Square Enix has announced that the full Kingdom Hearts saga so far is being upgraded and ported to PS5, Xbox Series X|S and Nintendo Switch 2, launching on 8th October 2026.

As part of this, the KINGDOM HEARTS Collection [I~III] will be sold as an all-in-one bundle for people that want the whole lot,  but you can also buy each chapter separately. That’s KINGDOM HEARTS -HD 1.5+2.5 ReMIX-, KINGDOM HEARTS HD 2.8 Final Chapter Prologue and KINGDOM HEARTS III + Re Mind (DLC).

I know I’m not the first one to say this, but the way these remastered collections have been named over the years is beyond ridiculous.

The big news for Switch 2 buyers is that these will now be running natively on the console, where the Switch 1 releases were all ‘Cloud ver.’ and played remotely. That was Goofy at the time and it’s still pretty quackers, if you ask Donald me. A demo of Kingdom Hearts 3 is available today for Switch 2 featuring the start of the game through to Olympus (with save data that can carry across to the full game), and then jumping ahead to Toy Box World (where save data will not carry over)

Upgrade pricing is also available, with a 50% discount on digital purchases from last gen to Switch 2, PS5 and Xbox Series X|S. Switch 1 to Switch 2 will also be able to transfer save data, but this is a mysteriously absent feature on Xbox and PlayStation. I see no good reason why it shouldn’t be possible, given that there’s countless other games that have a save transfer between generations.

Square Enix also released a new teaser trailer for Kingdom Hearts IV, confirming that it will now also be coming to Switch 2.

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Regardless of whether Intel would say it out loud, the Core Ultra 7 270K Plus and Core Ultra 5 250K Plus both represent an attempt to right the wrongs of the original Arrow Lake/Core Ultra 200S family. That bundle of chips was, necessarily, more power-efficient and cooler-running than the hotheaded 14th Gen models before them, though this came at the cost of hamstrung gaming performance. Rarely a desirable quality in a gaming CPU, that.

These two Core Ultra 200S Plus (or Arrow Lake Refresh) processors do, in comparison, achieve some appeal. They’re inexpensive and excellent multitaskers, and while they do still have efficiency on their silicon brains, Intel have looked to bump game speeds back up by rejigging their innards into a less latency-prone layout.

Alas, it’s not enough. Not only are Core Ultra 7 270K Plus and Core Ultra 5 250K Plus slower in games than AMD’s best chips, they once again fail to convincingly outpace Intel’s own back catalogue – the 2023 vintage 14th gen processors, included.

That’s especially unfortunate as the remedial measures Intel have taken for these chips are, on the face of it, sensible. Fingers may be pointed at the lack of major clock speed boosts: the 270K Plus’s 5.5GHz max boost clock is unchanged from the Core Ultra 7 265K’s, and the 250K Plus’ only rises to 5.3GHz, from 5.2GHz on the Core Ultra 5 245K. But previous Intel Core generations had been bumping up clock speeds for years, with little effect beyond increasingly troublesome temperatures.

Instead, the Core 200S Plus duo get 900MHz speed boosts to die-to-die (D2D) frequency, specifically addressing a problem with the original Core 200S models where the once-unified memory and compute controllers had been split into different tiles and spread across the processor. This is good for power efficiency, but introduces latency, as the disparate components need extra time to communicate with one another; an increase in D2D frequency should quicken this process, and get games performance back towards where it was when Intel chips were still monolithic.

These CPUs are also the first to wield Intel’s Binary Optimization Tool (apologies for the z, fellow Brits, that’s what it says here). A new component of the Intel Application Optimization (gargh) app, this tool supposedly speeds up certain games that were designed with older processors in mind. Or, rather, it speeds up how the Core Ultra 7 270K Plus and Intel Core Ultra 5 250K Plus can process them, producing game-specific increases in instructions per clock (IPC). That basically means the chips can get more done in each CPU clock cycle, uplifting performance without needing to raise clock speeds (and thus temperatures) themselves. It’s clever stuff, on paper.

In terms of testing all of this out, I may have slightly fired a .44 magnum cartridge directly through the ol’ metatarsals by being so disinterested in the original Arrow Lake chips that I never recorded proper benchmark results for them. For the requisite bar graph competition, though, I still think it makes sense to hold these new parts up to the 14th genners, which remain both the more likely subjects of “Should I upgrade?” ponderings and the most reliably high-performing Intel chips of the past few years. I’ve also thrown in the AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D – if Intel are serious about the Core Ultra 7 270K Plus being their “fastest ever” gaming CPU, then they surely won’t mind comparisons to a top performer from the Ryzen camp.

Thus, gaze ye upon gaming benchmarks:

This is obviously not great reading, from the Arrow Lake Refresh perspective. The two new chips could be called an improvement, but only in the sense that they are now roughly as fast as the 14th generation, not repeatedly worse. And they still fall behind in Total War: Warhammer III, the Core Ultra 5 250K Plus not even equalling the years-old Core i5-14600K.

The only real win here is in Cyberpunk 2077, where the 250K Plus does actually beat its ancestor by a meaningful margin, and the 270K Plus just sneaks ahead of the former flagship Core i9-14900K. Credit where it’s due, that feat is repeated in Returnal and very nearly achieved in Warhammer III. Given the newer CPU is also a good 10% slower in F1 2024, mind, that “fastest ever” claim comes with a big, bold-type asterisk . It’s also, quite clearly, nowhere near the Ryzen 7 9800X3D’s level.

Binary Optimization, it turns out, is of limited usefulness as well. Part of that is just inherent to the tool’s lack of widespread game support (barely over a dozen, at launch), but even when it works, it’s not much of a magic go-faster button. In Cyberpunk 2077, enabling the tool nudged the 270K Plus up from 233fps to 243fps: a mere 4% boost, in a game that was already more generous to Arrow Lake Refresh than most. The 250K Plus also climbed from 224fps to 233fps, another teeny 4% rise, though this does at least show – if you’re more inclined towards mid-rangers – that Binary Optimization can at least get Core Ultra 5 hardware up to Core Ultra 7 standards of performance. In certain games. And conditions. And assuming you don’t just enable the same tool on an Ultra 7 as well.

All the same, I can’t bring myself to get as huffy about Arrow Lake Refresh as I did about Intel’s preceding misfire. Factoring into that is the apparently earnest attempt at making amends on game performance, if it was ultimately a doomed one. More practically, there are other things this CPU duo does much, much better.

Multitasking and productivity are two. Get your PC doing something that can take better advantage of multiple threads than games, be it editing, encoding, or if you’re into that sort of thing, livestreaming, and both the Core Ultra 270K Plus and Core Ultra 250K Plus will juggle the workloads far more deftly than their older alternatives. Even if the 270K Plus isn’t entirely Intel’s fastest gaming CPU, it might well be their highest-scoring mainstream CPU in Cinebench’s simulated benchmark tests, and the 250K Plus finally nails down an outright victory over the Core i5-14600K here too.

Again, I don’t have results for their original 200S equivalents, though smart money is still on the newer CPUs: both have an additional four E-cores (E for Efficiency) over their pre-Refresh equivalents. While these aren’t as big and beefy as their accompanying P-cores (P for Performance), they still add four extra threads for the CPU to play with, and with minimal extra strain on power or thermals.

Speaking of, both chips remain nicely cool, even on the budget-friendly Thermalright Peerless Assassin 120 SE air cooler I’d tested them with. Whereas the same setup had the Core i9-14900K’s P-cores peaking at 90°c in games, even hitting the danger zone of 100°c during Cinebench runs, the Core Ultra 7 270K Plus only went as high as 76°c while playing, and stuck to a safe 90°c at its benchmarking peak. The Core Ultra 250K Plus was even chillier, peaking at 68°c in games (down from 77c° on the Core i5-14600K) and 74°c in Cinebench (down from 82°c). With the exception of the Ryzen 7 9800X3D’s 88°c peak temp in Cinebench, both chips were also consistently cooler than that AMD bigshot.

The fact that these processors can run on cheap coolers is particularly welcome at a time when memory shortages are driving component prices – and by extension, the cost of new PC builds – painfully skywards. And that’s not to mention how aggressively priced these CPUs are themselves: at $300 for the 270K Plus and $200 for the 250K Plus, these average around $100 less than the equivalent Arrow Lake pieces, with the former notably coming in nearly $200 cheaper than the Ryzen 7 9800X3D. That, alone, could pay for a decently specced motherboard (if not, regretfully, a good set of RAM) to go with it.

This is expected to be the last generation of Intel CPUs to fit the LGA 1851 socket, so any new mobo won’t get to carry over any future chip upgrades. But then, the CPU isn’t the kind of component you’ll be swapping out frequently anyway.

The Core Ultra 7 270K Plus and Core Ultra 5 250K Plus do have their place, then, as affordable multithreading engines. It’s also encouraging to see that Intel really have got a grip on temperatures; the 14900K, especially, was way too ready to hit boiling point.

It’s just that for games, specifically, they’re still not preferable to a shiny new Ryzen, or even to upgrading from any reasonably non-ancient Intel platform. Right now, you’re not going to see worthwhile improvements over an existing 14th or likely even 13th gen Core equivalent, while AMD’s 3D V-Cache tech still has Intel licked at the enthusiast end.

On that note, the most prudent buying decision of all may be to simply wait. Intel have yet another CPU family, Nova Lake, set to launch later this very year, and word is they’ll have their own answer to 3D V-Cache in the form of BLLC (Big Last-Level Cache). Throwing vast memory stores at game framerates may not sound as elegant as something like D2D optimisations, but hey, it’s been working for AMD for years – and it’s clearly time for Intel to try something different, at least to themselves.

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Meta is testing a new “Series” feature for Reels that’s designed to make it easier to keep up with serialized content on Instagram and Facebook, the company told TechCrunch.

Select creators will now be able to create a series using their Reels, both new and old. Each Reel will become an episode in a bigger story with a dedicated hub on their profile, mirroring an experience that’s already available on TikTok.

The launch of the new feature indicates that Meta is embracing longer-term viewing, rather than quick scrolling sessions, as is normally the case with short-form videos. With organized series, the social media giant is looking to bring audiences back repeatedly and build stronger viewing habits. As for creators, the new feature offers a more organized way to release episodic videos, like tutorials and challenges.

Meta told TechCrunch that it’s considering ways to monetize the new feature, but didn’t share specifics on what that could look like.

It’s worth noting that Instagram rival TikTok launched a Series feature back in 2023, allowing creators to post collections of premium content behind a paywall that viewers can purchase for access. It’s possible that Meta could follow a similar playbook with its own series feature in the future.

Meta says it’s already seeing serialized content take off, so its newest test feature is meant to make it simpler to catch every episode. For example, if a creator is doing a “10 days of healthier baking” series, they can bundle all ten videos into a single series. The series would appear in a new tab on the creator’s profile with its own page so people can find all the episodes, watch them in order, and pick up where they left off.

When viewers discover episodes of a series while scrolling their feed or the Reels tab, they will see the option to tap into the full series to see other episodes. Users also have the option to save a series to watch later or stay up-to-date.

For the testing phase, Meta is working with select creators and content producers who have already shared serialized content on Instagram and Facebook.

When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This doesn’t affect our editorial independence.

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The Gunstar Scimitar, one of the few battleships to escape the Cylon attack on Caprica, has a problem. Yes, it is the only military vessel standing between a pursuing robot army intent on wiping out the last of humanity and an unarmed civilian fleet, but the safety of the civvie ships that cluster around the Scimitar like pilot fish to a whale shark isn’t the immediate worry. Nor is it the imposter robot hiding among the command crew, planting bombs across the fleet and sewing seeds of discontent at every opportunity. It’s STDs. The colonial marines crewing the gunship are riddled with them. Charitably, you could say the soldiers saw it as their duty to restart the human race. Whatever the case, as the commander of the Scimitar, I have to choose whether to spare the marines their blushes and let the infections continue to spread or step in with some prophylactics and a lecture on safe sex.

If you choose to avoid embarrassment, the healthcare level of the entire fleet will drop, as infection spreads unabated through the amorous crew. Step in with condoms and talk of birds and bees and your relationship with the now-chastened military will deteriorate. Not every decision in Battlestar Galactica: Scattered Hopes, the roguelike FTL take on the sci-fi TV series, is to do with the nighttime antics of your crew, but they do all carry consequences.

Your objective in every run of Battlestar Galactica: Scattered Hopes is the same. You must survive jumps through 12 sectors of Cylon-controlled space and link up with the Commander Adama of the Battlestar Galactica. He is pulling together an armada to push out into the stars and find a new home for humanity. Holding your fragile fleet together long enough to catch up with Adama is not easy, though. As well as battling STDs, you must balance the needs of different factions, battle the Cylons who catch up with you in each sector, and deal with the frequently emerging crises by using your tired crew and scant resources.

It’s best to think of each sector on your journey as an episode. From the moment you arrive in a new sector, you have limited time before the Cylons arrive and you are forced to leave. That time is measured out in a small pool of actions. You must spend those visiting points of interest, dealing with crises in the fleet, or training the crews of the civilian ships. In addition to those actions which advance time, you also have some moves you can make only once per sector, such as visiting the bar to spend downtime with your crew and progressing your search for the imposter sabotaging the fleet. But I’ll come back to that. After you burn through your actions in the sector, you must face off against the Cylons in a real-time battle. Their forces are infinite and stronger than you. Your aim is to hold the toasters off just long enough for your jump drives to spool up so you can escape to the next sector and do it all over again.

The first thing you’ll want to do when you arrive in a sector is weigh up your options. There might be an abandoned station with fuel tanks just begging to be syphoned off, a depot stuffed with supplies aching for redistribution across the fleet, or maybe even a lost squadron of Mk 7 Vipers you can track down and recruit to your gunship. However, committing to any of these missions will cost time and resources. At a minimum, completing a point of interest costs fuel. Run your fleet’s resources dry and when it comes to jumping at the end of the sector, you will cause massive damage to your ships. If the fleet’s health hits zero or your gunship is destroyed, it’s game over for your run.

But you can also choose to invest more resources for a bonus. Your senior crew only has the energy to perform one action each sector, but send them on a mission and the rewards can be massive. Without a hero, a fuel syphoning mission may only return one additional fuel for the fleet, but if you send your head of engineering, they can up that to three. Even more if they’ve a trait that earns you a bonus. Send them to find a lost squadron or a hero in a drifting escape pod and the new recruit’s starting trait will be rare or higher. Traits can do things like earn bonus resources, or increase a squadron’s attack power in battle, or expand the radius of your battleship’s flak cannon screen.

However, points of interest are only one of things that will sap your time in a sector. Most of your energy will be spent solving crises. Sure, that may be a wave of STDs spreading across the fleet, but more often it is an act of sabotage, a ruptured hull, or a civilian uprising over working conditions. Some crises are straightforward: a Cylon has planted a bomb on one of your ships and it will explode in three turns unless you spend the resources to defuse it. Your choice is simple, use up a hero’s precious action point, invest limited supplies or scrap, or simply let the bomb go off and take the hit to your fleet’s health. Sometimes doing nothing is the best option.

Unlike a minor crisis, which can be resolved or ignored until the timer expires, a major crisis is either a costly, ongoing threat to your fleet, or a massive one-off fee. For instance, in one crisis, a murder took place on a civilian ship. I could either choose to investigate the crime or leave the civilians to take justice into their own hands. If I chose the latter, and bypassed the crisis, my repair costs for all ships and squadrons would jump up massively for the next two sectors. However, picking the former would reduce supply production across the fleet until the culprit was found.

As your run continues, these crises can pile up becoming a serious drain on your resources. You may at one point be facing a revolution on one of your civilian ships, an outbreak of plague on another, and a murder investigation on a third, forcing you to pick and choose where to spend your resources resolving them. A lovely touch is that the crises that spawn often reflect the status of your game. If you have a tense relationship with the military because, I don’t know, you gave them a lecture about proper condom use, then the next flashpoint you face will likely be a military junta. However, despite the setup, the crises themselves blend into one another because the actions are largely identical. Solving major crises often boils down to the same thing: a set of sub objectives, each of which is solved by either spending a chunk of supplies or using one of your senior crews’ actions. Canvas the scene of the crime: one hero action or four supplies; speak to the leaders of the revolution: one hero action or eight supplies; administer to the sick: one hero action point or six supplies. You get the idea.

The persistent crisis that is different is the Cylon investigation. In every run, after a few jumps, just when you’re starting to get comfortable, bombs will start to appear across the fleet. The culprit is within your senior crew and through a process of elimination you will need to expose them. Each sector, you can investigate an aspect of your crew’s history – their past before joining the fleet, medical history, fleet record, and material evidence. You can also overhear rumours in the bar, get offered suspicions by factions you’ve made friends with (again, in my game this was not the sternly-talked-to-STD-riddled colonial marines), or examine evidence left over from thwarted sabotage attempts. There will always be two suspects with three suspicious blots on their records. You then need to spend supplies or lock the suspect in the brig to find out the truth. However, while Cylon imposter is randomly chosen on every run, the investigation plays out in exactly the same way. It should be full of drama and intrigue, but instead it’s bland and predictable.

When you reach the end of the sector, the battle against the Cylons is swaps to real-time. Each melee begins with your battleship and civilian ships on one side of the screen and the Cylon battleship at the other side of the screen and you launch your squadrons into the space in between. Your job is simple: survive until your jump drive counter reaches zero and you can escape to the next sector.

There are fleeting moments where Battlestar Galactica: Scattered Hopes captures the look of the 2004 series. The two goliaths at each side of the battlefield fling munitions at each other, shredding any fighters caught in their flak barrages, nukes crisscross space and you’ll need to divert Vipers from their targets to intercept the missiles, and all of the Raptors, Vipers, and Cylon raiders that feature in the series make an appearance. But, as with the crises and the imposter investigation minigame, battles repeat and repeat and repeat. At the beginning of every encounter I sent my ships to the same starting positions, used the same formations, and barely varied my tactics. Even as my squadrons levelled up and I found new weapons for my battleship, I barely changed how I played.

I love the look of Scattered Hopes. Its low poly ships and pixel art textures are beautiful, the UI is crisp, and yet there is a lifelessness to its action. As I flick through the screenshots of battles, it’s impossible to ignore how static the battlefield is. The ships sitting stock still in the same location fight after fight. Even the way the ships move, is in simplistic straight lines. There’s a shot in the game’s opening cutscene that’s from the cockpit of a Viper firing out of a launch tube. It’s a shot familiar from the series and it’s glorious in this style, but there’s never a moment of that action in the game.

Battlestar Galactica: Scattered Hopes is playable for a run or two, and it has flickers of the series that inspired it, but spend too much time in its company and it simply becomes robotic.

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Animal Crossing: New Horizons has received a surprise patch today to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the life sim series. The update, version 3.0.2, is available across the Switch and Switch 2 versions of the game.

The patch brings a single new addition to New Horizons – a leaf item. Everyone gets it, too, so you don’t have to do anything special to acquire it.

After installing the patch, simply head to your in-house mailbox to claim it. The mail includes a hearty message to fans who supported the series for years, featuring an appropriate Nintendo N64 stamp.

The Leaf Statue, as it’s referred to in-game, lights up when placed.

April 14, 2011 marks the release of the original, lesser-known version of Animal Crossing in Japan. The game was initially released as Animal Forest (Dobutsu no Mori) on the Nintendo N64, before later making its way to the Nintendo GameCube in December of the same year as Dobutsu no Mori+ with some extra features.

That same, original design of the package is also available for display in your game. The rest of the patch notes are entirely about various bug fixes, so not much more there. You can see the full change log on Nintendo’s support website.

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