This Acer Predator Helios 16 Cyber Monday deal from BH Photo caught our attention because, not only do you get a good saving on a laptop we really like, but there are two of them. This dichotomy of deals means you can save big on both the i9 and i7 versions of the laptop – both 13th-gen Intel chips – which come with GeForce RTX 4080 and 4070 GPUs respectively, plus 32 and 16GB of RAM.

There’s $700 off the 24-core i9 version of the laptop, and $600 off the 16-core i7 equipped machine. This surely makes it one of the best gaming laptop deals around this Cyber Monday, but it’s worth noting the 165W limit on the GPU, which is not as high as the 175W equivalent on the MSI Vector GP68HX – a 200MHz difference.

• We’re curating all the best Cyber Monday P…
  

Call me a wannabe-aboo if you want, but I’ve never seen Attack on Titan. All I know is that it’s the one about naked giants who eat people. Apparently, in between being gobbled up like Saturn’s son, the characters find time to visit a fancy restaurant. Given the task of filling the backgrounds for that scene, someone put a screenshot of some sailing ships from Total War: Empire in a frame and knocked off for the day.

It’s the first screenshot you see on the Steam page for Total War: Empire, which makes this even funnier. Given the working conditions at animation studios in Japan, I’m not bothered by someone taking a shortcut rather than creating an entire Renaissance artwork just to round out a few shots. It’s just funny that it’s a screenshot from a videogame, and a particularly …

I feel like a dedicated Old School RuneScape player conquers a new Everest every week. There’s the player who grinded 149 hours of a terrible minigame to get a raccoon, the player who beat one in a hundred million odds to obtain a not particularly noteworthy gem, the guy who caught a million sub-par fish, and now? Meet the player who robbed half a million fascists to get their hands on, well, very little of value. Unless you’re really hungry.

Spotted by GamesRadar, the player in question is a Reddit user named eat_my_yarmulke (whose Reddit flair is a choice), who posted a screenshot to the OSRS subreddit two days ago of their haul from pickpocketing 500,000 members of HAM, or Humans Against Monsters, a kind of fantasy fascist organisation that aims to establish human supr…

You ever feel like Starfield’s best drops are a bit thin on the ground? Specifically, that its toughest elite enemies seem only ever to drop fairly naff rare and epic weapons instead of the legendary drops that come with three gameplay-altering modifiers? You’re not alone, but now, as spotted by GamesRadar, one enterprising player has applied the scientific method to the conundrum.

The scientific method, of course, was invented by Aristotle back in the 4th century BC, and means killing one guy a hundred times in a row to see what happens. That’s what Reddit user and Starfield player Endecc did to give a rough estimate of the odds of getting worthwhile legendary drops from high-level elite enemies. Friends, the odds aren’t good.

I killed a Level 9…

Note: Crossplay has been disabled for Windows 10 users, not all PC players. This article has been updated to reflect that.

Studio Wildcard has yoinked PvP crossplay for Windows 10 users of Ark: Survival Ascended, its recently released remaster of Ark: Survival Evolved. The reason is that a whole lot of gamers on Windows 10 have been put on the naughty list for cheating, with hacks letting them do everything from move like The Flash to blowing away console players through walls.

The game’s players have been in open revolt about this since the November 21 launch, and Studio Wildcard says it made the decision to “temporarily disable the Windows client” while it works to “implement robust anti-cheat measures.” Ark: Survival Ascended uses the popular anti-c…

The Steam subreddit has long been one of my go-to checks of a morning, for the simple reason that the crowd there really, really care about what’s going on with Valve’s omnipresent PC gaming platform. As one should, of course! It’s a community that pores over small changes and is constantly coming up with potential improvements, complaints, and Gabe Newell memes, and honestly I kinda admire anyone who thinks this much about a gaming client.

Check out the Steam subreddit today, however, and you will find no detailed arguments about how achievements are displayed or chart discussions. Instead you will find a whole bunch of enthusiasm for and posts about steam. You know, a substance containing water in the gas phase that has a million different applications, the harnessing of which i…

32 inches, 4K native res, IPS panel tech and 144Hz refresh. It’s what we all want, right? It’s certainly a checkbox list a lot of gamers aspire to. And now it’s possible for just $349.99 thanks to a Black Friday Acer deal, the lowest price we’ve ever seen for that combination of specifications (use Promo Code: BFCY2Z739 at NewEgg or hit the checkbox on Amazon for the right price).

The gaming monitor in question is the Acer Nitro XV322QK. Inevitably, it’s a slightly older model. But it absolutely doesn’t skimp on specs. 

The most important aspect is that IPS panel tech. We’ve seen several 32-inch 4K 144Hz gaming monitors dip under $400 before. But they’ve all had VA panels with suspect pixel response.

This Acer beauty is the real IPS deal. Not only…

Stuck on today’s Wordle and need a helping hand? You’ll find a hint for today’s puzzle just below, as well as a helpful assortment of tips and advice designed to improve your daily game. As luck would have it, you’ll also find the answer to the June 11 (722) Wordle, just in case you’re really stuck.

I could feel my heart sink in my chest as what I thought was the right word revealed nothing more than the same few greens I had before, over and over again, and this awful back and forth carried on until my very last go. Today’s Wordle answer was uncovered not by skill or luck but simply because there were no other letters left to try. Thank goodness that’s over.

Today’s Wordle hint

A Wordle hint for Sunday, June 11

Today’s answer is a protective wor…

Science fiction is a genre that loves to imagine fun, new vectors for human misery. Maybe we’ll end up in a future where alien embryos might erupt from our chest cavities. Maybe an evil sorcerer with a big space gun will start blowing up planets. If Warhammer 40,000 is any metric, we’ve got about 39 millennia before there is literally only war. And yet, somehow, Bethesda has created a future even more terrible: In Starfield, humanity’s lost a lot of its very good boys.

The reporting comes courtesy of novelty Twitter account Can You Pet the Dog, which tweeted a screenshot of Starfield’s item description for the Chocolate Labs food consumable. “Centauri Mills’ chocolate, shaped like an extinct canine called a Labrador Retriever,” the description says. It also notes that the consuma…