You don't need to drop two grand to play in the big leagues. Right now, Dell is offering its Tower Plus Gaming PC with an RTX 4070 Ti Super for $1,649.99, and it's quietly one of the smartest buys in the prebuilt space. Free shipping included, no hoops, no rebates, just solid specs at a better price than any RTX 5070 Ti system out there. If you've been waiting for a high-performance gaming rig without paying a "new GPU tax," this is it.
Sega are among the big games publishers who are currently feeding large swathes of their business to the flames of profit growth. In September 2023, they cancelled Creative Assembly’s looter shooter Hyenas and announced plans to cut costs across Sega Europe. Last January, they laid off 61 workers at Sega of America in California. Then, they chopped another 240 jobs across Creative Assembly, Hardlight, and other Sega operations in Europe.
Grim times, but there have been brighter moments. In November last year, Endless Legend and Humankind developers Amplitude Studios announced that they were splitting from Sega and going independent, care of a management buyout or MBO. Without wishing to sound too fatalistic about Sega, it put me somewhat in mind of the Millennium Falcon flying out of the exploding Death Star. Amplitude’s co-founder and CEO Romain de Waubert de Genlis tells me, however, that the Amplitude buyout wasn’t an emergency response to Sega’s restructuring. He himself started thinking about going indie over two years ago.
I've been eyeing SteelSeries Arctis Nova Pro Wireless for a while, and now that it's down to $269.99 from $349.99, I’m ready to pull the trigger. That's a solid 23% off, which puts it just shy of its best-ever price.
If you're rocking the ASUS ROG Ally X, you already know internal storage won't take you far. Big games, emulators, mods, and media add up fast. Instead of juggling what to uninstall next, a solid external SSD gives you room to breathe, no matter where you are.
It's not often an SSD drops in price this sharply — and even less often that it actually makes sense to buy it. Samsung's 990 Evo Plus 1TB is down to $69.99, 2TB for $139.99, and 4TB for $249.99. That's well under anything else in the 990 Pro range.
How many times has Hayabusa village burned down? Some Ninja Gaiden freaks out there must know. This aged series has changed a lot in the decades since its NES debut, but that blazing home village has become a running gag. Ninja Gaiden games are slicey-dicey outings of varying quality in which Ryu Hayabusa must kill everything he dislikes yet again. But in the upcoming Ninja Gaiden: Ragebound, it's going back to 2D, largely without Ryu. I scuttled along to a demo session to play the "neo-retro" action platformer, and found that the familiar hero does show up as a tutorial mentor you can battle. You might, unlike me, even be able to defeat him. But it won't matter. Your village will be burnt to the ground anyway.
"Because what would be a Ninja Gaiden game without it?" jokes game director David Jaumandreu of The Game Kitchen, who've been hired by Team Ninja to render those flames in old-school pixel art.
I now own the Razer Viper Ultimate because I needed something that actually works without making a big production out of it. It's $69.99 right now on Woot, down from the usual $99.99, and that includes the RGB charging dock. No extra add-ons, no fine print. Just the mouse and the dock, ready to go. Or, if you're a first time buyer, you can even save an extra $10 and pick it up for just $59.99 with code TENOFFRAZER. Here's why I recommend doing just that.
When I inherited - pardon me, founded Endless Bear Studios at the flickering end of the Roaring Twenties, I had a dream. And that dream was to film Peter Jackson's The Lord Of The Rings trilogy 30 years before Peter Jackson was born. Its one of many will-be classics I hope to "pre-make", as it were. But ugh, these writers>. There ain't a single Jackson amongst 'em. I've got four on staff right now: one is a gambler, another likes to drink, the third is an incorrigible slacker, and the fourth is a recent hire who can barely use a typewriter. I spoonfed the gambler the rudiments of Spartacus, and he came back with some rancid applesauce about a knight and a criminal mastermind and a village of pixies. I told the tippler to write The Hobbit, and he cooked up a leaden three-hander with no wizard.
Dear reader, allow me, if you will, a moment of honesty. I truly, wholly did not know that Skull and Bones was still going. Not only is it still going, but yesterday Ubisoft shared a look at the game's impending second year of updates, so I really missed the boat on this one - pun intended, of course. The first season of the pirate game's second year has already kicked off, introducing a few new features.
It was always going to end badly for Thillmann The Braggart. 30 gold, he told the brigands. He'd pay them 30 gold each if they could knock up a stew so disgusting that even he - Kobmanhaven's most famous glutton - couldn't keep it down. Whether Thillmann actually had the coin on him, they never found out. Seconds after he raised the first reeking spoon of what he suspected was mostly reindeer shit to his lips, he projectile vomited straight in the face of their leader, and they jumped him.
Death comes quickly in the turn-based tactics and open-world merc work of Battle Brothers, and victory comes hard. Really, it's the stories of the mercs you hire, and their emergent traits and peccadilloes, that make the game what it is. Still, Thillman was possessed of the sort of cocksure spirit that makes a man far less cognisant of sharp objects than he should be, although you couldn't fault his reasoning: he was still alive, so as far as fate had proven to him up until now, nothing could kill him. I can only apologise for adding to the bastard's delusions. The boys and I happened to be passing by at just the right time to save him from those brigands, and he's been with us ever since.