Suit up your arsenal of shotguns, minguns, handguns, and uh, cannon guns, because Serious Sam 4 is packing the heat at the end of the summer. The Sam Serious prequel game has launched a new trailer showing just a bit of the lovely hordes streaking over gorgeous grassy hills. Croteam claim they’re pitting Sammy up against over 100,000 simultaneous baddies when the game launches in August.
One weirdly persistent Destiny 2 fan theory is that Bungie are planning to fully obliterate and remove one of the MMOFPS’s areas, the Saturnian moon of Titan. It’ll be a dramatic show of force from the Darkness sweeping through the solar system, so the story goes. There is no real evidence to support this but I’ve seen some folks start repeating it as a given. Internet, eh? At this point, I don’t believe it. And yet… just in case, I have been spending a little more time on Titan. It is one of my favourite destinations, an alien waterworld where humanity once lived in great arcologies. Let me show you some favourite spots!
Area F2 may as well be called Area 51 now that Ubisoft have sued Apple, Google, and the developers of the mobile game that looked suspiciously similar to Mr. Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Siege. Area F2’s developer Ejoy have now posted a statement confirming the game’s closure and it’s been delisted from both the Google Play Store and App Store.
I watched Hive Time‘s development last year with barely restrained joy, but then it came out on the same day as the election and, well. Things happen, you know?
It is a delightful little game about building a hive of bees, and I am entirely covered in bruises from kicking myself for putting off writing about it for so long. But happily, it’s just been updated, adding more ways to customise difficulty, and a “beepedia” full of tips, tutorials, and BEE FACTS. There’s also a charming new trailer.
Some games are made to be watched. Games like I Wanna Run The Marathon. This hardcore platformer was designed to be played by four streamers for the first time at Fangame Marathon 2016, presenting a succession of eyewatering challenges intended to please the crowd.
And no wonder: it’s a supremely entertaining and pacey gauntlet of cruel traps, wry references and intricate level design, set across various sharp fangame parodies of games like Sonic, Mega Man, VVVVVV and Pokémon, incredibly. Seeing it played is like watching someone simultaneously unravelling a puzzle and telling a joke.
The holey, hexagon-obsessed folks over at Glorious are holding a 24-hour flash sale at the moment, making it a great time to upgrade your mouse, keyboard and all other manner of PC accessories on the cheap. There’s 20% off all gaming mice, including their superb Model O and Model D, 10% off all keyboards and 30% off mouse pads and wrist rests to name just some of the discounts.
Update 7.2 for ye olde Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds has landed hot on the live servers and it’s coming with some changes that are likely to rock the boat a bit. Despite PUBG Corp calling them a “controversial topic,” non-player AI contestants are dropping in to regular matches. For the extra-competitive players, a new Ranked Mode is replacing the old Survival Title system and is getting its own queue to boot.
When he’s not playing everyone’s favourite Rivia man in Netflix’s The Witcher, Henry Cavill likes to chill out with some Total War: Warhammer 2. It’s a fact that hasn’t gone unnoticed by Creative Assembly, either. They’ve only gone and put a nod to him in the game’s upcoming DLC, The Warden & The Paunch. And there’s even a Witcher reference thrown in there for good measure.
When AMD launched their incredible Ryzen 3 3300X the other week, I called it the $120 Core i5 killer. At the time, I only had Intel’s existing Core i5-9600K to compare it to, but finally we have its 10th Gen Comet Lake successor in the ring, the Core i5-10600K.
Like the 9600K, this 10th Gen chip still has six cores to its name, but Intel have doubled the thread count (that is, the number of virtual cores it has) up to 12 this time, giving it a bit more oomph when it comes to multi-tasking. Its clock speed has also been bumped from a base of 3.7GHz to a nippy 4.1GHz, while its max Turbo clock has inched up from 4.6GHz to 4.8GHz. However, with current prices for both the Core i5-9600K and its nearest AMD rival, the Ryzen 5 3600X, sitting at $200, is the Core i5-10600K worth its $262 asking price?
When Intel declared their 9th Gen Core i9-9900K was the world’s fastest gaming CPU at the end of 2018, it came at an astronomical cost. £600 / $580 was the asking price for the [cms-block] money could buy at the time, which today could get you an entire RTX 2080 Super GPU. Thankfully, Intel have reined in the pricing for their brand-new crop of 10th Gen desktop CPUs, with their flagship Core i9-10900K receiving one of the biggest price cuts across the entire Comet Lake family. It will still set you back a sizeable $488 in the US (UK pricing TBC), but with its closest AMD rival, the Ryzen 9 3900X, coming in just below it at $440 at time of writing, it does at least look more competitive than it was a generation ago.
Indeed, a cursory glance at the i9-10900K’s headline specs – its 10 cores, 20 threads and 14nm manufacturing process – might make it seem like Intel’s latest and greatest is already a bit old hat compared to 12 cores and 24 threads of the 7nm Ryzen 9 3900X. And in some respects it is. AMD still have the fastest CPU for juggling lots of multimedia tasks, but in terms of raw gaming performance, the Core i9-10900K is in a class of its own, blazing past its AMD rival with frames to spare. It is, without doubt, the best gaming CPU you can buy right now.