Gaming

Michael McWhertor is a New York-based journalist and editor with more than 20 years of experience covering games, industry events, technology, movies, and TV. GTA 6 won't 'directly' address Trump or COVID-19, Rockstar says

Update [Sat 17th Oct 2026, 1:30am]: Here's your reminder this "final content drop" for Year One of Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds is now available. It adds the paid Avatar Legends Pack featuring Aang and Katara. You can purchase it individually or unlock it in the paid Season Pass. The Avatar Legends Festival is also currently underway and runs until 18th October 2026. You can see what's ahead for Year Two of Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds in our previous post here on Nintendo Life:

Director Naoki Hamaguchi took to social media to share another bit of insight about the next entry in the Final Fantasy VII remake trilogy. He confirmed that we’ll still need to keep an eye on Cloud and the crew’s stamina when climbing the mountain and cliff to the North Crater location past the Great Glacier in FFVII Revelation, just like we did in Final Fantasy VII on the PlayStation. Recommended Videos The Great Glacier mountain and North Crater cliff are one of the locations in the original Final Fantasy VII and presumably in FFVII Revelation as well. In the PlayStation version of the game, stamina and temperature management come up once you leave Icicle Inn and complete the snowboarding minigame, as you can pass out and be sent back to a major NPC’s cabin to regroup and restart if you aren’t careful.  With regards to the cliff climbing section, you’ll need to move upward despite cold temperatures. When you reach a safe platform, you then need to have Cloud try and warm himself up to get his temperature up so his stamina doesn’t run out and he winds up back at a start again.

The franchise has slipped from its lofty perch in recent years, but there was a time when the launch of a new Call of Duty game was a huge event. The anticipation was never quite on the level of Grand Theft Auto 6, but the series reliably mattered in a way that many other games did not. When Microsoft purchased Activision, some of us assumed we wouldn’t have to wait long before being able to play all of those classic games on Xbox Game Pass. Why else would Microsoft drop that kind of money on the company, if not to leverage its library of classics? But Call of Duty has made only a weak showing on the subscription service since then, with many of its most iconic games still available only for purchase. With Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 launching Oct. 23, here are eight Call of Duty games somehow still missing from Game Pass. We’d love to see them get added soon. Released: Nov. 9, 2010 After Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, it was unclear how the franchise might top itself. Then came Call of Duty: Black Ops, with an energetic campaign that included outrageous moments such as an attempted assassination of Fidel Castro.

Massive Monster announced that a Cult of the Lamb Switch 2 version will appear and won’t feature any additional Upgrade Pack cost for Switch players who want the update. It will launch on October 22, 2026. It will cost $24.99 for the base game, which is the same price as the Switch version. (Though the base game can often be found for around $20 physically.)Recommended Videos The announcement didn’t note what extra features or upgrades we might notice in the Switch 2 version of Cult of the Lamb. So there’s no update on things like a new frame rate or resolution yet. The social media statement focused on the release date and fact that it won’t feature any additional costs. Go Ad-Free With Siliconera+View the site with no ads, be able to provide direct feedback about what we cover, and be automatically entered into our monthly PC game giveaway. Join Siliconera+ This comes after another major Cult of the Lamb release in 2026. Earlier this year, Massive Monster released the Woolhaven expansion. That costs $16.99 on its own.

Updated: Oct 16, 2026 9:54pm UTCProfessional Super Smash Bros. player Jason ‘Mew2King’ Zimmerman has been banned from a competitive tournament after posting photos of his concerning skin condition and complaining of a bug infestation in his home. On the morning of October 16, 2026, Zimmerman found himself going viral due to a thread of posts he’d published on Twitter/X the day before. In the posts, he complained of suffering from swelling hands, which he attributed to either playing too much without rest or being bitten by bugs in his home. “My hands are slightly swollen (could be from all the SSBM Fox or from the bugs in the house that bite me each day), like pink/red and puffy/fatter than usual, is there a way to fix this ASAP? I'm boarding my flight to Texas now,” he wrote. He went on to share a photo of his hand and one of his right leg, which was covered in red, painful-looking bumps that appeared to be bug bites. Zimmerman claimed that these bites happen to him “every week,” and are a driving factor in his decision to move from Ohio to California. “I had like a hundred of these on my body two months ago. Like, my entire body.

Rockstar Games served us with a new minute-and-a-half-long trailer for Grand Theft Auto 6 yesterday, and it’s got everything—army backstory stuff, a steamy shower sex scene, Jason throwing a dude off of a boat, the guy that says “Grand Theft Auto,” and, most importantly, a very blurry camera lens. Wait—hold up, I thought the internet was joking about the trailer looking blurry. Turns out, nope, some people are very genuinely concerned about the smudged camera-lens aesthetic featured in the latest trailer for GTA 6, to the point that some are even accusing Rockstar Games of “downgrading” the graphics before launch. Is an a upgrade or downgrade?? GTA 6. GTA 6Extended Look. New trailer pic.twitter.com/hNMlcNWsbm — tiwariji (@tiwariiji___) October 15, 2026 GTA 6 Trailer 1 (2023) VS Launch Trailer (2026) pic.twitter.com/JUozKjbeK1 — NikTek (@NikTek) October 15, 2026 GTA 6 Launch Trailer neden puslu gözüküyor? pic.twitter.com/NrBkOfPAOP — Burak (@andersonburak) October 15, 2026 Obviously, what we’re seeing in the latest trailer is an image-processing effect.

Updated: Oct 16, 2026 9:03pm UTCThe developers behind Castlevania: Belmont’s Curse are enthusiastic about all the “horny” fanart they’ve seen of the game’s characters, saying they specifically made them "hot" to appeal to fans. Castlevania: Belmont’s Curse released on October 15, and you’ve no doubt already seen the wealth of wild reactions to the title from players online — particularly in regards to its character designs. Yes, it’s true; players are thirsty for Trevor Belmont and the various monsters they must fight as they navigate the chaotic streets of Paris, but they shouldn’t feel embarrassed about it. In fact, the devs were counting on this to happen. Speaking with Fall Damage, marketing director and lead designer Bérenger Dupré and Sandro Bordier revealed that they are absolutely loving the thirsty reactions to the game’s characters — and that includes the “horny” fanart that they’ve seen on social media. “Oh, it has started already. Like, man, have we seen some things,” Bordier joked. “Trevor, especially,” Dupré added.

Part of my goal in putting together Guiding Key, Kotaku’s year-long Kingdom Hearts book club, is to interrogate how much the memes about Square Enix’s supposedly convoluted Disney and Final Fantasy crossover series have distorted what it actually is. That means seeing just where it is in this 25-year-long journey that Square Enix decided Kingdom Hearts was going to be more than just an anime-inspired jaunt through Disney worlds, and was instead going to become a decades-long epic. And now that I’ve started replaying the original Kingdom Hearts, I want to call out something that was disorienting and even perhaps frightening to me as a child: the tutorial. Immediately after the still-stunning opening cinematic set to Utada Hikaru’s “Simple and Clean,” Sora, our plucky protagonist, falls into an abyss, landing on a giant stained-glass platform adorned with Snow White’s likeness. At this point, Sora hasn’t met her, and won’t meet an actual Disney character for many hours, but he and his allies would return to places that looked like this many times throughout the series. This is the Dive to the Heart, which is essentially a physical space that symbolizes one’s heart.

Every Zelda dungeon runs on the same promise: find a tool, open a door, find a better tool. A whole genre of games borrows that loop without Hyrule’s precise theme music, and every few years one of them, like Tunic or Death’s Door, breaks out and lands on everyone’s recommendation list. This list is for the games that usually don’t make the cut. By the genre’s usual definition, a Zelda-like is an action-adventure game with mandatory puzzle solving, progression gated by new abilities or items, and dungeons that stand apart from the overworld. These nine games hit at least three of those criteria — usually with a bit of an oddball twist. Grab your sword (or yoyo, or large key), it’s time for an adventure! Zelda, but: A girl searches a world of islands for her missing father. At one point, Tilia’s biggest problem was dealing with dirty dishes. Along with her father and sister, Tilia runs the family tavern in Limestone, a village on a small island — until disaster strikes. Pirates raid the island and kidnap her best friend…and then her father, in hot pursuit of the pirates, vanishes outright. Tilia grabs a sword and starts following their trail.

I've tried playing Resident Evil 2 remake many times over the years and have never quite managed to finish the thing. It's good — very good — and I enjoy it. But there's just something about its narrow corridors and the threat of an undead monster popping out of a locker that keeps me from coming back to it. I've been playing Capcom's Switch 2 port of it lately, though, and I might finally make it to the end this time. The port is exquisite, and horrors on an 8-inch screen are much easier for my nerves to handle than big-screen frights. Resident Evil 2 remake picks up just as the events of the original Resident Evil draw to a close. Leon Kennedy is headed down to Raccoon City to start his new job as a police officer, and Claire Redfield is searching for her brother Chris (one of the first game's protagonists). After a few near-fatal encounters with zombies along the way, they arrive in the city. Then their car explodes, and a bigger truck explodes, and the city's on fire and full of zombies, so they get separated. It's impossible to save the city, so the only thing they can do is try to find a way out.

A new take on Dracula, a horror movie inspired on Barney, and more Happy weekend! There’s something for everyone at the movies this week, from genre fare like Street Fighter and Whalefall to corset romance, with the new adaptation of Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility. But if you don’t want to leave home, there’s also plenty to watch, from VOD to streaming. French auteur Luc Besson is back with his latest film, a new take on Dracula, starring Caleb Landry Jones and Christoph Waltz. Buddy is also available, following a group of kids trapped inside the surreal and creepy world of “It’s Buddy!”, a TV show hosted by an orange unicorn that looks a lot like Barney.

Bandai Namco announced a collection of five figures of Ayumu “Osaka” Kasuga from the Azumanga Daioh manga and anime will release as part of its Machiboke / Still Waiting for You Gashapon capsule line. The Japanese Gashapon Online page is already live and taking pre-orders until October 25, 2026, ahead of the release in machines in Japan. The online orders ship in February 2027, but they may appear in Japanese machines before then. There’s no word when they’ll be in the US and Japan yet. Other Machiboke items do appear worldwide as Still Waiting for You, so we should see these in North America. Recommended Videos All of the Osaka Azumanga Daioh Machiboke figures are based on scenes from the anime and manga depicting her waiting for something to happen. For example, the one of her holding a knife is based on the trip scene where she goes to wake up her teacher Miss Yukari by banging on a frying pan, but since she was half asleep she accidentally grabbed a cooking knife instead. She’s wearing her school uniform for each of the five items.

Within hours of its theatrical release, You Can See Everything has shot to the top of every significant media ranking website there is. At the time of publication, it’s sitting at a perfect 100-percent Fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes, a 4.7 stars average on Letterboxd, and a 98 metascore on Metacritic, putting it at number 26 on that site’s best movies of all time. You Can See Everything pits surrealist Nathan Fielder against Theranos con-artist Elizabeth Holmes in a Lying Liars Who Lie-off disguised as a documentary. According to early reviews, it’s so good it’s scary. I’m legit scared to see it, fearing whatever tricks of the mind Nathan Fielder pulls will irrevocably damage my psyche. I’ve seen both seasons of The Rehearsal, so I know that’s a damn sure bet to make. I was admittedly having audible reactions to You Can See Everything, so much so that I got a dirty look from the guy in the row ahead of me but like idk how u can see some of that shit and not have an audible reaction — Jared Gilman (@realJaredGilman) October 16, 2026 really don't think I will mix up scrambled eggs the same ever again…

In a movie as nonsensical as the new Street Fighter adaptation, getting too into the weeds of “consistency” with the video games might seem like a fool’s errand, but there is one thing about the film that myself and other fans of Capcom’s fighting game series are having trouble getting past: What the hell did they do to Cammy? For those not in the know, Cammy’s place in the Street Fighter universe is that of a tool turned into a hero. She is one of series villain M. Bison’s “Dolls,” a group of young women brainwashed by the Shadaloo organization. Cammy has been a mainstay of the series since Super Street Fighter II, and has spent much of these games fighting against Bison and trying to reclaim her autonomy. However, she was at one point a servant of Bison, and that is the role she plays in the Street Fighter movie. That’s not the part that Street Fighter fans are beefing with; it’s that the typically stoic soldier has been turned into a depraved, flirtatious, Harley Quinn-style character that feels like a stand-in for a different character.

After years of development and perhaps more hype than for any game, GTA 6 is set for release on November 19 for PS5 and Xbox Series X|S. Predicting that it will be an enormous success commercially is perhaps one of the safest bets anyone could make. But just how big will the launch be? And what records could GTA 6 beat if it delivers? Lucia and Jason in GTA 6. The records The last GTA game, 2013's GTA 5, was a huge hit right out of the gate. It brought in $800 million in revenue over its first 24 hours and $1 billion in its first three days . Even a decade later, the game remains a sales juggernaut, eclipsing 230 million copies sold and counting . Rockstar's latest game, 2018's Red Dead Redemption II, launched with $725 million in revenue over its opening weekend . It's gone on to sell more than 87 million copies, making it one of the top five best-selling games ever . Outside of Rockstar, Bethesda's 2015 RPG Fallout 4 had a gigantic launch, shipping 12 million copies for launch day alone , generating sales in excess of $750 million. So to sum up, here are the records that GTA 6 is expected to surpass: GTA 5: $800 million in 24 hours and $1 billion in three days Red Dead Redemption

I love collecting physical games but I realize digital games aren’t all bad. Swapping seamlessly between what’s in my PlayStation 5 library is a lot less of a pain than it would be if I had to get up and swap out discs each time. I also don’t have to worry about my console library creating actual physical clutter in my home, or a digital game getting lost or broken. But I also have zero control over what Sony decides to do with my digital purchases, whether they’re compatible with future hardware, or even whether they’re still playable in a world where PSN servers eventually shut down. So what’s the solution? We’d love to hear your ideas. While my first choice would be for Sony to back off from its decision to end PlayStation discs entirely, it’s also worth thinking about how digital game ownership should be improved in an all-digital gaming ecosystem. Kotaku broke the news on what this could look like earlier this week. Rep. Ritchie Torres announced plans to bring legislation to Congress that would provide the first step toward codifying digital ownership rights.

This week, there's a major MCU show out and a prequel to an iconic horror franchise Happy weekend! It’s a good time to be a TV fan. Over the past weeks, Mike Flanagan's Carrie remix and an anime based on an Anthony Bourdain manga have made their long-awaited debuts, offering something that suits everyone's interests. Avatar is also back, inspiring numerous Polygon articles about Seven Havens and what the new series means for the franchise's future — and past.