Gaming News - Page 1450

Microsoft and Platinum Games have confirmed Scalebound, a high profile Xbox One exclusive, has been cancelled and the two companies have pulled out of the project entirely.

With Microsoft's "monster" Project Scorpio console on the way, the company is in dire need of new exclusive games--right now Sony is absolutely thrashing the competition with its huge array of PlayStation exclusives. But instead of gaining new all star titles, Microsoft has just lost one of its biggest exclusives: Platinum Games' action RPG Scalebound.

"After careful deliberation, Microsoft Studios has come to the decision to end production for "Scalebound." We're working hard to deliver an amazing lineup of games to our fans this year, including "Halo Wars 2," "Crackdown 3," "State of Decay 2," "Sea of Thieves" and other great experiences," Microsoft confirmed to Windows Central.

Given Nintendo's new handheld-and-console Switch hybrid is powered by NVIDIA's custom Tegra chip, it stands to reason the company would hype the product up, but it looks like NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang is genuinely impressed by Nintendo's new hardware.

In a recent interview with VentureBeat, NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang once again affirmed that the Nintendo Switch will blow us away. While Huang didn't reveal any specs or answer the Switch's million dollar question (Tegra X1 or Pascal Tegra?), he did make a comment that's consistent with his standing about the device.

"Nintendo Switch is a game console. It's very Nintendo. That entire experience is going to be very Nintendo," the NVIDIA CEO said during the interview.

When it ships in Holiday 2017, Microsoft's "monster" Project Scorpio will be the world's most powerful games console. The "beast" has been lauded by developers at its E3 2016 announcement, and now that AMD is putting the finishing touches on its new high-performance Ryzen (Zen) CPU and enthusiast Vega GPU architectures, Project Scorpio is likely being shown off to key developers--and these devs are quite surprised with what they're seeing.

Microsoft's first-party developers will be privy to Project Scorpio's full unrestrained power, and we expect first-party titles to leverage the most out of the console itself. Frank O'Connor, longtime Halo dev and Franchise Development Director at 343 Industries, one of Microsoft's key first-party studios, said that the new 4K-ready console is "beefier than I expected." Is this even more evidence that Project Scorpio will leverage AMD's new Ryzen CPU and high-performance Vega GPU architecture?

"Haha, although I probably "know" in that I might have seen it in a slide or something, it's literally not something I have time to think about now and I actually couldn't remember whatever specs I've been exposed to even if I was tortured. I literally couldn't leak or answer a question that went beyond "Can I do this? Does it support that? How many of these could it render?" What I do remember is that it's beefier than I expected," O'Connor said in a recent NeoGAF post.

A copy of the Nintendo Switch Presentation's schedule sheet has apparently been leaked onto the internet, revealing that Nintendo's new handheld-and-console Switch hybrid may release on March 17--and that Zelda: Breath of the Wild will be a launch game.

If authentic, the presentation sheet also shows off which games will be available on the Switch's launch, and throughout 2017. We have no way of confirming this information, so take it with a grain of salt.

While the sheet doesn't explicitly say the Switch will launch on March 17, 2017, it does have many games listed for said date, and I highly doubt the games would release before the actual system. It's likely that the games listed for March 17 will compliment the system's official launch, and include games like The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, a special port of Mario Kart 8, a Splatoon port called "Counterattack," and a new Super Mario RPRG spliced with Ubisoft's Rabbids.

The launch games lineup for Nintendo's new Switch console-and-handheld hybrid has apparently been leaked onto the internet.

Thanks to a reported slip-up by IGN France, the Switch's launch games lineup has been showcased prematurely ahead of Nintendo's official presentation event planned on Jan 12. The list is pretty interesting, confirming recent reports, but also showing off some new games we haven't heard about yet including Ubisoft's newest Assassin's Creed: Egypt game, a new Pikmin game, and the latest Super Mario adventure.

The games include Super Mario Frost Land, a special Switch version of Mario Kart 8, a Switch port of Splatoon called "Counterattack," a new Piikmin game, Zelda Breath of the Wild (releases March 17!), Skyrim: Special Edition, Dragon Quest, and more.

Rockstar Games has promised that the sequel to its open-world Western would arrive in Autumn 2017, but no official release date has been given. In sheer industry fashion, an overseas retailer might have prematurely unveiled the game's launch date, and we could be waiting until October to jump into the game.

Red Dead Redemption 2 is slated for a release on October 2, 2017, according to UK retailer Littlewoods. The retailer recently posted up a pre-order listing for the game which outright shows a 10/2/2017 release date.

So what do we know about Red Dead Redemption 2 so far? We know it'll have a bigger open world than its predecessor, and we've heard it may have three protagonists just like GTA V that are memebers of John Marston's old gang. I personally think that Rockstar will tie in old infamous Old West gunslingers into the game, and the preview trailer shows seven men riding on horseback, possibly hinting at the Magnificent Seven. There's also reports it'll be set in a prequel timeline, and we have evidence to back that up.

Every big-budget game has a cutting room floor filled with amazing and expansive things that just didn't make it into the final game--especially Final Fantasy 15. I recently talked about some of the major game-changing things found on Fallout 4's cutting room floor, and now thanks to a new glitch we've uncovered a massive portion of Final Fantasy 15's scrapped content.

YouTuber Fotm Hero recently glitched through the game's barriers to uncover an absolutely massive in-game environment that wasn't explicitly used in the main game. The area is so big that the user spends a full hour running through the environment, which isn't fully fleshed out with items or anything, but it has towns and buildings and is still very far from unfinished.

Considering Final Fantasy 15's troubled development, finding an unused area this big isn't necessarily surprising: lots of Square Enix's plans never manifested into the final game, especially story content. That's one of the major reasons why the story seems so awkward. Pre-development leaks suggest that the devs wanted to have a second open world in Niflheim, but the plans were scrapped because of the strict deadline.

Nintendo's new hot-ticket NES Mini console is one of the most ridiculous things I've seen in a long time. Not only is the product ridiculous with its rather awkward non-expandable games library, but Nintendo's absolutely laughable business practices ensured no one could actually buy the thing due to artificially stunted demand. But hackers have taken matters into their own hands to fix at least one of these problems.

The NES Mini has officially been jailbroken, and the piddly library of 30 games has been expanded to 60 NES titles, including many of the must-have golden age games of yore. As we all know, the NES Mini is an cheap modified version of a Raspberry Pi 2 microconsole.

Despite having 512MB of onboard memory, the NES Mini only holds 30 NES games, which are insanely small despite having been touched up and "remastered," and since it can't be hooked up to the internet because its cheap PCB lacks the components to do so, it can't download any more games.

BioWare has confirmed that Mass Effect: Andromeda won't have a season pass, but that's not surprising, considering BioWare RPGs typically don't have season passes. But that doesn't mean the new Mass Effect won't have paid DLC--in fact, it will have microtransactions to fund multiplayer content.

BioWare General Manager Aaryn Flynn recently confirmed that ME: Andromeda wouldn't sport a season pass on Twitter. Like I said above, this isn't really a surprise--in fact, it's to be expected. What is surprising is that the game will have a loot bag style microtransaction model in its online multiplayer mode to unlock features in its card-based economy, likely similar to the one featured in Dragon Age: Inquisition.

And I fully expect Mass Effect: Andromeda to have DLC packs, but we'll have to pay for them a la carte like usual--but PC gamers will likely have to shell out for more BioWare Points.

CES 2017 - With LiquidSky, gamers can transform their old rigs into high-end PCs for free--all you have to do is watch ads.

LiquidSky is a more accessible free-to-play and microtransaction-style answer to NVIDIA's premium GeForce Now game streaming service. Using custom built IBM servers outfitted with high-end CPUs and enthusiast-grade NVIDIA video cards, LiquidSky using the cloud to beam supercomputer power to your outdated laptop, desktop PC, Mac, or Android and Apple mobile devices.

Yes, this service will stream PC games from Steam like GTA V on your phone over the cloud, although the touchscreen controls are a bit wonky.