Gaming - Page 678

Nickelodeon Animations are celebrating their internal annual Super Smash Bros. tournament and what better way to build the hype then to dish up a epic crossover poster.

Nickelodeon's SpongeBob Squarepants storyboard artist, Kurt Snyder is to thank for the above crossover poster that features the same layout as the Super Smash Bros. Ultimate one but features iconic Nickelodeon characters. Snyder has also gone above and beyond to converge the Super Smash Bros. Ultimate character positions and features with the Nickelodeon characters.

The first thing that has popped into my head after seeing this is what would Nickelodeon characters look like in Super Smash Bros.?They would certainly have to retain their cartoon look for authenticity purposes, but how would they play? Take Spongebob Square Pants for example, would his range attacks be him blowing bubbles? Could he form into a cube and smash into the ground like Kirby? Nickelodeon character move-sets are a strange but awesome thing to think about, and if Nickelodeon characters ever did make it to Smash I think they would be a massive nostalgic hit.

NASA has upgraded the International Space Station's data transmitting and receiving capabilities in a venture to sustain and provide high quality operational services to future exploration missions.

The International Space Station is currently located in Low Earth Orbit (LEO), and since it serves as a extremely effective controlled outpost to the infinite vastness of space, NASA has decided to upgrade its data transmitting capability in both sending and receiving data transfers. The new announcement sees the ISS be upgraded to a 600 megabit connection up (sending) and down (receiving) connection.

George Morrow, the acting center director of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center commented on the upgrade, saying "NASA's communications networks play a pivotal role in every NASA mission, enabling data from human spaceflight, space and Earth science research missions and technological demonstrations to reach Earth for the benefit of humanity. This increase in data rate capability for the International Space Station underlines our commitment to provide high-quality operational services for NASA exploration missions today and in the future."

Kingdom Come: Deliverance is powered by Crytek's CRYENGINE with developer Kingdom Come: Deliverance confirming that its sequel will also use CRYENGINE.

Warhorse Studios PR boss Tobias Stolz-Zwilling talked with Gamepressure recently, with the site asking if the developer would use CRYENGINE or not. Tobias replied: "We're not planning to change anything - simply because we made so many tools and so many things with the engine, adjusted it".

He continued: "It was never used for any RPGs before we did it. We did so much with the engine that we are afraid that changing it would mean starting from the beginning. And if you think of how long we needed to make the engine work for KCD before we could just start to... work with it - just too long. And hope on a good cooperation with CryTech".

PewDiePie has just reached a massive milestone, the first single person (not a group) that has reached 100 million subscribers on YouTube. YouTube itself celebrated the milestone:

Felix "PewDiePie" Kjellberg started his massive YouTuber journey with Minecraft and funnily enough, it is time for Minecraft's time in the limelight again with its resurgence in many ways. NVIDIA recently teamed with Microsoft for Minecraft with RTX, and it looks out of this world.

Indian music channel T-Series is home to the #1 subscribers on YouTube at 109 million, but PewDiePie's celebration is bigger - he's one person hitting 100m subscribers but he also got married this week. Some gigantic milestones for PewDiePie, that's for sure.

Razer is opening its largest store in the world on September 7, with the gaming giant set to open the doors to its new Las Vegas gaming store to Vegas-based gamers.

The new store is massive inside of the LINQ Promenade at a huge 2400 square feet through two floors, as both a "gaming hangout" that doubles as a social space, and somewhere that Razer can sell its vast range of gaming products.

Razer will have 10 gaming stations in the lower floor that will be home to esports tournaments, while the second story has a streaming lounge for online broadcasters. Razer will have a massive (and I'm sure super-awesome) 16-display wall that will be playing livestreams and competitions.

Control is coming out next week, but Remedy is already working on its next project. It just won't be released any time soon.

Remedy games are special and take a while to bake in the oven, but once one batch is done another goes right on the rack. As an indie studio, Remedy has to constantly jump from project-to-project in order to stay afloat, so it often starts planning its next game way before its current game is finished. This iterative process sees all previous games influencing the later ones, like Alan Wake 2 fed into Quantum Break which then morphed into Control.

Now Remedy talks about its upcoming projects, including a new AAA title and games in its new Vanguard live service team. We knew as far back as 2018 that a new AAA game outside of Control was in planning phases, but in a recent earnings call Remedy says the project is now in early dev stages.

Star Citizen is a money-printing machine that's always releasing massively expensive ships, and the latest costs $675 (it's not even the most expensive either).

Star Citizen, the game that may never be completed, recently revealed a new $675 ship called the Aegis Nautilus, a large-sized Squadron 42 military ship that lays two types of mines (sentry and homing mines). The Aegis Nautilus also sports dual S7 guns. Gamers affirm this is a niche ship, and many criticize Roberts Space Industries for not making more progress on the game's promised features including the big Squadron 42 singelplayer mode.

This is actually quite normal for the game and it routinely releases ships that cost as much as $1,200 a piece. Star Citizen even has a pack that costs $27,000--you can either buy a bunch of ships or a brand new car.

With its samurai blades, fluid wall-running, and replayability, Ghostrunner could be the next big arcade hit.

Ghostrunner looks to be an extremely addictive and fun romp in the vein of Superhot, complete with one-hit kills. But unlike Superhot, this stylish cyberpunk slasher has you jumping, sliding, dashing, sprint-strafing and wall-running like a Tenno--all in first-person. The areas are much more open-ended and fleshed out with high-tech visuals, reminding me of Midgar fused with Deus Ex's Utelek facility. And your only weapon is a dual-handed katana that slices and dices badguys. There's also instant respawns so you can jump right back into the action and try again; do or die, there is no try.

The project is being developed by indie devs One More Level and published by All In! Games, and even has a mission-based storyline with actual objectives. There's also a grappling hook. I mean what cyber-ninja would be complete without a grappling hook?

Microsoft is investing heavily into PC gaming, and UWP might not be a part of that plan.

Gears of War 5 on PC will use the more flexible Win32 API in both its Steam and Windows Store versions instead of the more closed-off Universal Windows Platform (UWP) framework. Senior community manager Liam Ashley confirmed the news on Twitter.

After recognizing the limitations and frustrations with UWP, Microsoft initially promised that more of its games sold on its digital PC storefront would support Win32. This move comes after Microsoft tried to unify its first-party PC games using the Windows 10-exclusive UWP, which would've nixed support for legacy Win32 apps and games. This fledgling attempt culminated in a wonky games launcher that was missing key features and added extra steps for developers.

Introducing Bleak Faith: Forsaken, a new supremely weird action RPG that blends bizarre art styles, Dark Souls survival combat, and nightmarish environments.

Bleak Faith: Forsaken looks pretty intense. It's the type of game that'd make Giger and Beksinski proud, up there with the likes of Scorn, and looks like a collaboration between Guillermo Del Toro and FromSoftware. Hell I think even Bryan Fuller of Hannibal TV show fame would be impressed. The game was successfully crowdfunded on Kickstarter with $30,000 in pledges, and is described as an open-world survival-horror action RPG with some serious freaky overtones and visuals.

Horrid monstrosities straight out of Del Toro's nightmares stomp around, weird demonic ritualistic music plays in the background, and the overall visual flair is post-apocalyptic otherworldliness mixed with medieval sword-and-board mystique. We didn't get to see much combat or gameplay in the trailer, but the Bleak Faith: Forsaken is still heavily in development.

Activision is blamed most for Destiny 2's overmonetization with microtransactions, season passes, and piecemeal expansion purchases, but Bungie says the publisher gave them tremendous power with the series.

Destiny has changed over the years, and for a bit Destiny 2 was an expensive hobby that required separate purchases of multiple expansions and a season pass for good measure. Microtransactions were thrown in too. This was all a result of Activison's attempt to "re-engage" (which really means re-monetize) Destiny 2's playerbase with Forsaken content. It was quite contentious and the attempt didn't work. Shortly after, Activision jettisoned the Destiny franchise because it was "tying up our resources" and sold it back to Bungie, who now holds publishing rights to the Destiny franchise.

Despite the live service red tape, Bungie is thankful for Activision's help. Years ago, Activision put up a whopping $500 million to fund Destiny across a big ten-year plan that culminated across three mainline releases. Without the publisher, Destiny would've never manifested--at least not in the way it did.

Not everyone wants in on Epic's lucrative exclusivity deals. Some publishers like Bandai Namco still want maximum long-term reach instead of short-term gains.

Epic is still spending big money on exclusivity contracts to fill up its games store. But its Fortnite billions can't buy everyone. Even as major players like Ubisoft and Take-Two jump on the Epic Games Store for that big 88-12 revenue split, Japanese games-makers like Bandai Namco simply aren't interested in trading exposure and potential sales for upfront cash or promised earnings. Japanese publishers like SEGA, Capcom, and Bandai Namco are still relatively new at PC ports but they still recognize the power of Steam's massive userbase.

Now Bandai Namco says Epic's exclusivity really isn't part of its grand vision--a vision that sees the company selling its games to 2 billion gamers worldwide. In order to do that they can't pick either Steam or the Epic Games Store. It has to be both or the biggest one.

I am a massive fan of destruction physics in games, riding the wave from the 90s of Red Faction (how good were those destruction physics for the 90s) through to DICE and multiple Battlefield games with kick ass destruction.

All of those games pale in comparison to this demo, from developer Dennis Gustafsson. I stumbled up on the video, with Gustafsson running the game on an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070, and a quad-core CPU with it hitting that liquid-smooth 60FPS mark.

It shows off what I will claim here, as the best destruction physics I've ever seen. It's not just buildings and pipes and cars, but internally the engine handles fire and smoke like I've never seen before.

GTA 5 is no longer playable on NVIDIA's GeForce Now streaming subscription service, and customer service says Rockstar decided to pull the game.

With over 100 million copies sold to date, GTA 5 is everywhere...except GeForce Now. The pop-culture juggernaut was pulled from NVIDIA's $7.99 a month GeForce Now cloud gaming service overnight, and the game no longer appears on the service's list of supported titles. Subscribers logged in and tried to fire up GTA 5 only to find it was missing.

Customer support indicates Rockstar removed the game arbitrarily, leading some to believe Rockstar signed an exclusive deal with Google's competing cloud service Stadia. It's possible and more likely that Rockstar's license deal with NVIDIA expired. For some, using NVIDIA's remote servers was the only way to play GTA 5 and others feel blindsided by the sudden disappearance.

Massively ambitious total conversion mod Skywind aims to recreate Morrowind in Skyrim's engine, complete with beloved spears and fancy alteration magics.

The folks over at the TES Renewal Team are real-life magicians. Not only are they recreating the entirety of Oblivion in Skyrim's game engine, but Morrowind is also getting unofficially remastered too. We have lots of questions about UI features, magic, level-up skills and more, but a new Skywind gameplay trailer reveals some awesome tidbits, including the return of two-handed spears.

The gameplay shows off Balmora's reinvigorated high-def beauty, complete with that distinct exotic ashlander architecture. The demo sees players take on an assassination mission for the nefarious Morag Tong guild. Joining this guild was contentious in the game and could alienate you from other factions, so you had to do it just right--I remember joining all the guilds in the game with a proper sequence. There's literal political differences that'll forever lock you out of a guild if you side with their enemies.

Although it's published by Private Division, a new label that favors the Epic Store, Kerbal Space Program 2 will instead be sold on Steam.

Kerbal Space Program 2 is happening, complete with co-op play and lots of new content like interstellar travel. It's also coming to Steam and "other digital storefronts," which could include the Epic Store, but it could also include the eShop. Right now Epic is focused on snatching up exclusivity to bolster game sales and engagement figures so they usually force exclusivity for all games on their storefronts, or at the very least force devs to choose between EGS and STeam. This shows that Take-Two's new Private Division label is quite flexible despite the parent company pushing some games on the Epic Store (Borderlands 3 is on the Epic Store, but at the same time NBA 2K20, Take-Two's cash crop, is on Steam).

Another refreshing bit of news is microtransactions won't be included either. The Kerbal devs say the sequel doesn't have in-game currencies or lootboxes, and they even confirm the original Kerbal Space Program isn't being retired or abandoned. New content is still on the way for the first game.

Mockups and renders are always a huge part of next-gen console hype, and some PS5 mockups started floating around based on the console's devkit design. But this isn't how the finalized PlayStation 5 should look--devkits are usually pretty different.

Compared to other devkits over the years, the PS5's devkit looks pretty flamboyant (we're not 100% sure if Sony's recent patents are actually a PS5 devkit, and only one Codemasters dev has stepped in to confirm). It's got a dramatic chassis with a layered V-shaped design, presumably for cooling the system's higher-end Navi GPU and Zen 2 CPU hardware. This makes sense considering devs are encouraged to push the hardware to its limits and max out CPU, GPU, and system memory limitations. But this mockup probably doesn't reflect the PS5 that'll be out on store shelves in late 2020.

Historically, developer kits of consoles are always quite different than the final design. It's a question of raw performance design versus a sleek, efficient, and appealing consumer product. Right now the PS5 looks like a next-gen Johnny 5 or a futuristic manta ray or something, not like the usual systems Sony sells. I mean, the original Xbox One (codenamed Durango) devkit was an actual PC tower not a console.

CD Projekt RED has released a new batch of Cyberpunk 2077 screenshots from Gamescom 2019, the screenshots are in gorgeous 4K and give us a great look into the detailed world of Cyberpunk 2077.

The released images give us a detailed look into some chaotic environments that look splendid. We also see some snap shots of fire fight combat (lovely blood splats), enemies, explosions, wide-spread location shots, and vehicles such as motorbikes and cars.

CD Projekt RED confirmed at this years Gamescom that Cyberpunk 2077 will be releasing as single-player only game, and that currently the developers are working on the community requested New Game Plus. It isn't yet clear whether or not Cyberpunk 2077 will arrive with a multiplayer aspect, but I'd say that CD Projekt RED will first nail the single-player release and then perhaps move onto multiplayer. Cyberpunk 2077 will release on April 16th, 2020 on the PS4, Xbox One and PC.

One of the very first games that was announced to be exclusive to the Epic Games Store has finally be given its Steam release date.

The game is called 'Hades' and is a dungeon crawler title developed by Supergiant Games. While this might not be the biggest and most recognized game on the market, since it was one of the first games to be exclusive to the Epic Games Store it certainly holds some historical value.

Since Hades' Epic Games Store exclusivity expiration seems to be coming to an end, Supergiant Games have released a Steam Early Access trailer on their YouTube Channel. The video is above, and if you are a dungeon crawler fan and don't have an Epic Games Store account, I'd definitely keep an eye on this title. If you want to keep a closer eye on it, here is the link to the games Steam store listing.

The first gameplay look at Bandai Namco's upcoming Dragon Ball Z title, Dragon Ball Z: Kakarot has been showcased and captured at Gamescom 2019.

Above we have the captured gameplay footage from Bandai Namco's Gamescom 2019 presentation showcasing some gameplay from the games 'Cell Saga'. We have 12 minutes of footage to enjoy and we can see Gohan going toe-to-toe with none other than Cell himself.

If you have been caught outside the loop, Bandai Namco will be soon releasing Dragon Ball Z: Kakarot which tells a story of the famous Goku and most of his epic battles. The game will allow players to experience challenging quests from the anime and TV show while also pitting players against some of Goku's most notorious villains. At the moment there isn't a release date scheduled for Dragon Ball Z: Kakarot, all we have to go on is that the title will be released sometime during 2020.