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We all have our favorites, but my strategy of 'use the cutest little guys' doesn't guarantee I've always got the best Palworld pals in 1.0. After my adventures in early access, I think I've learned my lesson, and finally have some actual recommendations for the best Palworld pals for suitabilities like Kindling, Handiwork, Medicine Production, and more... Read more.View the full article

It's an exciting time to be a Game of Thrones fan, with a ton of new content on the way to look forward to. Love it or hate it, House of the Dragon Season 3 has finally given us an on-screen depiction of some of Fire & Blood's most famous and beloved moments. Meanwhile, A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms Season 1 was an absolute smash-hit success, with season 2 looking even more promising, not to mention the Aegon's Conquest film that's currently in production. View the full article

The Lord of the Rings has entered a busy new era when it comes to upcoming releases for the franchise, for better or worse. While many fans of Tolkien's iconic fantasy world are excited to venture into new corners of Middle-Earth with The Rings of Power, Andy Serkis' The Hunt for Gollum, Stephen Colbert's Shadow of the Past project, and the upcoming Warhorse RPG, others are a bit nervous about what's to come. View the full article

New monsters include ****** ******, which come in three flavors: sour plum, veggie mix, and shrimp tempura. View the full article

Brandon Sanderson's Mistbornseries has become quintessential fantasy reading ever since the original Era 1 novels debuted in 2006, introducing readers to the ash-covered Final Empire and one of the genre's most inventive magic systems, Allomancy. The first trilogy consists of The Final Empire (2006), The Well of Ascension (2007), and The Hero of Ages (2008), telling a complete story centered on Vin, Kelsier, and the fate of Scadrial. View the full article

Redesigns of popular characters happen all of the time, and Star Wars' treasure trove of iconic heroes and villains is no exception. While these can range from minor tweaks to major overhauls, for the most part, they're done in good faith with the hope that fans will enjoy the changes. Of course, that doesn't always happen, with certain redesigns upsetting dogmatic fans, but the risk of ruffling a few feathers is worth the push for innovation, change, and novelty. View the full article

When Capcom finally lifted the veil on Dragon’s Dogma 2‘s upcoming expansion — much to long-time RPG fans’ excitement — View the full article

OtherSide Entertainment's stealth game Thick As Thieves launched in May of this year, but felt like it should have been in early access. It only had two maps, and though its campaign changed the objectives as it bounced you back and forth between them in either co-op or solo play, it felt thin. Frustrations like the specifics of how its time-limit system worked and the absence of options like rebindable keys at launch didn't help... Read more.View the full article

While showing off an early concept photo of the aged-up Team Avatar at a San Diego Comic-**** panel on Thursday afternoon, Avatar Aang: The Last Airbender director Lauren Montgomery recalled one of the films' earliest leaks in a rollout that's been plagued by unfortunate leaks. The image in question was what Montgomery called the "Avengers shot," with the characters posing together that leaked out of CinemaCon in 2024 before it was taken down. "This was one of the very first funny stories about this image. We had a version of this image, exact same painting. The characters looked a little bit different," Montgomery said. "Our production designer Jake [Panian] was never really happy with it. And then Paramount comes to us and says, ‘We want to go to CinemaCon.’ Jake is, like, ‘Absolutely not. It's gonna leak.’ They're like, ‘No, no, no, no. It won't leak. Everything's safe.’
Everything leaks. [Jake]'s like, 'Well, if they're gonna leak it, I'm gonna repaint the whole thing.' And he did. And it looks beautiful, and it looks amazing, and we've used this image a lot of times. And of course, it leaked. Cell phone camera footage of it from a weird angle. And then it's used as, like, official artwork in freakin’ interviews and posts everywhere. So, good time." Moving on from the anecdote, Montgomery walked through a slideshow of early character design concept art. She showed an Aang with a chinstrap-style beard, many iterations of Zuko's hairstyle, multiple versions of Sokka ("The note was alsays don’t let 'Sokka get TOO hot,'" Montgomery said), Toph in a "metalbending police get-up," and a pregnant Katara. "We moved away from that for our own reasons but a lot of those versions influenced the final version of Katara we see in the film," Montgomery said. "We're trying to keep this art form alive a little bit longer.” In mapping out how the team would then animate these rendered images for the feature film, Avatar co-creator Bryan Konietzko reflected on maintaining the importance of Avatar's defining animation style in the same panel that was attended by his fellow Avatar creator Mike DiMartino and most of the core voice cast of the movie. “One of the first things that we talked about was what the medium was going to be. No one told us, but we just assumed: It's a feature film. There's incredible stuff, like Spider-Verse, Arcane… people are doing really stylized, beautiful things with 3D characters that are kind of pushed more towards to 3D. So we just assumed initially, 'Oh, I guess that's what we'll do.’ And we started trying to figure out what that would look like. "But then one day it just hit me," Konietzko continued. "I was like, ‘What are we doing? This is Avatar. This is a love letter to Japanese anime. This needs to stay 2D. These characters need to be hand drawn.’ Our friends and peers in the industry — in the Western industry, especially — they want to do 2D, but they're being forced to do 3D. And again, there's beautiful stuff being done in 3D, but as artists, we should be able to explore all these different mediums. Mike and I were just like, 'You know what? We're gonna do 2D,' and luckily, our bosses were not forcing us to do 3D. So that's what we did. We're trying to keep this art form alive a little bit longer.” Creating a New Langauge System Konietzko also walked through the process of creating a new written language for the universe moving forward, called Avatarian. A look at the written language!#SDCC2026 #ATLA #AvatarAang [Hidden Content] — Cartoon Universe (@CartoonUV) July 23, 2026 “When we came back to do Avatar studios, we were working with our cultural consultants," Konietzko said. "Now that we had more time and resources for some projects, we had some discussions and realized doing the traditional thing we've been doing, where we're using ******** as the rhythm language for the Avatar world. That was great, and we love that stuff, but it didn't make as much sense with all the kind of real-world cultures that we pull from for inspiration in Avatar. So I was like, ‘All right, I'm going to create a written language for Avatar.’ 
 "So I just locked myself in my office for like three months. But I never like in fantasy stuff when the fantasy language just looks like English in cosplay, you know? It just looks like the Roman alphabet in cosplay. I was really inspired by Hangul, which I had studied when I was working on Avatar in Korea.
I built this language that it's a phonetic language that — if anything can be expressed with IPA, the International Phonetic Alphabet, it can be translated to Avatarian, and it creates these little syllable blocks, kind of Hangul. And then I use, like, these really simplified four element symbols as our kind of base radicals for the language.“ Other Avatar Aang reveals from the SDCC panel:The first trailer for Avatar: Seven Havens, a 26-episode 2D animated series about a new, post-Korra earthbending Avatar, along with an October 9 release date on Paramount+. New Legends Will Rise. Avatar: Seven Havens, coming to Paramount+ Oct 9th [Hidden Content] — Paramount+ (@paramountplus) July 23, 2026 Tagah, the new airbender introduced in the film voiced by Dave Bautista, will be an upcoming playable character in Avatar Legends: The Fighting Game, which we gave an 8.The movie's soundtrack will be available to stream on July 25. It's the first time Avatar music is available the same day the project comes out, DiMartino noted, and teased a physical media release down the line.Speaking of physical media, Avatar Aang: The Last Airbender is getting an art book packed with behind-the-scenes details. It will be available in November. Avatar Aang: The Last Airbender comes out on Parmount+ Saturday, July 25. We gave it an 8, calling it a "lovingly crafted and gorgeously animated movie" with "action scenes and settings [that] are thrilling and deserved to be seen on the big screen instead of streaming after a scuttled theatrical release and unfortunate leak changed plans that would have made this more of an event for fans." Leanne Butkovic (she/they) is an Editorial Project Manager at IGN, where they've also written about TV, movies, and games. View the full article

A brand-new co-op horror game on Steam called Shift at Midnight was released on July 22, and has already received plenty of rave reviews from fans of the genre. The game had attracted a ton of attention before its official launch, making it one of the more anticipated co-op horror releases on Steam. View the full article

At San Diego Comic-****, Amazon Luna and Warner Bros. unveiled Batman: Caped Crusader – Chronicles, a new exclusive game for Amazon Prime members at no additional cost. The game launches July 31 alongside the Season Two premiere of the acclaimed Batman: Caped Crusader animated series on Prime Video. Both the game and the new season of the hit show will be available for Amazon Prime members at no additional cost. It’s about time we had a day-and-date launch of a TV show and a game together. Amazon said players get to “play the series.” But of course it is exceedingly rare because games and shows operate on different development cycles. The Batman: Caped Crusader – Chronicles is an example of what can happen when a big company like Amazon coordinates with partners and its own divisions on a transmedia strategy. It’s an example of different parts of a company working together, said Jeff Gattis, head of games at Amazon, in an interview with GamesBeat. [Hidden Content] Gattis said that when you go to your Prime Video app, there will be a games tab at the top where you can access the Luna content. “That’s a big deal when you think about hundreds of millions of people watching video on Prime. We think it’s great for driving awareness of Luna,” Gattis said. Not to mention the fact that’s free for Prime members. He added, “This is not unique to us. But I think this notion of TV and movies and video games becoming more integrated as an overall thing adds value.” The Caped Crusader is back. Source: Amazon And one good idea is that games can align with Prime Video shows. As a hypothetical, Gattis said, “When Tomb Raider launches as a game, you might have a Tomb Raider page where the show exists, the movies exist, the video game exists. There’s a merchandise by Tomb Raider merchandise. I think those this is where you’re starting to use the powers of Amazon to do some really unique things.” Batman: Caped Crusader – Chronicles is a cooperative crime-solving party game for up to 4 players. As a crew of detectives, you’ll step into the dark, noir-soaked streets of Gotham City to become part of a special GCPD task force and Batman’s inner circle. Alongside Detective Montoya, you’ll interrogate, investigate, and deduce your way through 11 episodic missions, each featuring a distinct sleuthing minigame that tests your detective skills. Working together, you’ll foil Batman’s Rogues Gallery of villains, including Babyface, Scarecrow, Dollmaker, and even The Joker. [Hidden Content] The game is part of Amazon Luna’s growing roster of games, turning smartphones into controllers for an easy-to-access party gaming experience. Stream the game and start playing with the devices you already own; no additional controllers or hardware required. The game will also feature Hamish Linklater (Batman) and Michelle C. Bonilla (Detective Montoya) reprising their roles from the hit series in Batman: Caped Crusader – Chronicles, with additional voice talent to be announced ahead of the game’s July 31 launch. Batman: Caped Crusader – Chronicles Coming Exclusively to Amazon Luna. Source: Amazon Amazon Luna is Amazon’s game streaming service that Prime members can enjoy at no additional cost, with no downloads or dedicated gaming console or PC required. Prime members have access to a wide variety of games on Amazon Luna, including the BAFTA Award-winning story-driven superhero comedy Dispatch; EA Sports FC 26; the zany Courtroom Chaos starring Arnold Schwarzenegger; and the roguelike co-op deckbuilder Masters of the Universe: Legends Unite. More details The Batman game is a cooperative party game for one to four players. You and your crew will step into the noir-drenched Gotham City of Batman: Caped Crusader the animated series, where every alley hides a secret and every case leads deeper into the shadowy depths of the city’s criminal underworld. By playing alongside “Detective Montoya” as part of “Batman’s” inner circle and GCPD taskforce, players will decode evidence, chase leads, and confront iconic DC Super-Villains across 11 gripping episodes. Along the way, each episode serves up new sleuthing minigames that will put your detective skills to the test. Investigate, interrogate and deduce your way through the tangled crime webs woven by Gotham City’s most devious criminals. To offer fans the ultimate connection between the show and the game, series stars Hamish Linklater and Michelle C. Bonilla reprise their roles as Batman and Detective Montoya in Batman: Caped Crusader – Chronicles. Season One of Batman: Caped Crusader struck a chord with audiences, climbing as high as No. 1 on Prime Video’s global Top 10 list. With anticipation for Season Two running high, and Batman’s following as strong as it’s ever been, Amazon Luna and Prime Video created an opportunity for fans to inhabit and play inside Gotham City, as well as watch it. Batman: Caped Crusader – Chronicles is a major new addition to GameNight, a growing collection of games only available through Amazon Luna and free for Prime members. Designed to make group play easy, Batman: Caped Crusader – Chronicles will turn game night into a Gotham City stakeout, all enjoyed on the biggest screen at home. Your phone is your controller. No extra hardware. No downloads. No skill gap. Whether it’s family or friends on game night, everyone can jump in and play, from first-time players to seasoned detectives. Launching in Multiple Countries On July 31, Batman: Caped Crusader – Chronicles will be available to Prime members and Luna subscribers on the Luna app in the U.S., ***, Canada, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Austria, the Netherlands, Poland, Sweden, Portugal, Belgium, and Luxembourg. Grab your crew, put on your detective hat, and get ready — Gotham City’s case files are about to open. The post Amazon Luna unveils Batman: Caped Crusader – Chronicles as free game for Prime members appeared first on GamesBeat. View the full article

We chat with Japanese developer and publisher Sting about its self-publishing efforts, challenges, PC ports, the importance of Steam, the possibility of localizing Baroque Syndrome, Switch physical releases, coffee, and more. View the full article

Halo: Campaign Evolved players are finally diving into the remake and seeing what's so different from the original Halo: CE from back in the day. If you're really eager to see how things have changed, you don't have much of a choice other than to start tracking down some Skulls, seeing as these are how just about all the new features in the game are accessed. View the full article

Pre-orders for all items start today and will be available through August 17 on iam8bit's website. View the full article

Nearly two years after release, Dragon Ball: Sparking! Zero is about to get a brand-new single-player mode that completely transforms the arena fighting game. A successor to the classic Budokai Tenkaichi series, Sparking! Zero has enjoyed significant post-launch support, even as publisher Bandai Namco turns its attention toward the next Dragon Ball game with Xenoverse 3's new saga. A new game mode called Limit Breaker Journey will build on Sparking! Zero's incredible success, and it's right around the corner. View the full article

The first review scores for Halo: Campaign Evolved have now arrived from media outlets across the globe, with most responses trending in a positive, if mixed, direction so far. Halo: Campaign Evolved is the long-awaited remaster of 2001's Halo: Combat Evolved. View the full article

AI vibe coding has done the impossible: make Nintendo fans unexcited for Mario Kart Wii on PC. A new static recompilation project promises to give us a fresh way to play one of the best Wii games of all time, but as with many similar projects, the sentiment soon soured once prospective players realized it was built using AI. "Announcing Mario Kart Wiicompiled," developer patchzy exclaims in a tweet alongside a teaser trailer for the project. "The first static recompilation of a Wii game: Mario Kart Wii, rebuilt for PC. Releasing in beta this August, with online play and optional Retro Rewind support, bringing over 200 tracks!" Wii games finally getting the static recompilation treatment would be reason enough to get excited, since that would, in theory, open the door for many more Wii titles to become playable on PC. Decompilations and recompilations have been a rallying point for the communities around many classic games, as with the upcoming Spyro project – whose developers proudly proclaim that "no AI" was used in its making. [Hidden Content] But, as Time Extension notes, there are no such promises for Mario Kart Wiicompiled. In fact, the project's Discord explicitly confirms that AI was used "for code" – though "no ai art or assets were generated." That's a distinction that might satisfy some players, but you can just scroll down through the responses to the original tweet to see there are plenty more ready to reject a AI vibe-coded project outright. Only time will tell if Mario Kart Wiicompiled will actually play well, but many members of the various fan development communities are ready to dismiss vibe coding completely. Such is the case for PS3 emulator RPCS3, whose developers are begging contributors to "stop submitting AI slop code." It's also a key point for the developers behind Donkey Kong 64: Recompiled, who announced their project early in an effort to get out ahead of a vibe-coded rival. A poorly-made AI project can discourage traditional developers from putting in the effort to do it right, and that's a fear hanging over many potential PC ports for classic games in this new vibe coding era. "It creates lesser games": Indie game studios are supposed to love generative AI, so why do the 25 devs I spoke to avoid it? [/url]View the full article

I'm not even that far into my first ever playthrough of Grim Dawn and I can already see why I've heard people praise this game for the last 10 years. It's old, sure, but it's a surprisingly tight action RPG that despite its age hasn't been left to rust... Read more.View the full article

Dragon’s Dogma 2 might’ve been heavily praised for its combat, but at the end of the day, plenty of fans View the full article

PlayStation might make the growing $7.2 billion second-hand games market shrink down to roly-poly size once it officially abandons physical discs in 2028, analysts say. A CNBC report cites data from market researcher Dataintelo describing the video games resale market as worth $7.2 billion in 2025, though experts anticipated in March that it would expand to $13.8 billion by 2034. But that estimate might look dramatically different now that PlayStation has decided to stop feeding it. "Brick and mortar game retail is doomed," Wedbush Securities managing director of strategic planning Michael Pachter tells CNBC definitively. He explains that at least one-third of sold games are used, and these sales help fuel new game purchases, too. Fewer discs from PlayStation lead to fewer opportunities to purchase games in general, whether new or old. Morningstar equity research director Kazunori Ito likewise imagines the secondhand games market will "keep shrinking and eventually disappear" once Sony makes the transition to digital-only. PC games are already there with the help of major online shops like Steam, Epic, and GOG, and while Xbox technically hasn't renounced game discs yet, it's apparently headed that way, and it's practicing by testing a feature that digitizes entire disc collections. Without new PlayStation and Xbox games to keep it freshly stocked, the secondhand games market will grow stale. We'll all be passing around the same 5,000 copies of Cabela's Monster Buck Hunter until they'll rot, and then I'll really have no chance at securing one of the world's highly coveted Silent Hill 2 discs for less than $300. Ito adds, "There is an important difference between players accepting that shift [to digital] because they see value in it, and having it effectively forced on them by taking away the alternative." But it doesn't seem to matter to PlayStation. PlayStation killing discs is bad for everyone, whether you care about physical games or not. [/url]View the full article

A brand-new indie game on Steam called Scratch the Cat has caught the attention of 3D platformer fans with its ****** Bandicoot and Spyro the Dragon vibes. There is no shortage of 3D platformers on Steam, with plenty of options for fans of the genre, including many that are completely free to play. Still, there is always a demand for a retro-style title that can capture the same "mascot platformer" feeling as genre staples like ****** Bandicoot and Spyro. View the full article

Tim Cain knows better than nearly anyone that the earliest computer RPGs – like Fallout, which he helped create – had a huge advantage over their feeble brethren on consoles, which were afflicted with hardware limitations for at least two decades. After that, we were living in a post-Morrowind society. "In the '80s, console RPGs were incredibly primitive. I'm talking, stone knives and bear skins," Cain says on his YouTube channel in response to a fan question wondering about how consoles changed the RPG market over time. "I mean, tabletop RPGs were really the way to go if you wanted really in-depth rules, but even computer RPGs had more complex rules than console RPGs, because everything from the graphics, to the system mechanics, and sound effects all had to be really, really simplified and reduced to fit in that very limited memory storage that it had, and CPU bandwidth." "To me, console RPGs were kind of like toys that you could kind of play," Cain continues. Their controllers demanded select screens rather than the point-and-drag you could accomplish on PC, and checkpoint saves were a necessity for preserving their limited storage. But "all of this changed in 2002," when Bethesda launched The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind. [Hidden Content] "Morrowind came out on the Xbox. It was an open-world Western RPG that felt like it had none of the limitations of previous console games," says Cain. "It was a PC game playing on an Xbox." "It stunned me when it came out, because I remember thinking, 'This…this is it,'" he adds. "Not so much because of what the game was, but what it represented, which was – from now on, there's going to be a lot more parity between these two things. GamesRadar+'s Morrowind review apparently published in 2006 frothily declares "a new standard in role-playing games. [Morrowind is] astonishing in its depth and detail, and also sets a new benchmark in graphics." Morrowind was an in-depth spectacle – and not easily replicated. Cain thinks that buggy launches became more common for console games by at least the mid-2000s, once the Xbox 360 and PS3 had established digital storefronts where people could directly buy and download their games, which "meant it was also easy to patch them." "Maybe this was a coincidence, maybe it wasn't," Cain says generously, "but, suddenly, console games seemed to ship with bugs in a way they had never shipped with bugs before. They weren't as tight. Then, by the 2010s and 2020s, it felt like parity had been established and reached between PCs and consoles." With both of them covered in bugs, PC and console had reached equality at last. "Unconscionable": The day of Bethesda's Fallout reveal explosion, its laid-off Montreal devs were told they "would receive the smallest severance legally possible" and "immediately" lose health insurance benefits, union says. [/url]View the full article

Halo: Campaign Evolved has ten core Missions in total, plus three unique Bonus Missions, all of which contain three collectible Skulls hidden somewhere across the map. The Silent Cartographer is easily one of the most recognizable and fan-favorite Missions from the original Halo: CE, and while it will look very familiar to the original map, the Skulls are found in very different locations. View the full article

While we're still waiting for Netflix to drop the next season of JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, fans havebeen treated to several new releases that can help pass the time until we get to see the rest of Johnny's adventures in Steel Ball Run. As a legendary anime franchise with countless examples of video games, anime, and merchandise to enjoy, JoJo's has had more than a few strange releases over the years. View the full article

Patch 26.15 for League of Legends is releasing on July 29, and with it, the League of Legends: Classic mode View the full article