The March 17 Nintendo Indie live stream showed off a ton of great new indie titles, including some console exclusives like Exit the Gungeon. We also got a chance to see the latest game from the team behind No Man’s Sky – the somber and beautiful The Last Campfire, due out sometime this summer.
Whatever your preference, there’s probably a game in here for you, so check out the complete list of what was featured in the March 17 Nintendo Indie stream. What are you most excited about?
Baldo
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Release Date: Summer 2020, timed Nintendo Switch exclusive
This action-adventure RPG from Italian studio Naps Team is full of eccentric and silly characters done in the style of a Studio Ghibli film, so if you’re an anime fan, this one’s for you. In Baldo, you’ll complete puzzles and make your way through dungeons in a big, interactive open world.
B.ARK
(Image credit: Tic Toc Games)
Release Date: Late 2020, timed Nintendo Switch exclusive
B.ARK stands for “bio-interstallar ark” and it’s a side-scrolling couch co-op that lets you and your friends team up to play as pugs, cats, bunnies, and bears looking to save the solar system. In B.ARK, you’ll be able to combine and upgrade ship abilities, collect coins, and defeat enemies with your friends and family by your side. It’s animal astronauts, need I say more?
Blair Witch
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Release Date: Summer 2020
Bloober Games’ take on the iconic Blair Witch story will head to Nintendo Switch this summer, so you can take fear on the go. Head deep into the woods in search for a lost young boy with nothing but an early aughts cellphone, a flashlight, and your dog Bullet by your side. Prepare for scares.
Blue Fire
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Release Date: Summer 2020, timed Nintendo Switch exclusive
This dark, haunting 3D platformer will have you exploring mystical temples and taking on strange quests in a world that has long been forgotten. You’ll run into “peculiar” survivors who will help you find valuable collectibles as you navigate the world and get comfortable with the game’s movement style and hack-and-slash combat.
Bounty Battle
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Release Date: Summer 2020
Originally for PC, this hero brawler will drop on Nintendo Switch, Xbox One, and PS4 later this summer. Pit your favorite indie heroes from games like Owlboy, Dead cells, and Darkest Dungeon against each other in a frenzy of fighting.
Cyanide & Happiness – Freakpocalypse: Part 1
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Release Date: Summer 2020, timed Nintendo Switch exclusive
“Nobody likes you, school sucks, you can’t find a prom date, everybody bullies you (including your teachers) and your attempts to help only make things worse.” Did someone pull a game idea from my high school diary? In Cyanide & Happiness – Freakpocalypse: Part 1, you’ll play as Coop McCAathy and you’re just trying to make things better. The game world is just like the animated cartoon for which the game is named, but with dialogue, unlockable costumes, and more.
Dicey Dungeons
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Release Date: Later in 2020
The rogue-like deck building game is coming to Nintendo Switch and mobile sometime this year. You’ll become a gigantic walking dice and have to make your way through ever-changing dungeons.
Eldest Souls
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Release Date: Summer 2020, timed Nintendo Switch exclusive
Boss-rush gameplay meets combat customization in this Souls-like game set in a dark fantasy world. Eldest Souls tasks you with slaying ancient Gods, exploring a mysterious Citadel, and unlocking various talents and abilities to help take on ancient enemies.
Exit the Gungeon
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Release Date: Out now, timed Nintendo Switch exclusive
The sequel to the excellent Enter the Gungeon is out for Nintendo Switch right now and it’s translated the game into 2D stages. You’ll encounter familiar guns, enemies, and art styles in this dungeon crawler, with perilous elevator fights and ever-changing weapons. Ascend to escape the collapsing dungeon and dodge roll your way out of danger.
Faeria
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Release Date: Spring 2020
This strategic card battler was originally a mobile game, but it’s coming for Nintendo Switch in the near future. Build your own deck to shape the battlefield and gain a victory over your opponents. There’s over 100 hours of solo content, plus co-op missions, and puzzles galore.
Ghost of a Tale
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Release Date: Spring 2020
This action RPG originally released for PS4, Xbox One, and PC will hit Nintendo Switch this spring. In it, you’ll play Tilo, a mouse and minstrel who gets roped into a dangerous adventure in order to find out the fate of his true love. You’ll need to use stealth, agility, and disguises to make your way through a kingdom ruled by rats.
I Am Dead
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Release Date: Later in 2020, timed Nintendo Switch exclusive
Annapurna Interactive is bringing the team behind Hohokum’s puzzle adventure game to the Nintendo Switch before anything else. Explore the afterlife in brilliant technicolor with an X-Ray Vision puzzle mechanic that will help you discover secrets of the land of the dead.
Moving Out
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Release Date: April 28 for Nintendo Switch and other platforms
What’s more fun than moving? For the silly characters you embody in Moving Out, literally nothing. This couch co-op is like Overcooked but with fragile furniture, and as GamesRadar+ saw at PAX East, it’s a wildly fun time. You can play alone or locally with friends on more than 50 levels across three different modes. There’s a free demo out now for the Switch, so check it out for yourself.
PixelJunk Eden 2
(Image credit: Q-Games Ltd.)
Release Date: Summer 2020, Nintendo Switch exclusive
PixelJunk Eden 2 is a beautifully psychedelic sequel where you play as a Grimp trying to save your fellow Grimps. You’ll need to collect pollen and grow gardens back into full bloom, and each stage generates based on your actions as a player. It’s a completely immersive sensory experience, and you can play it alone or with a friend via local multiplayer.
Quantum League
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Release Date: Later in 2020
Quantum League is a FPS that originally dropped on Xbox One, PS4, and PC back in 2018. In this time-paradox shooter you’ll battle within a time loop, teaming up with your past and future selves in online 1v1 or 2v2 matches. Choose from six different characters to play and unlock new outfits as you evolve.
Sky Racket
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Release Date: Out now
A Switch version of this genre-blended game dropped during the Nintendo Indie presentation, so you can try it out right now if it interests you. Sky Racket is a blend of shoot-’em-ups and block breakers, in which you’ll have to make your way through pixel art levels with your laser tennis racket. You can also play Sky Racket as a co-op game with friends to help you get through the hordes of fluffy enemies.
Summer in Mara
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Release Date: Spring 2020, timed Nintendo Switch exclusive
Customize your very own island and explore the open ocean in Summer of Mara. You’ll be able to visit over 20 other islands, plant crops, tend to farm animals, and more in this farming adventure. There are over 300 quests you can partake in that will help make Mara a better place and over 25 characters to meet and befriend. A truly tropical, feel-good experience.
Superliminal
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Release Date: Summer 2020
The puzzle game is heading to Switch this summer, so prepare to have your mind blown, as Superliminal uses gameplay elements centered around optical illusions and forced perspective.
The Good Life
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Release Date: Later in 2020
You’re a journalist from New York who heads to a town in the English countryside called Rainy Woods, a cherry town that has a bizarre secret. On nights with a full moon, the townsfolk turn into dogs and cats. Sounds like my kind of village. You’re a journalist, so you’ll have to snap pics and upload them to earn money and help solve a murder. Don’t worry, you’ll get a chance to transform into a cat or dog, too.
The Last Campfire
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Release Date: Summer 2020
The latest game from Hello Games, the studio behind No Man’s Sky, is here. You play as Ember in this beautiful, somber game, and you have to find your way home. Find hope and bring it with you as you journey to light the last campfire and encounter other lost souls.
Wingspan
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Release Date: Spring 2020
The strategy card game is heading to Switch, bringing with it bird enthusiasm and wildlife preserves. In Wingspan, you’ll compete against up to five players to build up your own nature preserve in a limited number of turns – with each bird you draw you’ll extend a chain of combinations in a habitat, which in turn focuses on an aspect of growth in your preserves like laying eggs or gathering food.
Although no one likes a know-it-all, they dominate the Internet.
The Internet began as a vast repository of information. It quickly became a breeding ground for self-proclaimed experts seeking what most people desire: recognition and money.
Today, anyone with an Internet connection and some typing skills can position themselves, regardless of their education or experience, as a subject matter expert (SME). From relationship advice, career coaching, and health and nutrition tips to citizen journalists practicing pseudo-journalism, the Internet is awash with individuals—Internet talking heads—sharing their “insights,” which are, in large part, essentially educated guesses without the education or experience.
The Internet has become a 24/7/365 sitcom where armchair experts think they’re the star.
Not long ago, years, sometimes decades, of dedicated work and acquiring education in one’s field was once required to be recognized as an expert. The knowledge and opinions of doctors, scientists, historians, et al. were respected due to their education and experience. Today, a social media account and a knack for hyperbole are all it takes to present oneself as an “expert” to achieve Internet fame that can be monetized.
On the Internet, nearly every piece of content is self-serving in some way.
The line between actual expertise and self-professed knowledge has become blurry as an out-of-focus selfie. Inadvertently, social media platforms have created an informal degree program where likes and shares are equivalent to degrees. After reading selective articles, they’ve found via and watching some TikTok videos, a person can post a video claiming they’re an herbal medicine expert. Their new “knowledge,” which their followers will absorb, claims that Panda dung tea—one of the most expensive teas in the world and isn’t what its name implies—cures everything from hypertension to existential crisis. Meanwhile, registered dietitians are shaking their heads, wondering how to compete against all the misinformation their clients are exposed to.
More disturbing are individuals obsessed with evangelizing their beliefs or conspiracy theories. These people write in-depth blog posts, such as Elvis Is Alive and the Moon Landings Were Staged, with links to obscure YouTube videos, websites, social media accounts, and blogs. Regardless of your beliefs, someone or a group on the Internet shares them, thus confirming your beliefs.
Misinformation is the Internet’s currency used to get likes, shares, and engagement; thus, it often spreads like a cosmic joke. Consider the prevalence of clickbait headlines:
You Won’t Believe What Taylor Swift Says About Climate Change!
This Bedtime Drink Melts Belly Fat While You Sleep!
In One Week, I Turned $10 Into $1 Million!
Titles that make outrageous claims are how the content creator gets reads and views, which generates revenue via affiliate marketing, product placement, and pay-per-click (PPC) ads. Clickbait headlines are how you end up watching a TikTok video by a purported nutrition expert adamantly asserting you can lose belly fat while you sleep by drinking, for 14 consecutive days, a concoction of raw eggs, cinnamon, and apple cider vinegar 15 minutes before going to bed.
Our constant search for answers that’ll explain our convoluted world and our desire for shortcuts to success is how Internet talking heads achieve influencer status. Because we tend to seek low-hanging fruits, we listen to those with little experience or knowledge of the topics they discuss yet are astute enough to know what most people want to hear.
There’s a trend, more disturbing than spreading misinformation, that needs to be called out: individuals who’ve never achieved significant wealth or traded stocks giving how-to-make-easy-money advice, the appeal of which is undeniable. Several people I know have lost substantial money by following the “advice” of Internet talking heads.
Anyone on social media claiming to have a foolproof money-making strategy is lying. They wouldn’t be peddling their money-making strategy if they could make easy money.
Successful people tend to be secretive.
Social media companies design their respective algorithms to serve their advertisers—their source of revenue—interest; hence, content from Internet talking heads appears most prominent in your feeds. When a video of a self-professed expert goes viral, likely because it pressed an emotional button, the more people see it, the more engagement it receives, such as likes, shares and comments, creating a cycle akin to a tornado.
Imagine scrolling through your TikTok feed and stumbling upon a “scientist” who claims they can predict the weather using only aluminum foil, copper wire, sea salt and baking soda. You chuckle, but you notice his video got over 7,000 likes, has been shared over 600 times and received over 400 comments. You think to yourself, “Maybe this guy is onto something.” What started as a quest to achieve Internet fame evolved into an Internet-wide belief that weather forecasting can be as easy as DIY crafts.
Since anyone can call themselves “an expert,” you must cultivate critical thinking skills to distinguish genuine expertise from self-professed experts’ self-promoting nonsense. While the absurdity of the Internet can be entertaining, misinformation has serious consequences. The next time you read a headline that sounds too good to be true, it’s probably an Internet talking head making an educated guess; without the education seeking Internet fame, they can monetize.
TORONTO – A new survey says a majority of software engineers and developers feel tight project deadlines can put safety at risk.
Seventy-five per cent of the 1,000 global workers who responded to the survey released Tuesday say pressure to deliver projects on time and on budget could be compromising critical aspects like safety.
The concern is even higher among engineers and developers in North America, with 77 per cent of those surveyed on the continent reporting the urgency of projects could be straining safety.
The study was conducted between July and September by research agency Coleman Parkes and commissioned by BlackBerry Ltd.’s QNX division, which builds connected-car technology.
The results reflect a timeless tug of war engineers and developers grapple with as they balance the need to meet project deadlines with regulations and safety checks that can slow down the process.
Finding that balance is an issue that developers of even the simplest appliances face because of advancements in technology, said John Wall, a senior vice-president at BlackBerry and head of QNX.
“The software is getting more complicated and there is more software whether it’s in a vehicle, robotics, a toaster, you name it… so being able to patch vulnerabilities, to prevent bad actors from doing malicious acts is becoming more and more important,” he said.
The medical, industrial and automotive industries have standardized safety measures and anything they produce undergoes rigorous testing, but that work doesn’t happen overnight. It has to be carried out from the start and then at every step of the development process.
“What makes safety and security difficult is it’s an ongoing thing,” Wall said. “It’s not something where you’ve done it, and you are finished.”
The Waterloo, Ont.-based business found 90 per cent of its survey respondents reported that organizations are prioritizing safety.
However, when asked about why safety may not be a priority for their organization, 46 per cent of those surveyed answered cost pressures and 35 per cent said a lack of resources.
That doesn’t surprise Wall. Delays have become rampant in the development of tech, and in some cases, stand to push back the launch of vehicle lines by two years, he said.
“We have to make sure that people don’t compromise on safety and security to be able to get products out quicker,” he said.
“What we don’t want to see is people cutting corners and creating unsafe situations.”
The survey also took a peek at security breaches, which have hit major companies like London Drugs, Indigo Books & Music, Giant Tiger and Ticketmaster in recent years.
About 40 per cent of the survey’s respondents said they have encountered a security breach in their employer’s operating system. Those breaches resulted in major impacts for 27 per cent of respondents, moderate impacts for 42 per cent and minor impacts for 27 per cent.
“There are vulnerabilities all the time and this is what makes the job very difficult because when you ship the software, presumably the software has no security vulnerabilities, but things get discovered after the fact,” Wall said.
Security issues, he added, have really come to the forefront of the problems developers face, so “really without security, you have no safety.”
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Oct. 8, 2024.
As online shoppers hunt for bargains offered by Amazon during its annual fall sale this week, cybersecurity researchers are warning Canadians to beware of an influx of scammers posing as the tech giant.
In the 30 days leading up to Amazon’s Prime Big Deal Days, taking place Tuesday and Wednesday, there were more than 1,000 newly registered Amazon-related web domains, according to Check Point Software Technologies, a company that offers cybersecurity solutions.
The company said it deemed 88 per cent of those domains malicious or suspicious, suggesting they could have been set up by scammers to prey on vulnerable consumers. One in every 54 newly created Amazon-related domain included the phrase “Amazon Prime.”
“They’re almost indiscernible from the real Amazon domain,” said Robert Falzon, head of engineering at Check Point in Canada.
“With all these domains registered that look so similar, it’s tricking a lot of people. And that’s the whole intent here.”
Falzon said Check Point Research sees an uptick in attempted scams around big online shopping days throughout the year, including Prime Days.
Scams often come in the form of phishing emails, which are deceptive messages that appear to be from a reputable source in attempt to steal sensitive information.
In this case, he said scammers posing as Amazon commonly offer “outrageous” deals that appear to be associated with Prime Days, in order to trick recipients into clicking on a malicious link.
The cybersecurity firm said it has identified and blocked 100 unique Amazon Prime-themed scam emails targeting organizations and consumers over the past two weeks.
Scammers also target Prime members with unsolicited calls, claiming urgent account issues and requesting payment information.
“It’s like Christmas for them,” said Falzon.
“People expect there to be significant savings on Prime Day, so they’re not shocked that they see something of significant value. Usually, the old adage applies: If it seems too good to be true, it probably is.”
Amazon’s website lists a number of red flags that it recommends customers watch for to identify a potential impersonation scam.
Those include false urgency, requests for personal information, or indications that the sender prefers to complete the purchase outside of the Amazon website or mobile app.
Scammers may also request that customers exclusively pay with gift cards, a claim code or PIN. Any notifications about an order or delivery for an unexpected item should also raise alarm bells, the company says.
“During busy shopping moments, we tend to see a rise in impersonation scams reported by customers,” said Amazon spokeswoman Octavia Roufogalis in a statement.
“We will continue to invest in protecting consumers and educating the public on scam avoidance. We encourage consumers to report suspected scams to us so that we can protect their accounts and refer bad actors to law enforcement to help keep consumers safe.”
Falzon added that these scams are more successful than people might think.
As of June 30, the Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre said there had been $284 million lost to fraud so far this year, affecting 15,941 victims.
But Falzon said many incidents go unreported, as some Canadians who are targeted do not know how or where to flag a scam, or may choose not to out of embarrassment.
Check Point recommends Amazon customers take precautions while shopping on Prime Days, including by checking URLs carefully, creating strong passwords on their accounts, and avoiding personal information being shared such as their birthday or social security number.
The cybersecurity company said consumers should also look for “https” at the beginning of a website URL, which indicates a secure connection, and use credit cards rather than debit cards for online shopping, which offer better protection and less liability if stolen.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Oct. 8, 2024.
