Where You Buy Your Computer Cases?

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Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No! It's a car in Gran Turismo 7.
Gran Turismo 7 players have flocked to social media to share examples of, uh, unusual driving physics after the racer's 1.49 update added a new setting that seemingly fills vehicles with helium.
Where developer Polyphony Digital had hoped to introduce "more natural weight" for players, cars are instead launching themselves into the air, making for some extraordinarily amusing clips:
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In a pleasantly surprising move, BioWare will launch Dragon Age: The Veilguard natively via Steam on PC, meaning there's no need to download and install the fussy EA App.


What's more, the game will arrive verified for Steam Deck, so you can continue your quest to defend Thedas while on the bus, train or toilet.


"There's a few more surprises in store for later this summer," BioWare's Michael Gamble teased via social media platform X, sharing the news. "Here's the first from the DAV team."

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Hello! Welcome back to our regular feature where we write a little bit about some of the games we've been playing over the past few days. This week we enjoy poking around spooky oil rigs, we object in dramatic court cases, and we discover what we love about a game series through a TV adaptation of it.
What have you been playing?
Catch up with the older editions of this column in our What We've Been Playing archive.
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Sometimes a game comes along and sucker punches you right in the gut. You can be completely aware of the premise going in, but some element of the setting or the mechanics takes a broader theme or commentary and makes it deeply, intensely personal. Papers, Please got me like that. My job at the time involved identity verification and, while it was nowhere near as life or death as the game, it still made it all too real, too visceral. Dragon Age: Inquisition completely caught me off guard, with NPC reactions to my Qunari Inquisitor feeling way too close to my experiences as a very visible trans woman.
Nobody Wants to Die is a work of dystopian science fiction, so I was expecting some hard hitting moments. I'm hardly the first person to point out that the last few years have felt increasingly like living in a cyberpunk novel - only without the ability to get shiny chrome replacements for my ageing knees. As a disabled person with a veritable laundry list of health conditions forced to rely on the underfunded NHS, the games' medical themes hit way too close to home.
Nobody Wants to Die is set in New York circa 2329, which, in a completely shocking and surprising twist, looks a lot like New York circa 1929, complete with tommy guns and prohibition. The sci-fi angle brings flying cars, 500+ story high apartment blocks and, most importantly, immortality. The discovery of a substance called ichorite allows brains to be encoded and transferred to new bodies, making death little more than an inconvenience, other than on the rare occasions that ichorite is completely destroyed. It's all very Altered Carbon, really.
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This summer, Epic Games finally gets its wish when, thanks to new EU regulations, it's launching its own digital store on iOS and Android. And ahead of its arrival, the company has announced it's removing Fortnite and other Epic games from what it calls "rent collector" competing stores, "even if those stores offer us a special deal for our own games."


In its announcement post, Epic first confirms developers selling games on its on its new mobile store will be subject to the same 12 percent fee seen on its PC digital storefront (zero percent if a developer uses a third-party payment system). It then reveals plans to pull its own games from some competing stores. More specifically, it says it'll be "ending distribution partnerships with mobile stores that serve as rent collectors without competing robustly and serving all developers fairly, even if those stores offer us a special deal for our own games."


It's also pulling Fortnite and its other titles from the Samsung Galaxy Store, in what it calls "protest of Samsung's anticompetitive decision to block side-loading by default" on its devices. Conversely, Epic says it's planning to brings its own mobile games to stores that "give all developers a great deal". One of these will be the indie-focused AltStore.

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Crystal Dynamics' beloved dark fantasy action-adventure series Legacy of Kain could be poised to receive the remaster treatment, if newly sighted branding at Comic-Con is to be believed.


As spotted by a user on Resetera, logos for an unannounced "Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver 1 & 2 Remastered" were included on display plaques accompanying statues of game characters Kain and Raziel at this week's Comic-Con San Diego show.


A Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver graphic novel prequel, The Dead Shall Rise, was recently announced by Dark Horse Comics, and GameSpot has now received confirmation from the publisher's VP of product development and sales that this is due to release in August.

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UPDATE 26/07/24: Video game producers negotiating as part of the Interactive Media Agreement have responded to news of the SAG-AFTRA strike.
"We are disappointed the union has chosen to walk away when we are so close to a deal, and we remain prepared to resume negotiations," reads a statement from spokesperson for the video game producers party to the Interactive Media Agreement, Audrey Cooling, shared with Eurogamer.
"We have already found common ground on 24 out of 25 proposals, including historic wage increases and additional safety provisions. Our offer is directly responsive to SAG-AFTRA's concerns and extends meaningful AI protections that include requiring consent and fair compensation to all performers working under the IMA. These terms are among the strongest in the entertainment industry."
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Of all the changes made in the transition from Overwatch 1 to 2, the move from 6v6 battles to 5v5 was undoubtedly one of its most controversial. And now developer Blizzard Entertainment has confirmed its's revisiting that decision, exploring if and how 6v6 matches could be re-introduced to Overwatch 2 in a series of upcoming tests.


All this is detailed in a blog from Overwatch 2 director Aaron Keller, who begins by explaining exactly why the move to 5v5 was made in the first place. "The world of 6v6 could have really high, highs," he writes, "but reaaaally low, lows. One of the design goals of 5v5 was to try to raise that floor, even though it was at the expense of some of some of those high moments."


As such, 5v5 was chosen to increase individual agency, to better balance the impact each class can have in a match, to make the experience more "cognitively manageable, and - perhaps most significantly of all - to alleviate extremely long queue times. "Players generally queue Tank less," continues Keller, "leading to longer wait times for all while we wait for a Tank to free up to find a proper match." And with Overwatch 2 requiring one rather than two tanks in competitive play, average wait times for damage and support characters are now "much shorter".

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Maybe you've heard of Kamala Harris; she's the current US vice president and very likely the Democratic party's official presidential nominee for November's US election. But now she's firmly back in the spotlight, the mildly curious case of her secret life in developer Remedy's 2019 action-adventure Control has resurfaced online.


You see, pinned to a whiteboard in an unassuming corner of The Oldest House - the transdimensional Brutalist office block at the heart of Control's story - is a picture of a missing 40-year-old Bureau employee, Jane Farland, lost during one of the House's shifts. Only, Photoshopped eyes aside, Jane Farland is the spitting image of Vice President Harris.


Harris' surprise secret life as a fictitious video game character has been noted before - in this five-year-old Reddit thread, for instance - but the picture has started gaining traction again as Harris once again makes headlines thanks to her likely US presidential bid.

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Over 13 minutes of leaked gameplay from Star Wars Outlaws is currently making the rounds online.
Some of the footage shows the game's opening scenes, although there are no major spoilers. The footage was previously available to view on YouTube, but has since been pulled by Ubisoft. (There was little doubt as to the footage's authenticity, though the company's own copyright claim confirms the video as real.)
Other clips show off the game's aerial combat, along with footage of Star Wars' blackjack-like card game Sabacc.
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Infamous internet animation series Skibidi Toilet, made using Valve's Source Filmmaker software and featuring assets from Half-Life 2 and Counter-Strike, is in discussions to be turned into a Michael Bay movie.


Bay, who directed disaster film blockbusters such as Armageddon and Pearl Harbour, is reportedly in talks to launch a Skibidi Toilet film and TV franchise with former Paramount Pictures boss Adam Goodman.


"We are absolutely in talks right now, both on the television side and the earliest conversations right now on the film side," Goodman told Variety. "But it's not a be-all, end-all for us."

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This console generation has given us a wealth of PC-style in-game graphics options, with PS5, Series X and even Series S usually offering at least a quality and performance mode. Developer Nexon Games' latest effort, The First Descendant, goes a step further than most though, with this free-to-play Unreal Engine 5 shooter offering three core modes - but then also FSR 3 frame generation to increase performance on each, and a ray tracing toggle. The result is a lot of permutations to cover here, and the frank truth of the matter is that only a few of these settings are actually worth using.
The First Descendant falls into a similar trap as the 2022 Saints Row Reboot for example - and even the more recent Hogwarts Legacy. In each of those cases it was 'mode overload' on PS5, Series X and S, with developers essentially off-handing part of the optimisation work to the end user. Without a definitive, recommended option, the huge range of mode combinations ultimately makes it difficult for end users to know which to select on first boot-up - short of play-testing all of them - and with the potential for distastrous frame-rate performance. So it is true here as well: The First Descendant offers nine possible ways to play on PS5 and Series X, with a 60fps performance mode, 40fps balanced mode (on 120Hz displays) and 30fps fidelity mode - plus those frame generation and ray tracing toggles.
With that in mind, we've tested how each mode performs on PS5, Series X and Series S, how successfully frame generation is able to push to a 60fps target, and fundamentally which combination is the best way to play on each platform. To make all of this information easier to parse, we've even assembled a few tables below covering every native resolution in each mode. We've also investigated the game's ray tracing implementation on console (sans Series S where the option is removed), which has some key issues.
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A Steam app for Sony's PlayStation VR2 headset is due for release on 6th August.



The free, official app will allow Steam users to play games on the virtual reality headset, as well as use the PlayStation VR2 Sense controllers.


Use of the app will also require the PC adapter, which was unveiled in June and will release on 7th August.

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Monster Train, the acclaimed roguelike deckbuilder from developer Shiny Shoe, is making its way to PlayStation 5 today, 25th July, some four years after its original release.


Monster Train sees players attempting to restore Hell's inferno after it freezes over - a task requiring them to ride a train carrying a burning pyre deep into the heart of Hell.


At first glance, it's all a bit Slay the Spire, with branching pathways providing choices on how to progress and level up each run. But the proper fun comes in combat, where the real-time card battling sees players unleashing their hellish minions against the forces of heaven - gradually moving between multiple floors of the titular train as they try and defend the pyre on top to win.

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UPDATE: Now going live from 2:15pm BST (which is very soon!)
Pour yourselves a lovely hot cuppa, Fallout fans because the long awaited fan-made mod Fallout: London has finally arrived and I'll be attempting to stream the first couple of hours of the game from around 3pm BST today.
I say 'attempting' and 'around' as the download has just gone live and it's a beef(eater)y 33GB download. If I get it done earlier, I might go live earlier so keep an eye on the YouTube player below and I'll see you in post-apocalyptic London as soon as possible!
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