Gaming - Page 1163

Amazon's plan to make a gamepad has been leaked. As the images from Dave Zatz (Brazil's equivalent of the FCC), the chances are high that these images are not fake.

The controller consists of 4 action buttons A,B,X,Y with 2 analog sticks, a directional pad and four function buttons in the center. Towards the edge, Amazon provided media controllers. The controller uses two AA size batteries.

What's uncertain is that the purpose of these controllers. It is speculated that Amazon might have made this gamepad for Kindle Fire's GameCircle service. It could also be possible that this could be a part of Android powered gaming console that Amazon's probably working or. Seeing that there are basic media controls, it may be for an upcoming set-top box unit with an inbuilt gaming console.

League of Legends professional gamer Cheon 'Promise' Min-Ki attempted suicide by jumping from a twelve story building after he revealed an eSports match-fixing and scam via Reddit. Currently, the South Korean based gamer is in a serious condition.

Promise was a part of an eSports team where he claimed that it was nothing more than a scam. The gamer confessed that he and his team mates were told that they will receive cash sponsorships and computers. But what he came to know later that the sponsors will only give them gaming gear in exchange for the rights to the team's brand name.

He added,"Our manager Noh had lied to us, and took out a loan to pay for our housing, living expenses, computers, and even our salaries. He was planning on placing illegal bets on eSports games and fixing them to win back the borrowed money and make a profit."

EA seems to be trying to keep Battlefield 4 in the news for all the wrong reasons. Its bad enough that gamers have to pay for a game that is known to have multiple issues despite getting series of fixes and patches along the way, but the company decides to rub salt into its fan's wounds by adding advertisements.

It was found that Electronic Arts is now including in-game advertisements to Battlefield 4's main menu and the loading screen. The advertisement of a movie based on its own game 'Need For Speed' was spotted in the main page. What's even more shocking is that Battlefield 4's premium subscribers who paid as high as $110 may now see advertisements displayed in the game's menu and the loading screen.

EA did use many of its titles to push advertisements: Madden, NHL, FIFA and many racing game franchises through in-game-stadium billboards, banners and even on the loading & home screens.

We know that Watch Dogs has been delayed until May this year, with the studio needing more time to work on it. With each day that passes, we're finding out more information on the game - where today, it has been revealed that Ubisoft Montreal was "forced" to unveil the game at E3 2012 by Ubisoft.

Jonathan Morin, Creative Director on Watch Dogs, talked with Edge, where he said: "They forced us to go at E3 2012. Yves [Guillemot, CEO of Ubisoft] was the one who wanted us to go at that E3, even though we felt it was a bit early." Morin believes that the CEO of Ubisoft was actually correct, where he said: "in the end I think he was right."

Dominic Guay, Senior Producer on Watch Dogs, talked with Polygon in a recent interview, where he said that the studio began development on the PC because at the time, the PS4 and Xbox One didn't exist. When referring to the next-gen consoles, he said: "We kind of suspected, maybe, there might be other platforms eventually. So, because we thought that would happen, we chose the PC as our first target to have when we started developing Watch Dogs, so that we [would] have the flexibility to adapt to a different platform."

We all know that Titanfall has launched officially this week for the PC and Xbox One game console. Gaming PCs typically have hardware inside to support a great graphics experience for the game and the Xbox One certainly has the hardware for a next gen experience with the game.

Gamers looking forward to the Xbox 360 version may be worried that the older console will mean they have to give up some of the great visuals the game has. Microsoft executive Yusuf Mehdi says that the version of Titanfall for the Xbox 360 will be a first class experience. The 360 version of the game is being developed by Bluepoint Games and is set for launch on March 25.

The Xbox 360 version of the game was supposed to launch this week along with the PC and Xbox One versions. The launch of the 360 versions was delayed so that Bluepoint could "put the finishing touches on the game."

When we reported about the mammoth installation of Titanfall on the PC, we wondered what could be so big that it warranted a 48GB installation. Well, that 48GB install is filled with a massive 35GB of uncompressed audio.

The installation of Titanfall on the Xbox One weighs in at just 17GB, so jumping up to 48GB on the PC is quite ridiculous. Respawn decided to give PC gamers uncompressed audio, to account for less powerful hardware configurations. This is due to the large amount of dual-core machines, which just meet the minimum requirements on PC for Titanfall.

Respawn's Lead Engineer, Richard Baker, said that "a two-core machine would dedicate a huge chunk of one core to just decompressing audio," so the studio decided to go for uncompressed audio, in order to squeeze more performance out of the slower machines. This comes at the cost of 35GB, which is quite the chunk of hard drive space.

During next week's Philly Tech Week, Tetris will be played on the city's 29-story Cira Centre as screens. Frank Lee, a professor at Drexel University and founder of the school's Entrepreneurial Game Studio, is continuing what he did last year.

Last year, with the help of Brandywine Realty Trust, the company who owns the Cira Centre, played a special version of Pong on the side of the building. It happened during mid-April, when Philly Tech Week 2013 took place, setting a Guinness World Record for "Largest Architectural Video Game Display."

The massive game of Pong used 460 LEDs on one side of the building, taking up a giant 59,800 square feet of space. Lee's version of Tetris will take place on both the north- and south-facing walls of the building, expanding over a space of more than 100,000 square feet. Lee said in a press release: "One regret that I had was that we only used one side of the building. So it was only visible to half of the city. This year, I wanted to find a way to use all sides of the building and truly created an aesthetic of a unique and fleeting moment shared by all the people in Philadelphia."

CD Projekt Red has some bad news for The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, that it has been delayed until February 2015. The studio had originally pinned the release of the game for 2014, but the game is still in a technically "unfinished" state.

The delay comes at a time when the studio talked about other game studios bragging about the performance in their games when in an unfinished state, so maybe this delay has something to do with it. CD Projekt Red won't just release a game of this scale in an unfinished state, so some more time for the vast title is obviously needed, and welcomed.

The studio's official board members talked about the delay, saying they weren't happy with the game's overall quality and projected release date, as it wouldn't give them enough time to provide gamers with The Witcher 3 that the studio had originally envisioned: "We recently re-examined what we had achieved thus far, and faced a choice about the game's final release date. The decision we made was difficult, thoroughly considered, and ultimately clear and obvious."

This morning, Microsoft released one of the most anticipated games of 2014 to the world. Titanfall has been described as Halo for the next generation of gamers, as well as Call of Duty evolved, and Microsoft is billing it as the best FPS to hit the Xbox One since launch. Everything did not go smoothly though, and the Electronic Arts distributed game experienced connection issues which prompted EA to issue a patch just hours after the the game launched.

Just minutes after the game went live, both PC players and Xbox One owners who had pre-loaded the game began to experience connection issues which saw them stuck on the "initializing screen." This issue is quite similar to what Diablo 3, Sim City and Battlefield 4 users experienced on launch day as well. Fortunately, EA issued a 380MB patch around 2AM that has seemed to fix the issue.

The issue is not related to EA's servers though as the game is the first to be hosted on Microsoft's Azure cloud servers, which is able to scale up based on the amount of load the system is experiencing. EA says that some of the issues stemmed from a network issue with those using Belkin routers, which is fixed by players opening some ports in the routers admin panel. Titanfall is available on Origin and Xbox Live for $59.99.

Michał Krzemiński, the Senior Art Producer at CD Projekt RED, the studio behind The Witcher 3, has some interesting things to say when it comes to next-gen consoles and games.

He was asked about next-gen tech and RPG titles, where he talked about the on-going 'resolution war' that we are seeing roll out in front of our eyes thanks to the Xbox One and PS4. Krzemiński said: "If you're asking me to throw a rock in the PS4 vs. Xbox One resolution war, I won't. The game is not finished and talking about resolutions, framerates and min. specs (for PC) is, I think, pointless. Everything can change during the optimization process at the end of development. Rest assured, we're working our butts off make The Witcher 3 run and feel equally awesome on every platform."

Krzemiński was asked if there's anything that the next-gen hardware has allowed CD Projekt RED to do that might not have been possible on the previous generation consoles, to which he said: "There's no one specific thing that next-gens allowed us to do. There's a whole ton of them. Essentially, the game can look mind-blowing, we've got seamless gameplay with no loading screens (almost everything is streamed during gameplay, cutscenes etc.), we can add visual effects unavailable to us before because of performance issues and so on, the list is huge. All this constitutes a giant, lush open world with a myriad of things to do, quests, adventures, monster hunts, events and so on."

As a game that was meant to be a launch title for the PlayStation 4, Evolution Studios' racing game has just been delayed. PlayStation Software Product Development boss, Scott Rhode, told IGN that DriveClub has "gone back to the drawing board."

DriveClub was meant to be a launch title for the PS4, but was delayed at the start of the year, and removed as a PS4 launch title when Sony launched its console in Japan. Rhode told IGN that Sony is "willing to kinda eat that [cost]" when it comes to pushing back a big title like DriveClub. Rhode continued: "What I will say is that it all comes back to that fundamental principle, and that's that we want to build great games."

He added: "And we really don't want to release a game before it's ready. And sometimes, this happens in the normal course of business, where we think we're on track to deliver what we think is going to be a great game, and when we get closer, we realize that we'd be doing everyone a disservice if we shipped it before it was ready."

Valve says that it will now let developers set their own pricing on games they sell through Steam, something the company has had strict control over in the past. Word first came of the change in policy via a Reddit user named "Sharkiller," who leaked the information from Steam's private developer forums.

The new policy allows developers to set fixed week-long promotions as well as custom promotions that set a percentage off of the price for up to two weeks at the time. Users can also now set the full price of their game to their liking which could lead to pricing wars between developers and extra savings in the pockets of consumers.

"This new Steamworks tool allows developers to configure discounts for their own products, on their own schedules. They can define custom sale periods or opt in to regularly scheduled sales. This will enable developers to better coordinate their promotions with events, announcements, or major updates they are planning for their products," said Valve.

Ubisoft's upcoming open-world action game, Watch Dogs, was the topic of a recent livestream by the studio, where the company answered some fan questions. These questions included why the game was delayed, and how the drop-in multiplayer will work.

Danny Belanger, Watch Dogs' Lead Game Designer, said that players who weren't interested in unexpected drop ins from other gamers can turn the function off completely. Belanger said: "All the online activities are just part of the menu. They're a choice. But if someone is not into that .... they can totally turn it off."

One of the big reasons behind not wanting people jumping into your game is that they can hack you, where Belanger explains: "There's also something important called the shield. If someone comes into your game, they can't come in right after so you can't be spammed in that way - unless you become aggressive and you start going into other people's games. Then you really become available. But it's just a player choice in the end."

Now that Stephen Elop, the former boss of Nokia, is running Microsoft's Xbox division, the company has reiterated that it is dedicated to Xbox. Microsoft Game Studios' Phil Spencer spilled the beans on how the company was still fully committed to its console in his SXSW Gaming panel.

Spencer said: "In a funny way, our job is to create great games on Xbox, on Windows, on Windows Phone, and the stuff that happens above the studios is kind of just 'stuff' to a lot of the studios, which I think is the right way." The Microsoft Games Studio boss added: "They're still driven by the creative juices inside the studios to make great things happen. In terms of Microsoft's commitment in the space, I know both Satya and Stephen Elop, I know them well. I've had explicit conversations with them about Microsoft's commitment to Xbox - they're extremely committed to Xbox."

"Xbox is a really critical brand for us as a company as Microsoft; when you think about consumers, what they love about our company, Xbox is one of the most beloved brands that the company has. We're in the middle of a good, competitive battle in the console space with PlayStation, which is great for the industry. And they remain extremely committed to us succeeding with Xbox, which is nice to hear, right? It's something that resonates well inside the walls when you're talking to the teams, or when I stand in front of Xbox fans, I want to make sure that they understand we are extremely committed to this product."

Sony's PlayStation 4 console has been on the market for months now, outselling its main competitor: Microsoft's Xbox One. But, we've never known the official clock speed of the AMD-made eight-core Jaguar APU inside of the PS4.

Sony has now confirmed the clock speed of the PS4's eight-core processor, clocking in at 1.6GHz. Sony UK's Google+ page has teased that the PS4 is around 43 times the performance of the PS2, which really puts things into perspective. The formula used to reach this conclusion isn't rocket science, but it is basically 1600 x 8, and then divided by the PS2's CPU in MHz - 299.

Considering we have eight-core CPUs in smartphones now, and 2.5GHz+ quad-core chips in most of the high-end handsets, the PS4 doesn't seem so fast anymore. Especially when you consider the #pcmasterrace.

Portal is a big fan favorite for gamers, but the news of a Portal board game should set gamers wallets itching to come out of their pockets. Valve is working with Cryptozoic on the board game that should hit shelves before the year is up.

The game is still in development, so right now it doesn't have a final name - for now, it is being called "Portal: Uncooperative Cake Acquisition Game." The Portal-based board game will pit two to four players against each other as Aperture test subjects, where they'll be dumped into various testing environments trying to kill their opponents' pawns, or their own.

Players can team up and take on another, more powerful player on the board. We will have more information on the Portal board game as it arrives.

Microsoft Studios has owned the rights to Gears of War franchise for a little over a month now, but as of March 10, 2014 at 12:00pm Pacific Standard Time (PST), Epic Games will be shutting down and archiving the Gears of War forum.

Epic Games will also be handing over the Facebook and Twitter accounts to Gears of War over to Black Tusk Studios. Epic Games said on its Facebook page for Gears of War that "Black Tusk Studios asks for your patience and support as they set up new forums for the Gears of War community, and encourage you to communicate with them over Facebook (this page) and Twitter (https://Twitter.com/GearsofWar) during this forum transition over the coming weeks".

We now know why Ubisoft delayed Watch Dogs, but today is a new day, and today brings news of the resolution and frame rate that Watch Dogs will run along at on next-gen consoles on PC.

On the PS4, Watch Dogs will run at 1080p/30FPS, but will drop to 960p/30FPS on the Xbox One. On PC, you can drive Watch Dogs right up to 4K (and beyond) at variable frame rates of course. The PC version of Watch Dogs has seen Ubisoft team up with NVIDIA, so we should see some special details added to an already pretty game.

You can bet your bottom dollar we'll be running Watch Dogs through our multi-monitor, multi-GPU hoops here at TweakTown. We'll have it tested at 4K, and triple 1440p, too.

Ouya started out as a project on Kickstarter that blew up and made huge amounts of money. Since the project turned into an actual product, we have heard less from the company and sales haven't been much compared to other gaming platforms. Ouya announced recently that it was making itself into a service that would be embedded in other platforms.

Mad Catz and Ouya have announced this week that they have signed a content agreement. The agreement will bring Ouya to the MOJO console that Mad Catz unveiled last year. Along with the new content agreement, Mad Catz has announced that the MOJO console is getting its price cut to $199.99 in the US.

Similar price cuts are being made in other areas when the MOJO is sold. The MOJO is the first device to add Ouya Everywhere. The service will debut on the MOJO later this spring. An exact launch date hasn't been announced. When the service does launch all current Ouya content and future content will be available on the MOJO.

Oh my... Shaquille O'Neal is making a sequel to Shaq Fu, and has taken to IndieGoGo for the $450,000 he needs to make it happen. You might want to fund it, after you've checked out the trailer below:

Considering Shaq has mountains of money, why does he need to ask for crowdfunded money to get his game off the ground? Here's the explanation: