It seems you’ll finally be able to shout “1v1 me, bro” in developer Second Dinner’s superhero-themed mobile card game, Marvel Snap.
The popular licensed collectible card game, which won Best Mobile Game at the Game Awards, will finally be getting one of its most requested features since launching in October of last year: the ability to challenge your friends directly. The so-called Battle Mode will be available tomorrow.
It’s coming…
Get ready for Battle Mode where you can challenge your friends and see who’s really the best! pic.twitter.com/XPxkPXtRN8
Up until now, players have been at the mercy of Marvel Snap’s one and only playlist, a competitive matchmade mode that pits you against a random opponent in your skill bracket. In a recent blog post Second Dinner announced that Battle Mode would be a tournament-style mode where players play multiple games against one another until a clear winner emerges.
“Battle Mode pits two opponents against each other through multiple rounds. Each player starts with 10 health,” the post said. “Instead of Cubes, what’s at stake is the amount of damage the winner will deal to the loser. If you can deplete your opponent’s health to zero, you win!”
It’s still unclear if Battle Mode will come alongside a friends list or some way to keep track of people in your network to invite others to your game, something that doesn’t exist in Marvel Snap’s current form.
Sony San Diego revealed that Miami Marlins’ Jazz Chisholm Jr. is the cover athlete for MLB The Show 23. The studio also announced that the game will launch on March 28, 2023, for PS5, PS4, Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch.
MLB The Show 23 will also be heading to Xbox Game Pass on release day, and preorders for the game start on February 6. It features full cross-platform, cross-progression, and cross-save functionality so your card inventory can be carried between all console platforms. The exception to this are PS5 and Xbox Series X|S exclusive features such as Stadium Creator.
The game’s Collector’s Edition will also be fully revealed on February 2nd. It includes dual entitlement to both the PS4 and PS5 versions, with the former being a physical disc while the latter is a download code. Those who purchase the PS4 version can upgrade to the PS5 version for $10 later.
Chisholm’s reveal trailer details his background growing up in the Bahamas. With his friends, he played 6v6 matches with no catchers or umpires. Last year’s cover athlete was Shohei Ohtani of the Los Angeles Angels.
In IGN’s MLB The Show 22 review, we said, “MLB The Show 22 is mostly a retread of an already great game, but more bugs than usual and the not quite ready for primetime co-op mode are signs this series may be losing some velocity.”
George Yang is a freelance writer for IGN. He’s been writing about the industry since 2019 and has worked with other publications such as Insider, Kotaku, NPR, and Variety.
When not writing about video games, George is playing video games. What a surprise! You can follow him on Twitter @Yinyangfooey
This article was originally published in 2018 as the “13 Best Zombie Games of All Time,” and then updated in 2019 to include 19 games. As we enter 2023, we’ve revisited and revamped our list, expanding it to 25 and crowning a new king of zombie games.
Zombies make marvelous antagonists. They’re plodding, dark parodies of society’s short-sightedness. They’re plentiful and emotionless eaters of flesh, which makes them perfect cannon fodder for action films and twitch shooters. Their wasted visages serve the purposes of both horror and humor with equal effectiveness. They’ve been a part of the video game landscape for decades, so long they’ve carved out their own subgenre: the “zombie game.”
The still-shambling corpses of the damned have been important to some of gaming’s more notable narratives and innovations. These are the 25 best zombie games of all time.
25. Zombies Ate My Neighbors
Zombies Ate My Neighbors is a bizarre and colorful SNES action game from the golden days of LucasArts. It’s a wickedly funny shooter that relies on adorable and bizarre animation for most of the laughs, and the delightful cartoon enemies are half the fun. Before the journey is over you’ll battle space bugs, save cheerleaders, leap on trampolines, and fight a giant baby. Beyond the garish trappings, it’s a very well-designed cooperative shooter that manages to find environmentally destructive uses for everything from squirt guns to rocket launchers. Since the main thrust of each level is rescuing civilians rather than defeating enemies, it also requires a lot more thought to finish than your average arcade-style game, a design innovation that adds a great deal to the challenge and replayability.
24. The House of the Dead
Along with Resident Evil, this iconic on-rails arcade shooter helped restore zombies’ pop culture relevance in the ’90s and aid in the revival of the zombie film genre a decade later. In a 2013 interview with Paul Weedon, George A. Romero, long considered the father of zombie movies, credited House of the Dead and RE with popularizing modern zombies “more than anything else.”
23. State of Decay 2
The State of Decay series debuted as an Xbox Live Arcade game in 2013, and tackles the trials and tribulations of surviving and thriving among the undead. As such it’s a slower, more thoughtful apocalypse experience, though there’s no shortage of opportunities to satisfy your zombie bloodlust with a range of weapons and vehicles. The 2018 sequel built on the original’s zombie-sandbox premise by expanding in scope and adding four-player co-op while maintaining the near-constant tension that accompanies the threat of permadeath.
22. Zombi
ZombiU (later released as Zombi) is a punishing first-person survival horror game set in a zombie-infested London. While it doesn’t possess the best narrative on this list, nor does it receive high marks for combat, its novel, roguelike approach to death makes it worth checking out. When you’re bitten, your character dies, permanently, and you come back as a new survivor who must track down your previous (now reanimated) body to retrieve lost items. This cyclical system of death and rebirth (and death again) is thematically fitting for a zombie game, and the necessary killing of your previous corpse cleverly wraps a blood-covered bow on your previous run. Meanwhile, survivor mode requires you to complete the entirety of Zombi with a single character (i.e., without dying). It’s among the most difficult challenges of survival available on this list.
21. Days Gone
Days Gone’s open world is a post-apocalyptic playground on which you’re let loose with protagonist Deacon St. John’s rusty, trusty motorcycle and dozens of ways to (re)bury the undead. It was one of Sony’s less-celebrated exclusives from the PS4 era, yet it’s carved out a spot in the zombie-game pantheon thanks largely to its horde sequences. These encounters, of which there are 40, pit Deacon against up to 500 ‘freakers’ (Days Gone’s term for zombies) at once in a heart-pumping trial of quick wit and quicker reflexes.
20. Project Zomboid
Project Zomboid leans hard into the simulation aspects of surviving a zombie apocalypse. It’s a systems-heavy zombie game in which all actions must be considered; you’re not just fending off the undead but depression, starvation, and loneliness too. This level of depth is deeply rewarding for those with the patience to navigate these more mundane survival mechanics, which the developer continues to fine-tune with regular updates almost a decade after its release.
19. Zombie Army 4: Dead War
Developer Rebellion made a name for itself with the Sniper Elite series and its cringe-inducing, X-ray kill-cam, which lets players watch bullets rip through Nazi’s insides in super-gross, super-slow-motion. With Zombie Army it’s the same idea, but the Nazis are zombies.
Zombie Army brings the signature kill-cam into an alternate WWII, in which Nazis are raised from hell to chase the Allied troops out of Germany. The story lives up to its outrageous premise and is supported by fine-tuned sniping, gut-wrenching gore, and a killer soundtrack fitting of the finest ’80s horror flicks.
18. DayZ
The survival games genre owes a great debt to DayZ, which began life as a mod for military simulator ARMA II. DayZ contrasted the surrealism of a zombie infestation with the hyperrealism of exposure, infection, hunger, and the degeneration of human nature in the face of disaster. You simply never knew whether the next person you met was out to help or murder you. Just how much fun can playing as a cowering, nearly powerless victim in a world full of lumbering AI zombies and ruthless human scavengers really be? Turns out it’s an addictively captivating and exhilarating experience. Everything from Fortnite to Rust owes DayZ a tremendous debt for its willingness to throw unarmed players into a hostile land with their fellow humans to see what happens next. Turns out the zombies are rarely the real monsters.
17. They Are Billions
They Are Billions, specifically its survival mode, is an excellent mashup of zombie horror and RTS gameplay. Players must build and manage a post-apocalyptic city, while knowing hordes of undead are en route to tear it to the ground. With an emphasis on defense — a necessity considering you’ll face thousands of zombies at once — They Are Billions uniquely progresses from a city builder to a tense, often overwhelming game of survival.
16. Dead Rising 2
Following the success of its Resident Evil series, Capcom introduced a new, lighthearted take on the zombie genre with Dead Rising. Absent is the tense horror of Resident Evil, replaced by a fast-paced, campy zombie slaughter-fest. Its biggest strength lies in its weapon variety: from instruments to condiments, the many casinos and stores within Dead Rising 2‘s Fortune City are stocked with countless ways for protagonist Chuck Greene to lay the dead back to rest — not to mention the ability to combine weapons, resulting in extraordinary feats of apocalyptic engineering such as the Freedom Bear (robot bear + LMG) and the Hail Mary (football + grenade).
15. Resident Evil Village
Over 25 years after the original, Capcom still wears the industry’s survival-horror crown thanks to the continued excellence of Resident Evil. The series’ latest installment moves zombies to the backburner in favor of another form of flesh-eating enemy (lycans), yet Resident Evil illage earns its spot on this list for its world-class survival-horror gameplay and its late-game twist that pulls the undead back into the spotlight.
Planescape is one of those games that you occasionally hear is really good and then you look up one screenshot and go “nope, I’m never playing that” and walk away and your life is worse for it. Listen, I get that the appearance is anachronistic, but this game is too good to miss. It’s so good I can barely find words worthy to describe the magnitude of its goodness.
Planescape: Torment is an RPG about being immortal, crammed with more undead than you can shake a severed limb at, including zombies assigned to alternately sad and hilarious purposes. The necrotic atmosphere permeates every moment in the game: you start the story laying on a slab, your best friend is a disembodied skull, and there are so many dead things running around that there’s a special ability dedicated just to talking with them. Torment is a deeply biting and tragic RPG that turns practically every trope and convention of the genre on its head. It’s also quite accessible today, with ports to mobile and a nice shiny GOG wrapper to play on modern PCs.
13. Call Of Duty: World at War
World War II, zombies, and multiplayer shooters… together at last. Nazis have long been identified with occultism (both in reality and popular fiction) and Treyarch’s decision to go all-in on the campy grindhouse aesthetic changed the face of multiplayer shooters forever in Call of Duty: World at War. Zombies helped lighten the mood in a series that was increasingly mired in its own self-importance, reminding players, critics, and creators that it’s all a game.
12. Plants vs. Zombies
The original Plants vs. Zombies blended solid, approachable tower defense gameplay with whimsical charm, leading to its mass appeal on PC, consoles, and mobile. It found immediate success in its simplicity, and longevity in its well-crafted variety of plants and zombies. Its addictive, wave-based loop spawned a number of official follow-ups and countless imitators, making this family-friendly take on the undead worthy of a spot on our list.
11. Dying Light
Survival mechanics meet grappling hooks in Dying Light, a big, messy genre mash-up. It combines some of Minecraft’s greatest strengths, like scavenging for materials in an open world, item crafting, and scary monsters that come out at night, with solid hand-to-hand combat, a fun and speedy traversal system, and grappling hooks. Zombies and grappling hooks: a match made in video game heaven.
10. The Walking Dead: Saints and Sinners
Pop culture’s zombie renaissance of the 2000s culminated in the breakout success of The Walking Dead, which excelled at exploring the blurred lines of morality and humanity amidst constant threat and inescapable dread. The Walking Dead: Saints and Sinners honors that exploration with moral flexibility in its decision-making, where “right” and “wrong” look awfully similar when viewed from different angles. And, as a VR game, Saints and Sinners is easily one of the most immersive and therefore intense zombie experiences available.
9. Resident Evil HD Remaster
The original Resident Evil doesn’t boast the scope of its sprawling sequel, but the tighter, almost claustrophobic design of the mansion works to heighten its horror. The constant threat of the fearsome double-reanimated Crimson Heads in areas you’ve previously cleared fuels a compounding sense of dread that you’re in continual zombie danger no matter how heavily armed you become. The legendary cheesy dialogue is icing on the cake.
Also, if you finish the game in under three hours, you can blow up zombies with an infinite-ammo rocket launcher.
8. Red Dead Redemption: Undead Nightmare
How do you make your already successful open-world cowboy game even better? Release a reimagining of the western drama where all the characters you know and love now eat the flesh of the living! Undead Nightmare was pure zombie-blasting bliss with a healthy dose of supernatural armageddon to boot. Turns out John Marston was born to slay the undead and ride the horses of the apocalypse. Undead Nightmare set the gold standard for single-player DLC and, years later, remains a standout example of reimagined excellence.
7. Resident Evil 4
Though it reportedly went through four versions before being released, Capcom’s scrupulous development process paid off in 2005 with a horror masterpiece. From its opening, panic-inducing run-in with the villagers through its final boss and jet-ski escape, RE4 is filled with memorable scares and set pieces still discussed over 15 years later. It’s equally smart and scary in its design, which led IGN to call it the “best survival horror game ever created” at the time it was released — an argument that could still be made to this day.
Capcom is looking to build on its excellence with Resident Evil 4 Remake, due out on March 23.
6. The Last of Us Part 1
Yes, the clickers are technically big fungus people, but really they’re zombies. And yes, this is largely a game about throwing bottles and bricks at people, but who cares? It’s scary, it’s heartbreaking, it’s infuriating, and it’s beautiful. Two generations after its launch, The Last of Us remains a benchmark against which great video game drama is compared and retains its cultural relevance thanks to a masterful PS5 remake and successful HBO adaptation.
5. Dead Space
“It’s pretty obvious when you play Dead Space, to look at it and go, ‘Yeah, it’s almost like they decided to make Resident Evil 4 in space,’ which is exactly what we were doing.” That quote from Dead Space designer Ben Wanat (via PC Gamer) speaks to the type of survival-horror game Dead Space was designed to be, and its spot on this list speaks to its success at bringing that vision to fruition.
Dead Space’s variety of undead are necromorphs, grotesque corpses reanimated by an alien infection that line the tight, twisting corridors of the USG Ishimura spaceship. Their flayed skin and malformed bodies are a recipe for repulsion, adding to the satisfaction and relief when melting off necromorph limbs with a plasma cutter. And never has that dismemberment been more visceral than in the essential Dead Space remake.
4. The Walking Dead: Season 1
“Carly will remember that.” What a gut punch.
Long ago, before the TV show started to suck, The Walking Dead made us giggle a little and made us cry a lot. Through the masterfully written inaugural season, Telltale proved that point-and-click adventure games could somehow manage to terrify. The writing and delivery are minimal and masterful, with the bulk of the effort spent creating flawed characters we love or loathe and then stripping them away one by one. By the end, we wonder if anybody is getting out of this alive. The Walking Dead Season 1 helped kick off a revival of adventure game storytelling which continues to influence game design today. Telltale as we knew it may be gone, but their horror masterpiece remains undead in our hearts.
3. The Last of Us Part 2
The Last of Us Part 2 elevates the drama and action of its predecessor, masterfully weaving the two together over a relentless 25-hour campaign. Evil favors no form in Naughty Dog’s post-apocalyptic universe, as you’ll encounter murderous slavers, militias, cultists, and infected alike. The Last of Us’s mycologic variety of undead are creepier than ever in their aesthetic, sound design, and movement, and Part 2 introduces two new types of infected, including a one-of-a-kind monstrosity that calls to mind the horrors of Inside’s final chapter.
2. Left 4 Dead 2
Around the same time Treyarch was bringing Zombies into World at War, Valve introduced us all to their own cooperative take on battling the forces of undeath. Left 4 Dead pitted teams of four allies against mobs of zombies ruled by an invisible enemy: the innovative AI director, a carefully constructed protocol designed to dynamically influence the game as it unfolded. The result was a ridiculously replayable zombie shooter.
Just a year later, Valve brought us Left 4 Dead 2, building upon that successful formula with a familiar yet enhanced team-based shooter. Its gameplay tweaks, improved campaigns, new weaponry (including melee weapons), additional modes (Scavenge and Realism), and introduction of new zombie types (Jockey, Spitter, and Charger) make Left 4 Dead 2 one of the best co-op games of all time and nearly our pick for the best zombie game ever made.
1. Resident Evil 2 Remake
Resident Evil 2 is a triumph of survival horror, a sprawling, weirdly compelling epic that somehow managed to overcome its famously lackluster controls. And with those control issues remedied in the 2019 remake, alongside vastly improved graphics and various other tweaks, RE2 has only gotten better with time.
RE2 allows you to experience a single terrifying night through the unique perspective of two victims, their occasionally overlapping paths both snaking toward horrific discoveries in a city torn apart by an unleashed bioweapon. It’s a tremendously moody and atmospheric game with great pacing, a growing sense of dread, twisted monster design, frequent jump scares, and just enough resource scarcity to maintain a hum of tension throughout.
What’s your pick for the greatest zombie game of all time? Let us know in the comments.
Whether I’m enjoying my favorite memes or going back to rewatch one of the only cartoons I still legitimately laugh at as an adult, it’s hard to understate SpongeBob SquarePants’ influence on my life. Through it all, the porous goofball I’ve known for years feels like the perfect mascot for an over-the-top, cartoonish platformer. While 2003’s SpongeBob SquarePants: Battle for Bikini Bottom proved it could be done, we’ve been in dire need of a modern take on that idea starring everyone’s favorite fry cook. And yet, like a collapsing Squidward Souffle, SpongeBob SquarePants: The Cosmic Shake dried up my optimism the more I played: it’s merely a thin, by-the-numbers sequel to the 20-year-old Bikini Bottom rather than the ground-up redesign that absorbs the progress genre heroes like Mario or Ratchet and Clank have made in the decades since that we deserve. So although Cosmic Shake does benefit from the quirky SpongeBob characters and their world, as a platformer it’s a terribly bland journey that feels painfully frozen in time even as the fans of the show that ended eight years ago have continued to age (also painfully).
As I’ve come to expect from this delightful sponge, the story begins when he makes a series of extremely ill-advised decisions which cause the very fabric of Bikini Bottom to be torn apart at the seams. Determined to put things right, SpongeBob and a newly transformed balloon version of Patrick begin hopping through portals and fighting samey jelly monsters in search of their friends. What little plot follows is basically just a thinly veiled excuse to revisit memorable SpongeBob episodes, whether you’re running around the prehistoric version of Bikini Bottom or the creepy depths of Rock Bottom, which is a nice trip down memory lane but not exactly an original or memorable SpongeBob tale that can stand on its own.
That nostalgic indulgence is helped greatly by the appearance of so many recognizable characters – voiced by their original voice actors – including SpongeBob, Patrick, Pearl, The Flying Dutchman, and Mr. Krabs, most of whom have more than a few amusing lines or gags that they’re a part of. I got a chuckle out of seeing Mr. Krabs as a western bandito or Pearl as a medieval fantasy princess, and the resulting hijinks felt very much like it was straight out of a long-lost episode of the show. Similarly, all the realms you visit along the way are such colorful and vibrantly cartoonish reimaginings of the world of SpongeBob and friends. It’s even got an amazing loading screen where that classic French voice says “one hour later,” and those way-too-detailed closeup images of characters that gross you out, both of which are fantastic nods to the show.
It’s shocking how little the formula has been changed.
That’s what makes it a massive bummer that Cosmic Shake falls so woefully short when it comes to actual gameplay. It’s been almost 20 years since the release of SpongeBob SquarePants: Battle for Bikini Bottom – and just over two since the “Rehydrated” remaster reminded us of how poorly that game’s mechanics have aged – and it’s shocking how little that formula has evolved for this followup. In one of the dullest platformers in recent memory, Cosmic Shake serves up a recipe that’s almost identical to that of its predecessor and had me nodding off as I played. Dreadfully simplistic jumping puzzles and combat against the same handful of enemies who posed absolutely no challenge wore thin quickly. Sure, you can double-jump, ground pound, glide across gaps using a pizza box, attack with your bubble wand, and sometimes activate context-sensitive prompts to do special things like karate kick enemies or swing on a fishing line, but that toolbox is extremely light and never puts you into situations – mandatory or optional – that require a mastery over any of these skills. After the first few hours of its 10-hour campaign, I’d seen just about all the tricks up Cosmic Shake’s sleeves and had to press on through humdrum platforming and combat ad nauseum.
Every level has you jump through some metaphorical and literal hoops, broken up by waves of enemies that can easily be swatted away in seconds before going back to platforming. Variety, both in combat and in the “puzzles” that the platforming offers, is a major pain point, and even as you’re traveling through a pirate-themed realm or a Hollywood movie set, you’re fighting the same pushover purple enemies or hopping on the same floating rectangles. Even when you do get a special sequence, like a chase scene atop a seahorse or an extremely brief stealth section, it’s either incredibly short-lived or hardly different enough from the rest of the grind to keep things interesting.
The only unique moments are at the end of each level when you fight a boss, like an evil Sandy the Squirrel in a Bruce Lee outfit, though even these highlights aren’t breaking any new ground in terms of gameplay – they just feel loads better than the rest of the boring trek.
It’s not that the controls or ideas in Cosmic Shake are poorly implemented, but that they haven’t learned a thing from practically any modern-day platformers that are far more interesting. For example, you don’t get any of the highly entertaining gymnastic platforming feats or unique and silly combat options you’d find in Psychonauts 2 – a game that feels like a lot of its bones would have suited a SpongeBob platformer perfectly. Instead, it plays like every forgettable, middling platformer I’ve played in the past 20 years, and that stunning lack of creativity in an underwater world that’s known for its hilarious originality is a throbbing disappointment for the entirety. As a result, playing Cosmic Shake made me feel like I had put on a high-quality foam SpongeBob costume to attend a costume party, but was forced to perform excruciatingly dull chores while wearing it instead of goofing around; it’s amusing only in the charming disguise that accompanies the otherwise tedious experience.
There are just so many better platformers out there already, even for kids.
I understand that Cosmic Shake was almost certainly designed with children in mind and I’m sure a kid who hasn’t played a lot of better games would enjoy it just fine, but even so, I can’t imagine any of the children I know enjoying this as much as they would Super Mario Odyssey, which does practically everything better. There are just so many great kid-friendly platformers out there already in 2023, and aside from having SpongeBob’s face in it, Cosmic Shake gives you no reasons to play this one over the multitude of alternatives. I mean, you can only blissfully swat around the same three types of enemies or double-jump across identical gaps so many times before you’re sick of it, regardless of your age.
Aside from getting through the main story, Cosmic Shake does offer some optional collectathons to complete and even some side quests to go on. Most aren’t worth the trouble, like one side quest that has you cook Krabby Patties for hungry fish in a short minigame. That said, there’s plenty of new content hiding in areas that can be revisited once you’ve gained new abilities, some of which hide interesting secrets and areas that can only be accessed later. Usually, though, they just lead to more of the same dull combat and rote platforming you’ll already be bored with.
Hogwarts Legacy is incredibly close to releasing in the UK, and the hype continues to build. The game is now consistently number two on the Steam charts (sitting closely behind the Steam Deck), and is set to have a colossal launch. If you’re looking to preorder the game, or even preorder the deluxe edition to get early access, we’ve collected all the current best Hogwarts Legacy deals in the UK in one easy place.
But that’s not all, as there are plenty of other great UK deals to check out right now, including Horizon Forbidden West for £25, Dead Space Remake for £59.95, Mass Effect Legendary Edition for £12.95, and so much more as well. Check out all the other great discounts just below, and make sure you’re following @IGNUKDeals on Twitter for even more UK deal updates.
TL;DR – My Favourite UK Deals Today
Best Hogwarts Legacy Preorder Deals in the UK
These deals from Green Man Gaming are incredible, and definitely worth considering if you’re getting Hogwarts Legacy on PC or Xbox. This is especially good for those who use Steam, and even better if you’ve got a Steam Deck, as Hogwarts Legacy is confirmed to be Verified at launch.
For just £42.49 you can preorder the game and be ready to play on February 10 (or go for the Deluxe Edition for £50.99 and play on February 7 instead). See here for our final preview of the game.
Lunar New Year deals are looking pretty great at the moment, and there are a brilliant few sales going on at Xbox, Steam, and Green Man Gaming. My favourite sale is definitely at Green Man Gaming, however, as there are loads of brilliant Steam, Epic, and GOG PC games on offer at a fraction of the original price (my Steam Deck backlog is ready)!
George Orwell Sale Kindle Free Books
These are both relatively short reads, but absolutely worth checking out if you’ve never gotten around to reading them. Both are free on Amazon Kindle right now, so you can read both on the Kindle App on your phone as well.
Elden Ring Art Books Preorders Down to £48.99
It seems that From Software is really onto something with Elden Ring. Not only was it IGN’s Game of the Year 2022, but it’s also been a massive success with fans, selling millions and millions of copies. If you count yourself an Elden Ring fan, you might want to check these out: up for preorder on Amazon right now are volume 1 and volume 2 of the Elden Ring official Art Books. They’re set to publish on July 25, and they’re both on sale for £48.99 (down from the origianl RRP of £53.99).
Whenever a new HBO show comes out, we collectively as a nation go, so how do we watch it? HBO Max is infamously still not available in the UK, so every new HBO original show is normally shown via Sky or NOW (the streaming service owned by Sky).
So, if you want to watch The Last of Us TV series today, you’ll need to sort yourself out a NOW subscription for the next couple of months. Or, if you’re a Sky customer, you should already have access to watch the show right now.
Xbox All Access from £20.99/Month – 24-Months at 0% Interest (AD)
Here’s the gravy; if you minus the £10.99 you’re paying for Game Pass Ultimate, effectively you’re paying £10/month on the Xbox Series S, or £18/month on the Xbox Series X. Funnily enough, this means you can actually save money on an Xbox Series X|S with Xbox All Access (over the course of the 24-month payments). This is as it’s 0% interest over the 24 months, so you pay just £240 for the Series S (~£10 less than the RRP of £249.99), and £432 for the Series X (~£18 off the RRP for £449.99).
So, if you’re already paying for Game Pass Ultimate monthly, or you were definitely going to sign up for it when buying your console; Xbox All Access does seemingly save you money. (Just remember you are still paying for Game Pass in this deal, and it will still be £20.99/ £28.99 every month, Game Pass Ultimate can’t be removed from the offer).
Acclaimed actress Annie Wersching has passed away at the age of 45 after a prolonged battle with cancer.
As reported by Deadline, Wersching was diagnosed with cancer in 2020, yet continued her acting career, appearing in both Star Trek: Picard and The Rookie.
Wersching is best known for her roles as Renee Walker in the show 24, as well as Leslie Dean in Marvel’s Runaways. She is also well-known for her outstanding performance as Tess Servopoulos in the 2013 PlayStation game The Last of Us.
Neil Druckmann, co-creator of The Last of Us, posted on Twitter saying, “Just found out my dear friend, Annie Wersching, passed away. We just lost a beautiful artist and human being. My heart is shattered. Thoughts are with her loved ones.” He also posted a link to a GoFundMe that has been set up for her family.
Just found out my dear friend, Annie Wersching, passed away. We just lost a beautiful artist and human being. My heart is shattered. Thoughts are with her loved ones.
Wersching is survived by her husband, actor Stephen Full, and her three children: Freddie, Ozzie, and Archie. Her husband also issued the following statement regarding her untimely passing, “There is a cavernous hole in the soul of this family today. But she left us the tools to fill it. She found wonder in the simplest moment. She didn’t require music to dance. She taught us not to wait for adventure to find you. ‘Go find it. It’s everywhere.’”
Matthew Adler is a Commerce, Features, Guides, News, Previews, and Reviews writer for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter @MatthewAdler and watch him stream on Twitch.
WWE’s annual Royal Rumble event had plenty of exciting moments as wrestling’s biggest superstars fought for a title match spot at this year’s WrestleMania 39. One notable moment was Zelina Vega’s entrance during the women’s event where it was revealed that she will be lending her voice as a guest commentator in the upcoming Street Fighter 6.
Vega’s energetic entrance at the event saw her dressed as Juri Han from Street Fighter. You can watch the entire moment in the WWE tweet below.
Vega is no stranger to cosplay, having dressed up as a number of pop culture icons such as Mortal Kombat’s Kitana and Mileena, Nurse Joy from the Pokemon anime series, Poison Ivy, Harley Quinn, Overwatch’s D.Va, Starlight from The Boys, and many more.
During her Royal Rumble entrance, it was also revealed that she will be a guest commentator in the upcoming Street Fighter 6. This is in addition to a number of FGC commentators like Tasty Steve and James Chen who will spice up the matches with what Capcom is calling its “Real Time Commentary Feature.”
IGN is also excited to announce that Zelina Vega will be at this year’s IGN Fan Fest talking about her participation in Street Fighter 6. IGN Fan Fest will run from Februrary 17-18, beginning at 10:00 AM PT.
Matthew Adler is a Commerce, Features, Guides, News, Previews, and Reviews writer for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter @MatthewAdler and watch him stream on Twitch.
A Marvel Snap player has achieved a truly Marvel-ous feat by reaching the end of the Collection Level track and seemingly becoming the first player in the world to do so.
Spotted by @SnapDecks on Twitter, a player by the in-game name Aaron has reached the end of his progression in Marvel Snap, halting his progress and gaining the attention of the development team at Second Dinnner.
What happens when you finish the Collection Level? In what is being called a “World’s First” by the devs, a snap player with the in-game name of Aaron has hit the end of the road and, until it is increased, can no longer open caches. Attached is a video of the achievement. pic.twitter.com/XBB9lGoCLO
In the short video posted with the tweet, we can see Aaron has maxed out at CL 22,366, a number the vast majority of Marvel Snap players will likely never reach. Aaron created a post in the official Marvel Snap Discord to bring attention to the issue, as he is no longer able to earn in-game rewards simpy by playing to increase his Collection Level.
Second Dinner developer Stephen Jarrett responded to Aaron’s discord post by saying, “Thanks for sharing! Impresive achievement. Think we can call it a ‘World First’. We will extend it in a future update.”
For those unfamiliar with the fast-paced card battler, your Collection Level is a reward track that allows you to unlock new cards, variants (basically cosmetic skins for your collected cards), as well as in-game currencies and other cosmetic items. Prior to this discovery, it was assumed you could continue progressing indefinitely as once you achieve a full card collection, there are still thousands of variants and other cosmetic items such as titles and avatars to add to your collection.
Marvel Snap has been available globally since October 18, 2022, but had an extended closed beta period that began in May, which Aaron was a part of. This has given him additional time to grow his Collection Level, but he also added in Discord that “[he] stopped keeping track, but [he] spent like $400-500 a month since day 1 of closed beta. and bought every bundle, and maxed out the nexus event to get this far.”
For comparison, I’ve been playing Marvel Snap daily since its global release and I’m currently sitting at CL 2,458. That means if I keep up this pace, I’ll reach Aaron’s CL in a little over two years. That’s a lot of Marvel Snap.
Marvel Snap continues to see massive success since its launch a few months ago, taking home Best Mobile Game at The Game Awards. Its long-awaited upcoming Battle Mode is right around the corner and looks to shake up the existing formula by allowing players to finally play against their friends.
For even more Marvel Snap, check out our review as well as some top Tips and Strategies to help grow your collection.
Matthew Adler is a Commerce, Features, Guides, News, Previews, and Reviews writer for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter @MatthewAdler and watch him stream on Twitch.
Since late 2021, I’ve been tinkering away at a little column here on IGN.com highlighting indie games I thought were neat. It’s been running quietly away on Saturday afternoons, throwing spotlights on little games and developers that weren’t otherwise getting a lot of attention from mainstream gaming sites like ours.
I’m proud of that coverage up to today, but today I’m extra proud, because my quiet year-plus efforts are about to get much, much louder. My little column today joins a much larger IGN initiative to bring editorial columns of all varieties into the spotlight. Which means I get to take a moment to wax poetic about what my corner of this initiative is actually all about.
Indie game coverage is always a tricky question to answer, especially on sites like this one. With a large audience that rightfully expects us to cover all the biggest beats across games and entertainment every day, combined with the massive size of both industries, it’s inevitable that the vast majority of our resources go toward writing about things people already know they’re interested in. I’m talking about the Marvels, the big PlayStation exclusives, the prestige TV shows, the Marios. Our audiences desperately want to read about those things, we love to write about them, and there are only so many hours in the day to write, so write about them we do.
My goal is to shed a little light on the brilliant games inhabiting the spaces between the Marios and the Marvels
And yet, the unfortunate inevitability of this is that it often leaves out the truly massive body of work being done by smaller, lesser-known or even unknown creators who don’t have the IP, the budget, the thousand-person studios, or the names to already be known by a mainstream audience. Sure, occasionally an indie surprise garners a large enough community to hit the mainstream (see Stardew Valley, or Vampire Survivors), but those occasions are very, very rare. And yet, every single day, countless innovative, beautiful, moving, strange, clever, and fascinating games are being made that you will never hear about. Many of them are breaking game design, art, music, and conceptual ground that we never see touched in AAA due to fears of missing sales targets. Some are filling gaps in genres that mainstream gaming has forgotten entirely. And others are made by developers who overcame immense obstacles to chase their dream of making video games.
I firmly believe those games are also worth knowing about – not just in passing as part of a showcase or a quick tweet, but with joyful, curious depth and attention. And I think IGN has an important role to play in surfacing them.
So this is Hidden Treasures, a column where every month I’ll introduce you to a small game made by a small team that isn’t otherwise being covered extensively on IGN. I’ll use this space to tell you about my early impressions of it (at least the first few hours, if not more) and chat with its developers about who they are, what they’re making, why they’re making it, and why you should care. My goal isn’t to surface to you only 10/10 perfect indie gems, or the next Stardew Valley. It’s to shed a little light on the brilliant games inhabiting the spaces between the Marios and the Marvels, and celebrate the corners of this creative industry that don’t always get time in the sun.
I hope you’ll end up inspired by this column to at least check a few of them out, or if not, to go hunt for some hidden treasures of your own.
(And you can catch up on all previous Hidden Treasures columns, including from before this column had a name, right here.)
With that out of the way, I’d like to formally kick things off by telling you that I spent at least an hour last night ugly crying my way through the end of A Space for the Unbound – a gorgeous pixel art slice-of-life game that’s consumed my evenings for the last several days.
A Space for the Unbound follows a young man named Atma, who’s on the cusp of adulthood in late ’90s rural Indonesia. In a story structure that gives off massive Your Name and Weathering With You vibes, Atma and his girlfriend Raya are balancing big discussions of their future and completion of a wholesome bucket list with mutual discovery of strange, magical powers. Raya has some kind of matter manipulation thing going on, and Atma can “spacedive” into the hearts of people he meets and help them resolve their internal dilemmas.
Part of the way A Space for the Unbound lets its mystery pleasantly simmer in the backdrop is through its cheerful portrayal of ’90s Indonesia and Atma’s role in it as a young man. Between adventures with Raya, he’s exploring the town: collecting bottle caps, naming and petting every cat he sees, playing games at the arcade, helping local townspeople with their problems, or fending off school bullies. The various vignettes between major story beats offer a loving glimpse into Indonesia in the ’90s and the relatably mundane problems of ordinary people. As someone who has extremely little experience with this setting, I loved the mix of unfamiliar culture and familiar humanity.
A Space for the Unbound is clearly a very personal glimpse into a setting and time period close to game director Dimas Novan D.’s heart. He tells me in an email interview that his idea for the game came from the concept of Seichijunrei, or an “anime pilgrimage,” where you compare real-life locations with an anime counterpart. Through this idea, Dimas began to discover much of the anime he was familiar with referenced real-life locations ranging from iconic buildings or landmarks to common rural neighborhoods. He wanted to do the same, but for places he lived in during a time period that was personally sentimental to him and the development team.
Dimas began work on the game back in 2015 with a team of just two to three people within Surabaya-based Mojiken Studio. For much of that time, Mojiken was making and releasing a number of other games, including She and the Light Bearer and When the Past Was Around. But around 2020, with When the Past Was Around released, the studio was able to dedicate everyone at the studio (around 12-14 people) to Dimas’ project. But Dimas admits the first few years were “probably the hardest” for him personally.
“I [had] to juggle between work and trying to find ASFTU’s game direction,” he recalls. “The very basic concept of the story has already been finished since the ASFTU prototype in 2015, but making it a more substantial experience in a video game format was a heavy task. As somebody who is relatively very new in the game development field, I had a hard time deciding what kind of mechanic was suitable for the full game. If we talk about games, it has to have some kind of entertainment and interactivity aspect so that the player can have a great time with it and immerse themselves in the game.
“Plus the core message of the game is something that can not be said right after the very first part of the game. We have to slowly make the overall experience entertaining and compelling so people are willing to understand the message we want to deliver, especially the story. We made some prototypes, some elements worked and some elements didn’t. But in 2019, we were really glad that we finally found the right formula for the game, and in 2020, the demo was released to very positive reception.”
Along with his desire to depict a place and time close to his heart, Dimas hopes those who play A Space for the Unbound keenly feel the passage of time in Loka Town as they play. He tells me he was also inspired by another Japanese concept: Mono no aware, or “the pathos of things.” He describes it as an appreciation for or awareness of impermanence and the passage of time.
The most important thing for us is that it makes us feel at home as Indonesians, making it feel like our own growing-up time.
“We picked that theme because we grow older and want to reminisce about the past, those happy times, those difficult times, those growing up times,” Dimas says. “Every generation has its own memories and ASFTU is our memories and we want to preserve that before we completely forget about it. The most important thing for us is that it makes us feel at home as Indonesians, making it feel like our own growing-up time.”
While A Space for the Unbound is certainly about all these things – nostalgia, growing up, being aware of the passage of time as two young people enter a new chapter of their lives – there’s something else going on here that I don’t want to spoil, but that I want to urge you to play and uncover. The good news here is that you don’t have to play A Space for the Unbound long to be hooked on doing that detective work. Very early on, A Space for the Unbound has an overpowering sense of underlying mystery, even when you’re not exactly sure what the mystery is. Part of that comes from the prologue – a dream-like sequence featuring a young girl named Nirmala who’s friends with Atma but doesn’t seem to exist anywhere in his day-to-day life. Or maybe it’s the strange relationship Atma seems to have with everyone in town – he has memories of a favorite food stall, for instance, but not of another young woman in his class. By the end of chapter 2 I was ravenous to keep playing, just to figure out what on earth was going on in this town, because no easy theory seemed to make sense.
So no, I’m not going to spoil why I was blubbering into multiple handkerchiefs by A Space for the Unbound’s beautiful (emotionally and aesthetically) conclusion, but I desperately need to recommend the game as one of the fastest turnarounds from “Oh hey this looks neat” to “I MUST KEEP PLAYING THIS” I’ve ever experienced. If you’re at all keen on anime romances like Your Name, slice-of-life tales that take you to new places, emotional explorations of trauma or identity, or petting cats, give it a shot.
Rebekah Valentine is a news reporter for IGN. You can find her on Twitter @duckvalentine.
There have been plenty of questions about Game Freak’s development bandwidth in recent months, especially in light of Pokémon’s overall lack of polish over the past few years. But that isn’t stopping the studio from pursuing projects like Pocket Card Jockey: Ride On, which launched on Apple Arcade last week.
“The question of resources is always tricky,” says Game Freak General Manager of Development Department 1 Masafumi Saito. “Mr. Taya, the director of the Nintendo 3DS version, worked in parallel on development of game titles for the Pokémon series. And recently, we’ve been partnering with other companies for development, inclusive of Pocket Card Jockey: Ride On!. The technologies required for game development are complex and wide-ranging. We need to ready the best development team for each game, so we need to work together with all sorts of creators both inside Japan or elsewhere in the world.”
Saito’s comments follow the release of Pokémon Scarlet and Violet, which was a notably glitchy entry in the long-running series. Pokémon is supported by a complex array of interlocking companies and support studios, but the core team at Game Freak is extremely small by modern standards, numbering a little over 150 employees. In 2019, Game Freak’s Junichi Masuda talked about his preference for his small teams, which he said was due to the importance of communication.
Despite its size, Game Freak remains committed to making games outside of Pokémon. Speaking with IGN, Saito and Pocket Card Jockey director Masao Taya talked about the origins of Pocket Card Jockey and what the series means to Game Freak, in the process touching on how it’s rooted in the studio’s origins as first a fanzine then an independent studio.
“The departments in charge of developing original games aren’t limited by scale or platforms,” Saito says. “The most important thing is to create new games that will attract users. We are working on various small and large projects regardless of the platform. Game Freak came about out of our experiences of independently creating home video games, so we want to preserve the approach of personally wanting to try to create something new and unique.”
Pocket Card Jockey’s roots
Pocket Card Jockey is one of several original games developed by Game Freak. It was first released in North America for Nintendo 3DS in 2016, where it won praise for its good humor and its card-based mechanics. It’s based in part on Derby Stallion, a popular Japan-only horse-racing sim originally released on the NES.
Taya is a self-professed Derby Stallion fan, and he remembers “the thrill of seeing how the horses displayed in pixels of 16-dot squares behaved.” The experience remained with him even as he grew up and joined Game Freak, and he sought to recreate it with a game of his own.
“I spent time during several vacation days working on implementing a program like that. It went better than I thought, so I showed it to my co-workers and was content with that. I then decided to use that program to try and make a horse racing game. But I thought to myself, if it was just a development-type simulation it would be nothing more than a rehash of Derby Stallion several years too late,” Taya remembers. “So at Game Freak, I put forward the idea of adding in elements of a card game. I can see now that it wasn’t such a great idea because it was really just to avoid copying Derby Stallion. At the time, there were pretty high hurdles that prevented Game Freak from starting development of a new game, so in the end we didn’t go ahead with it.”
Pocket Card Jockey finally went ahead thanks to Game Freak’s Gear Project, an intiative that encourages developers to pitch original projects. If staff members are interested in a pitch, they will collaborate on a prototype. Taya’s idea was supported by Pokémon composer Go Ichinose, a fellow horse-racing fan who recommended a solitaire app to Taya.
Game Freak came about out of our experiences of independently creating home video games, so we want to preserve the approach of personally wanting to try to create something new and unique.
“[Ichinose] knew I wanted to make a horse racing game and to bring in card game elements, so he suggested using a solitaire type of card game. I formed a Gear Project with Ichinose and invited another staff member (Toshihiro Obata) to join. The end result was Pocket Card Jockey,” Taya remembers.
Pocket Card Jockey was initially released in Japan in 2013, with a mobile version following the year after. Taya wouldn’t comment on sales numbers in Japan or North America, but did say that the original game ultimately turned a profit.
After Pocket Card Jockey’s release, Taya says he remained interested in releasing a free-to-play version on mobile devices, but was discouraged by the original iOS release, which “didn’t go well in business terms.” He was ultimately attracted to Apple Arcade due to its subscription-based model, which allowed Game Freak to bring the series to mobile without “having to force it into a F2P style.”
In addition to being on a more accessible platform, Pocket Card Jockey: Ride On brings with it several improvements, most notably a new 3D engine that Taya hopes will enhance “ease of understanding to make for richer course views and effects.” Taya also retooled the stamina system, allowing players to recover stamina in areas of the map at the expense of gaining energy to win the race.
‘Even if resources are tight, we won’t stop making original games’
The reception has generally been positive, with plenty of new players discovering it for the first time. Will this be enough for Game Freak to pursue a sequel or a Switch port?
“Making a sequel would require a lot more time for trial and error. So rather than do that, I thought there would be more value in making sure we could provide a new Pocket Card Jockey to the fans who’d been waiting a long time, and to allow people who’d never played it before to try a version close to the original,” Taya says. “Of course, success with Apple Arcade raises the possibility of starting development on a sequel. On a personal level, I’d like to try creating a sequel!”
As for a Switch port, Taya says Game Freak’s “main focus is on Apple Arcade users enjoying. We want to see the reaction we get from that.”
Pocket Card Jockey is far from Game Freak’s stated aim of finding another Pokémon, but it nevertheless seems to be the most successful of the studio’s various side projects. The positive buzz around Ride On is no doubt a refreshing change of pace for Game Freak in light of the relentless negativity from Pokémon’s core fans.
One way or another, these curious and delightful side projects remain a big part of Game Freak’s DNA.
“Even if resources are tight, we won’t stop working on original games,” Saito says. “As a company we have to take on new challenges, and as creators we certainly want to make new fun things.”
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.
