For a very limited time, the biggest and baddest gaming monitor you can possibly get (short of getting a TV) has dropped to its lowest price ever. Samsung via its official store is offering the massive 57" Samsung Odyssey Neo G9 Dual 4K UHD gaming monitor for $1,349.99 with free shipping. If you click on the link and you see $1,449.99, don't give up! All you have to do is reload the page about three to five times. This discounted price is reserved for "select" customers, but Samsung is essentially just RNG-ing it every time someone lands on the page. Once you see that, add the $50 off upgrade credit on the product page, and then apply 10% off coupon code "L8AS4HAL4O" in your shopping cart. Your final price will be $1,160. This monitor retailed for $2,500 when it first launched in late 2023.
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57" Samsung Odyssey Neo G9 Dual 4K Monitor for $1,160
Reload this page until you see the price of $1,349.99 (usually 3x to 5x refreshes)
Add the $50 Exclusive Upgrade Credit
Proceed to your shopping cart
At your cart, apply 10% off code "L8AS4HAL4O"
Final price will be $1,160 with free shipping (before taxes)
The 57" Samsung Odyssey Neo G9 is one of few 57" dual 4K UHD monitors on the market, boasting an eye-watering 7680x2160 resolution, or the equivalent of two 4K UHD monitors stacked next to each other. Despite the display being so large, it has an above-average 140ppi pixel density, which is amazing considering the fact that in general the bigger the display, the lower the ppi. To put that into perspective, it's as sharp as a 32" 4K monitor. Wow.
The Odyssey Neo G9 is equipped with a Mini LED backlight paired with a quantum dot (QLED) panel. Like its namesake suggests, mini-LED panels have smaller LEDs than traditional LED LCD monitors, so you can squeeze in more lighting zones. Mini-LED monitors are also much brighter than OLED monitors, which is very important because larger monitors are generally dimmer than smaller ones to start. Local dimming combined with higher brightness improves contrast ratio and HDR and is also useful in overpowering glare and reflections.
I own one of these, and it's BIG.
The Samsung Neo G9 isn't a one-trick pony, and all the other specs live up to what we'd expect from a top-end gaming monitor. The display boasts an aggressive 1000R curve that practically hugs you as you play games. Curved panels are useless with small monitors but extremely helpful with super-wide ones. It also features a 1ms response time and 240Hz refresh rate. It is HDR1000 certified, which means that it can maintain peak brightness up to 1,000 nits. It's FreeSync Premium Pro certified, which means it works with G-Sync in compatibility mode as well.
Should you buy the Samsung Odyssey Neo G9 ?
Obviously, the Samsung Odyssey Neo G9 isn't a monitor for everyone. You need a rather generous gaming budget. Also, not all games support this resolution and aspect ratio. Some games will have letterboxing to compensate. Finally, gaming at dual 4K UHD resolution is extremely GPU intensive. Make sure you have a good graphics card that can handle the load. We'd recommend something no less powerful than a GeForce RTX 5070 Ti or Radeon RX 9070 XT.
Eric Song is the IGN commerce manager in charge of finding the best gaming and tech deals every day. When Eric isn't hunting for deals for other people at work, he's hunting for deals for himself during his free time.%!s()
Typing something that looks a bit like a face using nothing but a semicolon, an underscore, and what I've just learned is called a caret will never not be charming to me. However, the odd kaomoji is the limit of my text-based artistic talent. I can do nought but bow down to the supreme power of ASCII artists—especially when some are making entire cyberpunk cities out of ASCII symbols.
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But rather than an impressive 2D image, one solo developer has created an ASCII sci-fi city that you can walk around. Traditional 3D models are eschewed in favour of a custom ray-casting engine that, at the risk of over-simplifying, renders visible surfaces as ASCII art. Built by Grow Now! Games, the creator describes the project as a "fun little prototype" that runs from a single HTML file.
"There's no Unity, there's no Unreal, there's no 3D models, textures, or shaders," the developer explains. "Underneath the system, if you like, it's a grid-based 3D world. The city stores where roads, buildings, trees, cars, and people are, along with things like building height. And every frame, the renderer casts rays out from the camera across that grid, finds the first thing each ray hits, and uses the distance to work out perspective, size, depth, and what should be hidden behind other things."
Rendering at a 'resolution' of 120 x 56 ASCII characters with noticeable flickering, it's not the easiest thing on the eyes. Still, at the time of writing, the developer's original prototype video has been viewed more than 1 million times, and if that isn't evidence folks crave visual styles beyond grim-dark realism, I don't know what is.
The developer has continued to work on the project since uploading that first video earlier this month, detailing a number of improvements in their latest upload. The biggest news is that they're now offering access to the prototype for any curious cyberpunks via their Ko-Fi. Alongside engine improvements, this playable version also bumps up the resolution to 180 x 80 ASCII characters, making for a generally smoother, more detailed experience.
A Walkable 3D ASCII City in One HTML File — Now You Can Try It! - YouTube
Another big update to the prototype gives the buildings both interiors and multiple floors, allowing you to view the ASCII city from a fresh perspective. Grow Now! Games is far from done with the project, saying they've begun thinking about implementing a dialogue system and turning the prototype into a more fully-featured game.
Though still pretty unique, it wouldn't be the first game with an ASCII art style. For just one recent example from last year, our Josh got lost in the symbol sauce of Effulgence RPG, a turn-based title that sees you turning monster parts into weapons. Grow Now! Games hasn't teased any details beyond that potential dialogue system, but I can't wait to see how they paint their little ASCII town red.
Keep up to date with the most important stories and the best deals, as picked by the PC Gamer team.
Jess has been writing about games for over ten years, spending a significant chunk of that time working on print publications PLAY and Official PlayStation Magazine. When she’s not investigating all things hardware here, she's either constructing a passionate defence of a 7/10 game, daydreaming about her debut novel, or feeling wistful about the last time she chased some nerds around a field with an oversized foam sword. %!s()
Some stories refuse to stay on the page. The Hollywood Reporter’s Beyond the Book column explores what happens when books make the leap to screen and beyond — unpacking what stayed, changed, how it was done and why it matters with the creatives who made it.
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Before director Ben Gregor helmed Vertical’s The Magic Faraway Tree, he had never grown his own tomatoes. But during production, he found himself occasionally slipping away to the set’s greenhouse, where some of the most significant moments in the adaptation of Enid Blyton’s The Enchanted Wood unfurl.
“It smelled so good and it was so quiet. I had so many people asking me questions all day long, but no one could find me in the tomatoes,” the director tells The Hollywood Reporter. “I didn’t know how to garden. Now every year I’m growing tomatoes. I’m harvesting them, I’m making pasta and pizza sauce. I’ve learnt that from Tim and what Andrew brought to him. We’ve all taken something away from the process of making this film that slightly changed our lives.”
In Blyton’s book, there’s no storyline involving tomatoes. Nor is there a father named Tim, as the story’s fictional parents largely operate namelessly in the background. But their three children — the eldest a boy, and two younger girls — eagerly explore a magic tree in the English countryside, taking them to faraway lands in the clouds. They’re joined in these adventures by a set of fantastical characters, who equally buoy Blyton’s original and Farnaby’s modern spin: Moonface (Nonso Anozie), Silky (Nicola Coughlan), The Saucepan Man (Dustin Demri-Burns), Dame Washalot (Jessica Gunning), Mr. Watzisname (Oliver Chris), Angry Pixie (Hiran Abeysekera) and the villainous Dame Slap (Rebecca Ferguson).
The Magic Faraway Tree Book Cover
Little, Brown Books for Young Readers
Screenwriter Simon Farnaby’s The Magic Faraway Tree follows engineer Polly (Claire Foy) and her stay-at-home husband Tim (Garfield), who move their three children to the countryside after she quits her job at a tech company using smart fridges — voiced by Dame Judi Dench — to harvest customer data. With the move begrudgingly goes the devices (and online social lives) that dominate the attention of their kids, Beth (Billie Gadsdon), Joe (Phoenix Laroche) and Fran (Delilah Bennett-Cardy). But when Fran discovers a magic tree after wandering into the woods, the trio experience a series of life-altering adventures.
“I didn’t want to make an anti-screen movie. I wanted to show a modern family and all the challenges that come with dealing with this invasion of our lives from big tech,” says Farnaby, while crediting his wife Claire Keelan with introducing him to Blyton’s Faraway books and the U.K. sitcom The Good Life for its influence on his script. “To say there’s room for [screens], but there’s also room for playing in the woods, with your imagination, with your friends or your siblings. What was important was to keep the vibe of the books.”
“There’s a carefree sense of adventure in Blyton. She never went back and edited anything. She just typed, and that was what got published. So there’s an effortlessness to the story that we wanted to capture, and a very English kind of modesty,” says Gregor of the author.
The film worked to embody this, without venturing into the wax-ation about “how things were better before,” he adds. “The past can be looked on, especially in the United Kingdom, in a kind of jingoistic way. But you can find the parts of our culture that are worth loving and worth admiring. What’s beautiful is the English countryside and the values of common sense and togetherness, activity and adventure. There’s a lot there to treasure that has not been celebrated recently.”
Ultimately “all of the changes that we did brought tenderness into what is already quite a sweet story. We also had to bring risk and jeopardy. If you get stuck in the lands, you will die. If they give up, they will give up their dreams — the jeopardy of that is on the ground with the tomato story,” the filmmaker tells THR. “This family is constructing their dreams from a load of salvage with no budget and no Wi-Fi connection and I grow tomatoes now.”
The life-changing experience of those tomatoes on- and offscreen is just one way Farnaby’s script shares a spirit with Blyton’s 1939 children’s classic. Despite — and at times even because of — its plot differences, similar themes abound, including getting back in touch with nature, having a healthy appreciation for growth and change, and reconnecting with family — however you define it. “Simon wanted to have the parents as main characters to have a heartfelt story. You can’t imagine the film without Andrew Garfield and his longing to make connection, to make his family whole,” the director says. “It’s the same longing that Moonface has for connection with the kids who always forget him.”
The Magic Faraway Tree
Vertical
When it comes to fictional parents, in many children’s films and even books “there’s a shorthand to try and get you to care about the kids fast” whether it be through break ups, death or terminal diagnoses, says Gregor. But they didn’t want their parents to be “almost aggressive enemies or invisible.” Adds Farnaby: “We don’t kill a parent off in the first 10 minutes, which often happens — in films I’ve done, by the way. The mum and dad actually get on quite well, but it was a bit of a challenge. How can I do something not about divorce or death or kids trying to put their parents back together, but is driven by parents wanting their kids to have a different experience?”
Bringing this to screen and expanding the parents’ presence was part of “getting a bigger story that would fit an hour and a half or thereabout,” the writer explains. “Without wanting to criticize Enid Blyton, [the books are] fairly simple. They go up [a ladder], someone loses something, or they have to get something before they go down. It’s quite quick — all in a few pages.”
There was also “dealing with the old-fashionedness and bringing it up-to-date,” Farnaby continues. “The big thing in the books was that the kids really want to go to the countryside. They go, ‘Great! There’ll be wood, and I can play in the trees and eat cakes all day long.’ I don’t know any kid that speaks like that now.”
“I wanted to just have brilliant kids. They’re not likable to start. They are abrasive and we had feedback that ‘it’s too much.’ But then they transform,” adds Gregor. “The further the starting point, the bigger the transformation. When Beth says ‘Ok, I’ll join the family project,’ it’s a very down-low moment. I had to keep going to her [Gadsdon], to give less so that when she did give, it [was] meaningful.”
Farnaby’s work on projects like Paddington 2, Wonka and Ghosts well captures these kinds of dichotomies. In The Magic Faraway Tree, it’s a balance between funny and heartfelt that Gregor brings to life within a visual framework he calls the Blytopia. “What that means is imaginative, a sort of Heath Robinson-ish ingenious because there’s a lot of ingenuity in the lands. Claire Foy’s Polly is ingenious the way she uses salvaged stuff and her design skills to make random stuff,” he tells THR. “But keep it humble and modest. There was no plastic on set. I didn’t film one item of plastic in the whole film as a shorthand for everyone. Everything looked rougher — made of wood or old metal. It was a bit more found.”
The Magic Faraway Tree
Palisades Park Pictures
Bringing the grander “spectacle but modesty, humility but epicness” of Blyton’s magic tree, its lands and residents to the screen required both practical sets and a VFX department created just for the film. “There was no whole tree, because I wanted it to breathe. So we made our own visual effects company. We had a load of old servers, computers and electric fans and way too many of them plugged into the extension cables. It looked like some kind of dark web crypto farm above St James’s Park Tube Station in an abandoned headquarters of the subway,” he tells THR. “What it meant was the VFX are as handcrafted as all of the physical things.”
And while the director says he loves the VFX and the team of respected artists that became “like a little family,” he “built as many sets as I could” in an effort to balance Blyton’s fantastical and natural universe. Amid an assemblage of various sections equating to a three-story-high tree, sets featured fully constructed locations like Moonface’s house and Dame Washalot’s deck, alongside cushions rigged to lift the actors into the air. Filming was a highly physical experience, with the movie’s young actors having to traverse the tree with the help of climbing lessons and abseiling gear.
“The kids had to be amazed for real. So under the tree with the flowers, when you go in there through the veil, I wanted it to be like going into a rhododendron den,” says Gregor. “The Land of Goodies was edible, and yes, there’s huge giant sweets everywhere, but they’re growing on the trees. It’s a natural place.”
This “blytopia” philosophy extended to the characters themselves. “What I did with Moonface, it got some heat when the trailer came out because people were like, ‘You changed him too much. He should be Moonface, not Moon-Hair.’ But I just had a number of things that I wanted to do as part of my Blytopia,” the director explains. “Nonso is a fantastic actor, and to put him in a big white mask or VFX and cover his face, I just thought, why? I want to see his face. I want to see him connect.”
The choice was also partly inspired by Gregor’s experience on the BBC series Black Ops, which allowed him to “witness the power of Black hair and how amazingly expressive it all is. So I thought, what about a big crescent afro?” he tells THR. “[Nonso’s] face is darker, and there’s a dark side of the moon. His coat is dark on one side and light on the other. It’s all about the phases of the moon.”
In the script, Farnaby leaned into Blyton’s datedness as “kids find those old-fashioned traits quite funny. I liked that and definitely wanted to use the quaintness,” he tells THR. “For me, it was keeping the vibe of Enid Blyton in the tree and all those fun characters, but having it come colliding with the modern world. The tree people hadn’t had any modern kids for a while because Moonface said, ‘Let’s not have humans anymore,’ so they were all a bit old-fashioned.”
With a character like Silky, “she likes tea and cakes, and hasn’t heard of feminism, so that Beth can teach her something.” Farnaby understood The Saucepan Man as “a bit of a bad joke — that he can’t hear very well — you wouldn’t necessarily come up with now.” But his daughter found him funny the film, “it’s not that he’s deaf. He wears saucepans as an eccentric life choice, even though it means he can’t hear people, which I love.”
The children also provided the opportunity to shift away from certain depictions in Blyton’s writing. It’s why Beth, and not her brother Joe, is the oldest sibling in the film. “There’s a bit of casual sexism in her books — ‘You’re nearly as good as a boy’ — so the boy in [the film], he’s lovable, but he’s not ‘Come along, everyone. Keep up, girls.’ It just felt too 1950s.”
Moonface (Nonso Anozie) and Dame Washalot (Jessica Gunning).
Palisades Park Pictures
Since the film’s release overseas, some Blyton fans have appreciated the changes more than others. “On IMDb we don’t have a huge rating and I asked, ‘Why is that?’ I looked at it the other day, and it’s people who go, ‘Why isn’t it exactly like the books? Like exactly? Like why don’t they just film the books?’” Farnaby tells THR. “No disrespect to those people, but that is not going to be a good movie because you’ll have 20 very short stories with no connection, and it will all be sort of same-y.”
“I have a lot of respect for how loved a book is,” says Gregor. “It’s never the same as in your head, so I don’t expect to be as good as what’s in people’s minds. But I think everybody can see how full-hearted we were. And if you do something with love, even if it is different, people can acknowledge that’s not how it was in my head, but it was fine.”
Ahead of the film’s U.S. theatrical release, Farnaby is unsure whether Blyton’s work will garner the same reactions among Americans. They may have less familiarity with the beloved books than the U.K., where the film has become the top-grossing indie film in the first half of 2026, and is the latest in a line of book adaptations, alongside Project Hail Mary, Wuthering Heights and Hamnet, to bolster the regional box office. But after successful theatrical runs in places like Britain, Australia and Poland for Vertical, he is sure the movie’s Friday opening could cement future sequels. According to Gregor, there’s already a foundation of an idea for at least one immediate sequel. “When you grow up, you lose the idea of magic and that’s a central tenet of film — and certainly the main thing we want to explore in this sequel, which we will hopefully get to do,” he tells THR.
Farnaby says he’s up for at least two more films, though he notes the amount of book material available to them could produce more. “In terms of the story, for me, I was always sure that we could do sequels because there’s so many stories, so many lands to go to. And there’s like three or four books,” he tells THR. “So there’s plenty in there. And looking at it again, I was like, you could do like five sequels and there’s enough for Andrew and Claire to do. We’ve got lots of ideas about that, so it’s exciting.”
With the film’s international success the largest obstacle then may be, as with many family films featuring children or A-list actors, time. “Yeah, they’re going to age a little bit. I think the plan with the interest in two sequels was to maybe try and shoot them at the same time, and then the kids will be the same age,” Farnaby explains. “I know they suddenly change, but if we can do that, I think that’ll help us. The thing will be schedules, but Claire and Andrew are up for it, and the kids really want to do it. Everyone does, so fingers crossed.”
From left: Silky (Nicola Coughlan), Fran (Billie Gadsdon), Moonface (Nonso Anozie), Joe (Phoenix Laroche) and Saucepan Man (Dustin Demri-Burns)
Entertainment Film Distributors
Iman Vellani is hosting your countdown to Doomsday
Marvel recruits Ms. Marvel for Avengers: Doomsday (podcast)
Image: Marvel Studios
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With Avengers: Doomsday only four months away, Marvel and Disney are ramping up their promotional efforts for the first Avengers flick in seven years. Doctor Doom is invading Marvel video games, while Marvel Comics is revisiting the precursor to the 2015 Secret Wars event comic, which Doomsday (and, presumably, Avengers: Secret Wars in 2027) takes inspiration from.
The four months from now until Doomsday premieres give you plenty of time to watch the era-spanning movies on Marvel's official Doomsday watchlist, which starts with 2000's X-Men and ends with last year's The Fantastic Four: First Steps. Because everything gets an accompanying podcast these days, Marvel is premiering the Countdown to Avengers: Doomsday Official Podcast on Aug. 27. It will be hosted by none other than Ms. Marvel herself, Iman Vellani.
She'll be joined by Frank Alvarez as the pair revisits "all the major moments leading up to Doomsday," according to Marvel's press release. Vellani and Alvarez will examine crowd-pleasing scenes and discuss the films' broader legacies. The countdown podcast will last for five weeks, with its fifth and final episode coinciding with the rerelease of Avengers: Endgame in theaters, which will include a whole four minutes of new footage.
It's nice to know Vellani's not done with Marvel, but her joining Doomsday's podcast and not Doomsday itself isn't quite the return Ms. Marvel fans were hoping for. After debuting her take on Kamala Khan/Ms. Marvel in the 2022 streaming series Ms. Marvel, Vellani starred in 2023's The Marvels. That film ended with a meta scene of Ms. Marvel trying to recruit Hailee Steinfeld's Kate Bishop/Hawkeye for a new super team.
Vellani's Ms. Marvel hasn't popped up in the main Marvel Cinematic Universe continuity since, possibly because The Marvels was a box-office bomb, or possibly because the MCU just has too damn many characters right now. (Case in point: Shang-Chi's Doomsday appearance will be a full five years after his solo movie.) It's a shame, because Vellani is a near-perfect choice for Kamala Khan and her solo series is so damn good; Ms. Marvel has a 98% on Rotten Tomatoes.
Ms. Marvel is the type of new-ish Marvel superhero who can work in just about any story. She excels as a street-level hero like Spider-Man, protecting her neighborhood of Jersey City. Jersey City and New York City aren't too far away — why not have her join Tom Holland's next Spider-Man outing? If Spidey can have chemistry with Frank Castle, he can work with anyone. She's also fought in space and been the center of the Civil War-like event comic Outlawed.
While Vellani didn't get a chair during the big Avengers: Doomsday cast reveal stream last year, there's still the hope that she could return for Avengers: Secret Wars, or at least the MCU's post-Secret Wars future. The X-Men are headlining that future, and you know just who happens to be a mutant now after a controversial retcon? That's right — give Vellani yellow spandex and stick her in a future X-Men movie, Kevin Feige.
Until that future does or doesn't happen, you can catch Vellani next on the Doomsday pod. Countdown to Avengers: Doomsday Official Podcast will be available in video form on Disney Plus and YouTube. You can listen to an audio-only version on your preferred podcast app. %!s()
Precious metals prices are finally rallying after a mostly stagnant summer, with gold hitting its highest price in three months on Friday and silver hitting its highest level in two months, which analysts are largely attributing to a weaker dollar and the Treasury Department’s announcement it would ramp up buybacks of longer-dated government debt.
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The price of gold hit a three-month high Friday. (Photo by Matt Hunt/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
NurPhoto via Getty Images
Key Facts
Gold futures hit their highest level since about mid-May on Friday, rising about 2% to reach a price of $4,661.70.
Silver rose a similar amount, inching up about 2% to hit a price of $70.08, marking the first time the precious metal has crossed the $70 threshold since about mid-June.
Both metals are ending this week about 5% higher, marking a price rally that follows a mostly stagnant summer in which their prices did not budge much.
Ole S. Hansen, an analyst at Saxo Bank, posted on X Friday a softer dollar is one of the key drivers of commodity prices rising, as the dollar index is down very slightly Friday morning—about 0.02%—but is hovering around a three-month low.
UBS Group AG chief strategist Bhanu Baweja also told Bloomberg the rise in metals prices is partially because of the Treasury Department’s announcement it would double buybacks of 10-to-30 year securities, calling the move “a very important signal for gold.”
How Are Gold And Silver Prices Faring This Summer?
Gold and silver have largely come down from the historic highs they reached earlier this year, as gold languished between roughly $4,000 and $4,200 and silver hovered between $50 and $60 for much of the summer. For the quarter ending June 30, gold shed 16% of its value, representing its worst quarter in more than a decade. Around that time, gold and silver had fallen to seven-month lows, erasing some of the gains the metals made during a historic price rally that ended in January of this year. Analysts blamed the summer slump on factors including a then-stronger dollar and expectations that the Federal Reserve may raise interest rates at some point this year. Gold and silver have started to surge again in August, though, as gold recorded its best week in seven months earlier this month.
Will The Federal Reserve Raise Interest Rates This Year?
It’s possible the Fed could raise interest rates later this year, a move that typically depresses gold and silver prices. CME Group’s FedWatch tool says the probability of a rate hike at the Fed’s December meeting is about 70.9%, much higher than the likelihood of a rate increase at the central bank’s September or October meetings.
key background
Gold and silver rose to historic highs earlier this year, with gold topping off around $5,600 and silver reaching about $121 in late January. Prices were buoyed by factors including international tensions, President Donald Trump’s tariffs, interest rate cuts and increasing demand for metals from technological sectors. Prices fell in January after Trump named Kevin Warsh as his choice to lead the Federal Reserve, as Warsh was viewed as less likely to cut rates. Metals prices largely declined throughout the Iran war, as metals generally traded inversely with oil prices, which spiked.
further reading
Gold Price Hits Two-Month High After Mostly Stagnant Summer (Forbes) %!s()
Image: Marvel Studios