Movies, Music, Video Games, Social Networks and Lifestyle News And Reviews
Product reviews and news of digital entertainment products and services in movies, music, video games, game streaming, social networks and lifestyle products.
“Microtransaction” is often considered a dirty word in the gaming community. Several developers have come under fire for unfriendly, and even predatory, practices. However, the controversy surrounding microstransactions will not prevent Electronic Arts from incorporating them into its games. Battlefield V will include microtransactions this upcoming January. According to a recent Amazon store listing, the microtransactions should be live January 18th, 2019. Players can already pre-order the “Battlefield Currency” for their Xbox One game. Prices range from $4.99 USD for 500...
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EVGA is best known for its graphics cards, and for good reason. EVGA is the number one NVIDIA authorized board partner in the U.S. and they have been for a long time. Like many brands in the PC enthusiast space, however, EVGA has started to branch out beyond just graphics cards and today they have a wide range of items in their product stack, ranging from motherboards and notebooks to peripherals and power supplies. Despite being in the peripherals game for a relatively short while, however, EVGA already has five gaming mice in the market, and it just introduced its first mechanical keyboard, the...
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Whether you’re just getting into PC gaming, or are a seasoned DIY PC gamer with dozens of monster builds under your belt, NVIDIA’s GeForce Experience can be a useful all-in-one tool for taking the drudgery out of fine tuning and expanding your PC gaming experience. Want to optimize all those settings in Gears of War 4 with the ideal configuration for your PC, capture and share your best Overwatch POTG, or manage driver updates with notifications and automatic downloads? NVIDIA's GeForce Experience 3.0 software suite does all of this and more.GeForce Experience has been around for a while,...
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As we’ve detailed a number of times here at HotHardware, the NVIDIA SHIELD Android TV console is a powerful media streaming and gaming device that features a beefy Tegra X1 processor and an integrated 256-core Maxwell-based GPU (check out Marco’s full review here). While we’ve seen plenty of streaming devices come to the market with potent quad-core SoCs before, none of them are packing the kind of graphics hardware and Android TV polish lurking inside the SHIELD. To that end, NVIDIA thought that it could use the standard SHIELD (16GB) and the SHIELD Pro (500GB) as a centerpiece for Plex Media...
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When we learned earlier this week that Microsoft would be bringing Forza Motorsport to Windows, it was hard to not feel excited. Well, at least for those racing fans who call the PC home and have loathed the fact that the series never broke free from the Xbox. Forza is just the beginning, as Microsoft promised that all of its self-published Xbox One games will come to the PC. That would seem like a great thing. Or is it? In an opinion piece written for UK's The Guardian, Epic founder Tim Sweeney explains why Microsoft's initiative is not as great as it sounds on paper. The problems are tied to...
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It was being hunted... The monster had been avoiding a team of four hunters ever since it saw them jump out of the spaceship. But by the time the hunters’ feet had touched the ground, the monster was already distancing itself, jumping over large boulders and running through trees in order to get away from the human threat. Along the way, it would slay any of the indigenous wildlife in its path, to devour, in order to evolve and become stronger. Time passed, as the monster played a dangerous game of cat and mouse with the four hunters, while continuing to feed. Now, it felt strong enough to take...
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Whenever an organization becomes too large, too complex, and too intertwined in too many facets of business, governments begin to take notice. You need look no further than the breakup of the Bell System last century to see what's possible when a single entity begins to control too much of a given field. Now, regulators in the European Union are beginning to cast a similar glance in the direction of Google, with a motion being backed this week that would break up the company and in turn reduce its strength.Google hasn't exactly been in the best of graces with the EU, coming under fire for privacy...
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Telecom companies opposed to Facebook's proposed $19 billion acquisition of WhatsApp, a highly popular mobile messenger service, can go pound sand. That's basically what the European Commission said by approving the deal despite the outcry from telecoms that will have to find a way to compete with free voice-call services. "Consumer communications apps keep European citizens connected and are becoming increasingly popular. While Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp are two of the most popular apps, most people use more than one communications app. We have carefully reviewed this proposed acquisition...
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Many people have finally become truly fed-up with the likes of Facebook. All the ads, all the tracking, all the rules. Last month, the world's most popular social network found itself in hot water after it forced some drag performers to use their real names, and while it's not hard to understand Facebook's reasoning, it's a no-brainer that some people simply can't use their real names, either in the name of safety, or because they're better-known under an alias. It's for reasons like this, and especially privacy, that the popularity surrounding up-and-comer social network Ello has exploded. As...
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One of the most hotly debated issues regarding current consoles isn't just whether the PS4 or Xbox One is the better device -- it's whether the new consoles launched with sufficiently advanced hardware at all. Many in the press and readers alike have complained that next-gen devices just aren't powerful enough to justify an upgrade when compared to previous-gen products or current PCs. Now, game engine company Euclideon wants to change that -- with a new foray into gaming and a voxel-based engine. The company has put together a six-minute video clip of its new engine, and its genuinely impressive...
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How does one even begin a post with the above headline? In what is either a massive troll or an uncomfortable sign of the times, a pair of Brits named Matt Gray and Tom Scott are touting a new social network launching soon that will use only emoji. Dubbed “emoj.li”, the social network contains no words--no words!--but also no spam, which is its main selling point. “Social networks are broken,” says the product video, “with spam, trolls, memes, and hashtags.” Further, “There is no spam, because there isn’t an emoji for spam.” If you’re...
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At this point, after its CEO resigned in the aftermath of a launch fiasco, a couple of rounds of worker layoffs, and being voted “Worst Company in America”, Electronic Arts is probably in “screw it” mode. To that effect, the company announced that it’s killing off a trio of its Facebook games. The Sims Social, SimCity Social, and Pet Society will all be shut down on June 14th. In a blog post, EA staff stated, “After millions of people initially logged in to play these games, the number of players and amount of activity has fallen off. For people who have seen...
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When Eurocom sent us their latest gaming notebook for evaluation, we expected the usual huge, heavy machine with obscenely powerful components inside. It’s even called the “Monster”, which seems to indicate a particularly beastly rig. But when the box arrived on our doorstep, it seemed far too small to encase anything resembling the description above. Indeed, inside the small shipping container was an even smaller notebook. The Monster is barely bigger than a netbook, actually, with an 11.6-inch screen and a body that’s as thin as 0.5 inches and only as thick as 1.5 inches....
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Game developer Zynga has made a fortune in part by altering existing game concepts into their own creations, such as Words With Friends (an obvious take on Scrabble, with a social twist and other elements that are Zynga's own). As far as Electronic Arts is concerned, however, Zynga went too far with The Ville, which EA claims infringes its Facebook game The Sims Social. "Zynga's design choices, animations, visual arrangements, and character motions and actions have been directly lifted from The Sims Social," said Lucy Bradshaw, general manager of EA's Maxis label. From Zynga's legal vantage point,...
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