Video games

Video games

Metroid Prime 4: Beyond launched on the Nintendo Switch and Switch 2 in December, but if you're itching for some more lore, Metroid Prime 1-3: A Visual Retrospective is a nice way to dig in, especially now that it's on sale. Normally $49.99, you can currently buy the hardcover version for $41.08 (about $9 off) at Amazon and Walmart, which is one of the first discounts we've seen on the tabletop book.

Why does Hasbro keep shutting down studios instead of releasing games? Project Windless was the surprise hit out of last week's PlayStation showcase and its developers have been using genAI for the early development phase. And would it kill publishers to stop delisting old versions of their games? It's the latest edition of Morning Checkpoint, Kotaku 's daily roundup of gaming news, rumors, and culture.

AI-driven authoring is our second major area of focus for 2026. At the Game Developer Conference in March, we'll be unveiling a beta of the new upgraded Unity AI, which will enable developers to prompt full casual games into existence with natural language only, native to our platform - so it's simple to move from prototype to finished product.

The new chapter will include not only a game but a novel and music, the company said in a press release. The developer revealed the new IP via a live-action teaser, with an actor reading lines from William Blake's poem, The Sick Rose. A painting then fell from the wall, and the actor then turned over an hourglass with red sand, with a tagline stating "The door won't stay closed."

Sony and Nintendo are reportedly feeling squeezed by RAM shortages as demand from AI data centers takes up an increasing share of memory chip production. In response to rising costs and dwindling chip supplies, Sony is considering pushing back the release of its next PlayStation console "to 2028 or even 2029," according to industry sources cited by Bloomberg, while Nintendo may increase the $450 price of its Switch 2 console this year.

Because they had extremely limited computing power, they had to write their code as efficiently as possible. Consider the first-person shooter Quake III Arena, usually called Quake 3, for example: players navigated a three-dimensional world, so the programmers had to find the cleverest ways to handle 3D graphics and the associated calculations. Quake 3 released in 1999 and is considered one of the best computer games of its time.

It wasn't their first game, but exactly ten years ago the world was introduced to the Polish studio Bloober Team through Layers of Fear . On the heels of the heartbreak, 2016's Layers of Fear was a pared down, first-person psychological horror game concerning a painter suffering from a bout of Poe-inspired madness. Effective visuals and novel jump scares put Bloober Team on the road to a buffet of projects, including the 2024 remake of Silent Hill 2 .

Around the middle of the year, the primary source of entertainment isn't a new Netflix series or a big-budget Hollywood movie, but rather a seemingly endless supply of video game showcases. Recently, we've seen the idea of dedicated livestreams expand further, with publishers and various gaming initiatives hosting them year-round. What that means is that you can look forward to digital events that'll keep you in the loop with all of the upcoming games on the horizon.

The studio worked with Dutch video game developer Nixxes Software, which Sony acquired in 2021 to help bring PlayStation games to PCs. The sequel to the first Death Stranding is set in Australia almost a year after the events of the original game. It still features a post-apocalyptic world inhabited by strange creatures, and you'll still control Sam Porter Bridges to connect survivors in the continent to the chiral network communications system.

As part of the Steam Client Beta update Valve released on February 12, users will now be able to attach information about their hardware specifications when they post a new game review or update an old one. It's not uncommon to find negative reviews that complain about a game's performance, information that's hard to draw a conclusion from without knowing what kind of hardware the reviewer is using.

The gun stopped me. I did it again. Once again, the alien gun said no. When I tried once more, my weapon friend stopped me yet again...but warned that, next time, it wouldn't. If I wanted to interrupt this scripted moment and shoot the bad guy in the face, it would let me do that. And so I pulled that trigger again, and the game reacted, and I laughed.

Join GG Women Professionals (GGWP) at The MADE for a Valentine's celebration that goes beyond the bouquet. We're gathering gamemakers and players to celebrate the full spectrum of love-from the romantic arcs we write into our games to the platonic bonds that sustain our careers and the self-love that fuels our creativity. ​Whether you're looking for your "Player 2," celebrating your "Galentines," or investing in your own professional growth, there is a place for you here.

Slowly but surely, Monster Hunter Stories has established itself as more than just a spin-off of Capcom's famed action role-playing game. It has gone from a small project on the Nintendo 3DS to an ambitious Japanese RPG on the Nintendo Switch that punched above its weight. Now in its third iteration, Monster Hunter Stories 3: Twisted Reflection is the franchise's coming-out party. The entry is launching across multiple systems for the first time, and it's taking a different approach to the story.

Nioh 3 has received a hot new update that brings plenty of bug fixes to very specific issues, but it also implements fixes for a few of the most common - and incredibly annoying - bugs. Patch 1.03.01 arrived earlier on all platforms, and it comes with a chunky set of notes. This latest update, predictably, doesn't add any gameplay features, but some of the included fixes will absolutely delight - or vindicate - so many of the game's millions of players.

"Hermen Hulst, head of SIE, joked that 'Please do not kill [a] Tallneck (a giraffe-shaped machine),' and insisted 'Please take good care of Aloy. It feels like I am sending off my daughter at the aisle,'" Lee Seong-gu told Inven, based on a translation by Kotaku. Aloy seemingly won't be playable in the game but it's possible she could still appear in cutscenes.

Booting up Safeguard in the new season of COD: BLOPS7 was like returning to an old friend's house after years away to hang out. Something I've always appreciated about the mode was how it gave the defense a way to fight back that wasn't just "Kill the other team." You can instead focus your damage on the robot, and if you do enough, it will stop moving and have to reboot.

Sony's first State of Play stream of the year included an update on Mina the Hollower, the latest title from Shovel Knight studio Yacht Club Games.

As I bookmark games from PlayStation's State of Play to try later, one game that immediately shot to the top of my wishlist was Yakoh Shinobi Ops.

The VR industry has been on edge since Meta's massive job cuts earlier this year: One exec called the layoff announcements "one of VR's darkest weeks." There's talk of a VR winter, and multiple VR studios have conducted significant layoffs of their own. For Gorilla Tag maker Another Axiom, however, it's monkey - or monke, as they'd say - business as usual.