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David Piner

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In a world full of supply constraints, a specific electronics retailer has turned to an old school marketing practice to woo in new customers. Car dealerships used to offer free home gadgets in exchange for a test drive. Banks, if you opened a new account, would give you a toaster or other home gadget as well. It seems this trend is coming back in style. Micro Center is currently running a promotion where you can receive a free 240GB Inland SSD if you’re a new customer and willing to give them your email address and phone number (and if you don’t want them having it, willing to give it to them then unsubscribe after you snag your deal). While not specifically a toaster, it is an absolute total freebie if you just signup for their marketing messages. There’s a catch though… The Catch to the Micro Center 225GB Free SSD…

We have to store information in this world and we have to do with with electricity, which is quite hard. There’s physical means of storage, but ultimately, we’re using electricity to write it and read it, because computer instructions are just that: electricity. In that way, storing that information is important to everything we do: your bank needs to know how much money you have and your video game needs to know how much gold you have. Traditionally this information would be stored in a database, ultimately looking something like this: “294384,username,482,48982” which would be like your userID, userNAME, GOLD and DIAMONDs. Enter blockchain technology. A revolutionary new way of storing information, leveraging a decentralized list of records where multiple “nodes” process and verify data amongst one another. This gives all kinds of cool advantages, which I’ll let Wikipedia explain blockchain, but it also uses A LOT of power and…

There’s a lot going on right now in the world of video cards, but one of the hard truths that we have to face as gamers is that the actual super truth is that we’re hitting a point where the fidelity of games isn’t utilizing the entire graphics card power and thus, we’re looking at suffering in the video card market for a myriad of reasons and how people game is entirely one of them. People are quick to say “supply shortages” and “silicon shortages” as the reason for video card stock shortages and to a degree, it’s the simple answer, but what if I told you GTX 680s being viable today is probably a lot more involved in why there isn’t a rush to solve a what is now over a year long shortage in video cards. The Bargain Bin’s the Reason The biggest reason behind the ongoing video…

We wanted to put together an all in one resource on how to go out and find your next game purchase at the lowest price, for PC & console. The below guide covers the best deal site aggregators which let you search across multiple vendors and we also cover the best cash back rewards programs that you can leverage without any kind of credit card signup or formal card cash back program. You’d be surprised, sometimes you can get 8% back on a $300 purchase, which is $24 extra dollars back for doing nothing. The reason why is that it’s just easy to buy the game directly off of Steam or your console’s storefront. You search for the title and pay whatever they’re asking for. The problem is that with just a little bit of effort, you can find the game likely way cheaper. Then, on top of that, with…

Back in the early 2000s, when online gaming was a new frontier lag was everywhere. All of the fun and excitement of online gaming was met with rubber banding (where your character would move forward then snap back to a previous spot), in 2005 when WoW launched you would get stuck in the looting pose and in FPS games were heavily impacted on lag with shots being missed as players rubber banded around the map. These issues these days are still a problem, although not as much of one as they used to be. Gamers, to combat the lag, threw down their dial-up modems with 56k of blazing speed and took up cable and DSL as their preferred Internet standard. You had to live near a hub or some other kind of techno-gadget to get fast Internet, but that quickly expanded by 2010 to almost everywhere. That’s not to say…

So you’re converting to FFXIV from WoW and are ready to take on the world of Final Fantasy, the MMO, round two. A little back story, there was Final Fantasy XI (FFXI) which was another MMO that was pretty… interesting. It was, I would say, a game of patience and challenge loved by many, played by few. Then came FFXIV which followed on the coattails of the FFXIII for the PS3 which was a weird game because it was very linear compared to the open world Final Fantasy single player games of before. FFXIV when it originally launched was panned and then Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn was… born? I guess you could say. That’s the game we’re playing today and it was remade to be better than ever and is, for a tab-targeting game truly a AAA masterpiece in the genre now. After expansions iterating on the design,…

In a typical MMO, a dungeon would be known as a dungeon but in FFXIV they are known as a duty. The duty finder is basically the dungeon finder in FFXIV and the lifeblood of the game. Now, like any MMO with a dungeon finder, there isn’t always the best company to play with and you won’t always have a successful run of whatever you’re signing up for, but that’s okay and part of life. We’re going to go over the duty finder and some tips on how to make your duty runs more successful, because with just four player groups, one person can make a difference. For those coming over from WoW: Dungeon sizes are different in FFXIV. Dungeons are known as as a “Duty” in the game. Instanced gameplay comes through a lot of flavors. To continue the story, often a duty is required although these requirements change…

Below are some tips, tricks and a walkthrough of how to beat the story in Dodgeball Academia. This is a spoiler free guide, so we’re not going to mention the story at all. You can visit Humble Games to find out more about the game. It’s a really neat RPG / sports game hybrid with lots of fights, many optional and lots of fun stories and neat characters. Our guide below helps you through the entire game without spoiling anything, so we might be light on specifics but heavy on help. Stats are Kinda Useless Stats in this game are kind of useless. I did some testing and there isn’t anything that’s going to majorly change your game until you get toward the late game when you can buy all the juices you want to boost your stats. So like focusing on equipment and stats isn’t going to really matter.…

In a recent video by Karl Jobst, he proposes that we’re in a retro video game bubble that’s been artificially inflated by the same folks who have done so with coins and comic books. That prices right now are unsustainable and that the market will collapse, leaving sellers with no buyers. Which is kind of scary for folks who love video games and kind of hard to take in for those who are attempting to invest in retro games. Well, when we ask if we’re in a retro video game bubble, the answer is very likely dependent on the game itself and the condition of the game. Loose cartridges, CIB games and games that are new but not graded are all right now showing minor inflation due to higher demand during 2020 and 2021 lockdowns for older games, especially in the Gamecube market. Collectors may have to pay a premium…