Category: IGN

The Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences (AIAS) has announced its nominees for the 26th D.I.C.E. Awards, with Santa Monica Studios’ God of War: Ragnarok leading the pack with 12 nominations.

The annual video game award recognizes the best games of the year as chosen by the members of the AIAS, and the winners are chosen at an annual awards show hosted in Las Vegas. This year’s event will be hosted on February 23 on IGN.

This year’s awards will be co-hosted by Kinda Funny’s Greg Miller and IGN’s own Stella Chung, with IGN as the official media partner of the event. Check below for the full list of game of the year nominees which alongside God of War include Elden Ring, Horizon Forbidden West, Stray, and Vampire Survivors.

Outstanding Achievement in Animation

• Cuphead – The Delicious Last Course
• Elden Ring
• God of War Ragnarok
• Horizon Forbidden West
• Moss: Book 2

Outstanding Achievement in Art Direction

• Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2
• God of War Ragnarok
• Horizon Forbidden West
• Stray
• The Callisto Protocol

Outstanding Achievement in Character

• Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 – Alejandro Vargas
• God of War Ragnarok – Atreus
• God of War Ragnarok – Kratos
• Horizon Forbidden West – Aloy
• Return to Monkey Island – Guybrush Threepwood

Outstanding Achievement in Original Music Composition

• A Plague Tale: Requiem
• God of War Ragnarok
• Horizon Forbidden West
• Metal: Hellsinger
• Moss: Book 2

Outstanding Achievement in Audio Design

• A Plague Tale: Requiem
• Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2
• God of War Ragnarok
• Gotham Knights
• Somerville

Outsanding Achievement in Story

• Elden Ring
• God of War Ragnarok
• I Was a Teenage Exocolonist
• IMMORTALITY
• NORCO

Outstanding Technical Achievement

• A Plague Tale: Requiem
• Elden Ring
• God of War Ragnarok
• Horizon Forbidden West
• Teardown

Action Game of the Year

• Bayonetta 3
• Grounded
• Neon White
• Sifu
• Vampire Survivors

Adventure Game of the Year

• God of War Ragnarok
• Horizon Forbidden West
• NORCO
• Stray
• TUNIC

Family Game of the Year

• Disney Dreamlight Valley
• Kirby’s Dream Buffet
• Lost in Play
• Mario + Rabbids Sparks of Hope
• Trombone Champ

Fighting Game of the Year

• JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure: All-Star Battle R
• MultiVersus
• Rumbleverse
• SpiderHeck
• THE KING OF FIGHTERS XV

Racing Game of the Year

• F1 22
• Gran Turismo 7
• Need for Speed Unbound

Role-Playing Game of the Year

• Citizen Sleeper
• Elden Ring
• Weird West
• World of Warcraft: Dragonflight
• Xenoblade Chronicles 3

Sports Game of the Year

• EA SPORTS FIFA 23
• Mario Strikers: Battle League
• MLB The Show 22
• NBA 2k23
• OlliOlli World

Strategy/Simulation Game of the Year

• Dwarf Fortress
• IXION
• Marvel’s Midnight Suns
• Potion Craft: Alchemist Simulator
• Warhammer 40,000: CHaos Gate – Demonhunters

Immersive Reality Game of the Year

• Cosmonious High
• Moss: Book 2
• Red Matter 2
• Tenatcular
• The Last Clockwinder

Outstanding Achievement for an Independent Game

• IMMORTALITY
• Neon White
• Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder’s Revenge
• TUNIC
• Vampire Survivors

Mobile Game of the Year

• Diablo Immortal
• Gibbon: Beyond the Trees
• IMMORTALITY
• MARVEL SNAP
• Poinpy

Online Game of the Year

• Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2
• EA SPORTS FIFA 23
• FINAL FANTASY XIV: Endwalker
• MARVEL SNAP
• Rumbleverse

Outstanding Achievement in Game Design

• Elden Ring
• God of War Ragnarok
• MARVEL SNAP
• TUNIC
• Vampire Survivors

Outstanding Achievement in Game Direction

• Elden Ring
• God of War Ragnarok
• Horizon Forbidden West
• IMMORTALITY
• TUNIC

Game of the Year

• Elden Ring
• God of War Ragnarok
• Horizon Forbidden West
• Stray
• Vampire Survivors

Check out the winners when the 26th DICE Awards are livestreamed from Las Vegas on IGN on February 23, 2023.

Despite key credits on franchises like Silent Hill, Serious Sam, and Legacy of Kain, for the last decade Sam Barlow has been mostly known as that guy that makes the “FMV games.”

Barlow went indie in 2014 and published Her Story the following year before forming studio Half Mermaid and releasing Telling Lies and 2022’s Immortality. With all three, Barlow took a very different approach to video game storytelling — filming scenes with real actors and playing with variations on central mechanics that have the audience searching for information through hours upon hours of footage.

For this, Barlow and Half Mermaid have received numerous awards and accolades, with Immortality nominated three times at The Game Awards for best performance, best narrative, and best game direction respectively.

I spoke with Barlow the day after The Game Awards, who said he went “all out” with Immortality — which leaves him “slightly scared” to consider what he and Half Mermaid might follow it up with.

“Does that mean I have to raise the stakes more?” he says. “Is there an expectation that you keep- Which is the thing where everything always falls apart, right? Like you’ll see season one of a show. I remember really loving 24; the first season of 24 was great. And then every season after that they were like, ‘Oh, we need more. Bigger, crazier sh*t.’ And it just lost everything.”

I ask Barlow what, independent of audience expectations, would make him happy to create. But he replies: “It’s never about being happy.”

“The initial stage [of development] is always really fun,” he continues. “The research stage, and just getting an excuse to sit and read lots of books during the day when I’m awake…That’s really fun. But sometimes, I mean, it was Warren Spector who said all of his game ideas came from a place of…seeing other people do shit and being like, ‘You’re doing it wrong.’”

Despite the pressure, though, Barlow has plenty of ideas, and at least one of them would involve taking a break from being ‘the FMV guy.’ He tells me that during Immortality development, Half Mermaid did some pre-production on a 3D game that was later paused. He says the pitch was essentially a “perfect smooch” of “a 3D character game” and “all of that Her Story, Immortality stuff.”

Barlow is cognizant though that all his most recent work has straddled a strange line between games and television, but doesn’t fit neatly into the box of either. He notes that they came at the concept of Immortality from a “games” perspective at least in part because of the economic justification – they could sell it as a game on Steam for $20, and people would at least functionally understand it. Even if the vast majority of the gaming audience didn’t vibe with its unique structure, a significant subset would still be interested and would buy it.

But even with games as a convenient medium for selling the strange hybrid stories Barlow likes telling, another avenue for future projects Barlow is considering is making his particular brand of storytelling work in the TV space. He says he’s been impressed so far with how Netflix (who published Immortality via its Netflix Games label) has disrupted typical TV viewing between the binge model, variable episode lengths, and things like Black Mirror’s Bandersnatch. But unsurprisingly, Barlow wants more.

“I’d love to see them inject some of these things that are currently unique to gaming,” he says. “That is the expressivity, the exploration, the sense of it being alive. There are a whole bunch of experimental novels and things that have these weird non-linear structures, or books that you can just randomly read pages and put the story together…But what I loved about Her Story is, because it’s digital, you are essentially just pulling shit out of the ether and discovering it. And that was explicitly [the case] with Immortality – the aesthetic of the grid was to have this void of darkness behind it because you were just summoning up these clips. So that sense of surprise and excitement is possible because the computer can hide things from you and can reveal things. I’d love to see [Netflix] do those things.”

Barlow acknowledges there are a lot of business-related reasons why TV isn’t making his vision come true yet. Money-making endeavors are inherently risk-averse, and it’s hard to convince an individual corporate giant to be the first one to fund leaps like the one Barlow’s proposing. “Everyone’s like, ‘We’ll be number two. Someone will do it and then we’ll jump in and be number two.’”

And yet, he adds, big corporations know they have to be on the lookout for the next outside-the-box idea, which is how we got experimental projects like Soderbergh’s Mosaic and Bandersnatch in the first place. Barlow thinks there’s something to the ways in which the younger generation engage with TV that may be the key Netflix is looking for to pull them away from Fortnite and TikTok. And maybe, just maybe, he’ll get to be the one to break that ground.

“Younger people watch TV whilst looking at their phone with the subtitles on, so they don’t have to actually pay attention,” he says. “And all these ways in which my kids will slightly play television like it’s one of my games. They’ll jump into random episodes, skip around, re-watch their favorite episodes a bunch of times…That was one of the things that we were interested in with Immortality was…we’re just constantly watching videos and being just totally expecting that we have an ultimate control over these videos. We can stop, start, and rewind them. Re-watch that episode. ‘Oh, I missed that. I’m going to rewind five seconds because I didn’t hear what the person said.’

“You went and saw a movie in the fifties or watched a TV show, you had no control. You were just sat there, and the movie would be played at you, or the TV would be broadcast at you. I think Peter Greenaway said, ‘Cinema died in 1983 with the invention of the remote control,’ or something. We thought it would be interesting and work to slightly subvert that. So yeah, I’d love to mess around there.”

Rebekah Valentine is a news reporter for IGN. You can find her on Twitter @duckvalentine.

Here’s an excellent deal for fans of classic Nintendo games. Game & Watch: The Legend of Zelda is on sale for $25 at Walmart right now, with the sale price showing when you add it to your cart. That’s a pretty sweet discount, considering it normally costs $49.99. It’s an adorable handheld device that functions both as a clock and a retro gaming machine. This is the lowest price we’ve seen yet (it’s also on sale at Amazon for $42.99, if you really dislike Walmart for some reason).

Game & Watch: The Legend of Zelda Deal

Like Game & Watch: Super Mario Bros., this Zelda gizmo is a dedicated handheld device that offers a few different functions. For one, it comes with three games.

Games Included

• The Legend of Zelda (NES)
• Zelda II: The Adventures of Link (NES)
• The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening (Game Boy)

That’s a lot of hours of classic gaming (34 hours total, according to How Long to Beat). It includes both the Western and Japanese versions of the first two Zeldas, which feature different soundtracks and sound effects, as well as the Game & Watch game Vermin. The screen looks nice, clear, and colorful, and the speakers offer plenty of volume.

In addition to offering games, it also functions as a clock. In this mode, in addition to telling the time, the display features Link automatically walking around in Zelda landscapes and fighting enemies. There’s also a timer function you can set for between one and 10 minutes. In this mode, you can take control of the green-clad hero and clash swords with octoroks and mobilns yourself. This mini-game-of-sorts counts how many enemies you kill at each time setting.

The box the device comes in also functions as a stand, which comes in handy when using it in clock mode. You can check out our full Game & Watch: The Legend of Zelda review for even more details.

In any case, if you’ve been on the fence about picking this thing up, now’s a good time to do so, seeing as it’s on sale for the lowest price it’s ever been.

Chris Reed is a deals expert and commerce editor for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter @_chrislreed.

Microsoft confirmed a Developer Direct event for January 25 that will showcase Redfall, Forza Motorsport, Minecraft Legends, and Elder Scrolls Online with a separate standalone event for Starfield coming at a later date. This will be a deep dive into the games with much less presentation and more gameplay according to the team at Xbox. As the titles listed are promised for the first half of 2023 we can’t wait to see more. Plus, the Unlocked crew discusses the big Ubisoft news and some energy-saving options coming to Xbox consoles.

Subscribe on any of your favorite podcast feeds, to our YouTube channel, or grab an MP3 of this week’s episode.

Be sure to check out the latest gameplay from Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty with this month’s IGN First:

Miranda Sanchez is the executive editor of guides at IGN and a member of Podcast Unlocked. She’s a big fan of stationery and fountain pens. You can sometimes find her on Twitter.

For a limited time, Amazon is offering the excellent Wingspan board game for only $38.81. That’s a substantial 40% off the original retail price of $65. If you missed the deal on Black Friday, this is another chance for you to pick up a highly rated and very accessible board game for a deal-worthy price.

Wingspan Board Game for $38.81

Wingspan from Stonemeier Games is an incredibly good board game. So good in fact that we deemed it the best board game of 2019. Wingspan looks like a deceptively simple game; the endgame goal is to attract as many birds as you can to your wildlife preserve and help them proliferate. There are only four actions you can perform: draw a bird card, play a bird card, get food, and lay eggs. Sounds simple enough, right? Well let’s just say these four actions mask an incredibly complex engine-building game with which you will have to juggle between bringing new birds into the fold and keeping your existing birds well stocked and in a breeding frenzy. Wingspan is infinitely replayable, and you’ll find yourself developing and honing new strategies with every subsequent playthough.

It certainly helps that this is a very accessible game for both casuals and enthusiasts. The board game design is gorgeous, featuring over 170 detailed bird illustations by Elizabeth Hargrave, charming game board backdrops, and cute little tokens and egg minatures. The rules are easy to follow, and each game lasts about an hour, so you won’t need to carve out a huge chunk of time to play it. When we deemed it the best board game of 2019, we valued it against its original retail price; at 40% off this is a steal.

For more deals, take a look at our daily deals for today.

Months after its console and PC release, beat ’em up Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder’s Revenge is the latest game to head to mobile for Netflix subscribers.

Yesterday, Netflix announced the game’s arrival on mobile with a trailer. According to Netflix’s in-app description, the mobile port still features controller support and online multiplayer gameplay.

Inspired by arcade beat ’em ups of the ’90s (and including quite a few improvements to their combat systems), TMNT: Shredder’s Revenge sees the classic Turtles, along with a few newly playable characters, taking on new foes through a campaign mode and an arcade mode.

IGN gave TMNT: Shredder’s Revenge an 8 in our review, praising its “fun combat, a charming and nostalgic pixel aesthetic, and one of the best soundtracks of the year so far” despite its occasionally tedious level design.

In recent months, Netflix has added quite a few notable games to its roster, including indies like Spiritfarer, Into the Breach, and Before Your Eyes. The streaming service is also developing games of its own, including what seems to be an AAA shooter game, through its new studio.

However, Netflix hasn’t had an easy time getting subscribers to play its games, with less than 1 percent of subscribers playing games via Netflix as of August.

Amelia Zollner is a freelance writer at IGN who loves all things indie and Nintendo. Outside of IGN, they’ve contributed to sites like Polygon and Rock Paper Shotgun. Find them on Twitter: @ameliazollner.

Ubisoft has announced that it has, for the sixth time, delayed Skull & Bones, as well as canceled three more unannounced games amid “major challenges” in the industry, the underperformance of Mario + Rabbids: Sparks of Hope and Just Dance 2023, and an upcoming “restructuring.”

In a press release today, Ubisoft outlined a new strategy for the remainder of its fiscal year, as well as lowered expectations for the last fiscal quarter. Ubisoft explains the move as a result of the company “facing major challenges as the industry continues to shift towards mega-brands and long-lasting titles than [sic] can reach players across the globe, across platforms and business models.”

While Ubisoft notes its goal has been to build large, overarching, global brands, the release adds that “games from this investment phase have yet to be released, while our recent launches have not performed as well as expected.” Specifically, the press release later calls out Mario + Rabbids: Sparks of Hope as underperforming in the final weeks of 2022 and early January despite “an ambitious marketing plan.” Just Dance 2023 underperformed as well.

In response to these issues, Ubisoft is delaying Skull & Bones for the sixth time, and is also canceling three unannounced projects on top of the four it already canceled last year.

Developing…

EA Sports is planning to remove the CPR touchdown celebration from Madden NFL 23 after Buffalo Bills player Damar Hamlin collapsed on the pitch on January 3.

As reported by CBS, EA is working on an update that will remove the CPR celebration in the coming days.

Though the animation has been in the game for three years, many players called for its removal after Hamlin went into cardiac arrest and received CPR for around 10 minutes on the pitch.

“EA Sports is taking steps to remove the celebration from Madden NFL 23 via an update in the coming days,” a spokesperson said.

The animation in game can be triggered after scoring a touchdown, and sees one player lie down on the ground as another pretends to perform CPR on them. A third player imitates the use of a defibrillator.

Hamlin is expected to be released from hospital in the next 48 hours after improving considerably. His heart had to be restarted twice after collapsing during the game and he was left in a critical condition.

Ryan Dinsdale is an IGN freelancer and acting UK news editor. He’ll talk about The Witcher all day.

Oculus founder Palmer Luckey has revealed he was “blown away” by Sony’s upcoming PlayStation VR 2 virtual reality headset.

Replying to a tweet from head of PlayStation Indies Shuhei Yoshida (below), Luckey said he’d had the chance to try the new headset recently and has high expectations for its future.

“I was blown away when I used PSVR 2 recently,” he said. “The first PSVR was arguably the biggest success of the generation, [and] this version will do even better.”

PlayStation VR 2 will seemingly be a major upgrade over the original headset, not just because it’s being released seven years later, but due to the inclusion of brand new VR specific controllers.

The upgrade in tech has naturally created an increase in price, however, as where the original PSVR was the best “budget” headset on the market, Sony’s latest costs a hefty $549.99 – $50 more than the required PlayStation 5 console itself.

A Horizon: Call of the Mountain bundle will also be available from launch on February 22 for another $50, though users can still buy it separately alongside the other 20-something launch games.

It’s the only official PS VR2 bundle confirmed so far, though Sony has also announced a $49.99 controller charging station as an optional accessory.

Details on the software available at launch are still a little hazy, as while Sony has announced several games coming to the PS VR2 including Ghostbusters VR and Resident Evil Village, release windows for most remain at a vague 2023.

Other games announced for the platform include Crossfire: Sierra Squad, The Light Brigade, Cities VR – Enhanced Edition, Cosmonious High, Hello Neighbor: Search and Rescue, Jurassic World Aftermath Collection, Pistol Whip VR, Zenith: The Last City, After the Fall, Tentacular, and more.

Ryan Dinsdale is an IGN freelancer and acting UK news editor. He’ll talk about The Witcher all day.