Leon can, in fact, block Chainsaw Man (Capcom edition)‘s overhead. Sadly, it comes at a price.Screenshot: Capcom / Kotaku
In a new Game Informer cover story, Capcom detailed some of the changes that the hotly anticipated remake of Resident Evil 4 is making to the original, hugely influential horror game.
One of the major changes coming to the RE4 remake revolves around how Ashley Graham (not the supermodel) works in scenes when protagonist Leon S. Kennedy must escort and protect her. In the original RE4, players had to keep a watchful eye over Ashley’s health bar and ensure enemies didn’t carry her away. Ashley desperately, and frequently, screams out Leon’s name the instant players fail to do any of the aforementioned tasks.
In the remake, Ashley no longer has a health bar. Should President Graham’s Dumbo-eared daughter take too much damage while Leon attempts to escort her safely away from Las Plagas, she’ll enter a downed state and need to be revived, IGN reports.
According to a Capcom representative, this change to Ashley’s gameplay mechanic was made to make her “feel more like a natural companion and less like a second health bar to babysit.”
Read More:All The Changes We Spotted In The New Resident Evil 4 Remake Trailers
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Another change coming to RE4’sremake is weapon durability, specifically for Leon’s combat knife. As seen at the end of last October’s extendedgameplay trailer, Leon’s trusty knife being capable of parrying a chainsaw comes at a hefty cost. Instead of toting around “ol’ reliable” throughout the entirety of the RE4 remake to open wooden boxes, chip away at zombies, and conserve ammo, Leon’s knife will deteriorate over time, but players can have multiple knives in their inventory, which still takes the form of Leon’s iconic attache case.
Read More:Someone Finally Made The Inventory Briefcase From Resident Evil 4 A Puzzle Game
Side-quests are also making their way to the RE4 remake. According to IGN, blue flyers scattered about the game let you acquire optional tasks you can complete as side-quests. Lastly, the Game Informer cover story mentions that quick-time events, a frequent element of the original RE4, have effectively been removed, though this aspect of the remake had been mentioned in earlier interviews as well.
“I’d say there are ‘barely any’ QTEs. Different people have different definitions of what a QTE is, so while I can’t tell you that there aren’t any at all, I can say that there aren’t prompts to press buttons mid-cutscene,” producer Yoshiaki Hirabayashi told IGN in a prior interview.
Resident Evil 4 (Remake)is slated to release on March 24 on PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, PC, and Xbox Series X/S.
The Last of Usinspired no shortage of takes when it first released back in 2013. The HBO TV adaptation has been no different. Like a massive EpiPen of stimulus for the take economy in middle of winter, it has elicited both over-the-top praise, scornful dismissals, and everything in-between. But what is potentially the worst take of all wasn’t born until today.
“Hi FTC — did you catch last night’s episode of The Last of Us?” tweeted Activision Blizzard’s Executive Vice President of Corporates Affairs and Chief Communications Officer, Lulu Cheng Meservey. “It was incredible.” What followed from the Call of Duty publisher’s recently hired serial poster was a cringey thread about how The Last of Us TV show proves Microsoft should be allowed to acquire the company for $69 billion.
For those who might be living under a rock and don’t know: The Last of Us is a harrowing tale about love, loss, and redemption in a world brought to its knees by pandemic. This week’s especially intimate and emotional episode moved many to tears. It moved Meservey to post about how the largest acquisition in the history of tech raises no red flags.
Microsoft and Activision Blizzard have been on the offensive ever since the Federal Trade Commission launched an anti-trust lawsuit against them, seemingly with the intent to wriggle loose a few more concessions before eventually letting the deal go through. It is a multi-faceted, omni-directional campaign that has Microsoft repeatedly talking about how much it sucks compared to Sony, both in terms of making games and now in terms of making TV shows. That was certainly the sentiment Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer conveyed last week when asked to compareThe Last of Us TV show to the Halo TV show.
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“Sony’s talent and IP across gaming, TV, movies, and music are formidable and truly impressive,” Meservey tweeted today. “It’s no wonder they also continue to dominate as the market leader for consoles. In gaming, Sony is ‘the first of us’ – and they will be just fine without the FTC’s protection.”
Feeling excited, I wait for my PlayStation 5 to flicker on so I can go somewhere I haven’t before, the USG Ishimura, splattered with fresh blood by Motive Studio for its Dead Space remake, released January 27. The mining ship has always been the gray spinal cord to trigger-happy horror Dead Space, originally released in 2008 and made by the since-shuttered Visceral Games, and I’ve gleaned as a newbie (I was 10 in 2008) that it’s one of the best horror games of all time. But after I see the ship—and the atrocities that populate it, indicated by graffiti (“Fuck this ship, it’s a shitty capitalist organization,” one on-the-nose scrawl says) and hallways sticky with organic goo—I wonder if that’s still the case.
The USG Ishimuraitself, at least, lives up to my expectations. As engineer Isaac Clarke, a formerly non-speaking character now imbued with Dead Space 2 and 3 actor Gunner Wright’s cool voice of reason, I crash-land onto it along with my bickering crewmates, including Chief Security Officer Hammond and computer specialist Kendra Daniels. I’m immediately impressed by the ship’s engulfing shadows, the only extra dimension, really, to the lightless spine I spend around 16 hours running across and around.
It’s glued together by a speedy tram system, which was cut up by loading screens in the original game, but, in this Dead Space, travels smoothly without interruption. Though I often press my controller’s right stick to prompt a glowing blue line to guide me to my next location, the tram system makes Ishimura’s smallness obvious and more suffocating. This feeling doubles when I re-enter an area I was recently in, not thinking about the bodies I already wasted until noticing, there they are, still piled up.
Fuck this ship, it’s a shitty capitalist organization.Screenshot: Motive Studio / Kotaku
Those bodies, with their taut, twisted skin, lumpy intestines poking through—like when you stick your thumb into an orange to break it open—belong to Isaac’s main opponent, the necromorphs.
The remake adds rooms you can access with an added security clearance system (you earn Level 1, 2, and 3 clearance naturally as you progress through the game), which sustains exploration even after Ishimura’s halls become familiar, and optional side quests for added context and background on characters. But, other than that, Dead Space 2023 doesn’t build on Dead Space 2008’s unconvincing story of crazed Unitologist cult members infecting people with their Red Marker in their quest for ascension, and so necromorphs continue to be yowling, sour victims of the Marker, and you need to hack their limbs off.
There are options for how you’d like to accomplish this. Maybe you prefer the Plasma Cutter, Pulse Rifle, or the Ripper, which shoots saw blades. I’ve become attached to the Force Gun, a Dead Space 2 acquisition, which uses the game’s gravity manipulation module, Kinesis, to blast away necromorphs until they become piles of rattled bones.
I do that a lot. I blast away babies with tendrils unfurling from their back while they spit some green acid at my Isaac, who ejects a low groan or a gravelly scream in response. I can hear his pulse racing when he’s quiet.
I blast away necromorphs that look like overgrown bats and necromorphs that look like praying mantises while a “boss” necromorph lumbers toward me like an intimidating, headless bear. I pause it with Stasis, another gravity manipulation that you can recharge to put enemies in slow-mo—it goes down disappointingly easily with a few hits to the yellow pustules around its joints.
I start associating my disappointment with these fluid-filled bulbs. I’m confused by what the Dead Space remake chooses to keep and what it changes.
Its light and graphics get an objective improvement, the type that 15 years allow.
And this isn’t a change, but it’s also worth noting that Dead Space’s gameplay on PS5 is clean—aside from a minor irritation where starting the game back up after saving at a checkpoint immobilized Issac, so I had to close and restart the game on a few occasions— which annoyingly feels like a rarity for new releases.
I’m happy that a game runs like it’s supposed to. But Dead Space’s visual improvement isn’t as noticeable as Demon’s Soulsin 2020, and whether or not you like its tweaks and additions will come down to preference.
I might have preferred if Isaac never spoke. He was, before, an empty bowl for players to place their own fears, their anxieties—mine grew insistently the longer I spent hearing muffled moans reverberating throughout Ishimura.
In the remake, Isaac speaks, but he never gives me anything to identify with or root for. He’s following orders, and he wants to go home. Great, the same was true for nearly everyone else on Ishimura, and I’ve been mindlessly chopping them into pieces. Why should I care if Isaac, in particular, lives or dies? When he takes off his mask, I don’t even feel like I recognize him.
Hi, Isaac, who are you?Screenshot: Motive Studio / Kotaku
The game’s boss fights, as I mentioned, retain the boring, methodical process of the original. Hit the yellow boils until they pop. Move to the left if a tendril is about to hit you. Then to the right.
When I fight a boss in one of the game’s “zero gravity” environments, I use my jetpack (on loan from Dead Space 2), to help me execute a similar strategy, zooming away from tendrils and floating versions of those exploding yellow sacs while I awkwardly try to steer an Asteroid Defense System cannon into a weak point. I win. Yay. What am I fighting for again?
For love, maybe. Isaac wants to reunite with his girlfriend Nicole, a medical officer aboard the Ishimura who barely exists unless you pursue her optional side quest. But no, just as in 2008’s Dead Space, the first letters of the game’s chapter titles spell out N I C O L E I S D E A D, and love was never an option. In the game, it’s a token, something developers put in just so you’d be scared when you realized it wasn’t actually there.
It is, however, effective. I’m scared while playing Dead Space, though that feeling alternates with a droopy sense that I’m missing something, most likely the magic of 2008. I’m missing out on a PC to run those sooty, grainy graphics in someone’s dark dorm room.
15 years later, we have more compelling protagonists to choose from, and even more interesting space zombies, like those in Dead Space creator Glen Schofield’s The Callisto Protocol, which is also mired by repetitive bosses, but at least looks and sounds incredible. The Dead Space remake accomplishes what it set out to do, it makes an old game compatible for modern consoles. But that’s all it does. 2008’s lightning stays in its bottle.
Just trying to get away from the fakes.Image: Nintendo
A big fighting game tournament, Genesis 9, took place from January 20-23 in San Jose, California. Top talent from around the world, including Super Smash Bros. competitors Leonardo “MkLeo” Lopez and Samuel “Dabuz” Buzby, gathered at the San Jose McEnery Convention Center to play games like Guilty Gear Strive and Rivals of Aether. But for one Super Smash Bros. Melee pro, British player Elliot “Frenzy” Grossman, the Genesis 9 tournament started with an illegal taxi and, he claims, a near kidnapping.
“Got tricked into an illegal taxi coming out of [the San Francisco International Airport] and nearly got kidnapped,” Frenzy tweeted on January 19 with a picture of his scarred-up right hand. “Jumped out of the car after seeing the police chase after the vehicle and very luckily only bruised and scraped my hand and back. In the hospital [right now], [but I have] no idea how anything works here [to be honest].”
You might be wondering what the hell Frenzy’s talking about, as it sounds like some action movie stunt with Tom Cruise or something. Well, as it turns out, the Falco main, who was making his way to the Genesis 9 tourney, encountered some…complications when he touched down in California.
“So, I had just got off an 11-hour flight from London Heathrow Airport to San Francisco International Airport,” Frenzy told Kotaku in an email. “I was planning to get an Uber to my hotel in San Jose, but my phone had run out of battery on the way and wifi was often spotty at the airports. I decided to get a taxi instead and so, I walked out to the taxi stand.”
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Frenzy is a pro Melee player for the British esports organization Reason Gaming. Hailing from England and maining Falco, he is the UK’s second-best player and the 47th-best Melee competitor in the world as of 2022. His record speaks for itself, though. He regularly places in the top 10 bracket at most tournaments he participates in and has a few first-place wins under his belt as well, with his last one being at the Galint Melee Open: Fall Edition 2022 back in November. The dude can game! However, he wasn’t prepared for the game of California transportation.
Beyond the Summit
“A driver approaches me and asked if I was looking for a taxi, to which I replied yes and then asked where I was going as per usual,” Frenzy said. “He shows me to the car and opens the door for me to get in with my things and as I close the door and belt up, I look out of the window and see multiple police officers with weapons drawn running towards the vehicle and shouting ‘Stop the vehicle!’ and ‘Get out!’ The driver ignores this and then accelerated immediately as I was still getting in and belting up, at which point I knew that I had made a massive mistake. In the moment I just decided that if I got out quick enough, it was safer than either the driver getting away and being at his mercy or getting involved in a police chase which could end in a crash at higher speeds.”
“When I turned around to put my seatbelt on, I saw multiple cops running out to surround the car out of the window,” Frenzy said. “They had guns drawn. The driver then accelerated, foot to the floor, and tried to get away. That was when I decided to bail out. I was familiar with this sort of thing happening from the internet, but I was caught completely off guard by this specific attempt, so I knew exactly what was going on.”
Read More: Top Smash Ultimate Player Throws Controller At Tournament, Sparks ‘Privilege’ Discourse
Frenzy said he was in “such an adrenaline rush” that things went blurry. One minute, he was buckling his seatbelt to head to Genesis 9. The next, he was “rolling on the ground” after jumping out of the fake taxi cab. He said he “didn’t land badly or have anything else on the road” near him to cause further injury as he rolled onto the asphalt, the car going around 15-20mph. Still, he was in “pretty serious pain,” with a backpack only somewhat cushioning his tumble and his right hand taking most of the impact. The Mills-Peninsula Emergency Department in Burlingame said Frenzy didn’t break anything but had “really bad swelling, abrasions, and bruising” on his right hand as well as “friction burns” on his back from rolling on gravel and “low blood pressure” for a while. He also got in touch with cops after the incident for a quick police report.
“The cops asked a lot about what the criminal’s exact actions were and they explained they had been after this guy that had been running this scheme for a while,” Frenzy said. “They gave me some information about the case number and who to contact. I’m not 100% sure how they caught the vehicle or the criminal as I was recovering from the jump, but I saw he was in handcuffs far away as I was being attended to later on.”
A San Francisco Police Department officer told Kotaku over the phone that, although they couldn’t divulge any specific information about the incident, Frenzy’s case is real and an “ongoing investigation” is currently in progress. The officer also told Kotaku that the individual conducting the investigation will give us a callback, but that hasn’t happened yet.
“These sorts of schemes are all over the world and, as a pretty experienced traveller, I’m usually aware of them,” Frenzy said. “However, in a lapse of judgement and after a long flight, I got tricked. They try to trick you by positioning close to where the legitimate taxi stands are and even color their cars in the same layout as legit ones. They will approach people, especially those who are on their own or who are tourists, and ask if they are looking for a taxi and where they are going. Because of this, I usually tend to stick to ride share apps when traveling, but on this occasion my phone was out of battery so I was in a rough situation.”
Read More:Super Smash Bros. Ultimate Competitive Community Really Hates Steve From Minecraft
In the end, Frenzy made it to Genesis 9 to play some Super Smash Bros. Melee thanks to the help of the tournament’s organizers. After taking a day or two to heal up, he said he felt good enough to compete. He didn’t place that well, getting 49th in the tournament. However, he said the “event itself was amazing even despite what happened” and is “eager to return in full form next year.” Here’s hoping he gets there much safer next time.
Two days ago, Bungie turned off the Destiny 2 servers while the studio looked into a problem that had players apparently losing progress on in-game challenges. This outage lasted a bit longer than everyone expected, with the free-to-play loot shooter remaining offline for nearly 20 hours. So what happened? Today Bungie pulled back the curtain and explained exactly what went wrong and why it had to roll back the game, erasing a few hours of folks’ quest progress in the process.
On January 24 at around 2:00 p.m., Bungie tweeted that it was taking Destiny 2 offline while it investigated an “ongoing issue causing certain Triumphs, Seals, and Catalysts to lose progress for players.” A few hours later, at 5:51 p.m., Bungie tweeted that it had possibly found a fix for the issue and was testing it, but was unable to specify when or if Destiny 2’s servers would come back online. Nearly four hours later, Bungie tweeted for the last time that night, announcing that Destiny 2 would not be playable that evening. Nearly 12 hours later, at around 9:55 a.m, Bungie announced it had finally solved the problem and servers would be coming back online following a hotfix. The nearly 20 hours of downtime had some players worried about the game’s health, and its future. After years of bugs and broken updates, it was really starting to feel like the seven-year-old shooter was being held together with duct tape.
So what happened during those 20 hours and why was the game down for so long, seemingly with little warning? Bungie has explained what broke, why, and how it was fixed in its latest blog post. And surprisingly, the developer is more transparent than you might think, going into technical details of the issue.
According to Bungie, shortly after releasing a previous update for the game (Hotfix 6.3.0.5) players began reporting that many Triumphs, Seals, and catalysts had vanished. Bungie realized that this was being caused after it moved some “currently incompletable” challenges into a different area of the game’s data. To do this, Bungie used a “very powerful” tool that lets the studio tinker with a player’s game state and account. Apparently, due to a configuration error, Bungie accidentally “re-ran an older state migration process” used in a past update. Because of this error, the tool copied old data from this past update into the current version of the game, which basically undid some players’ recent in-game accomplishments
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“Once we identified that the issue resulted in a loss of player state,” wrote Bungie, “we took the game down and rolled back the player database while we investigated how to remove the dangerous change from the build.”
After creating a new patch that removed the mistaken change the issue was fixed, and following some testing, Bugnie deployed the update. However, as a result of this patch, all player accounts had to be rolled back a few hours before the troublesome update went live. This means any player progress made between 8:20 and 11 a.m. on January 24 was lost. Any purchases made during this time got refunded, too.
While it sucks that the game was down for so long and that the team was forced to spend what sounds like many late hours trying to fix their mistake, it’s refreshing to see a developer be so open and honest about what happened and how it was fixed. In a time when games feel buggier than ever and players are fed up with delays, outages, and broken updates, it’s smart to pull back the curtain and show everyone just how hard it is to make, maintain, and sustain video games as complex as Destiny 2.
Hopefully, next month’s new Destiny 2 expansion, Lightfall, and the upcoming Season 20 rollout will go a little smoother than this recent 20-hour hiccup.
Assassin’s Creed publisher Ubisoft has at least two new Far Cry experiences coming down the road. One will effectively be Far Cry 7, the next mainline game in the hit first-person shooter series. The other is a standalone multiplayer spin-off and likely the company’s latest attempt to create a live-service money-maker around one of its most successful franchises.
Insider Gaming reported on Thursday that the next single-player game in the Far Cry series is internally known as Project Blackbird and that the standalone multiplayer component is internally called Project Maverick. It also says that both were originally born of a single game that was previously under the supervision of Dan Hay, the franchise’s former overseer at Ubisoft Montreal. He left Ubisoft in 2021 and is now working at Blizzard on its unannounced survival game.
While Kotaku can’t corroborate the projects’ origins, it can confirm that Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot referenced both of these games in an internal company update last week, according to sources present. Far Cry has often included both co-op and competitive multiplayer, but this would be the first time in the franchise’s history that online multiplayer was packaged into a standalone title. Kotaku can’t yet confirm exactly what it will include, or whether it will have overlap with the story campaign of Far Cry 7.
According to three current and former Ubisoft developers, however, the next mainline game in the series will be switching from its existing Dunia engine to Snowdrop, the engine used for The Division 2 and Ubisoft’s upcoming open-world Star Wars game. They considered this an improvement over the legacy engine, which originally grew out of the CryEngine belonging to Crytek, the studio behind 2004’s very first Far Cry.
Ubisoft has been trying to make a fully multiplayer Far Cry game for many years now, sources have told Kotaku. Those efforts were often either canceled or morphed into other projects, including the single-player-driven Far Cry games that were eventually released. It’s possible the current split is yet another compromise of that nature.
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But the appeal of a robust live-service Far Cry game for Ubisoft is clear. 2015’s Rainbow Six Siege continues to be a huge money maker for the publisher. Meanwhile, Far Cry 5’s arcade content creator never really took off, and Far Cry 6 lacked a competitive mode entirely. The series’ post-launch DLC has also fallen flat compared to the multi-year seasons in Assassin’s Creed.
When asked for comment, a spokesperson for Ubisoft told Kotaku,“We don’t comment on rumors or speculation.”
And to finish, here’s the least likely Ubisoft game to see released in 2023, or perhaps, ever. Which is incredibly sad.
The original 2003 Prince of Persia: Sands of Time was revelatory. An exceptional game that reinvented how all third-person action games should be played, with its astonishing rewinding time mechanic, and fabulous 3D platforming. Sadly, no one else ever had the sense to copy it, and 20 years later we remain stuck in a mire of action games that endlessly kill us, rather than let us keep going. Oh, and there was that Jake Gyllenyhaal film to rub salt in the wound.
A remake was announced in 2020, with the ambitious release date of January, 2021. Spoiler alert: that didn’t happen, and it was maybe for the best, given just how awful it looked in the trailer above. It was then rather optimistically delayed until just March ‘21, before they seemingly admitted to themselves that it looked like a PS3 game, and kicked it down the road. Later that year Ubisoft said it’d appear in the 2022-2023 fiscal year, then took it from Indian developers Ubisoft Mumbai and gave it to Ubisoft Montreal, before announcing yet another delay last May, without even guessing at a fiscal year.
Come last November, things looked even worse when Ubisoft cancelled all pre-orders and returned everyone’s money. Perhaps a useful lesson on why you probably shouldn’t pre-order games that don’t exist yet. The publisher insists the game isn’t cancelled, but has yet to suggest a new release date, meaning this is unlikely perhaps even in 2024.
But hey, it’ll still probably come out before Beyond Good & Evil 2.
At the start of 2023, Twitch streamer MissMikkaa made headlines for beating Elden Ring’s notorious rot queen, Malenia, Blade of Miquella, with two completely different controllers at the same time. It was a ridiculous feat of dexterity and focus, but would you believe this method of play was how she finished FromSoftware’s latest Soulslike in its entirety? Well, it turns out MissMikkaa has been embarking on what she’s dubbed the “Ultimate Challenge Run” and, now that she’s wrapped up Elden Ring, she’s doing the same thing with Dark Souls Remastered.
MissMikkaa
Challenge runs aren’t new within the FromSoft community. Kotaku has reported on plenty of wild ones, from using a drawing tablet to playing with an electronic saxophone. MissMikkaa’s, however, is probably the most intense challenge run I’ve seen in a minute as she plays two copies of the FromSoft game simultaneously with two different types of controller inputs: a DDR-compatible dance pad and a PlayStation 5 DualSense. This is the basis for her “Ultimate Challenge Run.” As MissMikkaa specifies in her livestream overlays, the goal is to “kill bosses on the same try on both game instances” using the two different controllers. Kotaku caught up with MissMikkaa to pick her brain about playing FromSoft games in such a peculiar and difficult manner.
This Takes Lots Of Focus To Pull Off
Image: FromSoftware
MissMikkaa explained the process of setting up the “Ultimate Challenge Run,” including the model of the dance pad she’s using. After getting the dance pad hooked up to her PC, she used the software remapper JoyToKey to synch the pad’s movement arrows to the WASD keys, with the other buttons performing actions like attacking, dodging, healing, and the like. The dance pad has a limited number of buttons, though, so she would sometimes have to “create specific profiles for certain bosses or scenarios” to switch between before encounters like the one with Rykard, Lord of Blasphemy. But aside from fine-tuning the dance pad’s keybindings, this “Ultimate Challenge Run” challenged MissMikkaa in many other ways.
“In the beginning, I had a lot of trouble focusing on playing two games at once. It’s not an easy task trying to position your character, attack, dodge, and heal twice as much as what you’re used to,” MissMikkaa tells Kotaku. “There were a few days where I was feeling mentally fatigued from the amount of work my brain was doing, but the further I got in the run the more used to it I became. Physically it wasn’t much different from the previous runs I had done, luckily I was already used to 6-hour dance pad sessions. Midway through this run there were definitely a few moments of smooth sailing, but towards the end, things definitely got much harder and that was also partially used as a motivator to get me through.”
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Focus was difficult to maintain during the entire run, MissMikkaa says. Playing a FromSoft game, whether that’s Bloodborne or Sekiro, can already seem like an insurmountable challenge requiring tons of concentration. These are punishing games, after all! Adding a second layer on top—that is, playing another instance of the same game but with a separate controller simultaneously—increases both the level of difficulty you’ll face when playing and the focus required. Gravity killed her, a lot, because she “lost track of [her] character’s position and instead focused more on attacking and dodging.” But navigation got better as time went on.
The Bosses Were Equally Challenging
MissMikkaa
As you might expect with a FromSoft game, the bosses were a particular sore spot for this “Ultimate Challenge Run.” MissMikkaa says she died some 198 times to Malenia and her long sword alone. It doesn’t compare to the level 1 dance pad run she did back in October, in which she died over 500 times to the goddess, but she still points to Malenia as a true test.
“Malenia was by far the hardest boss in this run,” MissMikkaa admits. “She is a true test of skill and experience in most challenge runs. It was a lot of trial and error to kill Malenia both in regards to figuring out what build I wanted to use and just trying to survive when I got two waterfowl dances at the same time. But besides the obvious answer, I had a lot of trouble with Margit due to falling out of the arena. I was also struggling a lot with Mohg, specifically with his second phase transition since I didn’t use any in-game items like Mohg’s Shackle or Purifying Crystal Tear.”
That she prevented herself from using specific equipment also added to the difficulty. MissMikkaa says she not only tried to “not use any weapons or Ashes of War that would be considered too ‘OP’,” but she also couldn’t summon anyone or use any of the spirit ashes in battle.
It was just her, the enemies in front of her, and her two controller inputs. That’s it. In addition to these self-imposed limitations, MissMikkaa explains that she relegated herself to certain kinds of character builds, starting with a strength-focused one in the beginning before switching to an arcane one for the late game. Thankfully her gear of choice—bleed weapons such as the Great Stars great hammer and high-defense armor like the Bull-Goat set—helped ease the restrictions a little bit by letting her “outpoise [a boss’] poise damage in order to hit them through their attacks.” She’s tanky. And of course, because she’s playing two copies of the same game, she’s forced to have equipment parity between her two characters.
Giving Up On This Was Never In The Cards
Image: FromSoftware
Regardless of how challenging this “Ultimate Challenge Run” has been for MissMikkaa, she promises that she “never once thought about giving up.” The difficulty is a big reason why she was so motivated to finish the challenge. She found herself adapting to the process after every livestream and, once she got to Malenia, who is already an optional endgame boss, MissMikkaa said she was “pretty confident” that she could beat the queen of rot alongside many of the game’s other brutal enemies.
“The easiest part of this run was keeping myself motivated throughout,” MissMikkaa explains. “It was a fun challenge and I enjoyed every aspect of learning and mastering it. I love finding new ways to challenge myself, especially in Elden Ring. This idea was not really seriously considered at first, but when I found myself with an extra capture card in my streaming PC I started thinking to myself, ‘What would happen if I played two games at once?’ At first, I was unsure if the challenge was even possible to begin with, and so were the people around me. But I was kind of curious to see how far I could go. I’ve got to say…I’ve never had so many people coming in and questioning my sanity as I have during this run.”
I mean, I’m questioning MissMikkaa’s sanity, too. It’s hard enough stepping into a FromSoft boss arena on just one platform. Doing that twice, at the same time, with one of your controllers being essentially a slipper bath mat, and still walking away victorious makes me both envious of her skills and stoked about her accomplishment. Talk about “getting good.”
MissMikkaa tells us she finished Elden Ring around January 8, performing an All Remembrances playthrough which requires you beat a FromSoft game by defeating all the bosses that drop consumable “boss souls.” Since then, she’s been bouncing between games on Twitch, like Forspoken and The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, while embarking on another “Ultimate Challenge Run” in Dark Souls Remastered. At some point, she said she wants to play through Elden Ring with “a real guitar,” with actions like attacking and healing tied to full chords instead of just individual strings. Lord help her.
There are few studios out there on top of their respective games like Mimimi are. From Shadow Tactics to Desperadoes 3, they’ve proven themselves the master of the modern stealth tactics game, and in 2023 they’re back with an all-new game, this time about pirates.
This is Shadow Gambit: The Cursed Crew, which is due out towards the end of the year. It won’t take long in the trailers below to see some familiar sights: the mix of real-time action combined with stealth tactics and special powers is one Mimimi have been perfecting over the past decade, and after dabbling with some magic in their last game they’re fully committed to it now.
Here’s the game’s reveal trailer:
Shadow Gambit: The Cursed Crew – Cinematic Reveal Trailer
And, more helpfully, here’s the game’s debut gameplay trailer:
Shadow Gambit: The Cursed Crew – First Gameplay Trailer
Aside from the obvious thematic shift, from one colourful era of history to another, this will all look very familiar to fans of Shadow Tactics and Desperadoes 3. Which, let’s be clear, is a very good thing. Those two games have come about as close as games can come to perfecting a genre, so Shadow Gambit will be messing with things around the edges of the Mimimi experience, not making wholesale changes.
Shadow Gambit will be out at the end of 2023 on PC, Xbox and PlayStation. And if you think I’ve been more hyperbolic than usual in talking about these games, know that I have good reason. Here’s how I wrapped up my impressions of Desperadoes 3:
I can’t speak highly enough of Desperados 3. It’s almost the perfect stealth experience, tense but not terrifying, empowering but not easy (it actually gets really tough in parts), and if this is the pedigree that Mimimi are building for themselves in this space, I can’t wait to see what comes next.
Free-to-play online MMO looter shooter Destiny 2, released in 2017, is one of my favorite video games. I play it all the time. I have multiple characters. I own all the recent seasons. It’s fantastic. But I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t concerned for the game’s future, as with each passing season, it seems to become more prone to breaking. In fact, as I write this very paragraph at around 4:00 p.m. on January 24, the game remains offline as Bungie continues to investigate the latest problem. Meanwhile, many players are hoping for a brand-new engine and game, likely in the form of Destiny 3. But things are never that simple.
Earlier today, Destiny 2 was taken offline across all platforms as Bungie investigated players losing progress on triumphs and seals, which operate like in-game achievements and challenges. It’s not the end of the world, sure, but just last week a few players reported losing their characters along with all their progress and items. And before that, it was a new mission not updating properly for players. And before that it was something else. In 2023, after years of updates, expansions, and more, it feels like Destiny 2 is starting to buckle under its own weight.
Taking a peek at Bungie’s official support account on Twitter—which often updates frequently to let players know about upcoming patches, server issues, and other vital info about Destiny 2—you can find a lot of tweets that amount to Bungie going “Welp, this isn’t working. We are trying to fix it. More info later.” Online games not working every day isn’t new and it’s not a problem exclusive to Destiny 2. But is starting to become a more prevalent issue with the aging shooter. Looking at that support account, a lot of the tweets about bugs or broken missions don’t have weeks between them, but just a few days or less.
Anecdotally, my time playing Destiny 2 lately has been buggier than ever. This new season brought with it both cool new heist missions and weird lag that I’ve never seen before. I still run into the problem of the game not counting every PvP match, making us play more to finish challenges and weekly quests. And I’ve just accepted that in-game bounties tied to kills, missions, or other activities won’t always update as they should. In fact, the more I think about it, the more I realize that I and other players I know have just gotten used to Destiny 2 not being reliable. And it seems to be getting worse, not better, as the game expands and adds more layers and systems.
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Look online and you’ll quickly see players suggesting that Bungie needs to move on to a theoretical Destiny 3, a game that likely will happen—and is maybe in development already—but which hasn’t been confirmed. During today’s extended downtime, Destiny 3 was trending on Twitter as players argued over the shooter’s future and stability. For some, the idea of a new engine and fresh slate felt promising, giving hope it would solve many of Destiny 2’s problems. Others pointed out that a brand-new game isn’t easy to make or simple to launch, and would likely be missing features or content at release. Plus, there’s no guarantee it would fix all of the emerging problems.
Personally, I think a new Destiny would likely be a good move to eventually make. It could allow the devs to make something more flexible and able to handle the type of events they’ve spent years crafting and perfecting. But I also am not naive enough to believe it would fix everything or be easy to create. Still, I get the frustration players are feeling as Destiny 2 remains consistently inconsistent.
Like an old PC or blender, Destiny 2 mostly works, but it’s covered in duct tape, dents, and dirt. And every so often you have to kick it or mess with the cord to get it to start. Sure, it still rumbles to life for now, but you’ll probably need to replace it one day. And with Destiny 2, I get the feeling Bungie will be slapping on the tape for as long as it takes for Destiny 2 to survive through the end of its planned roadmap, which will likely see the final season arriving in 2024. Past that, well, I don’t know. Hopefully by then, the game will at least feel more stable and reliable, not worse.