I did not plan to fall in love with my backlog again, but here we are. This batch of deals sent me digging through games I already adore, ones I bounced off years ago, and a few I absolutely paid too much for at launch. There is something deeply satisfying about seeing time, patches, and good discounts finally align. Contents

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This Day in Gaming 🎂

In retro news, we're celebrating the big 25 for cult classics Armored Core 2 and Tokyo Highway Challenge 2. The former was largely unappreciated outside of Japan in its day, though the series is now bona fide AAA with its seventh iteration. The latter—which copped the suckiest EU market renaming since 'Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles'—garnered an IGN 9.3/10.

Zootopia 2 is now the highest-grossing animated Hollywood film of all time, with a huge $1.703 billion worldwide ($390 million domestic and $1.313 billion international). The Disney film has overtaken Inside Out 2’s $1.7 billion box office haul from 2024. Chinese fantasy film Ne Zha 2, with its astronomical $2.259 billion global box office, remains the highest-grossing animated movie of all time.

Zootopia 2 is now the number nine highest-grossing global release of all time, ahead of 2019’s The Lion King ($1.663 billion), 2015’s Jurassic World ($1.672 billion) and the aforementioned Inside Out 2. Number eight on the list is 2021’s Spider-Man: No Way Home, which made $1.921 billion at the global box office.

Disney’s other monstrous money-maker, Avatar: Fire and Ash, is now up to $1.319 billion worldwide after five weekends ($363.5 million domestic and $955.3 million international). Writer and director James Cameron is yet to signal that Avatar 4 and 5 are definitely going to happen, as box office watchers wonder whether Fire and Ash has done well enough to convince the powers that be at Disney to move ahead. The special effects-heavy Avatar films cost a huge amount of money to produce, but they have historically made billions of dollars at the box office. 2009's Avatar 1 remains the highest-grossing movie of all time (not adjusted for inflation), earning a staggering $2.9 billion across several theatrical runs. 2022's Avatar: The Way of Water has earned $2.3 billion, meanwhile, cementing its place as the third-highest grossing film of all time. Fire and Ash looks like it will struggle to come anywhere near to the box office hauls of its predecessors.

Meanwhile, horror sequel 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple appears to be struggling, with $31.2 million from its worldwide opening. Just $13 million came domestically. To put that into context, 28 Years Later, which only came out seven months ago, opened to $30 million from North American theaters alone. While The Bone Temple has great review scores (IGN’s review returned an 8/10), it may be suffering from releasing too soon after 28 Years Later. The hope for Sony will be positive word of mouth fuels a recovery.

What does this mean for the next film in the planned sequel trilogy? Last month, Sony confirmed it was moving forward with the third installment of the 28 Years Later films, with the decision coming over a month before the release of The Bone Temple. Alex Garland, who has written all the franchise entries thus far, was said to be working on the third entry, which does not have a title at this point. Danny Boyle has been open about wanting to direct it. While you wait to find out, check out IGN's article, 5 Questions We Have For the Next 28 Years Later Movie Following The Bone Temple.

Elsewhere, The Housemaid is showing remarkable staying power at the box office, hitting $247.3 million worldwide on its fifth weekend. Starring Sydney Sweeney and Amanda Seyfried and directed by Paul Feig, The Housemaid is a breakout hit fuelled by excellent word of mouth.

And finally, A24’s Marty Supreme earned $9,838,927 this weekend globally ($5,477,927 domestic and $4.361 million international) for a global total to date of $99.5 million. It is now A24’s highest-grossing movie in North America with $80 million, passing Everything Everywhere All at Once's $77 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.

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Despite being on TV for nearly 30 years, with 28 seasons and over 330 episodes so far, there have been shockingly few video games based on the hit animated television series, South Park. That could be down to the fact that video games take years to make and the average South Park episode only takes a few days, meaning the usual topical pop culture references that fuel the show might feel positively ancient by the time a video game hits shelves. Regardless, a dozen South Park games have managed to buck that trend and actually get released since the show debuted in 1997. Some of them great and some of them..not so great. Here are the best, worst, and weirdest South Park games.

South Park

The first South Park video game ever made was an ambitious one, even if a first-person snowball fighting simulator didn’t exactly make a ton of sense for the brand. But since local multiplayer FPS games like Goldeneye were all the rage on the N64 in 1998, it’s no surprise that South Park got a similar treatment, even if the end result was much sillier. Developer Iguana Entertainment (known mostly for the Turok game series at the time) and publisher Acclaim Entertainment came together to create a solid FPS game packed with South Park references, including a recreation of the show’s theme song, multiple playable characters, and Kenny dying brutally before the title screen even appears. It’s not a great game by any stretch, and seeing the traditionally flat and hand drawn South Park characters as low poly 3D models was an odd fit, but it had enough South Park fan service to make it worth checking out at the time.

South Park: Chef's Luv Shack

A year later South Park: Chef’s Luv Shack arrived, this time with a graphical style much truer to the show’s 2D look. Developed once again by Acclaim, it moved away from first person combat, instead providing a game show-style minigame and trivia collection for Kyle, Stan, Kenny, and Cartman to compete in. Unfortunately, it’s impossible to play this game without other human players, so if you were an only child (or just a loser like Butters), you were pretty much out of luck. Additionally, the limited trivia question set led to a lot of repetition, meaning the joke got old pretty fast, and fans were once again left holding a licensed video game letdown.

South Park Rally

The third and final Acclaim Entertainment South Park video game once again delivered an experience that critics disliked and diehard fans merely tolerated, this time attempting to take on the popular kart racing genre with the South Park license slapped on. South Park Rally is a crude and ugly kart racer with unreliable controls and lackluster track design, but hey, you can drive Big Gay Al’s car and throw Mr. Hanky turds at other players, so at least there’s that.

Despite the show’s immense popularity, South Park video games ended up taking a seven year hiatus after this capped off Acclaim's trilogy of games, which probably pleased South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone, seeing as they once said during a DVD commentary for an episode of the show: “Oh God, the South Park games were so bad. We were so bummed out on those, because we love playing video games.”

South Park 10: The Game

In 2007, South Park celebrated its 10th season on the air less than spectacularly by releasing a bare bones, Europe exclusive mobile game that referenced key moments from the show. South Park 10: The Game is a short and very no-frills platformer that looks like a fan made flash game. Aside from collecting hidden Cheesy Poofs in each level, there’s not much to do or see once you roll credits in under an hour. Still, it was nice to see somebody utilizing the license again, even if the final product was totally average. But you could play as a cow nearly two decades before Mario Kart World let you, so hey, there’s that.

South Park: Let's Go Tower Defense Play!

Two years later, Xbox Live Arcade got its own South Park tower defense game, pitting its main characters against waves of ginger kids, hippies, cows, and more as they tried to save their idyllic and weird little town. The 2D art direction, official voices and sound effects, and iconic humor elevated a pretty bog standard tower defense outing into an actually solid South Park video game.

South Park Mega Millionaire

Once again revisiting the game show setting for reasons that are unclear, 2009’s South Park Mega Millionaire - hot off the heels of 2008’s hit film, Slumdog Millionaire - was a mobile game that decided it was a good idea to strap roller skates to the South Park kids and put them in precarious platforming situations in front of a live studio audience. It’s not a great game by any stretch, but it does have one of the best South Park video game jokes of all time, as the kids survive a Japanese game show in hopes to win a ten thousand yen prize; unbeknownst to them, ten thousand yen equates to roughly sixty three dollars.

South Park: Tenorman's Revenge

2012's Tenorman’s Revenge is another Xbox exclusive South Park game, this time revisiting Scott Tenorman, a character from the infamous South Park episode where Cartman makes Scott eat chili made from the bodies of Scott’s own dead parents. Well, Scott Tenorman has returned to get revenge in video game form in this brief and mediocre platforming game which is only briefly improved by the occasional boss fight and its central plot device, which focuses on the kids having to recover a stolen Xbox 360 hard drive along with all of their precious game save files.

South Park: The Stick of Truth

As you can probably tell by now, the first 16 years of South Park games left a lot to be desired. Everything changed in 2014 with South Park: The Stick of Truth, a genuinely great RPG that, unlike previous South Park games, was made with direct input from the show’s creators. Known for their previous work on franchises like Fallout and Star Wars, developer Obsidian Entertainment built a fantastic and hilarious 2.5D role playing game that looked and felt almost exactly like an episode of the show. It’s not just one of the best licensed games ever made, it's also a fantastic turn-based RPG in its own right, and definitely the only game in the genre where you have to shrink down your character small enough to explore a human anus so you can disarm a bomb. Take that, Final Fantasy.

South Park: Pinball

Zen Studios, creators of the excellent digital pinball franchise Zen Pinball, created a set of South Park pinball tables that totally understood the assignment, mixing rock solid gameplay and hilarious show references to excellent results. There’s even a dedicated Butters pinball table, as well as Mr. Hanky inspired brown pinballs, in case you ever wanted to knock a bunch of pellet-shaped turds around to compete for high scores.

South Park: The Fractured But Whole

2017’s sequel to The Stick of Truth was The Fractured But Whole, which was probably/possibly legally as close as they could get to putting the word “butthole” in a video game title. Fractured But Whole is another fantastic and funny RPG, this time satirizing the superhero movie genre more than just role playing games in general, and once again looking exactly like an episode of the show. This time around the battle system takes place on a grid complete with environmental hazards like LEGO bricks that can injure characters when stepped on, and features levels like the Peppermint Hippo, a strip club complete with a lapdance minigame sequence, just in case you were worried that South Park would lose its edge in a Ubisoft published video game.

South Park: Phone Destroyer

That same year, South Park: Phone Destroyer was - you guessed it - a mobile game, which just so happens to be the only South Park mobile game you can still download and play on your phone today. Phone Destroyer is a free-to-play card battling game that does a surprisingly good job of playing to the strengths of its platform. You’ll receive believable calls and texts from Cartman, and you can unlock multiple endings based on how much real money players spend on premium microtransactions, even shaming you and telling you to seek help with addiction if you spend too much. More mobile games should do that. The world would be a better place.

South Park: Snow Day!

The latest (but hopefully not the last) South Park video game is South Park: Snow Day, a sloppy action adventure roguelike that simultaneously attempts to complete the story established in Stick of Truth and Fractured But Whole, while also returning to the original South Park game’s snowball fighting roots. It’s a shame that Snow Day doesn’t even come close to being fun or funny, with IGN’s own review calling it “thoroughly unenjoyable,” and “uncharacteristicly toothless and unfunny.”

It’s been a weird, windy road for South Park games, but with the recent Fortnite collaboration and megadeal renewal of the show, something tells me we’re just getting started and that hopefully, more South Park games are on the way.

So what’s your favorite South Park video game ever made? What’s your dream South Park game idea that you’d love to see someday? Go on down to the comments section and leave your woes behind. And if you want more about video game tie-ins to highly successful animated sitcoms that have been on TV for decades, go check out my video about the best, worst, and weirdest Simpsons video games.

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Warning: Spoilers follow for 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple.

28 Years Later: The Bone Temple is now in theaters and serves as the fourth film in the franchise that began back in 2003 with 28 Days Later. This story picks up after the events of last year's 28 Years Later, and we had the chance to speak to director Nia DaCosta and Sir Lord Jimmy Crystal actor Jack O'Connell about the evolution of the infected, the real danger behind the Jimmys, and much more.

You can read excerpts from our chat below or watch the full conversation in the video above, and we also encourage you to check out our 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple review, the five questions we have for the next 28 Years Later film, and everything you need to know about Sir Lord Jimmy Crystal before watching this movie.

IGN: Maybe we can start with Jimmy's backstory, which we sort of were filling in as an audience after the previous film, but how much did you guys dig in on the particulars of what happened to Jimmy since he was a child to now?

Jack O'Connell: It was a huge gray area, wasn't it? So, we have to assume that whatever they are, they're efficient because they've survived. I don't know if we went into too much detail about the in between of it, but I think it was important to see Jimmy and the Fingers. That is a wild statement if you've not watched the film.

Jimmy and his Fingers are very proficient at what they do. And that was important to me. So we do see them dispatch members of the infected with casual ease. And I think that gives you some sort of insight.

Nia DaCosta: And also just what their dynamic is. I think you have a very clear sort of inciting incident for his life, which is the first scene of Danny [Boyle]’s film. And then you can infer like, okay, from that he became this. And so the most important thing for us I think was like, what's the dynamic within the group? What's the power structure within the group? And so we talked about that.

IGN: Do you think he's a villain?

ND: Yes.

IGN: Obviously, when we meet him, yes. But I mean, he's not when he's a kid though, is he?

ND: Well, kids are innocent, but they can do villainous things. But no, he's just a little booboo running from his father, Satan.

JO: Throughout, even through The Bone Temple...

ND: Now we're getting emotional.

JO: And when you view him as that, he's a lot less threatening.

IGN: When you see Spike, who's sort of maybe a bit older than Jimmy was when things went down all those years ago, Spike's a good kid. We see him fighting against what Jimmy is now. But Spike, could he become that also?

ND: I don't know. Jimmy's dad is weird. When you meet him, he's like, "Here [the infected] are." And you're like, "Girl, that's not what's happening." And I think despite the flaws of Jamie, I think he's, as a father, instilled some better morals and ethics into Spike than the vicar has.

JO: Totally. I think with Spike, there is hope. With Jimmy, there's none.

IGN: Nia, can you talk about humanizing Samson? He's obviously so scary when we first get to know him, and then over the course of this film, he becomes a character, which is a new thing for the infected.

ND: I think that all started obviously in the script, but when Alex [Garland] created these different kinds of infected in the first film, there's the Slow-Lows and then there's the Alphas or the Berserkers, depending on what you call them, and then the ones that we're used to.

I think introducing this idea that they can develop differently also introduces an idea that they can have different paths and they can think differently. Being able to create a journey for that character alongside [Ralph Fiennes’ character] Kelson was really special because I think it really speaks to a theme of the film, which is like, can people change? Because a question of the film is like, is there hope? And people with hope tend to do better things than people without. Samson going on that journey kind of reveals that the film and the filmmakers believe that change is possible and hope is important.

IGN: Did you feel beholden to any stylistic aspects of the previous films?

ND: Not at all. When I came in, I said, "I don't want to do that. I don't want to try to imitate what Danny's doing." But if there's something that I'm like, "oh, that's interesting," sure I'll take it, and the thing that I took was the shutter angles.

IGN: Can you explain that?

ND: When Danny shoots the infected, he changes the shutter angle. So, that's why if you watch 28 Days Later again, whenever an infected attack happens, it's more stuttery and jarring. I just thought it was really effective and I really loved that in the original film. I also thought it was a nice way to kind of have an homage, but one that was really effective for what I was doing. And because that Jimmys are also in that space of the infected because of how much violence and horror they bring, we use that for them as well. My DP and I, Sean Bobbitt, who's amazing, we had three settings for the shutter angles, but we mostly used like 43.8 degrees or something, because you have to get really specific so that the lights aren't flickering.

IGN: That's awesome. Jack, what's Jimmy's grasp on reality? Because he thinks Ian might... he's a little unsure and is like, "is this guy [Kelson] actually Old Nick?"

JO: I think there is a vulnerability to him, which was a rare opportunity to show because, in other times, he is so obsessively in control. So I think to his mind, I mean, what is reality anyway in this world that we're in? Everything's been very completely skewed and sure, Jimmy Crystal is entirely corrupted. So what is that sense of reality? And I do think it's partly because of his insanity and that he does believe that he hears voices, which was my sort of ethos on him. Until he doesn't, until he starts using that as a guise and a tool to manipulate the people around him to his gain.

ND: But to your credit, you're very clear performance-wise when you are talking about really hearing voices and when you're full of shit, because one of my favorite performance moments for you is when you talk about how, your talking to Kelson and he's like, "Oh, you hear him in your head?" and you go, "The whole fucking time." And it's really sad.

JO: Yeah, like he's afflicted. I understood him as quite a sociopath. And then there's a moment in the film, in the scene with Dr. Kelson where, because Dr. Kelson is a doctor and he starts [treating] him, he sort of makes him feel something. And maybe that's the only time he feels a human emotion.

IGN: Yeah. Because also I think his gang, they live in fear of him basically, right? But then, here with the doctor, it's a different dynamic that Jimmy's probably not even used to experiencing. There's just someone approaching him just as a regular person who he wants to help.

ND: Also, who's kind of dad, you know?

IGN: Yeah.

IGN: Is there a world where we see Jimmy again? Is Jimmy done or could he come back still?

JO: I think he could have died more. Where that's concerned. And if Alex Garland is around and listening to this, I think he could have died a whole lot more, because we see people really die in this film.

IGN: Thank you for making me not feel dumb, because that's my take on it. Ok. Cillian Murphy. What was it like getting to do this, as the fans have been waiting for this character for so long.

ND: It was so cool. I mean, 28 Days Later was the film that made me such a big fan of him. So, him coming back and me being the one to direct that scene, and getting to decide what that would feel like and look like was, I mean, it's utterly insane for me as the 12-year-old girl who's like, "I like films." It's really cool.

Note: This interview has been edited for length and clarity.