December 2020

2020 was my upgrade year. I swapped monitors and went ultrawide for the first time, 3440×1440 @ 144 Hz. On Black Friday I got a $180 SATA 2TB SSD. And after completing a series of rituals involving toad blood, I acquired an RTX 3080.  Yes, it’s nice hitting my head against the 144 fps ceiling in Control and other games. But my biggest upgrade turned out to be bamboo. I knew I needed to change my work and gaming space in 2020. I was already working from home before the pandemic hit, but losing the option of lugging a laptop…

Our rivals and/or colleagues over at Edge Magazine have gotten an exclusive look at Hollow Knight: Silksong for Edge 354, which goes on sale today. Actually you know what they got to look at this before us so I’m going to officially come down on the rivals side of this—at least for the rest of the year. Team Cherry has blessed Edge (curse you, Edge!) with a look at the Hollow Knight sequel, which stars the character Hornet from the first game as she explores the new world of Pharloom. Game co-directors Ari Gibson and William Pellen revealed a lot…

It was the best of graphics tech, it was the worst of graphics tech, it was the age of unprecedented gen-on-gen performance bumps, it was the age of marketing foolishness, it was the epoch of affordable 4K gaming, it was the epoch of $1,500 GPUs, it was the season of ray tracing, it was the season of arbitrarily not enabling ray tracing, it was the summer of great new graphics card hope, it was the winter of empty shelf despair. Basically, in terms of new graphics cards, this year has been great… and then turned absolute dog eggs. This ill-fated…

Topping the list of best games released in 2020, at least according to the aggregate of Steam platform users, are Hades, Factorio, and Phasmophobia. Checking in on the last day of the year with the folks at Steam 250, a Steam user review aggregation and evaluation site, gives us a snapshot of what people were into here on December 31st, 2020. A look at their 150 best-rated games of 2020 gives an interesting insight into what people loved enough they bothered to both play and leave a review on it this year.  As you go through it all, feel free…

The Epic Games Store is enticing customers to rely on its developing storefront by releasing one game for free every week in 2020. That’s right, completely free! No strings attached, except the one tied to Epic’s storefront.  Even if you don’t plan on playing these free offerings anytime soon, you might as well login and add them to your library if you’ve got an Epic Store account. Keep checking in here to see what’s free right now and what’s coming in the future. We’ve also listed the full history of Epic’s giveaways, so you can see what’s already been given…

If you need a new gaming laptop but are not looking to spend a grand or more on one, then check out this deal for MSI’s GL65 Leopard (model 10SCSR-070). It is a 15.6-inch machine with an IPS display and a fast 144Hz refresh rate, priced at just $769 after discounts. There are three discounts available. Normally priced at $1,099, the laptop is on sale for $969 right now. That’s discount number one. Secondly, using promo code 4STUDENT at checkout knocks $100 of the price, bringing it down to $869 (anyone can use the code, not just students). That’s discount…

Here it is: PC Gamer’s 2020 Game of the Year. If you want to catch up on all of this year’s awards and staff picks, visit out GOTY hub. James Davenport: Cut out the noise around all the odd Kojima-isms, the myth of the nonsensical two-hour long cutscenes, the needless cameos and indulgent winks at the camera—it’s all there, and I like it, but it made up a miniscule percentage of my 100-plus hours wandering the American wastes.  What’s important: Death Stranding is one of the best games about getting from point A to point B ever made—looking at you…

With the Winter video game sales in full swing, or winding down with giveaways in some cases, it’s always prudent to trawl for the good stuff that’s good and cheap. Like, less than $1 American cheap. That, my friends, is cheap. So, like last year, I went trawling through the terrible search systems of the online PC game platforms to find you some sweet deals. Are they the newest games? No. Are they literally the cheapest games you can get? Also no. Are they better than every game you can play for free? Definitely not. But they are pretty good…

A cyberattack on the European branch website of publisher Koei Tecmo has caused the company to take down both the American and European websites. Koei Tecmo said in a statement that some 65,000 accounts on the European forums may have been compromised, with user registration information including account names, encrypted passwords, and email addresses at risk of having been stolen. That information may have been leaked as of December 25th. At the moment, Koei Tecmo believes no critical information such as credit card details has been stolen. Nonetheless, those with European Koei Tecmo accounts should change the logins of accounts…

 As I reflect on 2020, I’ve been giving some thought to what my hardware highlight of the year was. I tried to think about the conversations I had throughout the year that stuck with me. You’d think it would be something along the lines of how good or hard to find those RTX 3080s are, but as it turns out, the common thing I found myself telling people, “Yo, these 50 dollar mics sound amazing!”  That’s right, in a year of significant hardware advances from planar magnetic gaming headsets to GPUs capable of wildly high frame rates at affordable prices….

With performance-related components, such as graphics cards, the latest hardware is always the best. It’s faster, more powerful, and therefore, y’know, just better. Inevitably then, our best graphics card list is dominated by the new generation of GPUs AMD and Nvidia have unleashed upon the world in 2020. With both the red and green team releasing a swathe of high-end graphics cards over the last three months or so, 2020’s GPU game has been weighted very heavily towards the end of the year. That means the landscape has changed dramatically and incredibly quickly. Or at least it would have done…