Resident Evil 4‘s demo dropped on Thursday and in all likelihood its ganados-packed village is difficult and scary enough for me. If you’re made of stronger stuff, you might be interested in the demo’s secret ultra-hard “Mad Chainsaw Mode”, though.
Lemnis Gate is a multiplayer shooter trapped within a turn-based timeloop, in which players work across turns to support their past selves and stymy their opponents. If that were possible in reality, this would be the perfect moment for a new iteration to appear and throw a shield around Lemnis Gate, because its developers have announced that it will close down this summer.
If you’ve not heard of Paranormasight: The Seven Mysteries of Honjo, then don’t worry. Although this curious visual novel is receiving a worldwide release on the Switch eShop, its reveal was specifically earmarked for the Japanese Nintendo Direct back in February.
So while we were undoubtedly smitten over Metroid Prime Remastered shadow dropping and the launch of Game Boy games for the Nintendo Switch Online service, the lack of a western announcement for Paranormasight means that many horror fans could have potentially missed out on what is undoubtedly one of the most interesting and entertaining visual novels we’ve seen in quite some time. Thankfully, we’re here to right that wrong.
For the month before the 3DS and Wii U eShops close for new purchases on 27th March, each day we’re going to highlight a specific eShop game for one of those consoles and give a short pitch as to why we think it deserves your love and attention — before it’s too late. The chance to add these to your library will be gone for good soon and, for one reason or another, these eShop-exclusives are close to our hearts.
Today, Ollie nominates 3D Sonic The Hedgehog 2, because it’s a masterful revamp of the classic Genesis / Mega Drive title specifically for the 3DS eShop, and you can never have too many ways to play this one…
MAR10 Day has been packed with all sorts of surprises this year from movie trailers to LEGO announcements, and if that’s still not enough, you can always turn your attention to Mario’s video game history.
Much like its bloodsucking antagonist, Castlevania has lain dormant for many years, but Konami’s classic vampire-slaying franchise is finally beginning to awaken thanks to projects like Dead Cells: Return to Castlevania.
Released earlier this week, the heralded DLC stars Richter Belmont and Alucard in what Konami Return to Castlevania supervisor Tsutomu Taniguchi half-jokingly refers to as an isekai — slang for anime about characters suddenly being transported into a new and unfamiliar world.
“Is ‘isekai’ a buzzword ? Because this is how I would define this storyline,” Taniguchi told IGN in a new interview. “Let’s just say that Dracula’s Castle teleported on the Beheaded’s Island and what happened on the island stays on the island.”
No, Dead Cells: Return to Castlevania isn’t canon, but it is a fun reimagining of the old-school platformer, which got its start on the Famicom way back in 1986. The DLC has been heralded by fans and critics alike, with IGN’s review calling it a “shining blueprint of how to do a crossover right.”
‘Respectfully stolen’
According to Evil Empire chief operating officer Benjamin Laulan, it got its start at 2019’s BitSummit festival in Kyoto, which the studio attended in the hope of making a deal to sell Dead Cells in the Japanese market. A meeting with Konami convinced Laulan to shoot his shot and pitch a crossover, and was surprised to find a receptive audience.
“Back in France, we started working on it and well, since Dead Cells had ‘respectfully stolen’ so many elements from the series already, such as: the whip, the key art with the castle, the food hidden in walls… the ‘rogue-vania’ punchline… (oops!) It just made sense to continue this way, so we got lost into excitement and went all-in, the pitch quickly turned into a full DLC proposition,” Laulan said.
Laulan called Empire’s collaboration “really, really smooth,” saying Konami readily agreed to everything from Richter Mode to the Konami Code.
Taniguchi, for his part, said that Konami is “proud” that Castlevania had such an impact on Dead Cells.
“Seriously, knowing that Dead Cells, which is among the greatest indie games of the past ten years, was inspired by Castlevania is a huge source of pride for us,” he said. “When Evil Empire and Motion Twin came back with their full-DLC proposition instead of just this short featuring we weren’t really surprised and we were hoping for that to be honest. And we just thought we had to let them go full circle, because we knew they would use every ounce of their talent to honor the franchise. And also, I personally admit I just really wanted to see what a fight against Dracula in Dead Cells would look like!”
‘We know that our fans always want more’
Taniguchi wouldn’t say what the Dead Cells: Return to Castlevania means for the broader franchise, which hasn’t seen a proper release since 2014’s Castlevania: Lords of Shadow 2 (the successful Netflix series aside), but did acknowledge the “excitement and enthusiasm of the fans online,” which is “really motivating for [Konami].”
“We tried to bring back the games that people loved and cherished with the Castlevania Anniversary Collection and the Castlevania Advance Collection, we also brought back Rondo of Blood and Symphony of the Night for our PlayStation fans and on mobile, and launched Grimoire of Souls on Apple Arcade to celebrate the lore of the franchise,” Taniguchi said. “But we know that our fans always want more, and we do too, so this opportunity to have this amazing crossover with Dead Cells was impossible to pass up on. “
Will Castlevania follow suit? We’ll just have to see. But in the short-term, Dead Cells: Return to Castlevania is a tantalizing reminder of what could be for one of Konami’s most beloved franchises.
Kat Bailey is a Senior News Editor at IGN as well as co-host of Nintendo Voice Chat. Have a tip? Send her a DM at @the_katbot.
The Finals is a fast-paced first-person shooter that focuses on arcade-y game styles and game-show mechanics. What makes it unique is that everything, and I mean everything, can be destroyed. It’s a lot to take in, but after playing a bunch of it, all of the elements manage to work really well together when the game isn’t stuttery and buggy.
All For The Fame
The premise of The Finals is that you’re a contestant in a virtual combat entertainment game show. You compete for fame, money, and the opportunity to get generous sponsors on your side. Developer Embark Studios has said The Finals was inspired by The Hunger Games, Gladiator, and other arena-style competitions. You can customize your own Competitor, which is pretty cool though the options are fairly limited.
The maps in The Finals matches take place in real-life locations that have dynamic time of day and weather conditions like fog and rain that are randomized each time you start a new game. I played in Monaco, a more horizontal close-quarters map, and Seoul, a vertical map with lots of height and layers to play on.
Clock in, Cash Out
The Finals has lobbies of four teams of three vying for the most amount of money cashed in. So the only way to earn points for your team is to bank money. Throughout the map there will be Vault spawns that teams can capture. Once you unlock the cash in the Vaults you have to carry the box of cash in your hand, so whoever is carrying the cash cannot use their weapons, but does have free range of movement like climbing, ziplining, jump padding, and running.
With the box of cash in hand, you have to run it to a Cashout location where you can bank the money for your team and move up in the leaderboard. Securing the actual deposit for your team takes a long time. So you can choose to stay and defend it from enemy teams that may try to steal the upload, or you can try to run and grab more cash or steal someone else’s upload. While the actual deposit time seemed a little too long, I did really enjoy the aspect of potentially being able to steal someone’s $30,000 deposit from them last second because we were able to hijack the upload right before it finished.
In the Tournament mode, the matches are basically the same but they start with a Knockout Round where the top two winners from the lobbies move on and continue on till a winner is announced. So the matches are a bit longer in terms of time length just due to being roped into an actual tournament formatted game.
Adding to the Hunger Games-like competition, there are announcers who commentate on the game, noting which teams have been wiped, random events that may start, such double damage, and when a team has successfully cashed out. It’s a fun mechanic that I actually really enjoyed since it prevented any team from just camping out somewhere and hiding since the announcers would tell everyone in the lobby what was happening.
Insert Coin To Play
The Finals isn’t a battle royale; it allows for multiple respawns whether or not your team revives you through a timer that counts down and requires you to “enter coin” to respawn once that timer is gone. You have a limited amount of respawns, two per person in the Standard Quickplay matches, but again your teammates can revive you at any point. In Tournament matches, you have two respawns per person as well but can get one extra coin each time you qualify for the next round. To encourage your teammates to revive you, they can even drag your trophy around to get to a safer position to get you back in the fight.
Speaking of picking up trophies, you can pick up virtually (pun intended) anything in the environment. As with the usual game logic, you can pick up flammable canisters and throw them at walls to destroy them or throw them at players to injure them. There are also toxic gas canisters and The Finals’ signature Goo containers you can throw to utilize as well.
The Goo containers, grenades, and guns utilize The Finals’ concept of this weird expanding foam looking wall. It looks like a little plush cloud barrier that deploys and hardens as it lands and provides you a bit of cover. It seems pretty cool but I didn’t find myself using it too much.
Chaos Incarnate
The most unique aspect of The Finals is the fact that everything can be destroyed. All the walls, buildings, new Goo element… you name it. The destruction happens server-side, so everyone experiences the same destruction in the same lobby. It’s easily the most fun aspect of The Finals where you can run around and literally take the ground away from an enemy team and snatch their money from them.
This makes The Finals stand out from any other shooter where you have to be strategic with where you position yourself or breach a room from. Here, you can breach wherever you want and no corner is safe. You simply cannot play The Finals like your typical shooter and I love that about it. It’s chaotic and unpredictable which is really refreshing for a first-person shooter. No more camping out in corners when you can just RPG the floor and walls to expose the enemy team trying to cash out.
Of course, with fully-destructible environments, there is a good and bad side to the chaos that creates. The good side is that you can constantly confuse and terrify your enemies as you destroy the ground they stand on and bash through any walls between you and them. The bad side is that while you’re confusing your enemies, you’re probably also going to confuse yourself and create an environment where you can’t see a single damn thing around you.
There were several points in matches where there would be so much destruction I could not see my teammates or enemies or where I was and I was just always falling through the ground. I don’t feel that this is a terrible thing, but it’s a lot of visual clutter and will most likely be extremely overwhelming to new players trying to learn the game and get a bearing for how gunplay and movement work. Maybe with more time in the game it’ll get easier to understand, like with Overwatch or Apex, but it was definitely a lot when trying to get my feet underneath me.
The chaos is fun to deal with when I can actually play, though. In the original first preview version I played that was only open to a few press and influencers, it ran perfectly and never stuttered – even with the wild amounts of destruction that took place around me. However, in the current Closed Beta that players can enter by registering on Steam, performance has a huge step back that I can’t believe is the same game.
I can barely get 30fps especially when any destruction happens. The game looked like a slideshow at times and even when turning everything down to low and on Performance mode, The Finals just couldn’t keep up. There was also this awful static noise that constantly ran in the background of the game sounds that gave me a headache after trying to battle frame rates and game issues.
Choose Your Contestant
The equipment, abilities, and competitors are all great but they do leave a bit to be desired. You can customize your Contestant, your character, and choose between three builds (classes basically). These three base body builds have different speeds in running, HP levels, and select access to items,weapons, and signature abilities:
Light Build
150 HP, Fastest running speed, Sniper and Sub Machine Gun specialty
While the different abilities and signature weapons were cool, there was a heavy imbalance that was clear from the start. Having a build that is so small that the hitbox is almost impossible to hit was a huge problem, especially given that the Light build can run much faster than the other builds. So not only could they dodge bullets faster but they could also just dodge them easier with their default hitbox.
The Medium build had an issue where their healing stream was incredibly fast and efficient and would almost instantly heal your teammates. So if you had a dedicated healer, you could essentially never die. That and if you paired a Medium build with another Medium build, you could just have two healers on a Heavy build and never go down.
Speaking of the Heavy build, this is where the real problem lies. The Heavy gets access to a wall that basically is like Reinhardt’s shield where it stops bullets from hitting you but also allows your teammates to shoot through it. And the Heavy’s exclusive gun is the six-round Grenade Launcher that I found most players spamming since it knocks down walls, buildings, anything and also injures players heavily.
Balancing Act
There was no cap on how many players in a team could be a type of class, so virtually you could stack all Heavy or all Medium, or all Light if you wanted with the same guns. So I ran into a lot of teams running one Medium and two Heavy players to spam the grenade launcher while their Medium healed the Heavies who were then shielding their team from damage. With each update that The Finals implemented, it seemed that the game really struggled with finding balance with weapons and Builds. In the current closed beta, there are far too many one shot weapons that completely suck the wind out of getting into a fair fight.
The time to kill also never found its footing since the beta was completely different from the preview build and the balance kept shifting. I’d find myself having to switch to whatever gun was the most overpowered in that fresh update and use that while still getting one shot by the same weapon. I was incredibly frustrated just trying to spawn in and play the game and my teammates would often disconnect and just start a new game. The Finals is also hampered by destructible environments and visual clutter adding to the time to kill, since it’s incredibly easy for enemies to run away and recover health when you can’t see anything.
Otherwise, though, The Finals is a fun, fast-paced game that I really want to enjoy and see succeed ,but the balancing issues are very noticeable and make it frustrating to play and enjoy. However, the team at Embark were very quick to take feedback and make adjustments to the balancing issues with guns and abilities that show promise of The Finals being able to survive in the FPS world.
I genuinely want The Finals to live in the current FPS space. The amount of ambition in the game is exciting to see and it’s fun to play but there is a big potential that The Finals will not be able to find its footing with balancing to last as a major FPS competitor. I have major concerns about the way the game is being “balanced” in each minor patch but it’s still in beta so I’m giving it a chance. There was also no mention of how much the battlepass will be or how much cosmetics will cost once it leaves the beta so how the monetization will work is unclear.
The Finals is at the very least a unique take on the FPS space with strong mechanics, movement, and gunplay, but the current bugs and performance issues make me want to stay away until I know I can spare my eyes from 15fps. It was a huge disappointment to see the preview build and public beta build be completely different and full of many more issues.
Embark being quick to adjust to feedback does make me hopeful, but live service games are extremely difficult to keep up with on the developer and player sides. We’ll see what kind of audience The Finals ultimately attracts and holds after the beta and the full release.
Stella is a Video Producer, Host, and Editor at IGN. Her gameplay focus is on competitive FPS games and she’s previously reviewed Apex Legends, Hyper Scape, Halo Infinite Multiplayer, and Battlefield 2042. She regularly hosts and shoutcasts competitive Apex Legends and Halo Infinite tournaments when she isn’t streaming on her Twitch channel after work outs. You can follow her on Twitter @ParallaxStella.
A special event in tandem with the Super Mario Bros. Movie.
Update :
Nintendo of America has now publicised this same Super Mario Run event on its own social channels. This “special event” is being promoted in tandem with the upcoming release of The Super Mario Bros. Movie. As part of this, the game is also half-price until 30th May. A follow-up tweet further explains the free stage unlocks:
Only two and a half hours after going live, Destiny 2’s latest raid, Root of Nightmares, was first conquered by a relatively unknown team of underdogs called Team Hard in the Paint.
Raids are Destiny’s ultimate endgame challenge, which involve six players working together to figure out complicated mechanics and execute them to perfection, all while avoiding being killed by hordes of enemies and powerful bosses alike. For many years, Bungie has observed the launch of their raids by hosting official “World First Races,” which document the first team to beat these dastardly gauntlets.
Bungie confirmed the world first victory, writing, “Guardians from around the world fought against an ancient threat in the Root of Nightmares raid this weekend during the World First raid race. A massive congratulations to Team Hard in the Paint for emerging victorious. As the first team to both beat the raid and the additional challenges, all six members will receive World First title belts and will forever be known as the World First Champions of Root of Nightmares.”
For the past couple of raid releases, the same team, Clan Elysium, has claimed victory, including last year’s Vow of the Disciple. Several other top contenders and previous winning teams were also highly watched on Twitch Rivals as part of the contest. The winner though, as it turned out, included a group of small content creators and speedrunners whose streams had far fewer viewers until it became clear they were on pace to win it all.
One such speedrunner, RoenXD, has only 9K followers on Twitch even after his team’s victory, a testament to his crew’s underdog status.
IGN reached out to RoenXD shortly after his raid accomplishments, who said of the victory: “It’s still pretty surreal because it’s been a long time goal of ours to achieve this. My team are the greatest friends I could ask for, and this is for sure one of the highlights of our lives. We prepared a lot for this raid and gave it our best, and it paid off.”
Rip out the nightmares, root and stem.
Congratulations to the World First Destiny 2 #RootofNightmares winners, Team Hard in the Paint:
Reacting to the surprise victory, commenters chimed in on Twitter to praise the winning team’s impressive speed, or to bemoan or celebrate the loss of competing teams.
Since Destiny 2: Lightfall’s debut last week, unfavorable reactions to the expansion and lots of bugs have cast a shadow over the long-running looter shooter, a fact that’s reflected in IGN’s own review in progress. However, there appear to have been few technical issues during today’s raid race, a marked improvement over last year, which may be just the morale boost the Destiny community needs.
No matter who you were rooting for, this is a gaming underdog story for the ages. And who doesn’t love a good underdog story?
Resident Evil 4‘s demo dropped on Thursday and in all likelihood its ganados-packed village is difficult and scary enough for me. If you’re made of stronger stuff, you might be interested in the demo’s secret ultra-hard “Mad Chainsaw Mode”, though.
Lemnis Gate is a multiplayer shooter trapped within a turn-based timeloop, in which players work across turns to support their past selves and stymy their opponents. If that were possible in reality, this would be the perfect moment for a new iteration to appear and throw a shield around Lemnis Gate, because its developers have announced that it will close down this summer.
