IGN

Some Valentine’s Day gifts never go out of style. These include flowers, chocolate, and Pokémon-themed snuggly stuffies. For today, Amazon has discounted a wide selection of officially licensed Squishmallow 18″ Sleeping Pokémon plushies. They’re normally listed at $34.99 but several of the most popular Pokemon are currently on sale for 27% off, dropping the price to $25.49. Amazon Prime members can still expect to have them delivered on or before February 14, Valentine’s Day. If these adorable stuffies don’t bring a smile to your Valentine’s face, I don’t know what will.

27% Off Squishmallow 18″ Sleeping Pokémon

Before the award-winning RPGs or live-action show, there was The Witcher book series. Andrzej Sapkowski’s original story of Geralt of Rivia was heavily inspired by Slavic mythology as well as classic fantasy series like Lord of the Rings. Whether you already enjoyed Netflix or CD Projekt’s The Witcher adaptations or are just looking for a great book series, this wild world is worth diving into.

How Many Witcher Books Are There?

Andrzej Sapkowski has technically published four short story collections and six Witcher books since he started writing the series back in the mid-’80s. Geralt of Rivia’s first appearance in print was in a short story called Wiedzmín — “The Witcher” — published in the fantasy magazine Fantastyka in 1985. It quickly became a hit, leading to countless more short stories that were published as a collection called Wiedzmin in 1990. This collection is now out of print and every story it contains except one — “The Road to No Return” — was included in 1993’s The Last Wish.

So, after getting those details out of the way, here are the two short story collections and six books we recommend (in order) on our The Witcher Reading Guide:

1. The Last Wish (Short Story Collection)

2. Sword of Destiny (Short Story Collection)

3. Blood of Elves (The Witcher Saga #1)

4. The Time of Contempt (The Witcher Saga #2)

5. Baptism of Fire (The Witcher Saga #3)

6. The Tower of Swallows (The Witcher Saga #4)

7. The Lady of the Lake (The Witcher Saga #5)

8. Season of Storms (Prequel)

Though the marketing for the film hasn’t put him front and center (yet), we’ve known since at least 2022 that Tim Blake Nelson will reprise the role of Samuel Sterns/The Leader in Captain America: Brave New World. The actor of course originated the role all the way back in 2008’s The Incredible Hulk, but hasn’t been seen again in the MCU… until now.

While it’s great to see Marvel finally following up on that particular loose end, it is a little surprising that The Leader is being positioned as a Captain America villain rather than headlining a new Hulk movie. But as it turns out, that’s the whole point. The Leader is the last sort of enemy Sam Wilson is expecting to tussle with, and that’s exactly what makes him so dangerous. Let’s quickly break down The Leader’s background and why he may actually make sense as the next big Captain America villain.

The Leader: Who Is Tim Blake Nelson’s Character?

The Leader definitely qualifies as Hulk’s main archnemesis. Whereas most Hulk villains try to prove themselves stronger than the Jade Giant, Samuel Sterns is very much the polar opposite to Bruce Banner. His exposure to gamma radiation boosted his intelligence exponentially. He’s as smart as the Hulk is strong, making him easily among the most dangerous villains in the entire Marvel Universe.

2008’s The Incredible Hulk set up The Leader as a future MCU villain. Tim Blake Nelson plays a pre-transformation Samuel Sterns in the film. This version of Sterns is actually Banner’s ally – a cellular biologist helping the fugitive Banner seek a cure for his condition. But Sterns doesn’t entirely share Banner’s desire to eliminate the Hulk. He synthesizes Banner’s blood, believing it holds the key to eliminating disease and unlocking humanity’s full potential. Sterns is eventually strong-armed by General Ross into helping complete Emil Blonsky’s transformation into the Abomination.

The film ends with Sterns trapped in storytelling limbo. After a cut on his forehead is exposed to Banner’s irradiated blood, Sterns’ head begins to swell and change.

Are you ready to step into history? To celebrate the upcoming launch of Civilization VII, we’re giving one lucky winner the ultimate adventure! While Civilization VII immerses players in the complexities of global domination and cultural greatness, IGN is taking it one step further by sending a fan to a featured Civilization from CIV VII with a rich history to explore!

One lucky winner and their guest can win an all inclusive trip to Rome, Italy for a chance to dive into its rich culture. The winner will also receive a private tour of the Colosseum, 7-day accommodations, and airfare / transportation covered! Ten runner ups will receive a game prize pack so they can jump into Civilization VII at launch.

Sign up for your chance to win below here: https://ign.com/special/civilization-vii-au-giveaway

Whether you’re a lifelong Civ fan or just love history, this is your chance to experience one of the world’s greatest civilizations firsthand!

Hurry – the contest ends March 4th @ 10:00 AM AEST, and a winner will be announced shortly after. Don’t miss your chance to turn your Civilization VII dreams into reality. Rome awaits!

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Entry is open to users who: (i) are legally residents of Australia, (ii) are eighteen (18) years of age or older at the time of entry and (iii) have a valid email address. Entrants who are eligible to enter the Competition pursuant to these Terms and Conditions are referred to as “Eligible Entrants.” To enter, participants must: (i) Visit ign.com/civilisation-7-ancient-wonders-giveaway); (ii) Complete the entry form, which will provide Promoter with an entrant’s full name, phone or mobile number, email and mailing address); (iii) Tell us in [25] words or less what is your favourite moment in the history of the Civilization franchise); and (iv) have an existing 2K account. Only one (1) entry per person will be accepted. Subsequent attempts made by the same individual to submit multiple entries by using multiple accounts or otherwise may result in disqualification of the entrant.

#CivilizationVII #IGNsGreatCivilizationGiveaway #AUS

Amazon is running a terrific “Buy 1, Get 1 Half Off” sale on popular items like books, movies, and games. (Please ignore Amazon’s confusing language that makes it sound like you have to buy two items at regular price – that’s not the case). The sale includes all three of the Fourth Wing books, but it also has a bunch of excellent board games in it, many of which are already on sale. You can shop the whole sale here, or read on for some of the standout board games in the sale.

Board Games for Adults

Tons of the best board games are eligible for the sale, including recent(ish) classics like Azul, Catan, Carcassonne, Pandemic and the like. Plus there are tons of bigger, longer, deeper selections on sale, like Twilight Imperium, Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective, and the Lord of the Rings, as well as many more strategy board game.

Classic and Family Board Games

If your shelf could use some more timeless classic board games or family board games to entertain your guests, you’ll find plenty of those in the sale as well. We’re talking board games for kids like Mouse Trap and Guess Who, as well as Monopoly Junior, which makes that interminable old standby mercifully short in play time. And if you want to commune with the spirits of the dead, there’s that old family classic Ouija, which is only kind of a board game, but I’m including it anyway.

There are a lot more games on sale as well, plus expansions for many of the games listed above. There’s a lot to sift through, and that’s before you even start thinking about the movies and books you can mix and match to get the discount. So feel free to peruse the sale at your leisure and pick out whichever items you want.

Chris Reed is a deals expert and commerce editor for IGN. You can follow him on Bluesky @chrislreed.com.

Ubisoft has assured that Assassin’s Creed Shadows players who largely ignore one of the dual protagonists won’t be “missing out.”

Creative director Jonathan Dumont told Screen Rant said Assassin’s Creed Shadows won’t force players to play as both the stealthy Naoe and the brutish Yasuke in equal measure when it arrives March 20, nor will it lock off certain parts of the game to those who prefer one over the other.

“I don’t think you’re missing out on things too much,” Dumont said. “I think it’s more on your preference to [say], ‘Okay, I’ll see how the game will adapt a little bit to the character if you choose one over the other.’

“They get individual introductions and then they get their own questline also. Let’s say [for] Naoe, a personal questline cannot be played by Yasuke and those are two distinct things. But the core of the game can be pick your character and the game adapts.”

Naoe has a play style reminiscent of the original Assassin’s Creed games or, ironically, the most recent Assassin’s Creed Mirage, which prioritises stealth and encourages full combat only as a last resort.

This is a stark difference to Yasuke who emulates the more aggressive elements of the role-playing game Assassin’s Creed entries, meaning Origins, Odyssey, and Valhalla. He charges head on into battle instead of sticking to the shadows like Naoe.

“We’re not imposing players try to split the time,” Dumont said. “If you prefer one character for any reason, you can play maybe, I don’t know, I’m not going to put a percentage, but quite a bit of the game using one of them.

“But if you want to balance it out… I play quite a bit balanced out and what happens is, I play with one for three, four, five hours, and then I switch, and then I just play two, three hours. Usually I play stealth and then I [say], ‘All right, let me destroy some camps and stuff all right for a while.’ And then I just change like that.”

A lot rests on the shoulders of Assassin’s Creed Shadows as not only the long-awaited Japan-set entry and the first full Assassin’s Creed since 2020, but a struggling Ubisoft needs it to perform well following recent flops and investor frustration.

It’s not enjoyed a particularly positive promotional period so far, however, with the development team having to apologize on separate occasions for inaccuracies in Assassin’s Creed Shadows’ depictions of Japan and using a historical recreation group’s flag without permission.

Yet another controversy came as collectible figure maker PureArts removed an Assassin’s Creed Shadows statue from sale over its “insensitive” design, and combined with the two delays, fans are growing increasingly impatient as a result.

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

I was smitten with Compulsion’s South of Midnight well before I got to play a little more than an hour of it recently. From the first enigmatic trailers hinting at this Southern gothic, dark fantasy, magical realist stop-motion game set in the Deep South, to IGN’s own first look, to the bigger gameplay overview at the recent Xbox Developer Direct – South of Midnight struck me as a deeply moving, highly stylized game that would almost definitely make me cry. When I told the Art Director, Whitney Clayton, that I had immediately thought of that decade-plus-old movie Beasts of the Southern Wild, she confirmed that was one of their early major inspirations for its “Mythical Bayou-type location, folklore creatures, and this really heartwarming protagonist.” That, along with the “darkness and folktale fantasy” of Pan’s Labyrinth from Guillermo del Toro. Huge yes to all of that.

In the section that I got hands-on time with, I absolutely got the sense that all of the intrigue and hype-building was no bluff, and yet a couple elements of the gameplay still needed more time in the metaphorical oven before it’s ready to ship out. Even with those minor blemishes – which are slightly concerning because we’re just a couple months away from its April 8 release date – I left still enamored with the setting and bubbling with curiosity about the bigger story about ghosts and environmental catastrophe driving South of Midnight.

I played through Chapter 3, far along enough to have some magical combat tricks as a Weaver going up against spooky figures called Haints – which is exactly where I began. (Though the question of “What exactly is a Weaver?” is yet to be explained.) Diving pretty much headfirst into a fight was expectedly disorienting, but I was reassured that all of the mapped techniques – push, pull, and what’s basically a stun move – are introduced at a pace that’s much easier to get acquainted to naturally. Part of the struggle was the autolock feature being a little loosey-goosey at times; because of the volume of Haints and where they appear in the combat area, the camera spun around the main character, Hazel, in a way that made me a tiny bit woozy.

I eventually got the hang of the Weaving moves, plus the timing of dodging for its magic recoil against nearby Haints, and found it challenging enough but not necessarily revolutionary. But I hardly think it needs to be: South of Midnight’s charm is, well, basically everything else. As long as it’s fun (it was) and not horribly repetitive (it wasn’t), then it can, in fact, run almost purely on vibes. From each encounter with the Haints, I felt a sense of eerie dread from the lighting and fog, the blaring drums-and-horns score, the general spore-like creepiness of the Haints and their corruption. And when I finally beat their spooky asses, it culminated in a cathartic cleansing of the land, both physically and spiritually, that had been choking on its past. Hazel wasn’t just clearing out the wreckage of environmental disaster from a devastating hurricane where she lost her mother, setting her on this very journey. She was healing the ghosts of history that were haunting the land, too.

That’s kind of how the beats of the chapter went: platform around a swampy area with double jumps, glides, and magic skills to find what I’ll call “Haint holes,” clear ‘em out, and pick up little pieces of a bigger story that all point back to a Mythical Creature – this one in particular at the behest of a giant talking magical Catfish who is both narrator and seemingly Hazel’s mode of transportation around different areas. Chapter 3 didn’t end with a boss battle against one of the giants highlighted in earlier videos; instead I climbed up a giant man-shaped tree to clear the Stigma of its Wound. I swear, the game explains why it exists at all through the collected ghost stories, and houses and spaces are littered with ephemera that help fill out more of the character-building picture. But even so, the ultimate answer still felt like a cliffhanger: Who were these people and how were they connected to the bigger tapestry of South of Midnight? I gotta know!

This storybook narrative meshed peachily – pun intentional – with the luxuriously textured elements of its habitat. Clayton told me the basis of these details was rooted in making the animation feel tactile: “What would this look like if it were actually handcrafted in real life?” she said. “What kind of materials would they have been made out of to look like the thing that they’re supposed to be made out of?”

Speaking of stop-motion: The team knows that not everyone is going to love the style, Clayton said, and that’s fine: “Anytime you do something a bit bold, you’re gonna get polarizing feelings.” (For what it’s worth, if it’s that distracting, you’ll be able to turn it off outside of cutscenes in South of Midnight’s settings.) I will say, I did catch a couple of moments with frame rate issues that haven’t been fully ironed out yet, but Compulsion is aiming for 60fps on Series X by launch. And when everything is running smoothly as it ought to, South of Midnight should be a uniquely beautiful game that might even make you cry a little bit, too.

Fanatical’s BundleFest 2025 has just dropped an exciting new collection for PC players to jump on. For a limited time, you can build your own Capcom bundle from a fantastic collection of games including Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective, Ace Attorney, Resident Evil, Mega Man and quite a few more. This bundle starts from two games for $12.99 (which comes to $6.50 per game), and you can keep building up your bundle from there.

Head to the link below to start building your Capcom bundle today. We’ve also included a list of all the games included with this deal so you can have a better idea of what’s available right away.

Build Your Own Capcom Bundle at Fanatical

While Henry Cavill may be the most famous actor to have played Geralt of Rivia, he’s not the first name many will think of when discussing The Witcher. Certainly amongst the gaming community, Doug Cockle — the voice of Geralt in CD Projekt Red’s series of critically acclaimed RPGs — is considered the original and ultimate white wolf. But the paths of Cavill and Cockle’s Geralts have now merged, with Cockle bringing his unmistakable voice to Netflix’s interpretation of the character in the new animated movie, The Witcher: Sirens of the Deep.

While he’s not playing the same version of Geralt who appears in the games, Cockle was not asked to alter his performance to sound more like or include the mannerisms of Henry Cavill or Liam Hemsworth, who replaces Cavill as Geralt in the next season of the live-action show. This creative decision meant Cockle was able to draw upon the same method and approach that created the unmistakably gravelly tones of his Geralt of Rivia. And so you’ll still hear the same voice you’ve known and loved for nearly 20 years.

Cockle formulated that voice back in 2005 when recording dialogue for the first Witcher video game. “The thing I found most challenging about recording Witcher 1 was actually the voice itself,” Cockle recalls. “When I first started recording the game, (Geralt’s) voice was very, very far down in my register. It was something I had to push towards.”

At the time there was little guidance as to how long voice actors should spend recording in a single session, and so Cockle was spending eight or nine hours per day delivering that gravelly voice. “I was going back to my hotel just going, ‘Wow, my throat is ripped’,” he recalls. The struggle continued into the recording of The Witcher 2 a few years later, but Cockle’s vocal chords eventually strengthened and began attuned to what was required of them — a process he sheepishly likens to an athlete’s muscles getting into shape.

Cockle’s vocal chords adapting to better support Geralt’s voice wasn’t the only major change that happened during the development of the second game, though. “The books started to come out in English while I was recording Witcher 2,” he explains. “Before that, it was the developers from CD Projekt Red who taught me everything I needed to know about Geralt. So as soon as The Last Wish came out in English, I was down at the bookstore buying it, and I tore through it. And I understood things about Geralt just from reading just that one book that I didn’t understand at all before.

“The developers kept saying, ‘He’s emotionless’,” Cockle says. “And I was like, ‘Okay, I get it, I get it, but I’m an actor. I want to play with emotions.’ But I better understood [when reading] the book why they were pushing for as flat as possible of an emotional life for him.”

Stellar Blade developer Shift Up has posted a record breaking year financially as Stellar Blade brought in $43 million in royalties, and the PC version is expected to outsell the original PlayStation 5 game.

As reported by Game World Observer, Shift Up released its 2024 financial report which revealed it recorded $151.4 million in revenue, an increase of 30.4% year over year. This includes $43.2 million from Stellar Blade royalties alone.

There are seemingly no signs of it slowing down either, as Shift Up reiterated that it expects PC sales to be “better than that of the console version, especially in the Asian game market.” It also plans to reveal its new game, Project Witches, in the first half of 2025, though this doesn’t appear to be the highly requested Stellar Blade sequel.

Project Witches was revealed in 2024, not long after Stellar Blade was released on PS5, and therefore before momentum for a sequel was built. Shift Up has said it’s considering making another game in the franchise though.

Stellar Blade sees players take on the role of Eve as she battles against unknown invaders to reclaim Earth in fast paced action role-playing game combat. It earned a 7/10 in IGN’s review and proved popular otherwise, quickly selling a million copies.

“Stellar Blade is great in all of the most important ways for an action game, but dull characters, a lackluster story, and several frustrating elements of its RPG mechanics prevent it from soaring along with the best of the genre,” we said.

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