Nintendo fans now know who developed Switch 2 launch title Welcome Tour — the mini-game collection that also acts as an interactive instruction manual for the new console, which many have suggested should have been included for free.
While Nintendo Switch 2 Welcome Tour doesn’t state it within the game itself, Mario Party studio Nintendo Cube, formerly NDCube, has now updated its website to confirm the game is its work.
Nintendo Cube is a Tokyo-based subsidiary of Nintendo founded in 2000 that frequently handles the company’s various mini-game collection projects. It developed the so-so Wii Party (not to be confused with the better Wii Play, which came with a packed-in Wii Remote), as well as the disappointing Animal Crossing: Amiibo Festival on Wii U.
More recently, Nintendo Cube released the functional Clubhouse Games: 51 Worldwide Classics for Switch 1, before the infamous Everybody 1-2 Switch — a party game sequel launched with little fanfare that earned Nintendo some of its worst review scores in recent memory. (“Everybody 1-2-Switch might be the first party game I’ve played where I ended up with fewer friends afterwards,” IGN wrote in its 4/10 appraisal.)
But it’s for Mario Party that Nintendo Cube is best known, having taken over as the hugely popular party game series’ main developer beginning with 2012’s Mario Party 9 onwards, and continuing with Mario Party 10, Mario Party Star Rush, Mario Party: The Top 100, Super Mario Party and Mario Party Superstars.
Nintendo Cube’s next launch is (deep breath) Super Mario Party Jamboree: Nintendo Switch 2 Edition + Jamboree TV, a Switch 2 update for Super Mario Party Jamboree that makes use of the new console’s mouse controls and optional camera peripheral, due to arrive on July 24.
“Even if Nintendo Switch 2 Welcome Tour were the pack-in game it feels like it was meant to be, the execution of its charming concept is a muddled collection of quaint tech demos and boring factoids dressed up as an uncompelling completionist checklist,” IGN wrote in our Nintendo Switch 2 Welcome Tour review.
Tom Phillips is IGN’s News Editor. You can reach Tom at tom_phillips@ign.com or find him on Bluesky @tomphillipseg.bsky.social
There’s no doubting Hideo Kojima’s devotion to the art of video games. But one question that has followed the Metal Gear master around for much of his career is “Why doesn’t he just make a movie?”. This sentiment no doubt stems from the perception that his work at both Konami and Kojima Productions has been cutscene-heavy, opting to tell stories through often-thrillingly orchestrated cinematics rather than organic gameplay design. But is this perceived notion a reality? And, more importantly, does it even matter?
Well, I’ve done some number crunching and worked out what portion of each of the mainline Metal Gear Solid games, plus the duo of Death Strandings, is cutscenes. In some cases, it’s what you’d expect. In others, not so much…
How much of each Kojima game is cutscenes?
To work out just how much of each game is cutscene, I’ve used the average time to complete a main story playthrough, sourced from How Long to Beat’s data. I’ve then taken the total runtime of each game’s cutscenes and used it to assess what percentage that runtime is of the average playthrough. The results are:
Metal Gear Solid: 20.29% (11hr, 30m average playthrough, 2hr 20m of cutscenes)
Metal Gear Solid 2: 23.21% (13hr average playthrough, 3hr 1m of cutscenes)
Metal Gear Solid 3: 26.35% (16hr average playthrough, 4hr 13m of cutscenes)
Metal Gear Solid 4: 40.63% (18hr 30m average playthrough, 7hr 31m of cutscenes)
Metal Gear Solid 5: 8.13% (45hr 30m average playthrough, 3hr 42m of cutscenes)
Death Stranding: 15.75% (40hr 30m average playthrough, 6hr 22m of cutscenes)
Death Stranding 2: 15.97% (37hr 40m average playthrough*, 6hr 1m of cutscenes)
It is important to note that this percentage relates to cinematic cutscenes only. Codec calls or other such in-game conversations are not included, as they require some player interactivity to progress.
What do those percentages reveal about Kojima’s career?
It turns out that the original three Metal Gear Solid games follow a similar trend – cutscenes make up around 20-ish percent of the overall playtime, with each subsequent entry gradually contributing to a very slight upward trajectory. It’s with Metal Gear Solid 4 that things really shift. With 40% of it being cinematics, it’s not too far from the truth to say Guns of the Patriots is half cutscenes. Understandably, the game has become the poster child for Kojima’s cinematic indulgence, something only emphasised by length – the story famously crescendoes in a 71 minute-long final cinematic. That’s just 10 minutes shorter than the 1995 animated film Toy Story.
The same can’t be said for Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain, however. A game with a troubled development path to say the least, it suffers from the exact opposite issue as MGS 4: a paper-thin story. With just under 4 hours of cutscenes in 45 hours of gameplay, it’s a starkly low ratio by comparison to its predecessors. MGS 5 is undoubtedly one of the greatest stealth games ever made from a mechanical perspective, but its lack of narrative throughline (and, to be honest, ending) prevents it from feeling like a full Kojima package.
And then we have the Death Stranding games, which feature runtimes akin to The Phantom Pain, but a cutscene percentage closer to that of the first Metal Gear Solid. The result is a duology of games that feel more narratively complete than MGS 5, but not as trapped by cinematic ambition as Kojima’s more indulgent projects.
Are there too many cutscenes in Kojima’s games?
With all that data crunching out the way, let’s address the real question: is Kojima too reliant on cutscenes? I think the answer lies in each individual project, or at the very least each era of his career.
Across the original Metal Gear Solid trilogy, between a fifth and a quarter of each game is cinematics. Is being passive for that duration a problem? I’m not so sure. In the PS1 and PS2 era, telling complex stories was harder to do in player-controlled scenarios, and so that’s where cinematics, codec calls, or lengthy dialogue sequences came into play. The first three Metal Gear Solid games were lauded during their time, and are still revered, for their cinematic approach to presentation, and those early trips through Shadow Moses, Big Shell, and Soviet forests flowed beautifully. They told their tales through a healthy amount of cutscenes, yes, but never at the cost of gameplay, which ushered in never-before-seen approaches to stealth-action and many experimental fourth-wall-breaking surprises. They were cutscene-heavy, but never at the expense of the game itself.
That unquestionably changes with Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots. 7 hours and 31 minutes of it is spent idly watching cinematics that play out on either side of its linear stealth corridors and boss battles. Kojima had a grand story he wanted to tell, with multiple threads that needed tying up from across the trilogy that preceded it, but this arguably came at the cost of the game itself. The story isn’t necessarily a bad one, it just all-too-frequently interrupts the stealth-action we all desire from one of Snake’s adventures. And often they can be excessively lengthy – I’ve already mentioned the longer-than-a-movie finale, but the cutscenes that bridge one act to another often feature TV show-like runtimes.
Things go in the complete opposite direction with Metal Gear Solid 5, and while some of that can be blamed on its fraught development cycle, much of its reduced cutscene percentage is down to the switch from linear to open world design. This expanded vision aligned with “modern” game development trends in 2015, as massive maps full of opportunity were all the rage in a post-Skyrim world. Crucially, though, the open worlds developed around that time by studios like Bethesda, CD Projekt Red, and even Ubisoft were packed with narrative elements, both at small and large scale, made up of a combination of environmental storytelling, companion conversations, and cutscenes. Kojima didn’t subscribe to this formula, though, perhaps through a stubborn adherence to his traditional methods of sectioning off gameplay from story. But that big open world meant that more time was spent in active gameplay scenarios, and few individual missions in The Phantom Pain actually progress the plot as you play through them. The main story is told largely via cutscenes delivered as part of your trips back to Mother Base, and your time there is much more limited than your time in the field. This approach is simultaneously very Kojima, but oddly removed from the storytelling complexities we’d come to expect in 2015. It’s a fantastic game, but less so when viewed purely through a narrative lens, and the noticeably low number of cutscenes reflects this.
Heading into 2019’s Death Stranding, it may not have been a surprise to see Kojima head back to his roots when it comes to story construction. Sam Porter Bridges’ tale is told predominantly through cutscenes, and rarely during any of the many, many deliveries he’s asked to do. There’s the odd exception – Higgs planting a bomb in his cargo that he has to quickly dispose of, for example – but for the most part, story is reserved for hologram chatter (Death Stranding’s answer to codec calls) and beautifully rendered cinematics.
Both Death Stranding games are of a similar length to The Phantom Pain but, crucially, they don’t feel anywhere near as narratively sparse. The core gameplay, in which you connect various cities around a continent via delivering items and extending the internet-like “Chiral Network,” may not act as a direct vehicle for the story, but your mission goals never feel entirely divorced from the themes of human contact in a digital age. And so while the majority of the plot is therefore still told via cutscenes, as was the case way back in 1998 for Kojima on the original Metal Gear Solid, everything in between still feels narratively richer than it does in Metal Gear Solid 5.
Kojima’s effect on single-player stories
We’ve seen that the ratio of cutscenes can vary significantly across Kojima’s library, but how does his work compare to other studios working in similar spaces? Metal Gear Solid did, afterall, practically shape what modern-day PlayStation would become. We can see the impact of its legacy in many single-player, story-focused games – a recent prime example would be The Last of Us Part 2. 15.55% of its average playtime consists of non-interactive cinematic cutscenes, a percentage incredibly close to both Death Stranding games. Similarly, Grand Theft Auto 5, another open-world game with cinematic aspirations, is 12.5% cutscene on an average playthrough.
In both The Last of Us Part 2 and GTA 5, there feels like there’s a lot more story going on between cutscenes compared to Kojima’s games. Characters are constantly conversing to build out each other’s backstories, and radios chatter away to paint pictures of their worlds. But this constant noise can be overwhelming, and frankly, wouldn’t suit the worlds of Metal Gear Solid and Death Stranding at all. Both are built around protagonists that work in isolation – deep behind enemy lines, or trekking on a lonesome delivery path. This solitude, which enables stretches of reflection and contemplation, are what make these worlds – particularly that of Death Stranding – so singular to wander. The thought of story being injected simply to speed up the flow of its delivery feels counterintuitive. You don’t embody Sam Porter Bridges expecting an audiobook. Instead you get something of a therapeutic white noise machine that plays in between new chapter milestones.
So, should Kojima “just make a movie”? No. He’s created some of the most engaging worlds and unique mechanical gameplay experiences, both of which have helped shape the entire medium. We’d all be much poorer without his contributions. Should he be less reliant on cinematic cutscenes, or incorporate story into his missions? Perhaps. But his approach has worked well enough for me so far, and I don’t think a couple of blips 10-15 years ago should change my perspective on that. Death Stranding 2: On the Beach manages to tell a highly engaging story in only the way Kojima knows how, and I wouldn’t want him following a trend at the risk of receiving anything less interesting.
Simon Cardy is a Senior Editor at IGN who can mainly be found skulking around open world games, indulging in Korean cinema, or despairing at the state of Tottenham Hotspur and the New York Jets. Follow him on Bluesky at @cardy.bsky.social.
Room 17 of the British Museum contains an entire tomb – a two-thousand-year-old burial site framed by featureless lavenderbox walls, like an asset conjured up in a video game editor. Known as the “Nereid Monument” for the presence of sea nymphs among the pillars, it is thought to have been constructed for the Xanthian ruler Arbinas in what is now Türkiye, and appears in the Museum care of the 19th century British archaeologist Charles Fellows, who, in the Museum’s words, “brought many antiquities back to England with the full permission of the Ottoman Turkish authorities”. Modern-day Turkish repatriation organisations dispute this framing, naturally, and are campaigning for the monument’s return to the lands on which it once stood.
A developer who worked on Microsoft’s now-cancelled Perfect Dark reboot has addressed the claim that last year’s gameplay demo was “fake,” and said the glimpse was a vertical slice of the project running “in-engine.”
Perfect Dark was one of several projects canned by Microsoft this week as part of the company’s latest devastating cuts to Xbox staff and games. Developed by The Initiative, a studio Microsoft is now shutting down, alongside Tomb Raider studio Crystal Dynamics, Perfect Dark had rarely been glimpsed since its initial announcement back in 2020.
That all changed last year when a “gameplay reveal” video aired as part of the Xbox Games Showcase in June 2024. And it’s this video that has since sparked questions over how much of what it shows corresponds to actual, working game systems.
Earlier this week, Kotaku writer Ethan Gach posted on social media that he had been told last year’s demo had been “basically fake.” The question of the gameplay demo’s legitimacy was discussed in more detail by former Perfect Dark developer Adam McDonald, who now works as a senior game designer at Cuphead maker Studio MDHR.
“It is actually in-engine,” McDonald said. “I was one of three level designers that worked on it. It worked best if you played it the way the person playing in the video plays it, but it still worked even if you didn’t hit the marks perfectly.
“There’s some fake stuff in it,” he continued, “and the real gameplay systems shown off worked juuust enough to look good in this video. We were rapidly making real design decisions so as to not knowingly lie to players about what the game will be. The parkour is all real, the hacking/deception is mostly real.
“The combat is ‘real’ in that someone had to really do all that stuff in the video, but it’s set up to be played exactly that way and didn’t play well if you played it a different way.”
What McDonald is saying then, is that there’s nuance here. Like many vertical slices meant to showcase a project that’s still in development, it was made to work just enough, and to give a sense of how the final game would have appeared, had the project survived until launch.
McDonald’s suggestion here seems to be that the team behind it intended to show something that gave as accurate a sense of what Perfect Dark would be as was possible. That said, some elements clearly still sound like they were a work-in-progress, even if they were meant to be representative.
“I’m seeing big controversy over ‘THIS WHOLE THING WAS FAKE’ and it’s annoying me, so I wanted to say something,” McDonald concluded. Then, in a reply to another user, McDonald said “it was a pretty typical vertical slice” and “I don’t think we were particularly deceptive with it.”
He added: “It’s probably more real than you think. We were figuring stuff out on the fly in time to include it in the demo, doing our best not to ‘lie’ to players. There’s some fakery but quite a lot of it was legit.”
The studio making underwater survival game Subnautica 2 have promised fans that “nothing has changed” despite a recent drastic change in leadership at the company. The game is still planned to be a single player survival adventure with optional co-op.
“Nothing has changed with how the game is structured,” said a statement posted to Unknown World’s website yesterday. “It will remain a single-player first experience, with optional co-operative multiplayer. No subscriptions. No loot boxes. No battle pass. No microtransactions.” Okay nameless statement, this still dosn’t clear anything up.
With the addition of a fan in the Switch 2’s dock, we all knew that Nintendo’s new console would probably kick out a bit more heat than its predecessor in order to manage the more technically demanding games.
According to some folks in Japan, however (thanks, Nintendo Soup), their consoles are actually overheating. Multiple users have taken to X to relay instances in which their games have crashed, the consoles’ fans have gone into overdrive, or, in one case, their system simply became too hot to hold.
The Stop Killing Games initiative has reached the crucial 1 million signatures milestone in its quest to preserve video games for decades to come, but its fight isn’t over yet.
The self-described consumer movement soared past the goal yesterday, July 3, cementing its status as an impressive petition in gaming history and a movement that has plenty of gas left in the tank. It’s all in the name of protecting the video games players love – and even the ones they don’t – as the industry steadily marches toward a digital future.
Social media feeds have since filled with reactions from supporters praising an operation that could help save multiplayer and single-player games for future generations. While gamers take to the internet to celebrate, spokesperson and organizer Ross Scott says reaching 1 million signatures is good news but far from a victory.
“OK, the breaking news: The European Citizens’ Initiative has crossed 1 million signatures – except it hasn’t,” Scott said in a video update uploaded yesterday. “This is going to kill morale, but there are two things going on here. The first we knew was coming. Every time somebody makes a mistake when they sign the Initiative, their signature gets invalidated. So that means we need more signatures to make up for everybody’s mistakes.”
So, yeah, that sucks.
It’s an important variable in the equation on the road to 1 million legitimate Stop Killing Games endorsements, and it’s just one flaw to consider. The other involves reports Scott has received regarding fabricated signatures that could be artificially inflating the initiative’s progress.
“First off, I want to say that this is not a Change.org petition,” Scott adds. “This is a government process. Spoofing signatures on it is a crime. Please do not do this. They’ll be checked later by the EU commission, and my guess is the fake ones will get turned over to the Europol or Interpol, and they’ll follow up on this.”
To anyone who made a mistake or isn’t sure if they signed the EU initiative already, you can contact the official spokesperson (Daniel Ondruska) and he can direct you on how to reach the EU to sort it out. His contact is on the page under “more info”https://t.co/EpnNTDR85U
To account for what could be a significant number of invalid Stop Killing Games signatures, the initiative has altered its ideal goal to be 1.4 million signatures. At the time of this story’s publication, Stop Killing Games has reached 1.07 million endorsements ahead of its July 31 end date.
“So, yeah, that sucks,” Scott continued. “We’ll just keep plodding away unless we can figure out what the safe numbers are. Sorry this isn’t a big victory celebration. This is just kind of suspenseful and tense instead, and will probably hurt the morale of people signing.”
It means everything from The Crew to Concord could theoretically remain online to enjoy should the initiative amass enough public complaints to see the European Commission pass a law protecting consumer rights. Ideally, players could see live-service and multiplayer titles like BioWare’s Anthem, which was given a shutdown schedule just yesterday, could continue on in some form should a publisher decide to sunset support. Success could also mean single-player games that rely on online components, such as Death Stranding or Dark Souls, could remain intact, too.
WEAK
I know Anthem got panned, but it’s another example of one that seems like it had a cool looking world to run around in. I was interested in trying it out and keeping my expectations low. Yet another example of why SKG is so needed.https://t.co/fDsq0ZsP8K
Stop Killing Games wants to save the art that developers pour their hearts into while protecting consumers who prefer to access games they’ve already paid for, and it’s a movement that hundreds of thousands of game players are already supporting. Following its promising launch last year, however, the initiative struggled to maintain the support it needed to push its way through to the eyes that needed to see it.
Stop Killing Games’ chances at a successful campaign became so dire that Scott went as far as to publish a video titled “The end of Stop Killing Games” just last week. In the hour-long explainer piece, Scott listed a lack of exposure as one primary cause behind the lack of support. It was the Hail Mary the initiative needed, though, as prominent YouTubers like Jacksepticeye, penquinz0/Cr1TiKaL, Ludwig, and more were quick to voice their support with their own videos.
All within the weeks since Scott shared his concerns, Stop Killing Games has gained hundreds of thousands of signatures, resulting in a solid chunk of the more than 1 million names attached to the movement today. Success remains uncertain even if Scott is able to reach that magic 1.4 million number, with even more uncertainty lying on the other side of that goal post. Still, as outlined by Scott on the Stop Killing Games website, he feels optimistic about the future of game preservation if the signature goal is met.
“If we can pass the signature threshold,” Scott says, “there is a very strong chance that the European Commission will pass new law that will both protect consumer rights to retain video games that customers have purchased and advance preservation efforts massively.”
Michael Cripe is a freelance contributor 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).
January 12th, 2026. It’s my next birthday, and also now the date that BioWare exosuit shooter Anthem will finally be taken offline. I very much assume the two things are unrelated.
A real-time strategy take on Resident Evil has been announced for iPhone and Android, developed in “close collaboration with Capcom to ensure authenticity and quality.”
Resident Evil Survival Unit is being co-developed by Joycity Corporation, a Korean mobile gaming company that previously made Pirates of the Caribbean: Tides of War, another licensed real-time strategy spin-off.
A full reveal of Survival Unit will take place next week but, until then, a single piece of artwork released today offers the smallest of clues to the game’s setting.
Amid a suitably dark and ominous atmosphere, a vehicle is stopped in the woods next to an advertising billboard for… you guessed it, Umbrella Corporation. The ad shows two happily smiling people, with the tagline: “Our Business is life itself…”
Umbrella existing likely places Resident Evil Survival Unit before the events of Resident Evil 4, by which point the evil organisation has crumbled. Could we be looking at the woods around the Arklay Mountains, near Raccoon City? We can just about glimpse a mountain range in the background, so it’s possible.
It’s easy to imagine a real-time shooter taking advantage of the events seen in and around the Resident Evil game, where several teams of STARS commandos — characters that fans have now grown to care about — most be poked and prodded into action, while kept alive for as long as you can.
An accompanying press release states that Survival Unit is “designed to appeal to both long-time fans and new players,” suggesting we will see some familiar faces or settings here.
And with the main series headed back to Raccoon City in Resident Evil Requiem, and supposedly picking up the storyline of Umbrella, now seems a good time to revisit the setting and events that started it all.
Resident Evil Survival Unit will launch in Japan, South Korea, North America, Europe, and Asia, published by anime company Aniplex, a subsidiary of Sony. More details will be confirmed next week via an online showcase, set to broadcast via YouTube on July 10.
Tom Phillips is IGN’s News Editor. You can reach Tom at tom_phillips@ign.com or find him on Bluesky @tomphillipseg.bsky.social
Sorry, historical farming village folk. You live in the sea now. Ok, fine. By the sea. But that’s the best we can do. Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord‘s War Sails expansion is due this Autumn, and TaleWorlds have put out a new deep dive blog covering what to expect from the big battle strategy RPG‘s first foray into wavely warfare. Shiver me tambourines and other such phrases that would have confused a viking, here’s the first trailer in case you missed it.
