Hasta La Gadget!

Esports is most commonly associated with high-octane competitive games such as League of Legends, Rocket League and Call of Duty: Warzone. A chill farming sim might not immediately spring to mind, but very soon, some of the world’s finest Stardew Valley players will face off for thousands of dollars.

Creator Eric Barone (aka ConcernedApe) said the first official Stardew Valley Cup event will take place at noon ET on September 4th. “It’s a competition of skill, knowledge and teamwork, with a prize pool of over $40k,” Barone wrote on Twitter.

Barone and Stardew Valley streamer Zach “UnsurpassableZ” Hartman have concocted more than 100 challenges for competitors to tackle, as Kotaku notes. Four teams of four players will each have three hours to complete as many of the tasks as they can. The challenges include things like giving someone a gift they love at the Feast of the Winter Star (worth 25 points), winning the ice fishing contest (15 points) and completing item bundles in the Community Center (10 points each).

Players will have to prioritize the tasks, since some might not be entirely worth the points at stake. For instance, unless players are able to craft a ton of staircases, it can take an hour or so to reach the bottom of the mines, which is worth 10 points. Hartman will also add five surprise challenges during the event, each of which are worth 50 points, so competitors might have to adjust their plans on the fly.

Barone and Hartman will be commentators for the event, which you can watch on Hartman’s Twitch channel.

It’s actually not the first competitive Stardew Valley event with cash at stake. A few Stardew Twitch Rivals competitions have taken place. One event in 2019 had $35,000 on the line, and included challenges like catching all five legendary fish as quickly as possible and obtaining the most gold.

The second episode of What If imagined a universe in which T’Challa never grew up to become Wakanda’s Black Panther because he was abducted by aliens as a child. T’Challa’s journey to becoming the Star-Lord brings him into the lives of countless people from throughout the galaxy, and his mere presence has a profound…

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In recent weeks, we’ve seen one retro Nintendo game after another shatter the record for the most expensive video game sold at auction. At the start of July, a copy of The Legend of Zelda went for $870,000. Days later, a mint version of Super Mario 64 sold for $1.56 million. Now another Nintendo collectible has set a sales record, but this one is a bit different.

Over the weekend, a special commemorative edition of a Game & Watch system sold for approximately $9,100 on Yahoo Japan. As most Nintendo fans know, the Game & Watch predates the far more successful Game Boy. What makes this unit unique is that it was commissioned by Game & Watch creator Gunpei Yokoi after Nintendo sold more than 20,000 million units of the handheld. Before this weekend, this version of the console had never come on the market before.

What’s unclear is just how many units of the commemorative edition Game Nintendo produced. According to Beforemario, a blog devoted to games and toys the company made between the 1960s and 1980s, the unit is “extremely” rare. “If I had to guess, I would say there were more than three made [one for each of the individuals pictured on the plaque], but again, just a guess,” John Hardie, the director of the National Videogame Museum in Fresco, Texas, told Ars Technica.

Given the current state of the video game collectibles market, what seems like a one-of-a-kind historical artifact selling for so little is surprising. Part of that could be the result of the Game & Watch market. As Ars Technica points out, you can find common versions of the handheld for about $50. Rarer variants like the Ballon Fight one can go for as much as $2,000 if they’re in good condition.

Facebook again weaseled around antitrust scrutiny in its $400 million Giphy acquisition, according to a Bloomberg report citing two sources with knowledge of the matter. If history is any indicator, Facebook can and will do whatever it wants.

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Scientists at NASA were pretty excited in early August when the Perseverance rover indicated that it had drilled its first sample of Martian rock. But as it turned out, the sample tube was empty, and the Perseverance team began a remote investigation to solve the mystery of the disappearing rock.

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