March 2026

You can take the Bungie out of Halo, but it’ll take more than a 16 years-past Microsoft breakup to take the Halo out of Bungie. The presence of the seminal FPS can be felt throughout much of Bungie’s new extraction shooter, Marathon, in ways both subtle and decidedly obvious. Acknowledging that Marathon and Halo are…

The fun of a loot-based action RPG disappears when monsters pop in a single hit and the only thing that goes up are the damage numbers. Right now, you can upgrade your gear all you want in Diablo 4, but the majority of the game doesn’t really require it.This is a problem in a genre…

Back in our January 2024 launch impressions of Palworld, I wasn’t kind about its shameless design counterfeiting, calling its creatures “a surreal gallery of familiar eyes, limbs, and silhouettes” built from “the reassembled pieces of existing Pokémon, adding a color swap and a couple tweaked details to hide the Frankenstein stitching.”I understand now that I…

Valve recently published its Steam Year in Review for 2025, which is a big old list of things it has improved on the platform over the year for developers and publishers. Much of it won’t be of particular interest to players, unless you’re gagging to find out how Valve is messing with calendars and recommendations…

Daedalic was widely viewed as the inheritor of LucasArts’ point-and-click adventure crown a decade or so ago, back when it was putting out some truly great point-and-click adventure games. Whether Deponia is one of them is a matter of some debate, but I think it is, and more importantly I know that you can pick…

In order to help train its AI models, Meta (and others) have been using pirated versions of copyrighted books, without the consent of authors or publishers. The company behind Facebook and Instagram faces an ongoing class-action lawsuit brought by authors including Richard Kadrey, Sarah Silverman, and Christopher Golden, and one in which it has already…

I’d have bet money that the Harlem Globetrotters were founded in the 1960s or maybe the ’70s, but nope: today I learned the madcap basketball exhibition team has been around for a solid century, formed in 1926 as The Savoy Big Five (and in Chicago, not New York). To celebrate 100 years of baffling basketball…

To recap for those who’ve been recently resting under a cool, mossy rock, Phil Spencer has now retired from his role as CEO of Microsoft Gaming. His replacement is Asha Sharma, who joined Microsoft in 2024—as president of its CoreAI product. This has resulted in a wave of doomsaying for Xbox that leadership has since…