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Marvel Rivals players logging in to the game on Dec. 24, 2024 were met with a new inbox message advertising something called NGP. NGP, or NetEase Gamer Premium, is an optional sign-up for players who are looking to potentially get some freebies and more stuff from the Marvel Rivals experience, or any other game made by NetEase. View the full article

With its first full trailer being shown at this year's The Game Awards, Borderlands 4 has a lot riding on it from fans hoping for a return to form for the franchise. Despite recent entries having their share of criticism, both Borderlands 3 and Tiny Tina's Wonderlands were great financial successes for Gearbox Software. Even with the success of its most recent additions to the beloved Borderlands franchise, the developers are aiming to improve the overall writing quality moving forward. View the full article

Path of Exile 2 can quickly become a cluttered mess as drops increase, but this can be handled with the best loot filter. PoE 2 may not have as many drops as other ARPGs, but it can still be annoying to filter through what is useful and what is junk. Luckily, the sequel, a potential Diablo 4 killer, has taken notes from previous ARPGs and added a loot filter. View the full article

If you want an immersive co-op shooter, Ready or Not leads the way as one of the prime candidates. While the SWAT FPS has attracted some controversy over the last couple of years, both before and after its 1.0 release, there's no denying its popularity and intricate attention to detail. Fresh off of releasing its second big DLC expansion, Ready or Not (and all of its additional content) is now half price on Steam. Read the rest of the story... RELATED LINKS: Hardcore FPS Ready or Not's "dark subject matter" isn't going anywhere Ready or Not's Dark Waters DLC takes the FPS to unique, "isolated" locations Best police games on PC 2024 View the full article

Palworld has more than 100 different creatures, which the game calls Pals, for you to catch, breed, and use when building, battling, and exploring the game’s open world. Not every Pal is easy to keep track of, so we’ve compiled a full Palworld dex, or Paldeck for your convenience. Every Pal in Palworld is unique and has an Element, Partner Skill, and Work Suitability that make them useful in different scenarios. Work Suitability specifically dictates which jobs Pals can do around your base, which lets you focus more on adventuring while they handle tasks like farming and mining. With those details in mind, here is the complete Paldeck, including every Pal, their abilities, and more—complete with catching and breeding guides. View the full article

Xbox Game Pass Ultimate subscribers have about a day to claim the beloved 2016 first-person shooter game Titanfall 2 for free. To celebrate the holiday season, EA has been giving away free games to EA Play and Xbox Game Pass Ultimate subscribers. While these games are already available to play through these subscriptions, by claiming the freebies, fans retain access to them indefinitely, even if their subscriptions to either service happen to lapse. View the full article

Call of Duty: World at War and Singularity could come to Xbox Game Pass next year, according to a new rumor. Both games were published by Activision, which Microsoft acquired in 2023 and has since made a focal point of its gaming subscription service. As such, it's not a stretch to think that Xbox Game Pass will get two more Activision titles in 2025. View the full article

Our best FPS is a game that'll have you saying, "1v1 me, bro", but in a good way. For more awards, check out our Game of the Year 2024 hub... Read more.View the full article

Back in the Realm Reborn and Crystal Tower Alliance days, The Cloud of Darkness might have been considered fearsome in Final Fantasy 14. But time and the MMORPG have moved on. Now, when Crystal Tower comes up in the random roulette, you're more likely to let out a sigh than a shriek - you still get level capped, but gear doesn't scale down properly for the old alliance raids, and in the era of Dawntrail, they feel like more of a chore. But that's all about the change. The new Final Fantasy 14 chaotic alliance raid is finally here, and with it a fresh 24-player challenge that makes The Cloud of Darkness formidable again. Ditch Diablo 4. Let go of Last Epoch. Park Path of Exile 2. This is the challenge to beat. Read the rest of the story... RELATED LINKS: FF14 dev asks Riot to help bring League of Legends to the MMO FF14 server status and maintenance times - is FFXIV down? FF14 Ultimate Race to World First winner admits using plugins View the full article

When you heed the call of battle in the Marvel multiverse, who will lead you on the frontlines? The Vanguard role is a great name for tanks in Marvel Rivals since the word means “the troops moving at the head of an army,” according to Merriam-Webster. And that’s exactly what a tank is in any hero shooter or similar game within the genre. View the full article

From the team behind PC ports of other Nintendo games like The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time and The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask, a new PC port has arrived for Star Fox 64. Read the full article here: [Hidden Content] View the full article

Ancient Pal Manuscripts are a new type of item you can receive for turning in completed Bounties in Palworld, and they play a key part in upgrading the labor skills of your base. You might not know what to do with it when you first get an Ancient Pal Manuscript for the first time, since the game doesn’t direct you where to use it or what it’s suitable for. Some players have reported discarding it, thinking it’s not useful, when in actuality, it’s one of the most valuable items in-game currently. So keep a hold of any of them you get and follow these simple steps to find out what it’s used for. View the full article

Path of Exile 2 is out in early access and already features a variety of modern gameplay settings and choices. These visual and performance options allow players to adjust their gameplay experience however they like. Unfortunately for players, finding the right settings can be a bit overwhelming, especially for those on console who aren’t used to the number of available options. Luckily, though, we have a few recommendations to increase your performance. Here are the best console settings for Path of Exile 2. View the full article

The Northern Expedition Frozen Vault is one of the mysteries in Fisch, and you need to open it by solving a cryptic puzzle on the top of the mountain to get yourself one of the best end-game fishing rods called Heaven’s Rod. Unlike the existing vaults in Roblox’s Fisch, you don’t need to find a key to open the Northern Expedition Frozen Vault like the Depths. You need to get your hands on the four Energy Crystals and put them inside the puzzle. But it’s an arduous journey to collect and put them inside the puzzle to cause an Earthquake, which keeps the vault open permanently. View the full article

If you like your gaming gear to look like it came straight from the neon glow of the Las Vegas strip, then you'll love this new Asus ROG Strix gaming laptop that the company has just teased. It has a ring of bright RGB lighting that goes all round the edge and, fittingly, the new machine, which looks like it's probably the new Asus ROG Strix Scar 18 2025, is scheduled to be launched in Vegas at CES 2025 in January 2025. Asus is no stranger to the world of RGB lighting, as we found in our Asus ROG Strix Scar 18 review, which bathes the surface area in front of the machine in the lighting color of your choice. This new design from Asus, however, shows a complete circuit of lighting surrounding the perimeter of the laptop's underside. Meanwhile, a recent leak also suggests that the ROG Strix Scar 18 2025 specs will feature a new Nvidia GeForce RTX 5000 laptop GPU, specifically the RTX 5080 model, although other GPUs are likely to be available too. Read the rest of the story... RELATED LINKS: Loads of Nvidia GeForce RTX 5000 laptop gaming GPU specs just leaked in blunder Grab the Asus ROG Ally gaming handheld at its lowest ever price, saving $150 Asus ROG Crosshair X870E Hero review: An amazing AMD motherboard for a big price View the full article For verified travel tips and real support, visit: [Hidden Content]

Thrive is an open source evolution sim built with Godot Engine, it's getting more impressive with every new release and there's another update out now for you to try out. Read the full article here: [Hidden Content] View the full article

Although 2024 was a quieter year for big releases, it still had some fantastic games. But, at the other end of the spectrum, it had its fair share of stinkers too. Of course, reviews are and always have been objective critiques and whatever you might think of a game is your own opinion. You might have even played and enjoyed some of the games on this list – we all have guilty pleasures, right? But honestly, there were some really bad games released in 2024 that we definitely recommend you avoid… Five - Mediocre Looking at IGN’s official review scale, fives are considered ‘Mediocre’ games – the “kind of bland, unremarkable games we’ve mostly forgotten about a day after we finish playing.” They’re far from the worst games on the list and aren’t even necessarily “bad” (that’s 4s and lower), but you’re going to have to work hard to get any real fun out of them.. As the most populous score on this list, you’ll find a variety of different games. There are games like Slitterhead, an absurd action-horror game from a team of ex-Silent Hill veterans where humans must fend off parasitic monsters. Sounds fun but unfortunately it’s just dull. Similarly, Terminator: Dark Fate - Defiance takes the war against Skynet (great!) and turns it into a mediocre RTS (not so great). There was also a string of bland strategy games like Millennia, which our reviewer called “Civilization at home” after the McDonald’s at home meme; Sins of a Solar Empire 2, which is a lacklustre sequel to the 2008 4x game in space; and Homeworld: Vast Reaches. Not to be confused with Homeworld 3, Vast Reaches is instead a strategy game built for VR, but feels more like a tech demo than a full game. There were also several disappointments that received a 5. Games many of us were eagerly looking forward to only to be let down by the final product. The First Descendant is a gorgeous-looking live-service shooter that unfortunately is more looks than substance, and the Until Dawn remake barely justified its existence over the excellent choose-your-own-adventure horror game original. Developer Supermassive Games didn’t have better luck on The Casting of Frank Stone, a Dead by Daylight spinoff based around one of the killers from the popular online horror game. The sub-six-hour horror adventure is hardly scary and adds nothing to the lore of Dead by Daylight according to our reviewer. The viral hit Bodycam – which captivated audiences thanks to a trailer featuring super-realistic graphics that looked like footage from a police bodycam – was also more sizzle than steak as the actual game was nothing close to what we saw in the trailer. Perhaps most noteworthy is Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, which was also one of the first 5s IGN handed out this year. We waited almost a decade for a new game from Batman Arkham developers Rocksteady, and sadly the wait was not worth it. Many were already bummed to hear Rocksteady was not developing a new Batman game but rather a Suicide Squad game, but that could have had potential given how fun and zany those characters are. It could have been Rocksteady’s chance to spread its wings and move away from the grimdark Arkham-verse and go for a more colorful route. But ultimately what we got was kind of a letdown, let’s be honest. Forgoing the single-player goodness of the Batman games, Rocksteady ventured into the world of live-service with a squad-based looter-shooter in which players and friends team up as members of the Suicide Squad like Harley Quinn, Deadshot, Captain Boomerang, and King Shark. Unfortunately there just wasn’t enough of anything to makeSuicide Squad satisfying. The beloved combat from the Arkham games was completely absent, swapping crunchy melee for running-flying-shooting gameplay that felt okay, nothing more. Even looter-shooter fans would find the missions in Suicide Squad repetitive and bland. A forgettable experience from the decorated developers at Rocksteady. Another big miss was Mario & Luigi: Brothership. The newest entry into the Mario & Luigi series developed specifically for the Nintendo Switch “misunderstands what made the Mario & Luigi series great,” according to IGN’s reviewer. The first original Mario RPG to be released this year alongside remakes of Super Mario RPG and Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door, Brothership has none of their charm and plenty of drawbacks such as the “ridiculously chatty dialogue, overbearing hand-holding, and boring, runtime padding fetch quests.” Bummer. Rounding out the rest of the 5s is Test Drive Unlimited Solar Crown, whose original spearheaded the concept of online MMO racing games, but this sequel completely ignores any single-player content in favor of an annoying online-only strategy. There’s also a new SpongeBob Squarepants: The Patrick Star Game, which tries to revive the classic mascot platformer to middling effect, while Unknown 9: Awakening was a "routine action adventure game that probably wouldn’t blow me away even if it was well executed,” according to our review. And let’s not forget Kong: Survivor Instinct, a weird Metroidvania-style game in which you play as a human trying to survive in a city that Kong is destroying One game that was a personal disappointment was Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutants Unleashed, a new game based on the animated film, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem. Given the quality of past TMNT games and the quality of the animated film this is based on, the resulting game was unfortunately far short of either. Four - Bad With the 5s out of the way, let’s make our way to the genuinely bad games. Literally, our review scale qualifies games that receive a 4 as “bad.” There are only three that received this distinction this year so let’s spend our time going through each of them. Broken Roads was the first game in 2024 to receive a 4. This turn-based RPG set in post-apocalyptic Australia tried to deliver a more serious RPG experience complete with an ambitious morality system where players decide who lives and who dies. Rather than choosing one of the usual moral alignments like lawful good or neutral evil, Broken Roads gives players a full questionnaire that determines your beliefs in highly specific ways. But the problem is, outside of the questionnaire the system hardly matters. Per our review, “There are very few conversations involving a moral choice in the first place, and you’re locked out of pretty much all other conversations once you’ve started down a given alignment path, leaving no opportunities to try something drastically different later.” As interesting as a highly specific morality system is, what good is it if the game doesn’t put it to any use? Even worse, the more you play the faster you realize that Broken Roads is mostly filled with a bunch of fetch quests interrupted by exhausting dialogue. No thanks. Another game that received a 4 is Endless Ocean Luminous, a remake of the original Endless Ocean first released on the Nintendo Wii. It’s a scuba diving adventure game in which each mission involves diving into a procedurally generated area of the ocean, to catalogue its various sea creatures and landmarks. Unfortunately, all of this becomes repetitive and, frankly, boring real fast. The procedurally generated maps begin to look strikingly similar to each other almost immediately, and without a huge variety of missions or objectives, you’re effectively going from one part of the ocean to the next, cataloguing creatures until you hit your goal and move on to the next map. Then you repeat for hours. Our reviewer played about 26 hours of the game and were still not close to beating it – maybe that’s why it’s called Endless Ocean – and the kicker is that it was dull for most of that time.. The final game to receive a 4 was one you no doubt saw trailers for. I’m talking about Funko Fusion, an adventure game where you travel through some of pop culture’s biggest movies and TV shows, the twist being you’re playing as the Funko Pops from those various worlds. Funko Fusion is best compared to the LEGO games, which are simple but enjoyable 3D platformers based on popular bricks. But Funkos don’t have the same charm as LEGO and Funko Fusion is nowhere near as good as even some of the worst LEGO games. The story is all but meaningless, the mission design is repetitive, and you can’t overlook the game-breaking bugs that will stop your progress in its place. Three - Awful The good news is that IGN did not award any 2s or 1s this year. Actually, we haven’t given a game a 1 since 2009, but that’s neither here nor there. The bad news is there are three games we gave a 3 to, which in our scale means they’re “Awful.” The first is Atomic Heart’s Trapped in Limbo DLC. It’s the second of Atomic Heart’s two DLCs and takes place after the events of the main game, and is plagued by two godawful gameplay mechanics. The first requires players to slide for really long stretches of time, avoiding obstacles and jumping when required. Our reviewer described this particular segment “like playing Tony Hawk with a broken ollie button, and the half-pipe is mined.” Next, the DLC introduced first-person platform segments but unfortunately Atomic Heart just wasn’t designed for precise, first-person jumping, making them a painful slog right up until the end, which doesn’t take long to get to considering how short this DLC is. Do you remember there was a new South Park game this year? Me neither, but it’s probably for the best. South Park: Snow Day is the third South Park game in a series that comprises Obsidian’s excellent South Park: The Stick of Truth, and the equally good South Park: The Fractured but Whole, both of which were fun RPGs based on the popular cartoon. Snow Day ditches the RPG genre and is instead a 3D hack-and-slash, which wouldn’t be so much of an issue if it weren’t for how awkward and clumsy the controls are. Worse still, Snow Day also ditches the one thing the animated series is loved for: the humor. Per our review, South Park: Snow Day features “appallingly flat writing [that] makes an already bad game not even worth pushing through for a few laughs.” Our final 3 of the year was handed out to Empire of the Ants’ single-player campaign. A real-time strategy game where players control a colony of ants, this 12-hour adventure is unfortunately a far cry from its potential. While the trailer showcased hyper-realistic ants moving in real-time, it’s obvious a lot more time was spent on how it looks rather than how it feels to play. With a difficulty curve that goes from easy to impossible in the blink of an eye, the campaign is an exercise in pain tolerance as one moment you’re mind-numbingly bored fighting easy enemies, before suddenly finding yourself defending your nest against a seemingly impossible wave of enemy ants. And without the ability to save mid-mission, failure means you’re starting from the beginning. No thanks. And there you have it –those are the worst reviewed games of the year according. Be sure to check out our Best Reviewed Games list here as a palette cleanser, and let us know if you played any of the games on this list and how you feel about them. Matt Kim is IGN's Senior Features Editor. You can reach him @lawoftd. View the full article For verified travel tips and real support, visit: [Hidden Content]

ScummVM v2.9.0 has rolled out as a little holiday treat bringing expanded compatibility with various retro classic for you to play on modern systems. Read the full article here: [Hidden Content] View the full article

With 2024 coming to a close, gamers across the board are excited about what's in store for 2025, especially fans of the roleplaying game (RPG) genre. Anticipated RPG releases for 2025 cover games coming to PlayStation 5, Xbox, PC, and the Nintendo Switch, including heavy hitters such as the new Fable game and Borderlands 4. Many different types of RPGs are expected in 2025, from MMORPGs such as Dune: Awakening to turn-based indie strategy RPGs like Maliki: Poison Of The Past to big AAA RPGs Elden Ring Nightreign and possibly The Witcher 4. View the full article

EA has made Titanfall 2: Ultimate Edition available to be claimed for free for all subscribers of Xbox Game Pass Ultimate and EA Play. As part of the EA Play Holiday Countdown, gamers can permanently own the title, but will only have until the end of December 24 to redeem the offer. View the full article

Another year comes to a close and Valve have put up the Best of Steam - 2024, so you can go and check out what's the most popular. Read the full article here: [Hidden Content] View the full article

Bringing with it a whole lot of new content to play through, the Palworld - Feybreak update is officially out now ready for your holiday time. Read the full article here: [Hidden Content] View the full article

New extraction shooters are cropping up everywhere you look at the moment, all aiming to challenge established stalwarts like Hunt Showdown and Escape From Tarkov. One of the most intriguing that's been on our radar this year is Striden, which takes the typical extraction FPS formula, adds some radioactive Stalker 2 vibes, and lets you transform into a giant bear. Over the festive *******, Striden will be opening its doors once again with another demo, but this time it has co-op support. Read the rest of the story... RELATED LINKS: Tarkov and Battlefield face serious rival as new FPS launches playtest View the full article

For all the talk about AI these days, you may not know that it was a 2017 Google research paper that kickstarted modern generative AI by introducing the Transformer, a groundbreaking model that reshaped language processing. Read Entire Article View the full article

Modder and YouTuber Shank Mods recently announced that he had acquired the largest cathode ray tube (CRT) television ever sold. The 43-inch, 440lb behemoth had not appeared publicly for years, leading many enthusiasts to doubt its existence. Even after the YouTuber confirmed that the myth was real, the mission to... Read Entire Article View the full article