 Welcome back to VG news, we have a lot of stuff to get into so we're just going to dive right in and our very first thing we're going to talk about is actually Hollow Knight Silk Song. So look this game feels like when we had to wait eight years for The Last Guardian or I guess maybe even a decade for Grand Theft Auto 6 which is coming out next year. In fact I think it's over a decade for that game at this point but here's the thing it feels like we will wait forever because Hollow Knight Silk Song was actually announced all the way back February of 2019. Now the original game Hollow Knight came out in 2017 and really saw critical success from Team Cherry. Now the developers of the game are comprised of three people so a very small team and the game has gone on to sell roughly three million units. Now we haven't had an official update on this since 2019 2.8 million was what was announced back then but that's neither here nor there. The point is that it has been a long time for this game to be in development even though it's a small team. Now there was rumors at one point that the team was hit hard by the pandemic remember they are located in South Australia but then they themselves came out and announced that is not the case and the rumors aren't true so then why is this game taken so damn long? Now you might go well they announced it in February of 2019 so has it really been that long? After all they only started development then well I would agree with you it wasn't for the fact that E3 2019 happened. Now who remembers E3 when you could actually go in person? I know I do because at E3 2019 I played Hollow Knight's silk song and even beat a boss in the game and it was running buttery smooth. Now it's entirely possible at the time what was in the demo is literally all the content they had done we don't know because Team Cherry hasn't been doing interviews and we don't know a lot about the progress of this game. Now we have had some news over the last couple of years the last time we actually had anything official come from Team Cherry was all the way back in September of 2022 when the game was confirmed by PlayStation to be coming to PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5 and then before that it was all the way back on June 12th of 2022 when it was announced that it would be day one on Xbox Game Pass on the Xbox series of systems. Now that's really cool in fact that Xbox thing felt really special because at the time Microsoft said everything being shown up would release in the next 12 calendar months. Well June 2023 came and went and Hollow Knight's silk song didn't even have an update. In fact we've had no news on this game for a long time and a lot of you guys have been really really anticipating it. Well let me just throw this out there we now have some stuff. First off on the Xbox store there has now been a page created where you can now wishlist Hollow Knight silk song so that's already a very exciting update but there's more. There's now an ESRB rating of E10+. So yeah folks the game has been sent for ratings. That's maybe the biggest news here because it does make it seem highly plausible that yes Hollow Knight's silk song is actually going to release in 2024. That's the big news here. We might actually have this thing coming so I'm really happy for Team Cherry. I'm really hyped for this game. I love what I played back at E3. My gosh five years ago. Holy crap guys this game's been in development a long time. Now we're going to be talking about Destiny and Bungie. I got a lot of details to go over. I want to make sure I get this right because there's a lot of happening with Bungie that led to this conversation today. So let's just dive right in. You guys know what Destiny is at this point. Destiny fans are in for a treat as one week from today on April 9th there will be a half hour stream by Bungie to show off the final expansion for Destiny called The Final Shape at 9 30 a.m. Pacific. This expansion was originally supposed to come out on February 27th before suffering delays. The thing is a lot may be riding on this expansion other than just making sure current Destiny players have a nice culmination to their journey. Sony acquired Bungie back in July of 2022 and while Sony owns the company the deal was one of the more complex purchasing agreements in the industry. Essentially Bungie would remain independent and free to make their own decisions on what games to make and what platforms to make them for but Sony is obviously the overall owner and would reap the profits of their ventures. The deal however didn't appear to be so cut and dry. IGN reported last December that after Sony had laid off 100 Bungie employees the tensions began to come to a head at a corporate meeting. The board at Bungie is comprised of three Sony employees and three Bungie ones with tie-breaking votes decided by Bungie CEO Pete Parsons. This is mostly an understandable arrangement. Bungie being a subsidiary naturally has Sony giving input on everything but they maintain the final say on major decisions. But the sale isn't that cut and dry. Reportedly if Bungie fails to hit certain sales targets and profits Sony gains full control of every seat on the board. Yes let me say that again if they don't meet certain sales targets and everything they will end up being 100% controlled by Sony and likely making exclusive games like every other first-party Sony studio. I just I have to emphasize this point here because this is the part that feels like that would be a normal part of being bought but wasn't normal in this deal. And the CEO of Bungie has gone on record to say Sony didn't lay off 100 employees I laid off 100 employees and in hindsight it could have been to hit certain sales and profit targets to maintain their independence. So maybe when we heard about the layoffs at Bungie it wasn't bad guy Sony necessarily more so Bungie being like hey we're really trying to stay independent. I personally would probably just bite the bullet and say hey Sony owns our ass anyways might as well just at this point go and become a fully first-party studio for Sony but hey whatever we've heard about other issues at Bungie's as well and obviously we've had delays of the DLC and other stuff going on apparently their financials not being as great as what Sony thought when they bought the company yada yada yada. So there's just a lot of drama surrounding this but hey the good news is that the DLC is actually going to be coming out and now within a week well really a week from now you're going to be able to actually see the DLC by Bungie employees so that's the positive that comes out of all of this. Now we get to talk about Prince of Persia and no we're at talking about the one that was released earlier this year by Ubisoft Prince of Persia The Lost Crown that actually was a surprise hit in that it really reviewed very well critical acclaim everyone playing the game loves it a nice Metroidvania came out of kind of nowhere and while it wasn't the Sansa time remake all of us have been waiting for it was still a very well received and well regarded game and hopefully has gotten the sales to back it up we don't have a like any definitive sales dated on the yet but I'm hoping it went well. Now as it turns out that might not be the only Prince of Persia game we're getting this year thanks to a partnership with Evil Empire so if you don't know who Evil Empire are they are the folks that made dead cells and they apparently have this rogue light experience coming for Prince of Persia later in 2024. Now this is according to some reporting out there by Tom Henderson who works for Insider Gaming so these are his sources and the interesting thing about this is that the partnership supposedly started all the way back in 2019 when the group Evil Empire and Ubisoft met at Game Developers Conference 2019 and it was through meeting some execs and developers there that they formed a deal and have been working on this game ever since so that gives it about a four year development cycle a little bit more than that it just sort of depends on when it's coming out could be a full five years it really just depends on when this got going so what I find fascinating about this of course is that dead cells is a massive hit indie game it's moved over 10 million units it is extremely critically acclaimed and won a ton of awards so Evil Empire while a newer studio especially back in 2019 is now considered one of the best indie studios out there so if they've been working on this the rogue Prince of Persia game I have to believe it's probably gonna end up being extremely good especially since it seems to be based on something we already know rogue lights that's the genre it's working in that they've already been successful with so this to me feels like a match made in heaven and could you believe that in 2024 we may indeed be getting two separate independently developed Prince of Persia games that both review very well and could be up for some sort of awards at the game awards at the end of this year that to me is crazy again he's saying that it's supposed to come out later this year hasn't been announced yet we'll have to wait and see what happens probably going to be announced this summer man am I really happy for the Prince of Persia franchise and again there's no updates on the sands of time remake I know a lot of us are waiting for that maybe we'll get updates when this is also announced maybe sometime this summer after all Ubisoft is probably going to have some sort of event this summer and Ubisoft forward to reveal news just like this now yesterday we talked about why Nintendo or how frustrating I suppose it is that Nintendo just isn't even really acknowledging the existence of Nintendo switch to and then a day later a patent is published that seems to do that very thing now patents being published publicly don't always necessarily mean anything in fact I could argue most patents published by Nintendo don't mean anything they're either for games and products that are already out and they're just updating the patents or they're just now releasing the patents or or this is the other thing sometimes they are just putting patents out for products that they're now scrapped and not going to come out as an example Nintendo has patents for the Wii vitality sensor which is a product they did announce you know a long time ago during the Wii era but never came out so Nintendo's patents like that they also have patents you know for things that have already come out so when we're talking about a patent it's also important that we know what Shintura Furukawa from Nintendo had to say about patents just last year and I want to give this right here he said we are aware that patent information is published upon application however this does not necessarily mean that it will be featured in future products now he's not wrong there is a couple things he's a little wrong about you're not your patent's not published upon application it's published upon application approval so like the patent we're talking about today was originally applied for back in 2021 but not granted until now so as you can see there was quite a gap between application and having it actually be granted in fact Nintendo were literally released products without the patent even being approved yet just submitted so a little off there although Shintura Furukawa has an accounting background and as the president of a multi-billion dollar company look he's got other people that handle all the patent stuff and all the legal paperwork so I understand if he doesn't quite grasp how this all works now the reason we're going to talk about this patent today has to do with the fact that there are times Nintendo's patents for future products do contain real information we'll give you one easy to go to example tears of the kingdom had a patent back in 2022 and that patent featured a bunch of new abilities and new ways you could use the bow and other things that for the game that hey ended up actually being present in said game and we had not known about or seen any footage or any hints towards these abilities before so it is notable that there are times Nintendo patents can point towards future things now why are we talking about all this well that's because there's a really interesting patent going on right now for the Nintendo switch dock or the dock of the future and the funny thing about this is the dock patent which was again published yesterday is really about uniqueness with a dock in fact you know once I let me go ahead and grab my current Nintendo switch dock now the thing with this dock and this is the uh Zelda OLED edition one and the reason we're bringing this up because this patent has to do with a new dock and I actually read the entire the entire patent which is very wordy very verbose and it is written in a way where it's actually probably more fun to watch paint dry than read this damn patent but thankfully Nintendo did include a bunch of imagery and what we want to focus on here is the back of the dock so you know I can remove this plate and you've got your ports here right you got your HDMI your power and a USB port then you have your two USB ports on the side as well now on some models of the switch some of these ports are painted blue but it doesn't matter because they're not USB three or 3.1 or 3.2 which are usually red but sometimes blue as well and on the switch OLED they finally updated them all just to show the color for USB 2 because that's the only speeds that the Nintendo switch USB ports run at but that's not what we're really focused on here because I actually went through this entire new dock patent to find out if there was any updates to the ports and as far as I could tell there's no technical information in here about this new dock so if you're hoping to get technical information related to switch 2 whether it's going to be a 4k output from HDMI or USB 3.0 3.1 3.2 that's not here you're not going to get that information what you will see however is this and this is what I'm just going to call the swivel so what they have done is taken the ports that are inside the back of the switch moved it to the middle and given it a swivel mechanism where you have your USB your power in and one and your HDMI port basically on one side two USB that are used to be external but now are internal on the other side and then they give you two really large cutouts on either side and you can literally twist and swivel from one side to the other to decide how your cords can come out of the back of the Nintendo switch dock now again we're calling it a Nintendo switch dock this is not a dock that exists on any current products so it's probably a switch 2 related thing if this is something that ever reached the stage Nintendo wants to release it now Nintendo does care a bit about cable management when it comes to if you remember the original Nintendo switch dock just had a tiny little slit on the side that you could take your cables out of and then on the OLED here they gave us this where it now has a little rainbow effect where you can have the cords come out the side or you can have them come out a little bit on the back so Nintendo has definitely been trying to consider how people set up the switch dock in their entertainment system so it wouldn't be surprising when switch to if they had a new way to do it but they didn't stop with just a one idea there's two ideas put in here and the other one is this image here where instead of you being able to twist inside of the back of your system to turn which way the cords come out you actually just twist the entire back of the system and then the ports are actually on the outside just like the original two USB ports here you would just have your HDMI your power in and another USB here and you would just literally grab this entire back section which is its own section and just twist it to the other side now again none of this is really telling us any new features about the switch too and if you want to dig into the patent further you'll see all those little images of the slate the tablet part now when you look at it you notice it doesn't have rails on it it doesn't it doesn't have a thicker bezel on the sides and all that but here's the thing I went through the document and all the reference numbers none of it references anything here this is likely just a crude drawing of an original switch rather than a reference to switch too but hey it is out there it is neat to look at I'll have a link to the patent down below and of course one thing I want to make sure that I do here towards the end of the story is make sure we credit the person who originally discovered this patent and again patents are all public but this is the first person that at least brought it to my attention in Mike Odyssey who's going to be on our podcast tonight and we'll definitely be talking about this patent on that podcast episode so be sure to tune in at 8 p.m. Central Time so you can hear all of our thoughts on all of this switch to weirdness with this doc design and if we even like it now we have one last story we need to dive into and that has to do with Princess Peach Showtime you know because that game reviewed well and you guys love it maybe some of you guys do love the game I want to be clear I'm not the biggest fan of Princess Peach Showtime and I definitely played it there are parts I find fun but I got to admit I'm pretty damn bored and when I'm pretty damn bored with a game I'd rather spend my time playing something that isn't that boring to me if I'm going to play a game so look this is why you haven't seen me stream it a whole bunch and and try to beat it because frankly it's not as fun as I was hoping it would be but that's okay not every game has to be for every person but what I want to point out is something about the game that does matter and that's the music the music in Princess Peach Showtime is utterly amazing and I almost stuck out playing the entire game just for said music and that matters because they have announced a Tetris 99 crossover event with a new Maximus Cup that's right baby check out this little trailer from Nintendo look this is actually pretty cool because it has peach in the background it has the different color tetris blocks but beyond that you get all of the glorious music from the game now Tetris 99 we already know is a really great game because Tetris is a really great game and this event is happening literally at midnight beginning on April 5th and heading all the way through to 11.59 p.m on April 8th and again this is just a really neat thing Nintendo has been doing with a lot of their properties and partnering up with Tetris 99 which is something they helped develop and I look guys this is just a really cool thing and honestly to me this is the best way to enjoy Princess Peach Showtime at least for me you get all the glorious music and some beautiful peach imagery and you get to play an actual good game instead of having to suffer through what is I would say a mediocre game at best if you want if you want to be kind and I get it some of you guys might love Princess Peach Showtime and I know it feels like I'm slamming out of it I realize not every game for every person and it just so happens that as much as I enjoy my initial time with the demo of Princess Peach Showtime man after playing it for several hours in a row I really felt like I was just banging my head against the door listening to you know someone scratching a chalkboard or something it kind of felt a little torturous I still think it's a pretty high quality experience but it look there's always this joke that Nintendo games are for babies and I almost 1000% disagree with that statement but this is the one game where I'm like okay this is this game is is is meant for like a maybe my maybe my baby niece right I have a niece uh who's who's you know she just turned three maybe she's the target for this one anyways guys you guys are awesome and amazing thank you so much for tuning in we'll catch you guys in the next episode of VG news or on the podcast tonight it's been real it's been fun catch you in the next one