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For sci-fi tabletop wargame fans, it often feels like it's Warhammer 40k's world, and we're just living in it - but original, non-grimdark miniature game concepts can come from the weirdest of places. Case in point: The Block War, a new wargame and 3D printable model range by two independent creators, based on a future conflict between high-tech armies of... spheres and blocks. Read the rest of the story... RELATED LINKS: All the Warhammer 40k primarchs, and where they are now Warhammer 40k lore: What happened to the lost legions? The best Warhammer 40k deals on Humble Choice View the full article For verified travel tips and real support, visit: [Hidden Content]

Marvel Rivals has announced its first post-launch special event. Hero shooter Marvel Rivals has proven to be incredibly popular since launch, drawing in millions of players excited by its Overwatch meets Marvel concept. The launch version of Marvel Rivals has 33 playable characters, eight maps, and four game modes for players to enjoy, but like with any live service game, more is on the way. View the full article

The Starlight Celebration returns to Final Fantasy XIV, and you can participate this holiday season. You’ll have the rest of 2024 to work on these activities, grabbing some goodies to add to your collection to bring the festive cheer to your house and friends. The Starlight Celebration is an annual event close to the end of every calendar year. Although the overall structure remains the same, the rewards and items you can get will slightly alter. You might have also forgotten where you need to go to start this event and enjoy the festivities. We’ll show you what you need to do to begin the Starlight Celebration 2024 event and the rewards you can get in Final Fantasy XIV. View the full article

The world of Spongebob Squarepants is coming to Fortnite with the launch of four popular game modes themed around the Nickelodeon show, giving players the opportunity to explore Bikini Bottom and the franchise’s iconic humor. Four immersive UEFN experiences will see Spongebob Squarepants land in Fortnite, bringing Bikini Bottom to life with an under-the-sea twist on some of the most popular fan-created game modes in the Epic Games title. View the full article

Neil Newbon, the performance capture artist for Astarion in Baldur’s Gate 3 has an extensive career in acting and has become even more popular following his portrayal of the vampire elf in Larian Studios’ award-winning RPG. The character’s development and multiple personality layers are some of the aspects that make him so popular, in addition to the memorable Astarion quotes in Baldur’s Gate 3, which would not be as impactful if they were not delivered by Newbon. View the full article

In this brave new era of game-to-TV adaptations, I was thrilled to learn that Amazon's Fallout TV show was pretty great. The first season tossed in all sorts of touchstones from the games: from stimpacks to power armor, and a lot of Fallout's weirdo humor—vault gene pool struggles and all. It was a hit, raking in 65 million views in its first 16 days. One of our own Fallout fans, Jody MacGregor, called it the best Fallout since New Vegas in his Fallout season 1 review. So as a result of such high praise, it's not surprising that a second season was quickly announced... Read more.View the full article

Marvel Rivals players are in for a treat this festive season with the introduction of a limited-time mode and free cosmetics rewards to earn in the Winter Celebration event. Since launching in November, Marvel Rivals has gone from strength-to-strength, setting a staggering record after just 72 hours, and players are being given more reasons to play over the festive season with goodies up for grabs. View the full article

Whenever I start a new game on Fallout New Vegas - especially if I pick Hardcore Mode - I promise I'm going to do it: total purity, real survivalism, no fast travel. On paper, it's the best way to experience the greatest RPGs. When you physically have to walk from Whiterun to Solitude, it gives you a chance to properly breathe in the world and atmosphere of Skyrim. Cyberpunk 2077's Night City comes to more vivid life when you force yourself to manually explore every street. But let's be real - there's just no time. Stalker 2 is the perfect FPS for rugged, dedicated realism, but sometimes you need to take a shortcut. Enter this vital new Stalker 2 mod. Read the rest of the story... RELATED LINKS: Best Stalker 2 mods Stalker 2's most annoying problem gets fixed with vital new mod Stalker 2 missions list - all main and side quests View the full article For verified travel tips and real support, visit: [Hidden Content]

Be careful out there, Sonic fans, as spoilers for the third movie have seemingly hit the internet. Read more View the full article

Tim Cain's storied career includes a bunch of what are likely some of your favourite RPGs, including the first two Fallouts and Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines. Some of the games he worked on became huge mainstream successes, while others—particularly the games developed by his RPG studio, Troika—became cult classics. And people are always asking him why he never made follow-ups to the latter... Read more.View the full article

Disney Dreamlight Valley loves to bring new characters alongside its major content updates, and the Sew Delightful update welcomed Sally from the Nightmare Before Christmas. It's been a while since Jack Skellington made his debut, so it's about time his partner made her way to the valley. But if you're new to the game there's a lot that you need to do in preparation before you can unlock this character... Read more.View the full article

Personally, I've never thought about killing Mariah Carey. Hearing her screech "It's tiiiiiiime!" every December has nearly driven me to despair, but not to *******. However, thanks to a fan-made Dungeons and Dragons homebrew, I'm considering letting my D&D character have at her with a sword. Read the rest of the story... RELATED LINKS: All DnD races and species explained Dungeons and Dragons fans play a campaign for 44 years, write a book about it DnD sizes explained View the full article

Marvel Rivals has been a huge success since launching earlier this month, due in part to the fact that it’s available on PC as well as both PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S. Because of this, players are already longing for the ability to play their accounts on multiple platforms, getting to use the same unlocks, ranks, and skins on PC as they would be able to while relaxing and gaming on the couch on console. Right now, while playing Marvel Rivals on PC, PS5, or Xbox, all progress is independent any other platform you play on, with no way of linking accounts to migrate everything into one place. The game does have crossplay, so while you may encounter a console player while on PC or vice versa, account progress is not currently available across the different platforms. View the full article

A prominent Fortnite leaker has shown off concept art of a new skin that could be given out to players for free with the game's next major update. While it isn't confirmed, leakers believe the game's next update may arrive on December 18, which will likely kick off the annual Winterfest event in Fortnite. The holiday-themed event usually comes with map changes, decorations, new cosmetics, and free items for players to claim daily. View the full article

Marvel Rivals creative director Guangyun Chen has lifted the lid on the seasonal plans for the six-vs-six shooter and how characters, maps, and content will be introduced—with exciting reveals in the process. Since release in November, Marvel Rivals has been in Season Zero, a mini season that is significantly shorter in length, with season one due in January. Although the precise date has yet to be revealed, we now know what each season will entail. Speaking to Dot Esports, Chen explained how each season in Marvel Rivals will last for three months and will be split into two halves. At the start of each half, new characters will be introduced—effectively meaning new characters at the start of each season and during a mid-season update. View the full article

After days of speculation amid being replaced in the OpTic Texas lineup, Pred confirmed he has been dropped from the team and is now a free agent. Pred finally addressed the situation in an early morning stream on Dec. 16, saying that he has went back home to Australia in an attempt to improve his mental health. Unfortunately, clips from the stream are muted, but several viewers recapped what he had to say. Once again, the star player did not go into details about his situation, but addressed gambling rumors by saying that he did not gamble on Call of Duty League matches, and his issues stem from personal problems. View the full article

Drama Queen has become a contentious manga in the past few weeks, and the increasing spectacle of the series means that fans noticed when a line was altered in chapter one. The series follows two Japanese young adults who are fed up with the status quo which celebrates a race of alien “saviors” who allegedly […] Source View the full article

A player recently managed to capture a bizarre glitch while playing Marvel Rivals which swapped their chosen character with a completely different one. The glitch occurred while the player was checking out the Hela emote screen inside the menus of Marvel Rivals. However, Hela was nowhere to be seen, with her player model strangely being swapped with Captain America's. View the full article

Elden Ring Nightreign brings back the classic bloodstain mechanic, though it offers players a source of valuable loot for interacting with them instead of a glimpse of another player's death. One of the ******* surprise announcements during The Game Awards was From Software's latest title, Elden Ring Nightreign. View the full article

Sometimes dogs are hard to shut up. Over a year and half after releasing Hrot from early access, the developer of the Quake-inspired shooter has fixed the dogs after discovering that a few of the canines have been, for some players, barking in a hideous and endless loop. Read more View the full article

A rumor about the new Nvidia GeForce RTX 5060 has just dropped, and if it's true, it's not good news for the longevity of this future budget gaming GPU. This particular leak concerns the VRAM fitted to the new graphics card, and unless Nvidia prices this new GPU really competitively, the RTX 5060 could be in some trouble. It's been a struggle to recommend the best graphics card under $300 lately, with the 8GB Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060 being overpriced at $299, and the $269 8GB AMD Radeon RX 7600 struggling with ray tracing. It's an area where Intel has attempted to carve a niche for itself, with the $249 Intel Arc B580 specs offering 12GB of VRAM and faster performance than the RTX 4060. That situation is further complicated by a severe lack of supply of the new Intel GPUs right now, however. Read the rest of the story... RELATED LINKS: Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090 power draw could be lower than expected, suggests leak This new $249 Intel GPU beats the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060 Ti in benchmark leak There's a new Nvidia GeForce RTX 5000 GPU inside this leaked Dell laptop View the full article

When is the Bleach Rebirth of Souls release date? With the roaring success of Bleach's ongoing Thousand-Year Blood War arc anime adaptation, the concept of the first full-fledged 3D Bleach fighter in over a decade suddenly became a very real possibility. Now, as we celebrate the anime's 20th anniversary, Tamsoft is bringing the Soul Society and Hueco Mundo to the mortal realm. Bleach Rebirth of Souls is a 1v1 fighting game that lets you unleash powerful Bankai and devastating attacks as you take to its story and multiplayer game modes. We've already been inundated with gameplay footage, character reveals, and much more, so read on to find out all you need to know ahead of launch. Read the rest of the story... View the full article

The PC is arguably the definitive gaming platform, deeper and broader than any of the bespoke boxes you stick under your TV. It has become a catch-all for multiplatform games, an inevitable second home for first-party console exclusives, and a bastion for smaller games that may not be able to develop ports. It’s also a destination of its own for unique, mouse-and-keyboard-driven genres that just aren’t quite as comfy to play while sitting on a couch, while also being the place for portable-friendly games thanks to the likes of the Steam Deck. Unsurprisingly, it meant we had a lot of games to pick from when it came to crowning our 2024 PC favourites. While plenty of incredible games came to both the PC and other platforms this year, our picks for the best PC games of 2024 stand as a mix of impressive experiences across multiple genres – some of which you simply can’t play with a controller in your hand. There’s the intricate, automated empires of Satisfactory; the exquisite puzzle design of Animal Well; the just-one-more-round compulsion of Balatro; the thrilling detective work of The Rise of the Golden Idol, and more besides. But only one can be crowned the best PC game of 2024. What did the IGN team judge to be the most worthy? Let’s take a look at the results… Honorable Mentions With so many excellent games to choose from this year, the spread of votes for the best PC game was understandably broad. The varied taste of the IGN team meant that several games picked up a strong number of votes, but sadly not enough to secure a podium finish. Of those games, the two that only just missed out were 1000xResist and The Rise of the Golden Idol. Plenty of games tell a compelling story, but it’s the way 1000xResist tells its story that truly stands out. It is a confident and moving tale that isn’t afraid to get deep, blending surreal concepts with emotionally charged deconstructions of the human condition in a manner reminiscent of games like Nier: Automata. Thanks to its narrative-first design being something of a first cousin to visual novels, 1000xResist’s story is able to double down on delivering ideas and plot in innovative ways that raise the bar for its genre. A follow-up to 2022’s breakout detective game, The Rise of the Golden Idol continues to impress by empowering you to solve its crimes with hands-on detective work. Set in the 1970s, it presents multiple diorama-like crime scenes in each chapter, demanding you to gather clues via close observation and then piece together exactly what happened. Rarely are the actual events as simple as they seem, and the truth can only be deduced from spotting minor things such as an empty gun chamber or the hidden subtext in an angry note. It’s a “puzzle” game that’s not simply about finding the right button to push, with an artistic presentation uniquely its own. Runner-Up: Animal Well 2D pixel art platformers can feel like they are a dime a dozen these days, but Animal Well is different. That may sound like a cliche setup, something you’ve heard before about plenty of other games, but it really is true here. Animal Well wears the skin of a puzzle-driven metroidvania while also twisting all the usual trends that come along with that structure. You aren’t fighting your way through waves of enemies or upping your missile capacity here, in part thanks to Animal Well’s almost complete rejection of violence. Instead you’ll find bubble-blowing wands that can produce floating platforms, frisbees that can tame ferocious dogs, and firecrackers that illuminate the dark to reveal the hidden platforming challenges ahead. The real joy of Animal Well, though, is realising that there’s far, far more to each item than their obvious use. And then you begin to realise that there’s far, far more to each location than the obvious objectives. And as you begin to peel back the layers, you soon discover that what initially appeared to be a five-hour metroidvania is instead a gargantuan puzzle with enough secrets to discover that they could fill an actual well. It’s an innovative and endlessly enticing take on otherwise well-worn territory. Runner-Up: Satisfactory After nearly five years in Early Access, Satisfactory’s 1.0 update arrived this year to cement it as one of the absolute best automation games around. It’s a game all about building assembly lines and laying down endless miles of conveyor belts, which is much more of an immense joy than it may initially seem. The subsequent tech climb that sees your factories become faster, more efficient, and inevitably more complicated always keeps you looking forward to that next big breakthrough. The sight of spaghetti-like factories that span a thousand acres can seem intimidating at first, but don’t let that put you off: Satisfactory’s well-constructed web of objectives helps you build confidence in your engineering capabilities. Within just a few hours you’ll have graduated from novice conveyor belt enthusiast to an automation veteran, capable of troubleshooting catastrophic malfunctions as if they were minor inconveniences. But while the factories are your primary concern, Satisfactory is much more than the end result. This is also a Minecraft-style open world in which you must delve into caves, survive deadly gas clouds, and stripmine rock formations in order to gather the materials needed to both fund and fuel your colossal creations. Throw in a few friends working together in co-op to pave over every inch of green on this detailed alien world and you’ve got a recipe for “blink and an hour has passed” captivation that rarely quits. Runner-Up: UFO 50 UFO 50 is an almost incomprehensible achievement. The concept of an old-school gaming system being miraculously unearthed and made available today is a cute one already, and I wouldn’t blame you if you assumed the catalogue of 50 games that came with it were largely just quant minigames that make for an amusing but fleeting distraction. But that’s simply not the case. Each and every entry in this library is essentially the size of an entire retro game of its own, many of which would have surely been standout hits in their era if they actually existed at that time. But this isn’t a collection of games made in the 1980s, and the deeper down the rabbit hole you go the more obvious that becomes. The games of UFO 50 are smart. Like, modern day indie darling smart. Each one weaves excellent new ideas into the canvass of a retro classic, resulting in games that feel like toys of yesteryear but play like a 2024 Steam top-seller. Echoes of No Man’s Sky, Hotline Miami, Into The Breach and more can be found between the scan lines, but each game is more than just a de-make of its inspiration. UFO 50 is essentially a playable examination of the past and present of video games. There’s just so much to dig into here, with an almost alarmingly consistent level of quality. UFO 50 could have been half as big as it is and it still would have been impressive – instead, it’s borderline stunning. Winner: Balatro If you’ve already played Balatro, you probably understand why it’s here. In fact, odds are good you might still be playing it right now. And if you haven’t, I’d recommend you do, but the kinder thing might be to tell you to run. Because once you’ve jumped into its smart mix of roguelite deckbuilding and digital poker, you might find your free time slipping away and the sun creeping up during what was supposed to still be night. But then again, it sure is worth it. There’s something about Balatro that effortlessly hooks you, the “just one more turn” syndrome distilled into its purest form. Everything about its fairly simple presentation is tuned perfectly to be endlessly satisfying, bringing delight or destruction with every card you play. While on the surface it’s a poker game that’s approachable for anyone who can tell their flushes from their full houses, don’t be fooled into thinking you need to know the rules of the classic casino game to play. In fact, this isn’t actually poker. Balatro is an entirely original idea, and while poker hands may be at the centre of the screen, the real centre of the experience is building wild game-breaking decks that can send your score multiplier skyrocketing. Each round allows you to tweak and improve your collection of cards, switching out suits to more easily achieve better hands, or using celestial powers to assemble literal wildcards. The options are unbelievably deep for those who then want to break the intuitive tropes open with smart modifiers – you may have put together a four-of-a-kind in your day, but play a five-of-a-kind for the first time and you won’t ever want to go back. This is the truly impressive trick of Balatro, making you think you know what it’s doing at every step of the way, then teasing you in deeper as more game-shifting Jokers are discovered, more decks are unlocked, and the scores you consider impressive start stretching from the thousands into exponents so large you need a degree to decipher them. Wrap that up in a lo-fi presentation as deceptively well designed as the card game it houses, and you’ve got a game we’re undoubtedly going to be playing for years to come. More of IGN's 2024 AwardsThe Best Anime of 2024The Best Horror Movie of 2024The Best PC Game of 2024IGN Awards 2024: The Nominees[/url] View the full article

As hero shooters go, Marvel Rivals is easily one of the most popular in the gaming community right now, but one main complaint has been on players’ minds since its beta *******. With different Marvel heroes and villains taking up separate roles like Vanguard (tank), Duelist (damage), and Strategist (support/healer), many players are wondering when role ****** will be added to the game to help players ****** up for the role they wish to play. But also to prevent team compositions from getting too unbalanced or weird. View the full article

The rumored sequel to Tiny Tina's Wonderlands has reportedly been canceled. While Gearbox hadn't officially announced the second title in the Borderlands spinoff series, early signs had pointed to something in the works. Unfortunately for fans, the latest update on the Tiny Tina's Wonderlands sequel may confirm its existence by suggesting its cancelation. View the full article