PC News

Multiplayer VR melee game Ironlights is launching on April 9 for PC VR headsets via Oculus and Steam, as well as on the Oculus Store for Oculus Quest for $20. The game ran a successful Kickstarter campaign earlier in the year, and is now launching a full release after a limited beta that ran over the last month or so.

Recent events have laid bare the world’s reliance on digital. With billions under quarantine, people and businesses alike have relied on digital to connect with loved ones, customers, work remotely, get the news, and stay entertained.

Intellivision Entertainment‘s Amico retro video game console is proving popular with gamers who are anticipating its October launch in spite of the coronavirus pandemic.

The dotcom crash happened almost exactly 20 years ago today. I felt the same shiver then as I did this week. The company I was with, Conducent, saw revenues decline by 70%, followed by a 75% drop from the Nasdaq. $8 trillion of wealth was destroyed, and digital media couldn’t even be given away because doubleclick ad delivery contracts were so high that the media wasn’t worth the ad serving.

We’ve seen a few Spider-Man swinging demos on the Oculus Quest and PC VR (both official and non-official), but now an upcoming VR game is set to take fun web-swinging mechanics and apply them to an arcade-style arena shooter with a new property.

While there’s zero factual support for a conspiracy theory linking the COVID-19 virus to 5G cellular technology — and the scientific community has concluded that 5G is safe — the UK government was forced today to explicitly address the topic after arsonists burned down a cell tower over 5G, and used Facebook to encourage others to follow suit.

It’s been widely reported that U.S. hospital systems — particularly in hotspots like New York City, Detroit, Chicago, and New Orleans — are overwhelmed by the influx of patients affected by COVID-19. There’s a nationwide ventilator shortage. Convention centers and public parks have been repurposed as ward overflows. And waiting times at some call and testing centers are averaging multiple hours.

Google researchers developed an AI system that learns from the motions of animals to give robots greater agility, reveals a preprint paper and blog post published this week. The coauthors believe their approach could bolster the development of robots that can complete tasks in the real world, for instance transporting materials between multilevel warehouses and fulfillment centers.

We’re getting close to the April 10 launch of Final Fantasy VII Remake for PlayStation 4. So before we all get caught up with what’s new, I’d like to take a moment to talk about why the original is so danged special.

Not a day goes by in the age of the coronavirus (COVID-19) without a mention of Zoom. The video conferencing tool is being used by political parties, corporate offices, school districts, small businesses, and individuals needing to connect as they work and learn from home. We now finally have some numbers to quantify the jump: Zoom went from 10 million daily active users to 200 million daily active users in three months.