Month: February 2021

Nintendo announced remakes of Pokemon Diamond and Pearl in its 25th-anniversary stream today: Pokemon Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl will release later this year on Nintendo Switch. The Gen 4 remake games have been on many Pokemon fans’ wishlists for years, offering a chance to go back to the Sinnoh region and start a new adventure with Turtwig, Chimchar, or Piplup. Though an exact release date hasn’t been announced, Pokemon Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl are already up for preorder at Best Buy, and other listings will likely appear soon.

Pokemon Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl preorder bonuses

No preorder bonuses have been announced for Pokemon Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl yet. We’ll include that information here when available.

Pokemon Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl are not being developed by Game Freak but rather Ilca, which also worked on Pokemon Home. However, Game Freak’s Junichi Masuda, who directed the original games, is returning as director on the remakes alongside Ilca’s Yuichi Ueda.

The Gen 4 remakes have an adorable chibi art style with squat characters, though in battle, the Pokemon trainers will appear in a more realistically proportioned form. According to Nintendo, these are “faithful remakes” of the 2007 games, and “the sense of scale of the original games’ towns and routes has been carefully preserved.”

In addition to the reveal of Pokemon Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl, Nintendo announced Pokemon Legends Arceus, an open-world adventure also set in the Sinnoh region. Though it releases in early 2022, that game is also available to preorder now.

A brand-new spin on the Pokemon franchise is coming to Nintendo Switch in early 2022. Announced during the latest Pokemon Presents presentation, Pokemon Legends Arceus is an open-world RPG set in the Sinnoh region. While we don’t know much about the game just yet, diehard Pokemon fans can already preorder Pokemon Legends Arceus.

Pokemon Legends Arceus is set in a much earlier time period than the mainline entries. You play as a Pokemon trainer who is compiling Sinnoh’s first Pokedex. Sinnoh’s Pokemon Professor has brought three Pokemon to Sinnoh–Rowlet, Cyndaquil, and Oshawott–and you get to choose one of them as your partner Pokemon. From there, you head off on an adventure to survey and catch Pokemon. The legendary Pokemon at the center of the story is, of course, Arceus, who is described as an “Alpha Pokemon.”

Pokemon can be caught in one of two ways in Pokemon Legends Arceus. You can track them and lob a Poke Ball, or you can engage in traditional turn-based combat by sending your Pokemon into battle. It’s unclear at this time if you’ll face off against other trainers, but Sinnoh looks a lot more calm than normal, so it could be somewhat of a leisurely adventure. The visuals look like Pokemon Sword and Shield, while the world has a Breath of the Wild vibe.

Pokemon Legends Arceus was revealed alongside Pokemon Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl, remakes of the Gen 4 entries in the series that are also set in the Sinnoh region. Pokemon Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl are available to preorder now ahead of their launch later this year.

The first teaser trailer for Netflix’s Shadow and Bone has arrived, and IGN gave fans an exclusive inside look at the epic new fantasy series as part of IGN Fan Fest. Shadow and Bone is based on author Leigh Bardugo’s bestselling series of “Grishaverse” novels, which have sold more than 2.5 million copies worldwide to date.

IGN exclusively revealed the first teaser trailer from the series as part of an in-depth panel and Q&A with Bardugo, showrunner Eric Heisserer, and cast members Jessie Mei Li, Ben Barnes, Archie Renaux, Freddy Carter, Amita Suman, and Kit Young, uniting the cast and producers for their first public interview about the show.

Watch the cast and creators react to the Shadow and Bone teaser trailer and break down the biggest moments in the video below:

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Here’s how Netflix describes the ambitious new series: “Shadow and Bone finds us in a war-torn world where lowly soldier and orphan Alina Starkov (Jessie Mei Li) has just unleashed an extraordinary power that could be the key to setting her country free. With the monstrous threat of the Shadow Fold looming, Alina is torn from everything she knows to train as part of an elite army of magical soldiers known as Grisha. But as she struggles to hone her power, she finds that allies and enemies can be one and the same and that nothing in this lavish world is what it seems. There are dangerous forces at play, including a crew of charismatic criminals, and it will take more than magic to survive.”

Shadow and Bone premieres April 23 on Netflix.

Warning: This article contains spoilers for WandaVision Episode 8!

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The conclusion of WandaVision is fast approaching, and Episode 8 just gave us a taste of the epic battle to come. “Previously On” ends with a mid-credits sequence featuring SWORD Director Hayward activating a copy of Vision, one who looks just like our favorite Synthezoid but for one key difference – he’s all white.

If you were reading Marvel’s Avengers comics in the ’80s or have ever played a round of Captain America and the Avengers in the arcade, you probably recognize this unusual look for Vision. But if you’re not familiar with the difference between White Vision and the usual green, yellow and orange version, here’s a quick breakdown of how the series is drawing on the source material.

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The Origin of Vision’s White Costume

Vision’s white costume dates back to a 1989 storyline called Avengers West Coast: Vision Quest. There, Vision’s body is completely dismantled, forcing Hank Pym to attempt to put him back together. While Pym is able to physically reassemble the Synthezoid (minus his damaged skin), restoring his artificial mind proves to be an impossible task. There’s no way of recovering Vision’s memories. Worse, Vision was originally reprogrammed by the Avengers using the brain patterns of Wonder Man. Wonder Man refuses to allow his mind to be copied a second time.

The result is that Vision is reborn with none of the memories or latent humanity that made him who he was. He’s a cold, unfeeling android – a literal blank slate. His new white costume reflects that transformation, retaining the basic shapes and designs of the original but eliminating all traces of color. That new look was immortalized on the cover of The West Coast Avengers #45, a tribute to Vision’s first appearance in 1968’s The Avengers #57.

White Vision in the MCU

Obviously, there are a lot of differences between the comic book and MCU incarnations of Vision. For one thing, the MCU version has no connection to Wonder Man (a character who has yet to make a true appearance in this universe). The MCU Vision is instead built on a foundation of Tony Stark’s old AI unit JARVIS and given life via the Mind Stone.

Still, we can assume this new, white version of Vision is heavily inspired by the one introduced in Vision Quest. As we’ve learned over the course of the series, Hayward and his SWORD agents have been busy trying to rebuild and weaponize Vision, likely out of the same paranoia that once motivated Tony to “build a suit of armor around the world.” But Episode 8 makes it clear the original Vision is well and truly dead. Even the one who’s been appearing in the series up till now seems to be nothing more than an echo built on Wanda’s memories. It makes sense that, without a functioning Mind Stone or access to Tony’s old files, whatever climbs off that laboratory table is going to be a pale imitation of the real thing. This is a crude facsimile of Vision, one who possesses all of his powers but none of his warmth and humanity.

This being an MCU project, we’re almost surely going to see the two Visions battle it out in the series finale. The question is which of them will emerge in the end, assuming they aren’t both destroyed in the ensuing chaos. The series has hinted the regular Vision physically can’t exist outside the boundaries of Westview (which makes more sense in light of these new revelations). There may be no escaping this surreal prison Wanda has constructed. Even if Vision 2.0 is treated as an antagonist in the series finale, he may go on to have a longer arc in Phase 4 and beyond. Just as the comic book version of Vision fought a long, uphill battle to rebuild his mind and push past his white costume phase, this Vision copy may struggle to become more than just an unfeeling weapon of SWORD. And who knows, maybe we’ll finally meet the MCU’s Wonder Man along the way.

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For more on WandaVision, check out IGN’s review for Episode 8, see all the Marvel Easter eggs and sitcom references and learn everything we know about the live-action Marvel multiverse.

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Jesse is a mild-mannered staff writer for IGN. Allow him to lend a machete to your intellectual thicket by following @jschedeen on Twitter.

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Gameplay of New Pokemon Snap has revealed new features, including tools, photo editing, and more.

Shown during today’s Pokemon Presents broadcast, the gameplay showed off the game’s photo editing mode, which will allow you to alter, decorate and share your snaps. Photos can  rated by other players online, and even featured by the developers.

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AI scoring for shots was shown to be rated on Pose, Size, Direction, Placement, Other Pokemon, and Background, awarding both a points score and a star rating. Photos will seemingly also be used to fill a Pokemon Photodex.

There are also new tools in the shape of Illumina Orbs, items that can make Pokemon glow, and change their elemental effects – presumably for higher photo scores. We also see fruits being thrown, and melodies being played to elicit new gestures from Pokemon.

The story of the game isn’t totally clear, but we see the mythical Pokemon Celebi swoop by at the end of the new trailer. New Pokemon Snap will be released on April 30.

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Joe Skrebels is IGN’s Executive Editor of News. Follow him on Twitter. Have a tip for us? Want to discuss a possible story? Please send an email to [email protected].

A New Pokemon Snap trailer was shown during the Pokemon Direct presentation on February 26. During the presentation, we saw a number of different environments and features, with a good look at what to expect from the moment-to-moment gameplay.

Playing a melody for certain Pokemon can make them happier, giving you the chance to take the perfect shot, and you can also use special orbs to make Pokemon glow. Once you’re done, you can share photos with the professor and get a rating based on the rarity of the moment. If you want, you can even use stickers and frames to edit the photos before sharing them online. If your photo becomes popular, it can be featured in the game as well, getting extra attention from other players.

New Pokemon Snap takes place in the Lental region, and it will feature legendary Pokemon as well as some classic monsters you’ve seen in the series since the beginning. It’s the only game that lets you take a picture of Blastoise relaxing on the beach.

New Pokemon Snap is in development not at Nintendo, but instead Bandai Namco, though it is releasing exclusively for Nintendo Switch. It was announced as part of a Pokemon Presents video presentation last year, and more recently we learned its release date is set for April 30, 2021. For more on the game, check out our New Pokemon Snap preorder guide.

The other, bigger news out of the Pokemon Presents was word of a Pokemon Diamond/Pearl remake and a brand-new game called Pokemon Legends: Arceus.