Alongside new games coming to Xbox Game Pass, Microsoft announced some titles would be leaving the service. If you have been wanting to play games such as Borderlands: The Handsome Collection or Vampyr, you need to hurry. Coming soon to the service on PC is the story-driven title Astrologaster, set in Shakespeare’s London. It’s rather hilarious (we own it on Steam). In it, you play as a “doctor” named Simon Forman who treats his patients using astrology....

July’s Xbox Games with Gold have been announced, and the games are WRC 8 FIA World Rally Championship, Dunk Lords, Saints Row 2, and Juju. WRC 8 FIA World Rally Championship will be available for Xbox One July 1-31. Dunk Lords will arrive July 16 and will be available until August 15 for Xbox One. Xbox One and Xbox 360 users will be able to grab Saints Row 2 on July 1....

A number of retailers in the UK have just put a series of Xbox One X deals live at this new low starting price. After aggressively discounting consoles during Black Friday, it seems like Microsoft is aiming to keep up that pace and gain a few more converts with the Xbox Series X coming at the end of the year. It’s not a bad strategy, to be fair, as you can get a cheap console along with an Xbox Game Pass Ultimate deal to gain access to a vast library of games to work through....

Xenoblade Chronicles: Definitive Edition releases later this week for Switch on May 29, and we have rounded up the review scores for you. The game was originally released for Wii back in 2010 before eventually heading to Nintendo 3DS. With the Definite Edition, players can expect improved graphics, and a revamped Battle HUD and menu screens. It will also feature a new epilogue story titled Future Connected, and you can switch between the original soundtrack and the remastered and remixed tracks in the game on a battle by battle basis....

In the Yakuza: Like a Dragon trailer, Kasuga Ichiban, describes the videogame-esque heroic journey that takes him through various minigame distractions. These include kart racing, batting cages, SEGA arcades, vocational school tests, and the ability to manage and grow a company. The game also features English renditions of karaoke songs from previous entries in the series, as well as several brand-new songs. The full list of English-voiced karaoke songs includes:...

The stream will take place next week, September 14, at 11am BST/ 12pm CEST/ 6am EST, and is set to air on the official Sega Twitch channel. RGG Studio didn’t mention any specifics about what we can expect during the livestream in the announcement tweet, it’s probably pretty safe to say that Yakuza 8 will make some kind of appearance during the show. Back in July we received our first look at Yakuza 8, which was mostly just a few screenshots....

Hot on the heels of the launch of the critically acclaimed Yakuza: Like a Dragon, Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio plans to hold a livestream that’ll include notes on future plans for the series (thanks, PCGamesN). The studio announced the plans via its Twitter account, which reveals the dedicated livestream will include a retrospective on 15 years of the series and promises to announce “future developments” for Yakuza, too. The voice actors Takaya Kuroda and Kazuhiro Nakaya – who play Kiryu Kazuma and Ichiban Kasuga, respectively – will appear on the livestream and reflect on their roles across the series so far....

Revealed as part of the PS5 event from earlier this week, Spider-Man: Miles Morales is set to be the next installment in Insomniac’s Spider-Man series. However, as the name suggests, the eponymous hero isn’t Peter Parker. It’s Miles. Obviously. You might remember Miles from the original Marvel’s Spider-Man, or are perhaps familiar with him from the comics or Into The Spider-Verse. Regardless, Miles discovers he has spidey abilities towards the end of Marvel’s Spider-Man, and Spider-Man: Miles Morales is all about him using said abilities to do whatever a spider can....

The latest mod to capture our attention introduces Spyro the Dragon as your cute protagonist. I suspect there’ll no doubt be a very long line of future character mods to come, but if I say so myself, this feels like the best and most-fitting so far (aside from people modding their own pets into the game!). Modder, MrMarco1003, has plucked Spyro from the Reignited Trilogy and popped them into Stray....

“Explorations for allowing players to store (but not play) PS5 games on a USB drive in a future update are underway,” the blog post reads. This is good news, though we do hope the feature arrives sooner rather than later. You can read the original story below. Original story: Drive space is at a premium for both PS5 and Xbox Series X/S. Microsoft’s solution allows players to essentially use slower external drives as cold storage; moving rarely played games to them and copying them back when they want to play them....

It looks like Zombies have been confirmed for Call of Duty: Warzone. As spotted by Eurogamer, players have started to notice new calling card challenges following Season 2 of Black Ops Cold War rolling out earlier today. Some of these are rewards for players if they manage to kill some Zombies in Call of Duty: Warzone. This follows speculation that Zombies could be coming to the free-to-play battle royale portion of Call of Duty....

During a GameLab chat, Cyberpunk pen and paper creator Mike Pondsmith got pulled onto the topic of politics in games and came back with a response that - in his own words - will piss off both sides of the debate. “Games and art are inherently political,” he said, pissing off one side of the debate. “The point is, man is an inherently political animal. We organise our societies to work for people on top, or hopefully for people throughout societies....

During Embracer Group’s Q4 Report presentation, Saber Interactive CEO Matthew Karch was asked about the launch of Evil Dead: The Game, with the host of the presentation bringing up the game’s review scores… which he says “aren’t fantastic, but for the genre are quite solid”. In response, Karch notes that the Saber team is “pleasantly surprised” by the scores to date, which have – to date – exceeded the team’s internal targets....

I’m thinking about SF6 a lot, really - from where it’ll go with esports to what it needs to get right and beyond. But the character roster does loom rather large. If Street Fighter 5 set any precedent, it’s that in the modern age the starting character roster won’t be the end, of course. SF6 is likely to be continually updated with DLC and seasonal patches that will inevitably add new characters to the game....

An innovative blend of genres… Spellforce 3’s combination of RPG and RTS enables it to represent the full spectrum of scenarios you’d expect from a fantasy epic. You can create your own hero and form a party of adventures, exploring massive fantasy cities and delving through dungeons on exciting quests. But when the forces of darkness arise against you, you’re also able to build an army to fight them by establishing a base, recruiting units, and capturing territory to acquire resources....

Earlier this week, a selection of press and influences received a Crash Bandicoot-themed pizza box that contained stuff like a t-shirt and charging cables, mostly innocuous merch for the most part, as detailed by YouTuber Canadian Guy Eh (thanks GamesRadar). On the box the Crash 4 Steam release was teased with the text “Aku Aku’s Steam-in Pizza Shack,” before just outright saying it’s coming to the store October 18. But a teaser on the side of the box is potentially hinting at the reveal of the long-rumoured Crash Bandicoot Wumpa League....

The Witcher saga literally features a passage that makes Geralt’s ability to fall from massive heights unscathed canonical. I’ve read the books, but I never thought twice about it until someone posted it on Reddit earlier today. Check out the section below, which has been lifted from Time of Contempt. “They had been attacked by a white-haired fiend, who had fallen on them from a wall, from a height that would have broken a normal man’s legs,” the passage begins....

Right now, a consultation period is in effect at offices in France, Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, and the UK. According to GI.biz, Activision Blizzard is planning to consolidate its European publishing to the UK. The layoffs will not impact any development studios, customer support, or live operations. In a statement sent to GI.biz, Activision said that the lay-offs are due to players increasingly choosing to “connect to games digitally.”...

There have been a number of attempts over the years, of course. I have fond memories of those slightly-crap console ports of the earliest Command & Conquer games, and then C&C actually managed some pretty damn good controller-based releases of C&C3 and Red Alert 3. I’d argue those games have a direct lineage in control scheme to Halo Wars. Halo Wars was a decent bit of fun – and now another Microsoft strategy stalwart is entering Game Pass on console....

In a new Q&A, company president Shuntaro Furukawa confirmed the latest iteration of Animal Crossing has surpassed expected lifetime sales. “The initial sales of Animal Crossing: New Horizons have greatly exceeded our expectations," says the Nintendo head (translated by Nintendo Everything). “We were targeting the current sales numbers for the game’s lifetime considering fans have been waiting such a long time for this game, but it all happened at a much faster rate than we anticipated....