It’s unclear where publisher Activision will stream the game’s multiplayer, but you can set a reminder on Twitter to be notified when the broadcast will go live. The reveal will likely be livestreamed on the official Call of Duty Twitch and YouTube channels. It’s also unclear what aspects of Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War’s multiplayer will be shown, as well as how it will connect to Warzone.
The Call of Duty Twitter account shared a brief teaser video of what appears to be unseen Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War footage. The clip, below, shows players shooting in a desolate cavern, driving around on dune buggies, and evading exploding helicopters.
Recently, Activision provided some small details about Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War, including information on Zombies, how cross-gen and cross-play support works, and more. The publisher also confirmed some multiplayer details, saying that Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War will feature a battle pass and a “steady stream” of post-launch DLC with additional maps and modes.
This reveal announcement came not long after a few minutes of Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War multiplayer footage leaked online. The leaked gameplay showed two teams of six–either on the CIA or DGI side of the coin–skirmishing on a neon-lit Miami street. Meanwhile, the mode tasked players with attacking or defending a VIP with just one life each round akin to Search and Destroy.
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There is no singular theme to the puzzles in The Last Campfire. In fact, there aren’t even distinct spaces where puzzles exist. Instead, the entirety of this quaint puzzle adventure is just one puzzle built on another. Yet despite this, The Last Campfire isn’t simply one conundrum after the other. It’s a touching tale of helping others while finding your way, and sometimes accepting that not everyone who might look like they’re ready to move on needs a nudge in that direction.
You play as Ember, a small hooded figure lost in a world between worlds. After some misfortune, you find yourself completely off your intended path, searching for a way back to the gates that so frustratingly passed you by. Littered across your journey are a handful of campfires, each situated in the center of distinct biomes that house numerous other characters in need of your help. These similarly lost souls, known as Forlorn, have abandoned hope of moving on from this world, requiring you to help them overcome any fears and doubts holding them back.
Each manifests as a bite-sized puzzle with its own distinct theme. Some puzzles involve moving an object through a level toward a weighted switch, navigating chasms, and pulley elevators. Others task you with keeping a small flame lit through a maze littered with wind-generating hazards or rotating a block logically to set nearby lanterns alight without extinguishing the flame. The sheer variety of the puzzles is impressive, as is their intelligent design, which makes each one’s premise easy to understand. None of The Last Campfire’s puzzles are brain-racking conundrums, but each one does still manage to stir a sense of accomplishment on its solution.
The themes of the puzzles also reflect the troubles of the characters hosting them, with each darkened puzzle room appearing as a peek into their mind. These small stories unfold as you progress with your solution, with the folklore-style narration providing intriguing context to each of your actions. For example, a rusting robot once bursting with imagination has had its creative spark diminished, with the puzzle guiding you toward this small spark and helping to reignite it into a roaring flame once again. In another, the thoughts of an anxiety-filled Forlorn manifest as a twisting maze of incomplete pipes, tasking you to find a clear path through the confusion. Even with the large quantity of stories, I found myself compelled by each individual one, though their brevity did leave me craving for a chance to further explore each character.
The Last Campfire also showcases some restraint, featuring numerous characters who reject Ember’s help. Its message isn’t so much that every problem has a solution, but rather that the solutions themselves need to be well-thought-out before you attempt them. Some of The Last Campfire’s characters aren’t at a stage where they’re ready to accept Ember’s help, and it’s touching that the game frames this in an accepting manner.
Each of the small hubs that host these characters and their stories is a puzzle room itself, featuring more intricate problems to solve. Some of these puzzles play out like an adventure game, where you have to hunt down specific items to solve problems, such as bribing a giant frog with a large, juicy worm so that it will offer you passage to a new area. Despite taking place in a larger area, the solutions to these puzzles remain relatively straightforward, with helpful hints guiding you toward solutions if you happen to get stuck. The hints don’t outright spoil the fun of coming to the solution yourself but help point you in the right direction if you’ve scoured the area and just missed a deviously obscured path.
Other puzzles are more intricate in their presentation and are some of the best The Last Campfire has to offer. A foggy forest maze is a standout here, similar in structure to that found in The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening but with its own distinctly memorable mechanics. Instead of memorising the correct path through a series of hazy gates, you have to venture through them in search of pieces belonging to a central stone map. With the discovery of each new piece, you’re able to manipulate the routes of the gates around you, charting paths to new areas that were previously inaccessible. But just like its smaller and more self-contained puzzles, The Last Campfire balances its difficulty with these larger-scale puzzles deftly, gently challenging you but always being clear with each puzzle’s objectives and the means with which you can solve them.
Exploring each of these biomes is a treat too thanks to The Last Campfire’s bright color palette and whimsical world design. Its characters range from charming to frightening, with a welcoming cook brewing a delectable stew over a large black cauldron contrasted with an imposing bird atop a cold stone throne pushing you to toss aside your adventure. It’s easy to get engrossed in The Last Campfire’s mysterious world, but performance issues sometimes break its spell. On Nintendo Switch, the frame rate would often lurch to a near halt when transitioning between the larger world and self-contained puzzles, while it inexplicably crawled while traversing small, empty areas. It’s not prohibitive to the slower-paced gameplay, but it was frequent enough to be quite bothersome.
But when The Last Campfire captivates–which it does so often–it’s difficult not to sink into its breezy pacing and satisfying puzzle-solving. It never overstays its welcome or stretches puzzle ideas beyond their limits, letting each one leave an impression despite their brevity. The Last Campfire’s narrative contextualizes each of these with small anecdotes, letting your imagination fill in the blanks of its world between worlds to the backdrop of its colorful imagery. It’s a consistently relaxing and pleasant experience.
Bots that cheat, spam racist comments, and generally ruin games have become and remain a big problem in Valve’s Team Fortress 2.
The newest solution by an unknown player (or group of players) pits the “good” bots against “bad” bots. Called extermination bots, these new non-human players target cheating bots, and according to a Twitter user who shared screenshots of the bots in action, “they’re friendly with true players, [and] they will help you.” They’ve also been sighted in-game in bot takedown video compilations.
there is a new type of bots on tf2 “the extermination bot services”, they’re cheaters but scripted specially to kill other cheaters in any game, they won’t kill you, if you see one of them don’t kick him, they’re friendly with true players, they will help you. pic.twitter.com/M3FSuM4GBu
Valve tried to implement an anti-bot fix in June 2020 by preventing “certain new accounts” from using the chat function in official matchmaking modes. But commented that it is still searching for ways to “mitigate the use of new and free accounts for abusive purposes.”
Team Fortress 2 players have made attempts to resist the bots, created communities like TF2HackerSwat (formerly TF2HackerPolice) to share information about them. A moderator of that Reddit community, WordpuzzleQ, shared with Kotaku what players in the subreddit do against bots: “We use TF2’s wide array of unlocks to be as resistant to the instant headshots as possible. Second priority are high-DPS loadouts. We try to get the Steam accounts of the bots and report them, as that’s the most we can do.” A player also developed a TF2 bot detector that automatically detects and votekicks bots.
Unfortunately, even with the players’ efforts, bots still remain an issue in Team Fortress 2. And though the extermination bot is a fun twist in the war against bots, it’s hardly a final cure. A fix by Valve looks uncertain as well, since a Valve employee confirmed in 2019 that “there’s hardly anyone working on it.” Until a more effective solution is released, the Team Fortress 2 community will have to continue fighting against bots on their own.
Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1 + 2 Remastered is out now and I’m sure many of you folks out there playing it want to mess around with cheats or mods. Well, to get them all, it’s quite simple: Just complete the THPS 1 and THPS 2 tours and you’ll unlock them.
You have the most useful ones right off the bat, though. Mods like perfect balance, no bailing, and full special meter are available as assists, which come in handy if you’re having trouble with some aspects of the tours–there’s also no consequence or drawback from using them outside of ranked modes. However, the more silly ones are locked behind finishing the tours. Once you complete the THPS 1 tour, you get Skater Size–you can be massive and take up most of the screen, or you can be vewy smol and make it impossible to see what tricks you’re doing.
After finishing the THPS 2 tour, you get a few more mods. These include doubling the base score of your tricks, further modifying your skater’s stats in session, and some graphics filters. The filters are “Green Boy” that makes things look greenish like an old Game Boy, “Inverted” which inverts the color spectrum, “Black and White” which is self-explanatory, and “Old Timey” that looks like a sepia tone effect.
Note that you do not need to achieve 100% completion of objectives in either THPS 1 or THPS 2 tour to unlock these game mods, you just need to make it to the last competition in the level select and finish it. Once you’re done with those tours, the cheats will be available in the pause menu just like the assists and moveset options.
A look at the Game Mods menu in THPS 1 + 2 Remastered with cheats unlocked.
Double Base Score (On or Off)
Stats (Expert, Normal, Super)
Graphics (Normal, Inverted, Black and White, Green Boy, Old Timey)
Skater Size (Tiny, Normal, Giant)
We have much more coverage on this excellent nostalgia trip, so be sure to read our Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1 + 2 Remastered review in which author Mat Paget said, “Playing through the newly remade levels is immensely enjoyable, and that on its own is enough to call Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1 + 2 a success. However, smart additions and an engaging challenge system make it an experience that’s more than just a brief skate through Tony Hawk’s past.”We also have a tip onhow to unlock the secret characterOfficer Dick who’s played by actor Jack Black, and you can read about howculturally impactful the THPS serieshas been for many of us.
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The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild sent players on dozens of quests to help protect Hyrule from Ganon. Players had hoped they’d get the chance to rebuild Castle Town, one of the main locations across the Zelda series, once they finished the game’s main quest line, but they never got the chance. Holomento, an upcoming RPG, wants to give players the chance to rebuild its in-game castle town. It’s not Hyrule, but players can use their imagination.
“I’ve always wanted to rebuild/upgrade Hyrule Castle in Breath of the Wild and I figured it would be fun to try something similar in my game,” said game developer Sean Weech in a Reddit post. “Once you clear the central castle dungeon in the game, you will have the opportunity to upgrade various parts of the castle by removing boulders, replanting trees and more.”
Holomento is an upcoming third-person RPG developed by Weech. It’s scheduled to launch in 2021 and is currently in a closed alpha.
Breath of the Wild fans have wanted to go back and rebuild a war torn Hyrule since the open-world adventure launched in 2017. They envisioned a bustling Castle Town much bigger and livelier than the one in Ocarina of Time. They were hoping Breath of the Wild DLC would address their desire–but it never happened.
Hyrule Castle in a Breath of the Wild cinematic
Nintendo did give players a glimpse of what Castle Town looked like before Calamity Ganon destroyed it in one of Breath of the Wild’s memory segments. Players wanted a chance to help bring that version of the location to the game by completing missions similar to the Tarrey Town quests that let you build a settlement on a small part of the map. Players still hope something like this will come with the Breath of the Wild sequel that was announced at E3 2019.
“I’m so glad they decided to add that into the memory. It gave at least a little taste of what pre-calamity Hyrule was like, for those of us that were desperate to see,” said Redditor cacio0. “You can even see some people walking around the street.”
Developer Derek Yu has confirmed that Spelunky 2 will launch on Steam on Tuesday, September 29. You can wishlist the game on the platform right now to be notified when it releases.
This new date comes after the game suffered a delay on PC, missing its planned September 15 launch. Yu said the extra time was to ensure the game “runs well” on PC, as well as to test online multiplayer. Spelunky 2 still drops on September 15 for PlayStation 4.
Splenuky 2 was originally due out toward the end of 2019 but suffered a delay to focus on “density and detail.” Yu went quiet for a few months, only popping back up in March 2020 to confirm that development was going well before announcing the September release date at the beginning of August. He also shared a blog post at the time detailing how much more expansive Spelunky 2 is over its 2012 predecessor.
“Our hope is that all this new content is going to be fun for new players as well as existing Spelunky fans,” Yu said. “Not only is there more to see and do, but there will be more opportunities to find a playstyle that suits you best. And as you do explore the game world and unravel its secrets, you’ll be building a community of characters, old and new, who will support you on your journey and make your adventure feel richer and more interconnected.”
We’ve compiled Spelunky 2’s Steam system requirements below so you can check to see if your rig can handle the game.
Animal Crossing: New Horizons gives players a ton of freedom in how they want to design their islands. They’ve used that freedom to come up with new events and games to play with their friends online. One of the most inventive creations is by Redditor BunnyBoiEthos, who is turning their village into a Mario Party map.
“I love the [Mario Party] series,” BunnyBoiEthos wrote in a Reddit Post. “At first I thought I was gonna model it after some of my fave boards (Shy Guy’s Perplex Express and Grand Canal and a couple others) but then decided to just make it a bunch of smaller boards with themes based on the island!”
BunnyBoiEthos’ island has blue, red, and question mark spaces laid out across the map like a game board. The spaces, along with some of the pathways, are created with custom designs. Nook’s Cranny and the Able Sisters shop are placed as if they were the item shops from Mario Party. It’s still a work in progress, but BunnyBoiEthos wants to try running Mario Party-like games within Animal Crossing soon.
“I have a couple minigame ideas and I get inspiration from people making games on YouTube,” they told GameSpot. “Each area has a couple fruits associated with it and players can get fruit by exchanging bells on fruit spaces (like Mario Party stars) or landing on happening spaces. The first person to collect all 5 fruit would be the winner.”
Mario Party Island Dream Address: DA-5807-0486-7128
This Mario Party-themed island has highlighted some gameplay features that didn’t make the jump from Animal Crossing: New Leaf to New Horizons. Players could play games, like hide-and-seek or one where you hit a little robot with a hammer, with their friends on the 3DS game’s tropical island. New Horizons has no minigames, outside events like the fishing tournaments, so people are creating their own.
While New Horizons has a ton of in-game sporting goods, none of them can be used. Players have gone as far to use a player character as a ball in games of soccer. Others have built rulesets for game shows like Deal or No Deal. Other simple minigames, like hide-and-seek, are easy enough to duplicate in game as well.
We’re into September now, which means the days are getting shorter and there’s even more reason to stay home and watch your favorite streaming services. Luckily, Netflix has plenty on the way over the next seven days.
Fright fans will want to watch the latest Netflix Original movie The Babysitter: Killer Queen, which is the sequel to the 2017 horror comedy The Babysitter. It’s directed by McG (Terminator: Salvation) once more and continues the story of Cole, a teenage boy who has been targeted by a satanic cult made up of jocks and cheerleaders.
Several animated shows and movies also arrive on Netflix this week. Those ever-popular Pokémon return to Netflix, with the second part of the latest season, Pokémon Journeys. There’s also the animated Spanish fantasy adventure The Idhun Chronicles, based on the popular YA series, plus the hugely successful movie sequel How to Train Your Dragon 2.
Finally, sci-fi fans can revisit the fantastic 2016 thriller Midnight Special, which stars Michael Shannon as a father attempting to save his son from the US government and a cult who believe he has special powers. There’s also the new Netflix comedy The Duchess, in which comedian and writer Katherine Ryan plays a trouble-making single mom.
What’s new on Netflix this week?
September 7
Midnight Special
My Octopus Teacher – Netflix Docs
September 8
Starbeam: Season 2 – Netflix Kids
September 9
Cuties – Netflix Movies
La Línea: Shadow of Narco – Netflix Docs
Get Organized with the Home Edit – Netflix Series
September 10
Greenleaf: Season 5
The Idhun Chronicles – Netflix Anime
Julie and the Phantoms – Netflix Kids
The Babysitter: Killer Queen – Netflix Movies
The Gift: Season 2 – Netflix Series
September 11
Girlfriends: Seasons 1-8
How to Train Your Dragon 2
Pets United – Netflix Kids
Pokemon Journeys: The Series: Part 2 – Netflix Anime
Gamespot’s prolific Lucy James joins Joe and Cardy to discuss their experiences with Marvel’s Avengers this week. Also, Nintendo thought it would be a laugh to announce half a dozen Mario games out of nowhere so they delve into everything from revisiting classics to being able to drive mini Mario Karts around your house. There’s also some delightful indie game chat on offer including Spiritfarer and A Short Hike.
There’s a return for The Endless Search along with some delightful feedback and of course, a big helping of Willem Dafoe.
Remember, if you want to get in touch with the podcast, please do: [email protected].
Alpha footage from Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War’s multiplayer appears to have leaked online, revealing a number of details about the mode ahead of its planned reveal on September 9.
The multiplayer footage appears to have been accidentally streamed on Twitch by user DougisRaw for around seven minutes, with a four-minute segment of that stream being captured and circulated online.
There is a lot to glean from the footage of the 6v6 VIP Escort match, which takes place on a new map set in Miami, and follows DougisRaw as they attempt to stop the enemy VIP from reaching an extraction point. Here’s everything we noticed:
The four starting classes are Stealth Ops, Pointman, Grenadier, Fire Support and Double Agent.
Weapons have five attachment slots and level-based progression.
Some weapons shown in the footage include the XM4, the AK-74u, the M16 and the Gallo SA12 Shotgun.
Every loadout has a Tactical, Lethal and Field Upgrade slot, which is filled by the ‘Field Mic’ equipment in this footage.
Perks include Tactical Mask, Flak Jacket, Quartermaster, Scavenger, Ninja and Ghost.
Every loadout has a ‘Wildcards’ slot that lets players modify their loadout. One custom class features a wildcard called ‘Perk Greed’ which appears to let players take two perks per section.
Another Wildcard called ‘Danger Close’ looks as if it provides double tactical and lethal grenades.
It looks like multiplayer maps open with a quick cinematic – in this case, the team jumps out of a van.
Players only have one life each and can be incapacitated and revived in VIP Escort – the match ends when a team wins four rounds.
Each player has a visual health bar that gets depleted as they’re shot.
The two factions in this particular mission are known as the CIA and the DGI.
The round ends with a montage of the ‘Best Play’ of the game.
