Part of the allure of the FIFA video games is the licensing of real-world clubs and leagues. As EA has already publicised, this season’s game will include the UEFA Champions League – the most prestigious club competition in European football.
Now, the latest news to emerge is in regards to a new league that will be represented in FIFA 19. An image has surfaced via a tweet, revealing the Chinese Super League will be included in the upcoming annual release for the first time ever. This announcement was made during a presentation at the 2018 Animation-Comic-Game Hong Kong event.
The Chinese League is home to a number of famous players who have in the past been excluded from the FIFA games due to licensing issues. If this is eventually confirmed by EA, between the CSL and the Champions League, this would put the franchise even further ahead of the competition.
FIFA 19 arrives on Switch at the end of September. Will you be picking it up on release? Tell us in the comments.
You’re probably sick to death of us mentioning Rare on Nintendo Life – especially since the company has long since parted ways with Nintendo itself and is now firmly ensconced as a Microsoft studio. Still, we have our reasons – Nintendo Life Towers is located in the English Midlands, just a short drive away from Rare’s Twycross HQ – and just because it no longer works on Nintendo hardware that doesn’t mean Rare’s contribution to the incredible history of the Japanese firm should be ignored; that’s certainly the stance that Rare itself is taking, as a new exhibition proves.
Rare: From 8-Bit to Xbox One is currently taking place at The Herbert Art Gallery & Museum in the city of Coventry, just down the road from Rare’s offices. This exhibition showcases the complete history of the studio, from its days as Ultimate Play the Game operating out of a tiny cottage in Ashby-de-la-Zouch to its more recent escapades, namely the epic online pirate simulator Sea of Thieves. As diehard Rare fans, we simply had to pay a visit.
“This started a long time ago, just after Kinect Sports Rivals,” explains Rare Lead Engineer James Thomas, who spearheaded the team that pulled the exhibit together. “Our facilities manager was basically saying that they were tidying up the maintenance shed and they had a load of hardware, games, magazines and other stuff that needed tidying up. My eyes lit up at this point! I’ve been there long enough to know that I’ve seen cupboards with stacks of old merchandise or old games, so I saw this as an opportunity for us to pull it all together.”
The arrival of Rare Replay – a collection of the company’s most beloved titles on Xbox One – gave the project additional importance, although Thomas reveals that his archival work began before the compendium was even in production. “I went around the whole company, going through cupboards and stock rooms, pulling together everything I could find; cartridges, design docs, everything. Eventually, I started documenting it and listing it to make sure we knew what we had, because by no means did we have a complete collection – everyone who has worked at Rare will have taken their own mementoes when they left, which is fair enough. You worked on it, those are your design docs. But equally, there’s the fleetingness of what is important. What do you keep now thinking it’s going to be historic? In the exhibition here at the museum, they’ve got an Apple iPod. My wife is a curator here and someone asked her, ‘why have you got an iPod here?’ She said, ‘you’ve got to have one in there because at some point that will become part of history.'”
Thomas’ work in cataloguing all of this material proved invaluable when it came to creating the excellent bonus material for Rare Replay. “It was quite fortuitous that we had all that stuff together because it meant that we could fill out all the Rare Revealed videos and we could get all the sprites that we needed for any artwork,” he explains. “Also, a lot of the ROMs that we shipped on Rare Replay came from the stuff that myself and a couple of other people found during that time. It was all organised, but it was just that no one had an idea of the complete picture, so getting it all in one place really helped with that.”
After Rare Replay launched, that’s when the idea of having a proper public exhibit of all this amazing material arose. “Sea of Thieves started, which meant the archive got bundled up, tidied away securely,” Thomas recalls. “Last summer, my wife started telling me about this summer’s exhibition at The Herbert, which was going to be based around toys, games and play. They try to do something that’s quite engaging because it’s the school holidays. They decided to do the history of play, and how play has evolved over the years. You have everything from sticks and hoops right up to, obviously, video games. I got Leigh Loveday and Dale Murchie together from the Rare Replay team and we started putting a picture together to show to Craig Duncan, the studio head. We wanted to try to make sure it wasn’t an advert. It could have been so easy to just say, ‘buy Sea of Thieves!’ but we wanted it to be more than that, so we ended up splitting it into two. We wanted to show the history of Rare, and hopefully by extension, the history of gaming, because Rare has been going since the early ’80s.'”
This first room of the exhibit is packed with items that will catch the eye of any gamer, not just those who consider themselves to be Nintendo or Microsoft fans. There’s a Famicom console with a development board sat awkwardly on the top; Rare’s founders, Tim and Chris Stamper, famously reversed-engineered the console in order to secure a development deal with Nintendo. Sat next to this is a SNES with a massive plastic device crammed into its cartridge slot, which is emblazoned with the iconic Donkey Kong logo – no prizes for guessing what this dev cartridge was used to create.
Elsewhere, there’s a Donkey Kong plush, pages of concept art (some of which is for games that ever saw the light of day), a stretchy Battletoads figure, a Conker’s Bad Fur Day beer glass and – perhaps most interestingly of all – a glass cabinet filled to the bursting point with boxed Rare titles, such as Donkey Kong 64, The Amazing Spider-Man, Solar Jetman and even Beetlejuice. There’s certainly no shortage of cool things; it would seem that the real problem was knowing where to stop. “We could have probably filled the rest of the ‘play’ exhibition if we wanted to!” laughs Thomas. “It was hard because I had to actually take a step back and ask myself if the general public would be excited about it. We had a load of concept art and design documents from either early NES games or SNES games that never made it, and for me they were super fascinating, but they didn’t give a snapshot of the history of the company. What we did was choose roughly twice as many objects for each of the decades and then ask what fits best with the story, so we could vary the objects we show, rather than just going saying, ‘this is how games were made.’ It was a good test to show it to some of the curators here, as well; to actually show the objects to non-players and ask if it makes sense and is this interesting – that’s a nice test to see whether we’d chosen the right material.”
The second room is devoted purely to Sea of Thieves, which is understandable – it is Rare’s current opus, after all – but there’s an important reason for so much space being devoted to it. “I do careers talks every now and again,” explains Thomas. “When you go to the younger age group, even college or GCSE, not a huge number of people know what roles are available in game development, so we thought we’d take this opportunity to say, ‘these are the different functions, these are the different people that can come together, the different skills that you need to create a modern video game.'”
What’s really amazing is the amount of time and effort that has gone into creating this exhibition. “Over the last 9 months it’s been a slow and steady build-up,” Thomas reveals. “Going back and forth between ourselves and the museum, making sure the text that we want to put on is museum-friendly, and so on. There was a tiny bit of fighting between Rare’s slightly more laid back tone and the museum’s slightly more academic tone, so we had to find a nice compromise between the two!”
While the exhibit has had the misfortune of opening during one of the biggest heatwaves the UK has seen in decades, Thomas says the reaction has been a positive one. “I think what a lot of people don’t realise is that Rare is on their doorstep,” says Thomas. “Also the people who run the museum have been really fascinated by how the kids have taken to it. There’s an Xbox, N64 and SNES for people to play, and I think a lot of people just expected the kids to go off and play that, but so many of them have been equally intrigued reading how these things are put together. One of my friend’s kids thought that the NES and the Spectrum were artistic choices! We had to say, ‘actually, no. This is history. That’s what gaming has gone through to get to where it is now.'”
Given that it is helping to spread the good name of the studio, it’s only fitting that the exhibit has been well-attended by staff. “We had a lot of Rare-ites on the opening night,” says Thomas. “There were about 20 or 25 people who made the march from Twycross for the evening, and we got their seal of approval as well. Some even found out things about Rare they weren’t aware of, which meant that we’d done our job, so that’s good.”
But what about the Stampers themselves? As the founders of the company, this exhibit is, on so many levels, a tribute to their legacy; have they visited it? “I don’t know whether the Stampers have come in,” replies Thomas. “I’d like to think they will. I hope we’ve tried to make something that’s for old and new. Given the number of former Rare staffers we worked with on Rare Replay, with the videos and interviews, it’s clear we want to make sure that the people who worked on these games are with these games forever; hopefully, they can see it all here.”
Speaking of the Stampers, the siblings were famous for locking the down the studio and only occasionally speaking to the gaming press. Ironically, since Microsoft has taken over – a company which would have good reason to expunge the Nintendo era from Rare’s history books – the company has relaxed this secretive stance. “Over the years we’ve become a far more open studio,” says Thomas. “I think we try to let people peek behind the curtain more often. You can see that with the Sea of Thieves development blogs that Joe Neate puts out every week. I think the way Craig Duncan talks to the media is far more open as well. We’re getting more press to the studio far more often than we ever used to. We’re also trying to appreciate the past far more often; Rare Replay was a big celebration, but in recent times we’ve seen Conker, Battletoads and Killer Instinct all appear again, and we’re open about our history.”
Rare may have moved on from Nintendo hardware, but this excellent exhibit shows the firm isn’t turning its back on the games which made it famous; it’s a refreshingly open look at the rich history of a company that amazingly remains largely unknown to thousands of people in the English Midlands. Hopefully, the show – which runs until the end of September and is free of charge to enter – will change that. Even during the short time we spent at The Herbert, we noticed more than one family walk through the exhibit, with parents excitedly pointing out old consoles and sharing their memories of these classic games with their offspring – the next generation of players.
Wario’s hijacked the eShop, Nintendo’s Twitter account and even issued his own press release in celebration of WarioWare Gold arriving on the 3DS. Overall, it’s been an effective way of reminding everyone games are still actually being released on the system.
Now, website Gaming Reinvented reports an equally as naughty dataminer has uncovered unused content in Wario’s new game in the form of an early version of Penny’s intro cutscene. There are a series of early sketches by the game’s character designer, Ko Takeuchi, that have been improved upon as development progressed.
A video has also been released illustrating what the hand-drawn sketches look like in motion:
It’s surprising how content such as this has been discovered so soon in a new release when earlier this week we heard about the existence of a beta version of Bowser’s Castle in Mario Kart Wii that took a decade to reveal.
Did you pick up or download a copy of WarioWare Gold on release? Have you at least tried out the free demo? Tell us below.
Another Saturday is upon us, and so is another weekend full of opportunities to play our favourite games. As always, members of team Nintendo Life have gathered together to discuss their gaming plans, and this weekend sees a lot of Octopath Traveler, some other stuff, Octopath Traveler, some very lovely cardboard, and then just a little bit of Octopath Traveler. What can we say? We love our RPGs.
Dave Frear, retro reviewer
For about a week or so, my Switch has been telling me people are playing Octopath Traveler. Feeling left out, I decided to purchase it – backlog be damned! I love the “HD-2D” visuals and the music, although in typical Dave fashion I haven’t actually done much in the game so far. I’ve not even reached the point I did in the first demo, but I have a weekend off now to get stuck into it. Based on that demo, I’m playing as Primrose as I’m curious to see how the story plays out; I will have my revenge! Or I will get distracted by sidequests. Either way, I’m expecting an enjoyable couple of days.
Glen Fox, guides editor
I’m still playing Paladins so I’ll probably have a few rounds of that. Fancy something new though so I’m eyeing up Golf Story or Axiom Verge as potentials. I’m travelling this weekend, so I need something 2D that won’t drain my battery super quickly, and those two meet the criteria quite nicely. Probably should be Stardew Valley or Hollow Knight but I’ve bought these two already so shush.
I haven’t really played my Switch much recently though; I kind of feel like I’m waiting for the new shiny things to play. I’m super excited for Warframe, for example, and really just want to get started on the big old grind in that. Then there’s Pokémon Let’s Go and Tales of Vesperia – two games that will literally have to fight each other for my time. I hate waiting!
Gonçalo Lopes, contributing writer
I have reached the bit of Octopath Traveler where you [tiny spoiler alert] gather all eight main characters and am now facing the impossible hard choice of making a team with just half of them. There are so many great combination possibilities that this will require a lot of experimentation. Besides the regular JRPG fever, I got struck with another massive dose of ‘mech madness’ so SD Gundam G Generation Genesis is also back on the Switch rotation, along with GameCube import favourites Gundam: The Ace Pilot, Gundam vs. Zeta Gundam and the delightful SD Gundam Gashapon Wars. So many Gundams, so little weekend…
Richard Atkinson, contributing writer
Sun, Sea and Switch… my weekend in a nutshell, basically. As well as frantically trying to tan my embarrassingly pale skin at the local beach, I’ll be rounding up some friends on and offline for some free-to-play gaming sessions. Paladins and Fortnite (this member of NL staff still needs to figure out how to build and run at the same time) will be getting my undivided attention as whenever I take a peek at my friends list to take a nosey to see what my fellow gamers are playing, these two titles are, without fail, always being played. Time to ‘git gud’.
The new stage, Ancho V Games on Splatoon 2 looks to be in rotation for a lot of the weekend, and with the new weapons to try out and some serious levelling up on the cards, inking fellow squids on the battlefield is an absolute must. Oh, and losing on Mario Kart 8 Deluxe‘s 200c mode, too.
Alan Lopez, contributing writer
Bomb Chicken isn’t Mozart, okay? This isn’t Francis Ford Coppola lining up the perfect shot. As far as I can tell three levels deep, under no condition does this game deviate from its name; I’m a chicken and I lay bombs, and bombs help me not get eaten. Why can I lay bombs? Shut up.
I’m enjoying this little platforming game, though it’s sliding dangerously into tedium only a few levels in. Will I stop playing before I get eaten? For both me and my little chicken friend’s sake, let’s hope I can keep these bombs blowing.
Austin Voigt, contributing writer
This weekend, we’ll be in the process of adopting a new dog – and one of my secret burning ambitions is to design Nintendo Labo toys for pets. I plan to hunker down and try my hand at a dog treat dispenser or ball launcher – but if anyone else has additional ideas for dog-friendly Labo designs, leave them in the comments! I’m determined to cross the canine-human lexicon via videogames. If I manage to succeed at this endeavor, I’ll be sure to share the results (fair warning: I will likely fail miserably).
Side note: our newest furry family member is a white wolfhound/lab mix, so we’re thinking of naming her Ghost, à la Jon Snow’s direwolf. Speaking of which – can we get a Thrones game on Switch sometime in the near future? I’m going to need it after Season 8 ends.
Ryan Craddock, staff writer
As always, top priority this weekend will be making sure to keep on top of my daily challenges – and, hopefully, the harder weekly challenges – on Fortnite. Once they’re all cleared up, though, I might actually brave the potentially time-consuming and addictive world of Octopath Traveler.
I’ve been holding off from playing, partly because I’m not sure how well I’ll get on with the actual gameplay itself (I love some RPGs, but sometimes they just don’t really do it for me), and partly because I’m scared that I’ll get hopelessly hooked on it and have even less time for anything else in my life. Anyway, I’ve finally downloaded the demo and might play through its three-hour limit over the next couple of days – at least that way I’ll know what to expect if I take the plunge!
Liam Doolan, news reporter
I’m still hooked on Sonic Mania Plus. It’s mostly because it’s a game you can jump straight into rather than having to wait around in a lobby for half an hour while other players join. The new encore mode featuring Mighty and Ray has been giving me the quick fix I need. I’ve even been playing the competitive mode with family and friends.
When I’m not speeding about in Sonic this weekend, I’ll most likely be spending my time laying bombs in Bomb Chicken. I love its style and especially the art design; it really does remind me of the SNES classic Yoshi’s Island.
Dom Reseigh-Lincoln, reviewer
This weekend I’ll be shooting up a sweary storm in Not A Hero: Super Snazzy Edition and channelling my inner Mort for some reaper-esque duties in Flipping Death. Both games couldn’t be any different in terms of gameplay, but they both share an irreverent and dark sense of humour so they’ve already scored some brownie points with me (tune into Nintendo Life next week to find out just how many).
I’ll also be getting stuck in the Call of Duty Blacks Ops 4 private beta on *cough* PS4 *cough* (shock horror), but I’m sure I’ll find some time to leap back into my ongoing love affair with Paladins. Since it’s now free-to-play, I imagine its already busy servers will be jam-packed with fresh meat – I mean ‘champions’…
Which games are you playing this weekend? (306 votes)
The Chucklefish Switch eShop title WarGroove is being touted as a spiritual successor to Intelligence Systems’ Advance Wars series. Not only does it look and play exactly like the classic titles on Game Boy Advance, it even has its own built-in campaign and map editor.
In the latest WarGroove blog post, Chucklefish’s art director and producer revealed one of the recently implemented features enabling potentially limitless story scenarios. It’s a simple and easy to use cutscene editor. This tool will be accessible to all players from launch and will allow you to share your own unique cutscenes with your friends.
Here are some more details about the editor:
The cutscene editor is perfect for presenting the story in WarGroove. It supports a comprehensive timeline where you can add, rearrange and edit actions.
With several emotes and voice lines per character, you can whip up a quick interaction or spend hours fine tuning your perfect cutscene.
The post also notes how far development has come since the original announcement trailer for the game last year. Initially, all cutscenes were static portraits with on-screen text only, and now there’s more flexibility to tell a variety of stories.
At this point in time, a release date has not yet been announced. Are you looking forward to WarGroove’s eventual arrival on the Switch eShop? Tell us in the comments.
First 4 Figures are known for producing premium models based on popular video game characters. In recent times we’ve seen Banjo-Kazooie and Shovel Knight figures and now the talented team has revealed Warp Star Kirby – the fourth model in the Kirby resin statue line.
This latest creation is available in two versions. The exclusive edition (as seen above) includes a built-in LED light-up function within the Warp Star section of the statue and the regular edition of the model (below) does not include this feature.
Both versions of the model will set you back $349.99, with pre-orders for the exclusive statue only available until 4th September. On 7th August you’ll need to return to the website and validate your order for the Day One edition of the statue. The current estimated release is Q3 2019. Take a look at a full rundown of the statue in the one-hour long video below:
Does an expensive Kirby Warp Star figure interest you? Have you ever bought a statue from First 4 Figures? Tell us below.
Arena brawlers are all the rage nowadays. While SuperSmash Bros. reigns supreme, lesser known titles under the same banner continue to fight for fame. One of the best ways to achieve this appears to be by recruiting an all-star cast of indie fighters.
The Switch eShop title Brawlout has been busy bolstering its own line-up with characters like Juan from Guacamelee! and Hyper Light Drifter. More recently it was announced Playtonic’s Yooka-Laylee would also be a gust fighter in the game. Now, in the latest trailer building excitement for the all-format release, the protagonist from Dead Cells has been revealed.
What’s most intriguing about this particular reveal is the music associated with the new fighter. It’s evidently the theme of Shovel Knight playing in the background while the character from Dead Cells holds his battle-worn shovel high up in the air. It’s worth pointing out Shovel Knight already features in Indie Pogo and Blade Strangers.
Do you own Brawlout on Switch? Are you interested in playing it if more indie fighters are added to the roster? Are you excited for the release of Dead Cells? Tell us below.
It’s only a matter of time before Niantic introduces Gen 4 Pokémon into Pokémon GO, and we can hardly wait.
To help prepare you for the upcoming update, we thought we’d round up all of the Pokémon you can expect to catch when the Gen 4 update rolls out, hopefully soon.
We love a bargain at NL Towers, but sometimes you just can’t skimp on quality (maybe). As such we’ve decided to peel back the satin curtain and take a look into the wondrous realm of the finer side of Switch accessories.
Check out the video above where we research the most expensive but arguably useful accessories we could find for the Nintendo Switch, and drop us a comment below if you’ve splurged on something top-shelf recently that would be appropriate to mention on a Nintendo website.
Featuring an original storyline crafted alongside series creator Rebecca Sugar, Steven Universe: Save the Light released digitally on other platforms in October last year, acting as the sequel to mobile RPG Attack the Light. The game lets players discover new and familiar characters on a journey through Beach City and beyond, all in the hopes of stopping a mysterious Gem new to the world of Steven Universe. You’ll be building your party of heroes from the show’s cast, levelling them up with new gear and abilities, and unleashing mighty team attacks and ‘Fusions’ in battles that blend real-time and turn-based elements.
OK K.O.! Let’s Play Heroes, on the other hand, is a slightly unconventional action-RPG developed by Capybara Games, also featuring an original storyline made in collaboration with the series’ creator Ian Jones-Quartey. When the diabolical Lord Boxman resets the card levels of every hero in Lakewood Plaza Turbo, a mall for heroes, it’s up to young K.O. to help his friends, defeat Boxman’s robot army and save the day. Players need to smash and bash their way through “ridiculous” quests and hard-hitting battles featuring brawler-style combat.
The game will be available at retail on 30th October in North America and 2nd November in Europe, selling at a suggested price of $39.99 / £34.99 / €39.99. As this is the first time that the two games will be appearing on Switch, each title will also be released individually on the Switch eShop. Should you want to go digital, Steven Universe: Save the Light and OK K.O.! Let’s Play Heroes will be available for $24.99 / £19.99 / €24.99 and $19.99 / £17.99 / €19.99, respectively, from 30th October.
Will you be diving into these Cartoon Network tie-ins? Let us know below.
