Australia has had its COVID-19 contact tracing app COVIDSafe deployed to Australians, but the government received a huge pushback from Aussies that didn't want the app being forced on them as mandatory.

Well, India hasn't been so pleasant -- with the Indian home ministry making it mandatory for all workers to download and use their new COVID-19 contact tracing app 'Aarogya Setu'. To makes matters worse, the Indian home ministry have warned that there will be "punishment" if there's negligence.

Over 80 million people across India have downloaded the COVID-19 contact tracing app so far, but the government has hopes to hit 350 million smartphone users throughout the country -- on top of basic phone users with an interactive voice system. Yeah, India is taking things to the next level with COVID-19 contact tracing.

It was barely two weeks ago that I wrote a story on the latest screenshots from Microsoft Flight Simulator looking breathtaking, but these latest screenshots just continue to play games with my heart. Check them out:

These new screenshots from Flight Simulator have been taken from the Alpha build, and members of the community who are lucky enough to be included in that with Microsoft. The screenshots all have watermarks from the users who took them, with some of them looking jaw droppingly good.

You will need a pretty serious PC to play Flight Simulator when it drops, with Microsoft requiring at least 150GB of storage space and a GeForce RTX 2080 graphics card as the "ideal spec". Yeah, the basic game needs 150GB -- with a 5Mbps internet connection at a minimum, and 50Mbps for the "ideal spec" range.

I'm far more comfortable with a Hollywood star being inserted into a game franchise with deepfake technology than I thought, with this new deepfake of Nathan Fillion being inserted into Uncharted 4 as Nathan Drake thanks to deepfake tech. Check it out:

Firefly star Nathan Fillion was born for the role of Nathan Drake in Uncharted, with plenty of fans of Fillion, Firefly, and Uncharted wanting him for the role in the movie. There's an Uncharted movie that is coming, with Spider-Man and Avengers star Tom Holland -- who is no stranger to being deepfaked into something, where he was deepfaked into Back to the Future with Iron Man star Robert Downey Jr. recently.

Some will remember back in July 2018 that Nathan Fillion starred as Nathan Drake in "UNCHARTED -- Live Action Fan Film" directed by Allan Ungar. It was a short fan film that went for just under 15 minutes and racked up over 7.5 million views in that time. It showed that Fillion was born for the role, but now he has been "officially" deepfaked into Uncharted 4 with some great results.

A super hot new rumor starts the week with news that Intel will be using a new LGA1700 socket for its Alder Lake-S platform, with the LGA1700 socket to take a battle against AMD's next-gen AM5 socket in the future.

The new rumor sees Alder Lake-S succeeding Comet Lake-S, with the LGA1700 being a new socket that will reportedly support 3 new Intel CPU generations. It will feature a big core / small core architecture, and is rumored to feature Golden Cove / Gracemont cores. The news is coming from Lit-Tech, a Taiwanese-based manufacturer that handles Voltage Regulator Testing Tools for the Asian market.

The website lists unreleased architectures like the Ice Lake-S/H and Tiger Lake-H, but the news of LGA1700 isn't new. Earlier on in the year in January 2020, Komachi_Ensaka teased on Twitter of the new Intel LGA1700 socket.

Unreal Engine 4 has never looked better than it does right now, with Dekogon Studios revealing some rather incredible pieces in its portfolio of Unreal Engine 4-based environments. Check it out:

This one is a 90s high school science class room and it looks absolutely stunning. The team at Dekagon Studios built each asset for "realistic AAA quality visuals, style, and budget". It features a huge library of 461 Meshes, high quality and fidelity textures of up to 2K, fully baked lighting, and it's optimized for games.

Intel is expected to drop its new 10th generation Core processors on May 20, but between now and then we have some exciting benchmarks from the mid-range Core i5-10400.

The new Core i5-10400 processor has been benchmarked by Chinese review channel Bilibili, TecLab. They have tested Intel's new Core i5-10400 processor against the current-gen Core i5-9400F and Core i7-9700F, with the new Core i5-10400 packing quite the punch in its 6-core/12-thread CPU.

The Intel Core i5-10400 is a 6C/12T processor, up from the 6C/6T in the Core i5-9400 (which doesn't have SMT, whereas all 10th-gen CPUs have SMT). The Core i5-10400 has a base CPU clock of 2.9GHz, single-core boost of 4.3GHz, and all-core boost of 4GHz. There's 12MB of cache on the Core i5-10400, with a price of just $182. You're looking at least double for the Core i7-9700F.

AMD is ramping up production of the 7nm custom Navi- and Zen 2-powered SoCs used in next-gen PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X consoles.

Both Microsoft and Sony plan to ship their next-gen Xbox Series X and PS5 consoles on time in Holiday 2020, and mass production of each system's custom Zen 2 CPU and Navi GPU-powered SoCs will soon begin to make it happen. In a recent earnings report, AMD CEO Lisa Su confirmed production will start in Q2 2020 (April - June) in preparation for next-gen console launches later this year.

The company expects Q2 revenues to increase as Microsoft and Sony place high-volume chip orders ahead of launch, and then semi-custom earnings to spike further as both companies rev up for 2021 console supply. Sony and Microsoft make the orders 1-2 quarters ahead of time. Hardware availability may be constrained, however: Sony, in particular, plans to ship 5-6 million PlayStation 5 consoles in 2020, down 1-2 million units from the PS4's launch in 2013.

E3 2020 might be dead, but the annual EA Play show is continuing as a digital-based stream, and you should be excited.

Today EA confirmed its EA Play event will go live on June 11, 2020. This show could be a pretty big deal for Electronic Arts. The company is working on a number of high-profile games right now, all of which could be enhanced for next-gen consoles. EA plans to ship 8 major AAA games between 2020 and 2021: four sports games, and four "other titles that draw from the breadth of our IP."

Many of these tantalizing projects are a ways off (Battlefield 6, for example, won't be ready until 2021), but we could see some teasers, announcements, and/or gameplay. Dragon Age 4 was shown off at The Game Awards 2018 so it's high time for some fresh info.

id Software finally speaks out on the big Doom Eternal soundtrack controversy and sets the record straight.

Fans aren't happy with id and Bethesda right now, and it all stems from a fallout between Doom OST creator Mick Gordon and id. The consensus is Bethesda shafted Mick Gordon by mixing his tracks and "ruining" the OST. But the real story is far more involved, and the truth is not any one person is to blame. id Software executive producer Marty Stratton reveals what actually happened and why.

According to Stratton, id's relationship with Gordon is quite complicated. Gordon is the reason for the soundtrack's delay. The rocker requested a 4-week extension, which ended up turning into a 6-week extension, and id was concerned the deadline wouldn't be hit. So Mick suggested a team-up with id's audio designer to help fill in the tracks. id didn't butcher Gordon's OST. The truth is, Gordon's OST wasn't actually finished in time, and had to depend on tracks and content created by id's lead audio designer.

If Nintendo won't do it, modders will: Mario 64 has been ported to the PC with full native 4K resolution support, ultra-wide monitor support, and ultra-smooth animations.

Remember when 64 bits and polygons were all the rage? Now that classic era has been reborn in high-end PCs, and skilled modders have successfully ported Mario 64 onto PC with Unreal Engine 4. This isn't emulation like the Super Mario Odyssey 64 mod, but a literal native port that uses reverse-engineered decompiled code from the N64 game. The project was built in Unreal Engine 4 with DirectX 12 support, which allows for high resolutions like 3840 x 2160, support for 21:9 aspect ratios, and compatibility with other graphics overhaul mods and shaders.

The results are smooth animations, high-def textures and graphics (even if they're polygonal), and a generally all-around improved experience. If Nintendo officially released Mario 64 on PC, it'd look and play something like this.