Author: Game Infliction

Pokémon TCG: Scarlet and Violet—Shrouded Fable expansion kicks off on August 8, with preorders available now, and we’ve managed to get our hands on the latest expansion.

Based on the Loyal Three and their Moochi-feeding mythical master, Pecharunt, the Shrouded Fable set features some key players of the Pokémon Scarlet & Violet DLC: Hidden Treasures of Area Zero, amongst new additions. It’s a packed set, with Kingdra ex also making a royal splash in the expansion.

As night falls, Pecharunt ex emerges, commanding the Loyal Three—Okidogi ex, Munkidori ex, and Fezandipiti ex—in their evil mission. Meanwhile, Revavroom ex lights up the battlefield as a Lightning type through Terastallization.

Here’s a firsthand look at our highlights from the Elite Trainer Box, Kingambit Illustration Collection, Kingdra ex-Special Illustration Collection, and some standout cards from Pokémon TCG: Scarlet and Violet—Shrouded Fable.

Shrouded Fable Elite Trainer Box Preview

Video game actors are currently on strike, in hopes that withholding their work from video game companies will push those companies to agree to better actor protections around the use of AI. However, at least one video game CEO — Andrew Wilson of Electronic Arts — doesn’t think the strike is going to impact his company, at least in the short-term.

In today’s EA earnings call, Wilson answered a question from an investor about the impact of the strike on the business. Put simply, he’s not worried for now. Here’s the full quote:

We deeply value our talented actors who are an important part of the work we do to deliver the incredible entertainment experiences that our players enjoy around the world. We’re working very closely; this is not an EA-specific situation, this is an industry-specific stuation, and we’re working diligently to negotiate at the table. The way it works now in terms of our product specifically is that the strike is limited to games commencing production after September 2023, including live service games. So we don’t expect any near-term disruption to any of the games we have in development or any of the live services we’re currently running. That being said, we’re committed to continuing to bargain in good faith and are hopeful that the parties can expediently resolve our issues at the bargaining table. But we’re not anticipating any significant short-term impact at EA.

Wilson’s confidence likely comes from the fact that EA’s portfolio is almost entirely live service games right now, and games whose development began prior to September 2023 (so, basically every live service game) are not impacted by the strike. The company’s $1.26 billion in net bookings for the quarter was driven by Madden NFL 24, FC Mobile, and FC Online, all live service games, and the rest of its coming fiscal year is much of the same: Madden NFL 25, EA Sports FC 25, NHL 25, and so forth. The Sims 4 and College Football 25, also unaffected.

Its one single-player offering, Dragon Age: The Veilguard, is also fine. And while it’s impossible to speak to EA’s release slate further out, it’s probably a safe bet that next year’s release slate likely looks a lot like this year’s, and is entirely populated by games that have been in development for three, four, five or more years. EA, at least, is in a position to weather the storm for a long time.

What Wilson doesn’t mention is how this will impact the company in the long-term. The longer the strike goes, the more in-progress games will be impacted. Any game the studio greenlit after September of 2023 is going to be slowed down if no SAG voice actors will touch it, and this will impact EA’s plans for 2026, 2027, and so on. So while short-term impacts won’t be felt, it’s possible that a strike will start to have affects we’ll see years down the road, especially if a contract is not agreed on soon.

SAG-AFTRA officially called a video game actor strike late last week, beginning at 12:01 am on Friday, July 26. The union has been unable to come to an agreement with video game companies on a new contract for eighteen months, with AI protections being the primary sticking point of negotiations. The union has announced it will hold its first strike picket on Thursday, August 1 at WB Games. We wrote a detailed guide on what the SAG-AFTRA video game strike means for everyday gamers, which you can read right here.

Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter for IGN. Got a story tip? Send it to rvalentine@ign.com.

Xbox hardware sales are way down again in Microsoft’s Q4, while gaming content sales skyrocketed again thanks to the company’s acquisition of Activision-Blizzard last year.

The company posted its earnings today, which included a report of hardware revenue down 42% year-over-year. Hardware sales saw a significant dip of 31% year-over-year last quarter as well, though sales were up slightly (3%) in Q2 thanks to a series of holiday discounts and promotions. But hardware was also down 7% prior to that in Q1, and yes, dropping steadily for several quarters prior to that too.

Some studios will spend years of development time and hundreds of millions of dollars chasing emotional, Hollywood-quality stories and realistic graphics, but the Earth Defense Force series proudly prefers to remain the most pure video game nonsense ever conceived. Don’t be fooled by the PS3-era graphics, atrocious voice acting, absurd story, and uneven technical performance of Earth Defense Force 6 – developer Sandlot knows exactly what it’s doing with this over-the-top satire that makes Helldivers 2 look highbrow by comparison. Like its predecessors, EDF6 leans into its rough edges and silly cooperative mayhem, prioritizing mindless fun above all else, and the result is yet another wonderfully amusing entry in the ongoing saga. But even going in with the right expectations, it’s not all sunshine and dismembered thoraxes, as this inadvisably long campaign has tons of repetition, plenty of levels that are more boring than amusing, and at times crosses the line from knowingly campy to just plain bad. Still, this giant insect-filled monster fest is more often than not a hilariously good time, and that’s something we could certainly use more of.

Earth Defense Force 6 is a goofy as heck cooperative third-person shooter that throws you and up to three friends into a version of our world under siege by aliens. Called the Primus, these primarily insectoid invaders are a grab bag of dorky monsters that range from generic flying drones, knockoff Godzilla kaiju, oversized evil Battletoads, massive spiders that jump everywhere, and more. Across the 80+ hours it took me to complete its 147 level main campaign, you’ll blast these low-res goons to bits using a growing arsenal of guns, rocket launchers, grenades, turrets, vehicles, and giant Gundam mechs, some of which feel great while others are experiments gone horribly wrong. Wrap all of this ridiculousness in some contentedly outdated graphics and a framerate that becomes unstable whenever your explosive shenanigans reach a fever pitch, and you’re in for an uproarious good time.

You’ll also bounce between four returning character classes: the Ranger, a standard soldier whose only advantage is that their weapons are the best around; the Wing Diver, a Valkyrie-like class whose jet-pack and wings give her unmatched mobility (offset by the fact that she’s killed by a light breeze); the Air Raider, an often second-fiddle support class who specializes in calling in massive bombing runs, relies on gadgets like drones to squish bugs, and can summon vehicles to deal serious damage; and the Fencer, a dual-wielding tank class who can absorb serious damage with a giant shield and smash things to bits in melee, but who is also quite difficult to play well. It might be a little milquetoast, but I favor the Ranger – it’s just hard to beat rocket launchers that can level cityscapes in a few seconds and assault rifles that plow through hundreds of aliens with ease.

While the stories in Earth Defense Force games have always been charming rubbish, EDF 6 sets a new bar with a tale that actively makes no sense at various points (even if, like me, you’re following along very closely and occasionally taking notes). It makes heavy use of time travel and has humanity losing the war against the Primus, only for you and the aliens to both go back in time to try again – but the good guys perplexingly make very little use of the knowledge gained in the previous timeline, so you’ll have to watch them slowly piece together what’s happening while you and your character are already miles ahead of the buffoons trying saving humanity.

Most of the time, this insanity is as amusing as you might hope, like when one part introduces giant frog enemies and says they’re “just like humans” without addressing the fact that they’re clearly frogs, then later introduces cliche humanoid gray martian enemies and describes them as “not humanoid.” Other times, though, it’s just painful, like one section where they explain the origins and biological breakdown of a flying dragon monster while making you fight it about five times in a row, reminiscent of a filler episode of Dragonball Z.

The extremely poorly written story is eclipsed in its dreadfulness only by the voice acting, which sounds like it was performed by some poor souls who were rejected by their local improv troupes and decided to give video game voices a try. One part nearly made me spit-take when a character says, in the most monotone voice imaginable, “you have no idea how relieved I am” – you’re right, my dude, I definitely do not. But between all of that cringey dialogue and senseless plot development, there’s a ton of joy. There is still plenty of the kind of bad-by-design silliness at which EDF excels, and the times where it manages to walk that line properly are a gift that keeps on giving.

Thankfully, the heart and soul of Earth Defense Force 6, its over-the-top combat against all manner of blurry foes, is actually a lot of fun – and oftentimes pretty darn challenging. Dodging, dashing, and flying out of the way as monsters, aliens, overgrown insects, and robots rock the screen (and threaten the framerate) is exactly the kind of action-packed madness I love about this series, and it’s never been done better than in this iteration. The fundamentals of that action may be almost identical to what we got a few games ago, but EDF6 adds a ton of weapons and new enemy types to the mix and then dreams up interesting scenarios to put you in, like one level where you’re defending a beach from an entire army of giant poisonous reptiles. Playing through on the normal difficulty can be challenging enough, especially if you don’t have a competent crew at your back, but it gets absolutely insane once you dial that up to the harder options. It requires an intense amount of grinding to get the requisite powerful weapons and armor to put up a fight, plus a team who absolutely knows what they’re doing. As with prior entries, combat’s simple setup and silly attitude don’t get in the way of being extremely entertaining and genuinely satisfying to overcome, and that can make it pretty hard to put down.

That said, some of the design decisions definitely go a step beyond janky fun and into being straight up obnoxious, like how if you’re killed and waiting to be revived by a teammate, you just have to sit there staring at your own corpse until they come to get you. There’s no option to watch what other players are doing if they aren’t standing right by you and no respawn timer, which is just plain boring. There are also a handful of maps you’ll find yourself running missions on quite a few times, and while the enemies and objectives are usually at least a little different, the lack of variety definitely grated on me at times. Also, you’re occasionally made to play some slower-paced, story-focused levels that are simply the worst, though they at least only show up at a few specific moments. This isn’t the kind of story that’s at all worth slowing down the pacing to tell, and those segments just absolutely waste your time in a campaign that’s already way longer than it probably should be.