Month: January 2019

GameStop refreshes its weekly deals on PS4, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch games and hardware each Wednesday. This week’s sale is now live, dropping prices on a handful of worthy items you might want to pick up for cheap. The sale ends on January 15, so let’s dive in and look at some of the highlights before they go back up to regular price.

If you have a dusty old console you’re ready to offload, you’ll get an extra 25% in credit this week for trading it in. All pre-owned games $15 and under are available in a two-for-$20 deal. And anyone in the market for premium-quality headphones can get a nice discount on Turtle Beach Stealth 700 models for Xbox One and PS4, bringing them down to $120 (from $150).

As for game deals, you’ll find some decent ones this week. You can pick up the online shooter Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 or the action-RPG Divinity: Original Sin 2 – Definitive Edition on sale for $40 each. Ubisoft’s latest take on toys-to-life, Starlink: Battle for Atlas, is down to just $30. Each starter pack comes with the game and a controller mount for the included toy ship, weapons, and pilot; the Switch version comes with Star Fox’s Arwing ship as a digital in-game bonus.

Hitman 2, which offers wide-open levels rife with ways to take out your targets, is on sale for $30. The techno-action game Watch Dogs 2 is down to $20, as is the asymmetrical online horror game Friday the 13th. And if you’ve resolved to get more exercise this year, Just Dance 2019 will get you off the couch for $25.

You’ll find more of our picks below, or you can look at the full ad to find all the week’s discounts.

Activision Blizzard has announced a variety of reshuffled executive positions, which collectively reshape the company’s leadership structure. Each of the new roles is being filled by senior executives with the company, and the company included a brief moment of back-patting for its Call of Duty series in the announcement.

In the press release detailing the new roles, Activision mentioned that Call of Duty has generated more lifetime revenue than the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and doubled the cumulative box office of the entire Star Wars series. Take those comparisons with a grain of salt given that new video games cost roughly six times as much as a movie ticket, but it’s still an impressive comparison to show the scale of the franchise.

Rob Kostich, formerly the Call of Duty executive VP and general manager, has been named the new company president. King Digital CFO and CSO Humam Sakhnini has been named president of that unit. Finally, Dennis Durkin is remaining in his role as CFO and adding a new title: President of Activision Blizzard’s Emerging Businesses. The announcement also notes that, as previously announced, J. Allen Brack will continue to serve as the new president of Blizzzard Entertainment.

This comes shortly after some other shake-ups among Activision Blizzard’s senior management. Activision’s CFO was recently fired, and he joined Netflix. Then Blizzard’s CFO left to work at the mobile payment company Square. According to SEC documents, former Blizzard president Mike Morhaime will serve his last day as an advisor on April 7, 2019.

Kostich has shepherded the Call of Duty series through some big changes, most recently overseeing the series’ first entry to remove a single-player campaign entirely. Black Ops 4 focusing strictly on the multiplayer aspects, with the addition of a new battle royale mode, was potentially controversial. The game doesn’t seem to have suffered for it, though, as our own GameSpot review noted that the strength of the three multiplayer pillars make it hard to miss the campaign content.

Nintendo has revealed the next in-game event for Super Smash Bros. Ultimate. While previous ones have been themed around certain kinds of Spirits, this week’s event will give players a chance to earn some extra bonuses.

The Double XP and SP event kicks off on January 10 at 10 PM PT (1 AM ET / 6 AM GMT on January 11) and runs for the usual three days, concluding at the same time on January 13-14. During the event, you’ll earn twice the normal amount of Spirit experience and Spirit Points when you participate in Spirit Board matches.

In contrast to the game’s previous events, it doesn’t appear that any particular Spirits will pop up more frequently on the Spirit Board during Double XP and SP, but the event does provide a good opportunity to power up your own Spirits quickly.

Nintendo has been holding in-game events in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate on a weekly basis, though up until now, all of these have revolved around certain kinds of Spirits. Last week’s event featured old-school video game characters such as the Balloon Fighter and Sukapon, while December’s Mario Time event introduced a handful of exclusive Super Mario Party Spirits.

Super Smash Bros. Ultimate launched for Switch on December 7 and has been a big critical and commercial success for Nintendo, quickly becoming the fastest-selling installment in the series’ history. The title was also the best-selling video game on Amazon in 2018 despite launching near the end of the year.

In other Switch news, Nintendo recently announced a release date for Yoshi’s Crafted World. The adorable platformer launches exclusively for the hybrid console on March 29. The company also confirmed this month’s additions to Nintendo Switch Online’s NES library: Blaster Master and Zelda II, which join the service on January 16.

At CES 2019, AMD president and CEO Lisa Su announced the world’s first 7nm gaming GPU, titled the Radeon VII. According to CNET, Su claims it’s the most powerful gaming GPU the company has ever built.

AMD displayed the Radeon VII’s technical prowess at CES, demoing Devil May Cry 5. Su said the game was running “well above” 60 frames per second at 4K resolution. She also mentioned that in comparison to AMD’s Vega 64, most games on average get a 25 percent performance boost on the Radeon VII. Certain titles, such as Battlefield V, can receive as high as a 35 percent increase. The Radeon VII will have 16 gigabytes of high-performance memory and one terabyte a second bandwidth

The Radeon VII is scheduled to release February 7 and cost $700. The gaming GPU comes bundled with the remake of Resident Evil 2, The Division 2, and Devil May Cry 5.

There’s been plenty of announcements coming out of CES this year. Nvidia announced a new video card called the GeForce RTX 2060. HTC had a slew of reveals for its Vive VR products, including a new Viveport subscription model, an upcoming virtual reality social space, and two headsets–Pro Eye and Cosmos. Samsung unveiled two new TVs: one of which the company hopes can flagship a 2019 promotion for MicroLED screens, and another that is so large that it’s about the size of an average living room. LG showcased a new TV as well, one that can roll up and be stored away when it’s not in use.

All three games that come bundled with the Radeon VII come out early this year. The remake of Resident Evil 2 is the only game scheduled to release prior to the gaming GPU though. It launches on January 25 for Xbox One, PS4, and PC. The Division 2 and Devil May Cry 5 are coming to the same three systems, with the former scheduled for March 12 and the latter for March 8. So even if you buy the Radeon VII day one, you’ll still need to wait on two of the games that come with it.