The slogan, from the 1990s, is one of the most famous in video game history. It was a time when the bitter rivalry between the two Japanese game companies was at its fiercest. Today, that relationship has softened. You can play Sonic games on Nintendo consoles and the characters have even appeared in games together. But is Sega trying to restart the beef?

Nintendo made a slew of announcements during its latest Direct event, including details on a new Resident Evil game, a Ditto-centric Pokémon title, and more details on . Nintendo's Switch and Switch 2 release calendars are bulking up. During a packed Nintendo Direct livestream on Friday, the company announced on-sale dates for several games as well as the return of the Virtual Boy, the proto VR headset Nintendo originally launched in the mid-1990s. One of the biggest of Friday's announcements was that of the release date for the sequel to Supergiant's wildly popular . The long-awaited new game,, will also finally launch December 4 for Switch and Switch 2. The news comes ahead of the upcoming holiday season, which will be the Switch 2's first since its launch this summer.

If you are in Cologne this week, you will find the place overtaken by cheerful nerds, as Gamescom, the world's biggest gaming event, descends upon the city once again. Over 300,000 people are expected to visit the Koelnmesse to play upcoming games and enjoy each other's company, to the extent that it's possible to enjoy anyone's company in a giant crowded convention hall with woefully insufficient food options. The event began, as is now tradition, with a showcase of games (pdf) whose publishers could afford the hundreds of thousands of euros necessary to show a trailer on an official livestream. As ever, I am here to spare you from watching a full two hours of trailers and pick out the most interesting stuff. Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 was the big opener: our reporter Alyssa Mercante got a full introduction to its futuristic military paranoia, which you can read about later this week.

When Charlie Brooker's Netflix series about tech-driven dystopias, Black Mirror, returns, it will do so with a surprising new twist: a mobile video game tie-in called Thronglets. Think Tamagotchi, but psychologically threatening. Netflix showed off both a sneak peek of the new season of Black Mirror and the accompanying life sim game from Night School Studios during a private event in March during the Game Developers Conference. Sean Krankel, cofounder of Night School Studios and Netflix's newly appointed general manager of narrative, says the team worked closely with Brooker to create "an artifact" from the show people could experience as an extension of its story. "The way I came back to the team and I was like, oh my God, imagine if you brought a Mogwai home and it effed up your life after you watched Gremlins," Krankel says.

Alongside some worthy winners – Balatro, Astro Bot and Metaphor: ReFantazio swept the board – the Game awards last Thursday brought a generous bounty of end-of-year announcements, like unexpected gifts under the tree. In terms of newsworthy reveals, it was the best show yet: it felt a bit like an old-school E3 conference. If you were, quite understandably, not watching a three-hour video game awards show live from LA that aired after midnight UK time, here's what's worth knowing about. We've known that another dark-fantasy RPG has been in development in Poland at CD Projekt for some time, but now we've seen it. The next Witcher game stars white-haired warrior badass Ciri, instead of her sort-of-father-figure Geralt, and the trailer shows her locked in combat with an impressively gruesome monster.

The next Tron game is a follow-up to Tron: Identity, but it's also something completely new. Where Tron: Identity was a visual novel, Tron: Catalyst is an isometric action game with a looping narrative, and it's coming to PC, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S and Switch in 2025. Tron: Catalyst is in development at Bithell Games, the award-winning studio behind Tron: Identity, John Wick Hex and Thomas Was Alone. In Tron: Catalyst, players return to the Arq Grid, a virtual world that's evolved without human input, creating a siloed, Galapagos Islands type of space populated by sentient computer programs. The protagonist is Exo, a program who's able to relive segments of time by exploiting a system-level glitch that no one else can sense.

Google just announced a suite of updates to the Play Store in an attempt to make it more fun to use. This is part of a larger move by the company to turn its online marketplace into "an end-to-end experience that's more than a store." They want us to hang out on Google Play. Here's what the company has planned. The update brings AI-generated review summaries that pull from user reviews to develop a consensus.

Players of a certain age will no doubt have fond memories of the paper instruction manuals that once came with every video game. Dan Marshall, creator of The Swindle and Lair of the Clockwork God, certainly does. He remembers the ritual of poring over the manual for a new game on the bus ride home from the shops, trying to absorb all of its information in preparation for playing the game itself. He vividly recalls receiving Bullfrog's 1993 game Syndicate via mail order early one morning, then impatiently waiting hours for his brother to wake up so he could play it on the PC in his room. "And for that solid time I did nothing but read the manual over and over and over again," Marshall says.

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While a gaming PC might cost more than an equivalent game console (a lot more, if you want enough power to run new games at the highest visual fidelity), you can save a lot of money on the games themselves if you're mindful. And most PC gamers do, according to a new consumer survey. The data says that only about a third of players on the PC will buy a game at its full, initial retail price (stretching into $70 USD for AAA games at this point) while the rest will wait for a sale or a bundle. The data comes from a consumer survey performed by secondary market Ultra and Atomik Research. According to aggregate answers from 2,000 PC gamers, only 36 percent of them will buy a new game at full price, while 32 percent will wait for a sale or a bundle (like the Humble Bundle).