All due respect to developer Rare — I really enjoyed my time with Diddy Kong Racing, team! — I’m choosing to willfully ignore almost the entirety of its work on the Donkey Kong franchise, because there’s a bunch of very confusing ape lore I’d prefer not to think about while I play Donkey Kong Bananza next week. And, yeah, Candy Kong is a big part of that. I never want to...

Donkey Kong Bananza will add even more chaos to the confounding timeline of the Donkey Kong games, which over the past 40-plus years, has been a tangled mess of contradictions and confusion.  But Nintendo’s revelations about Pauline and its coyness about her age — she’s just 13 years old in this game — plays into the story of Donkey Kong Bananza offer a glimmer of hope that the Switch 2 exclusive...

The peaceful Suburbia map in Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3 hides many secrets and you need to uncover them to get the Suburbia secret tape. Old and new fans can skate around in classic maps like Suburbia in Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3+4. The two titles are receiving the modernizing treatment that the first two games got five years ago, but keeping the series DNA by challenging players to complete...

Missile Command Delta is a new take on a classic 1980 arcade game by Atari. I saw a trailer and was immediately taken with what seemed like an ingenious reinterpretation of the brilliant but archaic original’s gameplay. I couldn’t wait to get stuck in. So you can imagine my disappointment when the game turned out to be a tepid, poorly written first-person narrative game, in which I prodded listlessly about...

Donkey Kong Bananza may not look like a particularly demanding game, especially compared to visually impressive contemporaries like Death Stranding 2. But the Switch 2 exclusive makes ample use of voxel environments that Donkey Kong can destroy while the player charts a path forward with Pauline in tow — think The Finals or Just Cause 2 by way of Super Mario Odyssey. No wonder, then, that Nintendo held off on...

I’ve logged an unholy number of hours into NetEase’s hero-based shooter, Marvel Rivals, and to its credit, this time sink has largely been fueled by the strength of the gameplay. I’ve bought a couple of skins and unlocked a few things here and there, but for the most part, cosmetics for the characters I play — and by extension, the battle passes that have been available so far — have...

Nintendo announced on Thursday the company is sunsetting its Nintendo Switch Game Vouchers offer early next year. Nintendo Switch Online members will have until January 30, 2026, at 11:59 p.m. PST to take advantage of the offer. Vouchers are redeemable for up to a year after purchase. The Game Voucher program is a great way to save on Nintendo’s first-party line-up. Sold in pairs, for $100 players can receive two...

Sometimes a game can transport you back to an exact moment in time. When I think back to Islanders, I blink back to January 2020. It was a cold New York winter, and I was bundled up in my apartment for a particularly bitter weekend. I was feeling a bit of cabin fever, but I didn’t dare brave the frost. I needed a warm escape, and I found it in...

Console releases only happen every few years, so they’re a huge occasion for major retailers. That’s especially the case for an enthusiast storefront like GameStop; early adopters will flock to specialist stores before considering mainstream options that may not offer the same breadth of options. You’d think that when news started to spread that GameStop had sold ruined Switch 2 consoles to hundreds of customers, alarm bells were going off...

The folks at Aggro Crab were feeling the fatigue. Their previous game, the underwater Souls-like Another Crab’s Treasure, was their biggest undertaking since the studio was started back in 2019. While the creative action game had been received well by reviewers and players alike, it also took three years to make. A prototype for their next game, a sequel to 2020’s roguelike Going Under, was spun up almost immediately after...