Hello! Today we long to ride a motorcycle, discover the corn man, think about tricking pirates on a deserted island and ruin(?) Smash Bros. with dicks. It’s Morning Checkpoint!
Great Kotaku Content From The Past Week
Like most weeks, Kotaku was filled with some great stories. Here are a few of my favorites!
Humanity once again proves we can’t be trusted with too much power and freedom.
Why even put that awesome ride in the cutscene if you ain’t going to let players jump on it and take a spin? Just to tease us, Blizzard!?
No Man’s Sky has become very similar, in my mind, to EVE Online. They are both awesome looking games and have amazing communities and stories around them, but I will never try to play them again.
The only way this could be even more anime is a long lost brother appeared and beat them both and the dad and son teamed up to take him down, after 12 episodes of training and sparring.
Tweets!
I remember long ago playing some Call of Duty Modern Warfare with a friend on Xbox Live. They were getting their ass kicked by some snipers and they were getting very angry about it. Eventually, their dad popped into their room and said: “If you aren’t having fun, stop playing the game!!” Which, hey, fair point.
Finally, someone is using the stage builder in Smash for a good and worthwhile reason.
I’ve never met the corn man, but I can tell you this: If I do meet the corn man, I too will love him. Corn is great and someone who can provide me with that wonderful, starchy and yellow veggie sounds pretty cool.
News
- The Nintendo Switch Will Be Sold In China For The First Time
- Castlevania Collection Will Bring The Adorable Kid Dracula To The U.S. For The First Time
- New Disc-Less Xbox One Coming In May, Will Cost $250
- Apex Legends’s Easy-to-Hit Characters Just Got A Little Bit Tougher
- Nintendo Adds A Zoom Feature To The Switch
Some Good Comments
We’re on our way to lifetime, cradle to grave streamers. I’m so old.
-Thoraxifistian from “Through Births, Illnesses And Holidays, This Guy Streamed On Twitch For 2,000 Days In A Row”
Go beyond that. We aren’t that far away from someone streaming their pregnancy, the birth of their child, that child then streaming through their adult life and until death and then a final stream of their coffin being slid into the ground. RIP in the chat for...me.
I’ve occasionally marooned myself on an island and just wandered around for a few hours exploring the lagoons and caves, watching for approaching ships. Nobody has stopped at my island yet, but if they do I’m not sure what I would do. I could stay hidden and pull some tricks on them, I could stowaway onto their boat and try to steal their loot, or I could ask to join their crew for a bit. If they have voice chat enabled that would make the decision much easier.
-Miles Jacob from “On The Seas Of Thieves, I Only Sail Alone”
I really love the idea of someone hiding away on an island and other folks visiting that island and a rumor starts among those who visit that the island is haunted.
The neat thing about this is it’s the opposite of black magic - it’s extremely easy to do and pretty straightforward. The hard part is just getting the idea.First, the textures in your SNES games are pretty good- you’re seeing them as they’re ‘supposed’ to be now. What makes then look like smeary crap in your games is the limitations of the SNES’s mode 7 hardware (and normally the emulators try to reproduce those limitations).The first fix here is to take your SNES textures and upscale them 4x using nearest neighbor, so one green pixel turns into 16 green pixels. Then it does the scaling and rotation on those higher resolution pixels. That makes a huge improvement (see below). The great thing is that this takes no high resolution packs or anything, you can just use the game’s own textures. No weirdness like neural network upscalers, it’s completely deterministic.The next thing it does is use much better scaling and rotation math than the SNES could afford, so pixels go where they should be, rather than distorted - this was causing a lot of the ‘noise’ in the F-Zero shot up there.
-Sarusa from “SNES Mod Performs Black Magic On Mode 7's Barfy Resolution”
There’s more to this comment, explaining how Mode 7 works, why it looked so bad and how modders are fixing it. I always love these deep and informed posts about stuff I always wanted to know more about.
Trailers & Videos You May Have Missed
I can’t wait to play this and try building stuff that ends up being terrible and I feel bad. Just like Little Big Planet!
I’m always down for some new mobile games that look great. Maybe it will be fun to play?
Please don’t make me play more. I’m still recovering.
I love how much effort NetherRealm Studios puts into their story modes. As someone who rarely plays fighting games online or competitively, these modes are awesome.
Morning Checkpoint is all about catching you up on the past week, getting you ready for the next week, answering some questions, sharing stories and having a good time. You can email me anything you want or drop a comment below. Suggest tweets, comments, ideas, new sections and more for next week and thanks for reading!