Xbox, the FTC and Elephant Mario — quite the week | Kaser Focus

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If you had told me at the beginning of the week that I was going to be following along as Xbox faced down the Federal Trade Commission and see Mario transform into a bipedal elephant, I would have taken the day so I could go lay down. Don’t even get me started on the part where someone was apparently controlling a subpar submersible with a dinky Bluetooth Logitech controller — I’m still trying to process that. Basically what I’m saying is it’s been a whirlwind of a week.

Let’s start with the Nintendo Direct from the middle of the week. Nintendo held the Direct to show off the games that are coming out for the Switch in the back half of 2023, and it didn’t disappoint. It showed off Detective Pikachu 2, the Super Mario RPG remake, Pikmin 4 and Super Mario Bros Wonder (with its aforementioned Elephant Mario). The show featured a few smaller but equally interesting announcements, such as cozy titles Palia and Fae Farm coming to Switch, WarioWare: Move It and a Princess Peach title due sometime in 2024. At least it made that giant cup of coffee I drank before watching worth it.

The Xbox FTC sessions began this week, with the console maker defending its acquisition of Activision Blizzard before the skeptical commission. Among the other popcorn-worthy moments of the show so far, Microsoft has now said to the figurative face of a federal body that it lost the console wars. It also implied that part of the motivation for the acquisition was the fear that Sony would make Starfield PS-exclusive, after the Deathloop and Ghostwire: Tokyo contracts. Sarah Bond admitted that most players don’t use XCloud and the upcoming