Gaming - Page 1072

Steam just smashed a record today with over 12 million concurrent users online worldwide. This is naturally during another successful Steam Winter sale that's likely inspired people to take it easy today just before the post-holiday work week begins.

As of around 1:55PM EST 12,333,557 people were playing something on Steam, split mostly between DOTA 2 at 940,373 players logged in and Counter-Strike with 652,925 players vying for domination. Fallout 4 was a distant third with "only" 116,827 individuals wandering through the wasteland. This totals nearly 10% of the total user-base online at any one time.

This is far more than is normal for this time of year, though not nearly as high as the concurrent user count in November, with over 13.4 million concurrent users. The Winter Sale, which ends on the 4th of January, is the likely culprit as people find the time to try out the spoils of the sale.

Homebrew creations never cease to amaze me. Just this week we saw hackers jailbreak a PS4 to run Linux and play a Pokemon handheld game, opening the doors for current-gen homebrew creations. Now those enterprising console-crackers have found a way to get Windows 95 to successfully run on Nintendo's New 3DS XL handheld, showing the versatility of today's gaming hardware.

The honors go to a modder named Shutterbug2000, who posted up proof of Windows 95 running on the handheld onto the GBA Temp forums. How exactly would you go about getting a 20-year-old Windows operating system to run on a modern video game system? Shutterbug explains:

"Back a while ago, I tried compiling the dosbox from libretro, and using retroarch to emulate dosbox. Yet, every time, it froze on a rainbow glitchy mess. [Then] I tried it on my n3ds, and it just worked," Shutterbug2000 said in a forum response. "So, I think the o3ds just isn't powerful enough to run dosbox, or there's not enough RAM. At it's core, this is just libretro/retroarch dosbox. But I figured, hey, everyone want's Windows on their 3DS, right?"

During an end-of-year livestream by Roberts Space Industries last month, Chris Roberts gave some more details on the VR side of Star Citizen.

Roberts said that RSI would be refocusing its VR efforts for Star Citizen in the coming months, adding "The status of VR integration is that we've been pretty busy with getting [Alpha] 2.0 [out] and we're trying to get 2.1 so I would say we still have some stuff to integrate from the most recent CryEngine drops. They've been actually doing quite a lot of VR, I'm pretty sure you guys have noticed that they've completely doubled down and they're all VR now".

Roberts continued: "So there are some updates on VR that we need to integrate in. It's a little more complicated because we've changed the engine so much, we've changed the rendering pipeline to enable us to do a lot of things that we need to do so it's not very easy. Nowadays we've diverged from CryEngine where we don't take regular updates from them any more although we will cherry pick certain features that maybe we're not working on that we think would help out well and VR is a good example of that".

Mirror's Edge Catalyst will be released this year, and we're finally hearing more information on the next adventure of Faith from EA and DICE.

According to DICE's senior concept artist, Per Haagensen, Faith will look "more mature" in Mirror's Edge Catalyst. Haagensen added that DICE wants to show off "her skill, confidence and attitude in a dynamic manner, without her looking like a martial artist or super hero".

He added: "When I set out to sculpt her for the Key Art, aside from the realistic aspects of her appearance, more than anything it was to convey the pose with enough action, tension, and interest to make the audience curious about who this person is".

It was only a couple of days ago that we heard that AMD's next-gen GPU architecture would be called Polaris, but now we're hearing about a refreshed Xbox One that would feature this new GPU.

The news is coming from a rumor posted on the Overclock.net forums, where you can see the device model listed as "Xbox One Polaris", but the software version is also something worth noting: "Polaris-222". Now, this could just be a huge coincidence, that Microsoft's updated Xbox One software is called Polaris - but with a rumored Polaris architecture in the works from AMD? Well now. Keep in mind that AMD's APUs power the Xbox One, it makes sense.

We definitely have the rumor stamp out for this one, but if it turns out to be true, you can bet we'll hear more about this in the coming months.

Fans have been waiting almost a decade for Final Fantasy XV, and Square Enix has finally locked in a 2016 launch for the open-world adventure.

In a recent blog post, beloved Final Fantasy director Hajime Tabata rang in the new year with some great news: Final Fantasy XV will release in 2016. "We will finally release FFXV this year, in 2016! In development, previous phases required wisdom and strength. However, moving forward the final phase will focus on effort and willpower."

Due to surging demand, Microsoft's premium customizable Xbox One Elite controller is projected to be in limited supply until March 2016.

Despite the peripheral's steep $149 price tag, gamers everywhere want to get their hands-on the Xbox One Elite controller. Microsoft has had a hard time keeping up with demand since launching the new gamepads, leading to shortages throughout November. Now the controller's popularity has grown even more, and supply is expected to be scarce for three months into the new year. The sleek chrome-and-onyx gamepad is sold out across multiple retailers, including the Microsoft Store.

"While the Xbox Elite Wireless Controller is sold out in many retailers around the world, we are working quickly to get more units in the hands of fans," a Microsoft spokesperson said in a statement to the press. "We expect more units to arrive at retailers each week, but supply may be limited through to March 2016."

The RTS, particularly the true 3D environment kind where you can use the entire map (and astronomical objects) to your advantage kind, doesn't get as much love as it should. One indie project headed up by a small team is making some stellar (pun intended) progress with theirs, Shallow Space.

They've got an influx of new ship models to help round everything off. The MFC Vindicator is featured above. Previously they were using placeholders from the Unity store itself until they could get their project Omega off of the ground. The new ships have their own design flavor that's reminiscent of ships found in Jupiter: The Nexus Incident, of which Shallow Space is the spiritual successor.

Also coming soon are some new maps and areas so that you can take those aforementioned ships and duke it out with the opposing factions. Just AI for now. But in those maps you'll find a huge expanse occupied by NPC traffic and lots of enemies strewn about an objective laden area. Zooming in and watching the ensuing dogfights is going to be a lot of fun.

Final Fantasy IX is going to be making its debut on PC, via Steam, and on Android and iOS devices sometime next year. A new trailer for the classic JRPG has sprung up on the new teaser site. There's no word on when it'll be released, nor if there'll even definitively be a western release, despite the site being in English.

When the titular Final Fantasy IX does hit digital shelves, it'll be compatible with devices running Android 4.1 or later and iOS 7.0 or later. This will almost complete the collection of Final Fantasy games on Steam and mobile.

And for those not familiar, the story is as follows: "Princess Garnet of Alexandria will soon celebrate her birthday, and to commemorate the occasion, a theater troupe has come to put on a show. However, these traveling performers have come not to entertain but to kidnap Her Highness. What starts as a seemingly simple seizure escalates into an incredible adventure. Join Zidane, Princess Garnet, and a party of extraordinary characters on a journey to discover the truth of the Crystal and save their world from an encroaching darkness." It truly is a classic that should be enjoyed by everyone. We'll look for more details soon, we hope.

Although PC's and consoles share a similarity in hardware, consoles are much more closed off and limited to first-party firmware. Today marks a possible end to these restrictions, as hackers have finally jailbroken Sony's PlayStation 4 console.

As you see in the video above, the skilled homebrewers at Fail0verflow successfully ported Linux over on the PS4, which pretty much opens the door to Sony's console transforming into a full-fledged PC. The hackers further demonstrated the flexibility of the exploit by emulating a Pokemon Game Boy Advance game and playing it on the PS4.

To get a stable port of Linux running on the PS4, Fail0verflow used Cturt's recent PS4 kernel exploit. Using the gateway provided by the exploit, the team was then able to rewrite over 7,000 lines of code. Be advised that the crack is based on PS4's running v 1.76 firmware, so don't expect it to work on PS4's running the latest v3.11 updates.

Valve explains how the Steam Christmas privacy mix up happened, and how many users were affected.

This year's Christmas turned out to be anything but merry for Steam gamers. The digital storefront was assaulted on all fronts, leading to users accidentally seeing other users sensitive account information. Billing addresses were revealed, and gamers everywhere were spooked, choosing to stay well and clear of Steam despite the holiday sale.

According to Valve's official statement, the account information of 34,000 users were seen by others. Valve says that no full credit card information was leaked and that if you didn't access the storefront between 11:50 PST and 13:20 PST "your information could not have been shown to another user". Check below for Valve's statements, and a brief synopsis detailing how the cache error happened.

Sony just posted the game lineup that'll be included free for PlayStation Plus members. There are a few good games, lead by the incredibly good Grim Fandango: Remastered. If you've never had a chance to try Hardware: Rivals, now is as good a time as any, with its hilarious vehicular mayhem. All the below games will be available starting January 5th through the PSN.

PlayStation 4

PlayStation 3

A new bit of artwork is rumored to be associated with Platinum Games' upcoming Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles game...and it looks tubular.

The word is that Platinum Games, the Japanese devs who brought us such gaming greats as Bayonetta, Okami, and Viewtiful Joe, are apparently planning on spinning their magic on the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles series. According to an Australian classification listing, the game will be called TMNT: Mutants in Manhattan, and Activision will step in as publisher.

Up until now we haven't received any actual confirmations that the project exists, however a new bit of artwork may indeed be attached to the game. If genuine, the Mutants in Manhattan promo art shows authentic IDW-flavored artwork that harks back to the early days of the triumphant comic series.

The Duke is taking a small leave of absence from GoG while they continue negotiations with the new IP holder for the right to sell Duke Nukem games on their service. He'll definitely be coming back, no doubt about it.

And to commemorate the sabbatical that he'll be taking, GoG is offering up a Duke Nukem bundle that's a whopping 90% off of it's normal price. Or you can get each individual game with a 75% discount, but only until the 31st of December, by which time they'll be gone for an indeterminate amount of time. If you own the game, it'll remain in your catalog, being DRM free of course.

The reason for the small hiatus is that Gearbox has recently purchased the full rights to the Duke Nukem franchise and so they have to negotiate to keep selling the games. It's just a normal part of business that unfortunately means we have to go sans Duke for a bit.

Studio Wild Card has now has more daily players on the Xbox One than they do on Steam. Not an easy feat to accomplish when there are more PC gamers out there than Xbox One consoles. But they've been smashing some records with over 1 million players having downloaded ARK: Survival Evolved since December 16th.

And those 1 million people have spent a combined 200,000 real-life days surviving in the harsh landscape, taming the ancient wild beasts and generally exploring the treacherous and unforgiving environment. And in the next seven months before it's finally released in complete form they plan on adding a lot of new features to it. First on the list is a way to send feedback from inside the game itself. Then they'll add some of the most requested features; split-screen play, better gamepad customization, UI improvements, balance tweaks and of course all of the content that's already available on the PC.

The Xbox One is a great console in it's own right, yeah not everyone will agree, but there are still millions of potential players out there with one. ARK presents a very unique style of gameplay that isn't really found in anything else in the catalog at the moment, so perhaps that's but one small reason for the quick adoption. It's just too unique to pass up and it actually runs fairly well considering. It certainly doesn't hurt to be one of the first Unreal Engine 4 games that's actually playable on the platform either.

Halo: Reach is finally on the Xbox One through backwards compatibility, but it's not all roses for the newest game to be revived. The story is still intact and the graphics are still more than acceptable, but the framerate can't even reach Xbox 360 levels at the moment. Players everywhere are complaining of the poor performance.

But that's perhaps expected given the added overhead of running the game in a virtual machine, or emulator. This is a new implementation that'll take a bit of time to mature before performance is near a 1:1 ratio or even higher. That being said, the Xbox One generally is around 10FPS less than the Xbox 360 version in the same level. That's not insignificant.

What's more is that performance still takes a hit when your gameplay is played back through the "Theater Mode", though higher than live gameplay. That's supposed to be saved gameplay, so it should hit the same framerates, even though it doesn't. Curiously the Xbox 360, again, takes no performance hit.

Over the holidays, Lightning Returns: Final Fantasy XIII got some love on PC with a new patch that adds support for extra high resolutions. Six new ones in total are now supported: 3840 x 2160 (4K), 3200 x 1800, 2880 x 1620, 2560 x 1440, 2400 x 1350, and 2160 x 1215. Note you can't select a higher resolution than your monitor supports for supersampling purposes.

As well, in response to negative user feedback about not being able to boot the game in Offline Mode, you can now do just that. Square seemed to think Steam Cloud support meant Offline Mode couldn't be supported too, but now all is clear and the game can be booted regardless of whether you have a connection or not.

Hit up Steam for the patch.

Far Cry Primal just received its official ESRB rating. The rating itself isn't so high at only Mature, though the synopsis provides some fairly gruesome details of what to expect, and it definitely isn't something you'd want your kids or younger siblings playing. We knew it was going to be violent, but perhaps not quite up to whats being described in the synopsis.

The game will feature blood and gore, intense violence, nudity and sexual content, though the last part won't be explicit, per-se. Based on the setting itself, it makes sense to include all manner of activities that might be conducted by our ancestors, so it's not unexpected. And of course we don't know just how these graphic scenes will be depicted, but they're graphic enough to warrant the rating.

We all know that there are some pretty damn intense young gamers out there, thanks to hugely popular games like CS:GO and League of Legends - but just how different are their brains?

According to brain scans from around 200 adolescent boys, evidence popped up that the brains of compulsive video gamers are very different. Chronic gaming is associated with hyperconnectivity between several pairs of brain networks, reports PsyPost. PsyPost said: "Some of the changes are predicted to help game players respond to new information".

Some of the other changes "are associated with distractibility and poor impulse control", thanks to research done by University of Utah School of Medicine, and Chung-Ang University in South Korea, was published online in Addiction Biology on Dec. 22, 2015. The study said that obsessed gamers are so consumed with gaming that they subsitute eating and sleeping in order to play.

Crytek has been in the headlines for their work in VR, but Warhorse Studios used Kickstarter to get their CRYENGINE-powered Kingdom Come: Deliverance off the ground - with the developer showing off some new graphical prowess.

Warhorse Studios has shown off Kingdom Come: Deliverance with SVOGI, with the video above showing you the difference between the SVOGI being enabled, and disabled in the game. Crytek's implementation of SVOGI is quite good, with the developer providing some details on the voxel-based global illumination technology:

Overview