Gaming News - Page 81

Popular Twitch streamer Amouranth has revealed she is working with a European beer company to develop a custom beer that's created using her own vaginal yeast.

In a new interview with Dexerto, the Twitch streamer Kaitlyn Siragusa, or better known as Amouranth, revealed she is working with a Polish brewery, "The Order of Yoni," to develop a new beer that will use her vaginal smear as the main ingredient to develop a new flavor. Siragusa explained that it is true she is working with the company to produce this beer and that The Order of Yoni has done this in the past with many models' smears.

The Order of Yoni website explains it doesn't actually use yeast but instead a bacteria called lactobacillus. This entire process, from smear to a bottle of beer made out of vaginal bacteria, is explained on the company's website. First, a gynecologist collects the vaginal smear, which is then transported to a laboratory where the lactobacillus bacteria is isolated, cleaned, analyzed, and then replicated. After this process is complete, the leftover is pure lactic acid that is then put straight into Yoni beer.

Masahiro Sakurai, the director of Nintendo's beloved fighting game franchise Super Smash Bros., has reflected on the development of the latest installment in the franchise, Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, revealing some concern regarding future sequels.

Sakurai took to his own YouTube channel with a just over 10-minute presentation to reflect on how difficult development was for Super Smash Bros. Ultimate. Sakurai mentions challenging aspects of development such as the 16-gigabyte limitation on the Switch cartridge vs the 25Gb limitation for the Wii U disc, especially considering the tagline for Smash Ultimate was "Everyone is here!" which calls for more assets, etc.

While the video provides some really insightful information regarding the development of each Super Smash Bros. game, at the end of the video, Sakurai discusses the possibility of future Smash Bros. titles and how they will align with Super Smash Bros. Ultimate. Sakurai doesn't completely rule out a new Smash Bros. game, but he does remain skeptical that a development team would be able to create something that is bigger and better than Smash Bros Ultimate.

During the era of Doom, Quake, and Half-Life, console gamers got their slice of iconic first-person action on the Nintendo 64 with a little game called Goldeneye 007. Developed by Rare (now a first-party Xbox Game Studio), it revolutionized the genre as something more than games that are best experienced on PC.

The James Bond adaptation was released in 1997, with the team's follow-up - and original science fiction espionage IP by the name of Perfect Dark - hitting the console in 2000. As a first-person shooter for Nintendo gamers, it took what made Goldeneye 007 so popular and dialed it all up to 11, from the single-player missions to the multiplayer with bots and crazy weapons and rulesets.

With Xbox bringing Perfect Dark back to Xbox Series X|S via the newly formed The Initiative, the good news is that thanks to decompiling efforts that led to native versions of N64 games like Super Mario 64 being fully playable on PC - it looks like we can add Perfect Dark to the mix.

At this point, we're just curious to play Ubisoft's perpetually in-development and delayed Skull and Bones. With development led by Ubisoft Singapore, Skull and Bones began life as a spin-off to Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag, with the focus shifting to a full-on pirate high-seas "I'm on a boat" action.

That should clue you into how long this game has been in development; the team started working on it in 2013. The official reveal didn't happen until 2017; however, since that time, it's gone through several revisions, including restarts and pivots from live service to free-to-play to PVP to PVE and every trend from the last decade that you can think of.

As part of the latest financial earnings call, the company confirmed that Skull and Bones has been delayed once more to sometime during the first few months of 2024.

Video game acquisitions and buyouts will continue in 2024 as some of the biggest names plan to execute expansion efforts, investment firm Drake Star predicts.

This year, Microsoft made history by purchasing Activision-Blizzard for a record-breaking $68.7 billion. This combination was the biggest acquisition in the history of the video games industry, a segment that is poised to make over $180 billion in 2023. Multiple years of strategic investments and buyouts led to the Activision merger and the current availability of independent third-party publishers continues to dwindle.

According to investment bank Drake Star, this era of consolidation isn't over. M&A will continue throughout 2024 and big players like the $30 billion revenue Tencent, $26 billion Sony Interactive Entertainment, Saudi Arabia's Savvy Games Group, and the recently-merged Take-Two Interactive are expected to make buyouts.

I still remember running the original 3DMark99 benchmark repeatedly as a nerdy PC hardware enthusiast at 15 years old when it came out... making it 25 years old today after it was released in October 1998.

3DMark99 supported Windows 95 and Windows 98 at the time, with DirectX 6.0 compatible hardware. After that, 3DMark99 MAX was released, and then the unleashing of DirectX updates and the massively increased number of advancements in graphics cards from ATI and NVIDIA at the time.

3DMark2000 was released in December 1999, while my favorites of the day in 3DMark2001 and 3DMark2001 SE were released in March 2001 and February 2002, respectively. There have been plenty of 3DMark releases since then, which turned into the 3DMark suite back in 2013, which started with FireStrike, followed by TimeSpy, Port Royal, and then last year we had Speed Way.

Capcom is hard at work on its next-generation RE Engine, which was last used in Resident Evil 8... but it's being beefed up, and the company is providing developers working on the new RE Engine with some seriously powerful HEDT systems powered by AMD Ryzen Threadripper CPUs and a GeForce RTX 4090 24GB graphics card.

Just as Alan Wake 2 is launching using Remedy Entertainment's in-house Northlight engine, Capcom holds an overview of its RE Engine and even a tease of its next-gen RE Engine, which we'll go into more soon. This year, Capcom provided some high-end desktop PCs (HEDT) to engine developers with some seriously good specs: something that the company says will drop engine build time from 15 minutes with distributed builds to less than 5 minutes for local builds.

Inside, Capcom is using an AMD Ryzen Threadripper PRO 5975WX processor with 32 cores and 64 threads, an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 with 24GB of GDDR6X memory, a huge 256GB of RAM, and a massive 10TB of SSD storage. This is some seriously nice hardware to be developing on, with many developers probably reading this and being jealous compared to their far slower PCs used for development.

Morgan Stanley analysts predict the effects of artificial intelligence on the video games sector.

AI aims to supercharge productivity with new tools like Microsoft's Copilot, and artificial intelligence is also expected to help optimize production in the interactive entertainment industry. Video games take many years to make due to the complex nature of the process, which often requires tedious tweaking, steady iterative design, and lots of bug-squashing. The hope is that developers can use AI to automate a portion of these tasks and potentially reduce costs and release games even sooner.

Analysts at Morgan Stanley believe that AI will have a tangible effect on gaming. Platform-holders like PlayStation, Xbox, and potentially even Nintendo are expected to benefit the most from AI, as these companies can bake time-saving AI tools into their respective software development kits (SDKs) for console and gaming hardware. Other engine-makers like Unity and Epic Games could also leverage AI for their production environments.

The Metal Gear Solid Collection's first volume is available on consoles and PC. From Konami, it brings remastered ports of the first three games in Hideo Kojima's iconic stealth action series to all gamers - with Metal Gear Solid, Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty, and Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater all present. Throw in the Metal Gear games from the cartridge-era NES console, and it's a definite cause for celebration.

At least that's what many expected until they fired up the PC version and found that Metal Gear Solid 2 and 3 weren't optimized for keyboard and mouse controls, and the PS2-era titles maxed out at 720p rendering. Plugging in a controller fixes the first issues, but you'll need a mod for the latter.

Rendering old games at a super-high resolution can cause issues like UI and textures. Still, according to the MGSResolutionPatch (available via GitHub), it adds a smooth and crisp 4K option for Metal Gear Solid 3. And, as expected, the mod drops within hours of the collection's PC port. And it weighs in at a tiny 64 KB.

NVIDIA has published its latest Game Ready driver, which will offer the definitive day-one experience in Remedy Entertainment's just-launched Alan Wake 2, which features full ray tracing, path tracing, DLSS 3.5, Ray Reconstruction, and Reflex technologies from NVIDIA. Grab the new NVIDIA GeForce Game Ready driver here (701MB download).

Alan Wake 2 has absolutely beautiful ray-traced graphics, which are enhanced and accelerated by NVIDIA DLSS 3.5's huge suite of AI-powered technologies. NVIDIA's new Ray Reconstruction feature in DLSS 3.5 renders the Alan Wake 2 world at its absolute best, while frame rates are boosted by 4.5x with GeForce RTX 40 series GPUs.

"Full ray tracing," you ask: yeah, "full ray tracing" is also known as path tracing, and will accurately simulate light throughout an entire scene. It's used by visual effect artists in film and TV graphics that can be up to photorealistic in quality, but now, with the latest GeForce RTX series GPUs with RT Cores and AI abilities like NVIDIA DLSS, worlds like Alan Wake 2 are coming to life. We have full ray tracing in real-time in video games now, and Alan Wake 2 delivers the very best of what high-end PC gaming has to offer.