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.

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.

• Netgear Launches XR300 Nighthawk Pro Gaming Router Optimized to Minimize Lag for Gamers
• Razer Expands Best-Selling Lineup with a New Line Designed for Value-Conscious Gamers
• Spire X2 Unveils the RGB ZOOM Fan Series
• Roccat Purchased by Turtle Beach
• Spire X2 Also Launches the Aura Fan 3-pack
• Lounge Wizard – Introducing the K83 Wireless Entertainment Keyboard from CORSAIR
• Inno3D Announces the New Super Charger GeForce GTX 1660 Twin X2

Ubisoft has revealed a brand new trailer ahead of the release of Tom Clancy’s The Division 2. The trailer, which is titled ‘What is The Division 2?’ gives an in depth look at the upcoming title.

Led by Massive Entertainment in collaboration with seven other studios around the world, Tom Clancy’s The Division 2 is the next evolution in the open-world online shooter RPG genre that the first game helped establish. Set seven months after a deadly virus was released in New York City, Tom Clancy’s The Division 2 will bring players into a fractured and collapsing Washington D.C. The world is on the brink, its people living through the biggest crisis ever faced in human history. As veteran Division agents, players are the last hope against the complete fall of society as enemy factions vie for control of the city. If Washington D.C. is lost, the entire nation falls. Building upon more than two years of listening to and learnings from The Division community, Tom Clancy’s The Division 2 will offer a substantial campaign that organically flows into a robust endgame, to create a cohesive and meaningful experience for all types of players.

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

Tom Clancy’s The Division 2 releases worldwide on March 15th, 2019, on the Xbox One family of devices including the Xbox One X, PlayStation®4 computer entertainment system and Windows PC.

Source: Blue’s News

Heatblur’s DCS F-14 Tomcat DLC for DCS World has launched. This can be picked up on Steam for the DCS World Steam Edition and from the DCS E-Shop and the Heatblur Store for the non-Steam version of the virtual battlefield. There’s a post in the DCS forums also mentioning where to buy this in Russia and South Korea, and warning that keys picked up from sketchy sellers will not work, saying, “Any DCS World keys purchased from other sources are invalid and are simply trying to re-sell keys that are bound to other users or purchased through fraud. Such sites include Kinguin, CDExpress and G2A.” Ride into the danger zone in this launch trailer and read on for the full flight plan:

The F-14 Tomcat was a two-crew, variable geometry, maritime air superiority fighter that served with the US Navy for 32 years and continues to serve with the IRIAF in Iran. The F-14 was the US Navy’s frontline fighter from the 1970s until the mid 2000s. Over the course of its long service life it also became the US Navy’s premier precision ground-attack platform and lone airborne reconnaissance asset.

Outstanding features of the aircraft are the swing-wing configuration, crew of two, and the powerful AN/AWG-9 Weapons Control System (WCS) and radar. The AWG-9 allows employment of the powerful AIM-54 Phoenix air to air missile while the LANTIRN pod allows the ability to carry out precision ground strikes using laser guided bombs. The F-14 Tomcat was present during many pivotal historic moments such as the two Gulf of Sidra incidents, Operation Desert storm in Iraq, the conflict in Yugoslavia, Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan and Operation Iraqi Freedom. It was also immortalized in the iconic motion picture, Top Gun, and starred in several other feature films including The Final Countdown, Executive Decision, and others.

Independent developer and publisher Rebellion today announced Sniper Elite V2 Remastered, in this stunning gameplay trailer. Sniper Elite V2 Remastered launches on PS4, Xbox One, PC and Nintendo Switch in 2019. Fans can return to Berlin and revisit an epic campaign set in the final moments of World War 2.

Offering stunningly enhanced graphics, 4K resolution and HDR display, this is the visually definitive version of Sniper Elite V2. It will introduce new playable characters, a brand new photo mode, expanded online multiplayer for up to 16 combatants, as well as all the content ever released for the game. Sniper Elite V2 Remastered will be released both digitally and at retail later this year.

Sniper Elite V2 Remastered weaves an explosive story of an undercover American OSS agent, stalking enemy prey across key historical locations from the Battle of Berlin in a mission to unravel the mysteries and dangers of the German V-2 rocket programme.

Visit the official Sniper Elite website for more game information.