Month: March 2019

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  Surprise! A new Zelda game, made by the Vancouver team at Brace Yourself Games.

On Wednesday, Nintendo used the 2019 Game Developers Conference as an opportunity to unveil a litany of indie games, and like last year's GDC, the big N had a nostalgia-tinged "one more thing" at the end. This time, unlike the unveil of a No More Heroes spin-off, it went a little bigger: a brand-new Legend of Zelda game, Cadence of Hyrule, made by the developers of the Crypt of the Necrodancer series.

For the uninitiated, Necrodancer puts players in top-down dungeons that must be navigated by tapping buttons to the beat of the music. Every step and attack must happen to the rhythm. CoH will slap this mechanic onto a 2D, pixel-art Zelda universe, similar to Game Boy Advance fare like The Minish Cap. It stars Link and Zelda alongside Cadence, the protagonist of the Necrodancer series.

Unsurprisingly, the reveal video included an uptempo, chiptune remix of the Zelda overworld theme, and we can only imagine what kind of full soundtrack the final game will ship with when it launches this spring on Nintendo Switch. (Fans of Necrodancer swear by its killer soundtrack, led by Danny Baronofsky of Super Meat Boy fame.) We'll attend a Nindies event in San Francisco later today, where we'll hopefully get a better look at how familiar Zelda mechanics will combine with Necrodancer's rhythm-specific twists.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | pictafolio)

Internet service providers in Australia have temporarily blocked access to dozens of websites, including 4chan and 8chan, that hosted video of last week's New Zealand mass shooting. New Zealand ISPs have also been blocking websites that host the video.

In Australia, ISP Vodafone said that blocking requests generally come from courts or law enforcement agencies but that this time ISPs acted on their own. "This was an extreme case which we think requires an extraordinary response," Vodafone Australia said in a statement, according to an Australian Associated Press (AAP) article yesterday.

Telstra and Optus also blocked the sites in Australia. Besides 4chan and 8chan, ISP-level blocking affected the social network Voat, the blog Zerohedge, video hosting site LiveLeak, and others. "The ban on 4chan was lifted a few hours later," AAP wrote.

We kinda knew this might be coming. Yesterday Netflix released a short teaser for season 3 of its hit series Stranger Things, hinting, "It's almost feeding time." Today we got our first full look at what's in store for the teens of Hawkins—and it looks like it will be one wild and crazy summer.

(Some spoilers for first two seasons below.)

Stranger Things was an instant hit when it debuted on Netflix the summer of 2016. Set in the rural town of Hawkins, Indiana, in the early 1980s, it was a love letter of sorts to a more innocent era, when films like The Goonies, Ghostbusters, and E.T. led the box office. But all was not normal in this sleepy little town: an accident at a secret government lab opened an inter-dimensional portal and unleashed a supernatural threat from a different dimension.