Latest News - Page 2533

As soon as I was introduced to VR tech, I instantly thought "this needs to be in an arcade". VR could be what arcades need to completely rise from the ashes--a new, exciting platform to rejuvenate public gaming spaces like never before. Luckily, StarBreeze--the minds behind Overkill's PayDay games and the StarVR headset--agree and plan to kick off the VRcade revolution.

The VR-centric arcade will be called StarCade, and it'll likely be a major venue for StarBreeze's very own StarVR headset. The reasoning for a VR arcade--or VRcade--boils down to a simple point: you have to experience VR to believe it. You can't sell someone on VR without letting them try it first, and the mainstream public isn't going to drop $500-600 on hardware out of faith. VR needs to be accessible not just to buy, but to try.

"We continue to iterate the fact that VR really needs to be experienced in person to fully be able to appreciate the phenomenon, and why not have your first experience in a real premium setting in our StarVR headset?" Starbreeze CTO Emmanuel Marquez said. "We've managed to secure a prime location where people are welcome to step into our StarCade and enjoy our OVERKILL's The Walking Dead VR experience. We're developing our own StarCade catalogue of experiences, but we're open to any content. We will invite developers to join us and give them the opportunity to put their content in our StarCade. We as an industry continuously need to educate ourselves to make VR truly successful, and this is just the first step in our planning to do so."

Cortana is getting quite the upgrade today, with new features that'll help you manage your schedule, and keep your promises. It happens to the best of us, we say we'll do something, forget to actually put in on the calendar, then we forget. Cortana is going to make sure that that doesn't happen anymore.

Microsoft Research has come up with a better way to integrate Cortana into the OS and to leverage her natural attentiveness in order to automatically recognize any sort of commitments you make in through email, and scheduling those for you on the calendar. The way they've done this is through the implementation of a new Natural Language Processing algorithm that can identify these things, determine a time-frame you're likely to setup, and remind you to do those tasks. Now there's no excuse for forgetting to pick up more coffee at the store.

Another new feature coming to Cortana is how she'll be able to better organize your calendar too. Not only will there be automatic scheduling of meetings, but you'll get notified of any conflicts in times and anything outside your normal routine will be flagged so you can adjust accordingly.

PC games piracy may be on its death knell thanks to new DRM tech called Denuvo Anti-Tamper, and more and more new PC games are starting to leverage the crack-proof software.

Far Cry: Primal and the Xbox One hit Rise of the Tomb Raider are the latest PC games to use Denuvo as a shield against warez crackers. With the aid of the Anti-Tamper tech, both games will effectively be piracy-free for months after their launch on PC. The first few months of sales are crucial for publishers, and Denuvo will ensure both Square Enix and Ubisoft are able to maximize their revenue as much as possible.

Denuvo integration was verified on Far Cry: Primal's EULA page, which reads: THE PRODUCT IS PROTECTED BY DIGITAL RIGHTS MANAGEMENT SOFTWARE ("DRM SOFTWARE") AND DENUVO ANTI-TAMPER PROTECTION TECHNOLOGY." As for Rise of the Tomb Raider, the official CrackStatus Reddit posted up proof from a CodeFusion Support page, but the image is no longer available. The site is, however, registered to Denuvo exec Reinhard Blaukovitsch, and reports suggest that CodeFusion technology is owned by Denuvo.

A rumor apparently was going around that Bungie and Activision were going to start charging real-world money, microtransactions, for in-game ammunition. That you ammo would be limited only to those with the money to afford it.

But thankfully that rumor is actually incredibly false. Activision spoke to Game Informer regarding the rumor that sprouted up from a single source at VG24/7, and they rather pointedly said that "We're not doing that."

Can you imagine what would happen if a simple in-game resource were relegated to being paid for? If Destiny were having player retention issues now, the game could have been abandoned very quickly as a result of this move. As much as microtransactions do help pay for the upkeep of servers and keep MMO's going, ammo would be a horrible move on anyone's part.

Current-gen consoles don't have disc trays you can exactly force open. So what happens when your Xbox One simply won't eject a disc? Before you wait forever on Microsoft Customer Support, use this easy tutorial to grab your disc back from the console's hungry maw.

Dealing with a malfunctioning games console is incredibly frustrating. You've spent a good $300 or so on hardware, and you damn well expect it to work. As we all know, there are no guarantees when it comes to hardware--games or otherwise--but there are a few easy homemade fixes you can do in order to alleviate the situation. If your Xbox One's disc drive is on the fritz and won't eject your disc, then break out your paperclips and let's get cracking.

PC disc drives can be manually forced open with a paper clip, and apparently so can Xbox Ones. First, unhook the console's power and extra plugs, separating it from everything else. With the console facing you, rotate it counter-clockwise so you see the extra USB port and silver button. With the light shining on this side of the console, look through its vents for a little orange dot--this is where the manual eject pinhole is located.

Some astute individual went ahead and taken everything that Presidential candidate Donald Trump has said throughout this past year, and has created programming language that follows all those statements and rules. And the language doesn't follow any sort of logic whatsoever.

The language was created by two Rice University students during a hackathon, Chris Brown and Sam Shadwell, and it's based on Python. This appropriately named TrumpScript uses the basis of his Presidential campaign philosophy as the groundwork for how it operates. So you can't play with floating point numbers that are smaller than 1 million and users from China or Mexico can't use it either.

There're a lot more little nuggets of humor floating inside this semi-usable language, and you can play with it right now by heading over to the github page. But even in this incomplete state, it's a lot of fun to play with and you can even add your own audacious logic to it if you'd like.

Endless Legend, one of the best 4X strategy games to grace PC gaming, is getting another expansion pack in April, called Shifters.

Shifters adds a new faction called the Allayi that's able to "shift" during long winters, so they aren't quite as effected by the economic down-turn that comes from the colder weather. They're also adding in a new resource that you can collect called the Pearls of Auriga which will let you unlock new powers through the Altar of Auriga, which can help suitably alter the impact that Winter has on your units.

The new expansion is expected to land sometime in April, and if it's anything like the other expansions that they've had, the integration will be deep and the actual value will be quite high. Amplitude Studios puts a lot of effort into creating the lore and backstory, and it shows in the quality of their games.

The side-scrolling action adventure MIghty No. 9 has been delayed, again, from its original February 9th release until sometime later in the Spring while some trifling issues are dealt with.

The developer posted on the games blog as well as on their Kickstarter explaining that they've been having critical network mode issues that prevented the experience from being what they intend it to. So in order to try to maintain a February release date, and not push it back any further, they'll be dedicating themselves to resolving those issues, even up to the last minute before release.

Claimed by One More Thing to be a photo of Apple's next iPhone release, this small image is said to showcase exactly what we should expect to see launched in March.

Designed with a 4-inch screen, this model is reported by 9-to-5Mac to also have a weird name attached to its release - set to be called the 'iPhone 5se'. Not only is this name unusual because Apple hasn't released a 'se' phone to date, but also because industry experts expected it to be named the '6c'.

No matter what the name, you can expect this smartphone to come packed with an 8-megapixel camera, a rounded frame and an A8 processor.

Undisclosed sources claim that Twitter's engineering head Kevin Wail and its head of media, Katie Stanton, will be departing the social media giant soon, seen reported by The Australian recently.

The information has been leaked "according to people familiar with the matter," with further claims being made that Stanton has already announced her absence internally some time ago. Being a prior chairman, current chief executive Jack Dorsey told Twitter that he'll only take back the CEO role if the entire board of directors was replaced - it seems that he's now a few steps closer to this goal.

While Twitter has declined official comment itself, sources further claim that this major executive shuffle is a bold move by Dorsey to revitalise his company, one of which that has fallen on hard times recently.

Bethesda has released new screenshots of id Software's Doom reboot, which will be released later this year. The new screenshots, we have below for your viewing pleasure.

As for the new screenshots, sure - they look good. But they really don't look great. After watching the gameplay reveal trailer during E3 2015, it felt so watered down and slow to the first-person shooter that really started it all. I want to reserve judgement, but I think we're going to be disappointed with Doom on the PC, as they're having to cater to console gamers and their controllers - versus the fast-paced mouse and keyboard action we're used to on the PC.

There are plenty of more in the full story, with another 13 images to check out.

With the Game Developers Conference right around the corner, Quantum Break developer Remedy Entertainment will talk about how they were able to get through performance and efficiency issues on the Xbox One.

Remedy used their in-house Northlight engine for Quantum Break, with the developer explaining: "Northlight is Remedy Entertainment's in-house game engine which powers Quantum Break. In this presentation we discuss how various rendering performance and efficiency issues were solved with DirectX, and suggest design guidelines for modern graphics API usage".

We will also learn about the impressive AI used in Quantum Break, with Remedy Entertainment's Head of PR, Thomas Puha, saying that some of the big issues with Quantum Break was the weak AI. At the time, the AI wasn't fully baked, so the gameplay footage we saw wasn't indicative of the final game. He said: "So a lot of the footage you have seen is from summer 2015 for Gamescom. AI really was not done at that point, hence the enemies in the trailers don't seem to give you much fight".

With the hoopla surrounding the impending release of the Oculus Rift on March 28, and the HTC Vive the month after, we're not surprised to hear that EA's Frostbite Labs is working on VR and AR content.

The Stockholm-based developer is a group that EA says will help them push the "boundaries of technology and shape the future of gaming". As for the team, EA explains that Frostbite Labs will "begin as a small, multi-disciplined team within EA Studios. Based initially in Stockholm but reaching around the globe, the remit of Frostbite Labs is to explore the undefined or nascent opportunities for new experiences and ways to reach our players. These will be high-potential and possibly high-risk opportunities. Every project will have an intended destination within EA Studios or across Electronic Arts, and key measures to understand the return on each opportunity".

When it comes to the VR and AR content, Frostbite Labs is looking for a Senior Software Engineer, as well as a Senior Game Designer for VR projects. DICE's Technical Director, Johan Andersson, recently tweeted that EA is building a "small VR Frostbite team", and it looks like this is it. Personally, I'm excited to see what Frostbite Labs can cook up in the world's of VR and AR.

While we may have seen the elusive AMD Radeon R9 Fury X2 powering the HTC Vive at VRLA, NVIDIA was also there teasing its VR prototype, powered by Light Field technology.

Anshel Sag of Moor Insights & Strategy provided us with the above images, explaining: "This headset is an NVIDIA headset developed as a research project in conjunction with Stanford University project called the "Lightfield Stereoscope" which allows you to essentially view light field images in the headset and focus on virtually any point in the headset with your own eyes. This headset is clearly important enough to NVIDIA to show off at an event like VRLA and could be used for viewing things like Lytro's Lightfield photos that Lytro created with their light field cameras. This headset can also be used in VR to allow the entire scene to be rendered once and to let your eyes decide where to focus making the VR experience more realistic".

You might remember our story last year, where NVIDIA announced it was collaborating with Stanford University on a VR headset, which should reach us sometime in 2018. Well, checking out the official NVIDIA GeForce Twitter page, the GPU giant tweeted: "A user goes eyes-on with our Light Field Display prototype at @vrlosangeles. #VRLA".

While long term 'Star Wars' fans cling to the hope that they might just seen an official re-release of the original films, a group of fans has taken it upon themselves to archive film history.

For the last four years, a fan collective known as Team Negative One have painstakingly scanned a 35mm print of the original 'Star Wars' frame-by frame in 1080p, manually removing flaws and film artefacts and assembling the version of the film that audiences originally saw in 1977. Now their first assemblage is ready and the team have now shared their efforts online.

Coming from a theatrical print which is several generations removed from the original negative owned by Lucasfilm, and thus not as sharp or as clean, their restoration is still pretty astounding and the best way to currently view the film without all the CG crap added by creator George Lucas for the 1977 special edition release - and where Greedo shoots first.

Right now we have some seriously powerful smartphones, with up to 4GB of RAM and 8-core processors - but the next-gen chips are going to be insane. We're looking at 10nm, and up to 8GB of RAM - yeah, 8GB of RAM in a smartphone.

The latest rumor is coming out of China, claiming that Qualcomm's next-gen Snapdragon 830 processor will be manufactured on the 10nm process, which would make it the first system-on-a-chip (SoC) to be made on 10nm. Not only that, but Qualcomm has improved its Kyro cores on the processor for added performance, and lowered power consumption.

Not only will the CPU side of things be faster, but we're expecting to see 8GB of RAM in smartphones sometime in 2017. Qualcomm will reportedly launch its Snapdragon 830 processor next year, where we should see it powering the Galaxy S8 by Samsung, and similar, next-gen handsets.

The 1973 horror classic 'The Exorcist', based on the book by Peter Blatty went on to spawn two sequels and a more recent prequel, but despite remaining dormant for a decade, it's about to be resurrected to scare the crap out of a new generation.

According to the Hollywood Reporter, 20th Century Fox television has ordered a one hour television pilot based on the original 1971 Blatty novel to be penned by 'Fantastic Four' writer Jeremy Slater, which will act as a test bed to see if it go to a full season order.

There's no word yet on when we'll see 'The Exorcist' on the small screen or indeed if it can hold a candle to the original classic - but the future is certainly quite bright for the long-running series.

The last time we physically saw the dual-GPU version of the Fury X was at the launch event itself in Sydney, Australia - where we had our hands-on that beautiful PCB. But, the Radeon R9 Fury X2 has shown up again, this time at VRLA.

The VRLA expo was an event for all things virtual reality, held in LA last week. During the event, some of the HTC Vive demos were powered using the Radeon R9 Fury X2. Thanks to Facebook, we noticed Antal Tungler, PR Manager for AMD and all-round cool guy, posted on his Twitter account. He said: "Prototype Tiki from @FalconNW powering #htcvive with dual Fiji @AMDRadeon at the #vrla".

Someone asked Tungler "When you say "Dual Fiji" do you mean 2x Fiji cards, or 2x Fiji GPUs on 1 card? ;)", to which he replied with "One card". So we know that it wasn't 2 x R9 Fury X cards in the machine, but a single, dual-GPU beast. But with Polaris around the corner, I have to ask the question: where does the R9 Fury X2 fit in? It would only have 4GB of HBM1 per GPU, which really isn't enough VRAM considering it will be $1000+. VR headsets are pushing 90FPS, and a high-resolution to boot. I guess we'll see in the coming months, maybe AMD will launch the Fury X2 in between now and the release of Polaris in June/July.

Ubisoft Massive has released a treasure trove of hardcore details on the PC version of The Division, where we're learning that the developer has put lots of time into making sure the PC version of The Division doesn't suck.

We can expect multi-GPU support, multi-monitor support, and resolutions of up to 4K where The Division will "automatically adapt the resolution to fit multi-screen configurations with FOV correction". Not only that, but the frame rate is completely uncapped, and The Division has 'optimized graphic settings & customized GPU effects" on the PC. Awww yeah. Here's a full list of what to expect for the PC version of The Division:

Thanks to a chat with Rock, Paper, Shotgun - we're learning that Ubisoft seems to at least state that it cares about the PC. Creative Director on The Division, Magnus Jansén, said during the interview: "PC is incredibly important to us. There are plenty of incentives to do a good PC version".

He continued: "Personally it's important - a I play on PC whenever I can and I want the thing they play at home to be the best possible version. That is not to be underestimated as a driving force. Secondly, both of the studios, Massive and Red Storm started out on PC so it's a matter of pride, or heritage and pedigree if you will. We feel kind of ashamed if we don't do the PC version really well. It really is something that we care about".

"We're a very technical studio as well. Sweden is a very technical country - we're good at infrastructure and design, and a lot of our staff come from the old demoscene as well", he added. Continuing, Jansén said: "We're a very technical studio as well. Sweden is a very technical country - we're good at infrastructure and design, and a lot of our staff come from the old demoscene as well. There's a lot of that heritage in the Swedish dev community and that is true here at Massive as well. It comes very natural to us. The engine, Snowdrop, enables the artists to do all of that great UI work and makes it relatively easy to expose all of those options on PC".