As more time goes on, the coronavirus is becoming more of a worldwide concern as WHO has updated their global risk level due to the virus to ‘very high’ and it’s caused more disruption in the gaming world with GDC 2020 being moved to summer from March. Now, Plague Inc has been banned in China potentially due to the coronavirus! We’ll also be looking at the release of MAME 0.219 which brings fixes to the highly popular 1942 game among other things.

China bans Plague Inc from its App Store

For no clear reason, the Chinese government has taken issue with Plague Inc and its creators aren’t quite sure how to get it back on the App Store

Starting off with news that’s quite odd, Ndemic announced on Thursday that the People’s Republic Of China (mainland China) has decided to ban their disease simulation game Plague Inc from the country’s iOS App Store citing ‘content that is illegal in China as determined by the Cyberspace Administration of China’ as the reason.

However, there’s no mention of which content is being viewed as illegal and with the game being for sale during the last 8 years without issue, it’s being speculated that the takedown had something to do with the coronavirus outbreak which started in China.

As things stand right now, Ndemic is doing their best to get the game back up on the App Store but according to comments given to Polygon, Plague Inc’s creator has stated that “everything is quite unclear currently” meaning that there doesn’t seem to be a clear cut path on how to readmit the game on the App Store. Outside of mainland China, nothing will be changing but unfortunately, Plague Inc may see a surge in piracy in China since its the most popular paid game in the country.

MAME 0.219 released with fixes to 1942, support for Game&Watch Pinball and more TV games & more

If you’re feeling nostalgic for some Game & Watch Pinball or just want to try out something different, then MAME 0.219 has got you covered! (Image Source)

Keeping up with their monthly release schedule, the folks over at MAME have just released version 0.219 of their multi-system emulator which lets you play anything from Arcade games to Game & Watch titles together with good support for various bootlegs. This release brings about fixes for the highly popular 1942 game and Raiden Fighters, support for Game & Watch Pinball and many TV games such as Designer’s World.

In the pretty long changelog that was published with this release, we can find:

• Added support for many machines including Merry Circus 1.02, Retro Dance Mat, a variant of Mortal Kombat and numerous others
• Support for more clones like a Spanish bootleg of Galaxian, the Tasc ChessSystem R30, Time Killers and many more
• Better support for the Care Bears TV Games and the MIPS Magnum R4000 Big-Endian
• A good deal of working software added to the list together with many fixes all throughout the emulator

You may read more about MAME 0.219 by following this link and download it from here.

Conclusion

In other scenes, Reddit user ‘asynchronousdelta’ has published their own futuristic theme for both LiveArea & VitaShell, a minimal LiveArea theme and a matching custom boot screen. Byuu 1.4 has also been released and Hyrule Warriors is now playable in the latest Yuzu Early Access (Patreon) builds!