Welcome to our Saturday Daily Deals page. Today brings with it a nice little mix of deals, including discounted AA batteries at Amazon, a store wide sale on PC tech and games at Newegg and a great Health and Home sale over at Best Buy. However, the big draw is the amazing 25% discount to Adobe Software. Premiere, Audition, Photoshop and more are all on sale right now. If you’re a content creator, or looking to be one, this is a sale you shouldn’t miss.
Jonathan Ferguson, a weapons expert and Keeper of Firearms & Artillery at the Royal Armouries, breaks down the insane weaponry of the Counter-Strike franchise, including the iconic AK47 automatic rifle, the FNP90 submachine gun, and the many versions of the AR-15//M4 rifle.
The Castlevania Advance Collection has appeared on the Australian ratings board, hinting that a new game featuring all or some of Game Boy Advance’s Castlevania games may be on the way.
This currently unannounced Castlevania Advance Collection was classified on June 18, and it lists Konami Digital Entertainment as the Applicant and the Publisher and M2 as the author.
Konami owns the Castlevania IP, and M2 was responsible for developing the 2019’s Castlevania Anniversary Collection that included a number of 8-bit and 16-bit Castlevania games like the original Castlevania and Castlevania III: Dracula’s Curse.
A potential Castlevania Advance Collection would most likely include Castlevania: Circle of the Moon, Castlevania: Harmony of Dissonance, Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow, and potentially the Classic NES Series version of the original Castlevania.
In 2016, we ranked the Top 25 Game Boy Advance games and ranked Aria of Sorrow #3, saying, “new gameplay elements, additional characters, enhanced visuals, and the amazing soundtrack combine to produce one of the best games in the Castlevania series, for any system.”
Castlevania: Circle of the Moon also made our list for the Top 10 Console Launch Games, where we said that it “took everything that made the franchise special up until that point and built upon it.”
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Adam Bankhurst is a news writer for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter @AdamBankhurst and on Twitch.
Three years after being featured in a limited-time mode in Fortnite, Thanos is set to return to the battle royale as a purchasable outfit in the game’s Item Shop for the first time.
The Mad Titan himself will arrive in Fortnite’s Item Shop on June 26 at 5pm PT/8pm ET/1am BST (6/27) and will be available alongside the Infinity Gauntlet Back Bling inspired by Marvel Studios’ Avengers: Endgame – complete with all six Infinity Stones.
For those who can’t wait to play as Thanos, players will have an opportunity to get his Outfit and Back Bling early by entering The Thanos Cup on June 21. This Duos competition will task players with competing in up to 10 total matches in three hours to earn as many points as possible. The top-performing teams in each region will win these items early. Anyone who earns eight points will receive the Thanos Watches! Spray.
Thanos first came to Fortnite in 2018 via the Infinity Gauntlet limited-time mode. While you couldn’t purchase his Outfit or Back Bling back then, the mode let players search for the Infinity Gauntlet which would then turn them into Thanos when found. Once claimed, players would be able to take advantage of Thanos’ massive jump, his devastating ground pound punch, and his ability to use the Power Stone to fire a purple beam at his foes.
The Thanos Outfit will not grant any of those powers, unfortunately, and the post from The Fornite Team makes no mention of the Infinity Gauntlet LTM making a return.
Following the announcement of Elden Ring’s release date via its first gameplay trailer at E3 2021, George R.R. Martin has confirmed that his work on Elden Ring wrapped up years ago.
As reported by Eurogamer, Martin spoke to local news station WWTW when visiting Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism and discussed his career and his work on the much-anticipated Elden Ring.
George R. R. Martin talks Elden Ring in new interview: -His work on the game was done many years ago -He wrote the worldbuilding & characters -From would periodically show him enemy & graphic designs -He is excited for the final game 🙂 pic.twitter.com/y5gUDvo2Hd
“The game is called the Elden Ring and it’s a sequel to a video game that came out a few years ago called Dark Souls, and it came out of Japan,” Martin said. “My work on it was actually done years ago. These games, they’re like movies, they take a long time to develop. Basically, they wanted a world created to set the game in, they wanted world-building.”
It’s important to note that Martin may have misspoke when he said Elden Ring is a sequel to Dark Souls, as that hasn’t been stated at all, although maybe he knows something we don’t?! Probably not, but only time will tell.
“…They would come in periodically and show me some monsters they designed or the latest special effects or cool things, but the game has been very slowly developing and now it’s coming out in January, I believe,” Martin continued. “I’ll be as excited as anybody else to see it.”
So, while Martin may not have been involved in every step of the process, he was responsible for shaping the lore and mythos of the game world, including some of the the bosses.
Elden Ring game director Hidetaka Miyazaki told IGN that Martin “brought things to the table that we couldn’t have done by ourselves, in terms of that rich storytelling and that sense of character and drama.”
Some of these things brought to the table were Martin’s role in naming Elden Ring’s location as “The Lands Between” and providing the foundation for the game’s story. This, according to Miyazaki, should ensure the game’s story is a bit less vague and more understandable in terms of lore and story than previous FromSoftware games.
Savathun walks among us. The creepiest villain in Destiny 2–one Bungie has been slowly revealing over the course of the last four years–is seen apparently inhabiting some human form in the Last City in a recent lore entry for the Season of the Splicer. Some kind of shape-shifted Savathun is wandering our streets, puking up black stuff, and trying her damnedest to keep from being exposed while she unfurls her various evil machinations on the game’s world.
The way Destiny 2 has been building Savathun, one of the three incredibly powerful Hive gods and seemingly the big bad of next year’s Witch Queen expansion, has been absolutely masterful. Savathun has been a threat since vanilla Destiny 2, but we’ve only seen the effects of her influence as her many plans spread out across the game world. She’s popped up again and again, but not physically or personally–only as the implied puppet master behind various events. The Dreaming City’s whole three-week time-loop curse? That’s Savathun. She engineered pretty much everything that happened in the Forsaken expansion–so far as we know, anyway–and has been popping up here and there to be the monkey in the wrench time and time again since then.
Now we know she’s actually behind the latest threat in the game, the Endless Night that’s blanketing the Last City. We have no idea what she’s trying to accomplish, but we know the Endless Night is sapping the City’s electrical power, increasing sickness, and gravely harming morale in a way that’s beginning to brew civil unrest. Savathun’s machinations are seriously dangerous and seriously damaging, and we’re struggling to even understand them, much less anticipate and circumvent them.
But Destiny fans who have been paying attention to the lore are already coming to the conclusion that I have, which is that all these spooky Savathun plots are actually a series of red herrings. Unlike big scary enemies such as Oryx and Ghaul, Savathun isn’t working diligently to conquer humanity. She’s not carefully moving pawns around the board to bring about our ultimate destruction. Instead, what I think Witch Queen is going to reveal is that Savathun has been carefully creating this vast, multi-year chain of events with the aim of tricking us. She wants to trick us into becoming her friends.
For that to make sense, you have to understand how the Hive work, and specifically, how Savathun and the other Hive gods work. Before those in the Hive were the Hive, they were a vulnerable, short-lived people whose lives were generally pretty awful. One of the kings of those people, the head of the Osmium Court, was betrayed by one of his advisers to his enemies and assassinated. That left the king’s three daughters, Aurash, Xi Ro, and Sathona, scrambling in an effort to not get picked off in the coup. The pair wound up finding a ship and diving deep into the gas giant called Fundament, where they lived. There, they discovered worm creatures that pledged to give the three daughters immortality and power, in exchange for constantly feeding the worms in a symbiotic relationship. The three agreed and started converting the rest of the Krill people into the Hive.
If you’ve played Destiny or Destiny 2, you’re probably aware of the Hive’s weird thing with these worms. The Hive have a symbiotic relationship with these worms, and sometimes you even see them drop from dead Hive when you kill them. Most of the worms feed on violence and death–it’s why the Hive have spent millennia conquering the universe and why they’re now in our solar system, messing things up. The more you feed your worm, the stronger you become, but the more it needs to be fed. So the Hive are constantly killing and conquering because they literally cannot stop; if they do, their hungry worms will consume them.
For Aurash, Xi Ro, and Sathona, it was even worse. As the Hive’s founders and its most powerful, they became, essentially, living gods. They found ways to secure their immortality (that’s what the whole Ascendant Realm is about) and new ways to feed their worms. Aurash became Oryx, the Taken King; Xi Ro became Xivu Arath, the Hive god of war; and Sathona became Savathun, the Hive god of cunning and deception. The worms of the three original Hive were fed by the daughters pursuing their natures–Oryx had to constantly pursue knowledge, Xivu Arath had to constantly pursue strengthening herself through combat and conquest, and Savathun had to constantly work to deceive others. And like the rest of the Hive, if they stop doing the thing that feeds their worms, the three gods would be consumed by them, too.
So Oryx, Xivu Arath, and Savathun became extremely, ludicrously powerful, and have lived for, as mentioned, millennia under this system–what the Hive calls the Sword Logic. It’s essentially survival of the fittest, extended to everything in the universe. The Hive believe that if something can be killed, it must be killed, because they want to constantly cut away any weakness from the universe. They figure that whatever’s left will be the perfect shape of life. It means killing isn’t just in their nature, it’s in their core ideology. They make the universe better by removing anything that’s not perfect, and anything that’s weaker than the Hive must be imperfect, and therefore must be killed.
Okay, back to Savathun. Her entire deal is deception, unlike most of the other Hive, who feed their worms mostly by killing. For Savathun, being misunderstood by others, tricking them, manipulating them, and generally getting one over on them feeds her worm. But the whole schtick seems to be getting old. The lore suggests that for a long time, Savathun has been trying to find a way out of this whole worm deal she made.
We saw this first-hand in the Season of Arrivals, when Savathun teamed up with Oryx’s son Nokris specifically in hopes of breaking free of the worm pact. Nokris’s whole deal is that he’s a necromancer, raising Hive from the dead, which is a heresy since the Hive believe anything that can die should die. But Savathun doesn’t seem to have much use for those rules anymore. She’s looking for a better way.
So if we take it as a given that Savathun is trying to find a way to get rid of her worm, which will never be satisfied no matter how much deception or murder she does, then we can start to see her actions in a different light. Savathun can’t kill worm gods on her own, but you know who can kill worms? Guardians. We took on Xol, Will of Thousands in the Warmind DLC and, you know, apparently killed it. And we beat Oryx and sent his giant body falling into the atmosphere of Saturn. We have a pretty good track record dealing with these things.
The thing is, though, Savathun can’t just come to the Vanguard and say, “Hey, I’d love it if you’d kill this worm thing that makes me do evil.” First, would anyone believe her? Second, Savathun’s whole existence is built on trickery and misunderstanding. If she stops doing cons, she literally dies. So what does she do instead?
She institutes a series of extremely involved schemes to get us geared up to kill a worm god, of course.
That’s where we’re at currently. Everything in Destiny 2 is telling us that whatever we think we know about Savathun is wrong; she’s constantly scheming and always working to deceive. If we follow that logic, then the most fundamental assumption we have about Savathun–that she’s our enemy–is the most suspect piece of information possible.
Look at some of the things Savathun has been responsible for lately. In the Season of Arrivals, she worked to interfere with us communicating with the Darkness, which doesn’t make a whole lot of sense if she and the Darkness (which the worms serve and which gave rise to the Hive’s Sword Logic) are allies. In the Season of the Chosen, we learned she helped engineer Xivu Arath’s attack on Torobatl, the Cabal homeworld, which drove Caiatl and the rest of her people to our solar system–and we spent that season opening up a diplomatic discourse with some folks who were previously our enemies. It’s a thorny discourse and not in particularly great shape, granted–but it is a discourse.
And now, in the Season of the Splicer, Savathun has created a situation in which we have to join with the Eliksni, our age-old adversaries, in order to defeat a worse threat in the Endless Night. We’ve seen a whole bunch of problems arise from the Eliksni’s presence in the Last City, but it’s also breaking down barriers between our two species and exposing plots by bad actors. The Endless Night is very likely to leave us stronger, with more allies and newer perspectives, by the time it’s done.
If Savathun is allied with the Darkness, why suppress its ability to corrupt us to its side? If she wants to conquer and destroy us, why create situations in which former enemies are offering alliances against bigger threats? If she’s the ultimate schemer and deceiver, why do we keep seemingly stopping her plans before they can get off the ground?
It’s because the greatest trick Savathun can pull in Destiny 2 is convincing us we’re enemies–until we do what she wants us to do. Savathun can’t just ask us for help, because if she doesn’t deceive, she’ll die. She can’t just offer us an allegiance, because if she stops conning people, she’ll die. She must deceiveus (and everyone else) into helping her.
If we free Savathun from the worm gods and the Darkness, she’s suddenly free of the Sword Logic, free of the need to deceive, free of an existence of constant conquest. And maybe she’ll even enjoy having emotions that aren’t centered on killing people, since we keep seeing lore entries where she misses her old pre-Hive family or finds herself feeling things for the humans around her while she deceives them.
The themes of this entire year of Destiny 2 content have been about understanding our former adversaries, discovering common ground with them, and maybe finding a path toward becoming allies–or at least living in peace. That’s going to culminate with Savathun’s machinations in Witch Queen. The thematic threads have an endpoint.
Savathun wants to be best buds with us. She just has to trick us to make that happen.
After being one of the slowest to adopt cross-play, Sony Interactive Entertainment’s president and CEO Jim Ryan has said the company wants more cross-platform multiplayer for PlayStation games.
In an interview with Axios, Ryan clearly stated that “we support and encourage cross-play,” while also noting that cross-play currently works with such big games as Fortnite, Rocket League, Call of Duty, Minecraft, and Destiny 2, the last of which will be available soon.
PlayStation doesn’t plan on stopping there, and Ryan confirmed that “that number will continue to grow.”
This is a welcome acknowledgement from Ryan, especially following the controversy from 2018 related to Fortnite. After Fortnite was released on Switch, it was quickly discovered that players could not carry over their existing Epic Games account if even one game on PS4 was played. This also meant that PlayStation players could not play with other platforms, all while others could easily play together.
That doesn’t mean its been a smooth road, however, and it was recently revealed during the Epic v. Apple trial that Sony’s contract with Epic had them extra cash from cross-platform play, specifically when players would purchase V-bucks on other devices but were still gaming on Sony consoles.
To that, Ryan said he didn’t want to talk about a “live business issue with a long-standing partner,” but noted “our policies are consistent across all of the publishers.”
A new teaser for the second season of Netflix’s The Witcher features our best look yet of Henry Cavill’s Geralt and has given us a clue as to what destiny has in store for him.
Shared by The Witcher’s Twitter account, this 12-second clip throws a ton of scenes at us that go by very rapidly, but we do catch glimpses of Geralt, runes, Witcher medallions, weapons, snow, skeletons, and, perhaps most importantly, a hint that we may be getting another bath scene in this upcoming season.
What does destiny have in store for Geralt of Rivia in Season 2? Here’s a clue. pic.twitter.com/u1uXAnzUfG
This teaser follows a similar one that was focused on Ciri, the princess that Geralt will be taking with him to his childhood home of Kaer Morhen in season 2. The White Wolf will need to protect Ciri from the mysterious power she possesses while the Continent’s kings, elves, humans, and demons strive for supremacy outside the walls of the castle, which is located within the Kingdom of Kaedwen.
If that’s not enough The Witcher for you, Netflix is also working on The Witcher: Blood Origin, a spin-off prequel that is set 1,200 years before Geralt’s adventures, and an anime feature film focused on Vesemir called The Witcher: Nightmare of the Wolf.
Netflix has also announced WitcherCon for July 9, where we are expecting to hear more about the upcoming season and all the other Witcher projects currently in the works. Unfortunately, those looking for a new game announcement will be disappointed as it has already been stated that there will be such reveal at this event.
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Have a tip for us? Want to discuss a possible story? Please send an email to [email protected].
Adam Bankhurst is a news writer for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter @AdamBankhurst and on Twitch.
Amazon Prime Day is sure to dominate the conversation around deals when it kicks off this coming Monday, June 21, but it’s far from the only retailer launching its biggest sale of the summer right now. The size and popularity of Prime Day has driven Amazon’s biggest competitors to launch their own competing sales at the same time, and Best Buy is always one of the biggest players in the anti-Prime Day space. Right on schedule, Best Buy has kicked off a major sale just ahead of Prime Day, called “The Bigger Deal” savings event–which feels like a playful jab at Walmart’s “Deals for Days” and Target’s “Deal Days” sales.
We’ve rounded up the best flash deals in Best Buy’s The Bigger Deal savings event. Make sure to check back each day until the sale ends, as we’ll be updating this article every day with new flash deals.
You can save $400 on an excellent MacBook Pro today only. This particular 13-inch model includes an Intel Core i5 processor, not Apple’s in-house M1 chip. It also comes with 8GB of RAM and a 512GB SSD.
If you’re looking for a high-end productivity laptop for work or school, this HP Spectre x360 2-in-1 is a great option, especially for $200 off. This 15.6-inch laptop doubles as a Windows tablet with a touchscreen display. Speaking of the display, it boasts 4K UHD resolution, which makes it great for both work and entertainment. It’s fitted with an Intel Core i7 processor, 16GB of RAM, a 512GB SSD, and 32GB of Optane storage.
Smartwatches can help you achieve fitness goals and monitor your daily activity as well as connect to your phone for notifications. The Fitbit Versa 2 is one of the best smartwatches around, and its already reasonable price is even better today only. The Versa 2 includes live heart rate tracking, an app that records and monitors workouts, tracks your sleep and nutrition and plenty more. It syncs up to your phone to provide email and text notifications as well as personalized reminders. The Versa 2 also has Amazon Alexa built-in, which lets you utilize its bevy of features hands-free. Amazon is matching this deal, so you can shop at your preferred retailer.
Yes, the AirPods Max are still incredibly pricey even with a $50 discount–but this is the first markdown they’ve gotten since launch. Apple’s over-the-ear version of its popular AirPods line is aimed at the diehard fans. They’re stellar headphones with a ton of great features, including active noise-cancellation, spatial audio, and dynamic drivers that create crisp and impactful audio. The AirPods Max offer 20 hours of power on a full charge and come with a nice case for safe storage. They have comfortable earcups that are made out of knit-mesh and memory foam. You also get six months of Apple Music with your purchase. AirPods Max come in five colors: Space Gray, Sky Blue, green, pink, and silver.
We’ve entered outdoor grilling and backyard party season, and every get-together could use some music. A portable Bluetooth speaker is the most convenient option to use both outdoors and indoors. This Logitech Ultimate Ears Boom 2 speaker has 360-degree sound, a 15-hour battery life, and a 100-foot range for Bluetooth. It has a compact, durable design and produces loud, clear audio.
Watch live streams, videos, and more from GameSpot’s summer event. Check it out
If you’re an Amazon Prime member and have a device with Alexa enabled–including the mobile app–you can currently score some ridiculous deals on a number of Amazon products right now. These are substantially better deals than you’ll get ordering them via Amazon.com right now, and buying the new Echo Dot, Fire TV Stick 4K, and Kindle Paperwhite for a big discount is as simple as telling Alexa what to do. Through June 20, you can take advantage of Alexa-exclusive Prime Day deals just by saying, “Alexa, order an Echo Dot”–or any other eligible product that catches your eye.
Some of the items that qualify are both the 3rd Gen Echo Dot and the 4th Gen Echo Dot, available for $20 and $25 respectively when using Alexa. The Fire TV Stick 4K is a ridiculous $25 this way, and it comes with an Alexa-enabled remote. These are all-time lows for these products. Of course, the fact that Amazon is referring to these as “early access deals” means they’ll probably be available online for all Prime members come Monday, but why wait until then and risk stock selling out?
If you’re looking for something a bit more substantial, you can also get the Fire TV Cube for just $80, which is $40 cheaper than its MSRP. Tablets are also included in the promotion, with the Fire 10 HD available for $80–almost half off its normal price. The Kindle Paperwhite is typical $130, and it’s only $80 with the Alexa command. Make sure you’re logged into your Amazon Prime account to see the Alexa-exclusive pricing.
When you’re logged into your Prime account, you’ll see this message on eligible products.
In order to get the discount, go to the early access Alexa deals page on Amazon and select the item you want. You’ll see an Alexa command in quotes above its listing, and saying that to your device will bring up the deal so you can order the item for the steeply discounted price. It couldn’t be easier.
Amazon Prime Day officially kicks off this Monday, June 21, and runs for 48 hours. You can check out our Prime Day Deals hub to stay up to date on the best savings.
Watch live streams, videos, and more from GameSpot’s summer event. Check it out
