Nintendo has announced that the French judiciary Court has ruled that DSTORAGE SAS, who operates the sharehoster website ‘1fichier’, is liable for failing to remove or block pirated games from the platform.
Although the Paris Court of Appeals had previously ruled in favour of Nintendo in 2023, this further clarification from the French judiciary Court is considered the final word on the matter, marking “an end to a long lawsuit”.
There comes a time in every cat owner’s life where they must ask themselves: how large would this creature need to be before it attempted to bat me around like a catnip mouse? I suspect the answer is “only as large as it needed to be”, so it’s fortunate that Monster Hunter Wilds‘ Palicoes are apparently bred for helpfulness. Is installing a mod to the action game that makes them tall as humans a form of gene splicing? Don’t worry, hunter. Gene splicing is how nature heals itself.
Grand Theft Auto developer Rockstar has announced its acquisition of the Australian developer Video Games Deluxe.
This Sydney-based team, which worked on the upgrades to Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy – Definitive Edition last year, will be renamed Rockstar Australia. The same team has previously worked with Rockstar on the re-releases of L.A. Noire, and L.A. Noire: The VR Case Files.
In what is quickly becoming one of the worst-kept secrets in the biz, a blurred image of what appears to be the key art for the as-yet-unannounced Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3 + 4 remaster has leaked online (thanks for the heads up, Push Square).
Shared to Twitter by reliable leaker @billbil_kun (who previously correctly called the Super Mario Bros. WonderSwitch OLED bundle, amongst other things), the art shows a skater in purple, assumed to be The Birdman, pulling off an areal trick over what appears to be a Pro Skater 3 + 4 logo.
When Pokemon TCG Pocket first launched, the meta quickly came to be dominated by a very small handful of decks. One of those, centered around Misty and water-type Pokemon, came to be hated early on due to its potential to overpower opponents early on based entirely on how well some coin flips went.
Now, three expansions later, you would think other cards would have swooped in to replace or counter Misty decks. But instead, Pokemon TCG Pocket’s latest expansion just added a new card that makes Misty decks stronger than ever, and a lot of players are kind of over it.
For context, it’s not that Misty decks are necessarily the most powerful in the game. It’s that the luck-based nature of Misty makes losing to them feel very, very bad. Misty is a Supporter card, with the unique ability to allow the user to pick a water-type Pokemon, and flip a coin until they land on tails. They then attach a water-type energy to that Pokemon for every heads they flipped. This could result in a player attaching 0 water-type energy, effectively wasting a deck spot on the card and a supporter card play. Or they could attach 1, 2, 3, 5, 10 energy, or more, if luck is on their side that day. A well-flipped Misty could allow a player to win on turn one in certain situations, before the opponent even has a chance to make a move. Or, in more common scenarios, the user gets enough bonus energy to bring extremely powerful cards online before their opponent can build a meaningful defense.
All that’s fine and dandy, but what’s made Misty worse are the numerous cards in subsequent expansions that have made it even more powerful. Mythical Island added Vaporean, which has an ability allowing players to essentially move all that bonus energy freely around between their water-types. Space-Time Smackdown brought Manaphy in, which adds even more water energy to the board. Both expansions saw new, powerful water-type Pokemon that can make use of that energy, such as Palkia ex and Gyarados ex. As a result, water decks have been at the top of the meta consistently for multiple expansions in a row.
And now, with Triumphant Light, there’s another card out there making Misty decks even more hellish: Irida. Irida, like Misty, is a Supporter card, but its effect is that it can heal 40 damage from each Pokemon that has any water-type energy attached. Up to this point, grass-type decks have been the healing experts. But with Irida, water-type decks can make significant comebacks as long as they’ve collected and spread out enough energy…and between Misty, Manaphy, and Vaporeon, they’re very likely to do so.
For what it’s worth, some Pokemon TCG experts are offering a pretty logical explanation for Irida. In TCG Pocket, decks are limited to 20 cards That means if you want to add something like Irida, you need to take something else out. Water decks are simply swimming in good cards – at a certain point, players must weigh whether or not it’s actually worth removing Misty for a card like Irida. Some players are speculating that developer DeNA added Irida in an effort to crowd Misty out and force players to make tough choices about which Supporters to include. But that doesn’t mean plenty of wise deckbuilders haven’t found ways to include both.
As the player above points out, Pokemon TCG Pocket is gearing up for a regularly-scheduled event, where rewards will be doled out for going on win streaks in the game’s online competitive mode. The best reward, a gold profile badge, will be given out for winning five matches in a row. This is surprisingly difficult to do, and even moreso when many decks you’ll be facing can sweep you away within the first few turns if they flip coins correctly, and have backups like Irida to save them even if the flips go bad for them.
Expect to see a lot of water decks during this event and for a long time to come. In fact, at this point, it may just be worth playing one yourself if you’re not already.
Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter for IGN. You can find her posting on BlueSky @duckvalentine.bsky.social. Got a story tip? Send it to rvalentine@ign.com.
Well, it finally happened: the first game to be delisted from Nintendo Switch Online will disappear on 27th March. For years, the numbers have only gone up, and the total NSO game-count sits at an impressive 182 at the time of writing – with 109 more if you subscribe at the Expansion Pack tier.
NSO was a slow starter, but the value has grown enormously with its vintage game catalogue since October 2019. The threat of games being removed always lingered — and that’s the reason we’ve called for the return of the Virtual Console in the past — but as streaming services of all sorts routinely pull content for a variety of reasons, Nintendo’s lack of absentees was notable. Until now.
Last month was a time of love for video games. What game from last month’s lineup won over your heart? Some of the big new releases included Lost Records: Bloom & Rage – Tape 1, Monster Hunter Wilds, and Like A Dragon: Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii.
How does it work? At the end of every month, PlayStation Blog will open a poll where you can vote for the best new game released that month. After the polls close we will tally your votes, and announce the winner on our social channels and PlayStation.Blog.
What is the voting criteria? That’s up to you! If you were only able to recommend one new release to a friend that month, which would it be? Note: re-released games don’t qualify, but remakes do. We define remakes as ambitious, larger-scale rebuilds such as Resident Evil 4 (2023) and Final Fantasy VII Remake.
How are nominees decided? The PlayStation Blog editorial team will gather a list of that month’s most noteworthy releases and use it to seed the poll.
Since launch, PC players of Monster Hunter Wilds have been tinkering with the game, working to optimize their performance and settings. As it turns out, some even dug all the way into the config files and found a typo, which they subsequently tested to see if that could bump up their numbers.
As discovered on Steam over the weekend (thanks, Kotaku), inside the config file of Monster Hunter Wilds, there’s a line where “Resolution” is spelled “Resoltuion”. According to the original Steam poster, fixing the misspelled word gave them a “perfomance boost,” though they also said it made their processor temperature “jump significantly,” from 50 degrees Celsius to 70.
A Reddit thread spun up too, where the original poster claimed to get a mild performance bump from around 120 FPS with Frame Gen to around 140. “Again, maybe a coincidence but I have no idea,” the OP said. “Needs more testing. I’m just happy to gain FPS somehow.”
Now, several repliers have commented with some words of caution and reason: adjusting this variable could be doing something completely different. “Renaming could just be setting whatever it is to a default which is lower than whatever it was, hence the perfomance increase,” one Reddit commenter said.
Another user said it’s a placebo. The executable contains the same typo, so it actually refers to a specific node. “By ‘fixing’ the typo, that makes the game not find this one specific config key/value, so perhaps [its] defaulting to some other value,” the responder said.
There are, of course, posts disputing the placebo effect. Without official confirmation from Capcom, this does seem like a red herring. And it’s best to advise caution when diving into the config files or other parts of the critical game files.
Players’ avid search for what fixing the typo does, however, indicates the fervor with which Monster Hunter Wilds players are hunting for performance bumps. The PC optimization has been a point of discussion for Monster Hunter Wilds players, up to the point that even social posts about an upcoming fix for a progression-breaking bug are garnering responses asking for optimization fixes.
PC players continue to flood into Monster Hunter Wilds though, as Capcom’s latest has been a record-breaking entry for both the series and the Steam storefront. With this much popularity, hopefully we see some fine-tuning in the weeks and months ahead, typo or not. A title update for Monster Hunter Wilds is expected in April, which is due to add a new endgame area to gather, as well as more monster hunting action for players to embark on.
IGN’s Monster Hunter Wilds review returned an 8/10. We said: “Monster Hunter Wilds continues to smooth off the rougher corners of the series in smart ways, making for some extremely fun fights but also lacking any real challenge.”
Monster Hunter Wilds has a patch arriving soon, addressing a known but fairly important issue with its story progression.
As noted over the weekend by the Monster Hunter Status account on X/Twitter, players encountered an issue where a certain NPC didn’t appear. Without the NPC there, this disabled story progression for Main Mission: Chapter 5-2 “A World Turned Upside Down.”
The main Monster Hunter account followed up with an update this morning, and confirmed a patch addressing the known progression blcokers will be deployed tomorrow morning, March 4. The update will briefly drop players from their online sessions when it goes live, but they will be able to jump back in after updating.
It’s a fast turnaround for a very frustrating bug, which is good to see. Hopefully anyone stalled out by the random disappearing NPC will be able to find them now.
IGN’s Monster Hunter Wilds review returned an 8/10. We said: “Monster Hunter Wilds continues to smooth off the rougher corners of the series in smart ways, making for some extremely fun fights but also lacking any real challenge.”
