Game Informer News, Tips, Tricks, Ideas

The Prince of Persia series has a long and storied history going back decades, and I know none of it. The latest, Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown, from developer Ubisoft Montpellier, has me regretting that because if this game indicates what else awaits me in the franchise, I’ve clearly been missing out. The Lost Crown uses exhilarating platforming, a deep combat loop, and more to create a new Metroidvania classic. While I would like a more compelling story and a few tweaks to its systems, I struggled to put The Lost Crown down, taking my gameplay sessions into the late hours of the night. The Lost Crown is a fascinating and highly successful reemergence for the beloved series. 

Just as Final Fantasy VII Remake featured a predetermined endpoint – the escape from Midgar – Final Fantasy VII Rebirth players also know when their adventure will culminate in this game. The Forgotten Capital, the location that plays host to one of the most impactful moments in any video game, is the destination for the story contained within Final Fantasy VII Rebirth.

The most endearing aspect of the SteamWorld series is how each of its games relates to one another despite their disparate genres. From tower defense to turn-based RPG, each title offers a unique spin on a specific gameplay experience while adhering to a shared mythos, resulting in a fun collection of games that coalesce thematically. SteamWorld Build, Thunderful's city-builder/RTS hybrid, serves as the latest iteration of this formula. Sporting streamlined genre mechanics, intuitive controls, and charming visuals, many essential parts are in place. Unfortunately, despite a solid foundation, SteamWorld Build struggles to maintain an engaging experience throughout its campaign.

Remedy is known for being experimental. It mixes live-action footage into its video games, plays with player expectations, rewards those devoted to the developer’s history and gameography, and in the case of Alan Wake 2, eagerly performs big-budget lunacy for our entertainment and sometimes confusion. The highs of Alan Wake’s follow-up adventure are tall, but there are frequent lows that drag the whole experience into The Dark Place. I also encountered a number of bugs that forced frequent restarts and one full reinstallation. But even in the moments I was most frustrated, I still admire Remedy’s commitment to creating a unique experience and embracing its weirdness.

Persona 5 has become its own sort of mini-franchise within the Persona series. With many spin-off titles released over the years, such as Persona 5 Strikers, Persona 5: Dancing in Starlight, and Persona Q2: New Cinema Labyrinth, Atlus seems to love using Persona 5’s popularity to explore new stories and gameplay ideas. However, I applaud Atlus for making all of these spin-offs in completely different genres from each other. The latest, Persona 5 Tactica, delivers an entertaining story, a colorful cast of characters, and fun combat mechanics within the context of a strategy RPG. Longtime Phantom Thieves can look forward to an enjoyable side adventure, but its uneven pacing and low enemy variety hold it back from being a true revolution.

Final Fantasy VII is full of iconic scenes. Whether you're talking about the well-known sequences already depicted in Remake or the upcoming gut-punch at the Forgotten Capital, the Remake trilogy allows fans to experience these moments in their most fully realized forms. While this middle portion of Final Fantasy VII, which Rebirth depicts, focuses on Aerith and the looming specter of Sephiroth, so much of Rebirth's depiction emphasizes the deepening of relationships.

The Avatar films are great fun but have never blown me away with original storytelling. Instead, the translation of familiar formulas into a vibrant and visually arresting alien world elevates the films. Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora follows that same tack, featuring first-person exploration and combat that borrows liberally from franchises like Far Cry. But here, an enormous and detailed fantasy world breathes life into the experience, making it both more engaging and sometimes needlessly obtuse – but always with a flair for the source material.

RoboCop: Rogue City is likely the best game the action hero has ever starred in. That bar isn’t tough to hurdle, but the adventure delivers plenty of thrills for fans to be excited about. This narrative-driven first-person shooter has a loving reverence for the films and a good understanding of its protagonist, swinging for the fences with a lengthy original story, fun references, and plenty of enjoyably cheesy humor. Unfortunately, like the franchise’s vision of Detroit, Rogue City is very rough around the edges, resulting in a flawed hero but one that’s ultimately entertaining to patrol with. 

Developer Titan Forge Games and publisher Hi-Rez Studios have announced Smite 2, a sequel to Smite that is rebuilding the third-person action MOBA from the ground up in Unreal Engine 5. There's no release date for the sequel, but Titan Forge Games says it's coming to PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC via Steam and the Epic Games Store. Closed early alpha testing will begin this spring. 

Community chat application company, Discord, has laid off 170 employees, or 17 percent of its staff, according to a new report from The Verge. Discord CEO Jason Citron cites overhiring, which has led to the company becoming «less efficient» in how it operates. The layoffs affected people across various departments. 

Sand Land, the video game adaptation of Dragon Ball creator Akira Toriyama’s manga of the same name, has a release date and a new trailer setting up the story.

Nintendo has been slowly beefing up its library of games available to Nintendo Switch Online and Expansion Pack subscribers. 

Golden Sun and its sequel, Golden Sun: The Golden Age are joining the Nintendo Switch Online library next week. On January 17, these two classic Game Boy Advance games will be available to play for all Nintendo Switch Online + Expansion Pack subscribers. 

When you think of pirates, history mainstays like Blackbeard might come to mind alongside the fictional Jack Sparrow. An important but often forgotten name, however, is Cheng Shih. Not only is Cheng Shih one of history's most successful pirates, but she's also the woman who took over her late husband Cheng Yat's pirate armada after his death, putting her in indirect control of 40,000-plus pirates for a nearly decade-long stint in Chinese waters in the early 19th Century. While Cheng Shih's story can be found on pages of books and elsewhere, Singer Studios aims to bring her story to life in VR. 

Before we read and wrote, we moved. Stories of people moving – migrating – have been told since time immemorial. The Mexica journey to central Mexico; Moses leading the Jewish people across the desert; the founding of Rome – as told by Virgil – by those that fled the fall of Troy. Unsurprisingly, then, video games also tell stories of migration. On August 8, 2013, game designer Lucas Pope, the man behind the studio 3909, released Papers, Please, a game about managing migration.

Call of Duty cycles through its lineup of villains on a yearly basis. Sometimes it's Nazis, other times it's Russian nationalists or zombies. But the most dangerous threat is one without a lust for brains or access to weapons of war; it's stagnation. And while many Call of Duty teams often switch up just enough variables to stave off monotony, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III fully submits to the annual churn.   The campaign embodies this, as it rushes to a conclusion with little care for the details. COD missions usually follow a predictable yet mostly effective formula of packing together various one-off gameplay mechanics through fluctuating levels of intensity. Modern Warfare III cuts out necessary buildup and most of the variety, leading to basic stages riddled with pacing issues. Many max out at around 15 minutes, which means the usual rollercoaster of ups and downs has been stripped down to only include the descents. The spectacles are also less bombastic, and the abbreviated journey to them only further diminishes their appeal.

Climbing a skyscraper for the 25th time in a day quickly erodes the novelty of virtual reality.

Following the release of Sonic Mania (and its various follow-up versions), director Christian Whitehead and friends decided to start developer Evening Star to do one of the most difficult things in video games: create a brand new original property. Penny's Big Breakaway is a new character in a unique platformer and we had a chance to go hands on with it ahead of its release next year.

When the original Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl came out in 2021, it was a relatively bare-bones experience, but those bones were solid. Despite lacking many single-player modes, items, and even character voices, the core gameplay was good enough to keep the game afloat until it received refinements via online updates over the next two years. Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl 2, however, comes packaged with all those improvements and more. Developer Fair Play Labs has learned its lessons, and while the game isn't without its faults, it's a more-than-worthy follow-up.

At the end of every year, gamers are faced with an undeniable fact: far too many video games are released in a 12-month span for anyone to reasonably play them all. It's literally my job to play video games and I bet someone could fill a reasonable top ten this year of titles I didn't even get time to touch. But even as it's a universal, undeniable truth, the revelation that you missed out on something popular is always met with the same incredulous statement.

Beginning in 1989, the Prince of Persia series enjoyed consistent attention, with its longest break between releases being six years between Prince of Persia 2: The Shadow and the Flame and the better-left forgotten Prince of Persia 3D. 2003’s Sands of Time and its two sequels marked a new era for Prince and, in many ways, laid the foundation for Ubisoft’s most successful franchise, Assassin’s Creed. The 2008 Prince of Persia reboot didn’t reignite the series as Ubisoft had hoped, and 2010’s Forgotten Sands felt closer to a movie tie-in than a new, proper entry.

When Final Fantasy X exploded onto the PlayStation 2 in 2001, it revolutionized not just the Final Fantasy series but the role-playing genre as a whole. The tuned-to-perfection turn-based combat, the beautiful soundtrack, the heartfelt story, and the eye-popping-for-the-time visuals created one of the most important entries of one of the most important franchises in video game history. However, one element was absent from Final Fantasy X that several of the key developers involved with the project lamented: an explorable world map.

Jusant asks players to do one thing: climb. As a silent mountaineer accompanied by a cute critter, the only thing standing between you and your mysterious mission is one very tall mountain. The journey to its summit is treacherous, but thanks to an ingenious climbing system, beautiful art direction, and intriguing world-building, inching toward the top is worth the effort. 

Ever since its first title 20 years ago, the WarioWare franchise has shapeshifted to take advantage of the capabilities and gimmicks of whatever the current Nintendo platform was. But the first entry on Switch, Get It Together, bucked that trend, putting you in control of the actual cast of characters in platforming-style microgames instead of taking advantage of the Switch’s unique traits. WarioWare: Move It aligns more with the traditional WarioWare experience, resulting in a better overall collection.

The ground beneath Square Enix's Tetsuya Nomura's feet trembled. In his time since serving as character designer and visual director on Final Fantasy VII, his legend has grown substantially. In addition to working on nearly every acclaimed Final Fantasy game since Nomura also helped create the Kingdom Hearts series and has become a figurehead and luminary within the stacked ranks of Square Enix's stable of developers. But this 2015 trip to Los Angeles, California, was different.

This year represented one of the most difficult game of the year discussions we’ve had in some time; 2023 was overflowing with fantastic games. But our opinions are not the only ones (you can read Game Informer's top 2023 10 list right here).

There's never been a better time to get into Ace Attorney. Developer-publisher Capcom has spent the last few years remastering and re-releasing every game in the series, and with the Apollo Justice trilogy, you can now play every mainline game on modern consoles. And even though the three games in this collection are unchanged story-wise, after going hands-on, we can comfortably say that they've never felt better.

The original Super Mario RPG, released for Super Nintendo in 1996, felt like it was meant to be your first RPG. In an era when Final Fantasy tried its best to tell mature stories within the medium's limitations and Dragon Quest demanded hours and hours of your time, Mario’s adventure felt much brighter and more manageable. Familiar characters, a lighthearted story, a reasonable length, and timed button-pressing during combat made it stand out against the competition. Revisiting the game more than 25 years later in this new remade shape shows the original formula did not need much tweaking to deliver an engaging and enjoyable journey. Super Mario RPG is not entirely innocent of the sins of video games past, but old fans will relish the chance to see the game in a new light, and I’m confident newcomers will find something to love.

As 1983 came into focus, the future of video games in North America looked bleak. Store shelves were crowded with poorly made games, and consumer interest waned substantially. Developers that ushered in the “golden age” of arcades and the first two generations of home consoles began to crash and burn at an alarming pace. In no time, the once billion-dollar industry was reduced to rubble.

Following the events of Tekken 7, the stage for Tekken 8’s story is set up to be perhaps the most over-the-top yet. In the six months since the defeat of Heihachi Mishima, his son, Kazuya Mishima, has installed a reign of terror over the planet using his devil powers. And while the setup is, quite frankly, a lot to take in, if the first four chapters I played are any indication, the level of spectacle and bombast reaches new levels in Tekken 8’s Story Mode.

A Rōnin is a samurai without a master. Unshackled from bonds, these wandering swordsmen are free to carve their own path, and that freedom forms the foundation of Rise of the Ronin. The adventure is Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty and Nioh developer Team Ninja’s first choice-driven, open-world action game. We recently got another peek at the title during The Game Awards, and we spoke to the game’s lead designers to get some insight and context as to what the adventure entails. 

The first Ghostrunner is one of my all-time favorite games, and I've been excited for its sequel, Ghostrunner 2, since its reveal more than two years ago. I didn't need much to be satisfied with another parkour venture into developer One More Level's cyberpunk dystopia; I just wanted more Ghostrunner. And when Ghostrunner 2 is doing what put its predecessor on the map – fast-paced first-person action-parkour gameplay – it shines. But a few new attempts at expanding this world, both narratively and mechanically, don't shine as bright, however interesting and admirable they are. Nonetheless, Ghostrunner 2, with its exceptional action, soundtrack, and beautifully oppressive world, kept me smiling in delight for most of my 15 hours. 

I've been playing a ton of Super Mario Bros. Wonder over the last couple of weeks (in addition to the hands-on I had as a part of our current cover story), and the review embargo has officially lifted. However, due to restrictive embargo guidelines that don't allow us to discuss large portions of the game, we have opted to hold our final review until the game is available for purchase. With that said, I did want to share some brief thoughts within the confines of the embargo.

Final Fantasy VII Remake gave fans of the original game quite a shock as Cloud and the party exited Midgar. Zack, the protagonist of Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII and a key figure in Cloud, Aerith, and Sephiroth's past, appears to be alive, and helped an injured Cloud reach Midgar. This stands in stark contrast to his fate in the original continuity, where he was killed and his Buster Sword was handed over to Cloud. 

Xbox’s first-party studio lineup in 2017 consisted of five studios and a publishing arm: Rare, Turn 10, 343 Industries, The Coalition, Mojang Studios, and Xbox Game Studios Publishing. Today, six years later, Microsoft owns more than 50 studios, thanks to various acquisitions over the years.

In each issue, Game Informer prints questions that are submitted by readers via email and standard mail. We'd like to give our website readers the chance to make the magazine as well.

We recently sat down with Embark Studios' Creative Director Gustav Tilleby and Senior Environment Artist Joakim Stigsson in the hours leading up to The Finals' stealth release at The Game Awards.  We covered the making of the competitive first-person shooter, how the Embark team designed its destructible environments according to real-life architecture, and what it was like learning they'd be launching the game in front of a live audience. 

The Talos Principle II often left me staring at my screen in awe. Sometimes, from sheer intimidation in the face of a seemingly formidable puzzle. Other times,  from my incredulous pride after unraveling said problem. But most of all, the experience regularly gave me pause as I pondered a philosophical idea or argument that challenged my viewpoints on the nature of existence and humanity’s place in the cosmos. These moments spurred me to solve the game’s 100+ puzzles in search of answers, and I’m largely satisfied with what I discovered. 

Dragon Quest possesses so much history that any new game carries a degree of raised expectation. Dragon Quest Monsters: The Dark Prince delivers many of the conventions I’ve come to expect from the series: the vibrant opening song, the charismatic Slime, and the emotional storytelling I already associate with the franchise. But this game goes beyond those well-treaded territories, offering an intelligent and elegant yet simple approach to combat and dungeon design that makes it a solid spin-off experience.

James Sunderland is not going to survive this.

As far as pitches go, Like a Dragon Gaiden: The Man Who Erased His Name, the next game in what used to be called the Yakuza series, is hard to beat: Find out what happened to series protagonist Kiryu Kazuma between Yakuza 6: The Song of Life and Yakuza: Like a Dragon. The former ended with Kiryu faking his death to keep his adopted family of orphans safe. The idea was his story was over – he was moving on to the next chapter of his life. Developer Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio pitched it as such. Until the latter, when he showed back up, playing a large part in a game that was supposed to, and somewhat did, launch new series protagonist Ichiban Kasuga into the limelight. For the most part, Gaiden is an interesting bridge between those two games – even if it doesn't always go as deep into Kiryu's character as I hoped.

A target appears on your back when you’re a long-reigning champ. No longer the enigma you once were, contenders begin studying your body of work to figure out the path to ending your time at the top. The best way to fend off would-be challengers is to continually build and evolve. Developer EA Vancouver seems to understand this because while no legitimate contenders have emerged in the mixed-martial-arts genre, EA Sports UFC 5 retools several key areas to show the franchise isn’t resting on its laurels.

The quality of video game releases in 2023 has been discussed in detail by many, and it will absolutely go down as one of the best years the medium has experienced, strictly in terms of the excellent games that were released. The larger industry and its members will always look back on 2023 with justified frustration.

It’s no secret that 2023 is off to a raucous start with multiple high-scoring games hitting within the first few months of the year. This list will be your guide to every gaming experience Game Informer considers a must-play in 2023, encompassing the best games you can play on platforms like PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, Switch, and PC, among others.

As a series that has been around for nearly four decades, Super Mario Bros. should have shown signs of slowing down years ago. But continuous thoughtful reinvention has helped the franchise remain a genre leader. Super Mario Bros. Wonder represents the next step of evolution, delivering the tight, tried-and-true gameplay in the context of the most creative 2D entry in nearly 30 years.

The Finals offers rare novelty in the competitive multiplayer genre, encouraging creative strategies impossible in other titles because of its immense environmental destruction, physics-based hazards, and armory of whimsical gadgets. This first-person shooter occurs amid a digital game show where varying counts of three-person teams fight over money caches in an objective-focused format. The Finals is unpredictable in the best way: gameshow events like meteor showers or orbital lasers remap previously memorized paths, map variants like moving platforms or suspended structures can obfuscate objectives, and your team’s best-laid defensive plans are often interrupted as explosives obliterate the buildings around you. 

We've already published our staff-wide list of the best games of 2023, but every editor had a few games they wish could have received some praise. This is where we have the opportunity to shout out some of those games. Below, you'll see each individual Game Informer editor's personal top 10 list for 2023. Check out each editor's list and let us know in the comments section which editor you most align with!

Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League exists at a strange intersection of gaming hype. On the one hand, obviously, we are and should be excited for Rocksteady's return to the Arkham Universe that it popularized through some of the greatest superhero games of all time. Obviously. But on the other hand, Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League deviates from so many of the conventions that made Arkham Asylum, Arkham City, and Arkham Knight so beloved. And so many of those conventions that Kill the Justice League embraces – such as a team-based, co-op infrastructure, and a live-service-inspired post-launch content plan – have crashed and burned in other superhero games, most notably Crystal Dynamic's ill-fated 2020 Avengers title.

More than six years after the original Persona 5 arrived on U.S. store shelves, the RPG is still spitting out successors and spin-offs that capitalize on how beloved that title is to this day. The 2020 update, Persona 5 Royal, is the best-received successor, but both 2021 Musou hybrid Persona 5 Strikers and the recently released turn-based strategy RPG Persona 5 Tactica gave players plenty to love.

When Final Fantasy VII launched on PlayStation in 1997, it revolutionized the RPG genre and gaming as a whole. The transition from pixel art to fully animated computer graphics was a massive enough leap ahead, but the beauty of this classic title was much more than skin deep. Final Fantasy VII features an incredible cast of characters, an outstanding battle system, and a story that evokes joy, awe, anger, and grief. Final Fantasy VII is well-established as one of the most iconic and beloved video games of all time, but for Square Enix, the legacy is somewhat more important. 

Announced alongside Lego Fortnite, a new survival crafting experience, Rocket Racing is developer Psyonix's first new release since Rocket League in 2015 – and it's only playable inside Fortnite. Returning guest and gaming journalist Jesse Vitelli joins Game Informer's Alex Van Aken to show off Rocket Racing gameplay while discussing why the racing game is actually great.

Happy New Year! Now that 2024 is here, it’s time to push it the hell out of the way and look ahead to 2025. At least, that’s what it feels like the game industry is increasingly saying I should do. A number of recently revealed titles have been slapped with 2025 release windows, so I can’t help but wonder how next year will shape up and, most importantly, what the awards seasons will look like.  

Whether you’re new to the scene or you’ve been rolling dice and crafting adventures for years, 2023 had no shortage of wonderful games to pull you into other worlds. It’s an excellent time to get together with friends, gather around the table, and tell a story together, and each of the games that follow will take your group to surprising new destinations.

In the technical world of city-builders, 2015’s Cities: Skylines made a name for itself as an uncompromising but delicate game where players needed to spin a variety of municipal plates to keep things in order across their fantasy cities. Eight years and millions of digital building permits later, Colossal Order has returned to construct a convincing sequel in Cities: Skylines II. The iterative additions don’t arrive without consequential imperfections, but Cities: Skylines II still boasts all the intricacy and customizability necessary to provide players with a challenging and deep city-building experience.

Scaring players has helped put the small team at Red Candle Games on the map. Its first two titles, Detention and Devotion, impressed and terrified fans with frighteningly strong horror chops, but the team is leaving that behind to tackle something completely different in Nine Sols. This side-scrolling action platformer blends sci-fi with Chinese mythology and is Red Candle’s most ambitious project yet. This significant step forward affords an opportunity to look back on the studio’s young history, so we spoke with co-founder Vincent Yang to learn about how a small band of gamers in Taiwan formed one of the industry’s most promising – and, at one time, controversial – indie studios.

Incredible gaming was not limited to the screen this year. A wealth of fantastic board, card, and miniature games found their way to tables, bringing friends and families together for evenings of strategy, imagination, and fun. From simple party games to sprawling quest-driven adventures, these are some of the year’s best new projects for your gaming group.

Update, 1/11/2024:

There are few things the internet is hungrier for than news about the Switch successor. With relative silence from Nintendo, folks have been left to grasp at straws and theorize what it will look like, how it will be played, and when it will be released. Today, thanks to Digital Trends, we might have an answer to that last question, and it came from a rather odd place.

Paramount+ released the first season of its live-action Halo series back in 2022 and while the initial premiere showed promise, the show was ultimately a letdown, both as the Chief's first foray into the live-action television space and as a Halo story. Now, the subscription streaming service has released the official trailer for Season 2 of Halo: The Series and it promises the fall of Reach, plenty of Covenant and Energy Swords, and more of Master Chief without his helmet on for some reason. 

TeamKill Media, the developer behind last year's Quantum Error, has revealed Son and Bone, its PlayStation 5-exclusive first-person shooter where you kill dinosaurs. It's due out some time this year and you can watch the announcement teaser below. 

The 27th D.I.C.E. Awards return next month to Las Vegas, where the industry-only event celebrates the best games and achievements in games of 2023. Unlike The Game Awards, which are hosted and produced by Geoff Keighley, with votes from media outlets and the public in some instances, the D.I.C.E Awards are voted on exclusively by game developers. 

A retailer listing of a «V2 DualSense» controller for the PlayStation 5 has been spotted online, and it boasts an «exceptional» 12-hour battery life. That's a much longer battery life than the standard version of the DualSense controller, which averages between 6 to 10 hours (and many players would argue less). 

Naughty Dog and HBO have cast Young Mazino as Jesse for The Last of Us' second season. This follows yesterday's news that Kaitlyn Dever (Booksmart, No One Will Save You) will play Abby in the show's second season. 

Last year was one of the best years for game releases but easily one of the worst for the people who made them, with more than 10,000 workers laid off by various companies, including Microsoft, Epic Games, BioWare, Bungie, Naughty Dog, and many more. Unfortunately, it seems this heartbreaking trend is continuing into this new year as yesterday, Bloomberg reported that Amazon-owned streaming company Twitch is set to lay off 500 employees, or about 35 percent of its staff. 

Video game engine creator Unity is laying off 1800 employees, or 25% of its workforce, according to a report from Yahoo! Finance. The company announced these layoffs in an internal memo sent out on Monday, January 8. These job cuts follow a turbulent 2023 for the company after it attempted to introduce per-install fees to developers using its game engine before later walking it back. 

Last September, SAG-AFTRA union members voted yes to authorize a video game strike. Reasons why included a desire for better wages, increased safety precautions, and protections around exploitative uses of artificial intelligence. Now, just a few months later, SAG-AFTRA has signed an agreement with Replica Studios, an A.I. voice technology company, to allow game developers to use A.I. voices, as reported by Game Developer. 

Microsoft has announced the return of its Xbox Developer Direct next Thursday, January 18. The presentation will provide updates on several of its most anticipated upcoming games.

Kaitlyn Dever has been officially announced as The Last of Us TV adaptation's Abby. Kaitlyn Dever is perhaps best known for her role in 2019's Booksmart, but video game fans may know her best as the voice of Cassie Drake, seen at the end of Uncharted 4: A Thief's End. Dever was also an early fan cast for the role of Ellie when casting rumors for The Last of Us TV show first began swirling. She also reportedly read for the role of Ellie before it ultimately went to Bella Ramsey.

Sam Barlow’s acclaimed interactive cinematic mystery game Immortality is making its way to PlayStation 5 on January 23. The game first arrived on Xbox Series X/S and PC in August 2022.

The virtual reality market, while not as niche as it was years ago, is still a relatively small one. Even Sony's PlayStation VR2 launch last year seemed to come and go with little fanfare (and even less support for the platform nearly a year later). However, tech giant Apple is making its own case for VR and it's doing so with the $3,500 Vision Pro headset launching next month. 

Since its release on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC last February, developer Avalanche's Hogwarts Legacy has continued to sell well. It has maintained the top position almost every month for best-selling games in the U.S., too. Thanks to a new interview at Variety with Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment president David Haddad, we now know Hogwarts Legacy has surpassed 22 million copies sold and it did so in less than a year. 

Over the weekend, Square Enix revealed new information about Dawntrail , Final Fantasy XIV’s upcoming fifth expansion, during a fan event for the popular MMO. In addition to unveiling a lengthy cinematic trailer, fans got a look at one of the game’s two new jobs and its new playable race.

The 75th Emmy Awards will be broadcast live on January 15, and that's where a majority of the awards winners will be announced. However, the Creative Arts Emmy awards, a subset of of the Emmys that recognizes technical achievements, guest appearances, and more, have already been doled out, and HBO's The Last of Us picked up eight wins, as reported by Deadline. In total, the show, its crew, and actors have picked up 24 nominations. 

Netflix has released the first teaser trailer for season 2 of its hit animated series, Arcane. The next chapter of the League of Legends adaptation is scheduled to premiere this November. 

Persona 3 Reload is right around the corner – it hits PlayStation, Xbox, and PC on February 2. If you've ever played a Persona game, you're likely familiar with the «opening movie,» which is the awesome animated opening to the game set to what is typically the main theme song. Ahead of Persona 3 Reload's release next month, Atlus has released its opening movie, debuting a brand new track called «Full Moon Full Life.» 

PlayStation has released a promotional video highlighting some of the biggest games coming to its console this year. The video hypes both first and third-party releases, many of which already had release dates/windows, but it also casually confirms 2024 launches for two previously un-dated projects.

First, there was the Xbox Series X mini-fridge, and now the Series S gets its own appliance in the form of a toaster. Bread will never be the same again. 

When I was 13 years old, I struggled to beat Cynthia, the Pokémon League champion in Pokémon Platinum. U.S.-based 13-year-old Willis Gibson just beat an unbeatable Tetris game that players have been attempting to complete since its release on the NES in 1989. 

CD Projekt Red is one of the biggest developers in Europe, but the studio behind The Witcher and Cyberpunk 2077 has no interest in being acquired. That comes from a new interview with the studio’s CEO, Adam Kiciński, who discusses acquisition possibilities while providing small updates on the studio’s litany of upcoming projects.

On January 1, Steamboat Willie, the cartoon that introduced the world to Mickey Mouse, entered the public domain, meaning the first version of Disney’s iconic mascot is (mostly) free to use by anyone. And just like when the film Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey took advantage of that whimsical character entering the public domain, someone has already started making a twisted, horrifying version of Mickey. In this case, it’s a video game.