Prince Harry, Duke of Sussex and member of the British royal family, thinks that gaming phenomenon Fortnite shouldn’t be allowed.
The Daily Express reports that, during a visit to a YMCA in West London, Prince Harry urged parents to protect their children from “irresponsible” games, using Fortnite as an example. He described the game as an “addiction”, stating that parents don’t know what to do about it and its effects on their children.
“The game shouldn’t be allowed. Where is the benefit of having it in your household? It’s created to addict, an addiction to keep you in front of a computer for as long as possible. It’s so irresponsible.
“Parents have got their hands up – they don’t know what to do about it. It’s like waiting for the damage to be done.”
In January of last year, it was reported that the World Health Organisation would list game addiction as a mental health condition for the first time. It was a controversial decision amongst fans of the hobby, and one that went against the findings of a University of Oxford study looking into the matter; the Entertainment Software Association actually went on to criticise the decision.
Despite this, the wellbeing of people who game for long periods of time, especially those who are young, remains a topic of debate.
Where do you stand? Do you think games like Fortnite can be dangerously addictive? Do you think the accusations are unfounded? Let us know in the comments below.
Moonlight Games is hard at work on a new adventure game called Hunt the Night, with the likes of Zelda: A Link to the Past and Bloodborne acting as influences for the project.
The game is set in a dark world with 16-bit era graphics, tasking players with crossing a devastated world full of dungeons filled with puzzles, enemies and traps. The developers say that the difficulty is “high but rewarding”, especially when you come up against boss fights. Here’s a snippet of the game’s official press release:
If you love Bloodborne and Dark Souls style dark fantasy games, high but fair difficulty, build creation, gameplay that rewards the player’ skills and the exploration and graphic style of the classic Zelda and Secret of Mana games, Hunt the Night is for you!
A Kickstarter campaign has launched today to see the game through development, with a Switch version promised should it be successful. It’s aiming to generate €25,000 in 30 days – you can learn more, view the trailer and pledge your support right here.
What do you think? Do you like the sound of this one? Would you like to see it arrive on Switch? Tell us in the usual place.
Gaming giants Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft are all currently under investigation in the UK over fears that their online subscription services are unfair.
The Competition and Markets Authority (a non-ministerial department of the UK government which has the power to enforce competition and consumer law) says that it is “concerned about whether some of these companies’ business practices are legal, such as their use of auto-renewals for online gaming contracts, their cancellation and refund policies, and their terms and conditions”.
The emphasis here appears to be being placed upon the auto-renewal of the companies’ online services – Nintendo Switch Online, PS Plus and Xbox Live. Andrea Coscelli, Chief Executive of the CMA, has said the following:
“Our investigation will look into whether the biggest online gaming companies are being fair with their customers when they automatically renew their contracts, and whether people can easily cancel or get a refund.
Should we find that the firms aren’t treating people fairly under consumer protection law, we are fully prepared to take action.”
The CMA says that it has written to all three companies, requesting information about such contracts to “help better understand their practices”.
If you have experience with any of these services, do you feel that you are treated fairly when it comes to refunds and auto-renewals? Share your thoughts with us below.
Over the decades it’s been possible to track a small but beloved lineage of arcade football games that don’t take the sport too seriously. From SNK’s Soccer Brawl through Sega Soccer Slam and on to Mario Strikers Charged, the best of these games embellish the footy basics with fantastical settings and improbable special moves.
Super Kickers League would dearly love to be picked for this elite team of outlandish showboaters. Sadly, however, it lacks the vision, tight ball control, and sheer swagger to make the cut. This is a 3v3 variant of the beautiful game played on a small, enclosed pitch. The ball is always in play, and there’s no referee to adjudicate on those crunching challenges. Heck, one of the two tackle moves here bears closer resemblance to football of the American variety.
When in control of the ball, you only have a few things to consider. There are three kicks at your disposal: pass, long pass, and shoot. The right shoulder buttons give you a burst of pace, while the left ones initiate a little jink of some kind that can slide you past a careless challenge. The X button activates a chargable special move, which is unique to each team. These generally don’t prove overpowered or annoying, instead giving you things like an extra burst of speed or an exaggerated forward hop. One particular special move, however, stops your whole team in its tracks for a couple of seconds, which is all kinds of awful.
All in all, though, this is a very simple take on football. Simplicity is fine, but if you’re going to make an arcade-y take on a sport it needs to be even more fluid and exciting than the real thing. You need to exaggerate the good bits and gloss over the boring bits. Super Kickers League’s gameplay, by contrast, is stilted and rigid.
Shooting is a case of getting within approximate range of the goal and holding the shoot button. The resulting effort either loops into the corner of the net or it doesn’t, and little you do seems to affect that. Sometimes the ball will appear to blast right through the goalie, while at other times they’ll stop what looks like a guaranteed goal with an acrobatic parry. Meanwhile it’s frustratingly impossible to pull off a quick snapshot on the run, unless the ball is played in the air – a move that in itself lacks any sense of weight or fine judgement.
Defending isn’t so much an art as it is a case of getting in line with the opponent and tapping one of the defensive buttons to take them out. Players don’t seem to have a sense of solidity to them once a shot is taken, so there’s no benefit in tracking a run or throwing yourself in front of a goal bound effort. With no penalties for roughhousing, turnovers are exasperatingly frequent. All of which might lead you to think that passing is the best approach, but this is simultaneously heavily automated and precariously unpredictable. It’s very hard indeed to know where your team mates are when off-screen, despite the presence of indicator arrows.
Everything looks okay from a technical perspective, with big chunky sprites and a fluid frame rate. But it all has the slightly soulless look and the generic character design of a mobile endless runner. There’s an attempt at variation with the various teams, but they share the same basic characteristics and proportions.
If you’re not playing a lot of local multiplayer, the bulk of your time with Super Kickers League will be spent playing through its single player cup competitions. There’s little fanfare to them, just a series of games against AI that veers between being impossibly dim and frustratingly adept – sometimes within the same game.
One of the dimmest parts comes at the contested kickoffs, where we established a sure fire way to come away with the ball every time: just wait a beat for the opponent to run in and claim the ball, then slide in to take it off them. It works without fail. Elsewhere, we’re not sure why the goalies feel they can handle the ball outside the area. Maybe it’s because of the lack of refereeing.
The game is full of odd little touches and design decisions like this. Then there are the incongruous meteor showers, or the fact that there’s always an overtime period regardless of whether the teams are drawing or not (and with no stoppages, it sure ain’t injury time).
This sounds like nitpicking, and these aren’t major points of detraction in isolation. But combined with Super Kickers League’s stilted, one-dimensional gameplay, they suggest that the developer has somewhat missed the essential ingredients of football. What should have been a pacey, lively and unpredictable arcade-sports experience is more like an under-12s kick-around in your local park.
Conclusion
Super Kickers League is an inoffensive attempt at the arcade football sub-genre, but it lacks the excitement, fluidity and personality of the games it emulates. Now Nintendo, about that Mario Strikers Charged follow-up…
Supersonic racer GRIP: Combat Racing has just received a huge dollop of content as part of the development team’s aim to provide continuous support for the title going forward.
You can check out some of the new content in the trailer above; the update adds four free new tracks and the introduction of Team Racing and Deathmatch. We’ve got all the details you need in this super lengthy list below.
NEW CONTENT KEY FEATURES:
Team Modes (Available on Steam April 5th and later this month on console)
– Team Racing – Players can now join either Red or Blue teams to battle it out in any racing mode. These include: Classic Race, Ultimate, Elimination and Speed Demon. The team with the highest points wins! – Team Deathmatch – The way deathmatch is meant to be played. Jump on Red or Blue and blast each other away. The team with the highest points wins
Four New Tracks (Available on Steam April 5th and later this month on console)
– Mindbender (Haze reverse) (Orbital Prime) (City) A highly-modified version of Haze reverse. Key sections include a massive jump, tricky S-turn and twisting sewer section – Naptha Valley (Jahtra) (Desert) Quite possibly the most rollercoaster-y track of all. Set in a resource mining centre, key sections include a mineral deposit cave, large stepped curves of terrain and an indoor facility – Hive Horizon (Orbital Prime) (City) A beautiful, sunset soaked, gravity-defying city district. Key sections include an affluent block of corporate structures, a big ceiling ride to floor jump and an ascending spiral road – Spin Cycle (Liddo5) (Forest) Key sections include an open area with nice autumn visuals, tunnel turns perfect for barrel rolls, glass tunnels and an obstacle ridden turn to the finish!
Level Cap As of April 5th, the level cap has also been increased to 40, with unlocks of paint jobs and new tires for cars. In addition to this Pariah now have coloured paint that can be customized!
Garage Packs 2 ($1.99 / £1.69 / €1.99 individual packs. Also available as a money saving bundle) Available on Steam April 5th and later this month on console) Glow hot with new skins, decals and rims for each manufacture!
If you already own the game, make sure to jump back in to try out all of these new features; if you don’t already own it, perhaps this would be a good time to give it a go?
Feel free to read our review if you’d like to learn more, and let us know if you’ll be checking it out with a comment below.
Devolver Digital has revealed that Reigns: Game of Thrones is heading to Nintendo Switch next week. You’ll be able to get your hands on it from 11th April.
Developed in partnership with the TV show’s network HBO, the game is a spin-off in the Reigns strategy game series. You’ll be doing everything in your power to claim the Iron Throne as Cersei Lannister, Jon Snow, Daenerys Targaryen, and more favourites from the show, carefully navigating the complex relationships of the Seven Kingdoms.
The first two games in the Reign series have actually already been released on Switch in a double pack called Reigns: Kings & Queens. We thought that the games were already like a weird blend of Game of Thrones and Tinder when we reviewed them last year, so perhaps this is a perfect fit?
If you want to learn a little more about it, we’ll leave you with this lengthy description from the Nintendo store. The game will be available from 11th April for $3.99 / £3.59.
A Formidable Cast: Rule from the Iron Throne as Cersei Lannister, Jon Snow, Daenerys Targaryen, Tyrion Lannister, Sansa Stark, and more. Change between each king and queen you unlock to face challenges and mysteries unique to their story.
Impose Your Will: Swipe left or right to change the fate of the Seven Kingdoms forever as you hear the impassioned pleas and unpredictable demands from the people of Westeros. If a particular character becomes bothersome, tear their card in half to unburden Your Majesty with their concerns – but at what cost?
Reenvision Westeros: Melisandre’s visions are your playing field and extend beyond the TV series to imagine the many fates of those that would sit upon the Iron Throne. Rebuild the Great Sept of Baelor as Cersei or discover the path of the Seven Kingdoms if Sansa Stark had married Jaime Lannister.
Regal Mini Games: Even the most powerful rulers need to set aside their worries and partake in more trivial matters now and then. From jousting to tavern brawls, these distractions aren’t without consequence!
A Grander Reigns: Fans of the Reigns series will be delighted with the biggest, deepest entry in the series that does not simply retell the stories you know but rather lets you create new adventures at your whim.
Iconic Soundtrack: Decide the fate of Westeros and those that reside in your land to the soaring score of the HBO series by Ramin Djawadi.
Ever since it launched last summer, Octopath Traveler has been exclusive to the Nintendo Switch. It would appear that this is about to change, however, as a new Korean game rating has been spotted which suggests a PC release is on the way (thanks, Gematsu).
The rating refers to a PC version of the game which is to be published by Bandai Namco, which does regularly publish Square Enix games in the region. Assuming the release finds its way to the public soon, this will be the first time the game has appeared on any other system.
Of course, the Octopath Traveler brand has already been confirmed to be branching out to other platforms, with a prequel to the Switch release – called Octopath Traveler: Champions of the Continent – heading to smartphone devices in Japan this year.
Do you think it’s a good idea to port the game to PC, and maybe other consoles in the future? Or are you sad to hear that it might not be exclusive to Switch going forward? Share your thoughts with us below.
Launching today on the Switch eShop is Circuits, a puzzle game which features a minimalist music-based concept, hoping to give its players an insight into music creation.
Each level requires you to carefully listen to the music, combining several joints of a circuit to match the melody. Essentially, you’ll be piecing together the different parts of the soundtrack, with genres ranging from electronic and dubstep to ambient and orchestral pieces.
The Nintendo store listing contains the following info:
“As we love music, we wanted to make a game that gives the player an insight into how music is created and makes listening the core part of the experience. Packed with beautifullly designed minimal graphics, to not disturb the focus of the game, and 25 different songs for the player to reconstruct. So if you like music, you will like Circuits.”
Features: – Engaging gameplay that gives an insight into music creation for players -A soundtrack mix of electronic ambient,dubstep, and epic orchestra composed by David García (Deadlight, Rime…) -Beautiful minimal design – And a Turbo Mode!
You can pick this one up from the eShop right now for £4.49 / $4.99.
WIll you be giving this one a try? Compose a comment for us down below.
Japanese chart figures are now in for 25th – 31st March, revealing that Yoshi’s Crafted World has secured another number one position following on from its UK success reported earlier this week.
The game sold 53,327 copies in its first week on sale in the region, knocking last week’s number one, Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, down to second. Winning Post 9 is the only other new Nintendo Switch release in the top 20 this week, although it sold better on PS4.
Here are the top 20 (first numbers are this week’s sales, followed by total sales):
1) [NSW] Yoshi’s Crafted World (Nintendo) {2019.03.29} – 53.327 / NEW 2) [PS4] Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice (From Software) {2019.03.22} – 44.733 / 202.281 3) [NSW] Super Smash Bros. Ultimate (Nintendo) {2018.12.07} – 19.802 / 2.993.955 4) [NSW] New Super Mario Bros. U Deluxe (Nintendo) {2019.01.11} – 17.106 / 551.473 5) [PS4] Winning Post 9 (Koei Tecmo) {2019.03.28} – 13.280 / NEW 6) [NSW] Mario Kart 8Deluxe (Nintendo) {2017.04.28} – 12.664 / 2.203.456 7) [NSW] Minecraft (Microsoft Game Studios) {2018.06.21} – 10.431 / 660.392 8) [PS4] Super Robot Wars T (Bandai Namco Games) {2019.03.20} – 10.360 / 98.453 9) [NSW] Pokémon: Let’s Go, Pikachu! / Let’s Go, Eevee! (Pokemon Co.) {2018.11.16} – 10.006 / 1.556.950 10) [NSW] Super Mario Party (Nintendo) {2018.10.05} – 9.765 / 1.074.272 11) [NSW] Splatoon 2 (Nintendo) {2017.07.21} – 8.727 / 2.979.450 12) [PS4] Devil May Cry 5 (Capcom) {2019.03.08} – 8.686 / 173.389 13) [PS4] Tom Clancy’s The Division 2 (Ubisoft) {2019.03.15} 8.175 / 87.178 14) [NSW] The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (Nintendo) {2017.03.03} – 7.921 / 1.342.331 15) [NSW] Chocobo’s Mystery Dungeon: Every Buddy! (Square Enix) {2019.03.20} – 7.117 / 35.626 16) [NSW] Super Robot Wars T (Bandai Namco Games) {2019.03.20} – 5.968 / 50.019 17) [NSW] Winning Post 9 (Koei Tecmo) {2019.03.28} – 5.583 / NEW 18) [PS4] Chocobo’s Mystery Dungeon: Every Buddy! (Square Enix) {2019.03.20} – 4.989 / 26.030 19) [PS4] Kingdom Hearts III (Square Enix) {2019.01.25} – 4.668 20) [PS4] Call of Cthulhu (Oizumi Amuzio) {2019.03.28} – 4.371 / NEW
On the hardware front, Switch is still comfortably at the top of the chart, selling 50,367 units this week. Here are this week’s figures, with last week’s in brackets:
1) Switch – 50,367 (56,099) 2) PlayStation 4 – 18,878 (27,061) 3) PlayStation 4 Pro – 6,021 (7,834) 4) New 2DS LL – 5,024 (4,731) 5) New 3DS LL – 1,099 (912) 6) 2DS – 820 (2,300) 7) PlayStation Vita – 402 (376) 8) Xbox One X – 57 (63) 9) Xbox One – 23 (28)
If you prefer your games on the more gentle end of the scale, you’ll probably want to check out Feather, which has launched on the Switch eShop today.
Eeverything about this one is calm and peaceful, with players taking on the role of a bird flying around an island. The game’s description states that you’ll “lose yourself in zen-like flow” as you listen to a soothing soundtrack and swoop, glide, backflip, and roll your way around the skies with “responsive and fluid flight controls”.
The game features a passive online multiplayer cross-play system which allows you to join a flock of other players, and with no enemies or combat to speak of, you’ll simply be exploring the open world.
As noted above, the game is available from today. Usually, it’s priced at £8.09, but a 10% discount is available until 13th April.
Do you like to calm things down with a game like this every now and then? Let us know if you’ll be picking this one up with a comment.
