Plants vs. Zombies is getting an HD remaster with co-op
As the name suggests, it's a remake of the very first PvZ game, going all the way back to 2009. This is the first time we're seeing a version of the original title on a Nintendo platform since the DS .
This is more than just a simple HD refresh. The graphics have been upscaled, which is nice, but EA has also added new levels and plenty of secrets to uncover. The refresh will even include local co-op and PvP, which should be fun. The PSN and Xbox Live Arcade versions of the game, released in the early 2010s, had a co-op mode, but not's not true of many other iterations.
Preorders are open right now, and early birds will receive a retro Peashooter skin when the game launches. It remains to be seen if the game will come to other platforms beyond Nintendo's hybrid consoles. However, it's very likely to pop up on just about everything before too long.
As for the rest of today's Nintendo Direct , it was a muted affair focusing on third-party titles. Square Enix announced a new Octopath Traveler game and Atlus revealed that Persona 3 Reload is coming to Switch 2 . There was also a bizarre-looking game about building a campfire .
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Gizmodo
an hour ago
- Gizmodo
We Should Reject the Switch 2's Bogus Game-Key Cards or This Will Be the End of Physical Games
On Sunday, Nintendo propped up a survey for players to share a few thoughts about how they prefer to play games on the Switch 2. By Tuesday, Nintendo pulled the survey, but not before the poll went viral and offered gamers a new outlet to let loose about the lack of Switch 2 games you can buy that come entirely on physical game cards. There's a larger issue at play. The Switch 2 is an inflection point showing how the last few strands of actual game ownership are fraying. Nintendo's most-dedicated audience hopes game-key cards—essentially a download link inside a game card—don't become the standard going forward. Nintendo says game-key cards 'don't contain the full game data.' They instead include a 'key' that lets you immediately download a game to the Switch 2 as soon as you plop it in. The main benefit compared to a full digital download is you can easily sell or give away your game-key card when you want, but it's barely any better than a digital download. Game-key cards take the worst aspects of physical ownership—the possibility somebody could steal or you could lose your game—while missing out on all the benefits a regular game card provides. Downloading a game requires an internet connection, and some gamers will be hampered by slower internet speeds. Collectors want to actually own the game, rather than a key for it. Nintendo's user agreement shares how a digital download is merely a license to use the software on the system. Nintendo can restrict your games or your account, and it may even remotely deactivate your console if the company detects you've tried pirating its games. Game-key cards are just another method of DRM—or digital rights management—that restricts users from using the software they buy however they want to. Even if you play by the rules, that doesn't mean you'll have access to your digital download indefinitely. Nintendo, like every other game publisher, isn't going to keep its servers for downloading games running forever. The company took its Wii U and 3DS eShop services offline in 2023, and while that sucks, 11 and 12 years of operation, respectively, are longer than the systems' life cycles. To be fair, you can still download the games you own for those platforms, but you can't purchase any new software. At any moment, Nintendo could end the option to download old games as well. Cory Doctorow, a tech blogger, author, and longtime anti-DRM advocate (you can also thank him for coining the word 'enshittification'), told Gizmodo game-key cards represent the worst impulses of Nintendo. 'Nintendo could distribute a game with a physical token and create a situation where players truly own the games they buy,' Doctorow said over email. 'Given the company's legendary hostility to game preservation efforts (e.g., Super Smash Bros.) and that they refuse to make any guarantees or even representations about how long the game servers will be online for users who hold these tokens to retrieve the game from, this amounts to 'a downloadable game you can't play if you lose the little dingus that came with it'—not a game that is yours to play for as long as you want or that you can sell or give away when you get tired of it.' Compared to other consoles or PCs where games can demand well over 100GB of storage, Nintendo's less-powerful hardware ensured most titles didn't need nearly as much storage. While the Switch 2 has 256GB of built-in storage, the original Switch has only 32GB—almost mandating the use of a microSD card for more storage capacity. This limitation required both first- and third-party developers to format games to make them as small as possible. The original Switch became one of the last few bastions of physical media contained solely on a card you could own. The Switch 2 promised to be a much more powerful system, allowing devs to port today's modern titles with much less fuss. Having access to that fidelity means games will be larger, but developers still have some amount of control. CD Projekt Red managed to fit Cyberpunk 2077—which normally takes up more than 83GB on PC—on a 64GB Switch 2 game card. That game is an outlier compared to the Switch 2 third-party launch lineup. First-party games like Donkey Kong Bananza are contained on-card, but most third-party games are not. It doesn't matter the size of the game, either. Street Fighter 6 at 50GB is on a game-key card. Octopath Traveler 0, a low-fi old-school JRPG, is also slated to get a game-key card release Dec. 4. Publishers have to pay more money for larger flash storage inside of a game card. This problem is exacerbated by the reported lack of various game card sizes available to third parties. Early reports suggest Nintendo only offered 64GB game cards to outside publishers and saved smaller game card sizes for itself. That may change in the future. The Nintendo Patent Watch account on Bluesky first spotted that the company that made game cards for the original Switch, Macronix, could be preparing to make more cards with 'varying capacity needs.' That doesn't mean it will make more cards for Switch 2. The report doesn't even mandate that publishers choose actual game cards over cheaper game key cards. There are other consumer benefits to physical over digital. In a healthy retail ecosystem, brick-and-mortar shops offer discounts to move old product out of stores and make room for new content. Digital-only games cost what they cost. Nintendo said in its latest financial results that it sold 8.67 million software units in the first seven weeks after launch on June 5. Most of those were the digital version of Mario Kart World, which came bundled with the $500 launch version of the Switch 2. The new Mario Kart may be an outlier. Switch gamers have historically hung onto physical games longer than on other consoles. Circana industry analyst Mat Piscatella reported late last year that 53% of Switch game sales in the middle of 2024 were digital. By comparison, the vast majority of game sales on PlayStation 5 are digital downloads. If Nintendo fans fail to hit back against game-key cards, it could be the last domino to fall in the effort to own and preserve the games we buy.


Forbes
an hour ago
- Forbes
Switch 2 Upgrade For ‘Kirby And The Forgotten Land' Seems Worth $20
Earlier today, Nintendo dropped a video detailing the brand new and upcoming Star-Crossed World expansion for one of the original Switch's best adventures: Kirby and the Forgotten Land. The bad news: You can't play the DLC on Switch 1, nor can you reap any of the purported performance benefits. The good news: If you already own the base Switch game, as well as a Switch 2, and also happen to have an extra $20 lying around, then you'll be off to races later this month. And truthfully, the fresh content looks to be worth the price of admission. Viewing the updated gameplay footage on YouTube, I was immediately struck by the noticeably faster framerate. It's impossible to tell for sure without actual hands-on testing, but it sure seems like the developers have this running at a solid 60fps—excellent! Even on Switch 2 hardware, the vanilla Kirby and the Forgotten Land is capped at a meager 30fps, so this framerate bump will be much appreciated. The gameplay already appears so much smoother; definitely one of the benefits of releasing a more advanced machine, and very recently, too. FEATURED | Frase ByForbes™ Unscramble The Anagram To Reveal The Phrase Pinpoint By Linkedin Guess The Category Queens By Linkedin Crown Each Region Crossclimb By Linkedin Unlock A Trivia Ladder Granted, in its advertising copy, Nintendo is being pretty vague about the specific technical enhancements that will ship with the Switch 2 version, even though the upped framerate is pretty apparent. 'Improved graphics' and 'enhanced resolution' don't really tell us anything exact, really, but in a recent Nintendo Treehouse segment, one of the hosts said they're targeting 1080p for tabletop and handheld modes and 1440p when the Switch 2 is docked and playing on a TV or monitor. Honestly, it's a nice overhaul from how the game plays on the original Switch, which is 720p in tabletop/handheld and 1080p docked. This puts it in line with other first-party Switch 2 titles, like Mario Kart World and Donkey Kong Bananza, which both run at 1440p when docked, with some handy upscaling thrown in for good measure. I'm still waiting for Nintendo to aim for docked 4K/60fps performance with all of its in-house titles, but in the meantime, I'll have to settle for the buttery smooth 4K/60fps gameplay of third-party offerings like Fast Fusion. Performance improvements aside, the Switch 2 Kirby DLC itself seems very cool and definitely worth a look. The continuing story is triggered by a sudden meteor impact, which opens up familiar but altered Starry Stages that you'll need to complete in order to access the Star-Crossed World proper. So overall, there's new paths, new and altered enemies, new transformations (the bouncy Spring Mouth, a wall-climbing Gear Mouth and the sliding Sign Mouth), new collectible figures to earn and for all you masochists, an even harder boss rush mode called Ultimate Cup Z EX. I actually played through Kirby and the Forgotten Land for the first time not too long ago and found it to be very, very good. One of the best 3D platformers I've played, as a matter of fact, though not nearly as solid as Super Mario Odyssey. It will be fun returning to this bright, cheerful nod to post-apocalyptic experiences like The Last of Us and Horizon Zero Dawn, and even while I wish the upgrade came 'free' with my NSO subscription like Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom, I think $20 is more than fair for what we're getting here. Kirby and the Forgotten Land – Nintendo Switch 2 Edition + Star-Crossed World arrives in stores and on Nintendo's digital storefront in just a few weeks, on August 28.

USA Today
6 hours ago
- USA Today
NBA 2K26 new rebound timer is an example of the game's larger problem
I can't remember the exact year I stopped playing the NBA Live video game series. It was either NBA Live 06 or NBA Live 07. That part is less important than the feeling I had when I stopped playing, which I remember quite well. That feeling, when I finally decided enough was enough, was one of disappointment... disgust. I was viscerally upset at the game EA Sports delivered that year -- in a series I had been playing from childhood. I spent my hard-earned money (which wasn't much for someone in college at the time) on garbage. That was the last time I bought an EA basketball game. I've been playing the NBA 2K series ever since. That's why it brings me great disappointment to say, 20 years later, I'm now having the same feelings about NBA 2K. As the latest installment, NBA 2K26, is set to release on Sept. 5, the series has been on a downward trend for several years now. A gameplay clip of the new game that surfaced last week has me convinced that trend is a lock to continue. The caption alone, with the words "greening a rebound," did irreparable damage to my psyche. I almost thought it was a joke... until I clicked play and saw that god-forsaken ring light up under the rebounder. This had to be created by AI, right? Nope. I went to the 2K26 website, and sure enough, the new feature had a section: "New Rebound Timing Feedback." I'm sorry, but what?? This is worse than when they added timed layups a few years ago and every fast-break turned into a rebounding drill. Who asked for this? Better yet, what if I "red" a rebound with a seven-footer directly under the basket? Will a Bronny James-sized player on the other side of the rim get it over me because he "greened" his jump? I have questions. Look, in the micro, this is a small thing that won't likely mean much in how most people play the game. Any good player timed their jump on rebounds anyway. But in the big picture, this is just another of those changes nobody asked for that's adding to the complexity of a game that really isn't fun anymore. And that's before we get to the micro-transactions everyone hates. This was the same trap NBA Live fell into. That game sacrificed its fun gameplay in pursuit of superior graphics. It became a good-looking game that played horribly, and it all happened in basically one year. In the case of 2K, it's been a years-long deterioration as the developers experiment with giving users more control over everything. Which has probably been more frustrating than Live's decline because, with no alternate options on the market (for now), we come back each year hoping for something better. That hope was at an all-time low with 2K26 before I saw the rebounding clip. Even accounting for the fact I'm probably too washed to keep up with the changes, there are so many other gameplay-related things that could've been addressed before I ever would've suggested that. Maybe they got around to those too. I'll keep my eyes peeled for more clips that can maybe change my mind. I'm not very hopeful. Spurs extend De'Aaron Fox The San Antonio Spurs have reportedly signed De'Aaron Fox to a four-year, $229 million extension that will keep the point guard with the team through at least the 2029-30 season. After drafting Stephon Castle and Dylan Harper over the last two years, the Spurs now have obvious questions about how to fit all three guards around Victor Wembanyama. Bryan Kalbrosky took a stab at answering that question, which includes potentially playing them all at the same time: "We don't know how the group will fare with Harper in the mix as well, but they will have plenty of time to experiment with that this season. Fortunately for the Spurs, neither Castle nor Harper is undersized, so it is entirely possible that it could work out that all three could play together. Perhaps by the end of Fox's extension, it is incredibly obvious that the right mix for San Antonio involves involves Harper and Castle as their starting one and two. By then, maybe they will have to trade Fox and clear up that log jam." This sounds like a good problem to have. If nothing else, San Antonio's overloaded backcourt gives them a trade chip for down the line. Quick Hits: Eagles-Raiders trade ... QB4 Shedeur ... This was For The Win's daily newsletter, The Morning Win. Did a friend recommend or forward this to you? If so, subscribe here.