Approximately half of the sales were for Switch 2.
The Pokémon Company has announced Pokémon Legends: Z-A has sold a total of 5.8 million copies worldwide in its first week.
This includes the combined sales of the Switch and Switch 2 physical releases as well as digital downloads. According to the official press release, approximately half of these sales are for the Switch 2. In comparison, Pokémon Legends: Arceussold 6.5 million copies worldwide in its first week.
Also, he’s not planning to make it an “ongoing series”.
So many games nowadays come loaded with DLC, or at least plans for some other paid content drop in the future, but when it comes to the upcoming Switch 2 release Kirby Air Riders, you’ll be getting the full package on release.
How AVGN 8-bit’s Monsters Ring in the Spooky Season
Ryan Rasing, Game Designer & Writer, Retroware
Summary
Top tips for vanquishing the things that go bump in the night.
Plenty of ghoulish monsters with a modern retro, pixel-art flair.
Plenty of ghoulish monsters with a modern retro, pixel-art flair.
With the Halloween season well underway, it feels only appropriate to showcase just some of the ghoulish enemies you’ll be able to face in Angry Video Game Nerd (AVGN) 8-bit! You’ll blast through tons of enemies populating seven unique environments that take inspiration from the AVGN universe. But today, we’re taking a look only at those enemies and levels that truly evoke the spooky spirit!
AVGN 8-bit brings everyone’s favorite rage-induced Nerd back to take down a new threat to the gaming world! When an old ally of his somehow becomes corrupted, the Nerd must spring into action to fight this fallen force of good with an unimaginable force of evil: a “bad game” ritualistically made using the “worst” bad games of all time. With live action cutscenes featuring the Nerd himself commenting on your progress and encouraging you forward, it’s never a dull moment as you fight your way to the corrupted entity within. But first, you’ll have to deal with its minions. Let’s look at some techniques to keep you from suffering a dark fate!
Trigger-Finger Zombies and Walking Hands
Some of the first enemies you may encounter as you begin your digital “purge” are zombies and disembodied hands. Now, to the average horror enthusiast, these enemies shouldn’t sound too threatening, but what if the zombies can shoot lightning and the hands can rush at you on detection? For zombies, you’ll want to time your jumps right whenever they fire a bolt of lightning at you. Finish them off when you land back down. But be careful as they charge up their lightning shots, as zombies are able to temporarily reflect your own projectiles away. For those creepy, crawling hands, they’ll often charge at you along a linear path, so blasting them as fast as you can before they hit you is ideal.
A Soda Factory Full of Robo-Skeletons
There’s something definitely wrong when you have to take down a boss inside a factory that makes soda–not to mention having to go through a company of robo-skeletons first. For these enemies, they’ll come in three distinct forms: full-body walking types carrying rifles, crawling types that lob projectiles, and hanging types that fire bullet bursts at a downward angle. If you shoot at full-body walking types, they’ll collapse and turn into crawlers–you can finish them like you would the hands. For hanging types, try to stay clear from their bullet spreads, and manage your jumps to line up your shots well on them.
Spiders, Spiders, Spiders
It should come as no surprise that we’d have to include spiders as another spooky enemy. These skull-motifed guys will descend from the ceiling and try to shoot webs at you, while also being able to drop onto platforms and attack. You’ll want to be careful as they try to shoot webs at you in a downward arc. Getting caught in a web will drastically lower your movement speed, so, if one sticks to you, you’ll have to wiggle your way out of it. Spiders will eventually fall from their threads the longer you fire on them, so force them to be on the same plane as you, and you should be able to blast them away, no problem.
The Dark Realm Cometh
One of the hallmarks of giving off a haunting Halloween vibe is the temporary transition to the night world, which takes place in an otherwise seemingly normal-looking level. In this dark world, you’ll encounter enemies exclusive to this dark environment–including hopping zombie heads, scorpion-like monsters, floating sprites, and a persistent mask that fires an energy ball at you each time it appears. For hopping heads, try unloading on them as they land on the same plane as you. For those scorpion-like monsters, these function similarly to crawling hands and can be blasted easily if on the same plane. For floating sprites, you can destroy them as they get into your line of fire, but make sure you jump over any projectiles they launch at you on their death. Finally, for that recurring mask that appears and disappears quickly, be sure to dodge its single projectiles it fires at you. You won’t be able to destroy this mask enemy immediately, since this is actually the boss of that level you’ll face later on.
The Angry Video Game Nerd returns in 2025 just in time for the spooky season, with plenty of monsters for fans and newcomers to the AVGN universe to blast, so grab your controller and unleash the ultimate nerd rage in Angry Video Game Nerd 8-bit, digitally available now!
The ULTIMATE NERD RAGE is back in Angry Video Game Nerd 8-bit – an all-new action platformer set in the AVGN universe! Play as The Nerd and blast your way across a host of pixel art levels crawling with zombies, mechanical skeletons, ghoulish reapers, and more!
THE 8-BIT EXPERIENCE
We partnered with Mega Cat Studios and Programancer to make a brand new back-to-back 8-bit installment featuring the Angry Video Game Nerd!
THE AVGN UNIVERSE IN 8-BIT FORM
Journey through multiple levels inspired by the AVGN universe, and blast away at enemies themed around each level! Slide below platforms, pick up power-ups, and take alternate routes to get to the boss room!
FAMILIAR FACES, NEW FIGHTS
As The Nerd heads into the pixel-ridden fight, he must face off against familiar faces from his past! Waiting at the end of every level, bosses from the AVGN universe hope to destroy The Nerd!
Halloween may be right around the corner, but the winter holiday season will come at us just as fast. If you’re a big Zelda fan or have special someone in your life that is obsessed, Hallmark has a handful of awesome ornaments spanning the franchise’s storied history you can buy right now. Ranging in price from $12 to $32, purchasing one of these won’t break the bank and will last for holidays to come. If you’re looking for an affordable Legend of Zelda gift to buy ahead of the 2025 Christmas season, this is a delightful option worth considering.
Legend of Zelda Hallmark Ornaments
Pretty much every era from Zelda’s history is represented with these ornaments, from the NES original 8-bit Link to 2023’s Tears of the Kingdom Decayed Master Sword. The Link with his sword and shield ornament is another notable inclusion, since it plays classic Zelda tunes at the push of a button. I personally would have appreciated some Twilight Princess love with this collection, but I can’t complain with what’s on offer here.
Each ornament is only a few inches in every dimension, so storing them efficiently in the off-season or utilizing them as year-round decor is definitely on the table. I have a game shelf that the Toon Link ornament would be right at home on. The 8-bit Link ornament is low on stock, so if you’ve had your eye on it, now’s the perfect time to pick one up.
More Hallmark Nintendo Ornaments
Naturally, The Legend of Zelda franchise isn’t the only Nintendo property receiving the Hallmark treatment. There’s an Elephant Mario from Super Mario Bros. Wonder would look great on any Christmas tree, and the winter hat Rowlet is one of the cutest things I’ve ever seen.
Is Hallmark a Good Ornament Brand?
Hallmark isn’t the only ornament brand out there, but it is certainly one of the most well-known. The main appeal of Hallmark Keepsake ornaments is that the brand offers yearly releases from popular IPs like Nintendo, Star Wars, Disney, and more. If you’re looking for a little piece of your favorite movie or video game to hang on your tree, it’s most likely going to be a Hallmark-branded ornament. Seeing as the ornaments are officially-licensed, they are also likely to be of higher quality than any knock-off brands you find elsewhere.
Do you remember the worst day of your life? It’s okay; you don’t have to answer. I do. I was doing something I loved, I made a mistake, and a story someone else told about it for their own purposes cost me almost everything I had. People I thought were my friends walked out of my life, doors slammed shut in my face, and everything I’d worked for evaporated. My family resorted to communication by postcard because I refused to answer the phone, and I spent the next two years contemplating suicide before finally finding some semblence of peace. Nearly a decade later, those moments, that mistake – such a little thing, really – impacts every aspect of my life. I spend a lot of time grappling with that, wondering if I’ll ever be the person I was before that moment again. I don’t know the answer.
The worst day of Clementine McKinney’s life reminded me a lot of my own, though it came inside the cockpit of a Raptor mech rather than behind a keyboard. She made a decision, one rooted in trying to do the right thing and defend people she loved, and it cost her everything she had. Clementine McKinney died that day, and Graveyard Clem was born from the ashes. Bounty Star is about who you are after the worst day of your life, about what you do when the only option is to climb back into the machine that put you there in the first place. I didn’t have a choice; neither does Clem. We don’t know how to do anything else.
Clem is a bounty hunter. Building and piloting a Raptor is all she knows, and it’s the main thing you’ll do across the roughly 15-20 hours it took me to finish Bounty Star’s story (though there is ample replayability if you want it). After her world collapses, her friend Jake Triminy, the local marshall of a post-plague future that caused the collapse of human civilization and the return of the dinosaurs, sets her up with an old workshop that has enough space to double as a farm. Nobody much trusts her after what happened, so the bounties she is offered are for small fry: local bandits and the like. You spend her money to buy food and cook it in her kitchen for stat increases before going out on a mission. The first time she gets into her Raptor after the decision she made inside one destroyed her life, she spends a long time staring at the ol’ girl, her heart beating fast. Then she closes her eyes, exhales, and gets to work. Clem sees the irony, but it might also be her only way out. Both she and I sit in that cockpit, but we are not in the same place.
Clem wears her battles on her body. There’s a nasty burn on the side of her neck, a deep scar on the right side of her face, and another on the opposite cheek. She’s not young anymore; if you leave her alone long enough, she’ll stretch and complain about the way her body is failing her, even though her physique tells the story of a woman who builds Raptors and welds steel. Her clothes are covered in engine grease and stained with sweat. Her accent bears the twang of the American South. She drinks, smokes, plays guitar, and swears like it’s going out of style – and yet, when she gets stuck on a problem, she’ll pull out a stuffed dinosaur named Jeremy and talk to him until she realizes the solution. After a completed bounty, Clem sits on her Raptor and writes down her thoughts in a small journal, a warrior poet hoping that she’ll find herself in the words she arranges on the page. She is a person, messy and flawed and glorious, and I loved her in the way you love a kindred soul, someone whose failings you understand and strengths you admire.
Clem is a person, messy and flawed and glorious.
Once you’ve got your assignment, it’s time to outfit your Raptor and get to work. Raptors are relatively tiny mechs – think an Armored Core’s AC, but smaller, less well armed, and faster. They have melee and ranged weapons that range from chainswords and giant hammers to assault rifles and grenade launchers. You can customize them to fit your playstyle even further by popping in things like a booster for quick dodges, a burst repairer for on-the-spot healing, or a thermal computer to restore your Raptor to its base temperature faster.
There’s a lot to consider: each weapon has one of three types (Blade, Bludgeoning, Boom) that operate in a rock, paper, scissors style against different types of armor. Weapons and systems also build or reduce heat. Too much or too little, and your Raptor will shut down until it comes back under control, leaving you vulnerable. But there are benefits. High heat speeds up your melee weapon swings, while a cooler Raptor fires its guns more quickly.
Some bounties are only available in the morning, afternoon, or evening. It’s cooler at night, so weapons that generate heat are more viable than they would be in the afternoon, when you’ll want systems to keep your Raptor running cool. The right build takes your targets, time of day, and heat into account, and there is a joy in stepping into Clem’s mind, getting under the hood, and building a smooth-running rig.
In the field, a Raptor is nimble but purposeful, a force of fury and steel. It can dodge and run to avoid fire, but when you swing that chainsword, you commit to its weight and momentum. An assault rifle will kill a man in a single shot, but it will be less effective against a Driller mech built heavy for mining and repurposed by outlaws for combat. A double-barreled shotgun will chew through an unmanned Sieger, but you’ll need to be more precise against another mech. The heavier enemies – Drillers, Raptors like yours – have stability that must be reduced before your melee weapons stagger them, but once it’s gone, a hammer, chainsword, or flame gauntlet will rock them to the frame, steel grinding against steel until something breaks. But be wary of counter-attacks, which can stop your offense cold and send your Raptor reeling. To compensate, you have melee and dash tricks of your own. Cancel a swing of your hammer into an evasive maneuver while leaping backward and firing your shotgun, or dash forward into a swing of a built-for-a-mech baseball bat. To fight another Raptor is to tango, two gunslingers circling until one finds an opening.
It’s satisfying, though repetition does set in when you see the same Raptor, the same Sieger, the same group of enemies again and again, especially during the Low Priority repeatable bounties you’ll do between High Priority story missions. The environments Clem navigates, clearly a loving tribute to the American Southwest, are stunning at least. Though you’ll see some of the maps several times, many of them never lose their beauty, especially at night. Variety is found in optional objectives that offer additional cash and challenge you to take no damage, use a specific build, complete a bounty quickly, destroy objects scattered around the environment, find a hidden item, and so on. And it is always worth scavenging an area to find secret chests for additional rewards like world lore, resources, or even blueprints for new weapons or recipes for Clem to whip up in the kitchen.
I found joy in the repetition of a life lived outside of the cockpit.
Between bounties, you’ll use the money Clem earns to build up her new home and improve her Raptor. Things start small. But soon enough, you’re crafting new weapons, unlocking additional slots or loadouts, producing your own fuel, making your own ammunition, growing crops, and raising chickens. As she rebuilds herself, a place she didn’t want to be becomes a home. These chores are minor – feed the chickens, water the plants, sow new seeds, make sure the fuel producing systems have enough water, cook a meal before you head out – but I found joy in the repetition of a life lived outside of the cockpit, of seeing the real, tangible progress Clem and I were making on our journeys of healing.
A I invested more time and money into the farm, I was able to do these jobs faster, more efficiently. Carrying water to each plant will get the job done. But it’s much more fun to build a firearm-activated irrigation system, to watch empty space get filled in by the work you’ve done, slowly, piece by piece. Isn’t that a life? And my Raptor was becoming fiercer, too, the bounties bigger. At the start, one feeds the other. The Raptor. The farm. Over time, they intertwine, and it’s harder to see where one ends and the other begins.
In one of her journal entries, Clem reflects on her relationship with Raptors, wondering if she should loathe them on principle as machines of war or lean into the power and joy she feels while piloting one. It’s a question not just for her, but us as the player, too. She opts for the latter, partly because she has no choice, and partly because she feels she is making the world a better place by removing bad men from it. You can thankfully take bounties alive or scare off dinosaurs with fireworks instead of killing them (and sometimes you are paid more for it), but you’re going to rack up a lot of bodies either way. The home she builds is the opposite of that. At first, she resents it, wanting out as quickly as she can find a way. But she comes to see its potential. Soon, I was making just as much money from farming as I was from bounty hunting. What was a chore became a way of life.
And as she builds a new life, other characters come to inhabit it. She befriends a reformed bandit who offers her a way to relive past battles, useful for completing optional objectives in bygone story missions; a former thief atoning for his crimes by wearing a ridiculous steak outfit and selling meat as Mr. Meat; a miner trapped inside his suit who has dedicated himself to building an ethical mine for other miners; a weapons dealer who becomes a confidant; a giant insect driven from its colony who becomes a friend (and, when fed and watered, a weapon to be mounted on a Raptor).
Each is a mirror that offers Clem a chance to reflect on her life, her choices, to show us who she is, and who she still might be. Shall she be a woman at war with herself, reliving the battles that brought her here? There are many kinds of prisons. Some you carry with you wherever you go. Clem’s Raptor could be a cell. But it could be armor, too, the key to something else. Something better. The past is prologue, but it doesn’t have to define us. We choose who we are every day.
Bounty Star is a simple game. You would never mistake it for something with a ton of money behind it, though the writing and voice acting are excellent. And there were times it frustrated me, such as when it locked story progression behind building an engine I couldn’t afford. (Luckily, I had a pretty sizable farm at that point, and chicken eggs and corn command a premium.) It crashed on me a few times. It can be repetitive. I’m not sure I care about much of that, but it was part of my experience. But I did care about Clem, about her story, the people she loved and who loved her in return. This town takes in all kinds. I wanted her to rebuild her life, and that saw me through.
Watch out. There’s a musician mystery afoot. They’ve gone missing, mysteriously. So says Silver Pines, a Twin Peaks-inspired survival horror puzzler that’s set to arrive next year, according to an announcement trailer that’s just barged into my house in a trench coat, waving a gun about and demanding to know whether I did it.
No, I respond calmly, there are no missing musicians around here. For a moment, I fear he might notice the outline of a guitar’s headstock buried under the carpet. Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm, he says, as all detective-ish types do. Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm…
The Anniversary Edition includes the base game and all six official add-ons — Automatron, Far Harbor, Nuka-World, and the three Workshop expansions. Plus there’s over 150 pieces of Creation Club content to discover. New weapons, different breeds of Dogmeat (that’s your dog companion in-game, in case you’ve never heard of this good boy), new quests… it’s a big ol’ package, let’s just say.
Buckle Up, Xbox – Pacific Drive Launches Today with Game Pass
Blake Dove, Communications and Marketing Specialist, Ironwood Studios
Summary
Pacific Drive is now available on Xbox Series X|S and Xbox on PC, with the base game included in Xbox Game Pass Ultimate, Game Pass Premium and PC Game Pass.
The new Whispers in the Woods expansion launches alongside the Xbox release.
Explore eerie forests, uncover strange anomalies, and survive the Zone in your trusty station wagon.
Attention, Breachers: Pacific Drive is now available on Xbox, and the base game is included with Xbox Game Pass Ultimate, Game Pass Premium, and PC Game Pass from day one.
We’re also thrilled to announce that the Whispers in the Woods expansion is launching today — bringing even more mystery, danger and anomalies to discover in the Olympic Exclusion Zone.
Welcome to the Olympic Exclusion Zone!
In a quarantined region, deep within the Pacific Northwest, surreal dangers lurk — surrounding mysteries that might have been better left alone.
Pacific Drive is a first-person driving survival adventure where your car is your only companion. Keeping your trusty wood-paneled wagon running is the key to your survival in an unforgiving, unpredictable and hostile environment. Each excursion out into the wilderness brings unique and strange challenges as you restore and upgrade your car from an abandoned garage that acts as your home base. You’ll gather precious resources, craft blueprints and investigate what’s been left behind in the Zone to unravel a long-forgotten mystery, and hopefully live to tell the tale.
What’s so Exciting About Pacific Drive on Xbox?
Ever since Pacific Drive first hit the road on PlayStation and PC, one question has echoed through our community: “When is it coming to Xbox?”
From social media comments to forum threads and fan messages, the enthusiasm from Xbox players has never let up — and the team at Ironwood Studios heard every one of those requests.
Today’s launch is such a special moment. Bringing Pacific Drive to Xbox was a long-standing mission for the team here at Ironwood — a chance to open the gates of the Olympic Exclusion Zone to an entirely new group of drivers. The team couldn’t be happier to finally make that dream a reality.
With the base game available with Game Pass, there’s never been an easier way to start your journey. Whether you’re stepping into the Zone for the first time or returning to see what’s new, Ironwood can’t wait to welcome you to the driver’s seat.
What to Expect in Whispers in the Woods
Within this expansion, Xbox players will uncover a new chapter in the Zone’s story. Whispers in the Woods adds a ton of new content and several new features to the game, including:
A new narrative arc that you can explore alongside your main campaign, revealing an Anomaly-obsessed cult lurking in the forests.
New Anomalies and environmental twists shake up what you thought you knew about the Zone.
Artifacts — objects with strange, unpredictable effects (some helpful, some perilous) that force you to constantly adapt your driving and strategies.
A whole new explorable map with a new forest region roughly one-third the size of the base world — plus hours of additional content for veterans and newcomers alike.
This expansion is our most ambitious update so far, and we’re so excited Xbox players get their hands on it at the same time as everyone else.
Ready to Drive?
If you’ve got Game Pass Ultimate, Game Pass Premium or PC Game Pass, Pacific Drive is already yours. Fire up your Xbox, hop into the driver’s seat, and see what the Olympic Exclusion Zone has in store for you.
Xbox players — thank you for joining us on this surreal journey. We can’t wait to see what you uncover out there.
With its unsettling backdrops and detailed worldbuilding, Tormented Souls 2 may look like a contemporary horror game, but don’t let that modern dressing fool you. At its core beats the blackened heart of stone-cold classics like Resident Evil and Silent Hill, with all the treats — and tricks — that both endeared me to and enraged me about these formulaic survival horror games when they first gained popularity. Fixed camera angles? Check. Tank controls? Check. Insanely complex puzzles and an even more bizarre story, complete with cheesy dialogue and a manual save system? Check, check, check, and check. It makes Tormented Souls 2 a surprisingly faithful homage, bringing back all the stuff I loved about old survival horror games… as well as many of the things I loved to hate.
Tormented Souls 2 picks up right after the events of its 2021 predecessor, but you don’t have to have met the Walker sisters before to make sense of this sequel. That’s partly because it tells a standalone story, and partly because it’s so fantastical that nothing makes sense anyway. Sure, you may have questions about Caroline’s fetching eyepatch, but all you really need to know is she’s searching for answers about her little sister Anna’s terrifying visions and reality-bending drawings. For reasons that seem to exist exclusively in schlocky horror tales, that answer apparently sits somewhere in the depths of a creepy convent nestled in a far-flung location.
Before Caroline even gets the chance to shrug off her (exceedingly 90s) leather jacket, though, Anna goes missing, and it’s up to the older sibling to both find her sister and figure out what the hell is going on before it’s too late… with an emphasis on the “hell” bit, naturally. As stories go, it’s not unique, no, but the twists and turns of Tormented Souls 2’s roughly 20-hour campaign are delightfully over-the-top in the same way the original Resident Evil games are. It’s packed with cheesy dialogue, curious flavor text, and some truly bizarre encounters I couldn’t help but smile at. Caroline’s stay in the remote town of Villa Hess will take you to a number of wonderfully grim places, including a processing plant, spooky school, abandoned mall, bunker, and the sprawling convent you start off in, keeping the creepy environments feeling fresh.
And those environments are so detailed! Stuffed with interest and plenty of lore, Villa Hess and its surroundings are such fascinating, atmospheric places to explore. You never know when a key item or a helpful tool may be secreted away in a hidden room somewhere, so it’s always best to keep your curiosity piqued. While your investigation is sometimes interrupted by a bladed demon or shambling zombie, you’ll find that enemies have a tendency to stay dead in Tormented Souls 2 — once you’ve cleared out an area, you’re usually left to explore at your leisure. With little more than a flickering candle to guide the way, though, it’s a little too easy to miss things; I’ve been caught out a couple of times by overlooking a key clue or item, even in areas I thought I’d examined pretty closely.
As is seemingly the law for old-school survival horror, the more you play, the more you’ll find yourself opening up new routes to old places, providing access to rooms and entire areas that were previously blocked off. I suspect the backtracking will irk some — there’s a lot of it, particularly early on — but as the levels and fetch-quests are well-designed and usually rewarding, I couldn’t begrudge it. That said, there’s a reason fixed camera angles and tank controls are considered relics of the past. I grew up playing the games Tormented Souls 2 pays homage to (Resident Evil, Silent Hill 3, Parasite Eve, Alone in the Dark), but moving around Villa Hess is frustrating even when there isn’t a demon on your tail, with tight corridors and dead ends that make getting from one side of a building to the other unduly long-winded.
Add in Caroline’s fear of the dark: she’ll freeze and start to hyperventilate if plunged into darkness for even a split second, dying completely if you leave her there too long. You can’t even put away your lighter to shatter a porcelain pot or smash open a wooden crate unless there’s an ambient light source nearby… which there very often isn’t. The lighter sure does add to the atmosphere, though, which is almost continually tense and unnerving. As the primary source of light quite often, you’ll have to proactively step into a room to illuminate what, if anything, is hiding in the shadows, which inevitably means unwittingly getting up close and personal with the denizens skulking around the place.
It all falls apart a bit when there is something hiding in the dark, though. Tormented Souls 2’s combat isn’t clumsy as much as it is enraging. The reliance on Caroline’s lighter means you’re often unarmed when something lunges at you, and the fixed camera angles and stiff character movement make it harder than it should be to retreat or create a little distance. Caroline protects herself with a range of acquired and improvised weapons, from a shotgun to a nail gun. Some of them can be upgraded to improve their rate of fire or reload speed, but they’re still slow to use and difficult to wield accurately in a panic. I know it’s kind of a genre convention to ensure we feel weak and underpowered, but this could’ve been achieved through scarcer ammo or by throwing more enemies at us; inefficient weapons and fixed cameras don’t ramp up the tension as much as snap the immersion entirely.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, that jankiness follows you into boss fights. One of the first you’ll encounter, a giant nun, stomps around the room trying to batter you with a gigantic steel cross. But in that one single room, there are at least three different fixed camera angles, which means you may find yourself inadvertently sprinting towards your foe if the camera shifts while trying to put distance between you. This wouldn’t be so bad if your shotgun held more than two shots at a time or if the nun flinched with each hit, but she’ll keep galloping like an aggravated rhino, which made the camera feel like the real boss I was fighting.
Thankfully, for every underwhelming boss fight you’re forced to endure, you’ll happen across a good half-dozen puzzles which confuse and delight in equal measure. I never felt closer to an old Resident Evil or Silent Hill game than trying to figure out how to open a door, or decode a cipher, or prise open the jaws of a dead shark for reasons I still don’t quite understand. Often deeply cryptic, maddeningly illogical, or completely unsolvable because I stupidly missed a clue somewhere, these puzzles were exactly what I want from a game like this, all the way down to the mini-puzzles that ask you to combine specific items in your inventory. Yes, I’ll admit one or two (or five) brain teasers truly stumped me for an embarrassing amount of time, but if that isn’t old-school survival horror, then what is?
Bethesda has used Fallout Day to announce the Fallout: New Vegas 15th Anniversary Bundle, which celebrates Obsidian’s much-loved post-apocalyptic role-playing game turning 15 years old.
This edition will be available for pre-order on October 23 via the Bethesda Gear Store, and includes:
Fallout: New Vegas: Ultimate Edition PC Code
Victor Statue (8″ PVC): The friendly Securitron stands tall and is ready to roll
Doc Mitchell’s Evaluation Cards (8×8 cardstock set): Straight from your first moments in Goodsprings, a true piece of New Vegas history
Vault Boy Enamel Pin (1.5″): Vault Boy stacks the odds with poker chips in hand
Mojave Express Patch (3.5″ × 1.9″): Woven, iron-on, and full of wasteland charm
NCR Recon Patch (3.25″ × 3.5″): Woven, iron-on insignia of the New California Republic’s finest
Collector’s Big Box: A throwback-style display box created exclusively for the anniversary
2010’s Fallout: New Vegas still lives long in the memory, and interest in it is surging as a result of Fallout Season 2, which will head to New Vegas for Season 2 in December. Indeed, there are all sorts of rumors floating around about potential Fallout remakes now that The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered is out the door (Fallout 3 Remastered was leaked back in 2023, but those plans may have changed). And we know Bethesda wants to eventually get to Fallout 5, albeit after The Elder Scrolls 6.
“For other Fallout games in the future, you know, obviously I can’t talk about those right now, but I would say, sort of rushing through them, or we kind of need to get stuff out that is different than the work we’re doing in 76… we don’t feel like we need to rush any of that,” he said. “The Fallout TV show fills a certain niche in terms of the franchise and storytelling.”
The last mainline Fallout game was Fallout 4, which was released in 2015. DLC content for the entry was steadily released for PC and consoles over the next year, and in 2018, Bethesda launched its multiplayer-centered offshoot, Fallout 76. While fans slowly flocked to the West Virginia-set open-world RPG, it wasn’t until the premiere of Prime Video’s Fallout TV show that the Bethesda series leveled up in terms of attention.
Still, Howard wouldn’t budge when it came to desires for a substantial video game release. For him, it comes down to wanting to treat Bethesda’s franchises with care.
“Totally get the desire for a new kind of mainline single-player game,” he said. “And look, those things take time. I don’t think it’s bad for people to miss things. We just want to get it right and make sure that everything we’re doing in a franchise, whether it’s Elder Scrolls, Fallout, or now Starfield, that those become meaningful moments for everybody who loved these franchises as much as we do.”
Wesley is Director, News at IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.