Gaming

Final Fantasy VII Ever Crisis, an FFVII spinoff game on mobile and Steam, will reach end of service status on October 6th, Square Enix says. The company also shut down the short-lived FFVII mobile battle royale game back in 2023. At least there’s the final remake trilogy game to look forward to next year.

According to Retro Dodo, the G02 is “officially dead” and has been removed from “every marketplace it was originally sold on.” The $60 handheld was spotted earlier this year, shipping preloaded with thousands of copyrighted retro games from Nintendo, SEGA, and others.

That’s the sound of Wario Land being added to Nintendo’s lineup of classic games available to Switch Online subscribers. It’s out now alongside shooter Fortified Zone, dungeon crawler The Sword of Hope II, and Dr. Mario & Puzzle League (if you pay for the more expensive tier).

The company is continuing to retreat from the mobile game space (with a few strange exceptions), this time by ending support for Mario Kart Tour in September. However, unlike Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp, the game won’t be getting a microtransaction-free offline mode after support ends.

The Doom developer is reportedly the latest Xbox studio to be hit by Microsoft’s ongoing layoffs, prompting a new variant on an age-old question.

Today, from Summer Games Done Quick 2026, I’m recommending that you watch this race of Hey You, Pikachu! on the N64 — which, if you didn’t know, is a game where you talk to Pikachu with a microphone. It’s very silly.

I missed this yesterday, reported by Kotaku. The studio will apparently keep working on Grounded 2 and DLC for The Outer Worlds 2, but “plans beyond that are up in the air,” Kotaku says.

The Wall Street Journal reported the number on Monday. Bloomberg corroborated it on Tuesday, adding that the subscribers figure is “4 million fewer than it did when the company last publicly shared data in 2024.” At one point, Microsoft had hoped that the service would have 100 million subscribers by 2030 — it seems unlikely it’ll meet that bar.

The RPG Project Phoenix initially raised over $1 million in 2013, when it was slated to launch in 2015. As Kotaku reports, after seven years without any updates, the game’s director now says production won’t be finished until “the end of 2031,” when a release date will be revealed.

Following the 12 new sets announced last month featuring Smart Brick interactivity, Lego is once again expanding its Pokémon collection with five new sets. They range in price from a $69.99, 757-piece Munchlax to an elaborate $299.99, 2,386-piece Poké Ball that opens to reveal a battle scene and Professor Oak’s laboratory.

As Windows Central reports, Valve has released Windows drivers for the Steam Machine, like it previously did for the Steam Deck, so you can replace its Linux-based SteamOS if you want. However, the Steam Machine still doesn’t support dual-booting, so you can only have one OS installed at a time.

The $69.99 HyperMegaTech! Super Pocket Activision Edition! comes with 34 retro games pre-installed that were all available on Atari consoles decades ago. Bundled titles include Pitfall!, Chopper Command, and River Raid, but the handheld is also compatible with Evercade’s ever-growing collection of multi-title cartridges.

The 007 First Light studio previously confirmed it would be hit with layoffs after a “finance partnership” on its upcoming title Project Fantasy ended. Now the studio says it has regained ownership of the game, but will also be closing its Istanbul office and parting ways with an unspecified number of staff.

From Summer Games Done Quick, here’s a 15-minute run of Rail Heist, one game from the massive game collection UFO 50. Can’t ask for much more from this one: I learned about a game I hadn’t played before, the runner does some cool tech, and there are some unexpected shenanigans.

The total number of jobs impacted “could be as much as half the development team,” and a community manager has already shared that the game’s roadmaps “will be shifting,” according to Kotaku.

That’s no secret, and the demise of physical media isn’t helping things. Nintendo president Shuntaro Furukawa recently reiterated this sentiment during a shareholders meeting, explaining that “there are certain challenges in preserving and exhibiting past games as they are, particularly in keeping them in a playable state.“

Catch the event over the next week on Twitch, though my preferred way to watch is to catch VODs after the fact on YouTube.

According to Game File, in private communications, Sony told developers that games released before the January 1, 2028 cutoff could still get reorders of physical copies in 2028. So expect a glut of unfinished games to hit shelves in December 2027, just to ensure companies can still get discs.

As spotted by Brad Lynch, you can now find the complete instructions, files, and BOM to make the screen we saw at Valve HQ, which it’s now calling the “Inkterface.” (It was previously the “Mango Frunk,” likely a reference to MangoHud.) It uses a battery for power. If you’re not feeling DIY, Jsaux is working on one.

You know what weeping gamers really want? A burned CD with their GitHub repo on it. Fun novelty if you can get it, though. “This is a limited run, so signing up doesn’t guarantee one,” writes Microsoft-owned GitHub.

Check out this video tour of Panic’s demo showroom for Big Walk, its next game, at the company’s offices in Portland. I got to see this for my preview, and it was delightful.

Capcom is pushing up the launch of Onimusha: Way of the Sword to September 4th, up from the previously-planned September 25th. That moves the game out of the way of Control Resonant (September 24th) and Silent Hill: Townfall (September 25th) — and even farther ahead of Grand Theft Auto VI in November.

Instead of turning M5Stack’s M5PaperS3 development hardware into another Kindle clone, Wenting Zhang used the Playdate’s open source CrankBoy emulator to create a Game Boy alternative with an easy-on-the-eyes E Ink screen. Having to play with touchscreen controls isn’t ideal, but we’d love to see this turned into an app optimized for the Boox Palma devices.

With Sony ending production of PlayStation discs, one commenter points out that it confirms there’ll be no PS6 disc drive, ending backwards compatibility for physical games — though at least Microsoft is working on a fix for that.