ENTERTAINMENT

The leadup to the holiday season is in full swing, and Amazon is offering dozens of deals for gift cards right now as a part of its Holiday Sale. Gift cards are a great gift for anyone, even yourself! It’s easy to slip one into a card or a mailbox as a part of the holiday season. Some of these deals are only available for a few more hours, so act fast if you want to save!

Save on These Gift Cards from Amazon

Whether you’re looking for food, drink, entertainment, or games, there are options here with this gift card sale! The best deal available right now is the Beath & Body Works gift card. It is quickly selling out, so be sure to snag one while you still can. Additionally, Fandango and Cinemark both have eGift Cards on sale, which are sent via email to the email address of your choice. There are tons of upcoming movies, making these a great deal if you plan on heading to the theaters anytime soon.

Other notable deals besides the ones listed above include a $25 credit on a $250 Airbnb gift card, $15 off a $100 Hulu gift card, and $15 off a $75 Fanatics gift card. Overall, there is a great slew of options here that won’t be available for long. Outside of this sale, there is also a great deal ongoing for 10% off Xbox gift cards on Amazon.

If you’re still looking for gifts for the upcoming holiday season, be sure to check out our holiday gift guides! Whether you’re in the market for tech, games, or anything else, we’ve got the best deals outlined.

A new trailer for Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown has seemingly leaked, revealing a playable demo that will drop on January 11, one week before the Metroidvania comes to PC, Amazon Luna, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X | S on January 18, 2024.

The trailer, uploaded by PlayStation Brazil, is no longer accessible, very much suggesting that it may have been uploaded by accident. It seems likely that Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown was set to drop tonight as part of this year’s Game Awards, or at the least, sometime in the next few weeks. Of course, some keen-eyed fans, including X/Twitter user @BossBigBoss73, were quick to capture the video and reupload it.

Today’s footage focuses on the story while still giving a few more glimpses at gameplay, including some death-defying platformer sections over and around spike pits. It’s a two-minute trailer that highlights gruesome foes and protagonist Sargon’s stylish combat as well as that aforementioned demo.

Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown was revealed at Summer Games Fest earlier this year as a fresh take on Ubisoft’s classic action-adventure franchise. While the publisher is still hard at work on its Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time Remake, The Lost Crown is set to tell a new story with new mechanics and visuals.

In June, we got to go hands-on with the next Prince of Persia game and came away enthusiastic about its potential, saying, “A 2D Metroidvania was not what I expected of a new Prince of Persia game, but The Lost Crown is already proving itself a worthwhile pivot for the series.”

More recently, the project appeared during a Nintendo Direct to show off around one minute of more gameplay and how it will evolve throughout the journey.

If you’re of a certain age, that is to say “old,” then your first video game experience was likely on an Atari 2600 console. The wood-grain accented plastic box, with its mechanical switches and single-button joystick controller, represented both the runaway popularity of the home video game experience and its near-fatal collapse.

I am one of those people of that certain age, an old man whose earliest gaming memories were forged on an Atari 2600. While the first console my parents bought was a ColecoVision, we eventually got Atari’s box as well, and I spent hours in front of a 13″ black and white CRT playing games with baffling graphics and often unclear goals. And man oh man did I love it.

Well friends, Atari is back! Again! This time with the Atari 2600+, a shockingly faithful recreation of that now 46-year old gaming system that you can actually hook up to your modern TV.

Video Computer System

The 2600+ packaging is quite nice, actually. Inside the box you’ll find the console, a quick-start guide, a joystick, a 10-in-1 game, HDMI cable, and USB to USB-C power cable. There’s no adapter inside the box: you’ll need to supply your own. Crucially, and weirdly, you need to use a USB wall adapter. I thought I’d be slick by just swapping out my Nintendo Switch power cable, since it’s also USB-C, but that didn’t work. Neither did the power supply for my Steam Deck… same story with my Macbook USB-C charger. I don’t think I’ve ever encountered a piece of tech that didn’t just accept any USB-C connection I offered, but that was the case with the Atari 2600+. It’s not a big deal – who doesn’t have half a dozen or more USB chargers at this point – it’s just surprising.

The console itself is probably 20-30% smaller than the original device, but it’s incredibly faithful otherwise. All the switches on the face of the console feel exactly like they did on the original. I always loved the springiness of the “Game Select” and “Game Reset” switches, and the power and “TV Type” switches both have the exact same satisfying clunk of the old console.

In addition to the USB-C power and HDMI ports on the back, there are also difficulty switches for both left and right player, as well as a 4:3 or 16:9 aspect ratio selector. The aspect ratio switch is self-explanatory, the difficulty switch is less so. You see, back in the day, you could make games more difficult for one or both players by changing the position of a mechanical switch. The fact those switches remain is something I really love about the Atari 2600+. They could have done all this stuff in a menu, but instead decided to keep it pure. Respect.

The “TV Type” switch is also something I love. Back in the day, if you owned an Atari 2600, there was a good chance you had a black and white TV. Even in the 1980s, B&W TVs were still around and were a budget choice for many people. When my parents upgraded to what was then a massive-seeming 19″ color set, the 13″ B&W was moved into my brother’s and my room and became our gaming TV. Switching the TV Type to B&W changed the color palette of whatever game you were playing to a friendly greyscale, and I’m happy to say it still works as originally intended. Well, mostly. Some games, like Coleco’s Donkey Kong, don’t switch, but the majority of the ones I tried worked fine.

Atari’s decision to keep the 2600+ as close to the original as possible is kind of a double-edged sword. On the one hand, I am a sucker for attention to detail, and I just can’t get over how everything feels exactly like I remember. On the other hand… I don’t really like having to get up and reset the game with a switch on the console every time I die, or when I want to cycle through the available games on something like Combat.

The joystick cable is woefully short, which I also have a love-hate relationship with. It would be awesome to sit across my room, on my couch, and play these old games. But at the same time, being forced to sit directly in front of the TV is a much more genuine experience to the original. We didn’t sit in chairs, or on the couch, when we played old consoles back in the day. We sat on the floor directly in front of the TV until someone told us we were going to burn our eyes out, and dagnabbit we liked it.

Dust Off Those Old Carts

The biggest draw of the Atari 2600+ is it allows you to play the original cartridges from the 2600 and the 7800 on your modern TV (sorry, 5200 enjoyers). Unlike the Atari VCS (which I did not like much), there are no games living inside the memory of the system. It’s entirely cartridge-based, which makes it closer to something like the Hyperkin RetroN 5. It includes a 10-in-1 cartridge in the box, with 10 original 2600 games.

You select which game you want to play by setting the dip switches on the cart itself and be still my heart. Dip-switches? This is the most-retro computing feature I’ve ever professionally reviewed. The settings are printed on the cart, so you don’t have to worry about losing the box and having to guess your way through.

Of the included games, my favorite is, and maybe always will be, Yars Revenge. It’s one of the best Atari 2600 games, right up there with Vanguard. The other games include Adventure, Missile Command, and Combat, which was a pack-in with the original console.

Original cartridges also work just like you’d expect them to. Pop them into the top of the 2600+, turn it on, and start playing. It’s not instant-on, which I don’t like. You have to sit through a few seconds of a splash screen with the Atari logo and a screen telling you the game is loading. That’s weird to me, because Atari 2600 game files were limited to 4 kilobytes (with exceptions I won’t get into). Four kilobytes is almost impossible to fathom in modern computing terms, so I find it slightly irritating that it takes more than zero-seconds between me hitting power and the game starting up.

Small annoyances aside, I was able to hot-swap games without issue, although some of the older, original carts didn’t handle it well. That’s likely due to 40 years of wear and tear and corrosion more than the 2600+. I had no problem popping out the included cart, changing the dip-switches, and popping it back in again. Is hot-swapping a feature? Well, I don’t know for sure, there’s very little documentation out there, so proceed at your own risk.

While it is pretty awesome to be able to throw in an original Atari cartridge and have it work almost exactly like it did back in the day, the Atari 2600+ is an emulation machine, and doesn’t use an FPGA like the Analogue Pocket. It uses the open-source Stella emulator, which you can view in its entirety on GitHub. I like that they went with a known-entity rather than try and reinvent the wheel, but I would have preferred the fully identical hardware an FPGA solution would have afforded.

So what does the Atari 2600+’s emulation software mean for you, the owner of some 2600 carts you bought at a flea market? Probably very little. But because it’s software emulation rather than hardware, some games won’t work. The number of non-working games is pretty small, and you can find the list buried on the Atari 2600+ website. I didn’t have any trouble with any of the games I have, but if you’re really hoping to play that copy of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre for the 2600… well, maybe they’re doing you a favor.

40+ Year-Old Game Design

The biggest problem with any system designed around the Atari 2600 is a large majority of the games available for that console just aren’t much fun to play anymore. There are a few exceptions, like the previously mentioned Yars Revenge and the “how did they even do this?” Pitfall II. Adventure is one of the most historically significant games of the era, but its completely obtuse gameplay and single-pixel protagonist make it hard to appreciate as anything more than a relic.

That’s the biggest weakness of all the game systems from back in the day. The games just don’t hold up well. It’s hard to understand now, but a huge draw of the early home “arcade” systems was the novelty of being able to directly control the picture on your television. TV had always been completely passive, and now you could push a little stick and press a shiny red button and the images on the screen, primitive though they were, were entirely under your control. It’s impossible to ever replicate this novelty, which means many of the 2600 games have to live on the merits of their gameplay alone, and sadly, many of those games just suck ass.

None of this is the fault of the Atari 2600+, however. The good news is, those few games that actually are fun are pretty inexpensive, so you can easily build out a library of the all-time best of the best for the Atari 2600, and Atari 7800 carts are also easy to source and relatively cheap online.

The GTA 6 trailer is just a few days old, but Grand Theft Auto fans are already modding protagonist Lucia into other games.

Taking to popular modding website Nexus Mods to share their creations, fans are trying to trick themselves into thinking GTA 6 is out already by playing as Lucia in other games. While a couple of them make a lot of sense, like past Grand Theft Auto entries, another is a little bit more random.

Nexus Mods user huckpie uploaded their mod for Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1+2. “I couldn’t wait for GTA 6 to be released so here you go,” they said, alongside providing a funny little backstory. “Prior to her Bonnie and Clyde-esque escapades with her beau Jason, Lucia has been waiting ten years until Rockstar gets tired of milking GTA 5 dry by practicing the fine art of skateboarding.”

A little more on brand, Lucia was modded into both Grand Theft Auto 5 and Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas by Nexus Mods user sergiovandykmods. While Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1+2 is perhaps the best looking version of Lucia, the gameplay of these two will obviously provide the closest experience to GTA 6 until it finally releases in 2025.

The GTA 6 trailer — which reintroduces fans to Rockstar’s take on Miami, Vice City — has already broken records, and dwarfed the likes of Cyberpunk 2077’s reveal trailer in terms of views. Lasting 90 seconds, the trailer featured a ton of intricate details (here are 99 things IGN spotted) and plenty of references to wild and wacky real life events too.

While the game was revealed alongside the 2025 release date for PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X and S, PC players were left frustrated, though not necessarily surprised, that their platform was left off the list.

They weren’t the ones a little peeved though, as several developers from Rockstar itself took to social media to express their frustration at the trailer leaking early. In fact, the entire industry shared their disappointment that the exciting moment was dampened. Several streamers were also hit with content strikes and takedowns in the wake of the leak.

Ryan Dinsdale is an IGN freelance reporter. He’ll talk about The Witcher all day.

There’s no argument that Grand Theft Auto is one of the most popular franchises on earth. Simply look at the top ten sales for the past 10 years and GTA 5 has dominated the charts ever since it launched, two full console generations ago. Three years in we have been bereft of a full Rockstar game built from the ground up for the latest generation of console hardware. Today we finally have a glimpse of just what those shiny new consoles we purchased are capable of, and it did not disappoint.

First some basics on what we saw and the platforms that GTA 6 will launch on, come 2025. The trailer is a development work-in-progress build, likely running on the PlayStation 5. But GTA 6 will also ship on Xbox Series X and Series S, as confirmed by Rockstar when the trailer launched. It’s been in development since at least 2018 when Red Dead Redemption 2 launched, but possibly longer. The same Rockstar Advanced Game Engine is running it, although it will likely be a significantly enhanced and evolved version that will be designed around the capabilities of the current generation.

As before, the new GTA will not initially launch on PC, and no date was provided for when that will happen, so we can at least be confident that we are looking at real time PS5/Series X gameplay. The footage was capped at 30fps, but I would almost guarantee this will be a 30fps target for all three current consoles, which is not a bad thing at all and I think the results reflect that this was the correct choice. Regardless, it’s far too soon to worry about performance yet, especially when we have so much beauty on offer, so let’s get into it.

The Future’s So Bright, We Gotta Wear Shades.

Looking at the trailer, the internal base resolution appears to be 2560×1440 and is likely using a reconstruction solution within the engine to produce a 3840×2160 output. From a visual stability and clarity perspective, I have no concerns here and have long held the view that 1440p to 1620p is the perfect balance of pixel quality versus quantity.

But enough on the least interesting aspects of the engine, what about those brand-new features? As mentioned, this is an upgraded version of the Red Dead Redemption 2 and GTA 5 engine, and the current-generation updates of those games have already given us a taste of what to expect. Ray-traced shadows and reflections appear prominently within the trailer, as we see self-reflections of raucous crowds on those pearlescent paint jobs, and bikini-clad girls in pools (although planar reflections are a possibility here). Car wing mirrors reflect the bodywork and flying flamingos, in a nod to Miami Vice. We can see a high level of material quality and reflectance across wet streets, polished cars, and even carbon fibre weave. This is also a great area to show the level of Fresnel used across surfaces. As the car and the girl’s green dress move in the scene, the level of reflectance changes with the angle of incidence and lighting.

These also appear to mix and/or fall back to standard screen space reflections, and you can see evidence of disocclusion artifacts during some shots, as the object is occluded or offscreen. The balance here is likely that a limited subset of the scene’s geometry is built into a reflectance dataset. This is then traversed via the bounding volume hierarchy as rays are cast into the scene. Meaning we get all included objects within this BVH reflected via a lower level of detail proxy. And then anything else not within this data set is picked up via SSR or old-fashioned cube-maps.

The shadow solution is likely using a similar mixed method of ray-traced objects that is simply stunning. The trailer footage has signs of contact hardening and umbra and penumbra feathering from both the sun and electric light sources. As per the GTA 5 update, these look to mix with cascaded shadow maps (CSM) which allow a long range of lower quality shadows to be mixed with the pixel-precise ray-traced ones. These create that strong CGI look that the trailer has from all objects within the scene, with characters self-shadowing on their arms, faces and interiors. These are bolstered further with a robust ambient occlusion method, which may be a byproduct of the ray-traced shadows and improved Screen Space solution, such as HBAO or even a mixture of the two. The results are quite staggering, with almost no signs of flicker, dithering, or issues in the micro and macro details.

I did note a couple of close-up interiors that had some shadow flicker, but like ambient occlusion, Rockstar could also be using screen space shadows to help ground all small and distant objects within each of the plentiful shots. With such a limited amount of footage to evaluate it is impossible to know all the techniques deployed here, but mixing shadow maps with screen space shadows is a good solution for two main reasons. One, they lessen the cost of the expensive ray-traced ones, which balances performance with quality, and two, they become a great baseline for the Series S, which will almost certainly lose out on all ray tracing effects, but the fallback solution still provides a confident technique that delivers a close high quality.

Content of Character

One big reason GTA 6 looks so solid and impressive in this trailer is the phenomenal lighting quality throughout. From the manmade neons in clubs at night to the bright sunshine of the packed beaches, the light reactions across sand, buildings, palm trees, skin, hair, and water all look accurate and convincing. The extensive use of global illumination has been a key area of the Rockstar engine since GTA 5 and was improved with Red Dead Redemption 2. Here we see the next evolution of that system, which is also enhanced by clever use of post effects such as a faux VHS dither, perspective warping, and the fan-favourite chromatic aberration. What we get is soft diffuse light that bounces off sand mounds and concrete floors mixed with tight and highly specular dresses, car bonnets, and even sunglasses. The long views of the Miami- and Florida-inspired location highlight sub-surface scattering through the deep blue below as a plane flies by. These look close to shots from the excellent Microsoft Flight Simulator, only here you can fly right down and dive in to cool off.

The use of bounce light, be it baked into an image-based solution as per previous games or a more involved ray tracing one, produces impressive results. As we see, from dark occlusion under cars as they drive to high glare and irradiance bounce on shop interiors, the accuracy and consistency of the lighting solution leaves talk of ray tracing a moot point as the material and object reactions look much closer to an offline render than a real-time game.

This is even more prominent in the characters. The opening shot of the lead character Lucia brings many of these techniques together perfectly, as she stands by the frosted glass of the prison door. Soft burnt orange sunlight bleeds in and provides a red edge light to her skin and hair. Emphasizing the sub-surface scattering extends to skin and hair, but also drastically increases hair quality now. We see full spline-based rendering in many of the main characters here, as her hair swings and bobs. We also see this in the curly locks of the parole officer as her hair bobs and inter collides during this brief shot. Later in the trailer we see a variety of hair styles and features, but, purely in the interests of a technical analysis, the long blonde hair of the poolside bikini poser is the most impressive yet, and brings many of these elements discussed into a crystalised view.

With full hair simulation that not only carries full physics of movement but almost faultless character model and self-collision, it genuinely looks as good as a baked simulation. It twirls around with both weight and momentum, the various colours and layers have anisotropic reflectance across the strands, and they self-occlude and cast pixel-accurate shadows on themselves and the girl’s face and shoulders. These then drape and curve around her shoulders and hand as she poses. The dynamic natural quality of this is staggering, and is backed up not only by the motion-captured animation throughout this and the trailer, but also the sheer density and skinning of the character models. In such a close-quarter and very difficult move set on show here, we have perfect skin deformation on the neck, elbows, shoulders, and fingers. In fact, the only noticeable issues here are some clipping of her hair on the bikini top and the lack of reflectance of hair in the sunglasses.

It’s Hot in the City

Wrapping up this short and fast look is one of the often-missed aspects of many of these trailers and why they work. The rendering, lighting, shadows, and overall material work is top tier and I think safe to say the best we have seen on the current generation thus far. But what really blurs the line between CGI and real is the exquisite attention to detail and effort in the animation, physics, world density, and streaming quality. From every shot, be it a twerking star atop a car roof, a mud hungry hillbilly rock salute, or a hammer-wielding grandma captured on an emulated phone camera, everything you see in the trailer looks consistent and authentic. The police bodycam footage of the raid, the startled shoppers fleeing from the alligator, or the crotch-grabbing apology – it is all almost faultless and pristine. No obvious animation set blends, no lighting errors or flickering shadows, no glowing textures or flat-looking surfaces. The look and feel of GTA 6 is undoubtedly a tremendous amount of effort from all involved, and I have only scratched the surface on what we have been allowed to see here. The volumetric smoke that samples light and shadows, the staggering draw distance across many of the long shots and general lack of pop-in.

While a handpicked trailer should always flatter to present a game in the best light where possible, this is only the beginning, I feel, of what the team at Rockstar have in store. The water simulation and tessellated mud, the overblown lighting and fuzzy camera shots that could fool you into thinking it was just recorded on a potato for real. The trailer appears to have so many areas teased, and the sheer scale and variety GTA 6 promises to offer means the next trailer could and will likely highlight completely new aspects and visual and gameplay techniques not touched in this stunner. Rockstar always takes its time to deliver the goods, and with this likely being the only GTA game for this generation – probably the next two generations, in fact – this reveal certainly has grabbed the attention of audiences worldwide. GTA is back, baby.