The Nintendo Switch is the most versatile home console ever created. To call it a home console even is to do it an injustice, as its battery-powered handheld mode allows it to act as a supercharged portable games machine too. But its detachable controllers and central tablet-like core processing-and-display unit might make it even more versatile still – the Nintendo Switch could be getting VR support.

Nintendo sometimes makes a big deal about milestones—Mario's 30th, Zelda's 25th, and the "Year of Luigi" are all recent examples that come to mind—but one thing you won't usually hear them mention is how long it's been since something went away. Luckily, my encyclopedic knowledge of pointless factoids stands at the ready!

Oninaki was one of the new titles announced during last week's Nintendo Direct, and has been the beneficiary of some significant coverage in this week's issue of Japanese magazine Famitsu. Published by Square Enix and developed by Tokyo RPG Factory, Oninaki is being described as an "intensely shocking title" and is currently around 65% complete; a release is expected this summer.

A sealed and graded copy of the original NES video game, 'Super Mario Bros.', sells at auction for slightly more than $100K.

Do you like reading old video game junk? I do. I’ve got a Nintendo Power stack, an EGM stack, a GamePro stack, and when I get bored of those, I peruse magazines on archive.org or retromags.com . If that sounds lame, then it’s because you haven’t tried these things out. These treasures are full of predictions that, after 20 or 30 years of hindsight, are super precious. It’s fun to remember the glory days of now fallen giants.

At the end of 2018, Dario “TLO” Wünsch, a well-known professional gamer from Germany, was ranked 42nd in the world in the video game StarCraft II. He’d lost some—especially as he battled debilitating carpal tunnel syndrome—but he’d won enough to still be considered among the world’s best players. But last week, as he sat before his screen executing the unorthodox moves that have become his signature, he watched helplessly as his opponent slaughtered his armies and laid waste to his StarCraft II kingdom.

Guerrilla Games‘ picturesque canalside office was originally intended to house 190 people, its technical director Michiel van der Leeuw tells me as he rushes through the building in search of an empty room. But the Amsterdam-based game developer has grown rapidly over the past few years, filling every nook and cranny of the place, and now it’s bursting at the seams. Next year, it plans to move uptown. Right now, its 250 employees make do.

Steam, unquestionably, needs a sizeable competitor. With a significant monopoly on the PC games market, such that present rivals like GOG and Humble barely take a dent out of its audience, Valve is able to take an infuriatingly lackadaisical approach to many aspects of Steam. Something to scare them into action would be marvellous. And while not optimistic, I’d hoped that maybe Epic, with their lorries full of money, might be able to try. Except, with yet another exclusivity announcement today regarding Metro: Exodus, they’re going about it entirely the wrong way.

A lot of game developers say they want to unionize -- but will they?

Nintendo has released a new Nintendo Switch system update worldwide, with the portable home console’s current version now 7.0.0. While we once again get the usual “system stability improvements” that promise to enhance your experience with the console, there are new additions to accompany that.

Nintendo sold 9.41 million Switch consoles in the three months leading up to December 31st, 2018, bringing lifetime sales to 32.27 million. That's just 660,000 short of the immensely-popular Nintendo 64 and well beyond both the Gamecube and Wii U. The holiday quarter was a big improvement over 2017, when the company shifted 7.23 million Switch consoles. Still, it seems unlikely that the company will hit its 20 million sales target for the current financial year.

In his Foreword to The Ultimate Encyclopedia of Fantasy, the late Sir Terry Pratchett writes, "Imagination, not intelligence, made us human." Most people know Pratchett as the author of Discworld, the famous fantasy series about a flat planet balanced on the backs of four elephants. However, what many people don't know is that the knighted author was also a massive fan of video games - so much so that he actually worked on mods for Oblivion, most of which were spearheaded by a Morrowind modder named Emma.

British army recruiters have been accused of targeting children interested in video games by arranging for a glossy military magazine to be distributed with the latest issue of a leading gaming publication. When readers of PlayStation magazine unwrap the February edition from its plastic packaging, they are also presented with a copy of the The Locker magazine, which includes lifestyle features – and details of how to join the army.

I never intended to make videogames about my brother. But creating videogames became the way in which I tried to make sense of his death.

God of War is the result of the labors of 300 people at console industry leader Sony’s studio in Santa Monica, California. Yet it was the underdog in the battle for Game of the Year at The Game Awards, as Red Dead Redemption 2 was built by a team at Rockstar Games with 10 times more resources. Even so, God of War was the surprise Game of the Year winner, even though it came out in April, long before the fall games that were fresh in everyone’s mind during the holiday season.

Ubisoft has added a new quest to Assassin's Creed Odyssey. Like previous The Lost Tales of Greece quests, this latest escapade is free for all players. It's titled 'The Daughters of Lalaia' and it should give you something to do before the game's next DLC episode launches in the near future. Look, we've got to give Ubisoft credit here -- the company's been doing a great job of keeping Odyssey updated since the game released in October last year. New quests, bounties, and big title updates have been dropping on a regular basis, and every time we load the game up, it feels like we've got something to do.

Thousands of Elite Dangerous players—over 8,000, according to the sign-up sheet—are preparing to embark on another incredible voyage across the Milky Way. The destination is Beagle Point, some 65,279 light years from Earth, past the galactic core, at the very edge of the galaxy. The journey is expected to take 18 weeks, and like last time, casualties are expected.

When you've sunk literally thousands of hours into playing a game, and voraciously consume every piece of rumour and speculation about it, you're unlikely to be blindsided by any one particular piece of news. But that's exactly what happened yesterday, when to the surprise of pretty much everyone Bungie announced it was saying sayonara to its eight-year relationship with Activision, and would be going it alone as the self-publisher of Destiny, effective pretty much immediately.

From the first days of development right up until launch day and every day since, Rare's Sea of Thieves has been driven by its earliest brainstorming session mantra: "players creating stories together." For many fans, this directive has been what has made the game so special since it launched on Xbox One and Windows last March. For others, the "tools, not rules" design was off-putting, which left the game as a success among its close-knit community, but a perceived flash in the pan for many others.

Capcom's Hideaki Itsuno apparently considered making Dragon's Dogma 2 rather than Devil May Cry 5, as reported in a recent interview. Itsuno, director of Dragon's Dogma and the Devil May Cry series going back to the third entry, is said to have approached Capcom founder Kenzo Tsujimoto when talk of Devil May Cry 5 first arose, according to an interview with VG24/7. "Look, I want to make either Devil May Cry 5 or Dragon’s Dogma 2 next. He said ‘okay, do whatever you want. Do whichever one you want.’ So I thought, alright, y’know what… let’s do DMC5. So we did that.”

The beta for the online portion of “Red Dead Redemption 2” goes live in waves this week with those who purchased the Ultimate version of the game gaining access Tuesday, anyone who played on Nov. 26 gains access on Wednesday, anyone who played between Oct. 26 and Oct. 29 gets in on Thursday and everyone else by Friday.

The holidays are now upon us! Santa Claus has arrived early this year, because today we’re adding 50 more PlayStation 4 games to the PlayStation Now library, bringing the total to over 275 PS4 games to stream or download, and a total of over 700 PS4, PS3, and PS2 games to stream. We’ve also got some great discount deals happening on our subscriptions, so keep reading to find out more.

World War Z, the new third-person shooter video game will be released by Saber Interactive in 2019. The game is based on the movie World War Z in 2013, with the gameplay featuring over the shoulder third person shooter cooperative combat against large numbers of zombies, defensive traps and emplacements. The environment for the game will be set in New York, Jerusalem, and Moscow.

Nintendo’s NES and SNES Classic consoles are going away after the holidays — probably for good this time. In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter this week, Nintendo of America president Reggie Fils-Aimé said that the mini-consoles will be going out of production, and once the holiday season stock sells out, they won’t be restocked. Nintendo isn’t new to supply issues. The NES Classic immediately sold out when it was first released in November 2016, with resellers charging hundreds of dollars for the popular product.

In today's PCG Q&A, we're talking about the games we missed the boat on at the time. One of the best things about playing on PC is being able to access a vast archive of classics, so you can check out the games that were fundamental in the development of different genres. Sometimes, though, those games are just too old to enjoy in 2018, whether it's the controls, outdated systems or something else. We're definitely showing our age a bit in our choices here: most of us were born in the mid-late '80s, hence most of the games mentioned were released during our younger years.

For a limited time, get LEGO® The Lord of the Rings for free and keep it forever, courtesy of Humble Bundle! While supplies last.

Earlier this year in July during a shareholders meeting, Nintendo assured shareholders that it was on its way to ship 20 million Switch consoles before the year ended March 2019. In a new interview with Kyoto Shimbum (via) Nintendo President Shuntaro Furukawa stated that the company was confident in selling 100m software units for the year but the 20m hardware goal is “not easy”.

The genre-stretching game broke new narrative, technical, and gameplay ground and established the identity of one of the past two decades’ most storied video game studios

Some may have thought of this year as a down year for Nintendo. They came out with a number of ports for the Nintendo Switch from the Wii U, and although they were good, they lacked original titles. That all changed at the end of the year though. Torna: The Golden Country, which was a DLC add-on for Xenoblade Chronicles 2, was also released as a standalone game. Octopath Traveler was one of the best games of the year.

Shuntaro Furukawa replaced Tatsumi Kimishima last year as Nintendo's global president. Shortly after he was appointed, Furukawa mentioned how he "grew up" with Nintendo and would respect its traditions: originality and flexibility. With this in mind, during a recent interview with Nikkei - as translated by Nintendo Everything - Furukawa touched on these company traditions when asked a series of questions about Nintendo's past, present and future.

“Alien: Blackout” is a mobile game in development from FoxNext Games, D3 Go!, and Rival Games that puts players in the boots of Amanda Ripley aboard an alien-infested Weyland-Yutani space station. In the game, players need to guide their crew to safety and avoid encounters with the alien. The game will be available for download on the App Store, Google Play, and the Amazon Appstore, according to the publisher.

This week in gaming, Soulja Boy takes on Nintendo (and loses), a new standalone VR headset is on the horizon and there's a new free service offering a game every day.

For a game about encouraging people to move, the ESRB seems pretty hell-bent on making sure children don't play Fitness Boxing. As the spiritual successor to Wii Fit, Fitness Boxing has–naturally–flown under the radar. Its release seems to have been aimed at cashing in on those of us who are looking to start off 2019 with a workout routine or, at least, some way to justify our “new year, new me” attitude.

A newly-discovered bit of developer documentation suggests Valve has big plans in mind for third-party developers of multiplayer games. Most notably, it looks like Valve is working toward letting developers host their games through the company’s own dedicated servers. Exactly how this will work in practice remains to be seen, but the feature is currently in beta among some some number of developers.

The box is an avatar of inspiration, no charging required.