IGN

Get set for a special day of Easter Holiday savings, fellow games aficionados. Whether you’re chasing high-octane thrills, sprawling fantasy worlds, or deeply weird indie darlings, this week’s discount haul is absolutely stacked. I’ve scanned all of the shelves for you to find a buffet of must-play masterpieces, all going for a steal.

This Day in Gaming 🎂

In retro news, I’m celebrating the 25th anniversary of Wario Land 3, a Game Boy Color must-get. This weird and wonderful third outing reimagined platforming conventions and proved that Nintendo’s second banana was no mere sidekick by eschewing the elegant precision of its Mario-helmed cousins for a non-linear, transformation-based puzzle box. I sacrificed many a AA battery to this one, and it holds up surprisingly well today (gameplay-wise, at least).

Aussie bdays for notable games

– WWF SmackDown! (PS) 2000. eBay

– Wario Land 3 (GBC) 2000. eBay

– Top Spin 2 (X360) 2006. eBay

– Battlefield 2: Modern Combat (X360) 2006. eBay

Contents

• Nintendo
• Xbox
• PlayStation
• PC
• PC Gear
• LEGO
• Headphones
• TVs

Nice Savings for Nintendo Switch

Exciting Bargains for Xbox

For Xbox Series X, The Witcher 3 Complete is a towering fantasy epic where every side quest feels meaningful. CD Projekt Red famously hired a full-time lore coordinator just to keep the in-game books and bestiary entries consistent. Then there’s Remnant II, a brutally satisfying co-op shooter where world layouts are procedurally generated. No two campaigns are the same.

• Witcher 3 Complete (-60%) – A$31
• Resident Evil 4 (-34%) – A$39
• Lego Harry Potter Col. (-43%) – A$34
• Remnant II (-75%) – A$19
• Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 (-19%) – A$89

Xbox One

• Ni no Kuni: WotWW (-60%) – A$27
• Katamari Damacy Reroll (-75%) – A$11
• Little Nightmares Complete Ed. (-75%) – A$11
• Namco Museum Archives Vol. 1 (-75%) – A$7

Expiring Recent Deals

• Star Wars Outlaws (-55%) – A$49
• Monster Hunter Wilds (-50%) – A$58
• Hogwarts Legacy (-57%) – A$47
• Split Fiction (-16%) – A$59
• No More Heroes 3 (-41%) – A$44
• Dragon Age: Veilguard Del. (-58%) – A$59
• Lego 2K Drive (-24%) – A$41
• The Crew Motorfest (-52%) – A$48
• Monopoly 2024 (-51%) – A$24

Or just invest in an Xbox Card.

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Pure Scores for PlayStation

Over on PS5, God of War Ragnarök hurls you deeper into Norse mythology, and the mocap actors for Kratos and Atreus spent months training together to develop a more realistic father-son dynamic. Stellar Blade, meanwhile, was helmed by Korean studio Shift Up, whose creative director Hyung-Tae Kim is known for his wildly expressive art style and past work on Blade & Soul.

• Elden Ring Erdtree Ed. (-31%) – A$79
• Fancy DualSenses (-17%) – A$99
• Lego Horizon Adventures (-46%) – A$59
• Stellar Blade (-40%) – A$74
• God of War Ragnarök (-39%) – A$75
• Until Dawn (-46%) – A$59

PS4

• Hogwarts Legacy: Del. (-75%) – A$30
• Octopath Traveler II (-22%) – A$66
• Crash Bandicoot Trilogy (-60%) – A$27
• Neo: The World Ends With You (-60%) – A$33

Expiring Recent Deals

• Monster Hunter Wilds (-43%) – A$65
• Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth (-57%) – A$49
• Final Fantasy VII Rebirth (-57%) – A$49
• Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered (-25%) – A$55
• Need for Speed Unbound (-82%) – A$20
• Breachers (-40%) – A$26
• Dragon Quest XI S (-50%) – A$27
• What Remains of Edith Finch (-75%) – A$6
• Moving Out (-80%) – A$6
• Torchlight II (-80%) – A$5

PS+ Monthly Freebies
Yours to keep from Apr 1 with this subscription

• RoboCop: Rogue City | PS5
• The Texas Chain Saw Massacre | PS4/5
• Digimon Story: Cyber Sleuth HM | PS4

Or purchase a PS Store Card.

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Purchase Cheap for PC

And for PC players? BioShock: The Col. bundles the entire series. I say spend a mere eleven bucks on it and be blown away by its timeless gameplay and unforgettable twists, would you kindly?

• Intravenous 2 (-33%) – A$19
• Bioshock: The Col. (-85%) – A$11
• Dragon Age: Origins Ult. (-70%) – A$9
• Tomb Raider GotY (-85%) – A$4
• Fallout: New Vegas Ult. (-60%) – A$12

Expiring Recent Deals

• Dave the Diver (-55%) – A$13
• TLoU 2 Remastered (-12%) – A$65
• River City Girls (-100%) – FREE
• Batman: Arkham Col. (-85%) – A$12
• DmC 5 + Vergil (-75%) – A$11

Or just get a Steam Wallet Card

Laptop Deals

• Apple 2024 MacBook Air 15-inch (-12%) – A$2,197
• Lenovo ThinkPad E14 Gen 5 (-36%) – A$879
• Lenovo ThinkBook 16 Gen7 (-27%) – A$1,018

Desktop Deals

• HP OMEN 35L Gaming (-10%) – A$2,799
• Lenovo ThinkCentre neo Ultra (-25%) – A$2,249
• Lenovo ThinkCentre neo 50q (-35%) – A$629

Monitor Deals

• LG 24MR400-B, 24″ (-30%) – A$97
• Z-Edge 27″ 240Hz (-15%) – A$279
• Samsung 57″ Odyssey Neo Curved (-22%) – A$2,499

Component Deals

• MSI PRO B650M-A WiFi Motherboard (-41%) – A$229
• AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D (-7%) – A$876
• Corsair Vengeance 32GB (-35%) – A$82
• Kingston FURY Beast 16GB (-30%) – A$48

Storage Deals

• Seagate One Touch Portable HDD (-24%) – A$228
• Kingston 1TB USB 3.2 SSD (-17%) – A$115
• SanDisk 128GB Extreme PRO (-63%) – A$29
• SanDisk 32GB Ultra SDHC (-53%) – A$9.90

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Legit LEGO Deals

• Mando’s N-1 Starfighter (-36%) – A$32
• Fire Rescue Helicopter (-36%) – A$9
• Emergency Ambulance (-33%) – A$20
• City F1 Garage (-32%) – A$89

Expiring Recent Deals

• Botanicals Daffodils (-48%) – A$12
• Disney Celebration Train (-47%) – A$32
• Wicked Shiz University (-42%) – A$29
• TIE Fighter & X-Wing (-40%) – A$107

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Hot Headphones Deals

Audiophilia for less

• Samsung Galaxy Buds2 Pro (-49%) – A$179
• Sony WH-CH520 Wireless (-27%) – A$73
• SoundPEATS Space (-25%) – A$56.99
• Technics Premium (-36%) – A$349

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Terrific TV Deals

Do right by your console, upgrade your telly

• Samsung S95D 77″ OLED 4K (-19%) – A$6,499
• LG 43″ UT80 4K (-23%) – A$693
• Kogan 65″ QLED (-50%) – A$699

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Adam Mathew is our Aussie deals wrangler. He plays practically everything, often on YouTube.

The weekend is officially here, and we’ve rounded up the best deals you can find! Discover the best deals for April 13 below:

Like a Dragon: Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii for $49.99

While director Ryan Coogler’s new film Sinners is ostensibly a vampire horror film, what makes it a truly unique cinematic experience is how it brings a distinct time and place to life (Mississippi in the 1930s) while using the blues – once blasted by preachers as “the devil’s music” – to explore the lives of its largely African-American cast of characters, led by Michael B. Jordan as twin brothers Smoke and Stack.

“In addition to the hemoglobin vampires crave, Sinners has music flowing through its veins, starting with the blues that Sammie [Miles Caton] and respected local musician Delta Slim (Delroy Lindo) are hired to perform at Smoke and Stack’s place,” Eric Goldman wrote in his rave Sinners review for IGN.

“Coogler uses this as a focal point for a larger look at how music means so much to people of all walks of life, bonding them across generations, even when they themselves don’t ponder the lineage at work. Remmick (Jack O’Connell), the charming and charismatic leader of the vampires, provides a fascinating parallel to all the amazing blues on the soundtrack: The Irish folk tunes of his ancestors factor into Sinners, too, in continually bigger and bolder ways.”

Coogler thus uses two forms of traditional music – African-American blues and Irish folk – as a way to illuminate the respective painful colonial pasts that the humans and the vampires share. Both forms of music receive bravura set pieces at different points that, as Goldman puts it, makes Sinners “musical adjacent” and “lets us both see and hear how music reverberates through time and immortalizes the people who make it.”

I recently chatted with Ryan Coogler about Sinners’ use of blues and Irish music, its standout set-pieces, and why the vampire villain of Sinners was as personal a character for Coogler to write as Killmonger was in Black Panther. (The following interview has been edited for clarity.)

IGN: Can you talk about what blues music means to this world and these characters?

Ryan Coogler: What it means to the characters is, I think it’s an affirmation of that full humanity. And it goes hand in hand with church, which is why it has that genre of music. That’s some of the first music that’s known in the United States. We call it the devil’s music. And it was a lot of judgment lofted against that music and the culture surrounding it. But I think that the church is for the soul, but the blues music is for the full body. The soul and the flesh. It acknowledges the flesh and the pain that comes with a situation, the sexual desire, the anger. The whims of the flesh and the soul are acknowledged there. I think that the music is an affirmation of humanity. It’s a rebellion against the situation that these people were in. And had been in generationally. But it’s also a celebration of that beauty. It’s the full dose, the full human condition. Whereas, the church is somewhat edited, the bad parts cut out.

And there’s an inherent room for the accusation of hypocrisy there when you cutting out the bad, and not acknowledging the bad. There’s no hypocrisy in the blues as it was. It accepts you. It says, “I’m a bad man, I’m a piece of shit.” I’m married, but this woman here? I like her too. It’s an acknowledgement of all the flaws, but also, the soul is there too. I think that in the juke joint, which is the box that people can go and listen to the blues, it’s a safe haven to be fully yourself. A place where maybe you don’t got to hide what you really want, what you really desire, who you really are. It’s hard to be sexy in a cotton field. But I can show that part on myself here.

IGN: What’s your read on the vampire community? They bring all these people of different races and backgrounds together but now they’re a collective rather than individual. There’s probably a lot of ways people could interpret what that means.

Ryan Coogler: Look, I love this movie, man. And for me, I want to give it to audiences as raw as I can. For me, as soon as April 18th comes, man, it don’t belong to me and Zenzie and Sev and the filmmakers anymore. It’s you guys’ now. And I wanted it to be fully for the audience, man. And whatever people see in it, it should have its validity. I will say that I wrote… The Killmonger that’s on screen [in Black Panther] is from my heart, in that movie.

I’ve never felt about an antagonist how I felt about Remmick. I just loved writing him. And I loved directing Jack and his choices. And for me, my heart is very much with that character. I wanted the character to be a master vampire. Because there’s just so many different ways you could take vampires. You have the horde, where there’s an old leader. Or you could have the band of vampires where the leader is not as clear. It’s more egalitarian. And you meet them all together, like Kiefer Sutherland’s character in Lost Boys. He’s obviously the leader, but you meet them together. They’re already a fully formed group.

For this one, I was interested in meeting the one and watching the group develop. And learning more about him as the movie goes on. But I love this character. I love him presenting as one thing. Not just in terms of the vampirism, but presenting at one thing and being something completely different. Their fear of him being this racist guy, and learning that his view on race is the opposite. That, to me, was very powerful. If he actually identifies with these people. These are the people he wants to hang out with. And that, for me, it made me so excited because I hadn’t seen that just yet.

IGN: My two favorite sequences in this movie are the two big showstopping musical set pieces. The juke joint one and then the vampires get theirs too.

Ryan Coogler: Mine too. The movie’s about that. The movie’s about what (Remmick) said is fellowship and love. The movie doesn’t work without those scenes, to understand what it looks like. And these are people who, due to the circumstances of the imperial structures that were attempting and would be successful in dominating these people. They weren’t allowed to do this for a reason. When you talk about [Irish] step dance, it was an act of rebellion. In the form of it, the stiffness of it that we come to know, it’s because it wasn’t allowed. For this character to come find his way to Clarksdale in 1932, who does he identify with? Where does he want to spend Saturday night?

Those questions, for me, it just fired me up, bro, when we were making it. Because this is a cynical audience we’re releasing this movie too, bro. 2025, bro. People seen it all. And I want to give the audience an experience that I had at times that weren’t as cynical. When I walk into a theater and I’m in the drive-in in the early ‘90s and nobody has seen a dinosaur next to a jeep. Nah, I was like, “Wait, what?” A dinosaur in an industrial kitchen. I wanted to give all the audiences that feeling, if I could, in this vampire movie.

IGN: The juke joint sequence is particularly amazing because it’s staged as a one-er. You’re playing with time, and you’re showing the cultural crossovers too. Visually, you’re showing us how music is timeless, or at least what it brings out in people is timeless. At what point did you realize you wanted to play with time in that scene?

Ryan Coogler: It was during the writing process. But also realizing that just vampirism wasn’t enough. There had to be other supernatural elements to this. And if I could, through cinematic language, portray what it feels like because it’s a human experience. Everybody’s had this feeling, man. Every human adult has had the feeling of seeing a virtuoso performance, and being in a room with people who understand what they’re seeing. Because somebody who doesn’t have the cultural context [could watch] a virtuoso performance, and they can appreciate, hey, this person’s really good at the piano finishes. But they don’t understand why, and what he’s trying to say. And who he’s trying to say it to. It feels transcended, it feels like you coming out of your body.

And you’ll hear verbiage from people describing it, “Oh, my God, man, this dude tore the house down.” Or, “They blew me away.” Or they shredded the place down. It’s always a destructive description of what happened. But you understand, man, I missed something major. They don’t even have the words for it. For me, I speak the language of cinema. That’s my job, that’s why I’m here. How do I, through the tools that we have, how do I communicate that feeling to the audience but through the way that only cinema can? That’s my job.

Every time somebody green lights one of my movies, that’s my gig. And in that moment it’s like, well, how do I show this? And the why. Why did juke joint culture develop in the 1930s? And it’s because these people were denied this. And they were born at a time where they weren’t going to see more freedom. That was their luck. This is what they got. Maybe their grandkids will,. And how cool would they be if the music is just right, they can party with those grandkids?

IGN: There’s that second tour de force musical set-piece later, and it’s from the vampires’ perspective using traditional Irish folk music.

Ryan Coogler: What I love about Irish music, bro, it’s always a hidden contrast in it. “Rocky Road To Dublin” is a heartbreaking story. But it’s saying with all this crazy vigor that the contrast of it doesn’t totally make sense. And he’s talking about ghouls and goblins. He’s talking about fighting monsters. He was like, “Oh, y’all, the vampire is talking about how you got to fight ghouls and goblins.” It’s like, yo, this should be perfect. I think it’s a mastery of contrast, bro. Irish folk music and dance. The same way that delta blues music is. When you have these people that are from a land of agricultural abundance, and they know these fields. And they forced to work these fields, but at the same time that humanity is being denied, and they forcing the poverty. Just that contrast, that concept. That contrast permeates everything. At the funeral, we sad, but we going to dance. You could say that about African culture, you can say that about Irish culture. We going to get a ton of shit, we’re not going to cry about it.

IGN: Have a party.

Ryan Coogler: We not going to let them see us cry. That whole thing. We going to have songs with hidden meanings. I can sing this song while the British look at me and they won’t know that what I’m saying it actually is. That connection. This guy, this vampire happens upon people who don’t look like him, but he could give a fuck what they look like. He’s a vampire. What they’re going through, he knows like the back of his hand. That was fashion. That got us all excited. That’s filmmaking.

Sinners opens in theaters and in IMAX on April 18th.

As one HBO primetime show ends (farewell, The White Lotus), another must rise to take its spot. Two years after The Last of Us first aired on Max, the video game adaptation starring Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsey is returning for a second season.

The Last of Us game and the first season of the show both end with a cliffhanger that has… consequences. Anyone who’s already played The Last of Us Part 2, myself included, is probably feeling as much terror as excitement at the thought of witnessing what comes next on screen. In IGN’s review of Season 2, Simon Cardy acknowledges that it was “always going to be a challenge to adapt The Last of Us Part 2’s sprawling, twisting story into a television show,” so it makes sense that the story will continue over a third season.

If you’re planning to tune in for the premiere of The Last of Us Season 2 or still need to catch up on Season 1, check out the details below.

How to Watch The Last of Us Season 2

The weekend is officially here, and we’ve rounded up the best deals you can find! Discover the best deals for April 12 below:

Save 55% Off The 4K Middle-Earth 6-Film Collection

If Escape From Tarkov is the PUBG of the extraction shooter, boldly striking out into a new genre despite humble origins, then Bungie’s upcoming shooter, Marathon, is the big-budget refinement that could become the emerging category’s Fortnite. Coming from a studio with a pedigree for first-person shooters that’s virtually unmatched, and which wields the resources to take a good idea and reimagine it in a disturbing, beautifully detailed sci-fi universe, it’s easy to see how Bungie just might pull it off. But with a concept that’s so inherently geared towards the hardcore PvP crowd and such a clear departure from what they’ve done in the past, it’s certainly not without risks, even if they do manage to capture the usual FPS magic they’re known for. Even so, after spending the better part of two days sliding and gunning my way through Tau Ceti’s relentless ruins, I was hooked, and can’t wait to group up with my most tryhard friends and ruin people’s day.

Marathon is an extraction shooter where you and two friends are dropped into an extremely unmerciful wasteland to battle deadly enemies, including rival players, all in the name of loot and glory. If you’ve played Escape From Tarkov, then you’ll be familiar with this PvPvE framing, which forces you to ante up any loot you bring along with you, as it’s permanently lost if you fail to exfiltrate before time runs out or your team is killed. Those distressingly high stakes immediately got my blood pumping and made each match feel like the most important one so far. After fighting tooth and nail against surprisingly challenging AI enemies and ruthless fellow Runners to get a high-level rifle that could down most enemies in two hits, I wasn’t about to let my guard down for even a moment and risk losing it all to some unworthy foe.

If, like me, you bemoaned the quiet, undignified death of PvP’s relevance in Destiny 2, then you might share my eagerness to see Bungie focused squarely on a competitive experience here, and everything I played so far indicates they’ve still more than got what it takes to pull it off. Weapons and movement feels crisp, fluid, and incredibly satisfying in that rarified way that few studios can achieve, and the added element of hero shooter-like abilities, like one that lets you blast enemies with kinetic energy, sending them flying away, gives that extra kick you need to feel like a supernaturally powered badass. Marathon almost immediately feels fantastic to play, and as soon as I took out a robot who took a potshot at me from the window of a nearby building and tried out his weapon for myself on a nearby enemy, it was love at first snipe.

This gets even better once you start to familiarize yourself with the class-based Runners available to you (four of which I got to play extensively, out of the six that will be available at launch). Glitch is all about mobility and controlling positioning, and has abilities that help her move fast, jump up to areas others can’t reach, and push enemies away with a blast of kinetic energy. Locus is a tanky soldier who can pull up a shield to block incoming fire and launch a flurry of homing missiles at enemies, while Blackbird is all about intel and using her gadgets to ping any enemies within an area for the whole team, and sending out little robotic drones to seek and destroy nearby enemies. My personal favorite though, was Void: a deft ninja who can turn invisible for a time and deploy massive clouds of smoke to lose and confuse the enemy within. Each of these characters offers a completely different way to play Marathon, and by coordinating with my teammates, we were able to put together a balanced team of Runners who complemented one another’s strengths and helped make up for any weaknesses.

That came in handy as we explored dark and forgotten places throughout Marathon’s maps, which were filled with deadly creatures, like a species of giant ticks who ran at me frantically, and surprisingly accurate robots who were much, much better at surrounding and overwhelming players than the vast majority of AI enemies found in other games. Fighting these foes was no joke, but the loot was well worth it, whether it was finding a backpack that allowed for more storage space, a weapon that gave me better odds against a rival crew, or just some consumable healing items I could rely upon in a pinch. Some of the extremely rare and powerful items, of which my team only found a handful during our matches, changed things up quite significantly, like a backpack that turned the user invisible whenever they interacted with a container while wearing it – extremely useful in a game where you’re being hunted by everyone else on the map.

Marathon’s tensest moments, though, happen when you encounter enemy crews and inevitably clash in a bid to claim one another’s loot. Maybe we’d spot a crew in the distance and stealthily follow them – waiting for the right moment to stage an ambush – or sometimes we’d hear other players in the distance fighting off security forces and decide to go catch them when their guard was down, scooping up whatever goodies they were about to claim. And, of course, sometimes we found ourselves on the receiving end of that ruthless equation and had to scramble as one of us was downed by sudden gunfire from a rival team. These moments are when the PvP magic really shines and leaves you with stories to tell your friends, like the time my group got entangled in a nine-player free-for-all and came out unscathed thanks to some well-timed smoke grenades, or another time where both of my teammates were killed, but we came back to win it thanks to a clutch revive the other team didn’t see coming. Just like the most epic, heart-pounding moments of a battle royale match, Marathon provided me with tons of memorable moments of elation after a narrow victory and the occasionally sour taste of defeat.

Once we’d gotten our spoils or completed an objective or two, it was time to haul ass to the exfiltration beacon and stand near it long enough to be pulled out of the firefight and returned safely back to our base in outer space with our bloody bounty. But lighting that beacon also lets everyone else on the map know you’re trying to make off with your goods, via a giant blue light that shoots up into the sky for a prolonged period of time. This makes your last moments in the area pretty intense, or, if you’re like me, offers some exciting opportunities to kill a group right as they’re preparing to leave and benefit from all of their hard work.

The downside of Marathon’s “to the victors go the spoils” reward system is that in a pretty short amount of time, those with skill will enter fresh matches with gear that easily outmatches less skilled players, making them even less likely to be able to pull off a victory. Bungie’s gone out of its way to try and make it so a poorly geared squad still stands a chance against those with better loot if they play well, and you can always simply employ the strategy of avoiding other players until you’ve got a few extractions and some at least decent loot under your belt, but even so, it seems like it could get pretty demoralizing in short order if you run into a bout of bad luck and start to feel like you’ll never catch a break.

I was lucky enough to win the vast majority of my matches, and after the initial hump of stockpiling some basic equipment in my vault and unlocking a few permanent upgrades to make the going easier, I felt like even if I fell in battle and lost all my best stuff, at least I’d have some adequate backup gear to recover with. But that won’t be the case for everyone, and I wonder how big the chunk of players will be who simply run into a brick wall in their first few hours, log off, and never return. At least in Escape from Tarkov you’ve got your Kappa case to hold your most valuable items and protect them from being lost on the battlefield – Marathon has none of those safety measures, instead opting for a system where you’re given a sort of pity loadout, called a sponsored package, which sets you up with some basic gear after you’ve been quite literally bled dry. This definitely helps ice the wound of a string of bad luck, but might not exactly be the most comforting consolation prize.

To be clear, it very well might be a good thing that Marathon seemingly refuses to compromise on its dedication to ensuring each match has real, keenly felt stakes, even if it turns some folks off from it – I certainly count myself among those who enjoy a bit of sweatiness and quite liked how invested I was forced to be every single time I deployed onto a new map. But they definitely risk a situation where it feels like the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer, to the detriment of those who are on the unfortunate side of that brutal equation. Time will tell before we know how that will shake out, but even in my short time with it, I already felt a bit of friction emanating from those on the server who kept dying repeatedly and felt like they were getting outclassed by those with quality loadouts.

One thing that could be the key to preventing people from falling off is Marathon’s ongoing meta progression system, which I found surprisingly engaging in my time with it. Even though your loot is probably destined to be stripped off your still-warm corpse and stuffed into some rude opponent’s backpack, you can at least comfort yourself in the various perk trees and ongoing quests you’ll find in the menus between rounds of play. You might not have made it back alive from your most recent escapade, but maybe you were able to loot some chests from a specific part of the map or complete some other objective in your quest log before you went cold. In that case, you can at least still make your way through the faction questlines and upgrade systems, which unlock new bits of story and improve your reputation with each of the three groups who have taken a marked interest in your progress. Doing so grants you perks that make the going a bit easier, like those that let you buy slightly better gear from the vendor, in case you find all your existing loot confiscated by the enemy.

Elsewhere, despite some clear indications that some kind of plot will be included in Marathon even though multiplayer mayhem is plainly the focus, it’s still unclear to me how much that story will matter or deliver something that makes me want to progress, beyond just finding better weapons to use. As a mercenary called a Runner, your consciousness is repeatedly uploaded to a synthetic body and sent into dangerous territory in search of riches. Beyond this basic premise and some really cool details, like how your artificial bodies are sewn together out of synth silk by robotic caterpillars, there wasn’t a whole lot to go off of, and I could easily see this not being an area of particular focus for Marathon. That said, the world Bungie has built is every bit as beautiful as it is creepy and dystopian, and there are moments where they satisfyingly hint at the events of the Marathon trilogy from the ‘90s. But Bungie also told me that they’re not entirely following the events of the original games, and what little I saw did only slightly more than pay lip service to the world.

Another question is just how much support and longevity we can expect from Marathon. Bungie has earned its reputation for mastering the live-service model over the past decade of Destiny, and shows no signs of letting players down here, as they told me they already have plans to support Marathon with new maps, weapons, characters, and more as they develop it, but as always, there’s the question of whether they’ll do so at a fast enough pace to appease ever-ravenous players. And importantly, Marathon also plans to use the seasonal reset model found in the likes of Diablo 4, where you’ll be stripped of your loot and progress at the end of each season to do so again with new content and a new meta to mix things up. While I could definitely see this working for Marathon, there’s always the question of how they’ll manage to incentivize making that arduous climb from scratch each season.

After playing enough Marathon to get a pretty good feel for it in its alpha state, I’m already fairly confident it’ll scratch the Bungie PvP itch that’s been left unscratched for a number of years now. Here’s hoping they’ll knock it out of the park when it comes to PC and consoles in September.

The Lion King ride headed to Disneyland Paris has received new exciting images, details, and a construction start window of Fall 2025.

As detailed by Disney Parks Blog, the first-ever land and attraction themed to The Lion King will be one of the biggest draws of the reimagined Walt Disney Studios Park that will be known as Disney Adventure World. Alongside this new water ride that will take guests through the biggest moments of the 1994 classic, the land will feature a 120-foot-high Pride Rock and tons of dining, shopping, character meet-and-greets, and more.

Disney shared a new concept image from the ride, which you can see above, that shows Audio-Animatronics of young Simba, Timon, and Pumbaa chowing down on some grubs in a beautiful jungle setting. This will be just one part of the ride that will also send guests down a 52-foot drop, which is two inches taller than Tiana’s Bayou Adventure.

While we don’t have a date yet, it will be arriving after the grand opening of World of Frozen in 2026. This will also be one piece of the puzzle that is Disney Adventure World, which will be double the current park’s footprint.

Alongside World of Frozen, The Lion King ride, and the previously announced Raiponce Tangled Spin ride that will see Mandy Moore returning to voice Rapunzel, guests will get to look forward to the first-ever attraction themed after Up. This ride will be a “spinning carousel” that will offer a “bird’s eye view of the park’s stunning scenery.”

World Premiere will also be one of the stars of Disney Adventure World when it opens on May 15, 2025, as it will be a brand-new park entrance that will aim to recreate a “glamorous premiere in the heart of Hollywood.” There will also be World Premiere Plaza, which is inspired by Broadway and the West End district and will have theaters with such shows as TOGETHER: A Pixar Musical Adventure, Mickey and the Magician, and Frozen: A Musical Invitation.

For more in the world of Disney, check out our 30th anniversary retrospective of The Lion King, when you can get your tickets for Destination D23: A Journey Around the World of Disney and our recently updated top 25 Disney animated movies list.

Adam Bankhurst is a writer for IGN. You can follow him on X/Twitter @AdamBankhurst and on TikTok.o

This review contains full spoilers for Doctor Who season 2, episode 1, “The Robot Revolution”

“The Robot Revolution” kicks off Doctor Who’s second season (which is also the 15th of the revived era, and 41st of the series overall) with all the subtlety of a glitter cannon. It’s loud, bright, and begging you to have fun. It opens strong, racing through a pulpy rescue mission filled with bellowing red robots who shout “Behold!” like they’re auditioning for a live-action Thundercats reboot, and introduces a charmingly absurd polishing droid that deserves its own Star Wars-esque merch line. There’s visual invention to spare, and campier instincts that are proudly leaned into. But for all its spectacle and self-aware chaos, this premiere rarely pulls itself together into something emotionally or thematically solid. The pace is frantic, but the plot is hollow, and the initial spark fades quickly, leaving a forgettable story where a flagship return should have been.

Nowhere is that hollowness more obvious than in the central twist: The reveal that Belinda’s ex, Al (with a lowercase “l,” short for Alan), is actually the AI (with an uppercase “I”) Generator controlling the robot horde doesn’t so much twist as it unravels. It’s another of Russell T. Davies’ increasingly worn-out wordplay gambits, a spiritual cousin to last season’s Sue Tech/Sutekh gag and the ongoing parade of Susan Twist cameos. And like those, it doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. Al shows up for a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it intro, vanishes for 40 minutes, then returns as the “surprise” villain with all the dramatic impact of a Windows error message. The AI Generator itself looks like it stumbled out of a garish Fallout mod, all cartoon menace and flickering CRT pomp, but even that fizzles once the punchline lands. The problem isn’t just the twist itself, but that it mirrors a larger issue: It’s content to coast on style and quirk without giving the story anything to chew on.

Despite the limp plot and undercooked villainy, “The Robot Revolution” isn’t a total loss. Its best asset, by far, is its character work, which offers a promising glimpse at the season ahead. Belinda Chandra, played with disarming charm and quiet authority by Varada Sethu, isn’t exactly new. She first popped up in “Boom” as Mundy Flynn, a military medic in one of last season’s better standalone episodes. Here, we get a resolution to that setup: Belinda and Mundy are simply related, and separated by thousands of years. It’s not exactly the first time Doctor Who has had to account for an actor cast in multiple roles, and it does add just enough narrative gravity to Belinda’s TARDIS debut.

Better still, she arrives fully formed. Belinda’s got opinions, she pushes back, and she doesn’t let the Doctor get away with his usual verbal sleight of hand. That alone already sets her apart. While I appreciated Millie Gibson as Ruby Sunday last season – her energy with Ncuti Gatwa was electric – she sometimes felt more like a tag-along rather than a co-lead. So, it’s refreshing to see someone arrive with momentum and bite. With a Doctor who’s spent the last run veering between whimsy and wistfulness, a companion to properly bounce off in the TARDIS could be exactly what Doctor Who needs.

It also helps that the TARDIS finally starts acting like a character again. It’s not just a glossy teleportation pod: It’s temperamental, tactile, and responsive, and the Doctor doesn’t just pilot it, he negotiates, pleads, and wrestles with the console. “The Robot Revolution” gives Gatwa ample opportunity to showcase his physical performance skills, and he shines in those moments, injecting a raw drive and frustration into the scenes. The increased TARDIS action is a welcome shift, and its lavish, yet sterile, new design is finally made use of. It’s still missing the kind of lived-in charm it had back when Amy and Rory were knocking around in it, but getting to spend more time with its ravishing glowing panels will have to do for now.

Visually speaking “The Robot Revolution” throws everything it’s got at the wall. Time fractures shimmer, transitions snap into gear, and the robots, while one-note, benefit massively from those bulky, theatrical, practical suits. The production’s gunning for cinematic flair: Sometimes it lands, sometimes it looks like the green-screen footage was finalized at the 11th hour. The ambition’s admirable, even if the execution wobbles – which, to be completely fair, isn’t that unusual for Doctor Who sets.

For the most part, “The Robot Revolution” feels like mid-season filler dressed up in premiere clothing. There are flashes of fun, such as the episode’s humor, that occasionally manage to cut through its visual and narrative chaos. The throwaway “planet of the incels” line stands out as one of the few sharp moments that sticks. And while the rest of the plot is rather forgettable, there’s some semblance of narrative direction by its resolution. The Doctor and Belinda are being blocked from reaching Earth in 2025, nudging them toward a longer, stranger road home. It’s a modest hook, but enough to give the season a spine. If Doctor Who leans into that structure and continues building on the sharp chemistry between Gatwa and Sethu, there’s still time and space to grow.

So no, “The Robot Revolution” isn’t a knockout. But it’s a fast, intermittently funny, and mostly empty slice of sci-fi that may just be laying the groundwork for something more. If season 2 manages to focus on its new TARDIS team, and maybe even dial back some of the universe-ending theatrics, that journey back to Earth might be worth taking.

Just like any other gaming PC, gaming laptops are extremely complicated devices. When reviewing a gaming laptop, we need to look at it from every angle to make sure it is actually worth the often exorbitant prices they command. Here at IGN, we do primarily judge gaming laptops by how well they, well, play games, but we also want to know if they’re good laptops in general – whether it’s for doing work or just watching movies in your downtime.

That’s why after we run the system through a suite of benchmarks, we live with the device for a while – usually for around a week. After all, there are so many gaming laptops that absolutely kill it when it comes to benchmarks, but have uncomfortable keyboards, speakers that sound like they’re about to explode or have fans that immediately pull you out of any game you’re playing.

The Setup

Obviously, the first thing we do when getting a new gaming laptop is run it through the Windows 11 setup process. This is almost completely uniform among Windows gaming laptops, but once Microsoft’s process is over, there is room for a gaming laptop to show its flaws. Most laptop manufacturers these days include a suite of software that’s meant to make your life easier, but can seriously complicate the setup process with needless sign-in requests or ads for McAfee.

After everything is set up, we make sure the laptop is fully updated. First, we run Windows Update to make sure the operating system is up to date, then check any bespoke driver utilities provided by the manufacturer to make sure all drivers are current. Then, we check either the Nvidia App or AMD Adrenalin to make sure the GPU drivers are updated. After all updates are in place, we reboot the system to make sure everything is saved properly.

When the laptop is fully updated, it’s important to configure the laptop to make sure it lines up with other comparable devices. The biggest part of this is going into the power settings and setting the power profile to ‘Balanced’. For a lot of laptops this is all you really have to do, but there are some devices – like the Razer Blade 16 – which have their own power profiles in the manufacturer’s software. Because every laptop maker labels their power profiles a little differently, we need to use our best judgement to make sure that we’re not constraining the system with a silent profile or overclocking it with a “turbo” or “performance” mode – at least for comparative testing.

After all the benchmarks are recorded, reviewers are encouraged to test the system on any special performance modes.

There are a couple of things we need to do before running battery tests, too. First, we go into the power options and change when the display turns off and when the system goes to sleep to ‘never’. This is to make sure the battery actually drains down, rather than the system going to sleep randomly and ruining the result. We also set the screen brightness to 50%, the volume to 50% and disable Bluetooth. Then, if the laptop has RGB lighting of any kind, we turn it off for the battery test – those lights are pretty but everyone should have them turned off when using the laptop on battery power.

The Tests And Why We Run Them

When testing gaming laptops, we want to run them through a suite of games that cover a wide gamut of engines and graphics APIs that are relevant right now. The specific games tested might change over time, but in general we try to have a wide variety.

There are three tests we run in 3DMark – Speed Way, Steel Nomad and Night Raid. Speed Way tests DirectX 12 performance with ray tracing, while Steel Nomad tests the same engine, but without ray tracing. We also test Night Raid, which is a DirectX 12 test that’s a bit more lightweight, and geared towards non-gaming laptops. In general, 3DMark gives a good picture of the potential of the laptop, usually getting much better performance than actual games using the same API.

While we all love to play games, gaming laptops need to be, well, good laptops. We run the Procyon Office Productivity benchmark to measure how well the laptop handles office workloads. This benchmark cycles between Microsoft Office apps to measure how well it handles common productivity tasks. Most gaming laptops are way too fast for this to be any kind of challenge, but it does give a good picture of how the system works as a whole. Then, we run the Procyon battery test, which is essentially the same thing, only looped until the battery dies. It’s a varied enough workload that it gives a realistic picture of the battery life you can expect from your gaming laptop.

When it comes to the actual PC games, we advise our laptop reviewers to run each game benchmark at least twice. If the difference between those two runs is significant – i.e. more than 1-2 fps – the benchmark should be run a third time, with the reviewer figuring the average between them. That way we get a clearer picture of the actual performance you can expect from the gaming laptop.

The first gaming benchmark is Call of Duty: Black Ops 6. This is an extremely popular online shooter, and while it isn’t the most demanding game in the world, it does give a glimpse into performance in fast-paced online games. Though, this game does tend to favor AMD GPUs, so that should be noted when comparing gaming laptops with GPUs from different manufacturers.

We run three different versions of the Cyberpunk 2077 benchmark. The first we run on the RT Ultra preset, with upscaling depending on the resolution of the benchmark. For instance, at 1440p, DLSS, FSR or XeSS will be set to ‘Balanced’, but at 1080p, upscaling should be set to ‘Quality’. This is generally our guidance with upscaling in all of the games we test. Then, we set the game to RT Overdrive, which introduces path tracing to the equation. We run it under those conditions once without frame generation and once with frame generation set to 2x. That gives us both a good idea how this demanding game runs normally, and how much benefit you’ll get from frame generation tech. We only run it at 2x Frame Gen, to keep results comparable between AMD and Nvidia GPUs.

Then there’s Metro Exodus. This is an older game at this point, but an interesting one. The game only supports DLSS, not FSR or XeSS, which means we test the game with no upscaling, just to keep it fair. The byproduct of this approach is that Metro Exodus gives a good representation of what ray tracing performance without upscaling looks like. As such, despite it being an older game, it is still extremely demanding at any resolution.

We run Red Dead Redemption 2, another aging game, because it supports Vulkan and is still demanding on modern hardware. That said, new GPUs are starting to run into bottlenecking issues, even at higher resolutions, so the test also helps us identify if that’s a potential issue.

When it comes to Total War: Warhammer 3, the game doesn’t support any upscaler or ray tracing, which makes it one of the rare PC games that’s purely rasterized these days. It’s also extremely CPU heavy, which will highlight when the CPU is too weak for the GPU.

Assassins Creed Shadows is another game that’s extremely CPU heavy, but it also supports ray tracing and upscaling, which paints an excellent picture of how the entire system contributes to gaming performance. This is another game that we run both with Frame Generation and without it.

Living With the Laptop

After all the benchmarking is done, we encourage our laptop reviewers to live with the system for at least a week. That means using it for work, playing games on it, watching movies and carrying it around while they commute. It’s one thing to put a laptop through a suite of tests and mathematically rank it somewhere, but sometimes a slower laptop is just more comfortable to use, and that means something.

Likewise, there are a lot of extremely fast gaming laptops out there that are so heavy that they’re a pain to move around, whether it’s because of dual charging bricks or just a huge chassis that allows for that extra performance. There are some laptop manufacturers that also shove their laptops so chock-full of bloatware that using the device becomes a major headache until you go in and uninstall all of it. This is becoming less common these days, but it definitely still happens, especially in more affordable laptops that are subsidized by software companies.

Jackie Thomas is the Hardware and Buying Guides Editor at IGN and the PC components queen. You can follow her @Jackiecobra

The featherweight title is on the line tonight with the UFC 314 fight happening live down in Miami. Former champion Alexander Volkanovski is looking to reclaim his title by defeating up-and-comer Diego Lopes. The most recent featherweight champion, Ilia Topuria, left the title wide open by deciding to move up to the lightweight division. Will Volkanovski be able to take back the crown after getting KO’d in round two the last time this title was on the line? Or will Lopes surprise us with a KO?

If you’re wondering when and where you can watch tonight’s main PPV event, we’ve gathered all of the details below. There’s also the prelim rounds starting earlier in the day that you can watch without purchasing the PPV package.

Where to Stream UFC 314 Live Online