Gaming - Page 1024

Nintendo is riding the marketing wave of Pokemon GO right now, with the announcement of its NES Classic Edition. Nintendo's upcoming NES Classic Edition is a mini NES system with 30 built-in games, and it's going to sell like hotcakes with its $59.99 price.

The NES Classic Edition launches in November, and will connect to your TV through HDMI, and it'll also include a controller that will be designed to work just like the original NES controller. The new controller will also connect to a Wii Remote, which will allow you to play Virtual Console games on a Wii, or Wii U console.

The new NES Classic Edition will feature something we all wish the original NES did: multiple suspend points, which will mean you won't need to find passwords when you want to start playing a game again. Nintendo will be making its NES Classic Edition available on November 11 for just $59.99, with the 30 games included:

Now, you and I already know that our Lord and Savior Gabe Newell is what makes the sun rise and set every day... but what about all of the other people in the world? Well, Tim Sweeney knows it, too.

The Epic Games co-founder said during an interview with GameSpot recently on the topic of Oculus and its closed ecosystem that "Gabe Newell is the smartest person in the PC industry because he fundamentally realizes it. These gamers are smart; they know what's happening. When companies do this sort of thing, it pisses them off. Everybody wants to have control over the computer. They want to have complete freedom to install anything from any source. They don't want any company's product forcing them to do things against their will".

Sweeney chatted with GameSpot about Oculus and its closed ecosystem, which is where Gabe was injected into the conversation. Considering Gabe runs Valve, which owns Steam and even the Vive headset - as well as countless money makers like the Half-Life, Counter-Strike, DOTA2, and other franchises - his words have weight.

Sony has just confirmed it won't be holding a press conference at the upcoming European Gamescom tradeshow in Cologne, Germany, nixing any possibility of an official unveiling of its new 4K-ready PlayStation 4 Neo console.

Neither Microsoft nor Sony will be holding press conferences at Gamescom, but both gaming giants will attend to demo various games via booth venues, with Sony bringing its PlayStation VR in tow. While Microsoft announced their own abstinence from the show, Sony's no-show was confirmed by French site Jeux Video Live . "There will be no PlayStation conference at GamesCom," a Sony France rep told the website.

Analysts believe that Sony's PlayStation 4K console will be formally announced at Japan's annual Tokyo Game Show from September 19 - 20. Macquarie Securities analyst Damian Thong says we should expect more PS4 Neo news and a brand new PS4 Slim model at TGS 2016. These projections fit into Sony's typical presence at TGS--last year the company launched a salvo of announcements during the Tokyo-based show, and Sony is a confirmed exhibitor at the event.

Valve has officially responded to the CS:GO gambling and lottery-fixing controversy that's embroiled the PC gaming world.

I'm sure most of you have already heard about the CS:GO Lotto scandal, and how popular YouTuber's TmarTn and ProSyndicate have been caught promoting and encouraging gamers to throw money into the skin-gambling site while secretly owning it. The CS:GO skin trade is an incredibly lucrative industry, allowing everyday gamers to bet in-game weapon skins worth real money against other betters across the world. Now Valve has broken its long silence on the matter to deliver an official statement.

Valve begins by explaining how these lottery sites work, and explaining how they're not directly involved in the in-game economies. Valve goes on to note that the specific way that these sites use Steam's OpenID API to "run a gambling business isn't allowed by our API nor our user agreements." The Steam operators then promise to start shutting down these seedy gambling rings and "start sending notices to these sites requesting they cease operations through Steam" and also promise to "pursue the matter as necessary."

A Battlefield German community manager has indicated via livestream that the Battlefield 1 open beta will be launching shortly after Gamescom, which takes place the weekend of August 17-21. The beta date has been of significant curiosity given the closed nature of the currently ongoing alpha, so fans are no doubt relieved to have a better idea of when it begins.

It's also said that those signed up to Battlefield Insider will be able to play three days earlier than everyone else, so make sure to get on that if you're dying to get your hands-on it.

Lastly, Rush mode was strongly believed to be in the game following a file dump from the alpha, but now it's confirmed.

AMD and developer Firaxis are partnering again, this time to bring sweet graphics technology by way of DirectX 12 to Civilization VI. Not only will the game benefit from the low-level API and the added efficiency it brings, it will also enjoy asynchronous compute and explicit multi-adapter support.

Async compute is a DirectX 12 technique that allows parallel execution of compute and graphics tasks, drastically improving workload efficiency and thus, performance (as seen recently with Doom). The added boost should mean those late-turns shouldn't slow you down a bit. For now anyway, it's only really supported by Graphics Core Next (GCN) and Polaris GPUs; while NVIDIA says it is capable of supporting it, it's not fully enabled by its drivers yet, and user reports as is indicate overall inferior results.

Civ VI players can also look forward to explicit multi-adapter functionality, meaning if you run multiple GPUs, you benefit from official Microsoft support, which may result in more stable and powerful implementations. Explicit multi-adapter support also means you can use AMD and NVIDIA cards together.

Hideo Kojima says that his partnership with Sony will ultimately allow him to make Death Stranding his "best work yet."

Now that Hideo Kojima is working with Sony, the beloved Metal Gear Solid creator is enjoying a staggering amount of freedom he never experienced under Konami's restrictive reign. Thanks to Sony's hospitality, and Mark Cerny's openness with the secrets of the PlayStation 4 console, Kojima can now let his imagination roam free without being bogged down. The fruits of this union will culminate in Kojima's new unique and original PS4 game Death Stranding; in fact, Kojima said that he's "very confident this will be my best work," and Death Stranding could surpass his magnum opus MGS series.

"So far, when I've been making games, I've had to give up on something or at least compromise on something in order to get things done," Hideo Kojima said in a keynote speech at the Brighton Develop conference in the UK. "But this time, working with you [Mark Cerny and Sony] and you bringing the state of the art technologies, we will get around that. I'm very confident that we're working towards something completely new and that no-one has seen so far. This will be my best work so far, I'm very confident about that."

Gamescom 2016 kicks off next week, but Microsoft has confirmed it won't be holding an official press conference at the European event.

At its massive E3 2016 press briefing Microsoft revealed the full extent of its hand: a new 40% slimmer $299 Xbox One S console that plays 4K games and video, its enthusiast "monster" native 4K gaming Project Scorpio console, a slew of new first-party games, the new Xbox-and-PC Play Anywhere initiative, and a galaxy of new features, content, and accessories. Redmond won't be keeping up this momentum with Germany's Gamescom event--instead of a huge briefing, or even a smaller showcase with new announcements, it'll be hosting a bunch of booths that let gamers digest all the E3 reveals.

Microsoft's absence on the stage floor gives Sony a much-needed opportunity to reveal its anticipated new PlayStation Neo console, which supports upscaled 4K gaming and 4K video playback. Sony could steal the show with a PS4 Neo reveal, but then again, Nintendo could also shock the world by revealing its mysterious new NX console at Gamescom. Sony and Nintendo won't go at the same time, so if Sony reveals the PS4K at Gamescom, Nintendo will pick September's Tokyo Game Show for the NX.

The Federal Trade Commission has officially confirmed that Warner Bros. Interactive paid up to "tens of thousands of dollars" to bribe key YouTube personalities like PewDiePie for favorable coverage of Middle-Earth Shadow of Mordor.

According to reports published by the FTC, Warner Bros. Interactive has now settled its charges pertaining to its deceptive marketing campaign with Shadow of Mordor. The publisher caused quite a row when YouTuber Total Biscuit revealed the shady early access deal, but the deception went much farther: Warner Bros. paid anywhere from hundreds to tens of thousands of dollars to well-known YouTubers (including PewDiePie) for positive game videos. The FTC notes that the publisher "failed to require the paid influencers to adequately disclose [the sponsorship]," meaning everyday gamers thought the videos were genuine instead of paid ads. However PewDiePie made it explicitly clear on his original video that the content was sponsored by Warner Bros.

"Warner Bros. Home Entertainment, Inc. has settled Federal Trade Commission charges that it deceived consumers during a marketing campaign for the video game Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor, by failing to adequately disclose that it paid online 'influencers,' including the wildly popular 'PewDiePie,' thousands of dollars to post positive gameplay videos on YouTube and social media. Over the course of the campaign, the sponsored videos were viewed more than 5.5 million times," reads the FTC press release.

There's magic in old-school sci-fi book covers. Even if you didn't grow up in the '70s and '80s you can still appreciate the wonder and splendor that artists like John Berkey and Ralph McQuarrie unfolded before our eyes: the covers spoke of fanciful treks across exotic universes, of strange and exciting tales of derring-do, aliens, advanced tech, and infinite possibilities. In this respect, No Man's Sky--Hello Games' ambitious indie about exploring an infinitesimal universe--is a lot like like a sci-fi book cover, and it's only fitting that the game gets its own series of mock covers.

This artwork actually links to an interesting thing that the devs said about the game: Sean Murray told IGN that he wants gamers to "feel as if they've stepped into an old sci-fi book cover" every time they play No Man's Sky. So these mock-ups actually resonate quite strongly with the developer's own goals for the in-game experience.

"I've said it before, but No Man's Sky is the hardest thing I've ever worked on. It's even bigger than you can imagine. This is a type of game that hasn't been attempted before, by a smaller team than anyone would expect, under an intense amount of expectation,"Hello Games head Sean Murray said in a recent blog post.

In order to hit "true" 4K gaming with 6TFLOPs of performance with its new "monster" Project Scorpio console, Microsoft apparently won't use existing silicon that's currently on the market. Instead the new 4K Xbox will be built around its own custom graphics solution that will likely sit between AMD's mid-grade Polaris and enthusiast Vega families.

In a recent interview with The Guardian, Xbox boss Phil Spencer has pretty much confirmed that Project Scorpio won't use outdated hardware to enable native 4K gaming. "We had the ability to look at doing an interim console this year if we wanted to. We thought about that. But we didn't think we could deliver, with the silicon that's out there, a true 4K gaming six teraflop machine this year. So we decided to wait until we hit the real spec that people were asking for."

We've already speculated that the Scorpio's new custom AMD SoC would be made up of 14nm Polaris GPU alongside a Zen CPU, and Spencer seems to have confirmed our findings. But what if both Scorpio's GPU and CPU tech are 2017 hardware? This means that the Scorpio's graphics hardware might not be based on Polaris or AMD's new Vega GPU, but a new scaled custom GPU that sits in the middle between the two.

We all know Pokemon GO has absolutely exploded into the world, in a way that I've never seen before - it is the first game that I've seen that has people of all ages going out into the world, and playing a game.

Deadline is reporting that Pokemon GO's runaway success has "all Hollywood has renewed the chase for a deal to turn Pokémon into a feature film". Rumbles of a live-action Pokemon movie have been around for a while, but now things have been amplified after Pokemon GO became oxygen to gamers, with Deadline saying Legendary pictures "is moving toward a deal".

The report adds that there is a "scenario" where Max Landis, who directed Chronicle, could write the Pokemon movie, while Legendary made the film. The report adds that "everything went silent" a few months ago, but now that Pokemon GO has exploded in popularity, "it's come back around".

There's been a debate raging the past few weeks about whether or not Blizzard should implement a one hero limit for Overwatch. As it stands, there's no such limit, which sometimes leads to silly compositions that are tough to beat in some situations like double Winston, double Lucio, and double Tracer.

After much vocalization (particularly from the eSports scene), the developer is going ahead and implementing the limit, which it says is because stacking has decreased overall fun. As you'd probably hope, this is only for Competitive Mode; Quick Play remains the 'let's do silly things / try out heroes we're not good with' mode. A side effect of the limit is you'll likely notice more compositions that double up on effects but with different heroes as opposed to using the same heroes: for example, area control from Pharah and Junkrat, double turret action from Bastion and Torbjorn, and so on.

Also on the way is a balance patch which features buffs to a few heroes and a nerf to one.

Last week, a sniper rifle that appeared to have healing functionality was teased for Overwatch and today it's revealed as well as the hero that wields it. As some suspected, that hero is Ana Amari, mother to Pharah and a one-eyed sniper who has come out of retirement.

Ana's rifle allows her to deal perpetual damage to enemies (when zoomed out). When zoomed in, she acts like a traditional sniper. As well, the weapon can be set to restore health to allies. Other equipment includes a "sleep dart" that renders a foe unconscious until damage is dealt to them, a biotic grenade that deals damage to enemies and prevents them from healing while also healing any allies in the area of effect, and a nano boost (appears to be her Ultimate), which will inject a foe with a shot of adrenaline, allowing them to move faster, deal more damage, and take less damage from enemies.

With all of this high-value utility, it's not hard to imagine Ana as a Competitive Mode and tournament mainstay, but of course, time will tell. Whatever happens, it seems clear either Widowmaker will need a buff or Ana will need a nerf in order for both to be viable.

Rockstar Games parent company Take-Two Interactive will be at Gamescom 2016, so we could see Red Dead Redemption 2 teased and/or revealed onstage.

Take-Two Interactive skipped E3 2016 and missed the opportunity to reveal Red Dead Redemption 2: Legends of the Old West, but we could see the hugely anticipated sequel announced at Gamescom. The publisher will be in attendance (although Rockstar won't be tagging along) and has two separate booth areas that could feature demo builds of RDR2 and other titles.

Evidence of a Red Dead Redemption sequel--actually it might be a prequel--has been mounting, especially now that a copy of the game's map leaked out, adding more credence that the game will feature a "much bigger open world". The most convincing evidence comes from Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick, who confirmed the company is working on some "exciting future projects" that culminate in a "robust development plan that extends well beyond the current fiscal year."

Eidos Montreal confirms that Deus Ex: Mankind Divided will have a NewGame+ mode to allow players to continue their journey even after the game ends.

Deus Ex: Mankind Divided is a game about choice, and like any Deus Ex game, it gives a staggering amount of freedom to the player. Not only do we get to choose how to handle any given situation, how to build up Jensen's huge armory of weapons and abilities, or how our decisions impact everyday people, gamers get to choose when Jensen's story actually ends.

"We know New Game + totally breaks the narrative, but this is a game about choice, so we wanted players to explore that in this aspect too," Eidos Montreal Executive Narrative Director Mary DeMarle said in a recent PlayStation Blog post. "Your augmentations in New Game + really let you take advantage and get access to stuff that you didn't know was there the first time, especially as we designed the game to feature more verticality and 360 entrances for some of the buildings."

Modder Trix and his team breathed new life into Just Cause 2 (JC2) and its sequel Just Cause 3 (JC3) with well-received multiplayer mods. In the case of the JC3 mod, that's now being put on indefinite hold, and Trix is taking a job at Avalanche Studios (where the Just Cause series is made). Presumably, this means the next Just Cause title will feature native multiplayer.

"As part of Avalanche, I'll be able to bring many of the things you know and love from JC2-MP into future Avalanche experiences, while reaching heights that a mere mod couldn't facilitate," Trix states. "Unfortunately, due to time constraints, neither I or the rest of the team can actively pursue development on JC3-MP; our lives are just too busy to allow for it right now."

JC2-MP will be actively maintained (and AMD compatibility worked on), but beyond that, you're on your own. Fortunately, JC3 lovers can still check out a separate multiplayer mod from a different team.

Doom now supports the Vulkan API, meaning improved performance for you thanks in large part to more efficient CPU usage. While Doom already ran incredibly well on high-end hardware, this could mean 4K is now viable for you whereas before it was not. As well, those on low-end or midrange setups may now be able to run the game more smoothly.

Doom's Vulkan support also benefits from AMD's work in supporting Async Compute (only AMD GPUs support this for now), "Shader Instrinsics", and "Frame Flip Optimizations", three techniques designed to make GPU usage more efficient.

AMD claims up to 27% better performance with Vulkan on an RX480 at 1920x1080, and 23% on an RX480 at 2560x1440, which appears to be in line with user reports. The API is by no means restricted to AMD cards only though; NVIDIA users should see about the same improvement. However, note that NVIDIA GPUs with 2GB RAM on Windows 7 or on the 690 are not currently supported.

Niantic confirms that Pokemon GO is far from unfinished: like the furry Pocket Monsters it meshes with our real-world, the smartphone app will continue to evolve.

The free Pokemon GO smartphone game is a juggernaut. Not only has Pokemon GO topped the free iOS app charts, but it's about to eclipse Twitter as the most-used free app on the market. Nintendo and Niantic have hit a goldmine by making our everyday real lives into an AR "gotta catch em all" video game, leading Nintendo's market share to rise by 23% over the last few days. But can the game keep up the momentum and keep players actively engaged, or is Pokemon GO destined to be a curious case of "burning twice as bright for half as long" smartphone game experiments?

According to Niantic CEO John Hanke, Pokemon GO will get key features like Pokemon trading with friends and other content to keep the game fresh. "[Trading] is kind of a core element," Henke said. The CEO also says that players can expect updates to Pokestops and Pokemon Gyms, which exist now only "very most basic versions," and players will also be able to "customize their functions in other ways."

Unlike most games today, the infinite universe of No Man's Sky won't break your HDD space. In fact the entire game will fit on a 16GB thumb drive.

Even with its monstrously huge procedurally generated galaxies, No Man's Sky will only be 6GB in its disc form. Sean Murray even says that most of the 6GB is audio. Yes, really. The game has some 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 planets and its total install size is still less than the day-one patches of AAA games. With a size like this Hello Games doesn't even have to use a Blu-ray disc; they could just use a dual-sided DVD.

No Man's Sky owes its small install size to its procedurally generated environments, which offers advantages like "smaller file sizes, larger amounts of content, and randomness for less predictable gameplay." Both the New Yorker and PBS (see video above) have excellent content explaining how Hello Games made No Man's Sky's universe, so be sure to check those out.