Don’t get us wrong, the Super Mario Lego reveal earlier this week was great and all, but where are The Legend of Zelda and Donkey Kong sets? They’d be amazing, right? If you’re still imagining what else Nintendo and LEGO could eventually come up with, the good news is there seems to be a real chance of it happening.

During a recent interview with LEGO fansite The Brothers Brick, Design Manager at the LEGO Creative Play Lab and Digital Design Lead for LEGO Super Mario – Jonathan Bennink – was asked if Nintendo’s other series could eventually be transformed into LEGO sets.

While he couldn’t share “any specifics” just yet, he did say the LEGO team was open to the idea:

They [Nintendo] have a lot of very exciting IPs that we might do or might not do.

LEGO apparently hasn’t worked with Nintendo for the past four years just to release one wave, either. It’s hoping for a long-term partnership with the Japanese video game giant:

we haven’t worked for four years to release just one wave of products. We hope to have a long and fruitful relationship with Nintendo and their IPs, and we are really looking forward to working with them on a longer-term.

So, there you go – Nintendo and LEGO’s partnership could go well beyond Super Mario sets. Are there any particular sets you would like to see? Leave a comment below.

Epic Games has acquired Cubic Motion, the studio whose facial animation tech has powered the likes of God of War and Marvel’s Spider-Man.

The move aims to bolster its Unreal Engine team with the acquisition, and follows in the footsteps of January’s acquisition of 3Lateral. Both buys, Epic notes in a press release, aim to further the company’s goal of “advancing the state of the art in the creation of believable digital humans.”

Cubic Motion itself is behind automated performance-driven facial animation tech offered to the video game and film industries, as well as other fields.

Its latest offering, the Persona system, is used to create immediate character facial animation in Unreal engine by capturing data from actors and mapping that to a digital model in real time. While the acquisition sees Cubic Motion ramping up its development of Persona and Unreal Engine, a press release notes that the company will continue to work with customers and industry partners even as a part of Epic Games.

“They do try to take care of you, providing food, encouragement to go take breaks. But for the most part, the implication is: ‘Get the job done at all costs.’”

– A former Naughty Dog developer shares their experience crunching at the studio.

A recent Kotaku story speaks with a number of current and former developers from The Last of Us developer Naughty Dog about the work-life conditions during the development of past titles and in the lead up to The Last of Us II’s release.

The full story speaks with 13 current and former developers at Naughty Dog to bring attention to the expectation placed on teams working on triple-A games, and the cost they play on the lives and careers.

 “You feel obligated to be there later, because everyone else is there later,” one anonymous developer tells Kotaku. “If an animation needed to be put in and you weren’t there to help the animator, you’re now blocking the animator, and they may give you grief. It may not even be spoken—it may just be a look. ‘Man, you totally screwed me last night by not being here at 11 p.m.’”

Conversations between Kotaku and Naughty Dog developers reveal moments where teams continued working on assets being informed the content had been cut days or weeks prior, issues exacerbated by the fact that Naughty Dog as a studio doesn’t have a production department, out of a belief that each dev should be their own producer.

“It’s an amazing creative environment, but you can’t go home,” says a current The Last of Us II developer.

The full story on Kotaku shares more experiences from Naughty Dog developers, and talks about how these continuous problems have shifted with each passing release.

With Animal Crossing: New Horizons rapidly approaching, we’ve been finding ourselves increasingly impressed with the wonderful creativity shown by the community. As such, we thought we’d get in on the act with our very own music video – which took a lot more effort than we first imagined.

‘New Horizons’ (an imaginative song name, we know) documents the last few years and months building up to the game’s release. It’s pretty cheesy – but hopefully in a good way – and we hope a fair few of you will relate to the lyrics and enjoy bopping along. There are even a couple of guest appearances to look out for including Animal Crossing’s true musical star and a very pesky raccoon.

If you like what you hear and want to be an extra lovely person, you can save the song to your own personal music libraries at most major platforms. Here are a few:

Feel free to let us know what you think about the video in the comments – and try to be gentle! Only seven days to go!

Since 2017 we’ve seen a steady supply of Hamster’s Arcade Archives releases bringing arcade classics to the Switch eShop. What’s more, the series includes previously unreleased or hard-to-find arcade games from Nintendo itself. Having been so well acquainted with many of the NES versions, and it’s been wonderful to rediscover these games in their original (and sometimes quite different) arcade form over the past few years.

The number of titles in the Arcade Archives list grows on a near-weekly basis, so below we’ve reproduced the full list of Arcade Archives releases available on Switch eShop to date. With a variety of options to tailor each game’s presentation to your personal tastes, you can even flip the screen 90° for a more authentic rendition of games originally designed for an upturned CRT screen. Throw them in your Flip Grip and you’ve arguably got the best way to play these games in 2020, short of having the original arcade cabinets, of course.

New releases will be added to this list as they drop. The games are listed in alphabetical order, and it’s worth remembering that certain games – Castlevania, for example – start with a sneaky ‘VS’, so they’ll naturally be near the bottom. Alternatively, you can view them in our database sorted by Release Date or User Rating. Please note that we have NOT included the ACA Neo Geo releases here – we’ll have a separate guide for Neo Geo games on Switch before you can say “how many!?!”.

And if this huge list is a tad overwhelming, you’ll find our picks of the best Arcade Archives games on Switch at the bottom. You know, just to get you on the right track.

Arcade Archives Switch eShop releases – Complete list

Looking at that list and don’t know where to start? Then check out our picks of the best Arcade Archives games – in no particular order – to get you off on the right foot.

The best Switch Arcade Archives games…

Publisher: HAMSTER / Developer: Nintendo

Release Date: 14th Jun 2018 (USA) / 15th Jun 2018 (UK/EU)

Available for the first time since being tucked away as a bonus in Donkey Kong 64, Mario (or rather Jumpman) may seem quite limited in his abilities (and death by a short fall is very old-school), but Donkey Kong is still a fun game. Tougher than the NES port, it can get quite addictive as you seek to improve your high scores. Should the many re-releases of the NES version have failed to impressed, there’s nothing here that will win you over, but for fans of the game, this Arcade Archives release is something of an ‘ultimate edition’. Three versions of this classic with a few display options and HAMSTER’s usual array of modes and online leaderboards make this a great choice for high score chasers and people who wish they were more like Billy Mitchell.

Publisher: HAMSTER / Developer: Irem

Release Date: 21st Nov 2019 (USA) / 21st Nov 2019 (UK/EU)

Made by people that would go on to make Metal Slug, Irem’s In the Hunt is an excellent shoot-’em-up and a great fit for the Switch. Giving the final frontier the elbow in favour of a sub-based maritime excursion, it offers something comfortingly familiar in the genre but shockingly, joyously different in execution. It stands out as a high-quality deep cut in the Arcade Archives catalogue of retro classics.

Publisher: HAMSTER / Developer: Konami

Release Date: 12th Sep 2019 (USA) / 12th Sep 2019 (UK/EU)

Track & Field remains as endearingly entertaining as it was when it first appeared 36 years ago. It’s a little on the pricey side considering it only has six events, one of which (the high jump) is a bit of a stinker, and is obviously a one-trick pony given its subject matter. But it still does that one trick better than most games that have succeeded it, so if you’re looking for a quick button-basher this is a good choice.

Publisher: HAMSTER

Release Date: 8th Aug 2019 (USA) / 8th Aug 2019 (UK/EU)

A side-scrolling shooter in the R-Type vein, except you fly a ship that sprouts tentacles, Irem’s X Multiply deserves to sit alongside its more famous stablemate. When we say ‘in the vein’, we mean very literally as this game takes you into body of a human being infected with parasitic alien life forms. Timely, you might say!

Switching a space-based setting for a more interior, biological environment that would feel at home in an Alien movie or the latter stages of a Metroid title gives the game a much different, darker tone to R-Type but it’s just as addictive and well worth downloading if the 1989 arcade original (or the PlayStation and Saturn ports) passed you by.

Publisher: HAMSTER / Developer: Nintendo

Release Date: 30th Mar 2018 (USA) / 30th Mar 2018 (UK/EU)

Punch-Out!! is not only a nostalgic slice of Nintendo’s arcade history, it just so happens to be one of the most enjoyable boxing games ever made, laying down the entire foundation not only for the whole series but for several other games adopting the ‘behind the boxer’ viewpoint. Over three decades later, it is still a joy to pick up and play, still proving to be extremely rewarding when you finally figure out your opponent’s ‘tell’ and proceed to take them to the floor. Besides ARMS and Pato Box, Switch has few boxing alternatives on the system and despite being a little lacking content-wise when set side-by-side with later entries in the series, the core gameplay loop still delivers the goods. Short, sweet and straight to the point, just like Mr. Sandman’s right uppercut, then.

Publisher: HAMSTER

Release Date: 27th Feb 2020 (USA)

Yet another Irem shmup for you (what can we say – we love ’em), Konami’s Life Force, née Salamander, is a Gradius spin-off and a rollicking good one which alternates between horizontal and vertical-scrolling stages. As with X Multiple, this too is set inside a life form, although this time it’s a giant alien fighting off a virulent strain of something or other.

Life Force is a challenging beast and the Arcade Archives version includes three version of the game – the original Japanese Salamander from 1986, the renamed North American version that included narrative and graphical alterations, and yet another iteration (also renamed Life Force) which went back to Japan the following year with further tweaks. Three games in one? What more do you want, jam on it?

Publisher: Nintendo / Developer: HAMSTER

Release Date: 22nd Dec 2017 (USA) / 22nd Dec 2017 (UK/EU)

Super Mario Bros. being playable on a Nintendo system is not particularly surprising, but that it should first appear on Switch in its VS. incarnation was unexpected. The excellent gameplay, catchy music and a large chunk of the levels are still present, but the new stages make for a different feel that muscle-memory won’t get you through. Those levels may have since appeared in The Lost Levels, but their inclusion here alongside changes to existing levels (including a different solution to a multi-path puzzle) make for a still enjoyable but tougher alternative way of playing, with highscore chasing also adding to the fun thanks to the online leaderboards. Even if you can play through the regular version of the game in your sleep, VS. Super Mario Bros. is an excellent – and challenging – choice for platforming fans.

Obviously, Super Mario Bros. is a classic. The last entry on our list certainly isn’t, although it’s still a fascinating little curio in this collection…

Publisher: HAMSTER / Developer: Nintendo

Release Date: 20th Jul 2018 (USA) / 20th Jul 2018 (UK/EU)

Sky Skipper may not be a Nintendo arcade classic like Donkey Kong, but its inclusion in the Arcade Archives collection is significant thanks to its rarity and obscurity. The 1981 game was a commercial failure and virtually all of its cabinets were subsequently converted to run Popeye instead. Of a handful that made it to America, only one is known to exist and it resides in Nintendo of America HQ, and it was from that cabinet that the ROM for this release was extracted.

Regardless of the game’s quality, it’s something of a miracle that we’re able to play it at all and it’s wonderful to have it preserved and widely available now on Switch. For that reason alone, it’s worth investigating if you have the slightest interest in Nintendo’s arcade history.

With so many to choose from we’re just scratching the surface. It’s certainly worth bearing in mind the age of these games – that ‘Archives’ title is apt as many of these games belong in a museum and its a thrill to have them on Switch in such fine form. Give them time and the classic gameplay of the best of them still shines through.

Let us know which of Hamster’s Arcade Archives games you’ve most enjoyed, and which ones you’d avoid, with a cheeky comment below.

These Denisovan discoveries were based on statistical models created by Cox and his colleagues and run on Microsoft Azure, which proved a key factor in their project’s success. Massey, unlike many other universities, does not have its own on-premises computer facility to carry out big data-based research.

“These are big, costly computers, but their capacity is limited. Lots of people want to use them, and that means that it is very hard to get the compute time you need when you need it. You have to wait in line,” Cox explains.

In this case, the team went with a Microsoft cloud option. “Azure works well for us. It has scalability and flexibility. It gives us the freedom to work at the pace that we need to get answers.”

Science moves fast

Cox estimates that if the team had instead used an in-house IT facility, their work might have taken an extra six months, year, or more to complete.

“It’s hard to say. But actually, it might have been never. That’s because the amount of computing time we needed would have meant that someone else probably would have got to the answers before we did, and they would have published before us. Science moves fast, and the questions would have been addressed by others if we hadn’t got there at the speed we needed.”

Businesses and bureaucracies routinely use the power of the cloud to sift through, analyze, and harness mountains of big data in fast, secure, and flexible ways. Cox says cloud computing brings the same benefits to the laboratory. “Processing so much data can be boring and laborious,” he says. “Azure frees us to do other things to develop our research.”

New technologies and solutions that operate in the cloud and leverage artificial intelligence and machine learning promise to accelerate the pace of research. And the ability to process lots of data quickly can also open up new directions for scientific inquiry as it did for Cox and his colleagues.

Tying in with the recent reveal of its new Tokyo office – the third announcement of the Platinum4 – PlatinumGames has now shared information on a brand new game engine being developed in-house to help the studio create “thrilling next-generation action games”.

Known for now as the PlatinumEngine, this new tool will be used to drive the studio’s creations going forward, being described as “bigger, more expressive, more creative,” in an update shared online.

Wataru Ohmori, Platinum’s Research and Development Group Lead and Chief Technology Officer, explains how development on the engine began:

“We’ve used our own in-house engine, specialized for action game development, since PlatinumGames was founded. But modern games demand a whole new level of quality, a greater variety and number of objects on-screen, and a richer amount of expressive visual power. We came to the frightening realization that if we don’t make our work more efficient, we’re simply not going to be able to keep making the games that we want to make as technology and expectations grow. Our new engine will help us make bigger, more expressive games than ever before, and with greater ease.”

Ohmori goes on to explain that third-party engines like Unity and Unreal are lacking some features that PlatinumGames felt it needed, so an optimised engine was the only solution to meet the studio’s needs.

Platinum’s Research and Development Group Team Lead, Tsuyoshi Odera, and Research and Development Group Programmer, Ryoichi Takahashi, explain just what the engine aims to do:

Odera: “…Our goal with this new engine is to reduce, as much as we can, the amount of effort that goes into game development. The idea is to take all the unnecessary work away from our game development teams. We’re looking into everything we can do to make their work more efficient, even if those changes seem minor on the surface. Things like reducing the number of button presses needed to convert data, reflecting new work in the build right after it’s converted, or making levels playable directly from the editor.”

Takahashi: “For the most part, I’ve worked more closely with game development teams than on system development, and each project has its own needs that have to be met through manual work; they often start to approach the limits of what can be done in terms of time and scale. At the end of the day, I want to give our artists an engine that will let them dig in to a wide variety of visual styles – photorealism, cartoony cell-shading, and beyond – to make sure our games are up to Platinum standards visually.”

Improving workflow and providing new tools should be a fantastic change for both the developers working on the game and the players who get to experience them later down the line. Ohmori wraps things up by saying, “PlatinumGames is known for our action games, but going forward, we’re going to have to try making things we haven’t made before.

“Those new challenges might be under the broad “action game” umbrella, or they might be something completely different, with some action elements. Either way, we’ll need to step up our game in terms of scale and expression.”