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We've seen developers remake classic scenes from Zelda: Ocarina of Time and even Mario has gotten an Unreal Engine 4 makeover, but what about bigger projects? What about, say, the entirety of BioWare's hugely lauded Star Wars RPG, Knights of the Old Republic? That's right, Kotor is getting recreated in UE4.

The Kotor restoration project is called Knights of the Old Republic: Apeiron, and the devs describe it as a "remake and remastering of the original game with added content, new world's, missions, HUD, inventory, items, and companions".

Kotor: Apeiron will be completely free--it has to be considering the copyright laws--and it's being built by a dedicated group of fans in conjunction with the devs at Poem Studios. So far, progress on the remake has been slow-going, but the team has ported over two locations including the Endar Spire and Tattooine. Although the screenshots are pre-alpha snaps, they look quite good, and I can't wait to see the finished product.

Despite having a net worth of $100 million and his wife Kim Kardashian worth $85 million, Kanye West has cried poor to his 19 million Twitter followers, claiming he's $53 million dollars in debt. And now he's reaching out to Facebook founder Mark Zuckerbrg for a $1 billion lifeline.

In a flurry of tweets over the last 24 hours, West has proclaimed that "one of the coolest things you [Zuckerberg] could ever do is to help me in my time of need", before following up a few hours later with "Yes I am personally rich and I can buy furs and houses for my family". Unsympathetic Twitter users have unsurprisingly mocked the eccentric performer, including calls for him to "log off" and others suggesting he take out a small Kardashian loan.

While Zuckerberg doesn't have a Twitter account, I'm sure the news of West's investment proposal has reached him, although he hasn't yet responded. I'm not sure West should hold his breath. Despite his current money troubles, West's latest album 'Pitchfork' is due to be released within the next few days.

The Australian Xbox Store seems to have let loose a little bonus for those looking to order Dark Souls 3 on the Xbox One. It looks like you'll get a free digital code for the original Dark Souls that'll work with the backwards compatibility feature of the Xbone.

This deal seems to be a limited time offer and only available in Australia at the moment, though it's likely we'll see the deal, if it's real, extend to other regions as well. Once ordered, you'll receive a digital code within 7-10 days. This particular bundle, or any other versions or special editions for that matter, have been officially announced by Bandai Namco just yet. They have also yet to announce any season pass details either.

It's fantastic that such a great game is potentially gaining backwards compatibility, and it's a bit surprising given we haven't quite heard anything about it through the grapevine. More games in the library just add more potential value for those that still have the physical Xbox 360 discs or have that digital download available yet not able to find a home on your shiny new Xbox One. Of course, Dark Souls is available on the PC in a slightly visually upgraded version that runs well on a good deal of hardware.

Concept art is magical. It's a portal to a world that we don't always get to see represented in the final cut. The art is meant to be a guide, a forerunner with rough edges that conveys an idea or scene. But I for one like to venture into the vivid fantasy-scapes and revel in their imaginative beauty. A lot of the time, the concept art is more powerful and resonant than the finished product, especially when it comes to video game art.

Today I'll take you on a journey to some of my favorite pieces of video game concept art. We'll venture across time and space to discover the blueprints to some of the most iconic games of our era, from BioWare RPG's to timeless Final Fantasy masterpieces and the mysterious Forerunner constructs of the Halo universe.

We won't go too far, though--it's all to easy to get lost in the maze of wonder. Each section will have a brief introduction followed by a myriad of artwork, so be sure to keep scrolling if you want to see it all. Let's start the visual feast with the space-age techno wonders of Mass Effect, shall we?

Some of you will remember the ThingMaker, a 60s Mattel product that saw you pouring liquid plastic into metal molds to create crude toys. In a clever move, Mattel is bringing the ThingMaker back as a 3D printing device.

The updated device works in tandem with either an iOS or Android app, wherein you design figurines, jewelry and the like, then send them wirelessly to the ThingMaker, at which point it makes a thing. The app includes basic blueprints, and new parts for existing designs can be printed. Mattel says integrating brands like Barbie and Hot Wheels into the app is part of its longer term strategy.

Safety is of course a concern, and Mattel has handled it by implementing doors that automatically lock when the printer is in use, and making the printing head retracts out of reach when it's not doing its thing, preventing kids from touching it.

Even with no official release date in sight for Mass Effect: Andromeda, a new job listing confirms BioWare is already setting up development on a fresh new IP with an emphasis on online play.

BioWare Austin's new job listing calls for a server engineer to lead the team that creates the backend system to power an "exciting, new unannounced IP". The listing directly references that the candidate should have experience developing games with "extensive online components" and cloud-based computing, hinting the new IP could be a MMO.

"BioWare is seeking a qualified Senior Lead Server Engineer for a new, unannounced BioWare IP. This role will direct a team of software engineers to create the backend systems that will drive online play for this exciting new game. The successful candidate will have expert knowledge of and experience in the design, implementation, and continuing support of large scale real-time client/server applications using primarily C++. Extensive experience with and knowledge of multi-tier client/server architectures as well as scalable distributed systems are required. Experience developing PC or console games with significant online elements is a strong plus. Experience with current cloud-based computing solutions and technology is beneficial."

SteamOS already has a very large, and growing, library of compatible games. They might not exactly perform up to the same standards of performance as their Windows, and DirectX running, counterparts but support is blooming. And that catalog is about to increase by one incredible fighting game, Street Fighter V.

Capcom has released a little tidbit of information on their Steam news page letting fans know that a SteamOS is indeed in the works, and they don't plan on abandoning it like WB Games did for Batman: Arkham Knight, either.

According to the news post, it'll be a free update for existing owners and should be coming sometime this Spring. That means that if you own it, you can play it on the growing platform if you so choose. And with the final iteration of Vulkan quickly approaching release, we might even see them enable that in the Linux-based version as well.

id Software's new Doom reboot is an authentic return to the visceral, heart-pumping chaos that birthed the FPS genre. But what about the singleplayer campaign's length? Will gamers be able to lose themselves in the hallowed, maze-like halls of Hell again, or will the action be over with as quick as it started?

According to id, players will have plenty of time to digest the delicious demonic chaos that Doom has to offer, and you won't have to worry about a super short campaign. "The difficulty level plays a factor, but folks playing at the office average 13+ hours in the campaign," reads an official Tweet from the devs.

Thirteen hours sounds pretty good in itself, but we have to remember that the devs have spent months and months playing the game. Given all that testing, it's fair to assume id has become pretty badass at slaughtering monstrosities, meaning average joes will enjoy an even longer campaign. Don't forget that you can create your own mini campaign missions with Doom's in-game editor.

It's a problem with all turn-based strategy games that have this much data being processed per turn. It's not related to the graphics (though we do wish they were slightly better here), but it's common and it's annoying. The delay that happens deep into a very tough and demanding mission when you relinquish your turn to the evil alien overlords. It's slow, incredibly so, but there's a way to speed things up with a new community made mod called "Stop Wasting my Time."

This mod can't quite speed up those calculations, but it can remove some unnecessary pauses that occur at some points throughout the game, which ends up shaving off a significant amount of time, time that could otherwise be spent looking at the overview with a sad look on your face as you're confronted with nearly impossible odds, a small tear escaping down your cheek.

There are some pauses that can't be removed by modding, but everything else that can be, has been. In the latest iteration even removes some voiceovers that pause the game, telling you things you likely already know anyway. They also speed up unit movement by 20%, which is enough to keep things immersive and just short of Sonic the Hedgehog speeds. The full changes and what the mod does are listed in pretty bullet form below.

Microsoft has just unveiled the Lumia 650, a mid-range sibling to the beefier Lumia 950 and 950XL flagship. According to Redmond, the $199 handset is built for productivity and brings "first class to business class".

The Lumia 650 is powered by Windows 10 and aimed at the enterprise sector. The phone runs the latest Microsoft Office apps and services like Word, PowerPoint, Excel, and OneNote right out of the box, all of which are fully optimized for mobile touch-screen interfaces. As such, the Lumia 650 is touted to "work seamlessly with your company's Microsoft IT platforms". The sleek handset also features targeted security measures like full encryption and one-click memory wiping.

As the new Lumia is a mid-range device, specs are rather light. The phone's 5-inch OLED screen isn't even full HD, clocking in at 1280x720 resolution, and is set in a metal frame embodied in the device's 6.9mm thin design. It rocks a meager 16GB of onboard memory that's expandable to up to 200GB via MicroSD, a Quad-core 1.3 GHz Snapdragon 212 processor, and just 1GB of RAM.

Yesterday we reported that it was likely that Crash Bandicoot would finally be revived after a long hiatus from his preferred platform. He hasn't even called us to let us know he's okay. A comment was made at the New York Toy Faire by the president of NECA about making toys based on the mischievous bandicoot, but that comment was apparently not actually true, and was misunderstood.

NECA isn't making any toys on the famous character, at least they aren't anytime in the near future. A representative of the company reached out to GameSpot to tell them that otherwise. "It's not the case," the rep from NECA said. "Someone has misunderstood a comment he made. Randy saw a faked fan-made image right before he came to the show and said that if the game were coming back, we'd love to do figures."

So while the rumor isn't true, it doesn't mean it's completely out of the question. Even the PlayStation Mid East Twitter account is excited for the franchise and wants it back, and the tweet from them might be a sign that ideas are at least being thrown around at high-levels to make it a reality. It's unfortunate that a fan-made UE 4 game hasn't been released yet.

Thanks to a recent nation-wide outage, Telstra offered its mobile customers a free data Sunday promotion, seeing those from The Land Down Under take full advantage of this offering.

In total, it is explained that Australians downloaded a massive 1841 terabytes, something that News.com.au explained as 5.1 million Game of Thrones episodes.

With the majority of this data being downloaded over 4G connections, Telstra group managing director of networks, Mike Wright, explained that "Over the course of the day we had twice as much traffic as we would normally see on a Sunday (or any day)," further stating that "We hope it helps make up for some of the inconvenience we caused."

RFID is a cheap and convenient way to communicate information between devices. The problem is that it's also incredible insecure, and easily hacked by a number of ways. But researchers from Texas Instruments and MIT have come together to make a chip that won't be so easy to steal information from.

The implications for such a development are tremendous, with the idea that the public will finally start to trust the technology for more applications. Specifically they're being designed to be nearly impervious to a common attack on RFID devices, the side-channel attack. Those work by analyzing actual power fluctuations or memory access patterns in order to determine what the cryptographic key is, to break in and steal your precious information.

The new chip doesn't prevent the reading of those physical properties, because that would mean it doesn't work at all, but instead uses a a special ferroelectric crystal material that can self-power the chip, and store small amounts of information, to prevent people from cutting the power right before a cryptographic key exchange, which can reveal that key if done properly and the right equipment and software. They'll also incorporate a random number generator on-board to use a new secret key for each transaction, meaning that each one is completely unique, and thus far safer and more secure than ever before.

Apple has decided to reaffirm its global technology presence recently, with a podcast including executives Craig Federighi and Eddy Cue explaining of Apple's large and growing userbase in Apple music and iCloud services.

With Apple music sitting at 11 million subscribers, this can be compared to Spotify's recent data (from June 2015) stating that it has 20 million paying subscribers in total. While Spotify currently sits ahead, ZDNet explains that it took Spotify six years to reach the 11 million subscriber milestone, with Apple doing this in a fraction of that time.

As for iCloud users, it is claimed that there are a massive 782 million total worldwide. This impressive number sits alongside crazy data like the fact that 200,000 iMessages are sent every second and there are 750 million transactions weekly on iTunes and the App Store.

Any blossoming action RPG in development, such as Exoplanet: First Contact, is going to want to have a wide variety of different set pieces to keep you interested, and to help you suspend your believe that you're in some far off land. Wildlife, pets, livestock and creatures in general, especially in a far off star system, are just as important as the landscape to make it a unique and ultimately fun experience. Moving battle fortresses make it that much more fantastic, because who wouldn't want to train one to walk around like a sail barge in the desolate landscape.

Moving battle fortresses make it that much more fantastic, because who wouldn't want to train one to walk around like a sail barge in the desolate landscape. But the real reason why they're being added to the game is due to the desolate frontier that you'll be exploring. Fuel is an expensive commodity, one that costs far more than the grass upon which this delightful herbivore would nom upon. Meaning it's easier and cheaper, and better, to get around on the back of a massive creature than in the relative comfort of a small ship.

The idea is only in the planning stages, but the possibility of having a customization mount (akin to ARK perhaps, but better) could easily come to fruition here. Nurture your mount from a wee babe and then equip specially crafted armor, weapon mounts and even prison modules, or others, to customize it for your occupation of choice. What a way to get around, even if it's slightly slower than zipping along at high-speed in an covered, craft.

Backed by the statement that "Women disproportionately make contributions that projects need more urgently," a study conducted by Cal Poly and the North Carolina State University concluded that women make better coders than men, as seen on Gizmodo.

This paper is reportedly still waiting for its peer review process so all statement may be taken with a grain of salt. However, the findings are still quite interesting. Utilizing the data taken from 4 million GitHub users, the researchers then narrowed it down to 1.4 million users (the ones they were able to figure out the gender of) and discovered that code by women is more likely to be utilised compared to male coding - showing a 78.6 percent pull request rating compared to the male figure of 74.6 percent.

Using this newfound data and further research which is linked below, the paper concluded that "Women have a higher acceptance rate of pull requests overall, but when they're outsiders and their gender is identifiable, they have a lower acceptance rate than men," further stating "Our results suggest that although women on Github may be more competent overall, bias against them exists nonetheless."

It's not unusual these days to find evidence of new world's hanging out beyond our solar-system. The original Kepler project found thousands of candidates that are still being confirmed as potential exo-planets. But finding nearly visible evidence of a planet being formed in the presence of the harsh conditions of a binary star system? That doesn't come along every day.

Just 450 light-years away, shining brightly in the constellation Taurus, the HD 132527 star system just birthed a new planet, and it's been caught in some stunning high-resolution photos from both the Hubble telescope in the past and now from the Atcama Large Millimeter/sub-millimeter Array (ALMA) by researchers at Rice University. This is the first time we've ever had clear evidence of what planet formation actually looks like.

There's a tremendous amount of detail being recorded right now by the ALMA array, and it shows dust and gases coming together to actually make a planet. In the photo above, the bright red is where there's the most dust and where carbon monoxide is appearing. That gas is freezing inside the dust, clumping together to form solid rock formations that seem to be sticking together, making an even larger object.

As announced recently on the official Apple website, this technology giant will be replacing defective USB Type-C cables bundled with its latest MacBook Pro models, further covering standalone chargers bought as accessories.

The replacement process suggests that users head straight into an Apple Retail Store after booking a reservation, seemingly replacing dodgy chargers on the spot.

As seen above, the new cable will look basically identical to the previous edition, with the difference being a new serial number placed after the Apple design and manufacturer statements.

Hideo Kojima approached the Gears of War Creator, Cliff Bleszinski, regarding a partnership in a new type of Silent Hill, one that could potentially be something unique and a return to something fascinating for the series. But good ol' Cliff just didn't want to do it. But at least his reasons are sound, and surprisingly responsible.

I don't think that anyone can blame him for not enjoying LA, it's a place that you either love or harbor deep hate for. And of course he's working on his own new IP which is something that he most definitely won't want to just walk away from, or even delay. And because of the special nature of Silent Hill, he doesn't want to ruin it either.

That's a very responsible thing for anyone to say. Some directors or producers would be absolutely thrilled to be able to work on such an IP, adding their own vision to something that could harm fans perception of it and potentially desecrating a sacred franchise already marred with sub-par impressions.

In somewhat of an anti-Easter Egg finding, recent reports have shown that setting the date on your iPhone 5s (or newer) to Janurary 1, 1970 will ensure the device becomes quite useless.

There have recently been some images circulating on the internet saying that setting your phone to this date will ensure a fresh old school Apple logo will be displayed. This is a lie and setting your iPhone's date to 1970 will make sure that your device is unusable - being bricked without repair.

There's currently no fix for this issue, the easiest way to keep your iPhone working is by simply not changing the date.