Welcome to the Year of the Pegasus

Crunchyroll has announced the winners of the 2024 Anime Awards, the annual awards ceremony hosted in Japan to honor and celebrate the best shows, voice actors, animators, musicians, and creators of the past year. On Saturday, Jujutsu Kaisen season 2 took home this year’s top prize for anime of the year.

I’ve played both Ori games. I survived the Water Tower in Blind Forest. So I knew that, even though developer Moon Studios was changing genres for its next game, No Rest for the Wicked, I shouldn’t expect to breeze through it. And sure enough, after playing the first 90 minutes of an early build, culminating in a punishing boss fight, I had to earn every new piece of gear, every bit of loot, and every inch of progress. No Rest for the Wicked is beautiful, it is challenging, and it is rewarding. You are not a walking death machine here, like in Diablo. Instead, your enemies are the walking death machines, and you’ll need to learn how to survive them. It’s more like Dark Souls in an isometric-view action-RPG form.

Kaiju No. 8 is one of the most anticipated anime of the upcoming season and its latest trailer revealed a few exciting new things about the series. The teaser, which was released on Thursday, announced that the show will premiere on April 13, and revealed who will perform the opening and closing songs for the first season.

In 1600, the setting of FX’s adaptation of James Clavell’s historical epic Shōgun, Japan was all but closed off to most Western nations. The arrival of scruffy Englishman John Blackthorne (Cosmo Jarvis), in all his unwashed glory, qualifies as an event of the highest degree; Blackthorne is a “barbarian” who upsets the already delicate balance of scheming roiling in Osaka, not to mention his ship full of guns and canons. But in its first two episodes, Shōgun takes this scenario further, reminding us with a single scene that this is a place we might be familiar with, but not a place any of us really know. In just seven minutes, Shōgun expands the whole world.

Between movies like Dune: Part Two, Longlegs, Furiosa, Horizon, and Twisters, it’s already shaping up to be a pretty big year for movies. But even with all those big titles on the way, I Saw the TV Glow might still be the most exciting release of the year. The new horror movie from director Jane Schoenbrun got its first trailer on Wednesday, and it looks incredible.

2024 has been a cracking year for JRPGs, and it might get a lot better if a new Bravely Default game materializes. 

I owe you an apology, mister Shiren the Wanderer, because I wasn’t really familiar with your game before now. Sure, I’ve played a few mystery dungeon games in my time – your Pokémon Mystery Dungeons, and your Chocobo’s Mystery Dungeon Every Buddy!, but while I liked them, they never really got their claws into me. Even with my growing urges to play roguelikes, I never found myself a good enough reason to dip into the franchise that started it all until now, with Shiren the Wanderer: The Mystery Dungeon of Serpentcoil Island. I’m so happy I did, because it’s my new roguelike obsession, and the game that finally made mystery dungeons click for me.

Today's Nintendo Partner Direct included something I don't think any of us had on our bingo cards: a Switch comeback for the cult classic Wii diving series Endless Ocean.

I'm a deep admirer of the cult strategy game series Mount & Blade, in which you build and control an army across the plains of Europe. Kingmakers, announced earlier today, looks like it'll scratch that particular itch pretty successfully, but I need you to watch the trailer before I tell you anything else about it. 

The 2024 DICE Awards, organised by the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences, has just happened. Back in January, the nominees for the industry awards were announced, with Marvel's Spider-Man 2 leading the charge. Now, Insomniac's sequel also takes home the most wins, succeeding in six of the nine categories in which it was nominated.

The 2024 Game of the Year award has been handed out at the DICE Awards, and it has fallen into the hands of Larian for Baldur’s Gate 3.

The highly acclaimed Baldur's Gate 3 has brought home yet another set of accolades after the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences announced its yearly DICE Awards winners. The recent victory comes after Baldur's Gate 3 dominated The Game Awards late last year.