Games

Games

December is a great month to spend time with family and friends, take some time off of work, and dust off the Sinatra vinyl. It can also be a good time to take your shoes off and play some video games, and what's better than celebrating the holiday season in the games themselves? The number of games set during Christmas isn't incredibly long, but putting together this list, I discovered more than I previously knew about, including a few hidden gems that might be well

A spokesperson for Electronic Arts said in a statement on Monday that Zampella's influence on the video game industry was profound and far-reaching. A friend, colleague, leader and visionary creator, his work helped shape modern interactive entertainment and inspired millions of players and developers around the world. His legacy will continue to shape how games are made and how players connect for generations to come, a company spokesperson wrote.

"The goals behind a remake vary from project to project. However, I personally think it's to 'delight fans of the original game,'" Hayasaka tells Inverse. "Of course, acquiring new fans and adapting to current hardware, as mentioned earlier, are also often counted among our goals. However, a remake can only exist because the original game exists, and because there is a certain number of people who love it."

Rob Cross eased into the third round of the PDC World Darts Championship with a 3-1 win over the veteran Ian White. It has been a disappointing year for the 2018 champion, with a host of early exits in the major tournaments. But he still has dreams of adding a second world title and guaranteed a return to Alexandra Palace after Christmas with an accomplished display.

Joseph Cross, the art director on Bungie's upcoming extraction shooter Marathon, is leaving just months before the game's release. Cross's exit comes just after the game was finally announced for a March 2026 release, following an indefinite delay prompted by underwhelming player feedback on the shooter's alpha tests. Cross's departure from Bungie was tipped by an update to his LinkedIn page and social accounts, and he confirmed to Kotaku that it was his choice to leave.

One year ago, the world No 1, Magnus Carlsen, and the global chess body, Fide, were at loggerheads after the Norwegian was penalised for wearing jeans at the World Rapid in New York. The 35-year-old also agreed to share the World Blitz crown despite a rule requiring an outright winner. Relations worsened further when Fide opposed Carlsen's wish for the new Freestyle circuit winner to be called a world champion, he announced that he was done with Fide.

Battlestate Games controversially required that players re-purchase the game if they wanted to play it on Steam, even if they already purchased it directly from Battlestate. Escape from Tarkov also saw some controversy around its sales strategy when the studio revealed a $250 pre-order edition that unlocked access to an exclusive PVE mode, and other features that players called out as pay-to-win.

Picking up a video game in 2025 is a real commitment. Nowadays, players demand deeper stories, immersive experiences, and digital worlds that they can lose themselves in for hundreds of hours. Even people who enjoy video games, but wouldn't necessarily call themselves gamers, find it impossible to finish more than one major studio release a year. So Esquire is breaking down the absolute best the medium had to offer in 2025 throughout this week,

The world map is an RPG fixture going back to some of the earliest games in the genre. Leaving town to travel the world by foot or airship, getting a glimpse of the entire world laid out tells you just how far you have to go and all the danger lying in your way. In a new game on PlayStation Plus, the map becomes the world itself, flipping an RPG tradition on its head for an uncharacteristically cute pirate adventure.

Our cartoon caption was lost in a blizzard! Solve the clues to help us find it. Each answer is seven letters long and curls around one of the numbered spaces in the grid, as shown below: The numbered space will always contain either the first letter or the last letter of an answer. The remaining letters will curl either clockwise or counterclockwise, exiting or entering the central hexagon through the gap in the bolded border.

This, says Alexey Pajitnov, while holding a scrambled Rubik's Cube, is my favorite puzzle. But I also think it's simply one of the best things humanity has ever invented. If we could only send 10 things into space, this should be one of them. Standing beside Pajitnov who revolutionized the digital world when he created Tetris, the best-selling video game of all time is the cube's creator, Erno Rubik, smiling widely.

Saracens' ill-discipline proved costly as they fell to a 28-23 Investec Champions Cup defeat by the Sharks in torrential rain in Durban. The Prem side were set to take a hard-earned lead into the half-time break but a late tackle by Saracens captain Andy Onyeama-Christie gave the ball back to the Sharks. The South African side punished Saracens by powering up the field and freeing up Edwill van der Merwe to go over in the corner for a 21-15 lead.

Gamers, this is our Oscars. While, unfortunately, the 2025 Game Awards has nothing to do with the Movie Fantasy League, it is still a welcome addition to awards season as a whole. Everyone needs a video game break! Just because the Peacock Theater in Los Angeles was all about video games, it doesn't mean Hollywood wasn't in attendance. JJ Abrams, Gabriel Luna, and Jeffrey Wright were some of the stars presenting and accepting awards, and of course, Miss Piggy is going to more than flirt with host Geoff Keighley as she teased her later appearance in the show. Where's Kermit?!

Madison Square Garden. Photo by Dean Moses Madison Square Garden was electric on December 8, 2025, as 17,435 fans packed into The World's Most Famous Arena for The Garden Cup, a one-night showcase that blended high-level tennis, exhibition-style entertainment, and big-name star power. With a lineup featuring Aryna Sabalenka, Naomi Osaka, Nick Kyrgios, and Tommy Paul, the night delivered exactly what it promised: a mix of serious competition and playful showmanship under the New York lights.

Science fiction stories - from books to TV to film - are very often about more than just explosions and weapons that go pew-pew-pew. But in the gaming world, finding a science fiction game that really captures something without violent conflict is tricky. In the modern era, we've got cozy games like the 2021 masterpiece Sable, in which exploration in a -like world is made even sweeter by a wonderful score from Michelle Zauner of Japanese Breakfast.

Skate Story is two very different things simultaneously. On the one hand, it's a visceral take on skateboarding, providing a tight, fast, ground-level view as you brute-force your way through tricks and combos. But it's also a surrealist trip through the underworld where you control a skateboarding demon who faces off against the devil. Think of it like Dante's Inferno meets Thrasher magazine, and you're most of the way there.

It has been 13 long years since Aaron Foster last spoke to The Verge. Back then, Foster's tiny, three-person studio Lunar Software was touting sci-fi horror game Routine with a striking vision: Foster hoped to suck players into the desolate eeriness of its moon base setting, which was equal parts immersive and grounded. Foster ended that interview by swerving a release date question. With 13 years of hindsight, it reads like an all-timer understatement.

India's Sarwagya Singh Kushwaha has become the youngest player in chess history to earn an official Fide rating at the age of three years, seven months and 20 days. The chess prodigy edged out the previous record of compatriot Anish Sarkar, who was three years, eight months and 19 days when he reached the milestone in November last year. Kushwaha, who is enrolled in nursery school in the Indian state of Madhya Pradesh, holds a rapid rating of 1,572. To achieve a rating from Fide, the International Chess Federation, a player needs to beat at least one Fide-rated player. A rating is a score that measures a chess player's strengths based on their performances and is not the same as a ranking. World No 1 Magnus Carlsen is the top in rapid chess with a rating of 2,824.

Jofra Archer versus Steve Smith in 2019 is already Ashes folklore. The atmosphere at Lord's that afternoon was charged in all senses, a huge slab of cloud bringing darkness to the day. Fresh off a match-winning World Cup final, Archer marked his Test debut with what was then the fastest spell recorded for England. Smith was in the middle of a Bradman-hued streak of 774 runs in seven innings.

Ever since The Pokémon Company , the Animal Crossing -style life sim game has seemed a little off. Your character is helping rebuild a small town so Pokémon can live there, but the space is filled with desecrated buildings, and humans are nowhere to be found. Fans have been speculating that the cozy game might not be so cozy after all, and that it may take place in a post-apocalyptic version of the Kanto region from the original games. Now, a leak may have confirmed this.

I wouldn't fault you for being skeptical if a friend told you about the most amazing role-playing game, and one of the first things said was, "It's a port of a moderately successful mobile gacha game, but trust me! It's really great!" But here I am, your friend, telling you that Octopath Traveler 0 isn't merely okay, it's genuinely great.

YouTube has published its list of the top trending topics of 2025, and once again, gaming and pop culture were popular choices for what people watched on the video-streaming website. Out of the trending topics--which aren't ranked in any particular order--US YouTube viewers devoured any content related to the Switch 2 console, Roblox, and the RPG-strategy game Cookie Run Kingdom. Other topics of interest in the US included KPop Demon Hunters, Labubu collectible dolls, and the hit anime series Blue Lock.

I think what underpins our success is the pillars of scale, immersion, and authenticity. The tenants that we develop all our games by, and that level of authenticity we instill. It provides an experience that, for me, is unmatched,

Battlefield Studios is seemingly trying something different with Battlefield 6 's next patch, which everyone assumed would be a standard, mid-season update not intended to change the game significantly. However, it appears that it may bring more to the game than we realised, enough that the developer sees it as an excuse to bring back the pre-launch Battlefield Labs testing initiative.

The game, out now for the Nintendo Switch 2, is the follow-up to the quirky Kirby-flavored kart racer released in 2003 on the GameCube. It features Smash Bros. creator Masahiro Sakurai's round, pink, utterly charming child participating in short races where the main feature isn't so much about how fast you go, but how well you can manage the winding courses while fighting the cutest rogues' gallery ever committed to polygons.

The package includes a curated round-up of all of the community's favorite free fan-made add-ons for Bethesda's decade-old RPG. But the Fallout 4: Anniversary Collection is more than that. "It's a thank-you to the creators who've kept Fallout 4 evolving long after launch, and a gift to players returning to the Wasteland with fresh eyes," wrote Nexus user ModularCocoon. "Whether this is your first playthrough in years or your fifteenth settlement build this month, this is the Commonwealth at its most refined: a snapshot of what ten years of modding can achieve."

"I said I was all in, and I am delivering on that promise," he wrote. "The game is unfinished and runs on a build from over four years ago. Charging more didn't feel right. I don't think the game is good yet. My team and I will push hard to make it good, then great. The vision is clear and progress is fast."