Game Tech News

Moving your Steam installation from one PC to another has always been more of a “Technical workaround,” and less of a supported method of migrating games from Point A to B. This has been particularly true if you only wanted to change the installation location of a single title. Steam allows you to create a new folder on a separate drive to install games into without much argument, but it used to get grouchy if you tried to do it with games already installed to a specific system path. Now, a new client update has added the ability to move specific game folders without reinstalling a title or messing around with symlinks.

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Details on Microsoft’s Project Scorpio and how it might handle 4K gaming have been hard to come by ever since Microsoft announced the new platform. All we’ve known are a few basic specs, like the platform’s memory bandwidth (320GB/s), eight-core CPU, and available computational horsepower (6TFLOPS). Now we have more details thanks to a leaked PDF from a Microsoft developer website.

Eurogamer has the full details on the PDF, which doesn’t appear to be publicly available. According to Microsoft’s documentation, the Xbox Scorpio ditches the ESRAM cache the Xbox One relied on to deliver higher performance and acceptable frame rates. The PS4 and Xbox One are much more alike, architecturally speaking, than any previous pair of game consoles. ESRAM was one of the major differences between them — the Xbox One uses a 32MB ESRAM cache (divided into four 8MB blocks) to supplement its DDR3 memory interface, while the Sony PS4 has a unified 8GB GDDR5 memory pool.

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Star Wars: Episode VIII now has an official title and the Internet is buzzing about what it might mean. The upcoming film will also apparently be Carrie Fisher’s last appearance in the franchise (more on that in a moment), and will be titled Star Wars: The Last Jedi. Before anyone panics, remember “Jedi” is both singular and plural — “Last” Jedi doesn’t mean that only Luke or Rey survive the film, it just means that, well, we’re obviously still pretty low on Force users.

According to director Rian Johnson, the film will pick up directly where Episode VII left off, with Rey standing on a rocky island, holding out Anakin Skywalker’s long-lost lightsaber to Luke Skywalker. “I don’t want to skip ahead two years. I want to see the very next moment of what happens,” he told USA Today in January. Rian added that “a large part of the movie” is devoted to exploring the story of what happened to Skywalker between the end of Return of the Jedi and The Last of the Jedi, as well as focusing on Rey’s use of the Force and her exploration of her own power. “She’s taking her first step to coming to terms with this thing inside her that she never knew was there and is just starting to reveal its potential,” Johnson said.

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Microsoft’s Xbox One unveil back in spring 2013 didn’t have a lot of high points, but the console did feature a new mode Microsoft clearly hoped would be a key differentiation factor in years to come: Snap mode. Microsoft made much of the fact that you could “snap” various types of content to the side of the screen while still playing a game, in what was clearly a console-specific implementation of the app-pinning Windows 8 and 10 both support. The feature never made a ton of sense to me — I’ve never had a TV so large that I felt like giving over a third of it to stream video content, and Microsoft’s early multimedia focus with the Xbox One seemed ill-timed and badly considered compared with Sony’s “it plays games” approach.

Today, Microsoft announced that “Snap” mode will be removed in an upcoming Xbox One patch, to make room for future improvements and updates. Microsoft’s Mike Ybarra took to Twitter to discuss the change, though he was vague on what “bigger things” Microsoft is referring to.

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When Nintendo announced the Switch, the company made it clear that the device wouldn’t require specific, proprietary SD cards. That’s in contrast to companies like Sony, which have previously required that their handheld devices use proprietary SD cards with correspondingly inflated prices.

It’s a bit of a surprise, therefore, to see Nintendo partnering with manufacturer HORI in Japan to release two official flavors of SD cards — a 16GB and a 32GB. Forbes reports that at least the 32GB microSD card is notably more expensive than it would be under other circumstances, writing: “The 32 GB card is ¥7,900, or about $70 USD. But on Amazon, the “high end” 32 GB SD card from SanDisk is ¥2,690, or about $23 USD. Past that, if you want a cheaper version with the same amount of storage (but with slower read/write speed perhaps), you can find one for as little as ¥1,180/$10.”

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When Microsoft first debuted HoloLens two years ago, it wasn’t clear if the company was working on a niche research concept that would find little life outside of tech demos, or if the company intended to push augmented reality as the Next Big Thing in the consumer market. HoloLens’ first release was strictly intended for developers and early deployment in enterprise settings, with its $3,000 price tag, lack of a warranty, and limited application support. In a recent interview, however, Alex Kipman, the inventor of HoloLens, said*Microsoft has bigger plans for its platform over the long term.

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Sony has been laughably bad at keeping users abreast of what to expect from any given release on the PS4 Pro. Instead of a clear message from the source, consumers are often forced to go to sites like Digital Foundry and our sister site IGN to learn more about which games take advantage of the hardware, and what changes are actually being made. It’s maddening.

But in spite of the failed messaging and embarrassing optimization problems, the PS4 Pro actually has a surprising amount of support just two months into its lifespan. Some of this generation’s best titles are looking better than ever, so we want to take a moment to call out 10 games that really benefit from this $400 half-step.

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Nintendo released its annual financial report this week, and president Tatsumi Kimishima defended the Switch’s sparse*launch lineup, along with giving additional details on Nintendo’s mobile and console business performance. The Switch’s software lineup has been widely criticized for its unusually small size. Kimishima attempted to push back against this argument, saying:

Our thinking in arranging the 2017 software lineup is that it is important to continue to provide new titles regularly without long gaps. This encourages consumers to continue actively playing the system, maintains buzz, and spurs continued sales momentum for Nintendo Switch. April 28 Spring, 2017 Summer, 2017 For that reason, we will be releasing Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, ARMS, which is making its debut on the Nintendo Switch during the first half of 2017, and Splatoon 2, which attracted consumers’ attention most during the hands-on events in Japan, in summer 2017.

The problem with this argument is that the Switch’s lineup is painfully thin, no matter how Nintendo tries to paper over the issue. The North American Switch will launch with 10*titles:

• 1-2 Switch
• The Binding of Isaac: Afterbirth+
• Human Resource Machine
• Just Dance 2017
• The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild
• Little Inferno
• I am Setsuna
• Skylanders: Imaginators
• Super Bomberman R
• World of Goo

The Wii U launched with 32 titles, while the PS4 had 25 and the Xbox One had 22. Clearly launch titles alone don’t make or break a console, or the Wii U would’ve beaten both its rivals. But consumers do tend to treat launch support as indicative of overall developer buy-in.

What’s perhaps more worrying is the way this problem doesn’t resolve through the end of 2017. There are more games coming through the rest of the year (17 in total), but comparatively few top-franchise games. Mario Kart 8 Deluxe is a warmed-over refresh of a two-year-old game, and Splatoon doesn’t have the mass market appeal of a Mario or Pokemon game. Super Mario Odyssey is the biggest post-launch game for Switch with a 2017 launch date, and it won’t drop until the holiday season. When you combine the weak game lineup with the high price ($300), accessory costs, and lack of a bundled game, it’s hard to make a strong argument for the handheld — especially since Nintendo remains resolute that the Switch isn’t a handheld at all.

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Graphics card makers often toss in a free game with the purchase of a new card. This used to take the form of a physical disc in the box, but these days it’s a code for online redemption. Until now, you could use those codes on any piece of hardware. Nvidia*has started to use a redemption system that is tied to the piece of hardware that included the game, effectively stopping consumers from reselling those codes.

The standard way of handling free promo games involves going to the Nvidia website, entering the necessary info from your new video card, and then waiting for the code to be spit out. These codes for Steam, Origin, or some other service are free and clear — completely unrelated to the video card that was purchased. That led many people to re-sell the codes in order to recoup some of the cost of the card. Nvidia is not in favor of this behavior.

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Over the last few months, we’ve seen some really impressive PS4 Pro updates for games both old and new. Native 4K releases have been few and far between. But for a $400 investment, the PS4 Pro is certainly delivering some fine-looking video games.

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