Month: November 2020

The Apple Store may have a lousy Black Friday sale, but that doesn’t mean you won’t be able to find great deals on Apple products elsewhere. Below we’ve listed the best Black Friday deals you can get right now. These deals are mostly on the new Apple Watch Series 6 and Apple Watch SE, but there are also some deals on Apple AirPods, iPads, iPhones, and MacBooks. I can guarantee that more deals will be coming in as we get closer to Black Friday proper so check back to see the latest scoop.

Apple Black Friday Deals That Are Live Now

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What We Expect Will Go On Sale

• Apple AirPods 2 (Newest)
• Apple Watch Series 3
• Apple iPad (Newest)
• Apple iPad Air (Newest)
• Apple MacBook Pro
• Apple Mac Mini

More Black Friday Deals

• Best Black Friday Sales and Deals
• Best Black Friday Amazon Deals
• Best Black Friday PC and Laptop Deals
• Best Black Friday Video Game Deals
• Best Black Friday Walmart Deals
• Best Black Friday Nintendo Deals
• Best Black Friday TV Deals
• Best Black Friday Dell Deals
• BlackFriday.com Amazon Page
• BlackFriday.com Dell Page
• BlackFriday.com Walmart Page
• BlackFriday.com Best Buy Page

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Eric Song is IGN’s deal curator and spends roughly 1/4 of his income on stuff he posts. Check out his latest Daily Deals Article and subscribe to his IGN Deals Newsletter.

This is a good year to upgrade your TV to 4K and there’s no better time to get an awesome deal than on Black Friday. 4K is no longer “future” technology; it’s here and now. These days 4K TVs cost no more than a 1080p TV so there’s really no reason to choose anything else. There’s also plenty of 4K content available in the form of streaming sites like Netflix or Amazon Video and 4K Blu-ray discs. The new PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X can play 4K games at up to 60fps (and in cases 120fps). Black Friday is different this year compared to previous years; deals are spread out throughout the month of November instead of concentrated on a single day. Several advertised Black Friday TV deals are already live and buying now means you can escape the shipping backlog that comes after Thanksgiving. We’ve compiled the best TV deals from the biggest and most reliable vendors below.

Best Buy Black Friday TV Deals

Far and away Best Buy has the most legitimate Black Friday deals available right now. Best Buy also has several TVs that are exclusive to their site. The best thing about buying a TV from Best Buy online is that, worst case scenario, you can return it to any retail store location. If you’re considering getting an OLED TV, their Geek Squad protection plan (which costs extra) offers OLED burn-in protection.

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Amazon Black Friday TV Deals

Amazon has several Black Friday TV deals available as well. If you have an Amazon Prime Card (which is free to get and carries no annual fee), you can score the best deal for the super popular 65″ LG CX-series OLED TV. It keeps going in and out of stock, though, so check back if you want it.

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Target Black Friday TV Deals

Target has some awesome deals on budget 4K TVs, but the only problem is that they have a hard time meeting demand. Your best bet is to pick it up locally in-store.

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Walmart Black Friday TV Deals

Walmart’s Black Friday deals haven’t gone live yet. Check back later.

More Black Friday Deals

• Best Black Friday Sales and Deals
• Best Black Friday Amazon Deals
• Best Black Friday PC and Laptop Deals
• Best Black Friday Video Game Deals
• Best Black Friday Walmart Deals
• Best Black Friday Nintendo Deals
• Best Black Friday Dell Deals
• BlackFriday.com Amazon Page
• BlackFriday.com Dell Page
• BlackFriday.com Walmart Page
• BlackFriday.com Best Buy Page

______________________________

Eric Song is IGN’s deal curator and spends roughly 1/4 of his income on stuff he posts. Check out his latest Daily Deals Article and subscribe to his IGN Deals Newsletter.

Some Assassin’s Creed Valhalla players are reporting problems with trophies and achievements across both Xbox and PlayStation. While some bugs appear to be connected to cross-platform saves, other achievement-killing bugs have no clear origin.

GameSpot’s Lucy James picked up an achievement bug that seems to have come from swapping between the Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5 versions of the game. While cross-saves are designed so that achievements and their related progress doesn’t swap between platforms, it seems that the cross-saves eventually stopped the achievement system from working at all.

A thread on Reddit details a number of people having the same issue with achievements not unlocking on Xbox, but these cases don’t seem to be related to cross-saving. With a number of achievements that should be unlocked during standard moments in the game–such as one for travelling to England for the first time–some players are reporting that their accounts still show zero achievements.

Others say that counters on achievements that require players to complete a set number of tasks have frozen, even once they’ve completed more than the requisite number.

TrueAchievements has also reported on the problem, with a number of players reporting similar issues through their forum.

A number of Valhalla players have also been caught by surprise by the fact that trophies don’t transfer from PS4 to PS5, even though save data can be saved between platforms. For those who have only just got their next-gen consoles, or are still waiting on a pre-order, it means they will inevitably have to play through parts of the game again if they’re looking for a platinum trophy.

While this is an intended feature and not a bug, it’s still causing frustration for players making the transition to the next generation.

Gears 5 has added three new characters to its multiplayer roster, and it’s a trio that wrestling fans will get a kick out of. The New Day has arrived in The Coalition’s shooter, bringing their signature flamboyance and colorful verve to the game.

Xbox has launched this WWE Survivor cross-over event, and there are two ways to get your hands on these characters. Through to December 4, you can purchase the three characters in a $20 pack. Alternatively, Xbox Game Pass Ultimate subscribers can unlock them through Ultimate Perks. You’ll only have until December 4 to do so, though.

The New Day is made up of Kofi Kingston, Xavier Woods, and Big E. You can see them in action in the trailer below.

The WWE has also launched some official The New Day/Gears 5 merch, if you want to wear this crossover event on a shirt. And during the Survivor Series PPV on November 22, The New Day showed up in their custom Gears 5 armor, showing the tie-in off to the assembled digital crowd. You can check it out in the tweet below.

Gears 5 previously added former WWE superstar Batista as a playable character–and then, strangely, added in an option to replace Marcus with Batista throughout the campaign.

Gears 5 is included in Xbox Game Pass Ultimate for console and PC. The game was recently upgraded for Xbox Series X/S, and GameSpot’s Gears 5 review has been updated to reflect the changes introduced.

Rez creator Tetsuya Mizuguchi is celebrating the game’s 19th anniversary by announcing that he’s working on a new game. Mizuguchi, who worked as a designer on Tetris Effect too, has shared some news about the next project from his studio Enhance.

In a tweet, Mizuguchi announced that the studio is “moving forward” with a new game, and that it’ll be a “totally new adventure with synesthesia.” The term refers to a neurological condition that makes sensory experiences involuntarily invoking another sense: being able to see sounds, or hear colours, for instance.

Rez’s visualization of music has long been equated to a form of synesthesia.

Rez already has a sort-of sequel: Child of Eden, a game that was best-played on Xbox 360 Kinect. The game received an 8.5/10 in GameSpot’s review. Tetris Effect, meanwhile, earned a 9/10. If you haven’t yet played this new take on Tetris, it’s out now on Xbox Game Pass.

Rez received an update for PSVR in 2017, called Rez Infinite. It’s generally seen as the ultimate version of the game, and it too earned a 9/10 in GameSpot’s review.

Though the big day itself is on November 27, Black Friday 2020 sales are already in full swing, and major retailers are offering record-low prices on some of this year’s hottest games. If you’re looking for the spooks, look no further than Best Buy’s Black Friday deal on Resident Evil 3, the 2020 remake of the 1999’s Resident Evil 3: Nemesis. The retailer has knocked down the price of the game to $15 USD for PS4 and Xbox One. If you have an Xbox Series X or PS5 with a disc drive, you’ll be able to play this physical copy on those systems due to backwards compatibility.

Resident Evil 3 is the third remake for the survival horror franchise, following on the heels of the well-received Resident Evil 2 remake released last year. On that note: Resident Evil 2 is also on sale for Black Friday 2020, with Best Buy currently selling it for $15. So if you haven’t played either of the remakes, you can snag them both for just 30 bucks this week.

In GameSpot’s Resident Evil 3 review, the game received a 6/10. Editor Alessandro Fillari criticized its jarring set pieces and lack of presence for Nemesis, though he praised its fantastic visuals, protagonists, and survival horror elements. RE3’s campaign is roughly six hours, making it a tough sell at $60 but a much better offering for just $15.

After nerfing the overpowered MP5, it appears Treyarch is setting its sights on changing the values of another Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War weapon, while the studio also also provided some wider context on its approach to buffing and nerfing weapons in the multiplayer shooter.

Lead game designer Tony Flame posted an image on Twitter recently that suggests the M82 sniper rifle will see a buff in an upcoming update. “Next order of business,” Flame wrote, attaching an image of the weapon and a car getting a buff.

Flame also provided some higher-level context regarding how Treyarch approaches buffing and nerfing weapons. He said the studio’s main imperative is to focus on keeping the time-to-kill (TTK) values where they should be across all weapons.

“When a weapon far exceeds that baseline, we must nerf it to respect the TTK, and likewise buff to get it there.”

The first major post-release patch for Black Ops Cold War made a series of buffs and nerfs, including the FFAR1 (increased recoil, reduced max damage and max damage range), M16 (reduced max damage range and increased sprint to fire time, among other things), and all snipers (the sprint to fire time has been adjusted).

Some weapons saw buffs, including the magnum (getting improvements to fire rate and max damage range) and M60 (improved max damage range and movement speed).

Check out the full Black Ops Cold War patch notes to find out everything that’s new and different with the latest update.

GameSpot’s Black Ops Cold War review scored the game a 7/10. “Zombies is a good co-op time overall, but multiplayer falls flat, leaving the strong campaign to do most of the heavy lifting,” review Kallie Plagge said.

The Five Nights at Freddy’s movie based on the series of scary video games is moving forward with some positive news. Series creator Scott Cawthon has selected a script for the film and filming will begin in Spring 2021 at Get Out studio Blumhouse.

Writing on Reddit, Cawthon elaborated on a number of different scripts that he considered for the movie, but ultimately backed away from due to their problems. Some of these scripts were written by Cawthon himself, while other, unnamed writers submitted scripts, too. Additionally “big studios” and “big directors” were involved in some of the pitches, but Cawthon shared no names.

He did, however, provide a brief overview of each of the rejected scripts that he considered before settling on the one that will enter production in Spring 2021.

One of these, the “F” screenplay, involved a group of teenage troublemakers who break into the setting of the game, Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza, and then all hell breaks loose. In the video game series, the animatronic toys inside the pizzeria come to life and become murderous. Cawthon said he rejected this script because it had a lot of “odd choices” that “only got weirder” throughout the narrative.

“The story ended with our protagonists in a secret underground animatronic factory that was designing robots for the government. -___-” Cawthon said.

Another script involved the toys from the pizzeria leaving the restaurant and heading to Manhattan to do damage there. Cawthon seems to have not liked this script at all, as he had nothing positive to say about it whatsoever, and the final action he took with the script was for it to be “burned with fire.”

Another script, “Silver Eyes,” was written by Cawthon and Kira Breed-Wrisley, with whom he wrote the novelization of the FNAF series. Together they worked on three versions of this story in one year, adapting it from the Five Nights at Freddy’s book.

Cawthon said he experienced a number of challenges on this script. “These were the first attempts I made myself to write a screenplay after realizing it was going to be difficult to find someone else who understood the lore well enough to do it,” he said. “Unfortunately, it also meant these screenplays suffered greatly from my inexperience at writing. Even Kira, with her writing expertise, couldn’t save them.”

These scripts had “some good elements,” Cawthon said, but he said he became more interested in adapting the games and not the books for the screen.

One screenplay that got close to being greenlit was called “Misfit Kid.” In this story, a single mom brings her kid to the town with the Freddy’s pizzeria, and then “hilarity ensues.” Cawthon said the movie had a decent enough setup, but “it just didn’t work.” He said he struggled to connect with the characters in the script.

“One of the problems in creating a modern day story with an old Freddy’s setting is finding a way to connect the protagonists to the restaurant, finding a reason for them to be there, and finding a reason for them to stay,” Cawthon said. “The problem here was that the reason for this kid to go to Freddy’s and have misadventures was too contrived and too forced. This was going to be THE screenplay for a while because it didn’t have any serious flaws. I ultimately just decided it wasn’t good enough though.”

These are just a few examples of the rejected scripts–go to Reddit to learn more about all of them. As for the script that Cawthon ultimately said yes to, he is understandably keeping quiet about the specifics of the screenplay, which is called “Mike.”

“This makes sense. Why didn’t I think of this before? It has the best pieces from all the previous screenplays… Not really any problems here. All the right characters, all the right motivations, all the right stakes… Yeah, we’re going with this one. It’s fun, it’s scary, and it has a great central story!”

There is no word yet on who will star in the FNAF movie or who may direct it. At one point in time, Harry Potter and Home Alone director Chris Columbus was attached to direct. However, Cawthon vetoed the script for this version, and the movie was delayed. Presumably Columbus exited the project at this time, too.

Cawthon has been very protective of the Five Nights at Freddy’s movie and is taking time to make sure the film is done correctly. It has been a lengthy and challenging process to find the right script, but Cawthon said he won’t compromise on the story.

“I’m determined to find the right story,” he said in 2018. “I’m sticking to what I’ve always said: either the right movie gets made or no movie gets made. If that means that I have to start over ten more times, then that’s what I’m going to do. The good thing is that each attempt gets better and better, in my opinion. So, despite the delays, it’s going in the right direction.”

Monster Hunter Stories 2 was announced for Switch alongside Monster Hunter Rise, with a release planned for later in 2021. The original Monster Hunter Stories released on the 3DS and for mobile, and was well received. With this in mind, fans might be wondering whether the first game is coming to Switch–and whether they should play it ahead of the sequel.

In an interview with Gamereactor, producer Ryozo Tsujimoto explained that the first game is not likely to come to Switch. “There are no plans at the moment to bring the original Monster Hunter Stories to the Nintendo Switch,” he said, but clarified that anyone worried that they need to know the plot of the first game for the sequel can rest easy.

“I can put that fear to rest because there’s a brand new protagonist and a new storyline,” Tsujimoto said. “While its set in the same world, the game has absolutely been designed so that players can jump straight into Monster Hunter Stories 2.”

While some of the iconography in the trailer below will be familiar to fans of the first game, newcomers should be okay.

Monster Hunter Rise releases for Switch on March 26, 2021, and before that there’s a Monster Hunter movie releasing on Christmas day. 2021 should be a big year for Monster Hunter fans–as long as they own a Switch.