There’s a lot going on right now in the world of video cards, but one of the hard truths that we have to face as gamers is that the actual super truth is that we’re hitting a point where the fidelity of games isn’t utilizing the entire graphics card power and thus, we’re looking at suffering in the video card market for a myriad of reasons and how people game is entirely one of them. People are quick to say “supply shortages” and “silicon shortages” as the reason for video card stock shortages and to a degree, it’s the simple answer, but what if I told you GTX 680s being viable today is probably a lot more involved in why there isn’t a rush to solve a what is now over a year long shortage in video cards. The Bargain Bin’s the Reason The biggest reason behind the ongoing video…
We wanted to put together an all in one resource on how to go out and find your next game purchase at the lowest price, for PC & console. The below guide covers the best deal site aggregators which let you search across multiple vendors and we also cover the best cash back rewards programs that you can leverage without any kind of credit card signup or formal card cash back program. You’d be surprised, sometimes you can get 8% back on a $300 purchase, which is $24 extra dollars back for doing nothing. The reason why is that it’s just easy to buy the game directly off of Steam or your console’s storefront. You search for the title and pay whatever they’re asking for. The problem is that with just a little bit of effort, you can find the game likely way cheaper. Then, on top of that, with…
There may be occasions when you load up Battlefield 2042 and receive the “backend server could not be found” error message. This error is quite common and impacts a lot of players, but the good news is that it actually has nothing to do with you, your PC or your connection. It means that the EA servers running the game’s backend right now are just overloaded or experiencing some other error. During the beta, release and any patch you may run into this error frequently. It’s a bummer, because you can’t play immediately, but at the same time it’s not permanent. Just close out of the game and launch again. While you can’t fix the “backend server could not be found error;” you can wait it out. Why does this error happen? This error is caused by malfunctions on the server side of the game, meaning the framework that hosts…
Back in the early 2000s, when online gaming was a new frontier lag was everywhere. All of the fun and excitement of online gaming was met with rubber banding (where your character would move forward then snap back to a previous spot), in 2005 when WoW launched you would get stuck in the looting pose and in FPS games were heavily impacted on lag with shots being missed as players rubber banded around the map. These issues these days are still a problem, although not as much of one as they used to be. Gamers, to combat the lag, threw down their dial-up modems with 56k of blazing speed and took up cable and DSL as their preferred Internet standard. You had to live near a hub or some other kind of techno-gadget to get fast Internet, but that quickly expanded by 2010 to almost everywhere. That’s not to say…
To save you time, if you define a scam to mean that you give someone money for a service and they do not do that service, then by all means WATA and VGA (Video Game Authority) are not scams. They’re legitimate companies that, if you ship your games to them, will grade your games and send them back based on what services you paid for. Maybe not very quickly, but they do what they promise to do. Now, is video game grading in of itself a scam? A fictional system designed to inflate the prices of retro video games that are becoming more scarce due to the fragile materials used to construct their boxes? That’s a deeper question with some actually quite odd answers. Furthermore, should you invest in graded games? That’s an even tougher question. We will dive into all of them below. If you’re wanting to collect retro…
Steam Decks have just been announced and reservations will have opened up at 10AM July 16th. Assuming you have the chance to reserve one, depending on how much stock Valve has. You can reserve one on the following page at Steam and it comes in three models. A base model, a mid-tier model and a high end model. A quick rundown of the three: Base: 64GB of storage and a carrying case. $399Mid Tier: 256GB NVMe SSD (faster storage), the carrying case and a Steam Community Profile bundle. $529High End: 512GB NVMe SSD, anti-glare etched glass, the carrying case, the Steam Community profile bundle and an exclusive virtual keyboard theme. Note, there is a MicroSD slot for more storage. Great Overview If you want a solid professional unbiased overview of the hardware, checkout Gamer Nexus. History & Stock Shortages Valve has failed on almost every hardware release so far, with…
When we consider the power of gaming one of the things we don’t consider often is its ability to be extremely inclusive and allow for a wide swath of people from the full spectrum of socioeconomic statuses to enter into a video gaming career. Due to the nonstandard approach and ease of entry into the streaming space and just playing, becoming a professional eSports player is “easier” than ever. “Easier” of course being in quotations because it’s not “easy” as in you can just start day one and begin as a professional eSports player. No, the “easy” part is the materials for getting started. The rest of it is up to the skills of a player. You, your child or your young adult may be interested in being an eSports professional. Wearing a jersey, being on stage in front of a large crowd (or viewers at home) and basking in…
Microsoft Flight Simulator (2020) has gotten a wave of folks to take up the $1 offer for Microsoft Game Pass today. The question is, outside of MSFS what else is there to play? Here’s seven suggestions focused mostly around recent releases. Game Pass no longer has a “free trial” but does have new user bonuses. The following games have been reviewed for 2024 and remain awesome games to play on game pass. Touhou: Luna Nights An amazing Metroidvania game that is based on a popular bulletheck arcade style game. Very fun time control mechanic. Great for those new to Touhou and aren’t into bulletheck style games. Crusader Kings III A game that someone you know probably talks about so you should play it to find out what it’s about. You can delete it afterwards, no biggie, it’s only about 7 gigabytes. Fun to play with no intention to win and…
Murder by Numbers is a “nonogram,” “griddler” or “pixel puzzle” game mixed with a bit of visual novel style detective work. You can sum the entire game up by saying take a healthy dose of Picross and mix it with some Phoenix Wright and you now have an entirely new game. The comparison with Phoenix Wright starts and stops in the visual novel category, though. There is no in-depth investigation periods like in the Nonary Games or in Phoenix Wright. No courtroom trials like in Danganronpa or Phoenix Wright. There is pixel puzzles and a story and in a lot of ways, that’s fine. The gameplay loop is simple. There is a mystery to solve. You investigate by scanning a scene (you have a radar type mechanism to tell you where to go). When you’ve found something you’re thrown into a pixel puzzle which you solve and then obtain the…
GameStop is the last vestige of brick and mortar electronic gaming stores. It is a business of acquisitions, claiming most other large competitors and merging them into the fold and is on every YouTube and blog’s “Top 10 Companies Soon to Pull a Blockbuster” for the last six months to a year or so. Are they right? Is GameStop about to go under? I honestly am not some kind of market wizard, I can’t say if their current plans will save them or not, but we can talk about what’s gotten them to this point, in context of video game sales (not the whole who bought who what when and where, lots of that is already out there). So this chart pretty much tells a very, very interesting story. The company went public in 2002 at around $10 USD a share. In 2002, we were still in the world of…