Mario Party Superstars is a nostalgia-trip of iconic boards, Bumper Balls, and new improvements on the original Nintendo 64 and Nintendo GameCube games. I recruited three of my colleagues to join me in playing Horror Land, a board from 2000’s Mario Party 2 on N64. It’s so crazy seeing Birdo and Waluigi walking around this classic board I first played 21 years ago. Horror Land has a day/night cycle every two turns and includes a new transition animation for when the time changes. This board also allows Whomps to finally get a good night's rest, and you can’t wake them up to get by. In 2018’s Super Mario Party, you only needed 10 coins for a Star, but in Mario Party Superstars, you’ll need 20 coins to buy a Star. Toadette has to adjust for inflation, after all.

My absolute favorite new feature of Mario Party Superstars are the stickers. That’s right, stickers! Think of it as a quick chat feature while you play on a board. Sure, it’s a blast yelling and laughing with your friends in-person, but there’s something so rewarding about also communicating through what are essentially Nintendo emojis. With just a tap of the control stick, you can send a crying Toad saying “Gah!”, an angry Goomba that says “Bring It!”, or even select your own character yelling a distressed “Whaaat?!” The best part is that every time you send a sticker, a quick sound effect of the character plays, which makes it even funnier and more engaging than a traditional quick chat. You can send a sticker at any time during anyone’s turn, and you can unlock more stickers with collected coins. The (very large) sticker appears in your corner of the screen next to your player icon, and you can send the same sticker every few seconds as a distraction in hopes that your opponent accidentally selects “No, Thanks” when buying a Star. (I can dream, right?)

Superstars is the first Mario Party Nintendo Switch game that you can play in handheld mode. 2018’s Super Mario Party featured motion controls, so you could never play the game with Joy-Con controllers attached. Mario Party Superstars gets rid of that rule, and now every board and minigame can be played with button controls, preserving the experience of the original Mario Party games. You can also now play Mario Party Superstars natively on a Nintendo Switch Lite (no need to pair Joy-Con controllers), and you can finally use your Nintendo Switch Pro Controller! No more angrily waving around your Joy-Con trying to throw a basketball in a Cheep Cheep’s mouth.

We all know boards can get hectic in the last five turns, but in Mario Party Superstars you can add turns to your existing board game. If you’re in last place AND you can convince your friends to give you a chance to catch up, then this option is for you! Press pause and you can add turns at any time (except during the last turn, Toad can only do so much). The pause menu also lets you change things like text speed from “Normal” to “Slow” or “Fast.” If you’re like me and have played so many Mario Party games, you can now fly through NPC dialogue and get to the minigames even quicker. Other quality-of-life upgrades include being able to save your board game and pick up where you left off, so feel free to do 30 turns and play the long game! You can save up to 10 different board game sessions at a time. Once the game is over and the winner is announced, Toad will comment on your specific play style with a custom piece of artwork showing every player in the order that they placed. It’s very cool and I took a LOT of screenshots of it using the capture button on the Switch.

Mt. Minigames is a new location where you’ll be able to play all 100 minigames immediately in a variety of different modes, including Free Play, Coin Battle, Daily Challenge, Survival, Sports and Puzzles, Trio Challenge, and Tag Match. Of course the first thing I did was run to Free Play and play Bumper Balls ten times in a row. A cool thing about Bumper Balls and other specific minigames, is that you can actually choose which stage variation to play in. With Bumper Balls you can choose between a scary lava-based stage, a slippery ice-based stage, or a rocky island-based stage. Once you’re done playing Bumper Balls (impossible), you can jump into Trio Challenge to play all those tricky 3 vs. 1 minigames. I love being the solo player and seeing if I'm going to have the minigame’s advantage or disadvantage.

Mario Party fans old and new will enjoy playing Mario Party Superstars, and this game seems like a love letter to some of the most iconic boards and minigames from the N64 and GameCube era. My favorite tiny detail was every minigame you play will show which Mario Party game it came from, along with a cute N64 or GameCube icon. Never forget where you came from!

Jeffrey Vega is a Social Host/Producer at IGN and is probably feeding his neopets right now. You can follow him on Twitter @jeffreyvega, Instagram, and IGN's TikTok.

Nvidia has announced today that it is adding a new membership tier to its GeForce Now cloud gaming service. The new membership will allow subscribers to experience gaming with an RTX 3080 graphics card without having to physically buy one.

GeForce Now's RTX 3080 membership tier will allow gamers to play games in the cloud with an RTX 3080 PC gaming rig. Nvidia says that each cloud on GeForce Now's supercomputer consists of over 1,000 RTX 3080 GPUs with 39 petaflops of graphical horsepower. Each GPU offers 35 teraflops — nearly triple the performance of Microsoft's Xbox Series X, which has a GPU with 12 teraflops.

Nvidia notes that the GeForce Now RTX 3080 membership will allow games on the cloud service to run at up to 1440p resolution on PC and Mac clients or 4K resolution when streaming on Nvidia Shield. With up to 120 FPS with the PC, Mac, and Android versions of GeForce Now.

The RTX 3080 membership tier announcement comes at an interesting time for Nvidia as the company has struggled over the last year with trying to keep up with the unprecedented demand of its RTX 30 series graphics cards, which debuted in late 2020. Due to the ongoing chip shortage, which may continue well into 2023, this new membership tier for GeForce Now will allow users to get a taste of the RTX 3080's power without having to purchase a full PC gaming rig equipped with one of the GPUs.

GeForce Now's RTX 3080 membership will cost $99.99 for six months and be available in North America sometime next month, while European gamers have to wait until December. GeForce Now Founders and Priority members have early access to preorder the service beginning today.

Taylor is the Associate Tech Editor at IGN. You can follow her on Twitter @TayNixster.

Scientists have analysed wood samples from trees using a bygone cosmic storm as a reference point to reveal an exact year that Vikings were present in America.

According to a study published in the Nature journal, per National Geographic, researchers examined wooden artefacts to determine the exact year that Vikings journeyed to the L'Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland, Canada. The data retrieved indicated that European seafarers were felling trees in the area as early as A.D. 1021, exactly 1,000 years ago.

While the precise date corroborates previous evidence of Viking sagas, it also provides the earliest known record of a transatlantic crossing. "This is the first time the date has been scientifically established," archaeologist Margot Kuitems, a researcher at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands and the study's co-author, told NBC News.

"Previously the date was based only on sagas — oral histories that were only written down in the 13th century, at least 200 years after the events they described took place," she added.

The new evidence derives from preserved pieces of wood that were excavated in and around the L'Anse aux Meadows site, with three samples all pointing to the same year.

A solar storm in A.D. 993 released an enormous pulse of radiation that was absorbed and recorded in the rings of the world's trees. Scientists examined the signals that were left behind by the preceding "cosmogenic radiocarbon event" in the rings to determine the exact radiocarbon dates for the felling of the trees at the Vikings settlement.

"If you have a tree with lots of rings and have the bark edge, it's just a question of counting," Michael Dee, a radiocarbon dating expert at the University of Groningen, who led the new study, told NatGeo. "The [previous] radiocarbon dates stretch between the beginning and the end of the Viking Age. We're proving it happened by 1021 at the latest."

This study is particularly significant as it offers a secure juncture for late Viking chronology and presents the earliest known year for the presence of Europeans across the Atlantic.

Various aspects of the Viking Age have made the headlines in recent times. A DNA study last year revealed that most Vikings were not as fair-haired and blue-eyed as pop culture would have us believe. A month later, archaeologists unearthed the 1200-year-old remains of a large Viking temple in Norway that was dedicated to the worship of Thor and Odin.

For more on Marvel's very own God of Thunder, get all the latest on Thor: Love and Thunder.

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

The Sopranos creator David Chase is in talks for a new Sopranos TV show – a prequel that could eventually head to HBO Max.

Ann Sarnoff, WarnerMedia CEO of Studios and Network, told Deadline that the studio is “thrilled” with the success of The Many Saints of Newark. “We’re talking to David about a new series, Sopranos related, on HBO Max,” she said.

The decision seems to have been spurred by the success of The Many Saints of Newark, which despite only earning $11.4 million worldwide, has sparked huge interest in The Sopranos once more.

“You see The Sopranos pop into the top ten of viewed series on [HBO Max] and it’s given it an entirely new life,” she added. “It’s literally lifted all of The Sopranos franchise in a new way. You can’t measure just by the box office.”

Chase previously told Deadline that he would consider returning to make a sequel to The Many Saints of Newark. Now, it looks as though that may have become a TV series all of its own.

“There’s only one way that I would do it,” he said about creating another Sopranos movie. “And that was if Terry and I could write the script together. That I would do.”

The story would potentially take place after The Many Saints of Newark but before the start of the original series, bridging the gap between the movie and TV show. It’s unclear whether The Sopranos writer Terry Winter is already on board.

The Many Saints of Newark recently answered a long-lingering question for Sopranos fans, so a new series seems like a very timely addition. But while a new Sopranos show is an intriguing possibility, Warner executive Ann Sarnoff admitted that the series could become a movie sequel in time.

Either way, it looks as though there’s plenty more Sopranos yet to come. And The Many Saints of Newark is just the beginning. We awarded the prequel movie a 7/10 review, calling it "a solid and fan-friendly prequel to the classic HBO series, even if it does try to add too much to the Sopranos Universe."

Ryan Leston is an entertainment journalist and film critic for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter.

New World is currently being affected by a deflationary currency crisis so bad that on some servers, players have started bartering raw materials with one another instead of spending their increasingly valuable coins.

As per an article by Player Auctions, Amazon's latest MMORPG is currently facing a troubling time with deflation. Unlike other MMOs, which often have to combat inflation caused by players generating more money through grinding out quests and amassing small fortunes, New World is facing quite the opposite problem.

According to the article, the game's primary methods for distributing New World's currency to players across the land – through monster drops, salvage, and completing quests – aren't offering enough coins to keep up with the rate that they're exiting circulation as players spend their hard-earned coins. As circulation in the game decreases, this has resulted in prices on in-game items such as crafting materials falling "not necessarily because there isn’t enough coin to afford them, but because the value of the currency is so much higher than the value of goods".

While the issue of deflation poses a number of problems to players in-game, the falling price of raw materials alone could affect the way that fans play the game in the future. As prices lower, this could potentially disincentivize players from leveling up certain skills in order to generate income. For example, if the price of raw materials fell sharply enough, then players may be less likely to sink time into mining them as the return for ore being sold would become so negligible that it wouldn't be worth their time.

In some servers, Player Auctions reports that the value of the currency is now so high that players have regressed back to a barter economy where resources are being traded instead of coins. Players are now seemingly entering into transactions like "1000 linen, for 600 ore and 20 eggs, or star metal tools for 40 steel bars," in order to be able to hoard the coins that they have. While perhaps an apt way of trading in terms of the game's setting and environment, for New World's players this only further exemplifies the problems that deflation causes in the game.

How New World developer Amazon Games will look to address the issue remains to be seen. However, with the effects of deflation likely set to worsen should the issue be left untouched, players will be hoping that potential solutions to its currency crisis arrive sooner rather than later.

For more on New World, make sure to check out this article where we sent a virtual war reporter into the game, to tell us what life is like for each of the game's warring factions.

Jared Moore is a freelance writer for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter.