Ryzen 7 5800X3D was down to £348 at Amazon. Now though, thanks to a rogue 10% off deal at Ebay, you can pick up the same processor from Ebuyer’s Ebay store for £306.
£306! That’s a tiny price for a CPU that launched last year at an official RRP of £429 and a real-life asking price of £530. To get this reduced price, use code JAN10 at the checkout.
Lies of P hopes to fix, as revealed in a new gameplay trailer designed to show off how nice it looks on a Radeon RX 7900 XTX. I will likely never own a Radeon RX 7900 XTX, but it’s looking increasingly likely that I will buy Lies of P.
It’s a Soulslike that plonks you into an alternate Victorian London where people got real good at inventing creepy automata. You play as the big P himself, Pinocchio.
FIFA 23 is once again on top.
The latest UK charts are in and it’s pretty unremarkable, all told.
FIFA 23 regains its dominance at number one after slipping down to number two last week. The Switch version made up 25% of the split, coming in behind the PlayStation 5 version at 41%.
Read the full article on nintendolife.com
If you can’t get enough of The Last of Us after watching the series premiere on HBO Max, PlayStation is celebrating this big moment by offering a two-hour trial of PS5’s The Last of Us Part I for all PlayStation Plus Premium subscribers.
PlayStation Plus Premium is the highest level of PlayStation Plus and, in the U.S., it costs $17.99/month. In addition to Game Trials, subscribers also get access to cloud streaming, access to a growing library of PS1, PS3, PS4, PS5, and PSP games, cloud saves, monthly games, discounts, and more.
Watched #TheLastOfUs premiere on HBO Max?
Continue Joel and Ellie’s journey with a game trial for The Last of Us Part I available now with PlayStation Plus Premium: https://t.co/vANYKjiXN2 pic.twitter.com/1r41EDgu2S
— PlayStation (@PlayStation) January 16, 2023
The Last of Us Part I is a remake of the 2013 PlayStation classic and is the basis for Season 1 of HBO Max’s series that just had its debut this past weekend, although the team behind the show has said it will “deviate greatly” in some episodes.
In our review of the series premiere of HBO’s The Last of Us, we said that it “thrillingly lays the foundations for the emotional torture ready to hurt us along every step of its journey. A cast at the top of their game with technical artistry behind the camera to match, it throws us into a world on the edge of cataclysm before brilliantly catapulting us into one that has been plunged into the depths of it.”
As for the game, we said, “A gorgeous and well-honed remake of one of the biggest boppers in the PlayStation pantheon, The Last of Us Part I is the best way to play – or replay – Naughty Dog’s esteemed survival classic.”
For more on The Last of Us, check out our comparison of the game vs the TV show, how the series made its opening even more heartbreaking than the game, and our review of the entire first season.
Have a tip for us? Want to discuss a possible story? Please send an email to newstips@ign.com.
Adam Bankhurst is a news writer for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter @AdamBankhurst and on Twitch.
Marvel Snap that destroys any and all opposing cards in his lane with a power of 9 or above. He feels great to play, and miserable to play against. He is also, apparently, quite bad – at least according to project lead Ben Brode, who’s consulted his big statistics bank to discover that he appears in more losing decks than anyone else.
Huh. I suppose I can stop agonising over whether he has a place in my latest Patriot deck.
Valheim developers Iron Gate have decided it’s time to start cracking on their next biome update. They’re now chiselling away at the Ashlands, a volcanic “land of the dead” packed with skeletal horrors.
It’ll be a while before all the horrors are ready, but a smaller update with clothes and haircuts is on the way soon.
The scales are tipping.
Fire Emblem Engage is out this Friday, but some lucky people have already got their hands on the game. According to Fendoreo1 on ResetEra (don’t click the link if you want to avoid spoilers), someone is currently playing through the entirety of Fire Emblem Engage and posting their impressions online — including screenshots.
If you don’t want to know anything else about the upcoming game, it’s best to get muting right away as new details are emerging such as additional characters, maps, cutscenes, and story beats. Be safe out there!
Read the full article on nintendolife.com
Apex Legends has a content drought problem. It remains one of the best battle royales and has dominated the scene thanks to its intense, fast-paced movement, impeccable gunplay, and unique Legend characters. But while it’s been four years since Apex surprise launched and quickly rose to success, it’s now beginning to look tired.
While Apex’s season launches are usually great, offering either new guns, Legends, or maps, the content between season launches is usually few and far between. There are some updates between seasons that come a month or two after launch – season 14 launched 9th August introducing new Legend Vantage – and the following update, the Beast of Prey Collection event, dropped two months later.
Collection events usually last about two weeks and offer up a few cosmetic items to buy and earn, often including an Heirloom – a legendary item that transforms your melee attack with a unique weapon tied to a specific Legend.
These Collection events also bring in limited time modes like Gun Run (basically Gun Game from Call of Duty) and Control (Domination), it’s not that much of a draw and the player base, myself included, is getting tired. We’ve had the same limited time events every year for too long now. The Winter Express train domination mode event has been the same for the last three years and, while it’s still a fun game mode, I want something new. The Halloween event is the same and even though timed events last two weeks, some players lose interest after a week, often even less.
The community has been desperate for a new permanent game mode, something like Control, which pits two teams of nine against each other. It’s appeared in previous timed events and is a welcome change from Battle Royale and Arenas.
Last week, Control returned as part of the Spellbound Collection event, which was great to see. However, the event update had so many issues. I ran into a ton of difficulties when I tried to load Apex, I was unable to get past the loading screen most times and when I eventually made it to the main menu, I’d get kicked out of the game due to a “fatal error” or Code Net.
Getting disconnected from matches has been a recurring problem especially after major Season updates when there are big game changes like new maps, guns, or Legends. I’ve stated before that I honestly would not mind Apex taking a day or two off to implement a big update to fix some of the underlying issues to the game, like what Fortnite does between seasons. But this is much harder to implement than just saying. However, players have also been asking for Apex to fix its server stability issues for a long time, especially since getting disconnected from ranked games often result in players getting a time-out penalty for “leaving” the game when they were just disconnected.
The community really just would love some open communication and updates about the situation, especially when these problems are just aggravated by the event or season updates that highlight new cosmetics and the same repeating limited time game modes.
Respawn tweeted from its official account – not even the Apex account – that it was looking into the issues following the Spellbound launch. The next day, no update, nothing from Respawn, despite a lot of players reporting they’d lost the money they’d spent to get event skins, all because of the servers’ instabilities. They finally tweeted an update that a fix had been rolled out to stabilize the issues, nearly 24 hours after the debacle and still only on the Respawn account.
Heads up, legends ?
We just pushed a fix to resolve the connection issues players were seeing in the lobby. Thanks for sticking with us through this, and we hope you enjoy the Event!— Respawn (@Respawn) January 11, 2023
I adore Apex. It’s my number one battle royale, and one I continually play. But I cannot ignore the issues Apex has, with its lack of content drops and poor communication from Respawn. A quick fix could be to open up custom private lobbies to everyone, which the Spellbound event did do. However, lobbies needed a full server of 30 people to launch. Any less and it doesn’t work.
Obviously game development is extremely complicated – there are lots of moving parts to consider, especially with a live service, and everything needs to be thoroughly tested before it’s launched to the public. But Apex devs have already said they look at data from current and limited time modes, as well as player behaviors, to provide updates to the game. If that’s the case, why are we still getting the same holiday events time and again, even though interest has dwindled? And bugs like server issues that prevent people from logging on are, frankly, unforgivable.
Epic took Fortnite offline for a few days to relaunch it on a new engine. It was a big move – it no doubt cost millions in lost revenue – but it ultimately meant the player experience was the best it could be when it came back online. Maybe it’s time for Respawn to do the same? The Apex community has been asking for major updates to the sound and server system for years, due to the audio bugs and server latency issues that have plagued it in the past, but right now things don’t seem to be getting any better.
The lack of updates has meant that a lot of players and content creators who used to play Apex have started to migrate to other games. According to SteamDB, Twitch viewers dropped heavily from November 21st’s peak at 285,383 to a steady decline to a low of 83,838 on December 19th. That’s a huge 70% drop. The player base also dropped 12% from 413k on Steam to 360k during this timeframe as well which was between content updates.
Major Apex streamers like LuluLuvely have switched over to playing other games like Overwatch 2. Ex-Apex Pro player Rocker, who played for one of the top North American Apex teams NRG, released a statement on Twitter on January 10th saying he was quitting not only competitive Apex, but also playing Apex in general.
He wrote, “I’m done with apex. I’ve been lying to my self for awhile saying I want to grind and that I enjoy the game, but in reality I just cannot seem to enjoy it- let alone play the game for more than 2 hours at a time.”
quitting
Read: https://t.co/KhW7Mh0exG
— rocker (@rockerapex) January 11, 2023
I also took a break, though a shorter one, from Apex for a month to play Warzone, which was a nice vacation but for me, nothing comes close to Apex’s movement and gunplay. I love Apex and its core game, but the lack of updates will be its downfall unless it’s addressed, and fast.
Apex Season 16 is set to launch sometime in early February and since the holiday season is over we may get more updates to the game. I certainly hope so, because while I love the game and want to see it continue to succeed, if nothing changes I’ll have to shift my main FPS focus elsewhere.
The Lion’s Song devs Mi’pu’mi Games to be a turn-based tactical folktale, but cor, Howl sure does tick a heck of a lot of boxes for me. Due out later this year, you play a deaf hero in search of a cure to a sinister ‘howling plague’ that’s devastated the land around you and turned all its inhabitants into blood-thirsty beasts – and having played its first chapter last week, its combination of tight planning, grid-based shoving and limited ammo a la Into The Breach is very, very moreish indeed. Definitely one to watch for strategy game fans.
Warning: the below contains full spoilers for The Last of Us premiere, as well as the beginning of the video game.
In 2013, writer Neil Druckmann and developer Naughty Dog traumatized a generation of gamers with what could very well be the most devastating opening in video game history (until, that is, The Last of Us Part II came along). The Last of Us infamously opens with a gutpunch, having the player watch as a devastated Joel holds his dying daughter in his arms in the midst of a burgeoning zombie apocalypse. It’s one of the things that made The Last of Us the touchstone that it is, establishing an integral part of our protagonist’s motivations and setting the stage for one emotionally grueling game.
So how do you follow that up when adapting it to a television series? Apparently, you make it even more heartbreaking. Showrunners Druckmann and Craig Mazin could’ve just made a one-to-one adaptation of the game’s opening and it still would’ve been an effective introduction, but instead, they give us valuable time with Sarah (Nico Parker), while taking the opportunity to slowly build some chilling tension. The end result – Sarah dying in Joel’s (Pedro Pascal) arms – is the same, but the journey to get there is a key example of how adaptations can build upon their predecessors while staying loyal to them.
The TV series doesn’t so much change the opening as much as it adds to it. In fact, it quite literally doubles the runtime of the intro; in the game, it takes about 15 minutes to get from pressing play to watching the opening title card, whereas the series lingers further, spending 34 minutes setting the environment before jumping forward 20 years. Of those 34 minutes, only about 10 are spent directly adapting scenes from the game – specifically, when Joel, Sarah, and Tommy (Gabriel Luna) are booking it out of town, and staying true to its source to the point of showing Joel electing to keep driving past a family begging for help.
So what pads out the other 24 minutes? Firstly, some context for the virus that the characters are about to face, with a talk show clip from 1968 that has doctors explaining the threat that a certain type of fungus could pose to the human race (interestingly enough, the game saved its snippets of panicked news reports for after the initial intro, placing them over the opening credits that follow the title card). This serves to, again, build a little tension before we essentially get a day in the life of Sarah.
The TV series doesn’t rush its way to her death. Instead, we spend precious time with her, seeing the world through her eyes just hours before it descends into chaos. We don’t start in the evening, but at breakfast, with her preparing eggs for Joel’s birthday. From there, we see her going through the day-to-day motions – attending school, heading into the city to get Joel’s watch fixed, reluctantly spending time with the neighbors, and watching in horror as the pandemic begins to unfold.
Given that Sarah is still killed in the premiere, these additions might just seem like indulgent ways to elongate the already hefty 86-minute episode. But it’s clear that Druckmann and Mazin (who co-wrote the episode together) have a more considered goal, one based on adding weight to Sarah’s eventual death. There’s humanity in the mundane, and watching her go about these seemingly unimportant actions quietly gives us insight into her as a character, making us more attached to her in the process.
In the morning, we get to know her as a caretaker of sorts, making sure that her dad gets a birthday breakfast while also weaving in some charming banter between her, Joel, and Tommy. And in the game, while we may have seen her give the fixed watch to Joel, we didn’t see the thought that went into heading to the city to get it repaired. And when she’s hanging with the Adlers, she’s clearly not thrilled to be there, but she’s a devoted enough daughter that she heeds Joel’s request to do so without much of an argument.
In seeing all this, we get significant insight into her personality – something that the game didn’t take the time to do. Sure, we got to know game Sarah as funny while joking with Joel on the couch (the “Drugs. I sell hardcore drugs” quip survives in the show), and thoughtful in giving him the gift of the watch. But there’s something powerful and, most importantly, humanizing about seeing what she’s doing, rather than just knowing that it happened somewhere off-screen. It paints a picture of a more fleshed-out character who we can relate to and empathize with, making it even more heartbreaking when she’s inevitably offed. I won’t put Pedro Pascal’s performance up against game actor Troy Baker’s – both are absolutely gut-wrenching in Sarah’s death scene – but in the series, we’re not just crying over Joel losing his daughter; we’re crying over a character we got to know too.
On that note, it has the added benefit of making you think she’ll be the main character if you don’t know any better – and, given that HBO is marketing the series far beyond those who’ve played the game, there are going to be plenty of people who don’t know Sarah won’t live to see the end of the episode. It’s not quite “Ned Stark getting beheaded” levels of killing off your main character, but it’s certainly still a shock to unknowing audiences and gives them an idea of the stakes.
Sarah, too, is our anchor as the outbreak unfolds, and this is where I’d be remiss in not praising Nico Parker’s performance, as short-lived as it may be. As Sarah, she’s constantly relatable and charming, and the tear that escapes from her eye as she struggles to remain calm while Tommy and Joel rush them out of town is a brilliant little touch. Placing viewers in her shoes makes the tension more effective as well, with Parker showing real terror upon seeing the brutalized Adlers. And that shot of the elderly Adler, Connie, subtly showing symptoms in the background while Sarah reads a DVD box? Perfectly chilling.
As with any adaptation, one of the main questions facing HBO’s The Last of Us has been how much it will deviate from the source material. But that question perhaps hangs heavier over this adaptation than others, as The Last of Us’ story is one that could very easily be transferred to television without many tweaks and still be riveting. After all, there are more than a few compilations on YouTube that tell a compelling story just by stringing together The Last of Us’ important cutscenes.
But the best adaptations aren’t just the ones that do the story justice, but that evolve it – ones that take advantage of the medium to fill in character and world-building gaps. And it also gives Druckmann, the writer behind all of this, the chance to improve upon his own work from a decade ago, an opportunity many writers would kill for. You can’t judge a TV adaptation on just its premiere – 34 minutes of that premiere, no less – but in reworking one of the most iconic scenes from his own game, Druckmann’s made it clear he won’t be resting on his storytelling laurels for this one.
It also means that fans who are still recovering from the devastation of the game (and, it has to be said, from the emotional wringer that was The Last of Us Part II) have a lot more heartbreak to endure. But hey, at least you won’t be getting tears on your controller this time, right?
