There are a plethora of games released every week across all platforms, many of them independent of publishers and largely under the radar. It takes some creativity to get these games into the hands of gamers and software developer Panic is taking a direct approach with Playdate, a bright yellow handheld console with a black and white screen.
Is Playdate a new gaming console that will add to major competition between Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft? Doesn’t seem like it is being positioned as such. Panic calls it a “celebration of the video game” on the official website, and it will celebrate the medium by giving owners of the device a new, secret game weekly after its launch. You won’t know what they are until they arrive on the device, but they have some solid developers lined up.
Panic has a history of creating Mac and iOS software over its 20-year history. The company also published Campo Santo’s Firewatch, a 2016 indie hit, and is publishing Untitled Goose Game. For Playdate, the team reached out to game designers like Keita Takahashi, Zach Gage, Bennett Foddy, and Shaun Inman.
Takahashi is the game designer behind Katamari Damacy and the upcoming game Wattam, which will be published by Annapurna Interactive. Gage created SpellTower and also worked with Vlambeer on Ridiculous Fishing. Foddy is responsible for the hilarious platformer Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy. Last but not least, Inman is the creator of the web stats application Mint and iOS titles The Last Rocket and Flip’s Escape.
It’s a solid collection of designers on paper and the first revealed title, Crankin’s Time Travel Adventure, is from Takahashi. It’s a 2D adventure that utilizes Playdate’s unique crank, which was the product of a collaboration with Teenage Engineering. From the brief clip of the game, the crank allows a player to control time by winding it backward or forward.
Playdate will cost $150 when it launches in early 2020 and the first season of content will release at no additional charge. Twelve games are planned at this time, and it is not clear how much future seasons will cost.
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.”
It’s turning into a pretty good time to be a Monster Hunter fan who plays on a phone. Capcom has confirmed that Monster Hunter Outlanders will launch on Android and iOS on October 29, giving the series a new mobile-first game just as Monster Hunter Rise is also preparing to make the jump to smartphones through Netflix.
Outlanders is being developed by Tencent subsidiary TiMi Studio Group under license and supervision from Capcom. Unlike Rise, which appears to be the full console and PC game adapted for mobile, Outlanders is a free-to-play survival hunting game made specifically for phones.