Gaming

The company has been on a pretty solid run, and it looks like that could continue with the next Fire Emblem. Nintendo just showed off 20 minutes of Fortune’s Weave, getting into both the continent-spanning story and the nitty gritty of the strategy combat. It hits the Switch 2 on September 17th.

Deadline reports that Dave Bautista is in talks to take over the role, which has been vacant ever since original star Ryan Hurst was seriously injured on set. There’s no official word on casting from Amazon just yet.

Storing your many items in Pokopia is a huge chore, even if you like organizing. But the free update on August 5th will introduce a new shared storage item — anything stored inside will be accessible from other iterations of that item. That means a lot less running around trying to remember where you put all your copper.

According to Variety, the series will be a spin-off of Amazon’s 2024 Secret Level anthology series, which includes a Warhammer episode. It’s in development alongside the live-action Warhammer project Cavill’s also working on, and reportedly features the Deathwatch, “an elite group of Space Marines that specialize in hunting down alien threats.”

Nintendo’s next big Switch 2 exclusive — Fire Emblem: Fortune’s Weave — is also the subject of the company’s next Direct showcase. It streams August 4th at 10AM ET and will last around 20 minutes, according to Nintendo. The game, meanwhile, is launching on September 17th.

Batman: Caped Crusader - Chronicles lets you and up to three friends tackle mysteries based on the Caped Crusader Prime Video show. It’s a clear example of Amazon’s recent push to tie its gaming efforts more closely with its streaming properties.

As spotted by Android Authority, the new, unofficial Gen1Recomp port for the trio of classic Pokémon games also lets you easily add mods, like one that updates the games with cool 3D voxel graphics. You’ll need to use your own game ROM, though.

The servers for Champions Tactics: Grimoria Chronicles, which launched in 2024, will close down on October 30th, Kotaku reports. The shutdown follows an earlier announcement that the game would “progressively transition away from blockchain functionality.”

If you’re one of the folks who picked up a Virtual Boy headset for the Switch, Nintendo has a solid update coming your way: on August 4th two unreleased games are launching for subscribers, along with the option to adjust colors. Meanwhile, Super Mario Sunshine is being added to the Gamecube classics collection on August 13th.

Sony sold 1.6 million PlayStation 5 consoles, about a third fewer than last year at this time, and says it has plenty of memory for the foreseeable future:

Big Hops, an indie 3D platformer that launched earlier this year, was a blast solo, but now you can play the entire game co-op on Steam as part of a beta. As many as eight people can play at once, and it looks chaotic and wonderful.

In an SEC filing, EA said that as of today, it had obtained “all regulatory approvals required to complete the Merger.” The deal, announced in September, is expected to close “on or about the close of trading” on August 4th.

After announcing it’s shutting down Roblox Connect, Roblox said in its latest earnings report that it’s working on adding “integrated voice calls” and video chat, as alternatives to tools like Discord.

Apple recently started allowing alternative app marketplaces in Brazil following a long legal dispute, during which Epic originally announced that the store would be launching in the country.

Microsoft said Thursday that it’s been rolling the app out “over the past month” to supported TVs running Hisense’s VIDAA OS. The company announced earlier this year that the app was on the way.

The musical puzzler Lumines is making a return to smartphones with a new version billed as a remaster. It follows the excellent Lumines Arise from last year, and is available now on both Android and iOS; it’s a free download but costs $7.99 to unlock the full version.

Brandon Klayme was wrongly convicted for possession of child pornography after the investigation botched his Kik username, “fus_ro_dah,” in reference to Bethesda’s Skyrim videogame. The real suspect’s username — “fus__ro_dah” — included one additional underscore, a “subtle mistake that changed the course of my life,” Klayme said.

Maingear’s new Zero series of desktop PCs use 4mm-thick curved tempered glass for an airy, panoramic aesthetic. They come in Intel and AMD versions, starting at $2,699, with GPUs ranging from the RTX 5070 to RTX 5090.

I’ve heard Steam Remote Play is finally reaching parity with Moonlight when streaming games to your Steam Deck. Now, Steam Remote Play is getting AV1 for theoretically even better compression, and HDR for the Steam Deck OLED’s screen. I like streaming, but I’d also like more devs to embrace Dynamic Cloud Sync…

The new extended trailer for the first wave of Pokopia DLC gives us a much better look at all the water type monsters you’ll be able to befriend in Bubbly Basin beginning August 5th. It also looks like building underwater houses is about to get much easier.

“We don’t have the same problems,” Logitech’s new gaming boss Robin Piispanen tells me during our wide-ranging chat, when I ask if PC builders are delaying peripheral purchases like other parts of their build due to RAM prices. In fact, Logitech’s gaming sales are up 12 percent YoY and 21 percent sequentially in today’s Q1 earnings.

“Only the survival of our studio would ever make us consider such a painful action,” Double Fine founder Tim Schafer says in a statement. “Our transition to becoming an independent company also means becoming a size that we can sustain.”