Okay, sure, it’s maybe not the most pressing question ever, but we did have a chance to sit down with Sonic the Hedgehog trilogy writers Pat Casey and Josh Miller to ask where everyone’s favorite fisherman kitty has been all this time. And it turns out, they actually did write a cameo for Big the Cat into the second Sonic the Hedgehog film… only for it to be a bit too grim to make it to the final cut.
“In one draft of Sonic 2, we actually, when they’re going through the snowy mountains to the cave, we had a bit, because Sonic 2 was sort of an Indiana Jones,” Casey told us. “Indiana Jones, it’s a trope that at some point a skeleton pops out at you and scares you. So we were going to do that, but with a skeleton of a, I would say, a Big the Cat, not necessarily-“
Miller cuts in here, “Not necessarily the Big the Cat.”
“But we ended up cutting it,” Casey concludes. “It didn’t make any sense.”
Alas, we almost had a… dead Big the Cat in Sonic 2. The two writers said that “Big the Cat” is usually their joke answer when fans ask them who they want to add to the films, though they also informed me they’ve been unsuccessfully trying to get Rouge the Bat in as well for three fims straight.
Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter for IGN. You can find her posting on BlueSky @duckvalentine.bsky.social. Got a story tip? Send it to rvalentine@ign.com.
Space Marine 2 modders have once again answered players’ prayers by putting the axe from Secret Level’s Warhammer 40,000 episode into the game.
The Secret Level Warhammer 40,000 episode, called And They Shall Know No Fear, is a sequel to Space Marine 2 and stars protagonist Titus as he battles alongside his brothers to defeat the forces of Tzeentch. But while Titus appears in the animation as he looks in Space Marine 2, the episode also features a weapon players have yet to see in-game.
It sounds innocuous, but the action scene in which this mystery Power Axe is used steals the show. We see it wielded with brutal efficiency to tear apart cultists and Tzaangors. There’s even a super cool moment in which a Space Marine bashes the helm of the axe in order to shift it into the upright position in his glove.
THIS is why I’m a fan of Warhammer 40k! Hats off to @PrimeVideo for producing Secret Level: And They Shall Know No Fear. Watch it here: https://t.co/Gf0i2d0Rus
I highly recommend giving the entire 19 min episode a watch. It’s immersive and awesome. It’s a happy grim dark ray of… pic.twitter.com/iuYxprAo2J
Modders, as they so often do, have stepped into the breach. Astartes 2.0, from Space Marine 2 modder Warhammer Workshop, has just released a new update that adds the much-anticipated Power Axe, inspired by Secret Level, to the game, as well as the Chain-Axe and the Space King’s Hate Mace complete with its unique heraldry. (Space King is a fan-made Warhammer 40,000 parody.)
Generally, the Astartes overhaul mod adds loads of new content, including lore-accurate Space Marine classes, reworked combat, and even new missions. Space Marine 2 has a thriving modding scene that makes a significant number of improvements and changes to the record-breaking third-person melee / shooter hybrid. IGN has reported on Space Marine 2’s modding scene a number of times, shining a light on everything from more in-depth customization to a fix for one of the game’s biggest problems.
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.
How Nintendo World Championships helped me ‘git gud’.
I’ll admit, I’ve never been fond of speedrunning. The thought of shaving milliseconds off a time in a video game while playing the same sequence over and over sounds, in theory, more frustrating than fun. Sure, as a spectator, there is definitely joy in appreciating the wizardry of players pulling off pixel-perfect feats and shattering a runtime record. But I have neither the time nor the mettle to contemplate doing so myself.
Fortunately, this year gave us a game that weaved together 8-bit era charm, bite-sized accessibility, and addictive skill refinement. Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition was my gateway to finally “getting” speedrunning, and it’s some of the most fun I’ve had gaming in 2024.
Hello everyone! 2024 was another incredible year for indie games, and today, I’m very excited to share 11 of my favorite titles that were released on PlayStation this year.
Pacific Drive is a ‘road-lite’ survival game, where you navigate a stormy, mysterious forest with your car as your only companion. Each time you set off on an excursion, your car will slowly breakdown due to strange anomalies, and you must return safely back to your garage. Otherwise, you’re required to start over. You can restore and upgrade your car with resources gathered during your runs. Each trip into the wilderness is unique and randomized, which makes the gameplay all the more engrossing and addicting.
The pixel-art world of this beautiful game feels nostalgic yet somehow completely novel, with its surreal lighting that illuminates the map. Animal Well is a Metroidvania with a world filled with endless surprises. The sense of accomplishment you’ll feel after conquering its challenging platform sections and cryptic puzzles is truly unique and exhilarating.
The massively popular vampire survival PC game is now available on PlayStation. Players awaken as weakened vampires and hunt for the blood of enemies and animals to regain strength and acquire their powers to conquer the map. As vampires, players are vulnerable to sunlight. You must hide in the shadows and avoid sun exposure in order to survive during the daytime.
When you were a child, did you ever pretend that you could only move around by jumping from shadow to shadow? SCHiM allows you to relive those nostalgic moments by playing as a frog-like creature who can only navigate the map by hopping between shadows. It’s also a visually stunning game with its unique color pallet and art style.
Plucky Squire is a charming action adventure where you jump between 2D and 3D worlds.
One moment, you’re enjoying a 2D action game inside the pages of a storybook, but the next second, you’re embarking on an adventure in the outside 3D realm, and before you know it, you’re back inside the book, solving puzzles. Full of delightful gimmicks, the game delivers an experience that players of all ages can enjoy.
An indie game coming from Japan, Palworld is an open world, crafting and survival game full of adorable creatures (Pals), that took the gaming world by storm. The gameplay loop of collecting Pals, expanding your base, and venturing out further out into the world is very addicting and hard to put down.
The latest title from the visionary team behind GRIS, a beautiful yet heartbreaking adventure game released back in 2018. Neva chronicles the story of the player and a wolf cub, Neva, who together embark on a journey through a vibrant world that progresses from season to season. The story is told without dialogue, and the ending will move you to tears.
Fear the Spotlight is an atmospheric horror adventure featuring a retro low-polygon art style reminiscent of the original PlayStation era. Two teenage girls sneak into school after hours, only to be separated by disturbing paranormal activities. They must solve puzzles and stay out of sight of the monster who wanders the hall to be safely reunited.
From the mind of Keiichiro Toyama, the legendary creator behind Siren and Gravity Rush. During the ‘90s, Kowlong, Hong Kong, is faced with a series of gruesome murders. The player is a body-less entity that possess NPCs roaming the streets in order to battle Slitterheads, a monster that feasts on human brains. Finishing off the monsters as ordinary middle-aged men and women is an absolute blast.
A new game brought to life by Red Candle Games, the studio behind Detention and Devotion. Taking inspiration from Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, Nine Sols is a hardcore action game centered on deflection-based combat. Pulling off a perfect parry and counterattack is tremendously rewarding and invigorating. The atmosphere blends cyberpunk with ancient Chinese mythology and Taoism, is also unique and fascinating.
A fusion of poker and roguelike? You might think, “What’s that?” But once you start, you won’t be able to stop. This worldwide hit game is the creation of a single developer. Incredible!
Stalker 2 is a hit. Officially, it’s sold one million copies across PC and Xbox Series X and S, with many more playing on Game Pass. Reports coming out of Ukraine, where developer GSC Game World was originally based before Russia’s full-scale invasion of the country in 2022, indicate Stalker 2 is already profitable. There’s even talk of a Netflix series.
But what does this success mean for GSC Game World itself and the future of Stalker 2? IGN interviewed GSC CEO Ievgen Grygorovych and creative director Maria Grygorovych at BAFTA in Piccadilly, London following a screening of War Game: The Making of Stalker 2, to ask if Stalker 2’s big sales were a game-changer for the developer.
Discussing the impact of Stalker 2’s release in English, which is obviously not their first language, Ievgen and Maria talked about how the studio now faces “a new reality” and with it a bigger audience than it’s ever had to contend with. The first steps as part of this new reality will revolve around working to improve Stalker 2 itself, something GSC has already done with multiple patches, but also to expand its plans for continued support.
“You need to think properly because we now have a really big audience and sometimes different parts of this audience want to see different things,” Maria cautioned.
“So we need to live now with this new reality, with a live community and talking with them and try to understand them maybe deeper because we really want to make our relationship good.”
Ievgen went into more detail, saying that while GSC’s plan for the development of future video games remains unchanged, it plans to invest even more in post-launch support of Stalker 2 than it had previously earmarked.
“Around five years ago or maybe six years ago, we had a plan of what we were going to do in the nearest 10, 15 years,” he revealed. “What projects we want to do, how we’re going to look like. And all these years we are slightly updating this plan by just moving the dates forward until we release the game.
“And so six years passed and we still want to do the same games as we planned earlier and nothing changed. The only things that changed is that we didn’t think that we would like to invest much more time in live updates of Stalker 2 after game release, that we would want to add much more things in this game in live updates.”
What does this mean for Stalker 2 and its players, then? Ievgen confirmed that GSC is now in a position to add ideas it was forced to cut from the game before launch because they weren’t ready, and even add new ideas that have sprung up in the wake of Stalker 2’s release.
“We didn’t expect that we would go back to improving Stalker 2 for a lot,” Ievgen explained. “And now we still have the same plan for 10, 15 years of development of other things we want. But also putting much more in development of Stalker 2.
“Because actually I love the world we built. I still find a lot of things that we can make better and we want to make better. And now we have players for whom we can do that, for whom we have to do that. And for me it’s very driving.”
Those same reports coming out of Ukraine suggest Stalker 2 will get at least two expansions and even multiplayer, which may be one of the ideas Ievgen was talking about. The hope, it seems, is that Stalker 2’s success could help put Ukraine on the game development map, as CD Projekt’s The Witcher 2 had done for Poland.
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.
A dedicated Baldur’s Gate 3 fan has searched through thousands of lines of dialogue to discover which characters agree, and disagree, the most with each other.
The fan used the Approving and Disapproving mechanic of Baldur’s Gate 3 to do so. When the player character makes certain decisions, messages such as “Gale Approves” or “Halsin Disapproves” pop up, and Tarrasque-Named-John looked to see which characters approved and disapproved the same decisions the most.
Minsc and Karlach agreed the most, aligning on 97% of all decisions. They’re followed by a few pairs at 96%: Wyll and Halsin, Minsc and Halsin, Jaheira and Halsin, and Karlach and Halsin.
The opposite was revealed too, with Astarion and Wyll emerging as the most disagreeable pair with just 50% alignment. They’re followed by Minthara and Halsin at 51%, and both Wyll and Minthara and Karlach and Astarion at 52%
Tarrasque-Named-John also calculated who would become “best friends” by the end of Baldur’s Gate 3, ignoring percentage and looking directly at the total number of times characters agreed with each other.
Astarion’s bestie would be Lae’zel, and Lae’zel’s would be Astarion. Gale’s would be Karlach, but Karlach’s would be Wyll. Awkward. Wyll’s bestie is therefore Karlach, as is Shadowheart’s. Jaheria’s is Wyll, Minsc’s is Karlach, Minthara’s is Astarion, and finally, Halsin’s is Wyll.
In our 10/10 review of Baldur’s Gate 3, IGN said: “With crunchy, tactical RPG combat, a memorable story with complex characters, highly polished cinematic presentation, and a world that always rewards exploration and creativity, Baldur’s Gate 3 is the new high-water mark for CRPGs.”
Ryan Dinsdale is an IGN freelance reporter. He’ll talk about The Witcher all day.
Black Myth: Wukong arrived in 2024 to incredible success and has seemingly spawned some copycats as a result, with Nintendo Switch fans laughing as Wukong Sun: Black Legend hits the platform this week.
Gamers online have called out the $7.99 Wukong Sun: Black Legend as a fairly blatant rip-off of Black Myth: Wukong, which isn’t on Nintendo Switch itself. Not only is the name incredibly similar, but the promotional image could easily be mistaken for that of the actual game.
The similarities practically end there, however, as Wukong Sun: Black Legend is a side-scrolling platformer as opposed to Black Myth: Wukong’s third-person action. It also requires a meagre 338 megabytes of storage space according to the Nintendo eShop page.
It’s description doesn’t allude to this seemingly more limited experience, promising “a chaotic world teeming with powerful monsters,” “supercharged abilities and crazy fighting skills,” and “captivating visuals with unforgettable storytelling.”
“Seriously, this is not even subtle,” one ResetEra user wrote of the similarities between Wukong Sun: Black Legend and Black Myth: Wukong. “Not even trying,” wrote another. “Yeah, this seems like the kind of shovelware cashgrab someone would release,” said a third.
Black Myth: Wukong is based on classic Chinese novel Journey to the West, so Wukong Sun: Black Legend could technically also be based on this source material, but it’s not the first time such an incident has occurred.
Developers have felt the burden of this too, with Unpacking creative director Wren Brier calling out Nintendo for allowing copycats of their game on the eShop. As reported by Eurogamer, Brier called games such as Unpacking: Deluxe Edition or Unpacking: Chill Music Pack “egregious scams,” as they are in no way linked to their own game.
Ryan Dinsdale is an IGN freelance reporter. He’ll talk about The Witcher all day.
If you’re a fan of miniature consoles and the novel convenience they bring, then unfortunately you might want to just keep ahold of your current collection, because it doesn’t sound like Sega is particularly keen on making any more.
In an interview with The Guardian (thanks, Time Extension), Shuji Utsumi, the CEO of Sega America and Europe, dashed any hopes that we might see a ‘Saturn Mini’ or ‘Dreamcast Mini’ in the future. He stated that while the company appreciates its legacy, it wants to focus on the future and “embrace modern gamers”:
The original creators of much-loved sci-fi horror video game Dead Space say they pitched EA on Dead Space 4 this year, only for the publisher to say it wasn’t interested.
In an interview with Dan Allen Gaming, Glen Schofield, Christopher Stone, and Bret Robbins, three of the leading creatives at the now shuttered original Dead Space developer EA Redwood Shores / Visceral Games, revealed they all joined together to pitch EA on Dead Space 4.
“We tried, actually, the three of us,” Schofield revealed. “Dead Space 4. We’re talking this year.”
Unfortunately for Dead Space fans, EA said it wasn’t interested, with Schofield suggesting projections for how many copies Dead Space 4 would have to sell to make the venture worthwhile were perhaps a key factor in the decision.
“We didn’t go too deep,” Schofield explained. “They just said, ‘We’re not interested right now. We appreciate it blah blah blah, and you know we know who to talk to.’ So we didn’t take it any further. And we respected their opinion. They know their numbers and what they have to ship and all that so yeah.”
Stone added that the video game industry’s high-profile struggles and its subsequent risk aversion has made projects such as Dead Space 4 a particularly hard sell.
“The industry is in a weird place right now,” Stone said. “People are really hesitant to take chances on things. So you got to take it with a grain of salt. Who knows, maybe one day. I think we’d all love to do it.”
“Yeah,” Schofield continued, “we got some ideas.”
“I’d make a Dead Space 4,” Stone declared.
Alas, it sounds like Dead Space 4 is an unlikely prospect, with EA focusing on its enormously successful sports games, The Sims, the revival of Battlefield, and Respawn’s ongoing projects, including the third Star Wars Jedi game. BioWare recently released Dragon Age Veilguard and is working on Mass Effect 5.
EA released the well-received Dead Space remake in 2023, but since then EA hasn’t said anything about a potential Dead Space 4. The last mainline game in the franchise, Dead Space 3, came out over a decade ago, in 2013.
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.
