Marvel’s Spider-Man Remastered is landing on PC, and it’s pretty good! Co-developers Insomniac Games and Nixxes, who spoke to me this week about the port's development, have also taken the care to festoon this version of the open-world crim-puncher with various Windows-exclusive features. These span enhanced ray traced reflections and ultrawide monitor support to both Nvidia DLSS and (surprisingly, given it wasn’t in the initial PC features trailer) AMD FSR 2.0, adding to a list of visual options that already stretches into the sky like a Manhattan high rise. Let’s take a look, then, at how Marvel’s Spider-Man Remastered performs on PC – as well as the best settings to keep it swingin’ real smooth like.
]]>Marvel’s Spider-Man Remastered is the latest ex-PlayStation exclusive to rock up on PC, following a collaborative effort between original developers Insomniac Games and porting specialists Nixxes. It’s also a skyscape-swinging, baddie-decking good time, so says Alice Bee’s review, and one that comes with plenty of special features just for the Windows version. I’ll be posting a more performance-and-hardware-focused guide to it later this week, but in the meantime I called up Jurjen Katsman, founder and senior director of development at Nixxes, and Mike Fitzgerald, core technology director at Insomniac, for a chat about how Marvel’s Spider-Man Remastered makes the jump to PC.
]]>Marvel’s Spider-Man Remastered is getting more than a quick polish for its PC launch next month. A new PC features trailer has revealed the myriad of visual and technical improvements that the Windows version will wield over the PS5 edition, including ray traced reflections, Nvidia DLSS and DLAA compatibility, an uncapped framerate and ultrawide monitor support.
]]>Sony have bought another studio, after acquiring Housemarque earlier this week. This one is of particular interest to us, too. It's Nixxes Software, a "technical video game studio" responsible for, among other things, handling the PC ports for a lot of games.
]]>Earth's mightiest heroes today come crawling down your Internet pipe, offering everyone a free slice of Marvel's Avengers in an open beta weekend. The idea of a superhero game that's some sort of live service action-RPG with loot is a bit weird, so I'm curious. The beta start is staggered across the world, opening up at 9pm local time, so we here in the UK have a few hours to go but it is already live in easternmost parts of the world. You can preload the beta client while you wait.
]]>Marvel’s Avengers is a rare-earth neodymium snark magnet. It’s based on the most recognisable heroes on Earth, but starring what looks like their stunt-doubles. Though it meant Nate got to do this, it’s also made everyone a bit wary of what’s coming down our game tubes.
I imagine that Crystal Dynamics felt the best way to get ahead of that is let everyone take an extensive look at the game, which we have below. It’s splashy, swoopy, and restless, but it also adds another element of questionable authenticity: the quips are bloody awful.
]]>Earth's most lucrative heroes will reassemble in May 2020 with Marvel's Avengers, Square Enix announced today, to kick off a story that'll unfold over several years of updates. Unlike everything else to do with Marvel's marvelous moneymakers, story additions with new places and characters will be free to all players. Most importantly, yes, it will let you play superheroes with your pals and duff up baddies together in co-op. Come watch the announcement trailer.
]]>We've all seen Lara Croft's origin story a hundred times: bitten by a radioactive tomb, she gained great power and unslakeable bloodthirst, but when her father was killed in an alley by a cursed string of pearls she had herself raided, she realised she had a great responsibility to do errands for the indigenous peoples she's robbing. If you wish to once again discover how Lara Croft became The Tomb Raider, however, you're in luck as a demo for Shadow Of The Tomb Raider is out now. It offers the game's opening.
]]>The latest Tomb Raider reboot games have always been big technical showcases on PC, and Shadow of the Tomb Raider is no exception. After a slightly rocky pre-release build that's thankfully been ironed out in time for today's release (have a read of John's newly updated Shadow of the Tomb Raider review if you're still unsure), this is easily one of the most demanding games I've played all year, so I decided to chuck a load of today's best graphics cards at it to see how they all hold up.
]]>Update: We've made some substantial changes to this review to reflect the dramatic technical improvements made by the day one patch released on the 12th.
Shadow Of The Tomb Raider is, we're told, the final entry in the latest trilogy of Lara Croft adventures. And is, I'm pleased to report, by far the best of the three.
It remains a muddled affair, never quite sure what it wants to be, never certain what it wants to say. But there's plenty of fun to be had. Here's wot I think:
]]>If you wish to turn off all the objective markers, glowing item highlights, and even guiding paint splashes in Shadow Of The Tomb Raider, you will be able to. Leap and puzzle without any obvious assistance, if you please. Or if you find those handy and want all the help you can get, hey, the game will let you do that too. The game's makers have detailed its difficulty and accessibility options, and it all sounds pretty great.
]]>Just as night follows day, just as pudding follows main course, just as Westlife follows Boyzone, so too is Steam flooded with negative reviews following the release of a highly-anticipated new game. This time it's Deus Ex: Mankind Divided [official site], which was released yesterday to a mostly good critical response, but a cooler reception from PC players. Those who pointed their mecha-thumbs downwards are divided between complaints about performance, and being very upset about the inclusion of singleplayer microtransactions.
I did a quick poll of Team RPS to see how well this sucker is running on our many and various systems and, yeah, it seems like it's not exactly Captain Smooth From Smooth Town.
]]>New Rise of the Tomb Raider [official site] DLC will bring two-player co-op support to its survival mode Endurance and a whole load of things for Lara to do around Croft Manor. I like when video game people have homes. Lara will be kicking around her mansion in a new hunk o' story, as well as shooting through it in a nightmare thanks to a zombie mode. Given everything she's seen on her adventures, zombies seem relatively tame for a nightmare.
]]>This is what is so exciting about archaeology: we're always uncovering new (old) developments, learning more, and reshaping our understanding of history. As recently as yesterday, our radiocarbon dating techniques could only broadly date Rise of the Tomb Raider [official site] to a January release window. Today, a new development means that we now know a specific day: Thursday, January 28th. Isn't progress exciting! I'll be awfully disappointed if I don't see, within a week, this breakthrough attributed to Albert Einstein by a Twitter account named e.g. 'Science Is My Daddy'.
]]>NVidia have written a little apology note to all suffering with Tomb Raider graphics issues. Although I've yet to receive chocolates. I mentioned in yesterday's Tomb Raider review that I had some issues with running the game on prettier graphics, and it seems I'm not alone. Apart from the silly hair mode reducing NVidia cards to jelly, I had peculiar problems with the OSD occasionally causing the game to judder, and couldn't play above the normal settings. Extraordinarily, as spotted by Joystiq, this is because for some reason NVidia didn't receive final code of the game until the weekend before release, so didn't have a chance to create an update to accommodate it all.
]]>PC Gamer have the latest on all the different technical set-ups that Deus Ex: Human Revolution will support. First up, it'll support DirectX 11, which is great! It'll also support 3D, which is great if you don't have astigmatism and don't mind playing your video games looking like a D-list celebrity with a hangover. Finally, it'll support AMD Eyefinity, which you can see above, but don't be fooled! AMD Eyefinity doesn't just stop at three monitors- it actually supports up to six monitors, which is perfect for me, as I was wondering what to do with my five spare monitors and my five-foot long desk.
Click on through the jump to read what Jurjen Katsman, founder and president of Nixxes (the Dutch studio doing the PC version of DX:HR) told PC Gamer about DirectX 11 support. It will amaze you!
]]>I'm never quite sure how to take news that a PC version of a game is being worked on by an external studio. Volition recently named the practice as the reason for their dodgy PC ports, and have promised they will be doing all their PC development in house in future. But others use it as a means to ensure the PC version receives the extra attention it requires. Except, well, not by them. Tonight Shack News are reporting that Deus Ex: Human Revolution's PC code is being worked on by Dutch external studio, Nixxes. But Eidos are very keen to emphasise that this is a shared development, rather than just outsourcing the whole thing.
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