Last week gave us the announcement of Pokémon FireRed and LeafGreen coming to the Switch systems. This would've been celebrated under normal circumstances, but Nintendo and The Pokémon Company chose to skip the Nintendo Switch Online service in favour of a paid re-release of the original games at £16.99 (or $20) each. A silver lining was mention of support for the Pokémon Home service, but now that's up in the air.

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First it came for our intellectual property, then it came for our workers, and now it's after our Steam Decks!

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Balatro developer LocalThunk has marked the second anniversary of his hit indie roguelike with a heartfelt blog post that ended: "Yes, I'm still working on 1.1."

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Xbox CEO Phil Spencer has announced his retirement from Microsoft after nearly 40 years, amid a major leadership shakeup for the gaming brand that'll see Microsoft's current president of CoreAI, Asha Sharma, take over the role. Additionally, Xbox president Sarah Bond will depart the company.

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I was in the gift shop of a small art gallery the other day when I bought a postcard depicting a bunch of different keys. The postcard turned out to be a reproduction from the six-volume dictionary and encyclopedia Larousse du XXe siècle (me neither) and the keys come in a gorgeous range of shapes and sizes. The Roman key is broad and boot-shaped. The Merovingian looks like part of a crank.

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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.

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Jake Solomon, a decorated game designer known for his work at Firaxis on games like XCOM and Marvel Midnight Suns, has announced that his studio Midsummer is going to close. In doing so, he also shared a pre-alpha look at the "Life Sims + The Truman Show" game the studio was making, called Burbank.

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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.

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If you're anything like me, the second Nintendo announced it'd be giving select Switch 1 titles a fancy Switch 2 makeover, you probably immediately starting compiling a wish list. The Xenoblade series was high on mine, but remained persistently unloved. Until now that is! Out of nowhere, Nintendo just released an upgrade for last year's Xenoblade Chronicles X: Definitive Edition - and better still, it's available now.

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Bethesda Game Studios boss Todd Howard has flattened hope for a major Starfield overhaul by stating that the long-awaited update in development "is not Starfield 2.0".

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Is there a more terrifying sound in video games than the roar of a Reaper Leviathan or the irritated gurgle of a Crashfish as it suddenly torpedoes toward you from shadows unseen? I mean, yes, probably - but that's not the point. Every time I slip the word "horror" into conversations about Subnautica, it's usually met with dismissals and frowns. And sure, developer Unknown Worlds' sublime underwater survival adventure isn't technically horror, but I can think of few games capable of instilling such an ominous sense of dread in me, such a suffocating fear of the watery unknown, as this one. And with Subnautica's free Switch 2 update now here, what better time for reminiscences and to make myself unreasonably anxious all over again?

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The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim getting a native Nintendo Switch 2 version was one of those no-brainers we expected to see as soon as the console launched, yet it took more than a few months to arrive, and when it finally did, it was a mess. What happened there? It's a game from 2011, for Talos' sake.

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Unity CEO Matthew Bromberg has touted generative AI advancements in its game engine that'll soon enable users to "prompt full casual games into existence" just by using natural language.

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Hasbro and Wizards of the Coast-owned studio Atomic Arcade has reportedly been shut down.

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This is much more like the Overwatch 2 I wanted when it launched. We're having a redo moment. Blizzard isn't calling this a relaunch but to me, it feels like it is. This is a reintroduction of a game that floundered back in 2023 at launch, but three years later, it's solid and it's stacked. Overwatch (the 2 was symbolically dropped from the title recently) knows what it wants to be now and this is the fullest and strongest this game has ever been. Arguably it's also the strongest the series (can we call it a series now?) has ever been, which is a provocative thing to say, I know. But I haven't been this excited about Overwatch since the original came out 10 years ago.

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The Rogue Prince of Persia might not be one of the most popular roguelites around, but it's charmed enough veterans and newcomers since it launched into 1.0 last year. We figured it would be ending its development run shortly afterwards, but Evil Empire (one of the studios now hard at work on the next Castlevania) isn't done upgrading it yet.

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David Leslie Johnston-McGoldrick and Alexandre Aja will write Blumhouse-Atomc Monster's feature adaptation of Behaviour Interactive's Dead by Daylight.

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A playable demo for adventure brawler Scott Pilgrim EX is now available.

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Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 secured five awards at this week's Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences' (AIAS) DICE Awards (not to be confused with EA's Stockholm studio of the same name), including the coveted Game of the Year prize, while Sucker Punch's Ghost of Yotei secured three, including for Adventure Game of the Year.

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Hello and welcome back to our regular feature where we write a little about the games we've been playing. This week, Bertie plays a classic but finds himself getting a bit bored; Marie adopts a black cat called Salem; Tom can't get out of the menus; Victoria makes a young child cry; Dom Platinums a game and feels very smug about it; and Connor finds an inventive way to play two MMOs at once.

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