Thursday, September 8, 2016

News::Jonathan Blow's 'The Witness' gets the PlayStation 4 Pro treatment

The Witness, Jonathan Blow's latest release, is getting a special patch for the PlayStation 4 Pro to augment its visuals since it's coming to a brand new home. Blow's team at Thekla, Inc. is making it possible to enjoy the game at a higher resolution than ever before, offering an upgrade in visual fidelity over an increase in frame rate. The announcement comes right after Sony's special PlayStation event, where the PS4 Pro was officially unveiled.

Source: Thekla, Inc.



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News::The Professional eSports Association officially launches in 2017

The Professional eSports Association (PEA) has announced that it will officially begin operating in January 2017 with its inaugural title as Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. The PEA will be launching with seven prominent North American teams behind it: Team Solomid, Cloud9, Team Liquid, Counter Logic Gaming, Immortals, NRG eSports and compLexity Gaming. As Jason Katz, Commissioner of the PEA, states, the organization definitely represents "something new in eSports," and that is a professional organization where the largest teams in North America have joined together to create a more "stable, healthy, long-term environment for the players."

Source: Professional eSports Association



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News::Xbox One S helped Microsoft outsell the PS4 in August

The Xbox One outsold the PlayStation 4 in August, thanks to a boost from Microsoft's latest console, the Xbox One S. A 2TB model of the Xbox One S hit shelves on August 2nd for $400 and sales of the new console are bundled under the broader "Xbox One" banner. The Xbox One S supports HDR, 4K gaming, streaming and Blu-ray, and it's 40 percent smaller than the launch model.



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News::Sony's PlayStation 4 Pro reveal was a confident step forward

It's been a good year so far for Sony Interactive Entertainment. Yesterday's PlayStation Meeting continued the momentum from E3 and showed us the next step in its plan for home console domination: the PlayStation 4 Pro. The company's strategy was simple: show, rather than tell. The big news, if you own a fancy UHD display, is that Pro will play nicely with all those extra pixels and show off your screen's HDR capabilities.

Unlike with the Xbox One S, Sony also spelled out the benefits of buying a Pro, even if you don't own a 4K TV. The new, beefier machine will make existing games look and perform better on the 1080p TV that's sitting in your living room right now, and it can also give PlayStation VR games a facelift, too. All for $399 this November 10th. Sony's always had the edge on Microsoft with this generation, but a strong finish to 2016 feels like the gap could be widening.



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News::Welcome to the final console generation as we know it

PlayStation 4 architect Mark Cerny practically whispered into his microphone as he introduced the world to Sony's latest console iteration, the PS4 Pro. His voice was at odds with the setting: He stood at the center of attention in a New York City auditorium packed with journalists and fans eager to hear about the latest and greatest Sony gaming technology. Amid frantic keyboard tapping and camera flashes, Cerny described the PS4 Pro's upgrades like a museum curator detailing a magnificent piece of art he'd just acquired.

The Pro's GPU is twice as fast as the standard PS4, it can handle PSVR out of the box, it has a 1TB hard drive, boosted clock rate, and it supports 4K and HDR gaming. Even some older games, including Shadow of Mordor and Infamous: First Light, will be patched to support 4K and HDR features in a move that Sony labels, "forward compatibility."

Cerny called the PS4 Pro transformative, while PlayStation CEO Andrew House stressed that Sony wanted to ensure anyone playing on the new, beefed-up console would still be a part of the overall PS4 community.

"PS4 Pro is not intended to blur the lines between console generations," Cerny said.

However, despite Sony's best intentions, the PS4 Pro smudges this generational dividing line. Modern console generations have followed a fairly rigid pattern: standard console, "slim" console, rumors of a new console. Rinse and repeat for the next four to eight years.



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News::Will you buy the PlayStation 4 Pro?

The PlayStation 4 Neo Pro has finally been revealed, and it packs in an intriguing amount of power and features unforeseen in the console world. But given that it's only been three years since the PS4's original debut, is it really worth upgrading for the system's existing owners? And with Microsoft's Project Scorpio coming next year, which is even more powerful on paper, it might just be worth waiting a bit before pulling the trigger. Engadget's editors have opinions:

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News::What happened at Sony's PlayStation 4 Pro event

Sony's PlayStation event didn't have a ton of surprises, but still -- any time you get two new flavors of the PS4, it's worth paying attention. In the afterglow of today's announcements, senior editors Devindra Hardawar and Nathan Ingraham break down the good and bad of what Sony announced. The PS4 Slim is almost exactly what we expected: a cheaper and smaller version of the existing PS4. But Sony surprised us a bit by having a reasonable $399 price point and November 10th release date for its more powerful PS4 Pro console. Both new PS4 consoles will be in gamers' hands before long, so get caught up on what you need to know here.

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News::4K consoles will finally make 1080p gaming a reality

Microsoft and Sony have finally announced their new, more powerful console revisions. The PS4 Pro and Project Scorpio promise a significant performance bump over their current-gen counterparts, supposedly ushering in the era of 4K console gaming. But although we will see some 4K games, it's likely that neither console has the power to pull off the higher resolution without compromise.

We've heard this story before. When the Xbox 360 was unveiled at E3 in 2005, it was supposed to play games at a crisp 720p or 1080i. The following year, when Sony announced the PlayStation 3, it did so by showing off Gran Turismo HD running at a native 1080i/60, with the promise of 1080p games to come.

For the most part, that didn't happen. Instead, many Xbox 360 games upscaled just to hit 720p. The significantly more powerful PS3 also stuck mostly to 720p, with a smattering of 1,280 x 1,080 games (that were then processed to stretch out the horizontal resolution). To my memory, the only 1080p game I had on PlayStation 3 was Fifa Street 3 (I make bad life choices). Oh, and Gran Turismo 5: Prologue let me see my garage (and only my garage) in 1080p.

Then came the current console generation and the pitch of true 1080p gaming. Very quickly, that promise unraveled. Xbox One launch titles like Ryse (900p) and Dead Rising 3 (720p) that fell short, with only Forza Motorsport 5 hitting 1080p at the expense of anti-aliasing and texture quality. PlayStation 4 titles fared a little better: Infamous: Second Son, Killzone: Shadow Fall and Knack hit 1080p. But all three games suffered from serious frame rate issues: Killzone developer Guerrilla Games was forced to add a 30fps lock to the single player through an update and faced a (failed) lawsuit when it was discovered the "1080p 60fps" multiplayer actually ran at 960 x 1,080 and pixel doubled using "temporal reprojection."

The biggest cross-platform title of the launch window, Ubisoft's Watch Dogs, hit 792p on Xbox One and 900p on PlayStation 4. Both versions relied on adaptive v-sync (a trick that minimizes stuttering when frames aren't rendered in time) just to stick to 30fps.

Things have improved a little since then, as developers now understand the consoles' respective limitations. We now see some 1080p games that mostly stick to 30fps, with exclusive titles Rise of the Tomb Raider on Xbox One and Bloodborne on PlayStation 4 being prime examples. Even so, the vast majority of titles struggle, with shooters relying on dynamic scaling to hit 60fps and other games sticking with 30fps caps just to get by. There are outliers, of course: Lots of last-gen remasters are hitting the holy grail of 1080p and 60fps (1080p60). And some games -- like Forza Motorsport 6 on the Xbox One and Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain on the PS4 -- run almost entirely at 1080p60.



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News::'Animal Crossing' and 'Fire Emblem' mobile apps delayed to 2017

Nintendo's Super Mario Run for iPhone, iPad and Android made big news during Apple's event yesterday in San Francisco, but in all the fanfare it seems two additional planned Nintendo properties were pushed back.

Via: Polygon



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News::'Star Trek Online' launches for free on consoles

Star Trek Online arrived on PC in the busy MMORPG scene in February 2010, just as the sun started to set on the genre. But the game followed industry trends to keep its playerbase, relaunching in January 2012 with a free-to-play tier and releasing semi-annual "season" expansions of new content at no cost. Today, it's landing on PS4 and Xbox One, following other FTP titles in the move to consoles.

Source: Arc Games blog



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