Video game headlines: Smash World Tour, 'Marvel's Midnight Suns'

Smash World Tour Championship canceled

In a statement on Nov. 29, Smash World Tour said that they must cancel the Smash World Tour Championship and 2023 Smash World Tour following a notice from Nintendo, the publisher of the “Super Smash Bros.” franchise. The group received the notice the night of Nov. 23 without warning, telling them they would not receive a commercial license to continue operating.

Smash World Tour (SWT) is a previously established group that connected 6,400 live events with over 325,000 in-person entrants in 2022 alone. This made Smash World Tour the largest esports tour in history. The originally planned Championships had a prize pool of over $250,000, while the 2023 Smash World Tour was planned to have a prize pool of over $350,000.

Nintendo later made a statement to IGN regarding the shutdown decision. In their statement, Nintendo said its “decision was solely based on our assessment of the proposals submitted by the SWT and our evaluation of their unlicensed activities.” They also added that “any partner that we grant a license to has to meet the high standards we require when it comes to the health and safety of our fans.”

Given this news, some players have dropped out of the Panda Cup. Panda Cup is the first official Nintendo-licensed “Super Smash Bros.” circuit in North America. The championships for Panda Cup will be held Dec. 16 to 18.

In response to Nintendo canceling SWT, YouTuber and streamer Ludwig announced the “Scuffed World Tour” to which he would be inviting the top eight players from each SWT bracket. He has offered up a $50,000 prize pool for the event, which will be held Dec. 18, the last day of Panda Cup.

To end their statement, SWT expressed hope that “Nintendo reconsiders how it is currently proceeding with their relationship with the Smash community, as well as its partners.”

Minecraft speedrunner exposed as a cheat

The Minecraft speedrunner MinecrAvenger has had their world records stripped from speedrun.com leaderboards after allegations of cheating have recently arisen. MinecrAvenger played a big role in exposing popular YouTuber Dream for cheating in his Minecraft speedruns in 2020.

There are two types of Minecraft speedruns: random and seeded. In a random speedrun, players randomly generate a world and try to defeat the Ender Dragon as fast as possible, while in a seeded run, the world is generated the same for all players. This means the items that a player finds in a random run are randomly generated according to some predetermined rate.

This predetermined rate has been used to determine if a speedrunner is cheating. Minecraft speedrunner Feinberg did the calculations required to have the luck that MinecrAvenger had in one of his record-setting runs — the odds are just under one in 28 billion.

This logic was the same that caused Dream to get caught cheating: modifying loot tables to be more in the player’s favor. After nearly a month of silence following initial accusations, MinecrAvenger admitted to cheating by injecting their own code into mods.

‘Marvel’s Midnight Suns’ releases to mostly positive reviews

On Dec. 2, “Marvel’s Midnight Suns” released for Xbox Series X/S, PlayStation 4/5, PC, and Nintendo Switch. According to review aggregator OpenCritic, the game has a top critic average of 83, and 91 percent of critics recommending the game. This has earned the game a “Strong” rating on OpenCritic.

Many critics cite the game as having a great turn-based combat system but lacking in story. Dan Stapleton from IGN says, “Marvel's 'Midnight Suns' is an expansive tactical RPG that makes great use of card game mechanics to inject variety and unpredictability into its excellent combat.” Other critics praise the game for being fun and well-designed and worth putting some time into.

Official Mystery Flesh Pit National Park game canceled

After just 10 days on Kickstarter, a project for a Mystery Flesh Pit National Park video game has been canceled. At the time of the project’s cancellation, the project had received $12,622 of its $300,000 goal. The last three days the project was live, a number of backers canceled their pledge.

Mystery Flesh Pit National Park is a project by Trevor Roberts that started as a worldbuilding exercise and turned into much more. The project describes a national park in West Texas that features an enormous subterranean organism of indeterminate size and origin that is embedded deep within the earth. The official website for the project features a variety of media associated with the project that give insight into what Mystery Flesh Pit National Park really is.

The Kickstarter was paired with a message from Village Fox Media, the to-be developers of the game. “Unfortunately, it looks like we're not going to make our goal. As much as it hurts to leave it go, that's just how things happen sometimes. Instead of dragging it out for the remainder of the campaign, we're being proactive in moving on to other projects.”