Category: Video Gaming

SEGA is thrilled to announce Yakuza Kiwami 3 & Dark Ties, is coming to PlayStation5, PlayStation4 on February 12, 2026.

Debuting on PlayStation 3 in 2009, Yakuza 3 returns, revitalized with cutting-edge technology. This evolved edition brings Okinawa to life, featuring more intense battles, added cutscenes that bring depth to the story, and minigames chock-full of replay value. Kiryu’s back in the brawl, continuing the fight to protect those he holds dear.

This title also includes Dark Ties, which stars Yoshitaka Mine, Kiryu’s adversary.

Follow Mine on his journey from working as a venture company’s founder to becoming a full-fledged yakuza member. After losing everything, Mine sets off in an attempt to form a connection that would fill the void in his heart.

In Yakuza Kiwami 3 & Dark Ties, you can enjoy the passionate drama of two men — “Kazuma Kiryu” and “Yoshitaka Mine” — all in one game.

STORY：When the peace is shattered,the Dragon of Dojima makes his return.

After the Omi Alliance conflict, Kazuma Kiryu leaves the Tojo Clan in Daigo Dojima’s hands and moves to Okinawa with Haruka. There, he spends his days running Morning Glory, an orphanage tied to his foster father, Shintaro Kazama.

However, a government-sponsored resort deal threatens his newfound peace.

Morning Glory is caught in the crossfire, a Tojo Clan succession dispute erupts, and a conspiracy engulfs the political world.

When the maelstrom of conflicts converges, Kiryu steps into the fray once more.

BATTLE：Fight as Kiryu in His Prime Using Two Different Battle Styles

In Yakuza 3 Kiwami, Kiryu has two fighting styles at his disposal: the Dragon of Dojima Style and Ryukyu Style.

The Dragon of Dojima Style transforms you into an unstoppable force of nature. This style has been completely revamped, boasting the most diverse moveset in the series.

The Ryukyu Style utilizes traditional Okinawan weaponry, allowing for an exhilarating and technical playstyle. Master the 8 available weapons to dish out devastating attack combos.

ADVENTURE：Revel in the Nature and Tradition of Okinawa

At the Morning Glory Orphanage in Okinawa, you can experience “Life at Morning Glory” content that lets you enjoy the daily life of Kiryu and the children.With the team battle content “Bad Boy Dragon”, you can fight alongside a local ladies’ team to protect the streets of Okinawa.

Entertainment

In Downtown Ryukyu and Kamurocho, there are plenty of ways to cut loose.

Pose for the perfect shot at the Print Club, aim for strikes in bowling, and enjoy a series of other staple minigames—including golf, darts, karaoke, UFO Catchers, gambling, and mahjong!

STORY：A Man Drawn into the Heart of the Underworld

The year is 2007.

Yoshitaka Mine is the successful founder of a startup company, but he loses everything when his colleagues stab him in the back.

Wandering aimlessly through Kamurocho, he witnesses a gruesome conflict between yakuza.

The sight of the subordinates sacrificing themselves for their boss was everything Mine had been longing for—a bond that transcended material gain. The survivor of this assault is Daigo Dojima, the sixth chairman of Japan’s largest yakuza clan.

Hoping to find such a bond himself, Mine decides to acquaint himself with Tsuyoshi Kanda, a Tojo clan lieutenant.

Witness Yoshitaka Mine’s story, from his first steps into the criminal underworld to his ascent through the ranks of the Tojo Clan.

BATTLE：Ruthless Combat

Mine wields a stylish fighting style based on shootboxing.

He waits for his foes to slip up, beating them down using a string of elegant combos. You can also freely sweep through the air to toy with your enemies.

Additionally, Dark Awakening will completely transform your moveset, allowing you to unleash a barrage of brutal strikes and a dark special move that can knock the life right out of your opponents.

ADVENTURE：Paint Kamurocho red as Mine

Kamurocho, Tokyo

The city that never sleeps; a place where greed and desire run rampant.

Visitors always find themselves captivated by the restaurants, bars, and amusement facilities that line its streets. It is home to the Nishikiyama Family offices and other key locations.

In addition, unique content such as the “Kanda Damage Control” which aims to turn Kanda into a charismatic figure, and the exclusive battle spot “Underground Fight Club” for Dark Ties, where you can enjoy battles with various rules, are also available.

Entertainment

A plethora of minigames can be found throughout Kamurocho. Watch as the typically stoic Mine takes on billiards, the batting center, darts, and other series staples! You won’t want to miss his rendition of the fan-favorite karaoke track, “”Baka Mitai!””

You can also play minigames alongside Tsuyoshi Kanda at certain venues. Prepare to discover a whole new side of Mine you’ve never seen before!

key details: Release date, specify release platforms (PS4, PS5, PS VR2)

February 12, 2026.

PlayStation®5 / PlayStation®4

EA’s official Skate FAQ is very clear about what 2025’s new early access iteration represents for the series as a whole. “This isn’t a sequel, remake, or a remaster,” states the brief explanation. “It’s the evolution of the Skate franchise.” The first part I wholeheartedly agree with. This is not Skate 4, and it certainly isn’t a remake of the originals by any stretch of the imagination. The second part is not entirely untrue either: It is an evolution, of sorts. That is, it’s certainly changed. A lot. Unfortunately, this means this new version of Skate bears little semblance to the late-2000s originals I love – and I’m currently finding it impossible to warm to its sanitised, homogenised, and monetised reinvention. Yes, Skate has evolved dramatically, but it’s done so to blend into its free-to-play, service game-dominated surroundings – like moths in the sooty cities of the British Industrial Revolution. I don’t think I’ve ever compared a game to an insect before, but perhaps it makes sense when I find it this repellant.

Before I get too deep into why it’s offputting, there are a couple of true strengths that I can identify in Skate’s early access launch – the first of which are the sound effects. When it comes to capturing the nuanced array of skateboarding sounds – the hiss of spinning wheels, the friction of plywood on varied surfaces, and the clink of metal on metal – the team has done a terrific job. Ignoring the music and dialogue (which I’ll discuss later), Skate absolutely nails its sounds. This stuff is the symphony of skateboarding and, when you’re in a real flow, there’s an almost meditative rhythm to it. The pops and pings, the scrapes and squeaks – these sounds are just soothing, and I don’t know how else to explain it.

It must also be established that the feel of Skate, when you’re on a board at least, is still supreme. I adore the wild, arcade wackiness of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater – and I respect the punishing, twin-stick precision required by the likes of skate sims like Session – but Skate’s controls are my jam. Just about everything I crave is wrapped up in its approachable yet deceptively deep system. Tricks on the right stick, turning on the left, grabs on the triggers, and grinds on… how good you are at lining them up. There’s a lot of depth to unlock once you get the hang of it.

Now, the new Skate doesn’t quite look and feel identical to the older games. Turning appears a little stiffer, and probably lacks a bit of the more pronounced and organic lean from the early Skate games. The grind assist is also considerably too sticky by default, and there’s definitely jankiness present in the transition skating; I’m experimenting with the pump settings but haven’t quite cracked a consistent solution to always getting the momentum I want and not getting randomly bogged down. Skitching is absent, and there are other missing tricks. Overall, however, it’s entirely familiar enough to be instantly intuitive to me as a returning player. At a minimum, Skate has done a fine job of reconstructing that buttery, legacy street skating feel from the original games. That’s an important thing to bring back if you’re going to use the classic name.

Unfortunately, that’s all it brought back.

Streaming the Cube

Making Skate an exclusively online experience was an immediate and utter mistake. During my first session on the day of its early access launch I was unceremoniously disconnected during a random challenge and kicked out of the map, back to the main menu. The error message here was comically emblematic of my thoughts on the overall situation. Something went wrong? Yes, something certainly went wrong with Skate. But it went wrong long before I started playing.

I am, of course, aware that server problems and queues are typical of day one of a new online game (although I’m still waiting in queues the week after launch). The community has come to accept this compromise as the opposite side of the free-to-play coin. For me, this is uncharted territory. The last time I waited in an online queue I was buying concert tickets, but at least I got seats to Metallica out of it. Skate is giving me no such joy. It does not benefit from being an online-only live service. It has new priorities, like selling $25 clothing ensembles. To pass the downtime I played a bit of the existing Skate trilogy (all of which are parked on my Xbox courtesy of backwards compatibility and will work just fine offline today, tomorrow, and in 10 years time).

In a deeply unfortunate twist, playing the new Skate is regularly just as annoying as not being able to play it. From the get-go it’s evident every shred of the personality of the originals has been ruthlessly and shamelessly cut away in favour of infantilised garbage. Every part of Skate has been corporatised and Disney-fied, from art style to attitude.

Remember the authentic human characters that accompanied your skater as you progressed through the story modes of the old games, who would blurt in sympathy as you tumbled down the dam for the tenth time, breaking every bone in your body? Well, forget anything like that. Your “filmer” in the new Skate is… an AI app, called Vee, who just may be the single worst video game character I’ve ever encountered. Vee’s dialogue is beyond nauseating, and is delivered in a faux-robotic fashion that makes it doubly awful. It’s essentially a simulation of AI slop – like having a friend that only speaks to you like they’re reading the captions on a Tik-Tok video. The low-fi and realistic filmer approach of the old Skate games is greatly missed. In 2025, this could have been emulated easily by just giving us an in-game friend with a phone. Instead, we have an ill-conceived chatbot who regards my successful tricks as, “Algorithmic!”, refuses to stop “edu-skating” me on the fact “footy” means “video footage,” and mines 35-year-old LL Cool J songs for quips even my mum would wince at. “Your female parent said knock those objectives out?” Good grief.

Holy Cow Oh My God

Sadly the “human” cast is no better. They’re saddled with an inauthentic, overwritten script stuffed with cringeworthy sentences no person would ever say aloud, and lines I’m not even sure the voice actors quite understood before reading. Skate’s fascination with the term “skater eyes” (which is inexplicably capitalised in the captions like some kind of proper noun) is simply baffling. It’s referenced with such heavy regularity that it sounds like the name of an in-game function you can personally toggle on and off to highlight particular parts of the environment like Batman’s Detective Vision (like certain things that are automatically covered in a yellow mask during some challenges) but it isn’t. It’s just a hackneyed slang phrase Skate has invented and overuses far beyond the point of parody.

Who says the word “BEEP” instead of cursing, even mildly? Everything that’s even a fraction edgy or mature has been masked under layers of corporate coddling, like those soft, squishy curves that stop toddlers from splitting their heads on the corner of the kitchen bench. You can, I guess, mute the dialogue – but that doesn’t make it immune from criticism. Besides, the dialogue is also just one part of a cavalcade of complaints I have about the current state of Skate.

Why was it so important, for instance, to concoct an in-universe explanation for the fact that nobody in Skate’s new city of San Vansterdam can suffer any injuries? Making skaters invincible thanks to the medical miracle of “ImpervaTEK” doesn’t make Skate better; it just feels like it’s here because some suit was worried about the optics of children playing a game where people tossing themselves off buildings might have to be depicted as being seriously hurt. As a result, Skate’s traditional post-wipeout x-rays and bone-snapping sound effects are totally gone (as are bloody scrapes, grime, and wear on skaters and their boards).

My sons began playing the original Skate games from about the moment each was old enough to hold a controller. I vividly remember them cackling uncontrollably at how many bones they could break as their characters tumbled and fell, their skeletons squelching and shattering. Skate 2025 seems totally toothless in comparison. It treats its audience like babies.

10 Things I Skate About You

Skate’s art style doesn’t do it any favours, either. The stylised approach may be crisp and colourful, but it’s also vanilla and boring. The doe-eyed, Sims-style character models do absolutely nothing for me, and this cartoony u-turn is a truly unwelcome departure from the realistic approach the series previously took. I don’t like their plastic beards, or their chunky pants, and I certainly don’t like being surrounded by them at all times – particularly when other players have a habit of visibly stuttering, lagging, and even floating as they move by. It’s also a complete eyesore having everyone constantly clipping into each other, all plonked in front of the same shop counter – or teleporting and gathering atop the same ramp. I don’t know where I start and everyone else begins.

There’s also a real sterility to the city that the simplified visual style can’t shake. Plain walls, impossibly clean surfaces – San Vansterdam just isn’t a place that feels legitimate or lived-in. It feels fake because it looks fake. There’s not enough granular detail or texture. Hell, sometimes there’s no texture at all, like when the roads appear to glitch and turn into a featureless, uniformly black surface. That happens a lot.

San Vansterdam isn’t all that interesting to skate around, either. The map is a largely flat downtown area, broken up into four quadrants that aren’t particularly distinct from each other. You can skate across it in about two minutes. There’s no zany hill descent, or dam drop, or wild spillway – nothing I’m drawn to gravitate towards like I am in Skate 2’s San Vanelona. There was a sense of reward in finding a neat place to skate in the original games, because the maps primarily felt like cities – not skateparks. The DNA of San Vansterdam is that everything is skatepark-adjacent. Top of a building? Skatepark. Inside a church? Skatepark. At this point, designing the city to be an unrestrained skate utopia just feels like too much – like it’s a big, Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater level instead of a city you can skate in. It’s weird when the original Skate games were entirely antithetical to that.

Speaking of pro skaters, don’t expect to see any of those old faces in the new Skate. This obviously means no cleverly edited live-action intro montage packed with recognisable skaters in silly situations. Starting with a memorable short film may have become a tradition for the original trilogy, but that idea appears to have been firmly kickflipped to curb. More disappointingly, however, it also means no pro challenges – no real-life skaters to meet and speak to as you progress through what constitutes the campaign at the moment.

Could pros come to the game later in this fashion? As a live service… maybe, I guess. But I’m very pessimistic they’d add the same level of personality they injected into the original Skate games. Those had brief cutscenes with back and forth between the pros and your sarcastic filmer. Is John Rattray going to have a conversation with a disembodied app on a floating video camera? I doubt it.

As it stands right now, the campaign feels weak: part lengthy tutorial, part service game treadmill, where miscellaneous skating tasks are rationed out every 24 hours. Some of these are satisfying enough, and they do reward a certain degree of mastery of Skate’s classic controls. There are stints of Skate where I’m absorbed to some degree, sure, but there’s surprisingly little to it right now – particularly considering how immediately the daily challenges have begun to repeat.

In terms of solo content, there are no competitions, no death races, no games of S.K.A.T.E. No magazine cover shoots, or sponsorship challenges. The campaign missions, or “tours”, here are really just a series of lessons. It’s clumsily paced, too, since the only way to unlock new tours is to complete an extensive amount of goals from the miscellaneous trick challenges that are refreshed on a daily basis. That is, many hours after completing a daily objective that required me to do multiple manuals, I found myself sleepwalking through a separate tutorial mission about how to manual. And this after Skate confirmed with me I’d played Skate 3 before I even set foot on a board.

Skate sure does love its collection missions, though. In these you must skate a certain line while hitting a predetermined amount of floating wheel bearings, or perhaps skate through some basketball-sized bird poo. Either way, it’s mobile game-inspired fluff. I’m not a bored toddler in a restaurant being handed an iPad while his parents peruse the dessert menu, so this is just not my scene.

That only became more evident when I realised the whole progression loop is simply geared around collecting enough in-game currency to open loot boxes. Want to rank up? You need to return to the store to trigger that. Hey, while you’re at the store, why not open some boxes of crap with all your in-game credits? I didn’t bother opening any for the first few days because I wasn’t interested, but I eventually realised the boxes also contain additional reputation points that are important for leveling up your neighbourhood rank and unlocking new fast travel spots – so you basically have to open them. This means sitting through the unskippable “Congratulations!” animation for each individual one – that I assume has been meticulously modelled for maximum poker machine potency – every single time.

Which boxes? These ones, just past all the premium items you need to hand over real money for instead. Wait, why are there bundles of items priced at 1600 Skate-bucks when Skate-bucks are available in increments of 500 and 1050? Oops. Guess you’ll have to buy more than you need. It’s insidious and I hate it. I hate it in other games and I hate it in this one. I am not young and immune to the caveats of free-to-play gaming. It makes it feel like a service and a store first, and a game second.

Hell, maybe that’s true. After all, if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it’s a duck.

That’s what my female parent used to say.

Rank these skateboarding video games

Rank these skateboarding video games

Borderlands 4 debuted earlier this month on PC, Xbox Series X|S, and PlayStation 5. However, Switch 2 owners were supposed to get the game on October 3. Now, Gearbox Software has delayed the Borderlands 4 Switch 2 port 10 days before its release after citing a need for it to have more time in development.

Gearbox made the announcement on social media, and wrote that it “did not take this decision lightly.” The statement goes on to say that Gearbox is “committed to ensuring we deliver the best possible experience to our fans, and the game needs additional development and polish time to do that. Our hope is to also better align this release with the addition of cross saves, which we are working on and recognize is very important. We will update you all on the new release timing once we’ve fully adjusted our plans.”

The publisher also noted that all Borderlands 4 Switch 2 pre-orders will be canceled per Nintendo’s policy. Players can initiate a refund now or wait until Friday, September 26, when they will be issued automatically.

Borderlands 4 had positive critical reviews prior to launch, but PC players have left harsh feedback on Steam about performance and optimization issues. Gearbox Studios CEO Randy Pitchford has challenged players’ negative reviews about optimization issues and remained defiant about it days later, while also offering tips for better performance on PC and consoles.

Gearbox has already released a patch aimed at the PC stability issues. Pitchford has indicated that a PS5 Pro patch is in the works as well.

Despite many others disagreeing with this stance, I am of the opinion that it’s completely fine that we’ll likely never get a “classic” 3D Zelda game again. By that I mean, the whole Breath of the Wild/ Tears of the Kingdom format is definitely the direction Nintendo will continue to go in, they’ve just been too popular. However, I understand the desire for such an experience all the same, and I think Demi and the Fractured Dream might be able to scratch that itch.

Announced during today’s Annapurna Direct, Demi has you playing as, uh, Demi! A “voidsent” born into a world with a cursed fate he’s trying to avoid. It’s the debut title from Yarn Owl, and honestly, it really does kind of look like they went “hey wanna make a ’90s era Zelda game?” That’s not a knock against it to be clear, as it’s also a nicely stylish and swish looking game.

I often find that games inspired by the 3D Zeldas can look and feel a bit too flat, or uninspired. Demi the game has a real strong vibe going for it, with Demi the character appealing to my own sensibilities quite a lot. I very much vibe with his deer boy vibe, his sword with a handle made from what looks like a tree branch is cool as heck, and yeah, I even like that he literally just has Link’s pointy, droopy hat but in blue. Combat looks nice and smooth too, though that’s something I’d have to try out for myself at some point to comment on it properly.

As of right now it doesn’t have a release date, but you can probably already guess that it’s coming to PC given that I covered it here.

Another day, another Baldur’s Gate 3 hotfix, this one being number 34, or version 4.1.1.6931813 of the game if you really want to be specific. There’s a number of fixes we’ll get to in a minute, but first the thing you’re probably most excited to hear: it has a native Steam Deck build now! Developer Larian Studios shared word of this change in a Steam news post today, and what exactly it means for you.

The big things you should now notice while playing on Steam Deck is that the RPG has a more stable framerate, that loading times won’t be quite as long, and just generally smoother gameplay. As explained in the news post, this hotfix has made some changes to how game models are streamed in, meaning across all platforms areas like the Lower City in Act 3 that are known for their framerate spikes will work better too.

In turns of the big difference between the previous version of Baldur’s Gate 3 and this one for Steam Deck users, before it was a Proton version that ran on the Steam Deck via a Proton compatibility layer. This meant it was more intensive on the handheld’s CPU, but now that it runs natively it’ll need less CPU usage and memory consumption overall!”

There’s some details on where to find your saves in both versions of the game, and if you use Steam Cloud saves, you’ll find your saves post-update anyway. As long as you’re logged into your Larian account, all mods you’re subscribed to should be downloaded when the game transitions into the native build.

Now, some of the other more general fixes! On the gameplay side, the Hound of Ill Omen and the Accursed Spectre’s HP will no longer be affected by difficulty modifiers for enemy characters. An annoying bug that caused the Apostle of Myrkul to gain HP every time you would load a save mid-combat in Tactician and Honour Mode has also been fixed.

There are a bunch of audio fixes in this one too, like an issue where it sounded like smokepowder explosions going off on the floor above on the ground floor of Felogyr’s Fireworks would send like they’re happening next to you instead.

Perhaps my favourite fix is in the cinematics section, which simply reads, “Told one of the imps on the nautiloid to stop looking in the wrong direction.” You tell ’em, patch notes writer. You can read the full list of patch notes here.

Larian may be done with major updates to its blockbuster role-playing game Baldur’s Gate 3, but it’s still releasing hotfixes. The latest, Hotfix #34, is a juicy one. It adds a native Steam Deck build and should reduce framerate spikes in busy areas such as the Lower City in Act 3 across all platforms.

Baldur’s Gate 3 Act 3 is infamous for its performance issues. Indeed it was one of the tougher areas to navigate, especially in the months after the game launched and before Larian issued various updates, mainly due to the sheer number of NPCs who mill about on-screen and everything the game has to consider as a result.

In a post on Steam, Larian said the native Steam Deck build means Baldur’s Gate 3 has a more stable framerate, lower loading times, and smoother gameplay on Valve’s handheld. But the work done for this build benefits all players by improving the way the game’s models are streamed across all platforms.

Meanwhile, Hotfix #34 addresses “some rather annoying” instances of crashing on Xbox, Larian said. And as is Larian’s way, it sprinkled the patch notes, below, with some trademark flair. For example:

• Fixed the audio levels for a rat in the Lower City that you, tragically, couldn’t hear squeak when it squoke.
• Reminded Halsin to actually yell when he gains barbarian Rage instead of silently miming it.
• Told one of the imps on the nautiloid to stop looking in the wrong direction.

Baldur’s Gate 3 celebrated its two-year anniversary last month, with Larian boss Swen Vincke discussing how its enormous success paved the way for the studio to work on its hotly-anticipated next game.

Every IGN 10 of 2023