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Hollywood strikes back against illegal streaming Kodi add-ons
An anti-piracy alliance supported by many major US and UK movie studios, broadcasters and content providers has dealt a blow to the third-party Kodi add-on scene after it successfully forced a number of popular piracy-linked streaming tools offline. In what appears to be a coordinated crackdown, developers including jsergio123 and The_Alpha, who are responsible for the development and hosting of add-ons like urlresolver, metahandler, Bennu, DeathStreams and Sportie, confirmed that they will no longer maintain their Kodi creations and have immediately shut them down.
Gazillion adds Colossus, Ms. Marvel costumes to Marvel Heroes
If you've been thinking that what Marvel Heroes really needs is another couple of costumes, well, the game's newest blog post is probably going to put a smile on your face. Gazillion's new title already boasts over 110 costumes, but the company says it's just getting started. The newest update adds a pair of 1980s-era outfits, one for Ms. Marvel and one for Colossus. Both are available either via an in-game loot drop or the cash shop. Click through to the original post for more info and a couple of close-up images.
Brushing up on Marvel Heroes' super-sized beta update
While we've had several occasions to check out Marvel Heroes' journey through the beta process, Gazillion Entertainment wanted us to know that our previous glimpses are now obsolete. The makers of this superhero action-RPG have implemented a major beta update that has virtually transformed the look, feel, and function of the game. We spoke with Gazillion about the update, which clearly is a major step toward a finalized release version. The most obvious change to Marvel Heroes is a revamp of its user interface. The UI has been streamlined and modernized, with a crisper look and more color overall. The placeholder minimap has been scrapped and replaced with a new radar that functions in perspective, a friends list is now in place, and new arrow icons float around the edges of your screen to direct you to nearby events. And since loot is quite vital to the appeal of the game, the devs made sure to color-code all of the icons so that telling item rarity is an instant and effortless process. There are a few more surprises that were announced today, so hit the jump and we'll walk you through them!
City of Steam fires up the Colossus
There appears to be no shortage of interesting sights and sounds to experience in City of Steam, although one particular landmark looms above the rest. It's the Colossus, a slumbering defensive... thing that rests in the city proper, and Mechanist Games has an amusing post giving a bit of backstory to the machine. Apparently the Colossus was created a long time ago as a giant mobile fortress tasked with protecting the city in times of dire peril. As the city is more or less at peace, the Colossus is in stand-by mode -- although it could be woken at any moment. This mega-sized robot features cannons and an arm that's good for punchin' and aught else. The devs revealed that originally it had several more limbs, but revisions turned it into a walking fort instead.
Flameseeker Chronicles: The spotter's guide to the Fractals of the Mists
Welcome to the Mists, volunteer! What's that you say? You didn't volunteer? Well, you're here, aren't you? I'd say that's good enough. Now, if you and your party will be so kind as to pop into these unstable fractals and clear out all the ravening monsters inside, I'd be... "What are fractals," you ask? The Fractals of the Mists dungeon has been out and playable for a couple of weeks now and is possibly the greatest content addition in the Lost Shores patch. If you have around Lion's Arch for more than a few seconds, you're likely to see scads of LFG requests in mapchat. Don't let the number of people looking for level 21+ runs scare you off! Everyone starts somewhere -- in this case, it's at level 1. Let's take a look at what awaits you within Guild Wars 2's fractals.
E3 2012: RIFT shows Storm Legion's Tower of Dawn, confirms digital CE
While we got a great preview of some of the excitement coming with this fall's RIFT: Storm Legion expansion at E3, the public was treated to a "sneak peek" livestream from the press room by the devs. The livestreamed some of the content we've seen already, such as the clockwork dungeon and the mighty colossus attack, but also dropped a few new surprises as well. When asked if the expansion will have a collector's edition, the dev confirmed that it probably will have a digital CE. He then laughed that he probably let the cat out of the bag on that one. He was reluctant to show the in-game map of the new continents, however, explaining that they are a work in progress. The Trion Worlds team also demoed a special interior for the first time, the Tower of Dawn. While not a proper dungeon, the tower will be an expansive and dangerous location to explore. The dev said that players were asking for more interiors to explore, hence why Trion took the time to make it. You can scope out some of our screengrabs from the livestream after the break!
Enter at your own Rift: Checking out Update 1.3
The calm before the storm. That's the best way to describe the RIFT screenshot above. As I puttered around and wasted time trying to frame my screenshot from the ideal angle, working that nomad model to his full potential, I was seconds away from a zone event opening up on my head. Instantly, about 50 gigantic desert warriors emerged to attack us for their leader's amusement. And for the next half hour, Fortune's Shore was overrun with warriors, stone golems, and dog people. Fortune's Shore isn't the only place to experience chaos and danger, though. Whatever the Dwarves did in Hammerknell, it's finally caught up with them -- and with all of Telara. Abyssal and Endless Court forces are posing a real threat, and the Ascended are now tasked with repelling the invasions and charging back into Hammerknell. In this week's Enter at your Own Rift, we'll look at a few of the changes from Update 1.3. Read on for a look at tithes, character transfers, trial servers, and towering colossi!
Hauppauge is taking its HD component capture card internal
It wasn't that long ago that recording HD from just about any source on a PC was cost prohibitive. Then along came Hauppauge's HD PVR and while it isn't without its issues and limitations, it gets the job done at an affordable price. One of those limitations is the rather large external enclosure and the wall-wart that powers it. Now Hauppauge has addressed those nit picks with the release of an internal PCI-E capture card for $159. The single card can record up to 1080i from either component or unencrypted HDMI and will start shipping later this month. The support is very similar it its external brother, in fact other than the form factor, the two are very similar in most every other way. Another pictures and technical details after the jump.
OCZ Colossus refreshed as 'enthusiast' 1TB SSD, not worthy of enthusiasm
The formula for last year's OCZ Colossus 1TB solid state drive was simple: Two. Two of the company's 2.5-inch solid state drives in one 3.5-inch desktop package, with two Indilinx controllers reading and writing from two-bit MLC memory at up to 260MB / sec, over a thoroughly saturated SATA II connection. To improve the drive, the company would likely have had to upgrade to SATA 6G, support TRIM and possibly choose new controllers to boot. That's not what happened. The new OCZ Colossus LT is the exact same drive as its predecessor down to the read / write speeds, but with slightly cheaper 34nm flash memory. If the drive were substantially cheaper as a result, that might be enough, but pricing around the web shows that Colossus' price tags remain intact. You'll pay almost exactly the same -- about $1600 for 500GB, or $4000 for 1TB -- for this hefty SSD.
OCZ's Colossus desktop SSD gets reviewed: oh yeah, it's fast
It's been a long time coming, hasn't it? OCZ Technology's Colossus is the outfit's first in the desktop SSD space, and with capacities scaling as high at 1TB, it's certainly tempting for performance junkies who just can't pry themselves away from their tower. The benchmark-minded kids over at PC Perspective were able to get a drive in with final firmware a few weeks back, and they've pushed out a full review just prior to these things hitting retail en masse. Needless to say, all the numbers in the world won't make this any cheaper, but for those willing to spend at least $3.24 per gigabyte on internal storage, there's hardly a better option out right now. Reviewers found that read and write speeds seriously pushed the SATA 3Gb/sec limit, and the latter were "faster than on any SATA device tested to date." Sadly, the lack of TRIM support and the inability for end-users to upgrade the firmware put somewhat of a damper on things, but if neither one of those tidbits bother you, pulling the trigger just might be the right thing to do.
OCZ's Colossus desktop SSD line ships next week
OCZ Technology has been trumpeting its Colossus SSD desktop solution since June, but due to some strange issues with the housing that have been troubling engineers for the past few months, the company has been forced to quietly push back the expected release date. At any rate, the company has informed us that the drives -- which will arrive in 128GB, 256GB, 512GB and 1TB flavors and tout maximum read / writes rates of 260MB/s -- will begin shipping to retailers "next week." If you're lucky, you might catch one or two e-tailers selling their stock early, but first you'll need to figure out where exactly that $300, $650, $1,200 or $2,200 (in order of mention) is going to come from.
OCZ's 1TB Colossus SSD gets a price and launch timeframe
We already got word of the starting price for the entry-level 128GB drive in OCZ's new Colossus line of SSDs, but details on the standout 1TB model have unfortunately been quite a bit harder to come by. OCZ's now finally cleared up most of those remaining questions, however, and announced that the drive will be available mid-August for a jaw-dropping $2,500 (give or take a few bucks). The 500GB drive will also apparently be available at the same time, although OCZ doesn't seem to be saying anything more than that it'll be "less expensive."[Via Electronista]Update: OCZ just hit us up with the official information. The company is actually "about three weeks" out from release, and it'll ship the Colossus 120 (128GB), 250 (256GB), 500 (512GB) and 1TB (1024GB) for $300, $650, $1200 and $2200 in order of mention.
OCZ's Colossus SSD comes out of its shell
We got a brief glimpse of OCZ's massive new Colossus SSD drive at Computex last month, and gotten the official word on most of the basic specs straight from OCZ itself, but we've only just now gotten a look inside that slightly mysterious-looking black box and, well, there's a whole bunch of SSD chips inside. Available in capacities ranging from 128GB to 1TB, all of the drives boast a tightly packed design that includes a pair of Indilinx controllers and some associated DRAM cache for each, along with a dual-drive, single PCB implementation that makes it all appear as a single drive to the system. Still no word on a release date just yet, unfortunately, but it looks like these'll start at $299 for the 128GB drive.
OCZ's Ion-based Neutrino and Colossus SSD hands-on at Computex
OCZ Technology's Ion-infused Neutrino may not look all that different than the existing model, but we all know it's the secret sauce within that makes it so magical. Our BFFs over at Engadget Chinese managed to spend a few quality seconds (some might say they "had a moment") with this very machine as well as the all new desktop-bound Colossus SSD. Sadly, the booth workers couldn't provide a definitive ship date or price for either, but the read link's still the place to go for a few hands-on shots as well as a video of the Ion Neutrino showing 3DMark 06 who's boss.
OCZ intros 3.5-inch Colossus SSD at Computex
Not satisfied with a few new machines from OCZ Technology? Have a look at this. Over in Taiwan, the company has slid out an all new SSD solution designed to fit into the 3.5-inch holes that desktop gamers have grown to know and love. The so-called Colossus solid state drive will be made available in around eight weeks in 512GB and 1TB sizes, though there's no telling just yet how pricey they'll be. From what we can gather, there will be a pair of drives in there strung together in a RAID 0 array; in a sense, it's a Z-Drive in a different form factor. Color us emphatically interested -- even though we aren't yet willing to sacrifice our child's education in order to put a down payment on one.
Vigor Collosus Skulltrail-based gaming rig gets reviewed
Intel's Skulltrail gaming platform (we're still refusing to call it the "Intel Dual Socket Extreme Desktop Platform") has been out for a while now, but there haven't been too many pre-built systems based on the design -- in fact, all we've seen so far is the $6,799 Vigor Colossus desktop, which Computer Shopper just had in for a review. As you'd expect from a machine powered by two $1,499 Core 2 Extreme QX9775 processors and dual CrossFireX ATI Radeon HD 3870 X2 graphics cards, it's not exactly slow -- in fact, it was the fastest machine CS has ever tested in certain tests, putting up a 21,902 score in Cinebench 10, and a 6,695 mark in the Futuremark PCMark Vantage full-system test. All that power isn't necessarily useful, though: you'll have to be running serious multithreaded apps to really flex all eight cores, which means GPU-bound games won't get that much of a boost. Plus you'll have to deal with some major fans, relatively slow boot-up times, and some serious heat -- but come on, you know you want one.
Vigor's Colossus gets you close to Skulltrail, bankruptcy
We're not going to set this one up with some creepy bedtime story like Vigor does on its own website, but seriously, this beast is kind of scary. The aptly-dubbed Colossus houses Intel's Skulltrail platform along with two Core 2 Extreme QX9775 quad-core processors, and that's just the beginning. You'll also find a menacing (albeit somewhat unsightly) chassis, a 1,000-watt PSU, 4GB of DDR2 RAM, twin 74GB Raptor hard drives, 2TB of storage on a pair of RAIDed SATA HDDs, dual 512MB GeForce 8800 GTS Xtremes, a dual-layer DVD burner (skimp much?) and a 3.5-inch floppy drive for loading up your tax template from 1998. As you can probably surmise, this one won't run you cheap, so we'll leave it to you to decide if forking out a small fortune $6,799 is worth it.[Thanks, Zee]
Team Ico making plans for PS3 development
Team Ico wants you! Provided, that is, you're an ace programmer or a crack network engineer (for example) and keen to work on an exciting new PS3 project. There's a recruitment ad to this effect on Sony's Japanese website, while Sony has also bought a double-page spread in the latest issue of Weekly Famitsu to get the word out. So is this confirmation of a PS3 sequel to Wanda, or -- considering the specific requirement for networking staff -- can we expect an altogether different kind of beast? For now, we're just content to stare at the sketches and calculations scrawled by Team Ico staff on Sony's site.
