Latest News - Page 1381

EA introduces new preview boxes in FIFA that let consumers view the contents before they buy...for a limited time.

Today EA announced FIFA Preview Packs that allow players to open a pack and view its contents before committing to a purchase. These packs are part of the Festival of FUTball event and can be purchased with FUT Coins, which are earned in-game, and the premium FIFA Points currency.

"These packs will allow you to see all the specific Items contained within them before you need to make a decision on whether you want to buy the pack with FUT Coins or FIFA Points. Preview Packs will be the only pack type available in the FUT Store during this time, at the end of the campaign other pack types will return," EA said in an announcement post.

CDKDEALS is currently holding its amazing Mid-Year Sale where you can grab some hot deals on some of Microsoft's most popular products, such as Windows 10 (various versions), Office 2016, and Office 2019.

You can opt for a bundle deal, such as Windows 10 Pro + Office 2016 Pro, for even more savings. Here's a highlight of some of the best deals available to you.

Happy shopping!

EA Sports recently announced Madden NFL 22 and confirms the game will be $69.99 on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X consoles with no free upgrade.

Like Battlefield 2042, Madden NFL 22 will not support EA's Dual Entitlement program, which gave current-gen players a free next-gen upgrade. EA used this program in 2020 to ensure a smooth transition between platforms. Madden NFL 22 will not support Smart Delivery on Xbox platforms either.

Madden NFL 22 is listed for $69.99 on both Xbox Series X/S and PlayStation 5. EA is selling a cross-gen pack for $99.99, the same price as Battlefield 2042's dual-console SKU.

Elden Ring is one of the most exciting games coming in 2022, but it took a while before the game was ready. A long while. In fact, George R.R. Martin's work on the project has been done for years now.

For Elden Ring, Hidetaka Miyazaki and FromSoftware wanted to create a new world set in an expansive dark fantasy mythos. So they hired one of the best worldmakers in the business: A Song of Ice and Fire's George R.R. Martin. This collaboration has been in the works for some time; Martin says he was hired to make a template for Elden Ring's setting. After he was done, FromSoft adapted it to fit their needs.

"It's actually considerably different [than writing a book]. I've played some video games, I'm not a big video gamer. The game is called Elden Ring. My work on it was actually done years ago. These games, they're like movies, they take a long time to develop," Martin said in a recent interview with PBS Chicago.

NASA's Hubble Space Telescope experienced a malfunction and shut down, according to a press release by the US space agency.

The press release found on the NASA website states that the issue has something to do with Hubble's payload computer, and on June 13, it shut down. NASA's team of researchers analyzed the data and are now investigating if the issue can be attributed to a "degrading memory module". Preparations are currently being made for a memory module switch to occur on June 16, and after the switch has been made and tests are run for around one day, the telescope will resume its normal duties.

NASA explains, "The purpose of the payload computer is to control and coordinate the science instruments onboard the spacecraft. After the halt occurred on Sunday, the main computer stopped receiving a "keep-alive" signal, which is a standard handshake between the payload and main spacecraft computers to indicate all is well."

No one is safe from the unpredictable cryptocurrency market drops, not even people who are already billionaires and could be considered "whales".

Mark Cuban is one example, as a coin that he has personally backed saw a sharp decline in value as a massive sell-off wave occurred, reducing the value of the coin by 100%. The token in reference is Iron Titanium, and on Wednesday morning, the value begun to crash, driving the price from $64 on Wednesday to less than 0.01% of a penny by the time Thursday rolled around.

Large investors into the coin began to sell off their holding, causing the token's value to plummet, but Iron Titanium isn't the only coin to have done this. According to CoinMarketCap, around one-third of the world's top 100 most valuable cryptocurrencies on the market dropped by at least 40% in value over the past month and a bit. Additionally, twelve of the most valuable crypto's have reduced in value by more than 50% on average.

A professional NASCAR driver will be receiving at least part of his salary in cryptocurrencies, according to a new sponsorship deal that has been struck.

The professional NASCAR driver is Landon Cassill, who says he was already "very active" in the Litecoin market, and according to a report from Associated Press, Cassill will be receiving his entire sponsorship deal with Voyage in Bitcoin and Litecoin. The deal between Cassill and Voyage spans 19 years, and Cassill will receive a "portfolio of various digital assets" that contains Bitcoin and Litecoin.

Cassill states, "There are a handful of pilots who like crypto, but I am probably one of the ones who has been around long enough and I am quite comfortable with how it works. I can trade it right away before the market changes or hold on to it while the market goes up or down, take out a little, pay my bills with it and keep the rest."

Unidentified flying objects (UFO) have been a topic that has stigma attached to it for quite a long time, but now a new report headed for the US Senate may shine some light on the topic.

The US Senate will be receiving a detailed report on UFOs, or what the government calls them unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP), on June 25, and it's expected that some unclassified information will be released that will explain some recently released videos. People have been waiting for this report for many months now, and before it's released, there are some videos/pieces of information you should know.

Politicians that have already been briefed on the report have said that the information the report contains isn't very exciting, but it did raise some serious concerns for national security. In a comment to the NY Post, D-NY Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney said that the main issue is the safety and security of US military personal, and knowing the capabilities of the object.

Sony recently revealed that it is in the process of developing the next-generation PSVR headset. Sony hasn't said much about the new headset except that it will get fancy new controllers, although some details have begun to leak about the upcoming device. The most recent leak comes courtesy of Bloomberg.

In a new report about Japan Display Inc., which is making a pivot from manufacturing iPhone displays to building LCD panels for the VR market, Bloomberg noted that Sony Group Corp remains as "one important holdout" from adopting LCDs for its VR headset. Citing "people with knowledge of the matter," Bloomberg stated that Sony's upcoming PSVR2 would feature OLED panels from Samsung.

This new information about Sony opting for OLED panels follows a series of recent information leaks. In May, we learned that the PSVR 2 may include haptic feedback for your face and that the headset would likely include dual screens that offer 2K resolution per eye. The headset is also supposed to come with eye-tracking cameras to enable foveated rendering and lifelike interactions with virtual characters.

Microsoft employees that were required for the most urgent tasks in their data centers were sleeping in the data centers during the peak of the pandemic.

In a recent in chat with Morgan Stanley analysts Josh Baer and Mark Carlucci Kristen Roby Dimlow, corporate vice president for total rewards, performance and human resources business insights at Microsoft said: "I heard amazing stories about people actually sleeping in data centers".

Dimlow added: "In certain countries there was huge lockdown, and so we would have our own employees choose to sleep in the data center because they were worried they'd get stuck at a roadblock, trying to go home".

Oculus started rolling out update v30 to Quest and Quest 2 today. The latest platform update brings new accessibility features, multitasking in Infinite Office, and expands Air Link support to the original Quest.

Oculus added a new color correction system, which allows you to change the system-level color settings. The company said the update would "increase legibility of color that art commonly difficult to differentiate." The color correction option gives you three color presets; Deuteranomaly (green-red), Protanomoly (red-green), and Tritanoomaly (blue-yellow).

The new update also includes a new feature called Raise View, which allows you to adjust the height of your vantage point by up to 16-inches, enabling you to play standing games from a seated position.

Anduril Industries has just raised $450 million in Series D funding, with founder Palmer Luckey tweeting out the news and teasing the future of warfighting technology.

The Oculus VR founder tweeted that his company raised $450 million in funding, and that it would be used to "turn American and allied warfighters into invincible technomancers who wield the power of autonomous systems to safely accomplish their mission. Our future roadmap is going to blow you away, stay tuned!"

Anduril's huge $450 million funding round was led by Elad Gil, who was an early investor in the company, with the $450 million injection of funding also coming from Andreessen Horowitz, 8VC, Founders Fund, General Catalyst, Lux Capital, Valor Equity Partners, and D1 Capital Partners.

Call of Duty: Warzone on the Xbox Series X has been pumping away at 120FPS since November 2020, some 7 months ago now, but it's now time for PlayStation 5 owners to enjoy 120FPS in Warzone.

The new Call of Duty: Warzone update delivered Season 4 that packs new operators, new weapons, some map changes, and a million and one other tweaks as usual. But the big news here is that Warzone now has a 120FPS mode on the PS5.

You'll need to have COD: Warzone installed on your PlayStation 5 (duh) and then go to your PS5 system settings, then Screen and Video, then Video Output, and then set Enable 120Hz Output to Automatic.

The hype for Microsoft's next-gen Windows 10 operating system is pretty real, with the official reveal event taking place in less than a week -- on June 24 -- but before then, check out these awesome default wallpapers for Windows 11.

The recent Windows 11 leak has allowed the default wallpaper to be leaked alongside it, and they're really, really good. Microsoft has continued to make improvements with the default wallpaper with its new Windows operating system releases, but Windows 11 has the best default wallpaper by far.

Microsoft is including wallpaper for both light and dark modes in Windows 11, and as a big fan of the dark mode in any operating system -- the dark-themed wallpaper for Windows 11 looks especially awesome.

Razer has just unveiled its new Blade 14 gaming laptop, its first-ever Blade gaming laptop with an AMD processor inside.

The new Razer Blade 14 gaming laptop can be configured with the flagship Ryzen 9 5900HX processor, offering up 8 cores and 16 threads on the new Zen 3 architecture. GPU wise, you can tweak the new Blade 14 with NVIDIA's flagship GeForce RTX 3090 laptop GPU.

There's up to 16GB of DDR4-3200 RAM inside of the Razer Blade 14, and a 1TB PCIe 4.0 M.2 NVMe SSD. Inside, Razer keeps things cool with a vacuum-sealed vapor chamber that works alongside low-profile fans with 88 fan blades and a thickness of just 0.1mm -- the new Blade 14 can be just 0.66 inches thick thanks to the kick-ass cooling tech.

Cyberpunk 2077 is coming back to the PlayStation Store next week, and CD Projekt RED is rolling out even more patches to fix bugs and glitches.

CP2077's new Patch 1.23 update corrects a ton of bugs across all platforms, including fixes for 17 different missions and gigs. Some other major tweaks include adjustments to NPCs as well as crash fixes across all platforms in an effort to maintain stability and performance. There's also an optimization for I/O and system memory to reduce the amount of repeated NPC appearances across Night City.

There's even a prompt surrounding corrupted save data--an issue that plagued gamers a few patches ago. "A popup message asking to verify integrity of game data will now be displayed when incomplete or corrupted game data is detected," reads the notes.

Sabrent unleashed their performance-dominating Rocket 4 Plus 1TB + 2TB SSDs last year, offering an insane 7GB/sec (7000MB/sec) reads, and now those drives have some new firmware up for grabs.

The original version 1.1 firmware on the Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus has been updated, with a new version 1.2 firmware available for download on the official Sabrent website. There are a few issues with the new firmware, with early Sabrent Rocke 4 Plus SSDs now receiving some upgrades.

If you picked up one of Sabrent's super-fast Rocket 4 Plus SSDs closer to their release, you might have a drive with v1.1 firmware -- but most purchases after the initial waves should be v1.2 firmware and not needing the firmware update. For those who purchased early, that firmware update is now ready.

343i talks a bit more about Halo Infinite's multiplayer, but leaves out some really important details as well.

Halo devs showed up to talk about multiplayer at the Xbox Extended stream and revealed a few more tidbits about the F2P mode. According to 343i, the AI bots can be played on any map in the game, which allows gamers to practice the ins and outs of specific areas. Bots can also be scaled to difficulty and their loadouts and equipment usage can be customized.

Next we have something that will change the dynamic flow of multiplayer. Weapons and spawning equipment will be mounted on objects in Halo Infinite (e.g. walls) and they will also have active respawn timers that are visible to all players. So now you'll know exactly when the rockets, sword, or sniper will respawn. This affords more tactical strategy to gameplay, planning, and execution across team-based and FFA modes.

Microsoft Flight Simulator is one of the most demanding video games ever made. It pushes today's highest-end PCs to their limits. So how did Microsoft get it running on Xbox Series X/S hardware? It borrowed power from the cloud.

Microsoft Flight Simulator on consoles both rides the clouds and is powered by them. Today the company confirmed that Flight Simulator's console release is driven in part by Microsoft's potent Azure servers, which can stream the massive 2.5 petabytes of Flight Sim data from the servers directly to console hardware. Machine learning is also a big part of what makes Flight Simulator tick and is responsible for building the game's staggeringly-detailed environments in real-time.

"The Series X is a super-powerful console and we're also using the Microsoft tech stack in an interesting way. The Series X/S are like beasts, the GPU is awesome, the CPU is multiple cores, fast RAM so we can run in 4K, the SSD is super-fast. It's basically the equivalent of a high-end PC," said Flight Sim boss Jorg Neumann.

Top Gun's Maverick is coming to Microsoft Flight Simulator for PC and console, complete with another expansion pack in 2021.

Today Microsoft announced the Maverick expansion pack for Flight Simulator, which brings the eponymous big screen legend to the gaming world. Not much is known about the crossover other than it will coincide with the movie's release on November 19, 2021.

The company says the expansion is all about going fast: "All I can say is that we're going to go fast, like really fast, and we're going to be in the danger zone." More expansions are coming this year and next year; Microsoft has one other big expansion planned for 2021 and six more planned for 2022.