Gaming News - Page 1543

UPDATE: Nintendo being its usual shrewd self has forcibly taken down the Nintendo Power archive. Sorry, folks, but Nintendo has a zero tolerance policy on any kind of fan service and they're still out of touch with reality.

Now you can experience that golden age of gaming splendor all over again.

Remember video game magazines? Yeah, they're all but extinct now. But back in the old nostalgic days of retro gaming, Nintendo Power ruled our childhood. Now that every single issue of Nintendo Power has been published online, you can cruise through all 11 years of iconic gaming awesomeness and timewarp back to those nostalgic days on a whim.

Final Fantasy XV will have a season pass that unlocks access to six pieces of DLC content, three of which will be story-based.

According to Gematsu, who spotted a listing on the JP PlayStation Store, Final Fantasy XV's illustrious season pass will cost $25 includes three story-based episodes that possibly explore the backstory of the game's party members: Ignis, Prompto, and Gladiolus. Considering FF15 already tells the story of Noctis, the player character, it stands to reason Square Enix would love an opportunity to flesh out the other party members. Sony has since taken down the listing.

So far the season pass isn't available for purchase on its own; you have to buy the $84.99 Digital Premium Edition (DLC + main game) or grab the Season Pass Upgrade, which is only available to those who have already pre-ordered the game on PSN. The six DLC packs are as follows:

Rather than shutting down and ceasing all gambling activity as per Valve's orders, a major CS:GO gambling site is applying for a legal gambling license.

CSGO Lounge, one of the biggest players in the Counter-Strike GO skin trade, plans to apply for a legal gambling license so it can keep its lucrative business afloat. The site has put up an age gate to restrict betting to users 18 years or older, and you won't be able to bet unless eSports gambling is legal in your country.

"We have decided to acquire a license to legally operate in most of the countries and be able to accept the esports bets by our community, as if it would be real money," reads an update on CSGO Lounge's site.

iFixit cleaves open the Xbox One S's small skin to reveal its inner guts, showing some decent hardware jumps over the original Xbox One.

We already know that Microsoft's new $299 Xbox One S packs the same GPU/CPU hardware as the original Xbox One, only better: the S model's GPU has been overclocked to 914MHz (from XO's 853MHz) and is now housed on a new ultra-efficient 16nm FinFET SoC chip. But a new Xbox One S teardown from iFixit reveals some other interesting component upgrades that the Xbox slim offers, namely a SATA III 6.0 Gbps hard drive, a 802.11ac wireless chip, and HDMI 2.0a connectivity. Plus it's quite easy to repair!

Here are the particulars:

Microsoft's new $299 Xbox One S technically supports native 4K gaming, but don't expect to see the console run blockbusters like Battlefield 1 in 4K.

Yesterday we reported that the new Xbox One S rocks tweaked hardware to deliver noticeable performance gains across the board, including in-game FPS and power efficiency. Now Xbox exec Albert Penello has confirmed to Eurogamer that the new 40% smaller Xbox One S has an unlocked 4K frame buffer that developers can access to technically enable native 4K gaming--but only for limited games like indies.

Digital Foundry: "Can developers address a 4K framebuffer? Obviously we can't expect native 4K triple-A gaming, but simpler titles and 2D games could potentially work well - plus existing Xbox One owners would get 2x super-sampling."

Microsoft has released its tweaked and refined Xbox One S console, but now that it's here, we know that the GPU inside of the new Xbox One S console is actually faster than the one in the current Xbox One unit.

The new Xbox One S not only features its GPU clocked at 914MHz, compared to the 853MHz on the Xbox One. On a more technical side of things, Microsoft has used a new APU from AMD that is made on the 16nm FinFET process in the Xbox One S, down from the 28nm APU found in the Xbox One.

The new 16nm APU is clocked 7% faster than the 28nm APU inside of the Xbox One, improving the maximum compute performance and with the increased ESRAM bandwidth, we have a slightly faster console. The additional performance from the 7% overclock on the GPU will result in games that feature an unlocked framerate, or GPU-limited games where performance suffers on the Xbox One, the new Xbox One S will have less FPS drops, and a smoother gaming experience.

Hello Games is readying a patch update to fix No Man's Sky's most notorious glitches and wipe away all those pesky bugs outed by the leaked footage.

We've been keeping a close eye on all the leaked No Man's Sky footage that's been trickling onto the web, critiquing our worries and making note of bugs, glitches, and rather worrisome mechanics. The information shown in the leaks has fractured the No Man's Sky fanbase, and for good reason--using Atlas Stones, a gamer was able to reach the center of the universe in less than two days time. There's also some other pretty serious in-game bugs that hint No Man's Sky wasn't entirely finished when it went gold.

As I suspected, these leakers are playing the unfinished, unpatched version of No Man's Sky, and it won't be the version we get on August 9. Sean Murray has just confirmed that Hello Games is finalizing the game's first update which will likely be deployed as the coveted day one update, wiping the slate clean and making all the leaked content particularly moot.

Sony has been limping through the last few years on a crutch it calls its PlayStation division, which according to Sony's Q1 2016 financial report, is still the case. During Q1 2016, Sony's operating profits dropped 42% year-over-year to $546 million with $15.66 billion in sales for the three-month period.

Sony said the "significant decrease" in sales is because of the stronger yen and a 33.7% drop in sales for Sony smartphones. The company notes weak results in its semiconductors business, with a "significant decrease" because of it, with $132 million in expenses after the mid-April earthquake that hit Kumamoto, Japan.

The PlayStation division continues to do good business, with $3.21 billion in sales for Q1 2016 - an increase of 14.5% year-over-year. Sony attributes the "significant increase" in sales of its PlayStation division to the sales of PlayStation games. We've seen the release of Uncharted 4 which sold over 2.7 million copies in its launch week, becoming the fastest-selling first-party PS4 game yet.

It looks like Telltale Games is in for a world of hurt, with their latest game getting completely bagged on Steam. Batman: The Telltale Series is being called by some users as "100 percent broken as of launch".

Surely, gamers could adjust the visual settings and resolution for improved performance in Batman: The Telltale Series, but no - this doesn't help. One review on Steam says: "Resolution is an issue, try to set any [resolution] higher than 720p, your mouse gets held ransom in an invisible box at the top left of the screen".

Other users can't even change the resolution in the game, or have issues trying to save their new visual settings (which requires escaping out of the settings completely, which then asks you to save the settings). Moving to the game itself, Steam reviews say that Batman: The Telltale Series is plagued with framerate issues which bring the game down to an unplayable 10FPS, sound issues, and random crashes.

Final Fantasy XV will officially have DLC content that's bundled together in a season pass.

In a move that surprises no one (partially due to the trends in gaming and the fact that Tabata confirmed it months ago), Square Enix will be offering a season pass for future Final Fantasy XV content. What's a bit strange is that we can't exactly pre-order the season pass just yet: the DLC content is only available to those who pre-ordered the game, or on PSN through a special $84.99 Digital Premium Edition.

Doing a bit of math, we see that the Final Fantasy XV season pass equates to roughly $25, so all in all we probably shouldn't expect too much from the content. Then again, CD Projekt RED jam-packed an incredible amount of content with the Witcher 3's $25 Expansion Pass, and Square Enix has a penchant for high-quality games.