Category: Nintendo

No light to illuminate our paths.

The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom is absolutely stuffed to the brim with characters, mechanics, enemies, and things to do. However, one glaring omission is Kass, Breath of the Wild‘s travelling Rito minstrel. Luckily for fans, the recently released Master Works Book does propose a few scenarios as to where Kass may be in the sequel.

Zelda Lore shared an excerpt of the book on Twitter (thanks to Gaming Reinvented for the tip) which covers the potential whereabouts of Kass in Tears of the Kingdom. The bird isn’t present in Hyrule at all in the game, with no explanation at all given for his absence. He’s not even mentioned. At least, until the Master Works book.

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“She is a fan favourite already”.

Yooka-Replaylee was a bit of a welcome surprise when it was announced back in June. It looks utterly gorgeous and promises plenty of tweaks, changes, and accessibility features when it eventually launches. But one thing that many fans spotted was Laylee, Yooka’s purple bat companion, and her new, incredibly fluffy design.

In a Q&A published on the Playtonic YouTube Channel, community manager Steve James sat down with members of the Yooka-Replaylee art team — Ed Bryan, Nikita De Ruysscher, and Steve Mayles — to talk about the game’s brand new look. And one section focuses on the wisecracking bat.

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Let’s-a not!

Researchers from tech company Virtuals Protocol have published a paper on a new text-to-video AI model, MarioVGG, which can simulate Super Mario Bros. footage via some basic text inputs (thanks, ArsTechnica).

The model was fed over 737,000 Mario Bros. frames, showing Nintendo’s prized plumber in 32 different levels with varying degrees of success and failure (141 wins and 139 losses, according to Github). Based on these images, and how they are arranged, the AI model “learns” what commands such as “jump” and “run” correspond to on-screen and is then capable of simulating such commands in a video format, physics and all.

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Margit of error.

There were several moments in Nintendo’s pre-launch Switch marketing that left us a little lost for words: the hybrid form factor, our first look at Breath of the Wild, the way that one guy went to “walk his dog” but spent the entire time sat on a bench.

The reveal that Skyrim would be coming to the iddy biddy console was another. By this point, it was a sure sign that this wasn’t just Nintendo’s kid-friendly affair, but a big, grow-up machine for those who wanted to play big, grown-up, six-year-old games. It was also a sign of the Switch’s power, a wagging finger from Nintendo as if to say “You thought this was only going to run side-scrolling Mario levels? Think again”.

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The speed-based 3D platformer series returns.

A new trailer and PC demo for the upcoming release Toree Saturn have been released, with the developer Siactro also reconfirming the new entry will arrive at some point in 2024. This latest update mentions a Nintendo Switch release, too.

When this new project was originally announced in September last year, there was no Nintendo announcement at that point, so there you go!

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Are you not entertained?

Are you sitting comfortably? Ready to judge some classic covers? It’s time to dive into another edition of Box Art Brawl!

Last time, we matched up three different designs for Super R-Type. Despite a good variety between each, it was the North American variant that walked away with the win, taking 49% of the vote and leaving Europe and Japan with the remaining 30% and 25% respectively.

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Five legacy franchises are returning.

It appears there have been some more gameplay leaks of Sega’s legacy revival projects. This information comes from a leaker formerly known as ‘Midori’. According to the source, the footage on display is still “early” in each game’s development cycle.

First up, we have a look at the Crazy Taxi reboot, which shows multiple vehicles speeding around a game world delivering passengers to their destination. This footage supposedly dates back to “2022”, with claims this particular game could still be years out from release.

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Launching in Japan this October.

The Switch already has an extensive library of shoot ’em up games, and it looks like another one could be on its way to the west in the near future.

As highlighted by Gematsu, a Switch rating for Raiden NOVA has been spotted on the ESRB. This game was previously confirmed for an October 2024 release in Japan. According to this latest update, a local version will be published by UFO Interactive Games.

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Read the 21 pages of patch notes now!

Although Bandai Namco is busy preparing for Dragon Ball: Sparking! Zero‘s release in October, this week there’s actually been a new balance adjustment patch rolled out for its 2018 title Dragon Ball FighterZ. Yes, despite ending major content updates for the game some time ago, it’s still making changes behind the scenes.

This update, which bumps FighterZ up to Patch 1.38, is available now on multiple platforms – with the Nintendo Switch version to be “released soon”. Bandai will provide another update when the release date is confirmed for the hybrid platform. You can view the full 21-page patch note document via Bandai Namco’s website.

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Sat-Navi.

In the magazine business, the Back Page is where you’d find all the weird goofs that we couldn’t fit in anywhere else. Some may call it “filler”; we prefer “a whole page to make terrible jokes that are tangentially related to the content of the mag”.

We don’t have pages on the internet, but we still love terrible jokes — so welcome to our semi-regular feature, Back Page. Today, Jim’s heading out of this world…

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