Death Stranding and Metal Gear Solid creator Hideo Kojima seemingly worked on a concept akin to Amazon's The Boys before putting it on hold for being too similar. Now that he's put that out there, leads on the TV show say they want the legendary developer to work on a tie-in game.

Kojima said he was "warming up" the project for a long time - with Hannibal's Mads Mikkelsen picked out as the lead in his mind - and was about to start it just as The Boys' first season was released. Sharing the concept on Twitter (below), Kojima said he stopped watching The Boys after episode three of the first season.

"I thought I'd watch the rest of the show," he said. "Actually, I watched a few episodes that were delivered at the time when I was about to start a project that I had been warming up for a long time, and put it on hold because the concept was similar (different settings and tricks).

Kojima said his concept would have included "a buddy (male/female) thing with a special detective squad facing off against legendary heroes behind the scenes. I was thinking of Mads as the lead." The Boys tells the story of a team of regular humans tasked with policing (and occasionally violently killing) superpowered individuals.

1/2
"THE BOYS," which I quit after 3 episodes of season 1. I thought I'd watch the rest of the show. Actually, I watched a few episodes that were delivered at the time when I was about to start a project that I had been warming up for a long time, pic.twitter.com/UpI00pUIHQ

— HIDEO_KOJIMA (@HIDEO_KOJIMA_EN) June 26, 2022

It's not clear whether Kojima's concept was for a game, a movie, or otherwise, but the implication seems to be that it's not currently in the works. Kojima is currently working on a cloud project for Xbox, and we've heard tell of a horror game called Overdose and a Death Stranding sequel.

The Boys showrunner Eric Kripke responded to Kojima's tweets, declaring he was a huge fan and wanted to collaborate on a video game adaptation of the series. "Please come and make a The Boys game. We can team up and conquer," he said. Antony Starr, who plays Homelander in the series, concurred, saying that he seconds that notion.

The Boys Season 3 is currently airing, and we said the latest episode was great. The series has impressed overall, as in our 9/10 review of Season 2, IGN said: "The Boys is filled with memorable characters and plenty of that stylized and irreverent drama we love."

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

A Nintendo Direct Mini will be broadcast tomorrow, June 28. It will focus on third-party partners, so don't expect the likes of Mario, Zelda or other major Nintendo series to appear.

The 'Partner Showcase', which will be around 25 minutes long, will air on YouTube at 6am Pacific / 9am Eastern / 2pm UK / 11pm AEST.

A new #NintendoDirectMini: Partner Showcase is on the way! Watch on-demand via our YouTube channel beginning Tuesday, June 28 at 6am PT for roughly 25 minutes of info on upcoming third-party #NintendoSwitch games.

Subscribe & turn on notifications here: https://t.co/SZA1P3RSHS pic.twitter.com/8hmCJ1p5EX

— Nintendo of America (@NintendoAmerica) June 27, 2022

Nintendo traditionally airs a major Nintendo Direct as part of E3 in June. However, with E3 cancelled in 2022, it's unclear if Nintendo is delaying its own first-party showcase, or will announce its games in more piecemeal fashion this year.

The last Nintendo broadcast was May's Indie World show, which revealed the likes of Gunbrella, a Switch release for Totally Accurate Battle Simulator, and more.

Joe Skrebels is IGN's Executive Editor of News. Follow him on Twitter. Have a tip for us? Want to discuss a possible story? Please send an email to newstips@ign.com.

Riot Games will begin testing its voice chat monitoring technology in Valorant next month as part of a wider strategy to combat "disruptive behaviour" in its games.

In a blog post, Riot announced its voice evaluation system - eventually intended to identify community behavioural violations such as the use of abusive language - would begin testing on July 13.

Valorant players will have their voice chat analyzed by the technology but, at this stage, it won't be judged for appropriateness. Riot said this testing period, only taking place in North America and in English, will be used "to help train our language models and get the tech in a good enough place for a beta launch later this year".

Only once the technology is working effectively will Riot launch the official beta and begin evaluating players' voice chat following reports of disruptive behaviour. "This is brand new tech and there will for sure be growing pains," it said. "But the promise of a safer and more inclusive environment for everyone who chooses to play is worth it."

While Riot has only announced this specific voice chat monitoring roadmap for Valorant so far, it made clear in the blog post that it plans to bring the service to its other games (such as League of Legends) too.

In our 9/10 review, IGN said: "Valorant is a clever tactical hero shooter that’s plenty deep, and a lot of fun to master."

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

Elvis and Top Gun: Maverick have both earned $30.5 million at the domestic weekend box office so far and will have one final battle today, June 26, to see who comes out on top.

As reported by Variety and Box Office Mojo, Top Gun: Maverick currently has a slight lead at $30,500,176 in its fifth weekend in theaters. Elvis, which debuted this weekend, is sitting at $30,500,000.

Top Gun: Maverick is having one impressive run at the box office and has now reached $521 million domestically. It has also crossed the coveted $1 billion mark at the global box office and has become the highest-grossing movie in 2022 and the first film to pass $1 billion since Spider-Man: No Way Home earned $1.9 billion last year.

On the other hand, Elvis raked in another $20 million from 51 markets internationally and has a global tally of $50.5 million so far.

Top Gun: Maverick and Elvis have dropped down Jurassic World Dominion, the film that held the #1 spot for the past two weekends, to third place as it only earned $26.4 million. However, that was enough to bring the latest Jurassic World film past $300 million domestically and $746.6 million globally.

The Black Phone, which also debuted this weekend, took fourth place by earning $23.3 million domestically. It brought in $13.4 million overseas to help bring its global total to $35.8 million. The Black Phone only cost $18 million to produce, so it is well on a way to a successful box office run.

Lightyear rounded out the top five with $17.7 million, but it saw a 65% drop from its opening weekend. Lightyear has reached $88 million in North America and has earned $152.4 million at the global box office.

For more check out our review of Elvis and The Black Phone, how The Black Phone director's traumatic past inspired the horror film, and why the Elvis team says "credit needs to be given" to Rock & Roll's black pioneers.

Have a tip for us? Want to discuss a possible story? Please send an email to newstips@ign.com.

Adam Bankhurst is a news writer for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter @AdamBankhurst and on Twitch.

Elvis and Top Gun: Maverick have both earned $30.5 million at the domestic weekend box office so far and will have one final battle today, June 26, to see who comes out on top.

As reported by Variety and Box Office Mojo, Top Gun: Maverick currently has a slight lead at $30,500,176 in its fifth weekend in theaters. Elvis, which debuted this weekend, is sitting at $30,500,000.

Top Gun: Maverick is having one impressive run at the box office and has now reached $521 million domestically. It has also crossed the coveted $1 billion mark at the global box office and has become the highest-grossing movie in 2022 and the first film to pass $1 billion since Spider-Man: No Way Home earned $1.9 billion last year.

On the other hand, Elvis raked in another $20 million from 51 markets internationally and has a global tally of $50.5 million so far.

Top Gun: Maverick and Elvis have dropped down Jurassic World Dominion, the film that held the #1 spot for the past two weekends, to third place as it only earned $26.4 million. However, that was enough to bring the latest Jurassic World film past $300 million domestically and $746.6 million globally.

The Black Phone, which also debuted this weekend, took fourth place by earning $23.3 million domestically. It brought in $13.4 million overseas to help bring its global total to $35.8 million. The Black Phone only cost $18 million to produce, so it is well on a way to a successful box office run.

Lightyear rounded out the top five with $17.7 million, but it saw a 65% drop from its opening weekend. Lightyear has reached $88 million in North America and has earned $152.4 million at the global box office.

For more check out our review of Elvis and The Black Phone, how The Black Phone director's traumatic past inspired the horror film, and why the Elvis team says "credit needs to be given" to Rock & Roll's black pioneers.

Have a tip for us? Want to discuss a possible story? Please send an email to newstips@ign.com.

Adam Bankhurst is a news writer for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter @AdamBankhurst and on Twitch.

As AMD celebrates the first birthday of FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR), the tech company has announced that FSR 2.0 is now available for Xbox Series X/S and Xbox One developers.

AMD shared the news in a blog, confirming that "FSR 2.0 is also supported on Xbox and will be available in the Xbox GDK for registered developers to use in their games." This also marks the first time the tech is being utilized outside the world of PCs.

For those unfamiliar, FSR 2.0 is AMD's answer to NVIDIA's Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS) and is the "next-level AMD temporal upscaling technology designed to deliver similar or better than native image quality and boost framerates in supported games across a wide range of products and platforms."

Unlike DLSS, which uses machine learning, FSR optimizes anti-aliasing based on temporal data."

AMD confirmed FSR support for Xbox last year, noting that it uses "AI to upscale lower resolution images and makes them appear at a higher resolution without requiring a substantial amount of performance."

There are currently over 110 available and upcoming games that support both FSR 1.0 and 2.0, and they include God of War, Deathloop, Forspoken, Hitman 3, Microsoft Flight Simulator, Tiny Tina's Wonderlands, and The Callisto Protocol.

Have a tip for us? Want to discuss a possible story? Please send an email to newstips@ign.com.

Adam Bankhurst is a news writer for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter @AdamBankhurst and on Twitch.

As AMD celebrates the first birthday of FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR), the tech company has announced that FSR 2.0 is now available for Xbox Series X/S and Xbox One developers.

AMD shared the news in a blog, confirming that "FSR 2.0 is also supported on Xbox and will be available in the Xbox GDK for registered developers to use in their games." This also marks the first time the tech is being utilized outside the world of PCs.

For those unfamiliar, FSR 2.0 is AMD's answer to NVIDIA's Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS) and is the "next-level AMD temporal upscaling technology designed to deliver similar or better than native image quality and boost framerates in supported games across a wide range of products and platforms."

Unlike DLSS, which uses machine learning, FSR optimizes anti-aliasing based on temporal data."

AMD confirmed FSR support for Xbox last year, noting that it uses "AI to upscale lower resolution images and makes them appear at a higher resolution without requiring a substantial amount of performance."

There are currently over 110 available and upcoming games that support both FSR 1.0 and 2.0, and they include God of War, Deathloop, Forspoken, Hitman 3, Microsoft Flight Simulator, Tiny Tina's Wonderlands, and The Callisto Protocol.

Have a tip for us? Want to discuss a possible story? Please send an email to newstips@ign.com.

Adam Bankhurst is a news writer for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter @AdamBankhurst and on Twitch.

Paleontologists have discovered the oldest belly button known to science on a 125 million-year-old fossil of a dinosaur in the genus Psittacosaurus. Oh, the fossil also had the first dinosaur butthole ever found.

As reported by Live Science, the Psittacosaurus lived during the Cretaceous period, which was between 145 million to 66 million years ago, and the scientists discovered this belly button after they exposed the fossil to a concentrated beam of laser light.

These scientists reported their findings in the journal BMC Biology on June 7 and say they spotted a "thin trace of an umbilical scar" that is a "slight misalignment in the pattern of skin and scaled over the dinosaur's abdomen and is the reptile equivalent of a mammalian belly button."

While fetal mammals get their nutrients from a placenta, birds and reptiles get what they need from a yolk sac that is connected to their abdomens via blood vessels. When these types of creatures hatch, the yolk is absorbed into the body and an abdominal scar is all that remains.

For most birds and reptiles, the scar heals in a few days or weeks, but some reptiles, including alligators, can have the scar "beyond sexual maturity." This fossil has shed new light on dinosaurs and gives an indication that some dinosaurs did have these scars that didn't heal early on.

The fossil, which is known as SMF R 4970, was an early type of ceratopsian called Psittacosaurus mongoliensis that fell into a group of beaked herbivores that include Triceratops. It was discovered roughly 20 years ago, and it was so well preserved because the dinosaur was "fossillized while lying on its back." This also led to scientists discovering the previously mentioned "perfect" and "unique" butthole.

"Using LSF imaging, we identified distinctive scales that surrounded a long umbilical scar in the Psittacosaurus specimen, similar to [scars in] certain living lizards and crocodiles," paleontologist Michael Pittman, an assistant professor in the School of Life Sciences at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, said in the statement. "We call this kind of scar a belly button, and it is smaller in humans. This specimen is the first dinosaur fossil to preserve a belly button, which is due to its exceptional state of preservation."

Aside from its importance to science, this fossil has also been the subject of a "fierce repatriation controversy." The fossil was discovered in an unknown region of China in the 80s or 90s and was "allegedly smuggled out of the country and into underground European markets before being purchased and put on display in 2001 at the Senckenberg Museum in Frankfurt, Germany."

"There is ongoing debate regarding the legal ownership of this specimen and efforts to repatriate it to China have not been successful. Our international team of Australian, Belgian, British, Chinese and American members all hope for and support an amicable solution to this ongoing debate," the researchers wrote in their paper. "We think it is important to note that the specimen was acquired by the Senckenberg Museum to prevent its sale into private hands and to ensure its availability for scientific study."

For more on dinosaurs, check out how the Tyrannosaurus Rex may have actually been three separate dinosaurs and the recently discovered dinos in England that were dubbed "Hell Heron" and "Riverbank Hunter."

Have a tip for us? Want to discuss a possible story? Please send an email to newstips@ign.com.

Adam Bankhurst is a news writer for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter @AdamBankhurst and on Twitch.

Paleontologists have discovered the oldest belly button known to science on a 125 million-year-old fossil of a dinosaur in the genus Psittacosaurus. Oh, the fossil also had the first dinosaur butthole ever found.

As reported by Live Science, the Psittacosaurus lived during the Cretaceous period, which was between 145 million to 66 million years ago, and the scientists discovered this belly button after they exposed the fossil to a concentrated beam of laser light.

These scientists reported their findings in the journal BMC Biology on June 7 and say they spotted a "thin trace of an umbilical scar" that is a "slight misalignment in the pattern of skin and scaled over the dinosaur's abdomen and is the reptile equivalent of a mammalian belly button."

While fetal mammals get their nutrients from a placenta, birds and reptiles get what they need from a yolk sac that is connected to their abdomens via blood vessels. When these types of creatures hatch, the yolk is absorbed into the body and an abdominal scar is all that remains.

For most birds and reptiles, the scar heals in a few days or weeks, but some reptiles, including alligators, can have the scar "beyond sexual maturity." This fossil has shed new light on dinosaurs and gives an indication that some dinosaurs did have these scars that didn't heal early on.

The fossil, which is known as SMF R 4970, was an early type of ceratopsian called Psittacosaurus mongoliensis that fell into a group of beaked herbivores that include Triceratops. It was discovered roughly 20 years ago, and it was so well preserved because the dinosaur was "fossillized while lying on its back." This also led to scientists discovering the previously mentioned "perfect" and "unique" butthole.

"Using LSF imaging, we identified distinctive scales that surrounded a long umbilical scar in the Psittacosaurus specimen, similar to [scars in] certain living lizards and crocodiles," paleontologist Michael Pittman, an assistant professor in the School of Life Sciences at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, said in the statement. "We call this kind of scar a belly button, and it is smaller in humans. This specimen is the first dinosaur fossil to preserve a belly button, which is due to its exceptional state of preservation."

Aside from its importance to science, this fossil has also been the subject of a "fierce repatriation controversy." The fossil was discovered in an unknown region of China in the 80s or 90s and was "allegedly smuggled out of the country and into underground European markets before being purchased and put on display in 2001 at the Senckenberg Museum in Frankfurt, Germany."

"There is ongoing debate regarding the legal ownership of this specimen and efforts to repatriate it to China have not been successful. Our international team of Australian, Belgian, British, Chinese and American members all hope for and support an amicable solution to this ongoing debate," the researchers wrote in their paper. "We think it is important to note that the specimen was acquired by the Senckenberg Museum to prevent its sale into private hands and to ensure its availability for scientific study."

For more on dinosaurs, check out how the Tyrannosaurus Rex may have actually been three separate dinosaurs and the recently discovered dinos in England that were dubbed "Hell Heron" and "Riverbank Hunter."

Have a tip for us? Want to discuss a possible story? Please send an email to newstips@ign.com.

Adam Bankhurst is a news writer for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter @AdamBankhurst and on Twitch.

Thor: Love and Thunder's Chris Hemsworth has revealed that showing his butt in the upcoming MCU film was "10 years in the making" and was basically a dream come true for the actor.

Speaking to Variety at Thor: Love and Thunder's premiere at El Capitan Theatre in Hollywood, Hemsworth shared why this revealing moment is so special to him.

Chris Hemsworth on seeing Thor's butt in #ThorLoveAndThunder: "It was 10 years in the making that scene — kind of a dream of mine. The first time I played Thor I took my shirt off and I thought, 'You know what's gonna sweeten this...'" https://t.co/3aIXbiXW0C pic.twitter.com/kD2wsPN0zL

— Variety (@Variety) June 24, 2022

"It was 10 years in the making that scene — kind of a dream of mine,” Hemsworth said. “The first time I played Thor I took my shirt off and I thought, ‘You know what’s gonna sweeten this… a decade from now it’s all gonna come off.”

Thor: Love and Thunder director Taika Waititi also discussed Hemsworth's big butt moment in the film, saying that Chris worked too hard to not show off his body.

"I feel like we had all talked about it,” Waititi said. “We had talked about, ‘Yeah, we gotta show off this body.’ My whole thing was like, Chris works so hard, you’ve gotta show it off. Don’t cover it up with all these suits and the cape and stuff, it’s not fair!”

In the same chat with Variety, Hemsworth also talked about seeing Natalie Portman as Mighty Thor for the first time, saying that it was "a little stab to the ego, but I quickly got over it and I was in awe of everything she had done."

You can check out a blurred version of Thor's butt at the end of Thor: Love and Thunder's official trailer, and you can thank Russell Crowe's Zeus for making it happen.

Thor: Love and Thunder will be released in theaters on July 8, 2022. For more, check out why Christian Bale's Gorr the God Butcher is one of Hemsworth's favorite Marvel villains, how he wants to play Thor in Deadpool 3 to upset Hugh Jackman, and how he wants to quit playing Thor before he's told to go.

Have a tip for us? Want to discuss a possible story? Please send an email to newstips@ign.com.

Adam Bankhurst is a news writer for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter @AdamBankhurst and on Twitch.