Ubisoft is discounting some of its best-selling games through the end of May. The aptly named Legendary Sale is giving you a chance to score Far Cry 6, Rainbow Six Siege, Riders Republic, and more at some incredibly low prices. Best of all, you can use promo code LEGEND22 at checkout to earn an additional $10 off any purchase over $15.

Assassin’s Creed Valhalla is down to an incredible price during the sale. Listed for $24, you can get an additional $10 off using promo code LEGEND22–bringing it to a grand total of $14. Considering it’s an absolutely massive open-world game, you’re getting a lot of bang for your buck here.

With a Splinter Cell remake in development at Ubisoft, now’s a great time to relive some of Sam Fisher’s greatest missions. The Splinter Cell Collection is on sale for just $18, down from $90, and includes Chaos Theory, Double Agent, Conviction Deluxe, and Blacklist Deluxe. You can also scoop up the classic Chaos Theory for just three bucks as a standalone purchase.

Other popular titles on sale include Prince of Persia: Sands of Time Immortals Fenyx Rising, Rainbow Six Extraction, and The Division 2. Dozens of great games can be found in the catalog, so swing by and cash in on the discounts while you can.

Best deals on Ubisoft Store

Assassin’s Creed Odyssey: Gold Edition — $25 ($100) Assassin’s Creed Valhalla — $24 ($60) The Division 2 — $5 ($30) Far Cry 5 — $12 ($60) Far Cry 6 — $30 ($60) Immortals Fenyx Rising — $17 ($40) Prince of Persia: Sands of Time — $2 ($10) Rainbow Six Extraction: Deluxe Edition — $25 ($50) Rainbow Six Siege: Deluxe Edition — $10 ($30) Riders Republic — $30 ($60) South Park: The Fractured But Whole — $13 ($50) South Park: The Stick of Truth — $8 ($30) Splinter Cell Chaos Theory — $3 ($10) Splinter Cell Collection — $18 ($90) Steep: X Games Gold Edition — $10 ($50) Watch Dogs: Legion — $13 ($40)

Read MoreGameSpot – Game News

As the dark of the night rolls into China this evening, Qualcomm is hosting a mobile-focused product launch event they’re calling “Snapdragon Night”. Headlining the event is the announcement of the company’s new flagship SoC, the Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1. A mid-generation update to their flagship smartphone SoC, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1, the 8+ Gen 1 follows Qualcomm’s annual tradition of releasing a refresh product to boost performance and to give partners something new to work with for the second half of the year. And for this year in particular, we’re looking at a very notable change in chips from Qualcomm.

Unlike previous generations where Qualcomm merely launched a faster speed bin of their existing silicon, for 2022 we have something more substantial to talk about. Qualcomm has switched up foundries entirely – moving from Samsung to TSMC – and as a result is rolling out a new die. Thanks to this, the Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1 Qualcomm is reaping something of a one-off manufacturing gain, allowing them to both dial up CPU and GPU performance while simultaneously cutting power consumption.

Read MoreAnandTech

This is it: the last visit from Xur in Destiny 2 before the end of the Season of the Risen. That makes this a final chance to stock up on new Exotic and Legendary weapons and armor before the new season kicks off and raises the Power level caps, sending players back to grinding to get ready for high-level content. Here’s where you can find Xur and what he’s selling to help you prepare for the future.

Xur shows up with the daily reset on Friday, so we’ll update this article as soon as he arrives with everything you need to know.

Xur is present every weekend in Destiny 2, starting with the daily reset at 10 AM PT / 1 PM ET each Friday. His exact location is always a mystery when he first arrives, as he is not listed on the map, and for novice players, he can be easy to miss. However, there are a set number of locations where he takes up residence, including the Tower Hangar area, on Nessus in Watcher’s Grave, and in the Winding Cove area of the EDZ.

Alongside changes in his location, Xur’s inventory also rotates weekly. That means it’s worth visiting him each time to check out his new weapons and rolls on Exotic and Legendary armor. You can visit him any time between his arrival Friday and the weekly reset at 10 AM PT / 1 PM ET the following Tuesday when Xur departs the Solar System.

Read MoreGameSpot – Game News

Pokemon Go is, without a doubt, Niantic’s most successful and popular game, but many of its ideas and technology were created for Ingress, its other augmented reality, GPS-powered game. In recent weeks, Niantic has been experimenting with social features in Ingress that allow players to connect directly inside of the app, as opposed to coordinating outside of it, and it is ready to bring those features to Pokemon Go.

Just think – in about 9 minutes you could have your own Boldore.

Exactly what the features borrowed from Ingress will be and how they will be adapted to Pokemon Go is not yet entirely clear, but Niantic says the features will be coming to Pokemon Go sometime in the next few months. We reached out to Niantic for more clarity and it said that Pokemon Go’s features will be different from Ingress’s, but it is working on features that will give trainers tools to connect with their friends in game as well as other Trainers out in the real world, like real-time geo-coordination, as one example. Niantic outlined the new social features for Ingress in a blog earlier this month. These features allow Ingress players to find local communities, craft a Niantic friends list, send direct and group messages, and create local events, all without leaving the Ingress app.

Despite its success and massive player base, Pokemon Go has made little effort to connect players inside of the app outside of limited friends list features, for often understandable security reasons. Adding social features like those added to Ingress has the potential to change and optimistically improve the game. For more on the new features, you can read this Pokemon Go blog post about it.

Along with these new social features being on the way, Mega Energy and Rare Candy XL are currently available as rewards for completing local raid battles and starting on May 23, the shop’s 1 PokéCoin Event Box will no longer include Remote Raid Passes and will instead feature a rotating array of items.

Read MoreGameSpot – Game News

The Vampire: The Masquerade – Swansong Oedipus puzzle is a seemingly difficult riddle blocking Leysha’s path forward in Scene 7. You’re tasked with arranging a set of four swans in a certain order so the music box will play the right tune and unlock the way forward. As with most things in Swansong, the solution to the puzzle is hidden in (sort of) plain sight, but the clues are vague enough where it’s still easy to get stuck unless you approach it from the right angle. Here’s what you need to do.

Vampire Swansong Oedipus puzzle solution

The solution is in how you rotate the swans. They need to be facing the same direction Oedipus is pointing in the paintings they correspond with. From left to right and in terms of compass directions, they should be facing:

WestSouthwestSouthSoutheast

If you’ve been stuck trying to figure out where the actual hints are, the clues are in two spots hidden in the room. The first is a tape recorder you can insert tape n7 into to hear a message from Leysha’s psychiatrist. At the end of the tape is a sequence of notes you’re supposed to match with the swans.

The second, and much less clear, clue is on Richard’s computer, a blurb of text that says Oedipus will show you the way, if you can figure out the meaning. Lucky for you, you don’t have to brush up on your literature just to beat the game.

If you don’t feel like finding the room’s hidden clues, just make sure the swans are in these positions.

The names of the pictures correspond with specific swans and are based on the order of events in the Greek play Oedipus the King, but it’s essentially just contextual information. As long as the swans are positioned in the order above, you’re good to go.

Just bear in mind that finishing the puzzle will automatically progress the Scene forward towards the end. You won’t be able to do anything else, and the game will consider all incomplete side objectives as failed.

The good thing is, if you want to move forward and just deal with missed objectives later, that’s fine. As we mentioned in our Swansong beginner’s guide, you’ll mostly just miss out on some experience points.

Read MoreGameSpot – Game News

To celebrate Global Accessibility Awareness Day, Xbox has outlined efforts it is undertaking in order to promote “digital access and inclusion” for over 400 million players with disabilities.

In a post on Xbox Wire, Anita Mortaloni, Xbox’s Director of Accessibility, discussed the pillars on which the company is promising to build on in order to make inroads with the disability community. Xbox’s three pillars are:

fostering inclusive communities, connections, and supportenabling accessible design and developmentcontinually investing in accessibility

“Nothing should come between players and the games they love, which is why we are dedicated to finding accessibility solutions that help eliminate barriers to play and make it easier to connect with others,” Mortaloni writes, before diving into more explicit ways Xbox is achieving its accessibility goals.

In order to foster more inclusive communities for example, an accessibility-themed world is launching this month in Minecraft: Education Edition called BuildAbility. Students who play it will be able to “explore barriers experienced by people with disabilities by meeting an array of characters who reflect our real world and learn how to identify and eliminate accessibility barriers in their school and community.” The whole project is in collaboration with the Peel District School Board in Ontario, Canada and is just one of Xbox’s efforts on this front.

Xbox has also launched an American Sign Language Twitch channel which will offer “interpretation for approximately 25 hours of livestreams each week” for its livestream team. Additionally, it announced that the Xbox Accessibility Insiders League (XAIL), a way by which players with disabilities or allies can report accessibility feedback to the Xbox team, has grown to over 163,000 members, and that the Windows Insider Program will now also have accessibility features in Windows 11 preview builds.

To best enable accessible design and development, Xbox has updated their accessibility guidelines to include a new mental health guideline and additional guides for, among other things, reducing motion sickness and on-screen text legibility. It has also launched the Gaming Accessibility Resource Hub in conjunction with the disabled community and experts at Unity’s Unreal and Coherent team, with the goal of the hub being to assist developers “in all stages of their game’s accessibility journey.”

Xbox also took the time to tout its free five-module course that offers a rundown of accessibility topics including the fundamentals of accessibility, assistive hardware and software, and how to best develop gaming hardware with accessibility in mind.

Finally, Xbox doubled down on its commitment to accessibility by announcing a host of accessibility features being brought to Forza Horizon 5, including ASL and British Sign Language, as well as modifications to game speed and a color blindness mode. The post also makes mention of Xbox’s accessibility tag that was added last fall to help find accessible games more easily on its store, and an expansion on console and platform accessibility features like the ability to remap the share button to over 22 different buttons or muting the console UI.

Read MoreGameSpot – Game News

It’s rare to see a politician express opinions on video games, or at least somewhat informed opinions. NYC Mayor Eric Adams decided to break precedent and throw in his two cents about one Overwatch character in particular–Hanzo.

I couldn’t mash the send button fast enough — I may not be a gaming expert, but at least I’m not garbage like Hanzo! Proud to get in the game with @NYExcelsior. Let’s #getstuffdone @OW_Yaki @Kellan_OW @FloraOw02 @OMyunbong @GangNamJin_ow https://t.co/AoA104Cdlh

— Mayor Eric Adams (@NYCMayor) May 18, 2022

In response to New York’s Overwatch League team, NY Excelsior, welcoming him as an honorary member, Adams tweeted, “I couldn’t mash the send button fast enough–I may not be a gaming expert, but at least I’m not garbage like Hanzo!” Thanks, Mayor Adams, for your input.

It’s unclear what being an “honorary member” of NY Excelsior entails for Mayor Adams. But Adam’s support for NYC’s own esports team is in line with his agenda to make NYC “a global hub for the digital games industry,” according to a press document released by his office. He also supported the City University of New York (CUNY)’s initiative to create a new Bachelor’s Degree program in Digital Game Design.

“New York City has always been the center of innovation, but it is time that New York City level up and finally became a leader in the digital gaming space,” said Mayor Adams on CUNY’s new program. “It’s time to take advantage of all the talent we have here in New York by investing in the future of gaming. This $2 million investment will help us reach more than 1,000 students over the next three years and diversify the gaming field. This is how we get stuff done for our young people and for New York City!”

Anyways, do you think Hanzo is garbage? Sound off in the comments.

Read MoreGameSpot – Game News

Marvel Comics characters have been adapted into countless mobile games, but few have the heft of Marvel Snap. The new game from Second Dinner, an indie studio formed by ex-Hearthstone developers, looks to capture that game’s approachability while attempting to innovate with a fast pace and unique bluffing and zone control mechanics that set it apart.

Marvel Snap is the debut project from Second Dinner, an indie studio founded by veterans from Blizzard’s Team 5–the division that created its hit card battler, Hearthstone. That game from Blizzard was already known for simplifying card battler mechanics to make the genre more welcoming to newcomers, and Marvel Snap appears primed to extend that philosophy even further in some ways. Your deck is smaller at just 12 cards, and each match only lasts six turns, so the games are quicker as a result. Second Dinner says each game lasts about three minutes–decidedly shorter than Hearthstone and most other CCGs.

Marvel Snap is a card battler about zone management, similar to a control point map in a shooter like Halo or Overwatch. In each match, you and your opponent are dealt three random zones from a collection of more than 50 recognizable Marvel locations like the Hellfire Club or Stark Tower, each with their own special properties. You and your opponent take turns simultaneously, guessing at which cards they’ll play and in which locations. At the end of six turns, whoever controls two of the three zones wins. For an added layer of complexity and strategic decision-making, players can choose to “Snap” to raise the stakes by wagering they’ll win.

It’s a simple concept, and one that lends itself to the mobile-first approach. Though Second Dinner is planning a PC release, with an early access version coming around the time it launches, Marvel Snap is designed first and foremost to be a mobile game. That starts with the quick gameplay with no downtime and short rounds for a concentrated dose of CCG.

“We managed to make the games much faster without cutting out decision-making,” Brode told GameSpot. “We cut out waiting. So you’re still making decisions all the time; you’re just making decisions much faster than you would in games where players take turns back and forth.”

The fast gameplay means the structure of the game itself isn’t built for some traditional CCG ideas. I asked if the quicker pace makes for a more aggressive game with less room for control- or combo-oriented decks, as we see in many CCGs, and Brode was demure. It’s not that Marvel Snap is faster or more aggressive, necessarily, but rather that it exists outside of that paradigm altogether.

“None of those exist in Marvel Snap,” he said. “There’s no aggro, there’s no control, there’s no tempo because it’s so different. It’s not about board position. You’re not creating a wave of minions that are going to be hard for your opponent to deal with. Instead, it’s all about mind games, bluffing, and trying to control the board. So there’s cards that can make it harder for your opponent to play where they want to play, and cards that manipulate the locations so that you have an advantage based on what the locations are. It’s a very interactive game, but in a completely different way.”

As an example, he cites card advantage. In a traditional CCG, like Hearthstone or Magic the Gathering, some players organize their deck around survival and forcing their opponent to run out of resources so they’re still standing at the end. That relies on card advantage, having more value in your hand at the expense of aggression. That’s not really a factor here, according to Brode. Instead, your games are a tight six turns, every time, so there’s no bleeding out your opponent.

With the Marvel license in tow, though, Brode said one of the best parts of development was coming up with unique power sets for each of the cards. But this was also a unique challenge. In the case of popular heroes, they had to find flavorful ways to make their powers match the game mechanics.

“That is one of the most fun parts about making this game, is taking Marvel characters that we love and then imagining like, okay, what would Spider-Man do in this game? Spider-Man shoots webs out at the opponent’s side of the location and says, ‘Okay, that location’s webbed up. You can’t play cards there next turn.’ So you can really control the game with his webs. Or Hulk is just this massive card that has a huge amount of power. Wolverine, every time he’s destroyed, he’s got a super-healing factor so he comes right back and jumps to a random location. No matter how many times he’s killed, he’s always coming back into the game. Gambit’s one of my favorites: He takes one of the cards in your hand and charges it up with energy and throws it an enemy card, destroying it.”

But Brode says the design process sometimes works in reverse. Rather than imagining a power that fits a hero in a flavorful way, the designers come up with a fun mechanic and then have to find a hero to match. With Marvel’s massive roster of heroes, that meant scouring the archives.

“When we started working on this project, I bought every trading card from the ’90s, all the Marvel trading cards, and I bought the Marvel encyclopedias,” Brode said. “And so I just flip through the encyclopedia looking for someone who’s got a power set. Like, ‘I need a teleporter. Let me go look for all the teleporters in Marvel. Oh right, I forgot about that character.’ There’s so many Marvel characters, there’s always somebody who matches a design really well.”

Collecting characters and earning cosmetic upgrades is a big part of the progression, and you’ll collect more cards as you raise your collection level through play. Brode said that the team wants to introduce a way to target a specific character, if you have a favorite hero for example, and is currently exploring ideas for how to do that.

Your progress in Marvel Snap is measured in Cosmic Cubes, so as you play through Ranked mode, you constantly compete to get more Cubes. That’s also where it gets another mechanic, as well as its name: the ability to “Snap” is essentially placing a wager on yourself and daring your opponent to come back that much stronger and deny your extra earnings.

“So if I’m winning, I could Snap. And now I’m saying I’d like to play for double the stakes,” Brode says. “Every game is played for stakes, just like in other games with the rank ladder. If you win a game, you gain some rank points. If you lose a game, you lose some rank points. Our rank points are Cosmic Cubes. So the more Cosmic Cubes you have, the higher your rank on the rank ladder. When you’re playing a game, you can say, ‘I want to play for more Cosmic Cubes. I’m going to Snap.’ And my opponent then has to decide, ‘Okay, do I want to bail right now and lose one Cube or do I want to stay in and play for double the Cubes?'”

The Snap mechanic also allows you to bluff, since your opponent can simply surrender at that point rather than risk a bigger loss. But as in poker, you may also choose not to Snap if you don’t want to scare your opponent off too quickly. Brode says that in practice, it also means players who are losing get to save face–and some Cubes–rather than limp to the finish line in hopes of eking out a slight chance of victory.

“You just bail and you feel smart for bailing because you saved yourself some Cubes. So you’re like, wow. I avoided a disaster there. I only lost one Cube. Now I’ll go play again and hopefully win a bunch of Cubes. And so it actually ends up feeling like a non-zero-sum game because sure you lose a bunch of games, but the games you lose, you feel like you’ve won sometimes because you avoided disaster.”

No two games should feel exactly the same, because on top of yours and your opponent’s created decks, you’ll also be contending with the randomly dealt location cards. Second Dinner wants to keep the game “always fresh and exciting” by introducing new locations on a weekly basis. When a new location is introduced, it will be marked as “hot” for two days, so you’ll see it a lot more frequently before it gets shuffled into the overall pool. But not all locations in the pool are weighted evenly. Brode said that some locations are more fun if they only appear once in a while.

“One of the locations is Galactus’ ship, and when it’s revealed it says, ‘Destroy the other locations.’ So you’re going to play like the smallest game in one location. Each of you gets to play four cards. Choose your best four cards wisely. And that’s really fun sometimes, but it’s not fun every game. And so it’s very rare; it doesn’t show up that often. It creates really cool stories when it does. And then some locations are just really, really fun to play on all the time. They create really interesting gameplay scenarios, so those are a little bit more common.”

As a more common location, Brode cites Central Park, which adds a 1-power squirrel to every location. That takes up spots where you can no longer play cards, but it also enables you to, for example, play Captain America, who grants extra power to any other card in a location. And it dissuades you from playing Namor, who gets a power boost if he’s the only card occupying a certain spot. Wakanda throws up a power shield that keeps cards within from being destroyed. The Baxter Building, headquarters of the Fantastic Four, radiates power outward to other locations if you’re in control of it, giving all your cards in other locations three extra power. It’s the constant push and pull of controlling these zones that gives Marvel Snap its complexity.

“When you’re designing a game, you want strategic depth,” Brode said. “That’s super important. And you want complexity for the ability for people to learn the game to be super low. That’s super important. Maximizing the difference between those two things is the goal. So I think we’ve done that. We have the lowest complexity with the highest strategic depth.”

Marvel Snap will have a limited closed beta on Android ahead of its launch on mobile and PC, and sign-ups for the beta are open now at the official site.

Read MoreGameSpot – Game News

The premise seems totally absurd when you read it: the all-powerful Superman teaming with cowardly and perpetually hungry teenager Shaggy to throw down against a shape-shifting dog Jake and a face-stealing assassin Arya Stark. This is real, however, and it’s MultiVersus, the upcoming Warner Bros. platform fighter and the latest game to challenge Smash Bros. for its platform fighter throne. We got an early look at the upcoming closed alpha test, and so far MultiVersus is not only a viable challenger to Nintendo’s all-star smasher, but it could be a glimpse at the future of fighting games in general.

On the surface, MultiVersus looks very similar to other platform fighting games, as the combatants zip around a stage with multiple ledges, throwing out attacks and trying to knock each other off of the screen. The names on the marquee may be different–Superman, Wonder Woman, and Batman from DC Comics, Bugs Bunny and Taz from Looney Tunes, Shaggy from Scooby-Doo, etc.–but the action at a glance stays with the tried-and-true Smash Bros. formula.

It’s not entirely the same, however, and nowhere is that more apparent than in 2v2 team battles. Teams are split into red and blue teams, and the first team to score four knockouts wins. This is a slightly different approach to the stock battles of Smash Bros., as knockouts act as a scored point rather than one player losing a life. This scoring format allows both players to stay in the match the entire time, rather than one remaining player being at a disadvantage. Even with this change in scoring, the team battle mode sounds similar to other games that offer it, but there’s a deeper level of strategy to consider here that sets MultiVersus apart, elevating it from potential Smash Bros. clone to a game that can stand on its own two feet.

Every character has at least one move in their arsenal that not only damages the enemy, but gives a slight benefit to a teammate as well. When Shaggy charges up to full power with his neutral special, for example, his teammate also receives a power boost. Wonder Woman’s down special attack gives her a shield, but it also increases a teammate’s defense if they get close to one another while it’s active. A few characters have a tether ability that can latch onto a teammate, making both fighters more difficult to launch off-screen. The combinations and character synergies to discover are plentiful even here in a closed alpha test with only 15 characters; I am excited to see how deep this system goes once the full version releases.

There are single-player modes to check out, but they’re much more by-the-numbers than the team battles. 1v1 is the best way to truly test your skills competitively, as it’s a straightforward first-to-two-points battle with no teammates to worry about. Stages do have some obstacles, like the platforms that retract in the Haunted Mansion and some Treefort buildings that can be destroyed, but nothing in the alpha test’s stages was as wild as, say, Smash’s Poke Floats. The four-player free-for-all, meanwhile, is tailor-made for parties or less competitive environments with frenzied action happening all over the screen. While they offer plenty of fun, neither of these modes offer a new twist on old gameplay like team battles do, so they don’t stand out quite as much.

All three of these formats benefit tremendously from the game’s rollback netcode, which provided a smooth online experience in nearly every match we’ve played. There were a few instances where characters would glitch out or randomly teleport from one place to another, but in the 50 matches I played I can count only two instances of those technical issues. Every other match felt like my opponents were sitting in the same room, which is impressive, especially in matches with four players. Granted, this was an early preview of the closed alpha test, so the number of players logged on likely wasn’t massive, but it’s still as good of a sign as we could hope for at this point.

While the fighting isn’t revolutionary, the free-to-play format is what could give MultiVersus an edge . Fighting games fit incredibly well into a F2P model, and MultiVersus is solid proof. The game offers multiple progression systems: a standard battle pass with free and premium options, a profile-based leveling system, and character-specific progression. Each one offers separate rewards: the character-specific rewards include different cosmetics and perks that can enhance their abilities, the career progression provides in-game currency to purchase new characters and skins from the in-game shop, and the battle pass offers general cosmetics like banners and costumes, taunts, and other perks for the entire roster.

Earning rewards is remarkably quick, too, as I never felt like I was grinding for more gold or battle pass points. Seasonal milestones and daily missions make the 50-level battle pass seem to fly by, with one 1,000-point seasonal milestone earning multiple levels at once. The character progression isn’t quite as fast, but earning an XP boost through the battle pass can temporarily fix that. Career progression is also slower, but as the rewards earned there aren’t as impactful as the battle pass or character perks, I didn’t really mind.

The ways MultiVersus lets you customize the experience through earned cosmetics also speak to how well a battle pass fits into a fighting game like this. One of the types of cosmetics you can earn are knockout animations that play every time you score a successful knockout. Examples include Darkseid’s Omega Beams, the Space Kook from Scooby-Doo, and banners for Houses Lannister, Stark, and Targayren, but for my money the best one is “That’s All Folks,” where the iconic Looney Tunes ending screen–Porky Pig included–shows up wherever your opponent was eliminated. It made me laugh every single time, giving the game an extra layer of personality on top of all the action.

That personality is bolstered by the game’s voice acting, which is one of the best parts of the game. Each character is fully voiced, most of them by the original voice actors: Maisie Williams voices Arya Stark, Matthew Lillard provides the voice of Shaggy, and Kevin Conroy, Tara Strong, and George Newbern portray Batman, Harley Quinn, and Superman respectively. Each character is given authenticity through their voices, throwing out quick one-liners during battle that will make you chuckle. Knocking out Tom and Jerry is an absolute joy, for example, as Tom belts out his iconic scream whenever defeated. It’s not just in battle, either, as eventually you can unlock announcer voice packs for many of the characters through the character-specific progression as well.

More importantly, some of the spoken dialogue is specific to certain situations, providing an extra layer of depth that shows just how much effort Player First Games is putting into this project. For instance, during one battle I played as Arya Stark and teamed with Shaggy versus Adventure Time’s Jake the Dog and Superman. As the battle begins, Jake exclaims, “I can’t believe I’m paired up with Superman!!” After we’d won the match, Arya quipped, “Go back to your master, dog” at the victory screen, referring to the fallen Jake. Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl, another Smash-inspired game, garnered a lot of criticism for its lack of voices, and that omission seems even more egregious in retrospect after seeing how much it adds to the experience in MultiVersus.

While this is a closed alpha test, and a lot can change between now and when the game officially launches, MultiVersus is shaping up to be a special game. The roster of characters is wacky and wonderful, the action is both familiar and fresh, and the free-to-play progression systems let you earn rewards while never feeling like a grind. There are even a few hints of the future in the alpha, like how the tutorials use Meeseeks from Rick and Morty as targets or how Wonder Woman says “get over here!” when she pulls an opponent toward her with the Lasso of Truth. No matter what surprises are coming to MultiVersus next, based on this closed alpha test, that future looks as bright as Shaggy at 100% of his power.

MultiVersus will launch on Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, and PC. The closed alpha test runs May 19-27, and an open beta has been announced for July.

Read MoreGameSpot – Game News

First introduced back at CES 2022, this morning SK Hynix is finally kicking off sales of their new retail consumer SSD, the Platinum P41. The successor to the popular Gold P31, the P41 incorporates the latest controller and NAND technology from SK Hynix, upgrading their flagship SSD lineup with PCIe 4.0 connectivity and the performance to match. Though with prices topping out at $260 for the 2TB model, it would seem that SK Hynix has even greater ambition than before, placing the P41 squarely in the high-end segment of the SSD market.

Read MoreAnandTech