#71: GameFreak suffered a super leak

A huge treasure trove of Pokemon data has just been revealed.

Welcome, welcome, welcome to a new edition of the overkill digest newsletter, your go-to source to everything handheld gaming and then some.

When you're read this, I’m likely still driving back home, so I hope nothing else broke during this long drive, so bear with me if I’ve missed something.

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...and with that, let’s get to it!

What happened this week

Over 1TB of GameFreak data has been leaked. This is huge. GameFreak has been hacked, and over night, more and more information has been released to the wild: from beta-versions of basically every Pokémon to project data of already-released games (including meeting notes!) over to leaks about upcoming projects like games, movies, TV shows and more. Nintendo must be fuming right now, so I won’t link directly to any of the already released data, but if you want to learn more check out @CentroLeaks on X/Twitter.
The Steam Deck is launching in Australia. Valve announced as much during PAX Australia this week. It will ship in mid November and prices start at AU $649.
343 Industries is now called Halo Studios, and Halo will switch to Unreal Engine 5. I’m ambivalent about the name change, but not the biggest fan of the engine switch. There’s still too much wrong with Unreal Engine 5, and I’m sad about a custom engine dying. Though this third-person mode might just be worse.

Related read:

Leaked Anbernic handheld features dual display setup. Take this with a grain of salt, but our friends over at Retrododo found leaked data of what might look like an upcoming Anbernic handheld featuring two displays. DS/3DS emulation, anyone?
Red Dead Redemption is finally coming to PC. Finally! It only took 14 years. I never played the first RDR, and never finished Red Dead Redemption 2. Now, I can finally catch up. The game releases October 29th (for $50!).
Nintendo released… an alarm clock? When the internet first learned about an upcoming Nintendo product, people went wild with theories. But I doubt anyone had a Nintendo-themed bedside alarm on their bingo list. It comes in at $100, features over thirty wake-up scenes, and has some interesting features like motion tracking. My theory is Nintendo was sitting on a ton of unused motion sensors used in their Joy-Cons that they decided to reuse them in this product.
Many Of 2024's biggest games don't play well (or at all) on Steam Deck Interesting take from Zack Zwiezen over at Kotaku. Zack argues that the Steam Deck is fast reaching the end of its lifecycle with more and more of the latest AAA games not running well or at all on Valve’s handheld. I share this take: I find myself opting to play games on one of my Z1 Extreme based handhelds more and more, with the Steam Deck slowly turning into an indie machine. Valve needs to bring a new device in 2025.
We might get a remaster of the OG God of War games. Take this with a grain of salt, but a leaker shared that we’ll soon get remasters of the God of War Greek Saga, planned for early 2025.
Valve will warn you that you don’t own your Steam games. This is primarily a change in messaging, since nothing has changed on Valve’s side, but thanks to a new California law, Valve will now tell us on purchase that we’re only buying a license to a game, and not actually the game. So if a publisher decides to nuke the game, we might lose the right of access. (GOG is safe from this, since all games are DRM free.)
Lime3DS is now available on Google Play. Lime3DS is a Citra fork, still in active development.
Junk Store might be coming to Steam. This is a weird one. Junk Store is a Decky loader plugin that allows you to access the Epic Store and GOG directly from the Game Mode on the Steam Deck. Now, there’s a Steam entry available for the plugin which would allow you to download Junk Store like you download a game. But I doubt that this will see the light of day. It’s one thing to create a landing page (from what I know, anyone with a Steam dev account can create one) but a completely other one to actually release this. Too many open questions for now.
Soon, you can buy Xbox games directly on Android. A new court ruling will allow Microsoft to directly sell Xbox games on Android, and let you play these games on your Android devices thanks to cloud streaming. Additionally, Microsoft will allow players to stream their owned games without the need to have a Game Pass subscription.