Category: Nintendo

Smash Ultimate… Ultimate?

The Super Smash Bros. franchise has come a long way since the original launched 25 years ago in 1999. Yes, you read that right — the original Super Smash Bros. is 25 years old tomorrow, 21st January.

If we look at the character roster for a start, we began with a humble offering of 12 playable fighters in Super Smash Bros. for the N64 before this ballooned into a frankly insane total of 89 in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate (DLC characters included).

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What’s on the cards for you?

Welcome to another edition of What Are You Playing? where we all get to chat about our gaming plans for the weekend!

Before we get into that good stuff though, let’s take a look at what went down in Nintendo land this week. We were treated to the release of two new games in the NSO GBA library as Golden Sun and Golden Sun: The Lost Age joined the service. We also got excited to see that Ace Combat 7 will be flying over to Switch, which cheered us up following the news that GAME will be ending its trade-in programme.

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Tread carefully, Link.

Early last year, there was a rumour going around about LEGO working on a Legend of Zelda ‘Deku Tree’ set. Now, in an update, the well-known Lego leaker and Instagram user ‘1414falconfan’ is claiming the set will arrive this September and will contain 2,500 pieces.

The rumour stems from a marketing survey about several future LEGO projects. The original story also suggested this same set could be a 2-in-1 build based on the tree’s appearance in Ocarina of Time and Breath of the Wild.

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“It’s not even subtle about its rip-offs”.

The ‘Pokémon-with-guns’ game Palworld launched on Xbox, PC and Game Pass yesterday and while it’s already surpassed one million sales, it’s also making headlines for certain other reasons…

As highlighted by IGN, some Pokémon fans have taken to social media and other parts of the internet to share the “similarities” between Palworld monster designs and Nintendo’s famous franchise, claiming it’s “not a coincidence” and accusing certain ‘Pals’ of being blatant “rip-off” of Pokémon designs.

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The Indiana Jones developer might be involved.

If you’re a Quake fan, you might have heard some rumours about a possible return. Well now, in an update, it seems a new entry has been teased.

At Xbox’s Developer Direct this week, a brief scene during MachineGames’ Indiana Jones and the Great Circle gameplay reveal featured a whiteboard with the Quake logo and what appears to reference ‘Quake 6’.

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And it’s not getting much better.

GDC’s annual State of the Game Industry report has been released in the past 24 hours, and it’s not pretty reading. 2023 was a pretty awful year for game developers, with mass industry layoffs and studio closures — from Vanpool, Volition Studios, Brace Yourself Games, Crystal Dynamics, Free Radical, and more — GDC’s latest report finds that a staggering one-third of video game developers have been impacted by layoffs in some way (via Push Square).

In fact, it’s just over one-third. 35% of developers “aid they’ve been impacted by layoffs—either by having some layoffs take place within their team or company or by being laid off themselves.” The biggest number of layoffs come from the ever-vital quality assurance teams — you know, the people who make sure the games we’re playing work. GDC found that 22% of QA devs were laid off in 2023. Business and finance, on the other hand, only suffered 2% of layoffs.

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Stealth mission.

In the magazine business, the Back Page is where you’d find all the weird goofs that we couldn’t fit in anywhere else. Some may call it “filler”; we prefer “a whole page to make terrible jokes that are tangentially related to the content of the mag”. We don’t have pages on the internet, but we still love terrible jokes — so welcome to our semi-regular feature, Back Page.

Today, Jim sneaks into Nintendo HQ and spills the contents of a file marked ‘PLAN B’…

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piAKchu.

We have seen a good few Pokémon clones over the years, but very few have been quite as, ermm, out there as Palworld, the creature-collecting RPG… with guns. Well, it has launched into Early Access on Steam today.

Originally revealed at Indie Live Expo 2021, Palworld has everything you would expect from a Pokémon knock-off: catching, battling, suspiciously similar character models, sweatshops. You know, all the standard traits.

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Fighting game when?

In an official confirmation on social media, Japanese fighting game specialist Arc System Works has revealed it was the developer behind the new Switch release Another Code: Recollection.

Cing shut up shop years ago, so it’s no surprise to hear someone else handled it but we’ve now got an official confirmation. Here’s the rough translation, courtesy of Google:

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Unlock some special in-game goodies.

Now that the new year is underway, Nintendo is slowly returning to its regular schedule with new game releases, Switch Online subscription content, and game updates. With this in mind, Nintendo has today released a new update for its smash-hit RPG Xenoblade Chronicles 3.

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