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Sony and Microsoft don’t sweat Nintendo. At least, that’s the corporate line — they still might be coming for Nintendo’s ass.

Sony has shrugged off the notion that the PlayStation brand, with high-end graphics and adult-friendly play, could be considered in the same market as Nintendo’s Switch. Meanwhile, Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer openly dreamt of porting games to Switch and intends to support the Switch 2 through his expansive (while consolidated) hopes for Xbox. Nintendo pioneer Shigeru Miyamoto is happy to “not get involved in what is sometimes called the ‘game war.'” Companies to gamers: ✌️❤️

But for all the tunnel vision, everyone looks ready to rumble. The Switch 2’s specs inch Nintendo closer to offering the current-gen experience of the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X in handheld form. PlayStation has responded with murmurs of its own handheld plans, while Xbox hopes to turn every device into an Xbox. But the counter to Nintendo isn’t all a hardware game. At this year’s Summer Game Fest, a slew of games played like legit competition to the first-party games that have remained under Nintendo’s lock and key.

No, you won’t play the next 3D Mario game on a PlayStation without hacking your console… but you may come close?

Watch your back, Mario

There has been no shortage of Nintendo clones over the last 40 years, but rarely does, say, a DreamWorks All-Star Kart Racing hit like the real Nintendo first-party equivalent. Case in point: Astro Bot, such a revelation in terms of letting a platformer team cook with the time and standards of a Nintendo game that it easily swept up Game of the Year awards throughout 2024. At this year’s Game Developers Conference, Team Asobi studio head Nicolas Doucet attributed the success to a small team (60 people), compact gameplay (around 12 hours) and constant review process that meant Asobi was never “compromising the players’ happiness.”

Nintendo’s Shinya Takahashi has agonized in public over a dream to condense the development cycle of the company’s games, but doesn’t waver on a need for quality. It is the same Takahashi who, after all, scrapped all of Metroid Prime 4 in 2019 in favor of rebooting it (with shipping planned for fall 2025). Maybe a little competition in the software department between the home of Zelda and the other titan video game publishers would be a good thing.

Takashi Iizuka, the head of Sega’s Sonic Team, is reaching for that level of precision with Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds. After just an hour of racing — and during the launch week of Mario Kart World nonetheless! — CrossWorlds played like a true high-speed alternative to the Nintendo franchise. The races moved at a clip, the PS5-level graphics were crisp and kinetic, and while the course designers throw racers a curveball with the addition of ring portals that transport you to a new track mid-race, the cups I was able to play were traditional lap-style experiences (which may speak to a select perturbed Mario Kart racer right now).

CrossWorlds, which is out Sept. 25 across all consoles, can’t match the sheer number of available racers packed into Mario Kart World — and announced additions like Hatsune Miku, Minecraft, and SpongeBob feel more like cheap Fortnite season skins than an expansion of the Sega pantheon — but as a racing game, it’s as good as what Nintendo can do with a modern racer, minus the need to own a Switch 2. And as Iizuka has boasted, it actually has cross-play.

A single game summoning the non-Nintendo Nintendo spirit of Astro Bot wouldn’t be a trend, but then I played Lego Party. Developer SMG Studios is really not hiding anything with the title: The multiplayer game, due out later this year across all consoles, is just Mario Party with Legos. Maybe that’s creatively bankrupt, but it’s also a hoot.

Staged on a Lego-constructed game board— which the team at SMG Studios says was fully “constructed” using scanned bricks — players take turns spinning for spaces, navigating multiple paths, springing booby traps, matching reflexes in an array of minigames, and trading smack-talk (this is not built into the game, but inevitable as competitors swing in and out of first place). SMG puts the full Lego twist on every aspect of the game, including decisions on which parts of the board to even construct mid-play. Some minigames rely heavily on builds, while others rely solely on Lego Movie energy to create humorous frenzy. I laughed out loud several times in my 30-minute, six-turn run, running in both directions around a pirate-themed board — opposed to screaming in agony like I do during any Mario Party bonus star round.

The retro-game boom

This month’s Donkey Kong Bananza is likely to remind players why Nintendo, Astro Bot be damned, is in its own AAA platformer/adventure lane — the Super Mario Odyssey team goes big. But for all the promised scope, I couldn’t help but think the sicko energy of Super Meat Boy 3D, which premiered first-look footage on June’s Xbox Showcase stream, might be what retro-platformer heads (who complained about Astro Boy’s easy challenges) are actually craving.

Team Meat’s 2026 release promises to bring the velocity and difficulty of the original 2010 Super Meat Boy to an isometric 3D world. The stages gush with color — and an excessive number of razor-edged traps should add an extra coat of Meat Boy-red to the backgrounds. Simple, and if the physics have been meticulously perfected, effective platforming entertainment.

New first-party releases have always been half of the pleasure of owning a Switch, with the deep well of NES, SNES, Game Boy Advance, and N64 releases turning the console into the ultimate easy-emulation machine. With the addition of GameCube games to Switch 2, I have already found myself drifting from Mario Kart World to the pleasures of Nintendo history. I didn’t need upgraded hardware to play The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap, Soulcalibur 2, and Donkey Kong Country, but Switch 2 does make classics look and play better than ever.

But even Nintendo’s exclusive archives face competition from indie studios that are pushing retro history with modern sensibilities. This July’s Ninja Gaiden: Ragebound is an immaculate recreation of the franchise’s side-scroller NES trilogy with variable difficulties and loads of action. Like Streets of Rage 4 and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder’s Revenge before it, Tribute Games’ upcoming beat-’em-up Marvel Cosmic Invasion feels recovered from the mid-1990s, but takes full advantage of movesets that make each playable hero unique and tag-team combo systems that feel more like Marvel vs. Capcom than a brawler.

Moonlighter 2, which pivots from the first game’s 2D look to 3D, served Zelda-but-make-it-roguelike on the SGF floor, with some unique shopkeeper mechanics that made it more than a Hades riff. Meanwhile, Mina the Hollower, from Shovel Knight developer Yacht Club Games, played like an actual 2D Zelda game I somehow never got around to (and with one phenomenal twist: You can burrow underground to assist in combat and puzzles).

I know we’re not supposed to compare Digimon and Pokémon, but when the upcoming Time Stranger has RPG fans who never gave the virtual pets the time of day shaking with excitement, while Pokémon devotees are simply praying this fall’s PokémonLegends: Z-A runs smoother than Scarlet and Violet, I can only wonder if Nintendo is feeling the heat. Or if Sony, Microsoft, and the major publishers think they can finally take on the monolithic family-friendly brand. They should. With all due respect to Miyamoto, the “game war” raises the bar for everyone. Imagine what a Nintendo that faced true competition would come up with next.

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Here at this website, my colleagues and I follow our beats closely, from wearable tech and laptops to influencer culture and federal policy. Last year, I asked a bunch of staff at The Verge to pretend to be trend forecasters for a lighthearted collection of what's hot and what's not. Some of the predictions really held up: many would say the US Supreme Court continues to be out, congestion pricing in New York is decidedly in despite attempts to kill it, and cats are, as ever, a bit of both.

Predicting future trends - and having a pulse on what's happening now - is part art, part science, and, if we're being honest, part wish fulfillment. He …

Read the full story at The Verge.

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If you are a sucker for role-playing games and for retro things in general like me, there are plenty of choices to feed your vintage soul. We’re talking literally dozens of options. Despite that, for the past eight years, I have only played Dungeons & Dragons 5e, and have had a blast doing so. But driven by curiosity and circumstance, one fateful night, I left my D&D books on the shelf to dive into the unforgiving world of Dungeon Crawl Classics. What I found is a tabletop game I’m eager to return to — and I even learned some lessons I’ll apply to my future D&D games.

The Old School Renaissance (OSR) movement began in the mid-2000s, mainly as a reaction to the publication of Dungeons & Dragons 3e. Beginning as a topic of discussion on online forums, growing interest in OSR spawned a loose community of game designers and gamers, united by a common passion for Erol Otus and Larry Elmore’s art, 10-foot poles, and tables. Lots of tables. Nowadays, this playstyle refers to dozens of TTRPGs that draw inspiration from the earliest days of the genre. One of the most popular and appreciated of them is Dungeon Crawl Classics (DCC), published for the first time in 2012 by Goodman Games.

DCC sits in a weird spot in the OSR universe. While the art, feeling, and tone are straight out of the 1970s (the official inspiration being Appendix N, the list of books that informed the creation of the original Dungeons & Dragons), the rules are actually a streamlined version of D&D’s 3e — yes, the same edition that made many players so unhappy that they decided to create their own retro-inspired games. This is interesting because DCC came out in the waning days of D&D’s 4e, which was disliked even more by players, but a couple of years before Wizards of the Coast came out with the most successful version of D&D to date, 5e.

Like so many others, I fell off the D&D wagon during the 4th edition years, and was pulled back in when 5th edition gave us simpler rules, a focus on storytelling, and exceptional campaign settings (such as Curse of Strahd). I have been running games (yes, I am an eternal DM) almost nonstop for eight years now, and it’s been great. I have moved twice in that time period, and D&D helped me make friends, build connections, and spend my free time with creativity. Together with my players, we have told amazing stories that will live with me for a long time. However, that odd, wizened dragon called Old School was always staring at me from the corner of my eye…

Two weeks before writing this, I picked up the entire DCC library at a discount. Fatefully, one of my players could not attend that week’s D&D session, so we decided to put our campaign on hold and try something new in his absence. It was time to go old school.

I opened the DCC Quick Start rules, and was welcomed by the illustration of a brave warrior and a maiden (admittedly, scantily dressed) fighting off a Pteranodon with a clearly evil wizard looming behind, which seemed to come straight out of a pulp trade paperback. (OK, I’m interested.) The following page was a spoof on the black-and-white martial arts ads found in 1970s magazines, which proudly proclaimed DCC as the “Deadliest Game Alive.” (Now I’m entertained.) Before getting to the rules, one final message appeared: “You’re no hero.” Now I’m fully in.

The premise of DCC is that the game is not a heroic fantasy where players find fulfillment by building the strongest characters possible and achieving godlike feats. Instead, it’s a deadly run for treasure and glory where the fulfillment comes from surviving the horrors that await you. In DCC, you start by creating several 0-level peasants. Then you run them through a first dungeon, and if any of them survive, you get to pick one and bring it to level 1, where your adventuring career actually begins. The game’s core statement is that trying to balance player characters and monsters is a fool’s errand. This idea was also included in the OSR’s “manifesto,” A Quick Primer for Old School Gaming, written by Matthew Finch in 2008. DCC takes that idea and runs with it: In the game, everything about your character is randomized. You roll six stats, as usual, but there are no bonuses to them, and most importantly, you don’t decide where to assign the roll. If you roll low for your strength, for example, you won’t decide to play a warrior, because you won’t hit anything. Randomization brings balance, and it works surprisingly well.

Perhaps the biggest issue I’ve had with D&D 5e is how difficult it is to balance encounters after players get past the first three or four levels. I like to play narrative-focused campaigns, but I still want my players to feel a level of danger and excitement during the game, and that hasn’t been easy. At the end of the Rime of the Frostmaiden campaign, for example, players who should be between level 9 and 10 get to fight Auril, an actual goddess (albeit with limited powers at that moment). I was expecting this to be a challenging fight at least. Instead, my players easily dispatched Auril not once, but thrice (she has three forms, each one stronger than the previous one). Keep in mind that level 10 is, in theory, only half of a character’s progression in D&D.

It’s not a coincidence that, for the entirety of 5th edition, Wizards refused to publish adventures or campaigns for “high-level play,” tailored for characters of level 10 and above. (The only exception was 5e’s final book, Vecna: Eve of Ruin.) It was a silent admission that the game was not balanced for those levels, and it never would be. In DCC, on the other hand, character classes only get to level 10, and the game makes it very clear that getting so far should be an exception, not the rule. A level-5 character, for example, is described as “once in a generation,” with an incidence of one in every 10,000 people. At level 9, you are “the best there ever was,” with an incidence of one in every 10 million. At level 10, you are a demigod.

This is a perfect example of “old school mentality,” but I think there is a lesson here that can be applied to D&D campaigns, too. As a DM, you should not think that the only way to reward your players for surviving your challenges, progressing in the story, and showing up to sessions (the mightiest deed of them all!) is to have them level up. Sure, current D&D is built on that reward system, but what if you shake things up? Why not try to make the act of surviving the reward? Walking out of a really tough fight or a deadly dungeon without having to roll a new character can be a big moment of satisfaction for players, and there are always different rewards you can give. A powerful magic item, hoards of treasure, rising in the ranks of an organization, the deed to a house, or even something related to the new Bastions system; all of these things can reward players without impacting the balance of future encounters. More importantly, these rewards have a practical effect on the game, enriching it more than, say, a Barbarian gaining an extra use of Rage at level 6.

At the end of our DCC session, each of my players had one character surviving. (The game encourages players to run at least four or five characters each at level 0, as most will die in horrible and amusing ways.) They made it by the skin of their teeth. The session had been nonstop combat and exploration, two things I usually dread at my D&D table because they tend to be the slowest and most drawn-out. Instead, all the players were excited and satisfied. It was an eye-opener for me. I have been thinking for a while about making my D&D games deadlier in some way – especially as we are currently playing Out of the Abyss, the Underdark setting of which really plays into that – but I was afraid of getting out of my comfort zone. Now, I’m eager to insert some of that old-school feeling of “anything can happen” into my games.

I admit that DCC is not for everyone. Players coming from D&D could take offence at the fact that “species” are still “races” here, and they are classes too (you don’t get to play an “elf wizard,” just an elf), or at the exclusive use of male pronouns to refer to characters in the rules. However, if you have been thinking about trying an OSR game, or you are simply curious after reading this article, I encourage you to give it a shot. There are plenty of published adventures, too, and they are all weird, bizarre, and deadly fun. Laser harpies? Check. Barbarians fighting space robots? Also check. Even if you’re not an old-school fanatic, there are plenty of lessons from Dungeon Crawl Classics that can be applied to your Dungeons & Dragons games, too.

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It doesn’t look like anything special, but it is.

The world of Chromebooks has its MacBook Air.

Lenovo's latest Chromebook Plus 14 is an Arm-based thin-and-light with good specs, excellent battery life, a great keyboard, all-around solid build, and a fantastic OLED screen. But the best part is that its bright and punchy 14-inch panel comes standard on the base $649 configuration or as a touchscreen for $749.

That's cheaper than both the OLED-equipped Samsung Galaxy Chromebook Plus and Acer Chromebook Plus Spin with an IPS screen. It's also faster than either with more RAM.

The new Chromebook Plus 14 could be a go-to laptop for just about anyone - if you're okay living with ChromeOS in …

Read the full story at The Verge.

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Brazil often makes headlines for activities linked to Operation 404, an anti-piracy initiative under the Ministry of Justice and Public Security.

Best known for the mass blocking of apps in coordination with anti-piracy and law enforcement agencies around the world, the Operation 404 framework can now boast Brazil’s most significant criminal convictions linked to the supply of pirate IPTV.

Trio Sentenced at São Paulo Court

The landmark sentences were handed down June 24 at the 2nd Court of Tax Crimes, Criminal Organization, and Money Laundering. Three defendants, found guilty of money laundering offenses committed between January 1, 2017 and January 19, 2021, were identified by their initials.

The leader of the operation was identified by the initials RMDS. He was confirmed as the provider of an illicit service delivered through the MP 2.0 meuplayer.me app following a search and seizure order executed at his home. According to site snapshots, the app was available on Android and Windows desktop.

The investigation took place over a four-year period, with anti-piracy group Alianza Contra la Piratería Audiovisual (Alianza) playing a leading role. Documents seen by TorrentFreak reveal a campaign to remove the MeuPlayer app from sites including APKCombo and APKFun after hundreds of thousands of downloads.

Firearms and ammunition, numerous electronic devices, and other valuables were also seized by the authorities.

Three-Way Money Laundering

The investigation found that RMDS benefited most with the largest share of the available revenue.

More than 5,000 individual depositors sent over R$3.2 million (US$591,000) to bank accounts he controlled and various online payment platforms.

A company run by RMDS, with a name suggesting some type of hosting, was used in an attempt to conceal the source of the money. Suspicions were raised when Top Host Soluções generated disproportionately large revenues.

RMDS reportedly liked to spend money too. A Porsche Cayenne GTS was registered to his company, around R$579,000 (US$107,000) was invested in a São Paulo property, while around R$300,000 (US$55,400) was deposited into pension funds.

Transfers Back and Forth, Illegal Evidence

RMDS and his sister TMDSB were joined in the operation by an employee/mutual friend, GFL, with funds being received and also transferred between the trio.

According to a local report, 99 bank transfers were logged between RMDS and TMDSB in the period July 2017 to November 2020.

Across 7,300 transfers and cash deposits, TMDSB received over R$1 million in the same period, with around R$134,600 of the total transferred to RMDS. DPLNews describes TMDSB’s role as fundamental to the operation. Her lack of tax returns and GFL’s use of his mother’s bank account for a number of the 33 transfers, attributed to him, were also brought to the court’s attention.

Sentenced in São Paulo

Attempts by the defendants to undermine the case against them included allegations that the state court was incompetent, and the evidence was illegal and failed to show intent. The presiding judge noted that money laundering is a crime in its own right and can stand without a direct link to an underlying crime.

Judge Marcia Mayumi Okoda Oshiro sentenced the defendants at the São Paulo Court;

• RMDS – Five year prison sentence, unspecified fine • TMDSB – Five year prison sentence, unspecified fine • GFL – Four year prison sentence, unspecified fine

“This case confirms that piracy is no longer invisible or unpunished,” says anti-piracy group Alianza.

“Justice is taking action and will continue to severely punish those who violate intellectual property and public safety.”

The underlying intellectual property crimes matter is still pending.

From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.

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more rambling

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The Z Fold 6 brought us “improved flatness.”

I don't often get asked about the phones I'm testing when I'm out and about, unless it's a folding phone. Then I usually hear some version of the same thing: "Oh, I thought about getting one of those! But then I just got a [insert slab-style phone name here]." My anecdotal data matches the actual sales figures; there are many more people curious about folding phones than there are buyers of folding phones. Samsung would very much like that to not be the case, and, by all indications, it's about to pull out all the stops at at its Unpacked event on July 9th. But is putting the Ultra name on a folding phone enough?

The weak sales are not for …

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The Switch 2 launch lineup was weird — or that’s what I thought after watching the April Nintendo Direct, anyway. Sure, Mario Kart World as a launch game made sense from a business perspective. When a re-release of Mario Kart 8 sells 68 million copies on the original Switch, it’s hardly surprising to see Nintendo lead with what data shows would more than likely be a big success. But was that really it? Just a racing game?

One month later, I’ve played Mario Kart World more than any other game on my Switch 2. The way it fits into my life, whether I have a few minutes or an hour to play, transformed it from being an odd-seeming launch choice to one that makes perfect sense, even if Nintendo’s doing its best to make it seem otherwise.

I opted for the Mario Kart World bundle to save money, but the really exciting part about getting a Switch 2 — or so I thought at the time — was the chance to play The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom in full at last. I bounced off the game hard after speeding through some of its more difficult challenges for guides, and since it stuttered frequently in places and froze for several seconds during transitions between the open world and dungeons, I figured there wasn’t any point starting again until a more powerful Switch existed. The day my Switch 2 arrived, I loaded Tears of the Kingdom to see how much of a difference the frame rate improvement makes and haven’t played again.

Instead, I’ve spent most of my time with Mario Kart World. So far, I’ve ended up playing it far more than I played Breath of the Wild alongside the launch of the original Switch in 2017. At the end of a long day, after work and family obligations, I don’t just lack free time. I lack the desire to do much with the time I have and certainly don’t want to do something that requires mental effort. I could explore more parts of Night City in Cyberpunk 2077 or learn how to play a new character in Street Fighter 6 — or I could put a cow on a motorcycle and have them do backflips off a dinosaur.

It’s an easy choice, and one that fits into lunch breaks, quick sessions at night, longer play with others over the weekend — whatever I want, really. If I’m yearning for something with a bit more depth beyond learning a course’s shortcuts or messing around with wall-riding, I can always go online for a quick Knockout Tour. Five or 10 minutes in Tears of the Kingdom won’t get me much, but I can start and finish something that feels enjoyable and worthwhile in the same amount of time in Mario Kart World.

Not having enough time or willpower to allocate to longer games isn’t a problem unique to me. While it’s easy to label this a recent cultural trend brought on by publishers releasing a ludicrous number of games every week and the rotten state of national and world affairs, it’s not really a trend at all. It’s a constant of how we interact with games. Researchers studying how to improve project scope in game development for the Entertainment Computing journal found that most players never finish a game, even if they like it. As far back as 2013, former Ubisoft designer Jason Vandenberghe wrote in Game Developer Magazine that any good game developer knows most of their players won’t finish their game.

In a parallel universe where the Wii U wasn’t a historic failure, Nintendo’s software pipeline hadn’t dried up during the console’s final years, and the company didn’t have to prove it was still a contender with Breath of the Wild, I could see Mario Kart World or something like it being the launch game for the original Switch. Its mix of quick-hit challenges and longer races are the embodiment of the “anywhere, anytime, however you want” style of play Nintendo pioneered with the system, and it slots into your schedule without feeling like you’re having to sacrifice something else just to enjoy it. It’s the kind of game for people who don’t finish games, which is most of us.

That was important for Nintendo in 2017 when the convenience of mobile gaming living in your pocket seemed like its biggest competitor, and it seems even more important now when time and money constraints are influencing the industry more than ever. Of course Nintendo wants to launch its new, expensive system with a game that won’t make people think they’ll wait until X months later when they have more time, one they can play with friends and family without having to buy additional consoles and games. It just makes sense.

What doesn’t make sense is Nintendo’s approach to pretty much everything else about the Switch 2’s launch lineup. Mario Kart World seems like an anticlimactic opener thanks in part to the lack of transparency about what’s next. Yes, the excellent-sounding Donkey Kong Bananza is out later this month. But beyond that, Metroid Prime 4: Beyond is still floating in the aether, with no announced release date, and Pokémon Legends: Z-A is months away. Where Nintendo promised a set number of games each month and extensive third-party support during the original Switch’s first few months, there’s little indication of what’s in store between now and the holidays.

Nintendo provided fewer development kits to its publishing partners than it did in the lead-up to the first Switch’s release, in what some publishers told me is an effort to focus on quality. The policy led to excellent ports such as Cyberpunk 2077 and No Man’s Sky, but it also means there’s just not as much coming to the Switch 2 this year. Or if there is, we don’t know about it. That leaves Mario Kart World to steer the console through its first months of life, and racing games rarely carry much weight with critics or consumers, no matter how good they are.

Mario Kart World might not have the star power of a new 3D Mario game or the surprise appeal of something like Donkey Kong Bananza, where a second-tier mascot suddenly takes center stage. It might not have the universal appeal of a Pokémon sequel or the shiny veneer of a new Metroid. What it does have is convenience, flexibility, and respect for my time. In that regard, Nintendo was right after all: Just a racing game was enough.

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It's been an agonizing wait for more Deltarune. The first chapter of the episodic, parallel story to Toby Fox's acclaimed RPG Undertale came out nearly seven years ago. But the newly released third and fourth chapters are so good that I highly recommend playing everything that's available right now - even if there are still three more episodes to go.

In Deltarune, you play as Kris, a teenager who lives in a town inhabited by friendly animals and monsters. Kris is assigned a group project with Susie, an aloof bully, and together they stumble into a place called the Dark World (hidden in a closet at school, naturally). There, they partner up …

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