Nintendo Music has added another Game Boy soundtrack to its library. The Wario Land: Super Mario Land 3 album is now part of the premium service, arriving in a fresh update this month. It follows last month’s addition of the WarioWare: Move It! soundtrack, which means the app has now spent two consecutive updates on Wario’s corner of Nintendo’s catalogue. For anyone who has been following the service’s additions, that is a notably focused run. The new album brings back “That Smells!” and other tracks from the Game Boy title, giving the platform’s early portable era another representative in the app. Nintendo Music has gradually been building out its archive across generations, and the Game Boy has been one of the more intriguing sources precisely because its music had to work within severe hardware limits. That constraint is part of the appeal. Composers on the Game Boy had a small number of channels to...
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Nintendo is raising the cost of hardware repairs in Japan. The change takes effect on 16th November 2026 and will apply to both the Switch 2 and the original Switch. The announcement comes from Nintendo’s Japanese site, and it follows a year in which both consoles have already seen price increases around the world. Repair pricing is a separate matter from the cost of buying a console, but the two tend to move in the same direction when the pressures on manufacturing and logistics persist. For owners, the practical effect is straightforward: fixing a damaged console in Japan will cost more after the middle of November than it does now. Anyone with a repair already planned has a window of about a month to act before the new fees apply, though the details of how the adjustment is calculated have not been spelled out in the announcement. It is worth separating the regional picture...
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A replica N64 box is being offered as a reward in France, tied to the upcoming Switch 2 release of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. It is the latest in a growing line of retailer incentives surrounding the game. The item is a piece of packaging rather than the game itself, which is exactly why it has attracted attention. Replica boxes appeal to the part of the audience that remembers the original shelf presence of N64 releases, and they sit comfortably alongside the trend of collector-focused extras that have become common for high-profile re-releases. France is not alone in seeing this kind of promotion. As the launch approaches, merchants around the world have been revealing midnight openings and exclusive bonuses, each trying to secure pre-orders with something the others do not have. The result is a patchwork of offers that varies by country and, often, by retailer. That patchwork is worth understanding before ordering. A...
Read MoreEternal Anima has been a long time coming. The project was first disclosed in 2023 under the working title Project Life is RPG, and at the time Marvelous kept the details deliberately vague. What the publisher did say was that it was building a new IP intended to honour the classic titles of the genre, supported by concept art that suggested a strong sense of place. That combination, a veteran Japanese publisher with a nostalgic brief and a willingness to show artwork before gameplay, set expectations without pinning down what the game would actually be. Previews now offer a clearer view. The idea of returning to the past to build something modern is a familiar one in role-playing games, and it is easy to see why developers are drawn to it. The genre’s foundations are well understood: a party, a journey, a system of combat that rewards planning, and a world that opens up...
Read MoreThe creator of DayZ, Dean Hall, has delivered a blunt assessment of the games business: in his view, the industry is “rotting from its core.” The cause, as he frames it, is greed among the biggest companies rather than any single genre, platform or business model. The immediate targets of his criticism are Epic’s Unreal engine and Unity, the two technology platforms that underpin a huge portion of modern game development. Both are used by studios of every size, from small teams building a first project to large publishers shipping annual franchises, which is why criticism of them carries weight. An engine is not a neutral choice. Once a team commits to one, its tools, hiring, workflows and long-term support all tend to follow, and switching later is expensive. When a handful of companies control those foundations, the terms they set ripple outward through the whole industry, affecting budgets and schedules far beyond their...
Read MoreFew names in games carry as much accumulated history as Castlevania. The series has been associated for decades with gothic horror, the Belmont clan and a whip swung at Dracula and the inhabitants of his castle, and any new entry inherits that weight. Castlevania: Belmont’s Curse is the latest game to carry the name, and a full review has now been published. For anyone weighing it up, the useful question is not simply whether it is good, but whether it understands what made the series endure in the first place. The ingredients are well known. A sprawling castle, rooms that reward a second look, enemies placed with intent, and a difficulty curve that asks the player to learn rather than simply endure. Later entries added exploration and character progression, but the core remained action, timing and a certain grim atmosphere. Sound and presentation matter as much as mechanics here. Castlevania has long been known...
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