If you’ve ever had dreams of owning the original Charizard card from the first Pokémon TCG series, you’ll be pleased to hear The Pokémon Company is reviving this classic set.
In the latest Pokémon Presents, Pokémon president and CEO Tsunekazu Ishihara teased this return with a brief clip showing two players engaged in battle. It’s officially titled “Pokémon Trading Card Game Classic” and more will be revealed in the near future at the Pokémon Championships.
Beyond Good and Evil 2 is facing even more development trouble, as a new report says developer Ubisoft Montpellier is undergoing a major leadership shakeup.
According to a report from Kotaku, Ubisoft Montpellier staff were informed last week that their managing director was no longer with the company. Guillaume Carmona had been absent from the role since the beginning of 2023, and no reason for his departure was given. Carmona had been with Ubisoft for nearly two decades.
Sources also told Kotaku that Ubisoft Montpellier is facing a labor investigation from local government authorities due to a high number of developers experiencing burnout and going on sick leave. A Ubisoft spokesperson told Kotaku that “the Montpellier development team is undergoing well-being assessments through a third-party for preventative measures and to evaluate where additional support may be needed.”
The report also said that creative director Jean-Marc Geffroy and director Benjamin Dumaz have been replaced in those roles by former associate director Emile Morel and Charles Gaudron. Finally, sources told Kotaku that the developers are still struggling to nail down a fun and achievable creative vision for Beyond Good and Evil 2.
This report is the latest surrounding development troubles at Ubisoft, as the company recently canceled three more unannounced games while delaying Skull and Bones for the sixth time.
Logan Plant is a freelance writer for IGN covering video game and entertainment news. He has over six years of experience in the gaming industry with bylines at IGN, Nintendo Wire, Switch Player Magazine, and Lifewire. Find him on Twitter @LoganJPlant.
While playing Elden Ring can, if you want, be a completely solitary experience, one of its best features is its multiplayer: PvP, PvE, and the esoteric messages players leave for one another that have become something of their own meme culture. Given the unique nature of all these multiplayer interactions, it’s only natural that director Hidetaka Miyazaki has been doing a lot of thinking about multiplayer technology, and how it’s used in games other than his own.
Speaking to IGN following Elden Ring’s five wins (including Game of the Year) at the 26th annual DICE Awards, Miyazaki brought up the subject of multiplayer when we asked him what new technologies, trends, or ideas in gaming he finds inspiring or exciting right now.
“I’m not really sure whether this is the latest trend, but the multiplayer elements that in terms of both technology and the game designs, we keep updating [them],” he said. “So I’m really interested in that as one of the fans and one of the creators. Especially speaking of [Escape From] Tarkov, for example. So I’m basically paying attention to those elements as a creator and fan of the game.
“Other folks in the industry, they keep updating multiplayer network functionality and the game design in order to change the way that the players are involved in the gameplay, and how the players are used as one of the resources for the gameplay. So that’s why I’m paying attention to these elements.”
Escape From Tarkov is a 2017 tactical FPS that melds tactical simulation and FPS with MMO elements, and became wildly popular several years into its early access release in no small part due to a promotion that offered in-game items to those who watched Twitch streams of the game. It remains both fairly popular and in early access now in 2023, and its developers recently had to crackdown hard yet again against a wave of cheaters develper Battlestate referred to as “scum of the earth” in an official post.
‘It’s very simple’
We also asked Miyazaki if Elden Ring’s incredible critical, award-winning, and financial success meant that we’d be likely to see more Elden Ring in the future — but Miyazaki told us that its success was not a factor in deciding what FromSoftware wanted to make next.
“Obviously Elden Ring is a commercial success,” he said. “Everybody’s aware about that, but it doesn’t really affect what we are going to create next. We basically keep creating the game that we want to create, and that’s our policy. It’s very simple.
“It was obviously a good experience for me and the other team members working on Elden Ring. Sometimes we were all super excited about what we were doing. Sometimes we failed to do certain things in the game, implementing something into the game. But whatever the case it was a really good experience and we basically want to keep creating the game which has a very big worldview universe and let the players feel the adventure spirit.”
Even if all that success isn’t swaying Miyazaki and FromSoftware, the team certainly seems to like the universe enough to revisit it, as Miyazaki previously has teased at least some form of new content. Elden Ring did already get a Colosseum update recently, but Miyazaki’s quote above seems to hint even more might be on the way.
Rebekah Valentine is a news reporter for IGN. You can find her on Twitter @duckvalentine.
For more than 45 years, Shigeru Miyamoto has worked at Nintendo in some capacity, so it’s hard to imagine the home of Mario without the veteran director and designer. However, Miyamoto thinks Nintendo will “probably be the same” even after he’s gone.
In an interview with NPR, Miyamoto spoke about his inspirations, Nintendo’s future, and how a shared vision at the company drives its familiar essence. When asked about a Nintendo without him, Miyamoto thinks the creators and executives still there will keep things mostly the same.
“You know, I really feel it’s not going to change, ” Miyamoto said. “It’s probably going to be the same. There’s, you know, people on the executive team, creators within the company, and also people who create Mario, they all have this sense of what it means to be Nintendo.”
Miyamoto chalks that outlook up to a shared understanding at Nintendo. Even as the company introduces new ideas, he described a Nintendo where everyone is mostly on the same page.
“There’s always the fact that it’s a new idea, but also the fact that, is it a new idea that really has the essence of Nintendo or not? And I think that’s something that, you know, we have this incredible shared vision, almost a little scary shared vision, about this. So I think there won’t — it’s not going to change,” he said.
On that same note, when NPR asked the director which Nintendo world he would like to live in when it’s time for the afterlife, Miyamoto offered a bittersweet sentiment. He loves his current environment, as he can “engage in so many different things.” He joked he’d like it to remain in a similar place, but maybe at his desk or bathtub instead.
The Nintendo of today seems to demonstrate Miyamoto’s vision. After his decades there, iteration after iteration on hardware still offered familiar faces like Mario, just in new ways. Most recently, Nintendo hosted a soft opening for its Super Nintendo World theme park at Universal Studios Hollywood. It’s the second location of its kind, and the park continues to expand with Nintendo staples like Pokemon.
In IGN’s recent interview with Miyamoto, the creator offered another look at the past and present of the company. While he may see things mostly staying the same, Nintendo’s delivered on surprises in the past. When speaking to IGN, he explained his skepticism over a theme park venture but was glad to see it finally take shape.
Andrea Shearon is a freelance contributor for IGN covering games and entertainment. She’s worn several hats over her seven-year career in the games industry, with bylines over at Fanbyte, USA Today’s FTW, TheGamer, VG247, and RPG Site. Find her on Twitter (@Maajora) or the Materia Possessions podcast chatting about FFXIV, RPGs, and any series involving giant robots.
Ryzen 7000X3D processors arriving today, it’s perhaps not surprising to see last-gen models reaching new price lows. That’s the case for the Ryzen 5700X, one of the fastest eight-core Ryzen CPUs ever made (behind the 7700X, 5800X and 5800X3D) and now firmly a member of the sub-£200 club. In fact, this processor is down to £177 at Amazon UK at present, meaning it’s rapidly approaching half of its £329 UK RRP.
Yes, I know the CPU pictured is the 5800X. Please don’t tell anyone! I didn’t think you’d look at it that closely.
There are a lot of forgettable little indie RPGs floating around on the Nintendo Switch eShop, but it’d be a mistake to lump developer Odencat’s Meg’s Monster in with them. In fact, despite appearances of turn-based battles and an underworld filled with monsters to battle, we’d argue that Meg’s Monster isn’t an RPG at all, but rather a game that walks a fine line between the adventure and visual novel genres with light puzzles sprinkled in. It also has humour and heart in equal measure, making for a perfect little game to devote a weekend to.
Meg’s Monster begins with the titular Meg waking up in a trash heap in the underworld. She soon meets two monsters, Golan and Roy. Golan is quite happy that a child-sized snack waltzed up to them. Roy, on the other hand, has eyes only for an oily substance known as Magic Tar. However, as Golan goes to gobble up Meg, they soon find out her cries trigger an apocalypse. Golan convinces the reluctant and nearly indestructible Roy to keep her safe as they try to find her mom by smuggling her out of the underworld.
America is justly proud of its remaining areas of untamed wilderness, much of which is preserved through its national parks system. It’s been an inspiration to both artists and board game designers down the years, the latter giving us titles as diverse as hobby fare Cascadia to the much more mainstream National Parks-Opoly. But 2019’s PARKS aims to give you the best of both worlds with some accessible tactical play married to art from the 59 Parks print series.
What’s in the Box
The stylized waterfall art of the PARKS box cover is a lovely piece of work, but it doesn’t prepare you for the treasures inside. Beneath the rules booklet, there are two custom trays of wooden components, suns and droplets, mountains and trees, all dyed in appealing pastel tones. There are also a number of brown wildlife tokens, each and every one cut to resemble a different animal.
Underneath that there’s a plain tri-fold board and then at the bottom, there are several decks of cards, some large, some small. The largest cards are those for the national parks themselves. There’s no need for them to be so big except to showcase the glorious artwork from the 59 Parks print series that adorns each one. The smaller cards don’t have such impressive imagery but make up for it with little details like the fine layout and a lot of subtle gold shimmer to give them a luxurious feel.
You can see the same touches on the enamelled first player token, the wooden hiker pieces and all the counters you need to punch out, including board segments and a wonderful series of nature “photographs,” stylized in the same way as the park cards. Everything packs away neatly and securely in the sculpted tray that lines the bottom of the box. That tray showcases how much thought has gone into the physical design of PARKS and the results are delightful.
Rules and how it Plays
Your goal in PARKS is to steer a tag-team pair of hikers through as many of the biggest and most spectacular national parks as you can across four “seasons.” You do this by purchasing park cards from a face-up selection using the game’s four resources: the relatively common sun and water and the rarer forests and mountains. You can also get wildlife tokens which work as wild cards and can be spent in place of any resource.
A new board is constructed at random for each season out of the various board segments, making sure you have to vary your strategy a little every time. A season has an associated special effect, like gaining a bonus sun each time you get a forest, and a weather pattern which puts bonus resource markers on some of the segments. The first player to land on that segment gets the bonus alongside the special effects it provides to every visitor. These inbuilt effects mostly allow you to gain or swap resources.
So far, so ordinary. The tricksy thing about PARKS is that you’re allowed to move your hiker as far along the trail as you wish, but you can only go forward. So if there’s a space you particularly want, you’re caught in a conundrum between grabbing it now and skipping all the other useful spaces in between, or risking another player pipping you to the post. Of course, they’re all struggling with the same dilemma, too. You block a space you occupy although players can spend their campfire token to snuggle up to you if they want.
Campfire tokens are refreshed when your first hiker reaches the end of the trail, and this is your second problem. When you get there you can either use your resources to buy a park, spend sun tokens to buy gear which gives you future bonuses or discounts, or reserve a park card for your own future purchase and get the shiny first player token for the next round.
If you buy a card, which is the most common action, a new one gets added to the display. And this is both angsty and annoying at once. There’s a certain satisfaction in snatching a valuable card someone else has clearly been saving up for, and it adds to the strategies involved in pacing your hikers along the trail. But the fast turnover of cards and the random replacement tend to torpedo attempts at long-term strategy. PARKS is much more of a tactical affair.
You do get a choice of secret goal cards to work towards at the end of the game, like buying at least seven sun’s worth of gear, but these are so hard to achieve and give such paltry rewards that they rarely figure. Rather, strategy in this game is more about making sure you’ve got opportunities to get what you need. Mostly, these come from canteen cards. You start with one of the former and can gain more on certain spaces: they’re cards that cost one water to activate and get you either extra resources or the chance to exchange resources for other kinds.
Good play in PARKS is thus very much about knowing when to speed up and slow down on the trail to snaffle opportunities when they come your way. You’ll need to balance the time it takes to make use of your canteens and resource-swapping opportunities, with the flexibility it offers for the ever-changing makeup of cards on offer. You can also grab bonus points by taking photos in some spaces which cost two resources but then give you the camera. While you hold it, photos only cost one and you can take an extra snap at the end of each season. Knowing the right moment to steal the camera is yet another timing-based tactical decision you’ll need to add to your growing arsenal.
Despite the gorgeous presentation and the occasional thematic flourish, like the way the season card determines the weather, PARKS is an odd bird in terms of conveying its subject. There’s really nothing to link your open choice of destination or the constant turnover of park cards with the actual act of hiking. It’s really very abstract. Yet the game has such a wonderful visual evocation of the great outdoors that this actually feels vaguely confusing, as though there ought to be additional rules and game elements that simply aren’t there.
Ubisoft’s Skull and Bones may have been delayed yet again, but there is one way to get a taste of this long-awaited pirate-themed video game. Skull and Bones: Savage Storm is a spinoff from Dark Horse Comics, and IGN has an exclusive preview of the first issue.
Check out the slideshow gallery below to see several pages from Skull and Bones: Savage Storm #1:
Savage Storm is co-written by John Jackson Miller and James Mishler, with art by Christian Rosado, colors by Roshan Kurichiyanil and cover art by Pius Bak. Here’s Dark Horse’s official description for the first issue:
A merchant vessel on the high seas is besieged by a vicious crew of pirates, but the fighting is interrupted by a devastating typhoon. When the storm crashes in, it leaves predator and prey stranded on an island somewhere in the Indian Ocean. Discover the mysteries and danger that will betide them all. A gritty story set in the merciless world of Ubisoft’s upcoming pirate game.
We’ll be honest, it wasn’t quite the knockout showcase we were hoping for here at Nintendo Life. With the prior announcements that Pokémon Stadium and Pokémon Trading Card Game would be coming to Nintendo Switch Online, we were perhaps looking to be surprised with some release dates or — dare we say it — shadow drops.
From the mind behind Space Warlord Organ Trading Simulator comes a neo-noir third-person shooter about killing the monster you loved.
Battle supernatural creatures from across space and time with an arsenal of deadly weapons.
El Paso, Elsewhere is coming to Xbox consoles and PC this Fall.
Sometimes, your greatest enemies are your own memories.
We’re telling a new kind of love story in El Paso, Elsewhere, the latest title from my studio, the developers behind Space Warlord Organ Trading Simulator, Strange Scaffold. A nightmarish one-way trip set deep beneath a motel in El Paso, Texas, you’ll unravel a tale about addiction and heartbreak as you shoot and stake monsters from horror movies and our own minds. El Paso, Elsewhere is coming to Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, and PC this Fall.
The setup is, after learning that the world as we know it is going to be destroyed in an arcane ritual, recovering drug addict and Black folklore researcher James Savage returns to his hometown of El Paso, Texas. In a fight to save reality itself from being consumed by the Forces Beyond, he has to travel to a strange motel, clearing the floors that have mysteriously appeared beneath it of horrific creatures while saving hostages along the way. The lord of the vampires – and his ex – Draculae, is behind the plot, opening old wounds and abandoned coping mechanisms.
Inspired by the Max Payne-era of games, El Paso, Elsewhere is combining raw third-person action with a heavy, neo-noir narrative. As James Savage, you’ll be able to mow down the monstrous creatures you come across with a variety of weapons, including dual pistols, uzis, shotguns and – naturally – stakes. When you run out of ammo, you can always smash the wooden furniture located throughout the dimension-hopping biomes under the motel for more stakes. But you have to be careful: staking a creature means getting painfully close to the monsters guarding Draculae.
Savage also has some extra tricks up his sleeve, including Bullet Time. By diving or with the press of a single button, you can make the world slow down, letting you aim precise headshots or dodge attacks with ease. You can also leap into the air and bounce off of nearby walls to give your dive more airtime or a better vantage point. With near-inhuman movements and the ammo littering the floors you’ll explore, you will be able to tear through Draculae’s army.
But not every battle can be fought with guns. Through his descent, Savage will battle with his own memories – coming to terms with everything that brought him back to his hometown of El Paso, Texas and the fact that he might have to kill the monster he once loved. Through lush, minimal 3D cinematics, you’ll learn the tragic story of James and Draculae, and the roads they traveled to end up once again facing each other—this time, as enemies at the end of the world.
Ryzen 7000X3D processors arriving today, it’s perhaps not surprising to see last-gen models reaching new price lows. That’s the case for the Ryzen 5700X, one of the fastest eight-core Ryzen CPUs ever made (behind the 7700X, 5800X and 5800X3D) and now firmly a member of the sub-£200 club. In fact, this processor is down to £177 at Amazon UK at present, meaning it’s rapidly approaching half of its £329 UK RRP.
