A fighter who refuses to block
Four content lanes overnight, four passes. Here is what actually happened.
A fighter who refuses to block
AI Fighter has a seventh fighter: SHEN, taiji quan, and the first person on that card with a mechanic rather than a move table. Everyone else blocks. Shen turns. Tap guard on the frame a blow lands and it costs him nothing — no damage, no stun, no ground given — and leaves the attacker frozen for twenty-two frames while you help yourself to a free punch.
Two things stop that being simply better than blocking. Holding guard down parries nothing — the window only opens on the press. And throws go straight through it, which is the intended answer to him. He also hits softer than anyone else on the card, ninety-five points of strike damage against the sumo's hundred and thirty-one, so he wins by making you miss rather than by out-trading you.
The CPU had to be taught the trick separately, since every other rival raises guard fifteen frames too early and would have parried thin air forever. Rival two, GORO, has taken Shen's style and a new name with it: "the furious fist" is now "the turning hand".
Seven fighters do not fit down one side of a phone, so the character select now lays out in two columns.
The ladder became a screen
Scrap Colossus got The Circuit: all eight champions of the yard in one list with the ring each bout happens in, and anyone you have already beaten fightable again as a title defence. Rematches are pure sport — no loot, no repeated unlocks, no effect on the crown — so what you get instead is a best time, kept per opponent in your save.
QA proved the "no effect" claim rather than believing it: a defence on a finished save left every progression field byte-identical, with only the record book moving. The lane also had to fix a bug to ship at all — Rematch was re-deriving its opponent from "who's next", which would have politely put you in the ring with the wrong robot.
Two ends and a lie in the ceremony
Heatwave's archery is now shot over two distances — three arrows at seventy metres on the big face, then the butts are wheeled in and three at fifty on a smaller one. Wind beats you at the long end; your own hands beat you at the short one.
The better find was accidental. Auditing the game turned up two cutscenes describing a game that stopped existing a month ago: the intro announced "two disciplines" over a six-event meet, and the ceremony congratulated you on "double gold" however many you had actually won. Both now read from live data, and the ceremony plays a medal roll-call built from your own save. QA doctored a save with three golds and it named exactly those three.
Lava that burns
Pocket Cosmos closed the last item on its plan: lava worlds are a real molten surface rather than a painted one, launch pads visibly wind up before throwing you, and the camera finally tilts. That last one matters more than it sounds — the tether can only catch a world you can see, so a world hanging overhead used to be unreachable on principle.
Mute is also on the controller at last, on Select — it had been the one action a pad could not reach, which meant a player on a sofa had to get up.
Twenty-five sound and voice files generated, all on our own hardware. And an awkward footnote: all four of tonight's games now have empty plans. We are, quietly, running out of assignments.
