Video Games
Latest Andru Edwards Videos
Nintendo’s Free Switch 2 Update Crams Eight Mario Kart Players Onto One Screen
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Handhelds, Video Games,
Picture your TV chopped into eight little rectangles, each one holding a friend, a kart, and a red shell with their name on it. That's now something you can do in your living room.
Nintendo pushed out a free Switch 2 update for Mario Kart 8 Deluxe with no real warning, and the big change is local split-screen for eight players, up from a cap of four. This is a game that shipped on Wii U in 2014 and again on Switch in 2017. Twelve years on, it's still growing new features.
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The Switch 2 Costs $500 Today, and $450 Is Probably Gone for Good
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Handhelds, Video Games,
Consoles are supposed to get cheaper as they get older. Starting today, the Nintendo Switch 2 costs $50 more than it did yesterday, and yesterday was the last day you can buy one at the price it shipped with.
Nintendo of America moved the standard Switch 2 from $449.99 to $499.99 on September 1, 2026. That is the plain box: console, two Joy-Con, no game. If you have been circling this purchase since launch, you have until stores close.
Click to continue reading The Switch 2 Costs $500 Today, and $450 Is Probably Gone for Good
Xbox Disc to Digital Is Live for Insiders, and Your Series S Can’t Play Along
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Microsoft, Video Games,
There is a shelf in a lot of living rooms that has turned into a problem. Fifty Xbox games, maybe two hundred, and a growing suspicion that the next console you buy won't have anywhere to put them. Microsoft's answer started reaching Xbox Insiders on Monday, and the pitch is refreshingly boring. Put the disc in, launch the game, keep the digital copy.
Xbox announced the feature on its blog on August 26 and filled in details during a Gamescom livestream with Jason Ronald. Insert a supported disc into an Xbox One or Xbox Series X, start the game, and you claim a digital entitlement tied to that disc. The disc keeps working exactly as it always has. You just stop needing it in the tray.
Nvidia’s DLSS 5 Ships September 3, and It Changes What the Artists Drew
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: PC / Laptop, Video Games, Artificial Intelligence,
Every version of DLSS so far has been a clever way to draw the picture developers already designed. Render fewer pixels, let the AI fill in the rest, get your frame rate back. DLSS 5 is different. It reaches into the finished frame and adds detail that nobody at the studio put there.
It ships September 3 alongside NBA 2K27, it runs only on RTX 50-series cards, and Nvidia calls it 3D-guided neural rendering. The pitch is that it puts back what real-time budgets force studios to cut: light scattering under skin, light passing through hair and foliage, contact shadows, ambient occlusion. The reception so far has been rough. Early demos built on Resident Evil: Requiem and Starfield drew a pile of complaints about faces that landed square in the uncanny valley, and a leaked build that modders bolted onto older games made the criticism louder.
Click to continue reading Nvidia’s DLSS 5 Ships September 3, and It Changes What the Artists Drew
Godot Just Got Raytraced Sound, and a Solo Dev Built It
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Mods / Hacks, Software, Video Games,
Every time a game makes you feel like you are standing in a concrete stairwell, somebody put that stairwell there by hand. A sound designer drew a box around the space, tagged it with a reverb preset, drew another box around the doorway so footsteps muffle when you round the corner, then did it again for every other room in the level. It works. It is also an enormous amount of tedious labor, and it stops being true the second a player knocks a hole in a wall.
Vercidium, a game developer who has spent the past year posting audio experiments to YouTube, released a plugin for Godot that does the job the other way around. It traces sound the way a renderer traces light. Rays bounce off the real geometry of your level, lose energy to whatever they hit, and what reaches the player is whatever survives the trip. Nobody draws a box around anything.
Click to continue reading Godot Just Got Raytraced Sound, and a Solo Dev Built It
Sony Tells a Judge That Thinking You Own Your PlayStation Games Is Unreasonable
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Corporate News, Video Games,
You've clicked a button that says Buy. On the PlayStation Store it says Buy Now, then Confirm Purchase, and then the money leaves your account and the game shows up in your library. Sony's lawyers have now told a federal judge that if you walked away from that thinking you bought something, your understanding wasn't a reasonable one.
That's the argument in a motion Sony filed on August 21 in Heycock v. Sony Corporation of America, the proposed class action over PlayStation Store checkout language now in front of Judge Vince Chhabria in San Francisco. Sony's filing says "reasonable consumers would not be misled" into believing they own the digital games they buy, and that its checkout already does what California law asks, because you agree to the license terms before the purchase goes through. The Software Product License Agreement puts it flatly: "The software is licensed to you, not sold."
Rockstar Says GTA 6 Has No Microtransactions and No AI. Now Ask About GTA Online.
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Editorial, Video Games, Artificial Intelligence,
Ask a game executive about monetization and you normally get a paragraph with an escape hatch built into it. Rockstar North co-studio head Rob Nelson gave reporters two short answers instead: there is no monetization in Grand Theft Auto 6, and no generative AI in it either.
That comes from Kinda Funny's Andy Cortez and Greg Miller, who each put the question to Nelson during press visits to the studio and reported the answers on the Kinda Funny Gamecast. Cortez asked whether you can use real-world money to buy things in the game and got "no monetization." Miller says he asked point blank whether AI is in the game and got "no AI." A New York Times feature on GTA VI published August 27 lands in the same place, and reports that Rockstar emphasized the game's human-made craft.
Xbox Says Project Helix Is a ‘Family of Devices.’ The Rest Is Still a Guess.
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Corporate News, Microsoft, Video Games,
Every console generation starts with a word you're supposed to read a lot into. This time the word is "family."
Speaking to the BBC at gamescom, Xbox CEO Asha Sharma said the company has "been hard at work on a great next generation and a great family of devices for Helix, and we'll share more soon." Project Helix is the code name for whatever follows the Series X and Series S. Sharma didn't say how many devices are in that family, what any of them are, or when you could buy one.
Stealing a car in Grand Theft Auto has taken about as much effort as opening a door for two decades now. Walk up, hold a button, drive away. In Grand Theft Auto VI, that stops working on a lot of cars.
Rob Nelson, co-studio head at Rockstar North, told IGN the studio has "put some layers of stratification into the vehicles." Before, "you could just press triangle to automatically hotwire and steal any vehicle." Now certain parked cars stay shut to you "until you get a bit further along with the story and you acquire certain tools to get into them." Carjacking is untouched. In Nelson's words, "You can always carjack any driver you see."
Click to continue reading GTA 6 Is Making You Work for Stolen Cars
DLSS 5 Leaked Out of NBA 2K27, and Modders Already Have It Running in Control
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Mods / Hacks, PC / Laptop, Video Games,
A basketball game is a strange place to find Nvidia's next graphics technology, and yet here we are. NBA 2K27 went into early access this week carrying a file called nvngx_dlssnr.dll, short for DLSS Neural Rendering. Developer Renan Maniero spotted it. Within hours, modders had pulled it out and forced it into games it was never meant to touch.
DLSS 5 has not launched. Nvidia announced it in March and said it would arrive this fall, and a library buried in a basketball build is not a release. What people are running today is an unfinished piece of software that escaped early, injected into titles with no official support for it, at settings nobody outside Nvidia fully understands yet.