A wise man once said that a normal person, plus anonymity, plus an audience, equals…well, something we can’t reprint on a family-friendly website. But the tendency for anonymous crowds to be abusive is well-known, and adding in the competitive nature of online multiplayer games doesn’t help things.
How to Avoid Abusive Online Gamers
A wise man once said that a normal person, plus anonymity, plus an audience, equals…well, something we can’t reprint on a family-friendly website. But the tendency for anonymous crowds to be abusive is well-known, and adding in the competitive nature of online multiplayer games doesn’t help things.
Microsoft’s Xbox Game Pass promises access to over 100 games for a $10 per month subscription fee. Microsoft wants Xbox Game Pass to be the “Netflix of video games”—but is it really worth it?
What’s the ideal resolution for a PC game? Ask most players and they’ll immediately answer, “Whatever your monitor can support.” That’s the obvious solution—after all, it would hardly make sense to render graphics at higher than your equipment can actually output and your eyes can see, right? …Right?
You probably don’t do a lot of multitasking on your PlayStation 4, but sometimes you just need to flip back and forth between a pair of apps (or an app and a game). Fortunately, there’s a fast and easy way to do this.
Android apps on Chromebooks are great for getting things done, but they also allow Chromebooks to become more game friendly than ever before, thanks to Google Play’s vast game catalog. Pair that with a Bluetooth controller, and you have a pretty solid little gaming rig for on the go.
Blizzard’s team-based first-person shooter Overwatch has quickly become one of the most popular multiplayer games on the planet. There are a lot of reasons for this: fantastic character design, tight balancing, excellent gameplay variety. But one of the nicer perks of the game is that Blizzard periodically updates the game with new content for free, including brand new playable characters (known as “Heroes” in the Overwatch lexicon). If you want to try them out before everyone else, you can do so on what’s known at the PTR server.
iOS 11 is on its way, and Apple announced a number of new features and changes at WWDC 2017 this year. From improvements to Messages and Apple Pay to powerful multitasking and file management on the iPad, here are the best new features of iOS coming this fall. You can play with them yourself today if you install the iOS 11 public beta.
You can’t have video games without music. Well, you can—the earliest games didn’t have music in the strictest sense, just beeps and boops. But it wasn’t long before the two became inseparably linked, and now a 150-year-old saucy Russian folk tune is known as “that song from Tetris.” Today, developers and publishers put huge amounts of time, money, and consideration into the music that foes into their games. But if you’d rather play with your own meticulously-curated local collection, there are plenty of games that are happy to let you do so.
Virtual reality is the next big thing in digital gaming…and this time it might even stick around. But one of the biggest hurdles to adoption for VR systems like the Oculus Rift and the HTC Vive is that, at the end of the day, you’re strapping a screen to your face and tethering yourself to a computer. Having a thick bundle of cables rip off your headset just as you’re getting into the game is a long way from the immersive future we’ve been promised.
The Joy-Con and Pro Controllers for the Nintendo Switch work just like modern Xbox One and PlayStation 4 controllers. They support Bluetooth, so you can pair them with your PC without any special hardware.
With the Switch, Nintendo has left behind a long legacy of region-locking its consoles. Now, if you buy a console in the US, you can buy cartridges from Japan, or browse other region’s eShops for new games or cheaper prices. Here’s how to change the region on your Switch.
By default, the Nintendo Switch home screen shows you a basic battery icon. Tucked away in the system settings is an option to display a more precise battery percentage. Here’s how to enable it, and get a better idea of just how much game time you have left before you need to find a charger.
In addition to a brand new tier of consumer-grade processors, the Core i9 family, Intel also recently introduced the “X-series.” Here’s where things get confusing, because Core X processors don’t fit into a single line, family, or even chip architecture—it’s purely a marketing term, similar to the previous “Extreme Edition” processors that Intel offered a few years ago.
Gaming PCs are great, but sitting at a desk after an entire day of work isn’t the most comfortable thing in the world. You could game on your TV, but what if your spouse or kids are hogging it? No worries: With the right stuff, you can turn your iPhone or iPad into the ultimate portable gaming machine.
Games have been a staple of app stores since the inception of smartphones. But back then, the most popular games were short and quick, not the in-depth adventures you’d find on gaming consoles. But times have changed.
For such a tiny package, the Nintendo Switch’s Joy-Con controllers sure pack a lot of complex sensors and input mechanisms. There’s an accelorometer, gyroscope, infrared camera, 20+ buttons, and two control sticks, not to mention the touch screen on the Switch itself. Eventually, you might need to make sure all those inputs are working correctly. Here’s how to calibrate your control sticks, motion controls, and even test your buttons and touch screen.
The nostalgia of playing old school PlayStation games is awesome for a lot of us, but without having every generation of console, it can be difficult to get in on some of the best titles of yesterday. PlayStation Now, Sony’s online game streaming service, is the solution to that quandary. But man, is it really worth coughing up an Andrew Jackson every month just to play classic titles?
There are some surprisingly decent games on the iPhone, iPad, and Apple TV, but touch controls are usually…less than ideal. Many of those games support full gamepads, though, so you can play with the same precision you do on a console. Here are the gamepads to buy.
The Nintendo Switch comes with a meager 32GB of storage. You can expand your storage with an SD card, but that’s still a pretty small amount of space on your console. Here are several ways you can clear up internal storage space, or at least offload some of that data to an SD card.
When you wake your Nintendo Switch from sleep mode, you have to go through a slightly tiresome lock screen. First, you have to press A to unlock the lock screen, then press any button three times to really unlock the console. The lock screen doesn’t use a password or PIN, so there’s no security involved. It’s just an extra step, presumably to prevent the console from turning on in your bag. If you’d rather skip the tedium, here’s how to turn the lock screen off.
Steam Greenlight was a grand experiment in support for independent PC game developers: a cheap and easy way for creators to get access to the world’s biggest game distribution platform. Unfortunately, it was also a grand failure—for every successfully “greenlit” game that would go on to be a hit, like Stardew Valley or Broforce, it seemed like dozens and dozens of poorly-made and generally undesirable titles got through, many of which were incomplete or cobbled-together from pre-bought assets.
If you’re lucky enough to have a modern Chromebook that can run Android apps, you should definitely be taking advantage of this awesome new feature. And if you’re in the market for a new Chromebook, make sure you get one that can run Android apps out of the box. Here are the apps that make it worthwhile.
Windows 10’s Fall Creators Update, codenamed Redstone 3, will be released in September 2017. Here are all the new features you’ll see in the latest version of Windows—and some big, splashy features Microsoft announced that never arrived.
iPhone apps aren’t very expensive, but that doesn’t mean you can’t save a few bucks. Here’s how to track App Store sales so you can get the apps you want for a discount.
Cloud storage is the dream of the post-PC, mobile-focused tech world…but we’re not quite there yet. There’s a limit to what you can get for free, especially if you go with one of the major services. Here’s an exhaustive list of all the cloud storage and photo services we could find across the web that have at least some free storage options. Use them all at once to save a million Steam games, or just find the best one with the biggest bucket for your most important files.
