We love finding great deals on great laptops, and this 770 HP Victus deal at Best Buy definitely checks both boxes. That's a 400 discount for an entry-level gaming laptop that'll serve you well for some years. You could spend an absolute fortune on a top-of-the-line gaming laptop--even one that's on sale--but you don't really need to if you aren't an upper-rank competitive gamer or someone who chases hundreds of frames per second at Ultra settings. If all you want is reasonable gameplay with Fortnite, World of Warcraft, Minecraft, and the like, then you can get it at an excellent price with this 15.6-inch It ain't the brightest with 250 nits, but you'll be pushing decent graphics at decent frame rates with the RTX 4050 graphics card and Intel Core i7-12650H processor. It'll also be able to keep up with your daily workload with 16GB of RAM, though we do wish the 512GB SSD was more spacious.

Last week, the Guardian spoke to the team behind Lili, a video game retelling of Macbeth, shown at the Cannes film festival. The headline quote from the piece was "Shakespeare would be writing for games today", which I have heard many times, and does make a lot of sense. Shakespeare worked in the Elizabethan theatre, a period in which plays were considered popularist entertainment hardly worthy of analysis or preservation – just like video games today! The authorities were also concerned about the lewd and violent nature of plays and the effect they may have on the impressionable masses – ditto! But if we agree that a 21st-century Shakespeare would be making games, what sort would he be making?

The video game with the cult-following among Gen Z and Alpha took over the box office last month. Now the blockbuster film adapted from the game, dubbed A Minecraft Movie, is headed to households everywhere. From creepers and piglins to villages and the Nether, the film is full of staples from Mojang's crafting game. But that doesn't mean you need to have played the game before to see it (although a primer wouldn't hurt). It stars Jack Black, Jason Momoa, Emma Myers, Danielle Brooks, and Sebastian Hansen and is directed by Jared Hess -- the man known for Napoleon Dynamite, the kookiest film of the 2000s.

When game designer and entrepreneur Henk Rogers first encountered Tetris at the 1988 Las Vegas Consumer Electronics Show, he immediately knew it was special. "It was just the perfect game," he recalls. "It looked so simple, so rudimentary, but I wanted to play it again and again and again … There was no other game demo that ever did that to me." Rogers is now co-owner of the Tetris Company, which manages and licenses the Tetris brand. Over the past 30 years, he has become almost as famous as the game itself. The escapades surrounding his deal to buy its distribution rights from Russian agency Elektronorgtechnica (Elorg) were dramatised in an Apple TV film starring Taron Egerton.

If rom-coms taught us anything, it's that you never know when you might meet the love of your life. Well, it's time to add the world of Minecraft to that list of potential meet-cute spots. A couple not only met but also actually got married in the world of Minecraft. The story centers on Sarah Nguyen, 24, from Oregon, and Jamie Patel, 25, from England, who met playing Minecraft as kids. That eventually blossomed into a romantic relationship and a beautiful wedding...hosted in the world of Minecraft.

Intel said Wednesday that the company is adding its XeSS 2 technology to even more games, including top-tier titles like Diablo IV and Assassin's Creed Shadows -- pushing them into the "definitely playable" category by increasing framerates up to a whopping four times higher. As part of the announcement, Intel also revealed that some sort of XeSS support now exists in over 200 PC games. XeSS 2 was added in conjunction with the 250 Intel Arc B580 ("Battlemage") architecture at the end of 2024, a "budget" graphics card that certainly helped alleviate some of the sticker shock that accompanied cards from AMD and especially Nvidia. It combines upscaling, frame generation, and latency in reduction, and doesn't necessarily require an Intel GPU, either. The most important thing about XeSS is that it applies additional frames where it's really needed -- at the low end.

On a crisp Saturday in March, beneath a canopy of pixelated cherry blossoms, two avatars stood in front of a digital altar crafted from shimmering quartz blocks and flickering redstone torches. They were surrounded by a sprawling Minecraft village, complete with custom-coded NPCs reciting lore about the couple's decade-long digital courtship. Nearby, pixelated foxes darted between guests--each one logged in from across the world, dressed in custom skins as forest druids and rogue mages. After the vows (typed and read aloud on Discord), guests dispersed for side quests, scavenger hunts, and an enchanted maze culminating in a virtual fireworks show. This wasn't a rehearsal for an in-person wedding--this was the wedding.

Minecraft is no longer (officially) available on virtual and mixed reality platforms. The change was confirmed in today's patch notes for the game's Bedrock edition following an announcement from developer Mojang in October. Those fall patch notes suggested that the platforms would be removed in March, so players who favored VR wound up getting a few extra weeks to fully immerse themselves in their blocky worlds. Removing entire platforms isn't a choice game devs make lightly. Especially when Minecraft's player base still numbers in the hundreds of millions at any given time, it seems unlikely that Mojang would take away virtual and mixed reality unless it wouldn't cause a serious disruption for its many fans.

If you ever thought about virtually wandering through Minecraft's Overworld in a VR headset, think again. Those days are over, at least from Microsoft's perspective. Microsoft's latest update to Minecraft's Bedrock Edition, version 1.21.80, Now, Minecraft remains as a game that can be played on multiple consoles and platforms -- just not VR. Vivecraft will allow Minecraft to continue, as a way to play the sandbox game on Oculus or Windows MR, according to the website.

For a 10-day period the summer of 2006, in between handing in my resignation at my first job on a games magazine and returning to Scotland to start university, I did almost nothing except eat, sleep and play The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion on my Xbox 360. I hauled my TV from the living room of my small, unpleasantly warm flatshare into my bedroom so I could play uninterrupted; it was all I could think about. My character was a Khajiit thief, a kind of manky lion in black-leather armour with excellent pickpocketing skills. One afternoon, I decided to see whether I could steal every single object in the smallish town of Bravil, and got caught by the guards a couple of hours in. I did a runner, dropping a trail of random plates, cheese wheels and doublets in my wake, and the guards pursued me all the way to the other side of the map, where they finally got entangled with a bear who helpfully killed them for me.