Latest News - Page 1741

The new revised Nintendo Switch and Switch Lite systems have been hacked thanks to a new custom modchip.

Back in 2019, Nintendo used NVIDIA's revised 16nm Tegra X214 SoC in two new Switch models: The slightly modified 2019 Switch with a bigger battery, and the handheld-only Switch Lite. The whole idea behind this refresh was to improve battery life, increase thermal efficiency, and most importantly, close a hardware vulnerability that hackers had been exploiting since 2017 to run pirated software on the device.

The on-chip backdoor has been closed, but that didn't stop hackers from finding a way. TeamXecutor has created a new customized modchip that allows SX OS to run on the new revised Switch and Switch Lite models that use the new NVIDIA 16nm Tegra chip.

Square Enix plans to release a Final Fantasy 7 Remake game demo sometime in the future, and now we have footage of the playable demo in action.

The Final Fantasy 7 Remake game demo is very real. The demo was originally spotted on Gamestat, a tracking service that shows all new games and content coming to the PlayStation Store. The demo should be free, it may showcase roughly 1-2 hours of play, and it's coming to the PS4.

Someone got a hold of a leaked copy of the demo and put it up online, showing the first 3 minutes of prologue cinematic sequences. The visuals are absolutely incredible and breathe new life into the 1997 RPG classic, but all-in-all it's not much different than the official footage we've already seen. It's still pretty exciting because it's not straight from Square Enix.

Capcom could be developing Dragon's Dogma 2 in the RE Engine with original game director Hideaki Itsuno at the helm. And it could be released for next-gen consoles.

Capcom is back on top. We've seen a drastic turnaround from thanks to massive heavy-hitters like Monster Hunter World (its best-selling game of all time), Resident Evil 7, Devil May Cry 5, and Resident Evil 2 Remake. With this stable base of earnings, Capcom now wants to revisit old series by "reviving and awakening dormant intellectual properties." This leaves lots of exciting possibilities, including a Dino Crisis Remake and a Dragon's Dogma RPG sequel.

It gets better. Original Dragon's Dogma game director Hideaki Itsuno just teased a brand new game on Twitter with a short, tantalizing message: "2019 was the best year. Thank you to Devil May Cry fans. We will continue to work on the next project," Itsuno said.

Rumor has it Microsoft will release two next-gen consoles this year: The monstrously powerful (and expensive) Xbox Series X with its 12TFLOPs of power, and a cheaper disc-less system codenamed Lockhart with 4 TFLOPs of power. But going digital-only is a mistake, at least from a consumer's point of view.

Microsoft loves digital gaming. The Xbox brand is now built on digital engagement, a rich ecosystem made up of a myriad of subscriptions like Xbox LIVE and Game Pass that all strategically synergize with each other. Microsoft wants you locked into this landscape as much as possible for one big reason: Investment. When your entire games library is all-digital, you're not going to just start trading in your games or toss in your Xbox.

You're in what Phil Spencer calls The Gamer's Journey, a cyclic business model with tons of online multiplayer-driven games, microtransactions, friend and community interactions, and an ever-evolving storefront-service combo that's predicated on making you "sticky" in the digital ecosystem.

New leaks show the Xbox Series X could be 33% more powerful than the PlayStation 5, with a sizable 55% leap in GPU compute units. But how many third-party devs will push this new monster-eating console to its limits? Will devs play it safe and bet on the PlayStation 5 instead?

Game developers will be very busy in 2020. This is especially true for third-party developer-publishers like Capcom, Ubisoft, Take-Two, EA, and Activision-Blizzard that all release multi-platform games. Assuming the reports are right, this year developers will have to make games playable on eight different Xbox and PlayStation consoles. It's all thanks to the new hybrid business model that merges the best things about the iterative console cycle like backward compatibility with a full-on next-gen reset, like substantially more powerful hardware.

But next-gen consoles won't instantly replace current-gen systems when they launch in 2020. The Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5 will be extensions of current-gen systems, just with better hardware. The PS4 and Xbox family will live alongside their next-gen forebears for years to come (Sony, for example, will sell the PS4 until 2022). For all intents and purposes it's a new familial hierarchy--just think of the Xbox SX and PS5 as the new step-fathers who slowly gain custody of the kids (in this case, the PS4 and Xbox One games library).

Rumors are flying around the Smash Bros. community on forums regarding the final character to be revealed in the fighters pass.

Before jumping into these rumors, I must warn you that nothing in this article is officially confirmed by Nintendo, this is just what the current 'rumors' are. According to a 4Chan post by Leakguypossibly (shady name, I know), who claims a source has told him that there is going to be a bonus echo fighter for Joker, this fighter would be Kasumi from Persona 5. Leakguypossibly also says that Nintendo is planning on giving her a proper reveal and that she would be released after Persona 5 Royal releases in the west.

Moving onto Waluigi now. Brian David Gilbert recently made a video dedicated to asking Nintendo about creating a Waluigi video game. Funnily enough, Doug Bowser, now the Nintendo CEO, replied to the Twitter video with a clapping emoji and a purple heart. Smash fans are speculating that this approval towards Waluigi could lead to a new game for him or even an announcement from Nintendo about him being included in the fighters pass.

Back in October, I wrote an article about a gaming retailer listing Metro Redux for the Nintendo Switch before an official announcement was made. Now, we have an official rating for the game.

Metro Redux is a definitive edition collection of two Metro titles, Metro 2033 and Metro: Last Light. Redux was originally released back in 2014, and based on this new rating from the Pan European Game Information (PEGI) board, it's soon going to be heading over to the Nintendo Switch.

The rating for the title clearly states Metro Redux will be 18+ (obviously) and that it will be releasing on the 31st of December, 2019. Since that day is now in the past, it seems that this "release date" was just an end of the year placeholder. Between there being an official rating for the game and the physical game cover of the Switch version being spotted, I believe that we are due for an announcement within the first quarter of 2020.

If you didn't know, Capcom is currently hard at work making a Mega Man mobile game. Originally this mobile game was meant to release late in 2019. Unfortunately, that didn't happen.

While it's unfortunate that we didn't get the release of what has been titled as Mega Man X DiVE in 2019, it was for a good reason. Capcom has announced that instead of releasing a half-baked game, they will instead be spending some extra time making some optimization changes.

The current gaming scene is littered with developers releasing games that are poorly optimized and barely finished. So, seeing a developer owning up to what could be better is certainly a grand sight in gamers' eyes. I think I can speak on behalf of many gamers out there by saying that we would much rather wait for a completed titled then receive a title that is half-finished. Mega Man X DiVE is now expected to launch in the "First Quarter of 2020".

If you are a Nintendo Switch owner and you haven't dipped your toe into the great big Indie game pool then you are truly missing out on some fantastic titles.

If you are like me and don't like jumping into a random game without knowing whether or not its going to be worth your time playing it, then this might be the reason why you aren't giving some Indie titles a chance. That's a more than fair enough reason, so for your convenience Nintendo has compiled a list of the "Best-selling Indies of 2019".

Kicking off the list, Nintendo has got Cuphead, then the following titles are: Blasphemous, Downwell, Katana Zero, My Friend Pedro, Slay The Spire, War Groove, Untitled Goose Game, Castle Crashers, Terraria, Baba Is You, Unravel Two, Steam World Quest Hand of Gilgamech, Torchlight II and Ori and the Blind Forest Definitive Edition. If you were thinking about getting an Indie title and giving it a shot, any of the previously mentioned games are worth your time playing.

Music streaming has taken over the US music market. Organizations are now saying it accounts for 80% of the market, compared to only accounting for 7% back in 2010.

The Recording Industry Association of America or RIAA for short has released some new decade long statistics onto their official Twitter page. The RIAA says that over the course of the decade, streaming has become the staple way of accessing music in the music market, surpassing physical media by a landslide.

The above image shows that back in 2010, physical music took the lions share of the market at 52%, digital downloads took 38%, and streaming only had 7%. Now, looking at the 2019 data, streaming has basically eaten physical music, reducing it down to just 9% of the market, while streaming sits strongly at 80%. The increase in streaming is no doubt a result of many more Americans now having a smartphone and downloading apps such as Spotify or Apple Music.

Have you ever seen galactic fireworks? They don't have anything to do with traditional fireworks that use paper, powder and fire. Instead, they use sonic booms and gas.

The above photo is of a galaxy in NGC 4258, it's quite similar to our Milky Way galaxy but instead it has two extra spiral arms that flow in X-ray, optical and radio light. A new study using NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope revealed that at the heart of this galaxy a supermassive black hole could be spewing out high-energy particles that then heat up the disk of the galaxy, and create shock waves that are much like sonic booms.

NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory captured an image that showed many bubbles of heated gas that were equivalent to about 10 million suns. Astronomers observed these bubbles and concluded that gas that was originally in the disk of the galaxy had been heated and then catapulted out into different regions of space.

If you are a fan of the Caped Crusader and also enjoy video games, you are no doubt after another great Batman title.

The above video released by Ruslan Gadzhiev showcases a real-time 3D game model of Christian Bale as The Batman from Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight movie trilogy. The render was created used Unreal Engine 4, and by knowing that we can see that if there were to be a new Batman game, Batman would have about the same amount of quality as this render.

While it can't be said that developers will be able to 100% implement this level of quality in a new Batman game, this still gives us a rough estimation of what Unreal Engine 4 is capable of when it comes to Batman. In the entirety of this article, I have provided some high-quality screenshots for your viewing pleasure.

Astronomers are peering out into the black void and are wondering how space bodies (comets, asteroids) are interacting with our Sun and Jupiter.

The scientists decided to simulate many different types of space bodies and watch how each of them interacted with the Sun and Jupiter as they approached them. The results were released in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society and revealed that in some cases of an object entering our solar system, Jupiter could alter the trajectory of the object enough that it becomes bound to our solar system.

Hands and Walter Dehnen of the University of Munich said, "We used an advanced code which runs on graphics processing units rather than traditional computer processors to enable us to simulate such a large number of objects in a short time. The simulations took two days in total using around 70 graphics cards, so roughly 140 days if we had only used one card and much, much longer if we had used a normal desktop computer processor."

Recent leaks show the Xbox Series X crushing the PlayStation 5 in raw GPU power, at least insofar as relative devkit specs. But a less powerful console could give Sony a major advantage: A $399 price tag.

New reports show a clear discrepancy between next-gen console power. The leaks, which are based on devkit hardware, say the Xbox Series X sits at 12 TFLOP GPU clocked at a 1.7GHz frequency with a whopping 56 Navi Compute Units from AMD's new RDNA 2.0 architecture.

The PlayStation 5 conversely clocks in at 9.2 TFLOPs with only 36 Compute Units (the same as the PS4 Pro) at a 2GHz clock speed. With these numbers, the Xbox SX's GPU sports 33% more TFLOP performance and 55% more compute units. That's a sizable lead that should come with an equally sizable price tag.

Earlier in the year, Guild Wars developer ArenaNet prepared for job layoffs/restructuring, and now it seems the development studio is preparing to get back on track with a new title.

ArenaNet stepped into the game development sphere with the extremely popular MMORPG Guild Wars. Following up on that title, ArenaNet then developed a sequel, Guild Wars 2, and while that title kicked off on popularity, it's lack of end-game content caused players to leave and find their way back to other MMORPG's. As you can see, ArenaNet has always been a single game development studio, but since the layoffs earlier this year, we haven't heard much about what the studio is doing.

Now, according to a new job listing, ArenaNet is searching for a new art director that will be working on an "unannounced third-person fantasy action console title". This is extremely interesting, as this would mark the first time ArenaNet has moved towards developing a game for consoles rather than PC. The job listing also doesn't mention anything about the game being an MMO, which could mean that the studio is moving away from the Guild Wars series and starting something brand new. We will have to keep our eyes on this.

If you are a virtual reality gamer or just a gamer that pays attention to virtual reality titles, then you have no doubt heard of Beat Saber.

Beat Saber was renowned as the most popular virtual reality title with its extremely smooth movement and music-based system. The game got that popular that Oculus decided to pick them up. Now, a new VR title is on the block, and it's kicking up a storm in terms of revenue making and players.

The game is called Boneworks, it's developed and published by Stress Level Zero, and on December 11th, it released on the Steam Store. The title has since gone on to earn Steam "Best of 2019 Virtual Reality" which is a ranking awarded to the title that generates the most gross revenue for the entire year. Boneworks managed to pull in over 100,000 new VR gamers, equating to a staggering $3 million in revenue.

A new report has come out regarding how popular The Witcher TV show really is, and this report indicates that The Witcher TV show is now the most in-demand TV show in the world.

According to some new data figures from a data company Parrot Analytics, Netflix's The Witcher has taken first place from Disney Plus' The Mandalorian as the top global series. The data also indicates that The Witcher is now the second most popular Netflix series in the US, with Stranger Things leading the pack.

The Witcher arrived on Netflix on December 20th, and for the week ranging from December 22nd to 28th, the show pulled in 127 million demand expressions. This beat Disney's The Mandalorian, which had 115 million demand expressions in that same week. A Parrot Analytics representative said, "The Witcher's' immediate worldwide success highlights the impact that a binge-released series can have on driving audience demand."

Just as you would be thinking that the Uncharted movie is gaining some production traction, it has taken another hit on the nose.

It wasn't that long ago that the Uncharted movie picked up a new director, this director was Travis Knight, the director behind Bumblebee. Unfortunately, according to sources close to Deadline, Knight has had to give up his position as the director of the movie due to lead actor Tom Hollands filming schedule.

Deadline says that Holland's filming schedule for the upcoming third Spider-Man film has created a bunch of problems. On a more positive note, the Uncharted cast will still be remaining the same, with Mark Walberg scheduled to play Nathan Drakes (Tom Holland) older ally, Victor Sully. Since there has been a director change and filming isn't on schedule, I wouldn't be counting on that December 2020 premier.

If you have been tuning into The Witcher TV show, you would have noticed how much effort Henry Cavill has put into getting Geralt's raspy voice down. But what if the actresses of Ciri and Yennefer gave it a shot?

The above video has been posted on the official Twitter of Lauren S. Hissrich, the showrunner for Netflix's The Witcher. Hissrich has done a fantastic job of staying connected with her loyal fanbase, always posting updates on the shows progress, answering fans' questions etc. If you really enjoyed watching The Witcher TV show, I'd recommend going and following her personal Twitter for real-time updates.

On a more lighter and less information-based note, Hissrich just recently posted a video of actresses Freya Allan (Ciri) and Anya Chalotra (Yennefer) attempting to replicate Henry Cavill's Geralt of Rivia voice. Unfortunately, Cavill wins this one as Anya Chalotra is unable to even get down to that level of deepness and raspiness. She gave it more than a fair shot, though!

Sometimes a game doesn't have to be a massive open-world title with multiple endings, sometimes all it has to be is a goose.

Not too long ago, I wrote an article about why House House's Untitled Goose Game is one of the reasons you should love the internet. Without the internet, we would have never heard about this title, and honestly, what a shame that would be. It seems that over one million people were thinking a similar way and didn't want to miss out on the title as its sales have reached a point that has exceeded the developer's expectations.

According to Cabel, who worked on Untitled Goose Game as a publisher at Panic, Untitled Goose Game has surpassed the one million copies sold mark. Cabel took to his personal Twitter to thank everyone who purchased the game and hoped that they enjoyed their experience.