Skyrim modders have yet again managed to pull off something remarkable. You know how creating patches to ensure two mods work together smoothly’s long been something that requires firing up the likes of the creation kit or xEdit? Well, thanks to a new mod dubbed the in-game patcher, it’s possible to resolve issues like that simply by wandering up to the location as the Dragonborn and editing the very make-up of the world.
See a rock clipping through a house because you’ve downloaded a couple of works that give the same bit of Whiterun a makeover? Just mosey over, grab the misbehaving mineral, and either move it elsewhere or delete it. You’ll have make sure you’ve not messed up anything else in the process before you save your changes, but assuming all the NPCs still have their own heads, you’ve got your own patch.
“decades of prior art” may give developers the upper hand.
Nintendo’s recent legal activity has caused quite the commotion online. One patent application relating to the summoning of a so-called ‘sub character’ has proven particularly controversial following its swift approval, with the broad nature of its contents having potentially wide ramifications on the games industry.
Now, in speaking with Eurogamer, Don McGowan, former Chief Legal Officer for The Pokémon Company, believes that the patent will likely just be ignored. His belief is that because there are countless examples of existing games utilising a summoning mechanic, Nintendo’s patent simply won’t hold up in court should it choose to launch an infringement lawsuit.
Lace up your boots, EA Sports FC 26 is almost here. The franchise formerly known as FIFA will pack a ton of changes, and as has been the case for a few years now, you can jump in early depending on which edition you pick up.
Here’s everything included in the Standard Edition and Ultimate Editions of the game, including early access, Ultimate Team items, and just about anything else – and where you can buy each.
EA Sports FC 26 – Standard Edition
If you preorder the Standard Edition of EA FC, you’ll get the game (naturally), but if you buy the PS5 or Xbox Series X|S version, you’ll also get the PS4 or Xbox One version, respectively.
To be able to start playing on September 19, you’ll want the Ultimate Edition, which will give you a chance to start building your Ultimate Team lineup.
That’s made even easier with 6,000 FC Points doled out over 2 months and the Season 1 Premium Pass. You’ll also get the following:
3x Icons for Career
1x 93+ rated Ultimate Team Icon
1x 5-Star Coach in Manager Career
1x 5-Star Youth Scout in Manager Career
Manager Live Challenge Content
1x Archetype Unlock Consumable
2x Double Archetype XP for 10 matches
2x FUT Player Evolution Slots
Weirdly, Switch 2 players get 4,500 points, and you can only find it on the Switch 2 store. Similarly, the PS5 Ultimate Edition is also only available on Sony’s storefront.
Lloyd Coombes is an experienced freelancer in tech, gaming and fitness seen at Polygon, Eurogamer, Macworld, TechRadar and many more. He’s a big fan of Magic: The Gathering and other collectible card games, much to his wife’s dismay.
You’re gonna have to wait a bit longer to murder the steeple for a second time, with Slay The Spire II‘s early access release having just been delayed until March next year. Developers Mega Crit have at least cushioned the blow by revealing the day of the week it’ll arrive. A Thursday. Which Thursday? The cheeky folks won’t say.
With just hours to go until today’s major Nintendo Direct broadcast, fans have spotted domain name registrations that point to the upcoming Super Mario Bros. Movie sequel — and potentially reveal its title.
Multiple registrations by NBC Universal have been made that reference Super Mario Galaxy, such as supermariogalaxy.movie, the French supermariogalaxy-lefilm.com and the Spanish supermariogalaxy-lapelicula.com. All three were registered on September 10.
The beloved Wii platformer originally launched on Wii and featured a storyline that introduced space princess Rosalina, and sparked questions over Princess Peach’s original heritage — something that is very briefly also nodded to in the original Super Mario Bros. Movie.
So, will the currently-untitled Super Mario Bros. Movie sequel also be named Super Mario Galaxy? While these domain names have convinced many fans, there’s still some uncertainty.
Still, the timing of these domain names being registered has raised eyebrows, with fans now feeling confident there will be some kind of announcement made during today’s Nintendo Direct.
The original Super Mario Bros. game is about to celebrate its 40th anniversary, and there is an expectation that Nintendo will mark the occaison with a flurry of announcements — as it did for the game’s 35th birthday five years ago.
so the Old Spice x Super Mario Galaxy Movie deodorants look to be legit. Procter & Gamble applied for trademarks on DESERT DETOUR and BROOKLYN BOUNCE back in July at the Canadian Intellectual Property Office
Oddly, if the movie is indeed titled Super Mario Galaxy, this won’t be the first time we’ve seen the title appear on the internet. Earlier this year, an image featuring “The Super Mario Galaxy Movie”-emblazoned cans of Old Spice deoderant appeared on the internet, sparking discussion over its authenticity. Several Mario-themed trademarks linked to the image were also purportedly found via the Canadian Intellectual Property Office, fans said, including “Space Mischief,” “Cosmic Quest,” and “Brooklyn Bounce,”
At the time, fans remarked on the fact that the cans appeared to include previously-unseen artwork of Luigi and Yoshi, though the leak could not be fully verified. Time will tell if it ends up matching with whatever Universal has decided will be the movie’s final name.
Nintendo and Universal’s Super Mario Bros. Movie sequel, whatever it’s called, will launch in theaters on April 3, 2026. Today’s Nintendo Direct, meanwhile, will air at 6am Pacific / 9am Eastern / 2pm UK time later today — and IGN will be reporting live.
Tom Phillips is IGN’s News Editor. You can reach Tom at tom_phillips@ign.com or find him on Bluesky @tomphillipseg.bsky.social
Well it’s that time again, folks! Nintendo has announced via Nintendo Today! that yet another Direct presentation will be taking place on 12th September 2025 (yes, that’s tomorrow), hot on the heels of the Partner Showcase in July and the Indie World in August.
The showcase is set to kick off at 2pm BST / 3pm CEST / 9am ET / 6am PT and will provide 60 minutes’ worth of news and announcements on games heading to the Switch 2 and Switch.
Bandai Namco and developer Ganbarion have announced the free-to-play Dragon Ball: Gekishin Squadra (formerly known as Dragon Ball Project: Multi) will be coming to the Switch in the future.
Nature, a game about creating an ecosystem and evolving its inhabitants, is not exactly a new idea. Publisher North Star Games first released a similar title, Evolution, in 2014. Evolution spawned multiple expansions and spinoffs over the subsequent years, to much acclaim. Designer Dominic Crapuchettes just can’t let this idea go as 2025’s Nature is the latest iteration of this longstanding series. I’m glad he’s stuck with it, because this new standalone title is the most splendid variation yet.
Just like in Evolution, players steward a number of distinct species they must feed and protect. You gain a new budding lifeform in each of the four rounds, with species consisting of a size and population. The former represents its overall mass and scale, while the latter is the number of animals in the genus. So a small herd of elephant-like creatures would have a size of four but only a couple of population.
The most interesting aspect is that each species also consists of up to three trait cards. This is the nerve center of the design, as it consists of a nuanced card system that elicits difficult strategic decisions. The biggest concern is hand management, as well as guiding the evolutionary force in response to a shifting environment. Each animal is fighting for survival, and that includes gathering precious limited food from the central watering hole, or possibly going the carnivore route and hunting for sustenance. Your ability to work toward these goals and curb threats rests in the card play.
Trait cards function primarily as evolving mechanisms for defense or food gathering. You can play a Fast card on one of your species to help them outrun predators. Or maybe armored plating to provide a hardy shell. Similarly, claws may help you gather plants more efficiently, or provide an offensive bonus when hunting other creatures.
What’s marvelous is that the system is ostensibly a tableau builder. This is a style of game, popularized by games like Race for the Galaxy and 7 Wonders, where players place cards in their own personal area, creating an engine to generate points or resources. Nature twists this formula to create dynamic isolated tableaus that represent player-crafted species. So instead of managing a single tableau, players construct and manipulate several small sets of various properties. It’s a clever concept, using an existing mechanism to craft an ecosystem of evolving entities that must continually change in order to adapt to their environment.
The environmental pressures that incentivize adaptation are mainly a result of the hunter system. When you are playing cards during your turn, you may always slap a hunter trait onto one of your species. This makes them carnivores, shirking the watering hole and instead seeking to outmaneuver prey and feed on their population. A reason to do this is that the watering hole plant food is limited, particularly late game when the number and population of species has escalated.
Predators also devour population, effectively harming opponent’s tableaus and weakening their species. Population and feeding lead to points in this game, as each token of food devoured gets banked for end game scoring. Feeding off another player’s pack not only scores you points, but it also lowers the ceiling on their food consumption. It’s a brutal aspect of the game, but one rooted in player interaction and evolutionary force.
Many of these processes are identical to Nature’s predecessor, Evolution. The reason for this new edition of the game was to unify the design and its many branching expansions under a single family of products that all function together. This also allows for the Nature base game to be streamlined and simplified for a new generation of players. Crapuchettes’ goal here is to craft a game that offers a welcoming enough foundation for a wide audience, while allowing for endless expansion to layer complexity and nuance atop that sturdy base. Nature is intended to appeal to virtually any level of gamer, hobbyist or newcomer.
By at measure, Nature is predominantly a success. There are several expansion modules that add things such as dinosaurs, flying creatures, random events, and environments such as the Amazon or Arctic Tundra. Most add a new deck of trait cards which are kept separate from the primary set of cards. The unified implementation makes for easier integration, with setup and teardown being quite simple. The framework also allows for multiple expansions to be used together in order to tweak the experiences. This is the strongest quality of Nature, as it plays quite differently depending on the chosen content.
Say for instance you want a more violent and exciting game. The Jurassic expansion adds more nifty tools for predators, so that’s an easy inclusion. But tossing in the Amazon setting will also introduce a bluffing element with hidden traits, which will ratchet up the tension and result in more daring attacks. Next time you play you can swap Jurassic for Flight, which will result in a far less confrontational session and instead focus on flocks of birds migrating as a new avenue for scoring.
The extensibility is a core asset of the design.
The extensibility is a core asset of the design. Nature as a streamlined and simplified experience on its own would be disappointing for those of who have played this game system previously. But I don’t think comparing the core set of Nature to Evolution: Climate is fair. The breadth and scope of each product needs to be evaluated, and Nature’s ability to evolve and plug in new content in a manner similar to its own player-driven trait selection is frankly, a magnificent adaptation.
The main drawback to Nature is the somewhat obtuse feeding process. The process involves grabbing food from the watering hole equal to the size of your species, and is completely independent of the population. Additionally, bigger creatures don’t need to eat any more food, which is odd. This works mechanically and is an important aspect of the system, but it’s unintuitive and something players can struggle to internalize. The rest of the design is elegant, with the card play being clean and consistent and everything flowing extraordinarily well. I’m not sure the design itself could be carved away any further, but it’s a lingering question due to this mechanism not sitting perfectly flush.
Still, Nature meets its overall objective. It has a modest ruleset, and massive potential. Inserting a new expansion is seamless and the additional rules heft is only a couple of paragraphs. The core system is still sharp. It conveys its themes of evolutionary biology effortlessly. North Star Games continues to progress its flagship hobbyist title, unfurling new tricks and peculiarities.
When I was 13, my dad let me drive his car for the first time. It wasn’t on city streets – just in a big, empty parking lot – but I will never forget that’s the day I learned that a car creeps forward even when the driver’s not pressing the gas. Sure, I was only going a few miles an hour, but as a terrified, inexperienced driver, my heart was pounding and I felt totally out of control. I hit the brakes like a kick drum, starting, stopping, starting, and stopping, until I finally got a handle on the machine. It was a steep learning curve; before then, the closest experiences I had to real-life driving were go karts and Mario Kart, and I naively thought my hundreds of laps of motion control steering on Coconut Mall would give me some idea of what to expect.
Strangely, I thought about this memory a lot just a few days ago during my first hands-on demo with Kirby Air Riders. There are certainly a number of similarities: your character moves forward automatically without pressing any buttons, I was going completely off the rails and heavily relying on the brakes until I got the hang of things, and – most notably – my Mario Kart skills didn’t transfer whatsoever. But surprisingly, it was my Smash Bros. muscles that I found flexing instead, with Air Riders feeling like a strange pseudo-sequel to Super Smash Bros. Ultimate in the same way that Donkey Kong Bananza gave the Super Mario Odyssey treatment to another franchise. Let me explain.
Ever since Mario Kart World and Kirby Air Riders were formally revealed for Switch 2 back in April, lots of us have wondered the same thing: “Why is Nintendo releasing two kart racers in the same year?” It’s a fair question, one that even Air Riders director – and the creator of Kirby himself – Masahiro Sakurai posed in his presentation last month, joking that it “basically is like Mario Kart,” and one that he even brought up when Nintendo asked him to make Air Riders years ago.
On the surface, it’s an obvious comparison. Mario Kart World and Kirby Air Riders both feature a large roster of characters racing through colorful courses on various karts/machines, as they weaponize a wide lineup of power-ups to try to take first place. It’s easy to see why onlookers (and even Sakurai himself) would question the choice to place both of these games in Switch 2’s first six months on the market. But once I got Air Riders in my hands, I realized that Mario Kart World and Air Riders really don’t play like each other at all, even in their respective racing modes.
I got to try out the same pair of race courses as our previewer Leanne Butkovic did late last month, first speeding through the starter track, Floria Fields, before taking on the more intense Waveflow Waters. I was immediately struck by how fast Air Riders is compared to the GameCube original, where the racing always felt a bit sluggish. It echoes the jump from Smash 64 to Smash Melee: Melee is faster, more competitive, and stacks a ton of new mechanics on top of the original, just as Air Riders does when compared to Air Ride.
The difference is that Melee came out two years after the first one, and Air Riders is arriving more than two decades after its original, and it’s honestly really cool to see Sakurai pick up right where he left off, creating an iterative sequel that builds upon and fixes issues of what came before as if no time has passed at all. When Air Riders was first teased, I didn’t know what to expect from a legacy Sakurai sequel as he returned to a series from so long ago, and the answer being that it’s basically a GameCube game, but better, is a pretty cool direction to take.
Kirby Air Riders echoes the jump from Smash 64 to Smash Melee.
Air Riders felt like a roller coaster ride at first, as I swung around tight turns and glided through exciting setpieces like a stretch of road with rumbling waterfalls on either side of it. The strategy for these races is nothing like Mario Kart World, where it’s all about knowing your route on the track, crossing your fingers for the right item at the right time, and executing shortcuts when you get the power-up you’re looking for. Air Riders is more about attacking and reacting to your opponents – Nintendo even opened its behind-closed-doors presentation to the media by calling it a “Vehicle Action Game” rather than a kart racer. To play Air Riders successfully, I needed to focus on combat and my opponent’s positioning while racing around the course, both by attacking enemies to charge up my devastating special and following the leader’s exact path to take advantage of the new Star Slide ability that increases your speed when you collect the trail of stars machines leave behind. Once I wrapped my head around these core mechanics, I started to understand that from a gameplay perspective, Mario Kart World isn’t the immediate comparison point for Kirby Air Riders: it’s Sakurai’s other darling, Super Smash Bros.
Smash is technically classified as a fighting game, but it has really carved out its own niche with its focus on advanced platforming and knocking opponents out of the arena rather than depleting a health bar, and the same concept can be applied to Kirby Air Riders. Both Smash and Air Riders exist on the outskirts of their traditional genres, resulting in games that can be intimidating at first glance due to how they defy expectations, but ones that provide shocking mechanical depth to those who heavily invest in their systems. As I said, I was incredibly overwhelmed during my first Air Riders play session, but determined to understand its intricacies, I returned to the demo three additional times during PAX West, gradually getting better and more confident each time. I was reminded of the first time I played an eight-player match of Super Smash Bros. for Wii U. It was overstimulating, chaotic, and hard to follow, and I thought there was no way it was a mode I’d ever get attached to. But Sakurai games have a way of drawing you in, and it wasn’t long before eight-player matches became a staple on game nights with friends.
I could see the same thing happening with Air Riders’ City Trial mode, which I’ve now had the chance to play eight times. This returning fan-favorite from the GameCube original drops you into an open city alongside up to 15 other players, giving you five minutes to find a better machine to ride and upgrade, with stats and powerups that spawn throughout the map. At the end of five minutes, you compete in one of a lineup of competitions with the machine you developed which range from seeing who can glide the furthest to the straight-up speed test of a drag race.
Air Riders presents itself as a cute, simple racer, but in reality, it’s a complex action game.
Despite Sakurai warning against it in his presentation, I spent my first few City Trial runs gobbling up every power-up I could find, and it resulted in a machine that was way too fast for the minigames that followed. I was completely off the rails, and I initially felt punished for being too greedy during the exploration segment of City Trial. But for subsequent runs, I started being more selective about which power-ups I grabbed and which I left behind, trying to make a machine well-suited for any of the possible minigames that could show up.
Sakurai’s fingerprints are truly all over Air Riders. From the slick menu and UI design – which is traditionally designed by his wife, Michiko Sakurai – to the dramatic, slow-motion, red and black finish zoom that punctuates destroying an opponent’s machine just like the final knockout in a match of Ultimate. Even the main menu’s basic black title set on a white background is the same style as Ultimate, and Air Riders’ Japanese website could easily be confused with Sakurai’s other series at a quick glance, complete with character renders and alternate costume designs that scream Smash Bros. Each character’s unique special move instantly reminded me of a Final Smash, and the sheer level of polish and attention to detail across every facet of my demo was unmistakably Sakurai.
I’m so interested to see how the public perceives Air Riders when it comes out in a couple of months. It’s more nuanced than it appears, and for that reason, I don’t think Air Riders demos very well to people playing it for the first time. I spent about two hours watching various groups demo it at PAX West, and the vibe of players felt very familiar to my very first hands-on session: overstimulated, overwhelmed, and generally confused. Air Riders presents itself as a cute, simple, approachable racer that only uses the control stick and a couple of buttons, but in reality, it’s a deep, complex action game that demands your full attention. That tough, contradictory first impression, combined with the surface-level comparisons to Mario Kart, and Air Riders’ hefty $70 price tag, makes me worried that people won’t give it the time of day when it launches in November. I hope not, because after meeting Air Riders on its own terms and working across several demo sessions to understand it, I walked away very excited for a fascinating sequel from one of my favorite creators.
Logan Plant is the host of Nintendo Voice Chat and IGN’s Database Manager & Playlist Editor. The Legend of Zelda is his favorite video game franchise of all time, and he is patiently awaiting the day Nintendo announces a brand new F-Zero. You can find him online @LoganJPlant.
