Tower

Clans

Sandbox

Weapons

General Weapon and Perk Fixes

Abilities

Armor

Accessories Fixes

Rewards

General

Destinations

Crucible

Vendors

Black Armory

Character Boosts

General

Collections / Triumphs

Activities

Gambit

Gambit Matchmaking

Infamy

Gambit HUD 

Triumphs and Medals

General Fixes

Crucible

Last Wish

Eververse

Bright Engram

Prismatic Matrix

UI/UX

General

In case you somehow missed the news, last October, Sega revealed Team Sonic Racing had been delayed until 21st May 2019. Since then, it has been slowly drip-feeding racing enthusiasts more information about the upcoming multiplatform release.

In the latest trailer, we get a look at the car customisation options in the game. You’ll be able to change your ride’s performance mods, the sound of its horn, the paint job and even add vinyls. Take a look below:

Customize your car any way you want it in Team Sonic Racing! Check out a look at the new parts, paint, and decal options, as well as some new footage from the game.

Sega has also uploaded a few other Team Sonic Racing videos. The first is part one of an animation based on Team Sonic Racing:

Team Sonic, Team Rose, and Team Dark face off at Wisp Circuit in this first of two parts of a special animation based on Team Sonic Racing! As usual, the diabolical Dr. Eggman seems to have his own plans – can the teams overcome his tricks, or will they find themselves more than a little distracted?

Big thanks to Tyson Hesse and Neko productions for their hard work putting this together! Keep your eyes peeled for Part 2, arriving late April 2019!

And the second is a remixed music track for Bingo Party:

Bingo Party returns with an amazing new remix in Team Sonic Racing! Talented chiptune artist TORIENA teamed up with Jun Senoue for an amazing new take inspired by the Sonic Heroes classic.

Are you excited to customise your ride in Team Sonic Racing? Tell us below.

If the video clips for Team Sonic Racing weren’t already satisfying enough, the head of Sonic Team, Takashi Iizuka, has confirmed the next big entry in the mainline Sonic series is officially underway. The announcement was made during a panel at SXSW Gaming 2019. Other than this, no other information is currently known about the new Sonic game and there’s no indication as to when Sega will reveal more about it.

The most recent Sonic release was the enhanced title Sonic Mania Plus in 2018. The lead developer, Christian Whitehead, has since gone on to form his own studio – Evening Star – with several other Sonic Mania team members. The most recent 3D title in the Sonic series was Sonic Forces, released on multiple platforms in 2017.

Are you looking forward to the next major entry in this long-running series? Tell us down below.

Playing Card Crusade made this reviewer crave pizza…because it called to mind a shared truism between the two. You know what they say about pizza, when it’s good, it’s great, when it’s ‘meh’ it’s still pretty good. Well the same goes for roguelikes, a crowded yet beloved genre for pretty much the same reason. Few of them will reach the heights of, say, Dream Quest or Slay the Spire, but that doesn’t mean the also-rans of the genre aren’t any good.

It does mean that their fun and inventiveness are relatively limited. Card Crusade is satisfying to play but also suffers from some mediocrities. It’s quick and light and the development cycle shows future promise, but as-is needs a skosh more variety and challenge to stand on its own merits. Criticism aside, I couldn’t put it down.

The setup: a tale as old as time, an adventurer travels ever-deeper into a ten-level dungeon to face a final boss. The map in Card Crusade is almost entirely cosmetic, with a simple tap sending the player character scurrying to that precise spot. Tap to open doors and treasure and wander too close to draw aggro of the hostile mobs, which will hound you down once provoked. Battles ensue, with a turn-based, energy-limited card system.

It’s standard fare, with block, energy and health resources working just as you’d expect, along with a pretty nice suite of status effects to spice things up. Each piece of equipment you pick up adds a card to your deck, which starts off trim but needs to bulk up quickly in order to power through the scaling difficulties of the lower levels. Early mobs of packs of dogs or swarms of horseflies are child’s play to clear, but later on Witches and Eyeball Monsters (I guess they can’t call them Beholders?) will present a stiff challenge.

Each room with an enemy also contains a chest, which presents one of two possible new cards. While there are unique classes with abilities and a class-specific starting card, the rest of the possible card pool is totally open. Anyone can use poison, magic, a crossbow, a ‘metallicize’ defense. So in terms of deck-building the game is rather generous and free-form, which gives it a relaxed, sandbox quality. I love this, because it means that failed runs happen because of choices along the way rather than loot. The downside is repeat runs feel samey.

Battles have an unusual tempo to them. Of course it’s always best to clear the field as soon as possible, but the game usually proceeds in bursts of activity, with some turns devoted to healing and survival while others see play of an especially strong card to eliminate a key foe. Here Card Crusade breaks with longstanding roguelike tradition and does not offer full healing upon level-up or floor clear, which means damage suffered becomes persistent. This is one of the game’s smartest choices, adding a sense of pressure while simultaneously rewarding clean strategy and play. It unfortunately also weights defensive builds more positively and taxes health-sacrificing ones further.

The enemies have a little more variety to their abilities and effects. Some multiply and fill the field, others passively buff themselves until they hit like a truck. Their move sets are all made available right from the get-go, making planning a must for efficient clears. Aside from battling and choosing loot, the game offers nothing else, so its appeal lives or dies on the merits of these alone. The battles aren’t especially difficult, but the enemy variety is nice and refreshing, and the health margins for making it to the final boss are surprisingly slim. If the game feels relaxing or ‘easy’ this is a side-effect of its deliberately generous, low-variance design.

It also has some nice flourishes to differentiate repeat plays. Yes, the classes all work differently, but there are also Shrines which offer an optional benefit and drawback. (The closest analogue I can think of would be the excellent Desktop Dungeon’s shrine & faith system). They might boost poison, healing, burning or health, but the shrines always take a toll. The exchange is mostly fair, well-balanced and most importantly of all, well-advertised.

That’s probably the most just assessment of the game as a whole, honestly: fair and as-advertised. It might get quickly solved if you’ve already blazed through Dream Quest, Meteorfall, Night of the Full Moon, Slay the Spire, and every other card battler out there, but it’s still got enough meat on its bones to be worth the price of admission. Diverting, a fun time-sink whose future updates will hopefully add more cards and classes, maybe even a hard mode for those of us ready for a bigger challenge. It is undoubtedly good reliable fun, but this rush is half-nostalgia and half-quality. Here’s hoping the game continues to improve and enrich itself.

Nitrome’s delightful 2D action-puzzle platformer Bomb Chicken, previously released on the Switch eShop in July last year, will be receiving the physical treatment later this month.

Limited Run Games has revealed pre-orders will open on 29th March. Fortunately for your wallet, there’s no collector’s edition this time around. Below is the full Twitter announcement:

If you’ve not had the chance to play this game yet, we gave it eight out of ten stars and said it was an absolute blast to play with classic and refined gameplay, intelligent level design and a great sense of flow.

Would you be interested in a physical copy of this game? Leave a comment below.

Behind closed doors

• 
• by Liam Doolan
• 10 hours ago

It’s almost “show time.” That’s the phrasing used in media invitations to Apple’s March 25 event, where the company is expected to unveil its subscription packages for video, news, magazines, and games. It appears Apple is continuing to “pull the thread” to see where the future of television leads, and it sure looks like that future is tight integration between iOS, Apple TV and HomePod.

A new expansion of the Walled Garden

When Apple launches new products and services, it rarely focuses much attention on all the work required behind the scenes. This creates the illusion that such product launches are easy, just something that a corporation threw together based on a checklist of necessary features.

Most of the criticism directed at Apple niggles with what those features are, without much thought to what would be involved with “adding” something as “simple” as, say, native Spotify integration with HomePod, some legacy ports, or some other massive effort that’s easy to dream up as a “missing feature.”

Apple’s launches also create the illusion that any other company could just throw money at the same problem and get the same results. That clearly didn’t occur with Samsung’s Milk or Galaxy Gear; Microsoft’s PlaysForSure, its purchase of Nokia or its Surface hardware; Google’s various TV box offerings, its acquisition of Motorola, its attempts at building tablets or notebooks; or the entire industry’s consortium to develop digital video distribution services such as UltraViolet downloads or Miracast streaming. Doing anything big is actually extremely hard.

Looking back on Apple’s recent history in television, it’s clear that a lot of invisible efforts are required to build attractive and sustainable solutions. There are few initiatives that Apple has worked on that have fizzled, such as iTunes LP and Extra, its digital answers to DVD bonus content and the “enhanced CD” with video clips which never really took off.

However, the threads that Apple keeps pulling in television are overall establishing a very successful expansion of the Walled Garden that Apple first created to make iTunes’ commercial music and movies available as “audio-visual software” for Macs and then iPods, and then the App Store market that launched native software titles for iPhones and later iPad.

Services are a subscription to sell hardware

While pundits keep forwarding the idea that Apple is giving up hardware to simply become a Netflix, the reality is that Apple’s expanding efforts to make AirPlay 2, Apple Music streaming and iTunes movie downloads available on partner hardware from Samsung TVs to Alexa WiFi microphones is part of a strategy where Apple TV, HomePod and iPads all get a greatly expanded ecosystem to thrive in. Subscription software is a killer app that keeps killing.

Rather than giving up hardware for Services—as the dumbest hot takes suggest—Apple is reducing its dependence on unit sales of digital downloads and increasingly moving to a subscription model for audio, video, applications, and games—specifically with the intent to sell more hardware.

Apple has already largely migrated iTunes from download sales to Apple Music’s subscription streaming. Those efforts to shift the company’s legacy iTunes downloads into a subscription model is seldom appreciated as an example of astute adaption to change. However, Apple has rapidly turned around its huge ship in same the way that Microsoft had to scramble to attach a web browser to Windows to keep control of the PC desktop in the 1990s. It was pivot or die, and Apple has survived stronger than ever.

Spotify, a company that was claiming the most music streaming subscribers globally and crowing that it does business on platforms the tech media likes to describe as “dominant,” is suddenly crying that Apple Music and the Apple Store is a “monopoly” and that it needs governments to intervene on its behalf to force Apple to serve its interests for free.

That speaks volumes about the success Apple is seeing in making its shift from downloads to subscriptions. It also says something really unflattering about Spotify’s ability to find customers on its own and the supposed “dominance” of Android and Windows as computing platforms.

Oddly enough, the same pundits who squawk about Apple Music being the end of HomePod are hopeful that Spotify will soon learn how to navigate the consumer electronics hardware market and figure out how to sell a new device that helps to sell Spotify as a service. It’s like they don’t even read their own work.

Subscriptions better support software development

While subscription streaming royalties don’t deliver nearly the same revenues as music downloads or CDs for artists, subscription software appears to be working out really well for developers.

Adobe and Microsoft have both shifted their massive software business to subscription models, and the result has been dramatically successful. It has created reoccurring revenues that support ongoing development in a model that’s far more healthy—and sane—compared to big, expensive marketing releases every couple years that have to focus on fancy features to woo software suite purchases.

Rather than Adobe trying to hype up the Healing Brush as the reason to pay for an all-new Photoshop, or Microsoft having to refresh the UI of Office with the Ribbon just to push more boxes out the door, both software houses can focus on what they know to be actual, incremental improvements and deliver these as soon as they’re ready.

It’s also working out well for small developers, who can work on new titles and app functionality rather than focusing on sales and marketing—or running into the situation where their customers expect perpetual free app upgrades without ever paying for any of that work.

Subscription software is effectively the best way to pay for software because it keeps subscribers up-to-date on the latest tools without needing to regularly sell them on buying each new iteration. You just have to sell users on an ongoing subscription once and then keep them happy with it.

Apple and the Subscription OS

While Microsoft convinced the world back in the 1990s that the best way to sell software was to monopolize the market and sell big monolithic packages, its business was really created and sustained by Windows’ invisible tax that was slapped on PC boxes. When people bought new PCs, they effectively got Windows “for free” because it was being paid for by the PC licensee. That effectively blocked any competition for alternative PC operating systems like OS/2, NeXT, BeOS or Linux.

Everyone in the tech media could only see that Microsoft was also selling standalone Windows retail boxes, and implored Apple to follow the same model of charging money for its Mac system software. That was dumb advice that didn’t work out well at all.

With the introduction of the iPhone in 2007, Apple made iOS free and promised regular updates to deliver features that wouldn’t cost extra down the line. In 2009 Apple slashed the price of macOS upgrades from $129 to just $29 for Snow Leopard, then later to $19 on Mountain Lion, and finally began shipping new updates for free starting with 2013’s Mavericks. As with Windows PCs, the price of the OS was now hidden in the development costs of Macs.

Mac and iOS buyers effectively get a subscription to several years of OS updates by paying a premium for Apple hardware. So Apple effectively pioneered the “healthy and sane” approach to subscription software upgrades with macOS, iOS and its other OS platforms. It also began bundling significant software packages with new hardware, and these are also updated for free: Pages, Keynote, Numbers, iMovie, GarageBand and so on.

Apple has also seen success in selling online services under the iCloud brand, which provides cloud storage, backup, cloud sync and a variety of other services all bundled into an ongoing fee. Services is now Apple’s fastest-growing segment in revenues, outpacing the growth of both Macs and iPads. Yet Services aren’t coming at the cost of hardware sales; they are clearly driving new hardware sales.

In fact, the hardware that gains value from paid or free Services subscriptions (Apple Music, iCloud, OS updates, iWork) is what Apple is selling best. Hardware that doesn’t really benefit from content or OS subscriptions have largely been discontinued (AirPort routers, printers, displays, webcams).

One of the biggest potential hardware beneficiaries of these subscription models is Apple TV, iPad, and HomePod, all of which become more useful when you have subscription content to play on them. And once you are getting subscription content, you have more reason to buy additional Apple hardware to use with it, as the next segment will examine tomorrow.

We’ve made it to yet another weekend and it’s finally time to relax with some of our favourite games. After the excitement of the physical Hollow Knight release and the horror of seeing Zelda: Breath of the Wild without its cel-shading this week, team Nintendo Life has gathered to talk over our weekend gaming plans. You can read up on what we’re up to below, and make sure to join in via our poll and comment sections. Enjoy!

Austin Voigt, contributing writer

This is random, and I’m not sure why, but I’ve reverted back to the old 3DS to play a few throwbacks this weekend: Pokémon Alpha Sapphire (most hate this game, but I personally love it) as well as X & Y, Animal Crossing: New Leaf, various Zelda titles, Luigi’s Mansion, etc. As I look at this list, I realize I may just be getting excited for all of the new games in these franchises coming out on Switch later this year… woah, insight.

Dom Reseigh-Lincoln, reviewer

This weekend I’m almost certainly going to be playing more of RICO. It’s giving me the shooter fix I need when I’m commuting or chilling out on the sofa. Even when things get really challenging in the latter parts of the campaign I just love it. Plus those weapon skins won’t earn themselves.

I’ll also be spending some time with Motorsport Manager on Switch. I played the original back on mobile a couple of years ago and really dug how well it captured the complexity and abject disappointment of modern F1. Here’s hoping this version lives up to expectations. Have a good ‘un!

Ryan Craddock, staff writer

To be completely honest with you, I’ll likely be ditching the Switch this weekend to play through one of my old favourites on Steam (although it did also launch on Nintendo DS, so there’s no need to ban me from the site just yet). That old favourite is Plants vs. Zombies, a strategy, tower defence-like game featuring a quirky cast of… Well, plants and zombies.

I’ve never played the DS version sadly, but I can wholeheartedly recommend it if it’s anything like its PC counterpart. There’s something so wonderfully addictive about it, and it’s one of the very few games that I’ve completed multiple times. I’ve been itching to play it for a few weeks, so I’m looking forward to hours of uninterrupted bliss.

Gonçalo Lopes, contributing writer

Modern Combat Blackout is off the table! Oh, I still very much love it, but I am giving it a hard pass until Gameloft’s impending balancing patch that will nerf all the game breaking, no skill, auto-tracking guns into obscurity. This weekend brings the holy trinity of Nintendo events (Splatoon 2 Splatfest, ARMS Party Crash Bash and Super Smash Bros. Ultimate spirit board event) so expect to see me online often.

Whenever I need a break from the online hustle, back to Assault Android Cactus+ I go… and maybe a slice of the new Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker Special DLC chapter. My game of the week is naturally RICO. Kick door, shoot baddies, drop corny one-liner, rinse and repeat. Video gaming bliss!

Gavin Lane, staff writer

After nabbing a 400GB micro SD card on sale a couple of weeks back, I’ve been redownloading all my archived games (nearly two days it’s taken me!) and I’m now looking at a fully loaded Switch with about 80GB to spare. So, this weekend I’ll be revisiting a few of the things I was forced to archive – namely DOOM, Yoku’s Island Express and Thumper. I haven’t played Rocket League for ages, either, and that’s always a good time.

A conversation with a colleague also reminded me of the brilliance of Just Shapes & Beats, the musical bullet hell game I reviewed last year which seemed to get lost in the avalanche of eShop games – it’s an utter winner and just the notes of the opening theme put a big grin on my face, so I’ll be squeezing that in somewhere, too.

As always, thanks for reading! Make sure to leave a vote in the poll above and a comment below with your gaming choices over the next few days…