Gaming - Page 1092

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

I wish I didn't have to write stories like this, but unfortunately, it just happens. Reality Pump Studios, the developer handling Vendetta: The Curse of Raven's Cry, says that anything above 30FPS doesn't add to the gaming experience.

On the Steam forums, a fan asked if the studio would be optimizing its game to add SLI support - to which they replied: "On the one hand it is quite understandable, that a customer who spent 600+ bugs on a high-end card (e.g 980Ti) expects that a game runs faster than on a 2 years old (e.g.780 GTX) - on the other hand ... if you put two or four engines in a car it will be probably not run faster than with one powerful engine. It will for sure be more heavy and bigger, consume more fuel and be very expensive. Please notice, that the developers of the well known Benchmarks receive any support, money and any hardware they want from the video card manufactors ... we received the last free video card 5 years ago, never ever any money and have to purchase video cards like an end-user without any discount in retail".

It makes sense, as small studios don't receive much help in the way of hardware - but the next bit is the nail in the coffin for me. Raidor continued, adding: "And I may add something: it was not our intention to create a graphic benchmark. VCR is a complex RPG with unique characters and story driven. Our focus is on interesting quest chains (which are very difficult to create) and not on frames per second. Beside this I thing that anything above 30 FPS does not matter for the gaming experience. And on my PC i7, GF 780GTX the game runs with 4K never below 30 FPS. No idea what it does on a GF980ti â€" I heard it is sometimes slower".

Someone out there has managed to beat Fallout 4 without killing a single person, even the key characters that seemingly must be taken out in the name of the story. This is the first example of pacifism in a post-apocalyptic world that's ended peacefully.

Kyle Hinkley didn't want to give into the usual temptations and violence inherent in video-games, or at least he wanted to show you that in some open-world games there are truly a great number of different ways to play. Fallout 4 was even touted by Todd Howard as being a game that's inherently violent and one where you're expected to kill. Especially in the hardest mode, Survival.

And to prove that it's possible, Hinkley documented the entire thing to show that he did indeed get zero kills. There were some tricky situations that needed to be played a few times, to figure out the best non-violent solution, but every plot decision can apparently be made without violence. You can watch the whole attempt at his YouTube channel.

The highly anticipated new Mass Effect game may be delayed following possible internal strife at BioWare.

EA's upcoming Mass Effect: Andromeda is a fresh start for the franchise, and aims to completely reinvent the renown sci-fi saga for the current age of gaming. Shepard's mythos has been told, and now BioWare is spinning up something new for a targeted release in 2016. Although gamers are generally enthusiastic about the new game, the lack of solid information or visuals has tingled our collective warning bells, and many have suspected the game won't be ready in late 2016.

The possibility of a delay was reinforced by the departure of key BioWare dev talent. Senior Development Director Chris Wynn recently announced that he'll be leaving the Mass Effect: Andromeda team for unspecified reasons. "It is with a heavy heart today to say that I am moving on from BioWare and Mass Effect: Andromeda, and returning to the USA," Wynn wrote on Twitter.

More than 20 years later and the original Doom is still putting hardware to the test, thanks to the Brutal Doom mod which adds "advanced and unique features such as extra hitboxes for heads and legs, and more gore, fire, and smoke particles than any modern AAA game".

The new elements have rendered the game a slideshow in many circumstances, until now: v20b boasts massive performance improvements thanks to some clever optimization. See for yourself in the video above.

Head here if you'd like to get started playing Brutal Doom. v20b will launch alongside Starter Pack maps and gameplay improvements December 31.

Over the holidays the makers of Rocket League, Psyonix, revealed that they have nearly 9 million registered players worldwide across the PS4 and the PC. That's quite the amazing feat for a game that was just released in July of this year.

And Psyonix isn't quite done yet, either. In the coming year they plan on bringing on a number of new and exciting things into the fray. We can expect support on as grand a scale as they've had with a ton of new content to keep those 9 million coming back. There'll be new modes, new DLC, new arenas and of course plenty of new themed vehicles as time goes by.

That 9 million isn't a concurrent player number though, as that might just break the multiplayer infrastructure they have in place. But even having 9 million interested and playing throughout a month is no laughing matter. For perspective, on PC alone you can find 25K people playing at the moment with an average of 19.5K per day. That means you won't be waiting around for competition.

It's Christmas morning, and you see a box under the tree wrapped immaculately. You grab it, and feel the weight - you guesstimate that this could be what you've asked Santa for: a PS4. You open the box, and yes! It's a PS4! You tear the box that the PS4 comes in apart, and to your utter disappointment, inside there is just a block of wood - but with an upside, there's a dick drawn on the box.

Yeah, that was 9-year-old Scott Lundy's XMAS morning in a nutshell. Boston's Fox 25 reports that Lundy shouted "YES THIS IS THE BEST CHRISTMAS EVER DAD CAN WE SET THIS UP NOW?" But after opening the box for the PS4, the 9-year-old discovered that there was just a block of wood shaped like a PS4 inside, and his parents Kristin and Brian saw that there was a dick drawn on the box, with the message "From cock and balls with love".

Scott's step-mother, Kristin, said: "He's crying and he's upset and he's in the playroom by himself and he just wants to be alone so at that point. I was crushed". The Lundy's returned the package back to Saugus Target, where they had purchased it from, with the company giving them a $100 gift card and a free copy of The Uncharted Collection. Kristin posted on Facebook not long after, saying "This has ruined his belief in Santa".