Video Games | Page 1017 of 1097

Sony’s Old Mascot Lives With Xbox Now

After Microsoft’s shopping spree of studio acquisitions over the last few years, there’s a long list of video game licenses that are now technically first-party Xbox properties – but possibly the weirdest is that PlayStation’s biggest competitor is now the home of its original mascot, Crash Bandicoot.

If you grew up in the ’90s, Crash and PlayStation were almost synonymous. Not only were the first few crash games amazing tech demos of what Sony’s first console could do, Crash himself was an extremely vocal hype-man; the mascot platformer became a literal mascot for the PS1 and millions of people likely heard about Sony’s new console from a guy in a fur suit yelling through a megaphone about it in TV commercials.

The first three Crash games were published by Sony but the rights to the bandicoot himself belonged to Universal Studios’ video game publishing wing, Universal Interactive, which also happened to hold the leash of Sony’s second-most popular platformer, Spryo the Dragon. In 2001, Sony acquired Naughty Dog – the studio that created Crash – and Universal Interactive merged with another company to become Vivendi Universal Interactive Publishing.

After another merger in 2008 Vivendi became part of Activision Blizzard, but after a bunch of mediocre games and the decline in popularity of 3D platformers, the custody rights for Crash weren’t at the forefront of most peoples’ minds.

Sony’s earliest, most recognizable characters have officially packed their bags and moved in with their ex’s worst enemy.”

Then, at the 2015 Playstation Experience, head honcho Sean Layden appeared on stage in a Crash t-shirt, and a generation of PlayStation fans went N-SANE. Was the prodigal bandicoot returning home? 2016 turned out to be the year of the bandicoot and Crash’s 20th anniversary victory lap saw him popping up all over. He appeared in a Naughty Dog game for the first time this century, (okay it was an Uncharted game, but still…) then he was the guest of honor in Skylanders: Imaginators. Y’know, the Spyro spinoff that spun out of control.

Then finally, Activision Blizzard opened the nostalgia floodgates: full modern remakes of the original trilogy and Crash Team Racing paved the way for the long-overdue sequel It’s About Time. It seemed like Crash Bandicoot and PlayStation had rekindled that special connection they had in the ’90s… I mean, it was an open relationship so Crash could be on other platforms but still, the spark was back.

At least that’s how it felt until Microsoft ran off with Activision Blizzard, bandicoots and dragons and all. Sony might own Naughty Dog and Insomniac, the studios that created some of PlayStation’s earliest and most recognizable characters, but those characters themselves have officially packed their bags and moved in with their ex’s worst enemy.

Who knows? Maybe the next time we see Crash he’ll be in the parking lot of PlayStation headquarters, yelling through a megaphone about the wonders of Xbox Game Pass in front of a pickup truck full of series Xs. After all, stranger things have happened. There was a time when the idea of playing a Sega game on a Nintendo consoles was practically blasphemous and now that’s not only commonplace, we’ve got six whole games about Mario and Sonic at the Olympics.

Become god of a toy town in this cute upcoming sandbox game

Wood & Weather, an upcoming sandbox god game about manipulating weather as you oversee a small wooden toy town occupied by Notplaymobil figures. Someone wants coffee? Fetch them a coffee. Oh it’s too hot for coffee? Turn on the rain. Oh, and after all you do, they throw the empty cup on the floor? Great, thanks, lovely, pick it up and bin it for them. Check out the cute trailer below!

Nintendo’s Share Price Takes A Hit Following Latest Financial Report

Dropped by 7%.

Nintendo’s share price has dropped on the Tokyo Stock Exchange following yesterday’s Q3 FY2023 Financial Report (via VGC). The company’s price dropped by around 7% since yesterday’s report, and at the time of writing, it currently sits at ¥5,226, which is down from ¥5,624.

This drop doesn’t come as a huge surprise due to the company’s slightly disappointing results, where Nintendo revealed that it’s cutting sales forecasts after a decline in year-on-year sales in hardware and software. Other than reducing its year-end forecast for Switch sales again, from 19 million to 18 million, Nintendo is still staying quiet about a successor, despite the console about to enter its seventh year on the market.

Read the full article on nintendolife.com

This witch sim has the chicken-legged Baba Yaga house, so I want it

Reka. It’s a 19th-century witch sim being made by Emberstorm Entertainment, where you play as a traveling witch whose chosen mode of transportation is the legendary chicken-legged Baba Yaga house, which is the coolest thing ever.

Details on Reka are still super light, and the Steam page mentions a release year of 2024, but I’ve been following Emberstorm’s Twitter intently, looking at all the cool gifs for Reka and the house looks incredible! For one, it’s huge. It towers above the forest trees and looks like it could easily stomp unwanted visitors to death. When the young witch approaches the towering beast, it bends is legs to sit down, almost burring itself in the earth for her access to the house on top.

Vengeful Guardian: Moonrider Scores A Physical Switch Release, Pre-Orders Live

Three versions to choose from!

One eShop gem that’s already been released this year is Vengeful Guardian: Moon Rider – a homage to classic 16-bit action platformers like Shinobi III and Hagane: The Final Conflict. If you’ve been holding out for a physical copy of this one, the good news is pre-orders are now live.

There’s the option of a standard edition (34,90 €), collector’s edition (69,90 €), and a deluxe edition (149,90 €) – note: European pricing:

Read the full article on nintendolife.com

Nintendo Is Raising Its Employee Pay By 10% In Japan

Furukawa: “It’s important for our long-term growth”.

Despite a downturn in sales and profits for Nintendo in its third quarter, it’s reportedly raising the base salaries of its employees by 10% in its homeland.

A report by Reuters reveals the Japanese video game giant is taking action to secure the “long-term growth” of its workforce. It follows calls from the country’s Prime Minister Fumio Kishida – asking local companies to increase pay for workers to combat inflation.

Read the full article on nintendolife.com

Amazon Is Running a Buy 2, Get 1 50% Off Sale

Amazon is running another of its excellent buy one, get one 50% off deals. Now I will admit, I was thrown a bit by the “Buy 2, Get 1 50% Off” phrasing, but according to the sale page, that just means if you buy two items, one of them will be half-priced. Specifically, the lower-priced of the two items you buy. But holy crap is there a lot to choose from, including new release games like Dead Space and board games galore.

Amazon Buy One Get One Half Off Sale

This is but a tiny sliver of what’s available on the sale. Note: the items change quite frequently, so if I were you and I saw something I liked, I’d scoop it up.

Also, if you’ve never had an Audible subscription before, you can get 3 months of Audible Plus Premium for free right now. That’s a bonus. Amazon seems to really be going hard with the sales today.

Seth Macy is Executive Editor, IGN Commerce, and just wants to be your friend. You can find him hosting the Nintendo Voice Chat podcast.

Nintendo Direct February 2023: How to Watch and What to Expect

Nintendo fans, rejoice! A brand-new Nintendo Direct is on its way and it will be here tomorrow, February 8, with roughly 40 minutes of updates focused mostly on Switch games planned for release in the first half of 2023.

IGN is carrying the stream and, as usual, this watch guide will provide you with everything you need to know to watch the show, including when it starts, a list of places you can watch it with us, and what you can expect to see from the Nintendo Direct.

Nintendo Direct February 2023 Start Time

February 2023’s Nintendo Direct will take place on Wednesday, February 8, and will start at 2pm PT/5pm ET/10pm GMT. If you live in Australia, that translates to 9am AEDT on Thursday, February 9.

Where to Watch the Nintendo Direct February 2023

If you’re interested in watching the latest Nintendo Direct, we’ll be hosting the stream here and across our many channels on platforms like YouTube, Twitch, Twitter, Facebook, and more. Here’s the full list of places you can watch the show with us:

What to Expect at the Nintendo Direct February 2023

As with most of its full Nintendo Directs, Nintendo has not revealed which games we can expect to be featured in the show besides saying the Direct is “mostly focused on #NintendoSwitch games launching in the first half of 2023.”

What it did reveal, however, is that the Nintendo Direct will last roughly 40 minutes. So, what can we expect in those 40 minutes? Well, a good bet would be The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. This incredibly anticipated sequel to 2017’s The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild is set to be released on May 12, 2023, and we still don’t know all that much about it.

This would be the perfect time to show us more gameplay, reveal a bit more about the story, or even share with the world any special collector’s editions or themed Switch consoles that may be planned for this momentous launch.

We also know that Pikmin 4 is scheduled for 2023, so we may get an update on this new entry in the franchise that first began on GameCube in 2001. Another big question mark is Advance Wars 1+2: Reboot Camp, which was originally supposed to be released on April 8, 2022.

There’s also the Metroid-shaped elephant in the room we have to discuss, as Metroid Prime 4 is still somewhere out on the horizon and the biggest news we’ve heard in some time is that its development was restarted back in 2019. Furthermore, there have been rumors that a Metroid Prime Trilogy for Switch has been in the works, but that also has yet to show its face.

It may be time to learn more about Nintendo Switch Online, as well, as a report back in 2021 said Game Boy and Game Boy Color games were on their way to the service.

Another good bet may be DLC for Pokemon Scarlet and Violet, which was just confirmed to have sold more than 18 million units, and an appearance of some sort from The Super Mario Bros. Movie.

Speaking of Mario, it’s been quite some time since we’ve been treated to a brand-new, mainline Mario adventure, and this could be the best time to tease our favorite plumber’s next adventure. Could it be Super Mario Odyssey 2 with a The Super Mario Bros. Movie Kingdom? Maybe a new 2D adventure we’ll be playing this holiday? The options are limitless.

We’re also still very much waiting for these supposed ports of The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker and Twilight Princess, but it may not be the right time with Tears of the Kingdom right around the corner. One can hope though!

Oh! We have to mention Hollow Knight: Silksong and Mother 3, because those two titles are always some of the most requested to show up in Nintendo Directs!

Have a tip for us? Want to discuss a possible story? Please send an email to newstips@ign.com.

Adam Bankhurst is a news writer for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter @AdamBankhurst and on Twitch.

Transport Tycoon fan remake OpenTTD gets largest update in years

OpenTTD 13.0 been released, which is “one of the largest releases we’ve done in several years” according to the developers. If you don’t know OpenTTD, it’s an open source and free fan remake of Transport Tycoon which greatly expands, polishes and modernises the beloved business sim. This latest update improves the interface further, tweaks the world generation, and more.

Azul Board Game Review

Azul is named after azuleijos, the brightly coloured geometric tiles sported by beautiful buildings across North Africa and Portugal; the Portuguese learned to make them from the Moors. The board game has become a celebrated design in its own right, popular enough to launch several sequels which use the same core mechanics and the same beautiful printed plastic tiles. We’re revisiting the original to try and find out what makes this game about decorating palace walls quite so compelling.

What’s in the Box

Like many other abstracts, Azul is a little short on the components front, but what it lacks in quantity, it more than makes up for in quality. Underneath the rules sheet, you’ll find four colorful, clear, sturdy playboards, one for each player. There are also a number of cardboard discs and some classic wooden cubes.

The most impressive eye candy is the piles of plastic tiles and the big cloth drawstring bag you keep them in. They’re an absolute delight: smooth and chunky, bright and colorful and some are embossed with intricate geometric designs. The game has them on display for full effect and they’re really satisfying to handle and rummage around in when you pull them from the bag.

Rules and how it Plays

Again, like many other abstracts Azul is a fairly simple game to get to grips with, although its slight oddity may prove a bit of a stumbling block. Each player gets a play board and a number of card circles, called factories, each of which starts with four tiles drawn at random from the bag. On your turn, you choose one of the factories, take all tiles of one matching color from it, and then place the rest in the centre of the table. After the first turn, this central offering is treated like another factory from which players can select tiles.

The tiles you’ve chosen go in one of the five rows of your playboard. You can put them in any row, which holds from one to five tiles, so long as a row doesn’t hold more than one color at once. If you do end up with tiles you can’t find on your play board then they “fall” to the bottom and smash, costing you penalty points.

This continues until all the tiles have been taken. Then from any rows that are full, you’re allowed to take a tile and transfer it to the same row on your wall, a grid of color-coded squares, on the matching colored space. That row can no longer hold tiles of that color. You’ll then score points depending on how many tiles are adjacent to the one that you’ve placed. After one player has completed a whole row of tiles, it’s time for final scoring where you get fat bonuses for having completed rows, columns or diagonals of the same color.

From this description, you might imagine Azul to be a somewhat humdrum affair, the kind of mediocre abstract that amuses for a few sessions before being forgotten. But it has a great deal more to it than the pretty face of its toothsome tiles. At first, it’s tempting to look at Azul purely from the perspective of filing lines efficiently: if there’s a trio of tiles, it makes sense to fit them into your three-long space. But because scoring each placement is based on adjacency, that’s a quick way to lose.

Instead, you’ll start to try and pick colours that fill rows and columns. And then you’re in the teeth of a dilemma because, of course, the need to fill lines efficiently is still a thing. If you don’t take that trio of tiles, then someone else might. So you begin to glance around at the boards of other players, frantically trying to second guess who’s going to pip you to the post on a pick you want, and how much following players might benefit if you leave particularly sweet groups for them and when you reach this point the game becomes really interesting.

Consider: unless you’re picking from the center, every pick you make radically changes the tiles on offer to other players because your discards end up in the middle. That might accidentally create a very valuable group for someone else. It might also spoil another player’s choices because they wanted a specific amount to fit onto their board and now there are too many, so if they take it they’ll smash the excess and take penalty points. Best of all, you might actually be laying a trap for following players because the restrictions caused by what they’ve already placed could force them into take a whole pile of tiles they can’t fit, merely to merrily smash on their floor alongside the tinkling amusement of their opponents.

All this to think about on every turn and we haven’t even reached trying to complete rows, columns and colors for bonus points. There really is a whole lot to Azul and what’s particularly joyous about it is how your choices impact those of your fellow players, often very strongly, without a whiff of zero-sum interaction where what makes one player stronger makes another weaker. The game is well-balanced, deep and, unless you can calculate all the probabilities a dozen moves ahead, often quite exciting as you wait to see what the other players leave you.

The game is well-balanced and deep.

Against this, there is a certain degree of repetition to consider. From a thematic standpoint, this is essentially a game about tiling walls, hardly the most thrilling and dramatic subject matter for a clash of minds. There aren’t a lot of moving parts to Azul which, even though it makes the relative depth of strategy all the more impressive, doesn’t give you the variety many players want to sustain interest over a prolonged period of plays. Those who can maintain focus on a single game, however, will find a lot to reward them.

Where to Buy

Azul has earned a spot on our list of the best family board games. For more roundups, check out the best roll and write games, and the best deck-building games.