Month: September 2020

We all know Amazon Prime Day can be fun-filled drama with plenty of impressive deals on games, tech, household electronics, and more. But, one of the most popular items during Prime Day is always lurking, always waiting, until before you know it. You’ve got four in every room and Alexa watches you while you sleep.

Yes, the Amazon Echo series of smart speakers are unbelievable popular and tend to be one of the flagship items during Prime Day sales. This year, we expect no difference with the brand new 4th generation Echo Dot just being announced for preorder. Although that won’t be out until October 22, we can still expect a few cheeky preorder offers and bundles. That also means that the 3rd gen stock is set to be a very hot item as it’s going to be so cheap. Even now, the Echo Dot is available on an early Prime Day deal for just $39.98, and you get an extra Echo Dot for free.

Early Prime Day Amazon Device Deals

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There are already a few amazing Amazon device deals popping up before the event on October 13-14. The most popular of which is the deal we’ve already mentioned with the 3rd Gen Echo Dot being available for £39.98, and comes with an extra Echo Dot free.

Besides that, you can currently find a few impressive Echo Dot 4th Gen smart bundles, including the likes of Philips smart bulbs, smart plugs, and everything else that you could consider smart. You can also preorder two of the new Echo Dot and receive a $20 discount on your purchase. If you’re interested in some other early deals, head on over to find out the best electronics deals we expect from Amazon Prime Day, and what we expect overall Prime Day 2020.

Best Amazon Device Deals to Expect on Prime Day

Echo Dot deals, 3rd, and 4th gen are confirmed already. Other than that, you can expect the majority of Amazon devices to go on sale during the 48-hours of Prime Day. This would include smart speakers, Kindle e-readers, Fire Tablets, Fire Sticks, and everything else Fire.

You should also keep an eye out for some cheap bundles combining some of these devices, as there is a decent amount of money to be saved by quickly having just one purchase of a 4K Fire TV Stick, Echo Dot, and Amazon Smart Plug. For example, the 2020 Echo Dot can currently be preorder alongside an Amazon smart plug for just $59.99. This also applies to the slightly more expensive and aptly named, Echo Dot with Clock.

What is Amazon Prime Day?

Prime Day is one of the biggest shopping events of the year put on by the online retailer Amazon. The event usually lasts around two days and is specifically there to provide deals to Prime members. What is Prime? You might ask. Well in case you hadn’t heard about it just yet, Amazon Prime is a premium membership system where users can get access to a wide range of benefits for a monthly or yearly fee. There’s Prime Video, next day delivery, exclusive deals, and much more.

Prime Day usually situates itself in the Summer, normally July, but with everything that’s been going on in the world, it now finds itself firmly in October instead. It is set to start at 00:01 AM on October 13 and ends at 23:59 on October 14, so you’ve got two full days of deals to race through when it finally launches. But, we’re here to help with everything Prime Day and will be covering all the new and exciting deals that we are expecting to pop up.

If you’re not already a member, now is the time to sign up and take full advantage of the event. A 30-day free trial won’t cost you a thing, and you’ll be getting access to all of the best electronic, gaming, and tech deals available during the two-day event for 2020. If you’re a seasoned Amazon shopper, then the 1-year membership offers the best long-term value. The $119/yr fee is well worth the many perks of Amazon Prime.

Early Amazon Prime Day Membership Deals

• New Prime Members: Free 30-day trial membership
• Amazon offers 1 month of Prime for only $12.99
• New Student: Free 6-month trial
• Students also get 50% off 1 year of Prime

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Robert Anderson is a Commerce Writer for IGN. You can follow him @robertliam21

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The official Treyarch Studios Twitter announced today that the official reveal for Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War Zombies is happening later this week. At 10 a.m. PT/1 p.m. ET on Wednesday, Sept. 30, the official reveal of this new zombies story will go live on the official Call of Duty YouTube channel.

A new #Zombies story begins.

Watch the official reveal at 10AM PT Wednesday, Sept. 30th.https://t.co/TIBHK7LMOQ #BlackOpsColdWar pic.twitter.com/56EFrBYJ2l

— Treyarch Studios (@Treyarch) September 28, 2020

Fans of the series know that Call of Duty’s Zombies mode has grown far beyond the first Zombies mode that debuted in Call of Duty: World At War. What began as a wave-based zombie survival game mode grew into a separate entity with a complete story and dozens of maps. The longest-running Zombies storyline started years ago and continued through 2018’s Black Ops 4. You can check out our official Black Ops 4 Zombies wiki guide for information on how that storyline came to a close so as not to spoil it here.

Spoilers aside, what occurs in Black Ops 4’s Zombies was considered a definitive end, and considering Treyarch’s use of the word “new” in “a new #Zombies story begins,” it’s safe to say that Black Ops Cold War will see the beginning of a new zombie storyline for the Call of Duty series. We’ll be getting the first look at that this week when the official reveal goes live.

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For now, catch up on all things Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War by checking out the reveal and the reveal trailer. Then, read up on all the multiplayer details we know including maps, gameplay, next-gen capabilities, and more. If you’re looking to try the game out before it releases, read up on everything you need to know about the upcoming multiplayer betas and then read about what comes in each edition of the game up for preorder.

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Wesley LeBlanc is a freelance news writer and guide maker for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter @LeBlancWes.

The Epic Games vs Apple legal battle begins properly today as a hearing takes place to review evidence and decide on the legal outcome of Apple and Epic’s feud.

A hearing will take place today, September 28, with U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers in place to make the decision. Public opinion seems largely on Epic’s side as the company is seen to be challenging the status quo, but that’s no indication as to where the judge will draw the line.

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If you’ve not been keeping up with Epic and Apple’s disagreement, this all began when Epic implemented a direct-pay system into Fortnite. This meant that any V-bucks purchases sent money straight to Epic, bypassing the Apple App Store and ensuring Apple could not take a cut.

Naturally, Apple did not take kindly to this, and so the company removed Fortnite from the App Store. In response, Epic filed a lawsuit against Apple. It also began the #FreeFortnite hastag, along with an in-game event that featured a parody of the Apple 1984 commercial. Many saw these tactics as Epic weaponising its fans to hold sway against Apple.

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Apple responded by claiming that any damage Epic was suffering was “self-inflicted”. Despite requests from Epic, the courts ruled that Apple did not have to reinstate Fortnite on the App Store, which further damaged Epic’s fortunes. Epic quickly submitted a second request to be reinstates after reporting that daily active users of Fortnite on iOS was down over 60%.

The fate of this feud now lies with U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers, who will make a decision based on today’s hearing of the Preliminary Injunction, which begins at 9:30am.

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Matt Purslow is IGN’s UK News and Entertainment Writer. 

The world is still mourning the loss of Chadwick Boseman, who died in late August after a years-long battle with cancer. Now, his 21 Bridges co-star Sienna Miller reflects on his unconditional generosity while they worked together.

In an interview with Empire, Miller explained that Boseman fought for her to receive an increased salary for her work on the film, even going so far as to giving up a portion of his own salary to help out.

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Miller was hesitant to join the project at first as she was exhausted at the time from working non-stop, but Boseman convinced her to take the role of Frankie Burns as he was a big fan of her work.

“This was a pretty big budget film, and I know that everybody understands about the pay disparity in Hollywood, but I asked for a number that the studio wouldn’t get to,” Miller said. “Chadwick ended up donating some of his salary to get me to the number that I had asked for. He said that that was what I deserved to be paid.”

“It was about the most astounding thing that I’ve experienced,” she said. “That kind of thing just doesn’t happen.”

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Boseman’s impact was felt both on and off-screen, with many of his entertainment industry peers recounting their fond memories of the late actor.

Best known for portraying Black Panther in the MCU, Boseman’s legacy is honored on the latest cover of Empire magazine. A 40-minute special detailing his life and career is also available to stream on Disney Plus.

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Matthew Adler is a Features, News, Previews, and Reviews writer for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter @MatthewAdler and watch him stream on Twitch.

The rules of time-travel have been debated by scientists and sci-fi fans alike for years, but now a student physicist has been able to “square the numbers” to show how paradox-free time travel is theoretically possible. This means that should someone be able to time travel, the dreaded butterfly effect might not be as inevitable as has been feared — but that doesn’t mean a time-traveler might not still face unintended consequences.

In a peer-reviewed paper published in Classical and Quantum Gravity, University of Queensland student, Germain Tobar, collaborating with the university’s physics professor Fabio Costa, mathematically discovered how, “time travel with free will is logically possible in our universe without any paradox.”

The math involved in all this is enough to make Will Hunting scratch his head but Tobar, like a different Matt Damon character, has been able to “science the shit” out of theorizing how one could travel through time without causing those pesky logical paradoxes that bedevil many a science-fiction protagonist.

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One such example is the so-called grandfather paradox wherein, as their paper puts it, “a time traveller could kill her own grandfather and thus prevent her own birth, leading to a logical inconsistency.” Or, someone going back in time to prevent the COVID-19 pandemic from happening would then nix the very reason why they ever traveled through time. Yes, it’s like those arguments about time travel in Avengers: Endgame all over again!

“This is a paradox – an inconsistency that often leads people to think that time travel cannot occur in our universe,” Costa said. “Some physicists say it is possible, but logically it’s hard to accept because that would affect our freedom to make any arbitrary action. It would mean you can time travel, but you cannot do anything that would cause a paradox to occur.”

Tabor basically said, hold my beer and went about proving that, theoretically, one can travel through time, exert free will, and not create any such logical paradoxes.

Because classical dynamics and Einstein’s Theory of Relativity are at odds with each other on the matter, Tobar’s paper calculated how closed time-like curves (CTCs) “are not only compatible with determinism and with the local ‘free choice’ of operations, but also with a rich and diverse range of scenarios and dynamical processes.”

Or, as Popular Mechanics succinctly puts it, “as long as just two pieces of an entire scenario within a CTC are still in ‘causal order’ when you leave, the rest is subject to local free will.”

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Tabor’s calculations show how theoretically one could time-travel and exert free will in a way that wouldn’t prevent the reason why they went back in time. But it could make them wish they had never time-traveled to begin with:

“In the coronavirus patient zero example, you might try and stop patient zero from becoming infected, but in doing so you would catch the virus and become patient zero, or someone else would. No matter what you did, the salient events would just recalibrate around you. Try as you might to create a paradox, the events will always adjust themselves, to avoid any inconsistency.”

In the words of those venerable time travel experts Bill S. Preston, Esq. and Ted “Theodore” Logan: bogus!

For more science coverage, learn about the possibility of life on Venus, evidence of a parallel universe where time runs backward, why the moon is rusting, and the discovery of underground lakes on Mars.

Amazon has announced that Prime Day 2020 will take place October 13-14. That’s a few months later than usual, but these are nothing if not unusual times. A vast array of products Amazon sells will be on sale during the event, including gaming chairs. So if your current desk chair could use an upgrade–and specifically an upgrade to a racing-style gaming chair–you’ll want to be on the lookout for any killer deals that crop up. Luckily for you, we have a whole article on that, and you’re looking at it now.

So bookmark this page now and come back during the sale to find all the best gaming chairs for your needs. And if you’re interested in discounts on anything else, also be sure to check out our mega-list Amazon Prime Day 2020 article, which will transform into a collection of the best deals available when the discounts go live.

In the meantime, here’s some info you may find useful.

Prime Day Deals Live Now

Amazon isn’t waiting until mid-October to put up all the deals. Already you can save on a handful of items, assuming you’re a Prime member.

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Only Prime Members Will Get the Sale Prices

• Start a Free Trial (if you’ve never used the free trial)
• Get Prime for One Year – $119
• Get Prime for One Month – $12.99

Speaking of, since it’s Prime Day, you do actually have to be a Prime member to take advantage of the savings event.

Thankfully, you have a number of options for how to subscribe. For starters, if you’ve never done a free trial before, you can get one for a month at no cost. It even lets you participate in Prime Day, regardless of whether you cancel before paying a dime.

For those who have used their free trial before, you can get a one-month membership for $12.99 or a one-subscription for $119.

Last Year’s Prime Day Gaming Chair Deals

One of the best ways to figure out what kinds of deals to expect from this year’s Prime Day is to see what the online retailer did last year. Last year, a number of gaming chairs went on sale during the big day(s), including chairs from Homall, Respawn, and OFM. The discounts tended to be on the more affordable chairs, but they were good enough that they brought chairs that retail for $200 down to $100. Not bad

It’s also worth noting that Amazon wasn’t the only retailer to offer gaming chair discounts. We also saw discounts at Best Buy and Walmart. We’ll be keeping an eye on all of the retailers this Prime Day, and we’ll park all the best gaming chair deals right here. So come back on October 13 for the goods.

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Chris Reed is IGN’s shopping and commerce editor. You can follow him on Twitter @_chrislreed.

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Season 6 of Call of Duty starts today at 11 PM PT and this latest update is jam-packed with new features. A new trailer teased what’s to come, but for those eager to know it all, here’s everything you need to know about what’s coming to Modern Warfare and Warzone.

Story

To set the scene for Season 6, recently dispatched Nikolai and Farah discover a huge secret about Al Qatala’s operations in the city of Verdansk: They use the empty subway tunnels to travel unnoticed. By recommissioning the trains, Armistice is put back on track towards freedom from this dangerous international syndicate. These tunnels are key narratively and mechanically, as they facilitate this season’s new fast travel system in Warzone.

Fast Travel

The Metro is your new way to speed around Verdansk in Season 6. It combines pre-existing points of interest with new stations, so players will now have a high-risk, high-reward option while navigating the city.

Continue Reading at GameSpot

Tomorrow, create chaos all across Verdansk in Season Six of Modern Warfare and Warzone.