Games

Games

Our cartoon caption was lost in a blizzard! Solve the clues to help us find it. Each answer is seven letters long and curls around one of the numbered spaces in the grid, as shown below: The numbered space will always contain either the first letter or the last letter of an answer. The remaining letters will curl either clockwise or counterclockwise, exiting or entering the central hexagon through the gap in the bolded border.

This, says Alexey Pajitnov, while holding a scrambled Rubik's Cube, is my favorite puzzle. But I also think it's simply one of the best things humanity has ever invented. If we could only send 10 things into space, this should be one of them. Standing beside Pajitnov who revolutionized the digital world when he created Tetris, the best-selling video game of all time is the cube's creator, Erno Rubik, smiling widely.

Saracens' ill-discipline proved costly as they fell to a 28-23 Investec Champions Cup defeat by the Sharks in torrential rain in Durban. The Prem side were set to take a hard-earned lead into the half-time break but a late tackle by Saracens captain Andy Onyeama-Christie gave the ball back to the Sharks. The South African side punished Saracens by powering up the field and freeing up Edwill van der Merwe to go over in the corner for a 21-15 lead.

Gamers, this is our Oscars. While, unfortunately, the 2025 Game Awards has nothing to do with the Movie Fantasy League, it is still a welcome addition to awards season as a whole. Everyone needs a video game break! Just because the Peacock Theater in Los Angeles was all about video games, it doesn't mean Hollywood wasn't in attendance. JJ Abrams, Gabriel Luna, and Jeffrey Wright were some of the stars presenting and accepting awards, and of course, Miss Piggy is going to more than flirt with host Geoff Keighley as she teased her later appearance in the show. Where's Kermit?!

Madison Square Garden. Photo by Dean Moses Madison Square Garden was electric on December 8, 2025, as 17,435 fans packed into The World's Most Famous Arena for The Garden Cup, a one-night showcase that blended high-level tennis, exhibition-style entertainment, and big-name star power. With a lineup featuring Aryna Sabalenka, Naomi Osaka, Nick Kyrgios, and Tommy Paul, the night delivered exactly what it promised: a mix of serious competition and playful showmanship under the New York lights.

Science fiction stories - from books to TV to film - are very often about more than just explosions and weapons that go pew-pew-pew. But in the gaming world, finding a science fiction game that really captures something without violent conflict is tricky. In the modern era, we've got cozy games like the 2021 masterpiece Sable, in which exploration in a -like world is made even sweeter by a wonderful score from Michelle Zauner of Japanese Breakfast.

Skate Story is two very different things simultaneously. On the one hand, it's a visceral take on skateboarding, providing a tight, fast, ground-level view as you brute-force your way through tricks and combos. But it's also a surrealist trip through the underworld where you control a skateboarding demon who faces off against the devil. Think of it like Dante's Inferno meets Thrasher magazine, and you're most of the way there.

It has been 13 long years since Aaron Foster last spoke to The Verge. Back then, Foster's tiny, three-person studio Lunar Software was touting sci-fi horror game Routine with a striking vision: Foster hoped to suck players into the desolate eeriness of its moon base setting, which was equal parts immersive and grounded. Foster ended that interview by swerving a release date question. With 13 years of hindsight, it reads like an all-timer understatement.

India's Sarwagya Singh Kushwaha has become the youngest player in chess history to earn an official Fide rating at the age of three years, seven months and 20 days. The chess prodigy edged out the previous record of compatriot Anish Sarkar, who was three years, eight months and 19 days when he reached the milestone in November last year. Kushwaha, who is enrolled in nursery school in the Indian state of Madhya Pradesh, holds a rapid rating of 1,572. To achieve a rating from Fide, the International Chess Federation, a player needs to beat at least one Fide-rated player. A rating is a score that measures a chess player's strengths based on their performances and is not the same as a ranking. World No 1 Magnus Carlsen is the top in rapid chess with a rating of 2,824.

Jofra Archer versus Steve Smith in 2019 is already Ashes folklore. The atmosphere at Lord's that afternoon was charged in all senses, a huge slab of cloud bringing darkness to the day. Fresh off a match-winning World Cup final, Archer marked his Test debut with what was then the fastest spell recorded for England. Smith was in the middle of a Bradman-hued streak of 774 runs in seven innings.

Ever since The Pokémon Company , the Animal Crossing -style life sim game has seemed a little off. Your character is helping rebuild a small town so Pokémon can live there, but the space is filled with desecrated buildings, and humans are nowhere to be found. Fans have been speculating that the cozy game might not be so cozy after all, and that it may take place in a post-apocalyptic version of the Kanto region from the original games. Now, a leak may have confirmed this.

I wouldn't fault you for being skeptical if a friend told you about the most amazing role-playing game, and one of the first things said was, "It's a port of a moderately successful mobile gacha game, but trust me! It's really great!" But here I am, your friend, telling you that Octopath Traveler 0 isn't merely okay, it's genuinely great.

YouTube has published its list of the top trending topics of 2025, and once again, gaming and pop culture were popular choices for what people watched on the video-streaming website. Out of the trending topics--which aren't ranked in any particular order--US YouTube viewers devoured any content related to the Switch 2 console, Roblox, and the RPG-strategy game Cookie Run Kingdom. Other topics of interest in the US included KPop Demon Hunters, Labubu collectible dolls, and the hit anime series Blue Lock.

I think what underpins our success is the pillars of scale, immersion, and authenticity. The tenants that we develop all our games by, and that level of authenticity we instill. It provides an experience that, for me, is unmatched,

Battlefield Studios is seemingly trying something different with Battlefield 6 's next patch, which everyone assumed would be a standard, mid-season update not intended to change the game significantly. However, it appears that it may bring more to the game than we realised, enough that the developer sees it as an excuse to bring back the pre-launch Battlefield Labs testing initiative.

The game, out now for the Nintendo Switch 2, is the follow-up to the quirky Kirby-flavored kart racer released in 2003 on the GameCube. It features Smash Bros. creator Masahiro Sakurai's round, pink, utterly charming child participating in short races where the main feature isn't so much about how fast you go, but how well you can manage the winding courses while fighting the cutest rogues' gallery ever committed to polygons.

The package includes a curated round-up of all of the community's favorite free fan-made add-ons for Bethesda's decade-old RPG. But the Fallout 4: Anniversary Collection is more than that. "It's a thank-you to the creators who've kept Fallout 4 evolving long after launch, and a gift to players returning to the Wasteland with fresh eyes," wrote Nexus user ModularCocoon. "Whether this is your first playthrough in years or your fifteenth settlement build this month, this is the Commonwealth at its most refined: a snapshot of what ten years of modding can achieve."

"I said I was all in, and I am delivering on that promise," he wrote. "The game is unfinished and runs on a build from over four years ago. Charging more didn't feel right. I don't think the game is good yet. My team and I will push hard to make it good, then great. The vision is clear and progress is fast."

On November 20, during Xbox's Partner Preview showcase, IO Interactive announced that rapper Eminem would be the next elusive target coming to Hitman: World of Assassination in a free update arriving next month on all platforms. Here's the strange trailer, which shows Eminem teaming up with Agent 47 to take out his alter ego, Slim Shady, who is hanging out in a strange medical facility in Japan.

I throw a doll at a zombie's head, dispatch it with a roundhouse kick to the jowls as I watch my friends sweep demons off the floor in vortices of blood, and celebrate by returning to town and petting a dog. All in the name of passing a college assignment that I'm juggling alongside deciphering a millennia-old apocalyptic prophecy and making new friends.

Dropped into a multiplayer world overrun with hostile drones and military robots, every human player is at the mercy of the machines and each other. Can you trust the other raider you've spotted on your way back to humanity's safe haven underground, or will they shoot you and take everything you've just scavenged? Perhaps surprisingly, humanity is (mostly) choosing to band together, according to most people I've talked to about this game.

Trailblazing game industry bad-ass Rebecca Heineman has passed away. F**k cancer. Let's not forget her.

We are thrilled to announce that we have acquired from Riot Games. While it didn't make sense for them to continue developing it in its existing form, they ultimately wanted what's best for players, and that's for us to eventually play a revised version of the game. We are grateful to Riot Games for making this possible.

Black Ops 7, which can be accessed through the Call of Duty app, crossed 100,000 peak concurrent players on Steam on Sunday, as epr SteamDB, two days after it launched. Those numbers pale in comparison to Battlefield 6 and Arc Raiders, which hit 700,000 and 300,000 peak concurrent player counts on the platform right after launch. It is, however, worth noting that a large chunk of Black Ops 7 players on PC would have accessed the shooter through their Game Pass

On November 17, Ampere Analysis published the results of a large-scale video game survey focusing on single-player vs. multiplayer games. The research and marketing firm asked 34,428 people who have played a video game in the last year if they agreed with this statement: "I prefer single-player games over multiplayer games." And the newly released data shows that gamers in most countries do.

Jannik Sinner continued his total dominance of the indoor season as he held off an admirable early challenge from Alex de Minaur before bulldozing his path into the ATP Finals for a third consecutive year with a supreme 7-5, 6-2 victory, extending his winning record against the Australian to 13-0. Sinner continues to perform at an astounding level that has allowed him to rapidly rise the list of all-time great's.

Zenless Zone Zero's latest Special Program was a big one, bringing us all the news about Version 2.4, the next major update. It's called On the Precipice of the Abyss, and it will be available to download on November 26. On the Precipice of the Abyss has tendrils in many areas of the game, touching several parts of its fiction as well as gameplay, so it's one to watch out for.