Matrix Games today announced that Command: Desert Storm, a new DLC/Standalone release for Command: Modern Air/Naval Operations, will release on March 28th. Watch the Command: Desert Storm – Release Revealed trailer HERE.

On August 2, 1990, Iraq’s ground forces invaded and occupied Kuwait. 40% of the world’s oil production, and the developed world’s economy, was placed in imminent threat by Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein. In response, the United States promptly assembled an international coalition to attack and expel Iraqi forces out of Kuwait, and to eliminate Hussein’s capability to repeat such an act in the future. What followed would forever transform the face of war.

Relive the pivotal events of the conflict that sealed the Cold War and radically changed the Middle East geopolitical landscape: The massive coalition build-up following the Iraqi invasion; The first night over Baghdad on January 17, 1991; the “do or die” strike that stopped Iraq’s chemical retaliation in the nick of time; the frustrating “Scud hunts” all over the Iraqi desert; coalition attacks on Iraq’s airfields; the annihilation of the Iraqi navy at Bubiyan, the “highway of death” during the Iraqi retreat from Kuwait, and much more. Additionally, step into the unknown as you probe the great unanswered questions of the conflict: What if Iraq had pre-empted the coalition build-up and rolled right into S.Arabia? What if Israel had retaliated for the Scud attacks against it? What if Iran or even the Soviet Union had intervened against the coalition?

Get more information about Command: Desert Storm from the games official Product Page.

Source: Blue’s News

NVIDIA announces that the GeForce Experience Ansel RTX and Freestyle are now available through a new in-app version 3.18 update. The Ansel update brings a new version of the screenshot tool to over 200 games without requiring and SDK update, while Freestyle offers image adjustments that can be accessed on-the-fly from within games. Here’s word:

NVIDIA Freestyle – Change The Look and Feel of Games In Real-Time
NVIDIA Freestyle gives you the power to customize the appearance of a game in real-time through the application of post-processing filters. Add sharpening, adjust color and contrast, or make your own filter by stacking and tweaking any of the 17 available filters.

GeForce Experience Update Adds New Creative Tools For Your Games
To apply Freestyle filters in any of the 200+ games currently supported, simply press Alt+F3 during gameplay.

Ansel RTX – Even More Tools and Features For In-Game Photos
Ansel RTX expands select Ansel Photo Mode features to hundreds of games, allowing you to add stackable filters, save in HDR format, and capture photos at up to 8K resolution using AI Up-Res on GeForce RTX graphics cards.

By strudinox @ GND-Tech

These days, it seems that a lot of our focus that goes into new products is centered around bright lights and RGBs. While this is fine for those who love the puking rainbow scene, there are those who still prefer the stealthy subtle build over former. In this review, we’ll be diving in to the Cooler Master MasterBox NR600 which is perfect for those who prefer subtle stealth over the RGB rainbow. The NR600 is part of the MasterBox series of mid-tower cases that features clean crisp edges, plenty of cooling options, and of course a tempered glass side panel.

Read The Review Here

Check out these latest hardware announcements for today from around the web. Also included are some hardware news bits, and on some days, a few rumors tossed in for good measure. Click on the links below to read the official press release, visit the products web page, or to an independent news source.

• EKWB Updates Their Kits With Newer, Extended Range 120 mm Fans
• Cooler Master Launches New NR Series Chassis
• NZXT Announces HUE 2 Ambient Kit V2
• Turtle Beach Announces Battle Buds In-ear Headset with Removable High-sensitivity Boom Microphone
• Sharkoon Unveils WPM Gold ZERO Semi-modular Power Supply Series
• Netgear Announces Nighthawk AX12 12-Stream Wi-Fi 6 Router
• Noctua Presents NH-U12A Premium Class 120mm CPU Cooler
• Aerocool’s New RGB Case Squad Arriving Soon
• Turtle Beach Recon 70 Series Gaming Headset Announced
• Plugable Rolls Out the Performance Onyx Gaming Headset

By Bob Gordon @ Military History Magazine

Just after dawn on Christmas Day 1941 wounded Canadian Pvt. Sid Vale lay in his bed in Hong Kong’s St. Stephen’s College, then in use as an Allied military field hospital. Immobilized by his injuries, he could only shudder at the screams of a nurse being raped by Japanese soldiers in the next room. Minutes earlier the invading soldiers had marched off two British medical officers—hospital commander Lt. Col. George Black and adjutant Captain Peter Witney—who had rushed to head off the Japanese beneath a Red Cross flag at the building entrance. The men’s bayoneted, mutilated corpses turned up the next day on the ground floor of the hospital. A third officer, Sgt. William Parkin, was shot as he sought to flee.

Surging into the first-floor ward, the intruders had summarily executed nearly two-dozen patients in their beds before gang raping four Chinese nurses, three of whom they later killed. Japanese soldiers then serially raped the remaining three nurses in another room. By the time the atrocities ended at St. Stephen’s that horrific Christmas morning, upward of 70 patients and staff members had been killed, several tortured beforehand. Many of the victims were Canadians, members of a 1,975-strong force hurriedly dispatched to bolster the Crown colony’s defenses. They had arrived less than a month before war broke out in the Pacific, and those who were not killed in the defense of Hong Kong were condemned to the living hell of Japanese prison camps.

Read on…

Complete with helicopters, tanks and tractors.

By Fraser Brown @ PC Gamer

Battlefield 5 is getting into the battle royale business with its new Firestorm mode, which will be available to all players on March 25. Check out the reveal trailer HERE.

The battle royale mode was unofficially revealed last week, when a leaked tutorial video was uploaded to YouTube. It’s still there, and you can give it a watch to see some proper in-game footage.

As well as squishy humans duking it out, vehicles will prowl the battlefields. If you’re feeling vulnerable, hop in a tank. They’re not indestructible, though, and make you a big target. Some vehicles will be all about thick armour and firepower, while others will let you get around the map quicker, while offering a bit of extra protection from flying bullets. 17 types of vehicles will be available, including a helicopter and a tractor.

Read on…

Now is the time for all Agents to come to the aid of Washington, DC, as The Division 2 launches today on Xbox One, PC, and PS4. Playable solo or in co-op with up to three teammates, this open world shooter challenges you to take back the city by aiding its citizens, building up your Base of Operations, and fighting the enemy factions that patrol the streets. Grow your Agent’s capabilities by looting and customizing weapons, scavenging and crafting gear, and unlocking new skills to increase your impact in firefights. Flex your prowess in the Dark Zones, where enemy factions and other players pose a deadly threat, or go head-to-head in competitive multiplayer combat. Then prepare for the endgame, when a new high-tech faction arrives, and you unlock a powerful new Signature weapon to take them on.

In the coming months, new stories and challenges will be coming to all players of The Division 2, and Year 1 Pass owners will be the first to get their hands on them. From the franchise-first eight-player raid to a series of DLC episodes, you can find more details in The Division 2′s post-launch plan.

Tom Clancy’s The Division 2 is now available for purchase exclusively via the Epic Games Store and the Ubisoft Store.

More game information can be found on the official Tom Clancy’s The Division 2 website.

Not about doomsday preppers, but number one with doomsday preppers!

By Mike Williams @ USGamer

Yesterday, I loaded up The Division 2, intending to create my character and play for around 30 minutes to give myself a mental foothold. When I looked up, I had dumped around four hours into Ubisoft’s version of a Washington D.C that has fallen into chaos and anarchy. It’s the kind of game where you’ll tell yourself, “I’ll just peek around the corner and log off,” only to find yourself hip deep into several missions an hour later, backed by a silent squad of two players.

The Division 2 picks up seven months after the events of the first Division, where the United States collapses after the outbreak of a deadly virus. Gone are the snowy streets of New York, replaced by Washington D.C in the summer. As a native, I can tell you that it’s already unbearably muggy in June, and The Division 2′s slow encroachment of forests and swamps is probably not making things any better. While The Division’s New York dealt with the immediate aftermath of the viral outbreak, The Division 2′s D.C. is beginning to adjust. There are gangs, sure, but there are also pockets of peaceful civilization that you need to protect.

Read on…

By Brett Howse @ AnandTech

Sometimes things happen that are unexpected – just ask Ned Stark. In a far less fictional event, Microsoft has posted an update on their DirectX Blog announcing that they’ve brought a form of DirectX 12 to Windows 7, via official support for the latest DX12 version of World of Warcraft on Windows 7. Where do we even begin?

For some background, Microsoft’s latest DirectX API was created to remove some of the CPU bottlenecks for gaming by allowing for developers to use low-level programming conventions to shift some of the pressure points away from the CPU. This was a response to single-threaded CPU performance plateauing, making complex graphical workloads increasingly CPU-bounded. There’s many advantages to using this API over traditional DX11, especially for threading and draw calls. But, Microsoft made the decision long ago to only support DirectX 12 on Windows 10, with its WDDM 2.0 driver stack.

Today’s announcement is a pretty big surprise on a number of levels. If Microsoft had wanted to back-port DX12 to Windows 7, you would have thought they’d have done it before Windows 7 entered its long-term servicing state. As it is, even free security patches for Windows 7 are set to end on January 14, 2020, which is well under a year away, and the company is actively trying to migrate users to Windows 10 to avoid having a huge swath of machines sitting in an unpatched state. In fact, they are about to add a pop-up notification to Windows 7 to let users know that they are running out of support very soon. So adding a big feature like DX12 now not only risks undermining their own efforts to migrate people away from Windows 7, but also adding a new feature well after Windows 7 entered long-term support. It’s just bizarre.

Read on…

Source: TechPowerUp!

AMD has released the latest version of their Radeon Adrenalin 2019 Edition drivers. Beta version 19.3.2 is a significant update as it delivers support for Tom Clancy’s The Division 2 and Sid Meier’s Civilization VI: Gathering Storm. AMD also claims up to 4% gain in regards to average performance on the Radeon VII when compared to the previously released 19.2.3 drivers. To go with the added game support and performance boost this release also supports DirectX 12 on Windows 7 for select titles. The Vulkan API also gets some love with this release with the addition of various extensions with the most notable one being the VK_EXT_depth_clip_enable extension which allows for depth clipping operations to be controlled by the application rather than the driver thus making it useful for Developers translating Direct3D content to the Vulkan API.

The new Radeon Software Adrenalin 2019 Edition 19.3.2 beta drivers are available online at the AMD driver download page.