It’s been close to three years since the January 2022 reveal of Showa American Story, whose B-movie style trailer depicting 1980s America as a colony of Japan became a viral hit.
Updates have been few and far between since then, but IGN can now exclusively reveal a new trailer along with a 2025 release window on PlayStation 5 and PC (Steam). The game genre is described as an “end of the century romantic RPG fantasy ensemble period drama”.
The dramatic trailer introduces new boss character named Shogun, a tough-looking villain who holds a shield like Captain America, a fluttering cape, and floats like Superman against the sunset. Elsewhere in the video, we see Shogun riding on the back of a pitch-black giraffe.
Creative Director XY.Luo told IGN, “Shogun is a boss character who stands 6 meters tall. He uses the giraffe’s long neck to strike, and he can also fly, throwing his shield to attack the player.”
Luo explained that the battle against such an oversized enemy who rides on the back of an even taller beast will create an epic scale reminiscent of Monster Hunter.
Showa American Story is a road movie-style action RPG in which you cross America in a camper van and motorcycle, and the trailer shows a wealth of locations to visit. We see San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge decorated with Japanese lanterns, Las Vegas awash with neon signs in kanji, the Hollywood sign replaced with “Neo Yokohama”, and the newly christened Neo Tokyo-4 (Austin, Texas) awash with cherry blossoms. A man commits seppuku before Mount Rushmore. America is irresistibly dyed in the colors of Japan’s Showa era.
Protagonist Chouko Chigusa fights her way across America, fighting zombies and strange humanoid creatures with a variety of brutal combat options. In addition to her primary weapons of swords and guns, we see Chouko fight with a giant drill. Luo told us that Chouko’s arsenal will grow throughout her adventure, with a wide variety available. The trailer also shows a wealth of customization elements and minigames inside the camper van.
The story is still shrouded in mystery, but there’s no doubt it has a strong cast of characters. In August, IGN exclusively revealed boss character Gokou, the Texan governor turned cowboy-samurai who sold his state to Japan. And with the new trailer showing Chouko Chigusa stomping on enemies with her high heels and putting zombie heads with a golf club, our interest is piqued for further updates as Showa American Story’s 2025 release approaches.
Following the surprise launch of Nintendo Music on smartphone devices yesterday, Nintendo has now updated the application with Super Mario Bros. Wonder game music.
This includes music from the game’s title screen, the opening Grassland theme and of course the ‘Piranha Plants of Parade’ song. Some of these tracks can even be extended in length! All up there are 86 new songs you can listen to right now. And as long as you have an ‘active’ Switch Online sub and the app downloaded, you’re good to go!
Dragon Age: The Veilguard’s launch has already made it EA’s biggest ever single-player game on Steam, topping the charts and beating out the concurrents for 2023’s Star Wars Jedi: Survivor.
At the time of publication, Dragon Age: The Veilguard’s peak was about 70,414 concurrents, putting it just outside the top 10 most played games on the platform with mostly positive reviews. It sits one spot ahead of Baldur’s Gate 3, which continues to enjoy ongoing success thanks to the introduction of mods and other new features. EA previous high watermark was Jedi Survivor, which managed an all-time peak of 67,855.
We wrote in our own review, “Dragon Age: The Veilguard refreshes and reinvigorates a storied series that stumbled through its middle years, and leaves no doubt that it deserves its place in the RPG pantheon. The next Mass Effect is going to have a very tough act to follow, which is not something I ever imagined I’d be saying before I got swept away on this adventure.”
Overall it’s a solid start for BioWare’s new RPG given that it launched on a day when most of its fans are either at work or in school. It’ll be worth keeping an eye on its performance heading into its first full weekend as players properly dig into the first new Dragon Age release since 2014.
Hey Insiders! Happy Halloween to those who celebrate. The team is currently heads down working (and not at all playing Black Ops 6 between meetings) on getting the next releases and game previews ready.
It’s been a while since we posted one of these. We wanted to touch base to give you an update about the program and celebrate some of the things that team Xbox and the Insider Program have delivered. As always: a great big thank you to those who have participated in the Xbox Insider program over the years. We’ve got a big list of things to go over.
‘Freaky’ Feature Friday
There is an elephant in the room that I wanted to address first: the ‘Feature Friday’ plans for the subreddit that were announced some time ago. We haven’t forgotten our commitment to increased transparency and sharing more in-depth information about our process and ‘Feature Friday’ is part of that.
First, we read everything that is posted. We are here to champion your feedback and help make the Xbox community the best it can be. If we can’t do that in a way that the community feels heard, something needs to change. Right now, the team has renewed discussions about a few specific options internally. I don’t have more to share today, but I thought it was important to let you know that this is still on the forefront of our minds.
In spookier news, here are some of the terrifying highlights from our Operations team:
Game “Error when launching store” Previews – Tim W.
Everyone loves playtests as you get to preview new games or updates. We’ve had some great ones in the last few months including 33 Immortals, Starbound, Rhythm Towers, Off the Grid, FragPunk, and The First Berserker Khazan. We appreciate everyone participating and giving your feedback! We are continuing to partner with different developers to give you more playtests so keep an eye out for new previews and announcements in the Xbox Insider Hub app. The Rhythm Towers preview is still available to join, so if you haven’t already, give it a try.
If you launch the Xbox Insider Hub and don’t see the game you were expecting, it might be because we’ve reached the limit on users for that preview. Sometimes the developer only wants to target certain regions or requires you to sign up on their website. There are many reasons why you might not see a preview. While we try to include details about preview eligibility in our posts, if you think there’s an issue we always recommend using the Report a Problem feature.
Console “Gonna install right in the middle of your ranked match” OS – Joshua C
The past few months have been marked by more than 100 updates across the Xbox Update Preview rings! Together, we’ve seen fundamental updates to the friends and followers experience, and quality of life improvements like being able to choose specific components before starting a game install. There have also been great accessibility features released like toggle hold and being able to map buttons to thumbstick directions, and improvements to custom images for backgrounds and gamerpics. From the smallest changes to the biggest features, Xbox Insiders are always the first to experience the latest and greatest we have to offer.
Of course, we have also uncovered our fair share of issues these past months, and the feedback you’ve filed with Report a problem has been as invaluable as always. Your continued diligence in providing feedback has played a role in many of the issues resolved recently, including fixes to narrator and magnifier, unexpected game card navigation, as well as major improvements to capturing game clips and taking screenshots. Thank you for helping to make Xbox better for everyone!
PC “Wait, there’s a PC Insider Preview?” Flighting – Jon H
Over the past few months, Xbox Insiders on PC had the opportunity to preview several new features: Compact Mode for Game Bar, the new Friends and Followers Experience and just this week a new Home experience in the Xbox App. If you’re interested in previewing new features for PC and supported handhelds, make sure you register for the PC Gaming Preview in the Xbox Insider Hub.
I’d like to think I’m a good singer, and wanted to release this section as a video akin to a certain song some of you might have seen in school about how bills are passed on Capitol Hill (you know the one I’m talking about). Fortunately for everyone, that was vetoed.
But I do want to give the community some insight into how bugs work and why we need specific feedback.
So, you’re playing your favorite game, and it crashes back to the dashboard all of a sudden. You bring up the Report a problem prompt by holding down the Xbox button on your controller and selecting ‘Report a problem.’ After following the prompts and hitting submit, what happens to your feedback?
Here is the simplified version: your feedback lands in pool of all submitted Insider feedback. The Insider team reviews all the feedback. All of it. Each day, the team sends actionable feedback into another pool where the engineering teams investigate and fix or reroute if necessary.
That’s why it’s critically important to include specific details. What was the issue and when did you hit it. If you can tell us what you were doing, great! “It crashed” is helpful in that we know your game crashed. “It crashed on the splash screen” is even more helpful because we know when it crashed. “It crashed on the splash screen after I quit one game and then tried launching this one,” includes what you were doing. When in doubt, I recommend erring on the side of including more details. The easier it is for engineers to reproduce the problem, the more likely it is they can fix it. If you don’t want to use your controller, we have a couple other options (including a USB mouse and keyboard or using another device entirely). Read more here: Provide feedback to Team Xbox | Xbox Support
Thanks again for being an Xbox Insider, we appreciate you.
The House of the Dead will be the latest video game to head to the big screen, and it’s got a seasoned adaptation director at the helm.
Per a Deadline report on Thursday, Paul W.S. Anderson will write and direct the big-screen version of The House of the Dead, the Sega horror shooter series. He’ll also be producing alongside his longtime creative partner Jeremy Bolt.
And it seems Anderson just can’t stay away from this genre, with The House of the Dead marking his fourth adaptation of a video game property. Previously, Anderson directed Mortal Kombat (1995), Resident Evil (2002), and most recently Monster Hunter (2020).
Anderson also gave an interview to Deadline where he gave a quick glimpse as to how he’ll be approaching this adaptation, revealing that he’ll be basing it on the story of The House of the Dead 3. “If you know the mythology, that is all about family conflict, amidst the action and scares,” he told the outlet.
“It’s about a woman, Lisa Rogan, who’s attempting to rescue her father,” he explained. “And it’s also about Daniel Curien, who’s the son of the man who caused this mutant outbreak in the first place and who has to deal with the sins of the father.”
Anderson added he’s been a fan of The House of the Dead games since the ’90s, which is when the Sega series kicked off. It became known not only for its use of the light gun, but for its different take on the zombie genre, featuring fast-moving creatures.
“This is a full-on terror ride. It’s different than what we did with Resident Evil, where there were lots of traps and puzzles.”
“My approach will be to reflect what this hyper-immersive, kinetic video game is, which is why Zack Snyder took these creatures and made them fast moving (in 2004’s Dawn of the Dead),” Anderson said. “This is a full-on terror ride. It’s different than what we did with Resident Evil, where there were lots of traps and puzzles and things to be figured out. House of the Dead is at heart a light rail shooter game, so it drags you straight into the middle of the action. I’m going to make a movie that mirrors that approach and plays out in real time, dragging the audience straight into the action.”
It’s only the latest big-screen take on a Sega game, with the Sonic the Hedgehog movies continuing to move along with Paramount Pictures. And just earlier this month, Sega announced a film adaptation of its Shinobi movies at Universal.
Interestingly, the Deadline report notes that Sega has been protective of The House of the Dead IP. However, Toru Nakahara, Sega’s Head of Production for Movies/TV, tells the outlet that the Sonic films “changed the dynamic toward our transmedia policies and since then we’ve been actively developing a lot of productions, looking at it as an initiative to expand the whole Sega brand.”
Further details, including a cast or release window, are still pending. For more on the series, check out our review of the 2022 House of the Dead remake, where we said it “can be an enjoyable return to the classic arcade rail shooter, but performance hiccups and frustrating controls are scarier enemies than the zombies themselves.”
Alex Stedman is a Senior News Editor with IGN, overseeing entertainment reporting. When she’s not writing or editing, you can find her reading fantasy novels or playing Dungeons & Dragons.
EA and Respawn Entertainment are making a change to Apex Legends that will no longer allow players to access the game via Linux OS, including Steam Deck using Linux.
The developers announced the shift away from Linux support in a post on its website. Although it’s a move that will no doubt surprise those affected, EA says dropping support for the OS option is part of the company’s wider initiative to maintain “competitive integrity” and fight off cheaters.
“In our efforts to combat cheating in Apex, we’ve identified Linux OS as being a path for a variety of impactful exploits and cheats,” the post says. “As a result, we’ve decided to block Linux OS access to the game. While this will impact a small number of Apex players, we believe the decision will meaningfully reduce instances of cheating in our game.”
EA calls Linux an “attractive” OS for those looking to cheat for a variety of reasons. The thought process behind the decision involved weighing the number of legitimate Linux players against the impact the growing number of cheaters has had on the average Apex Legend fan. While it’s unclear exactly how many players utilize Linux when playing Apex Legends, EA and Respawn say it’s a tradeoff they are willing to make.
This means that Apex Legends will be unplayable immediately for those running this operating system.
The reason the team says it’ll be ending support for Steam Deck, which uses Linux by default, is that there is “currently no reliable way for us to differentiate a legitimate Steam Deck from a malicious cheat claiming to be a Steam Deck (via Linux).” However, if handheld users manage to install and use Windows on Steam Deck instead, they’ll be able to continue playing on the device. So, while the developers continue to crack down on cheaters plaguing the long-running battle royale game, all Linux users will no longer be able to enjoy the experience at all.
“To eliminate this cheat vector, we have made the decision to prevent access to the game for Linux users,” EA continues. “This means that Apex Legends will be unplayable immediately for those running this operating system.”
Apex Legends brought the Titanfall universe into the free-to-play battle royale world in 2019. We gave it a 9/10 in our review, saying that the experience’s “mix of exciting characters, excellent gunplay, and unmatched FPS movement keep it a consistently fresh thrill.” Although fans took the first-person shooter’s gameplay upon launch, it’s not been without its struggles. Respawn announced that it would make alterations to its Battle Pass model in July of this year but quickly reverted many changes after widespread outcry from fans.
Apex Legends Season 22, titled Shockwave, is currently wrapping up, with Season 23 set to soon continue a long run of seasonal updates. As for the far-off future, EA has recently confirmed that it has no interest in making Apex Legends 2.
Michael Cripe is a freelance contributor with IGN. He started writing in the industry in 2017 and is best known for his work at outlets such as The Pitch, The Escapist, OnlySP, and Gameranx.
Be sure to give him a follow on Twitter @MikeCripe.
You ever wonder how we got here? Not in an existential, “where did we come from?” kind of way, but more specifically “how did a one-off, co-op survival mode in a video game that used to put quotes about the horrors of war on screen when you died turn into this?” 16 years on, it’s hard to reconcile what the original Nazi Zombies mode from 2008’s World at War used to be with the outrageous, Resident Evil 6-inspired campfest Zombies has become. I’m not saying any of this in a bad way, mind you; Black Ops 6’s take on the mode is thrilling and unique thanks to all new movement mechanics, good map design, some absolutely killer Easter Eggs, lots of truly absurd guns, and the glorious return of round-based gameplay. Zombies hasn’t been the thing it was in World at War for a while, and I still find myself wondering how we got here, but I’m definitely not complaining about the end result.
Let’s carve out the bloody guts of this thing, shall we? Black Ops 6’s Zombies mode features two all-new maps: Terminus, a prison complex-turned-bio-research-station, and Liberty Falls, a small town in West Virginia whose slice of quaint Americana is about to test itself against The Worst Day Ever (spoiler: it doesn’t seem to be going well for the Americana). The story itself is a direct sequel to the Zombies campaign in 2020’s Black Ops Cold War, and if you, like me, have largely forgotten what happened in the intervening four years, there doesn’t seem to be much attempt to catch you up. That means you’re going to hear a lot of proper-noun-filled dialogue that could be important or fun references, but instead had me going “I vaguely remember that person,” a little too often. That said, there are some neat story beats here that I unfortunately can’t talk about without spoilers, and you’ll get more out of each map if you pay attention to the subtle details.
I wish I could say the same for the mid-combat dialogue. Mostly, I wanted the voices in my ear (and the characters I was playing) to shut up. They have what I’m going to call The Modern Video Game Character Problem™, which is to say they all talk too much – especially since half the time they’re just broadcasting their thoughts out loud. I’m not saying each and every one of them is a deeply annoying, terminally unfunny, outrageously unlikeable person, but I’m not not saying that, either. Their mid-combat banter is like something compiled from a Schwarzenegger film penned by ChatGPT – I’m not expecting poetry here, but at least give me Gears of War-level banter, you know? I can only hear lines like the one where someone is complaining about how the zombies make them so mad they “boil their piss” or how we need a mop to clean up all the brains we’re splattering everywhere so many times before I want to turn my gun towards my allies instead. Some of it is admittedly funny — I like Grey’s one about how she wanted a protractor to calculate an impact angle — but mostly it’s just kinda there.
You know what’s pretty sick, though? The gameplay. The biggest change here is Omnimovement (Zombiemovement?), Black Ops 6’s complete overhaul of Call of Duty’s basic movement mechanics. You can sprint, slide, and dive in every direction, even chaining these moves together. You’ve also got a full 360 degrees of motion, which means you can do sick stuff like sprint backwards, pull off a retreating dive, mow down the zombies approaching you from every angle, and then get up and keep moving before they even get close. We haven’t seen zombie-killing moves like this since Resident Evil 6, minus a few suplexes here and there. (Dear Treyarch, please add suplexes. Love, Will.) Even if Treyarch misses what might be the easiest post-launch, patch-introduced layup with that, though, the point I’m making is that this feels good, and I like it. That said, I feel like Omnimovement is more of a cool addition rather than something you’ll use all of the time, especially as the zombies get more numerous in the later rounds.
My favorite thing about this year’s Zombies mode are the maps.
My favorite thing about this year’s Zombies are the maps themselves. I prefer Liberty Falls over Terminus because I vibe with its more open areas and the unique travel options you have, like the extremely entertaining ziplines that let you zoom from roof to roof. I also enjoy its more traditional structure of “pay Essence to open doors and access new places” over Terminus’s “restore power to the generators and defend them from zombies so you can earn the ability to open doors” twist, but that’s not to say Terminus doesn’t do anything cool. At one point, you’ll have to use a little outboard-powered raft to venture to the smaller islands around the main area to do the next step in the map’s Easter Egg-fueled story mode. Even then, you’re not going to escape any zombies that were chasing you on the mainland. When my team and I landed on a beach, a horde of zombies popped out of the ground like a bunch of really angry, undead cabbages, but c’est la vie, right? C’est la undead? I don’t speak French.
What I do really like are the Easter Eggs unique to each map. Black Ops 6’s Zombies mode has you constantly moving, unlocking new areas, and trying to complete that map’s Main Quest during each round. That means a lot of running for your life and trying to earn enough Essence (which you get from offing zombies) to open the way to the next area, buy a new weapon, or upgrade a gun you like at a Pack-a-Punch Machine, which does exactly what it sounds like. Discovering the Easter Eggs is most of the fun. You’ve got your Main Quest ones, of course, like solving the math equations in Terminus’s science lab to build your Wonder Weapon (an incredibly powerful gun you’ll need to progress the Main Quest) or using that weapon to shoot some ceiling tentacles you’ve summoned to find the hard drive they’ve eaten. But the truly fun stuff are the optional Easter Eggs. Finding all the bowling shoes on Liberty Falls and going zombie bowling, for example, or shooting a hidden skull on top of the church to do your own cover of It’s Raining Men for extra resources. I don’t want to spoil all of these, but there are a lot of them, and they’re all fun, some in some pretty wild ways.
My only complaint is that, to do the fun stuff, you’ll essentially need a pre-built group. Every matchmade group I ran with either had no idea what they were doing or didn’t feel like talking, so our ability to make progress was limited. To complete the Main Quest on Black Ops 6’s Zombies, you’re going to either have a lot of patience and be willing to learn or know how to do it already. And I don’t just mean the Easter Eggs. You’ll need to know what perks, like increased speed and faster reload times or buffed health, to buy first from the soda machines (and where the machines are, so you can eventually grab them all), when to Pack-a-Punch your weapons with Essence and upgrade their rarity with Salvage, where to buy armor upgrades, what Easter Egg goodies to save for the late game, how to keep a single Zombie alive at the end of a round to progress the Main Quest more easily, and a whole lot more. There are a lot of mechanics in Black Ops 6, and you’ll need to know how to take advantage of… most of them.
Learning to make sense of all of this stuff is part of the fun.
The only one I found not getting a lot of spin in my runs were Gogglegums, single-use candies that return from Black Ops 3 and provide unique power-ups during matches. Essentially, you bring a customized pack into matches, and then spend Essence at Gobblegum machines to get them mid-match, though you can also earn them. It’s a cool idea, and there are some strong Gobblegums out there, like Perkaholic, which gives you every perk on the map, or Wonderbar, which will give you a guaranteed Wonder Weapon the next time you use a Mystery Box – but my team generally felt it was better to spend money on more expensive, guaranteed boons like a Pack-a-Punch upgrade than to gamble on the less expensive Gobblegums. We basically never used them. I don’t think they’re bad, per se, I just don’t think they’re necessary, either, given everything else you have access to and how tight Essence can sometimes be.
Don’t get me wrong: learning to make sense of all of this stuff is part of the fun. If you’ve played Zombies before, some of it will come naturally, but it does require a lot of coordination. And if don’t have that, well… based on some of the groups I got matched with, some folks just aren’t going to have much fun. Treyarch plans to provide an optional, more guided, story-focused version of the mode later on to preserve the sanctity of the Easter Egg hunt – that will disable Easter Eggs and Side Quests, but I kind of wish it was here now so I didn’t have to roll the matchmaking dice every time my friends were busy. At least any account progression you earn in Zombies carries over to the multiplayer if you wanna take a break, though. Get you some new guns before you go into matchmaking.
Oh, and if you want to do the Main Quest, you’d better be in it for the long haul. Completing a map can take a hours, even if you’re doing it right, and you can’t save your progress unless you’re playing solo – the first time I cleared Liberty Falls, for instance, it took our group about three hours; we were, admittedly, doing a lot of optional stuff, but that is still a long time. So, for the optimal experience, you’ll need a team, all available at the same time, a few spare hours, and for nothing to go wrong. Getting near the end of a map and dying is soul-crushing, not because you failed, but because of how long it can take to do it all again. One night, we got most of the way through a map, died, and then… tried again for about ten rounds before all of us realized we were exhausted and should probably just pick things back up tomorrow.
There are also some annoying bugs. Sometimes, I couldn’t interact with objects and my teammates would have to so we could progress, or trying to pick our Wonder Weapon would always drop the same, super-upgraded Pack-a-Punch gun instead of the cheap one we wanted to give up, or we’d have mid-match disconnects or stuttering. No big multiplayer game launches without similar problems, but they’re no fun either way. Once, we couldn’t even get out of a match properly. We didn’t lose progress, thankfully, but it was still obnoxious.
Part of the fun of Dragon Age’s fantasy is that it’s inconsistent – or at least, inconsistent by the standards of fantasy RPGs, which often break down into a million neatly organised and interlocking codex entries. It all rides on who you speak to. The humans believe one thing about the origins and workings of Thedas, the elves another, the qunari something else entirely. These differences are the basis for many factional disagreements and thus, many core series plot developments. According to former lead writer David Gaider, however, there’s an “uber-plot” behind it all that may one day be resolved and bring the series to a close, assuming BioWare continue to refer to his original (and closely guarded) narrative documents.
