The Nvidia GTX 1660 Ti, the worst kept secret in PC hardware, is now here and we’ve got the GPUs to prove it. Specifically this Asus Phoenix OC card and another ROG STRIX GTX 1660 Ti, displaying different ends of the mainstream Turing spectrum, and with very different PCGN recommendations too. Yes, the 16-series has launched. After the 20-series. With the GTX prefix instead of RTX. With this being the first in a new range of GeForce graphics cards it’s hard not to feel a little like GPU technology is in retrograde. But, after the lukewarm reception the 20-series graphics cards received for their introduction of real-time ray tracing and AI-assisted imagery, it’s not surprising to see the mainstream Turing chips stepping backwards in terms of next-gen tech. But that’s not to say these Turing GPUs aren’t without their graphics enhancements over the last-gen Pascal graphics cards. You may be losing the RT and Tensor Cores, but there is still enough in … [Read more...] about Nvidia GTX 1660 Ti review: Turing rising from the RTX ashes with the Asus Phoenix
The pointe phoenix
“I can’t wait for Kevin Feige to retcon X-Men” – The Dark Phoenix trailer is here and opinion is… mixed
The first X-Men: Dark Phoenix trailer is here. Oh boy. It’s the last movie in the series before the X-Men rights go over to you-know-who. This is it after 19 years and there’s just so much to take in: Jean Grey gone bad; a possible Magneto team-up with one of the purest X-Men, a probable big death, and so much more. The internet, as ever, has come prepared with its laundry list of hot takes and overreactions about the Dark Phoenix trailer. Let’s take a look at some of them, shall we?This is the endWelp. A lot of fans aren’t taking the fact that the Dark Phoenix trailer is the beginning of the end for Fox’s X-Men output very well at all. Sad face.Jean Grey as the focus: good or bad?This one’s going to split opinion right down the middle. Game of Thrones’ Sophie Turner is back again as Jean Grey – and the Phoenix Force seems to have gotten its mitts on her, as she looks suitably evil throughout the trailer. That’s not even taking … [Read more...] about “I can’t wait for Kevin Feige to retcon X-Men” – The Dark Phoenix trailer is here and opinion is… mixed
EGX Rezzed 2018: VG247’s top five games from the show
That’s another EGX Rezzed in the bag, then. The 2018 edition of London’s biggest and delightly indie-friendly gaming show had quite a few excellent games on offer – so here’s some of our favourites. There were honestly a great many games on show at EGX, and not even all of them were playable. Alex got to satisfy his curiosity around Theme Hospital spiritual successor Two Point Hospital through a chat with the developers and a look at some footage, while James got to grill legendary Japanese designer and all-around cool dude Suda51 about his latest Nintendo Switch project – a game he hinted about to us over a year ago. That’s just for starters, too. Aside from all this there was a lot to play at the show, too. From some of the delightfully inventive ideas on display as part of the Leftfield Collection, through to some of the offerings on the indie-focused stands of Nintendo, Microsoft and Sony. There’s way too much to mention even though … [Read more...] about EGX Rezzed 2018: VG247’s top five games from the show
From hip-hop to X-Men — meet the artist rewriting Marvel history
X-Men: Grand Design, which began at the end of last year, is a frankly superheroic attempt to compress 280 issues of X-books into a single coherent narrative by writer-artist Ed Piskor. With the first pair of issues out, we caught up with Piskor to talk about his background making comics about hip-hop and how he’s applying the lessons from that project to the X-Men. “X-Men: Grand Design is more of a remix of the first 30 years of X-Men comics than a simple retelling,” he says. “If I was to retell the existing stuff in the space I have available, you wouldn’t know what the fuck was going on.” Piskor is an old-school fan of the X-Men, but he’s the first to admit that, with a huge cast handed down between innumerable creators over the years — not to mention the proliferation of time travel, resurrections, secret relations and clones — it’s a series with a convoluted history. This creates a high barrier to entry, which Grand … [Read more...] about From hip-hop to X-Men — meet the artist rewriting Marvel history
Why Pokémon Crystal will always be the best Pokémon game
Nine-and-a-half: this is the sort of mental age I ascribe to Pokémon. To first playing it, that is, but you could say it probably also fits the mental age of Pokémon themselves, too, in a roundabout way. It's that weird bit of life you occupy right between having an adult brain and a child's - right after you start to pick up a moral compass that goes beyond just doing what you're told, to a sense of duty or justice, but right before you're really sentient enough to start thinking about why that is. Permit me to really overcommit to a point here: as humans, we are probably closest to Pokémon when we're about nine-and-a-half. For me, that very specific age is tied very specifically to my memories of Pokémon Crystal, a game which, after roughly 17 years of languishing on old, forgotten cartridges, sees its return to the hands of nine-and-a-half-year-olds today, on the 3DS. Remembering what it's like to be nine-and-a-half, and the weird, golden hour fuzz it glazes … [Read more...] about Why Pokémon Crystal will always be the best Pokémon game