Month: December 2024

Activision has shut down a highly anticipated Call of Duty mod, just hours before it was due to release. The mod, H2M, was billed as a remastering of the original Modern Warfare II multiplayer experience, delivering what Activision itself did not. But it’s not going to happen. As fans feared, Activision issued a cease and desist order to the developers, just like the company did with the fan-made Call of Duty SM2 mod in 2023.

“We are complying with this order and shutting down all operations immediately and permanently,” the developers said Come from Sports betting site VPbet . The order to shut it down came on August 15, just a day before the modders were due to release the H2M mod on August 16.

The mod would have required a copy of 2017’s Call of Duty: Modern Warfare Remastered. In anticipation of the mod’s release, sales of Modern Warfare Remastered rose significantly on Steam. After the news about the cease and desist order came out, however, players review-bombed Modern Warfare Remastered, turning its recent reviews rating to “mostly negative.”

Modern Warfare Remastered recently went on sale on S…

Razer’s Zephyr mask aims to bring its characteristic over-the-top RGB aesthetics to your face alongside N95 particulate and contagion protections for the COVID-19 era. While that might seem like a somewhat niche product, it hasn’t stopped its first stock from selling out quickly, nor has it stopped scalpers from leaping at the opportunity to mark up resales by ridiculous amounts.

As reported by IGN, online auction houses have been flooded by listings for the Zephyr mask that go as high as $500. Considering Razer is listing them for just $99, the scalpers are trying to get between 2.5x and 5x return on flipping the masks. People are buying these listings, too, as a search for sold masks returns dozens that have been purchased for way over normal asking price.

Scalpers take advantage of scarcity–artificial or real–in essentially any market; the supply chain issues and general shortages across industries have resulted in scalping becoming a bigger issue in the last couple of years. In this case, Razer opened more stock today (which also sold out nearly immediately) and states that there’ll be more restocks coming. Come from Read More

Atlantic City’s Borgata Casino officially announced the long-awaited relaunch of its high-limit Miralto lounge. The renovated play space underwent an extensive multi-million redesign, featuring many top-of-the-line amenities, appealing to wealthy bidders. The casino also plans to overhaul the rest of the slot and table game spaces to offer a more polished and engaging experience.

Miralto Remains a Premier Luxury Gaming Space

Borgata’s Miralto high-limit slot lounge reopens on December 23 after an extensive two-month rejuvenation project. The 8,300 square-foot space offers a hand-picked collection of over 100 slot games like the $500-dollar Red White and Blue Wild Star aimed at high-volume bettors. The lounge caters to the most discerning tastes, featuring private restrooms, exclusive cashiering services, and elegant, refined decor.

Director of slot operations at Borgata Demi Adebowale was excited to announce the lounge’s long-awaited reopening, welcoming clients to experience the updated…

Visitors to Deadwood, South Dakota are in for a treat, after Hard Rock International celebrated the opening of its newest boutique hotel and casino, offering different entertainment and hospitality options. A grand ceremony, commemorating the opening of the Rocksino by Hard Rock, took place earlier this week. The glamorous event saw the participation of the state’s governor, leaders of the Seminole Tribe of Florida and the South Dakota Sioux tribes, along with music stars and many guests.

The new Rocksino brings iconic Hard Rock hospitality, offering a boutique hotel and casino. The venue is slightly smaller in size than the usual Hard Rock resort properties, but it is still packed with entertaining options, including music memorabilia, a full-service restaurant and a bar that offers craft cocktails.

Not unexpectedly the Rocksino offers gambling entertainment as well and visitors can play 86 new slot machines. As with other such entertainment locations, a Rock Shop is also available where visitors can purchase custom apparel fr…

Before the vote, the CU’s mandate was rejected by Minister for Legal Protections, Franc Weerwind, who argued that financial risk checks had been incorporated into the imminent and approved amendments. He instead recommended that the House greenlight compulsory financial risk checks for player accounts with more than €350 in spending.

Weerwind, whose job it is to oversee KOA reforms, argued that a loss limit will be introduced by the KOA market, imposing a €150 spend restriction on the gambling accounts of any customer under the age of 24. The House’s approval of CU’s mandate hints at a possible conflict with the Minister’s proposed changes to the KOA Act.

MP Bikker urged Minister Weerwind to “rethink the design of Dutch online gambling protections” and to impose a fixed loss limit on KOA operators by the year’s end.

Stricter Financial Penalties

Michiel van Nispen, who is also a member of the House of Representatives (Tweede Kamer) of the Netherlands for the Socialist Party (SC), proposed a second motion to impose stricter financial penalties for online gambling violations. Those penalties proposed by V…

Baldur’s Gate 3 is a great game. Even that feels like an understatement, though. It’s one of our highest-scoring games in a decade and a half, a landmark RPG so significant it sparked actual debates in the developer community about its own quality. It’s also done. 

While the game’s going to keep getting patches and updates, there won’t be much in the way of significant DLCs—but Swen Vincke (developer Larian Studios’ CEO and founder) says that choice was mostly down to studio enthusiasm. That’s as per a talk Vincke had with IGN at GDC earlier this week.

“The obvious thing would have been to do a DLC, so we started on one. We started even thinking about BG4. But we hadn’t really had closure on BG3 yet, and just to jump forward on something new felt wrong.”

Vincke explains that Dungeons & Dragons 5th edition (5e)—the game that Baldur’s Gate 3 is built on—is a bit of a tough thing to roll with when you’re designing a videogame, noting that his team “had all these ideas of new combat we wanted to try out, and they were not compatible.” 

Which makes sense. Baldur’s Gate 3 is already a game that breaks a lot of 5e rules over its k…

We live in some strange times. Let’s say you’ve splashed the cash and bought yourself a brand new Ryzen 9 9950X processor. It’s got 16 cores, 32 threads and it’s a seriously capable CPU, though not the absolute best for gaming. Well, Asus reckons it has a fix for the latter in the form of a new Turbo Game Mode, that halves the number of cores and quarters the number of threads.

Specifically, what Turbo Game Mode (TGM) does is disable one of the CCDs (Core Complex Dies) and SMT (Simultaneous Multithreading). In short, it turns the likes of the 9950X into an 8-core, 8-thread processor. The idea is that some games just don’t like to have threads scattered across separate dies or sharing any cores.

To see if this is the case for any of the games in our CPU benchmarking suite, I ran them afresh with the beta 2505 BIOS for the Asus ROG Crosshair X670E Hero motherboard. The test setup used a Ryzen 9 9950X, 32 GB of DDR5-6000 CL28, a GeForce RTX 4070, and Windows 23H2.

You can see the results for yourself below but as a quick summary, Cyberpunk 2077 and Baldur’s Gate 3 ran worse with TGM enabled, Metro Exodus and Total War: Warhammer 3 ran exactly the same as without…

Sony’s assimilation of Destiny 2 studio Bungie took another step forward today with the announcement that its Creative Studios arm, responsible for directing and developing the “artistic vision” and branding of Bungie games, is now fully a part of PlayStation Studios.

Word of the change came from Bridget O’Neill, formerly the senior director of Creative Studios at Bungie, now the senior director of Creative at PlayStation Studios, who said on LinkedIn (via Game Developer) that her team “is joining PlayStation Studios to build the foundation for a creative team that can support all PlayStation live service games.”

“This opportunity to share our experience working on Bungie titles with other studios that are building live service games is so exciting,” O’Neill wrote.

“Live service is hard and comes with a unique set of challenges, so with PlayStation and Bungie working together we will be able to give a huge jumpstart on development for new games as they enter this super competitive market.”

Despite the move, O’Neill said the team will also continue working on Destiny 2 and Marathon.

In some ways, the change has been a long time coming…