Month: April 2020

240Hz gaming monitors are the new hotness when it comes to ultra-competitive play, but until now they’ve been limited to TN panels with poor viewing angles and less-than-stellar color accuracy. But Asus has finally broken the mold with the TUFGaming VG279QM, which features an IPS panel with a 240Hz refresh rate – or 280Hz with built-in overclocking – along with HDR, G-Sync, and a fast response time to keep motion smooth.

Design and Features

At $400, this display may not look too flashy, with a quarter-inch bezel around the edges and a mostly-unadorned stand. The stand has a cable routing hole in the middle, but it’s too small to easily fit cables through, which makes it kind of frustrating compared to more typical designs. The stand is, however, very adjustable, with customizable height, swivel, and tilt – you can even rotate it 90 degrees for a vertical orientation. On the back you’ll find one DisplayPort, two HDMI 2.0 ports, and a headphone jack – unimpressive, but not offensively bare. There are no USB ports, and the built-in speakers are, as you’d expect, not great.

But all that’s okay, because Asus nailed the important specs. The VG279QM is aimed at competitive, high-speed gaming, with a 1080p resolution and 240Hz refresh rate – overclockable to 280Hz through the on-screen menu, making this the fastest refresh rate monitor you can buy today. Asus warns that overclocking may introduce screen flickering or other issues, but it worked flawlessly for me, apart from an occasional black screen when disabling it (which I easily solved by turning the monitor off and on again). If 280Hz causes too many problems for you, there’s also a 270Hz overclock setting that’s more stable and still plenty fast.

That refresh rate would be impressive enough, but Asus is also using an IPS panel instead of the sub-par TN panels you usually see on high refresh rate displays. That means you get better viewing angles and better color reproduction, without the usual IPS drawbacks of slower refresh rates and response times. Asus puts a cherry on top with FreeSync support (that is certified G-Sync Compatible by Nvidia) and HDR400 (which, okay, can barely be considered HDR without local dimming, but it’s there). At 27 inches, 1080p is less sharp than I’d like, but it’s all in service of getting the highest refresh rates possible, so it’s forgivable for its target audience. I can’t decide whether I’d rather have a sharper 1080p image at 24 inches, or a more immersive experience at 27 inches.

You can adjust the panel’s settings via an on-screen display using a joystick-style controller on the back of the monitor. You get your typical brightness, contrast, and sharpness (which Asus calls VividPixel, for some reason), alongside presets for different types of gaming. Curiously, the default preset is named Racing, and it’s the most accurate of the bunch – Cinema uses far too cool a color temperature – so I recommend leaving it at the default, despite the confusing naming convention.

You’ll also find a few extra gaming features, like Shadow Boost (which lowers the contrast ratio but helps you see enemies in dark places), an on-screen crosshair, and a Sniper mode that zooms in so you can practice your faraway shots. Asus’ strobing backlight feature, which the company calls “ELMB Sync,” is unique in that it’s one of the only motion blur reduction features on the market that can be enabled alongside FreeSync and G-Sync – usually you have to pick one or the other. But it comes with its own drawbacks, which I’ll get to in a moment.

Performance

As with all monitors we review, I ran the VG279QM through a few of Lagom’s LCD test patterns to see how the panel performed. Gamma was a touch low on our test unit, hovering closer to 2.0 than the desired 2.2, and I found that black and white levels were just slightly crushed, meaning you might lose out on the darkest and brightest details in a given image. This is where that Shadow Boost feature can come in handy, as long as you don’t care about the loss in contrast ratio – which isn’t particularly great to begin with, due to IPS panels’ grey-ish blacks. Speaking of which, I also noticed some definite glow in the corners of the screen when it’s entirely black – again, typical of IPS panels, and well worth dealing with for the advantages IPS offers. But it’s still there, and still bothersome.

The rest of Lagom’s tests produced stellar results, though, with no visible banding in gradients, great viewing angles, and a fantastic response time. To test response time, Lagom uses a GIF that switches between two shades of grey – the slower your monitor shifts, the more flickering the GIF produces. With the default setting of Overdrive at 60, the VG279QM produced very little flickering, indicating a very low response time – a result backed up by Blur Buster’s UFO test, which showed almost no motion blur at 240Hz.

Note that Overdrive can naturally cause some “overshoot,” which manifests itself as visual artifacts around moving objects. At 240Hz, the default value of 60 was perfect, but if you’re gaming at lower refresh rates, you may need to lower the Overdrive setting to avoid those graphical glitches. At higher levels, the artifacting becomes too distracting for me to recommend. The same goes for the ELMB Sync setting, which seems to lock Overdrive at the highest setting. I wish Asus had left Overdrive user-configurable when ELMB is on, because with the right settings, this could be a killer combo. But thanks to the heavy artifacting, I recommend leaving ELMB Sync off. Feel free to give it a try, though.

Gaming

If you play highly competitive games, this monitor is a dream. Colorful, fast-paced titles like Overwatch look incredible with IPS colors and super-fast response times, and while 280Hz is a subtle improvement over 144Hz, it is noticeably smoother. Darting around the map feels effortless, and the complete lack of motion blur just makes each movement so smooth and precise that it’s hard to go back to displays with higher response times. Those kinds of butter-smooth framerates are tough to hit unless you have a pretty decent graphics card, though, even at 1080p. You may have to drop some graphical settings to get there, too, so make sure your PC is up to the task before dropping the cash to go all-in on refresh rate.

With more typical single-player games, like Battlefield V, the value add becomes a bit murkier. Sure, you still get the amazing colors of an IPS panel, not to mention the nearly blur-free response time. But you also have a lower contrast ratio than VA panels, barely-there HDR performance, and a lot of wasted refresh rate, since you’re highly unlikely to hit 240+ fps in high-fidelity titles. Couple that with the not-quite-sharp-enough 1080p resolution, and many gamers would probably do better with the1440p, 144Hz version of this monitor for a similar price – especially considering the advantages of higher resolution on the desktop. But unlike previous monitors in this space, the VG279QM acts as a pretty good all-arounder, without the larger sacrifices that 240Hz TN panels come with.

Still, there’s a place for those TN panels – if you really want 240Hz but don’t have the budget for Asus’ display, check out AOC’s AG251FZ2. At $279, it’s more affordable, albeit with a less impressive TN panel and a slightly smaller 25” size. But if you can swing the $400, trust me: the VG279QM is a big step up from its TN predecessors.

Purchasing Guide

The Asus TUF Gaming VG279QM is available on Amazon and Newegg with an MSRP of $400

HBO has announced that it will be making over 500 hours of its original programming available to stream for free to help “provide some entertainment relief for those doing their part to keep everyone safe and healthy in this time of social isolation.”

Starting Friday, April 3 for a “limited time” (the specific length of the free screening period hasn’t been announced) you’ll be able to stream some of the most iconic HBO series – like The Sopranos, Succession, Six Feet Under, The Wire, and Barry – on the HBO Go and HBO Now apps and websites for free, without a subscription. Additionally, HBO is making available a handful of films like Detective Pikachu, The Lego Movie 2, Crazy. Stupid, Love, and more.

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Below is a selection of the content coming to HBO Go and HBO Now for free, including nine full series and ten documentary series:

• Ballers (5 Seasons)
• Barry (2 Seasons)
• Silicon Valley (6 Seasons)
• Six Feet Under (5 Seasons)
• The Sopranos (7 Seasons)
• Succession (2 Seasons)
• True Blood (7 Seasons
• Veep (7 Seasons)
• The Wire (5 Seasons)
• The Apollo
• The Case Against Adnan Syed
• Elvis Presley: The Searcher
• I Love You, Now Die: The Commonwealth v. Michelle Carter
• The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley
• Jane Fonda in Five Acts
• McMillion$
• True Justice: Bryan Stevenson’s Fight for Equality
• United Skates
• We Are the Dream: The Kids of the MLK Oakland Oratorical Fest

If you’ve ever wanted to catch up on classic HBO shows like The Wire or The Sopranos, or more recent offerings like Barry and Succession, now would be a good time.

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If you want to take a break from streaming shows and movies, be sure to check out our list of the best games to play while you’re stuck at home. And here are some easy ways to stay safe and help prevent the spread of COVID–19.

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Andrew Smith is a freelance contributor with IGN. Follow him on Twitter @_andrewtsmith.

Thanks to a weekend trial of Predator: Hunting Grounds, I got to follow up on the couple of matches I played of Illfonic’s upcoming multiplayer shooter last fall to find out if the experience could stand the test of time. And I’m happy to report that after a few hours of play, several matches as both humans and the Predator, I’m eager to jump back in and find out if it still bleeds, so I can kill it.

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Hunter and Hunted

I broke down a bit of the difference in playing as either the Predator or the elite, human squad out in the field during my PAX West 2019 Predator: Hunting Grounds preview, but as a brief recap: Predator pits four humans on a set of various missions (find drugs, find bad men who probably sell drugs, kill men and their drugs) while racing against both the clock and AI enemies. All the while, the dreadlocked alien has one goal — kill this group of soldiers.

To steal from my coworker Tom Marks, Predator takes the smart approach that other recent asymmetric multiplayer games do — by giving the humans a mission other than killing the big bad, the added purpose makes every role feel vital even when you’re not the obviously very cool teched out alien. The missions, at least in the trial, are often samey and rather boring, moving you and your team from one pertinent location to the next while mowing down relatively simple AI enemies. But the hook of having something to do other than fear the Predator adds a nice cadence and purpose to matches that made the Predator’s hunt more unpredictable match to match.

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And that unknowable fear is key to the experience — the Predator is out there in the jungle, somewhere, and I often scanned Illfonic’s lush jungles (which look beautiful from afar but don’t quite hold up when close up against a tree or decaying structure) fruitlessly hoping to catch a glimpse of my foe running amongst the trees. Illfonic has captured a really intriguing blend of constant dread and the player’s need to compartmentalize that dread until it can’t be helped. For my first few matches I was a skittish, unhelpful squadmate, and I’m sorry to all of the strangers I played with. I feared the Predator could be behind any tree, around the corner of any dilapidated building, and I often met my end because of that. An unseen batch of AI foes, or, more commonly, the Predator finding me because I strayed away from the group.

I quickly had to get the idea of the Predator’s might out of my head — it would eventually come to kill us, and that’s when I could worry about its superior strength. Instead, I focused on being a more present player, and a more active teammate, and I often saw more success because of it.

Hunting Grounds rewards teams working together. Any time myself or someone else strayed from the pack, it was almost always to our detriment. But even when playing with strangers, and omitting voice chat, we could still complete our mission, or even take down the Predator, by sticking together, pointing out trouble with a quick ping system, and responding quickly to call in all our firepower when the Predator appeared. Whereas fighting the human AI is a matter of getting the jump on them and using cover well, the Predator can move so quickly, and so unexpectedly, that it’s often about finding the ideal window to unleash hell on it.

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And when playing as the Predator, how you respond to those firefights often determines the flow of a match in an instant. You can try to fight from afar, shooting down from the tree branches and using camouflage to avoid being spotted. Or, you can jump right into the fray, using melee attacks to swipe at foes while also opening yourself up to a lot more potential damage. Though trust me, few things have frightened me like being a human player inside a room as the Predator speeds in through the doorframe. There’s no way to win, then.

Finding balance is the key to winning as Predator, both in when to go full force on attacking or hang back in the shadows like a forest Batman, especially when you don’t know whether humans are packing grenade launchers or pistols. And all of your abilities are tied to a single energy gauge, so while firing off a few full-force blasts from your shoulder cannon could knock an enemy out, you might have no energy left to turn invisible and flee afterward. The Predator is, no doubt, a strong opponent to best, but at least with my time so far, it feels like there is enough in balance that defeating it feels achievable in every match, at least at first.

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Ranking Up

The biggest change from playing two matches of Hunting Grounds to playing a weekend of it was getting a chance to understand how progression works. With an overarching level tied to XP gained from both matches played as the Predator and humans, I unlocked “field lockers” — Predator’s version of loot boxes, that come with a host of weapon and character skins for customization. You’ll unlock more boxes as you level up, and can use currency to buy them as well, both in-game and real world. But for now, it seems these loot boxes are cosmetic only, and I obviously hope they stay that way.

But there is progression to characters as well. While I unfortunately didn’t get to play around with the different human characters, I was able to add perks and change loadouts for both humans and the Predator as I leveled up, with a clear bit of additional armament ready to be unlocked at higher levels. Keeping up with those upgrades is essential, as they can change how quickly a Predator’s energy reloads or improve the ability of muddy camouflage to hide from the Predator as a human. I noticed a marked improvement in my ability to handle the unexpected as I outfitted my character with more perks, and was eager to see what else I could unlock at higher levels and how it might make matches more varied, especially when so much can hinge on the more boring human AI enemies.

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I’m glad Predator: Hunting Grounds had this trial weekend, because the entire weekend was saddled with disappointing queue times, with it sometimes taking over four minutes to kick me into a match. The first day of the trial I was being matched with only a single human squadmate as well, too, or even having to go it alone against the Predator. Unsurprisingly, I didn’t do too well in those first matches.

By the end of the weekend, match load times were down, but I still waited a couple of minutes before getting kicked into a match, and had to back out to the menu a number of times as the Predator because I was not being matched with any opponents.

Of course, this being a test weekend, I’m glad Illfonic is taking the time to see how Predator works out in the wild. I think there’s a strong core in the matches — everything playing to its source material as being a Predator game still feels fun and worth diving into match after match. I do hope Illfonic can find a better balance to making the other objectives a bit more interesting, but outside of its technical issues, Predator shows plenty of promise by sticking to its franchise guns.

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Jonathon Dornbush is IGN’s senior news editor, host of Podcast Beyond!, and PlayStation lead. Talk to him on Twitter @jmdornbush.

In a recent interview with the British Academy of Film and Television Arts, Hideo Kojima, the head of Kojima Productions and game industry auteur, talked about working with celebrities in his video games and the future of his projects as a part of his induction into the organization’s fellowship program.

In Kojima’s last game, Death Stranding, the cast was predominantly made up of big name celebrities and cast members who weren’t usually affiliated with video games. Hollywood actor Norman Reedus, best known for The Walking Dead, starred as the main character, with Hannibal’s Mads Mikkelsen playing the antagonist role. Famous horror and comic book movie director, Guillermo del Toro, also played a major role in the game.

The game also included cameos from media personality Geoff Keighley, American talk show host Conan O’ Brien, and director Edgar Wright, just to name a few.

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A new patch for NHL 20 is coming on April 3, and it promises a number of gameplay changes based on player feedback. Starting with the general changes, the new update fixes an issue that could cause an injured player from being able to get off the ice. Ouch!

The new update also makes AI defenders smarter in some cases. It delivers a fix for AI that over-commits to the puck carrier in 2-on-1 situations, which should make scoring goals agains the AI more challenging. Additionally, the weak side defender in a 2-on-2 will now prioritize covering their own assignments over the passing lane. The update also “fixe[s] a case where players other than Brad Marchand would lose the puck at the start of a penalty shot,” which seems to be a reference to how the real-world athlete really botched a penalty shot back in January.

Elsewhere, the NHL 20 update makes goalies even smarter so they are better able to track the puck behind the net and close to the goal line; goalies are now smarter around passes close to the net.

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The encourage people to choose Battlefield V as their quarantine game of choice, DICE is giving everyone who logs into the military shooter a free bonus over the next few days.

Everyone who logs into Battlefield V on April 2, 3, or 4 will receive a stimulus package of sorts of 1500 Company Coin that will go directly into their game balance. People who log in over the weekend will get the Sapper Chassis and turret set for the Valentine MK VIII tank.

Battlefield V is regularly updated with new content and tweaks, so if you’ve been curious about the game or looking for a reason to come back, now seems like a good time to jump in.

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Call of Duty: Modern Warfare season 2 will soon be coming to an end, with April 7 being the last day of the two-month season of game play.

Season 2 brought a myriad of new content updates, with the return of the fan-favorite Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 map Rust and the addition of the battle royale mode, Warzone.

Before season 2 ends, Activision will be running a double XP weekend starting on April 3 at 10 PM PT through to April 6 at 10 AM PT. This overlaps with the free weekend for Modern Warfare’s multiplayer mode, allowing people to download and play the multiplayer content for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare from April 3 at 10 AM PT through to April 6 at 10 AM PT.

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It’s a pretty quiet week for the Nintendo Switch, with big titles like Trials of Mana and Xenoblade Chronicles Definite Edition still weeks away. Only a few indie titles are slated for this week. But don’t let the lack of hype turn you away; each of these indie games could be a sleeping giant.

Rocket jump into the puzzle platformer Gunbrick: Reloaded, fight your way across a magical world in the RPG adventure Monster Viator, and survive as a lone xenobiologist on a mysterious alien planet in the Indiecade 2019 Jury Pix Award Winner In Other Waters.

Players who enjoy the wacky chaos of Human Fall Flat may find a similar joy in the multiplayer puzzle action game Good Job! Play as the clumsy child of a CEO and climb the corporate ladder in office-themed puzzles. Do a good enough job and earn that promotion, or just embrace the chaos and see how much damage you can do; the choice is yours.

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If you’ve given up on finding the illustrious tarantula island in Animal Crossing: New Horizons, we have good news: You can just make your own. Instead of spending 2,000 Nook Miles per ticket on the chance of finding the rare deserted island that’s overrun with these spiders, which are desirable for how much they can be sold for, any deserted island can become a tarantula island if you just know how.

When Do Tarantulas Spawn?

The key to this method is understanding how the spawn mechanics in Animal Crossing: New Horizons work. Bugs require certain conditions to spawn, including months of the year, the weather, and the environment. Tarantulas require it to be nighttime (7 PM – 4 AM specifically) and during the correct months. In the Northern Hemisphere that’s November through April, while Southern Hemisphere players will need to be playing from May to October. You can always change your time and date in the Switch settings to fit these requirements, although time-skipping can have unintended consequences.

Tarantulas can be sold for a whopping 8,000 bells each (though you should put your first one in the museum of course), which means you can make some serious bells with this method. Make sure to purchase all the inventory upgrades first to get the best results, and ensure you aren’t carrying more than you need to.

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