Riot tweeted out two images on Sunday, the first showing Urgot using his chains over the words “in 5 days we break them” and the second declaring that the 2020 season begins on January 10. Season 10 will begin with a soft reset of ranked, with new ranks calculated based on performance during the pre-season as well as placement matches. Just like in season nine, you’ll get a provisional rank after your first match of the season and only after eight matches will it become visible. The first League

Look, before I even talk about this, just watch the video:Indie Developer Matt Stark has tweeted a video of his idea for a game on twitter. He first posted the concept in November 2019, but was then unsure if what he has done now was even possible. I’ll politely remind you that game design students thought up the primary mechanics for Portal. Matt Stark is a game design student. His released game project, so far, is a free puzzle game on the Android Store.

Employees at Riot Games had fears and concerns about their company’s plans to announce seven new games last year, specifically the mobile games and card game, due to prior backlash among gaming communities to similar projects. In recent years, Blizzard’s announcement of mobile game Diablo Immortal and Valve’s announcement of card game Artifact both triggered backlash from their dedicated fanbase. Riot feared the same from its dedicated League of Legends fans—especially as Riot has always been pe

Americans ages 50+ are increasingly interested in and playing games, with a marked increase in the older gamer population. Nearly half of these gamers report playing games daily. A significant number—33%—report playing games online, and one-third of those generally play with strangers. These gamers almost all report playing generally puzzle, logic, word, card, and video board games. The only two statistically significant changes in platform use among older gamers are in both PC and mobile device

The Ni No Kuni movie, a Level-5 production which is being directed by Yoshiyuki Momose, will receive a western release via Netflix this year. The Ni No Kuni movie tells a new story, but is based in part on the first game. It’s about two teenagers who travel to another world to save their friend, and find out she has an otherworld counterpart who is also in peril. Director Yoshiyuki Momose worked on both Ni No Kuni games and was an animator on Studio Ghibli movies Spirited Away and Porco Rosso, a

Welcome to Watoga, city of the future! Unfortunately, the future got a buncha nukes dropped on it and all that’s habitable in Watoga now is the series of automated parking garages that the city was built on. That’s what we gather from a bit of info Bethesda released about the upcoming Wastelanders expansion for Fallout 76, which was originally planned for 2019 but was delayed until later this year. “The city is built on top of a massive series of automated parking garage systems which allow citi

It’s been a couple of years since Frictional Games, the studio that over the past decade has given us the Penumbra trilogy, Amnesia: The Dark Descent, and Soma, revealed that its next “horrific” game was in full production, yet we still know nothing about it. Rock, Paper, Shotgun recently noticed that the Frictional website has been updated with a link to “Next Frictional Game,” and more importantly the nextfrictionalgame.com website is doing something different now, too. That, as we know now, b

Your laptop was unlocked, so now they could potentially access your passwords, private messages, and other personal information. Michael Altfield presents an interesting solution on his personal blog: the “BusKill.” Altfield built the BusKill for around $20, using a cheap USB drive (which is kept on your person), a keyring, a magnetic USB breakaway adapter, and a 1-meter USB extension cable. He then used udev, a Linux application for managing connected devices, to lock the screen whenever the US

It’s pretty well established by now that Henry Cavill is an avid gamer—that’s how he came into the role of Geralt in The Witcher series on Netflix, after all. But have you ever wondered what it’s like in Henry Cavill’s gaming man cave? In a December interview on the Rich Eisen Show, Cavill described his setup, and it might not be what you’re expecting. “I don’t have a man cave,” Cavill says, which is an interesting twist in a video that’s literally entitled What It’s Like in Henry Cavill’s Gamin

The excellent sales on gaming laptops didn’t stop with Black Friday. Now you can get a great MSI gaming laptop at a killer price. One version of MSI’s GF65 gaming laptop is now on sale for $749.00 at Newegg, a discount of $250 from the typical price. The specifications include an Intel Core i5-9300H processor, an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1660 Ti graphics card, 8GB of RAM, a 512GB NVMe SSD, and a 15.6-inch 1080p “IPS-Level” screen with a 120Hz refresh rate. The GTX 1660 Ti is an great graphics card for

Awesome Games Done Quick, the annual speedrunning extravaganza for charity, is now just a couple of days away. A summertime spinoff, Summer Games Done Quick, did even bigger numbers in 2019, raising over $3 million for Doctors Without Borders. One of the things I find most interesting about Games Done Quick is the sheer range of games that speedrunners take on. Speedrunners use all sorts of tricks and exploits to get from start to finish as quickly as possible, but there are rules to be followed

The Mother series, known as EarthBound outside of Japan, stopped with Mother 3 in 2006, and only the second game was released internationally. While the overt connections have been dropped, the trailer still gives out plenty of EarthBound vibes. The art, cast and combat are definitely meant to evoke EarthBound, but the style remains just as appealing now as it always has. There’s no release date yet, sadly, but EarthBound fans should be used to waiting. It’s been 25 years since the last game to

Amazon rings in the New Year with an aggressively cheap gaming laptop deal on a 15-inch Acer Nitro 5 for only $500. The Acer Nitro 5 gaming laptop is $500, down from the usual $670 price. It’s a great choice if you’re looking for a gaming laptop for a student going into their next semester with nothing to play Fortnite on. This Acer Nitro 5 has 1st Gen Ryzen 5 2500U CPU, 8GB RAM, 1TB HDD, and a Radeon RX 560X graphics card. It’s a budget gaming laptop that should handle 1080p gaming with a decen

Extremely wide gaming monitors spanning 49 inches are not exactly old hat, but it has been done before, multiple times. In an effort to shake things up, Samsung’s next 49-inch monster, the Odyssey G9, is just as wide as previous models but much more curvy. The Odyssey G9, along with 32-inch and 27-inch Odyssey G7 models, are the first ever to feature an “extremely deep” 1000R curvature. In theory, the Odyssey G9 and G7 models should be more immersive than the many 1800R monitors on the market. T

A lot of pretty great Star Wars characters and stories were tossed out after Disney swallowed up Lucasfilm and streamlined the messy galaxy’s history. The book also reveals that the Sith Trooper legions, which look very cool but we learn absolutely nothing about in the movie, are named after famous Sith, including Revan. With three games, one of them ongoing, and two comics, there’s still a lot from The Old Republic era that presumably hasn’t been added back into Star Wars canon, but Revan isn’t

The launch of the action-RPG Rune 2 in November was odd, to say the least. The day after it went live on the Epic Games Store, developer Human Head Studios closed its doors, and then reopened them—the same day—as Bethesda-owned Roundhouse Studios. “As always, thanks for sticking with us and being fans of Rune 2.” It’s good news for fans of the game that an update is finally in the works, but despite the return of the game property, the legal action between Ragnarok and Human Head remains in plac

A few days ago, ASRock posted a product page for AMD’s unannounced (but oft-rumored) Radeon RX 5600 XT, then promptly took it offline when the internet at large caught wind of it. Not to be outdone, XFX has published a product page for its own custom variant, the Radeon RX 5600 XT Thicc II Pro. What we are looking at is essentially a cut down version of the Radeon RX 5700. Here’s a look at the MSRPs for AMD’s existing Navi lineup:Radeon RX 5700 XT—$399Radeon RX 5700—$349Radeon RX 5500 XT 8GB—$19

(Image credit: Milkbar Lads)The latest roguelike to see you exploring exclusively downwards (well, and a little bit sideways), Holy Smokes is essentially Dig Dug but with bombs instead of a shovel, and with explosions instead of not explosions. Holy Smokes definitely feels more frantic, fast-paced and arcadey than most roguelikes, however. I found it quite tough, but maybe you’ll do better? Grab the demo for Holy Smokes and find out. For more great free experiences, check out our roundup of the

The initial announcement came in 2010, but it quickly stalled out, as did the studio making it, GSC Game World—and when GSC made its triumphant return in 2015, it was not with Stalker but with Cossacks. Today we got another reason to be hopeful—maybe even cautiously optimistic—as the official Stalker 2 Twitter feed revealed that the new game will use the Unreal Engine. 2 is powered by Unreal Engine: pic.twitter.com/RdDWr4yYj3January 2, 2020The original Stalker games were built on the proprietary

Like most of you, I’m looking forward to the continued decline in SSD pricing, though the NAND flash memory market can certainly be fickle. There are multiple reports that NAND pricing is about to go up, perhaps by as much as 40 percent. That figure comes by way of a Digitimes report, which cites unnamed sources within the memory supply chain. Market research firm TrendForce, a division of DRAMeXchange, is also predicting a rise in NAND flash memory pricing this year. “The demand performance of