Latest News - Page 1844

Using a VPN is the best way for internet users to protect their privacy online. But did you know that a VPN also has benefits for gamers? Gamers might opt to use a VPN for several reasons. With a VPN, players can access games that aren't available in their area, conceal their IP address, and protect their data from vulnerabilities in gaming servers. That said, not all VPNs on the market are right for gamers. There are a few things you should pay special attention to when choosing a VPN for gaming, which we'll tell you all about in this article.

When it comes to selecting a gaming VPN, the number of options is overwhelming. To make this process simpler, we've listed some of the essential features to consider before deciding on a VPN. Here are the things to keep in mind when choosing a VPN for gaming.

A secure VPN will slow down your speeds to an extent. But some VPNs are faster than others, especially if they have lots of high-bandwidth servers. Since tons of data passes between your device and the gaming server each second, a fast connection is essential. You'll want to consider bandwidth and Mbps speeds when making your choice. Opt for a VPN with speeds that are as close as possible to the speed you get with your ISP.

Cold Iron Studios just went on a hiring spree to bolster development of its new Aliens game, and positions are starting to fill up.

The last time we checked on Cold Iron, the studio was hiring 22 people to help on its new Aliens massive-multiplayer online shooter. Now that number has shrunken to 15, showing some progress has been made. The game has been in development since 2018 or thereabouts after FoxNext bought Cold Iron, but no details have been revealed. Based on the current job listings that call for higher positions like a Senior Producer, a Senior Character Artist, and a Senior Concept Artist, I'd say the game is still far away from release.

The new Aliens game is being built with Unreal Engine 4, it might be a Destiny-like MMO-FPS, and it's due out for consoles and PC--that's really all we know at this point. But there are some clues. FoxNext has been following a distinct formulaic approach to Alien games.

Nintendo has recently released their update model of the Nintendo Switch system, that system has now been tested and its new battery life has been measured.

The old Nintendo Switch model was HAC-001, and to give a good battery life time expectation, Nintendo estimated that if you played The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild it would last three hours. On the new Nintendo Switch model which is model HAC-001(-01), Nintendo expects that you will achieve 5.5 hours on The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, quite a nice improvement.

Of course battery drainage really depends on what game you are playing, so thanks to Tom's Guide we can get another battery life expectation result, but this time in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate. Tom's Guide ran an endless 8-player CPU battle in Smash Ultimate on both systems, the AI was turned up to the max, items were enabled and the brightness was cranked to the max. Their results were the following: New Nintendo Switch model achieved 4 hours and 50 minutes of life before the battery died and the old only got 2 hours and 45 minutes. Meaning the new model almost doubled battery life, quite the achievement!

Not to long ago Bethesda released their trilogy of classic DOOM games back on consoles out of nowhere. While this was a fantastic surprise some players were confused with the Bethesda account sign in requirement.

While you would firstly think that this was happy occasion as the DOOM games are classic and culturally solidified in gaming history as some of the best games ever created, it was sadly not for some players. Some players decided to fire back at Bethesda for the requirement of having players sign into their Bethesda.net account to play DOOM and DOOM II, even if they were offline.

Bethesda quickly recognized the dissatisfaction with the login and now has since added an option to bypass players having to enter their email address and password every time they want to play the game. I'd imagine many DOOM players are going to be extremely happy with the quality of life update, as now they can continue their blood-stained slaying much faster than they were previously.

The controversy surrounding Nintendo's newest addition to the Super Smash Bros. Ultimate's roster is rife with toxicity, as both sides of the argumentative fence have been going at each other since the characters release.

Since Hero's release in version 4.0.0 the character has had a microscope placed over him as many players (mostly competitive) believe that the character is unfit for professional competition due to his random-number-generated (RNG) moves/abilities. The South Australian Smash Central believes that this is the case and has officially banned Hero from competitive matches, they announced this news via their Twitter account.

South Australia's Smash community have said that they aren't banning Hero because he is "too strong", but more so because he is "anti-competitive" due to some of his moves (magic burst, zoom & critical strikes) having next to no counter-play. It was also argued that since Hero has many abilities/moves that rely on RNG, that the character is too dependent on the randomness which ultimately takes away from competitive skill.

Researchers have managed to create a new endoscope design that is capable of self-calibrating and taking images of objects smaller than a single cell.

For those that don't know, endoscopes are tiny instruments that are used to view the internals of the body. Traditional endoscopes use camera and light to capture images, while researchers that have developed this new endoscope have achieved 3D image capturing without the use of any optical, electrical or mechanical components. This new endoscope measures in at just 200 microns across, which is approximately the size of a needle.

This new endoscope will have widespread medical application and since its tiny, and doesn't feature any bulky components, it's expected that it will be especially useful in optogenetics. Juergen W. Czarske, Director and C4-Professor at TU Dresden, Germany and lead author on the paper gave a statement regarding the endoscope, saying "The lensless fiber endoscope is approximately the size of a needle, allowing it to have minimally invasive access and high-contrast imaging as well as stimulation with a robust calibration against bending or twisting of the fiber."

While our eyes cannot see high-energy radiant called gamma rays, NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope certainly can and it has produced incredible images of the cosmic rays hitting the Moon.

Above we have some progression images of the Moon's gamma ray exposure, and according to Mario Nicola Mazziotta and Francesco Loparco from Italy's National Institute of Nuclear Physics in Bari, these images give us a better understanding of how fast-moving particles called cosmic rays interact with the Moon. The particles we are seeing are electrically charged and since the Moon has no magnetic field these charged particles make it to the surface.

When the particles hit the Moon's surface they produce a gamma-ray emission, while the Moon does absorb most of the particles some escape its clutches. Since NASA are planning on returning humans to the Moon by 2024, these findings of gamma exposure on the Moon emphasize the importance of NASA equipping our astronauts with gamma-protection suits so they aren't doused in these cosmic rays. For a more in-depth analysis, check out this article here.

One of NASA's top officials has spoken out about the progress engineers are having building the next rocket that will take some extremely lucky astronauts to the lunar surface.

According to NASA administrator, Jim Bridenstine who spoke to journalists on Thursday at the New Orleans space facility while standing in front of the Orion capsule said that the rocket is about 90% complete. Engineers are still currently working on the core stage of the rocket which is the most complex and tedious part of the building process.

The Orion rocket will be apart of the Artemis 1 moon mission and the first test flight has been scheduled for 2020. The test flight will take a crewless Orion capsule around the Moon twice, yes, its going to do a loop around the moon over the course of a 25.5 day period. After the initial tests of the Orion capsule, the rocket is planned to take the first women and the next man to the lunar surface.

Instagram has changed the game today as users can now flag any 'false content' that they see on the platform. These flags will go back to an artificial intelligence system that will use the information to spot more false content.

Instagram will also be tracking the flagged information and depending on a range of different "signals" such as the posts age, engagement, the account holders previous behavior, Instagram will determine whether or not the flagged post should be reviewed by third-party fact checkers. To flag false content, Instagram users can simply press on the three dots at the top right hand corner of the Instagram post, once the dots are press they can select "it's inappropriate" and then choose "false information".

It should be noted that if a post is discovered to be false that it won't be removed from the platform and the uploader won't be notified of the discovery. Instead, the post will be "downplayed" on the 'Explorer' tab and its hash-tagged pages. Instagram's third-party 'fact checkers' are the same ones that Facebook use, 'Full Fact' who recently spoke out saying that Facebook's fact checking algorithms need work.

Virgin Galactic has just unveiled the world's first specifically-designed commercial spaceport, announcing that it is now "operationally functional". All systems go for space travel with Virgin Galactic.

The company has been testing flights out in the desert in Mojave, California with its first successful launch jetting off in December 2019. But now, it is hyping up its spaceport facility that passengers will chillax in -- something Virgin Galactic calls the "Gateway to Space" -- before they are flung into space.

There are two floors of dedicated space for spaceflight operations, while another floor is designed for future spaceport customers. Virgin Galactic told the Sun: "We are working towards commercial operation in 2020".

The Nintendo World Championships that have already happened at set to be streamed at the end of this month, and if you were planning on tuning in to the action you can on CBS.

The Nintendo World Championships occurred back on June 8th, but if you happened to miss the livestream then, CBS has partnered up with television show ELeague to bring the competition back to the big screen. On August 25th, CBS will be showcase Super Mario Maker 2, Splatoon 2 and Super Smash Bros. Ultimate players fighting it out for top place.

If you don't want to wait for the CBS livestream you can just check out the full livestream above as it has been uploaded to Nintendo's YouTube Channel. In other news about Nintendo games, Super Smash Bros. Ultimate just got a massive update, many of the fighters have been tweaked and there is a new addition to the fighting roster - Dragon Quest's 'The Hero', more on that here.

SK Hynix has returned to the retail SSD market with its surprise unveiling of the new SuperCore SSD series, which will be a retail-focused line of SSDs with capacities of 250GB, 500GB, and 1TB.

The new SK Hynix SuperCore SSDs will begin with the Gold S31 in the 2.5-inch form factor, will use a "SK Hynix Controller" and use SK Hynix 3D NAND flash. We're to expect sequential read speeds of up to 525MB/sec while sequential writes are at 560GB/sec.

There's nothing too special with the new SSDs as the read/writes are on par with most other high-quality 2.5-inch SATA SSD, but SK Hynix is backing them up with a large 5-year warranty. The 1TB model has much higher endurance with up to 600TBW compared to 200/300TBW (TBs written) on the smaller 250/500GB drives.

Respawn Entertainment recently launched the new Iron Crown Collection event for Apex Legends, with a new super-legendary cosmetic item that costs a huge $170 -- as well as a new Solos mode for the game.

Solos is meant to be 1v1 solo matches, where it's a battle to the last death between 60 Apex Legends players. It's already been quickly reported that there's an issue with the new solo mode, where players that queue at the same time will usually get put into the same match. They can easily meet up and then dominate other players as a team of 2v1.

This isn't exclusive to Apex Legends as it happens in other battle royale titles including PUBG, but the developer there allowed potential chicken dinner winners to report people they saw congregating in groups longer than they should, if at all.

Remedy seems to have learned its lesson on optimizing its games before launch, as the developer won't want another Quantum Break which was quantum broken upon launch on the PC.

Thomas Puha, the Head of Communications for Remedy Entertainment took to Resetera and explained about optimization when questioned about Control's performance. Puha said: "That was three years ago. Lot of optimization has happened since. You'll know soon enough".

Control is powered by Remedy Entertainment's in-house Northlight engine, which has had 3 years of work and optimizations in order to better craft it for Control since its time used last with Quantum Break.

We should be worried about being wiped out by a killer pathogen that is specifically designed to kill people of only a particular race, based on their DNA, warns scientists.

A new report from Cambridge University's Centre for the Study of Existential Risk says that world ogvernments have failed when it comes to preparing against threats like futuristic bioweapons powered by AI and genetic manipulation. Such weapons would have to power to target specific DNA, and kill certain races of people leaving other swaths of the population unharmed.

Imagine it being sprayed in the form of the tinfoil hat conspiracy of chemtrails, and wiping out certain portions of the population.

Huawei has announced that its Mate X foldable smartphone has a new release window of November and "ideally not any later", after the slip during its launch a few months ago.

Mate X was meant due in in September after being delayed from its June release, but now TechRadar said that at a press event at Huawei's Shenzhen HQ that it is coming in November. Furthermore, the site found out about the next Mate X and that it "could have more screens, and it might come out as soon as next year".

More displays on a Mate X 2.0 would see Huawei replacing the steel rear cover with a glass back, that could see touchscreens deployed. Now that would be quite insane, a foldable smartphone with double-sided displays. Yikes. If there were this many issues and delays in the first foldable smartphone launch, how would that go with dual, double-sided displays?

Epic Games hosted its gigantic Fortnite World Cup last month, where a 16-year-old took home $3 million while the tournament was embroiled in controversy over Epic letting known cheaters compete in the tournament.

Well, through all of that -- the $30 million prize pool attracted a lot of talent, as well as a lot of eyes. Epic already hit a milestone of a peak 2.3 million concurrent viewers during the Fortnite World Cup, an achievement that became the highest viewership for any esports event ever, outside of China.

Newzoo is reporting that Fortnite fans watched a huge 81.8 million hours of the Fortnite World Cup between Twitch and YouTube, with the numbers broken down into:

Microsoft currently has no plans to release an online-only mini Xbox, Microsoft's Phil Spencer confirms.

A while back we posited an interesting idea: what if Microsoft made a small, NVIDIA Shield-like set-top box specifically designed for online play? Fueled from the reports of the failed Project Hobart compute stick and Microsoft's digital-first business, we also predicted it'd be a digital-only Xbox. The latter manifested as the badly-named Xbox One S All-Digital Edition (Xbox One SAD Edition), but what about the former? A cheap dongle or micro-console would be huge for the new Project xCloud game streaming service...but Microsoft says it's not in the cards (yet?).

Xbox exec Phil Spencer says a streaming-only online-exclusive Xbox isn't in the works. The whole idea behind Project xCloud is an ancillary service that compliments existing hardware like PC and Xbox consoles--it's an extension, not a replacement, of that gaming experience. Project xCloud is meant to beam games from remote servers or even your Xbox One console at home to mobile phones, laptops, and tablets for on-the-go play. It's not about circumventing the current hardware landscape.

BioWare has a big morale problem and the studio is suffering. Anxiety, depression, miscommunication and ruthless crunch are endemic to the studio, causing massive problems in games like Mass Effect: Andromeda and Anthem. These issues have caused many key employees to leave over the years, and now the latest is a lead dev on Anthem.

Anthem might be dying a slow, painful death and hostile work culture might still infect BioWare. Actually we already knew Anthem was on the downward spiral (and I argued in favor of the game's death), but lead producer Ben Irving's departure from BioWare might seal the final nail in Anthem's coffin. Irving today announced he's leaving BioWare after 8 years, becoming another major studio veteran to withdraw in a string of departures.

"After 8 amazing years at BioWare I have made the decision to move on and have accepted an exciting opportunity at another gaming company. Since the first time I played Baldurs Gate many many years ago, BioWare was the dream place I always wanted to work," Irving said on Twitter.

Like all EA games, the new racing fantasy Need for Speed Heat will have microtransactions. There's no lootboxes this time around but gamers can buy time-savers to unlock collectibles faster.

The Miami-based Need For Speed Heat looks damn good, but there's something hiding under the hood: EA's penchant for monetization (they earned over $500 million from live services last quarter). Not only will the game be open-world with tons of stuff to unlock and find, but it has lots of customization options for building dream cars. Both of these are prime territory for microtransactions, both cosmetic or lootboxes. The only thing's missing is online play and integrated social connectivity, aka the glue of engagement. Expect those to be in too.

Now Ghost Games confirms Need For Speed Heat will indeed be monetized, but only with a one-time convenience pack that shows all collectibles on the map. There won't be any surprise mechanics or cosmetic purchases, and Speed Cards from Need For Speed Payback are gone. Macro-monetization will consist of buying car packs, the devs say.