GamesBeat weekly roundup: Guitar Hero returns, PS4 beats Xbox One again, and Star Wars: Battlefront

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Welcome to another GamesBeat weekly roundup! This time, we tell Nintendo how it should heed the lessons of its past to make its next console successful, modders struggle to crack Grand Theft Auto V on PC, and we reviewed the latest Mortal Kombat.

Enjoy, and have a great weekend!

Pieces of flair and opinion

• The DeanBeat: Yep, I played Total War: Attila for 243 hours — and I’m not done

• Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft Blackrock Mountain guide — how to beat Blackrock Spire

• Why Yo-kai Watch is crucial for Nintendo’s future

• The day the music died for guitar games — and how they’re coming back

• 6 Bloodborne invasion videos that show the cleverness of its players

• What the NX can learn from Nintendo’s past, from the NES to the Wii U

• Gamers react to Mortal Kombat X’s controversial ‘easy fatality’ microtransactions

• YouTube star iJustine on the secrets of getting attention — and 500M views

Above: Grand Theft Auto V is now out on Steam.

Image Credit: Take-Two Interactive

News

• Steve Wozniak and Stan Lee are bringing Silicon Valley its own comic con

• Modder makes three new Mortal Kombat X characters playable

• Epic Games hands out $71,000 in April through its Unreal Dev Grants program

• Nintendo boasts about its success with Mario Party, Smash Bros., and Zelda

• March 2015 NPD: PlayStation 4 is the top-selling console, No. 1 in software sales

• March 2015 NPD: PS4 beats Xbox One; Battlefield, Bloodborne lead sluggish March game sales

• AMD reports earnings miss of four cents per share on revenues of $1.03B

• Feminist critic Anita Sarkeesian is only game person on Time’s top 100

• No, really: Project Cars is coming out in May

• In China, Apple is bigger than Tencent, Lenovo, and all other tech brands

• Bloodborne sells 155K digital copies as demand increases while social gaming keeps falling

• Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft’s third Blackrock Mountain wing, Blackrock Spire, is now live

• 2K Australia is shutting down — it’s Australia’s last triple-A game studio

• Puzzle & Dragons studio Gung Ho may bring old Japanese role-playing games to Steam

• Grand Theft Auto V cracked, now open to PC modders

• Popular modder: ‘Rockstar did everything to prevent modding of GTA V’

• Smash Bros. community lists patch changes since Nintendo won’t

• Mewtwo comes to Super Smash Bros. today (for some)

• Prison-break simulator The Escapists is heading to PlayStation 4

• Games probably don’t make you sexist, German researcher finds — but one critic is unconvinced

• PBS Kids launches its first online world: the Kart Kingdom learning community

• 155M Americans play video games, and 80% of households own a gaming device

• Grand Theft Auto V beats Skyrim’s record for concurrent players on Steam

• Bloodborne surpasses 1M copies sold

• Intel’s latest investment could make holodeck-like experiences a reality

• World of Warcraft’s next patch adds shipyard and new raid

• Ninja Metrics unveils powerful analytics for streaming media and music

• X-Wing, Crysis leads team up for new studio — and take advice from Space X

• Can’t install Grand Theft Auto V? It’s probably because of your ‘weird’ Windows username

• Here’s the trailer for Destiny’s House of Wolves expansion

• Rockstar details Grand Theft Auto V’s PC-exclusive video editor

Mobile and social

• Koalah launches web platform for games with real-money stakes

• Amazon Game Studios launches new survival-horror game Lost Within on Fire and iOS devices

• Halo: Spartan Strike launches on iOS, Windows, and Windows Phone — with no microtransactions

• War Dragons joins crowd targeting hardcore gamers, not Candy Crush casuals

• Global mobile-ad spending on Android grew 539% in Q1

• Garfield gets a new iOS game in Survival of the Fattest

• Lumosity’s LumiKids announces its second game for young children

• QuizUp morphs into WeQuiz to take on the mammoth Chinese market

• 100B messages and 500M users say push still works — for messages that matter

• Roundme’s panoramic photo app jumps on iOS virtual reality rush

• Apple Watch is getting an adventure game from Shantae developer WayForward

• China now downloads more iOS apps than the United States

• Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft comes to Android, iOS phones today

• Education games company Muzzy Lane Software bags $450K — has worked with DARPA, National Geographic

• Google Play’s new Designed for Families program lets Android developers mark apps and games as kid-friendly

• Boondogl wants to make console-quality web games work on any device

• Me Girl developer raises $1M to expand its girl-gaming lineup

• Angry Birds are hitching a ride on airplanes

• Game of Thrones social game sees 30% boost thanks to HBO series’ Season 5 premiere

• Google Play dominates downloads in Southeast Asia, beating App Store by 4-to-1 ratio

Above: Darth Vader returns to Battlefront.

Image Credit: DICE

Previews and interviews

• Star Wars: Battlefront is coming Nov. 17 — here are some beautiful screenshots

• Make history in The Force Awakens’ planet of Jakku in Star Wars Battlefront

• Star Wars Battlefront: Force choke enemies, call in Y-Wing bombers, and more

• Blow up space crates of secret porn in Rebel Galaxy

• Enter the Gungeon has over 200 guns — like one that’s an alien ant face and barfs poison slime

• Crackdown vets’ Hollowpoint plays off 2D and 3D combat in a megacorp shadow war

• Creepy indie game Severed is a rarity — a PlayStation Vita exclusive

• Super Time Force Ultra gets Journey and The Order: 1886 characters

• Trans Galactic Tournament brings free-to-play MOBA combat to the PS4

• Resogun studio’s ‘shoot-and-loot’ co-op romp takes on an alien invasion

• This role-playing game mixes Diablo in the bright colors of The Banner Saga

• Guitar Hero is back — and this time, the songs are free in the cloud

• Shadow of Mordor has nothing on the orcs in this dating sim

Reviews

• Mortal Kombat X, I love you … but I hate you. Look, it’s komplicated

• Code Name: STEAM is better but still disappointing with fast-forward (review)