Gaming

He’ll play a character named Joey who wasn’t in the games. Ian Alexander, who voiced Lev in The Last of Us: Part II, will play opposite him as another original character, Paco. Laura Bailey, who voiced Abby in the game, will join the cast as Elizabeth, a leader of the Seraphites cult.

The original 1986 NES Castlevania is available for free on iOS and Android until October 24th, arriving ahead of the newest title in the series, Castlevania: Belmont’s Curse, launching on October 15th.

As distressing as it is to see the mutants in Zach Cregger’s Resident Evil up on the big screen, it’s very cool to see the experimental stunt work that went into the monsters’ creation.

One thing I was really missing from Control Resonant was a photo mode, but thankfully Remedy says that the feature is being added in November, so you’ll be able snap some beautiful shots of bizarro Manhattan. Before that, a New Game++ mode is being added next month.

11 years after the game first launched, the free upgrade for The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt hit RPG includes improved visuals, combat mechanics, UI designs, and more. It’s rolling out on September 29th, and you can now check the release map below for the exact global availability timings. Happy hunting!

The biopic arrives on Prime Video on November 18th, starring Cage as the famed NFL coach. The full trailer and some new photos also give a first look at the rest of the cast, including John Mulaney as EA founder Trip Hawkins and Christian Bale as Raiders owner Al Davis, as well as Kathryn Hahn, Sienna Miller, and Shane Gillis.

To celebrate 30 years of Lara Croft’s adventures, reskinned versions of the $119.99 8BitDo Ultimate 3 for Xbox and $79.99 Pro 3 Bluetooth Gamepad are now available for preorder with an official release starting on October 24th.

Not only is the price higher than the $90 GTA IV and $150 GTA V collectible sets, but this time around Rockstar says “Grand Theft Auto VI game sold separately,” for $79.99 or $99.99, respectively.

The hotfix will reduce the base health and amount of damage needed to stun “most” enemies. I just published an article about how I made liberal use of Resonant’s assist mode to make the combat less of a drag, but it sounds like these changes will make things a bit smoother.

Next year, you’ll be able to play versions of Beat Saber, Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney — Dual Destinies, and Tetris Effect in VR on the glasses just with your hands — no controller needed. When the glasses launch in the spring, Meta says more than 75 hands-enabled games will be available.

Although accessing the cooling fan requires quite a bit of disassembly and swapping out the battery involves a brief battle with glue, iFixit says Valve has applied the same “repair-friendly thinking” to the Steam Frame’s design as it did with the Steam Deck helping to potentially prolong the headset’s lifespan.

First announced last March with shipping in late June, the tiny Atom Plus is finally available from retailers like Amazon for $29.99. It’s slightly wider than the 8BitDo Micro but CRKD’s palmable gamepad adds a symmetrical pair of tunneling magnetoresistance (TMR) thumbsticks and two pairs of full-size shoulder buttons.

While Undead Labs is avoiding closing as Xbox’s assortment of developers continues to shrink, the studio announced on LinkedIn that “Unfortunately, today we are also saying goodbye to a significant number of our colleagues. It’s difficult to reach this moment knowing that not everyone who helped get us here gets to make the rest of the journey with us.”

It may not benefit every setup, the company warns, but Pyrowave is a new Steam Remote Play high bandwidth, low latency video codec now available in Steam beta on macOS, Windows, and Linux. It uses “5-10 times the amount of bandwidth of other streaming codecs,” but leverages your PC’s GPU to “encode and decode frames to achieve extremely low end to end latency with a good network.”

After first teasing their designs last November, the $99.99 E Ink and $89.99 Pixel Matrix magnetic faceplates are now available for preorder from Jsaux’s online store. The Verge’s Sean Hollister got some hands-on time with both displays and while the colorful pixelated faceplate needs a constant USB-C connection to the console, the E Ink is wireless with Bluetooth and a battery.

State of Decay 3 developer Undead Labs is now an independent employee-owned studio. It’s the third studio to successfully separate from Xbox, after Double Fine and Compulsion Games did the same recently. “Development of State of Decay 3 remains actively underway at Undead Labs,” says the team. The game is still planned to release in 2027 on Xbox (and Game Pass), PC, and PlayStation.

Nvidia is releasing a new Game Ready driver today, in preparation for the release of AION 2, Control Resonant, Gears of War: E-Day, and The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt - Remastered. The driver includes optimizations for all four games, as well as enabling DLSS 4.5 Ray Reconstruction in Control Resonant.

Microsoft is due to announce another round of Xbox layoffs today, according to sources familiar with the company’s plans. The cuts will reportedly be part of a larger restructuring, with The Information reporting that Microsoft plans to “consolidate several of its game studios.” Today’s layoffs will reportedly affect hundreds of employees, and are part of the 3,200 Xbox layoffs that Microsoft is planning by the end of June 2027.

A system for “contextually aware” ads described in the patent application could pause gameplay “at the operating system level” to show an ad when certain in-game events or triggers happen. For instance, players might get an ad break after a boss fight or when their avatar “is determined to be in a safe location, such as the user’s team base.”

I didn’t just review Valve’s Steam Frame last week — I spent a whole lot of time talking about the headset with fellow reviewers. I interviewed CNET’s Scott Stein about his review on The Vergecast, then Aftermath’s Chris Person turned the tables on me for Aftermath Hours, too!

Microsoft’s DLSS competitor isn’t just for Qualcomm laptops and Xbox Ally X anymore — the MSI Claw EX handheld and anything else Intel Core Ultra Series 3 should now qualify. Microsoft claims it’s enough to play at ultra instead of high, among other examples, and I see the hard-to-find Claw EX is now back in stock at B&H, MSI, and ExcaliberPC.

It says mods aren’t allowed to “expand or modify” official storylines, plots, missions, or characters. The updated policy also bans crossover mods that combine content from one Rockstar game into another, like maps or characters from previous GTA games, and limits multiplayer mods to Rockstar’s official Creator Platform.

Valve’s 0.3.0 update for Steam Frame claims “Substantially faster charging while unit is off / sleeping.” It’s true. I used to see 8-watt charging when plugging in a dead unit, and 27-watt charging at peak. Now I’m getting 19-21W charging right away and up to 42W in game.