Gaming - Page 1169

It looks like there's problems on the Xbox One version of Battlefield 4, where the Second Assault DLC is not available for Xbox One owners who have coughed up the dough for Battlefield Premium.

Battlefield 4: Second Assault includes four maps from Battlefield 3, and the biggest issue here is that the DLC is an Xbox One exclusive for two weeks to those who have Premium access. But, the problem is, that the pack is listing as "null data" when logging on to the in-game Premium store. An EA spokesperson has said that Microsoft is looking into the matter.

EA_Rick, said: "I know some of you have said already that it is being looked into, I wanted to just confirm that for you so you guys have a blue [staff] post to refer to. Right now all I can say is that we are aware of this issue and are currently investigating this with Microsoft. Once we have some more details I'll be sure to let you know."

Next year, there are two companies that have me the most excited: Valve and Oculus VR. The latter, for its awesome virtual reality device, Rift, and the former, for its multiple product releases, and software releases.

One of these, is the Steam Machine. The latest Steam Machine prototype has been teased by Engadget, which has had the first look at iBuyPower's prototype for a Steam Machine. It looks awesome, and looks nothing like a PC - which is exactly what Valve, and PC makers, need right now. There's a gorgeous light bar through the center of it, which looks like it changes color, an awesome touch.

There's a gigantic Steam logo on top, which is nice to see on a console. Better yet, it'll be just $499 and include a decent GPU in the AMD Radeon R9 270 - which is an $180 GPU on its own. One top of this, there'll be a multi-core AMD processor inside, and a Steam Controller. We're talking about specs that beat the next-gen consoles, with a price that matches them. This is what I know: I want one, and I want one now.

Unfortunately for Xbox 360 users who use their console as a U-verse TV receiver, you will no longer be able to use that service. AT&T is informing their customers that they will no longer have the IPTV support for the Xbox 360. AT&T says this will come in affect after December 31st.

Users will have to order a traditional U-verse receiver but 360 U-verse users will at least get a $99 credit in return of their troubles, according to AT&T it was originally going to be a $60 credit but they decided to make it $99. It doesn't look like they will be transferring the service to Xbox One either.

Letter to Xbox 360 U-verse customers:

We reported about the issues with some Xbox One consoles and their Blu-ray issues, but Microsoft is quickly jumping into damage control mode, offering anyone with a broken Xbox One free games.

If you're one of these people, you can ring up Microsoft customer support, and get a free game through the Xbox One exchange program. You'll receive a digital code for one of 4 games: Dead Rising 3, Forza Motorsport 5, Ryse, or Zoo Tycoon. Not too bad at all, isn't it? If you're experiencing issues with the Blu-ray drive on your Xbox One, get onto that free game deal, now!

Star Citizen is simply unstoppable right now - with its original $500,000 goal on Kickstarter now ballooning out to an amazing $30 million+. At the time of writing, it had received $30,374,530 of funding from 311,504 Star Citizens.

The next stretch goal is $31 million, and at this rate, it should hit that goal within the next day or two. People are excited about this game, as the premise does sound truly amazing, but when will this funding explosion stop? At the rate it's going, it will hit $40 million by the end of year. I've backed it, and I'm enjoying my hangar right now, and boy does it look glorious at 7860x1440.

I'm going to be the first to say it: but if things don't stop with this funding, it will be the first non-AAA (as in, developed/funded by a huge company like EA, Activision, Microsoft or Sony) to reach $100 million - you heard it here at TweakTown first, folks!

The developers of FlatOut did have a Kickstarter set up for their upcoming game, Next Car Game, but it looks like it has met a metal-crushing death. Not many gamers coughed up the funds to back the project, so Bugbear pulled the Kickstarter.

Bugbear will still continue Next Car Game through its Early Access program, going as far as offering a demo for early backers. Bugbear explained why it pulled the game from Kickstarter:

Assassin's Creed 4: Black Flag, is one of the best-looking PC games on the market right now, with the developer coming out and saying that it is pledging its commitment to optimizing its games for PC.

We've just lived through the launches of both next-gen consoles, and now Sylvain Trottier, Associate Producer of Assassin's Creed 4: Black Flag has had some wise words on the Ubisoft Blog. Trottier talked about Ubisoft finishing up the R&D stages of Black Flag, where they began working on optimizing the PC version of the game first.

There are three reasons behind this: the first, is that every team member has a PC at their desk, most engineers are more experienced and familiar with the PC environment in the early stages of next-gen consoles, and finally, the PS4 and Xbox One are pretty much PCs with their x86-based architectures. He said: "It's not 100 percent linear, but at least it gives you an order of magnitude."

Microsoft has over 1 million Xbox Ones in the wild, but it looks like some of these next-gen consoles are having issues with the internal Blu-ray drive. Problem is, Microsoft has no solution just yet.

The problematic Xbox Ones are seeing a bad grinding sound when the Xbox Ones Blu-ray drive attempts to read discs. The other issue is, we don't know how many Xbox One units have been affected. Kotaku reported the issue earlier on this evening, seeing over 100 people e-mail them, with the problem on their Xbox One unit, or knowing someone with the issue.

MSI's Beat It tournaments have been going strong since 2010 when the company saw the need to bring professional games together to compete in a professional gaming tournament series. Since then, hundreds of tournaments have taken place, and thousands of gamers have competed at the highest level of professional gaming.

This weekend MSI is hosting the Beat It 2013 Grand Finals in Beijing, China at the Shijingshan Stadium. More than 17 international CS:GO champion teams, and 85 players join this fantastic eSports tournament. Two of these teams, Fnatic and NearlyGod, are sponsored by MSI, and are geared up with the best hardware in the industry to go head to head with the best gamers in the world.

Champions will take home $10,000 and five MSI GE70 high-end gaming laptops equipped with WD SSHDs. MSI is the first mainstream system company to ship 1 TB WD_BLACK SSHDs in notebooks, taking mobile gaming storage to a whole new level of play. The second and third place each will get $7,000 and $5,000 cash prizes.

Yesterday we saw iFixit tear down Microsoft's next-gen gaming console, the Xbox One, and today the company is continuing the series by tearing down the new Kinect sensor. As a electronic hobbyist this is the teardown that I have been waiting for, and with the sensors new high-resolution capabilities, I can not wait to see it hacked!

Unlike the Xbox One, the Kinect is held together by screws which are hiding under labels, and a screwdriver makes quick work of opening up the case. When the Kinect is first opened up, you can see several optical sensors, and what appears to be an array of three high-intensity IR Blasters.

Also pictured is the large camera with what appears to me a mechanical focusing system. Interestingly enough, the Kinect now packed enough power that a Fan is required to keep things nice and cool, and I bet this has something to do with its sensors always being activated awaiting commands from the user. It also appears that the entire internal frame is being used as one giant heat sink to help aid in cooling. Unfortunately, the Kinect earned a repairibility score of just 6 out of 10 due to so many permanently affixed and propriety parts.

The optical output for the Xbox One will only play stereo through headsets at launch. Albert Panello Microsoft Director of product planning comments in a NeoGAF thread that full Dolby Digital support will be available post launch. Although Panello does not specify any sort of release date for the update. Unfortunately users that are accustomed to using Turtle Beach, Tritton, or any other expensive headset will have to deal with having stereo for the time being.

Microsoft Director of Product Planning Albert Panello in a NeoGAF thread: "Dolby Digital is coming post launch. This was a SW scheduling issue pure and simple, and I know people are disappointed, but we will have it. Anyone with an HDMI receiver should be fine, as we pass the uncompressed 5.1 and 7.1 through HDMI as well as DTS. Even if you have a Dolby only HDMI receiver, you will still get 5.1 or 7.1 sound since those receivers should accept uncompressed surround. For the Dolby only headsets, my understanding is that these will work but you will only get stereo audio since we only pass Stereo and DTS through the optical port. I have not tested this myself, but I'm told it works. Regardless, I understand this is an inconvenience, but again we're going to have Dolby coming."

With the Xbox One officially launching in New Zealand today, it was only a matter of time before the guys and gals over at iFixit got their hands on the next-gen console. The team from iFixit were on hand at the official Xbox launch party in New Zealand and managed to obtain an official Day One special edition console to tear down.

Unfortunately Microsoft chose not to hide any screws under the rubber feet and the team had to look elsewhere on how to begin the disassembly process. The Xbox One is disassembled by first removing the plastic grill much in the way one has to disassemble the Xbox 360. Once the Grill is removed, only a few plastic clips remain to hold things together.

Inside the Xbox One, the PCB and other internals are shielded inside a metal cover which is easily removed by extracting a few screws. Once the cover is removed the Blu-ray drive, cooling fan, and cooler are all prominently visible. The hard drive is also unveiled at this point and it appears to be a Samsung Spinpoint M8 ST500LM012 500 GB 5400 RPM with 8MB Cache SATA II 3.0Gb/s hard drive. With a form factor of 2.5-inches, this could easily be replaced with a large capacity SSD. You would void your warranty, so keep that in mind if you decide to tear down your Xbox One.

Tested has some interesting results for the world, where it has tested the PS4s internal HDD against a Samsung-built SSD, and a hybrid 1TB drive. Check out the video below.

As you can see, the SSD isn't that much faster than the hybrid drive - which is much cheaper, and much bigger - but the stock drive is slow as hell. Something I noticed is that loading games on the PS4 seems to take forever, but I'm comparing this to my all-SSD PC. Maybe it's the PS4 OS that needs some work.

So, as you can see, it looks like a hybrid HDD is the way to go.

Are video games causing the youth of today, and tomorrow, with behavioral or emotional problems in the future? Well, according to a huge new study of 11,000 kids, no, no it does not.

The University of Glasgow used surveys from mothers in a massive millennial survey to track behavior over time. The goal of this study was to see if there was any connection between screen time, and behavioral or emotional troubles in the future. The authors dived into the study wanting to use both TV and video games, arguing the point that there is a connection with attention disorders, anger and other problems that might be connected to both.

The researchers wanted to know if "games may have more powerful effects due to active user engagement, identification with characters and repeated rehearsal and reinforcement." Then, we have some key findings, where "exposure to video games had no effect on behavior, attention or emotional issues." The study also found that "neither television nor video games lead to attentional or emotional problems."

Battlefield 4 players may have experienced an excessive amount of server disconnects over the past weekend, and while many may have attributed them to bugs released with the game, EA says that they were the result of a massive DDoS attack. A new report from Bit-Tech claims that an EA employee has confirmed that Battlefield 4 was targeted on Friday, Saturday and Sunday.

While Battlefield 4 players have come to expect random server crashes, the number reported this weekend seemed to rise exponentially despite the fact that EA released an update around the same time that was said to fix the issues. It is still unknown who launched the denial of service attacks, or why they did it. The rep from EA did say that the company was working on preventing this from happening in the future, and they are continuing to work out bugs in-game that affect gameplay.

Many of those who bought PlayStation 4 consoles early are experiencing frequent and sometimes system bricking errors, and today we are learning that replacement systems will not be arriving until 2014. Call it sabotage, an acceptable margin of failure, or poor design, the fact still stands that many PlayStation 4 owners will have to wait months to get their consoles replaced.

The issues range from poor thermal dissipation which leads to overheating, while other reports suggest a red-ring-of-death type event where the PS4 will fail to boot, and will flash the status LEDs indicating an error. While this is common for the first devices off the assembly line, the true cause could be much more nefarious and could involve internal sabotage at the time of manufacture.

A report from Geek.com says that Sony is now telling customers that replacement PS4 units will not be available for shipping until February . If you purchased your dead PS4 from Amazon.com and opted for the extended warranty, then you could get your replacement console as early as January 2014, but you should expect to wait until Feburary like everyone else. Best Buy and GameStop also could see replacement units arrive as early as January, but that is still up in the air as well.

Normally I wouldn't like to write about porn in my news, but hey - the porn industry defines what medium is going to come in next, like it did with VHS, DVD, and Blu-ray. But, it looks like the PS4 is the system of choice for Pornhub, and this could be a big, big thing.

Pornhub is the first porn site to completely support the PS4, and it could be a big tipping point against the Xbox One. The porn site already supports the Nintendo Wii U, but what about Microsoft? It might not support the Xbox One, but I'm sure we'll see support, especially considering the Xbox One is more of a multimedia entertainment unit, versus the PS4 being a pure games console, with other content on the side.

What I want to know is: will it include trophy and achievement support...

The People at Ubisoft shipped out Assassin's Creed Black flag at 900p to make sure the GPU and CPU ran the game at a consistent 30 frames per second. They will be sending an update to make the game native 1080p. The update will also include an anti-aliasing which will improve jagged edges in the graphics. Anti-aliasing will be available on both the PlayStation 4 and the Xbox One. Ubisoft says the update will be available shortly after launch.

Community manager Gary Steinman: "Finishing the game at 900p gave the development team the extra room in terms of the GPU and CPU usage to ensure the frame rate never dips below 30 frames per second. The team then used the time between the ship date and the release to focus on a title update that could deliver native 1080p resolution on the PS4."

Associate producer Sylvain Trottier: "The most important part of this title update is not necessarily 1080p native resolution. It's the fact that even when we were done with the project, even when we were finished with the certification and everything else, even when most of the engineers had started to work on other projects - like we always do at Ubisoft - some of my engineers continued to work on Black Flag and they even developed a brand-new anti-aliasing technique."

After almost a decade, the PlayStation 4 is here, and the folks over at iFixit have wasted no time in tearing the next-generation console down to its basic components. Using nothing but a T9 Torx driver, two phillips drivers, and a pair of tweezers, iFixit was able to completely disassemble the PlayStation 4.

It appears that tearing down the PlayStation 4 is just about as easy as tearing down a common PC, and rightfully so as that is basically what a PS4 is. The teardown images from iFixit do lend some interesting insight into the PS4 though. Anyone who was hoping that they could upgrade the AMD processor inside will be sad to learn that the chip is permanently soldered to the board and is not even branded as an AMD device. Instead, the chip is labeled as a Sony Computer Entertainment Inc. CXD90026G, a SoC that features AMD Jaguar CPU Cores, and Radeon Graphics Cores.

Additionally, places around the APU, are 16x Samsung K4G41325FC-HC03 4 Gb (512 MB) GDDR5 RAM for a total of 8GB of video RAM. Samsung's K4B2G1646E-BCK0 2Gb DDR3 SDRAM is also present in a capacity of 8GB. The PS4 should have no cooling issues either, as a massive air-based cooler is present that appears to be made mostly of copper for maximum thermal dissipation. When it was all over and iFixit had removed the last screw, they awarded the PlayStation 4 a repairability score of 8 out of 10, which means that it will be easy to fix in the event of any hardware failures.

The PS4 launched in the United States today, but it looks like it is already having issues with some customers. Not only that, but some media are having issues, with Kotaku's PS4 review stating that the first retail unit it received from Sony "didn't work", and Kotaku even said that editors also used "one pre-release PS4 and three retail PS4s with no problems".

Customers who had received the borked PS4s reported that the next-gen console didn't boot, with Reddit user 'arogon' winning a PS4 through Taco Bell, receiving a DOA PS4. Another user, 'yearsoflove' claimed to also receive a dead on arrival PS4, but a replacement was currently being shipped from Sony. But all is not lost, because Sony has your back.

President of Worldwide Studios, Shuhei Yoshida, tweeted earlier today: "Be assured we are investigating reported PS4 issues. The number is very small compared to shipped, we believe they are isolated incidents".