Month: April 2022

Sorry Torrent! It seems your days as a faithful steed of Elden Ring may be over. Thanks to a custom level created for RedLynx’s motorcycle racing game Trials Rising, players can now BMX their way through an Elden Ring-inspired race track. The custom level was created by user Kailiman666 and was first spotted by a writer at Rock, Paper, Shotgun.

The custom level displays a stunning level of detail in its craft. A clip of it shared on Twitter shows a rider somewhat clumsily driving a motorbike over ramps and obstacles made of castle ruins that look like there were taken straight out of Limgrave. The racing course’s checkpoints are Sites of Grace, sparkling as the rider passes. All the while, a perfect recreation of the Erdtree and other monuments sit in the background.

Trials Rising, which launched in 2019, is the latest entry in RedLynx’s physics-based racing-puzzle-platformer series. The Trials series, which dates to 2009 on consoles and PC, puts players in extremely challenging and borderline ridiculous situations. For example, Trials Evolution has a track that allows you to drive through World War II’s D-Day landing at Normandy. The custom level adds an extra dimension to absurdity.

Halo Infinite was a nigh-perfect renewal of the Halo franchise. The game has a fun and expansive campaign and well-tuned multiplayer, in a package that hearkens back to the halcyon days of Xbox Live and the sound of power shields charging up. It’s also been slow to add new content to its excellent-but-troubled multiplayer mode, but help seems to be on the way in the form of Austin studio Certain Affinity, which has been hired to assist 343 Industries in “further evolving Halo Infinite.”

The news comes via the briefest of posts on the Certain Affinity site, which notes the studio will be “deepening our relationship with 343.” Founded in 2006 by Max Hoberman, the former multiplayer and online lead for the Halo series, Certain Affinity has carved out a niche as a support shop, largely assisting in the development of games in the Call of Duty and Halo franchises.

Certain Affinity’s hiring appears to be in step with recent comments from 343 about the Halo developers’ efforts to expand in order to meet the demand for more agile updates and a faster cadence of content. Responding to fans on Reddit, Brian Jarrard, community director at 343, spoke quite frankly about the “challenges and constraints” the studio is facing in supporting Infinite.

We’re certainly not happy to be unable to meet player and community expectations, it’s a difficult situation that’s going to take the team time to work through. Right now the focus is on S2 and we’ll have more to share on that in the coming weeks. Meanwhile a lot of production planning, costing, planning, hiring, etc. is all happening which doesn’t really lend to detailed regular updates. We understand the community is simply out of patience and frankly, I think understandably tired of words. It will take some time to sort out the details and then we’ll be able to share as much information as possible.

After an exhilarating launch, community frustration has grown with the lack of new content as well as a disappointing seasonal model. These frustrations have been compounded by the decision to continually delay big features like campaign co-op and the Forge map editor, and lengthy outages sidelining an entire multiplayer mode.

Getting Infinite up to speed will be a long and slow task for 343 and partners, but the studio is positioning forthcoming Season 2 — dubbed Lone Wolves — as the first small step, with two new maps, new multiplayer modes, and a bevy of tweaks.

Halo Infinite Season 2 launches on May 3.

The first official trailer for Stranger Things season 4 dropped on Tuesday, to the delight of diehard fans. Suddenly all the drips and drabs of information delivered by Netflix, over the past few years, started to make sense. Oddly enough, the biggest piece of the puzzle was actually released late last year, in the form of season 4’s episode list. It also invokes Vecna, a sorcerer and god who is one of Dungeons & Dragons’ most infamous villains.

Tuesday’s trailer points to an evil, mysterious force lurking behind Hawkins Indiana. At the bottom of that theoretical pyramid of power are the dog-like demogorgons from seasons 1 and 2. Those, in turn, are controlled by the massive and powerful mind flayer from season 3. Sitting above them all is another, unnamed entity given voice for the first time in this new trailer.

” You’ve made everything a sham,” the voice laments. “Your suffering is almost at an end.” Cut to a rotting corpse, held together by filaments of gore and lit by an angry red flash. “You have lost,” it concludes.

Add in the fact that season 4, episode 2 is titled “Vecna’s Curse” and we’ve pretty much found season 4’s big bad.

Image: Netflix

Vecna was a sorcerer who turned himself into an undead abomination known as a lich only to eventually ascend to godhood. He was first introduced to D&D way back in 1976 with the publication of Dungeons & Dragons Supplement III: Eldritch Wizardry, written by Gary Gygax and Brian Blume. According to Shannon Applecline, the history of DriveThruRPG’s product history, Blume was most likely responsible for his inclusion in the D&D Canon. Also of note is the fact that Vecna is an anagram for Jack Vance, a science fiction and fantasy author whose novels inspired the conceptual framework for how magic works in D&D.

Vecna originally entered the canon only as the mysterious source of two different artifacts. The Hand of Vecna was “a dry, shriveled, and blackened hands, similar to those that could have been caused having been burnt.” It turned its users into evil, and also had many difficult-to-control abilities, including levitation (but not limit) and the spell called Finger of Death.

Image: Netflix

The Eye, on the other … hand … was said to “glitter much in the same manner as the eye of a feline.” Among its powers was a particularly rare spell called “clairaudience,” which allows the user supernatural hearing and the ability to blink in and out of reality. There’s a catch, of course: In order to use the Eye of Vecna, users had to permanently graft it to their own skull, making its powerful blessings a curse that could not be removed.

Image: WizKids

“THE EFFECTS ON THE USER MAY NEVER BE ALTERED IN ANYMANNER,” declares Eldritch Wizardry all caps , “EVEN WISHES .”

Vecna has appeared several more times throughout the canon of D&D, including in the 5th edition Dungeon Masters Guide where he appeared as a part of a sample D&D pantheon for would-be Dungeon Masters to use in their world. But he appeared most recently as a god in Critical Role’s Vox Machina storyline. Grog Strongjaw, Keyleth, Marisha Ray, and another god called the Raven Queen helped Vecna drive his malevolent spirit out of the Material Plane. However, he wasn’t permanently killed.

Is it Vecna or someone else who acts and behaves like Vecna behind the scenes? Wizards of the Coast, D&D’s publisher, has been contacted to find out more. However, the name of the lich-turnedgod was not included in Netflix’s open-source ruleset. This would mean that special permission is required to use it.

Explorer’s Guide to Wildemount

These prices were correct at the time of publication.

This officially-licensed D&D sourcebook set in the world of Exandria makes mention of Vecna, The Whispered One and gives a few additional notes on playing him at the table.

We’ve published thousands of words about why you should play 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim, an audacious video game that combines a century of science-fiction tropes into something unpredictably new. The story can be described as universally by many definitions, and the structure blurs the lines between a visual novel or a master’s thesis of genre fiction. That said, I understand why most readers skipped #15 on Polygon’s Top 50 Games of 2020 list.

Like the game’s teenage protagonists, always a step behind the kaiju hellbent on destroying the world, 13 Sentinels has suffered from bad timing. The title was released on PlayStation 4 in the weeks before the PlayStation 5’s launch, a bad time for a 2D game that probably could have run on the PlayStation 3. Today, the game finally debuts on Nintendo Switch. With few major releases over the next month, hopefully, this little masterpiece will finally get the big audience it deserves.

Image: Vanillaware/Atlus

Okay, so it’s great, but why should anyone actually play this game with no connection to an established franchise, superhero, or general intellectual property? Because you’re unlikely to play anything that’s both this polished while being this batshit — in the best possible way.

The story takes place in 1984, along with a handful of points in the past and future, as early as 1945 and as late as … well, I won’t spoil that for you. You play through the adventures of 13 characters in episodic bits in whatever order you choose. Gradually, you’ll learn about their teenage lives, including their romances, rivals, motivations, and fantasies. And you’ll discover why they must pilot mechs to fight kaiju in some mysterious distant future.

The game doesn’t reference or borrow from sci-fi, so much as it rips loose entire ideas from the sci-fi canon, grafting them onto one monstrous mega-fiction. You might have wondered what it would look like if you combined E.T. and Godzilla with War of the Worlds ,, The Terminator, The Matrix and several other great classics to create a text that makes some sense, despite all odds.

13 Sentinels, which plays sort of like a point-and-click adventure with branching dialogue options, is only half of the game. The game also features a real-time strategy game and its own wiki, both of which expand upon the advent. They’re an entire can of worms that you can learn about from our original review, but one note for the Switch port: The strategy elements looked a little funky on a 4K TV, but fit perfectly on the smaller portable Switch screen.

While it is cliché to say that a game can be perfected for Switch, this one is. It’s nice that I can play this text-heavy game on the go, but what makes Switch the perfect home for 13 Sentinels is the option to alternate between portable and TV modes. When I’m grinding through mech battles or revisiting character sequences for clues, the portability is perfect. However, when I start a new story, I prefer the TV mode, projecting the game’s gorgeous hand-drawn art on a larger screen. I don’t recommend playing the entire game on a TV — as I did with the PS4 version. But I encourage you to take breaks from portable mode now and then to really appreciate just how beautiful this game can be.

I have more to say about this game. For example, how the twists stack on top of each other, creating a tower full of turtles. Without ever falling apart under that amount narrative weight. Though reading more would spoil the fun – and trust me, you’ll be doing plenty of reading once you boot the game up anyway. This game is my favorite. I have written so many things about it. Now I leave y’all to decide whether or not to play it.

13 Sentinels was released on April 12 on Nintendo Switch and is also available on PlayStation 4. The game was reviewed using a download code provided by Atlus. Vox Media has affiliate partnerships. Vox Media has affiliate partnerships. These are not intended to influence editorial content. However, Vox Media might earn commissions for products bought via these links. You can find additional information about Polygon’s ethics policy here.