I’ve found that PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds is a difficult game to get better at. Its firefights are sporadic, which means you don’t actually get much practice shooting its guns. I suppose it was only a matter of time until a game like Battle Royale Trainer came along. Now, I can’t help feel that there’s something seedy about buying a game just so you can practice getting better at a different game. But perhaps that’s PUBG’s fault: if it included a mode that let you practice firefights, then B

2017 was yet another year full of excellent PC games (see our GOTY awards and best-reviewed games of 2017 for reference), but with more games than ever releasing on a daily basis, there’s no way we, let alone anyone, can possibly keep up with them all. These are just a few of the games that didn’t catch fire last year, but are more than worthy of your time and money. By day, you’ll need to scavenge a randomly generated overworld in order to find materials for crafting weapons, bandages, and trap

The game, plus two DLC packs, are the early unlocks available to anyone that purchases the next Humble Monthly bundle, which you can pick up for just $12. The brilliant turn-based strategy game has had the odd 50%-off sale, but its price has never been anywhere near this low. It really is an incredible deal, offering the base game alongside its Viking-inspired DLC and its Australian scenario pack, which normally cost £3.99/$4.99 each. The bundle is a subscription service, but you can just pay $1

Epic Games’ attempt to protect its services against the Meltdown CPU exploit could make it difficult for some players to login to Fortnite for the next week, the developer said yesterday. Epic is patching its cloud servers—which is “heavily relies on”—to address their vulnerability to Meltdown, and the result is that the game will be unstable over the next week. “Unexpected issues may occur with our services over the next week as the cloud services we use are updated. Companies using or hosting

It doesn’t say much, but HTC’s comment on new year’s “resolution” is obviously a play on screen resolution. That hopefully means that HTC will be introducing a new upgraded Vive headset next week at CES, specifically on January 8. The current Vive headset uses a 2160×1200 resolution screen, or 1080×1200 per eye. The significance of a 4K per eye headset from HTC would be two-fold. First, high resolution displays are now the biggest drivers for increased performance in GPUs.

2018 looks to be off to a great start as well. As Overwatch enters its second full calendar year, I want to see the hero roster continue to grow with additions that don’t retread what we already have. Similarly, in Jeff Kaplan’s recent developer update, he described the forthcoming Hero 27 as a “very needed” addition to the Overwatch lineup. Address toxicity in a meaningful wayThere’s a lot of good in Overwatch, but also a lot of bad. It’s going to take continued vigilance, by not just us on the

The team behind the bizarre, creepy Rusty Lake games has announced that a new addition to the series, Rusty Lake Paradise, will be released next week. The game will follow the story of a young man named Jakob, who returns to his home of Paradise Island after the death of his mother leaves it cursed by the ten Plagues of Egypt. “Each plague brings its own atmosphere, suspense and a variety of Rusty Lake brain teasers,” and features its own theme song, with backdrops by Dutch painter Johan Scherft

And now it looks like another update adding a peaceful, puzzle-free “free roam” mode, could be on the way too. “That option now exists, and it’s called the Free Roam mode. Chmielarz also posted a few images demonstrating what the game looks like in the new mode. BeforeAfter—no blood or interactivity promptsUnfortunately, there’s no guarantee that the free roam mode will be released for the PC version of the game. Updating the PS4 version sounds like the biggest sticking point, but the PC version

The Red Strings Club is the new game from Deconstructeam, the indie studio responsible for Gods Will Be Watching and various other small projects. It’s based on a couple of those smaller game jam projects, and the variety that gives The Red Strings Club is one of its biggest strengths. The Red Strings Club does exactly that. Since hacking minigames are hard to get right and so very easy to get wrong, The Red Strings Club doesn’t have one. The Red Strings Club does exactly that.

Only PC games can come out of nowhere and become a phenomenon in the space of a couple of weeks. Then I returned home and immediately started replaying Arkham Asylum. And, five hours in, I’m delighted to discover that Arkham Asylum is still brilliant—and probably is my favourite Arkham game, despite the many improvements in City and, to a lesser extent, Knight. Tuan Nguyen: CES 2018 and gaming displaysFor hardware, 2018 is going to be the year of displays. And yes, this includes Intel, since it

Runescape’s Dragon Slayer quest is now 16 years old—approximately the same age I was when I completed it. After Old School Runescape’s most recent update, it now has a proper sequel titled—wait for it—Dragon Slayer 2. Dragon Slayer 2 taps into the circumstances of the original quest and returns to the island of Crandor, once besieged by the dread dragon Elvarg. What do you get for completing Dragon Slayer 2? And after clearing the quest, Vorkath becomes available as a normal, level 732 boss pack

Star Wars: Battlefront 2 (note the colon, to distinguish it from the newer Star Wars Battlefront 2) was released in 2005, and so it was an honest and very happy surprise when an update was released a few months ago to restore its disabled multiplayer support. Earlier this week it was updated again, this time with a patch that promises “minor bug fixes and optimized performance.” The minimal patch notes cite three fixes as being particularly important:Lobby functionality has been improvedSteam us

Bad North is a “minimalistic, real-time tactics roguelite game” to hear developer Plausible Concept tell it. An eclectic description, but I’m inclined to agree with it after seeing the game in action. Bad North is expected to release on PC this year but is also coming to consoles and mobile devices, so its controls are unabashedly simple. “You control the broad strokes of the battle” but each soldier is individually simulated which, the studio says, allows for greater depth. Frankly, I like the

CES officially kicks off next Thursday, but the deluge of press releases and product demonstrations will get started well in advance of that time. From phones and tablets to PC hardware, and on to displays, home entertainment, home appliances, and concept cars, CES has it all. CES is a great place to see where display tech will be in another decade. With the Tesla V100 and Titan V boasting unprecedented performance for deep learning applications, don’t expect anything new in the realm of Volta g

That includes some of its Alienware products, such as this Alienware Aurora desktop with a Core i7-8700 processor and GeForce GTX 1070 graphics card. This particularly configuration also sports 16GB of DDR4-2666 memory and a 2TB hard drive (7200 RPM, 64MB cache). One option is to downgrade the HDD to 1TB and add a 16GB Intel Optane memory module, which doesn’t affect the cost. You can also bump up to a GeForce GTX 1080 graphics card for $100 more. That setup is available here, or you can browser

The Messenger is a self-described love letter to 8-bit and 16-bit platformers and action games, and it just so happens to star a young ninja fighting to defend his clan from demons. As you may have guessed, The Messenger was heavily inspired by the old Ninja Gaiden games—so much so that, speaking with Polygon, lead designer Thierry Boulanger said much of his development history can be traced back to Ninja Gaiden 2 on the NES. Boulanger and developer Sabotage boast of “challenging gameplay and ti

A lobbying group comprised of dozens of the biggest technology companies announced that it is planning to file a lawsuit against the Federal Trade Commission over the gutting of net neutrality rules. Amazon, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Netflix, Twitter, and many others are part of the Internet Association, the trade group that is behind the lawsuit. As an intervenor, IA would not be the one filing a suit against the FCC. The FCC voted 3-2 in December to roll back net neutrality regulations that

A new Monster Hunter: World trailer introduces the Elder Dragons—mighty, element-breathing beasts who have migrated to the New World for reasons unknown. The end of the video also gives us a look at Deviljho, who according to the Monster Hunter Wiki is a “brute wyvern” who first appeared in Monster Hunter 3. “Deviljho must feed constantly and will devour anything in its way, even feeding on the largest of monsters with its massive jowls,” Capcom said. “This wild beast really is one for only the

In today’s episode of “what kind of dystopian horror show are we living in today?” “The more experience you have, the better your chances of survival are,” Tamara Griffith of the Army Research Laboratory in Orlando says in the video. Griffith said that a mother of a child who was murdered at Sandy Hook assisted with the creation of the scenario, which enabled the developers to more realistically emulate how a school shooting unfolds. “[Teachers] did not self-select into a role that they expect t

Even Goose and Maverick would have to be impressed with the newly approved IEEE 802.3bs standard. The specification lays out the requirements to enable blazing fast connectivity to the tune of 200Gbps and 400Gbps across various interconnects. On a 400Gbps connection, GTA V could be transferred to another PC in less than 2 seconds. “IEEE 802.3bs represents a transformational moment in the move to next generation of networks. Equally important to the blistering fast speed that IEEE 802.3bs enables