Author: Trafficblast

Amazon’s Prime Day doesn’t start until July 16, but the online retailer is already offering a number of deals to spark interest and get people talking about the retail holiday. The only hitch is that, like the deals on Prime Day, you need to be an Amazon Prime member to get the sale prices. You can sign up for Prime here, with a free one-month trial for first-time subscribers. With that out of the way, let’s look at what pre-Prime Day deals are available to Amazon Prime members right now.

Free PC Games

Amazon owns the streaming platform Twitch, and each month Amazon/Twitch Prime members get free PC games. The difference this month is that Prime Day is coming up. To celebrate, Twitch Prime members will get 21 free games in July, including Brutal Legend and Tacoma. You can find the full details here.

Price: $130 (normally $230)

Amazon Echo owners know how convenient it is to ask Alexa to play a song or inquire what the weather will be like on a given day. The Echo Show is an Alexa-enabled device with one big difference–it has a screen. It can do everything a standard Echo can do (including playing Skyrim), while also allowing you to view Amazon Video content, see music lyrics, security cameras, photos, weather forecasts, to-do and shopping lists, and make video calls to others with an Echo Show.

Price: $1 (normally $30)

Kindle Unlimited is Amazon’s subscription service that offers unlimited access to over a million books. It also comes with a rotating selection of magazines and thousands of books with Audible narration. You can access all the Kindle Unlimited content on any device with the Kindle app. The service normally costs $30 for three months, but Prime members can get it now for just $1.

Various Other Discounts

You can get discounts on lots of other things at Amazon right now as well. If you buy certain “everyday essentials” from Amazon brands, you’ll save 30%. Select furniture and home decor is available for 25% off. Amazon Basics are 25% off now as well for Prime members. These include everything from plastic cutlery to LED bulbs and luggage.

You can also enter to win a number of prizes without spending any money at all. The prizes include $50,000 in cash, a 2019 Lexus ES with Alexa, a trip for two to Seattle, and more. To enter, you can visit this page and click links to find out more about Amazon’s offerings. Alternatively, if you have an Alexa-enabled device, you can ask the AI assistant a number of questions that count as entries as well. Questions like, “Alexa, what is the news?” and “Alexa, what is Prime Day?” qualify.

More deals are coming for Prime members in the lead-up to Prime Day. We’ll continue covering the best deals, so be sure to check back later.

Microsoft has begun rolling out its July Xbox One update, which includes a few key features that the company has promised lately. The headliners are FastStart, which was announced at Xbox’s E3 media showcase, and Groups, which was tested for Alpha users last month.

FastStart uses machine learning to identify which files are needed first and prioritize those downloads so you can jump into a game faster while the rest of the file finishes. Microsoft boasts this means you can start up a game twice as fast. For the time being, this is limited to a select number of titles. But while it was presented in the context of Xbox Game Pass, today’s update appears to make the feature available for everyone.

Groups are a new feature for sorting the games and apps on your system, which essentially let you create multiple customized groups like your Pins. You can group together whatever you’d like, assign custom names, reorganize your groups, and assign them to Home. Pins are a Group by default, and you can create others.

The update also includes the option to press Y anywhere in the dashboard to bring up the search, and some improvements to Mixer. The update lets you use mouse and keyboard support on PC, multi-touch support for touch-enabled devices, a viewer leaderboard to show the most active users on a stream, and full-screen broadcasting. Those come alongside some under-the-hood improvements to broadcasting quality and stability.

Idris Elba is reportedly in final talks to play the villain in Hobbs and Shaw, the upcoming Fast and Furious spin-off movie. As the name implies, the film would star Dwayne Johnson and Jason Statham in their Fast and Furious character roles, Luke Hobbs and Deckard Shaw. The two began as rivals but began to team up in Fate of the Furious.

Variety reports that Elba will play the antagonist who forces the duo to work together. The script was penned by series architect Chris Morgan, and Deadpool 2 director David Leitch is set to direct. It’s slated to release on July 26, 2019.

Elba first gained widespread prominence for his turn on The Wire. While he’s known for playing more heroic characters like those in Thor: Ragnorok, The Dark Tower, and Pacific Rim, Elba has had some villainous turns too. He recently played the villain in Star Trek Beyond and voiced Shere Khan in the live-action The Jungle Book. He’s also been rumored to be under consideration to play the iconic character James Bond.

Universal has been looking for a way to put Dwayne Johnson in a starring role spin-off, given the popularity of his character. Fate of the Furious set up a natural vehicle for this to finally happen, given the buddy-cop chemistry with Statham. GameSpot’s Fate of the Furious review noted that the charisma of the characters, and Johnson in particular, carried the silly spectacle.

The first cast photo for It: Chapter Two makes them look like a pretty happy bunch. The Loser’s Club is all grown up now, though who can say how long the glee will last when they’ve got a killer clown on the hunt for them.

The full cast gathered around the table shows Jessica Chastain as Beverly Marsh alongside costars Bill Hader as Richie Tozier, James Mcavoy as Bill Denbrough, Jay Ryan as Ben Hanscom, James Ransone as Eddie Kaspbrak, Isaiah Mustafa as Mike Hanlon, and Andy Bean as Stanley Uris.

The photo was released by the official It movie Twitter account. Even though the movie isn’t coming out for more than a year, and people are already getting hyped about it with the release of the first cast photo.

The first It movie was based on the Stephen King novel, but this one will follow the cast all grown up, as Pennywise the sadistic clown returns to plague the group once again. It: Chapter Two is expected to be released September 6, 2019.

Star Wars Battlefront 2 is getting several updates this year. EA unveiled a roadmap that details when players can start seeing content drops. The first update is free and out now. It launches a new Hero Starfighter mode and patches Hero gameplay, map layouts, and a few other quality-of-life improvements.

Hero Starfighters is a new multiplayer mode that pits two teams of four against one another. Every player spawns as one of the Hero ships for their side. When a player is killed, they can no longer pilot a Hero ship and have to spawn as a standard fighter, interceptor, or bomber. Standard ships have unlimited lives. Teams win the round when all opposing Hero ships are destroyed and the game goes to whichever team wins three out of five rounds. This new mode will also offer a swifter way for players to level up any of their Hero ships.

The rest of the Hero Starfighter update addresses content that’s played on the ground. Hero characters that use a lightsaber can now turn their weapon on and off at the press of a button, and blocking blaster bolts with a lightsaber will now consume stamina. Ewok Hunt is back with a few tweaks to gameplay. Jetpack Cargo is now available on the Great Temple Yavin 4 map. Extraction is once again available as an Operation, but only for the month of July.

Almost every existing hero, hero ship, game mode, and map is getting an update. The full patch notes can be viewed on the Star Wars Battlefront II forum, but here’s a list of the more notable updates:

• Sullustan appearance has been added to the Resistance and Rebel version of the Assault class
• Players can swap their appearances pre-round
• Daily quest system now gives three quests per day instead of one, and the daily quests reward per quest has been reduced from 1000 to 500
• On Strike, Objective Delivery Zones are now visually represented in the world
• On Hero Showdown, there are new HUD elements that show the health of team members

Star Wars Battlefront 2 is available on Xbox One, PS4, and PC.

A TV version of the hit horror franchise The Purge has been in the works for a while now and USA/Syfy just released the first trailer for it. The plot of The Purge centers around the premise that there is an annual event in America called the purge night where people are allowed to indulge their worst instincts, let it all out, and then go back to their everyday lives. The government legalizes all forms of crime, including murder, and as a result, the crime rates around the country decrease dramatically for the rest of the year. People even consider it a kind of celebration, feeling morally obligated to participate because of the “benefits” it has on society.

There have been several installments of this franchise already. A new movie called The First Purge is coming out July 4 that explains the origins of the purge night, which has left some fans wondering what subject matter the TV show means to take on.

The trailer offers some of the same kind of content from the Purge movies; people celebrating the purge for its benefits spliced together with images of bleeding people and killer-groups in creepy masks going after the weak and innocent. But the trailer also seems to be highlighting issues of power and income inequality around the purge night. There are several shots of affluent people looking perfectly safe and patting themselves on the back for the “good” the purge has done, which makes the sinister imagery that follows seem exploitative and cruel.

All we know about the plot of the series is that it will follow a few different characters during the purge as they try their best to make it through the night while discovering how far they’re willing to go to survive. James DeMonaco, the creator of the franchise, is writing and executive producing the show, and some of the other members of the original team will be producing, including Michael Bay. The show looks to be titled simply, The Purge. It will be 10 episodes long and is set to premiere September 4.