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News

- Nintendo Announces New Switch Model with Longer Battery Life
  July 17, 2019NewsAn extra two hours of juice in the tank for the same price as the original Nintendo provided information on their Japanese site this morning about an updated version of the original Switch that includes a more powerful battery. Due in September (in Japan, at least), this model will retain virtually every other feature of the Switch already sitting in your home, from the blue and red Joy-Cons to the flimsy little kickstand in the back. The website claims the new battery will provide Switch players with between 4.5 to 9 hours of undocked battery life. Playing Breath of the Wild, their benchmark for more graphically demanding software, shortens that battery life to 5.5 hours. Still, it’s a marked improvement over the original Switch first released in March 2017. Currently, you can expect between 2.5 to 6.5 hours of portable gaming, with roughly three hours of power if you take Hyrule with you on the go. Nintendo’s updated battery seems to add a solid two hours to battery life expectancy across the board, nearly doubling current capabilities. Compared to the upcoming Switch Lite, the newer Switch will take back the prize for longest lasting battery. If you’re someone who likes to play games away from the living room, you won’t have to sacrifice additional features to extend your outdoor sessions. The console will come in the classic color combinations, with dark grey or blue/red Joy-Con combinations. There’s also a Dragon Quest XI special edition that will include the improved battery. It’s suggested retail price is the same as the currently available Nintendo Switch....
- Nintendo’s New Switch Lite Trades Special Features for Portability and Price
  July 10, 2019NewsLighter, leaner, and rocking an actual d-pad Rumors of a cheaper follow-up to the ultra-popular Switch console seems to have been true, as Nintendo announced the Switch Lite this morning. Priced at $199.99, it drops both the ability to dock with your TV and detach the Joy Cons, but the bargain means a better gaming-on-the-go experience. Releasing Sept. 20, The Switch Lite will be slightly smaller and lighter than its older sibling in every way. This apparently garners it an extra 30 minutes of battery life, according to Nintendo. The console will be available in three new colors: yellow, grey, and turquoise. Intentionally designed for players who prefer gaming away from the couch, the Switch Lite will not be able to connect to a TV, whether through a Switch dock or a more conventional input method like HDMI. In fact, the console will ship without either the dock, a kickstand or an included HDMI cable. You will be able to connect other controllers to the Switch Lite wirelessly, but charging those extra peripherals is on you. Nintendo recommends their Joy-Con Charging Grip, of course. As for games, all handheld compatible entries in the Switch catalog will be playable on the Switch Lite. Pokemon fans will be delighted to know a special edition of the Switch Lite featuring Sword and Shield’s front-of-box legendaries will be dropping just ahead of the games, on November 8. The light gray console boasts cyan and magenta buttons on its face and dynamic illustrations of both Zacian and Zamazenta on the back. It will cost $199.99, the same as the stock Nintendo Switch Lite. In an interview with CNet, Nintendo of America president Doug Bowser commented on whether the launch of a new Switch meant players would be able to transfer data between consoles. “Yes, you will have the ability to transfer between devices, your gameplay experiences,” Bowser told CNet. “More to come on there, but that is the intention.” There is no word if Nintendo is also developing a Switch model more powerful than the current offering, but the Switch Lite will at least fill a niche like the 2DS did during the last handheld console generation. ...

Features

- Nintendo Announces Breath of the Wild Sequel, Shows First Look at Animal Crossing, Announces Two New Smash Fighters, and More
  June 11, 2019Features / NewsThank you again to everyone who kept busting out the summoning circles; your work was invaluable Nintendo didn’t waste a moment of their 40-ish minute E3 Direct (unless you count the obligatory Bowser joke), and they dished up every fan ask short of a localization of Mother 3 or Reggie cameo. A sequel to Breath of the Wild is in development, the next Animal Crossing gets named and delayed, and two new Smash Bros. fighters will enter the fray before the end of 2019. Let’s hop in to the details! The arguably biggest news was held until Nintendo infamous “One More Thing” timeslot. Breath of the Wild, the critically and popularly acclaimed open world reimagining of the Zelda franchise has a sequel in development. The short teaser showed Zelda and Link traversing some ruins beneath Hyrule castle, eventually discovering a mummified… something imprisoned by an arm-shaped artifact. The figure breaks loose, likely precipitating the events of the game. Is this the body of Ganon, whose evil essence we banished in the first game? The series is built upon the cycle of these three characters continually clashing, so much so that it was hard coded upon the world in Skyward Sword. Without a release date, we will have to just wait and see how the upcoming sequel adapts the Legend. Our resident Animal Crossing expert, Rebecca, couldn’t help herself and already wrote about the announced next entry into the coziest franchise around. You can read all about Animal Crossing: New Horizons here. Bad news: the game was delayed until March 20, 2020. Proving the Smash community can wish anything into existence Nintendo announced not one, but TWO new DLC fighters coming in 2019. First, The Hero from the Dragon Quest series will appear sometime during the summer. Sporting his sword and Shield from Echoes of an Elusive Age (with a definitive edition is coming soon to Switch), The Hero plays similarly to Link and the other sword-swingers in Smash Bros. Prefer a different hero? Lucky you! The Hero’s look can be switched between four different models depending on your favorite game from one of the oldest JRPG series around. Their ultimate calls on the collective power over every past Hero for one devastating column of energy. The second announced fighter is actually two in one! That’s right: they actually, for real, seriously added the bear-and-bird duo of Banjo-Kazooie to the game. Take control of the platforming collectathoners this fall, swinging that iconic blue backpack and pecking your way to victory. Expect plenty of other Bottles-taught maneuvers to round out their moveset. Their final smash calls upon the aid of the tiny but mighty Jinjos to dish up some hurt that would certainly make Grunty’s backside wince. Luigi’s Mansion 3 puts players back into the shoes of the younger, more anxious Mario Brother for another ghastly adventure, this time set in a haunted hotel. Professor E. Gadd has hooked Luigi up with a new invention, the Poltergust G-00, that is equipped with some handy new capabilities. The most notable is the ability to create a green slime copy of our hero, known as Gooigi. Gooigi opens up the possibility for complex exploration and puzzle solving, but he can also be controlled by a second player in the game’s cooperative mode. Additionally, Luigi’s Mansion 3 sports local and online multiplayer game modes like ghost bashing, toad rescuing and more. Luigi’s Mansion 3 is coming sometime in 2019, but Nintendo did not provide a specific release date during today’s Direct. Further Highlights A tie-in game for Netflix’s Dark Crystal prequel, Age of Resistance, is being developed by BonusXP and En Masse Entertainment. The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance Tactics looks and plays a lot like Final Fantasy tactics, just with Skeksis and Gelflings on the tiled board. It’s set to arrive on August 30. The remake of Link’s Awakening provided a first look at a new feature that will allow players to build their own dungeons room-by-room, later running through them to collect awards. It isn’t clear how players will unlock these modular pieces, but the addition helps flesh out the modern take on a Zelda classic. Link’s Awakening comes to Switch on Sept. 22. A complete edition of Witcher 3 is coming to Switch in 2019. It will include all of the DLC and addition CDPR has made to the game since it’s release in 2015. Will the lower graphical fidelity compared to other consoles be a deal breaker or a compromise for bringing this acclaimed action RPG title to a new audience? A remake to the 1995 rail shooter Panzer Dragoon premiered in a first-look trailer. It’s not clear yet how closely it will stick to the original game, but the visual overhaul provided quite an impression. No release date is available at this time. Travis Touchdown, the anime and wrestling loving protagonist of Suda51’s No More Heroes series returns for a third entry in 2020. We saw Travis don a suit of mech armor and flying into battle against… well, we aren’t quite sure right now. If previous entries are any indication, it’ll be wacky and more than a little parodic. Pokémon Sword and Shield got the briefest of mentions during the Direct, but Nintendo did show off the Water Gym leader, Nessa. She will be the opponent during the E3 demo, showing off the new generation’s battle tactic, Dynamax. Also, the Pokéball Plus released for Pokémon Let’s Go will be partly compatible with Sword and Shield. You can’t use it as a controller, but carry a partner with you in the peripheral and something good might happen, according to Nintendo. Mario, Sonic, and all of their related coterie are back again to duke it out at the Olympics. A new entry in the crossover sports game series is coming soon in commemoration of the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, featuring new events and old classics. No release date is known, yet. Other tidbits: Fire Emblem: Three House release on July 26 Collection of Mana is available on the Switch eshop today, bundling a number of classic RPGs: Trials of Mana (Seiken Densetsu 3), Final Fantasy Adventure, and Secret of Mana. Resident Evil 5 and 6 are coming to Switch the fall, rounding out the series of horror games already available Contra Rogue Corps is a new entry in the Contra series, and it has a Panda with a gatling gun. What more do you need? It’s out Sept. 24 Mech shooter Daemon X Machina announced a release date of Sept. 13 Paradox and Romero games announced a strategy game set in the ‘20s era of gangsters called Empire of Sin. It’s coming to Switch in the spring of 2020....
- Just some screenshots of Keanu Reeves at #XboxE3
  June 9, 2019FeaturesWe all love Keanu Reeves. Some of us have loved Keanu our whole lives, even when many others made faces when we said he was one of our favorite actors. (Lauren from middle school, I’m looking at you.) But anyway, Keanu is celebrating a career renaissance at present, and what better way to prolong his time in the spotlight than to join a highly anticipated* game release? Yes, Johnny Mnemonic himself joins the cast of Cyberpunk 2077 as an as-yet-unnamed character who presumably encounters the player character at one (or more than one!) point during the game. To celebrate the extra #blessings of a Keanu Reeves encounter, here’s a series of screenshots from him on stage at Microsoft’s E3 presentation. No, really. That’s it. Just some screenshots. Why? Why not? There you have it. A series of screenshots of Keanu Reeves. Tell your friends, or your family, or no one at all. And happy Bill and Ted Day! *I am not at all anticipating Cyberpunk 2077, for reasons that are my own....

Reviews

- Snap Impressions: WarGroove
  February 12, 2019Features / ReviewsA new game that has both a figurative and literal dog in the strategy genre fight WarGroove is the newest Indie game from Chucklefish, a developer/publisher that can’t help but keep churning out hits. The strategy gameplay will immediately satisfy fans who, like me, sat hunched over their GBAs micromanaging tiny orange sprites. But wild difficulty spikes and somewhat inscrutable UI elements might confound old-hat COs and green recruits alike. You could be forgiven for saying WarGroove looked like fantasy Advanced Wars, with a splash of Fire Emblem. It’s a largely true statement, albeit one ignorant of the wide belief that Fire Emblem killed the Wars series after 2008’s Days of Ruin on the Nintendo DS. Still, you gotta call ‘em like you see ‘em. The new Switch strategy title lifts the gameplay nearly wholesale from the Wars series. The result is undeniably fun and will almost make you forget the decade without a decent entry in this little sub-genre. The fantasy aesthetic is right up my alley. Give me dragons and alchemists over bombers and helicopters any day of the week. Plus, the main cast of commanders ooze personality and charm. The ostensible protagonist, Queen Mercia, is a young warrior wielding a giant blade and a bigger heart. Her nemeses include frosty vampires, a hot-headed Frankenstein-esque berserker, and the skull-wearing, necromantic despot of the frozen wastes. Counted among her allies are secretive (and carnivorous) plant people, a boy genius piloting a mechanical golem, and Caesar, a battle-pup and goodest boy in the whole dang world. The kingdoms she encounters are monocultures in that way games without much narrative rope tend to have, but plot in Wargroove is largely a vehicle for the challenging scenarios. If you’re new, let’s break down the basics: you command units on a top-down map and are tasked with various objectives, ranging from traversing safely to the other side to complete annihilation of your enemy. Along the way, you will capture villages and barracks, which produce currency and units respectively. The coin produced by the villages is spent on units, but villages cannot protect themselves from enemy attacks and must rely on those units for protection. That’s the macro-level of each game. The more finite, nitty-gritty layer involves manipulating the terrain and unit types (both have wide variations) to your advantage in order to gain the upper hand against your foe. It’s a lot of number crunching and postulating that will become second nature as you try to conquer the more difficult meat of the game. And boy, does it get difficult. Perhaps the fifteen year interim has dulled my skills, but I found the game’s difficulty curve stupefying, if not actually demoralizing. Some missions would introduce a new type of unit, affording you some slack as you played around with your new toy. But the very next would throw you off the tricycle and into a charnel house where the tiniest mistake meant crushing defeat. One of the largest departures WarGroove takes from its predecessors is how it fields your commander alongside other units. Where previously your choice gave you access to a unique super-skill, commanders in WarGroove can attack, defend and deploy special moves called Grooves against your foes. They’re beefier than anything but the most expensive units and can really turn the tide of battle in your favor. But, they also have health and can be killed. These are named characters with importance to the game’s overarching plot, and their continued survival is a win/lose condition. You can choose to hold them off the front lines, but the game seems to be balanced around their power, so the scales will tip if you are precious with your leader. Losing a map 20-30 minutes in feels really, really bad. It doesn’t take much; park your commander one square inside the attack range of an archer or forget about that trebuchet towards the bottom, and you might face the defeat screen mere turns away from winning a mission. This might not be such a negative to lobby against the game if it didn’t play like an elaborate puzzle or chess match. Terrain and production facilities are predetermined, and while the enemy AI adapts really well to shifting strategies, a crafty player can outmaneuver them the same way every time. Bad calls with other units might mean losing a key defensive position or resource; a setback for sure, but you have time to recover and learn from your mistake. Lose your commander and it’s game over. You’re back to the beginning with no actionable knowledge gained. That’s what gets me, I think. Mistakes in games should be teachable moments. Show a player they made a bad call and then provide the space to immediately try again, using their hard-won insight to progress beyond this particular hurdle. Instead, WarGroove makes you invest another half-hour returning to the spot of your possible misclick just to see if things go better this time. I’m certainly not garbage at tactics games, but restarting a main story mission six times out of pure spite is not how you want people engaging with your game. There is so much to love in WarGroove, from the gorgeous and bright art style to the memorable cast of characters on both sides of the conflict. The sprites bounce up and down on wonderful cartoon aesthetic maps, and the soundtrack won’t hardly wear your patience as you try the same map for the sixth time. While Caesar the Dog’s missions are among the most difficult, they also showcase unique play styles that diverge in super interesting ways from anything in the main campaign. Chucklefish has already assuaged a common complaint that information is obscured behind an often inscrutable UI by announcing a series of fixes and updates aimed at clarifying information. I just worry that the game’s spikes in difficulty will turn off players otherwise interested in what this brand of strategy can provide. Have I mentioned all of the alternate modes? Not content with simply playing like Advance Wars, WarGroove contains editing tools allowing the creation of maps, missions and full-on campaigns. You can share these creations online and download the work of other players from within the game. Additionally, there’s a puzzle mode that offers special pre-set challenges, like defeating all enemies on the map in one turn. Both of these are welcome and filling side dishes to the main course. WarGroove scratches an itch I hadn’t indulged since sitting in the back of a church van on the way to Main Event, my GBA linked with four of my friends in what probably looked like a weird techno-ritual. I hope the mountainous challenge of some maps doesn’t dissuade too many from enjoying a richly colored experience sure to delight returning fans and the newly interested....
- You Should Play Octopath Traveler…Today!
  July 3, 2018ReviewsThe free demo of Square Enix’s new JRPG is available on the Switch right now, and our reporter Chase found lots to love in the first 3 hours. Octopath Traveler is a new RPG coming to the Switch by way of Square Enix, in collaboration with Acquire. You can experience what’s promised to be a lengthy, character-driven campaign in just two weeks, on July 13. Or… …you can download the demo and start playing immediately! Now, you might hold the rational opinion that demos, while great for sorting out your feelings on a game before purchasing, are for sampling, only. You’ll be starting over with a new file once you purchase the full game. Don’t waste your time. And normally, you would be right. But Octopath Traveler allows players the rare opportunity to transfer over any progress accrued in the demo to one file on the retail version of the game. This gives you a legitimate reason to download it immediately for the low, low price of zero real monies. As the name would imply, you can begin Octopath Traveler in one of eight ways, each corresponding to a potential party member. These prologues are character unique and also serve as tutorials, teaching you the basics of interaction, combat and the special Path Actions they possess. This is the first of Octopath Traveler’s unique characteristics. The eight main party characters each possess a tool for interacting with the world around them, fitting thematically with their backstory and persona. For example, Cyrus the Scholar can Scrutinize people and things, granting him insight into events he wasn’t around to witness firsthand. In the demo, Scrutinize gathered clues for an investigation, and I can see it being used to uncover well-hidden sidequests and optional content. On the other hand, Olberic the warrior can Challenge NPCs to combat, which strikes me as a fairly static and barefaced ability. Other path actions allow you to recruit NPCs to aid you in combat, each with various strengths and weapon skills. Hopefully, the game will provide opportunities to reward players for cunning use. Depending on the character you choose at the beginning of the game, your experience might be drastically different. I started with Olberic, once in charge of protecting a king but who now lives out a quiet existence in a small hillside village – some fantasy as heck stuff. Throughout the demo, the old warrior regarded the circumstances of his disgrace with sadness while also protecting the townsfolk from smalltime brigands. In another playthrough I was Tressa, the daughter of a merchant family looking to prove herself after meeting a charismatic trader with a gorgeous boat. Her head was full of big dreams, and her heart is full of adventure. I was immediately enamored with her prologue and Path Action, which allows you to trade with a wide variety of NPCs for items you might not find otherwise. But not all of the prologues were winners. Primrose was a dancer who witnessed the murder of her father and now searches restlessly for the three tattooed man who perpetrated the act. Except, she’s accepted a job as a “dancer” in a dirty town for a dirtier master. Her prologue was paved throughout with constant reminders the people in her life treat her like garbage. At a particularly low point she is being assaulted and coerced by her master, and Prim thinks to herself that she can bear anything except letting those who murdered her father get away. Yuck. Hopefully, her story takes a more positive and balanced tack in the full release. Even though my mileage varied on the characters, the combat was refreshingly engaging. More complicated than simply whittling down a health bar, encounters in Octopath involve a careful dance of breaking an enemy’s shield and exploiting their weakness. Shields can vary in strength depending on the enemy, and once broken you get a single turn to unleash hell before they recuperate. Teammates help with this – diversifying your available weapons and magics make sure someone is poised to blow up the armor chink everyone else opened up. But there’s one more wrinkle: Boosts. If your character used a regular attack on their turn, they will gain a charge of power called a Boost. These stack several times and can be spent to power up any attack or spell by a maximum of four magnitudes. Want to pierce a large baddy with a spear strike? Boost it, baby. Scourge the earth with a multi-target firestorm? Boost! Heal your party from nigh mortal wounds? You guessed it: Boost. You won’t gain a charge on the turn you used a boosted attack, so make sure to plan smart. Beyond everything else, Octopath Traveler looks gorgeous. The developers describe it as having an “HD-2D” aesthetic, but I see it more as a pop-up book decorated with lovingly crafted 16-bit artwork. Buildings and trees dot a 3D landscape like papercraft dioramas while stunning light effects play off rippling waters and moody skies. The visuals make traveling about both towns and the overworld a constant delight. I’ll have more complete thoughts once the game is released on July 13, but you will be hard pressed to find a better 3-hour free experience on the Switch right now. Even if you aren’t normally a JRPG fan, Octopath Traveler’s novel approach to visuals and storytelling might just win you over....