Posts

Showing posts from May, 2013

Transformers Universe First Trailer

Image

Mirror's Edge 2 Appears on EA Help Site

Image
Your Faith will be rewarded Update: Further evidence has surfaced for the existence of Mirror's Edge 2 after a help page for the game was spotted on EA's site. While the page only holds the name of the game and little else, it's worth noting that changing the URL to Mirror's Edge 3 leads to a dead page. Yesterday the unconfirmed sequel received a retail listing on Amazon Italy, which you can read about below. Original Story:  A second retail listing has appeared for the unconfirmed Mirror's Edge 2 , this time listing the game for Xbox One. The Amazon Italy listing has since been removed, but not before we managed to screengrab it. Seeing as the boxart is clearly mocked up, and the release date was listed as January 1, 2020, this is by no means official confirmation of the game's existence. However, this is the second incident in less than a week of an online retailer listing the title; last Thursday it appeared on Amazon Germany  for X

Sony's Rain is Beautiful and Melancholy

Image
Take shelter.  Often the best thing about the announcement of a new generation of consoles is the late flourish of curious games that appears on the current ones. Announced last year at a Sony Gamescom conference rich with cool  and unusual  new titles, Rain is an interesting, quietly atmospheric PSN exclusive from Sony’s Japan Studio; there are glimpses of ICO and The Unfinished Swan in its creative, puzzley platforming and melancholy ambience. It’s about a boy who follows a spectral girl into an alternate dimension where he’s invisible unless he’s in the rain – a dimension filled with phantom monsters that chase and stalk you through the night. As a Scottish person I naturally have a profound and lifelong relationship with rain, so as a thematic motif it’s familiar and resonant. Walking through this gloomy, rain-soaked city evokes an atmosphere of isolation and quiet sadness. What I didn’t expect to be so familiar was Rain’s urban setting; it’s modelled on

Sony: Vita Remote Play for All PS4 Games

Image
Vita's future just got brighter. Sony has asked developers to include Remote Play functionality for all PlayStation 4 games, excluding titles that will require the use of the console's stereoscopic camera, the PS4 Eye. The news comes from a "trusted developer source" speaking to Digital Foundry . And if true, it's a major boost for Sony's handheld which has yet to achieve mainstream success. It would effectively mean the PlayStation 4 could boast similar functionality to Nintendo's Wii U, which touted the off-TV experience of its GamePad as a major selling point of the system. This would be a real boost for the system following on from Sony's recent pledge to bring quality Indie games to the handheld. Remote Play compresses the PS4's experience and sends it to the Vita over local WiFi. The entire game can then be enjoyed on the handheld. Essentially, the Vita functions as a dummy terminal with the PS4 doing all of the heavy-lifti

Fallen Enchantress: Legendary Heroes Review

Image
Finally enchanted. → May 28, 2013 One of the problems with last October's Fallen Enchantress is that its hero characters (Sovereigns and Champions, as they're properly known) start out so powerful they render everything else almost irrelevant. It doesn't understand that having a godlike super-warrior on the field removes tension from battle, but Fallen Enchantress: Legendary Heroes does. In this stand-alone expansion heroes are superior enough to stand out and make me confident in battle, but not so much that I can neglect the soldiers and archers they lead. Everything feels m

Samsung I9190 Galaxy S4 mini

Image
Unofficial preliminary specifications. Also known as Samsung I9190 Galaxy S IV mini. Available as Samsung I9192 Galaxy S4 mini with dual SIM card slots. Image courtesy of Ermek Kubanychbekov. General 2G Network GSM 850 / 900 / 1800 / 1900 - GT-I9190   GSM 850 / 900 / 1800 / 1900 - GT-I9192 (SIM 1 & SIM 2) 3G Network HSDPA 900 / 1900 / 2100 4G Network LTE - GT-I9195 SIM Optional Dual SIM Announced Exp. announcement 2013, Q2 Status Rumored . Exp. release 2013, July Body Dimensions - Weight - Display Type Super AMOLED capacitive touchscreen, 16M colors Size 540 x 960 pixels, 4.3 inches (~256 ppi pixel density) Multitouch Yes Sound Alert types Vibration; MP3, WAV ringtones Loudspeaker Yes 3.5mm jack Yes Memory Card slot microSD, up to 32 GB Internal 32 GB, 1 GB RAM (3G model), 2 GB RAM (LTE model) Data GPRS Yes EDGE Yes Speed HSDPA 14.4 Mbps, HSUPA 5.76 Mbps WLAN Wi-Fi 8

New Destiny Trailer

Image

Thunder Wolves Review

Image
Air headed. → May 27, 2013 During a rare moment of calm just before we further obliterate the smoldering remains of a chemical weapons silo with a volley of homing missiles, my partner, the wise-cracking veteran Max, shares the following insight: “It’s not rocket science, kid. It’s just rockets.” He was, of course, referring to the task at hand, but he just as easily could have been describing Thunder Wolves as a whole. This souped-up, single-minded air combat game is good for one thing and one thing only: blowing up an ungodly amount of stuff. As long as

Xbox One to be Region-locked?

Image
"Games must meet country-specific regulatory guidelines" Microsoft’s Xbox One console will be region-locked, a company spokesperson has reportedly confirmed with Digital Trends. “Similar to the movie and music industry, games must meet country-specific regulatory guidelines before they are cleared for sale,” said the Microsoft representative. “We will continue to work with our partners to follow these guidelines with Xbox One.” It’s a muddy statement made murkier by the fact that region-locking is currently almost non-existent on PS3, a console that answers to the same country-specific regulatory guidelines. Microsoft has been approached for further comment since, but has left the topic unclarified. "Regarding region blocking, Microsoft don't have anything further to announce at this stage. We'll have more to share lat

The New Extreme PC Gaming: Underclocking

Image
Outdated hardware can pave the way for a true challenge. It's time to get zen. Any teenager with too many post-midnight hours to kill can hone their gaming skills to the point that the most righteous level of difficulty becomes a candyland and the only challenge lies in ever-faster, ever-more assured domination. With their primo computer rig and overclocked processor boiling away in a vacuum sealed bath of liquid nitrogen, the only thing slowing them down is the speed of their caffeine-fuelled reactions. Where’s the challenge in that? Do you want to step up to the plate and really test yourself? Do you want to push yourself beyond mere reaction time and explore the realm of subconscious zen gaming? Underclocking is for you. During the holidays I was stuck in a house with an old PC and some spare time. Logging on to Steam I dug through my library and tried to find something that would run on this ancient box. Sure, some of the indie games are low spec

Fuse Review

Image
Insomniac Games is trying something spectacular and new for itself, but is its original shooter really all that original? The best things in life are better with friends, but those experiences are rarely bad by yourself. Fuse w ants so badly for players to have a co-op group of four that it punishes them for trying to enjoy it alone. This is one of many crises Insomniac Games’ uncertain third-person shooter faces throughout its eight-hour campaign, which features so many ups and downs it’s difficult to discern where its greatness begins and mistakes end. In tone and depth of story, Fuse is essentially a playable summer blockbuster movie. For four-player co-op shooting purposes, that's a good thing: its a decent way to use these four sci-fi guns to make a mess of an army of bad dudes, including a wacky Russian psychic and a pile of murderous robots. In tandem with the distinct character skills – a resuscitative med-grenade, deployable cover, etc. – each member o

IllumiRoom

Image
During Samsung’s keynote at CES 2013, Microsoft unveiled IllumiRoom , a new technology that turns the entire room around your TV into an extension of the screen. As explained on Microsoft’s official site, IllumiRoom uses Kinect and a projector “to blur the lines between on-screen content and the environment we live in allowing us to combine our virtual and physical worlds.” [1] Microsoft explains that IllumiRoom “augments the area surrounding a television screen with projected visualizations to enhance the traditional living room entertainment experience” and “can change the appearance of the room, induce apparent motion, extend the field of view, and enable entirely new game experiences." Kinect captures the geometry of a room and adapts projected visuals “in real-time without any need to custom pre-process the graphics.” In a video demo shown off during Samsung’s keynote, Microsoft showed off several different applications of the technology, noting that the fo

Xbox One Features

Image
The Xbox One, in combination with Kinect 2, is designed to be a centric hub for the living room with integrated gaming, TV, internet and movie services all in one place. Kinect 2 The Xbox One, unlike the Xbox 360, requires Kinect to function. This makes it likely that the console will ship with Kinect 2 as standard. Kinect seems to be deeply integrated into the systems of the Xbox One, and allows users to browse using voice and gesture commands through the Xbox One User Interface . Examples of the Kinect 2 in action include saying 'Xbox: On' to activate the system. The console will then remember what the user was doing previously and return them immediately to that screen. Harvey Eagle, Microsoft's UK Marketing Director, was quizzed about the Kinect 2 integration by IGN . "Kinect does require to be connected to Xbox One in all cases, yes," he said. Asked whether the Xbox One will accommodate people who perhaps play in their bedroom rather th

Xbox One Hardware Specs

Image
Feature Xbox One Optical Drive Blu-Ray/DVD [1 ] Game DVR Yes [2] RAM 8GB DDR3 [3] CPU 8 Core Microsoft custom CPU [4] Storage 500 GB Hard Drive [5] Second Screen SmartGlass [6] Cloud Storage Yes [7] Mandatory Game Installs Yes [8] Required Internet Connection Yes [9] [10] Used Game Fee Yes [11] Backwards Compatibility None [12] Cross Game Chat Skype [13] Motion Control Kinect 2 Voice Commands Yes [14] Subscription Service Xbox Live [15] USB USB 3.0 [16] Live Streaming TBA Reputation Preservation Achievements will be ported [17] Web Connection Gigabit Ethernet, WiFi [18] BlueTooth Bluetooth 2.1 (EDR) [19] A/V Hookups HDMI input and output (4K support), Optical output [20] The Xbox One is a powerful piece of hardware with 8GB RAM, 64-bit processors and plenty more muscle. But as time passes this hardware will age. As Xbox One Director of development Boyd Multerer pointed out,