Where You Buy Your Computer Cases?

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Black Myth: Wukong is an impressive game from a technical standpoint, especially on PC where it delivers sumptuous visuals despite stutter and other performance issues. The PS5 version of the game offers a chance for developers Game Science to offer a more curated experience, yet baffling design choices and some visual cutbacks detract from what is otherwise a gripping game.
Those design choices start with the game's modes, which come in three familiar flavours: quality, balance and performance. These three modes seem to offer nearly identical settings, with similar shadows and texture resolution, so the primary differences here come in terms of resolution and frame-rate targets.
The quality mode is perhaps the most straightforward, with roughly 1440p internal resolutions (we measured 1224p to 1584p) upscaled to 4K with FSR 3. This looks convincingly 4K-like in stills, but can come undone in motion - something that's traditionally not FSR's strong suit.
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Xbox boss Phil Spencer has addressed the surprise revelation that first-party exclusive Indiana Jones and the Great Circle will release on PS5 in spring/Q2 2025 just a few months after its Xbox debut, stating Xbox is "a business", and that "the bar is high in terms of the delivery we have to give back" to parent company Microsoft.
In an in-house interview with Xbox On, Spencer was not directly challenged about the decision to release Indiana Jones on PS5 so soon after its December Xbox debut, only insisted that, at that time, Xbox was "gonna learn" and "watch", and "from our learning, we're gonna do more".
At that time, Spencer explicitly said that neither Starfield nor Indiana Jones and the Great Circle were one of the four games tipped to come to PS5, and whilst that's true - Indiana Jones was not one of the four games mentioned; it's actually the fifth - some fans have taken issue with Spencer's framing of the issue.
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In 1986, a man called Christopher Knight drove his car into the wilderness until it ran out of gas and then he abandoned it. He walked into the woods and never looked back. Knight stayed in that Maine wilderness in America for 27 years, never uttering a word even to himself. "Hi" was apparently all he said upon encountering some hikers. It would get so cold in the wilderness he'd have to wake himself up and walk around to warm up, and sometimes, on the brink of death, he'd see a cloaked figure off to the side, smiling at him and beckoning him to come closer. He'd consider it, but he never did let himself go.
That story is shared by developer David Wehle (The First Tree, Game Dev Unlocked) in his new game We Harvest Shadows, which was announced as a "first-person farming horror allegory" during last night's Gamescom Opening Night Live showcase. It was one of the weirder games on show, for sure. It's made only by him and he shared the story of Knight because it's a large part of the game's inspiration. "I read the book about Christopher during a dark time in my life," Wehle writes in the game's developer note. "I kinda envied him in some ways." We Harvest Shadows, he says, is a game "borne of pure self-hatred and desperation". It's personal, it's dark, and it fascinates me.
I've never seen a farming sim welded to a horror game concept before. Typically farming games are systemic: you build stuff in order to earn more stuff, and go on until you have a great big successful farm. Here there's some of that - you plant crops and harvest things and sell things, in order to get better things - but the reward for doing so is story. You push towards milestones so you can find out more about what's going on - who you are, why you came here, what happened to you. But while you're doing that, strange things happen, which will make you very afraid of the dark.
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Microsoft has announced the release date for its upcoming batch of Xbox console variants, including its digital-only Series X.
The three new Xbox console variants were initially revealed back in June. At this time, Microsoft merely said they would be available at the end of the year, with no further specifics.
That was, until today, when Microsoft confirmed the three new Xbox Series X/S console options will be released on 15th October, with select countries then following on 29th October.
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It took longer to buy back the Journey to the Savage Planet IP and source code from Google than it did to sell Typhoon Studios to it. "Because Google's used to buying stuff, but they are not used to giving it back," Reid Schneider, co-founder and studio head of Racoon Logic, tells me on a visit to their Montréal office for a hands-off preview of Revenge of the Savage Planet, a sort-of sequel to Journey to the Savage Planet.
I'm anecdotally told by Schneider and other Racoon Logic employees that Google wasn't used to a lot of how game development worked. "The core of it is: don't work with companies whose primary business is not making games, if you would like to make games," Alex Hutchinson, Racoon Logic co-founder and creative director, summarises. "[Google] didn't like how game development tasted," Schneider later adds.
The reason why new studio Racoon Logic knows so much about working with Google is that it was co-founded by, and hired, many employees who worked at Typhoon Studios, the developers of Journey to the Savage Planet. "The first, last, and only game Google ever paid for internally," Hutchinson laughs, as he and Schneider explain Typhoon's troubled history with Google.
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Gamescom 2024 is officially underway in Cologne - and alongside a raft of game announcements at Opening Night Live, a lot of new PC hardware has also been shown off for the first time.
Here are my personal highlights from the show so far, including next-gen AMD Ryzen motherboards, a promising new PC handheld, big news in the gaming monitor space and a host of special edition hardware to celebrate the meteoric launch of Black Myth: Wukong.
Take your pick from the six headlines below, or scroll on!
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A game narrator plays an important role, there is no doubt. Just look at Baldur's Gate 3's Amelia Tyler! This is a role that, indeed, also plays an integral part of the ongoing Sid Meier's Civilization series, and famous names such as Leonard Nimoy and Sean Bean have lent their vocal talents to the franchise.
Now, Bean is passing the narration sword - as it were - on to another Game of Thrones alum for the series' next instalment, Civilization 7.
As revealed in a new trailer, developer Firaxis has announced Gwendoline Christie (or, Brienne of Tarth to some) will be guiding us through the game on its release next year. "Now it's your turn to reimagine civilisation," Christie says in the trailer, "and build something you believe in."
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The Tomb Raider animated series will be making its debut on Netflix later this year. The show is set to follow on from the events of the rebooted Survivor trilogy, which those who have played the games will know saw Lara Croft lose more than one friend (in fact, Rhianna Pratchett admitted to me the first game in the series became a "cavalcade of death").
Now, speaking with Nerdist, the Tomb Raider series' showrunner Tasha Huo said Lara will deal with the resulting grief in the first season of The Legend of Lara Croft, so she can finally "start working on other shit".
"This series... really acts as a bridge between the origin story to the Lara that we fell in love with in the '90s, when we first started picking up the games," Huo told the publication. "That Lara was very quippy, very confident."
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Space can be a lot of things: beautiful, awe-inspiring, full of hope for mankind's future. But it can also be the setting for some truly spine-chilling horror - and that's what Starfield's upcoming Shattered Space DLC will focus on. It places the base game's creepy House Va'ruun faction - a cult who worship a deity called the Great Serpent - centre stage. (Taking a wild guess, this is probably not going to be one for people who don't like big snakes.)
Shattered Space will see you travelling to the House Va'ruun's homeworld, which has been designed specially to tell the DLC's story. This means, if you decide to venture back out into the stars, you'll be able to return to the DLC whenever you like and pick up the storyline where you left off.
But where does the name Shattered Space come in? Well, as we found out during a Gamescom 2024 showfloor presentation this morning, if Starfield's main campaign is about the pursuit of knowledge, then Shattered Space is about the knowledge you should really shut away in a box and never touch.

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Amazon has dropped a free 18-minute behind-the-scenes peek at the making of the first season of Amazon Prime's Fallout TV show.
"Good morning, Vault Dwellers!" the team announced on the show's Twitter/X account. "Please enjoy this new 18-minute look at the making of Fallout Season 1. For Your Consideration."
You can check it out via the video below:
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Here at Digital Foundry, we've already gone into depth on Black Myth: Wukong's high-end PC experience, with 'full RT' (ie path-traced) lighting - but the fact is that the vast majority of the audience will be using mainstream-level PC hardware. Thankfully, the game can scale and we've put together some optimised settings for you that allow you to enjoy a beautiful experience without being short-changed from the maxed out experience... well, the maxed out non-RT experience.
So, here's the deal: our first order of business was to look at the ray tracing settings to see what level of scalability is there and ultimately, we came up empty. It's all or nothing here: maxed out, you get a beautiful experience, but the manner of scaling on lower RT settings just doesn't make sense. Drop down from max and the roughness cut-off on reflections along with specular elements in general are savagely pared back.
The issue is worse with water rendering, where the medium setting is denoising incorrectly with a horrible flickering, caustics are removed completely. Low RT settings in water have a poor fallback to cube-mapped reflections that actually look worse than the non-RT option. The medium setting is bugged and should be fixed, but right now, we can't recommend anything other than maxing it out. Really, diffuse and specular global illumination, water caustics and shadows should be split out into different options.
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More Call of Duty Black Ops 6 footage has leaked online, this time purporting to be from its multiplayer mode.
Whilst the videos were eventually removed by the uploader themselves rather than a copyright claim, the footage - reportedly from the PC version - gave thousands of fans a sneaky peek before going offline.
As you may well expect by now, dozens of mirrors are popping up faster than Activision can take them down.
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Good news, shooter fans - Deadlock finally officially exists.
Even though Valve's hero shooter amassed a concurrent player peak of over 16,000 earlier in the month, Valve still wouldn't admit it existed. Overnight, however, it's finally been added to Steam.
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If nothing else, I've had a wonderful time playing Sabacc. The new variant, Kessel Sabacc, invented for Star Wars Outlaws is infinitely moreish, a simple card game that takes elements of Blackjack and Poker and a few others, and blends them into an eminently snackable bit of video game gambling. In the simplest terms, four players are each dealt a hand of two cards and take turns, through three rounds, to attempt to make a pair of the two lowest numbers possible. Drawing a new card costs a token, as does coming anywhere but first at the end of each set of rounds. When you're out of tokens you're out of the game; last player standing wins. I could play it all day.
In some sense this is open world Ubisoft at its best: a bit of colour off to the side, extraneous to the main story, and yet still woven into the world through unlockable cheats and sidequests and bonuses you can acquire and deploy. It's a byproduct of the kind of development the developer-publisher has come to be synonymous with, albeit usually in derogatory terms. This is Ubisoft 'formula' stuff, but it's also a reminder that the formula is often driven by generosity as much as anything. Development-as-gift-giving: have another system; chuck another mechanic on the pile; here's one more neat little thing to do.
The problem with Star Wars Outlaws, however, isn't that it adheres too closely to a development approach akin to hoarding, but that it does the opposite, stripping away years of accumulated video game clutter. Admirably Outlaws does this quite aggressively - Kessel Sabacc aside - but in doing so it reveals an integral issue: Ubisoft open worlds are not only fun because of their formula; they are their formula. To strip it away isn't like peeling off some old wallpaper to reveal the original brickwork. It's lifting up the carpet to find a whacking great hole in the ground.
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A new Nintendo Direct broadcast will air tomorrow, Tuesday 27th August, at 3pm UK time.


For those across the pond, that's 7am Pacific, or 10am Eastern.


Lasting roughly 40 minutes, the show will feature upcoming games and announcements for Nintendo Switch, from both major third-party developers as well as indie studios. Just don't expect any news on Nintendo's own games - such as the upcoming Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom - or Switch 2.

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