Online orders will once again only be available for shipping within the US, but Barone says he’s teamed up with a number of distributors in the UK, the EU, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand this time around, and that copies will be available directly from local stores in these regions. “It’s not possible for us to keep track of which stores specifically,” he adds, “so the best way is to contact your local store and ask if they are carrying copies....

Each character has a number of gifts they’ll prefer above all others, which, if given, will help raise their Friendship Level faster. Some of these gifts, however, can be quite hard to find, so you can always give them one of the universally liked gifts instead. Giving gifts will also help increase your Communication Skill, which will provide small boosts to your friendship growth with the residents of Olive Town as you level it up....

The stand, a collaboration between Lenovo and Intel, consisted of a Gladiators-style battle over a foam pit. However, several streamers were seriously injured at the stand, including Adriana Chechik who confirmed on Twitter she’ll be having surgery to recover. Watch on YouTube Eurogamer Newscast: Are CD Projekt’s Cyberpunk and Witcher plans too ambitious? “Well, I broke my back in two places and am getting surgery to put a meter rod in for support today....

PlayStation 4 and PS5 versions of the game will arrive in just over a week, on Tuesday 13th December, following the game’s debut on Nintendo Switch and Steam earlier this year. Neon White tasks you with shooting through levels - both in terms of the guns you fire and the speed in which you traverse. A single-player first-person shooter, it arms you with a variety of guns you can then trade-in for parkour moves via a card-based system, with the aim being to finish levels as quickly and cleanly as possible....

All five appear to be upcoming releases in The Dark Pictures series, are styled with the franchise’s logo, and were registered via the European patent office yesterday, 31st January (thanks, Gematsu). Upcoming titles include: “The Craven Man”, “O Death”, “Directive 8020”, “Intercession” and “Winterfold”. Supermassive Games has said in the past that it plans for at least eight entries in its horror anthology. Three have been released so far, with a fourth likely due this autumn....

“So roughly a day before Overwatch 2 launches, we’re going to be taking down the Overwatch 1 servers,” commercial lead Jon Spector explained to me. “So that means, as a practical point, that October 2nd really is the last day to go in and play Overwatch 1. And then it’s a 27-hour downtime that we’re planning in order to get the Overwatch 2 server stood up and running. “We’ll give current Overwatch players the ability to download Overwatch 2 a little bit ahead of when we launch, if they want to pre-download....

First, let’s rewind. The Last of Us was the PS3’s swan song, a showpiece title released just months before the arrival of the PS4. The mix of storytelling, survival horror and action resonated with fans, becoming one of Naughty Dog’s most successful games ever. The technical challenge Naughty Dog created for itself was the creation of a world almost entirely devoid of electric lights - The Last of Us relies heavily on indirect lighting which, in 2013, was still very difficult to achieve even when leaning on pre-calculated techniques....

Wherever you go, that’s a terrific price for a game that is undoubtedly been one of the year’s best and fully recommended in Eurogamer’s Resident Evil 2 review. I would have been happy with just a loving recreation of the iconic Raccoon Police Station, but then they went ahead and turned Mr. X into an unstoppable haunting presence throughout too. Thanks for the nightmares! Lastly, there are a couple of other tempting game deals floating around as we head into the weekend....

To discuss this, John Linneman and Alex Battaglia met up to compare notes. One limitation we noted right away is that VRR doesn’t work on every display - Alex’s Samsung NU8000 TV showed a black screen when launching a game with VRR enabled - but John was able to test more than 20 games on the system to good effect with his LG CX OLED. In most games, VRR does what it says on the tin, synchronising the refresh rate of the display to the frame-rate of the game, but it does come with some limitations....

Available today are Into the Pit on cloud, console and PC, and Outriders on PC. Hitting the subscription service on 21st October is Arc System Works’ superb fighting game Dragon Ball FighterZ, on console and cloud. Echo Generation is available day one on Xbox Game Pass across console, PC and cloud - also on 21st October. And spaceship shooter Everspace 2 hits Xbox Game Pass for PC on 21st October....

Martha is Dead unfolds in Tuscany, 1944, against the backdrop of the ongoing conflict between German and Allied forces; as its story begins, the body of a woman, Martha, is discovered by the side of a lake deep in the Italian countryside, and players - in the role of her twin sister - must deal with the repercussions of the murder, “all whilst the horror of war draws ever closer”....

The update, which is available right now for beta users, improves the algorithm that powers game searches. Search for games on the Xbox app has been notoriously bad up until this point, igniting the console wars between PlayStation and Xbox fans since the PlayStation is relatively good at finding what you want. The general response to the update appears to be positive, although as one Reddit user pointed out, the fact the search was so bad in the first place is ironic for a company that owns a search engine....

That makes for one long Pokérap to name them all. Today marks the official launch date for Pokémon Scarlet and Violet, and with them another 140 distinct species for the franchise’s overarching National Pokédex. Scarlet and Violet’s new species count brings the series as a whole to a grand total of 1010 unique species - although there are plenty of caveats here. For starters, two of the new ninth gen creatures can only currently be seen in picture form within Scarlet and Violet....

The Sandshrew-focused event will, as usual, be available to play anywhere. But if you fancy meeting up with some other Trainers, the following UK places have now been designated by Niantic as approved meetup points: Broadmead in Bristol, Churchill Way in Cardiff, Castle Street in Edinburgh, Liverpool ONE in Liverpool, Piccadilly Gardens in Manchester, plus both St. Alfege Park and Whitfield Gardens in London. A full list of European and US cities can be found below....

In a statement given to a Club Penguin fan blog, Detective Constable Daryl Fryatt, from the Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit (PIPCU), said “Following a complaint under copyright law, PIPCU have seized a gaming website as part of an ongoing investigation into the site.” The statement continues: “Three people were arrested on 12th April on suspicion of distributing materials infringing copyright and searches were carried out. They have been released under investigation and to aid with the police investigation, they agreed to sign over the website to the control of PIPCU....

The hugely-popular social app is conducting tests with in-app games in Vietnam, Reuters has said. In response, Tiktok confirmed the gaming push, and said it was currently looking at bringing HTML5 games to its app from third-party pubishers such as Zynga. Why Vietnam to start? As a country with the vast majority of its citizens under 35 - some 70 percent of the population - Tiktok may see a country primed to use its youth-orientated app....

It’s an odd kind of story, and fairly dull to an outsider, but squint and a narrative of sorts emerges. Snaps of LFT serial numbers and screenshots of train times for a trip to Margate. The tiled floor of a shelter down on the seafront where T.S. Eliot once sat and wrote “On Margate Sands./I can connect/Nothing with nothing.” Later, a visit to the Shell Grotto - recommended, possibly essential - and then a series of pictures from the weeks after we got back: a sunflower our neighbour gave us in a new pot, outlines of the murky continent that appeared on the ceiling one weekend when the bathroom above was leaking....

In a tweet video, below, Treyarch unveiled Miami Strike, which launches next week in multiplayer with a new 6v6 close-quarters layout and a 24/7 playlist. The first thing you’ll notice is Miami Strike is set in the daytime, whereas the original Miami is set at night. This is significant because one of the chief criticisms of Miami has to do with its poor visibility due to the dark. The tweet also shows how Miami Strike is a lot smaller than the original Miami....

In a great start to his YouTube career, part way through his stream on 2nd December he received a suspension due to “policy violations” from an earlier stream in which he was watching other streamer videos and reacting to news. Some speculate the suspension is for DMCA strikes, which makes Ludwig’s announcement video - in which he joked about playing music (see below) - all the more ironic. “You could say the switch has been going well,” he said in a tweet following the suspension....

The second game (which was at first only a cult favourite) was named Earthbound, a surreal and striking work that ended up as a crucial influence on Toby Fox, the creator of Undertale. And the third game was Chrono Trigger, perhaps the most consistent and winsome of all three. It influenced multiple games, including the upcoming Sea of Stars, which even has the same acclaimed composer, Yasunori Mitsuda, in a guest role....