Latest News - Page 2577

In a move that surprised absolutely no one, Sony has officially dropped the PlayStation 4's price tag to $350 in an effort to continue its reign of console dominance.

The Japanese console-maker announced the news in an update on the PlayStation Blog, where it reveals that the new permanent $350 price will take effect on October 9 in the United States and Canada. Sony also revealed a number of new bundles for the holidays, but the $350 flavors will come with the standard 500GB HDD.

"If you haven't made the jump yet, and you're starting early on your holiday wish list, I have good news - we're dropping the price of the PlayStation 4 system in the U.S. and Canada," Sony said in the update. "Starting tomorrow, October 9, you'll be able to pick up PS4 starting at the new price of $349.99 USD / $429.99 CAD (MSRP)."

While you can buy in-game insurance for your base in Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain, Crystal Dynamics doesn't want to be alone in the microtransaction game, announcing a bunch of digital gear for its upcoming Xbox One timed exclusive, Rise of the Tomb Raider.

Rise of the Tomb Raider will feature 'Expedition Cards' that allow players to "craft missions and challenge your friends to reach the top of the leaderboards" according to Crystal Dynamics' Creative Director, Noah Hughes. Hughes continued: "In Rise of the Tomb Raider, you'll earn credits by completing challenges and exploring the world. These credits can be used to purchase Expedition Card packs. When used, Expedition Cards become modifiers in game modes outside of the single player campaign. Some Cards are humorous, such as Big Head Mode, while others can increase the challenge or give you special advantages".

"There are two types of Expedition Cards: Foil and Common. A Foil Card will give Lara the strongest or strangest variations and can be used as many times as you wish. A Common Card is only used once, and you'll need to earn more credits to buy it back", Hughes continued. He added: "Expedition Cards offer "hundreds" of ways to customize Rise of the Tomb Raider, Hughes said. "You can also set up challenges for your friends to see if they can beat your scores with the same card setup. We'll have about 300 cards available at launch, and more will be added in the weeks that follow".

Microtransactions, for the most part, are a huge cash grab from developers - but they're big business these days. With the huge issues Konami is seeing in the press these days, you'd think they'd want to stay out of trouble, right? Wrong.

With the latest update to Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain, gamers can now purchase in-game insurance that will cover their Forward Operating Base (FOB). The insurance covers your FOB in case someone comes in and blows your base up while you're away from the game - like, you know, working or sleeping. The update including the insurance for your FOB is explained:

Your FOBs are always at risk of coming under attack. Now, you can rest easy with FOB insurance (paid service). If you sign up for insurance, then during the insurance period you will be compensated for any materials and staff lost due to rival infiltrations.

Can you believe that the Star Wars Battlefront beta is here? Now that it is, EA has shared the minimum and recommended PC requirements for the DICE-made first-person shooter.

Minimum PC System Requirements

OS: 64-bit Windows 7 or later

Even if you don't own Bungie's new expansion-entwined flavor of Destiny, the game might pop up on your PlayStation 4 UI anyway and prompt you to download it.

Non-Destiny PS4 gamers spotted this strange occurrence and reported it on NeoGAF, where it was revealed to be Sony's new "curated content" recommendation system that automatically adds suggestions based on your previously downloaded games. So if you happen to see it don't think you just got a free copy of the game or anything--when you activate the pane you'll be taken right to Destiny's listing on the PlayStation Store.

The feature can be pretty annoying, but you can simply disable it by ticking off "featured content" in the Automatic Download Settings pane. Here's what Sony has to say about the feature: "The PS4 system has the ability to learn about your preferences. It will learn your likes and dislikes, allowing you to discover content pre-loaded and ready to go on your console in your favorite game genres or by your favorite creators."

Destiny's new The Taken King expansion has a nice offering of hidden secrets, but there's one puzzle that even Master Rahool can't solve: the mystery surrounding the ultra-rare Sleeper Simulant exotic fusion rifle. Destiny fans have been chasing the elusive gun for weeks, dedicating serious time and effort in the Destiny Reddit...and it looks like they've unlocked another clue.

The Sleeper Simulant is one of the most powerful guns in the game, but the dynamic quest on how to actually attain it has been shrouded in mystery. Little by little Destiny fans across the globe have chipped in to solve the mystery, leading to a galactic treasure hunt that's brought the community closer together. Gamers have even delved into Destiny's source code looking for answers.

Now another clue has been spotted, but the search continues. According to a new Reddit thread, a Guardian was able to trigger a new quest called "The First Firewall" on Earth's Cosmodrome region. This mission is just the first in a line of quests that is believed to end with the Sleeper Simulant as a reward.

Apple's new pressure-sensitive 3D Touch display technology is one of the major features of the iPhone 6S and iPhone 6S Plus, offering a unique layered interface that redefines traditional smartphone UIs. But now it looks like the tech isn't just staying in Apple's reach, and will be crossing over to Android.

Human-interface developer Synaptics is responsible for the breakthrough and fully expects the new display technology to "become the new norm" in smartphones. Synaptics plans to use its new ClearPad 3700 Display Controller to fully mirror the same variable force performance of Apple's 3D Touch and bring it to the realm of Android phones.

According to Synaptics, this new display interface will offer "new dimensions in user interfaces such as speed scrolling, zoom, gaming, and text or photo editing by applying variable force with a finger or stylus". The controller also has SideTouch, a new function that allows users to use the bezels of a phone to scroll or tap within disrupting what's on the screen.

On the heels of iPhone 6S and iPhone 6S Plus sales, reports indicate that Apple is ready to bring 4K resolution to its 21.5-inch iMacs.

Sources at 9to5Mac say that Apple will start selling the new 4K iMacs as early as October 13, making it a surprise announcement to bolster its product line and fill in the gap between September's iPhone sales and November's upcoming iPad Pro release.

Although the 4K-ready iMacs will sport 4,096x2,304 resolution, the new models will reportedly match the current 1080p iMacs in terms of aesthetics. Significant changes are coming under the hood, however, with refreshed hardware across the board including a beefier video card to power the display. It's assumed Apple's El Capitan OS will be pre-loaded, and speculation hints that Apple's new Force-Touch Magic Mouse 2 and a new enhanced Bluetooth keyboard combo could come inside the box.

Not long ahead of the Star Wars: The Force Awakens movie launch and about a week before the Star Wars: Battlefront game launch, HP is releasing its Star Wars Special Edition Pavillion notebook.

It's a cheeky love letter of sorts to the hardcore Star Wars fan that packs in Star Wars sound bytes (like R2-D2 talking when you plug or unplug devices), a Death Star themed recycle bin icon that changes depending on how full it is, and a treasure trove of over 1,100 behind the scenes images, storyboards, artwork, audio selections, concept art, and more (which you can browse via the "Star Wars Command Center").

As for hardware, you can choose between a Skylake Core i5 or i7 CPU and Intel HD Graphics 520 or NVIDIA GeForce 940M7 GPUs, and set yourself up with as much as 12GB of RAM and 2TB storage. The display is a welcome 15.6'' and can be made touchscreen; an optical drive and B&O tuned speakers are also included; the battery will last you about seven hours. This is not the gaming laptop you are looking for, but if you're a Star Wars geek, it may be worth the $699.99 they're asking (an extra $39.99 if you want the themed wireless mouse and sleeve) over the $549.99 for the non-themed version.

Google met with technology companies and publishers recently to discuss the issue of slow loading websites on mobile, an issue they believe causes significant revenue loss for website owners.

Following the talks, they've launched the Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) project. As you can probably tell from the name, the aim is to improve mobile browsing performance, but it's also to better how code functions across all the different devices available today.

The project is built on AMP HTML, "a new open framework built entirely out of existing web technologies, which allows websites to build light-weight webpages."

Synology has teased that it is making some very large changes in 2016, where the NAS maker will be unveiling its new DiskStation Manager (DSM) 6.0 operating system, apps for wearables like the Apple Watch, advanced network attached storage (NAS) products, and its first ever router - the Synology RT1900ac.

The company will launch the DSM 6.0 beta today, with the full release scheduled for sometime in 2016. Synology Marketing Manager Jason Bonoan said: "Synology is more than NAS devices. Many of our business customers use our DiskStations and RackStations as replacement servers. So, it makes sense that SMEs and SMBs asked for more features for virtualization, data protection, disaster recovery, and productivity apps. We've listened and redesigned our OS and hardware to meet their demands".

On the consumer side of things, Synology is working on being the first to support Apple Watch with DSM 6.0. Synology's updated OS will be the first to support Apple Watch, where users can "use simple gestures or voice control to quickly check or create notes, or enjoy their favorite music - whenever and wherever they want". Inside of DSM 6.0 will be a new Video Station which is "refreshingly new, strikingly intuitive" according to the company. Synology added: "the completely redesigned Video Station will use a popular on-screen button layout, making navigation smoother and more intuitive than ever. New support for offline transcoding and Windows 10 enables users to switch between different devices and platforms - so they can enjoy an uninterrupted viewing experience".

If you're a fan of multiple monitor setups and enjoy the productivity that it gives, you may sometimes run into taskbar related issues, seeiong as you're only able to utilise the taskbar on your primary monitor.

Released by Actual Tools for Microsoft Windows OS only, 'Actual Multiple Monitors' software allows you to put a fully functional taskbar on any other monitor, including a fully functional recycling bin, start button and system tray.

As a celebration for its 13th anniversary, Actual Tools is offering this window manager for 40% off - priced at $29.95 for a limited time. Although possibly quite useful, is it worth that amount of money? The answer to this question is up to you to decide.

Now that CD Projekt Red is done with The Witcher 3, the studio is pumping more resources into Cyberpunk 2077, its upcoming sci-fi RPG. The developer is now beginning to talk more about Cyberpunk 2077, teasing that it's going to be absolutely huge.

Visual Effects Artist Jose Teixeira talked with MCV recently, where he said: "Cyberpunk is far bigger than anything else that CD Projekt Red has done before. Far, far bigger. We're really stepping into the unknown in terms of complexity and size and problems we encounter". He continued, saying that the scope of The Witcher 3 has really helped the studio with the open world of Cyberpunk 2077.

Teixeira added: "The Witcher helped Cyberpunk quite a bit, because the game got so big and so complex that it really taught us. We really didn't know what was going to happen. If anything, working on The Witcher 3 was a really good and often brutal learning experience. Cyberpunk is going to benefit greatly from it. I can almost guarantee it. I have a lot of things that I want to change and do better the next time around, and I can guarantee that almost everyone in that studio has something that they go 'I did this this time, next time I can do it differently, I can do it better'".

We knew it was coming, but now it's official: the Roku 4 is here. The new media layer has 4K video playback capabilities, but it also has some unique features; like a remote finder.

The new Roku 4 has a quad-core processor, 1.5GB of RAM (up from the 512MB on the Roku 3). This means the Roku 4 is more than capable of playing back 4K video streams at up to 60FPS. Inside, the Roku 4 features 802.11ac MIMO WI-Fi, optical audio out, Ethernet, HDMI, a microSD card slot, and a Wi-Fi Direct powered remote with voice search, a headphone jack and the awesome remote finder.

The remote finder works by pressing a button on top of the box, which will make a sound come out of the remote so you can find it. If you constantly lose your remote, or like me have little ones at home who are always moving them around, this will be a killer feature.

One of the biggest, if not the biggest Xbox One games coming out this year will feature 4-player cooperative mode. 343 Industries, the developer behind Halo 5: Guardians, has said that the 4-player cooperative mode for the single-player side of the game can be controlled by other gamers, or by AI.

343 Industries says that it wanted to tell a "much more sociable" story, with the developer continuing: "We were winding down on Halo 4 and thinking about moving to a new console, and we had already planned some of the technological upgrades that we wanted to make to the engine. And early on we started talking about the types of stories that we wanted to tell and the experiences that we wanted to create, and we really wanted to focus on a much more sociable experience, especially in our campaign".

While cooperative play isn't new to Halo, the studio acknowledges that past Halo games didn't really do it well, in terms of gameplay and story. Executive Producer on the game, Josh Holmes, added: "I think co-op has always been a big part of Halo's campaign, but in the past it's sort of been treated as a completely separate experience, where you just have three other clones of the Master Chief running side by side. The narrative breaks down. One of the big creative goals that we had for Halo 5 was to bring that into focus and support it through the story".

With Continuum, Microsoft essentially wants to turn Windows 10 phones into portable PCs. The tech giant showcased a live Continuum demo at their New York event, revealing just how potent and revolutionary the feature actually is.

Along with a slew of cross-device functionalities like Windows Hello biometric authentication, Continuum is supported on Microsoft's new flagship Lumia 950 and Lumia 950XL duo. Continuum represents a new shift in PC dependence, moving away from the traditional tethered desktop environment to a more free, unified ecosystem powered by Windows 10.

But how does it work? Continuum harnesses the Lumia 950's octacore processor to simulate a PC-like experience, making the phone the central heart or brains of the operation. This lets you completely circumvent the PC altogether. Just hook up a Lumia phone, a keyboard, mouse and monitor to the Display Dock hub to simulate a fully-fledged PC-like work environment.

Ubisoft has finally unveiled the specifics around yesterday's mysterious teaser, and it really is a Far Cry caveman survival sim...well sort of.

The game is officially called Far Cry Primal and takes place during the Stone Age era where giant mastodons and saber-toothed tigers roamed open expanses. Players will take the role of Takkar, a grizzled hunter that happens to be the last survivor of his clan. The goal of the game is to simply survive--but in a world where everything has teeth the size of your leg, that's easier said than done.

The reveal trailer shows off spears, bows and clubs as the major weapons, taking players back to the barebone basics of a cruel prehistoric world. "This isn't the Stone Age you thought you knew. This is the Stone Age with irreverence and mayhem. This is the Stone Age by Far Cry," Ubisoft says.

KitGuru staff writer Anton Shilov yesterday reported AMD was beginning to sell new DDR4 RAM modules compatible with Intel platforms and its own next-gen platforms. This is true, but the trouble came when he made this very biased statement: "AMD's Radeon R7 DDR4 memory modules are not performance champions, but fans of AMD's Radeon video cards and modders make purchase decisions based on design and visual aesthetics, not on performance."

The article -- which sports a 1.6/5 rating courtesy of 63 reader votes as of press time -- has since been edited accordingly. The statement now has a strikethrough, and editor in chief Allan Campbell describes the statement as "incorrect [and] inflammatory". Further, there is a link to a full apology by him, where he explains the statement does not reflect the views of the website. The text in its entirety can be found below.

It seems like everyone wants to get in on the success of Microsoft's Surface hybrid: Google has the new Pixel C tablet, and Apple has the transforming iPad Pro. In order to stay on top, Microsoft had to push the bar even further, leading the Redmond tech giant to create the Surface Pro 4.

The new Surface Pro 4 is an all-around improvement over the previous Surface line: it's thinner, lighter and much more powerful thanks to the onboard Intel Skylake CPU. It has a 12.3-inch display that utilizes new PixelSense technology. Microsoft actually fashioned a dedicated G5 chipset to run the new optical stack, which powers PixelSense to bring dramatic improvements to latency, parallax and palm detection for fluid writing and drawing with the new Surface Pen. The pen itself has 1,024 levels of pressure sensitive and comes with an eraser (an obvious jab at Apple's iPencil), and doesn't need to be recharged more than once a year.

Microsoft's new Surface tablet is just 8.4mm thin and features a laptop-class keyboard designed for performance input. Under the hood the Surface Pro 4's silicon soul is powered by a sixth-generation Intel Skylake CPU. Full Windows 10 Pro integration gives access to a slew of cross-platform apps as well as full stables like Office, Outlook, Skype and even Cortana voice-searching with a single button press of the stylus.

Microsoft has taken aim at Apple's Macbook line with its own 2-in-1 Surface Book, a 13.5-inch Windows 10 laptop that features higher-end specs while fitting right into the new Windows ecosystem.

The Surface Book is touted as the "world's most powerful, thinnest PC" and Microsoft boasts that "ounce for ounce its the fastest 13-inch laptop on the planet". The hybrid laptop can be docked or removed from the base to transform from a laptop or a tablet, but the GPU itself is located in the base so you'll need to keep it docked to tap its power.

Even with these claims Microsoft has been somewhat vague on the GPU specifics, saying that the Surface Book has an accelerated NVIDIA GeForce GPU with GDDR5 memory that's been tuned by the Xbox team. It sports Intel's latest 6th-generation Skylake Core i5 and i7 processors for beefy performance, and can utilize up to 16GB of RAM. There's word that a NVIDIA GeForce 940M could be the GPU that powers the Surface Book's base, but nothing's been confirmed just yet.