Birthdays: The Beginning, a world-building sandbox simulation game from the creator of the Harvest Moon series, will make its English-language debut in March for the PlayStation 4 and Windows PCs via Steam, publisher NIS America announced this week.
Helmed by veteran designer and director Yasuhiro Wada, Birthdays allows players to build and customize a simulated planet, with the goal being to produce a self-sustaining ecosystem.
In Birthdays: The Beginning, players are given control over a cube-shaped planet’s geography, temperature, and environmental landscape. Specific combinations of geographic elements and climates will advance the game’s storyline by attracting herds of unique creatures, including birds, crocodiles, and dinosaurs.
Each planet must be carefully balanced to account for predators and prey, however, or constructed ecosystems will quickly crumble. Much like Rare’s Viva Pinata series, gameplay in Birthdays: The Beginning requires players to carefully gauge the impact new creatures will have on the surrounding environment before they can be introduced.
In addition to predatory and herbivorous creatures, players can also produce various types of fauna, which also have an impact on local ecology. Gameplay will span a period of millions of years, starting with single-celled organisms and concluding with the rise of mammals and other advanced lifeforms.
NIS America is currently taking pre-orders for a limited-edition PlayStation 4 version of Birthdays: The Beginning that includes a collectible plush toy, a charm key chain, and a soundtrack CD, among other bundled goodies. A standard edition release for the PlayStation 4 will also hit retail next year, while the PC version will be available exclusively through digital channels.
Birthdays: The Beginning will launch first in Japan in January, and a North American release will follow on March 7. Gamers in Europe can look forward to Birthdays hitting store shelves a few days later on March 10.
Imagine tapping a Zelda icon on your iPhone and jumping straight into Hyrule. A new open-source project called nxnative makes that possible by repackaging Switch games you’ve bought into apps for iPhone, iPad, and Mac, with no emulator in the middle.
Why does this run so well on Apple devices?
The Call of Duty franchise has held a special place in my heart ever since I played my first Black Ops game back in 2010. That game's campaign was something else, with twists and turns that culminated in a mind-blowing finale. We can all admit that compared to those older campaigns, the recent CODs have been lackluster at best, and a complete and utter disappointment at worst. The reboot of Modern Warfare did give me some hope, as the first two installments were actually quite good, but the third game left such a bad taste in my mouth that I wasn’t exactly expecting much from Modern Warfare 4.
After recently finishing the campaign, I can say that this installment is nothing like the recent releases and instead feels closer to the franchise’s roots. For the first time in a long while, the campaign comes across as well-crafted rather than rushed to hit a release date. It arrives three years after MW3, and you can see exactly where all that time went. It seems the studio finally made listening to player feedback a priority.
Epic Games has just announced the 2026 Epic AI MegaJam, which is looking to see how much game development can be squeezed into a very short window. This is running from November 12 through November 15.
Participants can work alone or in teams of up to five people, build in Unreal Engine or Unreal Editor for Fortnite, and bring along “as many AI agents as you want.” Epic explicitly encourages coding agents, AI-generated assets, audio tools, writing tools, and other AI systems. The official event page literally says "Vibe your way to $50k.”