It’s turning out to be quite the day for Pokémon. We’ve already had the launch of Pokémon Home, as well as two new trailers for Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Rescue Team DX, and now The Pokémon Company has shared a list of tips to help you get stuck into the latter when it arrives next month.

The game, as you may well be aware, is a reimagining of Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Red Rescue Team and Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Blue Rescue Team, which originally released well over a decade ago. You play as a Pokémon, rather than a Trainer, and you’ll head out on a quest to recruit more Pokémon and help friends who are in trouble in mystery dungeons scattered all over the world.

So, about those tips we promised. Here’s the full low-down, courtesy of The Pokémon Company:

Teams
Players can set out on adventures with teams of up to three Pokémon, and they can have multiple teams. Players should try to choose the team best suited for the dungeon they are exploring, keeping in mind the types of Pokémon they are likely to encounter in that dungeon. Pokémon who join players’ teams can stay in rescue team camps. Players can also change which Pokémon is the leader of their teams.
Throughout players’ adventures, they should try to obtain Rainbow Gummis and DX Gummis! These items can give Pokémon useful capabilities known as rare qualities. Rare qualities will have a positive effect on all rescue team members in a dungeon, helping players explore the area. Look out for rare Pokémon that have a rare quality from the start!

Battles
Like the main series Pokémon games, Pokémon in Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Rescue Team DX can learn up to four moves that they can use to attack enemies, heal their party or apply some other special effects. Moves can also have different types and ranges.
But players shouldn’t forget to use items in battles, too! For example, Blast Seeds deal big damage after Pokémon eat them, while Gravelerocks can be used to attack from a distance, and Oran Berries can help Pokémon recover some HP. As with the layout of the dungeons, the kinds of items that appear and their locations will change each time players enter a dungeon.

Encounters
As players journey through Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Rescue Team DX, they can encounter over four hundred Pokémon—including Pokémon that can Mega Evolve! Keep an eye out for Lucario, too! Once a member of a legendary rescue team that was said to be the strongest of all, this Pokémon now plays an active part in the game.

In Pokémon Square, players will meet a lot of Pokémon with personalities of their own.

• The elder Whiscash will tell players all about this world’s legends and tales.
• Snubbull, with his kind and upbeat personality, always says whatever he is thinking.
• Young Caterpie looks up to the player and dreams of someday joining a rescue team.
• There’s also the emotional Lombre, who cheers up his friends.

Players will also meet other rescue teams.

• Team ACT, a powerful Gold Rank rescue team, is made up of Alakazam, Charizard and Tyranitar.
• A rescue team in name only, Team Meanies is formed by Gengar, Medicham and Ekans, and they’re up to no good.
• The greedy Team Shifty, led by Shiftry, only accepts jobs that pay a lot of money.
• Firefighters Blastoise, Feraligatr and Swampert form Team Hydro and are putting their Pokémon type to use.

Early game missions
Early in the adventure, players will be approached by Pokémon requiring their help. Among them are Dugtrio and Jumpluff.

• Dugtrio’s son, Diglett, has been taken by Skarmory and needs to be rescued. Set out for Mt. Steel to save Diglett!
• Shiftry, who reluctantly accepted the job to rescue Jumpluff’s friend stuck between some rocks, hasn’t returned from the mission yet. Why won’t the wind blow—and why hasn’t Shiftry come back? Head for the canyon to find out!

Not bad advice for the beginning of your adventure, we must admit.

Pre-orders for the game are available here; it launches exclusively on Nintendo Switch on 6th March.

This interview is part of our Road to the IGF series. You can find the rest by clicking here.

Neon Beats aims for simplicity as it tasks players with platforming through levels to the beat of the music, pressing them harder as the music’s intensity rises.

Rémi Jallageas and the team at OKYO GAMES, developers of the Best Student Game-nominated title, spoke with Gamasutra about tying gameplay to the beat without restraining what the player can do, aiming for clarity when the game’s demands were complex, and how music can help ’emphasize’ a moment in the player’s mind.

We are a team of 5 students. Paul Hebbinckuys is the sound designer and music composer, Alexandre Kadri is the programmer, I am the level designer, Brice Pinquet is the game designer, and Theo Tcheng is the VFX artist.

We don’t have a lot of background in the video game industry. Our courses allowed us to make several projects, and Neon Beats was developed during our studies of game design.

We created Neon Beats as part of an 8-week project supervised by the school. We were given constraints which were: non violent, playable one-handed, and colorblind friendly. We also had a theme: feel good. From there, we created the basic concept in a brainstorming.

To express the “Feel Good” atmosphere, we chose to link gameplay and music with a simple and minimalist artistic style.

We used the Unity engine. Firstly, we developed a tool in order to create the global structure of a level quickly and easily. We also created a tool that analyzes the audio spectrum of the music in order to link the gameplay to the songs.

What we wanted to create, and that we felt interested in, is the fact that the rhythm of the music never constrains the player’s actions. Only the levels are affected, which allow the player to enjoy and focus on mechanics more linked to platformers.

We truly think that a good link between music and gameplay creates a “feel good” experience.

The first thing to know is that we design a level depending on its music. With this idea, the structure of a level must fit the musical intensity. During tense moments, the player will experience fast-paced situations, while less intense situations will be linked to a calm and slow music.

The main challenge is to have an experience that respects the musical rhythm as much as possible while allowing the player total freedom of movement. The music of the game therefore evolves according to the player’s progression in the level.

One of the other challenges was the creation of a logical and interesting micro interest curve (internal to the level itself), but also at the macro level (from the beginning to the end of the game). That is why we tried to introduce mechanics as the player would advance in the game.

Feeling a progression in the music was something primordial. We also needed music that was not too repetitive, with a strong rhythm. Music that fits Neon Beats, is in fact, simple music.

We wanted a simple and efficient game. This visual simplicity allowed us to emphasize the core experience while creating accessibility and fast understanding of the gameplay.

To us, music is personal. Neon Beats is a our representation of what the music made us feel. Furthermore, music has the ability to emphasize every situation and emotion. That is why we tied the gameplay to the music – to create a memorable experience.

Audio is as important as an artistic direction. It’s a huge part of the experience and strongly contributes to the identity of the game.

The Bigben Group is merging two of its dealings, its video game accessory business Nacon and its video game publishing business Bigben Interactive, into a single entity.

The resulting company takes on the Nacon name, and will handle both its namesake’s accessories brand as well as the direct video game dealings of the former Bigben Interactive.

“We have brought together our Games and Accessories activities into one company and under one brand, Nacon; a single company to combine our efforts in the service of a single ambition which is to better understand and satisfy players,” explains a statement from the company.

“We are all different, we love different genres, games, and universes, which are our dreams and our passions. However, we all want the same thing, the best possible gaming experience! In order to improve this experience all of our teams will now work together under the same banner.”

These days there are very few first-party or Nintendo-published titles that don’t get an international release, but back in the day it was common for games to remain in their Japanese homeland for months or even years, if they ever came overseas at all. No, we’re not just talking about the countless Famicom/Super Famicom Mahjong or horse-betting titles which never left Japanese shores. In the dim and distant past we gamers in the West caught wind of foreign treasures via grainy screenshots in gaming mags; a whole other world of gaming which existed, hidden on the other side of the planet.

The more industrious among us began sourcing import hardware to get our greasy mitts on these ‘forbidden’ games. Nowadays we’re lucky enough to have access to so much more than before, with previously unavailable games receiving official remakes and restorations galore. Last year’s Collection of Mana, for example, was the first time that Seiken Densetsu 3 was officially available in the West, and there’s a 3D remake coming soon, too.

And even when a game isn’t scheduled for the West, if it’s available on the Japanese Switch eShop we can download it easily enough anywhere in the world. This is true of the upcoming Famicom Tantei Club remake on Switch, although our pitiful knowledge of Japanese could present a sizeable problem with that one. Nothing’s been announced with regards to a localised version, which is a shame. Despite excellent fan translations of various Japan-only titles, there are some games we wish Nintendo itself would bring to the West.

With that in mind, we’re going to take a look at ten Nintendo (or Nintendo-published) games we’d like to see spread their wings and fly overseas. They span consoles from the NES to the Wii and none of them have ever been released in an official capacity outside their homeland, so it’s about time they made the trip.

Famicom Wars (1988) / Game Boy Wars (1991) / Super Famicom Wars (1998)

As you may guessed from the cunning naming convention adopted by Intelligent Systems, all three of the above games belonged to the strategy series that would make its first appearance in the West with the sublime Advance Wars on – you guessed it – Game Boy Advance. We’ve seen fan translations and maps from these games turn up in Advance Wars games, but we’d love to see these get the full remake treatment.

And if you’re thinking 1998 seems a bit late for a Super Famicom game, it was a download-only title for the Nintendo Power cartridge, a Japan-only flash cart you could download games to from special kiosks. That being said, Fire Emblem: Thracia 776 (more of which later) got a full retail SFC release in 2000 long after Super Nintendo games dried up in the West.

Famicom Tantei Club (1988/89)

Famicom Tantei Club (or Famicom Detective Club) is a series of Nintendo-developed text adventure games that began life on the Famicom Disk System before being ported variously to Game Boy Advance and Super Famicom with the last of three games releasing on Satellaview in 1997. Several Nintendo luminaries worked on the series including Gunpei Yokoi, Satoru Okada and Yoshio Sakamoto of Metroid fame.

The games involve solving murder cases by examining evidence and interrogating suspects via a text command interface. Given its grisly subject, it’s rather unique in Nintendo’s first-party lineup, although given its absolute reliance on text, we can see why Nintendo of the late ’80s wouldn’t bother localising it. Still, with developer Mages at the helm of a Switch remake of the first two games (Famicom Tantei Club: Kieta Kōkeisha and Famicom Tantei Club Part II: Ushiro ni Tatsu Shōjo), there’s hope yet that we might eventually see these officially localised. You can see some comparison shots of the remake on Nintendo Japan’s official announcement page, or watch last year’s Japan-only Nintendo Direct reveal introduced by Yoshio Sakamoto himself:

Kaeru no Tame ni Kane wa Naru (1992)

Kaeru no Tame ni Kane wa Naru is a delightful Zelda-esque adventure for the original Game Boy that roughly translates as ‘For The Frog The Bell Tolls’. We’ve looked at this game before on Nintendo Life and it’s a continuing shame that there’s no official version available in the West. Perhaps Grezzo – the team responsible for the lovely Switch remake of The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening – could have a little look at this Game Boy gem next?

Marvelous: Mōhitotsu No Takarajima (1996)

Marvelous: Another Treasure Island is a fully first-party game directed by the man who now heads up one of Nintendo’s flagship franchises, Mr. Zelda himself, Eiji Aonuma. He intentionally gave top-down adventure game Marvelous a Link to the Past flavour, as you’ll appreciate if you watch a video of the game in action. Controlling three boys on a treasure hunt, Marvelous released very late in the Super Famicom’s cycle and with all resources diverted to the N64 and its polygonal graphics, Marvelous wasn’t considered for release overseas. Sterling fan translations exist, but what we’d give to see Nintendo Treehouse have a go a this one!

Custom Robo – Nintendo 64 (1999)

There are plenty of unlocalised games in the N64 catalogue, and while we’ve been lucky enough to sample games like Treasure’s Sin And Punishment via Virtual Console, there are still a trove of titles which never came to our shores. The Nintendo-published Custom Robo is an action RPG developed by Noise in which you pilot little customisable robots that battle each other in an arena called the Holosseum. The GameCube iteration in 2004 was the first to make it outside Japan, but we’d love the chance to build our own Custom Robos in the original.

Fire Emblem: New Mystery of the Emblem (2010) / Genealogy of the Holy War (1996) / Thracia 776 (2000) / The Binding Blade (2002)

It took us a while to get into the Fire Emblem groove here in the West, but now we’re cooking with gas and we’re wondering what we’ve missed over the years. While we have seen a plethora of remakes and remasters over the years such as Fire Emblem Echoes: Shadows of Valentia, there are still several games which we never got.

Fire Emblem: New Mystery of the Emblem was a 2010 DS remake of the 1994 Super Famicom original that even incorporated some story chapters from BS Fire Emblem on the Satellaview, too, but it never left Japan. Genealogy of the Holy War was the second SFC game in the series followed by the rock-hard sequel Thracia 776 and The Binding Blade on GBA in 2002, but none of them have been officially localised for the West.

With the success of Fire Emblem: Three Houses on Switch indicating there’s a massive audience for these games, there are rumours that a planned 3DS remake might be retooled for Switch, so we’re hoping it’s one of the above. In the meantime, anyone starved of Fire Emblem content should check out Nintendo’s latest title in the series, Super Smash Bros. Ultimate. Eh?!

We amuse ourselves, at least. Onwards!

Captain Rainbow (2008)

Coming from the developer behind Chibi-Robo, Skip Ltd.’s Captain Rainbow is the alter ego of unimportant everyman Nick who travels to an island filled with forgotten Nintendo side characters like Birdo and the Devil from Devil World. Featuring a host of obscure Nintendo references, it’s one of the most famous games on this list thanks to the many cameos it contains as Nick travels around the island granting wishes to the bit players he meets. Despite performing poorly in Japan and therefore scuppering any chance of a localisation, it has become something of a cult classic and has plenty to offer gamers who thrive on nods and winks to Nintendo’s past.

Skip seems to specialise in Japan-only titles and is also behind GiFTPiA, a charming little GameCube title which never crossed the Pacific despite being shown off at E3. It’s a small miracle we ever got Chibi-Robo, to be honest.

Fatal Frame: Mask of the Lunar Eclipse (2008)

Otherwise known as Fatal Frame IV, this Wii exclusive in Tecmo’s survival horror series was originally planned for an overseas release but that never materialised. The Wii U received the internationally released Fatal Frame: Maiden of Black Water, but the fourth main entry remains a Japanese exclusive. If only Nintendo had a really successful console at the moment which acquits itself most ably in the ports department, hmm?

Zangeki no Reginleiv (2010)

Another Nintendo-published Wii title, Zengeki no Reginleiv was developed by Sandlot and is a retelling of the old Norse Ragnarok chestnut. Featuring decent Wii Motionplus integration and co-op gameplay, it apparently provides hack-and-slash action aplenty and while we’re not lacking in that department these days on Switch, it might have been nice to give this a whirl on Wii a decade ago. Plus, it came in a sexy black box, so even if it’s rubbish we still want it.

…oh, and Mother 3 (2006)

But of course. Need we say more?

Apologies to Mahjong fans – we could have filled the article with nothing else. We’ve stuck to Nintendo-related games for systems that were released in the West, so there aren’t any 64DD or Satellaview games above. Got a burning desire to see Trade & Battle: Card Hero get the full Nintendo Treehouse treatment? What else would you like to see get the Nintendo Seal of Approval in the West? Share your hopes and dreams below…

Square Enix has released a number of demos over the past few years for major releases like Octopath Traveler and Dragon Quest XI S: Echoes of an Elusive Age and the trend looks set to continue.

There’s now been a listing over on the PlayStation Store tracker website Gamstat for a demo of Square Enix’s upcoming 3D remake, Trials of Mana. This website is the same site that revealed the Double Dragon & Kunio-kun Retro Brawler Bundle ahead of its official reveal last week, so it’s likely to be accurate.

Although this is a listing on a PlayStation website, the demo is expected to be made available on the Nintendo Switch as well. And whenever it does arrive, it’ll be available to download across all regions.

The game itself is a remake of the legendary Super Famicom RPG Seiken Densetsu 3 and is due out on 24th April. If you’re eager to find out more, you can always check out the original 1995 Super Famicom release, which was made available in the Collection of Mana last year.

Is this a demo you would be interested in playing ahead of the full game’s release? Leave a comment down below.

Earlier today (Tuesday, February 11th), after the launch of Hotfix 2.7.1.1, we were made aware of the re-emergence of an issue which caused a small percentage of players to lose currency and materials. This comes after the first incidence of this issue, which caused all players to lose currency and materials on January 28th with the launch of Hotfix 2.7.1, and resulted in player account rollbacks. With today’s incident, we have taken similar steps and rolled back accounts to the state they were in as of 8:30 AM PST (before the launch of 2.7.1.1).

Since both of these incidents are identical in cause and the effect on our players, and because both incidents happened within a close window of time, we wanted to give you a picture of what went wrong, how we fixed it, and how we’re planning on making sure this doesn’t happen again in the future. First, let’s look at what caused this problem in the first place: a game bug involving inventory management and a series of server configurations that re-introduced the bug after it was fixed.

Inventory Management

In Destiny 2, quests are treated similar to other inventory items, such as currency and materials. All items have a timestamp, based on when they were first added to a player’s inventory. This timestamp is used to sort quests in the order in which they were acquired. The game cleans up a player’s inventory upon each login, to make sure it is consistent with any changes to content, such as the maximum number of items of a particular type the player can carry.

Several months ago, players reported that quest log sorting wasn’t working properly, and we wanted to fix that. The team investigated and found that the clean-up process was resetting the timestamp on a subset of quests, which was breaking chronological sorting. We decided to fix this by disabling the timestamp-resetting behavior for quests. That fix was conceptually reasonable but, through subtle side effects, it ended up disabling too much of the clean-up process. The net result was that the game calculated the wrong cap quantity for stacked items (such as currencies and materials), which caused items above the cap to be lost. We knew this code was critical and, per our typical process, we had two domain experts provide code reviews for the change – but sadly, we didn’t spot the bug.

A few days later, our internal test teams caught this issue. However, we incorrectly concluded that it was caused by a tooling failure with debug workflows we use for testing, and not an actual bug within the game. Having dodged all our diligence, the issue went live in 4.7.1. Once the bug was identified in the live game, the next step was to figure out how to fix it, which leads us to the next discussion: game servers and their configurations.

Server Configurations

Before every major release (for example, Shadowkeep), we do comprehensive stress testing to try and model user behavior and its impact on our service architecture. Because there’s no substitute for millions of real player behaviors, we supplement this testing by closely monitoring service metrics after launch.

Back in October, in order to handle increased CPU and player load for Shadowkeep’s launch, we spun up additional servers (in this case, called WorldServers); more servers, in fact, than we have ever used before for this task. Running with this many servers has had some small side effects that we were tracking but were generally invisible to players. For example, one issue was that a small percentage (less than 1 percent) of these servers would crash on start-up due to the volume of servers overwhelming one of the backing databases. Our workaround for this was to simply manually restart the crashed servers each time we detected this issue, and this appeared to address the problem without any discernable side effects for players.

Fast forward again to today, February 11th, when we rolled out the 2.7.1.1 update coinciding with the launch of Crimson Days. After launch, some of the WorldServers once again crashed on startup because of a high volume of servers starting simultaneously. Once again we manually restarted those servers and thought everything was fine. We were wrong.

Unbeknownst to us, this crash resulted in those WorldServers not applying the previous character data corruption fix. This meant that a small percentage of WorldServers were running the old code and the bug that was corrupting character data. We have verification systems that detect these sorts of version misconfigurations, but the WorldServer crashes and subsequent manual restarts caused the servers to also skip the verification process. Prior to this morning, we had believed skipping these overrides and verifications to be impossible.

As a part of our standard practices of verifying a new build, we also have our test teams log in with a number of test accounts in order to verify the player experience. Because we have hundreds of servers in our retail environment, every manual test we performed was (un)lucky enough to hit the “good” servers, and all of them missed the small percentage of servers that were in a bad state. So we gave the all clear.

Today, as the game came back on after the 2.7.1.1 deployment, we started seeing player reports of lost currency. The team began investigating immediately and took the game down at 10:30 AM PST. In that time, hundreds of thousands of unique players had logged into the game or accessed their characters through a third party service. Our investigation uncovered what we thought was an impossible situation: a small number of our WorldServers had loaded without the correct configuration which fixed the corruption issues from 2.7.1. Unfortunately, anyone whose characters had been accessed using one of these out-of-date servers encountered the character-corrupting problem.

Once we determined this was the same issue that occurred on January 28th and we understood how it happened, the team decided that our best path forward – rather than trying to identify each affected account and risk missing something in the process – was to restore all character data from the backup that took place just before the 2.7.1.1 patch rolled out.

Preventive Measures

The team has identified a number of additional safeguards that should prevent this particular issue from happening in the future.