Patrick will apparently be the star of the show.
Patrick the starfish from Nickelodeon’s Spongebob SqaurePants series could be getting his very own video game, according to a new online listing.
Read the full article on nintendolife.com
Patrick will apparently be the star of the show.
Patrick the starfish from Nickelodeon’s Spongebob SqaurePants series could be getting his very own video game, according to a new online listing.
Read the full article on nintendolife.com
The weekend is finally here, and new deals have popped up. This time, most of the major deals are for PlayStation 5, as Sony is currently hosting its Back to School sale. Today is your last chance to score on these deals before they’re gone. The best deals for Saturday, August 3, include PSVR2, PS5 Slim, Persona 5 Tactica, Returnal, Demon’s Souls, and more.
You can score a new PlayStation VR2 headset for a record-low $349.99 right now at Amazon. This VR headset has all sorts of high-end features, including a 110-degree FOV, 4K HDR visuals, eye tracking, and more. Plus, the PC Adapter is set to release in just a few days, which will allow you to play Steam VR titles through the PSVR2 headset. While it’s certainly a tough buy if you play exclusively on PS5, the PSVR2 can make for an excellent PC headset, especially at this price.
Alongside deals on games and PSVR2, you can also save on a PlayStation 5 Slim! Both the Disc and Digital versions are available on sale for $50 off, which is likely the best deal you can grab outside of the Holiday season. If you’ve been thinking about picking up a PS5 for College Football 25 or the upcoming Astro Bot, now is an amazing time to save $50 and grab a new system.
Demon’s Souls has returned to an all-time low with the PlayStation Back to School sale. For $29.99, you can expirence this Bluepoint Games remake of one of FromSoftware’s most memorable titles. Since this title is only on PlayStation 5, you won’t be able to play Demon’s Souls on PC or other platforms. Slay the demons and explore the world of Boletaria like never before.
Amazon has Persona 5 Tactica listed for $19.99, matching the all-time low for this title. This action-packed adventure takes the Phantom Thieves into a new adventure with tactical combat. If you enjoyed Persona 5 Royal or Persona 5 Strikers, P5 Tactica should be a game on your radar. Erina, a character new to the series, is a great addition to an already amazing cast of characters.
Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 is also on sale, priced now at $49.99. This matches the previous low, which occurred during the Days of Play sale earlier this year. Spider-Man 2 features both Peter Parker and Miles Morales as playable characters, with a whole new area of New York to explore. You can swing through the city with new suit abilities like Web Wings and take down criminals all around. You’ll need to be prepared, as both Kraven the Hunter and the symbiote Venom are prepared to take you down and rule over NYC.
Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart was one of the first major PlayStation 5 titles, releasing in June 2021. This title featured Rivet for the first time, another Lombax who exists in the universe. Together, Rivet and Ratchet must work to take down Doctor Nefarious and save the galaxy once again. With the classic action gameplay and new features, Rift Apart is an excellent platform you should play if you are a fan of the genre.
Years later, God of War Ragnarok is still one of the best PS5 games you can pick up. This action game acts as the sequel to 2018’s God of War, following Kratos and Atreus as Fimbulwinter looms. If you’ve yet to play this game, this is a great time to pick up Ragnarok at a discount and see why so many players love this series. $39.99 is a fantastic price, and you’re not likely to see anything lower outside of major holiday sales toward the end of the year.
Returnal is also on sale this weekend as part of Sony’s Back to School sale. This challenging shooter features a procedural world that changes at every death. To date, this is still one the most tactical games you can buy on PS5, with dozens of hours of action awaiting. At $29.99, it’s not likely that we’ll see this title go much lower, if at all.
Amazon has Spider-Man: Miles Morales Ultimate Edition listed for $39.99, which is one of the lowest prices we’ve seen. This is an amazing deal since you’re essentially getting both Spider-Man: Miles Morales and Spider-Man Remastered for under $20 each. Both rarely go on sale for that low, so this is your best option to pick up these games.
K.K. Rider.
The second round of LEGO Animal Crossing sets brings two key locales from your Animal Crossing: New Horizons island to life in Danish brick form. Alongside the Dodo Airlines terminal, K.K. Slider makes his Lego debit in the K.K.’s Concert at the Plaza set.
This is the priciest of the two sets, including three minifigures (including a new version of Isabelle), a facade of the Town Hall including the clock, the noticeboard, and the flagpole, K.K.’s camper van, and a small cafe serving tea and sweetmeats.
Read the full article on nintendolife.com
Up to 65% off.
To celebrate the release of Star Wars: Bounty Hunter on the Nintendo Switch this week, Aspyr is currently running a Star Wars eShop flash sale in North America.
From now until 5th August 2024, Star Wars fans can get up to 65% off select titles like Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, Star Wars: Republic Commando, and even some bundle deals. Star Wars Battlefront: Classic Collection and Star Wars: Bounty Hunter are excluded from this sale.
Read the full article on nintendolife.com
If you’re looking for Hunter Era codes, IGN has you covered! In this article, you’ll find a list of active and working Hunter Era codes in August 2024 that you can redeem for free rewards and bonuses.
Hunter Era is a popular Hunter x Hunter-themed Roblox experience in which you fight and grow your skills to become the very best hunter on PC, mobile, and console.
Here are all the active Hunter Era codes in August 2024 and the rewards you get for redeeming them:
Below, you’ll find a list of expired Hunter Era codes that are no longer working in August 2024:
To redeem Hunter Era codes, follow the steps below:
If the Hunter Era code you’re trying to redeem isn’t working, it’s likely due to two possible reasons:
When inputting a Hunter Era code into Roblox, ensure it’s spelled correctly and that there are no accidental spaces before or after the code. If it still isn’t working, the code is probably expired.
To get more Hunter Era codes yourself, the two best ways are:
While we check for new codes often, the quickest way to know about new Hunter Era codes is to follow the experience’s official Discord server, where you can set your notification preferences for new codes.
Meg Koepp is a Guides Editor on the IGN Guides team, with a focus on trends. When she’s not working, you can find her adventuring around Eorzea in Final Fantasy XIV or making miniatures.
Epic Mickey, The Eternal Life of Goldman and exciting teasers.
THQ Nordic hosted its 2024 showcase this week and it featured all sorts of game releases and teasers, including some Nintendo ones.
Read the full article on nintendolife.com
Xbox has announced that it is delaying Avowed from later in 2024 to February 18, 2025, to “give players’ backlogs some breathing room.”
Xbox shared the news on X/Twitter alongside a graphic showing all of its currently announced first party Xbox games.
“So many games coming! As such, we’re moving Avowed to Feb 18, 2025, to give players’ backlogs some breathing room,” Xbox wrote. “Stay tuned for more from our games across Activision, Blizzard, Bethesda & Xbox Game Studios at gamescom, including our Aug 23 livestream for a look at Avowed.”
So many games coming! As such, we’re moving Avowed to Feb 18, 2025 to give players’ backlogs some breathing room.
Stay tuned for more from our games across Activision, Blizzard, Bethesda & Xbox Game Studios at gamescom, including our Aug 23 livestream for a look at Avowed:… pic.twitter.com/3RnyVwlHRa
— Xbox (@Xbox) August 2, 2024
The current release schedule for all of these games is as follows;
Avowed was originally planned to be released in Fall 2024. In June, a blog post accidentally revealed a new date of November 12, 2024, but it was quickly deleted as it appeared to not be set in stone.
Avowed got a new story trailer at the Xbox Games Showcase in June, and a 30-minute gameplay deep dive followed shortly after. The lengthy gameplay showed both first and third-person gameplay in the world of Eora and showcased some of the magical tools players will access to in the RPG.
With Avowed out of the way for now, you can check out what other games to focus on in our look The Biggest Games of August 2024 and beyond. Additionally, you can also check out the rest of Xbox’s gamescom plans right here.
Have a tip for us? Want to discuss a possible story? Please send an email to newstips@ign.com.
Adam Bankhurst is a writer for IGN. You can follow him on X/Twitter @AdamBankhurst and on TikTok.
If you were called on to guess the best-selling tabletop games on Amazon, you’d probably opt for a household name like Monopoly, or one of its exhausting catalog of identikit variants. Much of the time – sales numbers vary day by day, of course – you’d not only be wrong, but likely astonished to learn that Monopoly, Scrabble and a host of other well-worn names are regularly outsold by a humble series of murder mystery games called Cryptic Killers.
“Our bestselling game, Murder of a Millionaire, has consistently been above Monopoly’s classic board game for quite some time,” says Andrew Hobbs, co-inventor of the series. “We’re super proud to be up there amongst the big guys.” It also made IGN’s list of best murder mystery games.
Perhaps even more astonishing is the fact that this sales behemoth arose from a chance holiday meeting. “Luke Stephenson and I met each other at the beach bar in Mexico, over a beer back in 2012,” Hobbs continues. “When the holiday came to an end, we added each other on Facebook and left it there. We both thought we’d never see each other again.”
Fate, however, had other ideas. Both men were fond of keeping notebooks to scribble down ideas and inventions when inspiration struck, and it was something that came back to them five years later when they considered starting a business together. Hobbs picks up the tales. “Fast forward a couple more years, and we found ourselves enjoying a few detective style games during the pandemic,” he continues. “We both believed that we could do a great job of creating our own range of games in this genre, so we got to work, and Cryptic Killers was born.”
Even at the height of lockdown, however, murder mystery was already a crowded genre, and the games needed a selling point to help them stand out from the crowd. They turned to another in-vogue genre for inspiration. “We knew that true crime on Netflix, Amazon and the like is extremely popular,” Hobbs explains. “We wanted to mimic the type of feeling that you get after watching a great crime documentary, and we knew that if we could do that, we’d be onto something.”
But they also put a lot of thought into how to make sure the game started and remained compelling as players worked their way through the evidence. “Our cases contain multiple suspects with different motives, and players get a sense of achievement each time they’re able to eliminate one of the suspects, so rather than having one win at the end of the game, you have multiple “mini wins” throughout the experience,” Hobbs explains. He’s tapping into what psychologists call a feedback loop, where you achieve a small gain and immediately feel like you want to put your new knowledge into practice. It’s pleasurable and addictive, and is one reason why some games have that “one more turn” feeling, but it’s unusual to find it in a murder mystery.
Their initial design, Murder of a Millionaire tasked players with identifying the killer of an unlucky lottery winner from a cast of well-drawn characters, using a varied case file of evidence that included photographs, witness statements and ephemera such as train timetables and newspaper clippings. Solving the case called for a surprising variety of skills, from logical deduction, through puzzle solving and into the good, old-fashioned grunt work of picking out tiny details from images and reams of text.
The amount of information involved can make it feel like the game is best suited to a solo sleuth who can digest it all and not have to repeat reams of text for the benefit of a group, but Hobbs believes a small team works best. “The games encourage conversation,” he observes. “Most games have you competing against your peers; our games are the opposite, needing collaborative play. People digest the information differently to one another. This means that one person may pick up on a clue that someone else didn’t.” The breadth of different approaches required to solve the case also support the group approach, as it benefits from a range of skill sets.
While the case presented was thorough and compelling, some of the image work had room for improvement, even if it was supposed to represent the grainy images of CCTV. That’s partly because the intrepid designers had to literally do it all themselves. “Luke and I both appear as characters in the games because we didn’t have the luxury of being able to hire actors and professional sets,” Hobbs laughs. “It is actually Luke’s wife who is laying in a puddle of blood in the crime scene photos from Murder of a Millionaire. As our games have evolved, and budgets have since increased, we’ve been able to invest more time and money into developing higher quality assets.”
There were also elements of it that felt like a stretch, such as the idea that the investigating detective would just pass over their notes to a colleague, with no verbal explanation, and leaving them without essential information such as a password, which is one of the game’s opening puzzles. “We created a scenario that was possible, even if it wasn’t probable,” Hobbs explains. “The implausible often adds an element of fun or intrigue to the storyline. Take the story of Ted Bundy. He escaped from custody not once, but twice. He also represented himself in court, and proposed to his girlfriend while she was on the witness stand. If that didn’t seem implausible enough, some of the evidence in the case had been mishandled or lost during the investigation too!”
Leveraging a password as the basis for a puzzle also allowed the designers to explore new avenues of play, adding an online element to the experience. “It makes the games more interactive, more immersive, and allows us to introduce different types of media into the game such as video and audio,” says Hobbs. “It also helps with staging the game play. Sometimes you want players to read a piece of information in a certain order to lead their mind in a certain direction, and that’s not always easy to do if you hand over a case file of evidence where they can read it in any order they wish.”
Murder of a Millionaire sold well initially, but its real success came after a fan featured it on TikTok, showcasing the growing power of that platform to market long-playing tabletop games, despite its short-form video format. “When we first went viral on TikTok, we didn’t even have an account there,” Hobbs recalls. “Sales went through the roof and have remained that way ever since. I remember calling Luke, saying we needed to be on TikTok, and we ended up in the early hours of the morning pulling together bits and pieces to set up the account. We are extremely grateful to everyone that posts about us on social media, it really helps small companies like us.”
From that initial explosion, Cryptic Killers has become a diverse range of mystery modules with a dedicated fan base who like to swap completed scenarios with each other once the solution is out. Hobbs is happier about this than you might imagine. “It hearkens back to the old discussion of whether libraries are a good thing for book authors,” he observes. “If someone shares one with a friend, there’s always a chance that friend will come back to buy another one of our cases for themselves. It also helps us to build our community of loyal detectives, and encourages more word of mouth marketing. One way other companies have gotten round this is to create game assets that must be destroyed as part of the playing process. That’s not a route we wanted to go down.”
Further scenarios have led to Hobbs and Stephenson looking to add new elements to the gameplay to keep things fresh for fans. One thing they’ve become renowned for is a sense of theatricality, which was missing in their first games. “We’ve added more drama to each of the stories, heightened by introducing unique methods of murder, such as a poisoned saxophone reed,” says Hobbs. “Our later releases are themed to different decades, like the 1920s or the 1960s. This allows us to change up the type of evidence in each of the games.”
Of course, as the games have gone on, Hobbs has particular favorites from the titles he’s worked on. “My personal favorite is Murder at Merivale Manor,” he reveals. “It’s the case set in the 1920s, but you’re trying to solve the case in the present day.” But in terms of individual puzzles, he’s most proud of the double-whammy in Murder in Market Hill. “There is a big plot twist to the game and this particular puzzle incorporates two different puzzles that need to be solved to get to the answer,” he continues. “But I can’t say too much more without giving the game away!”
Despite the popularity of their murder mystery series, Hobbs is aware that he and Stephenson need to explore new territory to keep things fresh. But he’s staying as tight-lipped about what that might involve as he is about his precious puzzles, saying only that there’ll be a new case file soon, followed by the Cryptic Killers range “diversifying” into new areas. Fans of the series will have to do their own sleuthing if they want to try and figure out what that might mean.
Matt Thrower is a contributing freelancer for IGN, specializing in tabletop games. You can reach him on BlueSky at @mattthr.bsky.social.
I’ve never learned to drive, but every so often a well-meaning friend tells me I’d be good at it, because ‘look, Edwin, you play all those driving games, surely they’ve taught you the basics’. Friend, here is what driving games have taught me: traffic lights are there for regional flavour; drifting is the same thing as cornering; other cars exist to serve as bumper cushions when overshooting a turn. Certainly, nobody wants a guy whose ideas about automobiles come from 2018’s Wreckfest to be involved in the school run. On which note: THQ Nordic have just announced Wreckfest 2 – a fresh helping of destruction derby with fancified visuals and newly animate drivers who flinch and gesticulate when other drivers smash into them. Witness the carnage in the announcement trailer below.
Explaining why Castlevania 3 sounds better in Japan.
Masahiro Sakurai is once again delving into his video game knowledge with a video all about the intricacies of NES and Famicom audio.
What begins as an introduction to the consoles’ different audio processing channels (pulse, triangle, noise and DPCM), soon turns into a history lesson about how audio production developed for the platform as ROM capabilities increased.
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