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Crystal Dynamics subject to more layoffs following Perfect Dark cancellation

by admin August 30, 2025

Crystal Dynamics has announced the “difficult decision” to lay off more staff, citing “evolving business conditions”. It added the decision was not made lightly, but was necessary to “ensure the long-term health of our studio and core creative priorities in a continually shifting market”.

In a post shared on LinkedIn, the studio thanked those impacted by these layoffs for their “hard work, talent and passion”, stating Crystal Dynamics is “committed to offering the full extent of support and resources at our disposal during this transition”.

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It went on to additionally thank the rest of its team, as well as its community and partners for the “continued support” as the studio builds a “creative, sustainable, and resilient tomorrow together”.

The next entry in the Tomb Raider series – which is being developed in collaboration with Amazon – is not affected by these most recent layoffs at Crystal Dynamics.

This week’s layoffs follow the cancellation of Perfect Dark earlier this year by Microsoft. While the reboot was being helmed by The Initiative, Crystal Dynamics was supporting the project.

Well this is it. I was let go from Crystal Dynamics as Perfect Dark was cancelled. I am now out of a job. I genuinely dont know what to do at this moment but to frantically apply for as many jobs that are applicable. If anyone needs a Senior Environment Artist of 10+ years, please let me know.

— Maja Öberg (@majaoeberg.bsky.social) August 27, 2025 at 6:04 PM

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The studio previously laid off 17 staff members in March of this year. At this time, Crystal Dynamics said this was “necessary to better align our current business needs and the studio’s future success”, and was “not a reflection of the dedication or ability of those affected”.

This is a news-in-brief story. This is part of our vision to bring you all the big news as part of a daily live report.

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August 30, 2025 0 comments

Game Reviews

Sony’s XM4 Headphones Restocked at Nearly 50% Off, Perfect for Listening to K-Pop Demon Hunters Soundtrack

by admin August 29, 2025

What is good noise? “Golden” by Hunter/X from K-Pop Demon Hunters is good noise. New episodes of Jamie Loftus’ Sixteenth Minute (of Fame) podcast is good noise. The guns firing in the bank heist scene of Michael Mann’s Heat is good noise. What about bad noise? The couple on the bus with you arguing is bad noise. The turbine engines on flight is bad noise. Your cubicle’s neighbor punching away at their mechanical keyboard is bad noise. Wouldn’t it be swell if we could just cancel out the bad noise so we can focus in on the good noise? Well, you can do just that with the Sony WH-1000XM4 wireless noise cancelling headphones. For a limited time, Amazon has them for a whopping 43% off this labor day weekend. Normally priced at $348, you can currently pick them up for a solid $150 off. That means you only have to pay $198.

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The Sony WH-1000XM4 headphones utilize digital noise cancellation to ensure you can hear each and every note or word clearly with no disruptive sounds from your environment coming through. Two microphones in each earcup work together to capture and eliminate surrounding noise when listening to your music, podcasts, or audiobooks, removing it in real time with the help of the HD Noise Cancelling Processor QN1.

The noise-cancelling tech also works to amplify your voice during calls. Five microphones work to deliver clear voice quality. They isolate your voice from any background noise so the person on the other end hears you and just you.

The headphones are designed for all day listening. You can expect a full 30 hours of battery life on a single charge. That’ll last you the whole workday, your commute, and beyond. If you ever find yourself having forgotten to charge it, no need to worry. Just plugging it in for 10 minutes will let you listen for a solid five hours.

Multipoint Connection

One standout convenience with the Sony WH-1000XM4 headphones is that they can be paired with two Bluetooth devices at once. This is great as it allows you to be connected to your phone and a gaming console at the same time. It’s perfect for wanting to listen to your own music or podcasts through Spotify or something while playing a game on your Nintendo Switch. You can take a call without disconnecting and reconnecting anything.

Through Labor Day weekend, you can grab yourself a pair of the Sony WH-1000XM4 wireless noise-cancelling headphones for $150 off. The price is down to just $198 for a limited time.

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August 29, 2025 0 comments

Game Updates

Why Snake Eater is a perfect example of the tension between the real and the unreal that’s at the core of every Metal Gear Solid game

by admin August 29, 2025

The hallmark of the Metal Gear Solid games isn’t the presence of one of the Snakes. It isn’t nuclear dread or even hide-and-seek, often involving a cardboard box. And it’s not tactical espionage action. I think it’s a tone, or rather a carefully un-careful blend of conflicting tones. On one side there’s a movement towards steely realism. On the other, there are these bright lunges at absolute fantasy. It’s realism and its opposite. I just tried to google what realism’s opposite actually is, by the way. There is no one standard answer as far as I can see. How very Metal Gear.

None of this is a criticism, by the way. I love this stuff about these games. And it’s in there deep. I noticed this jarring combination the first time I saw Metal Gear Solid in action – or rather the first time I saw it in action again. Many years ago, my housemate at university had the game. I ducked into his room one evening and he was playing the early stages. Here was this game about avoiding enemy patrols and searchlights, a game where your character’s breath or cigarette smoke might give him away to a passing baddy. Cor, I thought. Games are getting – I was 19 at the time – games are getting really real!

And then I ducked in again a few days later. Same game. Same room-mate. Same protagonist, but now he was fighting with an intermittently invisible ninja who was talking about how much he enjoyed being killed. Or something.

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That was an ideal introduction to Kojima’s work. I’m not sure if I could have crafted a better one for myself. Even so, I think the greatest expression of these two impulses – realism and whatever its opposite is called – and the weird dance that unfolds as these two opposing things flow together, is in Metal Gear Solid 3. I’ve spent the last few weeks waiting for Delta, the latest version of this game, and watching various bits of footage old and new. I think if anything, the new version actually only heightens the thrilling collision between realism and whatever realism is not. More detailing: more gleeful confusion.

The thing that’s so exciting to me about this collision in Metal Gear Solid 3 is that you see it most clearly in the places where the game is possibly trying to play it straight. When it’s not playing it straight, Metal Gear Solid 3 is a riot of unrealism, of course. There’s a boss that controls hornets, if I remember correctly. You fight a boss that controls hornets!

But it’s when the game’s seemingly trying to be real that things get truly odd. The game has an injury system, for example – bones can be broken and you need to bandage scrapes and slam home antidotes to poisoned arrow wounds and all that jazz. Sounds like realism! But games are uniquely strange about these kinds of things, whether it’s the pliers-picking-out-bullets animation from Far Cry 2 to Metal Gear Solid 3’s stylish menu of bodily accidents. Including this stuff in the game, and then mediating it by slick UI and whatnot to make it into a playable mechanic, by making health something you can attend to while pausing, just renders the whole thing wonderfully warped from the start.

And this inherent oddness is everywhere in this, the most organic Metal Gear Solid game. The setting’s the jungle! Plants and rivers and all that nature jazz? Sounds a bit more real than the series’ futuristic military bases and deep sea platforms? Sure, it does in a way, but this jungle is carved up into neat little maps and filled with bespoke systems for you to meddle with in the name of stealth or aggression. It’s gloriously, openly hand-crafted in every detail. And did the Soviets even have a jungle? (I asked a friend: sort of, apparently. But also, apparently the game’s jungle is an artificial construction within the fiction of the game itself. This stuff goes dizzyingly deep.)

Snaked and alone.

To put it another way, On the PS2 version, the game’s jungle was a wonderful thing to look at, but it was no more real than the corridors and gantries of Metal Gear Solid 1’s Shadow Moses. It was game-space, all the stranger for being so close to the organic world. And naturally, this is only further confused by the new game’s Unreal 5 graphics.

Whatever version you play, everywhere you look in the game there’s this blend of realism and its opposite. Snake meets a real president, but this real president has to share the game’s green room with that guy who controls hornets. There’s that famous ladder climb, that expands the scope of the tactile in-game world into almost impossible dimensions, and there’s a boss who moves through a dauntingly huge stretch of terrain sniping at you in a battle that can last for genuine real-world hours. All the while the same game also encourages you to defeat that same boss by meddling with the internal clock in the PlayStation.

Ultimately, I’m not sure how much of this is authorial intent and how much is simply a symptom of what Kojima is trying to do elsewhere. It’s worth remembering that a lot of games exist in a sweet spot where questions of realism simply don’t come into it, whether that’s the candy-coated Disney world of Castle of Illusion, or the Indiana Jones-adjacent world of Uncharted. But games, being inherently non-real, generally get super weird the closer they get to any form of realism.

And I sometimes think it’s not realism Kojima’s chasing so much as something that I almost want to term fidelity: an attempt to capture a kind of texture of intricacy. He wants the weird stuff to feel luxurious and richly made, and he wants the same feeling when you’re having a quiet moment in the galley at the start of Metal Gear Solid 2, shooting the ladles and watching them ping back and forth or watching the way rain splatters on your shoulders when you go outside. Is this realism, or is it just luxurious interaction, a mind that notices the little things and wants everything in a game to be memorable? Throw in the topsy-turvy world of espionage and what’s real and what’s fantasy gets even harder to unpick, of course. I remember a back issue of Arcade magazine – God, I miss Arcade magazine – in which a real special forces person was asked to weigh in on Metal Gear Solid. Their cardboard box verdict? I’ve hidden under worse.

Who said Bruce Springsteen had to be The Boss? | Image credit: Eurogamer

Regardless, this mixture of realism and its opposite is a Kojima fixation. It’s here for life. It’s there waiting for you the moment you step off your futuristic bike in Death Stranding and grasp the baby in a flask around your neck, and then stumble, with a gorgeously recognisable human awkwardness, over mossy rocks.

And most hauntingly of all, perhaps, it was there during the making of another Metal Gear, Phantom Pain, in which Kojima’s team created a perfect model of one of their real meeting rooms in order to test out lighting and character models and, yes, how real things felt. Here’s Snake, tall as a real man, clad in leather and realistically lit by migrainey overhead office lighting, and yet for the first time I realised just how stylised he is, how perfect the angles of his grim face come together. He’s standing right in front of me, on the other side of the computer monitor at least, and yet he looks like an old seadog from Tintin or a Dick Tracy villain. And somewhere, is that Kojima laughing at it all?

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August 29, 2025 0 comments

Gaming Gear

Skate Hands-On Preview: I Think It Might Be the Perfect Free-to-Play Game

by admin August 28, 2025

It’s been nearly a decade and a half since the last Skate game was released, but veterans won’t have to wait much longer to tear up the streets once again. The next entry in the arcade-y skateboarding series launches into early access on Sept. 16.

The franchise reboot (just named “Skate”) was developed by Full Circle, a studio composed of much of the same talent that worked on the original games.

After a long drought, skateboarding game fans have dined well on the compilation remakes of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1 and 2, along with Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3 and 4. The Skate series has always been a bit different, emphasizing freeform skating with its unique control scheme of flicking the controller joysticks in different directions to achieve tricks, which has been faithfully rebuilt in the new game.

Even so, many fans of the series who would be otherwise excited for its return have their hackles raised, and I can’t blame them.

That’s because Skate is launching as a free-to-play, mainly online game in the “live service” fashion, with plans to continue releasing content for players to earn or buy. That might be a red flag for fans of the older offline single-player games, who may have grown weary of live service games that pressure players to play with limited-time events and to buy rare in-game items.

But after getting the chance to play Skate alongside dozens of other press members and influencers during an online prelaunch preview, I’m hopeful this might be one of the best examples of how live service games can work for developers and gamers alike. It feels like an experiment that developers poured their heart and soul into.

San Vansterdam is designed so that everything can be skated on. That includes food trucks, overpasses and more.

Full Circle

Community, collaboration and nailing tricks with your friends

The developer Full Circle aims to keep player freedom at the core of the new Skate game. The setting is the sprawling fictional city of San Vansterdam, designed to allow you to pull off whatever trick you want, wherever you want, whenever you want. Every street corner has some sort of attraction that implicitly encourages you to get big air, grind a long rail or climb a building to soar your board through the skies.

The game’s simple promise of letting players make their own fun at every juncture is a return to the series’ roots. The reason it works so well is that you’re surrounded by dozens of other players exploring the world, too.

Dumping 150 players into an open-world sandbox and letting them do their own thing is an inspired way to build a community. Skaters in real life are collaborative — they egg each other on and lift each other up as they work at the next big trick — and that applies to this virtual world just as well.

During my preview time in San Vansterdam, I played with only a couple of dozen other players at any given time, and it was an electric experience. It was awesome to watch skilled players pull off tricks (and then flounder to try and replicate their motions) before peeling off in another direction.

Locations like the church are natural hotspots of skater activity, drawing in many players at once.

Full Circle

Skate is the rare game where I didn’t feel like I needed an objective to guide my gameplay, mainly because I was having lots of stupid fun on my own. At one point, I discovered players rolling around off their boards, and I joined them in an impromptu tumbling conga line. Another time, I watched a player parkour up a building and followed their lead, discovering an entirely new area to do tricks above the hustle and bustle of the street.

My favorite moment was made possible by the new spectate feature. With this feature, I could watch nearby players do their thing and instantly teleport to them if I decided to join in on the action.

While I was flicking through perspectives, I discovered one player standing on top of a bridge in the northeast corner of the map. They were jumping off and ragdolling toward a bronze anchor statue, trying to thread the needle through the hole at the top.

I took part and made several dozen attempts at the base jump before making it through the hole myself, but not without my character slamming his head into the statue with a comically loud bang.

As Skate gets its early access release, I imagine an emerging community working together to find the most entertaining trick spots in San Vansterdam. The only thing more entertaining than trying to nail a trick is doing so while watching half a dozen randoms (and your friends) flounder around with you.

If you’re not afraid to get wacky, base jumping from buildings is a great way to make your own fun.

Full Circle

Will the game appeal to newcomers and veterans alike?

As a Skate first-timer and someone whose skateboarding experience mostly entails watching my brother learn to ollie and kickflip, I was worried that I might be in over my head.

Luckily, I was able to choose between the original dual-stick-flicking control scheme and a simpler, modern one that makes it easier to focus on landing tricks. There’s still a bit of a learning curve, but I was able to get on the board and nail some rudimentary moves to get me properly moving around the city after the tutorial wrapped up.

While I wasn’t the biggest fan of how my player character looked (he appeared soulless no matter how hard I tried to meddle with his face), I enjoyed how completing challenges in the open world would directly unlock more outfit options — though I suspect the best clothing will be locked to the purely cosmetic microtransactions that will support the game at launch.

As I donned a tangerine shirt and shorts and stuck a cherry pattern on my board, I felt like I was showing off my in-game experiences to other players. Likewise, their own avatar customization told me a story about their time with Skate.

While the world of San Vansterdam was built with player freedom in mind, the art style doesn’t reflect the Skate games that veterans have come to love and revere. Everything is minimalist, bright and sanitized. The city feels like it belongs in Mirror’s Edge rather than an arcade-style skateboarding game, a genre that embraces the grit and graffiti of street culture.

There are no realistic skateparks or grimy aqueducts to grind down. Gone are the Hall of Meat replays that would highlight gnarly bails and broken bones. And if you’re looking for familiar faces in the world of professional skateboarding, like those featured in the Tony Hawk games, you aren’t going to find them here.

Longtime fans will likely have their gripes with some of these choices, and those aren’t easy fixes. You can’t just change an entire art style on a whim, even if you can sign a deal to license pro skaters to feature in your game.

It remains to be seen if these will be deal-breakers for the vets, but I’ll say this much: Skate is made with a lot of love. The classic flick-it control scheme from the old games was rebuilt from the ground up just to cater to the old heads who want to play the same Skate they’ve known for years.

As an early access live service game, Skate has room to grow and develop according to its fans’ wants and needs. If Full Circle keeps an ear to the ground and addresses any pain points that arise early on, I think this may become a perennial fan-favorite.

Skate will be launched into early access on Sept. 16, releasing concurrently on the PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X and S, and PC. The game will support cross-platform play and cross-progression.

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August 28, 2025 0 comments