My favourite Switch 2 game is already AU$20.95 off on Amazon — get Donkey Kong Bananza for only AU$89
Although the game shares some similarities to its development team's previous title, Super Mario Odyssey, Donkey Kong Bananza feels like an entirely fresh approach for Nintendo, thanks to its smashable environments and layered levels, as well as the dynamic movement of its title character.
Best of all, Donkey Kong Bananza is just AU$109.95 AU$89 on Amazon right now, which is a solid saving of AU$20.95 on the RRP. Pretty good way to dodge Nintendo's next-gen price hike if you ask me...
Donkey Kong Bananza is the first must-have title to release for Nintendo Switch 2 since Mario Kart World, boasting a vast subterranean world that's just waiting to be smashed to pieces. Join DK and Pauline on an epic adventure in search of Banandium Gems. Use DK's fists to smash through the terrain and Pauline's singing abilities to transform DK into various animal forms. Now only AU$109.95 AU$89 on Amazon.
I've only played the game for a handful of hours so far, but I'm already hooked on its core mechanic of pummelling the environment to smithereens in search of precious Banandium Gems. In fact, I'm finding it hard to move forward in the game without smashing everything in sight — I may have a problem.
But don't just take my word for it — in his Donkey Kong Bananza review, my colleague Anthony Spadafora praised the game's "destructible environments and unique visuals." He also described it as "the 3D Donkey Kong game fans of the character have always wanted", though he did note that there were "some camera issues" and "far too many Banandium Gems to collect in a single playthrough."
Of course, those minor quibbles shouldn't stop you from playing one of the best Nintendo games in years — especially now that it's received a sweet 19% discount on Amazon, less than a fortnight after its release.
Don't own the Nintendo Switch 2 yet? You can find today's best Switch 2 prices below.
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CNN
38 minutes ago
- CNN
Inside the home of Pauline Karpidas, the art-world ‘grande dame' who could be the last of her kind
Behind the elegant but unassuming entryway to an apartment near London's Hyde Park, one of Europe's most prominent collectors has amassed a remarkable trove of Surrealist and postwar art in a home bursting with color and eclectic design. Now in her 80s, Pauline Karpidas is selling nearly all of the art and custom furniture housed in her dwelling, where major contemporary artists and other cultural figures have socialized among works by René Magritte, Salvador Dalí, Yves Tanguy, Max Ernst, Pablo Picasso and Andy Warhol. As a patron, she's been an influential and connecting force in the art world for decades, yet Karpidas has remained a private figure who rarely speaks to press. But her upcoming sale, expected to fetch some £60 million, ($79.6 million), will be the most expensive collection from a single owner ever offered by Sotheby's in Europe. 'I cannot think of a more comprehensive place, outside of any major museum collection, really, to study and to look and to be encircled with so many core masterpieces from the surrealist movement and beyond,' said Oliver Barker, the chairman of Sotheby's Europe, in a phone call from London. Karpidas' Warhol works feature Marilyn Monre (left) and the artist Man Ray (right). In the living room salon hang paintings by Pablo Picasso, René Magritte, Francis Picabia, Leonora Carrington and Yves Tanguy, among others. Out of the sale's 250 artworks and design pieces the top lot is a later Magritte painting 'La Statue volante,' estimated to sell for £9-12 million ($12-$16 million). Other highlights include two Warhol works inspired by the painter Edvard Munch; a Dalí pencil drawing of his wife, Gala; a Hans Bellmer painting made just before the artist was imprisoned in France during World War II; a formative, mystical Dorothea Tanning painting of her dog; and the collector's bed, made of sculptural copper twigs and leaves, by Claude Lalanne. The sale will take place on September 17 and 18, and the works will also go on view in London earlier in the month, providing a rare glimpse at many artworks that have been off the market for decades and will soon be scattered into private hands. The landmark auction comes just two years after Sotheby's sold off the contents of Karpidas summer home in Hydra, Greece, which became a summer hotspot for artists through her Hydra workshops. In that sale, which more than doubled its high estimate, works by Georg Baselitz, Marlene Dumas and Kiki Smith earned a combined €35.6 million ($37.6 million). 'She's a real diva, in the most positive sense of this word,' said the Swiss artist Urs Fischer in a video call. 'She's also a bit of a mystery to me, despite knowing her for a long time.' Fischer met Karpidas more than two decades ago when he was in his twenties, participated in one of her Hydra gatherings in the mid-2000s, and has regularly attended art-world parties with her. Fischer noted her 'larger-than-life' presence: She's often in striking hats, cigarette in hand, and has the tendency toward telling grand stories and scrawling, multi-page handwritten letters, he said. 'When I think of any memory of her, she's always at the center of a place — she's not the person on the periphery,' he recalled. 'A mirror of her' Karpidas, originally from Manchester, was introduced to art collecting through her late husband, Constantine Karpidas, known as 'Dinos,' whose own eye was fixed on 19th-century art including Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Claude Monet. Then by meeting the art dealer Alexander Iolas, Karpidas found her own path. Iolas, nearly retired by that point, had been a formidable dealer of major 20th-century artists, particularly Surrealists, and his approach was the 'blueprint' for international mega-galleries such as Gagosian and Hauser & Wirth today, according to Barker. But with Karpidas' financial means and determination, he worked with her to build a singular collection of 20th-century art. Pauline with Constantinos Karpidas, known as Dino, who introduced her to art collecting when they married. Karpidas is part of the lineage of 'grande dames,' Barker said — the affluent 20th-century women who built social networks across the most prominent artists, fashion houses and designers of the time — and she may be the last of her kind, he noted. She was close friends with Andy Warhol and frequented his parties at The Factory, she was dressed by Yves Saint Laurent, and her homes were the efforts of prominent interior designers Francis Sultana and Jacques Grange. She's been compared to the late, great female patrons Peggy Guggenheim and Dominique de Menil, both of whom she knew. But though her counterparts' collections have become important cultural institutions, through Sotheby's, the bulk of Karpidas' collection will be disseminated across the art market. In her London residence, Fischer said, 'the whole space became one artwork. Every fragment of that apartment has its own little story.' While he's been in many homes of affluent collectors over the years, Karpidas' apartment stands out for how personal and exuberant it is. 'In some way, it's probably a mirror of her interest and her psyche,' he said. 'It's not just like a wealthy person's home. It's like a firework.' Barker explained that Karpidas' acquisitions have not only been the result of her financial means, but her judicious timing, too. She was well-positioned in 1979 for the record-breaking sale of the collector and artist William Copley's personal collection, netting a 1929 painting by the French Surrealist Yves Tanguy, which will be resold in September. Many works owned by Karpidas have been passed down through famous hands, such as Surrealism founder André Breton, poet Paul Éluard, gallerist Julian Levy, and the family of Pablo Picasso. 'She was not only there at the right time, but she was choosing the right works,' Barker said. Important patrons have often become subjects themselves, and the same is true of Karpidas. In 2023, Fischer depicted her in an ephemeral piece, with a lifespan of a single gallery show. On the floor of LGDR (now Lévy Gorvy Dayan) in New York, he cast a sculpture of the collector gazing at a reproduction of the 2nd-century 'Three Graces,' an iconic Ancient Greek statue symbolizing beauty and harmony in art and society, which Karpidas purchased in 1989 before selling it to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In Fischer's version, he rendered the three female nudes, as well as Karpidas, as life-size wax candles. All white except her dark oversized jewelry, the wax effigy of Karpidas looked to the sculpture she'd purchased decades before, all of the figures' wicks' aflame. Eventually, like many of Fischers' works, they all melted down, the fire winking out.
Gizmodo
an hour ago
- Gizmodo
We Should Reject the Switch 2's Bogus Game-Key Cards or This Will Be the End of Physical Games
On Sunday, Nintendo propped up a survey for players to share a few thoughts about how they prefer to play games on the Switch 2. By Tuesday, Nintendo pulled the survey, but not before the poll went viral and offered gamers a new outlet to let loose about the lack of Switch 2 games you can buy that come entirely on physical game cards. There's a larger issue at play. The Switch 2 is an inflection point showing how the last few strands of actual game ownership are fraying. Nintendo's most-dedicated audience hopes game-key cards—essentially a download link inside a game card—don't become the standard going forward. Nintendo says game-key cards 'don't contain the full game data.' They instead include a 'key' that lets you immediately download a game to the Switch 2 as soon as you plop it in. The main benefit compared to a full digital download is you can easily sell or give away your game-key card when you want, but it's barely any better than a digital download. Game-key cards take the worst aspects of physical ownership—the possibility somebody could steal or you could lose your game—while missing out on all the benefits a regular game card provides. Downloading a game requires an internet connection, and some gamers will be hampered by slower internet speeds. Collectors want to actually own the game, rather than a key for it. Nintendo's user agreement shares how a digital download is merely a license to use the software on the system. Nintendo can restrict your games or your account, and it may even remotely deactivate your console if the company detects you've tried pirating its games. Game-key cards are just another method of DRM—or digital rights management—that restricts users from using the software they buy however they want to. Even if you play by the rules, that doesn't mean you'll have access to your digital download indefinitely. Nintendo, like every other game publisher, isn't going to keep its servers for downloading games running forever. The company took its Wii U and 3DS eShop services offline in 2023, and while that sucks, 11 and 12 years of operation, respectively, are longer than the systems' life cycles. To be fair, you can still download the games you own for those platforms, but you can't purchase any new software. At any moment, Nintendo could end the option to download old games as well. Cory Doctorow, a tech blogger, author, and longtime anti-DRM advocate (you can also thank him for coining the word 'enshittification'), told Gizmodo game-key cards represent the worst impulses of Nintendo. 'Nintendo could distribute a game with a physical token and create a situation where players truly own the games they buy,' Doctorow said over email. 'Given the company's legendary hostility to game preservation efforts (e.g., Super Smash Bros.) and that they refuse to make any guarantees or even representations about how long the game servers will be online for users who hold these tokens to retrieve the game from, this amounts to 'a downloadable game you can't play if you lose the little dingus that came with it'—not a game that is yours to play for as long as you want or that you can sell or give away when you get tired of it.' Compared to other consoles or PCs where games can demand well over 100GB of storage, Nintendo's less-powerful hardware ensured most titles didn't need nearly as much storage. While the Switch 2 has 256GB of built-in storage, the original Switch has only 32GB—almost mandating the use of a microSD card for more storage capacity. This limitation required both first- and third-party developers to format games to make them as small as possible. The original Switch became one of the last few bastions of physical media contained solely on a card you could own. The Switch 2 promised to be a much more powerful system, allowing devs to port today's modern titles with much less fuss. Having access to that fidelity means games will be larger, but developers still have some amount of control. CD Projekt Red managed to fit Cyberpunk 2077—which normally takes up more than 83GB on PC—on a 64GB Switch 2 game card. That game is an outlier compared to the Switch 2 third-party launch lineup. First-party games like Donkey Kong Bananza are contained on-card, but most third-party games are not. It doesn't matter the size of the game, either. Street Fighter 6 at 50GB is on a game-key card. Octopath Traveler 0, a low-fi old-school JRPG, is also slated to get a game-key card release Dec. 4. Publishers have to pay more money for larger flash storage inside of a game card. This problem is exacerbated by the reported lack of various game card sizes available to third parties. Early reports suggest Nintendo only offered 64GB game cards to outside publishers and saved smaller game card sizes for itself. That may change in the future. The Nintendo Patent Watch account on Bluesky first spotted that the company that made game cards for the original Switch, Macronix, could be preparing to make more cards with 'varying capacity needs.' That doesn't mean it will make more cards for Switch 2. The report doesn't even mandate that publishers choose actual game cards over cheaper game key cards. There are other consumer benefits to physical over digital. In a healthy retail ecosystem, brick-and-mortar shops offer discounts to move old product out of stores and make room for new content. Digital-only games cost what they cost. Nintendo said in its latest financial results that it sold 8.67 million software units in the first seven weeks after launch on June 5. Most of those were the digital version of Mario Kart World, which came bundled with the $500 launch version of the Switch 2. The new Mario Kart may be an outlier. Switch gamers have historically hung onto physical games longer than on other consoles. Circana industry analyst Mat Piscatella reported late last year that 53% of Switch game sales in the middle of 2024 were digital. By comparison, the vast majority of game sales on PlayStation 5 are digital downloads. If Nintendo fans fail to hit back against game-key cards, it could be the last domino to fall in the effort to own and preserve the games we buy.
New York Post
an hour ago
- New York Post
Is your backyard bird drama binge-worthy? Get 50% off this smart camera feeder and find out
New York Post may be compensated and/or receive an affiliate commission if you click or buy through our links. Featured pricing is subject to change. If I were a bird, I'd be so vain. I'd want high-res recordings of my good side being admired by humans. I'd want a feeder that doubled as my own little confession booth. And I'd want it now, preferably for 50% off. Enter: the Birdkiss Smart Bird Feeder with Camera, the most delightful surveillance system ever made for feathered friends. This clever little contraption doesn't just dispense seeds, it captures every peck, chirp, and strut in crisp 1080p. It's motion-activated, WiFi-connected, and comes with night vision — because the owl deserves her close-up too. Even better? It syncs with your phone, sends alerts when new visitors land, and uses AI to identify which birds are gracing your perch. With over 4,000 glowing Amazon reviews and currently half off, this thing is flying off the shelves (sorry). The only downside? You may never get anything done again. Amazon The Birdkiss Smart Bird Feeder with Camera is an AI-powered, 1080p HD bird feeder that captures real-time video of feathered visitors and sends notifications straight to your phone. It features motion detection, night vision, and a weatherproof build, plus a companion app that identifies bird species and stores footage in the cloud. Bonus: It has a built-in microphone so you can hear the little gossipers, too. For over 200 years, the New York Post has been America's go-to source for bold news, engaging stories, in-depth reporting, and now, insightful shopping guidance. We're not just thorough reporters – we sift through mountains of information, test and compare products, and consult experts on any topics we aren't already schooled specialists in to deliver useful, realistic product recommendations based on our extensive and hands-on analysis. Here at The Post, we're known for being brutally honest – we clearly label partnership content, and whether we receive anything from affiliate links, so you always know where we stand. We routinely update content to reflect current research and expert advice, provide context (and wit) and ensure our links work. Please note that deals can expire, and all prices are subject to change.
