Julius

No-one mentioned the fact that you can make your Switch profile icon a bed or snek after the launch of Echoes of Wisdom, and I feel personally aggrieved A fine addition to add to my personal Zelda collection of icons which also features Piece of Meat from Breath of the Wild™

20 million copies were sold in the game's first month, it has been confirmed at TGS, by Ken Kuturagi of all people, seemingly during the opening ceremony. Per Insider Gaming: Mental. Absolutely mental.

Super weird update on this, but it'll make you get those pitchforks back out for sure – GI alumni Ben Hanson was in the Mall of America recently for a MinnMax vid for one of their Patron stretch goals, and popped into a GameStop after noticing a very familiar looking Dark Souls III statue in the window (the below video is timestamped). To sum it up: No museum donations from the GI library, a load of GameStop managers were brought in to move things around and got first dibs on some items – like the manager in the video getting a mint, sealed in box Japanese copy of Pokémon Green (obviously it's not on that particular guy, I mean why wouldn't you grab that if you had the chance?). Just imagine how much great stuff that must have been in that library for physical game preservation. To quote Indy: And to tweak a quote to make it relevant here, from the ever-eloquent Ben Moore, formerly of Easy Allies: GameStop seem so gleefully happy to piss on the corpse of Game Informer, and they never seem to run out of urine. Screw those guys. Seriously.

Don't know how I missed this but I did Seems very appropriate that it's been recommended to me now in light of the lawsuit

Features trailer out of TGS: So excited for more people to play these games, and I absolutely can't wait to replay them! That 6th March release date suddenly has me real nervous about it getting buried, though, after the recent Monster Hunter Wilds and Pirate Yakuza release dates were announced as being on the 28th Feb

Second trailer for the game coming out of TGS, and this time focused on Virtuous Mission. Keeping us waiting on that release date still, huh? That kind of sucks. Looks so freaking good, though. I'm fully onboard at this point. There's definitely still that Unreal Engine-ness to it in its appearance when it comes to faces and the like - looks *very* similar to what we've seen so far across VII Remake and Rebirth - but I love it nonetheless, the textures on the fabrics and stuff like that are what's really making this feel new and shiny and just so great to look at for me. Cannot wait, think the characters look fantastic. Really hope I can convince some of my friends to check this out, if it turns out well enough I feel like this would be the easiest way to get them into MGS!

Another trailer for Season II. Looks great. Feel like the first season was a great if flawed adaptation of what is a practically flawless story in the game, be it the content or its pacing. Definitely dropped the ball at certain key moments for me. Meanwhile, the second season should have much more flexibility when it comes to its adaptation because of how flawed the second game is, it leaves plenty of room to be interpreted differently and potentially better by the showrunners, which I don't think could ever have been the case for adapting the first game (again: practically flawless). Scratching my head for when and how they pace and frame and order this second season, but I can't wait.

So, "SIREN" has shown up in some ratings over in Korea. Question is, what for? Been following the updates on this one for a while, and it really does look great. That thumbnail art which is all over the game's marketing completely betrays how great it looks in practice though

30th anniversary DualSense secured via PS Direct going to wait a bit for my second one so that I've got one in box, not to sell on but just for my own little collection. Was really, really hard not to add the Edge to my basket but I resisted for now, but if it's to resolve the stick drift issue...does it need resolving if I have enough controllers on rotation? The Man City of DualSense ownership

On today's TGS agenda (subtract 8 hours for BST equivalent): Curious to see what comes out of Xbox and Capcom, the biggest hitters of the day. Wonder if what was being teased for the Xbox event will be worth the wait?

Oof, that store looks awesome. Ah yes, the red Nintendo Switch shirt, as first seen in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild How could a game with this disgusting thing win so many GOTY awards?! It's a crime!!! Would kind of love if on the receipt it was listed as 'Zelda BOTW red tee' or something I sense an import haul coming on

It was totally because of them catching wind of Yōtei, I totally called it Anyways, I think it's a huge shame, and Ubisoft rightly have a lot of introspection to do right now. They're just a mess. The discourse over Assassin's Creed since pivoting into this new age following the huge open worlds of Origins, Odyssey and Valhalla, known to be mammoths of games and even coming with their own educational modes, then shifting back to Mirage and now this...I'm not saying a lot of what is being said about this game is right, but I think Ubisoft has done a terrible job of communicating the scale and goals of this game. I feel like people might've skipped Mirage to wait for this thinking it would be another Origins, Odyssey, or Valhalla, putting historical accuracy and scale at the forefront, but that doesn't seem to entirely be the case – even though it does look like they've shifted to improve where they can. Then there's having two massive licensed games in Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora and Star Wars Outlaws both seemingly not live up to expectations? Thanks @sumo73 for sharing those links, I was under the impression that there was much less collaboration, like you say it seems like there's still a lot more they can do though. Sticking my neck out here but I'll just say it – I'm one of those left questioning why Ubisoft went with the first and one of very few, if only, black Samurai. I don't care for "oh look at Ubisoft they're being so woke" - I absolutely DESPISE the term, it's so reductive and just sounds silly - and I will not for a second tolerate any racism, but it comes across incredibly poorly and very gross when you have to absolutely go out of your way to make the protagonist a person of a certain colour. Being diverse for the sake of diversity marginalises more natural creative choices – like, come on, you end up with the poster child of university campus posters here with two protags of minority backgrounds, an African male and an Asian female. Let's not pretend that including the first and potentially only black Samurai wasn't a move made with profits at the back of Ubi's collective minds, or at least from those at the top signing off on the game's expenses. I was talking to a friend about this today and think there are so many other great choices they could've made to include Yasuke, especially with the creative liberties they seem to be taking anyways. You could have him be a recurring character throughout the game before you get to control him for some missions and see just how powerful he is, maybe make him the eventual character you play as in DLC (you also then get to perhaps kill the protagonist, which would be dope! Not many games do that anymore!), or maybe you tweak it so that he ends up with a spin-off game of his own and we actually dive into HIS story (or whatever creative liberties they take in telling his story), and put him at the forefront. Right now, I think it just feels like they've gone out of their way to include another minority race (in the West, where let's be honest, Ubisoft is aiming most of their marketing for Assassin's Creed games) for the sake of it – like I said, you literally have to go so entirely far out of your way to include Yasuke in this game as a protagonist, and I think any importance of that character is potentially diminished by not giving him and his tale the proper care it deserves. It feels to me like such a weird step following just how well received some of the protagonists of the likes of Origins, Odyssey and Valhalla were received, and I think maybe that's the difference here compared with, say, something like Nioh which I know uses a white guy as its protag in kind of a similar situation to Yasuke, William Adams, because that's a brand new IP – and then obviously developed by a Japanese company so there's a whole different goal there, but also it just doesn't have that background already of trying to do characters native to the land being explored done right like AC seemed to have not too long ago, which similar to the historical accuracy controversies, is rooted in comparisons to work they've already done. Also, I think it'd be ridiculous to think they'd change their plans now - I think pivoting would be and look SO MUCH worse than staying the course they're already on - but I just think there were more tasteful ways to have Yasuke included which go beyond diversity for the sake of diversity. Hell, you could totally have put more effort in and if you really wanted Yasuke playable, maybe also make the option to play as a Japanese Samurai available too, and you get to choose who you play as. I don't think it'd be whitewashing to have had a Japanese main character, but hey, honestly, maybe they avoided that because of how successful Jin was in Ghost of Tsushima and not wanting to compete with his level of marketability – or even Rise of Ronin, which again, bringing marketability up when talking about the protag's race, just feels all kinds of gross. As an aside, it's mental to me that these big open world games set in Japan by AAA Western studios keep running into backlash. It feels like it mostly comes about as a result of virtue signalling clashing with overt racism in the West. Ghost of Tsushima, if you'll remember back at launch, was accused of cultural appropriation, things were being thrown around along the lines of "what does a Western studios know about Japan, anyways?"; Japanese devs and the Japanese audience LOOOOOOVED that game. And now we've got the backlash to this game, as well as Ghost of Yōtei, who has a female lead played by the genderfluid Erika Ishii (saw some of the reactions to her casting, and yep, they were as gross as you'd expect). A lot of controversy and keyboard fights going on over these Eastern shores, that's for sure. Origins sold over 10 million copies; Odyssey sold over 10 million copies; Valhalla we don't have unit sales (so it's unlikely it sold 10 million copies), but thanks to heavy MTX inclusion, was the first game in franchise history to generate over $1 billion in revenue; Mirage is the first one in a while which I think there can be genuine concern over, and obviously now there's this delay, but I'm not really seeing any evidence of the decline you mention. I don't know about Ubisoft being done for, but they do keep making dumb decisions and are acting like a company that wants to go under at times – the still crazy level of MTX and season pass inclusion in their games, the fact that they keep squandering licensed OP (come on, open world Star Wars should be the biggest and easiest home run, and yet you give it to the guys who made Division, who also just had another licensed game of theirs in Avatar launch last year? Seriously?), and now they've moved this to mid-Feb 2025. This game will still find its audience, I'm sure, but it's launching now in the same month as Civ VII (which releases 3 days before Shadows) and Monster Hunter Wilds (which releases 2 weeks after Shadows), two absolute titans in the industry. There are other games too, like Avowed, but these two in particular are gargantuan games you prioritise at launch to dig your teeth into, and are also two of the earliest big releases next year. It feels a little (a lot) like Ubisoft are sending this game out to die.

So this is getting a VR version released on the Meta Quest (playable on the Quest 2 and onwards): Wild, and looks pretty neat. Don't know how long I'd want to have a headset on for when playing a game like this, though. So I guess that Final Fantasy Tactics remake is getting a console and a VR version, that's what you're trying to tell us, isn't it Square?

Launch trailer: Kind of hilarious that every trailer for this game was a big ol' chunky thing, and the launch trailer is just...52 seconds long? Hey now, I'll have you know that Mario and Luigi have been having a tough time since the plumbing business went under and that dressing up like this for birthday parties was purely a last resort

Rugrats has been out since 1991, Glen, are you doing okay?

Ubisoft be reacting all over the shop – this is coming to Steam on November 21st! This from their Trading Update.

Demo is up people! Think I'll wait, with how long this game has been touted as being I think I might hold out until I'm off over Christmas.

Hahahahahahahaha At least they're honest

Reviews are dropping left and right: Early doors of course, but the game is currently at an 87 on Metacritic and an 86 on OpenCritic, for those that care General consensus seems to be that it's very good! Might watch a review or two later myself as I probably won't get to this until later on in the year with all the other wonderful games dropping

You can't hint at one of the most randomly funny scenes and not share it! If this is what games become, I won't be complaining

So what you're saying is... A 3RD SCREEN?!

Somehow, the Wii U has returned

Looks like a demo for the game is going to drop very soon, already seems to be up in some territories: