After keeping monthly game removals to less than ten titles since June 2025, Microsoft’s Xbox Game Pass is now seeing a larger wave of departures. Five games were removed on November 15th, and another five are scheduled to leave the service later today.
Everyone benefited from the rise of indie games, and a few even became incredibly popular, defining or creating entirely new types of games. Over the last decade, many indie titles have emerged, but which ones were truly groundbreaking when they first appeared, or still feel fresh and innovative today? If you’re a fan of indie games, these are all worth checking out. We’ll be ranking them based on their originality.
It’s amazing to me that even now, people like Ok-Adeptness-9973 are still finding new things to do in Zelda: Ocarina of Time. Seriously, this game is a classic for a reason! It’s officially the highest-rated game ever on Metacritic, with a 99 out of 100 – and that was way back on the Nintendo 64. I keep going back to it myself, whether it’s just for the memories, trying to beat my best speedrun, or just messing around and discovering things I never knew were possible, even after all these years.
Founded in early 2017, Hololive has quickly become a leading force in live streaming. The Japanese company saw huge growth in the early 2020s, with creators like Gawr Gura and Kiryu Coco gaining massive popularity online. This success allowed Hololive to expand globally, creating branches in Indonesia and China and launching a popular English-speaking group. Now, fans can connect with their favorite Hololive streamers in a new indie life simulation game.
A recent study from Newzoo (March 2025) found that PC gamers primarily play older games – titles released six or more years ago make up over two-thirds of their total gaming time. Popular, long-lasting games like DotA 2 and League of Legends are a major reason for this, but players also spend time revisiting games they’ve previously purchased. Often, though, they aren’t sure which game to play next.
The story of One Piece is entering its final arc, meaning the Straw Hat crew is nearing its complete lineup. Currently, the crew consists of ten members: Luffy, Zoro, Nami, Usopp, Sanji, Chopper, Robin, Franky, Brook, and Jinbe. While already a large group, Luffy intends to add at least one more member, and possibly more, to his crew as they pursue their goal of becoming the Pirate King. Several characters are potential candidates to join the Straw Hats before the story concludes.
Market confidence has been rekindled, but let’s not get too cozy-BTC’s still got more hurdles than a dating app profile. Buckle up, folks. 💨
One possibility is that this marks the start of a new “Phantom” event, a complicated alternate reality game (ARG) that has appeared in several Battlefield games. These events usually involve players solving puzzles both within the game and on external websites, collaborating to unlock special cosmetic items or weapons, like the Phantom Bow. However, the appearance of an alien skull – instead of the usual split human skull linked to the Phantom group – suggests this could be a hint towards something different. Some players believe it might signal a new game mode based on aliens for Battlefield 6.
![Clients employ a privacy-preserving federated learning approach by extracting $768$-dimensional $[CLS]$ tokens from a Vision Transformer, encrypting them with the CKKS scheme, and enabling the server to aggregate information across numerous clients while performing encrypted inference.](https://arxiv.org/html/2511.20983v1/x1.png)
A novel framework combines the power of vision transformers with lightweight encryption to enable privacy-preserving medical image analysis across distributed datasets.
As a huge One Piece fan, I truly believe the Straw Hats aren’t just the core of the story, they’re probably the most iconic crew ever in manga and anime! It’s amazing to think about how far Luffy and his friends have come over the last twenty-plus years – from the East Blue all the way to the New World, even to the skies and underwater! They’ve overcome incredible obstacles – defeated powerful enemies, overthrown tyrants, challenged a corrupt system, and fought in huge wars. Through it all, they’ve shared so many laughs, tears, victories, and losses. The crew has grown over time, and some members have stepped away briefly, but the Straw Hats have always remained the heart and soul of One Piece.