Speedrunner beats Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice blindfolded

Speedrunner beats Sekiro blindfolded

FromSoftware is famous for bone-hard games, and Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice is one of the hardest of the hard. This is presumably why a speedrunner decided to tackle it blindfolded, and managed the feat in two hours.

The streamer Mitchriz did the seemingly impossible during Awesome Games Done Quick, leading to the event trending on Twitter in the US and UK.

• Watch the narrated speedrun on AGDQ's YouTube channel
• Blindfolded speedrun completed in 2:00:35
• Mitchriz ‘spent months preparing for the feat

Mapped out: Mitchriz is already a seasoned Sekiro speedrunner, and has essentially memorized the game to the point where he only needs audio cues to understand his situation. He even managed to complete some key battles without taking any damage.

Yearly event: Awesome Games Done Quick raised $3,416,729.85 for the Prevent Cancer Foundation, bringing the total raised by the event over the last 12 years up to $34 million.

What was the first Yu-Gi-Oh console game released outside of Japan?

a) The Duelists of the Roses
b) Forbidden Memories
c) Monster Capsule: Breed and Battle
d) The Dawn of Destiny

The answer will be revealed at the bottom of today's issue. Join up with our community on Twitter and Facebook to discuss what the answer could be.

Sony’s game subscription was inevitable

Xbox big cheese Phil Spencer thinks it was inevitable that Sony would respond to the meteoric rise of Xbox Game Pass and PC Game Pass, so he’s hardly surprised that a rival service is on the way.

Sony’s rumoured service is codenamed Spartacus and will reportedly roll PlayStation Now and PlayStation Plus into one subscription service featuring three tiers with different amounts of content on offer.

’Right call’: “When I hear others doing things like Game Pass or coming to PC, it makes sense to me because I think that's the right answer,” he told IGN. He believes this is a natural development of the market.

PC & cloud: Spencer expects Sony will be shipping games to console, PC and cloud as well as making “them available Day 1 in the subscription service”.  PlayStation exclusives are already slowly making their way to PC.

Blame stingy publishers, not lazy devs

God of War has been warmly received by PC gamers, and over 70,000 players enjoyed the game on Steam over the launch weekend.

Game director Cory Barlog and his team at Santa Monica Studio worked with Jetpack Interactive from Vancouver to bring God of War to PC, and Barlog lays the blame for poor PC ports squarely on publishers.

Full circle: Barlog told GameStar the team experimented with PC development early on in the project despite targeting the PlayStation 4, and that this effort helped immensely when time came to finally bring the game to the new platform.

PC tweaks: God of War boasts a healthy list of graphic and accessibility options, as well as supporting cutting-edge technology like Nvidia's DLSS.

Winter sale and three gaming bundles

The Humble Bundle Winter Sale is upon us, and you can enjoy up to 80% off on a range of titles including Cyberpunk 2077, Resident Evil, Tales of Arise, and much more until January 24th.

There are also some pay-what-you-want bundles on offer, like the Dead of Winter Bundle featuring 7 items, the Surviving Mars Bundle with 11 items, and finally the PC Building Simulator Bundle with 10.

• The official Pokémon Go’s Raid Battle tips for Genesect strongly suggest using Fire-types against this Mythical Pokémon
• Pandemic: The Board Game pulled from Steam and is no longer no longer for sale on any platform
• Hogwarts Legacy delayed until 2023 with rumours claiming development is in “some sort of trouble”
• Likenesses of YouTubers minted as NFTs without authorization and auctioned off on OpenSea
• Wall Street Journal claims Activision is hiding the scale of internal problems and keeping the number of staff firings secret

What was the first Yu-Gi-Oh console game released outside of Japan?

ANSWER: Forbidden Memories!

You've probably heard about Yu-Gi-Oh, the card game, anime, and videogame phenomenon. One of the most popular game adaptations is Forbidden Memories, which has a thriving modding community. It was one of the earliest Yi-Gi-Oh videogames, and was developed before the card game's rules had matured.

The Japanese version relied on the Pocket Station, a memory card peripheral with a screen, and as a result, the localized versions were missing most of the high level cards necessary to beat the later challenges. That means the only way to beat certain particularly unreasonable challenges, like a six opponent gauntlet with no opportunity to save your game, is to grind, grind and grind some more. But at least you can grind to an unapologetically awesome soundtrack.

How are you all feeling about Game Pass so far? Do you still pick up physical copies of games? If there's one thing Game Pass has done, it's eaten up a lot of our HDD space…

Today's issue of DailyBits was written by Gavin Herman, Erlend Grefsrud, Simon Priest, and Jamie Davey. If you have any feedback or news tips for the team, please email us!