HP is getting into the holiday spirit with some big sales on a range of their products, with notebooks, printers and full desktops all on special. It ranges between their touch-capable notebooks through to more powerful desktops, right up to the gaming-focused Omen X by HP machines, all discounted for Christmas.

First up is the HP Envy 17 which is a larger-than-life 17-inch laptop where in a world dominated by smaller 15.6-inch panels, HP includes a 4K display on the 17-inch laptop and normally ships for $1799. HP's special drops the 17-inch Envy to just $1199, a discount of a rather large $600. There aren't many 17-inch notebooks on the market so if you're in the market for one, saving $600 on HP's Envy 17 would be a good start.

If you're after a small laptop then there's the HP Spectre X360 laptop which features a smaller 13-inch panel, but hefty Core i7 processor, up to 16GB RAM, and 512GB SSD storage. This all usually costs $1429, but HP is discounting the laptop to $1179 during the holidays.

In a recent press release from Nintendo Europe, Super Smash Bros. has been deemed Nintendo's fastest-selling home console game ever.

Nintendo Europe has announced on the official Twitter page that the recently released Super Smash Bros. Ultimate has become Nintendo's fastest selling home console ever. Since its release, Super Smash Bros. Ultimate has clocked record number sales within its first three days of being live. The total sales of Super Smash Bros. Ultimate in that same frame were 30% higher than that of Mario Kart Wii, which progressed to sell more than 37 million copies.

The COO of Europes Nintendo commented on the success of the title, saying "Super Smash Bros. Ultimate is the biggest Super Smash Bros. ever, and not only is it the fastest-selling game in the series we've ever seen in Europe, it's become our fastest-selling home console game ever. Nintendo Switch owners have a lot to look forward to in 2019, including new games in the Animal Crossing and Pokémon series, Yoshi's Crafted World, Fire Emblem: Three Houses, and more." Super Smash Bros. Ultimate is currently available exclusively on the Nintendo Switch, for more information visit the official Super Smash Bros. website here.

One of the most anticipated titles for Nintendo's Switch line-up for next year has got to be Yoshi's Crafted World, and with no official confirmed release date set, Amazon may have spilled the beans early.

We first heard about Yoshi's Crafted World when Nintendo accidentally leaked the name for the game back in September of this year. Then the games vague release date window of "spring 2019" was revealed by Nintendo during their Direct, it now seems that date has been further clarified by a mysterious Amazon listing.

It should be noted that Amazon has done with with many game titles and this should hold in no way state or form a confirmed release date for Yoshi's Crafted World. With that in mind, this release date given by Amazon does coincide with the originally planned "Spring 2019" set by Nintendo themselves. So we could actually be looking a legitimate release date, or at least something close to it. For more information regarding Yoshi's Crafted World, check out its official eShop listing here. Yoshi's Crafted World will be arriving on the Nintendo Switch Spring of 2019, I will be sure to update you when an official release date is set.

For Honor players will soon be suiting up as Ezio Auditore as Ubisoft has debuted an Assassin's Creed crossover event to For Honor. Prepare your hidden blades and longswords, Templars and Assassin's are about to battle it out.

The event titled 'For The Creed' will be bringing an Assassin's Creed-themed twist on "dominion mode, new map visuals, and new outfits, gear, executions, and emotes." The event will last for three-weeks and within that time players will be able to jump into a special version of dominion mode that puts Templars and Assassin's in a head-to-head scenario. The principles will still remain the same for dominion, players will fight for capture points but when the point that is closest to your home base is taken the commander for the defending side will come out.

Players will have to deal with Ezio Auditore da Firenze as the Assassin's commander, the Templars will feature Cesare Borgia as their commander. Each commander will have "massive health pools and devastating area area-of-effect swings, these commanders won't be easy to take out, but doing so nets your team 300 points and propels you that much closer to victory." To successfully win a game, a side must reach 1000 points, the first side to do this is deemed victor. To find out more about what Assassin's Creed themed changes are coming in the 'For The Creed' event, check out the official Ubisoft blog post here.

Indie developer Nik Nak Studios is the developer of a GTA 2 inspired title called Geneshift. Geneshift has now recently taken the 10th spot as Steam's 'most played' title.

Ben, the developer behind Nik Nak studios has been working on his title 'Geneshift' for a solid 9 years now, after recent popularity spike of the Battle Royale mode Ben decided to create a version of it for his game and give it away to Reddit to for free. His giveaway platform was Steam, and after some debates with Valve they gave him the go ahead. Ben proceeded to post onto /r/gaming with this gif, eventually the post made it to the front page of Reddit for a few hours and then Ben to his shock saw a 9000% increase in traffic to his game.

It wasn't just redditors that were giving his game a try, but bots and not just a small amount of them either. Since Ben's game was originally $10, it was still possible for the people playing to receive trading cards and sell them on the marketplace for just a couple cents. This motivated a bot farm to hijack Ben's game and become idle within it, Valve eventually caught wind of what was going on and disabled trading cards for Geneshift, not before the title could reach 213,000 concurrent players. After this fiasco, Geneshift now sits on the 10th spot on Steam's 'most played' game, and despite the bot hijacking I hope the publicity gets some well deserve player attention to this developer. Check out Geneshift here. Read the full story from Ben himself here.

Blizzard are getting into the full festive swing with a new stop-motion animated short, this time round Tracer is on 'cookiewatch' duty as a pesky Reaper attempts to steal Santa's cookies.

Back in May, we saw the first stop-motion animated short for Overwatch to celebrate the games second year anniversary. Blizzard must of taken in all the positive feedback and decided to create another for us to enjoy, introducing Tracers 'cookiewatch' and her mission to save Santa's cookies.

The short which would of been hours and hours of frame-by-frame work is about two and half minutes long and we can see Reaper jumping down to rob Santa of his cookies. Tracer see's what Reaper is up to and enforces the Christmas tradition of leaving the cookies for Santa. Dashing around the room and all around the Christmas tree with multiple shots fired from Reaper, Tracer and Reaper end up getting interrupted by Santa himself. Check out the above video for yourself, Overwatch is currently available on the PC, Xbox One and PS4.

Ford has just t eased something that, well I quite frankly didn't think I'd see right now: a prototype noise-canceling dog kennel for dog owners who have pets that are scared of fireworks, and other loud noises.

The new prototype kennel is just one part of a series of "Interventions" the car maker is working on, where it's throwing the knowledge it has from its noise cancellation technology that it uses in its new Edge SUVs, into a dog kennel. Ford's technology in the car uses microphones to record engine and transmissions sounds, and then uses speakers to play the opposite frequencies, canceling out the noise.

Human and dog hearing is vastly different, as dogs can hear up to 400% further away, so Ford had to put some serious work into the prototype kennel in the hopes of helping dogs that are scared of fireworks (that are used far away). Dogs can hear at high frequencies of between 67Hz to 45,000Hz while our puny human ears only hear frequencies between 20Hz and 20,000Hz.

Fortnite now has its own merch store, with developer Epic Games offering a bunch of different shirts, onesies, and other Fortnite-related goods for people to buy. One of those is the new Durr Burger Onesie.

The new onesie should be a big attraction for thousands of Fortnite fans, available for $70 and shipping in late-January 2019. There's also otehr things like the Skull Trooper pullover hoodie for $60, and a bunch of other Skull Trooper tees for $25 a piece.

There might not be much on the Fortnite merch store right now, but Epic will go into 2019 adding more to the store. I'm sure this is a test run to see how successful it is, and just how many of the tens of millions of Fortnite players in the world react to Fortnite merch. The onesie on the other hand, should sell like hotcakes.

There will be plenty of new iPad Pro tablets under the Christmas tree this year, and now Apple has confirmed that the reports of the strange warping issue on some of the iPad Pros is indeed real.

The new iPad Pro has been shipping out bent out of the box, with Mashable reporting that Apple said this is something that happens during the manufacturing process, specifically after the "device's metal and plastic components cool. The tech giant added that it shouldn't affect performance, nor should the bend worsen as time goes by. Still, if you find the bend annoying, you should be able to exchange or return the device to Apple or retailers".

When consumers are paying up to $1899 for the high-end 12.9-inch iPad Pro with 1TB of storage and LTE connectivity... you'd kinda not want a bend in your new tablet, right? Plenty of reports state that even brand new shrink wrapped iPad Pros have a slight bend in the aluminum, without being touched at all. This means they're rolling off the production line like this, and Apple are happy putting them on shelves and then into consumers' hands.

Atari today announced its total earnings for the first six-month period of its financial year, and reiterates a 2019 launch for its new Atari VCS console.

Atari is a curious business. It once reigned supreme in the early days of console gaming, but now its massive brand awareness is spent on licensing IPs and releasing games like Rollercoaster Tycoon. The company's earnings don't reflect a titanic industry force, but more so a company that's found its comfortable niche in the market. In the six-month period ending September 30, 2018, Atari made just 10.8 million Euros or about $12.7 million in total earnings, up 27% year-over-year. Operating income is up a mighty 87% YoY to 2.2 million Euros, and shareholder's equity spiked by an astronomical 194% to 23.1 million Euros.

For perspective on these numbers, the company's new crowdfunded Atari VCS generated $3 million on Indiegogo, or about a fourth of its half-year revenues.