We’ve already talked about current-gen Battlefield 4. Now, how do the next-gen versions BF4 stack up. Only slightly shockingly, EA’s “special relationship” with Xbox has resulted in the XB1 version having better textures than the PS4. I’m not saying accusing anyone of anything but if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck… [Digital Foundry]

And what about Battlefield’s PC fans? Well, I found a comparison of how various graphics cards handle BF4. Makes me wonder if I should upgrade to the R9 290X if I can find a good deal. [The Guru of 3D]

Was Beyond: Two Souls really a linear train ride throughout the whole game? One man sorted through the evidence to find that there were choices in the game but they may not have been obvious to everyone. [Player’s Delight]

Have you ever wondered where all the game console pictures on Wikipedia came from? Chances are they came from this one man. [Peta Pixel]

Star Wars: 1313 will never be made thanks to Disney killing LucasArts. Now we can lament what could have been with these pieces of concept art from the game. [Kotaku]

Wikipedia is an invaluable resource for just about everyone but would it surprise you that it’s on the decline. Upwards of one-third fewer people are updating it than six years ago. [MIT Technology Review]

Maybe I’m selling the new AMD Radeon HD R-series GPUs short. The flagship R9 290X may be a little loud but it’s certainly got amazing performance for the price. [Tom’s Hardware]

Your favourite childhood author, RL Stine, the man behind Goosebumps, did an AMA this week. He’s written an adult horror book because all his original readers have grown up. [/r/IAmA]

Zynga: The story of how one gaming company went from the penthouse to the outhouse. [Ars Technica]

And this weekend marks the StarCraft II World Championship Series Season 3 final from Toronto. Sadly, I don’t like near enough to make it to the big show so I’ll be watching it on stream. So here’s a viewer’s guide to the action. Given fellow Canuck Scarlett’s absence, I’m hoping for big runs from Polt and the Boss-Toss (MC). [Battered Joystick]

As much as I love going on Reddit, this news doesn’t surprise me. As popular as the site is, it still operates in the red. [Business Insider]

Speaking of sites in the red, IsoHunt is very much in the red after a lawsuit judgment that will see the BitTorrent search engine pay the MPAA $110 million and shut the site down. So when does the MPAA go after Google for allowing us to search terms like “Game of Thrones S3 torrent.” [Ars Technica]

While this technology is likely a long ways off from hitting the market, I think it’s cool. Chinese scientists are using lightbulbs to transmit wireless internet signals through light rather than radio frequencies. I’m sure my terrible wireless card would still drop a signal during every SC2 ladder match I try. [ZDnet]

Eleven years later, Star Wars: Jedi Outcast still stands up as one of the all-time great Star Wars games and one of the great melee combat systems. [Eurogamer]

The Sun isn’t even reputable enough to deserve to be called a newspaper but it’s still funny to see what slips by their editors. The recently published a piece about artificial implants including an artificial eyeball implant by Serif Industries. There’s just one problem with that story… [Kotaku]

Were you amped up for the new R series of AMD Radeon graphics cards? Well, if you’ve already got a 7000 series Radeon HD card, you don’t need to upgrade because it’s just the same old. Well, I was saving up for nothing. [Tom’s Hardware]

This list is an absolutely perfect comparison of Game of Thrones / A Song of Fire and Ice characters to game consoles. [Giant Bomb Forums]

What happens when you tweak Madden 25 to give the worst team in football a 5’0″, 400-pound quarterback who can only run or throw the deep ball? You break Madden. [SB Nation]

Rockstar is apologizing to gamers because of early troubles with GTA Online by giving everyone $500,000 of in-game money. [Official PlayStation Magazine UK]

I’m not in the habit of running ads but I’d bet a lot of people are interested in the upgrades to Deus Ex: Human Revolution – Director’s Cut. It’s has a pricing structure based on whether or not you own the game and/or the DLCs. Best of all, it’s not $60 for the full game. [Square Enix]

A new study shows that piracy may not harm the entertainment industry as much as you’d have them believe. In fact, the researchers believe that there are some benefits from piracy. [Torrent Freak]

Science magazine played what might be a smart or dirty trick on smaller publications depending on your perspective. They sent out a fake and obviously flawed study to show the dangers of open-source scientific journals that don’t review the studies they publish. [National Geographic]

A report on internet freedom suggests that it’s on the decline in the majority of the 60 countries surveyed. [RT]

Amazon is working on their own microconsole at the moment and are going out to find devs to make games for it. That’s quite a bit different than what I recall Ouya doing. [Gamasutra]

There a lot of popular comic book characters but not all of those characters debuted in the pages of a comic, including some very big characters in some universes. [Newsarama]

Wednesday, we mentioned that YouTube was overhauling its comment section to clean things up. Pop Sci is doing the opposite. They’re shutting down their comments to clean it up. [Popular Science]

You may not know that Valve operates using a fairly unusual flat organizational structure. It’s very much different from what the other big players in the industry use. [BBC News]

I’ve been banging on about game ratings and parental intervention lately. It’s not just me either. This retailer is concerned about who parents are buying for too. [Kotaku]

Looking for some free PC games to pad out your non-console gaming collection? PC Gamer has you covered. [PC Gamer]

Are you a soccer fan who has a PS Vita or Nintendo 3DS? For the love of god, DON’T BUY FIFA 14 FOR THOSE CONSOLES! FIFA 14 for Vita and 3DS is just a roster update of last year’s edition. [GearNuke]

The man who lead Nintendo from being a toy company to one of the biggest video game companies in the world, Hiroshi Yamauchi, died this week. [Venture Beat]

Netflix wants to be bigger than HBO but can they if their plan is to produce just five original series? [IBR]

Which version of Grand Theft Auto V looks better and performs better? [Digital Foundry]

And while Faux News is trying to blame violent video games for the shooting at the Navy Yard in Washington by a man who was hearing voices, Al Jazeera is asking if Grand Theft Auto’s trademark controversy has passed it by and now its just another video game. A critically acclaimed video game but a video game that doesn’t stand out from the crowd solely on the basis of controversial content. [Al Jazeera America]

Someone ranked the best fonts. Sounds like fun. [The Observer]

Verizon is going to court to kill Net Neutrality in the United States. If they’re successful, you might have to pay your ISP to access certain sites just like you do with your cable package. It would be the end of the internet. [InfoWorld]

Apple’s original design guru, Hartmut Esslinger, says that Apple has lost its soul and no longer innovates but it driven by money. [The Atlantic White]

Most of us haven’t worked retail jobs at a games store so we just assume that people have some idea of what they’re doing when they walk into a GameStop or the game section of Wal-Mart. However, that assumption would be entirely wrong. The average consumer has no idea about such concepts as console names, game reviews and ESRB ratings. [Destructoid]

Remember when Rock Band was the biggest game in the world. It seemed like everybody played it or wanted to play it. It certainly has disappeared, hasn’t it? [Gameological]

Microsoft has bought the xbone.com domain. Just thought that you might want to know. [Fusible]

Think that your data is safe because it’s somewhere with a reputation for being secure? Well, the NSA can get at most of the data on the internet. [New York Times]

Sony has big plans for their vision of the future of gaming. While Microsoft is going big on Kinect, Sony is going ahead with their own VR headset. [Games Industry]

Instead of being a Sony exclusive developer, Quanitc Dream could have been making games for Xbox consoles. However, Microsoft wanted to make a massive change to Heavy Rain that drove David Cage away from them. [Digital Spy]

Total War: Rome II has been getting a lot of praise from critics but gamers have found a lot of bugs in the game that conflict with reviews. One anonymous developer explained the process of design and checking for bugs and proceeded to eviscerate Creative Assembly for failing to adequately test their game for bugs. [Total War Forums]

Hotline Miami’s devs are willing to reconsider including the rape scene that was in HM2’s demo. They say there’s context for the scene in the game as a whole but are willing to compromise narrative because of the criticism. I’m dumping the link here because I don’t want to have to do the artistic integrity diatribe again because this pisses me off. Dennaton thinks the scene works in the narrative and we shouldn’t try to censor their artistry. [RPS]

All Things Digital’s (AKA AllThingsD) partnership with the Wall Street Journal ends at the end of this year. It’s believed that they can get a massive cash injection if they find a new partnership for the site. [Fortune]

I haven’t been keeping up with Game Informer’s Dragon Age: Inquisition preview/paid coverage like articles but I thought their roundtable about the future of BioWare was pretty interesting. [Game Informer]

Grand Theft Auto V will once again have another trademark GTA soundtrack. This time, Rockstar has over 240 licensed songs and what they estimate to be 20 movies worth of score. It literally sounds fantastic. [Rolling Stone]

I’ve been a fairly long-term fan of the Football Manager franchise so naturally I would be interested in the new improvements for FM2014. Here’s an interview with developer Sports Initiative director Miles Jacobson about the changes for this year’s iteration of the game. [Digital Spy]

Bomber may have won the StarCraft II World Championship Series Season 2 finals but the big story was Canada’s Scarlett who took Bomber to a deciding final game in their series and showed that foreigners can hang with the best Korea has to offer. [PAR]