XBOX goes all-caps and GoldenEye still slaps: May 13-19 gaming news

Hey, readers! We got some heavy hitters at the end of May. A super cute Yoshi game is coming out later this week on Switch 2, followed by a new Lego Batman game and a James Bond game from the studio behind Hitman.

With Lego Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight nearing launch, I thought I’d revisit 2022’s Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga and see if I could wrap that up. I previewed that game all the way back in E3 2019, and I even interviewed some of the developers behind it. Needless to say, I was quite excited for the game. But since owning that game, I’ve had sparse play sessions with it, and I think I figured out why after all these years.

I simply don’t like playing that game. (Sorry, devs.)

I won’t get too deep into why, but I’ll say that I stopped playing and uninstalled it. I assume I’m not the only person in the world who has trouble stopping myself from finishing a game out of a sunk cost fallacy, but this felt like an important lesson to respect my own time. Sometimes you have to recognize when something isn’t worth it.

Here’s hoping that Lego Batman game is more my speed—based on reviews, it just might be! We’ll touch on that next week, but for now, let’s get into this week’s headlines.

Fortnite is back on the Apple App Store (almost) everywhere in the world, with Australia the lone exception. It’s the latest development in a years-long dispute between Fortnite studio Epic Games and Apple that stems from the iPhone maker’s policy of taking a 30% cut of revenue made from mobile games.

As Epic Games infamously has its own store, the company naturally didn’t want Apple to take such a large chunk. When Epic added an in-app purchase option, Apple pulled the popular battle royale game from its platforms.

It’s a corporate feud that has gotten the ear of the U.S. Supreme Court, which recently denied a request from Apple and basically kicked the matter back to the lower courts. According to Epic, Apple signaled to the Supreme Court that its App Store fee structure for territories outside the United States will come to light during the case, which apparently made Epic Games confident enough to put Fortnite back on the App Store worldwide. Australia is an outlier because of what Epic calls “unlawful” developer terms from Apple.

Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney on X called this development “a critical moment in the battle against the App Store empire to win freedom for all developers and consumers,” seemingly framing this as a David vs. Goliath scenario when it’s really just two giant, self-serving corporations in a petty squabble.

As mentioned, Apple removed Fortnite from the App Store when Epic Games added a purchasing option in-game to circumvent Apple’s own store fees—that happened all the way back in 2020. Google also followed suit with the Android version of Fortnite.

And that’s when Epic launched its “Free Fortnite” campaign, which sought to mobilize Fortnite players against Apple and Google. Epic even produced a parody of Apple’s famous “1984” advertisement as part of its campaign to weaponize its fanbase against what the company saw as an “App Store Monopoly.”

It took until 2024 for Fortnite to return to iOS in European Union territories in compliance with the EU’s Digital Markets Act, which regulates digital platform “gatekeepers” like Apple, Google, Meta, and Microsoft. Then, Fortnite came back to Apple devices in the U.S. in May 2025 after a court ruling.

Sometimes, a big company will do something so minuscule that it doesn’t seem worth covering. But said company will make such a deal out of it that the press can’t seem to ignore it. Enter the latest news from Xbox, which is rebranding to… XBOX.

The bold and brash decision seemed to originate from what looked like a joke social media poll that Xbox CEO (I really don’t want to type “XBOX CEO” like I’m screaming at you) Asha Sharma posted on X. The all-caps fans had it, so Microsoft appeared to hit “Find and Replace” for every “Xbox” on social media to turn them into “XBOX.” Earth-shattering stuff.

Other than changes covered in previous editions of this newsletter, such as lowering the price of Xbox Game Pass Ultimate, Xbox also… changed the console’s start-up animation and sound. This new Xbox regime seems eager to listen to fans, even about the most mundane aspects of the brand.

Meanwhile, reporters and journalists like myself are content to entirely ignore “XBOX” in our copy and style guides.

As previously reported, Sharma has openly discussed how the Xbox team is currently reevaluating the company’s approach to exclusive games. And in what appears to be an effort for transparency and dialogue with fans, Microsoft launched the “XBOX Player Voice” platform, where just about anyone can chime in with general feedback and vote on other suggestions to raise visibility.

At the very top of the stack are a plea from fans to bring back Xbox-exclusive games, a refocus on Xbox’s backward compatibility efforts, and a request to make online multiplayer access free of subscription fees.

(Every week, I’ll address a question or curiosity about gaming from readers! Submit your inquiries through this Google Form and read my explainer in a future newsletter!)

Dear reader Em (happy birthday!!) writes in with a question that delves into a whole other world in the video gaming space:

Chances are you’ve seen Instagram or TikTok ads promoting these dual-screen gaming devices, some with claims that sound too good to be true. The short answer is that many of these machines are legit—but actually getting those name-brand games on there is a whole different story.

I can’t speak for every one of these devices that are advertised, but there are plenty of these retro gaming handhelds that work just fine. These are machines (usually single-board computers) meant to resemble a Game Boy, DS, or perhaps a PSP, that can emulate games from a variety of different platforms.

I’ve only held one or two of these in my hands before, but plenty of niche retro gaming sites would have a few emulators to recommend, such as the Retroid Pocket, AYN Thor, and AYANEO Pocket DS.

But is this legal? Basically, emulator devices themselves are okay, while actually obtaining the games to play on them usually isn’t. That’s to say that if you get one of these devices, many of which run on Android, you’re gonna have to do some extra (and legally dubious) work to have a decent library. Obviously, I’m not going to outline this process or point you in that direction, and I’d guess that any advertisement claiming it has brand-name games pre-installed is a huge red flag.

This is a bit of a tangent, but one company I’ve been curious about from afar is Analogue, which makes gaming hardware meant to replicate older consoles. Instead of utilizing emulation, Analogue’s devices actually play the original games. For instance, the Analogue Pocket plays Game Boy games, with adapters letting you put in Sega Game Gear, Atari Lynx, and even Neo Geo Pocket games.

And the Analogue 3D, which came out last year, plays Nintendo 64 cartridges, with Analogue arguing that its device plays those games better than Nintendo’s own software emulation on the Switch.

Retro gaming and emulation, in particular, is a wide rabbit hole to fall into, so I’d advise anyone interested in that realm to find people and resources they trust and to do proper research for themselves. I’m certainly no expert—I’m old-fashioned, and I’ll want to play on original hardware (or other official first-party means) when possible.

Or maybe I’m just too much of a goody two-shoes.

The first original James Bond video game since 2012 is out this month, and I’m sure that anyone working on that project will tell you that it’ll be the best Bond game ever. I’m likely giving IO Interactive’s 007 First Light a purchase when it releases, but I found this to be an opportune time to revisit what many consider to be the best Bond game: GoldenEye 007.

I had played the Wii remake back in 2010—a game that I found quite fun, despite arguably being closer to Call of Duty than GoldenEye. But my only experience with the Nintendo 64 classic was toying around with it when it came out on Xbox Game Pass a few years ago, and playing a little bit of splitscreen at a retro games convention. As legendary as the title was, its aged visuals and design put me off from seriously engaging with it.

But minutes into booting it up on the Nintendo Switch 2 N64 app (and using my official N64 controller!), I had a newfound appreciation for Rare’s classic. It’s easy to dismiss an old console FPS after growing up with games like Halo and Modern Warfare, which had splitscreen multiplayer experiences that undeniably owe it to GoldenEye 007. Looking at the single-player campaign, it was hard not to be impressed by some of the finer details, like how enemies flinch and react depending on which part of the body you shoot them.

It was also refreshing to play a shooter with open-ended levels and an objective-based mission structure. Modern games as a whole make it arguably too easy and thoughtless to progress, with waypoints and map markers taking away any effort and creativity. If I had to knock GoldenEye on something, it would be that the objectives could be too esoteric—steps like hacking a computer and such are unclear without enough prompting, and it’s hard to find anything when all of the rooms in a level look the same.

Surely, there must be a middle ground. But there are cases in games where being lost instead of having your hand held all the way through is a lot more exciting.

That’s all for this week’s gaming news digest. Until then, throw some more gaming questions my way!

Bye-bye for now,
Chris Compendio