CUPHEAD

Let’s start with one that’s actually always been cheap. Studio MDHR’s Cuphead is a modern run ‘n gun classic, boasting stellar art and animations, devilishly punishing yet brilliantly designed boss fights, and a healthy amount of content, with the entire package setting you back just $20. Throw in another $8, and you can also purchase its excellent expansion, The Delicious Last Course.

MONSTER HUNTER WORLD

Capcom sells its back catalog titles better than most other companies out there, and just as responsible for that as their enduring quality is the prices they drop down to. Monster Hunter World, Capcom’s highest selling game of all time, is currently prices at $20, which, for a game as good as it is and as much content it has, is a ridiculously good price.

RESIDENT EVIL 7

Another relatively older Capcom title that has lost none of its luster in the years since its launch, Resident Evil 7 is a game that also keeps on selling, and looking at its price, it’s easy to see why. Sure, it may not be the hundred-hour romp that Monster Hunter World is, but can you really turn your nose up at one of the best survival horror games of all time being sold for just $20?

THE EVIL WITHIN

We’ll stick with the survival horror genre here, and turn our attention to a nearly-decade old game that perhaps doesn’t get the sort of love it deserves. For fans of the over-the-shoulder Resident Evil formula, The Evil Within is an absolute must-play, thanks to its incredible atmosphere and relentlessly tense combat. At just $20, the game’s an absolute bargain, and one that any genre fan should be pouncing on.

STARDEW VALLEY

Indie darling Stardew Valley has never really been a costly game, given the fact that it’s, well, an indie game, which means it’s always been an absolute steel. Being sold at $15, this is a game that you can pour literally hundreds upon hundreds of hours into. Want to manage and expand your farm? Want to hang out with cool characters and deepen your bonds with them? Want to go exploring caves? In Stardew Valley, you can do all of this and more.

HOLLOW KNIGHT

You may have heard Hollow Knight being called one of the greatest games ever made by many, and trust us, that’s not an exaggeration in the slightest. This grueling Metroidvania masterpiece is an astounding piece of art, representing game design, music, art, and everything else in between at their absolute zenith. Again, by virtue of being an indie game, Hollow Knight has always offered incredible value for money, as it does right now for a price of just $15.

UNCHARTED: THE NATHAN DRAKE COLLECTION

The original Uncharted trilogy is pretty old at this point (he said while setting down his walking cane), but Naughty Dog’s action-adventure games are still worth going back to, not least because of the excellent remastering work that Bluepoint Games did with The Nathan Drake Collection on PS4. The collection can be bought for the price of just $20, which gives you access to not one, but three riotously enjoyable games, making it a pretty sweet deal all in all.

THE LAST OF US REMASTERED

Naughty Dog loves going back to The Last of Us, but even though we do have a full-fledged remake as an option on PS5, the PS4 remaster that launched in 2014 is still an excellent deal. It looks excellent and still plays great (not to mention the fact that it runs at 60 FPS), and can be purchased for $20. For that price, you also get access to the widely beloved Factions multiplayer mode, so in many ways, it’s actually a better option than the PS5 remake for those looking to go back to this modern classic.

GOD OF WAR

A much more recent entry than some of the other games we’ve spoken about on this list, 2018’s God of War is a game that people are going to keep going back to for years- something that is price is only bound to make easier. For a price of $20, you can dive into the action-adventure game’s rollercoaster, emotional journey, which combines narrative and action gameplay in one of the best PS4 experiences ever.

HORIZON ZERO DAWN

Speaking of landmark first party PS4 titles, Horizon Zero Dawn is another stellar game that you can dive into for a surprisingly low price right now. Guerrilla’s post-apocalyptic open world action RPG is retailing for a price of just $20 on PS4 right now, which is more than a reasonable price for a game that you can clock dozens of hours in. On PC, however, it’s priced at $50, so there’s definitely some disparity in its cross-platform pricing.

GEARS OF WAR 3

Yes, Gears of War 3 is more than a decade old, but it still remains one of the best third person shooters we’ve ever played, to the extent that even many much more recent ones can’t hold a candle to it. With an excellent campaign and addictive multiplayer offerings, at a price of just $12, the Xbox 360 title is almost unreasonably cheap right now. On Xbox Series X, in fact, it even benefits from visual and technical boosts, so if you haven’t played this masterpiece, now is the time to jump in.

GRAND THEFT AUTO 5

Nearly eleven years on from launch, Grand Theft Auto 5 keeps selling better than most games do instantly upon release, and doubtless, its reasonable pricing has had a hand to play in that. Currently being sold for a price of $20 on Xbox and PlayStation, the open world game is one that you can pour countless hours into without even the hint of boredom. We’re about a year away (and hopefully no more than that) from Grand Theft Auto 6, so if somehow you still haven’t played GTA 5, now’s the time.

BATMAN: ARKHAM KNIGHT

Rocksteady Studios’ Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League might not be what so many wanted the studio’s next game to be, but you can always go back to its older releases to remind yourself of why the studio is as beloved as it is. Batman: Arkham Knight has had some pretty rough luck with its platform-specific versions on PC and Nintendo Switch, but on PlayStation and Xbox, it’s still an incredible game to go back to- not least because you can do so for just $20 right now.

BLOODBORNE

Whether or not we’ll ever get a Bloodborne remaster, port, or even 60 FPS patch (much less a sequel) is anyone’s guess (though signs point to a big, fat no), but thankfully, FromSoftware’s eldritch horror action RPG is a stellar game even in its original form, even today. Like a number of other first party PlayStation titles we’ve mentioned here, it can be purchased for just $20, which, for what’s irrefutably one of the greatest games ever made, is a shockingly good price.

METAL GEAR SOLID 5

Metal Gear Solid 5’s legacy will always be a complicated one for so many reasons, but one thing that’s hard to dispute is that, for all its flaws (of which it has many), it’s somehow still an absolute masterpiece in more ways than one, from its timeless emergent stealth gameplay to the incredible design it sports across its many missions. Diving into all of that and more for a price of just $20 is more than a fair deal, to say the very least.

As reported by GamesIndustry’s Christopher Dring on Twitter, The Last of Us Part 1 for the PS5 enjoyed a steep growth in digital sales in the UK last week, with a week-on-week increase of 305%, and rose to No. 11 in the charts. Similarly, PS4’s The Last of Us Remastered also saw its digital sales going up by 337%, and slotted in at No. 16 in the charts.

With The Last of Us Part 1 also set to launch for PC on March 3, it’s likely that we’ll be seeing the game continue to rack up steady sales over the coming weeks and months. Recently, Sony also made a two-hour trial for the remake available to PlayStation Plus Premium subscribers, hoping to entice users into purchasing the full game.

Meanwhile, The Last of Us’ success on TV has prompted HBO to officially greenlight a second season for the show.

Now the digital data is in for the UK, we can see that The Last of Us Part 1 sales actually grew 305% week-on-week and is at No.11 in the charts. Last of Us Remastered was up 337%, and is at No.16

— Christopher Dring (@Chris_Dring) January 27, 2023

As per the Gfk’s latest weekly data for boxed software sales in the UK (via GamesIndustry), last week, following the HBO show’s debut, The Last of Us Part 1 saw an impressive 238% increase in sales over the week prior, climbing up to No. 20 in the charts.

Interestingly, the PS5 remake is not the only game to benefit from the TV show’s success. The Last of Us Remastered on the PS4 also saw an increase in sales of a whopping 322% over the previous week, and jumped up to No. 32 in the charts.

This is, of course, a big part of the reason why a remake of The Last of Us was greenlit by Sony, and sure enough, the company has been making a push for increased sales for the game to go along with the HBO series’ success. Recently, Sony also made a two-hour trial of The Last of Us Part 1 available to PlayStation Plus Premium subscribers.

On March 3, The Last of Us Part 1 will also be launching for PC, so there’s a good chance that we can expect the game to continue selling well for some time to come.

Meanwhile, The Last of Us’ second episode is set to premiere on HBO later today- head on over here for a sneak peak at upcoming episodes.

Despite the many improvements this version brings when compared to the original incarnation, The Last of Us Part 1 finds itself in a rock and a hard place as far as gameplay improvements are concerned. In addition to the improvements on the graphical front, there are some subtle improvements on the gameplay side of things as well – though that doesn’t amount to much when looking at the whole picture. But in this feature, we will be focusing on the graphical end of the game and comparing it with the remastered version on the PS4 in an effort to see what improvements this version is bringing to the table.

As you can easily gauge from a brief look at the two versions of The Last of Us, the PS5 version looks a lot darker than the PS4 remaster when it comes to the choice of colours. The Last of Us Remastered doesn’t shy away from using macabre colours like brown and grey but that is balanced out with the abundant use of green for the overgrowing foliage in the environments. The PS5 version ends up being really conservative with its colour palette, and the colours are a lot more muted which makes the environments feel drab, dreary, and more hostile than before. Of course, this is an artistic change that’s not reflective of the game being downgraded in any sense.

Putting The Last of Us Remastered and The Last of Us Part 1’s environments side by side, we can see that most of the level geometry and props are the same – but the actual assets have been re-built with higher quality textures which results in a more cleaned up look than the original. That said, because the geometry of the levels have remained the same – they can still end up feeling a bit unpolished and crude at times with some rough edges sticking out from places. It might not be immediately notiscale, but it’s a difference that one can notice when pitting the games side-by-side.

Then there are the character models, which have gotten a significant facelift in the PS5 version when compared to the PS4 remaster. The character models now boast markedly more detail than the original counterpart, which also has a downside in that some characters now look a lot older than before. Joel now has more visible wrinkles in his face, and the same can be said about Tess. On the flipside though, Bill seems a lot younger in this new rendition. Ellie’s character model has also been updated to retain similarity with the original. Poly-counts for these character models are incredibly high with highly detailed facial hair and skin meshes, and they all look spectacular in this new format.

The Last of Us Remastered uses a mixture of precalculated ambient lighting data along with sparse use of directional lights and shadows for most of its environmental lighting. The remake also seems to be utilizing the same lighting techniques, and the quality of lighting is in line with what one can expect from a modern game – complete with the additional cinematic lights that serve the purpose of adding more depth and definition to the character models during cutscenes. That said though, the cinematic lights in the remake seem to be softer in nature.

There are some more improvements with respect to lighting and reflections as well. Surfaces such as roads and the sides of buildings now reflect nearby environmental light sources like police sirens and rising flames with varying intensities depending on their reflective properties, which culminates in a more realistic feel when compared to the Remastered release. There’s no evidence of ray-tracing in reflections and shadow maps, but because the game’s environment’s lighting doesn’t dynamically change all that much – the lack of ray-tracing doesn’t really have any impact on the end result and the game still looks great nevertheless.

Particle effects have also seen a massive improvement with the remake, with a lot more alpha particles per explosion. The flames also look far more realistic than the original, and the volumetric smoke that surrounds the flames is also thick and diffuses light from its surroundings.

As for anti-aliasing, The Last of Us Remastered used Naughty Dog’s signature TAA implementation that worked to great effect in smoothing out the image quality without showing visible signs of artifacts during gameplay. Unsurprisingly, the developer has stuck to its roots for the remake and seems to have used the same TAA implementation along with the natural improvements that the Naughty Dog engine has seen over the course of almost a decade. That said, the game does looks sharper which is most likely a result of the higher base resolution on which the TAA pass is performed.

Briefly touching upon the animations, the cinematics animation data in The Last of Us Part 1 seem to be a one-to-one replica of that in The Last of Us Remastered, albeit with an added element of camera shakes. Character movement in cutscenes is the same, which isn’t a surprise since no motion captures were redone for this project. But there are major improvements in the facial animations which add more emotional weight. On the gameplay front, we now get the spectacular motion-matching technique which makes for seamless animations that blend well into one another. This improvement is more pronounced in sections featuring Ellie, though you can also spot some differences with the way how Joel now goes about things as well.

On that note, we should also talk about the performance. The Last of Us Part 1 is an interesting candidate from Naughty Dog because it’s the developer’s first release from the ground up in many years to have launched with support for 60fps gameplay. The game features two graphical modes – a Fidelity mode and a Graphics mode. The Fidelity Mode bumps the image resolution to 4K and locks the frame-rate to 30fps while Performance Mode knocks down the resolution to dynamic 4K and bumps the frame rate over to 60fps.

In addition to this, you can also adjust a couple of sliders such as motion blur, camera shake intensity, and film grain to get a better personalised experience for your playthrough. It’s all basic stuff, but appreciable nevertheless. The game performs well for the most part in both modes, which shouldn’t come as a surprise considering that the PS5 is much more powerful than the PS4 and the improvements featured in the remake are iterative rather than radical.

In conclusion, The Last of Us Part 1 is a faithful remake of the original – and the many improvements on the visual and gameplay front have been done in an effort to make the game fall in line with current gen standards.

Two scenes are compared – the burning barn in the Prologue, and Joel and Tommy traveling down a road on horseback. In the first, we see significantly improved lighting and fire effects along with the barn actually falling apart as the inferno rages in the PS5 version. In the second video, the amount of trees and their level of detail in the remake is far higher while the animation of the horses galloping looks more realistic.

The Last of Us Part 1 is out on September 2nd for PS5 and at an unannounced date for PC. Though players can’t crawl, dodge and go prone like in The Last of Us Part 2, Naughty Dog has outlined a bunch of other improvements and new accessibility features. You can learn more about them here.

When the PS5 launches this November, it will be able to play all but less than a dozen PS4 games released to date. Many of the games it runs via backward compatibility will also benefit from added boosts and enhancements to leverage the next-gen console’s most powerful hardware. And with the PS5’s launch right around the corner, it seems Sony have been stealthily releasing new patches for various PS4 games in preparation.

The Last of Us Remastered recently received a patch, following which its load times have been cut down from over a minute to just fourteen seconds, while it seems God of War (2018), God of War 3, and Until Dawn have also received similar updates that cut down load times. Meanwhile, as VGC points out, it seems that Concrete Genie also recently received a new patch.

As per users on ResetEra, the likes of Astro Bot Rescue Mission, Everybody’s Golf VR, Marvel’s Spider-Man, and PSVR Worlds have also received patches. Meanwhile, we also know that last week Final Fantasy 7 Remake got its first post-launch patch out of the blue.

None of these have been confirmed by Sony as patches that add enhancements for the PS5, but in many cases (such as God of War 3) these patches are suddenly being added in after years of inactivity for those games, which just seems like too much of a coincidence.

We’ve previously also heard that select PS4 and PS VR games will enjoy boosted frame rates on the PS5, while backward compatible titles will also use some of the new UX features being introduced with the new console.

Sony have been sending out the PS5 to various media outlets and influencers, so hands-on impressions and new details on the console should be coming in soon. Stay tuned for GamingBolt for all the updates.

God of War 3 Remastered and God of War (2018) both received updates in the last few days, for the first time in years. Both titles will likely benefit from PlayStation 5 boost mode in this case. I wonder if there’s anything else hidden inside…

— Lance McDonald (@manfightdragon) October 23, 2020

https://twitter.com/VizualDze/status/1320309315018915841

Seems Sony found a way to compress their games much more efficiently. They have been recently updating their games and for example TLOU Remaster loads like this now

This thing will be crazy fast of #ps5https://t.co/vUOEuY05qv pic.twitter.com/50ATZEDDWk

— Droid (@Alejandroid1979) October 24, 2020

In the months leading up to the PS5’s price and release date reveal, many wondered about backwards compatibility with PS4 titles. Sony sort of addressed this with the announcement of the PlayStation Plus Collection. Essentially, if you own PlayStation Plus on PS5, you’ll have access to a curated library of PS4 titles for the console.

Said titles include Monster Hunter World, Persona 5, God of War, Bloodborne, Ratchet and Clank, Batman Arkham Knight, Days Gone, The Last of Us Remastered and much more. This is noted as being an “added benefit” in addition to other PlayStation Plus perks and won’t cost extra. Of course, this approach raises a lot of other questions.

What about other PS4 titles like The Last of Us Part 2 or Ghost of Tsushima? Will there be more games added to the PlayStation Plus Collection and if so, how long will it take? Can we expect kinds of backwards compatibility? There are more questions than answers, for sure.

Regardless, the PS5 finally has a release date and price. It’s out on November 12th in the US for $499 ($399 for the digital edition) and November 19th for the rest of the world.

To no one’s surprise, Final Fantasy 7 Remake topped the UK charts for boxed video game sales in the week ending April 11, as we reported yesterday (via GamesIndustry). The game sold half as many physical copies as Final Fantasy 15 when it launched in December 2016, though not only is that down to most physical stores in the UK being closed due to a government-ordered lockdown, it’s also worth noting that Final Fantasy 15 launched during the Christmas period.

Physical sales in the UK on the whole, however, seem to be on the up. Over a million copies of games have been sold in the UK since the lockdown began, while if you include the week before that, the number goes up to 1.5 million, with Animal Crossing: New Horizons having had a big hand in that. Year-on-year physical sales are up 3 per cent, while sales this week are up 2 per cent over last week.

Resident Evil 3, which debuted in second place last week, has fallen down to No. 7, seeing a 78 per cent drop in sales. Meanwhile, curiously enough, The Last of Us Remastered re-entered the top 10. You can check out the full top 10 below.

1. Final Fantasy 7 Remake
2. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare
3. Animal Crossing: New Horizons
4. FIFA 20
5. Mario Kart 8 Deluxe
6. Forza Horizon 4
7. Resident Evil 3
8. Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order
9. Grand Theft Auto 5
10. The Last of Us Remastered