Georgian skaters Anastasiia Metelkina and Luka Berulava shared a Mortal Kombat-themed performance at the Olympics over the weekend.
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It feels weird to buy a peripheral in order to play games you don't own. I'm generally very positive about the Nintendo Classics offered through the Nintendo Switch Online membership (and the classic Mega Drive games). I know I'll lose access if I stop subscribing, but it feels like a reasonable fee to get these on top of other benefits. But, just like I have never bought DLC for a game I don't own, I find the idea of needing to buy a peripheral to play the newly added Virtual Boy games a little hard to swallow.
Yesterday was a big day for new video game trailers, courtesy of the Sony State of Play. But a little earlier, away from the limelight, came another lengthy showcase of an especially cool looking game you might have missed.
Hello and Happy New Year - is it okay to say that now? I'm not sure where the cut-off point is. Some people still have their Christmas trees up. We had ours out before New Year. Welcome back to What We've Been Playing! Or as I like to call this particular edition of it: What We Played Over Christmas, because it's been a couple of weeks since we've talked.
January is the month that, where I live, in the south of England, everyone gets serious again. All the paraphernalia of Christmas - all the merriment and cheer and colourful lighting - is cleared away in favour of sobering goals for the year ahead. It's never something that's appealed strongly to me, making goals, but I do feel the allure of wiping a slate clean and starting again. It's like a run in a roguelike game, I like to think. Time for a new me.
Microsoft has announced another Developer Direct, set to take place on the 22nd January. It'll feature Fable, Forza, and Beast of Reincarnation.
The top five games played on the PlayStation in 2025 by US players were exactly the same as in 2024, according to Circana's Player Engagement Tracker.
The price of an obscure PS4 game is skyrocketing on the second-hand market, thanks to its necessity in a new PS5 jailbreak. This game, of which 1,000 or less physical copies were produced, has suddenly become a hot commodity among jailbreak enthusiasts and resellers alike.
It's been another strange, difficult, and yet somehow also brilliant year for video games in 2025. Triple-A releases have been sparse again, compared to the boom times of old, with a great big GTA 6-shaped hole left in the final few months of the year. And yet once again, every gap left by the established order has been filled twice over with something brilliantly new.
If we're plotting out the year based on unexpected obsessions, mine were (in no particular order) weird Italian genre cinema of the 60s and 70s, an unhealthy appetite for unnecessarily elaborate physical media collector's editions, folk horror in literally any form I could consume, and, apparently, No Man's Sky. According to Steam's usual end-of-year thing, the exploratory space sim is by far my most played game of 2025, accounting for - somewhat incredibly - nearly 20 percent of my total playtime.
Hello and welcome back to our regular feature where we write a little bit about some of the games we've been playing. This week it's not about what we've been playing, but what we hope to be playing on Christmas Day (you're reading this now, but we wrote this back in June or something as we plan ahead).
The Xbox business today is pretty unrecognizable from that of 20 years past, which on this week all that time ago was launching the Xbox 360. There's all the changes to the business, a different suite of executives at the top, and an entirely different first-party portfolio, of course - but when I think of the changes, one absence comes to the forefront of my mind: Japan.
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Did you know that the Xbox Live Arcade actually started as a disc based distribution service on the original Xbox? Chances are you didn't (though I eagerly await the one person in the comments who stands to correct me), because Microsoft's mini marketplace only gained widespread popularity once it relaunched alongside the release of the Xbox 360. As someone who bought a 360 close to launch, when there weren't a huge amount of games out and backwards compatibility with OG Xbox games was limited, I used to look forward to every single new XBLA drop. I'd snap up whatever was on offer at the time, be it a new title like Zuma or a port of an old school arcade classic like Gauntlet. Some were great, some were bad, but none were ever as truly terrible as Yaris, a game that many regard to be The Worst Game Ever Released(TM) on the Xbox Live Arcade.
When I look back on most consoles, I'm largely looking back at the games. The PS3 is LittleBigPlanet and Metal Gear 4, as far as I'm concerned, and even the GameCube, that squat, characterful delight, is largely hidden behind Mario Sunshine, Wind-Waker and Animal Crossing. (Even just typing that: cor, what a time that was.)
Hello and welcome back to our regular feature where we write a little bit about some of the games we've been playing. This week, Kelsey discovers the joys and stresses of managing border control in Papers, Please; Tom holds off his Kojima dislike and plays Death Stranding; Victoria looks for anyone she can to talk to about Dispatch; Ed can't stop thinking about balls; Connor finds himself back in Guild Wars 2; and Bertie finds himself back in Dungeons & Dragons, getting everyone in trouble again.
At the tail end of 2024 the original PlayStation turned 30 years old. While the Xbox 360 is only hitting 20 and it's not an industry shaker to the degree the PS1 was, there's no doubt it earned its place as one of the most important consoles of all time. Xbox managed to challenge Sony in the traditional home console space the PlayStation had dominated with PS1 and PS2, and the console's brilliant line-up of games played a major role in that.
I now sort of understand why Kirby Air Riders was deemed worthy of a pair of Nintendo Directs that add up to a feature-length running time. Part of that is obviously the verbose design-nerd predilections of its director, Masahiro Sakurai, sure. But another reason is quite simple: this is a rather difficult game to describe.
Yesterday, we published part one of our interview with former Xbox 360 boss Peter Moore, where he talked about the creation of Microsoft's beloved machine, the grand idea encompassing it, and how his team had to break from the stuffy office-worker image Microsoft had. "Guys with pocket protectors and thick glasses", as he described it. He also talked about "throwing punches" to provoke the Xbox vs. PlayStation console war.
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