November 24, 2015

Huge Black Friday Sale Hits Heroes of the Storm

Posted on November 24, 2015 by Rae Michelle Richards

If you’re staying in this holiday weekend perhaps you might want to look into playing a few rounds of Blizzard’s addicting MOBA Heroes of the Storm. This weekend all of the mounts, skins and heroes in the Nexus are reduced by 50% (off of their cash purchase price, in game gold prices remain unaffected).

Blizzard has also released a limited time Second Chance bundle which allows you to gain access to some of the timed exclusive mounts from the game’s past. These mounts include the Lunar Tiger, Red Carpet mount and the Reindeer mount!

If you’re a really dedicated player within the Nexus then this is your only chance to grab the 365 day stim pack which grants you additional gold & experience for an entire year. Normally the stim packs are sold in 7 and 30 day allotments for $3.99 and $9.99 respectively. The 365 day stim pack is currently priced at $59.99 USD and will not be available after this weekend’s sale.

Personally I picked up the Ranger-General Sylvanas Skin for $3.99 – I just couldn’t resist the idea of having a living elf Sylvanas now that I’ve got her to a high level!

  • All Heroes, Mounts, and Skins will be on sale at a 50% real money discount
  • A new 360 Day Stimpack will be available at a deeply discounted price.
    • Please note: The 360 Day Stimpack is a limited-time item that will ONLY be available during the Black Friday Sale. 
  • A new Second Chance Bundle will be available with the following items:
    • Winter Veil Jaina Skin
    • Greatfather Winter Rehgar Skin
    • Reigndeer Mount
    • Nazeebra Mount
    • Lunar Tiger Mount
    • Magic Carpet Mount

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Holiday Weekend Sales Give Us All A Reason To Stay In-Doors & Game

Posted on November 24, 2015 by Rae Michelle Richards

All of our American editors are enjoying their time with family over the holiday weekends. As countless people are traveling across the continent to see family members and love ones that they may not have shared physical space together in many months. If you’re like me a long 8 hour flight with multiple lay-overs can be a great time to catch up on games that I might have ignored for quite some time.

I am of course not American – I’m Canadian – so I won’t be traveling anywhere this weekend. This doesn’t mean that some of the jaw dropping deals that large worldwide corporations have cooked up to coincide with a holiday steeped in colonialism. Some of these deals are USA only, most of them are open to everyone in USA & Canada and at least one is Canadian only.

PlayStation Store Co-Op Sale

Check All PlayStation Deals Here

PS4

  • Battlefield Hardline Hardline Edition – $19.99
  • Super Street Fighter IV Ultra – $14.99
  • Far Cry 4 – $23.10 (such an odd price)
  • Payday 2: Crime Wave Edition $20.00
  • Evolve – $18.80
  • Rayman Legends – $10.80

PS Vita

  • Dragon Ball Z: Battle of Z – $6
  • Resident Evil Revelations 2 – $17.99
  • Rayman Legends – $10.80

Origin Black Friday Deals

All Prices in USD

Check out all of the Origin PC deals

  • Sims 4 – $24.99
  • Battlefield 4 Premium Edition – $19.99
  • Dragon Age: Inquisitions – $14.99
  • Battlefield Hardline Standard Edition – $11.99
  • Sim City Standard Edition (2013) – $9.99

Humble Codemasters Bundle

All Prices In USD

Check Out All of Humble’s Deals Here

Donate at least $1 for access to:

  • Grid 2 + Drift Pack DLC
  • DIRT Showdown
  • Overlord
  • Operation Flashpoint Complete + Dragon Rising + Red River
  • Hospital Tycoon

Beat the average (currently $4.69 USD)

  • Grid Autosport + Road & Track Car Pack
  • Overlord II
  • Overlord Raising Hell Expansion
  • Grid 2 Track Pack

Donate $15 for all of the above plus

  • Grid Auto Sport Season Pass
  • DIRT 3 Complete Edition
  • All released GRID 2 DLC

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Illaoi, the Kraken Priestess Gets Her Own Browser Game As Riot Releases New League of Legends Champion

Posted on November 24, 2015 by Broken Joysticks

Illaoi

Illaoi, the Kraken Priestess, is the newest playable character for Free To Play money printing machine and biggest E-sport on Earth League of Legends. To celebrate, Riot has created a promotional browser-based minigame meant to show off her powers and backstory.

Really it’s nothing more than a cutscene and a bunch of quick-time events, but it is a pretty neat way of introducing a new Champion to the roster. I’ve always liked how much effort Riot puts into making sure all the designs for their Champions are distinctive and have a clear personality to them. Let’s hope this new one doesn’t break the game. Again.

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Fig Crowdfunding Service Opening Up To Smaller Investors

Posted on November 24, 2015 by Broken Joysticks

Fig

Fig, the crowdfunding platform that apparently already existed prior to me writing this news story, is changing it’s rules in regards to crowdfunding and “investors”. Fig’s signature feature is that if a minimum of 1000 dollars is given to a campaign, one will share in a portion of the profits proportional to the amount put in. These “investors” as Fig calls them were only allowed to participate if they had a yearly salary of at least 200.000 dollars, or a net worth of at least 1.000.000 dollars. This restriction has now been lifted for people wanting to invest anywhere between 1.000 and 10.000 dollars, although for amounts above 10.000 dollars the restriction still applies.

Fig is not only very selective of its special backers, but also of its campaigns. As of right now, only two campaigns have ever gone up on the service. Outer Wilds, which just managed to scrape in its 125.000 dollar asking price, and Anchors in the Drift, which didn’t even pass one third of the 500.000 dollar mark it was aiming for. It is fair to say that Fig as a crowdfunding service hasn’t been making too many splashes. I also fail to see the reasoning behind gating off its one distinguishing feature behind a salary wall. Still, I do think there’s a place for a more curated crowdfunding platform besides Indiegogo and Kickstarter. Let’s face it, the quality of the projects that go up on Crowdfunding sites can be….lacking, and a platform that strictly curates and vets its campaigns is an interesting prospect. Who knows, Fig might find its bearings after this change. I’ll certainly be interested in checking out what they choose to host as their third campaign.

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Fnatic launches peripherals range

Posted on November 24, 2015 by Fionna Schweit

Fnatic has decided to expand beyond simple T-shirts and branded soft goods with a newly announced line of gaming peripherals. The announcement was made via the teams page and they are running a IndieGoGo   to get the line off the ground. The design choices may seem out of place but Fnatic has taken great care on their site to explain the motivation behind the design. The price certainly is hi-end with the full keyboard and mouse set available in the IndieGoGo for 167$.

So what do you get for your almost 170$? The full set consists of the Flick G1 optical gaming mouse, the Rush G1 mechanical keyboard with Cheerry MX red switches, and the Focus G1 mouse pad (cloth), or the Boost G1 (polycarbonate) mouse pad.  The products are set to ship out in December and January of 2015 and 2016. That’s a pretty impressive turn around time for anything physical on Indie Go Go. The Keyboard looks to be fairly hi end, including two additional USB ports, LED backlighting, and several on board profiles no one is going to accuse the keyboard of being low end.

Kpkeyboard

The Flick mouse is equipped with a “pro-grade optical sensor, an ergonomic feel for the hand, and three customizable profiles” This at least is refreshing to see, as many hi end gaming mice do not support any on board profiles. As for the lower DPI of the sensor the officail word from the Indie GO GO is that they did not need a high DPI sensor, and that instead they wanted something which performed reliably.

Keypoints mouse

The final portion, the mouse pad is perhaps the most interesting of all. A variably sized mouse pad in two different types of materials a cloth and a PVC, a well as several sizes. The focus G1 and Boost G1 are the two mouse pads which each come in three sizes so that no matter how large or small your mousing surface is, you can still use one of them.

Kp mousepads

It remains to be seen weather or not these new gaming peripherals will make a dent in the already crowded market of high end keyboards and mice that are marketed exclusivly to gamers, but I for one would at least like to see the product before I pay 170$ for it.

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Witcher 3 price cut alert

Posted on November 24, 2015 by Fionna Schweit

TheWitcher 3 Gets Biggest Price Cut Ever in New GOG Sale

The game is on sale as part of the retailer’s new “Only on GOG.com” promotion. GOG has been incredible recently about undercutting literally everyone else on the market in terms of price. This is holding true to their in house development project The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. The most recent entry in the Witcher series The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, traditionally sells for 60USD. It is currently priced at 30USD a 50% discount.

This sale is a part of the GOG “Only GOG.com,” sale, which kicks off today.  When asked about the sale GOG said in a statement about the “GOG.com’s team of digital archaeologists and detectives work tirelessly to track down favorite games that have been lost to time, but never forgotten Committed to restoring the classics, each game is fully compatible with modern computers, with the original manuals and supplements preserved in digital format.”

Also included in the sale are:

  • D&D: Classic Bundle (up to -80%): featuring the classic editions of Baldur’s Gate, Planescape: Torment, Icewind Dale, Neverwinter Nights. 10 games in total.
  • D&D: Gold Box Bundle (up to -50%): featuring three tomes of Forgotten Realms: The Archives (with Eye of the Beholder, Pool of Radiance, Dungeon Hack, and more) as well as Al-Qadim, Dark Sun, Krynn, Ravenloft, and others. 18 games in total.
  • Warhammer Bundle (up to -50%): featuring 4 games: Final Liberation: Warhammer Epic 40,000, Warhammer 40,00: Chaos Gate, Warhammer: Shadow of the Horned Rat, Warhammer 40,00: Rites of War.
  • Star Trek Bundle (up to -60%): featuring 4 games: Star Trek: 25th Anniversary, Starfleet Academy, Starfleet Command, Judgment Rites.

This sale period runs for five days, ending on November 29 at 5:59 AM PST. Head to GOG.com to see all the deals.

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AMD Crimson Driver & Software Suite Rumored For Imminent Release

Posted on November 24, 2015 by Rae Michelle Richards

Owners of AMD cards have been seeing some inferior benchmarks when compared against comparable Nvidia hardware with recent titles like Batman: Arkham Asylum and The Witcher III. Many tech journalists and enthusiasts users have speculated that this disparity may have to do with these titles utilization of Nvidia’s proprietary GameWorks technologies. Rain effects in Batman, Lighting in Fallout 4 and hair in The Witcher III all utilize Nvidia exclusive technologies that AMD owners have had to tone down or disable entirely in order to achieve the same framerates as GeForce owners.

It looks like AMD might finally have an answer with the (rumored) impending release of AMD Radeon Crimson – a brand new driver and software suite that according to leaked marketing material will provide a number of benefits to owners of existing and future hardware.

On the r/PCGaming sub-reddit a user by the handle of BehindaCorpFirewall posted a link to over a dozen presentation slides that outline the AMD Crimson software. Here are a few of the more interesting points, at least to me:

Higher Frames Per Second

  • Asynchronous Shaders allow for breaking serial workloads into parallel tasks
  • Idle GPU resources used for this task instead of queuing
  • Improved multi-threading performance

Low Frame Rate Compensation Technology

  • Smooths out gameplay when application frame rate falls below monitor refresh rate
  • Algorithms adjust GPU output and refresh-rate to prevent game stuttering
  • No additional hardware or configuration required for this feature.

Custom Resolutions Support & Better Up-Scaling

  • Allows users to create custom resolutions.
  • Control over pixel density & refresh rate.
  • Improved 2k (1080P) à 4K (UHD) scaling

What do you think of some of these rumored changes that the Crimson driver & software may bring? If these leaked material are even close to accurate we could see the rollout of this new software package in the coming days. If you head-on over to the AMD website you can already watch a preview video outlining some of the work that has gone into Crimson.

Right now all of this should be considered a rumor, as an AMD owner I’ll be sure to take some bench marks in some of the games I regularly play and report back after the rollout.

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