Latest Articles (Page 1093)

Dreadnought, the free-to-play multiplayer game about big spaceships which don't get along, has moved out of open beta and launched on PlayStation 4.

Creative Assembly has issued a refreshingly frank update on the progress - or lack of - of Total War Warhammer's development.

After months of teasing, PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds has finally named its upcoming desert map and detailed some its various locales.

Superhot is getting a significant standalone expansion called Mind Control Delete, which will put a roguelike twist on the game. The full release is roughly a year away but a barebones build will be on Steam Early Access tomorrow, 7th December, and grow over time.

Firaxis has announced Korea for Civilization 6 expansion Rise and Fall.

Are you a scrub or are you a saint? That is, in essence, the question being posed by Arms' next Party Crash, it's time-limited event that sees players fight for two characters as they partake in a quick succession of themed fights over a couple of days.

Capcom has submitted an Amaterasu Courier for use in Dota 2 - and it looks like it will be added to the game.

The third and final episode of Life is Strange: Before the Storm will launch just before Christmas, on 20th December (thanks, IGN).

This past week has been a rough one for the FIFA community, with disturbing allegations of cheating calling into question the legitimacy of FIFA Ultimate Team's most competitive mode.

Steadily, patiently, Ubisoft has made a big success of Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Siege and it's lovely to see. The game had a rocky start in December 2015, but has now passed 25 million registered players.

Nintendo will launch a selection of its most popular Wii and GameCube games on Nvidia's Android-powered Shield tablet in China.

Rise of the Tomb Raider's year-old Blood Ties DLC episode, in which Lara goes a-poking around musty old Croft Manor, has finally received VR support on PC.

Perfection is something many strive for but few obtain. In the world of Pokémon, perfection is shrouded in hidden mechanics and obscured by a meta-game often seen as tiresome by hardcore players. For the Pokémon breeders, genners and hackers, perfection lies in the unravelling and recombination of digital DNA in a bid to create flawless replicants. Welcome to the Pokémon black market, a community built on ethical reproduction with more than its fair share of grey areas.

Titan Comics has offered the first look at its recently announced Bloodborne comic series, Bloodborne: The Death of Sleep.

Developer Red Hook has announced The Color of Madness, the latest paid DLC expansion for its superb Lovecraftian stress box, Darkest Dungeon.

A Choose Your Own Adventure Netflix show for adults? Excuse me?

I rarely play fighting games, and, man, I did not expect them to be this soothing. Arms is violent for sure - enemies are pummelled, the ground judders with impacts, and a last-minute defeat can still throw me into an internal rage. But rages, internal or otherwise, are actually fairly rare here - far rarer than last-minute defeats for sure. Most of the time, when I think of Arms - and I am in that honeymoon phase where I think of it constantly - I think of a game that presents itself as a series of nested delights. There's the music at launch, and its theme of wordless bellowing joy. There's the way the UI slides in and out in vibrant bursts, like the screen furniture for the best sporting show ever. There are the badges that you collect instead of Achievements, all neatly laid out in their treasure box screen, and there's the Get ARMS mode in which you cash in in-game money for the chance to earn new and surprising fists to hit people with, by means of a pacey shooting gallery that is rewarding you with stuff while secretly teaching you how to curve punches.

Still playing Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp? Nintendo's anthropomorphic sim for smartphones now has a second in-game event running to keep you busy.

In terms of PR nightmares, releasing a phone that could potentially explode ranks pretty highly. The fallout from the high-publicised recall of the Samsung Galaxy Note 7 has done a fair amount of damage to the reputation of the South Korean tech giant, but consumers are quick to forgive and despite its woes. Samsung is set to overtake Apple for the first time in terms of profitability - and that's thanks in no small part to its phenomenal success in the smartphone arena. Still, there's no denying that something truly special was required to cleanse the bad taste left by those flaming Note 7 handsets, and the result is the Galaxy S8, Samsung's flagship phone for 2017.

The Samsung Galaxy Note 7 was, by all accounts, a brilliant smartphone. It offered significant hardware and software benefits over the competition as well as a roomy Super AMOLED display and S-Pen functionality. Sadly, a few exploding units forced Samsung to issue a recall and halt production altogether and the Note 7 became a footnote in mobile phone history; a hiccup which cost the South Korean company millions. Samsung has bounced back with the impressive Galaxy S8, but the Note 8 was always going to be a hard sell given the intense publicity which surrounded the fiery fate of its forerunner.

We've already taken a look at the excellent Radeon RX Vega 56, the cut-down version of the full-fat graphics card reviewed here today - and it's a winner. A couple of outliers aside, it's as fast as Nvidia's GTX 1070 or significantly faster and it easily overclocks to push further ahead. It's AMD at its best - competitive, disruptive and adding value - but the same can't quite be said for the RX Vega 64. It's a good product overall and it's competitive enough with Nvidia, but it offers no knockout blow - in the here and now, at least.

It may be the most powerful gaming handheld ever made, but Switch's peak battery life of three hours while running Zelda Breath of the Wild - or two hours 37 minutes at maximum brightness - is the price we pay for this level of fidelity. Thankfully, there are plenty of inexpensive options for extending a play session on the go. Nintendo's use of the USB-C standard opens the door to a range of external batteries, where even a £19 power costing can triple your overall game time.

So here's a thought. Buy a Core i5 or Core i7 processor for gaming and the bottom line is this: on the majority of titles out there, its resources are highly underutilised. The GPU is the primary bottleneck during gaming, sometimes leaving your CPU with a significant amount of untapped overhead. So the question is this: can you spend less on your CPU and still get a great experience? And more to the point, what processor can keep your graphics card fed with data while offering exceptional value? We put our money where our mouth is and spent £63 on a Pentium G4560 - and it's something special. It truly is the new budget CPU king. Indeed, since we bought it, we've even seen it on pre-order for as low as £57.

The beauty of building a PC is that a diversity of parts allows users to construct a computer specifically designed to best serve their particular needs. AMD's Ryzen 7 1800X may not have taken Intel's crown for gaming, but the price vs performance ratio for just about everything else propels the fledgling line of processors well into contention. The Ryzen 7 1800X we recently reviewed isn't the only new AMD eight-core chip you can buy: cheaper 1700X and 1700 processors are available, and that is where the value really becomes difficult to ignore.

The rumours are true. Intel's new Coffee Lake-S represents the biggest generational leap we've seen since the classic Sandy Bridge second-gen Core line, launched way back in 2011. The Core i5 2500K and i7 2600K were the stuff of legend - processors so good, many still use them today, convinced that Intel's iterative approach to CPU upgrades didn't justify replacing a solid platform. Coffee Lake-S has much in common with those classic processors: there's a big gen-on-gen upgrade, an immediately noticeable improvement to performance in all areas and excellent overclocking. The key to Coffee Lake's power is simple: a refined process technology allows for overall faster clocks, while the move from four to six cores in both i5 and i7 offers a massive increase to processing power.

The Seagate Firecuda is a 2.5-inch 'laptop-size' drive - a 2TB hybrid costing around £115/$130. What makes it stick out? Well for PlayStation users, it ticks a few crucial boxes if you're itching to upgrade the standard hard drive. Until this model came along, we've had 1TB as the maximum size for 2.5-inch hybrid drives. Even with on-board NAND memory to increase speeds, 1TB might still not be quite enough to make an upgrade worthwhile - after all, PS4 Pro ships with the same level of storage out of the box. But the big question is, can this upgrade deliver both a capacity upgrade and a notable performance bump over the stock drive?

With the recent arrival of system software 4.5, PlayStation 4 finally possesses a 'must have' feature that has proved invaluable on Xbox One - full support for plug-in external storage, hooked up via USB. Boosting available hard drive space is now easy and virtually any kind of storage can be attached - but the question is, what's the best way to use this feature?

Intel's Coffee Lake-S flagship, the Core i7 8700K is - in our view - the fastest gaming CPU that money can buy right now, but what if you don't have £350/$350 to spend on a new processor? The new i5 line looks almost as exciting, bringing six physical cores to the mid-range market for the first time. The 8600K continues Intel's tradition of cutting hyper-threading and reducing clocks while leaving overclocking as an option, shaving off £100/$100 in the process. However, just as intriguing is the i5 8400 - a £180/$190 hexacore offering that offers remarkable value.

Since the release of the Core i5 2500K in January 2011, Intel's mainstream quad-core processor line has been the default choice for those looking to put together a capable gaming PC. The i5 is always fast out of the box and overclocking can keep your platform competitive for anything up to five or even six years. But the return of AMD has already proven disruptive in other areas of the x86 market and the Ryzen 5 1600 and 1600X are simply irresistible products: Core i5 is no longer the 'go to' CPU line for gamers - there is now genuine, potent competition. And to cut straight to the chase, given the choice between a 7600K or the cheaper Ryzen 5 1600, it's the AMD product we'd choose.

Long loading times are one of our biggest issues with current-gen consoles. Games are getting bigger, more complex, with ever-increasing levels of details in art assets - but the fundamental basis of storage technology is unchanged since the Xbox 360/PS3 era. Solid-state storage drives are the future, and the question is, can PlayStation 4 Pro - with its brand-new, high bandwidth SATA 3 interface - finally take a good-sized chunk out of the extended pauses between gameplay that are often part and parcel of modern console gaming?