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.

Donkey Kong Bananza is down to $62.99 at Amazon right now, $7 off its original list price, and a 10% saving for those counting. That’s a pretty rare discount for a Nintendo game not that long after release, 6 months at most by my estimates.

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If you got your hands on a shiny new Nintendo Switch 2 last year, first of all, congrats, it's a wonderful console, and a whole lot of fun. Second, it is probably, unfortunately, already yelling at you about storage. The console ships with 256GB of onboard space, which sounds generous until you download a couple of chunky first-party games, dabble in a few third-party ports, and suddenly find yourself doing mental gymnastics over which titles you can afford to delete.

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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.

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Nintendo has announced two pastelly new Joy-Con 2 controller colours for Switch 2, and said they'll release next month.

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If you haven't been watching, Fallout Season 2 is pretty great and has been enjoying a good deal of success. So much so that Season 3 is already well into the writing stage. New games are sadly still a ways off, however, which is why both veteran and new players are flocking to Fallout 4 and other entries to go post-apocalyptic.

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Filming for the third season of Amazon's Fallout adaptation is kicking off sooner that we first expected.

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Troy Baker, one of the most well known actors working in video games, believes generative AI could have a positive effect overall on performing arts. Baker thinks it'll cause a reaction whereby people will seek out "authentic" experiences more - live shows, live theatre - and turn away from "gruel that gets distilled to me through a black mirror".

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Hitman developer IO Interactive has detailed the PC requirements for its upcoming James Bond origin story, 007 First Light.

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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.

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Dataminers believe they've discovered more evidence that Monster Hunter Wilds could be coming to Nintendo Switch 2.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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I think these days, after years of Nintendo outright eschewing the console power rat race and focusing instead on different ways to play and honing their core craft, we forget that Nintendo is still a pretty sharp company in terms of technical innovation. Raw power went aside with the Wii, but the company's dedication to tinkering around the edges to create stand-out original experiences in other ways remained - or perhaps even intensified. There's been a lot of examples over the years, of course, from clever game design innovations to zany peripherals - but Donkey Kong Bananza has to be one of the finest showcases of that thinking from Nintendo in years.

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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).

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With just a month before the Mario Tennis Fever release on 12th February for Switch 2, Nintendo has shared a gameplay deep dive to reveal a bunch of the details to the latest Mario sports game.

Mario Tennis Fever is built, of course, around the core rules of Tennis with basic shots like Top Spin, Slice and Lobs, with slides and leaping shots to reach the ball… but this is a series that always brings something pretty extra. This time around it’s Fever Rackets, which can unleash all sorts of special shots and wild effects.

Having charged up your Fever gauge with a long enough rally, you can pull off a Fever Shot, with each of the game’s 30 rackets having a unique effect. These include:

• Ice Racket – Freeze a patch of the court
• Pokey Racket – Summon a Pokey
• Shadow Racket – Summon a shadow double to play alongside you
• Golden Dash Racket – Get a burst of speed to reach the ball

The tricky thing is that you can block a Fever Shot, so long as you reach and return the ball before it lands on your side of the court – Sneaky! The various Fever Shots that deal damage can also reduce your HP until you’re forced to take a time out. Oh, and in doubles, you can both unleash a Fever Shot at the same time.

There’s 38 characters in total, including all of the usuals and with a special shoutout for Baby Waluigi, Goomba and Nabbit. The full list is:

• Mario
• Luigi
• Peach
• Daisy
• Rosalina
• Pauline
• Wario
• Waluigi
• Toad
• Toadette
• Luma
• Yoshi
• Bowser
• Bowser Jr.
• Donkey Kong
• Boo
• Shy Guy
• Koop Trooper
• Kamek
• Spike
• Diddy Kong
• Bow-Wow
• Birdo
• Koopa Paratroopa
• Petey Piranha
• Piranha
• Boom Boom
• Blooper
• Dry Bowser
• Bry Bones
• Baby Mario
• Baby Luigi
• Baby Peach
• Wriggler
• Nabbit
• Goomba
• Baby Wario
• Baby Waluigi

Each has particular stats, but you can match them up with any racket.

There’s a bunch of modes to play in, from a standard tournament (now with commentary), to the tricky Trial Towers and Mix It Up mode, where you’ll have to play minigame modes like Ring Shot, Forest Court Match, Pinball Match, Racket Factory Match, Wonder Court Match (with Super Mario Wonder effects).

And then there’s the Adventure mode, which sees Mario, Luigi and chums all turned into babies. Now running around without your previous tennis abiliites, you’ll have to learn and train them all up again through the journey.

Of course, there’s a ton of multiplayer. Up to four players can play on a single system in split-screen, while there’s local wireless multiplayer, and support for GameShare (which also supports streaming to the original Nintendo Switch, even though this is a Switch 2 exclusive). Turning to the online, there will be both casual online rooms and ranked matches, while the more casual amongst you might like the motion controlled Swing Mode.

Mario Tennis Fever also has amiibo support, with various Mario amiibo changing the design of the ball used within play, but not actual gameplay effects.

What Square Enix RPGs can you play on Nintendo Switch 2?

OCTOPATH TRAVELER 0 is out now!