Oscar-winning actor Sally Field has a message for people who don't play The Legend of Zelda games, and that is, "What the hell is the matter with you?!"

She said this in an interview with Jake Hamilton after the journalist asked Field to recall a story working with the late actor Robin Williams on 1993's Mrs. Doubtfire. She said one of her favorite memories was playing Zelda games with Williams in her rented home when they were making the movie. "We'd play the early games of Zelda together. Zelda, the computer game, that I still play with my grandsons. Even when my grandsons aren't there, I pretend they are there. I play them," she said.

Field then turned to her Remarkably Bright Creatures co-star Lewis Pullman to ask if he had ever played the Zelda games. When he said he hadn't, Field said, "What the hell is the matter with you?! It's so fun." For his part, Pullman admitted he has been "missing out" on one of gaming's most legendary franchises.

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Mortal Kombat 2 comes to theaters on May 8, and the reviews for the movie are split down the middle. One of the movie's producers, Todd Garner, has now reacted to the divisive review scores and said he is baffled that people who don't appreciate a given genre are allowed to review a film in that genre.

"Some of these reviews are cracking me up," he wrote on social media. "It's clear they have never played the game and have no idea what the fans want or ANY of the rules/ canon of Mortal Kombat."

Garner also pointed out one specific review that mentioned Kano and his bionic eye. "Why the fu** do we still allow people that don't have any love for the genre review these movies! Baffling," he said.

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Depending on the day, if you asked me what my favorite game of all time is, I would tell you it's The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past. One of the greatest Zelda games and arguably the one that best nailed the classic formula, it holds a special place in my heart. Parts of it feel timeless, and I think for me, they always will. But if I'm honest, other parts are certainly products of their time and have not aged as gracefully. Combat in those early Zelda games was a means to an end, not the focus. So it's satisfying to find a game like Alabaster Dawn, which spiritually carries the inventive fantasy spirit and colorful characters and puzzle aspects that I love so much about Zelda--but also makes combat feel really, really good.

This isn't the first time that developer Radical Fish Games has impressed. Its 2018 release CrossCode was similarly a retro-styled action-RPG, and it has enjoyed a reputation as a standout indie game. Alabaster Dawn is an iterative step, but it feels like it takes lessons learned from that earlier experience to craft something that still feels fresh in 2026. This is a developer confidently hitting its stride in its sophomore effort, and even in early access, it looks and feels great.

With CrossCode, Radical Fish showed a knack for creating fantasy worlds that feel fully fleshed out and lived in, with lots of little details and sharp writing that lets you learn about the setting naturally, without overexplaining it. But where CrossCode was a sci-fi story set in the distant future, Alabaster Dawn is high fantasy, introducing its own spin on the genre's tropes.

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Star Fox fans had their hopes briefly raised today when Nintendo revealed a surprise Star Fox Direct, only to discover that the new game for the Switch 2 is doomed to be yet another remake of Star Fox 64. What's more, the uncomfortably realistic character redesigns have not gone down well with Star Fox's fanbase--but at least the meme game is on point.

The news of yet another Star Fox 64 remake has been met with some incredulity among fans, considering Star Fox will be the third remake Nintendo has made for Star Fox 64--which itself is a reboot of the original Star Fox. With only 10 total games in the franchise, half of them are now essentially the same game.

Recent leaks out of Nintendo had claimed a new Star Fox game was in development, giving fans hope that a sequel was on its way to refresh the long-neglected franchise. It's possible that a new game is still yet to be announced by Nintendo, but fans are starting to feel that the series will forever be haunted by the singularity of Star Fox 64.

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Take-Two is a powerhouse publisher behind a number of successful franchises like GTA, NBA 2K, Civilization, Borderlands, and BioShock, but not everything that Take-Two touches turns to gold.

In an interview with Game File, Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick said the company is unlikely to get back into MLB-licensed baseball video games because it's "too small a market" and Take-Two wants to place bets on games that are more likely to make money.

"We had a tough history with MLB," Zelnick said. "It's no secret there [that] we lost a great deal of money with them. And I don't like losing money."

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It was only about a year ago when I learned that not everyone gets goosebumps from listening to music. There's a French word for it--frisson--which describes the feeling some get when music or other powerful stimuli trigger a physiological response. This rush is felt in only about 50% of people in the world, it turns out. I used to think it was all of us. That's probably a big part of why music means so much to me, because I'm in the lucky camp that gets to enjoy this positively overwhelming response when the right song hits at just the right time. Mixtape is an adventure game that leans into this magical sensation, pairing its heartfelt, often hilarious moments with a sweeping soundtrack to create a coming-of-age story I'll never forget.

Mixtape is the second effort from Beethoven & Dinosaur, a small Australian team that includes some former rockstars who pivoted to game dev and brought their love for music with them. In it, you play the music-obsessed Stacey Rockford, whose headphones may as well be an organic appendage. Inspired by movies like Superbad and the works of John Hughes, the driving force of the '90s-set story is Stacey's attempt to make it to a killer beach party with her best pals Slater and Cassandra in tow.

The morning after this party, Stacey is off to chase her dream as a music supervisor--basically a professional mixtape maker for Hollywood projects--so this is her and her friends' last hurrah together, whether they're ready for life to drag them into adulthood and see them go their separate ways or not. While relatively small, these stakes are deeply relatable, revealing a lot of big, honest emotions across the four-hour runtime.

The starring trio is incredibly well-written and all three foster empathy and investment from the very start of the game, as they coast down the hills of their town on skateboards, calling out cars to dodge and doing flip tricks over trash cans. As Stacey breaks the fourth wall, announcing to you, the player, the song she picked for the moment, you understand she's no phony. She knows her stuff when it comes to music, but her decision to leave town for New York has driven a wedge in the friend group, who once made plans for a lengthy west coast road trip that's now up in the air.

Mixtape does so much so well, but one of the things I love most about it is its emotional honesty. Sure, as an adult with the benefit of hindsight, a friend moving away isn't the end of the world. But when you're a kid, it's your whole world blowing up. For Stacey, Slater, and Cassandra, they're on the verge of so much changing, and their comfortable routines are being thrown out, exchanged for the ambiguous world of growing up. Though the trio often joke around and give off a level of youthful sarcasm, they're also capable of letting down their emotional barriers and spilling how they feel.

It endears me to each of them and their journeys, whether it be Stacey's bold career-planning maneuvers, Cassandra's desperate desire to wiggle out from beneath her cop-dad's iron fist, or Slater's somewhat untapped potential as a musician himself. How they stand up for each other, challenge each other, and even just how they, for lack of a better phrase, dick around, feels authentic, and it mesmerized me in each scene. Even then, sometimes it's the things they don't speak that affected me the most. Through it all, excellent performances bring these characters and others to vibrant life.

The structure of those scenes is another tremendous highlight. As the night unfolds and the friends remain hellbent on hunting down some alcohol and/or weed for the party, you'll spend hangout time in each of their bedrooms. There, flashbacks unfold to the tune of Stacey's carefully curated mixtape, designed with the explicit intent to become the soundtrack to their grand finale in town together.

Though the game often carries a punky, middle-finger of a spirit, the soundtrack is eclectic, from favorites like Devo and Siouxsie and the Banshees to lesser-known (to me anyway) standouts like Harpers Bizarre and Stan Bush. You won't be shunned for not knowing them all, as Stacey acts as the studio's proxy, providing a bit of musical history with each entry when she breaks the fourth wall a la Ferris Bueller. I loved hearing these new-to-me tracks nearly as much as I loved revisiting some all-time favorites, like The Cure.

Each of these flashback moments is given relatively light gameplay mechanics, often bespoke for just a singular sequence and then quickly disposed of. Like the studio's previous game, The Artful Escape, Mixtape isn't meant to challenge most players on the sticks. Though occasional fail states exist, like if you crash into a car on your skateboard, there's no penalty for messing up. It just rewinds instantly and resumes. This is a game that uses the language of games to tell its story, not test you. And thanks to the story perfectly marrying a killer soundtrack and clever mechanics together, it hits just right.

In one moment, you may be toilet-papering the principal's house, then in another, you'll be stumbling through a video store as the employee calls out to you beyond the fog of your drunken stupor. And this must be the first game to ever let you control a pair of French-kissing tongues, swapping spit and twisting in a fervor of adolescent hormones.

In one of my favorite sequences, the kids fly high above the town, soaring out of the forest, over the nearby lake, and into town, deriding their high school as they coast over the pool of yellow buses. It's all set to the tune of Atmosphere by Joy Division--by my estimation, one of the greatest bands there ever was. Of course, the kids didn't really learn to fly that night, but it sure as hell felt that way to them. How lucky we must be to have had moments in our lives where we felt the same. Mixtape is telling you its story, but it trusts you'll recall moments of your own that resonate.

As great as the game feels and sounds, it also looks exquisite. Built in Unreal, it takes advantage of the engine's impeccable lighting. Coated in a hyper-stylized cartoonishness, it still manages to give its characters the emotiveness their excellent performances deserve. This puts the game on full display, averting the all-too-common video game problem of a great story and performances let down somewhat by wooden character models.

Every frame is a rad painting, and like the gameplay controls, the perspective shifts often, giving each scene what it needs. In one scene, for example, in which the kids flee a party crashed by the cops, you'll seamlessly transition from a traditional third-person perspective to the view from the news helicopter above, watching the runaways take their out-of-control shopping cart onto the interstate.

Broadly speaking, Mixtape is an adventure game, if only because that's often the bucket one might drop a game like this into--a game where the rules of establishing and then iterating on gameplay don't apply. Not one of these moments frustrates or overstays its welcome, with the minor exception being the time spent in the kids' bedrooms, when you're allowed to peruse for a bit and trigger missable dialogue by interacting with objects in each space.

Collectively, it's less like you're playing a game with a great soundtrack and more like someone has turned a soundtrack into an interactive experiment. It had to be a game, and that's partly what makes it so much more affecting than if this were a movie, but still, the music leads. Mixtape is whatever it needs to be in each moment, and the studio makes a strong case for why it must be that way.

By tying each memory or moment to a particular song, Mixtape delivers on its main idea: Music isn't something we do; it's something we are. When we work out, we put on the playlist that gets us ready to run through a brick wall. On our wedding day, we play a song that reminds us of when we first met or whose lyrics speak to our journey. When we scream the words to our favorite songs in a venue of 300 sweaty strangers, it bonds us to one another in a way nothing else does or even could do. Music can behave like a time machine, carrying you to a place and time as though you're there again. Stacey gets this intimately, as does Beethoven & Dinosaur, quite obviously.

Music can make us feel incredibly powerful or cathartically vulnerable. And when the right song hits at the right moment, it may just send a happy shiver down your spine, which is how I spent much of my time with Mixtape, and why I'll never forget it.

It was only about a year ago when I learned that not everyone gets goosebumps from listening to music. There's a French word for it--frisson--which describes the feeling some get when music or other powerful stimuli trigger a physiological response. This rush is felt in only about 50% of people in the world, it turns out. I used to think it was all of us. That's probably a big part of why music means so much to me, because I'm in the lucky camp that gets to enjoy this positively overwhelming response when the right song hits at just the right time. Mixtape is an adventure game that leans into this magical sensation, pairing its heartfelt, often hilarious moments with a sweeping soundtrack to create a coming-of-age story I'll never forget.

Mixtape is the second effort from Beethoven & Dinosaur, a small Australian team that includes some former rockstars who pivoted to game dev and brought their love for music with them. In it, you play the music-obsessed Stacey Rockford, whose headphones may as well be an organic appendage. Inspired by movies like Superbad and the works of John Hughes, the driving force of the '90s-set story is Stacey's attempt to make it to a killer beach party with her best pals Slater and Cassandra in tow.

The morning after this party, Stacey is off to chase her dream as a music supervisor--basically a professional mixtape maker for Hollywood projects--so this is her and her friends' last hurrah together, whether they're ready for life to drag them into adulthood and see them go their separate ways or not. While relatively small, these stakes are deeply relatable, revealing a lot of big, honest emotions across the four-hour runtime.

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New entries in the BioShock series used to arrive at a fairly consistent rate ever since the first game was released in 2007, but ever since work on BioShock Infinite and its expansions wrapped up, the franchise appears to be in limbo. That's not for a lack of trying, as back in 2019, 2K Games established Cloud Chamber to lead the charge on new BioShock games. Since then, nothing has been seen of the project, while layoffs at Cloud Chamber saw the departure of studio head Kelley Gilmore and former Diablo boss Rod Fergusson taking over.

In an interview with Game File, Take-Two Interactive CEO Strauss Zelnick spoke about being "deeply disappointed" about how Take-Two Interactive hadn't made a new BioShock game in over a decade, but he expressed hope for the future of the franchise.

"I think finding the right creative purchase was hard, as it turns out," Zelnick added when quizzed about current attempts to revive BioShock. "I think we, in retrospect, wasted a lot of time and money chasing down some creative alleys that turned out to be dead ends."

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Star Fox (Physical Edition)

$60 | Releases June 25

Preorder at Amazon ($50) View at other stores Preorder at Best Buy Preorder at Walmart ($50) Preorder at GameStop Star Fox (Digital Edition)

$50 | Releases June 25

Preorder at Amazon

After nearly a decade, Nintendo's Star Fox series is making a big comeback next month on Switch 2. Preorders are now live for Star Fox--a remake of the classic N64 game Star Fox 64--and it'll be available either as a $60 physical edition or a $50 digital version. It looks like Amazon and Walmart will have the best deal, as they're price-matching the physical edition with the $50 digital version, saving you $10 in the process.

Star Fox (Physical Edition)

$60 | Releases June 25

A space combat game featuring Fox McCloud--who made a memorable cameo in the recent Super Mario Galaxy Movie--and his allies Falco, Slippy, and Peppy, Star Fox sees players leap into an Arwing fighter jet and defend the Lylat system from invading forces. Nintendo has described the remake as a modernized adventure that features a complete visual overhaul, and the game is also enhanced with all-new cinematic cutscenes, new and returning game modes, additional Switch 2-specific features, and more.

Like most Nintendo first-party releases, the complete Star Fox game will be included on the game cart.

Preorder at Amazon ($50) Preorder at Best Buy Preorder at Walmart ($50) Preorder at GameStop Star Fox (Digital Edition)

$50 | Releases June 25

If you're looking to save a few bucks and you don't mind ditching the physical cartridge format, you can grab a download code for Star Fox priced at $50.

Preorder at Amazon

This isn't the first time that Star Fox 64 has been remade, as Star Fox Zero reimagined the classic game for the Wii U console back in 2016. Like the N64 original, the new remake is a rail shooter game where you'll get to pilot the Arwing jet, unleash laser fire, and do a good ol' barrel roll to evade danger. The new Switch 2 features include added mouse controls, and a second player can hop into the Arwing gunner seat while you focus on flying.

One of the other additions to the game is a Battle Mode for head-to-head action against other players who take control of Star Wolf, challenge modes for an extra layer of replayability, and support for GameShare. Star Fox is one of several Nintendo first-party games on the way, as Yoshi and the Mysterious Book arrives on May 21 and Splatoon Raiders will be released on July 23.

Don't forget, you can also catch Fox McCloud in The Super Mario Galaxy Movie when it hits Blu-ray soon. Preorders are live for the standard 4K, Blu-ray, and DVD releases, and there are also steelbook and collector's edition versions to grab.

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Star Fox (Physical Edition)

$60 | Releases June 25

Preorder at Amazon Preorder at Best Buy Preorder at Walmart Preorder at GameStop

Star Fox (Digital Edition)

$50 | Releases June 25

Preorder at Amazon

After nearly a decade, Nintendo's Star Fox series is making a big comeback next month on Switch 2. Preorders are now live for Star Fox--a remake of the classic N64 game Star Fox 64--and it'll be available either as a $60 physical edition or a $50 digital version. It looks like Walmart will have the best deal, as it's price-matching the physical edition with the $50 digital version, saving you $10 in the process.

Star Fox (Physical Edition) $60 | Releases June 25

A space combat game featuring Fox McCloud--who made a memorable cameo in the recent Super Mario Galaxy Movie--and his allies Falco, Slippy, and Peppy, Star Fox sees players leap into an Arwing fighter jet and defend the Lylat system from invading forces. Nintendo has described the remake as a modernized adventure that features a complete visual overhaul, and the game is also enhanced with all-new cinematic cutscenes, new and returning game modes, additional Switch 2-specific features, and more.

Like most Nintendo first-party releases, the complete Star Fox game will be included on the game cart.

Preorder at Amazon Preorder at Best Buy Preorder at Walmart Star Fox (Digital Edition) $50 | Releases June 25

If you're looking to save a few bucks and you don't mind ditching the physical cartridge format, you can grab a download code for Star Fox priced at $50.

Preorder at Amazon

This isn't the first time that Star Fox 64 has been remade, as Star Fox Zero reimagined the classic game for the Wii U console back in 2016. Like the N64 original, the new remake is a rail shooter game where you'll get to pilot the Arwing jet, unleash laser fire, and do a good ol' barrel roll to evade danger. The new Switch 2 features include added mouse controls, and a second player can hop into the Arwing gunner seat while you focus on flying.

One of the other additions to the game is a Battle Mode for head-to-head action against other players who take control of Star Wolf, challenge modes for an extra layer of replayability, and support for GameShare. Star Fox is one of several Nintendo first-party games on the way, as Yoshi and the Mysterious Book arrives on May 21 and Splatoon Raiders will be released on July 23.

Continue Reading at GameSpot

The Blood of Dawnwalker Day One Edition

$70 | Releases September 3

Preorder at Amazon Preorder at Best Buy

The Blood of Dawnwalker Collector's Edition

$200 | Releases September 3

Preorder at Bandai Namco Store

A new game from former Witcher and Cyberpunk 2077 developers, The Blood of Dawnwalker, launches soon for PC and console. Set in a dark fantasy world where vampires are real and plotting against humanity from the shadows, fans of swords and sorcery can pick up a stylish Day One edition of the game for $70 or a $200 Collector's Edition. Here's a closer look at what you'll find in each version.

The Blood of Dawnwalker preorder bonuses

Locking in your preorder for any edition of The Blood of the Dawnwalker will unlock the Sangoran Wayfarer's Armor set, protective gear adorned with an emblem of a nameless smith who traveled across the continent in pursuit of inspiration. This gear can also be acquired later in the game, but preorders will grant it to a player immediately, giving them an early boost when they start playing The Blood of the Dawnwalker.

The Blood of Dawnwalker Day One Edition

$70 | Releases September 3

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