Get Your Game On: A Gay Girls’ Baseball Team and YouTube Woes

Happy October! What games are you playing lately? I played a bit of Hitman: Sniper, an Android and iOS game where you play as a sniper tasked with increasingly difficult challenges (e.g., kill a guard by making another guard fall onto them). It only has two maps, but for one dollar, it’s a good time waster if you’re looking for a sniper game.

As always, let us know in the comments or on Twitter what games you’re obsessed with or looking forward to. Here’s some games news and links that have been on our radar this week.

Butterfly Soup: “gay Asian girls playing baseball and falling in love”

I just started Butterfly Soup, the new game from Brianna Lei.

Few things make me as happy as seeing “own stories,” and how many stories have you seen published on any medium that are based on the lives of queer women of color athletes? The music in this game is immediately addicting, and the characters have already inspired lots of fan art.

Voice Actor Strike Ending

The voice actor strike is (almost) over. After an 11-month strike, the largest voice actors union and a number of game companies have reached a tentative agreement. The union will review the agreement in October.

YouTube Monetization Woes

A number of YouTube creators found their end card links to Patreon removed by YouTube. YouTube is pushing a new “YouTube Partners Program” that requires creators to have at least 10,000 views before they can join the program. Only then can they include external links in end cards. YouTube has already had issues lately with demonetizing videos with queer content.

Nintendo News

The SNES Classic released last week. For $80, you get 21 games, including never-before-released Star Fox 2. Unfortunately you can’t add games or play any old SNES cartridges, but you do get classics like Final Fantasy VI and A Link to the Past.

Stardew Valley is coming to the Switch! No release date yet, but it’s exciting to see such a beloved game expanding to more platforms.

If you like the nitty-gritty details of your favorite gaming worlds, The Legend of Zelda Encyclopedia is coming next year from Dark Horse.

And lastly, Nintendo Switch was the top-selling console in the U.S. in August. That’s huge!

News Tidbits

• Are you playing Cuphead? Here’s a list of tips for making its difficulty less frustrating.
• Do you like John Boyega narrating things? He narrated the new Star Wars Battlefront II trailer.

• Final Fantasy XV got a September update with a new event added.
• Here’s a list of seven new indie games about food, including the aforementioned Butterfly Soup.
• The developers of PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds had some beef with the developers of Fortnite. Both games feature battle royale-style gameplay.
• Naughty Dog released a new The Last of Us poster for Outbreak Day. There’s a subtle silhouette of a wolf’s face contained within the flames. Let speculation commence on its meaning!

• A new game based on Battlestar Galactica released recently. It’s available on Steam.
• Any Dota 2 players here? Apparently its patches haven’t been releasing as quickly as hoped.
• Atari has a new console out in Spring 2018, the Ataribox. It sounds like it will have a really hard time attracting a target market.

Upcoming Releases

New games out this month include:

• Middle-earth: Shadow of War for PS4, PC, and Xbox One (Oct. 10)
• Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga + Bowser’s Minions for 3DS (Oct. 6)
• The Evil Within 2 for PS4, PC, and Xbox One (Oct. 13)
• Fire Emblem Warriors for 3DS and Switch (Oct. 20)
• Destiny 2 for PC (Oct. 24)
• Assassin’s Creed: Origins for PS4, PC, and Xbox One (Oct. 27)
• Super Mario Odyssey for Switch (Oct. 27)
• A Mortician’s Tale releases on October 18th.

• Red Dead Redemption II will release in Spring 2018 from Rockstar Games. Here’s the latest trailer.
• Harley Quinn will appear in the second episode of Telltale Games’ Batman: The Enemy Within.
• Assassin’s Creed: Origins will have a combat-free educational mode out in 2018 that intends to teach players about ancient Egypt.
• Monster Hunter World is coming to PS4 and Xbox One in January 2018.