A new bill may see May 17 become Bruce Lee Day in California, thanks to Assemblymember Matt Haney.

Assemblymember Haney is a Democrat from San Francisco — the city the martial arts movie star was born in — and he introduced bill AB 2455 to honor Chinese Americans and Lee’s enduring legacy. According to his team, this would mark the first Chinese American to be honored with their own official day in the state of California.

According to KTLA, the bill also encourages public schools in California to use the day as an opportunity to teach students about Lee’s “accomplishments and the contributions he made to the state.”

You might be wondering… why May 17? Simple. It’s the day Lee returned to San Francisco after spending his upbringing in Hong Kong.

Lee’s daughter Shannon Lee, who is the founder and CEO of the Bruce Lee Foundation, revealed that the Lee family was touched by the gesture. “From young people who found confidence and possibility in his philosophy, to families who finally saw themselves represented on screen, to athletes who still draw on his teachings of discipline and inner strength, his reach is profound,” she said in a statement. “My father was a bridge between cultures through his courage, and his spirit of interracial solidarity remains as relevant as ever.”

Lee was a martial arts icon and legendary actor who helped push Chinese American representation in films to the forefront of Hollywood. He is perhaps best known for his work in films The Big Boss, Fists of Fury, Enter the Dragon, and the series The Green Hornet. He died in 1973 aged just 32, but his gifts to the world live on in his films and those he influenced, like the city of San Francisco.

No word yet on the bill’s passing as it was recently introduced, but something tells us it’s going to be a unanimous yes.

Photo by Warner Brothers/Getty Images.

Lex Briscuso is film and television critic and a freelance entertainment writer for IGN. You can follow her on Twitter at @nikonamerica.

As our exclusive, all-February-long IGN First "cover story" on the upcoming black-and-white, hand-animated first-person shooter MOUSE: P.I. for Hire continues, we wanted to learn more about the origins of its unique 1930's rubberhose-animated style. And so we sat down with Fumi Studios CEO and Founder Mateusz Michalak as well as Art Director and Lead Animator Michal Rostek to go behind the scenes of this unique game. Read on for a lightly edited transcript of our conversation, or watch the video version below. And you can wishlist MOUSE on Steam if you're interested.

IGN: What came first here, the idea for the game itself or the desire and idea to use this 1930s Rubber Hose animation style?

Mateusz: Yeah, I think this is the question more for Michal right now because he was one of the original creators and the guy who created the first art for the MOUSE.

Michal: I came from the animation industry and I'm really passionate of the animation and especially of history of animation. The MOUSE is like my little passion project that I started inside of my regular animation work. When we started to make video games, I came into the matter with the idea of the boomer shooter with the style of the 1930s Rubber Hose animations, and he loved that idea and give this idea opportunity to make it happen. We started with five people on the small team of this project. Our programmer put a video of making the game on TikTok then it goes viral and resonates all around the world. I remember that day when I was going to work and met my friend in the subway and he told me, "Hey, I read the article, the gaming website, that some guys make a game that looks like the game that you want to make." And I said, "Really?" "Yeah." Then he showed me the article and that was MOUSE.

Mateusz: Yeah, I can add that from the beginning. It was passion project. We've done most of the work after hours. We started prototyping the game. The first prototype that Michal showed to me was really, really basic. Then we hired a coder/programmer, David, who joined the team and we started the first full small production and the game came out of this small teaser that he showed on TikTok.

IGN: That's cool. So my next question, was it always going to be black and white or was color in this animation? Was that a debate at all amongst the team?

Mateusz: It was never a debate among the team. It was debate in the community because when people first saw the art or the trailer, they thought, "Okay, it's quite original, but you need color." Because no one ever made an FPS cartoonish game in fully black and white. It was something unusual back then, but we sticked with our roots in our original design and we never wanted to add any color. It's challenging. It's really challenging, especially in player guidance, in patch finding because you can always add a yellow color if you have a color in game or any other color, and I think that we've done a pretty good job. It was really, really challenging. We learned a lot of new skills, managing only basically two basic colors, black and white.

IGN: Help me understand how much of this, of the animation of the art, was done by hand?

Mateusz: I think all the animations that you can see in the game are done by hand. It's not easy process, but having computers right now, we can speed up some elements in the whole pipeline. Of course, we used techniques from the 1930s, 1940s Rubber Hose techniques. But having computers, we could speed up the whole process. It was much, much nicer and we could basically see our effects not instantly, but quite fast in the game. So if you would use the old techniques, so using paper, pens, scanners, and so on, the whole process would take not months, but years. And in the game development, they don't tend to wait for games, they want games right now. That's why the whole development process of games is shortening every year and we couldn't tell people that, "Okay, you saw teaser, then you need to wait at least 7, 8 years to see the final product." That's why we used computers. And I think Michal can say something more about the whole pipeline of the animation.

Michal: Yeah, so the animation pipeline is really similar to the pipeline that we use in the animation industry because game is based on animation. So it's really similar but not 100% the same. So for example, we started with the concept that we took from the design department. They're giving us a idea and we made our first concept arts for the character, for the NPC, for the weapons of the game. And then we came to the process that, in the film industry is like a storyboard process when we made a limited animation to put in the game and look how this work.

And if it's good, it comes to the animation process when we put the life on the animations, on the characters, on the weapons and all of the interactive elements in the game. Then to clean up process, when we clean all the outline to not look rough, but to look good, put the colors on it, and the last final step on making animation for the game that is different than making animation for the film is to render all of these things, put it in the engine and pack it and make the magic go on.

IGN: Michal, were the weapons the most fun thing to animate in the game because for me, what I've seen and experienced of the game so far, I mean it's all gorgeous, I just love the entire look, but the weapons, I just love how alive the weapons are.

Michal: Definitely, it was a very fun thing to do, but for me, one of the most challenging things. And we couldn't make such a great design, such a great animations without our two animators and with our two artists, Abraham, who made the great concepts for the weapons on the game and Igor who animated all of the things. So it was also credits for our game design who put all the mechanics, all the specific timing for the weapons to look good because this is one of the things that we need to focus when we making animation for the video game is that it should fit the mechanic, it should fit the interactive aspect of the game and do it in the... right tempo because when you have a game hardly based on the animation, they should look good, but also be useful for the player and not be player shouldn't feel frustration when he uses an animated gun.

IGN: How did the animation influence the tone of the game? It seems to lean a little more playful and I'm just sort of curious how you guys balance that of matching the animation to the tone of the game?

Mateusz: Animation, it's crucial for the whole game, so it's connecting also with the whole narrative element. It's like when they think about MOUSE, they think about animation, they think about art and it's a really great thing because we have a hook, we can hook them, interest them in the game. But beneath that, this art animation elements, there is a deep vibrating story and I believe that we'll surprise a lot of people when they will play the game.

IGN: So you talked about the engine earlier. You guys are using the Unity engine here underneath the animation system. How much custom work had to go into Unity to get it to cooperate with the uniqueness of what you guys are doing with the animation?

Mateusz: The first prototype, however, the first prototype was done in Godot, but the proper development is we are doing in Unity. The unity is really good in managing the 2D animation sprites, it's really good. But our game has thousands of thousands of animations and this was the most challenging part because still, you can put as much assets in the game, 2D assets, as you can, but your game can grow having 200 gigabytes, 300 gigabytes. So the most challenging part was the optimization process of the whole animations and we needed to develop a special tools that will compress 2D animations to have a better performance for the whole level because there is tons of animations, different kinds of animations through the whole level.

IGN: Can you talk about, on a similar note about if there were challenges of using 2D animations in a 3D game? We don't see that very often. I imagine that had to present some sort of challenge either in the animation itself and maybe the level design as well.

Mateusz: I think it would be much easier to make everything in 3D. The most challenging part, managing 2D assets, especially enemies in 3D space is to animate all directions. So we need to animate front, front left, left side, back left, back. All the bosses, all the enemies, every skills, every objects, so not objects, every enemies, bosses and some interactive objects, they are animated in 9 or 8 directions. So it was challenging and really time-consuming. Also, having 3D animations, it's much easier to add every bit of animation to the game. Having 2D animations, we needed to think really carefully what we want to add because we don't want to spend weeks animating things and then we will just delete our work. We wanted to have the whole 2D animations into the foreground, not in the background. So we use flat colors as in the old Rubber Hose animation. So there are all flat colors and you can spot really easily every 2D animation, walking around the level. Either this is enemy or 2D animation objects, interactive objects, you can't really easily spot it.

IGN: I have to imagine that this project has been more difficult than maybe you initially thought. And I only say that because I mean making any video game is clearly not an easy thing, but nobody else does this. You guys are the only studio making a game in this way. So how much more difficult, how have you found the process over time? Have you really, I imagine you've learned a lot in the course of development.

Mateusz: We made a lot of mistakes, a lot of mistakes. And going back and forth, back and forth with numbers of things. I think that there are few FPS games that using sprites or using to the animations, but I think our project is unique that we are using a lot of frames, a lot of images in our animations to show that the Rubber Hose animation style is really unique and the whole animation is really unique. And I know that right now there is a debate if hand skills not be useful in the future or they will be replaced with some tools. I believe, and I think that we showed it, that having a great hand skills, having a great artist, it's only beneficial for your game and the project itself.

IGN: I'm curious as to maybe this might be a good one for Michal, your inspirations for this because Cuphead, I think of very quickly, for obvious reasons, the other really amazingly hand-drawn game, totally different kind of game of course than your boomer shooter, but I also, I get a little bit of Who Framed Roger Rabbit from this too. I'd be curious to hear your inspirations.

Michal: I think the biggest over overall our inspiration, our biggest inspiration is the Rubber Hose art style as a whole. Our biggest inspiration is the animations from the Fleischer Studios, the people who create such a characters as Betty Boop, Popeye, Coco the Clown, or Bimbo the Dog. Fun fact, we probably watched every available Popeye episode during the pre-production, took the best inspirations for the environments for the characters. But also how they inspired by works of Ub Iwerks. He was a lead animator in Disney. He was animating for example, Steamboat Willie but then he became a solo animator and became a solo career and make characters such as Flip The Frog or Willie Whopper, but also other animation studios for that era. Like for example, Paul Terry, Charles Mintz, but also the old cartoons that were quite violent for that era. But it was a good inspiration for the combat and fight for our game. So we took a lot from them.

IGN: Awesome. The last question I have for you guys, maybe for either or both of you, so now you're almost there. The game is nearly complete, it's almost out. Moving forward, do you guys want to stick with this animation style for your next project or was this a one-time fun experiment, fun project or is the Rubber Hose animation going to be the Fumi Studio signature moving forward?

Mateusz: I think that the overall hand-drawn style will be our studio signature. I believe in the craftsmen of artists and I think that we will surprise people in the future with our next project.

Ryan McCaffrey is IGN's executive editor of previews and host of both IGN's weekly Xbox show, Podcast Unlocked, as well as our semi-retired interview show, IGN Unfiltered. He's a North Jersey guy, so it's "Taylor ham," not "pork roll." Debate it with him on Twitter at @DMC_Ryan.

The Legend of Zelda turned 40 years old this week — though Nintendo has sadly done little to mark the occaison. There are no new Zelda games on the horizon, no remakes or re-releases on Nintendo Switch Online, and no sniff of a trailer for next year's ambitious-looking live-action movie. It's a far cry from the array of announcements made for Mario's 40th birthday last year, or the anticipation for Pokémon's 30th celebrations which culminate tomorrow.

In order to mark the occaison ourselves, then, we tracked down the perfect person to talk about their own role in the Zelda series — the voice of Zelda herself, Patricia Summersett. You'll have heard her voice in Breath of the Wild, Tears of the Kingdom, plus their Hyrule Warriors spin-off games Age of Calamity and Age of Imprisonment. In total, her contributions to the franchise now stretch 10 years — meaning she has been the voice of its princess for a quarter of its life.

A fan of the series before her work on it, Summersett previously made headlines when her thoughts on the nature of Link and Zelda's relationship blew up online — a situation she's now said she found angering, while disputing any suggestion that Nintendo itself asked her to intervene and set the record straight. Read on for more about that, her hopes for the franchise's future, Zelda's British accent, and how she originally also auditioned for the Deku Tree.

You've spoken previously about initially auditioning for Princess Zelda without knowing the true identity of the role — but what were you told? What direction were you given?

Patricia Summersett: The best way to describe it was as a bleached script, which is when you have a certain amount of information about what the archetypes of the character are, the general world — for example, that it looks like an RPG fantasy — but you have no idea what the actual roles are going to be or what the game is. And there would've been no way of predicting that it was Zelda because she didn't have a voice before. I just would never have assumed that was the game that I was auditioning for.

There was the description of her being a younger teenage princess, but wise beyond her years, having the weight of the world on her. And those were key things I'd gone into when I looked at the script, when I started to play around with my voice and decide what to do for that particular character.

But I also auditioned for Zelda as well as some other roles — what ended up being Urbosa and I think probably the Deku Tree. There were a few.

Your portrayal of Zelda has a British accent, was that also a note from Nintendo?

Summersett: No, no, it was a really wide open spec. I schooled in London and so I thought something that sounds a little bit RP would make it heightened and put it into that kind of class system I was imagining for royalty. So I did that. I think in the game it's easier now, especially because it's evolved a bit over time and people's interpretations of the character and even the accent has evolved over time. It's a little more comfortable to say this is a Hylian accent versus just a particular version of a UK accent.

“Burn it all down.” For a tagline so front and center of Paramount’s marketing for Scream 7, it has very little relationship to the actual ethos of the movie. Instead, Scream 7 feels like a return to roots for the venerable meta-slasher franchise, far more interested in and effective at propping up the more playful tone of Scream’s early days than the increasingly deconstructive tendencies of the fourth, fifth, and sixth entries. It succeeds as a(nother) back-to-basics reset for Scream, but ironically for a story centered on how much a mother will let her trauma affect her daughter, living in the past in order to drive a franchise reset does keep Scream 7 from having an identity of its own.

The two Radio Silence-directed installments which precede Scream 7 felt like very intentional attempts to recontextualize the franchise into a more modern sensibility, something really hammered home by Scream 6’s move to a bustling New York City. Kevin Williamson takes over directing and writing duties (the latter shared with Scream 5 and 6 co-writer Guy Busick) for Scream 7 and, though he wrote the first, second, and fourth films in the franchise, it represents his first time in the director’s chair on a Scream movie and his first time directing a film since 1999’s Teaching Mrs. Tingle. Williamson’s approach veers hard back into more old-fashioned Scream territory, something communicated quickly by the opening scene set at the house of Stu Macher, the co-killer of the original Scream. Stu’s house is now being used as a “psycho killer BNB,” decorated with chalk cutouts of the various victims and killers who’ve died there, posters from the Stab movies, and even a motion-activated Ghostface which you can be damn sure is going to get used to some spine-tingly ends. That sequence may end with Stu’s house in flames but, as the rest of Scream 7 plainly demonstrates, some foundations are just unshakable.

That idea persists through Williamson’s choice to move the action back to a small town, not Woodsboro this time, but Pine Grove, Indiana. Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell) has put down roots there with her police chief husband Mark (Joel McHale) and kids Tatum (Isabel May) and… the two younger ones conveniently visiting Mark’s parents out of town the week all the murder stuff kicks off.

Neve Campbell’s return as Sidney is a constant highlight of Scream 7. Campbell takes the comfort and confidence that comes with playing a character for 30 years and translates it into a performance that shifts believably from dead serious to tongue-in-cheek and back, often within the same scene but never in a way that rings false or tonally out of step with her circumstances. Sidney has to balance the normal anxieties of being parent to a teenager with how her bloody backstory is antagonizing her relationship with Tatum as news of the murders at Stu’s house reach them in Pine Grove. Even though much of how Scream 7 goes on to dig up the bones of the first movie winds up being to its detriment, Campbell’s performance as Sidney benefits from the constant resurfacing of the Woodsboro murders. It’s as if Kevin Williamson saw how hard David Gordon Green threw the “killing machine” lever in one direction for Laurie Strode in the recent Halloween sequels and said “I like it, but maybe 80% less.”

At 17, Tatum’s the same age Sidney was during the events of the first movie, which causes a ton of extra strife between the two once Ghostface comes a-calling again – that’s also what brings Courteney Cox’s Gale Weathers back into the fold, who’s mostly here to act as a sounding board for Sidney. Sidney can’t quite calibrate how much of her bloody past to share with Tatum, who’s grown to resent Sidney for sharing her story with the rest of the world through books and interviews, but never face-to-face with her. Isabel May is most at home in that tension in Tatum’s interactions with Sidney, doing a good job conveying the hurt associated with these feelings without straying into petulant territory. Petulant characters don’t do great in slashers most of the time.

But Tatum’s insecurity towards finding her place in the circle of life (and death) ends up translating into a character without much definition, something not helped by her being surrounded by trope-fuelled characters like “too-perfect boyfriend,” “popular blonde friend,” or my personal favorite, “weird kid.” Yes, Scream gets far more latitude than most other horror franchises when it comes to whipping these archetypes around like ill-fated marionettes, but Scream 7 rarely finds effective ways to use them in surprising ways, especially when we’ve already seen characters like these subverted again and again in this series.

Nostalgia is front and center from the opening scene set in Stu Macher’s house, where the finale of the first Scream took place – it’s even important enough to be the focus of a Mindy Meeks-Martin (Jasmine Savoy-Brown) breakdown on “the rules” for Tatum and her friends. It’s also the bedrock of much of Scream 7’s comedy, which is heavily rooted in, you guessed it, clowning on both Scream lore and horror history. But the more Scream 7 goes on, the more it feels like all that hearkening back to “where it all began” is designed to open the door for nods to the franchise’s past that don’t wind up feeling justified on their own merits. Scream 7 swings for the ‘member berries hardest in its climactic sequence, a mostly straightforward game of cat-and-mouse that builds nicely on the strength of Campbell and May’s intensity and teamwork and even ends with a satisfying bang. But the reveal of who’s behind Ghostface’s dastardly plot this time suffers greatly from the smoke and mirrors game the movie plays with that killer’s identity. By the time they’ve revealed themselves, it feels like Scream 7 has run out of time to flesh out their motives, or how those motives connect back to the movie’s nostalgic themes.

Scream 7 might be a little light on the deeper genre commentary that made the series famous, but as for how it functions as a pure slasher? The thing ticks like a clock. Williamson has a great sense of rhythm for building up, paying off, and cooling down from tension, which gives Scream 7 a lively pace that keeps many of its shortcomings from lingering long enough to feel fatal. The director has a clear affinity for the operatic when it comes to staging Ghostface kills, with a number of these sequences culminating in memorably grotesque tableaus. An early attack on one of Tatum’s friends leaving her dead body suspended above a stage, a long shot of a knife going through one character’s skull just long enough to really give you a secondhand migraine, and a kill involving a beer tap that feels like an instant classic moment for the series all point towards Williamson having put a lot of care into crafting each and every Ghostface encounter, even if one or two end a little too abruptly for their own good.

Video game deals have been popping up all over the place lately. Alongside PlayStation’s big sale at PlayStation Direct, Woot just dropped its own video game sale, offering an abundance of deals for games on all platforms.

While these games already boast solid discounts, the Amazon-owned online retailer is also offering a bonus 20% off them right now when you use the code ‘LEVEL20’ at checkout. However, that only lasts through February 27 so you’ll want to be quick to take advantage of it.

If you're not looking to drop a lot of cash right now, we’ve gathered together some of our top deals from Woot’s sale that are $20 or less. Have a look and pick up your favorites before the offer comes to an end. Keep in mind that the prices shown below include that extra 20% off from the promo code before tax is added on.

There are some genuinely great options to pick up for under $20, too. From Elden Ring Nightreign to Space Marine 2 to Metaphor: ReFantazio, this is a great time to pick up these games if they've been on your radar. They just scratch the surface of what's available at Woot right now as well.

To get a full look at what this sale has to offer, check out our breakdown of Woot's "Video Games For All!" sale. And while the 20% off bonus promo code only lasts through February 27, the sale itself is set to run until March 5, so there's plenty of time to grab your favorite discounts.

If you're looking for even more video game deals, it's definitely worth seeing what PlayStation's sale at PlayStation Direct has on offer right now. Whether you're hoping to pick up some new PS5 games or scoop up new PS5 accessories, there's quite a lot to look through at the moment.

Hannah Hoolihan is a freelancer who writes with the guides and commerce teams here at IGN.

This article contains spoilers for the first four episodes of DTF St. Louis… but not many of them, okay? Okay. The series debuts on HBO on March 1.

For decades now, HBO has carved out a niche as the TV destination for Sunday nights at 9 PM. Sometimes that takes the form of big fantasy shows like House of the Dragon or IP extensions like The Penguin and IT: Welcome to Derry; it can also mean a prestige series like The Gilded Age or Succession. But the most frequent mode for the time slot? HBO’s Sunday Night Mysteries, which aren’t branded as such but might as well be: True Detective, The White Lotus, Big Little Lies, even Mare of Easttown or Task. They all may have different tones and points of view, but the hook for viewers to come back each week is a serialized, ongoing mystery…usually of the murder variety.

That’s true of DTF St. Louis, a new series written and directed by Steven Conrad, and starring David Harbour, Jason Bateman, and Linda Cardellini in – per the official synopsis – “a limited series about a love triangle between three adults experiencing middle-age malaise, that leads to one of them ending up dead.” So yes, you’ve got a central mystery that’s already been spoiled in the trailers for the series: Who killed David Harbour’s Floyd? Over the course of the season (four episodes were provided to critics for review), the show flashes back in time to illuminate more and more of what went down with that central trio, twisting and turning as you discover that what you think is going on may, in fact, not be what really happened.

Surgent Studios, the developer behind Tales of Kenzara: ZAU, has unveiled its next game today, and it's...absolutely nothing like Tales of Kenzara: ZAU. It's called FixForce, and it's a chaotic cooperative "extraction platformer" about a team of robots fixing machines using random parts they find lying around.

FixForce puts up to six players together as a robot repair crew sent into an area to fix various broken structures littered around the area within an allotted amount of time. Each broken machine indicates what parts are needed to fix it, and those parts can be found scattered around the level.

However, many of those pieces will be stuck behind obstacles: bodies of water robots can't swim through, up tall towers, guarded by evil enemy robots. To collect them, you'll need to use your robot building abilities to pick up and place objects strategically so you and your friends can climb across them to reach whatever it is you need. And if you're injured by an obstacle, your head will fall off, and your teammates will need to find your head and body and stack them back together to resurrect you back into the game. Teams earn points based on how many things they fix within the time limit.

I got a chance to play a round of FixForce ahead of the announcement alongside the developers, and yeah, the level of silly chaos implied in the announcement trailer pretty much encapsulates it. It's easy to get distracted goofing around with all the objects in the level and building weird, random things, but FixForce also lends itself to silly emergent moments, like when one of the devs tried to toss platforms at me to save me from being stuck on an island, and instead slammed one into me and knocked me right into the water.

It was a surprisingly cheery and silly time for a studio that just made a game about grieving the death of a loved one. That fact is not lost on founder Abubakar Salim, though.

“As FixForce came together, we saw the pure chaos and hilarity it was unleashing and made the decision to move quickly and publish it ourselves," he said in a statement. "Yes, FixForce is completely unlike anything we’ve ever done before, but look: we made one game about grief and another about abuse and thought, ‘can we have a little bit of silly, stupid fun for a second?’ I promise we’ll go back to dark and depressing after this.”

Notably, this isn't the same game Salim announced in 2024, Project Uso, nor is it the horror game announced last year to be published by Pocketpair. Surgent clearly has a lot of irons in the fire here, but its eagerness to get something released quickly makes sense given the scale of its long-term ambitions and its financial struggles in 2024.

FixForce is dropping in early access on March 12 on PC via Steam and Epic Games Store, and its full, final release will also be on Xbox, the studio says.

Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter for IGN. Got a story tip? Send it to rvalentine@ign.com.

The end of an era that was, frankly, way too short. Creators Michael Cusack and Zach Hadel have unexpectedly announced that their breakout hit Adult Swim series Smiling Friends is ending with Season 3, which fans thought had concluded in late November last year.

"This is not a bit, this is not a joke," Hadel explained in a six-minute audio statement recorded alongside Cusack that was shared across Adult Swim's social media accounts on February 25. "Michael and I are here to announce Smiling Friends will be ending after Season 3 is done."

The creators cited burnout as a major factor in their decision. "To be honest, after Season 3, Zach and I both had the same feeling where we felt pretty burnt out after putting years and years into this, but also pretty accomplished,” Cusack explained. “We came to this feeling where we were like, 'This can just be it.'"

The dynamic duo — who got their starts as animators and voice actors making original content on YouTube — went on to give fans a bit of hope by noting that if someday they feel revitalized on the series or feel they have more they want to do, they may come back. It’s a nice maybe to have out there in the universe, but in the interest of not leading the fans on, Cusack and Hadel doubled down on the fact that the series is truly coming to an end at this point.

That said, they’re not finishing things off without a parting gift, especially considering the third season came and went with fans not suspecting a thing due to the fact that the series was already renewed for Seasons 4 and 5. The series will return to Adult Swim for just two more episodes, one the creators claimed in their statement were not finales but “stragglers” from the third season, on April 12.

Personally, I find this news to be devastating. Many fans have talked about their fears of the show overstaying its welcome and becoming a shell of the greatness that it once exuded, a phenomenon attributed mostly to Rick and Morty when citing this as a reason for wanting the show to go out on top. But Smiling Friends has been consistently excellent since day one, all the way through this third season. That’s a fear with any show; you want a series you think is great to stay great until the end, but far too many people (fans and creators alike) take that as an existential threat, which makes them afraid for a show to spend any length of time stretching its legs for fear it’ll fall into that terrifying subpar version of itself.

Ultimately, this is Smiling Friends going out on top, and if its creators don’t have that spark for it anymore, it’s noble of them to be honest with themselves and the audience. But that doesn’t mean we can’t be sad about it (I am, if you couldn’t tell).

Despite the shock of the announcement, this isn’t the first time Hadel and Cusack have discussed wanting to avoid a fate where the series loses its spark. "We don't want it to be a show that outstays its welcome and goes on forever," Cusack told Indiewire in October 2025. “Zach and I have made a promise to each other where we'll always be honest and say, 'Look, do we want to keep going with this, or do we want to wrap it up on a high note?'"

Smiling Friends premiered on Adult Swim in January 2022 after the pilot episode was aired during Adult Swim’s April Fools Day programming in 2020 and garnered a lot of attention. All three seasons are available to stream on HBO Max.

Lex Briscuso is a film and television critic and a freelance entertainment writer for IGN. You can follow her on Twitter at @nikonamerica.

After 15 years at Ubisoft working on Far Cry, Splinter Cell and Rainbow Six, veteran developer Patrik Méthé fancied doing something different — and three years later, at Sony's recent State of Play, viewers were treated to exactly that: a trailer for a blockbuster open-world action RPG starring a hulking bird warrior.

This is Project Windless, a game set in the world of the popular Korean novel series The Bird That Drinks Tears — albeit a franchise that many in the West won't have heard of. Reaction to the game's big reveal trailer was positive, Méthé tells IGN, though tinged with some jokes about its main character that is, essentially, a large humanoid chicken.

But after that initial moment of surprise, well, the game and its world look intriguing. And it's protagonist is certainly unique — a quality Méthé said had been key to centering the game on this particular hero, and why he was interested in the project overall.

"What you're playing is the rise of a mythical character that you will hear about in the [The Bird That Drinks Tears] novels, but obviously he's not there anymore because it's more than 1000 years before," Méthé said, making clear that the game has been created as an entry point for the fantasy franchise.

"You're really playing the foundation of this universe," he continued. "Whether you read the novels or not won't change your immersion, your understanding of the game itself."

Project Windless is set to be the first project from Méthé's Krafton Montreal, a studio forged around the idea of making this game that now houses 90 people. A further 40, meanwhile, are assisting development in a studio near Seoul.

"I was receiving a bunch of contacts on LinkedIn and stuff, and I received one from a company called Krafton," Méthé recalls of how his involvement began, shortly after leaving Ubisoft. "I had no clue what [Krafton] was so I almost closed it, but then it was written: 'the creator of PUBG. I'm like, 'oh, okay, might be worth [taking a look]'."

After a bit of research, Méthé found an old article suggesting that Krafton had been "looking to do the Korean Witcher" — and while this description wasn't in the official pitch for the project he eventually heard, it still piqued his interest.

"What Krafton asked us was simple, it was: 'We have this incredible IP, beloved in South Korea, you have the experience doing great AAA single-player games. What would you do with that in order to introduce it to the Western market?' Not that we don't want to sell to [Korean fans too], but what would you do?'"

"My answer was: 'if anyone answers you [on the spot] to that kind of question, you should stop the call immediately. Because to answer that alone, without thinking about it for more than a few minutes, it's a joke. This kind of project requires the expertise of many people, so if you want a serious answer and not just buzzwords — the used sales car pitch — give me the time to sync with experts and we'll get back to you with a real answer."

And that's what Krafton allowed Méthé to do. After some initial discussion around directly adapting The Bird That Drinks Tears' first novel, Méthé realized that setting the action generations before allowed for more flexibility in crafting a more unique story suited to a video game, rather than adapting the books' stories to a different medium while trying to hit all the same beats.

"For me it's more that we have the novels, which is great for us as developers because it answers a lot of questions that often take up a lot of resource and time," Méthé says. "We have those answers already in place, and we can then easily add layers of depth into the stories and the motivation of each race."

It hasn't all been plain sailing — Méthé says he underestimated how much of a "hectic and a bumpy adventure" it was going to be, figuring out what Project Windless would be while also "building a studio, finding a place, recruiting people, trying to understand the ecosystem of the company." He continued: "We knew it would be a good challenge and it is a good challenge. So it's never boring. Let's say it like that."

That said, it sounds like a welcome change for Méthé after more than 15 years working on Ubisoft shooters, including Splinter Cell Conviction, Far Cry 3, Far Cry 4, Far Cry 5, Far Cry New Dawn, and Rainbow Six Extraction — all of which he served as game director for.

"It's very refreshing," he says. "We're not a shooter at all. Sometimes as developers, because we're repeating stuff because we're say we're doing follow-ups, you find a certain pattern that works, whereas this time it's quite the opposite. We don't have a clear benchmark to follow, and we need to come up with our own vision of what we want."

Still, plenty about the game remains under wraps. Apart from that trailer, there's still much to learn about the game, and more work to be done to convince players that this is a franchise that can stand alongside other open-world action RPG staples. Méthé, however, believes his team is off to a good start.

"What I really loved, of all the comments I've seen and all the content creator reactions I've seen, most of the time it went like this: You see the start of the trailer and they're like, 'okay, interesting, interesting. Then they're like, 'what the...', and then they're like, 'I'm in,' without any hesitation. And that's gold. That's what we wanted. But it's our first communication. It's the first time people are hearing about this. There will be a bunch more down the road to clarify what the game is, how unique it is. For the time being we're just taking the time to celebrate this moment. And when the time comes, we'll be able to explain a bit more in detail."

Tom Phillips is IGN's News Editor. You can reach Tom at tom_phillips@ign.com or find him on Bluesky @tomphillipseg.bsky.social

The game director of extraction shooter Marathon has offered a number of top tips for players jumping into the server slam event this weekend.

Bungie’s Joe Ziegler took to social media to offer last-minute tips. I’m hoping to carve out some time this weekend to give Marathon a shot myself, so I found these tips interesting. Hopefully they will also prove useful!

• gear comes and goes, don’t be too precious about it, but learn to use what you got and it will serve you.
• remember to bring enough ammo and consumables to survive a couple fights, if you don’t have much then use a sponsored kit or play as rook and focus your runs on getting gear and creds or stocking up on resources.
• if you’re learning don’t rush your contract objectives, playing slow can help you avoid getting overwhelmed.
• keep your ears open. You will often hear threats before you see them.
• try to take the fights you think you can win, you don’t need to fight everything. Greed and ambition can lead to a quick downfall.
• don’t sleep on the battery weapons, in the right hands they are strong, but remember if you reload with them before they’re empty, you lose the battery.
• a friend who plays Triage is a keeper. Be kind to them.
• if you want to win a fight, use what your opponent wants against them. Patience and cunning are powerful allies.
• stray rooks are unpredictable and can either be a blessing or a curse depending on how you treat them.
• don’t tilt, cooler heads make smarter decisions.
• if all else fails beg for mercy in prox chat and hope someone listens :)

It all sounds pretty intense, but that’s what you’d expect from an extraction shooter. I expect I’ll be leaning on that last tip over the weekend.

The Marathon server slam runs from today, February 26, to March 2. We’ve got a quick guide to the exact launch times across the globe, as well as the associated rewards, so you know when you can get that download going and jump in. Marathon's full launch is scheduled for March 5 across PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X and S. PlayStation Plus subscribers can nab bonus weapon charms themed around Ghost of Yōtei, Death Stranding 2, and Helldivers 2 at launch. Marathon players on Steam automatically receive the exclusive Crowbar Weapon Charm (don't say Half-Life 3 confirmed!) when Marathon releases on March 5. Marathon players on Xbox Series X and S, meanwhile, get the exclusive Emerald Clutch Weapon Charm and Emerald Catch Weapon Charm.

Wesley is Director, News at IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.

Back in 2024, not long after laying off five percent of the company’s workforce, EA CEO Andrew Wilson got on a stage to wax poetic about all the ways generative AI would help take the gaming industry to the next level. Machine learning tools, he said, sticking to a script that may as well have been spat out by an LLM, would give developers an “exponentially bigger canvas upon which to create, and richer colors so they might paint more brilliant worlds.”

He’s hardly the only executive who’s promised his customers the world in recent years, though how exactly AI is going to impact game development remains as ambiguous now as it was the day we were first introduced to ChatGPT. While some, from EA and Ubisoft to Remedy and Larian, prepare to ride the wave, others are putting up walls and turrets. Hooded Horse’s Tim Bender has called the technology “cancerous” and added a No AI Assets clause to the company’s publishing contracts. Meanwhile, a survey by Game Developer found that 36% of industry professionals are using GenAI in their day-to-day work, but that half of them think it’s making games worse, not better.

Right now, it’s possible we’re headed for a future in which many triple-A titles will be incredibly large but feel lacking in substance, akin to the early days of No Man’s Sky’s procedurally generated, endless universe. Wilson himself suggested as much when he mentioned that College Football 25 – with its 150 stadiums and 11,000 athlete avatars – could not have been made without help from GenAI. Our ever-inflating expectations for larger maps and more realistic-looking graphics have pushed development cycles for franchises like Grand Theft Auto and The Elder Scrolls into the double digits, and AI seems like an obvious and cost-effective way to bring those numbers back down again while delivering gargantuan amounts of content.

But while AI could probably program testicle physics for horses, it can’t create a character as deeply human as Arthur Morgan. Consequently, the more you try to automate workflow, the less human (and therefore engaging) your games become. For this reason, I believe we should expect another, equally influential shift to sweep across the industry, one that will push some developers into the opposite direction. Instead of giant, hollow worlds with glossy AI finishes, I suspect we’ll see more games that are smaller in scope, tighter in design, and a little rougher around the edges. In short, we’ll see games that go where AI cannot follow.

To form an impression of how AI will impact games tomorrow, we can start by looking at how the technology is being used today. According to that Game Developer survey, AI use among industry professionals varies by level of seniority, with upper management using AI tools more frequently than those below them. Across the board, people are more reliant on AI for researching and brainstorming than actual asset generation. In other words, the more complex and creative a task, the less AI is used.

Another Game Developer survey, conducted in 2025, found that nearly half of industry professionals fear extensive use of AI would decrease the quality of their games. Brandon Sheffield, founder of Necrosoft Games and director of Demonschool, argued that overreliance on AI tools will cause games to become more generic in style and design, as these tools tend to slavishly replicate their training data without putting an original spin on them. Hidden Door CEO Hilary Mason, also interviewed for the survey, called AI “aspirationally mid,” adding that a technology which lacks both vision and ambition cannot produce anything other than mediocre slop.

People from various creative industries agree that AI tools remain just that: tools, used to take care of mindless busy work so that employees are free to focus on the tasks that they alone can do. This includes writing emails or cleaning up code, but also generating reference material and altering the color, lighting, or perspective of concept art and other types of assets. Take one look at social media, though, and you’ll see that AI’s role in that “busy work” is just as contested.

We can also learn a thing or two about AI’s impact on game design by looking at the impact of previous technological revolutions, like the invention of the camera. The camera did not, as many painters in the early 19th century feared, destroy the art of painting, but merely forced it to evolve. Now that there existed a device which could, in an instant, capture the likeness of anyone and anything, and do so with greater precision than even the most talented artists, there was no good reason to keep on painting realistically. Rather than compete with technology, art went in a direction where technology could not follow: towards abstraction and subjectivity, towards Impressionism, Expressionism, Fauvism, Cubism, Surrealism, and other movements that represented not the world as it is, but how we as individuals experience it.

Tomorrow’s best and brightest game designers, like yesterday’s most celebrated painters, will search for the limits of what AI can achieve and boldly set up shop outside that boundary. Right now, AI is predictable, regurgitating information in consistent, clearly recognizable patterns, so games made by humans will become more unpredictable and surprising. Genre titles – easily mimicable on account of their fixed rules and tropes – will give way to games that evade straightforward categorization. Just as we no longer use labels and describe almost all visual art as “postmodern,” so too might gaming arrive at a point where we can no longer distinguish shooters from Soulslikes or platformers from puzzlers. In many cases, the lines dividing these terms are already much blurrier than they were in previous decades.

AI cannot have personal experiences, so games will likely become more and more grounded in personal experience. Unlike, say, Pixar’s recent move away from autobiographical storytelling in favor of “mass appeal” – a decision which, judging by the box office performance of the studio’s latest film, Elio, isn’t exactly paying off – developers pushing for authenticity will want to draw from ideas they cannot get from LLMs. Think Ryan and Amy Green’s That Dragon, Cancer, about their child’s battle with terminal illness, Adam Robinson-Yu’s A Short Hike, inspired by memories of past hiking trips, or even Cory Barlog basing Kratos’ relationship with Atreus on his own struggles entering fatherhood.

Chances are, developers will also become increasingly keen on exploring the darker, messier, more confusing aspects of human nature and existence. The side that AI – being non-human – cannot comprehend. ChatGPT has the emotional complexity of your most obnoxious LinkedIn connection, and could never – as journalist Ioan Marc Jones points out in The Bookseller’s article about AI’s expected impact on writing – start a story like Albert Camus begins The Stranger: “Maman died today. Or yesterday maybe, I don’t know.” Think, here, of Papers, Please, which lets players explore the psychological conundrums of working as a border patrol officer in a semi-dystopian society, or Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice’s nuanced portrayal of psychosis.

Finally, AI-generated content often looks polished and perfect to the point of actually being kind of ugly and uncanny, so tomorrow’s games might embrace flaws, imperfections, and other signs of hands-on tinkering that let the humanity behind them shine through. Indeed, if AI won’t speed up triple-A development through automation, it may well do so by convincing AI resisting perfectionists to let go of some of their more compulsive, time-consuming tendencies. Red Dead Redemption 2 didn’t need horse testicle physics to reach the heights that Rockstar wanted to reach. Hell, it didn’t even need Guarma, yet the studio’s insistence on meeting such seemingly arbitrary and ultimately pointless benchmarks for size and detail contributed to a crunch culture so infamously brutal we’re still talking about it today, nearly a decade later.

As with painting, what games lose in visual and technical polish they’ll make up for in conceptual depth. Before the camera, painting was all about what was being painted, not how it was painted. Painting today, on the other hand, typically isn’t about the painting itself so much as how we, the viewer, interact with it: how artists manipulate shape and color to draw attention to the ways culture and brain chemistry quietly shape our perception. Just as the Mona Lisa makes you forget you’re looking at a painting as opposed to a real person, many triple-A games today want you to forget you’re playing a game and make you feel like you’re inside some kind of Hollywood blockbuster instead. Tomorrow’s games – rejecting the immersive potential of AI – will want to make it clear that you are, in fact, playing a game: something invented, constructed, and meta.

While many creatives fear that AI will put them out of work, there are convincing reasons to believe this will not happen – at least, not to the apocalyptic levels they anticipate. Paul Downs, a CG animator and animation teacher in Florida who I spoke to for a different, upcoming IGN article about animation, told me he believes that “AI slop will cancel itself out.” The more low-quality AI-generated content gets released into the world, he reasons, the more people will hunger for genuinely human art. This would be true of any artform, games included.

Two other seasoned artists I spoke to – Dariush Derakhshani and Sam Nielson – both agreed. Derakhshani recalled a time when his supervisors used GenAI to storyboard a film, only to give the job to a human when the results proved completely unusable. Comments by EA’s Andrew Wilson or DreamWorks co-founder Jeffrey Katzenberg – who once predicted that AI would slash labor costs by up to 90% – are, as far as Derakhshani is concerned, nothing but “empty posturing to inflate stock prices.”

Nielson, who teaches at BYU and worked as a designer on the Game Boy Advance game LEGO Bionicle: Quest for the Toa, echoes the results of the various Game Developer surveys, arguing that “the inherent complexity of both design and storytelling” and the “specific psychological criteria” for how audiences respond to those things make it difficult for AI to fully automate creative processes. “A retired colleague who taught 3D animation used to say that students who were hoping to find the button that makes animation easy were making a mistake,” he told me, offering an anecdote that – to my ears – rings true for gaming also. “Because once that button is invented, everyone will push it.”

Then again, perhaps not everyone. In a future where many companies, big and small, will turn to AI to automate significant and in some cases just about all parts of their production processes, we can be sure that a number of creative and ambitious developers will keep on making games that reflect and relish in the unmistakably human craft behind them.

Tim Brinkhof is a freelance writer specializing in art and history. After studying journalism at NYU, he has gone on to write for Vox, Vulture, Slate, Polygon, GQ, Esquire and more.

Death Stranding 2 isn't even a year old, but the PC version is already on the way in just a couple of weeks. When it launched on PS5, it was one of the most beautiful games on the platform, and while that would usually mean it's kind of hard to run on PC, the system requirements are forgiving.

Unlike some recent PC launches, Sony released different quality standards for its minimum and recommended system requirements, which should help pin down what to expect when you try to run the game on your PC. For instance, the minimum spec calls for either an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1660 or an AMD Radeon RX 5500 XT, which should run the game at 1080p with low settings, at 30 fps.

If you want to max out the game, though, you're going to need a bit more hardware, but it's still pretty reasonable. The recommended spec calls for an RTX 3070 or a Radeon RX 6800, and will run the game at 1440p with the High quality preset at 60 fps. Not bad.

I went ahead and listed all of Sony's recommended PC specs below, but as long as you have a relatively modern PC, the game should be able to run flawlessly onj your machine. Nixxes, the studio handling the PC port has also added a "portable preset" which should make it run smoothly on PC handhelds like the Steam Deck or the Xbox Ally X.

Humble Requirements

Even at the high end, Death Stranding 2's system requirements are pretty humble by today's standards. While the GeForce RTX 4080 seems like a lot, keep in mind that this is likely for maxing out the game at 4K, which you very much don't need to do.

Keep in mind that the minimum spec is calling for a GTX 1660, which was a low-end card when it came out in 2019, and that was almost seven years ago now. I won't know exactly how this game performs until I'm able to run it on my own hardware, but the wide range of GPUs being represented here likely means that the game is incredibly scalable.

It's also important to note that even on the PS5 Pro, Death Stranding 2 did not use ray tracing, which means the higher graphics settings are going to be a lot more approachable than other recent AAA games – unless, of course, ray tracing is added to the PC version. Luckily, Nixxes is also adding support for DLSS, XeSS, FSR and Guerilla's Pico upscaler, so you should be able to find some way to boost your performance.

Death Stranding 2 launches on PC March 19th, so at least we won't have to wait too long to see how it performs.

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

Magic: The Gathering just kicked off its schedule for 2026 with Lorwyn Eclipsed, but it won’t be long until we’re teaming up with the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles for their own set in March.

The next set will get its own Draft Night boxed set for players to enjoy right out of the box, and it’s now back in stock at Amazon for the first time in a good while. Here’s what’s included, and how you can save almost $30 as well.

Disney and WEBTOON have teamed up to create 'Mickey X F1 Racing to the Top!,' an original vertical comics series launching in March that aims to combine the creativity and imagination of Mickey & Friends and the excitement and drama of Formula 1.

'Mickey X F1 Racing to the Top!' will launch on March 6 during the Formula 1 Australian Grand Prix, and it will be available on WEBTOON's global platforms throughout the entire Formula 1 race season.

New episodes will drop during each race weekend, and the original story the comic will tell is inspired by the "high-octane thrills and teamwork of elite racing," and will see "Mickey, Minnie, Donald, and Goofy come together to help support a racing team in crisis, demonstrating the power of friendship and collaboration to overcome adversity."

"The Duckburg F1 fan club, led by Mickey Mouse, is invited to shadow a racing team to create a behind-the-scenes documentary," the official synopsis reads. "But when that team suddenly collapses at the very beginning of the season, Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck and friends step up to keep the project alive, filling key roles themselves and recommending Jun, a talented taxi driver chasing his lifelong dream of winning Formula 1, only to discover his teammate is his sister Lia, his ultimate rival who left him in the dust years before.

"Will Jun, with the help of Mickey Mouse, be able to overcome the old grudge, make peace with his sister and finally play as a team? It will be a long journey, to be covered at full speed on the Grand Prix tracks!"

For more in the world of Disney, check out our experience attending the Goofy's Mystery Tour Cast Member event at Walt Disney World and the latest updates on Hollywood Studios' The Magic of Disney Animation.

Adam Bankhurst is a writer for IGN. You can follow him on X/Twitter @AdamBankhurst, Instagram, and TikTok, and listen to his show, Talking Disney Magic.

The Scream series differentiates itself from other slasher series in many ways, beginning with its meta approach, but one other notable aspect is its lack of an ongoing villain. In 2022’s Scream (AKA Scream 5), Amber Freeman, discussing the movie-within-a-movie franchise used for much of the self-referential comedy, Stab, directly brings this up. Says Amber, “You know what the biggest problem with the Stab movies is? There's no Michael Myers or Jason Voorhees. No bad guy to keep coming back!”

Of course, that’s never really been a problem for Scream as the concept is part of its baked-in formula. Rather than an ongoing killer, Scream has mostly stuck to the same ongoing heroine, Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell), along with other key characters like Dewey Riley (David Arquette) and Gale Weathers (Courteney Cox). Each movie is a whodunnit, with a new killer donning the familiar Ghostface persona, complete with mask and robe, until their identity is revealed in the final act. Almost all of these movies have multiple killers too, working in tandem together, meaning as we go into the new Scream 7 (review), there’s already been plenty of Ghostfaces to go around.

But which of them has stood out the most and ranks as the best? We’re here to help!

13. Jason Carvey (Scream VI)

Scream VI’s Jason kind of has to go last, if you include him at all, simply for accomplishing so little. Well, unless we also gave a ranking to his would-be partner, Greg, who never actually managed to fully become Ghostface, despite intending to.

Blackmore University student Jason (played by Tony Revolori) wanted to follow in the footsteps of previous Ghostface Richie Kirsch, with a new murder spree alongside his intended partner Greg that would “finish Richie’s movie” - as in commit new murders to inspire a crowd-pleasing new Stab movie. But on the very night Jason killed his first victim, both Jason and Greg found out the hard way that there were others with their own Ghostface plans who saw these two as an inconvenience to be quickly disposed of.

We didn’t learn much more about the full extent of Jason and Greg’s plans because they become the kind of pre-title fodder that any good Scream (and Stab) fan knows is usually there just to set the scene, not be the focus.

12. Ethan Landry (Scream VI)

You’re about to notice a logjam of Scream VI killers here at the bottom, which is funny, because Scream VI is a really good movie. And on top of that, the final showdown between that film’s heroines, Samantha (Melissa Barrera) and Tara Carpenter (Jenna Ortega), and these particular killers is awesome, with the Carpenter sisters taking out each of the Scream franchise’s first-ever Ghostface trio in satisfying and suitably intense ways.

But that makes it all the more glaring that the actual killer reveal is kind of a dud. Yes, it’s a fun idea to have it be the family of the previous film’s killer, Richie, but the characters chosen aren’t exactly the most exciting, particularly Ethan, played by Jack Champion. Though sorta-kinda part of the central friend group in the film, by virtue of being “Core Four” character Chad’s roommate, Ethan is kept at arm’s length, not interacting with the others as much except in a jokey manner. He’s the nerdy virgin and that’s about it. Though it is amusing how Chad’s sister Mindy continually suspects he’s Ghostface before it turns out she’s right, there’s not much more to him than that.

But man is it great when Tara literally twists the knife after she stabs him in the mouth…

11. Quinn Bailey (Scream VI)

Liana Liberato’s Quinn rates just above her brother for a handful of reasons, including her simultaneous moxie and restraint. First off, she’s just a likeable character. Introduced as the roommate to Sam and Tara Carpenter, she’s funny and quirky and the idea that she has a, ahem, healthy amount of sexual partners is treated in an amusing manner. As Quinn describes it, she’s not “the slutty roommate” - she’s just sex positive.

Also, kudos on her stellar dead-body acting when she needed to fake her own death. But most of all, she stands out for feeling like the only one of the family who has a more grounded (by Ghostface standards) attitude when she, her brother, and her dad are revealed as the killers. She genuinely seems angry and menacing and vengeance-minded the whole time, while her brother and father are going just a wee bit – okay a lot – bigger.

Quinn’s kill count is probably low, most likely limited only to franchise perennial Gale Weathers’ boyfriend, but her showdown with Gale is memorable, as she comes closer than anyone ever has to finally taking out the intrepid reporter. And on top of that, she’s the first-ever Ghostface to actually get Gale on the phone for a classic Ghostface phone call scene, and that’s something, dang it!

10. Wayne Bailey (Scream VI)

Take it down a notch, Wayne!

Dermot Mulroney is a good actor, but the decision to have him go so very big, performance-wise, when his character Wayne is revealed as the patriarch of a very twisted, homicidal family, briefly knocks the wind out of the sails in Scream VI. It doesn’t mesh with how Wayne had behaved up until that point and it also feels contradictory because Wayne doesn’t personally care about the Stab movies - he just wants revenge for Samantha Carpenter killing his son Richie. But he’s behaving like the wackiest Stab superfan we’ve ever seen.

Wayne rates above his kids though for being the mastermind of the New York City Ghostface killings and for how he used his position as a police detective to further all sorts of Ghostface shenanigans. This goes back even before the family began killing people to when he helped Richie buy artifacts connected to the previous Ghostface murders for his first born’s macabre shrine. He then was able to successfully fake his daughter’s death and cast doubt on Kirby Reed, implicating her as Ghostface (though we’re still not sure if the stuff about Kirby no longer being FBI was true or not?).

On the kill-count front, it seems likely he was the Ghostface who stalked Sam and Tara in that bodega, taking out three different victims back-to-back-to-back in an intense and uncharacteristic group-kill scene unlike any in the series. This included him using a gun, in what’s become a debated fan topic, since that makes him the only Ghostface to use a firearm while in their full masked persona.

So yeah, Wayne did a lot during his Ghostface stint, but did he need to be so Crazy with a capital C about it?!

9. Charlie Walker (Scream 4)

Among Scream’s many murderous partners, there’s pretty much always a Ghostface hierarchy where you can tell who’s the one who’s coming up with most of the plans and calling the shots. And in a couple of cases, that hierarchy gets underlined in a big way by an outright betrayal as it turns out one Ghostface was just the pawn of another. Such is the case with Scream 4’s Charlie, who found out the hard way that his partner Jill had no intention of sharing the falsified “We’re the only survivors!” spotlight with him when she stabbed and killed him.

Up until then, Rory Culkin’s Charlie had been a decent Ghostface. With Jill needing to play her pre-determined role as the seeming main target of this killing spree, it was up to Charlie to carry out most of the actual murders, which he embraced wholeheartedly. And there was a clever hiding-in-plain-sight aspect to making him part of a nerdy movie-loving duo alongside his pal (until he murdered him) Robbie, which gave him more cover than he might have otherwise.

Oh, and though it’s delivered through the ol’ Ghostface voice changer (as said by the ever-great Roger L. Jackson, who’s been the Ghostface alter-ego voice from the start), it’s technically Charlie who has one of the funniest Ghostface lines in the franchise’s history as he gets outright pissed off about being misidentified on the phone as Jill’s ex-boyfriend and yells “This isn’t fucking Trevor!” in exasperation.

8. Mickey Altieri (Scream 2)

Obviously Timothy Olyphant rules, and kudos to Scream 2 for giving one of Hollywood’s greatest modern cowboy types his first high-profile role. But as a Ghostface, Olyphant’s Mickey isn’t exactly a standout.

First and foremost is that he just isn’t in enough of the movie. He’s established early on as one of Sidney’s college friends, but his appearances are rather scattershot, and he rarely gets a moment to stand out - except for voicing his false (in retrospect, of course) suspicions about Sid’s boyfriend, Derek. When he takes off the Ghostface mask, there really isn’t much excitement behind it because of how the movie has sidelined him so much.

That being said, once he is revealed as Ghostface, he gets a couple of strong moments, including his diabolical treatment of Derek, who he pretends is his partner in front of Sid, only to then shoot and kill him. The fact that he made Derek’s last moments extra emotionally agonizing is pretty dang cruel, which gets him some points, because remember, Ghostfaces are bad people!

Also, he’s interesting as the only Ghostface in Scream movie history who wants to be caught as part of his endgame, excited by the prospect of a big televised trial where he’s going to blame the movies for corrupting him. It’s a nice change-up from the norm of wanting to frame someone, which helps him briefly stand out… Except that he was always a pawn in someone else’s game, as proven when he’s oh-so-casually betrayed by fellow Ghostface Nancy Loomis, who guns him down.

7. Roman Bridger (Scream 3)

Played by Scott Foley, Roman’s a tricky one because he’s got some clear trouble spots, starting with the fact that he’s Ghostface in the weakest Scream movie, Scream 3. Also, the big reveal about his identity and his role in past events is a massive retcon that is not always embraced by the fanbase. And on top of that, that reveal is predicated on him telling Sidney who he really is in a movie that never had these two characters meet a single time before he takes off his mask, so from her point of view, he’s just some random guy suddenly showing up to take the spotlight.

Of course, that random guy then quickly explains he’s the brother she never knew she had, the most recent Ghostface who’s been killing his way through Los Angeles, and the guy behind everything in this series, given he’s the one who first pushed Billy Loomis to kill Roman and Sidney’s mother prior to the events of the first film. That last point may be divisive, but it positions him as a key player in the entire series, like it or not.

And then there’s the fact that you have to give Roman some extra credit because he’s the only solo Ghostface in the entire series. He had no partner to rely on or to help cover for him, and was doing it on his own with even greater danger of being caught. That takes initiative!

And jeez, he killed the entire main cast of Stab 3, the movie he was the director of! Think about how crazy that is and how much that would be talked about for the rest of time among infamous Hollywood scandals.

6. Nancy Loomis (Scream 2)

There’s nothing like the love of a mother, which was proven once more when original Ghostface Billy Loomis’ mom Nancy took up her baby boy’s mantle and set out to get revenge on Sidney for killing her son.

As it turned out, Billy must have gotten all of his own natural diabolical serial killer prowess from Momma, because Nancy took to her new mission like a pro. She gave herself a makeover and a new identity as seemingly awkward, small-town reporter Debbie Salt, while simultaneously recruiting her accomplice Mickey on the internet and getting him inserted at Windsor College alongside Sidney. And Mickey was the perfect dupe for her, not realizing she never intended to let him get arrested and have the showy trial he dreamed of.

It seems likely Nancy let Mickey take on most of the actual killings at Windsor, but look, as much as it hurts when fan favorite characters are taken out, Nancy was the one who managed to get the drop on Scream’s first movie geek extraordinaire, Randy Meeks, after he dared disparage her Billy. And when you’re accomplishing that, and bringing the audience that much pain, it’s a notch on your bloody belt.

Plus, Nancy gave us Laurie Metcalf as a Ghostface, and who doesn’t enjoy seeing Roseanne’s Aunt Jackie get homicidal?

5. Amber Freeman (Scream 2022)

There’s an argument to be made for putting Amber above her partner, given that she committed most of the murders in the fifth Scream movie, one of which was an incredibly notable character, and that Scream 5 filmmakers Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett have speculated she was likely the one really “leading from behind,” despite how it might have appeared. However, that latter bit of pondering was never made canon, and she does suffer a bit from just feeling like part of the friend group for much of the film without a lot of moments of her own (an excised plot point about her and Tara Carpenter actually being ex-girlfriends might have both alleviated that but also made her too obvious a suspect).

Still, by the end of the film, we realize Amber is a particularly passionate and cruel Ghostface. And this includes the revelation that she’s the one who pulled off the fan-agonizing move of finally taking out the beloved Dewey Riley after he managed to survive so many other near-fatal attacks before. “It’s an honor” she declared while slicing Dewey open, underlining the significance of what she’s doing.

When she’s revealed as Ghostface, she also stands out for how much future Academy Award-winner Mikey Madison absolutely goes for it as this demented teenager, who mocks Gale and Sidney – though she’ll come to regret that – to their faces with how she killed Dewey, while prematurely declaring “Your story’s over!”

4. Richie Kirsch (Scream 2022)

In a film series that’s always been oh-so meta and self-aware both about the movie tropes it’s trafficking in and how the audience perceives them, along with how that changes through the years, Scream 5’s Richie got to be the avatar for the ugly side of modern fandom in a notably witty and wicked way.

Richie’s motivation for going on a murder spree, along with tricking a woman into thinking he loved her when he really intended to frame her for his crimes? Well, there was a sequel to a movie he loved that he really hated! Who could blame him after that!?

Richie’s plan is to orchestrate a new Ghostface murder spree built around a “story” he thinks will make for a great Stab movie. Then the producers of the franchise will base the next Stab movie on these murders, course-correcting after the loathed Stab 8 dared to stray too far from the formula.

We’re all familiar with how nasty things can quickly get these days when fans feel “betrayed” by a new installment of a franchise they love failing to meet expectations, with some of the most intense folks sounding particularly… heated. From earnestly asking how fandom can possibly be perceived as toxic to the fact that the fictional movie that set him and Amber off was a sequel to a long-running franchise directed by freaking Rian Johnson, the commentary Richie embodies regarding where things can go with overly “enthusiastic” fans in the modern era is very on the nose, and also very funny and perfect for a Scream movie. Richie plotted an intricate murder spree because he's the biggest, most loyal Stab fan ever, and this is how he’ll fix the movies he loves so very much.

Another reason Richie works so well as a Ghostface is that Jack Quaid makes for the perfect seemingly sweet, dorky boyfriend type you hope truly has his girlfriend Sam’s best interests at heart, making it all the worse when he stabs her and reveals the truth. “I know, it’s a bummer it’s me!” he tells her. Which it is, which is also why it’s great.

3. Stu Macher (Scream)

Stu’s just the best! He’s so fun and goofy and likeable in that manner we’ve come to expect from the man portraying him, Matthew Lillard. Well, okay, he is an awful murderer too, but nobody’s perfect.

Ultimately, Stu is clearly the follower in his Ghostface partnership with Billy, who’s calling the shots and personally motivated when it comes to why the first-ever Woodsboro murder spree happens. But you can’t deny Stu didn’t embrace his role with gusto. He was all in, serving as both a perfect sidekick and partner, fully immersed in all of the murder, manipulation, and movie trivia phone calls that came with the territory. Lillard makes Stu a funny, quirky presence throughout the film, but it's his performance in the film’s big reveal sequence and ensuing showdown with Sid where he really gets to shine, as we see just how gleefully deranged and nearly Joker-esque he can be. It’s the kind of Big Crazy Killer vibe that other Ghostfaces are often living in the shadow of.

Oh, and he allowed himself to get grievously injured by Billy as part of their plan to look like the survivors at the end. Of course, Stu didn’t end up reacting so well after Billy stabbed him, which is where that whole likeable/disarmingly funny thing takes center stage again (including some healthy improv-ing from the intrepid Mr. Lillard). Because yes, Stu has other memorable lines like “It’s a scream baby!” and “It was fun!” but his most relatable moment is probably yelling “You hit me with the phone, you dick!” at Billy, along with becoming a blubbering mess and crying “My mom and dad are gonna be so mad at me!” when he believes Sidney is going to be able to successfully get them arrested. That might not make for a scary Ghostface moment, but it sure is an entertaining one.

2. Jill Roberts (Scream 4)

We know, we know, how can Stu not be number two when he’s so funny and Matthew Lillard is so great!? All of which is absolutely true, but we’re ranking Ghostfaces here and in the Ghostface realm, Stu wasn’t a mastermind. And when it comes to those who took the reins in the Ghostface dynamic, Emma Roberts’ Jill stands tall, despite her short stature.

Jill is as demented a Ghostface as you’ll find, coldly willing to kill all of her high school friends, her cousin Sidney Prescott, and even her own mother in order to achieve her ultimate goal. And that particular goal, to be famous for the sake of being famous, is another time Scream has stood out for shrewdly parodying a particularly online mindset. In fact, Scream 4 feels somewhat ahead of its time in this regard, because Jill’s motivations already worked in 2011, but eerily feel even more part of our zeitgeist these days as we’ve seen so many more people attract huge followings for the most random or inexplicable of reasons.

Jill has one of the best Ghostface reveal sequences ever, both because of her proclamation of why she’s doing what she’s doing – “I don’t need friends, I need fans!” standing out as her most iconic and oft-quoted line – and for how she goes about setting the scene to look like the only survivor of another massacre. Jill may be “remaking” what Billy and Stu did, but she’d doing it in her own impressive manner, from how coldly she kills both her ex-boyfriend Trevor and her partner and secret lover Charlie in order to frame them, to brutally stabbing Sidney. Frankly, she was so close to getting away with it too if she’d just made sure Sid was dead.

But the biggest feat of all is seeing her on her own go about causing all the brutal damage she needs to sell her lone-survivor scenario. From using Trevor’s dead hand to scratch her face and yank out her hair, to bracing a knife against a wall to deeply stab herself, to throwing her entire body through a glass table, Jill is fully committed, just not in the way she should have been if she’d gotten proper psychological testing.

1. Billy Loomis (Scream)

Let’s face it: Billy’s got to be number one. He was the first! Sure, Roman was the one who pushed him into killing Maureen Prescott, but Billy kept going after that with a much larger murder spree thanks to his own psychotic initiative. And presumably he was the one who came up with the whole “let’s wear this cool mask and call people with horror movie trivia questions” thing when the Ghostface murders really kicked in, though perhaps Stu helped with some brainstorming.

In so many ways, Billy really set the template for a Ghostface, which included his cruelly close relationship to Sidney prior to the murders and how diabolical it was that he was pretending to be a loving boyfriend while also the one killing her mother, her friends, and ultimately planning to kill her. And he took it to the next level of manipulation, leaning into and using that he knew he’d be seen as an obvious suspect before getting Stu to fake it so it seemed he himself was attacked, stabbed (and, for a moment it appeared, even killed) right in front of Sidney, both briefly making it seem like there was no way he could be the killer – and make her feel terrible for ever suspecting him – and then making it all the worse when he revealed he actually was the killer moments later.

His impact on the series has been profound, with later killers like Nancy and Roman turning out to be either related to him or directly connected to him. And then things went even further when the fifth and sixth movie introduced a new heroine, Samantha, who was his secret daughter, setting the stage for Skeet Ulrich’s Billy to become the first Ghostface to ever return onscreen in later installments of this supernatural-free series, albeit through Sam’s visions of him.

In Scream VI, when the shrine to all of the Ghostfaces is revealed, it’s Billy’s robe and mask that stands at the center, given an extra bit of reverence above the others. Which is fitting for the guy who first reminded us that we all go a little mad sometimes.

But who do you think is the greatest Ghostface of all time? Vote in our poll, and let’s discuss in the comments!

With Housemarque's new game Saros on the horizon, now is a great time to boot up the developer's previous release, Returnal. If you haven't added this one to your library yet but have been waiting for a good time to grab it, this is your chance: Amazon's dropped its price to $29.83 (see it here).

Considering it usually comes with a price tag of $69.99, this deal saves you 57% on the game overall. It's also just a few dollars away from its lowest price point at the retailer of $24.70. That's not too bad at all. Plus, there's still plenty of time before Saros is released, so the timing of jumping into Returnal couldn't be better. You've plenty of time to get a feel for Housemarque's style of roguelike shooter before jumping into the studio's new take on that formula.

Returnal for $29.83

In the run-up to Resident Evil Requiem’s release this week, the official Japanese X account for Resident Evil has come up with a quirky way to promote the game. On Tuesday, it made a joke post that Resident Evil’s nefarious pharmaceutical company Umbrella Corp. was filing a lawsuit against the real-life Nissin Noodles over their similarity to Umbrella Noodles.

Umbrella Noodles have appeared in several Resident Evil games. They were an item in 2003’s Resident Evil Outbreak and, more recently, showed up on posters around Raccoon City in the Resident Evil 3 remake. Umbrella Noodles’ packaging is a spoof on the red and white lettering of Nissin’s Cup Noodles, a cheeky Easter Egg for players who noticed. Real-life Japanese food company Nissin was founded by instant noodle inventor Momofuku Ando in 1948. After putting the world’s first instant ramen on the market in 1958, Nissin has been selling their Cup Noodles ever since 1971.

However, on February 24, Resident Evil’s official X account posted an announcement that Umbrella Corp. had submitted a complaint to the Raccoon City District Court, alleging that Nissin’s noodles significantly infringe upon Umbrella Corp.’s intellectual property rights regarding Umbrella Noodles. It’s worth noting that even if Umbrella Corp. were a real company, it set up shop in 1968 with an initial focus on biological weaponry, meaning that it’s unlikely it developed Umbrella Noodles before Nissin’s offering!

However, if there’s one thing S.T.A.R.S members can attest to, it’s that Umbrella Corp. does not give up easily. The official Japanese Resident Evil account then escalated the drama by posting a video featuring an Umbrella Corp. scientist apologizing to those who accidentally purchased “imposer” Nissin Noodles instead of Umbrella Noodles, and explaining how Nissin "copied" the recipe.

As evidence, they allege that they were able to recreate Umbrella Noodles from Nissin Cup Noodles with a 99.9% success rate, simply by adding entrails and a herby, mostly basil-based sauce to Nissin’s product (although it made Umbrella employees who ate it a little itchy... probably best not to ask where those entrails are from). Sharing the video, Nissin clapped back with, "However you look at it, you're the ones doing the copying!"

どうみてもパクリはそちらです。 https://t.co/7VvG8kqWQX

— カップヌードル (@cupnoodle_jp) February 25, 2026

Adding even more hot water to the situation, Japanese shoppertainment company Yume Group (who last week released a bizarre ultra-limited edition of Resident Evil Requiem bundled with exercise equipment, which sold out almost instantly), launched the over-the-top Umbrella Noodles/Resident Evil Requiem ad below. A terrified Grace Ashcroft comes across the Japanese infomercial duo casually munching on and singing the praises of Umbrella Noodles (the ad notes that Umbrella Noodles are not a real product, although Resident Evil Requiem is a real game).

夢グループの石田です。

今日は、『アンブレラヌードル』のご紹介です。
びっくりの美味しさ！
いったい何でできてるのかなぁ・・・？
みなさん、ぜひお試しください。

『バイオハザード レクイエム』はこちらからお買い求めください。https://t.co/pSdtjNwJ0S#バイオレクイエム pic.twitter.com/zfEBhiAy5G

— 夢グループ (@yumegroup) February 26, 2026

Soon after, the official account for Nissin Cup Noodles reacted, sharing the ad with a, “What the hell is this?”

The fake lawsuit and sudden focus on Umbrella Noodles sparked much amusement from Japanese-speaking commenters. “No way can Umbrella beat Nissin. You think a Tyrant can stop a cheese alien?” joked one fan, referencing the mascot that sometimes appears in Nissin Cup Noodle commercials (like this one from 2001). “Umbrella Noodles are delicious, yeah? Although a huge eye’ll appear on your shoulder the day after you eat them,” quipped another.

Given all this sudden focus on Umbrella Noodles, it seems likely that they will pop up in Resident Evil Requiem too. Perhaps Leon and Grace will be able to find Umbrella Noodles in Resident Evil Requiem and chow down on them as they explore the ruins of Raccoon City.

We've got plenty more on Resident Evil Requiem, including how long Resident Evil Requiem takes to beat, and we've tracked Resident Evil Requiem's global release times.

"Like the result of an experiment conducted in an underground Umbrella Corporation lab, Resident Evil Requiem successfully splices two separate strains of survival horror together into the one highly infectious new mutation," IGN wrote in our full Resident Evil Requiem review, which returned a 9/10 score.

Verity Townsend is a Japan-based freelance writer who previously served as editor, contributor and translator for the game news site Automaton West. She has also written about Japanese culture and movies for various publications.

Writer and director Damien Leone has issued an update on horror movie sequel Terrifier 4, addressing what he called “speculation and false information” doing the rounds online.

In a post on Facebook, Leone confirmed that the Terrifier 4 script is “very close” to completion, and that pre-production is set for this spring. However, there’s still no official release date.

“This is the most precious script I’ve written for many reasons, but it’s also the most challenging,” Leone explained. “There’s a lot of material to tackle and a lot riding on this one, not just creatively but emotionally.

“We’ve built something special together over the years. The cast and crew who have been here since the beginning deserve a finale that honors their dedication, and the fans who’ve championed this franchise deserve something unforgettable.

“In all honesty, I’m thrilled with the way it’s turning out and confident it will deliver. I will officially announce when the script is complete on my social media pages which also means we’ll be moving into pre-production. If you don’t see it coming from or confirmed by me, then it’s not official.

“Thank you for your patience. I promise it will be worth the wait!”

It’s worth noting that Leone calls Terrifier 4 the “finale” here, confirming plans to end the franchise with the fourth entry.

Terrifier began life in full-blown movie form in 2016, and revolves around demonic serial killer Art the Clown. 2022’s Terrifier 2 was a box office success (check out IGN's Terrifier 2 review here), and Terrifier 3 followed in 2024, bringing in even more money from theaters (here's our Terrifier 3 review).

Wesley is Director, News at IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.

Resident Evil Requiem includes numerous Easter eggs and unlockable extras, but none seemingly as complex as 'The Final Puzzle.'

Warning! Resident Evil Requiem puzzle spoilers follow:

As with other recent Resident Evil games, Requiem includes a list of challenges which add completion points to your playthrough score. At the bottom of the list is the appropriately-named 'The Final Puzzle' — which is proving to be something of a headscratcher.

IGN has a work-in-progress guide to The Final Puzzle where significant progress has been made through the challenge's convoluted early stages, which feel more complex than anything seen in any other Resident Evil game to date — and, seemingly, with still some way left to go.

Exactly what the final outcome or reward for the challenge might be remains unknown — but as the game continues its launch around the world, the hunt for answers here will undoubtedly become a major point of community focus.

The game's own description for the challenge offers only the vaguest of hints, to "Let the sweet pair hear the voice." The mechanics of the puzzle, or at least its first part, appear to rely on players picking up or examining a variety of objects throughout the game to determine fragments of a code.

Requiem's trail of clues relies on players picking up a specific severed hand which, if obtained, can also be scanned later on to provide a hidden RNA code in a blood sample analysis machine. Other items also hide their own codes, providing (with a bit more puzzling work) a version of that RNA sequence that can be plugged into a safe that features buttons labelled with a Star, Sun and Moon.

After that... well, it's here the trail has gone cold, though likely not for long. We'll be keeping an eye on further progress made throughout the next few days, as players uncover further steps. For now, however, it's just fun to see that the game hides this kind of puzzle.

For a far more granular look at each step to-date, IGN's work-in-progress guide to The Final Puzzle is right here. We've also logged how long Resident Evil Requiem takes to beat, and tracked Resident Evil Requiem's global release times.

"Like the result of an experiment conducted in an underground Umbrella Corporation lab, Resident Evil Requiem successfully splices two separate strains of survival horror together into the one highly infectious new mutation," IGN wrote in our full Resident Evil Requiem review, which returned a 9/10 score.

Tom Phillips is IGN's News Editor. You can reach Tom at tom_phillips@ign.com or find him on Bluesky @tomphillipseg.bsky.social

Amazon’s Woot store has been known to offer a bunch of deals in the past, but it might just have outdone itself this time around with its brand new "Video Games For All!" sale.

Not only is the retailer offering discounts on games like 2025 hits Monster Hunter Wilds and Pokémon Legends Z-A, but it’s got a handy "LEVEL20" discount code that makes them even cheaper. But, there's a limited time left to take advantage, as the promo code will expire by 11:59 PM CT on February 27.

That LEVEL20 promo code makes games like Monster Hunter Wilds just $13.59 (just wow!). Perfect for testing out the latest performance enhancements on all platforms and taking on the latest endgame content.

Legends Z-A, on the other hand, is just $35.92 on Switch 1. IGN's Rebekah Valentine gave the game an 8 out of 10 in her review last year, saying “Pokémon Legends: Z-A finally feels like Game Freak hitting its stride in Pokémon’s 3D era, with a fun setting to explore, a well-written story, and a total battle system overhaul that works surprisingly well.”

You can upgrade to the Switch 2 version digitally as well for just $10 after making your purchase, making this a certified bargain.

It’s not just newer titles, either. Elden Ring, heralded as one of the greatest games of all time (IGN awarded it a 10 out of 10 in our review), is just $15.99 on PS5 with the discount code as well.

Super Mario Bros. Wonder, which is getting Switch 2 features next month, got a 9 out of 10 review score from IGN, is down to $37.59 with the promo code.

Super Mario Galaxy 1 and 2 are just $47.19 for the pair, while if you’ve not played Breath of the Wild yet, it’s $35.19. That's just the tip of the iceberg as well, as there's some unbelievable discounts all round.

Lloyd Coombes is an experienced freelancer in tech, gaming and fitness seen at Polygon, Eurogamer, Macworld, TechRadar and many more. He's a big fan of Magic: The Gathering and other collectible card games, much to his wife's dismay.

It doesn’t sound like Scream 7 is the end for the horror franchise — Neve Campbell, who plays protagonist Sidney Prescott, already has a “great” idea for Scream 8, and it will be made as long as Scream 7 is a success.

Speaking to Deadline, Scream 7 writer and director Kevin Williamson confirmed that he and Campbell started discussing Scream 8 as they worked on this new movie.

“When you’re sitting on the set at 3am in the morning, you’re like, ‘Well, what would Scream 8 be about?’ And you just start spit-balling,” Williamson said. “And Neve had this great idea, and everyone seemed to run with it So yeah, if this movie works and people want it, we’re here for the fans. So, if they want it, we’ll certainly give it to them.”

Early indications are that Scream 7 is set for box office success. The Hollywood Reporter said Scream 7 is projected to debut with a 3-day total that lands between $40 and $45 million at the domestic box office, up on prior projections.

Earlier this week, Campbell confirmed that she skipped 2022’s Scream 6 because her salary offer didn’t reflect the 25 years of dedication she felt she gave to this story. “When I made that decision, I just didn’t think I could live with myself walking on set,” the actress recently told CBS Mornings in an interview about Scream 7. “I just didn’t feel right. I just knew that my value to this franchise was bigger than what had been offered. For me, I needed to make that choice.”

According to Variety, Campbell secured a nearly $7 million deal for Scream 7, whereas Scream mainstay Courteney Cox was paid $2 million.

Wesley is Director, News at IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.

Marvel Rivals players are asking NetEase Games to take action after the emergence of an unofficial bounty website triggered fears that it could harm the community it’s supposedly trying to protect.

Fans of the hero shooter sounded the alarm when third-party site Intlist.org went live on February 22. Established by Marvel Rivals content creator and X/Twitter user EchoRivals, its official Discord page says the goal is to give players an avenue to name those who intentionally sabotage or “throw” multiplayer matches and “put a price on their head.”

Tired of griefers getting away with it? 🚨

I built @IntlistOrg - post a bounty on any thrower. The community queues in, claims it, and earns 80% of the pool. 💰

⚡ Free to post
🎮 6 games supported
💵 Payouts via PayPal

Portion of proceeds may go toward community tournaments -… pic.twitter.com/cipHg3WhnJ

— Carson (@EchoRivals) February 23, 2026

“Put a bounty on griefers & throwers,” the first post on its X account says, promising a system that offers an 80% payout for those who successfully throw matches in retaliation. “Someone queues in, throws it back, gets paid.”

Intlist allows any player to post bounties related to disruptive behavior across seven games: Deadlock, Overwatch, Valorant, Counter-Strike 2, League of Legends, Dota 2, and, of course, Marvel Rivals. The site has done its best to sell the pitch as a simple solution to a common issue, but as Marvel Rivals fans have pointed out, there a number of concerns going unaddressed.

Some have already called out how a widely used bounty website could cause a domino effect that sees not only griefers punished but everyone else, too. One Reddit user calling attention to the issue says they’ve already seen an increase in sabotaged matches for every kind of player, warning that “now every game is people throwing each other’s games.”

“Something tells me throwing the game of someone who throws already is not going to annoy anyone but the four unfortunate randoms on the team,” another popular reply from a fan says. “I do not see the point of this like at all.”

The Intlist account replied to the criticism above: “Collateral damage is an unfortunate reality of war.”

pic.twitter.com/LJJX8xQEgw

— Viper4K (@Viper4K) February 25, 2026

Another matter brought to the table by fans online revolves around how the community defines who is and isn’t sabotaging matches, as well as Intlist’s verification process. The primary purpose of the site was already facing scrutiny at launch, as players suspected there may be too few safeguards to keep well-meaning players from falling victim to retaliation through the bounty system. Reports that notable Marvel Rivals content creators like Jay3 had joined the list of offenders only added to these concerns.

Meanwhile, as of the publication of this story, Intlist has been pulled offline as the team backing it teases that “something big is coming.” Discord messages from EchoRivals paint a clearer picture, explaining that the site was locked down after they “detected unauthorized access to our database from a single bad actor.”

“A limited number of email addresses tied to bounty posts were exposed,” the post adds. “No passwords, payment info, or plaintext IP addresses were compromised - we don't store any of those. The site is temporarily offline while we lock everything down - we were not taken down, one person just decided to ruin it for everyone temporarily. We're also working on some upgrades while we're at it.”

Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2’s long-awaited Techmarine update is out now across all platforms as part of patch 12.0. It adds the new Techmarine class, a new melee weapon, a new Operation, DLCs, and balance updates.

The Techmarine is the big draw here. The new playable class — the first to hit the explosive third-person action game since launch — has a unique Servo-Gun ability that locks onto enemies in a line of sight and automatically fires at them while the Techmarine continues fighting in melee or range. It also has access to the new Omnissian Axe, which can deal massive damage to both a single target with its standard attacks and to surrounding enemies with its finishing heavy attacks.

“We hope you will really like the new class,” game director Dmitry Grigorenko said in a post on publisher Focus Entertainment’s website. “We've tried to make sure that this class plays differently from the rest.”

A number of changes were made based on feedback from the recent PTS, outlined in the patch notes below. “We've tried to address most of it, but there are some big changes that we didn't have time to implement,” Grigorenko explained. “There will be more improvements and perks reworks in upcoming patches.”

Elsewhere, patch 12.0 heralds the addition of Space Marine 2's first voice pack, which costs $4.99. This is not included in the Season Pass (and thus has upset some players who believe it should be part of the premium DLC package). It includes 450 re-recorded voicelines and a unique Space Marine Head cosmetic for each of the following Space Marine chapters: Blood Angels, Space Wolves, and Black Templars.

Resident Evil Requiem has finally arrived, ready to provide you with hours and hours of survival horror action, in which you can test your mettle as both Grace Ashcroft and Leon S. Kennedy. Much like its modern predecessors, Requiem boasts a reasonably stacked campaign, but just how long is it? Here, we’ll let you know exactly how many hours it took different members of the IGN team to finish the game, and what they prioritised doing with that time.

How Long is Resident Evil Requiem?

• Our fastest player finished the game in 4.5 hours.
• Our “slowest” player finished the game in 16 hours.

Everyone plays games differently, so read on for more details about how everyone played, how long it took to reach the credits, and how much extra time players spent exploring. Once you've finished the game yourself, be sure to submit your times on our sister website, How Long To Beat, and see how your time compares!

Jesse Gomez - Senior Video Producer

Completion Time: 8 hours and 59 minutes on Standard (Modern) / 4 hours and 38 minutes on Insanity.

Shy of just under nine hours, my first playthrough of Resident Evil Requiem consisted of meticulously hunting down every single Mr. Raccoon collectable, reading as many files as I could (I missed just three of the 75 available to find), and relishing in the blood-soaked glory of Leon's vast, yet costly arsenal.

If I wasn't so engrossed by exploring every nook and cranny of the Rhodes Hill Chronic Care Center and beyond for secrets, I'm sure I could’ve shaved an hour or two off my playtime. For my second playthrough, though, I cut that time practically in half. I dove into a run on Insanity difficulty right after hitting credits and, armed with knowledge of objectives and environment layouts from my first playthrough, I blitzed through it all in just over four hours and a half hours. Such speed does come with some hiccups, though; to Grace's dismay, I did get munched on a few times by the many monstrosities that stalk the care centers' halls.

Dale Driver - Associate Director, Video Programming

Completion Time: 16 hours on Standard (Modern)

I hit credits 16 hours into my playthrough of Resident Evil Requiem after choosing what I assume to be the “good” ending! I played through the game on the standard modern difficulty; the hardest option available out of the gate that doesn’t demand you deal with Ink Ribbons taking up inventory space.

I was quite thorough during my playthrough, making sure I got all the antique coins and all the safes' codes, and generally trying not to leave anything behind. When I got to Raccoon City later in the game, I spent a decent amount of time revisiting the classic locations and soaking up the nostalgia.

I did have an advantage that many first-time players won’t have, which I assume might have cut an hour or two from my playthrough. I’d previously played through the majority of the Rhodes Hill Chronic Care Center section for IGN’s preview of Resident Evil Requiem, so when it came to that section I already knew what I needed to find and where it was hidden. That certainly sped up the early hours for me.

So far, I’ve only finished the game once, but I definitely plan to dive back in for an Insanity run and see what I missed!

Tristan Ogilvie - Senior Video Editor + Reviewer

Completion Time: 10 hours on Standard (Modern)

It took me just over 10 hours to roll credits on Resident Evil Requiem, however that was to arrive at the shorter and what I consider to be the worse of its two possible endings. Man, I hate that ending so much! So, I immediately reloaded my save game to play through the other, better, ending, which added close to another 30 minutes onto my playtime.

I opted to play Requiem on the Standard (Modern) difficulty setting, mainly because I didn’t want to be restricted to using ink ribbons in order to save my game during Grace’s sections like you are on the Standard (Classic) setting. As the parent of two young kids who are liable to disrupt me at any moment and for no good reason, I need to have the ability to save my game without any restrictions.

However, I am now playing a second time through on Standard (Classic) and taking my time with it a bit more. I’ve still got a number of small things like notes and Mr. Raccoon bobbleheads to track down, as well as a few areas here and there tucked away in the Rhodes Hill Chronic Care Center that I didn’t fully explore the first time through.

I’m too much of a coward to tackle the game a third time on the Insanity difficulty setting, however if Capcom ends up adding a Mercenaries mode to Requiem at a later date I’ll come charging back harder than a zombie chef with the smell of blood in his nostrils.

Matt Purslow - Executive Editor of Features

Completion Time: 11 Hours on Standard (Modern)

I completed Resident Evil Requiem in exactly 11 hours. And, if you’re planning to do a pretty “regular” playthrough, I expect you’ll clock up a similar playtime. While I didn’t scour every last corner, bookshelf, and drawer for the most fiendishly hidden treasures and lore drops, I was reasonably thorough in my exploration of the Rhodes Hill Chronic Care Center and the locations that await beyond it. I scavenged enough currency to buy a healthy selection of upgrades, ensuring both Grace and Leon were well equipped for the dangers they faced, but by the time credits rolled there were still guns that could be further modified and stats that could be improved. I unlocked some safes, but there are still several left to crack in a second playthrough. I read plenty of documents, and so learned many of the story’s extra details, but there are still mysteries to be solved by finding the papers I missed.

11 hours is pretty typical for a Resident Evil game, but relatively slender compared to many of today’s massive, RPG-style games, and so a second playthrough is certainly on the cards. I not only plan to gather what I missed, but also play with the opposite perspectives of Requiem’s default set up – I’m excited to see what exploring Rhodes Hill as Grace in third person is like, and taking on Leon’s sections as a first-person shooter. That’ll surely clock up another dozen hours.

Brian Altano - Executive Producer

Completion Time: 12 Hours on Standard (Classic)

It took me around 12 and a half hours to beat Resident Evil Requiem on the Standard (Classic) difficulty setting, in which Leon can save the game infinitely at pretty much every save station, while Grace needs to find (or craft) limited, finite ink ribbons, just like in the classic Resident Evil games.

I’m a huge fan of the series and I had a hunch I’d like this game, but I didn’t expect to practically adore it. I found myself exploring every inch of it for secrets, collectibles, easter eggs, and more. Ultimately I missed a few on my first run through the game, but then immediately started a second and third playthrough after initially rolling credits the first time in an effort to find everything.

There are some really fun post-game options tied to beating the campaign with specific parameters (like finishing it without using a single healing item), plus a couple of other little challenges I’m excited to try. There’s one specific Mr. Raccoon bobblehead I definitely wouldn’t have found without the help of IGN’s guides guru, Brendan Graeber, so if you’re a completionist who doesn’t want to miss anything on your first trek through the story, be sure to give our walkthrough a look. Then there’s the unlockable “Insanity” difficulty that I absolutely can’t wait to repeatedly get my butt kicked in.

All in all, I’ll probably put about 40 hours into Resident Evil Requiem, a number that will only go up if Capcom decides to add a Mercenaries mode and additional story DLC post launch. I really love this game!