Time for another look at this week's best deals - and just a few days until the Shenmue remasters hit! I'm unashamed to admit that I'm looking forward to playing through both Shenmue games more than I am most of this year's big releases. Okay, maybe I'm a little ashamed to say that, but that's just me. This week's batch of gaming deals ranges from graphics cards to MicroSD cards, with plenty of things that aren't cards also.
As usual, we've got deals that'll work in the UK, deals that'll work in the US and some deals that will work in both the UK and US, as well as presumably many other places. Let's get started.
For the next few hours, you can get yourself a copy of big brother paranoia simulator Orwell absolutely free from Humble. That's it, no catch as far as I can see, just a free game. The key will redeem on Steam, by the way, in case you were wondering. Fill your boots.
FIFA 19 is going big on the Spanish league with 16 brand new stadiums in the game.
In FIFA 19 you can pick any of the officially-licensed LaLiga clubs and play in their stadium in Career and Kick-Off modes, or add the item to your FIFA Ultimate Team club. However, PES still has the Camp Nou exclusively as part of its licensing deal with Barcelona.
Here are all 19 available stadiums (16 are new):
Bungie has announced a plan to make a new, more accessible version of the hardest weapon to get in Destiny 2 - and now the community is questioning the very nature of the grind itself.
Redrix's Claymore is a legendary quality pulse rifle with a unique perk combo: Outlaw and Desperado. In combination, these two perks are devastating for competitive multiplayer in particular. Outlaw sees precision kills greatly decrease reload time, while Desperado sees reloading while Outlaw is active increase your rate of fire. In short, Redrix's Claymore is a pretty relentless death dealer.
But, it's pretty rare, because it's so hard to obtain. To get it, you need to reach the "Fabled" Glory rank in competitive Crucible. If you have a 50 per cent win / loss rate in competitive Crucible, you need to play around 440 games to get the necessary 2200 points to reach the Fabled Glory Rank. That's a lot of matches in Destiny 2's most hardcore competitive multiplayer mode.
Overnight, Valve accidentally launched Steam.tv - what looks like a take on Twitch - early. The company pulled the website offline shortly after, but not before people got a chance to play around with it.
Cnet went hands-on with Steam.tv in the hour or so that it was online, and said it was showing The International - the big Dota 2 tournament that's going on right now.
Accessible via Steam.tv is the new Steam Chat friends list and group chats, Cnet reports, and you're able to watch videos with friends. There's voice chat, too.
It's fun to read angry reviews of rubbish things. But enthusiasm reads great, too. 'Valve just hit the high note no other developer could reach,' from Edge's Half-Life 2 review has stuck with me since I first read it (thank you nameless Edge contributor!).
It's why all those annual Best-Ofs or All-Time Top Tens are so satisfying. Yes, it's often the usual suspects of Halos and Dark Souls, the sequence lightly tossed. But it's a thrill to see someone take things so brilliant and familiar, and coil them into two or three sentences that spring on reading. Here's another from Edge (thanks again anonymous wordsmith!), from their Metroid Prime entry in their 2003 round-up: 'Even if you gouged the game out of the middle, the game would still recommend itself. The gorgeous mapping system, the glory of the visors, the convincing decay of a civilisation.'
Which I suppose is a bit like my love for video game magazines in general. Because even if you gouge the video and the game out of video games, reading about them is still a pleasure. Not just a proxy fun of games relayed and recounted, but games refracted - through an old-school static of fixed words and printed pictures - into something different and awesome and new.
The GeForce GTX 1050 3GB is the most recent graphics card to be added to Nvidia's stable, a replacement for the older GTX 1050 2GB model that provides extra VRAM to ensure better performance in texture-heavy games.
Interestingly though, the card isn't a carbon copy of the GTX 1050 with an extra gigabyte of RAM soldered on somewhere, which you'd expect would consistently perform the same or better than the 2GB model. Instead, the 3GB card is something of a mashup between the GTX 1050 2GB and the GTX 1050 Ti, with a unique drawback that means the 3GB card's performance could be slightly worse or significantly better than the 2GB model, depending on the game.
Specifically, the new card has better compute power and that extra gigabyte of memory, but it has lower memory bandwidth than the card that it replaces. That means that the 3GB card will generally perform better in games that keep a lot of textures in memory, but the trend reverses for games that swap textures in and out of memory frequently. Generally though, we expect the GTX 1050 3GB to outperform its 2GB predecessor in most titles, while remaining firmly behind the fully-enabled GTX 1050 Ti.
eBay is doing the voucher thing again! As has happened numerous times before, you can take 15 per cent off any purchase over 20 when you enter the code PIGGYBANK during checkout. That means everything from consoles to TVs to home appliances.
The offer is live right now but ending at 8pm (BST) tonight, so you've only got a matter of hours to find something you feel like picking up. Once you do (and you use the PIGGYBANK code during checkout), keep in mind that this voucher is a one-time use code, meaning you can use it on a single basket spend. It's not limited to one item, however, so you could stack up your items and buy multiple things at once, getting 15 per cent off the lot.
For some inspiration, here's some of what you can get with the 15 per cent discount already applied:
Treyarch has outlined changes coming to Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 based on feedback to the recent beta - and a lot of them sound promising.
First up we have a nerf to the controversial body armour gear item. As I've reported before, one aspect of Black Ops 4 that was universally criticised by players, many of whom wanted it pulled from the game entirely, was body armour.
The complaint revolved around Black Ops 4's "Time to Kill" being too long. Call of Duty is known for being a blisteringly lethal shooter, with just a few hits enough to kill an enemy. Black Ops 4's TTK feels longer than that of previous Call of Duty games, and with the new health recovery mechanic, players are surviving longer than ever before.
The PC version of Burnout Paradise Remastered comes out next week, developer Criterion has announced. It launches on 21st August.
But you can play it now if you subscribe to Origin Access. The basic version of Origin Access, which costs 3.99 a month or 19.99 a year, gets you a 10-hour trial. The Premier version of Origin Access, which costs 14.99 a month or 89.99 a year, gives you access to the full game.
Christian Donlan reviewed Burnout Paradise Remastered on Xbox One X back in March and called it "driving perfection".
Strip a modern F1 car of all of its sponsorship decals, goes the well-worn saying I've been guilty of bandying around myself, and you'd be hard pushed to tell any two models apart. So strictly defined is the modern rule-set, so homogeneous the designs, that underneath that lick of lurid paint every car is almost exactly the same - and it's an accusation you could well level at F1 2018, the 10th mainline outing of Codemasters' official take on the sport, and one of its most gently iterative outings yet.
To get a handle on what's new you'll need a cheat sheet to hand, and it hardly makes for compelling reading. The headline new feature is media interviews - something that returns from the series' first HD outing, F1 2010, before it was quietly jettisoned a little further down the line. Eight years on and it's not that much more convincing, a dead-eyed interviewer asking you some fairly banal questions with only a fairly banal selection of replies available, the results impacting gently on your standing within the team and its various departments. It's cute but comes off inconsequential - there are no really mischievous answers available, or at least I've yet to come across the chance to ask a fellow driver to suck my balls - and of all the features to focus on, it's surely low down on most players' lists.
How about doing away with the barebones menus and returning to the more premium front-end of those older games? Or fixing the UI so it's a little less cluttered and more in line with the FOM's official feed? And how about introducing some of the feeder series that make up the travelling circus, so we've got something to play with beyond F1 cars? Maybe these updates are to come in future editions, as the series makes its typically gentle progress - tied down as it is to yearly instalments, even if you suspect the resources aren't quite there to meaningfully move the games forward on an annual basis.