It made its debut on Switch Online last week.
The recent Switch Online + Expansion Pack release F-Zero Climax is celebrating its 20th anniversary tomorrow. As part of this, former Nintendo employee Takaya Imamura (who worked on the GBA title and the F-Zero series) back in the day has shared a special code.
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Fur-tastic news.
If you’ve played the Cat Quest games or are looking at getting into them, you might be interested to know there’s a physical Switch collection on the way. Developer ‘The Gentlebros’ originally announced this news in September.
Like the digital version, the hard copy of Cat Quest: The Fur-tastic Trilogy includes Cat Quest, Cat Quest II as well as Cat Quest III on one game cartridge. In addition to this, the hard copy also includes an exclusive vinyl sticker and a digital art book.
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“We hope to announce more early next year”.
In August, it was announced Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Splintered Fate would be getting DLC in the future.
Developer Super Evil Megacorp recently spoke to My Nintendo News about this content on the way to the game and while it couldn’t go into much detail because it’s apparently “top secret”, lead gameplay designed Daniel Stansens kind of shared a little bit more information. Here’s what was said:
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Star Citizen developer Cloud Imperium Games has said Squadron 42 launches at some point in 2026.
If the game does indeed launch then, it’ll come out an incredible 14 years after CIG first launched Star Citizen’s crowdfunding drive.
During CitizenCon in Manchester, England this evening, CIG boss Chris Roberts, known for creating the Wing Commander series, took to the stage to say he was “confident” that Star Citizen’s long-awaited standalone single-player story game would release in 2026.
Roberts’ on-stage comments followed a lengthy live gameplay demo that suffered a number of crashes, bugs, and graphical problems, but did give the audience a good idea of Squadron 42’s first hour.
CIG demoed Squadron 42’s prologue, which is designed to set the stage for the player as a pilot in the sci-fi game. The demo was heavy on flashy cutscenes with CGI representations of Hollywood stars such as Gillian Anderson, Henry Cavill, Gary Oldman, and Mark Strong, mixed with on-rails turret action in a huge space battle. The demo ended with a first-person shooter segment as the alien enemy boarded the player’s ship.
“We did say we were doing it live, risking the demo gods, and they brought their wrath down on us,” Roberts said as he walked on-stage.
“There’s a lot more that goes on in Squadron 42 after that, but that sets up where you came from and from there you become a pilot and start serving on a smaller ship, the Stanton. But there’s a lot more in the game than we were showing there. It’s been a lot more stable for me when I’ve been playing these last few weeks.”
Roberts continued: “Both the team and I are confident of giving you this game in 2026. Obviously you can see it’s not going to be tomorrow, because you saw a few crashes there.
“Thank you for supporting us and allowing us to build such an ambitious game. Crashes aside, there’s probably not another game that has a prologue that has that much action. Mostly there aren’t movies that have that much action in there. Gladiator has three minutes of battle and eight minutes of prologue. This was an hour of crazy stuff.
“But thank you for allowing us to build something so amazing, and I can’t wait for you all to be able to play it in the moderate future.”
Star Citizen is considered one of the most controversial projects in all video games. Over the 12 years since its crowdfunding drive began, Star Citizen has been called many things including a scam by those who wonder whether it will ever properly launch. Its virtual space ships, some of which cost hundreds of dollars, are often the focus of criticism.
Indeed, Star Citizen has now raised over $729 million according to figures from CIG. The developer makes revenue publicly available on its website, which at the time of this article’s publication shows Star Citizen has raised $729,151,801. CIG calls this money “funds raised.”
In March this year, CIG began talking about Star Citizen’s 1.0 launch being within sight, although there’s still no release window. 1.0, Roberts has said, “is what we consider the features and content set to represent ‘commercial’ release.” As it stands, Star Citizen is still in Alpha.
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.
The weekend is officially here, and we’ve rounded up the best deals you can find! Discover the best deals for Saturday, October 19, below:
EA Sports College Football 25 is available on sale for $42.99 this weekend. This game marked the first college football title from EA since NCAA 14, as a lawsuit regarding player NIL (name, image, and likeness) prevented the company from producing further entries. Many of the older modes have returned to College Football 25, including Dynasty, Team Builder, and Road to Glory. Of course, dozens of new features have been added, including Stadium Pulse, which creates challenging road environments in college football’s biggest stadiums.
Woot! (owned by Amazon) is offering The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom for Nintendo Switch for only $39.99 after you apply a $10 off promo code “ZELDAWELCOME” during checkout. Amazon Prime members get free shipping, otherwise there is a $6 flat fee. You’ll be getting a physical copy, which also includes a 90-day Woot! warranty. Woot! mentions that copies may or may not be imported, but all Nintendo Switch games are region-free so you’ll be able to play the game regardless. You won’t have to worry about language either since that setting is determined by your Switch console.
Luigi’s Mansion 3 is available this weekend at Woot for only $39.99. This is one of the best games available on Nintendo Switch, filled with charm and all sorts of fun puzzles. With Halloween right around the corner, there’s never been a better time to pick up the game if you haven’t already!
Kingdom Hearts is one of Square Enix’s best series, and it’s a must-play for any RPG fan. The series mashes together the worlds of Disney and Square Enix to tell the tale of light and darkness. This All-in-One package contains a total of ten games, with everything up to Kingdom Hearts III included. Now is the perfect time to get caught up before Kingdom Hearts IV, so pick up the All-in-One bundle today and jump into Sora’s journey.
Amazon has two popular LEGO sets available on sale for a limited time this weekend. First, you can save on the LEGO Super Mario Piranha Plant set. This kit allows you to make one of Super Mario’s most iconic enemies, warp pipe and all! Additionally, you can also save 20% off the LEGO Ideas Jazz Quartet set. You can build a piano, cello, drum kit, and more.
If you’re waiting for Super Mario Party Jamboree to go on sale, Woot has a great deal on Mario Party Superstars that can hold you over for the time being. Superstars features five boards from the Nintendo 64 era, recreated with new twists. You can hop online and play with friends anywhere in the world, with 100 different minigames to discover. While its content offerings are not as good as Jamboree, this is still a great Mario Party game and well worth picking up.
Metaphor: ReFantazio has quickly become one of the hottest games of 2024. Katsura Hashino, known for directing Persona 3, Persona 4, and Persona 5, has led ATLUS’ Studio Zero on this project, with illustrator Shigenori Soejima serving as Character Designer on the project. Metaphor is the first step into the world of fantasy for ATLUS, and it’s been a massive success. In our 9/10 review, we stated, “Metaphor: ReFantazio is poetic, and at times, idealistic, but it also understands its complexities and that change requires action, and that even far-fetched fantasy stories can serve as inspiration to make our world a better place.”
Pokén around.
The first generation of Pokémon games features some of the most iconic locations in the entire franchise. The eerie Lavender Town, the winding Viridian Forest, and the quaint Pallet Town where all players start their journey.
Pallet Town isn’t just a fanciful creation, but draws real-life inspiration from Pokémon creator Satoshi Tajiri’s hometown of Machida within the Tokyo Metropolis. While the Machida of today and of Tajiri’s childhood are very different, there are yet many elements within the city that evoke the adventurous feeling of Ash Ketchum’s hometown.
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We all have our favorite Call of Duty multiplayer map, but which Black Ops multiplayer map do the developers of the game keep returning to in their spare time? IGN sat down with senior Call of Duty Black Ops developers, many of whom actually created some of the most popular Call of Duty maps of all time, to answer once and for all which multiplayers maps truly are the best.
Just a note before we begin, this list will only cover multiplayer maps that have appeared in the Black Ops series, meaning you won’t be finding maps that appeared in the Modern Warfare games. Apologies to fans of Crash.
No list of Black Ops multiplayer maps can exist without Nuketown. Perhaps one of the most popular multiplayer maps in the entire Call of Duty franchise, this desolate test site for nuclear missile testing first appeared in the first Call of Duty: Black Ops. Since then, some version of the map has appeared in every Call of Duty Black Ops game ever since, speaking to its status as a perennial favorite.
On creating the map that started it all, expert level designer Adam Hoggatt says he has more fond memories of making the map than actually playing it, saying it wasn’t an idea that was pushed forward by the studio, but instead a passion project that was started up for fun. From there it just snowballed into what is now Nuketown: “We all just put all the most fun things we could think of into the map. There’s the doomsday clock, an engineer helped hook up the first mannequin Easter Egg, and the audio department said, ‘Hey, we have this Rolling Stones song that we licensed and don’t have anywhere to use it,”’ so we put that in there. The rest is pretty much history.”
Another popular map as chosen by the developers is Raid. Set in the Hollywood Hills of Los Angeles, the map is a sniper’s paradise and perfect for long-range weapons. Regarding its development, Hoggatt calls it almost the opposite of Nuketown because unlike the natural creative process behind Nuketown, Raid “started off a little bit rough.”
“It actually went through several complete redesigns,” he says. “But each time we iterated, something interesting from the previous iteration was carried over into the new one,” resulting in the fan favorite map.
Set atop a large military aircraft carrier, the appropriately named Carrier is associate creative director Miles Leslie’s favorite map, which is high praise considering he says he “literally worked on every single multiplayer map since World at War.”
Carrier is very much a different beast than Raid, with obstacles scattered across the deck preventing most long-range combat. Instead, close-quarter combat is required, and players will usually come out of the map with a large killstreak if they’re skilled enough.
“We knew going in it was going to be a super tough design because no one would ever make a multiplayer map on top of a Carrier,” says Leslie, “Because it’s flat.” But like Raid, Carrier underwent numerous iterations and ideas before finding its final form. One unused idea according to Leslie was that players could hop into a plane and use it to fire missiles. Sad we missed out on that one.
Another of Leslie’s favorite maps is Kowloon from the first Call of Duty: Black Ops. Inspired by what the single-player team was doing with the famous Hong Kong walled city, Leslie says Kowloon was another fun map to design because of the challenge it posed the development team. “If you look at the real Kowloon, the buildings are separated. How can you have a separated giant hole in the center of a multiplayer map?”
The solution was introducing the first zip lines in a multiplayer map ever, solving the layout issue and creating a crazy fun map to zip around in the process.
Not a map that’s often thrown around when discussing best multiplayer maps in Call of Duty, Evac is a personal favorite of Leslie’s thanks to how it incorporates Call of Duty’s advanced movement system.
Set in an abandoned evacuation zone on top of a flooded quarantine zone in Singapore, Evac is a “playground of fun” according to Leslie, who recalls how he and the team spent countless hours playtesting the map and immediately adding any fun idea they had into the finished product: A map where players can combo wall jumps and runs together into an exciting, parkour-heavy multiplayer map.
One of the newer maps on the list, lead game designer Joanna Leung says her favorite multiplayer map is Deprogram from Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War. Set inside the fragmented mind of Adler, this small map is primarily for close-quarters combat, though there are fun secret areas perfect for snipers if you can find them.
“I’m a SMG player at heart and I love getting up close and personal with my enemies while I kill them… So I love that map for that reason,” says Leung.
True to its name, Standoff from Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 is a map where two sides face-off to see who controls the center of the map. With snipers on either side, there’s not a lot of safe spaces in this map, which was inspired by a small border town between China and Kyrgyzstan.
But if you’re able to find your way through the small flanking routes in the side, you’ll find that you can get the drop on snipers and take them out. “It’s such a satisfying experience because I now get a leg up on those guys who kept sniping at me, and basically attack them from behind.”
One of the bigger maps in rotation, Cracked lent itself to the larger-than-life feel and big-scale action that Call of Duty is known for. It’s also the favorite map of Raven Software lead designer Damon Shubhastari.
“There was just a lot of internal playtests with Cracked that I felt like I had so much playing, especially when the RC XD came online. Cracked was just a very intense map, especially in Domination.”
Many popular maps get reimagined or remastered in later Black Ops games. For example, there’s Firing Range which was originally imagined as a military training facility before getting reskinned as a Hollywood backlot set, a change that Shubhastari particularly enjoyed.
“The fun was already there, in the map, we knew it. It was a classic fan favorite, but when the team remodeled [Firing Range] as a studio backlot I just thought it was super fun to play.”
Another recent map from Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War, Satellite is one of Matt Coutras’ favorite maps. A senior level designer at Treyarch, Coutras’ favorite map is actually Raid, but Satellite is another of his top hits considering he was involved with designing the map from start to finish.
One goal for Coutras with Satellite was to lean into the natural King of the Hill type gameplay of the map. “I tried to make it so all different types of gameplay styles could be used on that map. So if you want to snipe, you could go out to the dunes. If you wanted to run and gun with a shotgun or an SMG, you could go right down the dry riverbed and try to flank around to get upon top of the hill with a satellite.”
Another Cold War map, The Pines is set in a fictional New Jersey mall that was going to have its grand opening before being taken over by Perseus. The mix of suburban America and military gunfights is reminiscent of the classic film Red Dawn, and is another of Coutras’ favorite maps purely for nostalgia.
“It reminds me of the mall where I grew up on the East coast and it has an interesting design choice,” he says. “In the center of the map you have the high side versus the low side and it makes for some really interesting engagements.”
Based on a currently non-existent, California High-Speed Rail terminal, Express takes the classic three-lane map structure and dials up the intensity and fun, according to Jake Harley, associate lead audio designer at Raven Software.
“It’s a twist on traditional three lane map design where there are the parts that you could walk up and over on the stairs to over the train, as well as some sections on the side of the map that would go down into the terminal area.”
Those are the favorite Call of Duty Black Ops Multiplayer maps according to the developers. Let us know what your favorite Call of Duty Black Ops maps are in the comments.
Let’s kill some time.
The weekend is here, which means it’s time to kick back and enjoy some quality time with games. Before we find out what we’re diving into, however, let’s take a look back at some of this week’s biggest stories.
First up, it looks like the GameCube controller might be making some sort of comeback, which is pretty wild. We also heard word from Nintendo that NSO is promising to bring “excitement” in 2025, so let’s all look forward to that. And of course, we gave our final verdict on the bizarre, but rather delightful Alarmo clock.
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Expect fixes and more.
Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night didn’t arrive in the best state on the Switch, but it’s been continually updated with new content, features and fixes. The next one has now been announced for “all platforms” and will be arriving early next week.
This update will include bug fixes addressing a store soft lock issue, classic mode slow loads and a fix for the Switch-specific Glacial Tomb crash. Here’s the full message, courtesy of the Bloodstained social media account:
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“Another modern way” to revisit the sequel.
Nintendo delivered quite a surprise for N64 fans this week, announcing Rare’s 3D platformer Banjo-Tooie would be joining the Expansion Pack service next week on 25th October 2024.
As part of this announcement, Rare (known nowadays for titles like Sea of Thieves) has taken to social media to voice its own excitement about fans having access to this classic in “another modern way”. Here’s what the UK-based studio had to say:
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