Gaming - Page 1171

It's that time again everyone! Of course I am talking about the arrival of a new Humble Bundle and a fun and easy way to support some great charities. The new Humble Bundle features 6 games from Warner Bros. Games including Batman: Arkham Asylum GOTY, F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin, F.E.A.R. 3, and Lord of the Rings: War in the North.

For those who wish to pay a little extra to beat the average, ($4.56 at the time of this writing) you will also pick up Steam keys for Batman: Arkham City GOTY, and Scribblenauts Unlimited. This bundles chosen charity is the We Can Be Heroes foundation, which is designed to raise awareness and critical funds needed to fight the devastating hunger crisis in the Horn of Africa and bring help and hope to eight million people who are in urgent need of assistance.

I have purchased almost every humble bundle and weekly sale that has been offered so far, and today is no exception. I urge everyone to jump in and even if you can only afford to donate $1 you will land some sweet games, and help out a deserving charity at the same time. Do you plan on purchasing the new Humble Bundle? Let us know in the comments. For more on the We Can Be Heroes charity, check out the video below.

This morning Activision announced the official launch of the next installment in its Call of Duty franchise. Call of Duty: Ghost is built an all new, next-generation engine and places players in a battle scenario where they are heavily outnumbered and outgunned. This is a first for the series, and Activision is billing it as an "Epic Thrill Ride" that takes the franchise to the next level.

"The launch of Call of Duty has become a pop-cultural event shared by millions around the globe. We consider this a huge honour and it drives us to exceed our fans' expectations each and every time," said Eric Hirshberg, CEO of Activision Publishing Inc. "Call of Duty: Ghosts delivers on this promise with an epic thrill ride which takes the franchise to new heights on both current and next gen consoles. The teams at Infinity Ward, Raven and Neversoft have poured their hearts and souls into making this the must have gaming experience of the next generation. And of course, none of this would be possible without the most passionate fans in the world. Today is for them."

The game kicks off when the "Orbital Defense Initiative" or ODIN space station launches a strike on the earth after an intense firefight in space lands the weapon in the wrong hands. With your home destroyed, your brother and you come across an elite group of soldiers who are known as the Ghosts. You join up with their group and fight together as a squad to defend what's left of the earth. Our own Simon Hutchinson will have his full review of the game up soon, so stay tuned to TweakTown for the latest on Call of Duty: Ghosts.

We know that Call of Duty: Ghosts will be filling up all of those pixels natively on 1080p displays on the PlayStation 4, but it won't be doing so on the Xbox One, a console where Call of Duty sells better this generation, anyway.

We've been all over it in the news, because it's a big problem when a game can't run at 1080p at 60FPS on a next-gen console, especially a game like COD: Ghosts. Well, the developer of the game, Infinity Ward, has come out and explained why their title won't be running at native 1080p on the Xbox One. Infinity Ward head honcho, Mark Rubin, said that they had to sacrifice resolution in order to get the game at a continuous 60 frames per second.

He continued: "It's very possible we can get it to native 1080p [resolution]. I mean I've seen it working at 1080p native. 's just we couldn't get the frame rate in the neighbourhood we wanted it to be. And it wasn't a lack of effort. It wasn't that it was like last minute. We had the theoretical hardware for a long time. That's the thing you get pretty quickly and that doesn't change dramatically. It was more about resource allocation. The resource allocation is different on the consoles. That huge web of tangled resources, whether it's threads-based or if it's GPU threads or if it's memory - whatever it is - optimisation is something that could go theoretically on forever."

The original Ouya console didn't really aspire to much, mine is sitting on my shelving since I finished my review, completely untouched since. But, the company is pushing forward, announcing that a new, redesigned controller will ship in 2014.

The refreshed controller will hopefully fix most of the problems found in the origin, offering textured thumbsticks, more responsive triggers, and face buttons that don't get stuck in the controllers' faceplate. The problem with the new 'Ouya 2.0' is that it will be hard to differentiate between the current model and the model with the new controllers because the packaging will not reflect this change.

Ouya founder Julie Uhrman spoke with Polygon where she said: "The feel of the controller today is actually probably a lot better than in June. Our goal is to build a great controller. We wanted to build something that was ergonomic, that had great weight, that had a great feel, that offered developers a different way to develop games by including a touch pad in the design."

I recently had the pleasure of sitting down with Jeri Ellsworth and Rick Johnson, the two co-founders of Technical Illusions, the company behind CastAR. Many of you might remember Jeri Ellsworth from her many exploits in the Maker community, or from her time at Valve where she worked alongside Rick Johnson developing the early prototype of CastAR.

I won't go into much detail on CastAR in this post, but you can read my initial report on the next-gen gaming system which I wrote when Technical Illusions launched their Kickstarter campaign. Since its launch on October 14th, the CastAR project has raised over $674,000 and is well on their way to reaching their stretch goal #2 of $700k. The campaign still has 14 days left and a third stretch goal of $800,000 still needs to be met. Head over to the Kickstarter source link below and back the project.

I would like to thank Jeri Ellsworth, and Rick Johnson for taking time out of their busy schedule to sit down with me and wish them the best of luck with Technical Illusions and CastAR. With the gaming innovation we have seen appear in 2013, the future of gaming is here and I feel that Technical Illusions is right at the front of the pack leading the way!

We've heard some rumors in the last couple of weeks, but unfortunately they've been confirmed: Call of Duty: Ghosts on the Xbox One will indeed run at 720p, but at 60FPS.

The main problem here is that the PS4 version will run at the much-cranked-up 1080p resolution, at the same 60FPS frame rate. On the technical side of things, the Xbox One will bump the resolution up to 1080p, but it's still being rendered at 720p which is definitely not "next-gen" to me. Ghosts' producer, Mark Rubin, said through Twitter:

There was once a time when many of the big game developers said that Valve's Steam gaming network would never succeed and that no one wanted to buy a digital copy of a videogame. Fastforward a few years and Valve has just announced that Steam now has a record breaking 65 million users accessing and playing games on its platform.

Over the last year, Steam has seen over 15 million new accounts registered which equates to a rise of about 30-percent over the previous year. With 65 million users, Steam is now a bigger social and gaming platform that Microsoft's Xbox Live service. Sony's PlayStation Network is still larger with about 110 million users though. With SteamOS and Steam Machines coming in 2014, it appears that only the sky is the limit for what Steam can grow to in the next 12 months.

It has been almost exactly two years since Battlefield 3 was released to the world, and today, EA and Dice have officially launched the next-generation of Battlefield. Battlefield 4 is built upon the revolutionary Frostbite 3 engine, and features an immersive single player mode, and a multiplayer mode that can only be described as "EPIC."

Since its announcement earlier this year, Battlefield 4 has managed to win more than 40 industry awards, and has received nothing but rave reviews in the past 24 hours. With revolutionary features such as "Levolution" where players are able to destroy key locations that change the layout of the entire map, Battlefield 4 is truly a look into the future of first-person shooters. An excerpt from the official press release can be found below.

With the Xbox One launching in just a few short weeks, Microsoft is looking to generate as much hype around the next-gen console as possible. Today a new video surfaced online that takes us on a brief, but detailed walkthrough of the console's dashboard. Unfortunately Microsoft has chose to post it on the official Xbox One Website, fortunately, IGN seems to have a copy on their YouTube channel.

The video is only 1:23 long, but it does a very good job at showing us how fast one can navigate through the various screens, menus and features using a combination of voice commands and input from the controller. Microsoft will launch the Xbox One on November 22nd and is expected to hit record sales despite a very rough reception after its announcement earlier this year.

While it may have had some hiccups on launch, Grand Theft Auto Online can be considered nothing but a smashing success at this point, and today Rockstar has announced the first DLC pack for the game. The all new Beach Bum pack will be released early November and will be available for download at the unbeatable price of Free!

The Beach Bum pack will add new weapons as well as beach-themed vehicles that will be available for use in both GTA Online as well as GTA V. The update will feature several new jobs including Survivals, parachutes, deathmatches, races, and much more. New Tattoos, hairstyles, and clothing will also be included as well. Additionally users will be able to create custom deathmatches and races with the included Content Creator which is free to download as well.

NVIDIA has just updated its "GeForce Experience" software to version 1.7 and with the update, has launched the all new ShadowPlay gameplay recording module. ShadowPlay enables gamers to easily record video of their most exciting moments and quickly share them with the world.

ShadowPlay is a hardware-based encoder that reduces the impact that recording has on in-game performance and limits the frame rate reduction drastically over other recording methods by encoding to H.264. This reduces the exorbitantly large multi-gigabyte file sizes we are use to seeing, which equates to more space for additional videos, as well as a less taxing experience on the computers storage medium.

ShadowPlay is compatible with GeForce GTX 650 or higher cards, has two different modes, Shadow Mode and Manual Mode. Shadow mode constantly records gameplay for up to 20 minutes in Windows 8 (10 minutes in Windows 7) at full 1080p resolution. This feature allows you to press a pre-defined hot-key when something epic happens and the footage will be saved to your hard drive. Manual mode is what many of us are use to, and will record 20 minutes of continuous footage to the hard drive.

This morning, NVIDIA announced that it has launched a massive update for its Shield handheld gaming console. The update brings forth GeForce. NVIDIA says that the update allows Shield owners to take control of thousands of Android games that were only designed originally for touch-screen devices and remap their controls to be compatible with the Shields physical controls.

The other new and exciting feature is what NVIDIA is calling "Console Mode," which allows users to transform their portable shield into "full living room gaming and entertainment experience" for the big-screen TV. This new mode allows gamers to pair up a Bluetooth equipped gaming controller to the shield, and play the games on the big screen. NVIDIA says that its GameStream mode is compatible with Console Mode and will allow users to stream their PC Games directly to their TV.

Other Android 4.3 feature updates include restricted profiles, expandable notifications, and code and bug fixes that make everything operate much smoother and fluid than before. Additionally, Shield owners can now select game and app files which they want to move to the SD card. Before only .APK files could be moved, but now .OOB files can make their way over as well which will free up a lot of room on the Shield's internal storage.

You've just unwrapped your shiny new next-gen PlayStation 4, plugged it all in and want to get some online gaming a bash - well, you'll have to wait because there's a 300MB day-one patch you'll need to complete before you do anything.

This 300MB patch will enable a bunch of multiplayer/online functionality such as Remote Play, sharing, broadcasting and more. Sony of the PS4 features won't be available at launch, such as the suspend/resume mode that allows the PS4 to enter low-power mode, and then lets you pick up where you left off. The day-one patch will enable to following goodies:

Remote Play

The final system requirements for the upcoming Call of Duty: Ghosts has been released, with the first-person shooter having some steep requirements. First off, you'll need a 64-bit OS, secondly, a huge 6GB of RAM.

Sure, 6GB of RAM isn't that much these days, with lots of systems coming with 8GB minimum, but this is going to cut a serious chunk of consumers away from even being able to play COD: Ghosts. The CPU requirements aren't too bad with either an Intel Core 2 Duo E8200 or AMD Phenom X3 8750. GPU's also get a sigh of relief, with the minimum requirement only being an NVIDIA GeForce GTS 450 or AMD Radeon HD 5870 or better.

With these minimum requirements, I'm hoping to see a good jump in graphics from COD: Ghosts.

During an interview with Eurogamer, Guerrilla Games' Technical Director, Michiel van der Leeuw said that Killzone: Shadow Fall was exploding out to a size of over 290GB, but with Sony's help the studio shrunk the first-person shooter to just 40GB.

Van der Leeuw said that most of the PS4 exclusive's 39.7GB consisted of high-res textures that were designed for the PS4. He said: "I think at some point the disc image that we were generating was around 180 GB. And if we would have put all the levels in, which we didn't, because then the disc image generator broke, it would have been around 290 GB of data."

He continued: "So we had to completely re-architect how we deal with data. And we did a lot of work - this is actually something I'm extremely proud of - to optimize our disc access pattern. Sony made special libraries for us because we were the first ones hitting these sort of problems. I think it's something that a lot of people will need to be doing in future."

Call of Duty players generally get a bad rap and are often called out for their fanboy-like behavior anytime anyone writes an article about Call of Duty. It appears that Infinity Ward, the developers of Call of Duty: Ghosts are taking a stab at their franchise's fans as well.

During a recent interview, Infinity Ward executive producer Mark Rubin basically said that he does not look at Call of Duty players as hardcore gamers at all. "It's kind of a weird, ironic thing to say; They aren't hardcore gamers, or even gamers, but they play Call of Duty every night. And those guys are going to continue to play regardless of platform," Rubin said. "So I think not only will we continue to engage with that existing player base, but we'll take next gen and see how far we can go with it."

Rubin also thinks that the upcoming next-gen consoles will not do much in the way of strengthening the Call of Duty franchise, and says that the consoles will not have much of an impact on the games players either. "Regardless of platform - people's gaming habits aren't going to change just because there's a new platform," he said. "We have an enormous amount of players who are more in the casual game space, but they play a lot.

NVIDIA has announced its holiday game bundle packages for its mid to high-end video cards. The announcement came during the company's Montreal game showcase and this years bundle is going to be a tough one to beat. Unlike its current bundle which features Batman: Arkham Origins as the standalone bundled game, the new bundles will feature more games and a big discount on NVIDIA's Shield.

This fall, those who purchase an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 770, GTX 780, or GTX Titan will receive 3 game bundle of Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag, Batman: Arkham Origins, and Splinter Cell: Blacklist. Additionally, this package includes a $100 discount on an NVIDIA Shield handheld gaming device. Those who purchase a GeForce GTX 660, GTX 660Ti, GTX 670, GTX 680, or GTX 760 will receive Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag and Splinter Cell: Blacklist with $50 off Shield.

A new report out from CNET says that during the month of September total game spending in the physical channel topped $1.08 billion, and a considerable chunk of that was due to sales of Grand Theft Auto V. The report says that spending was up 27-percent in the US which was directly related to GTA V earning $848 million just days after launch.

Overall, total game software spending was up 53-percent year over year at $754 million, but hardware spending was down 13-percent. This drop was expected as consumers prepare for Microsoft and Sony to release their next-gen consoles later this fall. Nintendo did see its 3DS handheld console claim the top hardware spot for the fifth month in a row however and for the first time in 32 months, Sony's Playstation 3 edged out Microsoft,s Xbox 360 in number of units sold.

Many users who participated in the Battle Field 4 online beta experienced a number of issues ranging from minor bugs to major performance issues. While DICE and EA got a lot of flack for this,the purpose of the beta was to allow EA to test the servers, and discover bugs and glitches that exist across a wide range of systems.

Today EA and DICE have said that the beta provided a wealth of information and that they have already implemented a number a of fixes. Some of the fixes include performance and stability on multi-core systems. Other fixes take care of loading screen freezing issues, keybinding glitches, and even layout changes for console versions of the game.

"CPU usage could sometimes skyrocket for dual, quad and six-core processors," DICE's Vincent Vukovic admitted in a post to the official blog last night. "We identified some of the reasons and released three patches with fixes that went live during the beta, to address the problems. This was a true beta, and as such all the crash reports that were generated during this period will actually help us make a better game.," he added. "PC players may have experienced trouble in the beta getting the game running at a good frame rate. Rest assured that we're using the information we received to optimize the performance for the launch of the game."

Twelve days before Sixense successfully completed their STEM System Kickstarter campaign the company announced that the motion controller system would fully support the Raspberry Pi. I think that everyone knows by now that I am a bonafide Raspberry Pi enthusiast, so this announcement really caught my attention.

Today I got the chance to sit down with Sixense CEO Amir Rubin, and Scott Duensing to chat about the STEM System and how they have made the device compatible with the Raspberry Pi. Scott Duensing, the engineer behind the integration said that making the Sixense SDK compatible with the Raspberry Pi was important because it provided an affordable, highly accurate motion tracking system that developers can use to create amazing things with the Pi.

Ruben told me that the company will release the SDK early on and that anyone with a Raspberry Pi and a Razer Hydra can begin developing for the STEM system. Since the STEM system works off of the Hydra SDK, applications built by independent developers will work with STEM on day one. Ruben and Duensing both want to involve the maker / hacker community in the development of applications for STEM using the Raspberry Pi, and said that they would like feedback from the community as soon as possible.