Microsoft is currently locked in a courtroom battle with the Federal Trade Commission over its proposed $69 billion acquisition of Activision Blizzard, and although the focus is mostly on Xbox, on day two of the proceedings, the Nintendo Switch has already been roped into the fight.
The FTC has been attempting to argue the Switch is a very different platform (and experience) to the Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5 – suggesting it’s not really part of the same market by comparing its technical capabilities, with lines about its frame rate and how it compares in terms of GPU teraflops.
Happy birthday to Sonic the Hedgehog! It’s the blue blur’s birthday today, if you didn’t know, so it’s only appropriate we have some way to celebrate, right?
One of Celeste’s images is also one of its most striking. Following an intense dream, Madeline awakens with tears in her eyes. She is laying in bed, looking pensive as she stares up at the ceiling. On the table is a bottle of pills. To her left is a childhood picture with her mother. You can read any number of emotions into that expression, but it’s apparent that she’s caught in a moment of reflection.
The transgender community, for its part, zeroed in on pointed cues like the trans flag on Madeline’s desk. More than a year later, Celeste creator Maddy Thorson finally acknowledged what was obvious to queer fans: Madeline is transgender.
“This feels painfully obvious to a lot of (mostly trans) people, and likewise it feels painfully obvious to me too, in retrospect. It has also become painfully obvious to me that I, myself, am trans,“ Thorson wrote in a 2020 blog post.
“But these are things that I was not aware of during the development of Celeste, where I was writing Madeline and speaking from her perspective. Creating Celeste with my friends helped me reach the point where I could realize this truth about myself. During Celeste’s development, I did not know that Madeline or myself were trans. During the Farewell DLC’s development, I began to form a hunch. Post-development, I now know that we both are.”
It was a massive moment not just for transgender gamers, but for queer gamers as a whole. It was a moment of true validation and visibility in what was broadly a mainstream game.
It’s been more than five years now since Celeste’s release and it’s tough to find a more personal and affecting representation of a trans woman’s quest for self-acceptance in games or basically anywhere else. Today, it’s one of the most popular and influential transgender games ever made, which is to say that it’s one of the only popular and influential transgender games. But that still counts for a lot in a world increasingly hostile to that community’s very existence.
‘We didn’t really have a plan’
Celeste wasn’t always meant to be one of the canonical games of the queer community. In the early days, it didn’t have much of a story at all.
“We didn’t really have a plan,” Thorson remembers. “I mean like, at first, we didn’t even have a story. We got to Chapter 3 before we even had the story coming in, and the story very much came from the mechanics. But then at a certain point, the story started becoming the heart of the game and we started turning it around, where everything else was taking cues from the story, which was very unusual for us in the way we made stuff until then.”
The story that eventually developed follows Madeline, a young woman trying to make her way to the top of Mt. Celeste with the help of Theo, a traveler from the faraway land of Seattle (Theo has an Instagram account, and like most things in Celeste, it’s very cute). Along the way she’s chased by a shadowy doppelganger named Badeline who harasses and mocks Madeline as she makes her way through ever more perilous challenges, which she negotiates by jumping, dodging, and flying past obstacles.
[Celeste] would go on to sell more than a million units while competing with God of War and Red Dead Redemption 2 for Game of the Year honors
Above all, Celeste is a universal story about mental health. It’s about climbing the mountain and emerging whole. It’s not exclusively a transgender story, even if it has a special resonance for the trans community, especially trans women. It’s possible to draw many different meanings from its story, which is one reason it has proven so popular. First though, Thorson and her team had to find that story.
Going into Celeste, Thorson was still in the mindset of making a game similar to Towerfall, which had found success with local multiplayer fans in 2013. None of Celeste’s developers had an inkling that their “little game” as Thorson described it would go on to sell more than a million units while competing with God of War and Red Dead Redemption 2 for Game of the Year honors. Where many big-budget games can take six years or more to complete, Thorson’s team finished Celeste in just two.
The team began working on the project in 2016, which was around the time that Thorson encountered Lena Raine at the Game Developers Conference – the annual gathering of games industry professionals that takes place in San Francisco. Raine had been a freelancer for roughly a month at that point, having mainly served as what she describes an “add-on” interpreting other composers’ visions. Going independent was a risk, but Raine wanted to see if she could make it in the games industry. (Disclosure: Long before Raine worked on Celeste, she composed the themes for my various podcasts).
Raine got the job through a casual offer over Twitter DMs from Thorson, who said she thought her music would be a good fit for Celeste after listening to Singularity, a solo EP that Raine had released not long before.
“That was the style that they really latched onto,” Raine remembers. “It’s like listening to effectively what was my debut into exploring electronic music, and figuring out what I wanted to do with synths. Because before that EP, I really didn’t do a lot of electronic music. I did a lot of instrumental chamber stuff, I wrote for solo piano… guitar, and all that kind of stuff. And I really wanted to explore more sounds than just instruments that I didn’t have the money to hire people to play.”
Where more modern games favor mood-setting soundtracks, Celeste’s music is at the forefront from the beginning. It’s meant to be noticed.
That was the signature sound that Raine brought to Celeste, resulting in a soundtrack that would be streamed some 4 million times on Spotify by the end of 2018. The playful, exploratory, but haunted notes of First Steps backing the first stage made for a powerful first impression, echoing the memorable 8-bit and 16-bit music that had served as the soundtrack for gaming’s early years. Where more modern games, particularly ones developed by American studios, favor ambient or mood-setting soundtracks, Celeste’s music is at the forefront virtually from the beginning. It’s meant to be noticed.
Like the rest of the team, though, Raine had to find her way into Celeste’s overall themes. Her early work was “upbeat and peppy and a little bit more inspired by the Kirby games.” Raine was instructed to tone it down with an eye toward putting herself in Madeline’s shoes and focusing on the feeling of “standing at the very bottom of a room and looking at the puzzle of how to climb further.” It was a striking contrast to its platforming contemporaries like Super Meat Boy and N++, which in Raine’s words have a “frantic kind of pace to them.” It eventually became clear to Raine that Celeste’s story, and thus its music, had a clear emotional arc.
“I first got the hint at what the character themes and motivation were once we started getting into more of the cutscenes and some of the more introspective moments, because from the get-go, I had no idea necessarily the direction that I wanted to take it emotionally,” Raine says. “Writing the main theme and writing all this stuff, it was still evoking a lot of the feelings that were in the environment art in the first level. There was the ruined city and snowing… it was definitely evocative of a space… that initial ascent with first steps and with the first level, that set a groundwork for where I was going.”
Celeste was eventually released in early 2018. As with so much of the rest of the project’s development, its success felt almost serendipitous. Celeste had the benefit of being in the right place at the right time, arriving a little less than a year after the Nintendo Switch’s original launch. While it was released on several other platforms, it was most at home on Nintendo’s handheld, where its simple pixel graphics were able to shine. This being the early part of the Switch’s lifespan, it also didn’t have to fight as hard to stand out amid what would eventually become a deluge of indie releases on the platform.
Celeste went on to win praise from fans and critics alike, who lauded its distinctive art style, tight level design, and affecting storytelling. It quickly garnered a large and influential speedrunning community, who took pride in being able to beat its challenging B-Sides while dying as little as possible, but it also set the standard for accessibility with elements like Assist Mode. In short, it was a stunning achievement that was in many respects well ahead of its time.
“Celeste is a surprise masterpiece,” Tom Marks wrote in IGN’s Celeste review. “Its 2D platforming is some of the best and toughest since Super Meat Boy, with levels that are as challenging to figure out as they are satisfying to complete…But the greatest triumph of Celeste is that its best-in-class jumping and dashing is blended beautifully with an important and sincere story and an incredible soundtrack that make it a genuinely emotional game, even when your feet are planted firmly on the ground.”
‘She was just not a straight girl’
Thorson didn’t know she was transgender while working on Celeste. That came later. But Thorson tends to put a lot of herself into her writing, and her own conflicts with gender began to arise in Celeste’s story. In particular, it was apparent to the development team early on that Madeline was queer in some way, or as Raine puts it, “she was just not a straight girl.”
By the time work began on Celeste’s Farewell DLC, the ninth and final expansion that among other things introduced mechanics like Wavedashing and Wallbouncing, the team knew that Madeline was transgender. Raine, who is transgender herself, remembers artist Amora Bettany approaching her and asking whether it would be sensitively appropriate for her to have certain objects in her room.
“I was just like, ‘Yeah, those are really wonderful little details,’ that I think show what we want to say about the character without just making some big after-the-fact kind of statement because we were really sensitive to that kind of stuff. We didn’t want to say anything about a character that wasn’t actually presented in the text,” Raine remembers. “We really wanted to have the themes present for themselves.”
It wasn’t easy. Movies and television have a long and sordid history of presenting a character’s transgender identity as a shocking twist, which the development team worked diligently to avoid. As Thorson put it in her blog post a year later, the team didn’t want it to be a moment like Samus removing her helmet at the end of the original Metroid.
Movies and television have a long and sordid history of presenting a character’s transgender identity as a shocking twist, which the development team worked diligently to avoid.
When the Farewell DLC released in 2019 and fans took notice of the clues in that iconic image, the development team remained silent, choosing to let the moment speak for itself. It wasn’t until a year later that Thorson chose to address the topic, in the process opening up about being trans herself.
“The Celeste community has wanted clarification on Madeline’s identity for a long time now, and I don’t blame anyone for wanting that, but the messy realities of my gender identity and coming out have meant that I needed time before I could talk openly about it,” Thorson wrote.
Immediately after the post, Thorson remembers “so much outpouring of support and love and personal stories of how they relate to Madeline and how it makes them so happy to know that she is canonically trans and that the story came from that kind of perspective.” Both Thorson and Raine say they continue to receive heartfelt messages to this day.
Thorson’s post wound up filtering throughout the trans community, and many picked it up for the first time. Among them was Eleanor, who had previously avoided Celeste due to its reputation for being difficult, which she tended to associate with negative memories of hyper-competitive behavior among boys (Note: We are using a pseudonym at Eleanor’s request). In the end though, she discovered that she was not only able to cope with Celeste’s difficulty – she loved it.
“I think Celeste broke through my defenses on that because there are those cute little postcards with the strawberries at the start of every level reminding you, it’s okay to take a break, keep trying,” she said, noting that on an especially bad day she will go and play through all of Farewell. “Your death counter is something to be proud of. And there’s the design choices of fudging the physics a little so you land in the right place or letting you restart at the start of a room every time instead of going back to a checkpoint. That kept me going.”
Eleanor sees Celeste’s journey as an elastic metaphor that can be read in many different ways, but she mainly focuses on the sense that Madeline is running from her past, saying that she heavily identifies with her anxiety of “being thought to be someone you aren’t and the terror of branching out into a new life when people are trying to hold you back into what you once were.”
“You get that cryptic call with someone who might be a family member who’s cut her off or might be an ex-partner, and that’s one of the only times we see outside the frame of the game in the entire thing,” she says. “Throughout you’re told you aren’t a mountain climber. No, you can’t do this. No, this isn’t something you’re capable of. This is not who you are. This is not who you’re allowed to be. It’s all about that tension between past and current self and the potential of what you could be versus what you are.”
She remembers a sense of relief when seeing the image at the end of Farewell.
“I feel like there’s often this spectrum between someone writing a trans character where their entire story is about their trans-ness, and that’s often good, but it shouldn’t be the only thing. Or a character gets Dumbledored [a reference to Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling revealing that Dumbledore was gay], like the author’s voice many years later” she says.
“Seeing that shot at the end of Farewell, it was just this relief of, ‘Oh, okay, this feels very true to her character.’ And it’s such a relief as an artist who works with trans narratives that are also not necessarily narratives just for trans people to see someone who has put so much thought into trying to hit this balance. It meant a lot to me.”
‘I still tear up a little bit when I see that’
Celeste ultimately has a happy ending – still a rarity in media featuring transgender people. Madeline finds closure after Granny’s death. She unites with Badeline and summits the mountain.
[The mountain scene is something] I find a little challenging, because I don’t think I love the Badeline in myself in quite that same way. I don’t know how to – Eleanor
“It’s really beautiful,” Eleanor says. “I love the kind of quiet and gentle way that it makes clear that she just needs to love every part of herself, no matter how painful. And that’s the only thing that’s going to allow her to keep going. I still tear up a little bit when I see that. And at the same time, it’s still a scene that I find a little challenging, because I don’t think I love the Badeline in myself in quite that same way. I don’t know how to.”
It’s not an easy time for transgender people right now. Anti-transgender laws are sweeping the United States and other countries, and abuse is rampant on social media platforms like Twitter. Thorson says that Celeste reflects her belief that there are cisgender people who want to understand and care about transgender people.
“The one thing that makes me think that is the fact that so many cis people do relate to Celeste without even knowing that it’s a trans story, before we added that context,” Thorson says. “So that gives me hope, personally, that we aren’t these sort of aliens that are completely different where we’re just people and our stories are relatable. Maybe not in the details, but in the feelings and the human experience.”
huge congratulations to the whole Celeste Strawberry Jam team for launching their ridiculously huge fan compilation today 🤍
they released FIVE whole albums of music from the mod project & all profits go to Trans Lifeline, so you know what to do~https://t.co/tkf0NEqkld
She and Raine both hope that transgender people can find refuge in the transgender community, which remains highly active to this day. Earlier this year, a team of more than 350 contributors came together to release the Strawberry Jam mod, a collection featuring more than 111 maps with original mechanics, art, and music. Thorson describes the effort as “the most flattering thing possible.”
For true representation, it’s only ever going to come from indie games. You’re not going to get a game written from a trans perspective from Blizzard or whoever. It’s just not going to happen.
Thorson is less optimistic about other games, saying that she’s become disillusioned with representation in AAA games, many of which proudly tout LGBTQIA+ characters who are only identified as such in their biographies. Either that, or they’re one-dimensional sops for the transgender community, as was the case with Hogwarts Legacy’s Sirona Ryan, who was widely panned as a simplistic representation of trans pathos.
“I think for true representation, it’s only ever going to come from indie games. You’re not going to get a game written from a trans perspective from Blizzard or whoever. It’s just not going to happen. They’ll have their token trans character and they’ll stop doing harmful tropes, and that’s the best we can hope for, I think,” she says, adding that she thinks it’s at least good that some companies aren’t being actively harmful. “But yeah, I would look to indie games if you want to hear a trans story with some actual soul to it.”
Pressed for examples, she points to Get in the Car, Loser, an RPG about lesbian adventurers on a roadtrip with an angel, and Super Lesbian Animal RPG, which is about “love, anxiety, and fighting funny looking monsters in dungeons.” Other games like Tell Me Why have also centered around queer and trans characters.
What ultimately separates Celeste is that it’s transgender art from transgender creators with a mainstream following. That’s rare in any space, let alone gaming. It does more than center Madeline as a transgender character, it delves deep into her psyche – into her fears, her dreams, her insecurities.
Raine recalls an oft-discussed monologue that she recorded and reversed for one of the game’s tracks, titled In the Mirror. Seeking a good recording environment, she went into a closet and began talking to herself. In hindsight, she says, it felt like a potent metaphor.
“I was just reflecting on the themes of that level… I was monologuing as a means of a hidden message, just to have some sort of spooky reverse thing happening in the music track. But I really did reflect on those things, and I really was feeling the themes of the game. Because who doesn’t have some sort of experience that they can relate to with that?”
Kat Bailey is IGN’s News Director as well as co-host of Nintendo Voice Chat.
One of the third-party highlights of the latest Nintendo Direct earlier this week was the announcement Batman: Arkham Trilogy would be coming to the Switch this Fall.
As exciting as it is, some new information about the physical version has now surfaced. The Switch version’s FAQ has revealed the hard copy will only include Batman Arkham Asylum on the game card, with the other two titles (Batman: Arkham City and Batman: Arkham Knight) requiring a download:
Today’s testimonies in the FTC’s legal battle to press pause on Xbox’s merger with Activision were bookended by a closed session with Microsoft senior finance director Jamie Lawver and a brief questioning of Google Stadia product director Dov Zimring. But the real meat of today was the Phil Spencer show.
The suit-clad head of Xbox kept steady throughout a lengthy questioning by the FTC before laying out, in cross-examination, a clear map of Xbox’s mobile-focused strategy for acquiring Activision. When Microsoft wrapped up its inquiries, Spencer’s stint at the front of the court was concluded by a rather awkward line of questioning during which he found himself patiently explaining to FTC lawyer James Weingarten how, exactly, money works in acquisitions.
Relevant Markets Revisited
Once again, the FTC spent a solid portion of time focused on defining the “relevant markets” as part of its job in this affair is to prove that Microsoft acquiring Activision would “substantially lessen competition” in a “relevant market.” For this specific case, the FTC has put forth significant efforts on a couple of very specific relevant markets, one of which is high-end consoles – a.k.a., PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X and S…but not Nintendo Switch. Xbox has argued that it’s in “third place” behind both PlayStation and Switch, and an Activision acquisition would help bolster its weaker market position rather than harm competition. But if the FTC can remove the Switch as a competitor in its market definition, then the scales tip more in Xbox’s favor, and it can more reasonably make the argument that Xbox could hurt competition.
So, naturally, we heard a lot of back and forth over the Nintendo Switch today throughout multiple rounds of Spencer’s time on the witness stand. The FTC brought forward multiple internal Xbox documents demonstrating market share between PS5 and Xbox Series consoles as Gen 9, but seemed to exclude the Switch in an effort to prove that even internally, Microsoft does not consider the Switch a serious competitor.
Spencer’s argument, which gained strength once Microsoft counsel stepped up to counter-examine him, is that Microsoft uses a number of internal metrics to gauge success, some of which include Switch and some of which don’t – it just depends on what data they are looking for. Microsoft counsel busted out its own chart with all three platform holders on it to prove it – a chart Spencer supposedly receives an updated version of every single week. Spencer was given the opportunity to hail Switch as a strong and uniquely designed competitor – the strongest of the three consoles in terms of unit sales, even. And when he was passed back to the FTC for a final round, the FTC took the rather strange tactic of pointing out repeatedly that the Switch was listed last in Microsoft’s report, a move which did not seem to sufficiently prove anything of relevance.
A similar discussion was had regarding another “relevant market” definition, but this time with the FTC trying to demonstrate that the deal would be anti-competitive in the United States specifically because of Xbox’s comparatively larger market share (as opposed to its weaker position in Asia and Europe). Meanwhile, Microsoft gave Spencer the opportunity to argue that no one – neither console makers nor developers – is operating in a regional vacuum, but is designing everything with a global market in mind. Neither party spent much time on this specific line of questioning.
But we did to hear a delightful response from Spencer when he was asked by Weingarten if Xbox had “lost the console wars.”
“As the console wars is a social construct, with the community, I would never want to count our community out, they’re big fans,” Spencer replied. “If you look at our market share in the console space over the last 20+ years, we’re in third place. We’ve remained in third place for quite a while.”
Content Is King
Microsoft’s cross-examination, on the other hand, was far more cohesive. With Spencer more comfortable speaking at length under Microsoft counsel Beth Wilkinson’s questioning, they were able to lay out a coherent guide to Xbox’s attempted strategy in acquiring Activision Blizzard. The two covered all of Xbox’s greatest hit arguments here, including why it would make no sense financially for a developer to purposefully degrade a video game on another platform (“like designing a movie for Omaha and making it worse for New York City”), and why pulling Call of Duty from PlayStation would cause “irreperable harm” to the brand in the eyes of gamers.
One especially interesting segment, though, was Spencer’s outline of Xbox’s mobile strategy. Much of this we’ve heard before in filings earlier this year, but here Spencer had the opportunity to dig in deep on how Activision would be a balm to Xbox’s near-absence from the largest gaming market. He began, though, by what was almost an apologia for xCloud, which he explained had been a strategy to help Xbox compete in the mobile market. A strategy, he admits, that didn’t work out so well thanks to issues such as latency, screen size, and controller support. “Turns out there are a lot of barriers to console games being displayed on a phone screen,” Spencer said.
“Turns out there are a lot of barriers to console games being displayed on a phone screen.
“Our solution here is not customer led really,” he wrote in a 2019 email. “It’s led by what we have and a hope. I don’t like this but I’m not smart enough to come up with anything else. If I ask mobile gamers what they want, they won’t tell me that it’s to play Halo on their phone with a Bluetooth connection to an Xbox controller. That’s probably as far from what they want to do on their phone as anything. They also don’t pay for any games, all the mobile games are F2P. So even the business model around our games that mobile players don’t want is wrong.”
Spencer confirmed that Xbox tried to acquire Zynga to solve this problem, but realized they needed something even bigger. Then, in November of 2021, the Activision opportunity arose. As the biggest publisher of mobile content, Activision – largely via mobile subsidiary King – had the properties and the development chops to make big enough games that it could help Xbox realize its ambitions of breaking into the massive mobile market and becoming a real competitor. And it would do that not just through publishing mobile games, but through building its own mobile storefront:
“We believe there is an opportunity to create a gaming storefront on mobile phones for Apple and Google phones where people can come to find games to play, and a storefront that would really tailor toward players on Google and Apple’s platform,” Spencer said. “Now Google and Apple will fight us to do this. They don’t openly allow other storefronts on the largest gaming platform. So as we talked about, we started with this strategy of xCloud, maybe through the cloud, outside of their store, we’d be able to deliver content to them. This is an approach of having a native storefront on a phone where people could come to find our games and third-party games.”
With Activision’s games such as Call of Duty mobile and Candy Crush in its chamber, Xbox could drive its audience toward its mobile storefront and establish a meaningful presence on both mobile platforms, something it’s not able to do with its current portfolio by any stretch. This explains Xbox’s specter-like presence in the backdrop of the Epic v. Apple trial over Apple’s walled garden a few years ago, and could be a harbinger of more, similar disputes to come should the deal be approved.
The FTC Silenced
Throughout the day, the FTC introduced a number of questions that seemed to indicate misunderstandings of how the gaming business worked. While going back and forth with Spencer on why Minecraft had not yet been optimized for PS5, for instance, Weingarten seemed oddly focused about its lack of presence on PS Now or PS+, while Spencer evenly pointed out that Sony had never made an offer for the game to be on that service, and it wasn’t his job to dictate what content Sony had on its own subscriptions. Later, Weingarten repeated questions about a specific conversation Spencer might have had with Zenimax’s James Leder in fall of 2021 about game exclusivity – a conversation Spencer was able to easily enough claim he didn’t remember specific of, given that it happened two years ago and that he discusses the subject with his colleagues all the time.
And at another point, Weingarten questioned why Microsoft could afford a $70 billion acquisition but couldn’t afford to pay studios like Square Enix to make games like Final Fantasy exclusive to Xbox instead, which led to a truly fascinating exchange where the head of Xbox explained how the financials of acquisition works to an FTC lawyer.
“I would raise my hand. I will do whatever it takes,” he said. “We have no plan. I’m making a commitment standing here that we will not pull Call of Duty – it is my testimony – from PlayStation.”
It was a striking moment that stood out even after Spencer’s other repeated public pledges to do just that, but what was really curious was what followed when Weingarten returned to question Spencer further. Weingarten asked Spencer if he could still make that promise without looking at any of the “terms” involved. Spencer replied that this was not necessary – Xbox has shipped many games on PlayStation, he’s confident they can do it. Weingarten pressed harder.
“Can you swear under oath that you can promise that you’ll ship COD on all the future versions of PlayStation, for ten years, without knowing what the terms are?”
“I’m making a commitment standing here that we will not pull Call of Duty… from PlayStation.
The two went back and forth, with Spencer noting that it’s possible Sony changes the terms on Xbox in a way that makes shipping a game impossible, with the unspoken conclusion that this would be Sony’s fault, not Xbox’s. Weingarten clapped back, pointing out that in the ten-year agreement Xbox sent Sony, Sony asked for “significant commitments beyond the standard shipping of the game” that had caused the promise to remain unsigned, in limbo. Spencer said the deal was extraordinary, but was committed to bringing Call of Duty to PlayStation even without that specific contract signed.
Weingarten went on. Would Spencer make the same promise for all Activision content?
No, Spencer replied, that would not make sense, Activison has games currently that are on mobile or PC-only, like World of Warcraft.
What about Diablo? Weingarten went on. Can he commit to that?
It was at this point that Microsoft stepped in with an objection, and the judge urged proceedings on. But Weingarten came back to the same argument later, asking if Spencer would make the same commitment to Sony’s cloud gaming service, at which point the judge actively cut him off, clearly done with the discussion.
How It All Played Out
It’s admittedly difficult to imagine how someone unfamiliar with the gaming industry (as Judge Jacqueline Scott Corley self-admittedly is) might have felt about today. But from the inside, the FTC came out looking a bit ridiculous. Its lawyers repeatedly seemed to be unaware about basic business principles involved in bringing games to different platforms, and Spencer himself was able to hold up well under lengthy questioning. Microsoft, meanwhile, was at last given ample opportunity to outline the real reasons it wants Activision in front of a US judge, as well as counter a number of (it claims) non-reasons, such as making Call of Duty exclusive. And Microsoft still has multiple witnesses on the way next week when the trial resumes Tuesday.
It is still critical to remember that the FTC’s job isn’t to prove the deal is anti-competitive. At least not right now. It’s just trying to pause the deal long enough to take things to court against in August as it planned, rather than let the deal pass in July and have to fight to undo it down the line. With that in mind, Judge Corley outside perspective on the industry, and in light of recent US sleight of antitrust crackdowns, it’s still not clear which way the cards will fall, especially with both parties having the weekend to regroup. Even analysts aren’t fully convinced one way or another of the outcome, and it sounds like the answer won’t be here until sometime after the July 4th weekend.
GameStop and Target may have leaked the release date for Sonic Superstars following the Sonic Central livestream.
As spotted by Wario64, GameStop and Target, where Sonic Superstars is up for pre-order, listed its release date as October 17 on their websites, a month earlier than most Sonic game releases. IGN, however, found that the release date was later switched to the placeholder date of December 31, 2023 on both retailers’ websites.
Sega of America did not respond to IGN’s request for comment on the matter.
Sonic Superstars was revealed at Summer Game Fest earlier this month with a Fall 2023 release window. Given that the trailer for the game dropped so recently, it would mark a pretty quick turnaround to reveal its exact release date now.
General speculation, though, places the game somewhere between August and October. While August is techincally a summer month, Sonic Mania released at that time in 2017. And while November technically counts as a Fall month, typically, when Sega drops a new Sonic game trailer showing a Winter or Holiday release window such as Sonic Frontiers, the game gets a November release date several months later.
If Sonic Superstars is indeed slated to release on October 17, it would be in competition with Alan Wake 2, which comes out the same day. It would also be competing with Super Mario Bros. Wonder and Marvel’s Spider-Man 2, which come out October 20.
Cristina Alexander is a freelance writer for IGN. To paraphrase Calvin Harris, she wears her love for Sonic the Hedgehog on her sleeve like a big deal. Follow her on Twitter @SonicPrincess15.
Soar through the skies in one of aviation’s most distinctive and influential aircraft, the Ford 4-AT Trimotor, Microsoft Flight Simulator’s sixth Famous Flyer release.
The Ford 4-AT Trimotor is an aviator’s dream machine: an all-metal, high-wing, three-engine passenger, and cargo aircraft. Built ruggedly, it can operate out of some of the world’s most austere airfields, and due to its renowned forgivingness in the air, the Trimotor elevates pilot confidence to new heights.
The introduction of the Trimotor by the Ford Motor Company’s Stout Metal Airplane Division was one of the most important milestones in the early history of commercial passenger aviation. The sturdy, powerful, and comfortable aircraft made several long-range routes possible, including the line connecting Key West, Florida to Havana, Cuba. Roughly 100 airlines used the Ford Trimotor during its operational tenure, a testament to its reliability and efficiency. The 4-AT even saw limited service in military logistics support.
The aircraft took its maiden flight on June 11, 1926, and entered service later that year; 199 were manufactured during a production run that lasted from 1926 to 1933. It was crewed by one or two and carried up to 12 total passengers, including pilot(s). The Trimotor, actively and vigorously backed by Henry Ford, quickly established itself as one of the luminaries of the Golden Age of Flight.
The 4-AT features corrugated aluminum construction on its fuselage, wings, tail section, and control surfaces. It measures 49 feet, 10 inches in length, stands 11 feet, 9 inches high, and has a wingspan of 74 feet. It has a traditional empennage and a standard fixed undercarriage. The aircraft can be fitted with floats for water operation or skis for snow or glacier take-offs and landings.
The Trimotor is powered by three 300-horsepower, 9-cylinder Wright J-6-9 Whirlwind radial piston engines, each turning a 2-blade, fixed-pitch propeller. Two engines are located under the main wing, one on each side, suspended by braces. One engine is mounted on the nose of the airplane. The Trimotor has a range of 570 miles, climbs at 920 feet per minute, and has a service ceiling of 16,500 feet above sea level. It has a stall speed of 57 miles per hour, cruises at 115 mph, and has a maximum speed of 132 mph.
The Ford 4-AT Trimotor comes with five liveries (Black Ford, Emerald Harbor, New Guinea, Spanish Republic, and World Travel) and three landing gear configurations (terrestrial wheeled, floats, and skis). This classic is available today for one week FREE to simmers; starting on June 30 at 11:59 PM PDT, it will be available for $14.99. Explore the world from the cockpit of this iconic aircraft that has been rendered in exquisite detail – the sky is calling!
Microsoft Flight Simulator is available for Xbox Series X|S and PC with Xbox Game Pass, PC Game Pass, Windows, and Steam, and on Xbox One and supported mobile phones, tablets, and lower-spec PCs via Xbox Cloud Gaming. For the latest information on Microsoft Flight Simulator, stay tuned to @MSFSOfficial on Twitter.
The best way I can possibly describe what I’ve played of Testament: The Order of High Human is that it’s like Dark Messiah of Might and Magic directed by Tommy Wiseau. It’s bizarre, slightly unsettling, often unintentionally funny, but overall not very successful at what it sets out to do. It has some great character art and interesting environments to trek through, and there does seem to be a robust, physics-based magic system in the trailers that I only got a tiny taste of in the demo. But it’s difficult to find much to praise here.
As a writer and editor, I’ll get my biggest pet peeve out of the way quickly: This is not a game that was written by anyone with a strong grasp of the English language. Inconsistencies, even in how the title is styled, abound. Sometimes “High Human” is two words with no hyphen. Sometimes it’s hyphenated. Sometimes “Human” is capitalized in the subtitles and sometimes it’s not. The in-game encyclopedia that’s supposed to introduce you to important world concepts is full of high school English test errors in capitalization, punctuation, and basic grammar. There’s a notice when you first get to the main menu that this game was made by a very small team of 15 people. I wish one of them had been an editor.
And I definitely dig some small games made by scrappy, underground indie studios. I have over 300 hours in Stardew Valley, which was made by one guy. And if Testament was merely lacking in some technical polish, I could probably ignore that as long as there was worthwhile gameplay and a strong story underneath. Paradoxically, it’s kind of the opposite. Everything runs great and I didn’t encounter any major bugs. Not even in these tricky platforming areas, which are probably the most fun I had with the demo. But from the story to the basic combat mechanics, it simply doesn’t hold up. And having a small team can’t really excuse that.
Who Am I?
You play as Aran, a character who is not introduced to you at all until much later, who wakes up after being kidnapped by some kind of evil Treebeard. He’s a “High Human” – the very awkward and slightly eugenics-y name for this setting’s immortal, magically-gifted ruling class – and the former king of the land of Tessara. Somehow he’s ended up without his powers and only a cheap sword to defend himself. The reasons for this, again, are only explained later – usually through incredibly forced expositional monologues of Aran talking to himself about stuff he already knew, but I as the player did not.
Eventually we find out Aran’s brother turned to darkness, possibly because his wife died, and he pops out of a portal to mock you for being reduced to a “mortal,” give a quick evil villain speech, and vanish. I was still unclear what was actually going on until maybe an hour into the demo, and I don’t mean in the way where you’re excited to uncover a mystery. It’s more like picking up a novel that’s had the first four chapters ripped out and trying to piece together the story from there. Maybe the final version will have a more complete intro. Maybe this isn’t even the intended starting point. That would certainly help a lot.
Testament pretends to have a combo system, but it doesn’t really.
But, okay. A kind of confusingly-presented story and sloppy localization work would probably not be the biggest deal in the world if the combat were great. Sadly, it is not. Real-time, first-person swordplay that looks sort of Elder Scrolls-ish boils down to mainly doing the same combo over and over, then dodging out of the way of a telegraphed power attack from… these guys are called “halflings” for some reason, and at this point I had just decided to stop questioning the stylistic worldbuilding choices so I didn’t lose my mind. Testament pretends to have a combo system, but it doesn’t really. Whether I precisely time my swings like the tutorial tells you to, or just spam the left mouse button as fast as I can, the animation and the amount of damage I do seems pretty identical.
Eye on the Prize
Archery is a bit more fun. Most enemies die to a single headshot, and I really like it when I’m rewarded for my Robin Hood accuracy that way. Stealth attacks, likewise, can one-shot goons and do a lot of damage to bosses, but the opportunities to use them are fairly limited. The couple of spells I got to play with – including a destructible barrier similar to Geralt’s Quen sign in The Witcher and a very, very slow life drain beam – are alright, but you have to put away your sword to use them. That made me miss Skyrim’s more flexible combat system.
And if you run out of arrows and mana potions, you’re back to the same old, boring melee routine. Ranged enemies will often just stand there dumbfounded and let you hack them apart if you close the distance with them. The AI is generally not very good. You can’t even block or parry. At least not with the weapons I got to try out.
There is a skill tree-based progression system as well, which lets you focus on melee, archery, or magic. It’s… it’s fine.
I hate to be a downer on something that seems like a real passion project from a small group of motivated developers, but I don’t really see Testament: The Order of High Human making a splash when it comes to first-person action RPGs. Some of these jumping and wallrunning puzzles were neat, and maybe this demo wasn’t a good representation of the release version. I’d be willing to give it another shot. But my hopes aren’t high for High Human.
Best Way have announced the release date for their WW2 RTS Men Of War 2, and it’s coming in one of the busiest months of the year so far for big PC releases. Arriving on September 20th on Steam and the Epic Games Store, Men Of War 2 joins the likes of Lies Of P, Cyberpunk 2077‘s Phantom Liberty expansion, Pay Day 3, Mortal Kombat 1 and Life By You in the fight for your attention in the wake of Bethesda’s epic space RPG Starfield, which launches just two weeks beforehand on September 6th.
While Microsoft has said before that it has no intentions to withhold Call of Duty from PlayStation consoles should its acquisition of Activision Blizzard go through, Xbox boss Phil Spencer doubled down on that today in strong terms during the company’s FTC trial.
During day two of the trial, Judge Jacqueline Scott Corley pointedly reminded Spencer that he was under oath and asked him if Microsoft would indeed continue to ship Call of Duty to PlayStation.
“I would raise my hand. I will do whatever it takes,” he said in court. “We have no plan. I’m making a commitment standing here that we will not pull Call of Duty – it is my testimony – from PlayStation.”
“As you said, Sony obviously has to allow us to ship the game on their platform,” he went on. “But absent any of that, my commitment is, and my testimony is that we will continue to ship future versions of Call of Duty on Sony’s PlayStation 5.”
This is in line with Spencer’s previous statements on Call of Duty exclusivity, saying last year that Call of Duty will continue to ship to PlayStation “as long as there is a PlayStation to ship to.” And in an email revealed in court yesterday, PlayStation boss Jim Ryan wrote that “I’m pretty sure we will continue to see Call of Duty on PlayStation for many years to come” in response to the news that Microsoft was intending to acquire Activision Blizzard.
The issue of console exclusivity is one that has come up frequently in the first couple of days in the trial, with the FTC taking aim at Microsoft’s 2021 acquisition of Zenimax yesterday. And today, Spencer claimed that there was no PS5 version of Minecraft because Sony didn’t send dev kits to Microsoft.
Alex Stedman is a Senior News Editor with IGN, overseeing entertainment reporting. When she’s not writing or editing, you can find her reading fantasy novels or playing Dungeons & Dragons.
