Category: Video Games

Happy Indie World Showcase day! We just saw a Nintendo Indie World Showcase that included over 12 indie games coming to Nintendo Switch in 2023 and 2024, including several brand-new game announcements. Major reveals include the reemergence of a lost Shantae game, Outer Wilds’ long-awaited Switch debut, and much more.

If you missed it, here’s a quick rundown of everything we just saw at Indie World:

Shantae Advance: Risky Revolution

Announced earlier this year, Shantae creator WayForward has reached deep into its vault of canceled titles and brought back something we never thought would see the light of day. Back in 2001, WayForward was working on a GBA Shantae game called Shantae 2: Risky Revolution. The game was never finished, never released. But now, the studio has brought back much of the original development team to complete what’s now known as Shantae Advance: Risky Revolution, for a 2024 release. It’s built on the original game but with a restored/remastered look and a new, four-player local battle mode. It’s coming in 2024.

Core Keeper

Core Keeper, a top-down sandbox game set in an underground world, has been in early access on Steam since March of last year. It’s now coming to NIntendo Switch with a full release in 2024, including an online multiplayer for up to eight players.

On Your Tail

Newly revealed at Indie World, On Your Tail is a sleuthing game set in the seaside town of Borgo Marina, where anthropromorphic animals are enjoying holidays by the sea. Town exploration, minigames, fishing, and other life sim elements are interspersed with detective work as the main character tries to uncover the mystery behind a strange masked figure appearing in the town. On Your Tail is a timed console exclusive coming to Switch in 2024.

Howl

Howl is a turn-based, tactical folktale set in medieval times when a strange, sound-based plague called the “howl” is ravaging the land. The main character is a deaf prophet trying to save the locals as they search for a cute. Howl is out later today.

The Star Named EOS

The Star Named EOS is a narrative puzzle game where players use photography to explore the world and uncover the truth about the disappearance of the protagonist’s mother. It’s coming out in the spring of 2024.

Backpack Hero

If you like inventory management, this is the game for you. Backpack Hero is a roguelike about collecting items, organizing a bag, and using your organization skills to fight off enemies more effectively. It previously released in early access on Steam in 2022, and is coming to Switch later today.

Blade Chimera

Newly-announced sidescrolling 2D action game Blade Chimera has you wielding the Lumina Sword, which isn’t just a weapon to repel deadly demon attacks. It also can interfere with time itself, such as restoring broken platforms to help you make your way through the city you’re tasked with protecting. Blade Chimera is a timed console exclusive coming in spring 2024.

A Highland Song

From the studio behind 80 Days, A Highland Song is a narrative adventure about exploring the highlands of Scotland, where the paths you choose to take will impact how the story plays out. Set to Scottish folk music, A Highland Song intersperses open platforming with rhythm sections. It’s coming out on December 5, 2023.

Moonstone Island

Previously released on PC via Steam in September, Moonstone Island is finally coming to console in spring of 2024 as a timed Switch exclusive. Moonstone Island is a creature collection life sim game set in an open world of sky islands. There are over 60 different monster spirits to collect via card-based combat, alongside crafting, farming, befriending villagers, and exploring.

Death Trick: Double Blind

When a circus’ star magician goes missing, a pair of unlikely partners must team up and track down what happened to them. Death Trick: Double Blind is a detective game, an investigative visual novel set in a circus with point and click exploration and an emphasis on speaking to suspects and finding contradictions in their stories. It’s coming out in 2024.

Outer Wilds: Archaeologist Edition

Developer Mobius has been teasing us on a Nintendo Switch release for Outer Wilds for a long time now, and it’s almost here. The Archaeologist Edition for Switch is coming out on December 7, 2023, with a physical version planned for sometime next year. It includes both Outer Wilds, and the Echoes of the Eye expansion.

And more!

Today’s Indie World Showcase ended on a montage of other games coming to Switch, including:

• Enjoy the Diner, out today
• Heavenly Bodies, coming February 2024
• The Gecko Gods, coming spring of 2024
• Passpartout 2: The Lost Artist, out today
• Urban Myth Dissolution Center, coming in 2024
• Braid: Anniversary Edition, coming April 30, 2024.

And that’s it for Nintendo Indie World. And if this wasn’t enough, while you wait for some of these to come out, we’ve got a list of the best indie games of all time that’s full of gems you can play right now.

Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter for IGN. Got a story tip? Send it to rvalentine@ign.com.

Buying one of the best graphics cards is already an expensive endeavor, but thanks to Moore’s Law having one foot in the grave, there are a lot of hidden costs to upgrading your gaming PC, thankfully Black Friday GPU deals are right around the corner.

While you’re probably not going to see any super-flashy 50% off deals for a graphics card like the RTX 4080, you’ll be able to find offers that cut a good $100-$200 off of its steep asking price, especially if you know where to look.

And even if you don’t feel comfortable digging around the guts of your computer to make the upgrade, you should be able to find plenty of Black Friday gaming PC deals that also use these shiny new GPUs.

When Do Black Friday GPU Deals Start?

Black Friday 2023 arrives November 24, though a lot of retailers have either already started their sales, or will long before the 24th. For instance, Amazon’s Black Friday extravaganza officially kicks off on November 17th, so you should be able to find some time to snag a great deal on GPUs sometime during the week. There are even some early GPU deals already available thanks to other retailer sales.

Early Black Friday GPU Deals

Black Friday isn’t quite here yet, but if you just need a graphics card right now, you can find several on sale. Again, don’t expect to slash any prices in half, but these deals will make your graphics card a bit more affordable. Both Newegg and Amazon have discounts right now:

What About Cyber Monday?

Cyber Monday typically falls on the Monday after Black Friday, which is November 27 in 2023. In years past, this second sales holiday stood on its own, but it’s been increasingly absorbed into Black Friday over the last several years. Cyber Monday is as good as Black Friday when it comes to GPU deals, and you should have no problem finding a sale.

The Best Black Friday GPU Deals – What to Expect in 2023

As Black Friday approaches, we’re going to see a ton of graphics cards go on sale. However, while TVs and other gadgets will usually get huge doorbuster discounts, we usually don’t see that happen with graphics cards, and they usually sell out anyways.

That doesn’t mean we won’t see any deals at all, though. You can expect to find graphics cards at every price point with a decent discount on Black Friday, likely around 10-20% at most. That doesn’t seem like a lot, but when it comes to something like the RTX 4080, which costs a good $1,200, that’s $120 that stays in your wallet.

We’ll also likely see a lot of graphics cards from older generations go on sale. And just because the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 and AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT have newer versions on the market, it doesn’t mean they’re magically not good graphics cards anymore. A 1-generation-old graphics card is a great value, especially if you can find it listed at a significantly lower price than its current-generation counterpart. After all, both Nvidia and AMD have been in hot water for not improving enough on last-generation’s performance. You should absolutely take advantage of that on Black Friday.

Tips for Shopping Black Friday GPU Deals

Buying a graphics card is almost as complicated as the GPU itself. There are so many numbers and teraflops flopping around that it can be hard to focus on what you actually need to look out for. Here’s some Black Friday shopping tips so you can be prepared ahead of the sales event.

1. Set a budget: Just because the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 is the best card around, you don’t need to drop $1,600 to have a good time. Even if you just have a couple hundred bucks, you can get a great graphics card, especially if you’re content with 1080p gaming. Setting a budget before you set out to buy a card will help you focus and cut through the temptation of more expensive cards.
2. VRAM matters: One of my biggest pet peeves about graphics cards marketing is sometimes two graphics cards will share the same name but will have less VRAM (video memory). The best PC games are eating up more memory every single year, so you want to make sure you have enough for the games you want to play.
3. Be honest to yourself: It can be easy to tell yourself that once you have a fancy new graphics card that you’re going to play all the biggest AAA games with all the eye candy cranked up to 11. If you really think you’re going to do that, great! But don’t let yourself get sucked into that hype if you know the games you enjoy are esports games that generally take less horsepower to run. The RTX 4060 isn’t exactly sexy, but it makes much more sense for most people than a Radeon RX 7800 XTX.

Jackie Thomas is the Hardware and Buying Guides Editor at IGN and the PC components queen. You can follow her @Jackiecobra

Activision’s yearly festive treat is back. The IW engine, now in its ninth iteration, remains relatively static since the start of the current generation. There has been some regression on consoles at least, with Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War’s ray traced shadows no longer present. The PC offers DLSS and FSR options, which are necessary, even on my RTX 3080, if you want to hit 4K/60fps on Extreme settings. All three consoles offer two performance modes: a high resolution 60fps mode and a reduced quality 120fps mode. The real difference between the modes are as follows.

Xbox Series X and PS5 are identical in their base 60Hz modes. They both output at a full 3840 x 2160 with identical settings, and this is reconstructed from a base of 1920 x 2160, as per the previous two games. Xbox Series S sports a close match, visually, aside from small reductions on textures, alpha effects, bloom and shadows, but the biggest reduction is resolution, with it targeting a 2560 x 1440 output and then scaling or reconstruction from a 1280 x 1440 base.

The 60fps mode on PS5 and Series X is boring from an analysis perspective but great from a gameplay one. In one of the heaviest levels at the start of the campaign, we get a locked and stable 60fps readout from both Series X and PS5. Even when swamped with post processing effects, alpha, enemies and multiple shadow-casting lights, we get no deviation from that flat line, with later levels backing this up. All versions likely run an adaptive V-sync that helps any moments that dip below the required 16ms frame time, ensuring it still feels as fluid as possible. The Xbox Series S is the only one that registered tearing in my testing, as it struggles to stay close to that 60fps target on some levels. The opening, and largely most impressive mission, is the worst case tested. This is likely due to being bound on bandwidth and fill-rate in the heavy rain, bloom, lights, shadows, and action. In these situations, it can tear aggressively over the height of the screen, leaving performance around the mid 40s to low 50s but dipping more in worse case sections.

Later levels revert to larger, more open areas and fewer scripted sections, many of which are simply Multiplayer Warzone maps being reused within the campaign as a “mission”. The AI is terrible, and it plays like a standard Warzone game with Bots, but these are not as taxing on the GPU and possibly lean more on the CPU. Due to the open, wide levels, you get high geometry when in the faster 120Hz mode. At 60fps though these missions present a much better job keeping within the 16ms frame time, and with variable rate refresh enabled at 60fps, we only drop a handful of frames, which resolves the tearing whilst maintaining fluid controls.

Going Pro

High refresh rate is the real MVP of such a high octane, fast-paced shooter, especially when playing online, and this is where the 120Hz mode comes in. All three consoles offer the mode, but you need to enable it within your operating system menu. Repeating the opening level on both PS5 and Xbox Series X, we now see frame rates hover between the 70s and 90s, but with some dips into the 60s in the worst case. Both consoles see almost identical GPU-limited performance here, and although not a huge increase over the 60fps mode, the visuals are close to identical, albeit at a lower resolution.

The open levels lean a little less on the GPU, and we see faster performance as such. It’s much harder to align the action between both consoles, but following the same benchmarking route, both consoles average into the 100fps range on frame rates, with the Xbox Series X offering slightly better performance – on average in these tests it was up to 12% faster. Although this is a real advantage, at these high frame rates it is more academic, as both feel very smooth and responsive to play and the difference largely goes unnoticed. This is where Variable Refresh Rate shines, as without it this mode can tear constantly on all formats. Turning VRR on is an obvious choice to make if you can. Even if there is a bit of a noticeable impact to image quality, it is a worthy cost for the performance gain.

While I wouldn’t say that Variable Rate Refresh is required on all consoles, the Series S really benefits from it in both modes as it can struggle to hit 60fps in some levels. Although these open-ended, Warzone-like missions are less taxing and we do get much better performance, tearing is constant, meaning VRR offers a tangible boost to input times and image quality.

Across the current Generation consoles, Modern Warfare 3 stands as a game that really benefits from 120Hz and a VRR screen, especially on the Xbox Series S. The PS5 and Series X remain the best place to play on consoles, with the Series X just pipping the PS5 in that 120Hz screen. My recommended way to play is with that enabled alongside VRR and in both single and multiplayer, you will have your feet firmly on the ground, even if it feels like we have walked in these boots for a million miles already.

Microsoft has announced the second wave of games coming to Xbox Game Pass in November 2023, taking subscribers up to the end of the month.

Available today, November 14 is Coral Island (Cloud and Xbox Series X|S), a farm sim game about island living from Stairway Games. Here’s the official blurb: “Coral Island is a vibrant and laid-back reimagining of farm sim games. Be who you want and experience enchanting island living at your own pace — live off the land, nurture animals, build relationships with a diverse cast of townsfolk, and make the world around you a more vital and harmonious place.”

Persona 5 Tactica (Cloud, Console, and PC) launches day one into Game Pass on November 17. This tactical spinoff of Persona 5 was briefly made available on Steam last week in an apparent error.

Here’s a surprise: Dune: Spice Wars is available now via PC Game Pass and coming to Xbox consoles and Cloud Gaming on November 28. This 4X real-time strategy game developed by Shiro Games and published by Funcom is set in Frank Herbert’s Dune universe. You lead your faction and battle for control and dominance over the harsh desert planet of Arrakis. IGN’s Dune: Spice Wars review returned a 9/10: “Dune: Spice Wars is a clever, multilayered, challenging RTS that skillfully translates so much of what is cool about Frank Herbert’s universe in its interesting mechanics.”

And finally, Rollerdrome (Cloud, PC, and Xbox Series X|S) hits Game Pass on November 28. Rollerdrome is the well-received third-person action shooter from Roll7, the British game developer behind the OlliOlli series. It launched last year on PC, PlayStation 4, and PlayStation 5 to critical acclaim. IGN’s Rollerdrome review returned a 9/10: “Rollerdrome’s unexpected blend of skating and shooting is a joy to master, backed by an arresting art design, thumping soundtrack, and a surprisingly layered story.”

Here’s what’s coming next to Game Pass:

• Persona 5 Tactica (Cloud, Console, and PC) – November 17
• Dune: Spice Wars (Cloud and Console) – November 28
• Rollerdrome (Cloud, PC, and Xbox Series X|S) – November 28

Meanwhile, seven games leave Game Pass on November 30. They are:

• Anvil (Cloud, Console, and PC)
• Battlefield 1943 (Console) EA Play
• Battlefield: Bad Company (Console) EA Play
• Battlefield: Bad Company 2 (Console and PC) EA Play
• Disc Room (Cloud, Console, and PC)
• Eastward (Cloud, Console, and PC)
• Grid (Console) EA Play

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.