Latest News - Page 1791

Epic Games is celebrating Halloween for the first time ever since their release, and to do that the company is slashing prices for a large selection of games.

Epic hasn't just honed in on a specific genre of games to reduce pricing on, they have instead decided to hit almost every genre and diversify their sales catalog so everyone has a bit of something to enjoy. World War Z, Control, Beyond: Two Souls, Hades, Heavy Rain and The Walking Dead: The Telltale Series are just some of the titles Epic has got discounted.

If you aren't really into the titles mentioned above, Epic also has Darksiders III for half-price, Rainbow Six Siege for quarter of its normal price and For Honor heavily discounted. Not to mention the likes of Alan Wake being extremely cheap, Limbo and a large selection of The Walking Dead Telltale Games slashed. If you are interested in picking up some new titles this Halloween check out this link here.

So you are a lover of the GameCube controller and just don't want to pass up on using it, but you want to use your Nintendo Switch in handheld mode. SADES has your back with the GameCube-style Nintendo Switch Joy-Con's.

While it might not be the real deal when it comes to GameCube controllers, the GameCube-style JoyCon's from SADES is the closest your going to get in hand-held mode. SADES has announced this new controller in attempt to tap into the more than apparent GameCube market, and as someone who absolutely loves GameCube controllers they certainly have my attention.

The new pair of controllers come in at a cost of $59.99 which is about $10 more than your standard Nintendo Switch Joy-Con's. SADES has left no features out as well, the GameCube-style controllers come with NFC for amiibo and gyro support, a micro-USB charging cable, dock charging and HD rumble. While SADES Joy-Con's offer no extra utility when compared to normal Joy-Con's, they are more so aimed at a consumer who loves the GameCube aesthetic and wants that on their Nintendo Switch.

The first moon rover from the United Kingdom will be a small spider-bot that has the ability to jump and capture video in full HD.

This small, four-legged robot is expected to arrive on the Moon in 2021 aboard a United Launch Alliance Vulcan rocket which will be launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida. The UK company Spacebit are the ones responsible for creating this spider-bot and will be placing it inside the Peregrine lander for a total of a 10-day mission on the Moon.

The tiny spider-rover can jump and is super light weight coming in with a total weight of only one kilogram or a little over two pounds. While on the moon the spider-rover will be travelling 10 meters away from the lander and to record and send back full HD videos. Thinking ahead into the future, if this first mission is a success for Spacebit, more of these spider-like rover could be sent to explore certain parts of the Moon.

TikTok has just banned around two dozen ISIS-affiliated accounts from its service, with social media monitoring agency Storyful recently finding the ISIS-related accounts and TikTok swiftly removing them.

The ISIS-connected accounts were posting videos looking to recruit followers and increase support for ISIS, with videos showing ISIS anthems and videos of corpses and ISIS fighters.

ByteDance is the parent company of TikTok based in China, with a US-based TikTok representative telling Engadget: "Content promoting terrorist organizations has absolutely no place on TikTok. We permanently ban any such accounts and associated devices as soon as identified, and we continuously develop ever-stronger controls to proactively detect suspicious activity. This is an industry-wide challenge complicated by bad actors who actively seek to circumvent protective measures, but we have a team dedicated to aggressively protecting against malicious behavior on TikTok".

NVIDIA has just unveiled its new EGX Edge Supercomputing Platform during MWC 2019 in LA today, announcing that its new platform has been adopted by industry giants in Samsung, Walmart, and BMW just to name a few.

Walmart is using NVIDIA's new EGX technology in its retail lab in Levittown, NY in order to improve its in-store shopping experience, with the ability to tell staff to go and get shopping charts, or to restock shelves. It can even alert staff during busy periods to open up additional checkouts, or stock shelves when stock runs low all of the sudden.

In this example, NVIDIA was able to boast: "Walmart is able to compute in real-time more than 1.6 terabytes of data generated each second".

Disney just released the final Rise of Skywalker trailer, and we get some big teases from the final chapter.

Star Wars: Rise of Skywalker is the end of George Lucas' legendary sci-fi saga, so it's only proper the series goes out with a bang. The trailer shows lots of little tidbits that speak volumes. We get a glimpse of a big all-out war that could be the Resistance's last-ditch fusillade against the New Order, what appears to be a Kylo-Rey alliance to destroy a statue of Darth Vader, and a tantalizing clip of a robotic Emperor Palpatine at the end.

"Long have I waited. And now...you're coming together," Palpatine says in the trailer, possibly hinting that Kylo will try to seduce Rey to the dark side just as Vader did with Luke. Kylo could change and finally come into the light--at least temporarily--but there's some sequences where he's fighting Rey on an ocean planet.

In what feels like an extremely weird move given the on-going issues with China, Apple CEO Tim Cook has just been appointed the chairman of the advisory board of Tsinghua University School of Economics and Management in Beijing, an influential Beijing university.

Cook's new role will see him replace Jim Breyer, founder and chief executive of Breyer Capital, with the Apple CEO sitting in his new chairman position for three years. Cook isn't the first prominent member of silicon valley to join the Beijing university's board, with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Tesla CEO Elon Musk both involved with the school.

This position gives them access to the upper echelon of Chinese leaders in both business, and politics. Cook's official role with the board, like its other influential board members is to assist with the development of the school. Chinese business leaders in Jack Ma the founder of Alibaba, and Pony Ma the founder of Tencent.

The Coalition is probably working on Gears 6 right now, with Gears 5 now out the door and in gamers' hands the next iteration of Gears 6 could have a very interesting source to be inspired by, at least visually.

Gears 6 could be pulling visual inspiration from A Handmaid's Tale, the popular Hulu series, according to Iran-based vidoe game composer Hamidrez Nikoofar. He runs a podcast series called Wassup Conversations, where he chats with different developers. In a recent chat with Gears 5 art director Aryan Hanbeck, it was revealed the Hulu series is an inspiration.

Hanbeck said: "One thing - the guys here will probably laugh if they see this - but I've been telling all the artists nonstop to go watch Handmaid's Tale... The composition, the color, and just the cinematography and symbolism is just off the charts. So, I watched that and I'm like, 'Wow we gotta find a way to get more of this stuff in Gears 6".

Rockstar Games blew gamers away with the not-so-surprising reveal of Red Dead Redemption 2 on the PC, with uncapped FPS, 4K (and beyond) support, UltraWide monitor support, and so much more. But what does it look like compared to the console version? Check out the video below:

The comparison video does a good, but not perfect job, of showing us the differences between the console versions of Red Dead Redemption 2, and the upcoming PC version of the game. RDR2 on the PC boasts some great upgrades in resolution and monitor support, textures, and most importantly draw distance.

Red Dead Redemption 2 is already one of the best-looking games on current-gen consoles, but it definitely loses out to the PC version. The PC version on the other hand looks great, but it's not a mind-blowing upgrade from the console version which already looks good. The textures don't pop with super amounts of detail, but the increases in detail levels itself mixed with the higher draw distances really do look superior on the PC without a doubt.

We know that the semi-custom designs that AMD is providing in its Zen 2 and Navi chips for the next-gen Xbox Scarlett and PlayStation 5 consoels will provide a huge injection of performance... but 4K 120FPS is a big call.

It wasn't too long ago that I personally did some testing between two of NVIDIA's flagship GeForce RTX 2080 Ti graphics cards in SLI/NVLink, which enabled 4K 120FPS gaming on Ultra quality. But now, Aaron Greenberg who is the GM, Xbox Games Marketing at Microsoft, is teasing that the huge CPU upgrades inside of Microsoft's next-gen Xbox Scarlett console will open the doors for 4K 120FPS gaming.

In an interview with the Xbox Official Magazine, Greenberg said: "But, with the next-gen, I think you'll see a big upgrade in CPU, because we really want to make sure that you don't have any compromises with the framerates. Yes, we can do 4K, but we can also do 120 frames per second. So I think that type of capability will be something that people don't see today".

NordVPN has confirmed that it was hacked, after rumors began swirling that the virtual private network provider had an expired internal private key exposed. This means that the ones with that key could impersonate NordVPN, and you know how bad that could get.

While NordVPN says it has a "zero logs policy" by stating that the VPN provider doesn't "track, collect, or share your private data"... I'd dare say this is all in teh air right now. TechCrunch reached out to NordVPN, which spokesperson Laura Tyrell then explained: "One of the data centers in Finland we are renting our servers from was accessed with no authorization".

The hackers got into the NordVPN server by taking advantage of an insecure remote management system that was left open by the data center provider, NordVPN said that it was not aware of this system. NordVPN also didn't name the datacenter provider, for obvious reasons.

The next Batman game may be called Arkham Legacy, and feature a perspective-shifting campaign starring multiple heroes.

Warner Bros. Montreal has been working on a new Batman game for a while now, and it seems to be set in the Court of Owls story arc with a few unexpected twists. The studio has yet to confirm anything other than cryptic teasers and is likely holding off for a big reveal at The Game Awards 2019.

But new potential info hints multiple characters in the Wayne family will be playable, possibly Damien Wayne, Batgirl, and of course the Caped Crusader himself, hence the rumored Arkham Legacy title. The info comes from infamous Smash Bros. and Nintendo leaker Sabi, who tweeter the Arkham Legacy name and said the reports of a playable family in the next Batman seem legit.

The new Terminator Resistance game includes pretty much everything you don't want in a Terminator shooter, including lots of sneaking, a crafting system, inventory management, and an RPG skill-up pane.

I didn't have high hopes for the new Terminator shooter right out of the gate. It's being developed by Teyon, the same devs behind the disastrous Rambo game, but Terminator Resistance is looking a bit rough.

A new gameplay trailer for Terminator Resistance pretty much highlights the opposite of what you expect in a shooter. There's lots of evading enemies and tedious hacking, collecting materials, and an overall feeling of helplessness. In the full 27 minute trailer, the player doesn't fire a single shot or get into a gunfight. They just get shot in the back by a T-800 and die right away, or spend most of the time crouch-walking through an area and playing through a Frogger-like hacking mini-game.

Diablo IV has been outed by an artbook advertisement, confirming the game will be revealed soon.

German games magazine GameStar stole Blizzard's thunder, confirming Diablo IV's existence in an advertisement ahead of its huge Blizzcon 2019 reveal. The ad itself is for a new hardcover Diablo artbook that's slated to release November 3, days after Blizzcon begins. "Featuring over 500 artworks from Diablo, Diablo II, Diablo III and Diablo IV, this book features many noteworthy artworks created for Blizzard Entertainment's iconic action role-playing game that has given generations of fans everlasting nightmares," GameStar magazine reads.

We've known Diablo IV has been in the works for a while now, so this isn't a surprise. Blizzard started hiring for the new game back in 2016, and sources tell Kotaku that Diablo IV has been rebooted at least once. The current version of Diablo IV is more grim, malevolent, and bloody than Diablo III.

The official system requirements for The Outer Worlds have been released, detailing what PC gamers are going to need to run the title.

Obsidian Entertainment has taken to their forums to release the PC requirements for their upcoming title The Outer Worlds. From the releases specs we can see that the game won't be hitting PC very hard at all, while also not taking up a lot of storage space. The minimum PC requirements indicate that users will need to have at least a GTX 650 Ti or an AMD HD 7850 to play the game.

Recommended PC requirements are a GTX 1060 6GB or a Radeon RX 470. For those wondering how much storage is going to be required to install the game, The Outer Worlds comes it at a quite reasonable 40GB. I have listed all of the released PC requirements below, and if you wish to visit the official Obsidian forums you can find that here.

It was only a couple of weeks ago that Dark Mode for iOS and Android devices was rolled out, and since then users have been wondering if using Dark Mode affects the devices battery life. Tests have been released and it seems that it does.

Tests conducted by PhoneBuff indicate that for iPhone users who have upgraded to iOS 13 and have enabled Dark Mode will be given 30% more battery life. The set of tests conducted by PhoneBuff were with robots who did a bunch of predefined tasks that included typing out messages, scrolling Twitter, using YouTube and Google Maps. The phones that were used for these tests were two iPhone XS Max's that were brought to the same level of brightness to ensure fair testing.

The tests were recorded over a two hour period and what they found that was that the light mode killed the battery that much that the testing in Google Maps couldn't even be concluded. Dark Mode on the other hand still had 30% of its battery remaining. Why does Dark Mode give better battery efficiency? Well that's actually quite simple. When an OLED display is showing black it means the tiny pixel on the display is completely off, not draining any reserved power contained in the battery. To the contrary, when an OLED display is at full brightness more power is being drained due to the pixels being powered on, you can probably see where this is going.

Researchers at the University of Oxford built and trained a neural network to be able to fill in the letter gaps of ancient texts, and now the AI is better than expert scholars.

The researchers tested the AI on ancient Greek inscriptions that were on objects such as stones, ceramics and metal. The texts are dated back to 1500 and 2600 years ago, and according to a report out of New Scientist, the AI creamed the humans in a head-to-head speed test at deciphering the artifacts. "In a head-to-head test, where the AI attempted to fill the gaps in 2949 damaged inscriptions, human experts made 30 percent more mistakes than the AI. Whereas the experts took 2 hours to get through 50 inscriptions, Pythia gave its guesses for the entire cohort in seconds."

New Scientist says that the AI which has been titled as Pythia was able to recognize and remember patterns in 35,000 different relics that amassed over 3 million words. It was also able to pick up patterns and include context such as the shape and layout within its descriptions. Pythia gives scholars predictions for missing letters or words within the text and rather than returning to the scholars with a single prediction Pythia gives multiple predictions and its level of confidence for each one.

A new report out of CNBC has stated that third-party Amazon sellers are shipping out expired food to buyers much to frequently.

According to the report, numerous Amazon customers are receiving foods and products such as baby formula, coffee creamer, beef jerky, granola bars and more well past their sell-by-date. Interviews have been conducted with the Amazon third-party sellers, consumers and consultants and majority of the formulated opinions point the finger at Amazon for having numerous system loopholes.

CNBC also states in their article that an analytics firm that specializes in the Amazon Marketplace combed over the sites 100 best-selling food products. They found that out of the 40% of sellers, more than five customer complaints were lodged about expired goods. It seems that as Amazon grows and expands its food business so does the amount of problems that arise. According to some safety advocates these issues will only increase as Amazon doesn't have accountability for its products due to the previously mentioned system "loopholes".

Alphabet, Google's parent company has a subsidiary company called 'Wing', Wing has now become the first company in the United States to deliver a package by drone. Achievement unlocked!

A small town in Virginia is home called Christiansburg is home to Wing's testing grounds as residents can order products as per normal but instead of getting them driven by FedEx, they can get a drone drop off. Families can use the Wing app to order products, and one family who has already used the app bought Tylenol, cough drops, Vitamin C tablets, water and tissues.

The Wing drones are capable of transporting a maximum of three pounds of goods to a consumer that is located within six miles of the drone loading center called the "Nest". You are probably wondering how the dropping off transition happens, so once the drone has arrived at the marked address it hovers above the house and instead of landing it lowers the cargo via a cable to purchaser.

NASA astronauts Christina Koch and Jessica Meir made history this past Friday with a successful spacewalk mission to replace a broken part on the International Space Station's (ISS) power grid.

The astronauts main goal was to replace a faulty 19-year old charge-regulating device for one of the new batteries that was installed last week. NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine spectated the historical event from the NASA's HQ in Washington, here is what he had to say about the achievement "We have the right people doing the right job at the right time. They are an inspiration to people all over the world including me. And we're very excited to get this mission underway."

For those that don't know, the astronauts aboard the ISS are replacing old nickel-hydrogen batteries with new next-gen lithium ion batteries that are expected to last the rest of the floating laboratories lifespan. If you are after a more in-depth explanation at what these batteries are powering, check out my breakdown post here. In summary, congratulations to both Christina Koch and Jessica Meir for this achievement, women around the world are no doubt looking up to them both.