Playside are pitching Game Of Thrones: War For Westeros as an RTS for Age of Empires lovers, but it may also hook your fancy if you’re into vicious bastard boardgames. Speaking to me shortly after the new strategy project’s announcement at this year’s Summer Game Fest, game director Ryan McMahon explored how the requisite filthy traitor element of this latest George R.R. Martin adaptation will percolate through the project’s main “sandbox” mode, in which four players vie for supremacy over the Seven Kingdoms.

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I've found some great deals on gaming laptops and prebuilt desktops for todays daily deals. Everything from brand new high-end Alienware laptops that mimick their higher end cousins without the sticker shock to HP Omen beasts with cracking discounts. There's even deals on Windows handhelds from Lenovo and MSI. There’s a good mix of laptops, desktops, and portable rigs, and most of them come with pretty aggressive discounts or promo codes. Nice and simple, right? Let's get into it:

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While I have not one but two Windows gaming rigs for testing and writing, they’re both desktops. For working on the go, I use a MacBook Air (boo, hiss), but these HP Omen laptop deals have me considering a swap.

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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! We're doing tabletop designers now, firstly because I think tabletop is cool and secondly…nope, that's it. Every week we stray further from videogames, and every week we regain feeling in body parts we'd forgotten we had. Ten> toes, you say? Marvellous.

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Sunday! What more do you need to know?

"AI is here to stay" is a common refrain. Mike Cook tackles the meaning and limits of that phrase, with apt comparisons to asbestos.

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Back in April, Stray Gods: A Roleplaying Musical developer Summerfall Studios launched their Kickstarter for Malys, a roguelike deckbuilder where you play as a "former priest turned demon-hunter" that certainly looked quite atmospheric. This is the same studio co-founded by Dragon Age writer David Gaider, so it's not like they came out of nowhere. However, it fell a bit short of meeting its goal, something that quite often guarantees that death of a game. Except it just launched into early access this week. Go figure!

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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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