Super Mario is one of the biggest gaming properties ever created, with hundreds of games since the Nintendo Entertainment System. 20 different Mario games have released for Nintendo Switch, with more on the way later this year. As part of Walmart’s Labor Day sale, you can save on some of the biggest Mario titles available on Nintendo Switch.

While Labor Day isn’t considered one of the best times to buy video games, there are still some great deals here that are worth looking at. If you’ve yet to complete your Mario collection on Switch, don’t miss out on these deals, which are set to end today.

Save on Super Mario Bros. Wonder, Super Mario Odyssey, Super Mario RPG, and More This Labor Day

First, you can save $20 off Super Mario RPG, the Nintendo Switch remake of the SNES title. The beloved game returns with a fresh coat of paint and the combat we all love, with even Yoko Shimomura returning to compose a remade soundtrack! Super Mario RPG is incredibly beginner-friendly, so you don’t need to have any RPG experience to dive right in and enjoy this classic.

Another great title on sale is Super Mario Bros. Wonder, which is 20% off this weekend. Wonder introduced loads of wonderful new ideas to 2D Mario, including three new power ups, the Wonder Flower, and much more. While this game released just last year, this is the first new 2D Mario that Switch received, as previously only New Super Mario Bros. U Deluxe was available.

Additionally, you can save on Mario Party Superstars, the latest Mario Party title. Released in 2021, this game acted as a return to form for the Mario Party series, with multiple boards returning from previous entries. If you’re looking to refresh yourself before Super Mario Party Jamboree, now is a great time to pick up Mario Party Superstars.

Below, you can take a look at more Mario Nintendo Switch deals available at Walmart for Labor Day. Even new titles like Luigi’s Mansion 2 HD are available on sale for a limited time!

Looking for more deals? Check out our guide to the very best Labor Day sales of 2024 so far.

Rocksteady Studios has reportedly laid off several staff members as a result of the disastrous release of Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League.

Anonymous employees told Eurogamer that the Rocksteady quality assurance team had been cut from 33 members to 15 with poor sales of Suicide Squad (which cost owner Warner Bros. Discovery a $200 million hit to revenue) cited directly.

Rocksteady management has allegedly acknowledgedthat product quality will take a hit as a result of the lay offs, as remaining QA testers struggle to uphold the same standard as the team once double in size.

The 18 staff members affected reportedly included junior employees and veteran team members who were at the studio more than five years. IGN has asked Warner Bros. Discovery for comment.

Suicide Squad launched in January 2024 as a live service game featuring the likes of Harley Quinn and Deadshot, and issues emerged almost immediately as players who paid extra to play the game sooner were kicked out after an hour as Rocksteady dealt with a bug.

This was the first of several frustrations for fans and Suicide Squad failed to sell well, being dubbed a disappointment by Warner Bros. Discovery boss David Zaslav.

Its critical reception was just as poor, as in our 5/10 review, IGN said: “Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League is a repetitive and bland looter-shooter that, despite an engaging story, never stays fun for long enough.”

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

In July of 2023, Baldur’s Gate 3 was hardly a blip on my radar. When it was released one month later, it became one of my favorite games of all time.

Now, the game is celebrating its one-year anniversary. Its seventh major patch, which will add official modding support and new endings to the game, is right around the corner, and developer Larian Studios launched a brand new YouTube channel to provide behind-the-scenes looks at the game and its developers. Between its critical acclaim, numerous awards, and financial success, Baldur’s Gate 3 is worth celebrating, but its meteoric rise to success was just as surprising to the developers at Larian as it was to the rest of the gaming community.

“At every single point, I thought it was going to stop,” game director Swen Vincke says of the game’s success. “I remember arguing with our director of publishing, who said, ‘This is going to sell a lot.’ I said, ‘That’s impossible. The number you’re saying is just not possible.'”

The interview with Vincke is done virtually, but while I’m home in my office, Vincke answers my call from the passenger seat of a moving car. He’s the only one who can hear me, but he informs me of potential background noise from the backseat of the car, which is currently filled with several other developers who worked on the game. I don’t know exactly where they’re headed, but to schedule an interview for the travel time from one place to another makes one thing abundantly clear – Vincke is a busy man, but he’s not ready to share the project taking up all of his time.

Despite months of patches and media attention on Baldur’s Gate 3, Larian is already hard at work on its next project, and while we don’t know exactly what it is, we know it isn’t Baldur’s Gate 4. In March, Vincke announced the studio’s plans to end its partnership with Wizards of the Coast, meaning Larian won’t be making DLC or a sequel to their critical success. Several months after this announcement, Vincke says the folks at Larian have no regrets about the decision.

“We actually decided this only at Christmas. We were working on stuff, but […] our hearts weren’t as much in it, probably because we spent so much time already in it. So it was time for us to do new things, and ever since, we’ve felt better. We [got] our developer joy back […] and that’s the prime thing, right? If you don’t have that, you can’t make anything good.”

A Series Revivified

It’s only natural that after spending six years working on the game, Larian isn’t as enthusiastic about Baldur’s Gate 3 as it once was. But back in 2017, that exact enthusiasm was what led Vincke to pursue the project to begin with. The original Baldur’s Gate games are hailed as BioWare classics from the late 90s, and after decades without a new entry, Larian saw itself as a developer fit to continue the legacy. Wizards of the Coast (which owns the Baldur’s Gate IP) agreed to a pitch meeting, but the presentation’s date was, ironically, set for the same day as the release date for Larian’s then-upcoming title, Divinity: Original Sin 2. According to Vincke, the time crunch led to a subpar presentation.

“I’m still ashamed for it,” Vincke laughs when recalling the initial pitch meeting. Whatever it was Vincke showed Wizards of the Coast, it was clearly below their standards.

“That was the best that we could do. [Wizards of the Coast] said, ‘This is not very good.’ We said, ‘We know. Give us more time.’ And then they gave us more time.” Thankfully, the following presentation went much better, and the studio was given the green light. So, after shipping the definitive edition of Divinity: Original Sin 2, Larian focused all its efforts on making Baldur’s Gate 3.

The game entered early access in 2020. Just like with D:OS 2, the early access model allowed Larian to refine the gameplay experience with player feedback, but Vincke is unsure whether Larian will follow the same procedure for future games. “I think it has a tremendous amount of benefits,” he says, “but every game has its own structure – its own language – so I think you need to judge that game by game.”

In this case, players had plenty of feedback for Baldur’s Gate 3 and Larian had to “course correct on quite a few things.” In addition to a generally buggy launch (a complaint that would be levied at the game even months after its 1.0 release), fundamental pieces of the story and mechanics were completely reworked. Vincke recalls complaints about the past tense framing of the game’s opening sequence, struggles with implementing the Dungeons & Dragons ruleset, and general comments that it was too similar to their previous game. But the early access model ended up working quite well Vincke says. “At some point, we started figuring out how people wanted to play [Baldur’s Gate 3].” For the following three years, Larian would constantly update and expand the content in their early access release, in addition to developing the latter two acts of the game.

These updates often included adjustments to dialogue and story, which meant actors and voice-over artists frequently returned to the recording studio. Vincke and the rest of the writing team “changed the script continuously,” fine-tuning the plot, making everything flow more naturally, and adding more instances where the game could react to player behavior. Vincke’s audience of developers in the backseat of the car laughs as he tells this story. He adds, “Some of the victims of the rewrites are sitting here. The perpetrators, too.”

Roles With Advantages

Of course, no one is more impacted by script rewrites than the actors themselves, but when I spoke to Devora Wilde, the actress who portrays Lae’zel, she remembers being glad for the extra work. “I felt very lucky in the beginning to, as an actor, have a job for such a long period of time,” she says. “I was like, ‘Oh my god, I’m gonna have a job for two years.'” Due to delays in development, those two years would stretch to four, meaning Wilde spent a considerable amount of time in Lae’zel’s virtual shoes – and a considerable amount of time with a recurring gig.

Baldur’s Gate 3 finally launched on August 3, 2023, but Wilde didn’t feel the full impact the game would have for a few weeks. Between her TikTok posts and a video of the cast reading thirsty tweets, there was a considerable amount of online traction, but she didn’t comprehend the physical size of the fanbase until MCM London Comic Con. Jennifer English, who plays Shadowheart in the game, felt the same way.

“I’d gone to London Comic Con when the game was in early access and I remember being really honored that I had 10 people in my queue,” English says. “I think I’d made my rent that weekend. And I was like, ‘Wow, that’s amazing.'” When she came back the following year, her lines had grown to six-hour wait times and the cast needed a security detail to handle the number of people stopping them on the show floor.

Part of this boom in popularity has to do with the actors themselves and their willingness to promote themselves and the game on social media. Popular games are released all the time, but it’s not common for the actors behind video game characters to be thrust into the spotlight. While it wasn’t Larian’s suggestion that the cast begin engaging with memes on social media, Wilde says that Larian’s encouragement of the situation has a lot to do with their ultimate success.

“Larian [was] just gracious enough and fun-loving enough to be like, ‘You know what? We’re just gonna let them run with it.'” Wilde says. “Many other companies don’t allow actors to do that actually, and I think that [Larian] really embrace[s] the spirit of ‘let the actors just kind of get on with it.'”

In addition to the influx of followers, English says the online community’s response to Shadowheart has made her more fond of the role. Despite initially not liking the character, she says, “The stuff that [players] like in Shadowheart is kind of the stuff I like about myself,” and that fans have latched on to parts of the character that she hadn’t even consciously portrayed. Meanwhile, Wilde was surprised Lae’zel was “so polarizing” at first, with many fans being turned away by her stand-offish attitude, though that attitude eventually softened. She says, “I was getting a lot of delayed responses, even now, where people are like, ‘Oh, you know what? On my third playthrough, I gave her a chance and now I love her.”

Scheduling dilemmas mean my interviews with Wilde and English happen at different times, but I chose to speak with the two of them specifically because of their relationships with each other and the online community. Alongside Aliona Baranova, one of Baldur’s Gate 3’s motion capture directors and English’s girlfriend, the actors have cultivated a following that has become separate from the game altogether. This includes a line of merch, with t-shirts referencing Wilde’s love of ranch dressing and inside jokes suggesting the three of them are “God’s Favorite Throuple.”

The latter shirt references a meme of Shadowheart calling herself “God’s favorite princess,” which English recreated per her girlfriend’s suggestion. In fact, English credits her “chronically online girlfriend” Baranova for her social media successes, as English says it’s “never been something I’ve really partaken in.” Right on queue, Baranova peeks her head into the frame – she had been providing commentary from the other side of the Zoom camera the whole time – to say, “I just wanted to add that your Instagram was private. Do you remember?”

Between her personal life, her professional life, and her self-image, Baldur’s Gate 3 has had a profound impact on English. After Baranova leaves to grab dinner, English reflects on the anniversary and says, “It does not feel like a year. And yet, life has completely changed.”

The Next Campaign

English isn’t alone in that feeling; Baldur’s Gate 3 has had a tremendous effect on everyone at Larian. In the months following its release, it won Game of the Year at the Game Awards, the Golden Joystick Awards, the D.I.C.E. Awards, the GDC Awards, and the BAFTAs, not to mention a slew of other awards for narrative and performance, including the second ever Hugo award bestowed upon a video game. It has a staggering 96 on Metacritic and has been hailed as one of the greatest role-playing games of all time. In the face of this monumental impact, Larian’s goals as a studio remain remarkably humble.

“All this success means there are high expectations of what’s next,” art director Joachim Vleminckx writes over email. “We are playing it cool as always and we are not letting the success blind us to the amount of hard work it took to get here.”

“In practice, not much has changed,” Vleminckx’s fellow art director Alena Dubrovina says in that same email. “We are still hard working bees, ready for new adventures. The quality bar was set high by BG3, so we are wrapping our heads around how to raise it even higher.”

The idea of raising a bar past Baldur’s Gate 3 sounds absurd, but Vincke has nitpicks with the game, even now – he wishes the encounter at the entrance to the grove in act one wasn’t so much of a bottleneck, for example. “We could have continued for years tweaking it,” he says. While their future game is sure to present plenty of unseen challenges, the nitpicks and unforeseen hurdles in the past projects will allow Larian to evolve for future ones.

“BG3 was a game that was at a scale that was new to us, […] so we learned a lot about dealing with scale,” he says. “We learned a lot from what we didn’t have, and we’re trying to have that now so we [do] not make the same mistakes.”

From the moment its cinematic announcement trailer revealed that it would be played from a first-person perspective, Avowed has been viewed as Obsidian Entertainment’s answer to Skyrim. It’s a position Obsidian itself has tried to distance itself from, largely because Avowed is a smaller scale RPG made up of interconnected zones rather than a huge, sprawling open world game. Despite this, the Skyrim comparison makes a certain amount of sense; after proving it could do Bethesda games better than Bethesda itself with Fallout: New Vegas, Obsidian created its own Fallout analogue in 2019’s The Outer Worlds. It cut short the agonising wait for Fallout 5 with a similar style of RPG (sure, it wasn’t open world, but it was directed by Fallout’s original creators), and so eyes have naturally turned to Avowed – could this be the game that finally gives us a new Elder Scrolls-like adventure years before Bethesda ships its own Skyrim successor?

At gamescom 2024 I was able to play an hour of Avowed. That’s hardly enough to say if it truly is capable of standing up to such a landmark RPG as Skyrim – I didn’t even get to explore outside of a single cave. However, what I did play suggested it may well equal (or, hopefully, actually better) Skyrim in one important area: the stealth archer build.

It’s a meme among the Skyrim community that everyone will eventually spec into a stealth archer build, no matter their initial intentions for a playthrough. That’s because playing a shadowy sniper in Skyrim is incredibly satisfying. You can decimate entire dungeons largely unseen and the thud of an arrow hitting an enemy’s skull is delightful every single time, particularly when it triggers a slow-motion killcam. I think Obsidian knows all this and has gone to lengths to ensure its own ranger class is equally strong.

The gamescom demo’s example ranger build was, naturally, equipped with a bow. The fundamentals of it will be familiar to anyone who’s played not just Skyrim but any other game with archery – aim, zoom, draw back longer to increase power, and release. But as any stealth archer knows, the first shot is the most important – if it doesn’t hit true, if it doesn’t kill the target, then stealth is broken and chaos ensues. Seemingly recognising this, Avowed displays a small red diamond-shaped target on an enemy’s weak point when you zoom in, a feature likely pilfered from the similarly killing shot-obsessed Sniper Elite games. While I’m perfectly capable of aiming between the eyes without assistance, I actually don’t mind this – it’s like a HUD representation of your character’s archery prowess. They know exactly where to strike.

Archery is bolstered by two passive skills – power attacks and Steady Aim. Holding the drawn-back bow string engages the power attack, which empowers the notched arrow with a silver flame-like energy (I’m guessing this is because you play as a Godlike, a supernatural race from the Pillars of Eternity RPGs with which Avowed shares a setting with). Steady Aim, meanwhile, slows down time while aiming that power attack. These are, of course, repackaged versions of archery skills we’ve seen in Skyrim and beyond, but I’m glad they’re here because they’re a vital ingredient in the stealth archer’s return.

Where Avowed’s sample archer build begins to deviate from Skyrim’s template is when it comes to sneaking. Naturally, you can crouch to reduce your visibility and crawl into long grass to disappear completely. But Avowed rangers also have access to the Shadowing Beyond skill, an active ability that renders you fully invisible until you make a combat action (provided you can afford its mana-draining cost.) It’s as effective as it sounds; after literally tearing a hole in reality and slipping into some kind of parallel shadow realm, you’re able to walk right through enemy patrols without disturbing even the air molecules. It’s the stealth archer’s dream, enabling you to bypass tricky encounters or reposition to a more advantageous sniper’s perch. It’s an ability that’s hard to come by in Skyrim; in Tamriel, a stealth archer needs to either find the Bow of Shadows and make use of its invisibility perk (which is nowhere near as powerful or flexible as Shadowing Beyond), or train as an illusionary mage in order to cast the invisibility spell.