Nintendo has announced that, like The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom before it, Super Mario Bros. Wonder is getting a limited edition OLED Nintendo Switch.
Announced during August’s Super Mario Bros. Wonder Nintendo Direct, the limited edition console pays homage to the next big Switch game but doesn’t actually include Super Mario Bros. Wonder in the box.
This is because the hardware launches a little ahead of the game on October 6, while Super Mario Bros. Wonder itself launches on October 20.
The hardware includes special Joy-Cons and a unique docking station, both in (almost) plain “Mario Red”. A silhouette hides on the back of the console though, alongside some coins inside.
It’s high time for another RPS Game Club chat! This month we’ve been pondering Aperture Desk Job: a “playable short” Valve created as a Steam Deck accompaniment, yet still manages to squeeze in some deliciously ironic character beats and at least one mantis-based tragedy. We’ll be discussing it in the liveblog below from 4pm BST, and we want to know your thoughts too. Liked it? Loathed it? Have design feedback for the toilet turrets? We wanna hear ‘em, so join us by posting in the liveblog widget’s comments bit. See you in an hour, ish.
Rune Factory 3 Special! Trine 5! Chants of Sennaar!
The latest Nintendo Download update for North America has arrived, and it’s bringing new games galore to the eShop in your region. As always, be sure to drop a vote in our poll and comment down below with your potential picks for the week. Enjoy!
Switch eShop – Highlights
Rune Factory 3 Special(Marvelous (XSEED), 5th Sep), $39.99 – Restore peace between humans and monsters when Rune Factory 3 is reborn on the Nintendo Switch system! Take a break from quests to chat with the locals, cultivate crops and care for monsters, among other relaxing activities. You can also transform into a monster, altering your battle abilities and conversations depending on your form. Your choices will also cause different events to occur. A new mode has been added to help you enjoy more quality time with your in-game spouse, too! Rune Factory 3 Special launches on the Nintendo Switch system Sept 5.
Greetings readers. I’m Mårten, the Game Design Director at Hadoque, a collective of creatives in Sweden. I co-created the core concept of the game and oversee the game design. We’ve been working on Ultros – our first game together – for the past few years, and today, we’re thrilled to show you the core gameplay and a new boss.
To recap from our reveal at the PlayStation Showcase earlier in the year, Ultros is a mystical and poetic adventure where you fight dangerous space insects and plant seeds to create an alien garden. Our protagonist, Ouji, wakes up stranded on an overgrown sarcophagus in space. She has no memory of who she is and how she got here. But the world feels familiar, and it seems to react to her – like she has some sort of connection to it. Naturally, this is when you start to explore the depths of the sarcophagus.
As part of this exploration, platforming becomes vital. Ouji is nimble, swift, and can build momentum to create a natural feeling flow of movement. You’ll have to do your fair share of jumping, climbing, crawling, and breaking surfaces to reveal secret areas.
Revealing the Ultros gameplay loop
Not so long into your venture, you’ll discover insect-like aliens that are generally very territorial and can get agitated if you get too close. They’re all part of the game’s cryptic ecosystem that you’ll take part in as you progress. The first ones seen in our gameplay first-look trailer are some of the weaker enemies called Puppaluppas. When you defeat them with your sword, they drop body parts or different organs. Ultros has a reward system for finishing off enemies with finesse – the more variety in my attacks, the better the creature parts. As you collect these, you’ll enter a more detailed inspection view of the parts, accompanied by a bit of lore behind the part of the creature. You can then consume these parts to increase your variation nutrition levels.
Also revealed in our gameplay is a friendly, whimsical character named Gärdner, and as you might guess from his name, he teaches us about some of the planting mechanics in the game. These plants usually produce some sort of fruit. There are many types of seeds to find and plant in the game. Fruits can also be eaten to gain health and nutrition. Different creature parts and fruits have different nutritional benefits – it’s good to keep an eye on this detail, as there’s a strategy for finding the food with the proper nutrition you need.
When you reach a rest point, you can unlock new abilities on a skill tree (or cortex, as we call it) depending on your nutritional requirements and what you consume. This gets used on another enemy species, PomPoms. They can have shields that you must break with a charged attack. You can also juggle smaller enemies after a combo and hit them into the environment or other enemies, which feels almost too satisfying.
Ouji collects The Extractor in the latter half of the gameplay. The Shamans used this tool in their ritual on this space station. So, it’s important for the main plot of the game. But it also provides some cool power-ups. This first one grants us a double jump. We also encounter another major character, Qualia, a mysterious figure you’ll learn more about when you play the game. Still, she has some form of link to and influence on the ecosystem in the game.
This leads us to follow Qualia, chasing her into the new boss fight we’re revealing today. It’s a huge, grotesque, worm-like creature. Like most bosses in the game, the key is to avoid getting hurt while learning patterns in their attacks, finding their weak points, and striking back when the time is right.
Following this, Ouji kills a Shaman in a chamber, revealing many more Shamans to find to break the seal that has trapped Ouji in this world. Tracking down these Shamans will now serve as the main objective in the game. This disturbance awakens Ultros, a demonic being, which effectively restarts the loop of Ouji’s journey as she awakes in a familiar place again. This will be the main mystery to solve throughout the game – you must explore different directions as you try to figure out how to break the cycle.
We hoped you enjoyed this new look at the game. Ultros will release in 2024 for PlayStation 5 & PlayStation 4 and is available to wishlist now.
CD Projekt Red choosing to make Phantom Liberty the only Cyberpunk 2077 expansion was a “technological decision”, the developer has said.
Speaking during CD Projekt’s latest earnings call, senior vice president of business development Michał Nowakowski said shifting from REDengine, the developer’s own game engine, to Unreal Engine 5 was a “key reason” in deciding only one expansion would be made.
“As we have announced a long time ago, we’re not going to make a second or third expansion”, Nowakowski said when asked how many copies of Phantom Liberty would need to sell for CD Projekt Red to make more DLC. “This is the only expansion of the game, and it has nothing to do with the numbers and how satisfied or not we are with sales or anything of the kind.
“It’s a technological decision to be honest. This is the last time we’re working on the REDengine, for the time being at least, and in the foreseeable future as you know we are working on the Unreal Engine from Epic. This was one of the key reasons why we decided [Phantom Liberty] was the only one.”
Over the past week, dataminers have been rifling through Baldur’s Gate 3‘s code and have discovered a dragon’s hoard of alleged “cut content”. It’s hard to specify what they’ve unearthed without accidentally sounding the Major Spoilers trumpet and initiating Armageddon, but the supposed buried offerings include additional areas, swathes of dialogue, storylines, cutscenes, characters, romance opportunities and even deities. Given just how much Larian’s gargantuan RPG gives you to play with, I am kind of thankful for a generous amount of stuff being “left out” – certainly, I don’t need any more romanceable NPCs, I’m already fending them off with a broomhandle. But the news has gone down badly with a few players, and especially those who feel the game’s overall quality takes a dive in acts 2 and 3.
Developers have come to Larian’s defence, amongst them David Gaider, former Baldur’s Gate 2 and Dragon Age writer, who is nowadays creative director of Summerfall Games, creator of the very earwormy STRAY GODs: The Roleplaying Musical. “Not surprised to hear of the amount of stuff apparently cut from BG3,” Gaider wrote on Twix. “BG2 had a mountain of stuff cut over its development, some early and some even after lots of work had gone into it… almost every game does. Every DA game did. Heck, even Stray Gods had some considerable cuts.”
CD Projekt Red is shifting a “big part” of its Cyberpunk 2077 team to The Witcher 4 (officially known as Polaris) once the Phantom Liberty Expansion launches in September.
Speaking during CD Projekt’s latest earnings call, president and CEO Adam Kiciński said the company is shifting more and more resources to the next Witcher game with a big development boost happening when main development on Phantom Liberty is complete. There are currently “250ish” developers working on Polaris, while even more are working on the Cyberpunk 2077 expansion.
“After releasing Phantom Liberty we’ll transfer a big part of the team to Polaris,” Kiciński said. “Some remaining members will then focus on supporting other ongoing projects like Orion or Hadar but bear in mind we’ll also be supporting Phantom Liberty for some time.
Kiciński therefore made clear that not every developer working on Phantom Liberty will immediately shift over to the next Witcher game, though as CD Projekt Red’s development breakdown (above) shows, it’s likely most of the developer’s staff will be working on Polaris soon. Official numbers won’t arrive until the third quarter financial update on November 28, however.
It’s a stormy night. The lights are off. The doors are locked. Somewhere, a woman is singing. Somewhere else, a phone is ringing. The sinks are full of gunk and there are children hiding in the cupboards. Oh, and the darker stretches of floor are covered with writhing tentacles. This is Holstin, a Polish survival horror experience in which you merrily rove an isolated town that, based on 14 minutes of fumbling around in exactly one very unwelcoming house, already seems a match for Silent Hill in terms of existential squalor. A public playtest is underway, and I’ve got a trailer for you through the jump.
Here’s a classification you might not have expected! As spotted on social media, the ESRB for North America recently rated the Beyond Good and Evil 20th Anniversary Edition for multiple platforms including the Nintendo Switch.
The action-adventure game is rated ‘E10+’ and contains animated blood and fantasy violence. Here’s a summary of the rating – sharing a little bit of insight about this unannounced release:
Officially unveiled at this week’s Panic Games Showcase, Arco is a triptych of revenge stories set across the deserts, plains and forests of a fantastical, South American-style landscape. It’s a part of the world we don’t often get to see in games, and its stunning pixel art (and tiny cute little llamas) instantly caught my eye when I got to play an early mission from it at last week’s Gamescom. Made by four developers spread across the globe, the official genres listed on its Steam page describe it as a tactical turn-based action adventure RPG where you guide four separate heroes in their fight against the ominous sounding Red Company. But just saying it’s turn-based is doing Arco a disservice, I think, as it’s also a little bit real-time, a little bit simultaneous turns, and all pretty brilliant, if you ask me. Here are some very early impressions of it.
