Whether they’re toddlers, teenagers, or 23-year-olds, young people are disgusting. Old people are disgusting too of course, because being gross is the human condition. So let’s celebrate it by digging into the trends and topics fascinating internet youth this week: mucus fishing, vabbing, and most disgusting of all, having to work for a living.
Two gross new trends from TikTok: Mucus fishing, and vabbing
I apologize in advance if you’ve never heard of these two things that are growing popular among young people on the social medias.
Mucus fishing: Mucus fishing is using a cotton swab or your finger to drag the mucus out of your eyes, and post a video of the stomach-turning process. Not only is it gross, but removing the mucus from your eyes can cause irritation and result in the production of more mucus. Ophthalmologists agree that it is a bad idea to touch your eyeballs.
Vabbing: Popularized by “certified sexologist” Shan Boodran, “vabbing” is a portmanteau that combines “vagina” and “dabbing.” So it’s dabbing vaginal fluid on your skin like perfume with the idea of attracting a partner. It’s frequently done before a sweaty workout at the gym. Vaginas are awesome and all, but I have to stop thinking about this now.
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Three TikTok takes on work: Quiet quitting being “volun-told,” and the perils of the non-toxic workplace
As the trends above show, social media can be a bad thing, but as a counterweight to all that vabbing and mucus fishing, here’s something positive that young people are getting out of TikTok: Career advice from peers.
Before the internet, young workers’ main sources of “how to have a job”-related information were heavily management-slanted: Inc. Magazine, or brochures from HR. But now, rather than reading articles with titles like, “Are you working hard enough?” entry-level drones can get no-bullshit working wisdom with a “you are more important than your job” bias.
What is “quiet quitting”?
Like this video from zkchillin that defines the concept of “quiet quitting.” Quiet quitting is “when you’re not outright quitting your job. But you’re quitting the idea of going above-and-beyond. You’re still performing your duties, but you’re no longer subscribing to the hustle culture mentality that work has to be your life.” Definitely something I wish I had considered when I was 21 years old and knocking myself out for people who didn’t respect me.
What is being “volun-told”?
The Corporate Chase is a TikToker devoted to career advice and jokes, and his many videos are full of practical words young workers need, like what to say when your boss gives you more work with no extra pay, and what it feels like to be “volun-told” to do extra work. The videos are funny memes instead of anything life-changing, but the comments, in which young workers commiserate and share experiences, are the real joy of this account.
Is your workplace too non-toxic?
My final Tikjob influencer is ayomitok, who promises career advice and humor, but I’m not sure they’re the best source of either. In this video, ayomitok reports that their current workplace is not toxic enough. “I realize I low-key live for the drama and thrive in chaos,” they write, “my new job is not dysfunctional enough to get my best work out of me.” Also a little questionable: naming/shaming a company for having the temerity to not hire you. And then doing it to another company. At the risk of sounding like a writer for Inc. Magazine, potential employers can look at your TikTok—who’d want to risk being publicly blasted by even interviewing someone who did this?
The “Kia challenge” is actually real.
Police departments from Miami to St. Louis are warning people about the “Kia Challenge.” There are, reportedly, videos on TikTok and YouTube that show off how easy it is to steal certain models of Kias and Hyundais. I’m not sure how many videos there are, or whether they issue a challenge to steal cars, but the core information is accurate. According to our always-accurate sister site Jalopnik, car thieves really can bypass the chip in the key of some models of Hyundais and Kias by sticking a phone charger in a port in the stealing wheel. From there, they drive off, leaving Kia owners to take the bus. It’s not exactly a new problem, but the spread of videos detailing it on TikTok may be driving an uptick in car thievery. Or maybe it’s the spread of videos warning about the videos that show you how to steal cars.
Viral video of the week: The Deadliest Virus on Earth
I’m going to get all Inception right now: This week’s viral video is literally a viral video. Amusing science YouTubers Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell’s latest video is a deepish dive into The Deadliest Virus on Earth: Lyssavirus, also known as “rabies.” You’re probably aware of the macro-effects of rabies—how it makes you go mad, foam at the mouth, and fear water—but the microscopic world of Lyssavirus is just as interesting and scary. The complex way it tricks your immune system into not killing it while it slowly infects nerve cells until it reaches your brains is as horrifying a story as Cujo. While full blown rabies is nearly 100 percent fatal, there’s usually a long time between being bitten by a rabid Bassett hound and death, so victims can be saved with a vaccine. Usually.
Summer Games Done Quick, a charity speedrun marathon that was back with an in-person event for the first time in a few years, was held between June 26-July 3 in Bloomington, Minnesota. And at the end of the week, once all the runs were done, the event had raised an enormous $3 million for charity.
The final tally was $3,021,310.49, all of which will be donated to Médecins Sans Frontières/Doctors Without Borders. When you add that to the $3.4 million that Awesome Games Done Quick raised earlier this year, which went to the Prevent Cancer Foundation, that is a lot of money people are parting with to see runners do some very cool shit with video games.
SGDQ 2022 was the first in-person GDQ event since the pandemic began back in early 2020, so it was awesome seeing a live crowd on-hand to support/react to all the action taking place. If you didn’t catch any of the action yourself, here are some highlights. We’ll start off with this incredible Ocarina of Time run, which beats the game quick, sure, but also does so much more:
Ocarina of Time TAS by dwangoAC, TASBot, Savestate, Sauraen in 53:05 – Summer Games Done Quick 2022
And here’s a Pokémon Emerald run that involved four-player co-op, along with a randomiser that meant every time their Pokémon levelled up, it would randomly change into a different Pokémon. The result was absolute chaos:
Pokémon Emerald by Keizaron, 360Chrism, Shenanagans, adef in 3:14:04 – Summer Games Done Quick 2022
This is a Super Mario Sunshine run that has ups, downs then ups again before it’s over:
Super Mario Sunshine by SB_runs in 2:59:24 – Summer Games Done Quick 2022
And finally, here’s a Yakuza: Like a Dragon run that finished the entire game in less time than it took me to complete a couple of the tougher boss battles:
Yakuza: Like a Dragon by Froob in 4:09:52 – Summer Games Done Quick 2022
If you want to see more runs, or just pick one out of a game you’re particularly interested in, the organisers have recordings of every one of them on their YouTube page.
Photo: Rafael Henrique / SOPA Images / LightRocket (Getty Images)
The mobile game company behind Pokémon Go, Niantic, is struggling to find its next big hit. And now, a new report claims the studio canceled multiple projects and laid off staff members in an effort to “streamline” operations.
The San Francisco-based publisher cut 85 to 90 jobs and canceled four in-development games, including a Transformers spin-off announced last year called Heavy Metal,according to a Bloomberg report published today, Bloomberg further reported that an email was sent from CEO John Hanke to staff that said the company was “facing a time of economic turmoil” and that after previous efforts to cut costs, Niantic still needed to “further streamline our operations in order to best position the company to weather any economic storms that may lie ahead.”
Other reportedly canceled games include Hamlet, a planned collaboration between Niantic and theatre company Punchdrunk, and Blue Sky and Snowball, but it’s unclear if those were planned titles or internal codenames.
Niantic found big success with 2016’s AR-powered Pokémon Go, but it still hasn’t been able to replicate that success. In 2019, the studio released Harry Potter: Wizards Unite, but it never found a large audience and was eventually shut down earlier this year. Other games based on Pikminand Catan have also failed to set the world on fire.
Read More: NianticMapped The World. Now They’re Mapping You
In a statement sent to Kotaku, a Niantic spokesperson confirmed the news of the layoffs and explained it planned to continue to support Pokémon Go and its other games and projects.
“We recently decided to stop production on some projects and reduce our workforce by about eight percent to focus on our key priorities,” said Niantic. “We are grateful for the contributions of those leaving Niantic, and we are supporting them through this difficult transition.
The company also told Kotaku that this move will allow the company to focus more on “new experiences” and that it will “continue investing in the future of AR.”
While it’s true Niantic will keep investing in new games—the company did just announce a new project with the NBA after all—it’s unlikely that those laid off will find comfort in that fact. I can’t imagine watching your company continue to make billions of dollars on a single game while laying off staff is a good way to boost morale.
Today during the latest Summer Game Fest event, Naughty Dog announced a multiplayer-focused take on The Last of Us and promised more info will be revealed next year.
According to Naughty Dog’s Neil Druckmann, who spoke on stage during the event, the team isn’t quite ready yet to completely reveal the game but wanted to show some early concept art on the online project, calling it as large as any of their previous singleplayer games.
A later tweet called it the studio’s “biggest online experience” yet.
Last year, data miners found files buried in The Last of Us Part IIthat pointed toward an online mode that might have been inspired by popular battle royale games like Fortnite and PUBG. Back in 2020, footage of what appears to be Last of Us Part II multiplayer also leaked.
We’ve known for some time that Naughty Dog has been working on a The Last of Us-inspired multiplayer project. The developer had originally planned to include a multiplayer mode in The Last of Us Part II, released in June 2020. However, these plans changed in the summer of 2019, when the studio announced it was shelving the online portion of its The Last of Us sequel in order to focus all of its resources on the single-player campaign.
Then in 2021, more evidence of Naughty Dog having a new standalone multiplayer action game in development emerged when the company began hiring more devs for a project it described as a “new standalone multiplayer action game” that would feature a “cinematic experience” between online players.
So, not too surprising that the studio has now officially confirmed that, yes, it is in fact working on a The Last of Us online game.
The series first, 2013 game included what became a beloved multiplayer mode, Factions, and according to Naughty Dog, the 2020 sequel’s shelved multiplayer was going to be inspired by that fan-favorite experience. But that grew into something bigger, and eventually, the team decided to cut it free from The Last of Us Part II. At the time, the studio promised that players would get to play the expanded mode in some form in the future, and with today’s announcement, it appears to be following through.
Back in February, Nintendo made a very out-of-character move and provided access to a huge library of Pokémon Diamond and Pearl’s sound effects and music, even encouraging people to use them in their own (non-commercial) projects. What a lovely thing to do! So of course, three months later, it’s closing it down.
The Pokémon DP Sound Library is an archive of music and sound effects from the 2006 game (and not the recent remakes), which actively encouraged the public to nab the tunes and use them in their own personal projects. From Nintendo, a company we’re far more used to reportingonforstampingontinyhomebrewfanprojects, this seemed a super-positive move. So, just as The Pokémon Company announces record profits, Nintendo is taking the whole thing offline.
The library project is surprisingly friendly in its allowances, given this is Nintendo we’re talking about. It lets people use the music from the game as background music on YouTube videos, play it at non-commercial public events like parties and plays, or even have it played as you walk into weddings.
At the same time, and unsurprisingly, this wasn’t ever the copyleft release it could have been, and commercial re-use is not allowed. Oh, and users had better be super-careful, as it also disallows some fairly ambiguous purposes, including “anything that makes a specific ideological, religious, or political claim.” Which is, y’know, everything ever.
Now (as spotted by Eurogamer), for reasons ungiven, the whole lot is being taken off the internet. The site’s front page now explains that come May 31, 2022, at 9:00 a.m. UTC, the whole thing will be gone. Maybe someone at Nintendo found out they’d made someone smile without first charging $59.99, and that cannot be tolerated.
The message goes on to explain that people will still be able to use the music and effects they’ve downloaded, so long as they do so “within the scope of the Terms of Use and Guidelines,” which of course will be significantly harder to find once they’ve removed them from the website. Which should at least give their miserable lawyers some fun in the future, once said rules have been long forgotten.
Quite why such a fun and pleasingly-presented project should be snuffed out just three months after launch is unclear. We’ve asked Nintendo what’s up, and will update should they let us know. In the meantime, go download the whole lot right now because it’s gone tomorrow morning.
Yesterday, Epic launched the next season of Fortnite, and announced that for the following two weeks all the money it makes from in-game purchases in the popular battle royale will be donated to charities supporting humanitarian efforts in Ukraine. Now, just 24 hours later, and with 13 days remaining, Epic has revealed that it has already raised an eye-popping $36 million.
In a blog posted yesterday on Epic’s official news page, the company announced its plans to donate proceeds from all “real-money” purchases made in Fortnite between March 20 through April 3. According to Epic, this includes the purchasing of V-Buck packs and cosmetic packs sold for real money. Epic says proceeds from retail in-store purchases of V-Buck cards will also be included, but only for those redeemed in-game during the two-week window. Xbox is also donating all proceeds made in the Xbox version of Fortnite for the next two weeks too.
What’s wild is that Epic also explained that it will be donating the funds it earns as quickly as it can and won’t be waiting for the “actual funds to come in from our platform and payment partners” as this process can take a long time. Instead, Epic will send the funds to the charities only days after the “transactions are reported.”
According to Epic, all the money earned will be donated to a selection of organizations, which includes Direct Relief, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, the United Nations Children’s Fund, and the World Food Program. Epic says it will add more charities in the weeks to come.
Read More:Russia May Legalize Software Piracy As Tech Companies Continue To Pull Out
This money is much-needed by folks living in Ukraine who are dealing with the ongoing and horrific invasion by Russia. The war has already led to thousands dead and injured. It has also forced over 3 million people to flee the country, creating a large and growing refugee crisis. Since the start of the invasion in February, many companies around the world—like Sony / PlayStation, Twitch, Netflix, EA Games, and Witcher devs CDPR—have pulled support from the country. Meanwhile, a growing list of nations has enacted and continued to impose strict economic sanctions against Russia.
Over the weekend, two different video game charity bundles raised over $12 million to help support the people in Ukraine suffering from the war.
The latest season of Fornite Chapter 3 went live yesterday, bringing in some big changes and new characters to the free-to-play online shooter. One of the biggest tweaks was the removal of building, one of the game’s now-defining features, from some modes of online play. There are also some new parkour features and Dr. Strange from Marvel is hanging out here alongside Jonesy, that weird cat man, and God’s ultimate sin: Peely.
It’s exactly 26 years since the first Pokémon games released in Japan and the developers of the series lived up to the hype of this year’s international Pokémon Day by offering up a ton of updates on current games and one major surprise reveal: new mainline entries Pokémon Scarlet and Violet are coming to Nintendo Switch in late 2022.
When the latest Pokémon Presents livesetream was announced just a couple days ago, fans assumed their might be news about future DLC for Pokémon Legends: Arceus. Instead we got much, much more.
Here’s a quick rundown of everything that was announced and one thing that wasn’t:
Image: The Pokémon Company
Pokémon Go will get Alolan Pokémon on March 1.
The mobile game will see its Pokédex expanded to include Gen 7 additions from Sun and Moon. Those include starters like Rowlet, Litten, and Popplio, and nearly 80 others.
Image: The Pokémon Company
Pokémon Masters EX adds Victory Road.
The gacha game will get a new boss-rush mode where you can battle Victory Road trainers back-to-back. It’s also adding a bunch of new sync pairs over the next month including May and Latias and Skyla and Tornadus.
Image: The Pokémon Company
Pokémon Café Remix gets delivery feature.
The puzzle game will now let Pelipper deliver your drinks and dishes to far away Pokémon including the mythical Pokémon Victini. It’ll also be a way to collect new outfits and unlock hidden abilties to help with challenges.
Image: The Pokémon Company
Pokémon Unite gets mayham mode.
A new type of quick battle will let let players battle without cooldowns, making the MOBA even more chaotic. Mythical Pokémon Hoopa is also coming to the game, which can be earned by playing, along with Duraludon at a future date.
Image: The Pokémon Company
Pokémon Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl finally get Shaymin,
The mythical grass-type resides on a special island you can only reach after getting a special letter from Professor Oak. That event is now officially in the game. Of course, a bunch of players glitched their way in early shortly after the game came out last November.
Image: The Pokémon Company
Pokémon Legends: Arceus Daybreak update is now live.
The “free” 1.1 version patch focuses on investigating mass outbreaks and sounds like it will add new trainer battles. Players can also get 30 free Ultra, Gigaton, and Jet balls when they use the “ARCEUSADVENTURE” Mystery Code by March 31.
Image: The Pokémon Company
Pokémon Legends: Arceus is getting an anime adaptation.
It doesn’t have a name yet, but the Pokémon Company teased a new online series focused on the Hisui region with a piece of concept art showing a trainer trudging through a snowy forest.
Pokémon Scarlet and Violet are the next games in the series.
The Pokémon Presents wrapped up by giving us our first look at Gen 9, including starters Sprigatito, Fuecoco, and Quaxly. The new games will be open world and are due out on Nintendo Switch before the end of the year.
Image: The Pokémon Company
We still haven’t heard anything about Pokémon Sleep.
Teased back in 2019, the Pokémon Sleep app was supposed to monitor your sleep and connect it to Pokémon Go. It sounded extremely creepy, and nearly three years later we still don’t know anything about how it works. Maybe the Pokémon Company doesn’t either rand that’s why it’s quietly moved on.
And that’s everything we heard about in today’s Pokémon Presents. A busy time for Pokémon indeed. Even with all of the news we did get, fans are still waiting on bigger content updates for Arceus and BDSP. Players glitched into a hidden area in the former and players of the latter are still waiting for the Global Wonder Station to finish construction. In the meantime, I’m sure Pokémon fans can find plenty to fixate on in the Scarlet and Violet trailer.
Pokémon Legends: Arceus is the biggest Pokémon installment in quite some time, and as such, it can be a little daunting, even for experienced players. There’s a ton of stuff to track from new items and Pokéballs to Pokédex entries and updated Pokémon forms.
Here are some things I think you should keep in mind during your adventures.
ABC: Always Be Crafting
Inventory space is a limited commodity in Pokémon Legends: Arceus, and the only way to expand the amount of stuff you can carry is paying fees to a Galaxy Expedition Team member that quickly become exorbitant. That’s why, whenever you have some time to catch your breath between battling Pokémon and hunting down rare species, you should pop over to a crafting bench (or, eventually, use your portable crafting tools) to condense those materials into more useful items.
Too many apricorns and tumblestones? Turn those two stacks into Pokéballs, which you probably have on you already. Grabbed a bunch of caster ferns while searching for wisps? You can combine those with spoiled apricorns and balls of mud to make sticky globs, the perfect item for stunning a Pokémon that’s grown too angry to catch. Heck, I’ll sometimes find myself crafting things I don’t even need just to free up space for a stack of items I’m not currently carrying.
If you tend to hoard, keep on top of it and you won’t be surprised by the game saying you’re lugging around too much shit as often.
Screenshot: The Pokémon Company
Wait for Pokémon to show you their backs
With so much to do in Pokémon Legends: Arceus, it can be tempting to rampage through the Hisuian countryside, throwing capture balls willy nilly at any Pokémon stupid enough to enter your line of sight. And while early on that method feels like the most effective route for catching a lot of Pokémon in a short amount of time, it quickly becomes clear that even moderately strong monsters will do everything they can to stay free.
Of course, Pokémon is all about disturbing nature as much as possible, so there are plenty of things you can do to make capturing “friends” an easier task. First and foremost, you should always approach Pokémon from behind. Hitting monsters in the back, you see, improves your chances of capturing them, and you even get a free attack if you start battles with a back throw. Pokémon Legends: Arceus lets you know you successfully hit a Pokémon in the back with a special, more dramatic sound effect.
All those different berries you’re carrying can also be used to distract your prey. If a Pokémon won’t look away from the tall grass in which you’re hiding, just toss one over its head, wait for it to turn around and start munching, and then throw that Pokéball at its butt. Monsters that eat razz berries will be even easier to catch. Other than that, you’ll want to follow the basic rules of capturing Pokémon from previous games if you get drawn into battle: lower their health as much as possible (the move False Swipe, which will never make a Pokémon with more than 1 HP faint, works wonders in this regard) and inflict status effects like sleep and paralysis.
Watch your Pokéballs
Battles against wild Pokémon don’t end when you throw a Pokéball. Nope, those little suckers are going to do everything they can to break free. In previous games, this was indicated by a short animation of the Pokéball rocking back and forth that told you how close you were to actually catching the monster in question if it didn’t work that time.
In Pokémon Legends: Arceus, this whole process is shortened to play nice with the game’s more active gameplay loop, but you’re still going to want to keep a close eye on how your Pokéballs behave after throwing them. It’s all about how high the Pokéball gets off the ground while the Pokémon struggles. A short hop means you’re probably catching whatever’s in the capture device, but if it leaps into the air and seems to be venting a whole lot of steam, watch out, because you may need to try again.
This becomes super important when catching rare Pokémon, like alphas or shinies. When a Pokémon breaks free, you have a short window during which you can aim and throw another Pokéball. If timed correctly, you may even get a free back throw for your trouble. If you’re trying to catch something important, don’t run off until you’re absolutely sure that Pokémon is staying put.
Cancel throws
The game doesn’t teach you this, but you can cancel throwing Pokéballs or Pokémon with a simple press of the B or Y buttons.
Not really much to elucidate here. B simply cancels the throw and returns you to a neutral state while Y cancels the throw with a dodge roll. If you square up a toss but realize a Pokémon has moved or the environment isn’t optimal, this is a great way to avoid wasting resources or scaring away potential captures.
Screenshot: The Pokémon Company / Kotaku
Pay attention to the turn order
Pokémon Legends: Arceus takes a page from fellow role-playing games like Final Fantasy X and Shadow Hearts: Covenant by showing turn order during battle. While Pokémon battles normally play out with a simple back-and-forth format, the addition of agile and strong style move variations or the ability to catch a Pokémon unawares means there can be moments where you or your opponent can take two actions in a row.
That said, turn order isn’t visible by default. During your very first battle in Pokémon Legends: Arceus, be sure to hit the Y button so as to not deprive yourself of this valuable information. The best part is that you only have to do it once for it to stick around for the rest of the game—well, unless you accidentally hit Y again, of course.
Low-level Pokémon can still kick your ass
We’ve all been there. You’re running through an area with wild Pokémon, absent-mindedly traveling from point A to point B and wrecking whatever happens to crawl out of the grass. Maybe you’re also watching a TV show or YouTube video to pass the time as you hunt for shinies. Some moments in Pokémon games don’t require a whole lot of attention, but Sinnoh help the trainer who doesn’t keep a careful eye on their progress in Pokémon Legends: Arceus.
Just about every Pokémon you encounter in this spin-off, from early-game Bidoof to the giant, frenzied alpha monsters roaming the countryside, can seriously kick your ass if you don’t take them seriously. I don’t know why that is. Perhaps they were just more powerful before becoming widely domesticated. In any case, you’d be smart to approach every battle in Pokémon Legends: Arceus fully stocked with healing items as well as a few revives because, more often than not, you’re gonna take a beating.
Also, be careful starting Pokémon battles with multiple monsters around. More than one Pokémon can and will be drawn into battle against your solo partner if you’re not cognizant of your surroundings, which only exacerbates the chances of getting your shit pushed in.
Screenshot: The Pokémon Company / Kotaku
Stare down human opponents whenever possible
A cool thing about battling in Pokémon Legends: Arceus is that your trainer is given free reign to walk around a limited area while the mythical creatures are tearing each other to shreds. I like to use this opportunity, at least when I’m facing off against another Pokémon trainer, to walk over to their side of the battlefield and look them right in their eyes.
Does this provide any tactical advantages? Maybe a status effect for making your opponent nervous? Nope, not really. It’s just a fun thing to do.
Don’t release Pokémon until you fill four pastures
Pokémon Legends: Arceus, more than any game before it aside from maybe Pokémon Go, encourages the capturing of massive amounts of Pokémon. Fortunately, it also gives you adequate room to store them all, but at some point, you’re going to have to get rid of a few. My tip: Wait until you fill multiple pages of the storage screen to make the process of releasing Pokémon a much simpler affair.
Upon topping off a fourth pasture, Pokémon Legends: Arceus gives you the ability to mass release Pokémon. The option to select dozens of Pokémon at once to send back into the wild is so much better than doing so one by one but, again, this isn’t something Pokémon Legends: Arceus announces with fanfare. It just sorta happens and it’s up to you to notice the little button prompt at the bottom of the screen.
Take it from me, it’s much better to let those Pokémon accumulate for a bit.
Don’t be afraid to release Pokémon, either
The other side of the coin, naturally, is seeing how much room you’re given to collect Pokémon and being wary of releasing them at all. That’s also a bad idea!
Every time you release Pokémon, whether solo or in a group, they leave behind little presents for you. I don’t know if these gifts change further into Pokémon Legends: Arceus, but over the first few hours of my adventure, I’ve collected a buttload of grit dust, gravel, pebbles, and rocks, all of which are used to improve secondary Pokémon stats known as effort levels.
Like EVs (effort values) and IVs (individual values) before them, effort levels aren’t something you need to concern yourself with if you’re just playing Pokémon Legends: Arceus casually. But those of you who prefer to min-max your role-playing experience, you can read more about the process on wonderful Pokémon info repositories like Serebii and Bulbapedia. Then again, with even normal enemies being pretty tough, it might be smart to think about utilizing effort levels sooner rather than later.
You can turn off the HUD
Do you feel like the Pokémon Legends: Arceus screen is too cluttered? Well, you’re in luck, because nestled within the settings menu is an option to enable HUD toggling.
After turning this feature on, all it takes is a simple click of the right thumbstick to get rid of all the UI elements clogging up the screen, perfect for taking pictures of the game’s lush countryside and wild Pokémon.
Another photography tip: holding the left trigger puts you in first-person mode, another great way to get up close and personal with your Pokémon. For example, here are two alpha Bidoof that I caught one after the other last night. They are my large sons.
Screenshot: The Pokémon Company / Kotaku
Vibe
You’ve probably noticed already, but Pokémon Legends: Arceus is huge.There’s no reason to rush through it.
My last tip for this wonderful game is to savor it. Enjoy the adventure. Spend an hour here or there between story missions to wander through one of the game’s many areas, watching how wild Pokémon interact with their environment. Take out your favorite Pokémon in town and snap a few photos of their interactions. Before you know it, the adventure will be over, you’ll have collected a full Pokédex of shiny, alpha Pokémon, and there won’t be anything new to see until the next game.
Pokémon Legends: Arceus is a game decades in the making. It really does feel like the culmination of everything the developers have learned since the series debuted in 1996, not to mention something of a love letter to fans who have long asked for a more open-ended, organic Pokémon experience. Sadly, we’ll only get to see it for the first time just once, so do everything you can to cherish these moments of unknowing.
It’s only a few weeks before Switch players can get their hands on Pokémon Legends: Arceus. The next big entry in the series is winding back the clock to the Hisui Region before it came to be known as Sinnoh, and tasks players with exploring the area to research the pocket monsters in their natural habitats.
GameFreak and Nintendo’s gradual drip feed of information in the months since Arceus’ announcement have mainly focused on gameplay mechanics, but a promo released in Japan puts its focus mainly on the player exploring Hisui. For as easy as it was to joke that the game is basically the franchise’s answer to Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, the promo certainly leans into it as the player uses their Pokémon to travel through water, gallop down hills, and even fly past a volcano. It’s hard not to be wowed by the visual direction and how large the world feels in a way that previous games couldn’t always convey.
There’s been an open desire amongst fans for Pokémon to switch things up in the main games for a long time now, and what we know of Arceus thus far seems to address at least some of those complaints. Instead of being turn-based combat, it’s an open world action-RPG where players take quests from villagers, camp, and craft their own supplies. More interestingly, Pokémon could just straight up kill you this time around if you’re not careful. While it’s unlikely that Nintendo will ever give their own version of fans’ custom made Nuzlocke challenges, the extra tension that Arceus seemingly provides has some potential to push back on players who may forget these creatures they’re trying to snatch up have no qualms about defending themselves.
Whether or not Arceus serves as an overhaul or evolution to the formula, what it brings to the table both gameplay wise and narratively will be interesting for fans to chew on. At the very least, it won’t be a bad way to spend the winter, particularly if you’re cooped up at home.
Pokémon Legends: Arceus hits the Nintendo Switch on January 28.
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Screenshot: The Pokémon Company / MitchOG / Kotaku
It’s incredibly rare to encounter a Shiny Pokémon in Pokémon Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl. It’s even rarer to encounter two in a row in the same battle. Several thousand times rarer, in fact. But that’s exactly what happened to one Twitch streamer when he was least expecting it.
Mitchell “MitchOG” Versari was after a Shiny Turtwig, PokémonBDSP’s grass starter. Streaming for his viewers on Twitch, he restarted the game again and again waiting for the sparkling color variant to appear. On his 107th attempt, it finally did, but only after a Shiny Starly appeared in battle alongside it. Players have a one in 4,096 chance of their starter Pokémon being Shiny when it first appears. They have a one in 16,777,216 chance of both the starter and the first Pokémon it fights being Shiny.
“What?” MitchOG kept shouting as he fell out of his chair. “Merry Fucking Christmas Boys!”
While Shiny Pokémon don’t have any special traits outside of their sparkly appearance and significant rarity, it’s become common practice for some devoted players to at the very least wait for a Shiny to pop up before starting a new Pokémon game in earnest. But it’s practically unheard of to get a double-Shiny encounter in the opening moments of the game.
“I couldn’t even process what I was looking at honestly,” MitchOG told Kotaku. “It wasn’t until later that night after the stream that I realized I’ve never seen this happen before. I started looking for others online that have found both the uncatchable shiny Starly and a shiny starter Pokémon at the same time but I couldn’t find anything.”
The lighting-in-a-bottle moment came during MitchOG’s latest Challenge Run to beat PokémonBDSP using only a team of the first six Shiny Pokémon he can find. Prior to that, he streamed a playthrough where he beat the entire game using only a Bidoof. Longterm, he’s trying to capture one of every Shiny Pokémon in the series’ current Pokédex. There are over 800, and he says he’s about halfway there.
In the meantime, he’s achieved something even rarer. To put the odds of what happened to him in perspective, the average person is 1,000 times more likely to be hit by lightning during their lifetime.
“Safe to say I can retire from shiny hunting as the rest of my life’s luck was used yesterday,” said MitchOG.