Nintendo Switch Update Out Now, Here’s What It Does

Microsoft is starting to rollout some of its biggest games this year, and Hellblade 2 is just the start of it. Ahead of the upcoming action game’s release, Developer Ninja Theory has revealed the system requirements to play the game on PC as well as its download size.

Ninja Theory has provided a handy chart with graphics presets to show you what you’ll need in order to play the game at certain settings. While Hellblade II’s SSD requirement at 70GB isn’t as high as Starfield’s at 125GB, it’s still a sizeable amount. Across all settings, the game requires 16GB of system ram, 70GB SSD, and Windows 10/11 64 bit.

On the low-end the game requires an Intel I5-8400 or AMD Ryzen 5 2600 processor, as well as a GPU of NVIDIA GTX 1070, AMD RX 5700, or Intel Arc 1580. For recommend specs, you’ll need an Intel I7-10700K or AMD Ryzen 5 5600X processor and a GPU of NVIDIA RTX 3080, AMD RX 6800 XT, or Intel Arc A770.

On the high-end, you’ll need an Intel I5-12600K or AMD Ryzen 7 5700X processor, and a a NVIDIA RTX 4080 or AMD RX 7900 XTX GPU. Higher framerates and resolutions can also be achieved by using DLSS 3, FSR 3, or XESS 1.3.

Senua’s Saga: Hellblade II system requirements

Minimum specs

• Graphics Preset: Low 1080p
• OS: Windows 10/11 64 bit
• Processor: Intel I5-8400, AMD Ryzen 5 2600
• GPU: NVIDIA GTX 1070, AMD RX 5700, Intel Arc A580
• VRAM: 6GB
• System Ram: 16GB
• Storage: 70GB SSD

Medium specs

• Graphics: Medium 1080p
• OS: Windows 10/11 64 bit
• Processor: Intel I5-9600, AMD Ryzen 5 3600X
• GPU: RTX 2070, AMD RX 5700 XT, Intel Arc A580
• VRAM: 8GB
• System Ram: 16GB
• Storage: 70GB SSD

Recommended specs

• Graphics: High 1440p
• OS: Windows 10/11 64 bit
• Processor: Intel I7-10700K, AMD Ryzen 5 5600X
• GPU: NVIDA RTX 3080, AMD RX 6800 XT, Intel Arc A770
• VRAM: 8GB
• System Ram: 16GB
• Storage: 70GB SSD

Very High specs

• Graphics: High 4K
• OS: Windows 10/11 64 bit
• Processor: Intel I5-12600K, AMD Ryzen 7 5700X
• GPU: NVIDIA RTX 4080, AMD RX 700 XTX
• VRAM: 12GB
• System Ram: 16GB
• Storage: 70GB SSD

Ninja Theory has also confirmed that Senua’s Saga: Hellblade II only has one 30fps cinematic graphics mode setting on Xbox. The game is developed on Unreal Engine 5 and features dynamic scaling.

In GameSpot’s Senua’s Saga: Hellblade II preview, we said, “With Hellblade II, Ninja Theory seems to be building on the first game in all the right ways, doubling down on atmospheric locales and tense duels.”

Senua’s Saga: Hellblade II launches for PC and Xbox Series X|S on May 21.

Universal Studios Hollywood is about to get a little more furious as it announced the park’s first-ever, high-speed outdoor roller coaster, Fast & Furious: Hollywood Drift. The ride will join the theme park in the summer of 2026.

The state-of-the-art ride system is designed to take guests to the high-speed Fast & Furious universe with groundbreaking full 360-degree rotation of the individual ride vehicles as they speed down an elaborate track that creates the sensation of drifting cars with Dom and the family.

“As a premier entertainment theme park destination with a rich history in immersing guests in incredible rides based on today’s most inspiring movie, television, and gaming properties, we are excited to introduce our very first, high-speed outdoor roller coaster,” said Scott Strobl, Universal Studios Hollywood executive vice president and general manager in a statement.

“As Universal Studios Hollywood continues to evolve, the arrival of Fast & Furious: Hollywood Drift will be a powerful game-changer that will infuse a new level of thrill into our already dynamic theme park,” he continued. “We look forward to welcoming guests when it races onto the scene in 2026.”

The Fast & Furious franchise arrived in the parks as Fast & Furious: Supercharged, which hit Universal Hollywood in 2015, and Orlando three years later. The Orlando version is consistently ranked as one of the worst rides in the park. Even Thierry Coup, Universal’s creative senior vice president and CCO, admitted that the Florida attraction’s approval was the biggest mistake of his career.

Hollywood Drift joins other big-name Universal rides like Jurassic World, The Secret Life of Pets: Off the Leash, Despicable Me Minion Mayhem, The Simpsons Ride, Transformers 3-D, and Revenge of the Mummy.

Super Metroid recently celebrated its 30-year anniversary. Below, we look back at how it used and helped to create horror game tropes.

It begins with a benign pulse over black. An otherworldly synth shriek interrupting. Random shots of dead scientists in a pitch black laboratory. The only thing alive is an unknowable entity under a class capsule. Somehow, that isn’t the start of a new Resident Evil DLC, but the very first thing you see in a first-party Nintendo game in 1994. The game was Super Metroid.

Because there are entire generations of full grown adults who don’t understand the enormity of such stark horror imagery in a Super Nintendo game, we should go back to the early 90s a minute. While it’s now pretty commonplace to see M-rated games on the Switch, back in 1994, Nintendo was still trying to hold onto its innocence. Their Sega rivals had been bathing in digital blood for years, but Nintendo was trying to remain the place where everyone could play safely, and without invoking the ire of, say, Congress. As such, they were still regularly censoring arcade ports, and hesitant to put anything out that could court too much controversy, frighten children, or spill too much of the red stuff–though Mortal Kombat II was a major exception.

Super Metroid is still a product of that era, but even with the restrictions of its publisher at play, it’s not an experience to be trifled with. The Alex Garland Annihilation vibes of the Spore Spawn boss. The deep, bone-chilling mood of Brinstar Red’s soundtrack, and its alien chants as a driving beat. An entire level in a sunken, haunted spaceship, ruled over by the ghost of a kraken. Maridia making Zebes’ oceans feel utterly cursed. That’s to say nothing of the premise in general, with Samus forced to relive the haunted, hollowed out ruins of her 8-bit adventures in higher, grimmer fidelity.

Replaying Super Metroid in 2024 is striking when you realize that even with all the other ways the game is a masterpiece–it’s half the reason the term “Metroidvania” exists, after all–what we don’t talk about are the ways in which it was elevating digital horror in a way nothing else was at the time. And make no mistake, Super Metroid is not just horror, but it is uniquely horrific, even now.

Much has been said about Metroid as a fundamentally lonely experience over the years, especially in contrast with every misguided attempt to insert more human connection into Samus’ adventures, but that’s a tradition that begins with Super, reinforcing that loneliness through sound and stage design. Where the original games are all driven by courageous marches, and the tiny blips of Samus’ jumps, Super is immediately a different beast. The events of the previous games are retold as a hunter’s journal right at the start, the first time we’ve truly seen Samus’ thoughts on screen, and, as it turns out, the last we’ll see in this particular game. The first time the player gets control of Samus, it’s onboard the derelict space station from the title screen, utterly silent except for the unfeeling industrial hum of the ship.

We get to the room of the title sequence, and the bodies are still there, but the metroid inside the glass case is gone. When we find it, the silence of the scene breaks only as we see a glowing red eye in the dark, and Ridley fades into view. Storytelling through gameplay wasn’t a new concept in 1994, but it was very much an outlier when it came to establishing tension, and without the aid of cutscenes or voiceover, or even text to do any heavy lifting. Right away, Super Metroid is a game of not just constant discovery, but discovering time and time again that something is horribly wrong.

The same magic trick of narrative happens when Samus lands on Zebes. Years of training had us expecting to fire on the first thing that moves when Samus steps out of her ship. Except there’s nothing to fire on. Zebes is a dead planet when Samus arrives, battered with rain, with caves seemingly leading to nowhere, funneling Samus down through the labs where she fought Mother Brain in the original Metroid. No one has cleaned. No one has tried to reopen the place. It’s just dead, until Samus grabs her morph ball upgrade somewhere in the depths, and there is something so primally unsettling about the single spotlight that then shines on her, following her every move. Whatever is happening on Zebes, she’s absolutely not alone.

There are few examples of that simplicity of storytelling around this era–off the top, the long walk to Dracula’s staircase in Super Castlevania IV eerily lighting up candles to guide the way comes to mind, but that’s also an exception proving the rule. There’s such a unique patience to those first minutes in Super Metroid, for a game where the protagonist goes in with a cannon strapped to her arm, and even once the enemies start coming out of the woodwork, Super Metroid returns to that silence and patience when it has a new enemy or a boss to establish. It does it right away in fact; the first boss you fight on Zebes is one of the Chozo statues holding the Missile upgrade. What should be a place of safety is suddenly a fight to the death with a deadly bird-like goliath. And with that, Super Metroid teaches the valuable lesson so many games fail to impart: Samus is not just truly alone, but even the boons that help her may not actually be of of help. Souls games have brought that danger back, but of all the things the glut of Souls-likes try to copy, that’s not typically one of them.

There are a few titles that have attempted to deftly instill that peril upon the player. Axiom Verge, a game that feels like one of the most direct and blatant progeny of Super Metroid, performs those tricks admirably. The thing to remember is that at the time, Super Metroid represented a series unshackled from the NES. This is what series director Yoshio Sakamoto did with the freedom afforded by the Super Nintendo. And it’s telling that the 2D games he’d helm after all carried that element forward, albeit with far more narrative conceits to fall back on, like animated stills, and mission-giving AIs. The series has always done more with less. “More with less” isn’’’t necessarily uncommon in AAA gaming, but it is an ethos that’’’s too easy for creatives to ignore when they have more elaborate tools at their your their disposal. Given more horsepower, the approach has typically been to attempt realism or the look of cinema, while failing the things that games can do that cinema can’t. There are full fledged horror games that can’t accomplish across 20 hours what Super Metroid pulls off with just a single room with a Cronenbergian statue of the four main bosses and a low drone. It’s a difference between a game that’s trying to scare you rather than just being scary.