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Nioh 2 has received a free update, and it has brought new playable content and a photo mode to Team Ninja’s punishing action game. Update 1.09, announced over at PlayStation Blog, will let you capture images of some of the game’s stunning vistas and horrifying enemies.

The camera mode will feature plenty of options for fine-tuning, such as exposure, gradation, and lighting and tint adjustments. There are also numerous filters, letting you pretty up your photos of the game’s various grotesque beasts, as well as options to tilt your photos or display watermarks. You can see it in action in the screenshots below.

Nine new missions have also been added, and they’re divided between sub-missions and one Twilight missions. Here’s the complete list, as well as how far you’ll need to be to unlock them, according to Nioh 2 Wiki:

• The Chinese Bellflower Dagger (Clear Shadow chapter)
• The Child Prodigy’s Invitation (Clear The Golden Nation side-mission)
• Farewell to the Past (Clear Twilight chapter)
• A Strong Bond (Clear Twilight chapter)
• Winds of Ruin (Clear Afterglow chapter)
• The Trustworthy (Clear Afterglow chapter)
• Wave of Terror (Clear Afterglow chapter)
• Calamity’s Pulse (Clear Afterglow chapter)
• Mountain of the Dark Lord (Twilight Mission) (Clear Dawn chapter)

1.09 also adds the Guardian Spirit Mizuchi to the game, although we’re not clear on how they are unlocked yet.

Nioh 2 will expand further later this year with a trio of expansions, the first of which arrives in July. These are unlikely to be free, however. The PS4 exclusive received an 8/10 in GameSpot’s review, and reviewer Mike Epstein wrote that “though it sometimes feels like a curse as you play, it is a testament that Nioh 2 successfully grabs and holds your complete attention so close for so long.”

International Museum Day is apparently a real annual event that takes place on May 18, and not being one to shy away from obscure holidays and seasonal events, Animal Crossing: New Horizons is treating the day as an in-game event. It’s called the Stamp Rally, and it runs from May 18 until May 31. Like the May Day event that took place at the beginning of the month, the Stamp Rally gives you a week to visit your island’s museum in order to collect stamps and give you an excuse to spend some time fully appreciating Blathers’ beautiful building of bugs, bones, and bass (among other fish).

How To Participate In Stamp Rally

Taking part in the Stamp Rally couldn’t be simpler. Head into your island’s museum and speak to Blathers, who will explain the event and invite you to visit three different wings of the building–the fish, bug, and fossil wings. The art wing, if you have access to it, isn’t a part of this Stamp Rally event.

How Stamp Rally Works

Your goal is to simply find all the Stamp Rally stations located within each of the three participating museum wings and interact with them to get a stamp on your card. The wings will have three stations each, for a total of nine stations. Once you collect all the stamps on a card, speak to Blathers again to get a completion stamp, as well as your reward.

How To Complete Stamp Rally

Finding the Stamp Rally stations is a simple affair–they’re bright yellow and red booths that you can find located in front of certain exhibits in the participating museum wings. The catch is that the locations of the stamp booths will be randomised each day, but thankfully the wings are small enough that it shouldn’t take too much of your time to run around and find them.

What Do You Get For Stamp Rally?

Completing the Stamp Rally by handing in your completed stamp cards to Blathers will reward you with golden plaques of a fish, butterfly, and fossil, not unlike the ones you see mounted in the museum’s lobby. You can hang these on the wall of your home, which is handy in case you felt like creating your own competing museum to run Blathers out of business.

You can continue to visit the museum and complete the Stamp Rally on subsequent days. The location of the stamp stations will likely change, but the rewards you receive for completing your stamp card will not.

And that’s about all there is to know about this simple event. The next event for Animal Crossing: New Horizons is Wedding Season, a photography-focussed event which will take place for the entire month of June.

Bohemia Interactive’s survival shooter DayZ is enjoying a newfound level of success on Xbox One after the game was recently added to the Xbox Game Pass catalog. The publisher said in a news release that “hundreds of thousands” of new players jumped into DayZ following its introduction into the subscription program on May 7.

The game is “flourishing now more than ever, and has become one of the Most Played games on Xbox,” Bohemia said in its press release (via Eurogamer).

Publishing director Vojtěch Ješátko added: “Xbox Game Pass is a great opportunity for us to open the game to a different audience, and to let a massive number of new players experience DayZ in all its crude harshness and beauty, together with the veterans.”

Launching into a subscription program like Xbox Game Pass carries some risk, of course, but for DayZ at least, it seems to be working out. Not every developer is thrilled with subscription services. A recent GDC survey found that about a quarter of respondents worried that subscription programs may lead to the further de-valuation of games. Additionally, Devolver Digital told GameSpot that subscription services, overall, are a worry to the company.

All of Microsoft’s first-party games, including Halo Infinite later this year, will be available for subscribers at launch through Xbox Game Pass (for Xbox and PC). Some third-party games have launched into subscription catalog too, including the whimsical ’80s game Moving Out.

Xbox Game Pass is set to grow in a big way later this year when Microsoft’s game-streaming service, xCloud, gets folded into it. Currently, you must download and install Xbox Game Pass titles, which can take a long time, but xCloud integration will allow you to stream games with minimal waiting.

In other news about Xbox Game Pass, Rockstar’s celebrated open-world western, Red Dead Redemption 2, is now available in the catalog.

Minecraft developer Mojang is moving into the new decade with a new name, or at least a revised name. The company is now known as Mojang Studios, and it has a new logo to go along with it.

Inspired by the developer’s expansion into multiple offices around the world, Mojang Studios’ new name represents its scale and how it has expanded far beyond a small team working only on Minecraft.

The new logo is made up of little gadgets called “Mojangs,” appropriately enough, and in the trailer they are turned and twisted around to spell out the studio’s name. It sounds like it won’t be the last time we hear about the somewhat sentient gizmos, and they should pop up again as we learn about future Mojang Studios projects.

“They test and tinker, endlessly explore, and help us discover new corners of the Minecraft universe,” Mojang Studios’ head of creative communications said in the announcement post.

Speaking of new content, the developer has several things cooking. Aside from Minecraft and the spinoff game Minecraft Dungeons, Mojang Studios is also creating a feature film, experimenting with new game ideas, and producing a live show. Of course, none of this is stopping its continued work updating Minecraft with new features and content.

Most recently, the Minecraft RTX beta got even more worlds for players to check out. They make use of ray tracing technology to make the game look absolutely gorgeous. Minecraft Dungeons releases May 26 for Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, PS4, and PC.

Fans who’ve watched the new Scooby gang movie, Scoob!, will surely have noticed that, for the first time in a long while, Matthew Lillard is not voicing Shaggy. The Scream actor has been providing the voice for Scooby-Boo’s best pal, Shaggy Rogers, in animated projects for the better part of two decades, ever since he played the role in the first live-action Scooby movie in 2002.

In a huge change up, Will Forte plays Shaggy in Scoob! and recently Entertainment Tonight spoke with Lillard about this shocking changing of the guard.

“Yeah, about Scoob! I don’t have a lot of good things to say,” Lillard lamented. “I wish them all well. I hope the movie does really well.”

“It was a drag and I was surprised that it happened,” he added. “You know, Hollywood’s an interesting place and I’ve been around for a long time. Some of them are easier than others, when you don’t get a job, but that was a bummer. I like playing the part. I like sort of having a legacy in a career that’s been 30 years.”

You can watch the video interview here…

Matthew Lillard not being in Scoob is a crime pic.twitter.com/hIxjyn4XnN

— Ash Crossan (@AshCrossan) May 15, 2020

Lillard also, upon the movie’s release to VOD, offered up this supportive tweet…

Dear SCOOB.

I hope you’re everything the world needs in this time of crisis. Have a great opening. #zoinks. .

— matthew lillard (@MatthewLillard) May 15, 2020

You can check out IGN’s review of Scoob! here, which calls it a “pleasant enough diversion during these trying times,” and also watch the cast of Scoob! respond to IGN comments…

[ignvideo url=”https://www.ign.com/videos/2020/05/16/scoob-cast-respond-to-ign-comments”]

[poilib element=”accentDivider”]

Matt Fowler is a writer for IGN and a member of the Television Critics Association. Follow him on Twitter at @TheMattFowler and Facebook at Facebook.com/MattBFowler.

New game releases have slowed to a crawl as of late, but you can enjoy some of the best retro games for a great price on the Sega Genesis Mini. The plug-and-play system is currently being sold for just $50 on Amazon, and it comes with 40 of the most popular games for the Genesis across several different genres.

Typically sold for $80, the Sega Genesis Mini comes loaded with 40 games from the original Genesis library as well as two bonus games: Darius and an unreleased Genesis version of Tetris. Its design features impressive attention to detail, including a non-functional volume switch, cartridge slot, and expansion port. The console comes with two controllers by default, as well, so you can start playing competitive fighting games and other multiplayer titles right out of the box.

Most of the biggest Genesis games are included on the Genesis Mini, such as Sonic the Hedgehog, Earthworm Jim, Contra: Hard Corps, Castlevania: Bloodlines, Golden Axe, and Ecco the Dolphin. There is plenty of genre variety, as well, with a few great shoot-em-up games such as Thunder Force 3 and Gunstar Heroes.

The Sega Genesis Mini’s software was developed by M2, the same company responsible for the software on the TurboGrafx-16 Mini. The latter system was delayed in North America but is now scheduled to arrive on May 22. It includes a mix of TurboGrafx-16 games and PC Engine games, and it’s the perfect companion to the Sega Genesis Mini.