It’s Sunday, meaning it’s time for us to name our winner and our loser from the last week in tech.
Quite a bit has happened over this last week. Amazon officially announced a date for its Prime Day summer sale, Nintendo announced a wealth of new Switch titles at its June Nintendo Direct and Mark Zuckerberg agreed to take on Elon Musk in a cage fight we hope we never have to see.
Scroll down to discover our winner and our loser from this past week…
Winner: Mario fans
Nintendo shared some exciting news for Mario fans at this week’s Nintendo Direct event.
The latest Direct of the year included a look at the new characters and areas coming with this year’s Pokemon Scarlet and Violet expansions, along with more details about the upcoming Pikmin 4. The Switch-maker also announced five major updates to the Mario franchise.
The biggest news comes in the form of a new 2D platformer titled Super Mario Bros. Wonder. The game includes Luigi, Peach, Daisy, Toad and Yoshi and, of course, Mario (in both human and elephant form).
The twist comes in the form of a new power-up called the Wonder Flower.
“When you touch a Wonder Flower in the game, the wonders of the world unlock – pipes could come alive, hordes of enemies may appear, characters might change their looks, for example – transforming the gameplay in unpredictable ways,” explained Nintendo.
The company also announced a remake of the classic SNES game Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars (simply titled Super Mario RPG) and a new Wario game named WarioWare: Move It!, with all three games set to come to the Switch before the end of the year.
Nintendo also teased a new Princess Peach game and a port of the 3DS’s Luigi’s Mansion: Dark Moon, both of which will be coming to the Switch in 2024.
Loser: Microsoft
Our loser this week is Microsoft after the company announced it’ll be raising the prices of both the Xbox Series X console and Xbox Game Pass in the UK.
Starting August 13, the Xbox Series X will cost UK shoppers £479.99 up from £449.99. That’s a £30 increase putting the top-end Xbox in line with the PlayStation 5, a console that saw its own controversial price hike just one year prior.
The cost of Xbox Game Pass will also be increasing worldwide this summer, meaning gamers will need to fork out £12.99 a month instead of £10.99 for Game Pass Ultimate, or £8.99 instead of £7.99 for a standard Game Pass subscription.
“We’ve held on our prices for consoles for many years and have adjusted the prices to reflect the competitive conditions in each market,” Xbox’s head of communications Kari Perez said in a statement shared by The Verge.
All that being said, If you’ve been putting off picking up the current-gen Xbox, now might be the best time to do it. The console price hike won’t come into effect until August 13, meaning you have just under three weeks to bag the Series X for its original RRP.
Alternatively, you could pick the Series X up for its usual price next time you’re over in the US seeing as the States won’t be seeing the same increase (that is, provided you have enough space in your hand luggage to lug the console home with you).
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Editorial independence
Editorial independence means being able to give an unbiased verdict about a product or company, with the avoidance of conflicts of interest. To ensure this is possible, every member of the editorial staff follows a clear code of conduct.
Professional conduct
We also expect our journalists to follow clear ethical standards in their work. Our staff members must strive for honesty and accuracy in everything they do. We follow the IPSO Editors’ code of practice to underpin these standards.
