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It's been a pretty interesting year in terms of hardware; with the launch of the PS4 Slim and PS4 Pro, Sony's console managed to get both thinner and thicker. Then there was PSVR, which gave people a reason to own Playstation Move controllers again.

Spec reveals are never easy. Months - sometimes years - of anticipation build after initial teasers. Rumours circulate, patent applications are scoured for hints of what the platform holders might be planning, anonymous sources spring up telling us exactly what we want to hear - and then reality hits. Recently, Venturebeat essentially reconfirmed a Digital Foundry report from July, revealing that Nintendo Switch is based on Nvidia's Tegra X1, featuring a GPU based on second generation Maxwell technology. For those hoping for Xbox One power in a portable, it was a blow. Uncertainty remains on how Nintendo has customised the X1 processor, but we can go one step further today in revealing how the power of the console adjusts as Switch transitions from home console into a full portable.

A note from the editor: Jelly Deals is a new deals site launched by our parent company, Gamer Network, with a mission to find the best bargains out there. (It also has the best name.) We've invited the Jelly Deals team to share a weekly roundup of (mostly) gaming-related bargains with us, so we can pass their tips on to you. Full disclosure: if you make a purchase from one of these links, we will receive a small commission from the retailer. Hopefully you'll find it useful!

It happened: Nostalrius has begun all over again, reopening on Saturday having been shut down by Blizzard earlier this year.

Strip away the cinematic camera angles from Street Fighter 5's Critical Art super moves and they look very different indeed.

Grand Theft Auto 5 has just passed the 6m copies sold mark in the UK.

A very early version of Star Marine, the first-person shooter portion of space game Star Citizen, is now available to play.

The Dynasty Warriors series continues, as if there was any doubt, and this time it's going open world.

LittleBigPlanet creator Media Molecule announced its next PlayStation 4 game, Dreams, at E3 2015. We've not seen or heard much about it since.

Square Enix Japan has put out a lovely new gameplay video for Dragon Quest 11.

I can't see it much myself, but Deathwing is supposed to be Warhammer 40k's take on Left 4 Dead. Sure its multiplayer game is co-op only (and its campaign fed by AI bots), with you and up to three others up against relentless hordes of skittering horrors, but Left 4 Dead's clever narrative framework, its dynamic stage direction and cast of sarcastic characters are hard to make out in Deathwing's grim darkness of the far future. What you get is more of a glorified survival mode stretched thin over nine large levels, with you and your Terminator Space Marine buddies under regular assault by waves of Alien-inspired creatures as you stomp a steady path from one distant objective to the next.

Welcome to your weekly round-up of the video goings-on over at Outside Xbox, where this week we enjoyed a sandboxy nostalgia trip through Yooka-Laylee.

Welcome to the world of Digital Foundry Retro. Every weekend - or as frequently as we can schedule it - DF Retro brings us a new story based on a significant release in gaming history, backed by exemplary, clean capture taken using original console hardware. It's a great way to revisit the classics while reflecting on what made each game so special in its day. Check back often for brand new episodes as we update this article with the latest videos.

When it comes to licensing and promotion, George Lucas has never been shy. After completing Star Wars: A New Hope in 1977, the writer/director spent considerable time and effort fine-tuning the subsequent marketing assault. Toys, books, lunchboxes and an R2-D2 spatula all appeared, some of them taking a side-step away from the main characters of the movies, creating their own stories, heroes and villains; some of them taking those familiar characters and putting them in unfamiliar settings.

A note from the editor: Jelly Deals is a new deals site launched by our parent company, Gamer Network, with a mission to find the best bargains out there. (It also has the best name.) We've invited the Jelly Deals team to share a weekly roundup of (mostly) gaming-related bargains with us, so we can pass their tips on to you. Full disclosure: if you make a purchase from one of these links, we will receive a small commission from the retailer. Hopefully you'll find it useful!

Putting together the Digital Foundry platform comparisons aren't easy. Pristine, lossless captures are acquired quickly filling multi-terabyte RAID arrays, clips are meticulously lined up, shots are extracted, magnified and compared. And then of course, performance is tested. But what if we could carry out most of the Face-Off process in one pass? What if we could play two versions of the same game simultaneously while grabbing all the capture data we need in the background? Well, that's what we're doing here in this video presentation, where John Linneman and I play Knack on PS4 and PS4 Pro using a single Dual Shock 4 controller, with two screens side-by-side.

Quite possibly the most impressive technological achievement in the console space last year was Xbox One backward compatibility, a virtual machine that somehow - miraculously - managed to run Xbox 360 titles on Microsoft's latest console. Progress has continued on this brilliant feature, to the point where we reckon it has a good shout in staking a claim as the most impressive console technological achievement of 2016 too. We've demonstrated time and again this year how Xbox One is now running Xbox 360 titles faster and more smoothly than original hardware - but this week's release of the BioShock trilogy highlights just how much faster it can be.

In the very early days of video game development, most studios designed their graphics and levels on graph paper. At Atari in the 1970s, legendary designers like Ed Logg and Carol Shaw didn't have access to personal computers, instead they sketched out their ideas on paper, then hand coded them into a shared central terminal, line by line. Graph paper is also how Nintendo planned out the Super Mario Bros titles, every section of the landscape drawn on vast maps which were passed between artists and programmers, gathering hand drawn corrections as they went. The iconic Pac-Man maze existed first as a drawing. This is also how I started making and, crucially, thinking about games. But of course, on a much more modest scale.

Overwatch's new Winter Wonderland event sought to highlight fan-favourite climatologist Mei by giving the character her own Snowball Offensive mode, but Blizzard's good intentions backfired as the developer saddled her seasonal content with a disappointingly lackluster Legendary skin. In fact, Mei's high-end holiday garb received such a poor reception that Blizzard has apologised for it.

After its iOS launch yesterday Super Mario Run is doing the business on the App Store, where it's on track to smash Pokémon GO's record of 5.6m downloads in three days.

Silent Hill: Shattered Memories and Assassin's Creed Chronicles developer Climax Studios just announced a new surfing game entitled Surf World Series.

Super Mario Run, Mario's first foray onto mobile, is now live on the App Store.

Rebellion's PlayStation VR remake of 80's classic arcade tank shooter Battlezone is getting a retro option to mimic the vector graphics of its source material.

Isometric action-RPG Victor Vran is coming to PS4 and Xbox One in 2017.

Asymmetrical horror game Dead by Daylight is having a free weekend on Steam.

Remember the weird-looking NPC in Assassin's Creed The Ezio Collection? You know, the one with the clown face? Ubisoft patched him - his face - out of the game.

UPDATE 16th December 2016: Hello dear readers! We've kept a close eye on the feedback to our new article recommendation system and I'd like to update you on a few tweaks we're making to the way it works.

Happy New Year to you! And what better way to ease you into the undiscovered country of 2016 than with a look back at the games of last year? And with a Shakespeare reference that we only know because of Star Trek.

Street Fighter 5 suffered a big leak overnight, and it revealed Capcom plans to shame rage quitters by branding their fighter profile.

Final Fantasy 15! It's either one of the best Final Fantasy games since the series' heyday, or a travesty that doesn't deserve to bear the Final Fantasy name. Well, it's so divisive that it must be a Final Fantasy game, given how fans have never really found a consensus on what the best game in the series could possibly be.