Lego has announced a collaboration with Netflix to release a series of One Piece Lego sets "coming soon."

The One Piece collaboration was announced by Lego with a short teaser trailer, below, showing off Luffy's iconic straw hat in Lego form. No release date was announced, but the "collection" will be revealed in the coming month, and it's otherwise promised to release "soon."

These sets will be based on the Netflix live adaptation of the beloved manga series, and not it directly or its anime. That being said, the Netflix show perfectly recreated myriad elements of the source material so any Lego versions should be fairly close to all the above.

Straw Hats, are you ready for your next adventure? 🏴‍☠️ Coming soon. #LEGOOnePiece pic.twitter.com/kBbGTTWDlT

— ONE PIECE(ワンピース) Netflix (@onepiecenetflix) January 23, 2025

One Piece fans are invited to "follow the action and embark on their own grand adventures with multiple new Lego sets, inspired by some of the most iconic scenes straight out of the East Blue," Lego said.

"These sets will feature the main crew as seen in the show for the first time in Lego Minifigure form, transporting fans into the heart of the action featuring settings and scenes pulled straight from the screen."

Netflix vice president of consumer products Josh Simon emphasized an attention to detail, too. "Through every detail of the design process, we've worked to meticulously create a collection of playsets that will give fans new ways to live out their own epic voyages into the Grand Line one special Lego brick at a time," he said.

The live action One Piece adaptation premiered in 2023, while its second season is expected sometime in 2025. It will feature a number of new faces including Lera Abova as Nico Robin, Joe Manganiello as Crocodile, Charithra Chandran as Miss Wednesday, Katey Sagal as Dr. Kureha, Mark Harelik as Dr. Hiriluk, Sendhil Ramamurthy as Nefertari Cobra, Brendan Sean Murray as Brogy, Callum Kerr as Smoker, Camrus Johnson as Mr. 5, Clive Russell as Crocus, Daniel Lasker as Mr. 9, David Dastmalchian as Mr. 3, Jazzara Jaslyn as Miss Valentine, Julia Rehwald as Tashigi, Rob Colletti as Wapol, Ty Keogh as Dalton, and Werner Coetser as Dorry.

Jamie Lee Curtis, who was long expected to play Dr. Kureha after expressing interest herself and co-showrunner Matt Owens saying "at this point we're writing for her," won't appear in Season 2 after all.

Ryan Dinsdale is an IGN freelance reporter. He'll talk about The Witcher all day.

Sonic the Hedgehog's third cinematic adventure is speeding its way onto 4K and Blu-ray. If you've been hoping to add it to your physical media collection, you're in luck. The standard 4K release is now available to preorder for $35.99 and there are two steelbooks up for preorder as well for $44.99 a piece: one with a blue pattern on the cover and Sonic in the center and an Amazon exclusive steelbook with a red pattern and Shadow up front.

Both the standard 4K and steelbooks are set to release on April 15 this year. Head to the links below to get your preorders in fast.

Sonic the Hedgehog 3 4K Shadow Steelbook Preorder

Sonic the Hedgehog 3 4K Sonic Steelbook Preorder

Sonic the Hedgehog 3 4K UHD, Blu-Ray, and Digital Preorder

Sonic the Hedgehog 3 4K Special Features

• Commentary By Director Jeff Fowler and the Voice of Sonic Ben Schwartz — Embark on an adventure with the director and star!
• Sonic Family Fun — The Sonic cast and crew share how they've become like a family over the years.
• Enter Shadow — Keanu Reeves and other cast members talk about his portrayal of fan-favorite character Shadow the Hedgehog.
• Robotnik Family Reunion: Ivo and Gerald — Jim Carrey and the Sonic family discuss how the characters of Ivo and Gerald Robotnik were brought to life.
• For the Love of Sonic: Directing a Trilogy — With a background in visual effects and animation, director Jeff Fowler shares how directing the Sonic films has been a dream come true.
• The Fox, the Echidna, and the Hedgehog — Ben Schwartz as Sonic, Colleen O'Shaughnessey as Tails, and Idris Elba as Knuckles invite us into the recording booth.
• Live-Action Lunacy: Acting Opposite Puppets — Find out what it's like to act alongside life-sized puppets!
• From the Cryo-Tank to London: The World of Sonic — Explore the production designs for the film's many spectacular locations.
• Team Sonic vs. Shadow — The team behind the epic battle sequences details how the action is choreographed for maximum realism.
• A Very Sonic Christmas — Team Sonic helps Santa Claus save Christmas!
• Gag Reel — Laugh along with Team Sonic and these hilarious outtakes!
• Deleted Scenes

In our review of Sonic the Hedgehog 3 writer A.A. Dowd said, "Better jokes, better imagery, and two (!) inspired comic performances by Jim Carrey give this Sonic sequel an edge on its overly kiddy predecessors." If you're curious when and where you can stream Sonic the Hedgehog 3 instead, have a look at our guide on how to watch Sonic the Hedgehog 3. And if you'd like to know more about upcoming physical releases in general, check out our breakdown of upcoming 4K UHD and Blu-ray releases.

Hannah Hoolihan is a freelancer who writes with the guides and commerce teams here at IGN.

If you’re looking to upgrade your gaming PC, buying one of the best graphics cards can end up being one of the most expensive components. With that in mind, sometimes it’s worth holding off and waiting for the best time to buy a new GPU; but when is that?

As Nvidia and AMD release the next generation of GPUs, we break down some of the best times to buy a graphics card every year.

For the Best Time to Buy a GPU, Keep in Mind:

• What Type of Games You Play
• Sales Events Such as Black Friday and Prime Day
• When Is the Next Generation of GPUs Due to Be Released
• What Hardware You Currently Own
• Budget GPUs We Recommend

What Type of Games You Play

This might seem obvious to some, but if you play games that are less GPU intensive such as Roblox and Minecraft, you might want to consider steering away from a high-end, next-generation RTX 5090 card and focusing your budget on something a little less… monstrous.

If you’re on a budget, and you don’t need a NASA-certified graphics card, the best option is to look at older budget graphics cards, such as the AMD Radeon RX 6600 or Nvidia’s equivalent offering, the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3050.

If you don’t plan to play GPU-intensive games, or you’re a lover of indie games, you could consider a cheaper option. Buying the latest GPU for these games is like bringing a nuke to a knife fight, whereas a budget GPU would offer better value over a high-end GPU that the games you play most likely won’t fully utilize.

In many cases, games are more CPU-intensive than they are GPU-intensive. You might be better off looking at the best CPUs to upgrade your gaming PC instead.

But if you’re looking to rock some ray tracing eye candy, you’re going to need to splash out on something a little more powerful. Buying the previous generation of GPUs is often a great way to pick up a bargain.

Sales Events Such as Black Friday and Prime Day

As Tobey Maguire once said, with great power comes great responsibility. While I’m fairly sure he wasn’t talking about the price of GPUs, it does ring true in this case. If you want a powerful GPU, be responsible with your money and wait for the right sale to come along.

Black Friday, Cyber Monday and Prime Day are perfect for picking up a range of bargain graphics cards. Not only can you find the previous generations at a more affordable price, but you can often find the latest cards at a price that won't require a second mortgage to buy.

While historically sales such as Black Friday and Prime Day have seen some pretty good discounts on GPUs, it’s not guaranteed that the exact graphics card you want will be on sale. If you want a great price you might need to be open to buying a slightly different model, or a GPU from a different manufacturer than what you were hoping for.

Wait for the Next Generation of GPUs to Drop

If you’ve already got a GPU in mind, but it currently costs too much, you could wait for the next generation of GPUs to be announced. Oh wait, that's right now! Nvidia just announced their 50-series graphics cards, with the RTX 5090 and RTX 5080 set to release on January 30. Meanwhile, AMD's RX 9070 and RX 9070 XT are set to hit the market in March.

As soon as a new line of graphics cards is announced, most retailers tend to drop their prices in an attempt to make room for the next-generation GPUs. Once the new range of GPUs is officially released, you will often find that the price of last-gen GPUs often goes down again. So if you've been holding for the something from Nvidia's 40-series, like an RTX 4090 or RTX 4070 Super, expect prices to go down throughout 2025.

Of course, if you've decided you need a next-gen GPU that just released, you’re back to square one and will need to wait for a sale.

Are You Going to Bottleneck Your Machine?

When looking for the best time to buy a new GPU, it’s not just the price you need to consider, it’s your current build too. For example, if you’re sporting an Intel Core i5, you’re not going to want to pair that with a beefy AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX, as you’re more than likely going to cause a bottleneck.

You might also want to check that your current power supply is up to the task of powering a next-gen GPU. The best power supplies should not only have enough wattage to power your new GPU, but they should also have a sufficient rating to ensure better performance. When it comes to PSUs, there’s no such thing as overkill, a gold or platinum PSU will offer much better efficiency.

When you’re looking to upgrade your graphics card, you essentially want to make sure that no other parts are seriously outdated. If even one component is too far behind the rest of your gaming computer, you could be causing a potential bottleneck.

Is This GPU Overkill Right Now?

The last thing to consider when thinking about the best time to upgrade your GPU is the gaming market. For example, when a new engine is released, such as the fairly recent release of Unreal Engine 5, you will likely find yourself waiting a while before games come out that will push the limits of your next-gen GPU. Nvidia's RTX 4090 features DLSS 4, but only some games will be able to take advantage of the AI upscaling. You can check out the full list of DLSS 4 launch titles here.

Top Budget GPU's You Can Buy Right Now

If you're ready to upgrade sooner rather than later, but aren't looking to spend a fortune on the newest generation of cards, we highly recommend the Intel Arc B580. Check out more recommendations from our full guide to the best budget graphics cards on the market right now.

Capcom is experimenting with generative AI to create the "hundreds of thousands" of ideas needed for in-game environments.

As video game development costs rise, publishers are increasingly looking to controversial AI tools to speed up work and cut costs. Call of Duty reportedly sold an "AI-generated cosmetic" for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 in late 2023, and fans accused Activision of using generative AI again for a loading screen last year. EA said in September that AI was "the very core" of its business.

In a new interview with Google Cloud Japan, Kazuki Abe, a technical director at Capcom who has worked on huge titles like Monster Hunter: World and Exoprimal, explained how the company is experimenting with implementing AI in its game development processes.

“One of the most time-consuming and labor intensive parts of game development is coming up with hundreds of thousands of unique ideas,” Abe explained (via Automaton). He added that designs for things like televisions require their own unique designs, logos, and shape. “Including unused ones, we ended up having to come up with hundreds of thousands of ideas,” he continued.

Multiple proposals are needed for the thousands to tens of thousands of these kinds of objects per game, and each proposal includes illustrations needed to communicate the idea to the art director and artists as well as text, Abe explained.

Seeing room for efficiency improvements, Abe created a system where generative AI could read various game design documents and an AI could output the ideas, enhancing development speed and efficiency, delivering feedback for itself in the process and further refining output.

His prototype, which taps into multiple AI models such as Google Gemini Pro, Gemini Flash, and Imagen has apparently received positive feedback from internal development teams. The result of implementing the AI model would ultimately “reduce costs significantly” compared to doing them all by hand, while also improving quality.

Right now, Capcom’s experimentation with AI models appears to be limited to just this system, leaving other aspects of game development, such as ideation, gameplay, programming, and character design firmly in the hands of humans.

Sayem is a freelancer based in the UK, covering tech & hardware. You can get in touch with him at @sayem.zone on Bluesky.

The first season of the HBO show The Last of Us is arguably the best video game adaptation ever made. It's great, and it (mostly) sticks to the story originally laid out in the 2013 Naughty Dog game for PS3. With The Last of Us season two beginning to air in April on Max, the first season is getting an awesome limited-edition steelbook release so you can catch up to where the show left off. It’s available for preorder now, with a release date of March 18. Read on to see what comes with it.

Preorder The Last of Us: The Complete First Season (4K UHD Steelbook)

• Get it at Amazon
• Get it at Target
• Get it at Walmart

For anyone who hasn’t seen this first season, it basically covers everything that happened in the first game and the Left Behind expansion, plus some extra world-building story lines that add to the overall effect. The scripts for the first season were all written by showrunners Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann (Druckmann was a writer and creative director for both The Last of Us video games).

In the Max show, Pedro Pascal takes the role of Joel Miller, while Bella Ramsey plays Ellie. Troy Baker and Ashley Johnson (who played Joel and Ellie, respectively, in the games) have parts in the show as well. It follows the same basic story as the first game, with Joel escorting Ellie on a cross-country trip through a fungal-zombie-infested America, where Ellie will play a key role in potentially saving the world from the outbreak.

The Last of Us is one of my personal favorite video game series, and I think the show does justice to the exceptional story. You can check out our The Last of Us season one review for more details.

Special Features and Bonus Content

Included in The Last of Us: The Complete First Season Limited-Edition Collectible Steelbook bundle is over two hours of bonus content. Here’s what you get:

• Controllers Down: Adapting The Last of Us, From Levels to Live Action
• The Last of Us: Stranger than Fiction

If the show left you with an appetite to play the games, you can pick up The Last of Us: Part I on PS5 or PC. The Last of Us: Part II Remastered is also available on PS5 and is coming to PC on April 3. Sony has also released some pretty rad Joel and Ellie action figures, if that's your thing. And for those looking forward to the second season of the show, you can check out 5 details in the season two trailer.

Chris Reed is a deals expert and commerce editor for IGN. You can follow him on Bluesky @chrislreed.com.

The 2025 Oscar nominations for the 97th Academy Awards have been announced, and Emilia Pérez is leading the pack this year with 13 nods — the most earned by a film not in the English language.

Rachel Sennott and Bowen Yang unveiled the nominations on January 23 in a live presentation on the Oscars YouTube channel. Jacques Audiard’s Spanish crime thriller Emilia Pérez featured in multiple categories, including Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Lead Actress, which Karla Sofía Gascón is up for.

Wicked and The Brutalist followed closely behind with 10 nods apiece, while Conclave and A Complete Unknown each scored eight nominations.

Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 is the best selling game of both December 2024 and the full year 2024 in the U.S., returning to the No.1 spot after Hogwarts Legacy took the crown in 2023.

This is according to Circana data and analysis by Mat Piscatella shared with IGN. The annual Call of Duty release historically is almost always the No.1. best-selling game in the U.S. each year by dollar sales going back to 2008, with a few exceptions. Both Grand Theft Auto V and Red Dead Redemption II beat it out in their respective release years, and in 2023, Hogwarts Legacy took the crown. Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 was back on top this year, though it's possible that victory is short-lived given Grand Theft Auto VI's expected release late this year.

This year, Call of Duty was also once again the best-selling franchise in the U.S. for a record 16th year in a row.

EA Sports College Football 25, the No.2 best-selling game of 2024 and the No.3 best-selling game of December, was also the best-selling sports game in U.S. history.

Not a single Nintendo game cracked the top 20 for 2024, though that's possibly because Nintendo does not share digital sales data with Circana, meaning all Nintendo first-party games on this list are only including physical sales in their rankings. That said, on the Nintendo Switch console, Super Mario Party Jamboree was the best-selling game of the year, followed by Mario Kart 8 at No. 2 and Mario & Luigi: Brothership at No.3.

Most of the rankings for the month of December were releases from earlier in the year or even prior years, given a low number of new releases. Indiana Jones and the Great Circle was the only new release ranking in December, at No.14. Because Circana tracks in dollar sales, we don't see new releases Marvel Rivals (free-to-play) or Path of Exile 2 ($30, as opposed to $60) on the top-selling games list. However, both ranked on Circana's tracking of the top games in the U.S. by Steam MAUs (No.1 and No.3 for December, respectively) and Marvel Rivals was also No.3 on PS5 and Xbox Series by MAUs.

For the full year, content spending in the U.S. increased by 2% to $50.6 billion, the second highest total for content spending in U.S. history, behind 2021's $52 billion. There was an 11% drop in console content spending, but it was balanced out by growth in all other content areas. For December by itself, video game content spending was down 5% year over year to $5.8 billion. There was a 21% drop in console content spending in December, but PC content spending grew 13%.

Hardware spending for 2024 dropped 25% from 2023 to $4.9 billion, with PS5 as the best-selling console of both the month and the year. Switch was second place for the year in unit sales, while Xbox Series finished second in dollar sales. Digital editions made up 45% of PS5s sold in the U.S. during 2024, and 44% of Xbox Series.

For the month of December alone, hardware spending was down 29% from 2023 to $1.1 billion in December. All three console makers saw the drop: PS5 hardware spending dropped 18%, and Xbox Series and Switch both dropped by 38%.

For the full year, overall spending on games was down 1.1% to $58.7 billion. For December, total spending dropped 8.9% year over year to $7.5 billion.

The top 20 best-selling games in the U.S. for the month of December, based on dollar sales:

1. Call of Duty: Black Ops 6
2. Madden NFL 25
3. EA Sports College Football 25
4. EA Sports FC 25
5. Super Mario Party Jamboree*
6. Sonic X Shadow Generations
7. Hogwarts Legacy
8. Astro Bot
9. Minecraft*
10. NBA 2K25*
11. Dragon Ball: Sparking! Zero
12. Elden Ring
13. Marvel's Spider-Man 2
14. Indiana Jones and the Great Circle
15. Helldivers II
16. Mario Kart 8
17. Mario & Luigi: Brothership*
18. God of War: Ragnarok
19. The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom*
20. Just Dance 2025 Edition

The top 20 best-selling games in the U.S. for the full year 2024, based on dollar sales:

1. Call of Duty: Black Ops 6
2. EA Sports College Football 25
3. Helldivers II
4. Dragon Ball: Sparking! Zero
5. NBA 2K25*
6. Madden NFL 25
7. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III (2023)
8. EA Sports FC 25
9. Elden Ring
10. EA Sports MVP Bundle
11. Hogwarts Legacy
12. Dragon's Dogma II
13. WWE 2K24*
14. MLB: The Show 24*
15. Grand Theft Auto V*
16. Minecraft*
17. Final Fantasy VII: Rebirth
18. Tekken 8
19. Marvel's Spider-Man 2
20. NBA 2K24*

* Indicates that some or all digital sales are not included in Circana's data. Some publishers, including Nintendo and Take-Two, do not share certain digital data for this report.

Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter for IGN. You can find her posting on BlueSky @duckvalentine.bsky.social. Got a story tip? Send it to rvalentine@ign.com.

Nvidia has been a market leader in PC gaming graphics for years, and with the rise of machine learning, AI is playing an increasingly important role in how we experience our games. One of its most revolutionary advancements has been Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS), an intelligent upscaling solution that opens the door to increased performance, especially at higher resolutions. This technology has undergone multiple iterations over the years, and with the launch of the RTX 50-series, it’s making its biggest jump forward yet with DLSS 4.

In this guide, I’ll explain everything you need to know about how this tech works, why it matters to you and the future of PC gaming, and why it’s something you may want to keep in mind with your next PC upgrade.

What is DLSS?

DLSS, or Deep Learning Super Sampling, is Nvidia’s proprietary system for intelligently upscaling games. The company has consistently developed and built upon DLSS since its debut in 2019. Throughout that time, its core purpose has been to improve performance by rendering games at a lower resolution and then upscaling that content to your monitor’s native resolution. Rather than leave you with the soft and potentially blurry image you would experience turning up the resolution yourself, DLSS applies its scaling through a neural network that has been trained on thousands of hours of video games. Alternatively, if you don’t want or need to upscale, you can instead enable Deep Learning Anti-Aliasing (DLAA), which provides image enhancements to your native resolution.

These features are only available on Nvidia graphics cards with Tensor Cores, which began with the RTX 20-series. This is because the upscaling and enhancements taking place are the result of thousands of hours of neural training on Nvidia supercomputers. Its neural network ingests and learns from huge data sets to learn how to upscale and reconstruct/enhance images with the least quality loss and, in fact, even provide additional clarity in some situations.

As time has gone on, Nvidia has enhanced the system with additional features. One of the biggest is Frame Generation, which uses artificial intelligence to create an additional frame between each rendered frame, increasing frame rate. When used in conjunction with Nvidia Reflex (which is also being enhanced with the 50-series), these additional frames can blend in with a minimal impact on latency. The result of which isn’t just “better performance,” but allowing lower-performance graphics cards to reach previously unattainable frame rates with aspirational graphics settings.

Which brings us to the current day with DLSS 4.

TNN vs. CNN (The Transformer Model)

This generation marks the most significant change in the feature’s history and includes a completely different, and much more capable, AI model.

The Transformer Model

So far, DLSS has used a model of AI known as a CNN, or Convolutional Neural Network, to deliver its benefits. This type of model analyzes an image to determine key elements, like lines, edges, and spatial relationships to determine how to apply its enhancements. It’s a very common type of neural network specializing in image analysis, which is why it’s not surprising that it was the foundational model behind DLSS up to this point.

Every couple of years, Nvidia launches an extremely expensive, extremely powerful graphics card that brings PC gaming into a new generation. That is what the Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090 ultimately is, but the way it brings next-generation performance is unconventional, to say the least. Because in a lot of games, the performance uplift over the RTX 4090 isn’t quite as steep as you’d expect – at least when DLSS Frame Generation is taken out of consideration. With the next generation of Nvidia’s DLSS for both upscaling and frame generation, however, we get leaps in image quality and performance that feel even greater than what we see with a typical graphics generation.

How much of an upgrade the Nvidia RTX 5090 is going to be for you, then, is ultimately going to depend on the games you play, the resolution you play those games at, and whether you’re ok with an AI algorithm generating extra frames. For a lot of people playing games on anything less than a 4K monitor with a 240Hz refresh rate, this upgrade is simply not going to make a lot of sense. But if you do have a high-end display, these AI-generated frames are going to feel like a taste of the future.

RTX 5090 – Specs and Features

The Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090 is built on Blackwell, Nvidia’s high-end architecture that’s already powering the data centers and supercomputers behind many of the most popular AI models. That should give you an idea of what the RTX 5090 is especially good at, but Nvidia didn’t neglect the, well, non-AI parts of the card.

With the 5090, Nvidia found a way to shove more Streaming Multiprocessors (SMs) into the same amount of GPCs (Graphics Processing Clusters), which means more CUDA cores – 21,760, up from 16,384 in the RTX 4090. That makes up for a 32% uplift in the amount of shader cores over the previous generation, and is where a bulk of the raw gaming performance comes from.

Each SM also has four Tensor Cores and one RT Core, just like its predecessor. That means you get 680 Tensor Cores and 170 RT cores, compared to 512 and 128, respectively, for the RTX 4090. The 5th-generation Tensor Cores are tailor-made to boost AI performance, with this generation adding support for FP4 operations, which should make AI workloads less dependent on VRAM.

All of this silicon is coupled with 32GB of GDDR7 VRAM, or video memory. This is a generational shift from the GDDR6X memory in the RTX 4090, and should be faster and more power efficient than the previous generation. But because the RTX 5090 requires a staggering 575W of power, a huge increase over the already power hungry 4090, power efficiency isn’t exactly Nvidia’s main goal with this graphics card.

Because the new Tensor Cores are more efficient, Nvidia shifted the entire DLSS algorithm to run on a Transformer Neural Network (TNN), rather than a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN). This shift won’t necessarily improve your framerate when you enable DLSS, but Nvidia claims it will improve image quality, and mitigate issues like ghosting and other unwanted artifacts.

Nvidia did more than just make an under-the-hood change to the way DLSS works. Team Green also introduces Multi-Frame Generation, which takes the Frame Gen tech introduced with the RTX 4090, makes it more efficient and smooth, and allows it to generate multiple frames off of each rendered image. This drastically improves frame rate, but should probably only be enabled if you’re already getting a decent frame rate, just like the last generation version.

The Founders Edition

The Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090 requires 575W of power, which is much more than the 450W of the RTX 4090. More power inherently means more heat, which means increasingly powerful cooling solutions are needed. Looking back at the RTX 4090 and even the RTX 3090, the Founders Editions were these giant, triple-slot graphics cards that took up a ton of room, and straight up wouldn’t fit in some PC cases.

Before I saw the RTX 5090, I was expecting something even bigger and more unwieldy. However, somehow, it’s smaller. Nvidia was able to make a 575W graphics card fit in a dual-slot chassis with a dual fan configuration. And it works.

Throughout my time with the RTX 5090, which included both my standard testing suite and playing games with DLSS 4 enabled to test multi frame generation, the temperature maxed out at around 86°C, even while its power consumption peaked at 578W. That’s a high temperature, to be sure, and higher than the RTX 4090’s 80°C, but it’s not high enough to throttle, and that’s all that matters.

Nvidia was able to do this by shrinking down the PCB (printed circuit board) to a little square and placing it in the middle of the graphics card. The two fans are placed on each side of where the PCB is, with a heatsink that runs through the width of the card. These fans then take air in through the bottom of the card and shoot it straight through the top of the card and out through your exhaust fans in your PC case. In fact, this graphics card doesn’t even have exhaust vents under the output ports at the rear of the card, unlike previous generation designs.

But it’s immediately apparent that the RTX 5090 Founders Edition follows a similar design language to the last couple of generations. The center of the card has the same silver ‘X’ design as the RTX 4090, with a gunmetal-gray chassis surrounding the black heatsinks. On the outer edge of the graphics card, you get a ‘GeForce RTX’ logo that lights up with white LEDs, too.

Next to that logo, you’re going to find the power connector. While it looks very similar to the 12VHPWR connector of the last generation, it’s actually a new 12V-2x6 power connector. The difference is minor, but it’s supposedly more efficient than the last-generation connector. Maybe Nvidia will be available to avoid controversy around its power connectors melting with this generation – only time will tell.

Nvidia does include an 12V-2x6 adapter in the box, which takes four 8-pin PCIe power connectors in order to provide the required 575W of power. But what’s nice is that the connector on the graphics card itself is now angled, and facing the back of the graphics card, which should make connecting the cable much easier. The power connector seems more secure this time around, too.

The hidden benefit of this design is its ability to be slotted into smaller PC builds. You don’t need a giant case to run the RTX 5090, like you did with the RTX 4090 and 3090. However, it’s very likely that third-party designs from the likes of Asus and MSI are going to be much larger than Nvidia’s Founders Edition.

DLSS 4: Fake Frames?

When Nvidia revealed the RTX 5090, it claimed that it could boost performance by as much as 8x. The actual number isn’t that high, but the RTX 5090 can deliver extremely high frame rates in the most demanding games, but not exactly through traditional rendering. Because while the RTX 5090 does deliver a decent increase in raw rasterization performance, the real next-generation benefit is in its ability to generate extra frames to increase your frame rate.

DLSS 4 introduces ‘Multi-Frame Generation’, a next-gen version of the Frame Generation introduced with DLSS 3 and the RTX 4090. But it’s more than just using the same method to just produce more frames. And the secret behind it is a new AI Management Processor, or AMP core in the RTX 5090 – along with other RTX 5000 graphics cards. The AMP allows the graphics card to essentially assign work to different parts of the GPU, something that was traditionally handled by your CPU. But because it’s physically located on the GPU, it’s able to do this much more efficiently.

Developer VOXEL and publisher Noovola have announced The Bench, a upcoming "old man at the park" simulator. Yes, you play an elderly gentleman hanging out on a park bench controlling flocks of pigeons, fending off hungry wildlife, annoying park staff, and solving puzzles in the newspaper in this casual sim/puzzle game with a wholesome twist.

In addition to the largely cozy single-player action, The Bench is also, according to the developers, "enhanced with Twitch integrations, allowing viewers to interact with streamers by spawning in-game events like pigeons, raccoons, and NPCs that can either assist or hinder gameplay." Watch the teaser trailer above and check out the first screenshots in the gallery below.

A playable demo of The Bench will be available on Steam as part of Steam Next Fest next month. You can also wishlist it if you're interested.

Ryan McCaffrey is IGN's executive editor of previews and host of both IGN's weekly Xbox show, Podcast Unlocked, as well as our monthly(-ish) interview show, IGN Unfiltered. He's a North Jersey guy, so it's "Taylor ham," not "pork roll." Debate it with him on Twitter at @DMC_Ryan.

Pokémon Trading Card Game Pocket's next set is a Diamond and Pearl-themed booster called Space-Time Smackdown, and it launches next week.

The Pokémon Company revealed the set arrives January 29 in a trailer, below, but its website currently lists a January 30 date. Space-Time Smackdown includes the likes of Dialga ex and Palkia ex alongside the generation four starter Pokémon: Turtwig, Chimchar, and Piplup.

Despite being the second full set, unlike the expansion set that was Mythical Island, Space-Time Smackdown features between just 140 and 150 cards. This should make it significantly easier to complete compared to set one, Genetic Apex, which includes 286 cards. It's unclear if this 140 to 150 number includes the alternate art pieces, however, which could bump up that number by a few dozen.

"Are you ready to rumble? Discover a whole new expansion’s worth of cards in Pokémon Trading Card Game Pocket," The Pokémon Company said. "Legendary Pokémon Dialga and Palkia from the Sinnoh region have bent time and space to rule the battlefield as dimension-altering Pokémon ex.

"The Space-Time Smackdown expansion features over 140 cards including exciting Pokémon ex cards, new Trainer cards, and gorgeous immersive cards ready to bring you into the wondrous world of Pokémon."

The widely panned trading feature was also confirmed to arrive alongside this set.

Pokémon TCG Pocket arrived in October and follows the standard mobile and free-to-play game model, flooding players with rewards in the first few days before soon drying up, with spending real-world money the only real way to re-experience that early thrill outside of the occasional set drop like this one.

Completing Genetic Apex without spending money, for example, will take players around two years according to one estimate, while those looking to make it rain can wrap up the collection after dropping around $1,500.

Ryan Dinsdale is an IGN freelance reporter. He'll talk about The Witcher all day.

Square Enix has now completed the story of the third and final part of the Final Fantasy 7 Remake trilogy.

Speaking to Famitsu and translated by Eurogamer, Final Fantasy series producer Yoshinori Kitase and Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth director Naoki Hamaguchi said development on the highly anticipated conclusion is progressing smoothly.

"I'm very satisfied with [the story], so I'm sure fans will be satisfied with the final chapter," Kitase said, adding that Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth creative director Tetsuya Nomura gave him "homework" to ensure this was the case.

The story of Part 3, which currently lacks an official name or release window, was required to have a respect for the original Final Fantasy 7 alongside a new level of satisfaction not felt in that game, Kitase said.

Square Enix announced its plans to release Final Fantasy 7 Remake as a trilogy in June 2022, following the release of the first game which had fans questioning if the entire story would need a dozen parts to be told properly. This is because Final Fantasy Remake itself only adapted the opening few hours of the original game, up to the point where the party leaves Midgar.

Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth expanded the scope significantly, however, introducing the open world and thus covering myriad locations such as Costa del Sol, the Golden Saucer, and many more, including some new ones.

It brought the overall story up to the end of Disc 1 of the original Final Fantasy 7, which closes in both games with what's arguably the most iconic moment in video game history.

Part 3 will pick up immediately after this, though very little is known about it so far. Development began in June 2022 but Square Enix hasn't said when it will end, only vaguely noting it hopes to release Part 3 by 2027.

Something it has said, however, is that it "will not cheat" when it comes to the Highwind airship. This allowed the party to quickly move around the map in the original game but, now in the world of fast travel, many fans wondered how the iconic ship could be implemented.

"We will not cheat with the airship system [in Part 3] but take the challenge head on so it can freely fly all over the game map," Hamaguchi said in November.

In our 9/10 review of the last game, IGN said: "Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth impressively builds off of what Remake set in motion, both as a best-in-class action role playing game full of exciting challenges and an awe inspiring recreation of a world that has meant so much to so many for so long."

Ryan Dinsdale is an IGN freelance reporter. He'll talk about The Witcher all day.

Of all of the things connected to your PC, your mouse would be the last thing you'd expect to set itself alight. But that was the reality redditor lommelinn faced after they reportedly found their gaming mouse alight on their desk while their PC was in sleep mode — and it almost “burned down” their apartment.

Posting to reddit, Iommelinn claimed: “I smelled smoke early this morning, so I rushed into my room and found my computer mouse burning with large flames. Black smoke filled the room. I quickly extinguished the fire, but exhaled a lot of smoke in the process and my room is in a bad shape now, covered with black particles (my modular synth as well). Fortunately, we avoided the worst, but the fact that this can happen is still shocking. It's an older wired, optical mouse from Gigabyte.”

The mouse in question is a Gigabyte M6880X, an older wired mouse that seems like a completely normal wired gaming mouse. With no battery inside and running via USB 2.0, which only pulls in 5V of power at 0.5A, the Gigabyte M6880X's alleged catastrophic failure has certainly raised eyebrows.

In images posted by the user, the mouse itself appears to have had its top rear panel completely melted away, with the underside of the mouse managing to escape from much damage. The reasons behind why only the top casing of the mouse was damaged is also a mystery. In additional imagery, the damage to the user’s desk is also present, with a melted portion of the desk and mousepad in sight.

Gigabyte officially responded to Iommelinn’s claim in a comment within the reddit thread, confirming it had launched an investigation:

“Hi Everyone,

"We have been made aware of the incident shared by lommelin regarding the M6880X gaming mice. Our customer's safety is our top priority and we are actively looking into this case. Our team has reached out to lommelin to offer support and to investigate the matter fully. In the meantime, we appreciate the community’s understanding and patience as we work to address this issue.

"Best,
"The GIGABYTE Team.”

In a subsequent reddit post, lommelinn expressed their disbelief at the surprising series of events. "My PC was in sleep mode," they explained. "Since then, I checked the USB port with a voltage meter and it's fine. No clue how this can happen."

Image credit: Iommelinn / reddit.

Sayem is a freelancer based in the UK, covering tech & hardware. You can get in touch with him at @sayem.zone on Bluesky.

Palworld developer Pocketpair is moving into the publishing business to release Tales of Kenzera: Zau developer Surgent Studio's next game.

The newly formed Pocketpair Publishing said on X/Twitter it will support "a brand new horror game" from Surgent Studios, which released Tales of Kenzera: Zau as its debut title in April last year. The horror game published by Pocketpair won't be a continuation of that universe, however.

"We noticed a pattern in the entertainment industry, and Pocketpair has given us the opportunity to make a horror game about it," said Surgent Studios CEO Abubakar Salim. "Both Surgent and Pocketpair are well versed in taking risks. This game will be short and weird, and we think players will be interested in what we have to say.

"We’re still in earnest conversation about further projects set in the Tales of Kenzera universe, but this will be a standalone piece: a mile marker between where we’ve come from and where we’re going."

No release window or even a title was announced, so the project is presumably still a while away from releasing. This is also separate from the Project Uso concept previously shared by Surgent Studios.

Pocketpair Publishing, meanwhile, is now accepting pitches from other developers. "We don't want to tell you what to do.​ We don’t want to take control from you. We don’t want to change your dream or push you to make a certain type of game," it said on its website.

Head of Pocketpair Publishing John Buckley added: "At Pocketpair, there is nothing we love more than games, and Pocketpair Publishing is our latest venture to help the world enjoy gaming even more. Game development comes with many challenges, but we want to ease that process as much as possible and provide an environment where creators can pursue their dreams.

"We are pleased to be able to support Surgent Studios’ new title as our first step. We deeply sympathize with their original ideas and passion and are honoured to help them realize their vision. We will respect the autonomy and vision of developers and work together to make great games for people all over the world."

Salim, who is also an actor having played Assassin's Creed Origins protagonist Bayek, Alyn of Hull in House of the Dragon, and the titular character in Tales of Kenzera: Zau, said "it's an incredible honor to be Pocketpair Publishing's first partner" in a follow up post on X/Twitter.

"This is the energy I want to see driving games in 2025," he said, "developers lifting each other up, creating together, and pushing the industry forward."

Tales of Kenzera: Zau is a single player Metroidvania game which explores themes of grief and love. It earned a 7/10 in IGN's review. "Tales of Kenzera: Zau's action isn't groundbreaking within the genre, but its elevated by a truly moving tale about how to go on in this world when your loved ones have passed on to the next," we said.

The positive reception wasn't enough to drive unbridled success, however, as Surgent Studios announced layoffs in July. Things grew worse as employees were put on notice for redundancy in October amid further funding struggles, meaning the support from Pocketpair Publishing will likely go a long way.

As for Pocketpair, it's still battling The Pokémon Company and Nintendo's patent infringement lawsuit, filed following Palworld's record-breaking sales success.

Ryan Dinsdale is an IGN freelance reporter. He'll talk about The Witcher all day.

CD Projekt has announced that patch 2.21 for Cyberpunk 2077 is rolling out to players on PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X and S. The brunt of the changes are largely fixes for photo mode, as well as DLSS 4 support for PC players.

While patch 2.2 added a much deeper look at customization in photo mode, 2.21 adds heaps of fixes for the mode. One of the most notable is the ability to finally save characters and V’s rotation and position within your Photo Mode presets.

There are also fixes present for “texture and color inconsistencies for vehicles that have CrystalCoat applied,” in addition to several other menu fixes for the vehicle customization system added in patch 2.11.

For those looking at creating a character in future runs, you can now also preserve randomizer settings within the character creator after further customization of character attributes.

There are also a handful of changes to allow Johnny Silverhand to appear more in the passenger seat of your car if you’re ever feeling lonely while driving along the streets of Dogtown. Patch 2.2 originally sought to resolve this by having Johnny sitting shotgun around 25% of the time, which didn’t happen. The inverse also occurred, where Johnny could appear duplicated in the passenger seat in quests where he is set to appear during a scripted event. The new patch will solve any ghostly duplications of Silverhand, and have him spend more time with V in a car this time around.

Most notably, the game has also added DLSS 4 support for PC players, as well as Multi Frame Generation for RTX 50-series GPUs. This tool will now allow players to boost their FPS by “up to three times per traditionally rendered frame,” so long as you have the new GPUs to run it.

RTX 40-series users can also enjoy “faster single frame generation with reduced memory usage." All Nvidia RTX GPU owners can also choose between the traditional CNN model in DLSS features to the new Transformer model, which CD Projekt claimed can enhance “stability, lighting, and detail in motion."

RTX users can also enjoy enhanced Ray Reconstruction, with fewer artifacts and smudging in patch 2.21. CD Projekt has not announced whether or not this might be a final update to Cyberpunk 2077, as the company transitions to full development on The Witcher 4.

Cyberpunk 2077 update 2.21 patch notes:

Patch 2.21 for Cyberpunk 2077 is being rolled out on PC, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S!

This update adds support for DLSS 4 on PC and introduces various fixes, notably to SmartFrames on Xbox and Photo Mode across all platforms. For details, check the full list of changes below:

Photo Mode

• Nibbles and Adam Smasher can now be spawned while V is in the air or in water.
• Fixed the Facial Expression option for Adam Smasher.
• Fixed an issue where Adam Smasher's glowing chest cyberware was missing.
• Fixed an issue where, if Johnny's Alternate Appearance was enabled, both options to spawn him (default and alternate) resulted in the alternate look.
• Characters spawned while V is in the air or in water will no longer snap to the ground.
• Characters will now be properly saved in presets.
• Spawned characters will now be visible after adding a background.
• V's rotation and position will now be properly saved in presets.
• Fixed an issue where adjusting the Up/Down slider for V wouldn't change their position between certain values.
• NPCs that turn invisible after disabling the Surrounding NPCs option will no longer have collision.
• Fixed an issue where loading a preset could cause additional light sources to appear even when disabled, or spawn them in incorrect positions.
• Fixed an issue where the camera could get stuck on walls after setting Full Collision to ON.
• Fixed an issue where camera settings would only apply after loading a saved preset twice.
• Enabling a background will no longer change camera position.
• Rotating the camera will now work properly with a background enabled.
• Fixed an issue where the prompts for Move Camera and Rotate Camera would appear when the camera cannot be moved (e.g. when using the First-Person Perspective camera).
• Fixed an issue where it wasn't possible to move the camera after spawning a character while highlighting the Edit Character option.
• Disabling Chromatic Aberration in the Graphics settings will no longer affect the ability to adjust it.
• Fixed an issue where some items in scenes disappeared after setting the Surrounding NPCs option to OFF.
• Fixed an issue where enabling PhysX Cloth would unfreeze NCPD vehicles.
• The rule of thirds grid will now properly adapt to the selected aspect ratio.
• Fixed an issue where the image in a SmartFrame wouldn't be visible if accessed while V was not facing it.
• Fixed an issue where opening Photo Mode simultaneously with Wardrobe or Stash caused the game to become unresponsive.
• Fixed an issue where it was possible to access Photo Mode before a save file fully loaded, causing it to open without UI and block any further action.
• Fixed other minor Photo Mode issues related to spawned characters, camera movement, controls, and more.
• Fixed various UI issues in Photo Mode, SmartFrames and Gallery menus, including slider inconsistencies, localization errors, missing sound effects, incorrect behavior when interacting with certain features, and more.

Vehicle Color Customization

• Fixed several texture and color inconsistencies for vehicles that have CrystalCoat applied.
• Fixed an issue where the explanation of the spray paint icon was missing in the Autofixer tutorial pop-up after a vehicle contract was completed.
• Fixed several minor UI issues in the CrystalCoat and TwinTone menus.

Character Creation

• Randomizer settings in Character Creation will now be preserved after advancing to the Customize Attributes step.
• Fixed an issue where the Piercing Color option would not be available in Character Creation after enabling piercings if V initially had none.
• Fixed other minor issues in Character Creation, including appearance options not applying correctly, visual clipping, inconsistent UI behavior, functionality issues after using the randomizer, and more.

Miscellaneous

• Run This Town - Fixed an issue where, under certain circumstances, it wasn't possible to deactivate the Aguilar imprint after meeting with Bennett.
• Fixed several instances where Johnny could appear duplicated in the passenger seat during some quests when he was already present in the scene.
• Fixed an issue where Johnny did not appear as a passenger often enough.
• Introduced several fixes to NPC and vehicle behavior for various small events throughout Night City.
• Fixed an issue where some vendors were not interactable as intended.
• Fixed an issue where voiceovers on TV news channels could be missing or too quiet.
• Fixed an issue where the Quadra Turbo-R V-Tech used a description of Quadra Turbo-R 740 instead of its own unique one.
• Fixed the missing 2.2 "check what's new" pop-up in the main menu.

Console-specific

• Fixed an issue where screenshots appeared as blank in the Gallery on Xbox if they were taken with HDR10 enabled.
• Added a pop-up in the Gallery to notify players when access to screenshots is blocked by the console's privacy settings on Xbox.
• Screenshots deleted on Xbox outside the Gallery UI will now be correctly marked in the Gallery and will disappear from occupied slots after reopening the Gallery.
• Fixed an issue where the Graphics Mode on Xbox Series S could be set to Quality instead of Performance by default.

PC-specific

• Added support for DLSS 4 with Multi Frame Generation for GeForce RTX 50 Series graphics cards, which boosts FPS by using AI to generate up to three times per traditionally rendered frame – enabled with GeForce RTX 50 Series on January 30th. DLSS 4 also introduces faster single Frame Generation with reduced memory usage for RTX 50 and 40 Series. Additionally, you can now choose between the CNN model or the new Transformer model for DLSS Ray Reconstruction, DLSS Super Resolution, and DLAA on all GeForce RTX graphics cards today. The new Transformer model enhances stability, lighting, and detail in motion.
• Fixed artifacts and smudging on in-game screens when using DLSS Ray Reconstruction.
• The Frame Generation field in Graphics settings will now properly reset after switching Resolution Scaling to OFF.

Sayem is a freelancer based in the UK, covering tech & hardware. You can get in touch with him at @sayem.zone on Bluesky.

EA’s Origin App was introduced in 2011 so you could browse and purchase EA’s PC games on its digital storefront instead of Steam. The most notable launch from this time was a strict Origin requirement for Mass Effect 3 in 2012. However, it never really seemed to take off.

Due to clunky UX and frustrating login processes, many PC gamers chose to outright avoid using Origin as much as possible. Despite this, EA persisted, but has now finally decided to outright replace Origin with the equally clunky EA app.

This comes along with several caveats. Own Titanfall on Origin but can’t access your account? Too bad, if you don’t make a formal account switch from Origin to EA, you’ll lose access to the games you’ve paid for.

Along the way, anyone running a 32-bit system will also be left behind, as the EA app supports 64-bit OS only. To be fair to EA, Steam itself also dropped support for 32-bit operating systems in early 2024, with a scant few users on 32-bit systems remaining.

It’s extremely unlikely that anyone who has purchased a new PC or laptop, or assembled a custom gaming PC in the last five years will be running on a 32-bit OS. However, Microsoft did sell 32-bit versions of Windows 10 up to 2020. If you’re on Windows 11, there’s no sweat. 64-bit support was first introduced in Windows Vista’s release almost 20 years ago.

A quick way to check is to see how much RAM your system is running. A 32-bit OS can only use a maximum of 4GB of RAM, so if you’ve got more than that in your system, you’ve likely got nothing to worry about. However, if you’ve accidentally installed a 32-bit version of Windows, you’ll have to wipe your entire system and reinstall a 64-bit version of the OS.

While support being dropped for 32-bit systems isn’t too surprising in 2024, it calls into question the nature of digital ownership. It’s no fun losing access to a library of games that you’ve owned for years due to hardware changes. Steam isn’t free from this either, as Valve has also dropped 32-bit support, leaving players who can’t upgrade to modern systems high and dry.

Invasive digital DRM solutions like Denuvo are also becoming increasingly commonplace in PC games, since some elements require deep kernel-level access to your PC, or have arbitrary installation limits, despite your purchase.

One way of preserving a legitimately purchased digital library is to support GOG, run by CD Projekt. The DRM-free nature of every game listed on the store means that once you download a title, you’ll be able to run it and own it on whatever hardware the title supports, forever.

However, the window this opens up for developers is the possibility of software piracy. But, that’s not stopped new titles from being released on the platform, with the upcoming RPG Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 “coming soon” to GOG.

Sayem is a freelancer based in the UK, covering tech & hardware. You can get in touch with him at @sayem.zone on Bluesky.

Our favorite Game Pass deal is back for the first time in 2025. Woot! (which is owned by Amazon) is offering three months of Xbox Game Pass Ultimate for only $33.99. There's a 10% off coupon "SAVETEN" that drops the price to $30.59 with free digital delivery. The normal monthly cost is $19.99. This coupon only runs for 24 hours and will expire end of day.

Note that you can purchase multiple Game Pass codes and apply them to your account up to a maximum of 36 months, however SAVETEN is one-time use and will only work on one of your Game Pass codes. The coupon field is at the final step of checkout right under the "Place Order" button.

3 Months of Xbox Game Pass Ultimate for $30.59

Xbox Game Pass Ultimate gives you access to a library of hundreds of Xbox games, including day one releases. If you don't own a console and don't want to pay for one, there's even a legitimate way to play Game Pass games without an Xbox. Although you do lose access to the library once your membership is over, all your past achievements and progress will be saved. New release games are not cheap, and being able to play them at launch without paying retail price for them will save you a lot of money. This perk alone will easily recoup the cost of the membership.

Other perks include access to Xbox Game Pass for PC, exclusive membership discounts, Xbox Cloud Gaming, a bonus EA Play subscription, extra in-game content and rewards, and more.

Check out more of the best Xbox deals of 2025.

Eric Song is the IGN commerce manager in charge of finding the best gaming and tech deals every day. When Eric isn't hunting for deals for other people at work, he's hunting for deals for himself during his free time.

Watson premieres on CBS following the AFC Championship Game on Sunday, January 26, and moves to Sundays at 10pm ET on February 16.

The greatest strength of CBS’ new medical drama Watson is its potential for audacity. This is a show built for big, wild swings that either knock the ball clear out of the park or whiff so bad that everyone ends up in the hospital – whatever happens, it should be fun to watch. (And in the event of that mass hospitalization: Sounds like the seeds of a great episode of Watson.) Unfortunately, the series’ first five episodes are occasionally modest with their exam-room conundrums, and they come close to wasting both an excessively creative premise and a steady leading performance from Morris Chestnut. Because Watson isn’t just a new CBS medical drama, it’s also yet another modern revival of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes universe… that also happens to be a medical drama. And a mystery show. And a light thriller about the machinations of an evil villain. And sometimes a commentary on America’s healthcare system. And sometimes it’s about how high-functioning addicts can gaslight the people around them.

But perhaps most audacious of all is the fact that this has been done before, for eight whole seasons on Fox’s House. There are some very crucial differences between Watson and House, though, including the tone of both shows (mirroring its title character, House tended to be gritty and dark, while Watson is overtly optimistic), but the most explicit difference is that House’s Holmes influences were just that: Influences. Watson, on the other hand, straight-up takes place in a world where Chestnut’s Dr. John Watson went on a bunch of adventures with renowned detective Sherlock Holmes in London. He then returned to the United States to open a clinic after Holmes’ apparent death at the hands of the evil Professor Moriarty, which, as depicted in Doyle’s The Final Problem and Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes: A Game Of Shadows, involved the Reichenbach Falls.

This all works best when the backstory is integral to what’s happening onscreen and isn’t just color, like when it factors into the overarching plot or when Watson imparts some Holmesian lesson. But, at the same time, it is kind of fun to watch run-of-the-mill doctor stuff going on while thinking “Sherlock Holmes existed in this world” or “the guy doing this medical examination presumably met versions of Inspector Lestrade, Woman-with-a-capital-W Irene Adler, and the famously lazy Mycroft Holmes.”

That’s where the audacity comes in: Watson just works so hard to be interesting. There have been decades of medical dramas on TV that didn’t have to jump through this many conceptual hoops, but they’ve rendered the genre pretty dull and formulaic. Watson’s gimmick doesn’t go as hard as it should or could, but it’s a better gimmick than you’ll find in most of its peers – especially since so many are simply “What if there were a doctor who just cared a whole lot?”

There’s a fascinating potential for silliness in Watson, and its early goings contain at least one stand-out moment that might make you leap out of your chair at how impressively deranged it is. While those moments are too few and far between, it does at least always feel like one could pop up out of nowhere and make an episode a whole lot more fun than it was before.

The struggle of Watson is in those moments in between. When it’s just a straightforward doctor show with an emphasis on weird genetic mysteries (Watson’s speciality, apparently), it meets the bare minimum of being compelling, watchable television. This type of thing is popular for a reason, since it presents a dangerous situation and then makes you feel for the person in that situation and then everything works out in the end. The average episode of Watson follows that arc to a T.

Thankfully, Morris Chestnut’s casual magnetism makes the more generic material a little more appealing. He’s a great leading man, as his years on television would attest, and he does bring a sense of playful joy to the role that feels consistent with how Dr. John Watson is often portrayed in the typical Sherlock Holmes story. If he enjoys puzzling out a patient’s ailment so much, it makes sense that he’d throw his old life away so he could hang around with an acerbic English detective (and would then be devastated by that man’s death).

Less successful is virtually everyone else around him. Watson has (for lack of a better term) a House-style team of younger physicians (Eve Harlow, Peter Mark Kendall in a dual role, and Inga Schlingmann) who do most of the medical work, and each one is explicitly a gimmick unto themselves. It’s clever that those gimmicks are actually part of the plot and that everyone is aware they are a gimmick, but it’s clear that some of the characters were designed to carry storylines themselves and others are just there for the quirks of their personalities or backstories. Ritchie Coster also appears as classic Holmes side character Shinwell Johnson, who often feels like he was added to Watson at the last minute to deliver clearer exposition about the larger Holmes-y mythology of it all.

But there’s still that potential for silliness. There always seems to be a chance that Watson will pull the trigger on a ridiculous plot twist or a show-shaking reveal, and then the less-exciting parts will suddenly become Worth It. And if that doesn’t happen in a given episode… well, it might happen in the next one. That’s the weird trick of Watson: It’s not always great, and it’s not always fun, but when it is fun, it makes you want to stick around.

In the nearly 40 years since the one-two punch of Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home and Star Trek: The Next Generation ignited my enthusiasm for Gene Roddenberry’s sci-fi juggernaut, I’ve seen the franchise through highs (the Dominion War arc on Deep Space Nine, the movie First Contact, the ongoing Paramount+ series Strange New Worlds) and lows (the Voyager episode “Threshold,” the Enterprise finale, the morose tedium of Picard’s first season). But with it all, there’s a phrase I’ve never said in reaction to any film or show under the Trek umbrella – especially since it’s the rallying cry of so many bad faith bozos who monetize negativity on the internet. But the direct-to-streaming Star Trek film Section 31 has initiated a core breach in my soul, and my reaction is simple: “This isn’t Star Trek.”

Initially conceived as a spin-off series for Michelle Yeoh’s Star Trek: Discovery character, Terran Emperor-turned-undercover-Federation-do-gooder Philippa Georgiou, Section 31 arrives on Paramount+ as 100 minutes of generic schlock containing only trace elements of Star Trek. If you were to scrub the tricorder sound effects from the mix, brush out an occasional Delta shield, and cut out its titular black-ops organization’s connection to Starfleet, you’d just think, gee, this chintzy Syfy movie sure knows to copy from The Hunger Games and Guardians of the Galaxy (and X-Men and The Fifth Element) but doesn’t know a damn thing about being original. Or engaging.

Though it would still be boring, Section 31 might actually be better if you come to it with no knowledge of Star Trek lore. This way, at least, you won’t end up wondering how writer Craig Sweeny and director Olatunde Osunsanmi completely bungled the entire Trek ethos – its admittedly corny core tenets of exploration, optimism, and the pursuit of righteous achievement. (There’s a reason we Star Trek dorks got bullied a lot in junior high.) Section 31 is nothing but a lousy, uninteresting caper picture with middling special effects, bad acting (yes, even Yeoh), cringeworthy dialogue, and characters you don’t care about.

I’ll try to lay out the premise as quickly as possible, though Section 31’s boiled-down form doesn’t make that the easiest task. After flashing back to Philippa’s bloody ascendance to the throne of what we used to call the Mirror Universe, we find where she landed after peacing out from Section 31 in Discovery’s third season: “outside of Federation space,” running a cosmic Rick’s Café Américain where the main attraction seems to be low lighting and music that sounds like it was produced in 2024. Her former, secretive outfit has been reimagined as an Impossible Mission Force or Charlie’s Angels – with Yeoh’s Everything Everywhere All at Once pal Jamie Lee Curtis handing out assignments – and somehow the group has tracked Georgiou down and knows that some bad guy is coming to do an illegal weapon trade at her club.

Thus, a ragtag group of zany, Guardians-esque characters are dispatched to intercept and prevent this dangerous development. In addition to the cool guy leader (Omari Hardwick), there’s a quippy shapeshifter (Sam Richardson, who does the best he can with this material, and comes out of Section 31 okay), an “I’m the Juggernaut, bitch!” type mecha brute (Robert Kazinsky), a sexy Deltan (Humberly Gonzalez), and a wacky Vulcan (Sven Ruygrok) who actually is not a Vulcan, but rather a microscopic organism in a tiny spaceship inside a Vulcan-shaped Golem body. (Think Men in Black.) When his little ship moves around it looks and sounds like the flying cars from The Jetsons, which is unintentionally hilarious.

Embedded with this bickering crew is an observer from Starfleet, a young woman named Rachel Garrett (Kacey Rohl), who hardcore fans know will grow to become a pre-Picard Captain of the Enterprise. Garrett’s presence, combined with that of a figure from Georgiou’s past, throw the when of Section 31 into utter confusion – as if Sweeny tossed the nerds a bone by giving us people we kinda recognize, but made no attempt to actually make the fit within a consistent timeline. Agonizing over this, however, is the least of anyone’s worries, because the rest of this movie is so dreadfully dull.

With Georgiou (who, mind you, viciously murdered thousands, including her parents and baby brother) part of the new, fun Section 31 gang, we experience some hijinks, like a phase-shield fight with the arms smuggler which was done a lot cooler in Dune (both versions) and a runaway train-style chase straight out of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, but now made to look like CGI slop. There’s also the discovery that someone in the group is a mole – but these are characters we all just met, so there’s absolutely nothing at stake here. Someone whose name you barely know isn’t who they seem? Who cares?

Even with the golden opportunity to play interplanetary outlaws, none of the cast (except Richardson) are anything but annoying. Blame can be spread around, though. There’s not just unoriginal writing, but totally uninspired direction. When the team all present themselves for Georgiou once she’s officially been recruited, everyone stands still on their mark and barks backstory at her with an almost defiant lack of pizzazz. These lugubrious deliveries are intercut by editing that tries to add spice, but winds up disquieting and feels forced. Yeoh is chomping up every moment, which actually worked on Discovery when she was a supporting character playing off Sonequa Martin-Green or Anthony Rapp. But when she’s in the center seat, her dry, haughty tone quickly becomes irritating. The great athleticism of her fight scenes aside, there’s not much that’s likable here.

There’s a lot more fighting, a lot more chasing, and several examples in which the writing seems dictated from TikTok of three years ago. “You’re a chaos goblin!” the future Captain Garrett is told. “I love that for us,” she responds to a later prompt. Most importantly, there are none of the thought provoking elements that make Star Trek so special. There’s no wonder, just a push to expand the IP in a way that landed well with the Paramount suits. I suppose if I were to search for a thesis to Section 31 it’s that being a bloodthirsty tyrant eventually leads to some brief moments of introspection. So noted.

The weirdest thing is that this little cul-du-sac in the Star Trek universe – which I predict almost no one will remember in a year – exists when Lower Decks just ended and Strange New Worlds is readying for its next season. These are two shows that understand, on a molecular level, the joy and specificity of Star Trek. The franchise is still alive.

As such, it’s best to just consider Section 31 an aberration and move on. If I’ve learned anything from Starfleet, it’s to keep positive. I’m simply dispatching a warning buoy to all other ships to avoid this area of space and warping out of here.

There were a lot of great books that came out last year, but perhaps the biggest standout on the Amazon best sellers list for 2024 was one that didn't even release until this week. I'm talking of course, about the latest title in the Empyrean series: Onyx Storm.

If you aren't familiar with those names, you may have still heard of the first book in the series called Fourth Wing. The popularity of these novels by Rebecca Yarros is largely thanks to them going viral on BookTok, which is where other romance books have gone viral in the past. Perhaps the most famous book to get picked up on that corner of TikTok was It Ends With Us by Colleen Hoover, which skyrocketed the series to the top of the best selling list in 2022 and eventually got turned into a movie.

Why Is The Empyrean Series So Popular?

Today, I've got an eclectic gaggle of deals for you to play through over the weekend. There's a VR-y decent BYO Bundle for the headset-inclined, an Erdtree Edition for the masochists among you, and a bunch of CoDs (old and new) worth catching. Failing that, score some cut-price LEGO, because I'm obsessed with that also.

In retro news, I'm celebrating the 28th birthday of Kirby Super Star, a SNES...er, super...star that we called Kirby's Fun Pak down under. The inclusion of two-player co-op was an uncommon feature in platformers of this age, so a neighbourhood pal and I were all about slowly unlocking and smashing through this eight-game omnibus at launch. In particular, we had a blast in Spring Breeze (Kirby's Dream Land abridged) and The Great Cave Offensive (a Metroidvania filled with Nintendo stablemate references). That mechanic of P1 swallowing an enemy and then vomiting out a helper minion controlled by P2? Timelessly cool.

This Day in Gaming 🎂

Aussie birthdays for notable games.

- Kirby Super Star (SNES) 1997. eBay

- The Cave (PS3,WiiU) 2013. Get

- Kingdom Hearts HD 2.8 FCP (PS4) 2017. eBay

Table of Contents

• Nintendo Switch
• PC
• Xbox
• PlayStation
• LEGO

Nice Savings for Nintendo Switch

• Mortal Kombat 1 (-28%) - A$41.65
• The Survivalists Del. (-90%) - A$3.90
• Dead Cells (-50%) - A$18.75
• LEGO Skywalker Saga (-34%) - A$59
• Rune Factory 5 (-23%) - A$53.55
• Pac-Man Champ Ed. 2 Plus (-75%) - A$7.73

Expiring Recent Deals

• Yooka-Laylee (-80%) - A$6.50
• Hot Wheels Unleashed (-85%) - A$8.24
• Sonic X Shadow Generations (-14%) - A$69
• Namco Museum (-80%) - A$7.80

Or gift a Nintendo eShop Card.

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Purchase Cheap for PC

• Ori and the Blind Forest: DE (-75%) - A$7.48
• Ori: The Collection (-78%) - A$15.71
• Doom Franchise Sale (≤80%)
• Rainbow Six Siege (-65%) - A$10.54
• Stellaris (-75%) - A$14.23

Expiring Recent Deals

• Halo MC Collection (-75%) - A$14.98
• Total War: Three Kingdoms (-70%) - A$27.44
• FC 25 (-60%) - A$43.98
• Forza Horizon 5 (-50%) - A$44.97
• Halo Wars: DE (-75%) - A$7.48
• Manor Lords (-30%) - A$41.99

Or just get a Steam Wallet Card

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Exciting Bargains for Xbox

• CoD: BLOPS 6 (-20%) - A$89
• Monster Hunter Wilds (-17%) - A$99
• Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 (-19%) - A$89
• Avatar: FoP Del. (-60%) - A$51.98
• Prince of Persia TLC (-50%) - A$29.97

Expiring Recent Deals

• Sniper Elite 5 (-57%) - A$38.72
• Tekken 8 (-33%) - A$79.95
• The Crew Motorfest CG (-70%) - A$32.98
• Watch Dogs 2 Gold (-85%) - A$16.49
• The Surge (-85%) - A$3.36

Or just invest in an Xbox Card.

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Pure Scores for PlayStation

• CoD: WWII (-30%) - A$35.42
• CoD: BLOPS 6 (-20%) - A$89
• Monster Hunter Wilds (-17%) - A$99
• Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 (-19%) - A$89
• Space Marine 2 (-19%) - A$89

Expiring Recent Deals

• Astro Bot (-19%) - A$89
• Spidey Miles Morales Ult. (-45%) - A$69
• The First Berserker: Khazan (-11%) - A$89
• Cocoon (-58%) - A$25
• Star Wars Outlaws (-36%) - A$69
• LEGO DC Super-Villains Del. (-92%) - A$8.79
• Persona 5 (-85%) - A$12.74
• Mortal Kombat XL (-88%) - A$8.39

PS+ Monthly Freebies
Yours to keep from Jan 7 with this subscription

• Suicide Squad: KTJL [PS5]
• NFS Hot Pursuit Remastered [PS4]
• The Stanley Parable: Ultra [PS4/5]

Or purchase a PS Store Card.

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Legit LEGO Deals

• City: Fire Rescue Plane (-34%) - A$158
• Star Wars: Clone Troopers Battle (-33%) - A$22
• Star Wars: C-3PO (-31%) - A$159

Expiring Recent Deals

• Sonic: Tails’ Workshop and Tornado (-37%) - A$73.94
• Marvel: Electro Dinosaur Chase (-34%) - A$29.99
• Star Wars: Mandalorian Ambush (-34%) - A$23

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Best Buy just brought back a Black Friday deal and made it even better. Right now you can pick up a pretty massive 75" Samsung DU6950 Crystal 4K Smart TV for only $529.99 after a savings of $220 and get a second 43" Samsung DU6900 Crystal 4K Smart TV for free. The second TV will be automatically added to your shopping cart. This is also $20 cheaper than the deal we saw during Best Buy's 4-Day Sale over the weekend, and the bonus TV wasn't even included at the time. Here's your chance to upgrade your main TV and get a second TV for your bedroom or gaming den at a super price.

Buy a 75" Samsung TV for $530 and Get a Free 43" TV

Monster Hunter is one of the biggest game franchises out there right now, with the highly anticipated release of Monster Hunter Wilds set for next month. If you've ever wanted to square up with towering beasts and monsters, this is the perfect series for you.

Right now, Humble is offering the Monster Hunter New Year Hunting Collection, which packs in ten total items for only $25. This is a great starting place for beginners, as it gives you the biggest Monster Hunter games available on PC with their expansions. Check out the details below, and don't miss out on this incredible bundle!

Monster Hunter New Year Hunting Collection at Humble

For fans of the 2D platformer Celeste, you'll be sad to hear that the developers' next game, Earthblade, has been canceled.

In a blog post titled "Final Earthblade Update," Extremely OK Games announced that its follow-up to the award-winning game Celeste has been canceled. In the post, EXOK Director of R&D Maddy Thorson detailed the reasoning behind the decision, and what's next for the studio.

"Lat last month, Noel [Berry, EXOK Computer Programmer] made the difficult decision to cancel Earthblade... We made this decision in December and felt it best to wait until now to announce it."

Thorson's post details that at some point last year a dispute arose between Thorson and Berry and Earthblade art director Pedro Medeiros over the IP rights of Celeste. Thorson declined to detail the dispute other than to say that there was a resolution reached and Medeiros parted ways with the team and is now developing a separate game titled Neverway.

However, this dispute gave Thorson and Berry a chance to examine where they were at with Earthblade and discovered that the project was not coming along the way they had hoped. "Noel and I also began to reflect on how the game has felt for us to work on day-to-day and realized that it has been a struggle for a long time. Sure, working on one project for so long is bound to become a slog, but this feels like a deeper problem."