Sega is getting in on the micro-console act with the Mega Drive Mini, a bite-sized reimagining of its classic 16-bit home console not too dissimilar from Nintendo’s shrunk down SNES and NES Classics. 

As reported by Siliconera, the device is still in development, and is expected to launch at some point this year. 

Much like it’s micro-console cousins, the system will serve up a smattering of retro games when connected to a TV, allowing owners to rediscover the classics of yesteryear. 

Other details are thin on the ground, but a couple of posts over on Sega’s Japanese Twitter account give us a clear look at the console, and as you’d expect, it looks exactly like a Mega Drive that’s been through the dryer one too many times.

「メガドライブ」誕生30周年記念！
『メガドライブ ミニ』（仮称）2018年発売決定！

思い出の名作ゲームの数々が、これ1台で楽しめます！#セガフェス #メガドライブ #メガドライブ30周年https://t.co/HWj6NFL96y pic.twitter.com/0C9QH1l5Mr

— セガ公式アカウント (@SEGA_OFFICIAL) April 14, 2018

Terraria: Otherworld has been canned by developer Re-Logic after the studio realized the title wasn’t going to reach its potential in “any sort of reasonable time or fashion.”

Announced back in February 2015, Otherworld was pitched as a Terraria spin-off that would utilize RPG and strategy elements to explore “what might have been” had the original game taken a different path. 

Fast-forward three years and it seems Re-Logic has struggled to realize that vision, and while progress has been made since the spin-off was unveiled, the project remains well behind schedule. 

“Our team has a clear vision for this game, and, in spite of all of our efforts, the current state of the game remains equal parts far from that vision and beyond behind schedule from our initial planning when we shared Otherworld with all of you three years ago,” wrote the studio on the Terraria forums. 

“Progress has absolutely been made during that time — but unfortunately, a very thorough status review of the game versus its intended design showed […] that things were quite a bit further away from the finish line than we had imagined. 

“Taking the massive amount of work that would be remaining to complete along with the extensive time it would take to get that done, and how that would greatly interfere with the pursuit of other projects on behalf of Re-Logic — it becomes clear that this leaves things in a very undesirable state.”

While that means Otherworld will never see the light of day, Re-Logic has promised to learn from the process, and has already highlighted some key mistakes. 

For starters, the studio claims it should never have spoken publicly about the game at such an early stage, suggesting that “error in judgment” created an emotional rollercoaster for fans. It also believes outsourcing development of such a “critical title” was a mistake, and now intends to bring the core development of its more high-profile projects in-house. 

The company will continue to work on the original Terraria while it regroups, and has hinted it could implement some of Otherworld’s more promising features in future titles.

Starting at 2 p.m. PDT today, members of the Xbox One Preview Update Preview Rings (Beta, Delta and Omega) will begin receiving the latest Xbox One system update (1804.180407-1335). Read on for more about fixes and known issues in the latest system update and to learn about another opportunity to notify Team Xbox about potential audio issues.

Fixes:

Activity Feed

• Fixed an issue in which users would receive a “Something went wrong” error message when sharing game clips and captures through Twitter.

App Stability

• Fixed an issue in which a user would be using an app such as Netflix or Hulu would logout then unable to launch the app again until they power cycled.

Audio

• Fixed an issue in which some users would experience loss of system sounds on Home.

 Game Hub

• Fixed an issue in which users some users with High Contrast enabled could not see active Club counts and Looking For Group (LFG) post counts.

 Game Installation

• Resolved an issue which prevented some users from installing certain Games (Minecraft and Fallout Shelter), and received no notifications of the installation failure.

 Loss of Home Navigation playing Guitar Hero

• Fixed an issue in which users some users playing Guitar Hero with a Guitar Hero controller would return to Home and be unable to perform any navigation with their controller.

Mixer Crowd Control

• Fixed an issue when a user used the co-pilot for extended sessions the feature would stop working.

 My Games and Apps Collection

• You should no longer encounter an issue with My Games and Apps appearing empty or non-functional when launched.

 Settings – Privacy

• Fixed an issue in which some users could not view or change Privacy Settings.

 System Reliability

• Resolved a system stability issue that could result in apps crashing when multiple games or apps are running.

Video Playback

• Fixed issues with the UHD version of Disney’s latest BD-disc “Thor:Ragnarok” disc in which playback would hang towards the end of the movie.

Known Issues:

Pi-hole

• Pi-hole users may encounter issues signing in, creating, or recovering accounts upon downloading the 1804 update. This is due to a new configuration file which is downloaded from a URL Pi-hole blocks by default.
• Workaround: Add clientconfig.passport.net to the Pi-hole allowed IP address list.

Profile Color

• Sometimes users may encounter an incorrect Profile color when powering on the console.

Audio

• Hulu app volume is lower than expected—the Hulu team is working on an app update.

Audio Issues Help Needed

• We need your help if you are experiencing any audio issues on the console!
• If you experience any loss of audio on Home or in games and apps please use Report a problem and provide as much detail as possible please including:
  
  • TV make and model
  • Audio receiver or headset make and model
  • Duration and frequency of the issue (How long did the issue occur? How often?)
  • A video of the issue including audio if possible – please post a link to the video in your bug or we can direct message you for it.

BeautiFun Games has announced that its upcoming puzzle-adventure title Professor Lupo and his Horrible Pets will come to Switch “this Fall”.

Professor Lupo is a scientist who travels across each and every galaxy to collect the most horrible aliens, before returning to Earth to sell them for a healthy profit. Unfortunately for him, an attack occurs during his alien showcase, and his prized collection escapes to cause havoc in his space station. Your job, as an intern of the spaceship, must now take a terrifying new turn as you desperately try to find a way to escape in what is described as a “frantic puzzle-adventure game”.

Features:
– Puzzle-adventure game remarkably focused in the narrative.
– Investigate the aliens’ behaviour: use them in your favour!
– More than 100 levels of gameplay and replayability.
– Distinctive english voice-over for each character!
– Explore the depths of Aurora Space Station and its machinery.

Do you think you have what it takes to out-smart the aliens? Let us know if you’ll be keeping an eye on this one as we near release down below.

With Wimbledon only a few months away we can already taste that heady mix of strawberries and cream with a cold glass of Pimms, so what better way to keep that mood going than a new trailer for the Nintendo Switch-bound Tennis World Tour?

The new trailer is all about the game’s offline career mode, which sees you managing your avatars stamina while competing in tournaments, earning sponsorships and buying new equipment. It’s pretty standard fare if you’ve played the likes of NBA 2K18, but we’re hoping its systems are balanced and rewarding enough to keep us interested from rank 100 to number one.

Here’s the new trailer in all its racket-swiping glory. Will you be taking to its virtual courts this May, or will you be holding out for a certain other tennis title headed to Switch this summer? Go on, share your take with us below…

Play The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim Special Edition for FREE starting now through Sunday at 1PM Pacific Time. You can also pickup The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim Special Edition at 50% off the regular price!*

If you already have Steam installed, click here to install or play The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim Special Edition. If you don’t have Steam, you can download it here.

*Offer ends Monday at 10AM Pacific Time

This week at Bungie, we unleashed teams of six into Iron Banner.

We have a lot to cover. Iron Banner 6v6 is in full swing. Exotic weapon previews have been dropping like loot. We’re following that up with some important info on Power progression and reward changes coming in Season 3. On top of all this, we’re having special guests in the building to give us valuable feedback.

Let’s get to it.

Crucible Recap

Last week, we postponed Iron Banner while we worked out an issue. In its place, we rolled out a six-player version of Rumble based on player feedback. Here is PvP Design Lead Derek Carroll with more info on the state of combat between Guardians. 

Weapon Showcase

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Those poor, poor Fallen. That wasn’t the only video we teased out this week. You also got a glimpse of what Skyburner’s Oath will be capable of in Season 3. Now that we have shown you, here is Senior Designer Jon Weisnewski to tell you more about what is changing about those weapons and another you haven’t seen yet.

Jon: Hello. For some bizarre reason Cozmo asked me to come back and waste some more space on the TWAB. So here I am bloating the internet tubes with more bits and gigawatts. What does that mean for you? Another update on the Exotic weapon tuning headed your way this May. 

Today, we’ll talk about two guns: Skyburner’s Oath and Rat King.

A while back, I talked about Graviton Lance and how one of the main areas to improve was the lack of utility within a pretty successful show of spectacle. Skyburner’s Oath almost has the opposite problem: It’s a comparatively strong weapon, effective at multiple ranges, strong in ADS and from hip, with varying fire rates. However, it lacks spectacle to give it that exotic feeling; it kind of plays just like any other gun. To address this, we started with giving the projectiles explosive rounds as their default impact response. In ADS, the weapon will perform the same. Full auto, slow firing, high impact. 

When firing from the hip, Skyburner’s Oath now lobs slower projectiles at a faster rate of fire that tracks targets and explodes. The tracking functionality tends to draw projectiles to center mass rather than to precision regions, so we reduced the precision scalar a bit and increased damage to the body (precision hits still do bonus damage; and overall DPS is increased). The end result is a dual utility weapon that fires hit-scan, high-damage projectiles while aiming down sights and rapid-fire, lobbed, exploding, tracking projectiles from the hip. It almost feels like a rapid-fire grenade launcher that can transition to a precision death dealer with the press of a button. Here it is in action.

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Next up is Rat King, which already has something of a fan base, but definitely has room to improve. Of the stats that improve with more fireteam members running Rat King, the strongest is probably the increased rate of fire. Unfortunately, the DPS potential is hard to realize because some people just can’t physically pull the trigger fast enough to cash in on this benefit (or don’t know to try). To make sure this is both felt and used, we made Rat King full auto to ensure the rate of fire increase can make a difference when running in a pack. 

Another pain point was that the restriction of having Rat Pack only activate when allies have Rat Kings equipped in-hand felt a bit too situational. Rat Pack perk now triggers when fireteam members have Rat King slotted as their kinetic weapon, stowed or in hand. We also front-loaded the stat benefits of Rat Pack so they increase a bit more drastically with one or two fireteam members—and upped the base invisibility timer of Vermin to seven seconds. Last but not least, and not to overly tease, but why not, I’m gonna tease: the Masterwork upgrade for Rat King is going to put a tasty garnish on this meal you won’t want to miss out on. 

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It’s never a waste of space to have Newsk stop by to share what weapon changes he’s currently working on. Maybe we can convince him to come back next week to tell us about some more Exotics we are buffing up for Season 3. 

Power Climb

We have received a lot of feedback on rewards, Power, and how you want your actions to be more meaningful in determining how your character performs in the world of Destiny 2. We’re planning some adjustments based on this feedback, and Senior Designer Daniel Auchenpaugh is here to give you the details. 

Daniel: Last time I was here, I talked about our adjustments to the Raid rewards. This time, I want to talk about some more broad changes we’re making to the reward structure of Destiny 2. One of the things we did when Destiny 2 launched was make the climb to the power cap fast and easy for everyone. It didn’t matter who you were or what your play style was; the road to the cap was quick and accessible for everyone. The result was that achieving the cap felt less satisfying: It was easy, and there weren’t any activities that dared to require it.

So, with the release of Destiny 2 Expansion II: Warmind, we’re making some changes to the size and frequency of upgrades. These changes will apply to all of Destiny 2—not just the Warmind endgame content. Our goals with this change are to bring back meaning and accomplishment to achieving the Power cap, to give players a sense of progression when they come back to play each week, and to reward players who engage in a broader scope of the Destiny 2 endgame content. We’ve made an effort to de-emphasize grinding public events for Exotics and to reduce the impact of clan engrams on endgame progression.

Before we get into specifics, I want to define a couple terms so we’re on common ground. Soft cap is the point you can climb to easily via drops from any source. The hard cap is the power level you can obtain from weekly reward sources. The soft cap for Warmind is 340, and the hard cap is 380. These numbers don’t consider any +5 mods. Remember that all drops are calculated using your Best Possible Power, regardless of if you have the gear equipped or not. It can even be in the vault or on another character!

Our target is that players who participate in all the weekly activities should take several weeks to reach the hard cap. Raids/Trials grant the largest increases, clan engrams provide very small increases, and the other weekly sources fall between those two. Players who don’t participate in any group weekly activities are unlikely to hit the hard cap before the next release; dedicated omnivore players will hit it before players that just play Raids or Trials exclusively. Additionally, the final 10 points from 370 to 380 will be significantly slower than 340 to 370; we expect it to take players roughly equal time to go from 340 to 370 as from 370 to 380. We decided to make this change because climbing to 370 allows you to tackle endgame content without suffering a severe under level penalty, but creates a significant accomplishment in achieving 380.

Clan engrams offer excellent upgrades while a player is climbing to the soft cap; they should grant awards an average of 15 Power higher than your current best possible while you’re on the way there. This will help players catch up with their clanmates who are completing weekly activities. Once you’ve achieved the soft cap, your progress is going to rely a lot more on your own achievements; clan engrams above the soft cap will grant gear only 0–2 points above your best possible. 

In an effort to combat exploits around creating new characters to take advantage of one-time quest rewards, we’ve decided to limit those rewards to the soft cap for the release they first appeared in. This means Destiny 2 launch quests cap at 260 (before mods), Curse of Osiris caps at 300, and Warmind caps at 340. To compensate for their new caps, they’ll give you a large boost (15 Power) when you earn them as long as you’re below that cap. Farming Exotics to increase your Power has been removed; if they drop from a non-weekly source, they’ll come out of the engram at the same Power as a Legendary would after you’ve gotten to the soft cap. We believe the changes to quest rewards and Exotic farming will ensure the most effective way to reach the Power cap is to play the most challenges and social weekly activities.

Thanks for hanging in there through this long explanation. Please let us know any feedback you have about this new way forward for Destiny 2 rewards. We’re going to carefully monitor feedback from this post and our early data after Warmind launches to guide any changes we might make to this in the future. So if you love it, let us know! If you hate it, let us know that too!

High Altitude

The guy who used to write these “weekly blog addresses” (those are his words—he apparently hates the term “TWAB”) wants to hog the mic for just a minute to share some final thoughts on the Community Summit that’s happening tomorrow and Friday at Bungie.

DeeJ: Thanks, Cozmo.

Thursday and Friday, we’ll be honored and humbled to host a small but insightful sampling of the community here in our studio. They’ll be here to give us their opinions on our goals and our plans. Some of them you know. Some of them we know. We want you to know that this is not the only way we’re gathering feedback about Destiny 2, and these are not the only people we’re listening to about the game. This summit will be about collaboration. Our best conversations will be about the future. This isn’t a marketing event. There will be no reveals this week. We’re not streaming while they’re here. They won’t have a wealth of news to report once our time together is over. They’ll be welcome to report on the mood from the gathering and to tell you what they told us. We’d ask you not to press them for promises on what the state of Destiny 2 will be in the months to come. That work will still fall to us, and there is still plenty of time for those things to find their final form. Next week, if they want to, they’ll share some of their own content from the next expansion. For this week, we wanted to give them a seat at our table.

Back to you, Cozmo.

Helpful Hands

Whether its plants, animals, or other oddly named error codes, the Destiny Player Support has the information you need to diagnose any issues you come across in the wild.  

This is their report.

Iron Banner Updated

This week marks the first arrival of 6v6 Iron Banner, and is the first Iron Banner post-Update 1.1.4. Listed below are changes that players can expect to see in this playlist, as outlined in the Update 1.1.4 Patch Notes:

• Now features 6v6
• Time limit is 12 minutes
• Score limit is 125 points
• Respawn time is 7 seconds
• All Control Zones start off neutral
• Additional Guardians (max of 3) in a zone increases capture speed
• Emperor’s Respite has been removed from the Iron Banner Control playlist
• Power ammo
• • Recurring side crate respawn times reduced from 90 seconds to 45 seconds
  • Initial side crate respawn times reduced from 90 seconds to 30 seconds

Additionally, all Season 2 Iron Banner weapons will be available from Lord Saladin through either Reward Packages, or direct purchase using Iron Banner Tokens. For more information regarding Iron Banner, players should visit our Iron Banner Guide.

Error Codes

We are still investigating an increase in reports of CABBAGE, COCONUT, CURRANT, LETTUCE, and RABBIT error codes.

We have implemented a fix that should resolve most instances of ZEBRA error codes. Players with a poor connection quality or below minimum spec PC hardware may continue to encounter this error code.

Players who encounter these errors should try relaunching into their activity. Players who repeatedly encounter these error codes should report them to the #Help forum.

Put the Bunny Back in the Box

Here are this week’s winners.

Movie of the Week: New World

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Honorable Mention: Yoga Flame!

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Before we go, here are last week’s Nightfall scores. 

You just read over 2,400 words of knowledge. How you feeling? We have more lined up for you next week during the stream. Join us April 24 at 10 a.m. PDT on Twitch to see Warmind and Season 3. 

In the meantime, I’ll be playing some Iron Banner 6v6 and finishing up some ornaments. I’ll see you out there. 

<3 Cozmo