Everybody knows that Counter-Strike’s asymmetric levels are its best. If only someone had told its millions of players. Counter-Strike creator Minh Le seems to agree with me at least, naming cs_siege as one of his favourites in a recent interview.
This Prime Day deal is still available. Amazon is currently offering Amazon Prime members the 2TB SK Hynix P41 Platinum PCIe 4.0 NVME solid state drive (SSD) for only $127.99 shipped. That’s one of the best prices we’ve seen for a 2TB PS5-compatible SSD from a reputable brand. It also happens to be one of the fastest PCI-E 4.0 SSDs on the market right now. This is an outstanding candidate for your PS5 or gaming PC rig.
SK Hynix might not be a brand that the consumer recognizes as much as Samsung or Western Digital, but make no mistake that they are a major player in the flash memory market. SK Hynix is a South Korean DRAM manufacturer and is the world’s second-largest memory chipmaker and the world’s third-largest semiconductor company. They supply components for brands you’ve heard of, like Corsair and G.Skill.
The Platinum P41 is SK Hynix’s highest end SSD. It boasts sustained read speeds of 7,000MB/s and sustained write speeds of 6,500MB/s. It also boasts random read speeds of 1.4 million IOPS and random write speeds of 1.3 million IOPS. In terms of reliability and stability, the SSDs have been tested and validated through 1,000 hours of stress testing with MTBF reaching 1.5 million hours or up to 1,200TB written. SK Hynix backs it all up with a 5 year warranty. Unlike most other SSDs, both the chips and the controller are manufactured in-house. The P41 Platinum uses an Aries controller with 176-layer TLC NAND flash chips.
Of course, in terms of real world performance, the vast majority of users won’t be able to tell apart the speeds between the highest end PCI-E 4.0 SSDs. Some of these SSDs include the SK Hynix P41 Platinum, the Samsung 990 Pro, and the WD Black SN850X. Therefore, it all comes down to the price. At its current price point, the P41 Platinum isn’t just one of the fastest drives on the market, it’s also cheaper than any competitor that can come close to its performance.
The SK Hynix P41 Platinum does not come equipped with a heatsink. That’s because this SSD is catered to PC gamers looking to add storage to their desktop computer. Many motherboards come equipped with built-in SSD coolers and will only accept bare SSDs. It’s generally harder to remove a heatsink than to apply a new one. If you plan to use this for your PS5, rest assured that’ it is 100% compatible (in fact, it’s overkill). Although some people have gotten away with an SSD with no heatsink, we recommend you install one for peace of mind. You can easily get a PS5 heatsink for under $10.
Looking for more options? Check out the best M.2 SSDs of 2204.
It was just last month that we reported on Streets Of Rogue 2’s early access release date, then planned for the middle of August. Alas, the streets of video game development are meaner than first thought, and its release date has now slipped until October 22nd.
The best Prime Day power bank deal is still available. Amazon is offering Amazon Prime members the powerful and high capacity Anker Prime 27,650mAh USB Power Bank for only $119.99, a hefty 33% price drop from its original $180 MSRP. This is the successor to the Anker 737 that we deemed the best Steam Deck and ASUS ROG Ally charger. Note only does it carry a significant battery capacity, it also boasts an absolutely massive 250W of USB power delivery to charge even the most power hungry MacBooks, iPhones, and handheld gaming consoles (simultaneously, in most cases).
with 250W of USB Type-C Power Delivery
The Anker Prime is a hefy power bank, measuring 6.4″x2″x2.2″ and weighing in at 1.5 pounds. This is a heavier duty power bank designed to charge more power hungry devices like laptops, (multiple) portable gaming systems, and (multiple) phones. It has two USB Type-C ports and one USB Type-A port. Each USB Type C port supports up to 140W of Power Delivery, which is the max charging rate of a new 2024 MacBook Pro 16″ laptop. If you want to use both USB Type-C ports simultaneously, one will charge at 140W and the other at 100W. The USB Type-A port also boasts up to 65W of charging, although that drops to 18W if you’re using both USB Type-C ports at the same time.
The 27,650mAh battery capacity is more than you’ll ever need on your itinerary. It can charge a Nintendo Switch OLED about 6 times, iPhone 15 Pro Max about 6 times, Steam Deck about 5 times, and an ASUS ROG Ally about 10 times. What also makes the Anker Prime unique compared to most other power banks is the LCD digital readout. It displays a lot of useful real-time information like remaining battery capacity, power input, and power output from each port.
Regarding bringing the Anker Prime on airplanes, this power bank outputs 99.54Wh, which meets the TSA requirements for carry-on baggage. Power banks need to be under 100Wh, which means this is the absolutely highest capacity you can bring on board without needing special clearance.
Both the ROG Ally and Steam Deck suffer from a short battery life when gaming on the go. For instance, when playing most games at 60 FPS, you’re likely looking at four hours of battery life for the Steam Deck and maybe half that on the ASUS ROG Ally, which is equipped with a measly 2600mAh battery. During our Steam Deck review, we even found games like God of War or Spider-Man could potentially tap out in under 2 hours. At the end of the day, you’ll never get the full potential out of your Steam Deck or ROG Ally if you’re not equipped with a decent portable charger.
The Anker Prime is an outstanding charger for the Steam Deck and ASUS ROG Ally portable gaming handhelds. The Steam Deck supports up to 38W, the ASUS ROG Ally up to 65W, and the Nintendo Switch up to 18W of power delivery, That means technically you could charge all three gaming consoles at the same time across all three ports. If you’re traveling with a family with multiple Nintendo Switches or Steam Decks, this option will be a lot more convenient than bringing multiple power banks.
Check out more of our favorite power banks of 2024. Unsurprisingly, Anker tops the list.
Sonic Adventure 2, Sonic Heroes, and Sonic 06 favourites return.
Continuing the Year of Shadow celebrations, Sega has shared a brand new trailer for Sonic X Shadow Generations, which showcases a couple of the stages returning for Shadow’s side of the adventure.
And, just like with Sonic’s stages in Sonic Generations, Shadow will also be revisiting levels from previous titles. Sega has highlighted three of those, and they’ll be familiar to all of you diehard Shadow fans.
Read the full article on nintendolife.com
Tell them Thalya’s coming, and Hell’s coming with her! Dungeons 4 is catching a steam engine to the Wild West in its first DLC, The Good, the Bad and the Evil, on August 8, 2024, for Xbox Series X|S, taking you through a brand-new, western-inspired area of the overworld known as “The West.” The new frontier is bristling with opportunity for The Absolute Evil, featuring new enemies, environments, and challenges, including a 5-mission campaign that will revisit an old rivalry between the Dark-Elf Thalya and the Dwarf Queen Brynnhild, culminating in a duel at high-noon.
Brynnhilde and her army of do-gooder Dwarves gather their forces as the last bastion against Thalya and the uprising of The Absolute Evil. The feud reaches an epic climax as the minions of Evil battle against Dwarven gunslingers to determine the fate of the Overworld. But it won’t be easy; the Wild West is a dangerous place for even Thalya and her most formidable and evil Little Snots, and you will need to contend with powerful new enemies wielding weapons dreamt up by the finest Dwarven blacksmiths. Check them out below!
And if these new daunting enemies weren’t enough of a challenge for the Absolute Evil, the mighty (irritating) Dwarves and their new gunslinging factions have turned to the tracks to capitalize on their new steam locomotives, which roar and chug through the prairie. Outfitted with more dynamite than you can shake a stick at, the Dwarves are pulling out all the stops to try and stop Thalya from conquering the Overworld.
But, luckily for Thalya, the Train-Enthusiast Evil is a long-time Railway Empire 2 fan and has been conjuring up an idea for a locomotive of its very own. Traverse the West and research the necessary science to uncover the boundless resources of the dusty plains to build your own locomotive capable of destroying the Dwarves once and for all and put it to use for the good of all that is Evil!
Dungeons 4 – The Good, the Bad and the Evil releases on August 8, 2024, with the base game available to play now on Xbox and PC Game Pass. So, there is only one question left to answer – do you feel evil, punk?
Kalypso Media
Build a cozy and comfortable Dungeon to suit your creatures’ needs and rule over them, then send them out into the Overworld to kindly remind the good people living there that the Absolute Evil rules over their lands. Gather your Evilness in new and dynamic ways and unleash it upon the lush green forests and plains of the Overworld to turn them over to the dark side. But make sure that your Dungeon is well-secured by traps and defended by your creatures, for those pesky Overworlders won’t just twiddle their thumbs while you turn their land into the Absolute Evil’s most pleasurable holiday paradise.
But what is that noise? “Gold, gold, gold and gems, gold and gems and gold!” The ancient song echoes throughout the underworld, accompanied by the clanging steel of hammers and axes. The Dwarves have arrived to claim their share of the abundant resources and together with the Elves and Humans of the Overworld, they send out their raiding parties to find the Dungeon’s heart.
Dungeons 4 keeps the spirit of its predecessor, but everything is now bigger, better, and with even more dynamic Evilness
.
Features:
• Everything is better with Dwarves: The Dwarves have arrived to build their underground strongholds and the hardy little fellows (although they don’t like being called that) compete with the Ever-Expanding Evil for space and resources.
• It makes your Dungeon great again: Dungeons are up four times larger than before and there are many more creatures who wait for the All-Commanding Evil’s orders to conquer the Overworld. Now the time has come for massive armies and truly sprawling dungeons!
• Ripe for the taking: The Overworld is bigger than ever before. Gain Evilness by beating Mini Bosses like the obsessively harmonious Unicorn and use it to transform the Overworld into stunning biomes of pure evil.
• New and shiny: An ability-based Perk system for Thalya, the Absolute Evil’s trusted *cough* and most loyal subordinate, grants her impressive new powers. The Absolute Evil can now enjoy taking over the world, governing the creatures and slapping subordinates even more with the customizable Evil Hand.
• Minions, everywhere: The Horde, the Undead and the Demons wait to do the Absolute Evil’s bidding, with more creatures than ever eagerly following the gesturing Evil’s orders, and Snots will play a much more prominent role this time.
• Many ways to tell the story: A long campaign, narrated by the beloved English Narrator from previous titles, as well as several skirmish maps all to challenge your rule as the Absolute Evil.
• Change the world: Spread your Evilness across the Overworld to bring lush and green environments over to the dark side, now shining even more vibrantly and beautifully evil as you spread your evilness across many new biomes.
• Work together, slay together: 2-player co-op multiplayer with both players managing one Dungeon together. All maps from the campaign and the skirmish mode are playable in co-op.
Kalypso Media
The post Dungeons 4 Heads West in New DLC: The Good, the Bad, and the Evil appeared first on Xbox Wire.
It doesn’t take all that much to get me to dive back into Blizzard’s stellar ARPG, Diablo 4, which has had a fantastic run of seasonal content and updates in the year since it made its devilish debut. But after an extensive hands-on with its upcoming character class, the Spiritborn, I might be kissing my free time goodbye altogether. This jack of all trades impressively mixes up the Diablo ecosystem with its most customizable and varied class yet, opens up a whole new unexplored aspect of Diablo lore, and most importantly, lets you summon a giant spectral gorilla to Hulk-smash demons into pink giblets. By the end of my time exploring Vessel of Hatred’s spooky jungles and dark dungeons, I was ready to forsake my roguish ways and declare myself a Spiritborn main, and that’s no small feat.
A quick housekeeping note: my time playing Diablo IV: Vessel of Hatred was focused almost exclusively on the Spiritborn character class. After choosing my preferred Spiritborn warrior, I was dropped right into the action in the new region of Nahantu to craft my build and dismember everything in sight. Though all of the following things are in there, I didn’t see any story, meet any NPCs (aside from vendors), or get to check out the new hireable mercenaries feature. That said, my access to the Spiritborn class and all it offers was pretty exhaustive, so I’ll be focusing on that. Let’s dive in!
The Spiritborn are an entirely new class to the Diablo series, complete with their own lore that’s tied up in the ancient civilization of Nahantu – as seen in the Act 3 jungles of Diablo II – and the ethereal spirits with which they commune. Unlike the other Diablo IV classes, where you dive quite deep into a specific fantasy like tanking with the Barbarian or doing mad DPS with the Rogue, the Spiritborn is much more customizable and varied, thanks to the four guardian spirits you can choose to build into. Those four spirits are: the eagle, which focuses on mobility, evasion, and lightning damage; the gorilla, which is all about survivability and physical damage; the jaguar, which is the king of DPS, attack speed, and fire damage; and my personal favorite, the centipede, which uses poison, debuffs, and lifesteal to control the battlefield and feed off your foes’ misfortune.
Each of those spirit guardians is represented by a massive ghostly avatar that imbues you with power and occasionally takes to the battlefield itself to lay waste to your enemies, like how the centipede bursts onto the scene to start spitting giant globs of venom at everything in sight, or the eagle, which swoops in to zap your foes into dust. The skills and abilities that correspond with each of these spirits appear on the Spiritborn skill tree as color-coded nodes, so you can easily identify which you might want to focus on depending on your chosen spectral BFF.
These four distinct styles, and the divergent builds you can create from them as a result, make the Spiritborn feel like four new classes in one. For example, a slow-moving, extremely resilient gorilla build will feel very different from a jaguar build where you’re teleporting around the map. But although you’ll need to choose one of them to be your primary patron, one of the most defining characteristics of the character class is the ability to hybridize your build with some of the powers offered by other guardian animals. So, for example, if your jaguar build is feeling a bit squishy, you can reach across the aisle to your gorilla spirit and add a few of his tanky abilities to your repertoire, making yourself significantly more durable.
That’s a whole new ball game from the much more specific fantasies the other character classes offer, and at first I was worried that would make it feel like a jack of all trades and master of none. But the longer I played, the less I was concerned about the class feeling underpowered, as I went deep into a centipede-eagle (centipeagle?) build that had me filling the battlefield with life-sapping poison, then dashing out of reach when things got too hot. “You would think that it would have some kind of identity crisis, but if you play the build it doesn’t – it works,” Diablo IV Game Director Brent Gibson told me. “And I think the team has done a great job at picking the right things inside of each of the lanes that make it so unique and distinct without trying to turn it into giant cream corn.” From what I’ve played so far, I tend to agree.
After trying out half a dozen different builds, I’m very much sold on this extremely unorthodox class, and I really got a kick out of how different each of the spirits felt and how flexible the class was in allowing me to take on different roles depending on my current need or flight of fancy. It remains to be seen if any of these builds will be able to compete with the five existing and much more focused classes, but so far I’m really encouraged by what I saw, and have a feeling I’ll be running as a Spiritborn exclusively when I tackle Vessel of Hatred later this year.
Mario Kart’s Rainbow Road holds a special place in the hearts of many, and it also happens to hover over very specific parts of our planet.
X/Twitter account @MarioBrothBlog highlighted the placement of the racing series’ most iconic track in a series of posts. Those who have put in some time into the Nintendo spinoff franchise might have noticed that Earth can be seen below some versions of Rainbow Road in-game. Mario Broth offers an in-depth analysis of the size and location of both the Mario Kart 8 and Mario Kart Wii iterations of Rainbow Road, revealing that they both cast shadows over very different parts of the planet.
Mario Kart Wii’s and Mario Kart 8’s Rainbow Roads are both depicted as floating above the Earth. By examining the skyboxes, we can map their real-world locations. The Wii Rainbow Road is over Canada, while the Mario Kart 8 Rainbow Road is over the Mediterranean. pic.twitter.com/MUoHwhYiOL
— Supper Mario Broth (@MarioBrothBlog) July 18, 2024
Mario Kart Wii’s Rainbow Road is massive, covering a large portion of Canada and even a sliver of Greenland. Quebec and Nunavut get the most coverage, with the starting line placed just above the former. Mario Kart 8, meanwhile, seems to be positioned above the Mediterranean Sea and Tyrrhenian Sea, centered between Sardinia, Sicily, and Tunisia. It’s also much smaller than its Nintendo Wii counterpart. Mario Broth notes that the Booster Course Pass re-release of the Wii track uses this same skybox, putting it in same place.
But wait, there’s more! X user @SB2749 was able to track down a 3D model of the Mario Kart Tour version of Wii Rainbow Road, which comes with a few small changes. Notably, the gargantuan course hovers above Southeast Asia instead of Canada in the mobile entry, swallowing more than half of Japan with one sharp turn.
Addendum: reader @SB2749 has provided the location of the Mario Kart Tour version of the Wii Rainbow Road track, which is in yet another location, covering Japan, China and Southeast Asia: https://t.co/2xD73iMtYR
— Supper Mario Broth (@MarioBrothBlog) July 18, 2024
Nintendo likely didn’t intend for any version of its Rainbow Road to be built to scale, but it’s still fun to imagine you might catch a glimpse of Mario and co. if you break out a telescope. Meanwhile, Nintendo’s Mario Kart series is currently between releases. The last numbered entry arrived on the Wii U in 2014, though Nintendo’s managed to make the most of that experience with a Deluxe re-release for the Switch in 2017. A long list of DLC additions have since arrived over the course of the last few years via the Booster Course Pass, which wrapped up with its final wave of content late last year.
There’s no word on when another installment will appear. However, fans are patiently awaiting any news regarding Nintendo’s Switch successor. It’s not expected to launch anytime before April 2025. You can see what little we know about the mysterious device here.
Michael Cripe is a freelance contributor with IGN. He started writing in the industry in 2017 and is best known for his work at outlets such as The Pitch, The Escapist, OnlySP, and Gameranx.
Be sure to give him a follow on Twitter @MikeCripe.
Crow Country, Conscript, and now Vultures – Scavengers Of Death. We really do seem to be living through a craze for PS1-style horror games. Vultures is different to the others, though, in that it’s turn-based zombie crunching combined with roguelike scavenging to survive and get more powerful. It’s arriving on Steam sometime soon and it’s probably worth a looksy if you’re after biohazard disposal with a tactical twist.
The only moral Toree.
Toree’s Panic Pack costs 89p. 99¢. That’ll probably either perk up your ears, or make your face twist in reasonable scepticism. Luckily, as with all the previous Toree games, it’s absolutely worthy of the former and certainly not the latter.
Previous games in the series of short and colourful 3D platformers have had a mantra of ‘easy to pick up, difficult to master’, and if you’ve indulged in any of them and have been hankering for something a bit more ‘difficult to pick up, aching to master’, well you’ve struck gold here, sunshine.
Read the full article on nintendolife.com
