Interview: Nightingale devs talk worldbuilding and how to stand out in a competitive genre

Nintendo has released a free demo for Princess Peach: Showtime! ahead of its full release later this month.

Nintendo has released a demo for Princess Peach Showtime! on the Nintendo Switch eShop.

Kirby has been inhaling stuff since his video game introduction, an ability that grants him the power of whatever or whoever he swallows. In The Forgotten Land, the pink puffball kicked things up a notch. Most of the enemies and items Kirby had swallowed until his first 3D adventure were his size or smaller. However, in The Forgotten Land, he inhaled vending machines, gliders, and even a car. Car Mouth Kirby quickly became the image the game became synonymous with, and two years later, it has finally been turned into a collectible.

Even with Netflix’s recommendation algorithm serving you new movies, new TV shows, and original programming tailored to your viewing habits, the streaming service’s firehose of content makes what’s coming difficult to parse.

As another weekend rolls around, we're back with another batch of streaming recommendations. It's a strong week for movies, with brand-new sci-fi drama Spaceman taking Adam Sandler to new dimensions on Netflix, Ridley Scott's historical epic Napoleon arriving on Apple TV Plus, and Sofia Coppola's latest film Priscilla hitting MUBI in the UK. 

X has been rolling out a number of new features over the last few months in its efforts to turn the platform into more than just being a microblogging website. With new features and offerings, the billionaire Elon Musk-backed app has looked to stay relevant among users. Now, X has introduced the live video feature in Spaces, enabling hosts to activate video during chat sessions. It has been introduced as just a new button from where the live host can share the video. There were several speculations about the Periscope service to make a comeback, however, the live video in Spaces is quite different. Know what the X live video feature is all about.

Adam Sandler is like you’ve never seen him before in the new sci-fi movie Spaceman. In his most dramatic role yet, he plays an astronaut on a solo mission to the far reaches of Jupiter to collect ancient space dust.

This upcoming indie action RPG is perfect for fans of classic SNES games, as well as those who love cozy life sims like Stardew Valley.

Sometimes I wonder whether every genre fantasy RPG or RPG-inflected game is essentially a journey towards the Big City. Most such games start you off on the periphery of the world, out in the sleepy and/or brutish hamlets of FirstActShire, Chosen One County, and send you on a loose quest towards the cosmopolitan centre, where you'll typically learn about the ultimate villain of the piece, gain access to the juiciest concentration of shops, crafting facilities and quest-givers, and glean some hint at the location of the endgame dungeon. Sometimes the quest takes days of playtime, as in Baldur's Gate 3. Sometimes it takes less than an hour, as in the original Destiny. It's a common-enough device that when an RPG starts you off in the Big City, like Dragon Age 2, or creatively "provincialises" the Big City, like Roadwarden, I feel slightly unnerved.

Turbo Kid is a 2015 movie set in a post-apocalypse in which a comic book fan battles a local tyrant, with gory, comedic, '80s-pastiching results. It was not a film I expected to get a metroidvania sequel, but here it is with a new demo and an April release date.

With the launches of Helldivers 2, Nightingale, Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, Foamstars, and Skull & Bones, February 2024 has been packed with new multiplayer games planned to have live service tails.

Nightingale is off to a good start. The horror-tinged, multiplayer survival and crafting game entered early access this week on Steam, and so far has peaked at over 32,000 players. However, like many online games, it’s had a rough first week. One of the most common complaints from users (among the usual early access fare like the lack of some quality-of-life features), according to Steam forums, is the “always online” requirement, which requires even solo players to join a server.