Gaming
Nintendo Announces the New Shovel Knight Amiibo 3-Pack
As if I didn’t spend enough money on amiibo (curse you Player 2 Corrin and your Amazon exclusivity), Nintendo and Yacht Club Games have announced the latest wave of Shovel Knight amiibo. This time, three of the villainous — and playable — members of The Order of No Quarter will made available: Plague Knight, Specter Knight, and King Knight.
So, yea, the announcement trailer is weird, but it gives plenty of information on the functionality of these three amiibo. But, those of you who can’t stand the narrator’s comically sultry voice can also find this information in Yacht Club Games’ online article. As with the first Shovel Knight amiibo, the three dastardly statuettes will only function with the Nintendo Switch, 3DS, and Wii U versions of Shovel Knight. Each Order of No Quarter amiibo unlocks unique (cosmetic) armor for their respective knights, new challenge stages that…ahem…challenge players’ mastery of various knightly skills, and cute little helper fairies — well, if you can call a ghastly little imp wielding a big ass scythe cute. Oh, and as for why King Knight is in this pack, it’s simple: to hype the final Shovel Knight DLC pack that features the unscrupulous and arrogant knave.
Why am I making such a big deal out of the production of these new Shovel Knight amiibo? Well, first, we need to examine what makes amiibo such a big deal. Toys-to-life have become rather popular thanks to a small but impressive collection of games. Skylanders might have popularized the concept of toys-to-life, but Nintendo almost perfected it with its line of Super Smash Bros. amiibo, because unlike Skylanders, Lego Dimensions, and Disney Infinity’s (RIP) toys-to-life figures, amiibo usually have functionality outside their respective games. However, that brings us back to the question of why Shovel Knight amiibo are important, especially since they only have functionality within Shovel Knight. Because, Shovel Knight is the only third-party, non-Nintendo game to receive amiibo and amiibo support. Sure, non-Nintendo characters such as Mega Man, Pac-Man, Sonic, Cloud, and Bayonetta have their own amiibo, but these characters appear in the first-party Nintendo free-for-all known as Super Smash Bros. and their amiibo are designed primarily to function with that game. Shovel Knight is not a first-party Nintendo game but instead an indie game available on every modern console and PC. That’s why these three new amiibo are so important: because they buck Nintendo’s trend of making amiibo for first-party games. If these new Shovel Knight amiibo prove popular, perhaps we can expect more third-party character amiibo. Or is Nintendo only making an exception for Shovel Knight since it’s a celebration of the classic 8-bit platformers that made the Nintendo’s NES console famous?
While we do not know when these amiibo will be released (the trailer only states “coming soon”), I’m already hyped, and I want them.
Gaming
Ubisoft says that future Assassin’s Creed games will need more time to be made
As Assassin’s Creed Shadows is about to sneak up on people in November, Ubisoft says that the time between developing games needs to be longer to find the “right balance.” Shadows has been in development for four years, longer than any other game in the series up to this point. That includes the huge open-world epics Assassin’s Creed Odyssey and Assassin’s Creed Valhalla.
Shadows lead producer Karl Onnée (thanks, GamesIndustry.biz) says that the latest AC game took 25% longer to make than Valhalla. He says this is necessary to keep the quality of the series that it is known for: “It’s always a balance between time and costs, but the more time you have, the more you can iterate.” You can speed up a project by adding more people to it, but that doesn’t give you more time to make changes.
Onnée says this has as much to do with immersion and aesthetics as it does with fixing bugs and smoothing out pixels. This is because the development team needs time to learn about each new historical setting: “We are trying to make a game that is as real as possible.” We’re proud of it, and the process took a long time. In feudal Japan, building a house is very different from building a house in France or England in the Middle Ages. As an artist, you need to learn where to put things in a feudal Japanese home. For example, food might not belong there. Get all the information you need and learn it. That process takes a long time.”
You’ll have to wait a little longer for Ubisoft to work on each game. Are you okay with that? In what part of Shadows are you now? Is it interesting to you? Leave a comment below and let us know.
Gaming
You can now pre-order Lollipop Chainsaw RePOP on PS5
You can now pre-order Lollipop Chainsaw RePOP, a remaster that Dragami Games and Capcom both created. You can now pre-order the PS5 game on the PS Store for $44.99 or £39.99. If you have PS Plus, you can get an extra 10% off the price.
The company put out a new trailer with about three minutes of gameplay to mark the start of the pre-order period. Lollipop Chainsaw RePOP is a remaster of Grasshopper Manufacture’s crazy action game from 2012. You play as Juliet, a high school student who fights off waves of zombies.
The remaster adds RePOP mode, an alternative mode that swaps out the blood and gore for fun visual effects. It also adds a bunch of other features and improvements that make the game better overall. You can expect the graphics and sound to be better as well.
The game will now come out on September 12, 2024, instead of September 12, 2024. Are you excited to get back to this? Please cheer us on in the section below.
Gaming
This Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 zombies trailer is way too expensive
Is there really anyone who is following the story of Call of Duty’s zombie mode? We’ve known about the story in a vague way for a while, but we couldn’t tell you anything about it. It looks like the “Dark Aether” story will continue in Black Ops 6, but we don’t really know what that means.
For those of you who care, here is the official blurb with some background: “Requiem, led by the CIA, finally closed the last-dimensional portal, sending its inhabitants back to the nightmare world known as the Dark Aether, after two years of fighting zombie outbreaks around the world during the Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War timeline.”
Wait, there’s more! “Agent Samantha Maxis gave her life to seal this weird dimension from the inside out.” Even worse things were to come: senior staff members of Requiem were arrested without a reason by the Project Director, who turned out to be Edward Richtofen.
Black Ops 6 will take place about five years later, and it looks like it will show more about Richtofen’s goals and motivations. The most important thing is that you will probably be shooting an unimaginable number of zombies in the head. This week, on August 8, there will be a full reveal of the gameplay, so keep an eye out for that.
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