Where You Buy Your Computer Cases?

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PlayStation's 30th anniversary celebrations kicked off last week - and in a somewhat unexpected way. Key art on the PlayStation Blog showed a range of Sony hardware old and new in the background and carefully tucked away was a console we hadn't seen before. Or rather, we had seen it before, but only via a sketch from billbil-kun. This looks to be our first look at PlayStation 5 Pro and now it's been confirmed that PlayStation lead system architect Mark Cerny has a technical presentation to give tomorrow. This should be our first indication of how Sony aims to position PS5 Pro and to justify its existence.
Documentation leaks from Sony's developer portal already tell us what to expect from the hardware. The Zen 2 CPU remains unchanged, but has an optional ten percent clock speed boost. The GPU moves from RDNA 2 architecture to RDNA 3, with the base unit's 36 compute units rising to 60 in the new machine. Without tapping into new features, Sony suggests that PS5 games will run around 45 percent faster on Pro compared to the standard model. However, machine learning silicon rated for 300 TOPs opens the door to PSSR upscaling - which we would hope to match the quality of Intel XeSS and maybe knock on the door of Nvidia DLSS. Ray tracing hardware is also beefed up, while the audio Tempest Engine of the standard PS5 also gains more performance on Pro.
What does this mean for actual games? ML-based upscaling comprehensively bests the software-based solutions on PS5 right now. Games will run at higher resolutions and higher frame-rates, while PSSR improves upscaling quality, giving it a further boost over the existing model. Games with RT effects can run more RT effects while titles without RT features can now run with them. And even if a game has no Pro support at all, an 'ultra boost' mode should see that 45 percent of extra GPU power brought to bear. deliveing higher resolutions in games where that is dynamic, and higher frame-rates too. Where we won't see too much of a difference is in CPU-limited scenarios - of which there are many.
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A new film chronicling the rise and fall of Clive Sinclair's "now legendary" ZX Spectrum is set to premiere in London on 3rd October, 2024.
From Gracious Films, GEL, and MusicFilmNetwork, The Rubber Keyed Wonder "charts the development and creation of the ZX Spectrum from concept through to its first release, and the financial and reputational success it brought Clive Sinclair".
It also examines the enduring impact of several Spectrum games, including Jet Set Willy, Knightlore, Chuckie Egg, Ant Attack, and Saboteur.
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UPDATE 10/9/24: Sony is about to start its PlayStation 5 Pro announcement. Ahem, sorry, its PS5 technical presentation.
You can watch along with us now via the video below:
ORIGINAL 9/9/2024: Sony has announced a PlayStation 5 technical presentation.
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Can't wait until 8th October to revisit Silent Hill? Here's a free visit to everyone's special place courtesy of a Japanese content creator who has streamed the first 90 minutes of Silent Hill 2 Remake to YouTube.
The hugely popular 兄者弟者 (Siblings) YouTube channel has seemingly shared the footage by official sanction from Konami, which suggests this shouldn't get struck or pulled down by a pesky copyright notice. Which is just as well, as the video's only been out a few days, and it's already clocked up over half a million views.
Consider this your warning to read no further and be aware of video clips online if you're looking to avoid spoilers altogether ahead of release.
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Embracer-owned studio Lost Boys Interactive is facing another round of layoffs.
Writing on LinkedIn, the studio said it had "made the very difficult decision to reduce our overall headcount in accordance with local laws and consultation processes". It noted Lost Boys needed to "adapt to shifting market conditions" within the video game industry, which has seen multiple layoffs and studio closures in recent years.
Lost Boys said it is "committed to supporting our affected staff in finding new positions as quickly as possible". Additionally, Lost Boys will "collaborate with other studios and recruiters to help connect them with job opportunities" (thanks, VGC).
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Sony has quietly increased the price of a DualSense controller for its PlayStation 5 console.
As spotted by social media account Wario64, the price of various DualSense colour models has increased by $5 in multiple US retailers, but more importantly on Sony's official store PlayStation Direct.
The basic white DualSense controller has increased from $69.99 to $74.99. Over on the UK PlayStation Direct site, the same controller costs £64.99 - up from £59.99 previously.
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Baldur's Gate 3's latest and much-anticipated seventh patch is here, and we're already making the most of it. As announced by Larian Studios' Swen Vincke, "modding is pretty big - we had more than a million mods installed in less than 24 hours".
Fans have taken it even further, though, with one uploading a mod that "unlocks all the disabled features and enables writer permissions for the Baldur's Gate 3 toolkit", which includes level editing, save editing, "and more".
The BG3 Toolkit Unlocked mod - now available over at NexusMods (thanks, PC Gamer) - is especially exciting because it essentially gives Baldur's Gate 3's own community the ability to develop and add whole new areas, quests, and campaigns.
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We all know The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom was (and still is) called The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, but once upon a time Nintendo was thinking of a slightly different name for its Breath of the Wild follow-up.
Please be aware of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom spoilers below.
According to Tears of the Kingdom's producer Eiji Aonuma, the team was once thinking about calling the game Tears of the Dragon. However, there was concern this would put too much emphasis on some key plot points within the game.
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Every time I come to play Link's Awakening, there's one moment I always look forward to: getting Roc's Feather. That first dungeon treasure can never come soon enough, as it's the all-important item that lets Link jump about like he's suddenly grown a pair of kangaroo legs. It's oddly freeing in many ways - not just as a traversal tool, but the feel of it - the glide, the airtime, the speed - is just so perfectly engineered to give you pitch-perfect control over Link's movements.
It's a sensation that developer Pocket Trap have perfectly recreated in Pipistrello and the Cursed Yoyo, a top-down adventure that sees you spin, grind and leap across the screen as the young yoyo master Pippit Pipistrello, whose aunt's spirit gets trapped in said yoyo when their home gets attacked by some shady corporate crime barons. So begins Pippit's quest to save his family and take revenge on the mob bosses who are now running rife in their fair city.
In fact, Pocket Trap's homage to Nintendo's handheld Zelda games even goes as far as framing the whole of Pipistrello as a (completely legally distinct) Game Boy Advance cartridge that you boot up the moment you come to play it. It certainly looks the part, too, as its colourful sprites and sparky chiptune soundtrack do a brilliant job of capturing that specific era of 2D platformers, right down to the twhip-twhip sound effects that make every one of Pippit's yoyo strikes feel just like one of Link's sword chops.
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Amazon's Fallout adaptation now has two Emmy awards to its name.
The show, which was released earlier this year on Amazon Prime, follows the story of Ella Purnell's Lucy, Walton Goggins' Ghoul and Aaron Moten's Brotherhood of Steel member Maximus as they each make their way through the post-apocalyptic wasteland with varying degrees of success.
The series quickly became a hit for the streaming service, with scores of praise across the industry. Our own Fallout review called it "a lovely, if blood-spattered, surprise", while Fallout's original creator Tim Cain had nothing but praise for the adaptation.
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You know how humans will sometimes say "Well, there's good news and there's bad news"? And you know how that clues you in on there being good news as well as bad news so that you wait until you have the whole picture before you start rending garments and gnashing teeth and shaking your fist at the skies? Well, that's not how Nintendo handles emails about ceasing support for its freemium mobile game, Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp.
No.
Instead, in amongst your inbox's LinkedIn spam, the verification requests from that one persistent person attempting to hack your travel site account, and the messages from a Google alert regarding Casualty and Holby City actors appearing in pantomime this Christmas in the UK, you find an email titled "Notice of end of service for Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp".
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Astro Bot is set to receive DLC with more yet-to-be-revealed VIP bots, though the game's credits hint towards which characters we may see.
The free DLC will arrive this year, confirmed Team Asobi's Nicolas Doucet in an interview with Quest Daily, but it will be "small" and focus on speedruns following its popularity in Astro's Playroom. Leaderboards will be included.
What's more, "some characters that we didn't include yet will appear," said Doucet.
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Merciless. That's what this man is. Every enemy you encounter – every identikit soldier in combat fatigues, their red, dead, bug-like masks obscuring the human faces beneath them – will succumb to the same fate as you slip past, corpses hitting the ground before they even realise they're dead. Such is the life of a contract killer, I guess.
I Am Your Beast is glorious. Gloriously brutal and bloody and brash and intense in that Superhot, Children of the Sun way that means I can only play in fifteen-minute bursts for fear of giving myself an aneurysm. You barely have time to breathe as blood and bullets fly past, let alone carefully plot your route, which means much of your initial playthrough will be a panicked scramble as you shoot, punch, parkour, and plunder anything and everything that gets in the way between your position and the hatch that leads you the hell away from here. With even the longest level in the entire three-hour-ish playtime clocking in under two minutes, there's no time for mistakes, either. Mistime, misthrow, or misfire anything, and it's over. This time, anyway.
You fly through pulpy, comic-book shoot-em-up I Am Your Beast as Agent Alphonse Harding, an assassin born, and arguably broken, by the US military. Despite revelling in retirement – and by revelling, I mean embracing his hermit era out in a frozen forest in the middle of nowhere – handler Burkin asks you to do one last job one time too many. He doesn't take kindly to your refusal, and you don't take too kindly to that, either. To use his own expression, Harding "snaps", and for the next three-ish hours, you're on a one-man murder spree.
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Tales of the Shire: A Lord of the Rings Game has been delayed.
The upcoming cosy Hobbit life sim from Wētā Workshop and Private Division was initially slated for a release in the latter half of this year, across Nintendo Switch, PC, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S.
"All of us here at Wētā Workshop are excited to have you join us in the Shire, a peaceful corner of J. R. R Tolkien's world. When a new Hobbit steps into Bywater for the very first time, we want that moment to be everything you're hoping for," the Tales of the Shire studio wrote last night, announcing the delay.
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The Communications Workers of America union (CWA) has denounced Microsoft's decision to lay off an additional 650 video game workers yesterday as "extremely disappointing".
In a statement, the CWA said that as one of the world's "largest and most profitable corporations", Microsoft could have achieved its goals for "long-term success without destroying the livelihoods of 650 of our colleagues".
Whilst the union acknowledges that organising does not "always protect against layoffs", "collective bargaining does give workers a voice in the policies that affect them, including how layoffs are handled".
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