Disney has signed up Conan O'Brien for a role in Toy Story 5.
The redheaded chat show host will voice a mysterious new character named Smarty Pants in the upcoming movie.
O'Brien announced his involvement in Toy Story 5 via his official TeamCoco Instagram account, via a skit in which he jokingly suggests he asked Disney if he could voice Woody or Buzz Lightyear instead. (Thankfully, Tom Hanks and Tim Allen are already signed up to reprise their legendary roles.)
No other details on O'Brien's character were mentioned, leaving fans to speculate on who exactly Smarty Pants might be.
Toy Story 5 will reunite Woody, Buzz and the rest of Pixar's beloved cast for a fresh adventure that sees the traditional toys having to grapple with a world in which kids are now more interested in gadgets, gizmos and other technology.
Could Smarty Pants be some kind of electronic toy, and perhaps an antagonist for our intrepid toy heroes? Time will tell.
O'Brien's casting is the first time a fresh character has been announced for Toy Story 5, suggesting this is a casting of some importance.
Toy Story 5 will mark the first major new entry in Pixar's series since Toy Story 4 in 2019. A spin-off, Lightyear, which focused on the in-universe exploits of the original Buzz Lightyear character, launched in 2022 but was widely considered a flop.
Now, Disney is hoping to breathe fresh life back into its main Toy Story brand once more, despite the risks of having to follow the series' universally-praised original trilogy.
Toy Story 5 is set to launch on June 19, 2026, and will be the first of several new sequels to classic Pixar films due over the next few years, with Incredibles 3 and Coco 2 also on the cards.
Photo by Daniel Boczarski/Redferns.
Tom Phillips is IGN's News Editor. You can reach Tom at tom_phillips@ign.com or find him on Bluesky @tomphillipseg.bsky.social
Call of Duty fans are still digesting the news that Activision is walking away from Warzone Mobile, the game that was meant to lead the battle royale into a new era.
Over the weekend, Activision pulled Warzone Mobile from iOS and Android app stores, with the scope of the game being “streamlined" and an admission it had not met expectations. While servers will remain online for now, no new content or updates will be issued to the game, and players can no longer spend real money in it.
"We're proud of the accomplishment in bringing Call of Duty: Warzone to mobile in an authentic way, [but] it unfortunately has not met our expectations with mobile-first players like it has with PC and console audiences,” Activision said.
It’s a brutal end for a game that clearly struggled right out of the gate. Warzone Mobile launched in March 2024 on iOS and Android as a Warzone-specific Call of Duty mobile experience that offered battle royale for up to 120 players, as well as cross-progression with the PC and console Warzone, Modern Warfare 2 and 3, and, later in the year, Black Ops 6.
IGN's Call of Duty Warzone Mobile review returned an 8/10. We said: "Call of Duty: Warzone Mobile includes all the best elements of Warzone, while speeding up and streamlining matches and using cross-progression to make this a meaningful extension of the traditional experience."
Activision’s hope was that Warzone Mobile would make a splash in the competitive mobile shooter market, where the hugely successful Call of Duty Mobile, developed by Tencent-owned TiMi Studio Group, is already established. With Call of Duty Mobile, which has seen 1 billion downloads since launch, revenue is shared between Activision and Tencent. Warzone Mobile, on the other hand, was developed entirely in-house at Activision, and so the company received a bigger slice of the money pie every time a player dropped cash on a battle pass or a cosmetic.
But Warzone Mobile, which requires more powerful mobile phones than Call of Duty Mobile to work well, failed to meet Activision’s expectations, and its development team was scaled down when, in September last year, Microsoft-wide layoffs hit across the games business.
Now, Call of Duty fans, especially those who did play Warzone Mobile, have lamented the state of the game and indeed the franchise.
“This game simply came out too early and wanted to be too greedy,” said redditor Maddafragg. “It could be seen on the Reddit videos, a lot of gameplay was not fluid with weird graphics, it could be seen that even if the game is playable, the device struggles to run it. The world of mobile gaming is cursed, it's not just Warzone that's dying. Dead by Daylight mobile and Star Wars hunter will also close the doors.”
“Turns out mobile games need to be optimized on most devices to be successful, you can't just cater to high end devices and hope your game succeed — it won't,” added piegeamorue.
“Greed is a dangerous thing. Activision was too greedy and when it leaked that they planned on killing CODM in favor of WZM they essentially turned tens of millions of people against the game. It became ‘us vs them’ and CODM is vastly more accessible than WZM — the loss was guaranteed.”
What's next for Call of Duty, which appears to be in a tricky spot right now? Earlier this month, The Game Business reported that while Black Ops 6 launched big late last year, the Call of Duty franchise saw its users decline afterwards, and “more sharply” than in recent years.
Here’s the relevant blurb:
... the reality is that despite a strong start, Call of Duty has struggled to engage players to the degree it has in the past. According to Ampere, in March 2025, Call of Duty had 20.6 million players. That is still a huge number, but it’s slightly less than March 2024, which had 20.8 million players, and well down on March 2023, which saw 22.4 million players.
Related, there are a number of apparent datamined gameplay videos doing the rounds that show wall-running and even jet packs working in Black Ops 6. This, some believe, indicates this year's Black Ops 7 will ditch Activision’s ‘boots on the ground’ mantra for gameplay reminiscent of Black Ops 3.
🚨‼️WALL RUNNING CONFIRMED FOR BO7‼️🚨 There is wall running in BO6 currently It is unclear if it's leftover from BO3 that managed to make it's way into a glitch through BO6 or if it's from BO7 and is left in the BO6 files. @charlieINTEL@ModernWarzone@Dexertopic.twitter.com/0FJ0guUIEH
Activision told IGN its teams are busy and moving forward on a variety of work, so hopefully we’ll see the fruits of that soon. Microsoft’s annual June Xbox showcase is around the corner. Perhaps Call of Duty will turn up there. And, meanwhile, Call of Duty: Mobile is going strong, but, as we’ve pointed out, it’s not as lucrative a business for Activision, despite being bigger.
Activision Blizzard’s recent mobile struggles also call into question Microsoft’s $69 billion acquisition of the company itself, given Xbox boss Phil Spencer has made no secret that the decision was in part motivated by Xbox’s lofty mobile ambitions (Activision Blizzard owns King, the maker of phenomenally popular mobile game Candy Crush). Indeed, Microsoft plans to launch an app store of its own, taking on Apple and Google in the lucrative mobile game space.
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.
Nintendo has shown off our first proper look at a Nintendo Switch 2 game cartridge, ahead of the console's launch next month.
The latest video from the company's Nintendo Today app shows off a look at the official Switch 2 carry case, which has slots for you to safely tuck in up to six Nintendo Switch 1 and Switch 2 cartridges.
As we knew already, Switch 2 cartridges are the same size and shape as Switch 1 cartridges — meaning that the Switch 2 itself only needs one cartridge slot to play games from both Switch console generations. But there's one key difference: the cartridge's color.
Switch 2 cartridges are red — and this appears to be a universal decision, not just for the Mario Kart World cartridge seen in Nintendo's video. (If you don't have the Nintendo Today app, you can see the video via OatmealDome on X / Twitter below.)
The top of the cartridge's printed design sticker also shows a Switch 2 logo, rather than the Nintendo Switch design on original cartridges.
[Switch 2]
Here's a look inside the official Switch 2 carrying case. It has room for the console with the Joy-Con 2 attached, six cartridges, and two Joy-Con 2 straps.
(Also, Switch 2 cartridges seem to be the same size as Switch 1 cartridges, to no one's surprise.) pic.twitter.com/h7k0tqThQz
Other than that, Switch 2 cartridges are identical, even down to the foul-tasting coating that Nintendo applies to discourage you from putting the cartridges in your mouth.
"We don't want anybody to be at risk of any unwanted consumption," Switch 2 director Takuhiro Dohta previously told GameSpot. "We have indeed made it so that if it enters your mouth, you'll spit it out."
Helldivers 2 finally has Super Earth maps to fight on as part of the Heart of Democracy major update.
As had leaked last week, the Heart of Democracy update — out now across PC and PlayStation 5 — sees the Illuminate invasion reach Super Earth. You can now select missions on our home planet in Mega Cities and fight back alongside SEAF soldiers.
The city biomes include operations that work towards liberating the cities, which, developer Arrowhead said, have “a significant impact on planetary campaigns.” This is a part of Helldivers 2’s ongoing Galactic War, a community-driven meta narrative that Arrowhead orchestrates behind the scenes.
The Illuminate have reached the Heart of Democracy.
Our Mega Cities are under siege. Liberty now hangs in the balance. The Ministry of Defence has authorised arsenal upgrades and placed SEAF soldiers on active duty. Today, we fight for the future of Super Earth! pic.twitter.com/GxkrAQCmKD
The Helldivers are tasked with a new objective: to repel the Illuminate invasion by gaining ground over the squids as they fight to control areas where the fleet is landing. It won’t be a walk in the park, divers. Like a game of intergalactic tug-of-war, you will struggle against the incoming forces, gaining and losing control quickly.
You can activate Planetary Defense Cannons and take down the Illuminate fleet, as shown in the trailer. And, as mentioned, SEAF troops will help join the fight to defend the cities. These small squads will fight enemies on their own, or they can be ordered to follow Helldivers and provide temporary backup as you navigate toward objectives. You do, however, need to be mindful of civilians who are still roaming the streets; Helldivers 2 is as much about friendly fire management as it is blowing aliens up.
The Heart of Democracy update is part of Arrowhead's long-term committment to keeping Helldivers 2 going for years to come following its record-breaking launch last year.
"Nah. It's ALL Helldivers 2 for now," he insisted. "A very, very small team will spin up something later this year and go at it sloowly. Helldivers is our main focus and will be for a loooong time."
So, how long does Jorjani expect content updates for Helldivers 2 to last?
"As long as you folks keep playing and buying Super Credits we can keep it going," Jorjani said, pointing to Helldivers 2's virtual currency that's used to buy Premium Warbonds. "Last summer we were kinda screwing the pooch so it looked like we wouldn't be able to keep the train going for a long time - but we turned the ship around, you support us a lot so it's looking bright."
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.
Welcome to Derry has its first trailer, revealing a creepy look at HBO Max’s It prequel series, due out fall 2025.
The trailer, below, sets up the story, which is set in Maine in 1962. Newcomers to the area appear disturbed by reports of missing children, and the slow realization that something is very wrong in this part of the world. As is It tradition, a group of kids from Derry High School band together to try to find out what’s going on, worrying the adults will never believe a word they say.
There’s blood, screaming, creepy smiles, balloons, and, right at the end, a glimpse at It iconic villain Pennywise the Clown, once again played by Bill Skarsgård.
Welcome to Derry is a nine episode Season 1 from Andy Muschietti, who adapted the two It movies from Stephen King’s iconic horror novel. It’s set 27 years before the events of those films, showing Pennywise’s murder spree before hibernation.
"This is a book we love a lot, and we felt that there was still a lot of story to be covered," Muschietti and sister, Barbara, told Entertainment Weekly last year.
"It’s so rich with characters and events, we thought we would do justice to the book and the fans by going back into this world. Specifically, we are telling the stories of the interludes, writings by Mike Hanlon based on his investigation that includes interviews he conducts with the older people in the town.
“In Welcome to Derry, we touch on the usual themes that were talked about in the movie — friendship, loss, the power of unified belief — but this story focuses also on the use of fear as a weapon, which is one of the things that is also relevant to our times.
"27 years is the dormant period of Pennywise. It’s a different part of American history with a new set of fears for children, as well as adults having in mind the cost of the Cold War. Our baseline is 1962, but we do a few jumps to the past... Every 27 years when It appears, It’s cycle is marked by two catastrophic events, one at the beginning and one in the end. We are using the Black Spot as an event in which many stories are built around."
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.
Nintendo Switch 2 is still weeks from launch, and yet a key electronics partner is already thinking about the console's inevitable future hardware refresh.
That's according to a new report from Bloomberg, which states that Samsung is pushing Nintendo to incororate its OLED screens in the next version of Switch 2, whenever it appears.
Remember, of course, that the launch version of Switch 2 features an LCD screen — which some see as a slight downgrade from the display boasted by the Switch 1's later OLED model.
"Now there's a lot of advancements that have been made in LCD technology during development," Nintendo Switch 2 hardware design lead Tetsuya Sasaki explained. "We took a look at the technology that was available to us now and after a lot of consideration we decided to stick to LCD.
"Even with the OLED version of Nintendo Switch, we didn’t have compatibility support for HDR, but that's something we have the support for now."
In some respects, word of a Switch 2 refresh at some point in the future shouldn't be a surprise. Nintendo always launches new versions of its consoles after a couple of years (well, usually — sorry, Wii U).
The suggestion of an improved Switch 2 refresh with an OLED screen would also simply be following the same pattern Nintendo used with Switch 1.
But maybe don't cancel your Switch 2 pre-order just yet. There's no telling when Nintendo will actually decide to launch a new Switch 2 model — especially now, as demand for the launch version looks likely to remain sky high for a signficant period, and affordability of every console now a key issue.
Nintendo will only launch a new Switch 2 when it will be confident it can manufacture, ship and sell it at a price it believes customers will buy, and be happy to pay to upgrade from the base Switch 2 model. Remember, also, that the Switch 1's OLED model didn't turn up until October 2021, four years after the console's March 2017 debut.
In other words, while Samsung may be planning for Switch 2 OLED, you probably need not be.
Elsewhere in Bloomberg's report, Samsung sources stated they believed the company had the capacity for Nintendo to ship 20 million Switch 2 consoles this year — considerably more than the 15 million estimate that Nintendo has told investors it expects to shift before March 31, 2026.
That 15 million estimate would match the same number of Switch 1 consoles sold by Nintendo back in 2017, and has also been seen as a conservative figure by some analysts. Speaking to IGN sister site Eurogamer earlier this month, veteran firm DFC Intelligence said it believed Nintendo would in reality likely sell 16m, enough to say it had beaten its expectations.
Tom Phillips is IGN's News Editor. You can reach Tom at tom_phillips@ign.com or find him on Bluesky @tomphillipseg.bsky.social
Marc Laidlaw wrote 400 Boys in 1981 aged 21, long before he ended up Valve’s lead writer and one of the chief creators of the Half-Life games. The short story was published in Omni magazine in 1983, before it was picked up for Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk Anthology and enjoyed a wider audience. On Marc’s website, at the bottom of the short story itself, he points out 400 Boys has probably been read by more people than anything else he’s written, except perhaps Dota 2 seasonal ad copy. Yes, the video game world knows Marc Laidlaw as the lead writer of the Half-Life series. But he’s done a lot more than video games. It’s funny how things work out.
In a post-apocalyptic city where warring gangs follow a bushido-like code of honor, a new gang, the 400 Boys, forces them to unite. A blend of beauty and brutality from Canadian director Robert Valley, whose LDR episode “Ice” won the Emmy for Outstanding Short Form Animation.
“The inspiration for it just came out of walking around,” Marc remembers. “I lived in Eugene, Oregon and there was always the phone poles with the names of bands that were playing in town, and it was just name after name of super cool bands, and I just wanted a way to do that. I just wanted to make up lots of band names. So I came up with the idea of, if I have all these gangs in the story, I can come up with names for all these different gangs and that would be fun. And it was funny. That was kind of the thing that drove a big part of the story, just wanting to make band names.”
Now, over 40 years after 400 Boys was first published, it’s an episode of the fourth season of Netflix’s hugely popular animated anthology series Love, Death and Robots. The episode was directed by Robert Valley, the director of Zima Blue in Season 1 and Ice in Season 2. Tim Miller wrote it. The voice cast includes John Boyega, who famously played Finn in Star Wars. All of a sudden, 400 Boys is having its big moment. Marc Laidlaw never expected this.
“The story kind of faded out, but cyberpunk kept going and I didn't really think about it that much,” Laidlaw tells me over a video call just days before Season 4 of Love, Death and Robots kicks off on Netflix.
40 years. That’s a long time for anything to be turned into something, isn’t it? But it might have happened earlier, around 15 years ago, when Tim Miller from Blur (the company that does all those fancy video game cutscenes and, these days, so much more), got in touch about maybe turning 400 Boys into something. It didn’t happen. Like so many projects, it fell apart following studio changes.
Then Love, Death and Robots exploded onto the scene in March 2019. This edgy, adult-oriented animated anthology was unlike anything we’d seen on the streamer. Some episodes were challenging, some were weird, some were weirdly challenging. Whatever they were, you couldn’t help but watch. And, Marc noticed, Tim Miller from Blur was involved. “I always say, I can't imagine anybody else who would've turned The Drowned Giant, this J. G. Ballard story, into an episode of an animated feature,” Marc says. “So I had a lot of respect for Tim just from that.”
Marc moved to Los Angeles in 2020 and, as the pandemic eased, met Tim a few times at various events around town. He didn’t want to push 400 Boys, but maybe, just maybe, if this Love, Death and Robots thing kept on going, maybe it would come back around. Then, a year ago, Marc got the ‘would you be interested in us optioning 400 Boys?’ email. It was finally happening.
Marc spoke with Tim, who took over the script, about the story itself. He says the episode is faithful to the source, but there’s some new stuff that helps sell the story visually. He had a couple conversations with Robert Valley, the director. He pointed him to the 400 Boys audiobook, which Marc narrated (“I did a reading of this back in the pandemic when everybody was trying to entertain people by posting audio books of their fiction and stuff on YouTube”).
But really, Marc wasn’t that involved. “It just was fun to sit back and not have to be involved in the trenches on something for once,” he says. “And I just kind of wanted to enjoy it when it was done and see what they made of it.”
And Marc has seen the episode, as you’d expect. “John Boyega and the characters and the accents and the setting is just so cool to me. I mean, they made the story just so much more fun visually, I think.”
400 Boys is, as Marc describes it, from “a different me from lifetimes ago.” Of course it is, he wrote it over 40 years ago when he was a young man. “I'm still pretty happy with it considering how young I was when I wrote it.”
“And then there was a long time of not much happening,” he says. And then, as we all know, Marc got into the games industry in 1997, into Valve as it was making Half-Life. “And that whole thing happened…”
Laidlaw “retired” from Valve in 2016, but it came across as a hard retirement from everything. In truth, he’s in a comfortable enough position to be able to do what he wants, pick his own projects and share them when they're done. “I think I retired too hard,” he admits. He never wanted to stop being creative. He wanted to get back to writing, but the publishing industry sort of disappeared while he was working on video games. Forget new video games, too. “I can't do games without a bunch of people. I can't make a game myself.”
So Marc makes music now. He got a boost in audience after Valve’s Half-Life 2 anniversary documentary came out last year and he released a lost development video from the early days on his YouTube channel. “I'm like, I'm in the wrong business!” Marc jokes. “I should just be leaking information about my old employer.”
Did it feel weird looking back at Half-Life all these years later for the Valve documentary, I wonder?
“Yeah, it was good for me to just kind of process and put a bow on that stuff, see a bunch of old friends, think about that, the whole thing,” Marc says.
“I hadn't talked to or seen a lot of those people for a long time. I still stay in touch with a few folks, but they're also not really there anymore. I don't know what's going on there right now, but it was fun to hang out with people and talk it over and it was therapeutic.”
With Half-Life and Half-Life 2 anniversary documentaries done and dusted, the only Valve game Marc might be asked to reminisce over now is Dota 2, which, ominously, is 12 years old. Perhaps in eight years Valve will come calling. “I could speak to Dota. That's the only thing left.” Unless, of course, Valve fancies doing something on Alien Swarm (“I did a little bit on Alien Swarm”).
It is impossible, I find, to talk to Marc Laidlaw without talking about Half-Life. With those Valve documentaries out in the wild, there isn’t much left to say about the past. But maybe (hopefully?!) Half-Life has a future, and it’s that thread I want to pull on.
There is no point asking Marc if he knows whether Half-Life 3 is in the works. As he says, he doesn’t really know the people still left at Valve, but even if he did, he’s not about to announce the game here in our interview. Can you imagine the email Gaben would send if he did?
It is a better use of our time, I think, to ask Marc if he’d ever write for a video game again. Marc says he is, generally, still open to writing for a video game, and suggests Hideo Kojima should perhaps have given him a call. “When Death Stranding came out, I just was grinding my teeth. Like, does he know I'm available? I'd be happy to help do the last polish of dialogue on your script and not wreck anything, but just make it lines that actors would sound better coming out of their mouth.”
Marc, as he alluded to earlier, “retired really hard,” and he thinks that because of that, the industry doesn’t think to ask him to do anything. “When I see the Miyazaki stuff, the From studio stuff, of course you go to George R. R. Martin first if you could. Nobody needs my name on their project to sell copies. But I mean, that kind of thing to me is exciting.”
The lack of interesting offers post-Valve came as something of a surprise, Marc says. “I did kind of expect more interesting offers of stuff to do afterward and was kind of like, ‘this is weird: somebody wants me to write their synopsis for their mobile phone laser tag game.' It's like, they don't know what I do.”
Wait, really? Someone actually asked Marc Laidlaw to write a mobile phone laser tag game after he left Valve? “Those are the kind of things I would get,” Marc admits. “I'm like, ‘I don't know that I have much to offer you guys, but I mean, I don't really like to say no to stuff.”
Marc continues: “I haven't really heard any interesting game offers that seemed right for me. People think of me as, you can come in and write a bunch of stuff for a game. I'm like, 'do you notice how little writing there was in Half-Life?' Sort of the point of it was I hated reading in games.”
And then the inevitable interview-closer: if Valve gave Marc Laidlaw a call and said, ‘we want to get the band back together for Half-Life 3,’ would he answer that call?
“I would not do that,” he replies, matter of factly. “I can definitely say I would not do that. Even when I was there, I started to feel like, ‘Oh, now I'm the old guy shooting stuff down.’ I think at some point you need to let the people who are the fans and the creators who've come in because of what they learned from you maybe, and let them have that. We need new stuff. We didn't need me going, ‘Well, the G-Man wouldn't do that in my day.’ And I found I had to restrain myself. People would get enthusiastic about stuff, and I felt like it was becoming a negative force on some of the creative process.
“I haven't played the VR Half-Life: Alyx, so I don't really feel like I can. I don't know what's going on with anything. And it is not really my place. God knows what it's doing in terms of creative process of how to get a great experience that will surprise people. And you have to be right at the edge of what you can do in a moment. And I'm not on that edge anymore. That's not what's interesting to me at this point. So I don't think I'd be good.
“Plus, I'm one of the older guys, maybe not the oldest, but it's so much work. I mean, I don't think I could do that anymore. I get into my own things, but it's not on anyone else's schedule. And yeah, I'm pretty much done. I mean, maybe not done with games altogether, but definitely the Half-Life part of my life is way behind me.”
So, that’s that. Half-Life is done with Marc Laidlaw, and Marc Laidlaw is done with Half-Life. But there’s a lot more he’s done in the past that’s relevant now. Just look at Netflix making 400 Boys, 40 years later. Maybe, at some point in the future, Netflix will knock on Valve’s door and ask to turn Half-Life into something. Then Marc Laidlaw can go through all this all over again.
“The fact that I got into the cyberpunk thing before it was called cyberpunk, and then I came across this sort of beginning game company that ended up making Half-Life… I've been lucky to be a part of these things that just kind of become phenomena.”
Wesley is the UK News Editor for IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.
As far as package-shipping simulators go, Deliver At All Costs more closely resembles drunk driving than it does Death Stranding. There's no need for complicated weight management or careful navigation through its 1950s small-town USA setting; instead, this kooky courier quest loads your pickup truck with increasingly quirky cargo and sends you careening through road signs, fences, shopfronts, and countless pedestrians, with almost every dispatched delivery quickly devolving into a full-on destruction derby. It’s a riotously good time for a while, but it soon starts to sputter out and eventually breaks down well before it reaches the end of its 10-hour journey when its nonsensical sci-fi story fails to pay off and this world turns out to be far more rewarding to reduce to rubble than it is to actually explore.
There is a plot connecting all of its street-shredding shipments, but honestly the less said about it, the better. You’re Winston Green, a likeable fresh hire at the We Deliver corporation who’s seemingly on the run after a mysterious incident in his past. Though it begins as a sort of goofy workplace comedy it soon makes jarring tonal shifts into corporate crime conspiracies and eventually a preposterous tale of time travel, before crashlanding into a fast-tracked climax that left me feeling about as hollow as someone who’s tried to make a meal out of packing peanuts. Deliver At All Costs’ story is a bit like a box of flatpacked furniture delivered from IKEA; it’s full of interesting parts to pore over, but once you’ve put it all together it seems noticeably wonkier than you expected and it’s clear that there’s more than a couple of screws loose.
The real star is the staggering destructibility of its world, which is viewed from your choice of two top-down angles. Pretty much everything above ground can be satisfyingly smashed asunder as you tear around in your delivery truck turning every apartment block into a potential Jenga tower. There’s admittedly an overly fragile and weightless feel to it all – it’s a bit like crashing through houses made of cards rather than bricks and mortar because you rarely feel the impact or lose momentum – but punching my own shortcuts through everything from hotel lobbies to tennis courts and tombstone-covered graveyards kept me consistently amused for at least the first half of the drive. I gleefully sped around chewing through scenery like I was Nicholas Cage in Face/Off. Pretty much the only time I pumped the brakes was when I had to keep something from spilling out of my truckbed, or whenever I hit one of the abrupt loading screens that separates each district of the three cities that make up its decently sized open-world map.
Can’t Hardly Freight
Deliver At All Costs’ 20-mission-long chain of violent cargo hauls aren’t so much door-to-door as they are wall-through-wall, but that’s not to say I didn’t face some resistance along the way. Different challenges are introduced in keeping with the object that’s dumped into the back of your truck or dragged behind you with a winch, and a few entertainingly wacky work orders had me laughing out loud. In one mission reminiscent of Pixar’s Up, I was hired to transport a bouquet of helium balloons, which meant that even the smallest bump in the road launched me into a clumsy aerial drift that left me struggling to stay on terra firma like a mailman on the moon’s surface. In another, I had to steer around a leaking tank of napalm that was igniting a growing wall of fire behind me, turning a simple pick-up and drop-off into a citywide game of Snake that blew me to smithereens if I attempted to double back on my delivery route.Then there was the time I had to drag a new statue of the local mayor towards the town square without it getting bombed by the swooping seagulls dropping their own special deliveries.
I gleefully sped around chewing through scenery like I was Nicholas Cage in Face/Off.
Unfortunately, though, there are almost as many duds in the mix as there are standouts. Being asked to drive recklessly to scare a limousine full of crooked executives doesn’t really come as a break from the norm when you’ve been otherwise hurtling around like a madman during each and every other job, for example. A mission to photograph a series of cows being abducted by a UFO can be passed simply by mindlessly spamming the camera button. Meanwhile, the on-foot retrieval of your stolen truck from under the nose of a patrolling security van becomes less of a daring infiltration into a scrapyard and more of a walk in the park because Deliver At All Costs’ stealth system is non-existent, to the point where you can just stroll in there unopposed with minimal thought or effort. That’s not to say the rest of the on-foot action is much better – pretty much whenever you’re forced to leave your car for more than a moment it becomes a dull stretch of basic platforming where your only actions are walk, jump, climb, and shove.
Haul or Nothing
Elsewhere in Deliver At All Costs there’s rarely any substantial consequences for your actions, and that makes it start to get dull sooner than it seems like it should. If you accidentally flip your car over it will automatically right itself. If you bust a tyre you can hop out and instantly repair it with the tap of a button. If you bring down an entire building because you’re doing doughnuts through all four corners of its foundations you will almost certainly draw the attention of the police (who, the intro movie explains, are all but non-existent in this island town), but you can instantly lose that heat by leaving your truck and diving into a dumpster – even without necessarily breaking the line of sight. In fact, even if you’re caught, you just instantly respawn with no punishment served anyway. On the one hand, the general lack of rules or repercussions gave me the freedom to drive as recklessly as I wanted to, but it also meant that almost everything felt noticeably low in stakes.
Sometimes, in fact, Deliver At All Costs is so forgiving that it completely sucks any tension out of the task at hand. Steering your delivery truck from one side of the city to the other with an armed atom bomb couched in its cargo bed shouldn’t just have you flirting with danger, but buying danger a drink, beckoning danger onto the dance floor, and giving danger an open-mouthed kiss. But in practice, it’s surprisingly lacking in intensity: there’s no ticking clock to pressure you into keeping your foot clamped down on the accelerator, allowing you to take things as slow and steady as you like. That means the only challenge here is to not drive like a maniac. Even when I did accidentally bump into a car and blow myself to bits, generous checkpoints meant that I was back on the road with my unstable payload with minimum penalty to my progress. I don’t want a game to be overly punishing, but there’s a happy medium to be struck that this one never manages to nail.
Sometimes Deliver At All Costs is so forgiving that it completely sucks any tension out of the task at hand.
Elsewhere, and despite the consistently impressive amount of environmental detail to be found throughout its toy town world from Christmas tree-lined main streets to a giant drive-in theater projecting black and white films, there’s not a great deal of interesting activities to amuse yourself with when you’re off the clock. There are a further 10 side missions to be found dotted around the map, but few of them are particularly memorable. There’s a basic circuit race to place first in and a couple of missing persons to track down, but there’s little here to match the more creative courier tasks found in the main story path. Well, there’s one enjoyable exception that had me piloting a satanic sports car straight out of Stephen King’s Christine. Deliver At All Costs could’ve used a lot more like her to make its map call me back for more.
There are other unique vehicles to track down too, but these are uniformly disappointing on a number of counts. For one, their locations are clearly marked on the map from the outset, so you’re not provided with the same thrill of discovery of, say, a Forza Horizon barn find. You also don’t have a garage to store them in, and nor can you use them for a delivery mission, so they’re mainly there for a brief joyride before being ditched in favour of a return to your trusty We Deliver truck. Worse still, they don’t provide any real point of difference to make them even remotely worth the minimal effort to uncover – they each handle more or less the same, and there are no unique emergency missions to undertake in the ambulance or dessert drops in the ice cream van to trigger like you might find in a Grand Theft Auto game. They’re just sort of… there.
Another underwhelming factor is the upgrades you can weld onto your truck using spare parts found throughout the world (as ridiculous as it may be to open a giant chest to find someone has stashed a single roll of duct tape in it). They seem like they should open up new possibilities for mayhem and creativity in a world that’s as eager to be knocked down as this, but these, too, are disappointingly limited in their use. The crane is handy for the job that sees you load a giant marlin onto your truck and then literally fishtail your way to a drop-off point, but both it and the winch you get access to afterwards can’t actually be used outside of a mission to mess with objects at will. You can’t, say, attach the winch’s tow cable to a random car or pedestrian and drag them around town just for kicks like you can in Saints Row or Just Cause. You can supercharge your car horn to blast the windows out of shopfronts, but you can't use the cargo bed catapult at all outside of a handful of specific story moments. There’s a lot of potential for Deliver At All Costs to achieve the same sort of freeform fun that we see in games like Goat Simulator, but it just doesn’t give you enough flexibility to really revel in it after you’ve grown tired of blasting into people’s living rooms like a Kool-Aid Man on wheels.
Speaking to Collider, Mazin agreed that in order to wrap up The Last of Us’ story from the two Naughty Dog-developed video games in Season 3 would mean Season 3 itself "would take forever." So, while there's a "decent chance" Season 3 will be longer than Season 2, at the end of the day "there’s no way to complete this narrative in a third season."
He continued: "Hopefully, we’ll earn our keep enough to come back and finish it in a fourth. That’s the most likely outcome."
Warning! Spoilers for The Last of Us follow:
Here’s Mazin’s quote in full, which includes a big spoiler for The Last of Us Season 2:
Yeah, and it would take forever. There are natural perforations in the narrative where you can go, “Okay, let’s tear it here.” I think there’s a decent chance that Season 3 will be longer than Season 2, just because the manner of that narrative and the opportunities it affords us are a little different. The thing about Joel’s death is that it’s so impactful. It’s such a narrative nuclear bomb that it’s hard to wander away from it. We can’t really take a break and move off to the side and do a Bill and Frank story. I’m not sure that will necessarily be true for Season 3. I think we’ll have a little more room there. But certainly, there’s no way to complete this narrative in a third season. Hopefully, we’ll earn our keep enough to come back and finish it in a fourth. That’s the most likely outcome.
The Last of Us premiered in January 2023 to major acclaim, even being touted by some as the best video game adaptation thus far. Season 1 collected a whopping eight Emmy awards out of the 24 nominations it received.
Season 2 sees leads Bella Ramsey and Pedro Pascal return as Ellie and Joel, alongside newcomer Kaitlyn Dever as Abby, a soldier who is dead set on revenge in the wake of losing someone close to her. Beef star Young Mazino, Alien: Romulus star Isabelle Merced, Captain America: Brave New World star Danny Ramirez, and legends Catherine O’Hara and Jeffrey Wright are also in Season 2.
“I have to have an ending,” Druckmann said. “When I made The Last of Us 1, I didn’t know if there was going to be a sequel, so that had to be a definitive ending. When I worked on Uncharted 4, I don’t know if we’ll ever get to do it again. I need it to be a definitive ending. Last of Us 2, same way. All these things have to line up.
“I don’t know how long I’ll keep doing this or whether I’ll be given another opportunity. So I leave nothing on the line.
“Right now it’s like, we have an ending in mind. And that ending will be it. That ending will be it for this story.”
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.
Naughty Dog chief Neil Druckmann has revealed the studio has a secret, unannounced second game in the works other than Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet.
In an interview with the Press X to Continue podcast, Druckmann discussed his ongoing roles at Sony-owned Naughty Dog. On Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet, Druckmann works with two game directors: Matthew Gallant and Kurt Margenau, and is co-writing the game with narrative director Claire Carré. Druckmann did not say which director is working on the second game, however.
“There’s another game that’s being worked on at Naughty Dog where I am more of a producer role and I get to mentor and watch this other team and give feedback and be like the executive in the room,” he said.
“I enjoy all those roles, and the fact I jump between one to the next, it makes my job very exciting and always feeling fresh. I’m never bored.”
It is unclear at which stage each game is in production. Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet is announced, so you’d imagine it’s further along. But what is the second game?
There are some obvious candidates. Could it be The Last of Us 3? Druckmann has expressed his uncertainty in the past about being able to make the game, but has said he has an ending in mind for what the game would be. Based on Druckmann’s comments about having more of a producer role on this mystery second game, it doesn’t sound like it’s The Last of Us 3, as you’d imagine he’d want to be heavily involved and take on a director role for that game.
Alternatively, it could be another Uncharted game. There hasn’t been a brand new Uncharted game since 2017’s The Lost Legacy. Could it finally be time for a return? And there’s always a chance this second game could be a brand new intellectual property, as Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet is.
It’s worth noting that there’s always a chance this second game never comes out, or is never properly revealed by Sony. Naughty Dog has endured a tumultuous time in recent years, with the cancelation of its The Last of Us multiplayer game to focus on single-player games coming amid an apparent pull-back of live service titles at Sony.
Naughty Dog stopped development on The Last of Us Online in December 2023, saying it would have needed to put all its resources into post-launch content for years to come — an approach that would have severely impacted its ability to develop future single-player games.
Historically, Naughty Dog has struggled to work on two big games at the same time, with one tending to end up top of the tree internally. The studio hasn’t released a brand new game since 2020’s The Last of Us 2, with remakes and collections in the interim.
As for Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet, it features a star-studded cast that includes Tati Gabrielle from the Uncharted movie as protagonist Jordan A. Mun, and Kumail Nanjiani of Marvel's Eternals as a man called Colin Graves. It is not expected to release until 2027 at the earliest. It’s a pretty long wait, but speaking to IGN on the red carpet ahead of The Last of Us Season 2 premiere, Druckmann said that Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet is not only playable right now, but “really good.”
“I will say we are playing it at the office and it's incredible,” Druckmann teased. “It's really good. I'm so excited to finally put gameplay out into the world and show people about it, because we just showed you the very, very, very tip on the iceberg. The game goes pretty deep beyond that.”
Photo by Rich Polk/Deadline via Getty Images.
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.
With over a hundred years of history and a stacked portfolio of films and TV shows, it’s no surprise that Disney has its own horse in the competitive streaming service race. Since the inception of Disney+ in 2019, the streaming giant has grown its portfolio beyond its classic fairy tale roots and now boasts a catalogue of box office-busting films and bingeable series alike. From Star Wars to Marvel, you might be wondering: How can I stream Disney+ in 4K? Look no further, as our guide will run you through everything you’ll need, from subscription types to hardware.
How to Stream Disney+ in 4K
Unlike most streaming services on the market, Disney+ doesn’t require you to have a premium account to access 4K content. That means no matter what kind of subscription you’ve chosen, whether it be a bundle or basic plan, you’ll have access to 4K streaming on Disney+. So if you’re considering which bundle or account type to pick, the decisions will come down to what extras you’d like, such as offline downloads or ads.
Disney+ Hulu Bundle Basic (with Ads) – $10.99 per month
Disney+ Hulu Bundle Premium (without Ads) – $19.99 per month
Disney+, Hulu, ESPN+ Basic (with Ads) – $16.99 per month
Disney+, Hulu, ESPN+ Bundle Premium (without Ads) - $26.99 per month
Disney+, Hulu, Max Bundle (with Ads) - $16.99 per month
Disney+, Hulu, Max Bundle (without Ads) - $29.99 per month
Make Sure Your Setup Is 4K-Compatible
To stream Disney+ in 4K, you’ll need to ensure all aspects of your setup can support streaming in 4K. That means it’s not just your Smart TV that needs to be compatible, but also every other piece of hardware, too. If you use an Apple TV or Firestick, you’ll need to shop around for the 4K compatible versions. Same goes for buying a HDMI cable to connect your hardware.
One important caveat to consider is that, as of right now, streaming Disney+ in 4K is not possible on computer browsers. That means if you're using a laptop, your content will be limited.
Check Your Connection
When streaming 4K content on Disney+, there aren’t any internet settings to adjust, as the app automatically detects internet quality and adjusts your content’s video format accordingly. With that in mind, if you’re still running into problems, you can reset your device’s cache. To do this, we recommend following the official guide Disney+ has on its website.
Are There Other Ways to Watch Disney+ Movies and Shows in 4K ?
Even though your pile of shame’s already teetering and your backlog is the size of a felled sequoia, who are you and I to resist yet another bargain? Today's gaming treasure trove spans mischievous birds, noir cyborgs, and wizarding wonders, all at prices that’ll have your wallet breathing a sigh of relief. Whether you’re deep in console country or loyal to your trusty PC, there’s a little something here to make your day but ruin your bandwidth.
This Day in Gaming 🎂
In retro news, I'm lighting a 15-candle cake for WarioWare D.I.Y., one of my favourite Nintendo DS time-wasters. Nintendo essentially handed players the keys to the microgame factory and somehow didn’t burn the place down. Armed with a stylus and too much free time, you could compose janky 8-bit music, draw unhinged sprites, and script chaotic games that lasted all of five seconds but felt like fever dreams.
The tutorials starred Wario’s development crew trying (and mostly failing) to teach you game design basics without causing a workplace accident. Honestly, it was less Super Mario Maker and more Mario Paint meets GarageBand on a sugar high. It even let you upload your madness online, meaning no DS cartridge was safe from your homemade horrors. A beautiful, timeless mess.
Nintendo players can dash into Sonic Frontiers for A$49, a sprawling open zone adventure that lets the blue blur stretch his legs like never before. Or stir up some trouble in the minimalist mayhem of Untitled Goose Game, a local Melbourne creation that nabbed a BAFTA and inspired real-life goose protest signs.
Xbox Series X owners should absolutely look at Robocop: Rogue City - Alex Murphy Edition, now just A$10. The devs brought back Peter Weller himself to voice Robocop three decades after the original. Meanwhile, Ori and the Will of the Wisps remains one of the most heartbreakingly beautiful games of the generation, with animation influenced by Studio Ghibli.
PS5 players can get a discounted trip to Night City in Cyberpunk 2077 at A$71, now finally in the form fans were promised back in 2020. Or check out The Last of Us Part II Remastered, which includes a roguelike mode originally prototyped as a testbed for stealth mechanics.
Over on PC, Sleeping Dogs: Definitive Edition is criminally underplayed at just A$4. It’s essentially “GTA meets Hong Kong cinema” and includes an actual Bruce Lee outfit. Finally, Baldur’s Gate 3 is down to A$71, and it only took Larian Studios six years, three delays, and a player base that insists on seducing every NPC to make it one of the most beloved CRPGs of all time.
The market is already chock full of RGB LED decor, but Govee has still managed to release a unique product that might just deserve a spot on your desk. The Govee Pixel Light, which was first unveiled at CES 2025, is finally available for purchase for immediate delivery. This is essentially a 52x32 or 32x32 LED array panel that allows you to display personalized content. Prices start at $119.99 with free shipping, but there's a 30% off coupon code "PX30". This would make for a very cool toy for streamers, or maybe even for tech savvy and gadget-happy dads, since Father's Day is fast approaching.
Save 30% Off Govee's New Pixel Light
Govee's new Pixel Light comes in two sizes. The smaller 32x32 size features a total of 1,024 LED arrays and the larger 52x32 size features a total of 1,664 LED arrays. You can display static images, but animations are its bread and butter because the panel is capable of displaying moving images at a smooth 30 frames per second. If you just want to plug it in and have it work without any fiddling, Govee has already preloaded useful widgets like weather forecast, NBA schedules, Bitcoin, and countdown timers. There's even a trained AI model that will pre-select or custom create animations and scenes for you depending on what you type in the text prompt.
There have been other pixel displays in the past, but the pixel arrays are either too chunky, the framerate is too slow to be anything but a gimmick, or the software is borderline unusable. The Govee Pixel Light has a display that's both sharp and smooth, features a relatively intuitive user interface, and is well-priced compared to other similar types of lights.
Eric Song is the IGN commerce manager in charge of finding the best gaming and tech deals every day. When Eric isn't hunting for deals for other people at work, he's hunting for deals for himself during his free time.
The Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090 graphics card is still nigh impossible to find a standalone GPU, and your best bet is to get it pre-installed in a ready-made gaming computer. HP is currently the only online retailer I've found that has an RTX 5090 prebuilt gaming PC priced under $5,000. It's at least $400 less than every other prebuilt 5090 configuration out there. You'll need to follow my directions to configure the options, and HP's estimated June 4 delivery seems pretty optimistic, but if you're bent on getting one of these cards then you have to put in the effort.
HP Omen 45L RTX 5090 Prebuilt Gaming PC for $4489.99
Follow the directions below to properly configure this PC:
Select Chassis - Front Bezel Black Glass and 1200W Power Supply (+$60)
Price should show as $4,489.99 shipped (plus tax)
The RTX 5090 Is the Most Powerful Graphics Card Ever
The Nvidia 50-series GPUs were officially announced at CES 2025. Although this time around Nvidia has prioritized adding AI features and DLSS 4 technology to improve gameplay performance over the previous generation GPUs, the RTX 5090 has still emerged as the most powerful consumer GPU on the market even if you only factor hardware-based raster performance. This card boasts a 25%-30% uplift over the RTX 4090 and with 32GB of GDDR7 VRAM.
The Omen 45L is HP's Flagship Gaming Chassis
The Omen 45L is HP's flagship gaming PC and, in our opinion, one of the best prebuilt gaming PCs. This is HP's roomiest chassis with plenty of cooling in the form of four 120mm fans for system airflow and an additional 240mm to 360mm all-in-one liquid cooling solution for the CPU. This PC is equipped with a generous 1,200W 80Plus Gold power supply and current-gen components like an Intel Z790 motherboard, Kingston FURY DDR5 RGB memory modules, and a WD Black M.2 SSD. The chassis itself looks great with its blend of steel and tempered glass and RGB lighting. Although it certainly exudes a very premium feel, it doesn't scream "gamer" like some other PC cases.
Eric Song is the IGN commerce manager in charge of finding the best gaming and tech deals every day. When Eric isn't hunting for deals for other people at work, he's hunting for deals for himself during his free time.
This list contains spoilers for the Mission: Impossible franchise.
A new Mission: Impossible film is hitting theaters this month – the final one in the franchise, if we’re to believe Tom Cruise and the suits at Paramount – and if you’re like us, you’re probably knee deep in a series rewatch right now.
The focus of the films, spectacular action set pieces aside, has been Cruise’s lead spy, Ethan Hunt. Fellow team agents have often come and gone, and supposedly impossible missions have varied time after time, but Ethan has remained. The only other constant has been a steady supply of villains – men and women with big plans fueled by greed and/or malice, who think they’ll be the one to outwit, outsmart, and outrun Hunt. Fools.
It might seem counterintuitive ranking the Mission: Impossible villains under the banner of “best,” but every great hero needs an equally great villain. Numerous elements come into play when determining the best villain, but we’re zeroing in on the scale of their threat, the weight of the violence (both physical and emotional) they commit against Hunt and his team, and the palpable degree of villainous charisma they exhibit.
So cue up that classic Lalo Schifrin theme, here are the 10 Best Mission: Impossible Villains, Ranked!
10. A.I. The Entity (Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One)
“A self-aware, self-learning, truth-eating digital parasite infesting all of cyberspace” sounds like a pretty cool threat in any other high-octane thriller, but in the Mission: Impossible franchise it’s only good enough to land at number ten. It underwhelms compared to its human counterparts, because let’s be real – zeroes and ones ain’t got shit and madness and guns – but its power and immense reach are undeniable. The Entity began “life” as a digital weapon designed by the U.S. government before going rogue and hopping through cyberspace with the giddiness of a puppy experiencing its first snowfall.
Most villainous act of villainy: While toying with and killing a submarine filled with Russian sailors is an act of murderous cruelty, it’s the Entity’s bigger, broader acts of deception that mark it as a true villain. Its early days of online manipulation saw it shifting public opinion and behavior through social media, and it’s a brutal reminder of events in the real world. We live in a present where people with nefarious agendas are influencing easily shaped minds, and with the increased use of A.I. in our online dealings, it’s not hard to imagine something like the Entity stepping in and really turning our daily lives into a nightmare.
9. John Musgrave (Mission: Impossible III)
Not every villain has direct blood on his hands, but that doesn’t mean they’re any less dangerous. Musgrave is Hunt’s Operations Manager at the IMF, and it’s suggested they may even be minor friends – understandable as he’s played by Billy Crudup, and who wouldn’t want to be friends with Billy Crudup. He brings Hunt in on a mission to rescue one of his proteges, Lindsey Farris, and when that goes wrong and Hunt is blamed for the fallout, it’s Musgrave who helps the agent escape to pursue justice. See? A friend.
Surprise! It’s all a ruse, and Musgrave is actually a traitor working with a man named Owen Davian on some elaborate plan to retrieve a piece of tech nicknamed “the rabbit’s foot.” Musgrave’s a hero in his own mind, though, as he’s hoping to use this as motivation for first strikes against enemy forces. He wants the U.S. and the IMF to play a more aggressive role in the fight against terrorism, and if that means supporting terrorists along the way, well, he’s all for it.
Most villainous act of villainy: Musgrave might think his heart is in the right place here, but in addition to enabling a murderous terrorist in Davian, he crosses an equally big line by pulling Ethan’s wife, Julia, into danger. Worse, he lets Davian shoot Julia in the head right in front of Hunt. Sure, she’s revealed to have been a minor henchwoman in a mask, but the emotional damage is real.
8. Kurt Hendricks (Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol)
While some villains act out of greed and others cause misery simply for the fun of it, Kurt Hendricks is a man who only wants the best for humanity. What is the best, you ask? Well, in Hendricks’ mind, our species would benefit from something of a cleanse. From the great biblical flood to the atomic bombing of Japanese cities during World War II, immense disasters lead to rebuilding, recovery, and real improvement… apparently.
Sounds logical, so Hendricks sets out to trigger just such a global debacle starting with a massive attack on the Kremlin in Moscow and leading to the acquisition of nuclear codes. He proves himself to be one of the greatest threats Ethan Hunt has faced to that point.
Except, and this is where casting comes into serious play, the film wants us to see him as a physical threat to Hunt – but that’s nearly impossible. Michael Nyqvist was a fantastic actor, and he makes for a compelling villain through dialogue and intent. But a serious contender in a fight with Cruise? It’s difficult to buy, but that doesn’t stop director Brad Bird from letting him go toe to toe with the film’s star for a weirdly long fight. (To be fair, Chad Stahelski started it by letting Nyqvist seemingly hold his own for a bit with Keanu Reeves in John Wick.) So, while Hendricks is a grand threat on the world stage, he tumbles some in the ranking here as an unserious brawler against the highly trained and in far better shape Hunt.
Most villainous act of villainy: Like Musgrave above, Hendricks seriously thinks he’s doing the world a favor by causing harm. His final act results in a nuclear missile being fired towards San Francisco, something that would have killed tens of thousands of people immediately before triggering the death of millions more. That’s no small thing, and he would have gotten away with it, too, if it hadn’t been for those meddling IMF agents.
7. August Walker (Mission: Impossible - Fallout)
Hunt and his IMF team have been betrayed by double agents and traitors on numerous occasions, but most of them are greedy middle-aged men in suits who don’t pose an immediate physical threat to our intrepid hero. August Walker is something different entirely. He towers over Hunt and is jacked from his mustache on down. Henry Cavill’s portrayal ensures that he’s already menacing even while pretending to be on Hunt’s side, but once the truth comes out, the gloves come off.
Walker is revealed to be working in cahoots with the brilliant Solomon Lane, and together they frame Hunt and once again pull the love of his life, Julia, into harm’s way. His motivation for it all is a bit over the top and dramatic – he wants the old world to implode and give rise to something better – but what else would you expect from a man who seems to cock his arms like guns during fist fights.
Most villainous act of villainy: Walker and Lane are planning to detonate nuclear bombs, and while the latter stays behind to die in his greatest act of terror, Walker is on a chopper heading to safety. Hunt, of course, catches up to him in pursuit of the detonator that’s needed to stop the countdown. While Walker could have easily escaped by giving up the detonator, his desire to cause suffering – especially Hunt’s suffering if Julia were to die – leads him to a one-on-one fight to the death with the agent. It’s a decision built on rage and self-righteous justification, and it rightfully ends in his painful demise.
6. Paris (Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One)
When it comes to villains in the Mission: Impossible universe, few can touch Pom Klementieff’s Paris on style and charisma points. A henchwoman to Gabriel, she lets her gleefully murderous skillset do most of her talking, and it’s a refreshing change of pace from baddies who seem compelled to share their life stories before pulling a trigger.
Her costume and face makeup see her stand apart from the crowd, but don’t let her doll-like appearance fool you. Paris is a merciless fighter who refuses to quit despite the odds, as evidenced by a shootout and car chase in Rome that sees her literally plowing through obstacles both human and otherwise in her pursuit of Hunt.
Most villainous act of villainy: While Paris makes mincemeat out of numerous threats, she ultimately succumbs to Hunt during an alleyway brawl. He spares her life, though, and after being punished by Gabriel – he basically tries to kill her – she chooses to betray both him and her villainous tendencies by saving Hunt’s life. Maybe I’m stretching the definition here, but it takes a real badass to turn your back on villainy with the discovery of unexpected morals and a change of heart.
5. Gabriel (Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning)
The mysterious Gabriel arrives in the penultimate entry of the franchise, and he’s a man with deadly skills and an alliance with the Entity. He also comes with a backstory suggesting an integral role in Ethan Hunt’s life. It seems Gabriel killed a woman named Marie thirty years ago, someone Hunt was apparently fond of, and it’s that murder that landed Hunt at the IMF – where he went on to save thousands of lives. Hundreds of thousands, even. So maybe Gabriel is a hero? I kid, I kid.
He’s obviously a villain, and he may even be something of a seer (?), but while his late-to-the-party franchise arrival unavoidably undercuts his dramatic weight, the character’s casting lifts Gabriel right back up again. Esai Morales brings real charm and a calm menace to the character, and it’s immediately made clear that he’s not someone to be trifled with. You believe both his physical abilities and deadly intentions, and Morales’ added dramatic weight makes him a real threat to Hunt. He also earns a bump in the rankings by gifting viewers with the best, most unforgettable villain death in the entire franchise.
Most villainous act of villainy: Gabriel’s killed a lot of people, and he even destroyed a rolling Agatha Christie landmark, so it’s clear he’s a bad guy. His most vicious act, though, comes as a bookend to having “fridged” Marie three decades earlier. Gabriel threatens to do it again by killing either Ilsa or Grace – Hunt’s current love interest or the woman who just landed in his lap mere hours ago – and while the film wants to trick viewers into thinking it’s going to be the latter, it’s Ilsa who dies by Gabriel’s blade instead. McQuarrie and Cruise are obviously the real villains here for introducing this tired trope of a woman’s death being responsible for a man’s life, but it’s ultimately Gabriel who thrusts the knife into Ilsa’s gut. It could have been Grace who died. Hell, it should have been Benji. Instead, Gabriel extinguishes the franchise’s brightest flame this side of Hunt himself. J’accuse!
4. Jim Phelps (Mission: Impossible)
Jim Phelps wasn’t the only friend/fellow agent to betray Hunt over the years, but he was the first – and arguably the most shocking. The character, as played by Peter Graves, was the IMF’s lead agent for the bulk of the television series’ seven-season run from 1966 to 1973. He was unquestionably a good guy, so there was no reason to suspect that his presence in the first Mission: Impossible film would be anything different – well, Jon Voight in the role was probably a clue.
Audiences expected Phelps to essentially hand the reins over to Tom Cruise’s Ethan Hunt, but while he did just that, he did so with a major act of betrayal. As he tells Hunt once his ruse is discovered, the end of the Cold War threatens to end the need for the IMF – this is as naive a statement as ever uttered in the entirety of the franchise – and he was worried about becoming a relic barely scraping by on sixty-two thousand dollars a year.
Most villainous act of villainy: The betrayal itself is already brutal as Phelps turns his back on friends and agents who’ve risked their lives together over the years, but it’s the specifics of his traitorous act that hits hardest. In his effort to frame someone else for his crime, Phelps kills off three members of his team during an operation and then fakes his own death. What could have been a simple theft, instead becomes an act of cruelty making his betrayal sting even more.
3. Sean Ambrose (Mission: Impossible II)
“That was always the hardest part of having to portray you,” says ex-IMF agent Sean Ambrose to a beaten and angered Ethan Hunt, “grinning like an idiot every fifteen minutes.” That line alone makes Ambrose a top villain as it’s a terrific zing at both Hunt and Cruise himself. He’s equally dismissive of women as evidenced by his comment that they’re like monkeys when it comes to the men in their lives, that they “won’t let go of one branch until they get a grip on the next.” Say what you will about his greedy desires, but Ambrose (Dougray Scott) understands the assignment when it comes to being a charismatic villain.
That greed has led him to steal a deadly plague with plans to unleash it on whole populations if his demands aren’t met. While cash money is his primary motivator, though, Ambrose also seems fueled by a splash of jealousy towards Hunt. That makes their faceoffs all the more entertaining whether they’re jousting on motorcycles or sharing beatdowns in the sand as only the great John Woo can capture it.
Most villainous act of villainy: The film opens with Ambrose masquerading as Hunt in order to acquire the Chimera plague, but rather than just kill one man, Ambrose and his team crash an entire passenger jet filled with innocent civilians. Acts of terror would claim higher body counts in later films, but this puts faces to the dead in a far more direct way making it more personal and affecting.
2. Solomon Lane (Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation)
Whether due to low pay or poor benefits, the world is seemingly overflowing with ex-government employees ready and willing to betray their nations and jump on the train to villain town. Solomon Lane is one such agent, but he goes a step or three further by helping create an organization called The Syndicate that’s built entirely on those bitter, trigger happy ex-agents. They want to sow chaos and reap financial rewards, and they’ve been doing it for years.
Lane is introduced killing a young, unarmed female agent right in front of Hunt, and it’s soon revealed that he’s responsible for thousands of deaths over the years through events made to look like accidents or the work of wholly unrelated perpetrators. Lane’s history of manipulating trust and the world’s various systems makes him one of the most dangerous villains in the franchise. He’s ahead of Hunt at every step, and his mantra – “The greater the suffering, the greater the peace.” – marks him as a man willing to do anything to accomplish his goals.
While many actors go big playing villains, Sean Harris takes the opposite approach and makes Lane a weasel of a man who you just want to see get beaten senseless. It’s an unusually bold choice that leaves him without a darkly appealing persona or personality – he’s just a very bad man who couldn’t care less about you or your loved ones.
Most villainous act of villainy: As the rare villain to be an active threat across more than one film, Lane inflicts plenty of pain, suffering, and stress on Hunt and his team. The bulk of his evil acts were committed before Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation even begins, but his cruelest and most personal action unfolds during the followup, Fallout. Along with August Walker, Lane manages to activate two nuclear bombs threatening not only the water supply for billions of people, but also the life of Hunt’s greatest love, Julia. Seeing her in harm’s way is the kind of gut punch that Hunt felt only once before, and it’s clear just how sorry he is that his choices have once again brought her so close to dying.
1. Owen Davian (Mission: Impossible III)
There’s a lot of competition when it comes to selecting the best villain in the Mission: Impossible franchise, but there was never any doubt who’d land at the top of the heap. Davian doesn’t care about much beyond his own wants and needs, and the film reflects that by never revealing exactly what his end goal is – we know he wants the so-called rabbit’s foot, but what it is and what it does are never made clear. We just know that Davian will cut through anyone and anything to get it, and that makes him an exceptionally dangerous man.
J.J. Abrams’ Mission: Impossible III is unfairly maligned, but even those underwhelmed by the film itself can’t help but applaud Philip Seymour Hall’s frighteningly effective and highly entertaining portrayal of Davian. His blistering stares, his lightning quick shifts from dead silence to raging outbursts, and his deceptively calm way of threatening everything that Hunt holds dear all work to make him a villain who commands the screen and even steals every scene from Cruise himself.
There may not be a big, global threat at play here, but Davian is the man who arguably gets closer than any other villain to actually killing Hunt. He injects the agent’s head with an explosive device that gets within seconds of churning Hunt’s brain tissue into ground beef, and he even gets some serious licks in while brawling. You wouldn’t think a Cruise versus Hoffman fight would convince, but the latter’s pure ferocity paired with Hunt’s incapacitation due to the pain in his head makes for a viciously compelling bout.
Most villainous act of villainy: Davian is a mean bastard who, while still in restraints, coldly threatens to murder Hunt’s fiance Julia. “I’m gonna make her bleed and cry and call out your name”, he says, and it’s one of the few times where Hunt’s legendary control tips into real fear and emotion. Davian later comes close to doing just that after abducting Julia, tying her up, and appearing to shoot her in the head. Hunt’s pain is palpable, and it’s enough to damage his heart to the point that he’d go on to never let someone that close again. Davian has literally halted Hunt’s ability to connect with someone on a deeply personal level, and it’s the kind of attack that bullets and bombs just can’t compete with.
Ahead of its official Memorial Day Sale event, Sonos is offering an extra 25% off its two most popular portable speakers: the compact and rugged Sonos Roam 2 and the bigger sounding and more feature rich Sonos Move 2. These deals are available from Sonos direct and at various retailers, although I recommend buying from a retailer to get faster shipping.
Sonos Move 2 for $336
The Move 2 is Sonos' biggest and best portable speaker. It's bigger size allows it to house two tweeters, a mid-woofer, and three class-D digital amplifiers. The internal battery will provide up to 24 hours of continuous playtime and a little docking station is included, essentially turning it into a powered speaker. This is a standalone speaker with a self-contained battery and can be carried around from room to room. It is IP56 rated for weather resistance and has a built-in microphone.
Sonos Roam 2 for $134
The Sonos Roam 2 is much more compact than the Move 2. It weighs in at under one pound and is designed for both indoor and outdoor use thanks to an IP67-rated waterproof and dustproof housing. It houses one tweeter, one mid-woofer, and two class-H digital amplifers, so it's still able to pump out inpressively clean sound even at high volumes. The internal battery supplies the Roam 2 with nearly 10 hours of playtime, and it can be recharged over USB Type-C. It supports both Bluetooth and wireless connectivity and has a built-in microphone for voice control.
Why Is Sonos So Popular?
If you're looking for an easy solution to add great sound to your home, then you've probably already heard of Sonos. Sonos speakers are very easy to set up, don't take a large amount of space, and most importantly, offer distortion-free room-filling audio. We picked Sonos as our best soundbar of 2024.
Sound Quality for Its Size
Despite the fact that Sonos products are compact and don't take up much space in your house, they offer surprisingly loud and distortion-free audio. They're definitely pricier than budget options, but the sound quality is more akin to audio products that cost hundreds more or take up much more space.
Easy Setup
Sonos devices are usually simple plug and play. All you have to do is plug in a power cable (if even that's necessary) and one connection to your TV (if even that's necessary), download the Sonos app, and you're done. Generally a receiver isn't required; the soundbars are designed to plug right into your TV and the speakers are designed to work wirelessly. For something like a 5.1ch home theater setup, you don't have to deal with a mess of cables. Individual Sonos speakers can pair with your soundbar and be used as rear satellites, and the subwoofer is also wireless so it can be positioned virtually anywhere in your room.
Communication Between Devices
Practically all Sonos speakers can communicate with each other. That means you can pair different Sonos speakers in different rooms for multi-room capability. Or you can pair two speakers for stereo output. Or you can pair speakers to your soundbar to be used as a 5.1ch setup. It's all seamlessly done through the app.
Eric Song is the IGN commerce manager in charge of finding the best gaming and tech deals every day. When Eric isn't hunting for deals for other people at work, he's hunting for deals for himself during his free time.
Some of the best LEGO sets that have ever been created are now retired. While you can still find ways to buy them online, it is nearly impossible to find them below their original retail price. So if you find yourself face to face with a LEGO set that really sparks joy, it's best to pick it up before it's gone forever.
That being said, there are some rare cases when you can still find a set for below MSRP even after it gets retired. One such case is this current discount on the Green Hill Zone LEGO set at Amazon. It isn't much of a discount, but we don't expect it will still be at this price for much longer now that its been over five months since it was retired.
LEGO Sonic The Hedgehog – Green Hill Zone Sale
The LEGO Ideas Green Hill Zone set originally came out back in January 2022, but it wasn't until January of this year that LEGO retired the set. IGN actually had the chance to build back in 2022 when it first came out three years ago and we loved the build. It's a fun tribute to the iconic video game level from the series and one of our favorite Sonic the Hedgehog LEGO sets and is great for any fan of the franchise.
As far as I can tell, Amazon currently has the lowest possible price on this set if you're looking to buy it new, but Walmart also has it available. Ebay has a few different options on used versions for almost half the price, but you may risk missing pieces if you take that route. Considering it is still discounted, Amazon likely has quite a bit of stock left for this set, but as soon as that starts to dwindle you can expect prices to go up fairly quickly. LEGO is no longer selling this set, so once it's gone you'll only be able to purchase it at a markup unless you get lucky.
More Recently Retired LEGO Sets on Amazon
Once LEGO officially retires a set, they tend to hang around at other retailers for a bit longer. This makes Amazon one of the best places to buy LEGO thanks to their extended inventory of these products. There are a number of other recently retired sets you can currently still purchase right now. We've featured some of the most popular ones below:
There’s no way to talk about mechanical keyboards without bringing up Cherry and their prolific brand of switches, which you’ll see in some of the best gaming keyboards throughout time. Following the introduction of the new generation of switch components last year, the accessory company highlights its new wares in the Cherry XTRFY MX 3.1 keyboard. In what should have been a brilliant showcase for the company’s new product lineup, those fantastic new keys are marred by some odd design flaws on what’s otherwise a rather pleasant-feeling keyboard.
Cherry XTRFY MX 3.1 – Design and Features
Cherry packed a few frills into the XTRFY MX 3.1. It’s a wired full-size keyboard complete with a full set of Cherry’s new MX2A Red mechanical switches. It’s available in black and white color schemes as well as a light pink edition, although that’s only available in Asian territories. You can spice up the look with full RGB customization and shine through the keycaps and vents on board’s sides. Inside the box, you’ll find only the keyboard, a sturdy braided USB-A to C cable, and in lieu of any adjustable legs built onto the keyboard itself, Cherry provides a pair of screw-on feet to adjust the keyboard’s height. It’s nice that there’s an option of some kind to change the angle at which the keyboard sits, but I wish there were something to make that adjustment quicker and easier for users to switch between positions on the fly. That’s just the first of my issues with the MX 3.1’s design, but thankfully, the majority of my complaints are skin deep.
Like other products in the XTRFY line, the MX 3.1 isn’t a particularly handsome piece of tech. Its key layout is crowded, eliminating the gaps between the main keyboard and the number pad area, leaving space only for a trio of notification lights above the arrow keys. However, while it should be saving space, it’s still about as wide as the full-sized Logitech G413 SE, which manages to give each section more room to breathe than the MX 3.1. Thankfully, in practice, the MX 3.1 manages not to feel as cramped as it looks.
This is my first experience with Cherry’s MX2A Red switches, and I’m fairly impressed with how they feel.
The frame is comprised of a solid chunk of aluminum that’s machined into an angular base that houses the recessed switches and folds into feet on the front and rear edges. It’s flanked with dotted RGB side plates with a dotted pattern that aren’t quite flush with the frame – although it creates a sort of textured look, it makes the whole look of the keyboard rough and unpolished. The build quality is great, however, and doesn’t feel flimsy even if there are still a handful of edges that could use some cleaning up in its design philosophy.
Cherry is clearly aiming for the gaming crowd with the aesthetic of the XTRFY MX 3.1, going with a pseudo-futuristic look, but it feels like it’s living in the past. The stock keycaps are emblazoned with a sharp sci-fi-inspired font, making the unit as a whole look like some of the try-hard budget keyboards on sale over a decade ago. It’s not a complete eyesore, but it’s one of a few questionable choices Cherry made with the MX 3.1.
However, there are more confusing choices, specifically how some of the punctuation keys are depicted on the stock keycaps. When a key has multiple functions, the represented characters are oriented vertically, with the top character being the default and the bottom requiring a press of the Shift or Function keys. It’s a pretty standard configuration for most keyboards, except Cherry has decided that some of the punctuation keys have the same vertical orientation, while others are displayed horizontally. Here’s the kicker: there’s no consistency on whether the left or right character is supposed to be the default. For example, the bracket keys and forward slash, which are in line next to each other, are flip-flopped on each sequential key. It is truly a UX disaster.
Cherry XTRFY MX 3.1 – Software and Customization
When it comes to making things colorful, the adjustable RGB lighting is one of the best aspects of the MX 3.1, and brings the overall aesthetics back from the brink of being irredeemable. Using the Cherry Utility software, the keyboard can be customized with a variety of pulsing, waving, or static lighting styles, including on the side plates. For those who want to get granular with the look of their setup, each key can be individually lit with bespoke colors, which thankfully is becoming more common, and is especially great to see here. The lighting, which illuminates the characters on each key, gives a neat underglow to the recessed base of the device, with bright, colorful luminescence pouring through each crevice.
The Cherry Utility allows for multiple profiles to switch up the lighting as well as changing the functions of individual keys. There are options to remap keys, create macros, add specific multimedia functions, or type out a pre-written 1000-character field of text with a single keystroke, which is great for mapping your passwords to a key. The utility itself is simplistic, splitting customization up into “Lighting” and “Actions” segments, which are easy to navigate and use. There’s not a lot to do, but it’s great that Cherry has a clean interface for users to easily make the MX 3.1 more their own.
Cherry XTRFY MX 3.1 – Performance
The XTRFY MX 3.1’s saving grace is that it’s overall a pleasant keyboard to type with, especially for long periods of time. This is my first experience with Cherry’s MX2A Red switches, and I’m fairly impressed with how they feel. The switches require only a light touch to press, only 45g of actuation force, which is on the lower end of what Cherry offers with its various switches. As is pretty standard, each key has a total travel distance of 4.0mm and an actuation point in the direct center of that at 2.0mm. Cherry boasts that this reduces strain and fatigue when playing games and while I wouldn’t go as far as to fully endorse that statement, after a couple of weeks using the keyboard as my daily driver at work and while playing games, I haven’t come away from long sessions feeling like I needed to rest my hands and wrists.
Cherry claims the MX 3.1 is built to dampen the sound of its switches, and in practice, they’ve done a pretty great job. The MX2A Red switches are already designed as a linear switch which means it doesn’t have the clickiness of other Cherry switches, and when typing on the MX 3.1, it’s noticeably quiet. They aren’t completely silent, mind you, but they provide a satisfying sound like a couple of plastic measuring spoons gently tapping one another. There are layers within the keyboard to help dampening which isn’t visible without taking apart the chassis, but whatever it’s doing works really well.
The ABS keycaps themselves are largely unremarkable in look and feel, though they are comfortable enough to use. Laid out in the standard Cherry height and formation, the keys feel smooth when pressed. A common complaint about ABS keys is how they wear over time, and with Cherry suggesting these caps are abrasion-resistant, I gave them a minor stress test to find out. Lightly scraping a key with a small flathead screwdriver is obviously not a normal use case, but the tool hardly left a mark on the plastic. Pressing slightly harder did leave a more noticeable abrasion, but it’s hardly visible at a glance, and invisible enough to pass my quick test flying colors.
Amazon’s Memorial Day Sale is already in full swing, and with it, Apple’s latest iPad is back to its lowest price ever. The classic 11-inch iPad with an A16 processor just came out in March, and we’re excited to see it already getting discounted. It’s rare for these sales to happen so soon after an Apple release. However, this isn’t even the first time it’s dropped in price, as the newest iPad had $50 knocked off a couple weeks ago, with the same savings leading up to the unofficial start to summer this weekend. Right now, every color of the iPad is a great deal, so grab an option that fits your aesthetic while it lasts.
The 11th-generation iPad isn’t the only iPad model seeing discounts right now; a bunch of Apple’s latest tablets, including the iPad Air (2025) and iPad mini (2024), plus some other great tablets, are on sale before the holiday weekend.
Score $50 off the new 2025 Apple iPad (A16)
With its combination of affordability and capability, the 11th-generation iPad is the best iPad model for most people. This iPad has slight upgrades from previous generations. Most notably, it now comes with an A16 processor rather than an A14, making for even snappier performance in everyday tasks from scrolling socials to streaming. Base storage also doubled to 128GB, leaving extra space to download apps and games, while the screen only got a minuscule size increase from 10.9 inches to 11 inches. But even with these changes, Apple didn’t up the cost from the 10th-generation model, so the starting price is just $349.
Not much else has changed with the newest iPad. It looks nearly identical and still offers the same Wi-Fi 6 connection, camera, and USB-C charging. Support for Apple’s Magic Folio keyboard and the Apple Pencil (USB-C) also makes it a viable option for lighter workflows, but if you're after serious power, the iPad Air or iPad Pro may be a better option.
Save up to $100 on the Latest iPad Air (M3) models
If you need just a bit more power than the classic iPad can offer, the latest 7th-generation iPad Air (M3) models, which also came out this March, are on sale ahead of Memorial Day. The Air is our favorite iPad for students, thanks to its impressive M3 processor (the same found in some MacBooks), making it a productivity beast. While the M3 silicon is the only major upgrade from the 6th-generation iPad Air released in 2024, it’s nice to see the new models already discounted. Greater savings can be found on the 13-inch iPad Air (M3), with $100 knocked off the price. The 11-inch iPad Air is discounted by $70.
New iPad mini is $100 off right now
The seventh-generation iPad mini is also available for its lowest price ever, costing just $399 for a 20% savings. While this isn’t the first time it has been priced this low, $100 off isn’t too shabby for such a recently released iPad.
The mini finally got a long-overdue revamp in the fall of 2024, bringing upgrades to the processor, RAM, base storage, Wi-Fi, and charging port. Now running on A17 Pro silicon and 8GB of RAM, the iPad mini has some major zip and supports Apple Intelligence. The vibrant and compact 8.3-inch display puts it right in between the size of a typical smartphone and a tablet, making it an ideal reading tablet, while the support for the Apple Pencil Pro and Apple Pencil (USB-C) means the iPad mini is a great tool for note-taking as well.
Other Tablet Deals Happening Right Now
Maybe you want something a little bit cheaper, or are team Android. Plenty of other tablets are discounted during Amazon’s Memorial Day sale. From lower-powered options that just handle the basics, like streaming shows and checking email, to powerful machines that keep up with the iPad Pro, we’ve found a few great tablets on sale.
Amazon dropped one of the best games of 2024 to the lowest price I've seen. As part of the Amazon Memorial Day Sale, you can pick up a physical copy of Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2 for PlayStation 5 or Xbox Series X for just $39.99. That's 43% off the $70 list price and beats the previous price low (during last year's Black Friday) by $10.
Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2 (PS5, Xbox) for $39.99
Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2 follows Demetrian Titus, a newly minted Primaris Space Marine super soldier, reinstated into service after a century of inprisonment following the events of the original Space Marine game. Chris Reed reviewed it and gave it a "Great" 8/10 score, mentioning that although "[Space Marine 2] may not break the third-person shooter mold, it looks amazing, makes good use of its Warhammer lore, and has brutal combat that just feels great."
Eric Song is the IGN commerce manager in charge of finding the best gaming and tech deals every day. When Eric isn't hunting for deals for other people at work, he's hunting for deals for himself during his free time.
Memorial Day weekend is still a full work week away, but the sales have already arrived at some of the biggest online retailers like Amazon, Best Buy, and Walmart. While prices may not be quite as good as Prime Day or the Black Friday season, these discounts are still a great opportunity to save money. To help you sort through what's live and what isn't, I've put together a quick list of all of the biggest Memorial Day sales already happening ahead of the weekend. I'll be updating this page with all of the new sales as they go live this week.
The Best Memorial Day Sales Live Now
I've been covering and shopping Memorial Day sales for years and, honestly, I'm not that impressed with the discounts we've seen so far. That being said, it is still really early in the week and I expect to see prices drop a bit more before the weekend. Memorial Day isn't until May 26 this year, and many smaller retailers will likely launch their sales closer to the actual holiday weekend.
Should you shop Memorial Day sales or wait for better discounts?
The biggest question around Memorial Day sales in general is whether you should shop now or wait for better deals later in the year. In the past, we could usually count on upcoming sales events like Prime Day and Black Friday to have the lowest prices of the year on just about everything. Unfortunately, there has been a lot of confusion around tariffs and price increases in 2025 and it seems almost certain that baseline prices on many goods in the U.S. are probably going to go up before the end of the year.
If you're hoping to save as much money as possible in 2025, Memorial Day sales are definitely worth considering. Tariffs on most Chinese imports are likely to affect prices later in the year, so if you find a really good price on something you need right now, don't hesitate to pick it up before the price can go up.
What Should You Buy During Memorial Day Sales?
While there are certainly exceptions, I have generally found that the best Memorial Day sales tend to be for the same few categories every year. Unlike bigger shopping events like Black Friday, discounts tend to be more focused around home goods, consumer electronics, and clothing. Here's a quick breakdown of what is absolutely worth buying during Memorial Day weekend.
Furniture
Perhaps the overall best thing to buy during Memorial Day sales is furniture. Unless you're getting a really cheap nightstand from Ikea, furniture is generally expensive. Memorial Day deals are an excellent time to save a ton of money on pretty much every type of furniture, including desks, gaming chairs, and outdoor patio options. While you can find these deals at most major retailers like Amazon, Target, and Walmart, I'd recommend starting with the Wayfair Memorial Day sale.
TVs
There are actually a lot of good times to buy a new TV throughout the year, but Memorial Day weekend is consistently one of the best times to find discounts on newer TVs. This likely has something to do with the TV release cycle as we are now about halfway through the year and the latest TVs have finally started to drop in price. If you're looking to buy a great new television for a good price, I'd recommend picking up the LG C4 that just dropped to its lowest price ever. However, there are already plenty of other TV deals to choose from.
Mattresses
Although mattresses technically count as furniture, I've broken them out into their own category because of the sheer number of Memorial Day mattress sales. Memorial Day weekend is far and away one of the best times to buy a mattress every year – you likely won't find lower prices even on Black Friday. Most major retailers have mattress promotions right now and you can find deals at Amazon, Walmart, and even Costco. However, I'd recommend shopping direct from the manufacturer to save the most money. The DreamCloud mattress sale will get you up to 60% off a new mattress right now.
Clothing
Holiday weekends are almost always a good time to find discounts on clothes. This is largely thanks to their proximity to a change in seasons. In the case of a Memorial Day weekend, you should be able to find some of the best prices of the year on both summer and winter clothes. Winter clothes are most likely to be part of clearance sales during this time and you should be able to find good deals on things like jackets, sweaters, and other outdoor gear. Meanwhile, every major retailer will have a sale on some sort of summer-related clothing as we head into warmer weather. I'd personally recommend checking out the REI Anniversary sale happening right now as it is its biggest sale of the year.
Laptops and PCs
If you're looking to buy a new laptop or PC this year, I'd recommend making a purchase sooner rather than later. This is especially true if you're trying to find the best time to buy a gaming PC this year, because GPU prices are already on the rise. The best Memorial Day sales tend to be directly from the manufacturers, so that's usually where you'll want to look. Dell, HP, and Lenovo all have at least part of their Memorial Day sales live right now. You can also check out Best Buy and Amazon if you're looking for brands like Acer and LG at a discount, however.
When Do Memorial Day Sales End?
Quite a few Memorial Day sales still haven't gone live yet, so there is still plenty of time to shop before the deals are gone. Most Memorial Day sales will be ending at the end of actual Memorial Day – which is Monday, May 26 this year.
Jacob Kienlen is a Senior SEO Strategist and Writer for IGN. Born and raised in Portland, Oregon, he has considered the Northwest his home for his entire life. With a bachelor's degree in communication and over 8 years of professional writing experience, his expertise ranges from books and games to technology and food. He has spent a good chunk of his career writing about deals and sales to help consumers find the best discounts on whatever they may be looking to buy.
The Crunchyroll Store is currently offering a 30% discount on all Viz Media books. Anyone familiar with manga knows Viz is a primary publisher of official English translations, so the sale includes a wide range of individual tankōbon volumes, as well as deluxe editions, art books, and even coloring books. With more than 2,000 volumes of manga on sale, every type of manga reader should be able to find something. While there are plenty of options for reading manga online, there's always something special about flipping through the pages of your favorite series and getting to see it on your shelf.
Although Crunchyroll usually struggles to match Amazon prices, many of the manga deals I've listed here have actually gone lower. Otherwise, you can shop the full sale here. It ends tonight, so if you’re trying to stock up, now’s your chance.
30% Off Viz Manga at Crunchyroll Store
The sale is a great opportunity to try out a new manga or pick up new volumes of something you’ve already been reading (online or otherwise). Highlights include every single volume of Dan Da Dan, which is about to start airing its second anime season. In general, the sale is a great opportunity to check out the manga that inspired recent anime hits like Sakamoto Days and Frieren.
Of course, if we’re talking about iconic anime, you'll also find discounts on classics like Dragon Ball, One Piece, and JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure. One series I personally recommend that hasn't gotten an anime adaptation (at least not yet) is Kagurabachi. Otherwise, your best bet is scrolling through the full sale, which you can sort by individual series.
Art Books Also Included
Viz Media also publishes a substantial amount of art books and other physical merchandise. Aside from the standard slate of popular manga, these publications highlight authors like Junji Ito and animation giants like Studio Ghibli.
Do You Need a Crunchyroll Account to Shop the Sale?
Nope! However, Crunchyroll Premium members do save an extra 5-15% on orders from the Crunchyroll Store. You can theoretically sign up for a seven-day free trial and get the bonus discount on top of the current sale.
Otherwise, a Premium membership is really only worth it long-term if you’re also in the market for an anime-focused streaming service. Starting at $7.99, a subscription's major perk is access to ad-free streaming of Crunchyroll’s entire library. Speaking of, Crunchyroll is currently celebrating "Ani-May" by making a selection of their library free to stream.
Three gaming monitors have been announced at Computex that are pushing the limit on refresh rates. The fastest of these shown off at the giant computing trade show in Taipei is the Asus ROG Strix Ace XG248QSG, a 1080p display with a 610Hz refresh rate. Both MSI and Acer have released 1440p displays with 500Hz refresh rates – a spec you'd be hard pressed to drive, even with an RTX 5090 and multi-frame generation.
Acer's model is the Predator X27U F5, which is not only fast but also has a QD-OLED display, so it'll have incredible color accuracy. Currently, this monitor is only launching in Europe and China, starting at €899. I have reached out to Acer, and it said that the monitor will be coming to the US eventually, but wouldn't share a price on it. Acer attributes this delay in pricing to Tarriffs, and it's actively negotiating its pricing with retailers. The company will announce the US price closer to the X27U F5 hitting store shelves, but given how expensive tech products are getting here, I wouldn't hold my breath that it'll be affordable.
MSI is also launching a QD-OLED panel with the 27-inch MPG 271QR X50, though it didn't share pricing information. What's interesting here isn't necessarily the fast, beautiful panel, but a cool AI feature. According to a report from PC Gamer, which went hands-on with it, the monitor has a tiny sensor at the bottom of the display that'll sense when you move away. It then sends that data to an NPU (Neural Processing Unit) so the display automatically turns off, starting its burn-in protection.
Burn-in protection is common in any OLED display, especially in a gaming monitor that'll have static images just sitting there over most of its lifespan. The monitor shuts off periodically to refresh the pixels and prevent burn-in. While having it be AI-based is a little spooky, it's at least better than the OLED protection popping on when you're in the middle of something.
Do Gaming Monitors Need to Be This Fast?
It's a little wild that we're getting three monitors that are this fast, but the Asus ROG Strix Ace XG248QSG obviously takes the cake. Even at 1080p, a 610Hz display is incredibly fast, even in a time where we have Nvidia's multi-frame generation boosting frame rates higher than ever. Even in a game like Marvel Rivals, you're going to need an RTX 5090 to hit that frame rate, and that'd require multi-frame generation, which is generally not advised in competitive games as it adds a little bit of latency.
You'd need more than just a powerful graphics card with this kind of refresh rate; you'd need one hell of a CPU, too. You see, at these super-high frame rates, your CPU needs to be powerful enough to keep your graphics card fed with data. Technology like Nvidia Reflex and frame generation mitigates that to a point, but when you start getting up around 600-ish fps, you're going to need a powerful CPU regardless.
However, if you were able to render a game that quickly – especially if you didn't have to use frame generation to get there – you'd get incredibly low render latency, which is a huge deal for competitive games. After all, there's a reason why competitive Counter-Strike 2 players run the game on the lowest settings, even though the game can run on a potato: A higher frame rate means less input lag, and that can be the difference between life and death. Whether or not that'll be worth the doubtlessly expensive price tag for most people is another question.
Jackie Thomas is the Hardware and Buying Guides Editor at IGN and the PC components queen. You can follow her @Jackiecobra
The Screen Actors Guild - American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA) is filing an unfair labor practice charge with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) against Epic Games, after the company implemented an AI-voiced Darth Vader NPC in Fortnite last week.
The complaint, which can be viewed here, alleges that over the last six months, Llama Productions (owned by Epic Games) has failed to bargain in good faith with SAG-AFTRA's video game actors and has made "unilateral changes to terms and conditions of employment, without providing notice to the union or the opportunity to bargain, by utilizing AI-generated voices to replace bargaining unit work" on Fortnite.
Fortnite added the AI Darth Vader last week, as an NPC character that can join or leave your Fortnite squad and have conversations with players over voice chat in the persona of Darth Vader. Though the AI Darth Vader has been programmed to offer support for individuals who express they might be struggling with mental health, Epic Games also had to patch it almost immediately after it launched to keep it from dropping F-bombs.
The character of Darth Vader was originally voiced by James Earl Jones, who passed away in September of last year at the age of 93. This AI recreation was done with the blessing of James Earl Jones' estate, with his family stating that: "James Earl felt that the voice of Darth Vader was inseparable from the story of Star Wars, and he always wanted fans of all ages to continue to experience it. We hope that this collaboration with Fortnite will allow both longtime fans of Darth Vader and newer generations to share in the enjoyment of this iconic character."
However, the use of AI voices at all by Epic Games presents a major issue for SAG-AFTRA, given its efforts to come to an agreement on a contract for its video game performers over the last year. The video game performing members of the union have been on strike for around 10 months now. The strike was started specifically due to a lack of agreement on AI provisions, even as 24 out of 25 other contract proposals had been affirmed by both sides. Earlier this year, SAG-AFTRA publicly shared a breakdown of the portions of the contract still disagreed upon by both sides, expressing that it was still "frustratingly far apart" on the provisions.
In light of this, SAG-AFTRA has issued a statement explaining its unfair labor practice charge against Epic, essentially claiming that Epic's use of AI was undermining the work of human SAG-AFTRA members who have previously or could potentially do work of matching Darth Vader's voice with their own performances. Here's the statement, in full:
We celebrate the right of our members and their estates to control the use of their digital replicas and welcome the use of new technologies to allow new generations to share in the enjoyment of those legacies and renowned roles. However, we must protect our right to bargain terms and conditions around uses of voice that replace the work of our members, including those who previously did the work of matching Darth Vader's iconic rhythm and tone in video games.
Fortnite's signatory company, Llama Productions, chose to replace the work of human performers with A.I. technology. Unfortunately, they did so without providing any notice of their intent to do this and without bargaining with us over appropriate terms. As such, we have filed an unfair labor practice charge with the NLRB against Llama Productions.
With the charge filed, the next step will be a review by the NLRB, potentially followed by an investigation and hearing if the agency believes the charge has merit, or dismissal if the NLRB believes it does not. In the event that it is determined Epic Games has committed an unfair labor practice, the NLRB can force it to remedy the situation in various ways, such as potentially hiring an actor to record a voice for Darth Vader or removing him from the game entirely, or some other penalty. However, these cases often take months or even years to progress, or can be settled outside by the two parties and the charge dropped.
Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter for IGN. You can find her posting on BlueSky @duckvalentine.bsky.social. Got a story tip? Send it to rvalentine@ign.com.
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