Latest News - Page 2650

Xbox Game Preview is Microsoft's own spin-off of Steam's early access, a program that lets preview members beta test unreleased Xbox One games for a fee. Although the Xbox early access initiative was originally for indie games, Microsoft has since revealed it will use the program's community-driven approach to help develop and test its own first-party exclusives.

"First party will be using Game Preview for our games," Microsoft's head of publishing Shannon Loftis told GameInformer. "It's not 100 percent. It's very much developer choice, but it is definitely an option."

"We are curating that program very much with an eye for making sure that the games are high-quality games. A lot of the issues we've seen with the folks that tried this sort of service earlier are things that we've been able to learn from," Loftis says, nodding toward Steam's cluttered Early Access platform. "There is a little bit of extrapolation that the gamer has to make in order to guess that the end product is good. So far, nothing has backfired as far as gamer reception, but we are being very cautious."

Joining ESWC in the promotion of female-only gaming events, Ninjas in Pyjamas TV has announced a $1,000 online tournament featuring six teams.

Kicking off in a double elimination format, each initial match will be played as a best of three map series, with the finals ramping it up to best of five. With the winner set to take home $650 and second place taking the remaining $350, all six teams have been invited directly by the tournament organizers.

Seeing a wide variety of nations participating, Team Acer (French) and Games4U (multiple nations) are automatically seeded into the second round as they are the top two ranked teams in this competition.

With almost a full decade in development, fans are quite eager to finally get their hands on Final Fantasy 15...but up until now Square Enix has been quiet on any kind of release info. According to game director Hajime Tabata, the wait is almost over, and the devs have some extra goodies to share during the wait.

"At the very least, I can tell you that it isn't going to be released this year," Tabata said in an interview with GameSpot. "We can certainly say to people: it's going to be before 2017. I think we'll be able to tell you when we're making the announcement around PAX Prime, at the end of this month."

Sadly this isn't the fully fledged release date confirmation that gamers had hoped for. Square Enix seemed to be teasing something big for Gamescom 2015 and everyone thought at long last a release date would be announced. Amid this disappointment Tabata affirms that Square Enix has indeed set a release date for Final Fantasy 15, and that a strategic plan is in place.

20th Century Fox will no doubt be hoping to erase the memory of the decidedly average 'Hitman' feature film adaptation from 2007, as they ramp up for the release of a new feature film reboot. But this time around, it might actually go a way to pleasing fans of the game series.

Starring Rupert Friend as Agent 47 and 'Star Trek' star Zachary Quinto as clone John Smith, 'Hitman: Agent 47' seems to be courting a hard R rating, with all the blood and violence you'd rightly expect.

'Hitman: Agent 47' begins rolling out to cinemas worldwide starting from August 21st.

In an interesting announcement, Bethesda has said that Fallout 4 will not have a level cap at all and that the game doesn't end when the story is over. Players can "keep playing and leveling" once the main story is wrapped up.

Previous Fallout games have all featured level caps, so this is a big departure from previous entries in the franchise. The studio has said that it is also reworking the way enemy difficulty scales with the player's level, which is an obvious move with the lack of a level cap. During E3, Fallout 4's Game Director, Todd Howard, told Game Informer: "We call it rubberbanding; we'll have an area [where enemies scale from] level 5 to 10, and then this area will be level 30 and above".

Oculus is teasing a new 'multiplayer' mode for its VR application Oculus Cinema, an app that pits users into a virtual cinema so that they can watch movies and TV episodes on a massive, virtual screen.

During a talk with Road to VR, Oculus founder Palmer Luckey said that the idea behind Oculus Cinema was to always have VR users experiencing the movie together, just like you do when you go to the cinema. Luckey continued, saying that the app will continue to receive more social features in the coming months, such as avatars and a remote multiplayer function, so that users won't need to be in the same room.

The new social VR cinema experience will be pushed onto the Gear VR, which you'll need a Samsung Galaxy smartphone to use, but it will eventually reach the retail Oculus Rift headset when it launches in early 2016.

Twentieth Century Fox are doing the best they can to exploit the two Marvel licenses they currently hold, with the 'Fantastic Four' reboot opening this week, and filming on the latest 'X-Men' feature continuing under director Bryan Singer ahead of a release next year. But now, Fox's television arm is attempting to court Marvel on development of an X-Men spin-off series.

Fox Network Chairman and CEO Dana Walden confirmed that "we're in negotiations with Marvel. We're hopeful that we'll be able to announce something soon. We're not closed on a deal yet but it's something we're definitely pursuing." Walden opened up a little by stating that "we won't be including Marvel characters that are at ABC with Disney. This will be exclusively the franchise as it has existed at Fox."

The next installment in the feature film series; 'X-Men: Apocalypse' opens worldwide in May 2016.

EverDisplay has just shown off an incredible new mobile display, a 6-inch 4K display that has a massive pixel density of 734PPI. But what would you need this many pixels on a 6-inch display for?

Well, the company claims that VR applications and 3D imaging would be perfect for this new display. The manufacturer has been working with other technology too, such as round displays for wearables and the automotive industry. But it's not all sunshine and rainbows for a 6-inch 4K mobile display with 734PPI, as there's battery life to worry about, and heat output.

Still, we can see that 4K displays with insane pixel density are right around the corner, just as we prepare for the onslaught of virtual reality headsets from the likes of Oculus and HTC.

NVIDIA has just posted its Q2 2015 financial results, beating analysts' expectations by a considerable amount. Analysts pegged NVIDIA to have revenues decline by 8%, but NVIDIA had an increase of 4.5% in revenues instead.

The increased revenues were thanks to strong GeForce sales, surely led by the super-impressive GeForce GTX 900 series of video cards. The company is expecting sales to drop in Q3, while NVIDIA's gaming revenue increased 59% thanks to big GeForce numbers. Wedbush Securities analyst Betsy Van Hees said: "The near term story continues to be PC gaming. That is the key driver for them and they continue to dominate in that area".

Another area where NVIDIA is working hard is in the automotive sector, where the company has said that there are 8 million cars on the road using their technology and that they're working with over 50 companies for its DRIVE chip, allowing self-driving cars.

With the specification locked earlier this year, the Blu-ray Disc Association has announced that the upcoming successor to the Blu-ray format; UltraHD Blu-ray will begin licensing out to manufacturers in 2 weeks time, in order to have product available for the 2015 holiday season.

According to the release, "the format provides expanded color range, high frame rate (up to 60fps) and up-to 3840x2160 resolution" with "immersive, object-based sound formats" and "the optional digital bridge feature... can enable the consumer to view their content across a wide range of in-home and mobile devices". The Blu-ray Disc Association has also confirmed that "Ultra HD Blu-ray players will also be required to play back current HD Blu-ray Discs".

The Blu-ray Disc Association currently comprises over 50 consumer electronics and film distribution companies, including Sony, Panasonic, LG, Samsung, Pioneer and Microsoft.

Basemark has announced that it has teamed up with Crytek, the studio behind the Crysis franchise and the gorgeous CryENGINE, for a new real-world VR benchmark.

The new VR Benchmark will stress test your machine, providing you with a score that will determine if you can play VR games on the various VR HMDs coming out in the near future. With the Oculus Rift, HTC Vive (SteamVR), StarVR and various other VR HMDs on the horizon, Basemark is in a very lucrative spot with VR Benchmark.

Basemark's new VR benchmark is built on the foundations of CryENGINE using DirectX 12, and starts at 1920x1080. The benchmark will stress test your hardware to maintain a great VR experience at 60FPS, 75FPS, 90FPS or 120FPS. VR Benchmark will test out various latencies such as your input latency (from the tracker and the controller to your application) and the to-the-display latency (application to photon latency).

Recently there was news spread that Steve Luczo, CEO of Seagate, wasn't exactly a fan of SSDs as quoted in a recent investor conference call.

The line taken out and analyzed was Luczo stating "There is no one that is using SSDs for storage," with further clarification that "I mean, maybe at the margin for replacing boot drives... I mean, maybe one or three per cent of the hierarchy is SSDs for storage. Most of your flash product is actually not hanging off the storage bus, it is fast memory."

TweakTown has been contacted by Creation, a global communications agency, on behalf of Seagate in order to clarify some points. According to Creation's account group manager, Luczo was in fact talking about SSDs in relation to data center usage, not home applications.

Gamescom 2015 - Razer has just announced two new gaming peripherals at Gamescom, a new gaming keyboard and gaming keypad. The new DeathStalker Chroma keyboard and Orbweaver Chroma keypad are powered by RGB LEDs, so they also look awesome.

Starting with the DeathStalker Chroma, which is a slightly modified DeathStalker keyboard featuring laptop-style chiclet keys for silent typing, and the usual gaming use. The new DeathStalker Chroma features RGB LED backlit keys supporting up to 16.8 million colors, with Razer's Chroma software that lets users enjoy multiple lighting zones and color modes.

The new Razer Orbweaver Chroma keypad is for the hardcore gamers as it's a one-handed pad with 20 programmable mechanical keys, it features an eight-way direction pad, two additional buttons, and an adjustable spot for your thumb, wrist and palm. Razer has splashed the usual RGB LEDs within the mechanical keys, making it light up beautifully during those hardcore gaming sessions.

A few days ago YouTube updated its web-based video player, with the video sharing giant now removing the iconic 301+ view counter. It has been replaced with a new real-time view counter, which is much better for viewers, and YouTube content creators.

YouTube explained its 301+ view counter in an infographic, above, where it quickly became a placeholder to stop spammers from artificially increasing YouTube video views. Once a video hit 300 views, YouTube would halt the view counter at 301+ until it was able to confirm the views weren't spam bots, and then it would reveal the true view count.

But now, YouTube is confident that it can tell the difference between automated views and real-life people watching them. From now on, the view counter will drive up as more people watch the videos, with the iconic 301+ view counter now put to rest.

Gamescom 2015 - As promised, 2K Games has revealed the cinematic trailer to Mafia 3, with the game being set in a beautiful, reimagined New Orleans.

Mafia 3 is filled with era-inspired cars, fashion, music, characters and is a "haven for organized crime". The Italian mob controls illegal gambling, drugs, prostitution and more through corrupt police and politicians. Mafia 3 sees protagonist Lincoln Clay returning home after a stint in Vietnam, with family being the central point of the game.

But, his family was betrayed and killed by the Italian mob, making Lincoln's story all about revenge. As you progress throughout Mafia 3, Lincoln will align himself with other criminals in order to build his own empire and a new family, where it will transform New Orleans in the process.

Shiro Games has announced its Evoland 2: A Slight Case of Spacetime Continuum Disorder game will be released on August 25.

Evoland 2 isn't your traditional video game, as it is designed to help take players "on a truly epic journey through time and across a variety of classic and contemporary video game styles." The standalone gaming experience features a character who learns to "understand events in different timelines," while improving the future.

The initial game launch is for PCs, with Mac and Linux versions scheduled for a later release. It will cost $19.99.

An interesting turn of events for AMD's latest video cards has been discovered by 'TX12' from the OCN forums, where he has a universal tool that lets you unlock any Hawaii, Tonga or Fiji-based GPU to its full potential.

Some users have already managed to unlock their air-cooled Radeon R9 Fury cards to a full-blown Fury X, which requires water cooling. In the case of the Fury X, AMD disabled a number of CUs on the GPU, but this universal tool lets you unlock them and enjoy the full 4096 stream processor count from the Fury X, on your air-cooled Fury.

There are dangers of doing this, as you can completely brick your very expensive card, so use caution. The thread on the OCN forums has a full rundown of how to do it, with benchmarks and screenshots of a fully unlocked Fury to Fury X, increasing its stream processor count from 3840 to 4096.

In a year with the best slate of summer blockbusters in recent memory, one studio has had a very disappointing year. Whilst Universal have had two films gross a huge $1.5 billion at the world wide box office ('Jurassic World' and 'Furious 7', Sony Pictures highest grossing film of the year - 'Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2' has grossed just over $100 million - even less than it's great white hope; 'Pixels'. Not a great year - and today's announcement proves again that the studio is creatively bankrupt.

The studio has today announced their slate of films coming in 2016 and 2017, which include 2 sequels to 'Bad Boys', but also a remake of the 90's classic 'Jumanji' which starred Robin Williams and some (at the time) breakthrough CGI effects. Sony haven't confirmed the cast, director or screenwriter for the project, short of a December 25, 2016 release date.

We all know Hollywood loves reboots and remakes, but it's getting seriously ridiculous now.

This Tuesday, Facebook's latest patent was approved, giving this internet giant the ability to judge your friends list through a financial eye. This new ability means that a lender can examine the credit ratings of your Facebook friends in order to judge if you're suitable for a loan or not.

The full text reads: "When an individual applies for a loan, the lender examines the credit ratings of members of the individual's social network who are connected to the individual through authorized nodes. If the average credit rating of these members is at least a minimum credit score, the lender continues to process the loan application. Otherwise, the loan application is rejected."

Xbox chief Phil Spencer thinks Microsoft needs to push third-party game developers harder when it comes to creating different style of games for first-party Xbox One titles.

During Gamescom, Microsoft will show off exclusive game titles including the following: Crackdown, Scalebound and Quantum Break - with all three titles providing third-person action play. Unfortunately, Microsoft wants to see different types of game genres:

"More diversity in terms of genre and mechanics, I think it's a great thing for this industry to push," Spencer recently told GameSpot. "So yes, you do find a lot of third-party action games from us, and I do think we should be pushing harder on genre and control."