Nintendo recently revealed Switch Sports Resort during its June Nintendo Direct, but Amazon has once again knocked $10 off the physical edition ahead of launch.
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Instead of paying the usual $59.99 for a boxed copy, you can preorder Nintendo Switch Sports Resort for $49.94 at Amazon, matching the game's digital MSRP.
October 22, 2026
Nintendo Switch Sports Resort (Physical Edition)
It's a small but welcome saving, especially as Nintendo has introduced higher prices for physical Switch 2 releases, with many games now costing $10 more than their digital counterparts.
The deal also comes at an interesting time for the games industry, as Nintendo continues to fully support boxed releases on Switch 2.
While Sony has recently raised some eyebrows with its announcement that no new PlayStation 5 games would ship on disc from January 2028 onwards
That comes in contrast to Nintendo, which has recently said that boxed games still account for 38.5% of the Mario maker's software sales, suggesting that it has no desire to kill physical media anytime soon.
Is Nintendo Switch Sports Resort Good?
For many Nintendo fans, Wuhu Island is one of the most iconic locations from the Wii era. After debuting in Wii Sports Resort, the tropical island became a fan-favourite Nintendo destination, appearing in games like Pilotwings Resort, Mario Kart 7, and Super Smash Bros. before disappearing for years.
During a hands-on preview at San Diego Comic Con, IGN's Logan Plant returned to Wuhu Island in Nintendo Switch Sports Resort and tried four of the game's 12 sports: archery, bowling, power cruising, and thumb wrestling.
The early signs are promising, with Resort already looking like it could fix some of the issues that held back Nintendo Switch Sports.
The game launches with a much larger lineup of activities, while the upgraded Joy-Con 2 controllers make each sport feel more distinct, from aiming a bow in archery to gripping handlebars while racing across the island.
While much of the appeal comes from nostalgia, it's great to see Wuhu Island return as a place Nintendo fans can visit again.
Robert Anderson is IGN's Senior Commerce Editor and resident deals expert on games, collectibles, trading card games, and more. You can follow him @robertliam21 on Bluesky.%!s()
Tehran has set out a protracted negotiating timetable designed to keep Donald Trump embroiled in the Iran conflict until the midterm elections, in the hope of inflicting the same ruinous blow on his presidency as Jimmy Carter suffered over the 1979-81 US embassy hostage crisis.
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For many inside Iran, inflicting meaningful revenge on Trump is a legitimate and self-standing war aim, reflected in the mood of those attending the funeral of the supreme leader Ali Khamenei where demands for retribution were ubiquitous.
While Iranian officials since the 1979 Islamic revolution have never trusted the US, that animus is now also directed personally towards Trump. He not only tore up the painfully negotiated nuclear deal in 2018, but he sanctioned the assassination of the military leader Qassem Suleimani and twice involved Iran in negotiations on its nuclear programme only to launch wars against it. He shows no remorse for the killing of the country’s supreme leader, or for the attempt on the life of Iran’s president, Masoud Pezeshkian.
As the countdown to November’s midterms begins, what could be Trump’s political demise has become a subject of obsessive speculation in Tehran. Iranian media track the US president’s waning ratings, attributing the decline to the war’s unpopularity and high oil prices. The changing politics of the Democrats is minutely examined.
But the focus on the midterms became more obvious this week when the deputy foreign minister, Kazem Gharibabadi, told the official IRNA news agency that after agreeing a route for commercial shipping through the strait of Hormuz, it would take two to four months to reach the second phase of negotiations on Iran’s nuclear programme. The original plan – to commence the nuclear phase of the talks within 30 days of signing June’s memorandum of understanding (MoU) with the US – had been jettisoned by the Trump administration, Gharibabadi said.
To get to that second stage, he laid out an obstacle course including the lifting of sanctions, the end of the US blockade of Iranian ports, the unfreezing of Iranian assets and new commitments on non-belligerence in a process that could last well beyond the midterms.
If Tehran gets its way on this timetable, Trump will be going to the polls with no Iranian commitment on nuclear weapons, only a hefty economic bill for a failed war. “This raises the very likely scenario of continued cycles of conflict between the US and Tehran over the strait,” said Jason Brodsky from United against a Nuclear Iran, an advocate of the war. “There won’t be any true quiet before the midterm elections – Tehran has no interest in giving this to the Trump administration … It will continue to play games.”
Mehr News, an agency close to the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, published a piece saying Iran had given Trump a major dilemma. “Continuing the war could increase political and economic pressure on the government and exacerbate the decline in his popularity. On the other hand, backing down, or moving towards reducing tensions, could also be interpreted by some of Trump’s supporters as a retreat from his campaign slogans,” it said.
From this perspective, the outcome of this war will not be played out on the battlefield, but at the ballot box. The agency suggested the outcome could affect the course of American domestic and foreign policy for years to come.
Hardliners want to expel the US from the area not by negotiation but by using control of the entry points to the strait of Hormuz. Photograph: AFP/Getty Images
Few in Iran take Trump’s statements at face value. But his denials that the midterms affect his Iran strategy are treated with special scepticism. Iranian media point to comments from Marc Zell, chair of Republicans Overseas Israel, who has said: “It’s all about the midterms … the American public simply is tired of war and the administration is navigating the pre-election waters adroitly in order to avoid a Democratic takeover of Congress.”
Such remarks fuel the debate inside Iran about how much the midterms should be part of Iran’s calculus. Some believe the loss of Congress will inhibit Trump or lead to his impeachment; at the very least, it may mark the end of the war’s funding. Mostafa Zahrani, a former Iranian diplomat, argued electoral defeat “will make it inevitable that Trump will not be able to go back to war and will take the negotiations seriously”.
Others such as Nasser Hadian, a professor of international relations at Tehran University, disagree, advocating cashing in on Iran’s victories now rather than waiting for Trump to become weaker. “If he loses, he’ll have less incentive to reach an agreement with Iran, because in that case he’ll be weakened, and Israel and others will find it much easier to attack him – something they don’t dare do now,” he said. “Those who say we should wait for the midterm elections have no understanding of politics in America.”
Iran’s pleasure in seeing Trump defeated would indeed be reduced if he felt he had nothing left to lose, but its diplomats overall believe the US president’s freedom to act will be constrained by the unpopularity of more conflict and by Republican presidential candidates’ anxiety to wrap this up. Trump would also be at risk of seeing his whole second term consumed by a disastrous war.
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The bigger question is what Iran itself wants to achieve. Agreeing to keep the dispute simmering until November is not an answer to that question – one that Iranians are better at debating than resolving.
Pezeshkian, working in alliance with Mohammad Ghalibaf, the chief negotiator, repeatedly says he does not want endless war, and insists that almost all the supreme national security council concur. He still has faith in the MoU, saying it should be the cornerstone of Iran’s foreign policy.
But the conservative newspaper Kayhan describes the memorandum as worthless since the US always breaks its commitments. “Accordingly, officials should know that the strait of Hormuz is not a bargaining chip and should not be opened as a passage for America,” it said.
Both hardliners and moderates envision the war leading to a new regional security architecture. But the hardliners put the emphasis on America’s expulsion and see this as something less to be negotiated and more to be enforced using control of the entry points to the strait of Hormuz as a lever to close US bases.
Pezeshkian says he sees a place for legitimate US investment in Iran, while the former foreign minister Javad Zarif, in an essay this week, argued Iran in “a post-polar era would benefit from not depending solely on Russia and China in future”.
If Iran developed “a balanced and multifaceted foreign policy”, Tehran would not be forced into relationships based on necessity, he wrote. “Continuing uncontrolled tensions with the United States not only imposes direct costs on Iran, but also makes it more difficult for other countries, even close partners such as China and Russia, to cooperate with Iran.”
Just as Trump cannot resolve from one sentence to the next what he thinks of Iran, nor can Iran agree what it thinks it can get from America. %!s()
Sarajevo Film Festival has unveiled a new program in honor of the late Hungarian filmmaker Béla Tarr.
The selection, titled Béla Tarr in Sarajevo, is a long-term initiative dedicated to the legacy of Tarr, who died earlier this year at the age of 70. The films selected to take part are made by his former students at the Film Factory in Sarajevo. Tarr’s scheme was an international, experimental doctoral school for film studies that ran from 2013 to 2017 in the Bosnian capital.
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More than a retrospective, the program celebrates Tarr’s contribution to world cinema, but also to generations of authors who, through their own films, “continue to carry the spirit of curiosity, rigour and cinematic freedom that found a home in Sarajevo.”
“The selection reflects careers that have since taken these filmmakers to many of the world’s leading festivals, including Cannes, San Sebastián, Locarno, Rotterdam and Clermont-Ferrand,” said Jovan Marjanović, director of the Sarajevo Film Festival. “Rather than revealing a single aesthetic or cinematic school, their films reflect an educational philosophy that encouraged every filmmaker to discover a distinctly personal artistic language.”
Tarr was a longstanding friend of the Sarajevo Film Festival. In 2006, the Tribute To Program featured a retrospective of his selected works. He received the Honorary Heart of Sarajevo at the fest in 2013, and the following year served as president of the jury for the narrative feature film selection.
Among the films selected as part of this year’s inaugural Béla Tarr in Sarajevo program are Lamb from Iceland’s Valdimar Jóhannsson, about a childless couple who make an alarming discovery in their sheep barn, and Naval Gays, from the U.K.’s Grant Gulczynski, a meta-project about a filmmaker with low self-esteem who crafts a movie about sex, the body and himself.
A New Mexico Court judge on Thursday ordered Meta to pay a fine of $567 million, on top of the $375 million levied in March, in a case regarding social media harms and addiction. This brings the total fines the company has to pay to $942 million.
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The court also ordered Meta to make changes to how its platforms function in the state: It wants the company to remove Like counts, and only show such metrics to children under 18 with approval from a parent or a guardian. Push notifications to underaged users in the state are also to be paused between 10 p.m. and 7 a.m., and their usage should be limited to 90 hours a month, which amounts to roughly three hours per day.
“Significant numbers of people in New Mexico experience harm from Meta’s products due to risks of sexual exploitation, interference with education, and adverse mental health outcomes,” the order said.
The judge acknowledged that Meta is not the only platform causing a mental health crisis among youth in the state, but maintained that its platforms play a significant part. He said that the company has caused a significant “public nuisance” in New Mexico, and is required to abate that.
Meta said that it is going to appeal the judgment.
“We work hard to keep people safe on our platforms and have been transparent about the challenges of identifying and removing bad actors and harmful content. We remain confident in our record of protecting teens online and will continue to defend ourselves against claims that misrepresent the facts,” company spokesperson Andy Stone said in an emailed statement.
“For years, Meta knew its platforms were harming New Mexico’s kids, from feeding a youth mental health crisis to connecting predators with children, and it chose engagement and profit over their safety,” state Attorney General Raúl Torrez said in a statement.
“Today, Meta is paying for that choice. This judgment holds the company accountable for the damage it caused to our children, our families, and our schools, and it forces real changes to how Meta operates in New Mexico,” he added.
The ruling comes in the wake of another loss in Los Angeles in March, where the court also ruled against the social media company for creating addictive patterns.
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Ivan covers global consumer tech developments at TechCrunch. He is based out of India and has previously worked at publications including Huffington Post and The Next Web.
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Luca Guadagnino will receive the Cartier Glory to the Filmmaker Award at the 83rd Venice International Film Festival, where his new documentary Joie de vivre will premiere out of competition on Sept. 8. Guadagnino will receive the award at a ceremony before the documentary’s screening.
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Venice artistic director Alberto Barbera said the award recognizes a filmmaker “who has managed to transform his curiosity into a form of creative freedom.”
Guadagnino’s latest narrative feature, Artificial, will not make the trip to the Lido. The film, starring Andrew Garfield as OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, was originally set up at Amazon MGM Studios but was dropped shortly after Amazon announced a strategic partnership with OpenAI. Neon subsequently acquired worldwide rights.
As previously reported by The Hollywood Reporter, Artificial will skip the fall festival circuit as Neon has opted for a late December qualifying release before expanding the film in early 2027. Venice artistic director Alberto Barbera told THR the festival had hoped to premiere the movie, but Neon decided against a Venice launch because it wanted additional time to complete international sales.
Guadagnino will instead return to Venice with Joie de vivre, a 7-hour epic documentary on the legendary Italian filmmaker Bernardo Bertolucci.
“It might seem like a rhetorical gesture to say I am honored to receive the Glory to the Filmmaker award, but it is the plain truth for many reasons,” Guadagnino said. “To be honored for one’s craft or life as a filmmaker is an ambition that no one who makes films could ever presume to imagine achieving—especially by joining a group of filmmakers who have received this prestigious honor before me and to whom I owe so much of my development. So, I want to emphasize once again what an honor it is to receive this award, especially from Alberto Barbera and La Biennale di Venezia. Thank you, thank you!”
In a statement, Barbera said Guadagnino has established himself as a “global director, capable of working with leading international actors and producers,” while “defying alignment with any single school or movement… He has navigated diverse genres—from melodrama to horror, coming-of-age to psychological thriller—while maintaining a consistent and recognizable voice, without ever losing a deeply Italian identity in portraying bodies, settings, and history.”
The honor marks another Venice milestone for Guadagnino, whose films After the Hunt, Queer, Bones and All, Suspiria, A Bigger Splash, I Am Love and The Protagonists all premiered in Venice. He won the Silver Lion for best director in 2022 for Bones and All.