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Oh yeah, Mario time? Not quite yet, as according to a new report, Universal Studios Japan has delayed the opening of its Super Nintendo World area because of COVID-19 concerns. This is despite the section of the park being almost completely finished, but fans will have to wait to collect coins and race around the Mushroom Kingdom.

According to the Business Times, an official announcement will come this week and the plan is still for the area to open before the end of 2020. The park is based in Osaka, and Nintendo is hoping to have it open before the Tokyo Olympics begin. These were also delayed from Summer 2020 to 2021 well before Nintendo’s reported delay.

Universal Studios Japan’s Nintendo park is not the only one being built. There will also be areas built at Universal Studios Orlando and Hollywood, though they may not have the exact same attractions. Mario Kart and Yoshi rides appear to be part of the attractions, and there are also spinning coins that you can “collect” with a magnetic bracelet. There will likely be some sort of interaction with your Nintendo Switch console after collecting these coins, as well, but it hasn’t been detailed yet.

Because construction of the Japanese location began first, it looks like it will be a few more years before these parks are ready to open in the United States. With any luck, the pandemic will be over by that point and attendees will be able to break blocks and stomp on Koopa shells in peace.

Over the past few years, we’ve learned a lot about Cyberpunk 2077’s world, its look, and some of its characters. But what exactly is the plot of the game? Well thanks to some hands-on time with the first few hours and a lot of info from developer CD Projekt Red, we now have a clear picture of what V’s journey is in Night City, at least for the prologue.

This video breaks down all three of the game’s unique intros, which are known as Life Paths. There’s Street Kid, Nomad, and Corporate, with all of them offering a different backstory for main character V. We then dive right into the main plot, which does require us to put together a few pieces and get speculative. This means there are potential major spoilers, so maybe turn the video off after 3:40 if you rather experience it for yourself.

Cyberpunk 2077 releases this fall on November 19th for PC, PS4, and Xbox One with free updates for PS5 and Xbox Series X. If you’re interested in more Cyberpunk videos, we have a gameplay breakdown, hands-on impressions, and a developer interview. Jake Dekker and Tamoor Hussain will also be doing a Q&A video so leave your questions for them in the comments below.

It was the biggest match of Leaf’s Super Smash Bros. career, and her Lucas was one of the best in the game. All that stood in her way on the path to the tournament crown was a nasty Ridley player in a two-stock match. Leaf quickly dispatched Ridley’s first life by luring them to the map’s edge. But, immediately after respawning, Ridley knocked Lucas off the stage in a bold attempt to even the odds. Ridley then rushed forward to try and spike Lucas into oblivion, but whiffed the killing blow. Leaf quickly readjusted Lucas and gave Ridley a spike of their own, sealing the first-place finish.

Leaf, who prefers to go by her in-game tag, claimed victory in the Smash tournament, but she didn’t actually play in the match–her Amiibo did. Leaf is an Amiibo trainer: she “trains” an AI-controlled fighter, Lucas in this case, by playing against it in matches. But when Lucas competes in tournaments, it does so all on its own. Leaf can only watch and hope she’s prepared her Amiibo enough ahead of time whenever it goes to battle in the small, weird world of competitive Amiibo fighting.

Esports has become a booming industry with a huge number of players and spectators, but around the fringes of the games that get major attention, like League of Legends and Call of Duty, are the smaller, weirder competitions. Some well-known competitive games have smaller communities that focus on different aspects from the major competitors, such as with the Amiibo trainers or Rocket League hockey players. Other games that get little attention have thriving groups of competitors, like that of Star Wars Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy dualists. These groups rely on their own organization and programming ability to create the competitions they want without support from the mainstream.

“I was a day-one trainer,” Leaf said. It all started when Leaf’s uncle gave her a Link Amiibo when the line of Nintendo toys launched in 2014. She scanned the NFC chip that comes with every Amiibo into Super Smash Bros. Wii U, which generated an AI-controlled Link for Leaf to play against, and which would level up and become more skilled as they continually faced off in bouts. These Amiibo AI-controlled fighters served as sparring partners for Smash players with playstyles that developed based on how their owners played. The act of training Amiibo fighters soon took on a life of its own for players like Leaf. She found that she enjoyed training her computer-controlled fighter more than playing Smash the traditional way. Now, almost six years later, Leaf is one of the best Amiibo trainers in the world. In fact, the Link Amiibo her uncle gave her is a Super Smash Bros. champion.

“All you can do is watch and believe in your training.”

Leaf is part of a tiny but passionate and well-organized community of Amiibo lovers, one that put together a site hosting deep Amiibo training reports and guides called Amiibo Dojo (now known as Exion Vault) and a semi-regular tournament series with cash and custom Amiibo prizes.

The tournaments focus on a segment of the Smash Bros. community that uses the game in a very different way from other competitors. Participants don’t actually play as they compete; instead, they watch their AI-trained figures fight. “By the time your Amiibo plays against an opponent, your work is already done,” said “Cloud,” the founder of Amiibo Dojo, who also goes by his username. “All you can do is watch and believe in your training.”

The Amiibo community is much stronger today than it was after the figurines first launched in 2014, and is now home to several tournaments and many star trainers like Leaf. One of those is the Professional Amiibo League (PAL), hosted from Provo, Utah, by a Smash player who goes by the handle “Splice.” As many as 80 Amiibos fight in the league’s live-streamed open bracket before the top competitors go head-to-head in the playoffs and championship.

“I ran a small Melee league when I was going to college at [Brigham Young University]. It’s still going today,” Splice said during a Discord call. He had just finished commentating a series of matches for the PAL. “I was not interested in Amiibo whatsoever. They announced it for Super Smash Bros. Wii U and I thought it was weird … but someone gave me a Wii Fit Trainer as a thank you for running the league.”

Before Splice knew it, he was running a secondary tournament at BYU that featured nothing but Amiibo fighters. He eventually started helping another Amiibo Dojo community member set up the Professional Amiibo League by spray painting Amiibo for custom prizes (like a golden Pichu) and casting the tournaments on his Twitch channel.

Organizing tournaments for Amiibo was a little different than creating those for players, though. Participants had to actually mail their figurines to tournament organizers in order to participate, thanks to the way the figures work–they store all the information for the AI fighters inside the physical toy, which meant the only way for a tournament to pit Amiibo fighters against each other was for them all to be in the same place. It was a huge pain logistically and some players worried about never getting their figurines back.

Super Smash Bros. Ultimate brought online functionality to the Amiibo community, but that didn’t actually solve the problem. Nintendo’s poor online infrastructure has led organizers like Splice to keep tournaments offline. Luckily, competitors don’t have to mail Amiibo anymore; they’ve since figured out how to rip the AI data files from the Amiibo figures themselves. “[Competitors] can send a .bin file and then I spoof it,” he said. “We still do it all offline since the [online] lag is so bad.”

The Professional Amiibo League and the community that competes in it is a prime example of a small but vibrant esport that has all the trappings of an Overwatch League or IEM Katowice, just without the expensive production value and booming fan-filled arenas. The Professional Amiibo League and organizers like Splice will never rival the ESL or Major League Gaming in size or popularity, but still come together to offer prize money, stream a month-long tournament, run an open bracket, and navigate various hardware hurdles for what many would consider a “weird” competitive game.

A 15-year-old community rallied around dueling one-on-one with lightsabers in Star Wars: Jedi Academy is another instance of a niche community sprouting up around an addicting competitive aspect of a game. The third-person Jedi-fighter came out in 2004 with what fans call some of the best lightsaber combat ever. “You have a lot of free movement and can direct your swings in almost any direction you want to,” said Smoo, a player who competes in Jedi Academy tournaments. “Mike Gummelt, who worked on the saber combat, was inspired by Bushido Blade; if you are skilled enough and have good timing, you can kill your opponents in one hit.”

Jedi Academy had players duking it out in several different modes, including duel, free-for-all, and team free-for-all. There wasn’t a specific mode for team-based deathmatch, however, so players filled servers and played by their own rules in order to create competitions.

“There wasn’t a competitive ruleset out of the box,” said Steve, a member of the community who goes by the name “Inject.” Tournaments had to be played using the team free-for-all option, with competitors careful to follow their own two-versus-two and three-versus-three rulesets. The community even went as far as to tweak the game’s code to fit their needs. “We made a new build with some added console commands to streamline the tournament system. We added a command to reset the game state, giving a 1-2-3 countdown.” They even found tips, like how some lightsaber hilts gave you longer attack reach, hidden in the game code.

A remaster of Jedi Academy launched on PS4 and Nintendo Switch earlier this year, but it’s severely lacking in online functionality. It doesn’t support playing directly with friends on the Nintendo Switch and only lets players come together in parties on PS4, which means players can only battle people on their friend lists. It’s pretty hard to run a competitive tournament without being able to run your own server. While it’s unfortunate, the competitive community may have to rely on the old PC version of the game indefinitely.

Rocket League has a big esports competitive league, but beyond the teams who play intense matches of the game’s take on soccer with cars, there’s another, smaller competitive community that goes for one of Rocket League’s less-popular game modes. That community gathers on Discord servers that focus on competing in Rocket League’s hockey mode, Snow Day.

“Psyonix introduced Snow Day as a temporary holiday mode,” said DA Cook, one of the leaders in Rocket League’s hockey community. “A small but dedicated core group of players petitioned them to keep it permanently after it was removed.” They call themselves the Rocket Hockey League (RHL) and one of their commissioners actually delivered “a care package of NHL western conference hockey-pucks” to Psyonix to help convince the developer to keep the mode alive. It worked–Psyonix kept Snow Day as a permanent game mode.

Playing with a puck makes Snow Day vastly different from traditional soccer with cars, with its own idiosyncrasies that appeal to its competitors. One, a technique players use called “pinching the puck,” can mean launching it at incredibly high speeds towards the net. “The fastest I’ve personally seen in regulation puck is 132 mph,” Cook said. Many of the players that enjoy Snow Day rarely play Rocket League’s standard mode. The community around Snow Day is hoping to kick off their sixth competitive season this June.

Like Amiibo fighting or Jedi Academy team fights, in-game Rocket League tournament features are lacking, so RHL fans have to turn to third-party options to run their league of 18 teams. While still small, the community believes they’ve helped expand the game mode in significant ways. Their enthusiasm also resulted in Psyonix adding a ranked playlist and balance patches to Snow Day specifically, but they are always hoping for more.

“I honestly don’t think the devs think about us much, and that makes sense from a certain viewpoint given the small size of our community,” Cook said. “We’re looking forward to another season of growth and continued efforts to increase visibility and awareness of the mode and league.”

While Cook, Splice, and Leaf would love for their communities to grow into something much bigger, they don’t think the Professional Amiibo League or Rocket Hockey League will ever get close to being as big as Dota 2 or Counter-Strike. They do want to make both leagues sustainable to give Super Smash Bros. and Rocket League players a way to compete in their own way. As Splice explained, more players are coming into the Amiibo league each season, despite technical hurdles.

“I almost never play Smash regularly–I’m 35 and I can’t keep up with these kids with 10-step combos and all the time to train,” Splice said. Training Amiibos to fight in their stead is a way for people like Splice, who can’t contend against players in traditional Smash tournaments, and Leaf, who doesn’t live close to a local Smash community, to compete in their own ways.

But the current state of the toys-to-life genre has left the community’s future a mystery. Amiibo are still popular, with new figures coming out for new Smash fighters like Richter and Incineroar, but players like Leaf don’t know if that’ll continue after the Nintendo Switch. And two other toys-to-life franchises that competed with Amiibo, Skylanders and Disney Infinity, have been all but canceled in recent years.

“That’s the biggest question,” Splice said. “There’s been a Smash game for every system since the N64, but when they come out with the next thing, will it have NFC-reading technology? The community could die at the whim of Nintendo’s decision.”

“Amiibo is in a weird place right now; a lot of people have given up on collecting them.”

Players also develop a real connection to their Amiibo.

“Amiibo is in a weird place right now; a lot of people have given up on collecting them,” Leaf said. “Nintendo has accepted that they are a collectible item.”

The same uncertainty can be said about the Rocket League or Jedi Academy communities. Their futures may not be as uncertain as the lifespan of Nintendo’s Amiibo figurines, but those players also don’t know if Psyonix and Aspyr Studios–the studio handling the remake of Jedi Academy–will respectively support each down the line. Even though it has a precarious future, Inject and the rest of the Jedi Academy community will make do by using the 2003 version of the game.

Regardless of developer and publisher support, all three communities strive to leave a legacy on the games they’ve sunk thousands of hours into. Cook and the Rocket Hockey League don’t see themselves slowing down anytime soon and are working with the Hoops community–who play a basketball-inspired add-on mode of the game–to help Rocket League’s side modes grow.

For now, Leaf, Cloud, and Splice are enjoying the popularity that the Nintendo Switch and Super Smash Bros. Ultimate have brought to their community. Leaf’s planning on transferring the AI fighter from the Link Amiibo her uncle bought her in 2014 into a custom figure with the Fierce Deity skin that’s featured in Ultimate. They’ve been through a lot together over the years.

“I’ll be using shady methods to transplant the brain onto the custom Amiibo I have used, and will continue to use that figure,” said Leaf, whose custom Amiibo should arrive in a few weeks. “It’s the skin I put on him in-game. It seemed only fitting to get him a special figure due to his infamy.”

In our first hands-on preview of Cyberpunk 2077, Tamoor Hussain lamented the relative lack of humanity he witnessed in the game’s main questline as he played through the opening hours as a street kid. After all, in The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, the most impactful stories were often the smaller, more intimate ones. He eventually found a glimpse of that in a sidequest involving two monk brothers and their vow of non-violence, which complicated a rescue mission with grey decisions.

With the benefit of this knowledge and my own Cyberpunk 2077 demo to play, I went in with the express purpose of trying to find more of those glimpses. Above and beyond CD Projekt Red’s proven ability to create complex, humane storytelling, the cyberpunk genre itself is attractive because of its portrayal of its people and communities in an extreme future. As David Rayfield wrote back in 2018 (around the time when CD Projekt began to tease Cyberpunk’s resurfacing after a long silence), cyberpunk media draws us in with its cool-as-hell aesthetic, but the best cyberpunk stories “reveal to us modern society’s worst tendencies and offenders.”

And so I went into the opening hours of Cyberpunk 2077 with these questions in my head: How does 2077 use and play with cyberpunk conventions? What stories does 2077 want to tell outside its grandiose main questline? Does 2077 actually feel like a cyberpunk world beyond its flashy tech and neon-soaked Asian-inspired aesthetic? The results were… a little mixed.

Corporate Control

In cyberpunk fiction, capitalism rules. The genre imagines a world where international corporations have grown to such a size that they are untouchable by governments. The class divides are extreme, and quality of life is greatly determined by how much money you have–a scenario that feels even more real now than it did in the genre’s infancy back in the ’80s.

At the beginning of my demo, I chose the Corporate Life Path as the origin for my version of the protagonist, V. This situated her in a lofty counter-intelligence position in the Japanese corporation, Arasaka. V’s boss, the instantly-hateable Jenkins, orders her to organise a hit on his boss, Abernathy. V is conflicted, she’s anxious. She tries to confide in her best friend Jackie, she throws up in the bathroom. It is absolutely not something that she wants to do, but what choice does she have? Her livelihood–salary, apartment, Trauma Team medical insurance–is all made available to her because of her corporate loyalty.

At the end of this prologue, while V is trying to convince Jackie to help her out with the job, Arasaka goons confront her. Abernathy has found out about the scheme and V is cut off without recompense. It’s whatever the opposite of recompense is. She sees her bank balance zero out before her eyes, and all her corporate augmentations get fried. Jackie intervenes to prevent the goons from taking her out back (to kill her probably!), but her life is ruined. No money. No medical insurance. No home.

Seeing first-hand how people might suffer in a world of extreme capitalism was a pretty great start to things. But unsurprisingly, being the game’s protagonist, V has a safety net in the form of a thick wad of cash she just happened to have on her. She eventually gets back on her feet within six months, building a new working life for herself with Jackie. When the game truly begins, V has a swish apartment centrally located in the bustling city.

It stands to reason that others in this world would not be so lucky. To me, one of the signature aspects of cyberpunk fiction is a look at the ugly side of things. The rainy street level of Blade Runner’s Los Angeles. The claustrophobic slums of Prague in Deus Ex: Mankind Divided. The clinical housing, fabricated clothes, and protein goop of Technobabylon.

The area you start 2077 in is probably one of the more glamorous interpretations of cyberpunk I’ve seen. It’s densely populated and filled with the prerequisite amount of highrises and neon signage; when it’s raining at night it hits all the familiar notes. But the people and places that it is home to are definitely cut from a different kind of cloth. There’s a degree of wealth that is prevalent, people flashing their shiny augmentations, spending their nights at exclusive nightclubs and bars, exercising their fleshy parts at gyms and dojos, and spending time kicking back on rooftops wearing brightly-coloured activewear and chunky, impossibly clean sneakers. It’s cyberpunk chic, which I was a little taken aback by. That grim futuristic world was suddenly kind of aspirational more than anything.

There is a unique degree of ugliness to be found, though. I played most of my demo when the in-game sun was out, and it was still a good-looking city in a technical sense–I had the benefit of playing a locally-run code on PC, seeing it run in 4K with ray-tracing and DLSS effects pointed out to me. But seeing a cyberpunk city under the bright light of day was another interesting twist to what I’ve come to expect from the genre.

The first thing that shocked me was how clear the horizon was. I could see some rolling Californian mountain ranges in the horizon, and I wondered whether pollution and the environmental angle is something that will come into examination later. The depletion of Earth’s natural resources is another common cyberpunk theme–did the governments of 2077 work all those green deals out?

Without the darkness and neon to hide and distract, there’s definitely a more down-to-earth grimness that comes from residing in a concrete jungle of a city. Freeways criss-cross the district and as a result, there are areas of Night City where there isn’t much to see at all. But that dullness makes it feel pretty true-to-life, which I quite liked. Those underpasses, dead ends, and long stretches of deserted footpaths through industrial areas also helped make the bustling centres feel that much busier and exciting. And it’s here where I found hints of the less alluring side of this city.

Makeshift tents here and there suggest some kind of homeless or displaced population, and one curious encounter I had with a Cyberpsycho (Cyberpunk’s take on boss-like enemies that inhabit the world) came accompanied with some flavour text: He was a former mercenary, fired by his corporate employer but left on the street with the memories of the jobs he had done, and now suffering from PTSD. Given the size of the map, I’m hoping to see a lot more of these kinds of stories–the Pacifica region is supposedly the dedicated slum region–although in retrospect, given Night City was initially described as “the worst place to live in America” with a “sky-high rate of violence and more people living below the poverty line than anywhere else,” I was expecting something a lot worse from the get-go.

Stranger Strangers

Tamoor’s amazing-sounding experience with the Buddhist monks encouraged me to actively seek out more side-quest characters in my demo in order to gauge the temperature of the kinds of people that CD Projekt wanted to flesh out in this world. I spent a lot of my demo chasing question-mark icons on the map, but most of the time they would turn out to be Gigs, Cyberpunk’s more straightforward quests where you’re simply asked to kill someone or find something for a reward–there certainly are a lot of things you can distract yourself with in this open world, as was the case in The Witcher 3 or even something in the style of GTA V or Red Dead Redemption 2.

Two side-quest characters managed to get my attention. The first was a pair of twins, who had such a close relationship that they used technology to fuse their personalities into a single entity. “One person, two bodies” is the way they put it. They were part of a multi-part quest that asked you to rise up and be the best fist-fighter in the district, and they had a vaudeville-style routine going on with their back and forth banter, describing how they (he?) dealt with girlfriends. The second character was someone whose augmented penis was malfunctioning and causing him a lot of pain. The hysteric man wanted V to drive him to the nearest ripperdoc–surgeons that specialise in installing and repairing cybernetic implants. He seemed to be involved in a multi-part quest, since V adds him as a phone contact afterwards (as “Flaming Crotch Man” with a banana as his profile picture).

Both of these characters are on the more lighthearted side of the character spectrum–not exactly the humane character studies I was on the lookout for, but playful imaginings of the oddities that might come up in a technological future. It works in a sense because the main questline at this point revolves around more serious considerations of where technology might move, like the incredibly cool Braindance mechanic. It’s an edge that veers closer to the Yakuza series in terms of silliness than I was expecting from this game. I don’t mind that at all, but I’m still hopeful that there are more of those morally grey gut-punch stories too because Cyberpunk 2077’s side quests can’t just be all sunshine and hijinks, right?

The ambient street scenes poked at this a little bit during my time–a street preacher condemning body modification to make sure the next generation is pure was an immediate example, but they seemed to be almost drowned out by ever-present scenes of danger. Random world incidents involving cops and criminals can be found around nearly every corner, with various gang members and the Night City Police Department acting incredibly on edge all the time. This is one part of the game that certainly worked in establishing the “worst place in America” thing, but also to remind me that Cyberpunk 2077 is definitely cut from the same cloth as The Witcher 3, and not so much Deus Ex, despite appearances. There are even “nests” of enemies, so to speak, in the form of gang hideouts, which make it seem like the city’s primary goal is to give you things to do first and foremost. When it came to random Night City citizens, my handgun did most of the interacting.

I came away seeing a lot of unexpected things, but there was one facet of cyberpunk fiction that I noticed 2077 was staying true to. Unfortunately, it’s a personal gripe I’ve always raised an eyebrow to despite being a huge sucker for the genre: It’s the fact that despite cyberpunk absolutely revelling in the look and feel of modern neon-soaked Asian cities like Tokyo and Hong Kong, and being filled with citizens from all kinds of multicultural backgrounds, those cultures are rarely represented in the main cast of characters and primary perspectives these stories deal with. The only notable Asian character I came across during the first five hours was the head of the Arasaka corporation, Yorinobu Arasaka, who at this stage is just a big bad. Cyberpunk fiction was born with an orientalist problem, so my personal hope is that somewhere in Cyberpunk 2077, we get a deeper look into all the different cultures and factions of Night City (of which there are many), through characters you can meaningfully relate to. After all, given how heavily this supposedly Californian city is saturated in noodles, katanas, rice hats, and people yelling in foreign languages, there’s gotta be at least some cool Asian cyberpunks of note to hang out with, right?

At this point, you might think I’m nitpicking and speculating based on playing what is a relatively tiny portion of the game–but that’s only because I’m incredibly excited by it, like you, probably. Even though I came away with some wariness about 2077’s take on a cyberpunk world, I’m glad there are some twists here. I hope those interesting glimpses I saw will unravel into a variety of notable themes, characters, locations, and situations hours down the line. This is going to be the biggest interactive cyberpunk-themed world to date. Let’s hope its portrayal will be meaningful, too.

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