Category: Video Games

Marvel Snap will be getting its long-awaited PVP Battle Mode on January 31, assuming there are no “last minute issues.”

The news was revealed on Marvel Snap’s official website, and developer Second Dinner’s associate design director Kent-Erik Hagman also took to Unity Blog to further detail what players can expect.

Marvel Snap’s Battle Mode arrives as part of the Version 1.0 update, and it will see two opponents facing off against each other through multiple rounds. Both players will start with 10 health and the goal is to cut the other player’s health to 0 before they do the same to you.

Additionally, decks are locked throughout the entire battle, so it will benefit players to pay attention to what cards are played so they can know what they’ll be up against in future rounds. Another strategy is to hold a card back until a future round to surprise surprise your opponent.

Battle Mode went under multiple iterations during development, including times when the health value was different, where the Reality Stone could transform your cards before each game, and more. However, the team quickly saw that some of their earlier decisions led to games that weren’t as fun and engaging.

After all the playtests, the team honed in on a way to make games tense and still last just around 20 minutes. This time estimate is made possible by the High Stakes Rounds that “start with the stakes at two Damage, so it’s much more deadly.”

This is just the beginning of Marvel Snap’s Battle Mode, and although players can only face off against others in their same matchmaking region, global matchmaking will be on its way “a bit later.”

Assuming all goes well, January 31 will also see the arrival of Series Drop. This will see certain cards that are Series 5 (the rarest cards) drop down to Series 4, and certain cards that are Series 4 will move to Series 3. When cards drop a Series, they become “10x more common in Collector’s Reserves, and [they are] much cheaper in the Token Shop.”

These drops will happen every month, and the team will award players who acquire a Seris 5 card before it moves down with a special First Edition Badge. This feature will come later, however.

For more, check out our full wiki so you can become the best player you can and our Marvel Snap review.

Have a tip for us? Want to discuss a possible story? Please send an email to newstips@ign.com.

Adam Bankhurst is a news writer for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter @AdamBankhurst and on Twitch.

Google Stadia is officially shutting down on January 18, and the team behind the video game streaming service has gifted the world Worm Game, the final title that will be released for the platform and one that was used to test many of Stadia’s features before it launched.

Worm Game can be played now by anyone with a Google Chrome browser, and it is very much inspired by the classic game Snake. It’s not the most advanced game graphically, but it does have multiple levels, the ability to change the color of your worm, and four modes – Campaign, Arcade, Multiplayer, and Build.

It’s also important to note that, if you’d like to try Worm Game, you need to do so by January 18 as it will become unplayable when Google Stadia is officially shut down.

It’s a rare glimpse behind the curtain of game development, and it is a fascinating look at how the team helped bring Stadia to life.

“Play the game that came to Stadia before Stadia came to the world,” The Stadia Platform Content team wrote. “‘Worm Game’ is a humble title we used to test many of Stadia’s features, starting well before our 2019 public launch, right through 2022. It won’t win Game of the Year, but the Stadia team spent a LOT of time playing it, and we thought we’d share it with you. Thanks for playing, and for everything.”

Alongside Worm Game, the Stadia team has one other surprise in store for those who invested in the failed platform, as it will be releasing a “self-serve tool to enable Bluetooth connections on your Stadia Controller” next week. We don’t have the exact details as to how it will work as of yet, but those will come “on release.”

Google Stadia launched in 2019 and is a cloud gaming service that allows users to stream video games, including such AAA titles as Cyberpunk 2022 and Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, to devices that have Google Chrome. It doesn’t matter how powerful the device is either, as everything is run on Google’s cloud service.

Google announced in September 2022 that Stadia would be shutting down in January 2023, but it made the generous gesture of refunding “all Stadia hardware purchases made though the Google Store, and all game and add-on content purchases made through the Stadia Store.”

While Stadia may not live to see another month, the tech behind it will live on as Google has already began offering it as a white-label product. This means other companies can use the technology without saying, “hey, this is run by Google Stadia!” AT&T has already taken advantage of this when it offered Batman: Arkham Knight to its users for free.

To learn much more about the rise and fall of Google Stadia, be sure to check out our in-depth look at what happened to a platform that Google promised would be the “future of gaming.”

Have a tip for us? Want to discuss a possible story? Please send an email to newstips@ign.com.

Adam Bankhurst is a news writer for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter @AdamBankhurst and on Twitch.