Category: Video Games

If you’re looking for a well-rated power bank from a reliable brand, then we’ve got a deal for you here. Amazon is offering Amazon Prime members an Anker PowerCore PIQ 10,000mAh Power Bank for a mere $12.64 after you clip the 24% off coupon on the product page. The power bank is as simple as they come come by, but it’s inexpensive, compact and lightweight, and has both USB Type-A and Type-C outputs.

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The 10,000mAh power bank is the perfect compromise between battery capacity and size. The Anker Powercore model measures about 6.3″ long, 3.2″ wide, and 0.65″ thick, which makes it easy to carry with you just about anywhere, including on airplane carry-on. There are two ports: a USB Type-C port that serves as both output and input and one USB Type-A port that is output. The maximum power output at any one time is 12W. Note that the Nintendo Switch console accepts up to 18W of delivery. That means that although this power bank can and will charge your Switch to max (over two times), it will do so at a slower rate than the wall adapter that your Switch comes with.

Anker is one of the most trusted brands on Amazon when it comes to quality control and reliability. They are on our list of best power banks of 2024. Usually that means Anker commands a higher price point, but this 10K power bank is inexpensive even compared to other “no-name” brands give its featureset. If you’re in need of an inexpensive and universal battery backup, then Anker is usually a very safe bet.

Roblox boss Stefano Corazza has opened up about accusations of young developer exploitation on its platform, saying that the opportunity Roblox gives its teenage creators is “a gift.”

Roblox has had in-game development tools via its Studio feature for a while, offering users the chance to create entire games that can then be published for other players and monetized. It all takes place within Roblox itself, streamlining the experience for creators and giving Roblox a cut of the profits.

The Roblox creator website encourages users to “make anything you can imagine,” enticing would-be developers with the promise that experiences can be published instantly to more than 66.1 million other users across the globe. It adds that there are currently more than 3.1 million Roblox developers.

The Roblox name has long been associated with a younger player base, and many have accused Corazza and his team of taking advantage of children who use the platform to create games. The studio head attempted to shut down these claims during an interview with Eurogamer by explaining why their creation tools aren’t exploiting child labor.

“I don’t know, you can say this for a lot of things, right?” Corazza explained. “Like, you can say, ‘Okay, we are exploiting, you know, child labour,’ right? Or, you can say: we are offering people anywhere in the world the capability to get a job, and even like an income. So, I can be like 15 years old, in Indonesia, living in a slum, and then now, with just a laptop, I can create something, make money and then sustain my life.”

He continued: “There’s always the flip side of that, when you go broad and democratised – and in this case, also with a younger audience. I mean, our average game developer is in their 20s. But of course, there’s people that are teenagers – and we have hired some teenagers that had millions of players on the platform.”

Corazza elaborated, declaring the benefits Roblox Studio offers its more creative teenage users. He even says that the money the studio gives its creators every year is nearing $1 billion.

“For them, you know, hearing from their experience, they didn’t feel like they were exploited! They felt like, ‘Oh my god, this was the biggest gift, all of a sudden I could create something, I had millions of users, I made so much money I could retire.’ So, I focus more on the amount of money that we distribute every year to creators, which is now getting close to like a billion dollars, which is phenomenal.”

A Roblox PR representative clarified with Eurogamer that “the vast majority of people that are earning money on Roblox are over the age of 18.” It’s unclear how many creators are under 18 or exactly how much money they are bringing in for themselves and the Roblox company.

Roblox originally released for PC in 2006 and eventually came to iOS and Android devices in 2012 and 2014, respectively. It came to Xbox shortly after but wouldn’t arrive on PlayStation platforms until 2023. With some VR platforms also under its belt, Roblox is accessible on nearly every modern gaming platform.

Michael Cripe is a freelance contributor with IGN. He started writing in the industry in 2017 and is best known for his work at outlets such as The Pitch, The Escapist, OnlySP, and Gameranx.

Be sure to give him a follow on Twitter @MikeCripe.

Dragon’s Dogma 2‘s pesky Dragonsplague illness turns pawns murderous but only exhibits a few subtle symptoms up to that point, so one modder has made things really obvious for PC players by sticking a big number on the follower’s forehead.

As reported by VG247, NexusMods user rthomasv3 uploaded the “Dragonsplague Counter”, which doesn’t change non-infected pawns but brands those who are with a red number ranging from one to 10.

This tracks the severity of the infection in a more stark way than its normal symptoms, which include slight changes in behaviour like acting independently of the player and not obeying direct orders (you can find these explained further in IGN’s Dragon’s Dogma 2 guide).

If the disease gets out of hand, a cutscene will trigger when a player rests that sees nearly every other character in an area die. Dragon’s Dogma 2 doesn’t sugarcoat things for players either, as even important NPCs will be taken out and there’s limited revival items in the game.

The Dragonsplague Counter mod can therefore prevent disaster to those who aren’t paying incredibly close attention to their pawns. More information is now in the wild, thankfully, but players freaked out about the plague upon discovering it in the days following launch, not yet understanding what it was, how it was contracted, or when it would consume their pawns.

Dragon’s Dogma 2 arrived more than a decade after its predecessor on March 22, 2024 and proved a monster hit for publisher Capcom despite being seeped in controversy, selling 2.5 million units in 11 days amid microtransaction and performance complaints.

In our 8/10 review, IGN said: “More of a redo than a sequel, Dragon’s Dogma 2 is a strange and wonderful action-RPG that bolsters the original’s strengths without addressing its weaknesses.”

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

In Eternal Strands, a major part of your adventure will be doing battle with the nine massive bosses that wander freely throughout parts of the world. In my time exploring the magical land of The Enclave, I encountered a handful of these formidable monstrosities, which ranged from a robotic bipedal summoner who used his magical staff to cover the world in fire to a flying dragon who persistently hunted me from the skies above. Continuing our month-long coverage of Eternal Strands as part of IGN First, today we’ll be taking a look at one such oversized baddie: The Ark of the Forge, a hammer-wielding automaton with deep love of smelting puny Weavers into piles of ash.

The Ark of the Forge is one of the bosses you’ll encounter in the second half of your adventure, as you explore the underground forge of the ruined city-state of The Enclave. Since bringing down these behemoths is how you obtain your game-changing magical powers in Eternal Strands, you’ll want to throw yourself at this mechanical blacksmith at your earliest convenience, as I did the moment I saw him.

After getting immolated on my first attempt, Jo and Fred of Yellow Brick Games gave me some advice on fighting this fiery tyrant.

“So one of his trademark visual things you will notice, the first is, of course, the giant, flaming hammer. So spoiler alert: he does use this giant hammer to create fire in the environment. He can hit the ground with it. It makes a lot of flames everywhere, and makes the environment super hot. So then you need to avoid not only the giant hammer, which is enough trouble on its own, but also what that creates in the environment. Which, when you fight with him, after two to three minutes, you can get into a situation where you look at the battlefield and you don’t know where to go because there’s so much fire everywhere. It’s not a one-and-done. The fire stays in the environment and it does affect the battlefield a lot,” game designer Jonathan Lachance told me.

Game director and co-founder Frederic St-Laurent added, “He also has an anger management problem because…If you start doing a lot of damage to him, he’s going to get angry, like flame up his entire body and run directly at you to smash your face.”

That troublesome ability to light his entire body on fire certainly made fighting the big brute a challenge, since in order to beat him, you’ll probably want to climb atop his massive body to deal melee damage to areas of his body not protected by armor. That became quite difficult when I was not only managing the usual stamina meter for climbing, but also my health meter as I was dealt damage-over-time from the oppressive flames.

In order to counter his scorching offensive, I’d need to make use of some of the ice-based powers in my arsenal, which could not only help cool down the battlefield and put out flames, but also to prevent the blacksmith’s movement by doing things like freezing his foot to the ground, covering his hammer in ice, or even frosting his ankles together, each of which inhibits his movements or abilities in a specific way, buying you valuable time to climb the monster and start dealing damage.

Unfortunately for our hero, though, Eternal Strands makes sure you can’t just chop away at an enemy’s ankles by making each body part completely immune to damage once you’ve done a small amount of DPS to it. In the Ark of the Forge’s case, you can counter this in a couple ways, by using telekinetic powers to throw yourself in the air and land on a body part that’s higher up, using your ice abilities to make his armor brittle and break it off, exposing more weak areas, or by just gitting gud, dodging the boss’ counter attacks as you manually scale him. Of course, he isn’t likely to take any of these approaches lying down, and will shake you off limbs, break out of your ice, light everything on fire, throw objects at you, and even just pick you up while you’re climbing him to squash you like a bug and toss you back into the firestorm at his feet.

The fight also differed based on the exact scenario I faced him in, whether that be the environment or the weather of the area. For example, one time I fought him in a somewhat barren stretch of ruins where his flame attacks didn’t have much to engulf in flames, making the going easier, while in another instance I made the mistake of facing him while surrounded by vegetation and quickly found myself completely overwhelmed. The weather of the area you’re in also plays a major role in how easy of a time you’ll have, as a cold front will make all fire abilities, including the boss’, a lot less effective, while a heat wave will make fire all the more formidable and make your ice powers all but useless. Let’s just say that when I tried fighting him during a drought things didn’t go particularly well – but it definitely made for a fun challenge!

For more on Yellow Brick Games’ upcoming boss-slaying adventure Eternal Strands, check out the action-packed reveal trailer, and stay tuned for more exclusive reveals all month long as part of our ongoing IGN First coverage, and for everything else stick with IGN.