Making my kids their own homebrew machines for their birthdays, which of course need instruction manuals. Realising I may have subconsciously named them with these logos in mind.

Happy 40th to a real one. Probably the most consistently influential and imaginative of any 80s-era franchise that’s still going. I replayed this recently but I might get stuck into Oracle of Ages today to celebrate.

2026 is going to be a year Maybe it will be good! Plus the year of the PC, hands on with the Lego Smart Brick, and the Nintendo consoles with lower back pain

Press Any Button is back for 2026! You should read and subscribe if you like it. @timbiggs.bsky.social and I have a lot of fun writing it each week.

The best games of the second half of 2025 It's been a good one

Happy holidays everybody. Please be kind to each other, as well as to yourself, and also to strangers. Resist authoritarianism. Also, here are my and @alicedkc.bsky.social ‘s favourite video games for H2 2025. open.substack.com/pub/pressany...

The best video games of 2025, from Ghost of Yotei to Hades 2 There were hundreds of great games released this year, but these are my favourite 15.

I know we just had big commercial Game Awards, but don’t you also want the picks of a random person with no responsibility to consider outside opinion and no desire to categorise? There are games here TGAs didn’t mention, and games they mentioned 1000 times are absent. www.smh.com.au/technology/v...

Same! And I’ve been actively trying to provoke it! Which now that I think about it is probably the ultimate tell.

I’ve been making a bunch of new accounts on apps to see if I can tell how they’re trying to verify my age. But as an aside, a brand new profile on X . com is serving me nothing but violently anti-Somali content, violently anti-Afghan content and cringey sex pranks. Who would want to stay there?

The Metroid Prime morph ball is a lot bigger than I thought, now that I can see it next to regular humans (in powered suits of their own). Also when Samus is in ball mode she becomes a real jerk.

I’m getting old and irrelevant because looking at the Keighley Awards list I’d only played like two of those games. But also I know I missed 100 indies :(. This year I really liked:

Avowed
South of Midnight
Kulebra
Shantae Risky Revolution
Sword of the Sea
Ruffy and the Riverside
Wheel World
Hades

“In the pink” is one of those phrases I only ever see in newspaper headlines, used as a pun because something is literally pink (and figuratively in the pink, which is a posh British phrase from hundreds of years ago meaning “winning”). Nobody ever says it in any other context. It should be banned.

Well-meaning normies who know I’m into video games: “Are you jumping into Call of Duty this week?”

Me: “Good heavens no. I’m playing the one where you’re a rural mouse and you have to survive the winter. And I still have to play the webcam psychic baby simulator”.

This entire summary and judgement is very funny. I feel like people would care about it, if it could be packaged up as some kind of dramatised recreation.

‘Full circle’: The Australian video game showing why indies are back From Celeste to Silksong, indie games have become big business as they take on the goliaths of the industry.

I got to talk to the creators of Celeste — one of my all-time favourite games — recently for this article. It was such a great convo I wish I had somewhere to post the whole thing, but enjoy this snippet! www.theage.com.au/technology/v...

Finally I can retire the YouTube Music app, where I uploaded my CD of this OST like a decade ago, and just get my regular fix of Yoshi Star Galaxy direct from the source.

About TREATY for Victoria | The First Peoples' Assembly of Victoria Treaty is our opportunity to make sure we – the Traditional Owners of these lands – always have the freedom and power to make the decisions that affect our communities, our culture, and our Country.

Proud that our state's the first in Australia to introduce legislation for a treaty, not that it should have taken anywhere near this long. Huge congratulations to everyone who's been pushing it for more than a decade. firstpeoplesvic.org/treaty/

Samus the cat does not think I should be allowed to work.

But the extra cool thing is you can control the scale in the settings. If it's on a huge TV or you're close to your monitor it's a bit much to look at, so you can make it smaller. And if you're playing in 1080p, since 7x is only 1008 high, you can choose to stretch full screen or leave it sharp.

Played Mina the Hollower demo over lunch. First impression was to nerd out about video settings. The game's running at 256x144, so GBC but wider, and uses a perfect integer scale: 15x for 4K, 10x for 1440p, 7x for 1080p, 5x for 720p. Looks amazing, and on Switch 2 it runs 120Hz handheld and docked.

Fun fact: my copy of Final Fantasy has pen writing I've never thought to translate until now. The bit at the bottom says the game was completed on 31/1/89, which rules. But I have no hope of translating the upper message. I wonder what this RPG-beating badass was writing on their games 35 years ago?

We’ve adopted a kitten. The home said she was rescued off the road at five weeks old, having fallen out the back of a moving ute. But she’s tough. I’ve called her Samus.

Our favourite games of 2025 so far Ten great games that you can play right now.

It's our twice-annual Games of the Half Year special! Come get your recommendations for things to play that released between January 1 and now! pressanybutton.substack.com/p/our-favour...

Switch 2 Free Upgrades For Switch 1 Games Tested: Link's Awakening, Mario Odyssey, Splatoon 3 +More! YouTube video by Digital Foundry

I've been v impressed with a lot of Nintendo's free upgrades, including fixing the frame rate on Echoes of Wisdom and removing interlacing on Odyssey. But it's cool to see DF break it all down. Splatoon 3 being 4K 60 is wild, and Bowser's Fury look's so good. www.youtube.com/watch?v=0L8G...

I reviewed Mario Kart last week, and today put the link in my spreadsheet of reviews, finding I've now covered more than 300 games for Age / SMH over around 11 years. My dream is to one day fill in the (substantial) gaps and put out a Leonard Maltin style review book. Could cover a whole decade!

Nintendo enters the 4K era with a straightforward Switch successor The Switch 2 is better in every way with more power, better controls and expanded platform features. But it’s a revision rather than a revolution.

My verdict after a week of Switch 2 is up, though I’m sure you don’t need me to tell you it rules. www.theage.com.au/technology/v...

Inside the secretive labs where Apple’s torturers put iPhones to the test At an unmarked facility in California, tens of thousands of devices a year are dropped, dunked and dismantled.

In California last week I took a rare media tour of Apple’s durability labs in Sunnyvale, and it was legitimately very interesting. Come read about the several rooms and tests I observed, three of which I was even permitted to take pictures of! www.theage.com.au/technology/i...

Can confirm my favourite modern cube controller, the BattlerGC Pro, works great with Switch 2! Perfect in the GameCube app, but also any time you don’t mind octagonal gates and a big ol’ primary face button.

Halfway is pretty damn optimistic tbh.

Update: now that I believe I’ve seen all the clips, it’s a much better concept than my original theory of an alien transmission interrupting weird Earthlings. I love this campy 90s-style FMV game. Can’t wait for the update.

Crops are the real water hogs! I love the implication that we should consider eating less before we complain about AI energy efficiency. Also, I don't think we need AI to tell us how we can turn plants into food without giving it to cows first :D.

PlayStation's summer of tumbleweeds Plus Playdate, pride month, Switch 2 games and Perfect Dark.

This week on Press Any Button, at the eve of not-E3, we’re wondering how Big Hype Sony became One Game Per Year Sony, as well as talking Playdate, Pride month, Switch 2 games and Perfect Dark! pressanybutton.substack.com/p/playstatio...