PlayStation Portal Is Back In Stock at Walmart

The PlayStation Portal, Sony’s handheld gaming accessory for the PS5 console, is finally back in stock at Walmart, but who knows for how long. It’s almost always sold out everywhere, so don’t hesitate to place an order if you’ve been waiting. The PS Portal is not a standalone device, like the PS Vita. It’s a remote player for the PlayStation 5, so you’ll need a PS5 to use it. That said, it streams games from your console over Wi-Fi, essentially letting you play your PS5 games from anywhere in your home. Check out our PlayStation Portal review to see what our critic thought of it.

PlayStation Portal Back in Stock at Walmart

PS Portal is basically a DualSense controller with an 8-inch LCD screen in the middle of it. It lets you stream games from your PS5 at up to 60fps, with a 1080p screen resolution, so it should look plenty sharp considering the screen’s dimensions. It also features the full slate of vibrations, haptic feedback, and adaptive triggers you’d get from a standard DualSense — something that’s missing if you stream your PS5 games to a phone, tablet, computer, or Steam Deck. It will also work when you’re away from home, provided you have a strong internet connection and you left your PS5 in rest mode.

It should be said that the PlayStation Portal isn’t the only way to stream your PS5 games over Wi-Fi within your home. As mentioned above, you can do that on many internet-connected devices, including phones, tablets, computers, and Steam Deck. Just download the PS Remote Play app to set it up (details here). It’s a little more complicated to stream to Steam Deck, but just search for Chiaki and you can probably figure it out. You can also check out our PlayStation Portal vs. Steam Deck comparison for a look at both handhelds side-by-side.

The developers of Dead Cells, Darkest Dungeon and Slay The Spire are launching their own “triple-I” Game Awards

A regular rogue’s gallery of independent game developers – including the creators of Dead Cells, Slay The Spire, Darkest Dungeon, Spiritfarer, Terraria and V Rising – have clubbed together to run their own videogame showcase: the Triple-I Initiative. Initially screening on 10th April, it’ll be a 45-minute, unhosted, back-to-back series of trailers, reveals and surprise game or demo releases, designed (as per the press release) “to highlight fan-favorite games and hype up established indie classics as well as new IPs”. It could become a yearly thing, but that’ll obviously depend on how well the first showcase goes down.

According to a few of the organisers, the IIIIs – as they shall now and forever be known – reflect a high level of anxiety even among more established indie teams about finding an audience, together with a feeling that they aren’t being served by existing showcases like the Geoffies, with their blockbuster headliners, celebrity cameos and extended Kojima soliloquies.

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A New Corpse Party Game Is Creeping Onto Switch This Autumn

Hey, who turned out the lights?

Those who are easily scared might want to look away for a moment because the cult-classic Japanese horror series, Corpse Party, is once again getting creepy on Switch as Corpse Party II: Darkness Distortion brings the chills this Autumn (or ‘Fall,’ if you’d rather).

Published by Marvelous Europe (XSEED in North America) and developed by MAGES, Darkness Distortion looks set to contain all of your standard scares. There’s a creepy old hospital, a spooky legend and a decades-old curse to deal with as you try your best to help three high school friends survive the night.

Read the full article on nintendolife.com

Stampede: Racing Royale on Xbox Insider Program – Test Drive the Wild 60-Player Online Kart Racer

Ahem… ‘scuse me, is this thing on?

Hey there! Chris here from the Stampede: Racing Royale team. We’re super excited to bring our upcoming free-to-play racing game to Xbox Insider Program today! Like, right now! If you’re wondering what in the world this is all about, sit back, grab a snack, and let me give you the elevator pitch…

Developed by the racing veterans and all-round swell folks at Sumo Leamington, Stampede: Racing Royale combines the fun and thrill of kart racing, with the tension, competition, and social shenanigans of a battle royale. Imagine dropping into a go-kart and racing in 60-player online events (yes, sixty!), avoiding elimination across three rounds, and competing to become the ultimate champion. Throw in a variety of wild power-ups to deploy, incredible maps to master, and different modes like Battle and Zombies, and you’ve got yourself a tasty cocktail known as ‘Stampede: Racing Royale’.

There’s no point in racing well if you don’t look good doing it, either. This early version of the game already includes over 450 different customisation items to discover, earn, and equip for both your kart and character. From cheese wheels, to pirate costumes, to wearing an octopus on your head (they’re called Ollie!), play and progress to stand out on the track with the rarest and wildest gear.

We may be early on in Stampede’s journey, but there’s still plenty to keep you coming back for one more match. Special Events will mix things up with different scenarios and limited-time rewards to earn. Account levels and kart progression will see you unlock Rare and Legendary gear to show off. Challenges are there to, err, challenge you to complete objectives and win more goodies.

There’s so much more that Stampede will be serving up over time, but we’re getting ahead of ourselves. With Early Access kicking off later this year, joining Xbox Insider Program is an opportunity for our wonderful dev team to preview fresh features and additions, and a chance for you to test-drive what we’re building. Whether you’re on Xbox Series X|S or Windows PC, head to the Xbox Insider Hub now, find Stampede: Racing Royale, and jump into the action.

Whilst progress and unlocks unfortunately can’t be carried over once Early Access begins, we wanted to make sure your support for Stampede is rewarded. Play at any time via the Xbox Insider Program and, in a future version of Stampede, we’ll drop an exclusive gift into your account, available only to Xbox Insiders. Just make sure you’re playing on the same Xbox account you used for Xbox Insiders to redeem it.

Our first public playtests in 2023 allowed us to make improvements driven by community feedback, and we’ll be doing exactly the same with Xbox Insider Program. Keep an eye out for surveys and announcements in the Xbox Insider Hub to give your opinion, and share your thoughts on our official Discord server – or just hang out with us there. We’re cool, honest…

Stampede: Racing Royale is all about conquering the chaos with friends and against the world, making memories with fast-paced automotive shenanigans. The 10,000-IQ plays, the epic fails, the sick drifts – all that stuff. So, grab some friends, play, stream, give us your hot takes, and be part of the wildest racing event in existence. Now, where did I leave that homing missile…?

Ready to hit the track?

Note: This playtest has limited capacity and is offered on a first-come, first-served basis.

  1. Open the Xbox Insider Hub on your Xbox Series X|S or Windows PC.
  2. Navigate to Previews > Stampede: Racing Royale
  3. Select Join.
  4. Wait for registration to complete, and you should be directed to the correct Store Page to install the preview.

Need a pit stop?

If you experience any issues while playing Stampede: Racing Royale, please use “Report a problem” so we can investigate. (Note: This is only for Xbox consoles.)

  1. Hold down the home button on your Xbox controller.
  2. Select Report a problem.
  3. Select the Games category and Stampede: Racing Royale subcategory.
  4. Fill out the form, in detail, and select Submit.

Wanna keep in touch?

Stampede: Racing Royale on X/Twitter || YouTube || TikTok || Instagram

Xbox Insider on X/Twitter || Reddit

The post Stampede: Racing Royale on Xbox Insider Program – Test Drive the Wild 60-Player Online Kart Racer appeared first on Xbox Wire.

Pepper Grinder review: short, sweet and incredibly neat

Pepper Grinder is one of those games that has so many great moments in it that recounting them would almost feel unfair to anyone hoping to play it. There are feats of platforming prowess on show here that should really be experienced fresh and unsullied by rudimentary descriptions of them, because to say anymore would be to spoil the surprise. This feels doubly important when the game itself is so fleeting in length, its brief and dizzying journey through the dirt, magma, ice and marshy bogs of this strange, treasure-stuffed island coming to a swift conclusion in just over three and a half hours. It left me wanting more the moment the credits rolled, but deep down I know it’s also perfectly formed just the way it is. Rather than outstay its welcome, Pepper Grinder shows up, performs its party trick, then gets the hell out of the way, leaving you to bask in the warm glow of a good game well done.

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Pepper Grinder Review

To describe a game as being a non-stop grind from start to finish would be considered a negative in almost any other context, but not in the case of Pepper Grinder. This energetic platforming adventure straps a high-powered drill to your hand and throttles you forward through a series of terrain-churning 2D paths littered with enemies to pummel and challenging platform sections to navigate at speed. It’s lively, fluid, and frequently frantic, and folds in some fun diversions that help each stage stand out, even though a surprisingly short list of levels means that Pepper Grinder is here for a good time rather than a long time.

The setup is simple: a young girl named Pepper washes ashore on a mysterious island crawling with narwhal-like creatures known as the Narlings, gets unceremoniously dropped to the bottom of a cavern, straps on a power drill (and gives it the grooviest of Bruce Campbell-like revs) before riding a wave of mutilation through the monster army and gathering enough gemstones along the way to bedazzle a pair of Beyonce’s boots. From there it never stops feeling great to steer the pint-sized Pepper through sand and soil like a gas-fuelled groundhog, before emerging at an enemy’s feet to give them the spikiest of surprise attacks.

[Pepper Grinder] feels highly reminiscent of Sega’s Ecco the Dolphin, only with turf in place of surf.

Yet although it involves carving holes through rock and dirt with a runaway power drill, Pepper Grinder’s momentum-based movement doesn’t exactly break new ground. It actually feels highly reminiscent of Sega’s Ecco the Dolphin, only with turf in place of surf; swapping out bodies of water for suspended chunks of earth to form the basis of an adventure that’s less about landing precisely on the top of platforms than it is tunneling straight through them. Still, although it may effectively be an echo of an Ecco, Pepper Grinder successfully stands on its own thanks to the sheer variety of challenges to be found in its stages. In one you might get a literal helping hand between platforms from a friendly giant, while in another you’ll dive drill-first into saltwater sections and tear through the underbelly of heavily-armed Narling attack boats in order to sink them.

Assault and Pepper

In fact, although Pepper Grinder is almost entirely focussed on boring through rock, rarely does it run the risk of becoming boring itself. Not only does it introduce neat new ways to evolve the drill-based thrills, including a grappling hook to swing Pepper from one crumbly corridor to the next or bodies of water to skim along like an overly sharpened stone, but it also occasionally drops in some heavier hardware to consistently change things up. A machine gun attachment introduces captivating bursts of Contra-inspired carnage as you mow down monster mobs swarming from all directions. Meanwhile a hulking, drill-powered mech suit allows you to tear down buildings and stomp enemy skulls in the sort of devastating 2D rampage rarely seen outside of, well, Rampage. These sequences break up the otherwise non-stop subsurface swerving, although they also occasionally create fractures in the framerate, too (at least on PC).

Performance compromises aside, what’s great about these entertaining enhancements is that they’re used sparingly enough to keep them feeling special, and they allow for some nice surprises along the way. I went from grinding to grinning the first time I came upon a Narling piloting a snowmobile and then realised I could punt him out of the driver’s seat and take control of the vehicle myself, not unlike the magic moment several decades ago when I first discovered I could brazenly hijack Lakitu’s cloud in the original Super Mario Bros. Everything benefits from a smartly streamlined control setup built around a couple of face buttons and the right trigger, so it all feels intuitive as you seamlessly shift between boring holes through the earth to blasting bullets through enemies.

While there’s a healthy variety of enemy types to encounter in Pepper Grinder, it’s somewhat deflating that there are only four boss fights to be found, but they’re at least significantly distinct from each other. One involved a close encounter with a bus-sized rhino beetle that scrambled up the walls and along the ceiling, while another challenged me with toppling a towering magmaworm that punched momentum-halting holes in the terrain with its own pair of damaging drill-arms. While they are certainly physically imposing, none of these bosses are particularly tough to take down since their attack and movement patterns are limited and mostly easy to avoid. That is, with the exception of the final boss, whose wide area-of-effect strikes had me riding my luck just as much as Pepper’s power drill as I frequently surfed my way within a pixel’s width of death. As a result, overcoming Pepper Grinder’s hardened final hurdle left me feeling invigorated as I watched the credits finally roll after multiple tension-filled attempts.

It’s a rock-busting blast while it lasts, then, but it must be said that Pepper Grinder is a fairly compact adventure, and it only took me three hours to work my way through the 20-odd levels that make up its four worlds. While it’s true that it certainly doesn’t outstay its welcome, I can’t help but feel like it could have done with another couple of zones to plow through – especially since the ones included here are fairly boilerplate for the platforming genre. A snowy ice realm and lava-filled fire zone might be par for the course, but I would have loved to have seen developer Ahr Ech flex its considerably creative talents and conjure up a few other unique environments to house its entertaining style of subterranean surfing.

What’s Mined is Yours

As far as replay potential goes, each stage contains five skull coins to collect, typically hidden behind false walls or at the end of particularly tricky platforming sections, and you can spend them at the in-game shop to unlock a bonus level in each world at the cost of 10 coins a piece. These levels are some of Pepper Grinder’s most enjoyable, including a Donkey Kong Country-inspired cannon course that places the emphasis on precise timing as you bisect hovering hordes of enemies carrying spiky shields, and another that forces you to frantically propel yourself skyward through a series of ice clumps cascading down frozen waterfalls.

Outside of these four bonus levels, though, there’s little of note to spend your hard-earned gems and skull coins on. You can buy bog-standard cosmetics like palette-swapped hair and clothing for Pepper, as well as character stickers and level landscapes that can be arranged in a fairly frivolous sticker book. Since I wasn’t particularly interested in either, I ended up with pockets lined with unspent gems and little incentive to backtrack through stages in search of the skull coins I missed. However, the time attack mode unlocked after beating Pepper Grinder’s campaign did manage to drag me back in for another hour or so, since its medal-based time challenges are surprisingly strict and demand pinpoint power-drilling to earn, and getting into the supreme flow state required to pass them is when Pepper Grinder is at its most exhilarating.

I’m enjoying the unique challenge of playing Darktide with rubbish weapons and no talents

I’ve griped before that Warhammer 40,000 Darktide hides satisfying challenges behind tedious grind, but another interesting challenge is easily missed and forgotten at the opposite end of the scale. Darktide is hard when you start a new character, with weapons that barely scratch some foes and no talents to back them up. It’s a challenge unlike the official high difficulty levels, which lean towards drowning you in special enemies. So after hitting level 30 on all four classes and grinding out great gear, I’ve started a new character who’ll never learn skills or get a good gun. She’s quite bad, and that’s quite fun.

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Celeste Creator’s Next Game ‘Earthblade’ Gets Delayed, Will No Longer Release In 2024

“It feels like the start of a new era”.

It has been a whopping three years since we first heard about Earthblade, the 2D “explor-action” game from Celeste developer Extremely OK Games. This pretty pixel art platformer was given a 2024 release window back in late 2022, but now, it seems, things are going to be pushed back a little as the developers have announced a delay.

The news came in the form of a blog post from Extremely OK Games’ R&D Director, Maddy Thorson, in which she thanked fans for their continued support of the project, but confirmed that “this game ain’t coming out in 2024”.

Read the full article on nintendolife.com

Helldivers 2 Gets Two New Stratagems That Should Help Take Down Those Annoying Automatons

Helldivers 2 developer Arrowhead has released two new Stratagems to help players in the fight against the Automatons and Terminids.

First up is the MG-101 Heavy Machine Gun, which costs 6,000 requisition. This Stratagem is described as “a very powerful but difficult-to-wield machine gun with intense recoil.” It’s got a three second call-in time, a 480 cooldown, and unlimited uses.

And finally, the LAS-99 Quasar Cannon Stratagem is now in the game. This weapon charges up to fire a powerful, explosive energy burst, with a long cooldown period after firing. The Quasar costs 7,500 requisition, has a three second call-in time,480 second cooldown time, and unlimited use.

The Heavy Machine Gun and the Quasar Cannon are the first new Stratagems to hit Helldivers 2 since the release of mechs earlier this month. Arrowhead mentions the “Automaton horde” specifically in its announcement, so hopefully the two additions will help with Helldivers 2’s current major order, which revolves around fighting the alien robots.

While Helldivers 2 just got two new toys to play with, Arrowhead has warned players against snowball fights because they cause the game to crash. If you’re looking for more on Helldivers 2, check out IGN’s feature on the Let Me Solo Her of Helldivers 2, a player who has answered over 100 SOS Beacons as part of a mission to help others. Helldivers 2 has become one of the surprise hits of 2024 since launching in February, topping the charts on Steam and reportedly selling around three million copies. According to at least one analyst, it’s still growing. Check out IGN’s Helldivers 2 review to find out why it’s going down so well.

Wesley is the UK News Editor for IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.

In Chymicalia, you’re the slave of a teleporting alchemy shop

Chymicalia is an adventure game and/or visual novel “about causing chaos in a small Yorkshire town with unlicensed alchemy”. Hey, I’m from a small Yorkshire town originally! I recognise that chip shop with the palsied neon sign! And hey, that looks like the underpass they told us kids to stay away from! And the textile mill they eventually turned into an old folks home! And the teleporting sentient potion shop where we used to hang out and play pogs! Wait, scratch the last one.

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