Happy Friday, and welcome to Replay, WIRED's videogame news roundup. Some big shakeups in the streaming world this week, and Fortnite continues to pull out all the stops to stay on top. Let's get caught up on the biggest gaming headlines, starting now.
Ninja is arguably the most popular streamer ever, and he's no longer on Twitch. As reported by Polygon, Ninja, aka Tyler Blevins, announced on Thursday that he's leaving Twitch.tv for Mixer, exclusively broadcasting on the comparatively smaller, more niche service.
Niche is a relative term here, though; while Twitch.tv is a part of Amazon's massive internet monopoly, Mixer is owned by Microsoft, which is investing in the platform in the hopes of getting a piece of the growing industry. No word on what caused the switch, though rumors of a big payout from Microsoft are swirling, naturally. In a video, Ninja explained the move, saying, "It's the same me, just a different platform," and pointing out that his first game as a professional player was Halo, so returning to the Microsoft fold is, maybe, a little like coming home.
You've probably never heard of Mizzurna Falls, but it's an important bit of history. One of the earliest truly open-world games, the Twin Peaks-y detective story has an influence that you can feel in other titles like Deadly Premonition, and whose ideas about navigation in 3-D open spaces predate popularizers like Grand Theft Auto 3 by years.
And, as Kotaku reports, it's now, for the first time ever, playable in English. Thanks to intrepid fan translators and modders, a fully translated English version of the PlayStation 1 game is available online, though you'll have to get an emulator to play it. Warning, though, the primary link in this story has been pulled, and apparently the version released likes to crash a lot. If you go digging it up, you've been warned.
You might remember that Respawn Entertainment, the developers behind Apex Legends, were first known for the brilliant Titanfall shooters, which made their name on an inventive mixture of on-foot gunplay and rad giant robot fighting action. But one thing you might notice about Apex Legends is that, while an excellent game, it has no giant robots.
Enter: Fortnite, gaming's perpetual one-upper. For the tenth season of the battle royale shooter, Rock Paper Shotgun reports, Epic is adding its usual limited-time bells and whistles to the game, and this time those additions includ giant robots that you can climb inside and pilot. Each mech will require two pilots, one for weapons and one for locomotion, and presumably comes with an inscription inside the cockpit that reads, "Titanfall who?"
OK, but have you ever actually sat down and played through Starcraft's campaign? It's a beautiful little work of ugly science fiction, all dirty space marines and terrifying parasitic aliens. As a general rule, I'm bad at real-time strategy games. I don't have enough patience for those sorts of systems to ever learn then and reach toward mastery. But playing Starcraft against the computer is deeply, abidingly satisfying to me. At least, until the expansions, then it gets too hard. Like I said: not very good.
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