men dressed in matching plain white clothes ingested potassium cyanide and died sitting in chairs scattered around a ranch, each of them holding bibles and wearing sunglasses. It recalls infamous scenes like Jonestown or Heaven’s Gate and reminds me that, though The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is only very loosely based on a true story, its depictions of senseless violence really do occur in our world, too.

That was a major point of the original movie; it was a response to the violence of the Vietnam War. While real-life news networks shied away from reporting on the war’s casualties, the film’s creators dared people to stare directly into their inescapably dark reality and not blink. 50 years later, the game has captured this same effect. It creates a genuinely guttural sense of unease for the duration of every round as a way to authentically portray the movie in video game form.

These radio broadcasts could’ve just as easily not been in the game at all, and it probably still would’ve worked. The team sweat the small stuff and remade the house, the chainsaw, and the family in a way that winds up seeming like a museum to the film. But by adding layers to that world, like the news feed does so well, we sink even farther into the hellscape.

Just as the team tracked down the chainsaw’s exact make and model from the movie, it scoured the region’s history for authentic news reports.

“All the trees, the grass, the rocks, the dirt–every single thing you see, you know–all the rusted metal. That’s all from Texas. So when you play our game, it feels like you’re actually there. So we went with that angle, as opposed to just making sure the house was right. We created the whole world from Texas. And I think that gives it a sense of uniqueness that not a lot of games can say they did or they have. So that just keeps trickling down, you know, down to, ‘Okay, yeah, that is the right chair, or that’s the right wallpaper, or these characters are really wearing the right clothes from 1972 or 71. Or they have backstories that link them to real schools or real colleges or real towns.’ That was very important to us. If you know Texas, you know these places that we’re talking about; they really exist. And then we carry that down to the radio broadcasts.”

The finishing touch to these news reports is how you’re not likely to hear the whole thing in any round. A match begins, and as the team of victims, you’re introduced to the map and the selected killers so you can begin to plot your escape before both teams are handed control of their characters. All the while, you hear a news report, but it’s bound to be cut off before you can hear the whole story. This has a classic horror-movie effect that instinctively asks the player to fill in the details, like a restless child making monsters out of shapes in their closet. It all feels so cohesive as a feature, and yet, so optional that Hobbs wasn’t ever sure anyone was paying attention to them.

“It’s fun to talk about it because I still go, ‘Man, is anyone actually hearing these? Do they appreciate it?’ wondered Hobbs. “And then every now and then I run into people who know them all, and they send me questions like, “What about here? It cut me off! What’s the whole story?'”

As mentioned, sometimes these broadcasts allude to the game’s killers, but importantly, not always, even when wicked things are being reported. It’s important to the world-building that some of the game’s news reports are unrelated to the Sawyer family, or else you could wind up creating something like an Evil Forest Gump who happened to be present for every grisly event in Texas at the time. Still, I wondered if players might spot any references to killers yet to arrive in the game.

“They’re all there for a reason. Very, very few of them are just there because we liked the way they sounded,” Hobbs teased. “I’ll leave it at that. None of them are there by accident.”

The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is available on PC, Xbox Series X|S, PS5, Xbox One, and PS4. It’s also available via Xbox Game Pass. Today, the game received a new update that adds the latest map, The Mill, alongside a new playable victim portrayed by horror legend Barbara Crampton.

Fallout-Themed Arizona Green Tea Variety Pack Is Back In Stock

Society is done for, mutants roam the wasteland, and those snobs in the Vaults won’t let you inside. What’s a survivor of mutually assured destruction supposed to do? Sit down and enjoy a spot of tea, that’s what. Specifically, an ice-cold can of Fallout-themed Arizona Tea, as the beverage is getting a Fallout makeover, just in time for the April launch of the Fallout TV series on Prime Video. These special-edition Arizona green tea energy drinks have been going in and out of stock, and wait times are lengthy for some of the packs. As such, you may want to order soon, because interest will likely increase once the show debuts on April 11.

Currently, you can stock up your doomsday shelter with several varieties, all available in convenient 12-packs. These are 22-ounce cans, and each flavor has a green tea base. You can choose between Pomegranate, Georgia Peach, and Red Apple. Each serving contains some real juice, around 100 calories, and 234mg of caffeine. If you’re wanting to mix and match, the variety pack comes with four of each flavor.

Arizona Fallout Green Tea energy drinks

If you’re planning to explore your local post-apocalyptic environment, you can also pick up an official Fallout tumbler to keep your drink cold or hot. These are made from stainless steel, are BPA free, and have a leak-proof lid with a clear slider. If you prefer coffee to iced tea, Fallout coffee beans are also available to help you kickstart your day. Made by Bones Coffee Company, each bag features a metal design on the packaging, and the beans are available in multiple flavors, including Valiant Vanilla, Atomic Apple, and Wasteland Crunch.

For some more Fallout merch, there’s a lot on offer right now. Fans of collectible toys can pick up this impressive Brotherhood of Steel figure from ThreeZero–decked out in some pretty sweet Nuka Cola armor–McFarlane Toys is doing a limited run of collectibles for $25 each and a new set of Fallout: The Series mini figures will be available starting April 19.

Pepper Grinder Review – Short And Spicy

It only takes a glance to understand Pepper Grinder’s inventive gimmick. A small girl named Pepper–a pirate by trade–wields a drill named Grinder that’s roughly the size of her entire body. The gear allows her to grind through soft surfaces with ease, complete with the ability to launch out of the surface with a leap. That might have been enough to carry the game by itself, but what’s most surprising about Pepper Grinder is its sheer variety. Though it’s short, that brevity helps to make the campaign a no-filler thrill ride that continuously pushes the boundaries of its central mechanic.

It turns out Grinder is a pretty versatile tool, even regarding its most basic function. You can burrow through the ground, which immediately feels natural and smooth. At the same time, you can’t simply turn on a dime with an instant about-face like a typical platformer–you have to handle turns by curving an arc out of your drilling path. Additionally, when you pop out of the surface of the dirt, you won’t gain much distance unless you jump just before breaking through. Those little touches give the core mechanic a sense of finesse, imitating the feeling of a playful dolphin–or at least, a dolphin video game like the classic Ecco.

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Now Playing: Pepper Grinder GameSpot Video Review

Once you get the hang of it, drilling through soil and leaping out of the surface in a perfect arc, only to catch another piece of soft ground in the distance and continue your digging, feels thrilling and acrobatic. The drillable surfaces are nicely differentiated from hard environmental pieces, so you quickly learn to read a level and see the path through it, evoking a feeling similar to performing a great run in Tony Hawk. Collectibles like gems are scattered strategically throughout the stages to both subtly guide your eye along the path, while also sometimes setting traps for your greed.

Aside from being a traversal tool, Grinder is also your primary and often only weapon. It’s not enough to simply run into most enemies with a spinning drill, though–they often have their own specific approach to defeat them, like beetles with a hard upper carapace who need to be stabbed from the underside by burrowing underground. The main enemies, a breed of vicious narwhal-like creatures with horns on their head, are just as capable of hurting you with a head-on collision as you are of hurting them. None of the regular enemies are terribly tough by themselves, but they introduce new ways of approaching stages and obstacles as you need to get around them or through them to continue on your path.

A platformer with a standout hook like this one probably could have coasted on it, but Pepper Grinder doesn’t rest on its laurels. Instead, it consistently introduces new elements to master. These either integrate with your balletic burrowing or provide a change of pace from it. Grabbing a key with your drill will make it turn a lock, and you can use the kinetic energy to power machines. You’ll also shoot from cannons, drill holes into the bottoms of ships to make them take on water, carve through skyscrapers to make them collapse as you traverse through, and even pilot a giant mech. What appears at first to be a simple tool gives way to constant delightful little surprises.

A series of boss battles ramp up the difficulty nicely, taking the skills you’ve learned and putting them to the test. The first is relatively straightforward, as you dodge projectiles by moving through the soil and wait for the opportune moment to attack from the underside, while the second severely limits the amount of soft ground available and challenges you to leap high into the air to do damage. They progress from there, including one tough encounter with another human-like character that has roughly your size and agility. All this leads to a final boss encounter that is one of the most tense and difficult retro platformer bosses I’ve seen in a long time, which felt satisfying to overcome.

And on top of all this, Pepper Grinder carries itself with a cute, pixel-punk personality. Pepper’s diminutive sprite artwork has a charm to it, like how she revs up her trusty drill threateningly when coming face-to-face with a boss, or how she raises her pirate flag to declare victory in an area. The enemies can sometimes be seen doing their own pirate duties before you crash their party. And though story sequences are few and far between, they were just enough to explain what was going on with mimed, dialogue-free action. A short story sequence just before the final boss even made me laugh out loud.

This gentle giant is one of the fantastical creatures in Pepper Grinder.

Gallery

At such a breakneck pace of new ideas, Pepper Grinder doesn’t last very long, which is to its credit. I finished the campaign in roughly four hours, which is a relatively short playtime. Every stage also has a time-trial option, and there are still collectibles and cosmetics to unlock like stickers and hairstyles. The most important collectibles are Skull Coins, a limited resource–five per stage–that can be used to unlock special bonus stages in each of the four worlds. These are used to further explore gameplay concepts that had been introduced in the main stages. The first one, for example, takes the cannon mechanic to its logical conclusion with an entire stage built around ping-ponging from cannon to cannon, which felt pleasanlty reminiscent of Donkey Kong Country’s famous barrel stages.

Perhaps because of its brevity, I enjoyed every minute, and I appreciate the rare instance of a game that doesn’t overstay its welcome. Rather than slog through filler stages to pad its length, Pepper Grinder is bursting with new ideas for exactly as long as it can sustain that momentum. There’s something admirable about approaching its length with that level of confidence. I would have loved to play even more, if it could have sustained that pace, but this felt like a conscious choice to let the best ideas shine.

Pepper Grinder is here for a good time, not for a long time. Every piece, from the core drilling mechanic itself to the various ways it manifests with cannons and mechs and more, feels meticulously engineered to teach you a new concept, wring the fun out of it, and then move on to the next. That sense of propulsion makes every moment fun and engaging. It’s a great little gem of a game which, like its heroine, may be small in size but makes every bit count.

Making A Marvel Movie Sounds Like “A F**king Nightmare,” Kristen Stewart Says

No one should expect Kristen Stewart to appear in a Marvel movie anytime soon, as the actress has said the process sounds like “a f**king nightmare.”

“I will likely never do a Marvel movie … it sounds like a f**king nightmare, actually,” Stewart said on the Not Skinny But Not Fat podcast (via Variety).

Stewart went on to say she has some conditions that could change her mind. If Barbie director Greta Gerwig asked her to be in a Marvel movie, “then I would do it,” she said. Stewart also mentioned how she might consider it, but only under the pretense that “the system would have to change.”

“You would have to put so much money and so much trust into one person … and it doesn’t happen,” she said. “And so therefore what ends up happening is this algorithmic, weird experience where you can’t feel personal at all about it. So likely not. But maybe the world changes, that’s what I’m saying.”

Stewart said she has nothing against big movies, though, saying she enjoys making these “because I like people to watch them when I’m in them.” She starred in a massive franchise with the Twilight series opposite Robert Pattinson from 2008-2012. More recently, though, Stewart has opted to make smaller films, including her newest, Love Lies Bleeding. Stewart received an Academy Award nomination for playing Princess Diana in the movie Spencer.

Before this, Ray Winstone, who played a villain in the MCU movie Black Widow, said making Marvel movies can be “soul-destroying” and that he considered quitting the project. Dakota Johnson, who starred in Madame Web, recently shared her opinions on superhero filmmaking, too, saying she is unlikely to ever make another superhero film again.

“It’s so hard to get movies made, and in these big movies that get made–and it’s even starting to happen with the little ones, which is what’s really freaking me out–decisions are being made by committees, and art does not do well when it’s made by committee,” she said. “Films are made by a filmmaker and a team of artists around them. You cannot make art based on numbers and algorithms.”

Marvel owner Disney is changing things up with regards to the release schedule for its Marvel movies. In years past, Marvel would release multiple new films per year, but in 2024, Marvel has just one new movie coming–Deadpool and Wolverine. This is part of Disney’s wider strategy to release fewer, better movies.

Following Baldur’s Gate 3, WotC And Hasbro Are Investing $1 Billion In Their AAA Game Ecosystem

Hasbro and Wizards of the Coast want a bigger piece of the gaming industry’s pie, especially after the huge success of Larian Studios’ Baldur’s Gate 3. To that end, both companies are investing nearly one billion dollars into their shared gaming ecosystem, which includes half a dozen studios. Some of these studios are working on more Dungeons & Dragons games, while others are working on other Hasbro IP–Atomic Arcade is tackling a G.I. Joe Snake Eyes game, for example–and still more are creating brand-new IPs. We saw one of these new IPs revealed at last year’s The Game Awards: Archetype Entertainment’s Exodus.

At GDC 2024, I sat down with Dan Ayoub, Head of Digital Product Development at Wizards of the Coast, to talk about what these new games will look like, how WotC and Hasbro plan to protect developers’ jobs while pouring a ton of money into a brand-new initiative, and whether future D&D games will stay in Faerun or explore other settings (I’m keeping my fingers crossed for Eberron).

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Now Playing: Why Baldur’s Gate 3 Is GameSpot’s Game Of The Year 2023

GameSpot: I was really surprised to learn y’all have a ton of studios working on several new games. Has this been going on for a while and I just haven’t been privy to it?

Ayoub: I wish I could say that was the case. It has really been something we haven’t talked too much about. But if you think about it, it just makes a ton of sense, right? Hasbro is a company focused on games and play, but it’s kind of a well-kept secret that we’ve got this incredible video games [division] going on. So if you think about it, Hasbro’s a 100-year-old company. And like you, I grew up playing D&D, and a lot of Hasbro board games and things like that. But I look at my own kids and things like that, and their play engagement patterns are entirely different.

So if you think about it, if you squint, yeah, of course it makes sense for Hasbro to have all of these games going on. And certainly, you referenced Baldur’s Gate [3], Monopoly Go!–we’ve been doing a lot on the license side and I think we’ve been a little more out there talking about that. But I’m really excited to be able to talk about what we’re doing internally because we’ve got a billion dollars in games being developed right now, across multiple studios across North America. So why don’t we just jump right into it? So I guess the first studio worth talking about, because we just announced it at The Game Awards, is our Archetype studio out of Austin. And that’s being run by James Olin and a bunch of the Mass Effect 1 and 2 team.

And a common thing you’re going to see as I talk about the studios is we’ve built these studios around people and teams with DNA behind the types of things that we’re trying to make. So that’s been a really exciting project to work with the team on, and we were thrilled to finally be able to announce that to the world [at] The Game Awards. And frankly, the reaction blew us away; [we’re] just blown out the water. So I think that was a great watershed moment too, because it was not just the coming out of the game for us, but I kind of saw it as our studio’s coming out.

Exodus is a sci-fi RPG coming from Archetype.

We’ve got [a studio] in Montreal that’s working on a large Dungeons & Dragons-based game. That’s Invoke Studio. We’ve got Atomic Arcade in North Carolina that’s working on Snake Eyes. As we like to say [that that game is] not your daddy’s G.I. Joe. A very edgy take on Snake Eyes, and I’ll come back to the strategy there a little bit. And, of course, we’ve got Archetype and also Skeleton Key in Austin–I can’t say too much about [Skeleton Key’s project], but it’s something spooky.

And I think if you look at the different studios, you’ve got some really interesting approaches with each. You look at Exodus and it’s like, okay, this is a new IP, this is not an existing Hasbro or Wizards IP. And one of the great things about being in Hasbro [is] we’ve got toys. We’ve got all these other things we can do with it. So rather than, “Okay here’s a Hasbro IP, go make a game,” we’re trying to go the other way–create something through a digital space where it’s the fastest-growing medium and where more and more eyeballs are going, so that feels like the right place to do it.

Then of course you look at Atomic and Invoke and those are classical Hasbro or Wizards IP from G.I. Joe to Dungeons & Dragons. And Skeleton Key again is kind of like, okay, we’re going to try and do something new and innovative from a gaming side. So we’ve got, as I mentioned, about a billion dollars in games being developed, you got hundreds of people across all of these studios who are actively hiring as well. So we’re growing up these studio infrastructures. So it’s quite a large endeavor happening under the Hasbro umbrella right now.

Are there any, for lack of a better word, safeguards designed for this level of forward-looking and spending? I love the idea of all these studios growing and tackling all these new IPs, but also–just reading our industry right now–there’s just so many studios that grew a little bit too quickly over the pandemic and now good people are being laid off because the numbers aren’t quite matching the numbers that people were bringing in in 2020 and 2021.

We’re being diligent about our growth and I think the good thing is we’re obviously on the other side of the pandemic now. I think the studios are really now coming into that period where they’re growing. I think we’ve certainly looked and seen the lessons over the last couple of years. I think we’re being very diligent about our growth. We’ve got a lot of seasoned professionals who have been in the industry for a long time, and of course we’re still part of Hasbro, so we’ve got that constant dialogue back and forth with Hasbro about how quickly does it make sense to be growing and things like that. But this is a core part of Hasbro’s growth strategy, over the next several years. So the investment obviously is considerable, but yeah, I like to think we’re being very measured and diligent and just making sure we’re not growing too quickly.

Going back to what you said earlier, what do you mean when you’re saying that WotC and Hasbro are trying to build to the strengths of these studios? What’s the process?

[In some cases,] we went out and sought certain people. And in some cases it was the opposite, it was just people we were talking to. So, [as an example,] Atomic Arcade is doing the Snake Eyes game. We’ve got a lot of folks there that worked on Arkham, like our studio head. We wanted people who brought Batman to life, to, in very much the same way, what we want to do with Snake Eyes. And honestly, I cannot wait to show you. I’m a huge G.I. Joe fan and if you had seen what the team has done–I cannot wait to show this to people. And that replicates across our studio ecosystem. It was very much a conversation of, “Okay, what kind of game do we want to do? What makes sense, and what are the strengths we can bring to it?” And a big part of that strength is just talent that’s already done it before.

Some of these studios will be working on Hasbro properties that are totally separate from Wizards of the Coast.

How are they bringing Snake Eyes to life in a video game?

So myself and a lot of people on the team, at the risk of aging us, grew up with the ’80s cartoon and things like that, and then the comic books and things and all of that fun. So the question is, in some respects, the philosophical creative approach of how do we make this [game] work in a medium where new people might be discovering it [for the first time]? And the answer to that is just obviously make a great game first.

[Snake Eyes] is just an amazing character. He’s got that mix of commando, but he’s also a ninja. And I won’t say too much about the story or the game and things like that, but he is definitely the piece with which we’re looking to introduce or reintroduce a bunch of other characters and things like that back to the world. I don’t know if you were a big comic guy, but I was and I’m going to totally sound like a geek here but, in issue 21–it was one of those famous comics–there was just no dialogue, it just totally focused on [Snake Eyes being mute]. And for a character that can’t communicate, they can’t speak, it actually creates some fun gameplay mechanics for us as well.

When the time comes, we will have you sit down with [the game] and you will love it. [The team] have come up with some really, really clever ideas.

Can we expect to see more totally new ideas that don’t connect to any existing Hasbro IP?

We have a couple of ideas in the oven. So the short answer is yes, you can expect to see us do more new IP campaigns as a medium. Again, I’ll go back to my statement, Hasbro is a company that has play in its DNA and that is what it was based on. And play has changed over the last hundred years considerably. And Hasbro is making a lot of investments in the video game space because that’s where people are playing, more and more. So some of those will be expressions of things like G.I. Joe, like D&D. But you are going to see more and more new IP being developed under that banner as well.

I’d love to see a Baldur’s Gate 3-like game set in D&D’s Eberron or Planescape.

For all these studios, are they independent? Do they communicate with each other? Are they helping each other out? What’s their relationship?

Yeah, great question. The goal is building a lot of the studios, they’re all being built obviously under very strong creative leadership. So we want to give them the flexibility, it’s all about empowering the creative powerhouses we’ve brought in. And they do communicate amongst one another as well. So it’s kind of a combination where they’ve got a tremendous amount of creative independence. My role and our role within Hasbro is just how do we plus things up so four plus four equals 10? How do we amplify what they’ve got? We bring some structure to it, some centralized services, so we’re not replicating things with everybody. But yeah, the teams have a tremendous amount of creative liberty. We all work together really, really well. I am fortunate that I know many of these creatives, the industry is so small, from other stages of my own career. So yeah, it’s a nice mix where everyone’s got a lot of creative freedom, but they get the benefits that come with being part of a larger organization.

Given the success of Baldur’s Gate 3, is the goal for all of your D&D projects to replicate those systems? Or make games that are as different as possible an experience from Baldur’s Gate 3?

We were obviously thrilled at the reception of Baldur’s Gate 3. I think that proved a lot of things. People want these kinds of games and they want high quality, and things that are true to the franchise. So we obviously don’t exist on an island. When we make a D&D game, we work with the D&D team. We also want to tie into what they’re planning for future releases and things like that. So the different types of games and the roadmaps we have are tied in with a larger D&D strategy. So you may see some overlap, but if you do, it’s intentional. And that’s kind of where I go back to the studios having their creative freedom, but there’s still that larger plan. So you’re going to be seeing a number of different kinds of D&D experiences coming.

Baldur’s Gate 3 will not be the last D&D game we see–not by a long shot.

In terms of working with the D&D brand and doing your best to be on the same page, how do studios work alongside the system change as D&D 5e transitions to One D&D?

It’s an influence in some cases. So let me go and use Baldur’s Gate as an example. I mean, that was a very direct expression of the books and the [5e] rule set, and we will do games that are like that. And we will also do games that are just more action oriented and things like that, but it’ll always be grounded in some form to D&D, whether that grounding might be from a direct expression of the rule set, it might be the world, it might be characters. We’ll express it in different ways, but it’ll always be authentic.

And in terms of just settings, and maybe you can’t get into this, but Baldur’s Gate 3 is obviously set in Faerun, the best-known D&D setting right now and one that–at least for me–I’m a little tired of playing in. Any efforts to try to create a D&D-inspired game that isn’t necessarily set in that main world of Faerun?

Yes.

Just yes?

Obviously you hit the nail on the head–that’s certainly the most popular area. When you go to people wanting expressions of what they know, that’s a big part of it. We are going to play around the edges, a little bit as well. I can’t say too much more than that.

Look, man, Eberron is right there.

It’s funny, I’m a huge D&D player and I’m playing in Eberron right now.

Hell yeah. Any sort of roadmap for all of these games?

We definitely have a roadmap that goes pretty far in, actually, with dates kind of written in pencil as to when we think all of them are coming. And as we do project updates and things with the teams and things like that, we are constantly evaluating and reevaluating. You can probably guess based on what’s been announced, kind of like how the ball starts rolling. But we’ve not called any dates yet, although that time will certainly come when we feel a good level of confidence.

We don’t want to rush out with anything. This business is really, really important to us. It’s close to me personally. It’s close to all of the creatives we brought in, so we’re very diligent about making sure everything has time to get to the right stage.

This interview was edited for both brevity and readability.

Florence Pugh Shows Off Set Of Marvel’s Thunderbolts

Actress Florence Pugh has posted a video from the set of Marvel’s next big movie, Thunderbolts, revealing a behind-the-scenes look at the superhero film.

This wasn’t some sneaky, unsanctioned video, though–it was posted on Instagram with Marvel tagged as the co-contributor. It’s clearly a promotional video for the film meant to generate hype, and it certainly does that, while also providing a rare look at what the sets of Marvel’s movies actually look like. Take a look at the walkthrough video below to get a glimpse.

Due out in theaters in May 2025, Thunderbolts follows a team of superheroes recruited by the government for an important mission. Pugh returns to play Yelena Belove, with David Harbour coming back as well to reprise his role as Alexei. The movie also brings back Sebastian Stan as Bucky Barnes, with Wyatt Russell playing John Walker and Olga Kurylenko as Taskmaster. Julia Louis-Dreyfus plays Valentina Allegra de Fontaine.

Jake Schreier, who has directed music videos for Kanye West and Justin Bieber, as well as episodes of Kidding and Beef, is directing Thunderbolts.

Whereas previous years featured multiple releases, Marvel has just one new movie coming to theaters in 2024–Deadpool and Wolverine. This is part of Disney’s wider strategy to release fewer, better movies.

Judge Refuses To Dismiss Robert Kirkman’s Walking Dead Lawsuit

The Walking Dead may have come to an end in 2022, but the potential courtroom battle for the show’s profits will continue. Via Deadline, a federal court judge has denied AMC’s attempt to dismiss the profit participation lawsuit filed by Walking Dead co-creator Robert Kirkman, executive producers Gale Anne Hurd and David Alpert, as well as former showrunners Charles Eglee and Glen Mazzara.

Frank Darabont, the original Walking Dead showrunner who developed the comic for television, kicked off over a decade of legal headaches for AMC when he and his representatives at CAA filed a lawsuit against the cable network in 2013. Among other issues, Darabont contended that AMC’s self-dealing in-house licensing fees cut him out of his promised share of the show’s revenue. Darabont also argued that his dismissal from the series during the production of Season 2 was an attempt to keep him from being fully financially vested in that season, which would have also impacted his payday.

AMC settled with Darabont and CAA in 2021 to the tune of $200 million. And it’s because of that settlement that U.S. District Judge Fernando Aenlle-Rocha ruled that Kirkman and the others can continue with their own lawsuit against the network.

“It would be an illogical interpretation of the MFN (most favored nations) provisions and contrary to the reasonable expectations of the parties in entering into the agreements if the court were to allow Defendants, as a matter of law, to provide Darabont and CAA with increased contingent compensation and a greater share of future gross receipts for the series through a settlement agreement—at Plaintiffs’ expense—without providing Plaintiffs the same,” wrote Aenlle-Rocha in his ruling.

Barring a settlement or another ruling from the judge, Kirkman’s case against AMC will go to trial on September 17. Meanwhile, AMC’s sixth Walking Dead spin-off, The Walking Dead: The Ones Who Live, will have its first season finale on Sunday, March 31.