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Nintendo saved perhaps the best until towards the end at its Nintendo Direct with the announcement trailer for Metroid Prime 4: Beyond with the only downside being we will have to wait until next year to get our hands on it.
Samus Aran is back and it may well be with the game coming in 2025 that we will be playing on enhanced hardware in the form of Nintendo Switch 2. Of course, nothing was said about that but the timelines could end up lining up which could end up making the game look even better than it does in the trailer below.
We got to see two minutes of the game at Nintendo Direct in the epic trailer including lots of CGI and some gameplay footage which looked pretty smooth as the FPS sections with Samus really showed the game off.
It’s over seven years now since Nintendo first said it was working on Metroid Prime 4. As is the current trend in gaming at the moment we now get a subtitle after a colon, hence the :Beyond.

Besides the FPS shooting section, we also got a look at Samus morphing into a large ball rolling down a track between rooms. Again it all looked super smooth and shows that the Switch – if indeed that is what the game was running on, can still hold its own when its games are perfectly optimized.
We have waiting since 2007 when Metroid Prime 3 came out, and while we have had several remasters it was way back at E3 (remember that) in 2017 we first got a sniff that this would be coming. Nobody really expected it to be 2025 before we would get our hands on it, but from what we have just seen, the long wait may well have been worth it in the end.
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Tether Holdings Ltd. — the issuer of the world’s top stablecoin — Tether (USDT) announced the launch of a new synthetic dollar backed by gold.
The USDT token announced in a June 17 tweet by Tether chief technology officer Paolo Ardoino was created on the company’s new Alloy by Tether platform and will be available on the Ethereum (ETH) blockchain. Users can mint aUSDT through over-collateralization by depositing Tether’s gold-backed token, XAUt.

aUSDT, the first Tethered asset, just launched!aUSDT is a synthetic dollar over-collateralised by XAUt (Tether Gold).
Alloy by Tether is an open platform that allows to create collateralised synthetic digital assets and will soon be part of the new @Tether_to digital assets… https://t.co/J8JyWt9duh
— Paolo Ardoino (@paoloardoino) June 17, 2024

Tether’s expansion
This new offering highlights Tether’s ambition to expand beyond its flagship USDT stablecoin, which currently has a market capitalization of $112.5 billion and is backed by reserves of US Treasury bills and other securities and investments. The launch of aUSDT  introduces a new category of tokens offered by the company known as “tethered assets.”  The firm explained:
aUSD₮ is over-collateralised on-chain by Tether Gold XAU₮, merging the dollar utility with the millennial store of value gold. […] Tethered Assets are digital assets that aim to track the reference price of another asset through different stabilisation mechanisms. […]
In the case of Alloy […] aUSD₮ is over-collateralised by XAU₮ and its price stability is maintained through supply/demand dynamics on secondary markets (including liquidity pools).
Alloy by Tether is designed to be an open platform that allows for the creation of other tethered assets, potentially including yield-bearing products. The platform aims to track the price of reference assets through stabilization strategies like over-collateralization with liquid assets and secondary market liquidity pools.
Tether Gold (XAUt), which backs the new aUSDT currency, has a market capitalization of about $573 million and is backed by physical gold stored in Switzerland. The aUSDT is targeted at users who want to make transactions, payments, and remittances with a currency similar to the US dollar without having to sell their gold-backed digital assets.
Tether has been profitable amid the current high interest-rate environment, reporting a profit of $4.5 billion in the first quarter of 2024. However, the company has faced scrutiny over the quality of assets backing its stablecoins, with regulators expressing concerns about the liquidity of its reserves and their ability to withstand mass redemption requests under market pressure.
Despite this, Tether’s USDT has maintained its one-to-one peg with the US dollar without any major depegging incidents in recent years. The news follows Tether’s — and other major crypto companies’ — email service provider being breached, leading to a large-scale phishing attack.
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There’s no question that The Legend of Zelda franchise is one of the most beloved, with the vast majority of gamers playing at least one of the titles over the years.
However, while the usual task is to fight against dark forces and save Princess Zelda, in a series-first, the roles have been reversed, allowing Zelda to do the rescuing, in The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom.
Donning Switch’s Link’s Awakening art style, Echoes of Wisdom gives the Princess the power to push back Ganon’s lackeys, but not in the usual sword and shield fashion.
Instead, you’ll be utilizing an ‘echoes’ system, capturing the essence of various objects and enemies in the world using Zelda’s Tri Rod and utilizing them to your advantage.

This has a huge impact on the puzzles in the game, basically allowing you to craft the solution rather than using bombs, arrows, and simple traversal the usual top-down The Legend of Zelda games love.
The Legend of Zelda producer Eiji Aonuma stated that he hasn’t “counted” how many echoes there are in the game, suggesting that the new gameplay style isn’t just innovative, it’s also extremely varied.
Naturally, what this means is that every single playthrough of the game will be different depending on how Echoes are used – potentially making it the most diverse TLoZ game to date.
While this departure might not be what you were hoping or expecting for in the next The Legend of Zelda title, many have been asking for Zelda to be the protagonist for years, and if well-received, could open up further games of this ilk later down the line.

As for when you’ll be able to play as Zelda for the very first time, it’s far closer to release than you might think.
The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom will launch on September 26, 2024, approximately three months from time of writing.
And if you’re a fan of Nintendo games in general, Echoes of Wisdom wasn’t the only new self-published title. We saw the likes of Mario & Luigi Brothership and the long-awaited Metroid Prime 4 also revealed, further extending the already impressive first-party Switch line-up.
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The US government has taken legal action against software heavyweight Adobe for allegedly violating consumer protection laws, including the imposition of a difficult cancellation process.
It has been claimed the US multinational computer giant has hidden expensive fees to cancel early, as well as failing to provide clarity on terms and length of subscriptions.
The action has been taken by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), the government agency that acts with autonomy to uphold civil antitrust laws and consumer protections. It claims Adobe has refused to change its methods for financial reasons but the company has refuted this claim, as part of a fight against the lawsuit.
Adobe’s General Counsel and Chief Trust Officer Dana Rao stated, “We are transparent with the terms and conditions of our subscription agreements and have a simple cancellation process.”
“We will refute the FTC’s claims in court,” he said.
In recent days, Adobe has experienced the biggest gain in its share price for four years after strong projections were made for the upcoming year on the back of demand for its new range of artificial intelligence-based tools.
At the time of writing, the share price is sitting at 518.74 USD.

1. @FTC has taken action against Adobe and two executives for pushing people into subscriptions and then making it absurdly hard to cancel.
Adobe ambushed users with hefty “early termination fees” and threw up obstacles when people tried to cancel.https://t.co/lyWAv4GMm1
— Lina Khan (@linakhanFTC) June 17, 2024

‘Trapped customers into year-long subscriptions’
Adobe has had a subscription-based sales model in place since 2012, asking users to pay an annual or monthly fee but there has been acrimony due to ambiguity with the sign-up process and then similar frustration with cancellations.
When customers attempt to cancel, the company allegedly moves through a “convoluted process”, requesting re-entry of their password and navigation past multiple pop-up screens.
“Adobe trapped customers into year-long subscriptions through hidden early termination fees and numerous cancellation hurdles,” outlined Samuel Levine, director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection.
“Americans are tired of companies hiding the ball during subscription signup and then putting up roadblocks when they try to cancel,” said Levine.
Earlier this month, Adobe moved to clarify its terms and conditions after users expressed outrage when they were denied access to its products without agreeing to an updated T and C document.
The controversy stemmed from a provision in the document stating that Adobe could access users’ content using both “automated and manual methods.”
Image credit: Ideogram
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Nintendo has just unveiled Mario & Luigi Brothership at Nintendo Direct and considering it was the first game up it’s a strong start.
Nintendo’s Shinya Takahashi introduced the latest Mario game – the first new entry in the Mario & Luigi series in almost nine years and November 7th, 2024 is the date to pop into your calendars.
Players can look forward to a sea-faring adventure that will unfold across a series of islands in typical M&L style.
In a trailer lasting two minutes we got to see Mario & Luifi being chased around by a swarm of bees before being whisked off for some great-looking cooperative platforming action.

We also got to see a brief fight sequence which you can see in the trailer above that gives us a small insight into how some of the combat will work.
It all looks very lovely and we only have less than half a year before it arrives – of course, by then we will know much more about the Nintendo Switch 2 so we may well be talking about whether this will come out for that machine or if rumored backward compatibility will mean we don’t need to concern ourselves with it.

Mario & Luigi games
Mario and Luigi Brothership will be the 8th game to feature the pair together in their own series of games – they have appeared many times in other games, but here are the other games in the series to date.

Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga
Mario & Luigi: Partners in Time
Mario & Luigi: Bowser’s Inside Story
Mario & Luigi: Dream Team
Mario & Luigi: Paper Jam
Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga + Bowser’s Minions
Mario & Luigi: Bowser’s Inside Story + Bowser Jr.’s Journey
Mario & Luigi: Brothership

We will bring any further news on Brothership as it makes its way out into the wild over the coming weeks and months.
The post It’s-a-November launch for Mario & Luigi Brothership as the brothers are back after almost a decade appeared first on ReadWrite.