Category: Games

Stardew Valley players on PC have been able to enjoy the game’s massive Update 1.5 for almost two months now, and today console players will get the update as well. The new update is said to be the largest addition of new content since the game launched, with notable additions including split-screen co-op, a new beachside farm layout, and heaps of new endgame content.

Stardew Valley developer Eric “ConcernedApe” Barone has said that the update is heavy in endgame content for long-time players, but newcomers will still find something to enjoy. The update adds a new beachy farm type, as well as an entirely new island-based region in the game. This comes with a heap of new quests and character interactions, as well as new crops, trees, and farm animals.

Update 1.5 also adds split-screen coop, just in time for couples wanting to game together on Valentines Day. The update has already received a few patches for early issues on the PC, meaning the delayed console update should already benefit from those fixes. Check out all the details and the full Update 1.5 patch notes here.

Barone has previously said that Stardew Valley 2 may be a possibility in the future, though at that point all efforts were still focused on the huge 1.5 update. We may get more news soon, as Barone has said that he’ll decide what to do next with Stardew Valley once Update 1.5 was completed.

This is a spoiler-free review of the series premiere of Clarice, which is currently available to watch on CBS or CBS All Access in the US.

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She’s listed as one of the top ten heroes in cinematic history by the American Film Institute. But unlike her counterpart Dr. Hannibal Lecter, Clarice Starling has not been the constant focus of TV and film storytelling obsession. Jenny Lumet and Alex Kurtzman hope to change all that with their adaptation of her story in the singularly titled Clarice, premiering February 11 on CBS. Adding layers of psychological horror to its more traditional cops-and-bad-guys fare, Clarice is an enjoyable dissection of what makes this Starling sing.

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Taking place a year after the events of Silence of the Lambs, Starling (played by Rebecca Breeds) is barely hanging onto her sanity by burying herself in work. With unprocessed trauma bubbling just below the surface, the special agent is called to Washington, DC to work on the Violent Criminal Apprehension Program (VICAP) team tasked with finding serial killers. But this time around, Starling is forced to confront her past as the new attorney general is Ruth Martin (Jayne Atkinson), mother of Catherine Martin (Marnee Carpenter), Buffalo Bill’s last victim.

Starling’s addition to the VICAP team, however, is not a welcome one. Her teammates—lead by Paul Krendler (Michael Cudlitz)—are none too excited to employ her, feeling she is but a tool to make Ruth Martin look good. Though she does seem to have one of the men on her side (Lucca De Oliveira as Tomas Esquivel), the other two (Kal Penn as Emin Grigoryan and Nick Sandow as Murray Clarke) are a bit more suspect. And Krendler is fully not having it with Starling at all.

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What unfolds is a procedural with a compelling overarching story, entrenched in creepy, horrific, and often psychological mystery. Though it is decidedly less visually inventive, erotic, and outright grotesque than NBC’s Hannibal from 2013, it does feel like a spiritual sibling as they both pick at the scabs of what make their protagonists human. In a dream world where networks could cross pollinate, it would be interesting to see an intersection of these two Lecter-adjacent worlds. But, at least for now, Clarice is not legally allowed to mention the famous cannibal in its plot (which is an unavoidable but somewhat frustrating quirk of the series, given Lecter’s impact on Clarice’s life and what she’s endured so far). So this one will have to stay a bit of a dream.

Everyone on Clarice is compelling to watch, and the episodes provided to critics were all expertly paced. Meaning: you’re not tuning into some boring, run-of-the-mill coptime adventures. You’re learning what it means to be Clarice Starling, to survive the Buffalo Bill of it all—even more so than Lecter—and be a woman in an extremely male-dominated field. Starling isn’t some boot-stomping bravadoist, she’s quiet and observing. But there are cracks that just keep cracking, and it feels like it’s going to be exciting to watch.

In the end, while it doesn’t reinvent the wheel, Clarice will leave you engaged and satisfied if you’re looking for a horror-lite police procedural with high production value and an engaging central character. Its pilot sets the stage for a new chapter for Starling, one you’d be remiss to miss if you’re a fan of the Thomas Harris source material.

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We’ve seen about all we will of the Cosmodrome in Destiny 2, according to Bungie. Though the Destiny 1 location is now a bigger part of the game, thanks to additions with the Beyond Light expansion and the Season of the Chosen, the developer isn’t going to add back all the parts that appeared in the original game.

Bungie clarified the situation with the Cosmodrome in its latest This Week at Bungie post, in which it said that the two Cosmodrome Strikes it added with the Season of the Chosen, Fallen S.A.B.R.E. and The Devils’ Lair, are the last Cosmodrome additions it plans to make.

That’s at odds with what Bungie previously said about the Cosmodrome when it announced plans to bring the location back for Destiny 2. Back during the summer when Bungie made the announcement, the developer said the Cosmodrome would eventually be made roughly the same as it was in the first year of Destiny 1. Players have been wondering when the rest of the Cosmodrome would get added into the game and Bungie hasn’t had much of an answer for them.

According to the blog post, the developer decided that instead of reworking more of the Cosmodrome, it would be better to focus on developing new areas and locations for players to visit.

“As we approached Beyond Light’s launch, it became clear to us that we had a choice to make: After returning all three of its original strikes, do we invest more time and resources in bringing Cosmodrome to D1 parity or do we switch our focus to building new experiences for Year 4 and beyond?” Bungie wrote. “Given that we believed we had achieved our original goals and knowing the community and team’s desire for new content, we chose the latter option. But, when we made that decision, we failed to properly update your expectations for how far the Cosmodrome experience was going to be extended and that was a mistake. So, to clear things up: With the Devil’s Lair and Fallen S.A.B.E.R. strikes returning, we don’t have any active plans to add more to the Cosmodrome than what is there will be focusing on new updates overall.”

There is still more Destiny 1 content coming back to Destiny 2, though. Bungie also previously announced that the Vault of Glass, the original game’s first raid, will be added to Destiny 2, albeit in a reworked form. We still don’t know exactly when that will happen, though–Bungie has said the Vault is coming “this year,” but that’s as specific as the developer has gotten.

With the release of the Season of the Chosen, Bungie put out a big update to Destiny 2 that made several major adjustments and fixed a bunch of bugs. Not all those changes made it into the patch notes for Update 3.1.0, though–including one that removed an annoying bit of dialogue that’s been plaguing the game since it was first released.

That piece of dialogue comes from Suraya Hawthorne, the Clan vendor in the Tower, and plays every time you complete Hawthorne’s weekly clan challenge. In its This Week at Bungie blog, the developer noted that the dialogue has now been removed. Presumably, all Guardians are currently rejoicing.

The Hawthorne dialogue has been exactly the same since the release of Destiny 2, and even though three years of story advancements have come and gone since then, Hawthorne would still spend quite a while talking about players’ accomplishments from the conclusion of Destiny 2’s vanilla story campaign, the Red War. But the issue wasn’t just that Hawthorne’s dialogue hasn’t been updated in three years–it’s that you would hear it a lot.

Players have been complaining about Hawthorne’s dialogue for a while, because whether we wanted it or not, Hawthorne always had time to explain. Each week, players can complete a challenge for Hawthorne that has you contributing a certain amount of experience points to your clan to help level it up. The challenge is pretty easy to knock out just by playing the game and comes with a solid loot reward, so if you’re playing on any given week, you were probably visiting Hawthorne at least once by the end of it. For players running two or three characters, the result was visiting Hawthorne over and over again most weeks for years, hearing the same dialogue every time.

This isn’t the first time a repeated bit of dialogue has become a thing for Destiny players. Many got so familiar with Zavala’s opening speech for a Destiny 1 Strike, Cerberus Vei III, that it became a meme–and then Bungie joined the joke by turning the speech into a t-shirt.

Destiny 1 also featured the line “I don’t even have time to explain that I don’t have time to explain” from the Exo Stranger. It also turned into a joke that Bungie got in on when it released a gun called No Time To Explain in the Taken King expansion. (The Exo Stranger is back in Destiny 2’s Beyond Light expansion and she’s much more articulate this time around.)

And before that, the line “That Wizard came from the moon!” turned into a joke after it was featured in the game’s alpha. Bungie once again was willing to laugh at itself a bit, printing the line on a t-shirt it sold for charity–but it did also remove the line from the game.

Check out the additions to Update 3.1.0’s patch notes below.

Update 3.1.0 Additional Patch Notes

Rituals

• Removed Hawthorne’s Red War-era dialog when completing her Clan challenge.
• Players can now turn in Gunsmith materials 100 at a time, and Vanguard tokens 20 at a time – enough to get a full rank.

Reputation

• Valor, Glory, and Infamy rank-up banners are now at the bottom of the screen, no longer blocking players from taking actions in orbit when hitting a new rank.
• Valor, Glory, and Infamy values are now available on the main Director screen for the ritual.

Gambit

• Reworked the mote system for more reliable gathering.

Crucible

• Iron Banner
  • Removed Skill Based Matchmaking listing from the Iron Banner tooltip – it has been using Connection-Based Matchmaking, along with the rest of the Crucible, since June of 2020.
• Survival
  • Life count changed from 6 to 4, respawn time changed from 7s to 5s, consistent with ruleset prior to Beyond Light.

New Light

• A Guardian Rises
  • Destroying the Spider Tank during The Divide phase will now progress the directive by 50%.
  • Fixed an issue where veteran accounts that start a new character could not be progress or dismiss some tutorials.
• Schism
  • Fixed an issue where players could jump through a window during the Navota vignette and block their mission progress.
• Cold Boot
  • Fixed an issue for veteran characters playing the New Light quest that would cause the Legendary weapon tutorial to persist through the entire mission.

Risk/Reward (Riskrunner)

• Fixed an issue where players with full Energy weapon inventory slots would have Riskrunner sent to the Postmaster upon pick up.
• The weapon now drops as an Exotic Engram during the mission, allowing players to clear room in their inventories if they wish to pick up their Riskrunner immediately.

Forsaken Campaign

• Fixed an issue where players would see a “Quests Full” message when trying to start the Forsaken campaign, forcing them to find and pick up the quest at the Quest Archive in the Tower before proceeding.

Rocket League‘s latest limited-time event, Lucky Lanterns, is now live. The in-game celebration is themed around the Lunar New Year, and will last until March 1.

Lucky Lanterns adds Heatseeker to Rocket League until February 22. This 2v2 fan-favorite mode sees the ball naturally drawn to the opposing goal of whichever team touched it last, forcing players to react more quickly on blocks. Then, from February 22 to March 1, Super Cube returns to Rocket League. This 3v3 mode hasn’t been seen in Rocket League since 2015, the year the game launched. As its name implies, it transforms the ball into a cube.

Additionally, Lucky Lanterns adds a bunch of Lunar New Year décor to Rocket League. The Forbidden Temple (Day) arena has been redecorated in celebration of the upcoming Year of the Ox. New cosmetics will also be in the store during the event, including the now-painted Paper Dragon goal explosions. Lucky Lanterns will add limited-time event challenges as well, giving you more tasks to complete alongside your weekly challenges.

In the midst of the event, Rocket League is getting a new battle car. The Ford F-150 is coming to Rocket League, though only for a limited-time. From February 20-28, you can buy the Ford F-150 Rocket League Edition for 1500 Credits–the bundle includes the F-150 battle car, Chairman decal, SE wheels, Ford F-150 engine audio, Ford F-150 boost, and Ford F-150 player banner. According to developer Pysonix, the F-150 battle car has the same hitbox as the Octane.