Nintendo Switch fans can finally check out the Yakuza series with the impending release of Yakuza Kiwami, which was announced on Tuesday during the August Nintendo Direct Partner Showcase.
The remake of the original 2005 PlayStation 2 game Yakuza is releasing on Switch on October 24 and going back to where the action RPG series began: Kazuma Kiryu getting out of prison after 10 years for a murder he didn’t commit. The game isn’t available for preorder just yet.
Interestingly, developer Ryu Ga Gotoku studio head Masayoshi Yokoyama had previously been skeptical about the series’ prospects for Switch, citing the possibility that the games wouldn’t run well on the platform and that they wouldn’t fit in well with the Switch’s relatively younger audience.
“We still kind of think of ourselves as people of the night world, right? We don’t want to be like walking around the day with everybody else,” Yokoyama said in 2022, although he admitted later in the interview that the Switch’s catalog was changing. “Like for us, it’s kind of showing this kind of underground feeling. I think the underground kind of feeling is what we want to do.”
The Switch release also marks the first time a Yakuza game has released on a Nintendo console since the first two got ported to the Wii U in 2013.
There are a lot of Yakuza/Like a Dragon games, with many spinoffs, as well as mainline titles that follow Kiryu’s story, along with other protagonists like Ichiban Kasuga and Takayuki Yagami. It can be confusing figuring out the best order to play these games, but since Yakuza Kiwami is a remake of the first game, it’s a great place to start for almost any player.
But what’s fun about the Yakuza/Like a Dragon series is that while there is an overarching story and gameplay style, later games go off on their own and experiment with extensive minigames and turn-based RPG combat. Future entries will focus on collecting party members and falling into more turn-based gameplay. I’s another great reason to start with Yakuza Kiwami, so you can see where the series truly began.
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.”