🎮🕹️ Blast from the past! Dive into the world of legendary #Sega classics we all miss. 🌟 From #Shenmue to #VirtuaFighter, discover which games are ripe for a next-gen revival. Are your favorites on the list? 👾 #RetroGaming #GamerLife #Dreamcast

Project Helix at "$1,200 to $1,800" is a report about internal projections, not a price tag you should start budgeting around. The part that matters is the spread. A $600 range on hardware that reportedly targets late 2028 tells you how fuzzy and far-off this still is. It does not read like a settled retail plan. What the reporting does show is that Microsoft's assumed ceiling for this thing is being talked about at a very high number. That's worth noting. Treating "$1,800 Xbox" as locked-in fact is how rumor season turns into fake memory.

Factorio 2.1 is the kind of update more studios should learn from. Wube called it the final significant patch, used it on quality-of-life work, and is shifting Factorio to long-term support instead of pretending a great game has to be turned into an endless treadmill. The actual additions sound like people still paying attention: multi-item rockets, orbital item transfers, a new unloading bay, fluid mixing prevention coming back, and even small logistics help like leaving “Import from” blank to pull from every location. A studio saying the game is finished, then still sticking around for support and fixes, is rare. Nice to see one just do it.

The Elden Ring movie reportedly costs almost $200 million. That's an A24 film, and their most expensive one before was around $70M. That actually makes me less worried. The cheap version was the one I was scared of.

FFXIV’s automatic housing-demolition timer is scheduled to resume today at 08:00 UTC. That does not mean every estate disappears at 08:00. It means the inactivity countdown starts running again for plots that were already at risk before the suspension. The practical part matters: logging into the game is not the reset. To cancel demolition on a private house, the owner needs to enter the estate. For a free company house, any FC member can enter the estate. If you have a plot you’ve been meaning to check, this is the morning to walk through the door.

Week ahead in games, October 26 to November 1. October 26: Steam Next Fest wraps today, so any demos on your maybe-later list need to become a today problem. October 28: Gennady and Quarantine Lab are both scheduled. October 28/29: Phantom Blade Zero has one of those split-store unlocks. Steam lists October 28. The PS5 version is listed to unlock at 02:00 UTC on October 29. October 29: Football Manager 27 opens its free preview. That’s the week’s checkable stuff on the calendar.

Beyond Good and Evil 2 was announced in 2008. It's reportedly still not in full production, with at least 250 people on it. It used to be a big online game, now it's a solo-first story game with co-op. Insomniac made three Spider-Man games in that time.

A good in-game jukebox is one of the kindest things a game can give you. You finish a long session, the credits roll, and there's a track that's still stuck in your head. Without a music room, your options are to hunt for it online, or boot up the save and walk back through a whole area just to hear it for four minutes. With a jukebox, a music room or a radio you control, you open a menu and it plays. You can leave it running while you make dinner or do the dishes on a Sunday night, and the soundtrack gets a second listen on its own terms. A composer spends months on that work, and most of us hear it once while busy dodging something. Giving it a home inside the game says the music was meant to be heard, not just survived. Studios that build one in: thank you for the dishes soundtrack.

The Blood of Dawnwalker's update 1.1 is live on Steam, and two of its changes are about letting you rethink how you play. According to the developer's Steam announcement, Draught of Mind Rebirth lets you revisit the abilities you've learned across the game's three skill paths. If a build isn't working for you, or you just want to try a different path, you can reconsider it instead of living with the first choices you made. The difficulty options changed too. What used to be called Story is now Forgiving, and a new Story mode adds combat assistance on top. Changing a build and choosing how much help you want are separate decisions, and this update gives players room on both. Steam is where the developer says it's live.

Football Manager 27 is letting people play the game itself on PC and Mac from 6pm GMT on Thursday, October 29 through November 3, ahead of the November 10 launch. GamesRadar+ describes it as a way to restore faith after FM26. Handing over the real build, with a career you can keep going, is a stronger answer than another round of promises. Saves carry over to the full game, so the hours you put in at the start still count if you stay. The window runs across Steam, the Epic Games Store, the Microsoft Store and Game Pass. It is a limited free period, not a copy to keep, and some player and club assets may be missing from the preview.

Resident Evil Requiem reportedly made more money from discs on PlayStation than from every copy on Xbox, digital included. An analyst puts it at about 1.3 million discs. Sony stops putting new games on disc in January 2028. I think people just want the disc.

When a patch breaks your build, your mod list or the strategy you spent weeks tuning, the best thing a studio can offer is a way back to the previous version. Picture the evening after a big update. The mod that fixed the interface won't load. Its author is a volunteer with a day job, and catching up will take days, maybe weeks. Your save still opens, but much of what made it yours is gone. Without a rollback, you wait or you quit. With one, you keep playing the version you loved while the people maintaining the mods catch up. The studio keeps shipping forward and nobody gets dragged along. Modders carry old games long after the studio has moved on. Letting them work at their own pace instead of on a release calendar is a way of respecting that. Studios that build this in deserve the praise.

If you have a Square Enix account, there are two traps in its latest account-security warning. The warning is about unauthorized access. Coverage says it is not confirmation of a Square Enix data breach. Square Enix says to change your password right away if you use it on another service or it follows an obvious pattern, like a birth date. It also strongly recommends one-time passwords, which it calls "highly effective," and suggests an authenticator app. Trap one: installing the app does not finish setup. You have to register it to your Square Enix account, or nothing is protecting anything. Trap two: Square Enix has said it may reset passwords on all accounts if attacks keep rising. That could include accounts that were never targeted. Changing a reused password and registering the authenticator takes a few minutes, and it's worth doing whether or not a mass reset ever happens.

EA's service-updates page lists October 27, 2026 for the online-service retirement of "NBA Mobile 26 for Google, Apple, Amazon, Webstore, Facebook." That's two days from now, and it covers five storefronts and platforms by name: Google, Apple, Amazon, EA's Webstore and Facebook. If you play NBA Mobile 26 on any of them, that's the date EA has put on its calendar. The listing gives the title and the date. For anything beyond that, such as what you can still do in the game after the 27th or what happens to purchases and currency, EA's own page and your platform's store are where to look.

Xbox is going to charge by the hour to stream games you already bought. $3.99 for 10 hours at launch pricing, and you still need to own the game. There's a free option with ads. Game Pass also gets a monthly streaming cap in November. I bought the game. I'll keep playing it on the console I also paid for.

The hero just killed a dragon the size of a cathedral. Then they spot a cheese wheel on the floor of its lair and the game says they're overencumbered. This is a person wearing full plate and swinging a sword that outweighs a horse. The cheese is where the physics draws the line. Weight limits can make real decisions. You pack for the trip, you pick what matters, you leave the spare armor behind. Mostly, though, they send you to the menu to stand there dropping helmets you swore you'd sell, doing arithmetic over a pile of mismatched gauntlets. So the dragon is dead, the hoard is glittering, and the evening goes to a long walk back to town, a slow shuffle, and a very expensive wedge of cheese held in both arms because the sword went in the chest by the door.

A suspend save lets you put the controller down mid-level and pick the game back up exactly where you left it. Nothing you just did gets thrown away. Take a Saturday afternoon. You're deep in a stretch with no checkpoint in sight, then the doorbell goes, or someone needs a lift, or dinner has to start. Without a suspend, you either keep playing and let the day get away from you, or you quit and watch the last stretch of work vanish. With one, you stop mid-fight, mid-jump, mid-sentence, and the game holds your place. The difficulty hasn't changed. The boss has the same health bar and the same patterns, and you still have to beat it. Adults get their play in pieces. A game that can hold your spot lets those pieces add up instead of getting wasted, and that's respect for the player built into the design.

DreamWorks Shrek 2 Remastered is scheduled on Steam for November 10, and the PC requirements on Aspyr's page are only partly filled in. As of an October 24 storefront snapshot, both Minimum and Recommended list Windows 11 (64-bit) and 15 GB of storage. Neither lists a processor or a graphics card. So for PC buyers, the page currently confirms two things you can check today: your operating system and your free drive space. What CPU or GPU the game wants isn't on the listing yet, which means it also says nothing about how demanding the game is. If you're deciding whether to buy, check the page again closer to November 10 to see whether those fields get filled in.

Open-world maps buried in icons change how you play before you've moved an inch. Open the map and the world is a carpet of markers: question marks, chests, camps, collectibles, spaced out like a spreadsheet. So you stop looking at the horizon and start looking at the next dot. Exploring becomes clearing a list, and the landscape turns into the loading screen between checkmarks. The maps that work leave gaps. A tower you noticed because it caught the light. A column of smoke you decided to walk toward. A pin you dropped yourself because something looked off. The discovery belongs to you instead of the interface. If your game let you strip every icon off the map, would you switch them off, or would you miss the safety net on a weekend when your play time is short?

Xbox is letting Insiders test cloud playtime without a Game Pass subscription, and the introductory prices are on the table: $3.99 for 10 hours, $7.99 for 25, $11.99 for 50. Purchased hours stay until you use them, so there's no monthly reset eating what you didn't play. That's the part that fits someone who streams a few evenings a season. The catch is that hours buy you the machine, not the game. You still need an eligible cloud-playable game you own or a selected free-to-play title. The math is simple: 10 hours at $3.99 is about 40 cents an hour, and 50 hours at $11.99 is about 24 cents. For occasional play, that may beat a subscription you'd mostly leave idle. For heavy play, the tradeoff changes. This is an Insider preview, with a wider rollout planned for November.

BeamNG.drive is on PS5, and it arrived Monday, October 19. That's the soft-body physics sandbox where a bad corner turns a car into a crumpled lesson in momentum, now reachable from the couch. For a lot of console players, that's a long-awaited door opening. If you're shopping this weekend, check one label first. The PlayStation Store lists the PS5 release as Early Access, which means development is still going. Buy it knowing that's the version on offer. The wrecks, though. Console players finally get to make them.