As the weather starts to heat up, we’ve been investigating a bevy of fascinating tech, toys, tabletop games, and more. The items we’ve collected ahead are some of the best we have to recommend to enrich your gaming setup, brighten your display shelves, and bring new avenues to great entertainment in your home.
Disclaimer: Recommended products are selected by our editorial team, independent of our parent company, GameStop.
Star Wars Cal Kestis Statue
As more recent additions to the canon go, few new figures in Star Wars lore have captured the imagination like Cal Kestis. The star of Respawn’s Jedi: Fallen Order and Jedi: Survivor is presented here mid-battle, a transparent blue lightsaber raised to strike. The gallery diorama nails that juxtaposition of high action and constrained Jedi discipline and focus, and the cloth detailing on the PVC is exceptionally detailed. It goes without saying that BD-1 is also along for the ride, completing the picture. $80
PS5 DualSense Deep Earth Collection
Even with numerous more customizable options now available, the core first-party PS5 controller continues to be an excellent choice for your primary interface to games like Spider-Man 2, God of War Ragnarök, or Final Fantasy VII Rebirth. The new Deep Earth Collection keeps the function entirely unchanged but provides three enticing new color options – Volcanic Red, Cobalt Blue, and Sterling Silver. They all look great if your launch controller is finally showing its age and you’re ready for that needed replacement. $75
Time Travel DIY Book Nook
If your game, book, or movie collection is starting to look a bit stale on the shelf, these novel inserts are a ton of fun. Meant to be built at home in a few hours, the finished project lights up and sits within your display as a miniature doorway into fictional worlds, which you can match to your favorite aesthetic. While the time travel train is slick, alternate options include a Japanese street scene, a house of magic, and more. $47
Traces of Two Pasts: A Novel
It’s rare that a video game tie-in novel meaningfully adds to the understanding of the fiction or makes for an enjoyable enough read to justify the time investment. But even as Final Fantasy VII: Rebirth is rolling out, there’s a lot of compelling backstory to uncover here, charting the stories of Tifa and Aerith in the years before the big adventure, written with sensitivity to the characters’ complexity by one of the game’s chief writers, Kazushige Nojima. For dedicated fans, it helps to complete the picture and enriches your playthrough of the new game. $25
Ultimate Electric Go-Kart
Video gaming has no shortage of kart racing games, including the perennially popular Mario Kart, which seems like a fixture of family life for decades. If a child in your family is especially excited about that brand of fun, this kid-targeted go-kart is about as close as you can get to being Mario on Rainbow Road. The kart can be speed-limited at any of its three top MPHs (2.5, 5, and 8) to customize it to the right age. The 24 Volt battery and included charger eliminates the need for gas. What’s most exciting for the young target driver? The large rear wheels allow for honest-to-goodness drifting, just like in the games. $300
Nex Playground
The Nex Playground doesn’t tread into any fundamentally new waters with its motion-controlled, family-oriented video game platform; we’ve seen similar experiences from the Wii and Kinect. Instead, the tiny cube-shaped console focuses on simple and approachable motion gaming with few entry barriers, supported by a responsive wide-angle camera and AI-powered motion sensing. That goal pans out in practice with various easy-to-navigate experiences from dancing to whack-a-mole to fitness apps – all of which work well and read body movement without a problem – even with multiple players. It’s simplistic fun, and the added paid subscription is a must to tap the complete library of activities, but the device definitely gets everyone moving and laughing. $200
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