Busted? @sammygecsoyler.bsky.social reports on the week's events at Rockstar Games: www.theguardian.com/games/2025/n...

Just reached the unexpected "organised crime" chapter of Pokémon Legends Z-A - thanks Game Freak for this cherishable opportunity to try and explain loan sharks and compound interest to my small children

lol

The extremely strange afterlife of the Xbox Kinect camera, which came out 15 years ago today: www.theguardian.com/games/2025/m...

The extremely strange afterlife of the Xbox Kinect camera, which came out 15 years ago today: www.theguardian.com/games/2025/m...

hit da bricks

My book, Super Nintendo: How One Japanese Company Helped the World Have Fun, is out next February! It is a lively cultural history of the world's most beloved video game company, drawing from 20 years' worth of reporting and interviews. Pre-order here: linktr.ee/super_nintendo

If you are looking for a spooky diversion today and you're too much of a wuss for actual horror media, Ghost Town Pumpkin Festival has grown into something special www.theguardian.com/games/2025/o...

Here's what I learned from spending 8 hours of my weekend playing a game about revolutionary donkeys with a crowd of other people in a theatre www.theguardian.com/games/2025/o...

Great primer here on all the *extremely weird shit* we’ve seen these last couple of days linking Trump, ICE and the Master Chief. Vital to have people like @alyssamerc.bsky.social on this beat, as miserably bleak as it is.

This appropriation of gaming imagery and culture to push authoritarianism is, as @alyssamerc.bsky.social points out here, the natural extension of what Gamergate began www.theguardian.com/games/2025/o...

I am about to go and do my autumn/winter book shopping. What's the best thing you've read lately? I am a voracious reader of all things except horror/crime fiction

astonishing is absolutely the wrong word. it's disgusting, terrible, awful, harrowing that such a vast majority of trans people know how unsafe Britain is. but if you're paying attention it's hardly astonishing.

​Over at The Ringer, I went long on the history of PlayStation online, from SOCOM and Uncharted 2 to its current live-service woes. Notable hearing Shawn Layden on​ GaaS:​ “A live-service game to me isn’t really a game. It’s a repetitive action engagement device.” www.theringer.com/2025/10/24/v...

I reviewed The Seance of Blake Manor by @spookydoorway.bsky.social and absolutely adored it. Interesting procedural detective work, folk horror, Irish mythology, colonial subtexts and jump scares!! 👻 www.theguardian.com/games/2025/o...

I got to write this nice piece for @theguardian.com about the birthday of the Nintendo Entertainment System. Something that at least isn't full sorrow and horror, you know.

If only everyone could have predicted this www.thegamer.com/ea-generativ...

I love game reviews written in the style of "I fucking hate this game, 10/10 I'll never play it again but it was really good"

Well that explains a lot

I watched a clip of someone playing this and they do so well to get up a mountain and then they put one foot wrong (literally) and the character fell and slid for what seemed like 100 years. Watching the colour and life drain from the player's face was a sight to behold.

More than 1,200 video game journalists have left major publications in the past two years, and not returned to the media, according to data supplied to VGC. www.videogameschronicle.com/news/more-th...

Hi I wrote about the glory of seven-out-of-ten games focusing on Vampire The Masquerade Bloodlines 2. I finished with vampire puns and I wish I could say I was sorry but… www.theguardian.com/games/2025/o...

Ninja Gaiden and Dead or Alive creator Tomonobu Itagaki died last week, aged 58. His friend James Mielke remembers a pugnacious talent: www.theguardian.com/games/2025/o...

Special delivery of the one and only @mackeza.bsky.social's upcoming book! Can't wait to get stuck into this review copy!

Ninja Gaiden and Dead or Alive creator Tomonobu Itagaki died last week, aged 58. His friend James Mielke remembers a pugnacious talent: www.theguardian.com/games/2025/o...

It is unfortunate for Vampire: The Masquerade Bloodlines 2 that I binged AMC's Interview with the Vampire series before playing it. One of these is a masterful, frightening, sexually charged and deftly comic reimagining of vamp mythology. The other is *okay*. www.theguardian.com/games/2025/o...

Pokémon Legends Z-A getting an enthusiastic reception in this house. Unsurprisingly, children honestly do not care at all if a game's graphics aren't all that (think of the games we loved as children, for god's sake, they all looked like ass)

i think its very beautiful that your art might be viewed slightly differently based on the device a person views it through, and the history behind the device and the person's relationship to it. in many ways the device is the frame of the digital art - this is a medium characteristic to me

The main achievement of the tech industry has been increasing the flow of money from people who make or do things to people who already have more money than they could spend in a hundred lifetimes

Imagine texting a beautiful woman with this.

Thank you @mackeza.bsky.social for this latest addition to our shelves 💜 🙏 So excited to dive in❗️ 📚 📚 📚 📚 📚 📚 📚 @penguinrandomhouse.bsky.social #Nintendo #Booksky

To celebrate the NES' birthday, I got @mikedrucker.bsky.social to reminisce: www.theguardian.com/games/2025/o...

I wanted to review Silent Hill f but I didn’t want to rush it - so I didn’t. Consequently, here is my rather late verdict. It’s a masterpiece www.theguardian.com/games/2025/o...

We’ve met with Greta Thunberg and others in the flotilla. They describe hours-long scenes of torture and sexual harassment in Israeli captivity. Experts conclude that they have been subjected to serious crimes – Sweden’s foreign minister believes they have themselves to blame. tinyurl.se/crR

15 years later I am still Like This

I have never hated a game as I hate Baby Steps. I have been stuck inside a sandcastle for hours. It has brought out my worst self, as I curse vehemently at a pallid loser sliding pathetically down a sandy slope for the 40th time. Every time one of his pallid feet slips off a ledge I hate him more

I feel like someone has made this game specifically for me?? (I did my masters dissertation on Berlin's architectural memory, many years ago)

Waterstones are doing 25% off preorders on my book Super Nintendo this week, alongside other 2026 titles. Preorders are super important for authors so please, buy your future self some cool books! www.waterstones.com/book/super-n...

Sometimes as a writer it is important to really test yourself - to take risks, to break out of your comfort zone and do something radically new. With this in mind, I have written a nostalgic article about a Sega game www.theguardian.com/games/2025/o...

Hi I reviewed Battlefield 6. Tldr: multiplayer = great, back to classic Battlefield Campaign = ughhh 🤢 ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ www.theguardian.com/games/2025/o...

I've noticed the opposing team's fans only cheer when the opponents score on us. To win those fans over, I recommend we score on ourselves repeatedly; that will surely make them so happy they'll start supporting us. And I'm sure all our fans will keep cheering for us—who else is there to cheer for?

Impressive that AI has made even something as laborious and depersonalising as app dating worse www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle...

smart guy in an rpg: hmm.. party member: what's wrong? smart guy: it's nothing. (20 hours later) smart guy: so it's true... i knew it.

I'd love to know what every comedian who played the Riyadh Comedy Festival thinks of this piece by Jonathan Liew. It's an electrifying read. And really hard to think what any counter-justification from the participating comics would consist of. www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

My interview with Alyssa Walles of the @igda.org Foundation is live at @theguardian.com right now! What a lovely chat about a crucial service: helping people around the world break into the video game industry. www.theguardian.com/games/2025/o...

Just doing a bit of research into pre-2015 queer game characters for something I'm writing. By god, we were DESPERATE

In 2014 I wrote for @newyorker.com about @kurtjmac.bsky.social, a YouTuber who began walking in Minecraft and never stopped. His quest was to reach the Far Lands, a place at the limits of the algorithmic world, where the landscape breaks apart. On Saturday, after fourteen years, he arrived:

How are video games being used as a frontier for information war? What are democracies doing to respond to the challenge? And how are organisations like NATO grappling with the problems? Find out in this week's @vgim.bsky.social - videogamesindustrymemo.substack.com/p/natos-vide...

I am fascinated by how ubi has welded the aesthetics of politics in its games and marketing for decades, but always been profoundly cowardly about engaging with them. Political aspartame.