Since your monitor is the portal to actually using your PC, it makes sense to invest in a good one. Of course, the best gaming monitor for your needs depends on how you use your PC, and if ultra-fast framerates is your thing, check out this deal on the Alienware 25 (AW2518H). Compared to a typical IPS display, TN panels have tighter sweet spots and lower color gamuts, so keep that in mind. It has a 1ms response time to facilitate quick reactions, and is built for speed and smooth gameplay. To th

The holidays are all about getting free stuff (right?) and so here’s some free stuff for you: Ape Out, a top-down tale of a super-powered simian who loves freedom and jazz percussion in equal measure, is now yours for the taking on the Epic Games Store. Ape Out is kind of a silly thing: Frenetic, destructive, splattery, and loud, but in a really good way. The more havoc you wreak on your way out the door, the more gonzo the soundtrack becomes, and that’s what really sells it. An Epic Games Store

Presumably spurred on by the TV show, around 30,000 people are playing The Witcher 3 on Steam right now, with a peak of around 50,000. That’s the same as Red Dead Redemption 2. GTA 5, which launched on PC just before The Witcher 3, boasts even more players, but it has the advantage of GTA Online and never seems to leave the Steam charts. When you include the Epic Games Store and players who bought it via the Rockstar Games Launcher, Red Dead Redemption 2 likely has a lot more players in total, b

I do, and I am very excited to tell you that American Truck Simulator is going to Idaho very soon. Announced by SCS Software on Twitter, the DLC covers… the entire state of Idaho. It’s a nice upgrade for American Truck Simulator players, who are slowly gaining an ultra-detailed map of the United States to drive about in. The state covers two time zones, runs from Canada to Nevada, and encompasses the western side of the continental divide of the Rocky Mountains. You can go ahead and wishlist Ame

Insurgent shooter Freeman: Guerilla Warfare has rolled out official mod support, say developers KK Game Studio. Along with a functioning Steam Workshop, KK has released a rather bombastic trailer showing off what can be done with the modded game. Naturally that includes both historical scenarios, which makes sense given the game, and Anime Girls, because that is what every game with mods gets eventually. Freeman: Guerilla Warfare is generally described as “What if Mount & Blade, but guns?” The S

A Microsoft representative has confirmed that Senua’s Saga: Hellblade 2 will be released for both PC and the upcoming Xbox Series X. In a tweet to a fan, GM of Xbox Games Marketing Aaron Greenberg said that the game is being made “exclusively” for both Microsoft’s new console and the PC. While many had suspected that the game would make its way to PC via the Xbox Game Pass service, there wasn’t an official public confirmation the game would make it to PC at all. Having Hellblade 2 come to PC fit

Inspired by the visuals of 80s anime like Akira or Ghost in the Shell, peppered with a healthy dose of Blade Runner, Evolutis is a 2D story-driven action game coming in 2020. Made by Portuguese developers Poke Life Studio, the alpha footage and preview visuals are absolutely gorgeous. Evolutis was initially announced as crowd-funded, but now it looks like the publisher PM Studios is going to put it out. #ComingSoon #Evolutis #Cyberpunk #RT @MeganMcDuffee pic.twitter.com/QfSrattc5HDecember 19, 20

A new report says that Grand Theft Auto V’s on-stream Twitch viewers more than tripled to 523 million in 2019, up from 138 million in 2018. The State of the Stream 2019 report, created by StreamElements and Arsenal.gg, shows off the major changes in viewership numbers for various streamers, platforms, and games over the past year. While PUBG had 416 million views in 2018, it fell below #10 game Hearthstone’s 217 million views for 2019 and so didn’t make the cut. The remarkable rise of Grand Thef

The latest giveaway in Epic’s 12 Days of Free Games is Superhot, the first-person shooter in which time slows to the consistency of melted cheese, only speeding up when you choose to act. This is more than a slo-mo gunfight—by inextricably linking distance and time, the most convoluted action sequences are made possible. You’ll sidestep bullets, throw objects and shoot at the point you hope the enemy will eventually be standing. You’ll have to grab Superhot today because another game will be fre

The YouTube channel Tested went to Valve recently to play a few hours of an early build of Half-Life: Alyx on a variety of different VR setups, from Valve Index to Windows Mixed Reality and the original HTC Vive and Oculus Rift. Though they’re focused on the headsets rather than the game—which is clearly still in a very early state—they do seem quite impressed by it. As Tested cofounder Will Smith (not that Will Smith) says, “The amount and quality of art in this game is outstanding. As well as

Facepunch studios programmer Garry Newman has posted a yearly review that contains a bit of interesting fact: Survival game Rust has now made more money than his eponymous Garry’s Mod, or Gmod. With Rust having grossed $142 million at 9 million copies sold, it has surpassed GMod at a humble $108 million. GMod has still outsold rust in terms of copies, however, with 16 million total sales. Doing the math, that means both games have sold over a million copies for each year of release, while Rust h

A new developer diary for Crusader Kings 3 details some of the game’s new features and changes to important core game mechanics. Key changes to the game focus on shrinking the size of the player’s court, making the characters more relevant, and deepening the plots systems. Here’s the full video:Announced earlier this year, Crusader Kings 3 is the upcoming entry in the sprawling grand strategy roleplaying game hybrid series. By far the most successful grand strategy game of the last decade, Crusa

There was one Asus model with an RTX 2070 for $1,200 during Black Friday, but it sold out almost immediately. Now you can grab a laptop with that same GPU at that same price, this time from HP. This HP Omen laptop has a six-core/12-thread Intel Core i7-9750H processor, an Nvidia GeForce RTX 2070 graphics card (the full card, not the Max-Q variant), 16GB of RAM, a 512GB SSD, and a 15.6-inch IPS 1080p screen. Most laptops with an RTX 2070 graphics card go for around $1,500-$2,000, so this laptop i

The Witcher has been a pretty big deal in Poland for a long time, but it was virtually unknown to Western audiences prior to 2007, when CD Projekt released the first game in its groundbreaking RPG trilogy. It came to light much later that Witcher creator Andrzej Sapkowski had licensed the property for an up-front sum instead of a percentage deal, because he thought videogames were stupid and it wasn’t going add up to anything anyway. CD Projekt said no, but it also said that it would work toward

Holiday sales are now ticking away at all the usual places: Steam, Epic, Origin, Ubisoft, Microsoft. And also over at indie storefront Itch.io, which is offering an array of “Holiday Picks” for 2019, and also a bunch of games that just happen to be on sale now. One thing about Itch.io sales is that they generally don’t have the bells and whistles, or basic organization, of those on the bigger sites. I got pulled into the Rusty Lake series a few years ago via the very cheap Rusty Lake Hotel, and

Have you been banned from Halo: Reach, and you’re pretending that you don’t know why? Also remember to mute other players and on Xbox, you can ‘block’ and ‘report’ players who violate the Xbox online code of conduct. Also remember to mute other players and on Xbox, you can ‘block’ and ‘report’ players who violate the Xbox online code of conduct. “If work continues on its current trajectory, we are looking good to start [Halo: Combat Evolved] flights in January.” Halo: Reach, the first part of Th

There’s not much you can do about this takeover, but you can take snaps and use them to increase your social media clout. (Image credit: Victoria Smith)I found the pair below getting ready to type out their manifesto for the new regime. (Image credit: Victoria Smith)I clog up Twitter with labradoodle pics already, so I’m an old hat at this. Your social media followers always have something nice to say, too, and fully support your bird obsession. But what I will actually do is spend a few more mi

World of Warcraft: Battle for Azeroth’s next update sees the old god N’Zoth getting out of jail, which is presumably a bad thing. The vulpera look like foxes, but also a lot like very furry goblins. In the Vale of Eternal Blossoms, meanwhile, you’ll need to fight N’Zoth’s corruption and experience new Horrific Visions, where you’ll see more of what N’Zoth is planning for the world. Visions of N’Zoth goes live on January 14 in the US and January 15 in Europe, but you’ll need to wait a bit longer

The Epic Games Store’s 12 Days of Free Games event continues, this time letting you murder your mates with your archery skills in the superb TowerFall Ascension, which is free between now and 4 pm GMT/8 am PST tomorrow. TowerFall remains one of the best local multiplayer games around. blisteringly fast, chaotic, but incredibly easy to pick up, it’s one of the first games that comes to mind if you’ve got three people over. Marsh Davies had plenty of good things say about it way back in 2014 in hi

According to the developer, 3DMark 11 and a few others “no longer provide useful, comparable results on modern hardware.” That’s the same day Microsoft will discontinue support for Windows 7, a fact UL Benchmarks is keenly aware of. So in three and a half weeks, Windows 7, 3DMark 11, 3DMark Cloud Gate, 3DMark Ice Storm, PCMark 7, and Powermark will all cease to be supported. If you already own 3DMark 11 on Steam, however, it will stay in your library and you will still be able to run it. Keeping