Category: IGN

I’ve been keeping a close eye on the Pokémon TCG market this month, and we’re seeing two very different stories unfold. On one side, Surging Sparks cards are going through a steep correction.

On the other hand, Crown Zenith cards are showing early signs of what could be a long-term value surge. The bottom line? If you’re a collector or investor, now is the time to buy into both.

I’m picking up what I can from both sets. The current dip in Sparks is a glimmer of hope for long-suffering 2024-2025 collectors. And Crown Zenith is a train I want to be on before it leaves the station. Let’s go into more detail:

Pokémon Card Crashers

PUBG: Blindspot is a cheeky little PUBG: Battlegrounds spin off that’s currently in development, and was playable on the show floor at IGN Live. It’s a 5v5 top-down tactical shooter that has a classic team deathmatch mode – one we got hooked on even in the chaos of the gaming show floor – and a Demolition mode, that will see teams using traps and obstacles to outwit the enemy. It’s been compared to a top-down Rainbow Six Siege and with good reason: to rack up the kills you’re going to need to use your brain as well as your trigger finger.

1. Think ‘Peekaboo with bullets’

Forget all your FPS muscle memory, this is a top-down strategic PvP game where your cunning is as important as your reaction times. You’re dropped into a map full of corners, windows, doorways – basically anything you can think of to make line of sight a key part of gameplay – and you have to hunt down your opponents before they pop one in your back. You can see the whole map, but you’ll only see enemies if they’re in your cone of vision or your teammates, which sounds simple until someone snipes you through a window while you’re focused on the doorway at the end of a corridor.

2. Demolition Mode is on the way

While we didn’t get to play the Demolition Mode, it sounds like a step up in complexity from the 5v5 deathmatch, adding a greater need for planning and teamwork. Production Director Seungmyeong Yang explained more about it at IGN Live. “Demolition Mode can commonly be found in other games such as Counter Strike or Valorant,” he said. “In this Demolition Mode there is an attacking team and a defending team, and the defense team basically tries to block the attacking team from coming in and the attacking team tries to breach the building. It was really fun to see how the gamers react, they seem to really enjoy the game!” Demolition Mode is the inspiration for those Rainbow Six Siege comparisons, albeit it from a whole new top-down perspective.

3. Start your WASD warmups

The keyboard and mouse controls are more like a twin-stick shooter set up, and it’s going to take your brain a second to catch up to how they work. You control movement with WASD and your cone of vision with the mouse, while to aim and fire weapons you hold down the right mouse button. That will slow your movement, though, so it’s always a balance between moving quickly to avoid enemy detection and choosing when to take your shots. Once you’ve mastered that you can focus on being more accurate, using the mouse wheel and keyboard to go for head shots, body shots, or aiming specifically at any crouched enemies.

4. Character choice is key

Like any team game, who you have in your five-person kill crew is going to matter. The build I played had 10 characters to choose from, each with pleasingly distinct looks and loadouts to keep things interesting. I’m not exactly a subtle operative, so I gravitated towards those with weapons that could cause carnage up close and personal, like bearded cowboy Collision, who packs a Winchester 1300 shotgun and booby traps; or Kayak, who has a semi-automatic O12 combat shotgun and a remote sticky bomb. Support players can go for Fanatic with her P90 and First Aid Kid, or sniper Buddy with her scanning drones. Some you might want to play just because of their character designs – I’m not usually one for Toxic Gas Grenades, but Dropdown has a sort of Dystopian Harley Quinn vibe that’s hard to resist.

5. You can play it in August

There’s no official release date for the full game, but there is a PC beta planned for August. Keep an eye on the game’s official Steam page for updates.

Rachel Weber is the Senior Editorial Director of Games at IGN and an elder millennial. She’s been a professional nerd since 2006 when she got her start on Official PlayStation Magazine in the UK, and has since worked for GamesIndustry.Biz, Rolling Stone and GamesRadar. She loves horror, horror movies, horror games, and French Bulldogs. Those extra wrinkles on her face are thanks to going time blind and staying up too late finishing every sidequest in RPGs like Fallout and Witcher 3.

Dinosaurs captivate all ages. The creatures that dominated Earth ages ago, populating our world for 165 million years, will always be fascinating. And, on screen, as part of movie history, dinosaurs have always been a go-to genre for incredible spectacle and chilling thrills – whether you’re into t-rexes, pterodactyls, raptors, or gentle giant brontosauruses.

Dinosaur movies transport us back in time to the era of these wondrous reptiles, while other instances show dinosaurs living among us, either on a secluded island lost to history or as cloned beings brought back by science for our amusement (and dismemberment).

The Jurassic Park/World franchise has raked in over $6 billion in box office bucks over the past 30 years, proving that these glorious beasts can bring home the bacon. But which dinosaur films are the best?

Here are our picks of the 10 best dinosaur movies, from trampled theme parks to warring prehistoric titans.

Looking for more movies featuring giant lizards?

• The best dragon movies
• Godzilla movies in order

Jurassic Park (1993)

Everyone loves free games, especially when they are bundled in with something you were already planning to buy. Today is the last day that you can score Doom: The Dark Ages on PC via Steam for free with the purchase of an ASUS ROG accessory. If you’ve been on the lookout for a new gaming keyboard, mouse, or monitor, you can score both new tech and one of 2025’s biggest games to go with it.

Although Amazon Prime Day doesn’t start until next week, this offer is pretty tempting if you’re in the market for PC gaming accessories and don’t already own the game.

Get a Free Copy of Doom: The Dark Ages with ASUS ROG Accessories at Amazon

Doom: The Dark Ages took Doom to the world of dark sci-fi fantasy. The legendary Doom Slayer returns with a Shield in tow, and he’s even able to fly a dragon. This game brought what is arguably the best story in a Doom game thus far, with humans and villains more important than ever. In our 9/10 review, we wrote, “Doom: The Dark Ages may strip away the mobility focus of Doom Eternal, but replaces it with a very weighty and powerful style of play that is different from anything the series has done before, and still immensely satisfying in its own way.”

The game launched just recently on May 15, and if you haven’t played it yet, this offer on Amazon is the perfect excuse. Over 20 Asus ROG accessories are included in this promotion, but you only have until the end of today, June 30, to claim this offer. Keys are delivered alongside order confirmation, and you can enter the order into Gamesplanet to claim your free copy of Doom: The Dark Ages on Steam.

One of our favorite items in this sale is the 49-inch ROG Swift QD-OLED Curved Monitor. This 1440p ultrawide monitor has numerous excellent features that complement its gorgeous OLED panel. Asus has a custom heatsink inside the monitor to ensure no damage is done to the display, so no need to worry about overheating. Additionally, you also have a refresh rate of 144Hz here, which is essential for playing games in a smooth environment. The Swift monitor is priced at $899 right now, marking the lowest price we’ve seen yet.

If you’re just looking for the cheapest item, the Asus ROG Keris II Ace Wireless Gaming Mouse is your best bet. This mouse features a 42K optical sensor, ensuring precision across any game, and it only weighs 54g! Priced at $144.99, this is the cheapest ROG accessory on Amazon that includes a free copy of Doom.

Finally, another great accessory on sale is the ROG Azoth 75 Wireless Gaming Keyboard. This keyboard is equipped with an OLED display that you can customize to showcase audio visualizations, animations, settings, or even system temperatures. The Azroth 75 can be used via Bluetooth, wired, or via RF 2.4 GHz, with over 2,000+ hours of battery life with RGB lighting off.

Noah Hunter is a freelance writer and reviewer with a passion for games and technology. He co-founded Final Weapon, an outlet focused on nonsense-free Japanese gaming (in 2019) and has contributed to various publishers writing about the medium.

The Alters developer 11 Bit Studios has responded to fan accusations it used generative AI text and translation in the game, and has promised an update to both to replace the AI-generated content with handcrafted assets.

Last week, players of The Alters spotted what appeared to be text generated by AI in the game, on a screen in the Command Center. Specifically, the text includes the line, “Sure, here’s a revised version focusing purely on scientific and astronomical data:” followed by a Captain’s log, which suggests that someone prompted an AI for the text and forgot to delete the AI’s lead-in response.

In the English-language version of the game, that was the end of it. However, players of other language versions began to point out that some of the game’s translations include lines like, “Sure! Here is the translated text into Brazilian Portuguese.”, suggesting that 11 Bit Studios had used generative AI to localize at least some portion of the game. The Alters does not include a disclosure on its Steam page stating that it includes generative AI, which Valve makes mandatory for all games that use the technology.

In a statement sent via email to IGN and published across social platforms, 11 Bit Studios offered an explanation for the generative AI text and translations. The studio explained that the Captain’s Log text was intended as a placeholder and simply got missed during final release, and that no other such instances appear in the game. As for the localization, 11 Bit says that generative AI translations were limited to a few cutscenes added very late in development that needed last-minute translations, and that it always intended to replace them with professional translations.

Here’s the studio’s statement, in full:

We’ve seen a wide range of accusations regarding the use of AI-generated content in The Alters, and we feel it’s important to clarify our approach and give you more context. AI-generated assets were used strictly as temporary WIPs during the development process and in a very limited manner. Our team has always prioritized meaningful, handcrafted storytelling as one of the foundations of our game.

During production, an AI-generated text for a graphic asset, which was meant as a piece of background texture, was used by one of our graphical designers as a placeholder. This was never intended to be part of the final release. Unfortunately, due to an internal oversight, this single placeholder text was mistakenly left in the game. We have since conducted a thorough review and confirmed that this was an isolated case, and the asset in question is being updated.

For transparency, we’ve included a screenshot to show how and where it appears in the game. While we do not want to downplay the situation, we also want to clearly show its limited impact on your gaming experience.

In addition to that, a few licensed movies that the alters can watch in the social area of the base were added at the final stage of development. While those were externally produced, our team was not involved in the creative process, and these required additional last-minute translations. Due to extreme time constraints, we chose not to involve our translation partners and had these videos localized using AI to have them ready on launch. It was always our intention to involve our trusted translation agencies after release as part of our localization hotfix, to ensure those texts would be handled with the same care and quality as the rest of the game. That process is now underway, and updated translations are being implemented.

To give you a better understanding of what a small part of the overall scope of the game’s narrative layer they are, those few external movies are approximately 10k words out of 3.4 million across all languages in the game, or just 0.3% of the overall text. The alternative was to release those specific dialogues in English only, which we believed would be a worse experience for non-English speakers. In hindsight, we acknowledge this was the wrong call. Even more so, no matter what we decided, we should have simply let you know.

As AI tools evolve, they present new challenges and opportunities in game development. We’re actively adapting our internal processes to meet this reality. But above all, we remain committed to transparency in how we make our games. We appreciate your understanding and continued support as we work towards that goal.

11 Bit Studios is just the latest company to come under fire for generative AI usage. Just last week, Jurassic World Evolution 3 developer Frontier Developments had to walk back its use of generative AI characters portraits after widespread criticism. Activision has been skewered repeatedly for its generative AI use, including recent examples of an ad for a Guitar Hero game that doesn’t exist, and certain Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 assets. Other games, such as Palworld, have been accused of using generative AI but have gone to great lengths to prove the accusations were unfounded and that no generative AI was used.

Regardless of generative AI usage, we gave The Alters an 8/10 in our review, calling it “a highly atmospheric sci-fi character study mixed with simple but effective resource and base management that cleverly builds existential and interpersonal pressure throughout its story.”

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.

The card-based, narrative-driven RPG Sultan’s Game just dropped its latest update alongside new DLC. There’s new story content, a downloadable soundtrack, new cards, and the base game is on sale for 15% as part of the Steam Summer Sale right now.

For those who aren’t familiar with Sultan’s Game, the story begins with a tyrannical sultan who has experienced every vice and pleasure life has to offer, and he’s grown bored. But then a mysterious sorceress arrives with a card game meant only for the realm’s most powerful people. Each round of the game assigns you a Sultan Card and tasks you with destroying it, but each card has different requirements to defeat it.

Cards come in four different types with four different tiers within those types. The four card types are Carnality, Bloodshed, Conquest, and Extravagance. You sate Carnality cards with nights of passion, feed the hunger of Bloodshed cards with living sacrifices, fulfill Conquest cards by capturing locations, and satisfy Extravagance cards with wealth and treasure.

Each card also comes in one of four tiers of increasing value: stone, bronze, silver, and gold. To defeat a Sultan Card, you must use a card of equal or higher value. So, for instance, if you need to destroy a silver Bloodshed card, then you must kill a character card that’s either silver or gold.

While the game is played with cards, in-world those cards represent real people, so sacrificing cards means killing actual subjects. As you might expect, this is just the kind of game a tyrannical ruler would love. But you don’t play as the sultan — at least, not after the tutorial. You are one of his courtiers who had the courage to call out the game for its cruelty and depravity. Your punishment? The sultan puts you in charge of playing the game and having to make life-or-death decisions to defeat each Sultan Card. If you fail, he’ll execute you.

The beginning of each round will see you draw a new Sultan Card, and you’ll have seven days to figure out how to destroy it. There are activities available each day, and you can choose which activities to send cards in your deck to do. But you’ll need to be strategic about which activities you do each day and which cards you assign to them. Seven days can go by quickly, and there are limited resources at your disposal.

Some of those activities require dice rolls to determine if your chosen cards are successful. When you end the day, text-based scenes will play out based on who did what, whether they were successful, and your rewards. The primary rewards are gold coins (which can be used to gain access to other activities) or information cards (which can be used for a variety of things), but as the game progresses, more events get added with more varied results.

Ultimately, the story will be shaped by how you decide to approach each task and how moral or immoral you choose to be. Will you willingly go along with the sultan or secretly plot behind his back? Will you stay loyal to your wife or spend your free time at the local brothel? How will you treat the strangers that cross your path?

No matter what decisions you make, butterfly effects will follow in their wake, some of which won’t show themselves until long after you’ve made the initial choice. Some decisions might seem innocuous at first, but the story branches they open can continue branching from there and end up with wildly different outcomes.

Many of these decisions will test your morality. That starts as soon as the game begins, when you choose the background of your main character and his wife. Are you kind and charming or strong and intimidating? Are you a slave owner (this is a sultan’s court, after all) or a more enlightened friend of the nobility? Your starting deck and stats will be determined by the choices you make during this setup, but the moral decisions only get more complicated from there.

We won’t give any spoilers here, but we will say that there are some truly dark and extreme choices you can make, and they can dramatically alter the course of the story and the things you experience in your playthrough. You’ll have to grapple with questions like, “Who am I willing to kill?” and “What makes one person’s life more valuable than another?” Some moments might elicit excitement, others fear, and others maybe even disgust. A single playthrough takes about 10 hours, but seeing every ending can easily run you to 150+ hours, so there are lots of different paths to take.

The story has an extensive script, and the latest update refined that script. It also added new Steam badges, community items, and 10 new cards crowdsourced from the community (pictured below). But the biggest new additions come in the form of two DLCs: a downloadable soundtrack and prequel story.

The OST features 15 original tracks by Zeta and international artists, and it’s a fusion of Uyghur Muqam, guzheng, and Western orchestration that’s meant to represent the cross-cultural atmosphere of the game.

The prequel DLC is a digital novella called A Game for the Sultan, which will let fans read the original story that inspired development of the game. Written by the game’s lead writer, it takes place in the sultan’s court, tells a standalone story, and delves into the origin of the dreaded Sultan Cards and how they first corrupted a sultan’s court.

Sultan’s Game and its DLCs are currently exclusive to PC and are available now on Steam. The base game sold more than 600,000 units within its first month of release and is now approaching 1 million sales during the Steam Summer Sale. It’s also reviewed well on Steam, currently sitting at “very positive” with more than 16,000 reviews and “overwhelmingly positive” with 1,600 recent reviews. You can stay up to date on the latest info by following developer Double Cross Studio on Twitter.

Naraka: Bladepoint is approaching its fourth anniversary, and it’s celebrating with another Naraka Fest Direct. There will be news, reveals, updates, and details about upcoming in-game events and new content, and IGN will host a livestream of the show. We have all the info you need to watch the show live, as well as some ideas of what to expect to be shown.

Naraka Fest Direct Date, Time, and How to Watch

If you’re in the United States, this will be a nighttime show. It’ll begin on Tuesday, July 1 at 9 p.m. Pacific, which means it’ll be at midnight that night in the Eastern time zone. You can watch it live on any of these IGN channels:

IGN.com (our homepage)

IGN’s Facebook

IGN’s Twitter

IGN’s Twitch

IGN’s YouTube

If you can’t stay up late to watch it live, that’s okay. We’ll save the show in its entirety on our YouTube page, same as we did for last year’s Naraka Fest. So it’ll be waiting for you the next morning.

What to Expect from the Naraka Fest Direct

Before last year’s show, we already knew about the new map, Perdoria, that was being added. So we knew a deep dive into its details was approaching. This time around, we’ve gotten trailers letting us know big changes are coming. Naraka’s very world is breaking apart and a shift is rewriting every reality. In the midst of all that chaos, we can see a lightning-like figure traversing different timelines. Is that a hint about a new hero being introduced? We’ll have to wait and see.

Could those big, world-shaking changes also mean a new mode is on the horizon? Naraka: Bladepoint has kept its players engaged through its four-year run by consistently introducing new modes, like the recently added PvP mode Blessed Brutality. Could there be another new mode coming? What about collabs? There have been a bunch of collaborations to this point, ranging from other games (like The Witcher 3) to real-life figures (like fighter Buakaw Banchamek). Maybe there’s another one on the way. You can also bet on there being in-game events and rewards to celebrate the game’s fourth anniversary, but you’ll have to tune in on July 1 to see what they are.

Takaya Imamura — a video game designer and manga artist perhaps best known for his work on F-Zero, Star Fox, and The Legend of Zelda — has said that despite his lofty credits, there were “so many amazing people” in Nintendo, he felt “inferior” enough that it was a relief to eventually leave the company.

“There were so many incredible people at Nintendo,” Imamura wrote on X, as spotted and translated by Automaton, “and I remember constantly wondering how I could demonstrate my own worth in such an environment,” adding there was always “a sense of inferiority lingering somewhere.”

“When I left the company, it’s true that I felt a sense of freedom, as if I had been released from the inferiority complex I’d carried for years,” Imamura added. “But at the same time, there was also a loneliness in thinking, ‘I won’t be able to work with these people anymore…’ That said, with only a few years left until retirement anyway, and since game development often takes many years, I felt a stronger desire to move forward at my own pace, doing more freely creative things.”

While reading that may come as a surprise, it seems that sentiment is shared by many former Nintendo employees. One former Nintendo designer, Shinji Watanabe, who now heads up Epsilon Software, followed up to liken his former colleagues to “celestial beings,” whilst Ken Watanabe, who worked at Nintendo for 10 years before branching out an an indie creator, concurred, said: “There really is nothing but amazing people [at Nintendo]. Trying to find a way to stand out among them was both draining and fulfilling.”

On the subject of Nintendo… did you know Super Mario Strikers — or Mario Smash Football, as it’s known in Europe — is joining Nintendo Switch 2‘s Nintendo Switch Online GameCube library next week? It’s the first game to have been added to the library since Switch 2 launched earlier this month. And don’t forget, an extremely cool replica GameCube controller is also available for maximum nostalgia…

Nintendo Switch 2 is off to a strong start, with 3.5 million consoles sold, but an analysis on the console’s launch week sales paints a mixed picture of how well games not made by Nintendo are now selling.

Vikki Blake is a reporter for IGN, as well as a critic, columnist, and consultant with 15+ years experience working with some of the world’s biggest gaming sites and publications. She’s also a Guardian, Spartan, Silent Hillian, Legend, and perpetually High Chaos. Find her at BlueSky.

Assassin’s Creed Shadows is the most exciting the series has felt in years, and it’s now down to just $49.99 on Amazon for PS5 and Xbox.

It’s the first big discount the game has had since its release earlier this year, and comes courtesy of Amazon’s early Prime Day sales.

Dropping from $70, that’s a sizable $20 off the list price, and an increasingly more appealing price point for anyone previously unsure of Ubisoft’s latest open-world RPG.

Surprise! A new My Hero Academia game is on the way.

We learned the news during Bandai Namco’s brief teaser for its upcoming Summer Showcase, and while details were light — at least for now — we can expect more when the showcase goes live on July 2 at 12pm PT / 3pm ET / 9pm CEST / 4am JST.

My Hero Academia debuted in April 2016 and became an instant hit, telling the story of Izuku Midoriya as he navigates a school for superheroes after only just inheriting the world’s most powerful abilities. Alongside the eight seasons of anime, four films and myriad games have been released, too. The eighth and final series is set to air this coming October.

In the same 30-second teaser, Bandai Namco also revealed we’re set to get a new trailer for Towa and the Guardians of the Sacred Tree and a gameplay deep dive of Digimon Story: Time Stranger.

That’s not all. Also slated to appear are Code Vein 2, The Blood of Dawnwalker, Death Note Killer Within, Everybody’s Golf Hot Shots, Little Nightmares 3, Patapon 1+2 Replay, Shadow Labyrinth, Super Robot Wars Y, and Tekken 8.

We had a good look at The Blood of Dawnwalker quite recently, of course. Rebel Wolves — the studio led by former The Witcher 3 game director and co-director for Cyberpunk 2077, Konrad Tomaszkiewicz — confirmed its upcoming dark fantasy action-RPG will release in 2026 when it shared new gameplay footage earlier this month.

Bandai Namco went big on little things last week, too, confirming Little Nightmares 3 will release on October 10. And if that seems very far away, anyone who pre-orders a digital version of Little Nightmares 3 between now and launch day will get to revisit the game that started it all with Little Nightmares Enhanced Edition as an early access title.

Vikki Blake is a reporter for IGN, as well as a critic, columnist, and consultant with 15+ years experience working with some of the world’s biggest gaming sites and publications. She’s also a Guardian, Spartan, Silent Hillian, Legend, and perpetually High Chaos. Find her at BlueSky.