Latest News - Page 1665

Riot Games' new Overwatch-meets-Counter-Strike first-person shooter is called Valorant, and features at least three major heroes including Viper, Brimstone, and Sage.

Fans and Twitter sleuths have uncovered the name of Riot's new competitive shooter, Valorant, along with key details on the game's new Sage character. A few days ago, users uncovered the PlayValorant.com domain was registered by Riot Games. Now a screenshot from an early pre-release build of Project A has leaked out to give eager fans an idea of what to expect with the game's pretty robust hero abilities.

The screenshot--which was likely leaked from a recent Valorant demo shown to influencers earlier this month--reveals Sage, the game's essential Mercy class.

Polish officials prohibit audience attendance at IEM Katowice 2020, the ESL has announced.

The coronavirus outbreak continues disrupting some of gaming's biggest events, this time with the ESL's annual $500,000 international CS:GO tournament held in Poland. IEM Katowice, Counter-Strike's biggest global tournament held in Poland, won't have an audience due to coronavirus health risks.

Polish officials have pulled the ESL's license just hours before the event launched, and attendees will no longer be able to watch the playoffs on-site, nor can they roam around the expo hall.

In a bid to diversify its revenues and prop itself up for long-term earnings potential, Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance and NieR: Automata developer PlatinumGames will open a new Tokyo-based studio to work on live service games.

The third announcement in PlatinumGame's Platinum 4 reveals is a big one, albeit not as exciting as Kamiya's new Project GG game. The studio will open a new branch in Tokyo, Japan in April 2020 that's centered on sustainability rather than new and catalog game sales.

PlatinumGames plans to use online-driven live games as a consistent source of income via monetization to better diversify its earnings. This is a natural evolution for any developer-publisher in today's gaming landscape and will offer an opportunity to tap Japan's rich vein of live gaming revenues, which will be re-invested in new wholly-owned IPs. Tencent's major investment in the company helped spark this evolution of PlatinumGames.

Since it's recent explosion into the app world, TikTok has been a subject of controversy as many people have claimed the app is spyware. Now, Reddit's CEO has spoken out about what he thinks about the app.

Reddit CEO, Steve Huffman was sitting down with some former Facebook executives at a conference in San Francisco. Huffman was then asked if small Silicon Valley startup companies could learn something from the recent explosion in popularity surrounding TikTok. Huffman's response was rather bleak, and straight to the point, "Maybe I'm going to regret this, but I can't even get to that level of thinking with them."

He continued, "Because I look at that app as so fundamentally parasitic, that it's always listening, the fingerprinting technology they use is truly terrifying, and I could not bring myself to install an app like that on my phone. I actively tell people, 'Don't install that spyware on your phone". This isn't the first time TikTok has been linked to spyware, as the United States government banned the use of the app on any government-issued phone under "security threat".

Astronomers have just detected the biggest explosion in the Universe ever recorded. The only explosion that comes close to this explosion is the Big Bang.

In a distant galaxy, about 390 million light-years away from Earth called the Ophiuchus galaxy cluster, astronomers detected what is now recorded as the biggest explosion in the Universe since the original Big Bang. This explosion came from a supermassive black hole and released five times more energy than the last biggest explosion ever recorded. According to Professor Melanie Johnston-Hollitt, from the Curtin University node of the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research, "We've seen outbursts in the centres of galaxies before but this one is really, really massive."

Astronomers also don't know why the explosion was so big, Johnston-Hollitt states, "And we don't know why it's so big. But it happened very slowly-like an explosion in slow motion that took place over hundreds of millions of years." Researchers estimated how large the explosion was and found that it happened to tear a hole in the galaxy cluster that's so large that fifteen Milky Way's can be placed in a row there.

China has had a lunar lander stationed on the dark side of the Moon since 2019, and since it's been there, it has relayed back some interesting information. Now, the lander has relayed back some new information about the Moon's surface.

In a new paper published in Science Advances, China's lander called Yutu 2 has performed some new experiments on the Moon's surface using the rover's ground-penetrating radar tools. Yutu 2 used its radar to examine the Moon's surface and found that the top layer, which mostly consists of pale, dusty soil, sprinkled in with some rock that stretches down beneath the surface for about 39 feet.

After that layer is the second layer, which consists of much larger grains of soil and much more larger stones and rocks, this layer continues down beneath the Moon for about 40 feet. The final layer of the Moon stretches another 50 feet below the second layer and consists of even larger stones, but surprisingly has a mixture of both large and fine grains of soil. Unfortunately, the instrument that was used to measure these layers reached its maximum capabilities at this layer, so we don't know what's beneath it.

Elon Musk and his private rocket company SpaceX has gotten the thumbs up to build a manufacturing plant in Los Angeles for its deep-space Starship.

The Los Angeles City Council and L.A. Board of Harbor Commissioners granted a 10-year permit for SpaceX to build its manufacturing plant just last week. According to Reuters, the council votes to whether or not SpaceX should be granted the permit were a unanimous decision of 12-0 -- clearly, they want SpaceX there. Councilman Joe Buscaino, whose district includes the port, said, "It's crazy that here we are in 2020 preparing ourselves to send people to Mars, and it's going to happen in our backyard. We are becoming a spaceport."

If you are wondering whether SpaceX will be launching rockets from the L.A. port, that, unfortunately, won't be the case. This plant is purely for the manufacturing of parts, as all aerospace vehicles will be transported elsewhere for testing. If you don't know what Starship is, it's SpaceX's largest rocket standing over 387 feet, or 118 meters tall. Starship is designed to carry a large number of passengers to Mars, and Elon Musk plans on initiating test flights for the craft later this year.

Scientists have created a new AI-powered device that has the potential of saving hundreds, if not thousands of lives.

This new device, which doesn't have a name at the moment, is a patch that uses AI to monitor patients' heart rate. The device checks the patient's heart rhythm, breathing cycles, quality of their sleep, posture, and overall physical activity. The device then collates all this data and feeds it back into a smartphone app via Bluetooth. From here, the AI takes over to create a summarised baseline specific for every patient.

Once this baseline is created, the device will continue to monitor the patient and observe any deterioration of their condition. Scientists and researchers from the University of Utah Health and VA Salt Lake City Health Care System attached the device to 100 patients who have previously suffered from heart failure. Out of the 100 patients, the average age was around 68, and over the three months of monitoring, the device was able to successfully predict heart failure days before at a rate of 80%.

Over the years, Raspberry Pi's has only gotten better and better, but this year could very well be the best year yet.

Back in June last year, we saw the launch of the Raspberry Pi 4, which sported massive upgrades when comparing it to the first model of Raspberry Pi, which released back in 2012. Now, in celebration of the Raspberry Pi's eighth birthday, they are dropping the prices of the Raspberry Pi 2GB of RAM variant.

According to the blog post, due to the drop in RAM prices, Raspberry is now able to bring down the cost of the Raspberry Pi 4 with 2GB of RAM to just $35 from $45, which is the same price as the original Raspberry Pi when it launched. When comparing the Pi 4 to the original Pi from 2012, it has 40x the CPU performance, 8x the memory, 10x the I/O bandwidth, can support 4x the number of pixels on screen as well as dual screens, and finally, has dual-band wireless networking.

Introducing Daisy, the tiny microcomputer that sports all of the necessary equipment for coding your musical instruments.

The company behind this little device is Electrosmith, and according to their announcement, Daisy comes with the following features. Two channels of line-level audio, MIDI connectivity, an in-built micro USB port, 64MB of SDRAM, and latency under 1ms. It doesn't stop there though; Daisy also comes with programming languages such as C++, Arduino, Max/MSP, and Pure Data.

At the moment, Daisy is available on Kickstarter and comes in at the cost of $29, which I think is a damn good price considering all the features that come with it. If you are interested in checking out the other things that Daisy can do, head on over to the Kickstarter page here. On a side note, Electrosmith also believes that Daisy would be a great addition to STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) research and education. Quite a nifty little device Electrosmith, fantastic work!

Facebook has just announced that its F8 developer conference has been canceled, all because of the current coronavirus -- or COVID-19 outbreak.

It's not the first conference and it surely won't be the last, with Mobile World Congress (MWC) being canceled at the last minute over coronavirus. The upcoming Game Developers Conference (GDC) is most likely going to be axed with major players like Microsoft, Sony, Unity, and others pulling out of the event -- and now Facebook's F8 devleoper conference.

The social networking giant announced that it canceled the event on Thursday, which was scheduled to take palce at the McEnery Convention Center in San Jose, California between May 5-6, 2020. Facebook's Director of Developer Platforms & Programs, Konstantinos Papamiltiadis, explained that they tried working around keeping the in-person contact there, but it couldn't happen with it being such a big event with people flying in from all corners of the globe.

Logitech G has just announced that it has teamed up with Herman Miller, where the two companies will create "the world's most advanced gaming chair" together.

Logitech is a big name on its own with gamers, being one of the largest peripheral makers in the world -- while Herman Miller is known for its super high quality, ergonomic, and expensive chairs. Logitech teaming up with Herman Miller seems like it is preparing to take a fight at the best gaming chair company in the world: Secretlab.

The new gaming chair from Logitech G and Herman Miller will be unveiled sometime in spring 2020, with no details on pricing, what to expect... nothing. We should expect a high-end gaming chair which doesn't hold back, and if they want to fight against the likes of Secretlab which has been going from stride to stride, it'll have its fight cut out for them.

NVIDIA has just dropped their latest GeForce 442.50 WHQL drivers, which are Game Ready for a bunch of just-released updates to some of the largest games on the market. You can download NVIDIA's new GeForce 442.50 WHQL drivers right here.

The new drivers have Game Ready optimizations for Respawn's just-launched Apex Legends: Season 4, Tom Clancy's The Division 2 - Warlords of New York expansion, as well as ARK: Genesis Part 1. Not only that, but NVIDIA has added in some new security features into the GeForce 442.50 WHQL drivers.

NVIDIA has also added in a bunch of VRSS profiles for VR games, fixes on a bunch of other games, and added in some new monitors to the G-SYNC compatible list, which include:

Corsair's new ONE PRO i200 compact workstation-grade PC has been announced, packing in some seriously kick-ass components into something near impossibly small.

The new Corsair ONE PRO i200 packs a high-end 14-core, 28-thread Intel Core i9-10940X processor and flagship NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 Ti graphics card. Corsair also installs a huge 64GB of quad-channel VENGEANCE DDR4 memory that can handle virtually anything you throw at it when it comes to workstation use.

Corsair also packs in a super-fast 2TB M.2 NVMe SSD that will ensure you have super-fast loading times, and super-fast read/writes for everything you want to do. Corsair's new ONE PRO i200 workstation is not just a kick ass workstation PC, but it would be an insane gaming PC that would handle everything you throw at it all the way to 4K 60FPS gaming.

We are still just getting our toes dipped in the waters of PCIe 4.0 thanks to AMD's recent launch of the X570 chipset, and Ryzen 3000 series processors -- but PCIe 5.0 and PCIe 6.0 are also on the way. You know the story, technology never slows down.

PCI-SIG has officially announced version 0.5 of the new PCIe 6.0 standard -- yeah PCIe 6.0, not PCIe 5.0 -- which will have an insane 8x the bandwidth of PCIe 3.0 that most people are using today. PCIe 3.0 starts things off with 32GB/sec of bandwidth on a full PCIe 3.0 x16 port, while PCIe 4.0 x16 offers up to 64GB/sec.

Things start to really ramp up with PCIe 5.0 x16 with a huge 128GB/sec, but PCIe 6.0 takes things to the stars with 256GB/sec on a PCIe 6.0 x16 port. This means we're looking at a huge 8Gbps per lane of bandwidth with PCIe 6.0 -- crazy stuff, and while graphics cards won't benefit too much from it (unless things change in a big way), next-gen NVMe SSDs, networking controllers, and other technologies will suck up all that additional bandwidth easily.

You simply can't escape hearing the words coronavirus or COVID-19 on the daily, but when it comes to Ndemic Creations' game Plague Inc. -- what could go wrong? Well, how about the game being banned on the Chinese iOS App Store.

Yeah, so the disease sim has been getting more and more popular with the recent coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak, and now the game has been officially removed from the Chinese iOS App Store. The news is coming directly from Ndemic Creations, that has explained: "We've just been informed that Plague Inc. 'includes content that is illegal in China as determined by the Cyberspace Administration of China' and has been removed from the China App Store".

Ndemic Creations adds that "The situation is completely out of our control". The news is riding on the back of Ndemic seeing sales of Plague Inc spiking big time, and then Plague Inc. quickly becoming China's top-paid iOS game... weeks later? Banned on the Chinese iOS App Store. I'm not shocked to see this happen, and it's China of all places.

We probably would've heard more detailed specs about Sony's next-gen PlayStation 5 if the company attended the upcoming Game Developers Conference, but it pulled out -- along with Microsoft, Unity, and many others.

But with Sony pulling out of the Game Developers Conference (GDC) it didn't stop GameStop from listing some detailed specs on the upcoming next-gen PlayStation 5 console. GameStop has a new landing page for the PlayStation 5 console, which starts off by listing that the PlayStation 5 has "the ability to play physical & digital media".

This means the console has now been confirmed to pack a Blu-ray drive, and while the GameStop landing page doesn't detail whether it will be a 4K Ultra HD capable player, I would put good money down on it being a 4K-capable Blu-ray player. Sony's next-gen PlayStation 5 will also be capable of digital games of course, so you can choose physical copies of your games or digital downloads on the next-gen PS5.

UPDATE: In a huge new live stream, Larian has confirmed Baldur's Gate 3 is turn-based only and won't have real-time wait pause mechanics.

French website JeuxActu just accidentally uploaded new Baldur's Gate 3 screenshots, revealing the inner workings of Larian's new RPG sequel.

The newly leaked Baldur's Gate 3 screenshots show two things: A mixture of Real-Time Wait with a Pause (RTwP) combat lifted straight from the original cRPG series, and turn-based combat similar to Larian's previous Divinity: Original Sin games. The two modes interact and complement each other during battles to allow for maximum strategic planning; the idea could be to mostly use RTwP to plan things out and then execute via the turn-based combat sequences.

The Xbox Series X's new Smart Delivery system isn't really new. Microsoft used similar intelligent delivery for the optional Xbox One X upgrades that boosted games to 4K HDR on the console. But the Xbox Series X will take things even further and give developers even more potential to breathe new life into older games.

A while back we predicted how the Xbox Series X's Smart Delivery system would work. The feature is designed around one purpose: Act as a conduit that carries current games forward to next-gen and boosts in-game performance. As with the Xbox One X, developers will have the option to roll out game updates that basically upgrade current-gen games and let them tap the Xbox Series X's raw 12TFLOP GPU, Zen 2 CPU, and synergized SSD and GDDR6 memory pool.

Smart Delivery will enhance backward compatible games and push them to new heights that simply aren't possible on the Xbox One family of hardware. Remember, next-gen is an extension and an evolution of current-gen, not a replacement.

The highest-ranking Super Smash Bros. Ultimate player is no longer a free agent, as he has just announced that he's signed with T1.

Leonardo Lopez Perez, also known as MkLeo in the Super Smash Bros. community, is the world's highest-ranking player for Super Smash Bros. Ultimate. MkLeo has had a fantastic career in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate since it launched, taking out some of the other highest-ranking players with his notorious Joker play.

MkLeo was a free agent for a period of time, and being the world's number one player for Ultimate, it didn't take long for a sponsor to pick him up. According to MkLeo's personal Twitter account, he has now signed a new deal with T1 to create content under their banner as well as continue tournament play. The terms of the agreement were not revealed, but being the best player in the world, I'm sure MkLeo walked away from this deal happy.