Author: Sam Machkovech

Ars Technica tests the Tobii EyeX while playing Deus Ex. Video edited by Jennifer Hahn. (video link)

During Ars' review playthrough of the latest adventure in the Deus Ex series, I spied a curious option tucked into its Windows menus: "Tobii eye-tracking." None of Square Enix's press materials mentioned such a thing, which seemed strange for a series that revolves around human augmentation and sci-fi upgrades. Eye-tracking in an FPS? Sounds like some futuristic stealth-spy stuff!

The word "Tobii" perked up my coworkers' ears, as they'd tested simple prototypes of the eye-tracking doodad at various Consumer Electronics Shows. Deus Ex presented a great opportunity to test the add-on's full potential, and Tobii was kind enough to send loaner hardware. We wanted to find out: Just what does an eye-tracking sensor do for computer users—how does it translate the gaze of your eyes to real-world computer use—and does it work well enough to earn a $140 price tag?

Enlarge / Wanna get more in-game currency, weapons, and experience-point boosts in the new Deus Ex game? Pay up, suckers. (credit: Square Enix)

My review of the stellar cyberpunk stealth-adventure game Deus Ex: Mankind Divided was based on a retail version, which means it had received a "day-one" patch and contained all of the game's content... with one exception. The microtransaction system hadn't yet gone live.

At the time, this shop was limited to DX:MD's "Breach" mode, which combines arcade-style challenges and a "card-unlock" system for beefing your character up. This system works similarly to games like Hearthstone, in that you earn new cards and perks through normal gameplay, but since their rewards are random, you may feel compelled to pay money for more random-card unlocks. Also, because you can only equip so many perks at a time, and normal gameplay unlocks a ton of content, you don't really need to pay into this system to get the full game experience.

It's not ideal, but I ruled that this kind of microtransaction system was all in all tolerable for what was essentially a free bonus mode on top of an already-huge campaign in the retail package. Looks like Eidos Montreal had other ideas, however.

Thanks to some serious legal gymnastics, the video game makers at Rare have been able to re-release a lot of older software they made for other companies. That includes a ton of the games made while the company was part of the Nintendo "second-party" family in the '90s. The exceptions have been held back due to legal clearance issues and copyrighted characters, and none seems more legally thorny than the legendary GoldenEye 007. Companies like Nintendo, Activision, and MGM all have legal claims to this movie-gaming mess of licensing.

Those legal issues didn't stop a team of Rare developers from remastering the 1997 N64 classic from the ground up and prepping it for launch on the Xbox 360. The existence of this unreleased remake has been proven out by leaked image and video snippets over the years, but we've never seen anything quite like Tuesday's megadump of information: a full 30 minutes of GoldenEye 007 running on debug Xbox 360 hardware.

The footage, captured and posted by gaming history site Rare Thief, contains both campaign and multiplayer gameplay. This Xbox 360 version appears to retain most of the original's aspects, including level design, mission structure, sound effects, and low-poly geometry. The "remastered" aspect comes primarily from wholly redrawn textures and added graphical flair, such as better-looking skyboxes and extra bits of geometry. The video shows an on-the-fly graphics toggle that lets players switch between N64 graphics and redrawn graphics at any time to really see the difference; this function also appeared in both recent Halo game remasters. The other obvious improvement: a silky smooth 60 frames-per-second visual refresh that far exceeds the original game's 20 FPS in campaign mode (and even lower performance in split-screen).

PlayStation Now, Sony's two-year-old game-streaming service, will soon come to Windows PCs, if an incorrect image tag on a Sony blog post is meant to be believed.

Game-news sleuth Wario64 posted the discovery on Tuesday after mousing over an image promoting the upcoming PlayStation VR Worlds game. Upon doing so, a caption for something entirely different popped up: "PS Now on PC Announce Post by PlayStation Europe, on Flickr." Ars confirmed the caption was still live as of press time, though a peek at the blog post's metadata didn't point to any links to such a news post.

The news follows a report from French gaming news site Gamekult earlier in August that suggested PS Now would first be announced for Windows PCs in Europe on August 23, with American users getting a crack one week later. Amazon France may have also let the streaming cat out of the bag on Tuesday by launching a product page for a "DualShock USB adapter for PlayStation 4," which could be used to more easily connect the PS4's DualShock 4 controller to Windows PCs—though thanks to an empty product description, that's only speculation.

John Carmack (left) poses with Oculus founder Palmer Luckey (center) and other members of the Oculus team. (credit: OculusVR)

The 2014 lawsuit filed against virtual reality headset company Oculus and its parent company Facebook has now received its first major amendment in nearly two years. The civil complaint from game publisher ZeniMax was updated on August 16 with 22 additional "paragraphs," and those updates mince few words. Most notably, the lawsuit now names Oculus executives John Carmack and Brendan Iribe as defendants, in addition to the aforementioned companies and Oculus founder Palmer Luckey.

The updated filing, which was reported by Game Informer on Monday, still alleges that Oculus's major VR technologies were taken from ZeniMax in a way that violated contracts and nondisclosure agreements—especially since Carmack originally worked for ZeniMax and had signed contracts that made ZeniMax the owner of any technologies he worked on within the company (specifically, at its subsidiary, id Software). Now that Iribe and Carmack are listed as defendants, ZeniMax has aimed further allegations directly at those two men—and have questioned claims that Luckey had much to do with the development of Oculus' core technologies.

Issues with disclosure

In the last amended complaint, Zenimax simply said that "Rift’s VR Technology... had actually been developed by ZeniMax without Luckey’s involvement." This new complaint goes much further, especially when talking about the ways Oculus bolstered its reputation en route to being acquired by Facebook for $2 billion in 2014. "Oculus needed to be able to explain how it came to own VR technology" without acknowledging any misuse of another company's technologies, the suit now claims, and it also alleges that Iribe instructed Oculus staffers to "disseminate to the press the false and fanciful story that Luckey was the brilliant inventor of VR technology" and "had developed that technology in his parents' garage."

Enlarge / PlayStation Plus price hike coming on September 22nd. (credit: Sony)

If you're a fan of Sony's PlayStation Plus subscription service—which doles out free monthly downloads for the company's various systems and enables online play on PS4 games in exchange for an annual fee—you might want to lock in your next annual renewal of $50 per year pretty soon.

That's because the annual fee goes up to $60 (or CAD $70) starting September 22, which is exactly one month after an announcement posted on Monday. Sony took an odd approach to making this announcement: the company edited the news into a late-July alert about the freebies PS Plus members would receive in August. The post did not receive an updated headline, despite the official PlayStation Twitter account linking to the post once it had been edited.

The announcement explained that the price hike—the first for the service since its launch in 2010—is thanks to "current market conditions." Since the post neither linked to any financial or market analyses nor announced any new features coming to PlayStation Plus, Ars is tempted to assume that those "current market conditions" are little more than "we think people will grin and bear the price hike."

Enlarge / The faux-iest of faux leather could be yours for as little as $720. (credit: New Line Cinema)

If you need all six of Peter Jackson's films from the Hobbit and Lord of the Rings timeline and you need them on Blu-ray discs in bulky cases with oodles of extra discs, you can already buy those right now for around $125. But if you're the super-nerd who prefers the "collector's edition" version of your favorite releases, complete with limited-edition swag and over-the-top presentation, you've been out of luck with the Tolkien films—until this year.

Make no mistake, when New Line Cinema calls something the Middle Earth Ultimate Collector's Edition, the company doesn't mess around... at least, in terms of pricing. Welcome to possibly the most expensive Blu-ray box set ever, costing a cool $800 and launching on October 4.

Since it's an Amazon exclusive, that retail price doesn't apply in its pre-order state. Amazon aggressively prices many of its pre-orders with a 10 percent discount, so for now, the ultimate Tolkien Blu-ray offering costs just $720.

Captured on PC, Ars UK's Mark Walton takes Adam Jensen on his first mission into the heart of the aug ghetto Golem City. (video link)

Deus Ex: Mankind Divided is not an exciting-sounding sequel. It's one of those video games that feels like an expected follow-up, and it's probably fallen behind in the industry's "buzz" and "hype" quotients as a result.

Just like the last entry, 2011's DX: Human Revolution, this game puts you in the shoes of the same cybernetically enhanced anti-hero, offers the same "play how you want" system, and even replicates a lot of the last game's powers, controls, and aesthetic. You'd be forgiven for glancing at a snippet of gameplay and wondering which game is which.

Selected scenes from Ars' first few hours playing No Man's Sky (video link)

The video game No Man's Sky captured our hearts the moment its veil was lifted for one reason: seeming infinity, right now. A very sci-fi, virtual version, of course, but its abstract take is still something wild: more than 18 quintillion planets, all "magically" generated on the fly, for us to immediately fly toward, excavate, and marvel at.

It's not flying cars or an auto-mutating vaccine that can cure all influenza or anything, but it still seems like some sort of sci-fi dream. The marriage of technology and infinity is the kind of thing you might not have ever expected to see, especially on current systems.

(credit: Square Enix)

At a major Final Fantasy XV promotional event earlier this year, the game's developers announced its release date by having a slot-machine spin of months and days whiz by before briefly locking into "November 30," only to then slide into the "official" date: September 30, 2016.

Yeah, about that joke.

Early Monday morning, FFXV director Hajime Tabata took to YouTube to announce an official delay for the long-awaited RPG, now slated to launch on November 29 of this year (meaning, one off from the joke date). Tabata-san explained that the game's "master disc" (typically called the "gold" copy) had been completed "the other day," but its content would not be "the highest possible quality" without a downloadable patch, which he said would be completed by September 30.