Could new Xbox do more ARM than good?
Plus pride month, gaming on MacBook Air and a brand new GBA classic.
Hello there! It’s getting cold so I hope you’re all finding ways to stay cozy during the late-night gaming sessions without bankrupting yourselves with energy bills. I personally just hide under the blankets with the Steam Deck, which produces a lot of heat and also some kind of toxic plastic vent fumes that put me right to sleep. (Just kidding, the vent fumes are safe. But don’t sniff them.)
By sheer coincidence we’ve got a double helping of PC gaming talk for you this week, but don’t worry! We wouldn’t stoop as low as to discuss the extremely popular and ubiquitous kind of PC gaming powered by Intel and AMD chips. We’re talking ARM baby, which both Microsoft and Apple are using to very different effects gaming-wise. We’re also talking about the rising stakes of US-centred pride month, and reviewing the brand new retro game, Shantae: Risky Revolution.
If Xbox’s future is PC, and Microsoft PCs run ARM …
By Tim
Discussion around what form the next Xbox console will take has never really stopped bubbling in the background since the Series X debuted nearly five years ago, and there’s been plenty to fuel it.
The console’s role as a niche third player is increasingly clear, Microsoft is committing to publishing its games everywhere, which has some publishers wondering if it’s even worth making Xbox-specific versions of games, and we have execs on the record as saying the next Xbox will be a generational leap like we’ve never seen.
The most recent scuttlebutt comes from a job ad that seems to imply the next Xbox could run on a Qualcomm ARM-based chip, like many of Microsoft’s current Surface PCs. But is that reasonable, or just a massive reach from a fanbase accustomed to divining tea leaves?
To my mind, an Xbox based on ARM is all-but impossible. Microsoft would need to be ridiculously confident in its ability to get 25 years of games emulated properly for it to make sense, and I’d be surprised if they are. Currently those Surface machines can barely run any games, and they run them poorly. The job ad mentions Xbox, but in this era of “everything’s an Xbox”, I think we can assume that means the brand and not the console. It’s also worth noting that Microsoft has not abandoned x86 chips entirely, even in Surface, it’s just that Qualcomm’s Snapdragons make the most sense for mobile AI-forward platforms.
So what will the next Xbox look like? I’ve thought for a while that it’s probably going to be a loungeroom PC. A streamlined, powerful and (relatively) affordable Windows console makes sense from every angle, assuming AMD hardware inside. Everyone already makes games for PC, so no special Xbox versions would be needed. The hardware architecture’s similar, so getting all current and past Xbox games to work on it shouldn’t be difficult. And Microsoft could allow games from Steam, GOG, Epic and others onto its console, as we’ve seen in previous leaks.
In fact (and keeping in mind I’m no engineer), I don’t see any reason the Series X couldn’t be updated to become a Windows machine, with the next Xbox merely expanding the features, becoming more powerful and finalizing a consolidation that would make Game Pass and the whole Xbox ecosystem more cogent. Plus, it would balance out the idea of Xbox games on PlayStation, by making the PC versions of PlayStation games available on Xbox. It may be too early to discuss any of this in three weeks at the Xbox Games Showcase, but I (and the whole internet) will be keeping an eye out for clues anyway.
What to play
PlayStation Plus Extra and Deluxe subscribers get an influx of new games in the library today, headlined by Sand Land, an RPG based on Akira Toriyama’s manga of the same name. There’s also historical strategy Humankind, plus Soul Hackers 2, Five Nights at Freddy’s: Help Wanted, Battlefield V, the original S.T.A.L.K.E.R trilogy and more. Retro fans subscribed to Deluxe get one single addition: PS2 shooter Battle Engine Aquila.
New on Game Pass is Latin American afterlife adventure Kulebra: Souls of Limbo (pictured), a funny and emotional adventure where you help the recently departed embrace their loss. There’s also Police Simulator and Firefighting Simulator, if that’s your thing.
Nintendo has made an addition to its N64 app for Switch Online + Expansion Pack subscribers, in Killer Instinct Gold. This is probably more of a historical curiosity than a thing that will be fun to play in 2025, with Rare’s salacious pre-rendered characters on basic 3D backgrounds not exactly holding up despite being a great look at the time. The music still rules though.
Free on the Epic Games Store this week are Dead Island 2 and Happy Game. Dead Island 2 is a fun zombie survival action game that I (Alice) remember really enjoying when I first played it approximately 1000 years ago. Happy Game looks like an absolutely horrifying psychedelic horror puzzler.
The M4 MacBook Air is better for gaming than it has any right to be
By Alice
It’s no secret that Apple silicon is just running rings around Intel processors. Dollar for dollar, there’s just no comparison. The M4 chip is in an entirely different league. That’s meant that Apple laptops are able to handle intense processing workloads for those who need the power for their jobs (I used to edit clips for a TV show on an M1 MacBook Pro with no trouble), and, more importantly, games. The idea of having AAA games releasing on Mac was laughable 10 years ago, and now I am able to comfortably play Assassin’s Creed Shadows on a MacBook Air while on a plane.
The new MacBook Air is the latest and most affordable M4 Mac, and while the smaller form factor means cooling is a bit of a challenge, so it doesn’t run as smoothly as its beefier MacBook Pro sibling, it still handles just about everything absurdly well for what it is. Plus the battery life is ridiculously long.
Is this the gaming laptop I would buy if money were no object? No. If money were no object I would simply make an ultra portable gaming rig by getting the fanciest desktop available and then hiring a group of people to carry it and a desk around for me, setting it up whenever I had time to play. But for an ultra portable laptop around $2000, there is nothing like this on the market. Hell, looking at $3000+ ultraportable windows laptops, this still has far more power and handles games better than anything I’ve tested in the last year. Sure, not every big game is available for Mac, but there are more than enough available to satisfy most casual gamers and those who are just playing away from home.
The golden age of portable Mac gaming is here, and it’s weirdly more affordable than expected.
Bricks, Boards and Beginnings
by Alice
Pride month in Australia depends on where you are: Midsumma in Melbourne runs in January-February, and Sydney’s Mardi Gras is in February. There are probably also other capital cities. However, because corporations largely work around America’s calendar, corporate pride season is generally in June.
My feelings about corporate pride have always been mixed. On the one hand, I hate how some pride events self censor to make sponsors happy, sanding the rough edges off the queer community to make us palatable (looking at you, Sydney Mardi Gras).
However, corporate gestures of Pride have their roots in a time when most banks wouldn’t give queers loans, and car dealerships wouldn’t sell our queers cars. Lesbians will forever love Subaru not just because it was featured in The L Word, but because it was the first brand to embrace our community and make it clear we (and our money) were valued, and that those who hated us were not. Many brands have since jumped on the band wagon at times when embracing the queer community was safe and good for business, but we remember the companies who supported us when it was risky.
Plus, someone has to pay for the parties, and it may as well be a billion dollar corporation.
Now that the pendulum of progress has swung back to making support of the queer community, particularly our transgender siblings, a corporate risk, lots of companies have withdrawn their “support”. Companies like Target, Boeing, Nissan, 3M, Benefit Cosmetics, Smirnoff’s parent company (but not Smirnoff itself), and McDonalds have either fully withdrawn funding from events, or publicly shied away from “DEI” programs in the US.
This is happening while every lesbian parenting group I’m in is filled with anxious Americans trying to work out what extra protections they can put in place so they don’t lose parental rights if/when their marriages are overturned by the supreme court, or queer parenting comes into question. It’s a time when the community in a country that counts money as speech, could really use some heavy hitters to speak out against what’s happening.
So, while I usually go into corporate pride season skeptical that any of these companies would support us if things became complicated, I’m feeling more like embracing any show of support. That’s why the Apple Watch Pride Band feels more meaningful in 2025. It also helps that this is one of the prettiest designs yet. Sure, it’s just a watch band, that isn’t exactly going to save lives. But it is a visible symbol of pride from a corporation with headquarters in a country that is actively trying to overturn hard-fought LGBT rights, at a time when vocally supporting the queer community isn’t as easy as it used to be. I will take any positivity I can get, especially when that positivity looks like a particularly gay TV test pattern.
I will be watching what other tech companies do with great interest.
Retro Esoterica
by Tim
Shantae has always been strangely niche or marginal. Despite an extremely strong and consistent voice, great art and bawdy comedy writing, with a delightful light metroidvania structure, it’s never quite hit it big. And that’s a part of its charm; it doesn’t have to play to the mainstream.
The original 2002 Game Boy Color game, an attempt from brilliant work-for-hire studio WayForward to create its own franchise, was famously a flop. When our loveable half-genie hero reappeared in 2010 it was in Risky’s Revenge, a game exclusively for the DSi, only released in North America and Europe.
The games have since gone on to become more widely beloved, but it’s this early era we’re focusing on today. Because WayForward had originally begun development on a Game Boy Advance Shantae game, which it scrapped and later picked apart to help make its DSi game. Now that GBA game, Risky Revolution, has finally been finished and released, and it’s magnificent.
I paid for this game more than a year ago, so it feels like a long time coming. Parts of it are so very mid-2000s GBA, like its obsession with scaling and rotating visuals, while other parts feel like they were created very recently. Which of course they were.
Had this game released in 2004, I’ve no doubt it would be regarded as one of the GBA’s best. It runs perfectly on the ancient hardware, it’s beautiful to look at, it sounds brilliant, the writing is sharp and the humour toes the line between cute and playfully coarse as well as any other entry in the series. The somewhat repetitive structure that sees you teleporting around between towns and wider more exploratory action areas centred by dungeons feels just right for the time, but it’s focused and lean in a way that’s more reminiscent of modern indies, running for around eight hours.
I have no idea, of course, what a version of this game released in 2004 would have been like. I buy that the central mechanic of swapping backgrounds around was there from the start. And four of Shantae’s six animal transformations come directly from the first game. But so much of the heart comes from Shantae’s interactions with her friends and the bizarre side characters she meets along the way, and that all feels built for today. Fan favourite character Rottytops the zombie is practically omnipresent here, and Bolo makes an early crack about fan service that’s chortlingly self aware for 2025, but maybe not for 2004.
All up it’s exactly what I hoped for in a new but retro-style Shantae. And if you’re intrigued but not ordering-a-GBA-cartridge-in-2025 intrigued, the good news is it’s also coming to modern consoles soon.