Latest Articles (Page 1243)
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Black Friday week is biggest for PS4 hardware sales since console launch
Pokémon Sun and Moon combined sales top chart.
More PlayStation 4 consoles were sold in the UK last week than at any point since the system's November 2013 launch.
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Big Battlefield 2 mod Project Reality adds the Falklands War
And World War 2 is next.
Project Reality is one of the biggest, most in-depth mods for Battlefield 2 - and it's just been updated to add the Falklands War.
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Street Fighter 5 mod puts Overwatch's Sombra in the game
I'd play Overwatch vs Capcom.
The inevitable has happened: a Street Fighter 5 mod has made Sombra from Overwatch playable in the game.
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Recommended | Islands: Non-Places review
Either Augé.
Islands, as its titular addendum 'Non-Places' insinuates, is a game about those non-descript patches of no-man's land through which we all pass en route to where we're going. It's the baggage carousel in the airport, with its melancholy conga of luggage. It's the bus shelter, with its plastic seats, bathed in the white light of an advertising screen. It's the hotel lobby, with its deep chairs and bowed pot-plants. This is a surrealist study of architecture's supporting cast in which you're forced to consider and prod, at length, at the places that nobody ever cares about, or thinks about, or notices.
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Digital Foundry | Alienware Alpha R2 review
The ultra-compact gaming PC gets a big graphics upgrade.
Three years into their respective lifecycles, Xbox One and PlayStation 4 have relaunched in smaller, slimmer incarnations - but neither of them holds a candle to the Alienware Alpha's form-factor. It remains an absolutely tiny, ultra-cute piece of PC technology - and this new R2 incarnation is now a whole lot more powerful, having swapped out its Nvidia GTX 860M for a new range of GPU options, the flagship model boasting a GeForce GTX 960.
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Video | Watch: Careless caregivers who shouldn't be put in charge of kids, probably
Plus more videos from Outside Xbox.
Welcome to your weekly sampler of videos from Outside Xbox, where this week we were bemoaning the quality of childcare in video games.
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No Man's Sky studio breaks silence, announces base building and more in huge Foundation update
UPDATE: Live now, and here's everything it adds.
UPDATE 27/11/16 11.00am: No Man's Sky has now been patched with its big Foundation Update, which adds base building, freighters, farming, options for creative and survival modes and a lot more.
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Feature | Burnout Paradise is gaming perfection
Axel roads.
Editor's note: As Burnout Paradise finally arrives on the backwards compatibility list for Xbox One, we thought it was time to revisit this astonishing game.
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Feature | Finishing Final Fantasy
Inside the team working to complete the most troubled Final Fantasy game ever made.
Editor's note: Hello! This piece originally ran in early November, but it seemed entirely appropriate to republish it this morning, now that a truly monumental piece of game development is finally reaching its conclusion. Enjoy!
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Digital Foundry | How does PS4 Pro improve the PlayStation VR experience?
Digital Foundry puts a number of Pro-enabled virtual reality titles to the test.
Some might say that the new PlayStation 4 Pro is better equipped for enhanced VR gaming as opposed to its stated purpose of adapting titles for ultra HD displays. Effectively doubling GPU power over base hardware opens up a range of options for improving PlayStation VR titles - an area where smooth frame-rates take priority over image quality or graphical features on standard PS4 hardware. So the question is simple: to what extent does PSVR benefit with a PS4 Pro upgrade?
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Ninja Theory's Hellblade shaping up well but 2016 release iffy
When will it be devilered?
In the year since I played it, Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice appears significantly improved. A steady stream of developer diary videos, the most recent published yesterday, show a game looking much more the blockbuster production British developer Ninja Theory is known for - no small feat for the studio's first self-published, smaller-team game.
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Video | Watch: 7 game characters who should definitely avoid being in a stealth game, thanks
Smashing.
Between Emily and Corvo's quest for revenge in Dishonored 2 and Agent 47's episodic antics in Hitman, 2016 has been pretty kind to stealth game protagonists. They're a special bunch, when you think about it - surviving a stealth game requires cunning, poise and nerves of steel. In other words, being the hero or heroine of a stealth game isn't for everyone.
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Feature | Should games and politics ever mix?
Ellie Gibson on Juice Jam and fascism.
"What are you playing at the moment?" I dread being asked this question. I always feel like I should reply, "Oh, just this really cool hand-drawn physics-based puzzler inspired by the plot of The Cherry Orchard. It's being developed by an indie studio called Robot Avocado. They're based in Dalston and it's basically this guy Jude and his Jack Russell, Amis. You won't have heard of it."
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Video | Watch: Ian introduces Chris to the Atari Jaguar (and its controller inserts)
In this week's Late to the Party.
If you've been following our weekly series Late to the Party, you might have caught the episode in which Ian subjected - sorry, introduced - Chris to the delights of loading a tape into the ZX Spectrum. After several crashes and a somewhat abortive run at Fantasy World Dizzy, the video team's youngest member might have thought he was done with retro consoles. He would have been wrong.
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Ditto finally released into Pokémon Go
And how you catch him Transforms the game.
Months after launch, you can finally catch Ditto in mobile hit Pokémon Go.
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Feature | How Football Manager 2017 is making football fans panic about Brexit
It's coming home, it's coming.
Brexit means Brexit, according to Theresa May. But what does that actually mean? Aside from the fact that it means tautology is totally back in fashion, we honestly don't have a bleeding clue what Brexit is at the moment.
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Video | Watch: We found a recipe in Dishonored 2 and decided to cook it
Dish Honored.
Dishonored 2 is not short on things for you to read as you slink about the place. Just as unconscious guards get stuffed into bins and back alleys, Karnaca is stuffed with letters, notices, diaries and edicts to peruse when you aren't knifing an unsuspecting guard in the spleen. These random texts even, as I was surprised to discover during the game's third mission, contain the occasional recipe.
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Mass Effect Andromeda will leave some familiar alien races behind
But they could show up in sequels.
Mass Effect Andromeda is a fresh start for BioWare's sci-fi series, and far removed from Mass Effect 3 - so much so it's set in a different galaxy and 600 years into the future.
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Titanfall 2, Dishonored 2, Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare, Watch Dogs 2 - the list of big-budget games that have failed to live up to sales expectations this year is a surprisingly long one. Well, there's one game that's smashed sales expectation - and it did it without guns, hacking or wall running. It did it with...
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People are using the new Steam Awards to remind Valve that, yes, pretty much everyone wants Half-Life 3.
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Digital Foundry | Face-Off: Dishonored 2
A sub-par PC port takes on Xbox One, PS4 and PS4 Pro.
We can't kick off a Dishonored 2 platform comparison without first discussing just how remarkably poor the PC version is. We're not going to dwell too much on this because the backlash against the product is already intense enough, but let's put it this way - we've tested the title with an overclocked Core i7 4790K paired with Titan X Pascal and remarkably, it has trouble hitting 60fps at 1080p. Clearly, a fundamental re-evaluation of the PC version is required beyond the brace of patches seen so far. It's stunning to think that this title actually shares technological underpinnings with Doom 2016 - a title that runs maxed-out at over 100fps at 4K on the same hardware. Things do seem to be improving (the first patch could see the same Titan-powered system trough out at 38fps in full HD resolution) but the product had no business shipping in that state.
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Amazon slashes prices on Dishonored 2 and Watch Dogs 2 for Black Friday
UPDATE: Dishonored 2 and FIFA 17 now down to £29.99
UPDATE 25/11/16 09:55am There's an ongoing price-matching battle between different retailers, and Amazon has now nudged down some prices and increased a couple of others. Dishonored 2 and FIFA 17 are now down to £29.99, there's a pound off the 1TB Xbox One bundle with FIFA, Forza and Force Awakens, and Just Dance 2017 is now unmissable at £19.99. Titanfall 2 is down to £28 - but that's nowhere near HMV.
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Titanfall 2, Gears 4 price plunge at HMV on Black Friday
UPDATE: PC version £25 on Amazon now.
UPDATE 23/11/16 9.40am: It's live. HMV's ridiculous £19.99 price for Titanfall 2 on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One is available now, although stock has been reported as limited.
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The Tomorrow Children is a PlayStation 4-exclusive game published and trademarked by Sony Interactive Entertainment, and yet you can now nab a mobile spin-off for iPhone and Android.
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Interview | Capcom Vancouver defends Dead Rising 4's "super-polarising" changes
New zombie types, boss characters and the world explained.
The first Dead Rising is celebrated and despised in equal measure for its campaign timer, whereby certain events play out independently of the player over the course of the story. It's a system that obliges you to be in exactly the right place at the right time if you want to meet (or save) certain characters, learn the origins of the zombie plague, or simply uncover every amusing quirk the world has to offer.
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Feature | What Zelda can learn from Skyrim
Because you can teach an old dog new tricks.
While the original Legend Of Zelda was definitely a pioneer in terms of a game being set in an open world, it's the upcoming Breath of the Wild where the series has truly embraced what the genre is known for today. With a sweeping landscape and the always appealing selling point of 'if you see it, you can travel there', in many ways it's brand new territory for Nintendo. And with that comes a lot of anticipation, excitement and intrigue.
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Firewatch's excellent score gets a vinyl version
From the composer of Gone Home and Thirty Flights of Loving.
Somber literary drama Firewatch is getting a vinyl release for its excellent soundtrack.
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Digital Foundry | Samsung KU6400 4K TV review
A feature-packed display for PS4 Pro and PC gaming, starting from £479 - but what's the catch?
Samsung's KU6400 series comes in many different sizes, but here, we're reviewing the 40-inch version - a display we chose as a potential 4K screen for PS4 Pro, Xbox One S or PC users in a smaller office or bedroom gaming environment. It packs 4K pixel density into a 40-inch form factor that also features support for HDR. Combined with a VA panel for deep blacks, low input lag and Samsung's generally excellent calibration controls, we're looking at potentially outstanding performance with a budget price tag. Right now, the 40-inch KU6400 is available for just £479 - only £80 more than Samsung's 1080p K550. It's sounds like a bargain, but what's the catch?
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Digital Foundry | Panasonic DX750 ultra HD 4K TV review
Excellent 4K picture quality and HDR performance for PS4 Pro and Xbox One S.
When we went looking for a 4K TV for HDR gaming, our options were limited, with most displays either locking out game mode when high dynamic range content is fed to the screen or simply not displaying HDR correctly. At the time this ruled out most of Samsung's excellent 2016 models (which feature the lowest input lag out of all manufacturers for this year's line-up), and despite subsequent firmware updates, issues with HDR and game mode still persist across some models. LG's OLED screens are clearly the best, but the price-points are staggeringly high. However, Panasonic's 4K TVs are keenly prices and do allow game mode to run while displaying HDR properly, and with a massive 58-inch screen available for just £1199, the DX750 is the model we purchased for the Digital Foundry office. At this price-point the DX750 is something of a bargain for so much screen real estate, and performance is generally excellent too.
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Watch Dogs 2 "seamless multiplayer" finally rolling out a week from launch
UPDATE: More features now live.
UPDATE 24/11/16 3.45pm: Watch Dogs 2 developer Ubisoft has brought a second round of multiplayer features online, for both PlayStation 4 and Xbox One:
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