Category: Video Games

N64 classic GoldenEye 007 will finally arrive on Nintendo Switch Online’s Expansion Pass and Xbox Game Pass on January 27.

Announced via Nintendo’s YouTube channel and the Xbox Wire, the long-anticipated release date finally confirms when players can jump back into the role of James Bond both in single-player and its beloved multiplayer.

A series of leaks and rumours were finally confirmed by the two companies in September last year, though GoldenEye 007 previously only had a “coming soon” release window.

Those looking to play the game on Switch will need both Nintendo Switch Online and its Expansion Pass (that adds the N64 digital library), while Xbox users will be able to download it for no additional cost via Xbox Game Pass.

The two versions of the game aren’t identical, however, as only the Switch version will include online multiplayer – the first time this feature has been officially available for the 26 year old game. The Xbox version will be a remastered edition that includes new control options, achievements, 16:9 resolution, and up to 4K Ultra HD resolution.

GoldenEye 007 had been all but confirmed on Xbox for a long time as fan website True Achievements and even Xbox’s own website listed the game’s achievements, but fans will finally be able to get their hands on it later this week.

Ryan Dinsdale is an IGN freelancer and acting UK news editor. He’ll talk about The Witcher all day.

We do not live in a world rich with great Harry Potter games. Nobody harbors warm feelings for the horde of chintzy, cynical movie tie-ins that plagued the PS2 and Xbox during the mid-2000s. So, when Portkey Games unveiled the big-budget Hogwarts Legacy in 2020, it was clear that the studio was aiming spectacularly high with its interpretation of Harry Potter. After a two-hour hands-on, I can say with confidence that the Wizarding World has rarely looked better. The lilting charm, cockeyed whimsy, and high-fantasy hijinks of Hogwarts Legacy is rendered with dogmatic servitude to the books, while the combat and exploration — the game part of this video game — is robust enough to rope in more casual fans of the fiction. Unfortunately, it’s all happening at the exact moment the world is reconsidering their lifelong ties to one of the greatest stories ever told.

If you haven’t been keeping up with the information drip, Hogwarts Legacy takes place in the late 19th century — and therefore it operates independently from some of the more familiar touchstones of Potter lore. (No Voldemort, no Dumbledore, no multitude of Weasley surnames.) You play as a fifth-year transfer student that will be built with a potent character creator; denoting complexion, hair color, eyebrow shading, and yes, body types, vocal tenor, and the choice to be referred to as either a “witch” or a “wizard.” Afterwards, you’ll quickly be implanted directly into the day-to-day scholastic rhythms of Hogwarts. My time with the game was brokered into two major sections: a treacherous story chapter where I was asked to both infiltrate and destabilize a nefarious dragon cockfighting ring, and a dulcet afternoon on the castle grounds, where I solved sidequests, played minigames, and soaked in the Persona-like splendor of simply hanging out at school.

The combat was the highlight for me, which I was not expecting. In previous Potter games, the quicksilver wizard clashes of the books are reduced to dull, rote third-person shooting galleries — Harry, Ron, and Hermione taking on an endless series of identical death eaters, who all seem to brandish magical facsimiles of shotguns and sniper rifles. Hogwarts Legacy changes the formula considerably. Despite the projectiles ricocheting back and forth across the arenas, the game functions more like a Ninja Gaiden-esque combo masher. Your character automatically locks onto wherever they’re facing, and the hocus-pocus that comes cascading out of your wand can be chained together like a screen-filling, health bar-obliterating Marvel Vs. Capcom tsunami. Game director Alan Tew compares the system to a sort-of “long-range dueling.”

Your arsenal is mapped to the face buttons, and after messing around with the controls for a few minutes, I was able to come up with some wild, improvis-ed concoctions. I’d leviosa my enemy into the air, tag them with some basic filler casts, pull them in close with an accio, before setting them aflame with the incendio. The physics engine absolutely revels in your chaos — bodies fly across the map like they’ve become weightless and boneless at the mercy of your command. Harry Potter video games have tried, and failed, to replicate the fiction’s unique take on spellcasting for decades. Portkey seems to have established a structure that will likely be aped for years to come.

My stint wandering around Hogwarts itself wasn’t quite as exciting as my trip to the dragon’s den. My character enjoyed a peaceful free-roam back at home on the back of their flying broom, (the Roach of Hogwarts Legacy,) where they poked around nooks and crannies of the castle; soaking up collectibles, deciphering basic puzzles, and completing the menial tasks assigned to me by my classmates. (One of them accidentally put a charm on her books that caused them to flutter around in the air. I Accio’d them back into her possession.) Outside, in a courtyard, I joined a round of what can only be described as “Wizard’s Curling.” My adversary and I used our wands to usher a set of leather balls down a wooden platform. The closer they got to the edge, without falling off, the more points we’d score. These distractions were pretty lightweight — Portkey didn’t allow us to delve into, say, potions class, or a meaty sidequest digression — which left me hoping that Hogwarts Legacy will include some finer character moments outside of the core campaign. Let us broker a genuine camaraderie with the other denizens of the school. A Harry Potter game can only hit its marks if, by the end of the runtime, we’re willing to lay down our lives for a kindly groundskeeper or an eccentric headmaster.

It should also be said that Hogwarts Legacy appears to be swimming in the darker edges of the canon. It was shocking to see that one of the spells on my combat hotbar was Crucio — better known to layman as the torture spell — which inflicts searing, white-hot pain in its target. (In the Harry Potter universe, Crucio is one of the three “unforgivable curses.” A huge no-no!) Perhaps these are the themes Hogwarts Legacy intends to deal with; how did Crucio become unforgivable, anyways? Some of the finishing moves equipped to my character were similarly macabre. After charging up a meter and tapping the two shoulder buttons, my avatar could reduce a rival wizard into a pile of sooty Looney Tunes dust. The Harry Potter books are centered around the purity of teenaged friendship, so it is weird to watch a fifth-year take a life. Again, maybe Hogwarts Legacy intends to explore some of those questions. On first brush though, it’s pretty jarring.

Of course, anyone who chooses to play Hogwarts Legacy must contend with all sorts of contradictions — most of which are far more important than the usual dissonance we tend to find in video games. J.K. Rowling has established herself as one of the most prominent anti-trans mouthpieces on the planet. The character creator in Hogwarts Legacy offers a huge amount of gender diversity, but that cannot change the fact that the author of these books remains the proprietor of the Harry Potter intellectual property. If purchasing this video game feels like a tacit endorsement of Rowling’s retrograde worldview, nobody can say you’re wrong. I spoke with Alan Tew about these questions during my visit, and you can read the results of our conversation here — but you are not likely to find a clean answer to those concerns. It looks like we’re finally getting a good Harry Potter game. Shouldn’t it feel better than this?

Dragon Ball Z Kakarot has had a steady trickle of DLC since it launched three years ago, the most recent of which tells the story of Goku’s dad, Bardock, which goes to show you there are plenty more stories to tell in that universe.

Kakarot isn’t perfect, but it’s one of the best representations of Akira Toriyama’s awesome colorful world in interactive form. All the pieces are there for a massive sequel that builds on established systems and mechanics and raises the stakes even higher, probably recounting the events of Dragon Ball Super and its various new hair colors. However, I’m strongly of the opinion that the most potential for a follow-up to Kakarot lies in Goku’s earlier years, a game that retells the original Dragon Ball.

Something that makes Dragon Ball Z so appealing is also something that also often works against it: escalation. It’s all about taking things to the next level. DBZ tackles the afterlife, alien planets, time travel, and androids. Planets get destroyed, characters get killed off, resurrected, killed again and they regularly undergo drastic transformations – in some cases multiple characters get fused together to create new characters. It’s a lot. After a certain point, everyone gets so ridiculously overpowered that it stops being impressive. DBZ is the furthest thing from what you would call “grounded.” In fact, at various points, the ground literally gets blown up, and characters are just beating each other up while floating in mid-air – and maybe that doesn’t naturally lend itself to great gameplay?

Even starting from the beginning, Dragon Ball Z Kakorot feels like you’re jumping into someone else’s save file mid-game and playing as an overpowered character who has a ton of abilities unlocked – and in a sense, it is. You still level up and unlock moves, but at the start of Z, Goku’s one of the strongest warriors on the planet. He can fly and shoot energy blasts without thinking about it, and Kakarot’s gameplay reflects that. It took Goku three episodes to form that spirit bomb he chucked at Frieza, and it’s a two-button combo?

Dragon Ball, meanwhile, starts from square one with good ol’ fashioned martial arts. Early on, Goku relies primarily on his fists, feet, tail and powerpole during combat. He’ll occasionally resort to a Kamehameha wave as a last resort, but something that’s primarily ground-based melee combat could make for a solid beat-’em-up. Make those ranged attacks a special occasion. Or, maybe that’s where side characters come in? Have Bulma whip out an Uzi or make Oolong turn into a missile.

One of the gripes about Kakarot was that the open-ish world felt empty, and while that’s true, it might not have been quite as noticeable if players explored it at a different pace. With the push of a button, Goku can blast off and zoom halfway across the map. It’s fun as hell but also makes so much of the world blur past. In Dragon Ball, Goku spends a lot of the time on foot, or riding in a variety of cool-looking vehicles – many of which are already in Kakarot. Sure, he gets the Flying Nimbus pretty early, but it’s also often out of the picture. I dunno, make Nimbus like Torrent in Elden Ring, your magical ride that sometimes totally bails on you.

Another complaint about Kakarot was that in between epic showdowns against iconic villains, a lot of time was spent fighting the same handful of enemies. Random encounters with Saibamen, pirate robots, Frieza’s henchmen happen constantly. None of these seem like they should actually pose a threat to earth’s mightiest heroes, but you’ve gotta have something to fight in between big story beats. Oh, and since so much of the travel is aerial, all the enemies need to be able to fly. In Dragon Ball, Goku constantly crosses paths with goons, thugs, henchmen, and various other run-of-the-mill bad guys. Honestly, Goku taking on the Red Ribbon army is practically a video game already: he fights his way floor by floor up Muscle Tower, beating up tons of regular grunts, and encountering a new unique boss every few levels.

Something I loved about Kakarot is how much its structure felt like the Yakuza games – the mix of epic story missions, silly side quests, and fun activities. Something the Yakuza series has proven several times over is that as long as there’s new stuff to do in a game, nobody gets too mad that the map is getting reused, and I’d love to see that approach taken here.

Given the massive global success of Dragon Ball Z and Dragon Ball Super, the power creep clearly isn’t a deal breaker for a lot of fans, and for a lot of folks bigger is always better, period. Kakarot was the third best-selling Dragon Ball Z game to date, so I wouldn’t be shocked if Bandai Namco took the “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” route – but we’ve gotten SO many DBZ games, it’d be nice to see the OG get some love, perhaps to commemorate some significant milestone… like say, the 40th anniversary next year? It’s not the craziest thing anyone’s wished for.