Game Tech News

The team behind the Mortal Kombat series is one of the most reliable fighting game developers in the world. They’ve been cranking out well-liked fighters on the regular for nearly 30 years now, and Mortal Kombat 11 might be their best game to-date with the exception of its ugly lootbox implementation.

Mitchell Saltzman gave MK11 an amazing score of 9/10 at our sister site IGN – the highest score any MK has ever received from that outlet. The story mode, intricate mechanics, incredible visuals, and even the online performance receive incredibly high praise from Saltzman, but the shocking amount of grinding needed to unlock customization items from the krypt prevents the game from reaching its highest highs.

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Blizzard has announced the ship date for WoW Classic, a 15-year-old game that is, by virtually every measure, a more inferior version than the WoW that exists today. I’m both excited for it and genuinely annoyed at how excited I am. Facts first, wangst to follow.

On August 26 at 3 PM PDT, WoW Classic will go live on a staggered schedule across the world. Blizzard writes:
[INDENT]Beginning May 15, select WoW players will be invited to participate in a small-scale, focused closed beta test. Players will also get a chance to help put our servers and technology through their paces in a series of stress tests running from May through July—you can opt in now through Account Management and select the WoW Classic beta. Subsequent stress tests will extend the opportunity to even more players. Level caps will also be in place to ensure we’re emphasizing the “stress” in “stress test.

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One of the most interesting releases of the year isn’t a modern game at all — it’s a refreshed look at a 22 year-old title. Quake II probably isn’t a game a lot of modern players are even familiar with, which adds to some of the interest around the work Nvidia has done to refresh this decidedly ancient game with a massive facelift.

According to NV, the RTX-enabled version of Quake II will play on a GeForce RTX graphics card “or other capable hardware,” which likely means this release is essentially an NV exclusive. It is, however, a smart idea to allow people to experience ray tracing on older GPUs. Virtually any NV GPU that supports RTX ray tracing (and Nvidia has enabled the capability on its Pascal family of GPUs) should be able to handle Quake II, given the game’s absolutely anemic requirements in every other category. We’ve already seen how games with modest GPU requirements can be upgraded to stunning effect with a recent mod that added path tracing to Minecraft.

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Microsoft launched its subscription-based Xbox Game Pass in 2017, and the service has proven popular with avid console gamers. There has always been limited PC integration with Microsoft-developed titles, but the company’s new initiative goes a step further. The new PC version of Game Pass will bring more than 100 games to PC on a subscription basis.

On the Xbox console, those on the Game Pass subscription have access to a few dozen games, including some new releases like Mortal Kombat X and Forza Horizon 4. These games usually appear on Game Pass on the same day as they arrive at retail. It’s important to note that this isn’t a streaming system like Microsoft’s upcoming xCloud product. Game Pass titles are downloaded in a traditional manner and played on your local hardware. You can continue playing them for as long as you keep paying the $10 monthly fee.

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Game streaming has been tried before, and it’s never been a smashing success. Google thinks now is the time to launch its own game streaming platform. It unveiled Stadia at GDC several months back, but it left out many key details. In a new live-streamed announcement, Google has revealed pricing, games, and the launch date for Stadia. The service won’t be cheap, especially if you want to use it when it launches later this year.

Stadia is in the same vein as Nvidia GeForce Now and the now-defunct OnLive. Rather than rendering a game locally, a Stadia instance in the cloud does the heavy lifting and streams video of the gameplay down to your device. Your control inputs go back up to the cloud to control the gameplay. Google is using a lot of custom hardware and video compression in hopes of making the process smoother than past attempts.

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Companies like Nvidia and OnLive have tried to make game streaming technology work for years, but we may finally be reaching critical mass. Google is getting ready to launch its Stadia platform, and it might have a shot at succeeding. Meanwhile, Nvidia is testing a revamped GeForce Now, and Microsoft promises xCloud will launch soon. Bethesda is preparing to roll out its own game streaming technology called Orion. However, this isn’t an alternative to current game streaming platforms. Instead, Orion will integrate with games to make streaming services better.

All game streaming services work on a similar premise. Instead of rendering frames on your local hardware, a server someplace in the world renders the game for you. What you see on your screen is essentially a compressed video stream of the gameplay. Your control inputs go back up to the server to interact with the game. It’s a bit like playing a game with very, very long wires.

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At first glance, Velocity Micro’s Raptor Z55 (starts at $1,249; $2,999 as tested) could easily be mistaken for your everyday home computer. Slap a Dell logo on the front and many people would accept it as just another office PC. But underneath its almost entirely black aluminum exterior rests some of the best gaming hardware money can buy, as our sister site PCMag.com found in its review.

Build Specs

Caged inside of these metal walls rests an Intel Core i9-9900K processor that has eight CPU cores overclocked to blistering fast 5.1GHz. Immediately noticeable after unlocking the cage and removing the side-panel is the system’s CPU closed-loop water cooler that rests near the front bottom of the case.



This system is also packing a powerful EVGA Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 Ti graphics card and 16GB of DDR4 memory on an MSI MPG Z390M Gaming Edge AC motherboard. A 512GB NVMe Samsung 970 Pro SSD and a 1TB 7,200RPM HDD are included for storage, and the system is powered by a 750W EVGA 750BQ power supply.

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You might be able to play World 1-1 of Super Mario Bros. with your eyes closed, but can you play it at lightning speed while other Marios hurl turtle shells at you? Maybe, someone else is probably better. You can find out by playing Mario Royale in your browser right now. Don’t wait too long, though. Nintendo is sure to get this game purged from the internet soon.

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One of the areas where reviews sometimes fall short is in providing perspective on how component performance evolves over time. While the yearly new hardware launch cadence provides periodic opportunities to revisit how older components stack up to newer ones, the focus in any given launch is going to be on the CPU or GPU that’s being launched, not previous cards. Title-specific coverage, meanwhile, is typically measured and written in the days immediately following a launch, often as part of a game or product review. Stack these two trends together, and it can be more difficult than it ought to be for gamers to figure out how performance has changed over time and to tease out which GPUs are holding their value better than others.

With this in mind, we’ve completed an analysis of the data sets we gathered in our recent review of AMD’s Radeon RX 5700 and Radeon RX 5700 XT, as well as the Gigabyte Aorus RTX 2080 Xtreme 8GB. We updated all of our GPU data sets in late June / early July of 2019, which makes this a good time to look back at how Pascal, Turing, and GCN performance have each evolved over the past nine months.

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Growing up, I was not a console gamer. My parents steadfastly refused my entreaties for an NES or any console and only grudgingly tolerated my affection for computer games. I suspect they felt computers were going to be Too Important to the future to smash my primary means of interacting with them, and they respected the idea that I had the right to spend my own money on hobbies of my choice, but there were limits to their tolerance. Computer games fell on the right side of the line, barely. Console games did not. As a result, my own introduction to gaming came squarely from classics of the mid-to-late 1980s PC space — Space Quest III and Ultima IV were the two titles I remember playing first.



I played through Final Fantasy I, II, and III at a friend’s house, but I didn’t ever log much time on the side-scrollers that were popular. I played enough Super Mario Bros. to beat 1-1 and 1-2 and that’s about it. Recently, thanks to emulators, I’ve picked up some SNES games that I never played before — games like Castlevania IV, Super Mario World, and Super Metroid.



I genuinely wasn’t sure what I’d think. Mostly, I’ve been impressed. The skills required to play these titles well — and to be clear, I don’t play them well, having never acquired more than a rudimentary level of skill with a controller — are about more than just quick reflexes. They demand the player become intimately familiar with the position and movement of enemies through 2D space, timing certain attacks and jumps precisely. The games often challenge you with cleverly placed gotchas, like a Mario bullet that flies through the exact space you will be occupying if you attempt to grab a certain power-up. These puzzles can be maddening. The game developers leave hints to tell you that something can be done, but figuring out exactly how to do it is a challenge.

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