Month: December 2018

In the ever-shifting landscape of the video game industry, few franchises have managed to remain as consistently popular over the years as Pokemon. More than two decades after its humble debut on the Game Boy, the series is still one of Nintendo’s most beloved and lucrative properties, and that popularity only reached new heights with the release of Pokemon Go. When the game first hit mobile devices in the summer of 2016, it seemed the whole world was once again overtaken by Pokemon fever. Stories of expectant fathers capturing Pokemon while their wives gave birth and athletes referencing the game during competitions dominated news headlines in the weeks and months following its release, and the title itself quickly became one of the most successful mobile applications of all time.

Of course, no game can maintain that remarkable level of popularity forever, and before long, Pokemon Go’s began to wane. Thanks in part to the slow rollout of new content and some controversial design changes, the game’s active user base declined. It still enjoyed a healthy number of active users in 2017. In June of that year, the game had roughly 60 million monthly players–much fewer than the 100 million it had the previous August, but an impressive number in its own right. Still, it was clear the sway it once held over the public had diminished, and gone were the days when you’d see crowds of people stopping traffic just to capture a nearby Vaporeon.

That wasn’t the extent of the problems the game faced in 2017. Its first major live event, Pokemon Go Fest in Chicago, was an unmitigated disaster. The ostensible goal of the event was to encourage players to meet up and capture Pokemon together, but persistent technical issues rendered the game unplayable at the venue. Some attendees even filed a lawsuit against developer Niantic seeking reimbursement for their travel expenses. The entire ordeal prompted the company to postpone several live events that were scheduled to take place across Europe later that summer. Fortunately, future events would go off much more smoothly than the ill-fated Pokemon Go Fest, but it was nonetheless a portentous start for Niantic’s plans.

It’s remarkable, then, just how much Pokemon Go has been able to rebound in the past year. While it would certainly be an exaggeration to say the game was ever running the risk of becoming a flop–even with its decline in active users, Pokemon Go still had millions of players worldwide and was generating millions of dollars in revenue every month–it was no longer the cultural phenomenon that it was the first few weeks after it debuted. Thanks to a regular stream of new content, features, and events, however, Pokemon Go has enjoyed the most success it’s had since launch. This past May, the game had its most active users since summer 2016, and just last month alone, it grossed an estimated $80 million worldwide.

This impressive resurgence can be attributed to the generous slate of updates and new content Niantic has released for the game in 2018. Throughout the year, the developer rolled out new features and hosted numerous events to entice players back to the game. In January, Niantic held the inaugural Pokemon Go Community Day–the first in what would become a series of monthly events that offer players an opportunity to earn in-game bonuses and capture rare Pokemon. Unlike Pokemon Go Fest, Community Days aren’t hosted at a particular location, but rather during a specific window of time, meaning players around the world can go to any nearby park or other gathering place during the designated times and participate. Not only is it easier to take part in Community Days than other live events, each also offers players a chance to encounter a highly sought-after shiny Pokemon and even learn a special event-exclusive move that typically can’t be obtained by other means, providing a compelling incentive to return to the game each time an event rolls around.

In addition to Community Days, Niantic has been introducing new Pokemon to Go much more frequently this year. The first wave of Gen 2 Pokemon–those that originated in Pokemon Gold and Silver–didn’t arrive until February 2017, some seven months after the game launched, while Legendary Pokemon wouldn’t be introduced until later that summer. Since then, however, Niantic has been steadily rolling out Gen 3 and, more recently, Gen 4 Pokemon in Go. This year also saw the arrival of Alolan forms–tropical variants of certain monsters from Pokemon Sun and Moon. On top of that, the developer has been releasing new Legendaries on a near-monthly basis, ensuring there’s always a reason to fire up the app and see what’s new.

Complementing the regular stream of events and Pokemon has been a slew of compelling new features, beginning with a quest system. Now when players spin a Photo Disc at Gyms and PokeStops, they’ll collect Field Research tasks along with the usual assortment of items they’d receive. These tasks can range from catching a certain number or type of Pokemon to making a number of Great throws. Not only do these give players structured goals to aim for as they play Pokemon Go, but completing enough will reward them with a chance to capture a rare or Legendary Pokemon. Alongside Field Research tasks, Niantic also added Special Research to the game this year; these are story-based missions assigned by Professor Willow, and they typically culminate in an encounter with a Mythical Pokemon such as Mew or Celebi.

This year also saw the arrival of some features fans have been clamoring for ever since Pokemon Go first launched. This past summer, Niantic finally implemented friends lists and trading in the game. While there are some restrictions in place for the latter–as of this writing, you can only trade Pokemon with friends in-person–it is still a welcome addition. Most recently, the developer revealed that a PvP system is on the way to the game. Before, players were only able to team up and battle against Raid Bosses at Gyms, but the new Trainer Battle system will allow them to finally compete directly against other players–an option the game has been sorely lacking to this point.

Niantic’s continual improvements to Pokemon Go have helped it stand out as one of the year’s best evolving multiplayer games. But it is its integration into the Pokemon series’ latest mainline installments, Let’s Go Pikachu and Let’s Go Eevee for Nintendo Switch, that has truly solidified its importance to the franchise. For the first time, players are able to transfer Pokemon over from Go and use them in a proper Pokemon RPG. Moreover, connecting the two games is the key to unlocking a brand-new Mythical Pokemon named Meltan, which was revealed in Pokemon Go following September’s Community Day, making it the first Pokemon to debut in the mobile title rather than a main game. Let’s Go Pikachu and Eevee themselves also take some cues from Go, most notably incorporating its capture mechanics, opening the gameplay up to players who may have been introduced to the series through the mobile game.

Between the release of Let’s Go Pikachu and Eevee for Switch and the generous Year of Legendary Pokemon campaign, which saw The Pokemon Company give away a different Legendary Pokemon for Pokemon Sun, Moon, and their Ultra counterparts nearly every month, the past year has been a strong one for Pokemon. But it’s Pokemon Go’s impressive string of updates that have defined 2018 for the franchise. With other new features, such as a PokeStop nomination system, on the way to the game and more generations of Pokemon to be added, it doesn’t appear Pokemon Go will slow down any time soon. Meanwhile, a “core” Pokemon RPG is on the way to Switch next year, ensuring that 2019 will be another big year for the perennial franchise.

Desert Child is a game of modern ambitions and sensibilities wrapped up in a retro aesthetic. It looks like an early-’90s DOS game rendering of a future where humanity has colonized Mars and built a city that feels like a mix between a Cowboy Bebop planet and modern-day Australia. The game’s unique look, chilled vibe, and strong concept make for a great first impression, but unfortunately, by the end of it you’ll realize that there’s not much more to Desert Child than what you got in those opening minutes.

You play as a young man who leaves Earth in the game’s opening, looking to conquer Mars’ speeder bike circuit and earn enough money to prove himself in an upcoming championship. At the beginning of the game, you choose between four weapons to have mounted on the front of your vehicle, each with a different difficulty rating depending on how useful they are. All races are one-on-one and play out on a 2D plane viewed from a side-on perspective, which is a strange–but also a strangely enjoyable–way to compete. There are a handful of different tracks, all with unique obstacles, and when you start up a race you’ll be thrown into one of them at random. While there are obstacles to avoid, winning comes down to using your boost effectively and firing your weapon at TVs planted around the track. Each TV you take out gives you a speed boost, and to maintain your maximum speed you need to consistently destroy the televisions on the track before your opponent does.

The first few times you race in Desert Child, it’s thrilling. Your hoverbike controls well–it’s floaty and fast but precise–and blasting away at everything in front of you and timing your boosts well is fun. The game captures the inherent excitement of hoverbike racing, but once it becomes clear that every race is going to be more-or-less the same, that excitement dulls considerably. You can’t switch guns mid-game, the tracks all play very similarly, and the only real difference between opponents is that the very last one in the game is more difficult to beat than the others. I couldn’t highlight a uniquely cool moment from any of the races I took part in across two playthroughs of the game, or a race where the game showed off a new trick or idea.

Desert Child also has the thin veneer of an RPG system. You spend much of the game’s short running time wandering around a Martian city, exploring and poking at its different stores, NPCs, and the odd jobs it offers. There are only a handful of different environments for your unnamed protagonist to mosey through, and while they’re lovely to look at the first few times, the game’s small scale begins to feel limiting when you realize that the game world never changes in any significant way. After each race or job you take, the day progresses, and while some NPCs shift around and store stocks change, Mars very quickly starts to feel small and static.

Your major objective is to raise $10,000 for a tournament while keeping yourself well fed, your bike in good working order, and not attracting the law by taking on too many dodgy missions in the nightlife district. The goal seems to be to capture some of the tedium of life in this town–there’s a lot of walking around, visiting ramen stores, and switching between odd jobs. Some of these jobs are fun, but generally only for the first few times that you play them. For example, you can work as a pizza delivery person, riding a bicycle through one of the game’s tracks while shooting pizza boxes at people; you can herd kangaroos, which involves following a group of them through a field and maneuvering your hoverbike behind any slackers so that they don’t drop away from the pack; you can enter and intentionally lose a race for the local crime boss.

There are a few different minigames like this, but ultimately none of them really offers anything that feels like a meaningful twist on the existing racing (with the possible exception of the “hacking” minigame, in which you’re attacked by floating Windows logos and marble busts–I could not figure out this job’s victory conditions). Once you’ve quickly seen everything Mars has to offer, and especially once you’ve bought the game’s entire soundtrack from the record shop (which is worth doing, because the music is great), there’s nothing exciting to find or unlock.

There are a lot of references in Desert Child that will hit harder with an Australian audience. There’s a bridge dedicated to the welfare program Centrelink, complete with a job board that you can access different tasks from; the constant casual profanity is very Aussie; and there are little nods to local cultural touchstones dotted around Mars. The “Bring Back Tim Tams” graffiti might not hold the same appeal for all players, but it made me smile.

Before long, your focus will shift to saving up for the tournament, which boils down to racing and completing tasks over and over while storing your earnings in your bank to accrue interest. It’s an uninteresting progression model, and the tournament itself is unexciting–you race three times, and if you lose any of them you must start again. You earn huge amounts of money even if you lose the first two races, which lets you buy all your hoverbike’s potential upgrades and make things a bit easier on yourself. Winning the third race promptly ends the game, even though, narratively and mechanically, it really feels like things are just getting started.

Desert Child exhibits a number of smaller issues, too. While the numerous misspellings feel like they could plausibly be an intentional part of the game’s aesthetic, the lack of a pause option during races feels like an oversight, as does the fact that selecting “New Game” from the menu automatically starts up a new game without warning you that all previous data is going to be erased. Sometimes the equipment I’d put on my bike, like a laser sight for my gun, arbitrarily wouldn’t work during a race, and I could never figure out why there were TVs scattered around during the pizza delivery game with seemingly no way to destroy them. Problems like this pop up all over Desert Child, and while most of them are minor, they add up.

Desert Child has a wonderful sense of style, and there are moments when it clicks. When you jet across the water on your bike firing a shotgun blast that shatters several televisions in front of you, or when you first start to wrap your head around the aesthetic of Mars, the game briefly, but brightly, shines. But Desert Child doesn’t quite hang together, and by the end of its very brief runtime the things that seemed exciting just an hour prior have lost most of their luster. This could be a lovely proof of concept for a bigger game; as it stands, it’s hard not to get caught up thinking about all that it could have been.

Epic Games has retired work on its mobile series Infinity Blade–and pulled all three games from the Apple App Store–just as it issued a new update to Fortnite that inserts the weapon into the game. The weapon is fittingly extremely powerful, serving as an homage to the studio’s last mobile hit.

Unlike most weapons in Fortnite, there’s only one Infinity Blade. Picking it up from its castle on Polar Peak will give you double health and shields, gain 50 health upon scoring a kill, and let you move faster than other players. It can also destroy players and structures very quickly. As a trade-off, though, picking it up sheds all of your other weapons and inventory items. There’s only one Infinity Blade in any given match, and you can kill a player to force them to drop it.

Naturally, this also makes the Polar Peak area extremely dangerous, since the allure of the weapon is bound to attract players and force bottleneck bloodbaths. It’s possible that this weapon will only be available temporarily, similar to the powerful Thanos’ Gauntlet–though that was in its own limited-time mode, rather than in the main battle royale.

Infinity Blade was Epic’s first big mobile release, pushing the power of its own Unreal engine on Apple devices to serve as a showpiece. It was a timing-based fighting game consisting of various boss fights. The name comes from the weapon itself, which is wielded by descendants of a warrior who was killed by the immortal God King. Each playthrough maintains the experience of your previous run, until you’ve confronted and defeated the God King and beaten him with the Infinity Blade. Later sequels added more RPG elements and a more detailed plot structure.

This weapon addition is the first of its kind and was teased shortly after the Fortnite 7.00 patch released. That season changeover also introduced an aerial vehicle and a snowy makeover for the map. You can check out some pointers on how to complete all the new tasks in our Fortnite Season 7 challenges roundup.

If you’re like us and are always on the lookout for great deals on Xbox One games, it’s time to head to Xbox Live. This week’s Spotlight Sale and Deals with Gold promotion are now live, dropping prices on a selection of Xbox One and Xbox 360 games. You’ll need a Gold subscription to take advantage of most of this week’s deals, but some are available to everyone. Let’s look at the highlights of the sales running between now and December 17.

The headliner this week is Monster Hunter World, on sale for $25. Not only is this one of the best games of 2018, but Capcom isn’t done with it yet. A massive expansion called Iceborne is planned for release next year, and everyone’s favorite gruff-voiced witcher will also make an appearance in the game. All of which makes now a great time to pick it up on sale to see what the fuss is about.

While Xbox One owners missed out on the PS4-exclusive Castlevania Requiem, you can pick up Bloodstained: Curse of the Moon on sale for $7 right now. It’s a retro Castlevania-style game made by some of the creative team behind many entries in the classic series. Speaking of retro games, Mega Man Legacy Collection 1 & 2 Combo Pack and Mega Man X Legacy Collection 1 + 2 are on sale for $15 and $30 respectively.

If you enjoy shooters, you can get Battlefield 4 or Battlefield Hardline Ultimate Edition for under $10 each. Anyone with an itch to play an action-RPG can grab Divinity: Original Sin Enhanced Edition or The Technomancer for $10 apiece. Racing fans can rev up with MotoGP 17 for $12 or Valentino Rossi The Game for just $5.

You can find more of our picks below, or check out all the games on sale on Xbox.com. The discounts are live between now and December 17, so make your purchases by then.