It's a balmy Friday while I write this, and I'm thirsty. For every so-called RPS staff member who doesn't respond to my increasingly angry messages, I will punish them by likening them to a particular alcoholic beverage. It's a punishment because I know nothing about alcohol, and so my reasoning will be entirely askew, I'm sure. Suffer!>

Here's what we're all clicking on this weekend.

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Steam’s Summer Sale is legendary, but it doesn’t always mean you’re getting the lowest price. As much as we all love watching our wishlist light up with discounts, some of the best deals are actually happening off-site. Fanatical and Green Man Gaming have been busy undercutting Valve’s storefront with bigger savings on the exact same Steam keys.

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You'd think there'd be more video games that are explicitly about clearing away corpses, given how many corpses players produce. Getting rid of bodies is a routine problem for developers, with a variety of crafty or cursory solutions. Horror projects such as Resident Evil sometimes resort to accelerated decomposition, with felled zombies dissolving to maggots in seconds, but in most shooters, it's a question of despawning the victims when you look away. Stealth sims mandate a certain level of respectfulness, albeit by accident: stray cadavers must be carefully interred in random dumpsters or closets before they trigger an alarm.

As with a lot of things in games, there are technological concerns here that form a curious warping of practicalities in the world beyond the vidbox. Dead bodies in games absorb computing resources that are needed for the next enemies along. Bodies of actual flesh and bone are a weight, if not a burden upon the dead person's loved ones. The memory has to be freed up, so that it can be used for something else.

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Today’s lineup has something for every kind of setup. Alienware prebuild discounts headline the list, offering some hefty savings across a range of configurations. That does for solid 1440p performance with a RTX 5070 Ti build or securing a 4K futureproof rig with a 5090. There's also a strong showing from Flexispot with big cuts on their premium standing desks and ergonomic chair for 4th July, so if you’ve been meaning to upgrade your workspace, this is your sign.

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We’re always on the lookout for the best gaming laptop deals. Nothing comes close to matching the freedom of firing up your favorite competitive FPS and screaming at your screen in the middle of a coffee shop when your teammates don’t do what they should be (it’s definitely not a me problem).

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Every couple of years, I remember gaming laptops exist, repressing the shame and horror at my own coverage failures deep enough to focus on the flat-folding PCs that are out there. And, more importantly, which amongst them is worth buying. This time, let us consider the three most frame-abundant laptop GPUs in Nvidia’s current stable: the GeForce RTX 5090, RTX 5080, and RTX 5070 Ti, all namesakes of their variably desirable desktop counterparts, and very likely the graphics chips du jour> if you’re looking at the speedier end of the notebook market.

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Thilmann had always sneered at apocalyptic portents. Comfort blankets, he thought. The warming wool of fire and brimstone and an end to all that is and will ever be, pulled up over arrogant fools, shivering from just having come to terms with their own mortality, afeared they'd miss out on the important parts. It is the ultimate comfort, he always said, to believe that you'll tie with creation at the finish line, celestial mechanisms sputtering out in time with your own squishy innards. And yet, he could not help himself sensing finality on the wind. Louder even, it seemed, than the goading arena crowd about them.

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Today’s lineup is stacked. Two big hits from the Lies of P series are on deep discount over at Fanatical, and there’s a shiny preorder deal for Borderlands 4 with multiple editions up for grabs. If you’re itching for fresh horror-laced action or chaotic looter-shooting, you’re in luck. Use the FANATICAL15 code and you can scoop both Lies titles for under $26 each, which is downright criminal given how much content they pack in.

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The screen’s gone black. There’s a little loading bar in the top right hand corner, and occasionally the darkness gives way to momentary visions of a chrome body shell floating in limbo, accompanied by a low robotic whirr.

I’ve overcooked it, just a little bit.

Suddenly my view of the car comes back. It’s jiggling about, blurrily textured as though it’s travelling at the speed of light, between an empty void of sky and a featureless brown-ish disc. My futuristic phone rings.

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Back when Matt Nava was art director for glistering mountain pilgrimage Journey, he and his colleagues at thatgamescompany took a research expedition to California's Pismo beach, a swathe of desert that rolls right up to the Pacific Ocean. The spectacle of land and ocean overlapping did a number on Nava. "It looks like the dunes of the Sahara, you know, these massive sand dunes," he tells me. "But it's a beach, and so the ocean is right there. And it's amazing visually, because you have the waves of the ocean, and you have these sand dunes, which are wave shapes, and it's so easy to imagine them moving just like the ocean."

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