Category: Games

The festive season has commenced, and if you’re dreading hearing Mariah Carey’s annual Christmas jingle again, then perhaps a more gamer-orientated album will be more to your liking. Available right now, A Merry Hyrule Christmas is a Zelda tribute album that blends some of the classic tracks from the Nintendo series with traditional Christmas songs.

Produced by Eric Bucholz and the Seattle-based game music group Materia Collective, the album combines these tracks with orchestral and rock stylings.

“A Merry Hyrule Christmas is the first album to combine music from The Legend of Zelda franchise with classic holiday tunes of various genres,” Eric Buchholz said. “My goal was to create an album of videogame music that could blend in seamlessly with classic holiday tunes.”

You can read the full tracklist below:

1. Kakariko Village
2. O Sacred Light
3. Clock Town Sleigh Ride
4. Silent Knight
5. Carol of the Goddess
6. Dragon Roost Hymn
7. Din Rest Ye Merry Deku Scrubs
8. The Twelve Days of Christmas

If you’re interested in grabbing the album for yourself, it can be purchased and streamed from these storefronts. If you’d prefer a different Legend of Zelda experience, Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity is now out on Nintendo Switch.

“It’s strange to think of a bungled story leaving me so lukewarm on a Zelda game, even if it is a spin-off,” critic Suriel Vazquez said in his Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity review. “But paying off its premise is the burden a prequel to The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild is tasked with.”

2K has released a new update for the current-gen version of NBA 2K21. It’s light on content and fixes, but adds a seasonal flavour to the game on PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC.

New seasonal decorations and themed courts are now available as the winter holiday arrives at 2K Beach. In terms of fixes, MyCourt’s Limitless free throw drill is now set to use the 2K camera setting in MyCareer. Online VS–the difficulty used in MyTeam Unlimited and Limited–has also been added to Play With Friends Games in MyTeam.

Here are the full patch notes:

General

• Winter holiday has arrived at 2K Beach with new seasonal decorations and themed courts now available.

MyCareer

• MyCourt’s Limitless free throw drill is now set to use the 2K camera setting.

MyTeam

• Added Online VS, the difficulty used in MyTeam Unlimited & Limited, to Play With Friends games.

The basketball sim earned a score of 6/10 in GameSpot’s NBA 2K21 review. “NBA 2K21 shows that the lone basketball sim we have now has largely stagnated,” said critic Michael Higham. “It’s a full package, for sure, but one that demonstrates little-to-no motivation to meaningfully improve upon itself. That doesn’t take away from the strong foundation that makes NBA 2K a fun and rewarding time. However, when you go through the same grind and the same process with only superficial changes, you just get burnt out faster than years prior. If ball is still life, NBA 2K21 is as good a version as any to pick, although even the greatest ballers need a rest.”

Rare has announced that its pirate-themed action-adventure Sea of Thieves will be getting a battle pass in 2021. Sea of Thieves: Season One is set to launch in January and will introduce a plethora of new features for the Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, and PC title.

The studio shared the news on its YouTube channel, revealing that the huge new update will feature seasons, a new progression system, live events, and more. Each new season will last for approximately three months, offering a free 100-level battle pass for you to work your way through and earn rewards such as player and ship cosmetics.

Sea of Thieves’ current trading company progression system will remain, but the new battle pass will offer another set of goals for players to chase, with Rare saying that it’s designed to give players “a tangible sense of progress.” In addition to the free battle pass, there’s also a premium tier known as the Plunder Pass. This unlocks discounts for existing items in the premium Pirate Emporium store alongside a number of exclusive items.

Each new season will begin with the introduction of “a new experience or way to play.” For Season One, this puts the Merchant Alliance trading company front and centre. Players will be cast as detectives, tasked with piecing together clues to locate a lost shipwreck and plunder what remains.

Aside from all this, the arrival of a new season will also introduce quality-of-life updates, new Pirate Emporium additions, new Twitch drops, and one featured live event with its own goals and rewards. Regular monthly live events will also continue.

Unfortunately, these new updates to the game’s Adventure mode will result in development ceasing on Sea of Thieves’ PvP-based Arena mode. You’ll still be able to play Arena, but there will be no further updates.

Before all of this kicks off, however, The Festival of Giving will arrive in-game on December 9, including the return of the advent-calendar-style 12 Days of Giving Event, login bonuses, Guilded Voyages, Twitch drops, and more.

Activision’s Call of Duty-branded military veterans charity, the Call of Duty Endowment, has announced the details for this year’s C.O.D.E. Bowl event, which will be expanded from last year.

Held on December 11 and sponsored by USAA, the C.O.D.E. Bowl sees a big change this year in that all five branches of the US military will participate through their own eSports squads, while international military organizations will take part as well.

Three new teams from the US Marine Corps, US Air Force, and US Space Force will compete this year, while the UK’s British Army, Royal Air Force, and Royal Navy will also take part.

“We are proud to have the United States and the United Kingdom militaries come together to participate in the C.O.D.E. Bowl,” Call of Duty Endowment executive director Dan Goldenberg said in a statement.

Here’s how the actual C.O.D.E. Bowl will play out. The tournament begins at 10 AM PT on December 11, with eight teams in total competing in a Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War tournament. The teams consists of a popular Call of Duty streamer, a “top influencer,” and the soldiers from the US and UK. You can watch the tournament on YouTube and Twitch.

The list of participating military branches include the US Air Force, Army, Marine Corps, Navy, and Space Force, while the UK participants include the British Army, Royal Navy, and Royal Air Force. The streamers who will play on their teams include Courage, LEGIQN, Huskerrs, Swagg, Espresso, Vikkstar, Tommey, C9Emz, Spratt, and others to be announced later.

Scuf Controllers is one of the sponsors of this year’s C.O.D.E. Bowl, and the company is donating all net proceeds from the event to the Call of Duty Endowment. Additionally, Ram Trucks is giving away a 2021 Ram 1500 Built To Serve special edition truck to a military veteran through the event.

Since its founding in 2009, the Call of Duty Endowment has helped place more than 77,000 military veterans in jobs, and the organization is aiming for this figure to reach 100,000 by 2024. According to Activision, the average cost to place a veteran in a job through the Call of Duty Endowment was $500 in 2019, which compares to thousands through the US government.

The first DLC for Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War was a Call of Duty Endowment cosmetic bundle, the proceeds of which helped support military veterans. Activision’s Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1 + 2 also has DLC that supports the charity.

Elon Musk and his aerospace company, SpaceX, plan to launch two remote-controlled cars into space for a race on the surface of the moon next year.

Both of these RC vehicles will be sent to the moon in October 2021 aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. SpaceX has enlisted Frank Stephenson, who is best known for his design work at Ferrari, BMW, McLaren, and more, to design the cars, as reported by Business Insider.

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“This is a project helping to develop the innovators of the future, allowing them to dream big and realize that nothing is impossible,” Stephenson said in a Moon Mark press release. “Space is a fascinating place, remaining untapped for budding designers and I’m very much looking forward to sharing some of my knowledge to those involved in this innovative project.”

Stephenson will design the cars with two teams of high school students. After eight weeks of qualifying challenges by high-schoolers from around the world, six teams of five members will compete to become the final two that race on the Moon, according to Moon Mark, which is a multimedia education company helping to make this race happen. It’s those two teams that will work with Stephenson.

“Their adventures will be captured, produced and globally distributed by Moon Mark,” the company said in a November 17 press release. “The final two teams will complete their racer designs in Houston, Texas, before being loaded onto the lander that will transport them to the Kennedy Space Center, and then to the moon.”

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The two vehicles that the teams and Stephenson have yet to design and build will be carried in a Nova-C lunar lander created by Intuitive Machines aboard the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. Intuitive Machines is working with Moon Mark and Lunar Outpost, which is a space technology firm, to bring this off-world idea to life.

“Moon Mark’s mission of getting young people involved in aerospace and working toward utilizing space for the betterment of humanity is something that resonates with us,” Lunar Outpost CEO, Justin Cyrus, said. “We look forward to enabling racers on the Moon and being part of the journey to bring space to the world.”

For more off-world science, read about how the Moon is rusting and then check out possible signs of life on Venus that date back to the 1970s. After that, why not take a look at IGN’s Top 100 sci-fi movies.

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Wesley LeBlanc is a freelance news writer and guide maker for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter @LeBlancWes. 

Genshin Impact has, in terms of both spending and impact, been one of the biggest games of 2020. The title, which took top honors in Google Play and Apple’s game of the year lists, has reportedly brought in a huge amount of money every day since its release.

According to SensorTower, which tracks mobile spending and engagement, their stats suggest that Genshin Impact has brought in $393 million since it launched on September 28. which averages out to over $6 million every single day. Despite releasing late in the year, it’s reportedly the second-highest grossing mobile game of the year, behind Honor of Kings ($467 million).

$120 million of this revenue is said to have come from China, and $98 million of it from Japan. It’s worth noting that these numbers are based on SensorTower’s estimates, rather than hard figures released by developer miHoYo, so they might not be the exact numbers.

These figures only account for the mobile versions of the game, too–the PC and PS4/PS5 iterations of Genshin Impact have likely been very profitable, too.

Genshin Impact is a gacha game, so it makes its money from microtransactions. If you haven’t played yet and you’re worried about the game’s monetization model, you can read GameSpot’s full breakdown of how it works.

Genshin Impact earned a 7/10 in GameSpot’s review. “While there’s a lot to do, having several chunks of Genshin Impact gated off until you’ve reached a higher rank is an obnoxious restriction for an open-world game to have–and once you finally do see what lies in those unexplored areas, it’s often a bit underwhelming,” wrote reviewer Heidi Kemps.