What could have been…
The final design of the C Button
In the end, the ‘C’ button on Switch 2’s Joy-Con was revealed as a way of communicating and chatting with friends and family members.
Read the full article on nintendolife.com
Author: Game Infliction
Donkey Kong Bananza Producer Can’t Discuss DK’s Future Just Yet, But Is Relieved After Fan Reception
Seeing people have fun with DK again shows the “potential”.
After an incredibly long wait, Donkey Kong made his grand return to the 3D platforming space in Donkey Kong Bananza.
Making this particular IP one of the main titles for the Switch 2’s launch window was arguably a risk for Nintendo but it’s paid off, with the title shifting more than 4 million units worldwide and becoming the second best-selling Switch 2 title to date. It’s also received a bunch of awards since then.
Read the full article on nintendolife.com
HD-2D Series ‘Octopath Traveler’ Hits Another Major Sales Milestone
Following the release of Octopath Traveler 0.
Square Enix’s Octopath Traveler role-playing series, which originally started life as a Switch exclusive in 2018, has this week announced another massive sales milestone.
Read the full article on nintendolife.com
Slay the Spire 2 Early Access Review
The fact that Slay the Spire 2’s Early Access debut plays so similarly to the groundbreaking original deckbuilding roguelike makes this one of the easiest recommendations I’ve ever given. If you never played it, you’re missing out and should jump into its turn-based combat immediately if the concept is remotely appealing to you; if you’ve sunk 1,000-plus hours into the original like I have, the sequel’s new character classes and extensive reworking of the founding trio make going up against its even tougher bosses feel refreshed and less predictable. On top of that, the novel co-op mode gives us a new way to play and share all the thrilling highs and tragic lows of a great run. It may not be the most ambitious sequel when it comes to reinvention, but this is an excellent reinvigoration of a brilliant game.
After a week of playing, I’ve now clocked a little over 43 hours of Slay the Spire 2 and have completed full, three-act runs as each of its five classes – but of course the ever-escalating Ascension difficulty modifiers and unlockable cards and relic upgrades mean I’ve only really scratched the surface of the challenges it offers. The Ironclad, the Silent, and the Defect (my personal favorite) all play similarly to their old incarnations, to the point where most of their established strategies will still work just fine, but now there are more options available that let you take them in different directions. The Silent, for instance, now has cards that include the Sly label; discarding these has the same effect as playing them (much like Monster Train‘s Offering cards), so you can use that to make a build that goes a lot farther on fewer energy points per turn. That’s part of why Slay the Spire 2 seems much less dependent on upgrading your energy limit than the original, where if you didn’t end up with a way to do so you were likely to have a bad run.
The new characters, as you’d expect, play completely differently. I’m a fan of the Necrobinder, a glowing skeleton with a giant hand as a sidekick. Its Doom mechanic effectively lets you attack both sides of an enemy’s health bar at once (they’ll die after the rising Doom level passes their falling HP), and your buddy Osty serves as both a second layer of defense that absorbs damage after your armor fails, and an attack that starts small but can be built up to devastating levels. There are also the Soul cards that can be extracted from enemies and then used to draw an all but endless number of cards from your deck to keep raining down attacks. After a few experimental runs I was finding satisfying success with those new tools.
What about the other new class, the Regent, you ask? Well, this starfish-faced royal riding around on a weird living throne with legs became my white whale. It took me nearly 40 tries over more than 15 hours to finally pull off a win thanks to lucking into an extremely powerful combo of cards and relic modifiers. When he clicks, he really clicks: by quickly building up his special Star currency at the start of a fight I was able to unleash some wildly powerful spells that hit as many times as I had Stars to fuel it. That was then boosted by one of the sequel’s new card upgrades that made it do 50% more damage at the cost of inflicting two damage on myself. Add in a few relics that inflicted the Vulnerable status on all enemies in the first turn and gave me Vigor for +8 damage on my first attack, and I ended up annihilating the third and final boss on the second turn – and it only took that long because this particular boss has a multi-stage mechanic that prevents you from killing it in one.
All of my prior attempts, though, ended much less spectacularly. I had limited luck with the Forge mechanic that summons and then builds up a floating sword (it’s expensive to cast the attack and the sword has to be re-drawn before you can use it again) and I nearly succeeded on a run that looped an attack that places itself back on top of the draw pile. There are also some risky mechanics around filling your deck with junk debris so that you can then transform them into disposable minion attack or defense cards, or just use a card that does damage based on how many cards you’ve created. So the Regent has plenty of options and mechanics to play around with, I just found them trickier to use effectively than the other characters.
That said, I’ve seen other people say that he’s their new favorite and their best character by far. I think that speaks to the way Slay the Spire 2 is currently balanced: it’s tougher than the original, and perhaps a bit too tailored to an elite group of players with a very specific set of skills – the type who’d crawl over broken glass to playtest a sequel to Slay the Spire. But smoothing out that experience for everybody is what Early Access is all about, and it’s not as though I wasn’t having fun banging my head against that wall until it finally, cathartically crumbled.
It also took me a little while to realize that my playstyle had to change a bit when it came to choosing my path through each act’s map. The approach I’ve used successfully in hundreds of Daily Climb challenges (which of course return in the sequel) is based primarily on going wherever I’d get to take on the most Elite miniboss battles, and then beat the loot out of them. Those extra relics can be the foundation of some incredible builds. However, that hasn’t served me well in the sequel because the risks of tackling these powerful enemies have outweighed the rewards. One of my least favorite to encounter when I’m at less than 100 percent strength can only take 20 damage per turn no matter what, so you’re in for a drawn-out fight even if you lead with your big guns. Go up against too many like that in a run and you’re in trouble: even if they don’t kill you outright, since your health is persistent, the damage you take there could doom you in the next fight. So, I’ve had to rethink my strategy and pick my battles more carefully – which I must admit, I prefer to what had become an automatic process for me.
Instead, I’ve started to prioritize things like special events, some of which can give you a sort of quest that spans across acts (think a more formal version of the first game’s Red Mask interaction). I’ve gotten a map in Act 1 that led me to a huge treasure pile in Act 2, and a key in one act that opens a chest in the next. There’s also a bird egg that must be hatched at a rest site (so it comes at the opportunity cost of not healing yourself or upgrading a card). Those are represented by unplayable cards until their quest is resolved and the reward handed out, so there’s at least a minor consequence to carrying them with you because they take up space in your deck and hand that could’ve gone to something useful in the moment.
There’s another notable change in that instead of just picking a modifier from the weird big whale thing Neow in the beginning of a run, each act begins with a similar choice between three rewards that often include significant downsides. These have probably been the biggest bellwethers for how a run will go for me – if I get a major one, like something that grants extra energy, I’m going to have a much better shot than something that grants me a normal card reward and a random potion. It’s another roll of the dice, yes, but one that’s thrilling to win big but doesn’t take the legs out from under you if you don’t.
Other than the new, more lively art style that includes a lot more combat and death animations, the big feature that truly sets Slay the Spire 2 apart from the original is the up-to-four-player co-op mode. It’s a great test of how well you and your friends can work together and control your chaotic impulses. Within each turn of combat, it’s a real-time free-for-all where everybody plays their cards at once, so if you’re not coordinating your attacks over voice chat it gets crazy extremely quickly as the cards stack up and wait their turns for their animations to play out, and potential attacks are wasted on enemies that’re already effectively dead. If you plan on getting anywhere as a team you’ll definitely want to make sure you’re taking a moment to think things through, because Slay the Spire 2 balances out the presence of multiple players by dramatically increasing enemy hitpoints (and their attacks hit your whole team at once), so you’ll need to focus fire to take out priority targets quickly. Given there’s no matchmaking to find random people to play with, though, it’s safe to say you’ll be in some form of communication with your teammates. (Sadly there’s no local same-screen co-op.)
Things are made a little more forgiving in co-op in that downed players are automatically revived to 1HP after a battle (assuming at least one person survives) and you can use your rest site action to heal a teammate instead of yourself. You also get the same number of random artifacts as you have players each time they’re handed out, which lets you choose the best fit for each of your builds (with any disputes settled randomly). That gives you a major leg up in how you want to build your character, compared to simply having to take whatever single item pops out of a chest. Each character also has multiplayer-specific cards that allow them to help out their teammates, such as giving them a random card to play in combat or summoning an Osty for everybody.
Of course, the difficulty ramps up pretty dramatically as well, and requires even more planning of your order of operations than you have to do alone. It’s deliberately designed to make you and your teammates hash things out in conversation: You can’t see a teammate’s entire hand, but they can mouse over one card at a time and it’ll be displayed over their character’s head so you can see what they’re talking about. I also love how you can draw on the map now, plotting out where you’re going as a group or just doodling. (That works in single-player as well, if you want to leave yourself a note.)
I will say that it would be great if Mega Crit could find a better solution for what happens when someone in your party has to bail mid-run, because right now your options are to save and quit until they come back or that person’s character just stops and you have to abandon your game with nothing to show for it. To be fair, a typical run isn’t going to go more than an hour and everybody should know what they’re getting into before setting out on a group adventure, but things happen.
Another reason it’s so easy to recommend Slay the Spire 2 even in its Early Access state is that it at least appears to be largely “complete” in terms of how much content is here. Who knows how much bigger Mega Crit plans to make it before 1.0 (we can, I think, at least expect a fourth act to be tacked onto the end, and alternate versions of Acts 2 and 3 to match up with the two versions of Act 1 that are already available), but even if it were left as it is today it would be no slouch. Outside of the balance changes we’ve been told to expect, the only real indication that this is an Early Access game is the goofy MS Paint-style placeholder art you’ll see on a handful of cards and in the progression tree that serves up bite-sized bits of lore (which, like the first game, is fairly nonsensical, vague, and silly) as you unlock new cards, potions, and relics. And the one significant bug I encountered that ended a multiplayer run because I’d gotten too many potion slots has been patched out already – other than that, it’s performed pretty much flawlessly.
Arc Raiders Boss Says Bungie Did a ‘Really Good Job’ Addressing Feedback After ‘Heavily Criticized’ Marathon Playtest
Patrick Söderlund, CEO of Arc Raiders developer Embark Studios, is praising Bungie after the Marathon team managed to effectively address playtest feedback “in a very short period of time.”
The studio executive further extinguished the extraction shooter beef during an interview with GamesIndustry.biz. In between questions about the development of Arc Raiders, he gave his thoughts on Marathon, Bungie’s competing experience that launched March 5.
Although fans have spent months arguing about whether the Marathon revival could stand toe-to-toe with Arc Raiders, Söderlund took the opportunity to celebrate the former Halo developer’s accomplishments thus far. He specifically calls attention to how quickly the experience changed after early playtests yielded what Sony described as “varied” feedback from fans.
“I know their technical test last year was heavily criticized,” Söderlund said. “Whether that was accurate or fair, I can’t tell you. But what I can tell you is that, even though the feedback may be a little mixed, it looks like the team has done a really good job of turning what was a big problem around in a very short period of time. That’s unusual.”
He continued, wishing Bungie the best now that the team has applied that feedback to the launch build: “So credit to that team and to the work that they have done with the game. I hope that they do well.”
Bungie recently faced criticism from fans after Marathon players noticed that “Arc Raiders” had been censored in its in-game chat. It was a confusing moment that was quickly rectified when it was uncensored as official social media accounts for both extraction shooter experiences shared a wholesome moment online. It’s hard to say where Marathon will go from here, as post-launch support is only just beginning, but Söderlund’s comments at least show there’s only friendly competition to be found from Embark.
“I feel like [Marathon] is more PvP [player vs. player] prone,” he added when comparing the differences between Marathon and Arc Raiders. “PvE [player vs. environment] doesn’t feel like the focus of that game. But there are a lot of things in there that I actually like that they’ve done well. I like that what I do in the game is linked to my progression. There are many things in there that I actually think they’ve done a good job with.”
While Marathon is only just getting started, players have already spent months with Arc Raiders since its launch in October 2025. For more, you can read about why we think some Maraton quests are only getting in the way of the fun. You can also check out our recent interview with Söderlund, where we learned more about how Embark plans to continue building on its PvPvE shooter.
Michael Cripe is a freelance writer with IGN. He’s best known for his work at sites like The Pitch, The Escapist, and OnlySP. Be sure to give him a follow on Bluesky (@mikecripe.bsky.social) and Twitter (@MikeCripe).
“It Probably Went Too Far” – Even Bananza’s Creators Think One Transformation Is Overpowered
Tsk, tsk, tusk.
We all had a great time with Donkey Kong Bananza last year, didn’t we? The 3D platformer marked a great return for Nintendo’s great ape, and the developers haven’t been shy about the work that went into it — we got a three-part Ask the Developer interview on it shortly after launch, let’s not forget — but that doesn’t mean that the Odyssey team doesn’t still have a story or two to tell.
In a new interview with Game Informer, producer Kenta Motokura and programmer Tatsuya Kurihara did just that. While the pair reiterated tales about the game’s Switch 1 origins and its fancy voxel tech, they also confessed that the destructive power of one Bananza transformation in particular is perhaps a little bit overpowered.
Read the full article on nintendolife.com
Parkour Labs: Conquer Neon Skies and Defy Gravity in a Brutal Vaporwave Gauntlet
Summary
- First-person precision platformer in a neon-soaked Vaporwave world of lethal geometry.
- 60 brutal levels built around flow, timing, and absolute control.
- Pure skill challenge – every fall is your fault and every victory earned.
Reclaiming Pure Movement: How Parkour Labs was created (Solo)
Parkour Labs arrives after two intense years of solo development and an additional year dedicated to polishing its adaptation to consoles. It’s the purest vision of movement brought directly to the Xbox ecosystem.
The journey behind Parkour Labs hasn’t been conventional. Its creator comes from the audiovisual world, where he worked for years editing videos for clients. Over time, the need arose to leave behind imposed aesthetics and reinvent himself by learning programming on his own to create something truly his own.
Parkour Labs is the result of that personal effort: a project in which every mechanic, model, and line of code has been built from scratch.
It was born in response to a growing trend in big-budget video games: visually spectacular experiences with automated gameplay, where much of the action occurs without the player having real and precise control.
The goal was to recapture raw, organic gameplay. This title is designed for lovers of extreme movement who, lacking modern alternatives, turn to mods and communities in other games, such as the surf maps in Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, the competitive scene in Warfork.
The game offers a home for this community seeking 100% free movement based on realistic physics, bringing that essence intact to Xbox.
Designed to Die and Learn Instantly
Control is the core of the game. Character movement was fine-tuned until the final months of development to achieve such a level of precision that, after just a few matches, it’s possible to play almost without looking at the controller, feeling a direct connection with the character. The challenge is demanding and deliberate: you’ll fall many times before mastering each level. However, frustration is completely eliminated thanks to the absence of loading screens. If you fall, a flash appears, and in less than 0.2 seconds, you’re back in action. The rhythm never breaks.
Tips for Mastering All 60 Levels
To get ahead of today’s release, here are the fundamental rules:
1. Momentum Defines your Jumps
The double jump isn’t a fixed animation: it’s the sum of forces. The distance depends on the speed and momentum at the moment of execution.
2. The Player Levels Up
There are no stats, experience points, or grinding. It’s a purely mechanical game. Improvement is structural and depends on mastering the controls.
3. Extreme Optimization
The game has been polished to push the hardware to its limits and maintain absolute technical fluidity. A stable frame rate on Xbox is key to perfecting reaction times
Laboratory Rules
Learn to read the environment or you will fall:
- Yellow platforms: they blink and collapse. Don’t stop. Jump fast.
- Red platforms: contact means instant death.
- Violet platforms: stable platforming surfaces. Your only safe ground.
- Blue platforms: they launch you upward with a bounce. Use them to reach the impossible.
Today’s launch marks the beginning of a new era for the console movement community. Parkour Labs is now available and ready to test your reflexes, precision, and consistency.
Parkour Labs
Pdpartid@games
$14.99
Welcome to the Ultimate Parkour Game!
Welcome to Parkour Labs, a vaporwave-inspired parkour game.
Surf the waves of nostalgia and retro aesthetics, sliding down ramps and performing smooth turns.
Explore colorful and surreal landscapes inspired by the culture, music, and art of the 80s and 90s.
Collect glitch effects and artifacts to unlock new levels and secrets.
Experience the synthwave atmosphere in this unique and original game that challenges your mouse control and movement skills.
The post Parkour Labs: Conquer Neon Skies and Defy Gravity in a Brutal Vaporwave Gauntlet appeared first on Xbox Wire.
Official PlayStation Podcast Episode 536: Legendary Cooperation
Email us at PSPodcast@sony.com!
Subscribe via Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or download here
Hey, everybody! Tim and I are back this week to talk about the games they are playing, a busy news week, and some big contenders that are releasing soon. This week also features an interview with Darren Bridges, Lead Designer, Sucker Punch, for Ghost of Yōtei Legends.
Stuff We Talked About
- Next week’s release highlights:
- The Seven Deadly Sins: Origin | PS5
- MLB The Show 26 | PS5
- Crimson Desert | PS5
- Death Stranding 2 | PC
- Big Walk hands-on report blog — Explore a puzzle-filled open world in this upcoming multiplayer game, where any moment with friends becomes an adventure. Experience the chaos and cooperation as you journey together.
- Helldivers 2 new Warbond — Suit up for the Entrenched Division Premium Warbond, arriving March 17 and featuring new weapons, armors, emotes, and rewards to enhance your missions.
- Tomb Raider I-III Remastered New Challenge Mode — Dive into a free update today introducing Challenge Mode, a variety of new outfits, and a collection of fresh Trophies to earn as you explore iconic adventures anew.
- Little Nightmares: Altered Echoes coming to PS VR2 — Step into a new dimension in the Little Nightmares universe on April 24. Connect the story between Little Nightmares 1 and 2 as you uncover secrets in a haunting VR adventure.
- Seven Deadly Sins deep dive — Discover how haptic feedback and PS5 features elevate the anime-inspired world of Britannia when you enter on March 16, bringing the vibrant story and action to life.
- MLB The Show 26 Early Access — Digital Deluxe Edition players can take the mound early, ahead of the March 17 launch. Enjoy the World Baseball Classic and new Diamond Dynasty updates before the rest.
The Cast
Tim Turi – Content Communications Manager, SIE
O’Dell Harmon Jr. – Content Communications Specialist, SIE
Thanks to Dormilón for our rad theme song and show music.
[Editor’s note: PSN game release dates are subject to change without notice. Game details are gathered from press releases from their individual publishers and/or ESRB rating descriptions.]
‘It Is Getting Very Hard to Keep Players From Going All Over the Place’ — Yes, the Donkey Kong Bananza Devs Are Watching Your Speedruns
The fastest player to beat the game Donkey Kong Bananza, as of now, is a runner going by Vytox, who finished the game in just under an hour. In fact, players have so thoroughly optimized Bananza that even runners who chose to play in categories that involve beating all bosses and collecting all Bananza forms can do it in not too much more time than that. That’s crazy fast for a game with so many literal layers, and is possible because runners have invented all sorts of tricks to speed their way through levels and even fly through the sky in ways that were pretty clearly not intended by the developers.
And yet, it turns out that the Donkey Kong Bananza developers have been watching all along.
I learned this when I spoke to producer Kenta Motokura and programmer Tatsuya Kurihara this week at the Game Developers Conference, following their talk at the show: Constructive Destruction: Fusing Voxel Tech and 3D Action Platforming in ‘Donkey Kong Bananza.’ While their talk focused on the ways in which they encouraged the player to do things like destroy terrain and discover hidden treasures, I followed up with them by asking how they prevented players from doing things they weren’t supposed to do — especially in a game that was so open ended.
Motokura initially responded by telling me that unlike previous games the team has designed, Bananza had a lot more things about the player experience that the developers were unable to anticipate when designing.
“In that sense, we have to give them the play space they can enjoy and everything else would be essentially unreachable,” Motokura said. He gave as examples surfaces that Donkey Kong couldn’t climb, as well as other engineering solutions that made some things simply impossible. I was reminded, for instance, of one of the major barriers remaining in Donkey Kong speedruns: an inability to proceed through a certain boss battle if you haven’t yet broken Pauline out of her Odd Rock prison.
I followed up by asking if they found it was getting harder and harder as time went on to block players from getting into things that the designers wanted them to stay out of. Motokura responded in the affirmative: “To answer your question very briefly, it is getting very hard to keep players from going all over the place. But certainly we take those sorts of things into account as well.”
And indeed, this team in some ways almost appears to have conceded in this battle somewhat. I recalled the Super Mario Odyssey team placing coins up in hard-to-reach places anticipating that players would find savvy ways to jump up there. Bananza, similarly, has special dialogue if the player manages to skip their way to the end of the Racing Layer without going for a Rambi ride.
Motokura alluded to this as well in his answer. “Sometimes there are sequence breaks in game that you can, once you learn about them, design around so that there is a gameplay experience on the other side of that sequence break. And certainly when we see players who actually get to those areas and experience those parts, we look around at each other and say, ‘I’m really glad we made that.'”
Later in the interview, I asked both developers if there was anything players had done since the release that surprised them. Kurihara told me he was surprised that so many people try to break every single voxel on a given layer. He knew this was possible, of course, but didn’t think so many people would do it.
Motokura called back to the speedruns: “One thing that really surprised me, and this is maybe going back to the discussion of the sequence break that we had a little bit earlier, was the surprising ways that people are using voxels for movement, not just double jump, but other movement techniques entirely that they discovered on their own to get to some very interesting places.”
So yes, Donkey Kong Bananza’s designers have seen the silly things people are doing to cross massive gaps and speed across stages, and while they stopped short of condoning the behavior, Motokura at least seemed mildly amused by it. As the team eventually moves to future games, it will be interesting to see if they embrace the chaos or continue to try and find cheeky ways to acknowledge player tricks while simultaneously gating off certain paths.
You can read our full interview with Motokura and Kurihara right here.
Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter for IGN. Got a story tip? Send it to rvalentine@ign.com.
“If We Know People Want It, Never Say Never” – The Simpsons Showrunner Offers New Hope for Hit & Run Sequel
The Simpsons: Hit & Run remains one of the most beloved spinoffs in the franchise’s long history, even if that game still has yet to receive a remaster or sequel. But The Simpsons showrunner Matt Selman is adamant that fans shouldn’t give up hope on a Hit & Run revival, urging them to “Never say never.”
Selman offered this newfound hope as part of a larger interview with People surrounding the animated series’ recent 800th episode. The series’ showrunner also worked as one of the writers on the GTA-inspired game several decades ago, and he seems convinced that it’s simply a matter of showing the studio that the demand for more Hit & Run still exists.
“Nothing is set in stone. But my quote about Hit & Run would be, ‘Never say never,'” Selman said. “Because we know people love it. We know they want it, so that’s good. If we know people want it, never say never.”
“Hit & Run is so interesting,” Selman also said. “I’m a thousand years old, and when I was in my mid to late 20s, I helped write Hit & Run. I had no idea it would become a cult game, a cult success. Of all the games, the thousands of Simpsons games… that one…”
On the whole, Selman seems somewhat more optimistic about more Hit & Run than he was when IGN spoke to him in 2021. At the time, Selman noted it would be “a complicated corporate octopus to try to make that happen.”
Selman’s comments are well-timed, as it was just a few weeks ago that we learned the original The Simpsons: Hit & Run and Prototype developer Radical Entertainment has returned under the banner New Radical Games. It would certainly be fitting if the reconstituted Radical were tasked with developing a Hit & Run remake or a full-fledged sequel.
Whatever happens with Hit & Run, it’s clear the franchsie as a whole is in no danger of dying out anytime soon. Last year, the long-awaited The Simpsons Movie 2 got its first official poster and a 2027 release date. Selman also recently noted that while the animated series may eventually end, it won’t have an actual finale episode.
Jesse is a mild-mannered staff writer for IGN. Allow him to lend a machete to your intellectual thicket by following @jschedeen on BlueSky.