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Here’s what we’re covering in your daily audio tour through the world of video games, related technologies and pop culture like comics, movies and TV.
THE BIG STORIES

Insomniac Games reveals Song of the Deep
Friends’ deception, not strippers, sank Ant Simulator, developer says
Metal Gear Online will add Quiet, new maps, a new mode and more in March
EA exec’s remarks shine a light on Xbox One sales
Fallout 4’s latest patch fixes numerous issues with quests and perks
Ubisoft wants EA to give up the ‘ghost’ in trademark battle

THE BEST OF THE REST

XCOM 2 review
Video game releases for February 2016
10-Minute Barbarian is just the good parts of RTS games

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Polygon

Rey, Finn, Poe, BB-8 — the gang’s all here Lego Star Wars: The Force Awakens is the next Star Wars video game, according to a product page that popped up overnight on the Xbox Games Store and a trailer that leaked on YouTube.
The game is in development at TT Games and will be published by Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment, the Xbox Games Store page says. Lego Star Wars: The Force Awakens is set to be released June 28 on Nintendo 3DS, PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, PlayStation Vita, Wii U, Windows PC, Xbox 360 and Xbox One, according to the trailer. You can watch the brief video above.
The description on the Xbox Games Store says Lego Star Wars: The Force Awakens will allow players to take the roles of the main characters of Star Wars: The Force Awakens, including Rey, Finn, Poe Dameron, Han Solo, Kylo Ren and even the droid BB-8. It will also “feature exclusive playable content that bridges the story gap between Star Wars Episode VI: Return of the Jedi and Star Wars: The Force Awakens."
Lego Star Wars: The Force Awakens is presumably the "massive announcement" featuring "two of the world’s most popular entertainment brands" about which Warner Bros. Interactive notified members of the media yesterday. The company was planning to reveal its project at 6 a.m. PT today.
Developing …

Nintendo is exploring the possibility of getting into virtual reality, despite saying just last year that the technology isn’t fun.
The surprising news came out of a bleak quarterly earnings announcement, in which Nintendo president Tatsumi Kimishima worked to reassure investors with the promise of the company’s move into mobile games and the yet-to-be detailed NX console.
Nintendo’s third quarter revenues and profits dropped compared to the same period last year and 3DS and Wii U sales were down.
Kimishima told investors that the company’s first mobile game was on track to release in March and that the next one would not be a communication app and include a well known intellectual property, according to Bloomberg.
“Our second game will not be a communication app. We are going to pick some intellectual property that is very well known to everyone," Kimishima said. "There are plans for new businesses in the works."
Kimishima also reassured investors that work on the NX console remains on track and the company is exploring the possibilities of virtual reality.
Last year, Nintendo said that the NX would be detailed sometime in 2016.
Word that Nintendo is now possibly considering virtual reality could mean that the company is not as far along into the development of the NX as previously thought. Kimishima did not address when the NX would be officially announced or detailed this year.
Interest in VR is likely recent given Nintendo of America’s comments on the technology just last summer.
"We have knowledge of the technical space, and we’ve been experimenting with this for a long, long time," Nintendo of America president Reggie Fils-Aime told Polygon at E3. "What we believe is that, in order for this technology to move forward, you need to make it fun and you need to make it social.
"I haven’t walked the floor, so I can’t say in terms of what’s on the floor today, but at least based on what I’ve seen to date, it’s not fun, and it’s not social. It’s just tech."
This seeming shift in interest in the technology could be driven by the continued increase in virtual reality gaming which is being driven by the upcoming releases of the PlayStation VR, Oculus Rift and Vive headsets.

Debut title Knights and Bikes is Earthbound meets The Goonies Foam Sword Games, the studio co-led by former LittleBigPlanet, Tearaway and Ratchet and Clank designers, has launched a crowdfunding campaign for its first project: a co-op action adventure game called Knights and Bikes. Check out the debut video for the Kickstarter above, which shows off the title’s unique, colorful art style.
The two-person team behind Foam Sword is asking for $142,577 from backers for Knights and Bikes. Various campaign rewards include a digital copy of the game plus a mention in the credits at the most tier; access to the planned alpha and beta; a card game inspired by the release; and even “handcrafted plushes" of the two main characters. There’s also an art book up for grabs, which grants a deeper look into the game’s abstract, Media Molecule-esque designs.
While the designers’ pedigrees bear an obvious influence, they name other titles as stronger influences. Key inspirations for the 1980s-set project are fan favorite releases from that era, including EarthBound, E.T. and The Goonies. Foam Sword heads Moo Yu and Rex Crowle also mentioned Secret of Mana as an influence on Knights and Bikes, which stars a pair of young girls biking across their island home to uncover its medieval — and possibly evil — past.
A release for Linux, Mac and Windows PC on Steam is planned, with Foam Sword circling spring 2017 as a launch window; Kickstarter rewards are expected to be delivered by April 2017. Knights and Bikes is also accepting votes on Steam Greenlight, while its crowdfunding period is set to end in one month’s time.
See more of Knights and Bikes’ stylish art in the gallery below.

PlayStation players get exclusives, too Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment and developer TT Games have officially announced Lego Star Wars: The Force Awakens. Watch the debut trailer for the game, which launches June 28, above.
The game will debut across all major platforms — Nintendo 3DS, PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, PlayStation Vita, Wii U, Windows PC, Xbox 360 and Xbox One —€” but PS3 and PS4 owners will have access to exclusive downloadable content.
The Force Awakens’ Lego adaptation will not only cover the 2015 film, but introduce new content filling in the gap between Return of the Jedi and The Force Awakens.
Also new: a “Multi-Build" option and Blaster Battles, both unique to this Lego game. Players will also be able to pilot the Millennium Falcon while playing as various characters from the film, like Finn, Poe Dameron and Rey.
Lego Star Wars: The Force Awakens will also receive a season pass, although details remain scant on what it will include or its release schedule. A Deluxe Edition copy of the game, detailed by the game’s official website, promises access to the season pass content in full; it also comes with an exclusive FN-2187 (otherwise known as Finn) Lego figure.
The majority of these details leaked ahead of the official announcement when the trailer found its way to YouTube last night. The Xbox Games Store also posted a listing for the game in advance of its reveal.
Yesterday, Warner Bros. teased that it would be bringing two major brands together for a "massive announcement," to be detailed this morning. Yet Electronic Arts previously signed an exclusive licensing agreement with Disney and Lucasfilm to develop and publish games based on the Star Wars franchise. It remains unclear as to what arrangement Warner Bros., Disney and Lucasfilm came to in order to release this game.
Browse our gallery below to see more of Lego’s take on The Force Awakens.

This episode made the entire miniseries worth it Being a human being sucks.
Warning, spoilers below!
Animals have it made, in fact. They can lounge around, only having to worry about finding enough food to survive and not being eaten. They do what they feel like, and don’t have to think about finding a job, lying about their sex life or angst over the fact that if they haven’t written that novel by now, they probably won’t.
Take our friend Agent Mulder. He’s lived his life being completely sure that he’s surrounded by mysteries and secrets, and in the years since he’s given up that work many of those mysteries were solved without him. And it didn’t take a conspiracy to do things like mysteriously move rocks; it was just ice. Just ice.
The idea of shifting from the primal needs of lizards to the mid-life crisis of your garden variety human is what drives the third episode of The X-Files miniseries, imaginatively named “Mulder and Scully Meet the Were-Monster." Because they do both, in fact, meet the Were-Monster, even if it takes Mulder completely losing faith in himself and the mission to do it.
And this is one of the best episodes The X-Files has ever done, much less this uneven miniseries. I’ve watched it three times now, and every time I catch another joke or reference to the history of the show.
A few examples? During one scene Mulder gets drunk and passes out in front of a gravestone for Kim Manners, a director from the original series who has since passed away. The character at the beginning of the episode who is huffing paint is played by Tyler Labine who last played a stoner in "Quagmire," a third-season episode of The X-Files that was directed by … Kim Manners.
My wife connected the two stoners, and I promised to give her full credit for the intense level of X-Files geekery required for that feat to have taken place.

The phone call that wakes Mulder in that scene also reveals that Mulder’s ringtone is the theme for The X-Files, and I have no clue what to do with that information other than make a high-pitched noise of delight.
Every single detail of this episode, from the fact the monster has to be killed by being stabbed with green glass to the odd hotel covered with the stuffed heads of what may be Jackalopes staffed by a single creepy man drinking what may be rubbing alcohol while peeping on guests, is surreal. At one point Mulder beats himself up by trying to find the internal logic to what’s going on, only to be berated by the giant lizard who is temporarily a human in front of him. "Why?" the monster, who in his human form is named "Guy Man" (or is it Man Guy?), asks Mulder. "There’s no external logic to any of it!"
There’s winking at the audience, which this episode does constantly, and then there’s turning to the audience and shaking its collective hand while thanking it for paying attention. In this case, after an encounter with a suspect turns violent, Scully tells Mulder not to worry. "Don’t forget," she says. "I’m immortal."
So yep, The X-Files didn’t just acknowledge a fan theory, it made it canonical. During another scene Mulder paces around Scully’s bed giving his bonkers theory about what’s going on, supplying even Scully’s side of the conversation in a silly rant that seems to be making fun of the often turgid dialog of the show itself. "Yeah, this is how I like my Mulder," Scully says in response. He’s driven, paranoid and having fun looking for things in the night.
This is how I like both of them, and the chemistry between the two leads and the literal monster of the week is handled perfectly. "I had forgotten how much fun these cases can be!" Scully exclaims at one point, and we agree. This is The X-Files at its absolute best.
Odds and ends

"Obviously our ancestors were as obsessed with impotency as we are." That psychiatrist was amazing.
This episode was written and directed by Darin Morgan, who also wrote "Humbug," "Clyde Bruckman’s Final Repose," "War of the Coprophages" and "Jose Chung’s ‘From Outer Space.’" This is his fifth episode of The X-Files, and every single one is golden.
Clyde Bruckman was the character who first hinted that Scully was immortal, while also sharing that Mulder was destined to die of autoerotic asphyxiation
"I didn’t even get a chance to shoot blood out of my eyeballs!"
Pay attention to how David Duchovny says the word "Dagoo!" and fall in love with David Duchovny.
"When one checks into an establishment such as this, one expects the manager to be a peeping tom."
"Not with the gun, you idiot!"

Mobile plans include major character in an upcoming game, CEO says Nintendo suffered another sharp loss in profit for its fiscal quarter ending in December, but saw good news in the sales performance of Splatoon and Super Mario Maker, calling them “blockbusters that vitalized the Wii U platform."
Additionally, at a briefing Tuesday in Osaka, Nintendo teased a second title for its upcoming mobile games initiative, one that will feature one of its best known characters.
The bad news for Nintendo: Profits declined 36 percent compared to the same quarter a year ago. That lack of performance is seen in the slowing sales of the Wii U, down slightly at 2.1 percent from the preceding quarter, and in the 3DS line, down 28 percent.
Yet Nintendo still posted an overall profit, both for the quarter and the nine months comprising its current fiscal year. Nintendo is also sticking to its earlier estimates in revenue, operating profit and net profit for its fiscal year, which closes in three months. So there seems to be a moot point feeling about traditional measures as Nintendo approaches a shakeup 2016, which will see the launch of its first title for mobile devices, Miitomo, in March, and potentially a new console by the end of the year.
Roughly speaking, the company is asking investors to be patient.
Miitomo will be a free-to-play social media communication app, drawing on Nintendo’s Mii architecture dating back a decade on the Wii. Its second game, according to chief executive Tatsumi Kimishima, "will not be a communication app.
"We are going to pick some intellectual property that is very well known to everyone," Kimishima said, according to Bloomberg.
Among typical quarterly measurements, Nintendo has something to brag about with Splatoon and Super Mario Maker. Splatoon pushed over the 4 million units sold mark, after launching in late May. Super Mario Maker, which launched in September, stands at 3.34 million units as of Dec. 31. These are the No. 6 and 7 best-selling titles for Wii U made by Nintendo to date. (Super Smash Bros., which launched September 2014, is No. 5 at 4.61 million units on Wii U.)
To date, the Wii U has sold 12.6 million units since its November 2012 launch, and the Nintendo 3DS line has sold 57.94 million units. The first 3DS launched in February 2011.

Watch on YouTube | Subscribe to Polygon on YouTube
If you haven’t read the big news yet, take a moment to check it out here. Blizzard is about to introduce the biggest change in Hearthstone’s short history, and there’s a lot here to unpack.
We sat down over a few distracted games of Hearthstone to try to make sense of the news. What is wild format? How is it different from standard? And what does this mean for adventure sets and our ability to purchase them? Watch the video above to get all of those answers, as well as our honest reactions to the announcement.
If you’d like to watch more Hearthstone videos with a higher ratio of goofs to actual news, take a look at our YouTube playlist.

As Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft approaches its two-year anniversary, Blizzard is preparing to implement the biggest changes the popular digital card game has seen thus far. In a conversation with Polygon last week, Blizzard revealed plans to add formats to Hearthstone beginning with the launch of the game’s first expansion of 2016 later this year.
The idea of formats will be familiar to people who have played traditional card games like Magic: The Gathering; essentially, they’re rules that determine which cards from the complete set can be used in any given game. In the case of Hearthstone, there will be two formats introduced in 2016: wild and standard.
Wild format is the traditional mode that players have used up to now, where every card from all expansions and adventures is allowed. The new standard format will only allow cards from the Basic and Classic sets and any expansions or adventures from the the last two calendar years. Both wild and standard will have separate ranked and casual play modes.
“The volume of feedback that we’ve been hearing is, ‘Hey, it’s getting more and more difficult to get my friends to play Hearthstone,’" lead designer Ben Brode told Polygon in an interview last week. "We really want each new thing that we release to really shake up the meta-game. It’s one of those things that very slowly, over time, it gets harder and harder to do that."
When standard format is introduced this year, cards from the Curse of Naxxramas and Goblins vs. Gnomes sets will not be allowed in that format. Blackrock Mountain, The Grand Tournament, and League of Explorers cards will be allowed, along with Basic and Classic cards and cards from the as-yet-unnamed new expansion. Blizzard is calling 2016 "The Year of the Kraken" as "a thematic way to refer to the first year of standard format year." As card sets are rotated out of standard with each year’s first expansion, Blizzard will give each year a new name.

Once a set has been rotated out of standard, it will no longer be purchasable with either real money or in-game gold. Instead, Blizzard says players will be able to craft any non-standard cards they want to use in wild format using the game’s arcane dust crafting system. This includes cards from adventures, which were previously uncraftable.
Adventures themselves will also no longer be purchasable. If you want to experience the single-player content adventures offer, you’ll need to buy them before they’re rotated out of standard mode. Brode said Blizzard may consider making non-standard adventures purchasable again in the future, but the developer wants to avoid confusing new players with options that aren’t as useful to them.
Arena, the Hearthstone mode that allows players to put together a deck from random card choices, will remain in wild format, as will most of the weekly Tavern Brawl updates. However, standard format will be the main focus for Hearthstone tournaments and esports, as well as where Blizzard will push new players for an experience that requires less catching up when you initially start the game.
"Most of Hearthstone isn’t changing," Brode said. "You can still play Tavern Brawls with all your cards and solo adventures and challenge your friends and play in wild mode. We’re basically just adding a new way to play if you want a meta-game that changes more frequently or don’t have all the cards and want to get into a mode where you don’t feel like you have to go get every card ever made. That’s really what standard is for."
In addition to the fresh formats, Blizzard is taking this opportunity to introduce further changes to Hearthstone. Most notably, players will finally get a long-requested boost to the number of deck slots available. Players will now be able to create and save 18 total deck slots, up from the current nine allowed.

The Hearthstone team will also use the deck rotation each year as an opportunity to review and tweak cards from the Basic and Classic sets, which will remain part of standard format forever.
"We have a list of cards that we’re looking at," Brode said. "This will be the biggest balance change that we’ve ever made to Hearthstone. It’s not going to be a massive percentage of the set or anything like that. We have to hit a lot of cards, though. It’s definitely going to be significantly less than 20 cards. It’s not going to be even close to that number. It’ll be more than two. We’re still trying to get that final list and still tweaking things."
Brode pointed to classes like the druid as a key example of what the team hopes to change.
"Some classes have too many cards that are just too high power level," he said. "It makes it very hard to make new cards for classes like druid, because they have so many really good cards in Basic and Classic. We have to do some nerfs to make sure we can still see a different druid deck as a new set comes out."
Standard and wild formats will be introduced to Hearthstone when the first set of new cards for 2016 launches. Blizzard isn’t yet ready to talk about when or what that will be, but Brode mentioned that the company is targeting a spring release. An FAQ for the changes said the expansion will be "really really cool."
For more on Hearthstone, check out our YouTube playlist of goofy videos on the game.

The Vive wants you to walk in VR, and devs say the cable won’t hold you back There is a cable that connects the Vive virtual reality headset to the computer. When you’re walking around your room-scale VR experience, or even just standing in front of your system, you can feel it. It’s always there, and during my time with the Vive’s games at the recent developer showcase I often felt that I was going to trip over it, or perhaps pull a computer off the shelf.
But the developers working with the technology say I’ll get over it.
“The things people expect to have problems with aren’t problems for those who have been spending significant time with the hardware," Alex Schwartz, CEO of Owlchemy Labs, the developer behind Job Simulator told us. "Some devs have thousands of hours in VR. It’s not something that’s actually posed a problem after giving hundreds of demos."
"This isn’t just marketing, but I honestly find that there’s kind of a sixth sense you develop over time, to the point where anybody who is using the Vive regularly doesn’t even think about it," Joel Green, producer and audio director of the upcoming VR game The Gallery told Polygon. "Developers don’t really talk about the cable being an issue anymore, that I’ve heard. Because of the way it falls down the headset and you feel it on your body occasionally, you just kind of learn where it is and now it’s not an issue. I don’t think it takes too long for that to happen."
That thought was repeated multiple times when I asked about the cable.
"The cable itself becomes a little more natural once you’re in the game, you find yourself kind of flipping it with your leg and with your foot," Alex Knoll, the lead designer on Hover Junkers said. "To us the cable just becomes natural, like a natural extension of yourself. We don’t really find big problems with it."
It just takes a bit of time.
"We found that players who have spent some time in the Vive or people who have spent about 20-40 minutes playing in game are able to subconsciously manage the cable without any problem, either by moving in ways that wont tangle it or by kicking it out of the way without thinking about it," Knoll continued. "Many of the experiences have players turn around frequently and all developers have reported the same findings: the cable is just something you deal with, its never a real hindrance."
So don’t worry! According to the developers spending the most time in VR, you get used to it. And apparently it’s a fast process. "At the content showcase we demo’d for the three days to over 50 people and even to some people who have never set foot in VR before," Knoll said. "We didn’t jockey the cable for anyone and there were no problems."