This digest compiles the latest from The Verge.
Today’s The Verge Roundup
Job killer
21 Dec 2025, 2:30 pm by May Jeong
Park Chan-wook’s 12th feature-length movie, No Other Choice, begins with Man-su (Lee Byung-hun) as a proud patriarch at the barbecue, a vision of the platonic ideal domestic life he will spend most of the movie defending. In the long middle where life is lived, the movie offers its audience mirth and pathos and deep social critique. Also: murders. After being laid off from a paper company, Man-su realizes that his best chance at getting hired for his next job is to knock off the three other qualified candidates.
Adapted from Donald Westlake’s novel The Ax, No Other Choice captures – most delightfully and cathartically – the perpetual and un …
The best thing I bought this year: The Nintendo Switch 2
21 Dec 2025, 2:00 pm by Brandt Ranj
I waited for the Nintendo Switch 2 for a long time. Rumors of an allegedly-real-but-never-released Switch Pro swirled around for years as I watched fewer and fewer AAA third-party games make their way to Nintendo’s little console that could. There were always enough first-party titles and indie games to tide me over, but I watched with some envy as games like Elden Ring took the world by storm, knowing I’d have to wait until Nintendo’s next generation hardware arrived to add them to my Switch library. Now, finally, it’s here.
The Switch 2’s core strength for me boils down to it being a better version of the original Switch. Its 7.9-inch 120Hz 1080P screen looks sharp — yes, an OLED display would have been nicer, but I’m not complaining — and its ability to output at up to 4K, or up to 120Hz at lower resolutions, is a welcome improvement. It can play most original Nintendo Switch games, some of which have been updated through free or paid patches to run at a higher frame rate or resolution.
The only native Switch 2 game I’ve played so far is Mario Kart World, which I picked up as part of a bundle with the system. My most-played game is the original Switch title The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, which runs at 4K and 60 frames per second if you get the Switch 2 edition for $10 (it’s a free download if you have an active Nintendo Switch Online subscription). That subscription also allows me to play a growing number of GameCube games available as Nintendo Classics, including titles I didn’t get to play when I was a kid.
I specifically put off playing games from my backlog, including titles going back several years, until I could play them on a larger display in handheld mode, and I don’t regret my decision. Putting dozens of hours into Octopath Traveler while chilling on the couch with the big-screen handheld was a heck of a lot of fun. Nintendo and third-party developers have also been pretty generous with releasing free demos of Nintendo Switch 2 titles, including Donkey Kong Bananza and Final Fantasy VII Remake Intergrade, so it’s possible to sample bigger titles before deciding to pick them up.
My only real complaint with the Nintendo Switch 2 is its 256GB of internal storage, which isn’t enough for folks like me who’ve built up a large digital library of Switch games. Adding more requires you to pop in a microSD Express card, which can be twice the price of than the regular microSD cards used by the original Switch. My hope is that if a hardware revision comes down the line it’ll include an OLED display and at least 512GB of storage. By that time microSD Express cards will have hopefully become more affordable.
The console’s $449.99 starting price came as a shock to many, but it seems fair given its tech specs, and an escalating tariff situation that delayed the Switch 2’s preorder timing in North America and compelled Nintendo to raise the price of the original Nintendo Switch. Nintendo recently announced that it “will shift our primary development focus to Nintendo Switch 2 and expand our business around this new platform.” I’ll continue to look forward to exclusive titles making their way to my new console of choice, along with ports of third-party games that I haven’t gotten around to yet.
How AIM taught the internet to chat
21 Dec 2025, 1:58 pm by David Pierce
If you were an internet user around the turn of the century, there’s a good chance I could play a one-second long sound of a door opening and memories would immediately come flooding back. Memories of running home from school and logging onto AOL Instant Messenger to chat with your friends or your crush. Maybe memories of how AIM changed the way your company did business. Certainly memories of your old screen name, and the angsty song lyrics you put into your away message.
AIM was, for a time, the most important chat app on the internet. It also barely managed to continue to exist. The app was created by a semi-rogue team inside of AOL, and …
2025: a year in art on The Verge
21 Dec 2025, 1:30 pm by Verge Staff
The Verge art team’s favorite projects this year spanned the circus surrounding DOGE, the myths of the Vietnam War, the privacy crisis for trans people online, the vast surveillance network aimed at tracking down Iranian military dissidents, and much more. We built a kaleidoscope to showcase some standout products from The Verge‘s gift guides, sent an illustrator to the crowded halls of the courthouse to draw Luigi Mangione fans and spectators live, and dug deep into the confusing world of News Daddy to create collages about how college students get their news. Here’s a look back at some of what we made this year.
Wikipedia is resilient b …
Our favorite stuff of 2025
21 Dec 2025, 1:00 pm by David Pierce
Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 110, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you’re new here, welcome, happy holidays, and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.)
This week, I’ve been reading about mall Santas and malleable software and phone bans, wondering how I barely know any of the songs in DJ Earworm’s annual mashup, waiting patiently for Ugmonk’s Layflat notebooks to go back on sale, finally setting up my Switch 2 Camera for some holiday gaming, trying desperately to not come in last place in my fantasy football league, using MCP to build some really weird note-taking workflows …
Humanoid robots are coming. Eventually?
21 Dec 2025, 1:00 pm by Robert Hart
This is The Stepback, a weekly newsletter breaking down one essential story from the tech world. For more on robotics and AI, follow Robert Hart. The Stepback arrives in our subscribers’ inboxes at 8AM ET. Opt in for The Stepback here.
We’re taking a winter break! The Stepback will be back on January 11th, 2026. Meanwhile, you catch up on past issues here.
How it started
I have a soft spot for robot fail videos. I watch them on a loop, chuckling to myself, as a kind of therapy. Maybe I’m a sadist, maybe I need to get out more – you can judge me later – but they get me every time. So naturally, I’ve been glued to a clip of Tesla’s Optimus …
End of today’s The Verge roundup.
