By now, the history of Crash Bandicoot - and the bejorted platformer's fabled importance to the PlayStation - has been pretty well documented. With Sony's PlayStation facing off against the Sega Saturn and Nintendo 64, there in the era of Mario and Sonic the debut console-makers felt they badly needed a mascot. And here came Crash, from a small, upstart, still technically independent studio of just a handful of people, and just at the right moment. Shortly before the E3 show of May 1995, Sony was so impressed with Naughty Dog's demo it bumped Twisted Metal off its main stand and replaced that game, which it had only just signed, with Crash Bandicoot – pitching up directly across from Nintendo's booth, where Sony's rival had come with a new 3D platformer of its own, in Super Mario 64. Shigeru Miyamoto was seen happily giving Crash a whirl at the show, the game sold like gangbusters, and the PS1 lived happily ever after.
Digital Foundry first manifested on the pages of Eurogamer way back in 2007, looking at the differences between Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 software - but what if DF actually emerged back in 1994, examining the fifth generation consoles: Sega Saturn and Sony PlayStation? We can answer that question today with the publication of the first in an occasional series, where DF Retro goes back to the consoles and games of the 90s, using today's tools and methodologies to compare the games that made their way to both Sega and Sony platforms.
Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 players have hit out at "AI slop" they believe has been used within the game and its promotional materials.
Katsuhiro Harada surprises me with a question of his own. I've spent the last half hour challenging the Tekken development chief to remember the first game's launch on the original PlayStation over the course of 1995, first in Japan, then in Europe and North America. I'm not used to my interviewees turning the tables on me. I'm meant to be the one asking the questions! But Harada, from behind his trademark sunglasses, has the same curiosity about the much-loved 32-bit generation that I have.
Deck Nine Games, the studio behind Life is Strange: Double Exposure and last year's The Expanse: A Telltale Series, has confirmed further layoffs.
On first boot, the PC version of Indiana Jones and the Great Circle presents as a simply great PC release. Getting into the action, there's no shader compilation stutter and no obtrusive traversal stutter. It does require a graphics card with hardware-accelerated ray tracing and there is no fallback to a software alternative, but that's OK - performance is not a problem in this title. Machine Games has gone one step further, embracing future tech with 'full ray tracing', which renders all lighting via RT, but unfortunately we cannot talk about this today as it's only enabled on December 9th... which is a bit of a disappointment for high-end PC users who bought in via early access. Still, what you get is still an excellent PC release, not so much limited by graphics power but rather the VRAM allocation of your GPU.
Fighting game Hunter x Hunter Nen x Impact has been refused a rating by the notoriously-strict Australian ratings board.
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A free festive update has just dropped in 
Good news, Pokémon fans - Pokémon TV is back.
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