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If your current morning ritual involves violently hitting refresh on a dozen retail tabs, you already know the vibe: finding the Nintendo Switch 2: The Legend of Zelda 40th Anniversary Edition is turning into an Olympic sport.

Between automated bot armies scooping digital drops, surprise order cancellations at Walmart, and inventory vanishing in seconds on Amazon, this custom black-and-gold console feels like a myth. But while digital storefronts look completely barren, stock is actively circulating behind the scenes.

Where to check for Zelda Switch 2 stock right now

Before getting into the restock details, bookmark these retailer pages to check for surprise drops:

• Nintendo Store — Out of stock right now, but you can add it to your wishlist to get pinged the second a restock hits.

• Amazon — Dropping tiny batches of consoles randomly throughout the day.

• Walmart — Stock exists but only for third-party listings selling at way over market price, so make sure your in-stock email alerts are turned on.

• Target — Sold out online, but two drops went live in-store on Thursday, Nov. 5, and online on Friday, Nov. 6.

• Best Buy — Sold out online, but select stores ran midnight openings on Nov. 5 with walk-in stock.

• GameStop — Online orders are off; you will have to walk into a store to find one.

Why is the console selling out so fast?

The feeding frenzy is being supercharged by Nintendo’s staggered release calendar. While the custom Zelda 40th Anniversary hardware dropped first on Oct. 29, the flagship game driving demand — The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time for Nintendo Switch 2 — arrived on Thursday, Nov. 5.

The remake rebuilds the 1998 classic from the ground up with modernized controls, a fully orchestrated soundtrack, reworked dungeon puzzles, and expanded Hyrule environments. Since the $520 console doesn’t include the game, everyone is rushing to lock down a system before launch day.

What comes with the Zelda 40th anniversary Switch 2?

The package includes the special-edition Switch 2 system sporting a custom black-and-gold finish, themed Joy-Con 2 controllers, and a matching dock decorated with the gold Triforce emblem. It retains the platform’s signature flexibility, letting you switch between TV, Tabletop, and Handheld modes whenever you want.

The best tech deal this week

The Apple iPhone 18 Pro is free right now with T-Mobile

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Inside the themed chassis, you get 256GB of built-in storage (expandable with microSD Express cards), a vivid display in handheld mode, faster load times, and support for up to 4K resolution on compatible TVs when the console sits in the dock.

The magnetic Joy-Con 2 controllers add mouse-style tracking in supported games, while the new GameChat hub lets you voice chat and share your screen directly as you play. It also plays your older Switch games and supports standard multiplayer options.

How can you improve your chances of finding stock?

Landing limited-edition Nintendo hardware takes a little prep work, but these battle-tested habits will give you a real edge over the bots:

• Save your checkout details everywhere — Log in to Target, Best Buy, Walmart, and the Nintendo Store to save your shipping address and default card. Stopping to type a card number or billing zip code during a live drop is how you lose an order.

• Hands off the refresh button in Best Buy’s queue — When an online drop goes live, Best Buy puts shoppers into a randomized waiting line to filter out scrapers. Touching the reload button resets your spot and boots you straight to the back.

• Watch for Walmart+ early-access paywalls — Walmart frequently locks headline console drops behind paid Walmart+ subscriptions for the first 30 to 60 minutes. If you have a membership, keep that tab signed in; if not, wait for the general public window to unlock.

• Dodge third-party sellers — Double-check the seller before buying. Marketplace scalpers frequently list units for jacked-up prices; make sure it says “Sold and shipped by [Retailer]” at the standard price.

• Skip the web wars and head to physical stores — Online checkout bots grab website stock in under 15 seconds. Showing up in person is easily your most reliable path to securing one without paying scalper markups.

Will the Zelda Switch 2 be restocked on Black Friday?

Most likely, yes.

Stores like Walmart, Amazon, and Best Buy often hold onto popular gaming hardware to use as headline deals during Black Friday and Cyber Monday week.

With that said, Black Friday restocks are usually the hardest ones to catch. You will be fighting website crashes, gift shoppers, and automated bots all at once. If you can grab a console during the Nov. 5 launch drops at Target or Best Buy, take it. Think of Black Friday as a backup plan, not your main bet.

Console hunting sucks right now, period. But between the surprise micro-drops and Thursday’s physical store restocks, you still have real shots at retail price — just be ready to move the second that button turns yellow.

TL;DR: The Pokémon TCG 30th Celebration Elite Trainer Box is available for $59.99 at Amazon. That’s way under TCGplayer’s $1116 market price.

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After weeks of building excitement and preorder wars, the Pokémon TCG 30th Celebration Elite Trainer Box is out in the wild. And Amazon has marked the occasion by bringing back its stunning $59.99 deal.

As of Nov. 6, the Pokémon TCG 30th Celebration Elite Trainer Box is on sale for just $59.99 on Amazon. Everything is handled directly by Amazon, but Amazon is still routing orders through its “request invite” system. We can see these are selling fast, so it’s clearly a system that’s working for many shoppers. Don’t be discouraged by the invitation process.

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Amazon’s deal is way under TCGplayer’s $116 market price. We rarely see deals this far below market price, so we understand the hype.

The 30th Celebration Elite Trainer Box contains nine 30th Celebration booster packs, an exclusive full-art foil Nidorina promo card, 16 foil Basic Energy cards, 65 custom card sleeves, damage-counter dice, a condition marker, card dividers, a collector’s player guide, and a code card for Pokémon TCG Live.

Shop the Pokémon TCG 30th Celebration ETB for $59.99 at Amazon, while supplies last.

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Solar energy is booming.

By the end of the year, photovoltaics are expected to account for 10 percent of the world’s energy production, by which point it will have eclipsed even nuclear fission by sheer production capacity. As industrial supply chains make solar-generated electricity cheaper than ever before, a growing body of research indicates that solar farms are a net positive for many reasons — which makes recent anti-solar regulations all the more vexing.

New reporting by the Calgary Herald took a look at a 480-acre farm in southern Alberta, owned and operated by a man named Mark Owerko. Thanks to a transmission line located near his land, Owerko was situated in a prime area to establish a solar farm. After eight years, his property became a combination solar plant, apiary, and sheep farm.

That’s a winning combination, according to a paper published in the journal Environmental Research Letters. According to the study, allowing just two sheep per hectare to graze the grasses growing around photovoltaic installations improves the abundance of bees and beneficial beetles by 38 percent, driven mostly by an 83 percent increase in adjacent honey bee populations compared to solar farms mowed by hand.

As the paper’s lead author Leana Zoller told the Cornell Chronicle, “sheep grazing and beneficial insect habitat are two prominent conversation topics around solar development right now.”

Despite what seems like a win-win both for Owerko and Alberta as a whole, the Herald notes that similar developments are nearly-impossible under the provinces’ current regulatory environment. That’s thanks in large part to restrictive rules around renewable energy on agricultural land meant to preserve “pristine viewscapes.”

As Owerko explains, his solar project was one of the very last approved by Alberta before the government imposed a seven-month moratorium on new wind and solar development.

“The moratorium drove power pricing into a ditch,” Owerko told the Herald. “In doing that, they chased away investment.”

“Everywhere else in the country, we see renewables being added to the grids at an accelerating pace and winning even in markets that are not specifically contracting for renewables,” director of the Business Renewables Centre of Canada Jorden Dy told the paper. “In Alberta, we’re seeing a complete slowdown.”

Whether Alberta can solve its renewable energy woes and restart solar investments in the province remains to be seen. Its regulatory regime is part of a strange trend emerging among some state- and provincial-level governments throughout North America, where restrictive and short-sighted regulations dictate which green energy developments are allowed on private land.

More on solar energy: Venture Capitalists Disgusted by Solar Power Because It’s Generating Too Much Clean Electricity to Be Grossly Profitable

I grew up in Vice City. At least it feels like I did. It was released as I ended high school and headed to university, suddenly at liberty to play video games for as long as I wanted.

Sunshine-saturated Vice City – Grand Theft Auto’s version of Miami – was as real to me as anywhere else I’d visited. And it was extra exhilarating to think the thrilling world emanated from a bland office: the game’s developers Rockstar North were based in Edinburgh, near a Frankie & Benny’s my family would go to on special occasions.

I skipped a couple of GTA games until 2020-21 when taking a trip to the San Andreas of GTA V during lockdown was some sort of salvation. You could take a trip down to Del Perro Pier to ride the roller coaster, practise yoga by your pool or mostly just ‘borrow’ cars and listen to the radio, exploring the vast island setting at a time I spent nearly two years without being able to travel to the actual seaside.

Grand Theft Auto VI will be released next week. This isn’t just a new game, it’s the launch of what will be the biggest media title ever produced, eclipsing the $10+ billion the previous game grossed. Many people (even among our team, naming no names) have already booked time off around the release, with an estimated 1.5 million Americans expected to skip work or pull a sickie on 19 November, resulting in a projected $1 billion loss of economic productivity in the US that day. But that figure is dwarfed by the expected $3.2-$5.2bn the
game is expected to gross in its first week alone.

Over the years, reports about the game have tended to attack the supposed sensationalising of violence, glorification of crime and dodgy representation of women and minorities. 

These accusations tend to come from people who clearly haven’t played the games, which are predominantly intelligent satirisations of consumerist culture and corporate greed. Rockstar North themselves may not be immune to some of the bad habits of big business, with employees protesting the firing of unionised employees outside their offices in Edinburgh, London and Paris last year.