Author: Game Infliction

Action RPG Sand Land’s release date trailer is a montage of Dragon Ball-powered tank shenanigans

Bandai Namco have slapped a release date on Ilca Inc’s Sand Land, which isn’t a dodgy themepark created by an over-ambitious building supplies firm, but an action RPG adaptation of the same-named manga by Akira Toriyama, in which a titchy demon searches for the Legendary Spring and goes to war with a king who is hogging all the water.

It’s out 26th April 2024, and alternates beat ’em up action with cartoon tank customisation, in a sort of Dragon Ball X Mad Max homage with chunks of Dragon Quest thrown in for good measure.

Read more

Classic Konami Games Like Felix the Cat and Rocket Knight Being Re-Released

Classic Konami collections of games including Felix the Cat and Rocket Knight Adventures will be re-released in 2024, both physically and digitally.

As reported by Polygon, the Felix the Cat collection will include both the NES game and the Game Boy game, while what’s dubbed Rocket Knight Adventures: Re-Sparked will include Rocket Knight Adventures, Sparkster: Rocket Knight Adventures 2, and Sparkster. No release dates for either game were announced, though they’ll come to PlayStation 4 and 5 plus Nintendo Switch.

Physical editions will be released through Limited Run Games. Standard and Classic editions of Felix the Cat will be available (priced at $34.99 and $64.99 respectively), with the latter including a CD soundtrack, reversible poster, and NES-inspired packaging alongside the standard disc.

Rocket Knight Adventures: Re-Sparked will come in Standard, Classic, and Ultimate editions, priced at $34.99, $64.99, and $134.99 respectively. The Classic includes a CD soundtrack, reversible poster, steel book, and retro inspired packaging, while the Ultimate includes all this plus a Sparkster statuette, comic, design document collection, mini cartridge display case, and certificate of authenticity.

Further collections will be announced too, with another being revealed on February 24. Konami is also making various quality of life upgrades and other improvements.

“This release includes both the classic Nintendo Entertainment System title and the Game Boy title that was released a year later,” it said of the Felix the Cat collection. “Through Carbon Engine, and some help from Felix’s Magic Bag of Tricks, new features for the titles, including save states and other quality-of-life fixes, bring them into the modern era of gaming.”

Rocket Knight Adventures: Re-Sparked will also include a new animated intro from Studio Meala, a rewind feature, Boss Rush mode, and Museum mode featuring never before seen content.

Ryan Dinsdale is an IGN freelance reporter. He’ll talk about The Witcher all day.

New Cycle’s overview trailer reveals another city-builder grappling with the problem of hope in a fading world

Core Engage and Daedalic Entertainment have released a new overview trailer for New Cycle, their post-apocalyptic “dieselpunk” city management game. “New Cycle” is obviously a bit of a self-contradiction, and I suspect that’s deliberate – one of the questions the video leaves you with is whether there is “a future beyond survival”, or whether we are doomed to just repeat the processes of extraction and gradual building-up, resource overexploitation and encroaching disaster suggested by these 12 jam-packed minutes of in-game footage.

Read more

Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League Dev Rocksteady Lifts NDA ‘Now There Is More News Out on the Game’

After a round of Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League previews from media went live this week, developer Rocksteady has lifted its non-disclosure agreement (NDA) on the recently held closed alpha, allowing players to talk freely about their time with the game.

IGN was among a number of publications that published impressions of Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League earlier this week. “Rocksteady’s first large-scale game in almost nine years is not clicking with us yet,” we said.

Warner Bros.-owned Rocksteady has now lifted a portion of the NDA on the closed alpha, letting players talk about the game but not publish assets like videos and screenshots.

“Now that there is more news out on the game and players are asking, we’re no longer enforcing a portion of the NDA,” Rocksteady said in a statement. “And we’re allowing players to talk about their experience from the Closed Alpha Test. We’ve heard the community requests and want to give players an opportunity to discuss what it’s like to explore Metropolis as Harley Quinn, Deadshot, Captain Boomerang, and King Shark.

“To the amazing players who tested the game, please feel free to talk and write about your gameplay experience.”

As mentioned, other terms of the NDA remain in place. “Players may not post imagery or videos from the Closed Alpha Test,” Rocksteady said.

In Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League you play as one of four supervillains who take on members of the Justice League. You can play solo or co-op with friends in the open-world city of Metropolis. Suicide Squad follows Rocksteady’s critically acclaimed Batman Arkham series, which includes a number of single-player and story-focused games.

Suicide Squad, on the other hand, is very much a live service, with a battle pass to work through and gear score to increase as you pick up incrementally more powerful loot. But Rocksteady really does not want to call Suicide Squad a live service, perhaps to avoid the negative connotations the phrase now has.

Indeed, Rocksteady has faced an uphill challenge bringing its fans on-side following the announcement of Suicide Squad and the revelations about its live service elements, with many hoping for a return to the developer’s roots with a Batman Arkham-style game in the future.

Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League comes out February 2, 2024 on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X and S, and PC.

Wesley is the UK News Editor for IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.

Upgrade your ROG Ally, Legion Go or Steam Deck with this £81 1TB NVMe SSD

Choosing the lowest storage capacity Steam Deck or other PC gaming handheld then upgrading to a high-capacity SSD is often cheaper than choosing the highest-tier storage option out of the gate, and can even provide better performance too.

If that makes sense to you, we spotted a 10% discount on the WD SN740, a solid PCIe 4.0 option that works well in the Steam Deck and even better in the ROG Ally, Legion Go and MSI Claw gaming handhelds that support faster PCIe 4.0 speeds. After the discount at Scan in the UK, the SN740 is available for £81 for 1TB.

Read more

Sand Land, the Video Game Based on Dragon Ball Creator Akira Toriyama’s Manga, Has a Release Date

Sand Land launches on PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, Xbox Series X and S, and PC on April 26, 2024, publisher Bandai Namco has announced.

Announced in 2023, Bandai Namco’s Sand Land looks to translate a cult Japanese comic into an open-world adventure. Sand Land debuted in 2000 as a short-lived tale of a demon prince exploring a desolate wilderness.

Created by Akira Toriyama, a manga artist of major renown for his Dragonball series as well as his contributions to many games such as Dragon Quest, Sand Land remained a print-only phenomenon until 2023. A feature-length film debuted last summer, with this game serving as the next multimedia tie-in.

“Joining Beelzebub, the Fiend Prince, his chaperone, Thief, and Sheriff Rao, prepare to explore the vast desert and take on the Royal Army in various customisable vehicles,” reads the official synopsis.

“This unlikely team uniting humans and demons sets out on an adventure in search for the Legendary Spring capable of ending the terrible drought that has taken over the world. Together, they will travel beyond Sand Land to uncharted territories.”

IGN played a Sand Land demo at last year’s Tokyo Game Show. “Sand Land has a long way to go before I’d consider giving it another look,” we said at the time. “At present, the driving, combat, and exploration don’t entice me to dig any deeper.”

Wesley is the UK News Editor for IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.

This Lexar Play 1TB Micro SD card is down to £67.85 and works great in Steam Deck

Lexar’s Play Micro SD cards are some of the most affordable 1TB memory cards you can buy, and now you can pick up one for just £67.85 – within £3 of the cheapest price ever recorded for this model, which was during Black Friday last year.

These cards are rated for up to 150MB/s reads and have both UHS Speed Class 3 (3) and App Performance Class 2 (A2) certifications for minimum speeds, making them a decent choice for Steam Deck, ROG Ally and Lenovo Legion Go owners amongst other use cases in phones, cameras and more.

Read more

Mini Review: Shinorubi (Switch) – A Curious Shooter That’s A No-Go In Docked Mode

Not starring Joe Musashi.

Shinorubi feels like a game that came about by providing prompts to an AI specialising in video game building (coming soon, no doubt), feeding it information on various historical works of a particular nature, and then publishing whatever it spat out. That might sound mean to the humans that created it, but it’s an apt descriptor nonetheless.

Shinorubi has the odd misfortune of getting worse depending on the size of your screen. On our 55” panel, the experience was somewhat shocking. Filling the full 16:9 aspect and played in a vertical format, the player ships are enormous, with a giant pink jewel on their nose to dictate the hit-box area. Each pilot has different shot types, underpinned by a straightforward shot, laser, and bomb setup, as well as a fever power-up mode that’s triggered by collecting stars. It appears Shinorubi runs at 30fps, but on a large flatscreen is so janky it’s hard to say. Every ship in the game, with their various pros and cons, travel at extreme speeds to cover the play area, requiring inappropriate firing of the laser just to quell the weird skating of their movement. The larger the screen, the more prone you are to accidentally crash into bullets, not helped by laggy controls, and everything seems to stutter slightly. When you die in docked mode, it’s not because the game is overly difficult, but because you’re struggling to understand the action.

Read the full article on nintendolife.com

Golden Sun and Golden Sun: The Lost Age Rise at Last on Nintendo Switch Online

At last, Nintendo is bringing two of the Game Boy Advance’s best RPGs to Nintendo Switch Online. Stand up, Golden Sun fans, because we’re finally getting Golden Sun and Golden Sun: The Lost Age on the service next week, on January 17.

We knew Golden Sun would make its way to the service eventually – it was teased last year, when Nintendo first unveiled its plans for GBA games coming to Switch Online. But with Golden Sun and its sequel effectively being two critical halves of a full story, it makes a lot more sense to drop them both at the same time.

For those unfamiliar, Golden Sun was a 2001 RPG from developer Camelot, better known now for its work on the Mario Golf and Mario Tennis franchises. It follows a group of four heroes wielding elemental magic on a quest to stop a team of villains from lighting four elemental lighthouses and plunging the world of Weyard into chaos. However, Golden Sun only tells half of the story – its sequel, The Lost Age, was released two years later and follows some of the supposed “villains” from the first game as they work to finish the job they started in Golden Sun, while the first game’s heroes are in hot pursuit.

Both games are still beloved for their interesting and nuanced class systems revolving around elemental spirits called Djinn, the hybrid ways the game’s magic, or Psynergy, could be used both in and out of battle, and their incredible soundtracks by renowned composer Motoi Sakuraba. We reviewed both Golden Sun and The Lost Age very highly back in the early 2000s when they came out. Camelot did eventually release a third Golden Sun game, Dark Dawn, for DS in 2010, but it wasn’t as well-received as its predecessors, and we noted that it felt “somewhat dated.”

The debut of both Golden Sun and The Lost Age on Nintendo Switch Online is great news for fans of the series who were struggling to find ways to play these games in 2023 without digging up ancient handheld gaming devices. Now, if only we can convince Camelot to tackle a fourth Golden Sun game…

Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter for IGN. Got a story tip? Send it to rvalentine@ign.com.