Photo: Barone Firenze / Activision / Kotaku (Shutterstock)
Microsoft and Sony have finally reached a deal for keeping Call of Duty on PlayStation once the Activision Blizzard merger goes through. The surprise agreement comes after months of fighting between the two companies and is a sign the acquisition is all but inevitable.
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“We are pleased to announce that Microsoft and PlayStation have signed a binding agreement to keep Call of Duty on PlayStation following the acquisition of Activision Blizzard,” Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer tweeted on July 16. “We look forward to a future where players globally have more choice to play their favorite games.”
It’s not immediately clear what the terms of that agreement are, and whether they are similar to proposals Microsoft recently signed with Nintendo and other cloud gaming providers. In the past, Sony has paid Activision for special benefits relating to Call of Duty, including timed-exclusive content and special marketing rights. It was also revealed during the recent court battle over the deal that Activision had leveraged its partnership with Sony to negotiate better commission rates for the franchise on Xbox.
Sony had been vigorously contesting Microsoft’s planned acquisition of the publisher in regulatory proceedings across Europe, the UK, and the U.S. After the recent legal defeat of the Federal Trade Commission’s attempt to block the deal, however, the PlayStation 5 maker seems to have decided it’s time to settle. Sony Interactive Entertainment CEO Jim Ryan had reportedly said in the past that his only interest was in blocking the deal.
Sony’s current agreement with Activision wasn’t set to expire until 2025, and the new agreement seems likely to carry through for at least the rest of the PS5’s life. Microosft has claimed all along that it’s not in its financial interest to make the series exclusive as the games generate billions in revenue on the competing platform.
Microsoft declined to comment. Sony did not immediately respond.
Procrastinators are once again reaping. Xbox Series X/S owners who haven’t yet picked up some of the biggest games of this year and last can get them for up to 45 percent off, in case you didn’t already have enough to play after the recent jam-packed release window.
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Microsoft’s “Ultimate Game Sale” runs from July 14 through July 31 and includes discounts on console games big and small, as well as some PC ones. The deals include 25 percent off Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, one of the best games of 2023 which also recently got promoted to Kotaku’s list of best Xbox Series X/S games. Hogwarts Legacy is also on sale, though it’s a bit weird. The Deluxe Edition, which includes free unforgivable curses, is marked down to $64, while the regular edition remains full price at $70.
The other big discounts are Elden Ring, which is down to $42, and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II, with 45 percent off from the “next-gen” price tag. Here are some of the other deals worth a look:
Ghostwire: Tokyo – $20 (67 percent off)
Dead Island 2 Deluxe Edition – $60 (20 percent off)
Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga – $20 (67 percent off)
Unfortunately, there aren’t any good deals on the Xbox Series X or S consoles themselves at the moment. Accessories, meanwhile, have a few slight discounts. You can get $13 off Xbox controllers, or up to $40 off the Elite Series 2 depending on the color, which isn’t bad for one of the best game pads out there. There’s no special discount on Game Pass at the moment, though Microsoft did just bring back the $1 first month trial for new subscribers.
While the Nintendo Switch receives big, proper updates on a fairly regular basis, it also sometimes gets more quieter downloads, ones that take place without the user knowing or needing to do anything. Those updates tend to focus on the console’s ‘banned word list’.
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Nintendo maintains a “bad word” list to prohibit Switch users from making accounts that reference certain phrases that might be considered controversial or offensive. In 2020 the list was updated to add “Nazi,” “Slave,” “KKK,” “ACAB,” and “Covid,” among others. Throughout 2022 it grew to encompass more slurs, rude language, and various misspellings of Hitler.
In February, words like “ISIS”, the conservative catch-all “groomer” and the names of the Sandy Hook shooter were added as part of changes discovered and published by longtime Switch dataminer OatmealDome, who earlier today tweeted that the list had been updated yet again.
“A rebootless update for 16.0.3 is out”, they wrote. “The sole changes are to the bad words lists. It appears Nintendo focused on blocking corruptions of the name Hitler (for example: “titler”, “hizzler”)“.
It appears the word ‘TERF’ (trans-exclusionary radical feminist) has also been included, perhaps suggesting the delayed Switch version of Hogwarts Legacy is getting closer to release.
Remember, this isn’t just a general list of words Nintendo don’t like, it’s specifically aimed at user account names, and so goes beyond just some rude, bad words. As OatmealDome points out in a follow-up:
The bad words lists shouldn’t be seen as just a list of slurs. It contains everything from “stoner” to “covid” to actual slurs. I would interpret it as “lists containing words related to controversial topics that aren’t appropriate for games that minors might play”.
If you’re wondering what other words the list contains, I’m glad you asked (especially if you’re a 10-year-old kid), because a selection of highlights include:
Play it on: PS5, PS4, Xbox Series X/S, Xbox One, Windows (Steam Deck OK)
My current goal: Conquer every Stronghold
You read that right, on Steam Deck baby! The step-by-step process to get the just-released Diablo IV working on the Deck took me a little over 30 minutes and was relatively painless. However I do highly recommend using a Steam Deck dock and USB mouse, as there’s a decent amount of copy-pasting and the Deck’s touch-screen controls can be finicky.
Since installing, I’ve played nothing else. Partly because I accidentally unmounted my Steam Deck library so it no longer recognizes what I’ve already installed on there through the store (oops) and partially because Diablo IV on the Deck is simply that rad.
It’s impressive how well the Deck’s default controller scheme jells with Diablo IV. Blizzard’s action-RPG is perfect to play while listening to a podcast or catching up on the borderline dispiriting amount of quality spring anime series I have to watch.
How’s performance you may ask? Pretty good, actually. After tweaking some essential settings, and turning off Cross-Network Play (yes that really did make a difference) I consistently get 40-60FPS let’s say…80 percent of the time. However, entering or leaving a major hub (Kyovashad for example) or a hectic world event has my poor base model Deck wheezing and running at single digits. Using an ultimate spell in a large crowd of enemies will also have your audio popping off, and not in a fun way either. And as you can imagine D4 is a battery Greater Evil. I recommend playing with your AC charger plugged in for sessions longer than 30 minutes.
But like cmon, being able to tackle a Stronghold while laying on my couch? That’s objectively awesome and I look forward to parking my ass on aforementioned couch after I send Claire this blurb. Bye! — Eric Schulkin
We’ve covered the special Starfield-branded Xbox controllers before. They were one of the worst-kept secrets of 2023, alongside the Starfield-branded Xbox headset that is already joining them on store shelves. What I did not know until today was how damn cool the controller’s triggers are.
Thank You, PS Plus, For Making My Backlog Even Bigger
I mean, I like the controller design itself. I’m not exactly hyped for Starfield, I can take it or leave it, but the beauty of this pad in particular is that it doesn’t really look like a branded controller at all. It just looks like an Xbox controller with a really cool late-70s/early-80s sci-fi theme, like it was something out of The Last Starfighter, and so even if you had no idea what Starfield was, or did and did not care for it, you could still be into this controller.
Anyway! That aesthetic discourse off my chest, I want to talk about the triggers. From leaked product shots we already knew the triggers had a transparent housing, but it was one thing seeing them just sitting around. It’s another seeing them moving, because as long as we have had vibrating controllers—and it’s been decades now—I don’t know if I’ve ever seen the mechanics of them actually vibrating before while you’ve got the finished product in your hand:
That’s neat! Not surprising, we all knew roughly how they worked, but it’s still cool seeing it in action like that. Cool and worrying, because seeing how fast and hard those little guys have to work to keep rumbling I have no idea how controllers last as long as they do. Provided, uh, they actually last as long we want them to.
The Xbox Series X/S controller is $80 while the gaming headset is $125.
Microsoft revealed some exciting new first-party games like InExile’s Clockwork Revolution and Compulsion Games South of Midnight at its June 11 Xbox Showcase. But others like Fable and Avowed were first teased years ago and still don’t have clear release dates. What’s taking so long?
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Xbox Game Studios head Matt Booty recently said in interviews with Axios and IGNthat the industry is still catching up to a new reality that major projects are simply more complex due to new hardware and rising audience expectations. 4K graphics, ray-tracing and other graphical improvements have made development harder and more expensive, while Microsoft itself had to manage a transition period beginning in 2018 when it snatched up tons of new studios, including those under the Zenimax acquisition like Bethesda, id Software, and Machine Games.
“I think that the industry and the fans were a little behind the curve on sort of a reset to understand that games aren’t two or three years anymore,” Booty told Axios. “There are higher expectations. The level of fidelity that we’re able to deliver just goes up.”
“One, gen 9 hardware is awesome—ray tracing, all the stuff we can do,” he told IGN. “But that trickles down through everything through how the assets are build. Like in Forza Motorsport, how the cars have to be built, how the lighting’s got to be done, how the track’s got to be set up, all the detail. The expectation is very high. Games are just getting more complex in terms of the interactions that are expected.”
There are plenty of examples that back up Booty’s point about games taking longer. Ghost of Tsushima took Sucker Punch six years, the longest the studio had ever spent on making a single game. Final Fantasy XVI is in a similar boat, arriving seven years after the last game in the storied fantasy-RPG franchise. Exceptions like Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, a dense 35 hour action adventure and game of the year contender made in just three years, only undermine how rare that turn around time has become.
At the same time, it’s clear Microsoft in particular has struggled to iron things out in its post-acquisition production processes. Halo Infinite’s anemic post-launch support and the poor state of Redfall at release have shown that even when a big game finally arrives, it’s not without problems. Microsoft founded The Initiative back in 2018 but we’ve yet to see anything vaguely tangible out of Perfect Dark. Instead, it’s now reportedly relying on a partnership with Crystal Dynamics to push development forward on the game.
While games like State of Decay 3, Gears 6, and Everwild were all missing from the Xbox Showcase, Microsoft is hinting that they could make an appearance at other events throughout the year like Gamescom or The Game Awards. Even so, it’s not clear their re-emergence will include substantial gameplay reveals or definitive release dates versus CGI trailers. In the meantime, fans finally have Starfield and Forza Motorsport to round out the year. And if Booty’s right, a parade of hits will begin to follow shortly after.
Since Starfield was revealed, fans have been wondering what framerate the sci-fi RPG would run at on console. In a new interview with IGN, creative director Todd Howard confirmed the Xbox Series X/S version would remain locked at 30fps to maintain a consistent look and feel throughout the game.
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“I think it’ll come as no surprise, given our previous games, what we go for,” Howard told IGN after the Starfield Direct today. “Always these huge, open worlds, fully dynamic, hyper detail where anything can happen. And we do want to do that. It’s 4K in the X. It’s 1440 on the S. We do lock it at 30, because we want that fidelity, we want all that stuff. We don’t want to sacrifice any of it.”
The longtime Bethesda game designer added that the game is “running great” and even sometimes at 60fps. “But on the consoles, we do lock it because we prefer the consistency, where you’re not even thinking about it,” he said. It’s also apparently performing well on the less powerful Xbox Series S where Howard said he plays most of the time since his kids monopolize the Xbox Series X.
Higher framerates, something players on PC with higher-end gear have long had access to, were one of the big selling points for the “next-gen” consoles. Recently, however, some big blockbusters have struggled to hit that mark. Gotham Knights was locked at 30fps on console, and Arkane Austin’s Redfall, an Xbox first-party console exclusive promoted with 60fps gameplay footage, won’t get a 60fps mode until sometime in the future.
But given Bethesda’s past track record with sprawling open-world RPGs at launch, a stable 30fps will probably be a pleasant surprise for most fans.
Kotaku is covering everything Summer Game Fest, from the main show on Thursday to other events happening throughout the next week. Whether you’re into larger-than-life triple-A games or intimate, offbeat indies, you can keep up with all things SGF here.
Valve removed the Steam listing for Dolphin, a popular emulator for the GameCube and Wii, after it received a cease and desist from Nintendo, developers behind the project claim. The company behind MarioandZelda accuses the emulator of illegally circumventing its protections, and says it’s merely protecting the “hard work and creativity of video game engineers and developers.”
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A listing for Dolphin on Valve’s digital storefront first appeared back in March. “We are pleased to announce our great experiment—Dolphin is coming to Steam!” the creators wrote at the time. While the open-source project has been available online for years, interest in retro emulators has increased since the release of the Steam Deck, and an official store page would make the tool even easier to access.
On May 27, however, Dolphin’s developers announced the Steam port would be “indefinitely postponed” after Valve removed the listing following discussions with Nintendo. “It is with much disappointment that we have to announce that the Dolphin on Steam release has been indefinitely postponed,” the emulator team wrote in an update on the project’s blog. “We were notified by Valve that Nintendo has issued a cease and desist citing the DMCA against Dolphin’s Steam page, and have removed Dolphin from Steam until the matter is settled. We are currently investigating our options and will have a more in-depth response in the near future.”
According to a copy of the legal notice reviewed by PC Gamer, Nintendo accuses Dolphin of using “cryptographic keys without Nintendo’s authorization and decrypting the ROMs at or immediately before runtime.” While emulation is itself legal, providing users with ways to bypass protections on individual game ROMs could potentially violate Nintendo’s intellectual property rights. It’s an issue that would have to be hashed out in court, though the power imbalance between large corporations and homebrew projects like Dolphin means that rarely actually occurs.
“Nintendo is committed to protecting the hard work and creativity of video game engineers and developers,” a spokesperson for Nintendo told Kotaku in an email. “This emulator illegally circumvents Nintendo’s protection measures and runs illegal copies of games. Using illegal emulators or illegal copies of games harms development and ultimately stifles innovation. Nintendo respects the intellectual property rights of other companies, and in turn expects others to do the same.”
While the company has rarely looked the other way when it comes to piracy of its games and the tools that could facilitate it (like mod chips sold online), Nintendo has been particularly aggressive lately in clamping down on leaks and what it believes to be illegal misuses of its games and technology. In February it subpoenaed Discord for the personal information of someone suspected of leaking the official The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom art book. In April it issued multiple copyright strikes against dozens of popular Breath of the Wild gameplay videos on YouTube that relied on modded versions of the game. And in May it seemingly had a Switch emulation tool, Lotpick, removed from Github after illicit copies of Tears of the Kingdom began spreading like wildfire online prior to the game’s official release.
It’s not yet clear how Dolphin’s current developers will respond, or how willing Valve will be to bring the store page back unless the matter is resolved in court, which could take years. Last year, Valve accidentally included the Switch emulator Yuzu in its YouTube trailer for the Steam Deck. The video was later edited and re-uploaded to remove the reference. The company did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
With the wind at their back, Sony Interactive Entertainment CEO Jim Ryan and head of PlayStation Studios Hermen Hulst recently presented the state of the PlayStation 5 ecosystem to investors and hinted at what’s coming in the near future. Among other things, the company promised new IPs, more live-service games, and a big push behind cloud gaming.
Type S: Chiaki’s Journey II Volume 4
While Sony’s big gaming showcase will offer specific details on new game announcements, release dates, and potential hardware refreshes, the investor presentation was a broader look at the current state of the PlayStation business and where it’s headed next. We got a pretty granular breakdown of some interesting sales data as well as cryptic teases of upcoming initiatives, like Sony’s rumored cloud gaming handheld, Q Lite [Update 5/25/2023 11:07 a.m. ET: the devices was revealed in the showcase and it’s wild looking]. Here are some of the biggest takeaways from the company’s latest business meeting.
PS VR2 is already outselling the first virtual reality headset
Sony’s new virtual reality headset is a comfortable but pricey bundle that requires users to already own a PS5, but initial sales numbers show it’s actually tracking ahead of the first PS VR headset. PS VR2 sold 600,000 units in its first six weeks, while the PS VR1 sold closer to 550,000. Whether that momentum will build the platform into something more than an expensive accessory for enthusiasts remains to be seen.
Image: Sony / Kotaku
Analysts previously called for a price cut to fuel sales, and it’s unclear if big new games will arrive without a larger install base, especially as companies like Meta lay off VR developers amid cutbacks.
Sony plans to invest a ton in new franchises
Since the PS5 launched, fans have been waiting to see what new IPs would grow out of the latest console generation. So far it’s been mostly sequels to series that already existed or got their start on the PS4 like God of War, Horizon Zero Dawn, and Spider-Man. But Sony revealed that new franchises are planned. PlayStation Studios’ investment in new IP will hit 50 percent in 2025, compared to only 20 percent in 2019. However the lag in production means we might not end up seeing the results of that spending until late in the PS5’s life cycle.
Live-service games will be over half of that spending
Sony’s first-party single-player games have been setting the bar for story-driven blockbusters for years now, from The Last of Us to Ghost of Tsushima. It’s clear the company now wants to do the same for live-service multiplayer games as well, and will be leveraging its recent acquisition of Destiny 2 maker Bungie to achieve that.
Image: Sony / Kotaku
The breakdown of total spending on content this year will be 55 percent on live-service business models vs 45 percent on “traditional” ones. The difference will be even more stark by 2025, when live-service spending will reach 60 percent of seemingly all production costs. It’s possible some of those games will still have a traditional single-player emphasis and just include cosmetic shops, like Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed Valhalla. Others are sure to be multiplayer-focused affairs more like Destiny 2.
PS5 owners spend a ton on microtransactions
Prestigious exclusives might help sell consoles, but it’s not what makes the most money once players are locked in. Sony revealed that PS5 players are spending over $100 more than PS4 players were at a similar point in the console cycle. That extra money isn’t coming from more games sold, however. It’s coming from spending on add-on content, meaning paid DLC and microtransactions.
Full game sales actually dropped by 10 percent on the PS5, while add-on content grew by 210 percent. Although Sony collects a 30 percent commission on all in-game purchases in Fortnite, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II, and Apex Legends on the platform, it would stand to make a ton more if those purchases were made inside its own first-party exclusives.
Spider-Man sold great on PC while The Last of Us Part I is off to a slower start
2018’s Spider-Man didn’t arrive on PC until last year. In the eight months since it hit PC, the game sold an additional 1.5 million copies on the platform. The Last of Us Part I, meanwhile, has sold 368,000 copies since it arrived on Steam in March. That’s not bad considering it’s a remaster of a decade-old game many people have already played on PS3, PS4, and PS5. But it’s not exactly God of War numbers, which sold nearly a million copies in its first two and a half months on PC.
Image: Sony / Kotaku
It’s not clear how much The Last of Us Part I’s rough performance and poor optimization at launch hurt its initial momentum, compared to the overall increase in sales of the game across all platforms following the success of the hit HBO adaptation. It seems like the port was in part a learning exercise for Naughty Dog, potentially as Sony eyes bringing the rest of its games to PC.
Half of all game releases won’t just be on PS5 by 2025
In the past Sony seemed afraid to cannibalize console sales by releasing its games on PC. Now it’s clear the company is ready to do just the opposite, porting its exclusives and investing in potential mobile spin-offs. The company plans for 50 percent of its releases in 2025 to be either PC or mobile games.
A lot of players are paying for the more expensive PlayStation Plus subscriptions
When Sony unveiled its overhauled PS Plus program, creating three separate tiers and folding its PlayStation Now streaming service into the priciest one, it seemed needlessly complicated. The highest tier, Premium, also didn’t seem worth the extra price in exchange for a slim selection of PlayStation Classics and cloud gaming features that are still a work-in-progress.
Image: Sony / Kotaku
It turns out a lot of people were willing to upgrade, however. Sony says 14.1 million subscribers joined the higher tiers in the first 10 months, which now represent 30 percent of all PS Plus users. And Premium actually accounts for the majority of those with 17 percent of total subscribers, while the middle-tier, Extra, only has 13 percent.
The first PlayStation mobile game will arrive as early as 2023
Sony said it’s currently “partnered with established teams on games,” and “bringing some of our most celebrated IP to mobile,” with the first set to release in fiscal year 2023. The company acquired mobile maker Savage Game Studios last August and Bungie has also long been rumored to be working on a mobile version of Destiny 2. According to Sony’s charts, the mobile gaming market is already bigger than console and PC gaming combined, and it only projects that gap to widen in the coming years.
Sony’s doubling-down on cloud gaming
In the most cryptic part of the presentation, CEO Jim Ryan said the company has “some fairly interesting and quite aggressive plans to accelerate our initiatives in the space of the cloud.” He didn’t elaborate on what those are, but made the comment in the context of mobile gaming and portability. It certainly raises eyebrows since Sony has also now revealed a cloud gaming handheld codenamed Project Q that would be a remote play accessory for the PS5.
PS Plus also doesn’t currently support cloud gaming on smartphones either, requiring you to use a PS4, PS5, or PC. We do know that Sony has been developing a number of patents to decrease latency while streaming games, and The Verge previously reported that the company is hiring for a number of roles to build out its cloud gaming infrastructure. Cloud gaming has been at the center of the regulatory fight over Microsoft buying Activision Blizzard, and it seems like whatever the outcome of that proposed merger, Sony wants to take back some of the video game streaming market share it previously ceded to Game Pass and xCloud.
Like many others, I just bought the digital version ofThe Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom on my Switch. I paid for the game, exited the eShop, and then it just…started downloading. No prompt to delete something else to make room. No minor crisis over deciding which of the half-dozen unfinished games on my console would get the boot. The download finished quickly, and then I started playing. Simple, right? And yet I can’t remember the last time installing one of the biggest games of the year went so smoothly.
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The Week In Games: Return To Hyrule
Monday 3:53PM
Most modern blockbusters have filesizes of at least 50GB. The biggest are over 100GB, even well over it. With standard PS5 and Xbox Series X storage drives being only 500GB, with even less space available purely for storing games, it doesn’t’ take long before downloading the next hit, or even a small indie game, leads to headaches. Do I really have time to be replaying The Witcher 3 right now? Should I put God of War Ragnarök on hold while I finish Horizon Forbidden West’s Burning Shores DLC? What if I just play one more hour of the latest random 2DSoulslike I downloaded before deleting it?
Star Wars Jedi: Survivor threw this whole gauntlet into overdrive. The game was huge. The patches were huge. The patches kept coming. I love what I’ve played so far but man, that whole part sucks. God help you if you also have an online multiplayer game you jump into regularly like Destiny 2, Apex Legends, or Fortnite. And if it’s Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II, well, all I can say is I’m sorry.
Image: Nintendo
Hence the surge of relief when I installed Tears of the Kingdom and didn’t have to deal with any of that. I have a 128GB microSD in my Switch and have never pressed up against the invisible barrier of its storage limits. Nintendo is renowned for optimizing its Switch games, with filesizes routinely half of what ports like Doom 2016 require. Tears of the Kingdom is only one gigabyte bigger than Breath of the Wild, despite an entire new crafting system, a much bigger map, and a ton more voice acting. It’s a small marvel, and one I appreciate now more than ever. And the version 1.1 day-one patch? Barely 300MB.
I get it. With 4K textures, mountains of cutscenes, and full voice acting, cutting-edge blockbusters on the PS5, Xbox Series X, and PC are never going to be that small. External storage add-ons are also getting cheaper, alleviating concerns for those who can afford them. And maybe one day all our games will be streamed from the cloud anyway, making local storage obsolete. In the meantime, I’m not taking conveniently small game footprints for granted.
Something feels a little old-school about Tears of the Kingdom, and it’s not just that it’s the newest adventure for some of Nintendo’s oldest characters. The midnight launch. The lines wrapped around the block. The fact a gaming culture that’s increasingly fractured, fragmented, and heated is momentarily concentrated on Link gluing rockets to a raft. It’s nice. Also, the game just works. Incredible.
There have been a lot of buggy blockbuster launches recently, but it doesn’t sound like The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom will be one of them. Nintento’s latest big exclusive for the Switch has impressed many reviewers so far with how it runs on the six-year-old hardware, with even Digital Foundry’s experts marveling at how it performs.
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The Week In Games: Return To Hyrule
Monday 3:53PM
Back when previews dropped for the game, it seemed like there might be some big concerns around framerate drops and handheld mode performance, with anecdotal reports of slow down when crafting complex vehicles or flying between floating islands. Digital Foundry reports, however, that a pre-release patch massively improved things, alleviating those concerns.
“It’s a game changer: nearly every instance of major performance loss has been corrected resulting in a game that now holds very closely to the 30 fps target,” senior staff writer, John Linneman, said in Digital Foundry’s YouTube analysis. “Nearly the entirety of my video capture managed to maintain a solid 30 fps, at least in most instances, which for the Switch, running a game this fast and mergent is downright impressive.”
There are still some dips, mostly around using Link’s new Ultrahand ability to combine objects into useful machines—when first initiated, the game briefly drops to 20 fps—and in busy areas like Kakariko Village. Linneman points out, however, that these moments are few-and-far-between so as not to make it a big issue.
Graphically, Tears of the Kingdom looks very similar to Breath of the Wild, despite the six years separating them. Still, there appear to be slight improvements in draw distance, shadows, and cloud and mist effects. The game also apparently loads around 30 percent faster on average when fast-traveling, according to Digital Foundry’s metrics.
Gif: Nintendo / Digital Foundry / Kotaku
Handheld mode also appears to fair pretty decently, too. While the maximum resolution is capped at 720p, and thus occasionally drops below the HD threshold, it apparently looks great on the OLED Switch screen, as one might expect. The framerate does drop more often, but doesn’t sound like a deal breaker.
Several other reviews have backed up this assessment, pointing out that Tears of the Kingdom’s performance on Switch is a far cry from the bug-ridden launches of other recent Nintendo published games like Pokémon Scarlet and Violet. “Nintendo got this extraordinary game running on a 10-year-old chipset, on hardware thinner than a small stack of beer coasters, in a device I can fit in my back pocket, and it only takes up 16GB of hard drive space?” said YouTuber SkillUp in his video. “Tears of the Kingdom is a technological miracle, and that is the story that deserves to be told far more than the occasional frame drop.”
The only disappointment seems to come from the fact that a Switch 2 or Pro model didn’t arrive in time for the game. Digital Foundry points to some of the major visual improvements teased back in Tears of the Kingdom’s first trailer back at E3 2019. The scene of Link and Zelda exploring a dark cave is how the finished game opens, but it doesn’t look nearly as good as in that first glimpse.
Nintendo says new hardware won’t arrive until 2024 at the earliest. Maybe when it does, we’ll get an enhanced version of Tears of the Kingdom. In the meantime, it sounds like it plays just fine on the older console.
With The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom dropping on May 12, Nintendo is looking back and sharing more details about its predecessor, Breath of the Wild. Those details include confirmation that the Wii U console held back the production of and content included in BotW.
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As part of the eighth generation of consoles (alongside the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One), the Wii U was Nintendo’s first attempt at bridging the gap between on-the-go and at-home systems. It wasn’t a success. Yeah, it had some great games, including Bayonetta 2, Splatoon, and Xenoblade Chronicles X, among others. But the confusion around how to actually use the console, coupled with the proximity with which the GamePad had to be to the Wii U itself, made it cumbersome and frustrating. Hell, I remember when it was revealed during E3 2010 and folks (myself included) thought it was some sort of add-on for the Wii.
Despite some heavy-hitter titles like Breath of the Wild and Super Mario Maker, the Wii U was not the success Nintendo hoped it would be—or the success it’s used to. And although some of the better Wii U games are now on Nintendo Switch, the company’s home run handheld-console hybrid, Nintendo has admitted in a recent interview that BotW would have benefitted from being a Switch exclusive all along.
Some BotW features wouldn’t work on Wii U
Five Nintendo developers, including Zelda producer Eiji Aonuma, sat down to answer some questions about Tears of the Kingdom in a multi-part interview. In the latest segment, published on the official Nintendo website on May 10, the group was asked about how TotK has expanded in relation to its predecessor. Technical director Takuhiro Dohta explained that certain design elements couldn’t be implemented due to hardware limitations.
“Actually, the previous title, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, was originally developed for Wii U, so there were restrictions in development,” Dohta said. “There were a lot of ideas we wanted to implement during its development, but we made clear decisions on what we wouldn’t do in that game. For example, we decided that it wouldn’t involve flying. Then Aonuma kept saying, ‘If flying is out of the question, I want to dig underground!’ And we’d respond, ‘Oh no! Please don’t make us develop that too!’”
Now that TotK is a Nintendo Switch exclusive, though, those concepts left on the cutting-room floor—like cliffside caves that should present new exploration opportunities—are making an appearance. This is largely because the team is reusing the BotW map to streamline development.
“For The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, we began by compiling and implementing ideas we couldn’t include in the previous title,” Dohta said. “We wouldn’t have been able to do so had we made a completely new world, so developing in the same setting as the previous game was significant in this sense as well.”
Elsewhere in the interview, art director Satoru Takizawa confirmed that “traditional” Zelda dungeons are coming back as well. Although we learned this from the recent TotK leaks, it seems they will be more expansive than you saw in Link’s last outing.
“Making a ‘wide variety’ was pretty challenging,” Takizawa said. “The four Divine Beasts were the dungeons in [BotW], and they shared similar designs. This time, the dungeons are huge and each carry their own regional look and feel, just like traditional The Legend of Zelda games. We think they will provide a satisfying challenge for players. They were certainly a challenge to develop!”
Kotaku reached out to Nintendo for comment.
Tears of the Kingdom looks to be a huge expansion to Breath of the Wild, and not just because of the sky island you can explore above The Great Plateau. With Link’s plethora of new abilities, such as the Fuse skill that al mostly directly responds to weapon durability, it’ll be interesting to see what other ideas Nintendo has in store when Link’s latest adventure drops on May 12.
Sony has quietly closed down PixelOpus, one of its first-party PlayStation Studios. Based in San Mateo, California, the studio was responsible for 2014’s Entwined and 2019’s Concrete Genie.
This Wacky Magical Girl Anime Is Studio Trigger-Coded To Perfection
News of this first broke through a Twitter post from the studio, which expressed the team’s gratitude to the players who have enjoyed their games.
“Dear friends, our PixelOpus adventure has come to an end. As we look to new futures, we wanted to say a heartfelt thank you to the millions of passionate players who have supported us, and our mission to make beautiful, imaginative games with heart. We are so grateful!”
Sony didn’t immediately comment on the closure publicly but has since confirmed in a statement to IGN that PixelOpus is, in fact, shuttering on June 2.
“PlayStation Studios regularly evaluates its portfolio and the status of studio projects to ensure they meet the organization’s short and long-term strategic objectives,” the company told IGN. “As part of a recent review process, it has been decided that PixelOpus will close on June 2.”
PixelOpus was a small team within the hulking giant that is PlayStation Studios, having less than 20 employees as of 2019. The studio’s breakout game was 2019’s Concrete Genie on PS4, which was gorgeous to look at and had cool painting mechanics, but its pacing felt a bit plodding, even with a brisk run time of five or so hours. Before the closure, Pixelopus was working on a project with Sony Pictures Animation, but we don’t know yet if that game is still in the works with another team or has been canceled entirely.
It’s a sad end for a talented studio, but feels pretty in line with Sony’s hard pivot to prestige blockbusters at all costs. On top of closing PixelOpus, the company shuttered Japan Studio in 2021, which was putting out some of the more experimental work within the PlayStation first-party ecosystem. It’s a shame, and while there are still some studios doing cool things at places like Media Molecule, there’s certainly a gap within Sony’s catalog without it.
Some retro gaming enthusiasts are so preoccupied with what they could build, they won’t stop to question if they should. One such diabolical maker has combined his love of retro consoles with his expertise in 3D printing and robotics to build the NESdestroyer: a repurposed NES console shell with a fully mobile, circular-saw-equipped combat robot inside. It is a delightful work of destructive art.
Thank You, PS Plus, For Making My Backlog Even Bigger
Having previously built fabulous creations such as the world’s fastest Roomba and an aquatic drone with a first-person camera controlled via head-tracking, Australian maker Electrosync’s latest creation is likely to inspire fear in the hearts of Sega Master System owners. Featuring a dangerous blade capable of easily slicing through flesh, watermelons, and beer cans, Electrosync’s NESdestroyer is a mechanical death machine you can’t help but fall in love with. Observe, from start to finish, the birth of this beauty via his YouTube channel:
Electrosync
Inspired by his love of the great sport of competitive combat robotics, Electrosync saw fit to do what might make more than a few retro gamers squirm: dice up and repurpose an actual Nintendo Entertainment System shell to serve as the suit of armor for a battle-ready robot. Its high-speed blade inspires dread, but it’s also cute as hell, especially in this video from Electrosync’s Instagram featuring delicate acoustic guitar played over motorized carnage.
Isn’t it adorable?
Built for “exhibition matches” in the BattleBots TV show’s beetleweight class (for robots at three pounds, or 1.36 kilograms), the entire original guts of the NES console had to go to make way for conversion into a combat machine. The actual robotic parts were made of repurposed parts themselves, including a pulley from a 3D printer, and a motor Electrosync salvaged from a drone he crashed.
Once built and ready for fighting, Electrosync sicced his creation on a watermelon, a fake NES game, and a can of Australian beer (Victoria Bitter). While the NES cartridge’s plastic proved an unbeatable foe (causing the blade’s motors to jam up), NESdestroyer made quick, messy, gory work of the beer and watermelon.
Electrosync has also teased that more is to come. Describing the fruit and beer as mere “training,” he closes his video by saying the NESdestroyer’s next challenge will be the Nintendo Entertainment System’s arch nemesis: The Sega Master System. This will be a fight for the ages.
Electrosync has made the design files for the NESdestroyer available on his Patreon, should you harbor ambitions of destruction yourself.
The Last Of Us—a zombie apocalypse game, you might have heard of it—was finally released on PC this week. That’s good news for anyone who hasn’t managed to play it over its past three releases on various PlayStation consoles, but the bad news is that, at launch at least, the game isn’t at its best.
Thank You, PS Plus, For Making My Backlog Even Bigger
At time of posting the game only has a 33% positive rating on Steam, a figure and timeframe that has little to do with the quality of the game itself, and everything to do with the condition it has released in. Player’s complaints are many, but they boil down to a few widespread issues like:
Freezes: The game is locking up at all kinds of random places, sometimes on its own, sometimes taking Steam (or the whole PC) with it.
CTD: The game is constantly crashing to the desktop for many users.
Performance: Players are complaining that the game places far too much strain on the CPU rather than the GPU, and that as a result performance is nowhere near as smooth as it should be relative to their systems.
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Mouse stutter: Now this one is funny. Apparently using the keyboard + mouse results in stutters. Using a gamepad removes this. So there’s a control-based performance hit? Wild (this was also reportedly an issue with the Uncharted ports as well).
Some of my favourite Steam reviews include:
Wow this runs like crap
The single worst PC port I have ever seen. Waited 10 years for the game, avoiding any and all walkthrough videos, reviews, spoilers and etc. and this disgusting excuse of a port ruined every single ounce of excitement I had for the game. Building shaders for almost 2 hours now, crashes in main menu while building shaders every 5 or so minutes.
Terrible optimization. Game takes more than 8 gigs of VRAM on medium settings, 100% CPU utilization in menu. And the temps are really high too. Probably going to refund soon.
Pre-purchased & pre-loaded. Launched it as soon as it was ready. Went to the setings. Turns out this game is eating up nearly 10GB of VRAM at 1440p max settings (game defaulted the settings to maximum). I’m running a RTX 3080 Ti with 12GB VRAM, mind you. Never could get past the menu screen which always crashes when the game displays a notification at the bottom right corner that reads ‘BUILDING SHADERS’.
While you’d expect this stuff will be fixed (or at least improved) in the months to come, it’s starting to become a disappointing pattern that many of Sony’s big PlayStation ports are hitting with performance problems on PC. Horizon was a mess, Uncharted suffered from many of these same problems and now this. Sure, there’s encouragement to be found there too—Horizon overcame its early struggles to be a damn fine experience on the PC—but these bad first impressions aren’t helping anyone.
For what it’s worth, Naughty Dog has responded to the issues, saying:
The Last of Us Part I PC players: we’ve heard your concerns, and our team is actively investigating multiple issues you’ve reported. We will continue to update you, but our team is prioritizing updates and will address issues in upcoming patches.
Microsoft’s long-running introductory offer for its Xbox Game Pass subscription platform, which let users try the service out for $1 for the first month before moving onto more expensive payments, has finally come to a close.
As The Verge report, the deal—which applied to both Xbox Game Pass Ultimate and the PC Game Pass—has recently been pulled, with a Microsoft spokesperson saying “We have stopped our previous introductory offer for Xbox Game Pass Ultimate and PC Game Pass and are evaluating different marketing promotions for new members in the future”.
Anyone signed up for Game Pass will see months from existing subscriptions converted into partial months on the sharing plan. If you’re currently signed up for Xbox Game Pass Ultimate, every remaining month will turn into 18 days of Game Pass Friends and Family. Those signed up for the piecemeal tiers will see their subscriptions convert into 12 days of Game Pass Friends and Family.
There are some limitations, however. If you’re the account holder, you can only have four additional people on an account at any given time, and can only share with eight unique accounts over the course of a calendar year. And it’s region-locked: The primary account holder can only add members who live in the same country or region.
While that’s not a 1:1 replacement for the $1 offer, which was just a good deal for anyone, it does mean folks recommending Xbox Game Pass to friends or family would have a pretty easy way to get them onboard via their own account.
Microsoft’s $69 billion deal to buy Activision Blizzard inched closer in a big way on Friday. UK regulators announced a provisional finding that the acquisition wouldn’t harm competition, despite previously suggesting the Xbox maker might need to spin-off the Call of Duty business to get the sale approved.
The UK’s Competition and Markets Authority was initially skeptical of Microsoft’s promises to keepthe military shooteravailable on PlayStation consoles for many years to come, arguing it could have a financial incentive to pull the blockbuster series from the platform in the future. The CMA now says that after receiving more detailed information about Call of Duty player spending, it’s clear that making the series exclusive to Xbox would lose Microsoft a ton of money.
“The CMA inquiry group has updated its provisional findings and reached the provisional conclusion that, overall, the transaction will not result in a substantial lessening of competition in relation to console gaming in the UK,” it wrote in a press release. The CMA continued:
While the CMA’s original analysis indicated that this strategy would be profitable under most scenarios, new data (which provides better insight into the actual purchasing behaviour of CoD gamers) indicates that this strategy would be significantly loss-making under any plausible scenario. On this basis, the updated analysis now shows that it would not be commercially beneficial to Microsoft to make CoD exclusive to Xbox following the deal, but that Microsoft will instead still have the incentive to continue to make the game available on PlayStation.
The CMA is still reviewing Game Pass
The regulatory agency is still investigating the cloud gaming side of the deal, with its final verdict/decision still not due out until 26 April. Call of Duty seemed to be the biggest sticking point in the CMA’s skepticism of the deal, however, and Microsoft seems to have now tentatively assuaged those fears. It’s also been busy shoring up its defense on the cloud gaming front by striking deals with several smaller competitors to guarantee its first-party games will be available on other services if the deal goes through.
One big question that remains is what a final deal between Microsoft and Sony will look like. An Activision spokesperson had previously claimed that Sony Interactive Entertainment CEO Jim Ryan was unwilling to negotiate, stating his only objective was to permanently kill the acquisition. As that outcome becomes increasingly unlikely, the PS5 manufacturer will seemingly have no alternative but to hammer out the details of Microsoft’s 10-year Call of Duty proposal.
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Determining the availability of Activision Blizzard games like Diablo IV and an upcoming Black Ops sequel on Game Pass competitor PS Plus will be a key part of that. In its latest argument to the CMA pushing back on Sony’s concerns, Microsoft went so far as to suggest that 10 years would be plenty of time for it to go make its own Call of Duty competitor if it was so concerned about losing it.
In the meantime, Microsoft still needs to get approval from European regulators and deal with an antitrust lawsuit by the Federal Trade Commission. But investors seem more hyped for the deal than they’ve ever been. Activision Blizzard’s stock price shot up to $85 a share following the CMA’s latest announcement, more than at any point since the acquisition was announced.
I spend a lot of time putzing around my PlayStation 5: deleting games here, downloading them there, looking for old saves, and trying to talk to friends. It’s made me appreciate every new firmware update, no matter how small or niche the improvements it makes are. And earlier this month, Sony delivered a bunch of satisfying tweaks.
Players got a preview of March’s big 7.0 firmware upgrade back in February, revealing Discord integration, new save data transfer options, and more. It recently went live, and it’s a far cry from the usual opaque “improves system performance” updates. It’s not as big a deal as the PS5 finally getting folders, and there are still plenty of other new features I’d love to see, but it’s another milestone in the platform’s continued improvement.
Use Discord to voice chat with Xbox friends
Screenshot: Discord
Cross-play has been great for bringing people across PS5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC together, but actually trying to communicate with them was still a drag. Discord integration fixes that, and lets you easily start up conversations with anyone and feed the audio through your console.
Plus, it doesn’t even have to be game-specific. Someone playing Rocket League? Another person watching Mandalorian? No problem! Discord is actually great for just chilling together while everyone does their own thing.
Capture gameplay using your voice
It sounds silly, but you can now use the microphone on the DualSense controller to ask the PS5 to record gameplay. Perfect for capturing gameplay in the thick of battle or a tense competition when you don’t want to lose control while toggling over manually. Now if only there was text-to-speech to type out the social media posts sharing my highlights.
Update your DualSense wirelessly
There’s nothing worse than trying to play a game and seeing that your controller needs to get a firmware update. Previously, this required plugging it into the PS5. Now, you can download and install it wirelessly. It was the smallest of inconveniences, and thankfully it’s now gone.
Get variable refresh rates on 1440p monitors
Variable Refresh Rate support came to PS5 last year. It helps the framerate flow more smoothly and makes the graphics look crisper. With the lastest patch, it’ll also work with 1440p monitors, a niche but practical halfway point between 1080p and 4K. I don’t play my PS5 on one of these displays, but I’d be pleasantly surprised if I did.
Receive notifications for save data in the cloud
Image: Sony
Like a lot of PS5 owners, I have a huge library of PS4 games, and save data from all of them backed up in the cloud. Unlike Xbox Series X/S, however, the PS5 doesn’t automatically pull that save data over. But now, it does something almost as good: send a notification prompt when you install a game that supports your existing PS4 data (like a PS5 game where you can transfer saves). Clicking on the prompt will automatically start the transfer, rather than having to go rummaging through a bunch menus.
Join games directly from the party chat
Another button-prompt shortcut, it’s now possible to meet up with friends in-game directly from the party chat menu. It’s a nice time saver considering how often you migh group up to play the same thing, and your friends or clan mates probably already got started before you.
See what your friends are playing more easily
This feature is still somewhat incomplete, but it’s still a step in the right direction. Like with Steam, it’s now easier to see which friends own a game you have or are actively playing it. A small section with that info sits under each game tile on the PS5 home screen. My only quibble is that you have to click through to see which friends own it, and it only tells you someone plays that game if they are online in the middle of an active session. Baby steps.
Request to watch a friend’s game directly from their profile
I rarely use the share screen feature, usually because if I’m online with friends we’re probably already playing something together. Still, it’s another nice shortcut to be able to quickly watch what someone’s playing directly from their profile, skipping another bit of the PS5’s tedious and often esoteric menu scrolling.
Filter games when adding them to a folder
Image: Sony
Alright, game folders are my favorite new feature the PS5 has gotten since launch, and they just got easier to make. When they first went live, you had to scroll through your entire library adding stuff as you went. Now you can filter it by various categories, making the whole organizational process much, much faster. Will I ever play 99 percent of games I stick in the PS5’s folders? Not a chance. But I like doing it all the same. It helps me relax and feel less guilty about my backlog.
It’s possible we’ll get another batch of PS5 tweaks later in the year. “We are always thinking about the features that our fans might want to see and ways to make their gaming experiences on PS5 more fun, social, and connected,” Sony Product Management VP Hiromi Wakai said in a recent interview. “We keep a very long list of features and think carefully about how we prioritize our time and resources to deliver the ones that will make the most meaningful impact on our players’ experience.”
Hopefully PS5 background themes aren’t too far away.
While Japanese games of varying genres are enjoying success these days, the 2000s and 2010s weren’t as kind, especially in Western markets. Since then, there’s been a lot of speculation as to why Japanese games struggled during these years, often from westerners themselves, with some pointing to key game design trends. But recent comments from Final Fantasy’s creator Hironobu Sakaguchi suggest that the decline of unique console hardware, exclusives, and cultural differences is the likely cause.
By the late 1990s, Japanese games like Final Fantasy VII, Chrono Trigger, or Castlevania had become must-play experiences for their inspired stories, excellent technical presentation, and engaging gameplay. But the following two decades were a different story. Anticipated entries like Final Fantasy XIII failed to reach sales expectations with the rise of Western RPGs such as TK (and many felt that train came off the rails starting with 2001’s Final Fantasy X). Newer attempts at franchises like Sakaguchi’s Blue Dragon on Xbox 360 in 2006 were met with lukewarm reception at best. Meanwhile, Western-made games like Mass Effect had become the new gaming sensations. While some may point to declining interests in traditional, linear forms of storytelling in games as a likely reason, Hironobu Sakaguchi suspects that dramatic changes in the hardware used to play games presented a tough road for Japanese devs to follow.
Sakaguchi: ‘Consoles like the NES and PlayStation were very specific hardware’
Speaking to IGN along with Castlevania senior producer Koji Igarashi, Sakaguchi discussed why he feels Japanese games were of “higher quality” for systems with ‘“specific hardware”’ like the NES or PSX. The answer, as many students of video game history might suspect, has to do with those very consoles. With specific hardware configurations produced by Japanese manufacturers, devs at the time had to become experts in how to best utilize these devices, and there was no language barrier to gaining these skill sets. Sakaguchi said:
“[Specific, Japanese-made consoles] made it easier for Japanese developers to master the hardware, as we could ask Nintendo or Sony directly in Japanese. This is why—I realize it might be impolite to say this—Japanese games were of a higher quality at the time. As a result, Japanese games were regarded as more fun, but when the hardware became easier to develop for, things quickly changed.”
Castlevania producer Koji Igarashi added that the “long history of PC culture” in the West was better adapted to the hardware trends that would follow in the 2000s, a trend which continues to this day. The PS5 and Xbox Series consoles more closely match PC hardware than dedicated gaming boxes perhaps ever have. That change wasn’t easy.
Igarashi describes the journey as a tough growing pain. “Japanese developers could no longer rely on their speciality as console developers,” he said, “and had to master PC development.”
While some may be quick to point out, perhaps, that the PS3’s unique and troublesomeCell Broadband Engine certainly fits the criteria of “specific hardware,” it was maybe too specific. Though Sony made incredible promises for its performance (and odd commercials), its unique architecture was a chore for developers around the world, leading Sony to pivot away from it for the PS4. But the 2000s and 2010s were also a time where Japanese games, particularly Final Fantasy, made the switch to multi-platform releases. Devil May Cry 4 was another notable series that made the jump to other platforms. This shattered the trend of focusing on a specific set of hardware constraints. And at the time it didn’t really go over too well. It seems natural now to expect a Final Fantasy to appear on multiple consoles, but the announcement of XIII coming to Xbox 360 was quite the surprise in the 2000s.
Sakaguchi believes that where we play our games also makes a difference
Sakaguchi also said that the “cultural differences” between Japan and the West make meaningful differences in what kinds of games are made. “In the West,” Sakaguchi said, “children often get their own room from a very young age, whilst in Japan the whole family sleeps together in the same room.” He continued, “such small cultural differences can be felt through the games we make today […] I believe that cherishing my Japanese cultural background is what attracts people towards my games in the first place.”
While I for one can say that my private bedroom probably enhanced my experience of Final Fantasy VII, Sakaguchi’s comments concerning focused mastery of specific hardware likely explained why such epic experiences often felt so unique to the platforms I was playing them on. Or maybe that’s just the nostalgia talking.
The Nintendo GameCube was a weird little console, one that had all kinds of wacky add-ons and peripherals released for it over the years, from LAN adapters to Game Boy Links to bongo drums. One thing I never knew about until today, however, were the company’s plans for an official LCD screen.
Via Go Nintendo, Adam Doree has uploaded an uncut video of a presentation Nintendo made at E3 2002, featuring Shigeru Miyamoto, Satoru Iwata and Bill Trinen. In this video, after the crew had spent ages talking about Wind Waker and Metroid Prime, Iwata reveals that they have one last surprise to discuss: a first-party LCD screen, designed to attach to the top of the console and make it even more portable than it already was (the GameCube, famously, included a carrying handle on the back). I’ve set the video to autoplay at the beginning of the discussion about the screen:
I never knew this! Sure other companies have stepped into this vacuum over the years, releasing various screens of varying quality, but it would have been very cool to get an official Nintendo monitor.
It measured just five inches across, with a 4:3 ratio, and a resolution of just 320×240. Which sounds bad by 2023 standards but this was 2002, so for the time they weren’t terrible, as you can see in the footage above, where Mario Sunshine looks just fine! It’s also interesting hearing Iwata say it was peripherals like this that specifically convinced Nintendo to install digital output—itself a forgotten but amazing aspect of the hardware—for the GameCube.
Iwata even reveals that he had met with Sega’s Yuji Naka—in happier times—about Phantasy Star Online, and the pair discussed whether they could take that title and “make it a portable game” to make the most of this screen. None of which ever came to pass, of course, but it’s still neat imagining a GameCube era where you could have grabbed your console by its handle, taken it to a friends house and played Mario Kart Double Dash on your own little official Nintendo screen.
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Just because I’m only learning about this today doesn’t mean there isn’t other stuff out there about the screen; here’s a 2002 write-up on IGN about how nice it looked, for example, while its listing on Console Variations speculates that the high cost of LCD screens at the time made it too expensive to release. The video below, meanwhile, has a good linger on footage of the screen alongside some speakers, part of the most 2002 gaming setup imaginable.
E3 2002 – Nintendo Booth Footage
UPDATE: Thanks to Spindash on Twitter, there’s more! Satoru Iwata quietly revealed years later that the monitor had secret, glasses-free 3D capabilities that Nintendo “kept secret”, along with the trivia that the Phantasy Star Online figures visible in some of the display units ended up getting stolen off the showroom floor!
