Gaming - Page 511

I still remember walking into EB Games and buying the original Xbox along with the original Halo, and Project Gotham Racing, and losing probably a good 6-12 months solid of my life. But man, was it worth it. Now, we have emulators with the new Xemu v0.5 release... check it out:

The new Xemu v0.5 emulator has audio and graphical improvements, and runs natively on a bunch of operating systems: Windows, macOS, and Linux. There's even pre-compiled binaries available for Windows, macOS, and Ubuntu if you wanted to tinker around with it.

The team explains: "xemu v0.5 has been released! This marks another major milestone in the project. In addition to a host of graphics improvements, fixes to enable broader BIOS compatibility, and general usability improvements: preliminary audio support has been added!"

Hitman 3 will be launching later this month and developer IO Interactive has said that the new game be a "platform" for the full reboot trilogy.

With that, gamers will be able to import levels, collectibles and even progress from the last two games in the Hitman franchise. But now a verified member of the Hitman 3 development team talked about some of the inner workings on the ResetEra forums, and some of the magic IO Interactive has done with the game.

The poster explained: "One thing I think all of you will be happy to hear is that we have managed to get the size of the game down significantly. All three games with all content will take up around 100 GB. [...] Biggest wins are because of data management and file structures and how we deliver the game so we could remove duplicate data. We also use newer and better compression for textures".

In 2018, Bethesda showed us where The Elder Scrolls VI would be based. Fans think it's a toss up between two regions: The western wastes of Hammerfell, or the diverse lands of High Rock to the northwest. Now Bethesda might've dropped a new hint.

In a recent New Year's post, Bethesda shared a curious image that could give clues on The Elder Scrolls VI's location. The map shows a few candles precariously placed across Skyrim's map with a curious tagline: "Transcribe the past and map the future." One of these candles is placed in region of Hammerfell, which is southwest of Skyrim.

Hammerfell is the home of the desert-dwelling Redguards, the race of the famed Alik'r warriors with their curved swords. Hammerfell was previously featured in the old PC spin-off The Elder Scrolls Adventures: Redguard, as well as The Elder Scrolls: Arena, and Daggerfall.

Billion-dollar gaming titan Epic Games is planning major expansions in its home city of Cary, North Carolina.

Today Epic Games announced that it purchased a huge 980,000 square feet shopping mall for its future headquarters. Epic will transform the 87-acre Cary Towne Center into a fully-fledged game dev campus and HQ by 2024, and will be a major centerpiece for the company's hometown.

The deal is a win-win for everyone involved. The realtor sold the ailing mall, which suffered as multiple retail chains left, Epic Games gets a new HQ, and the Town of Cary, N.C. has a new tech hub that should create jobs over the next few years.

The PS5 isn't selling extremely well in Japan, and actually falls below the PS3's initial release sales.

According to Famitsu data, the PS5 has sold 240,000 units to date in Japan, making it the lowest-selling PlayStation console of all time. Key Japanese analyst firms like ACE Economic Research are taking note, and projects the PlayStation 5 could sell less than half of the PS4's lifetime sales in the region.

In a recent note to investors, ACE analyst Hideki Yasuda outlines a somewhat grim future for the console in its homeland. Conversely, the PlayStation 5 is breaking records in other regions and had the best launch in U.S. history.

Xbox's Phil Spencer teases big new things coming to Xbox in the next 1-2 years, and these experimental plans could transform gaming even more than Game Pass and Project xCloud.

With features like backwards compatibility, Project xCloud game streaming, and Game Pass, Microsoft has been a tremendous innovator for the games industry. The company isn't done yet. Microsoft plans to continue pushing the bar in its cross-platform framework with ambitious new content/services/hardware in the next 1-2 years.

In a recent podcast with Major Nelson, Xbox boss Phil Spencer says the company may reveal major new innovations in the next 1-2 years. Spencer doesn't say what these plans are--whether or not they're hardware, services, or new features coming to the Xbox-PC-smartphone ecosystem--but he does say they're "incredibly exciting."

Sony is ending production of certain PS4 and PS4 Pro models in Japan, overseas retailers report.

Sony plans to end production on the original 2013 PS4 launch variants as well as a particular PS4 Pro SKU. The news was relayed by Twitter user and Japan native Cheesemeister, who visited a retailer in Japan that warned consumers certain console models won't be available again: "Due to the manufacturer ending production, the following products will not be restocked," the retailer said.

Five PS4 consoles were listed as ending production:

SUP3R5 is making custom PlayStation 5 consoles stylized with a PlayStation 2 color scheme and design, but you'll have to act fast to get one.

We've seen gamers create their own custom PlayStation 5 models by simply adding a paintjob to the detachable sides. Now an online retailer is selling a batch of PS5 consoles made to look like Sony's old-school 2000s titan, complete with some nice black DualSense controllers.

The new consoles are being made by SUP3R5 and will cost a hefty $649, which is roughly $115 over the standard MSRP after taxes. Outside of the black paintjob, a smaller colorful PlayStation logo, and a purple badge on the side, there doesn't seem to be much difference between the custom model and the base PS5. The site is also selling a black DualSense for $99, but these look much better with stylized face buttons along with the black paintjob. Sadly, this customization voids the DualSense's warranty.

Cross-platform play is one of the biggest new features in gaming, but it's almost worthless without cross-saves. Luckily publishers like Ubisoft have you covered with platforms like Ubisoft Connect.

Playing the same game on multiple systems can be really awkward, especially if the games don't support cross-saves. This revolutionary new feature makes game saves universal and platform agnostic, letting gamers access their progress regardless of where they play. It's a feature available on the Xbox/PC/mobile trifecta, and now it's starting to make its way into mainstream games.

Titles like Assassin's Creed Valhalla, Watch Dogs Legion, and Destiny 2 all support true campaign cross-progression alongside cross-play. We've seen games like Call of Duty Black Ops support cross-progression for multiplayer, but not every game will do the same for offline singleplayer campaigns.

Xbox division head Phil Spencer confirms Bethesda Softworks is working on a few unannounced games...what could they be? Fallout 5? The new Doom sequel? The next-gen ZeniMax MMO IP?

Right now ZeniMax Media's dev teams are working on a bunch of projects. Some we know about; id has a new Doom game in the works, Arkane is making Deathloop, MachineGames is making Wolfenstein 3, Bethesda Game Studios is making Starfield and The Elder Scrolls VI, and ZeniMax Online is gearing up for a new mysterious IP. There's also some projects we don't know about, and these games should tremendously benefit from the big Microsoft acquisition.

In the most recent Major Nelson podcast, Xbox's Phil Spencer talked about Bethesda's ambitious new games and how the team is working on new projects we haven't seen yet. This could include a next-gen Fallout 5 built on the same engine as Starfield and TESVI...but something like that will happen way down the line.

Valve smashes into 2021 by breaking a new player record as coronavirus lockdowns and precautions stay in effect.

According to SteamDB, Steam just hit a new concurrent player high of 25 million for the first time in its 18-year history. The record was set about 13 hours ago and Steam now has a new record concurrent player peak of 25,415,080. The previous record was achieved in March 2020, where 24.38 million PC users logged on and played games at the same time.

We can only imagine what kind of revenues Valve is enjoying thanks to the rise in active players. Since Valve is a privately traded company, we don't get access to their earnings or sales figures, but we did get a nice breakdown of the top most-played games of 2020. Among Us was the fourth best-selling game in 2020 and enjoyed a player count that beat PUBG.

PUBG Mobile and its Chinese port have made nearly $3 billion in 2020, topping the worldwide mobile charts.

Mobile gaming is big business: In 2020, Newzoo estimated that mobile gaming would generate $77.2 billion and make up 48% of total industry earnings. Monetization was to make up 74% of revenues, or an incredible $117 billion, driven by a combination of free-to-play and premium games.

Now we're seeing the proof in those numbers. According to analyst firm SensorTower, five mobile games have generated over $1 billion in revenues in 2020. Titles like PUBG Mobile, Honor of Kings, Pokemon Go, Coin Master, and Roblox all pulled in more than $1 billion in revenues during the year, which is more than some games publishers make altogether.

This new Hitman 3 footage showcases the improvements IO Interactive has made with its in-house Glacier engine, including atmospheric effects and NPCs.

IO Interactive is sending off the Hitman trilogy off with a bang. Hitman 3 makes some hefty upgrades over the first two games, starting off with 4K 60FPS on PS5 and Xbox Series X, but a bit of new PC gameplay footage illustrates how the game will look on gaming's most powerful platform.

The new footage shows off 5 minutes of the opening Dubai mission. There's not a whole lot of action--there's no killing and mostly subterfuge and tons of beautiful atmospheric effects--but arguably there doesn't need to be. Agent 47's exploits have mostly been about spy-style stealth and disguise. We do get a nice glimpse of Agent 47 atop one of the world's tallest buildings in Dubai, India, and a direct look at the Glacier engine's new NPC rendering technology, which can pack up to 300 NPCs in a single area at one time.

Grim Dawn, one of the best action RPGs ever made, is just $5 right now on Steam. You should definitely check it out.

If you're a Diablo fan who grew up with the original Blizzard classic, or even Diablo II and it's epic Lord of Destruction expansion, then you might want to pick up Grim Dawn. This aRPG is a lot like those older games with a darker tone, more streamlined mechanics, and a few innovations thrown in for good measure. Grim Dawn is a pure loot-driven aRPG and even features online multiplayer so you can team up with your friends.

Diablo 4 is a long ways away, and the market simply doesn't have many aRPGs. You might've picked up Torchlight II for free on the Epic Store and that'll hold you over for a while. But if you're looking for something that's more violent, more mature, more grim, then definitely drop a fiver on Grim Dawn on Steam.

Is your PlayStation 5 making mysterious noises? The console's power supply could be to blame.

The PS5 is mostly a silent, cool machine even when it's belting out 4K 60FPS gaming and ray-traced visuals. In my PlayStation 5 review, I called the system a marvel of console engineering for its stellar thermal design. Not every PS5 is perfect. In fact, not every PS5 even uses the same fan design. On closer inspection, some PlayStation 5 consoles are making strange sounds during operation.

YouTuber TronixFix just put out a new video investigating the mysterious noises. He identified a fait buzzing sound emitting from the PS5, which some refer to as coil whine. As it turns out, the culprit for the so-called coil whine is a metalized film capacitor from the PS5's power supply unit. In fact, the PS5 uses the exact same capacitor as the PS4 Pro.

Cyberpunk 2077 can do with as much performance as you can throw at it, but now we have a new mod called Alternate Crowd Behavior which improves performance by making tweaks to NPCs.

The way it works is that Alernate Crowd Behavior makes tweaks to how crowds are generated in Cyberpunk 2077, but also how they move and how they interact with another NPC. You can download the new Cyberpunk 2077 Alternate Crowd Behavior here at Nexus Mods.

Changes List :

The Atari VCS can actually run PC games via Linux and Windows 10, but modern games like Cyberpunk 2077 are pretty janky.

On paper, the Atari VCS isn't anything to write home about. The system is billed as a PC-console "connected device" hybrid but is pretty weak. The Atari VCS sports a 14nm Ryzen Embedded R1606G APU with a dual-core Zen CPU and an integrated Radeon Vega 3 GPU, which isn't really enough for modern games. You're scraping the bottom of the barrel here when running Cyberpunk 2077 on the VCS.

That being said, Cyberpunk 2077 does technically run. YouTuber Kevin Kenson just put out a video detailing how CD Projekt RED's big new game runs on the Atari SoC. The short answer...not well. The game will actually run, but you have to crank the settings down to their minimum and the performance is still a choppy mess.

A new FPS test from VG Tech illustrates how the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X can both maintain consistent 120FPS in Destiny 2 on variable refresh displays.

120FPS games aren't super widespread on next-gen consoles, but a handful of titles like Destiny 2, The Master Chief Collection, Dirt 5, Call of Duty Black Ops Cold War, and Rainbow Six Siege can all hit the blistering-fast frame rate. Devs are coming right out of the gate with big optimizations that leverage the new Zen 2 CPUs and Navi 2x GPUs found in the PS5 and Xbox Series X. These games can technically hit 120FPS...but how often do they stay there?

A new comparison video from VG Tech shows that Destiny 2 hits a stable 120FPS on both consoles without any major fluctuations. The higher 120FPS mode is only available in the PVP Crucible gametype, and the game reverts to a dynamic 1440p resolution in order to hit such a high frame rate. Still, though, the game doesn't drop below 117 FPS the entire time...which is a pretty big development for console hardware.

GmanModz has created the world's smallest Nintendo 64 portable build that actually plays original console cartridges.

We've seen lots of awesome handheld creations over the years. Shankmods created a Wii that fits in your pocket, and even squeezed an entire Wii into a tiny Altoids tin. Now GmanModz has broken records with the smallest Nintendo 64 handheld ever made.

GmanModz didn't use any custom PCBs for the build. "Instead I used good old-fashioned board trimming, hand-wiring, and hot glue," he said. Gman was able to shave off space by using JoyCon analog sticks, which reduced the overall length, and a single 1860mAh battery cell, which reduces the thickness and powers the system for about 1 hour 31 minutes. The build is actually over 82,000 cubic centimeters (or roughly 23%) smaller than the previous record holder.

Emtek has just announced two new custom GeForce RTX 3080 and RTX 3070 graphics cards, with the new RTX 3080 HV Black Monster COD Edition and RTX 3070 HV Black Monster COD Edition graphics cards.

The new Emtek GeForce RTX 3080 HV Black Monster COD Edition graphics card, and its RTX 3070 counterpart are only available in South Korea. The flagship Emtek GeForce RTX 3080 HV Black Monster COD Edition requires 3 x 8-pin PCIe power connectors and rocks a 370W TGP which is one of the highest TGPs out of all of the custom RTX 3080s.

There's some slick RGB lighting on the top and front of the card, with a super-unique Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War themed backplate that looks pretty bad ass. If you're into Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War, and live in South Korea, and can actually find one of the Emtek RTX 3080/3070 HV Black Monster COD Edition graphics cards then you will probably want to grab one pretty quick.