PC, PlayStation 5, Nintendo Switch, Nintendo Switch 2, Xbox; Yacht Club Games
This brilliant adventure creates a whole world from one character with a unique ability

You could mistake Mina the Hollower for something found on the liquid-crystal display of a Game Boy Color around the turn of the millennium. Like the pocketable Zelda and Pokémon games of the time, it presents a kind of snow-globe reality that you peer into from above, relying on imagination to decipher each two-colour clump of pixels into a tree, or a skeleton, or a cloaked mouse wielding a hammer twice her size.

This is Mina, our hero: she jumps, she moves at a clip, and she can delve downward into the soil or floorboards, tunnelling underfoot for a moment or two before popping back up, like an inflatable forcibly submerged in a swimming pool. This is her signature move, perfectly elastic in sensation – the way the released button springs back against your thumb! – and in application. The burrow-jump is an excavation tool, unearthing any treasure you happen to dig through, and a navigational one, used to hop over gaps, reach high-up spots and nose into tiny hidden spaces, where more treasure almost invariably awaits.

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© Photograph: Yacht Club Games

© Photograph: Yacht Club Games

© Photograph: Yacht Club Games

The option is part of a collection of updates Microsoft is making to consoles and the Xbox PC app.

The option is part of a collection of updates Microsoft is making to consoles and the Xbox PC app.

When the Steam Deck OLED launched three years ago, we were glad to see that the new, more brilliant screen fixed the biggest flaw of Valve's original handheld hardware. So we're unsurprisingly excited about today's announcement that Asus is preparing a new, OLED-equipped ROG Xbox Ally X20 for the coming holiday season. Still, it's a bit worrying that Asus is positioning the new upgrade as a niche collector's item rather than its new handheld gaming standard.

The X20 expands the 7-inch screen found on last year's ROG Xbox Ally line to 7.4 inches, matching the display on the Steam Deck OLED and approaching the 7.9-inch screen on the Switch 2. The 1080p HDR panel also increases the maximum brightness from 500 nits on original Xbox Ally models to a full 1400 and adds some new anti-glare coating that should help when playing in direct sunlight. The X20's 120 Hz display now supports Dolby Vision HDR colors and FreeSync Premium Pro to help smooth frame rates while still providing a larger color gamut.

On the control front, the X20 introduces magnetic TMR thumbsticks, replacing the carbon-film potentiometers that made the original Xbox Ally more prone to stick drift and physical wear. A new D-pad on the X20 also introduces a neat little lift-and-twist design that can transform it from a four-direction cross to a more circular eight-direction pad, similar to the convertible D-pad found on some now-classic Xbox 360 controllers.

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© Asus

When the Steam Deck OLED launched three years ago, we were glad to see that the new, more brilliant screen fixed the biggest flaw of Valve's original handheld hardware. So we're unsurprisingly excited about today's announcement that Asus is preparing a new, OLED-equipped ROG Xbox Ally X20 for the coming holiday season. Still, it's a bit worrying that Asus is positioning the new upgrade as a niche collector's item rather than its new handheld gaming standard.

The X20 expands the 7-inch screen found on last year's ROG Xbox Ally line to 7.4 inches, matching the display on the Steam Deck OLED and approaching the 7.9-inch screen on the Switch 2. The 1080p HDR panel also increases the maximum brightness from 500 nits on original Xbox Ally models to a full 1400 and adds some new anti-glare coating that should help when playing in direct sunlight. The X20's 120 Hz display now supports Dolby Vision HDR colors and FreeSync Premium Pro to help smooth frame rates while still providing a larger color gamut.

On the control front, the X20 introduces magnetic TMR thumbsticks, replacing the carbon-film potentiometers that made the original Xbox Ally more prone to stick drift and physical wear. A new D-pad on the X20 also introduces a neat little lift-and-twist design that can transform it from a four-direction cross to a more circular eight-direction pad, similar to the convertible D-pad found on some now-classic Xbox 360 controllers.

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© Asus

Tune in Wednesday for a closer look with the game's developers and cast.

Tune in Wednesday for a closer look with the game's developers and cast.

Get ready for some gaming news. It’s officially June, which means splashy new events from PlayStation, Xbox, and gaming hype man Geoff Keighley. But this season doesn’t just feature the big tentpole shows; there will be a bunch of smaller events, too, and they might feature some promising games as well.

But this year’s events are taking place at a difficult time for the industry. The prices of consoles and gaming hardware have skyrocketed, with all of the three major console players announcing price hikes and PC handheld makers jacking up hardware costs as well.

Game companies also have to work around the looming giant that is Grand Theft Auto VI, which is set to launch on November 19th. That time of year is usually a very busy one as studios launch their games to get ahead of the holiday shopping season, but we could see some of the industry’s biggest games give GTA VI a wide berth.

We’ll be tracking the biggest news of the June gaming events season right here.

• Your guide to June’s biggest gaming events
• Xbox and PlayStation have a lot to prove
• There won’t be Project Helix news at the Xbox Games Showcase.
• Microsoft delays Fable (again) to avoid GTA VI
• Lots of games to think about.

The AI assistant is no longer coming to consoles and will be removed from the Xbox mobile app.

Most of the Steam Deck imitators on the market right now use AMD silicon, specifically the Ryzen Z-series chips. These are the same chips AMD makes for regular laptops, but with different power settings better suited to a compact handheld system. There are handhelds based on Intel silicon (MSI’s Claw is the main one), but Intel hasn’t yet tried making silicon marketed specifically for that purpose.

Today, the company is throwing its hat in the ring with two Intel Arc G-series processors, which will allow gaming handhelds to leverage the company's genuinely quite good Arc B-series integrated GPUs. Intel says that several Arc G-series handhelds will arrive "starting in June 2026, with broader availability throughout the year." These systems will include a new MSI Claw model, a Predator Atlas 8 from Acer, and a device from OneXPlayer.

Intel normally uses its "Arc" branding for integrated and dedicated GPUs, but in this case, the "Arc" brand encompasses the entire chip, including the CPU, GPU, NPU, and other components.

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© Intel

Most of the Steam Deck imitators on the market right now use AMD silicon, specifically the Ryzen Z-series chips. These are the same chips AMD makes for regular laptops, but with different power settings better suited to a compact handheld system. There are handhelds based on Intel silicon (MSI’s Claw is the main one), but Intel hasn’t yet tried making silicon marketed specifically for that purpose.

Today, the company is throwing its hat in the ring with two Intel Arc G-series processors, which will allow gaming handhelds to leverage the company's genuinely quite good Arc B-series integrated GPUs. Intel says that several Arc G-series handhelds will arrive "starting in June 2026, with broader availability throughout the year." These systems will include a new MSI Claw model, a Predator Atlas 8 from Acer, and a device from OneXPlayer.

Intel normally uses its "Arc" branding for integrated and dedicated GPUs, but in this case, the "Arc" brand encompasses the entire chip, including the CPU, GPU, NPU, and other components.

Read full article

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© Intel

The AI assistant is no longer coming to consoles and will be removed from the Xbox mobile app.