The star of the new Tomb Raider games doesn’t want a repeat of Perfect Dark. Big DLC is on the way for some hit games. And why is there no Xbox Wrapped for 2025? Welcome to the latest edition of Morning Checkpoint, Kotaku‘s daily roundup of gaming news and culture. If you missed this year’s Xbox Bowl, well, Master Chief road a Warthog onto the field, did the coin toss, and presented the trophy to winner Arkansas State at the end which included an Xbox Ally X. He did not, unfortunately, reveal a new game in the franchise.
Master Chief handed out the trophy at the Xbox Bowl College Football game last night pic.twitter.com/HpTroJ3v71
— CharlieIntel (@charlieINTEL) December 19, 2025
The new voice of Lara Croft opens up about losing Perfect Dark
Dragon Age and Cyberpunk 2077 voice actor Alix Wilton Regan told The Gamer she recorded “entire chapters” for Perfect Dark before being “blindsided” by its cancelation. She’s now playing Lara in Tomb Raider: Catalyst and Legacy of Atlantis, but still harbors concerns in the back of her mind about those projects suddenly facing trouble as well.
“The saving grace for me when Perfect Dark fell apart was that I’d already been shooting Lara for about a year as well,” she said. “I just felt so relieved that I still had Lara, but I also felt really frightened about losing Lara. I’m still frightened of losing Lara.”
The rats are still playing Doom and getting better at it
Tom’s Hardware reports there’s a new experiment for teaching rats how to play the classic 3D shooter. This time there are little air blasts to tell them when they’re hitting walls and a button they can press to actually shoot stuff as they move around. Their entire field of view is taken up by the game as well. It actually sounds like an incredibly hellish way to play the game.
Dave the Diver‘s In The Jungle DLC will have some Animal Crossing twists
A new developer vlog reveals that the DLC will run about 10 hours and feature the new jungle village of Utara where Dave can hang out and chat with residents in real time, gather resources, and complete quests. The new Bancho Grill restaurant requires fish to be cooked and shows off more movement options than the original game’s Bancho Sushi.
Don’t expect to find out how many hours Phil Spencer spent gaming this year
Windows Central reports that Microsoft won’t be releasing its own Xbox Wrapped-style roundup of players’ time spent on the platform over the past year. This is apparently because the company is investing all of its marketing resources into 25th anniversary celebrations for next year. I was really looking forward to seeing if Spencer could break a new record for time spent by a CEO playing games in 2025.
Adventure Time is coming to PowerWash Simulator 2
But not until the spring. The first of three paid DLCs will add five locations, including the Tree House and Ice King’s castle.
Sony wants to patent AI for censoring games
The company recently filed paper work for AI that performs “bespoke content edits” like censoring language or gore, reports Retro Handhelds. The technology suggests a possible future where settings could change not only a game’s difficulty but its age rating, depending on the extent of the content, though it also obviously raises concerns about artistic intent being censored alongside everything else.
