Game Tech News

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Great news for fans of old PC games: The venerable Internet Archive has made an additional 2,500 MS-DOS games playable online in a browser, and in most cases with accompanying manuals. We’ve already seen playable games from a variety of vintage software platforms appear over the past several years, many via the Internet Archive itself. But this latest batch was a tougher project to execute.

The trick with MS-DOS, in general, is that it’s not like emulating fixed console hardware or an old 8-bit computer like the Atari 800 or Commodore 64. There have been different versions of MS-DOS throughout the years, some of which supported specific hardware. Certain titles had special configurations you had to set up in CONFIG.SYS using memory managers in order to play; sometimes it was tricky to get this right even back when they were brand new, much less today. Archive curator Jason Scott wrote that the latest batch came from a project called eXoDOS that’s dedicated to preserving the ability to play old PC-compatible games.

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Long ago, in a gaming ecosystem far, far removed from the one we currently occupy, there were a solid handful of great Star Wars games. While they weren’t all produced by the same developer, they shared one common trait: They were principally single-player titles, though some of the FPS games did include multi-player game modes. The entire Jedi Knight series (Dark Forces, Dark Forces II, Jedi Outcast, Jedi Academy) and titles like Knights of the Old Republic 1 and 2 are great Star Wars games, though KOTOR 2 plays much better if you install fan-made patches and mods.

And then, it all ended. After KOTOR 2 in 2005, only the mediocre Force Unleashed and Force Unleashed 2 remained as far as robust single-player content was concerned. The most recent edition of Battlefront II was hailed for having a single-player campaign at all, which sort of tells you how far things have fallen. Games like Bioware’s The Old Republic may have attempted to fuse single-player storytelling with multi-player MMO gaming, but we haven’t had a Star Wars game that put the single-player front and center for a long time. Now, finally, it looks like that might be changing.

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The era of mobile gaming started off great with cute little time-wasters like Angry Birds, but then in-app purchases happened. Today’s top mobile games are mostly “free-to-play,” which is a nice way of saying everything you do seems to cost money. Some players are willing to pay, and one publisher has developed an AI that can identify the so-called “whales” who will spend the most. And you thought Oblivion Horse Armor was bad.

Developer and publisher Yodo1 is behind some highly popular mobile games like Crossy Road and Rodeo Stampede. It’s not uncommon for top players in these games to spend a few hundred dollars on power-ups, cosmetic items, and in-game currency. Yodo1 CEO Henry Fong recently revealed that Transformers: Earth Wars, a title published by Yodo1, has been much more successful in luring in whales. One player in that game spent a whopping $150,000. At Game Connect Asia Pacific, Fong talked about how Yodo1 uses AI to keep whales coming back.

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This week, Bethesda launched private servers for its struggling multiplayer game, Fallout 76. While this feature has been requested since before the game even launched, the company didn’t make it a free update. If you want a private Fallout 76 server, you’ll have to agree to pay $12.99 per month for it or $99 ($8.25 per month equivalent) for a year. Subscribers also get a handful of additional perks, including free currency to spend in the in-game store. If you want to avoid the endless inventory shuffling that FO76 is known for by purchasing unlimited player storage, the only way to currently get it is to pony up $12.99 per month for a private server.

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Electronic Arts (EA) famously bailed on Valve’s popular Steam platform years ago in favor of its own Origin digital storefront. At the time, EA had some of the most popular gaming franchises like Call of Duty and Mass Effect to lure people over to Origin. Today, EA has given up on keeping its walled garden exclusive and will begin launching games on Steam once again. It starts next month with Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order.

EA has started promoting pre-orders for Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order, but it’s directing gamers to Steam. That’s quite a change after funneling customers to Origin for the better part of a decade. This is the first major Star Wars release for EA since Battlefront II, which attracted widespread criticism due to its use of loot boxes. Fallen Order is a single-player game, so there are fewer opportunities for EA to nickel and dime players. Although, there are still pre-order bonuses and a “deluxe” edition of the game.

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Google’s DeepMind AI lab has contributed to some of the company’s most impressive AI feats in recent years such as the Wavenet voice engine and object recognition in Google Photos. DeepMind has also shown off its AI prowess by beating humans at games we never thought machines would be able to play. It started by besting the world’s best Go players, and then moved on to StarCraft II. The “AlphaStar” AI beat some of the world’s top players in early 2019, and now it’s playing online and crushing almost all challengers. DeepMind says AlphaStar is now the first AI to reach Grandmaster status in StarCraft II.

In January, DeepMind streamed matches between elite human players and the AlphaStar AI. During those matches, AlphaStar showed an incredible understanding of the game, rotating damaged units out of harm’s way, baiting enemies on ramps, and utilizing special abilities to cut enemy formations in half. AlphaStar beat almost all of its human opponents that day, and DeepMind has continued improving the AI in the months since.

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The Switch Lite is selling incredibly well for Nintendo. The company revealed during its last quarterly report that it shipped 1.95 million Switch Lite consoles in the first ten days it was available. That compares well even against the Switch, which sold 2.74 million units in its first month on shelves when it launched in April 2017.

The Switch Lite’s performance is a bit surprising for two reasons: It’s a less expensive version of a new console, not a brand-new system, and the price difference between the two is not as large as some of the other consoles on the market. At $199, the Switch Lite is definitely cheaper than a $299 Switch, but it’s not an enormous difference. It’s also got a significant negative stacked up against it — JoyCon drift. JoyCon drift is a problem where JoyCon controllers begin to register ghost “input” that occurs with no one actually touching the controller. It’s completely separate from any calibration problem, and we know the Switch Lite suffers from it — reports of JoyCon drift on the Switch Lite began to surface almost as soon as the console launched.

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Fresh off the PR firestorm surrounding its suspension of a Hearthstone player for supporting the Hong Kong protests, Blizzard has finally announced the long-awaited Diablo 4 at Blizzcon 2019. We don’t have many details on the game, but the 9-minute cinematic trailer should get Diablo fans sufficiently hyped.

The Diablo franchise stretches all the way back to 1996 when the original game marked a significant advance in the hack-and-slash RPG genre. Diablo pioneered many elements of the modern RPG that we take for granted, and both sequels have proved to be major successes in their own rights.

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Rumors began circulating about Google’s game streaming service more than a year ago, and the company began actively testing its technology publicly with Project Stream in late 2018. Project Stream became Stadia earlier this year, and it’s finally set to launch. Google has been talking about games that will come to Stadia at some point, but now we have the full launch lineup. It’ll be just 12 games.

Stadia is similar to GeForce Now and Microsoft’s upcoming xCloud service. Instead of downloading a game or buying a physical copy, Stadia renders the games on a Google server and streams the video down to your devices. Companies have been trying to figure this out for almost a decade, ever since OnLive began offering cloud gaming services in 2010.

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One company or another has been trying to sell consumers on cloud gaming for the last few years, but no one has made it stick. Not only do you need the clout to get game publishers on board, but you also need the network infrastructure to make the experience reliable for people all over the world. Google might have all the pieces in place to make Stadia work, but that doesn’t necessarily mean you should start buying your games on Stadia right now. You need a lot of bandwidth for the best Stadia experience, and hardware support will be skimpy at launch. Stadia has potential, but that’s what we’ve been saying about game streaming for nigh on a decade at this point.

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Sony is planning to launch the PlayStation 5 in time for the holiday season next year, but we know almost nothing about the console. The company has dropped a tidbit here and there, but it’s talked mostly about the controller. Now, we know what that controller might look like thanks to a Japanese patent filing. There are no huge surprises here, but there are some mysteries.

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Well, here it is. When Facebook bought Oculus, it assured users that it wouldn’t be using any data gathered via Oculus VR for advertising. It’s a question that’s come up again and again over the years, and it’s always been answered the same way: Oculus and Facebook do not and will not combine data…

Except, now, they do. Oculus has announced changes to its privacy policy regarding how data is shared between Oculus and Facebook when you connect an Oculus Rift to your FB account. You are not required to connect your Oculus account to Facebook in order to use your Rift. Oculus’ FAQ claims that one reason for the tighter integration between the two companies is that Facebook wants to create more social experiences in VR, and the company is launching a new social platform for VR gamers to connect on Facebook. That’s not a terrible idea given that VR suffers from a limited player base, but it’s not an option I’d choose, personally. I’m more a fan of single-player games in the first place.

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Last night, Microsoft officially unveiled what we’ve been referring to as the Xbox Next (Project Scarlett). Anyone hoping for the sudden appearance of a coherent Xbox branding strategy had their hopes dashed — the follow-up to the Xbox One is the Xbox X Series. In one stroke, Microsoft has taken a commanding lead in the “most appearances of a rare Scrabble tile” category. Pity the PlayStation 5, with its predictable naming scheme!

Snark aside, the best I can say for Xbox Series X is that it abbreviates agreeably to “Xbox SX” or “XSX.” Microsoft probably likes it because there’s no “Xbone” equivalent. I don’t like Xbox Series X for the same reason I didn’t like Apple Watch Edition: Changing the implied relationship between words can come off a little stilted, and “Series X” sounds a bit different than “Xbox One X.” It’s not unusual for a company to use “Series” as one signifier in a longer label, as in “Xbox Series X, Model 7.”

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On December 12, 2019, Microsoft announced the Xbox Series X, its next-generation game console. One of the major features of this new console is full backward-compatibility with the previous generation. Your titles will transfer. Xbox One controllers will work with the Xbox Series X, and Series X controllers will work with the Xbox One. All of this will arrive on Day 1, out of the box.

With that announcement, Microsoft bridged the last fundamental gap between PC and console gaming. On the PC, we don’t talk about “generations” the same way that the console market does. The closest thing to a generation in the PC space is a Direct3D version, but the two have never been equivalent — modern PC games use a variety of APIs, including DirectX 11, DirectX 12, and Vulkan. Instead, we use touchstones like when a game came out relative to when a person bought their PC or graphics card. The reason we don’t talk about “generations” is that PCs have remained more-or-less backward-compatible with decades of software. The majority of PC titles from the past 15 years will still run on modern systems, but that same time period refers to at least three different console generations.

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When I covered the official name of the new Xbox from Microsoft, I poked a bit of gentle fun at the company for the odd shift from Xbox One to Xbox Series X. It turns out that the situation is a little weirder than I realized. The “Xbox Series X” framing is apparently wrong, and all the sites that claimed the next Xbox would be called “Series X” were wrong. The alternate way to read this — and the one my ego likes better if I’m being honest — is that Microsoft managed to collectively confuse most of the media into reporting the wrong name because it can’t figure out how to brand its own equipment in a way that doesn’t confuse people.

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Blizzard announced Warcraft III: Reforged just over a year ago, promising a 2019 release. Well, that’s not going to happen. However, we do have an official release date for the remastered game. It’s coming on January 28, 2020. It’s no Warcraft 4, but this classic game was due for a makeover.

Warcraft III launched in 2002, which was seven long years after Warcraft II. That seemed like an unreasonably long wait at the time, but 17 years later, and there’s still no Warcraft 4. Nevertheless, Warcraft III delivered major advances in the real-time strategy genre. It was the first game in the Warcraft series to use 3D rendering, and the modding scene gave rise to Defense of the Ancients (DotA). That was arguably the first online battle arena game, a category that now includes the likes of League of Legends and Arena of Valor.

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Nvidia says a new generation of ultra-high refresh displays are coming, and Asus is on hand at CES with the first demo. The G-Sync Esports Displays will support 360Hz refresh, a significant increase over the previous top-of-the-line 240Hz technology. As the name implies, Nvidia is targeting professional and enthusiast Esports gamers with these displays, which will no doubt be very spendy.

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Bethesda released updated versions of its classic Doom and Doom II earlier this year. At the time, the new versions of the classic game mostly got noticed for the initial mandatory login in order to play Doom or Doom II. Bethesda has brought out a major game patch for the titles and is making the updated Doom and Doom II available to anyone who wants to buy them, via the Bethesda.net launcher. The Steam version of the game has not been updated.

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There’s two pieces of Half-Life related news today. First of all, the Half-Life: Alyx dev team has posted an AMA on Reddit, and they actually give some intriguing answers to what sorts of changes and design rules Valve has followed in developing the game. For example, Half-Life: Alyx doesn’t use jumping much, partly because players don’t tend to like jumping in VR. Instead of relying on jumps, the game has a continuous mantling system and uses jumping rarely. Creatures respond to audio cues more than they used to, and a lot of work was spent on tuning environments to make them more “sonically interesting” to reward player exploration.

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When Blizzard announced and launched Starcraft Remastered, the fan and critical response was excellent. People were pleased with the product and quality of the remaster and Blizzard was commended for the work it did. When the company announced Warcraft 3: Reforged, it gave fans plenty to look forward to, including more dynamic cutscenes, significant art upgrades, and some lore tweaks to bring WC3 and TFT more into line with later lore established by World of Warcraft.
It was, in short, a very different type of project than what Blizzard had announced with Starcraft, but it seemed like the team had some really good ideas for how to modernize an 18-year-old game.

The dynamism of the camera is a fraction of what it was, and the overall level of improvement in the scene seems lower. The visual updates aren’t bad, Kotaku reports, tbut they really don’t matter much when you’re practically zoomed out the way you need to be to play the game. Unit animations also still apparently run at 30fps, regardless of game frame rate.

The lack of any real “update” to what was originally billed as a more dramatic overhaul is only part of the problem. With Reforged, Blizzard decided to fuse the clients for Reforged and Warcraft 3 Classic. As a result, a heck of a lot of fundamental functionality just got removed from WC3, even for players who don’t even own Reforged. You can switch between Classic and Reforged graphics in the options menu, but since they use the same client, WC3 owners can’t access the other functions they used to have.

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Warcraft 3: Reforged hasn’t gotten any more popular in the days since its release. The clamor has gotten bad enough that Blizzard has reportedly begun giving instant refunds to players who want them.
That’s the word from Reddit user krOnicLTD, who received a refund within a minute after applying for one and posted the information (and a handy link) to the Blizzard site. If you’ve been unhappy with the game, you can ask for your money back, no questions asked. Frustration with the title has been high for a number of reasons, ranging from Blizzard’s aggressive copyright position on fan mods to the fact that the version of Warcraft 3: Reforged that the company ultimately shipped bears little resemblance to the game it promised it was making. Because both Reforged and Warcraft 3 Classic now share a mandatory front-end client, you can’t play WC3:C with its original set of capabilities as a separate title at all.

Blizzard has posted an update to its forums, giving fans an idea where the game is headed. There’s a bug currently causing colors and shading to look different than intended, which will be fixed in the coming days. Portrait animations and UI fixes will also be implemented. The lack of leaderboards and clans will be fixed in a future update. Features like the Reign of Chaos ruleset and tournaments will not be returning after having been removed in mid-2019.

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After years of struggling to make its game streaming service a reality, Nvidia finally launched GeForce Now earlier this month. One of Nvidia’s main selling points was that players would be able to bring the games they already owned to the service. However, there’s already a wrinkle in that plan. Nvidia announced via its GeForce Now forums that players are losing access to all Activision Blizzard games.

At launch, the Activision Blizzard was one of the game companies Nvidia called out by name with popular titles like Overwatch and Modern Warfare. Some gamers even purchased those titles from Activision Blizzard specifically to play on GeForce Now. It would appear Nvidia didn’t build any sort of guaranteed access into the deals it signed with game publishers, which could come back to bite it. At the same time, Blizzard has removed Warcraft 3: Reforged from AMD’s Raise the Game Radeon GPU Bundle. We don’t know if these moves are related, but the timing is suspect.

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Ever since Final Fantasy VII Remake was announced, fan enthusiasm and interest have run high. We’ve seen teasers and leaks for the game — impressive trailers and an entire suite of leaked demo music — but there’s always been the question of how well the game would actually play. It isn’t that hard to piece together good gameplay bits or CGI sequences, particularly when a remake has as much cultural cachet and nostalgia value as this game does. Now there’s a new demo available for the PS4 — and simultaneously, a number of publications have gotten hands-on time with the game and reported back with their own experiences.
The demo is available to anyone with a PS4, which means you can play through the opening chapter of the game and “the events of the iconic Make Reactor 1 bombing mission.” I’d be curious to know if this is a straight demo of the game or if it follows the convention of the actual demo Sony shipped for FF7 back in the day. For those of you who didn’t play it, the demo version of Final Fantasy VII that shipped on at least some discs gave you access to monster summons and abilities that you didn’t actually have at that point in the title when you played the game normally. The demo listing is here (no word on any PC version thus far, though we’ve gotten hints that there might be a PC version of FF7R on the way).

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Doom Eternal has taken a bit longer to materialize than we’d hoped it would, but developer id says the new game engine is a major leap forward. The new shooter will have more effects and crisper textures, and you’ll be able to render a lot more frames. Lead engine programmer Billy Kahn claims that Doom Eternal’s engine will support up to 1,000 frames per second. That’s more of a theoretical ceiling, though.

Doom Eternal picks up where the 2016 rebooted Doom leaves off. You are the iconic Doom Slayer, battling the forces of hell with all manner of awesome sci-fi weaponry. There will be more demon types in the new game, along with enhanced character upgrade mechanics. That’s all well and good, but Doom is about fast-paced hacking and blasting, and this game will be fast indeed.

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Electronic Arts has done plenty of things to draw the ire of gamers over the years, but remastering the original 1990s Command & Conquer games hopefully won’t be one of them. Some of the original developers got together in 2018 to announce a remastered Command & Conquer project, and EA has followed through. The Command & Conquer Remastered Collection launches on June 5 with numerous tweaks and enhancements for the modern age.

The Command & Conquer Remastered Collection focuses on the two iconic 90s titles: Command & Conquer: Tiberian Dawn (originally just known as Command & Conquer) and Command & Conquer: Red Alert. These games stood shoulder-to-shoulder with Warcraft and StarCraft to define the real-time strategy genre. While Blizzard’s franchises continued to grow in the 2000s and beyond, Command & Conquer was never the same after EA acquired the original developer (Westwood Studios) in 1998.

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The E3 game show — formally expected to be held from June 9-11, 2020 — has been canceled. The show drew some 66,000 thousand people to LA last year, including yours truly, but the show’s future had been on the chopping block since prominent sponsors started pulling out.

The announcement is at least well-timed, given that the WHO has now awarded pandemic status to SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes the illness known as Covid-19. According to StatMeds, there are basically two paths the virus could take.

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The continued spread of coronavirus has prompted many people to spend more time indoors, and what can one do while locked away from the world? If you said “play video games,” a lot of people agree with you. Steam reports this past weekend broke the record for active users at just a bit over 20 million.

Steam regularly breaks its own player records — every few months or once a year the service’s peak usage will inch upward just a bit more. Although, there’s usually something happening in the gaming world to precipitate the new milestone like a new game or one of Steam’s major sale events. This time, nothing like that was happening on Steam’s end.

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We were expecting to get more details about Microsoft’s next game console at the E3 show this spring, but organizers canceled the show as coronavirus continues to spread. Microsoft has decided to make its big announcement without a trade show backdrop. We now have the full, official specs for Microsoft’s Xbox Series X. Yes, it’s a beast, designed to target 4K resolution at 60fps, but it will be ready for a future of 8K and 120fps gameplay.

At the core of this new gaming machine is a custom AMD Zen2 CPU with eight cores, each clocked at 3.8GHz. The CPU uses a 7nm manufacturing process, and has a total of 16 logical threads. The 3.8GHz max speed is only available with SMT (hyperthreading in Intel lingo) disabled. Developers can choose to run with SMT at 3.6GHz on all cores. These clocks are locked and won’t vary based on thermal conditions. No surprise, there’s also an AMD GPU in the mix. The RDNA 2 GPU has 52 compute units, each clocked at 1.825GHz. That works out to 12 teraflops of graphical prowess. That’s just a bit more than the Nvidia GTX 1080 Ti, a powerful last-gen desktop graphics card that still holds its own. The RDNA 2 GPU also supports ray tracing for more realistic lighting. A 130mm fan at the top of the tower-like console keeps everything cool.

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Somehow our family became auto racing junkies. Watching F1 became a bonding experience, following a relative of ours who drives in IndyCar became a hobby, and the action of NASCAR wormed its way into our hearts. Even Formula E has grown on us. So when we were first encouraged to stay-at-home as much as possible we looked forward to watching racing as a way to break the monotony. At the time, it looked like racing might continue, minus local fans.

Except, of course, since then, actual auto racing has come to a complete standstill. In its place, its otherwise-second-class sibling of eSports has come to the rescue. Each of the major series has begun to ramp up its virtual racing efforts. We watched a number of the big-name versions over the weekend and found a wide variety of approaches and effectiveness.

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Once upon a time, Microsoft promised a truly impressive 4K overhaul for Minecraft and then canceled it. Shortly thereafter, Nvidia announced that it would create an RTX-powered version of Minecraft, delivering ray-traced visuals to Nvidia owners who own the Windows 10 version of the game and want to play it in this mode. Nvidia has just published some updated visuals for the game, along with asset packs intended to be used by modders and content creators to hit the ground running.
First, let’s look at some maps created by community members, as showcased by Nvidia. All captions by Nvidia.

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Temples and Totems RTX. By: Razzleberries – An adventure world focusing players on exploring and completing challenges in mysterious temples. Each temple showcases per-pixel emissivity and real-time shadows, and leverages global illumination to create an immersive experience for players. (Caption: Nvidia)

Cristal Palace RTX. By: GeminiTay. A survival map with a whimsical fantasy theme, that features a masterfully built castle. Ray-traced shadows and beautiful atmospherics create realism in this world built on a 1:1 scale. (Caption: Nvidia)

Imagination Island RTX. By: BlockWorks. A fully explorable theme park, filled with easter eggs, that hosts four distinct lands, each dedicated to an element of real-time ray tracing. In this scene we see the visitor center of the park, highlighted by god rays cast in real-time through the windows, shining down onto the floor. (Caption: Nvidia)

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Many of today’s biggest games feature loot box gameplay mechanics that critics claim are little different than gambling. Now, the Entertainment Software Ratings Board (ESRB) has announced it will take loot boxes a bit more seriously. Going forward, titles that rely on these microtransactions will get a special warning on the label right next to the main ESRB rating.

Microtransactions are nothing new in gaming. That idea stretches back to the Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, which tried to upsell gamers on cosmetic horse armor for $5. While gamers mocked Bethesda for the move, this would become a common element of game monetization in the intervening years. Today, popular games like Overwatch, Star Wars: Battlefront, and FIFA have leaned heavily on randomized loot boxes to make publishers more money. You can’t just buy the modern equivalent of horse armor in these games. You have to open random crates until you get the stuff you want.

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Out of all the video game companies, Nintendo seems to be the one best-positioned to ride out the pandemic sweeping the planet. While Sony and Microsoft are enjoying an increased wave of gamers in their ecosystems as well, the realities of the console cycle are working against each company. With the PS5 and Xbox Series X expected to launch in November, existing gamers may be buying more titles for the Xbox One and PS4, but they aren’t exactly rushing out to purchase hardware. (AMD has confirmed this already, by noting that it recorded negligible semicustom console revenue in Q1 due to drawdowns in preparation for future launches).

Nintendo, though, is having no such problems. The Switch has had a banner quarter, driven by an enormous surge of interest in games like Animal Crossing. Nintendo sold 3.29M Switches in the previous quarter, up 1.33x over Q1 2019. Lifetime sales of the Switch, which debuted on March 3, 2017 are now 55.77M, larger than both the GameCube and the N64, which sold 21.74M and 32.93M, respectively. It’s also above the lifetime estimated sales of the Xbox One family, despite the fact that the Xbox One turns seven this year, while the Switch is barely three. From April 2019 – March 2020, Nintendo sold 21.03M Switches, 1.53M units higher than its previous target.

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There are persistent rumors that both Diablo II and Diablo IV could drop before the end of the year, alongside the upcoming World of Warcraft expansion, Shadowlands. Blizzard has reportedly come under pressure to show more return on investment on an ongoing basis over the past few years, and this push towards multiple simultaneous launches at the back half of the year could be the company’s way of moving in that direction.

The rumor comes from French site ActuGaming, which has previously broken accurate rumors about upcoming Blizzard projects. Supposedly Vicarious Visions is supporting Blizzard on the remakes, which would make some sense; that company has been involved in a number of remastering efforts over the past few years. A launch date before the end of the year would put Diablo II: Resurrected in danger of colliding with Diablo IV, which might not be something Blizzard wants to tee up.

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Before Fortnite, Epic Games’ biggest contribution to gaming was the Unreal Engine. It has been six years since a major update, but that will change with the release of next-generation game consoles from Sony and Microsoft. Today, Epic showed off a demo of the new Unreal Engine 5 (UE5) running on a PlayStation 5, and it’s pretty amazing.

The first thing to know about this demo is that it’s not pre-rendered — it’s rendering in real-time on the PlayStation 5 dev kit. That speaks to the power of the console’s hardware as well as the abilities of the engine, which looks almost photorealistic. Epic designed this demo to show off the two new graphics technologies at work in Unreal Engine 5: Nanite and Lumen.

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Lenovo is starting the summer with deep discounts on some of our favorite 2-in-1 convertible laptops. Models from both the premium Yoga C940 series and mainstream Yoga C740 line -- both of which currently reside on our best laptops of 2020 list -- are marked down, and a business-minded ThinkPad X1 Yoga (our favorite premium business 2-in-1) is discounted by more than $1,000. Also marked down is the IdeaPad 3, one of the best configurations you'll find in a laptop that costs less than $500.
Note that each of these deals require discount codes that we've listed below. Which that small caveat, let's dive into the deals.

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When Epic released footage from its upcoming Unreal 5 tech demo last week, one major question was whether PC gamers would be able to enjoy equivalent performance or capabilities. As we discussed last week, any major boost to console performance that relies explicitly on storage hardware could require relatively fast hardware on the PC side of things.

Epic has now chimed in and confirmed our expectations. According to Epic Games China (via DSOGaming), the PS5 version of the game ran at 1440p at 30fps. A PC equipped with an RTX 2080 notebook and a Samsung 970 EVO is capable of running the demo at ~40fps.
And I can ensure that we can run this demo in our notebook, in editor , not cooked, it even can 40FPS. ( After someone in BBS confirm that the device is RTX2080 and 970EVO )

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The Switch is the biggest hardware success for Nintendo in years, but the money it makes on the console is nothing compared with game sales. Naturally, Nintendo is quick to deploy its army of lawyers when someone threatens to undermine those sales. For example, if you’re running a ROM repository. Hacking collective Team-Xecuter is set to release a tool that can unlock the Switch to play homebrew and pirated games. Nintendo would very much like to stop that from happening, so it has filed a lawsuit.

You might know Team-Xecuter from its last major project, a USB dongle that can install the custom SX OS on Switch units from June 2018 and earlier. Those consoles have an older version of the Nvidia Tegra SoC with an exploitable flaw that Team-Xecuter and others have used to mod the software. Newer consoles have a patched chip that blocks such mods, but Team-Xecuter says its upcoming SX Core (standard Switch) and SX Lite (Switch Lite) kits will be able to get SX OS on even the upgraded models.

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Mortal Kombat 11 players will soon be able to play out one of the most-discussed cinematic battles of the 1980s that never actually happened. RoboCop and Terminator are both coming to the franchise, finally allowing gamers to answer for themselves what we used to argue over during lunch.

Now, personally, I have to say — I’ve always been 100 percent on Team Terminator on this issue. In fact, I don’t even see how the “PRoboCop” faction even has a leg to stand on.

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Now that spring weather and warmer temperatures have arrived, it's time to venture outside. Of course, for some folks, that might not be much further than your front yard since many parts of the country are still maintaining social distancing. But at least your family can still have fun together, so this might be the ideal time to add a new game into the mix. (Let's face it, cornhole is played out, and most people don't have space for bocce ball or croquet in their yard.)

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The pinball maker's newest table screams '90s.

Stern Pinball Just try and look at pictures of Stern's newest pinball machine and not hear that classic 90s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoon theme music pop in your head. You can't do it.
The pinball maker's newest table screams out that nostalgia, especially for players who grew up on the cartoon series from the 90s.

Stern Pinball TMNT pinball looks as if it was ripped out of the cartoon style of the 90s, and may take cues from the classic arcade cabinet from the same era. There're all the usual suspects represented on the playfield: the turtles, Splinter, Shredder, April O'Neil and more, but even some deeper cuts like Baxter Stockman and the mousers.

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