Satisfactory reviewed on PC by Travis Northup.

Satisfactory is the best automation game ever made and I seriously can’t recommend it enough. Every moment of the over 130 hours it took to build messy conveyor belt disasters and delightfully efficient factories was engaging, ridiculous, and an absolute blast with friends. Exploring this gorgeous, bespoke world in search of secrets and resources serves as a fantastic change of pace from constructing assembly lines, even when combat doesn’t offer much more than a few generic aliens to shoot at while doing so. It’s a drag thatSatisfactory’s insatiable appetite for electronics also results in regular technical annoyances, but none of them come close to souring this stellar factory builder.

Dead Rising Deluxe Remaster reviewed by Luke Reilly on PC. Also available on Xbox Series X|S and PlayStation 5.

“Above all, Dead Rising Deluxe Remaster preserves the iconic original’s experience while including some very logical and welcome modern adjustments, like auto-saving, a new navigation system, and NPCs that seem less inclined to serve themselves for lunch. Not all the new voice acting is an improvement – and there are a variety of other tedious flaws that have gone unfixed – but wading back into the Willamette Parkview Mall after all these years has been an effective reminder of just how brilliant the original Dead Rising was back in 2006. Coaxing as many hapless consumers as I can back through throngs of the festering undead is as compulsive as it was nearly two decades ago. At the very least, now that I’ve paused to actually package this review together, it’s still gnawing at me to return – and that’s the sign of any great game (or reasonably effective zombie, for that matter).”

Dead Rising Deluxe Remaster reviewed by Luke Reilly on PC. Also available on Xbox Series X|S and PlayStation 5.

“Above all, Dead Rising Deluxe Remaster preserves the iconic original’s experience while including some very logical and welcome modern adjustments, like auto-saving, a new navigation system, and NPCs that seem less inclined to serve themselves for lunch. Not all the new voice acting is an improvement – and there are a variety of other tedious flaws that have gone unfixed – but wading back into the Willamette Parkview Mall after all these years has been an effective reminder of just how brilliant the original Dead Rising was back in 2006. Coaxing as many hapless consumers as I can back through throngs of the festering undead is as compulsive as it was nearly two decades ago. At the very least, now that I’ve paused to actually package this review together, it’s still gnawing at me to return – and that’s the sign of any great game (or reasonably effective zombie, for that matter).”

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Agatha All Along star Kathryn Hahn bares all in the opening scenes of her new WandaVision spin-off series – and she’s shared an insight into how Marvel’s first female bare bum shot came about.

The 51-year-old stars as the witch Agatha Harkness in the new Disney Plus show. At the end of WandaVision, Agatha is trapped in containment, but in the opening of the first episode, she wakes up back in the suburb where most of the original series took place.

She wanders out into the streets looking for answers about what’s going on – naked.

“I thought it was good to see her as stripped down, literally, as we possibly could, which spoke into her powerlessness at the present moment,” Hahn told Variety.

“[Agatha has] been stripped of all of her power at this point in the series. I mean, she really had nothing at that point, and so it became about illustrating that gap between that moment and her finding her power again.”

Showrunner Jac Schaeffer also added details about how the Emmy-nominated star came up with the idea for the nude shot.

“In the script, the idea was that she would emerge from the spell naked because that’s very witchy, and she’s taken all of her sort of performative selves off, and we’re getting down to the real Agatha,” Schaeffer told TV Line.

“But in the [original script], she realises where she is, and then she grabs a robe and goes outside. And Kathryn came to me, and she was like, ‘would Agatha stop to get a robe? I feel like she would go out there naked’.

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“And Kathryn was so up for it, so I took it to Kevin [Feige, the president of Marvel Studios], and [the reaction] was mostly, ‘really?!’.”

The nine-episode series is the first Marvel has released since Echo in January and early reactions to the first four episodes are glowingly positive, with it being called “perfect” and “spellbinding”.

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The title of the show comes after several name changes, with previous titles including House of Harkness, Darkhold Diaries and Coven of Chaos. It had been suggested that the title confusion was intentional, as confirmed by the tongue-in-cheek final title, according to a report by Variety months before the confirmation.

There was an undisputed winner of the summer of sport, which ended on Sunday night as the most spectacular Paralympics in living memory came to a close. Sport itself, and the unerring way it keeps so many of us watching – especially in a world where TV viewing figures increasingly resemble Tom Daley diving off a 10-metre platform.

The numbers really were staggering: 23.8 million across BBC and ITV for England’s Euro 2024 final defeat, the highest UK audience of the year. The BBC’s Olympics coverage topped the charts for 17 consecutive days, with 5 million to 7 million viewers. Channel 4 also enjoyed Paralympics audiences that regularly hopped over a million.

Broadcast TV figures have plummeted by 26% since 2015 – yet sport is the bubble that refuses to burst, the ratings winner that bucks the trend. Over the same period, it has fallen just 3%. Some of that is due to big falls in highlight shows, with Sky recently posting record figures for its live Premier League coverage.

All of us will have our favourite moments from the summer: Jude Bellingham’s survive-or-die overhead kick against Slovakia, igniting a previously moribund England; a men’s 1500m final for the ages in Paris; Carlos Alcaraz dissecting Novak Djokovic with a matador’s relish at Wimbledon, before the Serb got revenge at the Olympics. But the fact is we watched it in our droves.

As Enders Analysis, a company regarded as the gold standard for media research, put it in a recent report: “There is still a widespread misconception that sports viewing has declined at the same pace as the rest of broadcast TV due to increased competition, the high price of pay TV and the supposed short attention spans of the social media generation. In fact, sports viewing has been the most resilient component of broadcast TV.”

As Enders points out, it’s not just the big-ticket items on network TV which are flying either. In fact, young viewers now consume nearly half of their sports through Sky, “dwarfing the combined efforts of the BBC and ITV, which refutes the widely held view that young people don’t watch sport behind a paywall”, while TNT Sports has also seen its audience share rise.

That is noteworthy, given price rises and piracy concerns due to firesticks. And there is a final surprise in the Enders report. “Fears that young people are no longer interested in sport are overblown,” it says, pointing out that “sport is now a growing proportion of all under-35s’ live TV set viewing: 17% in 2023, up from 7% in 2015”.

That is backed up by Jonathan Licht, the managing director of Sky Sports. He tells me that on Sunday 1 September, Sky Sports had its highest ever share of total TV viewing audiences for under-35s and women between 2pm and 6pm.

“We’ve talked about how young fans tend to follow sport rather than always watch it,” he says. “But they do come for the big sport. Last weekend when we had Manchester United v Liverpool, the Italian Grand Prix, the Old Firm and the US Open, 60% of all under-35s that were watching TV were tuned to Sky Sports.”

Sky Sports also had more than 10% of all women viewers watching TV last Sunday – a record. “It may be harder to bring those younger audiences to TV generally,” Licht says. “But they are coming in for sport.”

So who are the winners and losers? Unsurprisingly football dominance has grown to the extent that it now “draws more viewing than the next nine sports combined and of the top sports is the youngest skewing”, according to Enders.

Cricket also did well last year, largely because of the Ashes and the Hundred, while Formula One’s audiences have recovered since going behind a paywall in 2019. Women’s football and the NFL are also growing, according to Licht.

The losers? The Enders report points out that rugby’s 2023 World Cup audiences fell a fifth on 2015, despite England doing well, and it also warns that “English club rugby is in an existentially unhealthy state”. Most Olympic sports, outside of the Games, also still struggle. But overall the picture is rosier than you might expect.

How can we explain this? Partly it is because in a world of personalised algorithms and subcultures, sport is one of few glues that bind us together. It helps, too, that it has to be watched live. But Enders also credits broadcasters and leagues “for maintaining sport’s appeal in a changing media landscape”.

There is a final point. Britain really does love sport. That much is made clear in “Game Changing: How sport makes us happier, healthier and better connected”, research out this week.

The report, published by Sky and compiled by the policy agency Public First, says that UK adults “have spent approximately 9.1bn hours watching and participating in sports” in the past year. It also found that 15 million people across the UK “went as far as to say that sport is an important part of their identity”.

And while sport is still seen as the toy factory, and remains down the list of the government’s priorities, the report makes clear the public is keen on more investment to encourage young people to enjoy sport.

Meanwhile, broadcasters continue to face dangerous headwinds. According to Ofcom, less than half of 16- to 24-year-olds now watch TV in an average week, down from 78% in 2018. They also spend far more time on TikTok and YouTube than watching live TV. Sport probably can’t defy this gravity for ever. But so far it is giving it a damn good shot.

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Strictly Come Dancing has unveiled the lineup of songs for week one of the competition, ahead of Saturday night’s first live show of the series.

The show returned to screens last week with a dazzling pre-recorded show to mark the beginning of its 20th anniversary series after months of scandal surrounding the programme’s professional dancers.

However, the pressure will rise this week as the 15 celebrity contestants perform live for the first time before the voting – and first elimination of the series – happens next weekend.

This week’s routines include three cha chas, two foxtrots, two tangos, two sambas and a Viennese waltz.

Comedian Chris McCausland and his partner Dianne Buswell will perform a cha cha to “Twist and Shout”’ by The Beatles, with TV doctor Punam Krishnan and Gorka Márquez performing the same style to Kylie Minogue’s “Love at First Sight”.

Former Love Island contestant Tasha Ghouri and Aljaž  Škorjanec will also dance a cha cha to Sabrina Carpenter’s summer anthem, “Espresso”.

As announced last week, former Arsenal/England player Paul Merson will be paying homage to his sport by performing the intriguing combination of an American Smooth to the popular football chant song “Vindaloo” by Fat Les.

Gladiators star Montell Douglas and Johannes Radebe will be foxtrotting to “Is You Is or Is You Ain’t My Baby?” by Dinah Washington, while Olympic Hockey player Sam Quek and Nikita Kuzmin are also performing a foxtrot to The Supremes’ hit “Where Did Our Love Go”.

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Tango-ing this week are Olympic swimmer Tom Dean and Nadiya Bychkova dancing to Harry Styles’s “Golden”, while Toyah Willcox and Neil Jones performing Madonna’s “Ray of Light”.

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In the samba corner are Shayne Ward and Nancy Xu, dancing to Stevie Wonder’s “Do I Do”, and Wynne Evans and Katya Jones performing Tom Jones’s “Help Yourself”.

TOWIE’s Pete Wicks and his partner Jowita Przystał will be performing what will likely be a fiery paso doble to “Breathe” by The Prodigy.

EastEnders star Jamie Borthwick and Michelle Tsiakkas will dance a Viennese Waltz to Benson Boone’s “Beautiful Things” and JLS’s JB Gill and Amy Dowden will perform a classic waltz to “When I Need You” by Leo Sayer.