Where You Buy Your Computer Cases?

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A new DF Direct Weekly arrives today and it's essentially two hours of myself, Oliver Mackenzie and Alex Battaglia revisiting the Mark Cerny reveal for PlayStation 5 Pro in the light of broadcast quality footage made available to the press after the event. It's a chance to reassess the introduction of the new hardware by being able to actually see the difference, with the blurry haze of YouTube compression artefacts removed from the presentation. In the process, we've learned more about the games shown and have some initial opinions about PSSR - PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution - the new AI upscaling technology used by PS5 Pro. Think of it as Sony's take on Nvidia's game-changing DLSS.
Of course, we've made a YouTube video about it embedded on this page and by extension, the audience might be wondering how we can show you the games running well on this medium if prior YT presentations could not. Well, we've been doing this for some time now and recognise that there's a limited amount of video bandwidth available - and you can get more from that bitrate budget by slowing footage down, freezing it and zooming it for extra clarity. This is particularly useful for users on mobile devices - well over half of our views the last time we looked and only growing in importance. Still not good enough for you? Well, this Direct and the Cerny presentation are available as pristine quality video downloads via the Digital Foundry Supporter Program.
The majority of titles seen in the Sony presentation last week are using PSSR upscaling and it turns out that 'countable pixel edges' - which we use to calculate internal rendering resolutions - are very easy to find, meaning we have a pretty firm lock on the details. It was somewhat disappointing to see newcomers to the DF Supporter Program share those details this weekend ahead of the show's public release and with none of the surrounding, crucial context.
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Which is it? Which is the game you absolutely shouldn't miss? This is precisely the wrong question, I think, but it's taken me a long time to arrive at that decision. For my first few hours, my first few days, it felt like exactly the right question. It felt like the only question.
UFO 50 is a collection of 50 new games that look like very old games - games that have come to us, by the armful, straight from the 8-bit generation. An opening graphic shows a storage locker roller door being flung back, and someone gasping in wonder at what's inside. 50 new games, arriving all at once. Not mini-games. Not micro-games. These are full games - games about driving and drifting and blowing planes out of the sky, games about betting on alien sporting events, and games about exploring the deepest oceans. They're polished and internally coherent and often filled with secrets. They're the kind of thing you'd buy individually on a NES cart in 1986 or rent from Blockbuster on a Friday night.
So the sense is, inevitably, that not all of these games are equal. In fact, there must be one truly special one in here. The first to be made perhaps, or the most lavishly detailed. There must be a polished gem, in amongst games about hitting people with beanbags, games about exploring while playing golf, and games about a hellish take on the Old West. There must be a sun around which the rest of the collection orbits like planets, like comets.
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Police have arrested nine Italian nationals thought to be selling counterfeit retro games and consoles for a video game trafficking ring estimated to be worth almost £42m (€50m / $55.5m).
The pirated material included 12,000 counterfeit "Nintendo, Sega, and Atari" consoles holding 47m fake versions of retro games like Mario Bros., Street Fighter, and Star Wars.
As reported by the BBC, Turin police confirmed the devices - which were using non-certified electronics and batteries that did not meet EU safety standards - were being sold online or to specialist shops.
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Sony's recently appointed joint CEO Hideaki Nishino says consoles will remain at the "core" of the company's business going forward, but it will still continue to offer titles on other platforms as well.
Nishino - who serves as CEO of the company's Platform Business Group - recently took part in an interview with Japanese publication Nikkei. Here, the company executive was asked to summarise the value of PlayStation consoles within Sony.
In response, Nishino said: "I think that with mobile devices, there are many games that show advertisements, and PCs are difficult to set up, but with PlayStation, once you turn it on, you can experience the content you bought straight away" (translated by VGC).
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Nintendo has now formally confirmed the end of its regular support for Splatoon 3, in a statement celebrating "two ink-credible years".


Fans had suspected such a statement from Nintendo, now posted to X, following the conclusion of the game's climactic Grand Festival event held over the past weekend.


Released in September 2022, Splatoon 3 has enjoyed a similar two-year window of post-launch content updates seen by its predecessor, Splatoon 2.

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Bungie's former chief in-house lawyer, Don McGowan, reckons it's a good thing that Sony is "inflicting some discipline" on the Destiny 2 studio, and helping management "run the game like a business".
"To be clear: I'm not talking about the layoffs, I'm talking about forcing them to get their heads out of their asses and focus on things like: implementing a method of new player acquisition; not just doing fan service for the fans in the Bungie C-suite; and running the game like a business," McGowan said on LinkedIn.
"Good. I still have friends in that environment and I'd like them to keep jobs."
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Don't be fooled by Sulfur's cutesy little goblin demons. Behind their simple, cell-shaded good looks, these are vicious little creatures intent on sinking their fangs into your weak and tender flesh. They are undeterred by your priestly garb and assortment of guns and wakizashi sword, and will leap, poke and shoot at you with savage abandon the moment they clap their beady yellow eyes on you. But these attacks are ultimately little more than nicks and scratches compared to the task ahead, as you've been promised a way to salvation through these ever-changing caves, and a chance to take revenge on the witch that burned your town church down and everyone in it.
Or at least that's according to your magic amulet, which seems to have a mind (and no doubt agenda) of its own in this capitvating FPS roguelike. It's never a good sign when something professes to be both your conscience and friend (or whatever convenient metaphor you need to help make sense of this cursed situation), but the prospect of being able to turn back time and save your flock from the witch's fiery damnation is just too tempting to ignore. So once more unto the breach you go, rising from your very own grave to claw your way through its titular hellscape one demon corpse at a time until you're powerful enough to take on the evil that brought you here.
It's a delicious premise whichever way you slice it, and it's backed up by tense and desperate gunplay as you fight your way through each level. Things start off simply enough, throwing moderate groups of demons at you as you carefully explore its proc gen caverns, but as your ammo supplies and health items start to dwindle, your search for new weapons and restorative foodstuffs becomes ever more frantic. Sulfur keeps its upgrades very close to its chest, and while corpses will occasionally spill out coins and questionable chunks of meat (and even the odd shoe sometimes) to use back at your ruined church base, you'll need to seek out its rare and unpredictably placed treasure chests if you want to expand your arsenal beyond your basic starter pistol.
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Alan Wake 2's composer Petri Alanko has teased some pretty emotional-sounding stuff for the game's upcoming DLC, The Lake House.
In a handful of social media posts shared over the weekend, Alanko said he was editing vocals for the DLC, calling it "by far the hardest thing I've ever run into". And why is that? Well, it is because the composer is being constantly brought to tears by his work.
"It's a damn ugly snot cry, not some posing-in-a-pic glycerin prop tear. Absolutely amazing stuff [is] coming," Alanko wrote on X. "I wish I could say more."
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Final Fantasy series producer Yoshinori Kitase has said the forthcoming third part of the Final Fantasy 7 Remake trilogy won't "betray the fans of the original".
Kitase commented on fan conjecture around how much the story will change from the original, as part of an interview with Anime News Network, alongside Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth director Naoki Hamaguchi and battle director Teruki Endo.
"We've always kept the original in mind, and I don't think it's going to be a storyline that will betray the fans of the original [game]," he said. "But also, at the same time, [it's] been 27 years since the release of the original Final Fantasy 7. There are these things we feel we can only do now in the remake project that can bring a new happiness, a new sort of feeling of satisfaction to the players playing this game now 27 years later. What this will entail exactly is something we hope players will experience soon."
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Earlier this year I met with Pokémon Go senior vice president Ed Wu to get a sense of where Niantic's ground-breaking mobile hit was heading, as the developer begins planning the app's path to success over a second decade. Fans had long expected the game to eventually implement Dynamax - the mechanic that powers up Pokémon to enormous size and strength introduced in Switch games Pokémon Sword and Shield. Niantic had previously been coy about the feature's introduction, but it's now clear Dynamax has been on the studio's office whiteboards for some time, given the far-reaching nature of its implementation now in Pokémon Go - which could truly be game-changing.


That said, a couple of weeks after Pokémon Go's Dynamax features first began to go live, the mechanic still feels pretty opaque and a work-in-progress, with arguably little yet to gain from engaging with it. There's no new Dynamax Pokédex to fill out, and no way yet of using Dynamax Pokémon outside of their own walled garden. Call it a soft launch, perhaps, or a slow introduction of a major feature to a casual player base with years of ingrained play patterns. Either way, there's been little explanation of why players should deviate from those play patterns to begin collecting Dynamax Pokémon or dabbling with its deeper features. I've found myself engaging with it more out of curiosity than anything else, with only a few clues where it's all headed.


Here's what we know so far. Dynamax Pokémon are a whole new version of the creatures players have been catching for years, and require you to start from scratch to once again find new, Dynamax-possible versions with perfect stats, or to obtain their rare Shiny form. In a nutshell, it's a way for Pokémon Go to re-release every species in the game already - similar to the introduction of Shadow Pokémon - with a fresh set of mechanics and systems that feel surprisingly standalone to the rest of the game.

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"Things- things are good," Miles Jacobson tells me, before a pause. "We've taken on a lot, with FM25."
It's early August, late in the afternoon on a Friday, and it's clearly been a long week for Jacobson, head of Football Manager developer Sports Interactive. The studio celebrates its 30th anniversary this year, the same year it aims to reinvent the series with the most significant changes for two decades, but it's noticeable that Jacobson is seeking to ease some expectations for FM25 as we begin to talk.
"What I don't want to do is be sitting here and be overhyping things," he says, "because I don't think it helps anyone."
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If (like me) you found developer Ironwood Studios' wonderfully weird four-wheeled survival game Pacific Drive just a bit too exhausting when it launched earlier this year, now might be the time to go back: its new Drive Your Way update introduces a whole bunch of custom difficulty settings and presets to make things easier - or masochistically more difficult, if you prefer.


With Pacific Drive's new update installed, players can immediately choose from seven presets enabling them to tweak the difficulty of their adventures across the Olympic Exclusion Zone. These range from the standard Pacific Drive experience to Joyride - which retains the same fundamental core but reduces gathering, crafting, and research requirements - to presets that lean hard in the other direction. Nuclear Journey, for instance, smears everything in lethal radiation, while Iron Wagon doesn't just make things tougher, it deletes your save if you fail.


However, it doesn't end there; the Drive Your Way update also makes it possible for players to create their own presets, with over 50 considerably more granular settings available - complete with tweakable value sliders for each - as detailed in the video below.

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EA has shared early first details for the next instalment in its Battlefield series, confirming the multiplayer shooter will be returning to the modern era for its next outing, and that the unpopular Specialists system has been jettisoned for good in favour of more traditional classes.


That's according to Respawn head and Battlefield boss Vince Zampella who, in conversation with IGN, teased a back-to-basics approach for the series' next outing following 2021's poorly received Battlefield 2042. That starts with a return to the modern era, with Zampella explaining, "If you look back to the peak or the pinnacle of Battlefield, it's that Battlefield 3... Battlefield 4 era where everything was modern. And I think we have to get back to the core of what Battlefield is and do that amazingly well, and then we'll see where it goes from there."


Beyond the setting, Zampella hints the still-unnamed next Battlefield may ditch 2042's sprawling 128-player maps in favour of more focused matches. "Did [128 players] make it more fun?," he posits. "Doing the number for the sake of the number doesn't make any sense. We're testing everything around what's the most fun... The maps, once they get to a certain scale, become different... So we are designing something that is more akin to previous Battlefields. I'd rather have nice, dense, really nice, well-designed play spaces."

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With the first anniversary of Cities: Skylines 2's disastrous launch approaching, publisher Paradox Interactive has announced further delays to the game's DLC as developer Colossal Order focuses its efforts on completing the "crucial" assets editor.


Colossal Order initially delayed Cities: Skylines 2's DLC last November, amid significant criticism of the game's performance. As a result, its Beach Properties Asset Pack was moved from its original 2023 release date to Q1 2024, while the Urban Promenades and Modern Architecture Creator Packs, and Bridges & Ports expansion shifted from Q1 2024 to Q2.


Unfortunately, Beach Properties' eventual arrival was slammed by players for its high price and lacklustre content. As a result, Paradox issued an apology for its "rushed" release, refunded players, and postponed work on all future paid DLC "indefinitely" while it continued to improve the game, shunting the Bridges & Ports expansion all the way into 2025.

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nDreams, the VR-focused developer behind the likes of Far Cry VR and Synapse, has confirmed restructuring and redundancies that could affect up to 17.5 percent of its workforce.


The UK studio, which was founded in 2006, currently consists of four teams - nDreams Studio, Orbital, Near Light, and Elevation - employing around 250 people between them. That means upward of 40 staff could lose their jobs as nDreams' redundancy process proceeds.


In a statement provided to Game Developer, nDreams CEO Patrick O'Luanaigh blamed the cuts on a "challenging VR games market" requiring a "renewed strategic focus". O'Luanaigh added that jobs may be cut at all levels, "including senior leadership".

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