Month: September 2024

Well, it’s been a long run of astonishing prices for the RTX 4090—and gaming PCs featuring Nvidia’s monster GPU—but this Amazon Prime Day we’re just starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel. Prime Day itself doesn’t technically kick off until tomorrow, but as veterans of the sales will tell you, the good deals start a lot earlier than that. 

We’ve already got a head start on the discounts on our Amazon Prime Day PC gaming deals page, and I’m pleased to report that the price drops are already well underway. As a result, I’ve already found some great deals on machines featuring Nvidia’s most powerful gaming GPU, and even an RTX 4090 itself for MSRP. 

Merciful mana from the heavens if you ask me, as while none of these deals could truly be called…

Three weeks after the launch of the neo-Victorian survival game Nightingale, Inflexion Games boss Aaryn Flynn says there are aspects of the game the studio isn’t happy with, but that fixes and improvements including a new patch aimed at eliminating disconnections from the game are on the way.

Nightingale got off to a strong start when it launched into early access on February 20, but, like so many other games, ran into trouble with its servers. The situation was made worse by Nightingale’s always-online requirement, even for solo play. The Steam user rating quickly slid to “mixed,” and the concurrent player count tailed off rapidly. It’s not a doom-and-gloom scenario—there are still thousands of people playing the game at any given time—but there’s definitely work to b…

“Mousetrap” is an anticheat technology developed for Rainbow Six Siege that’s intended to detect and punish “spoofers”—that is, players who use mouse and keyboard on their consoles in order to gain a precision advantage over people using controllers. Ubisoft announced the system in February and said it was supposed to go live in April, but it may have jumped the gun on that a bit because some Xim Apex users are already reporting that their devices are being detected.

Conventional wisdom dictates that the speed and precision of a mouse makes it inherently superior to controllers when it comes to shooters. Way back in 2010, for instance, Voodoo PC founder Rahul Sood claimed that Microsoft decided against enabling crossplay between PC and Xbox 360 consoles after testing found t…

Overwatch 2’s latest patch significantly changes two heroes at the center of the community’s recent discussions around one-shot kills.

Sojourn and Roadhog have had their power reduced just enough to add more predictability to the most lethal parts of their kit. Roadhog’s hook is no longer a death sentence and Sojourn’s railgun shot will now charge at a slower, steady rate, unaffected by Mercy and other heroes’ damage boosts.

While it’s definitely a nerf to both heroes’ ability to quickly kill their targets, it also makes their most lethal abilities more predictable—something Overwatch 2 has been desperately in need of. Getting hooked by a Roadhog or taking a duel with a Sojourn will have a different level of threat depending on which hero you’re playing. If Overwatch 2…

As spotted by Gamesradar, a particularly stubborn mathemagician has rolled up their sleeves to properly prove whether it’s even worth it to run high-tier nightmare dungeons in Diablo 4.

Posted last week on the game’s subreddit, fpsthirty put in a staggering amount of work to confirm their suspicions after tiring of the level 100 grind, wanting to “combine farming with an activity that is interesting and useful to the community … I decided to complete five dungeons of each tier, so that by the end of the experiment I would definitely [reach level 100] (I regretted the idea already on [tier 30], but I brought the plan to its end).”

This staggering one-gamer survey saw them complete over 400 nightmare dungeons in 18 days, cataloguing a staggering 8,104 Ancestral rarity i…

Rockstar’s transformation from DMA Design—the Scottish developer behind the Lemming series as well as Grand Theft Auto—into an international publishing behemoth is a tale that’s been told several times before. For starters, there’s David Kushner’s book Jacked: The Outlaw Story of Grand Theft Auto, and BBC docudrama The Game Changers starring Daniel Radcliffe. There’s even our own feature on how Rockstar made millions selling Scotland’s natural export: dark comedy.

One story that hadn’t been told in full is how the company’s immediately recognizable logo with the R and star against a yellow background came to be. Until now, as Time Extension has tracked down former Rockstar designer Karen Scott (then Karen Mui), who explained how she and artist Jeremy Blake created the …

Overwatch 2 game director Aaron Keller has been doing something pretty neat lately: talking about Overwatch 2. The de facto voice of Blizzard on matters of Overwatch recently made it a goal to communicate with players more often about the current state of the game, and the man is on a roll. So far with his “Director’s Take” series, Keller has written about ranked woes, the future of Arcade mode, and the failed experiment that is map pools.

It’s refreshing to see so much transparency from Overwatch’s top brass on topics that matter most to daily  players, and today’s blog concerning win rates and hero popularity is easily his most illuminating yet.

Right out of the gate, Keller shares some interesting observations about Overwatch 2’s ranked meta in the first weeks of sea…

Twitch streamers are pushing back against the platform’s new “branded content guidelines” that will put tight limits on how advertisements can be run on their channels—and at least one prominent channel is threatening to leave Twitch entirely if the planned changes aren’t dropped.

The new guidelines page starts off with a detailed breakdown of what does and doesn’t qualify as branded content, and when and how promotions and sponsorships need to be disclosed. There’s also a bit about a branded content disclosure too, that “enables you to easily notify your community that your stream includes branded content.”

Things take a turn in the second part of the page, though, where Twitch lays out “permitted and prohibited brand sponsorship formats,” and cuts right to what it’s …

Helldivers 2 has really given me a taste for relentless wars and hordes of killer machines, and it looks like Fun Dog Studios’ The Forever Winter is going to help me keep scratching that itch—albeit in a very different way. 

Instead of being a badass supersoldier, this survival horror looter shooter puts you in a squad of bedraggled survivors just trying to make it to the next day while an apocalyptic war consumes the planet. Fun times! “You’re a small fish in a big apocalypse,” the Steam page warns us. 

For 40 years, two superpowers have been duking it out in a world where ecological collapse and relentless technological advancement have messed everything up. Now, skyscraper-sized war machines batter each other while hordes of cyborgs prowl the ruined battle…

This Cyber Monday you should take a bold step into the future and RGB your toilet. And no, I’m not joking. I’ve had a glowing toilet since 2020 and it’s rad. It makes my bathroom look futuristic—each time I pee into my glowing toilet bowl it’s like whizzing into a cyberpunk cityscape. Instead of the boring old year of 2023 I feel like I’m in Blade Runner 2049 or Cyberpunk 2077—and I’ve really gotta go to the bathroom.

Again, I’m not kidding. The RGB toilet light is a genuinely great upgrade for your bathroom. In the middle of the night if I have to go, I don’t need to turn on a light. The motion sensor detects me and the light begins glowing automatically when I enter the bathroom, which is a lot better than flipping on a harsh light when you’ve just been slee…