On the heels of The Game Awards, this week saw the launch of two expansions for fan-fave games: God of War Ragnarok and Pokémon Scarlet and Violet. We also took a meaty deep dive into Analogue’s latest and greatest new retro console and did a year-three rundown on the state of the PS5.
Does anyone else feel like the PS5 just came out, not that long ago? Well, there’s already an abundance of chatter about a potential mid-gen Pro version of Sony’s strangely designed console. And we’ve also got a Game Awards rundown for you too.
It’s a quiet week for major releases, but a big week for savings and DLC from some of the biggest games in the land, like God of War Ragnarok and Pokémon Scarlet and Violet.
Despite The Game Awards officially capping off the end of video game news for 2023, we’ve still got stories to share, from GTA 6 controversies to the inglorious end of E3. Here’s your cheat sheet for the week’s most important stories in gaming.
It’s a bit of a sad day for The Last of Us fans…well, sort of. Last night the world learned that the highly anticipated yet stubbornly secretive multiplayer TLoU game isn’t going to happen. Despite plowing multiple years of development into the project, Naughty Dog announced it was pulling the plug. And now the…
When I reviewed Pokémon Scarlet and Violet’s Indigo Disk DLC, I said I wished it expanded further on some of the specific characters who were central to the main game’s stellar ending. It turns out, The Indigo Disk has a secret ending that the game doesn’t really direct you to in a meaningful way. While I still stand…
Recently, my wife and I went out to do some Christmas shopping. We also grabbed some lunch while we were out, brought dinner home, rented a movie, and bought a game to play the next day. It should have been a chill weekend, but it wasn’t. In 2023, thanks to greedy billionaires and giant, shitty companies, buying just…
Video game companies have gotten very creative when it comes to punishing cheaters, from cutting their parachutes’ strings in Call of Duty to blowing them up in Grand Theft Auto Online. But Valve just set a new benchmark for trolling players: sending them permabans wrapped up like Christmas presents.
Hideki Kamiya, the prolific action game director who co-founded the legendary developer PlatinumGames, surprised the industry when he left the studio behind on October 20 after nearly 20 years there. He said the decision was of his own accord, but questions about why still lingered. Now, Kamiya’s spoken out to share…
The Blueberry Points grind is the worst part of Pokémon Scarlet and Violet’s Indigo Disk DLC. To access most of the new features the expansion adds, you have to earn Blueberry Academy’s fake currency by doing menial open-world tasks. The game barely gives you any BP for each Blueberry Quest, and it just feels like a…
Streaming platform Twitch recently announced a change to its sexual content policies that allowed some forms of fictionalized nudity—such as digital characters, sculptures, or drawings—as long as it was properly labeled. But now, just a few days later, it’s rolling back these changes and has apologized to the…
Next month, January of space-year 2024, sees the release of a whole new set of shiny Pokémon cards. Paldean Fates is a muddle of reprinted cards from 2023's sets and a ridiculous 100 new shinies. It will also features a brand-new shiny Charizard, which is going to cost all of the money. However, old fire-face is…
Back in July of 2023—the month before Baldur’s Gate 3 finally released after spending years in early access—Larian Studios’ director of publishing Michael Douse said that the Dungeons & Dragons-based role-playing game has some 17,000 possible endings. “Wow,” you might be thinking, “that’s a lot of finales! How long…
Baldur’s Gate 3 director Swen Vincke believes the Dungeons & Dragons-based RPG is a big game worth paying for. I have to agree. The Larian Studios founder says that’s why the game isn’t coming to Xbox Game Pass.
It’s that time again: We’ve arrived at the weekend after another long series of cursed weekdays, and that, hopefully, means it’s time to get some gaming in.
The Last of Us Online is dead. Naughty Dog announced today that the multiplayer spin-off of the hit series is no longer in development, citing concerns about managing ongoing content for a live-service game while still trying to produce the single-player blockbusters the PlayStation studio is famous for.
Epic seems to have found the limit for cosmetic pricing. The company announced today that it is lowering the price of Fortnite’s recently added in-game cars from around $35 to around $23.
Ubisoft’s The Crew, which was released in 2014 for Xbox 360, Xbox One, PlayStation 4, and PC, has been delisted without warning. Its servers will shut off next year, too. And because the game is an always-online experience, Ubisoft has confirmed that it will become unplayable once that happens.
Curious about Alan Wake 2 but never played the first? Well if you’re a PC gamer, I’ve got some good news: Grab a copy of Alan Wake 2 on the Epic Games Store during its holiday sale and you’ll get a free copy of the 2021 remastered version of the first game.
Will we ever be finished re-litigating the Star Wars sequel trilogy? From The Last Jedi on, the movies have been a black hole of discourse that is near-inescapable if you have even a casual interest in the franchise. 2019’s The Rise Of Skywalker was such a rocky ending that it seems to have impeded Lucasfilm’s…
Pokémon Scarlet and Violet’s second DLC, The Indigo Disk, is a far less damning encapsulation of the base game than The Teal Mask expansion. The second half of The Hidden Treasure of Area Zero embodies the best parts of Scarlet and Violet—even if it never quite matches its highest highs. It’s still the buggy, ugly…
Final Fantasy XVI is a wonderful game with many flaws. One of the low-key biggest is a grimy, dark pink sky that eclipses the world near the end of the game. It can make completing every side-quest and monster hunt real depressing. Fortunately, players will get a much-needed vacation from the ugliness when the …
Since Grand Theft Auto VI isn’t coming out until 2025, you might be thinking about having a fling with its esteemed predecessor Grand Theft Auto V, either for the first time or for a repeated visit. It’s a long game with a lot to do, and has an extensive multiplayer component which extends its longevity even further.…
On December 11 the former mayor of a city in Pennsylvania was sentenced to prison for threatening and shooting at people playing Pokémon GO outside a community food bank last year.
In defense of English dubs, no one does it better than Studio Ghibli. It’s not a matter of either-or; with the incredible global talents that span the original Japanese voices and the English casts, it just means we get more!
Fans jumping into the newly released mobile ports of the Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy – The Definitive Edition games are discovering something surprising: It seems to include improved visual settings that more closely match the look of the original PlayStation 2 games, as well as new bug fixes. That’s good news, but…
Running the gaming division at the second-most valuable company in the world sounds like a very demanding job. Tons of decisions to make, lots of details to stress over, and accountability to thousands of employees and millions of customers for every little misstep. Not much time to play video games, probably. Unless…
With 2023 speeding to a close, you might be wondering how much time you spent gaming in what many have called the best year ever for the industry. (Was it, though?) It’s hard to remember the early months of the year when we enter the final stretch so, Microsoft, Nintendo, and Sony have devised a way for you to find…
Renowned video game developer and cinephile Hideo Kojima is expected to work with production company A24 to develop a film adaptation of his 2020 game Death Stranding. In a statement announcing the project, Kojima Productions said that the movie won’t be “just a direct translation of the game.”
Pokémon Scarlet and Violet’s Indigo Disk DLC adds a handful of new monsters to catch, one of which is, as fans had theorized, an evolution to Dipplin called Hydrapple. This means one of Applin’s diverging evolutionary lines finally has a third form. But if you’ve had a Dippllin since it was introduced in The Teal Mask DLC
The 2023 Game Awards was full of new trailers and announcements but light on actual awards. Host Geoff Keighley ended up speedrunning through many of them, ultimately denying the winners an acceptance speech or cutting them off before they could finish one. Fortunately, some of the devs behind the best games of the…
It’s that time of year again! By which I mean, that dread-inducing season when you realize the holidays are mere days away, instead of weeks. Maybe you were planning to give that special someone something one-of-a-kind and handmade. Perhaps you’d planned to make a run to the local mall, only for the sweet, sweet siren…
God of War Ragnarök’s free DLC, Valhalla, is so good I can’t believe it’s free. While the original Ragnarök was robust and a worthy successor to the 2018 reboot, it was also a bloated attempt to wrap up a trilogy’s worth of story in one game. Valhalla, meanwhile, is such a lean encapsulation of everything Ragnarök and…
Today, Sony and Insomniac confirmed that the PlayStation-5-exclusive open-world superhero action game, Marvel’s Spider-Man 2, will receive a big, free update in “Early 2024” that will add highly requested features.
Tesla is recalling and updating almost all of its two million electric cars sold in the United States to place additional limits on their included self-driving assistance mode, Autosteer. Investigations have shown Autosteer can be extremely dangerous, and it’s been blamed for multiple accidents and deaths.
George Carlin famously said “a house is just a pile of stuff with a cover on it.” At its core, Lego Fortnite is the same. Epic’s new collab with Lego has become an absolute phenom since it launched December 7, seeing a daily peak of around 2 million concurrent players. Like all good sandbox survival games, it’s driven…
New data reveals that Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III is already the second-best selling video game of 2023, despite awful reviews, a low Metacritic score, and complaints that its campaign was too short.
Insomniac Games has quickly become Sony’s most prodigious first-party studio. In the span of just five years it released Spider-Man, Spider-Man: Miles Morales, Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart, and Spider-Man 2. Now alleged leaks from a ransomware hack potentially point to a Spider-Verse spin-off being in development.
