The highly anticipated Animal Crossing: New Horizons 3.0 update has been released onto islands one day early, which means players can jump in right now.
Fans have heard right, update 3.0 is now live, extending Animal Crossing: New Horizons. The anticipated 3.0 update can be accessed by updating the title on the Nintendo Switch home screen, then jumping in as normal (players can start exploring the new content if Kapp’n has been unlocked). Unfortunately, those awaiting the Nintendo Switch 2 update will still have to wait until tomorrow. All new features are shown in the trailer below, in case you missed it.
The Animal Crossing:New Horizons updates were first announced last year, giving fans a welcome surprise after Nintendo had announced the 2.0 update would be the last update (and included content) to hit the game. The 3.0 update lets players visit a new hotel resort run by Kapp’n’s family that they can help decorate, new themed items and characters, exclusives like Slumber Island for Nintendo Switch Online members and more. Both the regular and Nintendo Switch 2 versions of the title can play this content update (tomorrow for Switch 2). Villagers with a Nintendo Switch Online membership can design and save up to three islands and play with friends online with those islands in Slumber Island.
The content update includes a range of new content for Villagers to explore, starting with quality-of-life improvements. Resetti is on hand in the new update with a convenient Reset Service to help tidy up player islands. Players can also now upgrade their home storage to hold up to 9,000 items, and storage can now hold trees, shrubs and flowers. The Nintendo Switch 2 version will include a built-in microphone, Game Chat, and support up to 12 players on any given island. Fans who own amiibo can also attract new Villagers to their islands with added amiibo support.
Animal Crossing: New Horizons Update 3.0 is out now, so fans can start decorating their hotels now. Nintendo Switch 2 owners will be able to jump in tomorrow.
Vince Zampella, known for co-creating the Call of Duty series, among many other roles, has died. Zampella, 55, died in a car crash in Los Angeles on Sunday. The fatal crash killed him, along with the occupant of his car.
Switch 2 had some very strong months after release, selling a lot of copies. So much so that Nintendo adjusted its projected earnings for the next year just based on the sales performance of the Switch 2. But, weirdly enough, it seemed to slow down at the end of the year, from November to December.
This is definitely unusual, as December is usually a strong month for console sales, as everyone is either buying or gifting them on Christmas. But that wasn’t the case for the Switch 2 this year. In fact, the sales were less than what the original Switch did in its release year.
Switch 2 Sales Slow Down At The End Of The Year
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According to Game Business, Switch 2 sales in the US during November and December were down a shocking 35% compared to the original Switch in its release year. Things weren’t better in the UK either, with about 16% less sales compared to the original Switch. Even in France, which is considered a strong market for Nintendo, the sales were 30% lower.
Japan had a similar story, but the difference wasn’t as significant compared to other countries. The Switch 2 still had fewer sales in November and December in Japan than the Switch 1 in its release year, but the difference wasn’t as big.
Thankfully, Switch 2’s early release days more than made up for this drop. The Switch 2 became the fastest-selling console this year with over 3.5 million units sold in four days after release. So, while the sales did suffer in November and December, the damage was a bit less because of the early success.
Despite the holiday dip, Nintendo isn’t necessarily in trouble; the console still posted strong first-year numbers overall, and its lifetime sales continue to grow.
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.
A new Life is Strange game, titled Life is Strange: Reunion, has been rated in Europe. Since being discovered by fans, the game's presence on the PEGI website has since been removed.
The analyst who forecasted a Witcher 3 expansion release in 2026 has told me they're "100 percent certain [CD Projekt Red] will release significant new content this year".
Kazutaka Kodaka is one of the most recognisable names in the games industry for those who really enjoy anime-inspired visual novels. Recently, he led The Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy's development, and the his name may be familiar to anyone au fait with the Danganronpa series. But the creator's journey to get back into the world of game development wasn't exactly a straight line.
On its release back in 2023, Nintendo kept the Imprisoning War Sages from The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom shrouded in a certain amount of mystery. In fact, despite them playing a fairly key role in terms of the overall backstory, we only saw them in the game very briefly.
43.8 million player votes later, the winners of the 2025 Steam Awards have been announced, with Hollow Knight: Silksong securing top prize, Game of the Year.
Underrated 'slow life' role-playing game Fantasy Life i: The Girl Who Steals Time - which stole a lot of my time last year on Switch 2 - has just received an exciting new year content drop.
2025 has gone by in a flash, hasn't it? Well, apart from the days I've spent tabulating all your Game of the Year votes and presenting the results here - that has felt like an eternity and I think has given me permanent neck pain. But, let's not worry about that. I'm sure you'll agree it was worth the sacrifice.
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).
We had these report cards in elementary school that, in addition to grading us on school subjects, also evaluated how we were doing on general life skills. I did pretty well in classes besides math, but the two skills I repeatedly failed were “penmanship” and “following directions.” I am simply not very good at reading and understanding explanations before I begin a task, and it’s this tendency that’s making the game Uncle Chop’s Rocket Shop a bit of a nightmare for me, but also really fun.
Uncle Chop’s Rocket Shop came out in 2024, and it’s been sitting in my Epic store library for a while before I finally decided to check it out this week. You play as Wilbur, a fox-headed dude who inherits an intergalactic mechanic’s shop and has to fix enough spaceships to make growing rent payments. There’s more plot than this– I’m only a few in-game days in, and I’ve already encountered mystical beings, thieves, meteor showers, and other hints that this isn’t just a job simulator. It’s possible to die, but the game is also a roguelike, with upgrades to your mechanic’s shop persisting between runs. But the bulk of your day is taken up by choosing from a number of repair jobs and getting them done to the customer’s satisfaction.
There are two modes to choose from: one with time pressure, where customers will get angry if you don’t fix their ships fast enough, and one that does away with the clock but makes the repairs harder and more exacting. I hate time pressure in games so opted for this more chill mode. This seems like a good way to learn the game, and especially how to come to grips with its giant, weird manual.
When you go to refill a customer’s fuel pump, for instance, you’ll see a symbol that will tell you which tab in the manual to go to, which you do by physically pulling the book out of your inventory and clicking through its pages. There, you’ll get a variety of images, brisk instructions, and references to other parts of the manual that will help you troubleshoot and solve the problem. My fuel jobs have been pretty basic–remove the fuel cell, refill it at my fuel station without filling it too far and exploding it, putting it back in. Oil is a little more complicated–in addition to the oil levels, there’s the oil quality to consider, as well as a pump, heat gauge, and other gadgets that could be busted. A recent job included both of these tasks and two new complications. There was an alarm that wouldn’t stop timing out and locking me out of the other ship modules, which had to be disarmed with a series of puzzles, and a “tomfoolery” module that required buying a new repair station to fix and then playing a whole other video game to calibrate.
Beard Envy
The actual fixing is wonderfully tactile, with lots of buttons to press and levers to pull and bolts to unscrew. Just like in real life, you have to make sure you do all these things–I’ve lost money for forgetting to close a panel back up, or gotten stuck because I was flipping switches in the wrong order. The manual tells you all this, but it’s written like a real professional manual that assumes a certain familiarity with the objects at hand. Everything you need to know is in there, but it can be a little baffling to get your head around, especially if you’re not a great visual learner or are me, who cannot help himself from skimming the instructions before diving into a ship’s guts. In the game’s time-pressure mode, I imagine learning a new task for the first time requires an overwhelming amount of speedreading and making good choices, but in my chill mode I have no justification for not taking the time to look everything over first besides being a dumbass. I find it hard to understand the manual without experiencing the thing it’s describing, but going step-by-step often gets me stumped if a problem is deeper in the book. I’ll plunge ahead with unearned confidence, run into problems, give the manual the most cursory glance, dive back in, and get stumped again, in an absurd loop I have no one to blame for but myself.
Beard Envy
I hate reading directions, but I do like research, so I enjoy looking stuff up in the manual even if I’m not fully digesting it. It’s hard not to get impatient to fiddle with all the strange machines, which give me some great Spaceteamvibes. The computer I’m playing Uncle Chop’s on sits next to an Ikea bookshelf I put together myself also without reading the instructions in full, and which is now listing to one side because I didn’t pay enough attention to the importance of rigorously attaching its shitty plywood back. Looking up from a game that reminds me I apparently haven’t grown at all as a person since third grade to real-world proof of the fact that I haven’t grown at all as a person since third grade is a lot, and the in-game consequences for my bad habit feel like a reminder that there will also be real-world consequences when my bookshelf inevitably collapses. At least in the game I’ll get a chance to start again, unlike my bookshelf, which will destroy everything around it when it forces me to pay for my hubris.
Uncle Chop’s Rocket Shop is available on PC and consoles.
