Enlarge / Artist’s conception of Sony executives welcoming the Switch version of Fortnite into working with their network in the future, perhaps?

Sony Interactive Entertainment America President and CEO Shawn Layden offered some vague hope to PS4 players who want to play with those on other consoles this week. In response to a question from Eurogamer at Spain’s Gamelab conference, Layden said he is “confident” the company will come up with some sort of cross-console play solution in the future.

“We’re hearing it,” Layden said of player complaints surrounding the inability for PS4 games to play well with other consoles. “We’re looking at a lot of the possibilities. You can imagine that the circumstances around that affect a lot more than just one game. I’m confident we’ll get to a solution which will be understood and accepted by our gaming community, while at the same time supporting our business.”

While Microsoft and Nintendo have opened up their online networks in recent years, Sony has consistently blocked developer efforts to let games on the PlayStation Network interact with versions of those same games on other consoles (though many PS4 games do allow cross-platform play with PC and mobile phone versions). The issue has gained increased visibility in recent weeks as Fortnite players on Nintendo Switch have discovered that playing the game on PS4 permanently locks their existing game accounts from compatibility with other consoles.

We’ve tackled Hearthstone and Warframe, and now our peek behind the curtains at the unsolved mysteries of gaming continues with what could still justifiably be called the world’s most popular game: the MOBA mega-hit League of Legends.

These are turbulent times for the monster e-sports giant, with world-class players like Faker playing Taric mid, and AD carries resorting bruisers in the bot lane (I don’t know what any of that means, but Ars Senior Space Editor Eric Berger is an avid LoL player and assures me that the above is not gibberish). As the Summer Split gets going, we wanted to go straight to the source for league gameplay to understand where the company has come from and where it’s going. In this interview with Greg Street, LoL lead designer at Riot Games, we delved into some of the mysteries behind the world’s most popular game, from champion re-works to how many champions are too many, and even into the game’s recharged lore.

Enlarge (credit: Enhance Games)

When the rhythm-puzzle game Lumines launched alongside the PSP in 2004, it maxed out that portable system’s two coolest features: a big, bold screen and room for tons of high-fidelity techno songs on a UMD. Lumines‘ striking aesthetic was largely thanks to the PSP difference, it seemed to declare, and it heartily one-upped anything on the similarly new Nintendo DS.

The EDM-loaded series has since appeared on pretty much every system imaginable, but this week’s Lumines Remastered is the first since the PSP original to cash in on new, unique hardware in dramatic fashion. The series’ return on current-gen consoles and PCs may seem unremarkable to some players, but a certain kind of Nintendo Switch owner is poised to get the most out of it.

More specifically, we’re talking about a weird kind of Switch owner—with spare Joy-Cons lying around and an outfit with tight-fitting pockets. Behold: gaming’s trippiest “rave” experience yet.

That $59.88 price is looking downright quaint these days. (credit: Imgur)

Fortnite owes much of its massively scaled success to the fact that anyone can download and play the game’s battle royale mode for free. But that free-to-play popularity hasn’t stopped people from paying heavily inflated prices of up to $450 for disc-based retail copies of the game.

Gearbox Software published a limited number of physical disc copies of Fortnite for PS4 and Xbox One (and the PC in Europe) alongside the game’s paid Early Access release last July. That $60 release—which was focused on the player-vs-environment “Save the World” mode—came well before the game started getting outsized attention for the launch of its free-to-play battle royale mode in late September.

The retail discs, which have been out of stock at major retailers for months now, are quickly becoming sought-after collector’s items for rabid Fortnite fans. A quick search of recently completed eBay listings shows retail console copies of Fortnite (including new, used, and sealed copies) selling for an average of about $130 (and a median of $110) over the past two weeks. Used copies from Amazon’s third-party sellers are currently going for a minimum of $175 for a bare disc without the case.

Enlarge / Lap-based keyboard-and-mouse solutions like the Razer Turret may soon be fully compatible with the Xbox One (credit: Razer)

It has been just over two years now since Microsoft’s Phil Spencer promised that mouse-and-keyboard support for the Xbox One was “not years away, it’s more like months away.” Though that’s a promise Microsoft has echoed a few times in the years since, thus far Minecraft is the only game on the platform with official support for the PC player’s controller of choice.

Over the weekend, though, Windows Central got its hands on a purported internal Microsoft presentation from earlier in the year detailing plans for the impending rollout of robust mouse-and-keyboard support for the Xbox One.

The developer-focused presentation, which also integrates lessons from Razer’s living room-focused lapboard peripheral, suggested an April API rollout to developers ahead of a planned fall announcement of support for players. It’s unclear, though, if those plans have changed since the presentation was given (Microsoft did not respond to a request for comment Update: A Microsoft spokesperson told Ars Technica, “We are always exploring new ways to improve the Xbox experience, but have nothing further to share at this time”).

The American Vandal creative team chats with Ars at ATX TV Festival 2018. (video link)

AUSTIN, Texas—Among the reasons Netflix’s American Vandal worked: dedication, not just to the bit but to the DNA. The creative team had an obsession with true crime documentaries, obviously. But they didn’t set out to make an homage, showrunner Dan Lagana and co-creators Dan Perrault and Tony Yacenda told Ars at this summer’s ATX TV Festival. Instead, they wanted to approach their fictional, scripted high school drama the exact same way Sarah Koenig (Serial) or Andrew Jarecki (The Jinx) would—like they were creating the most important documentary in the world.

“We didn’t want to do a parody. We love that stuff,” Yacenda later told the crowd during the show’s panel. “Sarah Koenig is a genius, what she did bringing us in as an unreliable narrator told a story in a way journalists wouldn’t before. We thought maybe we can do this for fictional narrative… if we use the tools our favorite documentarians use to get the audience to care, could we get people to care about dicks?”

Valve’s march toward launching new virtual reality video games—perhaps up to three of them—got more interesting on Thursday with the announcement of an update to the company’s next official piece of VR hardware. After a quiet 2016 unveil, the “Knuckles” controller is back with a major revision.

Dubbed Knuckles EV2, the mold-to-your-hand controller is still a developer-only prototype, but a huge dump of official information reveals how far Valve has gone to craft what might be the ultimate VR controller: a smart twist on how hands work in virtual space and a bonus slew of buttons for older legacy games.

Enlarge / A shot of the leaked DevMenu tool that lets users upload custom profile pictures on the Switch (including ones much less safe for work than this one). (credit: Mizumi / Twitter)

Nintendo only lets users choose from a limited number of preset profile pictures (or custom-made Miis) for their online avatar on the Switch network. So at least one Reddit user was quite surprised to see pornographic profile pictures showing up on the user-placed balloons in Super Mario Odyssey‘s online “Balloon World” mode.

“The picture was changed several times over the course of my time patrolling, each picture being pornographic content,” Redditor ewaison writes, including links to (censored) screenshots of the offending profile pictures in their post. “There are multiple [sic] of these balloons all being made by the same user. This is obviously intentional, and made to upset children.”

The reported imagery seems to trace its source back to the recent leak of an internal Switch developer menu online. We’ve seen pictures and reports of that previously dev-kit-exclusive system menu in the past, but users are now able to make use of an unpatchable Switch exploit to install the leaked menu on standard retail Switch hardware (as seen in his video).

Enlarge / BEHOLD YOUR WORST NIGHTMARE!

Batting a ball back and forth is one of the oldest concepts in video games, dating back to the days of William Higinbotham’s Tennis for Two oscilloscope experiments in the ‘50s. In the decades since, countless games have refined the idea of what virtual tennis can be, from as-faithful-as-possible recreations of the real sport to ultra-accessible, over-the-top arcade-inspired battles of reflex and positioning.

Like previous Mario Tennis games, Mario Tennis Aces sits far on the side of the over-the-top accessibility side of the equation. Simple controls and an ultra-forgiving hit positioning system make it easy enough for even complete gaming neophytes to get into a quick game. But Aces also adds a bit more depth to the series, introducing a new power meter system that adds a new layer of psychological brinksmanship to the proceedings.

At its most heated moments, Aces starts to resemble a fighting game more than a tennis game, and it’s all the better for it—especially when you’re playing against another human.

The best defense…

The basics here will be familiar to anyone who has played a Mario Tennis game before. As the ball comes over the net, you run to where it’s going to land, hit a button to prepare your shot and use the analog stick to aim that shot to one side of the court or the other. The opponent does the same in a battle of relative positioning that ends when someone fails to return the ball.

Video game collectible maker Fangamer is now seeking Kickstarter funding for the Flip Grip, a new Nintendo Switch holster that lets you more easily and portably play select games in their vertical “TATE mode” orientation.

The Flip Grip was first publicly mulled last April by Retronauts podcast co-host and classic gaming expert Jeremy Parish, who’s working with engineer Mike Choi on the device. Parish then teased the grip in March as a way to hold the Switch and two Joy-Con controllers comfortably in your hands with the screen oriented vertically.