Author: Zach Barbieri

Cairn, the free solo climbing game from The Game Bakers, is a pretty punishing experience. Part of this is the multitude of systems that need to be rigorously maintained to keep forward progression at a maximum. In there is one that can be easy to miss, and that is maintaining your hands, which will get cut up on the face of the mountain as the lead character Aava scales along them. This has a large influence on grip strength, which is a significant stat if you plan to make any progress. This is why climbing tape is so important for…

*This guide contains minor spoilers for Code Vein II Preperation While up to this point, you have fought tougher enemies than the usual fare, Franz the Dejected Assailant serves as one of the first true boss fights in the game, and as such, can be a struggle to defeat. Found at the end of the first foray into the past, the character is fought at the bottom of Magmell Tower and blocks you from the rest of the past version of the island until defeated. Despite this, you have unlocked the present day again, so there are some options if…

Dispatch received universal acclaim upon release, so when it was announced that it would be released on the Nintendo Switch and Nintendo Switch 2, there was a lot of anticipation. This was muddled by the title, which has a hard M rating through the use of language and sexual themes/nudity released on the platform, with the pre-existing censorship options enabled, with no way to turn them off, as is present on other platforms. Developer AdHoc addressed this change in a statement, saying, “different platforms have different content criteria. worked with Nintendo to adapt certain elements so Dispatch could be on…

Following a sweeping restructure at Ubisoft that led to multiple game cancellations, such as The Prince of Persia: Sands of Time Remake, along with several delays, we now know that Beyond Good & Evil 2 is still in development. This comes from Creative Director Fawzi Mesmar, who has responded to the restructure. In a LinkedIn post, the former DICE veteran assured fans that the extremely long-in-development Beyond Good & Evil 2 was not affected by the restructuring, something that was previously expected to occur. Mesmar went on to say he was “saddened” by the reorganization effects that have impacted his…

Xbox has had a continuing struggle to sell Consoles, with their numbers coming out of the Holiday Quarter of 2025 reflecting this. Microsoft has posted its Q2 2026 earnings, which include the news that hardware sales are down 32% year-over-year. This follows a multitude of declining quarters that stretch back two years. This report does not feature any actual numbers for console sales revenue, so we can’t say how much profit is lost here, but this is part of a continuing trend. Last quarter, Q1 2026, Xbox saw a hardware decline of 29% year-over-year. Prior to that, in Q4 2025,…

The developer behind titles like Layers of Fear, Cronos: The New Dawn, and Silent Hill 2 Remake, Bloober Team is teasing some announcement that they are set to reveal in February. A countdown website with a creepy atmosphere has cropped up with Bloober Team Inc listed on it, slowly ticking away from 17 days and some change at present. This would place the announcement date for that of Valentines day, February 14, 2026. The page itself has a picture of a rose, which fits with that motif. Underneath this is some text that reads “Some things never leave the walls.…

Listen, sometimes you want to just swing a weapon around and kill everything around you in whatever radius that might be. I’ll admit, it took me a lot longer than I care to admit for me to figure out there is a certain zen in the action. Dynasty Warriors Origins, developed by Omega Force and published by Koei Tecmo, understands that, but clearly picked up from the many spin-offs over the years that maybe JUST swinging a sword and just conquering the battlefield is a little boring too. You need to have something in there to struggle against, and in…

Nintendo Virtual Boy games will be arriving on both the Nintendo Switch and Nintendo Switch 2 next month via a Nintendo Switch Online subscription service, after being announced last year alongside the Switch 2 System. Among the upcoming library, two never-released games for the Virtual Boy will be available. The Virtual Boy library is set to officially join the retro services of the Switch Online on February 17, with a total of seven titles available at launch, and nine additional titles scheduled for a later date. Zero Racer and D-Hopper, two never-released titles for the platform, are scheduled to join…

When exactly does a franchise, a long-running series, hit its critical mass for characters? This was a question I asked myself a few times as I made my way through the prologue of The Legend of Heroes: Trails Beyond The Horizon. It feels like the cap off to the Daybreak titles, or at least an in-between game, similar to that of Reverie, bringing multiple paths through the story into convergence to both end the current arc and hint at the next. Emotionally, it took me a while to catch up to that, as the title spends the first hour bombarding…

Formula Legends was a game I was mildly intrigued by, to say the least. I try to follow F1 as closely as I can, despite the time differences, and the F1 games, despite my not buying every single one, do rank among the most fun in racing, at least in my mind, when you want to split the difference between a sim and arcade racing on a circuit track. Last year, there were also a few cute indie racers that kept my attention as well, like Chase Horizon 2, which I finally got around to. In this vein, I think…