Fortnite appears to be beginning to tease its upcoming season, with strange happenings in the world. This time it’s a series of runes near Loot Lake, and the community is already scrambling to unlock their mysteries.
Fans on the Fortnite subreddit have been swapping information about the “Loot Lake Rune Event” in a dedicated thread. There appear to be two runes spotted so far–one in Fatal Fields and one in Paradise Palms. The runes are moving, however, and seem to be changing directions. That could signify that they’re drawing a pattern, similar to past events with moving objects. Meanwhile, a strange vault has appeared at the bottom of Loot Lake, reports PC Gamer. That appears to correspond with the rune movements.
Fortnite Season 8 began on February 28, and seasons usually last 10 weeks. That means we have about two more weeks until the start of the next season, so now is the right time for Epic to begin laying the groundwork for it. Fortnite has been known to launch massive in-world events, usually with puzzles or big events for players to participate in, to both generate excitement and hint at the direction for the upcoming season.
That also means you only have a few weeks left to finish your challenges. If you need a hand with those, make sure to check out our challenge guide and Jigsaw pieces guide. The latest jigsaw puzzle formed a strange alien image, which could also be a clue of things to come.
Sony has kicked off a PlayStation Network flash sale, offering great prices on a large collection of games for a limited time. While Ubisoft games take center stage, lots of others are on sale as well. The prices will last through April 22.
If you’ve had an eye on games like The Division 2 or Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, you can pick up the games themselves, deluxe editions, or pieces of downloadable content for cheap. The Division 2 is going for $50, while the Gold Edition is down to $80 and the Ultimate is $96. Similarly, Odyssey is $20, and the season pass (which includes Assassin’s Creed 3 Remastered) is $24. South Park: The Fractured But Whole is down to $15.
Another Assassin’s Creed game can be had for cheap for a little longer too. Ubisoft is offering Assassin’s Creed Unity, the game set in 1700s Paris, for free for a limited time on its Ubisoft Store. The gesture is to pay homage to the Notre Dame Cathedral, which was recently damaged by a fire.
There was a lot of uncertainty surrounding the fate of the Trine series after 2015’s divisive Trine 3: The Artifacts of Power. That game marked a bold step for the burgeoning franchise, eschewing the 2.5D gameplay that defined its predecessors for full 3D environments. But developer Frozenbyte’s ambitions came at a steep cost; the game’s budget exceeded $5 million, nearly triple the amount it took to develop Trine 2, and the studio consequently had to pare the scope of the adventure back, leading to criticism that it felt unfinished.
Since then the series has largely lain dormant, but it is set to reemerge later this fall with the release of Trine 4: The Nightmare Prince, the first new installment in four years. Frozenbyte has evidently taken the criticisms leveled at Trine 3 to heart, as The Nightmare Prince brings the series back to its 2.5D roots. As the studio explained during a recent hands-off demo session, the impetus behind this decision was twofold: the developers found that the 2.5D gameplay was a better fit for the game’s puzzles, and fans had wanted to see the series return to the style of earlier titles.
Just as in the previous games, The Nightmare Prince follows the adventures of three heroes: Pontius the knight, Zoya the thief, and Amadeus the wizard. This time around, the trio have been dispatched by the Astral Academy to retrieve a missing prince who’s suffering from a curious affliction: his dark dreams are able to manifest in the real world and terrorize the people of the kingdom. As before, each of the three protagonists has their own unique abilities, which you’ll need to utilize fully on your quest to rescue the prince: Amadeus is able to conjure up large boxes that can be used to press down on switches or reach inaccessible areas; Zoya can fire arrows and tie objects together; and Pontius is capable of deflecting projectiles and rays of light with his shield.
You’re able to freely swap between all three characters on the fly as you play–and in fact you’ll need to do just that in order to progress through the adventure, as you’ll often come across bosses and environmental obstacles that can only be overcome by using the heroes’ abilities in tandem; a chasm, for instance, can be crossed by first conjuring a block with Amadeus, then using Zoya’s arrows to tie it to another object, creating a makeshift tightrope that you can walk across. Boss battles will likewise have puzzle elements to them; in the demo we witnessed, the rotund Pontius came face to face with a hulking undead knight. The creature was impervious to standard attacks, so Pontius had to first clear the vines choking the room’s windows to allow light to filter in, then reflect the beams at the foe.
While the entire adventure is playable solo, the series is best as a cooperative experience, and just as previous installments, Trine 4 allows other players to jump in and join the journey at any time locally or online. According to Frozenbyte, some of the game’s puzzles will even differ depending on if you’re playing alone or with friends, and you’ll be prompted whether you’d like to encounter the solo or co-op versions of the puzzles when in a multiplayer session. The developer also confirmed that the robust skill trees from the first two installments are returning in Trine 4, adding another layer of depth to the adventure.
After the ambitious missteps of Trine 3, Trine 4 is a clear reset for the beloved puzzle-platforming series. Frozenbyte is drawing heavily from the formula established by the first two Trine games for its latest installment. For fans of those titles, however, that is likely assurance enough that the series is returning to form. Trine 4: The Nightmare Prince launches for PS4, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, and PC via Steam this fall.
“The real story’s only just begun.” Those were the chilling final words spoken during the Cobra Kai Season 1 finale, as the disgraced former sensei of the Cobra Kai dojo, John Kreese (Martin Kove), made his first appearance on the series. It had been nearly three decades since Kreese had appeared on-screen in The Karate Kid Part III, but it was instantly clear that the vicious former mentor of Johnny Lawrence (William Zabka) is as devious as ever.
The actor behind the character, though, is a completely different story. That’s what I learned during a visit to the set of Cobra Kai’s second season. When we sat down to talk just outside of the dojo set, Kove–who introduced himself as Marty–proved to have very little in common with Kreese. Even on this cold day in Atlanta in the final days of production on the season, he was happy and excited about the opportunity to revisit this character.
“Working here, and the things that [Cobra Kai explores] of why and what has happened to [Kreese] in the last 30 years, it’s incredible,” he said. “And it’s so much fun to act.”
It’s not just Kove having fun, though. Bringing Kreese back to life on the series–you may remember Johnny’s Season 1 claim that his mentor was dead–allowed producers, who are longtime Karate Kid fans, the opportunity to explore the character in ways the movies never had the luxury.
“It’s like you get the Emperor from Star Wars back. This guy embodies the dark side of karate,” executive producer Josh Heald told GameSpot. “There’s not a single moment in any of the first three movies where he’s not this foreboding, scary bad guy. And so he brings all of that to the table as a character and here, in the series, we get to peel back the layers and understand in a real world, how could somebody be like this?”
That question is one Kove has thought about quite a bit over the years. “He doesn’t believe that karate is a defensive art. Karate is an offensive sport,” the actor explained. “And he believes that your opponent, if he’s not on the ground, pretty much unconscious, then you haven’t won yet. That came out of Vietnam, that came out of where our soldiers and our boys weren’t really allowed to win, because John Kreese, which I’ve talked about many times in panels and all, was always a champion, until he went to Vietnam, where our boys were not allowed to win. He vowed when he came back he’d never lose again and neither would his students.”
That, Kove believes, is where Cobra Kai’s no mercy declaration was born. “Mercy is for the weak and here on the streets [when] someone confronts you, he is your enemy and enemy deserves no mercy,” he said.
Cobra Kai is a different place in 2019 than it was when we last saw Kreese in 1989, though. When Johnny relaunched the dojo in Season 1, it was easy to see his vision differed from his mentor’s. “The only way that I could, as an actor, justify Johnny [relaunching the dojo is] that he’s trying to approach it differently and [hoping] for a different result,” William Zabka, the actor who plays Johnny, explained. “So he’s definitely not Kreese. He’s Johnny Lawrence with all of his history and all of his tics and challenges and dreams and all that, trying to help these kids genuinely, and he believes it.”
And with Johnny at the helm, Kreese is going to play nice–for now, at least. “He’s willing to obey the rules, he’s willing to try and gain the confidence of Johnny by being a human being,” Kove said. “And he doesn’t have a problem coming in, be an assistant sensei–even though he created Cobra Kai–as long as the values of Cobra Kai stay as he created them, which you would think, Johnny being his best student, would maintain.”
Of course, while Johnny may be trying to run a very different Cobra Kai, you can still expect to see Kreese up to some of his old tricks. “He brings a whole other flavor to the show which we really enjoy and you get to see him interacting with students of today, his former student in Johnny, and you get to [witness] Daniel LaRusso’s seeing Sensei Kreese again for the first time in a long time,” executive producer John Hurwitz teased.
At least as far as Kreese is concerned, he wasn’t kidding when he said, “The real story’s only just begun.” What that means for the future of Johnny Lawrence and the Cobra Kai dojo is something you’ll find out when Cobra Kai premieres Wednesday, April 24, on YouTube Premium.
Games have always existed in a numbers-obsessed industry. Sega vs. Nintendo defined a generation in the ’90s, while today’s more mild console wars and monthly NPD reports keep sales figures at the forefront of games-related discussion. With such a persistent emphasis on performance, one of the industry’s biggest questions has always been, What are the best-selling video games of all time?
To answer this question, we set out to compile the most accurate list possible, digging through financial reports, news stories, interviews, and more. The result is the following list of the ten best-selling video games of all time, as of March 2019.
(Notes: We’ve counted pack-in games toward sales totals, considering all ten games on this list were, at one point, bundled with a console. Free downloads are not counted as sales, therefore excluding games like Fortnite and League of Legends.)
