Max Payne and Alan Wake games' voice actor, James McCaffrey, passed away at 65 after battling blood cancer. McCaffrey has also set foot in various movies and television shows for decades. Following a good round of success, the actor was diagnosed with multiple myeloma, a form of blood cancer. The actor died on Sunday in Larchmont, New York, as confirmed by his wife, Rochelle Boström.

McCaffrey was a remembered voice in the video game world with him voicing the iconic Max Payne. He has also made his work shine in Alan Wake, where he played the writer Thomas Zane. In the sequel to Alan Wake, the actor stepped into the shoes of Alex Casey and delivered an iconic performance alongside Sam Lake. 

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James McCaffrey, the Voice for Max Payne Passed Away Due to Blood Cancer at 65

McCaffrey's career has spun across multiple projects where have done more than just video game voice acting. Both film and television shows have been prominent work for decades. One of the most popular roles he was known for was in a police drama called New York Undercover, where he played Arthur O'Byrne. He was also seen in popular American producer Dick Wolf's shows such as Swift Justice, Law and Order: Criminal Intent, and SVU. While some of these roles were small, he often left a memorable performance behind with his character.

For his movies, McCaffrey has appeared in many projects, including The Big Take, Cry From Within, Rescue Me, and Betrayed. These cult classic flicks were popular watches in the time when the actor left a mark.  Many of his past colleagues including Sam Lake were quick to share their condolences to the actor as he was known for being a kind-hearted individual on set. To gamers, his voice was well-known for playing the titular character of Max Payne.

Television presenter and video game journalist Geoff Keighley also paid his tributes to the actor on his official Twitter/X account, reminiscing the times he was on set together. Being Remedy-verse's one of the most popular voices in two of the iconic video games, James McCaffrey will be missed by the entire gaming community. That said, the rumoured Max Payne remake will also miss his voice with the character's return.

The Max Payne voice star was among the many talents the entertainment industry has lost this year, including Matthew Perry and André Braugher. McCaffrey's turn as Max Payne is regarded as one of the seminal performances in gaming and set a new high bar of standard for voice acting in video games. 

Just days ahead of the launch of the next season, a lot of information about what’s coming to Fortnite has emerged. While we might be going back to Chapter 2 for a month, there are plenty of new changes coming, including some key Fortnite Battle Pass changes.

The Battle Pass is central to gameplay in the game, a pass to grind upward. Users can unlock more cosmetics if they get the premium tier that even includes several skins. However, unlocking them has always been quite structured. Players are usually required to complete quests and play consistently to unlock what they want.

Soon, some Fortnite Battle Pass changes are coming into effect. For one thing, these changes will enable players to combine the Passes for each of Fortnite’s different modes, like Lego Fortnite. However, it’ll also let players pick and choose their rewards a bit more. These are the changes that are coming according to Fortnite leakers.

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Fortnite Battle Pass Changes Coming Soon

The Fortnite Battle Pass has been a central part of the experience for almost all Fortnite seasons. With the next big update, we can witness some changes. Starting with the core way players interact with the pass, battle Stars are on the way out.

Instead of unlocking stars to unlock cosmetics, players will just unlock them as they move forward through the levels. The good part about Battle Star was being able to choose the order players unlocked rewards, at least up in what they unlock on every few pages before claiming all to move forward.

With this change, that won’t be possible anymore. However, anyone who bought levels is getting a new way to do that. Players will now be able to buy individual rewards from the pass. If players only want one skin, they can get that without having to go through the entire pass.

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One Place For All The Battle Passes

Currently, Fortnite has a lot of different passes. We’ve got the Battle Pass, the main one for Battle Royale. Then a Festival Pass operates on its calendar. Along with a Lego Pass that pops up from time to time. Not everyone gets all of them, but if players do it can be a bit of a pain to keep track of.

Players will have to earn three different types of currency to progress and they don’t count towards each other’s progress. This is getting simplified with the new Fortnite Battle Pass changes.

Players will move forward through all passes at once, no matter what mode they are playing. Moreover, players can get all the passes in one place, rather than constantly having to re-up on one pass or another.

One of the best parts of Sonic x Shadow Generations, released last week, is the wealth of music, stories, and art in the game’s Collection. Acquired hidden emblems throughout each stage can be used as keys to unlock treasure chests throughout the White Space central hub zone and, with a quick shift of location, Shadow can check out his history through some wonderful artwork.

Earlier, Hoshino worked as an artist and character designer on several games such as Sonic the Hedgehog CD, Sonic Adventure, and Sonic Heroes.

Shadow the Hedgehog as a character was first launched in 2001’s Sonic Adventure 2 as the ‘Ultimate Lifeform,’ before appearing in his own standalone game in 2005 where he wields a gun. Hoshino worked as an art director on both projects. With further details provided by Hoshino, the sketches reveal early concepts for not only Shadow’s design, but the proposed weaponry, and bad guy Black Doom.

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Breathing New Life Into The Character

"I wanted to create a deep, mature story suited to backstory. Shadow was created with the idea of him being a lead character and not just part of a cast of characters," Hoshino tells Eurogamer of working on the Shadow the Hedgehog game, where that promise was fulfilled.

"When designing Shadow, I wanted to create a character with that sense of speed to rival that of Sonic himself. Sonic's speed is a result of running very fast and it would be boring if a new character achieved their speed in the same way. So I thought back to when I designed Metal Sonic, who achieves his high speeds via a jet engine and I also drew inspiration from speed skaters, giving Shadow his own unique ability that allows him to achieve the same speed as Sonic but in a different way."

Before Shadow, there was Terios - a design with longer spikes and scars to make it look particularly menacing. "When we originally started development, Shadow was first called Terios, and his character was more obviously evil," says Hoshino. "So in his earlier design, we were trying to give him a more evil appearance. And at that time, I personally called him Terios the Prisoner."

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Shadow Isn’t Just Fast But Also Handy

In the standalone game, Shadown doesn’t just run swiftly - he also wields guns too. This was unique to this particular game and hasn’t been explored after that. This led to some interesting gun concept designs, as well as poses of Shadow with the weapons.

Indeed, Shadow is a great character, a counterpoint to the blue blur himself - and this leads to some very dynamic artwork. That’s certainly been mirrored in Sonic x Shadow Generations, with Shadown’s cutscenes depicting him in a more action-hero manner.

"Shadow's selling point is his speed-skating-inspired action," says Hoshino. "The way he smashes his powerful rage into his enemies has a completely different appeal from Sonic's smart elegance."

One PlayStation fan has done something unusual to curb the hiking prices of the games. The fan spent something upwards of $2000 on 24 years' worth of PS Plus to avoid increasingly common price hikes.

Reddit user On_Reddit_In_Class said they "decided to stack PS Plus subscriptions until 2048 because of the absurd price increases the past few years." They plan to be gaming the rest of their lives so decided it would "save a good bit of money."

A PS Plus Essential subscription costs $79.99 per year, so 24 years worth costs $1,919.76. Then, the company was kind enough to offer the player an 89% discount to upgrade to a premium subscription in a bizarre loophole, charging just $199.99 rather than $1,889.75, meaning it came to $2,119.75 altogether.

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Fans Fed Up Of Constantly Hiking Prices

While the reaction to On_Reddit_In_Class’s post was a mixture of shock and wave, there is at least some logic behind the move, assuming PlayStation Plus remains a thing into the mid-21st century. Subscription service prices are on the rise, with everything from PS Plus to Xbox Game Pass and Netflix going up.

Sony last raised the price of PS Plus in September last year, from $59.99 to $79.99 for the most basic tier. "This price adjustment will enable us to continue bringing high-quality games and value-added benefits to your PlayStation Plus subscription service," it said at the time.

Analysts suggested that this was bound to happen, so another increase in the coming days isn’t out of the question. Xbox Game Pass has witnessed a similar price rise, doubling from $9.99 at its launch in 2017 to $19.99 now. Getting a subscription ahead of time guarantees the price remains the same, however, so On_Reddit_In_Class might be something.

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PlayStation Star Reward Points Will Now Only Last For a Year

Sony has brought a number of changes to its PlayStation Stars reward program which, among other things, will see earned points expire after a year instead of the 24 months they remained available previously.

PlayStation Stars, which was launched in October 2022 in the UK, is a part of the PlayStation App on mobile and rewards points based on the amount of money users spend in the PlayStation Store, as well as for completing in-app challenges. Points can then be redeemed against digital rewards, including “collectibles” and store credit.

As of March 2025, Sony is making changes to its definition of “eligible purchases,” which means payments for subscription services such as PlayStation Plus, will no longer churn Start points.

It’s been almost a year since there were reports about the launch of Squadron 42 - the single-player campaign portion of the now 12-year-old crowdfunding boondoggle Star Citizen—was "feature complete" and in the "polish phase."

Now, several years later, the game’s original 2015 release target, developer Roberts Space Industries (RSI) suggests that, with just a year or two of additional “polish,” the game will finally launch sometime in 2026.

The announcement came during the recent CitizenCon, as per IGN, where RSI founder and CEO Chris Roberts showed off a roughly hour-long prologue of the game’s promised 30 to 40-hour storyline. The outlet also reported that the live on-stage demo suffered “a number of crashes, bugs, and graphical problems,” which helps explain why a little more time is needed to get from “feature complete” to “actual release.”

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The Game Was Planned To Launch In May 2014

"We did say we were doing it live, risking the demo gods, and they brought their wrath down on us," Roberts said on stage, as per the IGN report. "Both the team and I are confident of giving you this game in 2026. Obviously, you can see it’s not going to be tomorrow because you saw a few crashes there."

The weekend’s festivities gave fans nostalgia. The game was planned to be released in May 2014 but was eventually delayed until December. At the time, Ars Technica noted that "a full release of the Star Citizen MMORPG [would be] expected near the end of 2016," a date that now seems as vague as the original 2015 launch window for Squadron 42. “We will build the game you are dreaming about”

Back in 2014, Roberts Space Industries raised just $67 million from crowd funders eager to see Roberts’ lofty vision for a new era of space simulation games. Now, that funding has climbed past $731 million from players purchasing pricey virtual ships in a game that exists only as an unpolished alpha plagued with significant gameplay issues.

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Squadron 42 Becomes Butt Of All Jokes

Roberts said in a March update that the team had "spent significant time looking at what Star Citizen 1.0 means and what it would take to get there." As of now, the team "is hard at work, heads down, driving toward the finish line" for Squadron 42, as highlighted by the game's public progress tracker.

The lengthy development path for Star Citizen and Squadron 42 has become a joke in the 12 years since it first became a crowdfunding darling. But it’s not like fans weren’t warned.

Call of Duty Black Ops 6 players are frustrated with the new shooter’s respawn mechanics. If you check the game’s subreddit, you will see several complaints from players who are struggling to break die-spawn-die cycles, with one player saying they were killed twice on the same death.

"[I'm] getting spawn trapped, getting killed by a player, and then respawning and getting killed again, with both deaths in the same deathcam," said one player. "That's how to spot a bad spawn system. "On some maps, in some situations, it's worse than MW2 release spawning."

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Players Complaining About Respawn Issues

"The spawns on most maps are terrible and will constantly spawn you in direct line of sight of the person that had just killed you," said another. "The maps themselves are way too campy and have way too many angles on you everywhere. Seriously, for every Hardpoint or Dom flag or whatever, just count how many angles could peek or push you. I can't figure out if they're just all terrible, the spawns make them terrible, or if it's a combination of both but either way, I'm pretty sick of it already."

In a post on X, Activision said it was "investigating an issue where players automatically spawn in-game rather than spectating when joining in-progress," and said that any further updates about the issue will be fixed in the tweet above.

Call of Duty Black Ops 6 is currently sitting on a “mixed” Steam user score as players on PC report performance issues and crashes. Threads on the shooter’s Steam discussion pages and subreddit show players are trying all kinds of things to ameliorate the issue, from removing other apps, removing auto-start apps, and disabling the anti-cheats of other games.

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Analysts Believe COD: Black Ops 6 To Attract 4M New Subscribers

With Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 almost here, analysts have talking about the impact it’s likely to have on Xbox Game Pass, with some reckoning it could bring as many as 4 million new members to Microsoft’s subscription service.

Black Ops 6 will be the first COD title to launch day one on Game Pass Ultimate and PC Game Pass, the move marking a critical test for the company’s subscription service strategy after its $69bn USD acquisition of Activision Blizzard in 2023.

And Black Ops 6’s Game Pass launch will lead to a surge of new subscribers according to analysts interviewed by GamesIndustry.biz. Wedbush Securities managing director Michael Pachter, for instance, believes Microsoft will see between 3-4 million new members following Black Ops 6’s Game Pass launch, although he reckons the move could result in up to 6m lost sales, based on the idea 25 percent of Game Pass subscribers may have bought the game anyway.