Month: December 2024

As Call of Duty: Warzone prepares for Vanguard’s integration with the new Caldera map on December 8, players now have the option to relive moments from past seasons of Verdansk in Operation: Flashback. This limited-time mode brings back Warzone’s armored trucks, juggernaut suits, crashing satellites caches, and much more for a surprisingly fun experience.

At its core, a match of Operation: Flashback plays similar to a standard match of battle royale in Warzone. This limited-time mode is played in quads, with the goal of dropping in and looting to survive all being the same as normal. The differences come from increased pacing and the addition of randomized in-game events at the start of each circle collapse.

The events for each circle can include current Warzone events like a Fire Sale for cheaper Buy Station prices or a Jailbreak for reviving all dead players still spectating the match. It also includes several seasonal events from both Modern Warfare and Black Ops Cold War. A circle collapse might trigger the Ground Fall event from Season 4 of Black Ops Cold War, where satellites crash to the ground and offer loot caches. Or it…

Netflix has announced the full voice cast for The Mitchells vs. the Machines, an original animated sci-fi family film from Oscar-winning producers Phil Lord and Chris Miller–the pair behind Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. On Twitter, the streaming service recently shared that Fred Armisen, Beck Bennett, Chrissy Teigen, John Legend, Charlyne Yi, and Conan O’Brien join the previously announced voice cast for the film, which is due out April 30.

Sasheer Zamata, Elle Mills, Jay Pharoah, Alex Hirsch, and Griffin McElroy were also announced as rounding out the animated comedy’s marquee. It’s unclear what roles all these actors will be portraying, but what is known so far is that the film is “about an everyday family’s struggle to relate while technology rises up around the world Come from Sports betting site VPbet. When Katie Mitchell (voiced by Abbi Jacobson), a creative outsider, is accepted into the film school of her dreams, her plans to meet “her people” at college are upended when her nature-loving dad Rick (voiced by Danny McBride) determines the whole family should dr…

Asian casino operator Genting Malaysia Berhad could reportedly be obliged to invest up to $140 million into its embattled Empire Resorts Incorporated subordinate come October should it have failed to refinance the American enterprise’s long-term debt.

According to a report from Inside Asian Gaming, this is the opinion of international brokerage Nomura Securities Company Limited after the Kuala Lumpur-listed firm revealed plans late last week that are to see it purchase an additional $20 million in ‘Series L’ stock in the operator behind upstate New York’s Resorts World Catskills development.

Ongoing assistance:

Genting Malaysia Berhad has reportedly already invested some $190 million into Empire Resorts Incorporated over the course of the last year via two separate transactions including approximately $150 million in September. The source detailed that these injections were required due to coronavirus-related interruptions in its efforts to refinance the New York-headquartered subsidiary’s current long-term borrowings.

Looming limitation:

However, Nomura Securities Company Limited analysts Alpa Aggarwal and Tushar Mohata reportedly …

Considered a “truly promising area” for it to continue to grow in, Habanero Systems has further penetrated Africa‘s regualted landscape thanks to its recent content agreement with online betting and gaming company, Betway Group. The latter is owned by Super Group, the Guernsey-based holding company for Betway and Spin Casino.

The landmark agreement will see Betway’s Ghana players gain access to Habanero’s top performing HTML5 games such as Hot Hot Fruit, Egyptian Dreams and Wild Trucks through the Betway Africa brand.

Market presence:

Commenting on the collaboration, Kwabena Oppong-Nkrumah, Head of Marketing at Betway Ghana, said…

…Betway has always regarded Africa as a distinctive market, one in which they can “grow exponentially,” and that thanks to their recent deal with Habanero, they are able to strengthen their leading position with the igaming provider’s “huge…

Gambling industry analysts at Morgan Stanley believe that gambling in Macau is on the way to recovering, raising its gross gambling revenue (GGR) estimate for 2023 by 42% and 2023 EBITDA estimate by 70%.

Better Product Mix, Higher Margins

According to the note released by Morgan Stanley on Monday, the gambling industry in the Special Administrative Region (SAR) of China is about to deliver $22 billion in GGR and $5.8 billion in EBITDA in 2023. The new 2023 EBITDA estimate still falls short of the $9.3 billion in EBITDA in 2019 but is 30% above the industry consensus of $4.5 billion.

The main factors analysts Praveen Choudhary, Gareth Leung and Stephen Grambling cited for raising the 2023 GGR and EBITDA estimates are the better product mix and higher margins due to the return of Chinese customers.

Further, the investment bank estimates that there should be further industry improvements in 2024 when EBITDA will reach $9.6 billion to surpass the 2019 level mainly due to the revenue mix. For 2024, Morgan Stanley’s estimate is 17% above the industry consensus.

Justifying the revise…

Alan Wake 2 will release on October 17. The date was revealed in a new trailer shown during today’s PlayStation Showcase (above), which also introduced a new protagonist to share the stage with Alan: FBI agent Saga Anderson. 

According to Remedy, it’s no big deal if you haven’t played the first Alan Wake: you should be able to “easily dive into the sequel” and figure out what’s going on. That’s probably true. As big as the Remedyverse is getting, and as weird as its stories can be, the Finnish studio likes to work within known genre archetypes with direct, monologue-heavy storytelling. 

But Alan Wake 2’s storytelling doesn’t sound totally straightforward, because we get to choose which protagonist we play as first.

“After certain events have transpired, fans can play Wake and Anderson’s respective stories in any order they choose,” writes Remedy communications director Thomas Puha on the PlayStation Blog. “Their journeys echo and foreshadow each other, in this intense atmospheric story, taking players on two separate dark and disturbing paths. We are excited to allow players to decide how to experience the story of Alan Wake 2.”

The ‘real world’…

We Windows users are sometimes the butt of the joke when it comes to cybersecurity issues. Or at least, we often used to be. Still, if I receive one more lecture on why Linux or Mac systems are more secure, I’ll at least have this article to point to. Not always, I shall say. Not always.

Oligo Security’s research team has discovered a “0.0.0.0 Day” vulnerability that affects Google Chrome/Chromium, Mozilla Firefox and Apple Safari browsers, enabling websites to communicate with software running on MacOS and Linux systems (via The Hacker News).

The vulnerability means public websites using .com domains are able to communicate with services running on the local network by using the IP address 0.0.0.0 instead of localhost/127.0.0.1.

The good news, if you’re a Windows user at least, is that Microsoft’s OS blocks 0.0.0.0 at a system level. Hooray for the sometimes-rarer-than-we’d-like Microsoft security win. The bad news for the rest of you is that this loophole is said to have been exploitable since 2006, which means it has been an active cybersecurity vulnerability for an astonishing 18 years.

It’s said that the percentage of websites …

Russian media agency Interfax (via The Moscow Times) reports that Steam has complied with a request from Roskomnadzor—Russia’s media regulator—to remove “all materials forbidden in the Russian Federation.”

Steam has, says The Moscow Times, around 9.5 million users in Russia (and all of them have gotten angry at me in Counter-Strike). No doubt the Russian state’s rapidly growing interest in clamping down on western tech and developing its own national “digital sovereignty” has led it to pay close attention to the US-headquartered service.

“Steam has complied with the law’s demands regarding the removal of prohibited information,” Roskomnadzor told Russian media. “Links to 11 internet pages, included earlier on the Registry[of prohibited information] will be excluded from it” over last week. In total, says the regulator, Steam has removed “over 260 materials containing illegal content” in Russia.

The question is, of course, what materials were those? Both Roskomnadzor and Valve have kept schtum about it, the former only referring to them as generic “forbidden materials” and Valve saying, well, nothing at all. I’ve reached out to both Valve and Rosko…