Sony has acquired UK developer Firesprite, marking the third studio acquisition from Sony this year alone.

As noted on the PlayStation Blog, Firesprite has worked closely with Sony, creating several titles together. Most notably, the developer helped to create The Playroom and The Playroom VR. Firesprite is also the developer behind The Persistence, a horror shooter originally released on the PS4 as a PSVR title before becoming a non-VR version on PS4, Xbox One, Switch, and PC two years later.

"We’ve had the pleasure of working with many talented developers and publishers across the industry and PlayStation, in particular, has been a friend and co-development partner for the best part of a decade," Firesprite Managing Director Graeme Ankers said in the announcement post.

It's something of a full circle moment, as Firesprite was formed by members of the disbanded Sony Liverpool after it closed in 2012. With over a 250-person team, Firesprite marks a major addition to PlayStation's stable of developers, too. In an interview with GameIndustry, Firesprite confirmed that it would work on games outside of the genres currently covered by Sony's other in-house studios.

This marks the third studio Sony Interactive Entertainment has purchased in 2021. In June, Sony acquired Housemarque, the Finnish developer that released the PS5-exclusive Returnal earlier this year. In July, Sony announced that it had acquired Nixxes, a Dutch studio that specializes in porting games to PC. Firesprite becomes the 14th studio in the wider PlayStation Studios stable.

Taylor is the Associate Tech Editor at IGN. You can follow her on Twitter @TayNixster.

Activision Blizzard is currently facing serious ongoing allegations of harassment and mistreatment of marginalized workers. To learn more, please visit our timeline as well as our in-depth report on the subject.

Diablo 2: Resurrected won't feature ultrawide monitor support when it launches on September 23 due to the discovery that the wider screens break AI mechanics within the original game.

Following the technical beta for Diablo 2: Resurrected, developer Vicarious Visions and Blizzard Entertainment took to updating fans on a number of in-game features that the team has revisited. As well as briefing players on changes that had been made to console lobbies and offering more insight into the removal of TCP/IP support (which it dropped back in August), Blizzard also updated fans on the subject of ultrawide monitors and why players won't be able to utilize the full width of their 21:9 screens when the game launches.

According to Blizzard, the issue mainly stems from the game's AI not registering players at distances available to those using 21:9 ultrawide screens. The update post expands on issues caused by ultrawide screens in the game:

"Ultrawide monitor support being modified was a subject we saw heavily discussed across our channels following the Beta. In the Technical Alpha, players with Ultrawide hardware saw their full 21:9 screens utilized during that test. However, during that test we identified limitations affecting those players and others. For example, the AI failed to sense the player and trigger attacks. Furthermore, players with 21:9 monitors were able to pull many more monsters into battle at a range limit beyond the original game’s intention. In a scenario where players (for example: playing a ranged class) were attacking monsters, players with 21:9 monitors could hit enemies with that extra screen space, but the monsters would not pull or react, but could still be defeated. Ultimately, the AI doesn’t register getting hit from that additional distance a 21:9 monitor provides. That’s not intended, especially if you’re sharing a game with a 16:9 user. To protect the integrity of everyone’s experience and promote an equal playing field for all, those with Ultrawide monitors will be able to have their game screen purview extended to 19:9 (the maximum length of the in-game limitation zones) with a vignette on the sides of the game screen."

Blizzard acknowledged that players are likely to have paid top-dollar for their ultrawide monitors and in doing so may feel irritated by the inclusion of black bars on the screen during their playthrough. In response to this, Blizzard has said that that it will continue to "explore possible solutions that don’t change how the game is played."

Elsewhere in the post, Blizzard said that two of its core principles for the game are "protecting the authenticity of the original Diablo II experience and making it more accessible in this modern age." Whilst finding a way to include ultrawide monitor support would arguably lean into the latter, a future patch to address the issue currently looks far from certain.

To read more about the upcoming remaster for Diablo 2, you can check out this piece that details everything you need to know about the game.

Jared Moore is a freelance writer for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter.

Titane hits theaters on Oct. 1.

Are you ready for a serial killer tale that is not just gory and vicious, but also wickedly funny and slyly sweet? Ready or not, Titane has arrived like a blow to the head, violent, nauseating, and deliriously dizzying. Fitting, since a blow to the head is the start of its anti-heroine’s tale, leaving her with the titular titanium plate embedded in her skull. But a warning to the faint of heart — or stomach — this is a supremely strange ride, and your mileage may vary.

Years after the formative car crash that made her part metal, 32-year-old go-go dancer Alexia (mesmerizing newcomer Agathe Rousselle) splits her time between twerking on hot rods at car shows and casually murdering anyone who dares come too close. With the law on her tail, she goes into hiding by binding her breasts, shaving off her hair, and posing as the long-lost son of a rugged firefighter named Vincent (Vincent Lindon). However, her true identity isn’t all she has to hide. A night of torrid car sex means her body is becoming a ticking timebomb, dripping with oil and dread.

“Hot femme fatale goes into hiding” might sound like a relatively simple crime-thriller setup, but on this framework, co-writer/director Julia Ducournau builds details that are savagely surreal and unapologetically transgressive. She welds the madness of midnight movies with the stranger-than-fiction details of a disturbing true-crime case, in which a French con man preyed on a grieving family desperate for hope. (Related: Watch Bart Layton’s documentary The Imposter). Together, these elements form a radical vehicle for exploring the terrain of broken souls and found families.

Within all this weirdness and violence, Ducournau works in a deranged sense of suspense and humor. A scene where Alexia purposely breaks her own nose is not only stomach-turning, it’s unnervingly funny. It’s not that violence is played for laughs. Instead, Ducournau sets up our expectation for the violence, and then slows the pace to make us twitch in anticipation of the impact. Laughter becomes our release valve. Alexia’s coolness in these moments is so shocking that it’s grimly hilarious, so much so that the impact of her blows need not even be onscreen to illicit cries, moans, or guffaws. A sound design rich with bone-crunching, flesh tearing, and organs squishing is powerful enough.

This sensational collision of body horror and comedy makes Titane a sensational follow-up to Raw, the cannibal coming-of-age film that first won Ducournau international acclaim. That menacing yet madcap movie also centered on an introverted antiheroine who had an irrepressible urge for violence. Here, however, Ducournau refuses to start off with a character who is sweet and meek, much less remotely affable. Alexia is hell on wheels from the first scene, revving her engines without a care to whom it might harm. Over the course of the film, she barely speaks. There are no monologues spelling out excuses for her bad behavior. No confidantes will display her softer side. Remarkably, this is Rousselle’s first feature film role, yet she scorches on screen. Alexia’s motivations are left unspoken, but her feelings are clear through every fearsome grimace, every hard stare, every slinky swivel of her hips, and even a stone face finally falling to softness. Rousselle is ruthlessly riveting, whether dancing, devastating, or crumbling.

Storied French actor Lindon proves her perfect match on screen. Playing an aging firefighter determined to be a protective and devoted dad, he’s got Big Christopher Meloni Energy. His burly muscles flex with a desperation to wrestle his world into order. His face clenches in efforts of patience. This projected toughness makes moments where he dances goofily or gently hugs all the more profound. The tension shifts from if he will find out who Alexia really is to the potential emotional fallout of that discovery. While Titane is full to the brim with jaw-dropping reveals, ghoulish gore, and twisted humor, it is plumbing the complexities of two characters who feel impossibly lost and unloved, so this mind-bending ride ultimately lingers in your heart.

The promotional website for Matrix Resurrections launched on Tuesday, and one user has already reverse-engineered the page to uncover teasers for every possible combination.

While the majority of us have been visiting the WhatIsTheMatrix.com website and selecting the red or the blue pill at different times of day in an effort to catch a new teaser generated from our choices, Twitter user @linuxct delved into the page contents to better understand how the time detection on the site worked.

After a bit of digging, the talented techie explained on Twitter how they then proceeded to reverse engineer the page to "see how they were generating the URLs for the videos of every possible combination." The results of that process were then compiled into CodePen, where users can generate links for any specific video they want to see.

I ended up reverse engineering the page (just a bit 😳) to see how they were generating the URLs for the videos of every possible combination.

I also created a Codepen that will generate a link to any video you want to see in specific. Check it out! https://t.co/btAiWnmsn7

— linuxct (@linuxct) September 8, 2021

The "Matrix 4 Promo Video Finder" allows you to personally select the different variables that influence the outcome on the site, including the time of day that you visit, the pill color selected, and the number of days until the trailer release date. After submitting the information, you are then presented with a link to the corresponding teaser.

WhatIsTheMatrix.com was the website that launched with the original Matrix movie and included multiple hidden pages accessed by codes, as well as games and comics based on the film. It was an early experiment into viral web marketing for a film – however, the new take on the old site has launched into a very different internet landscape.

If you don't have time to click through and watch the thousands of unique teaser videos on the site or you simply can't get enough of the footage on display, then you may want to keep your eyes peeled for the Matrix Resurrections trailer, which is coming up on September 9 ahead of the film's official release on December 22.

Adele Ankers is a freelance writer for IGN. Follow her on Twitter.

If Mario Party is a full meal, WarioWare has always been more like a bag of popcorn: a quick, delicious snack, but try to eat it for dinner and you’ll be craving something meatier before long. WarioWare: Get It Together! is no exception, with rapid-fire microgames that are a delightfully wacky test of both reaction speed and problem solving – this time with the interesting new twist of using unique characters that control differently. But while Get It Together! looks great and can be a lot of fun, some dud characters and its fleeting multiplayer modes keep it from being a regular part of a balanced party game diet.

All of Get It Together!’s madness is introduced through a brief but entertaining story mode, the entirety of which takes about two hours to complete. The story itself involves Wario, now a game developer himself, and the employees at his company getting sucked into the video game they are making to do battle with its bugs. That setup has nothing to do with playing the actual microgames, which give you a word or two of instructions and just a few seconds to follow them before throwing you to the next one, but the short cutscenes that kickoff each stage and the conversations between them can be very amusing.

But we’re not here for the plot, and WarioWare’s single-player modes have always been more about going for high scores in a variety of ever-escalating themed playlists rather than beating them once and moving on. That’s a fun challenge, particularly with the later playlists that have a larger pool of microgames to throw at you. The story levels are also playable in co-op this time around, which is certainly a nice inclusion, if one that can feel like a “little brother mode” since the games seemingly haven’t been adjusted for two simultaneous players.

Choose Your Character

Solo or co-op, however, Get It Together!’s assortment of microgames provide exactly the kind of madcap hilarity I want from this series. One second you’ll be removing a statue’s armpit hair and the next you’re scrambling to feed baby birds. The fan-favorite, Nintendo-themed games are also a joy, asking you to do things like deliver a present in Animal Crossing or complete a teatime in Fire Emblem. There’s a healthy mix of ridiculous moments and quick challenge here too, which allows you to tangibly improve as you begin to recognize levels.

That familiarity is mitigated by the new unique characters. There are more than a dozen to use, each with abilities and movement styles that can give the same microgame a different flavor when you swap between them. For example, Wario himself can fly anywhere on screen freely and punch left or right with the press of a button, while his pal 18-Volt is stuck sitting still as he shoots discs from his head to affect the level from afar. They each have their strengths and weaknesses for certain microgames, and story levels ask you to pick a roster of three to five characters that you’ll randomly swap between, adding some additional spice to stages you’ve beaten a dozen times.

Both the characters and the animations accompanying these playlists also deserve a shoutout for just how good they look. Get It Together! isn’t trying to push the bounds of modern graphics or anything, but the elaborate backgrounds between each microgame and the overall art direction are vibrant and full of personality. Tons of life has been poured into areas that could have otherwise safely blended into the wallpaper – including with the characters themselves, who use adorable 3D models that are made to look like chibi 2D sprites, making them wonderfully expressive despite their minimal designs.

But while the roster is visually diverse, some of these characters are just objectively worse versions of others, mechanically speaking. Why would I ever want to use video game enthusiast 9-Volt, who is stuck constantly skateboarding left-to-right and can throw a yo-yo directly upward, when the robot Mike can also shoot upward but fly anywhere on the screen freely while doing so? Similarly, the dog-cat duo Dribble and Spitz can fly but only shoot right or left, respectively, whereas ninjas Kat and Ana have the exact same directional restriction… but can never stop jumping up and down, making them far worse.

Meanwhile, the popular witch Ashley blows all the folk I just mentioned out of the water by being able to fly while shooting any direction she likes, and a unique option like the terrifying mother 5-Volt can be borderline unusable for some games since she only moves and attacks by teleporting. As a result, despite being given free choice of the roster, it felt like I was avoiding half of my options like the plague. There are definitely still enough good ones to keep the story levels interesting, but it’s a shame that “the same but worse” was used as a template so often.

Nevermind, Don’t Choose Your Character

The other half of the WarioWare coin is its multiplayer, which is hit and miss in Get It Together!. There are a total of 10 modes in a section called the Variety Pack, which range from head-to-head microgames to co-operative score-attack minigames to other oddball entries like a fighting game. The three score-attack modes are largely dull (including a super boring side-scrolling platformer, which I never actually finished a full run of without quitting because it was just so mind numbing), but the PvP options can be a lot of fun… at least, for a little while.

Apart from one of its two solid 1v1 modes and a janky volleyball minigame that’s only good for a couple rounds of entertainment (hot tip: 18-Volt is completely busted in this one), none of the four-player PvP modes actually let you pick your characters. Instead, they’re usually randomly picked and frequently changed, which feels like a truly baffling decision. That includes a clever territory-capture game with its own small set of unique PvP microgames (which are cool, but unfortunately get old fast since there are so few) and a Smash Bros.-style fighter that had promise but is let down by forced mid-match character swaps, causing it to devolve into the bad kind of party game chaos.

Only two of the seven modes that allow for up to four players are even about completing the regular microgames (one of which is WarioWare’s returning balloon inflation mode) which leaves Get It Together!’s multiplayer in a very strange spot. Everything about completing these games and the zany, unexpected madness of adapting on the fly can be a good time with friends, but you are given so little control and things are so random that none of it holds its shine for more than a few rounds. I absolutely enjoyed myself while I was playing, but after trying everything the Variety Pack had to offer, there’s not enough of lasting interest here to ever make Get It Together! a staple of my party game rotation like past console WarioWare games were.

To give credit where it’s due, Get It Together!’s story mode manages to make good use of its characters (at least the ones that don’t suck), and the genuine appeal of chasing high scores solo is further emphasized in the Wario Cup mode – a weekly unique score challenge with ranked leaderboards. It’s hard to tell how much long-term appeal this mode will hold having only seen two brief but entertaining challenges so far, but it is another neat inclusion to keep things fresh. That said, for having a ranked option, it’s a little strange to me that your score is partially influenced by how much you’ve engaged with Get It Together!’s cosmetic gacha system.

Don’t freak out: there are no microtransactions here whatsoever, so that’s good. However, completing games will earn you coins that can be spent on loot boxes that contain “Prezzies” of various rarities that are then given to characters to level them up and unlock cosmetic recolors. It’s a relatively ignorable system for those who don’t care and a decent (if perplexingly convoluted) way for dedicated players to be lightly rewarded for their time – but your character’s level will also increase your ranked score in Wario Cup for some odd reason. That’s not the end of the world in a goofy single-player score-attack mode with no real-money way to buy Prezzies, but it is a confounding decision all the same.