Month: March 2020

Absurdist comedy duo Tim Heidecker and Eric Weirheim are coming back to Adult Swim for their fourth show, Beef House, a “sitcom” (emphasis on the air-quotes) about a group of men living in a, well, Beef House. What is a Beef House? We’re not exactly sure, but we can’t wait to find out. Check out the new trailer to get some idea of just what you’re in for.

This will be Tim and Eric’s fourth Adult Swim collaboration following their earlier work, Tom Goes To The Mayor, Tim And Eric Awesome Show Great Job, and Tim And Eric’s Bedtime Stories. They’re also partially responsible for the John C. Riley spin-off show, Check It Out! With Doctor Steve Brule, where Riley’s character, the titular Dr. Steve Brule, regularly visited with Tim and Eric mainstay characters Jan and Wayne Skyler, the married news team.

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During today’s Road to PS5 presentation, Sony PlayStation chief architect Mark Cerny revealed some of the big changes coming to the next-gen consoles, including the switch to SSDs which among other things, will eliminate the long game installs that exist as it does today on PS4.

An early portion of Cerny’s PS5 tech talk revolves around the switch to SSDs, which he says will promise much faster performance on the next-gen consoles. One area in which this will become noticeable is installing new games or patches.

Currently, when a PS4 game downloads a patch onto the HDD, the console will take a long time to install the patch. This is because a brand new file has to be created each time a new patch is downloaded, or else the game will add a new seek and create performance problems later on.

A game with numerous patches on the PS4 will sometimes exhibit performance issues because of added Seek time, or the measure of time it takes for a computer to find a piece of data on a hard drive.

“With an SSD though, no seeks. So no need to make brand-new files with the changes incorporated. Which means no installs as you know them today,” Cerny revealed.

With the speed Cerny is promising with the PS5 thanks to an SSD, games will load faster, developers will have more maneuverability and space to design bigger games, and thankfully, there will be fewer install times.

Check out the full PS5 specs here.

Developing…

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Matt Kim is a reporter for IGN.

After a whole bunch of speculation from the Overwatch community, Blizzard has finally revealed the identity of its hero shooter’s next character. It’s Echo, a robotic character we saw back during BlizzCon 2019‘s Overwatch 2 announcement.

Blizzard dropped an origin story video to give players a sense of who Echo is, which you can watch below. According to Blizzard’s tweet introducing the Echo video, she’s “an evolutionary robot programmed with a rapidly adapting artificial intelligence.” It didn’t say when Echo will be available in the game, however.

We also don’t know yet what “rapidly adapting artificial intelligence” means in terms of gameplay. Blizzard hasn’t revealed Echo’s role or capabilities yet, so we’ll have to wait and see what the super robot will bring to her Overwatch teams.

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Overwatch’s 32nd hero has been revealed, an omnic named Echo.

Blizzard had teased Overwatch’s next hero reveal in recent days, but made things official this morning with the drop of Echo’s story trailer, which you can watch below.

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While not much else is known yet about Echo, the official trailer description describes them by saying “an evolutionary robot programmed with a rapidly adapting artificial intelligence, Echo represents the cutting edge of technology.” The story trailer shows Echo as a robot made by a member of Overwatch to “help the world.” One shot also shows a young Soldier 76 inviting its creator to Overwatch despite her having a hand in creating Omnics in the first place.

But this isn’t even close to the first time we’ve seen Echo, with the Overwatch community speculating about Echo’s arrival for years now – though the assumption was generally that they would be named Athena. Echo appeared in an Overwatch animated short called Reunion way back in 2018, and has technically been “in the game” the whole time as the payload on Route 66. A similar looking robot can even be seen in an extremely early piece of concept part.

Details on Echo’s abilities aren’t available yet, nor when they might be added (though the official YouTube channel says “Coming Soon”), but we’ll be sure to update this post when we know either.

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Tom Marks is IGN’s Deputy Reviews Editor and resident pie maker. You can follow him on Twitter.

 

At this time, streaming services are coming in handy to keep us entertained while we all practice social distancing. Luckily, we can look ahead to see what is coming to Disney+ for the month of April. Aside from more Clone Wars episodes, there are plenty of new movies, TV shows, and originals to check out.

Every Friday, a new episode of the final season of Star Wars: The Clone Wars arrives. April kicks off with Episode 7, titled “Dangerous Debt.” The official synopsis for the episode reads, “Taken prisoner by the Pykes, Ahsoka and the Martez sisters attempt to escape.” The season so far has been a lot of fun, and it introduced us to the characters, The Bad Batch. They’re a group of defective clones that remind us of the Ninja Turtles.

Additionally, to celebrate Earth Month, Disney+ is curating specials from the studio along with National Geographic to celebrate the natural world. Most the specials in the collection are already available, but Disney+ plans on highlighting them for the month–most likely in its own section on the front page. We highly recommend checking out NatGeo’s content as much of it is shot beautifully and is on par with BBC’s Planet Earth series.

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If you’ve been sitting on the fence waiting for Apple to finally update the iPad Pro, your wait is finally over.

This morning the Cupertino company introduced its 2020 refresh of both the 11-inch and 12.9-inch iPad Pro. They don’t feature a new design or the iPhone 11 Pro’s Super Retina Display, but they have been tuned up with an A12Z Bionic chip that promises to be faster than most Windows-based laptops.

Apple’s new tablet is also the first iPad to receive an Ultra-Wide camera—putting it on par with the iPhone 11—and studio-quality mics. Lastly, the new iPad Pro models feature a LiDAR Scanner for depth sensing and AR-powered apps.

What’s far more impressive is the new iPad keyboard Apple has rolled out. Firstly, it features a trackpad for the first time, allowing you to use your tablet like a genuine macOS device. This new Magic Keyboard also allows you to elevate your iPad Pro at a more comfortable typing and working angle.

The new 11-inch iPad Pro starts at $799 and the 12.9-inch iPad Pro runs for $999. Both base models come with 128GB of storage space. Of course, you have the option of picking the larger 256GB, 512GB, and 1TB capacities as well as adding 4G LTE cellular connectivity.

Of course, the iPad Pro doesn’t come with an included keyboard, so you’ll have to pony up $129 for the Smart Folio Keyboard. And if you want Apple’s new Magic Keyboard and its attached trackpad, that’ll be $299 for the 11-inch model, or $349 for the 12.9-inch one (yes, it really costs almost half as much as an 11-inch iPad Pro).

The MacBook Air is affordable again

Apple also announced a refreshed MacBook Air as its second laptop to receive the overhauled scissor switch-based Magic Keyboard.

Now that the new MacBook Air has ditched that Apple’s faulty butterfly mechanism, it should be a far more reliable typing companion. Plus, you get the same 1mm of keyboard travel as the 16-inch MacBook Pro.

The MacBook Air also features Intel’s latest 10nm Ice Lake Y-series processors with Intel Iris Plus Graphics, which promise to deliver 80% improved graphics performance.

Best of all Apple has dropped the price of the MacBook Air to $999—$100 less than the device’s initial $1,099 starting price—while also doubling the standard storage capacity to 256GB.

Speaking of doubling storage, the standard $799 configuration of the Mac Mini now comes with 256GB of storage as well.

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Kevin Lee is IGN’s Hardware and Roundups Editor. Follow him on Twitter @baggingspam

As part of Sony’s big PlayStation 5 information blowout during a GDC livestream, the company officially announced the specs for the next-generation console. In short, it’s a very powerful machine.

PlayStation system architect Mark Cerny is discussing the PS5 hardware as we speak, but during the stream, Digital Foundry published a feature revealing the system’s specs. Its CPU features 8 Zen 2 cores, and its GPU–using custom RDNA 2 architecture–offers 10.28 TFLOPs of power. It comes with 16 GB of memory and an 825 GB SSD, and it allows for storage to be expanded with an NVMe SSD slot.

Cerny noted during his chat that TFLOPs alone aren’t the ultimate measure of performance; you can’t simply compare compute units or FLOPs from PS4 to those of PS5, for instance. While that TFLOPs figure is lower than that of the Xbox Series X, Digital Foundry states, “Sony’s pitch is essentially this: a smaller GPU can be a more nimble, more agile GPU, the inference being that PS5’s graphics core should be able to deliver performance higher than you may expect from a TFLOPs number that doesn’t accurately encompass the capabilities of all parts of the GPU.”

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