Nintendo might have crushed some fans' dreams with its Famitsu interview. The company told the popular Japanese gaming magazine that its upcoming hybrid console won't be able to play Wii U discs or 3DS cartridges. It's unclear if the Switch won't be able to run digital games either, but if you were hoping to play your favorite 3DS titles on a 50-inch screen just for the heck of it, you may want to temper your expectations.
Source: Famitsu
Hold tight Fumito Ueda fans, your wait is almost over. Despite that long quiet period and even a recent six-week delay, tonight Sony Interactive exec Shuhei Yoshida tweeted that The Last Guardian has gone gold. That should put it on track for release December 6th, when everyone can adventure with a giant pet companion of their own.
Source: Shuhei Yoshida (Twitter)
After "the longest negotiation in SAG-AFTRA history," voice actors affiliated with acting guild SAG-AFTRA began a strike affecting video game publishers and developers, starting today, October 21. Any game in production that has not hired voice actors before February 17, 2015, will be part of the strike. Games that began some form of production before the date but only hired voice talent after the date passed will be struck.
Affected video game companies include Activision, Electronic Arts, Take-Two (2K Games), WB Games, and Insomniac Games, as well as voice acting producers Disney Character Voices, Blindlight, Corps of Discovery Films, Formosa Interactive, Interactive Associates, Inc, and VoiceWorks Productions, Inc. Other companies like Ubisoft and Square Enix will not be affected, as they are not part of the video game companies negotiating against SAG-AFTRA.
Destructoid attended a media roundtable at SAG Plaza earlier today, where representatives from the SAG-AFTRA Interactive Committee explained the reasoning behind the strike. SAG's primary goals have changed very little since the conversation went public last September: the committee is looking for guaranteed stunt coordinators at motion capture sessions, hazard pay and shorter shifts for intense recording sessions, information about the project once the voice actor has been booked, and a choice between higher upfront payments or post-release royalties based on sales.
Team Fortress 2 is celebrating its eighth (!) Halloween this year, and new events and items went live a few hours ago. Valve may be feeling a little pressure from Overwatch, because it looks like there's more new stuff available this time than in years past. Sadly, there's no new comic, but all of the new and old Halloween content will be active from now through November 9, 2016.
You can check the patch notes here, but here are the highlights.
Anyone who skipped last year's event will receive a Soul Gargoyle that tracks how many other players you kill in Halloween maps. It also unlocks Merasmissions, quests you can do to earn a classic Halloween item while the event is active.
It's amazing to look back and see how much extra stuff has gone into this game since its release. I'm not sure this is enough to pull me away from trying to get Mercy's Witch skin in Overwatch, though.
Scream Fortress VIII has arrived! [Teamfortress.com]
Adventure and role-playing games have always focused on telling stories, and that tradition has permeated into almost every other genre. Whether linear plots, or branching, adaptive tales, developers are putting story everywhere. And just as the technology powering games is evolving, so too are the narratives within them. One game is pushing forward into entirely new territory: City of the Shroud.
Partially funded by a small-scale Kickstarter campaign earlier this year, City of the Shroud is being developed by Abyssal Arts, a small team strewn across the US and UK, with some assistance from Japan. It's a hard game to categorize. It's an RPG, yes, but it blends tactical elements from X-Com, The Banner Saga and Final Fantasy Tactics with a real-time combat system that borrows from classic fighting games.
'Member Pikachu! Oh yeah he's great. 'Member Pokemon cards?!
That's basically what this trailer is in a nutshell, but for a non-official joint, it's incredibly well done. Most of us older folk specifically remember playing Red and Blue for the first time (I did the whole "staying up late under the covers with the glow light shebang), and possibly collecting cards. But even as I got older I never really lost touch, having played every iteration since the first.
And as this commercial shows, that wasn't really the case with everyone. With the rampant success of Pokemon Go, I bet a lot of former fans will be getting back in for the first time in a long time.
Plenty of Overwatch players do commentary over matches they’re streaming, but TheUnsteady has the voice of an angel... who ate an eSports commentator. He’s become notorious for suddenly shoutcasting in the middle of matches he’s playing. Funny thing is, he’s so good that people tend to stop talking and just listen.
Following an announcement on Monday, voice actors within the Screen Actors Guild‐American Federation of Television and Radio Artists have begun their strike against certain video game employers as of 3:01 AM EST today. Kotaku has reached out to the involved parties.
Look, I don't know what I expected. Whenever I talk to fellow pro wrestling fans about the WWE games, they often grimace before offering a handful of excuses. "It's not as bad as last year's" is a favorite refrain, although it rings hollow once you realize that means this year's game is still bad.
Such is the case with World Wrestling Entertainment Two Thousand and Seventeen, A.D. It's an encapsulation of everything people hate about the "reality" era, stapled to a bunch of mediocre gameplay modes. WWE 2K17 doesn't even manage to clear the lowest possible bar -- the fact that it is a video game starring wrestlers you ostensibly like -- with a roster that hides some of its most promising talent behind downloadable content like we're back in the early 2010s.
In fairness, WWE 2K17 is not offensively terrible; it works on a technical level, albeit not as well as you'd hope considering this is the series' third outing on current-gen hardware. It doesn't crash, the frame rate is perfectly fine, but that doesn't mean it's worth your time or your money.
It was sad enough to read about how Mimikyu dresses up like a popular Pokémon because it also wants to be loved. It’s another thing entirely to hear Mimikyu sing about its woes.
NETGEAR’s Nighthawk R6700 should be more than enough router for the vast majority of people, and you can pick it up for just $89 on Amazon today, after you clip the $20 coupon on the product page.
Nintendo has shown that its new gaming machine can be used as a portable but it’s not ready to say how long the machine can run in that mode without needing to be plugged in.
[Header image found at ZeroChan]
I wrote an article Wednesday about Overwatch's Public Test Realm (PTR) and how the Principal Designer told us that Blizzard is planning some significant changes to shake up the metagame. While the forum post mentioned that they wanted to get the patch out before the end of the week, it came out much faster than we were expecting, and you can try it out now if you have an Overwatch account on the PC.
The patch is pretty hefty (nearly 2.2 gigabytes), and it'll take a while to download. As advertised, there are significant changes to every character, though the developers cautioned that, unlike prior PTR patches, this one will probably be tweaked and changed considerably before going to live servers or to the console versions.
I got some play time in with the patch, and can report that the changes seem as though they're intended to slow the game down a bit. More tweaks and adjustments have been promised, so everything you're about to read is subject to change.
Here's what to expect in the first round of testing:
Most of these changes seem like they're intended to balance high level competitive play rather than casual quickplay. I'll be interested to see what else changes during testing. The change to ultimate abilities in particular feels like it's slowing the game down, and I'm not sure that's a positive direction to take things.
Ongoing Hero Balance Changes During the PTR [Blizzard Forums]
Hitman’s 12th Elusive Target, the Identity Thief, goes live today in Paris for a week. Surprise target! You can watch the briefing video here.
Managing editor Dana Wollman and senior editor Mona Lalwani join host Terrence O'Brien to talk Macbook rumors, Amazon ISP ambitions and Julian Assange. Then they'll talk about all the work that went into Engadget's five part series covering the world's first cyborg games, Superhumans and look at VR's ability generate empathy.
For as long as humans have dreamed, we’ve dreamed of flying. We’ve built machines to launch us into the heavens, ever aware that we’re merely visitors. Reality falls short, but virtual reality brings us a bit closer in Ubisoft’s Eagle Flight.
Upon the reveal of the Nintendo Switch, a lot of questions raced to everyone's mind including the status of battery life, backwards compatibility, region locking, touchscreen, motion control, price, and so on. Famitsu reached out to Nintendo and got a few answers.
Nintendo says Switch is not a successor to Wii U nor 3DS. When asked about compatibility with Wii U and 3DS, Nintendo replied that "Nintendo Switch will not be able to play Wii U game disks or 3DS cartridges." Considering the Switch will employ a "game card" cartridge system, it was obvious that Wii U discs would not be playable, but they aren't ready to phase out the 3DS just yet it seems. However, this does not close the door on those games being available on Switch digitally via the eShop.
Questions about battery life and if the console will include everything (the main system, the dock, and the joy con controllers) will be answered at a later date. Regarding the package, Nintendo did confirm that "two Joy-Con controllers, that is the left and right Joy-Con controllers, will be included in the package." Given that the main system is in the screen, they talked around the dock. I wonder if they will have differently priced packages with and without the dock?
When asked about making software titles intended for mobile, Nintendo declined to comment. In fact, and take this with a grain of salt, we may not get any news at all the rest of the year.
Wii U, 3DS compatibility? Package contents? Nintendo's answers regarding Nintendo Switch [Famitsu]
When Eneloop deals come around, they tend to come in droves. As we told you yesterday, you can still get a 4-pack of high-capacity Eneloop Pros for $24, but now you can also get the same combination with standard Eneloop batteries for $15.
Shenzi is a cosplayer from France who specialises in the kind of characters who will put on some space armour (or at least some fictional armour) then go shoot the place up.
Twitter, Spotify and Reddit, and a huge swath of other websites were down or screwed up this morning. This was happening as hackers unleashed a large distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack on the servers of Dyn, a major DNS host. It’s probably safe to assume that the two situations are related.
Deadspin BYU Commits Crime Against Football With Incredibly Futile Fake Punt | Jezebel Watch Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton Try to Play Nice at the Al Smith Dinner | Sploid Learn Three Magic Tricks You Can Easily Do With a Pen | The Slot Joe Biden Thinks Donald Trump Is Literally Too Stupid to Know What He’s Doing |
Today’s selection of articles from Kotaku’s reader run community: Rockmandash’s Top Anime of Summer 2016 • Wild Speculation and Discussion! Nintendo Switch Games Edition • The Sounds of Pokemon: Heartgold
It's been more than nine years since Half-Life 2: Episode Two came out and, yeah, that cliffhanger still stings. Thankfully, Microsoft's Larry Hryb has announced that The Orange Box is now available on the Xbox One via backwards compatibility. That gives everyone the chance to soften the blow of Valve's contempt for its audience by once again replaying five of the company's best games. The legendary bundle combines Half-Life 2, its two episodic sequels, Team Fortress Two and some rando game about physics puzzles that'll probably never take off. It's not just The Orange Box that's now available for your nostalgia, since Galaga Legions and Joe Danger 2: The Movie are also now available.
Track: Shiranami Top Water | Artist: Sakanaction | Album: Shiranami Top Water single
If you've shotgunned and boot-stomped your way through the new Doom campaign (and if you haven't yet, you should) fear not: Bethesda has plenty more demon hunting ready to go. The developer released "Free Update 4" this week, which comes with a nifty arcade mode. Every gun, suit and "Rune" upgrade is unlocked from the start, giving you the best possible edge in the battlefield. The aim is to blitz through the "streamlined" game in the shortest time possible, avoiding enemy attacks and racking up multipliers. Points are rewarded for butt-kicking your opponents, leading to a final score that you can compare with friends.
Source: Bethesda
Only! To mark the 20th anniversary of the Pokémon trading card game, here is a solid gold Pikachu card.
You’ll be happy to know that it is possible to see VR underpants in Namco Bandai’s PlayStation VR title Summer Lesson. Well, maybe you won’t, but someone will be.
About a year ago, Blizzard revealed a chat service for all of its Battle.net multiplayer games, starting with Overwatch. Last month it killed the Battle.net name altogether, saying multiplayer support is a "normal expectation" that no longer requires its own service. Now, the World of Warcraft maker has rolled out Blizzard Voice, a chat service that works across all its multiplayer titles.
Source: Blizzard (Twitter)
