(Image credit: Future)This month I've been: Inducting my daughter into a life of crime in Magical Princess, and constructing cozily cluttered dioramas in Shanty Town—two games I'm confident would also be fantastic on a handheld.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...

Star Citizen received a major update back in May, one which implemented a "full reset" of its sci-fi universe while also adding a bunch of new features. Unfortunately, Alpha 4.8 also added a lot of bugs to CIG's space MMO. So many, in fact, that the studio has been forced to change course on its next update, postponing plans for several new features and turning it into a gigantic bug-squashing...

First reported by Tom's Hardware, Linux-based gaming just got a massive shot in the arm thanks to developer Noah Cagle. That's right, baby: Hannah Montana Linux is back.Ok, maybe less a "shot in the arm" and more a "completely neutral development"—more on that in a second—but HML is a fully fledged OS capable of doing all the OS-y things you could possibly want, and it won't take screenshots of your...

Mortal Shell 2 finally has a release date, and it's arriving sooner than you might think. Like so many other games releasing this year, Cold Symmetry is getting ahead of Grand Theft Auto 6's attention tidal wave blocking out November's horizon, and will launch at the tail end of August.That makes the August-October release schedule even more stuffed than it already was, with games like Star Wars: Zero Company, Gears...

It's a miserable time in the upper echelons of game development right now, but in the midst of all the layoffs, cancelled games, and legendary studios being horribly and inexplicably gutted, one company at least is riding high—Saber Interactive.Previously known for vehicle simulators and middling action games like World War Z, Saber found itself with a monster hit on its hands two years ago, courtesy of Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine...

Grand Theft Auto 3's Ghost City was my first proper experience of community discovery.I was too young to fully appreciate game-breaking in the likes of Super Mario and Alex Kidd, so the idea of flying the clipped-wing Dodo aircraft from the runway of Frances International Airport at a very specific angle in order to break the 3D map and wind up in an otherwise inaccessible area—the section which housed the...

Amongst all the news of brutal layoffs, studio divestments, and ironic task force appointments at Microsoft this week, over in the Call of Duty corner of the megacorp, something kinda cool happened. Activision released updated ports of Call of Duty: Black Ops (2010) and Black Ops 2 (2012).They come with caveats, of course: At $40 a pop, the Call of Duty tax is firmly affixed to these elderly shooters. They're...

For the first time ever, seasonal content is here for The Elder Scrolls Online. Return of the Thieves Guild, its inaugural season, has launched for the long-running MMO, something you'd expect fans would be all abuzz for—if not for the fact that ZeniMax Online Studios has been gutted as part of the mass layoffs at Xbox this week.Yeah, the timing on this one ain't great. The developer of the MMO,...

The Palworld 1.0 update sure is a big one, and with all of the new pals, weapons, and zones to track it's easy to miss the little things—like new resources for crafting. As I climbed the revamped tech tree again, I breezed through most recipes until I ran into hardwood. It's a new tier of the basic building block you'll see pop up in later level recipes (around 40 to...

I've seen a lot of complaints and concerns about the layoffs at Xbox that put 3,200 people out of work and resulted in the spinoff of four studios—eventually five, once the Arkane situation is sorted. One I haven't run across is a claim that it's all part of an effort to take jobs away from Americans and replace them with non-Americans on H-1B visas. That changed today, though, when Microsoft...