Gaming

Upcoming indie title Drop Duchy combines two of my favorite things — tetrominoes and city-building — into one fascinating-looking game. It’s launching on PC this fall, but a playable demo is planned for Steam users “in the coming weeks.”

On July 9th, basketball will arrive in Nintendo Switch Sports. The free update will include online and local 2v2 play with motion controls. And for local play, you’ll get a 3-point shoot out mode and a five streak battle game that has you and your friends shoot it out to see who can score five baskets first.

Car Park Capital is a forthcoming real-time city-building sim where your job is to appease the auto industry by making more and more parking lots — and convince citizens it’s in their best interest.

Hilko Janssen, the Dutch creator of the game, told PC Gamer that the satirical sim was inspired in part by a 1954 GM car propaganda film promoting more roads to deal with congestion.

Hours after posting that a notarization submission for the Epic Games Store had been rejected by Apple, Epic and its CEO Tim Sweeney now say it has been un-rejected (a familiar situation here).

We’re still months away from EU residents actually getting the store on their iPhones and iPads, complete with Fortnite, but one barrier has been removed.

I knew this was coming, I just didn’t expect it so soon. FromSoftware has released a patch for Shadow of the Erdtree. Among the casualties...I mean “bug fixes” is a nerf to super busted but super satisfying perfume bottle build that basically turned anyone who used it into a walking nuke. How dare you FromSoftware, over a long holiday weekend no less?!

A year after Nintendo Japan announced it would stop repairing the Wii U when its supply of parts ran out, the company confirmed this week its Japanese support teams are no longer able to fix the 12-year-old console, as spotted by Nintendo Life.

After Nintendo shuttered the console’s online play in April, this week’s announcement feels like the Wii U’s final death blow.

Nintendo’s July collection of classic games coming to NES Online includes Golf, programmed by the company’s former CEO, Satoru Iwata, who passed in 2015.

Shortly after the Switch’s debut a copy of Golf was discovered as an Easter Egg on the console, which some assumed to be a tribute to the late CEO, but finding and playing the game is now much easier.

From a Bloomberg interview with Hironobu Sakaguchi:

“On a rare occasion — I want to stress ‘rare occasion’ — sometimes one of the Mistwalker team members will hop on Final Fantasy XIV, and I’ll see a message saying, ‘Hey, the meeting’s started,.”

Evercade first debuted this adorable handheld last year, and now it’s expanding the line with two new versions: one packed with 50 Atari classics, the other 15 Japanese arcade games like Double Dragon and River City Ransom. Both are also compatible with Evercade cartridges, and they’re expected to start shipping in October. Pre-orders open on July 31st.

Amazon has a new 3D “Gaming Zone” online showroom, which feels like it was designed to fit a marketing executive’s idea of “gamer aesthetic.” Also, the showroom is a chore to navigate. And you can’t even play the arcade cabinets!

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Epic Games has submitted the Epic Games Store and Fortnite to Apple for notarization. The company aims to launch them both in the EU on iOS in “the next couple months.”

In January, Epic said it planned to bring both to iOS “this year.”

Oh, and about those rumors you may have heard about a feature film or television series based on ELDEN RING… I have nothing to say.  Not a word, nope, not a thing, I know nothing, you never heard a peep from me, mum mum mum.  What rumor?

I can’t stop checking boxes on https://onemillioncheckboxes.com/, and I’d really like for them to stay checked.

Horizon Forbidden West, Ghost of Tsushima, Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart, and both Spider-Man PC games now support the upgrade to AMD’s upscaling and framerate boosting tech. It reduces shimmering, ghosting, and flickering of earlier versions and lets you use frame generation independently of upscaling.

God of War Ragnarök will also get FSR 3.1 “soon.”

The Nintendo DS-like’s lower screen will soon double as a virtual keyboard, triple as a virtual touchpad, and quadruple as a dual-screen task switcher with the company’s Ayaspace v2.5 software update. Those could all make it a bit easier to navigate Windows handheld!

With new Lovestruck expansion pack, coming to The Sims 4 on July 25th, your Sims too can experience the horrors of modern dating.

Create dating profiles for your Sims, define their attractions, plan and execute dates, and even get your Sim’s heart broken. The expansion adds new romance-themed traits, aspirations, and fears, and adds a new location, Ciudad Enamorada, where Sims can enjoy their new romantic interludes.