Netflix Black Mirror Striking Vipers

Striking Vipers is the name of one of the three new episodes from season five of Netflix's Black Mirror and, as usual, it is just as bleak as ever about how technology might impact our lives in the near-future.

With a stellar cast featuring Anthony Mackie (Falcon from the MCU) and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II (Black Manta in Aquaman, providing some Marvel versus DC excitement), the episode tells quite an engaging story involving a Street Fighter-style video game called Striking Vipers, which just got upgraded with a VR mode if played with the fancy TCKR System, which you plop onto the side of your head.

What grabbed our attention, though, was the box Striking Vipers came in – it's not entirely unlike a Switch game case, and contains a similarly diminutive cartridge (which, it should be said, looks like a hybrid between a Switch game card and a Vita one):

Mackie doesn't lick the cart, so we can't confirm if it has the same bitter coating as Switch game cards, and there's no bulky Labo VR headset needed, either. Instead, the game card slots into the controller on this console, so it seems Google's Stadia didn't take off in this alternate reality. With Google announcing launch plans for its streaming enterprise later today, we wonder if it'll do better in our own timeline.

Tetsuya Mizuguchi's psychedelic Tetris Effect also features in the episode, a game which has unfortunately yet to arrive on Switch, although we've got our fingers crossed it'll appear at some point. We're all about Tetris 99, of course, but that's hardly a game you can zone out to with a tasty beverage after a hard day at the office.

Let us know if you've seen the episode yet (and what you thought) with a comment below.

Thanks to Henmii for the spot!