Epic’s mass layoffs have fans worried about games like Rocket League. The creative director of Sonic Team is puzzled by a fan’s tattoo. Devil May Cry 5 and a bunch of other games seem like they are coming to Switch 2. Welcome to your Morning Checkpoint for March 27, 2026. How much more bad news can game companies fit in before the end of the fiscal quarter?
We’re less than a week out from the release of the second Mario movie. Will it be good? Will it top the last one’s $1+ billion box office gross? Will much of the original score once again be replaced by licensed hit singles primed for meme-fueled revivals on TikTok? I have my seats booked and am ready to smuggle in all of the snacks for the kids. In the meantime, Elizabeth Warren has questions for MrBeast. Don’t we all?
It sounds like Wario is in The Mario Galaxy Movie but Waluigi isn’t
Chris Pratt, who voices, Mario, and Charlie Day, who voices Luigi, were invited on the Tonight Show with noted gaming buff and advertiser-friendly stooge Jimmy Fallon to hype the movie and also answer a fan theory pop quiz. The duo was supposed to press a red shell if the answer to a question was no and a question block if the answer was yes.
Is there a third Mario brother in the movie? No. Is there a a non-Mario character in the movie? Yes. That’s seemingly the already confirmed appearance by Fox McCloud, though some fans will no doubt hope it’s Samus, Kirby, or one of the other Smash Bros. crossover favorites. But what about Wario and Waluigi? In response to that question, Pratt and Day pressed both buttons. One interpretation is that it was a yes to Wario, whose presence has been indicated in leaks, and a no to Waluigi. So maybe Nintendo is still saving a surprise or two for the final release.
Despite mass layoffs, Epic claims Rocket League isn’t going anywhere
“The Psyonix team is a core part of Epic’s game development,” a spokesperson told PCGamesN. “Rocket League is still a priority, and the team continues to work on making a great game for the community.” The free-to-play car soccer game remains a weekly go-to for millions of players, even if the only thing that changes about it is a conveyor belt of branded microtransactions running through the in-game shop.
Sonic creator is confused by fan getting the blue blur tattooed on his elbow
As the original designer, I’m happy to see it, but why on earth did he get that tattoo there…?
不意に自分の作品に出会う瞬間ｗ https://t.co/TorPRrbNIU— Kazuyuki Hoshino (@KazuyukiHoshino) March 26, 2026
A viral tweet this week showed someone with Sonic, Tails, and Knuckles all in spinning ball form tattooed on his elbow as a reference to 2003’s PS2 classic Sonic Heroes. “As the original designer, I’m happy to see it, but why on earth did he get that tattoo there?” wrote Kazuyuki Hoshino, creative director at Sonic Team an art director on Sonic Heroes. The fan in question later appeared to write back, “Not sure how to answer that, it was a very painful time.”
Devil May Cry 5 is reportedly coming to Switch 2, as are a bunch of other ports
That’s according to a Taiwan ratings board leak. The others include Clive Barker’s Hellraiser: Revival, Blood West, UN:Me, and Hell Is Us. The Switch 2 dev kit restrictions seem to be loosening. Should we be expecting another Nintendo Direct soon?
What if the N64 had an open-world game the size of Skyrim?
That’s the question guiding YouTuber James Lambert’s latest homebrew experiment which attempts to create an N64 game with a sprawling map (via FRVR). “This game has a draw distance on the scale of games like Skyrim,” he said. “You can stand on one corner of the map and see all the way to the other side.”
It’s currently about four times the size of the game world from Zelda: Twilight Princess, and Lambert has been updating the project to get the framerate stable and address other bugs. It’s not clear that you can really do anything in the game at this stage, but it’s a neat experiment in spec-maxxing a retro artifact.
It’s rougher than ever out there for laid-off developers
Deus Ex composer Alexander Brandon told PC Gamer he sent out 50 resumes last year and only got one call back. All of the snake oil selling around generative AI isn’t helping. “There are CEOs saying nobody’s going to have a job in, like, two seconds, and we’re all going to be in a utopia,” he said. “Money’s just going to flow into our mailboxes and we’re going to turn into Wall-E or whatever. I’m just like, stop the techbro crap—I think people are sick of that.”
He continued, “People drink all of this Kool-Aid and are like ‘if we don’t use this language, we are behind.’ We need to be behind. We need to acknowledge our limitations, and we need to be able to say, as humans, ‘we can’t keep pushing ourselves through this shitty economy and shitty situation.’ Not to soapbox too much.”