Bandai Namco’s beloved puzzle game Katamari Damacy is making its return, with the original game being re-released as Katamari Damacy Reroll on Nintendo Switch. During today’s Nintendo Direct, it was confirmed that the game will have Joy-Con gyroscope controls and support HD rumble.
Additionally, players will be able to take part in multiplayer battles using a single Joy-Con controller each. Katamari Damacy Reroll will be available in Winter 2018. Created by Keita Takahashi and released for the PlayStation 2 in 2004, Katamari Damacy was unlike anything other game around, and its uniqueness helped it develop a passionate fanbase.
In GameSpot’s Katamari Damacy review, Ryan Davis said the game “is not overly esoteric, and the mechanics are simple and enjoyable enough that people of virtually all shapes and sizes should be able to pick it up and start having fun in minutes.
“Katamari Damacy is far and away one of the strangest, most original games to come along in years,” he continued. “The gameplay concept, the visual style, the soundtrack, even the backstory are all conceived and executed with such a unique flavor that, when presented as a whole, it’s difficult not to be drawn in by all the weird little idiosyncrasies.
“It’s not a complex game, nor is it especially challenging, or long. It is, however, unapologetically surreal, which can make it tough to look away from, and its toylike gameplay model makes for a surprisingly satisfying experience.”
With Nintendo bringing so many of its franchises to Switch, fans have wondered when Animal Crossing’s turn will come–especially given how perfect of a match it is for the portable system. While details were more than light, the company did finally answer that question during its September Nintendo Direct stream: 2019.
As the presentation came to a close, we saw footage of Animal Crossing’s Isabelle hanging out in the mayor’s office, lamenting your absence. It seemed as if it was preparing an announcement of Animal Crossing, only for it to turn into a reveal of Isabelle as a playable character in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate.
After a look at her in action, the video then cut to Tom Nook, seemingly setting him up as a character. Instead, he talks about getting things ready from when they’re tired of playing Smash and the Animal Crossing mobile game, which led to the announcement of Animal Crossing for Nintendo Switch (the current working title).
Unfortunately, we didn’t get any more details than that, just that it’s coming in 2019. A subsequent press release from Nintendo affirms this is a “mainline” game, marking the first since 2013’s New Leaf for 3DS. That would suggest it’ll consist of the same basic town management, house-decorating, bug/fish/fossil-collecting gameplay we’ve come to know and love, though just what kind of changes Nintendo has in store for us remains to be seen.
You can check out how the announcement unfolded for yourself above. We’ll report back as Nintendo reveals more about the upcoming game, and what kind of tie-ins it’ll inevitably offer with the mobile game.
New Super Mario Bros. U, originally released for the Wii U, is coming to the Switch as New Super Mario Bros. U Deluxe. During the latest Nintendo Direct, it was confirmed that four people will be able to play together as with the original. A couple of new characters are being made playable for the Switch version, however: Toadette and Nabbit.
Toadette joins the fun with the ability to transform into Peachette and float around stages. In total, New Super Mario Bros. U Deluxe will have a 164 courses to platform through. This version will also include the New Super Luigi U expansion. The game will be available for Nintendo Switch from January 11, 2019.
New Super Mario Bros. U originally launched for Wii U in 2012 and was received well. “New Super Mario Bros. U is not a game that takes many risks, nor is it definitively the best 2D Mario title, but it’s certainly a contender,” said GameSpot’s Peter Brown.
“It’s consistently charming, often challenging, and an excellent illustration of that which makes Mario games so special. Nintendo seemingly recaptured traditional, distilled platforming, but also incorporated a newfound attention to modern gaming trends and expectations. It’s a challenging platformer, an excellent recreation of Mario’s best moments, and it’s the perfect way to kick-off Nintendo’s journey into HD.”
The game received an 8.5/10. You can find out more about the game and our verdict on it by reading the full New Super Mario Bros. U review. During the Nintendo Direct, a new entry in the Luigi’s Mansion was also revealed, though there was precious few details about it. All we know is that “Luigi’s Mansion 3″ isn’t final and that it’ll be available for Nintendo Switch in 2019.
Watch the ongoing Nintendo Direct here to see everything Nintendo has in store for Nintendo 3DS and Switch owners. You can also keep an eye on GameSpot to read all the news from the event.
During the latest Nintendo Direct presentation, it was announced that Mario Tennis Aces will receive an update that includes additional characters and the new Co-Op Challenge mode. The version 2 update is coming September 19.
As for the new characters, Birdo, Shy Guy, Koopa Paratroopa, and Petey Pirahna will join the roster of tennis aces. It was stated in the Direct that the these characters can be acquired by playing online, though it wasn’t clear what that meant. More content is scheduled to drop for Mario Tennis Aces until June 2019.
If you’re looking for new ways to play, Co-Op Challenge mode will bring up to four players together online to complete different objectives. Challenges are said to be limited-time and you can earn cosmetics such as outfits, character color schemes, and hats.
Mario Tennis Aces released back in June exclusively for the Nintendo Switch. In our review, author Justin Clark stated, “Off-beat stages and creative use of characters from the Marioverse ensure that you’ll never lose sight of simply having fun, but don’t let the adorable exterior trick you; Aces takes its unorthodox tennis very seriously.” You can also check out gameplay of Diddy Kong in Mario Tennis Aces from a previous update.
Nintendo has announced it is developing a third entry in the Luigi’s Mansion for Nintendo Switch. The game made its debut at the very start of today’s Nintendo Direct presentation, where a very short teaser was shown, along with a 2019 release date. The name, Luigi’s Mansion 3, was listed as a working title. No further details were provided about the game.
The last Luigi’s Mansion title was Dark Moon, which was released for the Nintendo 3DS in 2013. The game received a 6.5, with reviewer Carolyn Petit describing it as a”mostly pleasant game marred by the possibility of moments so frustrating, they threaten to overshadow the entire experience.”
She continued: “These missteps are all the more disappointing because the better elements of the game are so charming. You may still want to take up the PolterGust 5000 and explore these haunted houses, but be warned: the things lurking in these dark places aren’t likely to scare you, but they may well have you seeing red.” Read the full Luigi’s Mansion: Dark Moon review here.
As the name suggests, the Luigi’s Mansion games star Mario’s perpetually on edge brother as he attempts to rid an area of spooky inhabitants by sucking them up using a vacuum. He’s effectively a Ghost Buster, except always terrified of everything. The games are usually a mix of exploration, puzzle solving, and a tug of war against spooky poltergeists.
The first game in the series launched for the Nintendo Gamecube and a remake of this is coming to Nintendo 3DS. A mini-game themed around Luigi’s Mansion was also included in Nintendo Wii U launch title, Nintendo Land.
You can watch the ongoing Nintendo Direct here to see what else Nintendo has in store for us, and keep an eye on GameSpot to read all the news from the stream.
For one day only, on Saturday, September 15, GameStop is running a special sale just for Pro members. It will feature tons of excellent discounted games, plus additional savings on pre-owned games and bonus credit for trade-ins. It’s GameStop’sPro Day Sale, and it’s shaping up to be a great time to save cash on PS4, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch games and hardware. The catch, of course, is that you have to be a PowerUp Rewards Pro or Elite Pro member to get the savings.
If you’re not already a Pro member, a subscription costs $15 per year and comes with 10% bonus credit on trade-ins and 10% off pre-owned games year-round. You also get a year’s subscription to Game Informer and a “buy two, get one free” welcome offer on pre-owned games. You can find more about the program here. Now onto the sale.
On the hardware side of things, if you buy an Xbox One, you’ll get a free $50 gift card. Buy a PS4 Slim, and you can save $20 on a PS Plus membership. If you trade in a current-gen system toward another current-gen system, you’ll get between $125 and $275 guaranteed credit; you can check trade-in values here.
Lastly, Pro members will get 20% more credit for trading in games and accessories. Elite Pro members get an additional 30%. Also, all pre-owned games and accessories are 20% or 30% off, depending on your membership level.
Remember, these deals are only live Saturday, September 15. You can find more game deals below, or you can visit the Pro Day Sale page for the full list.
While many hit movies spawn sequels in Hollywood, few have had as strange a journey as the Predator movies. The first film might have introduced one of modern cinema’s most iconic monsters, but back in 1987 it was promoted as an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie, and there is no doubt that Arnold’s huge popularity during the ’80s helped it become a box office hit. Yet neither Schwarzenegger nor director John McTiernan returned for the sequel, which changed the cast, tone, and setting, and was not nearly as financially successful.
More than a decade later, the Predator finally returned to screens, but he had to share screen time with another of cinema’s great creatures–the Xenomorph. Unfortunately, the two Alien vs. Predator movies failed to satisfy fans of either franchise, and once more, a third movie fail to happen. By the time we reached the current decade, The Predator was back to headlining his movie solo, with 2010’s Predators and this year’s The Predator both trying to recapture what made the first movie so popular.
Even the most dedicated fan of the franchise would admit that the films haven’t always lived up to their potential. And yet, it’s not hard to see why the Predator has inspired so many movies, comic books, novels, and video games over the decades. From his technology and honour code to the ruthless pursuit of his prey, it’s a testament to the enduring popularity of the creature that has kept the fans coming back for more. So with The Predator now in theaters, here’s our ranking of every movie in the Predator series to date…
I lay restlessly in bed a few nights ago thinking about something I presume many people who have just turned 30 think about: Pokemon cards. I wasn’t counting Mareep to lull myself into a slumber, nor was I dreaming of sliding down the freakishly long neck of an Alolan Exeggutor (not tonight, at least). No, I was thinking about how bloody expensive the Pokemon Trading Card Game is, and this made me unreasonably upset at roughly 1 in the morning.
For a lot of people, the Pokemon Trading Card Game is something they remember fondly from school. Opening booster packs of 10 randomised cards, comparing shinies with mates, and making ill-advised trading decisions based on the playground economics of each card’s perceived worth. But for many, including myself, it’s so much more than that. It’s one of the best online and offline card games on the market, with the added bonus of fuzzy nostalgia in pocket-sized monster form.
A few years ago I got back into Pokemon cards. It was oddly fulfilling about being able to spend adult money on something I could rarely afford as a scruffy 11-year-old in secondary school. I quickly started playing and competing, thanks to the support of my local Pokemon League and the friendly bunch of players who turned up each Saturday morning. Building decks and taking my best Pokemon cards into an intense one-on-one battle was far more exciting than anything I had experienced in the video games. I was hooked.
Something you learn about very quickly in the world of Pokemon cards is the meta. Certain decks of 60 cards are just better than others, so if you want to be competitive you need to have one of those decks. It seems simple, but herein lies the inherent problem with The Pokemon Trading Card Game: the best decks have the best cards, and the best cards are often rare (or even ultra rare), which makes pulling them randomly from booster packs extremely unlikely and uneconomical. So unless you’re funded by Team Rocket or you can convince someone to trade their very good cards for your not-so-good ones, the next logical step is to find someone selling the cards you need on eBay or through a collectible card seller online. But of course the rare, powerful cards are in high demand and have a premium price tag attached to them.
What I’m describing will of course sound familiar to anyone who has played any trading or collectible card game. To a certain extent it’s just the nature of the beast, but other card games offer alternatives to you hemorrhaging cash just to keep up with the meta. Magic the Gathering, for example, widely supports multiple formats for veterans and newcomers on any budget, with limited formats like Draft and Sealed levelling the playing field, and a much larger player base to support this. Hearthstone, the popular online collectible card game from Blizzard, lets you break down unwanted cards so you can craft those you need. Pokemon, on the other hand, is effectively pay or lose.
In 2012 a card called Darkrai-EX came along, at the height of my love and obsession for Pokemon cards. The deck winning all the local tournaments had four of these cards, and it was available as part of the Dark Explorers expansion, so obviously I needed it. I decided to take the plunge and drop £80 on a box of 36 Dark Explorers booster packs. After feverishly unwrapping them in what was, to be fair, a pretty cathartic pack-cracking binge, I couldn’t believe what had happened: after all that money spent, I hadn’t pulled a single Darkrai-EX, and I needed four. The card was selling for £40 a pop on eBay, so that was it. I packed it all in and I headed for the greener pastures of the “Living Card Games” by Fantasy Flight Games, which did away with randomised boosters and offered a more constructed experience with games like Android: Netrunner and A Game of Thrones: The Card Game.
This brings us back to me, years later, an adult, laying in bed thinking about Pokemon cards. The 2018 Pokemon World Championships have just taken place in Nashville, Tennessee. There, the best TCG players in the world get together and put their decks to the ultimate test. First place takes home a massive $25,000, so the pressure is on to pick the right deck and pilot it to victory. Of course, I’m playing Pokemon cards again. Nothing has since matched the gameplay experience for me so I couldn’t stay away for long, but this time I’m determined to do it on a budget. I jump out of bed, switch on my computer, and begin to pore over the winning deck lists fresh from Nashville to see if I could afford any of them.
In the Masters Division a Zoroark / Garbodor deck carved a path to a first place victory. I looked up how much it would cost to buy these cards online and, at the time of writing, this deck would cost a whopping £237.40 ($305) to build. Second place went to a Malamar deck, another staple in the format, which carries a price tag of £145.52 ($187). In at third was a Zygarde / Lycanroc deck to the tune of £168.70 ($217), and finishing in fourth we have a deck using the recently released Rayquaza-GX from the Celestial Storm expansion. This one would cost £213.40 ($274) to build with cards purchased from online sellers, and as it happens similar Rayquaza decks also filled in three more spots in the top 10 at 5th, 7th and 10th.
You can see the picture I’m painting here, but at this point I want to stress that merely owning an expensive meta deck doesn’t guarantee victory. It takes a lot of skill, and hundreds if not thousands of hours of practice to play at the level seen at the Pokemon World Championships. To reduce the game simply to the cost of a deck would be a discredit to the incredibly talented, passionate, dedicated, kind, and friendly people who make up the TCG community.
The problem I’m facing, though, is that decks like Zoroark make up a huge percentage of what is currently played not just on the world stage but in local tournaments too. Zoroark decks alone made up nearly 30% of competitive play in the last season, so it’s hard to ignore the fact that expensive decks do win games, whether that’s at the highest level in tournaments, or friendly local games. Nearly every competitive deck includes multiple copies of the meta staple Tapu Lele-GX, which currently costs about £30 ($38) for one copy.
It’s no surprise, then, that pack-opening videos are so popular on YouTube, with people (likely a lot of young children) living vicariously through those who can afford to buy endless booster packs and share the treasures within for the viewer at home. There’s even an eight hour long video where an eye-watering $24,000 worth of Pokemon Sun & Moon boosters are opened up for over one million viewers.
At this point it seems to be widely accepted that this is just the cost of playing Pokemon cards. If you don’t have the cash to front for the best cards, then you won’t have the best chance when it comes to competing. Apply this to video games and the equivalent might be having to pay for better weapons in Call of Duty or Overwatch putting character abilities in loot boxes. There is already a lot of controversy surrounding loot boxes and “pay to win” content in video games as it is, but trading card game manufacturers aren’t held to the same level of scrutiny.
So what’s the solution? Am I doomed to weak budget decks or playing with printed proxies? Surely there is a way to lower the entry price for a competitive deck below £200, and below £100 or even £50 while we’re at it. After all, one deck won’t last you long, with new expansions releasing every few months and an ever-changing meta that sees new cards and strategies appearing like wild Zubat in a dark cave.
Booster packs will never go away, they have been a part of the Pokemon Trading Card Game since the beginning, and to be fair a lot of people do love them. But for the competitive scene, I want competitive cards to be more accessible with cheaper reprints for those not able to fork out hundreds. Granted there have been some already, and the must-have Tapu Lele-GX will be included in an upcoming boxset–but at $50 and well after the card initially hit the metagame in May 2017, it’s too little too late. Theme Decks are often a starting point for new players, so it’s good to see recent releases include a handful of staple uncommon cards to help kickstart a competitive collection, but there’s room for improvement. I would like to see The Pokemon Company make these cards easier to get ahold of and make powerful GX cards more frequent in booster packs, rather than the measly four or five you might be lucky enough to get in a full box of 36 boosters at the moment.
This will surely lead to a healthier meta, happier players, and more of them at that. I love the Pokemon Trading Card Game, but the thought of not being able to play because of my budget is literally keeping me up at night. I have a full time job and I can’t keep up with the cost of Pokemon cards.
In my mind Richard Garfield, creator of Magic: The Gathering has the best mentality when it comes to cards, their availability, and their pricing structure: “I wanted to see the cards collectible in the sense of stamps, where you go to the post office and buy some stamps you don’t expect them to be immediately worth $10 when you spent $2, but over time, they can be special.”
The CEO of GTA developer Rockstar Games’ parent company Take-Two Interactive has written a new book about health and fitness. Strauss Zelnick‘s new book, Becoming Ageless: The Four Secrets To Looking And Feeling Younger Than Ever, arrived earlier this month.
The 257-page book offers up a “three-month, detailed diet and exercise plan to create a leaner, more muscular and happier you.” Zelnick wrote the book with Muscle & Fitness senior writer Zack Zeigler.
According to the book’s official description, Becoming Ageless discusses the strategies “that allowed Zelnick to evolve from a skinny, out-of-shape business executive … to one of the world’s fittest and most physically active executives who reached his best-ever shape in his late 50s!”
Zelnick was the CEO of film company 20th Century Fox in his 30s. After resigning from that post, he was hired by Crystal Dynamics, though this was before the studio made Tomb Raider games. He is now Take-Two’s CEO.
Take-Two’s next big release is Red Dead Redemption 2, which launches at the end of October for PlayStation 4 and Xbox One.
Zelnick isn’t the only video game personality with a book. Gears of War designer Cliff Bleszinski is currently writing a memoir of sorts–and it’s shaping up well, apparently.
Becoming Ageless is published by Simon & Schuster, whose parent company–CBS–also owns GameSpot.
