Latest News - Page 2579

Nearly 25 years after exiting TV screens after seven seasons and two TV movies, the CBS Network is developing a small screen reboot of 'MacGyver', which originally starred Richard Dean Anderson as secret agent Angus MacGyver.

Sources have told The Hollywood Reporter that the new series will follow a "20-something MacGyver as he gets recruited into a clandestine organization where he uses his knack for solving problems in unconventional ways to help prevent disasters from happening."

'Fast and Furious 7' director James Wan and original executive Henry Winkler have teamed up to produce, with a script being written by R. Scott Gemmill. Wan was previously attached to a big screen reboot which fizzed out a few years ago.

The Oculus Rift's Q1 2016 launch is almost here, but there are still many doubts about the VR headset's price tag. Initial reports suggested that Oculus HMD would be at least $300, but now VR pioneer Palmer Luckey says that the final Rift will actually cost more than $350.

"You know, I'm going to be perfectly honest with you. We're roughly in [the $350] ballpark, but it's going to cost more than that. I can't tell you that it's going to be $350, and I would say I think people are going to be happy with what they get for the price because I really do think it's going to be that best VR headset you can buy," Oculus founder Palmer Luckey told Road To VR. "And the reason for that is that we've added a lot of technology to this thing beyond what existed in the DK1 and DK2 days."

"The Rift is a lot of custom hardware. It's using lenses that are some of the hardest to manufacture lenses in any consumer product you can go out and buy. It's using custom displays we worked on with Samsung that are optimized for virtual reality, in a lot of ways even beyond what you're actually seeing on these prototypes on the show floor," Luckey explained, highlighting the various internal components that work together to create the low-latency illusion of virtual reality.

Rather than sticking to pre-defined PR lines, Xbox boss Phil Spencer really takes the executive rigamarole out of his interactions with the public. More than once we've seen and heard Spencer say and do things that shows he's really on the same level as gamers, and now he's actually delivered some level-headed responses to Xbox LIVE disruptions.

When a huge global service like Xbox LIVE is down, it prevents millions of users from playing their games on their off hours or even watching Netflix. Interruptions are a big deal especially during the holiday season when users are downloading day-one updates, firmware updates, or trying to play online-only games like Destiny. Phil Spencer knows that downtime is a huge inconcenience, and even went so far as to say that it makes Xbox gamers actively distrust Microsoft.

Yesterday Xbox LIVE was down for quite some time on the Xbox One. When an everyday fan asked Spencer what was wrong with Xbox LIVE, he opened up and actually answered: "We are on the issue, apologies. We know the issue and what the fix is, shouldn't be too long," Spencer said, adding in the following: "We have to earn [your] trust, each day, and I know service disruptions hurts that trust."

Microsoft has just folded one of the industry's premiere and leading 3D physics providers into its massive ecosystem, giving the Redmond-based tech giant a huge home field advantage.

"Microsoft's acquisition of Havok continues our tradition of empowering developers by providing them with the tools to unleash their creativity to the world," Microsoft said in the official announcement. "We will continue to innovate for the benefit of development partners. Part of this innovation will include building the most complete cloud service, which we've just started to show through games like "Crackdown 3."

Havok is used in pretty much every game with a 3D environment. If you pick up any game released in the last 15 years or so, odds are that it will have Havok's logo on the back. The suite has powered tens of thousands of games across the entire spectrum of gaming, from yesteryear consoles like the PS2 and GameCube to the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One as well as an entirely galaxy of PC games. Picking up Havok is a monumental step forward for Microsoft and gives them a massive new armament to have priority for its first-party Xbox One exclusives as well as AR games with the HoloLens.

Today marks the last bundle in Microsoft's second Xbox One anniversary celebration, and it looks like they've saved the best for last. Now gamers will have the traditionally meaty Fallout franchise to chew through with their new consoles.

The new Fallout Xbox bundle comes with the new 1TB Xbox One console that doubles the stock 500GB storage, a download key for Fallout 4, another download key for Fallout 3 which will be playable thanks to the Xbox One's incoming backward compatibility update, an Xbox One controller fitted with the new 3.5mm headset jack, and a 14-day voucher for Xbox LIVE Gold.

This bundle is scheduled to launch alongside Fallout 4's release on November 10, 2015. Since it has the expanded 1TB HDD the bundle will retail for $399 rather than the more comfortable $349, but that extra space will help you further down the road if you're an active gamer.

In an age where 4K Ultra-HD is just starting to take hold in smartphones and TV set-top boxes like NVIDIA's Shield TV, tech engineers are already pushing the limits of 8K.

Sharp's titanic 85-inch 8K TV stands as a momentous leap forward in high-definition tech, but what about condensed 8K models? Apple supplier Japan Display leads the charge with the world's first compact 8K LCD panel, which condenses a resolution of 7,680 x 4,320 in a 17.3-inch display.

The 8K module sports a pixel density of 510 pixels-per-inch and has a total of 33,177,600 individual pixels, and an impressive 120Hz refresh rate. Thanks to its wide 176-degree viewing angle, high 2000:1 contrast ratio and minimized color shift, Japan Display affirms the 8K panel can deliver "life-like 8K images with a true sense of depth".

Ever since the PlayStation Vita released in 2012, there has been much debate over the exact clock speeds of the handheld's ARM Cortex A9 CPU. While Sony has stayed silent on exact details, hackers have finally unearthed some concrete details on the speeds of the PS Vita's quad-core processor.

Since the iPhone 4S uses the same ARM Cortex A9 CPU and was released in a similar timeframe as the PS Vita, the major consensus pinned the handheld's CPU at the 800MHz mark. But the recent findings show that the PS Vita's CPU actually runs at 333MHz by default and can be boosted to 444MHz with Wi-Fi turned off. Given that the ARM Cortex A9 processor has a max speed range of 800MHz - 2GHz, Sony actually underclocked the CPU frequency to about half of its suspected speed.

While Sony has no interest in upgrading the PlayStation Vita with a modern SKU, Nintendo took the opportunity to refresh its popular 3DS handheld with the New 3DS. Nintendo's New 3DS packs in beefier specs and the 804MHz speeds of its custom ARM 11 CPU actually almost doubles the CPU frequency of the PS Vita.

With the underwhelming performance and reviews of Terminator: Genisys, it should come as no surprise that Paramount Pictures has put any future sequels on hold, indefinitely.

Even though the studio pulled in $440 million worldwide on a budget of $155 million, marketing costs have to be put on top of that, and I'm sure Paramount really splashed out on marketing for the new Terminator movie in hopes it would win big at the box office. The Hollywood Reporter wrote that Terminator: Genisys is still losing money, even with the $440 million box office haul.

SOMA was released on September 22 for the PlayStation 4 and PC, with Frictional Games announcing that it has sold 92,000 copies in the 10 days since its release.

92,000 might not sound like a lot, but Frictional Games isn't a gigantic studio, with the developer saying: "Our goal for SOMA's sales is 100,000 after a month" and it will meet that very easily. Frictional Games added: "The money that we've got from this will pretty much pay our company expenses for another two years. Sales are still going pretty strongly too, with a total of around 2,000 copies sold per day. This number is bound to drop over time, and it'll be interesting to see just how fast and where it stabilizes".

If we compare the sales of SOMA against Frictional's famous Amnesia: The Dark Descent, SOMA is doing extremely well. In its first week, Amnesia sold 20,000 copies while its sequel, Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs sold 120,000 copies. Frictional added: "Our goal for SOMA's sales is 100,000 after a month, and at the current pace it should be able to reach pretty much exactly that with a few units to spare. However, this doesn't mean that we've come close to recouping all our costs. We need to sell almost three times that amount to do that. But given that it took us five years to make the project, there's no immediate stress to do so".

Showtime have some of the best shows on TV right now, with the likes of Homeland, Ray Donovan, and finished shows like the incredible Dexter (if you forgive that abysmal finale). But without a presence in the mobile world these days, you're not going to secure as many customers as your competition.

The company has just announced it is streaming Showtime to your Android device for $11 per month, without the need of a cable subscription. All you'll need is a credit card, a compatible device, and the new Showtime for Android app. Before this, the only way you could enjoy Showtime shows was by adding Showtime to Hulu, at $9 per month.

New users can even get a 30-day free trial when they download the app from the Google Play Store.

Hours after we broke news that AMD might not have the HBM2 game wrapped up, news has broken that AMD will be culling 5% of its global workforce. Around 500 jobs will be lost due to a restructuring process, which is said to streamline AMD's business and reduce costs as the company continues to struggle against Intel, reports Bloomberg.

AMD will record charges of around $42 million due to the restructuring plan, which will outsource some of its IT services and application development. The company will save around $2 million and $7 million in the last two quarters of the year, and a total savings of $58 million in 2016.

While Bloomberg might say this is down to Intel beating the company, AMD is taking an even worse battering from NVIDIA. In the discrete GPU market, NVIDIA controls 82% of the dGPU market share with its GeForce products, leaving AMD with scraps. The new Fiji-based cards powered by the next-generation High Bandwidth Memory seem to be few and far between, with stock not filling shelves, or gamers' PCs.

Pre-orders have just opened up for Fallout 4's $30 season pass, but why should you bother with it when mod support is coming in 2016?

When Fallout 4 releases in November, just about everyone in the known universe is going to put their lives on hold for a post-apolcayptic joyride in an irradiated Boston. Gamers will pour hundreds and hundreds of hours of their time into the game, exploring every nook and cranny whilst building up their respective survivors. Given that Fallout 4 will take over 400 hours to complete, isn't it really too soon to even think about DLC?

We all know how the games industry works. Pre-orders are the bread and butter for devs, and often season passes and DLC are planned out way before the game is actually finished. Now Bethsoft is participating in this, but they're also going to roll out full mod support across all platforms, bringing mods to consoles for the first time. This is huge. Before now console gamers have been locked out of user-created content and were at the mercy of whatever developers decided to throw at them.

In a bid to push Prime subscribers towards its own Fire TV set-top box, Amazon is planning on ceasing all sales of Google's Chromecast and the Apple TV.

The digital retailer says that it will no longer list or sell devices that don't support Prime Video streaming, including all current and last-generation Apple and Google streaming products. The new policy will go into effect starting October 29, whereupon the entire online retailer will be Chromecast and Apple TV-free.

"Over the last three years, Prime Video has become an important part of Prime," Amazon said in an official statement to Mashable. "It's important that the streaming media players we sell interact well with Prime Video in order to avoid customer confusion. Roku, XBOX, PlayStation and Fire TV are excellent choices."

Microsoft has been working hard since June to make it so inter-language conversations are possible on the Skype desktop program, courtesy of Skype Translator. As of today, it's finally possible, as the company begins its slow rollout to users, which will be complete within a few weeks.

Skype Translator covers both voice and text chat: six languages for the former, and 50 for the latter. Among the more popular: Chinese, English, French, Hindi, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Spanish, and just for good measure, Klingon (which was assisted by the Skype community).

Apparently the results earlier this year were impressive, so they should be even better now.

Amazon continues to evolve, with the launch of its latest service that pays part-time drivers to deliver packages for Amazon. Amazon Flex is an Uber-like delivery service that pays drivers between $18 and $25 per hour to deliver packages using Amazon Prime Now, within the promised one-hour delivery window.

Interested drivers need to be at least 21 years old, have their own vehicle, an Android-powered smartphone, and have to pass a background check. We don't know how many drivers Amazon is after, the delivery distance and package size they'd be handling and other factors that would determine how much a driver is paid per hour.

Part-time drivers can work two-, four-, or eight-hour shifts to supplement their income - or with the eight-hour shifts, it could very well be a full-time job. It's not as flexible as being an Uber driver, but the benefits are there. Amazon Flex drivers can work as much as they want, as Amazon needs delivery drivers seven days a week.

Ubisoft has confirmed that microtransactions are here to stay in the modern Assassin's Creed universe: we've seen them in Black Flag, Unity, and now they're coming to 18th century London in Assassin's Creed: Syndicate.

The paygate content will be "100% optional" so you can still all of the game's content without paying extra. Syndicate's microtransaction model will be focused on the money vs. time convenience scheme that involves shelling out cash to get the strongest items and possible level up faster. It'll likely be in the same currency tier scheme we see in freemium mobile games and F2P games like Warframe. Ubisoft maintains that Syndicate's microtransactions will be closer to Black Flag than Unity--which is a smart thing to say, considering how Unity is associated with catastrophe.

"Assassin's Creed Syndicate will include paid options to save time and accelerate progress," Ubisoft dev Francois Pelland said in a community Q&A on IGN. "The pay model allows players who do not have time to fully explore our huge game world to still be able to eventually acquire the game's most powerful gear as well as other items. Rest assured, all of AC Syndicate's content is available without paying anything additional and the game has been balanced such that microtransactions are 100% optional."

AMD has released its Catalyst 15.9.1 beta driver, a slight update over the recently released 15.9 beta driver.

The latter improved performance in the Fable: Legends benchmark and The Star Wars: Battlefront beta, but also gave rise to a severe memory leak bug that triggered when resizing windows. That bug is fixed in 15.9.1, so download and install via the source link to your heart's content.

Driver notes are below.

Due to overwhelming pressure from fans, Square Enix has pulled the plug on the "Augment Your Pre-order" scheme for Deus Ex: Mankind Divided.

The scheme itself was a brand new method to encourage and rack up pre-orders, and was universally condemned by gamers and the gaming press. Essentially players were strongly enticed to pre-order the game (which is a dangerous proposition in today's industry) to earn extra redeemable bonuses, and if enough gamers pre-ordered, the game would release four days early.

"We quickly noticed that this approach created even more frustration than before, resulting in a resounding amount of negative feedback," the publisher wrote in the official announcement.

We've all joked about the future of IoT wearable technology, especially with the audacious idea of "smart jewelry". But Apple is pretty serious about pushing the limits of wearables and now for the first time we have a glimpse of what may very well become the Apple iRing.

The patent for Apple's smart ring tech has just been published, revealing rough abstracts and schematics of the small wearable. According to the patent, the "iRing" is an "external electronic device with a finger-ring-mounted touchscreen that includes a computer processor, wireless transceiver, and a rechargable power source".

The ring's form factor is quite curious. One configuration of the device has a pressure-sensitive display (hinting at layered 3D Touch support) with haptic and tactile feedback on the front, with a slider dial, buttons and a built-in microphone underneath the screen. Other variants don't have a screen at all, Some variants come with an onboard camera for photos and video recording.

NVIDIA has just unveiled GeForce Now, its rebranded game streaming service that was until now, known as Grid. NVIDIA plans to compete against PlayStation Now, but at a much cheaper price point.

GeForce Now will be offering gamers the chance to stream games from their servers at 1080p 60FPS, blasting the titles to their Shield console, Shield Tablet, or Shield Portable. NVIDIA has more than 50 games on their GeForce Now service, with games like Alan Wake, Ultra Street Fighter IV, Grid 2, Dirt 3, Borderlands and multiple Batman titles. If you want to purchase games outright and play them instantly, you can get some hours pumped into titles like The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, Saints Row: Gat out of Hell and Resident Evil: Revelations 2.

NVIDIA is launching GeForce Now on October 1 in the United States, EU and Japan for $7.99 per month. The company is including a free three-month trial membership which will allow gamers to try out the service before they dive head first into it.