From cosy museums and tropical islands to nightmarishly difficult adventures – and revamps of favourites including Mario Kart and Pokémon – there’s something for everyone
Nintendo’s newest console has been out for a less than a year but it already boasts an impressive catalogue of excellent new games, as well as a variety of enhanced Switch greats. Here’s our selection of the 15 best titles currently on offer, ranging from family favourites to grittier, more adult challenges.
PlayStation 4/5, Nintendo Switch/Switch 2, Xbox, PC; Square-Enix This landmark role-playing game remains a revolutionary tour de force
At first glance, Final Fantasy Tactics: The Ivalice Chronicles, first released in 1997 and now available in newly remastered guise, does little to separate itself from other boilerplate fantasy fiction. There is a hero, Ramza – an idealistic nobleman with luscious blond hair who cavorts about the medieval-inspired realm of Ivalice in search of high adventure. But quickly, and with narrative elegance, the picture complicates: peasant revolutionaries duke it out with gilded monarchists; machiavellian plots plunge the kingdom into chaos. Ramza must navigate this knotty political matrix, all while experiencing his own ideological awakening.
There is a strong case to be made that Final Fantasy Tactics tells a better story than the landmark Final Fantasy VII (which saw Cloud Strife and a ragtag bunch of eco-terrorist pals taking on the shady megacorporation Shinra). And with our real-world political focus shifting from the looming threat of the climate crisis to the more pressing rise of fascism (though the two are inextricably linked), one can make the argument that Tactics is now also the more timely game.
In this week’s newsletter: Stranger Things’ climactic showdown is the latest pop culture spectacle to feel like its been ported straight from a console. The industries’ reciprocally influential relationship can be to everyone’s gain
It had begun to feel like an endurance test by the end, but nonetheless, like the sucker I am, I watched the Stranger Things finale last week. And spoiler warning: I’m going to talk about it in general terms in this newsletter. Because approximately 80% of the final season comprised twentysomething “teenagers” explaining things to each other while using random 1980s objects to illustrate convoluted plans and plot points, my expectations were not high. After an interminable hour, finally, something fun happens, as the not-kids arm themselves with machine guns and molotovs and face off against a monstrously gigantic demon-crab. Aha, I thought – the final boss battle!
The fight was like something out of Monster Hunter, all scale and spectacle with a touch of desperation. For a very long time, video games sought to imitate cinema. Now cinema (and TV) often feels like a video game. The structure of Stranger Things’ final season reminded me a lot of Resident Evil: long periods of walking slowly through corridors, with characters exchanging plot information aloud on their way to the action, and occasional explosions of gunfire, screeching monsters or car chases. Those long periods of relative inaction are much more tolerable when you’ve got a controller in your hands. I am all for TV and film embracing the excitement, spectacle and dynamism of video games, but do they have to embrace the unnecessary side-quests and open-world bloat, too?
This now venerable hardware remains an ideal platform for classics such as Minecraft and daring experiments from the brightest new developers
Now surely approaching their twilight years, the Xbox Series S and X machines nevertheless still have plenty to offer both new and veteran owners. We have selected 15 titles that show the range of what’s on offer, from the biggest blockbusters to lesser known indie gems you may have missed. Whether you’re after tense psychological horror or wild escapism, it’s all here and more.
New mind-bending puzzlers, landmark RPGs and furry multiverse adventures await you as the PlayStation 5 enters its sixth year
Entering its sixth year, the PlayStation 5 has built up a formidable library of epic adventures, button-pummelling shooters and even the odd cutesy platformer. So whether you’ve owned the machine for years or only just entered the current console generation, here are 15 titles we think you should have in your PlayStation collection.
Rosen, who led Sega from the 1960s into the 90s and who died on Christmas Day, was a hugely important figure in the history of arcade and home gaming
It is difficult to think of a more influential figure in the arcade game industry than David Rosen, who has died aged 95. The co-founder of Sega, who remained a director of the company until 1996, was instrumental in the birth and rise of the video game business in Japan, and in the 1980s and 90s oversaw the establishment of Sega of America and the huge success of the Mega Drive console.
As a US Air Force pilot during the Korean war, Rosen found himself stationed in Japan, and once the conflict was over, he stayed on, intrigued by the country and seeing possibilities in its recovering economy. In 1954 he set up Rosen Enterprises and noticing that Japanese civilians now required an increasing number of new ID cards he started importing photo booths from the US to answer the demand. From here he expanded to pinball tables and other coin-operated machines, importing them for installation in shops, restaurants and cinemas. In 1965, he merged the company with another importer, Nihon Goraku Bussan, whose coin-op business Service Games was shortened to Sega for the new venture.
‘There was no animation software in those days. So I videotaped my brother David running, jumping and climbing in a car park’
Programming was very open back in the 1980s. You had to teach yourself, either from magazines, or by swapping tips. When you wrote a video game, you submitted it on a floppy disk to a publisher, like a book manuscript. In my freshman year at Yale university, I sent Deathbounce, an Asteroids-esque game for the Apple II computer, to Broderbund, my favourite games company. They rejected it, but took my next effort, Karateka, a side-scrolling beat-’em-up.
With early access fast approaching for Hytale, the game is soon going to be at a point where there is, in fact, a canon and absolute limit for the lore in the game. But before we hit that point, a new entry on the game’s official site takes fans through the team’s approach to lore within […]
Yesterday, an article from investor website TipRanks circulated throughout the games industry: The rumor was that Microsoft is planning to cut somewhere between 11,000 and 22,000 jobs in January, roughly 10% of its current workforce, to allay the increased cost of data center expansion as part of the company’s hard push toward AI development. If […]
How do you feel about a new scenario in Once Human featuring a gigantic battle with a semi-submerged monstrous entity? The newest preview video from the game’s developer is promising that 2026 will be the “Year of the Monsters,” and not just because the developer quickly gets replaced by a light-headed monster to do the narrating. That […]
Ladies, gentlemen, and those who fit neither category, we pose an important question to you regarding EverQuest II: Why are the elves who help with Frostfell called “Frostfell elves” and not “Frostfelves?” It’s sitting right there? Now you can ponder it to as you help with the plethora of holiday tasks needed to earn new craftables, […]
Once again, Warframe has begin its annual Tennobaum event, which is still unlike most holiday events. No, really. There are in-game rewards, yes, and it is celebrating this time of the year. But unlike most similar events, this one doesn’t involve your grabbing items in-game and delivering them to gift piles. No, this is about players […]
Warning! Warning! There’s a house in your future! Wait, that sounds perhaps less warning-related than it should with World of Warcraft’s The Warning update landing tonight. But that is a big focus for this patch, right down to articles highlighting how achievements and every era of crafting can feed into finding decorations for your house. “Players who […]
