Miraculously meditative and frantic in equal measure, Once Upon A Katamari scratches the same carnal itch that the rest of the series always has. It delivers relentless charm, a wheeze-laugh-inducing sense of humor, brain chemistry-altering music, and soulfully satisfying-but-simple gameplay in psychedelic technicolor. This time-trotting adventure rolls out the red carpet for The Prince, The King of All Cosmos, The Queen, and their cadre of silly little cousins with flamboyant aplomb. And with more levels and a greater focus on replayability, there’s more Katamari to go around than ever before. The first new mainline Katamari game in 14 years doesn’t try to reinvent the misshapen mass of things you roll around, and that’s fine by me, because Katamari doesn’t need fixing.

At first blush, you probably wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between the original Katamari Damacy from 2004 and Bandai Namco’s latest iteration aside from the obvious jump from 480p to 4K. That’s because developer Rengame understood the assignment: Once Upon A Katamari is just as funny, satisfying, joyful, and energetic as the series has always been.

After showing off his juggling skills with a powerful scroll, the godlike King of All Cosmos flings it into the night sky, yet again destroying the heavenly bodies that inhabit it. It’s up to his son, The Prince, and his cousins to go to Earth and roll up everything in sight to make stars and planets to repopulate the sky. It might not make sense if you haven’t played a Katamari game (or, frankly, even if you have), but this setup has proven as reliable as Bowser kidnapping Princess Peach, and serves as a vehicle for some spectacularly funny stuff.

The King, a flamboyant, self-important, all-powerful – though overall benevolent – god who likes to wear really tight pants is beloved by all, even though he talks down to The Prince and his goofy-looking cousins. Making the most of every last syllable of dialogue, I chuckled at least once just about every time he mused on the nature of the universe or paid himself a compliment with his record-scratch-sound voice. Once Upon A Katamari is a masterclass of comedic writing and localization, efficiently using its humor to set up the goal for each level before the rolling starts without ever letting a joke get stale.

Completing a level will often reveal a quick and silly scene showing The King or The Queen getting up to some kind of shenanigans, like rolling a bunch of wild west outlaws into a katamari after a standoff that pays homage to The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly, or The King catching a giant crab and flinging it into the sky. Even failing a level has some cheek to it, as The King berates you for messing up, softening the sometimes frustrating blow of falling short of the goal. Despite this pervasive sense of humor, it never becomes cloying or overly self-aware, reliably delivering a smile at nearly every turn beyond The King’s pompous monologues. The overworld level-select maps are just as full of funny touches, like cats and dogs wandering around the Ancient Greek agora in Spartan armor or a cow sitting at a campfire like a human, warming its hooves next to its owner.

Each level takes advantage of just how much stuff there is to find within the seemingly chaotic splatter of candy, flowers, statues, lanterns, and TVs that camouflage a subtle, effortless sense of humor and direction within the madness. Tumbleweeds chase cowboys around in circles, titanic Super Sentai-style heroes practice wrestling their moves on kaiju over the horizon, bears and cows prepare for an all-fronts war, and mummies make TV shows underneath the pyramids. Again: madness. But even in the immense, sometimes overwhelming, chaos of each level, every object you can roll up is placed with deliberate care for either comedic effect or a satisfying sequence, like an octopus wreaking havoc on a pirate ship or bottles of soy sauce set up like bowling pins that will quickly push you into the next weight class so you can finally pick up that bowl of ramen in the other room.

Controlling your designated roller, you’ll whirl your massive ball of stuff around different time periods like the Jurassic period or Edo-era Japan, picking up anything smaller than your dung beetle-like ball. You might start a level the size of a pushpin or matchstick, but you could end it picking up cities or even planets by the end. The classic goal is simply to get your katamari (which literally means clump or mass in Japanese) as big as possible, but sometimes you’ll need to follow special rules. They could be as simple as collecting as many fish as possible, or as complex as only rolling up sweet items while avoiding savory or bitter things like hot sauce or charcoal because the child who asked you to do so wants to eat something sweet after a big meal.

No matter what you’re picking up, snowballing your katamari into a bigger and bigger collection of books, cannonballs, eggs, and flatware is oddly cerebral. Tapping into the same inexplicably satisfying, brain-scratching sensation you get from games like Tetris or PowerWash Simulator, there’s a zen-ness to decluttering Japanese palaces, Ice Age caves, and the decks of pirate ships washed in a low-poly-day-glo look.

Once Upon A Katamari’s oddly gripping, maximalist soundscape counters this calm with gusto. Different items snap to your odd ball with a satisfying zhoop, with certain things making unique noises like a wailing cat or a street punk scatting, turning your katamari the strangest chorus you’ve ever heard. As you roll up a ball of various odds and ends, Once Upon A Katamari matches your collection with an equally eclectic soundtrack. Inspired by the poppy hodge-podge sound of J-Pop subgenre Shibuya-kei, Once Upon A Katamari’s soundtrack stands shoulder-to-shoulder with the musical giants it’s following as a spectacular album in its own right, with or without a game to accompany it.

The only unifying themes among the notes are paying subtle homage to the Katamari riff (you know: that catchy one that goes na naaa nanana nana na na na na nana naaa) that permanently tattoos itself on your hippocampus after playing any game in this series. Otherwise, Once Upon A Katamari’s soundtrack is a diverse smorgasbord of different sounds and genres, from the energetic techno-rap opening theme, Katamari Time, to the funk-jazz-fusion jam, Power of Katamari Damacy, to the unexpectedly lovely choral title track from one of the series’ original composers, Asuka Sakai, featuring the San Francisco Boys Choir. There’s not a bad track among the 36-song bunch.

But Once Upon A Katamari is happy to oblige your sonic nostalgia for the other games, too, with nearly every track from the series’ 21-year history available in a music selector that has a handful of options to tweak. You can make a playlist of your favorite songs from across the series or loop a specific favorite over any of Once Upon A Katamari’s levels. It’s frustrating that you can’t just play an individual game’s soundtrack in order, and that multiple games are inexplicably clumped together in two separate eras instead of game by game, but the playlist feature at least more or less makes up for those shortcomings. The shuffle feature also has an odd hiccup where whichever song played last starts over when you start the next level. And since some of these levels are shorter than much of the near-100-song tracklist, you might wind up hearing some songs more times in a row than you’d want when choosing shuffle, but you can always select a new song before starting a level to fix that.

Rengame’s surgical approach to recreating the immutable charm of this series deftly avoids the uninteresting pitfalls of hollow nostalgia. Instead of treating iconic levels from the original as gospel doomed to be worn out in every Katamari game like the requisite recreation of 1-1 in the Mario series, nearly every stage here is wholly original. Katamari’s newest custodians toy with the formula with careful precision, supplementing the flow of what I’ve come to expect from a roll-icking good time with new level types and even power-ups to augment your rolling while taking care not to disrupt the delicate balance of calm and chaos that defines Katamari. Combining that with subtle modernizations established in more recent Katamari games, like a clearer scoring system, Once Upon A Katamari threads the needle between old and new surprisingly well.

For example, using both joysticks to control where and how you roll has always been deliberately awkward, with the mass becoming harder and harder to maneuver as you grow exponentially. Once Upon A Katamari makes zooming around at smaller sizes feel a little more precise than it used to, which I didn’t like at first, but this ultimately helped highlight the sense of scale this series has always been good at in bright yellow.

The power-ups add a nice layer to the rolling as well, and let Rengame play with new design ideas that emphasize the puzzle element of efficiently finding your way around – even breaking the trance-like flow for a certain level or part of one to instead experiment with puzzle-like problems to solve. The Rocket power-up, for example, helped me brave a powerful wind storm to pick up a few extra items, but only lasted for a short burst of speed, adding an extra layer of challenge and strategy I wasn’t normally used to. The Radar power-up helped me find specific items to complete a pharaoh’s series of requests in one of the Ancient Egypt levels as he asked for 10 bananas or a dozen eggs. None of these drastically reshape or redefine the rolling at Katamari’s core, but do open up new level design ideas that offer fun diversions from the standard “make your katamari as big as possible” levels.

Once Upon A Katamari is by far the biggest game in the series to date, though still relatively small in scope overall - it took me around 10 hours to complete every main level at least once. Rengame acknowledges and helps buttress this with new collectibles to find in each level and unlockable challenges to keep me coming back with a new approach. In addition to finding cousins who serve as additional playable characters and gifts that unlock new customization options for them, three crowns are hidden in each level, adding extra challenges and legitimately compelling reasons to revisit levels. Having a certain number of cousins or crowns will open up extra levels, too, adding even more reason to roll around the same place a few times. Challenges don’t offer the same rewards, but they’re a nice nod to players like me who regularly revisit completed Katamari games.

That all said, the stages that are available are unfortunately lopsided, with a majority of the levels taking place in Edo Japan – it holds more than double the amount of levels as the next biggest era. I understand that this series has always embraced Japanese culture, but in the context of Once Upon A Katamari’s time travel concept, it feels like a lot of ground was left uncovered across the nine other eras, some of which only host as few as three or four levels.

Rengame also builds on the multiplayer modes established in the other Katamari games with the series’ best take on multiplayer to date. While co-op control of a single katamari isn't available this time around, the PvP mode once again has you and other rollers try to pick up the most stuff. But unlike previous entries, you earn points by depositing your hard-earned stuff in a UFO, giving more utility to the new power-ups and adding a more dynamic flow to competition than just rolling as much as possible. Once your time’s up, The King intervenes to hand out bonus points in a Mario Party-style round-up that awards competitors for stuff like the number of times they’ve used a power-up or rolled up their opponents. It’s nothing revolutionary, but a step up that makes multiplayer feel like more than just an afterthought.

Call it the sentiment of an aging millennial, but I can't help but feel somewhat comforted while playing Plants vs. Zombies: Replanted. It not only updates the original's stellar blend of approachable tower-defense and puzzle gameplay, but it's also a reminder of how quirky and endearing games were in the late 2000s. Developer PopCap Games returns to give this classic another well-deserved moment in the sun, adding new content, quality-of-life improvements, and features from other ports to create a more complete package. That said, Replanted struggles to balance its updates with its attempts to preserve the look of the original. In doing so, it presents an uneven remaster that is the most complete version of Plants vs. Zombies ever released, but also one that feels less polished in the ways that matter most.

The charm of PvZ comes from its cheerful and fun vibes, which feel akin to an afternoon cartoon show you'd watch on Nickelodeon. In keeping with the series, Replanted never attempts to explain how this quirky side of the zombie apocalypse started, or, even more strangely, how the plants gained heightened sentience to fight back. And honestly, that still works out for the best, because vibes alone have helped the Plants vs. Zombies series go far. The tone always stays fast and loose with its premise to keep the absurdity ramping up, which it does plenty.

The Replanted edition brings back everything from the 2009 PC release along with nearly all of the additions from the various console and mobile ports that followed – including material from the discontinued Chinese release of PvZ. Even the local co-op and competitive modes from the console ports make a return, which I missed the first time around. This makes Replanted such a neat opportunity to get reacquainted both with why the original still holds up today and the many upgrades it got over the years.

What made Plants vs. Zombies so engaging was how it blended real-time strategy with the feeling of placing pieces of a puzzle onto a table. It really leans into the satisfaction of finding a particular approach and adapting your units as needed. When the action gets going, and your squads of peashooters and walnuts are holding the line against zombie quarterbacks, 'zomboni' drivers, and other oddball undead, it's so captivating to see play out. Even as someone who played it plenty 16 years ago, I still found myself immediately drawn back in, arranging my plants in the best tactical positions to keep the zombies off my doorstep.

The overall challenge of the original generally stayed fair and easygoing, but there were a few moments of unexpected difficulty spikes, and Replanted doesn't do much to fix that. Granted, many of the sudden challenges that arise are because of how breezy the campaign can be, which made the more difficult stages catch me off guard thanks to the tough new zombie units that came my way. I found the challenges to be reasonable overall, but the difficulty can still hit hard when you least expect it.

Replanted does make efforts to switch things up and add its own stuff that's not been seen elsewhere. One very welcome update for returning players is the ability to speed up battles. You can hit the fast-forward option to speed animations up three additional notches, which adds the challenge of making battles feel a bit more hectic at that heightened pace. It was generally helpful for clearing out the waiting periods in missions, which previously took up a lot of time. However, one downside of this is that changing the speed unfortunately alters the music, too. While I did like the remixed songs with faster beats, it means the classic music that ramped up as the battles escalated has been disappointingly removed from the soundtrack.

One of the more novel additions is the Rest in Peace Mode, PvZ's take on a permadeath run for the main adventure. With fewer defenses protecting your home, even one zombie breaking through your lines will result in an instant fail and send you back to the beginning of a run. As a concept, it fits perfectly with the style of PvZ, and I did feel that familiar tension that comes from the more intense missions. However, letting you bring in all your unlocked plants and seed slots at the start of a run does undermine a lot of the intended challenge, which is an odd choice if this is supposed to be the most difficult mode in PvZ. It's ultimately not as developed as I had hoped, so trying to make a go of the new mode mostly felt underwhelming.

The most interesting and inventive Replanted addition is the Cloudy Day mode, which combines elements of day and night gameplay into a single battle. This twist introduces an interesting change by making the sunny phase focus more on resource gathering and planning, while the cloudy phase is all about building units with the benefit of lower resource costs. It's a clever mash-up of the two battle styles of PvZ, and it kept me very engaged as I tried to maximize my moments in battle when the tide changed. It's by far Replanted's most impressive innovation.

This remaster generally looks great in motion as well, especially when the action heats up with zombie hordes in full force and your plants tossing everything they can to stop them. Unfortunately, the upgraded visuals often stick a little too closely to the style and structure of the original, and their expansion to larger resolutions can sometimes feel very artificial and uneven. This creates instances where the quality can be inconsistent and unintentionally below standard, such as blurry and rough character portraits or animations in menus, and the unsightly grim filter overlay in Rest in Peace mode.

This unevenness also contributes to one of the more bizarre changes: how the original iconic ending music video was handled. Without spoilers, instead of a rousing splash of an ending, this finale is shown as a video within another cutscene, condensed onto a classic tube TV set inside your character’s home. This unnecessary flourish diminishes the final sequence, which was previously on the same level as Portal's fantastic 'Still Alive' ending. It was an unexpected downer to see that celebration of the fun energy of Plants vs. Zombies instead turned into something that feels like I'm just watching a 16-year-old recording of the credits on YouTube in full 360p resolution. This type of decision is largely emblematic of the problems with Replanted overall, as it plays things overly safe as a remaster in order to avoid remaking elements of the main game, which has the downside of making it feel reductive in its attempt to preserve it.

Microsoft has announced Wave 2 of its Xbox Game Pass October 2025 lineup, fleshing out the rest of this month’s titles.

It’s worth noting today’s announcement on Xbox Wire follows Microsoft’s Game Pass price hike and rebranding of some tiers. So, we’re now talking about what’s on Game Pass Premium and Essential, rather than Standard and Core. Xbox Game Pass Ultimate and PC Game Pass keep their names.

Xbox Game Pass Tier and Price Changes, October 2025:

• Xbox Game Pass Ultimate: $29.99 a month, up from $19.99 a month
• Xbox Game Pass Premium: $14.99 a month, the same as the old Standard subscription
• Xbox Game Pass Essential: $9.99 a month, the same as the old Core subscription
• PC Game Pass: $16.49 a month, up from $11.99

So, available today, October 22, on Game Pass Premium, is Commandos: Origins (Cloud, Console, and PC), now with Game Pass Premium. Here’s the official blurb: “Commandos: Origins revisits the six iconic commandos from the original series. Witness elite stealth-tactics gameplay, use your team’s unique abilities to execute complex strategies, and combine your forces in 2-player co-op multiplayer. The battlefield is calling. Do you have what it takes?”

Also now on Game Pass Premium is Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 (Cloud, PC, and Xbox Series X|S). “Pursue your aviation career with dynamically generated missions, compete against other pilots, and explore the most detailed digital twin of the world to date. Set out on your global adventure with our largest fleet of aircraft as Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 takes simulation to new heights of authenticity and realism. The sky is calling!”

Tomorrow, October 23, PowerWash Simulator 2 (Cloud, PC, and Xbox Series X|S) hits Game Pass Ultimate and PC Game Pass as a day one Game Pass launch. IGN's PowerWash Simulator 2 review returned an 8/10. We said: "PowerWash Simulator 2 smartly sticks to what made the original formula such a blast while throwing in some upgrades to deal with few of its pesky problems."

Also on Game Pass Ultimate, PC Game Pass as a day one title on October 23 is Bounty Star (Cloud, PC, and Xbox Series X|S). “Bounty Star is an over-the-shoulder 3D action game that marries mech combat and customization with farming and base building. The player takes on the role of a broken but powerful ex-soldier named Clem, a war veteran, talented fighter and expert mech pilot.”

The day one launches continue on October 24 with Super Fantasy Kingdom (Game Preview) (PC) via Game Pass Ultimate and PC Game Pass. “Rebuild your kingdom and explore a vibrant fantasy world in this roguelite city builder. Defeat hordes of monsters with a unique team of defenders as you harvest, build, mine, cook, brew, and grow. But if your defenses should fail, be prepared to watch it all burn!”

Halls of Torment (Cloud, PC, and Xbox Series X|S) hits Game Pass Ultimate, Game Pass Premium, and PC Game Pass on October 28. “Slay hordes of terrifying monsters in this horde survival roguelite. Descend into the Halls of Torment where the Lords of the Underworld await you. Treasures, magical trinkets, and a growing cast of heroes will grant you the power to vanquish these horrors from beyond. How long can you survive?”

Here’s a big one: Obsidian’s The Outer Worlds 2 (Cloud, PC, and Xbox Series X|S) launches straight into Game Pass Ultimate and PC Game Pass on October 29. “The Outer Worlds 2 is the eagerly-awaited sequel to the award-winning first-person sci-fi RPG from Obsidian Entertainment (just look at the exciting number of dashes in this sentence!). Time to clear your calendar – get ready for an action-packed adventure with a new crew, new weapons, and new enemies in a new colony! Pre-order the Premium Upgrade Edition now to get up to 5 days early access, the Commander Zane’s Anti-Monopolistic Battle Pack, DLC Pass for 2 future story expansions, and more!”

And moving into next month, 1000xResist (Cloud, PC, and Xbox Series X|S) hits Game Pass Ultimate, Game Pass Premium, and PC Game Pass on November 4. “1000xResist is a thrilling sci-fi adventure. The year is unknown, and a disease spread by an alien invasion keeps you underground. You are Watcher. You dutifully fulfil your purpose in serving the Allmother, until the day you discover a shocking secret that changes everything.”

Rounding out the lineup is another big hitter: Football Manager 26 (PC) via Game Pass Ultimate and PC Game Pass as a day one launch on November 4. “New foundations set the stage for you to define your football destiny. Built on the Unity engine, FM26 is the legacy, redefined and where storytelling evolves, placing you at the heart of the beautiful game. A reimagined interface and more immersive matchday experience brings you closer to the action and combine to elevate every decision and match-defining moment.” This also includes Football Manager 26 Console (Cloud, Console, and PC) on the same day via Game Pass Ultimate and PC Game Pass.

Xbox Game Pass Wave 2 October 2025 lineup:

• PowerWash Simulator 2 (Cloud, PC, and Xbox Series X|S) – October 23, Game Pass Ultimate, PC Game Pass
• Bounty Star (Cloud, PC, and Xbox Series X|S) – October 23, Game Pass Ultimate, PC Game Pass
• Super Fantasy Kingdom (Game Preview) (PC) – October 24, Game Pass Ultimate, PC Game Pass
• Halls of Torment (Cloud, PC, and Xbox Series X|S) – October 28, Game Pass Ultimate, Game Pass Premium, PC Game Pass
• The Outer Worlds 2 (Cloud, PC, and Xbox Series X|S) – October 29, Game Pass Ultimate, PC Game Pass
• 1000xResist (Cloud, PC, and Xbox Series X|S) – November 4, Game Pass Ultimate, Game Pass Premium, PC Game Pass
• Football Manager 26 (PC) – November 4, Game Pass Ultimate, PC Game Pass
• Football Manager 26 Console (Cloud, Console, and PC) – November 4, Game Pass Ultimate, PC Game Pass

As always, a number of games leave Xbox Game Pass this month. You can save up to 20% off your purchase to keep playing.

Leaving Xbox Game Pass on October 31:

• Jusant (Cloud, Console, and PC)
• Metal Slug Tactics (Cloud, Console, and PC)
• Return to Monkey Island (Cloud, Console, and PC)

Wesley is Director, News at IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.

Here we go: KPop Demon Hunters is poised to be a global phenomenon. Why are we just saying that now? Well, because Netflix has officially announced that the hit film will work in joint partnership with toy giants Mattel and Hasbro to license a ton of cool toys for HUNTR/X and Saja Boys fans alike.

Once a movie or TV show starts getting toy lines, it’s serious, folks. The global co-master licenses for both companies will allow them to both produce toys, games, collectibles, role-play products, and more.

“Kpop Demon Hunters unleashed a global fan frenzy — we’re talking dancing, singing, and more screaming than anyone was emotionally prepared for,” Netflix’s Chief Marketing Officer Marian Lee said in a statement. “HUNTR/X showed us that a truly great trio is more than the sum of its parts. Netflix, Mattel and Hasbro joining forces on this first-of-its-kind collaboration means fans can finally get their hands on the best dolls, games, and merchandise they’ve been not-so-subtly demanding on every social platform known to humanity. As Rumi, Mira and Zoey say — for the fans!”

With Mattel, Netflix plans to develop a full range of products that naturally will include dolls and action figures, as the company is responsible for the legendary and iconic Barbie doll line. Additionally, the collaboration with Mattel will also include playsets, collectibles, accessories, and even collaborations with co-brands. Mattel's first product drop will be a three-pack of HUNTR/X dolls, which will be available for pre-order beginning November 12, 2025.

As for Hasbro, Netflix will develop some new youth electronics products, special feature plush products, and role play products with the company. Hasbro’s first KPop Demon Hunters product to hit the market will be Monopoly Deal: KPop Demon Hunters, which will be a branded version of the Monopoly spinoff game. It is available for pre-order now at Amazon, Target, and Walmart, and will ship January 1, 2026.

Most of the Hasbro and Mattel lines will debut in spring 2026 and be available for the 2026 holiday season and onward. KPop Demon Hunters, which is the most watched original title in Netflix history, is available to stream on the platform now.

Lex Briscuso is a film and television critic and a freelance entertainment writer for IGN. You can follow her on Twitter at @nikonamerica.

Nintendo and Retro Studios brought Metroid into stunning 3D with 2002's Metroid Prime, rebooting the series in a first-person shooter style through a sometimes challenging but ultimately fruitful relationship between Japanese and Western teams -- each with their own unique backgrounds and perspectives. But it wasn’t always smooth rolling for Samus along the way.

That’s according to a new book: Metroid Prime 1-3: A Visual Retrospective, in which Metroid Prime series producer Kensuke Tanabe comments throughout, sharing memories and insights from his perspective working with the U.S.-based Retro Studios on a Metroid game. This was a significant cross-seas, collaborative effort for Nintendo. Retro was working on a completely separate first-person game before series producer (and Super Mario and The Legend of Zelda creator) Shigeru Miyamoto proclaimed it should be a Metroid game. Metroid Prime was thus born. Tanabe recalls: “Metroid Prime was not a project that was originally planned. It was a title that came about by chance, as a result of Mr. Miyamoto clarifying the direction Retro should take… In a way it could be called a miracle.”

Tanabe frames the relationship between Retro Studios and Nintendo as ultimately hierarchical, with Nintendo having final say. “...Nintendo retained the final decision-making authority, there were many instances early on where our approaches to the specifications did not align, leading to disagreements. Retro often explained, ‘This is how Western studios approach and think about game development.' To help them understand our perspective, I told them, ‘Yes, but the game we are making now is a Nintendo game, and this is Retro’s first time working on one. I’ve been working on Nintendo games my whole career, so I believe I have the most experience in making Nintendo games. So please trust me first.'”

This led to creative tensions, with Retro holding its ground, clearly unwilling to totally cave to Nintendo. “One day, during a video conference about the Meta Ridley battle, our discussions kept clashing, and we couldn’t find common ground," Tanabe continued. "Time slipped away and by the time the meeting (which had started in the morning) finally ended, the sun was setting.”

Tanabe describes a Retro Studios that needed to be introduced to a set of design philosophies unique to Nintendo, for example enemy design beyond bosses was something Miyamoto had strong feelings about. “Many Nintendo developers have learned from Mr. Miyamoto that the appearance of enemy characters should be designed based on functionality… this had not yet been articulated quite so concisely. As a result, it took time for us to convey the concept clearly to Retro.”

You can see the collaboration working well in some cases, for instance, Retro won out in the implementation of morph ball rolling. In Metroid Prime, you generally view the game through Samus’s visor in first-person fashion, but for puzzles and tight spaces, Samus can transform into a rolling Morph Ball at which point the camera zooms out to third-person. Tanabe says of this: “The transition animation for shifting from first-person Morph Ball mode was proposed by Retro …however Retro also suggested a skip feature to reduce morphing time, but Mr. Miyamoto directed that it should be unskippable, as it was one of the opportunities to view Samus in third-person.”

It seems that Retro really pushed hard for the rolling mechanic to be expanded and ultimately won out, in an example of Nintendo relenting in the face of a great idea. Tanabe says: “Retro also proposed the mechanic of rolling through half-pipes in Morph Ball mode. Initially, Nintendo was skeptical, questioning whether it would actually be fun. However, Retro responded, ‘Please try it first before deciding.’”

The exchange of ideas and a willingness for teams to learn from one another paid off ultimately in a game IGN called a "must-have masterpiece” and which, for the 2023 remake, I scored a perfect 10/10. Tanabe reflects: “[The Metroid Prime Trilogy] was made possible by Retro maximizing the hardware’s potential through expert engineering, incorporating countless ideas without compromise to refine game design, and setting new standards for graphics in Nintendo titles.”

Metroid Prime 1-3: A Visual Retrospective is out October 28, 2025 and shares hundreds of pieces of concept art from the trilogy across Gamecube, Wii, and the Prime remake on Nintendo Switch. Comments from Retro Studios accompany Tanabe’s frequent notes, along with text taken from the game’s ample expository logs and scans. Metroid Prime 4, the latest team-up between Retro Studios and Nintendo, is set for Nintendo Switch 1 and Switch 2 on December 4, 2025.

Samuel Claiborn is IGN's managing editor and a fixes/breaks ancient arcade and pinball machines in his garage. TCELES B HSUP to follow him @Samuel_IGN on Twitter.

Do you have time to talk about my lord and saviour, PowerWash Simulator? The unexpected cult hit hooked weirdos like me back in 2022 with its relaxing, satisfying premise; clean dirt off things. Has the sequel, PowerWash Simulator 2, changed the fundamental act of power washing? Has it given new meaning to slowly blasting graffiti off a wall? Will it make you question what it truly means to be filthy in 2025? No. And thank Mr. Clean for that, because it's the simplicity that makes it so satisfying. What you do get is what fans like me - I've got over 400 hours logged in the original - really needed; some quality of life upgrades and lots of new things to wash. I can see myself racking up another 400 hours on this installment easily.

In case you missed out the first time, it really is as straightforward as it sounds. You are given a vehicle or location to clean, a selection of power washers (they all function the same way, just with varying power), soap, and if a level is feeling saucy, some ladders. You choose your washer, your nozzle (I'm a green girl, yellow for detail work, any one who uses white wasn't loved enough by their mother), and you're left to clean at your own pace, sluicing down sections in whatever way you please. One of the real beauties of PowerWash Simulator is that you can't eff it up. As long as you're blasting water at dirt, eventually things will get clean. Even if you never upgraded anything, you'd still get there in the end.

The big headline for the sequel is all the new cleaning jobs to work your way through, and they don't disappoint. There are vehicles like a mobility scooter or a car decorated like a dog; there are buildings like bandstands, public toilets, and grand houses; and there are even new multi-stage jobs where you'll need to clean a particular part of a map to reveal a new area. There is the perfect balance of large buildings and complex structures, for when I wanted to spend a solid hour spraying, alongside smaller vehicles for a quicker splash of dopamine. Less exciting for purists like me is the addition of a home base you can decorate (but alas, not clean) and some pet cats. I mean, everyone likes virtual pets, but unless I can tie mops to their feet I have no interest in them when I'm busy jetwashing a billboard.

You'll understand the beautiful mundanity of this game when I tell you that one of the most exciting innovations is that soap is now free and multipurpose. Not just a blow against capitalism, it actually removes one of the biggest annoyances about the first game. Soap had to be purchased, came in limited quantities, and a different soap was required for each surface. Now you just switch to the soap attachment and any surface, on any job, can be your own personal foam party as it breaks down tough stains. I've gone from a soap dodger to a detergent dilettante. While you're cleaning there are also new icons to help you track down things that still need polishing up, which might sound minor, but as someone who spent hours of their life looking for a 1% speck of dirt on a huge restroom wall, I am hugely grateful for it.

The other new tricks in your cleaning kit similarly make things that were a bit of a fiddle or a grind easier, without letting you skip the work. There's an abseiling rig for large structures like billboards, a cherry picker lift so you're not balancing on ladders to get to hard to reach areas, and a spinning surface cleaner - you know, like school janitors mysteriously push around after hours - to make polishing up large flat surfaces a little less daunting. There are even tiny tweaks, like that tall scaffolding now has a ladder on the outside when you just want to get to the top, no more zig zagging up and down.

What's key is that the improvements aren't about speeding you through the jobs more quickly or letting you skip chunks, because the whole point of PowerWash Simulator 1 and 2 is the meditative flow state you achieve just working away at the grime and graffiti, back and forth, up and down, all with the gentle hiss of water accompanying your progress. It's underrated as an ASMR experience, although you will need to pee every 10 minutes.

If you've yet to discover the wonders of jet washing random buildings and vehicles, good news; there's no lore you have to catch up on. The loose story is delivered through text messages while you're working, but you could skip them all without a problem. They usually explain why you're cleaning, for instance, a street sweeper covered in huckleberry jelly, or will give you weird information about the area. There are some nice touches for devotees of the original, too. A shooting gallery has miniature versions of the landmarks you'll recognize, and the chatter will reference the iconic merman statue or strange temple. It's nonsense, but it's nonsense I appreciated.

Halloween is a little over a week away, making now an excellent time to start marathoning scary movies in celebration of spooky season. If you're in the mood to watch some horror classics this year, Amazon has a sweet little treat to check out right now. The A Nightmare on Elm Street: Seven-Film Collection on 4K has dropped to a new low price at the retailer, according to price tracker camelcamelcamel, making now a great time to add it to your collection if you're interested.

A Nightmare on Elm Street 4K Collection for $90.40

Hello Games has released yet another No Man’s Sky update, this time adding space wrecks to explore. The patch notes, courtesy of the No Man's Sky website, are below.

Just over a month after the Voyagers update released for the long-running space game, and the highest player numbers since launch over nine years ago, the Breach update lets players salvage wrecks, unlocking new ship building parts along the way.

Hello Games has also improved and expanded ship building “in response to watching players spend so much time in the workshop designing their dream ships,” Hello Games chief Sean Murray said.

There’s also a new expedition where players will traverse a desolate and abandoned universe to discover what happened to a mysterious abandoned wreck. “Voyaging to the edge of space will be required if you are to salvage from the wreckage of the ill-fated ship and add unique parts and modules to your ship-building workshop,” Murray teased.

“The Breach expedition also brings players together to explore the strange and rare purple-star solar systems,” he continued. “The planets in these systems are particularly fun to explore with their deeper oceans, incredible terrains and volatile gas giants. It guides players towards the new space wrecks, is a great way to salvage some new rare ship parts, while uncovering a spooky story - suitable for the Halloween season!

“It has been a crazy year for the No Man’s Sky team and we’re so proud and pleased to be able to continue working on this game we all love so much nine years after launch.Seeing so many folks enjoying Voyagers has really inspired us, and we can’t wait for you to see what we have in store in future.”

No Man’s Sky continues to receive free updates even now, years after launch. And it’s clearly keeping players interested. No Man’s Sky launched in August 2016 on PS4 and PC to tens of thousands of negative reviews on Steam, with players complaining about broken promises and a lack of meaningful content, particularly on the multiplayer side. The game quickly settled on the dreaded ‘overwhelmingly negative’ Steam user review rating, a clear sign to anyone who visited its Steam page that something was very wrong.

But Guildford, England-based developer Hello Games has continued to update No Man’s Sky over the years, improving player sentiment to the point where it is now considered superb. It took two years to hit ‘mixed,’ then another three to hit ‘mostly positive.’ At the time, five years after launch, Tim Woodley, Head of Publishing at Hello Games, explained how hard it was to claw back Steam user reviews from such a low base.

As Hello Games continues to work on No Man’s Sky, it’s developing its next game, Light No Fire. It's about adventure, building, survival and exploration together, set on a fantasy planet the size of Earth.

No Man's Sky Breach update 6.10 patch notes:

BUG FIXES AND QOL

• Fixed an issue that could cause the player to be ejected into space if on an internal stair in a corvette while the pulse drive was active.
• Fixed an issue that prevented the corvette "current flightpath" autopilot from cancelling when the ship came into proximity of a large object such as a Space Station.
• Fixed an issue that prevented exiting the corvette pilot seat in the Space Station and Space Anomaly when using the Quick Menu in VR.
• Fixed an issue that prevented stairs in corvettes from being traversable using VR teleport movement.
• Fixed an issue that caused weapons to be misaligned with the crosshair when flying a corvette in first person.
• Fixed an issue that caused the corvette teleporter to persist after the corvette had landed on a planetary surface.
• Fixed an issue that could cause water to behave erratically when teleporting from a corvette into water.
• Fixed an issue that caused newly-assembled corvettes to appear at the wrong scale if another owned Corvette was docked nearby.
• Fixed an issue that could cause corvette interior doorways to become blocked.
• Fixed an issue that prevented the corvette Torpedo Launcher module from correctly installing the Rocket Launcher weapon.
• Fixed some corvette structural modules appearing under the exterior decoration category of the build menu.
• Fixed a rare issue that could cause corvette assembly data to be replaced with planetary base data.
• Improved the placement of corvette-class ships when teleporting to a Settlement with a corvette as the primary ship.
• Improved the behaviour of floating exotic creatures, especially in response to being offered Creature Pellets.
• Fixed an issue that could prevent biological monstrosities on derelict freighters from reacting aggressively to nearby Travellers.
• Fixed an issue that could prevent some varieties of hazardous flora appearing on planets.
• Fixed a timing-specific issue that could cause the player's wanted level to get stuck when using the pulse drive to exit planetary atmosphere.
• Fixed an issue that caused the current primary ship's thrusters to be used for launch fuel calculations when attempting to summon other ships from the Quick Menu.
• Fixed an issue that caused refiners to reset their requested output value to the maximum when refining was started.
• Fixed an issue that prevented the Personal Refiner from automatically starting when an input substance was inserted from the Inventory screen.
• Improved the error messaging when attempting to install duplicate technology in the inventory.
• Fixed an issue that caused rain to be audible when standing inside a corvette.
• Fixed an issue that could prevent the Corvette Assembly tutorial from starting in abandoned star systems.
• Fixed an issue that could cause Exosuit upgrade stations to lose their interaction prompt after a single use, especially in Abandoned Mode.
• Fixed an issue that could cause misleading instructional text during missions requiring planets with extreme weather conditions.
• Fixed an issue that caused some markers to persist unnecessarily in excavation and flora extermination missions from the Corvette Mission Radar.
• Fixed a number of minor messaging inconsistencies in missions requiring the player to prepare ingredients in the Nutrient Processor.

ART AND VISUALS

• Fixed an issue that could cause large waves to abruptly appear and disappear on the surface of water.
• Improved lighting transitions when changing environments - notably when warping between solar systems, when entering or exiting planetary atmosphere, or when moving between interior and exterior locations.
• Fixed a number of minor visual "seams" in lighting.
• Improved the appearance of holographic previews of corvette modules during corvette assembly.
• Fixed an issue that caused the Boundary Herald starship to render incorrectly.
• Fixed an issue that prevented the jetpack from displaying on the Inventory screen when using first-person camera view.
• Fixed an issue that prevented some varieties of aquatic creature from rendering in the Discoveries page.
• Fixed a number of minor visual and collision issues with corvette modules.
• Improved the appearance of corvette modules when viewed from a distance.
• Improved the icons on a number of corvette modules.
• Improved the collision of several planetary curiosities, such as large mushrooms.
• Fixed missing collision that allowed you to walk through the back of some freighter hangars.
• Fixed a number of issues that could prevent decals from being placed on Corvette modules.

INPUT

• Enabled Steam Input on Mac.
• Fixed a Steam-only issue that could cause controller bindings to shuffle or not respond on the first boot after the game was updated.
• Fixed an issue that prevented jetpacking while the Terrain Manipulator was in Create mode.

UI

• Improved the readability of several UI elements.
• Fixed a UI overlap issue on the Corvette trade menu, which could cause the "Make Offer" button to be activated when selecting a part to trade.
• Fixed an issue that caused markers for other players in a multiplayer session to appear at their feet instead of above their head.
• Fixed an issue that prevented the display of additional recipes in the Catalogue.
• Fixed a rare issue that could cause an incorrect UI to appear when absorbing a Memory Fragment to expand inventory slots.

STABILITY AND PERFORMANCE

• Fixed a crash that could occur on Corvettes with a large number of attached weapons.
• Fixed an issue that could cause a hang when opening the airlock door of a derelict freighter.
• Fixed an issue that could cause a hang when jumping through the centre of a galaxy in a freighter.
• Fixed an issue that could cause a softlock if opening the corvette parts menu while a dialog box was open.
• Implemented a number of engine optimisations to improve performance, especially when rendering complex objects such as corvettes.
• Implemented a number of lighting optimisations to improve performance.
• Implemented a number of optimisations and performance improvements on Nintendo Switch.

Wesley is Director, News at IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.

Microsoft is keeping its next-gen Xbox console plans under wraps, but it has suggested it will be ultra premium hardware.

The company has confirmed — as recently as earlier this month — that it still plans to follow the Xbox Series X and S with a next-gen console, and has announced an agreement with AMD to make it happen.

Microsoft has promised “next-level performance, cutting-edge graphics, breakthrough gameplay, and unmatched compatibility,” and said everything it’s working on will be “fully compatible” with users’ existing Xbox game library.

But how much will it cost, and just how powerful will it be? In an interview with Mashable, Xbox president Sarah Bond talked in vague terms about what Microsoft is going for with its next-gen console, but did suggest it will be a premium hybrid PC and console.

"The next-gen console is going to be a very premium, very high-end curated experience," Bond said. "You're starting to see some of the thinking we have in this handheld [ROG Xbox Ally], but I don't want to give it all away."

That’s a reference to the recently released ROG Xbox Ally X handheld, which costs $1,000. (In another interview, Bond said this and the less powerful, $600 ROG Ally are ultimately Asus-made handhelds — and because of this, Asus set the price.)

So, Xbox fans are now wincing at the thought of how expensive the next-gen console will be, particularly in the context of recent price rises to Xbox Game Pass and the Xbox Series X and S.

The cost of being an Xbox fan has been a hot topic in recent months. After announcing a jump to $80 for its games due out this holiday, Microsoft back-tracked to stick with $70 for the likes of The Outer Worlds 2.

But it's worth noting how much the Xbox Series X and S cost today, which perhaps gives us an idea of where Microsoft might go when the next-gen rolls around. In September, Microsoft increased the price of the Xbox Series X and S as follows:

• Xbox Series S 512GB: $399.99 (up $20 from $379.99)
• Xbox Series S 1TB: $449.99 (up $20 from $429.99)
• Xbox Series X Digital: $599.99 (up $50 from $549.99)
• Xbox Series X: $649.99 (up $50 from $599.99)
• Xbox Series X 2TB Galaxy Special Edition: $799.99 (up $70 from $729.99)

Earlier this year, Microsoft was reported to be targeting a 2027 release window for both its next-gen Xbox and a Xbox handheld. At the time, it was said that the next-gen Xbox would be more like a PC than any Xbox before it, and would support third-party storefronts such as Steam, the Epic Games Store, and GOG.

Prior comments from Bond have backed this suggestion up. "This is all about building you a gaming platform that's always with you, so you can play the games you want across devices anywhere you want, delivering you an Xbox experience not locked to a single store or tied to one device," Bond said.

"That's why we're working closely with the Windows team, to ensure that Windows is the number one platform for gaming."

Wesley is Director, News at IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.

This article contains spoilers for the Gen V Season 2 finale, “Trojan.”

After a wild eight episodes, Gen V Season 2 wrapped up its run with a game-changing hour that certainly puts a third season in doubt. Don’t worry, Godolkin U fans: There’s hope for more, which we’ll get into in a moment, as well as the whole future of The Boys universe and how this ties into the Prime Video franchise, directly setting up the final season of The Boys.

But first? A brief bit of recap for context. Kicking off with the huge twist in the penultimate episode that, let’s be frank, most viewers saw coming from a mile away, we discover that (sure enough) Thomas Godolkin (Ethan Slater) injected himself with Compound V at the same time he was being horribly crispified in 1967 during a lab accident at Project Odessa. It gave him bodily manipulation powers – or meat puppeting, if you’re nasty – as well as making him functionally immortal. As we find out later in the episode, he used V1, a variant that both Soldier Boy (Jensen Ackles) and Stormfront (Aya Cash) were given, which grants them all extraordinarily long life as well as their other powers.

Mortal Kombat 2's theatrical release date has changed again, but this time it's brought forward a week to May 8, 2026.

Mortal Kombat 2 was initially slated to debut on October 24, 2025, but it was delayed to May 15, 2026 instead after Warner Bros. and New Line Cinema decided the movie would perform better at the summer box office given the wild fan response to the trailer.

It moves the release further away from Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu, which is set to premier on May 22.

New Line Cinema describes the sequel as "the latest high-stakes installment in the blockbuster video game franchise in all its brutal glory." Actor Adeline Rudolph recently revealed that Kitana will play just as big a role in the movie as Karl Urban's Johnny Cage.

"Especially when I first read the script, it felt very much like the intertwining of two worlds. You have Earthrealm and then you have Edenia and Outworld," Rudolph said at the time. "Kitana's storyline feels very much interwoven into Johnny Cage's story, and they go in and out of each other throughout the movie."

As for what else is happening in the Mortal Kombat world? Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection, developed by Digital Eclipse and published by Atari, launches at the end of October. We also recently learned at New York Comic-Con that Mortal Kombat III is also in the works.

Vikki Blake is a reporter for IGN, as well as a critic, columnist, and consultant with 15+ years experience working with some of the world's biggest gaming sites and publications. She's also a Guardian, Spartan, Silent Hillian, Legend, and perpetually High Chaos. Find her at BlueSky.

James Gunn has confirmed DC’s Arkham Asylum series is well and truly dead.

While there’s "hope… sure," that Arkham Asylum may one day see the light of day, "that isn't something that is being developed by anyone right now," the DC Studios co-CEO told BobaTalks in a new interview.

Why? "You know, it just didn't work," is all Gunn would offer.

Confirmation from Gunn himself comes over a year after it was reported that HBO Max would no longer move forward with the Arkham Asylum series. Antonio Campos had signed on as showrunner back in October 2022, with the intention of setting Arkham Asylum within Matt Reeves' 'Batman Epic Crime Saga,' but Variety reported last year that his version of story was dead. However, Variety also suggested a story set within Gotham’s twisted asylum could still come to fruition in the future. Gunn’s comments suggest if that does happen, it will be a long time coming.

The Arkham Asylum series was announced in 2020 and originally had nothing to do with the iconic Batman location. Instead, the show was sold as a story centered on the Gotham City Police Department and set before the events of The Batman. One year (and one showrunner) later and the show was said to feature James Gordon, but director Matt Reeves then stated in 2022 that the GCPD show would focus on Arkham Asylum. Gunn eventually clarified that the Arkham Asylum series was separate from the world of The Batman and would take place within the company’s new universe, the DCU.

In March 2022, three weeks after The Batman’s release, Matt Reeves and Warner Bros. released a highly anticipated deleted scene featuring Barry Keoghan’s Joker — officially credited as “Unnamed Arkham Prisoner” — meeting with Robert Pattinson’s Batman in a Hannibal Lecter/Clarice Starling-type exchange. Reeves explained what he was going for in an interview with IGN.

While Arkham Asylum is dead, there are a number of confirmed projects in the works at DC Studios. The Batman 2 is of course due out in 2027. There is an expectation that The Penguin will get a Season 2 at some point, too.

As for Gunn’s DCU, next year will see Supergirl and Clayface hit theaters, while Lanterns will release on HBO Max. Looking further ahead, 2027 will see Gunn’s Superman follow-up, Man of Tomorrow, continue the overarching DCU story.

Speaking of which, Gunn has also this week confirmed that his “big bad” isn’t Darkseid, prompting questions about who will be the DCU’s Thanos equivalent.

Wesley is Director, News at IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.

Former Bethesda developer Bruce Nesmith has offered his thoughts on the divisive Starfield, insisting if it has been released by any other studio “it would have been received differently.”

Speaking to FRVR, the former Starfield systems designer admitted that the sci-fi RPG is “not in the same calibre” as Bethesda’s much-loved The Elder Scrolls and Fallout franchises, but insisted it was still “a great game.”

“I think it’s a good game,” Nesmith, who left Bethesda around a year before Starfield came out, said. “I don’t think it’s in the same calibre as the other two, you know, Fallout or Skyrim, or Elder Scrolls rather, but I think it’s a good game. I worked on it, I’m proud of the work I did. I’m proud of the work that the people I knew did on it. I think they made a great game.”

When “the studio that gave you Skyrim and Fallout makes a space game,” Nesmith said, there are certain “expectations,” and these weren’t met. “If the same game had been released by not Bethesda, it would have been received differently,” Nesmith insisted.

Starfield launched in September 2023 as Bethesda’s first brand new IP in 25 years, but it was not as well received as the studio’s previous games in the Fallout and The Elder Scrolls franchises, and the Shattered Space expansion, released a year later in September 2024, has a ‘mostly negative’ user review rating on Steam.

Starfield went on to reach 15 million players, but the question of whether Bethesda might walk away from the game to focus on its other franchises has been a running theme since release. In June 2024, Bethesda insisted it remained committed to supporting Starfield, and confirmed at least one other story expansion would come out following Shattered Space. And in an interview with YouTube channel MrMattyPlays, Bethesda Game Studios’ Todd Howard said the developer was aiming to release an annual story expansion for “hopefully a very long time.”

That, obviously, hasn't happened. In August, it was reported that Starfield's second expansion and much-anticipated PlayStation 5 port would now arrive in 2026, following the poor reception to Shattered Space.

So, what went wrong? Nesmith pointed to Starfield’s reliance on procedural generation as a problem, as opposed to the lack of real-time space travel, which he described as “inherently boring.”

“But when the planets start to feel very samey and you don’t start to feel the excitement on the planets, that’s to me where it falls apart,” he continued. “I was also disappointed when, pretty much, the only serious enemy you fought were people… there’s lots of cool alien creatures, but they’re like the wolves in Skyrim. They’re just there, they don’t contribute, you don’t have the variety of serious opponents that are story generators.”

Bethesda has confirmed plans to improve Starfield space gameplay “to make the travels there more rewarding” after datamined fragments of code suggested the developer had a more streamlined space travel experience in the works. Based on this datamine, while you may be able to travel between planets within the same system, you won’t be able to fly all the way between systems, nor fly directly from a planet's surface into orbit, like No Man's Sky.

In a new video discussing his career, veteran Bethesda developer Tim Lamb confirmed that the studio had been working on Starfield’s space gameplay, and that a new DLC story was still coming at some point.

“I think as it comes to Starfield, I'm really excited for players to see what the teams have been working on,” he said. “We have some cool stuff coming, including free updates and features the players have been asking for, as well as a new DLC story.

“I can't go into all the details just yet, but I will say part of the team has been focused on space gameplay to make the travels there more rewarding. We're also adding some new game systems, and a few other smaller delights. There's also some really interesting stuff coming down the pipe from our verified creators. There's some fun stuff.

“I just want to say thanks. We really appreciate the support and the enthusiasm. We can't wait to get it into the hands of our players.”

Last month, Bethesda teased new content for Starfield — at least that’s what fans thought after they spotted a hidden message in a social media video released to celebrate the game’s two-year anniversary.

Wesley is Director, News at IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.

Palworld developer and publisher Pocketpair has confirmed it will not be publishing any games that feature NFTs, Web3, or "big AI stuff," revealing the company "doesn't believe" in them.

In an interview with Game Developer, John “Bucky” Buckley, communications director and publishing manager for Pocketpair said: "People are going to say I'm lying, but these are just the hard facts. We don't believe in it. We're very upfront about it. If you're big on AI stuff or your game is Web3 or uses NFTs, there are lots of publishers out there [who'll talk to you], but we're not the right partner for that."

"I think over the next two or three years we're going to get into this weird era — and you can see it slowly happening now on Steam — of really low quality, AI-made games," Buckley added. "It's something that has plagued other stores but Steam had been good at keeping them out. But it's happening. This wave is coming, and I think we're going to enter this kind of authenticity market where people are going to slowly say 'no, these guys are really trying to make something special' to fight back."

Pocketpair is perhaps more sensitive than most when it comes to accusations about AI, not least because Palworld similarly faced claims it was "AI slop" and used generative AI, something the company vehemently denies and continues to challenge.

"You know, I can't just come out and start fighting with these people [who make the AI accusations] because that just fuels what's going on," Buckley explained. "[Regarding the translation accusation], one of their biggest pieces of 'evidence' was that because we hadn't published the individual names of the translators it must be AI. Well, no, this is just poor Japanese culture in general. A lot of Japanese games, the credits will say localization was handled by a company."

The use of AI in game development continues to be highly divisive, and for every fan of the emerging tech, you'll find someone fighting against it. Earlier today, we reported that Silent Hill series producer Motoi Okamoto similarly shirked AI, claiming "AI would never be able to make" a sequel like Silent Hill f. Conversely, Dead Space creator Glen Schofield recently unveiled plans to “fix” the industry in part via the use of generative AI in games development, and industry veteran and former Santa Monica Studio director, Meghan Morgan Juinio, said: "I think if we don’t embrace [AI], I think we’re selling ourselves short. AI is a tool, and something that will augment us. At least for right now, that’s how I see it. It’s going to evolve whether you’re onboard with it or not, so I want to be at the forefront of helping to guide how that goes and how we use it."

Epic Games boss Tim Sweeney believes small teams will soon be able to use AI prompts to make video games on the scale of Nintendo masterpiece The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild.

At the Game Developers Conference (GDC) in March, IGN sat down with Buckley to discuss number of Palworld’s struggles, including Nintendo’s patent infringement lawsuit against the studio.

Vikki Blake is a reporter for IGN, as well as a critic, columnist, and consultant with 15+ years experience working with some of the world's biggest gaming sites and publications. She's also a Guardian, Spartan, Silent Hillian, Legend, and perpetually High Chaos. Find her at BlueSky.

A post on the official Japanese Twitter / X account for the upcoming game Dissidia Duellum Final Fantasy received a reply from none other than veteran developer Akitoshi Kawazu, who surprised users by revealing new information about the inspiration behind a Final Fantasy II character.

Dissidia Duellum Final Fantasy is Square Enix’s upcoming free-to-play mobile game, slated for a 2026 release. Featuring cel-shaded graphics, Dissidia Duellum takes beloved Final Fantasy characters from throughout the RPG series’ history and transports them to modern Tokyo, where they take on monsters in 3vs3 battles. Two teams of Final Fantasy characters will race to fight their way through roaming monsters to beat the boss faster than the opposing team. The game will also feature voiced story segments.

Dissidia Duellum will not only let you put protagonists like Cloud, Squall, and Lightning in your party, but a whole host of other characters are also making a return, some in the form of special abilities. The official X account recently revealed that Minwu, a character from 1988’s Final Fantasy II, will be lending power to your party with his teleport ability.

ミン=ウは漢字で表記すると、呉明、となります。モデルは戦国時代の呉起。孫呉の兵法という形で孫氏と並び立つ兵法家という評価です。

— 河津秋敏 (@SaGa30kawazu) October 19, 2025

Veteran dev Akitoshi Kawazu, battle designer for Final Fantasy I and II as well as the key creator of the SaGa series, responded to this post with some insight into Minwu’s original inspiration. In his post, Kawazu revealed that Minwu was modelled on Wu Qi, a real life military general and philosopher from China's Warring States period. He explained that when Minwu’s name is written in kanji characters, it contains the same character for Wu as Wu Qi (rendered as 呉 in Japanese, and 吳 in traditional Chinese). For the Japanese release of Final Fantasy II, Minwu’s name was written phonetically in katakana (a script used for foreign loan words) just like the rest of the game’s cast of characters, so the reference to Wu Qi was not apparent to players.

In Final Fantasy II, Minwu is a white wizard from Mysidia who temporarily joins your party. He serves the Flynn royal family in exile as an advisor when the Palemecian Empire’s attack forces them to flee. He plays a key role in organizing rebel forces and the quest for the Ultima Tome.

Another reason Minwu’s inspiration is not readily apparent is his physical appearance. With his turban and dark skin, he does not visually resemble Wu Qi. However, his strategic role as an advisor plus his loyalty to the Flynn royal family and Princess Hilda does bear some resemblance to Wu Qi’s appointment as the head of Chu State and his fealty to King Dao. Sadly, both meet tragic ends.

Kawazu’s comment attracted many appreciative responses from other users. “It makes me extremely happy to receive new information about FFII in this day and age. Thank you,” said one commenter. Others were eager for more insight into the 37-year-old game: “I wonder if there are any behind-the-scenes revelations or inspirations for other Final Fantasy II characters?”

Dissidia Duellum is scheduled to launch on iOS and Android in 2026. Those in Canada and the U.S. can sign up for the closed beta in November to get a sneak peak at the game.

Verity Townsend is a Japan-based freelance writer who previously served as editor, contributor and translator for the game news site Automaton West. She has also written about Japanese culture and movies for various publications.

Silent Hill series producer Motoi Okamoto has insisted "AI would never be able to make" Silent Hill f, responding to comments made by former Konami developer Hideo Kojima that "remakes and sequels will be made by AI" in years to come.

In a new interview, Hideo Kojima cautioned against the industry's preoccupation with remaking or expanding existing franchises, suggesting it was creatively "dangerous" not to explore new things, and suggesting "in the future, remakes and sequels will be made by AI." And it's kicked up quite the discussion on social media.

Okamoto disagreed with Kojima's claims, however, saying that while AI could perhaps "put together" a sequel inspired by the Silent Hill universe, Konami's creative "bold choices" — such as to switch the setting to Japan, or employ Ryukishi07 as writer — were made by human developers.

In response to a Twitter / X post about Kojima's comments, Okamoto said: "It would be quite difficult for AI to replace works that take a significant departure from the original path of the series, like Silent Hill f.

"AI may be able to put together a project for a sequel that takes place in the Silent Hill universe, but things like changing the story’s setting to Japan or getting Ryukishi07 on board as a writer are the kind of bold choices AI would never be able to make,” he added (thanks, Automaton).

Silent Hill f is indeed a departure for the series as we know it, taking us not to the titular town but instead to 1960s Japan, where we follow Hinako Shimizu, a teenager struggling under the pressure of expectations from her friends, family, and society. It's out now for PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X and S and has sold 1 million copies since its debut at the end of September. Our Silent Hill f review returned a 7/10. We said: "Silent Hill f presents a fresh new setting to explore and a fascinatingly dark story to unravel, but its melee-focussed combat takes a big swing that doesn’t quite land."

Earlier this week, Okamoto opened up on why Konami revealed three new Silent Hill games at once after a full decade of silence, saying the publisher was keen to stress to old fans and new that it was "serious" about resurrecting the flailing horror series. Reflecting on how the series has performed since Konami's inaugural Silent Hill Transmission back in October 2022, Okamoto explained how the impressive Silent Hill 2 Remake was designed with "half new, half old customers in mind" to ensure it could attract new fans to the franchise. Silent Hill 2 Remake went on to sell 2.5 million worldwide, which pushes sales of the franchise overall to 10 million.

Vikki Blake is a reporter for IGN, as well as a critic, columnist, and consultant with 15+ years experience working with some of the world's biggest gaming sites and publications. She's also a Guardian, Spartan, Silent Hillian, Legend, and perpetually High Chaos. Find her at BlueSky.

While Battlefield 6 Support, Assault, and Recon classes work together to win matches, some Engineer fans have been caught using their time becoming in-game artists instead of capturing objectives.

The days following the launch of EA and Battlefield Studios’ long-awaited sixth numbered entry in the franchise have seen players coming together to share cinematic action movie-like moments they’ve experienced. As jets soar overhead and tanks roll through buildings, it’s the Engineer class that has found perhaps the most creative use of their gadgets.

drawing bunnies in battlefield 6 pic.twitter.com/h0F2FNaEld

— KA demz (@kineticdemi) October 14, 2025

The repair tool has been used to leave drawings for friendly and enemy squads for years, but Battlefield 6 has presented an opportunity for players to revisit the time-honored tradition. The Engineer gadget, which is supposed to be used to repair — or even damage — tanks, helicopters, and other armored vehicles, leaves behind burn marks wherever it’s pointed. In the hands of the right Engineer, the gadget makes for a handy pen for drawing, and Battlefield 6 players aren’t letting that go to waste.

Those on the way to capture or hold an objective may notice drawings from those who have found a more artistic way to enjoy Battlefield 6. These range from simple illustrations, such as the iconic “Cool S” or a smiley face, to time-consuming recreations of characters like digital pop star Hatsune Miku and Dragon Ball Z’s Vegeta.

"Meanwhile on the Battlefield," one player jokes, "Where are the engineers?" "Cut to a flaming tank," another adds.

Are detailed pictures easy to draw? No. Do time-consuming drawings keep Engineers from helping out their team? Probably, but that doesn’t mean others can’t enjoy them, too. Some players are even using the Engineer repair tool’s drawing ability to find new ways to play Battlefield 6 — including striking up a match of tic-tac-toe.

An Engineer focused on completing their Dragon Ball drawing is an easy target depending on where they choose to leave their work. Funnily enough, though, the artist behind the Vegeta drawing says not every Battlefield 6 player is looking for an easy kill.

"What was really cool is that an enemy saw me drawing and decided to let me be," they say, leaving a heart emoticon. "I'm going to go back in today and try something else. I don't know how many marks I get before they start disappearing so that's why I stopped drawing more of the hair but I'll try to go further."

While Engineers leave silly drawings for other Battlefield 6 players, some have instead started leaving messages for other classes. Support players have even picked up the repair tool to ask for a bit of patience from players begging to be revived.

Battlefield 6 launched October 10 for PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X and S and has enjoyed record-breaking success. Since then, the community has spent time talking about what kind of movement tweaks EA and BF Studios should make going forward. Others are just hoping to see fixes for some of the brighter maps Battlefield 6 has to offer.

For more on Battlefield 6, visit IGN's Battlefield 6 guide for a complete list and video of all campaign collectible locations, tips for getting an edge in multiplayer, and more.

Michael Cripe is a freelance writer with IGN. He's best known for his work at sites like The Pitch, The Escapist, and OnlySP. Be sure to give him a follow on Bluesky (@mikecripe.bsky.social) and Twitter (@MikeCripe).

Luigi's Mansion is finally coming to the Nintendo Switch Online library. Debuting on October 30, the GameCube classic arrives just in time for Halloween, and means the entire trilogy, along with Luigi's Mansion 2 and Luigi's Mansion 3, is now playable on Nintendo Switch 2.

Luigi's Mansion released way back in 2001 and sees Luigi win a creepy old mansion. It's all very exciting right up until his brother Mario mysteriously disappears, leaving Luigi to rid the mansion of Boos and ghouls in order to find the missing Mario.

Luigi’s won a mansion! The bad news is that it’s crawling with ghosts… 😱

Discover what frights await in Luigi’s Mansion, coming to Nintendo GameCube – Nintendo Classics on #NintendoSwitch2 for #NintendoSwitchOnline + Expansion Pack members on Oct 30! pic.twitter.com/vG0OfgwEP2

— Nintendo of America (@NintendoAmerica) October 22, 2025

As yet there's no word on how the classic game will make use of Nintendo Switch 2's most hyped features, including its new mouse controls, but we do know it'll be playable for Switch 2 owners who subscribe to the Nintendo Switch Online + Expansion Pack.

Nintendo Switch Online is a subscription-based online gaming service for the Nintendo Switch gaming platform. Memberships include online functionality, allowing you to compete or cooperate with friends, as well as a collection of classic Nintendo games spanning four decades, including titles from the NES, SNES, Game Boy, Nintendo 64, and, most recently, the new GameCube library. A free seven-day trial is also available.

The GameCube library currently includes The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker, F-Zero GX, and Soulcalibur 2. Further titles thought to be joining the service include Super Mario Sunshine, Pokemon XD: Gale of Darkness, and more. Most recently, Super Mario Strikers, Klonoa Empire of Dreams, Mr. Driller 2, and Mario Paint were added to the library of GameCube classics.

Vikki Blake is a reporter for IGN, as well as a critic, columnist, and consultant with 15+ years experience working with some of the world's biggest gaming sites and publications. She's also a Guardian, Spartan, Silent Hillian, Legend, and perpetually High Chaos. Find her at BlueSky.

James Gunn has officially ruled out his fledgling DC Universe building towards Darkseid as the “big bad.”

In a joint interview with a number of YouTube channels that focus on Easter egg breakdowns of superhero franchises, Gunn said that because director Zack Snyder had intended — and even briefly featured — Darkseid as the DCEU’s overarching enemy, and because of the character’s similarity to Marvel’s Thanos, the DCU was looking elsewhere.

Responding to questions from New Rockstars’ Erik Voss and ScreenCrush’s Heather Antos and Ryan Arey, Gunn said "using Darkseid as the big bad right now is not necessarily the thing."

The suggestion that Darkseid might have been the DCU’s “big bad” emerged after the ending of Peacemaker Season 2.

Warning! Spoilers for the end of Peacemaker Season 2 follow:

Season 2 ends with Peacemaker trapped on Salvation, a planet in another dimension that acts as a prison for metahumans. In the DC comics, Planet Salvation has acted as a Parademon training ground, watched over by Darkseid himself. But this isn’t what Gunn is going for here. In fact, Darkseid isn’t the enemy Gunn’s DCU is building towards either. And there are various reasons for this, he said, including the fact Darkseid made an appearance in Zack Snyder’s DCEU, and also the character’s similarity to Marvel’s Thanos, who was the main villain up to Avengers: Endgame.

“First of all, there's Kirby's whole world which he created which is totally fascinating,” Gunn began when asked what he thought of Darkseid as a character. “So, that's a huge part of it. It's the New Gods in general that is to me so interesting, which we're dealing with with Mister Miracle. And I have the screenplay that I haven't read yet on my shelf right now. So there's that aspect of it.

“And then there are aspects of Darkseid in Thanos, who are obviously very similar. They look very similar. And because of that — to give you probably more of an answer than you expected — using Darkseid as the big bad right now is not necessarily the thing. For a lot of reasons, because Zack did it so cool in his way, and because of Thanos in Marvel.”

So, we can rule out Planet Salvation heading towards Darkseid and the Final Crisis storyline from the comics. That prompts another question: if Darkseid isn't the DCU's "big bad," who is?

It'll probably be some time before we find out. But it does look like Man of Tomorrow, the 2027 follow-up to Gunn’s Superman, will see Brainiac enter the fray. Indeed, Superman and bitter rival Lex Luthor look set to put their differences aside (temporarily) to fend Brainiac off.

That reference to Mister Miracle, by the way, is the adult animated series based on DC’s 12-issue comic book series from Tom King and Mitch Gerads. It’s the second adult animated series from Warner Bros. Animation and DC Studios following Creature Commandos Season 1. Season 2 is currently in production for HBO Max. Other recent series greenlights from DC Studios and Warner Bros. Animation include Starfire!, My Adventures with Green Lantern, and DC Super Powers.

Earlier this month, during a roundtable Q&A with press ahead of the Peacemaker Season 2 finale, Gunn was asked if he was planning a Peacemaker Season 3. The answer was loud and clear.

“No, this is about the wider DCU and other stories in which this [the ending of Season 2] will play out right now,” Gunn replied. “So that doesn't mean that there won't be. I don't want to… never say never. But right now, no. This is about the future of the DCU.”

So if there’s no Peacemaker Season 3, what’s Gunn’s plan for Peacemaker himself? Gunn revealed that the conclusion of Season 2 sets up Peacemaker, played by John Cena, to take on a broader role in the DCU moving forward.

“He's really important to me,” Gunn said of the character. “Peacemaker is an important character. And I said from the beginning when we took on this job, it's about really propping up and maintaining and repositioning the big diamond properties that DC has, the Batmans and Wonder Womans and Supermans, and then creating diamond properties out of the smaller characters like Peacemaker.”

Warning: This article contains full spoilers for Gen V Season 2 Episode 8! You can also check out our spoiler-free review of the entire season.

Apparently, it’s becoming tradition for Gen V to wrap up each season with a gory massacre on the campus of Godolkin University. This time around, we’re seeing the seeds of Thomas Godolkin’s (Ethan Slater) pledge to “cull the herd” bear fruit, as Marie (Jaz Sinclair) and the gang make one last, desperate stand against the bloodthirsty dean. If the scope of the finale isn’t quite as huge as it could have been, the episode nonetheless serves as a fitting capper to an overall enjoyable sophomore season. It even works as a solid series finale, should it come to that (but we’ll get there).

Assuming you didn’t figure out the big Cipher/Godolkin twist ahead of time, you’re probably still reeling from the reveal that Hamish Linklater’s character was nothing more than a puppet for the true villain of the season. That was certainly a great way to ramp up the tension in Episode 7, and that twist helps give the finale an early momentum it doesn’t squander.

Again, the scope of this episode turns out to be a bit smaller than expected. Given how Episode 7 ended, I half-expected this chapter to open with Godolkin continuing to lay psychic waste to the students he so clearly despises. Instead, Godolkin’s murder spree is confined to the handful of students attending his seminar later in the episode. It’s almost as if there was a fear of letting the pot boil over too much and then having to explain why Antony Starr’s Homelander isn’t showing up to intervene.

Ultimately, the quieter, more intimate approach works to the show’s benefit. The early focus on Godolkin and Susan Heyward’s Sister Sage helps paint a vivid psychological portrait of a man who can’t help but become his own worst enemy. Early on in this episode, Godolkin has truly won; he got exactly what he wanted by tricking Marie into healing him. He’s free to be with Sage and reclaim his place in the upper echelons of Vought International. He has everything, yet he can’t stop himself from being tripped up by this foolish obsession with separating the wheat from the chaff. Godolkin is arrogant enough to believe that he knows better than the smartest person in the world, and we see where that gets him in the end.

Half the fun of “Trojan” is in seeing Slater really sink his teeth into a role that had been Hamish Linklater’s up to this point. Slater succeeds in making this feel like the same character without simply echoing Linklater’s performance; the sardonic wit and cold menace are there in full effect, but tinged by a certain degree of manic abandon. Again, this is what happens when Cipher gets a taste of what he craves and loses the plot. Even Sinclair gets a fun scene where she gets to play Marie possessed by Godolkin.

Thankfully, Linklater isn’t totally relegated to the background, even if he’s effectively now playing a completely different role as Doug. Linklater gets two great scenes – one which gives us a taste of just how awful it is to live as Godolkin’s meat puppet, and the other that provides an added bit of closure for the late Chance Perdomo’s Andre. I wish Doug were given more to do beyond those two scenes; given everything he’s endured, it feels like the character deserved better than to be abruptly killed off by Black Noir.

As for Sage, the series continues to make inspired use of the character in her recurring guest role. We get to see a very different side of Sage here, where she’s in love and clearly out of her depth because of it. There’s a great vulnerability to Sage during her bedside chat with Godolkin, followed by a wounded sense of grief when she visits Sean Patrick Thomas’ Polarity and realizes that her boyfriend has squandered everything they worked for. As much as Godolkin is his own worst enemy in this episode, he probably still would have won the day if not for his all-seeing lover.

The final showdown between our heroes and Godolkin doesn’t disappoint. If Godolkin’s killing spree proves surprisingly contained, there’s still a macabre glee in watching him lay waste to his class and then promptly force them to dance for his amusement. It’s equally satisfying to see how integral God U’s weakest and lamest students are in toppling the almighty dean, proving Sage’s point that the most dangerous enemies are the ones with nothing to lose. And Godolkin’s final death scene is every bit as gory and disgusting as fans of the series have come to expect – a fitting end for a guy who got way too high on his own supply by the end.

With that, it’s worth digging into the final scene a bit, and the question of whether there’s still a future for Gen V. I certainly wasn’t expecting Season 2 to close out by so directly laying the foundation for The Boys Season 5, but that’s what happens, as Erin Moriarty’s Starlight and Jesse T. Usher’s A-Train both stop by to formally invite Marie and her friends to join “the resistance.” It’s a great way of capping off Season 2 and acknowledging that these characters are ready to join the big leagues now; plus, a good NiN needle drop never hurts.

But should we take this to mean that there’s not going to be a Gen V Season 3? Are we effectively watching the series finale here? Possibly. It’s really a question of what state this universe is going to be in by the end of The Boys Season 5. Will there still be a Vought, much less a Vought-sponsored superhuman college? How many of these characters will still be alive by then? As much as I’d love to see more Gen V, this isn’t a bad way to cap off the show…if that’s indeed the goal. This finale closes out one era and opens the door to an exciting crossover; if nothing else, fans are certainly going to be rewarded for having watched this spinoff when The Boys finally makes its return.

There’s no question that one of the biggest talking points during last week’s Gamescom Asia x Thailand Game Show came out of Dead Space creator Glen Schofield’s opening keynote address, regarding his plans to “fix” the industry in part via the use of generative AI in games development. In addition to speaking with Schofield, IGN managed to get some time with another industry veteran, Meghan Morgan Juinio, to ask for her thoughts on the controversial practice that has previously been met with anger from Call of Duty fans, but also major support from games industry executives like EA CEO Andrew Wilson.

“I think if we don’t embrace it, I think we’re selling ourselves short,” said Juinio, who recently vacated her role as director of product development at Santa Monica Studio after 10 years and two hugely successful God of War games. “AI is a tool, and something that will augment us. At least for right now, that’s how I see it. It’s going to evolve whether you’re onboard with it or not, so I want to be at the forefront of helping to guide how that goes and how we use it.”

Juinio went on to compare the use of generative AI to the procedurally-generated content that's been a part of games development for decades now, pointing to SpeedTree – a tool for generating trees in real time – which was used as early as 2002 for the foliage in The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. She also recalled a time when animators were pushing back against motion capture and the use of procedural generation to blend animation frames rather than key them by hand. Both procedurally generated assets and animations have long become standard practices in games development, and Juinio seems just as confident that generative AI will also find its place.

“Personally, I’m super positive,” said Juinio. “Like [Glen Schofield said in his keynote address], this is the next big technological advancement that’s coming. In fact it’s here already, and I think as leaders in the video game industry it is on us to figure out not just can we do it with AI, but should we? And it’s a case-by-case type of decision making process and what's true for game X might not be true next year for game Y.”

When asked if she thought the increasing adoption of generative AI might help mitigate the swelling costs of AAA-games development, Juinio was clear that the use of AI in games development is unlikely to be the be-all end-all solution to the post-pandemic pattern of regular studio closures and the bursting of the blockbuster game bubble.

“I wouldn’t necessarily put it into an either/or kind of scenario in that way, because to me the size and scale and beauty of the game isn’t the main thing,” said Juinio. “At its heart, the game [needs] to be fun. [Ideally] at its heart the story is fantastic, it’s human, players connect to it, and it’s fun to play.”

“And yes it looks beautiful, and yes the music is immersive. But the music could be really immersive and the gameplay could be not good, or the story [might] not be engaging, and I don't think it would resonate with players as much. And so at least for right now, I don't see AI replacing the fun gameplay that is at the heart of a game like God of War.”

Although Juinio seems adament that generative AI in games development is here to stay, she also remains confident that it will never be able to rival the heart and soul that can only come from a human touch, and that the adoptance of AI will only be a positive if there's an equal amount of investment made into developers to help them get the best results out of it.

“At the end of the day you still need game developers to come up with the ideas,” said Juinio. “The story of God of War is very much a human story that is based on human experiences.”

“At least as of today, I don’t see that going away.”

Earlier this month the makers of Battlefield 6 stated that there was currently no way to implement the use of generative AI into the daily work of its development team, despite regarding the burgeoning technology as “very seducing”.

Indeed the debate over generative AI is bigger than in-game assets. At the start of October, Nintendo issued a statement in response to claims around generative AI, with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman calling Sora 2 copyrighted character videos “interactive fan fiction.”

Tristan Ogilvie is a senior video editor at IGN's Sydney office. He attended Gamescom Asia x Thai Game Show 2025 as a guest of the event organiser.

The LEGO Disney line is one of the most popular themes you'll find in 2025. There's currently a broad range of sets available based on animated classics and Pixar movies that appeal to both kids and Disney adults, but they are anything but cheap. So when a popular LEGO Disney set gets a big discount, it's usually worth mentioning.

Target is currently having a 20% off LEGO sale on a bunch of sets, but hidden within that is this Up House set that is actually almost 50% off its retail price. This is one of biggest discounts we've ever seen on this build and Amazon has already sold out its stock at the same price. If you're looking for an affordable Disney gift to grab ahead of Black Friday season, this one's worth a look.

LEGO Up House Sale at Target

Woot! (which is owned by Amazon) is offering rare deals on the latest Nvidia RTX 50 series graphics cards. Currently there are several Factory Reconditioned MSI GeForce RTX 50 series graphics cards on sale at below MSRP. These all come with a 6-month MSI warranty. Amazon Prime members get free shipping, the rest of us pay just $5 for the delivery fee. From past experience, these listings have very limited inventory, so the deals will probably sell out quickly. If you've been waiting for a discount on one of these GPUs, this is a good opportunity to pick one up at no markup.

Factory Reconditioned MSI GeForce RTX 5070 Ti GPUs

Choosing a tablet is tough, we know. Apple’s side alone has a variety of options, and it’s not always clear what’s so different between them. Unless you’re versed in all the jargon, the difference between a "Liquid Retina display" and a "Ultra Retina Tandem OLED with Pro Motion" isn't exactly obvious. There are also major differences under the hood, with Apple currently offering devices featuring an older A16 chip at the low end and an exceedingly fast M5 chip at the high end.

Android tablets only widen the field, of course. Where Apple tends to trim off the older tablets in its stable, the Android tablet market will still readily show you devices you shouldn’t have bought when they were new, let alone years later. And just like Apple’s devices, there’s a considerable range of hardware options that go from severely underpowered to total overkill – at which point a Windows tablet could make more sense. What makes Android tablet shopping even more complicated is the software support. Apple keeps its tablets running on the latest operating systems for a long time, but how long any given Android tablet will stay up to date is a much harder question to answer.

After looking at the market, considering all the tablets we’ve tested, and weighing what actually makes sense when purchasing a tablet, we’ve narrowed down a handful of the best options that strike the right balance.

TL;DR – These Are the Best Tablets:

1. iPad (11th Generation)

Best Tablet

2. Idea Tab Pro

Best Budget Tablet

3. Redmagic Astra

Best Tablet for Gaming

4. OnePlus Pad 2

Best Android Tablet

5. iPad Pro (M4, 2024)

Best Tablet for Creative Work

6. Onyx Boox Go 7

Best for Reading

7. Boox Tab X C

Best E-Ink Tablet

8. iPad Air (2024)

Best Thin and Light Tablet

How to Choose the Right Tablet for You

Budget

Figure out how much you can stomach to spend on a tablet. Looking to just stream shows and scroll socials? A cheap slate should suffice. However, you'll need to up your spending if you’re after a productivity tool that performs similarly to a laptop. You can even slap a keyboard onto some tablets, essentially turning them into detachable laptops, albeit with the limits of their hardware and operating system.

Design and Display

You'll want an option that’s lightweight but still durable for on-the-go use. A sizable, crisp, and responsive display ensures the best user experience, while OLED panels are a more premium option with deep blacks and richer colors over their LCD counterparts. Maybe you'd like none of the above and prefer something easier on the eyes like e-ink.

Internals

You don’t want a sluggish device that leads to you reaching for your smartphone or laptop instead. To prevent that from happening, a solid processor and at least 4GB of RAM is a must. For gaming or creative work, upgrading those specs can make a world of difference. Beyond that, you’ll want to ensure your software is up to date. Android OS is in its 16th generation, while iPadOS 26 is Apple’s latest.

Other features

Things like long battery life, great-sounding speakers, crisp cameras, and stylus support can help improve your experience on a tablet. You may even want to consider getting a 5G tablet that can connect to your cellular network when you’re not on Wi-Fi.

Tablets FAQ

Are iPads better than Android tablets?

No; they're not worse either. Both types of tablets have plenty of solid models to choose from. It’s more a matter of personal preference. If you already have an iPhone and/or MacBook, it makes sense to grab an iPad for seamless integration into your Apple ecosystem, including the ability to double as a second screen for a MacBook. iPads are known for their smooth user experience along with their wealth of apps and games, but the pricing is more restrictive.

Tablets running on Android OS come from various manufacturers using a wide variety of components and different versions of the Android operating system, meaning performance and the experience is all over the place. But there’s a wider selection of slates, from ultra-cheap to high-end. It’s just important to do your research, as there are some duds. The selection of apps optimized for an Android tablet is also more limited. Still, almost all Android apps should function fine, just not as well as on your phone.

Should you buy a tablet with cellular network support?

Most will find that a tablet with cellular network support is unnecessary unless you’re constantly on the go with no way to connect via Wi-Fi. Adding that extra line to your cellular plan can be expensive, and your smartphone can usually work as a Wi-Fi hotspot for your tablet when you’re in a pinch. However, should you decide you’d like cellular network support, many of our picks come in 5G versions; just know you have to make that decision up front.

Jackie Thomas is the Hardware and Buying Guides Editor at IGN and the PC components queen. You can follow her @Jackiecobra.

Mark Knapp is a contributing freelancer for IGN covering everything electronics and gaming hardware. He has over 10 years of experience in the tech industry with bylines at PCMag, Reviewed, CNET, and more. Find Mark on Twitter @Techn0Mark or BlueSky at @Techn0Mark.