Cyberpunk 2077 takes place in a far-off future where man and machine are coming together as one and technology permeates every facet of our existence. Of course, what that means in a video game is that players will have a wide array of weird tools at their disposal. For those who find themselves in conflict, CD Projekt Red presents the option to use weapons to fight for survival. As discussed in the Cyberpunk 2077 deep-dive stream, the weapons on offer come in a variety of shapes, sizes, and capabilities."Our guns are divided into three main categories," explained quest designer Pawel Sasako. "There are smart guns, [which] basically shoot homing bullets that follow targets. There is also tech weapons, and the tech weapons are those that have additional capabilities to the--for instance, they could pierce cover."Then there are power weapons ... mainly focused on being street-grade weapons. They have additional skills and capabilities connected to the fact that have been [modified] in some way. For instance, there is a bursting shotgun or something like that. We have put plenty of work into making sure that the weapons feel [good] and they have weight."Naturally, weapons have various quirks to them that players will be able to use to their advantage. "There's lots of really cool examples that I can give. For instance, there's a handgun that, as you use it, it actually speeds up the bullets and the longer you use it the faster the bullets become, so they can do more damage," Sasako explained."There's a class of handguns that have been created by a Russian company to fight cyborgs and that weapon is able to heat up the bullet to the point where it almost becomes like melted plastic. It's done so you can shoot off a cyborg's arms, for example. There's always a small piece of story wrapped up around the weapon and what it does."What's interesting is you can use a second firing mode for a weapon. Not all weapons have them, but some of them if you use it in a specific way, like for example the tech rifle, it changes the way it collapses together and allows it to pierce through cover and enemies. Or you can bounce bullets off the walls using ricochet. We tried to put enough depth into the gun."Even as development continues, more outrageous weapons are being created. Sasako recounted seeing "an awesome shotgun that has eight barrels and it shoots out of them at the same time."Senior level designer Miles Tost added that a lot of the companies that make the guns and tech in Cyberpunk 2077's world have lore and history. That includes the brands and ads in the game, which are crafted by an entire team at the studio.Phillip Weber, another quest designer, also noted that there are a variety of melee weapons, ranging from broken bottles strewn around the city to knives. You can specialize in melee weapons--perhaps because you want to be a cyber ninja--and often there are weapons that cater to this style, such as katanas. Cyberware for melee also exists, as seen in previous demos where a character punched his way through different environments.The deep-dive had plenty more to offer in terms of details. We got lots of information on how sidequests will work in Cyberpunk 2077, as well as how cyberware will change gameplay. CD Projekt Red also teased that it wants to solve an annoying RPG problem with the game.Cyberpunk 2077 launches for PS4, Xbox One, and PC on April 16, 2020. You can read more about the title's collector's edition and pre-order bonuses in our Cyberpunk 2077 pre-order guide. Info from Gamespot.com

CD Projekt Red revealed more new details about its upcoming RPG Cyberpunk 2077 during a recent gameplay stream. In this presentation, the developer detailed a few of the significant playstyles in the game. One of the more exciting playstyles is Netrunner, which focuses more on hacking anything that's connected to a network. But as a Netrunner, one of the most practical and useful tools at your disposal is the Nanowire. With this handy wire you can hack an enemy's implants from a distance.According to senior level designer Miles Tost, the Nanowire goes hand-in-hand with the Netrunner playstyle, which makes sense since you're probably going to breach a lot of networks. With the Nanowire, you'll gain access to unique attacks and solutions, such as remotely detonating an enemy's hand grenade or hacking a benchpress weight to slam down onto an unsuspecting foe mid-lift.While the Nanowire is mostly a functional tool, it can also be used as a deadly weapon. If you're so inclined, you can whip it around at enemies and slice them into bite-sized pieces. It all sounds relatively brutal.Cyberpunk 2077 is releasing on April 16 for PS4, Xbox One, and PC. For more Cyberpunk 2077 news, be sure to click from the links in the list below.Cyberpunk 2077 Created A New Team To Make Sidequests, After The Witcher 3Cyberpunk 2077 Netrunner Class Seems Perfect For Causing MischiefHow Cyberpunk 2077's Sidequests Will WorkCyberpunk 2077's Life Paths And Character Creation Sound Very DeepCyberpunk 2077 Will Allow For Non-Lethal Playthroughs, Here's How It'll WorkCyberpunk 2077's Weapons Come In Three Flavors, Here's What You Need To KnowInfo from Gamespot.com

CD Projekt Red shared a ton of new details about Cyberpunk 2077 during its latest deep-dive stream. The gameplay demonstration gave us a look at Pacifica, a rundown district of Night City that has been overrun by two rival gangs, and we learned a bit more about these warring factions from series creator himself, Mike Pondsmith.As previously mentioned, two major gangs have staked out territory in Pacifica. First are the Voodoo Boys, a group mainly made up of Haitians who arrived in Night City after the environmental changes caused Haiti to be completely flooded."When I created [the Voodoo Boys] many, many years ago, I was looking at kind of a really interesting idea, which is what we would now call cultural appropriation: what happens when somebody comes in and tries to adopt a culture that they know little or nothing about and does it really badly," Pondsmith explained.He continued: "The Voodoo Boys in [Cyberpunk] 2077 are really Voodoo Boys. They inherited the name, but it was sort of a natural fit; they were coming from Haiti and the Dominican Republic, and they were the real thing, and they managed to take a lot of the elements of their original culture and meld it into the world of 2077, bring that cyberpunk vibe into a very old and respected culture. So they're a gang, but they're not really; they're more of a cultural phenomenon, they're more a way of cultural exploration."On the other side of the spectrum are the Animals, who are driven by their desire for strength. "They're in it to basically build themselves up and become the tigers of their particular urban jungle," Pondsmith explained. "They want to be big, they want to be bad, and they want you to fear them just because they exist."But the Animals are very simple. They have an ethos: get big, lift, get strong, lift. So unlike the Voodoo Boys, who have a culture, the Animals have a thing, and contrasting that is interesting because in 2077, you get a chance to see that not every gang is the same as every other gang, and what motivates them depends on the people you meet on the street."We learned a lot of other interesting details about Cyberpunk 2077 during the deep-dive video, including how sidequests will work in the game and how cyberware will change gameplay. CD Projekt Red also confirmed the game will allow for non-lethal playthroughs, and the studio is working with real city planners to design Night City.Cyberpunk 2077 releases for PS4, Xbox One, and PC on April 16, 2020. The game is also coming to Google Stadia. For more about the title's collector's edition and pre-order bonuses, be sure to check out our Cyberpunk 2077 pre-order guide.Info from Gamespot.com

Like CD Projekt Red's previous games, there are tons of ways to customize your character in Cyberpunk 2077 to suit your liking. This level of personalization even stretches into the game's various gun types, which come in three unique flavors.When it comes to customizing guns, there are two significant ways to do so. First, you can change your gun's appearance by applying different skins or paint jobs. In contrast, the most meaningful way to customize your gun is by applying attachments and modifications, such as silencers and scopes. You can also specifically boost a gun's specific individual statistics.Aside from customization, it's worth noting as your proficiency with specific guns increases, your reloading and shooting animations change. For example, your crosshair might become smaller, indicating that your accuracy is improving, or your reloading animation becomes faster. According to senior level designer Miles Tost, this was implemented to better feed into your character's growth. "You really get this sense of progression and your character evolving as you play the game," said Tost. "I think that's a special experience when you combine it with the way you customize your gun where you get this feeling that this is your signature gun and that you're really good at using it." We learned a ton of new details about Cyberpunk 2077 during its recent deep-dive stream, including more information about how non-lethal playthroughs will work, the three different playstyles, and more. If you're keen to grab the game, be sure to check out our Cyberpunk 2077 pre-order guide.Cyberpunk 2077 is launching on April 16, 2020, for PS4, Xbox One, and PC.Info from Gamespot.com

August might have kept you busy with Fire Emblem: Three Houses, Control and Astral Chain--all great games that can suck your life away. But as the year ticks along, plenty of great, smaller games with stellar ideas and executions come out, especially on PC, and they won't eat up dozens of hours if you're looking for something fresh. But they're easy to miss.There are a lot of games out there, and we sure do play a lot of them. We've picked three standout games from August that which really sparked our interest and really captured our attention. They're games that might usually fly under most people's radar, but still great experiences in their own right, so if any of them sound up your alley, know that they have our hearty recommendation. A Short Hike (PC)If A Short Hike has a central theme, it’s that kindness is rewarded. In other words, be nice to those you meet and nice things will also come your way. It’s a lovely little game that will either make you feel better about the world or provide you with a brief escape from these dark, chaotic times.You play as Claire, a teen bird who is camping at a national park managed by her aunt while she awaits a very important phone call. Trouble is, reception is non-existent so Claire must hike to higher ground, all the way to the summit of the tallest mountain peak in the park. Though she may be a bird, Claire can’t ascend during flight; she can only glide in a gentle descent, making said hike somewhat more circuitous than you might expect. She can climb though, and so much of her time is spent exploring the woods, lakes, and beaches of the park in search of the golden feather collectibles that boost her stamina and allow her to scramble up ever higher surfaces.On her trek, Claire meets a cast of adorable animals who are likewise visiting the park, many of whom ask her for a favor--to find something valuable to them or maybe to just hang out for a little bit. These cheerful encounters work hand in hand with Claire’s exploration, sometimes rewarding her with the items she needs to journey further afield, other times encouraging her to slow down and breathe in the clean mountain air.Running, climbing, gliding--and occasionally digging, watering and fishing--through the park’s sprawling, looping network of obvious and not-so-obvious pathways is a heart-warming experience. Revealing new corners of the pleasingly chunky, vividly colored, lo-fi parkland is a constant delight matched by the satisfaction of having performed good deeds for good creatures every step of the way.Finding phone reception is a MacGuffin that actually pays off in a sincere and touching conclusion, after which you’re free to continue wandering the park to your heart’s desire. A Short Hike is honestly a misnomer. It’s more like a day trip that you’ll want to never end.It’s Like: Breath of the Wild’s climbing and gliding mechanics dropped into a walking simulator with the cast of Animal Crossing.You can find A Short Hike on Steam and Itch.io Anodyne 2: Return To Dust (PC)In Anodyne 2, dust is a catch-all metaphor. For repressed grief, for ennui, for illness, for denial, for confusion. For whatever is dragging us down, holding us back, stopping us from moving on. Dust is depicted as a plague, its nano particles clogging up the internal thoroughfares--both mental and physical--of those it has infected. As Nova, a so-called nano cleaner, you are tasked with eradicating such dust and healing the afflicted, and perhaps yourself in the process.The first Anodyne (released in 2013) told its tales of personal trauma via a reimagining of an NES-era action-RPG. In this far more ambitious sequel the nostalgic palette is broader, expanding its sources of inspiration to encompass not just The Legend of Zelda but late ‘80s PC RPGs like the Ultima series, SNES era JRPGs like Chrono Trigger, and even the early forays into 3D platforming on the N64 and PlayStation. One moment you’re driving across the lo-fi dunes of a bleak desert, later you’re in a top-down pixel-art Ren Fair castle while in between you’ve starred in a wrestling show and run the gauntlet of a survival horror chase through the isometric maze of your apartment building. To call Anodyne 2 eclectic is perhaps an understatement.Genre mashups can often have a hard time holding it all together. They can suffer from too many incompatible parts pulling in different directions. But Anodyne 2 finds a throughline in Nova. It’s her slow journey of self-discovery, even more so than the myriad side stories she intersects in her dust-busting capacity, that brings every perspective shift or gameplay refresh into focus.Things can get ugly at times--in a graphical fidelity sense and in terms of the raw emotions at stake--but despite the stylistic detours and tonal swings, Anodyne 2 retains an unfaltering commitment to exploring the very real, very relatable struggles of day to day human life. By turns dark, funny, confronting, empathetic and inexplicable, it’s a defiantly weird game that will keep surprising you until the end.It’s Like: The Legend of Zelda and Banjo-Kazooie pay a visit to the Psychonauts.You can find Anodyne 2: Return To Dust on Steam and Itch.ioEliza (PC)Eliza, the new game from developer Zachtronics, best known for procedural puzzle games like Infinifactory and Opus Magnum, is a tight, thought-provoking visual novel that connects the dots of our disconnected world, tracing a path through the alienation of social media, big data, the gig economy, startup culture, privacy, gentrification and more.Developed in the 1960s, ELIZA was a real-world, early attempt at programming a computer to speak with a user in what felt like natural language. It wasn’t an AI--it was more like a bot; it couldn’t learn, but rather called upon canned responses based on keywords and patterns entered by the user. ELIZA’s designer even wrote a script that mocked the popular conception of a psychotherapist, specifically the technique of reflecting a patient’s answer back at them in the form of a question. “And why do you think that you’re ripe for parody?”Here, Eliza speculates a future version of the program that now operates as a therapist, harvesting data from its users in an effort to learn how to help them and make the world a better place, at least in theory, at least. Evelyn she isn’t so sure. She's the former chief engineer at Skandha, the company responsible for Eliza, who left her job three years ago and has spent the intervening years battling depression.Evelyn has returned to Skandha, almost incognito, to work as a “proxy,” people employed to read Eliza’s words to clients in order to give the appearance of the human touch. Proxies can’t deviate from the Eliza script, much like the gameplay. Evelyn’s story is a series of conversations in which dialogue options, where there are any, mostly exist to give you a moment to reflect on the issues being examined. In the final chapter, Evelyn is faced with a few choices that affect the outcome, but until that point many of the things you can have her say are deliberately non-committal.It works though, because the game’s writer, Matthew Seiji Burns, is genuinely interested in understanding not just where AI is taking us, but how and why it’s taking us there, and maybe whether we should pause to consider whether there are other destinations we--that’s “we” as in the human race, not the technocrat class--might prefer.It’s Like: If the movie Her was a visual novel that really made you think.You can find Eliza on Steam. Info from Gamespot.com

The new Joker movie starring Joaquin Phoenix doesn't open in theatres until October, but the film had its premiere at the Venice Film Festival over the weekend. People there loved it. According to Variety, the crowd stood cheering for eight minutes at the end of Joker for a lengthy standing ovation with some calling for the film to get attention during awards season. GameSpot's review of Joker scored it a 10/10, with other critics also praising it highly. Some reviews were mixed to negative, however, with Time Magazine's Stephanie Zacharek writing, "Joker ... doesn't have a plot; it's more like a bunch of reaction GIFs strung together."Phoenix was at the Venice Film Festival for the screenings, and he spoke a little more about his character. He said previous performances of Joker by other actors did not influence him."I didn't refer to any past iteration of the character," Phoenix said. 'It just felt like something that was our creation in some ways."Also at the event, the Venice Film Festival artistic director Alberto Barbera said Joker will go "straight to the Oscars." Among other elements of the film, people are praising Phoenix's portrayal of Joker. In addition to Phoenix in the title role, the movie stars Robert de Niro, Zazie Beetz, and Frances Conroy. Joker is something of a change for writer-director Todd Phillips, who previously made the Hangover and Old School comedies. He also wrote for Borat, which earned him his Oscar nomination. Info from Gamespot.com

We've reached September, which means the seasons are changing all around the world. New Releases is here to highlight some of the biggest games coming this month. You can take a snowy retreat with Monster Hunter World's Iceborne expansion or an island getaway with The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening. You can also stay indoors and take to the basketball court with NBA 2K20. Finally, shooter fans can take on the Locust in Gears 5 or the Calypso Twins in Borderlands 3.Monster Hunter World: Iceborne -- September 6Available on: PS4, Xbox OneIceborne adds the new Hoarfrost Reach region to the New World, and it's full of snow, ice, and new monsters to take down. This expansion also adds a Master Rank difficulty for those of you who have already bested all the High Rank hunts. If you're not quite done exploring the game's main area, don't sweat it--you'll still see some fan-favorite monsters added to that part of the game too.More Coverage:Monster Hunter World: Iceborne Beta Test, Pre-Order Bonuses, And MoreWhat You Should Expect From Monster Hunter World: IceborneNBA 2K20 -- September 6Available on: PS4, Xbox One, PC, SwitchThis year's 2K basketball game offers the usual dose of modes like MyCareer, MyGM, MyLeague, and MyTeam, but the biggest addition is a series first: you can finally play as all 12 WNBA teams. If you need a break from the basketball court, there are plenty of ways to spend time (and money) on the game's loot boxes and gambling mechanics too.More Coverage:NBA 2K20 Pre-Order Bonuses, What's In The Legend Edition, And MoreYou Can Play A Lot Of Games That Aren't Basketball In The Basketball Game NBA 2K20Gears 5 -- September 10Available on: Xbox One, PCGears 5 focuses on Kait Diaz, who will learn more about her own family's history as she uncovers the Locust's origins. Gears 5 offers the standard campaign and multiplayer options, but there are some big changes to other modes this time around. For one, Horde mode gives every character unique abilities and ultimate attacks--there's even a pair of characters from Halo: Reach in the mix. Characters also get special perks in the new Escape mode, a three-player co-op experience where you have to destroy Locust hives.More Coverage:Gears 5: Pre-Load, Start Times, Launch Maps, And More RevealedGears 5's Horde Mode Is Getting The Hero Shooter TreatmentBorderlands 3 -- September 13Available on: PS4, Xbox One, PCThere are new characters to check out in Borderlands 3 as well. Amara the Siren, Moze the Gunner, Zane the Operative, and FL4K the Beastmaster are your Vault Hunters for his adventure. You won't just be seeking Vaults on Pandora, though; for the first time, you can travel to other planets aboard the Sanctuary III. As usual, expect to find a ridiculous amount of guns as you battle the evil Calypso Twins.More Coverage:Borderlands 3 Pre-Order Guide: Diamond Loot Chest, Super Deluxe Edition, BonusesBorderlands 3 PC System Requirements Are Pretty Reasonable, See Them HereThe Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening -- September 20Available on: SwitchThis is a remake of Link's Awakening on the Game Boy. While it offers the same story and dungeons across Koholint Island, there's also a completely fresh art style, reimagined soundtrack, and even a special dungeon editor. Tap an Amiibo, and you can unlock extra mini-games and chambers for that dungeon-builder.More Coverage:Zelda: Link's Awakening - Everything We Know About The Nintendo Switch RemakeGameStop Announces Exclusive Pre-Order Bonus For Link's AwakeningSeptember has just begun, and in addition to the games listed here, Catherine: Full Body and Final Fantasy VIII Remastered are also leading the charge, both launching on Tuesday, September 3. Next week, New Releases will take a look at some less-known games you won't wanna miss, like GreedFall and Blasphemous.Info from Gamespot.com

The new Joker movie starring Joaquin Phoenix and directed by The Hangover's Todd Phillips opens in theatres this October, but the film had its premiere at the Venice Film Festival over the weekend. Reviews for the movie are starting to come in, and to help you get an idea about if the film is worth your time and money, we're collecting excerpts from reviews here.GameSpot's own Joker review from Michael Rougeau said Phoenix turns in an "iconic" performance as the clown price of crime as he delivers a "new, complex version of the character we haven't seen before."You can see a rundown of Joker review excerpts below, while more information on the film's critical reception can be found on GameSpot sister site Metacritic.JokerDirected By: Todd PhillipsWritten By: Todd Phillips, Scott SilverStarring: Joaquin Phoenix, Zazie Beetz, Frances Conroy, Robert De NiroRelease Date: October 4 (United States)GameSpot"It might make you uncomfortable, and it will no doubt stay with you long after the curtains close; great movies often do." -- Michael Rougeau [Full review]Time Magazine"Phillips may want us to think he's giving us a movie all about the emptiness of our culture, but really, he's just offering a prime example of it." -- Stephanie Zacharek [Full review]The Guardian"What a gloriously daring and explosive film Joker is. It's a tale that’s almost as twisted as the man at its centre, bulging with ideas and pitching towards anarchy." -- Xan Brooks [Full review]The Wrap"It will be tempting for some to declare this the first art film based on a DC or Marvel property, but while it certainly represents a bit of a departure and something of a risk, Joker is ultimately grim-and-gritty comic book nihilism jacked up to the nth degree, wrapped up in a convincing but ultimately hollow simulacra of better, smarter movies." -- Alonso Duralde [Full review]IGN "Joker isn't just an awesome comic book movie, it's an awesome movie, period. It offers no easy answers to the unsettling questions it raises about a cruel society in decline. Joaquin Phoenix’s fully committed performance and Todd Phillips’ masterful albeit loose reinvention of the DC source material make Joker a film that should leave comic book fans and non-fans alike disturbed and moved in all the right ways." -- Jim Vejvoda [Full review]The Hollywood Reporter"Joaquin Phoenix boldly reinvents Batman's cackling arch-nemesis in Todd Phillips' dark new vision of the supervillain origin story, also starring Robert De Niro." -- David Rooney [Full review]Info from Gamespot.com

Even the most mundane, everyday things can seem full of mystery and adventure when you're a kid. Especially when you have a like-minded friend to bounce ideas off and encourage your flights of fancy. Knights & Bikes channels this familiar childhood experience in a knock-about co-operative (but you can still play it solo) adventure that remains endlessly charming even when its core mechanics don't join in the fun.Nessa is a stowaway on a boat that's just docked at the holiday island home of Demelza. Quickly, the two girls meet and, in that way only children can do, become firm friends almost instantly. Nessa is slightly older and seemingly orphaned; Demelza lives in the island's caravan park run by her single dad, who is struggling to keep the business afloat. The pair seize the opportunity to escape into each other's imaginations, setting off on a grand adventure to recover the island's legendary buried treasure and, Demelza hopes, use it to reverse her father's financial misfortune. The girls may have a treasure map to guide them, but things aren't quite so straightforward as realizing X marks the spot. Getting around town is a challenge. Nessa and Demelza can run--and if you hold down the run button they'll do that thing kids do where they spread their arms like wings and yell "Vrrrrrrrmmmm!" like they're a plane arcing through the air--but it's often not entirely clear where they ought to be running to. Luckily, Demelza's pet goose, Honkers, has a good nose for direction and will run off in the right direction, honking his little heart out if the girls fall behind. Oh, and don't worry, you can absolutely pet the goose.Early on Nessa and Demelza procure the eponymous bikes which allow them to zip around the island much faster than on foot. The bikes can be upgraded, too, with all kinds of handlebar grips, paint jobs, spoke decorations, and so on. All of these are purely cosmetic, save for one--a particular set of wheels that lets the girls traverse pools of mud that would otherwise be blocking their progress. Cycling around the island is hugely entertaining in itself, not because it's especially interesting to navigate the many crisscrossing paths connecting the handful of major points of interest, but because the presentation does such a great job of capturing the carefree abandon these girls are feeling. You mash to pedal and build up momentum then hold down the button for a short burst of extra speed, all the while the girls are hooting and howling and, it must be said, not necessarily obeying strict road safety procedures.Their adventure takes them from the caravan park to a mini golf course that doubles as the site of some historical battle to a maze-like scrapyard that transforms into a terrifying dungeon with seemingly no way out; to a hiking trail through the woods that twists and turns back in on itself in the manner of other more famous Lost Woods. Every step of the way the girls imbue the world with unwarranted but understandable wonder. The history book the local librarian is reading is obviously full of clues to the whereabouts of the treasure. That old man with a beard is very probably a wizard. And, clearly, every stroke of misfortune they encounter is a sign of the horrible curse afflicting the island. It's all great fun. The (probably) consensual hallucinations of the two girls are for the most part light and breezy and carry them headlong into one thrilling scrape after another. Their humour is infectious and their bonds of friendship, forged so fast in the fire of fantasy, are never in doubt. They're both such superbly written characters, flinging one-liners at each other and building upon the other's latest witty invention. And they're vividly expressive, each new close-up of their comically contorted faces frozen in shock, disgust, awe or sly realization will never fail to bring a smile to your lips.Where Knights & Bikes falters is in the moment to moment, the rote combat and light puzzling that knits together its seat-of-the-pants dash through childhood curiosity. Each girl finds three pieces of gear over the course of the game and these are used to both fend off enemies and negotiate numerous environmental puzzles. Nessa's water bombs, for example, can be thrown to deal damage to enemies, extinguish fires (and do extra damage to fire-based enemies) and, when splatted into a puddle on the ground, conduct electricity.But combat is mostly trivial. Enemies aren't especially hard to defeat and the girls can heal each other (via a cute high-five) as long as they have enough of the bandages that drop in consistently plentiful amounts. Combat has the same knock-about energy that infuses the rest of the game, so it's sort of fun to button-mash your way through. But it's never interesting enough to look forward to. The puzzles fare slightly better. There were a few occasions where I had to pause for a minute to think about what I needed to do next to progress. And I always enjoyed watching the next nonsensical triggered event play out after solving a puzzle even if I wasn't always sure what I was trying to accomplish. Most of the time I just chuckled and wondered what was going to happen next.Remarkably, for a game clearly designed for two-player cooperative play (locally or online), it works well when played solo. Here, you can switch between the two girls whenever you wish and the capable AI will assume control of the other. In combat, the AI controlled girl will use her abilities effectively and, even more impressively, when required to help solve a puzzle she'll smartly move to the right spot and perform whatever is necessary. Even if you don't have a co-op partner, you're not really missing out on much.Knights & Bikes was created by a small team featuring several people who worked on LittleBigPlanet and Tearaway, and you can feel that all these games share a similar creative vision. There's a kind of wide-eyed, rough and tumble spirit of adventure running through all three games that is hard to resist. Knights & Bikes is a wonderfully warm, effortlessly inviting experience that'll make you feel young again. Info from Gamespot.com

I died eight times before hitting level 10 in World of Warcraft Classic. Compared to vanilla World of Warcraft back in 2005, that was probably a lot more efficient than the first time around. In 'live,' or 'retail,' or whatever we're calling the current version of World of Warcraft, you really only die in the open world if you make a stupid mistake. WoW Classic is a surprising reminder that the game once seemed to be deeply comfortable with making players fall on their face.In the two years since WoW Classic was announced at BlizzCon 2017, the mood has shifted dramatically. At first, the majority of the sentiment wondered, "Why would someone want to go back?" But a hardcore tribe of vanilla WoW fans, so serious about the old-school experience they'd been chasing black market private servers to get that OG feeling any way they could, felt very different. In recent months, with the Classic beta giving many players and streamers a chance to look back and let the nostalgic love flow back into their hearts, it seemed like everyone was ready for launch day.Indeed, too many were ready for launch day.The queues were ridiculous, over 20,000 strong and half-day wait times on some servers. Lucky for some, rotten for others, server crashes saw the queues rotate a little faster, but those who crashed out found themselves sent to the back of the queue. Blizzard launched extra servers to spread the load and help people just get in and have fun. But the reason so many stayed in those queues instead of jumping to an easy server is a big part of what exactly people were coming back to Classic to look for.No, not the queue itself. "A true day one experience lol" was the catch cry, but the reason people stayed put was fundamental--people made plans to play with old friends and reform old guilds, and once the plans were in place you couldn't just swap to a new server on the fly. Classic is all about community. Even in those early levels the game plays in ways akin to why people are falling in love with more recent games that are lauded for their difficulty. Yes, World of Warcraft isn't really a 'hard' game in the same way something like Dark Souls is, but to succeed with minimal delay, you need friends to get by.Back in 2005, WoW was seen as so ubiquitous in Silicon Valley circles it built a reputation as a kind of 'new golf'. A place where people would meet and hang out. Run a dungeon together. Do some fishing. Discuss business while sitting in Booty Bay.Some of that may have been all talk, but in my own experience as an early-career tech and games journalist I did make friends with future colleagues through the game. I joined a guild and spent time regularly with people I'd met in the industry, which helped solidify work contacts and networks. If I'd started World of Warcraft in more recent years, the years since automated random dungeon and raid queues, and tools that let you group with people without ever needing to type a word or know their names, I don't feel like I'd have built such friend networks through the game so easily. During the first few days of WoW Classic, with everyone at low levels, sharing scant resources and mobs in the earliest areas of the game, spontaneous groups would form as people helped each other complete quests to progress a little faster and with minimal loss of life. I was invited to group while on my very first quest at level one--"Hey, we need to kill some stuff. Let's kill stuff together."The global chat channel in a multiplayer game was actually full of nice and helpful comments for once, as people answered each other's questions or requests for help. It was like a time before social media had made us all (or at least me) the jaded cynics we've become.Named mobs for early quests were a particular problem. At first, people just formed circles and partied up in groups of five. If you got the first hit, lucky you and your four friends. But then rumors started to circulate that some servers were forming spontaneous queues for bottleneck kills. If I hadn't seen the screenshots I'd have thought it was an urban myth.Let´s Do It The Right Way :D Build A Line Info from Gamespot.com

August had Fire Emblem: Three Houses, Control and Astral Chain. All great games that can suck your life away. But as the year ticks along, plenty of great, smaller games with stellar ideas and executions come out, especially on PC, and they won't eat up dozens of hours if you're looking for something fresh. But they're easy to miss.There are a lot of games out there, and we sure do play a lot of them. We've picked three standout games from August that which really sparked our interest and really captured our attention. They're games that might usually fly under most people's radar, but still great experiences in their own right, so if any of them sound up your alley, know that they have our hearty recommendation. A Short Hike (PC)If A Short Hike has a central theme, it’s that kindness is rewarded. In other words, be nice to those you meet and nice things will also come your way. It’s a lovely little game that will either make you feel better about the world or provide you with a brief escape from these dark, chaotic times.You play as Claire, a teen bird who is camping at a national park managed by her aunt while she awaits a very important phone call. Trouble is, reception is non-existent so Claire must hike to higher ground, all the way to the summit of the tallest mountain peak in the park. Though she may be a bird, Claire can’t ascend during flight; she can only glide in a gentle descent, making said hike somewhat more circuitous than you might expect. She can climb though, and so much of her time is spent exploring the woods, lakes, and beaches of the park in search of the golden feather collectibles that boost her stamina and allow her to scramble up ever higher surfaces.On her trek, Claire meets a cast of adorable animals who are likewise visiting the park, many of whom ask her for a favor--to find something valuable to them or maybe to just hang out for a little bit. These cheerful encounters work hand in hand with Claire’s exploration, sometimes rewarding her with the items she needs to journey further afield, other times encouraging her to slow down and breathe in the clean mountain air.Running, climbing, gliding--and occasionally digging, watering and fishing--through the park’s sprawling, looping network of obvious and not-so-obvious pathways is a heart-warming experience. Revealing new corners of the pleasingly chunky, vividly colored, lo-fi parkland is a constant delight matched by the satisfaction of having performed good deeds for good creatures every step of the way.Finding phone reception is a MacGuffin that actually pays off in a sincere and touching conclusion, after which you’re free to continue wandering the park to your heart’s desire. A Short Hike is honestly a misnomer. It’s more like a day trip that you’ll want to never end.It’s Like: Breath of the Wild’s climbing and gliding mechanics dropped into a walking simulator with the cast of Animal Crossing.You can find A Short Hike on Steam and Itch.io Anodyne 2: Return To Dust (PC)In Anodyne 2, dust is a catch-all metaphor. For repressed grief, for ennui, for illness, for denial, for confusion. For whatever is dragging us down, holding us back, stopping us from moving on. Dust is depicted as a plague, its nano particles clogging up the internal thoroughfares--both mental and physical--of those it has infected. As Nova, a so-called nano cleaner, you are tasked with eradicating such dust and healing the afflicted, and perhaps yourself in the process.The first Anodyne (released in 2013) told its tales of personal trauma via a reimagining of an NES-era action-RPG. In this far more ambitious sequel the nostalgic palette is broader, expanding its sources of inspiration to encompass not just The Legend of Zelda but late ‘80s PC RPGs like the Ultima series, SNES era JRPGs like Chrono Trigger, and even the early forays into 3D platforming on the N64 and PlayStation. One moment you’re driving across the lo-fi dunes of a bleak desert, later you’re in a top-down pixel-art Ren Fair castle while in between you’ve starred in a wrestling show and run the gauntlet of a survival horror chase through the isometric maze of your apartment building. To call Anodyne 2 eclectic is perhaps an understatement.Genre mashups can often have a hard time holding it all together. They can suffer from too many incompatible parts pulling in different directions. But Anodyne 2 finds a throughline in Nova. It’s her slow journey of self-discovery, even more so than the myriad side stories she intersects in her dust-busting capacity, that brings every perspective shift or gameplay refresh into focus.Things can get ugly at times--in a graphical fidelity sense and in terms of the raw emotions at stake--but despite the stylistic detours and tonal swings, Anodyne 2 retains an unfaltering commitment to exploring the very real, very relatable struggles of day to day human life. By turns dark, funny, confronting, empathetic and inexplicable, it’s a defiantly weird game that will keep surprising you until the end.It’s Like: The Legend of Zelda and Banjo-Kazooie pay a visit to the Psychonauts.You can find Anodyne 2: Return To Dust on Steam and Itch.ioEliza (PC)Eliza, the new game from developer Zachtronics, best known for procedural puzzle games like Infinifactory and Opus Magnum, is a tight, thought-provoking visual novel that connects the dots of our disconnected world, tracing a path through the alienation of social media, big data, the gig economy, startup culture, privacy, gentrification and more.Developed in the 1960s, ELIZA was a real-world, early attempt at programming a computer to speak with a user in what felt like natural language. It wasn’t an AI--it was more like a bot; it couldn’t learn, but rather called upon canned responses based on keywords and patterns entered by the user. ELIZA’s designer even wrote a script that mocked the popular conception of a psychotherapist, specifically the technique of reflecting a patient’s answer back at them in the form of a question. “And why do you think that you’re ripe for parody?”Here, Eliza speculates a future version of the program that now operates as a therapist, harvesting data from its users in an effort to learn how to help them and make the world a better place, at least in theory, at least. Evelyn she isn’t so sure. She's the former chief engineer at Skandha, the company responsible for Eliza, who left her job three years ago and has spent the intervening years battling depression.Evelyn has returned to Skandha, almost incognito, to work as a “proxy,” people employed to read Eliza’s words to clients in order to give the appearance of the human touch. Proxies can’t deviate from the Eliza script, much like the gameplay. Evelyn’s story is a series of conversations in which dialogue options, where there are any, mostly exist to give you a moment to reflect on the issues being examined. In the final chapter, Evelyn is faced with a few choices that affect the outcome, but until that point many of the things you can have her say are deliberately non-committal.It works though, because the game’s writer, Matthew Seiji Burns, is genuinely interested in understanding not just where AI is taking us, but how and why it’s taking us there, and maybe whether we should pause to consider whether there are other destinations we--that’s “we” as in the human race, not the technocrat class--might prefer.It’s Like: If the movie Her was a visual novel that really made you think.You can find Eliza on Steam. Info from Gamespot.com

Man of Medan is set almost entirely at sea on an enormous, abandoned boat. Loosely based on the real-life mystery of the OSS Ourang Medan, which became a shipwreck in the late 1940s after its entire crew were lost under mysterious circumstances, Man of Medan is also the first part of Supermassive Games' proposed Dark Pictures Anthology--a series of short, branching horror narrative experiences in the vein of its tremendous 2015 surprise hit, Until Dawn. If you've played Until Dawn, you'll know what to expect. But despite a smart online co-op mode, Man of Medan's weak narrative ultimately makes it a disappointing first installment.The game's plot jumps between five different playable characters who are all experiencing the same event. You'll determine their ultimate fates by making decisions for them, as well as responding to quick-time events. There are reportedly 69 different potential deaths you can experience (including those of non-playable characters), but it's also entirely possible that your whole crew will survive. Alternatively, they might all die. Man of Medan's main selling point is that your decisions will affect how things play out, how the relationships between your characters will develop, and what you'll uncover and experience along the way.In conversations, and at pivotal points in the plot, you'll often be given three options, one of which is always to say or do nothing. So focused is Man of Medan on its story, there are no puzzles to solve or combat systems to master outside of these choices, just lots of exploring and quick-time events. However, the game is plagued by a big central problem: a fundamentally weak plot.The story isn't engaging, as the player is given little reason to care about the characters and the horror tropes being explored mostly feel hackneyed and uncreative. After a brief prologue scene set in the '40s, you spend Man of Medan's four-hour (give or take) runtime in the present day. The story opens with the crew planning a dive to a previously untouched sunken fighter plane from World War II, which ultimately leads to a series of events that sees them trapped on the Medan, a seemingly haunted abandoned ship, held captive by a pirate gang who are convinced that the ship--which is riddled with dead bodies--contains treasure. Naturally, things start going bump in the night, and the gang finds themselves dealing with various ghouls and terrors too.There are plot holes and character inconsistencies throughout, some minor, some more blatant. It’s perhaps easy to forgive the questionable presence of rats all over the boat, still gnawing on hunks of meat that have been on the ship since the 40s, but it’s less easy to excuse how blasé the characters act about the horrifying situations they find themselves in. They're mostly unlikeable, too--There's the cool but insecure Alex, his dorky younger brother Brad, Alex's outgoing, wealthy partner Julia, Julia's obnoxious but well-meaning brother Conrad, and Fliss, the captain of the small boat the four have chartered at the story's opening. The dialogue is generally not very good; at times it successfully recreates the feeling of watching a fun-but-silly teen slasher, occasionally hitting that good-bad sweet-spot as a character awkwardly refers to something as ‘lit’ or flirts awkwardly, but it can also be annoying when the five central characters' interactions sound stilted and unrealistic. Without spoiling anything, the story also explains a little too much about what's happening on the Medan in a way that makes repeated playthroughs much less satisfying.There's also an over-reliance on jump scares, which cheapens the horror experience. One standout sequence midway through the game that does a great job of getting under your skin, as Brad finds himself stuck in a looping hallway that grows just a bit weirder every time he travels down it, but otherwise Man of Medan is reliant on spring-loaded cats and lots of suddenly-morphing faces. On the plus side, it looks tremendous--the character models can be a bit waxy, but the ship is extremely detailed and creepy, and the game effectively communicates how unpleasant the act of exploring a creaky rustbucket full of dark corners and rotting corpses must be. The trade-off, at least on a base PS4, is that animations frequently stutter, breaking the mood as frames slip away.There are pacing issues, too, especially with the extremely slow opening section that weighs down repeat playthroughs. While you can see different scenes or experience unique outcomes with each playthrough, some scenes will be essentially unchanged each time, which can quickly grate. You'll also occasionally have to check in on 'The Curator', an omnipresent suited man who is clearly meant to be the mascot for and host of the Dark Pictures Anthology. He's a pompous version of the Crypt Keeper (from Tales From The Crypt), but without any of the "good evening, boys and ghouls" merriment you want from a horror anthology host, and as a result, he doesn't quite fit.Multiplayer is Man of Medan's big addition to the formula laid out by Until Dawn. There are two forms of co-op: Shared Story, in which two players tackle the game together online, and Movie Night, where up to five players can play together offline, playing through the chapters of whichever characters they are assigned at the start. Playing together on the couch is perhaps meant to evoke that "don't go in there" feeling of watching a fun horror movie with friends, but Man of Medan's relatively straightforward level designs, which never make it seem dangerous to wander off-path and explore the open doors and alternate pathways you encounter, don't particularly facilitate this. Death is more often down to a failed QTE rather than a dialogue choice you made or because you decided to investigate something spooky. In fact, right near the end, a mistimed button press can be the difference between everyone surviving and everyone dying--being responsible for that in front of your friends is more embarrassing than it is funny.However, so many of the game's issues feel like much less of a problem when you jump into the smart and innovative online mode. It is, without a doubt, the definitive way to experience Man of Medan, especially if you're playing with another person who is familiar with the material. Shared Story sees you both playing at the same time, taking control of different characters as their scenes play out simultaneously. You'll both, eventually, get a turn with every character (if they live long enough), and often your paths will diverge. Once the five main characters meet after the initial prologue, Shared Story immediately offers a more engaging experience than the single-player campaign can.Early on, for instance, I played through a sequence where two characters dived down to inspect something underwater, while my co-op buddy stayed on the boat and experienced a different part of the story. In single-player, you'll still see both scenes, but one will be greatly truncated. In online co-op, some scenes are expanded, or you might occasionally see parts of the story, or make choices, that cannot be accessed in single-player.This led to the two of us conspiring to make certain things happen, to bend the game's story to our will. We were more successful with some outcomes than others (a failed quick-time event led to an unexpected death early on), but working together to achieve dramatic satisfaction, and choosing when to reveal what just happened and when to let the other player try to figure out what we'd done in our scenes, was a delight. Each player won't see every scene when playing this way, and it's entirely possible to play without ever communicating, which makes the plot more unpredictable.No matter how much or little you choose to share, though, Shared Story is absolutely the right way to play the game. It's very well designed; my co-op partner and I never found ourselves waiting for the other player to hurry up and trigger the next cutscene, and being able to see how your friend is trying to direct a scene, and deciding whether to help or hinder them in that, is excellent. It feels like you're working together to wring as many interesting outcomes as you can out of the game, and effectively doubling the number of potential choices leads to a much stronger sense of variety.Man of Medan is still telling a weak story, though, as much as Shared Story plasters over this with its excellent take on co-op, which lets you plan things out and work together to craft the narrative you want to tell (and kill the characters you find the most annoying). If you can organize a session with someone else who owns the game and play through the whole thing together, it's an excellent experience; but if you're after another single-player horror narrative experience like the one offered in Until Dawn, it's very disappointing. As a show of the potential for the Dark Pictures Anthology, Man of Medan is largely a success, but as a first episode, it leaves plenty to be desired. Info from Gamespot.com

Imagine that you wake up one morning and, to your horror, discover that you had inadvertently committed an act of infidelity. Think about the kind of confusion and dread that might race through your head at that moment. How did it happen? What the hell are you going to do? How on earth are you going to explain and amend the relationships with all parties involved? What kind of deep-seated anxieties might have led to this moment? In 2011, Atlus' Persona studio explored this predicament with Catherine, using a peculiar blend of social simulation and Sokoban-influenced action-puzzling. Eight years later, Catherine: Full Body is a remaster that demonstrates how well the game's distinctive premise and exploration of adult themes still hold up, even if its new additions to the plot don't fit in seamlessly.Vincent is a 32-year-old man in a long-term relationship with his girlfriend, Katherine, and at a stagnant point in his life where he isn't exactly sure what he wants for his future. His core group of friends are in different circumstances, but they share similar dilemmas; being in your thirties is hard. Vincent has recently found himself plagued by frequent nightmares of scrambling up a crumbling tower, and he's losing sleep and in a constant haze because of them. One morning, after a big night of drinking, he wakes up next to someone who is absolutely not his girlfriend, and what follows is a frantic, weeklong crusade to try and deal with the repercussions and decide what he wants to do with his life before Katherine can discover what's really going on.Central to Vincent's coping process is his aforementioned core group of friends. Every night after work, they all get together at their local bar, The Stray Sheep, to hang out. It's in these regular social scenarios where Vincent can confide in his friends, talk through his state of mind, sound off on his next course of action, and, hopefully, find a resolution. The conversations between characters are mostly predetermined, though the onus to spend Vincent's limited time having them is on you. A key component which you do have influence over, however, is your cell phone. Vincent will regularly be contacted throughout the night (by Katherine and his new fling, Catherine), and how you choose to respond to their text messages and calls, if at all, will impact Vincent's ethical compass--represented as a meter with opaque binaries.Time ticks along as you perform actions in the bar, and its patrons will come and go. You can skip these social sections entirely if you wish, but doing so robs you of the game's most engrossing component. Vincent's journey is a deeply introspective one, and though the plot's major beats unfold in the cutscenes that bookend each day, the nuances of his character come through in his interactions with other people. Managing Vincent's connection to his phone, and, in turn, how he treats the women in his life from a distance, sways how he might later react to significant plot points and revelations. Getting to know Vincent's deeply flawed but sympathetic friends, as well as peeling away at the backstories of the other bar patrons as the week goes on, helps to explore themes revolving around maturity and the nature of human relationships. Full Body's inclusion of the Japanese vocal track also provides an interesting and different take on character performances if you've already experienced the English version before.The ebb and flow of your social actions--chatting to your friends, ordering another drink, checking your phone intermittently, and spending time with Vincent's idle thoughts--make the ritual of whittling away time at the Stray Sheep strangely satisfying in its mundanity. The evocative soundtrack helps to foster this relaxed contemplative state, as does the game's holistic but understated audiovisual style. It's an incredibly pleasant atmosphere to be in, and it succeeds in replicating the quiet delight of spending a night drinking with friends with no particular occasion.It's nice to have that safe haven, because when Vincent goes home to bed each night, the nightmares start, and that's when things get really stressful. What's causing the nightmares is a mysterious unknown at first, but from the outset, it's clear that they act somewhat as a lucid metaphor for Vincent's internal strife. You need to guide Vincent up a sheer, crumbling tower constructed entirely of cubes and other cuboids, sometimes while being chased by a monstrous personification of one of Vincent's objects of anxiety. The tower is rarely more than three cubes deep, and while its construction might sometimes form a natural staircase for Vincent to climb, you'll frequently need to create a path upward yourself by pushing and pulling the cubes around in strict, grid-based arrangements.This task quickly escalates in difficulty, as the sheer tower faces become higher and harder to navigate. There will be fewer pieces to work with, while blocks with unique properties will also appear, such as being immovable or shattering after being stepped on twice. These scenarios stop you from creating an ordinary staircase, and they force you to think of more unorthodox ways to arrange and move around the tower. Vincent can hang on the edges of blocks, and blocks will support each other so long as a horizontal edge connects; both these rules are fundamental to many of the techniques required to work your way up.Finding that potential path takes careful consideration and forward-thinking, and this can be nerve-wracking. You need to keep up your momentum, lest the stage crumble under your feet and you fall, and the soundtrack--rousing renditions of an inspired selection of classical pieces--ratchets up the urgency of your ridiculous predicament to a high degree. It's very easy to put yourself in a dead-end situation, even with the game's generous undo mechanic, and at times you might stare at the pieces you have to work with for what seems like an eternity without any inspiration. But when you do have a sequence of moves in mind, successfully put them into practice, and start flying up the tower without pause, that sense of mastery and accomplishment is incredibly exciting.This remaster also includes a number of additional difficulty options and assists, however, if reaching those moments of elation are too few and far between. These include, among other things, a "Safety" difficulty level, which eliminates failure, and an auto-climb option that can be disabled on a whim. Catherine's puzzle difficulty does spike in places, so it's a boon over the original for anyone who wants to keep up the momentum with Vincent's story. If you love the puzzles, though (and I certainly do), Full Body also includes a handful of additional modes, which dramatically increase the amount of available stages. The story mode offers a "Remix" variant featuring new block types and stage layouts; the in-game "Rapunzel" arcade cabinet boasts a buffet of new stages in the same vein, too. Babel returns as a discrete puzzle mode with challenging, randomised stages for one or two players, and there's also a head-to-head competitive mode with local and online options. There's a lot here, but the biggest addition to Catherine is the inclusion of another potential love interest for Vincent, named Rin.While Katherine is sensible and Catherine is uninhibited, Rin acts as a sheepish but wholehearted personality for Vincent to fawn over. She's introduced right from the get-go and woven into the game's existing story beats, both in new cutscenes and into the social segments at the Stray Sheep. However, perhaps unsurprisingly, Rin's integration isn't an entirely seamless one. On a superficial level, story moments involving Rin will often play following whatever cinematics were part of the original game, and with that come some pacing issues. These new scenes have a strong, stylish direction, featuring more interesting edits and creative shot compositions than existing ones, but they unfortunately make the rhythm of cycling between social simulation, nightmare puzzles, and stretches of cinematics feel a little unbalanced. More significantly, though, the integration of Rin completely dismantles the game's enigmatic sense of mystery.If you've played the original version of Catherine through to one of its many different endings, then you'll have at least some idea of how Vincent's real-world difficulties and his nightmarish tribulations are related. However, it was previously hard to get any tangible sense of how things might fit together until the original game's penultimate chapter. Conversely, as soon as Rin appears on screen in Full Body, it is immediately clear that something is amiss, and this feeling of peculiarity is ever-present whenever Rin is involved in a scene. Even though her arc is an enticing new mystery in itself, and does feel additive to someone who already knows everything about the original Catherine's narrative, it's a shame. As soon as Full Body starts, Rin acts as a big, flashy distraction from the largely grounded and plausible story that Catherine revels in during its real-world sequences for most of its running time.Chasing Rin through the new branching path in the story feels a little inelegant overall, too. Actively choosing to pursue either Catherine or Katherine as Vincent's ultimate goal always feels like trying to hit a moving target. Trying to push Vincent in a certain direction on the game's ethical meter was difficult because of how hard it was to decipher which choices represented what--not just in Vincent's text messages, but also during the series of confronting "confessional" questions that you're asked in-between nightmare levels (eg. Would you rather kiss an alien or a corpse?). Pursing Rin feels far more blatant--a series of questions are flagged upfront as opportunities to "break" the meter and set off on a whole new path.Once you do break onto that new path, things go to some fascinating places. But the broad feeling of the new story branch is that it feels, well, too broad. Rin's enthusiastic earnestness rubs off on the direction of the new content a little too much, and even though the scenarios posited are genuinely interesting to see unfold, it lacks a more grounded subtlety that invites a similar level of contemplation to the existing branches for Katherine and Catherine. What's more dismaying is that the ultimate conclusion to Rin's story branch actually feels like it undermines the otherwise positive themes the new chapters work so intensely to convey, seeming to suggest that the kind of love that Rin and Vincent can potentially share is fantastical in nature.But Rin's presence still brings an intriguing new edge to Vincent's crisis, and Full Body still tells a fascinating, personal tale. The nightmarish block puzzles are still weirdly intense and satisfying to surmount, and the Stray Sheep is still a wonderful bar to spend your nights in. Full Body does a great job in refining and refreshing the Persona studio's fascinating foray into the social lives of adults, and Catherine continues to stand out as a game that feels both incredibly bizarre and authentically intimate. Info from Gamespot.com

With Labor Day and a three-day weekend on the horizon for many in the US and Canada, there's no better time to squeeze in some extra gaming time, and there are plenty of deals available this week in case you're looking for a new game to play. On the PlayStation Store alone, there's a massive August Savings sale going on all month long, and now Sony has kicked off a flash sale on PS4 and PS Vita games on top of the existing deals.This is one of PSN's smaller flash sales compared to previous ones we've seen--and it completely omits PS3 titles, with only a few Vita games up for grabs--but there are some gems to be highlighted. Notably, the Persona Dancing: Endless Night Collection is 50% off, selling for $50 instead of $100. The rhythm game bundle includes Persona 3: Dancing in Moonlight, Persona 5: Dancing in Starlight, and Persona 4: Dancing All Night, the latter of which is only available on PS4 through this collection. The Persona 3 and Persona 5 dancing games can also be experienced with PlayStation VR.Other deals worth mentioning include MLB The Show 19, which is discounted to $24. Hitman 2 is on sale for $30. Crash Team Racing: Nitro-Fueled, which just released June 21, is already on sale for $30, and you can grab its Nitros Oxide edition on sale for $45. You can also snag The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt Complete Edition for only $15 (assuming you don't want to wait for the Nintendo Switch release). Quite a few Sims 4 bundles and DLC are marked down too.See all deals at the PlayStation StoreThe flash sale deals will be available in the PlayStation Store until Monday, September 2, at 8 AM PT / 11 AM ET. See some of the best discounts below.Crash Team Racing: Nitro-Fueled -- $30 ($40)Crash Team Racing: Nitro-Fueled Nitros Oxide Edition -- $45 ($60)Far: Lone Sails -- $11.24 ($15)Hitman 2 -- $30 ($60)Hitman HD - Enhanced Collection -- $24 ($60)MLB The Show 19 -- $24 ($40)MLB The Show All-Star Edition -- $30 ($50)MLB The Show 19 Digital Deluxe Edition -- $48 ($80)Persona 3: Dancing in Moonlight (VR) -- $30 ($60)Persona 5: Dancing in Starlight (VR) -- $30 ($60)Persona Dancing: Endless Night Collection -- $50 ($100)Sega Genesis Classics -- $18 ($30)The Sims 4 Bundle: City Living -- $25 ($50)The Sims 4: Get to Work, Dine Out, Cool Kitchen Stuff -- $25 ($50)The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt Complete Edition -- $15 ($50)This Is the Police -- $5 ($20)Titan Quest -- $9 ($30)More great deals for Labor DaySony isn't the only company offering special deals around Labor Day. Be sure to check out the other gaming sales happening now through the weekend, including a 12-month PS Plus membership for $40 at Ebay, free-to-play weeks for Rainbow Six Siege and The Elder Scrolls Online, discounts on brand-new games released this week, and more.PSN's August Savings sale (PS4, PS3, and Vita games)Microsoft's physical game sale (Xbox One games)Free-to-play week for Rainbow Six Siege, Elder Scrolls Online (PS4, Xbox One, PC)Disney+ limited-time deal: Save 33% on an annual subscriptionEpic's weekly free games (Celeste and Inside)Humble Bundle's free Steam game (Dirt Rally)GameStop's Monday-only Labor Day sale (games, accessories, and consoles)GameStop's Nintendo Switch trade-in offer: Get the new Switch with better battery life for $75Target's 20% off digital downloads offer (games, DLC, add-ons, season passes, and in-game currencies)Control on sale for $10 off at Walmart, Amazon (PS4, Xbox One)Walmart's release day discount on Astral Chain ($10 off the Switch exclusive)Info from Gamespot.com

Castle Crashers Remastered, the classic side-scrolling beat-'em-up from developer The Behemoth, is launching on September 17 for Nintendo Switch. A PlayStation 4 version is set to follow shortly after, but no specific date has been announced yet.The Switch and PS4 version will be similar to the remastered edition that made its way to the Xbox One back in 2015, which is, of course, an upgraded version of the Xbox 360's original 2008 release. It will contain the Back Off Barbarian mini-game, all previously released DLC, and various gameplay improvements and performance updates, such as 60 frames per second gameplay and improved textures. The Switch version also utilizes the system's HD Rumble feature and four-player local Joy-Con support.The original Castle Crashers was one of the first games to establish Xbox Live as a viable marketplace for indie games and smaller-scale projects. As for why it's coming to Switch and PS4 11 years after launching on the 360, The Behemoth co-founder Dan Paladin says it mostly boils down to game preservation. "With Alien Hominid not being ported often, we’ve seen it slowly become unavailable in most places," he said in a recent blog post. "When we make games we want them to stick around. Taking advantage of the updated hardware of each generation is also very satisfying. Higher resolutions, higher framerates, chances to make tweaks, and better overall quality. Our debut title (Alien Hominid) was available on both Gameboy Advance and Nintendo Gamecube."GameSpot's review praised the original game, saying, "The main storyline offers hours of bad-guy beating and princess-rescuing fun that it is sure to please. The ability to play with friends should make the experience richer, even if it is limited to a more local experience. As a testament to its entertainment, feature losses and some disappointing online play hardly slow this juggernaut of amusement down. This is an absurdly hilarious romp you won't soon forget."Castle Crashers is launching on September 17 for Nintendo Switch, with a PS4 version to follow. Info from Gamespot.com