Looking to buy a premium graphics card like the GTX 1080 Ti, a new monitor or some other tech gear? Today's your lucky day, as UK retailers have some interesting GPU deals while Ebay.com is running a site-wide promotion for up to $100 off.
First, Ebay is offering 15% off everything on their US site today, making it a good opportunity to pick up a new graphics card - or another big PC purchase - for up to $100 off. Use the code PICKSOON before 6PM PT on an order of $25 or more to qualify for the deal, and ensure your eBay account is registered in a qualifying country.
The $100 off maximum means that in order to use the discount to the full, you should be targeting items around the $666 mark - say, a new graphics card, monitor or NVMe SSD. However, you're not limited to just computer gear either - you can buy pretty much anything on the site, with a few exceptions. I personally picked up a new smartphone, but games consoles, tablets, laptops and other expensive single purchases would also make sense.
Discord has now detailed the first wave of games which will debut for PC via its own store - each with an exclusivity period "typically" lasting 90 days.
The range, dubbed First on Discord, will roll-out this autumn with seven titles. Perhaps most notable in line-up is viking roguelike Bad North, already available on Switch:
Here's the full list:
Almost 10 years ago to the day, CD Projekt launched the online digital game store Good Old Games. The operation and scope was small - a handful of people salvaging iconic old PC games for modern operating systems - but the prices, customer service and DRM-free message were right, and slowly the service grew. And grew, and grew. And today things are different.
Today GOG employs more than 160 people and no longer restricts itself to good old games, so much so that the full meaning has been forgotten and replaced by the snappier acronym GOG. Today you find the newest and biggest independent games there, such as Pathfinder: Kingdom and A Bard's Tale 4, and they are kept up to date by the Steam-like client GOG Galaxy. And today CD Projekt is a household gaming name.
The Witcher games, developed under the same roof, have propelled GOG to new heights. They have been the first big new games on GOG and it has been the best place to find discounts for them. But never has CD Projekt flexed the family advantage as much as it will when selling Thronebreaker: The Witcher Tales exclusively on GOG next month. Thronebreaker, based on the card game Gwent, may not be The Witcher 4, but it's a 30-hour, $30 standalone game made by people responsible for The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt nonetheless. It's a big deal, and for GOG it could be massive.
Playground Games is back with a new Forza Horizon, complete with a creditable PC port just a patch or two away from being something truly special. While the series has deep roots on Xbox consoles, Forza as a franchise is still fairly new to PC and it's had some definite growing pains. Forza Horizon 3, in particular, initially launched with some CPU-related issues, but the good news is that this area is much improvedthis time around. In fact, the overall improvement in this area is so dramatic, I have to wonder if the introduction of the Xbox One X 60fps performance mode may be partially responsible.
As things stand, the PC game takes everything that makes the console versions so good and allows users with suitably powerful rigs to play with fewer compromises. So yes, if you want the X's 60fps mode with full 4K resolution and improved quality settings, that's no problem at all. It's all there for you - if you have the hardware capable of making it happen. However, as we shall discover, despite the arrival of a new 'extreme' quality preset, Xbox One X owners get a robust presentation that delivers almost all of PC's visual feature set. It's mostly in ultra territory, with the next-level extreme only providing diminishing returns in terms of visual upgrades.
Starting at the beginning, Horizon 4's option menu deserves kudos. Users have in-depth control over 20 different performance and visual options. There's full support for 21:9 ultrawide screens (though some cutscenes do clip to 16:9) and if you don't have such a display, field of view can be adjusted for many of the game's camera views. Each graphical preset boasts between three to six different settings, and this time around Playground has also included a frankly brilliant benchmarking tool, reminiscent of the excellent Gears of War 4, and great for balancing settings against hardware. Let's just say that without it, this article would have been a lot more difficult to put together.
Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 doesn't have a campaign, but it does have a 10-issue comic series that lets you learn more about the game's specialists.
Activision and Treyarch have released the first three issues of the new series for free on the Call of Duty website. They focus on Ruin, Prophet and Crash, three of the Black Ops 4 specialists. More will follow soon.
While Black Ops 4 doesn't have a traditional campaign, it has a number of solo missions that revolve around the specialists. We don't know how these will work, exactly, but they are linked to multiplayer.
If you buy a BlizzCon virtual ticket, you can play the World of Warcraft Classic demo at home, Blizzard has announced.
Around 8pm UK time on 2nd November, virtual ticket owners can download and play the demo that is also playable on the BlizzCon show floor. A virtual ticket costs 34.99.
Blizzard said players will get the chance to explore - on foot, of course - a limited questing experience through a pair of classic early-level zones, one for Horde and one for Alliance. The demo ends at 5pm UK time, 8th November.
Several months ago, on a rainy evening in Birmingham, I loaded up Discord and called my university friends. "Ok guys," I said. "What can we all play together?"
The answer was: very little. With our group split between Xbox and PlayStation owners, the obvious answers were out the window. Fortnite, Rocket League, even Minecraft - all were impossible due to the great console divide. We ended up playing hours upon hours of Civilization 5, which was the only thing everyone could run on their laptops. It's a great game, to be sure - but there's only so much Civ one can take. We soon gave up our dream of playing together.
If we'd been playing today, however, the situation would have been different. As of yesterday, Sony has approved full console cross-play in Fortnite. In an official blog post, the company stated it wants to "open up the platform" - thereby hinting cross-console play could come to other games in future.
Oculus Quest is a new VR headset due out spring 2019 that its makers hope will appeal more to the mainstream.
It's Oculus' first all-in-one, standalone six degrees of freedom (6DOF) virtual reality headset - and the 64GB version costs $399.
It comes with built-in audio, positional tracking and Touch controllers, and has a display resolution of 1600x1440 per eye with lens spacing adjustment for comfort.
Fornite season six launches today with a new spooky set of areas added to the map, a new consumable which turns you invisible, and - best of all - the addition of pets.
Let's start with pets. These guys will sit in a carrier on your back and "react to different situations you find yourself in", so presumably will be wailing a lot when I repeatedly die as soon as I land. This season's Battle Pass includes three pets: Bonsey, Scales and Camo - a puppy, dragon and chameleon.
How will they react when you turn invisible? Oh yes, you can do that now with the new Shadow Stone consumable. Shadow Stones look to be this season's rifts - you'll find them around the map and when interacted with you'll turn invisible, but only while remaining stationary. And, crucially, you'll also be unable to use weapons. On the upside, you'll move faster and be able to use your primary fire button instead to phase leap through objects for a quick getaway.
There's something about Football Manager that makes it feel more than the sum of its parts.
At its core it's just a database, a list of names that are assigned numbers which are then dragged and dropped into certain areas of a pitch by those who play it. Yet there's a reason players will don a real suit in preparation for playing in a virtual cup final, scout real-life footballers for a potential in-game transfer and why Sky Sports utilise the game's stats in its Premier League coverage Premier League. For many players, these numbers and names culminate in giving them a sense of unmatched gratification. A large part of Football Manager's appeal is in how it takes you that little bit closer to the environments of masterminds like Pep Guardiola and Jose Mourinho.
The truth, though, is that despite its ability to be used as an all-encompassing football database with an unimaginable depth of information, it's not a true reflection on what it takes to be an actual coach. Most real coaches spend their Saturday afternoons standing on the sidelines in the pouring rain taking abuse from Dave the double glazier. Football Manager can't hope of coming close to the real thing, in more ways than one.