The idea of taking serious hardware horsepower on the go was always the dream of my misspent, console-gaming youth. Don't get me wrong, I've always loved how older handheld systems made a calling card out of their limitations (and in the case of Nintendo, offered a hardware gimmick or gaming experience you couldn't find anywhere else). The fact that now you can play many of the same games on a portable device that you can also play in your gamer den would've blown my younger self's mind.

Unfortunately, the dream-come-true of handheld gaming PCs feels like it is coming to an end.

Our Andy updates our handheld gaming PC deals each week and recently shared a shocking revelation: 'Somehow, the $1,000 Asus ROG Ally Xbox X is the best value gaming handheld I can think of right now.' If you've got the cash then, sure, the Asus ROG Ally Xbox X with its AMD Ryzen Z2 Extreme chip, 24 GB of RAM, and 1 TB of onboard SSD storage makes sense for the asking price. But where does that leave you if you're on a much tighter budget?

The memory supply crisis has raised the pricing floor of all handhelds. Case in point, the device that we still rate as the best budget handheld gaming PC is the Steam Deck. The more affordable LCD models were quietly discontinued last year, leaving those looking to buy a Steam Deck new with only the very shiny OLED models to choose from. Years after release, the price for the base 512 GB OLED model has increased from $549 to $789. The 1 TB model has seen an almost 50% price increase, jumping from $649 to $949. The answer, then, to where that leaves the more budget-conscious? Without a paddle.

Despite this price hike (and the handheld's aged internals), both models of the Steam Deck sold out in North America shortly after the increase was announced back in May. The 1 TB model, which is going for £779 where I'm based in the UK, appears to be out of stock again at the time of writing. But I doubt this is a sustainable trend.

Let's zoom out a smidge. I update our best SSD deals every week, so I've not had the luxury of ignoring how storage prices have been climbing since the tail end of last year. Research suggests that memory prices are likely to rise as much as 50% in Q3 alone. Recent analysis by Bernstein suggests prices won't dip until 2028, when major manufacturers are expected to complete a number of capacity-increasing builds.

But here and now in 2026, it's not just gaming PC components that have seen price increases as a result of the memory supply crisis. For example, the Playstation 5 has seen three different price increases over the last six years and now costs a minimum of $650. I've written about it before but, despite buying a launch day PS5, it's becoming increasingly unlikely I'll pick up a PS6 day one. After all, if the PS5 Pro costs $900 today, how much more will the PS6 cost?

Hey, maybe Bernstein's predictions will bear out and hardware pricing will look a lot more sensible by the time Sony's next-gen console drops in 2028 or even 2029. But in the here and now, handheld gaming PCs remain in an arguably much more difficult position within the consumer market.

For those who don't already have a gaming PC, there's little doubt that a $650 base PS5 is going to look like the more economical option (particularly as Sony won't be bringing its handful of exclusives to PC in future, but maybe it's just me mourning the loss of, like, four games). If you already own a gaming PC, you'll likely want to save your pennies for increasingly expensive component upgrades. Where would a handheld feature in either budget?

The data suggests gamers generally are still willing to part with the cash for new hardware—though they aren't necessarily picking up a handheld gaming PC. A recent Circana report shared that the handheld of choice was overwhelmingly the Nintendo Switch 2, with the hybrid console largely credited for a year-over-year hardware spending increase that grew by 69%, climbing to $500 million this past March.

The Switch 2 saw its own price increase announced back in May, so it's worth pondering how much of this recent consumer clamour was motivated by a desire to scoop the console before it became more expensive. Even so, Nintendo's handheld is set to cost $500 from September 1 in the US.

There are plenty of PC gamers who have no interest in what the big N is doing these days, but a broad-view of today's gaming audience suggests a lot of gamers are more platform-agnostic. For instance, a 2023 Comscore report found 76% of gamers play across multiple platforms. Therefore, it's hard to ignore handheld gaming PC's most obvious competitor, even if the Switch 2 is underpowered compared to many of the available portable gaming options.

In short, the most performant handheld gaming PCs ask a price that's far too rich for my blood, and the best budget option is arguably not quite as compelling as Nintendo's offering (even after the price hike comes into effect later this year).

To paraphrase Andy's point, there's a chance gaming handhelds eventually revert to occupying a boutique niche for gamers with especially deep pockets. That's how they were in the before times prior to the Steam Deck's launch, with smaller Chinese outfits, such as OneXPlayer, releasing expensive, weak, poorly optimised devices. That's not really the future I want for handheld gaming PCs, but it's a strong possibility. However, given the state of, well, everything, I find myself taking a bleaker outlook.

In the longer term, it doesn't feel like handheld gaming PCs are the most economical proposition for brands or manufacturers either. For example, back in March Ayaneo suspended pre-orders for its uber-powerful Next 2 gaming handheld after costs approached 'twice the price we originally set'. To be clear, I strongly doubt Valve is going to pack it in with the Steam Deck any time soon. However, smaller companies with a much less diverse portfolio than, say, the company behind one of the largest storefronts for digital games, are likely to struggle.

What seems certain is that prices will continue to rise and meaningful chunks of the devices' audience will be priced out. My concern is that the maths may simply no longer math, and hardware companies will increasingly decide that handheld gaming PCs specifically just aren't worth it. For my wide-eyed younger self, I hope I'm wrong.

Here's an embarrassing thing to admit on the internet: when I was a teenage subscriber to Nintendo Power magazine, I picked the Donkey Kong 64 soundtrack as my "sign-up gift" because I wanted to be able to listen to the DK Rap on CD. Why I was obsessed with the song I can't say 25 years later, but Donkey Kong 64 is a memorable mess of a game—sprawling, ambitious, funny, inventive, and often infuriating, with a predilection for collectibles so infamous that the developers eventually made fun of themselves for it.

The point is, Donkey Kong 64 is a game that inspires strong feelings in those who've played it. So it seems fitting that members of the DK64 randomizer community, who've dedicated years to picking it apart and putting it back together, would start developing an unofficial PC port with a specific rallying cry:

"Fuck AI vibe coding bullshit."

DK64 Recompiled, announced in a YouTube video in late June, is actually the second project with that exact name, and that's no coincidence. It's the latest example of an increasingly common point of friction in the game emulation and hacking scene, as experienced programmers butt heads with those eager to use new AI tools to spin up new ports of old games in record time. In some cases, ports written with AI tools like Claude are ostracized or ignored. But in the case of Donkey Kong 64, the game's biggest fans weren't about to cede ground.

"The DK64 randomizer dev team is owning this shit now," contributor 2dos wrote in the N64 Recomp Discord server, shortly after the video's debut. "We have decided to take on and own this development due to the poor development direction of another recompilation project of DK64 happening concurrently that is heavily leaning on AI vibe code, and thus is resulting in a poor quality project that will make it progressively harder to manage as time goes on. Our DK64 recompilation project is backed by folks who have worked on and tinkered with the backend of the DK64 code for well over a decade, and do not rely on vibe coding to make code changes."

Static recompilation is a technique that, in short, translates all of a game's code from one system's language to another; unlike emulation, it's not simulating the original hardware holistically. The most prominent hobby project using this technique so far is N64 Recomp, announced just over two years ago, which is a recompilation tool specifically geared towards Nintendo 64 games. Since its debut we've seen modders use it to create PC ports of Banjo-Kazooie, Star Fox 64, Mario Kart 64, and more, while similar projects have sprung up for other consoles like the Xbox 360.

Legally, the freshly written code is clean because these recompiled ports don't contain any of the assets from the original games—players have to provide a ROM file themselves. The porting process has become an ethical, rather than legal, battleground in the last few months, as "vibe coded" projects have begun cropping up practically every day.

One developer has used Claude's AI coding to spin up recompilation tools for the NES, Sega Genesis, PlayStation, Super Nintendo, Game Boy Advance, and Virtual Boy, each with a handful of games at least bootable so far. Another's got GitHub repositories for everything from the PS3 to the ZX Spectrum. Others have used the Xbox 360 recompilation framework ReXGlue to pump out ports at a seemingly astonishing rate—but once you get past the YouTube videos hyping them up, the reality isn't quite so impressive.

"Vibe coding a recomp has started to become significantly more prominent and not in a good way," says Ballaam, a contributor to the DK64 randomizer and now DK64 Recompiled alongside 2dos. "I think GoldenEye was released somewhat recently with being heavily vibe coded and, as a result of that (and probably either dev inexperience or overconfidence in the AI output), it leads to some very critical bugs which make the recomp borderline unplayable. The main N64 recomp server has gone as far as to not promote any recomp which uses AI for a significant portion of it."

That GoldenEye project has also drawn criticism from those who know the game inside and out. The paradox of current tools making it easier than ever to start projects means anyone can vibe code their way to a partially working port, but shaping it into an accurate, crash-free, feature-rich version of a game is a different story.

2dos warns that a big risk with relying on AI is technical debt—a codebase becoming harder to understand and modify as it grows, with maintenance becoming "a nightmare" if you don't put in the work to thoroughly document it. The knock-on effect is that other humans are less likely to want (or even be able) to contribute. If a developer doesn't thoroughly understand the code the AI writes, that will also require them to spend more tokens to fix bugs. Those costs can add up fast, and the AI's "fixes" won't necessarily be good, either.

In the case of the AI-based Donkey Kong 64 recompilation, 2dos discovered that the agentic coding had modified RT64, "the base module that makes the N64 graphics render."

"That would lead to significant management and compatibility issues down the line, and cause other unexpected side effects that are currently visible in preview videos in the other recomp," he says.

Vibes: Questionable

Using AI is attractive because it skips past the slow, manual process of figuring out exactly what every function in a game is doing, which can often take years. Many of the polished recompilation ports available currently are for games that have previously been decompiled, creating fresh, human-readable source code. It's an enormous undertaking even for old games, but understanding what the source code is doing helps enormously when troubleshooting.

Decompilation also makes modding much more viable, which is one of the most attractive features for modern ports of retro games. (DK64: Recompiled's debut trailer touts support for a tag anywhere mod that will let players swap between Kongs on the fly, addressing one of the most common complaints about the game's backtrack-heavy design.)

Developer SrBananaMan64 recently released a PC port of Harvest Moon 64 alongside a range of mods to speed up messages, zoom out the camera, and so on. A completed decompilation by another developer helped make that a reality.

"Recompilation doesn’t actually need a 100% decomp to work, just enough for the symbols to be mapped out to produce a viable .elf file that N64Recomp uses," SrBananaMan64 says. "But this game seemed like it needed the proper enhancements to spruce [it] up… The quality of the game is lacking so it needs the widescreen and high frame rates to compensate for that in my opinion."

He shares the DK team's view that developers "should never let AI take the wheel," even if it can occasionally be an "amazing tool" for specific uses. "Minuscule tasks such as searching through a decomp for a certain function you would like to patch or mod," for example.

Lines for acceptable AI usage are now being drawn across the open source development scene. The maintainers of the Godot engine are now rejecting "substantial pieces" of AI-generated code. A nascent recompilation project for the GameCube & Wii declares "No AI code is used," and that it's a "human hand-made project by a group of passionate developers, who want the best for the Retro Gaming community." So does a solo project tackling recompilation for the PS1.

A port for Sonic Advance also has a "strict no AI policy," championing the endeavor's underlying purpose: "We want humans to use this project to practice their skills. Reverse engineering, documenting, understanding, being part of the process."

Tom, the developer behind ReXGlue, sees the low-effort ports as a "people problem," not an issue with the tool itself. "The real issue is people who don't bother to understand what they're posting," he says. "They're using a powerful tool without putting in the work to actually learn what it does, and then wondering why their project falls apart, performs poorly, or has nothing genuinely new to bring to the table. It's like riding a motorcycle before you can even ride a bike."

One common defense for vibe coding ports boil down to "this is just my hobby project, so ignore it if you don't like it." One counter-argument to that point is ethical. Even setting aside the broader environmental impact and stolen training data of generative AI models, there's an argument that even a fan-made port should endeavor to do justice to the original work—to honor the game's original creators by representing it as accuracy as possible. Another is that a vibe coded port that's likely to have those long-term maintenance issues 2dos warned about could pull interest away from a human-coded project that's more likely to be perfected in the long run. The existence of a half-assed project could even turn another developer away from putting months or years of their work into a game at all.

"That’s a big risk," SrBananaMan64 says. For example the Smash Bros. Battleship project which was completely AI generated will take away from the release of mine." (He's currently working on his own recompilation of the N64 fighter).

Another common defense from those simply eager to play a game they love—that anything is better than nothing—also doesn't necessarily hold up beyond the initial burst of excitement.

"I think there is some sentiment from those who haven't experienced a vibe coded recomp that 'who cares if its vibe coded as long as it works," says Ballaam, "when they don't fully realize that for the most part, they really really don't.

"LLMs nowadays have lowered the skill floor of producing a functioning piece of code that those who are technologically curious but don't have the patience or passion to fully learn a language can feel like they're coding. They scale up their projects but don't scale up their learning to accommodate their desires because they rely too much on the AI crutch."

Perhaps someday, as agentic coding continues to advance, vibe coded ports really will be sufficient. Perhaps a small portion of this initial wave of vibe coders will even pick up enough interest in the process to learn to do the programming themselves. Or maybe the rising costs of AI models will dissuade casual hobbyists from burning tokens on projects that are hard to see through to completion.

For now we're in the thick of it, and we're sure to see more competing projects like Donkey Kong 64 Recompiled before we come out the other side.

I love the engineering hubris of seeing a device and saying "I can run Doom on that", but I never thought 2009 sandbox game Minecraft would become a similar measuring stick. Ever since one engineer got the game running on a Game Boy Color, I've found myself wondering 'what's next?'

YouTuber Game of Tobi recently shared their work, and it's a thing of beauty (via RetroDodo). They didn't just want to approximate Minecraft in a 2D environment; they wanted a game that actually looked and felt 3D.

As they point out, the Game Boy Color launched hardware generations before we would get portable tech hardware intended for 3D games. They say, "Honestly, I wasn't sure if it is even possible to have something like this on the Game Boy because it is in 3D, and it is recognisable as a 3D world where you can walk around."

Though it is worth noting that Game of Tobi's port isn't the full Minecraft. You can choose from a couple of worlds, and it doesn't seem to have a health or inventory system. You can also break and place blocks, but it doesn't appear to have mobs or secrets.

Tobi is not done here, though. "Of course, I could just call it a day with all of these features, but let's just be real. I really want to do something with this. So, I also added a Nether, of course. Not a lot of stuff you can do there, but it does work."

With the Game Boy Color's limited controls, it does look a tad awkward to navigate. It seems like the D-pad controls movement, and then you hold another button while pressing the D-pad to look around. This means looking around and moving at the same time seems impossible to do on the 1998 bit of hardware.

If you fancy giving the game a go for yourself, you can download it for free via Game of Tobi's Patreon. The game itself comes in a .gbc file format, so to play it on the original Nintendo hardware, you will need a flash card and a little technical know-how.

Textures are off by default, and Tobi explains this is because it slows the game to a crawl. Rather impressively, at half the speed and in black and white, Tobi's Minecraft ROM even works on the original Game Boy, the Color's 1989 predecessor.

Still, this is one of those experiments that seems to come out of wondering if something can be done, rather than because it offers a better experience. Minecraft runs on both Nintendo Switch consoles, plus the majority of handheld gaming PCs, plus it even runs on phones.

If porting Minecraft becomes anything like modders' fascination with running Doom on random hardware, I'm hopeful we'll see a port to a vape or a charging station by the end of the year.

We included Elden Ring and Armored Core developer FromSoftware among our notable Summer Game Fest no-shows, and that's not technically true anymore: The studio piped up during today's Nintendo Direct to say, "Yeah, Duskbloods network test sometime this summer, I guess."

The Switch 2 exclusive's new trailer is even more cryptic than its first. It's the sort of mood piece that would make more sense as an initial teaser than a follow-up.

We got a few shots of gothic exteriors and stained glass windows, then close-ups of John Bangs (give this fella a haircut!) and some manner of rat man with glowing tattoos (I like the cut of his jib, at least). The narration? You better believe it's ominous and incomprehensible.

FromSoft's playing the hits, Duskbloods is not beating the Bloodborne 2 allegations, and I'm just miffed that this next game from one of my favorite studios is an exclusive (however temporarily) for the Switch 2, a worse handheld PC shackled to Nintendo's domineering software walled garden.

It feels like it's just about that time, you know? "Freaky teaser trailer for FromSoft's next big thing" o'clock. Elden Ring Nightreign certainly isn't getting support, so the studio can spare that manpower. Duskbloods' Nintendo-exclusive, multiplayer nature makes it feel like it can't possibly be FromSoft's next big thing, could it?

I'm still lighting a candle for an Armored Core 6 expansion-sequel in the series tradition, which seems less and less likely with each passing year. If nothing else, at least we have Elden Ring's Tarnished Edition DLC to look forward to. Bandai Namco has yet to reveal a price, but the pack will add two new classes, plus a number of new weapons and armor on August 28.

As strange as it is to say, I often feel like I'm forced to use the Xbox Controller whenever I turn on my Xbox (which is getting rarer and rarer nowadays anyway). It's still a lovely feeling pad, but it genuinely feels like a downgrade when putting down the Victrix Pro BFG Reloaded, Gamesir G7 Pro 8K, or even EasySMX D10, which I usually have to hand for my PC.

I've come to the realisation that, even ignoring the fact that Sony and Microsoft's standard controllers don't have much protection against stick drift, I still wouldn't pick them if I put them head to head against the rest of the controller market.

And yet, they still hog most of the conversation around controllers, and still regularly sit on Amazon's best-selling list. Case in point, two different listings for the Xbox controller(1 and 2) both have Amazon added tags ("Overall Pick" and "Best Seller" as of time of writing), and these serve to place those controllers front and centre to potential buyers. But this preference isn't only a thing on storefronts.

I'm interested in the Steam Controller. I don't really like its polling rate or membrane buttons, but its mouse input is neat, and it comes with drift-resistant sticks, which I'd argue should be almost mandatory for a controller now. But I noticed a common narrative came out during its launch: the belief that it's better than Microsoft and Sony's gamepads. While I think that's debatable, I'm left wondering why we are forced to choose only one of those three.

One post went around a few weeks ago, which now has over one million views and over 8K likes as of the time of writing, that directly compares the Steam Controller to Microsoft, Nintendo, and Sony's offerings. It shows that Valve's new controller has tonnes of features that none of the others do, and it justifies the price. It argues, "If your only argument against the Steam Controller is the price, you're stupid."

And it's easy to see why third-party controllers are often left out of these conversations. For one, as I noted at the start, Microsoft's platform is a finicky beast that only allows controllers to work wirelessly if they use its tech. This is why the GameSir G7 Pro has Xbox wireless versions (like the ZZZ and Wuchang model), which are more expensive. Unlike PC, you can't just grab any old wireless controller and get it working.

But the second, I think, is its history. Growing up, using a non-official controller often meant you were player two. It meant you had to deal with the jammy buttons, sticky bumpers, and weird thumbsticks. Third party meant cheap, both in cash and in feel. And I'm not convinced it has managed to shake that history. I do really like the EasySMX D10, but it being covered with RGB certainly doesn't help it in that regard. The same is true of the D05, which has a flashy gold D-Pad and triggers.

Let's look at raw specs. The Steam Controller for $100 gets you TMR analogue sticks, extra custom buttons, dual trackpads, dual-stage magnetic triggers, gyro support, and a 35-hour battery life with a charging dock. This does beat out the Xbox pad and Sony's DualSense. But the EasySMX D10 gives you TMR sticks, a polling rate that is four times greater, linear Hall effect and non-linear micro switches, extra reprogrammable buttons, and (in my opinion) a nicer dock.

The GameSir G7 Pro offers everything the D10 has, but with a nicer feel and stronger build quality (and it's $20 less than the Steam Controller). Raw stats would matter little if they didn't have feel, but these controllers are great in that regard, too. These, and 8BitDo, all offer genuinely excellent-feeling controllers, equally matching the big dogs of the controller world.

This doesn't immediately make them better than the Steam Controller, but instead makes each choice viable. And that's what people miss when they overlook third-party controllers.

In the weeks since its launch, I've become more and more enamoured with the Steam Controller, and I may pick one up anyway, but that will be at least partially driven by what makes the controller unique, not what makes the controller unique when compared to a limited range.

I like its touchpads and gyro support. I think it seems genuinely pretty neat, and I like its ergonomics too. But its competition is wide, and only getting wider every day. And it especially makes sense to know what's out there when you're spending up to $100 on it. Still, the fact that the controller can sing is kinda cool.

It's hard not to miss times gone by these days, ain't it? For the majority, the stressors of modern life have become so much, so frustrating, so tangible in their presence, it's as if they were solid. Like you could clench them up in your fist and just watch them writhe in front of you as if it was the most normal thing in the world. I think that's partly why we're seeing such a resurgence in such nostaligic design language. And it's something Acemagic is very clearly capitalizing on with the Retro X5.

I mean, we can all see it, right? The X5, it's almost a carbon copy of the NES. Except someone's swapped the ports and the power button around. Oh, and of course, it's a wee bit smaller too. The difference, though, (as you've probably already guessed because this is PC Gamer, not Edge magazine), is that this is a fully fledged SFF gaming PC. And although that doesn't automatically make it the best mini PC at that size, honestly, mild spoilers: it's a bloody good one.

So, if you're like me, bumbling through life as one of the Prime Millennials. Or perhaps a Gen Xer just desperate to relive the relatively stress free pre internet-era on a tiny machine packaged up as a Windows 11 PC (and sadly not a Pop! OS box) strapped up to your 55-inch OLED 4K TV, then the Retro X5 is here for your money. Or at least some of it.

That's my first issue, too. And yeah, I know, it sounds ridiculous, but the cost of this thing has dropped by about $400 since I first said: "yeah, I'll happily take a look at this tiny grey box". You can pick one up for $999 in the US (when it's not sold out), or £889 in the UK (see above) at time of writing. A decent price all-in-all, particularly as it comes with AMD's Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 12-core 24-thread chip, and the full 16 CU Radeon 890M iGPU to back that all up on the graphics front. But… as I said, that's with a $400/£410 price drop compared to its listing price. Man, if I were on that pre-order list prior to that price drop, I'd be seething by a good 29% or so. That's a bad joke. I'm leaving it in.

The good news is that it's actually fairly well equipped, even with the full-fat price tag. Acemagic's packaged this thing up with 32 GB (2x 16 GB) of SODIMM DDR5 clocked at 5,600 MT/s, and you get a relatively healthy 1 TB PCIe 4.0 SSD courtesy of Huawei's eKitStor Xtreme 200E model. It's a bit of a mystery drive that one, too. Not quite a "best SSD" so to speak, and it's not exactly new either, debuting in December of 2024. But we know it's got 232-layer YMTC QLC NAND strapped up in a single-sided design, though the controller is a complete mystery. All I can tell you is it doesn't have a DRAM cache, and that's about it.

And then we get to the port selection, which is honestly impressive. We're talking the whole spread. Peek round the back, and you're graced with twin 2.5 Gb ethernet ports, dual USB 3.2 Gen 1 Type-A ports, one USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-C port, DisplayPort, HDMI, the works.

Flip to the front, though, and that's where the real magic is. Sure, you've got another two USB 3.2 Type-As and an audio out as well (which, unless my eyes are back-to-front, is definitely forward-facing. Acemagic, you might want to tell your spec sheet that). But there's also a full-fat USB4 40 Gbps port on display here, as well.

That's real handy if you're chucking a rapid external SSD dock into this thing to load up your legally acquired ROMs, or you need to plumb in an eGPU to give the X5 a bit of an extra leg up (those are still a thing, right?) It's clean, though, real clean for a small rig like this. Heck, there's even WiFi 7 and Bluetooth 5.4 to round everything out; it's practically modern. And again, all regularly under the one grand mark.

Physically, though, she's a real thing of beauty. Like the Silverstone FLP02 chassis I reviewed recently, it shares the same nostalgic design language. The hard lines, the sleek gloss black pseudo infrared-port detailing, the two-tone grey matte finish. The grooves painstakingly carved out in CAD, no doubt. It encapsulates that late '80s early '90s chic in a way that just feels soothing to look at. It's like I'm almost dreaming, as if I'm about to blow on my Golden Axe cartridge and just while away a summer evening after school pretending I know how to play. Even the packaging is premium on this thing. I dig it, I really do. It's a far cry from Minisforum's AtomMan G1 that I looked at last month, that's for sure, and it'll no doubt age better because of it.

System performance

Cinebench R247-zipThermal performance

Single-core index score

Multi-core index score

Acemagic Retro X5

107

1169

Geekom A9 Max

119

1101

Cinebench R24 Data

Product	Value
Acemagic Retro X5	107 Single-core index score, 1169 Multi-core index score
Geekom A9 Max	119 Single-core index score, 1101 Multi-core index score

Compression (GIPS)

Decompression (GIPS)

Acemagic Retro X5

110.45

131.4

Geekom A9 Max

98.88

130.12

7-zip Data

Product	Value
Acemagic Retro X5	110.45 Compression (GIPS), 131.4 Decompression (GIPS)
Geekom A9 Max	98.88 Compression (GIPS), 130.12 Decompression (GIPS)

Max CPU temp (°C)

Max CPU package power (W)

Acemagic Retro X5

85

69.98

Geekom A9 Max

86

64.98

Thermal performance Data

Product	Value
Acemagic Retro X5	85 Max CPU temp (°C), 69.98 Max CPU package power (W)
Geekom A9 Max	86 Max CPU temp (°C), 64.98 Max CPU package power (W)

The beautiful Acemagic Retro X5 isn't just style over substance, it's engineered to keep the AMD chip inside it cool enough to hit top speeds

Okay, okay, I'll stop. It's just a bloody box, Zak. The performance, though, that's the real challenge, particularly given its size. The good news is it might look like it's 43 years old, but it don't act like it. That Ryzen 9 HX 370 does some serious work in Cinebench with impressive scores both on the single core and multi-core front, and manages to sustain an average frequency of around 3,527 MHz during that 10-minute multi-run, only peaking at 85 degrees on the max temp too. That dubious SSD equally scored a comfortable 2,460 points in 3D Mark as well, which for a drive in use is pretty impressive. It's not Sandisk WD Black SN8100 madness, no, but it's solid for a machine of this size.

Gaming performance

Black Myth Wukong (1080p Medium)Black Myth Wukong | Upscaling (1080p Medium)Cyberpunk 2077 (1080p Medium)Cyberpunk 2077 | Upscaling (1080p Medium)F1 24 (1080p Medium)F1 24 | Upscaling (1080p Medium)Horizon Zero Dawn (1080p Original)Horizon Zero Dawn | Upscaling (1080p Original)Metro Exodus Enhanced (1080p High)3DMark Time Spy3DMark StorageFFXIV Shadowbringers

Avg FPS

1% Low FPS

Acemagic Retro X5

20

16

Geekom A9 Max

9

7

Black Myth Wukong (1080p Medium) Data

Product	Value
Acemagic Retro X5	20 Avg FPS, 16 1% Low FPS
Geekom A9 Max	9 Avg FPS, 7 1% Low FPS

Avg FPS

1% Low FPS

Acemagic Retro X5

30

22

Geekom A9 Max

14

11

Black Myth Wukong | Upscaling (1080p Medium) Data

Product	Value
Acemagic Retro X5	30 Avg FPS, 22 1% Low FPS
Geekom A9 Max	14 Avg FPS, 11 1% Low FPS

Avg FPS

1% Low FPS

Acemagic Retro X5

38

22

Geekom A9 Max

22

15

Cyberpunk 2077 (1080p Medium) Data

Product	Value
Acemagic Retro X5	38 Avg FPS, 22 1% Low FPS
Geekom A9 Max	22 Avg FPS, 15 1% Low FPS

Avg FPS

1% Low FPS

Acemagic Retro X5

52

27

Geekom A9 Max

30

20

Cyberpunk 2077 | Upscaling (1080p Medium) Data

Product	Value
Acemagic Retro X5	52 Avg FPS, 27 1% Low FPS
Geekom A9 Max	30 Avg FPS, 20 1% Low FPS

Avg FPS

1% Low FPS

Acemagic Retro X5

73

59

Geekom A9 Max

30

24

F1 24 (1080p Medium) Data

Product	Value
Acemagic Retro X5	73 Avg FPS, 59 1% Low FPS
Geekom A9 Max	30 Avg FPS, 24 1% Low FPS

Avg FPS

1% Low FPS

Acemagic Retro X5

86

75

Geekom A9 Max

30

26

F1 24 | Upscaling (1080p Medium) Data

Product	Value
Acemagic Retro X5	86 Avg FPS, 75 1% Low FPS
Geekom A9 Max	30 Avg FPS, 26 1% Low FPS

Avg FPS

1% Low FPS

Acemagic Retro X5

43

32

Geekom A9 Max

23

13

Horizon Zero Dawn (1080p Original) Data

Product	Value
Acemagic Retro X5	43 Avg FPS, 32 1% Low FPS
Geekom A9 Max	23 Avg FPS, 13 1% Low FPS

Avg FPS

1% Low FPS

Acemagic Retro X5

63

44

Geekom A9 Max

36

21

Horizon Zero Dawn | Upscaling (1080p Original) Data

Product	Value
Acemagic Retro X5	63 Avg FPS, 44 1% Low FPS
Geekom A9 Max	36 Avg FPS, 21 1% Low FPS

Avg FPS

1% Low FPS

Acemagic Retro X5

23

8

Geekom A9 Max

14

5

Metro Exodus Enhanced (1080p High) Data

Product	Value
Acemagic Retro X5	23 Avg FPS, 8 1% Low FPS
Geekom A9 Max	14 Avg FPS, 5 1% Low FPS

Index score

GPU index score

CPU index score

Acemagic Retro X5

3532

3153

11109

Geekom A9 Max

2301

2035

8948

3DMark Time Spy Data

Product	Value
Acemagic Retro X5	3532 Index score, 3153 GPU index score, 11109 CPU index score
Geekom A9 Max	2301 Index score, 2035 GPU index score, 8948 CPU index score

Index score

Avg bandwidth (MB/s)

Access time (ųs)

Acemagic Retro X5

2460

415.65

72

Geekom A9 Max

1306

226.22

139

3DMark Storage Data

Product	Value
Acemagic Retro X5	2460 Index score, 415.65 Avg bandwidth (MB/s), 72 Access time (ųs)
Geekom A9 Max	1306 Index score, 226.22 Avg bandwidth (MB/s), 139 Access time (ųs)

Acemagic Retro X5

20.45

Geekom A9 Max

38.96

FFXIV Shadowbringers Data

Product	Value
Acemagic Retro X5	20.45
Geekom A9 Max	38.96

Even without upscaling, the Retrox X5 uses the Strix Point integrated GPU to its fullest, delivering impressive 1080p gaming frame rates

The gaming, though? Outstanding, even with a bit of added fan noise. Cyberpunk at 1080p, 38 fps without upscaling, 52 fps with it. Black Myth Wukong managed 20 fps then 30 fps with FSR. F1 24 was even more playable than that at 73 fps without upscaling, and Horizon Zero Dawn cranked out a clean 63 fps with upscaling. All top-tier titles, all look gorgeous, all ran by a tiny box that you could pick up and throw around the room with one hand. If you wanted. I certainly didn't.

I'm not going to spoil things. But I've tested another incredibly similar SFF PC this week from Geekom, very much like the X5. It costs nearly twice as much, and the testing results were, in some cases, almost half what the X5 could manage in-game. That's staggering. I can tell you now, it's entirely due to the memory configuration. That machine's running a single stick of 32GB, but without the bandwidth, it just doesn't perform anywhere near as well in-game with that Radeon chip.

No matter how you look at it, the X5 is just a remarkable piece of engineering. Yeah, its fans are a bit loud, and its pricing structure is a little inconsistent, and availability, understandably, is limited, but what it needs to do, it does well. Tapping into that nostalgic culture as clear as day, without compromising on what counts. The dread is in the room with us, but now it's selling us stuff sugarcoated and gussied up in '80s plastic, while we keep wearing those rose tinted glasses.

I've always loved the clean simplicity and disgusting combo game on offer in the original Super Smash Bros. but it's hard to actually get a game with other humans together in 2026. The same goes for anything that's most easily played on archaic hardware. While several emulators have netplay features, anything requiring twitch reactions tends to feel noticeably better in local multiplayer. But that might be changing—at least for the Nintendo 64.

RMG-K, a fork of the RMG Nintendo 64 emulator, received an update May 14 (via Kotaku) which implemented rollback netcode for the entire emulator, though developer CigNus has noted it's currently limited to two-player sessions. Bluesky user Grasluu00 posted a video of GoldenEye multiplayer using the new feature, saying "Input delay is greatly reduced and desyncs are far more uncommon. This morning we managed to play from Spain to Australia with 4 frames of delay! Before this we had to do 9!!!"

If you're not familiar with rollback netcode or why it causes crowds at fighting game tournaments to erupt into applause when its name is said, it's a miracle of online multiplayer tech that makes fast-paced multiplayer games playable even with rough connections.

While delay-based netcode requires both parties to catch up before button presses are honored on-screen, delay-based netcode makes predictions about what inputs will come next and quickly corrects itself when it's wrong. The result is a degree of responsiveness you just can't get with delay-based play.

Rollback's implementation in RMG-K uses the GekkoNet framework, as creator Heat shared in a post on X. The same framework is being used in a fan project to port the PS2 version of Street Fighter 3: 3rd Strike natively to PC. Programmer NyxTheShield, who worked on rollback for RMG-K, said on X that GekkoNet "did most of the lifting" and adding rollback "was honestly not that hard." I wonder if coders ever lose track of the fact that, from the sidelines, this all sounds like sorcerers discussing magic spells.

While it's hard to say how it feels in any given game—the N64 has lots of multiplayer games—but NyxTheShield posted footage of Smash 64 in action on X and it seems to work well.

It's worth noting that the RMG emulator’s original creator appears to have criticized the RMG-K fork for its use of AI in coding. "RMG-K is insulting, they took RMG's code, vibe coded changes with Claude and then have a donation button in the ReadMe of the project," developer Rosalie241 said yesterday on Reddit (while I can’t strictly verify that this is the same Rosalie who created the emulator, the account is five years old). "As someone who has spent years making RMG the way it is without any LLM assistance, seeing these vibe coded forks pop up is just depressing and just sad."

Coders involved with the project like NyxTheShield and CigNus have referenced their usage of AI in the past on social media, with Nyx stating on X that this rollback feature was implemented with using Codex as "an automation/helper … like in every workspace on the planet."

With the power of Linux installed on a Nintendo Switch, and open-source firmware called Klipper, YouTuber Cocoanix has figured out a way to speed up their 3D printing by 1000%. A model that usually takes 90 minutes to print took a mere eight in their latest video.

As spotted by Hackaday, Cocoanix didn't technically need to use a Nintendo Switch. They simply needed some sort of device to run Klipper through and offload some of the 3D printers' work. Cocoanix even argues "for most people, a Raspberry Pi is a better choice".

Klipper is an interesting bit of firmware. Where standard 3D printing firmware like Marlin runs on the 3D printer's microcontroller, Klipper is designed to let you offload that work onto a separate device. As Cocoanix puts it, Marlin is "a bit like asking a calculator to run a spreadsheet".

In this case, the Switch can handle the math and G-code processing, sending precise instructions to the printer in real time, and this not only improves speed but quality too. "The result is a cleaner, faster print with less ringing and ghosting"

Another benefit of Klipper is that it makes it easier to adjust code and edit files on the fly; you don't need to recompile firmware or save and restart. Using Linux on the Switch, they connected the handheld to the 3D printer, found its unique serial ID, connected the two devices, and "then I started pushing the printer to find its limits".

Those limits were 400 mm/s at 17,000 mm/s² of acceleration. Cocoanix say this is very impressive for the hardware, and a test print was only held back by the lack of better cooling and a stock hotend and extruder in the 3D printer.

Cocoanix argues that "Klipper is one of the best things you can do for an old printer" and they note "it's free, it's powerful, and apparently you can run it on a gaming handheld".

It's just a shame that upgrading to a Nintendo Switch 2 wouldn't get you shinier 3D printed models—Gotta use that ray tracing-capable chip for something.

If you've been keeping up with the retro console gaming scene, you know that it's a great time to play some golden oldies on your PC—and I'm not talking about emulation. Recompiled unofficial ports of games like Banjo-Kazooie, Super Mario 64, and the Jak & Daxter trilogy are the talk of the town, and yesterday a beloved Zelda game got the native port treatment: Twilight Princess.

This might sound familiar if you caught the showcase for Twilight Princess: Courage Reborn we shared recently, but this is actually a different project called Dusk. The basics will be familiar if you've toyed around with any of these ports before: you need to bring your own game files from either the NTSC or PAL releases of the GameCube version, but plug those in and you're off to the races.

It boasts an impressive feature list, especially given that it also supports iOS, Android, macOS, and Linux for you Steam Deck sickos out there. Dusk supports higher framerates, mouse or gyro aiming, custom models and texture packs, and features that came in with the WiiU version like Mirror Mode⁠—also known as "the original Wii port."

The trailer also shows off a huge list of gameplay settings to tweak—everything from quality-of-life options like instant text and autosaves to a damage multiplier in case you want to make the game absurdly hard. At the end of the trailer there's a tease for a randomizer mode, so I'm sure we're in for some silly stream highlights soon enough.

"When we started the Twilight Princess decompilation project in August 2020, it was hard to imagine it would ever be finished, much less to see it used for a project like this," reads a release blog from the Dusk team. "Years and years of effort have been poured into the decompilation by contributors all over the world, resulting in the largest decompilation project ever completed."

I'm going to let them fight it out with the Open GOAL people who ported the entire Jak & Daxter series to PC on that last claim, but it's no skin off my back. It's nice to think about a future where a bunch of retro classics have native PC ports complete with dedicated modding scenes and a team of volunteers actively adding new features, and it's no surprise that Zelda was early to the party and continues to be the life of it.

The action-adventure series was inspiring efforts like this all the way back in 1999, when a hobby programmer tried to bring the pioneering NES game to PC with all-original code. It's a pretty great story!

Nintendo has decided to increase the price of the Switch 2. After suggesting it was keeping a close eye on the tumultuous market, Nintendo is increasing the price of the popular handheld device by $50 in the US, starting September 1, 2026.

The price increase and when it is in effect is different between regions, so here's a quick breakdown:

"This is in response to various changes in market conditions, which are expected to extend over the medium to long term," Nintendo of America says.

It's the long-term bit that worries me. Prices often go up, they don't often come back down again, and the the memory crisis—one of the prevailing issues facing hardware manufacturers today—is not expected to wind-down until 2027, if not later.

The price of the original Nintendo Switch is not changing in the United States, Canada or Europe. While Latin America is yet to hear of a price hike, Nintendo has noted one is coming at a later date.

This announcement comes only a couple days after a report that Nintendo investors were unhappy with the price of the console.

Yep, that's an earlier and larger increase for Nintendo's home market of Japan. The Japanese market is also braced for impact earlier than everyone else. Furthermore, Japan is the only market noted by Nintendo to receive a price hike for the original Switch, Switch OLED, and Switch Lite. These are going up at a similar rate to the Switch 2—roughly ¥10,000, give or take.

Japanese customers will also have to pay more for Nintendo Switch Online services and Nintendo's playing cards, which is what the company first began making in 1889.

"In light of changes in market conditions, and after considering the global business outlook, Nintendo will revise the manufacturer’s suggested retail prices (MSRP) of the Nintendo Switch 2 system and Nintendo Switch systems in Japan," a press release says.

"We sincerely apologize for the impact these price revisions may have on our customers and other stakeholders, and we deeply appreciate your understanding."

The current price of the Switch 2 in Japan works out to around $320/€270. Even with a price hike, it's still a comparably cheaper device on home turf. But there is a wider economic picture here: the Yen has seen a decreasing purchasing power in recent years.

Nintendo joins Sony and Microsoft in hiking the price of current generation consoles. All three blame the wider economic environment, which is in part caused by spiking memory costs, but also worsened by the war in Iran. This has a knock-on effect on energy costs and access to supplies. PC gaming isn't immune, either. The Steam Machine is inevitably going to cost more than originally planned and RAM costs are through the roof—but you probably know that already.

The Nintendo Switch 2 felt quite pricey at launch, what with its $450 price tag and all. However, the memory crisis has hit everyone, and the Japanese company is feeling pressure to raise its prices.

This is all according to a recent report from Bloomberg. It notes that Nintendo's stock price has been on a decline, and hardware insecurity around both the memory crisis and outbreak of war in Iran has only made that worse.

Bloomberg notes that Nintendo investors are concerned its launch price of $450 is "deeply unprofitable".

Hideki Yasuda, an analyst at Toyo Research Advice, tells Bloomberg that the stock will continue to decline unless Nintendo ups its prices. As of right now, a $50-$100 price increase seems the most likely, according to Bloomberg, but Yasuda thinks this is still not enough to make the console profitable.

However, companies don't tend to make their profits on consoles. The first Switch model did manage to break even, but it's a bit of an anomaly in that sense. The likes of Nintendo have control over its own storefront and will take a portion of sales from software. With hits like Pokémon Pokopia back in March, the Switch 2 is simply the price of entry to play the game.

Not everyone agrees that a price hike is the right call, though. As reported by Bloomberg, Michael Pachter, an analyst at Wedbush Securities, says, "I think they would be foolish to raise prices".

As we reported earlier this year, Nintendo has been "carefully considering the situation" around the memory crisis and has been thinking about a price hike for a while. With Nintendo due to announce its earnings this Friday, all eyes are on that meeting.

I personally have been using my Switch 2 for almost a year now, and I still regularly turn the device on, but even $450 felt a bit much for me at launch. Paying $500-$550 for a comparably underpowered Nintendo console without any bundled games is a tough sell, no matter how much you want the next Mario game.

Have you ever heard of whale falls? The skinny is that when whales die, their carcasses are so packed with nutrients they essentially become miniature ecosystems when they hit the sea floor. Species of all sorts show up from near and far to make good of the leftovers. It's even thought that there are underwater species with specialized "equipment" to better take advantage of a whale fall. A worm called the bone-eating snot flower, for instance, might find the extent of its entire world bottled within a single rack of whale bones, fueling its every last wormy thought in a paradise we'd be tempted to call lifeless if we ever saw it.

If it had arms and a bigger brain and a taste for noscopes, I think the bone-eating snot flower would be a PC gamer. Although games are often considered disposable pop culture, we have a tendency to make incredible and enduring use of the bones—modding, private servers, custom games, and so on. Warcraft 3 was so nutrient-rich modders digested it and spit out DotA and hundreds of other new ideas.

In 1999 a hobby programmer called Phantom Menace began work on a custom replica of the NES's The Legend of Zelda for PC. What started as a makeshift take on one of the most celebrated games of all time eventually became a whale fall among whale falls, as the unlicensed port-of-sorts became the ultimate Zelda fangame engine and a superlatively accessible tool for amateur gamedev in its own right. Over 26 years later, ZQuest Classic's custom "quest editor" has kept generation after generation of Zelda fan creators fed.

Make somethin' will ya!

Renamed from Zelda Classic to distance the project from the big, litigious elephant in the room, the open source engine's development is currently shepherded by volunteers Connor Clark and Emily Venezia, who are in turn assisted by community contributors and testers. They both cultivated an interest in the project as kids after discovering the Zelda PC port practically had no barrier to entry.

"It is a very simple and classic style. You go to other game engines, like, sure, Godot is nice and easy to use. But you're not moving your character around the screen without writing your own character controller script," Venezia said. "ZQuest? You enter. You go. You maybe toggle some check boxes to change how some settings work, maybe tweak a couple numbers, but for the most part you don't need any coding knowledge yourself. You can just go."

Venezia reckons ZQuest belongs on a tier of its own between simple level editors or game-tools like Mario Maker and off-the-shelf game engines. While it's been used to make everything from a facsimile of Tetris to a Mega Man-inspired platformer, it's mostly easy to use because it's specialized for making a very particular kind of game: what you might affectionately call "clones" of 2D Zeldas.

"If you just want to make a Zelda game, as far as I know, this has been the simplest way to try to get something on the screen as fast as possible. I don't know if it's always been the best, or if it is the best these days, but it's definitely been something that anyone, even a 12-year-old kid, could boot up and click a few buttons and get someone else playing a game that they made," Clark said.

The same way you might play Dragon Quest and rush to assemble a tribute in RPG Maker, players have been making their own old-school adventures in ZQuest for decades. The results range from the quaint to the damn near authentic, and the cream of the crop is collected on a database-slash-forum called PureZC. It's a visually lean, community-driven treasure trove the likes of which I didn't think existed on the internet anymore. Custom games, all of which are called "quests" and disseminated as .qst files to be plugged into ZQuest, are split up into a few genres: Metroidvania, NES-style, dungeon romper, randomizer, and so on.

Like Venezia and Clark said, you can go a long way without writing so much as a line of code (though the option is there, should you opt to push the engine beyond its normal scope using the ZScript language). A fan favorite metroidvania quest from 2024, The Deep, features puzzles that incorporate shadows and fog, conveyor belts, a hookshot like you might remember from A Link to the Past, and all sorts of other novelties.

It's easy to see how it took home the gold in a community contest, but all the more intriguing when you learn it did so in a "non-scripted bracket" and was built in just over three weeks. Bigger, multi-year endeavors like Lost Isle and The Hero of Dreams are lengthy and fully-featured games in their own right—projects that, if you squint, look and feel remarkably like unreleased Game Boy Advance games. While the quests are diverse, numbering over a thousand, reverence for the 40-year-old Nintendo series is the one thing that makes it all cohere.

Quest of the Best

Check out some prominent custom creations, from NES love letters to the gleefully anachronistic.

Quest developer Eddy Oliveira, for instance, discovered the engine at just 10 years old. He published his first adventure in 2009, fueled by a desire to translate dungeons he'd drawn on paper into something playable. While "they started out kind of shoddy," he went on to become, as engine developer Clark reckons, the most prolific developer in the entire community with over 20 quests to his name. That Mega Man tribute I mentioned earlier? That's Eddy's doing.

"I certainly made a ton during my school and university days. The only person I know of that could compete with that is my brother," Oliveira said, though he added "it was never really a goal" to make so many; he was urged on by positive reactions to his projects, emboldened by a sense of belonging he found in the community.

"They are very much driven by passion," he said. "They all have the one common interest of being Zelda fans and I think that's what makes the community a very strong one, even if it isn't too big. Very lovely people, extremely helpful, and it absolutely feels like my primary internet home."

A link to tomorrow

Venezia and Clark have a yin-yangish relationship that keeps development moving at a steady pace. Clark is, as Velenzia described, "the glue holding everything together" and has helped the project stick to its ambition that any .qst file be able to run on the newest version of ZQuest. Since joining the project in 2022 he's led a massive rewrite of the engine, helped bring it to Mac and Linux, and added a "replay system" that lets the team preview the impact of changes on old quests without having to check them all manually. It "lets us be serious about compatibility," he said.

Venezia, on the other hand, is a self-described "mad scientist" who wakes up with new, wild ambitions for the engine on any given morning—when Clark is ready to start winding down on new features and get a patch ready to ship, Venezia is eager to bump the sprite limit or maximum number of items just that little bit more. She's been on ZQuest twice as long as Clark, having taught herself how it all works in college after picking up the project from an "MIA" former lead; if she hadn't, she thinks there's "a very high likelihood this program would have probably died."

The current incarnation, 2.55, has been out since September 2024, and the two main developers have their heads down as they prepare to deliver a sizable 3.0 overhaul. The patch will add "scrolling regions," allowing for larger interconnected play areas (a pet project of Clark's that took two-and-a-half years to build), a built-in ZScript debugger, and a laundry list of fixes and stability improvements. Beyond that, they have ambitions to implement a new original tileset so developers have swathes of copyright-free pixel art to assemble their creations with. It's an addition that further helps the project stand on its own.

As for what keeps them committed to so much legwork all these years later, Venezia had an answer that reminded me of Oliveira's response to the very same question.

"Watching other people go, 'Oh my God, look at this cool thing I did!' That's the fuel. That is absolutely the fuel," Venezia said. "When I see people go out and use all those cool new features I added to do super cool puzzles and stuff, it's like, aw man. That's all I need."

British studio Argonaut Games made a bunch of memorable games in the '90s and early 2000s, chief among them the original Star Fox, a Super Nintendo game based on The Ren & Stimpy Show and—who can forget—Croc. It was thanks to the latter that Argonaut Games was reopened in 2024 after a 17 year absence by its founder Jez San, resulting in a remaster of the 1997 3D platformer Croc Legend of the Gobbos. People seem to like it.

Croc is pretty iconic: if you were alive in the '90s and vaguely interested in videogames you'll recognise his whimsical green snout and oddly plaintive eyes immediately. The same cannot be said however, for Buck Bumble. He was the star of a 1998 Nintendo 64 third-person shooter that I had completely forgotten about until, oh, about 45 minutes ago.

A cyborg bumblebee, Buck Bumble was tasked with eliminating evil in an unfortunately-not-very-true-to-life imagining of London life in 2010. It kinda looks like it could have been Argonaut's pitch for a Star Fox game: it's an airborne shooter with a kinda cutesy art style, and a then-typical abundance of collectibles in a series of freeranging fog-smattered levels.

I do faintly remember being interested in playing Buck Bumble despite the middling contemporary reviews, but I never did. Thankfully, it looks like the revitalisation we were vaguely promised last year is actually coming to fruition.

"Right about now Buck Bumble is officially your new wholesome 4/20 mascot, and we will not be taking further questions ...at this time," the official Argonaut Games Bluesky account posted. "But stay tuned and BEE sure to follow us for forthcoming news and announcements!"

Right about now Buck Bumble is officially your new wholesome 4/20 mascot, and we will not be taking further questions ...at this time. But stay tuned and BEE sure to follow us for forthcoming news and announcements! 👀🐝 #BuckBumble

— @argonautgames.com (@argonautgames.com.bsky.social) 2026-04-21T08:20:48.083Z

I wonder what that could mean? Well, the accompanying video, which you can see in the embed above, does rock a very hi-res Buck Bumble, and a newly hi-res Buck Bumble logo. I would hazard a guess they're going to remaster that baggy 'ol 1998 shooter which, despite possibly not being groundbreaking, is a win for game preservation at the very least.

Seemingly driven by a dose of playful spite and curiosity, one developer has managed to successfully port macOS to a Nintendo Wii, partly because one person said it was impossible.

To take you back to the start of this story. Five years ago, when asked if one could get macOS on a Wii or Gamecube without virtualisation, one Redditor said, "There is a zero percent chance of this ever happening. If you truly understand the hardware-specific nature of OS X [now macOS] and the fact that the Wii does NOT actually use the same CPU, let alone GPU, you'll realise this."

That same user continued to double down, saying, "Go ahead and downvote me. I am correct on every single thing I said, especially about the CPU. That's a custom CPU and GPU in the Wii, and there are no published documents about them."

Developer, Bryan Keller, felt 'encouraged' by this and took this chance to prove that one guy wrong for that thing they said half a decade ago. They note that the Wii uses a PowerPC 750CL processor, which is an evolution of the chip used in some G3 iBooks and G3 iMacs, so "I felt confident that the CPU wouldn’t be a blocker."

The memory, on the other hand, is a bit unique. The Wii uses 88 MB total, which is 40 MB less than the 128 MB of RAM that Mac OS X 10 officially calls for. Luckily, it will run with 64 MB, so memory proved to not be a problem either.

In order to actually get the software to run on the device, Keller wrote their own bootloader, loaded the kernel from an SD card, and created a device tree to pick up on all those bits of hardware, which it would then pass control to the kernel. Effectively, this bootloader serves as a bridge between the Wii hardware and the operating system.

Keller isn't nearly done here, though. To get macOS running on the Wii, they also had to write their own drivers. Instead of using PCI to connect to various part of the system, the Wii uses a custom system-on-a-chip (SoC) called Hollywood, so Keller wrote a Hollywood driver, as well as an SD Card driver, Framebuffer driver, and they even managed to get help from a stranger on old messaging service Internet Relay Chat (IRC) for a patch to get their mouse and keyboard working on the Wii.

Once this was all done, they managed to finally boot the OS on the ageing Nintendo hardware. What they'll do with it from here is anyone's guess, but it's an accomplishment nonetheless.

Keller says, "There’s something deeply satisfying about accomplishing something that, at the start, you weren’t even sure was possible."

In fairness, they did reportedly have the idea to do this back in 2013, but if one Redditor declaring it's impossible has helped them to 'do the impossible', that seems like a good outcome of a throwaway comment made five years ago.

"In the end, I learned (and accomplished) far more than I ever expected—and perhaps more importantly, I was reminded that the projects that seem just out of reach are exactly the ones worth pursuing."

An easy way to feel insecure as a Pokopia player is to just hop onto Reddit and see all the spectacular creations other players are cooking up. There are some seriously impressive builds to be seen, like Resident Evil 2's RPD.

My favourite so far is a Cyberpunk underground city by Pokopia player No-Communication7040. Heading into an elevator, the doors suddenly open to reveal a huge underground Cyberpunk dystopia. Complete with neon lights and TV screens everywhere, you could fool me that I was actually stepping into Night City or even perhaps Sanabi as another player suggested.

Pokopia Cyberpunk Underground City from r/Pokopia

Creations like this make me wonder if there's actually some secret creative mode in Pokopia, but in reality it's just hard work and having the help of Magnemite's Magnet Rise ability. No-Communication7040 revealed that they've spent 260 hours so far in Pokopia, since the game's launch on March 5.

One equally impressed onlooker figured out that this means No-Communication7040 has spent almost "the same amount of time inside the game as outside" and that if you add in eight hours for sleeping and two hours for eating each day that just leaves a total of 48 hours to do anything else, not a lot of time.

Others are just plain confused how this is even possible for one player to create: "This game has me convinced I'm one of the least creative people on the planet". While another player simply says: "I swear to god you people aren’t human! This is absurd even if it ends just beyond what we see in the video." For context, I've only just tidied up Bleak Beach and am currently up to my neck in volcanic ash, god help me.

Meanwhile, another Pokopia player managed to turn Rocky Ridges into the Raccoon City, including the Raccoon City Police department, complete with a sleeping Machamp who's passed out in the corner of the building.

There seems to be no limit to how creative you can be in Pokopia, and as time passes players will only create bigger and better builds. You could probably recreate Stardew Valley's Pelican Town pretty easily in the Withered Wasteland or maybe even Delfino Plaza from Mario Sunshine in Bleak Beach, although I'll leave that task to a more skilled player than myself.

As the saying goes, records were made to be broken—and that's especially true if you invent a bunch of records just so you can say they've been broken.

The Super Mario Galaxy Movie came out last week and, despite it kinda sucking, predictably had a monster of a weekend at the box office. But after reading a bunch of stories breathlessly reporting that The Super Mario Galaxy Movie broke records on its opening weekend, I'm questioning exactly what records it broke and if they should even be considered records. According to articles from around the internet, The Super Mario Galaxy Movie had:

• The biggest global opening of 2026 to date
• The biggest domestic opening of 2026 to date
• The biggest MPA international opening of 2026 to date

Yes, TSMGM had a genuinely massive weekend (which began on Wednesday because that's when movie studios pretend the weekend begins so they can claim they had massive weekends). It made $372,487,455 worldwide ($190 million domestic and $182 million worldwide). That's fantastic. That almost matches the $377.5 million The Super Mario Bros. Movie made its first weekend in 2023—on its way to grossing over $1 billion.

That's inarguably a huge opening, biggest of the year, but just to point out the obvious: it's April. It's the beginning of April, even, and no one releases anything in January or February. Apart from Project Hail Mary in March (which made $141 million in its first weekend), there haven't been a lot of big movies to outperform for this "record." What did it really beat? Wuthering Heights? Scream 7? Another damn Avatar? Whatever the hell Hoppers is? Melania?

It's April. I have no doubt Galaxy is going to be one of the biggest movies of the year, but 2026 hasn't really started yet. Coming up this year we've still got Avengers: Doomsday, Toy Story 5, The Odyssey, Disney's live-action Moana, Spielberg's return to making alien movies, and another damn Spider-Man. Galaxy crushed it, no doubt. But it's April. Calm down.

I also read that SMGM is:

• The only animated franchise with two titles opening over $350M globally
• The only animated franchise to have two titles open over $170M internationally

Yeah, more impressive money stuff, but here you're just throwing the dart first and then drawing the bullseye around wherever it lands.

First, you don't need to differentiate between animated films and live-action films anymore—animation is perfectly mainstream these days—unless you're trying to exclude a whole bunch of live-action films so your invented record looks more impressive. Cut out Spider-Man movies, Avengers movies, The Fast & Furious franchise, Disney live-action remakes, and look who is left all alone on the podium: It's a-me, Mario! (Or as Chris Pratt would say: "It is me. I am Mario. Wa. Hoo.")

Second, unless you say beforehand that $350 million and $170 million are specific milestones, they just feel arbitrary as records. If Usain Bolt doesn't finish a 200 meter dash, you don't give him a medal for running the first 170 meters, right?

• The biggest Wednesday in April ever

There we go! That is simple, and true, and worth pointing out. Galaxy made $34 million on its first Wednesday in April, compared to the next best, which was $31 million for the 2023 Mario movie. A legit record. Good job!

But then we start getting really in the weeds:

• The second biggest three-day animated domestic opening for Universal
• The fourth biggest five-day domestic opening ever
• The fourth biggest three-day Easter weekend
• The third biggest three-day domestic opening for video game adaptation
• The fourth animated franchise with two titles opening over $100M over three days

OK, what are we doing here? Is the weekend three days or five days? Why not throw in a couple two-day and one-day weekends, too? And how many caveats should records have? "If you count two titles but exclude live-action and only count three days instead of five, it's only the fourth time it's ever happened!" Wow, you don't say.

The Super Mario Galaxy Movie had a massive opening weekend and is easily going to make a billion dollars. That's a reward in itself: there's no need to invent a bunch of extra ones.

Hot on the heels of fan-made PC port Jak 3, The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess will soon have a playable PC release of its own. As with previous ports of Nintendo classics like The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time and Star Fox 64, the Twilight Princess port is based on a decompilation of the original game code—a painstaking reverse-engineering process that results in completely rewritten code that can run natively on PC.

While Twilight Princess's decompilation was complete in late 2025, it's still a lot of work to turn that code into a playable PC port, complete with support for higher resolutions, framerates, and so on. The volunteer developers behind Twilight Princess: Courage Reborn, as the project is named, showed off their latest project in a video on Monday.

The adventure game's long introductory segment which plays out in Link's home village seems to be working quite well and is "completely crashless" according to the video, which offers a few nice details:

• Native 60 fps support
• Mac and Linux support in addition to Windows
• Mouse/keyboard input in addition to controllers
• The main menu will be modified to offer graphics options, which will also be available in-game

"The main goal is to get to open source now," says the video in closing. Currently development is contained to the project's Discord server, but as it approaches a beta-level release in the months to come you can expect to see it pop up on Github.

As with prior fan-made decompiled PC ports, Twilight Princess: Courage Reborn does not actually contain any of Nintendo's proprietary assets. The code itself is distinct, and players have to provide their own copy of the original game—ripped from a GameCube disc—to supply the port's executable with all the art and sound assets for that code to bring to life.

Usually I don't expect to see mods for a new PC game until it's actually, you know, out, but thanks to a long history of console romhacking and the Zelda series' diehard fandom, there are already mods in the works for Courage Reborn pre-release. In a real "Nintendon't" move, Link's counterpart Linkle looks like she'll be playable as soon as the Twilight Princess PC port arrives.

Norman Caruso, better known online as The Gaming Historian, has spent the last decade and a half making Ken Burns-style documentary videos for his YouTube audience; he currently has over 1 million subscribers. He's covered everything from a TV with a Super Famicom built into it to the Sega Mega Modem. But now he's calling it quits.

A video went up on Caruso's channel today titled "Thanks for Watching," and he promises there's "nothing dramatic" behind his decision—he just got burnt out after making his most ambitious video yet covering The Oregon Trail, and in the two years since it released, he hasn't wanted to make more.

"I assumed that after a few months, I'd get the itch again and make a new video," Caruso said in the video. "To my surprise, that itch to make a new video never really came back. I definitely tried to make something else. I even announced it on social media. But my heart just wasn't in it, and I knew that if I ever finished that video the quality would suffer. That's when it finally clicked: I was ready to move on from The Gaming Historian."

Moving forward, Caruso will focus on the history podcast he hosts alongside his wife Kristin. But even though he's putting his YouTube channel behind him, he unveiled one last treat for fans: a shedload of court documents he scanned for a video he no longer plans to make.

The documents cover a legal case from 1982 where Universal Studios alleged the game Donkey Kong was a trademark infringement of King Kong. Caruso discussed the case briefly in his video on how various Mario characters got their names, and in that he showed off a court document which lists several other names that were considered for Donkey Kong during development of the arcade game—among them are Bill Kong, Kong Holiday, and Kong Chase. I tell you that because I think we'll agree that Kong Holiday is a much better name.

For more trivia nuggets like that, you can view the documents Caruso uploaded to the Internet Archive. He said he also provided the files to the Video Game History Foundation in his video. "Making the Gaming Historian was truly a life-changing experience," he said. "I will always cherish that chapter of my life."

The Super Mario Galaxy movie released to some shaky reviews; most critics have slammed the sequel for "having no centre", being only "a series of large, vaguely connected explosions", and simply "a way of gouging cash out of families."

But all the awful reviews of the sequel aside, CEO of Illumination Chris Meledandri is still gushing about the movie's somewhat invisible successes, and how great it was working with Nintendo and director Shigeru Miyamoto during an interview with Cherry the Geek TV: "The secret is being able to bring Miyamoto and the team into the center of the process." (via GamesRadar).

"And I'm not just complimenting Miyamoto because he's standing here," Meledandri adds. "Part of me doesn't want to give away this secret because it's like having the secret to Coca-Cola and then giving it away. The secret actually is the inclusion of Miyamoto and the Nintendo artists in the center of the filmmaking process."

I'm not sure working with the original creators on an adaptation means it'll be better is much of a secret. In fact, I'd go as far as to say that any adaptation, whether it be film or TV, should always include some sort of expertise from the source material. But then again the Super Mario movies do tread new ground for Illumination.

"It's not something that we had ever done at Illumination," Meledandri says. "You know, we had made 10 movies at Illumination. We had made all of them completely inside the studio. So, this was the first time that we were going to work in a new way." Past movies include Despicable Me, The Secret Life of Pets, and Sing, all of which didn't have original source material to look back on.

The Super Mario Galaxy movie, like its predecessor, may not have done well initially, but that doesn't mean it won't break any records in the following weekends. The first Mario movie had an equally shaky start but then went on to earn over $1 billion worldwide, so it certainly wouldn't be surprising to see its sequel reach those heights, despite all the bad reviews.

Amidst its ongoing Japanese patent lawsuit against Palworld developer Pocketpair, Nintendo thoroughly stirred the legal pot on this side of the Pacific when news broke in September 2025 that the United States Patent and Trademark Office had granted the publisher US patent 12,403,397—a patent describing a system for battling summoned characters.

Despite concerns about how such patents could be weaponized, the USPTO approved the '397 patent with shockingly little pushback, drawing outcry from both players and legal experts—experts like videogame patent lawyer Kirk Sigmon, who called the patent's approval "an embarrassing failure of the US patent system." The USPTO now seems to agree, as it issued a nonfinal decision last week rejecting all of the '397 patent's claims, effectively declaring its intent to revoke the patent (via GamesFray). Nintendo will, however, be able to argue against the decision.

Before I continue, we should clarify the scope of Nintendo's '397 patent, which has been a common source of confusion. To be clear: Nintendo did not apply for and does not possess a patent on the general concept of battling summoned monsters. Patents are intended to protect original, unique inventions that would be non-obvious for practitioners of the associated art. In other words, an invention isn't patentable if it's overly broad or similar to existing works.

Even Nintendo's terrifying legal apparatus can't obtain a patent on an idea as broad as battling summoned characters. The concept of commanding creatures to fight would have been as unpatentable when Pokémon first released in 1996 as it is today, because patents don't protect concepts themselves. They protect clearly defined processes, designs, and applications. To meet that criteria, videogame patents like Nintendo's '397 patent are—by necessity—limited in scope to extremely specific mechanical implementations.

In Nintendo's case, its '397 patent claims the invention of a unique, hyperspecific system of sub-character battling mechanics: one in which a movable player character can be directed with an input to summon a sub-character at a designated location, where it will either enter a battle mode if an enemy character is present or begin automatic movement, during which the player can perform a second input to cause the sub-character to move to another designated location where, if an enemy character is present, the sub-character will enter and complete an automated battle.

And that's just how the claims are summarized in the patent abstract; they get even more granular. But as specific as those claims are, USPTO examiners are now saying the patent shouldn't have been granted in the first place.

Just weeks after Nintendo was granted the '397 patent, USPTO Director John A. Squires issued an order for an ex parte reexamination (EPR) of the patent, meaning a USPTO examiner would reevaluate whether the patent should have been granted to begin with. It was a noteworthy order, because unlike most EPRs that are initiated in response to requests from external parties, the '397 patent's reexamination was ordered under the USPTO Director's own initiative, indicating the case was now the subject of intensive USPTO scrutiny. (Better late than never, I suppose.)

After reevaluating Nintendo's claims in comparison with preexisting patents and videogames, the USPTO examiner's decision rejected all 26 of the '397 patent's claims, concluding that they bear too many similarities to prior art for the system they describe to be considered patentably non-obvious.

While the list of references cited in the examiner's decision delightfully includes both World of Warcraft fan wiki pages and Reddit threads about RPG autobattle mechanics, the USPTO's rejection relies primarily on a set of four preexisting videogame patent applications describing systems resembling those in the '397 patent. One of those patent applications was filed by Konami, another by Bandai Namco; the remaining two, however, are Nintendo's own prior patent applications, one of which features in all 26 arguments the examiner constructed to reject each of the '397 patent's claims.

As a US authority, the USPTO's decision has no direct bearing on Nintendo's Japanese patents or its ongoing Palworld lawsuit. Additionally, the USPTO's decision is nonfinal, and Nintendo has two months to respond with its own counterargument—a timeframe that can be extended at Nintendo's request—before the USPTO issues its final decision.

And even if the USPTO ultimately decides to revoke the '397 patent, Nintendo can pursue an appeal with the Federal Circuit. As should be clear by now, quick resolutions aren't often compatible with patent law.

I haven't seen the Super Mario Galaxy Movie and I won't because I'm an adult. But reviews were published earlier today, and it's difficult not to be curious about how the latest big game-to-film adaptation is faring. The short answer is: not very well.

The most impactful belongs to The Guardian, whose one-star review is scathing. "It’s now commonplace to compare programmatic stuff like this to AI, but this is almost a second evolutionary step downwards," writes Peter Bradshaw. "It looks as if humans, using AI, have tried to copy something that was originally AI generated, creating a bland, simplistic template that can be sold in all global territories where it can be dubbed by local voice talent. It’s certainly a way of gouging cash out of families for the Easter holidays."

The New York Times' critic detects a "flat empty nothingness" in the film, while Variety's Owen Gleiberman argues basically the same, but in different words: "Not a single one of these characters, including Mario and Luigi, occupies the center of The Super Mario Galaxy Movie. And that’s because the movie has no center."

The Times' Kevin Maher put his disenchantment very succinctly: "The film is torturous to sit through and, for me, provoked periods of actual physical discomfort."

Super Mario Galaxy Movie was clearly made to generate lots of revenue rather than enrich the interior lives of its impressionable young viewers, many of whom have media diets consisting almost entirely of soul-destroying vertical video slop. Unfortunately, this visit to the cinema won't offer much relief from their relentless exposure to meaninglessness, as the Independent's précis makes abundantly clear: "It’s a series of large, vaguely connected explosions."

Does anyone like the new Mario movie? Even the most positive reviews seem slightly icked about not trouncing it. "If 2023's The Super Mario Movie is the cinematic equivalent of World 1-1 – a safe, frictionless big-screen beginning for Nintendo's iconic mascot, The Super Mario Galaxy Movie does at least expand on a promising start with a starry sequel that sporadically lives up to the Galaxy moniker," Gamesradar's critic writes.

Meanwhile the Boston Globe confers a generous two stars while admitting that you'll probably never want to watch it again. "This is yet another big screen rehash of the Nintendo classics that will make you want to go play the games rather than watch this movie again."

A consistent point among the more positive reviews is that the movie does, at least, keep one occupied for the duration. "The movie’s speedy plot and 98-minute run time help keep boredom at bay," Polygon writes, while IGN's 6/10 review concedes that its viewers may enjoy the easter eggs and "wall-to-wall references".

Look, no amount of positivity is going to make me want to watch this churn. But if you happen to watch it, and want to get its horrible sugary aftertaste out of your mouth, may I recommend to you this nine-hour documentary about the slow decline of a Chinese industrial district.

It's important to get out of the way early on that there's still a lot we don't know about Microsoft's Project Helix— including how it will implement even the elements we do know about.

We know that Project Helix is designed to play Xbox and PC games, and it could bridge the gap between a Windows PC and a traditional Xbox. This means it will likely give more creative freedom than the likes of the Xbox Series X, and theoretically gives players more ways to play.

And, in a sense, one could argue that the Sony PlayStation 6 and whatever Nintendo does next is less its competition than the likes of the Steam Machine or prebuilt gaming PCs. On one hand, this seems like it could be a decent device. On the other hand, it feels like just another nail in the coffin that Xbox has been slowly dropping into the freshly dug earth that is Xbox Play Anywhere, a lack of exclusives, and a struggling USP.

Microsoft has a few things in its favour when it comes to making a kind of PC / kind of Xbox experience. Xbox consoles have traditionally been loss leaders, because Microsoft can make its cash back on software licence fees and extra hardware like peripherals. Someone building you a PC will not get a cut of whatever Steam makes, so they need to profit from selling the device. So, Project Helix could theoretically offer a PC-like experience, perhaps with some built-in Xbox branding and Xbox store incentives, and for cheaper than the competition.

Project Helix appears to have a tentative release date of late 2027, with a chance of being pushed back to 2028, and the memory crisis may not have ended by then. Micron recently revealed demand is in excess of supply for the foreseeable future, with plans to balance it out over 2027 and 2028, and SK Hynix recently suggested the wafer shortage will last until 2030.

As cynical as it feels to say, this could actually offer a bit of an advantage to the likes of Microsoft. It's a huge corporation which will have lines of communication and contracts with manufacturers, it has a long road to launch, and it can afford to sell at a loss. If it can offer a Windows-like experience with its Xbox Mode app, it's not hard to see why one might choose the more bespoke Project Helix over something prebuilt.

That selling point makes more sense with Xbox's last few years of strategy, too. The majority of 'true' exclusive games (that is to say, exclusives that are only on Xbox) are mostly reserved for backwards compatible games like Lost Odyssey.

With its catalogue and controller being available on PC, and the Xbox software coming to Windows in the future, I see very little reason for one to pick an Xbox Series X now over a PC. On its launch, ease of use and price made an argument, but the gap has been bridged somewhat, which means an Xbox Series X is sort of like a PC, except without access to Steam, Epic Games Store, and many other bits of PC software.

And Sony seems to have got the message that the scarcity of exclusives can sell consoles, as it is reportedly backing away from launching games on PC. Coming up to the launch of the PS6, users will likely want to feel like the console gives them access to something new and not available to PS5 and PC users.

But Project Helix trying to emulate a PC means that exclusives don't have to be its biggest selling point. It can theoretically offer a finetuned streamlined experience with PC games, and could even eat some costs to get it into the hands of customers for lower prices. That, to me, makes it already a more attractive option than the Xbox Series X.

I still don't think it's good enough, though, and I'm not fully convinced it's not just one more step backwards for Xbox to retreat from the console space. A few months ago, I said, "Everything is an Xbox now, so I see no reason to buy Xbox again". Though Microsoft retired the 'This is an Xbox' ad campaign, my feelings haven't fully changed.

Because even if the marketing is gone, the feeling remains. Xbox is an ecosystem that has spread to a seemingly endless list of devices, and it's getting easier to emulate the Xbox experience without having to throw cash at a new device and a separate storefront. But, in losing its appeal as a console, it could gain some appeal in a similar market to the likes of mini PCs.

Project Helix doesn't have to be built with upgradability in mind, so much as ease of use, and prettiness, and buyers will know that going in. But, ultimately, is that what one wants from a console, and importantly, is it good for the broader market?

To me, Sony and Nintendo feel like they operate side by side, giving distinct enough selling points to not feel like a direct competition. Microsoft's Xbox division could serve to keep Sony in line.

Think of that one 20-second video of PlayStation showing off how to share games. This snippy little response to Xbox's DMR fiasco is exactly the counterweight I'm talking about. If the PS5 proved to be unpopular, Xbox could have capitalised on its mistakes and punished it. With Xbox fitting into that middleground, Sony doesn't really have a balancing force, and that feels troublesome to me.

Xbox, in a console world, is part of the big three. It's admittedly the smallest part of the big three, but it has presence nonetheless. In a PC manufacturing world, it's one of a dozen, and I don't know yet if it has the chops to be worth the lateral move. Better on paper isn't necessarily better in practice.

Heavily systemic, decades-in-the-works roguelike RPG Caves of Qud belongs to a taxonomy of games that we, the experts at PC Gamer, professionally identify as "PC-ass PC games." Other PC-ass PC games include Deus Ex, Dwarf Fortress, and EVE Online. Notably, none of those games can be played on the Nintendo Switch or Nintendo Switch 2 videogame consoles—but as of February 2026, Caves of Qud can.

It's a port that doesn't seem like it should work, given that Caves of Qud uses a healthy chunk of the keyboard by default. It also does not seem like Caves of Qud should run on the decade-old Switch at anything approaching a healthy framerate, considering how hard its systemic generation can push a CPU. And that's exactly why it exists.

"I'm not sure it's a rational decision," Qud co-creator Brian Bucklew said in a recent interview with PC Gamer. "I think we are interested in solving impossible problems in general, and the idea of making Caves of Qud work on Switch—initially, making Caves of Qud work on gamepad—that doesn't seem like something that should happen. But the challenge entices me to do it."

As Bucklew is alluding to, Qud didn't make the jump from beefy desktop PCs to Switch overnight. In 2024, months before the game left early access after many many (many) years of development, Qud got a UI and control overhaul, which made it shockingly playable on the Steam Deck. It's still clearly a complex-as-hell game with a lot of information to convey, which can get a bit cramped on the Steam Deck's 1280x800 pixel display, but it works. And the gamepad binding scheme's savvy shortcuts and button combinations make actions that seem like they should require digging through several menus quite easy to pull off. Who knew examining the lethal geometry of the Chrome Pyramid could be so intuitive?

Bucklew clearly relishes a technical challenge, but the underlying motivation was the question why there aren't other PC-ass PC games on Switch.

"People think that there is not a market for systemic games on Switch," he said. "I think a lot of people might think a game like Caves of Qud would not succeed, but there aren't any, right? So on what basis are you making that claim, especially for a device that has as many users out there? If even a tiny amount of people want to play a deep systemic game, that is a lot of units for an indie studio. … And I think we've proven that there's a market for this kind of stuff on Switch."

Bucklew said that Caves of Qud's sales on Switch peaked in the top five of the 'Physical + Digital' category, aka "everything." Qud was only released digitally, but that actually makes its sales more impressive—that means at its best it was outselling 95 of the top 100 games across cartridges and the Nintendo eShop. He couldn't share specific sales numbers, but said the game has continued to do well even after leaving the Switch's most elite ranks.

Some of the design decisions in Qud that made it possible to play on a gamepad happened years ago, and they weren't necessarily intentional. "We accidentally made a choice to collapse [the way] older roguelikes would have 20 different keybinds on different letters, and one part of their appeal was puzzling out what keybinds even existed," he said. While designing Qud, he and Freehold Games co-founder Jason Grinblat decided to make its interactions more menu-driven than they would be in, say, pioneering roguelike NetHack.

"It's still quite complicated, and sufficiently interesting to discover things despite having a list of things you can do," he said. "That makes it very amenable to gamepad play, whereas if you had 70 keybinds, it just doesn't [work]. We barely fit onto gamepad, but we do, because of that decision."

The Qud team are now working on the next challenge: Fitting those controls and menus that barely work on the Switch onto a phone screen, translating the game to both portrait displays and touch inputs. "We don't know if we'll be able to pull off a nice Qud portrait design, but signs look pretty good," he said.

Performance, at least, may not be a huge challenge this time. Today's phones are monstrously capable, and Freehold already spent "many months" on performance optimizations to get the game running on the comparatively ancient Switch 1's CPU.

"People make claims like 'oh, people don't want to play big RPGs on their phone. Are there any actual examples of a phone-first design big RPG? Maybe single digits. Not very many, right? I think people make these claims because nobody takes the risk to do it, and it makes sense for big studios to avoid that risk. But for Qud we're building on a 20-year-old basis. We're paying our bills. We can take these risks."

Not so long ago, I was primarily a console gamer. One thing I definitely don't miss about those bad old days is that, unlike with a gaming PC, when things went wrong, cracking the console open myself was rarely a real option. Well, thanks to the EU's right to repair bill, some significant repairability hoops are about to disappear for the Nintendo Switch 2.

Teardown team iFixIt was previously unimpressed with the repairability of the Nintendo Switch 2, particularly on account of the battery being easy to disconnect but otherwise glued in place within the launch model. The good news is that Nintendo will soon release a version of the Nintendo Switch 2 with batteries you can replace much more easily yourself—but only in the European Union (via Nikkei).

The new version of the Switch 2 will feature replaceable batteries for both the main console and the Joy-Con controllers, too. The Switch 2 model featuring the glued-in battery will continue to be sold in Japan, and Nintendo still doesn't recommend folks outside of the EU attempt to replace the console's battery themselves.

Instead, Nintendo and many non-console manufacturers like it often only offer consumers a very short list of authorised repair facilities. Packing up and sending off faulty hardware is not only a faff, but can also be expensive if these sanctioned specialists then decide it's not worth the repair. In other words, there have been concerns for a long time that this repairability model actually limits consumer choice.

For instance, back in 2023, iFixit described Apple's iPhone 14 as 'literally not repairable' due to strict parts validation rules. This severely limited smaller repair shop operations' ability to fix the smartphone back then, though the iPhone 16—a year later, with its debond-on-demand battery—may have signified the first wave of a sea change.

Basically, the replaceable battery model of the Switch 2 exists so that the console remains compliant with various repairability laws that will soon come into effect across EU member states—specifically, the EU introduced fresh battery regulation back in 2023.

This includes a directive that aims to ensure portable batteries are easy to remove, replace, and recycle by typical consumers "without requiring the use of specialised tools, unless they are provided free of charge, or proprietary tools, thermal energy or solvents to disassemble it." This comes into effect from February 2027.

As we've previously covered, the EU further strengthened the 'right to repair' with fresh legislation back in 2024 as well. The resulting directive aims to "reduce premature disposal of viable goods purchased by consumers and to encourage consumers to use their goods longer" by "allowing consumers to seek affordable repair from the repair service provider of their choice." EU member states have until 31 July 2026 to incorporate this directive into national law.

Nintendo, seeing which way the legislative wind is blowing, is simply getting its ship in order. Now we've seen such a major player steering with the EU's current, odds are plenty of handheld gaming PC manufacturers will soon follow suit.

Offering replaceable batteries has been a long time coming for the handheld market, and there's little room to argue now that the EU has made it clear that that's the price to paddle among its waters. Here's hoping similar 'right to repair' legislation outside of the EU gets a boost, too, in the near future.

You may have heard of a little RPG series called Ultima, which was so successful in the '80s and '90s that series creator Richard Garriott earned enough money to travel to the bottom of the ocean and also the International Space Station. Part of the success of his game studio, Origin Systems, was due to his brother Robert Garriott, who later became a vice president at EA and then ran the US branch of Guild Wars studio NCSoft when it was launching MMOs like City of Heroes.

Before all that, though, Robert Garriott showed up to the 1989 Computer Game Developers Conference in his role as the business brain at Origin Systems, to talk about a very 2026 problem: There are just too many dang computer games!

Thanks to the Videogame History Foundation, which has digitized a near-complete set of cassette tapes from the 1989 conference, we can hear Garriott speaking on a panel with publishers from other big names at the time, including EA (which bought Origin Systems a few years later), Broderbund, and Accolade. During Garriott's turn at the mic, he addresses the "industry slump that everyone's been talking about," with PC game sales apparently going through a rocky period.

"The question everyone seems to be asking right now is why? Why did this happen?" Garriott asks. "Everyone's saying Nintendo, Nintendo's the obvious reason. I view Nintendo as something of a scapegoat."

Garriott claimed that arcade games and "entry-level roleplaying and strategy games" were being affected by the exploding popularity of the Nintendo Entertainment System, which was raising alarm bells across the PC industry at the time (check out this Computer Game World article from June 1988 titled "The Nintendo Threat?"). But Garriott argued that more in-depth PC RPGs and strategy games weren't viable on the game console, so why were sales down for them, too?

He blamed a drop in PC hardware sales from Apple, Commodore, and Dell, but also a "product proliferation." That's 1989 business speak for 'too many videogames.'

"The computer game industry has seen sales increase 15-25% every year for the last three years, which is a pretty healthy increase for any normal industry in America," Garriott said. "But unfortunately the number of new titles in the US market probably increased by 25-50%, so what that means is the sales per title have necessarily decreased. If everything else was the same, the sales per title has to be going down. I think that's also a factor in this issue."

Another problem afflicting the PC gaming industry in 1989? Some of the games sucked! "The consumer is being very confused," Garriott went on to say. "The consumer doesn't really know what to buy for their computer, and they're being basically lost from the entertainment market."

(Thankfully, the computer gamer of the day didn't have to wait too long for salvation—PC Gamer magazine debuted in November 1993, offering impeccable buying advice to the hopelessly confused masses. No longer would they have to suss out the qualities of the handful of new games being released every month on their own.)

Garriott was refreshingly candid, saying he was "embarrassed to say that I don't believe software publishers really understand the relative weight of all these factors," but that he was confident game sales would pick back up at some point. He had no idea at the time, of course, how gargantuan PC gaming would turn out to be in the years to come, or that more games would eventually launch on Steam in a single day than the computer industry of 1989 would see in a month.

His closing advice seems just as relevant today as it did 37 years ago, though.

"We have to develop products that cannot be duplicated on game machines. We're worried about Nintendo. We've got to develop long-playing, in-depth, high graphic, lots-of-memory types of products. And the final thing we need to do is we need to increase our quality. Quality always has, and always will, sell."

If there's one thing I've always wished for, it's for Animal Crossing to be available on PC. It's impossible, I know, but every time I've picked up a new cozy game a little voice in the back of my head has reminded me of the hundreds if not thousands of hours I've sunk into life as the town mayor or island director, or just the only human on an island of fantastic animal companions, and reminded me of how much I miss it.

At long last though, my wishes have come true, and a native port of Animal Crossing on GameCube has finally made its way on PC as part of an existing Animal Crossing decompilation project. It's been an unfathomable number of years since I booted up my save and was met with the scorn of my villagers—after all they weren't the kindest creatures—but this is definitely the thing that will convince me to do so.

Unlike a port which you can just boot up and play, you do need a copy of Animal Crossing GameCube already, which does make it a bit more challenging as it's not a particularly cheap game to buy if you don't already own it. But according to the description of the GitHub project "this repository does not contain any game assets or assembly whatsoever" and the project reads all of the assets directly from the disc, so it's sort of essential and completely worth it, if you ask me.

With that said, the current version isn't perfect, and few issues have been noted by players already, such as bass distortion in the fossil room of the museum, a low static hum, and a few random memory issues that can cause black screens and broken textures. But, the developer of the project shared in the comments of a YouTube video that they have "mostly fixed them for the next release" and just want to "test it a bit more before I'm confident."

But it's all looking good, and just knowing that the project is being worked on to make Animal Crossing GameCube on PC as polished as possible is enough motivation I need to dig through the boxes in my loft and dust off my copy. If it means I can be reunited with Filbert from the comfort of my desk without having to figure out how to use an AV cable adapter in 2026, I'll do anything.

Recently, the Supreme Court found that Trump's use of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) to justify tariffs was unjust, and in turn, companies affected are seeking compensation for it. Among them are Nintendo, Lenovo, Dyson, Epson, and more.

As reported by The Register, Nintendo's complaint (PDF warning) argues for "Defendants [US government] to promptly refund, with interest, any IEEPA duties paid by Plaintiff [Nintendo] regardless of liquidation status, or alternatively enter a money judgment in the same amount."

In Nintendo's complaint, it points to the collection of more than $200 billion in tariffs from the US government. It also notes that the Supreme Court case that argued against Trump's use of the IEEPA doesn't mention refunds to those hit with tariffs.

Nintendo was put in a very strange spot by tariffs last year. As well as tariffs naturally affecting sales of the Nintendo Switch and peripherals, it delayed the price announcement of the Nintendo Switch 2 in the US. A few weeks after this pricing delay, Nintendo did confirm the Switch 2 would be selling for its original price, but this turmoil naturally affected the announcement and reception of Nintendo's latest console.

Lenovo's complaint is very similar to Nintendo's. It (PDF warning) seeks refunds, as well as the payment of attorney fees and costs, alongside "providing such other relief as the court deems proper and necessary".

Nintendo and Lenovo are both looking for interest on top of refunds.

These cases have the potential to set a precedent. The likes of Dyson and Epson have also jumped into the legal ring, and if these companies manage to get refunds and any other compensations, it would become easier for subsequent suits to go through.

If successful, the precedent could raise an interesting question should the likes of Sony file. Sony has raised the price of its consoles, citing a 'challenging economic environment', so if tariffs are refunded and users still paid more for their devices previously, the only ones who lose out are those who paid the extra price in the interim.

Just last week, though, the Customs and Border Protection said it couldn't comply with a refund order until at least April. The hundreds of billions of dollars, with over 300,000 importers and 53 million entries, would require significant labour and a reinvestment into its technology. This is to say, even if awarded, it may take some time for the refund process to start.

The Pokémon Company International has criticised the Trump administration's use of its characters and imagery in political meme posts. The latest example was a still image from the newly released Pokopia that has been altered to feature the slogan "Make America Great Again", with series mascot Pikachu poking out from behind the "e" in "Make".

"We were not involved in its creation or distribution, and no permission was granted for the use of our intellectual property," said Pokémon spokeswoman Sravanthi Dev (thanks, BBC). "Our mission is to bring the world together, and that mission is not affiliated with any political viewpoint or agenda."

The Pokémon Company has previously criticised the White House for the use of Pokémon imagery in what Trump administration spokeswoman Abigail Jackson has previously described as "engaging posts and banger memes" which are "successfully communicating the president's extremely popular agenda."

In September last year, the White House posted a video showing arrests being made by US border patrol and ICE agents, intercut with footage from the opening credits of the Pokémon anime featuring Ash Ketchum. The video used the Pokémon tagline "gotta catch 'em all" and ended with digitally altered versions of Pokémon trading cards featuring the faces of people arrested by ICE and listing their alleged crimes.

"We are aware of a recent video posted by the Department of Homeland Security that includes imagery and language associated with our brand," the Pokémon Company said in a statement at the time. "Our company was not involved in the creation or distribution of this content, and permission was not granted for the use of our intellectual property."

The Pokémon Company has declined to say whether it intends to pursue a lawsuit against the US government.

In response to the company's statement, the White House pointed to a post on X by spokesman Kaelan Dorr, which features a screenshot of a Wall Street Journal article from July 16, 2016, headlined "Hillary Clinton's campaign uses Pokémon Go to register voters." At the time Clinton was running against Trump in the presidential election, and made reference to Pokémon Go when discussing how to engage younger voters, saying: "I don’t know who created Pokémon Go, but I'm trying to figure out how we get them to Pokémon Go… to the polls!"

Dorr adds the following caption to the above: "Hey Mr Pikachu, big fan. Question for you—why no response to articles like this? Seems kinda like you ARE maybe affiliated with a political viewpoint, no? Just sayin'"

The Pokémon Company is not the first brand or artist to complain about the unauthorised use of its material in Trump administration memes, and the belligerent response from the White House is typical. Dorr has subsequently posted a mocked-up image of Trump as a Pokémon trading card.

Videogames seem to be a favourite of this administration: In the last two hours the official White House account, and I can't quite believe I'm typing this, has posted the Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas meme featuring lead character CJ, in the context of destroying the Iranian regime. Last year it used Halo imagery to aggrandise Trump, and this week posted a video mixing images from the war in Iran with clips from Call of Duty.

Preserving videogame history is no easy feat. Besides the ephemeral nature of digital downloads these days, a significant obstacle over the decades has been the interests of corporate entities as they seek to protect their intellectual property. For example, a London-based collector was raided by the police last year after he purchased dev kits reportedly marked for disposal during a Sega UK office clear out.

The collector, Darius Khan, purchased a hardware lot from an e-waste subcontractor for £10,000. This included dev kits, controllers, autographed copies of games, and even prototype cartridges. Some time after listing parts of the find for sale online, UK police then raided Khan's property, alleging that the Sega dev kits had been stolen.

YouTube channel Gamers Nexus travelled to the UK to investigate, sharing an hour-long documentary on the case.

Darius Khan recounted the raid to Gamers Nexus, saying, "Seven o'clock in the morning—approximately—bang, bang, bang on the door. [...] I look through the peephole and I see a bunch of police, probably four or five police officers. I open the door [and I'm told], 'Mr. Khan, you're under arrest for money laundering. We're here to seize dev kits.'"

Even though Khan has yet to be charged with a criminal offence, this case is both strange and concerning. So, let's rewind a bit.

When Sega moved its UK head office from Brentford to Chiswick, London last year, it hired a e-waste company, Waste To Wonder, to dispose of hardware that was left behind in the old office building. This company hired a subcontractor that then took the lot, which contained dev kits and more besides, to an export yard that processes waste to then be sold to various buyers across Africa.

Darius Khan negotiated a deal with the e-waste subcontractor to buy the discarded hardware before it could be processed. Darius began listing parts of the find on both eBay and Facebook marketplace, which included Sony PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, as well as Nintendo DSI and Wii U dev kits. The Video Game Preservation Museum also started an online fundraising campaign to purchase the lot. Though not yet confirmed, it's likely these online listings and the fundraiser are what drew legal attention.

Darius was also contacted by a man using the name Paul, who claimed to be interested in the dev kits he had for sale. This man was actually a private investigator working for Fusion 85, an agency that specialises in protecting intellectual property. The agency has worked with Nintendo in the past, though it has not been confirmed who Fusion 85 were working for with regards to investigating the dev kits.

'Paul' visited Darius' home to inspect and take photographs of the hardware, before going quiet. Then in July 2025, 10 plain clothes police officers knocked on Darius' door (via The Daily Mail).

The officers confiscated the dev kits and prototype cartridges from Darius' home, but left other hardware bits such as controllers and cables. Darius was then held by police for eight hours, during which, Khan alleges, police asked him to sign a form relinquishing his ownership of the dev kits. He refused.

It has since emerged Sega had hired another firm, ITR Secure, to specifically dispose of its computer hardware. Still, sources told The Daily Mail that an on-site manager had instructed Waste to Wonder workers to clear out everything, including the dev kits.

Waste to Wonder denies any wrongdoing. Speaking to The Daily Mail, managing director of Waste to Wonder Michael Amos says, "IT [equipment] was not in scope and we never allow subcontractors to sell items. We no longer work with that subcontractor."

This tangled legal case is still ongoing, and it is not yet clear who—if anyone—will be charged. The fate of the seized dev kits also remains unknown. Arguably, Sega should have returned these dev kits to their respective manufacturers when they were no longer needed. Instead, the company's seemingly lax inventory management and e-waste disposal practices have proved a costly mistake.

When Palworld sold 12 million Steam copies in under two weeks, two things felt like they'd become inevitable: First, that Nintendo's lawyers would take any opening they could find to punish Pocketpair for daring to release what many had been calling Pokemon: Gun Version well before its launch, and second, that we'd eventually see Palworld prompt its own imitators with hopes of pulling off a similar smash hit.

While Nintendo threw down the lawsuit gauntlet within a year of Palworld's launch, the nature of videogame development timelines meant that if a new subgenre was spinning up, it'd be a bit longer before we saw the evidence. With the kickoff of the latest Steam Next Fest, however, it seems the time has finally come. The age of the Palworld-like is upon us.

Next Fest has brought a bumper crop of creature-collecting, base-building, open-world-survival-crafting demos. Here are the heaviest hitters among Palworld's latest competitors.

Palworld, but witches

Of the selection of emerging Palworld-inspired survival games, Witchspire is the one that feels like it has the most cohesive vision. Rather than generic base-building survivalists, you play as a coven of novice witches who can conjure structures, harvest resources with magic, and—for the Little Guy Labor Force factor—defeat magical creatures in battle "and collect their spirits to tame familiars."

Between conjuring forests when you need more wood to build with, floating in midair to get a better angle to build from, and binding magic sprites as farming familiars, witchcraft feels like it's gluing together Witchspire's creature collecting and survival elementspretty seamlessly, and it's all packaged in a pleasant art aesthetic. Some of the demo's reviews say it'll need a healthy amount of polish before launch, though.

Palworld, but with airships

Compared to Witchspire, Guardians of the Wild Sky has a bit more of a generic Unreal Engine look to it. But while it feels a bit like a game you might see running in the background of a police procedural, it does have airships. Everyone loves airships.

Unsurprisingly, Guardians of the Wild Sky is emphasizing verticality with airborne exploration and construction, meaning you can seemingly have creatures helping you grow crops on an airship in the sky. It's power fantasies on power fantasies—and so far, the demo's received a pretty warm reception, sitting at a Very Positive rating with 350 reviews at time of writing.

Palworld, but it's like a charming picturebook

Oddfauna: Secret of the Terrabeast seems like Palworld by way of Where the Wild Things Are. You play as a sort of picturebook gremlin helping to cultivate "a living world called a Terrabeast," a walking, pleasantly dopey-looking biome that you can build upon as it roams the landscape. And to do so, you'll need to attract the "oddfauna"—goobery little gremlins that you can befriend, ride, and fight alongside while exploring, farming, and building.

Oddfauna has a lovely textured art style reminiscent of a children's picturebook illustration. I don't know how much I'd actually want to inhabit its world alongside a terrabeast, but there's definitely something I admire about the emptyheaded gaze of its wildlife.

Palworld, but it's an AI-fueled disaster that's crying out for a merciful death

Guardians of the Wild Sky might look a little generic, but compared to Layer Land's visual palette of asset pasghetti, it looks like a masterwork. Layer Land looks like it doesn't want to exist, but is forced to maintain the barest suspension of disbelief about its promises of AI-powered creature generation and interaction just long enough for its first players to regret spending their time and money.

But the first trailer in its Steam listing shows players fighting a nine foot tall curvy dragon lady, so maybe I'm on the wrong side of history. Hard to say.

Nintendo Switch emulation has had a rough go of it. The first big Switch emulator, Yuzu, got targeted by a lawsuit in 2024 that its creators settled out of for $2.4 million, which PC Gamer senior editor Wes Fenlon called "an enormous blow to console emulation." Similarly, Ryujinx was subsequently discontinued after its creators were given an offer they could not refuse. Switch emulation scattered into all sorts of different forks, and now they're all feeling a familiar gaze cast their direction.

A thread from user Devile on Reddit spread the news online Thursday, noting that all manner of Switch emulators including Yuzu forks like Eden and Citron received DMCA takedown notices on GitHub. Replies quickly piled in with evidence from various emulation discords and frustration with the whole situation.

Commenter rappidkill stated on the thread, "If they kill one, 10 more will pop up. Kill 10, 100 more will pop up. They can never kill emulation." Redditor DWRedd commented, "It’s never a bad time to back up your favourite emulators."

Notably, any self-hosted repositories (in other words, places that host the files not on GitHub) are still up and seemingly unaffected, at least for now. The Citron and Eden websites appear to be doing fine.

"It is true, but nothing major," claimed Eden developer maufeat on the project's Discord. "Our release repo got the notice so you will probably have to download future releases and nightlies directly from us. Most of them are forks which was just a matter of time to get a DMCA notice on GitHub. But this is why we (and other emulators) don't host the source on GitHub."

When another Discord user replied with relief that "doomsday" wasn't "upon us," maufeat replied, "Not yet" with a custom server emoji of a pensive-looking cat. The consumer right to develop and use emulators has largely been held up by US case law, but it's not entirely cut and dry.

The association of emulation with piracy, fair or not, has often been used as a justification for legal action against emulator developers. Nintendo, always precious with its intellectual property, has been on the warpath against emulator developers, particularly for Nintendo Switch games, in recent years.

Mario is a PC gaming icon, and yes, that stands for "personal computer" and not "plumber chic." His best 3D platformer got a PC port back in 2020 thanks to a growing Nintendo 64 recompilation effort, and even if you don't count that, his dogshittest game came to PC back in 1992. But I'm not here to talk about Mario. I'm here to talk about Yoshi.

Yoshi, Baby Mario's foster father and adult Mario's horse, is the headlining new character in the Super Mario Galaxy movie, which appears to be a neverending tapestry of references for theater-attending videogame players to point at and whisper, "I remember that guy" to their spouses and/or parents. The new teaser Illumination put out yesterday is packed with visuals and characters from Mario Odyssey, Mario Kart, Mario Sunshine, and the titular Galaxy.

What's notable about this teaser is that Yoshi does that thing that he does. He gobbles up Kamek the Magikoopa in slow-motion with a flick of his tongue and then poops him out, his glasses comically intact over the fresh egg.

I had to Google whether this constitutes birth as mammalian live birth is a very different thing to reptile oviparity, and if the movie is anything like Super Smash Bros., Magikoopa can break out of the egg by rapidly rotating the control stick (which makes him rather unlike a fetus). Suffice it to say, my research yielded nothing of value, as Oxford defines birth as "the process of being born." If the headline is misleading, that one's on me.

It still looks like a colorful, gorgeously animated and lighthearted flick, which slightly offsets Chris Pratt's bizarrely grounded performance as Mario and Bowser Jr.'s haunted, beady eyes. Maybe it'll all be worth it to see Rosalina beat the stuffing out of Megaleg, a character I can't believe I remember the name of.

Once upon a time, ordering food online was not the nightmare of soaring platform pricing and underpaid gig workers we know today—dare I say it, there was once even a little room for whimsy. For instance, the Nintendo Wii once allowed Japanese gamers to place an order at a local restaurant right there on the console. Taking its name from food delivery platform Demae-Can, the Demae Channel was deactivated back in 2017 and the feature was never available outside of Japan—until now.

YouTuber Retro Game Attic recently documented the process of ordering from his local Domino's via the Food Channel, a homebrew resurrection of the Demae Channel that brings the Wii's food delivery functionality Stateside for the first time.

Peering at a fuzzy CRT (the Wii was a standard definition console), lengthy loads on the 2006 console draw out the process of ordering—but a 14-inch hand tossed pizza with extra cheese does ultimately arrive (via Hackaday).

As Nintendo has long since shut down many of the official servers that once supported the Wii, the Food Channel is instead offered by Wii Link, which is an unofficial homebrew community project working to restore much of the console's online functionality. Right now, the Food Channel is only available to folks in the US and Canada, and only allows for orders from their local Domino's.

Just Eat support has apparently been in the works since 2024. Deliveroo functionality was previously available though has since been discontinued. As for the currently offered Domino's pizza, it appears the only payment option is to pay on delivery. As this isn't an official development effort, it's probably just as well no payment information is processed…though you would still need to enter an address for delivery.

Otherwise, the Food Channel integrates with Domino's own online order API, displaying up to date info on pizza, prices, and even holiday opening hours. It's far from the most elegant food ordering experience you'll find, but it is perhaps one of the most novel. As surging memory prices have been suggested by one research firm to cause Nintendo to raise the price of the Switch 2, perhaps unearthing older hardware isn't such a bad shout.

Now, if you'll excuse me I think I've got some dusty hardware to dig out and some motion controls to fight with—it'll all be worth it if there's pizza at the end of it.

In response to the rising prices of RAM and storage in 2026, the Nintendo Switch 2 may be set to become more expensive.

This is according to research firm Niko Partners (via VGC). In its 2026 prediction post, Niko Partner says, "We believe the Switch 2 is set to follow in Sony and Microsoft’s footsteps with its own price hike driven by the impact from tariffs, increased memory costs, and broader macroeconomic conditions."

The report goes on to point out that Nintendo chose to keep the $449 price point last year, despite tariffs impacting production, and it suggests that Nintendo may instead choose to remove the cheapest Switch bundle. This would make buying a Nintendo Switch 2 more expensive, but only for those looking for a console by itself. If you buy the console in a bundle, it could cost the same, according to this prediction.

Tied to potential price hikes, Nintendo president Shuntaro Furukawa spoke to Kyoto Shimbun last week (thanks again, VGC, for the spot).

In that interview, Furukawa said (machine translated) "We procure from suppliers based on our medium- to long-term business plans, but the current memory market is very volatile." Adding to this, he says, "there is no immediate impact on earnings, but it is something we must monitor closely".

Furukawa doesn't confirm or deny those predictions either way but does say, "While it’s difficult to accurately gauge the future impact, our basic policy is to recognize tariffs as a cost and pass them on to prices as much as possible, not just in the US".

However, Furukawa also argues, "On the other hand, this is a crucial period for our game business as we promote the adoption of new hardware and maintain the momentum of our platforms. We are working on this while carefully considering the situation."

The volatility Furukawa gestures at is naturally being considered, but pricing is so important to a console, especially so early on in its life. The Nintendo Switch 2 only launched last June, and given the relatively budget price of the OG Switch and the Steam Deck, it felt like a lot of money for a console with few exclusives.

My first six months with the Switch 2 have certainly been positive, but paying even more for a device that can still get stick drift hurts the hardware nerd in me. And the Nintendo kid, too.

Before joining the PC Gamer team, I spent many years as a console gamer—shocking, I know. Though I have a Steam backlog many would envy, I'm still hopping between my rig and perhaps far too many consoles. What's a gamer to do? Crack each of those bad boys open and form something like a console Megazord? Well, one Chinese modder has basically done just that.

Hong Kong-based tech creator 小宁子 XNZ has built a 3-in-1 console that swaps between a PS5, Xbox Series S, and a Switch 2 at the push of a button (via TechSpot). It's a project vaguely reminiscent of Origin PC's The Big O, a liquid-cooled desktop with either a PS4 Pro or an Xbox One S console tucked inside, back in 2020. The creator calls her 3-in-1 effort the 'Ningtendo PXBOX 5,' and it turns out this hunk of hardware was no easy thing to create.

Rather than simply strapping all of the hardware together (which the YouTuber demonstrates would be both unwieldy and weigh a hefty 10 kg), she stripped everything down to its electrical components and completely rethought the hardware's housing. Don't worry, no motherboards were folded 'like a book' or otherwise harmed during this project.

Noticing that individual PSUs and cooling components take up an awful lot of space, the tech creator's first decision for her project was figuring out which components the consoles could share. Taking inspiration from the 2013 Mac Pro's 'trash can' design, 小宁子 XNZ set to work on designing a triangular cooling array with an exhaust at the top to regulate the temperature of all three consoles at once.

Actually making such a bespoke bit of kit proved an adventure in itself, though. After 3D printing her preliminary design for the cooler, 小宁子 XNZ found that relying on an outsourced manufacturing service to CNC machine her work in aluminium would be both a lengthy and costly process—so she decided to do it herself.

Seeking the time and space to iterate on her design, the tech creator chose to use an aluminium casting method not unlike lost-wax casting. Realising that, like wax, the PLA filament often used in 3D printing also has a low-ish melting point, she encased her cooler design inside a cast of gypsum. This version of the cooler is 3D printed with an extra channel for the creator to pour in molten aluminium. After a kind of chunky first attempt, the creator tweaked the design of the cooler's fins and tried again.

With a more successful later attempt coming out like 'a lotus flower emerging from water,' 小宁子 XNZ polished the aluminium chassis before attaching copper blocks to it for even better thermal regulation. For a spot of testing in Elden Ring, she strapped just the PS5's electrical hardware and a 12 cm cooling fan to the copper-aluminium-combo cooler. The console is shown to not only switch on in this bare bones state, but also doesn't exceed 60 °C over 30 minutes of gameplay.

The final 3-in-1 console runs off a single 250 W PC power supply, and even incorporates a push-button mechanism that allows the Switch 2 console to be ejected like a slice of funky, chunky poptart from a toaster. The actual console switching mechanism is accessed via a triangular button on top of the 'Ningtendo PXBOX 5,' with an Arduino-based control board handling the HDMI output and ensuring only one console is powered on at a time.

While multiple consoles can be in standby mode, it sounds like game switching on the Xbox isn't really supported by this setup. However, 小宁子 XNZ's video also demonstrates that hopping between consoles takes less than five seconds.

Black walnut panelling and an LED light strip that glows either blue, red, or green depending on the active console are among the finishing touches. Looking not unlike a hefty white chocolate Toblerone, the resulting 3-in-1 console is undeniably still bulky—though 小宁子 XNZ says she 'thinks it looks better than the PS5.'

Though I do have a bit of a soft spot for Sony's funky white box, the Ningtendo PXBOX 5 remains an incredibly impressive project. While I'm not sure the whole thing saves that much space in the end, I am also writing this from a rig that has a lot of the same games and arguably takes up even more room…

Pokémon games may not come to PC very often, but it's still the highest-grossing media franchise in the world and, therefore, serious business. Serious enough to pull a gun in the middle of a store, apparently, as NBC reported happening during a robbery in Manhattan on January 14.

No one was hurt, fortunately, but the trio of robbers brandished handguns and smashed open several display cases full of merchandise at the Poké Court on 13th Street. They stole what store owner Courtney Chin estimates is $100,000 in merchandise. The thieves remain at large.

Now, I know what you're thinking. This crime, though unfortunate, is sort of novel and maybe even a little funny because a Pokémon store was robbed and not a bank or an art museum. That's why you're reading it on PC Gamer, after all. Typically, the only heists we cover involve Payday 3 or the latest crypto nonsense⁠—who the heck steals Pokémon merch at gunpoint? But a brief trip down the rabbit hole informed me that this Pokéheist is embarrassingly mundane.

Earlier this month, a similar robbery in Los Angeles involving the creature collector netted some armed thieves triple the payday of the above case. The same weekend, another robbery took place in Simi Valley. In Dec. 2025, a different trading card store in Burbank was robbed. A month before that, a San Diego store was broken into at night. Reader, let me make my stance clear: you do not, under any circumstances, gotta catch 'em all. Not like this, at least.

It's easy to see why this sort of thing happens. As you might have gleaned from the six-figure labels attached to these crimes, rare and valuable trading cards tend to fetch outsized prices from collectors. That's why there's Magic card worth a million bucks, some guy just got $30,000 for trading in a Gengar to Gamestop, and a mad lad called the Kabuto King is on a journey to hoard every first edition of one of the game's oldest fossil Pokémon. You might think that doesn't make any of this less stupid, and my brief research on this topic indicates that you'd be right.

I'll be honest, I didn't really think the live action Legend of Zelda movie would ever release when it was first announced in 2023. I become more convinced I was wrong with each passing day, as not only have they started casting folks for the rumored trilogy, but streaming giant Netflix has successfully negotiated for the movie's streaming rights.

That was announced in a press release Thursday and reflects a continued partnership between Netflix and Sony Pictures Entertainment, the latter of which will distribute the film. It's part of a "landmark global Pay-1 licensing deal"—the Pay-1 window being the bit of a movie's rollout right after its theatrical run and home video release—which the release calls an "industry first."

The deal includes streaming rights to a host of Sony Pictures films, set to "roll out gradually starting later this year as individual territory rights become available, with full global availability on Netflix in early 2029," the release states. That includes a bunch of films from Sony's back catalog (exactly what is not clear yet), and upcoming flicks like The Legend of Zelda and Spider-Man: Beyond the Spider-Verse.

Long story short, if you're hoping to catch the Zelda movie and hate the magical collective experience of cinema in a real theater, expect to do so on Netflix—at first, anyway. Nothing beats the movie theater, but I'm curious to see if I get the same whiff of sublime melancholy I got from playing Twilight Princess while watching a live action Zelda production interrupted by AI slop ads every few minutes.

Either way, the movie will finally hit theaters May 7, 2027. It might not be a Zelda game on PC, but thankfully, modders have already done what Nintendon't in that regard.

In a move that future legal scholars will surely brand 'the matador approach,' Palworld—currently embroiled in a lawsuit with Nintendo over its various similarities to the Pokémon series—is launching a trading card game.

Created in partnership with Bushiroad and releasing July 30 this year, the Palworld Official Card Game "is a 2-player competitive card game where you can enjoy strategic and tactical battles through deploying various unique Pals." Which, so far you could swap out the word "Pals" for "Pokémon" and have a perfectly accurate description of the Pokémon TCG.

But it is different, I promise. From the blurb, it sounds like basebuilding will form a key part of the whole Palworld Official Card Game experience, much as you can in the videogame. "Players fight alongside their Pal companions, gathering resources, and building bases as they aim for victory. These adorable and dependable Pals will utilize their own unique traits to lead you to victory."

And that's about all there is to know at this point, though you can watch a video where a bunch of different Pals burst out of playing cards if that appeals. I suspect Pocketpair will reveal more details according to its own schedule as the release date approaches.

With Nintendo going after Pocketpair, claiming that the studio has infringed multiple of its lawsuits, the move to announce a Pokémon-esque card game feels like Palworld deliberately poking the bear.

Which, to be clear, it probably isn't. It would be a phenomenally bad idea to purposefully spit in Nintendo's eye while court proceedings are ongoing, and it's likely that Pocketpair's had these kinds of plans for a while, perhaps even since before Nintendo threw down the gauntlet.

But you have to admit, intentional or not, it is quite funny.

Hideo Kojima has done a new interview with Wired Tokyo, as part of a series where participants answer quickfire questions submitted by the public. There's a fair amount of familiar ground trodden, including some gushing over his favourite film directors, but one slightly unexpected answer came when Kojima was asked what game he's played the most.

"Super Mario Bros., definitely," answers Kojima without missing a beat. The 1985 masterpiece probably doesn't seem like the most obvious source of inspiration for a creator known for cinematic excess and overarching narrative ambition but, as Kojima goes on to point out, it's one hell of a good game.

"Played it for a year. I was a college student. I skipped school to play at home," laughs Kojima. "Without Super Mario, I probably wouldn't have been in this industry. Yeah. I can't really play it now, though. It's a side-scrolling action game. Mario just goes left to right. Basically just jumping. But there's a dash button, use that and the jump subtly changes the trajectory to attack or dodge."

That's exactly what set Super Mario Bros. apart from other platformers of the time, the balance and subtlety in speed and how that would affect your jumps. It's a game that still feels good to play now thanks to how much Nintendo wrings out of those two buttons.

"It had almost no story," continues Kojima, "but it felt like you were on an adventure. When I saw that, although it was pixel art with no story, I felt this medium would one day surpass movies. It was the catalyst that brought me to the game industry."

Super Mario Bros. is hardly alone for the era in being narrative-light, but what Nintendo did was craft an amazing and varied visual world filled with surprising elements, incorporating influences from Japanese folklore to Alice in Wonderland: Why do you think he gets bigger when he eats a mushroom? The Mushroom Kingdom was just background in a way, sure, but it felt like a world and, as Kojima says, an escalating adventure through one.

Elsewhere in the interview, Kojima is asked about his predictions around technology in MGS2. He says the game "is often mistaken for a story about AI, but it's about digital society… It wasn't about AI, but interweaving digital data gaining a will of its own. That was the story. So, well…. 24 years have passed. It has become somewhat of a reality. I didn't predict it, but rather a future I didn't desire, but unfortunately we're heading there."

The Italian plumber has very rarely graced our humble rigs, but lest we forget Mario has been on PC before in a couple '90s educational videogame stints. Which, to me, is more than enough of an excuse to yap a little about the upcoming Super Mario Galaxy Movie which just made a brief appearance in a seven-minute dedicated Nintendo Direct.

We got to peep a new trailer showing off Bowser Jr (voiced by Benny Safdie) and the undisputed best princess in the Mario universe Rosalina (Brie Larson) alongside the return of Mario, Luigi, Peach, and a miniature Bowser—who was shrunk at the end of the first movie, if you forgot.

Bowser seems to have taken to a bit of a Rapunzel lifestyle, chilling inside a toy-sized castle and painting diabolical works of art where he's a jacked-up hot bro. For whatever reason Bowser Jr.'s debut gets hit with the Prowler sound effect from Into the Spiderverse, and it looks like he'll be replacing his papa as the sequel's antagonist.

The trailer finds just enough time to squeeze in an appearance from my beloved Rosalina at the end making quick work of a Megaleg before making way for the movie's release date: April 3, 2026. Not that far off, really.

It makes sense that it's coming up quite soon. During the direct, Illumination (that's the Despicable Me studio also behind the Mario movie) CEO Chris Meledandri said that the studio was "just weeks away from completing animation," saying that the full movie will include familiar faces as well as "deep cuts that long-time fans will recognise." The Direct even has a Jack Black jumpscare appearance, and the guy seems incredibly stoked to be there.

I admit I actually quite enjoyed the first film despite the Chris Prattness of it all—please stop casting this guy in everything, I beg of you—and while it wasn't quite the videogame cinematic masterpiece of Sonic the Hedgehog, it's still a solidly decent movie especially by videogame adaptation standards.

I think Illumination and Nintendo are smart to tap into one of Mario's most popular games—I've never had the pleasure of playing either Galaxy games myself, but everyone I know who has never shut up about it, so they must be good.

Why do we love game cartridges so? It's something about the tactility, I'd wager, combined with the nostalgia of holding your individual games in your hand. Holiday gift vibes, that sort of thing. Anyway, Joel of YouTube channel Joel Creates has taken that nostalgia trip to its absolute extreme, creating a CRT-equipped Nintendo Switch 2 dock that allows you to use the entire console like a cartridge, slotting it into a mahoosive opening on the front.

The project itself is based on Joel's childhood memory of a Nintendo 64 running in a store window display, and attempts to recapture the magic of that experience (via Hackaday). There's something alluring about a game running on a CRT monitor, so they took it upon themselves to bring gaming on a small CRT display into the modern age, all in a somewhat-portable format.

The donor screen came from a portable Sony TV of what looks like early 90s stock, which at the time would have been a cutting edge device. However, while the internals of the TV are relatively compact for the era, fitting them into a console-friendly frame and interfacing them with modern hardware turned out to be quite the task.

After reaching out to a number of experts as to the tech behind CRT monitors, Joel turned to AI image generation to create multiple potential chassis designs, before selecting one with the screen at a 45 degree angle to the base—which would allow the cathode ray tube to fit in a small design while also facilitating side-mounted controls. A 3D-printed prototype was created, leading to an eventual design that allows the Switch 2 to be inserted into the front amid all the sandwiched old school tech inside.

After experimenting with an N64 controller, which proved unsuitable due to the need to split the circuit board in half between the two sides, a cheap third-party controller which could already split in half (complete with Nintendo-layout buttons) was integrated into the design. A Switch 2 dock was then torn apart to fit within the frame, complete with a cable extension to prevent having to mount the existing internals awkwardly.

After much more hardware wrangling, including the addition of a 100 W power bank for battery-based play, the project was complete. The end result looks to be far from the most portable console I've ever seen, but it certainly achieves the original goal of evoking childhood memories of gaming on a CRT screen.

It sure took a whole lot of effort, though, and what seems like a fair amount of expense, too. Still, Joel seems very happy with the end result, and the beige plastic surround has a certain familiarity to it that means it wouldn't look out of place in an 80s/90s gaming setup. Plus, with the Switch 2 on board, emulated retro games like Super Mario 64, F-Zero, and Sonic the Hedgehog look buttery smooth on the integrated CRT display.

It's a triumph of willpower over sense if you ask me, but the console itself still looks downright excellent. If you were looking for something easy and cheap to build that you could shove in your backpack, however, a regular Switch 2 still has quite the advantage. That being said, nostalgia does strange things to the mind, so I could absolutely see other creators using this as a leaping off point to create their own rose-tinted, Switch-based creations.

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The trio of patents asserted by Nintendo as the basis for its ongoing lawsuit against Palworld developer Pocketpair represent only a portion of Nintendo's efforts to secure patent protections on creature capturing, battling, and riding mechanics. Last week, however, that effort hit a hurdle: The Japanese Patent Office rejected one of Nintendo's pending patent applications as failing to demonstrate an "inventive step" that would differentiate it from prior art (via GamesFray).

While the patent application in question, JP 2024-031879, isn't directly relevant to the Palworld lawsuit, it's related to patents that are: It's the child application of one of the patents asserted in Nintendo's accusations and is itself the parent application of another. The rejection, therefore, could give Pocketpair a rhetorical opportunity to encourage a similar investigation of the patents it's accused of infringing.

The rejected patent application describes the implementation of mechanics for aiming and throwing items to capture or battle creatures like those used in 2023's Pokémon Legends: Arceus. For a patent to be granted, the application's claims must demonstrate an innovation unique enough from prior art in the field that it merits protection.

In the rejected application, Nintendo claims that the Legends: Arceus mechanics constitute a novel invention by combining third person aiming with two modes to throw items that either affect a target character—like stunning it or capturing it—or initiate combat against the target character by releasing a creature to battle it.

The JPO examiner disagreed, because somebody brought receipts.

In its rejection notice, the Patent Office said that it considered a third-party submission, which showed that similar aiming and projectile mechanics existed in games that predated the 2024 application. Among the prior art cited are creature battling systems and status-inflicting projectiles in ARK, tranq bomb throwing in Monster Hunter, monster catching in Pocketpair's Craftopia, and even the Poké Ball aiming reticle in Nintendo's own Pokémon Go.

In a machine translation of the rejection notice, the JPO said it refused the claims of the application because they "could have easily been made by persons who have common knowledge in the technical field to which the claimed invention(s) pertains," as demonstrated by those prior game releases.

It's worth noting that the JPO examiner's decision is non-final, and Nintendo has the ability to pursue an appeal with Japan's Intellectual Property High Court—which would be another lengthy process in itself. But while the refusal of the 031879 application doesn't directly affect the odds of the Palworld lawsuit, it could give Pocketpair more space to question the validity of the patents being asserted against it.

GamesFray notes that the presiding judges in patent lawsuits tend to weigh the decisions of JPO patent examiners in their deliberations. Additionally, Pocketpair has access to mechanisms similar to a request for judicial notice in US law, which would allow it to formally request that the presiding judge consider the JPO's refusal of the 031879 application while assessing the validity of the lawsuit's related patents.

Meanwhile, considering the bold "mods don't count as real games" stance Nintendo assumed just last month, it's safe to assume that it will be investigating every possible angle for shoring up the validity of its asserted patents as the lawsuit proceeds.

In 1997, two young hobbyists released two pieces of software that more or less prompted a new wave of interest in "retro" games—which were, at that point, really just a few years old. The first punch was Nesticle, a Nintendo Entertainment System emulator that quite suddenly made it free and easy to play Nintendo's '80s and early '90s games on a PC. The second punch, delivered near the end of the year, was ZSNES, which did the same for much newer Super Nintendo games. And it was fast—even on the modest PCs of the era.

"When I was 16 years old I started learning assembly, and I got so fascinated with optimization, making everything as fast as possible," said zsKnight, the developer behind ZSNES, in an interview last week. While most software is written in higher level programming languages like C++ that are easier to work with, even at a young age zsKnight was skilled enough in low level assembly language to start using it to program his own emulator.

Back in 1997, computer processors weren't yet fast enough to accurately emulate game consoles. While the Super Nintendo's 3.58MHz CPU was much slower and simpler than, say, a 133 MHz Intel Pentium CPU, every operation the console performs every fraction of a second has to be interpreted and then rewritten for the PC's processor, which isn't nearly as efficient. zsKnight recalled trying an early SNES emulator called Super Pasofami, which ran at about 10 fps on his PC and didn't even support sound.

He wondered if he could do better.

"I started coding everything in pure assembly—until the Windows port there was not a single line of C code in there," he said. "It's optimized to the brim. When I first started it, I wanted a Super Nintendo emulator that could play at full speed on my computer, but I actually did not expect to meet that goal."

As far as I'm aware this is the first time zsKnight has done an interview about his time working on ZSNES (other than this brief article from 2001), and it's quite a sweet retrospective. He's speaking with the creator of Zophar's Domain, one of the earliest emulation fan sites, and delves both into the creation of the emulator as well as what he did after leaving the project in 2001.

He didn't know how incredibly popular ZSNES was until he interviewed for a job at game publisher EA—they were all impressed by his work on the emulator. And for good reason, as this video from Modern Vintage Gamer helps summarize; ZSNES really was amazing in its day.

Outside work, though, few people ever knew who zsKnight was.

"When we released the first version of ZSNES, the friend who told me about Super Pasofami was so excited about ZSNES. He told me 'there's this awesome emulator out there!' I kept my identity a secret; I told him those guys who made it must be pretty amazing people, and he said 'hell yeah!' To this day he doesn't know it's me. I kept the development of ZSNES and my real life separate."

My favorite bits of the interview touch on ZSNES's iconic snowy effect when you open the UI. Despite being burned into the memories of a whole generation of emulation fans, it was basically a lark.

"It's a thing I only spent like an hour working on. I think people just love Easter eggs, and it looks nice… you're in this menu and it just feels peaceful."

Most interesting from a technical perspective, though, is how zsKnight got online multiplayer working in the emulator on the dial-up connections of 1997—basically inventing his own version of rollback netcode decades before it would be commonplace in fighting games.

"30 times a second, I do a secret save state. The emulator plays ahead, maybe 30 milliseconds, and whenever it gets a packet saying the controller has changed, it rewinds to that frame and replays the emulation until the current point with that new input buffer."

After spending years in big budget game development, zsKnight actually released his own indie game this year called Retro Endurance 8bit, a WarioWare-inspired collection of about 50 minigames. While the minigames were originally designed to just be played for a few seconds, during early access he's been expanding on them, and now 20 of them can be played as multi-stage arcade games. Even if they're simple, that's a lotta game for the $4 it costs on Steam.

Dementium: The Ward launched on Steam just in time for this week's Scream Fest, with a 40% discount that's got to be pretty tempting for anyone who enjoyed the horror game nearly 20 years ago on the Nintendo DS. One Steam reviewer calls Dementium "a bit like Silent Hill crossed with Doom 3," before zeroing in on an even more specific comparison: "Afraid of Monsters crossed with Doom 3, for those of you who have dabbled in Half-life horror mods."

Dementium may not be an all-timer horror game, but it was a bit clever, a bit different, and seeing it pop up on Steam got me thinking about just how many games developed for the Nintendo DS fit that description. And equally, how few are playable anywhere but the DS, even 15 years after Nintendo stopped making new handhelds.

Steam has seen HD remasters of some of the DS's best games over the years:

• Zero Escape
• Etrian Odyssey 1,2, and 3
• Ace Attorney Trilogy
• Castlevania Dominus Collection
• Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective

But it's a weirdly short list given just how many bangers came out on the DS over the course of its life. Even setting aside Nintendo's own stuff, there are some stone cold classics that deserve to be perma-installed on every Steam Deck. Where's Meteos, from Rez/Lumines creator Tetsuya Mizuguchi? Where are the Professor Layton puzzle games? Square Enix's 2000s Tokyo fashion time capsule The World Ends With You?

Bangai-O Spirits, one of the last action masterpieces from Ikaruga developer Treasure? Hotel Dusk, a detective mystery that still gets brought up every time a new great in that genre drops?

Ninja Gaiden: Dragon Sword? Okamiden? Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey? Atlus has sold millions of copies of its RPGs on Steam at this point, yet it's still leaving obvious ones like that out in the cold!

I'm not even venturing into "hidden gem" territory here; the DS's archive of great, or at least weird and interesting, games truly runs deep. There are quite a few more 3DS games on Steam than DS ones, perhaps because its more advanced 3D graphics were a bit easier to polish up for an HD re-release. But even as Steam has become the obvious place to build a decade-spanning library of games ported to PC for safekeeping, both systems remain underrepresented, which is particularly disappointing given the surge in handheld PC gaming in the last couple years.

We're only going to see more and more people playing their Steam libraries away from their desks in the next couple years. And I think the PC audience is more primed than ever to enjoy games that look like they cost the GDP of a small country to make or are wobbly and ugly but just as brilliant. No system ever did the latter better than the DS.

I even think that Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood—a Sonic the Hedgehog RPG made by Bioware with some of the worst music you've ever heard—should be ported to PC. For history's sake, y'know?

Dementium: The Ward is a cult-classic survival horror game first released on the Nintendo DS in 2007. There weren't a lot of horror games on Nintendo's handheld, which is most of the reason for Dementium's cult reputation. It cast you as an amnesiac trapped in a hospital full of zombies and giant worms you had to defeat with various guns and a nightstick. Nintendogs this ain't.

Developer Renegade Kid originally pitched it to Konami as a Silent Hill game. As director Jools Watsham told NintendoLife, "The person I met with from Konami was rather dismissive and said something to the effect of, 'We wouldn’t give the Silent Hill IP to a team like yours'. It was quite surprising and very disheartening."

Renegade Kid tried again years later, using the engine from Dementium 2 to mock up a third-person game to pitch to Konami. "Konami's response that time wasn't dismissive like the first time," Watsham told IGN. "They simply didn't want to venture into the DS space with a horror title at that time."

The trailer sure makes Dementium look a lot more like Doom 3 than Silent Hill 2, so I can't say I'm disappointed Renegade Kid had to come up with their own mythos rather than borrowing Silent Hill's. And while there wasn't anything else like it on the DS back in 2007, it does look like a textbook horror game in 2025. Maybe playing it on Steam Deck will bring back some of those handheld-horror vibes?

This remastered PC version supports 4K resolution, but also comes with a variety of retro display options if you want to add CRT scan-lines or play in old school 240p. It'll be available on Steam from October 27.

Nintendo has released an official response after rumors spread online last week that it was lobbying against generative AI with the Japanese government, as reported by Video Games Chronicle.

Nintendo stated in a post on X (formerly Twitter): "Contrary to recent discussions on the internet, Nintendo has not had any contact with the Japanese government about generative AI. Whether generative AI is involved or not, we will continue to take necessary actions against infringement of our intellectual property rights."

This statement was sparked by a now-deleted post by Japanese House of Representatives member Satoshi Asano claiming that Nintendo was "engaging in lobbying activities with the government" to push back against the use of generative AI. Asano posted a formal apology on Sunday after Nintendo's denial of the allegations, expressing regret at not adequately confirming the facts.

The mix-up comes amidst the tumultuous launch of OpenAI's Sora 2 AI video generation model, which was caught generating videos containing copyrighted content last week, including IP from Nintendo, Pokémon, Studio Ghibli, and more. One such video showed an AI-generated Sam Altman saying, "I hope Nintendo doesn't sue us," as photo-realistic Pokémon run around in the background. Backlash over these videos is likely part of the reason OpenAI is changing its policy for using copyrighted material in Sora.

Nintendo is famously protective of its IP, although its stance on the use of generative AI internally isn't fully clear yet. In the past, Nintendo has mentioned steering clear of generative AI for the time being, citing concerns about IP protection, but Nintendo president Shuntaro Furukawa has also said the company is "open to utilizing technological developments." So, generative AI might not be permanently out of the question for Nintendo, which isn't exactly surprising considering over half of Japanese game companies are already using it in some capacity.

Less than a week after OpenAI launched its Sora 2 AI video generation model on September 30, it's already backtracking to change its policy around copyrighted content, as reported by the Wall Street Journal.

In a blog post published on October 3, Sam Altman responded to a wave of copyright concerns surrounding Sora 2 and announced that OpenAI is updating its policy for copyrighted content to make it opt-in, meaning Sora will refuse prompts containing copyrighted material unless the copyright holder specifically gives OpenAI permission to use it.

Altman stated in the blog post: "We will give rightsholders more granular control over generation of characters, similar to the opt-in model for likeness but with additional controls. We are hearing from a lot of rightsholders who are very excited for this new kind of 'interactive fan fiction' and think this new kind of engagement will accrue a lot of value to them, but want the ability to specify how their characters can be used (including not at all)."

"In particular, we'd like to acknowledge the remarkable creative output of Japan—we are struck by how deep the connection between users and Japanese content is!"

This statement and the policy change come after a plethora of Sora-generated videos were posted online last week containing characters from Japanese game and anime studios, including IP from Nintendo, Pokémon, One Piece, Demon Slayer, Studio Ghibli, and others. One such video sums up the entire situation: an AI-generated, photo-realistic, 10-second clip of Sam Altman surrounded by a pack of Pokémon while saying, "I hope Nintendo doesn't sue us."

This video is just one of many examples, but you'll have a much harder time finding Sora-generated videos containing Marvel or Disney characters. As reported by Automaton, Sora appears to be refusing prompts containing references to American IP, but Japanese IP didn't seem to be getting the same treatment over the past week.

Japanese lawyer and House of Representatives member Akihisa Shiozaki called for action to protect creatives in a post on X (formerly Twitter), which has been translated by Automaton: "I’ve tried out [Sora 2] myself, but I felt that it poses a serious legal and political problem. We need to take immediate action if we want to protect leading Japanese creators and the domestic content industry, and help them further develop. (I wonder why Disney and Marvel characters can’t be displayed)."

Ahead of Sora 2's launch, the Wall Street Journal reported OpenAI's initial opt-out policy for copyright holders, which required creators to specifically tell OpenAI if they didn't want their characters or work to be used in Sora. This means that if a copyright holder didn't opt-out, it was assumed their content was allowed in Sora prompts.

In contrast, real people such as celebrities and other public figures were opt-in by default, meaning OpenAI will not allow users to create videos of them without their permission. The threat of copyright infringement lawsuits stemming from that policy difference is likely why OpenAI changed its tune this weekend.

Pocketpair’s Palworld has certainly found an audience since release: even if, unfortunately, those interested include Nintendo's lawyers. The ongoing copyright lawsuit between the indie studio and the most venerable company in gaming is the subject of great interest worldwide, but of particular fascination in Japan, where the suit is filed and where both companies are based.

A genuine Capcom legend has now waded into the debate with a strident take on the situation, and one that seems to have angered more people than it's won over. Yoshiki Okamoto is now the chairman of the Japan Game Culture Foundation, but had a stellar career in games including golden age arcade titles like 1942, Final Fight, and Street Fighter 2, alongside working on the original Resident Evil and later the mobile smash Monster Strike. There are dozens of other games to mention (and one in particular we'll flag later), but suffice to say Okamoto is the real deal.

Speaking on the Pocketpair—Nintendo dispute, he comes out swinging. "[Palworld is] a game that transcends the boundaries of war," begins Okamoto, going on to say it "crossed a line that should not be crossed, and I don't want the world to think it is acceptable." Okamoto says with regards to the copyright dispute that he doesn't like the kind of thinking that goes "It sold well, so it's OK, or it was fun, so it's OK, or it got good reviews, so it's OK."

Okamoto then goes on a digression about the game being in beta (Palworld is in Steam early access) and having a final version announced for next year which, he says, should "raise an eyebrow." He seems a little stuck on the fact that the game will get a 1.0 release and somehow regards this as a further affront, but we're barely getting started here.

"If a settlement is reached with Nintendo, then I think [Palworld] will become a game that is officially fine to play," says Okamoto, warming up to his theme. "However, it is currently a game that’s being sued so it’s unacceptable. By playing the game you are supporting it, so please don’t buy it."

This has gone down just as well as you'd expect: people don't like being told what they should and shouldn't play, and while we all love Nintendo games I think we can probably agree that their lawyers are not as loveable. Pocketpair obviously has its own lawyers, and is perfectly capable of defending itself, but most will see this lawsuit in the context of Nintendo's over-zealous attitude towards fan games and emulation, where it is undeniably ruthless.

One particularly controversial moment comes with a bleeped-out term that Okamoto uses to describe the game: he calls it "anti-[bleep]", with commenters speculating he's using a term that translates as "anti-social force” (thanks IGN). This is a term typically reserved for actual criminal outfits or those that skirt the margins of legality.

The reaction to this has been especially fiery, with some pointing out that Okamoto's own Monster Strike series owes a considerable debt to Pokemon itself. Not mentioned (that I could see) is that Okamoto actually directed an even more straightforward monster-collecting game, 2007's Folklore on the PS3. This game has a completely different aesthetic and vibe from Pokemon, being a dark fantasy world tinged with a little horror, but it is arguably closer to the actual mechanics of Nintendo's series than Palworld. Anyway.

The comments are universally against Okamoto's stance. "I will be supporting Pocketpair," reads one of the most-upvoted comments. "What Nintendo is doing is wrong. They did not invent monster fighting and the idea that a completely different game with similar mechanics does not deserve to enter the market is wrong and bad for consumers."

Another reads: "It's not a copyright issue, it's patent abuse from a company trying to gatekeep mechanics they themselves did not create. For an industry veteran, you seem to have forgotten your roots as a game developer."

Finally: "Patenting videogame mechanics is a 'line that should not have been crossed'. I can't believe we have to have this conversation. Greed is ugly."

For the avoidance of doubt, Okamoto says he's never played Palworld and has "no intention" of doing so "or spending money on it." He acknowledges that there are divided opinions on the game and "there are fans out there", but circles back to the copyright lawsuit and his concerns that, if Pocketpair emerges triumphant, other companies will become more brazen in copying prize IPs like Pokemon et al, particularly with the rise of generative AI.

The Nintendo-Palworld lawsuit rumbles on, centered around three patents granted to Nintendo. The goalposts do appear to be moving as the lawsuit develops: Nintendo's latest move is to target a Dark Souls 3 mod, believe it or not, that could invalidate the lawsuit.

Doug Bowser, the president and CEO of Nintendo of America, has announced he will retire at the end of 2025. Bowser succeeded Reggie Fils-Aime and has been in position for six years, but spent well over a decade in various other leadership roles at the company. He's also leaving the company on something of a high: the Switch 2 launched on June 5 this year, and is the fastest-selling hardware in Nintendo's history.

To be honest, and not to take anything away from Bowser, a potted plant could've probably done a decent job as NOA CEO over this period. The all-conquering Switch has continued to dominate the console market and print money, while Nintendo's also expanded into theme parks and most successfully the film industry: 2023's The Super Mario Bros. Movie grossed $1.36 billion at the box office, the first videogame film ever to top a billion.

"Bowser’s distinguished tenure includes delivering on the promise of the Nintendo Switch system to change the way people play video games and bring new experiences to a broad range of consumers," reads a Nintendo statement. "Earlier this year, he expanded on that mission when he oversaw the launch of Nintendo Switch 2 in the Americas and helped establish the system as the best-selling video game console of all time in its initial sales period."

“One of my earliest video game experiences was playing the arcade version of Donkey Kong,” said Bowser, adding BWAHAHAHA. "Since that time, all things Nintendo have continued to be a passion for both me and my family. Leading Nintendo of America has been the honor of a lifetime, and I am proud of what our team has accomplished in both business results and the experiences we’ve created for consumers.”

For one of the most magical companies in the world, Nintendo does do a great line in boring executive statements. Bowser's replacement as president will be Devon Pritchard, a NOA veteran, while Nintendo's Satoru Shibata joins NOA as CEO. Pritchard also joins the NOA Board of Directors and will become a Nintendo executive officer.

"I am humbled and excited to take on this new role," said Pritchard, establishing her dull corporate statement bona fides. "Doug has been a fantastic mentor, and I look forward to building on the incredible foundation he has helped establish. With characters and worlds that offer something for everyone, my focus will be continuing to build on Nintendo’s legacy of surprising and delighting our longtime fans, while at the same time welcoming new players into the Nintendo family."

Nintendo reassuringly adds that Pritchard will be "putting Nintendo fans at the top of her agenda", which just makes me think of a clipboard with "NINTENDO FANS?!?" written in sharpie.

"During his tenure, Doug made numerous contributions to bring smiles to the faces of people connected to Nintendo," says Nintendo president Shuntaro Furukawa. "I would like to express my gratitude for his strong efforts. Devon, who will become the next president, has also made many contributions to Nintendo over the years. I am confident that, like Doug, Devon will continue to support Nintendo’s important mission of creating smiles."

Only last week, Palworld developer Pocketpair announced that the hit survival game, which remains in early access, would be going quiet as it prepared for a full launch in 2026. Well well well… it looks like someone had a surprise up their sleeve, because today brought the announcement of an unexpected crossover, albeit with scant detail.

Palworld is collaborating with Ultrakill, a brilliant indie shooter by Arsi 'Hakita' Patala that's still in early access itself, and continuing to blow minds (the game sits at "overwhelmingly positive" on Steam with roughly 120K user reviews). Ultrakill is fast-paced, bloody, and constructed around five weapons and the intricate way their various fire modes can be comboed together. It also boasts the brilliant tagline: "Mankind is dead. Blood is fuel. Hell is full."

The announcement says that "collaboration gear and weapons from the cult-hit game Ultrakill are coming to Palworld!" Ultrakill's hardware is fantastic, and you'd expect there'll be some clever ways to get all your pals tooled-up and combo-ing merrily together.

Palworld's most recent high-profile crossover was with Terraria, which caused a big spike in players, so expect something similar for a collaboration that asks the question "will blood rain upon the Palpagos Islands?" You'd imagine it probably will.

There's no release date beyond "later this year," with Palworld also scheduled for a winter update (which Pocketpair has said won't be as big as the 2024 equivalent: but that was enormous.) Other than that, the developer's settling down to get it ready for the full release.

"Beyond just adding new content, there's a lot of cleanup that needs to be done before Palworld can exit early access," said Pocketpair community director Bucky last week. "It's no secret that Palworld has a lot of quirks and jank, and we want to take the time to properly address those before releasing the game. With that in mind, we plan to start this cleanup this year."