There are a few things that stop my progress through a video game. Things like game-breaking bugs. Unwarranted difficulty spikes. German adventure game sad clown voice acting. 

And photo modes. At least photo mode is something that stops my forward progress in a good way. Now Cyberpunk 2077 reveals that it's got one waiting for me. It's entrapment. I used to be the kind of player that spent an hour or two in character creation, but now I'm more of a default kinda guy. I like my Commander Shepard looking like the one in the key art. I like my Viking Eivor being recognizable in all the Assassin's Creed posters. 

But nowadays it's photo mode that slows me down. I'm a sucker. I whip out my in-game Instagram account, and camp on filters, depths of field, and Barbie-posing my character for the perfect no-look explosion snapshot. The Facebooks and Twitters of the world gave us the phrase "Pics or it didn't happen." Well, I might've deleted my personal Facebook and Twitter years ago, but I still live like pics-or-it-didn't-happen is true for me in video games.

After spending an entire console generation in development, and after months of possibly COVID-related delays, Cyberpunk 2077 finally launches next week, December 10, appearing on any current or new-gen PlayStation, Xbox, and PC, including Stadia.

Streaming channel (and GN partner) Games N Moorer hosted Gaming Nexus last night for a couple of hours of fun playing Heroes of Hammerwatch, a great pixel-art hack n' slash releasing today on PlayStation 4. 

If you missed the stream, you can check it out here:

Keep an eye out for more streams from Games N Moorer, coming soon. We'll keep you posted as Moorer are scheduled. See what I did there?

Super Bomberman R Online appeared on Stadia as a Free with Pro game back in September, 2020. Taking a quick look at it, I really enjoyed Super Bomberman R's fun and bouncy gameplay - but as usual with multiplayer games on Google's streaming platform, I fretted over the player base and whether Stadia's smaller install base would be able to support a battle royale in the long term. 

Stadia seems to have resolved that issue, by today converting Super Bomberman R Online over to a free-to-play title. To clarify, there is a difference between "Free with Pro" and free-to-play. Free with Pro games are given to Stadia Pro members once a month, and are available to members so long as they maintain their $10-a-month Pro membership. Free-to-play titles on Stadia are just that - no Pro membership needed. Anyone with Chrome, a controller, and a Gmail account can log into Stadia and play for absolutely free. Adding Super Bomberman R Online to the free-to-play list feels like it will pretty much resolve that whole "player base" issue.

Super Bomberman R Online is Stadia's second free-to-play game, after Destiny 2 blasted the doors off of Stadia's paywall last month. Before then, you either needed to get games via a Pro membership, or buy them outright. Now it seems that Stadia is committing to a new way of distributing games - giving them to the public at large for absolutely nothing.

The zeitgeist on Stadia has turned a corner lately. Twitter is full of testimonials every day from new users that picked up a Stadia Premiere with a YouTube membership, tried it out, and had their socks knocked off. Adding free games for everyone will likely help solidify the new momentum that Stadia has gained.

You can play Super Bomberman R Online right now, by clicking here.

Here's a novel approach: acknowledge that your game is not running in native 4K on Stadia on the day that it releases, then promise to patch it in. Hmm...why didn't everyone else think of that?

I'm speaking, of course, about ROCKFISH Games, and its hit 2017 space shooter Everspace, which is now available for free to Pro members on Stadia. Everspace launched today on Stadia, along with a $9.99 expansion pack, and ROCKFISH immediately put out a statement clarifying that it will be patching in 4K support in early 2021. There is something to be said for transparency, and ROCKFISH should be lauded for clarifying its ongoing support for the Stadia version of its game.

“Bringing the original EVERSPACE to Stadia was more than a commercial business decision for us,” said Michael Schade, ROCKFISH Games CEO and Co-founder. “Thanks to Stadia, we can finally offer tens of million space pilots around the globe the chance to enjoy EVERSPACE at a high quality gameplay experience even without owning a capable PC or console.” 

Gaming Nexus reviewed Everspace upon its original release and really enjoyed it, giving the game a 9.0. I plan on checking out Everspace's performance on Stadia in the next two days, so keep an eye on Gaming Nexus for a video or two.

If there is one thing I cant wait for its return after all this Covid nonsense is over, is the return to a normal FGC events. While online tournaments are still fun to watch, nothing beats seeing fighting games in an convention hall or an area with the crowd popping off constantly.

Final Kombat for MK11 was unfortunately one of those events that got scaled down once the Covid lockdowns earlier this year started happening. The event was still held in the convention hall but with no crowd in attendance. That said, season 2 of Mortal Kombat 11 Pro Kompetition kicks off next month as Kombat begins on December 5th. 

Here are the details from the PS4 Store page. 

It’s time to hit the lab for a kompetition that puts Shang Tsung’s original Mortal Kombat tournament to shame. The MK11 Pro Kompetition is finally back, exclusively on PlayStation®4! GET OVER HERE and earn enough points to snatch a meaty chunk of the $20,000 online regional prize pool.

Finish your foes and earn the right to fight live on stream to determine your sub region’s deadliest competitor.

Active PS Plus membership required. Must be 17+ and a member of an eligible country. Void where prohibited. See full rules.   

The online regional circuit is split into the North American League, Interkontinental Kombat, and Liga Latina. All three include sub regions. Discover region-specific schedules and other information before signing up.

DOOM Eternal launched back in March on most systems except the Nintendo Switch. Several months later however and it seems that DOOM Eternal on the Nintendo Switch has a launch date and it's closer than one might expect. DOOM Eternal will launch digitally on the Nintendo Switch on December 8th, 2020, just over a week away from the date of this post. The Switch version will utilize motion aiming with the Joy-Cons' built-in gyroscope feature and will also use traditional aiming. I'm a little weary of the motion aiming after playing Borderlands with it on, but I did start to get use to it there. At least though you'll have the ability to use traditional aiming instead it seems so if you're not into motion-controlled aiming you still have standard aiming controls to fall back on.

Heroes of Hammerwatch has been around for a while on Steam, garnering a Very Positive review status. The Ultimate Edition of this popular titles was recently released on Nintendo Switch, where it picked up an 85 on Metacritic. Now, this acclaimed hack n' slash RPG is prepping to bring its pixel art adventures to PlayStation 4.

Gaming Nexus is going live tonight with new partner Games N Moorer to check out this surprisingly deep game. Join us at 8:30 PM EST at https://www.facebook.com/gamesnmoorer/ to join in on the fun and chaos.

And of course, if you miss the stream we will be posting it in this spot tomorrow, so keep an eye out! See you tonight!

While launching a new generation of consoles is certainly a defining feature of 2020, the enormous seasonal sales from Steam are—along with Daylight Savings and tracking the moon's cycles for planting corn—a way of marking the passage of time through the year. While it's tempting to take a Mulligan and try 2020 over again, and while it's equally tempting to fast forward through it all and shake the ol' Etch A Sketch on New Year's Day 2021, there's also good reason to slow down today to give you time to cull your Steam Wishlist, see what to add to your library or what to delete from that list, and do what video gaming heroes can do during Pandemic 2: Electric Boogaloo—and that's play games.

But hey, while the government was pretty good at getting that first stimulus check out there, it's now obvious that's all we were going to get out of them for now. If you've still got your $1200, then you did better than I did, and you might need a little advice on what's really good in that Steam Sale before you go throwing money at another waste of time. We've reviewed most of the games on Steam's current best sellers. See if any of these current best sellers pique your interest:

• Destiny 2 is a living game, with an insurmountable amount of changes since its 2017 launch, but Rob, our resident Destiny expert, lays out the foundation.
• DOOM Eternal launched shortly into lockdown this year, and the game that I affectionately refer to as Due Maternal pulled a 9 out of 10.
• Halo: The Master Chief Collection is yet another game that's gone through mind-altering improvements since its 2014 launch. It's gone from a begrudging 7 out of 10 to an Overwhelmingly Positive 96% on Steam.
• Star Wars: Squadrons is a revelation in VR, but is a surprisingly deep flight sim on flatscreen too. After decades of fans clamoring for an X-Wing vs. TIE Fighter remake, Squadrons sticks the landing.
• The Sims 4 is quietly one of the biggest gaming franchises on the planet. And depending on where you stand with having to buy hundreds of dollars worth of DLC with each iteration, The Sims series as a whole is just absolutely wonderful. If you've never played one, give it a shot. It's the kind of game that realigns your perspective in life.
• Red Dead Redemption 2 stands alone in its field. Its dark country field. If you've never heard tell of the ballad of Arthur Morgan, then you're missing out on arguably the best Western in the whole medium.
• Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order is only a year old or so, and is simply the best Star Wars game in years. For as long as the game was, we left it wanting more.
• Borderlands 3, if you buy it now, marks 10 years since we first set foot on Pandora. It reunites old friends on new planets and is in keeping with the best that Borderlands has produced over the past decade.
• Civilization VI is already one or two games into the series that seems to have split the fanbase. Regardless, we can't not recommend this one. It's many virtues overshadow this age-old series' many faults.
• Sea of Thieves was a revelation to many of us Gaming Nexus staffers when we got a little co-op time in. Lots of yelling, puking, throwing in the brig'ing, and finger pointing when it came to why we'd dry-docked ourselves onto yet another pier. What do you do with a drunken sailor? We had no idea.
• The Elder Scrolls Online, a game from 2014, makes it frighteningly apparent how long we've been waiting for the single-player Elder Scrolls VI. Nevertheless, in an era where the golden age of MMOs has long since diminished, this one has managed to keep a sizeable playerbase, making Tamriel often show up in the same sentences as Azeroth.

We can't possibly link you to every single video game in the Steam Autumn Sale, but wanted to throw some scores at you for those top sellers. They all happen to be good, so you can't go wrong with them. Now it's just up to you where to spend that pre-Stimulus Check #2 money before you even get it. Only got a bout 23 hours left. Slow down 2020 just long enough for you to catch a good deal.

Amazon Luna is well into the second month of its beta, and a steady flow of games has been appearing throughout that could possibly suggest a cadence for the new platform. So far, an average of two games has been added to Luna each week. All of them have been indie titles, but some of them have been very acclaimed, well-known games.

This week, A Plague Tale: Innocence and Mighty Switch Force! Collection have appeared in the "Newly Added To Luna" category. 

I went ahead and took a look at A Plague Tale to see how it performs on Luna. Short answer: flippin' amazing. Take a look:

I'm not terribly familiar with Mighty Switch Force, but I took a look at the trailer, and it looks like a fun collection of puzzle/platformer games:

Keep an eye on Gaming Nexus for more Luna coverage. And if you enjoy gameplay videos, don't forget that our new streaming partner Games N Moorer will be regularly posting streams of new games and beloved classics.

The Monster Hunter feature film starring Milla Jovovich and directed by Paul W.S. Anderson is set to premiere on Christmas Day (because honestly how do you make a video game movie without the team at the core of the Resident Evil film franchise as well as Anderson's credit on Mortal Kombat, one of the films that started the entire game-to-movie trend). Monster Hunter: World on which the film is based is getting limited time in-game movie events with the Monster Hunter World: Iceborne expansion. 

In game, there is a two-part Event Quest incoming starting December 4th.  Hunters can take on the film's Black Diablos in the initial solo quest, then challenge the massive Greater Rathalos in the second. You must have Master Rank to attempt the challenge, and those who are victorious will be rewarded with special gear, layered armor, new titles, a new background and Guild Card poses. There is also a log-in bonus for all Iceborne players starting November 27th to claim one limited time item pack. 

For more information, visit the Monster Hunter World: Iceborne website: https://www.monsterhunter.com/world-iceborne/