If you were playingMonopoly Goback at Christmastime in 2024 and remember the bizarrely-timed Halloween event we had back then for the Haunted Mansion Adventure, then the Adventure Club Vikings event running between1PM EST on April 22and4PM EST on April 27will ring familiar bells. Team up with seven other players and play a card game not dissimilar to blackjack, trying to pull cards higher than the number shown on the current obstacle you’re trying to clear....

Quick Links Early inFantasy Life i: The Girl Who Steals Time, you will be introduced to mounts. In order to cross an especially scorching portion of the desert in Ginormosia, a mount is mandatory, lest you suffer 30 damage per second if you attempt to hoof it on-foot. The game won’t let you, because this is your formal mounts tutorial. But that first mount does not need to be your last....

Another Nintendo Direct. Another period of coming to terms with no ports ofThe Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker and Twilight Princess HDfor theNintendo Switch. After the long-awaited release ofXenoblade Chronicles X: Definitive Edition, and with the Switch 2 Direct poised to take place next week, I foolishly believed it was the last chance they had to be revealed. Well, I’m wrong, and two of the best Zelda games ever made remain trapped on an old system....

Summary They say that cooking is an art, but baking is a science. Despite all the warm, cozy, and comforting feelings we associate with baked goods, so much precision and accuracy goes into making that happen. Baking in real life is an ordeal that always ends up in a mess, and though game baking is cleaner, it has its challenges. Every type of pastry and more has multiple steps with multiple tools and movements that can be completely ruined with the slightest error....

Summary Kingdom Heartsfans think that one of the new Heartless inKH4could be teasing a world based on Meet the Robinsons, as it bears a striking resemblance to Doris from that movie. It’s been along time since Kingdom Hearts fans have had anything to get excited for or talk about, but that finally changed earlier this week. After suddenlycancelling Missing Link after years of development, Square Enix gave us apeace offering in the form of seven new Kingdom Hearts 4 screenshots....

The first new trailer forMetroid Prime 4: Beyondin months debuted during a recent Nintendo Direct, and the reactions have been somewhat mixed. As the biggest Metroid simp in the lower 48 (there’s a guy in Alaska who named his kid Mother Brain), I can’t help but feel blessed by every solitary frame of actual gameplay Nintendo has deigned to bestow upon us. I like the new planet, Viewros, and I’min lovewith Samus’ new space suit....

I am sincerely thrilled to see so many new players getting into Monster Hunter thanks toMonster Hunter Wilds. It’s been weeks since launch and Wilds is still seeingclose to a million peak concurrent players- and that’s just on PC alone. My social media feed is filled with Monster Hunter memes and reactions from newcomers to some of the series’ most iconic (and idiosyncratic) conventions, and I hope all of them have had a great experience and intend to stick with the game as it grows over the next couple years....

Summary Xenoblade Chronicles X: Definitive Editionhas a much higher degree of characters in it than any other games in the series. This extends not just to the people inhabiting the world, but those you directly interact with. There are 20 different characters that can be in your party, and NLA is constantly growing with more alien species. And that means there is plenty of opportunity for some iconic quotes. Some of these lines will be beaten into your head by the end of the game, while there are others that you might never hear by sheer merit of how much side content there is in the game....

Summary Magic: The Gatheringloves a good Willy Wonka-style treasure hunt, and various sets have included serialized cards in the past. One of the most famous examples of this was The One Ring in the Lord of the Rings: Tales of Middle-earth crossover back in 2023, which was a one-of-a-kind card that ended upbeing sold to Post Malone for a whopping $2.6 million. Due to the nature of them being extremely limited, serialized cards are often some of the most expensive cards you can pull, and the upcomingFinal Fantasycrossover set is going to have a serialized run of cards of its very own....

Summary TheNintendo Switch 2Direct was quite an emotional rollercoaster. We got to see someinteresting new features of the upcoming console, but were immediately let down byNintendo’s terrible Discord rip-off. Things were looking up again when we were shown a series offirst-partyandthird-party games, but were againdisappointed when their prices were revealed. These seemingly last-gen features and the inflated price of the console and first-party games left a bad taste in the mouth for viewers, andI’m not just talking about the cartridges....

How dare I even say anything bad aboutSkyrim?! Well, I’m going to - I love the game, but I always lovedOblivionmore. The stats and how you level up, the fantasy elements of the world, the quest design, and yes - the magic. Skyrim introduced Thu’ums, or Shouts, as a new form of power to play around with on top of the standard spells you could equip, but it all felt very basic in comparison to Oblivion, andOblivion Remasteredis reminding me just how strong the contrast truly is....

Summary Oblivion has one of the most famous tutorials in video game history. Players must navigate their way through the sewers, eventually emerging into the blinding sunlight on the other side. There’s something significant that has to happen in those sewers before the story can progress, and a whole new crop of Oblivion players has been trying to circumvent that event in the remaster. Oblivion Remastered shadow dropped last week, leading tomillions of people jumping into the polished version of the almost-20-year-old game, some of them for the first time....

I loveBreath of the Wild. It’s by far my favouriteZeldagame and one of my favourite games of all time.Tears of the Kingdomwas a fantastic follow-up that I also hold dear, though it was less revolutionary. But please, Nintendo, I would like to pet dogs in Castle Town again. This isn’t a gripe I have with Breath of the Wild - seeing the classic series reimagined with a post-apocalyptic setting is a big reason the game is so special....