gaming

Last month, in a profile of newly named Democratic vice presidential candidate Tim Walz, The New York Times included a throwaway line about “the time his wife had seized his Dreamcast, the Sega video game console, because he had been playing to excess.” Weeks later, that anecdote formed the unlikely basis for the unlikely Crazy Taxi: Tim Walz Edition mod, which inserts the Minnesota governor (and top-of-the-ticket running mate Kamala Harris) into the Dreamcast classic driving game.

“Rumor has it that Tim Walz played Crazy Taxi so much his wife took his Dreamcast away from him… so I decided to put him in the game,” modder Edward La Barbera wrote on the game’s Itch.io page.

Unfortunately, the pay-what-you-want mod can’t just be burned to a CD-R and played on actual Dreamcast hardware. Currently, the mod’s visual files are tuned to work only with Dreamcast emulator Flycast, which includes built-in features for replacing in-game textures.

After a few minutes of playing with settings and folder structures, launching the mod replaces the Crazy Taxi character Gus with a model of Walz sporting an open-buttoned black and red flannel shirt (a look The Wall Street Journal said has “made him a DNC fashion icon”). There are plenty of little visual touches beyond the Walz character, too, including “D” and “R” gears labeled as “Democrat” and “Republican,” a fare counter that’s labeled as “campaign $$$,” and a countdown measuring the seconds “till election time.”

The mod files also include new voice lines for Walz and Harris sourced from “their respective DNC speeches.” Getting those files to work in a standard Crazy Taxi ROM requires a good deal of fiddling with third-party ISO management programs, though, so you might be better off watching a gameplay video if you just want to hear a taxi-driving Walz cry out, “Mind your own business” to an impatient passenger.

The mod lets Walz and Harris (unofficially) join a long line of real political figures appearing in video games, including Bill Clinton and Al Gore as hidden NBA Jam characters, Barack Obama and Sarah Palin as DLC characters in Mercenaries 2 and, uh, Abraham Lincoln leading a mechanical strike team in 3DS title Code Name: S.T.E.A.M.

Where are they now: Walz’s Dreamcast edition

While Walz and the campaign haven’t commented publicly on his reported Dreamcast addiction, there’s been a surprising amount of detailed reporting on the fate of the Governor’s fabled Dreamcast itself. Former Walz student and campaign intern Tom Johnson told IGN that Walz brought the old console in as a potential donation in the summer of 2007. Tanner said it didn’t get much use in the office break room, but after the campaign, he took the system—complete with a copy of Crazy Taxi in the drive—home to play with roommate Alex Gaterud.

From there, Gaterud sold the console on Craigslist for a mere $25 in 2012—he recalled to IGN that, at the time, “advertising something ‘formerly owned by a US Congressman’ doesn’t add any value on Craigslist.” The customer in that Craigslist sale, Bryn Tanner, was posting about the acquisition online years before Walz became a national political celebrity.

More recently, Tanner has taken to posting TikTok videos about his relatively notable console and showing it off at local gaming convention 2D Con. “I’m basically famous,” Tanner joked in a post following the NYT story.

Walz, 60, is on the edge of the first generation of national politicians that grew up in the era of early home video game consoles (he would have been about 13 when the Atari 2600 launched). Younger politicians have even started to cater more specifically to the gaming demographic, too, as when congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez appeared on a charity-focused Donkey Kong 64 marathon Twitch stream to promote transgender awareness and political action.

But some of Walz’s political opponents have tried to make hay of the fact that he was apparently hooked on a console that came out when he was in his mid-30s. “This is reported as a fun, relatable story, but doesn’t anybody else find a 35-year-old man getting that addicted to video games a little sad?” conservative activist Charlie Kirk posted on social media.

To the people who knew Walz as a gamer, though, it just makes him more human. “I think it’s sort of the specificity of it that really gets me,” Tanner told the Minneapolis Star-Tribune last month. “The fact that it wasn’t just, ‘Oh, my wife took away my video game,’ because that could be anything. It was the Dreamcast. It was this kind of underrated flash in the pan.”

Sony today announced the PlayStation 5 Pro, a mid-generation hardware upgrade that will play the same game library as 2020’s PlayStation 5, but with higher frame rates and better resolution than on the original system. The new units will be available on November 7 for $700, Sony said.

The updated hardware will come complete with 2TB of solid-state storage (up from 1TB on the original PS5), but without an Ultra HD Blu-Ray disc drive, which users can purchase as an add-on accessory for $80.

In a video presentation Tuesday, Sony’s Mark Cerny said PS5 developers “desire more graphics performance” in order to deliver the visuals they want at a frame rate of 60 fps. The lack of enough graphical power on the PS5 leads to a difficult decision for players between the higher resolution of “fidelity” mode and the smoother frame rates of “performance” mode (with three-quarters of players choosing the latter, according to Cerny).

The goal of the PS5 Pro, Cerny says, is delivering “the graphics that the game creators aspire to, at the high frame rates players typically prefer.” To do this, the new system will sport a larger GPU that can support “up to 45 percent faster rendering,” Cerny said, with 67 percent more compute units and 28 percent faster video RAM than the PS5. This will allow for “almost fidelity-like graphics at ‘performance’ frame rates” of 60 frames per second in many existing PS5 games, Cerny said.

The PS5 Pro will also bring what Cerny says is a “streamlined and accelerated approach” to ray-tracing, with individual rays calculated at “double or even triple the speeds of PlayStation 5.” In examples shown on video, Cerny highlighted how reflections between cars are now available at 60 fps for Gran Turismo 7 on the PS5 Pro, and how games like Hogwarts Legacy could have more realistic shadow effects.

An “AI library” called PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution (PSSR) will be available on the PS5 Pro to automatically upscale in-game scenes as well. Cerny highlighted how this can make distant crowds in a game like Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart to look much clearer.

Titles that can take advantage of the PS5 Pro’s more powerful GPU will be marketed as “PS5 Pro Enhanced.” Titles that will sport that designation include:

• Alan Wake 2
• Assassin’s Creed: Shadows
• Demon’s Souls
• Dragon’s Dogma 2
• Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth
• Gran Turismo 7
• Hogwarts Legacy
• Horizon Forbidden West
• Marvel’s Spider-Man 2
• Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart
• The Crew Motorfest
• The First Descendant
• The Last of Us Part II Remastered

Other titles will be able to take advantage of “PS5 Pro Game Boost,” which Sony says “may stabilize or improve the performance of supported PS4 and PS5 games.”

PS5.5

The upgrade follows the history of the PS4 Pro, which launched almost exactly three years after the PS4 and offered the capacity for higher resolutions, faster frame rates, or both in many PS4 library games. The PS5 Pro comes further into the lifecycle for Sony’s latest console, though, and at a point where Sony has yet to lower the $500 launch price for the console and increased the price of the disc-drive-free Digital Edition last year (though inflation has taken some of the sting out of that nominal pricing).

The PS5 Pro comes after last year’s launch of a redesigned PS5 “Slim” model, which reduced the original PS5’s famously massive bulk while keeping the internal processing power the same while

Microsoft has yet to show any sign of plans for a similar update for the Xbox Series X/S, which also launched in late 2020. Earlier this year, though, Microsoft announced the first disc-drive-free edition of the Xbox Series X for this holiday season.

Nintendo, which launched a Switch with an improved OLED screen in 2021, is widely expected to launch a backward- compatible follow-up to the Switch in 2025.

This story has been updated with additional details and visuals from Sony’s announcement.