Hauntii is an upcoming twin-stick adventure game from Moonloop Games in which you play an adorable little ghost capable of haunting objects and using them to traverse the game’s version of eternity. Eternity features beautiful, bespoke graphics (almost all of which the four-person team illustrated on an iPad using Procreate), that are folksy and whimsical—the perfect vibe for a cozy ghost game.
Hauntii’s protagonist is, of course, a cute little ghost with glowing green eyes. You can use the twin-stick combat to shoot “essence” at objects, either destroying ones that will give you in-game currency or haunting ones that can be used to move around the game space. At one point, I jumped into a set of statues that I needed to move to unlock a teleport. At another point, I jumped into a tree that shook off some currency for me, my glowing green eyes peering out from the giant plant.
Hauntii – Official Announcement Trailer | Day of the Devs 2023
Hauntii also has a beautiful score to go along with its breathtaking illustrations, and though I only had ten minutes with it, I found myself wanting more. It’s due out for PC and console in 2024.
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.
Do you ever wish you could reacquire the games you once had? And not just copies of the same ones, but the very discs or cartridges you used? Well, the Named Cassette Museum in Tokyo is making that very thing a reality for many gamers: reuniting those who once wrote their names, addresses, or other personal identifying information on Famicom cassettes (and those from other consoles) with their old games.
For Junji Seki, the director of the Named Cassette Museum, collecting Famicom cassettes started out as a hobby. But whereas many collectors might not be too thrilled about discovering a potentially valuable game with someone’s name scrawled on it, Seki saw a different kind of value: Reuniting folks with the very cartridges that they once lost and learning the story behind them. Seki started the museum in 2015, all to document the history of these individual Famicom cassettes and to bring some happiness into the lives of gamers who had long lost (and likely given up hope of finding) their old games.
The museum has a few requirements if you spot a cassette you think was once yours: You must let the director deliver the game by hand, you must buy it (for a price of your choice), and you must let the museum document the story on its website to learn a bit about the history, how the cassette might’ve been lost, and any particular memories of the game.
It’s not just personal stories. In a translated interview with Mirai-idea.jp, Seki says that , personally marked-up games tell a story about the time they were acquired and used. “If you look at [a] cassette“that says ‘110 yen,’ it’s probably when the 3 percent consumption tax was introduced” in 1989. Seki is also interested in deciphering what certain handwriting might mean, why certain letters are capitalized and others aren’t.
Seki doesn’t just collect games either. As the president of game studio Happymeal, he’s also a developer. And the experience of the Named Cassette Museum directly inspires the games he makes. One such game, Ise-Shima Mystery Guide: Fake Black Pearl (which received a Japan-only release on the Nintendo Switch) is “a reproduction of the atmosphere of the Famicom era,” according to a translation from Seki.
As someone who once had many physical games that are now long lost to time, the idea of once again getting to see or hold such relics of days gone is pretty exciting; collecting old games can become a pricey endeavor, but when it tells the story of the gamer who once enjoyed the worlds contained inside the plastic and the tech, well it’s hard to put a price on that. And when you consider the wide expanse of streaming and on-demand gaming services like Game Pass and PlayStation Plus, efforts to save our physical connections with games we love and grew up with are even more important.
Farming experience points has never been easier. Pokémon Scarlet and Violet introduced a “Let’s Go” function that allows your leading Pokémon to auto-battle roaming opponents in the overworld. But if you want to take your laziness a step further, there’s a passive farming hack that lets you strengthen your Pokémon while you’re doing something else. You just have to be a monster about it.
Here’s how it works. Fly over to the isolated puddle in North Province (Area Two), which you can see in the screenshot below. Since the puddle is surrounded by cliffs on all sides, you can only get there once you’ve unlocked the final form of Koraidon or Miraidon. By completing the Path of Legends quest, your motorbike Pokémon will be able to scale cliffs. So be sure to finish gathering all of the herbs from the five Titan Pokémon before attempting this trick.
Screenshot: Nintendo / Kotaku
Once you’re there, you should spot a ton of Golducks, Dratini, and Vaporeons. To start farming, jump straight into the pit and send out a Pokémon that’s strong against Water-types—you can do this by pressing the R button. Then use your motorbike to jump safely onto the top of the pit. Your Pokémon will stay within the confined area and battle everything that spawns in it, while you’re just chilling on a clifftop. The hack was originally discovered by NerdyNinetales on TikTok, and I was able to get it working on my own copy of the game.
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As I watched my Arboliva pulverize everything in the pit, I couldn’t help but feel slightly… guilty? Did I just turn this peaceful wildlife refuge into a death pit? These wild Pokémon don’t even get to experience the sweet release of death, as soon as they get back up from their beating, your Pokémon whallops them all over again, ad infinitum. All so that I could read a book while grinding some levels.
I wrote in my Scarletreview that Pokémon training felt too streamlined. Grinding your favorite Pokémon is supposed to be a labor of love. Instead, we let our beloved companions raise themselves with minimal supervision. We want the level 100 Meowscarada without the burden of having cared for it. If that’s you, then this method is perfect for raising competitive Pokémon. Personally, I’ll raise mine the normal way: Putting them in one-on-one cockfights.
Americans across the nation are sitting down to celebrate Thanksgiving. The Onion polled all 330 million Americans to find out what they’re most thankful for.
