Daily Gaming News: August 11, 2020

I just heard the Final Fantasy VIII theme song Eyes on Me on a random Spotify station, and it brought me back to the days of controlling the most emo protagonist in Final Fantasy history. It wasn’t my favorite FF game by a long shot, but I respect Square’s decision to make it a love story.

The Last of Us Part II is back with the Grounded update

We know everyone’s itching to play The Last of Us Part II again (see my review), and Naughty Dog is helping everybody out by releasing a new update, “Grounded”. The update brings Grounded mode (from The Last of Us 1, essentially a harder game mode with slow motion and other minor stuff), new graphics options (pixelated, poster edges/comic book style, a matrix screensaver type look, etc), and a Permadeath mode (sounds awful).

Story decisions aside, the gameplay in The Last of Us Part II was solid, if not a bit predictable, and it’s good to see Naughty Dog supporting the game with new modes.

Halo Infinite gets delayed to 2021

Amid COVID-19 and complaints about the gameplay demo’s graphics fidelity, 343 Industries announced that shooter Halo Infinite would be delayed to 2021. While this is probably a good decision that hopefully lessens “crunch” and allows more time for quality control – or so we hope – this isn’t good news for Microsoft, as Infinite was slated to be one of its launch titles.

Which brings us to…

Xbox Series X officially launching this November

IGN reports that Microsoft has honed in on November 2020 for the launch of its nest console, the Xbox Series X. Even though Halo Infinite will no longer be available at the same time, the console is still launching with full backwards compatibility for all previous generation Xbox games and will also support the Xbox Game Pass. 

The MVS X is a Neo Geo arcade machine for your home

I never knew just how many King of Fighters, Fatal Fury and Metal Slug games were made until today’s announcement for the MVS X home arcade machine (and if you want to how many: it’s a lot).

The MVS X is the latest entry in the home arcade system genre, and consists of the top-half of a typical arcade machine – to be fair, I think the Arcade1Up machines are like this too – with the bottom half base sold separately. It plays 50 classic Neo Geo games (with about half being the ones mentioned above) and comes out in October for the retail price of $449.99 (or $499 with the base). Unfortunately, the site is a bit broken currently and doesn’t let you get past the region selection page.

Red Dead Online patch introduces flying horses and ghostly bald men

Rockstar’s latest 1.21 patch for Red Dead Online seems to have shaken up the game world in some wacky ways that include raining alligators, flying chariots, and a random bald guy that runs around and subsequently crashes the game after being approached. A fix is reportedly in the works for many of the issues.

I don’t see any problems here. If I were in charge, the bald men would be flying too.