Poll: Will You Be Getting The Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition – Deluxe Set?

Go on, tell us.

The Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition was recently announced for the Switch and as part of this there will be a special ‘Deluxe Set’ released, containing a physical game card, a set of five pins, 13 art cards, and a gold coloured replica NES cartridge.

Nintendo has now released a new trailer showing off this ‘Deluxe Set’ and it’s got us wondering if anyone in the Nintendo Life will be picking it up, and who has been able to successfully secure a pre-order so far. So vote in our poll and leave a comment below.

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Minecraft Celebrates 15 Years With Switch eShop Anniversary Sale, 50% Off

Time flies when you’re crafting, building and surviving.

Mojang’s survival-crafting hit Minecraft is currently celebrating its 15th anniversary and as part of this, there’s a special sale on the Switch eShop.

Between now and 4th June 2024, you can get a 50% discount on Minecraft, reducing it to just US$14.99 (or your regional equivalent). Minecraft Dungeons and Minecraft Legends are also half-price.

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Random: Danny DeVito Open To Voicing Wario In Mario Movie Sequel

“You never know what happens in the world”.

Wario hasn’t been introduced to Mario’s cinematic universe (at least yet), but one Hollywood movie star who is apparently “up for” the role on the big screen is Danny DeVito.

When asked about the possibility of voicing Mario’s archrival in the sequel, DeVito mentioned how he was “ready to do a lot of things”. Here’s what he jokingly had to say during a recent chat with the YouTube channel ‘The Movie Dweeb’:

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Toys for Bob Updates Website With Simple Purple Tiki Mask, Sparking Speculation Over Next Project

It looks like Toys for Bob is beginning its next chapter, and it’s starting with a mysterious purple tiki mask.

The Crash Bandicoot 4: It’s About Time and Spyro Reignited Trilogy developer published the strange picture in a new update on its website. Those who head to the site will notice that an image of a purple, teeth-clenching tiki head is now the only accessible page.

It’s unclear what it could mean, but there is a good chance the mask is simply Toys for Bob’s new logo. Opening the image reveals that it’s named “TFB_LogoVector_TikiMask-purple.” It’s also been pointed out that the Toys for Bob offices have been tiki-themed in the past. Still, that hasn’t stopped fans from speculating that the image may be tied to a new game.

In March, Windows Central reported that Xbox would still work with the developer on its next game following the news that Toys for Bob would be going indepedent earlier this year. Microsoft also finalized its acquisition of Activision last year, so if Xbox and Toys for Bob have indeed come to an agreement, then the developer could theoretically be working on a Crash Bandicoot and/or Spyro the Dragon game.

The presence of the tiki mask has many fans believing that Crash Bandicoot 5 is in development. Others, meanwhile have pointed out that its purple coloring could be pointing to a new Spyro game.

It’s best to not assume such a project is in development until Toys for Bob has more to announce. The studio separated itself from Activision and Microsoft in February, expressing a desire to return to its roots as “a small and nimble studio.”

“With the same enthusiasm and passion, we believe that now is the time to take the studio and our future games to the next level,” Toys for Bob said at the time.

We enjoyed the studio’s last game, Crash 4, giving it an 8/10 in our review. We said, “Crash Bandicoot 4 is a great return to form, with some new ideas that add a fresh spin to Crash’s classic gameplay.”

Michael Cripe is a freelance contributor with IGN. He started writing in the industry in 2017 and is best known for his work at outlets such as The Pitch, The Escapist, OnlySP, and Gameranx.

Be sure to give him a follow on Twitter @MikeCripe.

Review: Slayers X (Switch) – A Fun But Basic Boomer Shooter That Lacks An X Factor

The video game equivalent of Limp Bizkit.

Fans of unconventional narrative-driven games may be familiar with Hypnospace Outlaw, a cool project from a few years ago that aimed to simulate an alternate take on the social environment of the late ’90s internet. Though Hypnospace Outlaw will be receiving a proper sequel with the upcoming Dreamsettler, Tendershoot decided to give waiting players a more unconventional spin-off release that takes things in a much different direction. Dubbed Slayers X: Terminal Aftermath: Vengeance of the Slayer, this classic-style boomer shooter launched on PC and Xbox in 2023 and sort of bears some narrative connections to Hypnospace Outlaw. It’s a decent game in its own right, and even though it didn’t manage to ‘wow’ us, we’d still suggest you give it a look.

The story of Slayers X is rather fascinating, as there are essentially two levels to it. On the first, you have the premise: this is the in-universe game that Zane Lofton from Hypnospace Outlaw referenced. He essentially designed this with the help of a friend, so the experience you’re ultimately getting with Slayers X is something an immature, horny teenager would make if he was given free rein to express himself. This leads to the second narrative level, the ‘in-game’ plot. You play the role of “Big Z”, an X-Slayer in-training who is forced into action when the monstrous Psyko Sindikate attacks his town, kills both his mom and mentor, and kidnaps one of his fellow X-Slayers. He thus sets out on a quest for revenge, blowing up a whole lot of baddies along the way as he fights to free his friend.

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The Best Trick-Taking Games (2024)

Trick-taking, where a hand of cards progresses by one player leading a suit and others following, matching that suit if they can, is so old that its origins are lost. The earliest one we have records for in Europe is called Karnöffel, and it dates from 15th century Germany, but playing cards generally are far older and were developed in the far east. Such is the popularity of this mechanism that it’s still with us, and has blossomed into thousands of different forms, many of which you can enjoy with a standard deck of playing cards.

Needless to say, such a popular method of play has also made its way into any number of more modern, more specialized and more strategically rich games, and it’s those we’ll be focusing on to pick out the best. Designers have been able to adapt it into myriad forms, across competitive and cooperative play, and by marrying it with other mechanics to create longer games. But the real trick of trick-taking is that it’s so familiar that almost anyone can pick up and play these games with ease.

Wizard

Trick-taking is an old concept that dates back to playing card games, so it makes sense to start with this relatively old game that mostly uses a deck of standard playing cards. The magic comes from eight extra cards, four wizards and four jesters. The first wizard played always wins a trick, while jesters are the lowest value and are beaten by all other cards. While that not sound much like sorcery, Wizard also uses another common feature of trick-taking games: before each round you must bid the number of tricks you think you’ll win, and must match that number to score. The wizard and jester combo make this notoriously hard to predict, but also leaves you with the strategic flexibility to play defensively or offensively in attempts to shore up your score, or push for a sudden, thrilling win.

Skull King

Pirate-themed Skull King is the captain of the bidding game ship. There are three normal suits alongside a trump suit and, as usual, the highest card wins a trick. You start each hand looking at your cards and predicting how many tricks you’re going to win, scoring points if you hit the target but losing them otherwise, ensuring each hand comes down to a thrilling climax. But the deck is full of special cards to give the game some serious spice: pirates always win a trick, escape cards always lose and the terrible skull king himself lords it over everything, gaining a bonus if he scoops up any pirates. They’re easy enough concepts to learn, but fill the game with more than enough variety to ensure there’s lots of skill in making your bids.

Sail

Staying with the nautical theme, Sail sees two of you working together to steer a ship across a course of islands while being chased by a ferocious kraken. It’s notoriously hard for trick-taking games to work as two-player games, but Sail’s ingenious ruleset not only manages it, but ensures a white-knuckle ride on every game. Each card has not only a suite and a value but also a symbol, and the pairing of symbols determines what your ship does that round, whether that’s moving, firing on the kraken or taking a smash from one of the thing’s tentacles. The round ends when one player wins five tricks, meaning you’ve got to balance the load while still taking the right action pairings, a task made doubly difficult by a ban on communication. Every attempt is an edge-of-the-seat challenge across six scenarios.

The Crew: Mission Deep Sea

If you want a cooperative trick-taker for more than two (this one ended up on our list of the best four-player board games as well), then it’s time to venture into the depths of the ocean as you attempt to keep your team alive in The Crew. The game plays through a long sequence of narrative scenarios of increasing difficulty, giving you more and more tasks to complete from a random and imaginatively varied selection. The basic formula is that a given player has to win a trick containing a particular card, but the concept blossoms into all kinds of demanding challenges, for example winning or not winning particular suits or numbers of tricks. This would be easy if you could share what’s in your hand, but that’s not allowed: you can only offer elusive hints. Success is thus a matter of tracking plays and trying to engineer situations where you can complete your assigned tasks. It’s harder than it sounds, highly addictive, and its cooperative nature makes it superb for family play.

Brian Boru: High King of Ireland

Most of the games on this list are fast-playing games, but Brian Boru is a rare instance of a much deeper strategy affair that uses trick-taking. Players are competing to become the next King of medieval Ireland by controlling towns on the map, but control of any given town is decided by playing cards from your hand, which you’ll have picked via drafting at the game start. As usual the highest card value wins, from the suit matching that of the town you’re vying over, but there are some cool wrinkles. First, there’s a wild white suit that matches any color. Second, the lower value the card, the better rewards you get whether you win the trick or lose. This spatial control element married to those cunning inverse rewards give this a unique and engrossing strategic feel, while trick-winning is full of tension.

Cat in the Box

Bidding games don’t come much more bizarre than this beauty, inspired by Schrödinger’s famous feline thought experiment. On the face of it, it’s a normal trick-taking game where you follow a color suit, one color is a trump, and the highest-value card wins. The twist is that the cards are not colored: you decide what color a card is as you play it. That pairing is then crossed off a grid because, after all, you can’t have two cards of the same color and value, right? You can even decide, at any point, that your hand is completely out of a particular color, allowing you to sneak in a trump, but you’ll never be able to play that color again! This can lead to paradoxes where you’re left with unplayable cards, and you lose points. But win or lose, the sheer, head-spinning innovation of this game will take your breath away.

Ghosts of Christmas

Another cleverly peculiar bidding game, this time inspired by Dickens’ famous Yuletide yarn “A Christmas Carol,” Ghosts of Christmas lets you hedge your bets and bid numbers for tricks you think you might win, for a points penalty. But that isn’t its secret sauce. Rather, this is a game where you play hands at once, represented by the multiple time periods of the titular ghosts: past, present and future. Once a given time has a card lead in it, it’s fixed to that for the rest of the hand, so everyone gets a chance to lead, and the unfolding play sees you juggling strategy across several hands from the same pool of cards. Even Scrooge himself might have trouble doing that kind of accounting, although the result is no humbug but a top class, challenging title.

Jekyll vs Hyde

Another trick-taker for two, even if you are representing personalities in the same body as per the classic tale of gothic horror, Jekyll vs. Hyde manages to bring some thematic class to the genre. Each suit represents a negative character trait and, unusually, they’re ranked in the order of which they get played each round and, if a player can’t follow suit, a higher-ranked card will beat a lower-ranked one, a deliciously devious strategic flair. You can also dump out potion cards, which have unexpected effects depending on the suit it’s paired with, resetting the ranks, swapping cards or even stealing a trick from your opponent. But winning isn’t always the point: at the end of a hand, you work out the difference between the two tricks and Hyde advance that many spaces toward his transformation, and victory. If he can’t manage it within three hands, good wins and Jekyll keeps his self-control, but you’ll have a fun time either way.

Inside Job

Imagine a cooperative trick-taking game like The Crew, but with slightly simpler missions and a time limit. Might not sound terribly appealing, but there’s a big surprise waiting in each game of Inside Job: one of the players is a traitor, trying to sabotage the group’s spy missions. Each trick won earns the winner an intel token, and if the traitor gets enough of these, they win instantly. The rest of the agents win if they clear a threshold of successful missions in time. Should neither happen, it comes down to a vote, with the agents winning if they can successfully identify the insider, or losing if not. Blending the best of trick-taking and hidden role games in an easy to learn package, this is genre blending at its most fun.

The Fox in the Forest

Our final specialist two-player pick, The Fox in the Forest is a standard, simple trick-taker with one glorious twist that makes it stand out: you get points for winning either very few or slightly above average tricks, rather than sweeping the board. This necessitates a complete rethink of how you approach the game, as you’re no longer leading to win every time. Instead, you’ve got to consider what your opponent might be holding and mix things up so that you can win the requisite number of tricks to net the big points. To further mix things up, all the odd-numbered cards have special powers like changing the trump suit or the win conditions for a given hand, ensuring this is a game where you always have to think on your feet as you field the constant curveballs that it throws you.

Seas of Strife

As you’ve probably noticed, many trick-taking games take the basic formula and succeed by making a small twist – that’s how addictive the basic recipe is. Seas of Strife, which unusually has different numbers across all its suits, has two. Firstly, you win by losing: that is, collecting as few tricks as possible. Second, if you can’t follow suit and have to dump a card, that card’s suit not only becomes valid but can win the trick if it’s the most common suit played. This makes the obvious tactic of dumping high cards extremely dangerous, and ensures that every hand has the unexpected in store right until the final card is played. At the same time it’s super-easy to pick up, and great fun for all ages.

Matt Thrower is a contributing freelance board game and video game writer for IGN. (Board, video, all sorts of games!)

Ghost of Tsushima’s PSN login requirement will stop you playing multiplayer on Steam Deck

We’re just a couple of days away from Ghost of Tsushima’s PC release date, as the former PlayStation exclusive prepares to drop its Director’s Cut – including its expansion and multiplayer DLC – on Steam. Having recently cleared up the question around whether you’ll need to sign in with a PSN account after the Helldivers 2 debacle – yes, if you want to play the co-op mode – developers Nixxes and Sucker Punch have now revealed that the login requirement will mean multiplayer won’t work on Steam Deck.

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PlayStation Plus Game Catalog Additions for May 2024 Revealed

Sony has revealed the full line-up of PlayStation Plus Games Catalog additions for May 2024, which includes Red Dead Redemption 2, Cat Quest, Watch Dogs, and more.

Announced on the PlayStation Blog, a total of 13 games are joining the library: 10 in the Games Catalog available to Extra and Premium members and three in the Classic Games Catalog only available to Premium members.

While perhaps a thinner line-up compared to recent months, the addition of Red Dead Redemption 2 will carry May’s line-up a long way. It’s worth noting this is actually a return to the service for Rockstar’s open-world cowboy adventure, however, as it was one of the first games announced for the Games Catalog two years prior. All games hit the service on May 21.

PlayStation Plus Games Catalog Additions for April 2024

PlayStation Plus Classics Games Catalog Additions for April 2024

Red Dead Redemption 2 is Grand Theft Auto developer Rockstar Games’ take on the wild west as players take on the role of Arthur Morgan as he looks tries to survive in America’s unforgiving heartland. IGN deemed it a masterpiece in our review. “Red Dead Redemption 2 is a game of rare quality; a meticulously polished open world ode to the outlaw era,” we said.

Deceive Inc. deploys you into the world of high stakes subterfuge, working for a private corporation with complete monopoly over the international espionage market. Rival spies are after the same objective as the player, however, and each one of them is as equally skilled, cunning, and well-equipped.

The Sims 4: City Living is an expansion for the beloved simulation game, and while the base version of Sims 4 is required to play, this is also permanently free. City Living lets players take their Sims to the city and explore everything it has to offer, from bustling action right outside the front door to unique situations that come only with apartment living.

Crime Boss: Rockay City is a stealth action first person shooter where players look to become the leaders of a criminal underworld in 1990s Florida. IGN didn’t rate it very highly, however, giving it a 4/10 in our review. “Crime Boss: Rockay City’s hokey charm is nowhere near strong enough to offset its bugs and repetitive design, and it totally squanders its kitsch cast,” we said.

The latest instalment in the long running strategy game series, The Settlers: New Allies lets players discover new worlds and build sprawling cities as they take control of a band of settlers who have fled cataclysmic events in their homeland to seek new lands to settle, explore, and conquer.

On a somewhat similar note, albeit with a sprinkle of sci-fi, Stranded: Alien Dawn is a planet survival sim placing the fate of a small marooned group in the player’s hands. Promising compelling and immersive strategic gameplay, players must make vital decisions to protect their survivors.

Cat Quest and its sequel, the aptly titled Cat Quest 2, will both be available through the PlayStation Plus Games Catalog. Both 2D, open world role-playing games set in a world full of cats, players must embark on a quest to save their catnapped sister in the first game while the second sees them fight to save the world of cats from advancing dog armies.

Classic LEGO goodness arrives through The LEGO Movie 2 Video Game, which lets players bash and build their way through the events of the film. Alien monster invaders have left Bricksburg in ruins and taken Emmet’s friends, and it’s now up to him and his team of heroic characters to go beyond their world and save their friends from the strange inhabitants of the Systar System.

Watch Dogs is the first open-world action game set in the fan-favorite franchise, kicking things off with solemn protagonist Aiden Pearce hacking (with, like, a smartphone) his way through Chicago. “Watch Dogs is an excellent open world action game with some unique hacking magic that makes it a memorable experience,” IGN said in our 8/10 review.

On the classic games front, 2Xtreme was promised to be a high flying sports game where players could snowboard in Japan, in-line skate in Last Vegas, mountain bike in Africa, skateboard in Los Angeles, and more. Unfortunately, however, it couldn’t stick the landing, as when the PlayStation classic was re-released for the PlayStation Portable, IGN gave it a rare 2/10 in our review.

Another PlayStation classic, and one that received a better rating from IGN, comes in G-Police. This 1997 title saw Jeff Slater join a voluntary police force after an unspeakable corporate cover-up caused his sister’s death. As a helicopter pilot, players must fly through 35 grueling levels to take their revenge. “With a flair for the dramatic and an attention to detail that should impress even the toughest of critics, G-Police is a rock-solid example of great gameplay,” we said in our 8/10 review.

Finally, Worms Pinball rounds out May 2024’s PlayStation Plus Classic Games Catalog additions, and does exactly what it says on the tin. This 2000 title is a mix of pinball and the wacky Worms characters, offering a table sporting 3D LED displayed sub-games and parallel objectives, transparent ramps, user-controllable moving gadgets, bounce and flip passes, bang backs, death saves, and more.

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

Assassin’s Creed Shadows is both a samurai and a ninja game, as it borrows Syndicate’s dual-character story

After being unceremoniously thrown into the spotlight yesterday with a pre-reveal leak, Assassin’s Creed Shadows has been given a proper unveiling via a flashy cinematic trailer, confirming both its leaked November release date and revealing that we’ll be playing as two protagonists for the first time in the series since Syndicate almost a decade ago. One of those heroes will also be the series’ first playable real-life figure: the African samurai Yasuke.

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Rumour: Pokémon Leaker Suggests Gen 10 Games Are Coming In 2026

Peek à Khu.

Renowned Pokémon leaker Khu has suggested that we will have to wait a while to see the first Generation 10 games which, they hint, may align with the series’ 30th anniversary.

In a recent tweet, the Pokémon leaker asked if we are “prepared for G10?” and accompanied the question with “30thA”. The series’ 30th anniversary will fall in 2026, one year after the release of Pokémon Legends: Z-A.

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