GamingNews

Smoke app brings the Steam store to your Apple Watch

December 31, 2019
If you can’t bear to be away from Steam for a moment least you miss one of its famously great sales, then Smoke, a new app for the Apple Watch, has you covered. Smoke advertises that it “brings parts of Steam” to the Apple Watch. The hardware is obviously pretty limited, so don’t expect to be purchasing or launching games from your wrist. You will be able to view your…
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GamingNews

2016 indie hit 'Hyper Light Drifter' is free in the Epic Games Store

December 28, 2019
The Epic Holiday Sale is still going, and today’s daily free game is Hyper Light Drifter. The top-down action RPG was crowdfunded a few years ago before it was eventually released in 2016, and now you can try it out yourself for zero dollars. Hyper Light Drifter’s 88 Metacritic score and list of awards won indicates it’s at least worth your time among the slew of retro 2D games…
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GamingNews

Ubisoft uses AI to teach a car to drive itself in a racing game

December 27, 2019
Reinforcement learning, an AI training technique that employs rewards to drive software policies toward goals, has been applied successfully to domains from industrial robotics to drug discovery. But while firms including OpenAI and Alphabet’s DeepMind have investigated its efficacy in video games like Dota 2, Quake III Arena, and StarCraft 2, few to date have studied its use under constraints…
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GamingNews

How Twitch started to lose its grip on video game streaming

December 26, 2019
For the longest time, Twitch was the undisputed champ of video game live streaming. The Amazon-owned platform has the highest number of ‘broadcasters’ and, more importantly, viewers watching, chatting and donating in real-time. For most full-time streamers…
GamingNews

Researchers want to use Mega Man 2 to evaluate AI

December 26, 2019
Games have long served as a training ground for AI algorithms, and not without good reason. Games — particularly video games — provide challenging environments against which to benchmark autonomous systems. In 2013, a team of researchers introduced the Arcade Learning…
GamingNews

'Call of Duty: Modern Warfare' adds holiday-only snowball fights

December 25, 2019
The Call of Duty: Modern Warfare team is marking the holidays with decidedly kinder, more lighthearted gameplay. Infinity Ward and Activision have introduced a Snowfight mode that will only be available until December 31st at 1PM Eastern. It’s exactly what it sounds like: you and a partner have to take down foes using snowballs instead of the usual guns and explosives. If you’re…
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