Taiwan's technology giant Foxconn was set to purchase struggling Japanese electronics maker Sharp for nearly $6 billion this morning until it discovered some concerning information released by the latter company yesterday. Now Foxconn is taking time to look over the details, but says it hopes to resolve the situation quickly and then complete the deal.

Its concern is understandable: Sharp released a list of approximately 100 contingent liabilities that would see Foxconn inherit a potential $3.1 billion worth of risk should it take the company over, sources close to the matter say.

This latest disturbance is just one of many in the long-running on and off negotiations which date back to at least 2012.

Google's Boston Dynamics has an impressive new version of its Atlas robot on display in the video below, which gives off a pretty strong AT-AT vibe. In it, you can see Atlas open doors, walk through rocky, snowy terrain, pick up and move boxes, and get up again when it gets knocked down. Pretty impressive, especially considering this failure at last year's DARPA Robotics Challenge.

As for the source of its mystical robot powers, it features articulated, sensate hands, and an articulated sensor head with stereo cameras and laser range finder.

Sources close to the company and security experts are saying Apple is currently working on upgrading its iPhone security measures, which would shield them from potential win by the government in the ongoing encryption war. It's said they've been working on it since before the San Bernardino attack.

The new security would be configured in such a way that a backdoor couldn't be created for it at the government's request (as is currently the case). Specifically, it addresses the vulnerability introduced by the troubleshooting system that allows Apple to update system software without a password. Once the new security in place, the government could request all it likes: Apple wouldn't be able to oblige even if it wanted to.

Experts believe Apple will be able to go through with it. Should the government win the fight, it's expected a new round of court battles would begin, at which point Apple may introduce yet more security measures, and round and round we go. In other words, Apple currently has the upper hand and will for the foreseeable future, barring Congress involvement.

Samsung is getting serious about mobile storage. They may have brought back expandable storage with the Galaxy S7, but they want native storage to grow exponentially as well. And they're doing that by producing 256GB embedded NAND using the Universal Flash Storage (UFS) 2.0 standard.

The UFS 2.0 standard will allow phones to enjoy read speeds that are nearly twice as fast as SATA 6, though still lagging behind NVMe enabled PCIe SSD's. The new embedded UFS 2.0 NAND from Samsung will be able to read at around 850MB/s and write at a much lower, but still acceptable, 250MB/s. They're quoting that it'll be able to sustain around 45,000 IOPS, which is far faster than the previous generation.

Samsung says that this is the ideal solution to record 4K footage to, since more mobile phones are beginning to have 4K capabilities. The faster interface means you can actually record them without having to rely on buffering in RAM or otherwise.

Marvell just expanded their line of ARMADA SoC ecosystem, that are frequently used in NAS and other networking devices, to include native support for open-source software platforms like OpenWRT and openSUSE.

Before now Marvell didn't officially support any other software than that which was initially installed on their platforms. Adding support in the kernel of the various open-source OS's required a lot of time from volunteers to make it work properly. Because of that, support was always a bit precarious, and it could take quite awhile for new devices to be added to the compatibility lists.

Now, however, their 64-bit ARMv8 powered ARMADA 3700 Cortex-A53 device family and ARMADA 7K and ARMADA 8K Cortex-A72 device families are getting full-fledged support for the Linux kernel as well as U-Boot support. That means that it'll be compatible with a much wider range of OS's, anything that has ARM support baked in can run on their chips, essentially.

Warren Spector, the mind behind the original System Shock and Deus Ex, is making his way back into the game industry but he isn't too impressed with the progress he's seen since he made his exit so many years ago.

He left the University of Texas to get back into an industry that he says changes constantly, but even that change seems to be just putting a facade over the same wall. Putting a new coat of paint on the same thing. "I can't believe I'm about to say this -- I'll never work in this industry again -- but in the mainstream space I really haven't seen a whole lot of progress. It seems like we're getting more finely-tuned, prettier versions of games we've been playing for years."

Spector sees a stagnant industry that's being held back by a number of different factors, but he's confident that better AI, non-combat related AI specifically, could help revitalize and breath new ideas into games. "What I want to do, is I see a variety of places where we could make some strides that would help take games to the next level. The biggest one, for me, is more robust characters and character AI. We've gotten very good at combat AI, we've made great strides there, but I don't think we've done much in the world of non-combat AI and interacting with people -- human or otherwise."

Following its trend of re-releases, Capcom today announced a new trio of remasters set in its landmark zombie outbreak franchise: Resident Evil 4, 5 and 6 will be released on PS4 and Xbox One.

The Japanese games-maker broke the news in a recent Capcom Unity blog post, and honestly we're mostly excited for RE4 making the jump to current gen. It's the best out of the bunch, and is arguably the best Resident Evil game of them all.

Sadly, Capcom has a disjointed release schedule for the remasters. Each game will be released separately for $20, and instead of going in order, RE6 will be released first on March 29, followed by RE5 in Summer 2016, and RE4 in Fall 2016. Each game will be available digitally or on physical discs in North and South America. Be sure to check out the screens below, and the reveal trailer above.

Assassin's Creed Syndicate just got a new patch that seems to focus the most on improving performance all around. It wasn't the worst performing AC game on release, but it also wasn't the smoothest experience from a new game either.

Unlike the misstep that was the release of Assassin's Creed Unity, Syndicate had fewer bugs and game-breaking glitches when it became available. The crowd density was reduced in order to help alleviate some of the issues regarding framerate while walking around the bustling city. That helped, but the increased environmental geometry, improved ambient occlusion along with increased shadow map rendering quality has made for quite the resource hungry game.

SLI in particular scaled horribly in the beginning, though it works quite well now. Ubisoft has been very quick to react to player feedback this time around putting out patches that have solved nearly all the issues and glitches that did, unfortunately, happen to make it into the final release of Assassin's Creed Syndicate. Curious if your system is any better, download the patch and let us know!

It seems that the cat is out of the bag a little early on this one. Once again the trademark system has helped to uncover and confirm two upcoming Pokemon games for the 3DS before the big Nintendo Direct anniversary celebration tomorrow. Though nothing has actually been confirmed (aside from a fake parody account doing so) officially as of yet. The filings, however, are indeed real.

According to OHIM website, Nintendo put in an application to trademark Pokemon Sun and Pokemon Moon just earlier today. This corresponds to the surprise that Nintendo was teasing just yesterday for the 20th anniversary. More info will likely be available tomorrow during the Nintendo Direct, an we'll be watching along side you for all the juicy bits of info.

GIGABYTE has some new 17.3-inch gaming focused laptops coming to market soon with the latest round of Skylake mobile processors.

The new laptops are in the P57 family, which has at its core, an Intel Core i7-6700HQ under the hood that runs at 2.6GHz and can boost to 3.5GHz. It's on Intel's HM170 chipset and can have up to 32GB of DDR4-2133 memory installed along side it. There are currently two different variants of the laptop, the P57K and the P57W.

They both share a 1080P IPS matte screen but the P57K powers that screen with an NVIDIA GTX 965M whereas the P57W has a more powerful GTX 970M with 3GB of VRAM. For storage they're using a 512GB M.2 SSD that uses a PCIe 3.0 x4 interface for some blistering fast speeds. In the front of the massive laptop is a Blu-Ray RW drive that's situated just under the trackpad, a strange and new location for the drive, which can also be swapped out for more storage if you so choose.