To celebrate Valentine’s Day and doing things together with friends and loved ones, Sony is making online multiplayer free this weekend across PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5. Normally, players would need a PlayStation Plus subscription for online multiplayer, but that will not be the case this weekend.

The free play weekend starts February 12 at 12:01 AM local time and wraps up at 11:59 PM local time on Monday, February 14, which is Valentine’s Day. “Who will you team up with this weekend?” Sony said in its announcement of the free play event. A promotional video for the event uses the popular Richard Marx love song “Right Here Waiting.” Check it out below.

The start of this free weekend comes not long after Sony kicked off a new PS4 and PS5 beta program that introduces a suite of UI changes, adjustments, and accessibility features. The PS5 also got an entirely new feature that lets players use voice commands.

PlayStation isn’t the only gaming company celebrating Valentine’s Day. Rockstar Games just recently announced its own special events and bonuses for Valentine’s Day in GTA Online. Additionally, cupid has some to Hitman 3 for a variety of special contracts.

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Activision’s Call of Duty Endowment charity, which helps place military veterans in jobs after they leave the service, had a big year in 2021–it broke a number of records during the year.

In a blog post, the charity shared some 2021 stats, including how it placed 16,138 veterans in jobs in 2021, which is up from 15,446 in 2020. The Endowment’s goal is to have placed a total of 100,000 veterans in new jobs by 2024. Additionally, the average salary of the Endowment’s job placement for former service members in 2021 was $64,163, which is the highest in the group’s 12-year history. The average salary for a job placement from the Endowment in 2020 was $61,050.

“Every veteran matters, and the Endowment is proud to support traditionally under-represented populations as part of our work. Last year, 20% of the veterans we placed in meaningful employment were Black, as compared to the 12% of the veteran population. Women also saw success–19% of our placements were women, as compared to 10% of the total veteran population,” The Endowment said.

The Endowment also thanked its grantees, including the American Corporate Partners, which won the Endowment’s 2021 Seal of Distinction. ACP received a $30,000 unrestricted grant for this achievement.

Additionally, the Endowment paid $8.6 million in grants in 2021 to a dozen other US and UK-based groups that help find jobs for military veterans. According to Activision, the Endowment can place a veteran in a new job for about $547, while the US government spends on average $4,998 to do so.

The Endowment is funded also in part by fans who buy digital content for Activision’s games. In 2021, Treyarch released a DLC pack inspired by former Army medic Tim Hobbs, with proceeds going in part to the Endowment. There was also the Revival Challenge in Call of Duty Warzone for Military Appreciation Month that raised month for the Endowment. “Our first-party partners at Microsoft and Sony had a huge impact on our ability to sell these packs, and we thank them for their support,” Activision said.

It was a big year for the Call of Duty Endowment

Thanks to digital content packs alone, the Endowment placed more than 5,500 military veterans in jobs, Activision said. The Endowment also got help from corporate partners in 2021, including GameStop, Pilot Company, USAA, and Humble Bundle in the US alone, as well as Jingle Jam, Amazon, and Papa John’s in the UK.

“We’re so grateful for your support and the tireless efforts of our grantees. We know, as you do, that veterans can and should be a vital part of our country’s workforce and our communities. The Endowment will continue to make that happen in 2022,” it said.

Check out the full blog post to see a rundown of the Endowment’s accomplishments in 2021.

It is not immediately clear what impact, if any, Microsoft’s proposed acquisition of Activision Blizzard could have on the Endowment. Keep checking back with GameSpot for the latest.

The Call of Duty series continues this year with a new game from Infinity Ward, which is rumored to be Modern Warfare 2.

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The first post-launch patch for Pokemon Legends: Arceus has arrived, bringing with it fixes for a number of glitches that have made life difficult for Arceus players. Chief among these: an issue where Cherrim would become uncatchable if it changed forms during a battle has now been fixed.

Prior to the 1.0.2 patch, the cute little cherry Pokemon was proving almost impossible to catch, with players on Reddit saying they spent multiple hours on the attempt, with Cherrim breaking out of Ultra Balls even on 1HP. The game’s Japanese support page acknowledged the bug prior to the new patch, saying that Cherrim couldn’t be caught if it transformed even once during a battle.

Other updates include a fix for an issue where, during offline play, the screen would freeze if players tried to pick up a lost satchel after throwing a ball containing a Pokemon. Another fix stops players from obtaining duplicates of a Pokemon that was only intended to appear once.

Unfortunately, the update seems to have caused another bug with the potential to prevent players from ultimately catching Arceus. As mentioned by players on Reddit and now acknowledged on the Japanese support page, patch 1.0.2 has created an issue where players won’t be able to complete the “The Plate of Moonview Arena” mission if they catch Cresselia without talking to Melli first. As this mission is part of eventually unlocking the game’s ultimate Arceus encounter, it’s a frustrating bug for players to come up against.

The support page has said that this bug will be fixed in the next update, but hasn’t specified when that will be. For now, players are encouraged to make sure they talk to Melli before proceeding to try and catch Cresselia.

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EarthBound and EarthBound Beginnings–first released as Mother in Japan–are coming to Nintendo Switch. Revealed during today’s Nintendo Direct, both games appear to be faithful ports of the critically-acclaimed titles, and will be available for for Switch Online + Expansion Pack subscribers later today.

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BioShock Infinite now has one less mystery within its floating walls thanks to the excitement of SkateBird developer Megan Fox, as she tweeted her love for the game’s environmental storytelling. That, in turn, led to some explanation of the infamous dancing bread boy from the first-person shooter.

Following Fox’s tweet, it didn’t take long for Gwen Frey to show up and spill the flour that everyone wanted to hear. Frey founded Chump Squad, an indie studio with one of the best names ever, but she previously worked on BioShock Infinite and its subsequent DLC, Burial at Sea. One of Frey’s jobs during development included placing “all the background characters,” which also included giving life to the dancing bread boy. Frey revealed the whole process in a series of tweets, which are delicious, even if they are a little heavy in carbs.

Frey believed the Paris scenes were “too static and needed more motion.”

“I was populating the Paris scene with ‘chumps’ (skeletal meshes of humans with no AI). I’d play a looping animation on a person, script some head-tracking or whatever, & request VO lines from the writers to flesh them out.”

Frey continued, saying that chumps were the only real option as the team couldn’t add anything additional with “proper AI pathfinding.”

She also had to “[reuse] animations from the base game,” due to a lack of resources for new background character animations for Burial at Sea. Any animations she wanted to use had to be pulled from things already made for Infinite’s main game.

Luckily, Elizabeth’s dance by the beach provided Frey with a very busy animation, which would break up the Paris scene quite nicely.

She was forced to abandon the idea of two dancing children after encountering another technical hurdle. The bread boy’s dance around a cylinder-shaped object was necessary to prevent collision issues with the player. The giant baguette above the boy’s head came next.

Frey tried to use child hands and feet on bread boy, but the animations didn’t line up with the scene. The boy was clipping through the environment since the proportions were different from the adults. She added adult hands and feet to correct this issue but then had to compensate for the boy’s hands being so far above his head. A giant baguette was added, which somehow just made it all work. (It’s probably the yeast.)

Frey ended her story with what she planned to say if anyone started asking questions about bread boy before BioShock Infinite was shipped, saying,”I figured if anyone asked I’d just say ‘bread is great right?!'”

Compromises forged from a lack of resources and/or time are common in game design. We see it all the time but don’t always know it because of creative people like Gwen Frey.

If you’re not familiar with my new favorite video game character, bear witness to him and his full carb-fueled glory. Cliff Bleszinski and I both think the story of Bread Boy is legendary. I do, however, wish it didn’t mean learning about the existence of BioShock’s man-baby-man, which you now have to live with too.

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