This popular Black Friday deal is back. For a limited time, Dell is offering the Xbox Series S 512GB Gaming Console for the same price we saw during the 2023 holiday season. Right now you can get it for only $229.99 shipped, a 24% price drop from its original $300 MSRP. Check out the best Xbox deals for more discounts on games, controllers, and accessories.
Best Xbox Series S Deal: $229.99
At the current price point, the Xbox Series S costs 54% less than an Xbox Series X. The Xbox Series S does not have quite the processing power as the Series X; in order to maintain a consistent 60-120fps in most games, the default resolution has been bumped down from 4K to 1440p or 1080p, unlike the Xbox Series X, which can play games at a full 4K. The Xbox Series S comes with 512GB of storage, half of the Xbox Series X. The Xbox Series S also does not have a physical disc drive. However, the Xbox Series S can play all of the same games as the Xbox Series X. It’s also backwards compatible with Xbox One games, and there’s no doubt that the Xbox Series S is more than capable of handling any previous gen games. If you don’t have a 4K TV, or you’re satisfied with the fact that you’ll be able to play any new Xbox game, or you feel that the extra $280 you saved could be better spent elsewhere, then the Xbox Series S might be a smarter purchase.
Amazon has discounted the Samsung EVO Select 512GB Micro SDXC Card down to $24.99, a 30% price drop from its original $35 MSRP. This is an excellent price for a 512GB Micro SDXC card from a well-known and respected brand. I’s fully compatible with the Nintendo Switch, Steam Deck, and ASUS ROG Ally portable handhelds. It also comes with a SD adapter for devices that only take full-sized SD cards. Check out all of the best Nintendo Switch deals for sales on other games and accessories.
512GB Samsung Micro SDXC Card for $24.99
If you’ve started compiling a collection of digital games, you probably already know just how limited the Switch’s base storage capacity. The Switch and Switch OLED consoles have 32GB and 64GB of internal storage, respectively, with some of it reserved for the OS. The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom uses up 16GB and Breath of the Wild about 13.5GB. If bought digitally, those two games alone would take up all of your internal storage on the OG Switch console. There’s only one expansion slot in the Switch console so you want to make sure you get the biggest card you can afford.
The Samsung EVO Select Micro SDXC card is compatible with virtually any device that accepts the Micro SDXC card standard. That includes the Nintendo Switch, Steam Deck, ASUS ROG Ally, any recently released smartphone that supports expandable memory, GoPros, cameras and much more. Despite its low price, the Samsung EVO Select is faster than your average Micro SDXC card. It has a U3 A2 rating and boasts transfer speeds of up to 130MB/s.
Larian Studios has revealed a few features coming in Baldur’s Gate 3 Patch 6 alongside its colossal file size.
The developer made a series of posts on X/Twitter to tease the update, which is due sometime this week, and revealed its 21GB download. Those on PC and Steam Deck will need around 150GB of free space to download Patch 6, though Larian said those short on space can uninstall the full game and redownload the patched version. Mac players will receive the Patch at a later date, which is yet to be announced.
Though Patch 6 will no doubt feature a lot more given its size, Larian teased a handful of changes the update will make to the beloved Dungeons & Dragons role-playing game. The first is a time-saving change, as players will be able to dismiss a recruited companion while recruiting another in camp, instead of having to do these both separately.
We’re also here to help you practice some self-love this month, by making sure you’re the star of the show ⭐️
With Patch 6, automatically triggered dialogue will now try to prioritise your avatar as the main speaker, so your party members should stop stealing the limelight! pic.twitter.com/dy1Ai5TJ1i
Two skills, Shield Bash and Rebuke the Mighty, have both been fixed too, so Patch 6 will have players’ passive abilities working properly again. Larian has also addressed an issue where party members would begin talking to non-player characters instead of the player during automatically triggered dialogue.
The developer announced other changes when it revealed Patch 6 earlier in February, including “improved smooches”, new camp animations, more Legendary Actions, and more. Patch 6 will also come packed with myriad bug fixes.
Baldur’s Gate 3 launched in 2023 and became a smash hit, earning a 10/10 in IGN’s review. “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,” we said.
Ryan Dinsdale is an IGN freelance reporter. He’ll talk about The Witcher all day.
The Mario Party-style Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba – Sweep the Board! game coming to Nintendo Switch has received an overview trailer ahead of its April 26 release date.
The trailer, below, shows how the dramatic and action-packed Demon Slayer anime has been transferred into party game ridiculousness, showing the likes of Tanjiro and Nezuko rolling dice and taking part in myriad minigames.
Up to four players can choose from 12 characters and move around boards inspired by the likes of Tsuzumi Mansion, Mount Natagumo, and the Mugen Train. Players move around by rolling dice just like in traditional board games, with the separate squares triggering minigames, offering the ability to buy helpful items, giving upgrades, and more.
The minigames also pull scenes from the anime, like one revolving around smacking Tanjiro with a stick when he stops breathing properly, another with Inosuke smashing bits out of his sword, and more.
The Demon Slayer anime continues to prove popular and will likely continue to do so due to its fourth season imminently premiering in April 2024. Though its first two seasons were incredibly well-received, IGN wasn’t a fan of the latest.
In our 5/10 review, we said: “Demon Slayer Season 3 continues to show ufotable’s skill at crafting visually stunning action, but the season is bogged down by repetitive and overly long fight scenes and a dull story.”
Ryan Dinsdale is an IGN freelance reporter. He’ll talk about The Witcher all day.
Granblue Fantasy: Relink is a hit, selling over one million copies since going on sale early February 2024.
Cygames’ action RPG hit the million milestone worldwide across PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4 and PC via Steam just 11 days after it came out on February 1. It’s been a particularly big hit on Steam, where it remains one of the most-played games with a concurrent player peak of 114,054.
Granblue Fantasy: Relink joins a growing list of successful Japanese role-playing games that launched early 2024 and hit one million sales. RGG Studio’s Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth and Atlus’ Persona 3: Reload have each sold one million copies, breaking records for each franchise.
IGN’s Granblue Fantasy: Relink review returned an 8/10. We said: “Granblue Fantasy: Relink has a succinct story, fantastic battle system, and fun multiplayer options that help it stand out.”
Announcing the sales, Cygames said Granblue Fantasy: Relink players can look forward to a new quest, new playable characters, and other surprises featured in planned updates starting from March.
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.
Diablo 4’s troubled history with microtransactions has grown more grim after Blizzard began selling class-locked portal reskins.
“Portal through Sanctuary in style,” begins the description for the $29.99 Dark Pathways pack, as noted by PC Gamer. The pack includes the Hell and Back bundle containing the Tempest Gate Sorcerer Town Portal, Transit Artery Rogue Town Portal, Netherworld Threshold Necromancer Town Portal, Wildroot Way Druid Town Portal, Warpath Barbarian Town Portal, and 1000 Platinum (which is itself worth $9.99). There is currently no way to buy the portals individually.
As you’d expect, players have reacted negatively to the existence of the cosmetic pack, and not just because the price of the thing is equivalent to some other hugely popular PC games, such as Palworld, but that the price of the bundle is needlessly raised by the inclusion of premium currency, a standard tactic to make virtual bundles appear more valuable in customers’ eyes. but
It’s the fact the portals can only be used by the applicable character class that’s really sent Diablo 4’s community into a furore. Each portal is unique with a theme that matches the class, so it’s not possible to swap freely between the portals while using the same class. Don’t have a Druid on the go? Then you can’t use the Wildroot Way Druid Town Portal.
It’s worth noting that Diablo 4 is a full-price action role-playing game, and while these portal skins are purely cosmetic and do not affect gameplay, they join a long list of controversial microtransactions that have hit the game since its record-breaking launch in June.
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.
Dungeons & Dragons has announced the release dates for its new Player’s Handbook, Dungeon Master’s Guide, and Monster Manual, though they won’t all arrive in 2024 despite that expectation set by publisher Wizards of the Coast.
The Dungeon Master’s Guide will arrive a little later on November 12, 2024, but despite Wizards of the Coast itself suggesting the One D&D refresh would kick off fully in 2024, the Monster Manual has slipped into 2025, launching on February 18.
“The new core rulebooks are expected to be released in 2024,” reads a frequently asked questions post still available on the Dungeons & Dragons website.
The publisher didn’t share much about the contents of these new core rulebooks, but as previously announced they will revamp core elements of the current fifth edition without making it redundant to address player feedback.
While some fans will be frustrated with the delay, especially as One D&D was expected to launch fully as a celebration of the game’s 50th anniversary, which is in 2024, Wizards of the Coast still announced a handful of other events to tide players over.
An adventure campaign called Vecna: Eve of Ruin will be released on May 11, letting players engage in “a high-stakes adventure in which the fate of the entire multiverse hangs in the balance.” The heroes begin in the Forgotten Realms and travel to Planescape, Spelljammer, Eberron, Ravenloft, Dragonlance, and Greyhawk as they race to save existence from obliteration by the notorious lich Vecna who is weaving a ritual to eliminate good, obliterate the gods, and subjugate all worlds.
A book called The Making of Original Dungeons & Dragons: 1970 – 1977 is being released on June 18 too. Wizards of the Coast described it as “the ultimate book showcasing D&D’s inception, including Gary Gygax’s never-before-seen first draft of D&D written in 1973.”
The Quests from the Infinite Staircase adventure anthology will be released on July 16, weaving together six classic D&D adventures while updating them for the game’s current edition (which will be compatible with One D&D). Exactly which adventures these will be hasn’t been announced, but it will be targeted at characters between levels one and 13.
While co-op third-person shooter Helldivers 2 has gone down well with players and become Sony’s biggest ever PC game launch, it has continued to struggle with login issues and rewards not tracking, even forcing its developer to roll back a patch due to performance problems.
Helldivers 2 developer Arrowhead Game Studios released patch 01.000.005 for the game on Steam yesterday, January 12. The update was designed to tackle the main issues impacting players’ ability to log in, but it caused performance problems, which in turn caused Arrowhead to roll the patch back.
“We have rolled back the patch due to some users experiencing significant degradation in performance,” Arrowhead said in a note on the Helldivers Discord. “The mission reward fix will not be affected by this.”
In the patch notes for update 01.000.005, Arrowhead promised to compensate players for lost rewards via an increased reward event. Much of Helldivers 2’s progression is gained from mission rewards, which makes this a particularly bad problem for players trying to grow their avatars more powerful.
Meanwhile, today, February 13, Arrowhead rolled out a patch for the PS5 version that addresses server capacity, login capacity progression, and mission rewards. It’s the same as the PC patch, but Arrowhead said it does not anticipate performance problems on PS5. “We are currently investigating that issue with the PC build from yesterday,” the developer said.
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.
Atomic Heart’s Trapped in Limbo DLC is colourful and eye-catching, and I hated every minute of it. I certainly felt trapped; trapped in a mobile game-inspired expansion that’s repetitive, frustrating, and a chore to complete. As someone who enjoyed Atomic Heart itself a great deal last year and found several things to like about the previous DLC, I am genuinely baffled at how actively I do not want to play Trapped in Limbo ever again.
While Atomic Heart’s first dose of DLC, Annihilation Instinct, explores what happens after the shorter of the main game’s two unfulfilling endings, Trapped in Limbo picks up in the aftermath of the longer one. Respecting and expanding upon both endings is an interesting and commendable approach, even if having these add-on DLC chapters flip-flopping from one ending to the other before anything is resolved makes playing through them feel like reading a Choose Your Own Adventure book from front to back.
In this conclusion, P-3 is left in limbo – a dream world for the subconscious that P-3 was previously sent to during the main campaign while the Kollektive network controlled his body. Unfortunately, unlike the visits to limbo during the core campaign – which were creepy, quirky, and used in brief bursts – Trapped in Limbo drastically overstays its welcome and goes all in on just a couple of gameplay mechanics that are repeated ad nauseam until I was thoroughly nauseated. For clarity, it only goes for a few hours – which is entirely fair for a low-priced add-on. The levels are just not enjoyable, so they drag. Everything here really could’ve been edited into a short prologue level to illustrate P-3’s return to the real-world. The majority of what’s here is just padding.
The first – and worst – are the sliding levels, which function similarly to Counter-Strike’s “surfing” (which, if you’re not familiar with it, is a long-running mod scene for Counter-Strike that embraces a physics quirk and is based around sliding down sloped platforms). Trapped in Limbo’s sliding levels are finicky, trial-and-error affairs, and they go on and on and on. I can see no other reason for the “percentage complete” bar at the top of the screen other than to reassure us that there is, indeed, an end to this torment – if we can persevere to it.
There’s just something off about the way it feels, and I was never able to get a good gauge on how to consistently get the right amount of air off the end of each slide segment. It has nothing to do with jumping, because you can’t. It’s all about the angle – and yet getting it right is not always possible thanks to the huge spiky obstacles. It’s like playing Tony Hawk with a broken ollie button, and the half-pipe is mined. I didn’t feel a sense of satisfaction getting to the end of these sliding levels – only relief that they were done and I wouldn’t have to do them again. That’s not a sensation I associate with having a good time.
Accompanying the two sliding levels are a pair of climbing ones, which focus on first-person platforming (although they also include aggravating sliding sections of their own). These levels are a lot more in line with the moments of first-person puzzle-platforming present in the main game, and they’re certainly a little more straightforward. For instance, it’s quite forgiving when it comes to landing on tiny cubes and detecting clambering opportunities. That said, I still had times where I was cursing the sloppiness of the jumping on a timing-based trap, or reloading my last save after falling into an area it didn’t appear I was supposed to have been able to get into. Like the sliding levels, I have no desire to play these again, either.
If you’re wondering why we haven’t discussed combat yet, it’s because there really isn’t much of it beyond a few arenas. Enemies are largely edible reskins of the ones in the main game but, despite the small cache of sugar-coated candy cannons at your disposal, the combat is anything but sweet. I get P-3 is living in a dreamland here, but it just has none of the punch or metal-rending mayhem of the main campaign. It’s plain.
The fifth and final level of Trapped in Limbo is the weirdest of all, and that’s saying something in a universe where the main character’s dead wife is actually two eight-foot-tall ballerina robots. It’s… an endless runner. The level actually does have an end, but it’s long enough to feel like it doesn’t – and not in a good way. I get that this version of Limbo is a weird place where anything’s possible, but an endless runner as Atomic Heart DLC is a little like having a band you like coming out for their encore and humming a nursery rhyme.
Not quite what you’d expect – and you’d probably walk out.
Nintendo is attributing the financial success of Super Mario Bros. Wonder to its multiplayer mode, as Mario’s latest outing becomes the latest Nintendo game to offer another way for one to make memories with their friends and loved ones.
In a Q&A with investors following its recent earnings report, Nintendo president Shuntaro Furukawa explained some of the likely contributing factors to Super Mario Bros. Wonder’s success. Furukawa explained how the multiplayer feature in Wonder was vital in that it “suited the need for a game many people can enjoy with family and friends” as the game was released ahead of the holiday season and was likely a gift for many during that period.
Super Mario Bros. Wonder offers local and online multiplayer. The latter allows four players to play on one Nintendo Switch and run through the game’s levels; in contrast, the latter allows up to 12 players to gather in a private lobby before breaking off into groups of four to run through the levels. According to Furukawa, “around half” of Mario Wonder’s users played in multiplayer.
More interestingly, Furukawa noted that The Super Mario Bros. Movie, released in theatres and is available to stream on Peacock and Netflix, was also an influential factor in Super Mario Bros. Wonder’s sales.
“So even though the theatrical release is over, the number of people who have seen the movie for the first time continues to increase, and we believe this has also helped drive the good sales of Super Mario Bros. Wonder,” Furukawa explained.
Nintendo has previously been vocal about Super Mario Bros. Wonder’s success. In early November, the company revealed that it was the fastest-selling Mario game to date, selling 4,3 million units within the first two weeks of its release with the company anticipating the number would continue to grow.
In our review of Super Mario Bros. Wonder, IGN said: “Super Mario Bros. Wonder looks and plays like the true next step for 2D Mario platformers. Wonder effects change each stage in both surprising and delightful ways, the Flower Kingdom makes for a vibrant and refreshing change of pace, and Elephant Mario steals the show.”
Taylor is a Reporter at IGN. You can follow her on Twitter @TayNixster.
