This Week on JungleDrums:
Your JungleDrums host, AcuteJungle66, delves into this week’s latest tech and gaming news. An ‘affordable’ 4K HDR monitor is coming soon, The Division celebrates its 2 Year Anniversary, Ryzen 7 2700X spotted, and more!
- BenQ will be releasing their EL2870U, a 28-inch display ‘designed specifically for home entertainment’ that supports 4K and HDR (HDR10 to be more precise). This appears to be an affordable (sub $500) monitor whether you are a PC Gamer or have one of the newer consoles that is capable of 4K. The EL2870U uses a TN panel with a fast 1ms response time for fast-action game play. It also supports FreeSync to smooth out the visuals if you’re running a Radeon graphics card or playing on an Xbox One X.
- The Division is rapidly approaching its second anniversary. To celebrate this landmark, Ubisoft will hold four Global Events over the course of the month. These introduce modifiers to the game that ‘spice up your traditional game play experience’ and offer players rewards including Tokens that can be spent on in-game items and opportunities to pick up coveted Classified Gear. The first event, Outbreak, is live now and runs until March 5, with modifiers that affect all enemies, including Contagious, which drains player health when enemies are too close. After that comes Assault, from March 8-12, followed by Strike on March 15-19, and finally Ambush, which will run from March 22-26.
- Xbox One X and Xbox One S now support output at 1440p resolution for games and media; 1440p resolution, sometimes referred to as 2560×1440 or QHD, is a popular choice for PC users. With over a million and a half more pixels than 1080p, this resolution fills the gap between Full HD (1080p) and 4K displays. Additionally, Mixer streamers on Xbox One will soon have the option of sharing their controller with a Mixer viewer who is watching through Mixer.com. Streamers can share their entire controller (except the Xbox button) in the Xbox game they are playing, and a viewer can take control through the on-screen game pad or by plugging a controller into their PC.
- The first consumer desktop Ryzen 7 2000 CPU has been spotted. It appears to have 300 MHz higher clock than its predecessor, the Ryzen 7 1700X. The CPU going by the name of Ryzen 7 2700X can be found with a base clock of 3700 MHz and a turbo clock of 4124 MHz. Other entries showcase clocks speed up to 4200 MHz. The Ryzen 7 2700X is an 8-core and 16-thread processor featuring Zen+ architecture utilizing 12nm FinFET fabrication process. AMD has confirmed that Ryzen 2000 series will be available in April.
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Destiny 2’s semi-regular Iron Banner event is going “old-school” this spring — the game’s next major update will make it so that Iron Banner matches work similarly to the way they did in the original Destiny, developer Bungie announced today. Bungie previously said that it was working on six-versus-six Crucible matches for Destiny 2, after launching the game with a reduced player count of four-versus-four. Bungie has provided more details on the revisions to Iron Banner that it is building into Destiny 2’s version 1.1.4 update, which is scheduled to be released March 27.
- The Entertainment Software Rating Board (ESRB), the self-regulatory association responsible for rating the content of video games, responded to the mounting controversy around the industry’s shift toward micro-transactions, specifically the gambling-style loot box systems favored by the world’s most popular competitive multiplayer titles. Unfortunately, the ESRB’s solution is only a new ‘in-game purchases’ label that seems as if it would apply to a vast majority of modern games, from story-focused Nintendo classics like The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild to EA’s bungled Battlefront 2.
About JungleDrums:
JungleDrums is a weekly news show run by Scholarly Gamers’ Content Coordinator, AcuteJungle66. Topics discussed in the show focus heavily on gaming, highlights, streams, and tech, but will typically hover around hot-button topics of the week. Joining AcuteJungle66 are a rotating selection of guests, ranging from friends and those interested in the topic at hand, fellow Scholarly Gamers, or members of raiding parties from gaming staples of his such as Destiny 2, The Division, Rainbow Six Siege, or Monster Hunter: World.
