Month: September 2020

The Pokemon Company has announced that a link between Pokemon Go and Pokemon Home will be set up “before the end of 2020”. This will allow the transfer of Pokemon between the mobile Pokemon Go app and the Pokemon Sword and Shield Nintendo Switch games.

Revealed by Pokemon Company President and CEO, Tsunekazu Ishihara, the link will enable Pokemon caught in Pokemon Go to “set off on an adventure in the world of Pokemon Sword and Shield by way of Pokemon Home.”

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There’s more to the system than just that, too. If you send a Pokemon from Pokemon Go to Pokemon Home, you’ll be able to open a Mystery Box in Pokemon Go. Opening the box will cause the mythical Pokemon Meltan to appear on the map within the Pokemon Go app.

In addition, you’ll also receive a mystery gift in Pokemon Home which contains a special Melmetal capable of Gigantamaxing, for use in Pokemon Sword and Shield.

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The announcement came as part of an update video about Pokemon Sword and Shield, which also revealed the Crown Tundra DLC release date. For more information, check out everything you need to know about Pokemon Home.

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Matt Purslow is IGN’s UK News and Entertainment Writer.  

The Crown Tundra expansion for Pokemon Sword & Shield will be released on October 22.

The Crown Tundra is a snowy new open area being added to the world of Sword & Shield, adding new characters, Pokemon and quests. You’ll be able to explore Pokemon Dens, and meet every legendary Pokemon in the series so far – as well as a brand new mythical Pokemon, and new forms of the original legendary birds, Articuno, Zapdos, and Moltres.

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Dynamax Adventures will let you join 3 other trainers to explore caves and take on battles against Dynamax Pokemon. The brief clips we’ve seen point to choices of route that take you past different Pokemon types.

The Galarian Star Tournament will also be added to the game, an endgame event allowing you to battle alongside and against trainers from throughout Sword and Shield. The tournament should offer new story and character elements that weren’t available in the main game.

On November 6, you’ll also be able to buy bundled versions of Pokemon Sword and Shield, alongside their respective expansion passes. No price was given for the bundled version.

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To celebrate the Crown Tundra announcement, you’ll also be able to catch eight versions of Ash’s Pikachu, wearing a variety of different caps – each unlocked by Mystery Gift passwords that are entered in-game. Passwords will be available in “various places”, but the first – for Pikachu wearing Ash Ketchum’s original cap – is P1KACHUGET. You can find instructions for how to redeem the password on the Pokemon website.

As far as we know right now, the Crown Tundra expansion will be the final piece of new content for Pokemon Sword & Shield. We awarded the first DLC epxansion, Isle of Armor, a 7/10, calling it “a solid first attempt at DLC in a Pokémon game, even if it’s too short-lived to offer anything that feels like a truly substantial addition beyond the location itself.”

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Joe Skrebels is IGN’s Executive Editor of News. Follow him on Twitter. Have a tip for us? Want to discuss a possible story? Please send an email to newstips@ign.com.

Dragon Quest Tact, a tactical game in the vein of Fire Emblem Heroes, has been announced for English language markets. The game, which released in Japan back in July, will come to the west soon–although an exact date has not been announced.

Pre-registration is now available on Google Play. You can watch a CGI trailer below, which does not show gameplay but shows how the game uses classic Dragon Quest villains in a tactical setting.

The game will let you build up and train a team of monsters from the series, then equip them with items and send them into battle. This is a tile-based tactical game, where you guide your team around the battlefield and attack enemy foes.

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While Apple has recently updated its App Store rules to explicitly allow game streaming services, their restrictiveness means we likely won’t see services like Microsoft xCloud or Google Stadia on iOS any time soon. Despite the lack of official options, a Redditor has recently found workaround to use Stadia on iOS devices, and it’s the simplest one yet.

While a Stadia app does exist on the App Store, it doesn’t allow for games to be played on iOS devices–it’s simply a tool that lets players manage Stadia for other devices. The workaround picked up by Redditor u/zmknox, as reported by Engadget, involves its own specialized app, however.

“Over the past few weeks, some tricks were floating around this subreddit for [getting] Stadia working on iOS 14,” the Reddit post reads. “I decided to ship a highly specialized browser app to the App Store which can make doing this super easy.”

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The partnership between Sony and Activision for Call of Duty continues with Modern Warfare and Warzone, and now it’s been confirmed that the Season 6 update includes even more exclusive content for PS4 owners.

Writing on the PlayStation Blog, Activision laid out all of this content, beginning with a new map for the Spec Ops Survival mode. Survival mode will support the Hovec Sawmill map for its wave-based mode with the Season 6 update; this map is set at a sawmill with a barn in the middle and long sightlines for players who like sniping.

In other news about the Survival mode for Spec Ops, after nearly a year of exclusivity to PS4, the mode itself will be available on Xbox One and PC starting on October 1. Activision also clarified that the Hovec Sawmill map for Survival mode will be exclusive to PS4 until October 1.

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Genshin Impact, an open world RPG by Chinese developer Mihoyo, made waves when it was announced last year, with many complaining that the game looked like it had plagiarized Zelda: Breath Of The Wild‘s most distinctive features. Now that the game is out for free on multiple platforms, you can decide for yourself how close it is to the Nintendo epic.

Available now on PC, PS4, and mobile, with a Switch release coming later, Genshin Impact’s biggest point of difference is that it’s free-to-play, with the game hoping to pull a profit through gacha mechanics. Due to being developed in China, which has strict loot box regulations, Genshin Impact’s gacha pulls are at least transparent about their drop rates.

Like Breath of the Wild, Genshin Impact features an expansive open world, climbing and running governed by a stamina bar, and even a similar graphical style. It adds more playable characters to the mix, however, as well as co-op gameplay and a combo-based combat system.

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WWE and 2K are being taken to court over the depiction of one wrestler’s sleeve tattoos. The Hollywood Reporter notes that artist Catherine Alexander has challenged these organizations over their use of her tattoo designs, present on the player model of Randy Orton, which marks the first case of a copyright dispute over tattoo art reproduction in a game that has gone to trial.

A federal judge in Illinois has given a partial summary judgment that finds that the WWE 2K game series has copied Alexander’s work, and it will now come down to a jury to decide whether this constitutes copyright infringement. The case centers around six tattoos on Orton’s arms, all of which have been recreated in-game, which Alexander never gave permission to reproduce.

This is not the first time 2K has been to court over tattoos, but when a similar challenge happened relating to NBA 2K, the courts found in favor of 2K. The case was never taken to trial.

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