Author: Trafficblast

Nintendo has announced the free NES games that Nintendo Switch Online subscribers can grab in February–and there are four in total coming this month.

These include the “cute-’em-up” shooter Pop’n TwinBee and the 16-bit tennis game, Smash Tennis, for SNES, as well as the NES games Shadow of the Ninja and Eliminator Boat Duel.

Both titles arrive in the Switch’s US eShop on February 19. With the new additions, there will be 52 NES games in the library and 26 SNES titles for a total of 78 freebies for subscribers.

Check out the video above to see these titles in action. GameSpot’s managing editor, Peter Brown, speaks highly of Shadow of the Ninja in particular. He says, “Shadow of the Ninja is a sick-ass NES game and you can quote me on that.”

In other Nintendo news, the company has confirmed that the Coronavirus outbreak will not impact Switch sales in the west, while the new Pokemon subscription service, Pokemon Home, is now available across Switch, iOS, and Android.

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If you’ve been following the pre-release buzz around Persona 5 Scramble: The Phantom Strikers, then you’re probably aware that it’s as close to a direct sequel as you could get to the original RPG. Developed in conjunction with Koei Tecmo and Omega Force (makers of Dynasty Warriors games), Atlus is bringing an action game that continues the story of the Phantom Thieves while still delivering the core Persona experience of exploring cities in Japan during free time and making connections with characters (both old and new) throughout the story.

However, you might be wondering how the game actually plays, this being a Musou-style action game and all. Persona 5 Scramble certainly shows elements of the Warriors games, namely tearing through ridiculously large enemy hordes. But based on what we’ve seen from previews in Japan and our own experience playing the demo that’s only available on the Japanese Eshop and PSN, its combat is shaping up to be more than hack-and-slash by incorporating many of the RPG elements found in Persona 5.

While you have basic attack combos, Persona 5 Scramble includes spell casting based on the persona(s) equipped on the character you’re controlling. By holding R1, you bring up your list of abilities and time stops, allowing you to aim the spell’s area of effect before setting it off. What’s more, Scramble retains the mechanics of exploiting enemies’ elemental weaknesses to do increased damage and stagger them. Guns are another option, letting you lock-on targets to get off a few shots; it’s not the most effective attack, but it’s great against enemies weak to the gun element.

After hitting a weakness, you can initiate the series’ signature all-out attack where all party members jump into the scuffle to lay down heavy damage on staggered enemies and any others within range. You also build up a separate meter to initiate Showtime attacks which include a quick, flashy cinematic cut before dealing a ton of damage. Bosses present a slightly different challenge as they have armor that needs to be broken by exploiting their weakness continuously while dealing with mobs. Much like Persona 5 itself, fights are hyper-stylized but move fast to keep the action moving at a brisk pace.

Mobility is another key piece that Scramble doesn’t seem to overlook; you have the ability to dart across high-up places like streetlights and scaffolding to get the drop on enemies with a sort of whirlwind attack. And there’s something liberating about having a dedicated jump button (as opposed to context sensitive actions) for platforming and navigating the chaos, which emphasizes the slick, acrobatic sensibilities of Persona 5.

There’s still more we haven’t seen from Persona 5 Scramble, though it’s nice to see how the core RPG’s battle mechanics make the gameplay dynamic. The demo itself only showed a snippet, acting mostly as a tutorial but we now had hands-on with Atlus’ approach to a Persona action-RPG. We’ll get a better picture of the game when it launches for PlayStation 4 and Nintendo Switch on February 20 in Japan and later this year in the West.

Quentin Tarantino’s latest movie, Once Upon A Time In Hollywood, featured a long list of famous actors like Brad Pitt and Leonardo DiCaprio, and it could have featured one more big name. Home Alone star Macaulay Culkin revealed in an interview with Esquire that he auditioned for a role.

Unfortunately for Culkin, however, he bungled the audition. It was so bad that he wouldn’t have cast himself if he was the casting director. “It was a disaster. I wouldn’t have hired me,” he said. “I’m terrible at auditioning anyway, and this was my first audition in like eight years.”

Culkin did not share which role he was going for or any other details about his audition.

Brad Pitt won the Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his performance as Cliff Booth in Once Upon A Time In Hollywood, marking Pitt’s second Academy Award win and his first in an acting role.

The movie also features Leonardo DiCaprio, Margot Robbie, Timothy Olyphant, Dakota Fanning, Austin Butler, Al Pacino, and Luke Perry in his final movie role before his death.

The Once Upon A Time In Hollywood movie may expand to a new medium. Quentin Tarantino told Deadline that he plans to direct a spin-off TV show focused on Leonardo DiCaprio’s Rick Dalton character from the fictional TV show Bounty Law.

Surprising absolutely no one, Activision Blizzard has confirmed that a new Call of Duty game is set for release in 2020; however, curiously, the company has not yet confirmed which team is developing the title. For eight years, Activision Blizzard has maintained a strict pattern when it’s come to Call of Duty’s development cycle. So when, on the February 2019 Activision quarterly call, the publisher remained coy about which of its developers is working on the Call of Duty game scheduled for 2020, it led to speculation that something unexpected may be afoot this time around.

To delve into what could be in the works for 2020’s Call of Duty, we’re going to have to look back at several years of Call of Duty history and examine how Activision has traditionally handled reveals for the franchise.

Activision has managed to get a new Call of Duty game out the door every year since 2005’s Call of Duty 2 (though you could argue that, technically, a new game has come out every year from the very beginning if you count 2004’s Call of Duty: Finest Hour, the console version of the original 2003 PC game). There are four Activision studios currently associated with Call of Duty development–Infinity Ward, Treyarch, Raven Software, and Sledgehammer Games. The first two have been mainstays, while the latter two initially served as support studios. For Sledgehammer, that changed in the last decade, as Activision made the developer the main studio behind Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare and Call of Duty: WWII.

Initially, Activision went back and forth between Infinity Ward and Treyarch, having the two complete Call of Duty games in two years while Sledgehammer and Raven supported the two where needed. From 2012 through 2019, however, Activision adopted and maintained a new pattern with Call of Duty: Treyarch releases a Call of Duty game, then Infinity Ward, then Sledgehammer, and then the three repeat in that order. This gives each studio a buffer of about three years between each game they make, which probably makes it easier for Activision to maintain its annual Call of Duty release schedule.

In 2012, Treyarch released Black Ops II, and went on to make 2015’s Black Ops III and 2018’s Black Ops 4. In 2013, Infinity Ward released Ghosts, and then followed with 2016’s Infinite Warfare and 2019’s Modern Warfare. Sledgehammer released Advanced Warfare in 2014 and then WWII in 2017–the developer should be scheduled to release its third Call of Duty game in 2020, assuming the trend continues, and followed by Treyarch releasing its next game in 2021.

Or at least, that should be the plan, but Activision hasn’t confirmed whether that’s the case. According to Kotaku, Activision was already handling the release of 2020’s Call of Duty a little differently, partnering up Sledgehammer with Raven to tackle the project together, similarly to how Infinity Ward and Sledgehammer partnered on Modern Warfare 3. A slight change, but nothing that would disrupt Activision’s pattern.

But, according to that same Kotaku report, things have not been on track for Sledgehammer and Raven, so Treyarch is now the studio in charge of 2020’s Call of Duty. Sledgehammer and Raven were reportedly working on a Call of Duty set during the events of the Cold War but tensions between the two teams (combined with both Sledgehammer co-founders leaving the studio and several additional devs following suit) resulted in delays. Both Sledgehammer and Raven are reportedly reassigned as support studios for Treyarch, which is rumored to be working on Black Ops 5, and the game is now coming in 2020–a whole year early.

Activision hasn’t confirmed any of this, but recent announcements have at least lent greater credence to the idea that 2020’s Call of Duty will, in some capacity, break from the tradition the publisher has maintained these past eight years.

Activision believes that 2020’s Call of Duty won’t sell as well as 2019’s Modern Warfare–a fair assumption given that Modern Warfare has outsold every Call of Duty from this console generation–highlighting how Modern Warfare has done amazingly well. As Infinity Ward and Activision have already announced plans to continue supporting Modern Warfare (which can be seen with the start of Season 2 and a teaser for what looks like a new Call of Duty battle royale mode), it may be detrimental for Activision to do what it’s always done and jump to the next Call of Duty entry so soon.

So perhaps that’s where Treyarch comes in. Treyarch decided to forgo a traditional single-player campaign in 2018’s Black Ops 4 and instead included a battle royale mode called Blackout (which turned out to be popular). So perhaps Activision is tapping Treyarch to develop a new Call of Duty game that is focused around battle royale–one that can be bought as a standalone game but is still connected to Modern Warfare in some capacity.

Of course, because Activision hasn’t confirmed any of this, all of what we say here could end up being false conjecture. Activision may have just held out on announcing which developer is working on 2020’s Call of Duty because it just doesn’t want to say which one it is yet. Which is a boring explanation but still entirely possible.

If, however, the disruption to Activision’s Call of Duty schedule is true, it raises questions about the future of the franchise. Prior to 2012, Activision just went back and forth between Treyarch and Infinity Ward–would the publisher return to only two studios headlining new Call of Duty games? Could it maintain its annual release schedule if that were the case? Should it even try to maintain that schedule when both Modern Warfare and (the immensely successful) Call of Duty Mobile are great examples of how individual Call of Duty games can continue to excel via regular post-launch support and content updates?

Regardless of what happens, something at least seems to be up with 2020’s Call of Duty, because Activision is being oddly coy about who’s actually responsible for the game. Or maybe we’re just thinking too hard about all this.

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A couple years ago, I got drawn into Kazuma Kiryu’s world, the world of Yakuza games, being completely enamored by charismatic characters and the allure of rowdy city streets. The series’ pitch-perfect blend of gripping melodrama and absurdist humor is as consistent as kindhearted tough-guy Kazuma Kiryu getting suckered into his former gang’s illicit business. With Yakuza 5 Remastered out now, alongside the whole Yakuza Remastered Collection, the entire saga is now playable on PlayStation 4. Each entry was memorable in its own right, but Yakuza 5’s opening chapter is the one that will forever be burnt into my memory.

On a calm winter night in Fukuoka, about 700 miles from his home turf of Kamurocho in Tokyo, Kiryu’s chaotic life is shown to have seemingly settled down again. He’s a cab driver assuming a new identity under a different name, appearing to have put decades of his life involved in the yakuza in the past, for real this time. But it’s not just that Kiryu had to move far away to leave the criminal underworld behind, he had to leave everything behind: the kids at his orphanage who relied on him, the people who truly had his back, and even his adoptive daughter Haruka. All of it.

The very first scene shows some familiar yakuza business brewing in Fukuoka with Tojo Clan chairman Daigo Dojima involved, the man Kiryu mentored to take care of the gang. It just so happens that Kiryu picks up Daigo in his cab, followed by cryptic exchanges between the two. In true melodramatic fashion, Daigo acknowledges he knows it’s Kiryu driving, and refers to his undefined drop-off as a metaphor for Daigo having to run the clan himself.

This opening also shows the series at its most cinematic, with the opening credits and a bittersweet tune over your introduction to Kiryu’s mundane life behind the wheel. He talks about his past life in vague terms to those around him in Fukuoka, yet they all understand and respect him. Though none of it is explicitly stated, it’s immediately understood where he’s at in his life.

The gameplay in the first chapter also leans heavily into that narrative core. You don’t necessarily need to go around beating the crap out of goons unless they really deserve it. You go out on a night of drinking with your carefree boss, work at a ramen stand, take people around town in your cab, and transfer funds to your orphanage at the corner store ATM. The kids send heartfelt messages after giving back, and as sad as it is, Kiryu is convinced that his presence only puts them in danger, especially with Haruka growing into a successful pop idol.

At least for the opening hours, you experience both the solace of Kiryu living a normal life and the pain that comes from being detached from those he loves. It’s not like he hasn’t tried something like this before–Yakuza 3 also has Kiryu trying to build a life outside of the seedy streets of Kamurocho, running an orphanage near a small beachfront town. However, gang life and the violence and drama attached to it followed him regardless.

After five whole games of him rarely turning a blind eye to injustice in the street, taking care of those in need, raising Haruka and other kids as his own, Kiryu shows the reluctance of cutting himself off. To the surprise of absolutely no one who plays these games, trouble finds Kiryu and ropes him back into the Tojo Clan’s messy drama, but you see that it’s the hardest he’s fought against the idea of coming back.

That’s just scratching the surface of Yakuza 5–it’s the longest entry in the series, spanning five playable characters across five different locations. You’ll play as Haruka who overcomes the struggles of working as a pop idol through rhythm-game mechanics, and continue the trials and tribulations of Taiga Saejima who has his own gripping arc in snow-covered Hokkaido. Yakuza is one of those series where you’ll want to play them all in sequential order to get the full picture, which you can now do, all on the PS4.

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