Worx’s petite cube vacuum appeals to my desire for cleanliness, control, and cute things in my life.

In case you haven't checked out Archinect's Pinterest boards in a while, we have compiled ten recently pinned images from outstanding projects on various Archinect Firm and People profiles. Today's top images (in no particular order) are from the board Fancy Facades. Tip: Use the handy FOLLOW feature to easily keep up-to-date with all your favorite Archinect profiles! ↑ 1345 S. Wabash in Chicago, IL. Architect of Record: ParkFowler Plus; Photo: Darris Lee Harris ↑ Zhongtian · Jing Yue Qing Lan "Multicolor Villa" in Hangzhou, China by line+; Photo: line+ ↑ Brown House in Washington, D.C. by BLDUS; Photo: Jennifer Hughes ↑ Angkor Grace in Siem Reap, Cambodia by Bloom Architecture (Phnom Penh); Photo: Oki Hiroyuki ↑ PLP City Range mixed-use in Bangkok, Thailand by ASWA (Architectural Studio of Work - Aholic); Photo: ASWA ↑ RLJ Chapel in San Juan Cosalá, Mexico by Ricardo Yslas Gámez Arquitectos; Photo: Jaime Navarro ↑ Potash Tower in Ahmedabad, India by INI Design Studio; Photo: Vinay ...

Several months on from its original release, World of Goo 2 is set to open the gates for a larger audience on additional platforms. 2D Boy and Tomorrow Corporation have announced that the sidescrolling puzzle platforming sequel will launch for PS5 later this month, on April 25.  World of Goo 2 will also launch for Steam on PC on the same day. Upon its PC release in August last year, the game was available exclusively via the Epic Games Store. In March, 2D Boy and Tomorrow Corporation announced that that exclusivity would end sometime this spring– now we know exactly when to expect it on Steam, and it’s not too far away.  Via a Steam post, the developers also confirm that they’re set to release a new update for World of Goo 2 that will add three new levels that are “designed especially for the most clever, the most hardcore, the most goo-imbued players,” alongside over 30 new achievements, a new options menu, and more.  World of Goo 2 is currently available on Nintendo Switch and PC via the Epic Games Store.

If you’ve been waiting for the right moment to pull the trigger on the Apple Watch Series 10, you’d be hard-pressed to find a better time than now. That’s because Apple’s latest flagship is on sale at Amazon, Walmart, and Best Buy right now in its 42mm base configuration starting at $299 ($100 off), matching its lowest price to date. You can also purchase the 46mm model with Wi-Fi at Amazon, Walmart, and Best Buy for just $329 ($100 off), which remains the best price we’ve seen for the larger configuration since its debut in September.Apple Watch Series 10 (GPS)$299$39925% off$299The Apple Watch Series 10 has a larger, wide-angle OLED display with up to 30 percent more screen area. It’s thinner and lighter than its predecessors, yet it charges faster and features the same fitness and wellness features. Read our review.Overall, the Series 10 is a relatively minor upgrade over the Series 9 — though, that’s not a bad thing. The last-gen model was an excellent smartwatch, and the Series 10 primarily builds upon it with a bigger, brighter wide-angle OLED display that makes reading texts and notifications that much easier. What’s more it does so without adding any unwanted bulk; in fact, the Series 10 is actually 10 percent thinner than the Series 9 and a whopping 30 percent thinner than the Apple Watch Ultra, ensuring it will likely never catch on your sleeves.RelatedAs for other changes, the Series 10 charges significantly faster than the last-gen model, allowing your watch to go from zero to 80 percent in just 30 minutes. It features Apple’s newest S10 SiP (System in Package), as well as FDA-cleared sleep apnea detection and a range of fitness-centric features. Some of those — such as the new Vitals app and the ability to pause your Activity Rings — come courtesy of watchOS 11 as opposed to the new hardware, though they’re welcome all the same.More ways to save this weekendIf you’re looking to outfit your home with some brick-ified, faux greenery, Lego’s Lucky Bamboo set is on sale at Amazon, Walmart, and Target for an all-time low of $23.99 ($6 off). It’s not quite as intricate as Lego’s Wildflower Bouquet or some of the other models in the Botanicals Collection, but the excellent 325-piece kit includes three stems, pebbles, and a pot with a wood-effect plenth.We’re big fans of Elgato’s macro controllers here at The Verge, so much so we’ve written an entire article rounding up our favorite hacks. Thankfully, if you don’t own one, the Stream Deck MK.2 is down to $129.99 ($20 off) at Amazon and Best Buy. The MK.2 is essentially the midrange model; it comes with a detachable stand, a swappable faceplate, and 15 programmable LCD keys, which you can use to carry out shortcuts across Windows and macOS.8BitDo’s Ultimate 2 Wireless Controller is receiving its first discount at Amazon, where you can pick it up for $53.99 ($6 off) thanks to an on-page coupon. It’s not a vast departure from the original model 8BitDo launched in 2022, though the updated version adds color-changing LED lighting and an extra pair of customizable shoulder buttons. Best of all, it’s equipped with tunneling magneto-resistance (TMR) joysticks, which draw less power and are even more durable than Hall effect sticks.See More:

Every year but one for the last half-century, one of the biggest, baudiest, most excessive movies ever made graces the small screen, courtesy of the ABC network. As surely as the seasons change, come spring Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments returns to TV in a massive four-and-a-half-hour block of ad-supported religious television... and people are still watching. As recently as 2023, it topped broadcast TV viewership for the week of Passover. It’s a time of year I look forward to immensely.Not that I’m watching it on ABC... who needs that many Ozempic commercials interrupting the 10 plagues of Egypt? But I still stream it just before Easter every year, just as I have since I was a little kid and it was on TV the Saturday night before we all got dressed up in our Easter best the next day. 1956’s The Ten Commandments is not a good movie, but it’s a massively important one, and it’s certainly one of my favorites. Its hammy, sometimes wooden, deeply pretentious and overly concerned with itself, with long pseudo-biblical narration in pretentious King James-ish tones. But it’s also huge, bawdy, violent, sensual, packed with Hollywood legends, and stunningly entertaining thanks to its colossal scale and its extraordinary commitment to exploiting its audience. Now I want to be very clear here: I’m not particularly talking about the Exodus story. I’m talking about the film. I’m a Quaker, and I take Exodus with a lot of theological weight: Even if I doubt much of it ever happened historically, the story itself still says some very powerful, meaningful things. It lays a foundation for three great religions, and establishes the extraordinary character of Moses, a deeply flawed, deeply reluctant, and empathetic cultural hero. And The Ten Commandments themselves represent something quite powerful historically... a legal code that, while theistic, endeavors to be truly just, promoting a peaceful and civil society.Charlton Heston as Moses in Cecil B. DeMille's The Ten CommandmentsThe (Covertly Exploitative) Ten CommandmentsThe Ten Commandments is an epic, certainly, and a feat of filmmaking at scale. But more than anything else, it’s an exploitation flick. I think that in the modern world, when many of us hear “exploitation flick” we instantly travel to the 1970s grindhouse aesthetic. But exploitation flicks have existed much longer, and The Ten Commandments is easily the biggest, most expensive, and most brazen ever made. What makes an exploitation flick not just another movie is its overt appeal to a very specific audience; in this case, people of faith and “family” moviegoers looking for a moral and ethical play to confirm their own biases. And once the viewer is in the seat, a proper exploitation film delivers enough sordid, tantalizing material to keep them invested. The moral and religious trappings of The Ten Commandments are the bright paint and swan facade on the entrance to the Tunnel of Love. The theological and patriotic nuances fully justify a ticket purchase for even the most prudish. But once through the doors and in the darkness, our riders sail over a world of temptations, sins, and horrors: murder, political intrigue, lust, sex, dancing girls, kidnapping, assault, infanticide, sorcery, and revolution, all culminating in the most famous and spectacular Hollywood special effect of all time. The Ten Commandments is easily the biggest, most expensive, and most brazen exploitation flick ever made. “The Hays Code had neutered movie storytelling for over 20 years, forcing filmmakers to create largely sanitized universes of bloodless cowboy violence and gee-gosh-darn-it language. Sexuality was still present, but heavily curtained, hidden behind layers of innuendo... Lauren Bacall’s famous “You just put your lips together, and blow” in To Have or Have Not being the best example.But The Ten Commandments was no Republic Pictures cowboy flick. It was a Big Important Movie about Big Important Things, like God, a morality play where good is rewarded and evil is punished. And that framing allowed DeMille to get around the Hays code in some absolutely amazing moments. Moses’ story in scripture is plenty violent and miraculous, but it lacks what audiences always want: sex appeal. And Cecil B. DeMille had absolutely no difficulty rectifying that omission on the part of the Bible.At least six-and-a-half of The Ten Commandments are broken in the story of The Ten Commandments. Near the film’s climax, a golden idol is crafted and worshipped... that’s one and two. Rameses bears false witness against Moses. There’s a lot of killing at the beginning (babies) and again at the end (more babies and the Egyptian cavalry). Dathan and Baka covet what they do not yet possess. Theft and graft are integral to the plot. And while we don’t see overt adultery, Egypt is very thirsty, with affairs and alliances heavily inferred.Charlton Heston and Yul BrynnerIf this seems like a cynical take on a famous film, I ask you to consider the history of exploitation cinema. Take, for example, the cautionary tales and health films of early Hollywood, which overtly engaged sexual material under the guise of moral teaching. Reefer Madness is probably the most famous example of this bit; there were plenty of others. The Ten Commandments is exploiting morality and faith to get butts into theater seats... then using sex and violence to keep them there. The film is incredibly horny. The Ten Commandments weaves a lust triangle between dreamy, chiseled Moses, his much hotter adoptive brother Rameses, and the princess Nefretiri, played by the sultry Anne Baxter. Whichever of the two rival men becomes Pharaoh will marry her. Nefretiri is team Moses all the way, but the sexual tension between the two men and Nefretiri is palpable. Consider this dripping exchange when Nefretiri and Rameses are finally alone: Shirtless Yul Brynner: “Remember, my sweet, that you must be wife to the next Pharaoh. That you are going to be mine, all mine, like my dog or my horse or my falcon. Only I will love you more, and trust you less. You will never do the things to me you would have done to Moses.”They kiss.Anne Baxter, dressed in a transparent gown: “Did you think my kiss was a promise of what you'll have? No, my pompous one. It was to let you know what you will not have. I could never love you.”Shirtless Yul Brynner, now smouldering: “Does that matter? You will be my wife. You will come to me whenever I call you, and I will enjoy that very much. Whether you enjoy it or not is your own affair… but I think you will.”Anne Baxter and Yul Brynner are two parts of the film's lust triangle.See what I mean? There’s a lot more stuff like that throughout the film. Showing off see-through wedding night fashion accessories. The women of Midian dancing for the entertainment of the men, who will choose one to be a bride. A startlingly overt suggestion (for 1950s America) of interracial romance between Moses and the Princess of Ethiopia, delivered masterfully by the talented actor Esther Brown (who sadly seems to disappear from Hollywood soon after). There’s murder by knife, murder by balcony, murder by strangling, death by angel, death by dart, a giant magic pillar of fire, a parted sea, laws drawn on stone by the finger of God, and of course, a Golden Calf orgy. This is not a boring film. Stuff happens. But there may have been another element at work in the film’s moral storytelling composition, and act of political rather than audience exploitation. For more background on this, you have to consider just how different our country was at that time, and also how powerful Cecl B. DeMille was. An Overtly Conservative TimeThe mid-1950s were a dark time for America, an era of racial animus and anti-communist paranoia. On Capitol Hill, Senator Joe McCarthy brazenly flaunted his baseless lies before the Senate, and in the House the Un-American Activities Committee spread fear and suspicion. It was also the age of the Hollywood blacklist, when stars and writers suspected of leftist sympathies were barred from work. The Ten Commandments was released during the era of the Hollywood blacklist. (Photo Credit: American Stock Archive/Archive Photos/Getty Images)It was a tense period in Hollywood, a place always existing between the demands of commercial success and artistic expression, now inflamed by the steady gaze of Washington. And in the midst of this doubtful environment, no movie was a safer commercial bet than The Ten Commandments, something DeMille understood incredibly well. After all, he practically invented moviemaking as we understand it. It’s not an exaggeration to say that Cecil B. DeMille created Hollywood. And while today we may think of a 1956 movie as ancient, by the time he produced this film, Cecil B. DeMille had already been making films for over 40 years. He’d seen two world wars, the silent era, the silver screen era, and now color film. He was a pioneer, and his films made bank. An Americanized retelling of Exodus was an ideally palatable film for an age of political orthodoxy. Mom-and-apple-pie values were all there in the fabric of the story: the elevation of personal freedom, denouncement of bondage and tyranny, a cursory reverence for some Abrahamic perspectives on God, and an emphasis on family across Moses’ life, from his Egyptian brother, mother, and father, to his Hebrew birth family, and yet again to his adoptive family in Midian. Don Draper would have been happy to cynically espouse all of these virtues in print and radio for a nominal free.Mom-and-apple-pie values were all there in the fabric of The Ten Commandments' story.“Was The Ten Commandments a deliberate bending-of-the-knee to McCarthyist trends? DeMille was famously conservative, and some elements lend themselves to interpreting a political dimension to the film. The first is DeMille’s theatrical spoken intro to the film in theaters (not typically included on streaming cuts). In the brief intro, the director evokes some potent language, calling the film “The story of the birth of freedom.” He goes on to say:“The theme of this picture is whether they are to be ruled by God’s law, or whether they are to be ruled by the whims of a dictator like Rameses? Are men the property of the state, or are they free souls under God? This same battle continues throughout the world today.” While there are plenty of flags in the production and story of The Ten Commandments that support a McCarthyist interpretation, also note that two formerly-graylisted individuals contributed significantly to The Ten Commandments, with actor Edward G. Robinson and composer Elmer Bernstein helping make the film with DeMille’s blessing. When you compare The Ten Commandments to another successful sword-and-sandals epic released just four years later, you get a sense of just how overtly conservative and covertly exploitative it is. Like The Ten Commandments, 1960’s Spartacus sported a world-class cast, a legendary director (Stanley Kubrick), and colossal setpieces rivaling the parting of the Red Sea. Both films center on enslaved people revolting against tyranny. But where The Ten Commandments loudly espouses Americana orthodoxy while selling titillation, Spartacus makes no qualms about its more liberal politics. It’s a story of a popular uprising against an established national authority... a nation masquerading as a republic but where only the privileged and powerful are free. It proudly credits two blacklisted writers (novel and screenplay). But that was four years after The Ten Commandments, when Joe McCarthy was dead. In 1956, what we got was the life of Moses filtered through the two veils of the hour: the Iron Curtain, and the filter of American sexual repression. "The water turns to blood."Watching the Film TodayThere’s not a great deal that’s artful about the way The Ten Commandments is constructed, but its straightforwardness actually makes it kind of timeless. As admirer Martin Scorsese advised, stop looking at the plot and try to follow the imagery and spectacle instead. It’s almost a horror movie in several places: The image of an Egyptian soldier pulling a bloodied sword from a cradle next to a wide-eyed, dead mother in the opening sequence is haunting, and the coming of the Angel of Death like a cloud of poison gas is genuinely disturbing.Everything before Moses meets God is pretty much Charlton Heston at his hammiest best, but once he encounters the burning bush, he sort of walks around looking stoned. The Red Sea parting is a very cool effect, and Vincent Price absolutely slays as Baka, a truly sinister and gross master builder who turns in the best performance of the movie. This Ten Commandments is almost 70 years old, yet I can think of few films I’d rather watch. The thing is, the traps DeMille set worked. All that sex and violence really is damn entertaining. It’s huge for the sake of being huge, opulent, indulgent even.Just understand the movie for what it is: a film exploiting a divine story. It’s there to entertain, not instruct. If you want something less lurid and more spiritual, the book of Exodus is a short read, and provides the same tale in its much older form, a tale that details a vital chapter in the ancient lives of the Hebrew people.

This article contains Sinners spoilers. In a movie suffused with otherworldly musical sequences and phantasmagorical imagery, it is easily the weirdest thing we see. Jack O’Connell’s presumably thousand-year-old Remmick is performing a Celtic jig from his homeland, and freshly turned vampires like poor disfigured Cornbread (Omar Benson Miller), lonely Mary (Hailee Steinfeld), and even rebellious Stack (Michael B. Jordan) are prancing right along with him in the river dance. Only a handful moments earlier in the film, these same people, all Black or of mixed heritage, were communing with a different kind of spirit when they thrived and writhed to the sound of a blues guitar so true that it connected them with their ancestors and descendants. For a glorious moment, the past, present, and future coexisted, with the sounds of rhythmic drums, electric guitars, and propulsive spoken verse melding together into a harmony that is the African American and larger diaspora experience. But that was their party and their fleeting moment of escape. Before the night is out, it’s been rendered as illusory as Stack and twin brother Smoke’s ownership of this slaughterhouse-turned-juke joint. Now many of those same souls have been “seduced”—or forcibly attacked—by a smiling white devil who offers pledges of comity and fraternity. And those forced to buy into that lie repeat it like an unconvincing PSA that would one day be placed before the grandkids they’ll now never be allowed to have. Among the first to be turned, Cornbread bemoans to Smoke “why can’t we all just get along” and be “polite” to one another? He pleads this even as his new employer angles to literally rip Smoke’s throat out and watch him bleed out on the slaughterhouse floor. For all the imagery of vampire fangs and crimson-red eyes, the story of Sinners is one that’s as old as the cotton fields it’s set in. It’s an American tragedy. “The film for me personally was a reclamation of a time period and a place that my family doesn’t talk about much,” Ryan Coogler previously told us during a preview of Sinners’ trailer back in January. The director was referring specifically to Mississippi where his maternal grandfather grew up, as did a beloved uncle who would only speak of the land of cotton while blues records played. “It’s a lot of feelings associated with our history. We go there, showing these people in their full… humanity.’” Coogler refers to the generation on the screen at the juke joint as his grandparents’ era. And they’re depicted as just as wild and free-wheeling as the generations who preferred rock ’n roll or rap over the blues and jazz. That is demonstrable in the sequence where the guitar and voice of Miles Caton’s Sammie conjures ghosts. But it is also the story of how each generation must face levers of control and coercion—of white faces promising equality and unity, even while they have a literal klansman among their ranks. Indeed, the first time we meet the film’s vampiric villain he has mysteriously escaped Indigenous vampire hunters who surely have a tale to tell of their own while chasing this revenant across the hills. He is spared, however, by faces who trust a white man first, much to their sorrow soon thereafter. Before Remmick turns this dirt poor couple attempting to muddle through the Great Depression into undead lackeys, the vampire clocks the husband as a klansman after spotting a hood in the house. Later we learn from the same ghoul that by drinking this shit-kicker’s blood, Remmick realized the Klan never intended to let Smoke and Stack keep the land they bought with their own hard-won money. The plan apparently was to slaughter as many Black men and women as possible to make a lesson for any other entrepreneurial men of color in the area. The vampires just got there first. It’s as sickening as it is unsurprising, and it belies the real-world insidiousness of Remmick’s offer of immortality. He claims that he does not see race or religion among his flock. But if you join him, even as free a spirit as Stack is consigned to dance to the vampire’s drum; to play the white man’s music; and to have his own individuality and heritage sapped away and appropriated. So this is also, of course, the story of Mississippi and the larger American South that birthed the blues. It’s no accident that Coogler captures the rolling fields of cotton in wide, painterly IMAX lenses. This is the coveted cash crop that so many Black Americans’ ancestors were torn from their homeland to pick, toil, and die over. It is also the same crop that similarly enslaves in all but name the neighbors of Stack, Smoke, and Sammie throughout Clarksdale, Mississippi. Join our mailing list Get the best of Den of Geek delivered right to your inbox! Sammie’s father, a preacher at the nearby plantation, laments his son’s secular, heathen music. However, he himself like his father before him is trapped on the same plantation that perhaps two generations prior was tended by literally enslaved people. After the Civil War and emancipation, though, white Southern fears of William Tecumseh Sherman’s promises of 40 acres for every freed Black man proved unfounded. President Andrew Johnson returned most plantation land to its previous white owners, and to make up for the loss of Black slaves, the remnants of the planter class trapped newly freedmen into Faustian sharecropping bargains. Black farmers were “paid” with a share of crop they could sell, but it would never be enough to make up for the land and tools rented and leased to them. They would be caught in a cycle of debt and poverty that would become generational. Sharecropping was still the law of the land in the Jim Crow South of 1932 when Sinners is set, and many Black men who believed they could beat the rigged game were terrorized or worse by the Klan and its institutionalized ilk. Delta Slim (Delroy Lindo) tells the story in the film of a bandmate who dreamed of using a tiny fortune they made to open his own store. He was lynched before he reached a train out of town. And a few years earlier, and a few states over from where Sinners is set, white neighbors grew so indignant of an emerging Black upper-middle class in Tulsa, Oklahoma that in 1921 they murdered nearly a thousand of them, including by dropping bombs from the sky in World War I era airplanes. Remmick seems to offer a theoretically less cruel sense of conquest, even if it’s by drinking actual life blood. But it’s really not that different than the white record producers of Carter family who might pay Lesley Riddle for writing a song, but never gave him copyright credit. They never let him truly own his own music. Certainly Elvis Presley got a lot richer singing “Hound Dog” than Big Mama Thornton. Sinners contextualizes how much of this was Smoke and Stack’s past while relying on the audience to fill in the gaps we know from their future. The vampire getting Black converts to insist on the need of politeness and community might even be viewed as a cynical wariness to those who yearn for a “post-racial” America when 70 years after Brown v. Board of Education, Southern states are still attempting to whitewash the horrors of slavery out of our history books and classrooms. Encourage future generations to go back to the plantation. Hence why the real catharsis of Sinners is not Smoke staking the fanciful monster that claims to date back to the days of St. Patrick. It’s Smoke slaying a much more tangible creature by emptying a tommy gun clip into the local grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. He doesn’t really defeat the system, of course. In fact, Smoke dies from a bullet wound he picks up during his fire fight with the lynch mob. The American system is rigged, and the dream of his and Stack’s juke joint could never be long-lasting. But for a brief and beautiful moment, it’s real. And in the here and now, that white old bastard is still worm meat. It’s a momentary victory like that night at the party, or any other where Sammie grows into blues legend Buddy Guy. And it can be savored by sinners and saints alike.

If chivalry isn't already dead, it's certainly circling the drain.OpenAI CEO and tech billionaire Sam Altman recently admitted that people politely saying "please" and "thank you" to their AI chatbots is costing him bigtime.When one poster on X-formerly-Twitter wondered aloud "how much money OpenAI has lost in electricity costs from people saying 'please' and 'thank you' to their models," Altman chimed in, saying it's "tens of millions of dollars well spent.""You never know," he added.While it may seem pointless to treat an AI chatbot with respect, some AI architects say it's an important move. Microsoft's design manager Kurtis Beavers, for example, says proper etiquette "helps generate respectful, collaborative outputs.""Using polite language sets a tone for the response," Beavers notes. The argument can certainly be made; what we consider "artificial intelligence" might more accurately be described as "prediction machines," like your phone's predictive text, but with more autonomy to spit out complete sentences in response to questions or instructions."When it clocks politeness, it’s more likely to be polite back," a Microsoft WorkLab memo notes. "Generative AI also mirrors the levels of professionalism, clarity, and detail in the prompts you provide."A late 2024 survey found that 67 percent of US respondents reported being nice to their chatbots. Of those who practice courtesy, 55 percent of American AI users said they do it "because it's the right thing to do," while 12 percent did it to appease the algorithm in the case of an AI uprising.That AI revolution is probably a long way off, if it happens at all — many AI researchers doubt we'll ever build a truly "intelligent" algorithm, at least based on the current tech of large language models (LLMs) — but the environmental consequences of present-day AI are all too real. Unfortunately, those "pleases" and "thank yous" are adding up, bigtime.One Washington Post investigation, done in collaboration with researchers at the University of California, studied the impacts of generating a 100-word email. They found that just one email requires .14 kilowatt-hours worth of electricity, or enough to power 14 LED lights for an hour. If you were to send one AI email a week over the course of a year, you'd use an eye-watering 7.5kWh, roughly equal to an hour's worth of electricity consumed by 9 households in Washington DC.Now imagine the tens of thousands of lengthy prompts we're feeding chatbots like OpenAI's ChatGPT on the daily — not exactly low-impact.While AI etiquette might sound trivial, it all underscores the rather grim reality that our queries have consequences, particularly on the environment. The data centers used to power these chatbots already suck up about 2 percent of the world's energy consumption, a number that's likely to skyrocket as AI floods every corner of daily life.So if you're mulling whether or not to thank Grok for its efforts, maybe the better move would be to ditch the chatbot and write the email yourself. The earth — and your brain — will thank you.Share This Article

Can the in-form Verdiblancos derail Barça's title challenge?

Indiana Jones and the Great Circle on PS5: excellent game, solid port But PS5 Pro only gets a resolution upgrade. Image credit: Bethesda Face-off by Thomas Morgan Senior Staff Writer, Digital Foundry Published on April 19, 2025 As one of the major titles to emerge from Microsoft's acquisition of Bethesda, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle proved a critical hit on Xbox Series X, S and PC in late 2024 - and now, four months later, it arrives on PlayStation 5 consoles. To cut to the chase, this translation to PS5 and PS5 Pro is a success all round. It compares well to Series X in particular, with developer MachineGames realising an authentic take on the Indiana Jones films using its Motor engine - a customised branch of ID Tech 7, which itself powered the likes of 2020's Doom Eternal. It's impressive stuff: from the near 1:1 recreation of Raiders of the Lost Ark's opening scene to the sprawling Vatican city, each level plays host to all manner of whip-cracking, stealth, puzzling and sleuthing. And once again, we get ray traced global illumination - RTGI - into the bargain on PS5 consoles, allowing for more accurate indirect lighting and shading at 60 frames per second. So how does the experience match up to Series X? And what about PS5 Pro? The Great Circle broadly has parity feature-wise with the Series X release though it's worth noting that PS5 adds adaptive trigger support on its DualSense controller. As a result, melee combat, pulling the trigger on a gun, or using the whip, come with varying levels of feedback. Beyond that, the visual setup is remarkably straightforward: MachineGames optimises PS5 purely around a 60fps experience with RTGI as the de facto means of lighting its environments. There is no graphics mode toggle, nor any alternative 30fps option pushing higher fidelity settings, but the upshot is that we get a polished single means of playing the game. Looking at the platform comparisons, there are mixed fortunes here, but in general terms, most of the core visual settings see Series X, PS5 and Pro matched. Texture quality, shadow resolution, and world detail draw across the forest all run at the same settings between the consoles. Likewise, the quality of the RTGI also translates to both PS5 machines. In effect, this setting limits the objects within the scene affected by the ray traced diffuse lighting pass, and continues to operate below PC presets. It's a concession to hit a 60fps target on consoles while keeping RTGI in place, but the result is still impressive overall. Otherwise, volumetric quality is also matched between base PS5 and Series X - though it appears we get a higher setting on PS5 Pro - the net benefit being there's marginally less aliasing along the streaks of light spilling through the college windows, though again it falls short of PC's best volumetric setting. Indiana Jones and the Great Circle on PS5 and PS5 Pro, stacked up against Series X. It's the Digital Foundry tech review.Watch on YouTube In every other respect, there is parity between the three. Frustratingly this also extends to the game's occasional rough points on Series X, notably in the presentation of shadows. Even four months on from release, there's a lingering issue with shadow filtering on Xbox, which stays in place on the PS5 consoles as well. In short, shadow maps lining the floors of the college will abruptly step up in detail based on your proximity to it - and this update occurs in set, metre-length increments to make matters more obvious. It's a shame that shadow filtering is such a distraction and it's really the only blemish on what's otherwise a well presented package. There is also a small discrepancy in brightness on Series X, owing to its default setting being five clicks higher by default - but that's the full extent of the difference. In terms of rendering resolutions, MachineGames keeps it simple on base PS5 but enhances the Pro version to allow a higher max pixel output. Dynamic resolution scaling is in play, with PS5 and Series X each running at a 1200p to 1800p range, while PS5 Pro adjusts between a higher 1440p lower bounds, rising to 4K at peak. All use id Tech's TAA method to clean up visual noise, with the only side-effect being the presence of occasional banding on movement across busy points within the frame - like fine stitching on clothing. These DRS ranges don't tell the whole story, either. As raw metrics they only point to the extreme best and worst cases, but the average, practical resolution tends to rest in between those values. For example, focusing on PS5 and Series X - which share the same 1200-1800p range - it's clear that Series X often runs at a higher resolution on average. In almost every scenario Series X renders more pixels per frame, resulting in a sharper resolve - especially visible in zooming into the dense jungle detail of the first level. This Series X image quality advantage is curious but consistent with another id Tech 7 game, Doom Eternal. In both cases we have a use of hardware-based variable rate shading - VRS - which was engineered by Microsoft's Advanced Technology Group. Also much like Doom Eternal, The Great Circle shares the same 1800p target resolution, where VRS reduces the bandwidth taken up by pixel shading threads. It's a huge benefit for taxing, ray traced titles in this mould, and ultimately frees up Series X's GPU to push to higher resolutions along its DRS scale. This would go a long way to explaining the sharper image next to PS5, where hardware VRS is not supported - and despite their matching DRS ranges. Just as with Doom Eternal though, compared to PS5, there are subtle downsides to this feature - notably a more obvious form of 'block noise'. Neither console is free of visual noise, even with film grain and chromatic aberration disabled - but artefacts are more apparent on Series X. It's not a massive distraction at a regular viewing distance, and these issues are outweighed by the way VRS affords Series X a boost in overall clarity. To see this content please enable targeting cookies. The PS5 Pro benefits are worth touching on too. While hardware based VRS is in theory a feature of Pro, it doesn't seem to use it here. Even so, PS5 Pro excels for one reason alone: its ability to generate even higher resolution frames, afforded by a beefier 16.7TF GPU. Going up to a native 4K means the fine thread-work of clothing appears pin sharp, especially compared to base PS5, as does the presentation of grass in the opening jungles. PS5 Pro pushes the cleanest image of the trio here - even if benefits in settings outside of this are rather limited. Jumping to performance testing, The Great Circle benefits from strong optimisation on PS5 and PS5 Pro alike, for any regular gameplay. Each is tightly optimised around a 60fps target, where areas flooded with NPCs, or the dense jungles simply fly by at 60. For any variances in on-screen load, their dynamic resolution setups are able to compensate - though it's not always a perfectly smooth ride. Much like Series X, there are two snags that carry over to PS5 systems. Firstly there is an auto-saving feature which triggers a small hitch - a frame-time spike that kicks at invisible thresholds around the world. It's more-so obvious around the Vatican city, with each mini stutter being followed by a small auto-save symbol - and it's a shame it's not more discrete. The second point relates to the in-engine cutscenes. As authentic as each cinematic is, every camera cut is coupled with a string of dropped frames. Most likely, this is a buffer used by the renderer to allow the physics-based elements - like clothes - to settle for a few frames first and avoid a distracting position refresh with every cut. Still, the end result is PS5, PS5 Pro and Series X all drop frames at these exact same moments and there's nothing to split them. With all that being said, there is one repeatable drop during an in-engine scene, later in the crypts of the Vatican. This is a rare, outlier case really, given that everything else runs so well, but it does underline a Series X advantage. While Indy studies a parchment, a vehicle crashes through the ceiling, causing a burst of alpha and particle effects to fill the frame. In this moment, Series X has the GPU headroom to get closest to 60 frames per second, with the expected hitches on every camera cut. PS5 takes a more drastic hit, down to the 40s, while PS5 Pro finds a midway point between all three machines - with some drops to the 50s. Again this is a rare moment, and worth highlighting - and shows another potential advantage of Series X's hardware VRS. Summarising, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle makes a successful leap on to PS5 platforms and despite its delayed release, everything we loved about the Xbox experience is intact. In comparison, the Series X is a preference over the base PS5 - given the often higher average resolution on Xbox - but the margin isn't wide enough to be a deal-breaker. PS5 owners still get a superb take on MachineGames' latest work. In every other respect the two are matched, right down to the consistency of their 60fps readings in gameplay and the use of RTGI. Meanwhile, PS5 Pro enjoys an extra benefit in image clarity over the other consoles with a higher 4K maximum target, while still hitting that same stable 60fps. The only criticism here is one I'd level at all three consoles: the poor shadow filtering remains a rough spot that only the PC version is currently able to fix. Beyond that, this remains a superb game that's highly recommended on all systems.