Westworld is back for Season 3 on HBO! Lucy and Tamoor break down the plot, characters and key moments from the season premiere.
Matrix 4 Is The Latest Movie To Stop Production During Coronavirus Pandemic
The Matrix 4 is in production. Well, it was until Warner Bros. decided to pull the plug on it because of the COVID-19 (coronavirus) pandemic that is currently underway.
The film had wrapped up shooting in San Francisco and was picking back up in Berlin, according to Variety. However, because of President Trump’s travel restrictions, WB executives felt that it was best to postpone shooting for the time being.
The film was set to release on May 21, 2021–the same day as John Wick: Chapter 4. It is unknown at this time as to when production will start back up and whether or not this stoppage will affect the release date of the movie.
This Air Force Veteran Helps Traumatized Soldiers Flourish Through Farming
After ten years of service, LeeAnn Murphy sees volunteer work with Veterans to Farmers as her “second service.”
How This Military Wife Changed Her Approach To Deployment And Transformed Her Life
Military wife Becky Hoy encourages “heroes at home” to opt in.
After 20 Years Of Military Service, This Single Mom Is Giving Back To Female Vets
Because “no one comes back the same way they went in.”
States, Cities Put Bans On Restaurants And Bars To Stem Coronavirus Spread
Several states and major cities have prohibited dine-in services at eateries and drinking holes.
Core Is Like Fortnite Mashed-Up With Dreams, And It’s Now In Open Alpha
Core, the new game/creation tool hybrid coming from Manticore Games, allows players to craft, share, and play within custom worlds designed around different experiences. Core is well situated within an already growing space populated by other games like Fortnite, Dreams, and Minecraft. However, as a free-to-play game on PC, Core does things differently by focusing more on the experience of exploring different player worlds, tying into a more extensive network that is essentially a multiverse of unique player-created landscapes.
Out now in open alpha on PC, newcomers will be able to join the online community that the game has already formed during its closed alpha period, and take many of the player-creations for a test run, or dive into the mechanics head-on to push the limits of the system themselves. But what sets Core apart from games like Fortnite and Dreams is the level of flexibility to explore and experiment with the various constructs. When players dive into the game, they can just stick with one player’s level, such as a standard multiplayer deathmatch with other players set in custom created locales. However, if you want to switch things up without leaving the game, you can seamlessly hop over to different levels via an in-game portal, no matter how different they are.
Much like in games such as Dreams and LittleBigPlanet, you’ll be able to work within a robust level and map editor to design a variety of different spaces and retool various aspects of the core gameplay. In addition to using other player creations as a base, letting you get a grasp of the systems and go from there, you can also make a world from scratch and mold it into any type of experience you see fit. On a mechanic-level, Core feels most accustomed to the mechanics of a shooter, like Fortnite, but players will be able to reshape the game into something else entirely. Instead of being locked into one type of experience until you exit the game, you can portal hop over into a drastically different game and setting–akin to switching over to a different channel.
New Xbox Series X Details: Specs, Quick Resume, Controller, And Everything We Just Learned
Microsoft’s next-generation Xbox Series X arrives later this year, and the company has been gradually revealing new details about it in the lead up to its release. We’ve now learned a wealth of new information about the upcoming system in an Xbox Wire post and Digital Foundry report, including its official specifications and how its Quick Resume function will work. To help catch you up on all the details, we’ve rounded up everything new we’ve learned about Xbox Series X below.
Xbox Series X Full Specs Revealed
We’ve previously known some broad details about Xbox Series X’s hardware, but Microsoft has now revealed the console’s full specs. The system offers 12 teraflops of performance and boasts 16 GB of GDDR6 memory across a variable memory bus. It will also support two types of external memory, allowing you to expand SSD storage with a proprietary drive from Seagate or store games on an external HDD (much as you can with Xbox One).
- CPU: 8x Zen 2 Cores at 3.8GHz (3.6GHz with SMT)
- GPU: 12 TFLOPs, 52 CUs at 1.825GHz, Custom RDNA 2
- Die Size: 360.45mm2
- Process: TSMC 7nm Enhanced
- Memory: 16GB GDDR6
- Memory Bandwidth: 10GB at 560GB/s, 6GB at 336GB/s
- Internal Storage: 1TB Custom NVMe SSD
- IO Throughput: 2.4GB/s (Raw), 4.8GB/s (Compressed)
- Expandable Storage: 1TB Expansion Card
- External Storage: USB 3.2 HDD Support
- Optical Drive: 4K UHD Blu-ray Drive
- Performance Target: 4K at 60fps – up to 120fps
Quick Resume And Faster Loading
Animal Crossing: New Horizons Review Roundup
Animal Crossing is well-known for its leisurely pace of play, and that attitude also applies to its release schedule. Barring a few spin-offs of varying quality, New Horizons–which is set to release this Friday, March 20–is the first core entry in the series since 2012’s New Leaf. This Switch title takes the series in a fresh direction, placing the player in charge of a deserted island, and introducing Minecraft-like crafting systems to the game.
Reviews for the bubbly sim game are in, and they’re overwhelmingly positive, including our 8/10 review-in-progress. “There’s only so much you can do every day in Animal Crossing,” our critic Kallie Plagge wrote. “Part of the fun of its real-time clock is going to bed wondering what you might wake up to in the morning–how your town might change, who might move in, what special visitor might be there tomorrow. So far, I’ve played Animal Crossing: New Horizons for 80 hours over 17 days, and that anticipation hasn’t yet gone away. While I’ve spent a lot of time developing my island so far, I still feel as if there’s plenty left for me to do and see–there’s a lot in New Horizons to occupy your time with.”
We’ve rounded up some more reviews below, with most of them striking a fairly similar tone. In general, critics are impressed by the integration of the new survival-inspired mechanics within the existing framework of the series. On the other hand, some express concerns about the game’s pace and overall longevity. For more reviews, check out our sister site Metacritic to see what even more writers had to say.
Xbox Series X Adds HDR To Older Games That Don’t Have HDR
The Xbox Series X can use a Smart Delivery feature to give you a version of software that matches your current hardware power, but even older games that haven’t been enhanced for new hardware will get a visual upgrade. According to a detailed breakdown from Digital Foundry, the Series X will use a machine-learning algorithm to upgrade older games with high-dynamic range (HDR) color.
The report says both Halo 5 and Fusion Frenzy were shown running with HDR, and a heatmap showed highlights that went beyond the capabilities of standard dynamic range. The examples were a technical demo, but principal software engineer Claude Marais said it could “be applied to all games theoretically.” That said, he said the team is still working through things like user experiences.
“This was a show-stopping moment,” the report states. “It was indeed Fusion Frenzy – an original Xbox title – running with its usual 16x resolution multiplier via back-compat, but this time presented with highly convincing, perceptibly real HDR.”