The Weekly Round-Up: Sega trolls Nintendo, Sony vs Tencent and MindsEye man’s mental maelstrom
Our light-hearted recap of the week’s most interesting news
Chris Scullion
This is a blog post, where VGC writers post irreverent and (occasionally) entertaining coverage of video game culture.
It’s Sunday, which means it’s time for another weekly round-up of the past week’s gaming news.
We’ve been doing these on Patreon for more than a year and have now brought them to the main VGC site. If you’re new to them, this is our way of winding up the past week by recapping its more interesting stories, often with a shamelessly rubbish joke at the end.
VGC Patreon subscribers on all paid tiers have been receiving these round-ups for more than a year, and will continue to get this in newsletter form on Friday afternoons, so if you like what you read and you’d like early access so you can start your weekend with a laugh instead of ending it with one, why not consider subscribing?
Last week’s newsletter went up on Patreon just before the Nintendo Direct, so a couple of stories from that feature in this round-up despite being from last Friday. If that’s sacrilegious to you because it goes against every definition you have of a week, I don’t know what to tell you.
That aside, let’s crack on with this week’s round-up.
A short teaser for the movie, premiered during the latest Nintendo Direct, shows Mario lying outside Peach’s Castle. Nintendo also reconfirmed that the film will be released in cinemas in April 2026.
“As we celebrate Mario’s 40th anniversary it’s an opportunity to reflect on the four decades of creativity, imagination and adventure that Mario has brought to life across generations and around the world,” Illumination’s Chris Meledandri said.
“From its ground-breaking world-building to its iconic characters and unforgettable music, the Super Mario Bros have left a lasting impact on the very fabric of our culture.”
Unfortunately, one way in which it hasn’t made an impact on our culture is that it hasn’t yet managed to teach everyone that you pronounce ‘Bros’ as ‘brothers’ and not ‘broze’.
Eye eye, what’s all this then
The star of MindsEye and Mafia 3 has spoken about how being the protagonist in two critical disappointments affected his confidence.
In an interview with the FRVR Podcast, Alex Hernandez – who played Jacob Diaz in MindsEye and Lincoln Clay in Mafia 3 – spoke about the abuse he received for his roles in each game, and his reaction to the negative reception each game received.
Despite taking learnings from the experience, Hernandez said he did feel at times like he had something of an unlucky touch, having been the star in two separate poorly received games, but that he’s proud of his accomplishments regardless of the reception to the finished products.
“I’m not a superstitious man but there can’t help but be some Spidey Sense tingling that’s like ‘is it just me? Do I have the opposite of the golden touch? Like the fucking shit brown touch? Everything I touch turns to poop?’” he explained. “It is the flipside of the blessing that it is to be the guy on the box.”
“Take our Spidey Sense out of your mouth,” replied Peter Parker and Miles Morales. “We don’t have a problem shifting games when we’re on the box.”
The dedicated Virtual Boy accessory will be required to play games, Nintendo said, and replicates the form of the original 1995 Virtual Boy by allowing users to insert their Switch or Switch 2 console.
A cardboard model will also be available, it said, and Virtual Boy will launch on Switch Online on February 17, 2026.
14 games will be released “over time”, including Mario’s Tennis, Galactic Pinball, Wario Land, and V Tetris.
The Virtual Boy for Nintendo Switch 2 / Nintendo Switch accessory will cost $100 / £67, the cardboard model will be available for $25 / £17, and a 12-pack of paracetamol for the resulting headache costs between £0.35 and £2.00 depending on the brand.
Most notable are the Kirby figures, which at $50 are the most expensive Amiibo to date. Typically, Amiibo figures cost between $20 and $30 in the US, and at launch a decade ago, they were closer to $15.
However, the Kirby Amiibo are unique in that they include both a ‘rider’ figure and a machine to which they can be attached, with drivers also interchangeable.
It’s a similar gimmick to the Monster Hunter Stories amiibo, which let users swap the characters and their monster mounts. I bought them all, and some of them now go for up to $200 on the resale market, so who’s laughing now?
The latest ad shows a race car zooming down a stretch of road, with a TV on the back showing the game in action to emphasise its speed, followed by a caravan with Mario Kart World on the back, failing to start as a tortoise walks past it.
“What if you want to roam around on the open road?” the ad says dismissively, taking aim at Mario Kart World’s open-world map.
Long-term Sega fans will recognise the ad as an homage to the company’s infamous US ‘blast processing’ ad from the early 90s, where a TV showing Sega Genesis games like Sonic the Hedgehog is strapped to a race car while a sputtering van fails to start while playing SNES game Super Mario Kart.
Ubisoft released The Crew in 2014 but shut down the servers last year. This led to The Crew Unlimited, a free fan-made server emulator project which lets owners of The Crew play it again, either offline (by running a local server) or online (by connecting to the project’s new public server).
The Crew Unlimited works by taking the player’s original installation of The Crew and their saved games, and applies a patch that makes them connect to an emulated ‘active’ server instead of Ubisoft’s deactivated server.
“After over 10 hours of non-stop tech support, it has come to my attention that a lot of you have acquired (by whichever shady method) broken/corrupted game files,” the game’s lead developer wrote on Discord.
“If you have acquired the game files from shady sources then we are not responsible for whether your game works or not. Players with legit Steam copies have had by far the least issues, no wonder.”
Players have been complaining that they’ve managed to get the game working again only to find a broken collision system and rubber-banding AI opponents who cheat mercilessly – before being informed that those were always in The Crew.
In July, Sony filed a lawsuit in California federal court alleging copyright and trademark infringement, and claiming that Light of Motiram is so close to Horizon Zero Dawn and Horizon Forbidden West that players could be confused into thinking it’s part of the same series.
Tencent has now responded to Sony’s lawsuit, calling the claims “startling” and accusing Sony of trying to monopolise a part of popular culture when – in Tencent’s view – Horizon wasn’t particularly original in the first place.
“By suing over an unreleased project that merely employs the same time-honored tropes embraced by scores of other games released both before and after Horizon – like Enslaved, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, Far Cry: Primal, Far Cry: New Dawn, Outer Wilds, Biomutant, and many more – Sony seeks an impermissible monopoly on genre conventions.”
Sony’s initial lawsuit claims that Light of Motiram’s use of “a young, red-headed female protagonist and tribal groups fighting for survival among large robotic animals in a post-apocalyptic world” results in a project that has “wilfully infringed” registered Horizon copyrights, as well as the Aloy character trademark.
VGC understands that Tencent also plans to point at Disney’s Brave, the Jumanji reboot and the Wendy’s logo during the hearing and simply shout “LOOK, THEY ALL HAVE BLOODY GINGERS IN THEM TOO”.
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