Out of nowhere, Nintendo announced all the key details for Super Smash Bros. Ultimate's big Version 3.0 update today. In terms of new features, Ultimate is adding free stage- and video-editing tools for everyone to use.A video from Nintendo showcases how each of these features will work. Building off the Stage builder from Super Smash Bros. Brawl and Super Smash Bros. Wii U, the new version features tools that players can use to create basically whatever they want. In handheld mode, players can use the touch screen to draw to make their creations. Some of the things you can do include create moving platforms and spinning traps, or anything else you can think up and design.The Stage builder also features front and back layers for a further level of depth. The custom stages will live in a new Custom tab of the Stage Select screen. Players can also share them with the community. People are able to rate creations, so in theory the best ones should surface. The stages can also be viewed using the Nintendo Switch Online app, and players can even queue up a new stage download so when they get home it should start downloading.As for the video editor, it does what you would expect. You can combine your saved video clips and adds subtitles and sound effects. As you'd expect, you can then share your creations in the Smash World page in the Nintendo Switch Online app.Skip to around 11 minutes in the video above to check out the stage builder and video editor.The Version 3.0 update for Smash Bros. Ultimate launches on April 17. In addition to the Stage builder and video editor, the update adds Joker from Persona 5 as a new paid DLC character, as well as a number of different Persona and Sonic Mii Fighter Costumes. Info from Gamespot.com

On the face of it, Heaven's Vault sounds like chaos: It's a planet-surfing science-fiction adventure game in which you play as an archaeologist who gets caught up in a doomsday prophecy. But it's a much calmer experience than you might expect--you play as Aliyah, an archaeologist employed by a university on Iox, the wealthiest, most opulent planet within her nebula, to track down Renba, a professor who has disappeared. Throughout the journey, you'll peel away at the complex and ambitious lore of the world and meet the interesting characters who inhabit it, but not without some slow sailing.You spend much of the game hunting for clues to determine not only Renba's fate, but also the nature of his research and the discoveries he was making in his travels. For most of the game, the exact details of Renba's mission are pleasantly unclear, and major theories the player concocts early on can be proven incorrect by later discoveries. To get to the bottom of things, you'll need to investigate various moons throughout the nebula, some settled, some abandoned. You'll also build and maintain friendships or trade alliances with folks who can provide you with assistance, collect artifacts and clues, and mess around with the game's neat translation mechanic.Throughout the game, Aliyah will encounter many passages written in "Ancient" script, which require translation to decipher. This will begin as guesswork, but as you progress you'll develop a better understanding of what different glyphs within longer words might represent. There's a two-tiered system in place for translating words: If you encounter an inscription of a full phrase, you can guess any of the words you're not certain of until you have a full, hopefully coherent sentence. If you find what Aliyah will describe as a part of a longer phrase, a list of potential words you've already translated or guessed will appear on the screen, and you must see if the part of text matches up with any of the words you already understand or have guessed at. These partial texts can confirm your definitions--if you've decided that a word means 'water' in a previous translation, for example, and it pops up again as part of a longer phrase, Aliyah might declare that she is either now confident in the translation of that word or believes it's wrong. After a while, you'll build up a much bigger vocabulary of translated words, making it easier to fill in the gaps.Across the game's somewhat excessive running time, I lost track of what the actual advantage of all this translation was to my progression, as correct translations tend to prompt conversation options rather than key clues for where to go next. But it's still an interesting and exciting mechanic, as so much of the pleasure of Heaven's Vault is about uncovering the lore of the world you're in and the characters who occupy it. You're dropped in largely unaware, and while the game builds an exhaustive timeline of events, stretching right back to ancient times, it's mostly on you to figure out the nuances of the occasionally abstract game world.Heaven's Vault opens near its own ending--the very first scene tells you where your adventure will end, which is a curious structural choice for a game that is so contingent on player choice. It's meant to indicate, perhaps, that your story is always going to end up the same way, although how you reach that ending will differ dramatically between players.This seems to be a fair claim, too. During my playthrough, I compared notes with another player to make sure that our choices mattered, and we discovered that our paths diverged completely at several points. Heaven's Vault unfurls in substantially different ways depending on how you play it and which choices you make. You can miss entire characters and plotlines, or experience hugely different relationships with the game's small but well-developed cast of recurring figures. The writing is mostly strong throughout, with dialogue flowing naturally and feeling in line with decisions you've made, and the moment by moment plot of Heaven's Vault genuinely feels like the culmination of your choices. There are some strange issues with character development--at one point a character demanded I come to visit them so that they could tell me about a major discovery and let me in on "certain confidences," only for them to reveal nothing when I visited with them, and a major character stopped trading goods with me for reasons I don't fully understand, substantially slowing down my progress through the game.When you're bouncing easily between locations, making discoveries and having interesting chats with Aliyah's friends and co-workers--not to mention your robot companion, Six--Heaven's Vault is a pleasure. It's perhaps too easy to lose track of the spine of the plot, but in the first half especially, there's a constant influx of discoveries and revelations that give the game a propulsive hook. But the scope and ambition of Heaven's Vault get the better of it in the back half. It took me 22 hours to finish the game, and it felt like a lot of those last 12 hours was spent on busywork--particularly when it comes to the game's sailing mechanic.In one of the lore's weirdest elements, traveling across the nebula necessitates that you "sail" the rivers between moons, steering your ship across literal bodies of water that act as pathways between locations. They only flow in one direction, so the only meaningful control you have comes when paths diverge in two directions and you must choose which way to turn. There's little to do out on the waters--you can steer left and right, fold your sails in to go slightly faster, stop to observe any interesting landmarks you pass, and check your map. Sailing isn't particularly exciting, yet it makes up a huge portion of Heaven's Vault.For the first half of the game, sailing feels like a mildly irritating distraction with moments of beauty, taking up a few minutes at a time. But in the back half, the sailing mechanics come perilously close to ruining the whole experience. The sites you need to visit in order to progress are marked on the map as large areas to explore, and while you can make the search areas smaller by finding more artifacts throughout the game, at some point you're almost definitely going to have to find it by scouring those areas yourself. The layout of the river can become infuriating at this point. When you're traveling to a moon you've been to before and miss a turn, you're given the option to rewind to a point just before the turn; however, when you're searching for an unknown site, no such option exists, and a wrong turn can mean a long, slow course correction as you follow the one-way rivers back to where you just were, potentially eating up to half an hour.The game has additional pacing issues throughout--Aliyah moves very slowly, and there was a section of the game where I found myself bouncing repeatedly between the game's two main locations, Elboreth and Iox, in the hopes of triggering new dialogue options between characters that would make the search for the next site easier. (Thankfully, you can skip the rigmarole of sailing to these two particular locations by asking Six to do it for you.)Heaven's Vault can be a fiddly experience--although patches hit during the pre-launch period that cleaned up most major issues, I continued to encounter a lot of camera problems throughout, and at one point, a site that took half an hour of sailing to find failed to load when I reached it. When I eventually sailed back there, it ended up being the least interesting site in the game. While some of these places you're searching for are teeming with plot development, others can feel like a chore.There's plenty to be charmed by in Heaven's Vault. The art style is pleasant, and the orchestral soundtrack is often beautiful. The writing and lore can occasionally make the game feel like an adaptation of a book that doesn't exist, and it's hard not to get invested in learning more about the game's world. It's just a shame that there's so much tedium to get through as well, and that the experience doesn't always reach the greatness it occasionally shows itself to be capable of. Heaven's Vault excels in creating a well-constructed, branching narrative, but expect long sections of it to feel like a slog.Info from Gamespot.com

My Time at Portia starts off predictably when you disembark into its expanse of rolling hills and curious ruins. Like the Marvelous Interactive titles it clearly draws inspiration from (namely Harvest Moon and Story of Seasons), it sets you up with the holy trinity of prologues: a father, a child, and a ripe plot of land. No time passes at all until you're welcomed by a well-meaning public servant who tells you that your absent parent left a legacy of building and being a Home Depot whiz before disappearing like the evening tide. Now, fresh off the boat, you're tasked with taking over for your old man and making yourself invaluable to the people whose lives he enriched, which suggests My Time at Portia will be a more fulfilling adventure than it actually ends up being.Portia has a distinctly post-apocalyptic feel, which lends a sense of intrigue to what would otherwise have been a familiar traversal of yet another sleepy town to be spiced up by the voiceless city-slicker of a player-character. The game paints a tidy, watercolor-inspired picture that wouldn't be out of place on a postcard; a "wish you were here" would fit nicely against the giant, scraped-out husks of metal that loom over lush fields and quaint cottages like relics from a bygone age. In fact, they are: Humanity in My Time at Portia is said to have gotten too ambitious in the past by exploiting technology and science to reach lofty heights that it was struck down for. Now, it's back to the Agrarian Age for the foreseeable future, and you're the closest they've got to Noah and the Ark.These monolithic reminders dot the various landscapes of My Time at Portia, and they're an effective and unintrusive way to ensure you're clued into the broader message around hubris leading to the apocalypse. It makes for an interesting plot device, which would be well-utilized if it went beyond making the world more visually interesting, or even beyond the inclusion of one faction of NPCs dedicated to keeping the town of Portia back in the comparative Dark Ages. But that's about as far as it goes: aesthetic as opposed to substance. No storylines really pursue it, nor do the townsfolk seem to care. You're not provided with the opportunity to engage meaningfully with the setpiece of the world's past, which is a shame given how interesting it seems.Instead, the majority of the experience remains relatively familiar and unbroken by a loop of crafting, fighting, and gathering missions. The crafting system is the game's real treat, though. As the child of a master-builder, you're given access very early on to plans created by your father. These plans function like crafting blueprints; they stay on your person as you romp around the world in search of materials, and you can easily refer to them and check exactly how much tin ore you need to convert into whatever arbitrary amount of bronze bars you need to prop a bridge up.You're also given the ability to use a crafting station back at your house which tells you exactly what you're missing to build a particular item. There's no need for guesswork, and you also get to visually appreciate the nitty-gritty of what you're building as completing various parts of items sees them come to life before your eyes on the workbench. This wonderfully intuitive approach ties neatly into what you're told is the protagonist's innate skill as a crafter, which means that you spend less time wondering how many rocks you have to crack open and more time thinking about the next great creation taking shape in your backyard.Crafting is also the only aspect of the game that feels integral to actually getting anywhere with the story--everything is expensive, and the most effective way to make money is to grind out crafting items to sell. But while the reliance on grinding isn't a surprise if you're a genre fan, the combination of quick day-night cycles in the game, timed quests, and the time commitment needed to actually get anything crafted is a recipe for dissatisfaction. Time feels like it crawls by unless you're occupying yourself with busywork, which unfortunately ends up detracting from the charm of the lively hustle and bustle of the town of Portia.However, while the crafting is robust and an essential part of your experience with My Time at Portia, the other integrated systems--relationship management, dungeoneering, animal husbandry, and farming--aren't as engaging, fleshed out, or vital by comparison. Being able to gift your way to a perfect marriage does a disservice to some of the unique personalities that you can court, and you feel discouraged from spending time on farming because of how time-consuming and expensive it is to acquire enough land to turn those parsnips into a profit. The main story forces you to invest heavily in crafting and once you’ve tried your hand at the carpentry trade, it can be hard to look elsewhere when the demands of time and money limit your ability to engage in the other systems.Among the cacophony of mechanics, there's a wistfulness for depth. An upgrade system has you picking various skills, ranging from increased experience gain to a higher chance of getting more items, each time you level up. But it's hard to actually feel the effect of these perks, and there isn't one clear build which gives you a significantly better performance over the rest. Min-maxing attributes is rarely the point of lifestyle sims, so it makes sense that rewards seem more like a little bit of gas in the tank rather than a whole new engine. But failing to actually use your skill points on anything is unlikely to disadvantage you at all, which cheapens the purpose behind giving you a mountain of options in the first place. Being a little bit more efficient at carrying out objectives in a game that's all about repetitive grinding isn't a bad thing, but you find yourself wishing that the improvements afforded to you were more significant for the time invested.Your time at Portia is likely going to be an idyllic one, interspersed with chores and chatter and putting household items together for your neighbors. You'll spend your time idly dangling your legs off the edge of the pier, participating in fishing tourneys, ushering in holidays with your partner, and fending off local wildlife. However, the ruins of a time long forgotten will always darken the horizon, and there'll be a part of you that wonders what more there could have been before you find yourself shunted to the next life goal in a long series of life goals. That feeling is unfortunately hard to shake, and it's a shame that there's not as much to the world of Portia as first appears. Info from Gamespot.com

When you're struggling, Pathway sends you a dog to help out. It's that kind of game. You might have seen your squad massacred in the North African desert, but look! Here's a cute puppy called Donut. He's even got sharp teeth and the "Anti-Fascist" character trait that means he does +20% damage against Nazis. In moments like these, Pathway picks you back up and says maybe you can still complete the mission after all. Pathway is generous like that.Heavily indebted to the genre of mid-20th-century pulp adventure of which Indiana Jones is the obvious cultural touchstone, Pathway depicts a world where the Nazis are plundering ancient artifacts to harness their powers in occult experiments and so must obviously be stopped by an international band of mercenaries. It's a light, breezy, knock-about game of turn-based combat that understandably always wants you to succeed at killing Nazis, with or without a surprise canine companion. However, it lacks tactical depth and, while killing Nazis is a noble pursuit, its moral stance is less sure-footed when it steps into the territory of tired colonialist tropes.The core of Pathway is in its XCOM-style combat. Every encounter is preceded by a planning phase in which you place each member of your squad onto the battlefield. Smart players can take advantage of this head start by positioning their squad to, say, rush an exposed enemy on the first turn. In an early sign of Pathway's charitable spirit, you get this planning phase even when your squad has been ambushed and, unlike in XCOM, you'll never see an enemy already in cover on the first turn of a fight.During combat, each squad member can typically perform separate two actions--move and shoot, heal and reload, or some combination thereof--and much of the time an encounter consists of outflanking an enemy to get off a shot at them around whatever cover they happen to be hiding behind. Characters can also perform special actions depending on the weapon they carry and, in some cases, the skills they possess. Pistols, for example, allow for a special double-shot action that can target two enemies, while characters require specific skills to use items like grenades or medkits in combat.And that's about as deep as it gets, unfortunately. Aside from minor variations in clip size and range, all the guns function in much the same fashion and can drop most enemies in one to two shots. As a result, a character with an assault rifle plays no differently to one with a shotgun. The only meaningfully different weapon is the knife, not merely the game's only melee weapon but the weapon with the highest damage potential. Since there's no "zone of control" or "attack of opportunity" mechanic (outside a special action reserved for sniper rifles), it's perfectly feasible to run right up to enemies, jump over their cover and attack from the adjacent square. In fact, it's often the most effective approach, no matter how silly it looks or tactically uninteresting it becomes.Fights can still be challenging, even on the default normal difficulty. A way of evening the odds is to have the enemy greatly outnumber you. Unimaginative, sure, but it gets the job done. At other times, some enemies will have access to special abilities that you don't, while others can move further than your squad. These factors create situations where you're encouraged to think several turns in advance, coordinate attacks between your squad members, and time your limited special actions.But still, most of the time you're not really feeling that pressure. Most of the time you're just moving and shooting, moving and shooting, with the odd moving and knifing thrown in. Where the lack of depth is truly exposed is in the slim variety of actions on display, a failure that can be attributed to the derivative nature of each character's skill tree. Indeed, when leveling up characters don't earn new abilities, they merely improve existing ones; they'll boost that chance to for a critical hit, perhaps, or beef up their HP. True, you can unlock the ability for a character to use an additional weapon, so that they can now carry a shotgun as well as a pistol, but it's hard to get excited about that when, again, weapons don't function in any meaningfully different way.The lack of variety extends to the maps on which the battles take place. There is barely a handful of scenarios--Nazi camp, desert village, underground temple--and you're served up a seemingly randomly-generated version assembled from stock parts each time you enter combat. A benefit of this approach is that you never know exactly what you're going to get, but on the flip side, it means that none of the individual battlefields are ever memorable and they all end up blurring into one by the end of a campaign. That's not to say the arenas are poorly designed; they're serviceable and little more.Linking one encounter to the next is a campaign structure that sees you plotting a pathway across a network of nodes. At each node, you hit a narrative event that could be anything from following some Nazis into a mysterious mineshaft to finding an oasis at which you can rest. Sometimes you might end up in a fight, sometimes you might find some treasure or a trader with whom you can buy and sell, and sometimes nothing happens at all. It's a bit like FTL, really, except instead of zipping across space you're driving a jeep across the Sahara. These narrative moments are fun and typically well-written. They often allow for choices that can lead to surprising results and occasionally let you utilize the skills of one of the squad characters you've opted to take on the journey. But they do a poor job of depicting the African people whose countries, from Morocco and Egypt and beyond, have been invaded by the Germans. The locals you meet are helpless simpletons, peaceful goat herders at best and, at worst, cowards hiding in ruined villages and collapsed caves until you wander by to hopefully rescue them. These poor people can't do anything until saved by a globetrotting band of wealthy adventurers.Further, throughout the entire game, you're collecting treasure, much of it ancient religious and cultural relics of the people you're ostensibly helping. Literally the only thing to do with this treasure is sell it to fund the purchase of more fuel for your jeep and ammunition for your guns. Retrieve an ancient inscribed vase from the altar room of a secret temple? That goes for $250 at the next trader stop. The suggested idea is you're keeping these precious relics out of Nazi hands, but surely there's a better option than looting them for yourself and then selling them back to the people you stole it from.Pathway looks and sounds great, it nails the pulpy attitude it's aiming for, and, of course, it's always fun to shoot Nazis. But the more I played, the more the cracks started to show, the more samey it all became, and the more uncomfortable some aspects of its design made me feel. I still enjoyed much of my time with Pathway. There's a pleasure to be had in both its aesthetic choices and the frictionless grind of its structure, but I came away wanting more--more tactical meat in its combat and a more thoughtful approach to the way it chose to represent its world. Info from Gamespot.com

Sony's beloved PS4 action game God of War came out one year ago this week, and to celebrate the birthday, the company is holding a week-long party of sorts. It kicks off with the release of new dynamic theme for PS4 that you can get right now. It shows a nice scene with Kratos and Atreus in the Lake of Nine. The theme is free for everyone. Then on Wednesday (April 17), Sony will release a new PS4 avatar set for God of War. It is also free. You don't need to have purchased God of War for PS4 to get the freebies. You can see images of the avatar sets and dynamic theme here on the PlayStation Blog.Shannon Studstill, the head of God of War developer Sony Santa Monica, penned a nice blog post about the game's anniversary. She said she was excited by the idea that game director Cory Barlog brought to the table years ago, but acknowledged it was no easy road."Change to a longstanding franchise comes with immeasurable doubt, a studio-defining risk, and a huge leap of faith," she said. "Thank you to our entire worldwide team; the Sony PlayStation family and you, the millions of God of War fans around the world who embraced that leap with us, on a journey we never expected. We made this journey together."God of War won multiple Game of the Year awards, including most recently at the BAFTAs. After such high praise for God of War, Studstill said she's enthusiastic about Sony Santa Monica's future games. "If I had to predict the next 20 years of Santa Monica Studio, I can tell you without a shadow of a doubt, we will continue to create games whose art reflects life, life reflects art, with stories we want to resonate for years to come," she said. "Thank you from the bottom of our hearts for embracing the new God of War and for helping Santa Monica Studio rise up to a new beginning as well. From our whole team to you, that has meant everything to us. Now, we have a long journey ahead."Info from Gamespot.com

Despite its commercial and critical success, Sony's PlayStation 4 action game God of War will not receive an expansion. This much has already been confirmed. And now game director Cory Barlog confirmed it again."There is no DLC coming for the game. Sorry," Barlog said on Twitter. His tweet came in response to another tweet where he seemingly teased something new for God of War. But as it stands, he was only referring to more reveals coming this week for God of War's anniversary celebration.Just so no one gets the wrong idea - there is no DLC coming for the game. Sorry. — Cory Barlog 🎮 (@corybarlog) April 14, 2019We already know about the free dynamic theme and avatar set, and Barlog teased that even more is coming. But it won't be an announcement of God of War DLC.In January this year, Barlog talked about pitching an idea for God of War DLC. However, it was "too ambitious," and people told him the idea was crazy, so it got scrapped."I had a really fun idea for a DLC that I only regret because I would love to have done that," Barlog told Kinda Funny. "But it was too ambitious."It would have been similar to The Last of Us 1's Left Behind or Uncharted Lost Legacy releases, which were big enough to warrant their own standalone releases. "It would [have] ended up being its own thing," Barlog said of the God of War expansion we'll never see. "Rightfully so, everybody said, 'Dude, this is crazy, this isn't DLC, this is a little too big."In other news, Barlog joked on Twitter that the next God of War game will be exclusive to the Epic Store.Info from Gamespot.com

After almost two long years of waiting, Game of Thrones Season 8 has finally premiered on HBO. Our review of the premiere episode is below, but we have plenty more GoT goodness beyond that. For more theorizing, check out why the crossbow Qyburn gave Bronn matters, what weapon Arya asked Gendry to make for her, and 17 other Easter eggs, references, and callbacks to earlier episodes you might have missed. And for a deep dive into each episode of Season 8, check out GameSpot of Thrones with Westeros superfans Lucy, Ryan, Tamoor, and Dave each week as we count down the final six episodes of Game of Thrones.The final season of Game of Thrones is here. The premiere episode aired on HBO tonight, marking the beginning of the end. There are just five more episodes left to go now, and Game of Thrones has a lot to fit in before the finale if the show wants to wrap up every loose end created over the last eight years. For now, though, Season 8 Episode 1 was focused on one thing above all others: setup.Events in Winterfell set up the battle to come, as well as the interpersonal conflicts that will ultimately help determine the outcome of that battle. The characters in King's Landing continued to maneuver for the inevitable conclusion of the war of Westeros's Great Houses, and offscreen, the White Walkers struck their first blow south of the Wall.There were some monumental events in this episode--which will hopefully be the case for every episode of the final season. But from Jon finally riding a dragon to his finding out that he's the true heir to the Iron Throne, even these long-awaited, emotionally charged moments are really just setup for conflicts to come.Jon learning that he's a Targaryen is something book readers have been waiting for ever since the first book was published back in 1996 and fans originally theorized about his true parentage (the books are so far behind at this point that the theory still hasn't been confirmed officially in the source material). Jon and Daenerys being related doesn't necessarily spell doom for their blooming relationship--Targaryens of old frequently married within their own family to keep their Valyrian bloodline going strong. But as Jon replied to Sam in this premiere, voicing the revelation is akin to treason. Dany, on the other hand, has been self-assured regarding her right to the Throne since the beginning--and come to think of it, she probably won't take well to this news. Based on this episode, it's shaping up to be one of the major conflicts of the final season.The sight of Dany's Unsullied marching through the streets of Winter Town was enough to stir any Game of Thrones fan's blood, whether you started with the TV show or have been reading the books for 23 years. Old school Game of Thrones fans are much more comfortable in the in-between, perpetually waiting for the next book to come out or the next season to premiere. To be so close to the end is actually slightly uncomfortable, but for better or worse, here we are.One thing that will always feel good is watching long-separated Starks finally reunite. And this was an episode of reunions. From Jon and Arya to Sansa and Tyrion, these are conversations fans have speculated about, theorized on, and dreamt of for years. And by and large, they delivered exactly what we wanted: Arya flirted with Gendry and was vaguely threatening toward Sandor, while Sansa and Tyrion showed something approaching a mutual understanding. If nothing else, it's simply fun to see these characters come back together after so very long apart.For books fans, though, the show still can't help but feel a bit like fan fiction. Some characters, like the Hound, were so far removed from the story the last time we glimpsed them in the books that it seems unlikely they'll ever actually re-enter the books' events. Others, like Cersei, have changed so much from the source material that they're barely recognizable. I'm not saying whether that's good or bad--it just is. Since author George R.R. Martin hasn't been able to finish a book in eight years, this is the situation we're in.In King's Landing, events progressed pretty much as you'd expect. Euron arrived with the Golden Company, and Cersei continued to deride everyone around her, which will hopefully be her ultimate downfall. Euron finally getting in her pants may have been a big event for him--and no doubt Jaime wouldn't be thrilled if he were around--but for Cersei, using her sexuality to control the people around her isn't anything new. She's up to the same old tricks, but as this war comes to an end, old tricks might not cut it anymore. That said, we wanted to see those elephants as badly as you did, Cersei.There are only five episodes left of Game of Thrones. For longtime fans, it's bittersweet to get the ending from HBO's series instead of the books that we've loved for decades. But despite some ups and downs, HBO has done a fine job finishing what George R.R. Martin apparently can't. And I'm excited to see exactly how they do it over the next five weeks. Info from Gamespot.com

Things are pretty rough House Lannister in Season 8 of Game of Thrones. Cersei holds the Iron Throne, but she's paid dearly for it--her three children have died in her pursuit of power, and she's been at war for pretty much her entire reign. Through it all, though, she's had her twin brother Jaime at her side, and their relationship justified many of her sacrifices and most ruthless instincts.That changed at the end of Season 7. After Jaime and Cersei met with Daenerys Targaryen and Tyrion, the Lannisters pledged to help with the war against the White Walkers. But once everyone had left King's Landing, Cersei revealed that she planned to double-cross everybody else and leave them to get wiped out by the White Walkers. Jaime wasn't happy about Cersei forcing him to break his promise, so at the end of the season, he struck off north alone, leaving his sister behind.Cersei had already threatened Jaime about betraying her, and it's well known that she hates her other brother, Tyrion. In the premiere of Season 8, we see how Cersei plans to deal with Jaime and Tyrion--she's sending Bronn to kill both of them with a crossbow. Cersei likes to make a statement with her murders, though--which is why the weapon Qyburn gave to Bronn to use on the traitorous Lannisters is a significant one. It's the same crossbow Tyrion wielded way back in Season 4, and used to kill his father, Tywin Lannister. That was after Tyrion was tried and convicted of poisoning King Joffrey, and Tywin sentenced Tyrion to death, even though he was innocent. Jaime helped Tyrion escape, but before he did, Tyrion went to Tywin's room. There, Tyrion found Shae, his former lover who testified against him, and killed her. After that, Tyrion found Tywin on the toilet, and finished him off with a crossbow decorated with gold. (There's even more Lannister history with the crossbow--it's the one Joffrey used to cradle while torturing women, and eventually used to kill Varys' spy, Ros.)Cersei sending Bronn with that same crossbow is a reminder of Tyrion's betrayal of the Lannister family. She blames Tyrion for the deaths of her children--since Joffrey's death, she's maintained that Tyrion was responsible, but even learning from Jaime that Lady Olenna Tyrell (Diana Rigg) poisoned her son hasn't changed her mind. She also blames him for the deaths of Myrcella (Nell Tiger Free) and Tommen--as Cersei said in Season 7, when Tyrion killed Tywin, it left the Lannisters exposed."Do you have any idea what you did when you fired that crossbow?" Cersei asks Tyrion. "You left us open. You laid us bare for the vultures and the vultures came and tore us apart. You may not have killed Joffrey, but you killed Myrcella, you killed Tommen. No one would have touched them if Father was here--no one would have dared."Making sure that the same crossbow Tyrion used to kill Tywin is used against him is exactly the kind of poetic message-sending Cersei loves. Like playing "The Rains of Castamere," it's a power move that builds her reputation, shows her spite for her enemies, and strikes fear in others. The question now is whether Bronn will actually try to kill his two former employers.Info from Gamespot.com

Game of Thrones is approaching its end in Season 8, and some of the elements that have been in play since the beginning are finally starting to wrap up. Among the biggest are the secret of Jon Snow's true identity, the prophecy that Daenerys heard in her travels across the Narrow Sea, and other mystical things that look to be important to the final battle of the Night King--they're all related, and they're all going to have major implications for the war with the White Walkers.One giant hanging thread is the question of the Prince That Was Promised, a longstanding prophecy about the hero who will appear to kill the Night King with the help of the Lord of Light. Also known as Azor Ahai, the question of who will fill the role of the Prince That Was Promised has been teased since Season 2 and the introduction of the Red Witch Melisandre and Stannis Baratheon. The premiere of Season 8 might have given a new hint as to who Azor Ahai is, and could be answering a question fans of both the show and the books on which they're based have had for years.It starts in Season 7, when Jon had a bonding moment with Drogon, touching the dragon and seemingly gaining his trust. In the Season 8 premiere, Jon actually rides Rhaegal, Daenerys' other surviving dragon. It's an extension of that moment Season 7, solidifying Jon's bond with both Daenerys and the dragons. We saw in Season 7 what might be the reason for Drogon trusting Jon: he's actually the son of Daenerys' brother, Prince Rhaegar. He's member of the royal family of dragon riders who consider themselves to be "blood of the dragon." (It's also worth noting that Rhaegal is named for Rhaegar, Jon's father--a fact Jon will likely find very meaningful.)Jon riding a dragon seemingly answers a question fans have been wondering about for years, thanks to a prophecy that doesn't appear in the show, but is in George R. R. Martin's "A Song of Ice and Fire" books on which Game of Thrones is based. In that book, Daenerys had a vision of Rhaegar when she was in the House of the Undying in Qarth, in which Rhaegar said his son Aegon was the Prince That Was Promised. He also told Daenerys "the dragon has three heads." (In the show, Daenerys sees the Red Keep in ruins and the Iron Throne frozen, and is visited briefly by the ghosts of her husband Drogo and their baby, Rhaego.)First off, we now know that Jon is, in fact, Rhaegar's son Aegon. That might mean that he's the returned Azor Ahai--the hero the red priests of the Lord of Light have been expecting to show up and defeat the Night King, using a flaming sword called Lightbringer.The second part of the vision is still an open question, though, if the show is going to address it. Fans have interpreted "the dragon has three heads" to suggest there will be three key people who will ride Daenerys' dragons--and maybe even three Targaryens. That tracks with the revelation that Jon is a Targaryen, and now seeing him riding a dragon.The question is whether "the dragon has three heads" will actually be born out by the show now that the Night King has turned Daenerys' third dragon, Viserion, into an undead wight. Fans have been expecting a third dragon rider, but now the third dragon rider is the Night King himself.But there's still room for another hidden Targaryen to appear. As fans have theorized who might be the third of the dragon's three heads, a lot of speculation has fallen to Tyrion Lannister. There's a rumor in Westeros that Tyrion isn't really the son of Tywin Lannister, but that the Mad King Aerys Targaryen raped Tyrion's mother, Joanna Lannister. That might be part of the reason why Tywin was so awful to Tyrion his whole life, and fulfill Daenerys' vision. Tyrion also had his moment with the dragons under the pyramid of Meereen, which makes him one of the few people they seem cool with.In any event, it seems the dragon has two heads, at least. And if Game of Thrones doesn't address Rhaegar's words through the rest of Season 8, it seems there might still be a few tidbits for fans of the novels to look forward to--if Martin ever finishes the series.Info from Gamespot.com

Game of Thrones is finally back. Episode 1 aired tonight on HBO, and it served as a setup of sorts to dramatic events to come in the show's eighth and final season. Now that the episode has ended, HBO has released a nice behind-the-scenes video where showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss break down the episode's biggest moments and key scenes.Obviously this video is stuffed with spoilers, so be sure to watch the episode first before checking out this breakdown. With that out of the way, here you go:For lots more on Episode 1, you can check out GameSpot's review of the episode here. You can also read the stories below to learn more about Game of Thrones and the first episode; we've put spoiler tags on two of them because even the titles might be spoiler-y:Game Of Thrones Season 8: Who Is The Night King?Game Of Thrones: Here's Why That Crossbow Qyburn Gave To Bronn MattersGame Of Thrones: Jon Riding A Dragon Is Huge -- Here's WhyInfo from Gamespot.com

The Game of Thrones Season 8 premiere not only started to provide clues about how the show will wrap up, but it also revealed what probably happened to Ed Sheeran's character.SPOILERS FOLLOW BELOWA scene in the episode shows Bronn "enjoying the attentions" of three women. One of them talks about how a Lannister soldier with ginger hair named "Eddie" met his fate at the battle when Daenerys scorched the Lannister soldiers with her dragons."That boy Eddie came back with his face burned right off. He's got no eyelids now," one of the women said, according to Polygon.Sheeran appeared in the Season 7 Game of Thrones premiere, but that was the only episode he was in. He made his way into Game of Thrones thanks in part to Arya Stark actress Maisie Williams' fondness for the "Shape of You" singer.Sheeran's appearance on Game of Thrones was met with some amount of debate and controversy. The episode's director defended Sheeran's appearance in the episode and praised him as an actor.Sheeran himself told BuzzFeed that he thought his character was just "chillin'" after the battle. "It was fun being in Game of Thrones, but I definitely think they should've killed me off in the episode. I reckon that probably would've been the redemption for people that didn't like it," he said. So it turns out fans got what they wanted in a way.Sheeran was not the first musician to have a cameo Game of Thrones. Sigur Ros, the drummer from Coldplay, and members of the metal band Mastodon have all been on the show in the past.For lots more on Episode 1, you can check out GameSpot's review of the episode here.Info from Gamespot.com

HBO has released a teaser for next week's Game of Thrones episode--and it looks dramatic. In the teaser, we hear Daenerys talking about wanting to do terrible things to Jaime."When I was a child, my brother would tell me a bedtime story about the man who murdered our father -- about all the things we would do to that man," she says to a council. It appears they are deciding Jaime. He also pushed Bran Stark out of a window and he might finally have to pay for that act as well. Jaime looks frightened as he stands before the group.After that, the teaser moves to Daenerys talking with Sansa about Cersei and how she's led them astray and betrayed their trust. We also learn in the teaser that the White Walkers are closing in, and they don't have much time to prepare.Episode 2 airs Sunday, April 21 at 9 PM on HBO.For lots more on Episode 1, you can check out GameSpot's review of the episode here. You can also watch this video to see showrunners D.B. Weiss and David Benioff explain all the key scenes. And finally, the Season 8 premiere also confirmed what happened to Ed Sheeran's character.Info from Gamespot.com

Seemingly confirming the long-running rumours and reports, images of the supposed "All-Digital" Xbox One that has no disc drive have emerged online. The German website WinFuture.de obtained the images, which appear to be from a European retailer.Based on the sales art, it appears Minecraft, Sea of Thieves, and Forza Horizon 3 might come pre-installed on this console, with a 1 TB hard drive. Bear in mind that this may only be one version of an all-digital Xbox One SKU that Microsoft is planning. Pricing hasn't been announced, and bundles tend to vary greatly by region.Xbox One S "All Digital' console leaked, €229.99, 1TB for May 7th in Europe (no-disc drive) https://t.co/WAAI7k0Xll pic.twitter.com/178He93wSY— Wario64 (@Wario64) April 13, 2019Whatever the case, given that what appear to be official images for the console are showing up online, it might not be long until Microsoft officially announces it. As it happens, Microsoft's next Inside Xbox event is coming up on April 16. In addition to news about Microsoft's plans for E3, the company might announce this console during the show.Microsoft is also reportedly planning a "disc-to-digital" campaign where you can bring a disc game to a retailer and get a download code. Additionally, there are rumours of a new Xbox Live + Xbox Game Pass bundle offering for $15 USD/month, so that could be another one of the announcements coming for the Inside Xbox stream this week.Pre-orders for the All-Digital Xbox One console are said to open in April, with the system then scheduled to go on sale in May around the world.The disc-free Xbox One might not be the last console Microsoft announces in the coming months. Microsoft is rumoured to reveal at least one next-gen console at E3 in June. And importantly, if Microsoft does make a disc-free Xbox One, it doesn't necessarily mean the company will stop making Xbox One consoles with disc drives. Internet availability and speed vary by region, and all-digital consoles won't work everywhere at this stage. It appears Microsoft will be providing the option to go all-digital for those who want to.Would you be interested in a disc-free Xbox One? Let us know in the comments below!Info from Gamespot.com

The Game of Thrones's Season 8 premiere has arrived, and to celebrate the beloved show's return, Sony is giving away some free Thrones content for US PS4 owners. You can grab two avatars and a theme; all you need to do is follow the steps below.Firstly, visit Sony's website and sign in to your PSN account. You'll be presented with three videos, each of which awards you one of the three free gifts once you've watched them. You'll be given a code to redeem on the PlayStation Store in order to grab the gifts. Note this offer is unfortunately only available to users with US PSN accounts.🔥 Tonight's the night ❄️Download this free, limited-run Game of Thrones theme before the final season premieres: https://t.co/M1eWcYRF0d pic.twitter.com/Gj7CZWm7RS — PlayStation (@PlayStation) April 14, 2019The promotion comes just hours after Sony began giving away a God of War PS4 theme to celebrate the game's first anniversary. The company has, however, confirmed Kratos' adventure will not be expanded upon with DLC.Game of Thrones has finally returned, meanwhile, and if you want to read more about it you can read our Season 8 Episode 1 review or our favorite lines from Game of Thrones' Season 8 premiere. We've also got six new theories for the rest of Season 8.Info from Gamespot.com

DC's Shazam retained the No.1 slot on the US box office chart this weekend, in its second week on release. The movie has secured the studio some its best reviews, and audiences have similarly responded by bringing its US total to $94 million to date. Worldwide, the film has made $221 million so far. While it won't reach the amazing heights of Aquaman, these numbers show that a lesser known DC hero can still bring in impressive box office results.The weekend's highest new entry was the comedy Little. The film opened with an estimated $15.4 million, which is a solid opening given the modest $20 million production budget. Less impressive was the debut of the Hellboy reboot. The movie sees Stranger Things star David Harbour take over the title role, but negative reviews and reports of behind-the-scenes problems were followed by an unimpressive estimated weekend debut of $12 million.The next few films all dropped a few places from last week. The Stephen King adaptation Pet Semetary fell to No.4, with Dumbo, Captain Marvel, and the horror hit Us just below it. The week's other two entries were at No.8 and No.9. The romantic drama After opened with $6 million, while the animated movie Missing Link finished ninth and could only manage a weekend total of $5.8 million. This is the lowest ever opening for a film from the Laika studio, which previously scored hits with films such as Boxtrolls and Kubo and the Two Strings. The period drama The Best of Enemies rounded off the chart, falling four places to No.10.You can see the full Top 10 list for the April 12-14 US box office below, as compiled by Box Office Mojo.US Box Office For April 12-14:Shazam! – $25.1Little – $15.4Hellboy – $12.,0Pet Sematary – $10.0Dumbo – $9.1Captain Marvel – $8.6Us – $6.9After – $6.,2Missing Link – $5.8The Best of Enemies – $2.0Info from Gamespot.com