Monthly Archives: November 2018
Forget About Wires, Get the Best Wireless Gaming Mice Today
If you haven't tried using a wireless gaming mouse you should. There’s a lot of convenience and freedom with a wireless gaming mouse—once you get used to whipping your mouse around without dragging a cable along with it, it’s hard to go back. Wireless mice used to come at a higher premium, but all that extra freedom and mobility hardly comes at a cost any more as some excellent models start at $50 or less now.
That said, regular wired mice can game forever while the battery life of wireless gaming mice still hovers around weeks. No wireless mouse can ever be as lightweight as a wired mouse either as long as batteries are included in the equation. For some, those are big deterrents. For others, the joys of using a completely untethered mouse make these minor setbacks seem trivial. After all, given all the hours you spend using your mouse, shouldn’t that experience be as pleasant as possible?
Here Are the Best Graphics Cards From Both Team Green and Team Red
The GPU market is in a pretty interesting place right now. Nvidia introduced a 1.5 version of Turing with Super versions of its high-end RTX GPUs and some of its most affordable GTX graphics cards yet. Meanwhile, AMD introduced its Radeon VII and its first Navi graphics cards are shaking things up a bit by giving gamers a 7nm GPU alternative to Nvidia's fully-fleshed out Turing line-up.
Westworld Location Burns Down in Woolsey Fire
The Western town location seen in Westworld has burned down in the California wildfires.
The Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area tweeted that "the Woolsey Fire has burned Western Town at Paramount Ranch."
The Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area tweeted about the destruction of the iconic Westworld set.
Inside the Outlander Premiere’s Brutal Final Scene
This interview contains spoilers for the Outlander Season 4 premiere, "America the Beautiful." Check out our review of the Season 4 premiere here.
Season 4 of Outlander brings our star-crossed heroes, Claire (Caitriona Balfe) and Jamie (Sam Heughan), to North Carolina - where they hope to start a new life in the New World.
But a chance encounter with a charming convict named Stephen Bonnet (Ed Speleers) will have major consequences for the Frasers after Jamie and Claire help him escape being hanged early in the episode, only to have him repay their kindness by robbing them and killing their friend Lesley in the final minutes of the Season 4 premiere. And this isn’t the last we’ll see of Bonnet this season…
Picard Show Will Be “Grounded, New and Different”
Full spoilers follow for the Star Trek: Short Treks episode “Calypso.”
CBS All Access just dropped the Short Treks episode “Calypso,” perhaps their best addition to the Star Trek universe since they started making new episodes last year. And no doubt much of the success of the short is the result of the script by Michael Chabon, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author who has made the jump to TV with “Calypso” and is also on the upcoming, untitled Picard show’s writing staff.
Watch the trailer for Calypso above.
In “Calypso” (read our review here), a lost solider named Craft (Aldis Hodge) finds himself onboard the USS Discovery, which somehow lost its crew a thousand years earlier. In the millennium that has passed, the ship’s computer has evolved into an AI named Zora (voiced by Annabelle Wallis), and it is she who nurses the injured Craft back to health. But of course, an unlikely bond forms between man and machine, even while the question of what it means to be a man, or a machine, or a woman arises… This is Star Trek, after all!
What GTA 6 Can Learn From Red Dead 2
After roughly 80 hours, I finally rolled credits on Red Dead Redemption 2, and even with lots still left to do in that world, it’s hard not to look to the future. Rockstar has done some amazing things in their rendition of the Old West, and despite some of its faults, they’ve set a new bar for themselves as a studio. From the gorgeous environments to the world’s interactivity, there are plenty of new ideas and mechanics that would be great additions to the studio’s flagship franchise -- but there are few smaller lessons that we think Red Dead’s older sibling could benefit from, too. Here are 8 things that GTA 6 can learn from Red Dead 2.
The Best Blu-ray Players
Be sure to visit IGN Tech for all the latest comprehensive hands-on reviews and best-of roundups. Note that if you click on one of these links to buy the product, IGN may get a share of the sale. For more, read our Terms of Use.
It might seem a bit quaint to be talking about something that plays physical media, but many of us still have a wall of discs – or at least a couple shelves – and might even still be adding to that collection. I personally added Blade Runner 2049 to my collection this summer because though the availability of streaming content continues to grow, it still doesn’t encompass everything, since new content is added and old stuff is removed from services monthly.
Best Gifts Under $25 for 2018
If you buy something through this post, IGN may get a share of the sale. For more, read our Terms of Use.
The holidays can be a stressful and demanding time, especially for that poor wallet of yours. All the gift buying and the present shopping can leave your wallet beaten and empty so we've compiled a guide with awesome gifts at an affordable price for under $25 apiece.
Best Game Gifts Under $25
Fallout 76 Review
After more than 50 hours plundering the irradiated wasteland of Fallout 76, the greatest mystery still lingering is who this mutated take on Fallout is intended for. Like many of Vault-Tec’s underground bunkers, Bethesda’s multiplayer riff on its post-nuclear RPG series is an experiment gone awry. There are bright spots entangled in this mass of frustratingly buggy and sometimes conflicting systems, but what fun I was able to salvage from the expansive but underpopulated West Virginia map was consistently overshadowed by the monotony of its gathering and crafting treadmill.
On the surface, Fallout 76 is another dose of Bethesda’s tried-and-true open-world RPG formula on a larger-than-ever map that’s begging to be explored. As you emerge from Vault 76 you’ll start in a relatively peaceful forest and venture out into more dangerous pockets of the irradiated wasteland. My favorite is traveling the lengths of the Cranberry Bog, where the pinkish-red fields are seemingly inviting from afar but turn out to be full of a snaking system of trenches and alien forests that hide the worst horrors of the wasteland, but there are many more.
The Road to Overlord: When Horror Mixes with World War II Movies
It's not exaggeration to say that World War II was a war of many horrors, but as the years have passed, storytellers have used the shocking, world-spanning conflict as the backdrop for many horror stories that go above and beyond the battlefield.
Julius Avery's Overlord (read our review here), about a squad of American soldiers whose mission sends them straight to a Nazi mad scientist's horrifying laboratory, is the latest and probably the most expensive World War II horror movie to date, but it's by no means the first. There's a long history of World War II horror movies, some of them brilliant, some of them schlocky. So buckle up, folks. These are the World War II horror movies you really need to see...