Latest News - Page 3107

Activision Publishing, Inc., a wholly-owned subsidiary of Activision Blizzard, Inc. announced today that Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 passed the $1 billion mark in sales in just 16 days since its November 8 launch. This beats the record set in 2009 from James Cameron's "Avatar" which hit $1 billion in 17 days.

The Call of Duty community now consists of more than 30 million gamers, which is more than the combined populations of the cities of New York, London, Tokyo, Paris and Madrid. Some crazy, crazy numbers. Bobby Kotick, CEO of Activision Blizzard has said:

Sequel to the 2009 action flick, G.I. Joe: Rise of the Cobra is nearly here, with G.I. Joe: Retaliation arriving in the middle of 2012. Today we have the first teaser trailer to the new movie, which has some new stars in the form of Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson and Bruce Willis. Yes, Bruce Willis!

The above trailer shows off a bunch of scenes from the movie, and a tease of the storyline. It seems the G.I. Joe's have been wiped out after an attack, and the 'retaliation' from them is what the movie seems to be about. Bruce Willis is in it, so it's an instant buy for me, as cheesy as he has become lately, I have an old school 80's/90's action movie love for the guy.

The new G.I. Joe movie still includes some other big name stars such as Channing Tatum, Adrianne Palicki, Ray Stevenson and Arnold Vosloo who plays Zartan, whom the G.I. Joe team have to face off against.

ASUS are reportedly working on a new ultrabook style laptop where they are said to be baking in a swivel design display that transforms the device into a tablet. Since Windows 8 is much more tablet-friendly, this move would actually be quite the bold move by ASUS. DigiTimes says the device will be unveiled at 2012 Computex in Taipei, Taiwan, and might hit retail shelves in time for the launch of Windows 8 next September.

ASUS have been here before, with their Eee PC T91 netbook (as pictured above) in 2009. The device did not sell that well, but with tablets being more popular than ever, and Windows 8 having the OS build a tablet UI directly into the OS itself, it could really work.

There has, to this day, not been a device that could do both. Apple have the iPad and their MacBook range, but nothing that can do both. I personally own a 2011 17-inch MacBook Pro and I've wished for a long time now that I could disconnect my 17-inch display and use it like a big iPad. If ASUS can pull this off, I can tell you now, I'll be all over that in a heartbeat. I can see it now, it'll be called Asus Ultrabot or similar, in line with their "Transformer" line of products. You heard it here first, folks! I call Ultrabot from here on out.

Behar Merlaku was sitting on a slot machine at a casino in Bregenz, Austria when he thought he hit the big time. Not just a few thousand dollars, but he hit the jackpot winning an astounding, life-changing $57 million. At just 26 years old, this would be one of those life-defining moments, where you realise everything will be OK from here on out.

Until he went up to the cashier to cash his prize to have the casino owners say it was "all a mistake", and just a "software glitch'. They argued that the jackpot alarm went off erroneously and that Merlaku's game had not actually hit the required five matches. He had only gotten four, they said. Instead of the $57 million Merlaku thought he'd won, the casino spat in his face an offered him $100 and a free meal. Yep.

This is the point when I would most likely form myself into a ball of pure hatred and darkness, and either implode without a trace of my existence, or explode in a fire of pure rage.

U.S. cyber security analysts and experts are reporting that fewer than 12 different Chinese groups are responsible for most of the China-based cyber attacks that have resulted in critical data being stolen from U.S. companies and government agencies. The analysts spoke to The Associated press where they've said the intrusions have resulted in the loss of billions of dollars of intellectual property and other critical data.

The attacks may have been stealthy, agressive and somewhat ninja, but the distinct signatures the hackers leave behind make it possible for U.S. cyber security investigators to more or less accurately identify which teams were responsible for the attacks. According to the report, the U.S. gives unique names or numbers to the attackers, and at times can tell where the hackers are and even who they may be.

It's virtually impossible, however, to prosecute hackers based in China due to the lack of any form of agreement between the two countries. Even if it were 100-percent possible to provide definitive proof of where and who the attacks came from, China would most likely not even bat an eyelid. Given that at least a handful of the groups are believed to have financial backing from the Chinese government or military.

The development team responsible for the amazing Uncharted series of games on the PlayStation 3, have some good news for the world. Shortly after Uncharted 2: Among Thieves came out, Naughty Dog split its focus into two separate projects.

One team handled the sequel to Uncharted 2: Among Thieves, Uncharted 3: Drakes Deception, while the other tem handled a new IP, "The Last of Us" and have been working on this new title for the last two years. The Two uf Us is a PS3-exclusive game, about an apocalyptic Earth, in which you'll find abandoned cities reclaimed by nature. The population has been decimated by a modern plague, There are survivors killing each other for food, weapons, or whatever they can get their hands on.

Joel, a brutal survivor, and Ellie, a brave young teenage girl who is wise beyond her years, must work together if they hope to survive their journey across the US.

Every time I read the word "atom," I say to myself "up and Atom" from the character "Radioactive Man" from the Simpsons. Anyway, researchers from McGill University and Sandia National Laboratories have built a circuit that has two wires that are separated by just 150 atoms, built on a 15nm process.

Circuits of this size include the usual benefits of lower power consumption and heat, as well as bringing extra functionality due to the larger transistor density. The challenges at this level, as you can imagine, are great. Dan Olds, an analyst at The Gabriel Consulting Group said of this research:

The studio responsible for S.T.A.L.K.E.R have reportedly closed down, with Ukrainian developer GSC Game World closing their doors. The company was founded back in 1995, and have had quite the run of success with S.T.A.L.K.E.R., their first-person shooter game.

There were multiple games in the series, Shadow of Chernobyl, Clear Sky, and Call of Pripyat. S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 was being developed and was looking to have a release next year.1C Ukraine's Sergey Galenkin blogged about the closure, with 1C being one of the publishers of the original S.T.A.L.K.E.R. The blog states the shut down has been confirmed, with Galenkin attributing this to a combination of things including a failed publishing deal for a console version of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 and the difficulties in self-publishing a PC game in Eastern Europe.

It's a sad, sad day and I'm truly disappointed that GSC Game World have gone. What next?

Hitachi Global Storage Technologies (Hitachi GST) have just announced the industry's highest capacity 4TB storage solutions in the form of the Deskstar 5K4000 Internal Hard Drive Kit and the Touro Desk External Hard Drive. The Hitachi 4TB Deskstar 5K4000 hard drive is a 3.5-inch drive with a 32MB cache and also sports Hitachi's CoolSpin technology. CoolSpin, along with other Hitachi power management techniques, give the Deskstar 5K4000 up to 28-percent idle power savings over the Deskstar 7K3000 7,200 RPM drives.

The suggest retail price on the drive is $399.99. The kit comes inclusive of mounting screws, step-by-step instructions and a software download that allows both 32- and 64-bit Microsoft Windows, Apple OS X and Linux-based systems to access the full capacity and power of the 4TB drive.

The second drive announced by Hitachi is their 4TB Touro Desk External Drive which has the ability to be placed vertically, or horizontally, depending on you of course. It sports a smooth black, textured body and is the perfect solution for all of your high-def video, pictures, music or just to add another whopping 4TB of storage to your ever-growing collection of HDDs. It includes the fast USB 3.0 interface and comes in 3TB, 2TB and also 1TB capacities.

Motorola would be running around saying HELLO MOTO to each other today in excitement, as a German court ruled against Apple in an ongoing battle over patents. Motorola's complaing was that Apple failed to license on of their wireless intellectual properties. Apple use this technology in their 3G-packing iPads and iPhones.

Motorola could now force Apple to remove the feature from their products, or even have the ability to slap a sales ban in Germany. Apple have said that they intend to appeal the ruling, while Motorola claim the ruling validated its "efforts to enforce its patents against Apple's infringement."

Apple have replied, by saying:

comScore have just released their U.S. online holiday spending numbers for the season to-date, where it has been revealed that consumers continued to spend online in record amounts. In just 39 days of the November to December 2011 holiday season, $24.6 billion was spent online, which is a 15-percent increase compared to the same time last year.

The week ending December 9 reached $5.9 billion in spending, up 15-percent with 3 days surpassing $1 billion in spending. For this holiday season, six individual days have surpassed $1 billion in spending, which for an economy in tatters, is quite the achievement. Cyber Monday leads this with $1.25 billion in sales, as well as Monday, December 5, which now ranks as the second heaviest spending day in history at $1.18 billion.

One of the driving forces behind this new found love for online retail shopping is the use of coupons and deals as well as the increased amount of free shipping offers from retailers. Smartphones and tablets have also helped, with more and more people using price comparison apps, both making purchases from the comfort of their own homes, or inside retail stores. E-commerce companies have noticed this trend and are now offering strong incentives to use and buy through mobile apps.

OK, let me collect myself here. Bioware, check. Frostbite 2-powered, check. Command & Conquer, check. PC-only, check. That's all I need to say, enjoy and goodbye. But really, At the VGA 2011 awards, it was announced that Bioware are making an RTS, they have an RTS studio under their label.

Announced, was Command & Conquer Generals 2, which will be powered by the same engine that drives Battlefield 3, Frostbite 2. It will be PC-only, but excites me more than I can express through my keyboard with Dr Ray saying:

AMD's next-generation high-end graphics card has been spotted, with images making their way onto the Internet. The new boards are marked as "Tahiti" and are believed to be the top-of-the-line single-GPU cards from AMD. This should be what the Radeon HD 7900-Series will eventually be.

The card, as you can see in the picture above, is quite long, roughly the same length as AMD's current Radeon HD 6970. It sports twelve GDDR5 memory chips, which means they use a 384-bit memory bus. It also includes two 8-pin PCI Express power connectors, which should give it up to 375W of power to suck down. The card, however, is powered by the SIG-approved 6-pin plus 8-pin config, which uses up to 300W of power.

It shouldn't be long until we have more concrete info, but generally, when there are leaks like this, the real things aren't far behind.

Bethesda have been very quick on patching their dragon-slaying, you-can-do-everything RPG, Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. They've released Patch 1.3 which brings general stability improvements, optimized performance for Intel's Core 2 Duo processors and resolves the following problems:

Fixed Radiant Story incorrectly filling certain roles

Fixed magic resistances not calculating properly

This is a bit unexpected, but a good move for Zalman. They have just announced their entry into the GPU market with the shipping of Zalman-branded GPUs to start shipping on December 13.

Zalman's first entry will be AMD Radeon HD 6000 Series GPUs, in three different models: Zalman HD6870-H , H-Zalman HD6850 and HD6770 Zalman-H. As you can tell from the model numbers, they are HD 6870, HD 6850 and HD 6770 GPUs. Nothing high-end yet, but I'm sure Zalman are just putting their toes into the water, for now.

All cards will feature two DVI outputs, one HDMI output and one DisplayPort output. All cards are dual-slot with the fan located in the center of the card. The PCB is a wicked blue color.

Razer's gaming-themed and feature-packed gaming laptop, Blade, is said to hit shelves and customers hands before Christmas. Razer CEO Min-Liang Tan also explains what has changed since the "world's first true gaming laptop" was unveiled in August, and talks about the Army origins of the laptop's sleek and sexy design.

Something I did not know, is that Tan served in the Army, and is quoted:

OnLive have released a new update to its Android and iOS app which allows PC-quality high-definition gameplay to a very wide range of smartphones, tablets and media players. This includes the iPad, iPhone, iPod touch and Kindle Fire.

The app is available on Thursday, December 8 and will add complete gameplay support for any game offered through the OnLive service, which includes some of the latest AAA games on the market right now such as Batman: Arkham City, L.A. Noire, Assassin's Creed: Revelations and more.

The previous version of the OnLive app only allowed users to use the OnLive marketplace and access the social features of the service, but after tomorrow, you'll be able to play any game as long as you're connected to Wi-Fi, and if not, it'll also work over 3G and 4G LTE connections with a minimum speed of just 1Mbps.

You may think theres some form of trickery to my title there, but there is not. Quite simply put, Amazing are offering consumers up to $5 off on purchases if they are to compare prices using Amazon's mobile phone application in-store.

The promotion is for one day only, this Saturday, and is a sneaky way of Amazon to increase the usage of its bar-code-scanning application, while also collecting intel on prices in the stores. Mobile commerce is a booming market right now, with more and more customers more than happy to use applications on their smartphones to either shop, or compare prices not just at home, but at work, in the shop itself, or while in the toilet.

Thanksgiving and Black Friday sales were enormous, and I'm sure Amazon want a repeat of that success when Santa comes visiting in a few weeks. Amazon's Price Check app is available on both the Apple App Store and the Android Market, the app allows shoppers to scan a bar code, take a picture of an item or conduct a text search to find the lowest prices.

I could sum this news up in just four letters: ROFL. But, I'll explain what is going on here... the Red Cross are investigating whether 600 million gamers are violating the Hague and Geneva conventions when they kill and blow stuff up for fun.

Delegates at the 31st International Conference of the Red Cross (ICRC) and Red Crescent raised their concerts over the potential "International Humanitarian Law" violations, which can constitute war crimes - during a workshop in Geneva.

The Red Cross wrote in its daily bulletin:

Samsung's Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich phone may be available internationally, but U.S.-based fans are still waiting on the subsidized CDMA version to be sold by none other than Verizon and made available this Friday.

The Galaxy Nexus will be available for $199 on a two-year contract, which is something that has now been confirmed. The smartphone will also be the first Ice Cream Sandwich phone to officially arrive in the U.S. market. If you don't already know, the Galaxy Nexus sports the beautiful AMOLED display which comes in at 4.65-inches with a high-density resolution of 1280x720.

[edit] I have received some e-mails and comments on this article, after some more digging around - there are conflicting reports of a $199 figure, which could've been a Black Friday sale amount, and there is a $299 figure floating around too. It could all be a marketing stunt too, as the Galaxy Nexus is most likely going to be the biggest competitor against the iPhone 4S. I guess we'll see in just over a days time.