What if the company that sold your cheese also sold your PC gaming hardware? This is not the murmuring of some poor sod on a nineteen-hour Dota 2 binge who’s started thinking that the crumbs in his keyboard resemble a viable snack, but a bold new reality, one I recently found myself staring down during a trip to Asda. The supermarket chain – third biggest in the UK by turnover and purveyors of ill-fitting clothes and surprisingly good doughnuts alike – has added light-up gaming mice, keyboards, and headsets to its mountain of own-brand wares.

Asda being what it is (Americans, if you’re unfamiliar, think Walmart with less gun violence), it’s all dirt cheap as well. £17 for a full-size keyboard. £16 for an FPS mouse. Overwhelmed with curiosity, I ended up taking home a complete starter set (keeb, different mouse, headset, and mousemat) for £45, or about a third of the price of the Logitech G515 Lightspeed TKL that I’d shortly kick off my desk. Could this be a new frontier in affordable PC hardware, bringing tech to the masses in a way no specialist retailer ever could, or should supermarkets stick to cereal and meal deals? Surely the Asda Tech (real name) 4-in-1 Gaming Kit would have the answers.

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In his Vampire Survivors review, Matt Cox described the game as something he could play with "one hand in a packet of crisps". I think about this quite often, actually, as someone whose largely offline friends (or Fortnite/FIFA pals) ask me to recommend them a game that's good or interesting. Show them something popular like Elden Ring and, despite its grandeur, it might prove too much in all facets. But Vampire Survivors? It's an easy sell: simple, digestible, ridiculous value.

All of this is to say, One BTN Bosses is from the same school of the easy sell. You can fight bosses with one hand in a packet of pickled onion Space Raiders, after all.

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Is early adoption a chump’s game? I dunno about that, though between the Asus ROG Ally X and the Steam Deck OLED, those who stayed their hand on their earlier handheld gaming PC counterparts do have a couple of quality second-genners to choose from. Valve’s effort manages to wring multiple performance, design, and battery life improvements out of its new display, while the ROG Ally X makes similar upgrades with a bigger-yet-better take on the original ROG Ally.

The only thing to do, clearly, is make them fight. It’s probably in the Irish Code Duello or something: "Should one portable games box impugn another’s honour by releasing shortly after it, satisfaction must be claimed through a comparison article." My hands are bound here, folks, though if you yourself have been playing the waiting game on a handheld purchase, perhaps this little head-to-head can help you pick the right one.

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Hello reader who is also a reader, and welcome back to Booked For The Week - our regular Sunday chat with a selection of cool industry folks about books! July has shrivelled up like a freshly laundered sock left on the radiator for too long, and yet, it's still hot enough that even typing the word radiator makes me want to inject concentrated Solero straight into my bloodstream. With my last remaining un-fugged brain cells, I have wrenched this column back from its hiatus, and who better than to get us into the swing of things once more than Baldur’s Gate 3 lead writer and bloody RPS legend Adam Smith! Cheers Adam! Mind if we have a nose at your bookshelf?

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Sundays are for doing a little dance in the kitchen. Go on. No-one’s watching. Raise that tin opener to the roof. Before you get carried away and fling errant globules of mushy pea all over your freshly sponged worktops, let’s read this week’s best writing about games (and game related things!)

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It's Saturday morning, everyone! Birds are swaying, the trees are singing. Time to celebrate all the ways in which we'll be staying indoors staring at screens. I've given the outside world a go, but it feels a bit unbalanced, a bit glitchy. I think I'll wait until they've added a bit more content. So here's what we'll all be clicking on this weekend!

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There’s a new version of AMD Fluid Motion Frames (AFMF) available to try, and good news for Radeon GPU owners: it is drastically, almost comically better than the original version. Whereas AMD’s first take on driver-level frame generation – the same kind of framerate-roiding image generation trickery that FSR 3 and DLSS 3 are based around – came yoked to a barrel of jittering, stuttering, and visual artefacting issues, Fluid Motion Frames 2 is as smooth and you’d like. Without compromising on the ability to deploy it in theoretically any DirectX 11- or 12-based game, too.

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Hello reader who is also a reader, and welcome back to Booked For The Week - our regular Sunday chat with a selection of cool industry folks about books! Except, as reader’s of last week’s edition will know, this is a lie. There are no industry folks, cool or otherwise, in this week’s column. It is simply a placeholder - as voted for by you ravenous spine-fiends - while I take a break for the rest of July.

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Sundays are for…god help me, I’m going to start catching up on all the Destiny 2 I missed since Witch Queen. Pray for mojo. Before I shoot infinite dudes and am rewarded with another infinite dudes to shoot, let’s read this week’s best writing about games (and game related things!)

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Wrong answers only please: how did I slice open my finger earlier this week? Bystander in a climactic shinobi duel? Fell afoul of the local mantis shrimp? Got out of bed too quickly? Whatever the case, typing is painful for me at the moment, so let's get straight to it. Here's what we're all clicking on this lovely weekend!

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