Grow Home was quite a successful little game. For those of you who missed out, Grow Home saw one little droid’s quest to grow as much green as possible to reoxygenate his homeworld, mainly through the use of giant, ever branching beanstalk vines that he rode to climb ever higher. Now the sequel game has an announced release date and it’s pretty soon.

Grow Home’s sequel Grow Up was announced at E3 last month, and will see the Botonical Utility Droid journeying ever higher through a “new open-world” as he tries to recover the parts of his lost spacecraft MOM (and I would assume reassemble it too. In a blog post about the game Ubisoft Reflections reveals that BUD will be accompanied by a new flying companion named POD and will also have access to a new device called the Floradex 3000, a device that will allow for BUD’s cloning of the game’s 24 different plant species to allow for easier passage as BUD makes his way to his ultimate target destination of the homeworld’s moon.

Grow Up will be coming to PC and the Xbox One and PS4 on August 16th.

Check out the game’s E3 announcement trailer below:

There’s nothing better than playing old-school classic games on the original hardware. Sure, software emulators, Nintendo’s Virtual Console, and Steam re-releases may make it far easier to play older games and even bring them with you, but there’s just something about using the original controllers and playing on dedicated hardware that just feels right. Problem is, when those consoles are approaching three decades old, are chunky as hell, and the cartridges likely to now be rusted-out and playable – not to mention they use the kind of outputs like coaxial cables that are practically unheard of on modern generation TVs – who really wants to go to the effort of setting up an original NES once again to play games like Castlevania the way they were meant to be played?

If you’re one of the people who agrees with everything I just said, you might find Nintendo’s newest product announcement of interest. Enter the Nintendo Entertainment System: NES Classic Edition, a mini replica of the original console. The NES Classic Edition is designed to give you the feel of playing on original NES Hardware – the controller even looks and feels like the original – while removing all the inconveniences. While it won’t read your cartridges, the NES Classic Edition packs in 30 of the NES’s classic titles, which together offer a well-rounded sample of the best of NES history even if there are some decidedly odd choices – SUPER C but not the original Contra? Come on, Nintendo!

The full list of included games runs as follows: Balloon Fight, Bubble Bobble, Castlevania, Castlevania II: Simon’s Quest, Donkey Kong, Donkey Kong Jr., Double Dragon II: The Revenge, Dr. Mario, Excitebike, Final Fantasy, Galaga, Ghosts’n Goblins, Gradius, Ice Climber, Kid Icarus, Kirby’s Adventure, Mario Bros., Mega Man 2, Metroid, Ninja Gaiden, Pac-Man, Punch-Out!! Featuring Mr. Dream, StarTropics, SUPER C, Super Mario Bros., Super Mario Bros. 2, Super Mario Bros. 3, Tecmo Bowl, The Legend of Zelda and Zelda II: The Adventure of Link.

All this is packed into a miniaturised replica of the original NES hardware that’s small enough stand on your outstretched palm. The package also includes a HDMI cable so that the games can be played on modern HDTVs, and a single NES Classic Controller. The controllers and ports use the Firewire standard as used on the Wii Controller for its accessories – so sorry, original NES peripherals won’t work here, like they’d have much use anyway.

The system launches this November 11th for $59.99 across North America and the UK. However, it is interesting to note that the UK edition will not launch with its own AC adapter, which is included with the North American edition. Cheers for that, Nintendo. We still remember the 3DS XL…

Pokemon Go is taking the world by storm (at least in the places it’s available), and it seems that Niantic Labs is planning to make this work for them, by making the little game a money-earner in more wsays than just one.

The microtransactions in the game were a bit of a given and known about well before the game’s release, and now the secondary part of the money-earning has been lined out – sponsorship deals.

Like Niantic’s previous game of Ingress, Pokemon Go will have companies pay for their places to become ‘sponsored locations’. This means that special promotions of events will be available within those places, making players flock towards them in great numbers and hopefully meaning that every player who checks in and buys one of the sponsored locations products will get Niantic a little bit of cash. Sounds odd but the last week or so has shown that players will flock to places with Lures to catch rarer Pokemon so it’s a feasible way of making money.

Even though no specific plans have officially been set forward, some people have already figured out that McDonalds is likely to be the first of many sponsorship companies involved. Reddit user  tf2manu posted a snippet of the game’s source code that actually mntions McDonalds as a sponsor with fellow user KcYoung adding that the McDonalds logo is already in the game’s resource files with the usual clothing textures and icons.

This sort of thing doesn’t come as too big of a surprise really given that the game needs to make money to continue its servers staying online, and if you frequent the sponsored locations you’ll be getting rewards too. Maybe McDonalds isn’t your thing, but future locations will probably be added down the line and we’ve no idea who they could be yet.

Modding is a big part of gaming right now, mostly on PC although a few games on the consoles are getting the same treatment now. However, it’s worth remembering that these mods are fan-made and so sometimes… don’t work quite as intended.

The Fallout 4 Unofficial Patch was released to fix a batch of smaller bugs that Bethesda overlooked, much in the same vein as their previous Bethesda game patches. Only this time, something’s begun to mess it all up and that thing is Settlements – the very thing that Fallout 4 pushes as a central game mechanic.

Detailed extensively on this forum post here, the issue is that modded scripts seem to be making the game reload NPCs regularly. This includes your settlers and anything that the game isn’t told to remember is randomised each time they’re reloaded. Unfortunately this includes such things as the settler’s held gear, appearance, gender and even the species of the settler. Also, the reloading can happen even if the settler is just out of line of sight. So turning your back on your settler’s designated guard could have them turn into someone completely different when you turn back to them and their specially modded weapon could be replaced by something basic as hell. Oh, and it also stops new settlers from being recruited at all. As I said earlier the settlement mechanic is central to the game so if you enjoy that aspect of it, this isn’t good news.

They think it has something to do with the scripts that edit specific files relating to the workshop, but a Bethesda employee spoke up on the topic to say that they don’t agree. SmkViper has denied that it is the fault of the scripts mentioned, as well as saying the mod makers’ misconceptions about how the coding works could have them barking up the wrong tree. Regardless of this though Bethesda seems to be working to replicate the bug to see how they can help resolve this. For now, a temporary fix is in place with the mod team having removed part of an AI routine. Unfortunately those settlers who changed during the bug will not be able to change back.

Nowadays paid disclosure on Youtube, while still a big talking point, is at least better managed and done than it used to be in days gone by (with some exceptions still). Of course, it wasn’t always just the Youtubers at fault and to get to this point shady things and suspicions of such had to happen, and now one of those events seems to be coming back to bite Warner Bros in the backside.

Back in 2014, the company released Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor. However they also got into some trouble when leaked e-mails suggested that they had been paying big name Youtubers, those with many subscribers in their subboxes, for positive coverage of the game. At the same time they were holding back the review copies that were for the press.

Now the Federal Trade Commission have published their findings on the whole issue, with Warner Bros having come under fire for their marketing campaign. It was alleged at the time that Warner had reached out to the big-name Youtubers paying them for positive coverage of their games and had even encouraged them to be less than clear about the deal being a paid one, ensuring that the disclosures for sponsored content were placed “below the fold” – which means placing text so that it can’t be read unless someone expanded the video’s description. Some of the Youtubers also only disclosed that they had received early access, but not that Warner was paying them to make the video.

Warner are now accused of not having ensured that the paid influencers would disclose the paid content “clearly and conspicuously”. While they are avoiding a fine this time around, Warner Bros have been warned that in future online marketing of this nature needs a satisfactory effort made to ensure Youtubers are properly disclosing their paid videos as well as encouraging it to happen.

“Consumers have the right to know if reviewers are providing their own opinions or paid sales pitches,” said Jessica Rich, director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection. “Companies like Warner Brothers need to be straight with consumers in their online ad campaigns.”