This weekend Industrial Light and Magic have been showing off a load of interesting and shiny toys to do with the Star Wars franchise, at the Star Wars Celebration event that’s been held in London’s ExCel centre. Among the things on show was a VR game/demo called Trials of Tatooine and now its been announced that the game will be made available free to Vive owners from Monday.

The game was co-written by Lucasfilm CTO Rob Bredow and Pablo Hidalgo, keeper of the Star Wars canon. Set in a time just after Luke Skywalker has defeated the Emperor, the Jedi Order is slowly being rebuilt and new hopefuls are being recruited to learn the ways of the Force.

As one of these hopeful padawan learners, you travel to Tatooine, end up aboard the Millenium Falcom and have a familiar astromech droid gift you a lightsaber to use. This is of course the thing that will appeal to fans young and old, and will be used through the experience to reflect blaster fire.

It’s nice to see such a game being made available to adopters of the new VR tech, especially since I dare say it was one of the first things most people thought of when VR started to become a larger thing.

It seems that when the public discovered that two prominent Youtubers (ProSyndicate and TmarTn) were owners of a CSGO Gambling site that they have heavily promoted without disclosure of their connection to the site a spotlight was shone upon a very secretive dark corner. A lot more has come out involving other sites and other prominent content-creators on both Youtube and Twitch. Now a set of Skype logs has been leaked that seem to implicate a Twitch streamer who became well known after he was swatted while on-air.

James “PhantomL0rd” Varga suffered the swatting back in 2013 as one of the earliest victims of the “prank”. Now a hacker aiming to steal from a French target, Duhau Joris, a French web developer who owns the domain of gambling site CSGOShuffle, has leaked out to Richard Lewis a games and esports journalist. Watch his video here:

The Skype logs in question seem to prove that PhantomL0rd has at least a vested interest in the site, if not having some part in owning the business. Previously the streamer had claimed that the site only sponsored him when questions were raised in the wake of the CSGOLotto scandal earlier.

There are also implications that streamed pots might have been rigged in order to make the site more enticing to viewers by showing what could be won if they are only willing to come along and bet away their in-game items and skins in hopes of winning more.

Others implicated in this include cAre, one of the most well-known and prolific skin gamblers in the CS:GO trading scene right now, in that he might too have taken part in pots he knew were rigged (logs to do with his involvement are being translated still from the native French of cAre and Joris); as well as suggestions that PhantomL0rd is aware that another CSGOWild is affliated with an eSports organisation, FaZe. He also seemed to know of Syndicate’s involvement with CSGOLotto as far back as November of last year.

“Also [CSGOLotto] the syndicate site and [CSGOWild] by the cod faze guys,” Varga says. “I’m talking to both looking into what they’re doing and if its [sic] a threat or not.”

In the wake of exposure of shady and underhanded dealings to do with many CSGO gambling sites and content creators, Valve has recently put a stop to third-party gambling sites as they were ruled to violate Terms of Service that had been in place since 2010.

As always, when watching a content creator always be wary. Even with rules and laws in place, sometimes things aren’t always as they seem.

Grow Home was quite a successful little game. For those of you who missed out, Grow Home saw one little droid’s quest to grow as much green as possible to reoxygenate his homeworld, mainly through the use of giant, ever branching beanstalk vines that he rode to climb ever higher. Now the sequel game has an announced release date and it’s pretty soon.

Grow Home’s sequel Grow Up was announced at E3 last month, and will see the Botonical Utility Droid journeying ever higher through a “new open-world” as he tries to recover the parts of his lost spacecraft MOM (and I would assume reassemble it too. In a blog post about the game Ubisoft Reflections reveals that BUD will be accompanied by a new flying companion named POD and will also have access to a new device called the Floradex 3000, a device that will allow for BUD’s cloning of the game’s 24 different plant species to allow for easier passage as BUD makes his way to his ultimate target destination of the homeworld’s moon.

Grow Up will be coming to PC and the Xbox One and PS4 on August 16th.

Check out the game’s E3 announcement trailer below:

Modding is a big part of gaming right now, mostly on PC although a few games on the consoles are getting the same treatment now. However, it’s worth remembering that these mods are fan-made and so sometimes… don’t work quite as intended.

The Fallout 4 Unofficial Patch was released to fix a batch of smaller bugs that Bethesda overlooked, much in the same vein as their previous Bethesda game patches. Only this time, something’s begun to mess it all up and that thing is Settlements – the very thing that Fallout 4 pushes as a central game mechanic.

Detailed extensively on this forum post here, the issue is that modded scripts seem to be making the game reload NPCs regularly. This includes your settlers and anything that the game isn’t told to remember is randomised each time they’re reloaded. Unfortunately this includes such things as the settler’s held gear, appearance, gender and even the species of the settler. Also, the reloading can happen even if the settler is just out of line of sight. So turning your back on your settler’s designated guard could have them turn into someone completely different when you turn back to them and their specially modded weapon could be replaced by something basic as hell. Oh, and it also stops new settlers from being recruited at all. As I said earlier the settlement mechanic is central to the game so if you enjoy that aspect of it, this isn’t good news.

They think it has something to do with the scripts that edit specific files relating to the workshop, but a Bethesda employee spoke up on the topic to say that they don’t agree. SmkViper has denied that it is the fault of the scripts mentioned, as well as saying the mod makers’ misconceptions about how the coding works could have them barking up the wrong tree. Regardless of this though Bethesda seems to be working to replicate the bug to see how they can help resolve this. For now, a temporary fix is in place with the mod team having removed part of an AI routine. Unfortunately those settlers who changed during the bug will not be able to change back.

Nowadays paid disclosure on Youtube, while still a big talking point, is at least better managed and done than it used to be in days gone by (with some exceptions still). Of course, it wasn’t always just the Youtubers at fault and to get to this point shady things and suspicions of such had to happen, and now one of those events seems to be coming back to bite Warner Bros in the backside.

Back in 2014, the company released Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor. However they also got into some trouble when leaked e-mails suggested that they had been paying big name Youtubers, those with many subscribers in their subboxes, for positive coverage of the game. At the same time they were holding back the review copies that were for the press.

Now the Federal Trade Commission have published their findings on the whole issue, with Warner Bros having come under fire for their marketing campaign. It was alleged at the time that Warner had reached out to the big-name Youtubers paying them for positive coverage of their games and had even encouraged them to be less than clear about the deal being a paid one, ensuring that the disclosures for sponsored content were placed “below the fold” – which means placing text so that it can’t be read unless someone expanded the video’s description. Some of the Youtubers also only disclosed that they had received early access, but not that Warner was paying them to make the video.

Warner are now accused of not having ensured that the paid influencers would disclose the paid content “clearly and conspicuously”. While they are avoiding a fine this time around, Warner Bros have been warned that in future online marketing of this nature needs a satisfactory effort made to ensure Youtubers are properly disclosing their paid videos as well as encouraging it to happen.

“Consumers have the right to know if reviewers are providing their own opinions or paid sales pitches,” said Jessica Rich, director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection. “Companies like Warner Brothers need to be straight with consumers in their online ad campaigns.”