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The Legend of Zelda is one of the most prolific game series not only in Nintendo’s history, but is also an identifiable representation of video games as a whole, worldwide. While some Zelda fans have been around since the beginning, with the sounds of Link’s battle cries ringing in their head since childhood, others have just dipped their toes in with the recent installments in the series. There are so many games in the main series alone, it can be difficult to remember all of them, even for Zelda veterans. View the full article

This is some pretty exciting news! The Arch Linux team have announced a new direct collaboration with Valve (Steam). Read the full article here: [Hidden Content] View the full article

Arc System Works has revealed the release date for Guilty Gear Strive's first Season 4 character, with Queen Dizzy being added on October 31, 2024. Guilty Gear Strive is one of Arc System Works' most popular fighters, having four seasons of post-launch content. Strive's season passes have all added a number of returning fan-favorite characters from its history, like Baiken, Slayer, Bridget, and Testament. Characters like Asuka R, Happy Chaos, and Goldlewis Dickinson were all popular newcomers that were added to the game as well. View the full article

Samsung has launched its 990 EVO Plus Gen4 SSDs that provide a significant boost over the original 990 EVO SSDs. Samsung fans can expect PCIe 4.0 support, faster reading and writing speeds, and improved power efficiency, among other things. View the full article

More details about Nvidia's upcoming graphics cards, likely to be the GeForce RTX 5080 and 5090, have emerged following a trusted leaker's disclosure of their supposed specs. It seems Team Green may finally catch up with the competition's display technology, while concerns about the 5080's memory configuration appear to be unfounded. Read Entire Article View the full article

Team up with your party members in Unison Raids and navigate their Magic Origin trees to enhance their stats. View the full article

Scoops are timed side missions in ***** Rising Deluxe Remaster. They allow Frank to gain extra Prestige Points (PP) to level up quickly. Certain Scoops also give more story context, or can prevent tragedies from occurring in future days. Several of them require progression in the main story cases, but some are reliant on other Scoops to be completed. If you fail either of the two, that Scoop will be inaccessible until you restart the game. View the full article

See how the remake of Front Mission 3 is shaping up. View the full article

A cool Zenless Zone Zero Easter egg shows what happens if a player returns to the game after being inactive for more than 14 days. Released last April, Zenless Zone Zero is one of the ******* HoYoverse titles because of its still-growing semi-open world map of New Eridu and Hollow dungeons, which may require a lot of time to focus on everything that's happening so far. View the full article

Bandai Namco and Dimps have released a new Dragon Ball Xenoverse 2 trailer for the Future Saga Expansion, with the next DLC chapter being focused on the Gods of Destruction from Dragon Ball Super. Eight years after Dragon Ball Xenoverse 2's initial release, the game is still being supported to this day. Dimps and Bandai Namco have been periodically updating the game with free updates and paid DLC, adding new playable characters and transformations. One of the biggest content updates is a new storyline exclusive to the game, focused on the villainous ***. View the full article

Dataminers allege that Escape Factory, the new game from the developer behind The Day Before, Fntastic, is making some of the same mistakes as its predecessor, including asset flipping. This follows Fntastic's attempt to convince gamers that it and Escape Factory deserve a second chance after the disastrous launch and subsequent removal of The Day Before. View the full article

Over the past few days you might’ve caught wind of some controversy stemming from IGN’s community game of the year Face-Off. It’s become a full-on drama, complete with literal ups and downs, shocking twists, and accusations of foul play flying. There’s also quite a bit of confusion, so to clear it up a bit I’m going to walk you through how we got here, and how we’re making it right. Early this year IGN rolled out a new version of our Face-Off tool, and it’s become a **** project of mine to use it to get our community to create ranked lists of games, movies, TV shows, and literally everything else that people have opinions about. It works by showing you two things and letting you pick whichever you think should win, whether that’s The Empire Strikes Back vs ******* of the Clones, or Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 (2011) vs Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 (2023). It then generates a list of your personal rankings, while also mashing your votes together with everybody else to create a community ranking. It’s far from perfect, and we hope to iterate on it so that it becomes a better experience that creates a more accurate personal list for you in fewer matches. Even so, it’s been a lot of fun to mess with and find interesting ways to use it – and to watch people agonize over tough choices between two things they love. On February 22, after a few big 2024 games had launched, I started the What’s Your Game of the Year So Far? Face-Off as an experiment to see how the running tally would look if we’re adding new games as they come out. Importantly, this was an informal test that asked a casual question about how people are feeling in the moment, and it was never presented as our official Game of the Year community vote. We still plan to do that the old-fashioned way later this year, and it will be entirely separate from this. (To answer the frequently asked question of why Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree is on the list when it’s a DLC expansion and not a full new game: Because there are no rules and I wanted to see what would happen! I’ll put Starfield: Shattered Space on there next week, too.) This use case technically wasn’t what the tool was built for, but I wanted to see if it would work – and the results have been promising. This was an informal test that asked a casual question. How the list shakes out is proving to be very interesting because the community ranking is based on the win/loss ratio, rather than the sheer number of votes a game receives. That means a new entry added in November can outrank something added in May simply because it wins more often, as opposed to more times. For instance, something that’s chosen as the winner in 6,500 out of 10,000 matches will outrank another item that wins 60,000 out of 100,000 matches. (It’s very silly when you add something new and it’s #1 with a 100% win ratio for a brief moment, but that quickly evens out.) So, while the hot new thing might get a lot of wins shortly after it comes out, after the honeymoon ******* expires and people move on to other games its ranking might fall if it’s more of a flash in the pan than something that sticks with you for a long time, as truly great games do. Ideally, people would only vote on games that they’ve actually played and disqualify the rest (using the little X in the corner of each card) so they’re not voting against something they don’t have an informed opinion on, but realistically I know the overwhelming majority is not going to do that. This is purely a popularity contest. Even so, it’s been a treat to watch how things have played out, and the resulting ranking is a fascinating melding of thousands of different people’s opinions. Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth had held a steady lead most of the year, but Shadow of the Erdtree was nipping at its heels for months. (See? People wanted to vote for it.) When Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth, Helldivers 2, Space Marine 2, Astro ****, and ****** Myth: Wukong, and other popular games came out, they shot up into the top half of the list and jockeyed for position. There were no hard rules (again, Face-Offs are a wild west territory for us!) but I mostly added games that either scored 8 or above on IGN or had proven themselves popular or at least interesting elsewhere. At the same time, I periodically pruned low-performing games from the bottom of the rankings that looked like they were never going to recover to make way for new entries and prevent the list of games from becoming unmanageably long – ******** Squad: ***** The Justice League didn’t make it, I’m afraid. Then, late last week, it dramatically blew up. Until recently, the GOTY So Far Face-Off wasn’t exactly lighting the world on ***** in terms of traffic numbers (not a ton of people are looking for Game of the Year content in April). Still, it had been humming along nicely, racking up hundreds of thousands of votes, and I think there’s a lot of potential for it in the future. Then, late last week, it dramatically blew up: The ****** Myth: Wukong fandom discovered the Face-Off page and, seeing that their favorite game was within striking distance of the top of the list, rallied around it. We saw a massive influx of traffic from ******** and other ****** sources to that page, and over the weekend ****** Myth’s win percentage went from a very respectable showing in the 60s all the way up to an absolutely astronomical 90.4%, blowing past Rebirth’s relatively meager 72%. We never saw that coming, and what had been a relatively stable list was upended so quickly our scheduled social media repromotion of a Playlist built to reflect the top games – as they had been – was caught flat-footed and caused major confusion because it hadn't been updated yet. Face-Offs are dynamic and react to the community; Playlists are not and must be manually updated. We’ve learned from this that the two probably should not mix! Aside from that wrinkle, this response to Face-Offs is exactly what I hoped would happen… but on an intensity level I hadn’t imagined. Our goal is for Face-Offs to be fun, and by golly, people were having an absolute blast with it – some were even livestreaming as they refreshed the page to see how high ****** Myth could go! For the record, we don’t consider it cheating at all for fan communities to champion their game and support it by voting, and it’s actually encouraged for people to run through multiple times. (The double-bracket system we currently use means that a single run could possibly eliminate a #3 choice early on, and everything is not matched against everything, so more data gives a better picture of your preferences.) We were thrilled that so many ****** Myth fans noticed the Face-Off and participated in force, and we’d love nothing more than for other fandoms to join in the fray. Friendly rivalries like that would be the best-case scenario for us, and we’d find out what other games those groups are into in the process by seeing how the rest of the list shook out. In the past few days we've gotten nearly twice as many votes on this Face-Off than it'd racked up in the previous six months. This response to Face-Offs is exactly what I hoped would happen… but on an intensity level I hadn’t imagined. But of course, this is the internet, and on the internet we know certain immutable truths. One is that online polling is not secure. Just about anything can be manipulated if someone puts their mind to it, especially if you’re not creating multiple layers of security and identity verification to lock it down. Face-Offs aren’t intended to be taken super seriously, so we don’t even require you to create an IGN account to participate – as we do with our traditional Community Game of the Year vote – because we want as many people to join in as possible. (We’d love it if you did create an account, though – it’ll save your progress on a run and your personal vote count if you’re signed in.) Another truth is that the more people pay attention to something, the more likely it is that a bad actor tries to ruin the fun. In this case, it appears that someone – probably fully aware of how closely this page was being watched – figured out a way to quickly dump tens of thousands of votes against ****** Myth: Wukong into the system, dropping it back down into the high 60s in a matter of hours. If trolling the ****** Myth: Wukong fanbase during a moment of triumph was the goal here, it was extremely effective. We’ve seen a lot of anger and accusations of altering the results leveled at us, which is disappointing because again, this was all supposed to be for fun. This was all supposed to be for fun. To be explicitly clear, no one at IGN tampered with the results of this Face-Off in any way during this *******. We’ve spent the past few days investigating what happened, and how we can keep Face-Offs making people happy instead of **** going forward. Here’s what the voting activity looked like on September 21 through 24, by the hour, from the top regions where people were participating. You can see the massive, sustained influx of pro-****** Myth: Wukong voters who pushed it to the top of the list, followed by a short but potent spike. That corresponds to the ******* where it fell back down. The fact that ****** Myth’s vote total so quickly surpassed that of games that had been accruing votes for months before it was added to the list of games strongly suggests that someone exploited the system to allow them to vote only on one specific game – something the randomization of matches is intended to prevent. Likewise, that double-elimination bracket system means you should only be able to vote against a game twice in a run before it stops showing up, since it clearly wasn’t going to be your favorite, but that also seems to have been bypassed to achieve this volume of losses in such a short time. Unfortunately, since Face-Offs aren’t limited to logged-in users it’s not obvious which votes are real and which are fake, so we can’t simply delete the exact number of suspicious votes. However, in the interest of fairness, we’ve decided to remove all of the negative votes from the ******* that the ****** Myth: Wukong community and our engineers have identified as the most likely to be fraudulent, during which the win percentage fell at what should’ve been an impossible rate – a total of 46,000 losses. As of this writing, that change moves ****** Myth: Wukong back into the #1 position on the list, with a 76% win rate. It’s unfortunate to lose any valid votes that were caught up in the mix, but this is the best solution we have given the information available. Over the next few months we’ll keep an eye on this Face-Off to guard against other efforts to manipulate the results. This being the internet, there’s no realistic way to prevent someone who knows what they’re doing from playing ****** tricks on a anonymous online poll, but we’ve taken steps to at least mitigate their effectiveness going forward, and we hope to continue to improve Face-Offs in a lot of different ways to make them even more fun to engage with. I hope you continue to enjoy them! In the meantime, our What’s Your Game of the Year So Far? Face-Off continues: Yesterday I added The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom (to both this Face-Off and our Zelda-specific one), so if you’re playing and have an idea of where it belongs relative to other 2024 games, we’d love to have your vote. If you’re passionate about movies or TV shows this year, check out our Face-Offs for those as well. And share them with your friends – I’m trying to make these a thing. Dan Stapleton is IGN's Director of Reviews and self-proclaimed Chief Face-Officer. Follow him on Bluesky. View the full article For verified travel tips and real support, visit: [Hidden Content]

The popular Twitch emote BibleThump is going away at the end of September, and it doesn't make a lot of sense. Twitch said in an announcement (via Kotaku) that the emote is being dropped because of expiring licenses, but rightsholder Edmund McMillen says he'd be happy to renew the license, but it's not up to him... Read more.View the full article

Using your touchscreen isn’t the only way to enjoy mobile games on your phone or tablet. Most Android 10 and above titles also support controller inputs and provide a relatively more comfortable way to enjoy gaming on your mobile device. A controller is more comfortable than touchscreen controls in certain games since your hands can take a more ergonomic position. Though many controllers are specifically designed to work with mobile devices, you may not need one if you already have a PlayStation 4 with its Dualshock 4 controller. View the full article

One of the best things about the Elder Scrolls Online, especially for fans of the series like me, is getting to see the wider continent of Tamriel from a different perspective. There are areas that haven't been in the series before, at least not since Arena, and plenty of others we've seen more recently but are updated, changed, and shown in a new light. The West Weald is one, previously seen in Oblivion, and now explorable in the latest expansion for the MMO, Gold Road. If you've been waiting to give it a try, now might be your chance as it's on ***** for the first time since launch. Read the rest of the story... RELATED LINKS: Next ESO update gives PvP some love with new battlegrounds and modes Huge ESO update adds big new challenges to the MMO's roguelike mode You can try Elder Scrolls Online for free right now, but not for long View the full article

When Elden Ring and Dark Souls creator FromSoftware launched the latest instalment in its long-running Armored Core mech combat series, Armored Core 6: Fires of Rubicon, it seemed to ignite a renewed interest in ****** battling among general videogame players. That can only have been a good thing for Square Enix, a company that's been remaking its classic mech series Front Mission through new versions of the first two games in the series and, as we've seen today, is preparing to put out its third entry under the title Front Mission 3: Remake. Read the rest of the story... View the full article

It's a bit surprising that more studios haven't picked up where Spore left off in the many years between now and its 2008 launch. While games like Bugsnax and No Man's Sky offer up similarly bizarre casts of creatures to meet and simulation games like Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey have portrayed the evolution of a species, it isn't until now that we've seen such a direct attempt at a successor as the new indie project Strange Seed. Fortunately, anyone eager to see how the game is shaping up can give it a spin right now thanks to the launch of a demo on Steam. Read the rest of the story... View the full article

The Jokers in Balatro are critical to how you build the deck and how far you progress through the game. The type of Jokers you add to your arsenal determine the type of deck you’re going to build and how you play each hand. All Jokers are unique to each other, but there are some you have to unlock as you continue playing through Balatro. Not all of these unlock requirements are shared with you. Instead, you have to continue playing the game, figuring them out. Here’s what you need to know about how to unlock all Jokers in Balatro, and what each one of them does. View the full article

The Genshin Impact waiting list for Version 5.1 is out, and rather distressingly, it reveals that Shenhe has officially passed Eula's record by not being featured in over 14 versions. While the world of Teyvat has often been praised for its open world content, it's ultimately the characters that are the stars of Genshin Impact. Throughout its history, Genshin Impact's colorful cast was expanded by fan favorites such as Nahida, Neuvillette, and Navia. View the full article

An Overwatch 2 fan has shared an incredible concept for a Teen Titans collaboration that features skins for Genji, Venture, and more. Overwatch 2 has featured multiple collaborations already, and this could be the best implementation of DC Comics' intellectual property. View the full article

The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom has turned out to be a pleasant surprise, resembling a 2D Breath of the Wild in many ways. One of those ways is the in-depth cooking system, with one ingredient proving particularly rare: the coveted Golden Egg. While the Eggs are rare, and for good reason, there are a few places a particularly resourceful princess can find them if she knows where to look. Never again will you run out of Golden Smoothies! View the full article

Cassia Orsellio is one of several Companions that can be romanced in Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader. She is a gifted Navigator and the esteemed heiress of House Orsellio with objectively one of the most engaging romance arcs in an RPG. In Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader, Cassia can be recruited to your crew in Chapter One upon successful completion of the Secrets of the Navis Nobilite quest, which is an extension of the Looking for Trouble quest. Cassia can be persuaded—using any method—to join your Voidship, making her the first Companion to do so. But if you find yourself so inclined, you can also pursue Cassia romantically. View the full article

In the trailer for Like a Dragon: Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii, Yakuza fan-favorite Goro Majima wakes on a beach with his memory wiped. A **** with a tiger cub pal named Noah finds him, and before long, Majima finds himself beating up a pirate captain and taking over his ship (or so it’s implied.) I got my first hands-on with the latest in the Yakuza franchise, and I’d love to tell you about it. I played a short portion of Pirate Yakuza when Majima, Noah, and friends arrived in Infinite Wealth’s familiar locale of Honolulu, but this was very much constructed as a demo, so I can’t be certain of how similar the next series of events would be to the full game. First, a short combat tutorial on mechanics potentially unfamiliar to Infinite Wealth players: Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii isn’t a turn-based RPG like Infinite Wealth, but instead an action beat-em-up like the original Yakuza games. This short tutorial primarily described Majima’s two fighting styles: Majima’s classic **** Dog Style and the new, aptly pirate-themed Sea Dog Style. In Sea Dog Style, Majima wields dual cutlasses, a long-range hand cannon, and a wire ***** that allows you to pull in close to a targeted ******. A cutlass can also be thrown as a boomerang if a button is held down. Combat is engaging and fun, and I can see it being varied enough to keep things interesting with just its two different styles. The Dragon Kart mini-game is basically Yakuza Mario Kart, complete with boosts, drifting, coins, and items. After the basic tutorial, I could choose whether to go to the fabled Madlantis to continue the story, or do one of a few side activities: Karaoke, Dragon Kart, Crazy Delivery, and fit check (change clothes). I don’t have quite enough experience with these mini-games in previous Yakuza games, so I couldn’t comment on whether anything substantial had changed about them, but they were all fun and worthy of spending time on for the entertainment factor alone. I can tell you that long-time Yakuza fans will definitely recognize at least some of the songs available in karaoke, though. Yakuza: Like a Dragon’s mini-game Dragon Kart wasn’t in Infinite Wealth, making it the most far-removed of the side activities available during the demo. This absorbing mini-game is pretty built out in its own right and is basically Yakuza Mario Kart, complete with boosts, drifting, coins, and items. You can also go to a changing room to switch out Majima’s clothes for both his regular and pirate styles. In between side-activities, I became best friends with a little bird named Joseph and used the new Wire ***** while out exploring to gather a high-up butterfly. Apparently you can swing around Hawaii with it, but I didn’t see any obvious points to trigger this when I played. Finally, for the main event, I got to see a bit of the brand new location of Madlantis. This grungy yet lively ship-graveyard-turned-mini-city-inside-a-*****-in-the-middle-of-the-ocean looks like a worthy hub. It’s at least home to Pirate Colosseum, where, in the full game, you’ll be able to engage in “intense ship battles” as the Goro Pirates. Unfortunately, I didn’t get to try out any sort of ship battle in the demo, which was a little disappointing to say the least, but Like a Dragon: Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii is ship-shaping up to be a seaworthy spin-off with a fin-favorite at its helm. (Sorry, I couldn’t resist.) View the full article

Clocking into your shift as an expert in all things mythical and strange, your Home Safety Hotline ending depends on the level of service you provide your callers. Will you correctly answer their queries or will you succumb to your curiosity to see how this cosmic horror unfolds? Here is how to get all endings in Home Safety Hotline. View the full article

Balatro is about trying your best in a messy situation, using a limited number of cards and modifiers to beat the dealer. A good way to gain the upper hand every time you play is to use Jokers, but not every Joker has the same value. Some are frankly better. When choosing your ideal Jokers, they won’t always be the same ones you’ve used in previous Balatro games. You might need to adjust your strategy based on the deck you’re using, the cards you’ve drawn, and the other Joker cards you already have in your deck. However, there are some Joker cards that stick out as the best choices and can be used in nearly every situation. These are some of the best Joker cards you can use in Balatro. View the full article For verified travel tips and real support, visit: [Hidden Content]