Month: January 2018

Technology is ever evolving, and it’s an industry that moves fast. While 2017 brought us a slew of new tech toys that include the Xbox One X, Nintendo Switch, and more, there’s still a lot of hardware that we want that hasn’t hit the market yet. We’ve compiled a list of components and gadgets that includes advances in displays, VR, AR, GPUs, and more that we hope to release in 2018.

High Refresh Rate 4K Monitors

4K displays have become much more affordable in 2017. But while ultra-high definition displays went more mainstream, many PC enthusiasts have opted for high refresh rate monitors, trading in pixel count for higher performance. Refresh rate dictates the number of frames a certain screen can display at any second; high-end 1080p and 1440p monitors will have a 144Hz refresh rate instead of the standard 60Hz. As of now, 4K monitors on the market only reach 60Hz. High refresh rate 4K monitors would be the next step for displays in PC gaming.

However, there’s a bit of a catch. To take advantage of the hertz increase, your PC has to be powerful enough to produce those higher framerates. The only GPUs capable of high FPS in 4K are enthusiast-level cards (GTX 1080, RX Vega 64, GTX 1080 Ti), and even these GPUs sometimes struggle to maintain 60 FPS. 4K high refresh monitors would need to come out alongside the next generation GPUs for them to be truly worthwhile.

Nvidia Volta GeForce GPUs

Nvidia recently launched its $3,000 Titan V GPU based on the company’s new Volta micro-architecture. The card is capable of delivering 110 teraflops of performance, but it’s prohibitively expensive and is designed for data scientists. Hopefully the Titan V paves the way for Volta-based GeForce cards geared towards gamers in 2018. We’re hoping that it maintains the Titan V’s efficient 12nm manufacturing process along with the newer high-bandwidth memory 2 (HBM2) video RAM. Nvidia claims that Volta is twice as power-efficient as the company’s Pascal architecture, so it sounds really promising from a performance perspective.

HDR OLED Gaming Monitors

Companies like Asus, Acer, and Dell have teased HDR monitors in 2017, but there aren’t many options out on the market at the moment. HDR OLED gaming monitors, which can provide true black levels with their individually backlit pixels, are non-existent. While you can purchase 4K HDR TVs today, hopefully 2018 brings HDR OLED gaming monitors to the fold. The colors and contrast that they would offer would be a very welcomed option.

AMD Vega Refresh, Mid-Range Options or Enthusiast-Level Card

Now that we no longer have to ‘wait for Vega,’ we can look to how AMD is going to make its next step after setting a strong foundation with its RX Vega 64 and RX Vega 56 GPUs. At the mid-range and budget-level, AMD offers the RX 500-series, which was a simple refresh of its older RX 400-series, but it’d be nice to see a more affordable Vega-architecture card in 2018. Considering that the Vega 56 is $400 MSRP, something cheaper would be much appreciated.

A refresh of the current Vega cards is also a good prospect. Both current models use a lot more power than their Nvidia competitors. Also, an AMD card to stand up to the GTX 1080 Ti seems plausible.

N64 Classic

Considering we got the NES classic in 2016, and the SNES Classic in 2017, it stands to reason that we’ll get an N64 Classic in 2018, or at least we hope. While the N64 didn’t feature the deepest game library in existence, it produced gems like Super Mario 64, Mario Kart 64, Mario Party, and The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. The N64 also suffered from frame rate dips, but if Nintendo could re-release a tiny version of the console that irons out the performance issues so that all of its games would run at a consistent 60 FPS, that would be amazing. It should, of course, also support four controllers. The icing on the cake would be if GoldenEye 64 came with it, though that is admittedly a pipe dream considering the game’s rights have changed significantly since it came out in 1997.

Hololens

When Microsoft initially revealed the HoloLens in 2015, the AR headset showed tremendous potential. It was able to project believable tracked holograms into living rooms without the need for external sensors. This meant you could see a little Minecraft cave etched into a wall or see virtual characters walking around a real house. Unfortunately, the headset has only been sold as dev kits for $3,000. We also haven’t heard much from Microsoft about it since. Hopefully 2018 will be the year Microsoft’s AR headset makes a resurgence and releases to consumers.

After the jaw-dropping events of “eXploited”, The Gifted stumbled with “3 X1.” Instead of continuing to move the show into new and dangerous places, this episode spent most of its time spinning its wheels as characters made decisions that were, at best, logically dubious.

Warning: this review contains full spoilers!

The confusion started at the outset when we see the three reunited Cuckoos explaining where all of the major characters are now, but what doesn’t track is how they let it wind up like that. The Hellfire Club clearly wants the Strucker children and the heavy-hitters of the mutant underground, so why wouldn’t they use their powers (or just pick up a gun off one of the many dead Sentinel Services officers) and force them to come along with them to Hellfire HQ? Yes, the Cuckoos do explain that things got a bit crazy with all the alarms going off and they decided to flee, but for a calculating character like Esme, surely she could have accounted for that.

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Platinum Games, the company behind action titles like Bayonetta, Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance, and Nier: Automata, has a number of projects in the works right now. We already know the company is making Bayonetta 3 for Nintendo Switch and co-developing Lost Order and Granblue Fantasy Project Re: Link for mobile and PlayStation 4, respectively, but it seems there are even more projects on the way.

The company’s head of development, Atsushi Inaba, told Game Informer that Platinum is in the initial stages of planning a further two projects: “We’ve pretty much opened the company up to ‘Anybody can pitch a game,’ and so over the last year we’ve gotten about 70 design documents from different people,” Inaba said. “So [2017 was] about us basically diluting which stuff we wanted to focus on and not focus on, and drilling down to the point where we now have two designs that we’re genuinely focused on.”

He continued: “We can’t put together a AAA, $10 million-plus game, because we just don’t have that sort of cash as an independent developer. However, we don’t plan to go the indies route with just a few people on a team making a game, so it’ll be somewhere in the middle, looking at probably about 20 people on the staff making the game, so that’ll still be a healthy [size].”

Inaba also stated that Platinum is looking to self-publish more of its games going forward–every one of its games so far have been published by other companies. “One of the things Platinum is focused on is we’re looking into creating our own IP, creating our own game,” he said. “Up until now, obviously we’ve worked on original IPs for a wide variety of publishers. We’ve also worked on other Hollywood IPs for other publishers as well. But we’re becoming more and more interested in the idea of self-publishing and doing our own title.”

However, Inaba says this doesn’t mean the end of Platinum working on other companies’ franchises: “We will continue to do AAA games for other publishers and that’s because, again, we don’t have the cash flow to take on the risk to only do self-published games.”

Bayonetta 3 will be published by Nintendo, but we don’t yet know a release date. Until recently, Platinum was also working on a game for Xbox One. However, Microsoft canceled Scalebound, saying the move would be “better for Xbox gamers.”

Platinum’s most recent game was the PS4 and PC exclusive Nier: Automata, which we said was the #10 best game of the year in 2017. For more, check out our Nier: Automata review.

Learn about new shows and discover when your favorites return with this guide to Winter/Spring TV – from X-Files to Jessica Jones to Black Lightning.

Let’s be honest: there’s no release date that inspires less confidence than the first weekend of January, which has recently given us such horror classics as The Forest, The Woman in Black 2: Angel of Death, Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones, Texas Chainsaw 3D and The Devil Inside. Yeesh.

So compared to that crop of… let’s just call it “crop”… Insidious: The Last Key is a fairly adequate supernatural horror thriller, with a few decent scares and another great turn by Lin Shaye as the unassuming but deeply heroic ghostbuster Elise Rainier. But compared to all the other films in the Insidious series, and to other horror films in general, it’s clearly a bit of a letdown.

Insidious: The Last Key is the fourth film in the franchise, and the second prequel in a row. The previous entry, Insidious: Chapter 3, revealed how Elise met her comic relief sidekicks Specs (Leigh Whannell) and Tucker (Angus Sampson), and the new film – which isn’t called a “chapter”, a fact which already implies that this is more like a footnote – is all about their first major adventure as an official team.

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Rocket League has hit another major milestone, reaching 40 million players across PC, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch.

Developer Psyonix announced the news on Twitter, with the game now having gained two million more players in just a few weeks. Rocket League hit 38 million registered players earlier in December.

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