The Verge’s gaming section brings the latest video game news, reviews of the most exciting releases, and interviews with the industry’s biggest names. We cover everything from PlayStation and Xbox blockbusters, to quirky Nintendo games, to the cool indie gems on PC and Android that you might otherwise miss.
Sony sells console covers in various colors, but here’s something different.
The games industry is being rocked by layoffs, rising prices, and studio closures. Then there’s Nintendo.
MSI’s April Fools’ prank aims to solve the problem of your cat plopping itself directly atop your keyboard. It showed off an “MEG Cat Holder” that gives your furry friend its very own RGB bed attached to your monitor. As MSI puts it: “Your cat already acts like they own your setup, now they can complete it!”
Next week Bethesda’s sci-fi RPG is coming to the PS5 and getting a paid story expansion. But Starfield is also getting a major free update that adds a long list of features, including pets and a much-improved New Game Plus. You can get a rundown in this new trailer.
In celebration of April Fools Day, Pokopia is running a small, one-day-only event where pokémon will impersonate each other and ask you to figure out who they’re pretending to be.
Also: you can snag one of those wacky waving inflatable tube thingies that look like a Sudowoodo.
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The Palworld developer continues to insist that its dating sim spinoff is indeed a real game that you’ll be able to play. There’s even a new video to prove it. And while the game doesn’t have a release date, the studio says it’s coming “soon… we promise.”
For April Fools’ Day, The New York Times is sharing a “Micro Crossword,” which has just three boxes to fill in. The NYT is also launching April Fools’ Day-themed versions of other puzzles, too, including a maximalist Connections.
Nintendo and Illumination’s latest film is another visual stunner with a ho-hum story.
This time it’s at Polyarc, creator of PSVR, Meta Quest, and SteamVR darling Moss (and its sequels). Polyarc will “significantly reduce the size of the company.” We called Moss one of “the 14 best games to download for your new VR gaming headset” back in 2019.
Zero Parades: For Dead Spies, the upcoming “spy RPG” from the studio behind Disco Elysium, launches on PC on May 21st. I got to play it last month, and it felt very much like a spiritual successor to Disco but with a heavy dose of spy thriller vibes.
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Super Mario Bros. Wonder just got an expansion, and the Super Mario Galaxy Movie comes out on Wednesday. But before that Mario Kart World’s new update adds the returning favorite “Bob-omb Blast” battle mode. The update also nerfs boomerangs — you can check out the full patch notes here.
Aptoide’s AppArena is now available in Japan as an Apple Store alternative. It comes after regulators required Apple and Google to support third-party app marketplaces and payment systems. AppArena features AI-assisted discovery of apps and games, cashback rewards, and 15-minute game trials.
The Embracer-owned studio, behind games like Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy and Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, says that the cuts are “a result of changing project needs and impacts across production and support teams.” Studio head David Anfossi is also leaving the company.
[LinkedIn]
The cute 3D platforming game starring a frog is getting a “2+ hour photography game” where you’ll help out a “conspiracy theorist” owl. It looks like a fun twist on a video game photo mode.
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The NW5 Case Keyring features a removable core that can store three Switch cartridges (OG or new) plus three microSD cards. It slides into a protective silicone recreation of the original Game Boy featuring a window for displaying game art and an included carabiner. It’s $15.99 from Elago, or $14.99 through Amazon.
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Nearly four decades after Jordan Mechner’s original Prince of Persia debuted on the Apple II, a new port called Prince Of Arabia is now available for the Flipper Zero. It’s the full game, including fights and traps, and doesn’t require the Zero’s optional Video Game Module unless you want to play on a bigger screen.
BeamMP, which lets you play BeamNG.drive’s physics-based vehicle sim with friends, is offline after a hacker infiltrated its infrastructure and shut down its Discord server.
While the BeamMP team says it has “no verified reasons to believe that any end users have been ‘hacked’ as a result of the incident,” the bad actor likely accessed a “database where email addresses and encrypted passwords were stored.”
The latest casualty: PUBG spinoff Blindspot, which shuts down today after less than two months in early access. In a previous post, the developer said “we are no longer able to sustainably provide the level of experience we set out to deliver.” The news comes just a few days after the Fortnite team was hit with large-scale layoffs.
The latest project from Swedish designer Love Hultén is the NES-SY2.0 — a bespoke synthesizer that includes an NES Poly chiptune synth, KeyStep and Flamma FS22 interfaces, and a custom-made MIDI visualizer. And yes, Hultén says the system supports NES game cartridges!
Developer Niels Leenheer decided to see if he could recreate the classic FPS using the language that describes webpage formatting. cssDOOM is a bit messy and definitely pushing the limits of what is possible using cascading style sheets, but it’s undeniably impressive.
You get a few seconds to sear a color into your brain. Then you have to find it again with a set of hue, saturation, and brightness sliders. Then you do it four more times. You can challenge yourself, your friends, or play against the entire world.
[Dialed]
Benchmark test results from Phoronix show KDE Plasma 6.6 consistently outperforming GNOME 50 on Ubuntu 26.04 while using both AMD and Nvidia graphics cards. While these results could vary based on distro and hardware, gamers might want to opt for KDE over GNOME as the desktop environment for their next Linux gaming PC.
Yesterday brought the surprise news that Fox McCloud would be in the Super Mario Galaxy Movie. Now we know who will voice the Star Fox character: Glen Powell. And he seems pretty excited.
Ludovic ‘Shinobi’ Helme has worked on games ranging from Cyberpunk 2077 to Expedition 33.
After creating an HDMI upgrade kit for the Sega Genesis called the Megaswitch HD, Stanislav Parhomovich has announced a similar solution for the original Super Nintendo. By avoiding the console’s analog output hardware and connecting directly to its digital buses, the Superswitch HD mod will enable crisp 1080p output (upscaled) over HDMI.
The Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 is a follow-up to last year’s excellent gaming chip, with 16 Zen 5 cores and 208MB of total cachem with the V-Cache split across both chiplets.
However, its upgrades may not do much for gaming alone, with the company’s pitch instead highlighting a 5 - 10 percent performance bump in creative apps like DaVinci Resolve, positioning it as a compromise option between Threadripper CPUs and options like the Ryzen 7 9850X3D.
It may be called the Super Mario Galaxy Movie, but Nintendo’s next film is giving off some Smash Bros. vibes now that we know Fox McCloud will make an appearance.
