Coming This Week to Digital Foundry (Week 46 2025) (Patreon)

Hello there! Well, there's a lot going on right now but that top image says it all. John is now in full production of the next DF Retro epic, celebrating Xbox 360 on the occasion of its 20th anniversary and today, he and I filmed the retro unboxing of our original, virtually untouched launch Xbox 360 Core machine - and it brought back a lot of great memories. It's an unboxing that I actually don't feel any contempt about - haha! Just remembering some good times. The unboxing video will go out on November 22nd, followed by the full episode soon after.

OK, so stuff is still formative right now but here's what's cooking:

Rich (ie me) is still working in the background on the Xbox Ally X assets that'll form part of the big review that Oliver and I are working on. This will include actual testing of Advanced Shader Delivery! I'm also spending some time on the website this week as we bed in on that one. Still early days there, but we're very pleased with the impact of the first few days and it's good to see us being "noticed" by Google Discover and other traffic drivers, even without slavish SEO. Oh, and I'm still aching to crack open the GPD Win 5.

Tom will - and I'm going to promise you on this - deliver that Pokémon Legends: Z-A reviews we've been threatening you with since the cooling of the Earth's core billions of years ago. Looking to the future, Tom will likely be tackling COD BLOPS 7 and STALKER 2 as it transitions across to PlayStation hardware.

You already know what Oliver is working on, but he's got some embargoed content to work through first. Looking well ahead, he's also keen on covering the new Apple M5.

Alex is gearing up for some sponsored #content but he's also intrigued by a Monster Hunter Wilds optimisation mod that essentially decompresses all of the assets and allows the game to access those assets, leading to alleged performance improvements.

John has completed "taping" of the second episode of the DF Retro Super Show and now contemplates the third. But really it's all about dat Xbox 360. He's got plans for a look at every single launch title in every territory, complete with the frame-rate analysis that didn't exist at the time. Oh, and how about 4K60 capture using a RetroTink 4K and nearest neighbour 3x3 scaling? It looks stunning. And yes, this also means you'll get to see the Blades properly upscaled to 4K for the first time!

Sam, of course, will be continuing to adapt our content for the website!

It's interesting that the deluge of releases has actually calmed down a bit now - not that we're not extremely busy - but feel free to pitch ideas for #content (we'd like to revisit ARC Raiders on consoles, for example). That's all for now though - have a great week!