Yesterday, the Pokémon Company launched its latest Trading Card Game expansion, Destined Rivals, via its online store. As was predicted, the set proved to be massively popular, and many of those hoping to pick up one of the sought-after Elite Trainer Boxes were hit with site crashes and multiple hour-long wait times.
If that wasn’t rough enough, we’ve today learnt that even those who managed to place an order may not actually be able to get their hands on the elusive ETB, as The Pokémon Company appears to be retroactively cancelling orders (thanks for the heads up, VGC).
There are two kinds of Steam Deck players. Those who plug in and panic every two hours, and those who carry a power bank and keep playing like gods. I’ve tested a lot of power banks over the past year, and. Some were great, others burnt out far too quickly. The four below are the ones I keep reaching for, are some of the best Steam Deck accessories going, and they’re also currently discounted during the Amazon Spring Sale.
Amazon’s Big Spring Sale is here, running from March 25-31, and it’s shaping up to be one of the biggest shopping events of the season. While it may not have the name recognition of Black Friday or Prime Day, the deals speak for themselves in offering some of the lowest prices of the year so far on big game items like Apple AirPods, Kindles, Fire TV Sticks, and more. If you’ve been waiting for the perfect time to save, this is it.
Amazon has a dedicated Spring Sale hub showcasing all the best discounts, but we’ve done the hard work for you – curating only the absolute best deals worth your time. Every discount featured is either at its lowest-ever price or matches the best price of the year so far. And we’re not stopping there – we’ll be updating this list in real-time, ensuring you never miss out on the biggest savings before the sale wraps up on March 31.
The Best Amazon Spring Sale Deals Today
There are already some incredible doorbuster deals in the Amazon Spring Sale 2025. One of the best is the Anker 10K mAh 30W Power Bank, now just $11.99 with code 0UGJZX8B – a record low price. It’s an absolute must-buy, especially for Nintendo Switch users, but even beyond that, it’s just an outstanding power bank at an unbeatable price. If you grab only one thing from this sale, make it this.
Other tech deals include the standard slate of Apple products, like AirPods and the newest Apple Watch, as well as Amazon devices like Fire TV.
It’d be silly not to mention the latest round of Pokémon TCG stock at Amazon during the sale, with elusive Elite Trainer Boxes like Twilight Masquerade available again, alongside a slew of other hot booster sets.
LEGO Deals
LEGO sets are getting more expensive, but they always seem to get solid discounts during these types of sales. Some highlights from the current sale include discounts on the LEGO Wednesday collaboration as well as some very cozy LEGO Animal Crossing sets.
Should You Shop the Amazon Big Spring Sale or Wait?
The Amazon Spring Sale (March 25-31) couldn’t come at a better time. With no major shopping holidays between now and Memorial Day, this is one of the best opportunities to score great deals before summer. While Prime Day and Black Friday might bring even steeper discounts, those are months away – if you’re looking to save right now, this sale is your best bet.
That said, strategic shopping always wins. If you’re eyeing a big-ticket item like a TV or Kindle but don’t need it immediately, waiting for a larger sale could be worth it. Want to make sure you’re getting the best possible price? Tools like CamelCamelCamel let you track pricing history, helping you spot real deals from the ones that just look good. It’s a trick we swear by to make sure every recommendation is truly worth your money.
LiDAR or “light detection and ranging” is a way of working out and picturing the distance to an object by shooting laser beams at it, and timing how long it takes the laser to bounce back to the scanner. It’s been used for a bunch of Hard Science-y purposes, from mapping cave systems to measuring changes in the Amazon forest canopy. It’s also become popular among artists, who use it to create high-fidelity yet abstractly coloured and ethereal visualisations of, for example, rivers. Now here’s LiDAR Exploration Program, a “relaxing atmospheric horror” game from KenForest, in which you roam maps with a handheld LiDAR gun scanning the geography into being.
Even 14 years after its launch, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim is still one of the finest RPGs to date, with tons of deep lore to enjoy. That’s The Skyrim Library, a three-volume collection of texts detailing its massive world and history, a must-buy for any avid fan.
Originally released in 2017 at $110.00, this The Skyrim Library brings together gorgeous volumes— I: The Histories, II: Man, Mer & Beast, and III: The Arcane— into a deluxe slipcase that can either be displayed on its own or fit neatly into your larger home assortment of tomes at home.
With each of its 232 pages thoughtfully written in impeccable detail and artistically illustrated, each book promises to immerse you in Skyrim’s history, its people, creatures, and the depths of its magical roots, almost as much as the iconic 2011 game had.
Going into some of the video reviews on its Amazon page, the whole package looks especially impressive. The outer slip case carries a distinct stone aesthetic and folds out to show a very well-done illustration of what appears to be Alduin.
The books themselves look just as high-quality, with embellished and raised text over the durable hardback cover—giving you that luxury feel every time you want to open one up and peek into the Skyrim universe without jumping into the game itself or checking your phone.
Written by Elder Scrolls developer Bethesda Softworks themselves, such a superb set comes as no surprise. Although their games aren’t short of imperfections with bugs, Bethesda always seems to go the extra mile when it comes to books based on their worlds.
Ben Williams – IGN freelance contributor with over 10 years of experience covering gaming, tech, film, TV, and anime. Follow him on Twitter/X @BenLevelTen.
Nintendo Music is a fun little app, but you need to have an active Switch Online subscription if you want to use it.
It seems Nintendo will be slightly adjusting this in the future, with an update planned for “around October 2025”. This update will allow users of this mobile app to access “some” Nintendo Music functions going forward, even after you’ve cancelled your membership.
Break out your neck braces because Wreckfest 2 – the hard-ramming, door-slamming second coming of the hit 2018 demolition racer from smash ’em up specialists Bugbear – has officially T-boned Steam early access. With some stunning track design, a rich array of sound refinements, and even better handling than the original, the early signs are extremely promising. Early, however, is the operative word here, and my experience of Wreckfest 2 so far has been a little uneven. While I absolutely adore the driving feel, the throaty roar of overworked engines, and the metal-mashing mayhem, what’s currently being sold is very slim in terms of toys to smash together and I have suffered a number of crashes – but not the kind I crave in a destruction derby game.
On Steam, “early access” can mean many things, but most commonly it’s either a very rough draft version of a game that will evolve in major ways over the course of a long development (a la Assetto Corsa Evo), or a rather polished vertical slice that holds back the remainder of the content for its 1.0 launch (such as the surprisingly hefty early access version of Tokyo Xtreme Racer). Like the original Wreckfest’s own early access launch before it, Wreckfest 2 arrives as the former. It’s just a demo, really; the kind of thing that used to have a video game magazine glued to the back of it. Here we get four cars, three environments with a couple of tracks each, and a virtual map full of enormous jumps and stunt props. Long-time fans of Bugbear’s games may recognise some of those from the very first “technology sneak peek” demo for Wreckfest way back in 2013, when it was still under the working title ‘Next Car Game’ and fighting its way back to life after a failed Kickstarter. It’s a cute nod to the origins of the Wreckfest story and good fun to tool around in for a bit, even if the enormous ramps, basketball rings, car crushers, and cannons don’t have quite the same novelty in 2025 as they did just over a decade ago.
More impressive is the new Scrapyard environment, which is incredibly eye-catching thanks to the sheer amount of interesting salvage strewn all over the place, and it’s overflowing with destructible objects. Scrapyard is currently home to two circuits that snake their way through huge mountains of loose tyres and stacked car wrecks. These aren’t just cubes with the texture of a crushed car slapped on it; they’re all individual, stripped-down car shells looming like Jenga towers all over the place. What’s impressive is that there are dozens of them, on top of the two dozen running cars that are already screaming around the course trying to put you into a pole at the first opportunity. Some racing games operate under a strict look-don’t-touch philosophy, with invisible walls protecting the carefully crafted trackside props, and pinballing cars away from having any meaningful interaction with anything located off the main racing strip. That was never Wreckfest – and it wasn’t Bugbear’s original FlatOut games before it – but Wreckfest 2 dials the destruction up several notches. It’s a total spectacle, and it’s quite remarkable how smoothly it runs on my setup (RTX 4080, Intel Core Ultra 9 185H) looking as good as it does. It’s a fabulous looking racer, and how Bugbear maintains this massive level of destructibility without major fidelity sacrifices remains a mystery.
The cars aren’t exactly in concours condition, but they’re still bursting with detail and character. The sophisticated, location-based damage modelling that puts dents exactly where they should be as a result of your reckless driving is obviously still front-and-centre – and it remains what sets Wreckfest 2 apart from its peers. This time around, however, it’s even more nuanced. HUD warnings will let you know if you’ve thrown a tyre off a rim, and they’ll slowly chart the death of your engine after you cop damage to your radiator. That is, once your coolant’s gone you can expect your pistons and bearings to go too, along with your head gasket. On track, this appears to translate to your car belching black smoke. I can’t detect a major car performance hit when that happens, though, and I haven’t hit a point yet where my engine packs it in entirely. Broadly, I’m wondering whether engine rebuilds after this sort of damage might be a feature in career mode in the final game, but right now it’s too early to tell, in part because no car or engine tinkering or tuning is currently possible in this initial build. The original Wreckfest features a great upgrade system so it’s unlikely this will remain absent from Wreckfest 2, but the only thing we can do for now is apply paint.
There is impressive and distinct audio for an aching engine as opposed to a healthy one, and it’s part of an noticeably improved tapestry of sound overall. I particularly love the crackle of Wreckfest 2’s new (and currently unnamed) riff on a third-generation Chevrolet Cavalier (for clarity, it was initially dubbed the ‘Striker’, but following some fixes it’s now just called the ‘American 1’). I did initially have some early sessions where layers of sound would gradually drop out – first the engines, then impacts – until I was racing in silence, but I haven’t been able to reproduce it lately.
The AI is suitably belligerent, quick when they extract themselves from the pack, and prone to unpredictability and mistakes.
The actual racing, fortunately, is great. The AI is suitably belligerent, quick when they extract themselves from the pack, and prone to unpredictability and mistakes. Traditional racing and destruction derby are the only modes currently available, though. That does wear thin fairly quickly, but I can’t wait to see what other modes Bugbear has in tow for the final release. Caravans, please – as long as we’re speaking about towing.
The new off-brand Cavalier is actually my favourite of the four available cars to drive, as its front-wheel drive layout makes it quite stable. It’s also easier to recover from being turned around by aggressive competitors. By contrast, the pair of muscle cars here are a hoot to drift, but they generally just want to rotate the moment the AI starts harassing you. Of course, that is part of the deal of a high-contact racer like Wreckfest 2. You’re not going to get much sympathy for being crashed into.
Unfortunately, the crashing I dohave had a minor problem with was Wreckfest 2 itself crashing to my desktop. I haven’t really been able to pin down what’s triggering it, and it’s been unpredictable. One afternoon I had a whole string of crashes, straight from the middle of races. The next day, not one. Obviously, as an early access project, Bugbear has plenty of scope to iron out such problems – but it’s still a caveat worth considering for those interested in buying Wreckfest 2 immediately in its current (and very much still gestating) form.
Like any soulslike fan, I’m quite accustomed to the process of dying over and over again until I’ve mastered a tough section, but playing through AI Limit was the first time I felt that sense of learned repetition before I’d even died at all. That’s because, aside from its anime-inspired art style and a few minor abilities you unlock throughout the story, this by-the-numbers adventure is without question the most milquetoast and unimaginative game I’ve played in the genre. It pit me against boring and meager enemies, laughably wimpy bosses I was largely able to stomp dead without issue, and a story with almost as little to say as its dull protagonist. In fairness, there’s not much especially awful about what AI Limit is doing (apart from its regular crashes and bugs that send you falling through the floor mid boss fight), but there’s almost nothing worthy of praise across this forgettable journey, either.
AI Limit is set in a vague sci-fi universe where society has collapsed due to mysterious circumstances and is now overrun with a bizarre black mud that is both toxic to all life and a delicious meal you eat to regain your health. As an android called a Blader, you were created for the sole purpose of restoring the world back to balance, which you do by killing almost everything you see. You’ll unquestioningly run around the ruins of a civilization that apparently used a book of genre tropes as a blueprint, complete with a sewer that serves as the tutorial and a poison swamp level that’s mandatorily included per the Miyazaki Accords of 2011 – an actual, legally binding statute that’s so evidently real you don’t even need to bother Googling it. The robotic nature of your Blader also provides a convenient excuse for them to never exhibit even mild character traits as they speak in a monotone voice throughout the 30-hour adventure. Having a hazy setting and a forgettable protagonist isn’t exactly unique to this type of game, but if the non-fantasy setting had you hoping this might be one of the ways in which AI Limit breaks that mold: Nah.
The action is largely an impression of better soulslikes.
The actual action is largely an impression of better soulslikes. You’ll split your time between exploring dark and dangerous places, fending off smaller enemies as you work your way to the next bonfire-like checkpoint (in this case, branches sprouting out of the ground), and confronting big, menacing bosses with long health bars and deadly attacks. But that familiar structure underwhelms almost immediately here thanks to a lack of enemy variety, samey and empty levels, and combat that’s overly simplistic and unchallenging. You’ll swing melee weapons several times larger than your body, loose spells that shoot fire, lightning, and more at your opponents, and, of course, dodge roll and parry to keep yourself alive. But while there’s not much unique to be found in AI Limit’s combat, the few new things it tries are mostly good ideas that make me wish it took more risks.
The biggest of these mechanics is the Sync Rate bar, which fills up as you do damage and is drained when you use spells or get hurt. The higher your Sync Rate, the more damage you’ll do – but if you take too many hits or use too many spells, you’ll find yourself in a weakened state, unable to use many of your abilities until you land some blows. That rewards cautious play and allows you to cut through boss fights more quickly if you manage to avoid damage while you press the attack. It’s also nice to determine how often you can use your spells by how well you play instead of being limited by a mana meter or something like that. AI Limit even ditches the stamina bar entirely (a genre staple I largely find annoying), letting you attack without fear of running out of steam so long as you are paying attention to your Sync Rate.
There’s also a pretty neat system where you unlock four special powers that you can freely swap between in the middle of combat, like turning one of your arms into a shield or switching on an ability that lets you make short, quick dashes from place to place. Unfortunately, the first of these abilities that you get allows you to parry enemy attacks, and there’s almost no reason to switch to any of the other powers once you have it since almost everything can be pretty reliably parried, utterly devastating the enemy. So while toggling between these to do some interesting stuff in the middle of combat is a great concept, fights rarely play out that way.
Bosses only very rarely have interesting designs.
You’ll mostly encounter the same handful of aliens that look like leftover costumes from the monsters in Stranger Things and generic robots with identical attack patterns, all of which are easily avoided or parried with little trouble; plus they almost always come at you one at a time. Boss fights are largely straightforward, too, with extremely telegraphed moves that can (once again) be easily parried, stopping those big bads in their tracks as they forget what they were doing for several seconds while you slash away half their health. Bosses also only very rarely have interesting designs, like one that’s just a flying version of the same Stranger Things monsters you’ve already been fighting, and then many are disappointingly recycled, either by almost immediately being reintroduced as common foot soldiers or when they are just straight up reused in another boss fight later on.
It’s unfortunate, because there are times where AI Limit clearly shows promise, like later in the story when the generic, slow-moving bosses very occasionally make way for engaging battles against fellow Bladers. Their movesets are more interesting and challenging, and they have their own Sync Rate bars that must be depleted through attacks and parries in order to reduce the amount of damage they do and open them up to devastating finishing moves. There’s also one or two encounters where AI Limit tries new stuff, like a fight against a giant robot that sits at the end of the room trying to blast you with deadly lasers, and the only way to defeat it is by destroying the electrical equipment powering it as you cut through its minions. But these fights are few and far between, leaving you to slap around the much less interesting, big, ugly, slow moving enemies that make up the bulk of the boss fights most of the time.
Another thing that holds AI Limit back pretty significantly is how buggy it is. I had at least a dozen crashes, got stuck in the environment in ways that caused me to twitch bizarrely, fell right through the floor during boss fights, and once even continuously respawned over and over again at a save point that threw me through the map until I went to the PlayStation dashboard and closed the app. Some of these crashes happened when I was quite deep into exploring an area and far away from a checkpoint, forcing me to start over again through no fault of my own and lose materials in the process. In fact, nearly all of my most frustrating deaths came from straight up glitches, rather than fighting bad guys. That’s not exactly the kind of difficulty I was hoping for.
Following its release on the Switch last June, Super Monkey Ball Banana Rumble is still getting all sorts of new content and game updates.
The latest one bumps the game up to Version 2.20 – adding a new Robot Smash stage (Floral Ring), stability improvements and all sorts of bug fixes. Perhaps most notably though is the release of the new DLC Pac-Man. Yes, Pac-Man is now able to roll around in Banana Rumble.
Unlike previous entries in the Assassin’s Creed series, AC Shadows does not automatically remove the fog of war when activating Viewpoints. Instead, you’ll be left to manually uncover locations for the likes of all Landmarks, Collectibles, Activities, and even Quests. Thankfully, IGN’s AC Shadows interactive map has you covered and is loaded with thousands of map points plotted and ready to help you on your journey across Japan.
Assassin’s Creed Shadows Interactive Map
IGN’s Assassin’s Creed Shadows interactive map includes filters for the following:
.jpg?width=1920&height=1920&fit=bounds&quality=80&format=jpg&auto=webp){kind=tracking}
