Hello reader who is also a reader, and welcome back to Booked For The Week – our regular Sunday chat with a selection of cool industry folks about books! No cool industry person this week. Instead, a minor celebration. The RPS content management system tells me that I have used the ‘Booked For The Week’ tag….52 times! I have forgotten to post a few times and there was a brief hiatus, but in terms of volume at least, I’m declaring this the column’s official one year anniversary. Chin chin!
Issue #25 – June 2025.
Welcome back to the Nintendo Life Mailbox. You are now living in a post-Switch 2-release world. Having fun?
It’s been a whirlwind month for Nintendo fans, with a brand new console to busy ourselves with! Consequently, penning missives to us at NL Towers hasn’t been top of your list, it seems. Don’t worry, we understand – those Peach Medallions aren’t going to collect themselves!
Read the full article on nintendolife.com
Last Chance To Enter!
The Nintendo Switch 2 has officially launched, and to commemorate this exciting release, Nintendo Life is able to offer an amazing LEGO giveaway, sponsored by Nintendo UK.
You could win a LEGO Mario Kart – Mario & Standard Kart (72037) set alongside an impressive LEGO The Mighty Bowser™ (71411) set, boasting a combined retail value of an astounding £379.98! These incredible sets offer hours of fun, whether you’re a builder, collector or want a new set to play with. !
Read the full article on nintendolife.com
The “gnarly remake” adds multiple new parks.
Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3 + 4 revives two more classics next month, but that’s not all! In case you missed it, it’s also adding a new pinball-themed park to the series featuring the Birdman himself.
This is one of multiple new parks “joining the lineup of original parks” in this upcoming title, due out for the Switch and Switch 2 on 11th July 2025. To build up the excitement, Activision and Iron Galaxy have now released a new trailer showcasing this park in motion. Here’s what you can expect along with some of the inspiration behind this design:
Read the full article on nintendolife.com
SpongeBob and friends join the race.
Following character leaks earlier this month, Sega has now officially confirmed SpongeBob SquarePants and other Nickelodeon characters will be racing alongside Sonic and friends in Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds when it arrives this September.
This news was shared during the 2025 Nickelodeon Kids’ Choice Awards. SpongeBob (and Patrick Star) will be part of the game’s season pass and will be joined by characters from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and the Avatar universe. This extends to themed vehicles and tracks.
Read the full article on nintendolife.com
A little over three years since it was announced, Dreamsettler, the spiritual sequel to Hypnospace Outlaw, has been cancelled. Yesterday, lead developer Jay Tholen shared a video simply titled “Dreamsettler is canceled”, where he explained some of his reasoning behind the decision. “This is not a joke, and I’m sorry everyone,” Tholen wrote in the description of the video.
I’ve said it a ton over the last few weeks, but interest in Magic: The Gathering is at what feels like an all-time high. With the recently released Final Fantasy Universes Beyond crossover set, new players that may have never picked up a card are now inching ever so slowly towards one of the most addicting and time-consuming hobbies around. If you’re one of these people, or someone looking to dip your toes into the wonderful world of hundred-dollar cardboard, IGN has you covered with our Magic: The Gathering beginner’s guide.
For newcomers, the best place to start playing in person is with what we call “kitchen table” Magic. No formats, no banlist, no meta, just good old fashioned vibes. Find a starter kit you like, grab a friend, sleeve them up, and jump in. These starter decks are great ways to learn the rules. I’d also highly recommend picking up MTG Foundations, as this set is specifically designed with brand new players in mind.
Now that you’ve learned the rules, found the colors you like, and learned a strategy that suits you, you probably want to move up to playing at a local game store (LGS) in your area. Your mileage will vary, as some stores’ player bases favor certain formats over others. But for the most part, many LGSs will run the Standard format as their primary Friday Night Magic (FNM) event. To find an LGS near you, use the Wizards Event Locator to enter your address and distance you want to check.
Every store is different, and not everybody enjoys playing the same formats all the time. Here’s a quick breakdown of some of the most popular formats:
All Constructed formats have a list of banned cards to help balance out the meta and remove insane combos from their respective formats.
For the best place to pick up singles to round out your decks or find sealed product, I recommend Card Kingdom and TCGPlayer. These are the two biggest and most-trusted TCG vendors in the world.
Magic: The Gathering Online has been around for years, and is a pretty good translation of in-person play to this online client. You can play every format available in paper, buy, sell, and trade cards with other players, and it’s the best way to grind out games to practice or learn different strategies.
MTG: Arena is the most recent online Magic client, launching in 2019. Taking visual cues from games like Hearthstone, Arena is my preferred way to play the Standard and Pioneer formats – Modern, Legacy, and other older non-rotating formats aren’t present on Arena. You can still do booster draft and sealed, however. Arena also has a handful of its own bespoke, digital-only formats. Aside from Standard, Pioneer, and Limited, here’s what’s exclusive to Arena:
There you have it! Everything you need to know to start playing Magic: The Gathering both in-person and online. Whether you’re the next best Pro Tour grinder or run the Commander tables at your LGS, there are countless ways to play and enjoy the most popular trading card game in the world. There are countless sealed products to buy and build your collection, and new sets are released every few months. For hardcore collectors, we’ve even helped track some of the most valuable cards to chase in the Final Fantasy Through the Ages collection. And if you’re looking for great gifts for that special Planeswalker in your life or interested in some of the best MTG accessories and supplies, check we’ve got a guide breaking down dozens of my personal recommendations.
Myles Obenza is a freelance writer for IGN. Follow him on Bluesky @mylesobenza.bsky.social.
Ever since Gravity Rush 2 came out eight years ago (let’s not focus too hard on how much time that actually is for my mental health), I have, unfortunately, not been able to stop thinking about it. It is a game with a world full of whimsy, video game ass mechanics, and, most interestingly of all, a plot that quite directly deals with topics like class. What more can you want! And yet a sequel has never materialised. Lucky for me, just yesterday a new gravity shifting game entered the scene: Metro Gravity.
“We can make it work for you”.
It’s fair to say that Switch 2 Game-Key Cards haven’t gone down all that well with consumers.
While Japanese video game consultancy firm Kyos Inc insists that publishers are “thanking Nintendo” for the move following rising production costs of physical media, others are less keen on them; almost 70% of you said you wouldn’t be buying Game-Key Card releases, and many companies within the industry have said they dislike the approach.
Read the full article on nintendolife.com
I know this is a PC games focused outlet, but I’d like to present to you the most PS3 coded game I’ve seen in a long while: Chains of Lukomoyre. Now, to be clear I mean this in the most loving of ways possible. That era of video games obviously set the foundations for the rinse and repeat we see in a lot of triple-A games these days, but there was still the occasional oddity out there that just had the right vibe. And I think Chains of Lukomoyre fits that vibe quite well.
