Mario Kart 8 is almost upon us. What better way to celebrate than by announcing DLC? 

Mercedes and Nintendo of Japan have partnered to bring the new Mercedes GLA do the game in kart form. The best part though, is this commercial featuring a truly terrifying Mario.

(No word on availability of the GLA Kart DLC outside of Japan as yet, stay tuned for updates).

Nintendo’s involvement with Youtube and the people who do let’s plays of their games is well-known. The company’s stance to those videos who earn a living by reviewing games in video-form was simply “don’t do it, or if you do be prepared to give us all the revenue from it” and led to many, many content creators simply deciding not to do Nintendo content as it was simply more trouble than it was worth.

Now it seems that Nintendo has relaxed its policy. Reviewers and Youtubers who make their living from gaming video content can make and monetise videos of Nintendo’s games now… as long as they’re prepared to sign up to what the company calls an ‘affiliate program’. These programs are arrangements made between ad companies, Nintendo and Google and mean that the revenue gets shared between the video maker, Google and Nintendo.

While it’s a step up from the previous policy, it’s still probably not what Youtube content creators would hope for. As of yet, the standards of the program is unknown which could mean smaller channels might get rejected. Either way, this new policy might not convince those who swore off Nintendo content to start making it again.

Possibly intended to be seen first at the upcoming E3 event, the trailer for EA’s new game was leaked today. Battlefield: Hardline is a game that takes place on the tough streets of the city Omaha, taking the usual Battlefield formula and applying it to the new setting of ‘war on crime’ You play as the law of the city and you can choose to be as righteous or crooked as you wish while fighting crime or potentially your fellow officers.

The trailer is over 7 minutes long and details aspects of the multiplayer mode, gadgets that can be used as well as the story for the single player mode. Multiplayer mode is to be criminals vs cops, and the trailer emphasises that it is all about teamwork within your squad as well as tactical movement and co-ordination. Modes will include hostage situations and heists, as well as chases and a ‘capture the flag’ type game with a pile of money acting as the ‘flag’. The Visceral Games team joins in to provide the story for the single player mode, about a young Miami detective who teams up with other cops and criminals to get revenge on former partners. The trailer says it takes cues from police dramas, with each level being like an episode and left on cliffhangers at the end of each.

Also noted are the open-world feel of levels, re-designed enemy AI and the fact that a lot of the surrounding environment is dynamic and most importantly for a game of this genre; destructible. There will also be a large range of military weaponry available in-game for use, including pistols, machine guns and weapons of a much more explosive nature; along with gadgets to help players move about the maps quicker and a lot of vehicles to pilot around the map.

Unfortunately, as this article was being written up, the trailer was taken down from where it’d been posted on Youtube so we can’t actually show you the trailer. If you missed it, you’ll just have to wait until EA actually release it themselves. Judging by the date on the official website, it’s probably going to be June 9th so you don’t have long to wait.

Official Battlefield: Hardline website is here.

The people behind the Natural Selection games are due to move onto their next game, Subnautica. This would usually be a bit of a problem, as there’s still a sizeable community of players for NS2 right now and having the game’s developers working on their new game would mean infrequent updates to the older game. However, Unknown Worlds have come up with a solution.

Thanking the community for their dedication, passion and for keeping the game alive years after release, it was announced today that development of NS2 would carry on through their efforts. “We are happy to announce that Unknown Worlds Entertainment has approved a team of experienced and passionate community members to help carry on the development of NS2 into a potential patch 266 (and hopefully, beyond!).” Which essentially means that the IP has been put in the hands of the players.

The new team has been called “Squad 5” and will be a small team led by two community members called Wasabi and Obraxis. They won’t be paid for their efforts to keep the game alive, but anyone in the community who contributes in a notible way, be it through a bugfix or adding something the game that enhances the core gameplay will get a special Squad 5 badge on their profile to show their involvement. The team is also promising to be transparent with the updates, promising to be seen around talking about changes on podcasts and streams as well as being involved in-game too.

Placing a game’s IP into the hands of the community is a fairly bold move, but it could easily turn out to be a good one as far as updates for the game go. Provided the community can keep itself working together, NS2 could yet have many more years in it.

Growing Pains is a small indie platformer game by Smudged Cat Games with unique game mechanics that is already available on Xbox 360 through the indie channel and is soon to be released on Steam.

In the game you play a small orange creature called the ‘Vessel’ that resembles nothing more than a living ball of orange spiky fur with an eye. The little thing’s very active though, able to jump twice its height (or more if you time the jump upon landing correctly), ‘run’ along the ground at a decent speed and even wall jump which is how you find yourself moving on through the levels most of the time. Oh, and as time ticks by the Vessel is ever so slowly growing, causing levels to become a race against time to complete your task before you get too large to move onto the next section of the level.

The game contains 9 levels, each with 3 difficulty levels. The aim of the levels is the same each time: make your way through the levels without getting stuck or killed by one of the traps as fast as possible, collecting the rainbow-coloured ‘glowsticks’ to open up the ‘gates’ blocking your path at the end of each small room of the level. As noted above, you can run, jump, cling against walls to slow your descent, wall-jump up the wall you’re clinging to and get a higher leap upon landing (although you need to time it just right) to make your way around the rooms and avoid the traps. You can also temporarily stop your growth by holding down a key (default is the ‘o’ key) using up a power gauge shown at the top of the screen or accelerate your growth to allow you to be able to make the height you need to jump (default is the ‘p’ key).

Playing the game I must admit it has elements I like. The concept of completing a task before you grow too large is a good one, and the controls are responsive and smooth. Provided you time it all right it’s possible to leap between two walls close together to climb up a tall vertical part of the map like some sort of limbless athlete, laughing at the spiked ball obstacles in your way. The sounds too are wonderful and the music charming. The game lacks a multiplayer but it does contain scoreboards (one for each difficulty per level, making a grand total of 27 over all) which you can try to get onto the top of and giving the player an excuse to keep trying levels to perfect their jumps and glowstick collection techniques.

However, there are some things that threw me off about the game. One of them is the visuals, with the Vessel being very nicely detailed but other elements such as the glowsticks and the spiked balls being much less so which caused a bit of a weird disconnect for me I’m afraid. This game is also by its nature very hard to get right without a lot of practice and after a handful of failed attempts it did feel a bit hard to want to keep going and complete the level, never mind aim for the leaderboards. The default positioning of the ‘stop growing’ and ‘grow more’ keys also made me feel a bit irritated as the ‘move’ keys are set to ‘a’ and ‘d’ and jump is space, and this sets the growing commands on the opposite side of the keyboard to the other controls which is a bit of a pain when you need to keep them held down while you’re moving about. Fortunately like most games, the controls are rebindable so you can move them if you wish and so this downside is only a niggle at best because of it.

Overall as a game Growing Pains is a decent game, if not quite the best I’ve ever played. The music is good, the visuals are alright and the concept simple but well-executed. I will say this though. If not already available Smudged Cat needs to make and sell plushie versions of the Vessel. I’d buy one, with black button eyes. 😀

Growing Pains is released on Steam tomorrow, May 28^th.