Susanna Clarke’s genre-bending debut novel Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell was a literary sensation in 2004. It garnered many rave reviews and spent three months on the New York Times Best Seller list while nabbing a litany of nominations for coveted awards. It would go on to win the Hugo Award for Best Novel–the most prestigious award in science fiction and fantasy–as well as the World Fantasy Award and Locus Award. It’s a big book with big ideas, and there hasn’t really been anything quite like it since.If you haven’t read it or if you’re looking for an excuse to dive back in, Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell is getting a 20th Anniversary Edition with gorgeous new cover art. The new hardcover edition will be published by Bloomsbury on October 22 and is available t…
Read moreCall of Duty: Black Ops 6’s multiplayer beta is available now in early access, but unfortunately, the servers buckled under the influx of players logging in at the same time early on. A lot of the issues have been addressed due to Activision adding more servers. Servers went live at around 10 AM PT / 1 PM ET, and a lot of people hopped in all at once, leading to some problems due to simple server load, it seems. Developer Treyarch is now adding more servers to help deal with the load. “More servers? More servers!” Treyarch said. [Update: the server deployment has been enacted and Activision says improvements have been made to the multiplayer experience as a result]
The new Dune Awakening trailer, debuted at Gamescom Opening Night Live, showed off its survival gameplay and announced a release window of early 2025. The trailer offers a peak into the general arc of the game. You’ll start Dune: Awakening by creating your character and choosing their background, before crashing into the middle of the planet. Staying out in the desert is perilous. You can get sun stroke and heat exhaustion from standing in the sun, and sandworms will detect you if you run on open ground. The trailer then showcases taking out an NPC encampment. The game offers multiple strategies and approaches: You can get in close with a blade, attack with guns, block ranged fire with a shield, and even deploy a hunter seeker drone to kill from afar. After the battle ends, you wi…
Read moreThe massive world of Warhammer 40,000 has seen a whole lot of adaptations into video games, covering genres from third- and first-person shooters to turn-based strategy. For the latter, Fanatical has the massive Build Your Own Battles: Warhammer 40,000 Battles bundle. It’s full of PC games and DLC, giving you plenty of opportunities to wage war with games you can snag for as little as $2.50 each. You can get the entire bundle of games and DLC packs, 18 in total, for $45. Build your Warhammer bundle The centerpieces of the bundle are Warhammer 40,000: Gladius – Relics of War; Warhammer 40,000: Sanctus Reach; Warhammer 40,000: Armageddon; and Warhammer 40,000: Battlesector. Each is a massive turn-based strategy gam…
Read moreAs far as underrated consoles go, it’s hard to beat the Sega Dreamcast. Discontinued after just a few years on the market, it never earned the critical acclaim of its competitors–the PS2, Xbox, and GameCube. However, Dreamcast was home to some of the best games of the generation, and you can relive its history with The Dreamcast Encyclopedia. Written by prolific games journalist Chris Scullion, the hardcover book takes a look at the console’s troubled timeline while also discussing its entire game catalog, making it the definitive destination for fans of the platform.
The Dreamcast Encyclopedia (Hardcover)
Read more
EA Sports College Football 25 released a few weeks ago, and players are clearly happy with it based on its continued presence on sales charts since launch. The development team has been working to implement changes based on feedback from those players, and today it has unveiled over 50 changes now live in CFB 25 via the Title Update 2 patch.Multiple adjustments have been confirmed for the latest patch, including new shotgun formations for nearly three-dozen teams, new uniform pieces for 15 other teams, behavioral adjustments to AI opponents, and a few key changes to the Wear and Tear system. For example, a quarterback forced to scramble behind the line of scrimmage will use more stamina than they would running up the field, which can affect their performance later in the game.
Warner Bros. has debuted the first trailer for the long-in-development Minecraft movie, and it looks pretty great. For a deeper dive, make sure to check out our trailer breakdown. The film, which is based on Mojang’s popular sandbox game, has a big cast of huge names, including Jason Momoa, Jack Black, Kate McKinnon, Danielle Brooks, Jennifer Coolidge, Emma Myers, and Jemaine Clement.Since the film was announced more than 10 years ago, people have been wondering how director Jared Hess (Napoleon Dynamite, Nacho Libre) and the writers might make a movie out of a game that has no real story. And now we know–take a look at the trailer for yourself below.