Samsung’s New 980 Pro SSDs Might Be Fast Enough For PS5

Solid-state drives, or SSDs, keeping getting quicker and quicker. If you’ve recently upgraded your PC with a motherboard that supports PCIe 4.0, then you have access to some of the fastest drives out there. This includes Samsung’s new 980 Pro, which could be fast enough to be used as expandable storage for the PlayStation 5, pending Sony’s confirmation that it will fit in the next-gen console.

The NVMe M.2 drive is Samsung’s new flagship storage option, boasting sequential read/write speeds of up to 7,000MB/s and 5,000MB/s, respectively. To put that into perspective, that’s already twice as fast as the maximum capabilities of PCIe 3.0, as well as 13 times faster than the more popular SATA SSDs that have become incredibly cheaper over the last few months.

Of course, you’ll need a motherboard that supports PCIe 4.0 to really bring the best out of the 980 Pro, and Samsung is seemingly aware that most of its customers won’t have that yet. The 980 Pro is still compatible on PCIe 3.0 boards and features some impressive speeds on the more limited interface. With sequential read/write speeds of 3,500MB/s and 3,450MB/s respectively, this could be a great drive to use now and future-proof your PC for the years to com.

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Pokemon Go Is Holding A Team Rocket Event Before Jessie And James Leave The Game

Team Rocket’s Jessie and James made their debut in Pokemon Go earlier this summer, but they won’t be around for much longer. The duo are set to leave the game on September 30, but before then, Niantic is holding a little event that gives you more chances to battle them before they blast off for good.

Starting today, September 22, at 12 PM local time, Jessie and James will appear in Pokemon Go more often than usual, so you’ll have more opportunities to challenge them to battles and rescue their Shadow Pokemon. Unlike other Team Go Rocket grunts, Jessie and James will appear above the world map in their signature Meowth-shaped hot air balloon, so you’ll know immediately when you’ve spotted them.

The Team Rocket event runs through the end of the month, until 11:59 PM local time on September 30, when the duo will leave the game. It’s not yet clear if Jessie and James will return to Pokemon Go in the future, so if you want to add their Shadow Ekans and Koffing to your collection, you’ll need to battle them before they depart. You can read more about the event on the Pokemon Go website.

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Surprise! Xbox Preorders Were A Total Mess, Too

Xbox Series X and S preorders went live this morning right on time, as Microsoft announced they would. At least, they did in some places. For some people. As long as you weren’t stuck in a queue, or told it was sold out when it seemingly was not. Well, at least Amazon had pictures of cute dogs to keep you company.

Predictably, Xbox preorders were a shitshow, demonstrating for the third time in a short span (after the RTX 3080 and PS5) that retailer websites just aren’t equipped to deal with this level of heavy demand. Microsoft appears to have done what it could, announcing that preorders would go live at a specified time so that people could be prepared, rather than giving bots the opportunity to scrape everything up as they went live. But everyone knowing exactly when preorders would begin also ensured the maximum amount of traffic to all of these websites, and none of them seem to have handled it particularly well.

For starters, neither Amazon nor Best Buy had their preorders available right at 8 AM PT. That may have meant you were stuck frustratingly refreshing those pages, expecting them to be live any second, when you could have been spending your time frustratingly refreshing pages on Walmart, Target, and the Xbox Store, where there were consoles to place orders on right away.

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Dishonored, Prey Dev Arkane Hiring For Unannounced AAA Project

Developer Arkane Studios is hiring for some unannounced AAA title. This comes not long after the Dishonored and Prey creator was scooped up by Microsoft, along with other ZeniMax Media studios for $7.5 billion.

According to a Twitter thread by user MauroNL3, a number of positions are open at Arkane’s Austin, Texas and Lyon, France locations. The availabilities run the gamut from character animation engineer and engine programmer to systems designer and tools programmer. Many of the positions hint at what Arkane plans to work on next.

The graphics engineer position in Austin is looking for someone with Unreal Engine 4 familiarity, signaling a possible engine change for the studio. Most of Arkane’s games, with the exception of Prey, run on a form of id Tech, a proprietary engine developed by id Software.

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Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare Season 6 Brings Back Some Familiar Faces

Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War is fast approaching, but if you’re still getting your first-person shooting fix with Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, you have more seasonal content to look forward to next week.

Season 6 for both Modern Warfare’s multiplayer and the free-to-play battle royale, Warzone, is launching on all platforms on September 29. The trailer for the new season brings back two of Modern Warfare’s main characters–freedom fighter Farah Karim and Soviet soldier Nikolai. The two are involved in an operation underground, with an abandoned subway station looking like a new map setting for the new season.

The trailer doesn’t reveal much else about what will be included in Season 6 or what will be exclusive to Warzone. You can probably bet on getting both Farah and Nikolai as operators with the battle pass, as has been the tradition with past season-headlining characters.

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Hey, You: It’s National Voter Registration Day, So Register To Vote

We all have a lot of fun here talking about video games and movies and occasionally Lego Baby Yodas, but there’s one thing that’s no laughing matter: democracy. The United States election is coming up, and today is National Voter Registration Day. The holiday (of sorts) is a reminder to make sure you’re registered to vote in November.

“But where do I start?” you may ask. I’m so glad you did! The National Voter Registration Day site has all the information and resources you need to check your voter registration in your state or territory. If you aren’t registered, you can go straight from there to the correct registration link, or even request a mail-in ballot. Registering to vote is important, because without a proper registration you may not be able to vote in November.

But don’t just listen to me, listen to important people like these celebrities.

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Attack On Titan Final Season Coming To Funimation Later This Year

Attack on Titan fans finally have confirmation about the upcoming fourth season. Funimation announced that the Attack on Titan final season sub and dub will be available on its streaming service later this year. The subtitled episodes will stream day and date with its Japanese broadcast in the US, Canada, the UK, and Ireland.

While no date has been announced, Funimation has released an official trailer for the upcoming season, which you can watch below.

Animation studio MAPPA replaced Attack on Titan’s original studio, WIT, for work on the final season. With the MAPPA takover, Jun Shishido and Yuichiro Hayashi replaced Tetsuro Araki and Masashi Koizuka as chief director and series director, respectively. MAPPA is the studio responsible for hit Yuri on Ice, on which Shishido was the chief director, as well as other well-known series like Hajime no Ippo and Kakegurui.

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Destiny 2 Just Added A Mission Honoring A Developer – Here’s How To Find It

Destiny 2‘s September 22 weekly reset came with a small hotfix, as well as another new addition: a tribute to Vicarious Visions developer Matt Helsom, who worked on Destiny 2 during the years it was being published by Activision. Helsom died in 2019, and a short new mission commemorates his contribution by writing him into Destiny lore as a Golden Age figure.

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Fire up Destiny 2 starting today and you’ll see a screen that directs you to Mars to investigate a signal. You won’t see this mission in your quest log or receive any markers to track it, thanks to the fact that this isn’t your usual Destiny 2 excursion. To find the tribute, head to the Braytech Futurescape area of Mars and head north into the building, past Ana Bray, toward the Mindlab: Rasputin area.

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CW’s Supergirl To End With Season 6

The CW’s sprawling DC superhero universe, the Arrowverse, is about to get a little smaller. Supergirl will be ending its run with Season 6, which is scheduled to premiere next year, GameSpot has confirmed. This is the second Arrowverse series to conclude following the franchise’s titular Arrow, which ended after 8 seasons earlier this year.

The show’s final season will include 20 episodes and will likely arrive at some point in the midseason of 2021, although no premiere date has been set. Production is scheduled to begin later this month.

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It Sure Looks Like People Are Buying Xbox One X By Mistake

Microsoft’s announcement that its next generation would be called Xbox Series X and Series S got some amount of ribbing–what if people confuse it with the current-gen Xbox One X and One S? Now as the console preorders go live, there’s at least some indication that the naming scheme is leading to mistaken purchases.

According to Amazon’s “Movers & Shakers” chart in the video games category, Xbox One X sales are up 431% as of the time of writing. These kinds of percentage-based charts can be misleading, but that kind of sudden surge at least suggests that some consumers may be buying the system by mistake, intending to preorder the next-gen console. This is speculation, however, so we can’t make definitive conclusions.

There is no similar surge for Xbox One S on the charts. If product confusion were at issue it seems that may be happening too, as customers mistake the One S for the similarly named Series S.

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