Article Image

PlayStation Plus is adding the Yakuza series. Here are what tiers you’ll need

The Yakuza franchise is finally joining PlayStation Plus starting in August. Some titles will release right away while others will come later in the year.

PlayStation has revealed it will be adding all eight mainline Yakuza games to PlayStation Plus throughout the rest of the year, starting in August.

Yakuza 0, Yakuza Kiwami, Yakuza Kiwami 2, and Yakuza: Like a Dragon will be added first into the service next month. Later in the year, Yakuza 3 Remastered, Yakuza 4 Remastered, Yakuza 5 Remastered, and Yakuza 6: Song of Life will be included too.

The revamped PlayStation Plus service has three different tiers: Essential, Extra, and Premium. The availability of the Yakuza games is spread among them, so it can be a bit confusing, but here is the list as follows:

PlayStation has also announced the three monthly free games that will be included in the Essential tier for August. The aforementioned Yakuza: Like a Dragon is one of them, along with Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1+2 and Little Nightmares.

It’s finally time that the Yakuza games joined PlayStation’s subscription service, as the series has been on Xbox Game Pass for a good while now. With Yakuza: Like a Dragon joining August 2022’s PlayStation Plus lineup, it’s interesting timing as earlier this month, developer Ryu Ga Gotoku gave us the first glimpse at Yakuza 8.

While Yakuza 8 has been confirmed to be in development, the game hasn’t been officially revealed just yet. There are two upcoming game showcases in the near future, which are Tokyo Game Show and Gamescom. It’s possible we could see Yakuza 8‘s first official trailer at either conference.

For years, Call of Duty’s campaign mode has used big, scripted set pieces to tell the overarching story amid all the adrenaline-pumping action. The 2023 Modern Warfare 3 tried to shake up the established formula by introducing a handful of short open combat missions, and I genuinely liked the idea, but the game's overall negative reception seeped into how those missions were received.

I feared the next iteration might abandon the idea because of the backlash, but I am glad it didn't. MW4’s “Stranded” mission uses the same approach, but instead of fragmenting it across the campaign, it puts it all in a single large-scale open-world mission.

Acer’s Predator Atlas 8 finally has a US release date and price, several months after the company first showed off the handheld in May. The highlight is the Intel Arc G3 Extreme chip inside, which has been adopted by only a couple of other consoles besides the Atlas 8. This version will go on sale exclusively at Best Buy on November 1 for $1,299.99.

Acer originally said the Atlas 8 would arrive in North America in October, but left pricing open at the time. The launch came amid the ongoing DRAM crunch, which has made memory more expensive across the PC industry and complicated pricing for hardware makers.

Gaming laptops and I have a complicated relationship. One of my first gaming rigs was an Acer Predator that was already outdated when I bought it. I was a broke college kid, and that was the best I could afford. So trying out high-end gaming laptops is always fun. But ASUS' ROG Zephyrus G14 is a lot more than a laptop that can run AAA games. It is portable, so you're not lugging around a 2.5kg machine everywhere you go. It is built well, none of that plastic chassis, and can even function as a normal laptop outside of just gaming.