Gaming - Page 2057

If there are two things I enjoy than life itself, it's singing karaoke and never leaving my home. Thanks to a new collaboration between Microsoft and The Karaoke Channel, I won't have to as the company will release a Karaoke application for the Xbox 360 this holiday season.

Karaoke will allow users to rock out by the hour as they'll need to purchase blocks of time, which are said to be two, six and 24-hours of time, although I'm sure the 24-hour block of time won't need to be used all at once or you could end up with no voice for days after your marathon performance. Players will also be given the opportunity to select a number of free karaoke tracks to sing through.

Once you picked an amount of time, you'll be given access to Karaoke's complete song library of over 8,000 tracks to sing to that selections from Pop, Rock, Country, R&B/Hip-Hop and more. If it was a popular tune at one point in time, we're sure you'll be able to find it in the Karaoke app.

One of the biggest selling points for Black Ops 2 fans to pre-order their game, aside from playing the latest and great Call of Duty game, had to have been the return of one of the most popular multiplayer maps in Call of Duty: Black Ops, Nuketown 2025. The pre-order bonus had its own playlist where players could play Nuketown to their heart's content with other Nuketown fans, but it looks like the plug has been pulled on the map's dedicated playlist as it no longer is available to play through matchmaking.

Confirmation of the playlist's removal came from the Twitter account of Treyarch's game design director, David Vonderhaar.

It's been nearly 36 hours since Nintendo's Wii U launched, which means users are bound to report issues as soon as they happen via social networks like Twitter and Facebook. One such complaint that is currently making the rounds is the extremely high possibility of Wii U owners bricking their console.

When new Wii U owners connect their console for the first time, they're going to be met with a rather large 5GB update, which enables the Wii U's online functionality, that can take nearly an hour to complete depending on your connection.

Users who have mistakingly interrupted the update process through a number of possibilities such as their power or Internet going down during the update, have been met with a "bricked" console, meaning it's completely unusable. As of now, it isn't known just how widespread this issue is as Nintendo has yet to comment on it, but seeing how users will need to have a constant stream of energy and Internet flowing into their Wii U could translate into a disaster this holiday season if a user decides to hook up their console during a storm.

Since the dawn of the Internet, many have attempted to save minors from experiencing the beast that is the world wide web. Age-gates are used for a number of video game websites as well as other adult material on the web that vary from asking "Are you over 18?" to something a tad more thought provoking like requesting the user's birthdate. Nintendo's Wii U has introduced its own age-gate of sorts for minors who would like access to the Nintendo Network at the cost of their guardians.

When a user registers their account to be connected to the Nintendo Network, they'll be asked if they're over 18 years old. If they are, the user can just continue on and finish the sign-up process without thinking twice of their honor of being an adult.

If a minor creates their profile and registers for the Nintendo Network, they'll be asked to obtain the approval of their parent or guardian by having the amount of $.50 charged to the adult's credit card.

Anand himself has grabbed out his tool belt, and ripped Nintendo's latest, just released, next-gen console, the Wii U, and gave it a teardown treatment. The Wii U isn't too hard to open up and begin looking inside, according to Anand.

The included Wii U optical drive uses a custom format, offering 25GB of storage on-disc. Max sequential read speeds are actually pretty good compared to current-gen consoles, at 22MB/sec. There's two separate 802.11 b/g/n Wi-Fi controllers, one for the usual Internet connectivity, one for the Miracast display streaming between the Wii U and the GamePad display.

There's some Samsung eMMC included, and Toshiba NAND on the back of the board. Four 4Gb (512MB) Hynix DDR3-1600 devices are baked inside, with the memory shared between the CPU and GPU. We should have around 12.8GB/sec of peak memory bandwidth in the Wii U. Comparing this to the 5.6GB/sec available on the Wii, and we're looking at just over double the internal bandwidth - which isn't too bad at all.

Skyrim lovers get ready, as Bethesda have unveiled twelve new images to the upcoming Skyrim DLC, Dragonborn. Dragonborn is considered, by some enthusiasts, as the game's first "real" expansion, going above and beyond previous DLC packs by introducing an entire new, and very large territory to explore.

Gamers will be able to leave Skyrim, to travel over to the island of Solstheim, located northwest of Vvardenfell, and was previously mentioned in Bloodmoon. Bloodmoon being the second expansion to the 2002-released The Elder Scrolls III - Morrowind.

The terrain of Solstheim has been described as "ash wastes and glacial valleys", with Bethesda teasing that when you're on the island, you'll "encounter the Dark Elven Settlers of Raven Rock and the native Skaal as you unravel the mystery of a Dragonborn's return". New towns, dungeons and quests will be available to the player, with it ending in what should be your biggest battle yet - the first Dragonborn.

Grand Theft Auto V is set to pretty much be one of the biggest games of 2013, and one of the biggest games ever released - but with no PC version in sight, it is disappointing.

GTAForums, a community dedicated to everything GTA, has some more details on GTA V thanks to a recent Q&A session with Italian website, Multiplayer.it. GTAForums published the finding in a recent thread, and there are some very big details on the game:

Of course, this is all on an un-refined, unfinished demo of the game, and does not, at all, mean that everything here is correct. The final version will undoubtedly sport some huge improvements in performance, as well as changes in the above information.

People buying the WiiU might be upset that they must basically be in the same room as the WiiU to use the WiiU GamePad. While the recommended usage distance is in fact 26 feet, the designers of the wireless chipset used in the tablet say that it is capable of much, much more, but Nintendo wanted to be sure they wouldn't be sued by someone trying to use it too far away.

Ultimately, the range comes down to the amount of wireless interference present in the installation location. If you're in an apartment building in New York City, you'll likely have much less range than someone out in the middle of nowhere, a location where not even cell phones get reception.

In the latter situation, Dino Bekis, senior director of Wireless Connectivity at Boradcom has said that people could likely get up to 100 feet of range. It also depends on what your house is composed of and different factors. The bottom line is that Nintendo went pretty conservative on the number to ensure that all users would receive a decent experience.

Microsoft is celebrating its Xbox Live 10-year anniversary this month as it was officially launched back in November 15, 2002, but Sony has hijacked their party, popped their festive balloons and punched every celebratory cake in sight with its news of updated sales figures for the PlayStation 3 and PlayStation Move controller.

Sony has announced today its PlayStation 3 has reached a total of 70 million units sold worldwide since its debut back in November of 2006, one year after the Xbox 360 was made available. Even with a one-year head start, Sony has caught up with Microsoft's Xbox 360 as they reached their 70 million units sold worldwide mark just last month. Seeing how Microsoft has always struggled selling its Xbox 360 in Japan, I'm sure Sony's dominance of the region helped reach today's goal.

Sony also announced its PlayStation Move controller has hit the 15 million units sold worldwide mark two years after its debut in 2010, which currently has over 400 titles supporting it.

With the Nintendo Wii U getting ready to launch this Sunday, Nintendo chose today to announce its TVii and all streaming video services will be delayed weeks after the launch of the console.

In a press release sent out today, Nintendo indirectly announced the delays through the description of the TVii and video-on-demand services.

Here's the description Nintendo sent out for the Nintendo TVii: