Nintendo has a history of fleshing out the larger Pokémon world through spinoffs. What games from the Pokémon Snap and Detective Pikachu series lacked in terms of action, they made up for in the way they made pokémon feel like creatures with rich lives outside of their relationships with trainers.
The big new mechanic for this title is that instead of Zone Shots from Mario Tennis Aces, you can equip each character with a different racket, similar to how you can choose between a range of vehicles in Mario Kart. Every racket features a different special ability that you can charge up by rallying back and forth. When the gauge is full, you can unleash a Fever Shot to potentially devastating results.
Starting off the trailer is a cinematic showing several illustrations of a Pikachu traveling around the world. Each drawing shows Pikachu in a different region from the first nine generations, from Kanto to Paldea. It's a cute way to lead into the next generation and also pay homage to the series' 30th anniversary.
One of the big highlights of Animal Crossing: New Horizons' 3.0 update is the new Slumber Islands feature. This feature lets you fully customize additional islands, providing you with more freedom to design than your standard home island. You can also enjoy customizing Slumber Islands with friends. In this guide, we'll explain how to access Slumber Islands and how to use this new sandbox-style feature.
One of Mario Kart World's big novelties is its vast open-world map of race courses that connect to one another. Instead of competing on a series of isolated tracks, racing to the next course across open highways is part of the competition. This has made for some mixed results in traditional Grand Prix mode, where old-school fans prefer the "purity" of traditional closed-circuit loops, but it's also highlighted what's so fun about the game's new Knockout Tour mode.
The Donkey Kong Country Returns HD free update is out today and adds Dixie Kong as a playable character along with her helicopter hair spin. It also adds a Turbo Attack mode which essentially turns every level into a speedrun challenge. Finally, a free Switch 2 upgrade will give the game better resolution, improved visuals, and faster load times. It'll also include support for GameShare so two players can play local coop on separate devices using only one copy of the game.
From the trailer alone, there are quite a few other noticeable differences from the previous games, like the lack of character names on the combat screen, as well as the whopping eight party members in combat at once. In previous games, while you have a full party of eight as the name would imply, you'd only select four of them to actually fight at once.