A new indie game mixes a magical version of Deliveroo with a 2D platformer, that’s hoping to be this year’s latest cosy hit.

In the last few years, keeping up with the news hasn’t inspired much joy. Pandemics, war, and political wrangling can leave you in the mood for a calming escape, which is part of the reason cosy games have enjoyed so much success recently. Massive hits like Animal Crossing and Stardew Valley are backed up by hundreds of indie titles, most of which feature pixel art, whimsical music, and absolutely no bloodshed.

Magical Delicacy is one such game, its friendly, 2D side-scrolling platforming opening up as its Metroidvania gating gradually allows access to increasing volumes of the map. Its heroine, Flora, is a witch who’s recently left home and moved to an apparently witch-friendly town where she sets up a food delivery business.

Unlike Deliveroo, her first act is not to launch an app and recruit an under-compensated, zero hour workforce, but to do all the cooking and delivery work herself. That means going out and meeting hungry townsfolk, finding or buying ingredients, before cooking them for just the right amount of time and bringing them to the person who placed the order.

While outwardly simple, her job is complicated by a number of factors, the first of which is acquiring the right ingredients. While some can be found and harvested, others need to be purchased from suppliers dotted around the map. To buy them you’ll find little bits of currency by walking over crockery, but mostly you’ll need to earn money by delivering food orders.

Things start with your humble cooking pot, which does a bang up job of stews – provided you remember to collect them before they overcook. Soon enough though, you’ll need a chopping board, pestle and mortar, an oven, and more, as your food requests become increasingly complex, often requiring foodstuffs that have been pre-prepared using another piece of kitchen equipment.

Some of those add-ons are purchased at the blacksmith’s shop, while others come from vendors further away on the map. Extra storage for your kitchen, herbs, and the components of potions – an increasing requirement from your expanding customer base – all need to be sourced and then brought back to your shop for preparation and cooking, before setting off on your return journey to the person who ordered them.

The problem with that is the constant traversal, which for the most part isn’t all that tricky, but is insanely laborious. Spending several minutes traipsing from your customer to a vendor, to casting about looking for an obscure ingredient you’ve yet to find, only then to have to return to your shop, do some cooking, then head off in search of whoever it was that wanted it in the first place, is a process that rapidly loses its charm.

Fortunately, much of that drudgery is undone when you unlock fast travel, even if the many bottlenecks and webs of interdependencies remain. To help navigate your way through that you can pin recipes to an easily accessible list on the left of the screen, although you can only store three there at a time, which soon begins to feel inadequate.

There are other issues with the interface, as things get more complex. Some of those can be mitigated by finding and purchasing add-ons for your map or kitchen, but many persist, rendering what might have been reasonably straightforward tasks into irritating memory tests, or reasons to fast travel all over the map in search of missing kitchen equipment or ingredients.

To add to the mild irritants, the game’s day/night cycle is essential in multiple operations. Potions can only be brewed during the hours of darkness, and you’ll also find certain harvestable plants only appear at night or during the day. And while you can go to sleep, skipping straight to dawn, if you need a potion you just have to wait for dusk, with nothing much to do until it arrives.

On the plus side, like a 1990s Japanese role-player, conversations are text-only and despite their sometimes absurd content, they’re played completely straight, the game’s earnest cartoon characters communicating politely and clearly, without even thinking about knocking on the fourth wall. It harks back to a simpler era – a core competence of the cosy genre.

It also doesn’t require much skill. The platforming is generally relaxed rather than challenging, even if there are occasional moments that require sequences of precision jumps. The cooking is even easier. If you abandon a dish while it’s baking or frying it’ll get burnt, but since the process takes at most a few seconds, that’s not something you’re ever likely to experience unless you do it deliberately to see what happens.

The game’s biggest challenge lies with your own power of recall. Trying to remember where a particular ingredient is grown or sold, or where exactly the customer who placed an order is located on the map can be a problem. You can buy markers to drop at important places, so you can find them later, but it’s not a complete solution and the issue it half fixes is mildly annoying rather than a fun and interesting mechanic.

There’s a lot to like about Magical Delicacy. Its gentle pace, lovely looking 16-bit-style graphics, and mellow chiptune soundtrack does more than enough to remove you from the world’s ills for a few hours. However, the limitations of its interface, unfortunate bottlenecks, and emphasis on repeatedly visiting poorly signposted, yet distant, parts of a sprawling map can feel unnecessarily irksome.

Formats: Xbox Series X/S (reviewed), Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, and PC
Price: £20.99*
Publisher: Whitethorn Games
Developer: sKaule
Release Date: 16th July 2024
Age Rating: 3

*Game Pass day one

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The highs and lows of Chained Together have been encapsulated in a stream on Kai Cenat’s Twitch channel, but there’s a happy ending to the tale.

Twitch star Kai Cenat is known for setting himself insane challenges during his streams, as shown in his recent Elden Ring marathon, but his latest throws a co-op dynamic into the mix.

On Sunday, Cenat teamed up with fellow streamer IShowSpeed to beat platform game Chained Together, where players have to escape Hell by climbing as high as possible while being chained to their co-op teammates.

The shared agony has made it a popular hit with streamers since it launched last month, with Cenat and IShowSpeed taking the trend further by literally chaining themselves together while streaming the game in the same location.

The pair tasked themselves with completing the game in its entirety in one stream which, as you might expect, led to some severe bouts of frustration.

At one point, Cenat and IShowSpeed took a huge fall during one of the highest points of the game, losing hours of progress and reducing the former to tears. IShowSpeed, meanwhile, chucked off his headphones in anger.

‘Oh my gosh, I’m an idiot,’ Cenat said while covering his face with his hands.

After 12 hours of literal ups and downs, Cenat and IShowSpeed eventually made their way to the top – sparking the kind of reaction usually reserved for surviving a traumatic event.

‘I’m free,’ IShowSpeed yelled, as he ripped off his actual chains. “I’m not a slave anymore!’

For context, Chained Together is listed as taking around six hours to complete (via HowLongToBeat), so it took them double the average time.

Last month, Cenat collaborated with Kevin Hart and comedian Druski in his biggest stream to date, reaching over 721,000 viewers.

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Microsoft has unveiled a new Wolverine Xbox controller to match Deadpool, but your chances of getting either are pretty slim.

Deadpool & Wolverine looks set to be the biggest movie of the summer, so unsurprisingly the film’s marketing has spread into the video game world.

Outside of rumoured collaborations with Fortnite and Call Of Duty, Microsoft recently unveiled a Deadpool-themed Xbox controller with a particularly rotund posterior, alongside a customised Xbox Series X console featuring foam katanas.

A week later, Xbox has now debuted a Wolverine controller with a plump rump to match.

As shown in an Xbox Wire post, the controller has even been given a billboard in Alberta, Canada (Wolverine’s supposed to be Canadian), where Deadpool is sat between Wolverine’s cheeks.

The biggest kicker is that all these items are restricted to giveaways, so they will not be available to buy. To be in with a chance of winning the Wolverine controller, fans are being told to keep an eye on Microsoft’s Instagram page for a post tagged #MicrosoftCheekySweepstakes for further details.

As for the Deadpool console and controllers, you have to follow and repost the tweet below from the Xbox account before August 11. To enter, you also have to be aged 18 or over.

If you’re wondering how the buttocks function in action, the plastic bum extension is a detachable plate locked in by magnets – so you can easily pop it off to make it a normal controller for actual gaming sessions.

Xbox has promised further giveaways in a live broadcast of the Deadpool & Wolverine premiere on Twitch, which takes place in New York later today (July 22).

Deadpool And Wolverine, meanwhile, is released in cinemas on Friday July 26.

This is the latest in a long line of Xbox promotional items which seem like they’d sell like hotcakes but which Microsoft only produces one or two of, to give away as prizes – we still can’t believe they never made the Bluey console a regular product.

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Frontier’s Formula One management sim offers a major improvement on last year’s game but how realistic is it really?

If you’re a Formula One fan but don’t consider yourself a skilled virtual race driver, you may not be aware of the alternative gameplay experience that F1 Manager offers. As franchises go, it’s relatively new and F1 Manager 2024 is just the third annual iteration. Like EA’s F1 24, it bears the official licence of motorsports’ most prestigious formula, but instead of putting you behind the wheel of an F1 car it casts you as the principal of one of its teams: a worthy challenge for lovers of management sims, given Formula One’s famous complexity.

It’s impossible to assess F1 Manager 2024 without also addressing the existence of F1 24: the latter is so sprawling and complex that you could already play it as a management sim, if you so wished. However, that would require a vast amount of trawling through menus and would leave you with the feeling that you were defeating the object of the game. F1 Manager 2024 is a very different kind of game to F1 24: it’s focused and easy to understand, and much, much cheaper.

This year’s version of F1 Manager adds a whole new game mode, the inclusion of which telegraphs the fact that it’s still a new franchise. Called Create-A-Team, it lets you enter Formula One from scratch, as the proprietor of a fictional eleventh team on the grid, which you can name and whose logo and livery you can design. It’s the sort of feature you would’ve expected as standard but it’s only now that it’s being added.

However, Create-A-Team has a way to go yet, as it fudges the issue of starting a new team from scratch. Instead of giving you a preparation period in which to design your car, and perhaps cherry pick components from the previous year’s car of an affiliated team (as the Haas team effectively did with Ferrari, when it entered Formula One in 2016), it plunges you straight into this year’s season with a pre-designed car. So the whole exercise feels rather too similar to simply opting to take charge of one the real-life teams that perennially struggles at the back of the grid.

Sure, there’s a great deal of satisfaction to be had from scoring your first World Championship point, and developing upgrades that elevate you from the back of the grid to the midfield, but that’s the same satisfaction that you would get from taking the helm of, say, Sauber or Williams. It would have been nice to see more points of difference between the gameplay of Create-A-Team and the main mode, which invites you to take charge of one of the real-life teams.

When you do that (and most people will surely run parallel games involving one real team and one self-created one) there’s plenty of fun to be had, within the context of what is actually happening in the real-life Formula One World Championship right now. For example, we opted to take charge of McLaren, to see if we could – as has happened over the course of this season – turn them from a promising base into realistic contenders, to topple Red Bull from their position of dominance.

Which is exactly what we were able to do. F1 Manager 2024 throws much of what constitutes modern Formula One at you, forcing you to juggle a number of factors including poaching and improving staff (if, for example, you overtrain your pit crew, sheer exhaustion will lead to them making mistakes in races); drilling down deep into the perks you offer potential sponsors (which can also interfere with your staff, while they pursue their core jobs); and, of course, choosing which parts of your car to develop in order to address weaknesses and build on strengths – all while keeping an eye on the sport’s cost cap.

Staff morale is a new and much-needed mechanic that developer Frontier has added to the game, as you also have to nurture affiliate drivers from lesser formulae, putting them in your car in practice sessions to ensure they are ready to step in if injury or illness strikes.

But the fun really starts when you enter each race weekend. Obviously, given that F1 Manager 2024 is a management sim, you’re not actually doing the driving yourself, but you can instruct your drivers to operate in specific ways during different stages of sessions or races: preserving new tyres at the start of a stint, using all of their ERS electric power boost to effect overtakes, or driving super-defensively in a bid to keep faster cars behind.

Perhaps the most fun aspect of F1 Manager 2024’s gameplay, however, comes in the practice sessions before each race, in which you send out your drivers on different tyres to glean information about car setup and then, via what amounts to a mini-game, adjust parameters such as wing angle and anti-roll, toe-in, and camber settings to achieve the perfect setup.

In the races, you swiftly discover the importance of tyre strategies, and often experience the thrill of having to adjust your approach on the fly when, say, a safety car comes out. F1 Manager 2024 is the first game in the franchise to include mechanical failures (manufacturing spare parts when you’re away from the track is a must), which adds another element of authenticity.

But we found that in the actual races, far fewer crashes and offs occurred than they do in real-life, and widespread track limit violations, leading to time penalties, were absent whereas in real-life, they can dominate racing at certain circuits. Although, admittedly, there are plenty of Formula One fans who would be only too happy to see the abolishment of such penalties.

Guiding your drivers to success, or otherwise, is great fun, helped by another new feature: a bird’s-eye view of the track, which you can combine with speeding up time so that the race passes up to 16 times faster than real-life (although any incidents which require your attention will drop you back to real-time – you can even pause races while you ponder team management dilemmas).

There’s also a Race Replay option, which lets you rewrite history by taking control of specific teams during replays of real-life races. This offers a great means of jumping into particular challenges when you fancy a quick blast on the game.

However, there are provisos, mainly in terms of polish and detail, which become particularly noticeable if you have played one of EA Sports’s F1 games. Such comparisons are a tad unfair, since F1 24 costs at least twice as much as F1 Manager 24, but can’t be unseen or unheard.

For example, F1 Manager 2024 includes David Croft and Karun Chandhok from Sky’s commentary team, but they are only used to introduce races in a very generic and bland manner. During the races, you do get plenty of radio communication from the drivers, whose real-life voices, commendably, have been recorded. But the build-up and post-race periods lack the intensity of the real thing.

Plus, our review copy threw up a few visual glitches, including ghost tyres that remined in the pit after tyre-changes, and the odd crash in which cars sailed undamaged through the barriers. Hopefully, those will have been addressed by the time the game launches.

Overall, F1 Manager 2024 is great fun to play, offering a solid facsimile of the mad, complex, and overblown circus that constitutes modern Formula One. It tests your skills as a team manager and strategist, but it also leaves you with the nagging feeling that it could be better.

Formula One fan are detail obsessives and while this gets the fundamentals right it doesn’t feel as startlingly realistic as F1 24. To its credit, F1 Manager 2024 is a huge improvement on the previous instalment, but it’s still got a way to go before it becomes the perfect management simulator.

Formats: Xbox Series X/S (reviewed), Xbox One, PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 5, and PC
Price: £29.99
Publisher: Frontier Developments
Developer: Frontier Developments
Release Date: 23rd July 2024
Age Rating: 3

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Tekken 8, Street Fighter 6, and others received major updates during the world’s biggest fighting game tournament, so here’s every announcement.

The Evolution Championship Series (Evo) is the world’s biggest and most prestigious fighting game tournament and has become the natural place to make major announcements for related games.

Developers often make appearances in-between matches and this year’s edition was no exception, with Tekken producers Katsuhiro Harada and Michael Murray putting in an appearance, along with Granblue Fantasy Versus: Rising director Tetsuya Fukuhara.

While new characters are usually the main takeaway, this year’s event in Las Vegas managed to cook up a few other surprises too. Check out a full rundown below.

SNK Vs. Capcom: SVC Chaos is out now on Switch and PlayStation

During the event, SNK announced a surprise re-release of 2003 arcade title SNK Vs. Capcom: SVC Chaos. This new version comes with rollback netcode and new tournament modes, along with a hitbox viewer and a gallery featuring 89 pieces of artwork.

The title, which features a roster of 36 characters, primarily from Capcom’s Street Fighter and SNK’s The King Of Fighters, is out now across PC, PlayStation 4, and Nintendo Switch.

It comes after Capcom recently announced the Marvel Vs. Capcom Fighting Collection, and will further raise hopes of a new Versus fighter in the future.

Speaking prior to Evo, Capcom producer Shuhei Matsumoto told Dexerto that, ‘The development team at Capcom has big dreams. Maybe there is an opportunity for a new Marvel Vs. Capcom game. Maybe there is an opportunity for a new Capcom-based SNK game.

‘I don’t know. But, if that were to happen, that would take some time and effort in order to create and release those kinds of games, but the short-term with what we can do now is at least reintroduce these past legacy games to a new audience, to people who may not have the opportunity to play it, because it might not be out on modern or current platforms.’

Matsumoto later added that there ‘may be future opportunities to make bigger games’ once people ‘familiarise themselves’ with these legacy titles, so it seems like Capcom is at least gauging interest for future instalments.

First look at Terry Bogard in Street Fighter 6

On the same SNK and Capcom crossover theme, Fatal Fury’s Terry Bogard will be playable in Street Fighter 6 in autumn 2024. The guest character was shown off for the first time in a new trailer, although it doesn’t display his moveset.

Terry Bogard, who was also a guest character in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, is the second character in Street Fighter 6’s second DLC pass. Street Fighter veteran M. Bison was released last month, with Elena and Mai Shiranui (also from Fatal Fury) set to arrive next year.

Granblue Fantasy Versus: Rising shows off multiple characters

While not as well known as others on the roster, Granblue Fantasy Versus: Rising had a strong showing in terms of announcements. Developer Cygames debuted new character Versusia, along with additions coming in an update on August 20 – ranging from new story episodes, stages, and a mode called Grand Bruise.

At the end of the trailer, Granblue veteran Vikala was also announced as a DLC character for October, while Sandalphon was teased for the game’s second character pass.

Heihachi is back from the dead again in Tekken 8

Despite being tossed into a river of magma in Tekken 7, antagonist Heihachi Mishima is being resurrected as a DLC fighter in Tekken 8. Heihachi will be the title’s third DLC fighter in autumn 2024, following Eddy Gordo and Lidia Sobieska.

If the cinematic trailer is anything to go by, his arrival also looks set to come with new story content – presumably to explain his latest dance with death. In the meantime, Lidia Sobieska is set to be officially released on July 26 in the UK, with early access starting three days prior.

Elsewhere at the event, Bandai Namco confirmed this year’s Tekken World Tour Finals will take place in Tokyo, Japan in December.

Lucy from Cyberpunk: Edgerunners is coming to Guilty Gear Strive

Developer Arc System Works revealed what’s in store in the fourth season of Guilty Gear Strive, including a new 3v3 mode, the addition of new colour schemes for characters, new stages, and four new characters.

Two of these characters, Dizzy and Venom, have appeared in past games, while Unika is set to appear in upcoming Guilty Gear anime Dual Rulers. The most surprising addition is Lucy from Netflix series Cyberpunk: Edgerunners, a TV spin-off from Cyberpunk 2077. Dizzy is set to debut in October this year, with the others set to arrive in 2025.

For those who want to try the new 3v3 mode, which looks as chaotic as you’d expect, an open beta test is set to kick off on July 25.

Sony is expanding Evo

Beyond the games themselves, Evo, which is partly owned by Sony, announced several new events for 2025. Along with the usual Evo and Evo Japan events, the inaugural Evo Awards will take place in Los Angeles in February, while Evo France – the first major Evo event in Europe – will be held on October 10 in Nice. In 2026, meanwhile, there will be an Evo Singapore.

According to Evo’s website, the awards event will ‘feature a full suite of live audience programming to commemorate and celebrate the feats of the fighting game community’s many prestigious members, formally inducting them into halls of fame’. The awards will be decided entirely by a public vote too, with more information promised soon.

The most exciting prospect is a regular Evo competition in Europe, although it remains to be seen whether it will stay in France or move around the continent in the years to come.

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An announcement regarding the PS5 Pro might be around the corner, as more details about the system’s graphical improvements emerge.

Despite various leaks around the console, Sony still hasn’t officially confirmed the existence of the PS5 Pro – which is widely expected to be released this year.

The sheer amount of leaks suggests a more powerful version of the PlayStation 5 does exist, with leaked technical specifications outing the existence of Sony’s new in-house upscaling technology PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution (PSSR).

Suggestions that the PS5 Pro could be delayed into next year have now been refuted, with more information about the system’s increased capabilities emerging from multiple, separate dataminers.

According to dataminer Kepler, who previously leaked specs about the PS5 Pro console, the system will utilise ray-tracing upgrades in AMD’s in-development RDNA 4 graphics cards.

Kepler posted a list of RDNA 4 upgrades on Twitter, which includes a double ray-tracing intersect engine, 64B RT node, and other rather complicated specs. ‘Most if not all of these should be in the PS5 Pro too,’ they noted.

The insider later claimed the PS5 Pro will be built on a customised version of AMD’s current RDNA 3 architecture, which allows for significant improvements, while supporting certain features from the chip company’s upcoming RDNA 4.

These features include the ray-tracing upgrades, along with RDNA 4’s Wave Matrix Multiply Accumulate and new data prefetcher – both of which boost performance.

While Sony has not confirmed any details about the PS5 Pro, the original PlayStation 5 is built using AMD technology – so it’s reasonable to assume any improvements to the console will come from the company’s latest chips.

Some potential details around the PS5 Pro’s graphical preset options have also emerged via ThatBomberBoi, a dataminer from within the No Man’s Sky community. Last week, he posted files showing graphical preset options for ‘Trinity’, the PS5 Pro’s alleged internal codename.

The improvements themselves are very minor, bumping up the dynamic resolution factor from 0.6 to 0.8, but these upgrades could be a work in progress. It’s important to note that these are specific to No Man’s Sky too, so other games could use the PS5 Pro very differently.

It does suggest the PS5 Pro could be announced soon though. Sony recently confirmed it will have a key presence at the Tokyo Game Show in September, which might be the perfect time to announce a mid-generation refresh, but that’s not been suggested by any reliable leaker.

If the system is coming out in 2024, the big question might be what game could demonstrate the PS5 Pro’s improved capabilities. Astro Bot is the only remaining PlayStation 5 exclusive this year, which is due out in September.

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Despite being a much bigger company, Microsoft has admitted it has far less money to spend on advertising than Sony PlayStation.

A few weeks ago, it was suggested that Microsoft was preparing to all but give up marketing the Xbox console in Europe, after decades of underperformance. The report wasn’t very specific, with no mention of the UK – where the consoles have always done much better than on the Continent, but while believable it didn’t seem like the sort of thing you’d ever get any hard proof of.

However, in a new interview with the marketing boss of Xbox in EMEA (Europe, Middle East, and Africa), they’ve admitted that, ‘We’re not blessed with big marketing budgets.’

Whether this is before or after the rumoured cuts is unclear but given the lack of advertising for Xbox in general it doesn’t really come as much of a surprise. And yet it’s still shocking that the same trillion dollar company that paid $69 billion for Activision Blizzard doesn’t want to spend the money necessary to promote its consoles.

The implication is that Microsoft has given up trying to sell the Xbox in Europe, after years of being rejected by the market and falling hardware sales even the US.

With its new emphasis on multiformat support and streaming, including recent initiatives like Amazon Fire, it’s easy to imagine that would become the new focus in Europe, although the interview with Xbox’s Michael Flatt in Marketing Week doesn’t even guarantee that.

‘From a funding point of view, we need to work really hard against our competition,’ said Flatt.

Referring to Sony, Flatt said that, ‘Regrettably they outspend us. ‘They’re blessed with marketing funds that we’re just not able to enjoy. But that’s totally fine. We adopt what I would call a more fiscally responsible approach to media investments.’

‘We’re not blessed with huge media budgets, so we have to be quite scrappy really, and quite tenacious to fight for funds that would probably go somewhere else,’ he adds.

It seems absurd that such a massive company, that has spent so much on increasing its presence in the games industry, is reduced to acting ‘scrappy’ when it comes to markets outside the US but then its approach to the Continent is much the same as Japan, where it has also always struggled.

Even basic things like the Xbox dashboard and interface are criticised in Europe, where translations are apparently left up to AI, creating a poor first impression for the format.

There’s also the issue that Microsoft has never been very good at marketing in general, from the questionable names it gives to its consoles and services to the lack of support given to new game releases.

Without investing more money in marketing it’s hard to see how any of this is going to change, with Microsoft operating as if it’s a much smaller and less well funded company than Sony – who in reality are a vastly smaller business.

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The Monday letters page discusses the appeal of Nintendo World Championships and speedrunning, as one reader laments the end of the Halo TV show.

To join in with the discussions yourself email gamecentral@metro.co.uk

The three pillars
The internet detective angle is getting pretty crazy with some fans, but I can’t argue that the evidence for The Elder Scrolls 6 being set in Hammerfell is looking pretty definite. I haven’t played anything other than Oblivion or Skyrim, so I have no opinion on it, but if it’s got lots of diverse locations that sounds good to me. Skyrim wasn’t really the most varied place to visit, so I’d appreciate an improvement on that level.

Beyond that, I’m not really sure what to expect from the new game, especially given Starfield didn’t really manage to advance anything. Better first person combat, for sure, but for me the thing that made Skyrim so impressive is the immersion, the customisability, and the detail and hidden areas of the world.

Improving on these three pillars is the most important thing, in my opinion, not just compared to Skyrim but everything that’s come since. It still feels like Skyrim does some things better than much more recent games but the question now is can even Bethesda beat it?
Jonah

The Nintendo curse
I definitely like the idea of a Zelda: Ocarina Of Time remake for the launch of the Switch 2, but I feel like as soon as you make a prediction for Nintendo to do something that basically guarantees that it won’t happen. It’s like a jinx or something, because I don’t think I’ve ever seen it come true even for basic things that should be easy to guess.

I do agree that Nintendo will want some kind of Zelda game for the launch window, but I agree it won’t be Breath Of The Wild – for the simple reason that that was the launch game for the Switch and it might confuse causal gamers as to whether the Switch 2 is even new, if it’s launching with the same game. Unless it’s just promoted as a remaster upgrade and not really a separate thing, but that doesn’t sound very Nintendo-like.

But that brings you right back to what game will it be, and I admit I don’t know. But that’s why the Switch 2 is exciting. I like not knowing.
Kobe

Cher warned you
Just as we all knew at the time, even Xbox fans, the FTC were right and the Activision Blizzard acquisition should never have gone through. In fact, I think Xbox fans are the most regretful, as it becomes obvious what it really means for the format.

Problem is you can’t turn back time. I’m no legal expert but I’m going to assume that the FTC can’t get the acquisition overturned, so at worst what’s going to happen? A fine? Something that will lead to Microsoft laying off even more people?

The worst thing is none of this seems to have helped Xbox at all, unless you think they needed something to push them into going more multiformat, which I guess you could argue is true. But it all seems like a big mess to me.
FUDD

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Fast vs. slow
I have no intention of buying Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition but I do find myself weirdly fascinated by it, since it is so far beyond anything I would ever be interested in. I find speedruns to be a very strange way to enjoy a game and find them very boring to watch.

To me, it’s like you’re purposefully breaking the game and trying to get it over with as quickly as possible. I realise I’m downplaying them by saying that but it’s so completely opposite to the way I try to enjoy games I struggle to believe there’s people that prefer it this way.

I also don’t know where they get the spare time to get so good at just one particular game. I would much rather use that time to play something else. But whatever floats your boat.
84Colbat

Konamivania
Does anyone else not think it’s madness that Konami still hasn’t even hinted at a new Castlevania game yet? I really don’t understand why they’re putting all this effort into new Silent Hill games, when Castlevania is so much better known.

I guess Castlevania isn’t a big seller in the modern world either but at least non-gamers have heard of it, if only through the Netlfix series. I remember there were rumours of a big budget game a while back but nothing has ever come of that. If I were Konami I’d just sell my video games to someone else.

They’re never going to have the bottle to make a new Metal Gear game, so what’s the point?
Eelfish

Worldwide apocalypse
Very much looking forward to Fallout London and I hope this encourages even more mods on a similar scale, especially if Bethesda officially endorses them. For me, the most obvious location is Russia but looking around there doesn’t seem to be any planned at the moment. I found an old one called New Moscow on Nexus Mods, but I don’t think it’s very good.

I really think Bethesda were wrong to say that Fallout will never be set outside of the US in any major way. This isn’t GTA, where the whole point is a satire of American culture. I guess that’s what Bethesda thinks it is, but I would never even have considered that if they hadn’t mentioned it.

For me, Fallout is about what happens after a nuclear apocalypse. It’s the attempt to restart civilisation and what different routes people take. None of that is exclusive to the US. In fact, it’s more interesting if you look at how different cultures deal with the same problems.

Setting new Fallout sequels in increasingly more obscure American cities seems like such a waste of the concept. At this rate, where is Fallout 8 going to be set? Some place I’ve never heard of, I’d imagine.
Taylor Moon

Everyone Vs. Capcom
Loved the Reader’s Feature with all the Vs. Capcom ideas. I don’t see any of them happening, but I’d be up for any and all of them. One thing he didn’t mention though was the idea of a Capcom Vs. The World game, in terms of rival fighting games.

I know we won’t ever get Mortal Kombat, but we could have Street Fighter Vs. Tekken Vs. SNK Vs. Sega Vs. Arc System Works Vs. French-Bread. I think that’d be great and because fighting games are kind of niche by their nature it could be organised more easily than other kinds of games, I would assume.
Tobin

Rare release
I was quite upset at the success of Sea Of Thieves on PlayStation 5. Not because of any console war nonsense but because it seemed to lessen the chance that there’d be any new game from Rare. I know they announced Everwild but I don’t see that ever coming out and the developers seem to have admitted it was just a vague idea that never really existed as an actual game.

The fact that they haven’t released a new game in six years is really upsetting to me, as I enjoyed their games so much during the N64 era. I know lots of people have left since then and they’re, literally, not the same company anymore but the name still means something to me and, as far as I know, they’re still one of the biggest developers in the UK.

To see it all wasted in some multiplayer-only online game is really annoying. New ideas would be better, but I certainly wouldn’t object to a new Blast Corps, Banjo-Kazooie, or Conker. I also would’ve thought Microsoft would want to encourage one of the only companies to ever come close to Nintendo in terms of making 3D platformers but there’s been nothing.

I hope Rare are happy doing what they’re doing at the moment, but it’s hard to imagine given how famous and popular they used to be and how most people playing Sea Of Thieves probably don’t even known who they are. It’s a case of success being a double-edge sword as far as I’m concerned.
Tronix

Inbox also-rans
I see Paramount cancelled the Halo live action series after two series. While the first was average I really enjoyed the second and the special effects were way better, as was the story, and was looking forward to the continuation of the story.
TWO MACKS

GC: There’s some talk of a different network picking it up for series three, but we’re not sure how likely that is.

I very rarely buy DLC, once in a blue moon, however the Shadow Of The Erdtree DLC is up there with the XCOM 2: War Of The Chosen DLC. Amazing games, both embellished further by passionate developers.
Chevy Malibu (PSN ID)

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The small print
New Inbox updates appear every weekday morning, with special Hot Topic Inboxes at the weekend. Readers’ letters are used on merit and may be edited for length and content.

You can also submit your own 500 to 600-word Reader’s Feature at any time via email or our Submit Stuff page, which if used will be shown in the next available weekend slot.

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As a reader tries to predict the launch line-up for the Switch 2, he suggests that a remake of Zelda: Ocarina Of Time is the logical choice for Nintendo.

All the summer showcases are over and we’re getting to a point in the year where a Switch 2 announcement could happen at any time. Literally, given how unpredictable Nintendo is. I’ve seen lots of very sensible ideas about what the launch games could be but there’s one theory that I don’t think holds much water and that’s the idea that one of the games will be a remaster of Zelda: Breath Of The Wild.

Now, Nintendo will undoubtedly want a Zelda game at launch, just as they’ll want a Mario one, but since Tears Of The Kingdom was only last year there’s no way it’ll be a new mainline entry. We’re getting a spin-off this year too, with Wisdom Of Echoes, so the best guess for next year is some kind of remake or remaster.

But I think Breath Of The Wild is a problem in many ways. Obviously, it’s not that old but I also can’t imagine the power of the Switch 2 will make that much difference to what it looks like or plays like, which isn’t a very good advert for the new console. Then you’ve got the complication of how you pay for it, which knowing Nintendo doesn’t like to give anything away for free is only likely to cause resentment.

Personally, I think the best idea is a remake and to me the remake that makes the most sense is Ocarina Of Time. It’s widely considered one of the best games ever made and yet it’s only had one remaster, on the 3DS, and is currently only available in its original form on N64 – which, let’s be honest, is definitely showing its age at this point.

It doesn’t seem right that such a beloved and important game should be so difficult to play and given the current popularity of remakes I think there would be a real appetite for a remake from both new fans and old.

It’s also a great way to show off the graphics of the Switch 2, without having to remake something the size of Breath Of The Wild. Ocarina Of Time is a big game but it’s not open world in the modern sense, so it’s a finite, practical thing to remake that Nintendo could’ve been working on for years, for this eventuality.

Another benefit is that while there’ll be no sequel to Tears Of The Kingdom you can safely assume that the next mainline entry will follow in its footsteps, in terms of being open world. Nintendo has made it clear they’re not going backwards, and returning to the old Zelda formula for future games (not for a mainline game anyway), so this would be the perfect way to make a ‘new’ old school game with high production values.

The magic of Ocarina Of Time is that it still plays great, it’s just the graphics have gotten old, the frame rate is arthritic, and the controls are set-up for non-standard controllers (even the 3DS was a bit weird). Remake the visuals, remaster the music, and you really wouldn’t have to change too much else. In fact, I wouldn’t want them to.

Younger gamers must look at Ocarina Of Time and wonder why people describe it as the best game of all-time but a remake of the quality of Capcom’s Resident Evil games would make it very clear.

By reader Onibee

The reader’s features do not necessarily represent the views of GameCentral or Metro.

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A reader makes five enticing suggestions for Marvel Vs. Capcom style games, including crossovers with Disney and Transformers.

As soon as Capcom announced Marvel Vs. Capcom Fighting Collection: Arcade Classics fans like me immediately started hoping that this meant they had the Marvel licence and were now free to make a new game. Things aren’t as simple as that though and there’s actually reason to think they don’t have the rights to anything other than the older games, but let’s pretend, eh?

Except I don’t want to do the obvious and just reel off my list of characters that I think should be in a possible Marvel Vs. Capcom 4 (or will it be 5?). Instead, and as a back-up in case they don’t have the licence, here’s some ideas of other crossover fighters they could do.

There have been a lot over the years, including with SNK and Tatsunoko (the anime company that made G-Force). They’ve also collaborated with Namco and Sega a few times, although the only actual fighter was Street Fighter X Tekken. They generally seem up for team-ups with anyone, so I don’t necessarily think the following are as impossible as they might sound.

DC Comics Vs. Capcom

Let’s get the obvious one out of the way. It’s probably not going to happen because Warner Bros. owns Mortal Kombat maker NetherRealm but if it did, I would be over the moon as not only are Capcom a much better fighting game developer but I love the way they reinterpret the characters – Marvel Vs. Capcom is still my favourite look for many Marvel characters. Marvel Vs. DC would also be great, but that’s obviously not going to happen. Mortal Kombat Vs. Capcom isn’t either, because Capcom doesn’t want anyone ripping Ryu’s head off.

Sega Vs. Capcom

I can’t believe this hasn’t been at least discussed in some way, but obviously Sega has a wide roster of both fighting games and recognisable characters. I’d like to keep it as Sonic light as possible and focus more on their classic arcade and Dreamcast games, which could actaully fit in with what Sega is doing at the moment, with trying to revive their older titles. You’d want the Virtua Fighter and Fighting Vipers crew in there, but I’d also take a lot of influence from Fighters Megamix, with weird stuff like the Daytona USA car and the AM2 Palm Tree.

The weirder the better with crossover fighters, as far as I’m concerned, but while Sega is the most obvious partner I’d also go with similar set-ups for any major Japanese publisher, including Bandai Namco, Square Enix, Konami, Koei Tecmo, etc. And of course more SNK would be great.

Nintendo Vs. Capcom

The big one, that deserves its own space. I’d also be surprised if this hadn’t come up before, at least in casual conversation between the two companies. I would’ve loved to see 2D sprite-based versions of Mario, Link, Samus, and co. back in the 90s but I’d settle for anything these two choose to collaborate on. I don’t really see much competition with Smash Bros., as the gameplay style would be very different, but what I’d love is if Nintendo designed the Capcom characters and Capcom designed the Nintendo ones. I think that’d be really neat and something Nintendo might actually be interested in.

Disney Vs. Capcom

This is the biggie for Capcom, if they could convince them to go for it. Obviously, you could do Marvel Vs. Capcom, Star Wars Vs. Capcom, and so on separately but a combined fighter with everything Disney owns would be hilarious. They made Kingdom Hearts happily enough, although I suspect the fact that it’s a fighting game will put them off. Punching Mikey Mouse in the face sounds bad but then you do the same to Mario and Peach in Smash Bros., so why not here? Having all their cartoon characters and live action properties together would be really cool and there was that Disney Infinity toys to life thing they did which mixed them up just like that.

Transformers Vs. Capcom

Throwing this one in for GC but I actually don’t see it as a bad idea at all. It’s certainly a lot more marketable than Tatsunoko Vs. Capcom and Hasbro don’t seem to care who they give the Transformers licence to or what the quality of the games are. Again, one of the main appeals here would be seeing Capcom’s take on what the Transformers look like, but what I think would be cool is if the Capcom side of things were robot versions of their characters, that transformed into something else from their game. I think that’d be a really neat gimmick.

By reader Johnson

The reader’s features do not necessarily represent the views of GameCentral or Metro.

You can submit your own 500 to 600-word reader feature at any time, which if used will be published in the next appropriate weekend slot. Just contact us at gamecentral@metro.co.uk or use our Submit Stuff page and you won’t need to send an email.

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