Category Archive

Technology

AMD Announces New Processors & Motherboards To Exist Alongside Current Offerings

Posted on February 2, 2016 by Rae Michelle Richards

Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) has announced new entries in its existing line of “A Series” APUs and “Athlon” brand processors that will co-exist alongside existing offerings. They have also announced that they will begin producing motherboards for their current AM3+/FMS2+ socket types that will feature more modern connectivity options such as USB 3.1 with the C-type connector. In terms of new processor AMD will roll out the A10-7860K, the A6-7470K and the Athlon X4 845.  The A10 is currently AMD’s most powerful all-in-one APU providing Radeon graphics processing and a multi-core processor on one dye. The new A10 APU will

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GDC 2016 Survey: VR Support Up, PS Vita Support Nowhere To Be Found

Posted on January 20, 2016 by Rae Michelle Richards

The upcoming Game Developer’s Conference will be held in San Francisco this coming March and ahead of the conference GDC has released their annual “State of the Industry” survey results. State of the Industry captures the pulse of the development community thanks to over 2,000 participants, the results give developers, students and the media (heh.. that’s us) a sense of what is trending in development circles. Here are some of the interesting findings from the 2016 survey: VR’s Popularity Among Developers Is On The Rise Development kits for the popular Oculus Rift have been available for sometime, Samsung has entered

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A Few Things You Learn When Buying A Used Oculus Rift Off Of Kijiji

Posted on January 19, 2016 by Rae Michelle Richards

Two weeks ago while pursuing the online computer classifieds I came across something I didn’t think I’d see locally for some time, an Oculus VR headset at a reasonable price. After the announcement that Oculus wanted $600 USD for the upcoming consumer version (known as CV1 in the Oculus community) I figured my dreams of trying modern VR were all but washed away, except for maybe the odd industry convention for the foreseeable future. Here are three things that I’ve learned after acquiring and using my Oculus DK1 for more than a week.

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SpaceX’s Latest Rocket Landing Attempt Ends In Fantastic Explosion

Posted on January 18, 2016 by Rae Michelle Richards

SpaceX
Before we can colonize other worlds or send astronauts on journeys outside of our immediate interstellar backdoor we must first find a way to reuse spacecraft. This is the current goal of Tesla Motors founder Elon Musk’s SpaceX company, who today attempted to land a craft on a floating platform after deploying a satellite. They absolutely nailed the first part, but the landing? Not so much. What could only be described as an epic fireball of failure, the Falcon rocket failed to connect with of the latches for it’s four legs. The rocket promptly keeled over onto the landing pad

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Activision Blizzard Announces New Co-President For TV Unit

Posted on January 13, 2016 by Rae Michelle Richards

This morning mega publisher Activision Blizzard announced that Stacey Sher has been named co-president of the company’s television and film production division Activision Blizzard Studios. Sher’s credits include producer roles in recent films like Quentin Tarantino’s recent release The Hateful Eight, 2000’s Erin Brockovich, 1997’s Gattica among other major film and television productions. She will be joined alongside existing president Nick Van Dyk. The recently formed studio aims to bring some of Activision’s longest running franchises to both television and film. The first property to be adapted for the big screen is Duncan Jone’s adaption of the popular Warcraft series

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What It’s Like Entering The World of Virtual Reality With A Vision Impairment

Posted on January 9, 2016 by Rae Michelle Richards

R2D2 Google Cardboard
With the Oculus Rift finally available for pre-order it’s easy to argue that the conversation surrounding virtual reality has never really been hotter. With all of the immersive enhancements that products like PlayStation VR, Oculus Rift, HTC Vive and Open VR are providing to players – stereoscopic 3D, head tracking etc. I’ve noticed very little discussion about what VR could mean to individuals with disabilities.  I’m near blind in one eye and after having an interest in virtual reality for a number of years I finally got the chance to try out VR recently. It was a hell of a

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X-Split Gamecaster Updates To Version 2.7

Posted on January 8, 2016 by Rae Michelle Richards

Xsplit logo
Popular game streaming software X-Split have released version 2.7 today. The latest update brings support for Intel’s bleeding edge which allows streamers to use chroma-key like effects without the need for a physical green screen. Other major updates include built-in integration with Facebook and Twitter to make communicating with fans easier, they’ve also included an enhanced screenshot feature allowing you to take screen-grabs and post them right to social media. Here’s a detailed rundown of everything included in X-Split 2.7 as per Splitmedialab’s press released issued today: Tobii Eye Tracking Integration XSplit Gamecaster now recognizes Tobii Eye Tracking, allowing users

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Oculus Rift Priced; Internet Freaks Out

Posted on January 8, 2016 by Kenny Keelan

Paradigm Shift In case you missed it or you’ve been living underneath a gaming rock for the last little while, Oculus announced a price and start date for shipping for its Rift VR Headset: 599$ USD and March 28th. As one can expect, the reaction was generally the same as it is with things that have been hyped a lot: “gaming company does a thing; the internet freaks out.” I could talk about the reasoning behind such pricing, why some people think it’s outrageous, why I think it’s perfectly reasonable and should have been expected, and why expectations were set differently

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Independent Games Festival 2016 Finalists Announced

Posted on January 6, 2016 by Rae Michelle Richards

The Independent Games Festival have announced their line-up of finalists across seven different categories for the IGF Awards which are to be announced during the 2016 Games Developer Conference in San Francisco California. It must have been a painstaking process for the 400 evaluators to select this small list of finalists from among the more than 750 entrants that were in the running this year. Evaluators are selected from industry professionals based upon their expertise in the distinct categories, according to the IGF. So what is in the running this year? Toby Fox’s Undertale, the minimalistic train simulator Mini Metro,

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Oculus Rift Pre-Orders Open, Servers Crash Despite $600 USD Price Point

Posted on January 6, 2016 by Rae Michelle Richards

Oculus
As expected Facebook owned Oculus opened up pre-orders for their much anticipated virtual reality headset this morning. No one knew what the price point of the fledgling technology was going to be before the pre-order page went live. Potential Oculus Rift owners were greeted with a $599 USD (849.99 CDN) price point and of course there was so much traffic going to Oculus’ servers that at times the page wouldn’t load. So what does almost a thousand dollars Canadian get you? There’s the Oculus headset of course but the slickly packaged virtual reality headset also includes several other items in

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Steel Series Announces The Rival 700 – A Mouse With A Headshot Counter

Posted on January 5, 2016 by Rae Michelle Richards

Steel Series Gaming Mouse
Hardware manufacturer Steel Series has announced the Rival 700 Smart Gaming Mouse, a pretty neat piece of kit that is being marketed to the hard-core Counter Strike: Global Offensive crowd. What makes this mouse worthy of your headshots over say a rival mouse? Aside from a number of pretty neat inclusions, which I’ll get to in a moment, the Rival 700 Smart Gaming Mouse has a build in OLED screen that will act as a headshot counter when using StatTrak weapons in Global Offensive. Aside from the customizable OLED screen (which can be tweaked using the Steel Series Engine) the

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NVIDIA Opens Up CES Keynote With Self Driving Car Announcements

Posted on January 4, 2016 by Rae Michelle Richards

Today at their CES press event NVIDIA opened up their discussion of upcoming technologies with their recent investments in self driving cars. A special computer developed by NVIDIA called the NVIDIA Drive PX2 is powered by a 12 CPU-core system that is liquid cooled and contains the companies upcoming Pascal GPU. NVIDIA is billing their self driving car initiative as something that will revolutionize society by spurring urban re-design, more accessibility to transportation and reduced number of fatalities. Jim-Hsun Huang called humans the weakest link in the driving equation. NVIDIA is trying to position themselves as a provider of the

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Hackers Get Full Windows 95 To Work On New 3DS

Posted on January 2, 2016 by Rae Michelle Richards

Nintendo 3DS Windows
Only one day after the new year we’re going to party like it’s… 1995? A clever hacker has gotten Microsoft’s two decade only operating system Windows 95 to run on Nintendo’s New 3DS according to a post on console modification forum GBATMP.  RetroRampage37 released a rough build of the Windows 95 hack and certainly it fill our minds with the idea of playing older DOS games on Nintendo’s handheld. As of right now the hack does not appear to work on the original 3DS but to be sure the community is working on it. As for the utility of this

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2016 and Gaming: A Year in Preview

Posted on December 28, 2015 by Kenny Keelan

2016featured
As we’re closing in on the end of one year and getting ready to start the next, a lot of people are reflecting on the year that’s past and others are looking at the year to come. I’m one of those looking to the future and I’ll tell you why: 2016 and the coming years after are going to be an extremely exciting time for games. While gaming has always been a longtime passion of mine, I do have to admit that it has felt like, in the last couple generations, innovation and creativity had been been steadily decreasing while

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GameStop Accidently Ships Pirated Game Just In Time For Christmas

Posted on December 27, 2015 by Rae Michelle Richards

It’s frustrating when someone gifts you a game you’ve waited months for only to find out you’re one of the unlucky few who have a defective product. What would your reaction be if it turns out you were gifted a pirated copy of a game by mistake? The parents of Reddit user Vernm51 bought them a copy of Pokemon Heart Gold for Christmas after Vern was unable to find a copy at a local GameStop Vern’s parents ordered a copy online from GameStop.com. The cartridge looks authentic enough with the expected Heart Gold sticker and Nintendo product serial number but

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