Microsoft is cutting the price of Game Pass, six months after issuing the service's biggest price hike.
With the cut comes the end of day-and-date Call of Duty launches into Game Pass
GP Ultimate to cost $84/year LESS, with $70 CoDs no longer launching into it
www.gamefile.news/p/xbox-pc-ga...
Nintendo's pricing experiment continues. Splatoon Raiders, out in July, is $60 physical; $50 digital
NEW: The wedding invitation sent to game publisher Panic was intentional. So was the letter that included a dead fly. And the many heartfelt notes from gamers
But the tooth? That was a mistake
Possibly the most feel-good story I've run on Game File....
www.gamefile.news/p/panic-mail...
PS: Hugh and the android girl Diana are the best video game piggyback duo since a red breegull jumped into dopey bear's backpack.
In other words, consider this game Banjo-Kazooie 4
REVIEW: Capcom's Pragmata is an excellently paced action game of ordinary plot and extraordinary gameplay.
She hacks. He shoots. And the developers keep adding new twists to how those can work together, even after the end credits
www.gamefile.news/p/13-exquisi...
NEW: When I took a meeting to try out Awaysis, I was expecting to play a physics-driven dungeon crawler
I did and it was cool
I did not expect to learn that Microsoft fully funded its development
Nor the chance connection that led to Hip Tanaka scoring the game
www.gamefile.news/p/awaysis-pr...
Professor Layton update from Level 5 today, for any fellow Layton obsessives
In today's Game File, three short previews of three intriguing games
1. At Fate's End - a gorgeous family feud
2. Blighted - a brain-eating game whose world levels up, the better you play
3. Crop - an eerie farming game that requires you to dig a grave
www.gamefile.news/p/swords-bra...
Fascinating. For which games? Would it load the relevant app in a browser?
What controller on your phone? I always had to download an app, since I first tried it around Christmas. This was on an iPhone. The Android version lets you use the Netflix app, I believe
NEW: Netflix's game controller app, which is used to play multiplayer games you can stream via Netflix, just had a huge weekend
For a spell, it was America's most downloaded free iOS app, ahead of ChatGPT, Temu, etc
Data suggests it's a recurring hit on holidays
www.gamefile.news/p/netflix-vi...
Good morning!
I highly recommend anyone who thinks they might possibly interested to apply for my job at IGN. It is a fantastic (UNION!!!!!) job working with the absolute best people. I have loved it with all my heart. You will too.
www.ziffdavis.com/careers/jobs...
I enjoyed Screenbound's first world but am even more interested in the second
Screenbound, a so-called 5D game (2D + 3D) is pretty cool.
I played it, wrote about it, put some clips of it in today's Game File, including the game's little-seen second world.
If the game's first world is a Mario riff, the second's a link's awakening
www.gamefile.news/p/screenboun...
So, what do you do when your daughter loves the new Tamagotchi she got during spring break but is now worried about how it will survive if she has to leave it home during the school day? I found one tip about how to “pause” them by setting the time. Is that it?
Mario Galaxy movie thoughts... I took my kids to a 1:20pm matinee yesterday. Only one other family in the theater, but it's spring break and lots of people are traveling. The kids (both 9) had a good time. They tend not to be critical of the movies we see and were amused. There's a dinosaur part that my daughter enjoyed, and she was proud of herself for predicting a revelation about a couple of the characters. Aside from that, it was one of the most lightweight movies I've seen with them. We watch a lot of movies and TV shows together and it's really striking how little either of these Mario movies accomplish in terms of character development, underlying themes, or providing any heft beyond offering piles of references to parts of Nintendo games. Sure, there are some creative action scenes, but the kids and I have been watching through the late-2000s Nickelodeon cartoon Avatar The Last Airbender, which is just as action-packed but has something to say about people and how they relate to each other. Frozen is arthouse cinema compared to the Mario Galaxy movie. All that said, across two Mario movies, it sure feels like the people writing these movies want to be telling Princess Peach and Bowser stories. Mario is the least interesting part of his movies (and Luigi isn't much better). It'll be interesting to see how the Zelda movie compares next year. Right now, I can't tell if these Mario movies are a byproduct of Nintendo itself wanting its films to be as void of narrative and thematic texture as possible ... or if this is just Nintendo and Illumination's assessment of what a Mario movie should be like. After all, Mario games also are all-action and have nothing to say about people--which is fine with me when I'm playing a Mario game! But it also makes for really flimsy films, judged against other kids' entertainment or otherwise.
My Mario Galaxy movie thoughts, copied from Game File reader chat substack.com/chat/66124/p...
25 years ago today, I was in the Houston Astrodome
NEW: A couple of weeks ago, I finally played through Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, so I could speak to the developers about the ending.
We certainly did (and I've marked that part with spoilers, if you want to skip)
But much wilder things happened.
Enjoy...
www.gamefile.news/p/the-develo...
Yes, and this was also all explained in the article I linked to in the first place.
It is, and so manufacture of DDR5 is at least being spun up, at the cost of continued DDR4 supply. Nex Playground uses DDR4.
As Sony raises the PS5 price by $100+, I'd like to point people to yesterday's Game File. A rare case of a console-maker on the record about this stuff
Nex CEO David Lee told me price was potentially going to go up (it did) but was also exploring a switch from increasingly scarce DDR4 RAM to DDR5
That increase equals the cost of one whole annual Game File subscription!
May I recommend one more?
NEW: The Nex Playground is a rare success story in the video game industry right now. They're a hit with families. They're building up tiny 1st-party teams. Game budgets are low.
Only problem is RAM. They just had to raise their price.
We talked about all of it
www.gamefile.news/p/for-nexs-u...
I changed my sweater for this one at the last minute so that Chris and I would have a better color contrast
It was a good chat. Lots of Switch stats from @dringo.bsky.social, while I googled for the avg. length of a dog walk (I'm a cat person and the results of my search reinforced that choice)
It might be a good time to point out that the Switch version of Ubisoft's 2018 Starlink: Battle for Atlas--which does not require toys to play--doubled as a pretty good Star Fox game. And it's still the newest Star Fox adventure available
kotaku.com/theres-a-lot...
www.nintendo.com/us/store/pro...
As I've reported about Microsoft, Amazon, Sony and others, these lists offer a different look at layoffs. Big numbers can feel impersonal. This, perhaps, feels more real
www.gamefile.news/p/video-game...
82 of the 1000+ workers laid off by Epic this week worked in Washington State, which is among the most transparent with these situations. Which is why we can see those 82 cuts by job title
Layoffs included:
- 2 senior gameplay programmers
- 1 director, LiveOps
- 1 senior counsel, employment & labor
An affront to all woker-owned news outlets!
It's always possible to state things more clearly.
To wit, a reader asked if I was going to be using ChatGPT or other gen AI like that for my reporting. (Said they'd prefer to cancel their sub if I planned to.)
The short answer is no.
The longer answer is here: www.gamefile.news/p/whoops-cha...
