Game Infliction, Author at Game Infliction

Mario Kart 8 Deluxe Continues to Sell Millions, So Will Nintendo Release Mario Kart 9 for Switch 2?

Nintendo Switch exclusive Mario Kart 8 Deluxe continues to sell millions of copies even now, with the game seven-and-a-half years old.

In its latest financial report, Nintendo said Mario Kart 8 Deluxe sold another 2.31 million units from April to September, which means Mario Kart 8 Deluxe is now up to an incredible 64.27 million sold. In fact, Mario Kart 8 Deluxe sold almost as many copies as the brand new The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom so far this financial year, and more than either Pario Mario: The Thousand-Year Door or Luigi’s Mansion 2 HD.

Mario Kart 8 Deluxe is comfortably the best-selling Nintendo Switch game, ahead of Animal Crossing: New Horizons (46.45 million) in second place. And its enduring popularity is easy to understand; not only is Mario Kart 8 Deluxe superb in its own right, but it’s an almost essential buy for any new Switch owner looking for a fun game to play with family and friends pretty much out of the box. Speaking of which, Mario Kart 8 Deluxe looks set to continue to sell well with Nintendo pushing the Switch ahead of the crucial holiday sales period.

The question now is, will Nintendo release a sequel, presumably Mario Kart 9, for the upcoming Switch 2, or continue Mario Kart 8 Deluxe’s dominance via backwards compatibility and a beefy next-gen update?

Nintendo has so far kept its cards close to its chest when it comes to Switch 2 information. All it’s said on the record is that an announcement will be made at some point during this financial year, which ends March 2025. Analysts are now saying it’s unlikely Nintendo will announce Switch 2 this year. A release for the console itself looks set for the next financial year, meaning April 2025 at the earliest.

Wesley is the UK News Editor for IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.

Pokémon TCG Pocket Releases Lapras ex Through Limited Time Battle Event

The second timed event in Pokémon Trading Card Game Pocket has now begun and gives players a chance to win a Lapras ex.

The Lapras ex Drop Event adds a new category in the Solo Battle menu that lets players take on four increasingly difficult Lapras decks with a chance of winning a special booster pack after each, the Promo Pack A Series Vol. 1.

This booster pack, available in the Gifts menu once obtained, contains one of five cards, including the Lapras ex and a brand new Mankey. The three remaining cards include alternative art versions of Pikachu, Butterfree, and Clefairy, and all five cards come stamped.

Players must persevere through some random chance encounters before they can pick up all five cards. The Lapras event introduces Chance Rewards, essentially giving players more incentive to repeat battles again and again, as these can drop after each win against a Lapras deck.

Players then have just a one-in-five chance of pulling the Lapras ex in the booster pack, though those looking to collect ’em all will be eager to pick up all five cards anyway. Grinding through the Lapras decks will be necessary to do so, but the Auto Battle feature is still available to speed things up.

Lapras ex itself is a Basic Pokémon with 140 hit points and an 80 damage attack at the cost of three energy: two water and one colorless. This Bubble Drain attack heals 20 damage from Lapras ex too.

Pokémon TCG Pocket arrived in October as a streamlined, digital version of the beloved trading card game. It lets players open packs, collect cards, build decks, and battle others, a simple formula that has already proved popular given it made $12 million in just four days.

Ryan Dinsdale is an IGN freelance reporter. He’ll talk about The Witcher all day.

This bite-size free horror game has you study an ancient artefact that holds a dark secret

I have zero archaeology experience or knowledge, but I bet archaeologists really love their jobs (for the most part). They get to analyse and discover cool artefacts and educate us on the histories of forgotten civilisations. That’s dreamy stuff, that is. But I do wonder what it’s like for archaeologists to discover and study something they shouldn’t have; something with a disturbing secret – a curse, maybe. Bite-sized horror game The Children Of Clay explores this idea and I’d like more of it, please.

Random: Stolen Pokémon Card Worth £30,000 Is Returned To Its Trainer

“Your Pokémon is fighting fit!”.

A stolen Pokémon card supposedly worth up to £30,000 has been safely returned to its rightful owner/trainer.

As reported by the BBC, police have stated that the theft of a Charizard card took place in Heathfield in East Sussex between 2nd and 5th September 2024. The same card was then found to have been listed for sale on Facebook, leading to a search order being completed on an address in Polegate, roughly 11-12 miles away from the original location.

Read the full article on nintendolife.com

Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 Players Rotate Between Wanting to Skip the Winner’s Circle and Liking It Because It Gives Them Time to Check Their Phone Between Matches

With Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 now a week old, fans of the Multiplayer portion of the game are having their say on the controversial — and unskippable — Winner’s Circle feature.

The Winner’s Circle shows the top three performing players from the winning team after the Play of the Game has run its course. Under normal circumstances it lets each player who does well enough to appear on the podium perform an emote, most of which are either toxic or hilarious depending on your point of view.

Black Ops 6 isn’t the first Call of Duty to feature The Winner’s Circle mechanic, as it’s appeared in the likes of Black Ops 3, Infinite Warfare, and WWII. But it’s impact feels particularly pronounced this year, and the debate around it was only exacerbated by the recent release of fan-favorite map Nuketown, which in addition to the Play of the Game and the Winner’s Circle, shows a short cutscene of the map getting nuked before players return to the lobby.

There are a number of issues players have brought up with Black Ops 6’s Winner’s Circle. The main one is the time it takes to view: players have to sit through the Winner’s Circle whether they make the cut or not, and the handful of seconds it lasts can feel like an age when all you want to do is get into another match or check your loadout. Because of this, some players have called on Treyarch to add a skip button or even pull the Winner’s Circle from the game entirely.

Then there’s the issue of toxicity, with some saying the ability to taunt your opponent after a victory discourages them from continuing to play having just lost a game. The slow camera zoom into the top player’s face doesn’t help matters.

They really thought they were cooking with this
byu/Difficult-Rest8524 inblackops6

Treyarch actually nerfed the Winner’s Circle following feedback from the Black Ops 6 beta so it had a shorter overall duration and “mitigated emote spam” for launch. During those preview weekends, players were able to spam emotes in the Winner’s Circle, which was certainly more frustrating to watch. Currently, you’re only able to trigger one emote. Or at least, you’re only supposed to be able to trigger one emote.

Players have worked out that they can still spam emotes here by quickly pausing and unpausing the game. Doing this, they’re able to fit in a few emotes into the Winner’s Circle before it closes, which, yeah, is pretty annoying to watch.

But! If you’re sick of watching the shenanigans that go on in the Winner’s Circle, players have worked out they can make the player avatars disappear by heading to the in-game social tab. This doesn’t make the Winner’s Circle go away any quicker, but it does get rid of the emotes, if you’re feeling particularly put out by them. It’s a bizarre glitch that Treyarch will probably patch out at some point.

Pro tip: you can close the winners circle by going to social
byu/Soggy-Pouch inblackops6

It’s been interesting to see how players have reacted to the Winner’s Circle since Black Ops 6’s explosive launch. Some have said they don’t mind it, given it provides them with a bit of time to check their phone before being thrust into the next match (modern gaming!). Others really, really hate it, and want to skip it at all costs. “Goofy” is a word I’ve seen tossed about by many in response to these emotes.

Despite the ongoing debate about Black Ops 6’s Winner’s Circle, it seems unlikely that Treyarch will strip it out of the game or even let players skip it. It provides an opportunity to show off players’ elaborate and often costly cosmetics, including premium emotes, to all players still in the lobby — and we all know how crucial cosmetics sales are to Activision’s bottom line.

If you’re jumping into Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 multiplayer, check out our Essential Multiplayer Tips and Tricks to help you get started. We’ve also got a full weapons list, a guide to all multiplayer maps and game modes, and details on how to unlock all Black Ops 6 operators.

Wesley is the UK News Editor for IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.

Black Ops 6 devs still looking into unfair spawning – “yes, we saw ourselves in a Killcam before selecting a Loadout too”

Early reactions to Call Of Duty: Black Ops 6 multiplayer range from frothing dislike through omnimovement hype to our own Ed Thorn’s dead-eyed appraisal that it’s “a good one, I think. Not a bad one. If you like Call Of Duty, you will like this. If you don’t like Call Of Duty, you will not like this.” I feel like we need to emergency-deploy a supply crate of smelling salts, because the sheer OK-ness of Black Ops 6 appears to have tumbled Ed in a stupor.

Perhaps it would be a different story if he’d encountered some of the spawning issues and glitches people are talking about, with players joining games and materialising right into a hail of fire. The players in question include Black Ops 6’s developers, who comically note in the latest Black Ops 6 patch notes that “Yes, we saw ourselves in a Killcam before selecting a Loadout too.” The latest patch seeks to address this, naturally. As regards the campaign side of things, it also resets your safehouse currency to 5000, if you’ve had your single player funds stolen (or multiplied) by technical gremlins.

As the World Waits for Nintendo to Announce Switch 2, Sales of the Switch Continue to Plummet

Nintendo has slashed its forecast for Switch sales this financial year amid growing anticipation for the announcement of the Switch 2.

Today, November 5, Nintendo cut its Switch sales projection for the financial year ending March 2025 from 13.5 million units to 12.5 million units, with the console now in its eighth year on sale.

Nintendo also cut its forecasts for sales (1.35 trillion yen down to 1.28 trillion yen) and operating profit (400 billion yen to 360 billion yen).

Nintendo has said it will announce the Switch successor at some point during the current financial year, which means fans can expect to hear more before April.

As for the second quarter of the current financial year (July to September 2024), Nintendo generated 276.7 billion yen ($1.8 billion) in revenue and a net profit of 27.7 billion yen ($182 million). That’s a 17% revenue drop and a whopping 69% profit drop versus the same quarter last financial year.

It’s worth noting that last year was a big one for Nintendo, with the release of the Super Mario Bros. Movie and The Legend of Zelda: Tears Of The Kingdom breaking records. This year, however, has been notably lighter for the company.

Nintendo sold 4.72 million Switch units in the six months ending September 30, down from the 6.84 million sold during the same period last year. That’s a drop of 31%. Software unit sales were down nearly 28% year-on-year to 70.28 million.

“Unit sales of both hardware and software were extremely high for the first half of the previous fiscal year,” Nintendo said, pointing to the Mario movie’s positive impact on its video game business.

“There were no such special factors in the first half of this fiscal year, and with Nintendo Switch now in its eighth year since launch, unit sales of both hardware and software decreased significantly year-on-year,” Nintendo added.

Alongside the financials, Nintendo provided sales updates for its recently released games. Paper Mario Thousand-Year Door, released in May, sold 1.94 million units, Luigi’s Mansion 2 HD, released in June, sold 1.57 million units, and The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom, released in September, “got off to a good start,” Nintendo said, with sales of 2.58 million units. Mario Kart 8 Deluxe continues to sell incredibly well, with another 2.31 million units. It’s now up to an eye-watering 64.27 million sold.

Looking to the future, Nintendo failed to say anything about the Switch 2, but did say it plans to continue to push the Switch.

“By continuing to convey the appeal of Nintendo Switch, we try to not only put one system in every home, but several in every home, or even one for every person,” Nintendo said. “Another objective is to continually release new offerings so more consumers keep playing Nintendo Switch even longer and we can maximize hardware sales.”

Upcoming Switch games include Mario & Luigi: Brothership later this week, and Donkey Kong Country Returns HD in January 2025.

Photo by Anusak Laowilas/NurPhoto via Getty Images.

Wesley is the UK News Editor for IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.

The Binding Of Isaac: Rebirth celebrates 10 year anniversary with online co-op announcement and sale

Beloved roguelike traumatic-childhood-em-up The Binding Of Issac: Rebirth turned 10 yesterday, and it’s half off on Steam to celebrate. What’s more, maker Edmund McMillen has announced that the foretold online co-op update is due on the 18th of this month, alongside a “considerable” balance update. Consider me considering the considerability of said considerable update!

Rayman Creator Michel Ancel Confirms Involvement With New Ubisoft Project

And hopes ‘The Lost Crown’ team can reform for a sequel.

After Ubisoft confirmed Michel Ancel would be a consultant on its new Rayman project last month, the creator of the series has now acknowledged this in a post on Instagram.

He mentioned how he’s “very happy to have been consulted” and confirmed it’s a “real pleasure” to know Rayman and his pals will be returning. Ancel also took this opportunity to speak a little about the recently disbanded development team behind Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown – calling for a “well-deserved sequel”:

Read the full article on nintendolife.com

Tomb Raider I-III Remastered Update 4 Now Available, Here Are The Full Patch Notes

Fixes, changes, improvements and much more.

Tomb Raider I-III Remastered has done a great job reviving Lara Croft’s original trilogy of games, and months after its release, Aspyr is still rolling out new updates for this collection.

The latest one (Patch 4) is now available for all platforms and includes a bunch of fixes, changes and improvements for Tomb Raider and Tomb Raider 3. Here’s the full rundown, courtesy of the official Aspyr support page:

Read the full article on nintendolife.com