Enlarge / Finally, Link has enough diamonds to bling out every single one of his teeth. (credit: Nintendo)

Well, it was nice while it lasted.

For a few weeks now, The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom players have been able to use a surprising number of glitches to endlessly duplicate items, materials, weapons, and more to their heart's content. But the endless item party officially comes to an end today, with data miners reporting that the new ver. 1.1.2 game update fixes these unintended endless item glitches (you can still stock up your inventory before installing the update, by all accounts).

While Nintendo lumps this fix under "several issues [that] have been addressed to improve the gameplay experience," I'm reluctant to call this an improvement at all. On the contrary, I think Nintendo should embrace this "glitch" and make secret codes for infinite items (and money and health, etc.) an integral, intentional option for players who just want to tinker with the game's amazing creation engine.

Enlarge / Tools with great potential often require great effort to unlock. In Zelda games, that usually means a number of Heart Containers. In the emulation underground, you need title keys, shader caches, hotfixes, and a willingness to download from some sketchy sites. (credit: Nintendo/YouTube)

Perhaps woken by news of its next premier first-party title already looking really impressive on emulators , Nintendo has moved to take down key tools for emulating and unlocking Switch consoles, including one that lets Switch owners grab keys from their own device.

Simon Aarons maintained a forked repository of Lockpick , a tool (along with Lockpick_RCM ) that grabbed the encryption keys from a Nintendo Switch and allowed it to run officially licensed games. Aarons tweeted on Thursday night that Nintendo had issued DMCA takedown requests to GitHub, asking Lockpick, Lockpick_RCM, and nearly 80 forks and derivations to be taken down under section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act , which largely makes illegal the circumvention of technological protection measures that safeguard copyrighted material.

Nintendo's takedown request (RTF file) notes that the Switch contains "multiple technological protection measures" that allow the Switch to play only "legitimate Nintendo video game files." Lockpick tools, combined with a modified Switch, let users grab the cryptographic keys from their own Switch and use them on "systems without Nintendo's Console TPMs" to play "pirated versions of Nintendo's copyright-protected game software." GitHub typically allows repositories with DMCA strikes filed against them to remain open while their maintainers argue their case.

Enlarge / Star Wars: Luke's Awakening imagines a Game Boy Color game that never was. (credit: Shoehead)

Just in time for Star Wars Day , Irish pixel artist and indie game developer Shoehead debuted nine delightful mock-up images of a non-existent Game Boy Color game called Star Wars: Luke's Awakening . It's a fan tribute that melds the design sensibilities of the 1993 Game Boy classic Zelda: Link's Awakening with the storyline of the original Star Wars trilogy.

In the pixel art, Shoehead depicts a title screen and eight key scenes that reflect important events in A New Hope , The Empire Strikes Back , and Return of the Jedi . The scenes include watching the "Help me, Obi-Wan Kenobi" sequence with the Jedi master, an encounter with a Wampa on Hoth, a Darth Vader boss battle, evading the Rancor monster, getting zapped by the Emperor, and seeing the Force ghosts of Anakin, Yoda, and Obi-Wan at the end of Return of the Jedi .

• 

  Fan-made mock-up title screen artwork for a fantasy Star Wars: Luke's Awakening game. [credit: Shoehead ]

The images abound with delightful details, such as choices of weapons appropriate for each scene and how Shoehead perfectly adapted the "chibi" style of Zelda's Game Boy adventures to Star Wars .

Enlarge / Enough taking in majestic beauty, it's time to build! (credit: Nintendo)

For decades, solving puzzles and figuring out how to advance in Zelda games followed a well-established pattern. You'd hunt around a dungeon for a key item, use that item to get around some obstacle and/or beat a new boss, then explore the overworld until you found an area that was newly accessible with your shiny new item.

It's been over six years since Breath of the Wild turned that basic design on its head . Traversal abilities like climbing and floating made it much easier to carve your own path through the game's wide open world, to the point where players can technically run to the final boss after completing the tutorial area . The game's early introduction of Link's magical new abilities has also led players to craft some incredibly inventive and unintended solutions to the game's shrine puzzles and combat challenges.

After spending an hour or so playing a near-final build of Tears of the Kingdom , it seems clear that the newest Zelda sequel is determined to go even further in letting players craft their own creative solutions to the game's challenges. In doing so, though, the game seems to have gotten even further from the basic Zelda gameplay loop that served the series so well for so long.

For a major game that was first announced nearly four years ago and is set to launch in less than two months , we've seen remarkably little gameplay footage from The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom beyond some very sparse trailers . Nintendo set out to partially fix that today, releasing a new video in which Zelda producer Eiji Aonuma showed off some of Link's new abilities in a guided 10-minute gameplay presentation.

The most impactful new ability on display was called "Fuse," which lets Link put together two disparate objects to create a new one with a brand-new effect. In the simplest example of this, Aonuma fused together a basic tree branch (which breaks incredibly easily even during simple fights) with a rock, creating a makeshift hammer with a lot more power and durability.

Tree branch + boulder = makeshift hammer. (credit: Nintendo )

Unlike in Breath of the Wild , where Link had to hunt for the most powerful weapons, the focus here will be on creating those weapons from component parts, Aonuma said. Fusing a long stick with a pitchfork can give you a longer attack range, for instance, and fusing various materials to arrows can create useful side-effects like freezing powers or a homing capability.