Month: January 2018

Enlarge (credit: MattMakesGames)

Stop me if you've heard this one before: a quirky, pixellated video game breathes new life into the Mario-like side-scroller genre. Or, well, those games used to breathe life, before they became commonplace. Super Meat Boy set this kind of resurgence into motion nearly a decade ago. That's a long time in side-scrolling years.

A peek at this week's Celeste—which favors pixellated designs and squishy, bouncy characters—could make any skeptical passerby sigh in that "Gosh, another one of these?" way. I get that.

But I insist there's something here. In the past few years, we've seen a few super-beautiful, far-from-pixellated platformers emerge with serious fans. Cuphead made a huge splash in 2017 by emphasizing brutal difficulty and hand-drawn beauty. Fans of 2014's Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze swear by its breadth and production values. And 2015's Ori and the Blind Forest injected gorgeous designs and wild platforming maneuvers into a "Metroidvania" adventure.

If you ever liked Miitomo, you can log in to its graveyard period and claim a bunch of free clothes and items before the game officially expires in May. (credit: Nintendo)

March 2016 saw Nintendo finally release its first game for smartphones, and while it wasn't one of the company's classic franchises, the oddball Miitomo seemed like it might be a good smartphone fit.

Although the game attracted headlines and millions of downloads in its first week, it didn't turn out to be a solid, classic Nintendo "social game" like Animal Crossing. Less than two years later, the app has already taken its first steps to a game-as-a-service graveyard, as Nintendo announced the game's immediate freeze of paid microtransactions (MTX) on Thursday ahead of a full game shutdown on May 9. On that day, all login attempts will stop working, and all "Mii" characters made in the game will be trapped. (Log in ahead of the shutdown should you wish to transfer those Miis to other compatible consoles like the Switch and Nintendo 3DS.)

This announcement, like the ones we've seen for other dying-soon MMOs and online games, offers a consolation of free in-game items and bonuses for players who continue logging in until the final days. The game's Japanese site describes impending refunds for any unused paid currencies in the game, but we didn't see similar text appear in the English-language announcement, perhaps owing to the default, non-refundable nature of MTX in shops like Google Play and the iOS App Store.

Enlarge / What's in the box? Maybe gambling addiction!

The government backlash against randomized video game loot boxes—which some observers and legislators consider a form of gambling—moved from Hawaii to Washington state earlier this month. That's when a group of three Democratic state senators introduced a bill that would require the state gambling commission to examine loot boxes and determine "whether games and apps containing these mechanisms are considered gambling under Washington law."

“What the bill says is, ‘Industry, state: sit down to figure out the best way to regulate this,’” Orcas Island Senator and bill coauthor Kevin Ranker told the Tacoma News Tribune. “It is unacceptable to be targeting our children with predatory gambling masked in a game with dancing bunnies or something.”

The bill text puts specific focus on the question of whether children who "may be more vulnerable to gambling addiction" should be allowed to access games with loot boxes, and on the question of "transparency" around "the odds of receiving each type of virtual item." The latter point took on additional salience last month as Apple required such odds to be posted alongside games with loot boxes.

Enlarge / New York Governor Andrew Cuomo. (credit: Getty Images | Spencer Platt )

New York has become the second state to enforce net neutrality with an executive order that prevents ISPs from obtaining state contracts unless they follow net neutrality principles.

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo signed the executive order yesterday, days after Montana Governor Steve Bullock did the same. The states are challenging the Federal Communications Commission, which repealed its own net neutrality rules and preempted states from imposing similar ones.

The executive orders attempt an end run around the FCC's preemption of local laws. Instead of directly requiring all ISPs to follow net neutrality principles, the executive orders require state agencies to only do business with ISPs that offer neutral networks.