Samsung Doesn't Love GTA 5 Mod That Replaces Bombs With Galaxy Note 7s

Samsung has forced a video of the GTA 5 mod offline.

Grand Theft Auto V saw the addition of a new user-created mod earlier this month, when one player replaced the game's sticky explosives with Samsung's Galaxy Note 7. Now, the electronics company has issued a DMCA takedown against a YouTube video that featured the mod (via The Verge).

The mod is a pretty simple one. You throw the Note 7, and it explodes. This is a joke on the phone, which has been the focus of some attention for its tendency to catch fire and blow up. Samsung issued recalls when this first popped up but has since discontinued the product entirely after continued defects.

Despite the removal of one video, there are still several that haven't been taken down yet. You can take a look at one in the embed below. Additionally, the mod can be found here. As always, you should be careful when downloading anything from the internet.

In related news, Grand Theft Auto V publisher Rockstar Games has revealed a sequel to 2010's Red Dead Redemption. It releases next year and will feature "a brand-new online multiplayer experience." A trailer is scheduled to launch on Thursday, October 20, at 8 AM PT.

Source : Aces up solitaire

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Improve your winrate in Overwatch's ranked mode

More wins, less salt.

Ranking up in Overwatch’s competitive scene can be difficult, especially if you’re trying to coordinate your efforts with random players. It can be utterly infuriating when a game based purely on team synergy feels like a solo experience, and even being placed within a decent team can feel like an uphill struggle. While Overwatch’s competitive play can have its frustrating lows, it’s the exhilarating highs that keep us coming back. So what can you do to increase your winrate and maximise the odds of your team succeeding when playing ranked?

Attack and defend as a team

Don’t trickle in one at a time. Your chance of surviving and your overall impact are greatly diminished when you jump into a teamfight solo. Walking single file into the enemy is such a common occurrence in both competitive and casual levels of play that it’s easily one of the main reasons people lose games. When you die, your instinct is to rush back to the fray, but this is rarely the best option. If there are five or six opponents alive and they’re holding down a position, you will only make matters worse by engaging them one at a time. Never think you can take on the enemy team by yourself.

Turn on your killfeed to see which teammates died recently. This will allow you to gauge whether it’s best to get back to the fight and support your remaining allies or whether you should wait and regroup. If you find most of your teammates keep getting picked off it’s better to simply regroup and re-engage. Attacking and defending as one unit is much stronger than just two or three heroes trying to take on the enemy team. You’re better of waiting for your team and attacking together.

Take care when flanking

If you flank and find yourself waiting for your team or end up in a precarious situation just disengage or deny your enemy the kill. There’s no point wasting valuable time waiting for your team to push and distract your opponents. You’re of little use to your team and easy pickings for the enemy who will capitalise off your bad positioning. Only flank if you're certain you won't get caught and if you can actively communicate with your team so they know when to engage. Flankers run a very high risk of being killed before the initial engagement and can result in an instant a 5 vs 6 fight for your team. A flanker should participate in the team fights but prioritise picking off high value targets from the sides or behind.

Communicate

Don’t be afraid to communicate to your team. Tell them that you’re being flanked by an enemy Tracer, tell them that your ultimate is up and you want to engage, let them know enemy positions. You will increase your chances of winning a game if you are proactive in your communication. We all know how useful Widowmaker’s Infra-Sight is for the team, but you don’t need to be able to see the heat signatures of targets through walls to relay similar information. The more details and information your team has on your opponents, the easier it is to coordinate and repel potential attacks.

Be flexible

Refusing to switch heroes when your team lacks a certain role can lose you the game before it’s even started. If you decide you’re playing Genji and disregard your team's overall composition the enemy will simply capitalise on your weaknesses, and use your stubbornness against you. Instead be more flexible in your picks, choose Mercy if your team requires a support, go for Reinhardt if you need a tank. There’s no point refusing to change or demanding others to if you’re not willing compromise yourself. Master a hero from each role so you can fill and switch effectively, it’s no good picking Lúcio if you’ve never played him before, instead use quick match games as a testing ground to learn a plethora of heroes. Having the ability to quickly change your role to counter your opponents will instantly put you leagues ahead of those that main just one hero.

Try not to hesitate 

Don’t hesitate when you see an opportunity to punish the enemy team. Again look at your kill feed and see how many players are alive and then decided whether it’s worth pushing the payload or jumping onto a control point. If you’re about to die don’t bother using your ultimate as a last resort. Yes you may get a kill or two from it, but at higher levels of play teams rely on synergising their ultimates to lock down and neutralise the main damage threats.

For example, Zarya's ultimate pulls in all nearby enemies and when this is combined with Pharah’s Barrage, Hanzo's Dragonstrike, Tracer's Pulse Bomb or McCree's Deadeye you will absolutely devastate the enemy team. If you hesitate to follow up on an engage or miss an opportunity to kill multiple enemies you are likely to get killed as a result. We all make mistakes, especially at high levels of play where the pressure to perform increases, but this doesn’t mean you should be afraid to go through with your initial instincts.

Check your kill-cam

Your kill cam is a valuable feature that provides you with a few seconds of game changing information that you can use to your advantage. Say if you die to Pharah and you see she has access to her Barrage ability you can relay this information to your team mates. Tell them not to group up so they can avoid her ultimate and negate its overall potency. You can see turret placements and even where Symmetra’s Teleporter is located. Watching the kill-cam not only gives you a better understanding of enemy movements, it also helps you improve as a player to see how and where you went wrong. So instead of outright skipping the kill-cam make it habit to check it occasionally. After all, you never know what information is hidden behind the lens.

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Battlefield 1 Intro Cinematics Show Life Before and During the War

The intro cinematics set up two of Battlefield 1's single-player missions.

Battlefield 1's single-player campaign will consist of five War Stories, and we got our first look at one of these stories' intro cinematic this past weekend at TwitchCon. You can watch it below.

The video contains two scenes. The first kicks off the "Through Mud and Blood" campaign, which puts you in the shoes of a tank crew member. The cinematic shows the driver character, sitting in a luxurious car presumably before the war. It then flashes forward or backward to the war, where the driver is taken to the tank and introduced to the crew. Watch it for yourself below.

The second scene in the video above was originally released by Westie. It shows a soldier in bed before awakening in the midst of battle. It plays before the Storm of Steel mission in "Through Mud and Blood." You can watch 12 minutes of gameplay from that mission here.

Battlefield 1 releases October 21 on PS4, Xbox One, and PC, but you can play a portion of the game even earlier than that if you're an EA/Origin Access member. Additionally, you can gain three-day early access with the $80 special edition. Last week, EA released a trailer for its single-player campaign that gave us a look at the single-player stories of five different characters. Another short clip was recently released that teased a battle against the Ottoman Empire.

Developer DICE explained that featuring multiple playable characters helps the game's immersion and respects the setting better than having "one character hopping through those different" places around the world.

"[W]e decided on an anthology format; a set of characters with their own more focused stories," the developer explained. "That way we can have immersion and variety--a double win."

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Graphics card comparison: which offers the best bang for your buck?

Getting the most out of your next graphics card upgrade.

Our guide to the best graphics cards for gaming is broken up into categories. If money's no object, the Nvidia GTX 1080 is today's no-brainer pick. It runs circles around the AMD RX 480! Then again, the RX 480 costs less than half the GTX 1080—they were never meant to compete in the first place.

But without those categories, which card is actually the better value for your dollar? As a companion to our overall recommendations in our graphics card buying guide, this is our breakdown of how every current graphics card delivers on performance-per-dollar.

If you want to make sure you're spending your money as efficiently as possible—well, we've got charts.

The GeForce GTX 1060 3GB may end VRAM limited in some games.

Before I get to the data, a few things are worth spelling out just so everyone is on the same page. First, while I've tested all of the cards, deciding how to best compare cards of different performance levels can be tricky. A card with 2GB VRAM will choke on a lot of games if you run at 'ultra' settings and high resolutions, but it might do great at 'high' settings and 1080p. The games you test—and the APIs used while testing—can also play a major role. If you want to skew things heavily in favor of AMD or Nvidia, there are ways to do exactly that.

I test a collection of 16 games, of varying ages, at settings that tend to be more demanding than budget cards can really handle. I'm working on retesting a few cards at lower settings (specifically, cards that cost under $200), but those results aren't ready yet. I'll keep this piece updated on a regular basis to reflect the changing prices and hardware as well, so you can check back any time you're in the market for a new graphics card.

My primary focus is going to be on upgrading your graphics card, so I'm eliminating the rest of the system cost from the picture. I've checked prices in the US and UK at the time of writing. All of the charts are also using my 1080p Ultra results for relative value, rather than averaging 1080p, 1440p, and 4K results. This is to help keep things relatively fair among all the competitors, though it potentially penalizes both the fastest (and most expensive) cards, where the CPU can become a bottleneck at lower resolutions, and the least expensive cards, where limited VRAM can be a problem.

If you're looking for the best bargain on a new graphics card, Nvidia's GTX 1060 3GB card comes out on top in the US. While there are ways to penalize a card with 'only' 3GB VRAM, in practice it just doesn't seem to make a huge difference right now.

With cards readily available at close to MSRP ($200 / £190), most games are easily able to break into the 60fps or higher range at 1080p and nearly max settings. If you fall a bit short now and then, tweaking a few settings should make up the difference without a drastic drop in quality. And you get all this in a card that uses less than 120W of power—unless it's a factory overclocked model, which many are.

But maybe you don't care for Nvidia, you want an extra gig of VRAM, you think DX12 is the way of the future, and/or you live in the UK. In that case, the RX 470 4GB is an excellent alternative, with significantly lower pricing than the 1060 3GB in the UK ($199 / £175).

I'll say this: Hitman DX12 and Doom Vulkan both give the RX 470 a clear advantage over the GTX 1060, and new releases with DX12 support like Deus Ex: Mankind Divided and Forza Horizon 3 appear to continue that pattern. (Interestingly, Ashes of the Singularity, the oldest DX12 game, actually favors the 1060 3GB by a few fps.) Ultimately, the RX 470 rates either slightly behind or slightly ahead of the 1060 3GB, depending on price, with very similar performance. And if you want to run CrossFire, you can do that with the RX 470.

It shouldn't be a surprise that the $200 GPUs place near the top of the value charts, but if that's still too much money, the RX 460 is an excellent budget alternative. Performance ends up being pretty similar to the GTX 950 (slightly faster or slower, depending on the game), but the card is a power miser and sells for around $110 / £105.

Just know that running 1080p ultra settings will present difficulties; set your sights for 1080p medium-to-high and you should do okay—or run lighter fare like LoL, DotA2, or StarCraft II, where the card has ample performance to hit high fps. There are 2GB and 4GB models, but you'll typically run out of GPU performance before you run out of VRAM.

Moving down the chart, after the 1060 3GB and RX 470 4GB, the GTX 1060 6GB and RX 480 8GB are the next best 'modern' cards to consider. The 1060 is about ten percent faster than the RX 480 8GB and costs less, so it's the better value at $250 / £250. If you want AMD's 8GB alternatives, though, I recommend the RX 480 over the RX 470; you can find it for around $270 / £245. As with the above 1060/470 comparison, the RX 480 tends to be faster in DX12/Vulkan games, but slower in DX11 games.

For high-end gaming, the GTX 1070 is another good option. It combines blisteringly fast performance with a high price of $400 / £380. It's slightly faster than the previous generation GTX 980 Ti at a lower price, and while it won't do 4K at max quality, 1440p ultra and/or 4k high are certainly within reach. The fastest current consumer graphics card, the GTX 1080, is a questionable value if all you're looking at is bang for the buck, but we'd expect no less from a card that costs $610 / £575 or more.

The remaining cards are mostly on their way out now, with prices fluctuating but in most cases increasing over the past month or two. The R9 300 series cards have definitely gone up in price, and the R9 Fury/Nano are trending up as well. GTX 970 is still a decent value, though I wouldn't go buy one at this stage (get a GTX 1060 instead), and GTX 980 is now effectively dead in the US market—you can find a GTX 980 Ti for a lower price! Basically, there's not much reason to bother with buying a new GTX 900 or R9 300/Fury series card these days.

There are other factors to consider beyond pure performance for your money, however. Even though it tops the charts right now, the 3GB VRAM in the GTX 1060 could prove limiting in a year or two, particularly with the next-gen consoles offering more RAM than ever before. I'd rather get a 6GB 1060 or 8GB 470/480 if possible, simply because they're less likely to run into memory limitations over the coming years.

Those who already have a decent card like a GTX 970 or R9 380 (or faster) don't need to rush out and upgrade, but if you're in the market, look to the latest models. Investing in the previous generation of graphics hardware several months after the next generation appears is generally a bad idea. And if you need additional advice, our best graphics card and idiot's guide to buying a graphics card can help.

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