Technologies
Pokemon TCG Pocket’s Breakneck Expansion Releases Are Stressing Me Out
Collectors who want to complete a master set are finding that it’s just too hard to keep up with the game.

Pokemon TCG Pocket’s next Alola-themed set is releasing on May 29. Extradimensional Crisis is a sister expansion to the recent Celestial Guardians set — and it’s introducing the wacky and weird Ultra Beasts to the game.
Every Pokemon from another dimension now has a special Ultra Beast tag displayed just under its health point total. And certain Pokemon abilities and Trainer cards from the new set will only work on cards with this tag. While there are always new cards that shake up the metagame, this expansion looks ike it will largely introduce cards that play well with others in the set.
Extradimensional Crisis is one of TCG Pocket’s smaller base set expansions. These companion sets are often released a month or so after a big expansion. Mythical Island released after the massive Genetic Apex launch set, and Triumphant Light was the supplement to Space-Time Showdown.
Normally, I’d love to rip into packs in order to hunt more than 100 new base set cards being added to the game. Buzzwole, Nihilego and Guzzlord are some of my favorite monsters from the seventh-gen Pokemon games and the art for their cards is gorgeous.
This time around, I’m just not able to get as excited about the new drop.
Pokemon TCG Pocket is releasing expansions too quickly for me
I’ve played Pokemon TCG Pocket every day since launch. With few exceptions, I’ve opened both of my free daily packs — even if I have to stay up past my usual bedtime to do so. Ripping these suckers open has become a part of my daily routine, and I’ve been largely content to do so (even when I pull five common base set dupes).
But these expansions are getting a little out of hand now. For most games, having too much content is a good problem to have, but struggling to keep up with a collectible game saps the fun. Extradimensional Crisis will be the seventh set released in the game over the course of eight months. Despite my diligence, I’ve only completed a single base set — Shining Revelry — and I’ve never completed a master set with all of the full art cards and shiny Pokemon.
To be clear, I don’t expect to be able to keep up with every expansion in the game. I don’t even want to collect all of the secret cards — I just want to put together the base sets. I’m a fully free-to-play TCG Pocket gamer, and developer DeNA Games needs to make money to keep the app running. New releases grease peoples’ palms and keep the money flowing.
Even still, these releases have been dropping at such breakneck speeds that I don’t feel like I can return to past sets to finish collecting the cards I’m missing. It’s disheartening to complete the majority of an expansion and then leave it behind with so many gaps.
This sentiment seems to be shared among at least some parts of the Pokemon TCG Pocket community. It’s probably not a great sign when a contingent of the top comments on the YouTube video of your next big reveal are asking you to stop revealing things.
«Crisis? [The only] crisis is the one I’m having with so few hourglasses,» said one commenter.
Another person put things more plainly: «Honestly, I’d prefer if they’d slow the rollout of the expansions a little bit. Let the sets take hold for a few months and then drop bigger, higher quality sets.»
The joking hides real frustration, as many free players haven’t been able to complete the game’s full base sets. I’m not asking for these releases to be spaced out too far apart, but a single month between expansions is starting to feel untenable. Double the downtime between sets and let people breathe — and maybe I’ll finally be able to finish up Genetic Apex.
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WWE 2K25 Jumps From the Top Rope Onto PlayStation Plus in September
Subscribers will also be able to play a turn-based strategy Persona game.

«The American Nightmare» Cody Rhodes, son of one of the greatest pro wrestlers of all time, «The American Dream» Dusty Rhodes, is the current undisputed WWE champion. And PlayStation Plus subscribers can bring Rhodes down a peg or help establish a new wrestling dynasty with the champion beginning on Sept. 16 in WWE 2K25.
PlayStation Plus is Sony’s version of Xbox Game Pass, and it offers subscribers a large and constantly expanding library of games. There are three PlayStation Plus tiers — Essential ($10 a month), Extra ($15 a month) and Premium ($18 a month) — and each gives subscribers access to games. However, only Extra and Premium tier subscribers can access the PlayStation Plus Game Catalog.
Here are all the games PS Plus Extra and Premium subscribers can access starting on Sept. 16. You can also check out the games all PS Plus subscribers can play in September, including Psychonauts 2.
Don’t miss any of our unbiased tech content and lab-based reviews. Add CNET as a preferred Google source.
WWE 2K25
Take control of your favorite superstar from the men’s and women’s divisions in this knockdown, dragout wrestling game. Become one of over 300 wrestlers from today and years past, like Rhea Ripley and Andre the Giant. This entry in the series also introduces intergender wrestling matches, barricade diving and new brawl environments where you can get over or turn heel.
Persona 5 Tactica
Join the Phantom Thieves in this real-time strategy game set in the Persona universe. You and the group wander into a bizarre realm where people are living under tyrannical oppression, and you cross paths with a revolutionary named Erina. Now you’re in cahoots with the rebels as you try to free an oppressed people and find your way back home.
Other games on PS Plus
Those are a few of the games Sony is bringing to PlayStation Plus, and subscribers can play these games as well starting on Sept. 16.
*Premium subscribers only.
For more on PlayStation Plus, here’s what to know about the service and a rundown of PS Plus Extra and Premium games added in August. You can also check out the latest and upcoming games on Xbox Game Pass and Apple Arcade.
Technologies
Little Nightmares 3 Hands-On: a Creepy Co-Op Game Arriving Just in Time for Halloween
The sequel adds cooperative play with all the haunting hallmarks of the earlier games.

After about an hour playing Little Nightmares 3, I’d used a person’s bisected halves to solve a puzzle, gotten a high score in a carnival shooting game and escaped the murderous claws of a deranged baby. As a 2-foot-tall youth trying to survive the morbid dangers of one demented area after another with my co-player, I was terrified and delighted.
I’ve only sampled the first two Little Nightmares games, but in my brief preview of Little Nightmares 3, it felt like a refined version of the series’ premise: small protagonists endangered by a large, grim world filled with traps to evade, puzzles to solve and horrid, lethal enemies to outwit. Take the scale of the animated horror movie 9, mix it with the darkest of stop-motion director Henry Selick’s maudlin settings and let players enjoy the haunting ride, room by perilous room.
This time, players aren’t alone. In Little Nightmares 3, developed by Supermassive Games, two players (or one and an AI companion) choose between characters Low (a bird-masked boy with a bow) and Alone (a girl with a jumpsuit and a wrench), who rely on each other and get out of rooms using their unique tools or just good ol’ fashioned teamwork. Sometimes this means pushing a box for the other to jump on, but other obstacles require rather complex puzzle-solving.
In the game, Low and Alone seek to escape the bleak Nowhere and its roulette of dystopian lands. My preview was limited to one of these areas — Carnevale, a demented circus where our small characters had to sneak under the feet of grotesque, ambling workers (or their corpses, tied up or swinging for the sport of their fellows). When we thought we were safe, possessed puppets sprinted after us until we could team up to knock their wooden heads off and crush them. Being noticed by anyone meant our demise, requiring frantic cooperation amid the anxious stakes of rather gruesome deaths.
It’s this tension and the dour setting that sets Little Nightmares 3 apart from other co-op games like the more excitable and dynamic Split Fiction released earlier this year, a rollercoaster flipbook of game genres that made for a breathless if not terribly coherent experience. In contrast, the section of Little Nightmares 3 I played unfolded like a series of grim vignettes that rely on its pleasingly goth trappings as much as working together with your friend (or computer teammate) to progress.
Surviving your little nightmares
While I got only an hour with the game, Little Nightmares 3 seems to iterate on rather than innovate away from its predecessors: Expect more of the same in new, grotesque settings, just with the welcome addition of tightly designed teamwork dynamics. For fans of the series, this is likely a good thing. There’s not much else like Little Nightmares.
The Carnevale stage I played through opened up with rain pelting red-and-white circus tent tops, which I as the masked Low (and someone from Bandai Namco who kindly played as the jumpsuit-wearing Alone) skittered between. Lumbering above us were brutish factory workers seeking escape at the funfair, which very quickly turned sinister as we very shortly saw some hanging tied-up as others took turns beating them like a piñata. We entered one room to find one worker in connected boxes as the subject of a magician’s saw-in-half trick…which was no trick, as we had to separate the halves to climb out of a window. I tried, and failed, to ignore the viscera slopping out of the boxes.
While we hid from the human-size enemies, we had to fight the wooden puppets. Like Geppeto’s most horrid creations, they ambushed us in several rooms, requiring me to knock their heads off with Low’s bow and run away from their decapitated bodies while my teammate rushed forward to crush their heads with Alone’s wrench.
But most of the rooms are about solving puzzles, which could be as simple as moving a box for my teammate to jump up and pull a switch or figure out how a radio plays into a complex solution. While these quiet moments are a nice break from the tense combat or pursuit, they also give time to appreciate the macabre backgrounds: I ran past one room with a circle of empty tall chairs only to come back a few seconds later to find them filled with puppets, unmoving but watching.
And then there are the really, really tense moments. We moved from the carnival to the adjoining candy factory (apparently where all those brutes work) and up to the offices where the boss works, to find him asleep with the TV droning on in the darkness…and his frankly hideous baby nestled next to him. Naturally, we had to make noise, cranking open a grate, awakening the terrifying spawn who ran after us. After many, many failed escapes, my teammate and I discovered we had to scramble for a hiding place after making it past the grate.
This was perhaps the most frustrating part of the preview as we panicked looking for a solution to our deadly woes (as opposed to the slow, methodical gameplay earlier) — but that’s part of the tension, especially when adding a teammate to the mix. Ultimately, it was a hard-won lesson in patience. In the next room, a kitchen, the nightmarish baby banged a bowl on the table until the father walked over to a corpse (presumably his worker) and cut out some meat for his ghoulish child to eat.
In my short time with it, Little Nightmares 3 seems like a cooperative spooky storybook for players and their friends (but not couch buddies, sadly — it’s online co-op only) to experience. How much it lives up to previous games in the series, especially as developer Supermassive Games takes more of the reins from the franchise’s original creators Tarsier Games, is anyone’s guess. (Tarsier’s similar spiritual sequel to Little Nightmares, Reanimal, is coming in 2026.)
But as the air turns crisp and Halloween beckons, it’s the best time of the year for a creepy co-op game like Little Nightmares 3 to land.
Little Nightmares 3 comes out Oct.10, 2025, for PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, Nintendo Switch and Nintendo Switch 2.
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