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The whole premise of Roller Coaster Tycoon World is making some of the craziest and most unusual rides that you've ever seenm

Roller Coaster Tycoon World has some very big shoes to fill since it's the first PC game of the franchise in nearly a decade. And with the advent of the Steam Workshop and the big focus on modding in the PC community with a lot of other games this could be the perfect platform to show Atari's attention to the PC crowd again. The beta tests have provided some invaluable insight into what fans want, and one of those is user-generated-content. Being able to take an insanely over-engineered masterpiece and slap it into your own park.

This UGC functionality is Atari's answer to a new generation of Roller Coaster Tycoon players on the PC that have embraced this personalization and want ways to truly customize content on their own. It integrates directly with Steam Workshop and lets anyone decorate and plan the best-looking park you've ever dreamed of. You may not have the time it takes to make some of the more complex rides, and we expect people to be very imaginative with their creations, so why not be able to share what you've made and use other's to make your park unique among all others. This is a great development, and it does show their commitment to making PC gaming a priority for Atari.

First we saw Coca-Cola convert 12-pack cartons into DIY virtual reality headsets, now the fast-food moguls at McDonald's are doing the same thing with their Happy Meals.

Big Macs and golden arches may be the furthest thing from your mind when you think about VR, but for a limited time, McDonald's is transforming its legendary Happy Meals into a Google Cardboard-style VR HMD. The kit, called Happy Googles, folds together to make an enclosure to slide in your mobile phone, and comes with a lens pack to simulate VR.

Unfortunately, Happy Googles may not see a widespread roll-out. McDonald's plans to ship some 3,500 units in Sweden later this month to accompany the country's "Sportlov" holiday, and a special VR skiing game will be released as well. If things go well in Sweden, we could see the kits ship overseas.

Torn Banner Studios, the folks behind Chivalry: Medieval Warfare are hard at work on their next game, and it looks like it'll take the multiplayer warfare madness from their first game and morph it into an enchanted adventure.

It's short, and the full teaser won't be until next week, but what we're shown is a fast-paced and bloody, combat-centric multiplayer game rendered in Unreal Engine 4. They want to branch into the high-fantasy realm and the magical effects look pretty dazzling so far. We can't wait to see the official reveal coming up on March 9th.

If it's anything like Medieval Warfare, then we're bound to have an interactive and unique online game That is, if the underlying community doesn't become toxic and ruin the experience for those just wishing to have fun.

I've always thought that crossbows fit extremely well into the Fallout universe, and was super bummed when Bethesda didn't add them into Fallout 4. Luckily modders once again have our collective backs, and now we can channel Daryl Dixon's deadly arrow-slinging prowess in the wasteland.

Crossbows of the Commonwealth introduces actual working bolt-shooting crossbows into Fallout 4, meeting a very real demand among players. The crossbow is crank-fired like the laser musket, and must be reloaded manually after each shot. It's a neat idea, but in execution, the weapon leaves much to be desired unless you're playing on lower difficulties. Of course, you can fully kit it out with upgrades and even Legendary stats.

After installing the mod, raiders will randomly start using crossbows, and certain merchants will sell bolts as ammunition. Or you could just use the "help crossbow 4" console command to get the spawn code, and manually add them to your inventory. The closest thing we've seen to actual crossbows is Geralt's Witcher Gear mod, but that one fired actual bullets instead of bolts.

Written in conjunction with Simon den Bekker

Counter-Strike Global Offensive has a strange internal economy that's driven in large part by the weapon skins created by the community. It also attracts a lot of attention and players to the game. In essence, it's the backbone of the game, a reason why people play. To have these digital works of art and display them in-game. These player-contributed and professionally contributed works of art (and sometimes non-art) are sometimes a source of great pride among players, as they compare and compete in order to win or open a case with an expensive and sometimes beautiful looking weapon skin. Also, people can make money from these.

Valve oddly makes betting incredibly easy in the game itself. One can buy cases that have randomly won weapons upon opening, which the keys to open also cost money. Those weapon skins can be easily transferred to third-party pools, or websites, to be either sold or put into a 'pot' to be won by betting on different professional and semi-professional CSGO matches. There is a wide variety of websites that offer ways to use your weapon skins as collateral, and currency, to gamble and place bets.

Someone has integrated an actual, working electrocardiogram onto a small business card. You heard right, a company called MobilECG has done something startlingly clever, giving the diagnostic power to everyone. And it's an open-source design that anyone can play with.

The card uses sensors built into it that measure the electrical signals created by the heart through your thumbs. It's not quite the most accurate way to do it, but as a first-line diagnostic tool when you're not quite feeling well, it might be a life-saver. A blog post from the company says that it should be accurate enough to provide cursory information from the P, Q, R, S and the T waves to prompt people to go to the hospital.

The innovation coming from different startups for integrated and smaller technology is just astounding. Just imagine where medical devices can go if something like this is just on the boundary of our imagination. At the moment, they're gauging interest in their product, and you can request one if you'd like. They'll sell you one for $29, or less if more people start showing interest.

Pirating just became a whole lot easier thanks to the Internet. A group of sea-going pirates were able to hack into the content management system of a shipping company to pinch the shipping manifests and schedule to better plan their brazen heists.

According to a new security report by Verizon, the Internet, and hacking in general, is becoming an ever increasing resource for the seafaring thieves. Based on the evidence, however, it appears that the pirates themselves are carrying out the attacks because of the sloppy way in which they're going about it. It's proven easy to trace the activity completely to its source.

Pirating is evolving. It once was a primarily physical activity, but now they're becoming more efficient and careful. Why waste resources physically looking for ships on the open sea when you can just track precisely where they'll be by taking a look at the schedule. It's a bold move, especially when they don't seem to care that they get caught. Their mobile nature makes that point moot anyhow

As a die-hard fan of the Diablo ARPG series, I'm incredibly excited to report that Blizzard may be making a new chapter of the landmark franchise.

A batch of new job listings pretty much confirm that a new Diablo is in the works, with Blizzard hiring a senior concept artist, a lighting artist, and a senior character artist for an "unnannounced project". Blizzard pretty much gives it away by explicitly stating that the ideal candidates will be responsible for molding the Diablo universe.

"Blizzard Entertainment is seeking exceptionally skilled and passionate senior concept artists to help drive the vision of characters and world's in our next hit game! We're looking for artists that are self-starting, versatile, and enjoy being part of a collaborative environment. The ideal candidate shares our sensibilities, loves dark medieval world's, and feels there are countless stories left to tell in the Diablo universe!"

An adrenalin charged trailer for Io Interactive's upcoming Hitman was just released, and it shows off some of the settings and missions we'll be exploring when it releases on March 11th.

The first "season" as they're calling it is going to have a variety of very different and engaging missions to go through. Agent 47 is back and in the prime of his career in this new, live and almost re-imagined game. The amount of free-will and choices you'll have should be astounding. Even the beta, as short as it was, had a great many possibilities in how to accomplish it.

The episodic way that they're releasing this will give you new, fresh contracts and challenges to complete every week as well as new, major content appearing every month until the season ends. The plan for them is to continue to support the game with fresh content for quite some time. The base-mechanics are already in-place, and they're pretty good.

Acer has a number of awesome gaming monitors under their belt, with the 27-inch 4K monitor in the form of the XB280HK, as well as my personal favorite and current workstation and gaming display - the Predator X34 (34-inch 3440x1440 w/NVIDIA G-Sync).

Well, Acer has done it again by unveiling their new Predator XB321HK, a new 32-inch 4K gaming monitor. The new Predator XB321HK features a 32-inch 4K panel with 100% sRGB coverage, 178-degree viewing angles, 10-bit color and NVIDIA's G-Sync technology. Acer also notes that the Predator XB321HK features 4ms response time, 350 cd/2 maximum brightness, and dynamic mega-contrast ratio.

Acer also has its EyeProtect feature which reduces blue light emissions, and its GameView technology which dynamically adjusts the display to the type of game you're playing. The Acer Predator XB321HK has DisplayPort 1.2 and HDMI connectivity as well as a USB 3.0 hub and is priced at $1299.

Steam is an oft-hacked platform for a number of reasons. The internal economy and lack of proper controls for trading the strangely valuable items makes it a very sweet target for scammers and hackers alike. Valve is committed to helping stop that from happening and is rolling out some new ways to help prevent you from outright losing your inventory.

On March 9th, a Steam update will add a number of new features to the trading mechanism to make it more difficult for scammers to steal from their intended victims. These changes are in response to the nearly 77,000 accounts that tend to be hacked or otherwise compromised in some fashion each month.

And for goodness sake, use Steam Guard Mobile Authenticator, it's relatively easy to setup and it helps tremendously. 2FA is a very effective tool in preventing both hacking as well as enabling a safer and more effective trading environment.

Star Wars has been a very successful franchise for EA this year with Battlefront alone having shipped more than 13 million copies worldwide since it released. Star Wars: The Old Republic has seen a revival in its player base thanks, in part, to a return to the highly successful narrative driven gameplay they reintroduced with the Knights of the Fallen Empire. Galaxy of Heroes, too, has been a smashing success.

And now EA wants to start teasing what they're planning on doing next with the franchise. During the Morgan Stanley Technology, Media and Telecom Conference in San Francisco, the companies CFO, Blake Jorgensen, talked elusively about how they plan on moving forward. "We've got a couple of things up our sleeve that we haven't talked about yet but you'll probably see them teased over the next six months," Jorgensen said. We already have an idea about the direction they're headed, with an Amy Hennig directed open-world RPG and even potential sequels to Battlefront itself.

The strong sales of Battlefront, regardless of the actual numbers of people playing at any given time, has show EA just how strong a franchise it can be for them, hopefully something that'll resonate and help to invigorate the development of well thought-out games that are true to the spirit of Star Wars.

Western Digital has just announced that it has expanded its internal and external storage solutions, now offering huge 16TB external storage solutions for professionals on-the-go, or those who need serious amounts of backup at home or work.

WD will be launching a slew of new HDDs throughout the first half of 2016, which will include their My Cloud personal storage devices, My Book external HDDs, as well as the internal WD Red, WD Red Pro and WD Purple HDDs. All of these drives will offer "purpose-driven engineering and HelioSeal helium-technology with the new 8TB drives for maximum and efficient performance in the applications for which each model is designed". VP of Product Marketing for WD, Brendan Collins, explains: "We are committed to integrating high-performance, high-capacity and high-quality drives into all of our solutions. No matter what market or application, we have a solution - whether it's for small businesses, channel partners, enterprises or end-users. Our goal is to deliver the best and most competitive solutions on the market".

As for the HDDs that will be bumped up to 8TB or 16TB (with 2 x 8TB HDDs in RAID 0), it'll include:

In a move that certainly surprises no one but disappoints everyone, EA has officially confirmed that Mass Effect: Andromeda won't be releasing in 2016. The "best and largest ever" Mass Effect game will instead be releasing in the first quarter of 2017, which is from January 1 through March 31, 2017.

During a presentation at the Morgan Stanley Technology Conference, EA CFO Blake Jorgensen detailed the company's roadmap for 2016 and beyond. "We've got a great year ahead... we've got our Battlefield first-person shooter game coming in the third quarter, and our third-party title that Respawn, our partner, built, it's called TItanfall, it's the second title that they brought into that brand. We have our Mirror's Edge runner game this first quarter, and then we have Mass Effect, which is a sci-fi action game, in our fourth quarter. So big year ahead and we're pretty excited."

As EA's fiscal year begins with Q1 on December 15 and ends in Q4 on March 31, we can surmise that ME: Andromeda will be out by March of next year. Not so long ago we predicted that Andromeda would be delayed due to the departure of key talent, including Senior Development Director Chris Wynn and lead writer Chris Schlerf.

Uncharted 4: A Thief's End will be a cornerstone of Sony's massive PlayStation 4 dominance this year, but the game has been delayed... again. Uncharted 4 was delayed from 2015 into 2016, then it was delayed into April 2016, and now it has been delayed again - until May 10.

President and CEO of Sony Computer Entertainment America, Shawn Layden, explained on the PlayStation Blog: "In an effort to meet the considerable worldwide demand, and to ensure that all gamers worldwide have the opportunity to play the game on day one, we have chosen to postpone the launch of the game by two weeks to allow for extra manufacturing time. We know this news might be disappointing, and we are sorry to have to make you wait a little longer to play Naughty Dog's latest. The good news is that the game is phenomenal - we are fully confident that it will be worth the wait and the team at Naughty Dog is eager as ever for you to experience Nathan Drake's final adventure".

There will also be an Uncharted 4 open beta multiplayer that kicks off this weekend, which will give Naughty Dog and Sony a chance to test out the game's servers for its launch, hopefully, on May 10.

If there's one huge area where consoles lose out to PCs, it would be that they're not upgradeable. Console owners and fans would disagree, saying that it creates an ecosystem that allows Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo to develop, and let third-party studios develop games for hardware that is identical between consoles. So, if one person owns a PS4 - the other 25 million+ have the exact same hardware.

Well, according to Xbox boss Phil Spencer, this could all change in the future. Optional hardware purchases could happen, and they would be different to the "optional" microtransactions games have today, except you'd actually get value out of spending money. Speaking with Polygon, Spencer said: "When you look at the console space, I believe we will see more hardware innovation in the console space than we've ever seen".

He continued: "You'll actually see us come out with new hardware capability during a generation allowing the same games to run backward and forward compatible because we have a Universal Windows Application running on top of the Universal Windows Platform that allows us to focus more and more on hardware innovation without invalidating the games that run on that platform". So that makes sense, as we really do need hardware innovation in the console space, as it has been dead for 10 years now - we're still in the 720p-ish 30FPS-ish world, and that's shocking, as it's 2016 - not 1996.

Rise of the Tomb Raider has been enjoying huge sales on the PC, where it has smashed the sales of the Xbox One version - but what about the rumored DX12 patch for the game?

Well, it looks like it could be closer than we thought, with Microsoft teasing that Rise of the Tomb Raider was running in DX12 at its Xbox Showcase Media Event. Microsoft confirmed: "DirectX 12 Showcase: Rise of the Tomb Raider, Ashes of the Singularity, King of Wushu - Square Enix, Snail, and Stardock showcased their latest DirectX 12 enhancements for Rise of the Tomb Raider, King of Wushu, and Ashes of the Singularity on Origin PCs, iBUYPOWER Revolt 2, and Maingear PCs".

They continued: "Ashes of the Singularity is taking advantage the DirectX 12 multi-adapter technology, allowing PCs to use multiple GPUs, even from different manufacturers. Rise of the Tomb Raider was playable for the first time at the Xbox Spring Showcase running DirectX 12".

Killer Instinct is coming over to the PC through Windows 10, with Microsoft confirming the news earlier today. The game will launch on March 29, and thanks to a new FAQ posted on the official website, we know that if you buy the Xbox One version of Killer Instinct, you won't lose all of the content you've purchased.

If you want to keep your existing Killer Instinct content when you shift over from the Xbox One to Windows 10, you must "receive the Season 3 game update, available starting March 29, 2016. Simply login to your Xbox One console and launch Killer Instinct. Ensure you're connected to Xbox Live and follow the prompts to receive the update. Once the update is complete, launch Killer Instinct fully. Once the update is complete and you have launched Killer Instinct again, you will be able to login into Windows 10 to access your owned and earned content".

As for the minimum and recommended requirements, this is what you'll need:

The future of the sequel to the 2013 robot/monster bash-em-up 'Pacific Rim' has been shaky to say the least, but it looks like that's all behind them as Warner Bros have re-committed to the film. There's just one hitch though - creator Guillermo del Toro has abandoned directing duties.

According to Deadline Hollywood, 'Spartacus' creator Steven S. DeKnight will jump in as director in his feature film debut, from a script written by Jon Spaihts. Del Toro will instead join Thomas Tull, Jon Jashni, and Mary Parent as executive producers.

While the original 2017 announced release date will most certainly change, the studio has not yet confirmed when the franchise will return, but 2018 is probably a reasonable estimate.

A landmark decision has been reached in the ongoing data encryption war. A US magistrate judge in New York, presiding over a drug trafficking case, has ruled Apple cannot be forced to unlock an iPhone by the US government, which has been using the more than 100 year-old All Writs Act (AWA) as part of its argument. While this doesn't directly involve the bigger San Bernardino terrorism case, it's a big win for Apple and smartphone users in general who support their right to encryption, and will certainly help its argument in that case.

"The established rules for interpreting a statute's text constrain me to reject the government's interpretation that the AWA empowers a court to grant any relief not outright prohibited by law," magistrate Judge James Orenstein stated in his order.

In other words, the government overstepped its bounds in its interpretation of the AWA. Orenstein went on to conclude this is a congressional issue.