Ready for a sentence that could only apply to the everything-but-the-kitchen-sink pop-culture smorgasbord of modern-day Fortnite? Here we go! A rucksack containing Star Wars’ Yoda has been temporarily banned from the battle royale game, after crashing games when players wearing the green Jedi master on their back do the Zoidberg Scuttle emote from Futurama.
Grabbit.
Daedalic Entertainment has brought fantasy point-and-clicker The Night of the Rabbit to Switch and it’s available on the eShop from…today! Originally released on PC back in 2013, it’s a beautiful-looking thing, as you can tell from the Switch release trailer above.
Described in the blurb as being “reminiscent of classic LucasArts adventures,” we can’t vouch for whether that just means it’s a classic-style P&C or not, but if the voice acting and animation are anything to go by, it could be a bit special, if you’re into that sort of thing.
Read the full article on nintendolife.com
We are so excited to announce that Spin Rhythm XD is coming to PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5 and the first-ever VR version on PlayStation VR2!
Spin Rhythm XD is a kinetic rhythm-action game where players move, tap, slide, scratch, and spin to the beat all while traveling through incredible reactive backgrounds. Made by a team of three friends from Australia including the original creators of Fruit Ninja and Jetpack Joyride, the game’s simple combination of color matching and physical gestures (spinning a wheel) combine to put players in a deep flow state.
We have assembled a huge variety of 60+ tracks from artists including Camellia, Anamanaguchi, Hyper Potions, Haywyre, Lena Raine, 2 Mello, Teminite, Tokyo Machine, Moe Shop, Au5, Meganeko, Akira Complex and many more. There’s also a 10-track DLC available from music label Monstercat, plus will be launching our second DLC when the game is released on PlayStation with 10 tracks from Chillhop music – something a bit different with a mellow vibe to chill and relax to.
Spin Rhythm XD is designed to be accessible to those new to rhythm games while providing a unique challenge to veterans of the genre. Our 60+ tracks each contain 5 difficulties that each introduce new mechanics.
Conquer the global leaderboards and level up to unlock new tracks, wheel skins and more. We have also included a full suite of accessibility features including custom colors, low motion options for every background element, custom track speeds and more.
PlayStation’s awesome DualSense wireless controller provides a truly unique gameplay experience. Players can use motion controls to move the wheel and even use the touchpad to flick and scratch like a DJ.
This release will be the first-ever VR version of Spin Rhythm XD on PS VR2. The PS VR2 Sense controllers provide a perfectly smooth motion input that turns the play area into a kind of interdimensional drum kit. Move your main hand pointer inside the wheel to rotate, flick to spin and smash down to hit tap notes, keep your off-hand ready to hit the green beat notes.
We have included more than 40 Trophies to achieve and Challenge Activities so you can compete directly with your friends.
We hope you can join us in the Rhythm Dimension. If you’re new to the genre we hope you find something fresh and fun, and if you’re a veteran rhythm gamer you will experience a unique and challenging game with an incredible sense of flow.
2023 and 2024 have shown that 2TB PS5 SSD upgrades are actually worth the price. In 2022, prices for 1TB PS5 SSDs averaged around $150, whereas 2TB SSDs hovered closer to $300. Now, we’re seeing 1TB SSDs trickle below the $70 price point and 2TB SSDs can drop to around $100 or sometimes even lower if there’s a good sale. It’s worth noting, though, that you can’t use any old SSD and expect it to perform well on the PS5 console. You’ll want to pick up a PCIe Gen4 x4 M.2 solid-state drive with at least a 5,500MB/s read speed to match the PS5’s internal drive.
Note that Sony recommends a heatsink attached to your SSD and not all SSDs listed here have pre-installed heatsinks. For the ones that do, we’ll be sure to mention it. For the ones that don’t, all you have to do is purchase your own heatsink (like this one for $9) and install it yourself. For our top recommended picks for 2024, check out our full breakdown for the Best PS5 SSDs.
So we’re cheating a little here, but are you looking to completely maximize your PS5 storage capabilities? Then this is the deal for you. For a limited time only, this PS5 4TB SSD is available at Amazon for just $239.49 (see here). It has an MSRP of $699.99 which is rather dramatic, but in reality, this and many other 4TB SSDs have been sitting around $280-$300 recently. The 1TB version is also down to just $71.49 as well, the best price you can find on a PS5 SSD at the time of writing. Again, we’re unlikely to see better deals than this until Prime Day in the summer.
This is one of the faster SSDs on the market with read speeds of up to 7400MB/s and write speeds of up to 6800MB/s. Alongside 2TB of storage, it also has a very slim preinstalled heatsink that can slot perfectly into your PS5. Right now, you can score it for an excellent price of $129.99.
Thanks to a $15 coupon that can be clipped on the Amazon store page, this 2TB SSD has dropped even further in price to $139.95 from its usual price of $164.95. Featuring read/write speeds of 7400/6500MB/s, it’s a perfect fit for your PS5 that even comes complete with a heatsink!
This SSD offers 2TB of storage, excellent read and write speeds (read speeds of up to 7,300MB/s and write speeds up to 6,800MB/s), and a built-in heatsink all at a fantastic price. It’s currently available for $149.99 on Amazon, 17% off its MSRP of $179.99, so well worth picking up for your PS5.
This is another 2TB SSD deal that’s well worth taking advantage of. This option from XPG has dropped 29% in price, from $209.99 to $149.99, but you’ll have to grab a heatsink to go with it as well (which you can do here for $9). This SSD has read and write speeds of 7400/6800MB/s as well.
This is another deal for those looking to maximize their PS5’s storage. For a limited time only, this PS5 4TB SSD is available at Amazon for just $319.00 (see here). Normally, it has an MSRP of $699.99, but nowadays, this and many other 4TB SSDs have been sitting around $280-$300 recently. You’ll also have to grab a heatsink to go with it (which you can do here for $9).
This is the newest model from Crucial and it already has an excellent discount on Amazon. For a limited time, you can get 26% off this SSD, bringing it down to $294.99 from $399.99. It’s well worth the investment as well, as it offers crazy good sequential read/write speeds up to 14,500/12,700MB/s. If you feel the need for speed, this SSD will certainly get you there.
Amazon is offering a nice deal at the moment on the Crucial T500 2TB SSD, which is discounted down to $162.99. This SSD has a heatsink all ready to go, so you can install it right away in your PS5, and even offers excellent read/write speeds of 7,400/7,000MB/s.
Samsung SSDs need no introduction. They’ve made some of the most popular and reliable PS5 SSDs on the market. The 980 Pro has been out for a long time, way back in January of 2020. A testament to its reliability is the fact that Samsung didn’t feel any need to release any newer flagship model until 2022. In terms of performance, it’s no longer the fastest SSD on the market (the 990 Pro is), but it’s still a very fast drive. It certainly more than meets the minimum 5600MB/s speed requirement to be used as a PS5 storage upgrade, with speeds of up to 7,100MB/s.
The Samsung 990 Pro is an excellent SSD for your PS5. From a purely performance perspective, it’s overkill; the stock SSD in your PS5 will be the limiting factor. You’ll want to pick up a PCIe Gen4 x4 M.2 solid state drive with a rated 5,500MB/s read speed to match the PS5’s internal drive and the 990 Pro is much faster. This one does not come with a heatsink, though, so you’ll need to invest in one.
Sony recommends you install an SSD that has an attached heatsink. If the SSD you purchase doesn’t include one, it’s simple enough to buy one for $9 on Amazon and add it yourself. Most of these heatsinks are just attached using an adhesive like thermal tape.
There may be other SSD deals out there, but these are the PS5 SSDs we’ve tried ourselves and highly recommend. They also double up as outstanding boot drives for your gaming PC, in case you don’t need additional storage for your PS5 console.
It’s extremely easy! Removing the case cover is completely toolless. In fact, the only screw you have to remove is the one that keeps the cover for the SSD bay in place. You don’t even put it back when you’re done. Sony has a quick and easy YouTube video guide.
Hannah Hoolihan is a freelance writer who works with the Guides and Commerce teams here at IGN.
Despite being hugely allergic to horses – my eyes once swelled up so severely at a local fair my wife had to guide me home – I continue to be absolutely spellbound by the animals. I’ve been rewatching The Lord of the Rings this week and I’ve been genuinely gripped by watching professionally trained horses galloping across the vistas of New Zealand, rearing up against tennis balls representing CGI orcs and charging down the incredibly steep slope next to Helm’s Deep. Not to mention my love of just riding endlessly in a direction on horseback in Red Dead Redemption 2 and Assassin’s Creed Odyssey (helped by Kassandra’s wonderful command of “Phobos!” to summon her mount).
Confident design is one thing, but there is confidence, and then there’s the almost reckless certainty in both your game’s sturdiness and the player’s curiosity required to trust a feckless, glitch-hungry game-poker with Prey (2017)’s GLOO Cannon. A recklessness in designing a sprawling, multi-tiered, metroidvania-esque space station – one boasting multiple-bathroom verisimilitude – like Talos I, and then immediately giving the player a gun that lets them make their own ladders up keycard locked grav-elevators.
As I write this, Gray Zone Warfare is sat at fourth place in Steam’s top sellers list. I’ve seen loads of vids from big FPS YouTubers pivoting to it as the next big thing, especially for the Escape From Tarkov-likers. So I gave it a whirl, both as someone who wanted to see what these more hardcore extraction shooters were like and to play a video game that worked. Unfortunately for me, the game barely functions on my rig to the point where it hurts my poor eyes.
I can sing a rail shooter.
Developer Success’s flagship franchise since 1991, Cotton‘s enigmatic Halloween world and cutesy-witchy theme struck a chord with fans of the shoot-’em-up genre. Its zany premise of broomsticking across badlands in search of delicious candy, coupled with a magical mix of coloured gem grabbing, weapon power-ups, flashy bomb attacks, and mouthy fairies, have been staples in every instalment since the beginning.
Bar one pachinko outlier, most Cotton games follow the same 2D horizontal shooting format, including 2021’s Cotton Fantasy: Superlative Night Dreams. But with Panorama Cotton, a 1994 Mega Drive exclusive and one of the system’s most technically impressive titles, Success switched the action to a 3D perspective, plotting the camera behind Cotton’s back. It delivered a Space Harrier-style dynamic across eye-bleedingly colourful stages, occasionally with varying paths. Despite being a graphical showcase for the system, it wasn’t as critically well-received as its predecessors, never appeared overseas (until 2021), and had a famously low print run.
Read the full article on nintendolife.com
The 2023 Formula One season yielded a grand total of three winning drivers over 22 Grands Prix. Just six rounds into the 2024 season and we’ve already seen three different GP winners, across three different teams to boot. Has this season just threatened to become interesting?
Well, it’s almost certainly too early to be hopeful of that. However, even if we are ultimately destined for yet another season of single car dominance, at least F1 24’s updated career mode will give us all a place where we can watch (and hear) the championship unfold a little differently.
F1 24’s key new hook is the ability to “be one of the 20.” That is, we can now take one of F1’s superstar drivers and play as them in a complete, multi-season career mode experience called Driver Career. Driver Career appears to be drilling down on an experience specific to the drivers themselves. This means the focus is on gaining recognition and improving your driver ratings over multiple seasons, dealing with the driver contract market with secret meetings, and completing a variety of short- and long-term goals. Senior creative director Lee Mather confirms the focus on revamping the career mode has been a “huge fan requested feature.”
“It still sees huge numbers of people playing it, but obviously we were starting to feel each year the build-up of players saying, ‘I love Driver Career, it’s one of my favourite areas of the game, but you’ve not done anything with it. Why haven’t you done anything with it? Why haven’t you moved it on? Why haven’t you changed it?’” says Mather. “So we definitely had that in mind.”
“The tipping point was we wanted to bring in the ability for the player to play as a Formula One driver because that’s now such a prominent thing; those drivers have now become super celebrities. They now want to be those drivers. That was less a thing back in 2010. It was more about the world of Formula One and driving Formula One cars.”
Described as the biggest career mode innovation since 2016, Mather is aware that such a change to the career approach is likely to land with more weight with fans than usual.
“So, as a team, it always feels like we have a lot going on,” explains Mather. “I think it just depends on where the focus comes from the players, really.”
“There are some things that always land with more weight than others, but the scale of the work that goes into it is always just as significant. Something like Braking Point, for example, is a massive body of work. Things like F1 World last year; big body of work. But when it’s on something like career mode, which is an absolute pillar of the game and has been since 2010, I think that lands with a lot more weight.
“They’re the areas of the game that have the most complexity because there are so many intertwined systems, and not only are we trying to obviously replicate the sport, but we’re trying to present it in a way that’s super compelling in a video game as well.”
Driver Career isn’t a replacement for My Team mode, which will still exist within F1 24. You can also create custom drivers to race as yourself in Driver Career, or choose an F2 driver or past icon of the sport. However, Driver Career does very much seem geared around encouraging players to enjoy racing as one of this season’s current F1 superstars – especially considering all the driver-specific audio the team has now included. Yes, they’re not just sound bites tossed into the trailer for a little atmosphere – they’re now in the game itself.
“It’s something that we started a conversation with Formula One on a few years ago, and there was an opportunity for us to do that for quite a while,” confirms Mather. “But we didn’t really feel it fit with what we were doing with the title. It didn’t really gel and make sense.”
“But as soon as we opened up the opportunity to race as the real Formula One drivers [in Career Mode], it just made perfect sense to have that VO.”
The question here, of course, is just how exhaustive is that pool of audio, on the back of a season where one bloke won 19 out of 22 Grands Prix? Does that narrow the selection somewhat? For instance, what happens when a driver from a minnow team jags a virtual GP win in F1 24?
“It is a challenge,” says Mather. “Obviously, the front runners who’ve had wins, or close to wins, will have those moments of pure elation. The exciting ones. But then there are drivers who won’t have been in those positions, and we’ve had to be creative with the lines to ensure that they’d be fitting of the scenario as best as possible.”
“Thankfully there’s a lot that the viewers never see. Formula One obviously have everything and they’ve really taken the time to go through and trawl the archives. The good thing is, obviously, there are multiple years. A lot of the drivers in the sport now have been in for several years. Even the rookies have now been in for a couple of years, so there is a good amount.
“It definitely is challenging for the audio team to pick out ones that are relevant for drivers who you might play as and get a win, who’ve never actually had a win. There was definitely a challenge there, but we found ones.
“There’ll be some that players recognise, because they’ll remember them from real life. I think obviously some of the Max ones stand out; they’re fairly recognisable. But Lando’s got some nice ones as well. I think Lando has got a really nice one for Monaco, which is really cool.”
There’s much more to the new career experience, too. Expect rivalries that now come in three different levels of intensity (from ones that last a few races to ones that will define parts of your entire career), and a new two-player driver career mode with all the same features that can be played co-operatively, or on different teams (or both, from season to season). There’s even a spin-off of the new Driver Career called Challenge Career, which will be a curated, episodic version with which players can compete asynchronously for leaderboard placement.
F1 24’s handling is again promising further refinement, with the goal being to make the cars more realistically compliant.
“It’s a drum we’ve been banging for years, really, which is realism doesn’t necessarily mean difficult,” says Mather. “That isn’t generally always the case.”
“There’s a perception from some parts of the community that a sim has to be difficult. And as we’ve said, we’ve got a really in-depth sim at the core of this game. And then how we build out the handling model is through the numbers. We simulate everything authentically, only this year we’ve taken that to the next level.
“We knew where we’d got some big holes in the sim and there were things that were achieving the end result, but we knew we could do it better and add more depth to it. One of the prime examples is the weight transfer that you get now in the cars due to the revised centre of mass, but also the suspension behaviour – the anti-dive and the anti-squat behaviour – gives a better feeling of movement in the car and weight transfer to the player.
“So that’s another thing that adds to that, ‘Well, I now know what my car’s doing.’ So before we would’ve accentuated that maybe with additional camera movement, so you got the feel that the car was doing something. Now you get that through the body of the car.
“The real depth in a racing game is in the handling model, isn’t it? You should able to instantly pick up and play, but give yourself a few weeks and you should be absolutely nailing those lines, playing with the car setups, and feeling the intricacies of it all.”
F1 24 arrives on May 31 for Xbox, PlayStation, and PC – just in time to rewrite the results of this year’s Monaco Grand Prix if you feel it’s necessary.
Luke is a Senior Editor on the IGN reviews team. You can chat to him on Twitter @MrLukeReilly.
Tangle Tower was a weird and cute point and click murder mystery set in a big weird tower full of colourful characters, so what better way for the devs to fill time before the sequel comes out than by making a creepy retro survival horror set in a regional theme park? Crow Country is like if Resident Evil was made out of Duplo: more chunky, less threatening, and easier than playing with a fully motorised K’Nex ferris wheel, but darn it, it’s still a good time.
