The Pokémon Company sets up 16ft Christmas tree made of plushies

Like many of you, I was hoping the Nintendo Switch 2 would be a thing in time for Christmas this year. But alas, I’m going to have to make do with my 2017 launch console for a little longer, and I’ll no doubt be sinking time into my backlog over the holidays. Thankfully, I just started testing an upscaler that helps spruce up the OG console’s graphics in a way I’d never considered, and it’s going to help me not think about a next gen Nintendo console over the Holidays.

Welcome to the busiest moviegoing season of the year, when films in theaters are actually worth trekking out to see and everything hitting VOD and streaming is… the movies that came out a few months ago that are also super worth checking out. Ack!

Microsoft has an extremely solid deal on the Xbox Series X console, bringing the price down to just $349, a full $150 off.

Meryl Streep may have received an Oscar nomination for her performance in The Devil Wears Prada, but her casting was initially an unpopular choice.

Pokemon proved it can collaborate with just about anything and cause a stir when it announced a crossover with the Van Gogh Museum. Revealing a line of products inspired by the iconic Dutch artist's work, Pokemon fans were so eager to get their hands on a promotional Pikachu card that replaced Van Gogh with Pikachu in the former's famous self-portrait, it caused a frenzy at the museum store that led to the card being removed from sale at the store.

The Den of Wolves trailer at The Game Awards first announces that we're looking at a new game from from the creator of Payday: The Heist and Payday 2, but then goes on to show something that has very little resemblance to a bank robbery: a pair of men growling at each other in a sci-fi dungeon that could've appeared in Cyberpunk 2077. So, what the heck is this game? As implied by the Payday connection, Den of Wolves is a four-player co-op game from 10 Chambers, the Stockholm-based studio co-founded by Payday 1 and 2 designer Ulf Andersson. But it's Andersson's vision for, like, Payday 5. Rather than present-day burglaries, Den of Wolves takes place in 2097 in a city run by unregulated corporations who've secured their global stock exchange against AI-powered hackers by somehow using biological encryption—that is, living human brains. It's a heist game inspired by Inception, The Matrix, Ghost in the Shell, and Blade Runner—in short, «mindfuck sci-fi,» as Den of Wolves narrative director Simon Viklund (also a Payday alum) put it to me when we met last week. The twist in The Game Awards trailer gives us a glimpse of what he's talking about, as the corpo's interrogation of some punk's subconscious is revealed to actually be the opposite. Clearly we're going to invade some mind palaces in this thing. I didn't get to see any Den of Wolves gameplay beyond the snippets of shooting everyone can see in the trailer, but Viklund spoke at length about the studio's vision during a presentation and interview.

Players will be able to play as their captured creatures in Pokémon Scarlet and Violet's DLC, The Indigo Disk.

One of the games that pioneered the open-world format is getting a long awaited sequel, and we finally know when.

Shiny Pokémon are making their return to Pokémon TCG with the Scarlet and Violet — Paldean Fates expansion. The expansion launches on Jan. 26, 2024, though some of the specialty items below will launch later. The tins and Premium Collection sets will be available starting Feb. 9, 2024 and the booster bundle won’t launch until Feb. 23, 2024.

Some Baldur's Gate 3 players are taking the new epilogue as an indication that more story stuff for the RPG might be in the works.

It’s the most wonderful time of year — Spotify Wrapped season! Every year, the music streaming service aggregates its users’ listening data and presents them with fun little infographics about their most-listened-to artists and songs. In addition to the standard things like your Top Artist (Taylor Swift for me) and Top Song of the year (thanks to an association with an NPC in our D&D game, mine was Jimmy Buffett’s “Margaritaville”), Spotify likes to get a little quirky and come up with other categories like listening archetypes. This year, one such category was “Sound Town,” which supposedly tells you which town’s population has the listening habits most similar to yours.

By Charles Pulliam-Moore, a reporter focusing on film, TV, and pop culture. Before The Verge, he wrote about comic books, labor, race, and more at io9 and Gizmodo for almost five years.