Latest News - Page 2648

Electronic Arts could offer backward compatibility so EA Access members can play Xbox 360 game titles on their Xbox One game console, according to a recent tweet from the official EA Access account:

The EA Access subscription offers access to EA games, DLC discounts, and early access to game titles - and while the game collection is for Xbox One titles - it looks like Xbox 360 games could be thrown into the mix.

The addition of Xbox One backward compatibility has been praised by game studios, according to Microsoft, with Xbox One owners happy to be able to play their Xbox 360 game libraries. Microsoft is offering gamers who purchase Gears of War: Ultimate Edition a few additional games: Gears of War 2, 3, and Judgment.

The "Islamic State Hacking Division," a hacker group claiming to be affiliated with the extremist group operating in Syria and Iraq, took credit for posting the personal information of hundreds of US military and government personnel.

Compromised data included names, email addresses, passwords, phone numbers and other information of personnel of the Air Force, Marine Corps, Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, and NASA.

Leaked data also reportedly included credit card information from US State Department officials, along with Facebook message screenshots between military personnel. The group previously targeted Canadian military cadets, and hacked websites to share images from Syria.

Activist news organization Ryot is giving virtual reality supporters a 360-degree view of Syria, with its "Welcome to Aleppo" three-minute film. The journalist who captured the footage used six cameras and a 3D-printed gimbal placed on a tripod in one of the most dangerous regions of the world.

"VR will definitely be used for entertainment, porn, video games, all of that," said Christian Stephen, the global editor responsible for filming the video in Syria for Ryot, in a statement to the AP. "It can also be used to genuinely communicate stories around the world in desperate need of reaching people. The fatigue that has come with photos and videos of explosions and people crying has numbed people to the reality of the world, especially in Syria."

Stephen admitted trying to capture the footage was a daunting task, with regime and rebel snipers taking aim at the odd contraption - and those responsible for leaving it unattended. "It's an incredibly harsh environment to work in normally, but when they see you running around with a tripod and an alien device on top of it, they are going to try and kill you."

Larian Studios, the developers behind the acclaimed Divinity series, today announced a new sequel to the PC CRPG hit Divinity: Original Sin will enter development following the success of a new Kickstarter campaign.

"For a long time, we've dreamed of making something even bigger, better, and more engaging than Divinity: Original Sin, and now it might finally be within our reach," Larian Studios said on its Kickstarter page for Divinity: Original Sin II. "However, we can't reach that dream without your help. As Swen says in his latest blog post, 'Divinity: Original Sin wouldn't be the game it was without the input from our Kickstarter backers ... without having that same community on board, it's going to be very hard for us to achieve the goals we have for Divinity: Original Sin 2.'"

Larian has opened up its forums and encourages the community to provide ideas and feedback for stretch goals and pledge rewards to help shape the game's development. Fans have already posted up a few suggestions like 4-player co-op, an original physical map, a collector's edition guidebook and even a card game (anyone up for a round of Gwent?).

By heavily modding and cracking Microsoft's region-locked free-to-play Halo Online, a tech-savvy team of modders is working hard on bringing a free, fully functioning port of Halo 3 multiplayer to the PC for the first time.

In an effort to serve PC gamers with an authentic Halo 3 port, a growing community of modders have created the Eldorito mod, a bit of software that effectively allows gamers to test-play a user-modified version of Halo 3 online multiplayer.

"I feel strange saying I want an almost ten-year-old game on my PC with nothing new, but there is something about Halo 3's simplicity that I enjoy," Sam Fish, one of the modders working directly on the project, said to PC Gamer. "I think that having Eldorito at least getting to Vanilla Halo 3 status would be an insane starting point for modding and going crazy with the game. We have already seen an insane amount of support with the community with people making Forge maps and mods and posting them on our subreddit almost daily. I think that if our community stays this awesome, Eldorito will have an amazing year."

Every month Valve conducts in-depth surveys to determine the most popular hardware and software solutions used by Steam gamers and compares them on a month-by-month basis. Last month's survey report reveals that most gamers are using stock hardware rather than high-performance rigs.

According to July 2015's hardware survey, only 34% of Steam users play at 1920x1080 resolution, with 26% running games at the laptop standard resolution of 1366x768. Out of the gamers that opt in for multi-display gaming, a full ~29% of these users run at 3840 x 1080 resolution.

When it comes to CPU's ~48% of Steam users run dual-core CPU's, with quad-core CPU's close behind at ~45%. The bulk of CPU clock speeds are between 2.3 GHz and 2.6Ghz, but the 3.3-3.69Ghz clock bracket is on the rise accounting for approximately ~16% of users. Intel CPU's predictably dominate with an inclusion rate of 75% versus AMD APU's at just a quarter of users.

Thecus has just announced its expanding its rackmount NAS lineup by introducing the N8900PRO, which packs an Intel Xeon E3-1275 quad-core processor clocked at 3.4GHz, 8GB of DDR3 RAM (expandable by up to 32GB), and an AES-NI hardware encryption engine.

Florence Shih, CEO of Thecus, explains: "For businesses in need of a powerful, all-purpose NAS server, the N8900PRO provides a robust hardware platform to handle the rigorous day-to-day operations in the workplace. With the 8-bay, N8900PRO, users are able to deploy a high capacity, cost effective storage solution with ensured data protection and security".

The new N8900PRO from Thecus has eight bays that can take either SAS or SATA drives, 10GbE support for ultra-fast network transfers, and oodles of features that will have business users happy for years. There's also VMware, Microsoft and Citrix virtualization solutions, and much more included. Better yet, the N8900PRO takes use of Thecus' Daisy Chaining technology and iCSCI Thin Provisioning, which allows users to hit an insane 576TB of storage. Multiple file systems are supported, including ext3, ext4, Btrfs, and XFS.

Although the acclaimed P.T. demo will turn a year old tomorrow, the game continues to spellbind players across the globe who continue to search for secrets buried in the hallowed depths.

One gamer shares his find on Reddit, saying that P.T.'s terrifying ghost Lisa will appear as a mini jump-scare in the starting basement.

"After you get trapped in the bathroom and are forced to be possessed on the next loop, get killed by Lisa to get back to the room you start in," says metatronicsauce, the finder of the new scare. "If you exit the room backwards, you will see Lisa very briefly before you enter the hallway. You might also sometimes hear her moaning in the basement room as if you were possessed." Lisa only pops up in the corner of your eye so you have to watch closely or you'll miss her.

The development of Lionsgate and Saban Entertainment's reboot of the mid 90's TV/movie/action figure franchise 'Mighty Morphin Power Rangers' feature film series is well on the way, with the studio providing details to Collider on the main characters that will make an appearance.

Your favourite Power Rangers characters including Jason, Kimberley, Trini, Billy and Zack are all here.. but missing is the Green ranger Tommy - I guess we gotta wait for the sequel for him to turn up. Lionsgate haven't made any comment on casting, but with a release date set for January 2017, the studio will be looking to lock these down soon.

Dean Israelite, who directed this summer's teen-oriented 'Project Almanac' is behind the camera, with a script by Ashley Miller and Zack Stentz who've previously collaborated on 'Thor' and 'X-Men: First Class'.

Verizon has teased that it has successfully tested out its new, insanely fast fiber-optic technology that goes by the name of next-generation passive optical network, or NG-PON2.

This new technology is capable of blasting speeds to users at anywhere between 10Gbps and 80Gbps, enough to download many Blu-ray movies in just a few seconds. The new technology uses an optical line terminal (OLT) which is capable of generating four wavelengths of light, each capable of transmitting data at 10Gbps down, and 2.5Gbps up.

Verizon's impressive new technology is capable of transmitting both the current GPON (or Gigabit-capable Passive Optical Network) as well as the new, insanely quick NG-PON2, simultaneously. The system is even capable of switching between the four wavelengths in the case of something going wrong, where it can quickly restore the 10Gbps connection.

Samsung has just announced three TCO-optimized, high-performance SSDs based on its incredibly exciting 3D V-NAND technology. These new products will be solely aimed at the enterprise and data center markets.

Kicking off with its latest SAS-based SSD, the new PM1633 is "designed to meet all requirements of Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) interface based systems". The PM1633 is based on the 2.5-inch form factor and the 12Gbps SAS standard, and will arrive in 480GB, 960GB, 1.92TB and 3.84TB versions. Samsung's PM1633 is capable of random read and write speeds of up to 160,000 and 18,000 IOPS, respectively. When it comes to sequential read and writes, we can expect 1.1GB/sec and 1GB/sec, respectively.

Moving onto the new half-height, half-length (HHHL) card-type, NVMe-based SSD - the new PM1725 - offers huge speeds, and massive capacities of 3.2TB and 6.4TB. The PM1725 is capable of random read speeds of up to 1 million IOPS, while writes hit 120,000. It can read at a huge 5.5GB/sec while it writes at 1.8GB/sec, with Samsung teasing that it can enable "users to save a 5GB video in less than three seconds".

At the Flash Memory Summit, Seagate has announced its new Nytro XF1440 2.5-inch, Nytro XM1440 M.2-based NVMe SSDs, and the new Nytro XP6500 Flash Accelerator Card. These new products, as Seagate puts it: "extend Seagate's portfolio of flash-based solutions, which are designed to work in conjunction with Seagate storage products to meet nearly any data storage need".

The new Seagate Nytro XF1440 and XM1440 are industry-leading power efficient, high-performance NVMe SSDs that are available in both ultra-small 2.5-inch and M.2 form factors. On the other hand, the Nytro XP6500 is a PCIe-based flash accelerator card that offers incredibly low write latency, all the while improving response time in application that require high IOPS and bandwidth.

Seagate's Vice President of Flash Products, Cloud Systems and Electronics Solutions, Brett Pemble, said: "These new flash products greatly expand the range of our total product portfolio and demonstrate how Seagate's acquisition of the LSI flash technologies is paying off. With these products, Seagate's commitment to the modern datacenter is clear. The Nytro XF1440/XM1440 SSDs deliver the highest performance in the smallest power envelope. The XP6500 flash accelerator card provides ultra-low latency capability for applications that require fast logging and produce significantly higher transactions per second, something today's applications demand".

Gaming company Nintendo announced earlier this year that it planned to enter the mobile gaming market - and at least five mobile games could be expected by March 2017.

"We can't deny the massive install base of smartphones out there, and some fans that aren't old enough yet to afford their own gaming console, perhaps for those consumers they can start to appreciate some of our content and build a relationship with some of our characters and our franchises," said Scott Moffitt, executive of Nintendo of America, in a statement to the Examiner. "We feel it's going to be an additive to our console business."

Just because Nintendo is dabbling in the smartphone game market doesn't mean investors and supporters need to be worried about executives abandoning the company's core business: "Normally, we wouldn't have taken that step of telling people we are working on the next system, but we wanted people to know we remain committed to the dedicated game device business," he said while referring to the Nintendo NX.

There are plenty of folks in Washington, D.C. unhappy with former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, and you can count retired Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R-GA) as one of those people. Snowden remains holed up in Moscow, Russia, with very few options considering the severity of charges he faces in the United States.

Chambliss believes there could be only one way to punish Snowden for his actions:

"We need to hang him on the courthouse square as soon as we get our hands on him," Chambliss recently told students at the University of Georgia's Terry College of Business. "I hope none of you have any sympathy for him."

A new report from PageFair says that there has been a 41% spike in the use of ad blockers over the last 12 months, something that will cost the industry around $21.8 billion in lost advertising revenue in 2015 alone.

The report warns that ad-blocking software is a large threat to the future of free content on the web, with PageFair's 'The cost of ad blocking' study saying that close to 200 million monthly Internet users are now using ad-blocking browser extensions. The report continued, saying that sites targeting "young, technically savvy, or more male audiences" are the ones that are most effected when it comes to ad blockers.

In the United States, around 45 million monthly active users use ad-blocking software, but that pales in comparison to Europe's 77 million users. Greece tops them all with 36.7% of the Internet population using ad-blocking software of some sort. Co-founder and Chief Executive of PageFair, Sean Blanchfield said: "It is tragic that ad block users are inadvertently inflicting multi-billion dollar losses on the very websites they most enjoy. With ad blocking going mobile, there's an eminent threat that the business model that has supported the open web for two decades is going to collapse".

It looks like Samsung is keen to stay ahead of the curve when it comes to storage technology, with the South Korean electronics giant announcing it has started manufacturing the first 256-gigabit (32GB) 3D vertical flash memory.

This new achievement is double Samsung's previous efforts, but what can we expect from this new memory technology? Well, how do massive SSDs sound? Samsung added that manufacturing is 40% more productive, so the bigger SSDs won't come with an inflated price when they're released. Samsung is hoping to continue making its 256-gigabit flash memory for the rest of the year, so we should see products with this technology inside of them starting towards the end of the year, or into 2016.

Now that the release of Windows 10 is out of the way, the next big thing for Microsoft is the refreshed Surface Pro 4 that's expected to drop sometime next month.

Microsoft's Surface Pro 4 is expected to rock Intel's new Skylake-powered processors, as well as an increase in on-screen pixels with a 4K option. There will be lower resolution offerings, but you can customize the new Surface Pro 4 to 4K if you want to spend the money. We will of course see Windows 10 powering the new Surface Pro 4 units.

The base model should feature a 10-inch 1080p display with a fanless Intel Core i3 processor, 4GB of RAM and USB Type-C connectivity. This model will pack a huge 8600mAh battery. The higher-end Surface Pro 4 will rock a Skylake-based Core i7 processor, a huge 16GB of RAM and a larger 13-inch display that can be configured up to 4K.

Despite appalling reviews (currently 9% on Rotten Tomatoes) and a disappointing box office take that performed well under expectations, Twentieth Century Fox is remaining bullish on a sequel to 'Fantastic Four', ahead of the rights returning to Disney in 2024.

As reported by ComicBookMovie, Fox domestic distribution chief Chris Aronson commented that "While we're disappointed, we remain committed to these characters and we have a lot to look forward to in our Marvel universe and then a follow up comment "We love these characters, and we will find ways to make use of them." Which basically means that, no we aren't going to give this property back to Disney.

The blame game has already started, with director Josh Trank taking to Twitter with a now deleted tweet which blamed Fox for ruining the film. In case you were wondering, the original 2005 take on 'Fantastic Four' enjoys a relatively higher 27% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. 'Fantastic Four' 2015 is currently playing in theatres worldwide, but probably not for much longer.

According to the latest rumors, NVIDIA is preparing a new mobile GPU in the form of the GeForce GTX 990M. With the GTX 980M already being quite powerful, it still isn't as fast as a desktop GTX 980, but the new GTX 990M will fix that.

NVIDIA's purported GeForce GTX 990M would reportedly be as fast as current GTX 980M SLI configurations, with the GTX 980M being based off of the GM204 die with 1536 CUDA cores. A laptop powered by GTX 980M SLI beats a desktop GTX 980 by around 10%, so for a GTX 990M to beat both of those setups, we're talking about some serious mobile performance.

One of the big problems that NVIDIA will have is power consumption, with the GTX 980M SLI using around 180W TDP. Either NVIDIA is going to have to work some magic on the purported GTX 990M, or we're looking at around 150-180W TDP on the mobile GPU. After using the ASUS ROG G751 gaming laptop and its included GeForce GTX 980M for a few months now, it doesn't get too hot or loud at all. All NVIDIA would need is some half decent cooling, which all gaming laptops feature these days, and we could be looking at mobile 4K 60FPS gaming on the GTX 990M.

Smach has just surprised gamers by unveiling its new portable Steam Machine which will go on sale on November 10 for $299, the day that Valve begins selling its Steam Machines, but it won't begin shipping until late 2016.

The company that will be building the portable Steam Machine is Smach, which has said it will begin shipping out units in Q4 2016. The $299 price is the pre-sale price only, so expect this to go up a little. What was known as the Steamboy is now known as the Smach Zero, claiming to be "the first handheld console to play Steam games on the go" and will play "more than 1000 games" from the Steam library upon launch.

When it comes to specs, Smach announced back in June: