Devil May Cry 5 is Capcom back to its best. After a rocky start to the generation, the legendary developer has upped its game dramatically over the last couple of years, and the return of Dante is a standout moment, once again proving that no one understands action quite like Capcom.
In short, Devil May Cry 5 is easily one of the best action titles on the PlayStation 4. Its strength lies in its ability to convey intense, brutal, and satisfying combat in the most stylish way imaginable, resulting in something that’s both amazing to play and incredible to watch. The game’s a feast for the senses; an immensely polished thrill-ride that doesn’t let up until after the credits roll.
The holidays are over, the year is coming to a close, but like Christmas decorations on December 28, the holidays aren’t quite over yet. So let’s get a little festive one last time before we end the year and the decade.
We hope you had a great holiday season and are ready to take on a new year. This season always gets super busy, making it easy to lose track of the things that truly brightened our day. We wanted to take today to give you the opportunity to share the gift you enjoyed the most this year and why. Maybe you got a completely unexpected present, or you got exactly what you’ve been begging for. It could even be something you picked out for another person that totally made their day. Either way, now is the appropriate time to show off your loot and tell us why a gift meant so much to you.
If you boot up Overwatch between now and January 2, you’ll find five virtual presents waiting for you. As part of Overwatch’s annual Winter Wonderland event, Blizzard is once again giving players five free loot boxes that are filled exclusively with holiday themed skins, sprays, and more. The boxes do not contain three of this year’s Winter Wonderland legendary skins, as they are tied to weekly challenges that push the player win nine games to get a skin.
When you boot up the game, you are met with the message “It has truly been an eventful and amazing year, and we wanted to take a moment to thank you for being a part of it. We could not have done this without the tremendous support, passion, and enthusiasm that you’ve shown for Overwatch. From the entire Blizzard team, we wish you and yours the very best and look forward to spending an exciting new year with you!”
Here’s hoping all of you get at least one skin or item you’ve been wanting to add to your collection, and above all else, I hope you have a great holiday and new year. 2020 is going to be a great one for games. We may even get Overwatch 2.
At the start of the year, Switch fans got quite a shock when Nintendo announced the development of Metroid Prime 4 had been entirely restarted. This followed later on in the year with the delay of Animal Crossing: New Horizons.
With this in mind, it’s nice when we do get regular updates from developers about how their upcoming projects are coming along. In this case, the latest one is about the anticipated Switch exclusive, Bayonetta 3. A Twitter user reached out to PlatinumGames’ Hideki Kamiya recently and asked when fans could expect to hear more. Kamiya responded with the following line: “Development’s going really well. There you go” (translation by Nintendo Everything).
Nintendo has announced the next event for its free-to-play mobile game Mario Kart Tour. Of course, it’s all tied to the new year. Celebrations starting on 31st December with the aptly named New Year’s Tour.
This next tour will decorate the Tokyo track, add multiple new driver alts, karts and gliders, and ends on 14th January. As you can see in the trailer above, Mario is wearing traditional Happi attire from Super Mario Odyssey and Toad has a much sillier new year’s outfit on. There’s also a Gold Koopa and Red Yoshi on show.
We get fed the same spiel every generation, but newly minted PlayStation indies evangelist Shuhei Yoshida has purportedly been waxing lyrical about Sony’s next-gen system in an interview with Japanese magazine Dengeki PlayStation. According to DualShockers, the former Worldwide Studios chief reiterated how complicated the PlayStation 3 was to develop for, and how steps were taken to rectify this with the PlayStation 4.
The upcoming PlayStation 5, however, takes things to the next level. Allegedly studios working on the device are claiming that it’s the “easiest” console they’ve ever developed for. This, of course, doesn’t mean that teams are going to be pumping out AAA titles every six months; games are still outrageously difficult to develop, but it sounds like the Japanese giant has avoided hardware hurdles with its latest system. And that’s good news for players and creators alike.
The details of the patent explain slightly different uses for two of the newly added triggers, however. According to the documentation, the larger keys will be employed to extend the length of the revised DualShock’s hand grips, meaning that it’ll fit different hand sizes more comfortably. The other buttons are, as you’d expected, designed to be used in gameplay.
Standard shared web hosting packages are cheap and user-friendly, but they’re also slow, inflexible, and don’t have the power or functionality that professional and business users often need.
If you need more than a basic host but can’t afford a dedicated server or don’t want to deal with the complexity of these beasts, VPS (Virtual Private Server) hosting could be a smart choice.
Buying a VPS plan means that you get your very own virtual server environment. You have full control over the operating system, the extensions and apps you install, and all their settings. Each physical server will still host multiple VPS customers, but not as many as with shared hosting, and typically each VPS will be allocated a share of key resources – RAM, storage space, CPU cores – for their use alone.
This can be easier to manage than you might think. Many VPS plans include standard tools like cPanel to help monitor and configure your site. Some hosts will manage the service for you, monitoring for problems like a crashed service, and fixing them as soon as they’re detected.
VPS prices and specs vary from a few dollars a month to hundreds, depending on your requirements. There’s a lot of choice out there, but don’t panic – our list of five best VPS providers will point you in the right direction.
Founded in 2004, Hostinger has been providing a quality hosting service for some time now and their VPS hosting is no different.
You have plenty of choices here from the low-tier plan that has 1 CPU, 1 GB RAM, 20 GB of storage and 1000 GB bandwidth to high-tier plan where you get 8 CPU, 8 GB RAM, 160 GB of storage and 8000 GB bandwidth.
Pricing is affordable too, especially if you commit to longer terms. The 1 CPU plan starts at $3.95 per month (if you choose the 4-year billing) and renews at $8.16 per month, while the 8 CPU plan starts at $29.95 per month (if you choose the 4-year billing) and renews at $65.56 per month.
All plans have IPv6 support, a dedicated IP, 100 Mb/s Network and a few more additions. Linux users also have plenty of choices. Apart from the usual CentOS, Ubuntu, Fedora and Debian, you can also choose Suse. Windows VPS hosting is available as well, with the plans being more pricier but also more powerful.
If you encounter any problems, there’s a 24/7 live chat service to help you. Hostinger delivers a capable VPS hosting with a very tempting first term price, and with all plans being fully refundable, everyone can try out the service.
Bluehost has been around for quite some time and always offered powerful plans for a variety of users, and their VPS range is no different.
You have three plans to choose from, with the cheapest plan starting at $19.99 per month for the first term and $29.99 per month on renewal. That gets you 2 CPU cores (2x Xeon Gold 5220), 30GB SSD storage, 2 GB RAM, 1 TB bandwidth and one IP address. The top-tier plan called Ultimate, gives you 4 CPU cores (2x Xeon Gold 5222), 120GB SSD storage, 8 GB RAM, 3 TB bandwidth and two IP addresses, and it’s priced at $59.99 per month for the first term and $119.99 per month on renewal.
All plans come with a free SSL certificate and a 1-year domain. You also get unlimited subdomains and email accounts, and cPanel is included too. Domain privacy and protection, and SiteLock are categorized as optional add-ons, so you’ll have to pay extra if you need them.
Support is available 24/7 so if you encounter any difficulties you’ll be able to call them at any time of the day. All in all, Bluehost is a capable provider for both newbies and experienced users so they are definitely worth a try.
InMotion is one of the more popular web hosting providers out there and it is no surprise that they’re secured a spot here
Check out a few VPS hosting providers and it’s easy to be tempted with low headline rates, but don’t be fooled – companies use a range of tricks to keep their charges down.
The hardware specs of a starter product are often kept unrealistically low, for instance, to keep the price right down. Important items – backups, cPanel – may be expensive extras. And even then, the headline rate may only apply if you pay for two or three years upfront, increasing dramatically on renewal.
InMotion Hosting is refreshingly different. Its baseline VPS-1000HA-S plan doesn’t have the most eye-catching price at $39.99 per month over two years (at the moment of writing, the price dropped to $19.99 due to a sale), but it’s easy to see why the company asks this much. The product has a better specification – 4GB RAM, 75GB storage, 4TB bandwidth, 3 dedicated IPs – than some high-end plans from other providers, backups and a cPanel licence are included for free, and there’s a 90-day money-back guarantee.
There’s an unusual feature in what InMotion calls “unlocked CPU cores”. Rather than having access to one or two cores only, you’re able to spread your processing load across all cores on the server, a major performance boost for tasks involving a lot of simultaneous processing.
Welcome bonus touches include a feature called Launch Assist, which essentially means you get two hours of free time with one of InMotion’s server administrators. Whether you need to change domain settings, configure cPanel, migrate WordPress or database files, they can help you get the job done.
Put it all together and you’re getting a very capable set of VPS hosting plans. If you’d prefer a package that comes with unexpected surprises, rather than hidden catches, we’d give InMotion a try.
Some VPS hosts focus on first-time users, others go for big business, but Hostwinds does its best to appeal to everyone with no less than 10 different VPS hosting plans.
The low-end Tier One plan looks a little underpowered to us, with just 1GB RAM, one CPU core, 30GB of disk space and 1TB traffic. But it’s cheap at $4.49 per month, and you can extend it significantly without spending a huge amount (adding basic server monitoring and cloud backups costs an extra $6 a month for both).
The more realistic Tier Four includes 6GB RAM, 100GB drive space, two CPU cores and 2TB of traffic. It’s also significantly more expensive at $26.09 a month, but still competitive with other providers.
Meanwhile the top-of-the-range Tier Ten product gets you 96GB RAM, 16 CPU cores, 750GB storage and 9TB of traffic for an initial $296.09 a month. You probably don’t need anything like that, but this does show there’s plenty of scope for upgrading your site over time.
Every plan has some appealing configuration options. In particular, along with support for the usual Linux variants – CentOS, Ubuntu, Fedora, Debian – you can choose Windows Server 2008, 2012 or 2016 for only a $5 a month premium. That’s very good value, and if you’re more familiar with Windows than Linux, it could save you from lots of management hassles later on.
Liquid Web is a premium web hosting provider which has been offering top quality managed solutions for more than 20 years, and now handles 500,000 sites for more than 32,000 customers worldwide.
The company doesn’t try to beat the competition on price, instead focusing on delivering comprehensive products which will deliver quality results.
The cheapest Liquid Web plan may cost $59 a month (you can reduce that to $29 a month by going annual), for instance, but that gets you 2GB RAM, 40GB storage and a very generous 10TB of bandwidth.
There are lots of configuration options. Instead of just telling you that you’re getting CentOS 7, Liquid Web allows you to select CentOS 6, Debian 8, Ubuntu 14.04 or 16.04, and often with multiple options of their own: cPanel, Plesk, CloudLinux and more.
This is a managed product, too. Liquid Web fully supports the base operating system, and the support team will proactively restore failed services as soon as they’re detected. Getting a managed VPS with other providers could cost you an extra $30 a month, or more.
If your VPS still has issues, there’s speedy 24x7x365 support from knowledgeable professionals who will do their best to solve your problems at speed.
Liquid Web may not have the most appealing headline prices, but it’s still cheaper than many others considering the features you get, and the excellent support will help keep your site running smoothly down the line.
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