EA Is Diving Headfirst Into Generative AI With New Partnership

“Together, we’re opening new creative frontiers”.

Electronic Arts (EA) has already caused some controversy in recent weeks when it announced it had been acquired by the PIF (Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund), Silver Lake, and Affinity Partners for a cool $55 billion.

Now, the company is back at it again. In a new announcement, Stability AI (of which acclaimed movie creator James Cameron is part of its board of directors) has confirmed that it has entered into a new partnership with EA to “co-develop transformative generative AI models, tools, and workflows that empower EA’s artists, designers, and developers to reimagine how games are made”.

Read the full article on nintendolife.com

Instruments of Destruction Explodes onto Xbox Series X|S Today

Instruments of Destruction Explodes onto Xbox Series X|S Today

Instruments of Destruction key art

Summary

  • Development history and what to expect from the highly-destructible sandbox.
  • Developed by Red Faction: Guerrilla’s lead technical designer Luke Schneider.
  • How fan feedback helped shaped gameplay design.

It’s been a pretty long journey to get here, but today, Instruments of Destruction is launching on Xbox Series X|S.

I’ve been working as a solo developer for over 15 years now, and this has been by far my most ambitious game to date. Most of my games have been smaller, more arcade-style titles like Fireball 2 (which launched on Xbox Series X|S earlier this year) that are designed for short bursts, but Instruments of Destruction has a whole lot more that I’ve added across five years of development.

In the game’s story, you’re a new hire at Sharpe Industries as a vehicle test pilot, tasked with taking the titular instruments of destruction out to see how much havoc they can wreak across various scenarios. There are over 50 Campaign missions with various objectives – destroy everything within a time limit, avoid damaging specific structures, and so on – each with additional challenges once you’ve finished the level. As well as that, there’s a 25 mission Build & Destroy campaign which introduces you to the mechanics of building your own vehicles. To top it all off, there’s a Sandbox mode where you can build whatever you want and take it out on any unlock level to see what wonderful creations you can come up with. There’s a lot to do!

I started work on Instruments of Destruction in 2020 with a simple goal in mind – I wanted to make a game about destruction. I had previously worked as the lead technical designer on Red Faction: Guerrilla, and while I’d worked closely with a team of programmers to make sure the destruction in that game looked and felt incredible, I hadn’t actually coded any of it myself. With this as my twentieth game, I wanted to push my own skills and see what I could come up with.

I spent a long time fine-tuning the physics and destruction model into something that looked impressive and played nicely with everything else on the screen. Building your own vehicles was also key to the game, and this was a ton of hard work, making sure all the joints worked correctly and vehicles didn’t collapse as soon as you tried to drive them.

But as I got further into development, it became clear that it wasn’t very beginner-friendly. I’d added all these granular tools for building vehicles and making them blow stuff up, and somehow, it felt like the game wasn’t reaching its true potential. So, I regrouped and considered what Instruments of Destruction is actually about – vehicles, physics, and destruction. How could I remove the barrier to entry so players could experience all of those elements within moments of booting up?

Looking around at other games, I saw people talking fondly about Blast Corps, a game I’d missed when it first came out. After taking a weekend to play through and understand what made it so beloved, I had the answer to my problem – a fully-featured campaign with pre-built vehicles, where you can jump in and get straight to the destruction. It took years of designing and fine-tuning to get the campaign levels just right, but in the end, it was worth it.

Instruments of Destruction wouldn’t have made it this far without the dedicated community of builders and destruction lovers who gave me their feedback throughout its development, from the early beta days through Early Access and all the way to launching in 1.0. And now with the support of publisher Secret Mode, I can bring it to an entirely new audience on consoles, complete with all the game modes and mechanics you’d get from the PC version.

I learned a lot making Instruments of Destruction, and I’ll be taking all those lessons into my next games, which will continue to be focused around pushing my skills in creating even better destruction mechanics. Thank you to everyone who helped me get the game this far and thank you to everyone who checks it out on Xbox Series X|S. I can’t wait to see what new vehicles people make!

Instruments of Destruction

Secret Mode

$19.99

Join Sharpe Industries as a vehicle test pilot and journey across the world to remote outposts where everything needs to be destroyed, using purpose-built wrecking machines such as flying bulldozers, tanks wielding quad rocket launchers, and ornithopters with grappling hooks.

Master these contraptions and demolish every structure in sight across two campaigns and a Sandbox mode. Deconstruct buildings piece-by-piece or take advantage of explosive chain-reactions with Instruments of Destruction’s advanced physics system.

Tackle a carnage-filled campaign filled with demolition-based objectives, then test your skills even further in dedicated high-score challenges that apply new parameters and objectives to each level. Or take a break from missions and unwind in the Sandbox mode to raze the world at your own pace.

And don’t just destroy: build. Learn how to design your own machines in a dedicated epilogue campaign for the ultimate demolition experience. Use the in-built editor to construct devastating vehicles armed with chainsaws, lasers, claws, wrecking balls, magnets, vortex generators, and much more.

The post Instruments of Destruction Explodes onto Xbox Series X|S Today appeared first on Xbox Wire.

Spec Ops: The Line director’s new insomnia horror game Sleep Awake will release in December

Speaking as a veteran insomniac who routinely has to operate across time zones, let me share a few of my top tips for staying awake when you really want to sleep. Firstly, fill your eyes with as much light as possible – moonlight, fridgelight, phonelight, flamingoilbarrelight – and your lungs with as much bracing external air as they can take. Secondly, enlist a similarly restless friend for some mutual tickling. Thirdly, remember your failures. All of them. Fourthly, consume a carefully calibrated mixture of fresh fruit and coffee, then look up dad jokes on Reddit.

It doesn’t feel like any of these proven strategies will work in Sleep Awake, the new first-person “psychedelic” horror game from former Spec Ops: The Line director and designer Cory Davis and his team at Eyes Out. Nobody wants to tickle you here, going by the trailer. Nobody has any dad jokes to share. They just want to beat you to a bloody sludge with pipes.

Read more

Hades 2 post-launch patch 1 revamps Melinoë’s “true ending”, and is out now in Steam preview form

Hades 2‘s true ending didn’t feel totally slam dunk satisfying to me in its 1.0 release form, and developers Supergiant Games seem to have agreed with those sorts of assessments. Hence, in the roguelike‘s first proper post-launch patch they’ve just put out as a Steam preview, some “true ending enhancements” being rolled out like a boon from a sassy god.

Shameless plug alert, if you want to read my full thoughts on that 1.0 version, you can read this here review. The short version is that it’s good.

Read more

Bluey Is Going On A New Quest And It’s Coming To Switch And Switch 2 In 2026

“A brand new, original story-led adventure”.

Bluey, the popular Australian animation for children, is getting a new video game on the Switch and Switch 2 in 2026.

It’s officially titled Bluey’s Quest for the Gold Pen and is an “original story-led adventure game” by the show’s creator Joe Brumm. Halfbrick – the Fruit Ninja studio based in Bluey’s hometown of Brisbane – will be bringing this title to Nintendo platforms and other systems in partnership with PM Studios.

Read the full article on nintendolife.com

Pokémon Legends: Z-A Sold 5.8 Million Copies Globally In Its First Week

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: Arceus sold 6.5 million copies worldwide in its first week.

Read the full article on nintendolife.com

How AVGN 8-bit’s Monsters Ring in the Spooky Season

How AVGN 8-bit’s Monsters Ring in the Spooky Season

AVGN key art

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!

Angry Video Game Nerd 8-bit

Retroware


4


$19.99

$17.99

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!

The post How AVGN 8-bit’s Monsters Ring in the Spooky Season appeared first on Xbox Wire.

Every Legend of Zelda Hallmark Keepsake Ornament You Can Buy in 2025

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.

Myles Obenza is a freelance writer for IGN. Follow him on Bluesky @mylesobenza.bsky.social.

Bounty Star Review

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.