Month: June 2019

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  Based on how Final Fantasy VII Remake's reveal looked live at Square Enix's event (meaning, on the company's giant projectors), its stutters and minor visual artifacts hint at fully real-time rendering on PS4. But we'll have to wait and see if that bears out when we test the game later this week at E3. [credit: Square Enix ]

LOS ANGELES—Square Enix's E3 press conference began by wasting no time with its big, expected news: Final Fantasy VII Remake finally has a release date. The PlayStation 4-exclusive JRPG will launch on March 3, 2020. If that sounds like too long to wait, and you're in Los Angeles this week, Square Enix says all E3 2019 attendees will have a chance to play the game's first real-time demo on the show floor.

Monday night's event included the clearest demonstration yet of how the game's combat system will work: as a mix of real-time attacking and dodging, and an "active time battle" (ATB) system of pausing to activate special abilities and items. The latter will only activate once players have built up enough of their fighters' ATB meters, which grow as players pull off more successful weapon swipes and dodges. (This means crucial items like potions and Phoenix Down revives won't work until you rack up enough hits on foes, and using those will mean waiting longer to activate magical spells and special melee attacks.)

More familiar FFVII characters finally got their in-game reveals, as well, particularly the popular martial arts ally Tifa. One of her ATB special attacks, a flurry of punches followed by a flashy bicycle kick, fit in nicely with Cloud's barrage of sword swipes within a Japanese kanji character, a massive lighting-ball blast from Barret's machine gun, and a particle-filled explosion of green, healing power from Aerith. Barret's standard attacks will largely revolve around gun shots, not melee swipes, so he will be able to control real-time combat from a distance--and that likely means other popular FFVII characters will work the same.

LOS ANGELES—When Microsoft announced the first details of its next game console Sunday, it said that "thousands of games across four console generations will look and play best on Project Scarlett." In a video follow-up focused on backward compatibility posted Monday, the company clarified that its goal is that "every single game you play on Xbox One today [will] work on the Scarlett device."

That would be a change from previous Xbox console generations, which have only supported a significant subset of previous generations' titles through software updates. It sounds like getting Xbox One games to run on Project Scarlett will also take some specific software-level effort on the part of Microsoft, rather than being supported directly at the hardware level.

"Ensuring every game that runs on Xbox One is going to run incredibly well on Scarlett will take a ton of commitment and time from our team," Microsoft Head of Xbox Phil Spencer said in the video. "The team is dedicated. We're ramping up our testing facilities to make sure we can hit the ground running and make sure that stuff works."

This says "coming this fall" now, but it said something else earlier today. (credit: Apple)

Apple introduced two pricy and powerful pieces of pro-targeted hardware at its developer conference last month: the modular desktop tower Mac Pro, and the creative-focused Pro Display XDR. Although Apple said the devices would come this fall when discussing them during its keynote stage last week, the industry giant didn't get any more specific than that. But an apparent mistake in the Apple Store may have narrowed down the date.

Earlier today, MacRumors and 9to5Mac discovered that, when you clicked on the option to "Notify Me" of availability for the products, they were presented with text that said "coming in September." This was while other parts of the website all said "coming in the fall." Since the news broke, Apple quietly changed the copy in the "notify me" panel to also say "coming in the fall."

September would make sense as a narrower launch window. Apple often holds an event focused on the iPhone and Apple Watch around that time each year, so the company could announce final public availability of the Mac Pro and Pro Display XDR there.

Enlarge / A firefighter passes by a Smokey the Bear fire danger sign during a brush fire in Burbank, Calif., on May 25, 2018. (credit: Ronen Tivony/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

This weekend, one of California's largest utilities—Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E)—elected to shut off power to customers in two counties as part of its newly-expanded "Public Safety Power Shutoff" plan.

The plan was approved by California regulators in May as a way to minimize the risk of wildfire in Northern California. As climate change has made summers hotter and winter rain more unpredictable, PG&E's power lines sparked dangerous and destructive fires 2017 and 2018. In recent years, California fires caused by power lines have burned millions of acres of land, razing homes and towns, and killing residents who couldn't evacuate quickly enough.

In order to combat these fires, PG&E is proactively shutting down both distribution and transmissions lines when conditions are dangerous enough. This weekend, hot, windy weather with low humidity resulted in power outages for 20,500 residents of Butte and Yuba counties, just west of the Tahoe and Plumas National Forests.

Enlarge / A firefighter passes by a Smokey the Bear fire danger sign during a brush fire in Burbank, Calif., on May 25, 2018. (credit: Ronen Tivony/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

This weekend, one of California's largest utilities—Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E)—elected to shut off power to customers in two counties as part of its newly-expanded "Public Safety Power Shutoff" plan.

The plan was approved by California regulators in May as a way to minimize the risk of wildfire in Northern California. As climate change has made summers hotter and winter rain more unpredictable, PG&E's power lines sparked dangerous and destructive fires 2017 and 2018. In recent years, California fires caused by power lines have burned millions of acres of land, razing homes and towns, and killing residents who couldn't evacuate quickly enough.

In order to combat these fires, PG&E is proactively shutting down both distribution and transmissions lines when conditions are dangerous enough. This weekend, hot, windy weather with low humidity resulted in power outages for 20,500 residents of Butte and Yuba counties, just west of the Tahoe and Plumas National Forests.

Enlarge / Just a few of the titles and franchises coming to Ubisoft's UPlay+ service. (credit: Ubisoft)

LOS ANGELES—At its E3 press conference today, Ubisoft announced a new subscription service called UPlay+. For $14.99 a month, subscribers will be able to access every title in Ubisoft's catalog—over 100 games—as a PC download (starting September 3) and through Google's Stadia streaming service (starting in 2020).

That list of available games includes:

• Upcoming releases: Watch Dogs: Legion, Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon: Breakpoint, Rainbow Six Quarantine, Gods & Monsters
• Recent games: Tom Clancy's The Division 2, Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Siege, Far Cry 5, Anno 1800
• Classic Ubisoft Titles: Titles from the Far Cry and Rayman franchises, Prince of Persia, Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell, Beyond Good & Evil
• Beloved PC Franchises: Heroes of Might and Magic, Silent Hunter, The Settlers, Anno

A subscription to UPlay+ will also include the "earliest available access to new games," including beta and early access editions of upcoming titles. Additional content "such as DLCs, expansions and automatic updates" is also included as part of the package.