This Week In: The Internet

Too many things were announced in the past week so I’m going to cover a bunch of them! Here we go~

Riot Games and American Express are teaming up to create a League of Legends debit card. They’re doing a full reveal of it tomorrow but it looks like they are going to be offering a lot of Riot Points to customers. 22,000 points by my count, for signing up, adding money and making ten transactions. That’s almost $150 in Riot Points, which is a pretty damn good deal. It isn't a credit card, so there’s no credit check and no chance of it stealing money from you in interest. I’m still waiting to see more details, but if the American Express website is to be believed other than ATM fees and the one time signup fee it doesn't cost a thing. If it’s really on the up and up I’ll totally get one for myself.

Mark Whitten confirmed in a Reddit AMA that the Xbox One no longer requires the Kinect to be plugged in to function. This is fantastic news, because even if you love the Kinect and would always have it plugged in, you have to admit that losing your Kinect or having it break also resulting in the effective bricking of your console would be extraordinarily annoying. Not to mention the fact that Microsoft had stated in the past that it is possible to disable the Kinect on the software side, but if you could disable it but not unplug it, it leads to some questions about how much you can actually disable.

Finally, Nintendo announced a new element for the new Pokemon games; Mega Pokemon. This has been a big controversial point among Pokemon fans, mostly because we don’t have enough information about how they work mechanically. I like the designs from a visual standpoint, and from what we've seen the forms are activated in battle through the use of a hold item, which seems pretty straightforward. Nintendo probably won’t give too many details about this until the game is closer to release, but I’ll keep my eyes open. Another advancement for the new games is a system to track and build EVsin game, which isn't a big deal if you don’t play the game competitively, but if you do play competitively it’s a huge freaking deal.

Honestly though Mega Pokemon, good or bad, are totally redeemed by one thing: L'oreal Ampharos.

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