Former Rockstar technical director, Obbe Vermeij, has commended Baldur's Gate 3 developer Larian Studios for walking away from the hugely successful Dungeons & Dragons series, calling it a "bold move".Read more
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Former Rockstar technical director, Obbe Vermeij, has commended Baldur's Gate 3 developer Larian Studios for walking away from the hugely successful Dungeons & Dragons series, calling it a "bold move".
Chinese action game Phantom Blade Zero has amassed over a million wishlists in the two weeks since its September 2026 release date was confirmed.
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.
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.
I think a lot of Dispatch can be distilled into a single moment at the beginning of the game when the player comes face to face with a penis. There it is, dangling visibly between the legs of an unclothed, toxic-drenched super-villain you're about to fight. The camera all but centers on it. There's no way you can miss it unless you've flipped the nudity switch off, in which case it's replaced by an even more conspicuous black box that only amplifies the naughtiness of the part hidden within. But most people don't turn nudity off because they're expecting boobs. That's what we usually see. In Dispatch, however, it's a penis we see waggling unavoidably on our screens.
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.
Gaming can't escape the shadow of global economic uncertainty, and things are going to get worse following 2025's price hikes due to the memory shortages caused by the AI and data centre gold rush (which doesn't seem to be producing much gold just yet). What about Nintendo Switch 2 following a strong summer launch but slow Christmas? Will it be safe from the price hikes?
Much has been written about Stellar Blade's handling of its lead female character, the culture war surrounding it, and developer Shift Up's several eyebrow-raising missteps as the game broke through into mainstream conciousness. Regardless, the PS5 title was a big success and a sequel is now in development. Before we even get a first look at it, however, a new storm appears to be brewing.
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