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Half-Life launched 19 years ago now, but when it first arrived in Germany, it was a censored version of the game that has right up until now, been the only version German gamers could play - unless they pirated it, of course.

The censored version of Half-Life saw robots instead of soldiers, barnacles spewing nuts and bolts instead of blood and gore, and sad looks from scientists if you shot them - instead of them dying. Germany has a history of strict limitations on gaming content, with Half-Life being a very big example of that censorship.

Schnittberichte reports that "it is now possible for the publisher to release the uncensored versions again in Germany officially".

Things aren't looking good for AMD with all of these lukewarm rumors on Radeon RX Vega, with the latest purported results of the HBM2-based graphics card barely edging out NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 1070 in 3DMark TimeSpy.

The leaked result on Radeon RX Vega was powered by AMD's own Ryzen 7 1800X processor, with the system scoring 5950. If we compare this to our results, the GTX 1070 scores 5703, while the GTX 1080 pushes 6709, and the GTX 1080 Ti leaps ahead with 8312.

AMD's upcoming Radeon RX Vega seems to have its GPU clocked at 1GHz base, and 1.2GHz boost - at least in reference form. There's 8GB of HBM2 with 512GB/sec of memory bandwidth, and a TDP of 225W. If these results are true, Vega isn't exactly a GTX 1080 killer, let alone a GTX 1080 Ti killer. But then remember that AMD could be under delivering with performance right now, and things will change with tuned drivers and final hardware.

Neil Blomkamp's on-again off-again 'Alien' sequel looks to now be totally dead, according to the director who started it all, Sir Ridley Scott.

Speaking to French publication Allocine and translated by Screen Rant, Scott is pessimistic about the sequel ever coming to fruition, saying "I don't think it will ever see the light of day. There was never a script. Just an idea that evolved from a dozen or so pages. I had to participate as producer, but it didn't go farther because Fox decided it didn't want to do it. As far I was concerned, I had already done Prometheus and I was working on Covenant."

The film was apparently near to being greenlit back in 2015 before being shelved in favour of Scott's proposed films.

If you have ever been to Los Angeles, you can understand how a person can get frustrated with the traffic there. And if you are Elon Musk, you are going to do something about it.

Musk recently started a new project named The Boring Company, which will hopefully, solve the problem of traffic in LA, and possibly later in other cities. Elon's idea is to build tunnels underneath the city which would allow you to skip the traffic and get from point A to point B much faster.

At a recent TED conference in Vancouver, Musk showed a video of his futuristic underground transportation tunnels. The video shows a Tesla car getting on a platform called a car skate which then lowers into the underground tunnel. The car then travels at a speed of up to 130 mph (around 210 km/h) in a single vehicle lane. Other cars can also be seen traveling through the tunnel in the same and opposite direction.

Despite near-universal unavailability, Nintendo has sold over 2 million NES Classic Edition consoles across the globe.

In a recent interview with TIME, Nintendo of America President Reggie Fils-Aime confirmed the famously unattainable retro NES micro-console has sold 2.3 million units worldwide. In fact, the mini NES and its 30 classic games was only meant to be a holiday product but Nintendo extended its lifespan due to popularity.

"We had originally planned for this to be a product for last holiday. We just didn't anticipate how incredible the response would be. Once we saw that response, we added shipments and extended the product for as long as we could to meet more of that consumer demand," the NoA President told TIME in the interview.

Following stellar launch-month sales, Nintendo forecasts its new handheld-console hybrid Switch system will hit 10 million sales.

Nintendo's new unique Switch system sold 2.74 million in just 29 days and pulled in $822 million in global sales, offering a significant boost to the company's fourth-quarter financials. Now the Japanese console-maker plans to keep the console's strong sales momentum going throughout its 2017 fiscal year.

Nintendo President Tatsumi Kimishima said in the latest financial results briefing that the company expects to sell 10 million Nintendo Switch consoles from April 1, 2017 to March 31, 2018. "We are planning to ship 10 million units of Nintendo Switch hardware in the fiscal year ending March 2018. The cumulative total for units shipped through the fiscal year ending March 2018 will be 12.7 million units," Mr. Kimishima said in the briefing.

Capcom just reported its yearly earnings, and they're positive.

As with any company's financials, Capcom's latest Fiscal Year 2016 earnings give us a good idea on its current position and its plans for 2017. Capcom recorded increases across the board in net sales, operating income, and bottom-line profits. From April 1, 2017 to March 31, 2017 Capcom earned 87.1 billion yen ($781.68 million) in net sales representing a 13.2% increase year-over-year. Operating income was boosted by 13.5% YoY to 13.65 billion yen ($122.4 million). Finally we have Capcom's bottom-line profits, which boosted by 14.6% YoY to 8.87 billion yen ($79.6 million).

Capcom's Digital Contents division--games across all platforms--is by far the company's most lucrative segment, and also enjoyed boosts in net sales, but losses in operating income. The division's net sales increased by 11.7% year-over-year to 58.7 billion yen ($526.4 million) due to strong sales of key IPs like Resident Evil 7 and Monster Hunter XX as well as other online titles. Operating income was down by 8.8% YoY to 11 billion yen ($99.5 million).

Sony has shipped about 60 million PlayStation 4 consoles across the globe, pushing it farther ahead of its competitors.

While Sony hasn't officially announced the console's huge sales milestone, a bit of simple math reveals the number. In its recent fiscal year earnings report Sony confirmed it shipped 20 million PS4 consoles from April 2016 to March 2017. Back in May 2016 Sony revealed the PS4 has shipped 40 million consoles to date. So combining the two figures we get 60 million...but that figure isn't 100% exact. Sony's fiscal year ends in March, so May 2016 is part of its Fiscal Year 2016, meaning we're not sure how many of those 40 million PS4s overlap with Sony's total 20 million FY16 sales.

Sony's fiscal data only goes back to FY14 and doesn't include how many PS4 consoles were sold in its Q3-Q4 FY13 (November 2013 onwards) timeframe, so until Sony announces the data, we're not exactly sure how many consoles have been sold globally.

On the heels of its new 4K-ready PlayStation 4 Pro console, Sony is expected to launch a third top-tier PlayStation console to counter Microsoft's premium native 4K Project Scorpio console.

Macquarie Capital Securities analyst Damien Thong predicts that Sony will release a next-gen PlayStation console by the second half of 2018, according to reports from The Wall Street Journal's Takashi Mochizuki. Sony's new PlayStation systemwould coincide with the company's Fiscal Year 2018.

The Japanese games and entertainment titan recently released its Fiscal Year 2016 earnings, showing its Games and Network Services sector is once again its most valuable branch. Furthermore, Sony just hit its 60 million PS4 sales milestone.

Acer teased its upcoming Triton 700 gaming laptop at its press conference a few days ago, with the new laptop featuring a NVIDIA GeForce GTX 10-series graphics chip, but Acer didn't say exactly which one it was.

The upcoming Triton 700 gaming laptop starts at $3000, so it would have to be GTX 1070 or better - but then NotebookCheck reported that Acer's new Triton 700 rocks a "GTX 1080 Max-Q" chip that NVIDIA will reveal at Computex, next month. Acer said that the Triton 700 was hitting 17,000 points in 3DMark 11, which its Core i7-7700HQ and unreleased Pascal GPU pumped away at - a score that is better than a GTX 1070, but not as good as the GTX 1080.

The Tech Report notes that the Triton 700 is just 0.75 inches (19mm) thick, which is damn thin for something that has better-than-GTX 1070 performance - with TR adding: "Getting this level of performance usually requires a laptop at least 0.9" (23 mm) thick or more".

We're beginning to hear more on AMD's upcoming Radeon RX Vega graphics card, with the TechPowerUp GPU database being updated, and the upcoming Radeon RX Vega is now listed with 'relative performance' results at 1080p against various graphics cards.

TPU's relative performance chart shows the RX Vega being 5% slower than NVIDIA's stock GeForce GTX 1080, and 27% slower than the GTX 1080 Ti, at 1080p. Radeon RX Vega beats the Radeon R9 Fury X by 31%, and is just 11% faster than the GTX 1070 at 1080p. These results should be taken with massive handfuls of salt, and real-world testing will need to happen to ensure we're not being fooled.

The listing shows that AMD has 8GB of HBM2 on a 2048-bit memory bus, with the Vega GPU clocked at 1GHz stock, while it can be boosted up to 1.2GHz in reference form. The 8GB of HBM2 is clocked at 1GHz, and shouldn't be confused with the 11GHz+ on the GDDR5X on the new GTX 1080 11Gbps and GTX 1080 Ti cards because they use GDDR5X compared to the HBM2 tech on AMD's upcoming Radeon RX Vega.

I fervently believe Halo 5: Guardians is the worst Halo game ever made, and that 343 Industries doesn't know what it's doing with the franchise. Now the developers say they've learned a lot from their terrible decisions with Halo 5, and promise to do better with future games.

One of the biggest disappointments about Halo 5 was its truly awful storyline. It started out with so much promise; with the help of his beloved Blue Team (and some of the most deadly Spartans alive), Master Chief goes "rogue" to find Cortana. Then 343i decided to throw in Osiris Team, a group of throwaway "heroes" led by one of the most one-dimensional characters in video games history. So instead of playing as Master Chief and his esteemed Blue Team, who haven't ever been in a Halo game before Halo 5, we spend half of the game chasing after Chief as Osiris Team. Most gamers--myself included--didn't care about Locke and Osiris, we wanted the Chief.

In a recent interview with GamesTM, 343 Industries executive producer Kiki Wolfkill they've heard our feedback...but in the same breath she proves she doesn't really understand Halo--or what Master Chief means to gamers and the franchise. "We took some digs for storytelling in Halo 5, but they were absolutely merited. We very much realized that people wanted Master Chief's story of Halo 5. For some fans and certainly fans of Master Chief, it was a huge disappointment because they wanted more Chief," Wolfkill said.

Nintendo has a long tradition skipping E3 pressers, and this year will be no different.

(Photo: Techno Buffalo)

Nintendo President Tatsumi Kimishima confirms that the Japanese console-maker won't be holding a press conference at E3 2017 in June. "The video game tradeshow E3 will be held in Los Angeles this June. Again this year, we will not be hosting a large-scale press conference for institutional investors, analysts and the media," Mr. Kimishima said in the latest investor relations report.

Most tech companies are pumping engineers, man hours, and technology and man hours into Deep Learning and AI technology - but will it eventually result in tens of millions of job losses across the world? Yes, yes it will - according to Kai-Fu Lee, the founder of venture capital firm Sinovation Ventures. Lee is also a leading voice on technology in China.

Lee recently spoke with CNBC, where he said that AI is the "singular thing that will be larger than all of human tech revolutions added together, including electricity, [the] industrial revolution, internet, mobile internet - because AI is pervasive". Amazingly scary words, but also very exciting. Lee added that "It is the decision engine that will replace people". It was only recently that I reported that AI engineers had left the grip of Google, moving into the most secretive AI startup on the planet - probably Skynet, I guess.

Lee said that his firm has invested millions of dollars into AI companies that are capable of recognizing 3 million faces simultaneously, or pumping out loans in less than 8 seconds. He added: "These are things that are superhuman, and we think this will be in every industry, will probably replace 50 percent of human jobs, create a huge amount of wealth for mankind and wipe out poverty".

We're not far away from a world where 4K 144Hz HDR G-Sync gaming monitors are a thing, with the high-end gaming displays teased at CES 2017 earlier this year, Acer held its own press event in New York City to display its latest and greatest - including their upcoming Predator X27 gaming display.

Acer's upcoming Predator X27 display is a 27-inch 4K gaming monitor with the sublime 144Hz refresh rate with NVIDIA's G-Sync tech sprinkled on top, but introduces HDR tech as well. There are 384 individually controlled LED zones that will provide a wide color contrast, so expect this to be one of the best gaming displays ever released.

Victor Chien, the President of Acer's Digital Display Business said: "Acer is excited to be expanding our premium gaming monitor line-up with two new quantum dot models to make gameplay more lifelike than ever before. The Predator X27's 4K resolution at 144 Hz and Acer HDR Ultra technology create dazzling visuals that must be seen to be believed".

Unikrn is making big moves into Las Vegas by acquiring LEET, a tournament organizer that works with casinos run events, and recently working with Downtown Grand to become the first casino in Vegas with eSports betting, setting a new trend leading into Luxor, and other casinos.

I reached out to Unikrn boss Rahul Sood, who said: "Far and away the biggest threat to casino operators is their complete lack of understanding and empathy to their future customer. This is a pretty big issue, and I believe alot of it stems from trying to protect old business models". He continued: "So the best way to start is with some smaller, less risky changes".

"So the best way to start is with some smaller, less risky changes. Over time those smaller changes become bigger cultural changes. I think this is what LEET does really well. The Downtown Grand is a good example of how a casino client started out with an idea and a vision, and they have now turned it into a money making business. Granted these changes were driven from the top, and Seth Shorr should be credited for making esports a "thing" in Las Vegas casinos".

Just hours after reporting its latest yearly earnings, Nintendo starts off its new fiscal year with a brand new handheld in the 3DS family: the New 2DS XL.

Nintendo's New 2DS XL is perhaps the logical successor to the 3DS that doesn't actually replace it, and represents an incredibly smart move in Nintendo's part. The New 2DS XL hits all the right checkboxes: it has a clamshell folding mechanism with dual XL screens, no pesky 3D gimmick, a faster processor, a C-stick, and the best part: it'll play all existing and new 3DS games.

We also expect the New 2DS XL to have access to the Super Nintendo Virtual Console library too. The New 2DS XL launches July 28, the same day as Hey Pikmin! and Miitopia, for the lower price of $149.

AMD hasn't had the smoothest launch with Ryzen, but the company is quickly refining its new CPU architecture and now we have the latest release of its core logic (chipset) drivers, for Windows 7, 8.1, and 10.

AMD's new v17.10 WHQL drivers include the new Windows power management plan 'Ryzen Balanced Power' which will be better than the stock 'Balanced' power plan in Windows 10, something that will allow better power management through Windows, to the silicon-level power management logic inside of Ryzen processors through SenseMI.

This includes fine-grained voltage and clock gating over individual cores, something that would normally trip up latency problems with OS-level power management through P-state triggers. The new power plan is compatible with AMD's new A320, B350, and X370 chipsets, and is available right here.

Nintendo has made dozens of partnerships with third-party publishers and developers to fill out the Switch's games library, and now the company re-affirms its commitment to keeping Switch owners happy.

As a Nintendo Switch owner I'm not so happy with the games lineup so far, and would like more of a selection of games. The console's first-party lineup has been described as an "IP treasure trove", with strong games like Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, ARMS, Splatoon 2, and Super Mario Odyssey in the holiday season. But what about third-party games?

"In addition, we will maintain favorable conditions surrounding Nintendo Switch by providing a continuous stream of appealing third-party titles across varying genres. We aim to stimulate the platform and expand sales going into the holiday season this year," Nintendo said in its latest FY 2016 earnings report.

UPDATE: Nintendo President Tatsumi Kimishima recently issued the following statement on the company's fiscal earnings briefing:

The 3DS and Nintendo Switch will live alongside one another at least for another year.

Nintendo President Tatsumi Kimishima has already said the company's new Switch handheld-console hybrid won't cannibalize its long-running 3DS handheld, iterating that the "Switch and the 3DS can co-exist for the time being." Now the company's latest fiscal year earnings report reaffirms Mr. Kimishima's commitment.