Tag: hurrah
Google releases its “humble” test title on Stadia for one last hurrah
Google Stadia has just seen the release of its last ever game before it shuts down next week, and it’s from the company that made the platform itself.
At the end of September, Google announced that it would be shutting down its cloud gaming service Stadia, just three years after it launched. The final day you’ll be able to use the service is January 18, just a few days away now, and in a slightly sad way to mark the occasion, Google has released one final game before it does shut down: Worm Game.
“Play the game that came to Stadia before Stadia came to the world,” reads the game’s description on its Stadia page. “‘Worm Game’ is a humble title we used to test many of Stadia’s features, starting well before our 2019 public launch, right through 2022. It won’t win Game of the Year, but the Stadia team spent a LOT of time playing it, and we thought we’d share it with you. Thanks for playing, and for everything.” Quite the sad send off, honestly.
Nintendo in 2023: Is Tears of the Kingdom going to be the Switch’s last big hurrah?
There are whispers in the industry – according to several ‘insiders’ that don’t dare to name their sources – that The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom will be the last “significant” game for the Nintendo Switch. Whether or not these whispers are true (or just represent the egos of a few chronic tweeters that can’t ignore the chance of a tiny bit of delicious, empty-calorie clout), it poses an interesting question: what does Nintendo look like in 2023 and beyond?
The Nintendo Switch launched way back in 2017 – almost six years ago at the time of writing. Per new reports from Digital Foundry, Nintendo is no longer working on a Switch Pro and is instead focused on a proper, full-fat next-gen console. This statement has been corroborated by other industry names.
“I have heard that after Zelda, Nintendo doesn’t have a significant game for quite some time,” said industry analyst Chris Dring of GamesIndustry.biz. “From what I’m hearing I wouldn’t be surprised if Nintendo starts talking about new hardware by 2024,” says VGC boss Andy Robinson. If these comments are to be believed (though neither have committed these comments to articles on their respective sites, Dring and Robinson are both respected games media veterans) then it looks like Tears of the Kingdom really will be one of the last big games for the Nintendo Switch – and that leaves us with some questions.
AMD Radeon RX 6650 XT review: a last hurrah for RDNA 2
There’s nothing inherently wrong with the AMD Radeon RX 6650 XT’s concept – faster clock speeds than the RX 6600 XT, to better compete with Nvidia’s RTX cards? Yeah why not – but surely its timing is questionable. Any GPU launching several months into 2022 would only ever do so under the looming shadows of Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 40 series and the AMD Radeon RX 7000 series, the latter being officially revealed in just a few days’ time. Not to mention Intel Arc Alchemist, delayed as it has been.
Still. AMD’s next-gen, RDNA 3-based GPUs are an unknown quantity, and the RTX 40 series will at first focus on high-end models like the RTX 4090. Even if its RDNA 2 architecture is on the way out, could the RX 6650 XT not find room in the pack as one of the best graphics cards for 1080p and 1440p?