Category: Video Games

This is definitely one of the more interesting power bank deals we’ve posted on IGN. Right now Amazon is offering a Baseus 10,000mAh Power Bank with up to 22.5W of Power Delivery, a digital display, and not one, but TWO retractable charging cables for only $17.99 after clipping the 30% off coupon on the product page and applying 10% off coupon code: “SK888222“. That’s a great price for any old 10,000mAh power bank, but even better for one that has so many great features.

Baseus 10,000mAh USB Type-C Power Bank for $17.99

A 10,000mAh capacity power bank is the perfect compromise between battery capacity and size for the Nintendo Switch. This Baseus model measures only 4.5″ long, 2.8″ wide, and 0.8″ thick, smaller than many smartphones. The 10,000mAh capacity can charge Nintendo Switch over two times, an iPhone 15 Pro over three times, and a full-sized iPad Pro 12.9″ almost one full time. In addition, the USB Type-C port supports Power Delivery with up to 22.5W of power. That’s enough to fully max out the charging speed on a Nintendo Switch. There is also a display that tells you how much charge is remaining.

Perhaps the most unique feature of this power bank are the two retractable cables integrated into the power bank. One is a 22.5W USB Type-C cable and the other is a 20W Apple Lightning cable. That means that even if you don’t have any spare cables lying around, you’ll still be able to charge your Android smartphone, iPhone, or Nintendo Switch console. In addition to the retractable cables, there are two more ports: a USB Type-C port that serves as both input and output as well as a USB Type-A port.

The Baseus power bank comes with built-in safety protections you’d expect from a decent quality power bank (although it’s not UL or ETL certified to save on costs). Baseus might not be as well known as Anker, but their power banks thus far have been pretty reliable, and they’ve been racking up plenty of favorable reviews and recommendations.

For more options, check out our picks for the best power banks of 2024. If you’re looking for more Nintendo Switch accessories that might be on sales check out the best Nintendo Switch deals today.

Nintendo has teamed up with Uniqlo to release a clothing line based on The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom.

As reported by VGC, the collection of six t-shirts is so far only announced for Japan but will be released on April 26, 2024 and cost ¥1,500 (around $10) each as part of Uniqlo’s UT brand.

“This is an original collection only available at UT which expresses the [Tears of the Kingdom’s] magnificent world view, unique characters, and memorable scenes and lines as t-shirts and incorporates them into the design.”

One black t-shirt has silhouettes of Link and Zelda with the phrase “please lend him your power” between them, and the Tears of the Kingdom key art on the back. Another one, this time tan, features koroks hiding behind the pocket, and one sneaking away on the back too.

Tears of the Kingdom was one of the biggest games of 2023, both critically and commercially, as Nintendo announced the Breath of the Wild sequel sold 10 million copies within three days.

In our 10/10 review, IGN said: “The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom is an unfathomable follow-up, expanding a world that already felt full beyond expectation and raising the bar ever higher into the clouds.”

And for help with everything Tears of the Kingdom, take a look at our Tears of the Kingdom Walkthrough and Guide about making your way through Hyrule.

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

When Homeworld 3 was first announced, I kept hoping for a VR mode announcement that never came. Wouldn’t it be great to see all of the iconic ships flying around, dogfighting and exploding all around your head? It’s a no-brainer! It turns out that the lack of VR support wasn’t because Homeworld 3’s developers at Blackbird didn’t see the potential; it was because there was another studio, FarBridge, working on a parallel Homeworld game that’s built for VR – specifically the Meta Quest 2 and 3 – from the ground up. It’s called Homeworld: Vast Reaches (see what they did there?) and, as coincidence would have it, after Homeworld 3’s delay to this coming May, both will launch very close together.

When I first put on the headset, the look and feel was immediately very, very Homeworld. It’s not quite up to the fidelity of Homeworld 3, naturally, but it’s a good representation of how these memorable ships were originally designed, and it’s a trip to have the old-school animatic cutscenes fill my entire field of view. The cherry on top, of course, is new music by Paul Ruskay, the composer of Homeworld 1, 2, Deserts of Kharak, and the upcoming Homeworld 3. So it’s certainly got authenticity on its side.

The 11-mission, single-player-only story campaign of Homeworld VR is set between the events of Homeworld and Homeworld 2 (as opposed to the further-future Homeworld 3) as Karen Sjet comes out of retirement to coach a new person learning to pilot the Mothership (you) and mop up the remnants of the Taiidan Empire. A new race shows up and, while initially promising to help the Hiigarans with new advanced tech, quickly turns on you. This sudden but inevitable betrayal comes in the middle of a training exercise where their ships were already conveniently labeled in red.

The controls certainly take a little getting used to (though I’m told they’re still being tuned) but things have been simplified a bit so it’s not hard to get up to speed if you’ve played a Homeworld game before. It’s certainly easier to judge distance and depth in VR, which is important in a game where ships can freely move up and down (to a point) in space, so there’s no need to manipulate the camera as much as in 2D to determine something’s location. The pointer-based controls are a little finicky when you’re trying to aim a resource harvester at a distant asteroid cluster when there’s anything else around it, unless you have a surgeon’s steady hand, but of course the obvious solution there is to pause the action with a tap of the Quest’s Y button, fly over to the asteroid, and issue commands up close before resuming time.

The radar and control group menus pop up on either side of your left wrist when you raise your arm and flip your hand to swap between them, which I quickly got the hang of for selecting and jumping to my ships (but I never did learn to stop trying to click on the Mothership to bring up a menu). The trickiest part to learn was the camera controls, which allow you to float or teleport through space once you figure out that moving up and down is controlled by which way you’re tilting the right controller as you move.

My early-game fleet was composed of the same Hiigaran scouts, fighters, bombers, corvettes, and resource harvesters that we played with in the original Homeworld. However, even more so than Homeworld 2 and 3, the way you interact with ships is control group-based, to the point where you can’t individually order a ship or even a squadron around – you have to build ships into one of the groups (during these early levels you’re limited to three, but that will expand as your tech upgrades) and give orders that apply to all the ships within it. There aren’t any pre-set formations, but you can literally pick up ships and place them in the formation you want within the group, or move them to a different group. There also aren’t any passive, neutral, or aggressive stances to tell the AI how you want the ships to behave in combat, but you can activate a boost to their firepower for a short time.

It may be simplified, but combat uses the same rock-paper-scissors style balancing we’re used to, where fighters kill bombers, bombers kill bigger ships, and bigger ships kill fighters. These early missions were mostly about defending the Mothership from waves of attackers while harvesting all of the available resources nearby before jumping away, which is very familiar for this series. Since this is the original Mothership it’s unarmed and stationary, but I noticed that here you don’t really interact with it much. Because ships are built directly into the control groups they don’t fly out of the hangar, and repairs are done with a support ship rather than by docking. But as ever, it’s there to serve as your avatar on the map, and it must be protected at all costs.

Homeworld VR’s weirdest trick, though, is the option on the Quest 3 to play in augmented reality mode. When you flip on this option in the menu, the backdrop of space is replaced by the real world around you, and your ships are just flying around the room. It’s bizarre, especially if there are other people nearby, and it can be a little difficult to spot ships in a cluttered area, but I was surprised at how quickly I got used to it and was back to playing as normal. I could see myself playing this way if my kids or cats were in the room and I wanted to be able to keep an eye on them without leaving my game, but all things considered I expect I’ll prefer to experience the full immersion in the Homeworld universe when Homeworld VR launches on Quest “soon.”