Latest News - Page 2382

Facebook is punishing clickbait, and now Google is about to punish intrusive ads on mobile -- the future of the internet is bright, indeed.

The search engine giant acknowledges how frustrating intrusive "interstitials" (pop-up ads that obscure content) can be, and says it will soon be cracking down. Should a site employ these types of ads, its ranking on Google may find itself lower than it would otherwise. The emphasis here is on "may", because if the content is of great quality and relevant enough, it could still rank highly.

The policy does not affect pop-ups related to cookie usage, age verification, login, or reasonably sized banners.

Details regarding the Premium Pass for Battlefield 1 have surfaced on the Xbox Store and Origin, indicating a similar setup to recent Battlefield games.

The base game will cost you the usual $60, while Premium will go for $50. For your money, you'll get (over time) four expansion packs (one themed around Russia) which will include 16 maps, new modes, Elite classes (akin to heroes in Battlefront e.g. flamethrower guy), 20 new weapons, 14 Battlepacks, exclusive dog tags, and more.

Each expansion will be available two weeks early to Premium members. The first -- titled They Shall Not Pass -- is themed around the French army, and will launch in March.

AMD is going to be in center stage later this year at newly-formed VR Society's two-day conference for entertainment, media and marketing professionals at Paramount Pictures Studios in Hollywood, October 13-14. VR Society was founded by The Advanced Imaging Society to push forward the art and technologies of VR, AR and 360-degree content for professionals in the entertainment, media and marketing industries.

VR On The Lot will have major studios, publishers, directors and everyone in between, including: The Producers Guild of America, Sony Entertainment, Sony Music, Warner Bros., 20th Century Fox, Walt Disney Studios, NBC Universal, DreamWorks Animation, The Virtual Reality Company, Legend, Time Inc.'s LIFE VR, AMD, Intel, HP, HTC Vive, Oculus, Technicolor, Dolby, Epic Games, Edelman, Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, UploadVR, Chapman University Dodge College of Film and Media Arts, The USC School of Cinematic Arts, Wemersive, Loot Interactive, Cause-Play, 360 AdSpots, Sci-Futures, StoryTech, Lucid Dreams Productions, Canon Street London, All Good Partners, and Entertainment Tonight.

One of the leading threads from the event will be VRE, or Virtual Reality Experiences, which will be led by the biggest VR enthusiast I know apart from myself - Roy Taylor. Taylor is the CVP of Content and Alliances for AMD, where he explained: "These aren't movies, they aren't television and they aren't games. VRE is a new medium and these pieces of content shape unique creative and business opportunities". Roy and I have talked about this in detail a few times now, and I totally agree - VRE is going to be huge, and will create totally new avenues of entertainment that we haven't seen before.

The sequel to Larian's beloved CPRG, Divinity Original Sin 2, is coming to Steam's early access on September 15. For now the game's early access will stay exclusive to Steam, but it may come to GOG soon after.

Larian Studios is bringing Divinity Original Sin 2 to Steam's early access, offering a sample of the game's first act and the arena mode. The early access portion will be free to all Kickstarter backers, but for everyone else it'll cost $45, but remember this gets you a copy of the final game too. Larian says that early access codes will be sent out to Kickstarter backers sometime next week, but you'll want to check their new blog post for important info on how to redeem your code (we've also included the info below).

"We are incredibly excited to announce that you'll get your first taste of Divinity: Original Sin 2 on the 15th of September. We're giving all Kickstarter backers access to the first act of the game: Fort Joy," the devs announced on their blog.

Tesla has just announced a new, even faster version of its Model S electric vehicle; the P100D. The new P100D is capable of going from 0-60mph in just 2.5 seconds, with Tesla adding its the third-fastest production car ever. The only ones that beat it are the Ferrari LaFerrari, which costs a huge $1.4 million, and the Porsche 918 Spyder, which costs $845,000.

Tesla's new P100D starts at only $135,000 and it's quicker than a huge list of expensive cars, something that most people wouldn't have thought was possible a few years ago. The new P100D has a range of 315 miles, up from the 294 miles on the 90kWh battery, an increase of around 7%. The new Model X P100D is capable of 289 miles, up from 250 miles on the previous Model X P90D. The larger battery will be made available exclusively for the all-wheel drive model with the Ludicrous Mode option.

There are small changes and improvements with the P100D, including some upgrades made to the wiring harness and other small differences, but the drivetrain remains the same. The new 100kWh battery uses the same cell technology, but Tesla executives have teased the advancements in the battery pack technology being a leap in itself. Tesla CTO JB Straubel explains: "It's a pretty big change in the battery module and pack technology. It's a complete redo on the cooling architecture".

Samsung has been rocking the curved smartphone game for a while now, first introduced with its Galaxy S6 edge smartphone and continued right into the new Galaxy Note 7 smartphone which has a dual curved display that's simply gorgeous.

According to sources of Nikkei Asian Review that are "familiar with Apple's plans", the company will unveil a "4.7-inch model, another that will be 5.5-inches, and a premium handset that will be either 5.5-inches or larger equipped with a screen bent on the two sides". We could see a new iPhone that is similar to the S6 edge, or the new Note 7 smartphone with dual edges. The upcoming premium iPhone will use an OLED display, which has been rumored for a while, but a whopping 5.8-inch OLED is teased for the larger iPhone.

Nikkei expects that the "premium" 5.5-inch model will be released this year, and that the company will be making a regular 5.5-inch iPhone 7 Plus, joined with the 4.7-inch iPhone 7.

HoloLens has been detailed at the Hot Chips conference in Cupertino, with Microsoft teasing that there's a "holographic processing unit", or HPU inside of HoloLens, that is capable of around 1 trillion operations per second.

TSMC build the "Tensilica" chip for HoloLens on the 28nm process, with 65 million logic gates, 8MB of ultra-fast static RAM (SRAM), and 1GB of DDR3 RAM. Microsoft managed to fit all of this into a 12mm x 12mm (half-inch square) package that's designed to process input from the inertial chip, environmental cameras, depth cameras, and other sensors on HoloLens.

HoloLens is capable of speeding up calculations 200 times over software alone, with ready-to-use positional data to the headset's main Intel Cherry Trail-based CPU, so that it's free to run apps and games. It makes sense now why the headset is $3000.

Installation 01, the ambitious fan-made project that aims to bring a quality modern Halo game to PC, has made some amazing progress so far.

The creators of Installation 01, the fan-made Halo PC game, have released a brand new ViDoc that shows just how far the team has come in the past few months, and the results are absolutely stunning. Installation 01 isn't officially licensed from Microsoft, it's being made by a dedicated team of 30+ developers and fans, but that doesn't mean the game is ramshackle: the footage shows rather impressive 3D modeling work, physics programming, smooth animations, lighting effects, and pretty much everything else you'd expect from an actual AAA experience. The team has even done their own mocap work for Installation 01--that's some serious dedication.

The free Installation 01 Halo game aims to mix "all the best from existing Halo games", offering campaign, online multiplayer, Firefight modes, Forge, custom games, and maybe even a theater mode. Installation 01 will have full-scale maps (both original Halo maps and new ones) with vehicles and classic Halo weapons, completely with varying playlists like Big Team Battle, Multi-Team, Team Deathmatch and so on.

Mafia 3 is getting closer to release, with its October 7 launch looming closer and now developer Hangar 13 is detailing more on the detailed soundtrack from the game.

Mafia 3 will feature over 100 incensed songs from the 1960s, breathing life into the fictional New Bordeaux, where era-appropriate cars and fashion are on display. The entire soundtrack to Mafia 3 can be listened to right now on this Pandora playlist, while the game will include its original score composed by Jesse Harlin and Jim Booney, and will be heard during firefights, cutscenes and other story-based moments. The score includes 26 songs that will be available for digital purchase separately later.

If you buy Mafia 3's Collector's Edition, you'll receive the score and a sampling of the soundtrack on a 180 gram vinyl. Here are song of the included tracks in the Mafia 3 soundtrack:

Sony will introduce key PlayStation, PS2, and PS3 games to PC by bringing its super unpopular PlayStation Now service to the platform.

Remember when I said that Sony really wants to bolster its subscription services? Well, Sony is finally breaking down the console vs PC barrier by bringing some of its landmark exclusives to its competitor's Windows PC world...albeit in a cloud-streaming, subscription-based service. Remember that Sony will soon let you Remote Play PS4 games on your PC, not unlike Microsoft's Xbox-to-PC game streaming.

PlayStation Now will soon be available for PC, Sony wrote in a PlayStation Blog post, but in order to play you'll likely need to shell out $24.99 for the new DualShock USB Adapter and a brand new 3-4 DualShock controller. I highly doubt Sony will let anyone use Xbox 360 or even mouse/keyboard for PS Now (if they're going to bring PS to PC, Sony's gonna do it on their own terms).

The mess that is No Man's Sky continues to find its way into the headlines, this time with sales in the UK plummeting by 81% in its second week on the market. The game has taken a 78% decline in sales in the US recently, too.

No Man's Sky has been replaced by F1 2016 in the UK Charts, with F1 2016's first week sales down by around 32% compared to F1 2015. Keep in mind that the UK Charts only track the games that are sold at retail, and not digital sales. So, this would be mostly the PS4 version of the game, which is still pretty big considering Sony was pushing it pre-release. See what we thought of No Man's Sky in our official review. As for the top 10 games in the UK right now, here's the list:

NVIDIA revealed its Tesla P100 graphics card at its GPU Technology Conference earlier this year, the first Pascal-based graphics card, and the first HBM2-powered card from NVIDIA. It was a compute monster, and it was only today during the annual Hot Chips symposium that NVIDIA revealed their first die shot of the 610mm2 GPU die.

The company released the GP100 die shot as part of their presentation on Pascal and NVLink 1.0, but die shots have not frequent from both NVIDIA and AMD, so it's nice to see the GP100 die out in the wild. GP100 is NVIDIA's first part that features HBM and NVLink, which is an important time in the company's history, as this exciting technology isn't available for the consumer GeForce graphics cards... yet.

NVIDIA's new GP100 die shot teases the HBM2 interfaces at the top and bottom of the picture, with the 4096-bit memory bus able to transfer information at over 1TB/sec.

Massachusetts, USA is introducing a first of its kind tax on ride hailing services like Uber and Lyft, a portion of which will be funneled into the taxi industry. It's said the money will help the industry adopt "new technologies and advanced service, safety and operational capabilities", as well as develop the workforce.

The tax will be 20 cents per trip and will be sourced from the ride hailing companies themselves; 5 cents will go toward taxi companies, with 10 going to cities and towns, and 5 toward state transportation. Currently, Uber and Lyft alone account for 2.5 million rides per month in the state, so raising millions per year is plausible.

The move is part of Republican Governor Charlie Baker's plan to regulate the industry with a broad package, which ride services aren't happy with.

From all of the videos we've seen on Resident Evil 7: Biohazard that we've seen so far, most of them have not had much combat in them at all. Well, fans of Resident Evil are a little worried, so Resident Evil 7 producer Masachika Kawata has said that there will definitely be combat in the game.

Kawata talked with Metro GameCentral, where he revealed: "Combat is obviously something that's really important in a Resident Evil game, we're just kind of showing a little bit at a time with different aspects. Beginning Hour was really just the feeling of atmosphere and exploration, which is another classic Resident Evil element, and now you've been able to see a little bit more of the fear of escape from an enemy. And also we've had a little bit of puzzle element in it".

He continued: "So we're taking it one step at a time here. Some people have got the impression that combat is missing from this game, because of the content we've shown so far, but actually combat is definitely in there. The main character is not one of these gun-toting heroes that we've sort of gone towards in the recent entries. It's very much a normal person, a normal guy who's put in an extreme situation and has to survive. And we're going to be showing off some more around that, but for the time being we haven't got around to that yet. But rest assured we know what people want from Resident Evil: it's exploration, puzzle-solving, managing limited resources, and combat in a horrifying situation. And you know, we're gonna get there".

Oculus founder Palmer Luckey has been embroiled in a scandal over VR technology allegedly stolen from his previous employer, and now id Software co-founder John Carmack is finding himself in the same situation. ZeniMax, who owns id Software - where Carmack used to work until he joined Oculus as their CTO - is claiming that Carmack stole technology from ZeniMax that ended up in the Oculus Rift.

An amended complaint was filed on August 16, accusing Carmack of stealing technology from ZeniMax, where they state: "For many years, ZeniMax invested tens of millions of dollars in research and development, including research into virtual reality and immersive technologies. In 2011 and 2012, John Carmack, a singularly experienced and highly proficient ZeniMax programmer who was at that time Technical Director for ZeniMax's Texas-based subsidiary, id Software, conducted research to address technological issues associated with virtual reality. Carmack and other ZeniMax employees conducted that research at ZeniMax offices, on ZeniMax computers, and using ZeniMax resources".

The complaint adds that Carmack's copy of the Oculus Rift prototype was given to him by Luckey, and was improved on both a hardware and software level by ZeniMax employees, using ZeniMax hardware and resources, including the work completed by Carmack himself. The amended filing provides an interesting twist, as it fully accuses Carmack of theft.

25 years ago today, Nintendo released one of the best consoles ever made: the legendary Super Nintendo Entertainment System. In celebration of this momentous occasion, I thought I'd take you back to the past and recount seven of my favorite SNES games of all time.

With the NES, Nintendo revived the legendary video game crash of 1984 and ushered in the golden age of console gaming. With the SNES, however, the company smashed our wildest expectations and gave way to an era of splendor, wonder, and amazement. I still remember my first time playing Donkey Kong Country on my brother's console, instantly being pulled into the whimsical--yet sometimes sadistic--tropical world of platforming apes. But once I got my own SNES I was introduced to the love of my gaming life: retro RPGs.

The SNES delivered some of the best JRPGs in existence, many of which are still enjoyed to this day. A good portion of these games--like Chrono Trigger--pushed forth new mechanics that are still being used by developers in modern games, showing just how ahead of their time these games were. Below I have a quick list of seven of my favorite SNES games of all time, but be forewarned, it's quite RPG heavy.

Xbox Australia has recently announced their latest in gaming fashion for customers with the Xbox Onesie. The gaming attire will be available in either black or white with the release of the newest Xbox One S (500GB or 1TB) console. For those who already experienced the comfy one-piece know that they are perfect for lounging around the house or gaming for hours on end.

The hot new piece is available for men and women with sizings to fit all, with the design being a one of a kind Xbox exclusive. This onesie isn't like your regular pajamas with a couple of pockets and a standard zip, Microsoft has completely packed their Xbox onesie full of useful features. For gaming convenience the pockets are larger to fit your Xbox controller and remotes, with an enlarged arm pouch for easy access to your smartphone.

No one likes to get hot or cold when in the middle of a long game session, so Microsoft made it easy for gamers by catering for all temperatures and seasons with roll able sleeves and pants . When it comes to those edge of the seat moments and it's getting intense, no one wants to slip up with any sort of mistake, don't fear - the Xbox onesie has forearm grips to prevent slipping anywhere in your seat. The extra large hood has room for larger gaming headsets and eyewear, with a fancy customized gamer tag embroidery making it more personalized for you.

Sony's new slimmer, thinner and cheaper PlayStation 4 "Slim" model gets unboxed ahead of its release.

Now that we know Sony's new PS4 Slim has been confirmed as authentic, it's time to see what the new console looks like right out of the box. YouTuber ZRZ is one of the few gamers who acquired an early PS4 Slim console from an unknown source, and has shared an unboxing video of the new system. In case you're still skeptical, ZRZ hooks the PS4 Slim to a TV and boots it up, showing the same sequence as the Eurogamer confirmation.

The PS4 Slim isn't actually a separate system, but a same-specced PS4 in a smaller chassis with a few features shaved off. The new thinner, slimmer refresh will replace the current thicker PS4 model and will be sold simply as "PlayStation 4" rather than a "PS4 Slim" variant. Sony is expected to discontinue the launch PS4s in favor of the new cheaper--yet uglier--model. So the new model is an earnest console refresh and resembles how the slim PS2 replaced the fatter launch PS2's ages ago.

NVIDIA has been forging forward with Ansel, announcing that a third game now supports their immersive screenshot-taking software, with The Witness joining the Ansel ranks.

The Witness now has Ansel support courtesy of a patch released for the game, and a new NVIDIA driver, which allows Ansel users to fly around The Witness in free camera mode, and more. You can also use post-process filters for your screenshots, 360-degree screenshots for more immersion - especially on Facebook, and super resolution (which is still in beta).

If you haven't heard of The Witness yet, the Steam page for the game describes it as "You wake up, alone, on a strange island full of puzzles that will challenge and surprise you".

Gamescom 2016 - The hype surrounding the upcoming Project Scorpio and PlayStation 4 Neo consoles is hitting new heights, having EA executive vice president Patrick Söderlund compare it to Sega's late Mega CD upgrade from 1991.

During an interview with Game Informer at Gamescom, Söderlund said: "We haven't seen this whole idea of upgrading since the Mega CD in 1991 or something. At the time, that might not have worked, but this is different. I can only comment to what's been announced by Microsoft, the whole idea of keeping the ecosystem intact and scaleable is right. If you get in later in the cycle, you can get a Scorpio or you can upgrade to it".

He continued, after making his Sega CD comment, adding: "It's an interesting, smart approach, and we'll see how well it works. It's something that we as a company are 100 percent behind. I got super excited when I saw what they are working on, and without giving you any information, the same is true of Sony. In general, this is a good thing".