A regular look at gaming-related stories from the past week or so whereby conclusions are drawn from anything and everything. These may be incredibly well reasoned based on events from the week. Alternatively, they may be highly speculative, drawn from very little evidence. More likely, they will be somewhere in between.
Conclusion One: Nintendo has a new President
After the passing of Satoru Iwata in 2015, Tatsumi Kimishima stepped into the role of Nintendo’s President — only the second after the Yamauchi family stepped away from direct leadership. His remit was simple: revive the company’s fortunes and do so by execution of the plans laid by Iwata-san.
With the Switch and its success, plus that of its games, it’s fair to say Kimishima-san achieved this with aplomb. Now he is stepping down, and giving way for the third post-Yamauchi President in Nintendo’s history, Shuntaro Furukawa, a 46-year-old executive suddenly in charge of the key to the Mushroom Kingdom. At the earnings brief where this change was announced, Furukawa-san had the following to say:
“My top priority is to keep and expand the momentum for the Switch”
Makes sense, wouldn’t you say?
Conclusion Two: The Nintendo Switch has been hacked
If you have ever wanted a Linux tablet with full touchscreen support, now’s your opportunity. A hack that is enabled by way of the internal Tegra processor, you can run Linux and the Switch OS side by side forever more if you chose to. Nintendo cannot just stop this from happening as it’s the hardware itself — not any software — that makes it so.
What could you do with this? Well, anything you want, as long as Linux allows it. So you could run Doom 3 if you wanted, or do your open-source computing of choice with touch screen control if you so wished.
Nintendo can’t stop this from being used, and presumably given enough effort and time people will be able to do a great deal of things with it. I guess the focus will be on eradicating the hardware issue — or revising the hardware — for future production runs, but right now anyone with a Switch might want to, ahem, Switch to an alternative OS and variety of uses for their portable games console of choice?
Conclusion Three: The Avengers are coming to Sony PlayStation!
We know the actual Avengers game is currently in production, but for now we do have Spider-Man coming in September. We also know from various trailers that he’s probably gonna try on the suit he was offered up at the end of Spider-Man: Homecoming when Tony Stark invited him to officially join the Avengers.
This suit will be available to gamers when Spidey drops onto PlayStation in September if you’ve pre-ordered. We’re not going to go into any more detail though as that would spoil the film, something no one wants to happen, not even in the slightest way.
Conclusion Four: You’re already past it
We touched on this earlier in the year when a 16 year old won the first FUT Champions Cup of the year in a FIFA esports event. Now it turns out even that’s too late — as a 13-year-old Fortnite player turns pro according to Engadget.
Pro gaming organisation Team Secret recently recruited a new four-person squad for Fortnite competition. It turns out that the youngest in that group, a gamer by the name of Kyle ‘Mongraal’ Jackson, is just 13 and from England.
Conclusion Five: Games are educational
One of the key hurdles to overcome when teaching children and young adults is to make the lesson interesting and engaging such that they listen, and either take it all in at face value or by some backdoor route when they thought they were hearing about something else.
To that end a teacher in Detroit, Nick Lenk, used Overwatch to illustrate some scientific calculations, the need for assumptions (and stating them clearly) and more. In the game, one character called Mei has a freeze gun which can, well, freeze her enemies. The question posed was what is the temperature coming from her gun if it is able to freeze those bad guys?
Take a look at the video and learn about science whilst really watching some stuff about videogames.
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