In the wake of a massive hype wave following the latest The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom trailer, Nintendo has seemingly ratched up the number of rogue copyright claims it puts out against content creators on Youtube, and at least one of them is hitting back. In his latest video, Eric “PointCrow” Morino pleaded with Nintendo to leave his channel alone after it recently issued dozens of additional claims against his videos.
Skyward Sword HD Revisits The Stumble That Led To Breath Of The Wild
“Please remove these strikes and claims or at least start a dialogue with us so we can all move forward with the excitement I’m sure you would love to see about your future games,” Morino said in a video to Nintendo posted on YouTube on April 14 that he said was vetted by his lawyer. The request comes after the Switch manufacturer apparently doubled down on issuing copyright claims and strikes against Morino’s channel, increasing the total number to 28, including ones against older videos that had nothing to do with Breath of the Wild, like one about Wii Sports.
Nintendo did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Nintendo first began targeting the Zelda speedrunner’s YouTube channel on April 6 after he uploaded footage of a Breath of the Wild multiplayer mod he commissioned and released to the public. Despite making videos featuring challenge runs and other modded content for years, it appeared to be the first time Nintendo signaled it took any sort of issue with the content. Morino posted about it on Twitter at the time, criticizing the move and calling on the publisher to reverse its decision.
He now says Nintendo has done the opposite, proceeding to copyright claim over 20 additional videos spanning his entire content making career. While most of them included the word “mod” in the title, at least one contained just vanilla gameplay with commentary. “These takedowns may have started with modded content, but they’ve spiraled into something else entirely,” Morino said in his latest video.
On April 23, another Zelda Youtuber, Croton, said 10 of their streams and two of their videos were “nuked” from the platform. “No answers, no context, just a copyright removal,” they tweeted. “And one of these videos has literally nothing to do with mods and was simply a Zelda challenge run.”
In his own video, Morino accuses Nintendo of flouting its content creator guidelines to target him, and defends his modded Breath of the Wild runs, which have collectively garnered tens of millions of views and helped maintain excitement around a game that’s now six years old. “To be clear I have never encouraged piracy of Nintendo’s games,” he said. “The mods I’ve commissioned are not being sold, and all of the code is custom, meaning they are free of Nintendo’s assets.”
At the exact time when many content creators are gearing up for a massive influx of interest from fans and viewers ahead of the release of Tears of the Kingdom next month, Morino’s now weary of making content for the game at all, lest the arbitrary copyright claims continue. “This is a little scary because the precedent that they set with this case may apply heavily for their upcoming release of The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom,” he said. “As per their decisions to take down challenge and gameplay videos alongside the modded content it will be difficult for any content creator to post creative concepts without having the fear of Nintendo exercising their copyright over video that is in line with their own policies.”
Morino initially planned to appeal the copyright claims, defending his videos on fair use grounds, but he now says those legal efforts could cost millions and could jeopardize the future of his over 1.6 million subscriber YouTube channel. He recently tweeted, “it’s hard to become excited for Tears of the Kingdom when the Zelda community is being nuked off YouTube.”
The wait is nearly over. The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom finally hits the Switch on May 14, 2023. Three epic trailers plus a look at some gameplay have only made us even more excited to finally dive into the next chapter in Nintendo’s adventure series. This time around, Link has a number of sweet new abilities. One of them is a clever take on crafting, which the game calls “Fuse.”
Link’s new “Fuse” and “Ultrahand” abilities, as teased in trailers and fully explained in a gameplay deep dive on March 28, is actually a pretty sweet crafting system. Instead of just following preset recipes for crafting, players will be able to combine all manner of unique objects they find around Hyrule to forge makeshift weaponry, Mad Max-worthy vehicles, and who knows what else? Footage so far has shown the ability to create custom designs with simulated physics like buoyancy and air propulsion. Other examples show off weapon upgrades that trigger status effects like freezing.
With such a versatile system, the sky’s the limit for what you might be able to craft come May 12. To give you some idea of just how handy Link can get, we’ve cataloged everything we’ve seen our hero Fuse thus far. You’ll see he’s actually very handy.
Dumpster divers find all kinds of things in the trash. From a full pallet of cold brew coffee to hundreds of metal tins for Yu-Gi-Oh cards, there’s no shortage of cool stuff buried in the heaps of garbage you’ll likely find in the bin. But while some of it may be useless, redditor Rydirp7 took the saying “one man’s trash is another man’s treasure” to heart and built a whole PC out of discarded computer parts.
It’s no secret that electronics aren’t as recyclable as other materials, like certain types of fabrics, glass, metals, and plastics. According to a 2019 UN report, about 50 million tons of electronic waste (e-waste) is produced every year globally, with only 20 percent of it formally recycled. This means the other 80 percent—which equals an annual value of $62.5 billion—either gets shipped off to a landfill or is “informally recycled,” the process of throwing away unwanted things in the trash that can end up in poorer communities, which results in environmental contamination and hazardous health impacts. This is where dumpster divers, or folks who dig through the garbage to find cool or interesting stuff, can alleviate the strain by repurposing what was unused into something actually usable.
Rydirp7 did just that recently, posting his trash PC build on the popular subreddit r/DumpsterDiving and revealing that he only bought two components for the custom-built machine. The rest, from the graphics card to the processing chip, were found in a local dumpster. One redditor said it was “amazing.” Another user said they have “mad respect for people” like him. Most in the comments simply congratulated him on the build and hopes he keeps it up. Kotaku reached out to Rydirp7 to learn about the process behind building a trash PC and the benefits of looking in the garbage for gaming setups.
Dumpster diving for PC parts
Rydirp7, who is a resident of South Dakota, said he was inspired by the stuff he heard about dumpster diving online, and in the summer of 2022, thought he’d give the activity a shot. He visited a local computer store in his town “in the middle of nowhere” to see if he could find some things and was quite surprised by his discoveries.
“There was some stuff there,” Rydirp7 told Kotaku in a phone interview. “Ever since, I occasionally check the store’s dumpster and yeah, with that PC that you saw in the Reddit post, it was built almost entirely using parts pulled out of that dumpster over the course of like six or seven months.”
The only components he bought were the power supply and RAM, which came out to approximately $120 in total. Rydirp7 said these two parts were already in his possession as he purchased them for a different computer but figured he’d reuse them for this build since they were just lying around his home. Interestingly, he ran into an issue with the graphics card he found, as it was a 10-year-old EVGA GeForce GTX 570. While it “runs games decently,” he had to extensively troubleshoot it because “the drivers wouldn’t install correctly.”
Image: Rydirp7 / Kotaku / Shutterstock / GROGL
After countless hours of trying to fix the graphics card, he decided it was time to just bake the thing in the oven. Seriously. This is known as the oven trick in the PC community and, as Rydirp7 put it, the card’s been working fine ever since.
“Essentially what the oven trick is is you take off pretty much everything from the graphics card,” Rydirp7 said. “The heat sink, the shroud—basically, you strip it down to the bare PCB and then what you do is wrap it in aluminum foil to help protect some of the more sensitive components on the PCB. You preheat the oven to somewhere around 400 degrees Fahrenheit, then put the graphics card, or whatever electronic it is that you’re trying to fix, in the oven. It’s typically like 8 to 12 minutes for a graphics card, I believe. But yeah, that’s basically the oven trick. I’ve done this on two different graphics cards: The other one was a GTX 240 and then this GTX 570, and the trick has worked both times for me.”
Baking the graphics card like a cookie in the oven works because faulty connections due to loose or old soldering joints are re-melted, allowing the power to reconnect and flow back through what are likely broken points.
The challenges of building a trash PC
Rydirp7 admits he’s “a bit of a hoarder when it comes to PC parts,” so this trash PC was actually the second one he built out of garbage components. The first one—which had an AMD FX 6300 CPU, 8GB of RAM, that GTX 240, and a 500-watt power supply—went to one of his friends a while back. While he said his first attempt at a trash PC was perfectly serviceable this second one is “quite a bit better,” because it houses double the RAM and outputs more power. However, one of the most challenging components to find for the build was the 256GB SSD.
Image: Rydirp7
“The SSD was the last part I found,” Rydirp7 said. “I had been checking the dumpster for months and months but couldn’t ever find anything. When there was something, it was like a hard drive that was already disassembled. Initially when I found this SSD, I thought it was a new one that didn’t have any data on it. But when I got the SSD hooked up to the system to install Windows 10, it turned out that it actually wasn’t new and had someone else’s data on it. So what I do when I find a part that has someone else’s data on it is immediately wipe it for the privacy of the previous owner because it’s none of my business.”
Meanwhile, the Dell OptiPlex 9010 motherboard was one of the first components Rydirp7 pulled out of his local computer store’s garbage. Unlike the graphics card and SSD, this part worked fine and didn’t need to be tinkered with. He said the store, which he wouldn’t disclose the name or location of for privacy reasons, “mostly throws out older hardware” that’s still functional. It’s thanks to this store that he was able to build what has become his “main rig.” While he doesn’t play a whole lot of games, he listed a few that he plays regularly, noting that his trash PC “can get a little warm” when he’s gaming.
“It could probably play Crysis,” Rydirp7 said. “But yeah, I don’t actually play a whole lot of games. The only stuff I really play is Minecraft, Roblox, and Scrap Mechanic. That’s about it, and my PC runs all of those games fairly well.”
The benefits of building a trash PC
Building trash PCs is one way for combatting the roughly 70 percent of e-waste that Americans produce, Rydirp7 said, acknowledging the frequency with which most people’s old electronics end up in landfills.
“This tactic of building trash PCs from garbage components keeps perfectly usable electronics from going into landfills,” Rydirp7 said. “It can be easy for someone to build a computer with little to no money invested in it.”
As far as the viability of the trash PC, well, it depends on what you can find and how you’re going to use it. It’s more than capable of performing your everyday tasks, like writing emails and watching YouTube, another thing Rydirp7 said he frequently does on this computer. But as my colleague Claire Jackson said, “In 2010, this was a nice rig!”
Image: Rydirp7 / Kotaku / Shutterstock / GROGL
In 2023, these aren’t the ideal components for playing more modern games with 4K visuals and ray tracing. Rydirp7 may be able to get away with running Crysis on his trash PC, especially since Crytek’s sci-fi FPS has been optimized to run on the Nintendo Switch these days. But it’s highly unlikely he could play Cyberpunk 2077 or any of the PlayStation games—like Days Gone or God of War—that made the jump to PC.
Still, to each their own. And you can’t complain much when you’ve only spent a cool $120 on something that could run most indies and Xbox 360-era games. That’s not a bad trade-off, especially if you don’t play that many games to begin with. You can check out Rydirp7’s trash PC specs below:
EVGA GTX 570 Graphics Card
Intel Core I7-3770 Non-K Processor
16GB Corsair Vengeance RAM at 1600mhz
750-watt Corsair Power Supply
iBUYPOWER Snowblind Element Case
Dell OptiPlex 9010 Motherboard
While it may not be the most powerful PC in the world, what actually makes this PC stronger than most is the fact that it was built sustainably in the most literal definition of the phrase. By recycling and reusing old computer components, turning them into a functional Frankenstein PC, Rydirp7 has has figured out a way to reduce his overall environmental footprint. I can’t speak to his energy consumption’s impact on the world, but building trash PCs could go a long way in minimizing global e-waste.
Bungie is cracking down on Destiny 2 players using third-party peripherals to cheat in the game’s competitive and cooperative modes.
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The studio is following Call of Duty: Warzone’s example, which implemented a similar ban at the beginning of April, and is now monitoring when players use devices to get the leg up against others. Bungie outlines its policy in a blog post on its website, but stops short of naming any specific software or hardware because it “simply [doesn’t] want to offer a bigger spotlight than necessary.” But broadly, the post lists things like “programmable controllers, keyboard and mouse adapters, advanced macros, or automation via artificial intelligence” meant to let the user use inputs in a way that goes beyond what the game or player is typically capable of.
Bungie makes a distinction between things like external accessibility aids that make the game playable as intended for people with disabilities and third-party peripherals maliciously designed to give the user an advantage over others. Because Destiny 2’s PvE content also affects things like races to finish the game’s raids at launch, Bungie is extending these rules to cooperative modes, as well.
“Simply using an accessibility aide to play Destiny 2, where a player could not play otherwise, would not be a violation of this policy,” the post reads. “Using these tools to mitigate challenges all players face, such as reducing recoil or increasing aim assist, would be a violation.”
Moving forward, Bungie says it will be monitoring for violations, with plans to issue warnings, restrictions, or outright bans depending on the situation. Cheating in online games is as old as the medium, but what that means and how it’s detectable varies from game to game. Valve recently caught and banned over 40,000 cheaters from Dota 2and then publicized the move as a threat to would-be cheaters.
While third-party software and peripherals are one part of the conversation, some competitive communities are deciding for themselves what cheating looks like. The Super Smash Bros. Ultimate competitive scene has been dealing with an in-game strategy that was deemed unfair involving the character Steve. Since then, some tournament organizers have made the decision to ban the character outright, rather than having to vet suspect players at events.
The writer O. Henry is alleged to have said of New York City, “It’ll be a great place if they ever finish it.” I have a very similar feeling about Minecraft Legends. Its mix of real-time strategy and third-person action seems like it could be a splendid game, should Mojang ever get around to completing it.
Legends is an ambitious concept. As Minecraft Dungeons is to the action-RPG, Minecraft Legends is to the strategy game, another spin-off from the almighty franchise that attempts to make a complicated genre more immediately palatable to a family audience. However, where Dungeons is a roaring success, a delightful game to sit and blast through, Legends is a bemusing and messy creation that runs out of ideas before it runs out of tutorial.
How Minecraft Legends Becomes Strategic
Screenshot: Mojang / Kotaku
It’s peculiar, reviewing something in the Minecraft milieu. It doesn’t matter a bit what I or anyone else has to say about it, because it’s predestined to be a phenomenon. My local department store is already filled with tie-in promotional products, from toys to t-shirts, a week before it’s even released. “Friends & Allies” reads one such kids’ shirt, showing the traditional Minecraft enemies stood alongside a heroic Steve-like, capturing the game’s USP: This time you fight alongside the Creepers, Zombies, Skeletons and so on, in a united front against a Piglin invasion of the Overworld.
In a large map (growing in size depending upon your difficulty level) that’s randomly arranged at the start of a single-player campaign, you are selected by three somewhat celestial beings, Knowledge, Action, and Foresight to repel the piggy invasion. These porcine pests are determined to take over the villages of the franchise’s erstwhile Villagers, building their own encampments, and despoiling the very ground beneath them. To fight against this, you play in third-person controlling your hero, accompanied by a team of golems that you create via spawners, who (are supposed to) follow you wherever you go, and follow your issued orders during on-the-fly battles.
Screenshot: Mojang / Kotaku
It all begins pretty well. Knowledge, Action, and Foresight are all brilliant characters, excellently voiced and welcoming to new players. They are there to explain the basics of the game, as new concepts are introduced in the initial stages of play. You learn how to gather resources, starting off with wood and stone. Then how to build spawners, generate golems (and later Skeletons, Creepers, Zombies, etc), beginning with two types, a ranged arrow-firing block-like creature, and a melee rock-type, that furiously punches at enemies and enemy structures. Once this is established, Minecraft Legends lets you get into scraps with the Piglins, then you find a village, and get a rundown on the basics of protecting each location’s central well, done by building walls and defensive structures.
You roam the beautiful world on the back of one of four mount types (one’s a beetle that’s great at climbing, another’s a bird that can glide from heights without taking damage), all used to negotiate those familiar Minecraft biomes, mountains, and seas. But you can also build in this world by holding down the left trigger, then placing objects RTS-style around you, or drag-dropping lengths of wall into place on the ground near your character.
With all of these gameplay elements put in place, Minecraft Legends then just sets you free with almost none of the most important mechanics properly explained, while blathering new information at you while you’re trying to come to grips with what a complete mess the controls are. Devolving entirely into “tell, don’t show,” I was left struggling to work out how I was supposed to improve my tools, as it keeps demanding you should. Via trial and error, I eventually figured out it’s about building new structures at a central location, using materials it hasn’t told me how to get yet, and oh good Lord.
Why Minecraft Legends Is So Frustrating
Screenshot: Mojang / Kotaku
Eventually, I figure all Minecraft Legends’ mechanics out. I get there. But it’s such aa frustrating experience, only to learn that one whole mess—of placing special towers that can variously improve the amounts of resources you can carry, the numbers of golems you can have in your army, the ability to have your alleys gather new resource types, and even the ability to gather other tower types—would have been far better as a skill tree in the menus. Then it would be clear, visibly understandable, and much better communicated to players.
But communication is Legends greatest failure. There’s just so much that’s so peculiarly missing here, not least when it comes to the game’s map. It allows you to fast travel between discovered villages, and also shows the location of different biomes, mount types, potential allies (the Skeletons, Creepers, etc), and the Piglin encampments. Hover over many of these and one of the characters will—after a weirdly long delay—tell you some information. Perhaps this Piglin camp is planning to create a new site tonight, or that this village is intended for attack by the Piglins and needs your help defending itself.
But what it absolutely doesn’t tell you, neither in the pop-up text nor the voice over, is whether a Piglin camp is possible to attack. To find that out, you have to run vast distances across the terrain to reach its borders, where either a (splendid) cutscene will play introducing that battle, or a text box will pop up saying you’re not yet ready to attack it. Again, get close enough and its difficulty level will appear on screen—1 to 4—giving you an idea of the challenge ahead. But that information isn’t on the map, either before or after you’ve learned it elsewhere. Why not? This is such basic stuff. The amount of time I wasted running toward battles I couldn’t play is galling, and could so easily have been prevented.
Screenshot: Mojang / Kotaku
And when Minecraft Legends does give you valuable on-screen information, it’s often obfuscated and unexplained. I eventually work out which unlabeled number represents how many characters I currently have following me anywhere, and which represents how many of my total possible golems currently exist in the world. The two can’t usefully be matched up, because the former contains any random animals you might have picked up on your travels, given the only way to select units around you is to hit X, and grab the attention of anyone in a very small circle. Which means, yes, there’s literally no way to call your units to you when exploring or battling without going up to their immediate vicinity and hitting X. Instruct them to attack that structure over there, and they’ll rush off to do so, and then when it’s done, stand there. Forever. You have to run to them, and meticulously select them all, to issue another instruction. Which is bewildering.
It gets significantly worse because of the atrocious pathfinding. Most of the Piglin bases are on raised platforms, requiring you to build ramps for your troops to ascend between the rocky plateaus. But none of them can cope with the narrow paths and enemy structures that bounce them off the platform, meaning you constantly lose your units to the ground below. Down there, rather than make their way back to you, they’ll instead just stand there, uselessly, not even defending themselves from attacks. If you’re five platforms up, trying to fight an enormous Piglin elephant-thing, while attempting to destroy enemy towers that are raining fire on you, at the same time as thirty Piglins are fighting you from all sides, you are forced to jump all the way down, gather your stragglers, guide them all the way back up to the battle, and then watch them idiotically walk off the sides again. Over and over and over.
Lose your troops entirely, as you often will, and you need to run away from the battle site to the nearest spawners you’ve placed to generate some fighters. In a traditional RTS game, this would involve zooming out from your godlike view of the map, clicking on facilities that generate new units, then commanding them to head toward your fight. But in Legends, it involves riding your purple tiger away from the hundreds of enemies all attacking you, bounding across the terrain to your nearest spawners (only possible to place on non-enemy terrain, hence the journey), create new ones, then manically gather them to follow you because they’ll just stand there if you don’t get every single one within your tiny X-circle, then run with them all back to the battle, up all your ramps again, into the fray, likely to see half of them immediately killed by a massive fireball, and the other half throw themselves off the sides to get lost in the ground below.
How Minecraft Legends Buries Its Fun
Screenshot: Mojang / Kotaku
I’ve described the above at such meticulous lengths, because that’s the majority of the experience of playing Minecraft Legends. It’s about painstakingly guiding these gormless troops via punishingly poor interaction into distant battles, over and over until you’ve finally whittled away at things enough to destroy the central portal. And all the time, you can see the fun you should be having, the solid family-friendly game that hides beneath all this clumsy crap, but you can never quite touch it.
Everything is so opaque. New structures are added with no fanfare, no notice, and are only discovered when you remember that there’s an in-game book-thing that lets you rearrange your UI. As the game progresses, you end up with the farcical issue of having about 15 different structures you want to have access to at any time, but a UI that only lets you select eight of them at a time. You’re supposed to endlessly juggle them about, which would be massively annoying if it weren’t for the next huge issue: you can’t sodding pause.
Because the game has been designed with co-op or combative multiplayer in mind, the single-player campaign that it presents as its main mode is forced to be an always-online experience. So when you hit pause to answer the front door, or deal with the kids, Minecraft Legends just carries on playing almost invisibly behind the apparent pause menu, killing your troops, and advancing time so the Piglin bases expand unchecked, villages are attacked, and allies lose faith in your support. The same is true when you’re opening the ‘book’ to try to rearrange your UI, so you can build the attacking structure you need to defend a village, but have your units wiped out while forced to fight with these menus. Idiotic.
An 8-Year-Old’s Review Of Minecraft Legends
Screenshot: Mojang / Kotaku
All these frustrations aside, the game beneath them sadly all also falls short. Once you’ve defended a bunch of villages, and attacked a bunch of Piglin bases, it very quickly becomes apparent that you’ve seen all it has to offer. And unlike Dungeons, where replaying the same dungeons lets you make progress in your armor, equipment, etc, there’s nothing like that in Minecraft Legends. You get access to more golem types and more structures, but once they’re all in place there’s no carrot remaining to motivate continued play.
Of course, this is all based on the single-player game—my many hours with it were spent before release, and as such, before there was anyone else to cooperate or compete with. However, given the mad mess of awful unit controls, dreadful pathfinding and AI, and a lack of variety in what you get to do, I struggle to see how things could be dramatically improved by subjecting someone else. And it’s crucially important to note that unlike Dungeons, there’s no couch co-op here, and never will be, which is disastrous.
However, and this is a very significant however, I’m not the only one in my house who played Minecraft Legends. I was accompanied for much of my time by my 8-year-old son, currently on his school vacations, and he’s spent a good deal of time playing it for himself. His view is different. In fact, I commissioned him to write about them (paying him from my fee for this review, I stress). His view, from a much more relaxed approach to playing, just muddling about and not focused on attempting to make strong progress, was far more positive. Here’s Toby’s review:
I much prefer Minecraft Legends than normal Minecraft but Legends has bad things about it,too. Like for instance, I much prefer animals in normal Minecraft than in Legends though, I do quite like the Piglins so mixed feelings. I prefer mining in normal Minecraft and I prefer how you level up and beat the game in normal Minecraft. Minecraft Legends brings fights to another level. The Piglin bases are fun to fight, challenging and not too challenging. Also defending villages is super fun because of building defenses and attacking the mobs. I prefer building in normal Minecraft but that’s no big deal. So overall I think that Minecraft Legends is great and I really like it. THE END!!!
Screenshot: Mojang / Kotaku
So there you have it. As I said at the beginning, a 45-year-old games journalist’s views on Minecraft Legends are close to irrelevant. It’s going to be on Game Pass (along with the grimly inevitable in-app purchases for skins and cosmetic nonsense). It seamlessly transfers between your PC and your Xbox (we played the game on both, picking up downstairs where we left off upstairs), meaning it’ll be there on the couch or on your laptop. And perhaps most significantly, it’s going to be in every toy store, supermarket, and bus stop for the foreseeable future.
That it’s not a very good game, and one that desperately needed a lot more development before this seemingly premature release, will matter almost not at all. It’s stunningly pretty, it lets you make friends with the Creepers, and the cutscenes are brilliant. And it matches those new pyjamas. Should they ever finish Minecraft Legends, allowing you to instantly gather your spawned troops from anywhere, fixing the atrocious UI, giving your units some vestiges of pathfinding, and hugely increasing the mission variation, I think it could be a great place.
Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, the upcoming online co-op action shooter from Rocksteady, has officially been delayed from its planned May release to February 2024. This follows a report of a previous delay in March and the release of new gameplay footage in February that was met with a flood of negative reactions from fans and critics alike.
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First revealed way back in August 2020, Rocksteady’s Suicide Squad game stars popular DC villains like Harley Quinn and Captain Boomerang and is based on a long-running series of comics about villains being recruited by government agent Amanda Waller to take on wildly dangerous threats and complete ethically dubious missions. It’s also connected to the Arkham games, unlike 2022’s previous DC co-op flop, Gotham Knights. But if you were still excited to play Rocksteady’s next big game, you’re going to have to wait nearly a year.
On Thursday, following a March report about a possible delay from Bloomberg, WB Games and Rocksteady officially confirmed that their Suicide Squad game has been delayed until February 2, 2024.
We have made the tough but necessary decision to take the time needed to work on getting the game to be the best quality experience for players. Thank you to our amazing community for the continued support, patience, and understanding. There is so much more to share in the months ahead and we look forward to seeing you in Metropolis next year.
What this might mean for the Suicide Squad game
In March, Bloomberg reporter Jason Schreier explained on Twitter that the then-reportedly short delay was likely not intended to “overhaul the core gameplay” and instead would be just about “polishing” what was already present. However, the delay announced today turned out to be much lengthier than first reported, and it seems that the devs are going to have a lot more time to possibly rip out some of the live-service aspects prospective players reacted cooly toward.
While I’m not sure you can expect WB and Rocksteady to rip out all the live-service crap, multiple currencies, or the game’s always-online requirement, I wouldn’t be shocked if some of that stuff got cut or streamlined by the time the game finally comes out in 2024. (Assuming no further delays, of course.) Fully expunging all live-service aspects seems unrealistic, and would require a much longer and more expensive delay.
Also, keep in mind, this isn’t the first time Rocksteady’s DC shooter has slipped. Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice Leaguewas originally scheduled to ship last year, but in early 2022 it got delayed until spring 2023. Now the troubled shooter will miss that planned release date, too. And while it’s not nearly as much of a saga as Ubisoft’s oft-delayed pirate game, it’s starting to feel like Suicide Squad might be the next AAA video game cursed to be forever stuck in development hell. Let’s hope it gets out soon for the sake of all the folks working on it.
Update 4/13/2023 4:35 p.m. ET: This post was originally published on March 9, 2023. It has been updated and expanded to account for the official announcement of the game’s delay into 2024.
The city-building genre is absolutely having a moment right now, whether at the big end of the market (Cities Skylines 2) or, more popularly, the smaller end (just look at Steam’s sales charts on any day of the week). Sliding effortlessly into this latter category is Terrascape, one of my favourite examples of the genre in years.
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Terrascape is a game set on a hex-based world, where you’re asked to place medieval-era buildings on the most optimal piece of land possible. For buildings that harvest resources, like woodcutters or hunter’s lodges, that means getting them as close to as many trees or wild animals as possible, and for more advanced structures that means placing them next to other buildings. The more optimal your position, based on the number of resources and adjacent structures, the bigger the score you get.
You don’t just get to build anything though, this is a very board game-like experience where you have to choose from decks based on major categories (fishing, village, farming, etc) and then are given a hand of cards, each card able to be played to drop a building on the map. Beginning with just a handful, over the course of a game you’ll unlock more cards for a deck, then more decks with new buildings.
Screenshot: Terrascape
If this is starting to sound familiar, that’s because it is. Dorfromantik did a lot of this. As did Islanders. I loved both of those games, and I love Terrascape for the same reasons, because it takes the essence of a city-builder, breaks it down into the simplest means of implementing it possible, then makes the whole thing incredibly relaxing.
There are objectives, whether you’re playing the game’s specific challenge maps (which gives you city-building optimisation puzzles to complete) or its more enjoyable sandbox mode (which just lets you loose and gives you bonus objectives to score points on), but they never feel rushed. It’s beautiful to look at, there are no time limits and the whole thing is just incredibly chill to be around, as you drop a little farm here, and oh look, a town square there, isn’t that lovely.
The way each hex’s art bleeds into the next, and the little pop every time you place a building makes the whole experience hugely satisfying. I’ve spent the last week firing this up whenever I’ve had some downtime and, rather than trying to complete any goals or objectives, have just scrolled around the map painting a town into being, like a 14th-century Bob Ross. Bobbe Rosse.
If spending your entire time in a zen-like state doesn’t appeal, though, you can still game this thing if you want (and will need to to complete some of the tougher/bigger maps). The game’s scoring system stacks, rather than remaining consistent, so if you drop a hunter’s lodge early on and score a ton of points from the nearby wildlife, you don’t lose those points if you later build a medieval village on top of it all. This makes every map a fascinating exercise in forward-planning, as you start out thinking about trees and fish and deer, before advancing through the decks and having to shift gear and start thinking about large manor houses and taverns instead.
Terrascape is still in early access on Steam, and is available now.
In March, an employee at a Massachusetts GameStop leaked on Reddit that Nintendo was probably about to reveal its long rumored special edition Zelda Switch at an upcoming mini-Direct for The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. Special editions such as these are highly coveted collector’s items, and news of one for the sequel to a best-selling game would be huge for fans looking to buy a new system. This week, GameStop fired the employee who leaked the news, and the employee claims he was told Nintendo helped make it happen.
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Back in March, Mike, who requested Kotaku only use his first name, posted a photo of a GameStop computer screen showing the inventory database had been updated with a secret new Switch model on the Tears of the Kingdom subreddit. It was the day before Nintendo’s big extended gameplay reveal for Tears of the Kingdom, and the employee speculated in the post that a special edition Zelda Switch which had already leaked back in December, would be announced during the stream. Mike says he got fired on April 11, about two weeks later.
In a phone interview with Kotaku, Mike said he made the leak because he was a big fan of the franchise and wanted to give others a heads up in case pre-orders went live that day. GameStop in particular has seen issues for buyers when it comes to preorders in the past, though this wasn’t a reason cited by Mike for the leak. On March 28, Nintendo did reveal a special edition Switch, and the following day pre-orders went live at GameStop and other retailers.
At the time, the Reddit post didn’t garner a ton of upvotes, and the now former employee said he didn’t think of it as a big deal since he didn’t technically leak any images or special details about the console itself, and the post itself was mostly speculative. Nintendo also tends to release special consoles such as this one for most of its major releases, such as Pokémon.
Collector’s Editions Are A Big Deal At GameStop
But on April 5, a week later, Mike said the company traced the leak back to them. Coming in for his afternoon shift after watching the new Super Mario Bros. Movie on release day, he said his district manager called him into the backroom for a meeting. Joined by another GameStop supervisor via video conference, the employee said he was asked if he made the post and whether he knew it violated company policy.
Mike said he immediately confessed, but maintained he wasn’t aware it went against the company’s social media policies. The district manager took their keys and placed them on suspension, saying the final punishment could vary between a first-offense write up and termination. It ended up being the latter. And the now former employee thinks Nintendo is to blame.
When their store manager called on April 11 to deliver the bad news, he said the supervisor told them “off the record” that Nintendo had forced the company’s hand, demanding the employee be terminated over the leak. Mike shared the allegation on the Tears of the Kingdom subreddit shortly afterwards writing, “Hopefully all of you were able to get your switch pre-orders in as now I will not be able to get mine.”
GameStop and Nintendo did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Image: Nintendo
Another employee at the store corroborated Mike’s account to Kotaku, and said they were told by the same store manager in a separate conversation that Nintendo was the catalyst. “He was an amazing worker,” they said of Mike, adding that he was one of the top performers in the area when it came to achieving GameStop’s aggressive sales goals.
Whoever ultimately made the decision to fire them, the leaker would have been easy to discover. Their social media accounts, including Instagram, Twitter, and Twitch, were linked in various ways to their Reddit account, and included several references to their general geographic location, as well as selfies. “I wasn’t really trying to cover my tracks because I didn’t know it would lead to this,” Mike told Kotaku.
As a large-scale retailer staffed mostly by entry-level workers paid terrible hourly rates, GameStop has historically been a hotbed for big gaming leaks, from Assassin’s Creed to Call of Duty. But it’s rare to hear that someone was actually fired in connection with one of the leaks. It’s perhaps less surprising that this one happens to have been in connection with a big Nintendo reveal, however. The Mario maker has been on the warpath against leaks for years, most recently attempting to subpoena Discord for the private data of someone who shared images from the Tears of the Kingdom collector’s edition artbook.
When asked if the former GameStop employee ultimately managed to secure a Zelda Switch pre-order, Mike confirmed he had. “But sadly I won’t be able to afford it anymore due to lack of a job,” he said. Mike added that when his manager had to deliver the bad news over the phone they pointed out what a shame it was: “This is your favorite company and now they hate you.”
I’ve reviewed a lot of board game adaptations of video games on this website, and with good reason: it’s the most intimate intersection of our board game and video game coverage. In nearly every case, the key consideration has been how does the board game feel compared to the original. What kind of concessions have been made, how does it differ, does it match the video game in terms of vibes, if not exact mechanics.
Frostpunk is different. It’s a hulking huge board game that seeks, in almost every meaningful way, not to adapt the video game to the tabletop, but to bring it wholesale, warts and all. It’s an ambitious undertaking if nothing else, but I’m also not quite sure if it’s worth all the effort.
And it is an effort. When I went to play the game for the first time I was at least 30 minutes into setting it up when I started to get the sweats. I had spent half an hour painstakingly punching cards, reading the manual and placing tokens on the table and it looked like I’d barely begun. Was I doing something wrong? Was I just a very slow guy? After reading this Dicebreaker story called “I spent an hour failing to set up a board game and it made me question everything” it turns out no, thankfully I’m fine, it’s the game that’s slow.
Photo: Luke Plunkett | Kotaku
Frostpunk is one of the most complex board games I have ever played, let alone set up (and that’s not just me talking, it has a 4.32/5 “weight” rating on BoardGameGeek, which is very high). There are a seemingly endless array of tokens, multiple decks of cards that look the same but aren’t and loads of different rules that bend and sway for each player. Most maddeningly, there are eight boards you have to keep track of.
Eight. Boards. That’s too many boards.
If you’re wondering why the board game version of a (relatively) straightforward city-builder needs to be so complicated, it’s because this edition of the game, for whatever reason, didn’t want to vaguely recreate the spirit of playing Frostpunk. It wants to recreate the whole damn thing, substituting tabletop components for mouse clicks. Nearly everything you can do in the video game, from the politics to the resource gathering to the quest expeditions to city-building is here, and it works much the same way it does on PC.
It is, in many ways, a staggering achievement. Once you (eventually) get on top of the game’s vast array of components, boards and rules it really does feel like you’re playing Frostpunk, the pressures and nagging responsibilities of the digital wasteland transplanted perfectly to the physical world. Indeed some of those pressures are even better here, because Frostpunk is a co-op game, meaning there can be 2-4 of you (there’s also a singleplayer mode, but I didn’t play that) taking on different jobs within the city, working together while at the same time arguing over every decision. If you thought the social and political stuff was cool in the video game, it’s great here since you’re essentially acting out a lot of those debates in the flesh.
Yet in other ways it all feels a bit pointless? The board game cuts so close to the video game’s cloth that at times you wonder why you’re bothering at all, since the video game does all this for you, without the arduous setup time or constant consultation with the rules. Sure, that’s a more solitary experience, but there’s a point where that trade-off can be worth it, and for many people—myself included—that point can come when you’re hours into a single game and find you’re not even close to finishing it.
Photo: Luke Plunkett | Kotaku
At least some of that setup is worth it. The game ships with an enormous plastic recreation of The Generator, which doesn’t just look amazing on the middle of the table but has actual gameplay use as well, since players need to drop coal into it almost every turn as they play, an act that rivals Deep Rock Galactic’s robot mining as one of the most satisfying physical actions in recent board game history.
And, in a very rare occurrence for these reviews, I want to give a shout out to the game’s documentation. For whatever reason most board game rulebooks in 2023 still suck, but Frostpunk, despite the game’s complexity and scale, never let us down.
There’s a very specific type of person out there for this game. Someone who is into Frostpunk but gets lonely playing it, or someone who has never played the video game but is intrigued by the density and politics on offer here. Sadly I was neither of those people, I found its setup time and length just too much, but like I’ve said I can at least appreciate the exhaustive design effort that went into the approach taken here, if nothing else.
Normally I wouldn’t get too excited about a Resident Evil film, as both the live-action and CG entries haven’t been great. But a new trailer for the upcomingDeath Island looks too damn campy and fun to ignore. I mean, all your favorite Resident Evil heroes—like RE4’s Leon and RE3’s Jill—are back together to take on zombie sharks. How can I not get excited about this?
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The CG-animated film Resident Evil: Death Island, first announced in February, takes place in 2015, putting it after the events of Resident Evil 6 but before those of Resident Evil 7 and Village. It’s a direct sequel to 2017’s CG movie Resident Evil: Vendetta. Check out the new trailer for the film, released on April 11 and featuring Chris Redfield, Jill Valentine, Rebecca Chambers, Claire Redfield, and Leon S. Kennedy:
Kadokawa / Capcom
Yes, this is basically Resident Evil’s spin on The Avengers, taking all the previous characters and events, tossing them into a blender, and then hitting the “Cool Shit” button. I’m not mad at all. The direct references to Resident Evil 5, Revelations 2, and other Resident Evil games had me smiling like a fanboy and the action looks silly and over-the-top. And I’ll admit it: Seeing that Avengers-like shot at the end with all of the heroes fighting one big foe made me pump my fist a bit.
What’s Death Island about, and when does it come out?
D.S.O. agent Leon S. Kennedy is on a mission to rescue Dr. Antonio Taylor from kidnappers, when a mysterious woman thwarts his pursuit. Meanwhile, B.S.A.A. agent Chris Redfield is investigating a zombie outbreak in San Francisco, where the cause of the infection cannot be identified. The only thing the victims have in common is that they all visited Alcatraz Island recently. Following that clue, Chris and his team head to the island, where a new horror awaits them.
As for when to expect the movie, so far Capcom’s only revealed a Japan release date: It will hit theaters over there on July 7, 2023. In the past, some of these CG Resident Evil movies have played in theaters in the UK and U.S. for a limited time before releasing digitally, so I expect something similar here. If Capcom follows a similar pattern as with past films, I’d expect a U.S. theatrical release around late July or early August, and a home release to follow shortly after.
A few days back a Counter-Strike: Global Offensive player by the name of sp1cay was playing with some friends when, after a quick sprint and toss of a grenade, they whipped out their AWP sniper rifle and fired off a single shot.
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That shot carried right on through the initial target—a handy shot by itself—and straight into the dude behind them. Then the dude behind them. And so on until five bodies were on the ground.
There’s a term in Counter-Strike called ‘Ace’, and like aerial combat in the real world it’s used when a single player is able to eliminate five opponents (which in Counter-Strike also happens to be an entire team). It’s a rare achievement, and applies so long as a single player wipes out all five enemies themselves, regardless of the time or ammo spent.
To manage it in a single shot is…holy shit. Apparently the guy responsible—fast becoming a Counter-Strike celebrity—“doesn’t even want anything, just for people to check out his full clip on YouTube”, so without further ado:
AWP 5k – 1 bullet
“I have never seen this before so i think it is rare?”, he says on YouTube. “Not sure! hope everyone enjoys 🙂 “. Since blowing up earlier today, sp1cay’s YouTube comments have been flooded with praise like:
That is a once in many lifetimes shot. Insanely unreal. Grats.
This is the craziest thing ever man. Valve should promote this
Fantastic moment in gaming history. Someone send this to geoff to make sure its on game awards highlights
I don’t know if I am going to see another one like this in my life
That was fuckin rad dude. I’ve never seen a shot like that in CS history
no ones ever gonna hit something like this again
Something to tell your kids for sure — cause I would. Once in a lifetime thing for sure.
I don’t even play the game but I know this is awesome!
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.
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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.
I watched The Super Mario Bros Movie during its opening week with the intent of writing this Easter eggs and references article, only to realize that the movie is nothing but Easter Eggs and references. A thorough roundup would be indistinguishable from a wholesale rundown of the entire movie.
The plot for The Super Mario Bros Movie is paper-thin. Narratively, the characters are static bordering on inert; there’s no arc or growth to any of them. It’s just one action set piece to the next; your enjoyment is intimately tied to your pre-existing knowledge of these characters and your ability to recognize a parade of homages to Nintendo history.
It is, in other words, narratively identical to a Mario 2D platformer. Critics are complaining about the lack of characterization and depth in the Mario movie. But to paraphrase Gertrude Stein, there is no “there” there. We needn’t be so harsh.
Take that away, and we’re left with a reel of Easter eggs, which is exactly how this movie was intended. Here are 20 of the best ones that we spotted. Which one was your favorite?
The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom is almost here, and from the looks of it, the enigmatic faction called the Zonai may play a big role in the sequel after mostly existing in the background of Breath of the Wild. If you’re feeling like you’re walking in on something or like you missed a big plot beat in the last game, don’t worry. Despite a lot of theory crafting over the years, even the biggest Zelda fans don’t have a lot of concrete details as to who or what the Zonai were. But let’s break down what we do know and why fans think the Zonai are being primed as a key player in Tears of the Kingdom.
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What do we already know about the Zonai?
In Breath of the Wild, the Zonai are described as a tribe that no longer exists within Hyrule, but their nature is seemingly up for debate within the game’s world. They’re described both as a savage tribe of barbarians, as well as powerful magic users who worship animals, specifically Farosh, a water dragon that can be found in places like the Gerudo Highlands. Traces of their existence are visible in places like the Zonai Ruins in the southern area of the map, with long-abandoned architecture hinting at their reverence for Hyrule’s wildlife. In the lore and art book The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild – Creating a Champion, it’s revealed the animals prominently featured in what’s left of the Zonai’s home reference the three pieces of the Triforce: a dragon for Courage, an owl for Wisdom, and a boar for Power. Beyond the animals, the Zonai also have their own crest resembling a spiral, which is seen on architecture associated with the tribe.
Beyond that, Link can acquire a Barbarian armor set in Breath of the Wild believed to be worn by members of the Zonai long ago after navigating specific labyrinths implied to have been built by the tribe. While it all fits together, much of what we know about the tribe is speculation fostered by the game’s ambient storytelling. It’s a very minimalistic, FromSoftware-style approach to world-building and largely rewards those who want to explore the game’s big world. However, it might be paying off for all of us in Tears of the Kingdom.
Nintendo of America
Why do fans think Tears of the Kingdom will involve the Zonai?
Theories that the Zonai would be a major player in Tears of the Kingdom have been prevalent since the game’s reveal in 2019 because of the focus on the spiral motif central to Zonai architecture. However, the connection is much more concrete now thanks to the most recent gameplay showcase. During this stream, Nintendo revealed the Zonai are tied to the events of Tears of the Kingdom through a piece of loot. In the 10-minute gameplay trailer, Link defeats an enemy in the floating sky islands, and it drops an item called a Zonai Charge. The video doesn’t linger on the item, but it clearly has the same green energy seen to power the machine-like enemies Link is fighting, the (broken) seal around Ganondorf seen in the original trailer, and Link’s corrupted, glowing arm.
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Will we meet the Zonai in Tears of the Kingdom?
Given how quiet Nintendo has been regarding Tears of the Kingdom’s story, it’s hard to say whether or not Link will actually come across a member of the Zonai tribe. Given the group seems to have been entirely gone from Hyrule in Breath of the Wild, with the only information we have on them coming from theories and their remaining architecture, it seems most logical that the Zonai have been wiped out or have gone into hiding. But even so, their technology and magic are still present and causing trouble for our hero in Tears of the Kingdom. All that being said, it’s not entirely out of the question that some may have survived and have been waiting for the events of this game to reveal themselves. The series is also no stranger to time travel, with it being a key pillar to games like Ocarina of Time and Oracle of Ages. So there’s a chance Link could come face-to-face with the Zonai during their prime, but that’s not confirmed.
Wait, how does Twilight Princess play into all this?
Like most of the possibilities discussed here, the connection between The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess and Tears of the Kingdom is still speculation, but fans believe they’ve found connections between the Zonai and the Twili, who were introduced in Twilight Princess. Breath of the Wild incorporates several tribes and species from the series’ lifetime from the Sheikah to the Zora. The Twili, however, are notably absent, but given the similarities to architecture and magic seen in Tears of the Kingdom and that of the Twili, fans speculate that the Zonai could be the original race that was turned into monsters by Zant in Twilight Princess. There are even some breakdowns of iconography and sigils throughout Breath of the Wildthat do closely resemble imagery in Twilight Princess. It’s all theory crafting at this point, and Breath of the Wild itself doesn’t do much on its own to directly make this possible tie-in apparent. So don’t feel like you completely missed out on a potential connection. This is all fan interpretation, for now.
Whatever the Zonai are, it does seem like they will be at least part of Tears of the Kingdom’s larger setup. Whether we actually meet one remains to be seen, but we’ll find out when the game comes to Switch on May 12.
My life changed forever when I got a copy of Final Fantasy VII in 1997 (losing those discs has haunted me ever since). While I enjoy much of the 2020 Remake, the original experience is irreplaceably special to me. I start a new playthrough of it at least once a year, every year. Other times, I’ll just jump into a random save file I was working my way through at some point. It must be on anything I own that can run it.
Since 2015, the remaster (not Remake) has made the experience much smoother; and it’s always fun to occasionally mess around with mods that tweak character models or apply AI upscaled backgrounds to clean up the image.
The story, the characters, the landmark soundtrack with gorgeous compositions and tear-jerking melodies surpass the limitations of the rather humdrum sounds the midi-controlled sequencer on the PSX produced, it culminates into not just one of my favorite video games of all time, it’s one of my favorite media experiences, period.
Final Fantasy VII, in its original form, is an epic story of identity, friendship, love, and struggle in the face of insurmountable odds against seemingly unstoppable foes. I delight, as I did in my youth, blissfully getting lost in it. Its world, with blocky polygonal models might seem primordial by today’s standards, but to me its graphical limitations are an abstract that paints a bigger picture in my head—one that no amount of modern, hyper powerful game engines with all the bells and whistles will ever be able to touch.
And, yeah, you were right, Aeris; it was always the only way.
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Before we move forward, some quick background on this ongoing feud. The Reedy Creek Improvement District was established in Southern Florida in 1967. It was created because Walt Disney wanted more control of the area surrounding his then-soon-to-be-opened Walt Disney World resort. He had plans for a private city, and even after that never happened, the special district remained. Since then, Disney World hasn’t had to follow certain Florida laws, essentially giving the company its own mini-government. But after a 2022 spat between DeSantis and Disney over the company’s (tepid) support for LGBTQ rights, DeSantis used Florida House Bill 9B to restructure the district.
As part of this, he appointed a new board of directors to oversee the district. But upon showing up for its first meeting, the new board learned that, in its final hours, Disney’s outgoing board had legally given nearly all control over the district back to Disney. This greatly upset DeSantis who called the deal a “collusive and self-dealing” arrangement that “undercut Florida’s legislative process.” He also asked Florida’s authorities to investigate the situation. He was, in other words, big mad about fucking around and finding out with Disney’s lawyers.
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However, DeSantis isn’t done being mad or finished with his fight against Disney. As reported by Deadline, the Florida Commander in Chief visited Hillsdale College in Michigan on Thursday and spoke about the ongoing Disney battle, claiming that in the end he and the state would win.
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“What Disney has tried to do is they have tried to say that they should be able to operate outside the context of our constitutional system in Florida,” DeSantis said. “Now, we took this action prior to the election. We won overwhelmingly. They are not superior to the people of Florida. And so come hell or high water, we’re going to make sure that that policy of Florida carries the day, and so they can keep trying to do things, but ultimately, we’re going to win on every single issue involving Disney. I can tell you that.”
Deadline further reports that DeSantis seemed upset about media reports that Mickey Mouse’s company had “pulled one over on the state” which makes sense. When you get made a fool, you tend to not enjoy that experience. But DeSantis also suggested that legislation would “void anything” Disney’s board did before leaving. And also hinted at further punishments to levy against the company.
“Now that Disney has reopened this issue, we’re not just going to void the development agreement they tried to do, we’re going to look at things like taxes on hotels, we’re going to look at things like tolls on the roads, we’re going to look at things like developing some of the property that the district owns.”
Why DeSantis is fighting Disney and stripping it of its special district
Image: Giorgio Viera / Arturo Holmes / Kotaku (Getty Images)
And let’s be clear: DeSantis isn’t going after Disney because he suddenly became an anti-capitalist who wants to destroy the company and make it pay its fair share in taxes. No, instead, as he explained during his Michigan visit, all of this was because Disney dared to speak up mildly against his horrible, fascist laws and policies against LGTBQ and trans people, including pushing schools to out students to their parents. State leader didn’t like that one bit, adding that he didn’t want Florida to be “subsidizing woke activism.”
“We just had to look at this and say, ‘OK, do they have a quote, First Amendment right to be advocating for gender ideology in Kindergarten? Yeah, I guess. Is that honestly faithful to their fiduciary duty to their shareholders? I don’t think so. But that’s not really in my wheelhouse as governor, but what I can tell you as governor is that under no circumstances should the state of Florida be subsidizing woke activism by allowing them to have their own government. So we took it away,” DeSantis said at the time.
It’s clear that Disney and DeSantis aren’t done yet and while I hate rooting for a giant corporation like Disney, I don’t mind seeing an asshole like DeSantis keep losing over and over again. And really, the only winners in all of this are (as usual) lawyers who bill by the hour.
Red, Green, and Blue are the bestsellingPokémon games of all time, and as the games that first launched the franchise on Game Boy in Japan way back in 1996, they’re old enough that I was convinced I’d seen every form of homage and fan media dedicated to Pokémon’s humble beginnings. I was wrong. I recently discovered War/Crimes, a fan comic that features the Kanto gym leaders Lt. Surge and Team Rocket boss Giovanni, whose relationship in the comic feels too nuanced to be easily summed up as “on-off boyfriends.” Despite the provocative cover and the characters being “sexy violent [and] gay” throughout, it’s the comic’s exploration of Kanto’s military-industrial complex that will stay in the back of my brain forever.
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Lieutenant Surge has always been a strange presence in the Pokémon games. Prior to 2010’s Black and White, the Fame Checker (an item which offers up descriptions of important people) called Surge “The Lightning American.” He likes electric Pokémon, we were told,because they “saved” him during “the war.” He flew an electrical plane as a pilot, which means that he likely fought in World War II. Or whatever the equivalent is in the Pokémon universe.
The developers could have just left Surge in as a quirky reference to a war that ended Japan’s imperial capabilities. But the lore goes deeper. He had a cautious nature in the army, set up his own electric traps, and uses double locks everywhere. It’s not the behavior of a man who left the army with his psyche entirely intact. Comic artist and animation director Kelly Turnbull took this premise and went wild with it.
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Image: Kelly Turnbull
As War/Crimes tells it, Surge and Giovanni were comrades-in-arms during the war, and they’ve both got their baggage about how disposable their lives were. Surge is now relatively poor, and he’s struggling to define himself beyond his post-traumatic stress disorder. Giovanni joined the army to fund his Pokémon League challenge,but after watching his Nidoking get ripped apart in front of him, he grew angry towards the war machine. War/Crimes doesn’t spend any time wondering whether or not the war was justified, or whether or not their losses were noble sacrifices. It’s more interested in how economic violence can cause even more suffering in the world.
See, it wasn’t just Giovanni’s ambition that created Team Rocket here. It was the money-hungry Pokémon League, which is more concerned about profit than helping children rise above their station. The comic explains that the Cerulean Gym secured the designation of being water specialists from the League by relying on “underage” girls to sway officials, all while the more deserving Vermillion City, which actually has a coastline, went overlooked. And Surge does not become a gym leader because of his leadership abilities or military strength; it was a new life, loaned to him by the boss of Team Rocket. War/Crimes isn’t just showing us a queer reading of the Game Boy games, but one viewed through an anti-capitalist lens.
Before you ask: Yes, the two veterans are unambiguously gay, good news for those who think subtext is for cowards. They have sexual contact with one another, though they call each other “friends” throughout the comic. I liked that a lot. Their relationship in the comic feels comfortable, intimate, and familiar even when they don’t directly address it or what it is. The army officer and the leader of Team Rocket don’t need to adhere to pageantry. But it could be self-protective masculinity too. These two men have been eviscerated by the war machine, and they think that they have no more blood to give, nothing left to be ashamed of. But the scary thing about the modern world is that it always finds a way.
There’s one line that sticks in my brain several days after reading. “What happened to us?” Surge asks after a nightmare causes him to punch Giovanni in his sleep. But the mob boss doesn’t get angry, doesn’t push him away. “Other people,” he replied. Even if these men have wonderful chemistry with each other, even if they work towards being vulnerable, the world can be a terrible place that makes love and loving hard, even as it remains the only thing that can save them. This is not the same Pokémon world that I know, but it compels me to imagine the implications of Kanto having a military-industrial complex that funnels poor men like Giovanni into institutions that try to kill them.
It’s never too late to start reading comics about old gay men. The comic is worth sampling if you’re interested in alternate interpretations of Pokémon history. Turnbull plans to post one page for free every day. If you can’t wait for the entire thing, you can also purchase it on itch.io for a dollar.
Skips and speedruns are basically like magic, to me. The tenacity it takes to find ways to break a game and circumvent entire sections is a skill and patience I don’t have. That being said, I’m always glad to watch someone just walk or drive through a wall and end up somewhere they weren’t supposed to be yet. It’s delightful. It’s an art form that people are always chipping away at, and that means sometimes these skips can be found in old games like Mario Kart 64. After 27 years, someone has managed to pull off a skip in the Bowser’s Castle course so difficult to execute, it’s almost impossible to repeat…until now.
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For a lot of us, Mario Kart tech is mostly just about using your items strategically and knowing when to drift. Maybe you know a good shortcut, or can pull off drifting. But for the speedrunning community, it’s about carefully studying each track and nailing down frame-perfect maneuvers to shave off even the smallest fraction of your time. For the Mario Kart 64 speedrunning community, Bowser’s Castle has presented a white whale in the form of a skip that requires you to drive through a specific wall. The technical breakdown is pretty complex and boils down to some walls in the game being built in such a way that there’s a tiny gap for players to squeeze through. It’s all about hitting it at the right angle and using speed items like the mushroom. But luckily, YouTube user Abyssoft has an entire video breaking down the skip, the tech behind it, and how multiple speedrunners have suddenly been able to utilize it after all these years.
Abyssoft
The first time the skip was first introduced in 2021 was by speedrunner Forest64, which sparked a fire in the community to attempt to recreate it. However, it wouldn’t be until almost two years later that it was recreated and used in a speedrun, resulting in some shifts in the track’s speedrunning records. Forest64 himself managed to implement the skip in a run after over 200 hours of grinding and thousands of attempts on March 11, 2023 beating the previous non-shortcut time by just four-tenths of a second. This was impressive because it both dethroned the original time, and was the first time the skip was successfully pulled off through play, rather than testing.
However, that reign would be short lived, as speedrunner Christian C. hit the skip and shaved off a second of his time just two days later on March 13. The following day, speedrunner Aaron Jablonski also managed to hit the skip but wasn’t quite able to overtake Christian’s time. Abyssoft’s video breaks down some of the ways this run can still be improved by using the skip, but given just how difficult it’s proven for the pros to pull off, it may be some time before anyone manages to improve the run through this method.
Ironically enough, after all the hubbub the world record for Bowser’s Castle was overtaken again by Beck Abney on April 4 without using the skip. As of this writing, Abney’s record of 1’49″38 sits on the top spot, but there’s still room for the speedrunners to cut down the already impressive time if the skip is implemented.
YouTuber and speedrunner Eric “PointCrow” Morino released a brand new multiplayer mod for The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild on April 4. It basically transforms the hit 2017 Switch game into a modern open-world version of the beloved co-op Zelda spin-off Four Swords Adventures. A couple of days later, Morino says Nintendo hit him with copyright infringement claims that led some of his biggest YouTube videos to be demonetized.
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“Incredibly disappointed that Nintendo of America has decided to block my videos on Breath of the Wild,” he tweeted on April 6. “It’s the love for the community and the innovation that we bring to it that has kept it alive & brought new people to love the Zelda series. I hope you reverse your decision soon.” Morino also shared a screencap of several of his YouTube videos, including ones featuring gameplay footage from the multiplayer mod, showing they’d been flagged for copyright issues.
Nintendo didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
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Publishers maintain they have full ownership and control over any footage produced from their games, but they rarely seek to penalize YouTubers and other content creators for sharing it online and potentially profiting off of it. In fact most companies go out of their way to promote the sharing of footage and screenshots from their games to help spread awareness, increase sales, and cultivate a community of passionate fans.
When it comes to social media content around fan projects and mods, however, Nintendo is one company that’s often aggressively pushed back. Late last year, the Switch manufacturer went after a YouTube documentary about an abandoned pitch for a Zelda tactics spin-off, seeking to get it removed from Google’s platform. The creators eventually managed to appeal the decision and get it reversed.
In response to Morino’s post, several other big content creators chimed in. “Not good for them considering they’re releasing a new game soon and many content creators will popularize it even more and may choose not to create videos around it,” wrote Kittyplays. “Nintendo detected fans having fun and they can’t have that,” wrote LostPause. “This is sad given how much love and effort you given them and botw.”
Breath of the Wild is the fourth best-selling game on Switch, and has remained relevant years after its release in part due to the discoveries, tricks, and new stunts pulled off by people like Morino. Outside of the recent multiplayer mod, he’s drawn millions of additional eyeballs to the game with weird runs like Link growing bigger every time the A button is pressed, or trying to beat the game while both the hardest randomizer mode and the very difficult, map-changing Relics of the Past mod are active.
Morino didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment but tweeted that he’s currently appealing the decision with YouTube. “As of now, [the videos are still visible for you to watch—however, they are not monetized,” he wrote. “Hopefully Nintendo releases these claims, as I significantly transform their work and my videos are under fair use.”
On April 6, 5-Time World Chess Champion Magnus Carlsen lost in a dramatic and surprising way: His mouse slipped and he moved his queen to the wrong spot, instantly costing him the match. Not only did this knock him out of the tournament and cost him a chance at the sizable $30,000 top prize, but this was also the last event he’d participate in as the reigning World Champion.
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Last year, you might remember that one of the biggest stories in the world of professional chess was the surprising defeat of Carlsen at the hands of the young Grandmaster Hans Niemann. The stunning upset quickly sparked online accusations of cheating, with one particular Reddit (joke) theory about vibrating anal beads spreading like wildfire. Carlsen believes Niemann is a cheater and Chess.com accused him of cheating, too. Niemann denied the charges and in October 2022 sued Carlsen, his chess app Play Magnus, the website Chess.com, Chess.com’s Daniel Rensch, and streamer Hikaru Nakamura for $100 million.
As reported by Chess.com, Carlsen was competing against his old rival, Nakamura; the two are considered to be two of the best online chess players in the world. They were competing in an armageddon-rules play-off in the Losers Bracket. But in the final seconds of the tense match, Carlsen accidentally dropped his queen on the wrong spot. According to chess grandmaster David Howell it was “the worst possible mouse slip.” Right after the mistake, Nakamura took down Carlsen’s misplaced queen and the game ended instantly.
The tournament is still ongoing, and Nakamura has advanced out of the Losers Bracket and toward the prize money.
As for Carlsen, this likely won’t be the end of the world. While he will vacate his World Champion title soon, he won’t be retiring. In July 2022, he explained in a podcast that he will remain an active chess player and has events and matches to come in the future. He just no longer wanted to defend his title, as he found it was starting to be a more negative than positive experience, even when winning.
Still, I bet he didn’t have “mouse slips and I lose my final match as World Champ in a million-dollar tournament” on the bingo card for how this chapter of his career would wrap up.
