New to Netflix for April 2021
7 Things We Want In Starfield
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Save On Storage Expansion For Xbox Series X With This Newegg Deal
Next-gen game sizes can be truly enormous, and if you’ve already run out of space on your Xbox Series X but don’t want to delete anything, Newegg has a deal for you. The Seagate Storage Expansion Card for Xbox Series X|S is currently on sale via a promo code for 10% off, amounting to about $22 in savings.
To get the Seagate Storage Expansion Card for that price, you need to put it in your cart and use the promo code 93XQS68. That will bring the price down to $198, and you can also click a button to automatically apply the code when you get to the checkout page.
Both the Xbox Series X|S and the PS5 make use of ultra-fast NVMe SSDs instead of traditional SSDs or hard drives. This lets them load games extremely quickly and enables features on Xbox like Quick Resume. However, it’s also extremely new, hence the price of the expansion card, and it makes other external options incompatible.
The good news is all you had to do to use the Seagate drive is plug it into a port on the back of your system. For PS5 users, they’ll eventually be able to install approved NVMe drives into an internal slot, but the feature is currently disabled. On Xbox Series X|S, you can also store games on another drive and move them internally when you’re ready to play., and we can help you with the best Xbox Series X storage solutions.
Firearms Expert Reacts To Battlefield 4’s Guns
Jonathan Ferguson, a weapons expert and Keeper of Firearms & Artillery at the Royal Armouries, breaks down the insane weaponry of Battlefield 4, including the FN F2000 rifle, the UTS 15 shotgun, and the Chinese QBB Type-95 automatic rifle.
Developer Cancels PlayStation Vita Game, Was Surprised By Store Closure News
News that the PlayStation Store was going offline for the PS3, PSP, and PlayStation Vita caught us by surprise, but a game developer that had been planning on releasing a Vita game found itself in a trickier situation. Now, the game is canceled, and the developer said it was not told in advance about the closure.
Speaking to IGN, Lillymo Games founder Barry Johnson said it didn’t receive any notice from Sony about the Vita store’s planned closure prior to the public news. Because of this, its next, unannounced game will have its Vita version canceled, and the studio’s requests for information from Sony were met with silence.

Others, like Miguel Sternberg at Spooky Squid games, are still rushing to get their games out prior to game submissions being closed. Lightwood Games developer Katherine Gordon even offered her studio’s assistance in order to bug-test the game so it can release before the deadline.
Russian Subway Dogs on PS Vita update now that we have more info.
It looks like there is still a small window to submit games for the platform so I’m going to hustle and try my best to hit it!#VitaIsland #PSVita https://t.co/6QHxLInaoW— Miguel 🦑 Sternberg (@spookysquid) March 30, 2021
Hi Miguel, if we can help in any way let us know. We’ve got a Vita test kit so if nothing else we can provide an extra set of eyes to check over your build before you submit – try to catch any obvious bugs to help keep you within the deadline :o)
— Katherine (@lightwoodgames) March 30, 2021
The Vita is a somewhat unique case in that Sony stopped supporting it with its own games relatively quickly, but it has remained an indie gaming favorite–and to a degree, this even continued after the Switch release and offered a similar handheld experience. The Vita got briefly marketed as a companion device of sorts for the PS4, but the system itself has already been out of production for more than two years.
You’ll still be able to buy games on PlayStation Vita until August 27. The PS3 and PSP stores, meanwhile, are closing on July 2, so make any purchases you want before that date. You will still be able to download them later.
Outriders Video Review In Progress
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The Star Wars Vintage Collection Arrives on Disney+
The Mandalorian and the Book of Boba Fett are both a ways off, but if you’re looking to get a Star Wars fix right now, Disney+ has you covered with the new Star Wars Vintage Collection, which arrives on the service today.
The collection includes a bunch of old, out-of-print movies and series. That includes projects like the 1984 television movie, Caravan of Courage: An Ewok Adventure, a live-action movie in which Ewoks help a pair of siblings find and rescue their parents. There’s also Ewoks: The Battle for Endor. Also a television movie, this 1985 movie is a sequel to the Caravan of Courage and stars the character Cindel from the first movie; her parents and brother are killed by marauders in the opening moments. Maybe you’re interested in the 1985-1986 Ewoks animated series, developed by beloved Batman: The Animated Series writer Paul Dini. Lucasfilm went really hard on Ewoks for a little bit there. The Story of the Faithful Wookiee, from the 1978 Star Wars Holiday Special, features the first instance of that tuning-fork-shaped Pulse Gun used by Din Djarin in The Mandalorian.
There are a few other titles as well, so here’s the whole list:
- The Caravan of Courage: An Ewok Adventure
- Ewoks: The Battle for Endor
- The Story of the Faithful Wookiee
- Ewoks
- Clone Wars 2D Micro-Series Volumes 1 & 2
- Droids (coming later this year)
The Star Wars Vintage Collection is a weird bit of Star Wars history, featuring old, forgotten stories that often shift the focus away from Jedi but with very mixed results. But then, it’s not like it costs anything to watch, and it’s available on Disney+ right now.
Destiny 2 Trials Of Osiris Map And Rewards This Week (April 2-6)
The Trials of Osiris are back for the weekend–alongside Exotics vendor Xur–in Destiny 2, giving you a few days to try to get some of the best weapons in the game. This week, you can snag the powerful shotgun Astral Horizon just for putting in some time. Here’s what map you have to deal with and what rewards you can earn this week.
There’s also a whole lot of new gear in Trials this season, including new armor and cosmetics. This weekend’s Trials event actually continues to the Tuesday weekly reset on April 6, so you’ve got a little extra time to earn rewards and spend tokens with Saint-14.
Trials of Osiris Map And Rewards (April 2-6)
- Map: Javelin-4
- 3 wins — Astral Horizon, Kinetic shotgun
- 5 wins — Hunter, Warlock, or Titan Chest Armor: Pyrrhic Ascent Vest, Vestment, or Plate
- 7 wins — Hunter, Warlock, or Titan Gauntlets: Pyrrhic Ascent Grasps, Gloves, or Gauntlets
- Flawless run — Astral Horizon (Adept), Kinetic shotgun
If you’ve been hesitant about Trials in the past, it’s still worth playing in the mode to earn new gear. You don’t even have to get wins, because the End Game bounty from Saint-14 will give you the three-win reward just for playing Trials in general. You can also snag another weapon drop for completing a new Seasonal Challenge if you can win a total of seven rounds (as opposed to complete matches).
The Trials of Osiris is Destiny 2’s super-tough weekend competitive multiplayer event, which takes place from Friday to Tuesday every week, and it represents some of the highest-level challenges and rewards in the game. Your goal is to rack up as many victories as you can before you suffer three total losses, which forces you to reset your Trials run, or Passage. You’ll earn loot along the way as you rack up more and more wins, but the best rewards in the event come when you go on a winning streak of seven matches in a row–a “Flawless” run.
If you can manage to go Flawless, you’ll visit the Lighthouse, which is only available to Flawless players, where you’ll get some exclusive rewards. Opening the chest in the Lighthouse now gets you an “Adept” weapon, which has extra stat boosts you can’t get almost anywhere else.
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Icarus Hands-On: DayZ Creator Has Unfinished Business With Survival Genre
“I think me and survival games have some unfinished business,” Dean Hall told me as we looked over the truly terrible, ramshackle wood hut I’d just built. We were standing beside a pristine river running through a forested valley, ringed by mountains cutting across a cloudless blue sky. This is the planet Icarus in the upcoming survival game of the same name from Hall’s studio, Rocketwerkz, although it looks more like Yosemite National Park than an alien world.
Rocketwerkz recently gave GameSpot a chance to play about an hour of an early build of Icarus with Hall, the creator of DayZ. He showed off a bunch of the game’s elements, including its tech tree, building capabilities, wildlife, and weather systems.
“I think there is an innate human understanding of the need to survive, and I think that that’s a fascinating and under-looked-at area,” Hall continued, explaining what keeps drawing him back to the survival genre. “I also think that a lot of people haven’t taken it seriously because they haven’t had the resources, and this is a real serious attempt–a long-term attempt to have an ability to build a survival platform where we can introduce different experiences while still linking you with this broad progression.”
The idea that Icarus could be a survival platform as much as a survival game is possibly the most fascinating thing about the project. Rocketwerkz’s approach to Icarus is based on game sessions, taking a page from games like Escape from Tarkov or Fortnite, rather than putting you in a persistent world where you work to survive endlessly. In Icarus, you play as a prospector who’s traveled to a new world from Earth, where special materials called “exotics” have been discovered. They’re exceedingly valuable, but the planet itself is hostile; Earth scientists attempted to terraform it to be just like their home planet, but the exotics caused the terraforming to fail. Your job is to drop from an orbital station onto the planet for set missions, in hopes of gathering the resources that might make you rich–but if you don’t make it back to your drop pod in time to leave, you’ll be left behind, which means certain doom.

Missions drop you in for variable lengths of time–anywhere from less than an hour to days, tracked by an in-game mission clock–and you’re stuck using whatever you can on the planet to survive until it’s time to go. Since you’re playing these mission sessions, things in Icarus aren’t persistent for the most part. But that mission-based structure allows Rocketwerkz to solve a lot of the problems Hall says he first saw in the survival genre when he helped popularize it with the Arma II DayZ mod, and has continued to see since he left developer Bohemia Interactive in 2014 while the studio was developing the standalone version of DayZ.
“A lot of survival games, including DayZ, really struggle with scale,” Hall explained. “So you’re building all this awesome stuff…you build a big castle, and the castle starts to lag, and you end up with all these problems with survival, both technical in terms of performance. But in addition, the game starts to break itself, because the only way back from that is to destroy the player’s structure, but that’s a very negative thing. So what we do with Icarus is we say, ‘Okay, we’re giving you this goal. Go do these things.’ You need to build some infrastructure to support that goal, and that means that every time you play a session you’re getting new reasons to build new buildings. You don’t have to invent them, you don’t have to be like, ‘I’m going to build the most awesome looking thing here so that it gets on GameSpot, or PC Gamer,’ or whatever. You actually have real important reasons to build different kinds of structures to support your operation, particularly as you advance as a character.”
The session-based nature of the game gives Rocketwerkz opportunities to control Icarus and build its particular experience. Our hands-on time put us in a valley that Hall said was eight kilometers square, where every single tree could be cut down, every rock could be mined and broken apart, and every bush could be harvested. Some elements are procedural in a drop, Hall said, such as whether certain locations like caves are accessible or not, but the rest of the map is hand-created.
In practice, Icarus is pretty similar to other survival games, and in particular feels a bit like a first-person take on something like Valheim, but in space (Hall said he even feels like Valheim is a “cousin” to Icarus, with both games addressing similar survival experiences). As a prospector, you exhausted most of your resources just getting to Icarus, so every time you drop to the planet, you’re scrounging whatever you can to keep yourself alive. Just about everything you do, from cutting down trees to harvesting minerals that help you keep your spacesuit oxygenated, earns you experience points, which allow you to progress up Icarus’s tech tree and unlock the ability to craft more and more stuff.

Your focus is on keeping yourself fed, hydrated, breathing, and sheltered, like in most survival games, but you don’t have to worry as much about dying–at least, not right away. Cooperative players can revive you, but even alone, my experience was that getting taken out by an animal only resulted in a short period of being rendered unconscious. The real failure state in Icarus is being left on the planet when your mission timer runs out. If that happens, you lose your character–along with any skills you’ve unlocked for them, anything they’ve built or brought down from orbit with them, and everything they’ve learned. Things you left in orbit and the “planetary” tech tree you advance by playing survive, but if your character gets left on Icarus, it’s like you’re starting over as a different person–and that person has to learn everything your previous prospector already knew.
The biome we wandered around was the Earth-like forest, which was home to raccoons, deer, wolves, and bears deposited by terraformers. Armed with only a bow, Hall and I fought off a few animals as we talked. Later, a powerful storm swept in, pelting the buildings and bridges the developers had created ahead of our session with rain and wind. The extreme weather tore off chunks of the buildings and knocked down trees, and Hall said lightning strikes could even lead to forest fires. This, he said a few times, is Icarus’s safest biome.
Hall said Rocketwerkz really wanted to emphasize the sense that it’s you–and, potentially, your friends–against the planet. Icarus, like Valheim, puts a lot of emphasis on cooperation, and while it’s possible to smash buildings with trees and wreak other destruction, at least right now, it’s all about working together.
“The cooperative side of survival has been massively neglected,” Hall said. “We just really wanted to ramp up the drama of the world. Storms, and fires, and there’s so much challenge, and just exploring, and just surviving.”
That doesn’t mean Icarus has to be wholly cooperative, though, Hall said.

“There’s nothing stopping us having game session modes that aren’t as cooperative,” he said. “That’s a huge advantage of sessionizing this experience.”
The same is true about the possibility of more persistent drops, where players might create lasting structures. Hall said Rocketwerkz is working closely with a group of early Icarus players to determine what they might want or need out of the game. Because of the sessionized approach, Icarus can deliver a variety of experiences, he explained.
While individual drops will be divided into sessions, it sounds like Rocketwerkz’s overall view of the game is taking a similar approach, with Icarus releasing chapters over time. Hall explained three of those chapters. Chapter 1 is called “First Cohort,” sending you into the forest biome as one of the first prospectors. Later chapters can open up additional biomes and send you to other locations.
“The second [chapter] is New Frontiers, which is where they start opening up some of the more dangerous, more alien prospects,” Hall said. “This was a failed terraforming experiment, and it failed because of these exotics reacting with the enzymes they released. And so the next phase starts to open up to the areas that didn’t get properly terraformed, and finally we end up in Dangerous Horizons, where you’ll face… well, let’s just say some pretty fearsome creatures and pretty insane challenges.”
Icarus: No Rescue – Documentary Reveal Trailer
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That sort of episodic approach also gives Rocketwerkz a chance to do something that might be unique among survival games: develop its story. Already, the studio has laid some of the groundwork for what the tale of Icarus might be with an eight-minute documentary style video. It catches up with a group of First Cohort prospectors some 20 years after their time on Icarus, and while it explains what the game is like and what players will face, it also crafts a tale of how Icarus was explored and some of the intrigue about what might be going on there.
“We have an incredible concept team, an incredible team in our world-building and our lore-building, with an insane amount of experience,” Hall said. “That’s been a big focus, not only to craft really interesting survival mechanics, but have you actually explore a world. And sessionizing the survival gameplay makes that a lot more straightforward for us to do, because we can give you all these new scenarios to do without breaking your world while still giving you that player story progression through your character that builds between it, and binds them like mortar binding bricks. So absolutely, there is a whole universe. And I think when you watch the in-universe documentary, it will leave no doubt in your mind that we have some pretty aggressive and ambitious plans for storytelling.”