Latest News - Page 2508

IO Interactive is making Hitman a more interactive experience, adding in a "live" component to the mix that makes the game more true to live than any game has ever attempted in the past.

But just how are they going to incorporate live events into a video game that isn't a persistent MMO? One way is the addition of what they're calling "Elusive Targets" which are contracts for custom-made characters that are only in an existing location for a limited time, and in real-time. So you only have one chance to complete the contract, and if you don't, then you'll never have another chance.

Each Elusive Target will have a custom briefing video, a backstory and a unique reason for being in that location. When you're actually playing in the location, the Elusive Target will not appear on the map and will not appear in Instinct. Meaning you've got to use actual skill to find and eliminate the target. There's no help here. And the save game mechanism will be turned off, so you won't have any second chances. It's all or nothing. There'll be exclusive prizes and rewards for completing these most difficult contracts.

When you're simply wanting to run the best house parties, it seems that Dashbon is the company to call up. Its new invention is called 'Flicks' and these two models offer up to eight hours of playback when operating off an internal battery while pumping out sound at the same time.

Available in a 140WH model which is priced at $599 and a 280WH model at $699, these LED projectors both display content in 720p HD, offer a HDMI connection that includes smartphone support, rechargeable lithium-ion batteries and Bluetooth 4.0 support. The smaller edition provides four hours of movie playback or 28 hours of Bluetooth jams while the larger 280WH model offers the claimed eight-hour movie experience or 56 hours of Bluetooth music.

Weighing in at 6.17 lb (2.8 kg) and 7.72lb (3.5 kg) respectively, you can further connect these all-in-one projectors to your Roku Streaming Stick, Google Chromcast or Amazon Fire TV Stick.

The Hololens from Microsoft was revealed to be one of the most interesting augmented reality device coming in the near future. The possibilities outside of gaming are just massive. There are so many incredible uses and ways to interact with the world with such a device. A team within Microsoft has created the Galaxy Explorer, a way to physically (well, digitally) interact with the Milky Way right in front of your eyes.

Galaxy Explorer is an app that the community voted on that they've decided to dedicate some resources into realizing. It's an expression of some of the coolest things that you can do with the Hololens. In a way, it's almost a realistic, and personal, representation of the astrogation room from Star Trek. Or a 3D representation of the Star Citizen Star Map. Explore the galaxy in any way you want. Check out those exoplanets that have been found by Kepler in person. And even take a look at what the moon would look like as cheese.

They're in the planning phase at the moment, but the idea is to get people excited about Hololens and get people thinking about the possibilities inherent in the new platform. They're planning to have Galaxy Explorer ready to show at the Microsoft Build Developer Conference, which takes place from 30th March - 1st, April 2016.

Bethesda is cooking up something special for the future of its IPs. How special? According to the studio's exec wizard Todd Howard, these new games will not only be "big and crazy", but they're unlike anything we've ever seen before from the studio.

"We actually have three kind of longer term projects we're doing that are all-we'll talk about them at a future date-but they're different than anything we've done before, while also being a Bethesda-style game," Howard said during a talk at DICE 2016. "Big and crazy, but in many ways different than things we've done before. It's an exciting time."

As a die-hard Bethesda RPG fan, this is huge news. The Fallout and Elder Scrolls series are some of my favorite games, but let's face it, they have problems, and the studio's oldish game engine could use a refresh. I love it when games studios tease ambitious new projects--that goes double for Bethsoft--and we can pretty much bet that one of these "crazy" games will be Elder Scrolls VI. Or maybe a Fallout MMO. Hey, it could happen--Elder Scrolls Online is proof of that.

BIOSTAR has gone completely LED crazy, introducing its VIVID LED DJ technology on multiple RACING series motherboards, including customization and personalization features to allow for maximum control.

BIOSTAR's VIVID LED DJ technology will help users synchronise their case color schemes with RGB onboard motherboard lighting, helping create a uniform lighting experience. Used in unison with BIOSTAR's 5050 LED Fun product, simply plug the strips into your motherboard and control everything through the VIVID software, creating a central place for all users to have maximum control over their color schemes.

This new LED technology is now available across a slew of BIOSTAR motherboard releases, including those from the Z170, B150 and H170 families. If you're interested, these products can be bought through Newegg.

The Ascalon H7L gaming mouse joins Tesoro's fleet of gaming peripherals, and is specifically built to meet the needs of high-performance gaming.

Tesoro's new Ascalon H7L gaming mouse ticks all the right boxes, featuring a 32-bit ARM Cortex processor that enables 6400 True DPI and a nice polling rate of 1000 Hz to ensure efficient aiming and 1ms response times.

Shaped in a sleek, ergonomic design, the mouse is a perfect fit for RTS and FPS gaming thanks to its six custom-programmable buttons that can be set to trigger a variety of functions, along with an extra 2x trigger button. Thanks to its onboard Omron switches and a precision gaming sensor, the Ascalon can ensure 200 ips motion detection with 50g acceleration.

Named '!inverse', this new invention by indie designers 'Rational Bananas' has been in the works for quite some time, focusing on a single goal - create the world's smallest case that can back a full-sized GPU and water cooling.

The project background and development process can be found here, with lead designer Ray also posting up a complete PC build and thermal tests on Hard Forum. This small form factor case is designed as a complete alumnimum housing for your components and was described to me in a conversation as "a steambox-style case."

The tester build in its entirety includes an Intel i5-4690K, 8GB of RAM, a 120GB SSD, 500GB HDD and a GIGABYTE AMD Radeon R9 390 video card. While this system fitting into an 11-liter case is an impressive feat alone, Ray further overclocked this processor to 4.4GHz. The temperature tests brought back some interesting results, with the 4.4GHz overclock ensuring that the CPU was running a little hot under load at a max of 89 degrees celsius, with the VGA under stress, capping out at 94 degrees.

The PC requirements for Need for Speed have been released, with Ghost Games' take on the iconic driving franchise requiring modest hardware - if you want to game at 720p @ 30FPS, that is. You'll require:

Minimum Requirements for 720p30 at low settings:

Recommended Requirements for 1080p60 at high settings:

Seagate has just unveiled their latest 2TB mechanical HDD, but what makes this one stand out from the slew of 2TB, 4TB, 6TB and even 8TB HDDs on the market? Well, it's only 7mm thick.

The company has pushed out its new 2TB slim HDD that will find a home inside of notebooks, where 3.5-inch HDDs are just too thick. Seagate explains: "Utilizing 1TB per disk, the Seagate Mobile HDD delivers the highest capacity possible in a small 7mm form factor. Compatible with most of today's mobile computers, the drive's standard SATA 6Gb/s interface provides for easy integration into existing laptop designs and portable computer upgrades. With up to 2TB of space, the Mobile HDD enables affordable high capacity storage, while supporting over 200,000 photos, 250,000 songs or 124 hours of high definition video. The drive is available in both 1TB and 2TB capacities".

Seagate adds that its new 2TB HDD is 25% lighter than its predecessor, and its 7mm form factor won't have issues in both desktops and laptops. The worrying part of this is that the company didn't release any performance numbers, so we don't know the read/write speeds at the moment.

Ubisoft has had a tumultuous couple of years, with the completely botched launch of Watch Dogs, and we all know how bad Assassin's Creed has been for the last few years. But The Division is shaping up nicely, and while its graphics have been downgraded, it still looks great.

During Ubisoft's recent Investor Day, the company provided a bunch of slides and figures to its investors. The company has said that open world games are a major growth driver for the industry, saying that open world games have increased from 7% in fiscal year 2008 to 33% in fiscal year 2015. Ubisoft says that they're the only developer that can 'regularly deliver open world's', and with big IP like Assassin's Creed, Far Cry, and The Division - it's kinda true... kinda.

Ubisoft has a record 9000+ employees working for the company, something that allows them to bring open world games to market quicker than other developers (including many GB day one patches, broken games, watered down graphics, and so on). 2/3 of production takes place in competitive countries, with material costs estimated to be lower than direct peers.

NVIDIA said it teased its Pascal-based Drive PX 2 system at CES 2016 earlier this year, but we found out quickly after that it was just their Maxwell-based GPUs standing up for attention in the space of the Pascal GPUs. Well, now we're hearing that Volvo will be using NVIDIA's Drive PX 2 system in their self-driving cars, which will hit the road in 2017.

Jen-Hsun Huang, co-founder and CEO of NVIDIA said: "Volvo, well-known for its safety and reliability, will be the first to develop DRIVE PX 2, using it as the brain for its fleet of 100 self-driving cars to be publicly available next year in its hometown of Gothenburg, Sweden". Volvo will be using the Pascal-based Drive PX 2 for its self-driving capabilities, with NVIDIA providing both the hardware and software that will culminate in an array of cameras, lidar (light ray shooting radar), radar, and ultrasonic sensors.

All of this will create a 360-degree picture of everything going on around the vehicle. This will obviously require considerable horsepower, which is where the Pascal-based Drive PX 2 comes into play.

League of Legends fans will be happy to know that the 2016 World Championships will take place across the United States, later this year.

The 2016 World Championships will start with the Group Stages, which kicks off on September 29, and runs through to October 2. It starts back up on October 6, running through to October 9 at hte Graham Civic Auditorium in San Francisco, California. The Quarterfinals will run from October 13-16 at the Chicago Theatre in Chicago, Illinois. From there, four qualifying teams will participate in the semifinals, which takes place October 21-22 at Madison Square Garden in New York City.

After that, the final two teams will battle on October 29 at the Staples Center in LA, California. Riot Games adds that more information on ticket sales for the huge eSports event will be coming soon.

While most people instantly think 'gaming' when it comes to VR, the applications in which it will be used are virtually limitless. Doctors at the Angers University Hospital in western France have used a VR headset to map a patient's brain during surgery, removing the tumor late last month.

During the procedure, the patient was concious, with doctors using the virtual environment to map zones of the brain. Up until now, mappning and monitoring neural connections in certain areas of the brain wasn't easily done, especially in the operating room. Neurosurgeon Philippe Menei explains: "By totally controlling what the patient sees and hears, we can put him in situations that allow us to do tests on certain connections that were not possible before".

In this procedure, doctors needed to monitor the patient's vision carefully, as the tumor had spread to one eye. In order to know what was going on with the reactions in the brain, the surgical team created a VR environment without a single point of focus. Instead, they employed "luminous objects" in the patient's peripheral vision. These results were positive, as the patient's sight remains intact post-op, considering where the tumor was. Doctors are now planning to use the setup for future cases that are similar, where they're impacting the region of the brain that controls sight.

Theatrical ticket provider Fandango has just acquired Rotten Tomatoes and Flixster, which were both owned by Warner Bros. Entertainment, for an undisclosed sum of money.

Warner Bros. has secured itself a minority ownership in Fandango, and will continue to serve as an ongoing strategic partner. Warner Bros. said that both Flixster and Rotten Tomatoes receive around 20 million unique hits per month, but with Fandango's magic and combined audience, it projects these numbers to grow to over 63 million per month. Fandango and Flixster's mobile apps have been downloaded over 100 million times, according to Warner Bros.

Fandango President Paul Yanover said that Rotten Tomatoes and Flixster were invaluable resources for movie fans, and they look forward to seeing their new acquisitions grow. The company wants to increase theatrical ticketing and super-serving consumers with all of their movie needs, with both sites continuing as consumer-facing brands. Fandango will however add its ticketing capabilities to the Flixster app in the coming months.

Yesterday, Apple CEO Tim Cook published an open letter to the company's customers, explaining why Apple feels so strongly about supporting one's right to data encryption and privacy. Shortly afterward, Google CEO Sundar Pichai chimed in on Twitter, describing the letter as "important" before siding with Cook.

"Forcing companies to enable hacking could compromise users' privacy," he writes. "We know that law enforcement and intelligence agencies face significant challenges in protecting the public against crime and terrorism. We build secure products to keep your information safe and we give law enforcement access to data based on valid legal orders, but that's wholly different than requiring companies to enable hacking of customer devices & data. Could be a troubling precedent. [I'm] looking forward to a thoughtful and open discussion on this important issue."

With the Game Developers Conference less than a month away, I've been wondering when the GPU hype train would begin from both AMD and NVIDIA regarding their next-gen GPU technology. Well, AMD just fired the first shots, with AMD Marketing Director Chris Hook taking to Twitter, teasing Polaris.

Hook tweeted to Raja Koduri, boss of AMD's newly-formed Radeon Technologies Group: "Someone told me GDC is looking kind of bland this year. I think we need some Capsaicin to spice things up a bit.....". We know that this is code for Polaris, with Koduri tweeting back to AnandTech's Ryan Smith, and Hook: "no worries Ryan - we will make it interesting for everyone".

Last year, NVIDIA unveiled its behemoth at GDC - with the GeForce GTX Titan X being revealed at the Game Developers Conference in March 2015. This year, we should expect both sides to be firing shots constantly - with NVIDIA poised to unveil its Pascal-based Titan X successor at GDC, or a few weeks later at its own GPU Technology Conference (GTC).

Yesterday we reported India was getting a new $4 smartphone dubbed the Freedom 251. With a price that low, naturally, concerns have arisen over its quality and sourcing.

Turns out Ringing Bells -- the company behind the phone -- is expecting to get lot of breaks, allowing it to cut costs now in anticipation of future savings. Bells is expecting state governments to waive duty fees, with more waived through the Make in India initiative (amusingly, the phones will be 70 percent made in Taiwan) and startup schemes. Finally, they say the remaining cost reductions will be made through 'economies of scale.'

Without these breaks, they claim the phone would cost anywhere from $36 to $43. So why not do that anyway? Marketing. The idea is to sell the 251 on the cheap in order to make its new brand famous (and it's sure working so far), then use that fame to sell future higher-priced models. Keep in mind it plans to sell only about 200,000 phones at the $4 price. The scheme worked for Datawind, who manufactured the aforementioned tablet -- no doubt Ringing Bells is following their lead.

In an interview with 20 Minuten, John Romero revealed that he's working on a new FPS game, but of course he didn't want to give any details away quite yet.

While at the Zürich Game Festival, Ludicious, John Romero was asked about what game designers and developers, such as him, do when they become a bit older and more wise with experience. Of course he opened up a school to help teach prospective students the need for good level design, he also, surprisingly, opened up and confirmed that he's working on a new project. An as of yet unnamed FPS that has no details. I am currently also working on a new FPS, Romero said.

The new level he created for Doom might have just been a warm-up for his new project, or projects, that he's working on. The veteran game designer knows the intricacies of what a good game is, and hopefully whatever he churns out follows the same principles as some of his more successful titles, and not that of Daikatana.

VR has lot of possibilities, and can help us experience things we never could, like actually engaging in pitched sword-fights in the tight confines of a dungeon. This trailer for A Legend of Luca shows us precisely why that would be a great game idea. Just imagine using an actual (though not sharp or dangerous) sword-like controller to swing and destroy your enemies?

This FPS is inspired by The Legend of Zelda and takes the dungeon crawling aspect and puts you square in the middle of it. Smash through your enemies, shoot lighting from your sword and bash those pots to find precious Rupees.

The game will be available on Steam on April 29th and makes use of the HTC Vive's ability to let you use an entire room. There're multiple rooms that you can wander around in with smooth transitions so you don't end up walking into a wall. How they're doing that is likely a procedural technological marvel. Multiple weapon types will make their way into the game, potentially even with dual-wield capabilities. Earlier videos showed the use of a staff, while this lets you slash your enemies to bits with a lightning shooting sword.

So what exactly goes on at Area 51 in the Nevada desert these days? Well, we're no closer to the truth, but thanks to one incredibly ballsy drone pilot, we've got some new views over some of the world's most restricted airspace.

Pilot Hans Faulkner sent his drone up over a number of locations at the secretive base, North West Gate, and the Groom Lake from South Gate - a historically significant site which served as the airspace for some of the experimental aircraft and which the pilot uploaded to his YouTube channel.

Faulkner described the spot as "very difficult to move around" and that "white trucks follow us and hide when we record them". My hat's off to you, Hans.