Fortnite’s Week 7 Secret Battle Star Location Guide (Season 9 Utopia Challenge)

Hot on the heels of Fortnite‘s 9.30 patch, Week 7’s challenges have now arrived on PS4, Xbox One, PC, Nintendo Switch, and mobile. Not only will completing these tasks help level your Battle Pass up and unlock more of Season 9’s cosmetic rewards, an extra bonus awaits if you can clear all seven challenges from a given week: a special loading screen that points to a free item hidden somewhere around the map.

The loading screen is the reward for completing one of Season 9’s Utopia challenges, and the item they point to varies by the week. Each even-numbered Utopia challenge will lead you to a Fortbyte, a new kind of collectible to find in Season 9. Odd-numbered Utopia challenges, on the other hand, will guide you to a free Battle Star, which will level your Battle Pass up by one full tier once collected.

Complete seven weeks’ worth of Season 9 challenges and you’ll unlock the loading screen pictured below. This week’s screen is set in the Pressure Plant, the new facility located where Season 8’s volcano stood. The clue this time should be fairly easy to spot; look on the left side of the picture and you’ll see a Battle Star on the set of stairs. That’s where you’ll find it in the game.

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Make your way to the Pressure Plant after you jump into a match and locate the stairs featured in the loading screen–the Battle Star will be floating in the air there, just as teased. Build your way up to it to collect it, then finish the match and you’ll level your Battle Pass up by one tier. If you need more help finding it, we’ve marked the Battle Star’s location on the map below. You can also see where we go to find it in the video at the top of this guide.

Unlike the aforementioned Fortbytes, which can be found by anyone who owns a Season 9 Battle Pass, the secret Battle Star will only appear if you’ve cleared its corresponding Utopia challenge and unlocked the above loading screen, so you can’t simply go to the right area and expect to find it if you haven’t done the necessary work. If you need helping finishing any of this season’s challenges, you can find tips for the trickier ones in our complete Fortnite Season 9 challenges guide.

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Fortnite’s 9.30 update arrived on June 18 and added a new item to the game, the Chug Splash, which can be thrown to heal yourself and other players within the range of its explosion. With the update, Epic also vaulted three items–the Boom Bow, Dual Pistols, and Dynamite–and tweaked a handful of other ones. You can find the full patch notes for the update on Epic’s official website.

TMNT and Marvel Arcade1up Cabinets Coming This Fall

Towering above the E3 landscape is a 16-foot behemoth of an arcade cabinet. Arcade1up is known primarily for shrinking cabinets down, to a much more manageable 4-foot size, but with the enormous crowds moving about the floor of the LA Convention Center, an oversize arcade cabinet is a good way to bring attention to the ones you’ll be able to bring home this fall.

Arcade1up, who’ve previously taken such classics as Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat and made them easier to bring home, is showing off its new 4-player cabinets on the floor of E3 2019.

Coming out October 13, 4-player Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle and Marvel Super Heroes cabinets are playable now at E3. That doesn’t do you any good if you’re not at E3, so here are some nice photos to make up for it.

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Monster Hunter World Getting New Dynamic Difficulty, Even Without Iceborne

During Capcom’s E3 Monster Hunter World: Iceborne developer showcase, we learned about quite a few new features, including the Steamworks minigame, a view mode camera, and most importantly, dynamic difficulty settings. This brand new feature for the Monster Hunter series will be added to the base Monster Hunter World without requiring the Iceborne expansion.

This new dynamic difficulty setting includes two brand new features. For the first time ever, a third difficulty setting is introduced for two-player hunting parties. Not only that, but now if players leave or are disconnected during a hunt, Monster Hunter World will automatically scale the difficulty down to the appropriate level. No more dealing with a multiplayer-scaled monster if you get disconnected, and no worries if you can’t fill out a large party. Though three-player parties are still stuck in the broader multiplayer difficulty category, and palicos still won’t re-spawn, this is still great news.

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Valve’s Newest Game Beat Artifact’s Peak Player Count in Under 2 Hours

Dota Underlords, Valve’s newest game, entered open beta on PC and mobile at noon PT today, and in less than two hours it passed the peak concurrent player count on Steam of Valve’s last game, Artifact.

As of 2pm PT, Dota Underlords had reached a concurrent player count of 62,946, while Artifact’s all time high stopped at 60,740. The big caveat here, of course, is that Dota Underlords is entirely free-to-play, while Artifact costs $20. It had also been in a closed beta open only to select players and those who owned Dota 2’s Battle Pass since last week, but the flood gates are now officially open.

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Crash Team Racing Nitro-Fueled Review

Twenty years ago, Naughty Dog’s Crash Team Racing made a name for itself as “the other good kart racer.” And to this day its dynamic courses, flavorful lore, challenging-yet-clear power-sliding mechanic, and lack of catch-up items make it a game that deserves better than living in Mario Kart’s shadow. Despite a few seriously frustrating single-player races, Crash Team Racing Nitro-Fueled is a thrilling ride that keeps the excellent original game intact while adding some quality of life updates, such as an improved HUD, and obligatory modern trappings such as unlockable cosmetics.

Crash Team Racing Nitro-Fueled instantly transports me back to 1999 and the early 2000s with its familiar tracks, cartoonishly bright colors, and ridiculous plot of stopping Nitros Oxide from turning Earth into a parking lot. But this remaster is far from stuck in the past: visually, it looks stunning with vivid details around every corner and animations that give each character plenty of personality. The ability to swap between characters during Adventure mode and the cosmetic options are welcome additions, and learning to master each of these 31 tracks proved to be a real challenge because of their frequent tight turns, competent (though sometimes cheap) competition from the AI.

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Link’s Awakening Switch: I Stole From a Shop and Was Murdered

After playing over 30 minutes of The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening Remastered for Nintendo Switch I learned three main things: The combat feels great, old-school Zelda puzzles are still fun (and unchanged), and this game is struggling to perform acceptably on the Switch (at least in full-screen mode on a TV) in its current state. Oh, and I also learned that stealing is wrong (albeit very fun). There’s a video of the incident below.

Let’s start with the good stuff: The shield is now mapped to the right trigger so it no longer takes up one of two inventory slots. This means you can block, stab, swipe, spin, AND jump (with Roc’s Feather, which I got in Tail Cave) all without juggling inventory slots. If you’ve played the original game, you know this was annoying and fixing it is a big deal. Here’s some combat footage from my playthrough today:

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Forza Horizon 4: LEGO Speed Champions Review

Playground Games is doing its best to please everybody. Forza Horizon 4’s first expansion – Fortune Island – was the DLC for authentic driving and drifting purists, but its second is a quirkier package that’s more in line with Forza Horizon 3’s memorably wacky Hot Wheels add-on from 2017. After that, Forza Horizon 4: LEGO Speed Champions feels like a logical leap and it looks absolutely terrific, although it doesn’t quite hit the same heights as its Hot Wheels-based predecessor (figuratively or, indeed, literally).

LEGO Speed Champions remains in sync with Playground’s previous work with Hot Wheels – just like the enormous, highway-width orange tracks of Hot Wheels Island, the LEGO bricks here have been scaled up to suit the real world, as if some billionaire lost a bet to a 10-year-old in the toy aisle. The LEGO looks quite remarkable, too – especially under bright sunlight. The softly-scratched surfaces of the LEGO bricks (particularly clear pieces like headlights and windscreens) are incredibly authentic; close up it’s far more in line with the look of The LEGO Movie and its follow-ups than Traveller’s Tales’ more stylised LEGO-branded games over the years.

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New Stranger Things 3 Trailer Teases An Action-Packed Season

Stranger Things has come a long way since it initially premiered back in 2016, and that’s never been more clear than in the new trailer for Season 3 that Netflix released today. A lot has happened to Eleven and her friends, and it seems Season 3 will see the gang fighting against the most dangerous and menacing threat so far.

The new Season 3 trailer, which Netflix says is the final one, is riddled with spoilers about previous events, so steer clear if you’re not caught up.

Season 3 is set in Hawkins, Indiana in the summer of 1985–and yes, elements of the period such as New Coke will appear. In addition to the evil alien threat they’re facing, Eleven and company are learning more about one another. Here is the official description for Season 3:

“School’s out, there’s a brand new mall in town, and the Hawkins crew are on the cusp of adulthood. Romance blossoms and complicates the group’s dynamic, and they’ll have to figure out how to grow up without growing apart. Meanwhile, danger looms. When the town’s threatened by enemies old and new, Eleven and her friends are reminded that evil never ends; it evolves. Now they’ll have to band together to survive, and remember that friendship is always stronger than fear.”

Stranger Things Season 3 premieres July 4 on Netflix. All of the main cast return for Season 3, along with Princess Bride star Cary Elwes who plays the sleazy politician Mayor Kline. There’s also the offspring of some ’80s stars; Jake Busey, son of Point Break star Gary Busey, will play a journalist named Bruce, while Maya Thurman-Hawke (daughter of Uma and Ethan) is set to play a character named Robin.

Stranger Things Season 3 Trailer Teases the Mind Flayer’s Endgame

We’re less than a month away from the premiere of Stranger Things Season 3, which debuts on July 4 as part of Netflix’s genius scheme to keep everyone in America glued to their TVs this Independence Day instead of out getting sunburnt.

Ahead of the show’s return, Netflix has released a new Stranger Things Season 3 trailer that offers us an even better look at the threat facing Mike, Eleven and the rest of the Hawkins gang in the new eight-episode third season.

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Halo Infinite Beta Coming First To Xbox; Split-Screen Already Up And Running

Halo Infinite had a big showing at E3 2019 last week, but Microsoft isn’t done dropping news about the long-awaited Xbox and PC game. Developer 343 Industries to shared some new details on the game, and it’s a lot to take in.

Starting off, 343 confirmed in a blog post that Halo Infinite will support LAN and that the already announced split-screen feature is “up and running” already. That’s a big deal because Halo 5 dropped split-screen in a move that upset a number of series fans.

343 also announced that the beta tests for Halo Infinite, known as “flights,” will take place first on Xbox and then PC. The testing periods will “start small” and then “slowly expand” up until the game’s release in Holiday 2020. “Flighting may come a little bit later for PC players, but we’re treating it as a first-class citizen,” 343 said.

The studio also confirmed that the characters in Halo Infinite will have black undersuits. That sounds like a small detail, but in Halo 4 and Halo 5 players had different colored undersuits, which garnered a mix reaction from fans.

Additionally, 343 teased Halo Infinite’s armor customization options, saying, “if you liked the level of armor customziation in Halo: Reach, you will be pleased [with Halo infinite].” On top of that, 343 confirmed that those who reach the highest level in Halo 5, SR 152, will receive a “token of appreciation” in Halo Infinite.

Finally, 343 stated that it has an internal team of professional gamers testing Halo Infinite’s multiplayer. And on the story side, 343 re-affirmed that Halo Infinite’s story begins “some time after” the end of Halo 5.

Halo Infinite releases in Holiday 2020 as a launch title for Project Scarlett. The game plays on the entire family of Xbox One consoles, as well as PC.