Category: Platforms

Parent Category for All Gaming Platforms discussed on Twinstiq

Wrestling with your PC?

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I happened to be doing my daily Steam search for sales and I noticed an odd one. 
It looks like WWE 2K15 will be coming to steam April 28th, which is just six days away. This version includes all the DLC for the game and seems to be the next gen console version complete with my favorite addition to WWE 2K, My Career mode. I'm pretty excited as I've wanted a PC wrestling game ever since WWE RAW came out and stunk up the joint. Excited? Apathetic? Hoping to see me streaming My Career mode? Leave a comment below.

Get up to 13 Games in EA’s Humble Origin Bundle 2

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Electronic Arts is putting up some excellent games for you to pick up, and 100% of the proceeds are going to charities such as Girls Who Code which attempts to close the gender gap in engineering and programming, The V Foundation for cancer research, and buildOn which runs after school services and neighborhood improvement programs for urban youths. Read on to find out what the games are and where you can get them!
The lowest payment tier will get you:

  • Dead Space 2
  • Commander & Conquer Generals + Zero Hour DLC
  • Medal of Honor Allied Assault: War Chest
  • Dragon Age: Origins
  • Peggle

If you want to pay more than the average, you'll also get:

  • Plants vs. Zombies: Garden Warfare
  • Bejeweled 3
  • Mass Effect 2
  • Ultima VII: The Complete Edition
  • Wing Commander IV: The Price of Freedom
  • Wing Commander III: Heart of the Tiger
  • SimCity 2000
  • Dragon Age II

You'll be able to redeem the games on Steam, Origin on the Windows OS.
Source: GameSpot

Elder Scrolls Online Console Beta Starts Tomorrow

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Check your inboxes! If you're one of the lucky ones who got a beta invitation, you'll be able to start the limited public beta for The Elder Scrolls Online tomorrow on PS4 and Xbox One. and lasts until the 27th of April. There's no NDA in place, so we may learn a lot about performance and stability.
Since unforeseen issues may arise, PC characters will not carry over for the duration of the beta. For that, you'll have to wait until the official launch on June 9th. Xbox One and PlayStation 4 servers will be isolated from each other and the PC version.
Source: Gematsu

Halo 3: ODST Due Next Month

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The official Halo Waypoint blog has announced that Halo 3: ODST will launch alongside the Master Chief Collection content pack due in May. The update contains the Relic multiplayer map, and many fixes for ranking, matchmaking penalties, and stability.
Remember that if you bought the Master Chief Collection between November 11, 2014, and December 19, 2014, you are entitled to receive the Halo 3: ODST campaign for free.

New PlayStation Store Releases: Shovel Knight!

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Finally making its way to Sony platforms this week is none other than the retro indie darling, Shovel Knight (as a sexy Cross Buy 3-Way, no less)! Also releasing this week, Assassin's Creed (goes to) China, and LA Cops (you can find our review of that one here). Head past the break to dig up the complete list of new releases.
PlayStation 4

[Image: Yacht Club Games]

Xbox Deals With Gold: 21st – 27th April 2015

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This week, Xbox Deals With Gold is all about Call of Duty. First up is Ghosts, which offers a 60% discount on both the Xbox One and 360. Then you can also get Call of Duty 3 and Black Ops II (or Cod Blops Deux, as I like to call it) at a nice discount. There's a couple other non-CoDfish games on sale this week as well. Head past the break to see the complete list of deals.
Xbox One

Call of Duty: Ghosts - 60% Discount
Never Alone (Kisima Ingitchuna) - 40% Discount
We Are Doomed - 10% Discount
Xbox 360

Call of Duty: Ghosts - 60% Discount
Call of Duty: Black Ops II - 66% Discount
Call of Duty 3 - 50% Discount
[Image: Activision]

Andrew J Amideo
[Source: Major Nelson]

Phil Harrison’s New Venture Licenses Unannounced MS Tech

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We previously reported on Phil Harrison's departure from Microsoft. Since then, he has founded Alloy Platform Industries, a startup focused on top-secret bleeding edge consumer tech. Harrison mentions that "Alloy has licensed some [...] unannounced technology that nobody outside of Microsoft knows about." Very exciting stuff!
While the ex-Xbox boss doesn't state exactly what his company will be doing, he does mention that the most money to be found from marketing these technologies is in the phone and games industry. Staying in stealth mode for the foreseeable future, Harrison must believe that what Alloy is working on is highly innovative, but we'll have to wait for Harrison to pull the curtain back to learn more.

"We'll stay in stealth mode for a while. It's very exciting, and something I've been planning for a little over a year, in full consultation and collaboration with Microsoft, specifically with Phil Spencer."

If the project is at all related to highly secretive Microsoft tech, then perhaps a partnership is in the works. Is it something for Windows Phone? The Xbox One? The desktop or tablet space? What do you think?

A Warning Against Buying Expensive SSDs for Games

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Are you thinking of purchasing an expensive PCI Express Solid State Drive to help improve load times for your favorite games? You might want to hold onto your wallet when you hear about this.

PCIe SSDs tend to offer faster boot times than older SATA based SSDs, so it would seem logical that they would improve game load times as well. According to a hardware benchmark including today's expensive top of the line drives and traditional consumer grade SSDs, it turns out that may not be the case.
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When it comes to streaming texture and map data from a drive, the benefits of the PCI Express interface such as more IOPS (input/output operations per second) don't help very much. This would matter more for referencing a database, or running many virtual machine instances on a server. The bottleneck for entertainment applications is usually top throughput speed.

Games typically won't be able to take advantage of PCIe drives, they merely load large globs of data that are already optimized for streaming, and don't need to worry about multiple tiny cache writes and on-disk lookup tables. That type of thing is typically done on the graphics hardware in much faster RAM anyway.

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If you're the type of power user that wants to hot rod his or her PC, save that cash for a more substantial upgrade later on, or simply just to buy more games.
Source: Slashdot

Microsoft Aims for Sony’s Sore Spot With E3 Focus on First Party

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With Uncharted being pushed to 2016 and the Xbox One lock on Tomb Raider, Microsoft is further exploiting a perceived weakness in its arch rival by focusing on first party exclusives at this year's E3. The head of Microsoft's Xbox Division, Phil Spencer, is saying "this may be the best year for first-party content on Microsoft consoles than ever before."
At least one exclusive new first party IP will be unveiled at this year's E3 in addition to other franchises that will see new entries unique to the Xbox One's library. Perhaps we'll see more of Crackdown, a title which was previously used to demonstrate the potential of leveraging Microsoft's cloud computing. What would you like to see?
Source: Neowin