As the Switch moves into the twilight years of an especially lengthy lifespan, Nintendo has increasingly turned toward remasters of its back catalog to fill out the release calendar. This is the context for Luigi’s Mansion 2 HD, a remastered version of a relatively recent 2013 release on 3DS. The sequel is a game that served as a sharpened, refined take on the ideas presented by the first Luigi’s Mansion–and laid the groundwork for the even better Luigi’s Mansion 3–so having access to that piece of the series’ history untethered from the 3DS makes it feel that much more valuable. While the recency makes it feel less essential than some remasters of older classics like Metroid Prime or Super Mario RPG, it’s still just as fun to solve puzzles, schlurp ghosts into your jerry-rigged vacuum cleaner, and enjoy some gentle scares along the way.
The original Luigi’s Mansion was a cute diversion-verging-on-tech-demo that helped cement Luigi’s personality as Mario’…
Smilegate’s recently released PC game Lost Ark continues to soar on Steam, recently surpassing 1.3 million concurrent players on its way to becoming Steam’s second most-popular game of all time based on player numbers.
Lost Ark is also only the fifth game ever to pass 1 million concurrent players on Steam, the others being Cyberpunk 2077, Dota 2, CS: Go, and PUBG, according to SteamDB. Lost Ark reached a peak concurrent player record of 1.325 million to become Steam’s second-biggest game ever. It now only trails PUBG, which reached an astonishing 3.25 million peak concurrent players years ago.
Following its early access launch for people who bought the founder’s pack, Lost Ark released officially for everyone as a free-to-play game on February 11 with some notable fixes at launch. The release was delayed slightly, but did eventually release that day.
Lost Ark has also seen huge numbers of viewers on Twitch(which is owned by Lost Ark’s publisher Amazon). The game s…