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Like the original, Psychonauts 2 is brimming with collectibles hidden throughout its many locales–both in the real world and in the minds of its characters. Uncovering all of them helps you to level up Raz more quickly, gaining new powers and learning more about each of the people whose minds you’ll explore. But finding everything hidden in the depths of the psyche can be tough.

We’ve been combing through every lobe and synapse of Psychonauts 2 to discover all that’s hidden within the game, with the aim of making it a little easier to discover everything. The guide below will walk you through the game’s first level, Loboto’s Labyrinth, to help you uncover all that’s hidden within Dr. Loboto’s mind.

Stay tuned for more Psychonauts 2 coverage and guides, and don’t forget to check out our Psychonauts 2 review.

Loboto’s Labyrinth Collectibles

• Nuggets of Wisdom: 2
• Memory Vaults: 2
• Emotional Baggage: Hat Box, Steamer Trunk, Suit Case, Purse
• Figments: 80

Much of Loboto’s Labyrinth is a tutorial for the rest of Psychonauts 2, with your powers slowly unlocking during the course of the level. Those powers then usually allow you to access nearby collectibles, so be aware that you might need to backtrack a bit to get everything you need. We’re marking each collectible as it appears during the course of the level, but some will require you to return to the stage at a later time.

Memory Vault: Look for this first collectible to the left of the first Loboto portrait you find, just as you enter the central office after following him.

Duffle Bag Emotional Baggage: In this same room, you can spot the blue Duffle Bag on a small table to the right of the Dental Door where Coach stands. You’ll need a tag to open the bag, though–look for the Duffle Bag Tag near the desks further to the right when facing the Dental Door.

Hatbox Emotional Baggage Tag: You’ll next enter the Conference Room, which has a long, winding table in the center. The Hatbox Tag is beside it. You’ll find the Hatbox later in the level.

Suitcase Emotional Baggage: You can’t access this one the first time you enter the Conference Room, but you’ll likely hear it. It’s hidden behind the poster on the left wall. You need Pyrokinesis to burn down the poster, but you won’t get it until later in the level. The Suitcase Tag is also located at a later point, so you’ll need to replay the level to unlock this one.

Steamer Trunk Emotional Baggage Tag: Up ahead is the Dental Void area, in which you’ll have to jump between dental mirrors serving as platforms. The Steamer Trunk Tag is on the distant platform you can’t reach, past the sink where you exit the area. You’ll need the Mental Connection PSI power to get to it, which means you’ll have to come back to this level again later.

Nugget of Wisdom: Further on, you’ll enter a room themed on a trash can. Look for a tooth zipper, which hides the Nugget of Wisdom–use Telekinesis to open the zipper.

Hatbox Emotional Baggage: Keep going until you burn through a poster on the wall to reveal a path forward. Keep moving past the pools of water (er, hope that’s water) until you’ve nearly reached the last one. Burn the Loboto portrait on the left wall before the last pool to reveal the Hatbox behind it.

Purse Emotional Baggage: Keep moving until you hit a hallway with another watery canal, this one filled with teeth that sink as you jump from one to the next. At the end of the hall is a room where bookshelves flank both sides and a big portrait of Dr. Loboto waits in the center. Don’t burn it yet–first, look for the Purse on top of the shelf on the left. You won’t be able to open it yet, as the Purse Tag is further in the level, requiring you to return a second time for this one. Burn the portrait to continue.

Memory Vault: This one requires a new power you won’t have your first time through: Mental Connection. Look for the Memory Vault in the Asylum area, after you climb the spiral staircase into a tower.

Steamer Trunk Emotional Baggage: The same platform that holds the Memory Vault in the Asylum section of the level also contains the Steamer Trunk. You’ll need Mental Connection to reach both, so don’t worry about these your first time through.

A viral Twitter thread about someone’s old Xbox 360 Gamertag profile picture being cropped weird with each new Xbox console has prompted one Xbox engineer to go ahead and just… fix the problem.

As reported by The Verge, Twitter user Noukon purchased a Pac-Man ghost avatar years ago and has kept it as their profile picture ever since. According to Noukon, they purchased the Gamerpic for 80 Xbox Points in 2006 and he’ll “be f*cked if it won’t remain the best dollar I’ve ever spent until the seas boil over.”

With each passing generation, Xbox tries to shame my Pac-Man ghost avatar by shrinking it ever smaller and smaller. I will not yield. I bought this gamerpic for 80 Xbox Points in 2006, and I’ll be fucked if it won’t remain the best dollar I’ve ever spent until the seas boil over pic.twitter.com/Ji5ttoUVjh

— Gabriel Roland (@noukon) August 19, 2021

Have you played Xbox Series X?

YESNO

Unfortunately, advances in Xbox’s UI means the profile pic from 2006 now looks like a tiny square surrounding by an empty gray circle. Luckily, Xbox engineer Eden Marie saw Nokoun’s Tweet and decided to go ahead and solve the problem, calling it her “personal mission to fix this.”

Marie posted a full Twitter thread of her process, beginning with purchasing the same profile picture pack as Noukon (for a more expensive price of $2.38), before setting out to diagnose and ultimately solve the issue.

Listen, I can’t promise anything, but I’m going to make it my personal mission to fix this https://t.co/o1zYjBBHSd

— Eden Marie (@neonepiphany) August 25, 2021

According to Marie, “a long time ago someone decided that no matter how big a Gamerpic we wanted to display, the 360 Gamerpic would never get bigger than 72 x 72 pixels. The rest of the background is filled in with a blown up, faded version of itself,” Marie says.

The solution, ultimately, lay with the Xbox dashboard’s ability to recognize transparent PNG files. This allowed Marie to take the small square 360-era Gamerpic and put it in a transparent circle and adjust the dimensions, resulting in a fixed, totally normal-looking Pac-Man ghost avatar for Noukon.

Marie was able to fix the issue during something called Exploration Time which is where members of the Experiences team can spend half a day each week to tackle random things within the product. “This week I absolutely chose to use it to rescue ghosts,” Marie tweeted.

It’s a lot of fun, and sometimes, you even learn something new, like… apparently 360 gamerpics supported transparency all along?

SURPRISE

Anyway, what do you think, @noukon? Feel better about that dollar? pic.twitter.com/zxQx7SmHJw

— Eden Marie (@neonepiphany) August 27, 2021

Who knows, maybe the next time you’re having a weird issue on Xbox Live, an Xbox engineer with free time can fix your problem for you?

Matt T.M. Kim is IGN’s News Editor. You can reach him @lawoftd.

How do you market an affordable and capable, but somewhat boring phone? That’s the question Google had to ask itself before releasing the Pixel 5a in the US and Japan on Thursday. The answer the company settled on was to hire a soft-spoken actor to do their best Jony Ive impersonation and wax poetic about the humble headphone jack.

It’s a usual approach, but one that highlights a feature that’s missing in most modern phones, and in a way that’s funny and memorable. “The circle: perfect, simple. Some might say simply perfect,” the actor declares in the opening moments of the clip, reciting a script that perfectly apes the overwrought writing that Ive’s videos at Apple became known for in his later years at the company. When the ad shortly thereafter turns to materials, you know exactly where it’s going.

“Forged and machined from the finest premium-grade copper and iron. Housed in a unibody of diecast aluminium,” the actor says of the component, a voice in the background softly whispering, “fancy pronunciation.” Make sure to stay for the end of the clip to hear a fun bonus on that front.

But my favorite part of the clip involves how the Pixel 5a’s headphone jack is “designed to welcome both three-pole TRS and TRRS connections.” Translation: you can plug a headset with an in-line microphone into the phone and it will work without issue. It all culminates with the actor stating, “Yes, it’s a headphone jack. With the Google Pixel 5a with 5G, the circle has finally come full circle.” While the ad is mostly in good fun, it’s worth pointing out Google’s high-end phones haven’t had headphone jacks in years, nor will the Pixel 6 include one when it comes out later this year. 

The news that the new Saints Row will be a more grounded, less offensive game than previous entries in the franchise, has been met with mixed responses. While some are delighted that a series that had previously alienated them might become more inviting, inevitably so much of the reaction has been rooted in tiresome whining about “political correctness” or what have you. Except, that’s not the problem at all. The problem is that Saints Row was a series that understood just how extraordinarily silly video games could be, where almost no others do, and now it too is apparently reverting to the dreary norm.

In the eight years since SRIV came out, undoubtedly the world has changed. Whereas the 2013 game was released at the tail-end of a time when outrageous/offensive comedy was big business, where your South Parks and your Jackasses were just finishing having their day, 2021 is a very different place. Offensiveness has become highly politicized, reactions to it heavily policed by either extreme, and whether you view this as important progress or stifling of speech, no one can pretend things are all the same.

There is no question that attempting to release a game in the manner of the previous Saints Rows would be a whole different deal today. However it approached its offensive content, which through the series shifted from adolescent grotesqueness to often quite sophisticated (if very immature) satire, it would still be received by far more noise and contention than any major developer is likely to want to face. But, here’s the thing—read my description of how Saints Row IV begins:

Saints Row IV was a game that began with your character disarming a nuclear bomb as it fell toward the Earth, and then becoming the President of America, with actor Keith David as your Vice President. However, moments later the Earth is attacked by aliens, the White House destroyed, and you and your gang members are kidnapped and placed in a computer simulation of a ‘50s style sitcom. You escape that, Earth is blown up, and you discover you’re in fact now living in a virtual reality, an alien recreation of Steelport, the city setting for Saints Row: The Third. Oh, and now you have superpowers.

See, what Saints Row brought gaming was not hilariously/revoltingly offensive content, and it wasn’t post-ironic ironic misogyny. It was ridiculousness.

When I finished SRIV, after I was done laughing so hard at the credits gag that I genuinely had a headache, my main thought was: “I cannot wait to see how they top that!”

A game in which you begin as the President of America, and end as the ruler of the galaxy. A game in which they hired Roddy Piper and Keith David to recreate their famous fight scene from They Live. A game in which Earth is destroyed as an incidental detail, and one where the main cast, mid-player-controlled car ride, start gloriously singing along to Biz Markie’s “Just A Friend” on the radio. What were they going to do to one-up all of that?

Funnily enough, the thought was an echo of what followed the release of Saints Row: The Third. As Polygon reported in 2013, Volition senior producer Jim Boone talked up SRIV by saying, “I read all the reviews that were done for Saints Row 3 and they wondered if we could do anything more over-the-top than this. So I suppose it’s a challenge coming from that standpoint of can we do something crazier?”

Yes! It was! And boy did they meet it. Which is why my heart sank so hard when I saw the same person (on the same outlet) this week saying, “By the time you’re done with Saints Row 4, you are the ruler of the galaxy. If you were to think, ‘Where would we take it from there?’—we went to Hell and conquered that, even, right? So there truly isn’t anywhere to go past that.”

No! Of course there is! This is video games.

My argument here is not about whether you were disappointed that the Saints Row series got so bonkers that driving became irrelevant, where you were a near-omnipotent super-being, wreaking ludicrous destruction in between scripted sequences eviscerating rival games with whip-smart satire (Mass Effect gets such a beating). My argument is that despite the extraordinary freedom offered by gaming, almost no other games are taking advantage of it. Games are, in the vast majority of cases, so chaste.

Heck, Saints Row IV begins with a sequence so many forget, because it’s immediately followed by the bombastic lunacy: a scene in which you’re playing yet another stealth action game. The first thing you do in SRIV is rushing from wall to wall, infiltrating a terrorist base in the Middle East. It’s as generic as… well, as most AAA gaming, and it does it perfectly! It’s so straight-faced, so pious and deadpan, and it does it for just too long, long enough to make you worry that this isn’t the game you were expecting at all. And then seconds later you’re dismantling an atomic bomb in midair as it hurtles toward Washington DC. This was Volition making such a statement. “We can do the same boring crap as everyone else. See, we just did it. And now we’re not going to.”

And when I watched that CGI trailer for 2022’s Saints Row, all I could think was, “Now they’re going to.”

It’s totally fair to say that Johnny Gat, Shaundi, Kenzie and the rest have had their day. Their storyline arc (well, more an exponential curve) had certainly gone some places. Things got so meta that in Saints Row IV there’s a scene in which Shaundi meets the version of herself from Saints Row 2. So yes, let’s move on. But while I have zero time for the ghastly ballbags wailing their ill-informed nonsense about “woke liberals” because the new cast is… young, I do kind of sympathize with the complaints that they look so very, very generic.

Saints Row, for all its awful beginnings (the original game was such a blatant rip-off of GTA that when I confronted the developers about this at a preview event, they told me with straight faces that, “We consider GTA to be a genre, not a game, and we’re making a game in that genre,”), has always been about excess. Certainly that began with an excess of really unpleasant misogyny (the same preview event had scantily clad women serving burgers out of vans marked up with the game’s “Freckle Bitches” decals, including “Chicken Bazooms” and “Big Swallow” shakes), but it quickly grew into an excess of joyful silliness.

Its characters were outlandish cartoons, enormous personalities stored within a wonderfully diverse cast. This lot… they don’t look like they’re going to be that. They might! Obviously so much of this is based on a CGI trailer with which Volition’s developers likely had minimal involvement. But it’s fair to say it really doesn’t show off the incredibly sharp writing and stunning performances the series became known for. Instead it’s heavy-handed, triple-underlined joke-jokes. I was genuinely surprised none of them says, “There’s no way you’ll see me at the big dance at 9 o’clock,” before cutting to them at the party in front of a clock reading 9 o’clock. Nickelodeon sitcom stuff.

The most recently released footage introduces these new guys as, “a set of characters you’re going to want to invite into your living room every day.” I don’t want characters I would want to invite into my living room! Another developer says, “This reset let us add heart in a big way, and that’s like the number one thing about this game.” Nooooooo! Another: “They’re one hundred percent relatable.” What is happening?!

From what we’ve seen of in-game footage, things look even more significantly muted. Yes, shit explodes, cars get picked up by helicopters, blood pops out of people’s heads when shot. But that’s every other game! It absolutely looks like every other open world game. If you told me this was Ubisoft, I’d not have blinked.

Yes, of course Volition can make any game they want, however they want. And yes, demoralizingly, it does seem horribly likely that making a game that looks like every other game will help it sell a lot better. But what upsets me is that Volition were the only team that seemed to want to see just how big, how ridiculous games could be. And now they don’t seem like that at all. Now they say things about how they can’t possibly top their last game’s craziness, so why even bother? But I believe they could have. If anyone could, it was them.

Video games could be so much more than they are. They could allow such absolute lunacy, such vast-scale nonsense. And yet almost everything coming from major studios is so prudish, so reserved. Excessiveness is woefully missing. It’s why I adored Saints Row IV so much. It may well be exactly what put you off the game, and that’s cool too. But I’d argue that those against such proclivities are more than adequately catered for by this industry. Those who want things to get as huge and silly as is possible to imagine are rather less well served.

Absolutely everyone who’s worried the new Saints Row is going to be “woke” can fuck right off. The last two Saints Row games were, in so many ways, incredibly “woke”, not least with their diverse casts (alongside Kenn Michael, Michael Clarke Duncan, Sumalee Montano, and Danielle Nicolet, the series’ main non-player character, Gat, has been voiced by Daniel Dae Kim since the start, in an industry that all but ignores Asian roles). This is about something very different. It’s about the loss of silliness.

I want more silliness in this industry. I am constantly bemused by the lack of it. And while I’m sure the new Saints Row will have some of it in there, it’s unequivocally not aiming to match what came before, let alone see how much further they could take it.

 

It’s been eleven years since we were last treated to a mainline entry in the No More Heroes franchise, but that wait finally comes to an end today with the launch of No More Heroes III.

With 2019’s Travis Strikes Again: No More Heroes leaving fans with mixed feelings, all the attention soon shifted towards the next main course in No More Heroes 3. We’ve had the chance to take the game for a spin ourselves, describing it as “another inarguably impressive, balls-to-the-wall carnage-fest” in our full review, but now we’re keen to see how you’re feeling on day one.

So, it’s over to you. Are you planning on trying this latest title from Suda51? Have you been waiting for this ever since the glory days on Wii, or are you getting stuck in for the first time with No More Heroes 3? Cast your votes below, and feel free to expand upon your answers in the comments.

Make sure to give our review a read if you’re still on the fence, and if you’re already playing it as we speak, let us know how you’re getting on in the comments.

SAN FRANCISCO, Aug 26 (Reuters) – Microsoft (MSFT.O) on Thursday warned thousands of its cloud computing customers, including some of the world’s largest companies, that intruders could have the ability to read, change or even delete their main databases, according to a copy of the email and a cyber security researcher.

The vulnerability is in Microsoft Azure’s flagship Cosmos DB database. A research team at security company Wiz discovered it was able to access keys that control access to databases held by thousands of companies. Wiz Chief Technology Officer Ami Luttwak is a former chief technology officer at Microsoft’s Cloud Security Group.

Because Microsoft cannot change those keys by itself, it emailed the customers Thursday telling them to create new ones. Microsoft agreed to pay Wiz $40,000 for finding the flaw and reporting it, according to an email it sent to Wiz.

“We fixed this issue immediately to keep our customers safe and protected. We thank the security researchers for working under coordinated vulnerability disclosure,” Microsoft told Reuters.

Microsoft’s email to customers said there was no evidence the flaw had been exploited. “We have no indication that external entities outside the researcher (Wiz) had access to the primary read-write key,” the email said.

“This is the worst cloud vulnerability you can imagine. It is a long-lasting secret,” Luttwak told Reuters. “This is the central database of Azure, and we were able to get access to any customer database that we wanted.”

Luttwak’s team found the problem, dubbed ChaosDB, on Aug. 9 and notified Microsoft Aug. 12, Luttwak said.

The flaw was in a visualization tool called Jupyter Notebook, which has been available for years but was enabled by default in Cosmos beginning in February. After Reuters reported on the flaw, Wiz detailed the issue in a blog post.

Luttwak said even customers who have not been notified by Microsoft could have had their keys swiped by attackers, giving them access until those keys are changed. Microsoft only told customers whose keys were visible this month, when Wiz was working on the issue.

Microsoft told Reuters that “customers who may have been impacted received a notification from us,” without elaborating.

The disclosure comes after months of bad security news for Microsoft. The company was breached by the same suspected Russian government hackers that infiltrated SolarWinds, who stole Microsoft source code. Then a wide number of hackers broke into Exchange email servers while a patch was being developed.

A recent fix for a printer flaw that allowed computer takeovers had to be redone repeatedly. Another Exchange flaw last week prompted an urgent U.S. government warning that customers need to install patches issued months ago because ransomware gangs are now exploiting it.

Problems with Azure are especially troubling, because Microsoft and outside security experts have been pushing companies to abandon most of their own infrastructure and rely on the cloud for more security.

But though cloud attacks are more rare, they can be more devastating when they occur. What’s more, some are never publicized.

A federally contracted research lab tracks all known security flaws in software and rates them by severity. But there is no equivalent system for holes in cloud architecture, so many critical vulnerabilities remain undisclosed to users, Luttwak said.

Reporting by Joseph Menn; Editing by William Mallard

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

When you think of the online video game Fortnite, what’s the first thing that pops into your head? If you answered “the late Civil Rights activist Martin Luther King Jr.,” then there’s good news for you: a new virtual in-game exhibit will pay tribute to the slain leader by exposing players to his speeches and crusade for justice, Fortnite’s parent company, Epic Studios, announced on Thursday.

Fortnite—a game best known for its battle royale-style violence—has previously featured promotional appearances by artists like Travis Scott and Ariana Grande, making Martin Luther King Jr., a Nobel Peace Prize recipient and famous advocate of nonviolent protest, an obvious next choice for an in-game feature. According to Epic, the new exhibit, which was created as part of a partnership with TIME Studios, “teleports players to D.C. 63, a reimagined Washington, DC.,” where they will be able to visit the Lincoln Memorial and the National Mall to hear to King deliver his infamous 17-minute speech calling for civil rights.

“The experience extends with museum-inspired points of interest, and collaborative mini-game quests you complete with others,” Epic said. “These activities progress players through the experience and bring to life important themes of Dr. King’s speech: we move forward when we work together.”

Lest you assume that a violent battle game senselessly appropriated the message and likeness of a man who was literally assassinated during his attempts to broker peace, know that the King Estate played an active role in green-lighting the homage. Eric D. Tidwell, Esq., the managing director and general counsel of the King Estate said the organization was “excited” to work with TIME on the Fortnite project.

“With the advent of emerging technology, we seek to use all resources available to continue to spread his wonderful legacy of hope, peace, love, and equality,” Tidwell told The Wrap in a statement. “Presenting his most famous speech in such an interactive format helps us achieve that goal.”

Indeed, perhaps this is the push America’s gamer youth needs in order to move us into a brighter, more egalitarian future, one free from senseless violence and ugly prejudice. Or maybe this will just lead to more idiots using their Fortnite avatars to floss on the National Mall while King’s ‘I Have a Dream’ speech blares in the background—one or the other.