You can save an extra 20% on a PC Gamer subscription today onlu with the code BOX20. This is on top of the already discounted holiday prices for the UK edition, meaning you can get a year’s print subscription for just £43.60, which is less than £3.50 an issue. For US readers, this is a chance to save 20% off any subscription, print or digital—just apply the code BOX20 at checkout to see the savings. Get a year of the magazine sent to your door for just $19.20. You can even get a print and digita

Widely considered one of the best SSDs of all time, Samsung’s venerable 850 EVO is on sale again, with the 250GB model going for $85 on Amazon. We’re not sure if this has to do with Boxing Day, as it’s a US listing, but it’s still a great deal nevertheless on a fantastic SSD. Samsung manufacturers its SSDs end-to-end, in that the NAND chips, board, and everything are built and supported by Samsung. Plus, Samsung’s Magician software is great at making sure your SSD always has the latest firmware

Despite it not being Black Friday or Cyber Monday, Logitech’s fantastic C920 webcam is on sale right now for its lowest price ever: $46 on Amazon. Well, it was $1 cheaper on December 11th, but heck, even at $1 more, it’s still a great deal. The C920 is our favorite pick when it comes to webcams because it handles everything so well. While the built in microphone is nothing to write home about, its high-quality Carl Zeiss lens still lets the wannabe streaming in you shine through. For microphone

Yet the notion persists that the advancement of games as a medium is inherently technological, that better technology leads to better experiences, and that better games means bigger budgets. In fact, I think it’s a reflection of the way that the attention of big publishers has shifted. Of course, not all triple-A games are like this. Dishonored, Prey, Doom, and Wolfenstein are evidence that there’s still interest in big budget singleplayer experiences. Developers are still making, and profiting

Welcome back to another exciting edition of The Sims 4 battle royale, where I’ve trapped eight Sims in a national park and keep building blue walls around them to see who will be the last Sim standing. Luckily for Hayley, Lori is having a friendly chat with the Grim Reaper, so Hayley takes the opportunity to leave the cabin and walk to the food drop. If this were battle royale duo mode, they would be the clear winners and this horror would end. It’s a very nice piano. She walks into the house sh

Our focus here is on the RAM, or Random Access Memory, and we’ll talk about how it works, how much you need, and how the various specifications affect performance. To pull a random byte of data from memory requires the memory bank to close the currently open row, open a new row, and then access a specific column. Basically, there’s a lot of extra stuff in our PCs to try to avoid relying too much on memory speed. Given the above discussion of memory speeds and timings, you can hopefully begin to

Somehow, both of those statements are true, thanks to the clever structure of The Sexy Brutale, the extremely stylish adventure from Cavalier Game Studios and Tequila Works. In one of those ornate and creepy mansions people always seem to get murdered in, people are getting murdered. You do that in The Sexy Brutale, too, but in a way it feels more appropriate. The time travel hook isn’t just a system to solve murders but a clever deconstruction of the adventure game genre. Ad if you’re gonna be

Our Ongoing Game award goes to No Man’s Sky. And whatever you originally thought of No Man’s Sky when it released last year, this year marked a period of significant growth and improvement. Andy Kelly: At launch No Man’s Sky felt like a shell of a game. Philippa Warr: I was one of those people who actually loved No Man’s Sky when it came out. The first big update to the game—Foundation—came towards the end of 2016 bringing things like base building, freighters and farming.

The holidays are almost upon us, and Overwatch game director Jeff Kaplan is embracing the festive feeling by sitting in front of an open fire, doing nothing. Kaplan, clearly annoyed with his support team, clapped his hands sharply, and an unseen lacky made with the fix. According to Polygon he’s been at this since around 11 am ET, which means he’s been sitting there for about five hours so far. No talking to fans, no playing Overwatch, no stuffing his face with milk and cookies. Update 3: At app

When developer GalaxyTrail announced Freedom Planet 2, the follow-up to 2014’s Sonic-inspired Freedom Planet, it said it was bidding “farewell to nostalgia”. But if the gameplay video (above) released this week is anything to go by, nostalgia has proved tricky to get rid off. That’s no bad thing though, and this is very much going to be a game made for fans of the first. Along with the video, the developers have released an updated demo that adds new character abilities, graphical polishes and b

One of deck-building RPG Hand of Fate 2’s most memorable characters—the enigmatic, taunting dealer—is now available as a player companion thanks to a free update. The Dealer’s Apprentice add-on also includes fresh Dealer-themed customisation options for your character, which are available to anyone starting a new game. Alongside the update, developer Very Positive outlined their plans to expand the game in 2018. Its combat isn’t great, but it tells a good story and building the perfect deck is s

But there’s just no avoiding it: every holiday visit, someone’s going to say “Can you fix the computer?” Then read our cheat sheet below for five straightforward tips that will likely help you clean up a problem computer and make it fit for human use once again. That’s why it’s a good idea to play it safe and run Malwarebytes, a reliable free program for identifying spyware and malware that will only take a few minutes to run. You’ll look especially cool if you keep it in a belt holster, ready t

Another fire has broken out in my Sims 4 Battle Royale arena. Meaning the back porch was still accessible through the new blue wall. In this Sims version, it just means people can continue to use the porch bench as a sleeping spot. As night falls again, Gunnar, the most dapper Sim in this battle royale, suddenly groans, clutches his stomach, and collapses. I guess that’s to be expected: he hasn’t eaten in about two days (the outdoor grill was consumed by the blue wall very early in the match).

Shadowhand is an RPG card game with bags of ambition, but is “sorely in need of some tweaking”, Pip wrote in her review earlier this month. A new Relaxed Mode pits you against easier enemies and hands you more gold if you win. You can skip any duels that you lose and you’ll still receive the enemy loot, too. And hard mode is now called ‘very hard’, “because that’s what it is”. Again, Pip’s review is a good place to start if you want to know whether this game is for you.

Crowbar Collective moved another baby step towards the release of the long-awaited Xen portion of its Half-Life remake Black Mesa yesterday. A graphical update makes it look a whole lot fancier, with real-time dynamic lights, lens flares, god rays and more texture detail. “We are putting our full effort into completing Xen in a timely manner so that everyone can have the complete Black Mesa experience”, the developer said in the latest update. Click here for the full patch notes, and scroll down

This year’s best mod is Fallout 4’s Sim Settlements. Sim Settlements helps make Fallout 4’s settlement system feel more connected to the rest of the game. Not me, which is why I paid the Sim Settlements mod little mind when I first caught wind of it. In doing so, Sim Settlements helps make Fallout 4’s settlement system feel more connected to the rest of the game. Fallout 4 is a game about communities, and Sim Settlements lets those communities work towards their own recovery.

Where there are games, however, there are characters, and where there are characters there are character designs. So let’s look at the best and worst dressed of these, shall we? Billie Lurk, Dishonored 2: Death of the OutsiderEveryone in Dishonored is well-dressed: it just appears to be the law. Yes, I am a man of taste and wealth, appropriate to the time that the game takes place in. You look like you’re auditioning for a Game of Death remake starring N-Sync.

Prison Architect’s latest update lets you control your prison warden, and that small change has a massive impact on the way you play. You WASD around the prison and can pick up objects, including weapons and body armour to protect yourself from inmate attack, which seems almost inevitable. If you don’t want to get your hands dirty then you can recruit guards to your personal protection squad. Elsewhere, the update adds floor signage, which is a handy way to direct prisoners and staff down partic

It’s been a surprisingly good year for PC ports, in both quality and quantity. But, as always, a few PC ports arrived with some half-baked features or just plain weird problems. Nier: Automata mostly runs fine on PC, but a few performance problems that simply shouldn’t be there really drag it down. PC players deserved better. But it’s pretty weird to release a PC game in 2017 that doesn’t even acknowledge the mouse as an input device.

You can now watch an hour of gameplay from Squadron 42, the singe-player section of massive space sim Star Citizen. We still don’t know when Squadron 42 will be released but judging by the video, which is ‘pre-alpha gameplay footage’, it won’t be for a while. If you want, you can watch the video with developer commentary below instead. In other Star Citizen news, the 3.0 alpha build of the main game is now available to all backers on the public test servers. For instructions on how to update you