The Weekly Round-Up: Halo on PS5, Zelda goes vinyl and Kojima’s Matrix muddle
Our light-hearted recap of the week’s most interesting news
Chris Scullion
This is a blog post, where VGC writers post irreverent and (occasionally) entertaining coverage of video game culture.
It’s Sunday, which means it’s time for another of our weekly news round-ups.
For those new to our round-ups, we’ve been doing these recaps of the weekly news on Patreon for more than a year, and have decided to bring them to the main site. These are our way of winding up the past week by recapping its more interesting stories, often signed off with a bad punchline.
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That said, let’s crack on with this week’s round-up.
Halo: Campaign Evolved is a full remake of the campaign portion of the series’ first game, Halo: Combat Evolved. While no specific release date was announced, Microsoft has confirmed the game will launch next year.
The game will feature four-player co-op and completely rebuilt visuals. The game has been developed in Unreal Engine 5.
“This fully-rebuilt campaign will introduce remastered 4K visuals, beloved Halo weapons and vehicles, plus brand-new story content,” according to Xbox Wire.
Turns out when Halo 3 was released with the tagline “Finish the Fight”, it was actually referring to the console war.
Speaking during an announcement stream, in which Halo Studios officially revealed the remake of the original Halo campaign for Xbox, PS5, and PC, community director Brian Jarrard appeared wearing a PlayStation t-shirt and confirmed it was the studio’s intention for the series to remain multiplatform.
“It’s a huge deal. It’s a long time coming,” he said about Halo coming to PlayStation consoles. “We’re just super excited to be able to welcome even more players now into the franchise we love, to fall in love with Halo the same way we all did 24 years ago.
“As a community guy, I know the Halo community is super excited to welcome in their friends as well. It’s just going to mean more Halo for everyone. It’s really a new era. Halo is on PlayStation going forward, starting with Halo: Campaign Evolved.”
As previously discussed on the VGC Podcast, there hasn’t been such a shock involving a video game t-shirt since I picked up my daughter from school wearing a shirt that just said ‘SNATCHER’ on it.
Molyneux – whose career as a game designer has spanned 43 years and led to the creation of such titles as Fable, Populous, Dungeon Keeper, Black & White, Theme Park and Curiosity: What’s in the Cube – has gained a reputation over the years for making bold claims about what his games will do while they’re in development, then not delivering on those claims when the games are released.
“I think that line in Fable – ‘for every choice, a consequence’ – wasn’t delivered on well enough,” Molyneux told Edge magazine. “I think the possession mechanic that we had in Dungeon Keeper wasn’t delivered on enough. The open-world freedom that we had in Black & White, I think it was good at the start, but it didn’t deliver enough at the end.
“And Masters Of Albion is an opportunity to mix all those together. Even though one is an RTS, one is a god game, and one is a roleplaying game, why the fuck can’t we mix them all together?”
“After all,” he added, “it’s only going to be the greatest video game ever made, where you literally start off as a single-celled organism then play through the entire history of the universe. Probably.”
The original Super Mario Bros. team, including executive fellow Shigeru Miyamoto, executive office Takashi Tezuka, composer Koji Kondo, and SRD president Toshihiko Nakago, discuss the past and future of the series in a special Nintendo Museum book to celebrate the game’s 40th anniversary.
Tezuka said that one consideration Nintendo may make for the future of Mario is that multiple generations of people have started playing games since the series began in 1985.
Until just a little while ago, two generations-parents and children were playing together, Tezuka said. “Now, three can. I don’t know if we’ll get to four, but we want to make something that can be played together for generations to come.
Good news, then, for any youngsters out there who are desperate to hand their great-grandmother’s arse to her in Splatoon.
REDSEC has launched alongside the start of Season 1 for Battlefield 6, and players are able to progress through their Battle Pass tiers by playing either Battlefield 6 or Battlefield REDSEC.
REDSEC launches with two main modes, Battle Royale and Gauntlet. The Battle Royale mode holds up to 100 players, but players take part in either four-player squads or duos.
The news came as players of Battlefield 6 complained that its latest map is so open, and places opposing bases so close together, that it’s impossible to spawn into a plane and take off without an anti-aircraft gun blowing them up before they even leave the ground.
In its free-to-play form, REDSEC stands for ‘REDacted SECtor’. In Battlefield 6, it seemingly stands for ‘Respawn, Exploit, Die, Shout Expletives, Continue’.
The clock is Tikking
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has echoed comments from Xbox’s leadership that the company views its competition in gaming not as other game platforms, but short form video like TikTok.
Speaking to TBPN during a live stream on Tuesday, Nadella echoed comments made by Xbox games boss Matt Booty last week, in which he claimed Xbox’s biggest competitor was not another console, but TikTok and movies.
“Most importantly, the game business model has to be where we have to invent maybe some new interactive media as well, because after all, gaming’s competition is not other gaming. Gaming’s competition is short-form video,” Nadella said.
“And so if we as an industry don’t continue to innovate, both how we produce, what we produce, how we think about distribution, the economic model, right, the best way to innovate is to have good margins, because that’s the way you can fund.”
He then stood up, performed an elaborate dance routine, reunited with a family member for the first time in 20 years and poured a bucket of ice water over himself.
Earlier this week Konami‘s former vice president of licensing Christopher Bergstresser claimed that Konami’s Kazumi Kitaue – who would go on to become CEO of Konami Digital Entertainment a few years later – immediately denied a request to have Kojima make a Matrix game when the Wachowskis visited the company at the time of the first movie’s Japanese premiere.
Now Kojima has responded to the claim, saying that while the meeting with Kitaue did take place, Kojima didn’t arrive at Konami’s HQ until it had already ended, meaning he wasn’t aware of such a request.
“I was surprised to see on social media that the Wachowski sisters had ‘offered me a Matrix game project’ back in 1999,” Kojima wrote. “In all these 26 years, no one ever told me such a conversation had taken place.”
He added: “At that time, I was already extremely busy with Metal Gear Solid 2 and probably couldn’t have accepted the offer right away,” he wrote. “But if someone had told me, maybe there could’ve been a way to make it work.”
Given that Metal Gear Solid and The Matrix both have some of the most convoluted lore in all of popular culture, it’s probably a good thing that Kojima and the Wachowskis didn’t collaborate, for the sake of all our delicate brains.
It’s the first time Nintendo has ever released a vinyl soundtrack in the West, and it’s being released by Laced Records on June 19, 2026.
The soundtrack will come in two versions – a double LP set containing 34 selected tracks from the game priced at $49.99, and an eight-LP set containing 130 tracks priced at $194.99.
Both versions will also be available on standard black vinyl, or on limited edition coloured vinyl with artwork on the records themselves.
According to Nintendo’s vice president of player and product experience Bill Trinen, the company is treating this release as a test case, and it could be the first of a series of vinyl soundtrack releases in the West depending on how big the demand is for them.
“I’m so glad this is vinyl-ly happening,” a Nintendo fan said, before being sentenced to 18 actual months in prison for such an awful pun.
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