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Nintendo's latest Switch model could include a mixed reality headset with its own dedicated screen and internal SoC components. Or it could be a new 3DS-like folding Switch revision.

References to a new Switch model were uncovered in the latest 10.0.0 firmware patch, igniting tons of speculation on the internet. Hacker Mike Hestin discovered the designation after datamining the update. The new model, nx-abcd, hints at a new form factor revision with a second screen, and it could mean a Switch console + dedicated mixed reality headset combo.

So far, Nintendo has only toe-dipped into VR by using the Switch tablet screen as a slot-in display in makeshift cardboard Labo kits. The results are disorienting to say the least. Nintendo is clearly interested in VR, and recently exposed aspirations to explore AR too. It's possible this new Switch model could be a Switch handheld-console hybrid that comes with a special Nintendo-branded mixed reality headset with customized internals.

Sony today announced the Play At Home program that gives out free games to every PlayStation 4 owner.

As gamers worldwide stay at home to curb coronavirus spread, Sony is doing its part to keep us sane by releasing two free games to all PlayStation gamers. Starting tomorrow, April 15 at 8PM PST, Journey and The Uncharted Nathan Drake Collection will be available as free downloads until May 5. China and Germany will get Knack 2 instead of the Uncharted Collection. This collectively means PS Plus subscribers get four free PS4 games this month, including Dirt Rally 2.0 and Uncharted 4: A Thief's End.

"As a thank you to all who are doing their part to lessen the impact of this pandemic, Sony Interactive Entertainment is pleased to announce the Play At Home initiative," Sony wrote on the PlayStation Blog.

Right now Google is letting everyone try Stadia Pro free for two months. But should you even bother? The short answer is: Not really.

Even as a free trial, Stadia just isn't there yet. It's not really worth your time. Free is free, and there's really no risk if you cancel your sign ups before the two month period is over (yes, Google makes you put in credit card info and Stadia Pro is $10 a month after the trial ends in May). But there's a very valuable cost--your time. Honestly if you're not a gamer I don't think Stadia should be your entry point into gaming. You should simply do something else with your time.

Is Stadia horrible? No, it's not. But it's definitely not the ideal way to play games. Instant access is great at first, but as you play it becomes clear why convenience doesn't beat performance when it comes to Chrome gaming. We didn't try Stadia on our phones, just on a desktop PC via Chrome.

The Switch has been out for over three years and is just now getting button mapping options. Better late than never, right?

Nintendo Switch's latest 10.0.0 firmware update adds one of the most-requested features: Button remapping. With the exception of the home and screenshot buttons, all of the buttons and triggers can be re-configured and swapped out. Nintendo even lets you swap the analog stick movement schemes just in case your left or right JoyCon is drifting, and you can also lock the controller in vertical or horizontal orientation.

Users can save five different presets with different mappings, and right now the feature only works with official Nintendo-branded devices. Access and customize the JoyCon or Switch Pro controller layout by hopping into System Settings-> Controllers and Sensors-> Change Button Mapping.

The coronavirus is undoubtedly a terrible thing to have happened to everyone, but out of the world's misery shines fantastic examples of humans coming together for one common cause.

One of those common causes is Folding@Home, which is a computing project run by a team at Stanford University. The whole premise of Folding@Home is that the public can donate spare computation power from either their GPU or CPU to the project, and then the project aims that computational power at calculations that give scientists more understanding about a topic, or subject. At the moment, Folding@Home is aiming its power at understanding the coronavirus, and it has recently hit a new power level - 2.4 exaFLOPS.

In the above Twitter post from the official Folding@Home Twitter account, it's stated that the collective power of the Folding@Home project is almost at 2.5exaFLOPS, which is "faster than the top 500 supercomputers combined!". The Twitter post also contains a graph, and as you can see, Folding@Home is clearly exceeding all competing supercomputers, even to the point that it's "15x faster than any current supercomputer". It's absolutely fantastic to see the technology community rally together under one great cause. If you want to check out more about Folding@Home, or would like to donate some of your own computation power, check out this link here.

Call of Duty Warzone was set to break records when it was released, and now it's doing that very thing with millions of players flocking to the battle royale.

According to a new post by the official Call of Duty Twitter account, Warzone how now surpassed the 50 million player mark as of April 11th. It should be noted that Warzone only released just over a month ago on March 10th, meaning that the new battle royale shooter has amassed a staggering 50 million players in just a month. As of March, 2019, Fortnite is reported to have 250 million players in total, which means Warzone has almost reached a quarter of Fortnite's total players in just over a month.

To keep new players happy and engaged, Infinity Ward recently rolled out a new content update that includes a bunch of new weapons and skins. This content update comes under 'Season 3', and also added four-player squads for Warzone, or 'quads'. Not only do Warzone players get to enjoy the carnage with three of their friends, but they also get a bunch of new weapon blueprints and more. Infinity Ward didn't forget about the Modern Warfare players either, content such as 6v6 maps was released, more on that can be found here.

A social media post that has been doing the rounds showed Italian medical scrubs dead on the operating room floor, mid-operation, killed by COVID-19.

The social media post has a caption that reads: "some bodies among the 200 doctors in Italy who died yesterday of coronavirus". Italy has been slammed by coronavirus, so it has caused quite the stir... except its a total fabrication. The photo was reverse image searched and found to be a still from Grey's Anatomy.

Yeah, the COVID-19 death photo was from a 2007 episode (S3E14) called 'Wishin' and Hopin'. On the left of the image is the Italian medical scrubs that "died from COVID-19" on the ground, the right is the still image from the Wishin' and Hopin' episode of Grey's Anatomy.

Zack Snyder's Justice League star Henry Cavill and Superman himself, is like us right now -- stuck inside of their homes on COVID-19 coronavirus lockdown.

But the Superman star is a gamer (and a PC gamer at that) as well as a huge nerd, so during his lockdown Cavill showed off on his personal Instagram that he is a huge fan of Total War and Warhammer. Cavill posted a picture of himself painting an Adeptus Custodes helmet, and said: "One of my almost life long hobbies, that I've been following but not actively doing, is this. A company called Games Workshop... or plastic crack as 'we' call it".

Kal-El continued: "Genuinely can't get enough of the lore they have built over the decades. They have been some of my most enthused reads! If you were in denial about me being a geek before, you can't hide from it now".

Huawei is reportedly about to announce that it has been working on a new discrete GPU for the server and HPC market, according to a new report from a South Korean publication.

The Chinese giant has opened a new division in China called the Cloud and AI Business Group, where Huawei will begin its battle against NVIDIA and AMD -- and once Xe launches it will have Intel join the fight, for the GPU server and HPC businesses. Huawei is reportedly looking at a late 2020 release for its first-gen GPU, but it could have a gaming-focused GPU in the works and released in the next few years.

Huawei is pushing its new GPU-focused business with a home base in South Korea, with the Chinese giant acquiring local talent as well as acquiring a number of ex-NVIDIA engineers.

If you want to stay up-to-date with COVID-19 in the United States, then you'll want to check out John Hopkins University's recently updated COVID-19 dashboard.

The new COVID-19 dashboard focuses on the United States, and packs huge amounts of data including county-level data and infographics that you can't see in the global version. You can click into county-specific infographics that provide huge amounts of details like deaths, fatality rates, and more that are provided next to state-level data on testing, cases, deaths, and fatality rates of COVID-19.

John Hopkins University also includes information on county-level healthcare resources, with details like staffed hospital beds and ICU beds, as well as mitigation policies for COVID-19. There is an easy-to-read bar graph that shows the health insurance status of Americans by age group, with basic data for the local population and its size, race, and ethnicity breakdowns -- hell, there's even poverty status, and the number of Americans aged over 65.

With all of the current shelter-in-place, quarantines, and global lockdowns -- services like Zoom have seen a gigantic surge in popularity and use by companies and people around the world.

Well, did you know that over 500,000 Zoom accounts are being sold on the dark web and hacker forums for as low as 1c each, and in some cases, they're even free? Yeah, so new reports show that Zoom login details are happening through credential stuffing attacks, where hackers will login to Zoom accounts using leaked data from previous breaches.

If the login in successful, that Zoom account login goes into a list and is then sold to other hackers. Some of the Zoom accounts are offered up on a platter on the cheap, or for free -- where other hackers will use them for "zoom-bombing pranks" and "other malicious activities", reports BleepingComputer.

If you're a die hard Pokemon fan then you might want to check out the new Pikachu True Wireless Earbuds from Razer, a special edition version of their kick ass Hammerhead True Wireless Earbuds.

Razer made some changes to the charging case for the Pikachu True Wireless Earbuds, where the small fits-in-your-hand black case gets morphed into an awesome Poke ball. The front button lights up to indicate the charging level of your earbuds, while the wrist strap lets you carry it around on your... uh, wrist.

Just like the normal Razer Hammerhead earbuds, the new Pikachu True Wireless Earbuds have 13mm drivers, IPX4 water resistance, and Bluetooth 5.0 tech. If you want to get your gaming on, the Pikachu True Wireless Earbuds have low latency mode that reduces latency to 60ms. Razer goes more custom on the Pikachu True Wireless Earbuds, where the voice prompts are replaced by Pikachu's voice, which is actually really cool.

New PlayStation 5 renders are a mix of PS4 Slim, the V-style devkit, and a stylish spoiler because...why not? The PS5's gotta go fast.

After Sony revealed its new DualSense controller, we've seen some nice mock-ups try to recreate the style and guess what the PS5 will look like. Now Redditor robo3687 just made a batch of new PS5 renders using the DualSense as a template.

The mock-up accounts for sizing and cooling specifics too. robo3687 says their mock-up clocks in at 11.8 inches wide x 11 inches deep x 2.6 inches high, which is akin to the PlayStation 4 Pro's sizing. It can fit a 50mm fan and has special curvatures on the sides for airflow. "Yes it has a spoiler," the artist said.

There's apparently a rumor going around that Microsoft could acquire SEGA. That's not going to happen. At the most, we'll see a collaboration.

We shouldn't really have to write this article, and to a lot of you, the rumors of Microsoft buying SEGA are ridiculous. But we thought it prudent to illustrate why this won't happen. The reasons are pretty clear: Microsoft has no real reason to buy SEGA, and SEGA has no reason to sell. It's the same situation as the Sony buying Metal Gear Solid rumors, or the more preposterous Microsoft acquiring CD Projekt RED rumors.

First lets take a look at SEGA. Right now, SEGA is doing pretty good. The Japanese games-maker is an interesting company with a variety of revenue streams that stem from gaming to resort businesses. The latter will probably be hit hard thanks to COVID-19, but SEGA is nowhere near the red. That's usually when companies start eyeing buyouts or even selling off its IPs. SEGA is still making $1 billion+ in quarterly revenues; in Q3'19 during the holiday period, SEGA made $1.7 billion in revenues, and its profits were up a massive 52% YoY to $148 million. To put that into perspective, that's roughly 1/3 of what Xbox makes every quarter.

The ESRB has updated its new in-game purchases label warning with even more transparency and will now disclose a game's randomized elements.

The new label would specifically mark games with random microtransactions, namely lootboxes. This has huge implications for the live games market, which is thrived under blind awareness for years now. This is a particularly interesting move from the ESRB, especially since it said lootboxes aren't gambling back in 2017. Publishers have tried to circumvent the label warnings by delaying microtransaction roll outs until after a game box is printed and released in stores, and this has actually worked in the past.

Crytek once again teases Crysis remastered with a new two-word Tweet that speaks volumes. This is the first time the Crysis Twitter has been active since 2016.

Crytek hasn't been too subtle about teasing Crysis remastered. It's left more than a few clues in its latest CryEngine tech demos, and all the signs point to a re-release on current- and next-gen consoles and PC. We're talking high-end optimizations like 4K 60FPS+ and ray tracing, all wrapped in the beastly new CryEngine 5.6.

Throw in special attention to next-gen console SSD tech, and Crysis will be blistering fast, buttery smooth, and push the on-board APU's Zen 2 CPU and Navi 2X GPU to their limits. In short, Crysis could be back to utterly melt our hardware again.

Resident Evil 3 might have divided the fan base a little bit, but Capcom's latest remake is a big success on the market with 2 million units shipped worldwide in five days.

Capcom today announced some pretty beefy figures for its new Resident Evil 3 Remake. The action-based game has sold-in (shipped, not sold-through or actual sales) over 2 million copies globally in its first five days of availability. This figure includes both physical copies shipped around the world as well as digital purchases on PS4, Xbox One, and PC. Capcom also confirmed 50% of RE3 Remake's sales were from digital, which is quite substantial but not necessarily surprising given the COVID-19 lockdowns.

Those are big numbers for any AAA game, but Resident Evil 2 Remake's 3 million copies sold in 3 days still conquers the sequel. At the time of writing, Resident Evil 2 Remake is now beating Street Fighter II with a whopping whopping 6.5 million copies sold on all platforms. RE2 Remake is now Capcom's fifth best-selling game of all time.

NASA is working hard towards the Mars 2020 mission, and every day the space agency is making progress. Now, a new announcement has come out regarding what will be aboard the Mars 2020 rover.

A new announcement on NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory blog has shined a light on NASA completing one of the more critical steps towards the Mars 2020 mission, the Mars Helicopter. NASA has successfully constructed a helicopter that will mark the first time humans have flown an object on another planet besides Earth. NASA states on their blog that the helicopter will be deployed roughly two and a half months after Perseverance lands.

If you thought that the helicopter couldn't be full-sized, you thought right. NASA's Mars Helicopter weighs in at just four pounds (1.8 kilograms) and features propellers 4 feet (1.2 meters) in diameter. The helicopter is also cocooned within the rover's delivery system, and on April 6th, NASA engineers made 34 electrical connections between the rover and the delivery system located on the rover's stomach. If you are interested in reading more about the NASA's Mars Helicopter, check out the blog post here.

Half-Life: Alyx is the best VR game ever made, and one of the best games I have played in my 37 years on this planet. But, you need a VR headset to play it and not everyone has, or wants to buy one for Half-Life: Alyx.

But now, you don't need a VR headset to play, enjoy, and finish Valve's masterpiece game in Half-Life: Alyx as you can play it with a new no VR mod. The new mod is called Driver, and it lets you play Half-Life: Alyx without a VR headset.

I would suggest playing it in VR if you can because it is utterly amazing, as Valve built Half-Life: Alyx from the ground up for VR and it would be a shame not to play it the way the developer intended. But still, if you don't want to or simply don't like gaming in VR -- now you don't need to and can play Half-Life: Alyx in all its glory.

The future of travel might involve something that some governments are already discussing, a new COVID-19 "immunity passport". This immunity passport would certify you, the traveler, as immune to COVID-19 and approved to travel.

Germany, Italy, the UK and the US are already considering a COVID-19 immunity passport, which would acknowledge that you've had the disease and are now immune to it. You won't be able to infect others if you travel to foreign countries, and it would give a government stamp of approval to those working in critical sectors and essential workers.

While a COVID-19 immunity passport would be super beneficial to those in specific industries like healthcare workers (nurses, doctors, surgeons), police, army, first responders, and other essential and emergency services, it isn't all good. How long does COVID-19 immunity last? Will it mutate like the flu does every year, requiring up-to-date vaccinations to comply with your COVID-19 immunity passport.