The absence of the E3 expo in Los Angeles for the past two years has left a gigantic vacuum in the video game calendar. Last week, the industry did its best to fill that gaping content maw with three online events – the Summer Game fest, the Xbox and Bethesda showcase and the PC gaming show. They were underwhelming for many seasoned players. Major reveals included a remake of The Last of Us, a remake of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II, Street Fighter 6, Final Fantasy XVI and news about the reimagining of the classic role-player System Shock. Even fresh titles seemed familiar.

If you're looking for a way to upgrade your TV setup before the big game without dropping too much money, one of Roku's soundbars could do the trick. Both the Streambar and the Streambar Pro are already competitively priced compared to other soundbars, but now you can get the Streambar Pro at its lowest price yet -- only $150. The smaller Streambar has also been discounted to $100, but it's hovered at that sale price for a few months now. The Streambar Pro is the larger cousin of the standard Streambar, and it adds a few extra features into the mix. First and foremost, it's larger and houses four 2.5-inch full range drivers and supports virtual surround sound.

It's just a little over two weeks until football's national holiday and if you want to get a new set for the big game, now is your chance. Best Buy is selling a 65-inch Vizio 4K TV for $500, which is down from $600. The deal lasts until February 15. The Vizio V655-J09 features 3840-by-2160 resolution and it supports a variety of high dynamic range formats including Dolby Vision, HDR10, HDR10, and HLG. However, neither Best Buy nor Vizio list the brightness and some reports put it at under 300 nits.

Since the pandemic began, the video games industry has been booming. Last year was a bumper year, with most of the world's population forced inside by lockdowns and looking for safe ways to have fun and socialise, and new games consoles such as PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S launching in November. UK consumers spent more on games last year than ever before; Roblox, a gaming platform popular with children and teens, saw an 85% uptick in players and shares in the company recently rose 60%, increasing its value to $47bn. Last year's games were great, too, from lockdown saviour Animal Crossing: New Horizons to the provocative horror game The Last of Us II and the knockabout multiplayer caper Fall Guys. But 2021, so far, is depressingly devoid of exciting gaming experiences.

The Super Bowl is just around the corner, and you know what that means: awesome game day food, a whole lineup of unusually interesting commercials, and of course, the most exciting event of the year for football fans, all while gathered around the big screen. Even cord-cutters won't have to miss out on the action. In fact, you can tune in on the cheap with the help of a pretty sweet discount on Amazon's Fire TV Cube, down to $80 today from a list price of $120. This cube-shaped streaming device is best-known for its voice control, with the smarts of Amazon's Alexa digital assistant built right in. You can turn on your TV, play videos and music, adjust volume, change the channel, check the weather and news, and more with just the sound of your voice.

On October 27, three of the biggest videogames of the year arrive, all at once: Wolfenstein 2: The New Colossus, Assassin's Creed: Origins, and Nintendo's Super Mario Odyssey. Together, these three titles represent a cross-section of the big-budget gaming industry, from a family-friendly run-and-jump romp to a bloody rampage through a Nazi-filled alternate history. From power fantasy to primer on Ancient Egyptian architecture, this one day showcases much of the best of what triple-A gaming--the biggest, costliest games by the biggest, wealthiest publishers--can do. It represents enough money to balance the budget of a small country. Accounting for years of development time, bleeding-edge machines and software, and astronomical advertising budgets, these three games, all told, are worth hundreds of millions of dollars. None of this is new, of course.

The residual plot above shows the prediction error of the test dataset plotted against a selected feature. We built this model just before the wild-card round of the NFL playoffs, and we wanted to test the model against 10 previous games. Of our 10 predictions, seven were correct, and two of the three incorrect predictions were very close to margin (50 percent), as seen in the table below. So, we were comfortable with this model. Next, our model correctly predicted the outcome of three out of four playoff games.