Latest News - Page 2482

Last month, the MPAA revealed the existence of an R-rated cut of the upcoming 'Batman V Superman', and now Director Zack Snyder has addressed the topic and revealed what we'll see.

Speaking to the Hollywood Reporter, Snyder reacted against accusations that Deadpool is the reason why it will be rated, saying "Online, everyone's like, 'Oh, they're doing an R-rated in reaction to Deadpool,' and you're like We didn't just shoot it last week, and we also didn't edit it last week.". So what might we see in the extended cut? "The why of that is [the DVD version] is a half-hour longer, and some of that additional material is some of the stuff we took out for the rating. I was like, "Cool, I can put it back in for the director's cut." There was nothing by design. This was the material I just put back in, and then when [the MPAA] looked at it again, they were like, "Oh, now the movie's rated R." And, by the way, it's not a hard R. There's no nudity. There's a little bit of violence. It just tips the scale."

For mainstream fans who want to see it as soon as possible, 'Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice' will be released in 3D and 2D cinemas as well as IMAX screens on March 25th 2016 worldwide.

While VR headsets add a new dimension to the entire spectrum of entertainment, everyone wants to know about the games. Now Oculus has revealed the fill thirty-title lineup that'll release alongside the Oculus Rift when it starts shipping later this month.

The Rift's launch games are pretty varied in price, so you could spend anywhere from $10 to $60 on each game. Smaller games run about $5 whereas the big-hitters like Elite: Dangerous will cost you the full $59.99, which is to be expected. Bear in mind that the Rift comes with two games--EVE: Valkyrie and the platformer Luckey's Tale--with its $599 price tag.

Check below for a full list of launch games including the rather amazing-looking space sim Adrift.

Destiny players are suffering from content fatigue, but Bungie is ready to unload a bounty of content with a new major update coming April 12.

In the latest weekly update, Bungie has outlined what Guardians can expect from Destiny's new "April Update". The content drop will include a fresh batch of activities across the full spectrum of the game, from PVE to PVP, so no players are left out. That's a pretty important designation considering PVE gamers have long been clamoring for new stuff to do in the interstellar sandbox. Check below for a bullet breakdown.

Of course Bungie doesn't reveal too much about the nebulous April Update--they're not about to break their infamous hype-building nature and expose full transparency--but we do get an actual release date and content hints. Bungie will also be streaming the new content on its Twitch channel every Wednesday for the next three weeks, so be sure to tune in if you're interested. Sadly, I think most of Destiny's playerbase has moved on to The Division by now.

Microsoft wants the entire world running on Windows 10 (for obvious reasons), so it's not so far-fetched to think that Redmond would start sneakily upgrading Windows 7 and 8.1 users to the new OS. That's exactly what a significant amount of users claim happened, but Microsoft (once again) denies that this is even possible.

According to Redmond, users remain "fully in control" over their Windows PCs, and Windows 10 will not upgrade or install without your permission. "We have updated the upgrade experience to make it easier for customers to schedule a time for their upgrade to take place. Customers continue to be fully in control of their devices, and can choose to not install the Windows 10 upgrade or remove the upgrade from Windows Update (WU) by changing the WU settings."

Despite these assurances, thousands of Windows users are reporting that Windows 10 has been forcefully installed on their systems.. These are the users who have opted not to upgrade to Windows 10 just yet and still run Windows 7 and 8.1 as their platform of choice, willingly choosing not to upgrade, so its fair to think they didn't give any permissions to upgrade to Windows 10.

GDC 2016 - With the enormous success of Facebook's $2 billion acquisition of Oculus, everyone expects VR to be a money-making experience. Oculus founder Palmer Luckey pulled people out of a virtual world and back to reality by saying that there will be a lot of failures in VR, too.

During a chat at the Game Developers Conference, Luckey said: "I wish I could come up on this stage and tell you that virtual reality is going to change everything, it's all going to be for the better, nobody is going to fail and you're going to make so much money if you get involved in virtual reality".

He continued: "The actual truth is that we don't know how things are going to play out. We know there are going to be a lot of successes, but the likelihood is that there are also going to be a lot of failures, it's really the same of anyone else in the games industry. There's a lot of optimism, but the rubber hasn't really hit the road yet".

Logitech announced two new gaming keyboards today that are going to use Cherry MX switches as opposed to the Romer made switches that they've been using in their top-end gaming keyboards up until now.

They have two version of their new G610 Orion keyboard coming out, one that features Cherry MX Brown switches, and another that has Cherry MX Red switches on board. The two newcomers are of a more simplistic and understated, industrial design. There's very little in the way of flair, save for perhaps the logo, which itself doesn't stand out too much. The backlighting is with white LED's and the brightness of each key can be adjusted, and other lighting patterns (of the same color) can be programmed in. There are also dedicated media keys to ease controlling sound level and playing back music.

Curiously, even though they began their independent foray into mechanical keyboards with Romer switches, they're calling Cherry MX the "industry standard," of which they are due to the widespread adoption, but they seem to be downplaying their relationship with the other switch maker. Regardless, it's good to see Logitech expand into other territory to provide more choice to gamers. Both the G610 Orion Red and Brown will be available this month for $119.

GDC 2016 - During the Game Developers Conference, Microsoft's Principal Group Program Manager, Jason Ronald, held a programming session talking about the future of game development on Windows. In this session, Ronald talked about what Microsoft is doing to push their vision on game development, on both the Xbox, and Windows.

Ronald also provided an overview of a "host of new platform innovations for games in every genre". DualShockers sat in on the session, noticing some great news on DX12, with Ronald talking about how DX12 will offer gains in both CPUs and GPUs.

Ronald mentioned that Star Wars: Battlefront will be the first DX12 title on the Xbox One, but didn't provide any release window on when this would happen. He did note that Microsoft has strong partner support in DX12 thanks to recent releases like Rise of the Tomb Raider, Gears of War: Ultimate Edition, Hitman and Ashes of the Singularity.

The latest trailer to X-Men: Apocalypse is here, with Bryan Singer continuing his directing run after the stellar X-Men: Days of Future Past. Check it out, below:

The trailer highlights the movie's main villain - Apocalypse - reintroducing the concept of his Four Horsemen. In the comics, the Four Horsemen are mutants who bodies and minds are changed by Apocalypse, becoming his slaves. During the war, these mutants are his closest allies, and when he needs to attack someone or something, these mutants carry it out.

The trailer expands on our look of the new Jean Grey and Scott Summers (Phoenix and Cyclops), but the larger battle is still at play. X-Men: Apocalypse kicks off after the events of X-Men: Days of Future Past, with a younger group of mutants taking helm.

The Division has been one of the most successful new games that Ubisoft has ever released, reaching over $330 million dollars in revenue globally within the first five days after it was released. But it didn't just sell well, people are actually playing it too, with over 1.2 million players having enjoyed it concurrently over this past weekend across all platforms.

That's an impressive amount of people playing a game at any one time, despite it starting off with a few, nearly game breaking, problems. There's been an incredible amount of actual involvement by the player-base, with a generally positive attitude even with the problems and association with past Ubisoft titles. Right now there is a recorded all-time peak, just through Steam alone, of 113,887 players at any given time. That's not bad at all, and almost more than the Team Fortress 2 record of 117,917.

"The Division taking the top spot in the industry for first-week sales of a new franchise is a tremendous achievement. We are very proud of our teams, and humbled by and thankful for the millions of players who are giving us their feedback and support," Ubisoft's CEO, Yves Guillemot, said in a statement regarding the success. "The Division is the latest example yet of our unique ability to deliver immersive gaming playgrounds that keep players engaged, and that they eagerly share with their friends and community."

Gaming Evolved, or Raptr, hasn't exactly had the shining reception that AMD might have wanted when it was included with their driver set. But it's getting better with each iteration, and more useful too. The newest update vastly improves the video capture and recording features of the integrated Play.tv, beyond a lot of other free or premium platforms.

Recording, if you set it to, can begin automatically once you start a game up now. It can detect and begin without you having to remember to turn it on, capturing the entire play session and even going so far as to deleting older videos as time goes on to save storage space. They've added the ability to use a hotkey to "bookmark" a particular moment in the game, which will make a 30-second video clip when you press that hotkey. Play.tv will also record your mouse clicks, webcam, mic nearly everything so you can analyze your competitive play. And now they have a real video editor that allows you to actually edit those clips and make them viewable right from the app. It used to be quite the pain to get things ready for sharing.

Something quite revolutionary is the new integration with League of Legends and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. When you play these games, the AMD Gaming Evolved client uses live match data to automatically create highlights that are completely pre-edited, ready to watch or share instantly. They plan on adding in more games that are compatible with it soon as well.

GDC 2016 - NVIDIA announced their latest GameWorks 3.1 package at the Game Developers Conference, and then Unity announced their latest version of their popular engine - and now, Unity Technologies has revealed that it will be adding support for NVIDIA VRWorks into the Unity engine.

VRWorks being added to Unity means that it'll soon support VR SLI and Multi-Res Shading, which will make it much easier for developers to build VR support into the Unity engine for GeForce video cards. As for the Unity engine, it continues to expand at rapid levels, with VR games like Cloudlands: MiniGolf VR, Hover Junkers, and Job Simulator.

But, the Unity engine isn't just there for games - as there are various VR applications it can be used for, such as social, medical, tourism, design, education and training. Multi-Res Shading is capable of providing a 50% performance improvement when used in the right application, which is something that game developers - and gamers - can get quite excited over.

Microsoft announced that they've changed their internal policies regarding cross-console play, but there's been the question of whether or not it was actually possible. The president of Sony Computer Entertainment, Shuhei Yoshida, says that the technical part of having the two platforms work together in games would potentially be the easiest part of the process. In fact, Sony has had cross-platform play available with the PC since the PlayStation 2 days, so they're definitely not against such an idea.

Yoshida is all for allowing gamers to play together whatever the platform, they've been pioneers since Final Fantasy 11 (which is still operational by the way). But connecting to the PC is much more straightforward with it being a much more open network. Speaking to Eurogamer, he said that "Because PC is an open platform it's much more straightforward. Connecting two different closed networks is much more complicated so we have to work with developers and publishers to understand what it is they are trying to accomplish." But it isn't an insurmountable challenge at all.

He continued by mentioning that the technical aspects of it were the easiest part to overcome. The challenge lies in whether or not it's in their best interest, from a business perspective, to actually allow it. It comes down to policy and business issues more than anything. But at least it's possible, and we're bound to eventually see Xbox One and PlayStation 4 gamers enjoying non-exclusive games harmoniously. Or at least semi-harmoniously.

Skyforge, an MMO that crosses the line between science-fiction and fantasy letting you play almost as a god, has received a new update called Dark Omen, and it's all about improving the quality of life for your pantheon (the equivalent of a guild) and bringing a bit more content before they drop an even larger and more substantial update coming very soon.

Overall this update is a quality of life update. In the update they've created a new operations system where higher level players can combine their powers to fight off any invasions much more efficiently, and spectacularly too. They've made this easier to use, and much better looking too. An Elder God questline has been added, so you have a chance to learn the backstory of what it actually takes to become a divine Elder God on Aelion. That questline culminates in a showdown with a massive boss battle unlike anything seen so far in the game.

One of the issues that players have noticed is that of merging their pantheon of warriors with another. Sometimes growth meant teaming up with others, but there was no easy way to accomplish this. Allods Team, the developer, have added a new Pantheon Fusion tool that makes it much easier to join forces against the invading forces that are trying to wipe you out.

A new online collectible card game is coming out of the gates swinging, and wants to capture your attention in a way that no other game of its genre quite has just yet. Star Crusade: War for the Expanse gives you a massive overarching story, where you get to be in control of one of the six different, powerful factions struggling for power.

Star Crusade offers a deep and highly customizable card battle experience with more than 400 playable cards and multiple different types of playable modes. They've got single-player matches and competitive battles against friends or random people. Four-player play, sharing and gifting of your deck is all coming soon as well.

Competitive collectible card games are a genre that's been growing as of late. The popularity is now crossing over into the digital realm with the likes of Hearthstone continuing to gain momentum since it was officially released in 2013. It's quite the phenomenon really.

MSI's Vortex, the minuscule yet powerful cylindrical PC that may be the illegitimate offspring of the Mac Pro, is finally available for purchase.

The Vortex is a mean, lean fighting machine it looks like. They've been able to stuff in a quite a few high-end components into the small area, and everything is capable of being upgraded, within reason of course. All models share an Intel Core i7-6700K, an Intel Z170 motherboard, a 256GB PCIe M.2 SSD with a 1TB storage drive. They also all share a Killer E2400 wired ethernet/ Killer N1535 wireless card, four USB 3.0, two mini-DisplayPort and two Thunderbolt 3 connectors around back. The less expensive version comes in at $2199 and has dual GTX 960's sitting in SLI with 16GB of 2133MHz DDR4. The more expensive version is $3999 and swaps out those 960's for dual GTX 980's and has a total of 32GB of RAM instead. All powered by a 450W power supply.

The whole 6.5L package is a marvel of engineering no less than the Mac Pro it was likely inspired by. The cooling system is very efficient, and is quite the capable performer. The GPU's are all of the MXM variety, also shared with the Mac Pro design. A necessary design consideration if you want to pack as much power into as small a space as possible.

GDC 2016 - Sony is getting serious when it comes to performance and the PlayStation VR, where according to Gamasutra, Sony is aiming for 60FPS or above.

During GDC, SCEA Senior Dev Support Engineer Chris Norden had some interesting things to say about PlayStation VR to developers. He said to developers at GDC that Sony would most likely reject games with variable frame rates, or anything running under 60FPS.

Norden said: "Frame rate is really important; you cannot drop below 60 frames per second, ever. If you submit a game to us and it drops to 55, or 51... we're probably going to reject it. I know I'm going to get flak for this, but there's no excuse for not hitting frame rate. It's really hard, and I'm not going to lie to and say it's extremely easy...it's really difficult. 60hz is the minimum acceptable framerate. Everybody drill that into your heads".

GDC 2016 - Razer's external GPU enclosure now has a price, with the Razer Core costing $499 on its own, or $399 if it's purchased with compatible Razer gaming notebooks.

The Razer Core is a unique GPU enclosure, which takes dual-slot, full-length video cards. GPUs that are installed can include the Radeon R9 Fury and GeForce GTX Titan X, as the Razer Core has an internal 500W PSU. The Razer Core also feature 4 x USB 3.0 ports, GbE connectivity, and two-zone lighting.

Core connects to your laptop through Thunderbolt USB-C, which offers up to 40Gbps of bandwidth. Installing a video card inside of the Razer Core is super simple, as it's a tool-less design. Better yet, AMD's impressive XConnect technology is something that's compatible with Core, meaning your laptop can seamlessly switch between onboard graphics, and the GPU inside of the Core.

MSI has announced its new GeForce GTX 950 models won't require any additional PCIe power connectors, as they'll be powered by the PCIe port itself, consuming a maximum of 75W.

There are two new models from MSI: the MSI GeForce GTX 950 2GD5T OCV3 and the MSI GeForce GTX 950 2GD5T OCV2. Both feature the GM206 GPU, which rocks 768 stream processors, 48 texture units, 32 ROPS and a 128-bit memory interface with 2GB of GDDR5 RAM. Both of the cards have their GPUs clocked at 1076MHz, but have boost clocks of 1253MHz.

The difference between the cards is their cooling, and how long they are. The 2GD5T OCV3 model sports a dual fan design and a longer PCB that MSI wants to see installed into a traditional desktop PC, while the shorter 2GD5T OCV2 models uses a single fan, and is destined for mini-ITX machines.

DICE and the Frostbite Engine team are putting their weight behind AMD's GPUOpen initiative, as you can see from the tweet and video below.

In the video, DICE rendering engineer Arne Schober touts the level of hardware access GPUOpen offers programmers like himself, while also praising the friendly, powerful ecosystem it encourages.

"It is really nice to have physical access to the source code and be able to handcraft the tools to our own needs," he says, later adding, "By opening up the source, we can help each other across the entire industry, solving problems together instead of individually. This would improve our effectiveness and lower development costs at the same time by sharing our knowledge."

After years of promises, Nike finally revealed the prototype self-lacing Nike Mag shoes last year, on the 30th anniversary of the 'Back to the Future' franchise and provided star Michael J Fox with the first pair. Now, the company has re-iterated it's promise that fans will have the opportunity to purchase the shoes this year (if they're lucky), but perhaps even more interesting is the further implementation of the technology into a whole new line of products.

Explaining the HyperAdapt 1.0 technology, Nike's Vice President for Design and Special Projects Tinker Hatfield said "It is amazing to consider a shoe that senses what the body needs in real-time. That eliminates a multitude of distractions, including mental attrition, and thus truly benefits performance. Wouldn't it be great if a shoe, in the future, could sense when you needed to have it tighter or looser? Could it take you even tighter than you'd normally go if it senses you really need extra snugness in a quick maneuver? That's where we're headed. In the future, product will come alive." The company also released a video showing how they'll work.

The 'Back to the Future' styled Nike MAG shoes modeled on their appearance in 'Back to the Future Part II' will be available later in the year via online auction, with proceeds going to the Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson's Research.