Latest News - Page 2089

Nintendo's Deputy General Manager of Nintendo EPD, Yoshiaki Koizumi, has taken to the Nintendo YouTube channel to answer some fan questions regarding Super Mario Odyssey.

Koizumi began by addressing the confusion surrounding if Toad is wearing a hat or if what is on his head is just his head, "So that, as it turns out, is actually Toad's head I'm going to have to leave it to all of you to figure out exactly how that works out. Maybe there's something inside..." answered Koizumi.

While Super Mario Odyssey was arguably an incredible game, fans were still confused at why Mario seemed to have nipples but didn't feature a belly button of any sort, Koizumi slightly touches on the subject, "I didn't really expect that to be a topic among fans. Once I heard that people were talking so much about Mario's belly button, it made me start to think about whether we should revisit the topic on the design side."

Activision's Crash Bandicoot N.Sane Trilogy is a remastered collection of the original Crash Bandicoot games, but now news has surfaced from a European supplier of licensed merchandise that the remastered Crash Bandicoot game is coming to the Nintendo Switch and PC.

According to the License Source Book Europe, a supplier of licensed merchandise named GB eye discussed the success of the N.Sane trilogy and explained that it triggered a long-term plan for the Crash Bandicoot games.

"The new game [the N. Sane trilogy] was a huge success at retail..." said Max Arguile, licensing manager of GB Eye. "Next year it will be going broader (Switch and PC) and there will be a new game in 2019. Activision have a five-year plan for this and GB eye is delighted to be fully on board for all products." said Max Arguile, licensing manager of GB eye.

One of Twitch's most popular streamers took a 7-week gap between streams and now those streamers are back in full force, with Dr. Disrespect returning to Twitch and PUBG and crashing Twitch in the process.

Dr. Disrespect went to launch his stream at 11AM PST, but the huge wave of Twitch viewers wanting to jump onto his stream smashed Twitch's servers. The Doc tweeted that he broke Twitch, where he most likely had anywhere between 100,000 and 300,000 people jumping onto his stream... all at once.

This situation is similar to League of Legends player Tyler1 who returned earlier this year and crashed Twitch, where he broke Twitch's concurrent viewer record with more than 400,000 people watching at once.

There are new rumors circling of the next Call of Duty game being a sequel to Black Ops 3, with COD: Black Ops 4 being teased to launch not only on the Xbox, PlayStation and PC but the Nintendo Switch as well.

KitGuru reports that industry insider and editor Marcus Sellars, says that the 2018 release of Call of Duty will be Black Ops 4. COD: Black Ops 4 will reportedly be set in modern times, with boots-on-the-ground gameplay - meaning wall running and jet packs are out of the picture.

Activision appears to be keen to get Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 onto the incredibly successful Nintendo Switch, where the Switch version of Black Ops 4 to reportedly pack new DLC map packs, HD Rumble, and support for the Joy-Con motion controls.

SK Hynix has just taken the wraps off of its new enterprise SSD, packing their in-house 72-layer 64GB 3D NAND flash, and arriving at up to 4TB capacities.

This isn't the first enterprise SSD from SK Hynix using their in-house NAND flash, as the consumer side of the market were first. SK Hynix is releasing the new enterprise SSDs in both 2.5-inch SATA and so-far unspecified NVMe form, but we should expect M.2 as usual.

As for the performance of these new SSDs, we can expect the 1TB SATA SSD to pack sequential reads of up to 560MB/sec while writes will hit 515MB/sec or so, with random reads of up to 98K IOPs, and random writes of up to 32K IOPs.

NVIDIA is partnering with German automotive components maker Continental, where together the two companies will produce a full-scale self-driving car platform.

NVIDIA's own Xavier chips will be used on the hardware side, with the company using their operating system and software from their DRIVE suite, while Continental takes care of its security certification experience with its LiDar radar technology, as well as their camera products.

Continental and NVIDIA are aioming for their self-driving car platform to hit level 2 autonomy, which will include smart cruise control similar to Tesla's Autopilot technology, right through to level 5 which would be a full self-driving car without steering implements. Wow.

Samsung is gearing up for the massive reveal of its next-gen Galaxy S9 flagship smartphone, where we should see a slightly tweaked design with a huge upgrade to the camera.

The latest peek at the Galaxy S9 is courtesy of notorious leaker Evan Blass (@evleaks on Twitter) where he teased some new renders of both the Galaxy S9 and Galaxy S9+ and what we should expect from Samsung's new flagship.

Samsung will continue the overall styling of the Galaxy S8 with the new Galaxy S9, where we can see what will be a beautiful edge-to-edge Super AMOLED display. The slightly larger Galaxy S9+ will rock a new vertical dual camera on the back, which I really like the look of.

Microsoft is steady and strong with Windows 10 updates, and now we're hearing the name of the 2018 update to Windows 10: Spring Creators Update.

The company started their February Bug Bush and had some Quests to Insiders in order to find some bugs, with references of the Spring Creators Update found by @WildDreamer95 on Twitter, and found by Richard Hay. Hay tweeted: "Is Windows 10 Redstone 4 the Springs Creators Update? This Windows Defender Application Guard Quest for this months Bug Bash seems to like that name! Thanks to @WildDreamer95 for the tip."

After the Spring Creators Update reference was found, Microsoft were quick to replace the text with 'R4 update'.

Anyone that is involved with cryptocurrency is feeling the same thing we're all going through right now: every emotion available to my human vessel is being amped to 500% right now.

The entire cryptomarket is in freefall right now and while it's not an outright crash, some people are calling it that - and it seems so, especially when you look at the total cryptocurrency market cap. At the time of writing the crypto market cap was at $328 billion, down from the lofty heights of $830 billion back on January 7.

This means a huge $500,000,000,000 has been wiped away from the cryptocurrency market cap, a huge number... half a trillion dollars, gone. Everything is down as well, not just Bitcoin which has dropped from its heights of $19,500 in January to just $7000 now.

Capcom Vancouver has been hit with major layoffs that have dramatically affected the studio's future projects, sources say.

Capcom's main Osaka branch has decided to slice up its Vancouver-based studio to make it more lean and re-focus development on the next Dead Rising game, sources told Kotaku's Jason Schreier. Development on the following Dead Rising game was apparently getting out of hand and the shape kept changing, so this was Capcom's response to keep things in line (although the studio is still understaffed).

The anonymous source said Capcom laid off about 50 employees in the move, or about 20% of its once 250-strong workforce.

Mario Party 11 will come to the Nintendo Switch sometime in 2019, according to a new rumor, pinning one of the most successful franchises in the second year of the console's lifespan.

Nintendo insider Marcus Sellars has made another prediction/leak/rumor with his latest Tweet, which attests that the Japanese gaming giant will release the next Mario Party on the Switch within 2019. Sellars didn't specify whether or not the game would be part of Nintendo's FY'19 release slate (if the game releases before March 2019 it's part of FY19, if it releases after it'll be part of FY'20).

So why should we even care what some person says on Twitter? Sellars has been accurate a few times--he announced the Nintendo Direct date and was right on the money there--but there's no guarantee this prediction will come to fruition. Saying that Nintendo will make a new Mario Party for the Switch should be clear as day to anyone, and the release timing somewhat fits, but be sure to take this with a nice spoonful of salt.

Strong hardware sales and software adoption drove Sony's network sales to milestone heights in its holiday quarter.

While scouting through Sony's Fiscal Q3'17 earnings I noticed something interesting: the company says it made over 300 billion yen (or $2.72 billion) from network sales in the holiday quarter. In it's entire storied history Sony affirmed this is the first time it's made that much in a single quarter. Remember that network sales include digital game and entertainment product sales on the PlayStation Network, PS Plus subscriptions, PS Now subs, and all of its streaming services combined.

The Games and Network Services segment, which serves as the parent segment for network sales, was up about 16% year-over-year to about 718 billion yen ($6.52 billion), driven by strong PlayStation 4 hardware and software sales during the holiday quarter and foreign exchange rates. Sony shipped 9 million PS4s during the Q3'17 timeline. However, network sales were up by a mighty 40% year-over-year.

Sony's plan to attract more paying customers to its premium PlayStation Plus subscription plan is working out.

In October Sony promised to "implement measures" to retain PS Plus subscribers by making the service more appealing and persuasive. "For existing members we would like to make our service more attractive so that the retention rate remains high. That's going to be more important. It is not easy to retain [users] for a long time, but we have been implementing measures to retain them," said Atsuko Murakami, Senior General Manager of Finance Department at Sony Corp, in the company's Fiscal Q2'17 earnings call.

It looks like these measures, which include offering a plethora of AAA games month after month on PS4, have worked: subscribers have risen about 2.7% since last quarter.

Sony's PlayStation 4 continues its strong sales streak through Q3'17, selling almost 10 million units during the crucial holiday period.

In its Fiscal Q3'17 earnings filing, Sony has revealed that the PlayStation 4's total cumulative sales are now at 73.6 million units worldwide since the system launched in 2013. Sony says it has sold-in (shipped to retailers, not sold-through to consumers) 9 million consoles during the quarter from October through December 2017, bringing the total sell-in numbers to 76.5 million units. This effectively means Sony has sold about 96% of the systems it has shipped to retailers, and in Q3'17 it sold-in more than double than its previous quarters combined (Q2'17 saw 4.2 million shipments whereas Q1'17 saw 3.3 million).

The console-maker's Games and Network Services segment, which includes PlayStation hardware and software as well as streaming services, rose 16% year-over-year by 100 billion yen in sales thanks to the strong holiday gaming push. The segment pulled in 718 billion yen in sales and 84.5 billion yen in operating income, the latter of which was up 70% year-over-year.

A Chinese man has plead guilty to the crimes of selling counterfeit Apple products in the US, the criminal received $1.1 million in payments before being caught.

Jianhua Li, currently living as a student in the US has plead guilty to trafficking in 40,000 counterfeit electronic devices from China between 2009 and 2014.

Li wasn't alone though, there was three others that were in on the deal, Andreina Becerra, Rosario LaMarca and Roberto Volpe which have all also plead guilty. According to Justice Department the group did their best to attempt in covering their trails, when the counterfeit devices were shipped the group made sure the counterfeit labels were shipped separately to avoid suspicion.

Out of nowhere, we have a new company that we'll be keeping a close eye on; Ampere. Ampere has just launched a new 64-bit ARM server processor that will compete against products released by Qualcomm, HP Enterprise, and many others.

ARM is an important cog in Ampere's new machine, as it is capable of great power efficiency and lower cost of ownership. Until now, the biggest issue with ARM-based systems is that there isn't a massive list of applications that will work with ARM processors, but that will soon change.

Ampere's first processor rocks a custom core ARM v8 64-bit at up to 3.3GHz, up to 1TB of memory and a 125W TDP. Ampere is fabless, and will have production of these new ARM processors sometime in 2H 2018.

In a recent interview with GameCentral, the director and CEO of Square Enix, Yosuke Matsuda has vowed to continue support for single-player titles.

When Matsuda was asked about what he thinks Games as a Service means to him he replied with: "The way we're looking at it, what it boils down to is... that idea of keeping people engaged with our games and enjoying them for longer periods of time. The way we use that expression, really... the whole idea, for a single-player game particularly, is the idea that you have the game released and you keep adding more content to keep the players engaged and enjoying the game."

Matsuda continued answering questions such as if Square Enix will continue making single-player games as well as his personal thoughts on the popular loot box system.

Square Enix has provided those hardcore Final Fantasy fans with an epic Bahamut statue, something that is available to pre-order now and has a release date of July this year.

The statue which has been sculpted by Takayuki Takeya and has been designed with articulated jointing, meaning the statue is fully configurable to whichever pose is decided.

Behind the statue is the Bahamut stand which instead of being a boring plastic rod, Bahamuts stand features crystals that are emerging from the ground around him. The statue itself will cost around $135 USD and will be released later this year in July, for those wanting to pre-order the link can be found here.

A new short trailer has been released for the upcoming Nintendo Switch release, Bayonetta 2. The new trailer showcases the game running at a smooth 60FPS and gives more of a tease into the gameplay of Bayonetta 2.

The above trailer shows us some plot points that can be noted as well as gameplay from which Bayonetta seems to be taking on some very large enemies. The gameplay of Bayonetta 2 fighting is at 60FPS, this could of been achieved by reducing the FPS of cut-scenes to 30FPS, when looking at the trailer this is what seems to of happened.

Bayonetta and Bayonetta 2 will release together on the Nintendo Switch on February 16th.

The PC version of Final Fantasy XV will release next month, ahead of the launch we have found out that the Windows version of the game will be supporting cross-play co-op with Xbox One players.

Yesterday we discovered the PC version of Final Fantasy XV is a generation ahead of the 2016 console release and now cross-play co-op has been revealed to us on the Microsoft Store listing.

According to the listing, Final Fantasy XV players will be able to play with Xbox One users if they have purchased the game through the Windows Store client, meaning that Steam users will not have this feature available.