Category: Entertainment & Lifestyle

MultiVersus found itself within the whirlwind of the modern gaming landscape being an immediate success that couldn’t be followed through until it crashed and burned.

Before MVS closes in two months, what remains of Player First Games has released at least one more update to their platform fighter along with patch notes.

The big addition of the Season 5 1.5.1 update today appears to be a new photo mode that’s been made available in the offline modes when you pause the game.

Moreover, Aquaman, Gizmo, Iron Giant, Jake, Morty, Rick, Samurai Jack, Steven Universe, Taz, and the Powerpuff Girls have been touched up for what may be the final time.

MultiVersus is set to close down its servers on May 30, 2025, which is only one year after the game officially launched.

Although the game found initial success in player numbers, those figures dwindled as support for the game was seemingly mishandled until reaching a breaking point from Warner Bros.

Those who log in before that date will still be able to play MultiVersus offline with all of the content they’ve acquired.

On top of that, WB is also shuttering Player First Games itself too after just purchasing the studio last Summer.

You can check out the new patch notes below or on the MultiVersus website.

It’s been nearly two years since the announcement that a new live action Street Fighter film was in the works. Legendary Entertainment is reportedly the studio behind the project’s production.

Just last month, we learned that Kitao Sakurai, the Director and Executive Producer of The Eric Andre Show for more than a decade, had signed up as the Director of the Street Fighter movie. Funnily enough, it took nearly two years for the project to get a Director.

By this point, the only things we knew about this live action Street Fighter film is its generic movie poster and the identity of its Director. Outside of that, we know nothing about its actors or filming location.

Needless to say, we expressed some doubts about the project actually hitting the theaters on March 20, 2026, its supposed release date. With all of this in mind, it feels like 2027 would be a safer bet.

Indeed, there’s evidence that suggests that the mysterious Street Fighter project has already been delayed. As noted by Variety, Sony has seemingly removed the Street Fighter adaption from its release calendar while shifting Tommy Wirkola’s shark thriller “Beneath the Storm,” retitled “Shiver,” from August 2025 to July 2026.

Due to this, it’s believed that the Street Fighter movie is being delayed. For now, the adaption has been completely removed from Sony’s calendar, so we currently don’t have any information about when to expect the movie to hit theaters at this point.

Of course, this could also be a sign that the Street Fighter film is outright being cancelled, but no such announcement as been made thus far. We’ll just have to keep an eye on the situation and see how things play out from here.

The T-1000 was recently made playable in Mortal Kombat 1: Khaos Reigns. Though the T-800 was previously playable in Mortal Kombat 11, the T-1000 is completely unlike any other character we’ve seen in the Mortal Kombat series due to the properties of the polymimetic alloy (artificial liquid metal) that he’s made up of.

Shortly after the release of Conan the Barbarian as a DLC fighter before the T-1000, a funny Easter egg for Conan was discovered. Apparently, by pressing L2 or R2 (PlayStation 5 version) after performing a Brutality, Conan can be commanded to rhythmically flex his pecs.

It turns out that the T-1000 has an Easter egg with a similar functionality. This can be performed after winning a match via one of the T-1000’s Brutalities.

Upon pressing R2 (PlayStation 5 version), the T-1000 will morph into his liquid metal state. Funnily enough, any blood that was splattered onto him will disappear from this interaction.

By pushing R1 (PlayStation 5 version), the T-1000 will then revert back to his more human appearance. The player can repeatedly morph the T-1000 back and forth through these methods.

Throughout all of this, the T-1000 will continue wagging his finger while facing the screen. This has become an iconic gesture of the T-1000’s.

Check it all out below:

Masahiro Sakurai is known within the gaming industry for making games that are easy to pick up. However, he actually considers himself a hardcore gamer.

He recently sat down for an interview with Gen Hoshino. During this interview, Sakurai took the time to explain what inspired him to make games with low learning curves despite his own experiences.

“The first game you directed was the Game Boy game Kirby’s Adventure. Kirby was a game that caught on with lots of people who had never touched games before so it had a very wide audience. But Sakurai-san, you yourself are a core gamer, yes?” asked Hoshino.

“But I started considering, what would I need for someone like that to start enjoying games?” — Masahiro Sakurai

“That’s right, I’m pretty hardcore with games,” responded Sakurai.

Of course, this answer was expected from Sakurai as he has talked about this before. As a designer, Sakurai doesn’t necessarily design games based on his own interests and skills. This prompted Hoshino to get to what he really wanted to ask of Sakurai.

“So why did you make a game like Kirby which was aimed at beginners?” continued Hoshino.

“For example, I thought it’d be impossible to get my mother to play a video game,” begun Sakurai. “But I started considering, what would I need for someone like that to start enjoying games?”

“Even if Kirby were made specifically with beginners in mind, as long as it had those important elements, then we wouldn’t end up with a scenario where high level players didn’t play it at all.” — Masahiro Sakurai

“I talked about it during my ‘design concepts’ videos, but the Game Boy in particular was a system where we tried to figure out how to get people engrossed in the game world.”

Sakurai was also considering the Game Boy in which he was designing for. Since levels couldn’t be too long due to battery life limitations, many developers resorted to making games difficult for the sake of extending game time. However, Sakurai had his doubts about this approach.

“At the time, RPGs and Action RPGs had a relatively high popularity, and tended to have quite high difficulty to allow for longer game time, and also because of low battery time often consisted of fairly short stages that you could die on many times before clearing them,” continued Sakurai. “But I thought, why is that?”

“You were doubtful about this trend?” inquired Hoshino in response.

“I started thinking that as long as it feels good and you can play it over and over again, isn’t that a good way to approach it?” — Masahiro Sakurai

Even though Sakurai was designing explicitly for beginners, he didn’t think that this would dissuade more experienced gamers from playing if the game still had a fun experience attached to it.

“For example, even for arcade games where you could reach the ending within 20 minutes, if they were fun enough you’d keep playing them over and over again,” declared Sakurai. “So having controls that felt good, music that you liked to hear, things like this were good to focus on, I thought.”

“Even if Kirby were made specifically with beginners in mind, as long as it had those important elements, then we wouldn’t end up with a scenario where high level players didn’t play it at all.”

“I started thinking that as long as it feels good and you can play it over and over again, isn’t that a good way to approach it?”

Overall, this is how the Super Smash Bros. series designed. Although the controls are simple in nature, there’s still plenty of depth for experienced gamers to explore for years and years.

This design philosophy will likely carry over into future games designed by Masahiro Sakurai, despite how far the Super Smash Bros. franchise has come with Super Smash Bros. Ultimate as the latest entry in the series.

Notably, Nintendo recently unveiled a sneak peek at the Switch 2. A Nintendo Switch 2 focused Direct is scheduled to take place on April 2, 2025.

It turns out that Sakurai has been working on a secret game project since April 2022, which has seemingly been ongoing even during this interview. We’ll just have to see just how beginner friendly the game is when it likely gets revealed during that Switch 2 Direct.

A special thanks goes out to Nicholas “MajinTenshinhan” Taylor for the translations featured in this article.

Unless they want to run their new Capcom Pro Tour year still running on Season 2

It’s been a bit less than two months since Mai Shiranui hit Street Fighter 6, but players are eagerly awaiting what’s coming next to the flagship fighting game.

Despite Capcom Cup 11 going down a few weeks ago, there was no news of Elena in sight, and their window of opportunity to show her off seems to rapidly be closing.

We’re nearly at the end of March now, but we should be seeing the final DLC character of Season 2 very soon.

This is judging by Capcom’s previous release and buildup handling of SF6 thus far as well as some external factors that have to be taken into account too.

Normally, the developers would have basically as much time as they’d want to fit into that “Spring 2025” release window, however, there’s something else on the calendar that should demand their attention too.

Evo Japan 2025 is set to take place from May 9–11.

Why that’s important is the big event will also kick off the Capcom Pro Tour 2025 season as its first offline Premier tournament.

It’d be a rather unprecedented move for Capcom to begin their Season 3 event run still using the Season 2 version of the game.

As far as we know, that’s never really happened in the modern Street Fighter landscape, and it’d be a weird move to do now.

Considering we expect the Season 3 balance changes will come with Elena like they did for Season 2 with Akuma, that’s not a lot of time for players to get acclimated with the new version of SF6.

The norm is to expect at least two weeks of prep time before a big update should be used at a major like this, so that limits the amount of time Capcom comfortably has left too.

That would put the presumed cutoff date for Elena’s update to be around April 25, which is just a month away.

So that would be the latest we currently expect the capoeira fighter to be released.

And then we also have to take into consideration the amount of time Capcom likes to take in the leadup to their DLC character launches too.

Looking back at Mai, her teaser trailer dropped earlier than usual on December 5 while her gameplay trailer was shared on January 13 while the character herself launched on February 5.

That’s a full two months, which was around the same for Terry, but we’re more used to seeing all of that go down in around a month to a month and a half.

There has been a time, though, that Capcom expedited that process back with M. Bison, who was teased and released in less than three weeks.

So if Capcom goes that route again, that means we’d have to see Elena’s teaser by around April 4 to make everything fit.

And then there’s the presumed Elena Arrives Fighting Pass that would start at the beginning of April too, but we saw with Mai that Capcom is willing to release those after the character is available too.

Assuming then Capcom keeps up with some of their norms here, we’re expecting to see Elena sometime within the next week or so.

But perhaps they will pull the unprecedented move of starting their new Capcom Pro Tour year still running on SF6 Season 2 since there’s nothing technically stopping them from doing so.

If that ends up being the case, we may not see Elena at all until Evo Japan and then release her in late May to early June, which would still fall within the Spring launch window.

Although late May would also put her up too close to Combo Breaker 2025 on the CPT too.

But we suspect they’ll want to get out what they’ve been cooking sooner rather than later.

Capcom Cup 11 came to a riveting conclusion earlier this month. Of course, some spectators were quick to point out how many of the matches were decided by throw loops, a problem that has been consistently complained about for Street Fighter 6 for some time now.

As such, Diaphone has released a video that has him talking about what can potentially be done about throw loops in Street Fighter 6. The video starts off by highlighting the opinions of notable figures within the fighting game community about the subject.

From there, Diaphone goes into why throws are so powerful in Street Fighter 6. Unlike a game such as Street Fighter 4, there’s no way to option select against a throw, which rendered throws to be especially weak in that game despite the reward that they granted upon landing one.

Additionally, it can be difficult to punish throw attempts even with back dashes or neutral jumps. Overall, throws just recover too quickly to be consistently dealt with in this manner.

In other fighting games, throws are kept in check by making them riskier, making them easy to react to, or giving the opponents options to reset the situation with correct reads.

Diaphone believes that the best way to address throw loops is to just add a few more recovery frames to whiffed throws so that it can be easier to punish them. He also adds that characters like JP probably shouldn’t have a throw loop in the first place.

Check it all out in the video below:

Bandai Namco hosted the Tekken Talk Live: Season 2 and Anna Williams special livestream just yesterday. Some interesting details regarding the future of Tekken 8 were revealed during the stream that lasted for over two and a half hours.

At one point, the developers updated the Season 2 roadmap. We previously already knew that there would be two additional stages and three more characters after Anna Williams, but the developers shed some light on additional details that we didn’t know about.

First off, it was reiterated that a newcomer will be joining the Tekken 8 Season 2 Character & Stage Pass, specifically “after Summer 2025.” The developers were willing to share a little more information about the timeline regarding this new fighter.

“And so, we made some changes to this slide so that you can see what’s coming with a higher degree of fidelity,” said Katsuhiro Harada (through Michael Murray’s translations). “One of the things that was interesting when we were asking people’s opinions on whether they like the traditional route we’ve taken or if they’d like to have all of them at the same time.”

“Outside of that, the people who said that they would at least like to know if it’s a returning character or not were actually quite a lot,” continued the translation. “So we decided to add that aspect to the slide. Also, you’ll note the coloring of this might serve as hints as well.”

Indeed, it’s been indicated that the first DLC stage of Tekken 8 Season 2 coming in Summer 2025 will serve as a celebration of the 45th anniversary of the Pac-Man series. This is coming up sometime in May of this year.

The DLC combatants set to arrive in Summer 2025 and Autumn 2025 have both been indicated to be returning veterans. Through process of elimination, this means that the DLC challenger expected in Winter 2025 is the new challenger, and has been labeled as such.

Notably, the returning character that’s joining in Summer 2025 has been colored a dark blue color. Meanwhile, the Autumn 2025 combatant is colored violet.

Finally, the newcomer has some sort of turquoise theme going on with their hint. Perhaps this fighter will have something to do with the winter?

There’s also the extra stage being added in Winter 2025, but it’s portion of the roadmap is identical to how it looked before. It’s possible that this could be a stage for the newcomer.

Check it all out below:

Click images for larger versions

Just yesterday, the Venom gameplay trailer for Guilty Gear Strive was released during the Arc World Tour 2024-2025 Finals. Much to everyone’s surprise, the character is set to be released today.

It’s necessary for Arc System Works to release a new patch for the purpose of making Venom available and compatible. As such, Arc System Works has released patch notes for version 1.44 of the game.

Overall, this is a pretty minor patch. The most notable change is simply the addition of Venom as a new playable character.

Outside of that, there really aren’t any balance adjustments being applied. All of the changes being made to the characters are simply listed as fixes.

However, it’s interesting to note that there are now new intro dialogue sequences between Leo and Ramlethal, Leo and Sin, as well as Millia vs. Millia.

There are also new digital figures related to Queen Dizzy that can be acquired in-game.

Check it all out below:

・Added Venom as a playable character.

* Venom will be available after purchasing “GGST Season Pass 4” or the “Venom” DLC item.

・Added the Venom theme, “A Tenth of Myself.”

* Venom must be selectable in order to use the BGM.

・Added avatar items for Venom.

* The new avatar items can be obtained via “fishing.”

・Added the following BGM to the Gallery Mode:

– A Solitude That Asks Nothing In Return (Venom’s theme from GGXX)

– Call Shot (Venom’s theme from GGXrd)

*The newly added BGM can be accessed after obtaining it via “fishing.”

・Added new dialogue interactions for the pre-battle introduction sequence with the following characters.

– Leo VS Ramlethal or Ramlethal VS Leo

– Leo VS Sin or Sin VS Leo

– Millia VS Millia

・Added additional content for Queen Dizzy.

*The new Digital Figure items can be accessed after obtaining them via “fishing.”

・Adjusted the display area in which the figures are hidden, to make it easier to take images with the camera zoomed in as long as certain areas are not visible.

・Fixed an issue causing the aim sight from Happy Chaos’s assist Break-In to remain on-screen under certain conditions during Team of 3 battles.

・Fixed an issue causing some button guides to be displayed incorrectly when the Attack Button Display Format option in System Settings is set to “Platform Based.” After this fix, the buttons will be shown based on the platform in areas outside of Combo Recipe mode as well.

・Fixed issues with some Command List videos differing from the actual behavior in-game.

・Fixed other minor issues.

・Updated the Battle version from Ver.4.02 to Ver.4.03.

・All changes are fixes for issues. Please refer to the list below.

Universal Mechanics:

・Fixed an issue when after activating Roman Cancel with a simultaneous press of 3 attack buttons a special move would activate sometimes even when the attack button is not input.

Chipp:

・Fixed an issue causing Chipp to move to an unintended position when performing certain inputs during Tightrope Run while in Baiken’s tethered state.

Faust:

・Fixed an issue causing the Hammer to go flying without an active hitbox after hitting it with Hole in One! at the same time as the second bound after throwing the Hammer.

Happy Chaos:

・Fixed an issue causing the block sound effect to play back repeatedly when Happy Chaos blocks under certain conditions.

Faust, Goldlewis, Johnny, Dizzy:

・Fixed the following issues occurring while Ice Field is active:

– Faust’s Bone-crushing Excitement and Johnny’s That’s My Name would not enter the cinematic after hitting at a certain timing.

– Goldlewis’s Down With The System would not hit consecutively during the animation after hitting at a certain timing.

Mortal Kombat 2, Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3, Shaolin Monks, Deception and Konquest all specifically mentioned

It’s a matter of when, not if, we’ll see some of the older Mortal Kombat games remastered according to Ed Boon. Whether this will be done by NetherRealm Studios or an outside development team remains to be seen.

Also, which title(s) will be remastered is also up for debate, but in a question and answer session, the Mortal Kombat series co-creator mentioned a few specific possibilities: Mortal Kombat 2, Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3, Shaolin Monks, Deception and Konquest.

Ed Boon was asked what he hopes to see in the future of the Mortal Kombat franchise, by fans at the show at the Cleveland Gaming Classic video game convention.

“To me, there’s two kinds of directions. One, I think we do need to continue moving forward with new content,” said Boon, likely referring to DLC and other things for the 2023 release, Mortal Kombat 1.

Addressing the second part, Boon said that “There’s a catalogue of 30 years of games, and a lot of high points in people’s memories. Mortal Kombat: Shaolin Monks, Deception and Konquest, all of these pivotal moments.”

Back in 2021 on Twitter, Boon asked his followers which remaster they’d be most interested in, and fans responded that it was Shaolin Monks.

“Some people in the audience were probably born after the first Mortal Kombat [game came out in 1992], so a lot of people have kind of been on boarded into Mortal Kombat,” said Boon.

“I would love it if we could revisit some of those moments with the latest technology. Remasters, another action-adventure game, I really feel like there’s great opportunities for that,” Boon stated.

Later, Ed Boon was asked if he considered a modern take on the photo capture style of the original Mortal Kombat game released in the early 1990s.

“Yeah, there was a project that got started that had much higher resolution [assets],” he said.

While it’s not confirmed, it’s likely Boon is referring to the Mortal Kombat HD Kollection that he mentioned on Twitter back in 2021.

“I think they were 3D models, but they certainly looked like photo-realistic versions of the characters, it was kind of remakes of the classic arcade games,” Boon said.

“They’d started, but hit snags that I’m not really allowed to discuss, but it stalled them,” Boon noted.

It seems Boon is under some kind of obligation that prevents him from discussing why this project was cancelled, which he hopes to address at some point in the future.

Regardless, Ed is optimistic that such a project will emerge — at some point in time.

“But that’s certainly something that’s always on our minds, someday it would be great to bring back Mortal Kombat 2 or Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 using today’s technology,” he said.

“One day the stars are going to align and we’re going to make that happen,” concluded Boon.

You can check out the embedded video where these quotes came from below.

If you’d like to go further, make sure you read about how the developers of the first Mortal Kombat game knew they had a hit on their hands, and how one of Baraka’s fatalities went too far and they cut it from the game.

Video from Tabmok99.

The developers of Tekken 8 will be sitting down today for a live special about Season 2 and Anna Williams’ upcoming release for the game.

Katsuhiro Harada, Michael Murray, Kohei ‘Nakatsu’ Ikeda and Yasuda eSports are all scheduled to participate, with the show kicking off at 8 p.m. Pacific / 11 p.m. Eastern.

More details on Season 2 of Tekken 8 are set to be revealed today, which will include Anna Williams and launch on March 31, 2025.

It’s unlikely that we’ll see the full Season 2 DLC lineup revealed during the broadcast, as despite the poll Michael Murray ran, he said we probably will not get the full lineup revealed all at once.

The developers previously said that big updates are coming to the game for Season 2, and that a certain top tier fighter (Nina) would be getting nerfed.

The game is also expected to have more of a defensive focus going forward, compared to how Tekken 8 initially launched.

You can scope out the previously released Tekken 8 patch notes for both February 2025 and March 2025 in advance of the broadcast as well.