Gamer's Outpost Press (Archived)

by Marc Graser

Hackers “overwhelmed” Sony’s PlayStation Network on Sunday, making the service unavailable to its tens of millions of users.

The move brought back painful memories for Sony of a serious 2011 breach that exposed the names and passwords of millions of customers on the PlayStation Network.

While the latest attack wasn’t a significant security flaw in its service, Sunday’s event raises questions whether Sony’s system — which the company sees as a major distribution platform, and thus revenue stream, for video games, movies, TV shows, web series and music — is vulnerable to future hacks.

Sony wasn’t alone with Microsoft’s Xbox Live also hit by hackers. “Gaming and social” features were limited Monday with owners of the Xbox One and Xbox 360 consoles unable to play games online or communicate via chat. The company said its support team was working “to get these issues fixed ASAP.”

“Xbox members, are you having trouble connecting to Party Chat, or running into server unavailability issues within ‘Diablo III?’” Xbox wrote on its blog on Monday. “We are currently working with our partner to get these issues fixed as quickly as possible. Thanks for being patient during this process. We’ll provide an update to you when we have more information.”

A hacker group called Lizard Squad on Sunday claimed to take down the PSN via a similar distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack, which prevented users from streaming Netflix movies or playing multiplayer games online via their PlayStation Plus accounts due to heavy traffic. That was before turning its attention to the Xbox Live service.

On its Twitter feed, Sunday, Lizard Squad posted that it was “preaching” that Sony should be spending more money to protect its customers’ accounts from such hacks.

It tweeted: “Sony, yet another large company, but they aren’t spending the waves of cash they obtain on their customers’ PSN service. End the greed.”

It’s worth noting that DDoS attacks are designed to flood a system’s servers with artificially high traffic and not access encrypted information, but rather disrupt access and overwhelm a service to the point where it must shut down.

The PlayStation Network and Sony Entertainment Network were hit by “an attempt to overwhelm our network with artificially high traffic,” Sony said Sunday in a blog post.

The Lizard Squad also spent the weekend attacking other gaming servers like Blizzard Entertainment’s Battle.net, Riot Games’ “League of Legends,” and Grinding Gear Games’ “Path of Exile.”

In 2011, hacker group Lulzsec attacked the same PSN network, exposing the personal information, including passwords and credit card data, of 77 million accounts. It took Sony 24 days to fix the problem, and spent $15 million to settle a class action lawsuit.

Sony execs are sure to be double checking any security holes that need to be plugged in its system after Sunday’s event.

The PlayStation Network, which offers up streaming services and access to the PlayStation Store to buy and rent movies and other entertainment, is free. However, Sony charges $50 a year for gamers to play multiplayer games on the PlayStation 4. Doing so on the PlayStation 3 is free.

As of July, Sony had sold 10 million PlayStation 4 videogame consoles.

Lizard Squad certainly took the hack to extremes over the weekend, calling out terrorist organization ISIS with a tweet: “Today we planted the ISIS flag on @Sony’s servers #ISIS #jihad” and posting tweets to American Airlines about a bomb threat on an American Airlines flight that carried Sony Online Entertainment president John Smedley.

The plane landed in Phoenix, with Smedley responding via Twitter: “Yes. My plane was diverted. Not going to discuss more than that. Justice will find these guys.”

The PlayStation Network and Sony Entertainment Network are now back online. A scheduled maintenance of the networks, which were set to occur Monday, has been canceled, Sony said on its PlayStation blog.

“The networks were taken offline due to a distributed denial of service attack. We have seen no evidence of any intrusion to the network and no evidence of any unauthorized access to users’ personal information. We sincerely apologize for the inconvenience caused by this issue. Thanks for your patience and support.”

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by Will Holden

There’s no doubting that Destiny is one of the most anticipated games of the year. Bungie’s brand new sci-fi world has already captured the imaginations of the millions of gamers who participated in its alpha and beta versions. We recently had a chance to sit down with Eric Hirshberg, the CEO of Activision, to discuss why he feels delaying the game a while back was the right decision.

“It was the right decision to delay it because you never get a second chance to launch [a new game] and make that first impression. Obviously we wanted to prioritize getting the game right and setup for the 10 year vision that we have for ‘Destiny’.”

As for the idea that Destiny’s release date would conflict with Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare’s November release, Hirshberg stated that he didn’t feel it would be much of an issue. He told us that the two games’ release dates are about as far apart as they could be while still remaining in the holiday quarter. He also noted that, while both games are first-person action games, their style and approach to the genre vary greatly.

“One is a gritty, somewhat realistic, military shooter, and the other one is a far-future fantasy with capes and aliens and takes place on other planets. So yes, they both have the first-person point of view in common, but I think they’ll actually attract some different types of fans.”

Even with the differing fan bases, Hirshberg notes that there will be plenty of crossover as well. He stated that the first-person genre has proven to have enough of a mass appeal to allow for multiple blockbuster titles to release within the same season. It also doesn’t hurt that the Call of Duty series has seen consistent success over the last several years, and that Bungie’s Halo franchise has earned the company a dedicated fan base of their own.

Destiny will be available for the PS3, PS4, Xbox 360 and Xbox One when it launches on September 9th. Prospective PS4 owners can look forward to the white console bundle that will be releasing on the same day.

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by Rashid Sayed

Housemarque are currently working on Alienation, a PlayStation 4 exclusive which was revealed during last week’s Sony Gamescom presentation. For those of you who don’t know, Housemarque is the developer behind last year’s critical hit Resogun which was praised not only for its gameplay but also for its slick visuals running at 1080p and 60fps.

Given that Alienation is their second major project on the PlayStation 4, does it make them comfortable that they are working on a machine that has allowed achieving those targets without any major development challenges?

“I would argue on the “without major development challenges” part. PS4 is powerful, but it really depends on what you have on screen,” Tommaso De Benetti from Housemarque said to GamingBolt. “In Alienation we have destructible environments, a new tech for liquids, another one for rendering materials such as metals, plus a pretty insane particle system. I mean, if you’re running a puzzle game, sure, 1080p and 60fps are not a challenge.”

It’s important to note that this in no way indicates Alienation will run below 1080p and 60fps and in fact they are still working on optimizing the game. Given that the game comes out in 2015, we can hope that Housemarque achieves that standard once again.

Let us know your thoughts in the comments below.

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by Gunther Barbosa

PC vs Consoles is always a popular topic among gamers. With the release of the next-gen gaming consoles PS4 and Xbox One and recent announcement of Valve’s Steam Machines, it looks like the PC vs Console debate will grow more and won’t die down any time soon.

In a report by Cinema Blend, The CyberpowerPC Steam Machine looks like it will be a threat to living-room gaming supremacy held by Sony and Microsoft as, by looking at its specs, it is significantly more powerful than the next-gen consoles at almost the same price.

Here’s a comparison between the next-gen consoles and the CyberpowerPC Steam Machine:

CPU
The Xbox One and PS4 both have Jaguar APU technology provided by AMD. Both systems also house octo-core processors. The PS4’s core clock speed is 1.6ghz with a max OC range of 2.75ghz per core. The Xbox One’s core processing speed is 1.75ghz according to Microsoft.

By comparison, the CyberpowerPC Steam Machine has an A6-6400K 3.90 GHz CPU from AMD. Compared to the tablet-style Jaguar APUs in the Xbox One and PS4, overclocked, the A6-6400K has more brute-force performance per core, even though the PS4 and Xbox One have more cores. Essentially, this could mean the A6-6400K could be out-classed with games that take advantage of multi-threaded design configurations, but those games are far and few between.

GPU
While the APUs for the Xbox One and PS4 have the CPU and GPU sharing a die, they’re still clocked differently enough to stand against the comparison of what will be featured in the OEM Steam Machines. The Xbox One’s GPU was upgraded by 53mhz just before going into production, allowing for an 853mhz core clock speed of the GPU with 12 compute units. The PS4 has an 800mhz core clock speed with 18 compute units. The PS4 has some custom design work done on the GPU which allows the GPU to out muscle the Xbox One by a theoretical performance rate of up to 50%.

The CyberpowerPC Steam Machine has a Radeon R9 270 with 2GB GDDR5 VRAM. According to Cinema Blend, The Xbox One’s GPU is about equivalent to an underclocked 7770, which by comparison, would mean the R9 270 outdoes the Xbox One in memory bandwidth by about 150% and a pixel rate of more than 100%. With the PS4’s GPU capabilities closer to a Radeon HD 7870, that would mean the R9 270 is potentially 17% faster when it comes to memory bandwidth and 11% more powerful when it comes to pixel computations according to Hardware Compare. Of course, the R9 270 can scale with overclocking, enabling it to outperform the PS4 over the long haul with proper cooling.

RAM
Xbox One is using 8GB of DDR3 RAM, and 32MB of ESRAM. The 8GB of DDR3 however is divided with the OS requirements, which takes up 3GB, bringing the usable amount down to 5GB. The PS4 also has 8GB but it shares it’s GDDR5 memory between the GPU and CPU on the APU. There is continual debate about the PS4’s OS RAM requirements but most suggest it, too, is limited to 5GB of usable RAM.

By comparison, the CyberpowerPC Steam Machine comes with 8GB of DDR3 dual-channel 1600mhz memory with overclocking capabilities. While we don’t have a stable footprint on the SteamOS’ RAM requirements, it’s suggested that you have at least 4GB of RAM installed, which would mean that it’s likely to use up about 1GB, similar to Windows 7. In essence, SteamOS has a smaller RAM requirement overhead than the home consoles and has scalable speeds.

Price
The CyberpowerPC Steam Machine is $499. The Xbox One is $499. The PS4 is $399. Even at $100 more than the PS4, the specs of the Steam Machine are obviously more powerful given their scalability; and given the open-source Linux OS, you can add whatever apps you want, for free. There is also no fee for playing online unlike the consoles.

The CyperpowerPC Steam Machine beats the PS4 and Xbox One in specs and price, especially comparing what you’re getting in the package for the same price as Microsoft’s offering and for $100 more than Sony’s offerings.

Who do you think is the winner of the PC vs Consoles debate? Sound off in the comments below and tell us your views on PC vs Consoles!

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by Dave Scarborough

The Silent Hills teaser is packed with mysteries that fans are still having trouble wrapping their petrified little heads around, but at least there’s one enigma that has been cleared up.

Speaking about the game during a Japanese language Konami video (while also scaring the crap out of several people volunteering to play the demo), Hideo Kojima went on to shed light on the meaning behind 7780s – the name of the fake developer originally thought to be making the game.

It turns out that 7780 translates into a postcode, the location of which is the Shizuoka region of Japan. The name roughly translates as Quiet Hills and the region’s name has become a nickname for Silent Hill in its native country. Add an ‘s’ on the end and you have Silent Hills.

We’re sure there’s plenty more secrets tucked away in the P.T. demo. In fact, we’re still not entirely sure the correct sequence of events in the final puzzle. Nevertheless, Silent Hills has quickly become the most talked about game in the world right now.

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by Dean Howard

During PS4’s announcement at E3 last year, Sony talked of a ground breaking concept that will radically change the way we play video games forever. At the time so many information and rumors were in circulation that it wasn’t very clear which direction Sony was going with its next generation powerhouse. Since then a lot has come to light with one particular announcement at this years Gamescom14 having the potential of putting money in your pocket for a change.

Buying video games can be an expensive habit with most AAA games costing as much as $60 dollars. Sony have been working with developers and publishers to make games much more affordable by providing top notch digital services like PlayStation Plus and the recent PlayStation Now. These services will allow players to rent or even play games for free at a subscription cost as low as $50 dollars for the entire year.

Now we have been closely watching the success of broadcasters on TwitchTV and seen many passionate gamers who can now afford to broadcast their video games full-time to hundreds and thousands of loyal fans on a daily basis. What makes Twitch great is that not only can these broadcasters set up a subscription fee on their channels, they can also set up donations which is where most serious dedicated broadcaster make their major income.

Money and Power to The Player

Now with the recent Shareplay 2.0 Update announcement coming to PS4 this fall. Sony could potential provide a similar sort of opportunity to those who share their streams with others gamers in return for a fee. The potential to expand Shareplay into an income stream for gamers who invest in popular games early could be a lucrative venture for both Sony and Players alike. Especially with socially connected games like DriveClub and Destiny on their way. Sony could expand the share play functionality to more than one streaming console at a time, doubling or even tripling their earning potential. This way those who wish to rather play the latest PS4 games than buy it, could enjoy sharing this experience at a cost much less than they would pay for the full game. Kind of like a virtual online arcade.

What do you think of this idea? Let us know in the comments below.

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by Chris Morris

Wave goodbye to motion controls.

Microsoft’s motion-tracking Kinect 2.0 sensor was supposed to be what differentiated the Xbox One from the competition. It was more than just a way to talk directly to your console: it was a tool designed to transform the game machine into a social and media hub, the tip of the spear in Microsoft’s fight to take over your living room. More than anything, it was supposed to be way, way better than the first Kinect.

Today, though, it seems little more than an afterthought.

The decision to decouple Kinect from the Xbox One in May was surprising only in that it took the company a good year to do so. We certainly saw this coming: the company spent most of 2013 backtracking on its initial plan that the Xbox One couldn’t exist without Kinect. That simply wasn’t the case.

Unbundling Kinect also made sense on paper, allowing Microsoft to lower the price of the system to better compete with the PlayStation 4. But since that move, the company has had very little to say about its once heralded accessory. And while Kinect is still very much available, the ongoing silence has many people wondering if Microsoft is essentially walking away from the device.

At its recent press conference before the Gamescom show in Germany, for instance, Kinect wasn’t mentioned at all. At E3 2014 in June, it was mentioned in a quick announcement about a new Dance Central game, but otherwise flew under the radar.

Microsoft, not surprisingly, has downplayed talks that it’s de-emphasizing Kinect.

“That wasn’t, in any way, to make any editorial statement about the future of Kinect,” Phil Harrison, corporate VP at Microsoft, told IGN after the Gamescom press event. “It’s just that these were the games we wanted to highlight in our briefing. The games that we focused on in our briefing were the blockbusters and exclusives for this holiday, 2014.”

Harrison’s follow-up comment, though, was more telling.

“We let the developers choose [whether they want to use Kinect],” he said. “It’s one of the tools that they have in their tool belt for taking advantage of the Xbox One, and we hope they continue to do so.”

Punting the decision to use Kinect over to publishers is a graceful way for Microsoft to take a hands-off approach to its fate. That’s because developers have no real incentive to use the controller, given that creating a Kinect-less game gives game makers 10 percent more graphical processing power to tap into. The development system update that followed the Kinect decoupling, in fact, let game maker Bungie increase the resolution of the Xbox One version of Destiny.

Even Microsoft’s most notable in-house Kinect developer, legendary game company Rare, is stepping away.

Four years ago, Rare studio head Scott Henson, announced the company’s allegiance for the peripheral, saying “Kinect will be the main focus for Rare going forwards as it’s a very rich canvas. This is just the beginning of an experience that will touch millions of people.”

At Gamescom, though, Xbox studio head Phil Spencer, in discussing what’s next for Rare, downplayed the relationship.

“I don’t want the Rare brand to mean Kinect Sports,” he said.

Kinect hasn’t been completely buried. In a prominent television campaign, actor Aaron Paul showcases its features (inadvertently turning on existing Xbox Ones around the country).

However, when that ad comes to the all-important price screen, the $399 non-Kinect version of the Xbox One is shown, presumably the version people will seek out at retail.

And Kinect games? There are only a handful in the pipeline right now: Disney’s Fantasia and Dance Central Spotlight from Harmonix, Shape Up and Just Dance 2015 from Ubisoft, Fruit Ninja Kinect 2 from Halfbrick Studios, and the clever puzzle-platformer Fru from indie outfit Thought Games.

That’s a pretty meager crop, and at least one major publisher isn’t exactly gearing up for more.

“It depends which hat I put on,” said Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot, when asked about his thoughts about Microsoft downplaying Kinect at E3 this year. “When I put on the casual hat, it’s not good, for sure. We have less families with a camera. So it’s more difficult for [Ubisoft] to do content for families. [However,] when I put my gamer hat on, it makes sense.”

Without a significant slate of upcoming games to help promote it, Kinect in its current form seems destined for the bargain bin. It might not be dead yet, but it isn’t moving much.

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by Giuseppe Nelva

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt is one of the most anticipated titles for the beginning of next year, and many are wondering how it’ll hold up on consoles compared to PC.

We had a chance to chat with Viausl Effects Artists Jose Teixeira at Gamescom, and he gave us some more color on the issue.

Teixeira explained that the screen space ambient occlusion (SSAO) will be slightly different, the water in the ocean won’t have the same advanced tassellation, and there are other “tiny little sacrifices” that “hopefully won’t make a huge visual impact” but will give a big performance advantage.

He also mentioned that optimization on consoles is going a lot better than expected from the very start.

To explain that he brought up a little fun anecdote: the first time the folks at CD Projekt tried to run The Witcher 2 on Xbox 360, it wouldn’t run at all. It just crashed.

The first time they tried to render Wild Hunt on the new generation of consoles, it resulted only in a black screen, and everybody was overjoyed.

That may sound strange, but the black screen meant that the game was actually running, just not rendering properly, while on the previous game the team had to do a lot of work to even get to the black screen.

Teixeira continued by mentioning that the game is surprisingly running pretty well on consoles already, with some areas already running at 30 fps. While he doesn’t know if the final frame rate will be dynamic or locked, it’ll be at least 30 frames per second and console gamers can expect really impressive graphics.

Stay tuned for the full interview soon, and believe me, if you love geeky tech talk, you really don’t want to miss that one.

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by Grace Huang

Nintendo Co. rose the most in almost five months after its new Mario Kart 8 video game surpassed 1 million units in sales in the U.S.

Nintendo’s affiliate The Pokemon Co. also will make an online trading card game available as an application for Apple Inc’s iPad later this year, Engadget reported, citing the company without identifying anyone.

Nintendo rose as much as 6.5 percent, the most since March 24 on an intraday basis, before trading 5.9 percent higher at 11,950 yen at 10:25 a.m. in Tokyo.

Mario Kart 8 and a lineup of figurines that interact with games are part of the company’s strategy to revive flagging sales of its Wii U console and retain players who are shifting to games on smartphones and faster consoles like Sony Corp’s PlayStation 4 and Microsoft Corp’s Xbox One.

“Mario Kart 8 is selling well in other regions, as well,” said Yasuhiro Minagawa, a spokesman for Nintendo.

The Pokemon trading card game is already available for desktop computers, according to the company’s website. The Tokyo-based company’s media relations office didn’t immediately respond to a telephone message seeking comment.

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by Rashid Sayed

Popular middleware provider Geomerics have worked on AAA cross generation games like Battlefield 4 and Dragon Age Inquisition. But in the coming months they will be working exclusively on new generation hardware with games like Star Wars Battlefront and Mirrors Edge. This will have a big impact on how Geomerics works going forward.

Speaking to Chris Doran who is the founder of Geomerics, GamingBolt asked how they plan to use utilize the full potential of the new consoles and modern gaming PCs, given that they are freed from the shackles of old hardware. “The big difference with the new consoles is where the power is located. Pretty much across the board the new consoles are a factor of 10 better than the previous generation, but in terms of compute power the GPUs massively out-strip the CPUs in the new hardware,” Chris Doran said.

“This is great for us, as it enables Enlighten to interact much more tightly with the rest of the graphics pipeline. This removes any latency, and can drive higher levels of dynamism. We have also been researching the interaction between Enlighten and physically-based shading, and the results look great. We’ll see a lot more in this direction on PS4 and Xbox One,” he said.

Last year Doran had stated that 8GB of RAM will be sufficient to create realistic lighting. But now that we are settling down in to the new generation of consoles and with graphics technology setting new benchmarks, does he still think 8GB is going to be sufficient?

“Yes, it feels like the right amount. As mentioned above, the new consoles are nicely balanced between CPU / GPU / Memory. They have struck a sensible balance and given developers hardware that it will take a few years to really stretch.”

We will have more coverage for Enlighten and Geomerics in the coming days. Stay tuned.

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