It’s Black Friday and the war for your Christmas budget is getting heated. Microsoft brings this year’s best exclusive lineup with Tomb Raider, Halo 5 and Forza 6, Sony on the other hand still has the better hardware and… wait, what are their holiday exclusives again? Oh, right, a Beyond: Two Souls remaster, but what is up with that?

When Beyond came out in 2013 it was one of the best looking games on consoles, though maybe not the richest gaming experience. The PS3 version still looks great to this day actually, so why am I so underwhelmed with the visuals of the PS4 port?

I am one of the biggest proponents of a 1080p/60fps minimum. Most games tend to deliver a better experience at a high framerate with a crisp image. But you can’t just upscale a sub 720p previous gen game and call it quits. AAA console titles are optimized to hell and back and upscaling makes all those cuts to the visuals noticeable. You might not notice a low polygon model and low resolution texture when you are playing a game at 544p, but blow it up to almost 3 times the size and suddenly all those little resource saving tricks make your game as ugly as the arm of a Krokodil addict (nah, don’t google that).

Ok, Beyond: Two Souls on the PS4 does not look bad, but it lost its finesse, its visual coherence. The original release was a technological masterpiece and managed to immerse you in its world despite a lack in processing power and clear aliasing. The port is a showcase for the pitfalls of remastering. Well, at least they kept the 30fps target. Would have been too easy to fuck that part up. (And yes, thanks to the limited interaction this is one of those games that actually benefits from <60fps to make it look more like a movie)

But what is everyone playing over the weekend?

• Greywolfe (Twitter, YouTube): i took a week off.  so no real games.  just constantly running wow raids and dungeons for mounts.
  AFTER YEARS I GOT ASHES OF AL'AR.
• Scrooloose: More Fallout 4 because it's finally getting interesting. Still planning on starting Darksiders 2, Deathfinitive Edition. Also picked up Hard West and I'm really excited to get into that. Probably some Rocket League here and there... less lateley because leavers.
• Thomas (Twitter): Baking Christmas cookies and maybe getting baked myself. Won’t have many opportunities to game, but should I, I’ll probably return to Fallout 4 and Star War: Battlefront. Despite everyone bitching, that game is fun as fuck.
• Trish (Twitch): IM GONNA EAT THIS TURKEY AND PLAY MY GOD OF WAR COLLECTION
• Yoda0VGs (Twitter): Fix computer power supply possible related problems and hopefully get the fucked running again Game 2015. Its a chalenging game but not a whole lotta fun.