Latest News - Page 1057

A new live action Pac-Man movie is in development, sources have told The Hollywood Reporter.

Japanese games giant Bandai Namco has greenlit a new film based on its most iconic arcade character. The Pac-Man movie will follow Sonic The Hedgehog's winning live-action formula and will be based on an all-original idea from Lightbeam's Chuck Williams, who produced the Sonic films. The Sonic movies are now the highest-grossing video game movies of all time.

Not much is known about the project other than those involved; Wayfarer is set to produce alongside Lightbeam Entertainment, with Wayfarer's Justin Baldoni, Manu Gargi and Andrew Calof joining Lightbeam's Tim Kwok and Chuck Williams on the film. Pac-Man remains one of the most recognizable video game franchises of all time and is prominently featured on Bandai Namco's website, merchandise, and gaming products.

EA's most recent earnings call didn't deliver any real substantial news on upcoming games or content with zero mention of Battlefield 2042.

Alongside BioWare's failed game Anthem, Battlefield 2042 is one of EA's biggest bombs in recent memory. The shooter launched to massive controversy due to performance issues and lack of basic features. EA has publicly acknowledged Battlefield 2042's shortcomings and has promised fixes are coming.

Fast-forward to EA's recent Q1 FY23 earnings call and there's absolutely no mention of Battlefield 2042. The usual suspects--Apex, FIFA, Madden--are touted, but DICE's latest shooter is left out.

EA explains why Skate went free-to-play...and the short answer is social interactions.

The main reason why most games go free-to-play is to maximize reach and microtransaction spending. This is certainly one of EA's big motivations with Skate, which is indeed F2P and will also have microtransactions. EA makes billions every year from live services and Skate will feed into this stream.

Aside from the game's business tactics, EA management gives more color, saying that Skate's new F2P release will appeal and cater to a very specific age group: Gen Z and Gen Alpha, both of which are very much connected to live games.

Bandai Namco has teased a new Tekken game at EVO 2022, and it's likely Tekken 8.

Tekken is coming back sometime and based on the quick teaser clip shown at EVO 2022, it should be an ultra high-def brawler on PS5 and Xbox Series X/S.

To show off the game's new graphics, Bandai Namco had a stark compare-and-contrast clip showing the cinematic end scene from Tekken 1 where Kazuya throws Heihachi off a cliff. Kazuya turns and looks at the viewer in the classic old-school shot with PS1 graphics, which promptly zaps over to the modernized visuals of the new Tekken game. Kazuya's devil eye gleams in high-def glory.

An artificial intelligence has been asked to create an image of what death looks like, and the results are simply stunning.

The artificial intelligence (AI) that was asked to create the images seen in the above video is called MidJourney, which was created by David Holtz, co-founder of Leap Motion, and is currently run by a small self-funded team that has several well-known advisors such as Jim Keller, known for his work at AMD, Apple, Tesla, and Intel, Nat Friedman, the CEO of Github, and Bill Warner, the founder of Avid Technology and inventor of nonlinear video editing.

MidJourney is an incredible piece of technology, and it recently went into open beta, which means anyone can try it by simply heading over to its dedicated Discord server. Users can enter "/imagine", followed by a text prompt of what they want the AI to produce. Users have been testing the AI's capabilities by entering descriptive words such as HD, hyper-realistic, 4K, wallpaper, and more. All of which work perfectly.

Twitter has been discovered to have a major flaw that has reportedly exposed account data of millions of users, including celebrities and companies.

A cybersecurity expert that goes by the name Zhirinovskiy took to the HackerOne forum in January to report a vulnerability within Twitter's login pipeline. According to the report, the vulnerability was a gaping hole within the platform's cybersecurity, and just within a few days, Zhirinovskiy was able to successfully infiltrate and discover Twitter accounts linked to specific numbers and email addresses. Zhirinovskiy explained that a malicious party could easily find an individual's Twitter account with a phone number or email address.

Zhirinovskiy contacted Twitter support about the security flaw, which was found in Twitter's Android app, and was rewarded a $5,040 bug bounty for the discovery. A patch was rolled out that fixed the major issue, but according to Restore Privacy, it was already too late as a malicious individual that uses the username "devil" had already exploited the flaw and scraped 5,485,636 Twitter accounts. The swath of data was then thrown onto the dark web hacking community forum 'Breached Forums', where the lister claimed that the data included users that "range from Celebrities to Companies, randoms, OGs, etc."

About 1,000 people have been left trapped after historic flash flooding submerged roads leading in and out of Death Valley National Park.

Reports indicate that 500 staffers and 500 visitors of the Death Valley National Park have been left stranded, with CNN reporting that some individuals have managed to find ways out of the park despite the mass flooding. Notably, at least 60 vehicles have been left in the dirt and debris, with Death Valley officials writing in a Facebook post that conditions have lessened, allowing for repair crews and authorities to work on fixing the roads and escorting individuals out of the park.

So, what caused all this destruction? A historic storm battered the region, with officials writing that Death Valley experienced 75% of its annual rainfall in just 24 hours. Notably, Death Valley gets about two inches of rain every year, with the 24-hour record being 1.47 inches. Over the weekend, the Furnace Creek region got 1.46 inches of rainfall.

NASA successfully landed the Curiosity rover on Mars on August 6, 2012, and since then, it has been exploring the Gale Crater to answer one big question.

NASA sent the now-seasoned rover to the Red Planet to answer a simple yet difficult question - did Mars have all the ingredients to support life? According to Curiosity's Deputy Project Scientist Abigail Fraeman, after 10 years of being on the planet and streams of data acquired by Curiosity, researchers can definitively say that Mars did have ingredients to support life.

Notably, NASA only expected to get about two years out of Curiosity, meaning the rover has more than surpassed its mission requirements and still, to this day, continues to explore the Martian surface. Being stationed on the Red Planet for the past 10 years has caused some damage to the rover, with its wheels taking most of the beating as it traverses Mars' rocky terrain. So far, Curiosity has sent back 3,102 gigabytes of data and drilled 35 samples.

Elon Musk has issued a challenge to the CEO of Twitter, Parag Agrawal, for a "public debate" regarding the number of bots on the platform.

The issue of the number of bots on Twitter has been the cornerstone of Musk's offer to purchase the company for $44 billion being withdrawn, which resulted in lawsuits being filed from both teams. Now, the Tesla and SpaceX CEO has taken to Twitter to issue a challenge to Agrawal, with Musk writing that "I hereby challenge @paraga to a public debate about the Twitter bot percentage".

The challenge from Musk came after he replied to a Twitter thread that supported his legal case against Twitter as the billionaire wrote that "If Twitter simply provides their method of sampling 100 accounts and how they're confirmed to be real, the deal should proceed on original terms". If Twitter provides its method for getting its estimate of less than 5% of Twitter's daily accounts are fake or spam, and it's proven to be accurate, Musk says the deal will go forward as its SEC filing would then be accurate.

North Korea has stepped up its hacking game as cybersecurity firms drop warning about new never-before-seen malware that infects Gmail accounts.

According to reports, cybersecurity firm Volexity has detected North Korean hackers using simple browser extensions to gain access to individuals' Gmail accounts. The cybersecurity firm has warned that the malware is different from the usual "spear phishing" techniques that would require users to agree to download infected software, as the new malware is capable of downloading itself on an individual's PC without the user even knowing its happening.

Volexity wrote to Ars Technica and said that the malware is called SharpTounge and that it's currently only affecting Windows users. However, the cybersecurity firms President Steven Adair has warned that there is a big possibility of macOS and Linux users also being targeted. Reports indicate that the North Korean state likely backs the hacking group and that it targets users in the US, Europe, and South Korea who are working on topics involving North Korea.

An asteroid that was only discovered at the end of last month by astronomers has made its approach to Earth, confirms officials.

The asteroid recently dubbed 2022 OE2 was discovered on July 26, and according to astronomers' estimates, the space rock is approximately the size of two American football fields - between 557 and 1,246 feet wide. If this asteroid was to collide with Earth, officials have estimated it would release more energy than approximately 1,000 nuclear bombs. However, that won't happen as NASA has confirmed that its trajectory won't put it on a collision course with our little blue planet.

Officials have measured 2022 OE2 and found that it will pass Earth at about 3.2 million miles, which is about 13 times the average distance between the Earth and the moon. 2022 OE2 safely zoomed past Earth on August 4. If you are wondering if Earth is due to be impacted by any large asteroids of this caliber, fear not, as NASA is tracking thousands of space rocks such as 2022 OE2, and according to the space agency, there isn't a cataclysmic asteroid that its aware of due to impact Earth for at least the next 100 years.

Intel's new flagship 13th Gen Core "Rocket Lake" CPU is in the news again, with a new Geekbench run seeing the new Rocket Lake flagship CPU boosting up to 5.8GHz, and smashing AMD's flagship Ryzen 9 5950X in the process.

The Core i9-13900K has a maximum frequency of 5520MHz according to the Geekbench results, but the CPU actually boosted up to 5790MHz at its peak, while sitting at around 5.7GHz for the most part. We don't know if this is automatic or manual overclocking, but we should see close to and over 6.0GHz with high-end AIO coolers and 6.0GHz+ under exotic cooling setups: think custom loop, LN2 cooling, and some much higher power numbers.

In the Geekbench 5 benchmark, the new Intel Core i9-13900K hits a huge 2314 points in the single-core run of Geekbench 5, and 26464 in multi-core.

Lenovo has just announced the world's first all-in-one PC that uses an Intel Arc GPU, with the introduction of the Xiaoxin Pro 27.

The new Lenovo Xiaoxin Pro 27 is an all-in-one (AIO) PC that packs Intel's latest 12th Gen Core "Alder Lake" CPU as well as an Intel Arc A-Series GPU in the form of the Arc A370M. Lenovo is making a 23.8-inch and 27-inch version, both with a native 2560x1440 resolution and smooth 100Hz refresh rate.

Lenovo is also baking in dual 5W speakers from JBL and a 2.5K resolution camera. The Lenovo Xiaoxin Pro 27 AIO system can be configured with either an Intel Arc A370M graphics card or NVIDIA's mid-range GeForce RTX 3060 graphics card. Gaming-wise, Lenovo is saying that its new AIO system can handle something like League of Legends (running at 1440p) at 152FPS, CS:GO (running at 1440p) at 110FPS, and World of Tanks (running at 1080p) at 142FPS.

Acer's new Nitro N50-640 pre-built gaming PC has been announced: packing the Intel 12th Gen Core "Alder Lake" CPU and some mid-range GPU offerings, one of which includes the Intel Arc A380 graphics card.

French retailer Boulanger has been the first in Europe to list the Acer Nitro N50-640 pre-built gaming PC, and while we've got this listing in early-August, we won't see the Acer Nitro N50-640 gaming PC not shipping until at least October 8... two months from now.

Inside, the Acer Nitro PC packs an Intel Core i5-12400F processor, 16GB of DDR4 memory, and 500GB of SSD storage... in total we're looking at a rather high $950+ price tag. You can get the GeForce RTX 3060 graphics card inside of the Acer Nitro N50-640 system, for a bigger $1500 price (but you'll get the GeForce RTX 3060 graphics card, and Wi-Fi 6 connectivity here, too.

EVGA has just slashed a huge $1000 from its enthusiast-ready GeForce RTX 3090 Ti FTW3 graphics card, which cost $2149 just a week ago... and now it's down to $1149.

The custom EVGA GeForce RTX 3090 Ti FTW3 graphics card was introduced at $2149, with it being the cheapest of the three SKUs that EVGA has in its GeForce RTX 3090 Ti arsenal. As it stands, EVGA is selling its GeForce RTX 3090 Ti FTW3 graphics cards for between $1150 and $1400.

EVGA is discounting $1000 from its GeForce RTX 3090 Ti FTW3 ULTRA graphics card as well, down from $2199 to $1199 while the GeForce RTX 3090 Ti FTW3 BLACK is $600 discounted, down from $1999 to $1399. EVGA is still selling its higher-end GeForce RTX 3090 Ti HYDRO Copper and GeForce RTX 3090 Ti KINGPIN Hybrid graphics cards for $1500 and $2000, respectively.

Well, we now know that MSI isn't the AIB partner that pulled out of making custom Intel Arc graphics cards, as the company has just announced its new gaming PC that features the MSI Intel Arc A380 6G graphics card.

MSI's upcoming Intel Arc A380 6G graphics card is a little different to the ASRock and GUNNIR Intel Arc A380 graphics cards, where MSI is using Intel's own reference design: no factory overclocking, and a conservative 75W TDP. GPU clocks on the MSI Intel Arc A380 6G are at 2000MHz, with 6GB of GDDR6 memory clocked at 15.5Gbps.

You won't be able to buy MSI's new Intel Arc A380 6G graphics card anywhere yet, as it's only available inside of the MSI pre-built PC that is sold exclusively through Chinese etailer JD.com. Inside of said MSI system you'll find an H510M or H610M Bomber motherboard, with the cheaper model featuring the Intel Core i3-10105F while the slightly higher-end Core i5-10400F and Core i5-12400F processors are used. You'll be looking at $532 up to $650 for the pre-built MSI gaming PC.

Intel is dropping the premium packaging of two of its high-end flagship Core i9 processors, the Core i9-12900K and Core i9-10980XE.

The news is coming directly from Intel, with the company posting a Product Change Notification (PCN) for the Core i9-12900K and Core i9-10980XE processors. Starting from September 4, these two processors will not come in their fancy packaging, but rather a regular, same-sized box.

It's no surprise for the Cascade Lake-based Core i9-10980XE processor, but the Core i9-12900K is still being sold right now... while the "Raptor Lake" and the Core i9-13900K aren't too far away now. Hopefully, Intel keeps the fancy packaging for the higher-end Raptor Lake-based Core i9-13900K, and doesn't start cutting corners from here on out.

Netac's new 2.5-inch SATA SSD is here with capacities for everyone: between 120GB and 1TB, and speeds of up to 530MB/sec reads.

The new Netac SA500 SSD comes in 120GB, 128GB, 240GB, 256GB, 480GB, 960GB, and 1TB capacities... so everyone, absolutely everyone, is covered. Netac is using the SATA 6Gbps standard, but it's backwards compatible, weighs just 46g, and has a 3-year warranty.

Netac is using 3D NAND flash and an "advanced controller" on the SA500 SSD, which the company says is "designed to improve the response speed of notebooks and desktops". There's up to 530MB/sec reads on the 960GB and 1TB models, while the 240/256GB and 480/512GB models have up to 520MB/sec, and the 120/128GB with up to 500MB/sec reads.

We've been hearing all sorts of bad news about Intel's new Arc GPUs where I've been reporting on news that Intel would outright cancel their Arc GPUs altogether over how bad it has gotten, and now Intel has reportedly lost their first AIB.

The first AIB to stop production of custom Intel Arc GPUs has reportedly made history, becoming the first AIB to pull out of Intel's new Arc GPUs before they even really began. The news is coming from Igor Wallossek at Igor's Lab, who reports that the first of the big board partners have "stopped the production of Intel cards completely" which his sources say are "due to quality concerns".

Igor reports: "At least one of the big board partners has even stopped the production of Intel cards completely ("due to quality concerns"), as I could find out yesterday and today. [...] Other board partners have at least already completely capped their marketing activities, and it does not currently look as if there will be any real launch offensives from the board partners in the time window I mentioned between August 5, 2022 and September 29, 2022. What will really arrive on the market (as retail) will be seen in the next few weeks. From the customer's point of view, I can only hope for the best, I alone lack faith".

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