#game-preservation

#game-preservation

While the PlayStation 4 was considered jailbroken by 2016, the Xbox One has remained invulnerable since its release on November 22, 2013. Well, that is until very recently, as Markus 'Doom' Gaasedelen just showcased a newly discovered 'Bliss' exploit at RE//verse 2026.

Over the past several months, quite a few players have noticed an eerie bug that turns all of their family photos black. While the bug has apparently been around for a whopping five years, it seems like it's become rampant over the past several months. Photos serve as arguably the game's most sentimental feature, and they've become a handy way to keep track of memories from past generations, so players are understandably really, really upset.

Why does Hasbro keep shutting down studios instead of releasing games? Project Windless was the surprise hit out of last week's PlayStation showcase and its developers have been using genAI for the early development phase. And would it kill publishers to stop delisting old versions of their games? It's the latest edition of Morning Checkpoint, Kotaku 's daily roundup of gaming news, rumors, and culture.

"We started with maybe, I don't know, three or four [classes] that were top of mind," Cederquist said. "But then we kind of shopped that around to the team, and the team was most excited about two specifically out of those, but then we thought, 'All right, we're gonna rock out the Warlock just because the team was so excited about it.' They're like, 'oh yeah, we can make this amazing.'"

At the end of Darrah's video, he starts to give a soft pitch for how could live on and maybe even see a bit of that fabled No Man's Sky redemption arc that BioWare was hoping for when it announced it was revamping the game in 2019. He says that his idea would "conservatively" run EA about $10 million, and if that should sell more than 400,000 copies, it could actually work out for everyone involved.

The Operative: No One Lives Forever was released on November 10, 2000. It's very unclear the last time it was possible to buy, but it was certainly some time before 2010. Since then, the Monolith-made game has become one of the most notoriously unavailable games of all time, and it seems that this might never change. Which is calamitous, given what things of joy both NOLF and its sequel are. Yet, and lean closer so I can whisper: you can totally still play them.

is going away as EA will shut it down on January 20, nearly eight years after its debut in March 2018. An update that went live on Monday is the final one and the company is delisting the game on October 21. Since the game requires online servers (game progress is stored there), it'll no longer be possible to play The Sims Mobile in three months' time.

The Crew 2 was updated today to include Hybrid Mode, adding an offline mode to the driving game. Online and offline modes are separate saves, so if you snag a sweet ride while playing offline, it won't be available the next time you join an online session. Players will have the option to re-export their online save to the offline one, but it will overwrite and erase all offline-only progress. Multiplayer content, user-generated content, LIVE Summits and Crew Credits purchases will not be available in the offline mode.

A man completes an absurd but humanity-affirming journey in Minecraft. Control finally gets Hideo Kojima's voiceover on console. And the first indicator of Ghost of Yotei sales is a potentially impressive one. Welcome to the latest Morning Checkpoint, Kotaku's daily roundup of gaming news and culture. My co-author, Zack Zwiezen, is out on vacation to parts unknown for a while so in the meantime, you're stuck with me.

As frustrating as it can be, Digimon World 's vibes are still unmatched by most of the franchise. There's a true sense of loneliness as your character is isekai'd into the Digital World, aimlessly wandering through this unknowable realm and discovering new friends and enemies as you explore. It also still has that PS1-era grit that has kind of washed away from more modern games, which is especially effective when you're young and these worlds still feel vast and scary.

When getting to work on the remake, Maehiro and his team discovered they had to rebuild the source code from the ground up since it was lost thanks to the industry's unstandardized practices in the '90s, according to Bloomberg. When translating Final Fantasy Tactics from Japanese to English for the global release, the company would overwrite the original Japanese version's code.

Big Fan Games announced that John Wick Hex will be delisted from all platforms on July 17, although those who previously acquired it can still download it.

The Stop Killing Games movement seeks to prevent the remote disabling of video games by the publishers, providing reasonable means to continue functioning without publisher involvement.