Shovel Knight caught our attention from the first time we saw it on a Nintendo Treehouse at a big gaming event. The game has been popular enough on Nintendo consoles that Yacht Club Games decided to release retail versions of the game.

Now however they’ve just announced that not only will the retail edition coming to PlayStation 4, Wii U, Nintendo 3DS and PC (in Europe only) be delayed until October 30th in Europe and November 3rd in North America; the retail copy for the Xbox One had been cancelled altogether.

Explaining the situation on their website Yacht Club Games wrote: “The final few steps of the Plague of Shadows content took a little longer than expected, but it was important to us that this update to be on the disc/cart right out of the box. Unfortunately that meant we had to push back the date just a little a bit.” They then explained that the Xbox retail edition had been cancelled for now owing to “publishing policies on that platform that are totally beyond our control.” The digital version is still available though.

The price of the physical copy has also been raised a little, but people who pre-ordered at the original price should have their retailers honouring that original price. The decision to bump up the price was down to limited space to display wares and down to the location of where certain priced merchandise was to be displayed meaning that Shovel Knight might not have been displayed where Yacht Club Games would have liked it to have been. “We didn’t want our ‘bargain priced’ game to go straight to the bargain bin.”

Each physical version will now come with a free soundtrack download to make up for the delay and price increases, and Yacht Club Games have said that updates on the retail Vita version and the Shovel Knight Amiibo are coming soon.

With the game coming out soon, EA has opened up a small slice of Star Wars: Battlefront for beta testing. I’ve taken it for a spin and collected my thoughts for you in a handy video. Check it out below:

Cheltenham, in the leafy Cotswolds of England, has a long history of Music, Art and Gaming. It was the home of developers Acclaim, way back in the day and artists like Jimmy Hendrix, The Beatles and more, over the years have regularly played at the various venues and events held at the yearly festivals the beautiful spa town holds.

It’s also the home, of course, to Sanitarium.FM and lots of great business’, and has been the venue for Guinness World Record attempts over the years too. This weekend will add to that list as Joe Kelly, of Flaming Paper, a local video production company, is attempting to beat the CURRENT WORLD RECORD for playing Minecraft. The current record for this stands at 24 hours and 10 minutes. Joe hopes to beat this, and will be streaming his attempt live online from the Holiday Inn Express in Cheltenham. It all starts this Saturday at 8:30am and I will be standing as an expert witness to the record attempt aswell, which I am immensely proud to do.

Joe is attempting this record in order to raise money for Cancer Research UK. You can visit his Just Giving page for more information, plus Sanitarium.FM will be donating any of the station’s monthly donations (for October)  to this cause aswell as it’s a great cause.

Joe will be livestreaming the record attempt to his Youtube channel over the weekend while he plays, but he has also made a series of films on his Youtube channel about the difficulty of record attempts and how to not only prepare for them, but survive the attempts

Once again, myself and the Sanitarium.FM are very proud to be supporting this attempt and we wish Joe every luck possible with it!

~Lone

Today the full version of Prison Architect releases, and to celebrate the developers of War For the Overworld have released a small patch that contains an exclusive worker skin if the player also owns Prison Architect in their Steam Library.

Writing a post on Steam Subterranean Games wrote: “We’re rolling out a small patch today in support of our friends over at Introversion Software, they’ll be launching v1.0 of Prison Architect tomorrow on October 6th. If you love management games and want to see more of them be sure to grab yourselves a copy, and to show our appreciation we’ll reward you with an exclusive worker skin that we know you’ll want on your side in a prison break.”

The skin will be available to players in both the Multiplayer and Skirmish modes of the game, with anyone who already owns both games before the patch automatically having the reward available to them without need for an extra code input.

The patch does also come with some minor changes, with team colours added to prop efficiency and progress shields as well as a slight performance improvement to reduce overhead caused by unused animation bones on the standard theme worker. However the post does also say that another patch with more content will be coming out as soon as Subterranean are sure it’s been tested enough to say it works correctly.

Steam “Patch 1.2.2 Release Notes”: [x]

The Old Republic is going to be slightly revised in time for the launch of its upcoming expansion Knights of the Fallen Empire.

Previously if you were a higher level than your friends you might have been separated from them in-game because of the level mismatch. Now BioWare are introducing a system that will let you re-visit lower level planets by scaling down your level temporarily while you are there.

Called Level Sync it kicks in automatically if you land on a planet with a target level lower than your currently held one, matching you to the missions you tackle. It also scales down your stats, weapon damage and armour as well to the appropriate levels, but abilities and passive effects stay in place. You also receive “scaled experience” which BioWare feel will see players “rewarded appropriately for [the] time investment”.

There have also been changes to XP assignment in grouping as well. Experience is no longer split between members of a group – but rather is based on the level difference between your most experienced comrade, post-level sync, and the mob you’re fighting.

It all sounds pretty sensible. And is probably a relief to those players who managed to level out of the range of their friend group (there’s always one person who seems to level faster than anyone else).