A new month is almost upon us, which means Sony is about to refresh the lineup of games that all PlayStation Plus members can claim and keep in their collection as long as they maintain their subscription. Between March 4 and March 31, you'll be able to snag Dragon Age: The Veilguard, Sonic Colors: Ultimate and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Cowabunga Collection. Dragon Age: The Veilguard (PS5) is the clear headliner this time around. Fans had to wait a decade between new installments in BioWare's series, partly because the studio rebooted its work on the latest title several times. Veilguard, an action RPG, is a direct sequel to 2014's Dragon Age Inquisition.

Back in 2013, having bought the series from Eidos, Square Enix released a reboot of the hit 1990s action game Tomb Raider starring a significantly less objectified Lara Croft. I loved that game, despite a quasi-assault scene near the beginning that I would later come to view as a bit icky, and I wasn't the only one – it was extremely well received, selling 3.4m copies in its first month alone. Then Square Enix came out and called it a disappointment. Sales did not meet the publisher's expectations, apparently, which raises the question: what were the expectations? Was it supposed to sell 5m in one month?

Ten video games have received nominations for the 36th Annual GLAAD Media Awards. This program celebrates media works that feature "fair, accurate and inclusive representations of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ) community and the issues that affect their lives." There are nominees for television, film, music, theater, journalism and comics as well as video games. One of the 2024 nominees for outstanding video game is the re-release of Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door for the Nintendo Switch. The original Japanese version of the GameCube title included a minor character named Vivian who was transgender. The game contained dialogue about her challenges being misgendered and her journey to understanding her own identity.

This year may not have been as jam packed as 2023 was for gaming, but there were still plenty of amazing new releases. Whether you love a good indie or a big-budget production, this year had you covered. All you needed to do was look a bit deeper than you might have in 2023. The core of Animal Well isn't that structurally complicated: It's a lock-and-key Metroidvania. You go to places to unlock other places and abilities. Beating the core "story" opens up a couple layers of admirably elaborate and increasingly meta secrets, but let's be real, most people interested in those are just going to look up the answers online. And yet, you play it, and you can't help but think there isn't much like it nowadays. It's the fact that you never learn what your little blob guy is. It's giving you a map to mark up yourself instead of providing any instructions.

The EA Play recreation subscription service brings collectively a few of the most famous titles revealed by Digital Arts below one roof. And it begins at solely Rs. 315 monthly in India. However in case you're already subscribed to Xbox Recreation Move Final, you possibly can take pleasure in content material from EA Play for no extra value. However the record of video games could be a bit overwhelming, contemplating it has a plethora of titles starting from basic first-person shooters resembling Battlefield and Crysis, to co-op masterpieces resembling It Takes Two. EA Play additionally brings alongside remastered variations of racing video video games resembling Burnout Paradise and Want for Velocity Sizzling Pursuit.

The next Dragon Age game is still a long ways off, but that isn't stopping BioWare from expanding the fantasy RPG's reach. Netflix has unveiled a six-episode anime series, Dragon Age: Absolution, premiering sometime in December. The teaser trailer (below) doesn't reveal much, but you can expect a "new saga" in Tevinter that appears to center on a special ring -- and, of course, plenty of magic and bloody swordplay. Red Dog Culture House (which created an episode for Love, Death & Robots) is producing the limited-run project. Guardians of the Galaxy series producer Mairghread Scott is serving as the showrunner.

Grid representations offer many advantages for path planning. Lookups in grids are fast, due to the uniform memory layout, and it is easy to modify grids. But, grids often have significant memory requirements, they cannot directly represent more complex surfaces, and path planning is slower due to their high granularity representation of the world. The speed of path planning on grids has been addressed using abstract representations, such as has been documented in work on Dragon Age: Origins. The abstract representation used in this game was compact, preventing permanent changes to the grid.

"Red Dead Redemption 2" made an early impact on The Game Award's fifth annual event in Los Angeles. But "God of War" prevailed in the end. The blockbuster Western open world epic from Rockstar Games won the first award presented during the event – best narrative – which kicked off at 9 p.m. ET and can be seen on many sites including YouTube. Soon after, Roger Clark, who voiced the starring character in the game, Arthur Morgan, won for best performance. The game also won for the award for best music/score, and best audio design.

For Xbox Live Gold subscribers, June's free roster of games is anchored around a mix of major flagship franchise titles and indie options. Microsoft confirmed that June's Xbox Live Games With Gold program will be headlined with Watch Dogs, Dragon Age: Origins and Assassin's Creed III . Subscribers to Xbox Live Gold can get free games through Microsoft with the Games With Gold program every month. Originally released in 2014, Watch Dogs comes from developer Ubisoft. The open-world third-person shooter puts you into the role of hacker Aiden Pearce.

Big, beautiful open worlds don't necessarily translate into compelling games. Ultimately, perhaps the biggest problem with Mass Effect: Andromeda is that BioWare believed the game would succeed if only it were bigger and more graphically stunning than the games that preceded it. Here we have a game that's fully embraced the open world design concepts of modern game development, replete with lots of gathering and scanning and crafting and the like. The grind is strong in this one. Ironically, the value of highly structured open-world game design has come into question lately, especially with the release of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild.