Hello and welcome back to our regular feature where we write a little about the games we've been playing. This week, Victoria knows something her husband doesn't; Tom endures the perennial terror known as entertaining a child over half-term; Bertie realises he's missed something important again; and Will makes mech combat somehow sound rather fun.
Former Assassin's Creed director Alexandre Amancio has shared his thoughts about AAA development, suggesting we need "smaller teams" and admitting that big-budget developers cannot "solve a problem by throwing people at it".
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.
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.
Rainbow Six Siege is still struggling today after hackers gave out "billions" in in-game currency, forcing Ubisoft to briefly "intentionally" shut down the game.
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.
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.
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Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot has stated generative AI has been integrated across the entire company, expressing his belief that generative AI is as big a "revolution" for video games as the shift from 2D to 3D.
I'll lay my age card on the table here: Uno on the Xbox 360 was the first time I used a webcam. Ever. It was also one of the first games I ever played, on my first ever console. As you can imagine, this combination of first times has given the game a spot quite close to my heart - it showed me how social and casual gaming fits into the world of video games… as well as a few other things I probably shouldn't have been seeing.
Rebecca Heineman, one of the co-founders of Interplay Entertainment - a key programmer as well as the designer of The Bard's Tale 3 - has passed away. She was 62 years old.
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