Bloober Team, the developer behind the likes of Layers of Fear and Observer, will be bringing its dual-survival reality horror The Medium to Xbox Series X/S and PC on 10th December.

The Medium (which was initially announced for Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and Wii U back in 2012 before dramatically changing course), casts players as the psychically gifted Marianne - a woman who's been haunted by visions of a child's murder for years - who travels to an abandoned hotel resort in a bid to find answers.

Notably, it's Bloober's first stab at third-person horror (as it discussed in more detail when we spoke earlier this year) and its semi-fixed camera, combined with a soundtrack created by legendary composer Akira Yamaoka, gives the experience something of a Silent Hill vibe.

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From the southern Feldip Hills to the barren waste of the Wilderness, Gielinor, RuneScape's setting, is home to a collection of countries and kingdoms, within which lie cities and towns, many hiding dungeons beneath their streets. Beyond the borders of these settlements you can find ancient ruins, ghast infested swamps, a portal for interplanetary travel and even a spa. Yet, the more you explore the world of RuneScape, the more you'll start to notice that something is slightly wrong with Gielinor's geography.

How does climbing Ice Mountain, a peak so high that it's the only place in Asgarnia always covered in snow, take less than 30 seconds? Why do characters act like certain towns are miles apart, but, when you undertake the journey, it takes five minutes by foot? Most of all - how is Lumbridge, the quintessential country town (goblin problem aside), literally a short walking distance away from the Kharidian Desert?

I don't need my geography GCSE to tell me that something isn't quite right here. Thankfully, the RuneScape community has an answer in the form of scale theory and, before you ask, it has nothing to do with that flat earth - sorry, flat Gielinor - nonsense.

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Microsoft is developing a browser-based workaround to get its game-streaming xCloud service onto iPhones and iPads.

That's according to Business Insider and The Verge, which reported on comments made by Xbox boss Phil Spencer to staff in a recent company meeting.

"We absolutely will end up on iOS," said Spencer, who mentioned an early 2021 launch for the . "We'll end up on iPhones, and iPads with Game Pass."

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Earlier this year, Bithell Games helped UK micro-indie Grey Alien Games publish Ancient Enemy, the latest in a series of what can only be called solitaire adventures by Jake Birkett. Mike Bithell - of Thomas Was Alone and John Wick Hex - must have enjoyed the experience, because here he is with his own twist on solitaire-with-a-story, The Solitaire Conspiracy, as part of his Shorts series of smaller-scale projects. It's out now for PC and Mac on Steam and the Epic store.

Now, two of my favourite time-wasters of the last decade have been Birkett's delightful, Jane Austen-inspired amuse-bouche Regency Solitaire and Klei Entertainment's mini-masterpiece of future espionage tactics, Invisible, Inc. The Solitaire Conspiracy appears strongly influenced by both, so I was excited to try it. Like the Klei game, it features a cast of augmented spooks and hackers on daring undercover missions, and has a sharp-edged, neon-lit aesthetic, all violet and cyan over midnight blue and suspenseful synth music. Like Regency Solitaire, it playfully - perhaps arbitrarily - frames a ripping yarn around hands of solitaire, where the aim is to clear a layout of cards to progress to the next chapter.

Both comparisons are unfortunate ones for The Solitaire Conspiracy. Invisible, Inc. found, in a procedurally generated, XCOM-style turn-based tactics game, a perfect engine for creating knife-edge stealth scenarios for its cartoon espionage action. Bithell tries to find a similar thematic sympathy in solitaire, envisioning the cards as unruly agents, the suits as spy teams of contrasting styles, and the player as spymaster, brooding over the field of play and trying to bring order to the chaos.

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I think it's fair to say Star Wars: Squadrons hasn't had the smoothest of take-offs, with the game launching with a variety of issues for flight stick and PC VR users. At least some of those issues have now been solved, thanks to a patch deployed last night which took aim at some of the most annoying technical problems.

One of the game's more frustrating bugs has related to Fleet Battles ranking, in which players could not rank after completing their initial placement matches. Thanks to the patch, players who are yet to start their placement matches will now be able to rank normally, while those who were caught mid-way through the process will have their remaining matches use the corrected system. Unfortunately for those who already played all their placement matches, there will be no rank resets "at this time" to even the playing field, and it looks like you'll be graded on your matches going forwards.

At launch, many flight stick users complained Squadrons had an oversized deadzone (the area of your controller that doesn't respond to stick movement) which players described as "mak[ing] flying with HOTAS feel like your ship is drunk". Motive has now introduced a menu option to allow players to modify the deadzone individually, rather than having to use workarounds with their HOTAS software. No more death sticks for you. On top of this, the default input curves for flight sticks have also been adjusted, which should apparently make the controls feel more responsive.

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FIFA 21 has made a raft of gameplay changes while retaining long-standing issues that drag the series down (more on that over at our FIFA 21 review). But one fix made on the down-low that most players will never notice, is that FIFA 21 has got rid of the giant goalkeepers that plagued FIFA 20.

It's an issue that has been a part of FIFA 20 ever since it came out late 2019, but it went under the radar because it was limited to a single mode - one that doesn't tend to grab the headlines.

With FIFA 20, EA launched a brand new mode called Volta. This FIFA Street-esque mode sees up to 5v5 matches on small pitches, with skill and style the focus. Here, you create an avatar, then build your squad as you play. Here's how it looks:

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Marvel's Avengers developer Crystal Dynamics has said it is working on new updates for the game "as fast as we safely can" in a bid to reignite waning player interest.

Yesterday a Forbes report highlighted SteamCharts numbers suggesting the game's PC audience had slumped to between 1000-2000 people a month after launch - low enough for the game to begin experiencing matchmaking issues.

In response, Crystal Dynamics boss Scot Amos issued a lengthy statement to Kotaku on the studio's plans for the game in the near-term future, and said he is confident players will "return" to the game on PC, as well as on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One.

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AMD's latest Ryzen processors are official - and this time, they're gunning for Intel's gaming throne with their new Zen 3 designs. They're doing that with significantly faster single-core speeds, a new eight-core complex and a few more clever tweaks to the winning Ryzen formula. Here's what you need to know about Ryzen 5000.

So first off: Zen 3. AMD's Zen+ and Zen 2 designs each incorporated better single-core performance, allowing subsequent Ryzen processors to narrow the gap in IPC against Intel, and Zen 3 takes that to the next level with the greatest gen-on-gen increase in single-core performance in the series' short history. There's also an architectural change here, as the company shifts from four-core core complexes (CCXs) to eight-core complexes. That means that an eight-core processor will use a single complex, meaning that there's no complex-to-complex latency and all cores can use a single (double-size) cache.

There will be four Zen 3 designs initially: the flagship Ryzen 5950X ($799), the penultimate Ryzen 9 5900X ($549), the high-end Ryzen 7 5800X ($449) and the mid-range Ryzen 5 5600X ($299). These designs have 16, 12, eight and six cores, respectively, with boost clocks of up to 4.9GHz on the 5950X. This is backed with around 70MB of combined L2 and L3 cache on the top two parts, with 35MB on the other models. TDPs are similar to last-gen, with three 105W parts at the upper end and one 65W option for the Ryzen 5. You can see our spec table for the full breakdown.

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Infinity Ward has issued an patch addressing two guns in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare and Warzone: the AS Val and the SP-R 208.

Both guns, added to the game with the release of season six, had serious issues. In the case of the Val, it suffered from a bug that meant it could shoot through multiple walls. This, obviously, broke the game as it meant players could kill each other from across maps - ignoring cover along the way.

And then the SP-R 208, deemed by most Call of Duty players to be the most dominant weapon in the game this season. This sniper was so powerful, it was felt pretty much essential not just for Warzone, but for Modern Warfare multiplayer, too.

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Is 8K gaming actually viable with Nvidia's latest Ampere-based GPUs? While a small selection of triple-A titles stand a good chance of hitting decent frame-rates at native 8K, Nvidia has released a new ultra performance mode for its DLSS AI upscaling technology - and its ambition is extraordinary. It aims to boost detail with a 9x multiplier, meaning that a core 1440p image is reconstructed to full 7680x4320 resolution: that's a final render output of 33 million pixels, reconstructed from just 3.7m. There's a whole discussion about whether 8K gaming is actually needed in the here and now - and it's a situation that can only be ascertained by actually giving it a go on a consumer screen, something we still don't have right now. Even so, the tools and techniques are certainly available to get a close-up look at image quality and performance and to draw some initial conclusions.

Before we go on, our contention remains that chasing resolution probably isn't the best use of GPU resources - even at 4K, let alone 8K. Ultra HD rendering is demanding enough, and pushing to 8K actually increases core resolution by 4x - an almost insane workload. We'd rather see higher quality pixels as opposed to more of them, especially as technologies like hardware-accelerated ray tracing are starting to produce some brilliant results. And it's certainly the case that native 8K rendering with RT is a bit of a disaster, even with the RTX 3090 - where Control renders a relatively simple ray traced scene at just nine frames per second. However, engage DLSS's new ultra performance mode and that leaps up to 50fps - a 455 per cent increase. The real question is whether you retain image quality as well and I think that from my perspective, there are promising beginnings here, but the technology isn't quite there yet.

There is still some impressive stuff on display though: 8K ultra performance DLSS renders at a native 1440p. Compare the image quality to native 1440p blown up to 8K and the difference is stark: Nvidia's AI upscaler is definitely doing a job here in resolving more detail, though the performance impact of 14 per cent is not insignificant. However, while initially promising, clarity is lost with the new technique when the game is in motion. It doesn't quite hold up, and certainly up against a native 8K image, it's simply not as good. With ray tracing in particular, the 9x multiplier in rays traced makes a big difference and the sheer detail isn't replicated. Put simply, in Control at least, the new DLSS can give a 'better than 4K' level of image quality - but it's not a match for the look of native rendering at 'full fat' 8K.

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