Nintendo kills a couple of consoles, Aloy makes the cover of a mainstream magazine, and Master Chief takes off his helmet.
We finally made it to the weekend, but since the news never sleeps, we still had plenty to work on today. We found out that Nintendo has been planning to close the Wii U eShop for at least eight years now, Microsoft offered to buy Activision Blizzard a mere three days after the abuse allegations came to light, and Vanity Fair put the Horizon Zero Dawn and Forbidden West character Aloy on the cover of their magazine this month. Fans of the Halo franchise are also going to be seeing Master Chief’s face for the first time in the upcoming TV show.
Nintendo has apparently been planning to put the Wii U and 3DS behind them for quite some time. The news broke today that both consoles have been on their last legs for at least eight years now. The company previously announced that "it will no longer be possible to make purchases in the Nintendo eShop for the Wii U system and the Nintendo 3DS family of systems” beginning in March, 2023. While the official statement says that purchases will be accessible for the “foreseeable future," sources recently mentioned that Nintendo is going to “give notice in 2023 that the server will be shut down after a time. People will lose their games if something happens to their Wii U or the drive they have their games on." This prompted the Video Game History Foundation to put out a scathing critique, saying the plans were "actively destructive to video game history.”
Microsoft said they would be carefully monitoring the activities at Activision Blizzard. People across the board interpreted this to mean that Microsoft would be distancing itself from the company. The opposite turned out to be true. Microsoft went on to announce the acquisition of Activision Blizzard in a landmark deal for $69 billion only a few months down the road. We found out today that Microsoft really didn’t need very much time at all before they were able to make up their minds about the purchase. As it turns out, the company only needed a couple of days to come to the conclusion that a deal should be brokered.
The news broke that a professional Tekken player by the name of Tanukana was booted from her team, Cyclops Athlete Gaming, after she made some remarks about short men. We discovered today that her comments were only the tip of the iceberg. Tanukana has apparently been making derogatory remarks about all sorts of people for years. She for example has called unemployed people and low income earners “trash” and said they should “kill themselves.” The professional gamer also said that women with small breasts “shouldn’t have human rights.” Tanukana even went so far as to call people in the LGBTQ+ community “mentally ill.” The main takeaway seems to be that her extraordinarily narrow-minded worldview is much worse than previous reports have led us to believe.
Horizon Forbidden West has been racking up raving reviews from pretty much all corners, but nobody expected the player character, Aloy, to be found on the cover of any mainstream magazines. We were both surprised and delighted today to find out that she made the cover of Vanity Fair over in Italy this month. The headline reads “Aloy and the Revolution” which captures the angle taken in the article rather nicely. “With her freckled cheeks and austere appearance, Aloy has managed to redeem an industry,” writer Ofmario Manca said. "Aloy is neither mother nor spouse, neither supporting actor nor helper but a strong and courageous woman who exists in a world where gender differences no longer exist."
Fans of the Halo franchise have gone almost 25 years without ever having seen Master Chief’s face. But this will be changing when the upcoming Halo TV series finally comes out. “You will see his face," Executive Producer Kiki Wolfkill remarked before going on to say that she understands why some viewers wouldn’t want to see Master Chief's appearance. "For some people, it’s been a moment 20 years in the making. And for other people, it’s something that feels very hard to imagine," she explained. "We absolutely respect both sides of that fence — those who really want to see Chief's face and those who really don't. But for the nature of this story, it felt really important to connect with the Master Chief in a different way and that meant showing the face."
Forbidden West is just Zero Dawn But Bigger, and for a lot of Horizon fans, that will be enough.
Justin is an archaeologist specializing in architecture, urbanism and spatial theory. He also happens to be a pilot. But you probably know him as a columnist at Unwinnable and an editor at TheGamer where he writes articles and publishes news about games. You can find some of his work in EGM, Vice, Heterotopias and more.
