… and for what’s its worth the XBOX section is (and has been for a while) gutted too. Only the Nintendo aisle has games.

The creator of Disgaea, Sohei Niikawa, has criticized PlayStation's reported decision to phase out physical games, arguing that if the company abandons discs entirely, it should "get rid of the hardware" as well. Speaking with Noisy Pixel at Anime Expo 2026, Niikawa said physical games offer something digital never can: a lasting connection between developers and fans through collectibles, signatures, and cherished memories. While he understands the business reasons behind the shift to digital, he believes removing physical media strips away a core part of what makes dedicated gaming hardware meaningful.

A whole $2 and everything was in there!

Nintendo’s Shigeru Miyamoto acknowledged in a Famitsu interview this week that “it’s good to create new characters.” At the same time, the company has to be “strict in judging whether they’ll really work globally.” While sharing his thoughts, Miyamoto did say that Nintendo needs “to be more proactive” in creating new characters.

His full response is as follows:

“We’ll be flexible in that regard, but it’s good to create new characters. However, I think we need to be strict in judging whether they’ll really work globally. Even during the development of Splatoon, there were times when we thought, ‘If the characters are going to be like this, wouldn’t it be better to just use Mario?’ And then, when we came up with the prototype for the Inklings that are out there now, we realized, ‘With these, there’s no need to use Mario.’

It’s been 25 years since I arrived at Pikmin, which was the result of my own pursuit of a globally appealing character, so we need to be more proactive to create new ones. I’ll leave that to the younger generation (laughs).”

​

https://news.xbox.com/en-us/2026/07/22/xbox-backward-compatibility-on-pc/

Few games for now, but this eventually expand and, whi knows, even cover Xbox360 games.

Finally, Lost Odyssey saved from the Xbox consoles jail.

When I was stationed in Carlisle Barracks in Carlisle Pennsylvania. I preordered two of these. Back then I don’t know but I’m glad I did.

Still package in the original packaging with a street date of 11/09/04.

Found this after we had a tornado warning and I was resetting our router.

Every manual and box art I could find on Nintendo of America's website in the highest resolution I could find them at.

https://archive.org/details/High-Res-Nintendo-Boxart (181 MB)

https://archive.org/details/Nintendo-Hi-Res-Manuals-2026/ (4.8 GB)

Hi there!

My name is Jeff Ashbrook, and I’m the founder of indie development studio Adventure Works. Before game development, I worked on Disney’s Imagineering R&D team for almost a decade and built attractions like Millennium Falcon: Smugglers Run. 

Last week, we launched our debut title, LIFTED, a cinematic 2.5D puzzle platformer about an extra credit assignment gone wrong, leading to a student-and-professor buddy comedy adventure across space and time! 

LIFTED pays homage to both classic cartoon films and old-school sidescrollers. I wanted to create a family-friendly game that captures the movie magic of ‘90s animated blockbusters, evoking the same feeling we all had watching our favorite childhood movies. 

Our Steam page is linked here: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2184020/LIFTED/

I’m here to answer all kinds of questions you have about LIFTED’s development, including:

• LIFTED’s inspirations (including how a chance encounter with an archaeologist in Egypt led to the game’s creation)
• Development
• LIFTED’s family-friendly, retro gameplay design
• My time working as a Disney Imagineer
• How to make a game that feels like a classic buddy comedy

…and anything else you can think of! Ask me anything.

So me and 2 other friends constantly play games (most recently a lot of ARC Raiders) and we are trying to look for more games to play. We tried Bombanana Demo and PEAK, loved it. RV there yet, played for a while but had a lot of fun. Phasmophobia, also fun but they already know how to play and I'm the rookie. Anyways, we're open to suggestions (hard part is convincing them to buy the game lol)

I played Palworld almost two years ago, back when it first launched in Early Access and now I'm trying to decide whether it's worth buying.

My biggest concern is the variety of Pals. If the experience is basically the same as before, just with a larger map, I think I'd probably get bored.

So, for those of you who played both the early version and the full release, how much has the game changed in terms of Pal variety? Are there enough new Pals, abilities and reasons to explore that it feels like a fresh experience or does it still feel mostly the same with more content added on top?

I'd especially love to hear from people who played the game back then and came back for the full release.

Kind of random, but I'm just realizing I've never been required to string or unstring a bow other than when initially crafting one

Expedition 33 was that game for me.

i've always been a huge horror game fan. i played a lot of first person horror and had fun with those games. then i played alien isolation and amnesia the bunker...

alien isolation constantly had me paranoid with the alien learning and always being a constant threat.

amnesia the bunker with it's highly sound sensitive monster and a flashlight that's loud AF. every single noise you make could attract the monster and you often gotta decide if you crank the flashlight and endanger yourself or if you walk through absolute darkness to avoid the monster.

those games were the best horror experiences i had so far. now every other first person horror game just seems like a walking simulator with stealth that goes like this: crouch to make less noise and dont get into the enemies line of sight.

so now i'm wondering, are there any horror games that give the same kind of feeling? like you're constantly being followed or in danger?

My 4 year old and I play Horizon Chase Turbo at times. I've been enjoying slowly working our way through it, and I love I can help with progression on his child account in multiplayer.

So I figured I'd eventually get the DLC, but wasn't in a rush since we're progressing slowly.

Today I discovered when he selected the DLC modes and I saw no prices that they weren't available any more, and then I read up on how Epic Games delisted them as of June 1st. And the main game. From everywhere.

I'm sure there's "reasons", and I'm definitely not going to claim I'm going to boycott anything over this. Just a little sad.

Particularly since I'm probably going to hear about how the Breeze is my son's favourite car even though it's not available ("which is ok") until the end of time, ahahahaha.

So I've been thinking about that one quote from Gabe Newell about game reactivity:

"The point I would make is, if I go up to a wall and shoot it [and nothing happens], to me it feels like the wall is ignoring me. I'm getting a narcissistic injury when the world is ignoring me. So it is like, to me, I was trying to convey to the user a sense of, “Yes, you were making choices; yes, you were progressing.” Which meant the game had to acknowledge that back to you. If you shoot at a wall, there have to be decals. If you kill a bunch of Marines; the Marines have to run away from you, right? You have to have this sense of the game acknowledging and responding to the choices and actions and progressions that you've made. Otherwise it loses any sort of impact."

This is still something that I think games haven't invested enough in. There was a big trend surrounding making more interactive environments, such as through environmental destruction (which is probably the most extreme example of game reactivity), but as of late developers are prioritizing other elements instead.

Games that just devour time like an insatiable monster.

I've been playing the Guildrun demo nonstop and haven't encountered a time gremlin game like this since maybe Balatro.

8 PM, I'll do a run. Look up, it's 1 AM and I don't understand how.

What's yours?

My pick for this is The Callisto Protocol because of how realistic the faces are in that game. 

They used a custom shading model called The Callisto BRDF to get more realism out of skin and materials. It produces far better results than the industry standard shading model (Lambert).

Striking Distance Studios even made a presentation on The Callisto BRDF: https://advances.realtimerendering.com/s2023/SIGGRAPH2023-Advances-The-Rendering-of-The-Callisto-Protocol-JimenezPetersen.pdf

Here’s a concise video if you don’t want to read a whole rendering paper: https://youtu.be/qZtNU-4yqtI?is=2Ig1eEgdZWxipErR

Anyway, all of that leads me back to my original question. Which games have produced the most lifelike visuals?

I've recently been playing Final Fantasy X, a game that I love deeply. In FFX you've got the minigame Blitzball, a minigame that I also quite like but I understand completely why people hate it, partially because it's a rather different experience from the main game, but mainly because of the way most people first experience the minigame.

For those of you who haven't played FFX, the way they introduce Blitzball is by giving you a list of 12 keywords, each of which you can click to go through a poorly explained tutorial of how that keyword is relevant to the minigame. Each of these minitutorials is maybe about 2 minutes long during which the music is made more quiet, there's no VA and barely even any sound. In my opinion the tutorials themselves don't even do a particularly good job of teaching you how the mechanics work. So the player has to sit through each of these minitutorials trying to get their heads around how to play the minigame with the game not even trying to meet you halfway.

Once you've sat through all of that, the game throws a cutscene at you and you head off in search of another character who was apparently spotted in town. You go through Luca looking for him, have a few cutscenes to further characterise Tidus and Yuna and you end up at a cafe where you find out that Yuna has been kidnapped. You then travel through Luca down to the docks, fighting robots along the way until you reach where the kidnappers had docked and board their ship. Here you fight a boss and have another cutscene that gives some more information about Yuna's backstory, who Wakka is as a person and Lulu's past with Wakka's brother. After this you return to the locker room where Wakka decides to warm the bench since he was injured during the Blitzball match that he played while you went after Yuna, allowing Tidus to actually join the team.

After all of that you finally get to play your first ever game of Blitzball! Where you play against the Luca Goers, definitely not the hardest team to face off against but also far from the weakest team to play. As if all of this wasn't enough, during your first game of Blitzball the game also sets the default position to Auto meaning that when your team gets control of the ball you're not actually in control as the game will just have the character swim around according to its own AI. And to make it even worse, partway through the second half of the match Tidus decides that this game should really be about the Aurochs (the team he's on), not about him. So he swims off and bring in Wakka instead, and while Wakka is a serviceable player he's not on the level of Tidus.

In summary, the game gives you a long, boring tutorial that poorly teaches you the mechanics, it then takes you away from the minigame for long enough that you're likely to forget most of what you learned, only to throw you into the deep end against a fairly challenging team and to then end it with making you straight up weaker at the end of the match.

TL;DR: FFX is great, Blitzball is also great, the way Blitzball is introduced is just horrendously terrible.

Are there any minigames with poorer introductions than this? I genuinely believe that Blitzball has the worst intro of any minigame ever relative to the quality of the minigame itself (if a minigame is garbage then it's pretty hard to introduce it in a way that's good).