This is Forza Motorsport vs Gran Turismo: The Revenge, as Turn 10 and Polyphony Digital's latest works return to Digital Foundry for a proper face-off six years after our first comparison between the two racing franchises. With the power of new generation consoles and years of meticulous work behind them, Forza Motorsport (2023) and Gran Turismo 7 promise a new level of visual fidelity. Can they deliver?

To find out, we'll directly compare these two titans of racing both in-game and around the track, on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X. We'll even bring real world locales into the mix this time.

It's not a surprise that fans of each series are heavily invested in this competition - and the comparisons are fascinating even for unaffiliated onlookers, despite the comparison being little more than an academic exercise with these games appearing on wholly different platforms.

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Despite taking nearly 10 minutes on stage to promote his upcoming game at this year’s Game Awards, we don’t actually know a whole lot about Hideo Kojima’s OD, aside from the fact that it’s a horror game, has some famous actors, and makes use of Xbox’s cloud infrastructure in some way. Some internet sleuths, however,…

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Circana today released its monthly US game spending report, with the industry's total November haul taking a hit thanks to year-over-year declines in hardware and console software spending.

For the November reporting period, total game spending in the US was down 7% to $5.87 billion.

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Before I start this feature, I would be remiss not to acknowledge that the games industry is now nearly 10,000 people shorter. Writing my feature as this celebratory thing feels weird in light of that fact.

Now, I don't engage with media for escapism mostly because escaping reality is 1) not a privilege for people like myself, and 2) real-life demands that I keep essential matters in front of my mind.

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We made it. After a tumultuous 11 months of really high highs (the games) and really low lows (the layoffs), we’re finally rounding out the last month of 2023. Good riddance. And to really underscore that goodbye, we here at Kotaku thought it’d be fitting to take a look back at what felt like the longest year yet to…

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In 2023, the Fire Emblem Heroes Christmas banner stars multiple Three Houses characters and includes an Engage Yunaka cameo. People can get Byleth with Byleth as a Duo unit, as well as Dimitri or Edelgard, starting on December 14, 2023.

Dimitri, Edelgard, and the Byleth Duo unit are all five-star characters. Dimitri is a cavalry character with the Blue Yule Axe. Edelgard is an armored unit with the Black Yule Lance. The Byleth pair features the male and female versions of the avatars as armored units who wield the Holy Yule Blade sword.

Yunaka is the lone Fire Emblem Engage character, and the five-star cavalry character’s kit is based on her role as a thief. She uses a colorless ranged Silent Yule Knife to attack.  She’s also the first character in the game with the Assassin’s Strike B skill that deals seven damage to her enemy when she starts a battle, deals damage based on her opponent’s defense, and debuffs their defense and speed. 

There’s also one other character who shows up in the new trailer, but isn’t a part of the Fire Emblem Heroes Christmas banner for 2023. Claude will be able to earn at the four and five-star levels via the next Tempest Trial+. 

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The GamesIndustry.biz team gathers around their mics to reflect on the past year, as well as the biggest stories and trends we've covered.

The discussion inevitably begins with the waves of layoffs we've seen throughout 2023, and what they say about both the state of the industry and what we can expect in 2024.

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A good parry mechanic is a kind of redemption. Where blocking - aka holding a button to avoid damage - is a concession to the tedious attritional undertow of many action games, parrying - aka pressing a button on cue to cancel damage and often, prep a counter - is the act of cutting through the bullshit. It passively reduces any and all visual and thematic overwhelm the game would have you experience to a question of timing.

In the face of a good parry mechanic, the grandest of bosses are equivalent to rank-and-file mobs. You're a monster the size of a building? You're the demonic manifestation of a protagonist's mother issues? You're capitalism incarnate? You're wielding eight chainsaws at once? Ehhh. I'm not just going to survive your onslaught. I'm going to dismiss it. All of it: your absurd DPS, your multiple elemental modifiers, your screen-blanketing special effects, your overcooked core concept, the very laws of physics - poof, gone, as though they had never been. Blocking is akin to maintaining a poker face while you're being harangued by your boss over Zoom. Parrying is politely pointing out that your boss has left his camera on, and that he should probably wear trousers when he's at work. It is "nope" said so quietly that it shuts everything else up.

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The Striker’s big brother, the Striker 9, is a fantastic weapon for new and old players alike in Modern Warfare 3. Due to its ease of use, we wanted to find the best Striker 9 loadout so you can dominate in MW3 and Warzone.

After a barn-burner of a year for anime, some classics in the making have set themselves apart. These shows are must-watch material for any self-respecting anime fan, and more than deserve the distinction of being among our picks for the best anime of 2023.

If someone owns the PC version of Skullgirls 2nd Encore and the DLC on Steam, they now have early access to Marie. Hidden Variable Studios launched the Skullgirl ahead of her 2024 debut.

If someone wants to start using Marie, it is fairly easy. They need a copy of the game and either the $9.99 Marie DLC or the $34.99 Season 1 Pass. You then need to select the latest beta when launching the game. This can be done in-game in options or before you even launch it by choosing "Skullgirls Beta" from the launcher. Note that since she’s still early on, it doesn’t have everything yet. 

As for what to expect from Marie at this point, she isn’t fully balanced or complete yet. This means her moves and the damage they do might not be completely set yet. Her story, stage, and full alternate color selections won’t be around until she launches in Q1 2024. 2024 also is when she and the other Season Pass 1 DLC characters will get voice acting in their story mode tales. However, Hidden Variable did share the following completed alternate colors.

Here’s the latest trailer showing off the Steam early access version of Marie in the PC version of Skullgirls 2nd Encore.

The latest Tekken 8 character trailer focuses on Yoshimitsu, a series staple who’s been around since the first game. This video focuses on his look and moveset this time around.

The video begins with his normal introduction, as well as a look at an otherworldly stage tied to him. We get to see many of his attacks against past characters revealed, like Nina. Yoshimitsu also mentions getting revenge, with the blade “thirsting” for his opponent’s life and “avenging followers.” We get to see an example of the character's ninjitsu and sword-based attacks throughout, with the video ending with a special finisher.

Here's the full look at Yoshimitsu.

One of the special things about games, and a thing that I have always struggled to articulate, is that the good ones, the really good ones, take you deep. Have you ever noticed how small a TV screen or a computer monitor actually is? Let alone the dinky grotto skylights of a Game Boy or a Vita. These screens take up such a small portion of your overall vision, unless you're crowded in really close. But when the right game comes along, the rest of the world just irises out. You don't see the border of the screen. You don't even really get a meaningful sense of its flatness anymore. A good game draws you deep inside.

This is what William Gibson called cyberspace, I gather. He tried to picture the world on the other side of the scrolling PC monitor and a whole landscape was born. But it doesn't feel like cyberspace here very often. I always feel that I emerge from games after playing - that I have to kick my way up to the surface from deep underwater. Some games don't replace the world around them in a delicate manner so much as absolutely flood it. A great game always leaves me feeling like I've just crawled, soaking, out of the drum of a washing machine.

Bahnsen Knights is one of these games. For the few hours this week in which I played it, it was a comprehensive submerging of the rest of the world. I was in there deep, just as I have been with the other two games in the Pixel Pulp series to which Bahnsen Knights belongs: Mothmen 1966 and Varney Lake. So this is a review of Bahnsen Knights, but it really feels like a belated review of the whole Pixel Pulp project. And that's because, right at the start, I got something wrong, and it's upset me in some dim, muttering way ever since.

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This week's verdict in the antitrust trial between Epic and Google is not just a significant step forward for the former's legal crusade against app stores, but potentially a landmark moment in the evolution of the mobile market.

The jury voted unanimously that Epic won on every count, deeming the dominance of Google Play and the requirement for developers to use its billing system – entitling Google to 30% of all transactions – to be monopolistic and anti-competitive.

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Valve has asked Steam Deck owners to stop sniffing the fumes which come out of the handheld's vents.

Smelling the fumes has become something of a meme on the Steam Deck subreddit, for apparently smelling quite nice. If you search "smell" over there, you'll find a whole range of posts from people discovering the vents smell "bloody delightful", asking how to return their Steam Deck once the fan stopped smelling, and pleas for Valve to release a Steam Deck cologne or scented candle.

If Valve wasn't aware of this habit before, it definitely is now thanks to Metapod100 on Reddit, who shared a screenshot of a reply they received from Steam Support. Their support ticket? "Is it safe to inhale the exhaust fumes from the top of the Steam Deck Vent?"

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Swedish production company Studios Extraordinaires and developer Fallen Leaf have announced a TV and film adaptation of Fort Solis.

Fort Solis released on 22nd August this year on PC and PS5, and stars Roger Clark (Red Dead Redemption 2), Troy Baker (The Last of Us), and Julia Brown (World On Fire) in a sci-fi, horror adventure game set in a mining base on Mars.

There aren't many details on the adaptation yet and it's unknown whether Clark, Baker, and Brown will reprise their roles, but on its website Studio Extraordinaires says it'll tell "an entirely fresh encounter", suggesting it won't be a retelling of the game.

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The latest KDColle (Kadokawa Collection) Oshi no Ko figure will feature Ai, Ruby, and Aqua Hoshino. This means all three characters in the family will be represented in one statue. The first 3D prototype ended up just being revealed on the official KDColle social media account.

This new Oshi no Ko figure features Ai’s children, Ruby and Aqua, in their younger forms. In the figure, Ruby is shown happily hugging Ai, while Aqua is engrossed reading a book in his mother’s lap. Overall, this figure recreates a touching scene for the Hoshino family.

Currently, this 3D prototype features no coloring besides the Hoshino family’s sparkling eyes. Fans of Oshi no Ko will recognize the significance of their starry eyes. They will apparently be recreated faithfully in this figure as well. We can expect to see a fully painted prototype released in the future as development continues.

View the 3D prototype for the Oshi no Ko family figure in the post below:

Video game analyst group Circana has released its November 2023 U.S. Video Game Market Highlights report and in it, the company reveals that, unsurprisingly, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III was the best-selling game of the month. It launched on PlayStation, Xbox, and PC on November 10 and is already the second best-selling game of 2023, behind Hogwarts Legacy. 

This story is part of our new Future of Gaming series, a three-site look at gaming’s most pioneering technologies, players, and makers.

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Tekken 8 hits PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC in just over a month, on January 26, 2024. As the release date nears, developer Bandai Namco has been releasing more and more about the latest entry in its flagship fighting series. We learned about newcomer Reina last month, and recently went hands-on with the game, too – read Game Informer's Tekken 8 preview here. Now, Bandai Namco has revealed the first gameplay trailer for its "mechanized space ninja" Yoshimitsu. 

It did so with a new Tekken 8 gameplay trailer that shows Yoshimitsu ripping and slicing through various fighters in the game's roster. This ninja is no stranger to the Tekken series, having appeared in every mainline numbered Tekken game since the series' start – he's actually my favorite fighter, and for money, this is his best look yet. 

Check him out in the Tekken 8 Yoshimitsu reveal and gameplay trailer for yourself below: 

As you can see, Yoshimitsu unsurprisingly relies on his ninja sword to do a lot of damage to enemy fighters. And he does so with the speed the character is known for. 

Cospa announced that new Tsukihime: A Piece of Blue Glass Moon merchandise will appear at Comiket 103. The new goods are based on Arcueid, Ciel, and Neco-Arc, and the lineup includes T-shirts, acrylic stands, tote bags, and stickers. [Thanks, PR Times!]

The new Tsukihime items will also be available for pre-order from the Cospa online store. Pre-orders end on January 14, 2024. The Cospa website includes older Tsukihime merchandise and items. The Comiket 1033 items are marked with a “new” tag. All T-shirt items are available in S, M, L, and XL sizes.

Here is the full lineup of Tsukihime goods and merchandise that will be available at Comiket 103, alongside their prices:

• Arcueid Brunestud Princess of the True Ancestors T-shirt – 3,300 yen (~$23)
• Arcueid Brunestud Full Graphic T-shirt – 6,930 yen (~$48)

Developer Bethesda Game Studios is working on bringing mod support, city maps, and "all-new ways to traveling" to its recently released sci-fi RPG, Starfield. It announced this by way of a Starfield subreddit comment from the official developer Reddit account, as reported by IGN. The team says it's working on other things, too, like quest fixes, hotfixes, and more. 

It says players can expect a rollout of fixes and updates roughly every six weeks, although if something can be corrected with a quick hotfix, it might launch those in between the six-week waits.

While bug and progression fixes are nice, it's the new ways of traveling and city maps that has me most excited. Traversing Starfield's cities is fun, but actually learning them is quite difficult without a map. And I'm hoping the new ways of travel makes traversing vast landscapes on alien planets easier – I'm tired of landing somewhere and walking 10 minutes to reach a point of interest. 

God of War  Ragnarök's Valhalla DLC is out now on PlayStation 5 and PlayStation 4, less than a week after it was revealed at The Game Awards 2023. It features a good bit of story content that acts as an epilogue to the events of Ragnarok, and it's packaged within a roguelite structure, meaning it's heavy on combat. Apparently, there's an endgame challenge in Valhalla so difficult that nobody on the dev team could complete it on the DLC's "Show Me Mastery" difficulty, according to Valhalla's director Mihir Sheth. 

"I am so, so curious to see how quickly players will humble us...as they often do...but maybe this time we've beaten them?" Sheth writes on Twitter, as first reported by Wccftech. 

There is an endgame challenge in #GodOfWarRagnarokValhalla that no one on the dev team has completed on the hardest difficulty 'Show Me Mastery'.

I am so, so curious to see how quickly players will humble us.. as they often do... but maybe this time we've beaten them? 👀

What's that I hear behind today's Advent Calendar door? A sweet guitar riff and a sick drum beat that makes me want to snap my fingers forevermore? Man, I'm tapping my toes just thinking about it!

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Nintendo has said the nature of Link and Zelda's relationship in Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom is open to interpretation, after months of discourse on whether the two characters are dating or not.

In Tears of the Kingdom, you can find some objects owned by Zelda inside Link's house in Hateno Village. There's only one bed in the house, which led some fans to believe the pair had moved in together after the events of Breath of the Wild.

In an interview with IGN, Zelda producer Eiji Aonuma suggested the development team doesn't have an answer and instead wants players to come to their own conclusions.

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Five of the Best is a weekly series for supporters of Eurogamer. It's a series that highlights some of the features in games that are often overlooked. It's also about having your say, so don't be shy, use the comments below and join in!

Oh and you can find our entire Five of the Best archive elsewhere on the site.

There are elements of our real world that games feel particularly smug about being able to recreate, and mirrors are one of them. I'm not surprised; mirrors have always seemed slightly magical to me, and to my cat, who I don't think quite comprehends reflections. And why should she! It's unnerving seeing an exact replica standing there before you, doing what you're doing and looking at you. Staring. So yes, I can understand why reflections are hard to do, and with it, why they're such an accomplishment in games. The question is, which mirrors in games have been the most memorable? Which are the best?

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Earth has a space junk problem. With each new rocket launch, or decommissioned satellite, we add more detritus to high orbit. Already satellites sometimes collide and one day, or so I've read, there'll be so much flotsam up there we'll be earthbound; unable to launch new spacecraft through a prison of shrapnel. Anyway, I'm no rocket scientist, but this does seem an apt metaphor for today's games market. Back in the day there were few enough new indies that games like Super Meat Boy, Crimzon Clover or FTL went straight to the moon. Today we're blessed with so many launches that it's hard to spot the gems among the debris.

Nowhere is this truer than the deck-builder genre. Slay the Spire, 2017's roguelike indie darling, made such an impact with its spontaneous cardplay that it blasted 1001 other deck-builders into the atmosphere. In the half-decade since, it's barely been touched. Monster Train and Inscryption have come close. But nothing has yet landed the very same way and, for each successful take-off, there have been scores of spaceX style catastrophes. Against this celestial backdrop, then, enter Cobalt Core, a plucky cosmic roguelike from a little-known, three-person dev team, which maybe, just maybe, earns a place among the constellations.

Spider-Man 2 studio Insomniac Games have reportedly been hacked by ransomware group Rhysida, which has led to the release of docs and screenshots purporting to be of the Sony-owned developer's mysterious Wolverine game. Sony are "investigating" these reports and say that "they have no reason to believe that any other SIE or Sony divisions have been impacted", which reads to me like an acknowledgement that the leaks are legit. Colour that speculation for the moment, however.

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"Consider yourself warned! This book contains scenes of graphic violence!" These are the words that adorn the Doom comic book, which was originally released for promotional purposes during 1996's E3 by GT Interactive and Marvel Comics. "Knee-deep in the dead!" is the next bit of text below the logo, referencing the name of the first shareware Doom episode and beautifully describing the blood-soaked cover illustration by Tom Grindberg, who was apparently tickled enough at the thought of drawing this monstrosity to take time away from working on 2000 AD.

The cover is an accurate peek at the gore and demonic entrails that lie within this epic work of sequential storytelling, which required the writing skills of not one, but two gentlemen - Steve "Body Bag" Behling and Michael "Splatter" Stewart. Both Behling and Stewart have a decent body of work between them at Marvel, where they've penned more civilised fare starring the likes of Ant-Man and The Hulk. The Doom comic, in comparison, seems to have been a thing that was written in a fever dream, and DoomWorld, which lovingly hosts scans of this brisk read to this day, describes it appropriately: "Some time in 1996 a couple of guys got together and smoked what was apparently a large amount of crack and then injected pure heroin into their eyes and then proceeded to create what is now known only as 'the Doom comic.'"

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Following the ESA's announcement that E3 is no more, developers and industry figures have been sharing their memories of the event as they wish it farewell.

The death of E3 was formally announced yesterday, but was suspected following the cancellation of the convention for 2023 and the foreseeable future.

Reactions have been pouring in from fans who attended E3 in the past, those who never had the chance to go, and the developers who were there to present their games to the world.

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Lost save files for Baldur's Gate 3 on Xbox continue to be an issue, despite an Xbox console firmware update earlier this week meant to address the problem.

Microsoft has now recommended a specific method of closing Baldur's Gate 3 when you finish your play session, as it is "aware of a problem that can cause players to lose saved progress".

"We are working to fix this ASAP," Microsoft's Xbox Support account wrote on X, formerly Twitter.

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Midwest Games has appointed a new COO, with Alyssa Walles joining the publisher.

With over 20 years of experience, Walles was on Atari's board of directors for almost a decade, and ran her own consulting company called Amplitude for over 17 years. She currently is also the part-time executive director of the IGDA Foundation.

Midwest also made an appointment to its board of directors, with VentureBeat's chief strategy officer Gina Joseph joining.

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Legendary-tier monster cards on the table time: I do not like video game loot. I think that the popularity of "looting", an English word itself looted from Hindi during the time of the East India Company, is one of the worst aspects of the modern games industry and especially of the blockbuster live service game, which strives to keep its audience coming back by means of fresh loot injections at regular intervals.

I distrust how the randomisation element of much video game looting flirts with actual gambling mechanics. I hate that structuring games around the acquisition of loot creates a framework and an appetite for microtransactions and arguably, NFTs. But I am kind of fascinated by the art of designing loot, and especially when it comes to action RPGs such as Diablo 4 and Path Of Exile 2, because it seems to trade on some irresolvable contradictions.

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Look, you saw what we saw this year. 2023 was practically raining men capable of making fans’ legs go weak. And yet, as is always the case, some stood out more than others, which is why they made our list of the top 10 best anime Husbandos of 2023.

Before proceeding, it’s worth noting that only one Husbando has been selected from each show to make sure Jujutsu Kaisen doesn’t dominate the entire dang list. Likewise, Levi of Attack on Titan has been left out of the competition on the grounds that the poor man needs to be left alone to process and heal following the proverbial and literal hell he went through.

Nijisanji announced the graduation of Vtubers Yuki Chihiro and Azuchi Momo. The Vtubers belong to the main branch and will graduate on January 31, 2024.

Yuki Chihiro made her debut on February 8, 2018 as part of Nijisanji’s first generation of Vtubers. She will be the first Vtuber of the first Nijisanji generation to graduate. In the graduation announcement posted on her social media, Chihiro thanked fans and apologized for being the first among the first generation Vtubers to graduate. She also said that her graduation is the result of lots of thinking and worrying.

Meanwhile, Azuchi Momo debuted on June 3, 2018 as a first-generation member of Nijisanji SEEDs. Momo also released two social media posts thanking her fans for their support, and said that she considered graduating after her birthday on March 3, but ultimately decided against it. She apologized to fans for this, as she is aware that some fans might have started preparations to celebrate it.

It's looking increasingly unlikely Starfield will have the quite same kind of longevity as its Bethesda RPG stablemates, but that isn't discouraging the studio from continuing to tinker with the space adventure's core - and one intriguing addition Bethesda has now confirmed is that "new ways of traveling" are coming at some point in 2024.

Bethesda teased new modes of travel in an update shared on Reddit to accompany the launch of a small patch addressing Starfield's "pet-asteroid" bug - which has amusingly caused some players to be relentlessly followed across the solar system by doggedly persistent space rocks.

"We've been hard at work on many of the issues you've posted," Bethesda explained in its message to players, "and expect an update early next year that will include a large number of 'in-progress' quest fixes as well as FSR3 and XeSS. Though we fixed several quest issues from occurring, in-progress quest fixes are much harder to fix and we've built a new system to correct those without you having to roll back your save."

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Hololive’s Houshou Marine is the first Vtuber singer to perform at the FNS Music Festival. The latest 2023 FNS Music Festival will be held on December 13, 2023, at 6:30 pm JST. [Thanks, Inside!]

This will be the first time in the history of Fuji Television's annual music festival that a Vtuber will perform. Houshou Marine recently confirmed on her official X account (formerly Twitter) that the song she will perform at the festival is "Bishoujo Muzai Pirates."

The first episode of the 2023 edition of the show premiered on December 6, 2023, and various voice actors from the Uma Musume also appeared. In addition to Houshou Marine, other popular Japanese performers will appear during the second episode, including Japanese children’s characters Gachapin and Mukku, pop duo ClariS, J-pop band King Gnu, Nana Mizuki, Mamoru Miyano, Hello Kitty, and Momoiro Clover Z.

I'm not normally in a rush to post marketing videos in which developers talk about how great their new game is, but I need all the help I can get in understanding Metaphor: ReFantazio. The new RPG from the makers of Persona looks stylish, dense, exciting, and almost entirely baffling in its trailers, so 14 minutes of the folks from Atlus just describing it is welcome.

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Open your map in Starfield and you won't see much more than a height map, even in cities. If you want to then travel around, you're limited to walking huge distances when on planet surfaces and using fast travel spaceship hops when in outerspace.

Both these things might change next year, as Bethesda have teased that they're working on "many new features" that players have asked for, including city maps and "new ways of traveling".

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Valve has a message to all you folks (myself included) who love huffing your Steam Deck exhaust fumes: Stop it. Please.

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