is sort of like Roblox: a place where people can make their own games and easily chat and play with friends. Where it most differs from Roblox is its early focus on supporting virtual reality, and its developers now report that the game has “over 1 million monthly active VR users”. That’s a lot.
appeals to me because it lets me build the kind of Pinterest-worthy homes I’ll never live in in real-life, so I’m often more excited about the game’s Stuff packs than its game-changing expansions. This time is no different: the Paranormal stuff pack arrives later this month and as well as adding a new career and bringing back Bonehilda, it also adds some sweet looking desks.
It’s January, which means it’s almost time for YouTube to start serving me nothing but list videos about the most exciting citybuilders of 2021. It does this because I watch every one it recommends, every year. I’m betting Farthest Frontier will be high placed on some of those videos: it’s a middle ages-ish citybuilder about leading your people to survive harsh winters and miserable diseases, and it’s from the makers of well-liked action RPG Grim Dawn.
Grapple hooks: the confirmed best thing in videogames. Grapple Hoops: a first-person game in which you grapple hook across an obstacle course, smash and kick through doors and windows, and then explosively dunk a basketball into a hoop. There’s a pre-alpha demo you can play right now, but at the very least you owe it to yourself to watch the video.
Back at the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, Razer began converting some of their manufacturing facilities to make face masks for frontline workers. So far, they’ve donated over a million face masks worldwide to hospitals, governments and other healthcare organisations, but now Razer are putting their own spin on this now vital part of our lives with their Project Hazel concept. Dubbed the world’s smartest face mask, Project Hazel has a clear, transparent design with a built-in voice amplifier to make it easier to talk to people around you, and it will also clean and disinfect itself via UV lights inside its special charging box. Why does a face mask need a charging box, I hear you ask? Well, it’s got Razer Chroma RGBs built into it, doesn’t it?
CES has brought us some some bonkers bits of gaming tech in years gone by. Last year, it was Dell’s Alienware UFO Switch-alike. The year before that, it was Razer’s HyperSense prototype, a complete haptic feedback system designed to put you right in the centre of your gaming experience. This year, Razer have gone one step further and created what they’re hoping is going to be the ultimate gaming chair. Currently codenamed Project Brooklyn, this mad thing has a fold-out 60in OLED display that wraps around your head, and transformable arm rests that double-up as a keyboard tray. And, of course, it has Razer Chroma LEDs aplenty in the seat and base to light up your room with the same colours as what’s onscreen.
Nvidia have just announced their RTX 30 GPUs are coming to laptops, and that can only mean one thing. We’re about to get inundated with dozens and dozens of newly refreshed gaming laptops, all with beefed up innards and even higher resolutions and refresh rate displays to make the most of Nvidia’s latest crop of mobile RTX 3060, RTX 3070 and RTX 3080 chips. While many laptops are familiar riffs on what we’ve seen before, there are a couple of new ones on the horizon that look set to offer even more ways to play when we’re away from our PCs. Here are the most exciting gaming laptops to watch out for in 2021.
Ray tracing is the hot new graphics tech of 2021, and Nvidia have just announced another fresh crop of ray tracing and DLSS games that are coming to PC later this year. To help you keep track of them all, I’ve created this list of all the confirmed ray tracing games you can play on PC right now, as well which ones will be getting ray tracing support in the future. And because ray tracing tends to go hand in hand with Nvidia’s performance-boosting DLSS tech these days, I’ve also listed all the current and upcoming games that support DLSS as well.
The tree is in the attic, there isn’t a scrap of chocolate left in the house, and those that took annual leave at the start of the year — the people we were all jealous of — are now back. 2021 is well and truly underway.
Well, sort of.
Hot off the heels of the RTX 3060 Ti‘s launch at the end of last year, Nvidia have finally announced the regular version of the RTX 3060. It will be launching in late February for $329. That’s not all, either, as Nvidia also announced that their RTX 30 series GPUs will be coming to laptops, too, with RTX 3060, RTX 3070 and RTX 3080 models arriving in just a couple of weeks time.
