Game Tech News

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Microsoft has spent the past few years trying to rebuild the Xbox franchise and compete effectively with Sony in the console wars. With the Xbox One X launched, the company is considering another problem with its lineup: a distinct lack of third-party exclusives.

That’s the word from Polygon, which notes that the Xbox One remains far behind the PS4 in terms of total units shipped (VGChartz reports 36.4M Xbox One sales to-date, compared with 73.6M PS4 sales). The Xbox One X outsold the PS4 in December in the United States, at least, but the Switch sold more than either.

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Ever since AMD launched its first APU family, it’s been clear that faster RAM had a significant impact on performance. With the Ryzen 5 2400G, the potential impact of faster DDR4 could be even more significant. The CPU-GPU interconnect system uses AMD’s Infinity Fabric as well, and Infinity Fabric’s clock is directly tied to DRAM clock.

We decided to put the Ryzen 5 2400G to work at both DDR4-2133 and DDR4-3200 to see how much performance improved from using faster RAM. Normally, such a shift would also incur a hefty financial penalty, since RAM is typically priced by performance binning. In any given era, you’ll find a fairly flat area under the price curve — in this case, we would expect the slowest DDR4 (2133) to be priced quite similarly to moderately quicker RAM, like DDR4-2667 or DDR4-2933. Then the price curve would bend upwards at an increasing rate. If DDR4-3200 was 15 percent more expensive than DDR4-2667, we’d expect DDR4-3866 to be 30-40 percent more expensive than DDR4-3200 (all numbers are approximate).

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The 1970s were a deeply confusing time. Formica countertops were everywhere, shag carpet was popular, dark wood paneling (combined with shag carpeting) conspired to make the interior of every home a place where visible light went to die, and virtually every consumer product came in either vague pastels or eye-searing colors that could drive a cat to frenzy.

Evaluated by the decorating standards of the day, the JVC Videosphere is a brilliant piece of hardware. It’s a TV built into a space helmet, modeled on the astronaut uniforms shown in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Designed as a portable TV, the Videosphere came with its own portable carrying chain (shown below) and could be wired up with a 12V cable plugged into a cigarette lighter. Some early versions came with a rechargeable battery pack as well. Now a hardware modder in the UK has demonstrated how one of these TVs can be wired up for modern gaming — and that’s impressive, for several reasons.

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Warcraft III is widely considered to be one of the best real-time strategy (RTS) games ever produced, and fans clamored for a Warcraft IV for many years (and some still do). Blizzard has been silent on the idea, but it just released a patch for a 16 year-old game and announced a tournament in the first Warcraft III International. There are rumors in the air of a new remaster edition and a fair bit of excitement at the prospect.

To understand why fans are cheering, it’s useful to retrospectively check out Warcraft III. The game’s visual design was much improved over Starcraft and it was the first game in the Warcraft series to introduce meaningful differentiation between the races. In Warcraft 1 and 2, units were identical save for some difference in spells. In Warcraft III, each of the four races had its own unique characteristics.

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More than a year after its console debut, Square Enix is finally getting around to releasing Final Fantasy XV on the PC. True 4K support will be available when the game launches on March 6, so this is our opportunity for a version without compromise, right? Right?!

When XV was released in 2016, the Xbox One, PS4, and PS4 Pro versions all had their own unique quirks. The eventual Xbox One X patch was a nice step up, but it still lacked the fit and finish that we hoped for. So, how is it going to hold up on the PC?

Over at the Digital Foundry, the team has analyzed the pre-release FFXV benchmarking program, and they found some significant performance concerns – especially on AMD cards. Square Enix is using Nvidia’s GameWorks, and that causes a performance penalty that’s hard to excuse. On a GTX 1060, DF found that GameWorks drops the average frame rate by about 11fps. On the RX 580? It’s closer to a 20fps difference – gross.

Even worse, an overclocked GTX 1080 Ti with everything turned on can’t even deliver a perfect 1080p60. That’s wildly disappointing to hear, but there is some hope. This benchmark app doesn’t really offer much in the way of tweaking, but Square Enix promises the final version will offer more options. If you’re willing to make graphical compromises, hitting a perfect 60fps will likely be in reach.

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If you’ve wanted to buy a consumer GPU these past few months, you’ve had nothing but tough choices to make. Current high-end cards from AMD and Nvidia are badly overpriced thanks to ongoing pressure from the cryptocurrency market. It’s a complex situation with a lot of moving parts, but the PC market, generally speaking, isn’t used to these kinds of shortages. There’s news that Nvidia is prepping some crypto-focused cards that could take pressure off the mainstream market — but it’s only going to work if the market remains relatively tame.
The specs on the Inno3D P102-100 units, according to Cryptomining-blog, are as follows:

• CUDA Cores: 3200
• Base Clock: 1582 MHz
• Memory Clock: 11 Gbps
• Physical Memory Size: 5 GB
• Memory Type: GDDR5X
• Memory Interface Width: 320-bit
• Memory Bandwidth: 400 GB/s
• Bus Support: PCIe Gen1 x4
• Card Size: 21.5 cm length, 12.5 cm height, dual slot
• Max TDP: 250 Watt
• Power Connectors: 2x 8-pin PCI-E

Since the blog mentions a PCIe Gen 1 x4 bus connection and that’s rather clearly not an x4 bus above, presumably the card is designed to be an x4 electrical connection rather than an x16 (there’s no problem with doing this on PCIe). The GP102 chip, by the way, corresponds with the GTX 1080 Ti, albeit a trimmed configuration of 3,200 CUDA cores instead of 3,584 cores.

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Logitech has been making PC speakers for many years, but none of them have had RGB lights in them. In this age of LEDs in mousepads, headphones, and keyboards, how are speakers so far behind? Logitech is looking to rectify this with the new G560 gaming speakers. They’ve got a lot of power, but also a lot of RGB. Isn’t that what you want in new speakers?

The G560 is the first speaker setup from Logitech under its gaming-focused G brand. That’s usually reserved for keyboards, mice, and other gaming peripherals. This is a 2.1 audio setup with a pair of powered satellite speakers and a large standing subwoofer. The specs make the G560 look like a capable setup with peak power of 240 watts and RMS of 120 watts. They have DTS:X Ultra technology to simulate surround sound as well. There’s a full 10-band equalizer in the software settings so you can adjust the sound however you like.

The LEDs are integrated with the satellites in four different “zones” on the front and back of each speaker. The LEDs are capable of displaying the standard 16.8 million RGB colors. The speakers support Bluetooth streaming, but most of the fancy lighting features require a connection to your computer over USB. There is support for a 3.5mm audio connection, but that limits what you can do. There’s a button on the speakers for quickly switching inputs, so you can have up to four devices connected at once (two BT, one 3.5mm, and one USB).

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EA has completely revamped Star Wars: Battlefront 2 as part of an effort to respond to longstanding player grievances and to remove the pay-to-win mechanics that destroyed the game’s reputation before it even hit store shelves last year.
Where the first Battlefront was an enjoyable, if thin romp through a licensed galaxy far far away, EA promised the second game would deliver deeper play, more vehicles, multiple eras within the Star Wars universe, and a single-player campaign. It even promised to make expansions available to people who bought the base game without splitting the player base between those who shelled out more money for new maps and modes and those who didn’t. So far, so good.

The enormous amount of negative publicity surrounding Battlefront 2 had a substantial impact on the game’s sales. EA initially reported 9 million sales compared with 10 million expected, but later corrected its own figure and reported approximately roughly 7 million sales. While that’s an excellent figure in its own right, it’s also roughly three million fewer copies than the studio expected.

If Battlefront 2 is the kind of game you would have purchased if it hadn’t used pay-to-win microtransactions, there’s a strong argument for purchasing it now. Gamers unquestionably sent a message when they refused to buy the game in the first place. Picking up a copy now that the system is gone would tell EA that the problem really was the microtransaction system as opposed to the rest of the title. Of course, some will argue that EA doesn’t deserve a sale under any circumstances for having the gall to try this trick at all. Either way, EA’s decision to scrap pay-to-win microtransactions is a win for the BF2 player base and a lesson the company won’t soon forget — until it does. Despite the happy ending, we’re still talking about EA, after all.

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Sales momentum in the consumer space for HTC’s Vive VR headset may have been disappointing over the last year. But the company has been doing some brisk business in enterprise applications thanks to its early presence in the market, room-scale tracking, and flexible SDK. From listening to its most active customers and developers, HTC has picked off a few of their most requested features and incorporated them into its new Vive Pro. I had a chance to demo one at Nvidia’s GTC 2018, and found a number of pretty nice improvements.

The Vive Pro’s headline new feature is its improved resolution. At 1440 x 1600 for each eye, the Vive Pro offers nearly double the pixels of the current version (which is 1080 x 1200 per eye). This is noticeable when looking at surfaces with detailed reflections, or objects in the distance. For enterprise applications, the higher resolution will also help make labels and other text on dashboards and various other types of tools and equipment much easier to read. That will help the headset’s effectiveness in industrial scenarios. It’s still not like looking at a quality 4K monitor, but except for some less-visible screen-dooring, it would hold up okay detail-wise compared with a consumer-quality 1080p monitor.

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Nvidia has announced that it will end support for 32-bit operating systems this month, including Windows 10. The company states:

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Game Ready Driver upgrades, including performance enhancements, new features, and bug fixes, will be available only on 64-bit operating systems. Critical security updates will be provided for 32-bit operating systems through January 2019… Software upgrades with new features, security updates, and bug fixes will be available only on Windows 64-bit operating systems. Existing features and services such as optimal game settings will continue to work on Windows 32-bit operating systems.

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This change is unlikely to impact many users. The last operating system to enjoy a larger 32-bit market share than 64-bit was Windows Vista. Beginning with Windows 7 in 2009, most machines went 64-bit. There have been exceptions for years — there are probably still a handful of low-end 32-bit netbook SKUs wandering around in various locations — but the Steam Hardware Survey suggests that usage of 32-bit Windows is fractional.

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With the Cambridge Analytica scandal still roiling, Silicon Valley companies have collectively just discovered that privacy is something they care about. Valve, which owns the Steam gaming service that dominates PC game distribution, has announced a new set of privacy changes that give users more control over their profiles, and a greater ability to hide what other people see in them. Unfortunately, one side effect of these changes means the end of the Steam Spy service.

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Sega announced this weekend that it’s prepping a new Mega Drive Mini to take advantage of the recent craze for retro hardware. The question of who is building it, however, is somewhat less clear — and that matters, given how the company handled its last micro console.

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When the original God of War came out in 2005, it was arguably the most attractive game on the PS2. Thirteen years later, Sony Santa Monica is still capable of blowing us away. This new heartfelt interpretation of God of War on the PS4 stands alongside Uncharted 4 and Horizon as the most visually impressive games on both the vanilla model and the PS4 Pro.

After the massive shrug that was 2013’s God of War: Ascension, a complete redesign was absolutely necessary. As such, every aspect of the series has been rethought for this impressive comeback. We’re dealing with a different pantheon, more methodical combat, a close-up camera that never cuts away, and a palette of emotions that actually extends beyond pure rage.

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Back in February, we covered the enormous surge in graphics card prices and the impact this had on AMD and Nvidia hardware. For the past few months, our recommendation has been to avoid building a PC with a discrete GPU at all, and to instead make do with older hardware, used cards, or an APU. Intel’s Hades Canyon was another possibility. But it’s been a few months since we checked in on GPU prices (See on Amazon), and we know the crypto market is cooling off — so is it time to buy?

That’s going to depend on what you’re looking for. All prices are current as of today (5/10/2018) and were sourced from Newegg. We did not include temporary sale prices on GPUs, but took the lowest price listed as a non-sale price. We’ve run the lineups for AMD and Nvidia, covered below.

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Halo has been a flagship Xbox franchise since the original Halo: Combat Evolved debuted on the original console back in 2001. It’s been about 2.5 years since the last flagship Halo title appeared, and plenty of game publications have bet on seeing Halo at E3 this year. We still don’t know if there’s going to be a console Halo title in the works for E3, but Microsoft does have a Halo game to talk about — it’s just not one you’ll be playing in your living room. Halo: Fireteam Raven is a four-person team-up that you play at an arcade on a 130-inch 4K panel.

Fireteam Raven is a light-gun shooter that sees you teaming up with up to three other people (and Master Chief in-game) as you battle through areas last visited during Halo: Combat Evolved. It’s going to be deployed exclusively at Dave & Busters arcades in the US and Canada, with deployment to other locations coming later this year. The game won’t even be available at all Dave & Busters — the installation apparently eats some 11 cubic feet, which isn’t a small footprint.

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As fun as gaming is, it’s not always possible to sit at the high-end of the market and play the latest titles. Whether you’re traveling with a lightweight system, using a secondary rig, or simply working from an old PC because you can’t afford an upgrade, we’ve put together a list of titles you can still enjoy, even from an older system.

One of the greatest strengths of PC gaming is its backwards compatibility. Thanks to the steady advance of system performance, even at the integrated graphics level, even modest machines from several years ago can enjoy a huge range of games today. The titles on our list below range from relatively recent games that run well on even modest systems to old titles that still hold up today.

Keep in mind, however, that after decades of publishing, there aren’t just “25 great games you can play on laptops and low-end PCs.” There’s hundreds, possibly thousands of titles that still run well on even low-end hardware. Travel back to the early days of the 3D era, and even Intel integrated GPUs have far more horsepower than the GPUs that powered games like Quake II or The Elder Scrolls: Morrowind. GoG has a huge list of games released from 2004 or earlier that would run well on even an aging Atom netbook today. We’ve tried to cover a range of franchises and titles, from indie games to AAA releases, and with multiple genres represented.

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The next time you reach out to Microsoft’s Xbox support, you might not be talking to a Microsoft employee — or an employee of any kind. According to a new report, Microsoft has replaced most of its paid social support staff with unpaid “Xbox Ambassadors.” In some cases, the support reps who were let go spent their final weeks of employment training the new unpaid volunteers.

The Xbox Ambassador program existed prior to this move, but they weren’t taking on the role of front-line customer support reps. The Ambassadors were active on the Xbox forums, essentially acting as moderators who answered questions and kept order. These are entirely volunteer roles in the Xbox community, but Microsoft opted to replace a dozen paid staff who ran the popular @Xboxsupport Twitter account with ambassadors. When you use the Xbox support site, you get an AI chatbot that will eventually pass you off to the Twitter account or forums.

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With the release of popular competitive mobile games like PUBG and Fortnite on mobile, there is renewed interest in “gaming phones.” Devices like the Razer Phone and Red Magic are a bit more mainstream than old gaming-oriented devices like the Sony Xperia Play. They’re still normal Android-powered slates, but they have high-end specs and “gamer” design quirks. Asus is the latest smartphone maker to jump into this emerging market with the ROG Phone. This phone has all the bells and whistles — in fact, it has extra bells and whistles.

Internally, the Asus ROG Phone has similar specs to other high-end smartphones. There’s a Snapdragon 845, 8GB of RAM, 1 4,000 mAh battery, and either 128 GB or 512 GB of storage. The Snapdragon chip is slightly overclocked compared with the standard version in other phones (2.96GHz versus 2.8GHz). A 6-inch OLED panel dominates the front of the phone with a resolution of 2160×1080 and HDR support. It has an 18:9 aspect ratio like many new phones, so it’ll be more comfortable to hold than a Razer Phone, which has the same diagonal measurement. Although, it’s just a 60Hz panel as opposed to 120Hz on the Razer.

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Nintendo stumbled with the Wii U, but its follow up console/portable hybrid has been a hit. According to Nintendo America, the Switch is the fastest selling game console in history. However, the Switch still has the classic Nintendo problem of a shallow game catalog. The company is looking to bulk up its offerings at E3.
The Nintendo press conference included some much-anticipated announcements, including Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, Fortnite, and more. Here are all the major new Switch titles.

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Blizzard has recently revisited some of its classic titles, with updates and improvements dropping for Warcraft III, Starcraft, and World of Warcraft’s upcoming Classic servers. Some of its older games, like the original Diablo, however, haven’t received the same coat of paint or support. Diablo was a huge hit in 1996, eventually shifting 2.5 million copies by 2001 — but it was completely dwarfed by Diablo II, which reportedly sold 17.5 million copies. But interest in the original game has never died, and one programmer, GalaXyHaXz, has posted a reconstruction of Diablo’s source code, dubbed Devilution, that’s intended to significantly improve the original game’s compatibility with modern operating systems, as well as allowing it to be ported to OSes like Linux.

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Let’s get one thing straight: The Xbox One (including the One X and One S) is a PC in everything but name. It runs a modified version of Windows 10 on commodity x86 hardware using a GPU developed for the mainstream graphics market. True, the exact specifics of the SoC are unlike anything you can buy today at market — but so what? A low-end Atom SoC and a 28-core Xeon Platinum are both capable of running Windows, despite being utterly unlike each other in virtually every practical respect. And that means it’s long past time that keyboard and mouse support came to the Xbox One, since there’s no reason why anyone should be stuck gaming with just a controller.

Now, there’s signs that’s finally happening. Supposedly, Microsoft has worked with Razer to prepare a new line of gaming peripherals with support for Razer’s Chroma lighting scheme in-game. If you’re unfamiliar with it, typically how this works is that the keyboard backlight or mouse light changes color to reflect what’s happening in-game, turning green when your health is good, yellow when you’ve been injured, and red when you’re near death.

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Beloved Facebook subsidiary Oculus has announced that going forward, the Oculus Rift will only support Windows 10 systems once the Rift Core 2.0 update drops. While this isn’t expected to lead to any near-term loss of features or capabilities on Windows 7 or Windows 8.1, the firm’s messaging is clear: Update now.

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Video games are omnipotent issue. With the rise of mobile gaming, digital distribution and improving tools and engines that make creating games reachable for anyone, the push is without help getting augmented. Games are becoming more unapproachable, and gamers expect more: improved graphics, more fascinating undertaking and unique, swift behavior and experiences. Despite all of the improvements in imitation of again the last few generations of gaming, something that games invariably nonattendance is still a suitable AI.

Sure, an NPC might be roomy to appear in its job simply, but most good human players find little challenge in taking gone reference to an AI, and having it as a teammate is not much greater than before. It'll piece of legislation awkwardly, fracture players' assimilation and is impossible to coordinate behind. Often, people compulsion to viewpoint to multiplayer to acquire the gaming experience they'on the subject of looking for, and that's not always unchangeable.

Decisive is here to bend all that. Imagine players mammal practiced to challenge a cunning, nimble Intelligent Artificial Player (IAP) which learns from its mistakes, and all the mistakes it's ever made nearby someone else. Imagine a teammate who can actually in the future rather than hindering and a rival who challenges a artiste to their fullest.

When you create a game considering Decisive inside, players will know they'regarding getting a satisfying foe or an amazing ally. The fact that it's Artificial is just an appendage.

Read More Information About Decisive Artificial Intelligence

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World of Warcraft’s pre-patch for the upcoming Battle for Azeroth expansion dropped. It brings the usual set of pre-expansion talent and game changes, a massive “stat squish” in preparation for several years of new content, an updated client with DirectX 12 support baked in, no more support for DX9, and a host of other in-game changes. But one major change comes unannounced, and it lowers the barrier to entry for the still-popular MMO.

Up until now, you’ve unlocked access to World of Warcraft by first buying a copy of the base game plus expansions, and then paying for a monthly subscription. The typical fee has been along the lines of $40 for base game plus all released expansions up to and including the current, except when a brand-new expansion was about to drop, as is currently the case. To simplify this, let’s use numbers. Ordinarily, with Battle for Azeroth (WoW’s 7th expansion) about to be released, we’d expect WoW + Expansions 1 – 6 to sell for a discount (say, ~$15-$20) while WoW + Expansions 1-7 would sell for $40 – $50. As of now, that’s changed. You can access the entire base game and everything up through the end of Legion for just $15, and need only buy BfA when and if you decide to push further into the game.

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Hard as it might be to believe, there are still people getting into World of Warcraft for the first time. I recently introduced my fiancée to the game and met several other new players in doing so. Blizzard is also presumably gearing up for a substantial surge of returning players. I’ve already seen some familiar faces popping up in guild again, and players returning to the game.

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Centuries from now, digital anthropologists combing through the remains of our civilization will note a regular sequence of 1’s and 0’s that began appearing on computers in the early 1990s and soon spread across everything from smartwatches to copy machines. They will undoubtedly conclude that this program represents some form of vital information or research that was carefully preserved across many different types of devices to ensure that it remained accessible even as other, incredibly valued works of film, literature, and software languished on obsolete mediums or were lost to the ravages of time. If they’re fortunate enough to stumble across 1337Doom, they’ll likely think an homage to earlier methods of communicating in text, all rendered as part of an art project to recreate one of humanity’s most treasured historical moments known as “Knee Deep in the Dead.”

This latest ancient video game-cum-arthouse project mashes up ASCII art and Doom itself to recreate the levels and monsters of the original game entirely in numbers and letters. The craziest thing about it? At minimal difficulty (meaning, with small letters that create a game world that looks vaguely similar to the real thing), 1337d00m doesn’t look too far off Doom itself.

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For years, AMD has discussed launching new semi-custom design wins that didn’t revolve around Microsoft and Sony. Those designs have mostly failed to materialize, with the AMD-Intel collaboration on Hades Canyon a notable exception. Now, AMD has announced a new semi-custom chip for a custom gaming console, but not for any company familiar to Western shores. Instead, AMD will be working closely with a Chinese company, Zhongshan Subor.

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After years of hype, closed-door demonstrations, and billions raised in funding, the Magic Leap is finally available to order, for $2,295. The new Creator Edition isn’t the mass market product supposedly launching later this year with AT&T. In fact, you’ll only be able to buy it in six cities: Los Angeles, Miami, New York, the San Francisco Bay Area, and Seattle.

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This isn’t exactly the stuff that dreams are made of. If you’re in the select cities, you’ll receive “complimentary delivery, fit and set-up service.” If you aren’t in select cities, you can place a reservation and receive your hardware later. A $495 ” “professional development package” for users who need Magic Leap replaced within 24 hours if it breaks is also available. Not only is that a huge premium to place on an overnight warranty service, it’s a huge leap of faith to assume anyone is ever going to need to replace a Magic Leap within 24 hours of the last one breaking.

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Hackers have released video of the Nintendo Switch’s “VR Mode” firing up, implying that Nintendo’s experiments with VR progressed to the point of being tested on the unit before the company put the idea aside. Back in 2016, Nintendo of America CEO Reggie Fils-Aime told reporters that the company wasn’t interested in the capability because the technologies hadn’t gone mainstream yet and weren’t guaranteed to be well positioned to catch consumer interest. While that may be true, clearly some work was done at Nintendo to make the Switch VR-capable - at least in theory.

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Could you suggest something like that, please?

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Nvidia has released a list of games with upcoming support for its new RTX ray-tracing feature, as well as a brief discussion of how that feature will be deployed in a shipping title. With a wide range of games promising support, these new features have a good initial showing for debut, though there are questions about the size of the visual fidelity improvement and the performance hit from enabling. We’ll discuss those shortly.

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Microsoft is looking to make it even easier to get into its gaming ecosystem with Xbox All Access. This new limited time program lets you finance a new Xbox console with online gaming services for a single monthly price. You’ve got your choice of the Xbox One S or Xbox One X, but you can only get this deal in a Microsoft Store.

The Xbox All Access bundle has everything you need to start playing games out of the box. In addition to the console, you get Xbox Live Gold and Xbox Game Pass. This is a financing offer with 0% APR, so you’re actually paying off the console and online services monthly over the course of two years. It’s similar to the way most mobile carriers sell phones now.

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The market, it seems, isn’t terribly impressed with Nvidia’s recent RTX family, either. Shares of the company’s stock have slipped in recent days, particularly Friday, after Morgan Stanley said the performance of the latest RTX video cards hadn’t met its expectations.

“As review embargos broke for the new gaming products, performance improvements in older games is not the leap we had initially hoped for,” Morgan Stanley analyst Joseph Moore said in a note to clients on Thursday according to CNBC. “Performance boost on older games that do not incorporate advanced features is somewhat below our initial expectations, and review recommendations are mixed given higher price points.
“We are surprised that the RTX 2080 is only slightly better than the 1080 Ti, which has been available for over a year and is slightly less expensive,” he said. “With higher clock speeds, higher core count, and 40 percent higher memory bandwidth, we had expected a bigger boost.”

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For many gamers, the Xbox controller is just how they’ve always played games. Still, there are some of us who might like the added precision and versatility of a classic keyboard and mouse setup. Microsoft has been promising to add support for this hardware to the Xbox One since the middle of 2016. Now, it’s finally happening. Well, sort of.
If you talk to PC gamers who almost always use a keyboard and mouse for shooters, they’ll tell you the mouse provides finer control of aiming, and the keyboard is easier to remap for access to a lot of functions. At the same time, the true analog input of a controller can make movement more fluid than when using a keyboard (unless it’s analog, too). Basically, everyone has reasons to prefer their control scheme. The point is, most gamers want the choice on consoles.
According to Microsoft, select Xbox insiders will get an update in the coming weeks that enabled keyboard and mouse support. However, that’s just enabling it at the system level — it will be technically possible to game with a keyboard and mouse. It’s up to game developers to allow you to do so. If a developer doesn’t support keyboard and mouse input, you’ll be stuck with a controller.

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Streaming services have transformed the way people receive music and movies, but game streaming has, thus far, had a comparatively small impact on the market. The bandwidth and latency requirements for game streaming are tougher to meet than they are for audio or film content, and the impact of a bandwidth drop is larger. Despite this, we’ve seen a slow-but-steady movement towards streaming services from a number of major content providers and gaming companies, with Microsoft planning to develop a next-generation Xbox dedicated to the concept. Now, even Google wants in on the action with a new Chrome browser initiative dubbed Project Stream.

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Google has partnered with Ubisoft to create a technology demo in which Assassin’s Creed Odyssey will be available to stream to the Chrome browser on your local laptop or desktop. Google is actually the second company to announce that Odyssey will be available via streaming service — Nintendo made a similar announcement concerning the Switch in September, though in that case, the stream will only be available to the company’s Japanese subscribers. Google has released a video about its own initiative, available below:

http://youtu.be/sE53eSbzxoU

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For a 14-year-old game, World of Warcraft has continued to evolve and grow at a surprising rate. Earlier this year, the game added DirectX 12 support as part of the run-up to the launch of its current expansion, Battle for Azeroth. We benchmarked the addition at the time but found the change to be of minimal value on both AMD and Nvidia hardware. Nvidia GPUs performed sharply better in DirectX 11 mode (which isn’t surprising) but even AMD cards were hitting higher minimum frame rates in that API as well.

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There’s a small group of Blizzard fans still hopefully waiting for a sequel announcement that may never come. I’m speaking, of course, about The Death and Return of Superman, the company’s first title published under the “Blizzard Entertainment” brand.

Just kidding. I’m actually talking about Warcraft III. Fans of Blizzard’s fantasy RTS have waited over 15 years for a sequel and… well, they still aren’t getting one. But they are getting a remastered Warcraft III and presumably Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne.

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Headed into Blizzcon this year, there was a great deal of chatter about an expected Diablo announcement. While we already knew that the Switch was getting Diablo III, it’s been more than six years since Diablo III dropped. The hope was that we’d see a new game — hopefully one with a better story arc this time around (Diablo III’s gameplay loop is quite good these days, but I’d argue that the actual story was a step back from Diablo II, even by the paper-thin story arcs of this kind of game). At Blizzcon this past weekend, Blizzard did indeed announce a new title — but Diablo Immortal is a mobile game, not a further continuation of the primary story.

Kotaku took the game for a spin and noted how limited it is in practice. Each character class has four abilities that can’t be swapped and no mana, energy, rage, or other resource to manage. There’s loot, but it doesn’t change your character’s appearance and currently only provides basic attack or defense stats. Blizzard has told players that there will be a larger roster of 12 skills to choose from that you’ll unlock over time and that they’re going to have a functional loot system as well.

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The success of Nintendo’s NES Classic has led to no shortage of hangers-on and also-rans trying to capture the same magic for alternative platforms, typically with poor results. Unlike the NES and SNES Classic, both of which were fairly well-received as far as their own hardware and game loadouts (availability was a different matter), the alternate platforms have generally been skips or misses. Even Sony’s PlayStation Classic has been reviewed as a completely bare-bones experience with a game loadout that generally failed to excite. Now a new company has announced that it will bring the ‘PC Classic’ to market via a crowdfunding campaign set to kick off in the next days or months.

According to Unit-e, the company behind the product, they want to deliver “an adorable DOS game console for your TV” with many of the titles “that defined the PC gaming experience of the ’80s and ’90s.” The video below shows off the hardware, such as it is — two USB ports in the front, a third USB port in the back, and both composite video and HDMI output. Games, we are told, will be preconfigured for joystick support (by which the company appears to mean ‘gamepad’ support). Keyboard and mouse support will be included out of the box.

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Nintendo feigned surprise in 2016 when people flooded the internet with complaints about the limited supply of NES Classic consoles. The company ended production after giving everyone a taste of retro goodness, and it didn’t sit well. Nintendo came back with more NES units and the SNES Classic Edition. The stage seemed set for the Nintendo 64 classic, but don’t hold your breath.

The NES Classic was the must-have holiday gift in 2016 with unopened units going for hundreds of dollars above the $60 retail price. The device came with a set of 30 built-in games, and it was tiny compared with the original hardware. Gamers and modders quickly embraced the device, playing the included games and hacking the firmware to install more of them. The SNES Classic came along in 2017 with 21 games, including the never-before-released Star Fox 2. It was a little more expensive at $80, but it still flew off shelves.

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Intel has released a new version of its Windows 10 Graphics Driver, but there are some things to be aware of before you download and install the software. This new driver — 25.20.100.6444 — is the first Intel driver written to support Microsoft’s Windows Modern Drivers, also known as Universal Windows drivers. According to Microsoft, the benefit of using this style of driver is that they “enable developers to create a single driver package that runs across multiple different device types, from embedded systems to tablets and desktop PCs.” Unlike previous editions of Windows, Windows 10 1809 (the much-maligned October Update) requires UWDs.

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