Latest News - Page 2525

Yahoo and ESL announced a partnership recently, with Yahoo promising to deliver eSports content to the globe on new gaming tournaments conducted by the world's largest eSports company.

This partnership kicked off at the recent Intel Extreme Masters competition in Katowice on March 4th to 6th, seeing Yahoo "provide ESL's audience a world class viewing experience, delivering HD video quality with its video technology that live streamed the NFL to over 15 million people around the world last October."

While Yahoo is said to be currently searching for a buyer, it seems that there are no plans to stop expansion.

It seems that the lead designer of Star Wars Battlefront, Dennis Brännvall, gave into his anger on Twitter after someone told him that he, and his development team, were lazy.

The Twitter comments come after a fan asked why Greedo and Nien Nunb were the two new hero characters in the upcoming Outer Rim expansion pack when those particular species that they represent are already playable. The designer replied that it would be a waste to not include those characters in the game, despite others thinking it might be an "easy" addition to the game, considering the models are already in the game.

Brännvall promptly apologized for his behavior, but his comments and the negative reaction from the community do highlight the disconnect between how we perceive game development to go, and how difficult it actually is. Making any asset in-game, regardless of whether the base model and textures already exist, isn't easy. Even though us gamers might be a bit salty regarding the staying power of Battlefront, the art and graphics are nothing short of stunning. It takes a lot of work to make it look that good. A lot.

One of the quickest ways to hardware failure is running your system incredibly hot, sitting up there with rubbing your motherboard on the carpet or putting your video card through the washing machine.

Investing in a good heat sink or cooling fan is something that Reddit user 'ghalfacree' has suggested, sporting a thermal image of his Raspberry Pi 3 running at a scorching 100 degrees celsius, thanks to the help of thermal imagery.

While sitting at triple digit temperature isn't exactly common, this test was conducted on an open board under full load, causing concern for those who are straining theirRaspberry Pi 3 while contained in a small case or custom chassis. Ghalfacree's solution is a cute little fan, ensuring that his miniature pride and joy computer doesn't melt away.

Rising Storm 2: Vietnam's gameplay trailer is full of all of the cliche's you'd expect, but it's also a game that covers an often overlooked and ignored segment of our history.

Despite being in an alpha state, the look and feel, at the very least, looks accurate enough despite the overly played-out cliche's with music and actions. But it does look pretty good as far as a shooter goes. If it's more of an open-world type single-player experience, letting you use the jungle to your own advantage, then that might be compelling to take a look.

The game is coming out sometime this year without a concrete release date. If the trailer is anything to go by, then we're in for a treat. War games tend to center around the modern, future or WWII, and that's it. It's nice to see someone branch out and add to the small collection of Vietnam-era games.

If you've been casually following the various Raspberry Pi releases like myself, it's likely you have little to no idea what other mini ARM boards there are on the market.

Thankfully Phoronix has published a quick wrap-up and some benchmarks of competing boards compared to the well-known Raspberry Pi 3. Coming in hot and topping the list was the ODROID-C2, labeled as costing "just a few dollars more ($40 USD) while having a faster SoC and other advantages."

The claimed advantages of this product include a 64-bit quad-core SBC, backed by the Amlogic S905 which comes in at 2GHz with four Cortex-154 cores, paired with 2GB of DDR3 SDRAM and a Mali 450 GPU. Connection options include Gigabit Ethernet, HDMI 2.0 and full support for Android and Ubuntu, all wrapped up in a $40 asking price.

The Coalition is hard at work, with the help of AMD, in fixing Gears of War: Ultimate Edition on the PC. One of the first items up for business that they want to add in is multi-GPU support, so you can strive for even more performance once the rest of the fixes come along.

Just recently they introduced a fix to the issues that caused graphics corruption to be prevalent with AMD GPU's as well as being one of the major causes of the performance issues that AMD users were seeing.

That last part of his tweet refers to how the game doesn't really have a true unlocked framerate as of yet. If you turn off v-sync, it'll run only up to your monitors refresh rate, which is likely 60Hz for the majority of gamers. They are being quite open about the issues they're working on despite the fact that those issues shouldn't even be there to begin with.

Released as a new line of products, EK Water Blocks has announced its P series of liquid cooling kits to the public in a recent press release.

Made up of EK-KIT P240, EK-KIT P280 and EK-KIT P360 models, these three new additions offer various components and specialty features. The press release mentioned that "All P kits can be expanded with additional GPU water blocks and with VR boom just around the corner," meaning that consumers will need to keep an eye on future releases.

All kits contain 40mm thick radiators with double stack copper fins for extra surface area and cooling performance, with the P240 coming backed with two 120mm Vardar fans, the P280 with two 140mm fans and the P360 packing three 120mm fans of its own. All three kits also contain an Ek-Supremacy EVO universal CPU water block. For further insight into exactly what each kit contains, check out the image below.

According to an article published by Silicon Valley analyst Andrew Chen, most people are the same as me - they install an app, and most of the time they don't use it after a few days.

Chen reports that an average app loses 77% of its users within 72 hours, and after a month, 90% of them stop using the app altogether. After the 3-month mark, just 5% continue to use the app. These figures would strike directly into the hearts of app creators as their biggest hurdle is getting users to continue using their apps - not just past the 3-month/90-day mark, but.. well... forever.

The data used was from over 125 million smartphones, with the apps in his report available from the Google Play Store, with each app having over 10,000 downloads. Chen didn't use any Google apps for the study, either.

The latest Tomb Raider games have been received incredibly well with gamers, with Rise of the Tomb Raider doing better on the PC than consoles - but did you know there's a new Tomb Raider movie on the way? Yeah, and it's a reboot from the Angelina Jolie movies from years ago.

Norwegian director Roar Uthaug is directing the new Tomb Raider movie reboot, with Transformer 5 writer Geneva Robertson-Dworet handling the script. Uthaug confirmed that the reboot of Tomb Raider will be an origin story, similar to the reboot of the game in 2013. He was asked if the new series of games would be an influence on the movie reboot, to which Uthaug praised Crystal Dynamics' ability to make Lara Croft a relatable character.

Uthaug said that the developer's take on Lara Croft will influence his movie, and that he will be taking a similar approach in his movie. Uthaug said: "I think making Lara Croft feel like a real human being, that's definitely something we want to bring to the big screen as well. I think we'll want to make people relate to Lara as a character. I'm hoping to bring some of my Norwegian sensibilities to the franchise".

Ubisoft has outlined its plan for DLC for The Division, with two free upgrades to hit gamers quite early. The first will be a team-based endgame mode (Incursions) which will drop in April, while in May we'll receive the Conflict update which will include the Columbus Circle event and a new Dark Zone feature.

Then the paid DLC will arrive in June, where we'll get battles in NYC underground tunnels, a new Survival expansion in the summer, and then a Last Stand scenario in the winter. At the same time, Ubisoft will bust out new missions daily and weekly, as well as periodic Dark Zone events. The developer notes that you can buy either the Season Pass, or one of the deluxe versions of the game (Gold or Collector's Edition), so that you'll receive as much The Division content as possible.

The Division launches on March 8 (wwhhhaaattt, so soon now) on the Xbox One, PS4 and PC.

For what feels like forever, Windows users have been at the butt of attacks from Mac users when it comes to "but Windows is open, and gets hit by viruses, malware, and ransomware all the time". Well, that might be something of the past now.

Palo Alto Networks is claiming it's discovered the first known OS X-based ransomware, known as "KeRanger". How do you get it? You download software infected with the nasty code, with BitTorrent client Transmission, where it will encrypt your files after 72 hours, after which it'll demand that you hand over digital currency ransom to get your files back. Nice.

The latest version of Transmission, alongside Apple revoking a security certificate from another developer that KeRanger used to get past OS X's built-in defenses, should keep you safe. But, this should act as a warning: OS X isn't as safe as most people think it is, and this could be the tip of the iceberg in the months, and years to come.

The new Hitman launches on March 11, with the developer teasing that it will support DirectX 12 at launch - which is awesome. The news arrived from the PC Gamer Weekender event that took place over the weekend.

With Hitman having support for DX12, we can expect to see better performance, mostly thanks to the improved multithreaded support, and increased performance for CPU-bound instructions. PC Gamer's slide image said that DX12 will provide Hitman with:

To celebrate this week's release of 'Spectre' on Blu-ray HD and DVD, we have ten Blu-ray prize packs to give away thanks to our friends at 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment.

A cryptic message from the past sends James Bond on a rogue mission to Mexico City and eventually Rome, where he meets Lucia Sciarra (Monica Bellucci), the beautiful and forbidden widow of an infamous criminal. Bond infiltrates a secret meeting and uncovers the existence of the sinister organisation known as Spectre. Meanwhile back in London, Max Denbigh (Andrew Scott), the new head of the Centre for National Security, questions Bond's actions and challenges the relevance of MI6, led by M (Ralph Fiennes). Bond covertly enlists Moneypenny (Naomie Harris) and Q (Ben Whishaw) to help him seek out Madeleine Swann (Léa Seydoux), the daughter of his old nemesis Mr White (Jesper Christensen), who may hold the clue to untangling the web of Spectre. As Bond ventures towards the heart of Spectre, he learns of a chilling connection between himself and the enemy he seeks.

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

The State of the Internet report has been released for the fourth quarter of 2015 and it highlights some of the more malicious trends coming from across the Internet. The short of it is, the volume of attacks against websites has increased through nearly every avenue than compared to the third quarter.

DDoS's in particular have seen quite the massive increase since last quarter, with a 148.85% increase in overall occurrences. The bright side is that duration seems to have been shortened, probably due to the pay-per-play nature of the services that seem to be the most used. But that didn't stop those sites from being targeted multiple times, up to 24 times in some cases. The good news is that the actual number of packets sent was lower. How very nice of these attackers.

Size of attacks seemed to be below 30Mbps, with only four that exceeded that amount and two that peaked even higher. The biggest were at around 309Gpps with 202Mpps (packets per second).That's actually a small decline in the number of big attacks, but 44.44%. But the interesting part is that the majority of attacks, some 54.45% of all the DDoS activity was focused on the gaming sector. People are getting more and more mad during and after online matches, preventing people, servers and games themselves from working right. Not to mention the massive attack on Xbox Live and the PlayStation Network.

AMD has already teased that it will "spice things up" at the Game Developers Conference next week, but what has me excited is the promise of next-gen, ultra-thin gaming notebooks.

During an AMA on Reddit, AMD's Robert Hallock said: "Ultra-thin notebooks are awesome to carry, but nobody in their right mind would confuse one for a gaming notebook. But there's still a HUGE appetite for thin notebooks that can game. I also bet there's a bunch of gamers out there who, as they get into their 30s and 40s, wouldn't mind condensing their entire computing life down into one device that does it all... External GPUs are the answer. External GPUs with standardised connectors, cables, drivers, plug'n'play, OS support, etc".

The ultra-thin gaming notebooks should be powered by Thunderbolt 3 connectivity, which boasts up to 40Gbps of bandwidth. We've recently seen Razer tease its Core GPU enclosure, which offers its Blade Stealth gaming notebook an external GPU enclosure, super-powering your portable gaming experience. We should see AMD unveil something awesome at GDC 2016 next week in San Francisco.

The Witcher series of games have been widely successful on both the PC and various consoles over the years, but during a recent interview with CD Projekt Red (the developer behind The Witcher series), we've found out that the PC is the lead platform when it comes to sales.

CD Projekt Red's Marcin Iwinski explained during the interview: "Consoles began for real with PS2 from Sony, and then with X360. PS wasn't available for everyone. It was an expensive toy with expensive games. I was already distributing games at that time and I remember what was the expenditure for video games. PS was available for more affluent people and PS2 was available for the masses and started to develop this market. However, the PC still holds strong. Most of The Witcher sales are for the PC, though consoles started selling very well".

The Coalition and Microsoft have found themselves in a pretty insane position right now, launching Gears of War: Ultimate Edition onto the Windows Store. Windows Store-based games do not feature multi-GPU support, so with it being a DX12-powered game - those high-end GPUs in SLI or Crossfire are wasted on GoW: Ultimate Edition... for now.

According to Rod Fergusson, Studio Head of The Coalition, the developer is working on multi-GPU support. Fergusson fielded some questions on Twitter, where he said: "Microsoft working on multi-GPU and if you unlock framerate it runs at monitor framerate so may need to bump it up".

As for the general performance and stability of Gears of War: Ultimate Edition on the PC, PezRader from The Coalition has said: "We do not have any news to share at this time for the PC version. I know some are worried but please don't fret. We are wanting to make sure polish and performance are prioritized on the PC version so that you all have a great experience".

Capcom is as tired of rage-quitters as you are, and they're going to implement some keen punishment for those that take advantage of the ability to quit mid-match in Street Fighter V.

The problem is that the system is far too lenient for those that wish to simply quit as opposed to suffer a loss. But Capcom will start resetting League Points, and thus their rank, for those players that tend to quit more than others after each week is up. And they have a lot of data points to work with to help make a permanent, automated solution to this. That permanent solution still hasn't been implemented, though.

To get to this point they've asked players from around the world to submit video, and other, proof to help them determine the when rage-quitters are at their worst, and cross-reference that with internal data so they can compile their solution. They want those occasional quitters to know that it's okay to be mad once in awhile, that they're targeting the absolute worst offenders of the lot. "The players who fit the criteria of what we would call a "Rage Quitter" typically have an 80-90% disconnect rate and their accounts sit far outside of the norm as compared to the majority of other players."

Keanu Reeves is currently training for John Wick: Chapter Two, where a new video has emerged of him "shedding" - or training with guns - with Taran Tactical.

Taran Tactical Innovations took to Facebook, explaining: "Well ladies and gents, everyone loves a little shredding. Make sure you guys check out 'John Wick II' when it hits theaters. The firearms action alone will be unlike anything you've ever seen. So much of it is revolutionary stuff that we gun owners have known of for years but never made it to the big screen".

It looks like Neo didn't die in The Matrix Revolutions, he just turned into Keanu Reeves and starting making movies as Reeves. Check out John Wick: Chapter Two when it's released next year.

We all know how powerful Netflix is, but what kind of impression is it leaving against the traditional TV market? Well, Netflix is really cutting into traditional TV ratings, and that's both a good, and bad thing.

In 2015 alone, Netflix accounted for around 50% of the 3% decline in TV viewing in the US, according to a new study by Michael Nathanson of MoffettNathanson. Nathanson calculated that based on an estimate of Netflix's domestic subscribers, who streamed a huge 29 billion hours of video in 2015 - and worldwide, Netflix members streamed a huge 42.5 billion hours of content. With 29 billion hours of video streamed, it represents 6% of total American live-plus-7 TV viewing reported by Nielsen (up from 4.4% in 2014).

Nathanson continued in his report, adding that he predicts Netflix's total streaming hours as a percentage of TV viewing will increase - where in 2020 it should be hitting around 14%, he noted: "Currently, Netflix is a source of industry pain, but not necessarily a cause of industry death".