Category: Games

After months of steadily increasing in price, Skytech RTX 30 series equipped gaming PC desktops have finally been marked down. I’m not sure the exact reason why, but I’m going to assume it is because of the state of bitcoin and bitcoin mining at this moment, since it’s still impossible to find an RTX 30 series card at any retailer. These aren’t insubsantial savings either; we’re talking about discounts of up to $400. Score an RTX 3060 PC from $1499, and RTX 3070 PC from $1899, or an RTX 3080 PC from $2499. Amazon has also listed RTX 3070 Ti and RTX 3080 Ti PCs that should ship out by the end of the month.

Skytech RTX 30 Series Gaming PCs on Amazon

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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 the IGN Deals articles and subscribe to the IGN Deals Twitter page.

Let’s say you need to buy a gift for a Nintendo fan, but you don’t want to get them a game. Finally, there’s a solution to your problem. Nintendo has teamed up with Edible Arrangements to create a series of gift-able food treats themed around Mario. Buying them even gets you My Nintendo Platinum Points. You can see the full selection here.

Fifteen gift baskets (or arrangements, if you will) are in the collection, and they offer a decent amount of culinary variety. Some only include fruit (chocolate-dipped strawberries count as fruit, right?). Others come with fruit and cookies, or even balloons and flowers.

Most of the baskets are themed around Mario Kart, so you can get a Rainbow Road Arrangement or a Mario Kart Cup Berry Box. Others are just Mario-themed, like Cookie & Fruit Power-Up Birthday Bundle. Buying any of these Nintendo-themed Edible Arrangements gets you 100 My Nintendo Platinum Points.

Granted, these are pretty unconventional gifts. But if you’re going to a Mario-themed birthday party, for instance, they’d fit right in. Regardless, they’re fun and would undoubtedly bring a smile to the face of your Nintendo-loving friend or family member. If you want to peruse the options, you can pick one out here.

Warning: Spoilers ahead if you haven’t seen Black Widow!

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Marvel’s Black Widow is finally here! It’s been 11 years since Natasha Romanoff made her debut in the Marvel Cinematic Universe in Iron Man 2 and now she finally has her own movie. While this could be perceived as being “too late” for the former Russian spy to get her day in the sun, it’s actually the perfect time. If this film had been made a decade earlier, we may have gotten an overly sexualized femme fatale instead of a woman looking to reconcile with her past and her family.

This film, which is currently breaking pandemic box office records, is not a traditional female spy movie. It’s not about wigs and costumes and seductions and assassinations like Alias or Red Sparrow. It could have been about all those things. We could have seen what Natasha was like as an agent of the Red Room, a weapon used to seduce and kill, similar to how female Bond villains are often depicted. However, that’s not the direction this film took. It went for a more personal story, one that touches on childhood trauma, abduction, brainwashing and human trafficking.

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The Red Room

The first time we glimpsed Natasha Romanoff in the Red Room was in Avengers: Age of Ultron. In a series of flashbacks we saw a young Natasha undergoing training: She was learning ballet, she was learning how to use a gun, and she was learning how to kill. It was easy to assume that we would have gotten a lot more Red Room flashbacks in the Black Widow movie. Instead, the film provides a series of montages during the opening credits depicting brainwashing, combat training, and more, all set to a haunting Nirvana cover. The Red Room is the entire basis of the film, but we don’t really get to see it.

While some may say this was a missed opportunity, it was actually very tasteful to omit it. What happens in the Red Room is brainwashing and torture. Most of the inductees and recruits are children. It was wise not to attempt to show the horrors of this place on screen. Instead, we see the byproducts of the Red Room. We see them in Natasha herself, in Yelena, in Taskmaster, and in the other Widows. When programmed, they were practically killer robots, completely compliant and ready to do the will of their leader, Dreykov.

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Human Trafficking

The issues that the Red Room touches on are exceedingly dark — much darker than the ballet flashback we got in Age of Ultron. The Red Room is one way to describe the reality of human trafficking. Numerous scenes in the film really drive this point home: seeing the sisters drugged at the airport and put in a shipping container to make the journey from Cuba to Russia; when the shipping crate is opened and the Russian soldiers are met with the screams of the girls who were taken; and when Natasha finds out Dreykov took her as a child, paid her mother, and then killed her mother. This type of child kidnapping happens everyday, all around the world. It’s a dark reality, one which rarely gets a spotlight in film, let alone in a major superhero franchise. Taken, the Liam Neeson film from 2008, explores this topic, as does another Rachel Weisz-starring film, The Whistleblower. However it’s still a generally taboo topic in Hollywood. 

The moment that truly sells the human trafficking element is Dreykov’s grand speech to Natasha. “The most disposable workforce in the world is girls.” Girls, being vulnerable, being targeted, being taken. According to the U.S. State Department, 24.9 million people across the globe were in some form of forced slavery in 2016. The types of slavery include private labor, public labor, governmental labor, religious labor, and sexual labor. SafeHaven expands these statistics to explain that women and girls make up 71% of those enslaved, roughly 17 million.

Dismantling Dreykov

Making Natasha’s motivation in the film dismantling the Red Room is a powerful premise. It’s personal for her. She was brainwashed and forced to do terrible things while working for Dreykov. Her sister was also brainwashed and forced to become a killer, Alexei calls her “the greatest child killer” the world has ever known. At some point in Natasha’s past she overcame her programming and left the Black Widow program. Natasha thought she had destroyed the Red Room when she defected to S.H.I.E.L.D., having killed Dreykov and his daughter. But when she finds out the Red Room still exists, with Dreykov still in charge, she is compelled to confront him again.

This premise is both incredibly personal for Natasha, because she has to revisit the darkest chapter in her life, and it’s global, because the Avenger in her must get involved. Dreykov was kidnapping new girls all the time and brainwashing them for his nefarious purposes. He had them planted, as sleeper agents, in every government in the world. As far as supervillains go, he is perhaps the most grotesque villain we’ve had in the MCU so far. In one scene he’s willing to lobotomize Yelena so he can study why she was “defective” against his brainwashing drug. He also turned his own daughter into a killing machine not to save her, but to use her as his test subject for brainwashing. Dreykov is vile and represents a type of villain that exists in our world today: human traffickers.

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Severing the Nerve

One of Dreykov’s most unholy weapons is his pheromones. The women he brainwashes can’t kill him because they were chemically coded not to harm him. Not even Natasha could lay a hand on him. This was his final layer of protection, but thankfully Natasha isn’t afraid of doing a little damage to herself to break his hold on her. Severing the nerve in her nose is a powerful metaphor for her finally severing her ties to her former master — cutting the brainwashing and programming he forced on her mind and body when she was young. This needed to happen for her to bring down Dreykov, his empire, and his Red Room. And she isn’t alone. Other Widows help her bring it down. Where other films might see these types of women fighting against each other, Black Widow ultimately unifies them. Nat gives them something to believe in and something to fight for. 

The entire message of this film is about overcoming your past, reconciling your mistakes, and being strong enough to erase unhealthy programming. Natasha thought she was done with her past, but ignoring it just left Dreykov unchecked to restart the Black Widow program. By reuniting with her “family” and confronting her darkest deed, the murder of Dreykov’s daughter, Natasha was finally able to bring down the Red Room and liberate potentially thousands of other brainwashed women and girls. 

This film really showcases Marvel’s ability to tell a personal story with global implications. No other MCU film has come this close to an issue as dark and tragic as trafficking. Iron Man’s past in weapons manufacturing touches on this issue, but it doesn’t seem to go as dark as it could have. Two other Marvel properties have touched on trafficking: Daredevil and Black Panther. Those inclusions were jumping off points for this film to truly leap into the subject matter. Addressing it in this story feels personal and really illuminates Natasha’s past. Watching her lead the charge of freedom is cathartic and makes her feel even more like a hero, an Avenger who would go on to give her life for others in Avengers: Endgame.

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For more on the film, check out our Black Widow ending explained, delve into the history of that surprise character, investigate the difference between the comics and movie versions of Taskmaster, and find out about the Easter egg screenwriter Eric Pearson wanted to put in the movie.

Escape Room: Tournament of Champions debuts on Friday, July 16, in U.S. theaters.

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What if an escape room were a life-and-death game? That was the simple but effective premise of the 2019 horror hit Escape Room. Competing for a big cash prize, puzzle enthusiasts reported to the mysterious Minos company only to find themselves pitched into a lethal labyrinth. Defying the odds, two survived but found that their prize was not cash — just trauma. Now, this disturbed duo is roped back into this grim game with Escape Room: Tournament of Champions, a savage sequel lacking in smarts, character development and suspense.

Taylor Russell returns as orphaned quiz kid Zoey, while Logan Miller reprises the role of Ben, a drunken stock boy who has cleaned up and crushes hard on the haunted heroine. Determined to expose Minos, Zoey drags Ben to the company’s hidden Manhattan headquarters. Despite knowing they’re dealing with an evil organization with obscene wealth, insane strategies, and an insatiable thirst for suffering, the scrappy young heroes barge in without a plan. And this is just the first eyeroll-worthy leap of logic this stupid sequel makes.

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When it comes to horror movies, suspension of disbelief is regularly surrendered with ease. We accept that the sorority sister runs up the stairs instead of outside the door. We agree that slashers can be decapitated but come back for a sequel. We cheer when Jaws gets blown to bits by some dubious MacGyvering because we’re on board for the adventure. Escape Room established a world where a mighty evil corporation could pull off nightmarish mazes that bordered on the impossible. So, we accept that a subway car can dump its rattled riders onto a subterranean bank floor, which leads to a sandy seaside beach, and beyond. However, the first film also established that Zoey and Ben were incredibly clever people. So why is their very first move against their malevolent game masters so deeply dumb?

Escape Room: Tournament of Champions will not justify this pivotal decision beyond trauma. Indeed, trauma is the special seasoning that’s liberally sprinkled over the entire cast of characters. It’s as if physical scars, scowls, and hastily delivered tragic backstories are a solid substitute for character development. In the first film, director Adam Robitel (who also helms this sequel) offered enough time to get a beat on the stock types of the puzzle solvers. So, we swiftly knew to root for the wide-eyed sad girl and the noble veteran (Deborah Ann Woll) and keep an eye on the smug finance bro (Jay Ellis). This time around, the script (by Will Honley, Maria Melnik, and Daniel Tuch) doesn’t even give us the names of this new batch of contestants before one of them is unceremoniously slaughtered. All you need to know is they’ve all played a Minos maze before, so they know the score and to be scared.

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The puzzles themselves are treated with just as little care. Sure, they’re surprising in their settings and full of traps that make for grisly kills (or at least as grisly as you can get with a PG-13 rating). However, there’s no opportunity for the audience to play along. The frantic pacing of the film allows no time for our eyes to explore the frame for clues. Instead, this Scooby Crew hurdles themselves from one wild-guess to the next, setting off boobytraps and reciting what they’re doing in case we’d miss it. “The room is filling with water!” “The tile set off a laser!” “There’s a key!” Lines like this make up much of the dialogue, and are most often hollered at top volume. Forget the screenwriting advice “show, don’t tell.” This frenzied thriller opts for “Scream, don’t show.”

It’s as if Robitel also had a sinister affluent overlord who demanded this puzzle pic finish under 90 minutes or else! To make that deadline, sacrifices must be made. The first to die was any logic about the inciting incident. Next felled would be any attempt at worthwhile character development. So, we’re saddled with hastily sketched wife-guy (Carlito Olivero), drunk priest (Thomas Cocquerel), girl with scar (Indya Moore), and girl with emo-eyeliner (Holland Roden). Even the showcase scares suffer. Creepy settings are barely established before the threat hits. Thus, the resulting deaths feel abrupt and frankly anti-climactic. Yet the real killer of sustained suspense is the dreadful suspicion there can be no winning this game.

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In the first film, Zoey and Ben got out by the skin of their teeth, because they learned Minos doesn’t play fair. Zoey talks endlessly about how Minos won’t let them live to expose its secrets. The Tournament of Champions premise, which thrusts survivors into another deadly game against their will, supports the idea that there can truly be no escape. All that might have been setting up a haunting commentary on trauma, but this movie doesn’t dare get that deep. There’s just no time. Instead, this atmosphere of dread flattens what might have been fun. The movie itself seems to smirk smugly at those who fight to survive.

Are you sure you have the best cell phone plan for your needs? It turns out, if you switch to a prepaid option rather than being tied to a contract, you could be saving huge amounts of money. That’s because while the average US cell contract is a huge $67 a month, there are some amazing pre-paid deals to be found online for a fraction of the price – and which don’t tie you to a contract. 

One of the best of those is Boost Mobile, and today you can get six months of prepaid unlimited talk and text, 2GB LTE Data, and a free SIM for just $50. That’s a 52% discount off the regular price of $104 and works out to less than $8.50 a month. 

Boost Mobile allows you to prepay your six-month phone plan upfront, giving you unlimited talk time and text messages, as well as 2GB a month of high-speed data, with 99% nationwide coverage – all with no annual contracts, no credit checks, no monthly bills, no overage fees, and no roaming charges. You’ll even get your own mobile hotspot included, too. 

You’ll be able to choose to keep your existing number or get a new one, so whether you want to swap your existing plan for a smarter, more affordable choice, or open a second phone line to use for your business (a much-needed bonus while remote working), this is the perfect way to do it.

Perhaps the best part of this deal, aside from freeing yourself from being locked into long, expensive contracts? You’ll be with America’s fastest network, as won at the January 2021 Opensignal Awards in the category USA: 5G User Experience – so you can expect lightning-fast data connections, too. 

Not only does it offer award-winning cell service, but Boost Mobile comes highly rated by its customers, too, with an impressive 5/5 star review score, who also particularly praised the ease of setup. As one recent customer wrote, “​The activation process was seamless and the service has been excellent thus far.” 

Stop overpaying for your cell phone contract today with a Boost Mobile Prepaid Unlimited Talk & Text, 2GB LTE Data + Free SIM, on sale with 52% off right now for $50 (reg. $104). 

Images can make or break a brand. In fact, research shows that 65% of all people are visual learners, while company Facebook pages that post image updates create 100% stronger engagement online. Poor quality pictures reflect the same on you – and none at all? People won’t even remember your page in the first place. 

But, one photography company is changing the game when it comes to stock photos, making stunning photography affordable for everyone, without paying huge sums of money. That business is Scopio Authentic Stock Photography – and right now, we’ve found a Lifetime Subscription to the service, plus $30 back for you to spend in store credit, on sale for just $29.99 (regular price $3480). 

With this lifetime deal, you’ll get unlimited access to an ever-growing library of more than 400,000 high-quality photographs, covering a wide range of editorial topics and current events, which are all royalty-free and available for you to use in eye-catching social media, ads, websites, presentations, merchandise and more. 

What really sets Scopio apart, though – aside from its affordability – is that it specializes in authentic, diverse images, taken by more than 13,000 different photographers around the world, which challenge stereotypes while supporting artists spanning 150 countries. 

It’s one of the many reasons that the female-founded company was even featured in Forbes’ esteemed 30 Under 30 list this year. As the publication wrote this year, “Scopio is a platform that launched in 2016, and aptly named, “scopes” out the world’s greatest photos and videos from the 4 billion pieces of content posted daily on social media.”

Take your website, social media, and personal branding to the next level today with a Scopio Authentic Stock Photography: Lifetime Subscription + $30 Store Credit, on sale today with 99% off, for $29.99 (reg. $3480). 

Investing has never been hotter than this past year, and that’s down to the huge rise of cryptocurrency. There’s said to be more than 100,000 bitcoin millionaires out there (a rise from 15,00 just a year ago), while Dogecoin, the cryptocurrency which started as a joke, experienced a meteoric explosion in value this year – much to the joy of people who had invested earlier for just fractions of cents. 

But how do you know where to make smart cryptocurrency investments? The answer is in learning from the pros – and you can do just that in your own time, from anywhere, with The Intro to Cryptocurrency & Bitcoin Bundle. Even better, today we’ve found the bundle of five different courses, usually $995, on sale for just $19.99 – that works out to less than $4 a course. Now, that’s a smart first crypto investment. 

This bundle includes more than 10 hours of training on all the skills you need to start investing and trading like a pro. Courses like the 4.4/5 rated Getting Started with Cryptocurrency, Bitcoin & More will take you from zero knowledge to having a strong understanding of the fundamentals of crypto and blockchain tech, as well as how to buy it and trading strategies. Then, cement your skills with the 4.3/5 rated Bitcoin: Cryptocurrency Investing Masterclass, where you’ll learn the right times to invest, the best crypto exchanges and more. 

Each course in this bundle is created by SkillSuccess, one of the world’s leading elearning hubs, and home to more than 2000 carefully curated online video courses which can be accessed on the go, via any device, and which has been featured on CNN, Entrepreneur, Mashable, and CNET. Your crypto courses will be taught by experts in their field, including Jason Gandy, a serial entrepreneur and online business expert with an impressive 4.4/5 star instructor rating from previous students, and the 4.6/5 star rated FinTech School, industry leaders in the latest in technology, finance, and crypto. 

Start understanding and investing in crypto today with The Intro to Cryptocurrency & Bitcoin Bundle, on sale with 97% off right now, for $19.95 (regular price $995). 

Mobile games have come a long way – in fact, Sony is set to be expanding its AAA titles into mobile gaming, while some of the most exciting new games of the year happen to be on the App Store, and taking over the small screen. 

The only problem with most mobile games is just that, though: the screen. Using your device’s touchscreen as a controller can seriously let down the gameplay of some otherwise amazing games. But, what if there was an on-the-go controller that could change that? Enter: the Serafim S1, a multi-platform gaming controller that you can use anywhere, and was such a beloved idea that it was successfully funded on Kickstarter to a rave response, smashing its original goals. Today, we’ve found it on sale for just $45.99 – that’s a 34% discount off the regular price of $69. 

Compatible with a massive 10 different platforms, from mobile gaming to consoles, consider the Serafim S1 as your go-to travel companion for gaming on the go. Simply connect via Bluetooth, and you’ll never be without a proper controller, combining a Switch-style setup of two joysticks and 12 buttons (including A/B/X/Y and trigger buttons) with the ability to map it to the virtual buttons on your phone’s screen to create your own, perfect custom controller for any game. 

Finally, you’ll be able to enjoy the full experience – and master – the most popular mobile games like Call of Duty Mobile, PUBGM, League of Legends, and Mario Kart Tour, without sacrificing any gameplay quality. 

Plus, the dedicated Serafim Play app comes with pre-loaded mapped controllers for some of the biggest games out there – so you can simply plug in and play right away. It also supports macro functions, allowing you to record and customize your macros for quick and easy looping, too. 

Change your mobile gaming experience forever with the Serafim S1: Multi-Platform Gaming Controller On the Go, on sale right now with 34% off, for $45.99 (regular price $69).