If you're in the mood to save grandpa's farm on PlayStation 4 or Xbox One, the makers of the hit PC game Stardew Valley are giving you extra reason to buy: they've released a special Stardew Valley Collector's Edition and it's full of goodies. Check out the preview below.
The popular Steam game was released on console last year, but for $29.99 you can now buy the physical Collector's Edition (available in stores), which comes with:
The full game
The soundtrack (33 songs)
An exclusive printed map of Stardew Valley
A mini-guidebook by video game author and artist Kari Fry.
The Collector's Edition is out now in North America, and will be released in Europe tomorrow. The original digital version of the game is now available on the PlayStation and Xbox stores for US $19.99.
"It's been incredible to watch such a fantastic and supportive community form around Stardew Valley. This charming country life RPG created by a solo developer has now sold over two million copies and received over 50,000 positive player reviews," said Molly Carroll, Marketing Manager at Chucklefish, which has partnered with Stardew Valley on the Collector's Edition release.
Origin PC sent us its new Evo15-S to review. Before we conduct our benchmarks and give you our final thoughts on the notebook, however, we wanted to provide you some pictures and specs of the laptop.
On paper, the gaming laptop has well-balanced, high-end specs. It's equipped with a leading quad-core CPU, a 1080P IPS display, a powerful GPU, 16GB of RAM, and plenty of storage (click here to get an understanding of what you should look for when buying a gaming laptop).
Spec chart
CPU
Intel Core i7-7700HQ
GPU
Nvidia GeForce GTX 1060 (6GB)
RAM
16GB 2400MHz Dual Channel DDR4 Memory
Display
15.6-inch 1920x1080 IPS
Storage
512GB NVME m.2 and 2TB 5400RPM HDD
Click through our gallery to get more pictures of the Evo15-S.
There are a lot of different color options to choose from, but Origin sent us a custom model with the GameSpot logo painted on the back. There's also Origin's logo on the lower right-hand corner.
For a gaming laptop, the Evo15-S is very thin at one inch.
The laptop is also relatively light at four pounds.
The notebook uses a 15-inch IPS display that offers accurate colors with wide viewing angles.
The Evo15-S uses traditional LED-backlit chiclet-style keys. You may also notice that the matte body makes it a little susceptible to fingerprints.
The keyboard also supports RGB backlighting in three different zones. Here, the laptop sports a red, white, and blue color arrangement.
Despite the relatively thin chassis, the Evo15-S offers a decent array of ports. On the right, the gaming laptop offers a USB port, USB-C port, HDMI port, and DisplayPort connection.
On the left side of the laptop, the Evo15-S offers three USB 3.0 ports, headphone and mic inputs, an SD card reader, and an Ethernet port.
The back panel showcases the laptop's sparkly paint job.
The power brick is far from the largest gaming laptop solution we've seen, but it isn't particularly small either.
How powerful is the Evo15-S exactly? Expect to read our in-depth review in the near future.
The Harry Potter spinoff Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them was one of last year's biggest hits, and the sequel is due to start shooting soon. It has now been confirmed that Jude Law will play Dumbledore in the movie.
As reported by Variety, the British star will play the younger version of the Hogwarts headmaster in the movie. Law will star alongside Eddie Redmayne, reprising his role as magizoologist Newt Scamander, and Johnny Depp, playing the villainous Grindelwald. Law is best known for such movies as Sherlock Holmes, A.I. Artificial Intelligence, The Talented Mr. Ripley, and Hugo. He will also appear in the upcoming King Arthur: Legend of the Sword.
Director David Yates said in a statement: "Jude Law is a phenomenally talented actor whose work I have long admired, and I'm looking forward to finally having the opportunity to work with him. I know he will brilliantly capture all the unexpected facets of Albus Dumbledore as J.K. Rowling reveals this very different time in his life."
Yates also directed the first movie, which was released last November and has made $813 million at the worldwide box office. The sequel is set for a November 16, 2018 release, and according to Rowling will be the second of five movies. Last year it was revealed that the film would be set in Paris.
Dumbledore was played by Richard Harris in the first two Harry Potter movies, and was replaced by Michael Gambon for the rest of the series, following Harris's death in 2002.
Head of Xbox Phil Spencer has explained why Project Scorpio will arrive around a year after Sony's upgraded PlayStation 4, citing the hardware that was available as the reason for the time difference.
"We thought 4K TVs would get to scale in the middle of this generation," he told Gamasutra. "So we designed a console for 2016, and a console for 2017. We were kind of working on both plans simultaneously. And at some point, we [had] to--let's just call it greenlight. For what we would do in 2016 … [I said] I think we need to do more than what the silicon is that's available in 2016 at a price point that a console customer would want to pay."
Microsoft's eventual decision to focus on the 2017 version of the plan brought them to what Scorpio is today, says Spencer: "We stopped that [2016] effort and said, 'Okay, we're going to put all of our weight and execution capability of the hardware team behind delivering a higher-powered console in 2017 that's completely geared towards 4K.'"
Spencer went on to compare Microsoft's two distinct plans to what Sony produced in the PS4 Pro: "Sometimes I get in trouble when I talk about Sony too much, but, the choice they made on PS4 Pro, I totally get that choice, from their perspective and what they wanted to go do. I've said it publicly and I've said it privately, I think they've built a good 2016 PS4 Pro. With the silicon that was available, they picked the parts that made sense to go and put together a console in 2016."
"But the point on not wanting framerate to drop ... if the developers want to push resolution, to say to the player, 'Here, you bought this higher-end console, let me show you higher-end resolution,' you don't want the framerate to drop. And that was something we didn't think we could deliver with the silicon that was available in 2016.
"So some of it was time, as certain things come down in price--some of them not as quickly as we would like. And some of it was hardware capability from our silicon partners that allowed us to go do that in 2017."
Nintendo wants to make sure the Switch and 3DS are as secure as possible, and it's turning to a community of "white-hat hackers" to find any vulnerabilities. The company has taken out a listing on HackerOne, a "bug bounty and vulnerability disclosure platform," asking for reports on those two systems only.
In exchange, Nintendo is offering a "bounty" of up to $20,000 for new information on any of the following:
Piracy
Cheating
Dissemination of inappropriate content to children
System vulnerabilities regarding Nintendo Switch
Vulnerabilities regarding Nintendo-published applications for Nintendo Switch
System vulnerabilities regarding the Nintendo 3DS family of systems
So how much exactly will you get for a valuable tip? Nintendo says it depends on how important and useful the reported info is. It says, in general, "the importance of the information is higher if the vulnerability is severe, easy-to-exploit."
Hackers will have to show a proof of concept or functional exploit code, but if you don't have that Nintendo is still encouraging you to "report to us sooner rather than later such that you do not to lose the opportunity to become the first reporter."
So far three people have reported vulnerabilities and received their bounties. How much, and what bugs they found, are kept secret.
The supernatural Netflix thriller Stranger Things was one of 2016's most acclaimed TV shows, and expectations are high for the upcoming second season. Now star David Harbour, who plays cop Jim Hopper, has spoken about what fans can expect from Season 2.
As part of an AMA at onmogul.com, Harbour spoke about the differences in his character from the first season. "Hop starts Season 2 in a completely different place than Season 1," he said. "He saved Will and has found a renewed interest in life. So his arc for Season 2 in my mind becomes more about butting up against the places where his hero fantasy can't take him. The places where that hero complex may force him to make the wrong decisions. It's a satisfying, completely different journey in Season 2."
Harbour also revealed he had seen the finished first episode of the new season. "I've seen episode 1 and have seen a lot of the shooting at the monitor and I can honestly say that I am so excited for you all to see this season," he said. "It's so fun and dark and complex. The characters all get to deepen and develop and we get to take on even greater demons (inner and outer)."
The actor went on to state that, "Episodes 4 and 5 are pretty epic. Last year I felt they were the slowest of the season, but in this season, [episodes] 4 and 5 are incredible.
"The story moves so fast in the middle and the tension is so high. They're killer, but I haven't even seen 8 and 9 yet, and they'll likely be even better."
Harbour's comments about the season's tone are similar to those made last year by creators Matt and Ross Duffer, who stated that it would be "darker and weirder" than the first season.
A first teaser was screened during the Super Bowl in January--check it out here. Stranger Things Season 2 hits Netflix in October.
In the wake of much recent Project Scorpio information, the first images of the device's development kit have emerged. As it's a dev kit, this shouldn't be taken as an indication of how the final product will look. Take a look at one image below, or take a look at the full gallery over at Gamasutra.
The site recently spoke to Xbox boss Phil Spencer about Microsoft's upcoming console. Among other topics, he discussed how he still sees Scorpio as part of the Xbox One family.
"[Xbox One] games will run on Scorpio," he stated. "Any hardware peripheral you have, any game, any app; it is part of the Xbox One family."
"Even when you set [Scorpio] on top of your One, it directly portmaps. Like, you literally plug power in, plug HDMI in, it's all exactly the same," he continued, before adding that he doesn't want to disappoint fans who already own an Xbox One: "We have millions of customers that have made a commitment to the Xbox One generation."
"As we watched how we built it, we realized we could actually build some benefits for … the 1080p customer [as well]," he later added. "Because the capabilities of the box don't dictate that somebody builds their game in 4K, or that you plug in a 4K TV. So if you're running one of our games in 1K, we wanted to do better there as well."
The executive went on to reveal that Microsoft is not forcing developers to work with Scorpio at all: "When you ship an Xbox One game two years from now, even if you don't look at Scorpio as something that you want to take advantage of, fine. That's up to you. We're not mandating that people go and do Scorpio-specific work." He did, however, note that for most triple-A developers, making games for a more powerful machine than Xbox One was not much of an issue as "they already have the assets" from their PC development builds.
Although Microsoft is yet to reveal any plans for a VR headset--its Hololens device is perhaps more accurately labeled as augmented reality--Spencer later reaffirmed his commitment to virtual reality:
"I think we're on like a decade-long journey with VR, and we're still right at the beginning. So I have hesitated to say let's lock on one piece of hardware on our console and say this is it, we've figured out what VR is, this is it. Because from a hardware standpoint I think you can kind of do that, though I still think we're early, but from an experience standpoint I don't think we've seen the things that we need to really have VR break out.
"So we will support VR on Scorpio. We said that onstage. We will support VR on Scorpio, we're going to do that, I think it's important, I think there's some great immersive VR experiences."
By Anonymous on Apr 12, 2017 09:36 pm This week we talk about Project Scorpio's specs, Battlefront 2 trailer leaks, Overwatch's new Horde Mode, and why some AAA games are struggling.
Sega has announced that Yakuza Kiwami, a remake of the first game in the series, will be available on PlayStation 4 in America and Europe on August 29.
The remake features "recreated graphics and fully re-recorded Japanese audio by the original voice actors." Additionally, "added distractions and 30 minutes of new cutscenes" have been introduced.
Another gameplay addition is what Sega is calling the "Majima Everywhere" system. In this "the series' deranged, one-eyed maniac will constantly surprise and challenge Kiryu to combat when he least expects it." It sounds a lot like the Mr. Shakedown encounters from Yakuza 0, but Sega has promised it will be extra goofy.
Yakuza Kiwami will be available physically and digitally for $29.99/£29.99/€34.99. Those that pre-order or purchase one of the limited first run copies of the physical version will receive the game in a steelbook case. You can see a picture of it below.
The last entry in the series was Yakuza 0, which was released in January. In GameSpot's Yakuza 0 review, Peter Brown described it as "a fascinating adventure" and awarded it an 8/10.
"Unless you have a strong aversion to violence, sex, or middling graphics, you owe it to yourself to give Zero a chance," he said. "Its story will surprise you, its inhabitants will make you laugh at every turn, and its ambitious scope will redefine how you think about open-world games."
Xbox boss Phil Spencer has stated that Microsoft has "roughly designed" a handheld Xbox in the past, but that he "still believes in the the power of a television."
The executive was talking to Gamasutra about the evolution of Xbox, and where the platform could go in the future.
"Well," he began, "let me say that the amount of times we've designed, roughly designed, an Xbox handheld, or a cheap Xbox kind of stick that you could plug in and stream from an Xbox in the home, or play low-powered games... we are always thinking and brainstorming on different scenarios of where the console could go. Or [where] the gaming experience, I guess, more specifically, could go.
"In terms of where [consoles] will go, I still believe in the power of a television in the home," he stated, before concluding, "I know it's something that we're committed to, in the long run."
Nevertheless, Spencer said he believes there will no doubt be some disruptions in the console space, and he cited the Nintendo Switch as a recent example.
"Nintendo, I thought, did a cool thing with picking mobile. They kind of said okay, Switch is going to be a console that you can take with you. That's an interesting idea. Nintendo always does cool things, right. They did the second screen with Wii U, they obviously did the Wii and motion gaming in the room. I love that innovation."
Every Xbox device to date has been a home console, while Microsoft's main competitors, Nintendo and Sony, have a history of releasing portable devices.
Bethesda's Prey reboot launches in just a few weeks, but fans will get to play the spooky first-person shooter over a week before its release thanks to a playable demo.
Prey Demo: Opening Hour is coming to PlayStation 4 and Xbox One on April 27, eight days ahead of the full game's May 5 launch. Bethesda's press release did not contain any mention of this trial version coming to PC.
The trial will give you a glimpse of life in the shoes of Morgan Yu, lead scientist aboard the Talos I space station. Bethesda has previously revealed that players can choose whether they want to play as a male or female Morgan, and that events will pan out slightly differently depending on which option you pick. Your environment can also change depending on your relationship with Morgan's brother, Alex, who happens to be the boss of Talos I.
The first trailer for Star Wars Battlefront 2 was scheduled to premiere during the Star Wars Celebration event this week in Orlando, but it has arrived early due to a leak. You can watch the trailer here. The trailer is a leak, so it's likely this version, like the previous one, will get taken down soon.
A female soldier narrates the video, which shows there will be a story campaign ("the untold soldier's story," the video says), as well as multiplayer battles that the series is known for. And as rumored, Battlefront 2 won't be limited to one era of Star Wars alone. Instead, "all eras" will be represented, the video says. Some of the characters shown in the video include Darth Maul, Yoda, Rey, and Kylo Ren. You may have a new mode of traversal, too, as it looks like there will be rideable Tauntauns.
We also learn from the video that people who preorder will get access to something called Star Wars: The Last Jedi Heroes. This sounds like it could be content related to the new movie, The Last Jedi, which is due out in December. 2015's Star Wars: Battlefront also received content (Battle of Jakku) tied to a new movie, in that case The Force Awakens.
Today's leaked trailer confirms Battlefront 2 is coming to PlayStation 4. Versions of the game for Xbox One and PC are also expected. It also appears that Sony's co-marketing deal with Disney continues for the sequel, as the new video ends by saying "the Force is strong with PlayStation."
No release date has been announced for Battlefront 2, though launching near The Last Jedi would seem likely.
EA had planned to debut a Battlefront 2 trailer (possibly this one) during a panel at Star Wars Celebration on April 15. The panel is titled, "The Galaxywide Premiere of Star Wars Battlefront II," and it takes place at 11:30 AM PT on April 15; you can watch it live.
What do you make of the first (leaked) trailer for Battlefront 2? Let us know in the comments below!
The latest trailer for Transformers: The Last knight has been released. The fifth movie in the blockbuster action series hits theaters in June, and this new trailer suggests it will be the biggest, loudest, most spectacular entry yet. Check it out bellow:
The movie stars Mark Wahlberg, Isabela Moner, Anthony Hopkins, Josh Duhamel, Stanley Tucci, and John Goodman. It is directed by Michael Bay, who has previously stated that this will be his last movie in the series.
Hopkins was interviewed recently by Yahoo Movies and had plenty of praise for Bay. "This guy's a genius, he really is,'" he said. "He's the same ilk as Oliver Stone and Spielberg and Scorsese. They're brilliant. Savants. I mean, he's a savant."
Here's a look at a Project Scorpio dev kit.
This week we talk about Project Scorpio's specs, Battlefront 2 trailer leaks, Overwatch's new Horde Mode, and why some AAA games are struggling.
A Sony ad has leaked the first trailer.
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