Latest News - Page 2550

One of the coolest new features being rolled out to the Model S is its new "Summon" feature, which is part of Tesla Motors' v7.1 software for the Model S.

Summon will allow Model S owners to park, and retrieve their Model S vehicles without being inside of the car, or even near it. But, Consumer Reports' latest video has some testing done with Summon, which failed some of their safety tests. They found if you exited the Tesla app on the iPhone 6S while the Model S was moving out of its park, the car would continue to move - which is worrying.

Telsa has been playing with the smartphone app, limiting its Summon abilities for this very reason. The key fob that Model S owners have will be able to stop the car, but not drive it - while the app itself will require users to have their finger on the screen for the feature to work.

It's been 15 years since Square Enix first launched their own online store. It seems like only yesterday they came online, peddling their physical discs and merchandise directly. But after having been open for longer than a lot of gamers have been alive, they're celebrating with up to 50% off of some of their best games.

Over 100 games on all platforms feasible are discounted and available. A lot of great classics from their canonical JRPG years as well as some modern titles you're likely to love. The entire Hitman collection and Deus Ex Human Revolution are there, of course. If you're a rewards member you'll get an extra 50 points if you spend over $20. Any physical merchandise (or disc) orders over $20 also land you a Final Fantasy lanyard for free.

Some of the best deals you'll find there are below. And there's quite a few good looking ones too.

There are few moments in life where you become so surprised that your mouth literally hangs agape at home. But watching Gabe Newell, usually a quiet, reserved and mysterious person that rarely makes public appearances do something this generous is one of those. He gave away HTC Vive Pre's at the 2016 Unity Vision Summit like a veritable Oprah.

Even though it's pretty clearly a marketing stunt and probably doesn't cost Valve very much to give them away, it's still an incredible gesture to the assembly of people eagerly awaiting his presence. He appeared on screen with a fluffy white beard and did what only the Internet Santa Claus can do, give away awesome prizes.

Lord Gaben has a surprising way of exciting crowds, even if there are plenty of people who disagree with how he runs his business. But this was is moment, or his Oprah moment as he proclaimed. "And our third announcement, I get to have my Oprah moment, all the developers at the Vision Summit get their own Vive. You get a Vive. You get a Vive. You get a Vive. And you get a Vive. I'm very excited to see what you guys come up with and I hope you enjoy it."

We still don't know what the G5 smartphone will arrive as, but LG has just taken the wraps off of the touch-enabled Quick Cover for its forthcoming flagship smartphone.

LG announced the touch-enabled Quick Cover for the unreleased and unannounced G5 smartphone, teasing the G5 as a "smartphone that does not officially exist". LG continued, saying that the cover is wrapped in "a unique film with a glossy metallic finish" for a premium feel. The G5's touch-enabled Quick Cover will also allow owners to take calls and control alarm settings through its semitransparent mesh material, without having to open the case and reveal the G5.

We should expect the always-on display from the G5 to be front and center, literally, when the G5 is announced on February 21 during Mobile World Congress.

Rocket League is an obvious choice of game to compete with. It's a blend of some of the two best things in the world, so it's a no-brainer to bake competition right into the framework. Season two has now begun, and there are a lot of changes, with new maps in the future too.

The new season means a new patch with a few changes for a fresh perspective on competitive play. Overall they've de-emphasized individual performance and have shifted the focus to be more about improving your game. Sure, winning is great, but improving your skill counts for something too.

The ranking system is completely new and you'll have to play ten matches to determine what skill division you'll be placed into. If you played in the first season, that data about how great you are will remain, so you'll be placed in an appropriate level. So you won't have to worry about starting completely over.

Quantum Break was originally touted as an Xbox One exclusive when it was announced in 2014, but that's changed as it's now been announced to be coming to the PC on April 5th.

Microsoft and Remedy Entertainment are wanting to "empower gamers" to enjoy whatever platform they want, within reason of course, so the extreme time manipulating game will be coming to Windows 10 as well, and if you pre-order on the Xbox One, you'll get the PC version for free. Any version of the game will net you a digital download token that you can use at the Windows Store.

They've also just announced the Quantum Break special bundle, that includes a snow white 500GB Xbox One with the game and the extra free Alan Wake games. Why 500GB when 1TB could easily be included? That's a good question, especially considering the increasing size of games.

Blade and Soul reached a concurrent player record in the EU and the US in nearly no time at all. Only a mere three weeks after NCSoft brought the MMO to the west it's now peaking at well over 2 million players.

In the press-release they confirmed the staggering number of people enjoying the game, stating that "NCSOFT has confirmed that Blade & Soul has now surpassed 2 million players in the US and Europe, only three weeks since its official launch." They also talked about the new content that's now live.

Rising Waters, the new update, is adding a significant amount to the core of the game. A new party dungeon known as Bloodshade Harbor, which is available only to those that have reached level 45, and should have some of the hardest bosses you can imagine. A single-player dungeon called Munshin's Tower is also available that has seven different floors of enemies that increase in difficulty with each one. They've also added Nightshade Harbor

We all know the pain of being on a plane without Wi-Fi, but US communications company ViaSat could change all of that. The company has teamed up with Boeing to launch three new satellites that would have massive bandwidth.

The companies will be launching new satellites that will feature twice the total combined network capacity of all of the connected satellites flying through space. The two companies have already started this work, with two of the three ViaSat-3 satellites. These new satellites will have more than 1Tbps of capacity, each.

ViaSat will be in control of designing and manufacturing the payload while Boeing will be taking care of developing the "associated satellite bus platforms" for its 2019 launch. The first two satellites will take care of the Americas, Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) while the third satellite will cover Asia.

Since the release of Windows 10, we've been slowly learning just how much of a spying tool it is for Microsoft, but these new numbers are going to blow you away.

Voat user CheesusCrust has completed some extensive testing on Windows 10, where he reports that during an 8-hour period, Windows 10 attempted to send back data from his PC to over 51 different IPS addresses owned by Microsoft, and at a staggering 5500 times.

After 30 hours, the data being sent back to Microsoft from Windows 10 expanded to a huge 113 non-private IP addresses. These IP addresses being non-private means that hackers can intercept that data, which makes anyone using Windows 10 very, very vulnerable. You might think this is just a once-off, and that the proof can't be replicated? Yeah, well, no.

AR and VR companies Magic Leap and Virtuix are the latest to join the Entertainment Software Association.

Magic Leap only recently secured itself a huge $800 million investment, which will see their augmented reality (AR) technology leap into the arms of consumers in the near future. Virtuix on the other hand, is a VR firm that took to Kickstarter with its Virtuix Omni platform, which enables physical movement and mobility in the VR world.

Jan Goetgeluk, founder and CEO of Virtuix, said: "We're proud to join ESA during this exciting time of transformation for video games and virtual reality. We look forward to joining ESA at the forefront of critical policy issues facing our dynamic industry".

After the whirlwind success of 'The Force Awakens' comes to an end, with an astonishing $2b worldwide haul, attention now moves to the series continuation, and it's upcoming spin-off 'Rogue One'. In an announcement that's sure to get fans in a tizzy, Disney and Lucasfilm have announced that cameras have begun rolling on the as-yet untitled 'Episode VIII'.

According to ComingSoon, Disney CEO Bob Iger confirmed during an investor conference call yesterday that "filming of 'Star Wars: Episode VIII', the next chapter of the legendary saga has just commenced"" before also confirming that "production of 'Episode IX' ... has also begun."

If you've seen 'The Force Awakens' you'll have a pretty solid idea at who's set to return, a mixture of the original cast and the new cast. Under the helm of 'Looper' director Rian Johnston, 'Episode VIII' will hit screens worldwide in December 2018.

It looks like the mobile app market is doing extremely well, with a new report from App Annie expecting to see global spending reach $50.9 billion this year - with the Google Play Store to overtake the Apple App Store in 2017.

App Annie released its new Mobile App Forecast recently, predicting that worldwide mobile app store revenues would hit $101.1 billion in 2020. The analyst firm is expecting consumer spending on apps to be up 24% year-over-year at $50.9 billion this year, with these numbers including non-gaming apps, but not mobile commerce and advertising revenue.

The company expects the Apple App Store to be the single highest grossing app storefront into the near future, with $44.8 billion generated in 2020, it will be overtaken by the Google Play Store in gross revenue numbers next year, with $55.7 billion expected in 2020. Why is Android poised to take over? The report points to the huge growth of Android in emerging markets like India, Mexico, Brazil and Indonesia.

The whole world mourned the loss of P.T. but it looks like we might see it live again in another way through Visage, which is inspired by the likes of P.T. and the Silent Hills series.

Visage has taken to Kickstarter with a funding goal of $35,000 CAD - at the time of writing and with 30 days to go, it has reached $47,603 CAD with 1424 backers. Visage is explained as: "The game will be set inside a huge house in which terrible things have happened. You'll wander through the gloomy corridors, explore every dead room, and get lost in endless mazes, your head filling with memories of the dead families that once lived in this very home. This twisted environment, void of any life other than yours, will take you to places you couldn't even bear imagining".

The next stretch goal doesn't seem too hard at $50,000, which will see the game made with VR support - but then once it hits $75,000 "it gets real" with more 3D character models.

Nothing says confidence in your product than starting development on a sequel before the first one has even hit screens, but such is the buzz (and audience tracking) on 'Deadpool', that Fox have apparently greenlit a sequel to the Marvel feature.

According to The Hollywood Reporter, 'Deadpool' writers Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick have already been commission to write the follow up, which 20th Century Fox have already given the go-ahead for. While director Tim Miller has not yet been re-hired, the core team of the writers, Miller and star Ryan Reynolds are all expected to return.

By today's standards, the $58m budget is considered for a movie of this genre and the fact it's tracking to recoup its entire budget on opening weekend probably plays a part in today's news. But will the film be any good? Come back in a week for TweakTown's review!

During the Unity Vision Summit, Oculus founder Palmer Luckey had some choice words to say regarding the expectations of Rift pre-orders, and that it should be far more than a few hundred thousand units.

Luckey said: "A few hundred thousand dev kits is nothing compared to what we will be doing this year...". Luckey also added that Oculus had shipped around 200,000 developer kits to developers, including the DK1 and DK2 units. Judging by what Luckey is saying here, it looks like he's hinting that Oculus would be shipping millions of Rift units, and that doesn't seem right.

We reached out to our good friend Anshel Sag, Staff Technologist and Technical Writer of Moor Insights & Strategy, who said: "I believe that it would be extremely unlikely that Oculus would ship more than 100,000 to 200,000 Rift headsets this year. I believe that Palmer's statements are more of his wishes and hope than the reality of the current situation, similar to what we saw with pricing of the Rift".

AMD's upcoming Zen architecture is exciting on its own, but what about the Opteron line of processors? According to the latest slides used by Liviu Valsan, a Computer Engineer with CERN, the Zen-based Opteron is going to be a beast.

The slide teases that the Zen-based Opteron would be made on the 14nm process, "expected to bring a 40% improvement for Instructions Per Clock compared to current generation AMD processors", and a huge 32 physical cores. We should also see 8-channel DDR4 support, up from the quad-channel DDR4 on enthusiast platforms from Intel.

With AMD offering its Zen-based Opteron with up to 32 CPU cores, it means the company can scale right down to SKUs with 8, 16, and 24 cores, too. This means on the consumer desktop platform, AMD will have 8-core FX series CPUs, but it would be nice to see 16-core processors based on Zen, too.

With the release of Far Cry Primal around the corner, Oz Modz custom PC builder Stephen Hoad had created a beautiful custom gaming PC in the theme of Ubisoft's upcoming first-person shooter.

The PC rocks an ASUS T.U.F. Sabertooth Z170 Mark 1 motherboard, backed up by 2 x ASUS Strix NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970s in SLI. CPU wise, Stephen used an Intel Core i7-6700K, backed up by 16GB of Corsair Vengeance DDR4 RAM. The Corsair RM 850i PSU was used, with 2 x 240GB Kingston Hyper-X Savage SSDs backed up by a 2TB Western Digital Black HDD handling storage. The full list of gear inside of the system, we have below:

Just as it was alluded to last month, the next great expansion to the free-to-play MMO, Neverwinter, is here for the Xbox One.

The new expansion lets you journey into the Underdark with a story that's written by one of the original Forgotten Realms creators, R.A. Salvatore himself. After the initial encounter there'll be a whole new campaign waiting for you. Complete with hordes of demons that obviously need your slaying.

Inside there'll be two new skirmishes, the Prophecy of Madness and the Throne of the Dwarven Gods that should prove to be quite challenging. After you whet your whistle with those, you can enjoy a better looking Tarmalune Trade Bar STore, which has been overhauled and has a lot of new items with vastly reduced prices. Below you can see all the great new things that're included in the new expansion.

The head of Sony's VR studio, Dr. David Ranyard is stepping down from his position at Sony's London Studio. According to a press release, he plans on pursuing independent VR projects.

In a statement he said that "2016 is going to be the year of VR so it's the perfect time for me to take this step into independent development." The potential opportunities in the industry are what drew him to alternative possibilities. "The emergence of a new medium like VR doesn't come along very often and I really want to be a part of this new world."

It's sad to see such leader in the industry move on from a large venture such as the one he was heading at Sony's London Studio. But even with the loss, that just means the proliferation of more opportunities and more competition to help fuel better innovation. PlayStation VR is looking closer to release, so it's likely he wants to help other startups and make VR a much more common and accessible experience. He hasn't said specifically where he'll be going next, though.

If you wanted to give Paragon a try during the PlayStation 4 test that they're having on February 13th, then you'll also be able to play on servers against PC players in a marvelous example of true cross-play functionality.

They started asking for beta testers just last month when they opened up the sign-up page to include PlayStation 4 users. If you were one of those that has beta access, you'll get some more information from them this week and a way to redeem a PS4 specific key. Just make sure you've linked your Epic Games account with your PSN account in order for it to work properly.

Below are the official testing times for the beta, dubbed Online Test 7.