Video Games

Emmet Built a From Scratch Game Console That Plays Retro Games Off Custom CDs

By Bill Smith October 1, 2026

Emmet wanted a living room console that still asked for a disc, so he built one instead of buying a PlayStation 5 or an Xbox. The result sits on a ZimaBoard 2, a small x86 computer with an Intel N150, 32GB of onboard storage, DisplayPort, USB, and a pair of SATA connectors. A USB CD drive hangs off one port. A 500GB SSD occupies the other after he opened a SATA-to-USB enclosure, pulled the drive free, and wired it straight into the board. DisplayPort runs to a television at 4K and 60 frames a second. Batocera, a Linux build made for retro emulation on x86, handles the library.

Mike Tomlin Walks Through the Minecraft City He Built Across Twelve Quiet Years

By Bill Smith September 30, 2026

Mike Tomlin left the Steelers sideline in January 2025 after nineteen seasons, a Super Bowl, and a record that never fell below .500. Eight months later he told Craig Melvin on the Today show that he had been working on one city in Minecraft creative mode for about twelve years, and that his oldest son, Dino, kept telling him people ought to see it.

Game of Tobi Builds Super Mario FX and Plays It on Real SNES Hardware

By Bill Smith September 29, 2026

Game of Tobi spent the last stretch of September proving that Super Mario 64 can move on a Super Nintendo if the cartridge carries a Super FX chip. His video, titled Fine, I made Super Mario FX, shows the result on original hardware, with Mario jumping through low, blocky versions of rooms that still read as Peach’s Castle, Bob-omb Battlefield, and Jolly Roger Bay.

Xbox and Prince Street Pizza Arm Gears of War Fans With a Prototype Lancer Cutter

By Bill Smith September 28, 2026

Fans who grew up sawing Locust in half and arguing over Sicilian squares got the same announcement at once. Xbox and Prince St. Pizza put a limited-edition Gears of War Prototype Lancer pizza cutter on sale Monday for $60, then watched it sell out the same day on their official merch store.

KyTyPS5 Emulator Climbs From One Frame to Fifty as Wolverine Finally Boots

By Bill Smith September 28, 2026

KyTyPS5 just turned a pair of PlayStation 5 holdouts into the week’s most watched PC clips. Bluepoint’s 2020 Demon’s Souls remake, a game Sony never sold on computers, is now running real combat at 40 to 50 frames per second in a closed build, with scenery that looks close to the console original. Twelve days after Insomniac’s Marvel’s Wolverine launched on September 15, the same project can open that game’s start screen on a desktop, even if the menu crawls.

Pilotwings 64 Recompiled Lands Nintendo’s Flight School Natively on Windows and Linux

By Bill Smith September 27, 2026

Nintendo 64 owners spent 1996 lining up hang gliders over Little States and hoping the analog stick would forgive a late flare. Nearly thirty years later, Pilotwings 64 Recompiled puts that same flight school on Windows and Linux as a native program you launch like any other PC game.

Minecraft World Hotel and Escape the Nether Coaster Arrive at Chessington in 2027

By Bill Smith September 26, 2026

Merlin Entertainments and Mojang Studios used Saturday’s Minecraft Live stream to confirm Minecraft World Hotel will open in 2027 at Chessington World of Adventures in south-west London, inside a new £50 million land called Minecraft World. The stay sits beside the first official Minecraft theme park land, a project first sketched in March 2026 and now far enough along that construction footage shows coaster track already going in.

Nintendo Switch Pro Controller Remains Tough to Beat Across Every Generation

By Bill Smith September 26, 2026

Nintendo shipped the Switch Pro, priced at $55.97 (was $80), a while back, the same day the original Switch arrived, and the shape has barely needed defending since. You get a one-piece gamepad measuring 106 millimeters tall, 152 millimeters wide, and 60 millimeters thick, weighing about 246 grams. Offset analog sticks sit in the familiar Xbox arrangement, with a plus-shaped direction pad under the left stick and the four face buttons above the right. Both sticks click. Capture, Home, Plus, and Minus land where muscle memory already lives. Plastic feels dense without turning heavy, and the grips stay comfortable through long docked sessions that split Joy-Cons never quite manage.

Claude Opus 5.5 Recreates Fortnite From Scratch as Lighting Outruns the Models

By Bill Smith September 25, 2026

Minimunch opened Claude Opus 5.5 with a blunt claim and a harder job: make playable games from scratch, starting with Fortnite Battle Royale. About three and a half hours later, a browser build was running on very high settings, complete with a battle bus drop, loot boxes, building, a storm that actually kills people, and two wins in two matches. Character drawings and map pieces still look unfinished if you stare at them. Color and light do the rescue work. Gradation across the island is dense enough that the whole scene reads richer than the models deserve, which is exactly the gap you flagged.

Rare Burnout 3 Xbox ‘Beta 3’ Disc From July 2004 Finally Gets Dumped

By Bill Smith September 25, 2026

Game preservationist MattKC spotted an undocumented original Xbox copy of Burnout 3 on eBay this summer and paid a steep price to have it shipped from Australia. Printed on the face is July 28, 2004, the words Beta 3, and a warning that reads Confidential material: return to mastering lab. A name on the label, blurred in the video for privacy, belonged to a product manager at EA Australia, which fits the moment Electronic Arts bought Criterion and took the series in-house. How the disc left that office and landed on a public auction remains a guess.