Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp will no longer be a free-to-play (with subscription service) mobile game. Instead it will become a standalone full single-player mobile game. Its live online service model will cease on November 28, 2024. It will become a complete paid app afterward which is a good way to end things off to this 7 year old mobile game.

There had been numerous content added to Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp that it's ironic that it has about 7 years worth of added content compared to the main entry of Animal Crossing: New Horizons. New Horizons 2.0 was released on September 2021. But it would be an utter shame to have all of Pocket Camp content cease to exist, right? So Nintendo will make it a paid game instead for the mobile platforms -- which is honestly a good move despite a last ditch effort for some revenue. A welcome move, even. With absence of network play of course.

I'll buy Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp Complete. I've been a late adopter of the game in 2020 since I've been playing New Leaf around the time it released. I haven't subscribed though. But I welcome the game as a solid and full game for my mobile. Oh the irony again, the reason why I staved off from it is I'm not much of F2P mobile spin-offs for my Nintendo game. And now it has become a paid game instead. Full circle.

Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp Complete pre-order is live. Early discounted price is at $9.99 with planned release on December 3, 2024. The discounted preorder price will apply until January 5, 2025. The app will then be set on its regular price of $19.99 on February 2025. Read more details on its official page.

Back 4 Blood is on and it's 90% off on Steam right now. Back 4 Blood is (considered) the spiritual successor to Left 4 Dead, although it received mixed reviews. The 4-player coop game did not make a significant impact compared to the Left 4 Dead IP perhaps due to the competing identity crisis attributed to the game that it should be a Left 4 Dead game instead of being Back 4 Blood. However 90% off is a huge discount and B4B is still worth your collection with 90% off.

The largest downer would be that Turtle Rock Studios has announced that they will no longer release more content to Back 4 Blood. But frankly this all suggests a Back 4 Blood 2 to me. I'm also suspicious that Back 4 Blood will soon be free on Epic.

I still feel stupid buying World War Z at full price on Epic only for it to be free after a few days.

The Provincial Government of Manitoba announces that the provincial minimum wage increase is in effect today from $15.30 to $15.80 as of October 1, 2024.

PlayStation 5 Pro will be priced at $959.99 CAD and pre-order is live today, September 26. PS5 Pro will be released on November 7, 2024. Note that the PS5 Pro will not possess a disc drive and will be digital on this release. A separate PlayStation 5 disc drive is available and will need to be purchased to play your physical discs. I bought mine at $699.99 on May 2022 (which was $783.99 with tax). I didn't even want the bundle version but this is when the PS5 supply was still short, so I went ahead and bought it from Best Buy while it was in stock.

Although $959.99 for a console without a disc drive? How much ACTUAL fps gain are we talking about? It is possible to build a 4k gaming PC under $1000, but would they compare with a PS5 Pro? Point is: we're going back to the olden days when consoles were expensive. PS4 Pro was released with $499 CAD retail. Sony, throw in the disc and MAYBE PS5 Pro would be worth it.

New World will delete expired usernames upon New World: Aeternum's release date on October 15. This means that any username that has not been active prior or after October 15 will be deleted and will be made available for new players to use. New World will NOT delete player characters, but only the usernames.

Any character with an old inactive username that's logging back into the game will have to rename their character first before being able to play. To avoid this, log into the game now, and keep logging in within 6 months to retain activity. But if your gaming has been reduced to just logging into the game, it's probably better to stop playing the game altogether.

On the flip-side: if you want a name change, don't log in for 6 months then come back afterward.

New World: Aeternum will release on current-gen consoles XBox Series X|S and PlayStation 5 this October 15.

Shinji Mikami comments that there is no space for a Dino Crisis remake because of Monster Hunter according to an interview by Eurogamer. Shinji Mikami is known for the creation of Resident Evil and Dino Crisis when he worked as a director and producer for Capcom. However, fans are confused from his statement suggesting that Dino Crisis and Monster Hunter are mutually exclusive.

Monster Hunter is not a survival horror game. At best, players capture monsters that resemble like dinosaurs. Dino Crisis is a survival horror game, where players investigate and try to survive in a setting that has been infested by dinosaurs.

Interestingly, both Dino Crisis and Resident Evil had familiar similarities such as the fixed cameras, pre-rendered scenes, and obviously as survival horror games. Dino Crisis felt like Resident Evil with dinos. Yet each title earned millions of respective sales, granted that Resident Evil had more sales. If having similarities was an issue, Dino Crisis shouldn't have existed back then.

If we're hearing this right: the statement doesn't make sense. A Dino Crisis remake could not exist because Gran Turismo exists. It would make more sense if he said there's no space for a Dino Crisis remake because of the Resident Evil remakes. But that would drive a point for a Dino Crisis remake as the recent RE2, RE3, and RE4 remakes raked millions of sales. Clearly there's a market for survival horror remakes from the Playstation 1 era.

There are a few things to note though. Shinji Mikami does not work for Capcom anymore. If we're talking about remaking Dino Crisis, it would be Dino Crisis 1 and 2. Not so much for any spin-offs. Dino Crisis is interesting enough that fans keep trying to rebuild their fan versions of the game. Perhaps Shinji Mikami making such a Dino Crisis remark started a conversation on the Internet which a potential impact for a remake. While I've been waiting for a Dino Crisis remake for a VERY long time.

Elder Scrolls: Castles is now available on select countries (including Canada) and will release globally on September 10. Castles is another Elder Scrolls mobile game with a twist of Fallout Shelter. Your main goal is to build your dynasty and your castle while keeping stability in your kingdom. Your kingdom runs on food and oil, while gold economy runs on fulfilling orders and quests.

Your subjects age per real-time day and thus you have to ensure naming heirs to your throne to maintain your population. Adulthood starts at 16 years where they can begin working on the kitchen, the oil press, the mill, and etcetera. The young ones simply walks and plays around your castle.

Unlike Fallout Shelter, your Castle scales upwards. You build rooms and stairs, place decors, and install facilities in those empty rooms to the point where no two castles can be the same. You can equip items and outfits to your subjects to improve their efficiency or when they go on quests. Your subjects going through quests prompts auto-battle encounters where you can cast skills and use potions.

It's not Elder Scrolls 6 and I was hoping that there was the ES6 announcement along with it. Similar to how Fallout Shelter was introduced after Fallout 4. Shelter foreshadowed providing shelter to those who want to be dwellers; in Fallout 4, your settlements provided shelter to settlers. Could this be a hint of castle building in ES 6? I would go for vanilla quaint hamlet living to castle building.

Elder Scrolls: Castles is a fun game. Graphic-wise it's different, but it's a solid single-player game for a mobile game. In-app purchases are present though optional. Castles is available on the Google Playstore and the App Store.

Terminator Zero is the new Terminator anime series on Netflix about Malcolm Lee developing the Kokoro AI in Japan supposedly to compete with Skynet, and a future soldier sent back in time to protect Malcolm and his three children from a mysterious assassin. All to prevent "Judgment Day", the bleak future war between man and machine. Terminator Zero will premiere August 29 on Netflix slated to run for eight episodes. How this story fits with alongside the lore (and Sarah Chronicles' Catherine Weaver's John/Turk's AI), we will know soon.

Canada updates its travel advisory for Venezuela due to the spontaneous demonstrations in the country after the presidential election results. According to the travel advisory: Canadians must avoid all travel to Venezuela due to the significant level of violent crime, the unstable political and economic situations and the decline in basic living conditions, including shortages of medication, gasoline and water.

The Embassy of Canada to Venezuela in Caracas has temporarily suspended its operations. Further response include sanctions and humanitarian efforts. Ongoing demonstrations and protests wracked the South American country after both candidates have been declared victorious post Presidential election. Flights involving Venezuela, Panama and the Dominican Republic have also been affected. Edmundo Gonzalez Urrutia claims that he beat Nicolas Maduro. Nicolas Maduro would be sitting on his third term as President if elected.

Unlike the Y2K scare (that hasn't come to fruition), it isn't a bug but a glitched update that caused the crash.

CrowrdStrike rolled out a bad software update which prompted Windows computers to crash and restart in an endless loop. As a result, the glitched update has caused a global outage disrupting banks, flights, markets, and other services running Windows machines. CrowdStrike has made a statement addressing the issue identifying the error as not a cyber security incident but related to the Falcon Sensor and posted their workaround.

I'm glad I got paid today when my bank has also posted a service disruption.

Breaking news as of July 13, 2024 at 9:00 PM Central Time, Former US President Donald Trump shot during the Trump Rally in Pennsylvania. Three to four distinctive shots could be heard from a video of Forbes Breaking News. Sky News posted on their YouTube an aerial video of a body and a rifle lying on a roof - the remains of what appears to have been the shooter.

The former US President felt something on his right ear and ducked on stage, when the Secret Service rushed to him and ordered him to stay low. Onlookers behind the stage were terrified. Trump could be seen with a wounded right ear and with spots of blood over his face after being escorted away. One could only imagine where the shooter was specifically aiming after Trump's bloodied ear.

Pieces Interactive announced on their website that they will be closing their studio. They've added their logo with the years 2007-2024 and a tag Thanks for Playing With Us. Pieces Interactive was acquired by Embracer recently and the closure may have been caused by the softer-than-expected performance of the Alone in the Dark reboot.

The Alone in the Dark series is arguably the "progenitor" of contemporary third-person survival horror. The original Alone in the Dark in 1992 was a survival horror MS-DOS videogame that featured pre-rendered polygons and a fixed camera third-person view. These influenced Shinji Mikami on how to design Resident Evil, especially the fixed camera. The Alone in the Dark reboot / remake was released this March 20, 2024 for the current-gen Playstation 5, Xbox Series X/S and PC. The game received mixed reviews which is a rating that's shared among contemporary Alone in the Dark games.

Life By You was a promising life-sim game that was supposed to have an Early Access this 2024. The EA build has been delayed twice. A disappointing news however has been announced by Lilja Mattias, Deputy CEO of Paradox Interactive, that Life By You has been cancelled. According to the announcement, (unspecified) key areas of the game have been found lacking, and the overall result was deemed unsatisfactory.

The biggest selling point of Life By You was its open-world concurrent gameplay, similar to The Sims 3. Rod Humble explained that neighborhoods would transform as your game progresses.

The official statement indicated that incremental improvements during their builds. Which makes all of this a little confusing. There is clearly a demand in the Life-sim category of gaming. And none of the upcoming competitors such as Paralives, Vivaland, or Sims 5 are even releasing soon. In the end, cancelling Life By You is primarily the biggest disappointment among players especially those who have preordered the game.

Pocket Pair reveals the trailer to its Palworld summer update on YouTube. The Sakurajima Island update will bring more Pals, add more weapons, and grant more building pieces. And expect tons more feature such as, XBox dedicated servers, and the PvP Arena. Sakurajima Island inspired by the Japanese medieval era, will be released on June 27!