June is nearly over, which means we're barreling headfirst into the dog-days of summer. While much of the country is wringing out from a heat wave, there are some cool deals happening at the moment, which should help only if you're interested in the most painfully stretched of metaphors.

But in all seriousness, there are some great opportunities to grab some deals, especially that SSD deal for GameStop Pro members. The Nintendo eShop deal is also delivering up some surprises, so read on to see what today has to offer.

LG OLED C1 Deal

This remains one of the best 4KTVs out there, even with the newer version supplanting it. While the C2 has plenty to love, and improves on the C1 in a lot of different ways, it's not on sale for $1096 for the 55" model. In fact, all the sizes are on sale today, from the LG C1 48" for $769.99 to the most popular size of all, the 65" LG C1 OLED for $1596.99.

Official Taiko no Tatsujin Controller for Switch + Game Deal

If you've been eyeing the Taiko no Tatsujin drum controller but shied away at the steep price, look again. Right now it's on sale for the lowest price ever. There's no official way to get the official drum kit in America, so these 3rd party vendors are the only way to get them short of eBay or buying them yourself in Japan and flying them over. Note that the game isn't included with the drum kit. But the Nintendo eShop sale happening right now has an incredible deal, marking down the base game to just $10 from its normal $49.99 price tag.

Samsung 980 Pro 1TB SSD (PS5 Compatible) for $134.99 at GameStop

If you're a GameStop Pro member, you can get this unbelievably tempting deal on a 1TB PS5 compatible SSD. In fact, this is one of the best PS5 SSDs going, and the opportunity to get it at this price should absolutely be on your to-do list. It's actually worth signing up for Pro, because even with the addition of the $14.99 membership fee, you still get a deal.

Google 6 Pixel Pro Unlocked for $779.99

Woot, one of my personal favorite online retailers, is offering brand-new, unlocked Google 6 Pixel Pro smartphones today for $779.99. The phone comes with 128GB of storage, a 120Hz display, and is 5G capable, of course. Want to stress again this is a new phone, not a used or a refurb, so this is a solid deal.

Samsung QLED Ultrawide Gaming Monitor Is $100 Off

If you need to immerse yourself in your gaming, but don't want to completely cut yourself off from the real world with a VR helmet, the excellent 49" Samsung CHG90 gaming monitor is marked down to $899 right now. This monstrous monitor has a native 144Hz refresh rate and a 1ms reponse time. Resolution is 3840×1080, which is a little bit of a bummer, but it also means just about any recent GPU should have no difficulty with it.

40% Off Elden Ring Official Strategy Guides Preorder

Out July 29

These guides have been two of the most popular items we've been posting as of late, and it's not even close. At full price, they were selling like hotcakes, but once the discount hit, they really took off in popularity. The first volume releases in just a month, and if you preorder it at the $29.99 price, you lock it in for the remainder of the preorder period. In other words, if the price goes back up, as long as you have your preorder in at the lower price, that's what you'll be charged. Score.

Gigabyte Gaming PC Deals at Best Buy

The crypto crash has been good to PC purchasing. OK, it might be just a coincedence but we all know it's not. The demand for high-end GPUs has slowed significantly thanks to the crypto-crash, and if you want to buy a 30-series GPU, or a computer containing one, now's a great time. Just look at the specs on that Aero. Man.

Marvel Classic Anthologies on Sale

These newly-released anthologies collect some of the best comics of all time into one beautiful hardcover edition. You can bring home Spider-Man, which collects Amazing Fantasy #15, The Amazing Spider-Man #1-4, #9, #10, #13, #14, #17-19, Strange Tales #97 and The Amazing Spider-Man Annual #1. Captain America features Captain America Comics #1, excerpts from Tales of Suspense #59, #63-68, #75-81, #92-95, #110-113, and 'Captain America…Commie Smasher' from Captain America #78. The Black Panther anthology includes Fantastic Four #52-53 and Jungle Action #6-21.

I personally love these old comics. I've started buying the Marvel Masterworks books when I see them, which are similarly themed but lack that hardcover sheen. If you're a fan of Silver and Bronze-Age comics, or a Marvel fan at all, these should definitely be in your collection.

Alien: Fate of The Nostromo for 30% Off

If you're a board game fan, or an Alien fan, or some combination of both, than this awesome boardgame deal has your name written all over it. If your name is Ravensburger, it LITERALLY has your name written all over it, because that's who makes it. If you're not familiar with Ravensburger's board games, they have some of the biggest names around, like Disney's Villainous. They even make that strangely amazing Jaws game, too.

According to our review, Alien: Fate of the Nostromo is more for casual game nights than it is for hardcore boardgame veterans, but that's not a knock against it.

Nintendo eShop Sale

The big Nintendo sale I referenced earlier is in full effect right now, with retailers like Amazon matching most of the deals available at the eShop. It's a great time to get yourself loaded up on some new Switch games, but most of the deals aren't anything we haven't seen before. Still, Nintendo sale!

Seth Macy is Executive Editor, IGN Commerce, and just wants to be your friend. You can find him hosting the Nintendo Voice Chat podcast.

Christian Bale has revealed that he would only return to play Batman if Christopher Nolan asked him to reprise the role.

The actor may have hung up his cape and cowl when the Dark Knight trilogy wrapped, but he hasn't completely closed the door on the idea of suiting up as Batman again. During an interview with ComicBook.com, Bale admitted that he would consider returning to play the Caped Crusader on one condition: Christopher Nolan must be in the director's chair.

Despite his willingness to reteam with the Dark Knight trilogy director, Bale confirmed that Nolan nor anyone else had ever approached him about reprising his DC role. "Nobody, nobody reaches out to me or they keep me like a mushroom, keep me in the dark and feed me s***," Bale told the outlet.

"For me, that would be a matter of Chris Nolan, if he ever decided to do it again and if he chose to come my way again, then yeah, I would consider it because that was always our pact between each other is we would just stick to it," he then added. "We said we would only ever make three. And then I said to myself, and I'd only ever make it with Chris."

Bale portrayed Bruce Wayne/Batman in Batman Begins, The Dark Knight, and The Dark Knight Rises, which capped off the trilogy in 2012. Warner Bros. later pitched a fourth Batman movie to Bale, but he decided to turn it down out of respect for Nolan who had always envisioned his story as a three-film series and nothing more.

Bale is, however, pressing forward with comic book movies as he will soon be making his MCU debut as Gorr the God Butcher in Thor: Love and Thunder, which opens in theaters on July 8. Actor Chris Hemsworth has already gushed over Bale's performance in the movie, and director Taika Waititi has claimed that he's probably the MCU's best villain yet.

Adele Ankers-Range is a freelance writer for IGN. Follow her on Twitter.

Tencent Games has announced Code: To Jin Yong, an open-world martial arts game set in ancient China.

Code: To Jin Yong is being developed in Unreal Engine 5 by Lightspeed Studios (PUBG Mobile and Apex Legends Mobile), the first AAA game from the studio. It will be based on the novels of legendary Chinese writer Jin Yong.

A two-minute trailer was released during Tencent's 2022 game conference (below) which shows off a fast-paced and frantic sword fight between two characters.

The combat will also feature magic of some sort, with what appears to be the protagonist wielding wind and his opponent (literally) throwing hands.

Tencent promised that Code: To Jin Yong will be a tribute to the late author, bringing to life his wuxia (martial art fiction set in ancient China) novels that are incredibly popular and have already spawned a myriad of film, TV, and game adaptations.

This will be the first modern game set in Jin Yong's universe, however, and seemingly the first to be targeted at an English-speaking audience. No indication of a release window was given by Tencent, though the trailer makes clear that this footage isn't final, and the game's platforms are also currently unclear.

The Shenzhen, China-based publisher has been pushing further and further into the games industry in recent years, acquiring developers including Riot Games and Turtle Rock Studios.

Ryan Dinsdale is an IGN freelancer who occasionally remembers to tweet @thelastdinsdale. He'll talk about The Witcher all day.

Ever since Outriders released early last year, I’ve held a theory that it's the ultimate fast food game: a bland story filled with cheesy one-liners and mindless encounters that you know aren’t good for you, but undeniably awesome combat that’s easy for you and your friends to lose hours in just makes it so dang tasty. In that context, if the base game was a Big Mac, then the latest expansion, Worldslayer, is that one sandwich from KFC where the bread is replaced by fried chicken. With a fine-tuned combat sandbox, expanded build-crafting options, and a drastically upgraded endgame, Worldslayer improves upon a lot of what was already great about the original, but it also doubles down on many of its shortcomings. That includes another weak story, annoying boss fights, and an overall lack of stuff to do. The result is a fleeting evolution of its space–magic mayhem, but one that’s still entertaining enough to leave me feeling good about making a return trip to Enoch.

Like the vanilla campaign, Worldslayer’s borderline incoherent story takes place on an alien world where you play as a magical soldier called an Outrider, complete with a stupid sci-fi haircut and some of the cringiest dialogue in all the cosmos. The same mysterious anomaly that gave your character powers now threatens to destroy the entire planet, plus there’s a new scary lady that wants to kill everyone, and yadda yadda yadda – now you’ve gotta murder thousands of people and animals in the name of all that’s good.

It isn’t exactly high art, and the morbid curiosity that kept me following along meant I frequently found myself to be the one holdout in my group who didn’t vote to skip most cutscenes. That said, the story does actually answer some key questions I had after the main game and, crucially, addresses the ECA/Insurgency civil war that was left unresolved in the base campaign. It’s just unfortunate that a sci-fi world with this much potential is bogged down by bad dialogue and vague cutscenes that feel like they’re rushing through the beats to minimize the amount of time spent not killing things.

After roughly seven short hours that’s mostly mindlessly killing waves upon waves of enemies, you’ll wrap up the core Worldslayer campaign in a pretty disappointing fashion. Having defeated enemies you hardly had a chance to meet, made new allies that speak mostly in cryptic riddles, and saved bland characters from an early death, you’ll walk off into whatever the Enoch equivalent of a sunset is to advance towards the equally indecipherable endgame story.

But while the plot falls comically short of pushing you toward the action, the satisfying-as-heck combat picks up the slack in a big way. Whether you’re pulling off insane DPS as the ninja-like Trickster or Hulk-smashing groups of enemies as the unstoppable Devastator, turning whole groups of enemies into bright red giblets hits all the right notes. Automatic shotguns tear through and dismember people at short range, submachine guns apply nonstop pressure on waves of enemies, sniper rifles allow you to cover your friends from afar, and running and gunning with a crew just feels so darn good – not to mention all the wonderfully over-the-top space magic you can use.

While all of that was true with the base Outriders package, Worldslayer significantly improves the sandbox with more weapons and armor, and importantly, Apocalypse items that grant an additional mod slot which opens up a whole bunch of new possibilities. Now you’ve got a potential for 50% more ways to grab new perks that synergize with your build on every slot of your inventory, and that allows for some insane stunts. In my Trickster build, I managed to equip a full set of mods that made me a nightmare against large groups of enemies, where damaging one poor soul meant damaging everyone in the vicinity. In another build, I made all my equipment either apply freeze or increase damage against frozen enemies, which left the baddies hilariously helpless against me.

The one major exception to the otherwise excellent combat is that, as was true with the base game, fighting bosses is usually not a good time at all. Where Outriders generally makes you feel like a complete badass, boss fights pit you against an enemy with a health bar a mile long that you’ve gotta shoot at for several centuries before they finally die. Meanwhile you’re spinning your wheels spamming abilities and killing adds while you wait for the bad guy to eventually drop dead. It just goes on for so long and makes you feel like a complete wimp in the process – plus it’s got that classic game problem where the boss only has a few voice lines they repeatedly scream at you the whole time, and that gets old really fast.

On top of the new weapon and armor options are some endgame progression systems like Pax Points, which are used in an advanced skill tree that lets you pick five new, uber-powerful perks, and Ascension Points, a slow-burning progression system that reminds me of Diablo 3’s Paragon system and allows you to make small, incremental improvements the longer you play. These systems not only give you plenty of reasons to continue beyond the first campaign playthrough, but also offer some serious game-changer abilities. For example, one standout power caused critical hits with weapons to make my Anomaly powers more deadly, while using Anomaly powers made my weapons do significantly more damage. Working my build around these abilities made my character feel more powerful than I’ve ever felt in Outriders, which is no small task.

These new progression systems give you the perfect opportunity to put them to the ultimate test in Worldslayer’s endgame, which centers around a dungeon-delving activity called The Trial of Tarya Gratar. This challenging activity is a dungeon in three acts, with an aforementioned bullet sponge of a boss to fight at the end of each act and some smaller battles along the way. There are also branching paths that give you multiple ways to get through it and even offer some optional encounters that can be tackled to target-farm certain pieces of equipment – a godsend for those really looking to grind this endgame.

The actual content in The Trial isn’t terribly different from what you get during the regular Worldslayer campaign, with waves of enemies to defeat and loot to claim along the way, although it’s much more difficult than everything else and can be scaled to your level to be near-limitlessly daunting. If you were hoping for a procedurally-generated dungeon that’s different each time you enter though, you’ll be sad to learn that The Trial is essentially the same every run, with only your chosen path leading you to different encounters. That’s a bit disappointing in terms of replayability, but the good news is the encounters baked into it are some of the best in Outriders so far.

My favorite encounter is the second boss fight, which features a floating monster that isn’t a complete bullet sponge and instead requires you to deactivate his invulnerability shield before he can be damaged. Taking on waves of adds while quickly performing a ritual to make the boss damageable before he begins casting deadly spells is an absolute thrill, and it made me annoyed that every other boss fight just amounted to staying alive for a very long time while you slowly whittle down their health. Hopefully they’ll do more boss fights like that one in the future, because it makes all the others look downright awful by comparison.

Another interesting part of the post-campaign content is that it continues the (still bad) story, which was an unexpected but welcome surprise since plenty of similar games don’t even bother trying to tie a story into the endgame – including the base Outriders campaign. Unfortunately, without going into spoilers, the main issue with all this new story content is that your character has almost no role in it. You aren’t really the protagonist, and as a result you feel like a bystander in a story that’s happening around you, or in many cases you’re getting history lessons on stuff that’s already happened that has little to no impact on what you’re doing moment-to-moment. This all culminates in the expansion’s anticlimactic final plot points during the endgame, where the twists seem to have very little bearing on anything. It’s great that they’re trying to weave the story into the grind – I just wish that story was better than what we got.

If you’ve played Dungeon of the Endless, then you’ll know the biggest hallmark of the tactical tower defense game is its incredibly high level of difficulty. Defending against countless waves of enemies as a squishy hero while managing scant resources to use for tower defense was often a humbling experience. With successor Endless Dungeon being a roguelite, you might wonder if developer Amplitude intends to use a lighter touch going forward. After several hours of getting absolutely dabbed on by various bugs and robots in Endless Dungeon’s harrowing space station, I can safely report that no quarter is being granted – and that’s great news for gluttons for punishment like myself.

A lot has changed since 2014’s Dungeon of the Endless, but the core formula is still immediately recognizable in Endless Dungeon. I took on the role of two heroes stranded on a space station, searching for an exit with the help of a mechanical spider who I had to protect at all costs. Managing resources, obtaining new gear, and building defensive towers all became essential skills to surviving the brutal and relentless waves of enemies that easily overwhelmed me despite my not-insignificant tower defense chops.

Even with my characters’ extremely useful abilities, like Bunker’s skill of becoming invulnerable for an extended period of time, I quickly learned that a fast trigger finger would never be enough to prevent my untimely death on its own. Instead, I had to proceed with extreme caution as I explored the derelict space station and made my ultimately futile attempts at reaching the exit. Each new room I entered brought with it the anxiety and excitement of hoping I’d find some useful resources, while bracing myself for the inevitable monster’s den I was probably walking into. Suffice it to say, I didn’t have a single successful run in my limited time with this harrowing dungeon-crawler, and I consider that a testament to its bonafides as a hardcore roguelite – it just wouldn’t feel right if they made it easy for me.

But just because Endless Dungeon calls itself a roguelite versus the roguelikes of the past doesn’t mean it’s going to be easy. It’s true that the final version will feature a meta progression system that presumably makes the going a bit easier with each consecutive playthrough, but Amplitude describes that progression as horizontal unlockables versus vertical ones that make the player more powerful. For example, you might unlock new characters that give you more options to tackle the dungeon and its enemies, but you won’t be able to make your existing characters much more powerful than they are initially.

There are exceptions to this rule, like weapons that can be improved to give you an edge or mod slots that can give characters certain permanent boosts, but for the most part if you want any hope in surviving Endless Dungeon’s brutal waves of relentless enemies, your skill will need to improve – grinding your way to unrivaled power is not on the menu. With this model, Endless Dungeon straddles the line between being somewhat more approachable than a fully Darwinian roguelike, without putting the same kid gloves on that’s common with roguelites.

That said, the version I played had no progression system whatsoever, so I ended up just getting repeatedly eviscerated by hordes of enemies until I learned to carefully put my resources to their best use and got a tiny bit further with each attempt. It’s certainly not for the faint of heart and although I got my butt kicked every step of the way, it was an experience that left me wanting more. I look forward to getting humiliated again when Endless Dungeon comes to Early Access later this year.