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New Pokemon Snap has received a snazzy new website dedicated to helping players learn the basics before jumping into the Lental region when the game launches next week.

The game will be released on April 30 and this new website is perfect for those excited for what awaits them in New Pokemon Snap. The website, aptly named ExploreLental.com as if it were the tourism site for a real place, will require you to log in with your Nintendo account before gaining access to it. That’s because you can earn My Nintendo Points while exploring the site.

When you make it to the actual site, you’ll be shown an overview of the Lental region and you’ll see eight different icons on the map. By “visiting,” as it were, the eight icons on the map, you’ll earn My Nintendo Points. From left to right across the map above, they are the Nature Park, Nighttime, the Desert, the Jungle, “Using Items,” the Beach, “Photodex & Album,” and Daytime.

In the Nature Park part of the map, you’ll be given a brief glimpse of what to expect there in a quick, 10-second video. The Nature Park is exactly what it sounds like: a beautiful, natural park with Pokemon like Bouffalant, Taillow, and Swanna freely roaming about.

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After viewing the video, you’ll be brought to a landing page with four unique photos that show some of the things players can expect to encounter in the game such as a Grookey and a Pichu playing together, a Florges waiving at the camera, and more.

Be sure to click each photo to watch a quick video showcasing how that photo was captured in the game. After checking out each of the four photos, you can then take a photo or upload your own to the site. The site will then automatically apply a website-exclusive frame based on that part of the map to your photo, at which point, you’re free to save and share said photo on social media.

In the Nighttime section of the map, you’ll encounter Pokemon doing some unique “nighttime” activities, such as a Lyrcanroc howling in the night. It’s here that you’ll likely learn about the hidden trivia questions scattered about the site — we were asked how many forms of Lycanroc are in the game here.

Each of the other named areas of the map like the Nature Park, the Desert, the Jungle, the Beach, and Daytime feature the same kind of setup: a quick video introducing this part of the map, four photos showcasing what players can expect to see there, and a button to grab the photo frame for that area.

Two of the icons on the map — “Using Items” and “Photodex & Album” — led to the more informational pages of the site. The “Using Items” page had quick explainers for how items like Fluffruit, Illumina Orbs, and Melodies work in the game.

The “Photodex & Album” page explains the game’s many mechanics related specifically to your photo captures such as the ability to edit them by adjusting blur, focus size, focal point, brightness, and more. The videos here also demonstrate how players can add filters, stickers, and frames to each of their photos as well as how photos are rated in the game based on the pose, size, direction, placement, whether another Pokemon is present in the capture, and the background of the photo.

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You can check out all of this and more for yourself by going to ExploreLental.com, which is now live. Be sure to check out this New Pokemon Snap overview trailer after that and then check out our list of every Pokemon confirmed in New Pokemon Snap.

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

Barry Windsor-Smith has undoubtedly earned his reputation as one of the comic book industry’s finest living artists, from his hugely influential run on Marvel’s Conan comics to the seminal 1991 graphic novel Weapon X. Windsor-Smith has kept a fairly low profile for the past two decades, but that promises to change very soon. Fantagraphics is finally set to release Windsor-Smith’s Monsters, a graphic novel that’s been in the works for no fewer than 35 years.

IGN can exclusively reveal several pages from this haunting new book. Get a feel for Windsor-Smith’s long-awaited return to comics in the slideshow gallery below:

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Monsters isn’t necessarily an easy book to describe, but certain elements may resonate with fans of Windsor-Smith’s Weapon X graphic novel. The book’s protagonist, Bobby Bailey, is also a man trying to escape his tragic past, leading him to become a test subject for a top-secret government program. The tragic events of this story are set in motion when Bailey’s commanding officer, Sergeant McFarland, attempts to intervene on his behalf, setting the stage for a multi-generational story that’s equal parts espionage thriller, family drama and metaphysical character study. In this case, the monsters are both literal and figurative.

For those unfamiliar with his career, Windsor-Smith rose to prominence in the early ’70s through his work on Conan the Barbarian. Windsor-Smith drew the majority of the first 24 issues of that series, arguably doing more than any artist apart from Frank Frazetta to shape the look of Conan in the public consciousness. Along with writer Roy Thomas, Windsor-Smith also created Red Sonja, a character loosely based on Robert E. Howard’s heroines Red Sonya of Rogatino and Dark Agnes de Chastillon.

Windsor-Smith worked on a number of Marvel titles throughout the ’70s and ’80s, including Daredevil, The Avengers and Uncanny X-Men. His Marvel work culminated with 1991’s Weapon X, a story serialized in the pages of Marvel Comics Presents that revealed how Wolverine first acquired his adamantium skeleton. Windsor-Smith also played a key role in the original incarnation of Valiant Comics, serving as the company’s lead artist and creative director. Monsters will be his first published work since 2005’s The Freebooters.

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“I’ve known Barry for over 50 years now,” said Fantagraphics publisher Gary Groth in the company’s press release, “so publishing his biggest and most artistically mature work to date is a personal and professional milestone for me, and I’m grateful that he’s entrusted this important work to us.”

The hardcover edition of Monsters clocks in at 360 pages and is priced at $39.99. The book will be released on Tuesday, April 27.

In other recent comic book news, Dark Horse will publish a prequel to Netflix’s Masters of the Universe: Revelation, DC is continuing a classic animated universe in Justice League Infinity and Game of Thrones star Emilia Clarke is making her comic book writing debut with M.O.M.: Mother of Madness.

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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.

Returnal’s core gameplay loop can be confusing to wrap your head around without having played it yourself. Sure, it may be familiar to those who have played the likes of Hades, Rogue Legacy and Dead Cells, but it varies enough from those to warrant explanation. Here, we try to succinctly as possible, and without spoiling any of the story, describe just what you’ll be doing in a loop of Returnal.

The First Loop

Returnal opens with protagonist Selene having crash landed on the alien planet of Atropos. With communications down and no help on the way you’re given the mysterious main objective of “Locate the White Shadow Broadcast”. With only a semi-automatic pistol to help protect you (unless you get lucky and find a new weapon) you’ll likely not get far, and end up dying to either one of these razor-fisted Titanops, or maybe these teleporting tree aliens. Don’t worry though, dying is very much part of Returnal and it won’t be the last time that you live, die and repeat.

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The Loops Until You Clear the First Biome

The first time you do die in Returnal, you’ll wake up inside Selene’s crashed ship from the first-person perspective. You can then choose to exit the ship and continue on your way to death again.

This is where Returnal differs from the likes of Hades, there isn’t the same level of persistence to be found and you won’t be popping points into stat boosts or permanent upgrades to gain tangible strength at the start of each run. There are some things that will be carried over from run to run, but we’ll get onto that a bit later.

For now, you’ll be improving your arsenal over the course of each lifecycle, getting your hands on shotguns, carbine rifles and so on, but then losing them each time you die. Every run starts with just your sidearm in hand, and finding better weapons along the way should be one of your main focuses in Returnal.

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You’ll also find power ups that offer unique abilities such as auto health regeneration and the risk/reward option to attach parasite arm-huggers to your body. These can give you very helpful perks, but always come packaged with a negative side effect. A run in Returnal ultimately comes down to making your way through an area, getting stronger by finding weapons and boosts, before feeling powerful enough to take on the boss of that biome.

Defeating the boss may take several attempts, and finding out the best loadouts to take down enemies may take many experimental trial runs. But once you’ve defeated that boss once, things will get a whole lot easier.

Every Loop After

This is where Returnal yet again mixes things up when compared to Hades or Dead Cells. Once a boss is killed in an area, you won’t have to kill them again. Instead, killing them gives you a special key that opens the gate to the second biome of Atropos, which is now permanently stored in your inventory for every subsequent run. This also applies to other key items in the game, such as your lightsaber-like melee weapon.

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While the combat within each of Returnal’s encounters can be challenging, the fact that you can just find the gate to the next area each time from here on in and pass through, does make it a much more forgiving experience on the whole. By bringing some of the persistent elements of rogue-lites into this more rogue-like game, Returnal makes it easier for you to progress the story and see more of the world at a quicker pace.

Once you’ve cleared the first biome you’ll then be able to interact with the daily challenge terminal on your ship. These are high-score chasing runs that won’t progress the story but will satiate those looking to top leaderboards like only Housemarque know how to make you want to.

Hopefully that’s cleared up any questions you may have had about what exactly you’ll be doing in Returnal. The best way of course though, is to experience the world of Atropos and all of its horrors for yourself.

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Simon Cardy still thinks that Returnal is not a great name for what is shaping up to be a great game. Find him over on Twitter at @CardySimon.

The team behind Assassin’s Creed Valhalla has acknowledged that recent updates haven’t met expectations, and committed to longer testing periods for updates going forward.

In a blog post about the update pipeline for Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, a spokesperson wrote: “Our community is at the heart of everything we do, and we always strive to provide you with great experiences. That said, we recognize that some of our recent title updates may not have met your expectations or been up to our standard.”

Updates to Valhalla have brought fan-requested features, but many players have reported new bugs appearing within those updates. Recently, Ubisoft added a fan-requested transmogrification feature to Valhalla, but its implementation didn’t go down too well with fans. Other title updates have brought crashes and glitches to the game too. In response, Ubisoft is changing its production pipeline to deliver “more robust updates,” and are shifting from a 4-week to a 5-week update release cycle so that new patches can be tested thoroughly.

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Responding to the blog post, community members on Reddit voiced their concerns and asked about the potential of Ubisoft implementing New Game Plus to increase Valhalla’s replayability. “The game is so broken lmao. Every update brings worse bugs than before. I was really looking forward to the [Wrath of the Druids] DLC since I beat the game way before the first patch, just to hear they pushed it back. If I had new game plus, I could at least enjoy everything without the game and audio crashing like it did before the patches,” said TheFirstAtom. “If they mess up another update it will be embarrassing,” said  Arun1910.

 

The blog also digs into the multi-stage process of creating title updates for a game as expansive as Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, explaining each part of the pipeline in detail. It also offers timelines for a few major fixes. The full fix for an issue that sees fish disappear from the map (making related quests difficult to complete) will arrive in June, with a partial solution coming in the April update. The team is also looking into a number of issues with quests In the Absence of an Ealdorman and the Pig of Prophecy. Ubisoft plans to implement a fix for the latter in a forthcoming April title update.

The team touched on the game’s current roadmap and the delay of its major DLC expansion, Wrath of the Druids, which will now land on May 13. The roadmap seen below also reveals that a new free game mode called Mastery Challenge will land in late spring after the launch of Title Update 1.2.2.

Assassin’s Creed longtime narrative director, Darby McDevitt, recently announced his departure from Ubisoft after 10 years of work writing on the franchise. Ubisoft has also announced that Ubisoft Forward, its summer digital conference, is part of E3 2021.

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Jordan Oloman is a freelance writer for IGN. Follow him on Twitter.

One of the world’s most renowned video game stores, Japan’s Super Potato now has a brand new international eBay storefront. The legendary flagship store in Akihabara, Tokyo has become something of a tourist hotspot, and there’s plenty of good reason for it to be. With over three floors of video games anime, and manga products, with a big focus on rare Japanese games. Many of these rare games are now available to purchase via the new eBay storefront, but they certainly aren’t cheap.

For video game enthusiasts, Super Potato really is as good as it can get, and with the opening of its new eBay storefront, everyone can now browse its incredible collection of retro games. If you’ve got pockets deep enough, you might even find yourself buying some of these classic titles, which are undeniably cool. The only caveats are the shipping costs, and that some of the items listed definitely aren’t the cheapest going. We’ve listed a couple of our favorites below, but there are hundreds of retro games to check out, it’s definitely worth browsing through.

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If you want to keep up to date with any new entries to the Super Potato store, then check out @SuperpotatoG on Twitter, or follow @IGNDeals for even more updates on collectables, video games, and more. Will you be buying anything from the eBay store, or waiting for your very own visit to the iconic destination?

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Robert Anderson is a Commerce Editor and deals expert for IGN. Send him awesome gaming screenshots @robertliam21 on Twitter.

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Scroll down to find out if there’s a post-credit scene in the latest episode of The Falcon and the Winter Soldier. Spoilers follow for every episode of the show.

If you’re binging the series, use this guide for quick reference on whether or not any of the episodes have end credits scenes.

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Marvel’s The Falcon and the Winter Soldier officially launched on Disney+ as the second part of the MCU’s Phase 4.

The sixth and final episode, “One World, One People” has now debuted, giving us our first look at Falcon’s transformation into a brand new, wing-equipped Captain America (and even changing the title of the show to match). Alongside Bucky and John Walker – who will now be known by his U.S. Agent moniker from the comics – the trio help save the captured members of the GRC from the radicalised Flag Smashers, but Karli Morgenthau and many of her super-powered group die in the process (with several deaths down to a car bomb organised by Zemo from the Raft).

As hinted at in episode 5, Sharon Carter is indeed the Power Broker, with many of the show’s machinations leading back to her door. With Karli dead (at Carter’s hand, no less), that fact is kept secret from the show’s heroes. With the GRC saved, Sam Wilson steps up to the Captain America to tell the resettlement council its mistakes, leading to a change in policy. Bucky comes to some closure around his murderous past, and Isaiah Bradley comes to terms with the idea of a Black man becoming Captain America. Sam even organises an addition to the MCU’s Captain America museum exhibit, adding a section about Bradley’s once-secret exploits, so that the country, and world never forgets his contribution.

But was there a post-credit scene…?

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The Falcon and the Winter Soldier Episode 6: Yes, There Is a Post Credit Scene

Yes, there was a post-credit scene this week in the sixth episode.

A mid-credits scene revealed Sharon Carter being given a full pardon by the US government, and an offer of a postion in her old division at the CIA.

Of course, during the course of the episode, we learn that Carter is also the Power Broker, and we see her lining up buyers for government secrets and technology before the episode ends.

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The Falcon and the Winter Soldier Episode 5: Yes, There Is a Post Credit Scene

Yes, there was a post-credit scene this week in the fifth episode.

A mid-credits break revealed a distressed and defeated John Walker, having been previously stripped of the exalted Captain America mantle, crafting his own crude non-vibranium version of Cap’s shield, using his own Medal of Valor as part of the design.

Yep, no matter what the government says, he still sees himself as Captain America and it looks like we’ll be getting one more collision between Walker, Karli, and our heroes in next week’s finale.

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The Falcon and the Winter Soldier Episode 4: No Post Credit Scene

No, there was no post-credit scene this week in the fourth episode.

Episode 4, “The Whole World Is Watching,” didn’t have anything after the credits started rolling, but it sure left us with one hell of a disturbing cliffhanger. A shot of Walker, dressed as Captain America, standing almost proudly with a blood-spattered shield after murdering Flag-Smasher Nico (Noah Mills) – with a shocked group of onlookers all having filmed the deed with phones.

On top of this, Zemo’s in the wind now. Still, it seems unlikely, at this point, that he’s secretly the Power Broker given how, when faced with scattered tubes of serum, he chose to destroy them and not recover them. How will Sam and Bucky track him down? Easy. Follow the colorful trail of Turkish delight.

The Falcon and the Winter Soldier Episode 3: No Post Credit Scene

No, there was no post-credit scene this week in the third episode.

“Power Broker” had no post credit tease, but it did end with a nice twist as Bucky encountered Florence Kasumba’s Ayo, a militant member of Wakanda’s Dora Milaje. Yes, it turns out John Walker wasn’t the only one tracking the adventures of Sam and Bucky. Ayo managed to find the duo in Latvia’s capital, Riga, after word got out that Zemo had escaped from prison.

What will Ayo do when Bucky tells her that he’s voluntarily working with Zemo for, presumedly, the greater good? Will she join the team or will the fact that Zemo murdered King T’Chaka be too much to overlook?

And who’s really running the show here? Who’s the ultimate puppet master? Is it the Power Broker, Zemo, or even Sharon (who looked to be very much connected and tapped into the Madripoor mayhem)?

The Falcon and the Winter Soldier Episode 2: No Post Credit Scene

No, there was no post-credit scene in the second episode.

The story ended with Sam and Bucky deciding to pay a visit to Zemo in hopes of gaining intel on possible HYDRA players who could be out there handing out doses of Super Soldier Serum to the Flag-Smashers. Zemo, from what we can gather, never vanished during the Blip, as he’s still imprisoned in Berlin.

Now that Zemo’s been brought in the story, the only big player missing is Emily VanCamp’s Agent 13/Sharon Carter, who we learned this week was deemed an enemy of the state following the events of Civil War. Showrunner Malcolm Spellman recently explained that we’re going to see a “whole different” Agent 13 on this series, and that “Sharon Carter is going to emerge as a badass.”

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The Falcon and the Winter Soldier Episode 1: No Post Credit Scene

No, there was no post-credit scene in the first episode.

The first week of The Falcon and the Winter Soldier focused on establishing Sam Wilson and Bucky Barnes’ post-Endgame lives. In fact, the two didn’t even meet up with one another during the episode (though we know Bucky has been dodging Sam’s texts). There was also no post-credit scene this week.

The Falcon and the Winter Soldier

For more on Marvel’s The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, here’s our review of the fifth episode, plus a full explainer on Erin Kellyman’s leader of the Flag-Smashers.

You can also read all about Isaiah Bradley’s history from the comics and how Marvel opened up a full MCU website about Madripoor.

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We haven’t regularly covered the MotoGP series in the past but the motorcycle specialists at developer Milestone have been quietly iterating on it for over 15 years. With all that experience, it should probably come as no surprise that the latest edition, MotoGP 21, is a deep, satisfying, and sometimes unflinchingly tough modern motorsport simulation. It’s packaged fairly similarly to Codemasters’ F1 series and KT Racing’s WRC games, only with 50% fewer wheels and 500% more terrifying crashes.

Of course, if you’ve been keeping close track of its progress you’ll find that MotoGP 21 is a lot like MotoGP 20 – identical even, in some areas – although there have been a couple of welcome tweaks that do genuinely improve the bike handling and the racing.

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MotoGP 21’s sensation of speed is quite remarkable, especially in first-person, and the feeling of weight is also excellent. On track the racing is aggressive and dangerous: relative to last year’s game, changes to the suspension system means the bikes feel more alive over bumps, and particularly under heavy braking. Milestone has also added brake temperature management, which augments the racing with yet another layer of strategy to wrestle with. Brakes that are too cold or too hot, for instance, won’t be as effective, and I definitely noticed when the bike wasn’t pulling up as quickly.

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MotoGP 21 is an extremely demanding racer, though, and the degree of difficulty increases exponentially the more you lower the riding aids, which offer assists like throttle and braking input modulation and a cornering assist that irons out frantic left stick inputs – basically an invisible guiding hand to help the bike dip left and right more smoothly. Even with those crutches, however – and even against relatively sedate levels of AI competition – MotoGP 21 requires a high level of finesse to succeed. As a result, pulling off a win or placing well after a great fight on track is a rather rewarding experience.

Mode Rash

For racing fans yet to try Milestone’s series,  MotoGP 21 turns out to be a good year to jump in thanks to a new tutorial mode that adds an extremely useful launchpad for getting accustomed to MotoGP’s tricky brand of bike racing. MotoGP 20 never took time to educate you on how to ride or even how to use your bike’s systems, but this year’s instalment rectifies that with a simple series of playable lessons outlining everything from straightforward bike control, to fuel management, and to electronic systems like engine brake, anti-wheelie, and traction control – all of which can be adjusted on track, on the fly. As such, despite its otherwise steep difficulty curve, MotoGP 21 is probably the most beginner-friendly MotoGP game in years, and I think the effort to make it slightly less impenetrable for newbies is a very good move.

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Of course, if you’re a complete purist, rewinds and all other assists can be reduced or toggled off to force you to suffer the full consequences of coming off your bike so that you can experience one of the most notable new additions this year: a full, manual bike-retrieval sequence. That is, after coming off you won’t automatically respawn on your bike; you’ll need to jog over to wherever the bike came to a stop, lift it up, and hop back on. I actually really like how this looks in-game – and it’s certainly a cool, authentic little sequence to layer into the racing – but the fact that manual bike retrieval is only applicable to humans and not the AI means it’s enormously and fundamentally flawed. How is it fair that the AI racers still respawn on their bikes instantly, speeding away while I was still hoofing it back to my own bike? It’ll be neat if this is fixed in an update, but in its current form the function is pointless to use.

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Super Bang-on

MotoGP 21 also introduces the real-world series’ Long Lap Penalty, a narrow and specifically longer route placed somewhere on each track that serves to punish riders for track limit violations and false starts. Long Lap Penalty zones have been added to every track from the 2021 championship and definitely bolster MotoGP 21’s feeling of authenticity, though I’d stress I’ve never seen the AI have to take one yet.

Finally, while MotoGP 21 is filled with character faces only a mother could love, there’s some pretty great detail to be spotted elsewhere, from the mistreated rubber of a cooked tyre to the gleam of wet asphalt. Off-track, however, the recycled vignettes and same-same menus make things feel a bit stale, generally. It’s also peculiar that female riders are still being referred to as blokes – that just feels half-baked.

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