Mother-load.
Get out your very best magnifying glass, folks – it’s time to analyse some artwork in the latest edition of Box Art Brawl!
We’ve got a serious big-hitter for you this week, but before we get cracking, let’s take a look at how things panned out last time. We looked at Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III: The Manhattan Project for the NES, pitting North America against Japan in a classic duel. North America
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Take a look.
The Super Mario Bros. Movie has almost been out for a year and now that it’s out in the wild, some of the artists who worked on the movie (Travis Ruiz and Megan Rose Ruiz) have shared concept art on social media. Here’s a round up of some of the posts so far:
What do you think of these concepts? Tell us below.
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Have you added them to your collection?
Nintendo’s amiibo line is still a thing in 2024, with the first releases of the year arriving earlier this week.
In case you did miss it, it’s a double pack featuring the Xenoblade Chronicles 3 protagonist Noah and Mio. They’re available now for $39.99 / £34.99 and will unlock some special clothing items in-game. The latest Xenoblade Chronicles update (Version 2.2.0) also allows players to unlock this content in the game without the amiibo.
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“I am happy that so many people have played our game”.
While a lot of the focus last year was on the new Zelda and Mario games, there were plenty of other first-party releases. This includes the tactical RPG Fire Emblem Engage, which this week celebrates its first anniversary.
Yes, it’s already a year old! To celebrate, artist and illustrator Mika Pikazo has shared some new artwork in the form of a portrait of Veyle. Pikazo is the same character artist involved in the design of the game’s protagonist, Alear.
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Smash Ultimate… Ultimate?
The Super Smash Bros. franchise has come a long way since the original launched 25 years ago in 1999. Yes, you read that right — the original Super Smash Bros. is 25 years old tomorrow, 21st January.
If we look at the character roster for a start, we began with a humble offering of 12 playable fighters in Super Smash Bros. for the N64 before this ballooned into a frankly insane total of 89 in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate (DLC characters included).
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What’s on the cards for you?
Welcome to another edition of What Are You Playing? where we all get to chat about our gaming plans for the weekend!
Before we get into that good stuff though, let’s take a look at what went down in Nintendo land this week. We were treated to the release of two new games in the NSO GBA library as Golden Sun and Golden Sun: The Lost Age joined the service. We also got excited to see that Ace Combat 7 will be flying over to Switch, which cheered us up following the news that GAME will be ending its trade-in programme.
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Tread carefully, Link.
Early last year, there was a rumour going around about LEGO working on a Legend of Zelda ‘Deku Tree’ set. Now, in an update, the well-known Lego leaker and Instagram user ‘1414falconfan’ is claiming the set will arrive this September and will contain 2,500 pieces.
The rumour stems from a marketing survey about several future LEGO projects. The original story also suggested this same set could be a 2-in-1 build based on the tree’s appearance in Ocarina of Time and Breath of the Wild.
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“It’s not even subtle about its rip-offs”.
The ‘Pokémon-with-guns’ game Palworld launched on Xbox, PC and Game Pass yesterday and while it’s already surpassed one million sales, it’s also making headlines for certain other reasons…
As highlighted by IGN, some Pokémon fans have taken to social media and other parts of the internet to share the “similarities” between Palworld monster designs and Nintendo’s famous franchise, claiming it’s “not a coincidence” and accusing certain ‘Pals’ of being blatant “rip-off” of Pokémon designs.
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The Indiana Jones developer might be involved.
If you’re a Quake fan, you might have heard some rumours about a possible return. Well now, in an update, it seems a new entry has been teased.
At Xbox’s Developer Direct this week, a brief scene during MachineGames’ Indiana Jones and the Great Circle gameplay reveal featured a whiteboard with the Quake logo and what appears to reference ‘Quake 6’.
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And it’s not getting much better.
GDC’s annual State of the Game Industry report has been released in the past 24 hours, and it’s not pretty reading. 2023 was a pretty awful year for game developers, with mass industry layoffs and studio closures — from Vanpool, Volition Studios, Brace Yourself Games, Crystal Dynamics, Free Radical, and more — GDC’s latest report finds that a staggering one-third of video game developers have been impacted by layoffs in some way (via Push Square).
In fact, it’s just over one-third. 35% of developers “aid they’ve been impacted by layoffs—either by having some layoffs take place within their team or company or by being laid off themselves.” The biggest number of layoffs come from the ever-vital quality assurance teams — you know, the people who make sure the games we’re playing work. GDC found that 22% of QA devs were laid off in 2023. Business and finance, on the other hand, only suffered 2% of layoffs.
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