Latest News - Page 2574

Fresh from the Public Test Universe (PTU), Alpha 2.1 for Star Citizen is now available for download.

The focus of the new ~27GB patch is mainly on finding those gigantic bugs and stomping them so that the Star Citizen experience can be maintained. That is, you don't fall out of your ship randomly or crash to the desktop, as can sometimes happen in an alpha build. Thus 2.1 is far more stable than its predecessor.

And aside from the monumental task of fixing a tremendous amount of issues and bugs, there are now two additional flyable ships available, the Aegis Vanguard Warden, which is a flying weapons platform similar to the A10 Warthog, and the MISC Freelancer, a large multi-purpose ship that can be refitted for a variety of missions. The militia variant is particularly attractive, but you'll eventually be able to modify it in-game to suit your own specific needs. While not flyable, the Aegis Sabre will be available in your hanger module if you own it, which is only a cool $170 at the moment. New weapons and the Million Mile High Club are also available in this update.

David Bowie and his genius has unfortunately been lost to us as he becomes one with the Force, but his legacy will live on in a lot of different mediums. Even in the world of gaming,

For some it seems like only yesterday that his music, and his likeness, was used as a major plot point in Omikron: The Nomad Soul. That RPG changed the face of the genre forever, or at least I'd like to think it did, and in part because of David Bowie and his contributions. His music alone made it one of the most unique and enjoyable games of that era. And while Omikron itself was slightly buggy (read: very) when it first launched, I couldn't get enough of it. A recent playthrough I did reinforced how unique it was.

And David Cage, the founder of Quantic Dream, the studio that made Omikron, has been kind enough to share some of this memories of working with the iconic David Bowie. His battle with cancer might tragically be over, but we'll always remember him as being singularly unique and inspiring.

There are two bills sitting in the California State legislature that could change the future of drones in that state, and probably beyond. These laws, if they pass, would require you to register with the state, have a tiny physical or electronic license plate and have insurance for damage to property and for hurting people too.

The first bill is is just a requirement for a small amount of property and personal insurance should injuries or damage accidentally occurs. It might even eventually evolve as a natural extension of auto insurance, though in this case it's a small policy bought at the point you bought the drone. That bill also requires GPS enabled drones to have an auto shut-off feature enabled that'll shut drones down when they approach airports. A necessary function, unfortunately.

The second bill wants to help curb future hit and run type accidents, with a state registration system similar to what we already have for cars. This would also require pilots to leave their information, much as with a car accident, in a conspicuous place after the fact, or face legal consequences. This should help place more responsibility on the drone pilot themselves.

During a recent official PlayStation Blogcast it was revealed that the fantastic cell-shaded RPG, Dark Cloud 2, is going to join an already stellar cast of revived PS2 games on the PS4 via emulation on January 19th.

This came amidst a discussion on their favorite games of 2015, including the recently emulated that have been able to bring great value to the PS4. One of the greatest reasons to keep a PS3 is the large library of older games that some still find quite enjoyable, or that perhaps some haven't had a chance to enjoy quite yet. That issue is slowly being rectified, however.

Dark Cloud 2 follows two time-warped kids as they make their way through procedural generated dungeons to put a stop to an evil emperor whose hell bent on destroying the world, but from the past. It was unique in how it presented leveling up, where you leveled your weapons instead. Look for that and many more classic games coming soon via emulation to the PS4.

The monthly sales report for December from the NPD Group is now out and it shows that the PlayStation 4 enjoyed a nice healthy lead for the last month of the year, which was likely expected by many. That isn't to say that the Xbox One did poorly, just that the PS4 remained on top last month and throughout the entire year.

The PS4 was built upon the success enjoy over the first part of the year and was able the sell around 5.7 million units during the holiday season and over 35 million games. The holiday season covers the period between November 22nd all the way through January 2nd, though that's no easy feat.

While the PS4 didn't quite have the amount of exclusives or timed exclusives as the Xbox One, that apparently didn't stop it from being the leading console of the year. For the Xbox One, no numbers are quoted, though the VP of Xbox Marketing did note that they enjoyed a hefty 61% increase in sales over the same period last in 2014. So both consoles enjoyed great growth year over year and record profits.

Square Enix has made the leap to have Hitman be a fully episodic game, meaning that content within will be spread out throughout the year, released intermittently as it's ready for release.

The first portion of content includes a prologue mission and a Paris mission releasing on March 11th. The next location will be set in Italy and will release in April, followed by a mission set in Morocco coming in May. After that initial schedule we'll see content updates every month with at least three different locations spanning Thailand, the US and Japan.

The general idea is that they want to get it right and have each of the massive set pieces make their way to us in a more complete state, so as to avoid the problems that have occurred with other massively scaled games in the past who suffered a lot of criticism as a result. "We decided to take the full leap and publish HITMAN as a truly episodic game experience," said Hannes Seifert, Head of Studio at Io-Interactive. "Part of that decision is for that little bit of extra time to ensure every location we release is at the quality level fitting for a HITMAN game. But the main driving reason is that this will allow us to create a living game that will expand and evolve over time and establish a foundation for the future - this is the first game in a storyline which will continue and expand with future Hitman games."

The minimum PC specifications needed to enjoy Rise of the Tomb Raider, out January 28th, are now out. And for the bare minimum, it doesn't seem to require a whole lot for a good experience. Remember, the below specs are for minimum only, it's not even a recommended setup.

All you really need to just play the game, and of course not at 4K with everything on, is an older Sandy Bridge Intel i3-2100 or AMD equivalent and at least a GTX 650, or an HD 7770 from AMD. That's it. That means it should be playable, though at the lowest of settings, on a variety of hardware out there.

But that's just the minimum, and we know that with the plethora of options, we'll be able to dial in the experience and also dial it up a notch for some, hopefully, very impressive visuals at 4K and even above, for those with Eyefinity setups.

WarnerBros is going full steam ahead with Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice clips, with the latest TV spot airing during a recent episode of Conan.

The TV spot doesn't show much new, but what it does show is Superman ripping open the doors to the Batmobile, and being a menace to Batman. Superman says "next time they shine your light in the sky, don't go to it. The Bat is dead. Bury it."

Batman seems pissed, responding with "tell me, do you bleed?" with Superman looking at him like he's nothing - and then flying away. Batman looks to the skies, adding "you will".

Just Cause 3 was developed to make good use of DirectX 12 by Avalanche Studios, with the studio talking about the use of DX12 in their engine in the past.

Well, during the Game Developers Conference 2016 event in March, a programming session will take place, organized by Avalanche Studios and Intel. The duo will be talking about the changes the developer made for Just Cause 3, with the session being presented by Intel's Graphics Software Engineer, Antoine Cohade.

The session teases: "Just Cause 3 is Avalanche studio's latest addition to the mind (and lots of other stuff) blowing open world action-adventure series: Just Cause. Published by Square Enix, the game released on December 1, 2015 for Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. During the development of the game, Intel and Avalanche have been working closely together to optimize the game on Iris graphics, but also to make use of DX12's features to improve the performance even further as well as bring additional visual quality to the game!"

HBM2 is nearly here, with JEDEC releasing the official specification behind the fastest VRAM we've ever had on a video card, and this is incredibly exciting.

The official specification on HBM2 sees cards ramping up to 32GB, with up to 1TB/sec of memory bandwidth. This is a huge leap in the available VRAM over HBM1, which was limited to only 4GB on the Fiji-powered cards from AMD, including the super-small R9 Nano, Radeon R9 Fury and the R9 Fury X.

The power consumption of HBM2 will be lower than HBM1, with 8% saved over HBM1, on top of the 48% saved over GDDR5. The most important part of HBM is the amount of DRAM stacked, with HBM2 driving it up to 4/8 Hi Stacks (4/8GB) over the 4 Hi Stack of HBM1 (1GB total).

Samsung is now set to be Apple's primary supplier of OLED displays, according to Korea's ET News. It's said an agreement between the two parties -- which sees Samsung investing somewhere between $2.49bn and $3.32bn and increasing to as much as $7.47bn -- has "practically been decided."

Apple only uses OLED displays in its Apple Watch at the moment, but the rumor mill has suggested the iPhone will switch over to OLED starting in 2018 following an agreement with Samsung or LG.

Samsung not long ago elected to use its in-house Exynos chip over Qualcomm's Snapdragon 810 in its Galaxy S6 and S6 Edge; today it confirms it has begun manufacturing Snapdragon 820 mobile processors utilizing its new 14nm LPP process for the semiconductor company. The new process is said to deliver up to 15 percent faster speeds and 15 percent less power consumption over its 14mn LPE process (found in the Exynos 7 Octa chip).

Samsung wouldn't say whether the new chip would find its way into its future phones, but rumors indicate a Galaxy S7 is on the horizon and will indeed contain the 820. Patrick Moorhead, president and principal analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy (and formerly of AMD), says, "I do believe Samsung must use the 820 to be more competitive with Apple. 820 hits performance per watt levels Exynos just can't hit."

The slow rollout of Skype Translator began about 14 weeks ago following its creation nearly two years ago; now it's finally public for everyone.

Translator lets you converse with others who don't speak your language, translating what each of you says with text so you can both understand each other. This works with video or text chats, although far fewer languages are supported for video at the moment (more will come).

To try it out, bring up a conversation window in Skype and click the globe icon just below the call button. If you don't see it, click Help > Check for Updates in the same window.

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts have announced the nominees for this year's Oscars, with Alejandro G. Iñárritu's 'The Revenant' and George Miller's 'Mad Max: Fury Road' leading the pack.

Eight films vie for Best Picture this year, including 'The Big Short', 'Bridge of Spies', 'Brooklyn', 'Mad Max: Fury Road', 'The Martian', The Revenant', 'Room' and Spotlight', with many of those films directors including Adam McKay, George Miller, Alejandro G. Iñárritu, Lenny Abrahamson and Tom McCarthy are also up for the Best Director category.

One surprise that the nomination of Michael Fassbender as Best Actor for his role as Apple founder Steve Jobs in the film of the same name, as well as Sylvester Stallone in the exceptionally well received 'Creed'. Oscar winners will be announced at the 88th Academy Awards ceremony in Hollywood on February 28th.

Twitter now has its own gaming focused Twitter feed, but we're not entirely sure why they've done this. As we understand it, it's just a feed to tweet and retweet other gaming related topics and memes. So in other words, it's very similar to any other gaming site or other related feed, except super official and from Twitter themselves.

But this is an initiative to help gamers find what they're looking for in an easy to find package. "There are thousands of gaming-related Tweets sent on Twitter each day," Twitter said in a statement about their new venture. "Whether folks are discovering a new game, Tweeting at a gaming personality, keeping up with gaming news or following their favorite esport, we want want to make it easy for gaming fans to find and join the most vibrant conversations about games."

It's similar to their other official feeds about other topics, such as Twitter Music, Twitter Government and others, but it's a strange thing given that the search function is very useful and effective at finding the topics you want, with or without hashtags, which aren't really required anymore.

In a week which has already seen the loss of legend David Bowie, tributes are also flowing in for veteran character actor Alan Rickman, who passed away yesterday aged 69 following a battle with cancer.

Best known to audiences as Snape in the 'Harry Potter' series, Rickman had a long career in film, with memorable roles in 'Die Hard', 'Galaxy Quest', Love, Actually' and 'Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves'.

'Harry Potter' luminaries, such as creator J.K. Rowling and star Daniel Radcliffe have taken to social media to mourn the actor's passing.

CES 2016 - Leading up to CES 2016, I had plans to try out the new HTC Vive Pre as many times as I could. I booked a meeting with HTC themselves, but then I had a meeting with both AMD and NVIDIA where I could try it out, too.

So during the entire show, we had a chance to use the Vive Pre three times, which was enough to give me a great foundation to write on. I have a larger piece covering the Vive Pre that I'll write once I land back in Australia, but the impressions versus the original Vive are nothing but stellar.

The newly refreshed Lighthouse controllers feel lighter, the triggers feel better, and the entire controller feels more balanced in the hand. The original controllers felt a little top heavy, but HTC has redesigned the Lighthouse controllers with a strange circle at the top of them. We chatted with a few of our industry friends including the guys at Hardware Canucks, trying to figure out why they're designed like that.

World of Tanks, the free-to-play online armored vehicle mayhem simulator, is completing it's console infiltration by releasing on the PlayStation 4 on January 20th 2016.

The Xbox 360 was the first foray into consoles for Wargamin.net's World of Tanks, and it was a rousing success. The Xbox One was next, and in it they added cross-play functionality between the two consoles so that you didn't have to leave your friends behind. Now the PS4 is the next to be blessed with what might be arguably the most fun free-to-play MMOTPS (massively multiplayer tank person shooter).

On PC and Xbox One alone there are around 12 million daily users that log-in, far more than the amount of concurrent Steam users on at any one time on an average day. The micro-transactions in-game aren't required by any means, and you can play, successfully, without spending a dime.

CD Projekt RED is extremely confident that The Witcher 3's final expansion, Blood and Wine, will be an amazing experience.

The upcoming Blood and Wine expansion isn't like your average DLC: CDPR says that it's actually like its own separate game. The content features a huge 20-hour story that's entirely separate of The Wild Hunt, featuring nothing but fresh gameplay experiences. Blood and Wine will conclude the epic journey of Geralt of Rivia, and CDPR is sending the legendary witcher out with a bang. While many regard The Witcher 3 as a perfect magnum opus, CDPR notes that they felt they could improve, and Blood and Wine will be the fruits of their improvements.

How can you top something like The Witcher 3? To start, the Polish devs have created a new "charismatic enemy" that players won't soon forget, and tied that devious antagonist with a winding, sprawling story that arcs across the new region of Toussiant. The result is something that CDRP says is "even better than the main game".

The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess is getting it's very own amiibo exclusive dungeon to compliment the already large selection of difficult dungeons in the classic Gamecube game.

The name of the new dungeon was revealed on the French Amazon site as "La Cave du Crepuscule" which translates, through Google Translate of course, to The Cave of Twilight. Ominous sounding, to be sure, and a good fit for the revival of Twilight Princess. Amazon France posted the details in error, though it seems that even Amazon US has followed and you can take a look at the unreleased amiibo, which is Wolf Link.

We've known about Wolf Link for some time, though what we didn't know is that Wolf Link would come with a special dungeon to complete. Other amiibo's will also have other cool effects and should give you in-game boosts and other incentives when you use them. You'll be able to replenish your health or arrows or some such. The listing also says that you'll be able to use these amiibo's with the upcoming Zelda title for the Wii U. The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess HD comes out on March 16th, which isn't too far off. And the other Zelda game is still slated for a general "2016" release date.