The Wednesday letters page is intrigued by Yoshi And The Mysterious Book, as a reader dreams of a big budget Transformers game from Hasbro.

Games Inbox is a collection of our readers’ letters, comments, and opinions. To join in with the discussions yourself email gamecentral@metro.co.uk

Slow realisation
So it’s pretty hard not to take the news about Sony abandoning the PC as anything but good news. For starters it’s an acknowledgement that it was a dumb idea in the first place, to remove a big reason for buying a PlayStation 5. For second, it implies they’re also moving back from live service games and concentrating more on single-player.

I know they didn’t say that exactly (they’d see it as showing weakness, even if it is true) but if even Hasbro can realise that chasing live service games is a fool’s errand then it’s about time Sony woke up as well.

I’m going to be the millionth person to say it, but they’ve wasted this generation with their nonsense and it’s only because Xbox has failed harder that they haven’t been punished for it. Just go back to making games like you did on the PlayStation 4 and stop thinking you can make the next Fortnite. That’s not what fans want, they want the next The Last Of Us and God Of War – and I don’t mean actual sequels but games of equivalent quality.
Clem

Sloppy lies
Every time I hear Xbox running their mouth about big changes and amazing innovation all I can think of is AI. I can’t think of anything else they could possibly do that would change anything and considering it’s Microsoft… it’s definitely going to be AI. And it’ll be awful.

In short, I don’t believe a word they’re saying about anything. There is no way they’re going back to having exclusives, even though they keep pretending they will, and as much as they say they understand people not liking AI slop I don’t believe that either. Or they wouldn’t have employed all those people who were AI experts and know nothing about games.
Limpton

One good game
Having over 1,000 pokémon is crazy but I do kind of admire it as well. I don’t recognise any but a fraction of them nowadays but I find that kind of cool, because it means there’s so many that come as a surprise, even beyond the new ones they add with each new sequel.

After enjoying Pokopia, I’m feeling surprisingly enthusiastic about Winds and Waves, especially as the trailer looked good, with some nice graphics. Even if you don’t care anything about Pokémon, it’s useful proof that there’s nothing wrong with a struggling franchise that can’t be solved by a good game. Halo and co. should bear that in mind.
Tridangle

Email your comments to: gamecentral@metro.co.uk

Time travel
The visuals, sound, and driving is pretty much faultless on Forza Horizon 6. Turning up the Japanese radio station and entering those over-the-top, crazy events is the closest feeling I’ve had to being in an arcade in the 90s since being in an arcade in the 90s.

I thought it’s going to be much of the same and it is in a way, but it doesn’t feel like it for some reason, absolutely more refined, no doubt.

The loading is notably quicker between driving and menus, having cars appear as roadside bargains always makes me stop what I’m doing to see what it is and how much.

Tokyo city itself, now I’ve gone round it a little bit more, seems like a mix of Metropolis Street Racer and Need for Speed Underground 2, they’re the vibes it’s giving me with how the road layouts are. It’s ticking all the boxes for me.

I’m not sure what they’d do to improve it apart from getting rid of all the Horizon festival nonsense. It’s the weakest part for me but I know it holds the whole game together. Been playing it since it’s early release last week and it’s very impressive.
Nick The Greek

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Roll out
I can only imagine how happy GC is about the idea of big budget Transformers. I’d say I don’t believe it, because it just seems too much money for what is not quite big enough a franchise, but $1 billion is a lot of money for Hasbro to be investing.

Actually, reading the guy with the unfortunate surname’s comments he sounds completely on the ball, especially in terms of saying no to live service games. It seems that lesson is finally being learnt, even though it should’ve just bene common sense. But better late than never, eh?

Let’s hope we get an annoucement of something cool this summer or at The Games Awards.
Gantz

Great shot kid, that’s one in 300 million!
One of my favourite arcade games ever was mentioned by Grackle on Tuesday, so I thought it was about time I showed off mine! I collect vintage arcade machines from the golden age of arcades. I have 12 in my flat, including Space Invaders, Pac-Man, Defender and Star Wars, which cost me a fortune and continues to do so!

Classic arcade machines were not built to last. They were meant to make money for an arcade operator/chip shop owner/pub landlord, etc. for a year or four and then be skipped, burnt on a bonfire, or pushed off the end of a seaside pier into the sea! Yes, that did actually used to happen! So it takes a lot of skill and effort to keep these old machines working.

I can do the very basics, testing voltages with a multimeter, pushing down on chips that might have become unseated, cleaning the edge connectors, etc., but if anything else goes wrong you have to send your PCB, or monitor, or the whole machine off to an expert to repair them. When I bought Star Wars it was working, when it left the seller, but by the time it was delivered to me by a courier it had developed a fault. Every time I turned it on it tripped my fusebox.

After trying several things suggested by the seller, I eventually gave up and hired a courier to take it to a company to repair. They couldn’t sort it, so I had to get the courier to take it back to the seller who repaired it for me for nothing, which was fantastic, but it was costing me £90 each time I used the courier. I got it home and enjoyed playing it for a good few months until the PCB developed a fault. I sent it off for repair and got it back in working order again soon after. Last year it got another fault on the PCB and I have now had it repaired again.

So you see, owning these machines is a dream for some, myself included, but the initial cost isn’t the only cost. If you want to relive your youth and play Atari Star Wars again, they have the cockpit and upright versions at Arcade Club Bury, AC Leeds, and AC Blackpool. I loved the game so much that when I was a kid I would make a 16 mile round trip to an arcade in Tamworth on my bicycle to play the cockpit version.

My friend Robert Mruczek, who was in the film The King of Kong, is a world record holder on Star Wars. In 1984, he scored over 300 million points! It took 49 hours. Obviously, you can’t pause an arcade machine. He told me that he didn’t go to the toilet at all during those 49 hours!
Tim Keeling

Dark horse
Interesting review of Yoshi And The Mysterious Book. I had forgotten the game even existed but it’s got an 81 on Metacritic, which is really good. It seems that Nintendo is doing well with these less anticipated games, especially Pokémon Pokopia, but it’s the ones with all the expectation on them that they’ve struggled with.

I don’t know if that’s going to be a thing going forward but if there’s one thing Metroid Prime 4 and Mario Kart World proved, it’s that no matter how long a game has in development or how big the name is you can still get a disappointing game. Nobody was going to be disappointed by Yoshi, just surprised if it turned out good.
Zeiss

Endless Horizon
Forza Horizon 6 is here. It’s been a long wait. I pre-ordered. That’s something I very rarely do these days, but I couldn’t resist. Is it worth it, though ?

Where to start? Well, the game looks great, runs great on Xbox Series X. 60fps. I had a frame rate problem the one time I used quick resume, otherwise no issues; smooth. The car handling, excellent. The amount of stuff to do (race events, stunt events, collectibles, barn finds, and much more) is mind-boggling; a bit overwhelming if you’re a Forza Horizon newbie.

Over 500 cars at launch, expect this figure to rise up to 900 or more in the coming months. It doesn’t break the Forza Horizon mould; it’s evolution, with some new stuff added, rather than revolution. But, the real star of the show this time around is the map. It is huge! The design is absolutely incredible! Awesome!

A few new game modes will be added to the evolving world of Forza Horizon 6 in the future; the festival playlist starts on May 21st, offering the chance to win rare cars and provide more longevity. I’m expecting several hundred hours of playtime from this game.

So, the answer to the question ‘Is it worth it?’ is, of course it is. Definitely. But then, I never expected it not to be. Having played the previous five games and loved them all (1,105 hours, single-player, out of Forza Horizon 4) it was never in doubt.

9.5/10. Possibly a 10.
Paul C.
PS: Arcade racers are a bit of a dying breed these days. All the big name franchises seem to have fallen by the wayside. A shame, that is. Would love to see a new Project Gotham Racing and a new Burnout. There’s still a big market for this type of racer. The Horizon series is proof of that.

Inbox also-rans
If there is not a Nintendo Direct in June, in the usual slot or close to it, that will be absolutely crazy. When is Nintendo going to tell us about their big Christmas game? Christmas Eve?!
Jonno

Am I the only one that doesn’t like the Ghost Of Tsushima games? People talk about Assassin’s Creed being bland but I got bored of both these games in a couple of hours (I only borrowed the second one).
Qwent

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MORE: Games Inbox: When will GTA 6 pre-orders start?

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Police are investigating an attack on a Jewish man in Golders Green, London, just weeks after two Jewish men were stabbed in the area. These are the latest in a series of violent attacks on Jewish people and institutions. They have also given fresh impetus to a long-running debate about the extent of antisemitism in the UK.

My research explores how the law approaches the thorny question of where political critique of Israel ends and antisemitism begins. This is a sensitive topic, which events like this have brought to public attention once again.

In a statement, Prime Minister Keir Starmer identified three causes of what he described as a “crisis for all of us”. First, he cited “hate preachers” and “charities that promote antisemitic extremism”. Second, Starmer referred to “the malign threat posed by states like Iran,” after a group with Iranian links was investigated in relation to arson attacks on Jewish charity Hatzola ambulances in Golders Green.

The third was more controversial: the prime minister pointed the finger at those who “diminish” the antisemitism faced by Jews today. Standing alongside those who chant “globalise the intifada” at marches is, according to Starmer, “calling for terrorism against Jews”.

À lire aussi :
Why banning pro-Palestine marches is a risky response to antisemitic violence

“Intifada” is an Arabic term used to describe Palestinian uprisings against Israel in the late 1980s and early 2000s – the latter involving suicide bombings aimed at civilian targets in Israel. Starmer went as far as saying that people who approvingly use that phrase should be prosecuted.

Responses from some of the British Jewish community seemed to back Starmer up. Many expressed a sense of vulnerability and isolation, exacerbated by betrayal at a perceived lack of solidarity from anti-racist activists.

Similar feelings surfaced after the Hamas atrocities of October 7, 2023. For many Jews, a lack of empathy – at best – for the victims and the scale of the trauma testified to an “indifference to Jewish death … across the world”. Throughout the subsequent war in Gaza, many felt that the military threat posed by Hamas was routinely erased from public debate.

The rising popularity of zero-sum arguments pitting Israeli “settler colonialism” against Palestinian “indigeneity” further squeezed the space for dialogue. This led to a defensive hardening of positions. Even British Jews sceptical of – or appalled by – the war’s conduct felt unable to express that opposition, for fear that it might be used to delegitimise Israel’s existence and encourage antisemitic reprisals.

But it also contributed to the widespread adoption of a new critique of “antizionist ideology”. While recognising that some of the more outlandish claims about Israeli conduct can draw on an older repertoire of anti-Jewish conspiracies, in its more crude variations this ends up classing almost any accusation of Israeli wrongdoing as a “libel”.

The claim that Israeli actions in Gaza could amount to genocide, for example, is regarded as akin to the “blood libel” – the antisemitic fantasy that Jews kill Christian children for religious rituals. Often, no distinction is made between, say, the careful analysis of an Israeli scholar and the wild-eyed rantings of a social media provocateur.

There are diverse modes of opposition to Israel, ranging from Islamist rejections of the concept of Jewish sovereignty, to sober reports of Israeli human rights abuses. In the current framing of antizionism, these are reduced into a singular, undifferentiated ideology, which is then inflated into an existential threat to “the west”.

This mirrors the equally reductive characterisation of Zionism by some of the pro-Palestinian movement: a single, innately malign ideology that is “the enemy of world peace”, responsible for climate change, and a danger to the world.

At its worst, this new movement against antizionism denies Palestinian suffering in much the same way as those who refuse to “open their eyes to Jewish pain”, as Starmer put it.

Jewish identity and Israel

Starmer’s claim that slogans like “globalise the intifada” should be simply understood as “terrorism against Jews” owes something to this reductive approach. It is true that some Jews interpret such phrases in this way, particularly in light of the sometimes casual attitude to political violence among protesters. And there are clearly times when they could be hate speech – if directly targeted at Jewish people, communal buildings or even pro-Israel protesters for instance.

But there are other rational interpretations for its non-targeted use – using “intifada” as substitute for “revolution”, perhaps, or as an attempt to link the Palestinian cause to wider opposition to global capitalism. Regardless of how convincing one finds such explanations, such uses of the word cannot be automatically classed as calls for antisemitic violence.

To insist that this is the only meaning is to eradicate any distinction between Jews in general and Israel in particular. This is troublingly similar to those who call for violence against Jews in retaliation for Israeli actions – albeit for very different reasons.

Conflating Jews and Israel, from whatever direction, simplifies the complex historical relation that exists between modern Jewish identity and Israel. The two are certainly not identical, as confirmed by the rising number of Jews who are rejecting any connection, or warning of an impending clash between “Jewish values” and an Israel controlled by far-right factions.

Yet it is also too easy to pretend that they have nothing to do with each other. Like other 19th-century nationalisms, Zionism sought to revive and transform older modes of (Jewish) collective belonging. Meanwhile, the post-Holocaust reconstruction of Jewish identity was inextricably linked to the establishment of Israel as a Jewish-majority state.

The connection might vary from person to person – from the belief that Israel is needed to guarantee Jewish safety, to national, religious, cultural and familial reasons. But the significance of Israel to the majority of Jews cannot be lightly skipped over by repeating truisms like “not all Jews are Zionists” – even if it categorically does not mean Jews are politically responsible for what the Israeli government does.

But neither is Israel a simple extension of Jewish identity, in the way that Starmer suggests. The risk is that – as shown by the misguided proscribing of the Palestine Action group – pouring police resources into arresting those who chant indeterminate slogans will divert attention away from protecting communities like Golders Green.

Ms Cooper said: “We obviously have a UK domestic mission to halve violence against women and girls over the next 10 years, but what we’re now trying to do is to build an international mission on ending violence against women and girls, and working closely with Spain, but also with other countries, including Jamaica, South Africa, Morocco, Australia, countries from across the world.”

The York Dungeon, which opened on July 3, 1986, seeks to place its first staff members at the heart of a celebration to mark its 40th anniversary.

The event will kickstart with a grand opening at 10am on Friday (July 3) this year.

Recommended reading:

The company has also urged former workers to get in touch with “interesting stories” about working at the Dungeon over the years.

A spokesperson said: “They may be funny, they may be scary, they may be both!

“If you do, then we would love to hear from you.”

The York Dungeon was originally opened by Sir Fred Pontin, the founder of the Kunick Leisure Group and was the second of the Dungeon attractions to open, following the London Dungeon in 1974.

To share your stories, or if you worked there back when the York Dungeon first opened in 1986, please send an email to yorkguests@merlinentertainments.biz

Designed by Royal Mint coin designer Thomas T Docherty, the reverse or “tails” side of the 50p also features the Elvish lettering and Black Speech inscribed on the Ring, representing the words: “One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them, One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them.”

The discount supermarket wants customers in Tyne and Wear to suggest areas where they would like to see a new Aldi open as part of its nationwide expansion plans.

With over £370 million earmarked for new stores this year, Aldi is working towards its goal of reaching 1,500 locations across the UK.

Jonathan Neale, managing director of national real estate at Aldi UK, said: “We know how important it is for people to have access to affordable, high-quality food close to where they live, which is why we’re asking our shoppers to help us identify the communities that would benefit most from a new Aldi store.

“Opening new stores in these areas means we can bring great value to more customers, while also creating jobs and offering industry-leading pay.”

Last year’s campaign highlighted London, Merseyside, and Oxfordshire as priority areas, with new stores already in progress near Pendle Drive in Liverpool and in the London areas of Hanworth and Willesden.

To put forward a suggestion, customers can email NextNewStore@aldi.co.uk, listing their chosen town in the subject line.

Submissions are open until Thursday, June 18, 2026, with Aldi set to announce the next round of priority locations later this year.

The expansion is part of Aldi’s commitment to improving access to affordable food and supporting communities through job creation.