DF Direct Weekly on the Half-Life 2 Switch mod and Sony's new PC hardware

It’s Monday, it’s DF Direct Weekly – which as the name heavily implies – is Digital Foundry’s weekly show, where team members take a break from their current projects to discuss the latest gaming and technology news. What’s excited us the most this week is the ‘shadow drop’ of Valve’s Portal and Portal 2 for Nintendo Switch. These games are timeless: brilliant examples of excellent design that don’t actually require immense hardware to look and play wonderfully. Nevertheless, it’s great to see 720p60 and 1080p60 gameplay from the Switch in mobile and docked permutations respectively – and we’ll be covering the package in more depth in more extended form this week.

For the purposes of the Direct discussion though, John shares his first-hand knowledge of port before the team move onto the emergence within 24 hours of a modded version of the game that injects Half-Life 2 assets to remarkable effect. It turns out that Portal was written around the Source Engine and Half-Life 2 specifically, meaning that a semi-working ‘port’ of the classic title could be realised very quickly. It’s a great story, but more than that, the possibility of an actual official Switch port of the game and its subsequent episodes is mouthwatering. Fingers crossed that Valve takes heed.

Beyond discussion of Nier Automata coming to Switch – not to mention the bizarre pronounciation of the game’s name in its official trailer – we also spend some time talking about Sony’s InZone collection of headsets and monitors. The stylings of the devices are PS5 in nature, yet with support for 1080p240 and 4K144 monitors, these are products clearly aimed at the PC audience. And yet, how come there’s no high refresh rate 1440p option? We’re looking to cover these displays and headsets, so hopefully Sony can come through with review samples. As for me? I’ll be sticking to my 48-inch LG CX OLED – an amazing TV that also doubles up as a brilliant PC monitor.