Month: January 2019

The holidays may be over, but Xbox Game Pass members will be getting new Xbox One games to play at no additional charge in January. Six new games are landing on the service between January 3-10. That’s in addition to two late December arrivals Microsoft introduced after the announcement of December’s lineup.

December’s late additions include Life is Strange Complete Season, which contains all five episodes of the time-manipulating adventure game’s first season. A week later, all three episodes of the prequel, Life is Strange: Before the Storm, hit the service. Next, on January 3, subscribers will get access to the first episode of Life is Strange 2 (with the rest of the episodes arriving on the service as they’re released).

Also coming to Xbox Game Pass on January 3 are the futuristic dino-survival game Ark: Survival Evolved and the aptly titled Farming Simulator 17, which has you tend crops and livestock while you manage a farm. January 7 sees the addition of the online combat game Absolver, followed on January 10 by Just Cause 3 and the brand-new 3v3 combat game Aftercharge.

Xbox Game Pass lets you download and play over 100 Xbox One games, including first-party titles on the day they’re released. That means you can play games like State of Decay 2 and Forza Horizon 4 already, and will gain access to Crackdown 3 when it launches on February 15.

You can sign up for Xbox Game Pass for for $1 for the first month and pay $10 for each additional month. Currently, the service is only available for Xbox One, but Xbox boss Phil Spencer has big plans for the future and wants to see it come to “every device.”

Xbox Game Pass January Titles

• Life is Strange Complete Season (December 20)
• Life is Strange: Before the Storm (December 27)
• Life is Strange 2: Part 1 (January 3)
• Ark: Survival Evolved (January 3)
• Farming Simulator 17 (January 3)
• Absolver (January 7)
• Just Cause 3 (January 10)
• Aftercharge (January 10)

One of Fallout 76‘s most explosive features was temporarily out-of-service recently. A bug rendered players unable to launch nuclear weapons, before Bethesda issued a statement that it was aware and issued a hotfix.

Usually the nuclear launch codes are reset on a weekly basis, every Monday evening, and players have to battle their way through enemies to find the new ones. Codes in hand, they can go to a nuclear silo and launch them at spots on the map to punish other players, or simply give a fresh dose of radiation to a spot and create mutated high-level enemies there.

This week, however, the old codes were still in place, and no longer worked. The changeover took place on New Year’s Day. In a statement on Twitter, the company said it’s aware of the issue and looking into it. Then, on January 2, the game went down for maintenance and came back up just over an hour later.

This is far from the first unexpected hiccup to hit Fallout 76. The game has experienced an ongoing series of issues, from low review scores to controversy over its special edition canvas bags to a personal data leak. The studio hasn’t shown any sign of slowing its plans for the game, though. It’s still regularly issuing patches and announcing upcoming features, including a new mode without PvP restrictions, and the ability to run your own shop.

Sony isn’t messing around with its holiday sale this year. Between now and January 15, you can save up to 70% on nearly 1,700 games, expansions, and digital items for some of the biggest titles of 2018 and beyond. And if you’re a PS Plus member, you’ll get an even bigger discount on many of the on-sale items. We’ve already highlighted some of the best PS4 games on sale, and a selection of the best titles available for $5 or less. But now that we’ve arrived at Week 4 of the sale, a new batch of games has been added, making now a good time to see if anything you want is on discount.

If you’re in the market for a big-budget shooter, you can grab Battlefield V for $36. It received high marks in our Battlefield V review and is set to get a decent amount of added content in the coming months–including a battle royale mode. Speaking of add-on content, Prey, one of last year’s more overlooked titles, got an expansion called Mooncrash that turns the game into a roguelike experience, complete with randomized loot and procedurally generated enironments. You can get the base game and all of the DLC for just $20 right now in Prey: Digital Deluxe Edition.

For fans of moody Metroidvania-style games, Hollow Knight: Voidheart Edition is on sale for $10. The crossover fighting game Marvel Vs. Capcom: Infinite is on sale for $20, and the seriously scary first-person horror game Resident Evil 7: Biohazard is down to $18.

The sale also features a whole lot of PS3 and PS Vita games on sale as well. And if you’d like to see just the deals on PSVR games, the PS4 exclusives, or 2018 releases, you can filter those games here. Just make sure you finalize your purchases by January 8, when some of these games go back up to regular price. And note that the sale ends once and for all on January 15.

Slightly Mad Studios CEO Ian Bell has revealed the company is developing a standalone console. Exact hardware and software specs haven’t been announced yet, but Bell has provided a few details.

The first mention of the console came via Twitter, when Bell tweeted, “The Mad Box is coming.” Bell told Variety that the Mad Box will probably release in about three years and support up to 120 frames-per-second for virtual reality play. “It will support most major VR headsets and those upcoming and the specs will be equivalent to a very fast PC two years from now,” Bell wrote. “We’re in early talks with manufacturers of components so we can’t say much more right now other than we have the designs specced out in detail.”

When it comes to games on the console, Bell wrote, “We think exclusives are ‘exclusionary’ but given that we’ll be shipping a cross platform engine to all developers it will be their choice. As of now we have no plans to pay developers ‘incentives’ to exclude other hardware vendors.” He further explained that Slightly Mad Studios thinks “the industry is a little too much of a monopoly or a micro oligopoly,” and The Mad Box aims to bring some healthy competition to the console race, which for years has pretty much exclusively been a three-way battle between Microsoft’s Xbox, Sony’s PlayStation, and Nintendo’s hardware.

Bell added that early design builds for the Mad Box will be revealed in about four to six weeks. The Mad Box is planned to release worldwide and be competitively priced in comparison to other upcoming consoles. “We have multiple investors already offering the required funding for us to see the product to completion, but it’s still early days and we’re looking at the best offers right now,” Bell wrote.

2018 saw numerous changes to a lot of gaming hardware, including consoles. Some were good, and others not so much. Check out our report cards for more detailed accounts.

GameSpot 2018 Report Cards

What better way to ring in the new year than with a bunch of new TV shows and movies to binge? Amazon Prime Video is adding a bunch of new titles to its library to kick off 2019, including some very exciting films.

Among the movies coming to Prime this month is 2006’s Alpha Dog, Escobar: Paradise Lost, and Fahrenheit 11/9. Additionally, Golden Globe nominee Eighth Grade, which was released in 2018, will arrive on the service on January 13. The most exciting new addition just might be the original Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory, though, which was added to Prime on January 1.

As for new TV show additions, the most notable arrivals are of Amazon Prime Video originals. New seasons of Informer and The Grand Tour arrive in January, plus a brand-new series called Four More Shots Please. Additionally, the Prime Video original film Beautiful Boy arrived on January 4.

You can take a look at everything Amazon Prime Video is adding in January below. Make sure you also take a look at Netflix and Hulu’s offerings for the month.

Coming to Amazon Prime Video in January

January 1

• A Beautiful Mind (2001)
• Alpha Dog (2006)
• Brazil (1985)
• Breaking Big, Season 1
• First Civilizations, Season 1
• Frontline, Season 36
• GI Jews: Jewish Americans in World War II (2018)
• Going to War (2018)
• Jane Eyre (2011)
• Nova Wonders, Season 1
• Reprisal (2018)
• Rwanda: The Royal Tour (2018)
• The Art of the Shine (2018)
• The Jazz Ambassadors (2018)
• Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory (1971)

January 3

• Leave No Trace (2018)

January 4

• Beautiful Boy (Prime Original movie)
• Sherlock Gnomes (2018)

January 11

• Informer (Prime Original series), Season 2

January 12

• Final Score

January 13

• Eighth Grade (2018)

January 16

• The Debt (2010)

January 18

• The Grand Tour (Prime Original series), Season 3

January 19

• Fahrenheit 11/9 (2018)

January 25

• Escobar: Paradise Lost (2014)
• Four More Shots Please! (Prime Original series), Season 1

January 29

• Endeavour, Season 5

A new in-game event is set to kick off in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate soon. This week’s Spirit Board event is titled Classics, and as its name suggests, it revolves around old-school video game characters.

Throughout the weekend, characters from the NES, Famicom, and the Famicom Disk System–such as the Balloon Fighter and Donkey Kong Jr.–will appear much more frequently on the Spirit Board. You’ll also have a chance to get a handful of Legend-class Spirits during the event, including Donkey Kong & Lady, Sukapon, and the NES incarnation of Link.

On top of that, defeating retro characters during the Classics event will net you even more Snacks than usual, which you can use to further level up your Spirits. The event is scheduled to begin at 10 PM PT on January 3 (1 AM ET / 6 AM GMT / 5 PM AEDT on January 4) and will run until the same time on January 6.

Classics follows last week’s Mario Time event, which was themed around characters from the Mario series. Unlike other events in the game thus far, it also featured a handful of exclusive Super Mario Party Spirits: Dice Block, River Survival, and Golden Dash Mushroom. These weren’t previously available to get in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, and there’s no word yet on if they’ll reappear in the game.

Super Smash Bros. Ultimate launched for Nintendo Switch last month and quickly set new sales records for the series. The game has also been a critical success; GameSpot awarded it a 9/10 in our Super Smash Bros. Ultimate review and selected it as one of our 10 best video games of 2018.

Red Dead Redemption 2 was one of the biggest games of 2018, and we now know it ended the year at the top of the UK sales chart. Rockstar’s open-world PS4 and Xbox One game was the best-selling physical game in the UK’s final trading week of the year after also topping the Christmas chart the week before.

FIFA 19 follows at No. 2 for the week ending December 29, with Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 rounding off a podium of big hitters for the end of 2018. Nintendo Switch exclusive Super Smash Bros. Ultimate rises one place to No. 4, swapping positions with Battlefield V.

No new titles entered the chart this week, though old faces do crop up: both Spyro Reignited Trilogy and Crash Bandicoot N. Sane Trilogy are in the top 10 at No. 7 and No. 9, respectively. The continued success of the ’90s gaming mascots is an encouraging sign for Activision with Crash Team Racing Nitro-Fueled coming to Switch, PS4, and Xbox One in June.

There are no major titles launching until later in January, so the chart will likely remain similar until New Super Mario Bros. U Deluxe and Mario & Luigi: Bowser’s Inside Story launch for Switch and 3DS, respectively.

You can read the full top 10 sales chart below, courtesy of UKIE and Chart-Track. Note this table does not include digital sales data, and so should not be considered representative of all UK game sales.

1. Red Dead Redemption 2
2. FIFA 19
3. Call of Duty: Black Ops 4
4. Super Smash Bros. Ultimate
5. Battlefield V
6. Forza Horizon 4
7. Spyro Reignited Trilogy
8. Mario Kart 8 Deluxe
9. Crash Bandicoot N. Sane Trilogy
10. Spider-Man