Latest News - Page 2351

The ESA's Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO) arrived in Mars' orbit on October 19th as a part of ExoMars mission. The European Space Agency has now published a video compiled of a series of images taken in November by the TGO.

The first image sequence shown was taken at a distance of 5300 km, followed by a sequence acquired during closest approach of 235 km altitude. The video shows the Hebes Chasma region and Arisa Chasmata, which is located on the flanks of a large volcano on Mars named Arsia Mons.

The ExoMars mission will help us get a closer and better look at Mars and its regions, which should be favorable in our plan to colonize Mars.

Ubisoft has officially announced they are connecting their VR platforms, allowing players on PSVR, Oculus Rift, and HTC Vive to team up or play against each other.

Their Eagle Flight already supports cross-platform play (currently available on PSVR and Oculus Rift; will be out on HTC Vive on December 20th), and this is just the start. Werewolves Within is scheduled for release on December 6th and Star Trek: Bridge Crew is coming on March 14th, and both will be available for all three platforms at launch.

David Votypka, senior creative director at Red Storm, said in an official statement:

One of the biggest problems with the electric cars is their range or lack of charging stations for such vehicles. To improve the current situation and encourage people to buy electric cars, the leading car manufacturers have agreed that they will jointly invest in the construction of a network of ultra-fast charging sites across Europe.

Driven by the huge demand for Tesla's cars in the US, manufacturers such as Daimler, Ford, BMW, Volkswagen, Audi, and Porsche will finance the project, which will start next year. In the first phase, they plan to build 400 charging stations. By the end of 2020, they want to ensure that drivers have thousands of charging points across Europe where they will be able to recharge their electric cars. The network will allow ultra-fast power levels of up to 350kW.

"The availability of high-power stations allows long-distance electric mobility for the first time and will convince more and more customers to opt for an electric vehicle," Daimler Chief Executive Dieter Zetsche said.

"The cosmonaut training in Moscow saved my life," said Esther Dyson at the European Business Angels Network (EBAN) conference in Zagreb, Croatia. Back in the 2008 and 2009, she went through the training as a replacement for Charles Simonyi, a Hungarian-born American businessman who became the fifth space tourist in 2007, and in March 2009 he made a second trip to the International Space Station.

During her training, Dyson had gone through extensive coaching and learned a lot about every aspect of living in space. One of the routines during training were detailed medical inspections during which she was warned that she should carry out regular checks of the esophagus. She listened to the doctors and made sure she do as they said. This year she was diagnosed with esophageal cancer, luckily in the earliest stages and the cancer is completely curable. Dyson noted that if she hadn't gone through the space training and tests, the cancer might have been detected too late.

This journalist, investor, and philanthropist now invests in the non-profit sector, and during her speech, she explained that she didn't completely stop with the classic investments. One of the projects she invested in "sounds boring," she said jokingly because it's a private company that develops products and offers services for the commercial utilization of space - NanoRacks.

If there was a controversial game of 2016 award, it would have to go to No Man's Sky, for its years of hype - it had the world taken by storm when it heroically fell from gaming grace, and was one of the biggest disappointment to thousands of gamers. It was only days ago that the new Foundation Update was released, adding and fixing parts of No Man's Sky, with Hello Games founder Sean Murray finally breaking his silence, after going dark when the game was released.

That hasn't stopped the UK's Advertising Standards Agency going over claims of No Man's Sky's listing on Steam was misleading, with upset gamers who provided screenshots, videos, and text about the game pre-release. In the evidence provided, the pre-release version of No Man's Sky had improved graphics, had better performance (instead of the myriad of problems PC gamers had) and planetary exploration.

These clips and explanations from the developer teased alien life, ship battles and warping - with gamers upset with the final state of No Man's Sky when it launched. The ASA disagreed in the end, saying that the materials provided were "largely representative of the final product and "unlikely to mislead" consumers", reports Engadget.

AMD has teased an event for December 13, where we should learn about all things Zen - with the event titled "New Horizon". New Horizon will be hosted by gaming journalist Geoff Keighley in Austin, Texas - and it'll be livestreamed, too.

New Horizon will be an exclusive preview of the enthusiast/high-end Zen, which is reportedly priced at $499 and combats against Intel's Core i7-5960X, which costs $999. The new enthusiast SKU of the yet-to-be-branded Zen CPU will feature 8 cores and 16 threads of CPU power - the biggest leap for an AMD processor in many, many years.

AMD teases: "Join AMD at New Horizon on 12/13 at 3pm CST for an exclusive advance preview of our new "Zen" CPU ahead of its 2017 Q1 release. New Horizon is AMD's fan-focused event, designed to engage our most dedicated customers. As well as a hands-on preview of the power of "Zen", attendees will be able to talk to the AMD minds behind the chip itself and grab expert gaming advice from eSports & Evil Geniuses legend PPD. The event is hosted by industry veteran Geoff Keighley, who'll introduce special guests throughout the day".

After their hat adventure with Team Fortress 2, skins for guns in Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, the newest addition to Valve cosmetics' ranks are gloves?

Valve have just introduced a new Glove case to CS:GO. It features 17 community designed skins for your weapons but unlike all other cases, you can earn gloves in this one. For the first patch, you have 24 of them which you can see for yourself in the image . We can safely assume that there will be others coming soon.

A new Steam Group lobbies feature have been added. Instead of partying with your friends, Valve states that you can "view and join lobbies created by members of the Steam Groups you belong to. Steam Group Lobbies will be listed in the Steam Groups tab on the Main Menu. Create a group that reflects your CS:GO interests, or join one of the thousands of Steam Groups representing various communities, countries, languages, and common interests.".

When fan made Nintendo games like AM2R (Another Metroid 2 Remake) and Pokemon Uranium got removed due to pressure from the Japanese game giant, we were all pretty pissed off. AM2R have been in development for a decade and Uranium was for 9 years.

Yet, how do you feel when all your hard work have been sit on it by a company? How would you feel when the slightest recognition of the blood you shed for something you love is squandered? Well, that's what happened with both game nominations taken off from the prestigious Game Award 2016 last week without notice.

The Game Awards' creator and host Geoff Keighly recently explained on a stream why these masterpieces' nomination were taken away. He said: "I think the big challenge that we face as a show is that everything in the show has to be legally cleared by the game companies in question. So one of the things that we go through is this clearance process where we have to get basically rights from everyone that owns the IPs of the games, but we don't tell those companies in advance who's nominated, and we find out together".

Intel is ramping up towards their release of Kaby Lake, led by the enthusiast Core i7-7700K processor (which runs at 100C under load) - and now, we have leaked details on the entire Z270-based line up from ASUS.

ASUS's next-gen Maximus, Strix, and TUF series products are on their way, and they look delicious. ASUS will be revealing 8 motherboards based on the Z270 chipset, but there will be other H170-based boards released, aimed at mid- and budget-minded consumers. All of the ASUS Z270-based boards will be enthusiast/overclocker/gaming boards, and we are beyond excited.

The best of the best from the Z270 series by ASUS will be the ROG Maximus IX Formula, with the usual upgrades over the Z170-based motherboards, but it rocks an awesome integrated I/O and backplate.

Back when Hitman was first released in March 2016, players were furious that they couldn't use their unlockable items, earned during when they were connected to the game server, in their offline sessions. After what seems to be an eternity of complaining and begging for a feature that should be in the game from the players, IO Interactive finally released the feature with its November patch.

What the developers essentially did was to create a offline profile and all the unlockables you unlock during your game server time is also saved there. So, when you play in Offline mode, you gonna have access to all the items you spend you hard time obtaining them. Eurogamer reports: "Items include all mastery items; including weapons, gear, starting/pickup locations as well as Elusive Target suit rewards and Challenge Pack unlocks".

Yet, there a quirk to that. If you want to get new unlocks, you gotta connect to the game servers again. The update release note also release the November content schedule: 3 elusive target, number 13-15, 10 featured contracts and 1 escalation contracts. Good hunt!

Nintendo has made one thing clear with its new Switch handheld console hybrid: it wants to embrace third-party games and completely turn around the Wii U's secular games library. To do so, the Japanese console-maker is making huge concessions and efforts to attract major third-party developers and publishers like Take-Two Interactive, Ubisoft, and Bethesda to name a few--and all of these companies are quite impressed with the Switch. It appears Nintendo's plan is working.

GTA V and Red Dead Redemption publisher Take-Two Interactive is the latest to praise Nintendo's strategy with the Switch, affirming that the company is making a "great effort" to ensure third-party support is properly ported, curated and maintained.

"The folks at Nintendo are making a great effort to support third-party developers, we're very optimistic on the Switch though we are not announcing anything specific today," Take-Two Interactive President Karl Slatoff said at the Credit Suisse 20th Annual Technology, Media & Telecom Conference IR conference.

The 5.0 update for Star Wars: The Old Republic is live. One of the biggest updates for any game I've ever seen, it packs in a mountain of new content and overhauls seemingly every aspect of the game.

There's too much to list here, but the juiciest bits include the Knights of the Eternal Throne storyline spanning nine new chapters and two new planets, a level 70 cap for all classes, a Dark vs. Light alignment system, gear progression just for playing, repeatable, four-player group content known as "Uprisings", an advanced class option at character creation, and ranked Warzone Arena season 8.

Eternal Throne is exclusive to Early Access eligible players until December 2.

To celebrate this week's release of 'Family Guy: Season 16' on DVD, we have 5 complete season boxsets to give away thanks to our friends at Fox Home Entertainment.

Expose yourself to this titillating (giggity) collection of 20 uncensored Family Guy episodes, in which Peter reveals his sweet K-pop dance moves, Stewie lands a sticky gig as a peanut butter spokesbaby, Brian fetches true love in India, and the gang spends a terrifying night in a totally insane asylum. It's a haunting and hilarious complete season, featuring celebrity guest voices Ed O'Neill, Margaret Cho, Glenn Close, Simon Cowell and many more!

To go into the running to win a prize, simply correctly answer the following question:

I've been playing Overwatch for what feels like forever (well, 60 hours or something like that) and I'm still not even at level 100 - while 'TaZzERK' has hit the unofficial level cap of Overwatch - at level 1800.

More impressively, the Overwatch player hit level 1800 without account sharing - something that a few gamers do in order to rank up in Overwatch quicker. TaZzeRK says that around 1700 hours were required to hit level 1800, which accounts to an average of 16-17 hours per day.

Holy hell, that's a lot of Overwatch.

AT&T launched its DirecTV Now streaming service this week, allowing customers to view cable channels online at will. That's all well and good except AT&T is offering data exemption for the service, giving it what some might call an unfair leg up over rival services like those from Dish and Sony.

Without net neutrality laws preventing it from doing so, the advantage -- known as "zero rating" -- could mean AT&T and potentially other ISP giants take over the cable streaming market, reducing competition and likely value as well.

At present, the FCC judges matters such as this as they come up, so it's possible it will change; already it's sent a letter to the company expressing its "serious concerns" over harming competition. Time will tell if anything more comes of it, but it seems less likely with President-elect Trump's appointment of two opponents to the FCC's current workings: economist and former telecom consultant Jeffrey Eisenach and professor and former Sprint lobbyist Mark Jamison.

Winter is already at our doors in North America and the Forza's newest expansion is going to remind you of that even in the game: with a multiple maps around a snowy mountain, 3 new race types and more sexy cars.

The "Blizzard Mountain" expansion pack for Forza Horizon 3 is either available separately or as a part of the expansion pass that grants you two expansion packs for $34.99 with players who own the Ultimate Edition can enjoy a 10 bucks discount on the pass.

This expansion pack will include 50 new events + challenges, new race types such as Hill Climb, Descent and Blizzard race. It will also include new bucket list Blueprint and Rival events + 28 new Xbox Live challenges that can earn 500 Gamerscore points.

Nintendo and Universal are teaming up to make "a whole world of Nintendo" theme park attractions that make attendees feel as if they've "walked into their game platform."

Both Nintendo and Universal have been quite tight-lipped on the plans for these whimsical attractions, but that changed today as Shigeru Miyamoto and Universal's Mark Woodbury outlined some visions and promises for the upcoming theme park areas.

"We're going to be able to create an entire Nintendo world, and as we continue to develop it, that world became more immersive and more evolved and more colorful and more exciting...and more interactive," said Univesal Studios creative Mark Woodbury.

While we've been distracted with news of AMD's upcoming Zen architecture changing up the CPU game in 2017, we're hearing more about Intel's next-gen Kaby Lake architecture and how its flagship Core i7-7700K hits 5GHz without much volts, but also reaches 100C under load.

Well, it looks like the Core i3-7350K processor could be the one to look for, with the unlocked Core i3 processor easily hitting 4.2GHz. In leaked benchmarks, the new Core i3-7350K scores 5137 in the single-core performance run of Geekbench, while it reaches 10,048 in multi-core testing. This might not sound like much, but it's Intel's new dual-core processor, beating the current-gen quad-core processor - and that's freakin' awesome.

Intel's upcoming unlocked Core i3 processor is something we've been wanting for a while, a cheaper CPU that overclocks well - giving me the feels of the Celeron 300A days. The new Core i3-7350K has a default clock of 4GHz, while it will boost up to 4.2GHz, sporting 4MB of cache and a 91W TDP.

BioWare's Aaryn Flynn opens up about the studio's new mysterious new IP, affirming the game will follow in the studio's familiar storytelling path...but we'll have to wait quite some time to play it.

Here at TweakTown we've extensively covered all mentions and reports of BioWare's new secret IP, and based on our past coverage, we can tell you that the game may have extensive online components, it has something to do with a rook piece from Chess, it could be related to Dragon Age: Tactics, that it may be action-based rather than a RPG-based, and that the IP is actually in a playable state and looks "stunning."

Now one of BioWare's own execs discusses some key details about the IP, affirming it will have some distinct story elements:

Although Final Fantasy 15 literally just released across the globe, a skilled Japanese gamer has already beaten the main campaign. How long did it take? Just 10 hours.

The Japanese gamer uploaded his proof to 2ch, a popular Japanese message board. By skipping all the cutscenes and rushing through the main story, the player beat the game in approximately 10 hours and 36 minutes. When you beat Final Fantasy 15's main campaign, the game issues you a specific certificate with a time-stamp, but there's a possibility the image was doctored.

For comparison's sake, Final Fantasy 15's game director Hajime Tabata says that the game's main story should last 40 to 50 hours of gameplay including cutscenes.