She’s an Icon, She’s a Legend, and She Is the Moment

Confirming leeks leaks, Hatsune Miku officially joins Fortnite as the Festival Season 7 Icon.

The virtual singer will not only arrive to the stage with appropriately themed outfits, instruments, and even more songs, but she will also be joining the game at the same as the arrival of a pair of iconic kaiju for an upcoming Godzilla x Kong collaboration.

Ubisoft’s Unending Issues

Ubisoft announced another delay for Assassin’s Creed Shadows. The game, originally due out November 15, 2024, was initially pushed to February, and is now rescheduled again to release on March 20, 2025.

Ubisoft also stated that they have “appointed leading advisors to review and pursue various transformational strategic and capitalistic options to extract the best value for stakeholders.” This sounds like a good thing a healthy company does (John writes with sarcasm).

Because meanwhile, Indonesian support studio Brandoville Studios, who have been instrumental in Shadows’ development, have been outed by allegations of workplace abuse in a report by People Make Games. The support studio ultimately shuttered in 2024, and an Ubisoft spokesperson otherwise expresses their vague “condem[nation]” of the accounts.

The Los Angeles Wildfires

The ongoing Los Angeles wildfires have destroyed numerous homes and displaced hundreds of thousands of individuals. With LA being a sprawling point of the United States’ entertainment industry, a few celebrity homes and landmarks have been destroyed, and several anticipated events have been postponed.

Located near an evacuation warning zone, Riot Games has closed its Santa Monica office for all but “critical functions”. CEO Dylan Jadeja writes that, “Riot will be ready to stand up for Los Angeles and give back in every way [they] can.”

Dungeons & Dragons web series Critical Role has also postponed broadcast, with many of its performers based in impacted areas. The company has donated to a wildfire recovery fund.

As the path of the fire continues to be actively monitored, neighboring communities also continue to be subjected to smoke and strong winds, as Insomniac Games senior writer Nick Folkman comments.

This is a list of several funds you can donate to that aim to help support the victims of the fires.

For Californian residents, here’s a spreadsheet compiling numerous resources and local community hubs that are offering free necessities and shelter. Sorted by location, some of these spaces are seeking volunteers as well. The sheet is being updated and maintained by the Mutual Aid LA Network and are receptive to feedback.

Medical suppliers like Planet Halo Health are also taking requests for free respirators and face masks for community-based or individual distribution.

Through 211 LA, Airbnb is also providing temporary housing for those displaced.

In other news…

A remake of The House of the Dead 2 has been announced. Due out in Spring, the latest return to the light gun franchise will release on Switch, PlayStation, Xbox, Steam, and GOG.

Splash Damage’s co-op shooter Transformers: Reactivated has been canceled.

Sony has announced Horizon: Zero Dawn and Helldivers films, which means they’re pretty much just remaking Starship Troopers at this point. The second season of HBO’s The Last of Us series is also starting in April.

RetroRemake has announced the “first affordable FPGA gaming console” with the SS One, a device modeled after the PS One. The console will support PS1 games, memory cards, and controllers, and can also do anything the MiSTer can handle. The first run will cost $149, and future runs will be more expensive, but with a promise it will be at or under $220.

FuturLab, developers of PowerWash Simulator, has announced that support for the VR version of the game is going on indefinite hiatus. In the post announcing this, their CEO Kirsty Rigden said that the VR version wasn’t breaking even, and when job openings for the non-VR version became available, the decision was made to move the VR team over to those jobs so they could have job security.

This year’s Evo lineup has seemingly leaked thanks to an accidentally uploaded YouTube thumbnail. The games this year will be Street Fighter 6, Tekken 8, Guilty Gear Strive, Granblue Fantasy Versus: Rising, Under Night In-Birth 2, Mortal Kombat 1, Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves, and Marvel vs Capcom 2. The thumbnail may have been out of date, so this may not be 100% accurate, but it makes sense.

And finally, bunch more of Switch 2 leaks happened, and Nintendo still hasn’t announced the friggin’ thing. Sources are claiming the console will be announced on the 16th, with a release sometime in May or June.

They did, however, announce that a LEGO Game Boy kit will release in October.

The post The Bulletin: Miku Monday appeared first on Gamesline.

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John:

Pokémon has been a constant in my life almost since conception. My first Pokémon memory was when my father, who worked as a delivery driver, brought home a beat up original Game Boy with an even worse for wear copy of Red Version. He said he “found it” in a truck he was driving in, but there are hundreds of different possibilities as to what truly transpired. I played the holy hell out of that game, and I still have the original game (not the Game Boy anymore, since I eventually upgraded to newer models as time went on). Pokémon continued with me throughout my life, as I’ve purchased each new release every year since then.

My first forays onto the Internet were for Pokémon reasons too, and I eventually found myself perusing and messing around on Pokémon forums. I actually honed my sense of humor on these sites, and while I may not be too proud of some of the shenanigans I pulled on people back then, I definitely wouldn’t be where I am today if I didn’t start out listening to Pokémon themed podcasts, yearning to record one myself and have other people listen respond like I responded to those podcasts back then.

Ryan: 

My earliest memories of Pokémon can be best described as murky, yet fond. I remember going the whole hog on Pokémon, being pushed to the edge of playground fistfight death-matches on my willingness to defend Pikachu and friends over the clearly inferior Digimon. Being a small child through most of the 90’s, it’s impossible to say what roped me into Pokémon first, as life in the latter half of that decade was often a relentless inundation of Pokémon-related material. There were the games, the show, the trading cards, the toys, the books, the clothes, the novelty foods, the moral panics, and of course, those poor resolute souls who flew too close the sun with stout proclamations that Pokémon was just another fad.

Even at the time, six-year-old me, forming my first substantial gaming memories with Pokémon Crystal on a bright yellow Game Boy Color (Pikachu colors, of course), wouldn’t have believed them. Between my innumerable hours spent watching the cartoon, or collecting the trading cards, or playing Crystal or Stadium or Snap, or later Ruby, I couldn’t afford to believe that Pokémon was anything less than the best thing in the world. And now, 20 years after Red and Blue were unleashed onto an unsuspecting world, I’m less involved in the franchise, but nonetheless ecstatic about how it’s managed to endure and appeal all this time later. Thanks to the wide-eyed wonder of my younger self and the power of nostalgia, I’ll always see gaming as Pokémon’s world. Everything else is just living in it.

Niall:

I’m going to be honest here, out of everyone at Chooch, Pokémon probably means the least to me, and it’s probably not even close in that respect. I probably couldn’t name a single Pokémon outside the original 151 off the top of my head. With that said though, there was a time when Pokémon was basically my everything. It was huge when it first made its way west, and I was one of the millions enchanted by its spell – I got a Gameboy one Christmas purely to play Pokémon Red and Blue.

I probably put a couple hundred hours into those games – most of which was into Red – and a further couple hundred into the TCG game. During that time, Pokémon was my life. I had magazines, books, toys, all of it. But just as deeply as I got wrapped up in it all, I fell out of it equally. By the time Gold and Silver had come out, my interest was waning, and it had totally evaporated by the next games. For me, Pokémon was a fad, but one that gave me a lot of enjoyment for a year or two, all the same.

Kay:

Pokémon has genuinely been one of the biggest influences in my life. It was the first video game I ever owned. One day, my parents presented me with a blue Game Boy Pocket with a copy of Pokémon Blue inside. My uncle had found it laying in the middle of the road, lost by some poor kid during a bike ride or something. I was instantly hooked, loving it intensely, though I’m embarrassed to admit that it took me several weeks before I discovered I could actually save the game. I repeatedly made it to Lt. Surge in Vermilion City before those wimpy triple-A batteries would run out, but thankfully discovered I could save during a camping trip, finally discovering the option on the pause menu. After that, my Bulbasaur and I powered through the game, continuing to play it long after I had beaten every challenge in it, squeezing every ounce of entertainment from the little cartridge.

Pokémon did more for me than just the start of my lifelong love affair with video games. It helped me get my start on the internet, with my first community being a Pokémon forum. It also aided me connect with people in real life, helping me make friends with other fans who I might have had trouble interacting with socially otherwise. It helped me get through some dark times in my life, and even helped me identify that I was suffering from depression. I know I’d be in a much worse place today if some kid hadn’t carelessly dropped his Game Boy in front of my uncle’s house. While there are some franchises that would be better off ending before they hit 20 year, Pokémon is definitely not one of them. I hope when I’m an old lady at the age of 104, I’ll be celebrating the Pokémon’s 100th anniversary by booting up my Nintendo VR Chamber to play the latest game in the series.

Michael:

For years I wasn’t very good at video games. I had been going into my brother’s save in Link to the Past and Final Fantasy II, casting powerful spells and beating powerful enemies I couldn’t get to on my own. I wanted to play more games, but my options were limited to my skill. Then Pokémon landed, and an obsession was born.

After its release I would be left with two Gameboy Colors, all three versions of the game, and several hours spent duplicating items with glitches and trading back and forth to prepare the best team I could. My original save, started in 1998, still sits on my Pokémon Red cartridge. The first game I did everything in. The first game I pushed to its limits. When my friends had moved on I remained fixated on catching them all.

It was the birth of my inner nerd. A potent mixture of curiosity and dogged determination. A convoluted motivation I can’t control that propels me forward. It’s unpredictable but aimable. It lays dormant, waiting for another subject to lay waste to. A powerful catalyst birthed by Pokémon Red in 1998.

The post Our Pokémon Memories appeared first on Gamesline.