Alienware is running Black Friday in July, dropping a bunch of desktops and laptops down to some of the lowest prices I’ve seen all summer. Doesn’t matter if you’re after a decked-out Area‑51 tower with an RTX 5090 or just looking for a leaner Aurora machine for everyday gaming, there’s something on offer. And it’s not just desktops either. A handful of 16 and 18-inch gaming laptops are trimmed down by hundreds, which is rare for models packing things like 5070 Ti or 5080 graphics

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Ex-Elder Scrolls developer Julian LeFay has stepped away from his role as technical producer on The Wayward Realms due to an ongoing battle with cancer taking a turn for the worse. OnceLost Games, the studio LeFay's been working with for the past few years, say they've been informed by his doctors that "his time with us is limited".

The developer's best known for his work on the first two Elder Scrolls games, Arena and Daggerfall, alongside The Wayward Realms creative director Ted Peterson. The pair gave a talk together at 2024's GDC delving into those early days at Bethesda, and the RPG they've been working on at OnceLost since 2019 is very much aiming to recapture Daggerfall's vibes.

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Virtuos, the company best known for working with other studios to deliver the likes of Dark Souls Remastered, Oblivion Remastered and the upcoming Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater, are reportedly preparing to lay off staff. 300 people are cited as being at risk.

That's according to reporting posted to Bluesky by Gauthier Andres of French outlet Origami. Andres' post dropped same day Virtuos lead game designer Adrien Jouannet appeared on a Cyberpunk 2077 livestream to talk about the studio's work with CD Projekt on the futuristic RPG's latest update.

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Brendan and I once had a podcast conversation about Hitman in which we predicted that IO Interactive would be limited by James Bond's license holders MGM to a maximum of three toilet drownings, one fish spearing, and absolutely no duck explosions. While we can't yet confirm specifics, IO's franchise director Jonathan Lacaille has said that MGM were "a lot more daring than (the studio) thought" in a recent chat with Very Gary Computing.

It doesn't sound like they restricted IO very much at all, actually, aside from asking them not to make 007: First Light's Bond "a killing machine!". Lacaille actually credits Hitman's, um, restraint in helping them secure the license in the first place.

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Chinese action-RPG Wuchang: Fallen Feathers is out in a week, and it's high time we heard about the system requirements, which don't seem that high for a game in which you can lob lightning at supersized peacocks and leave a delicate furrow through new-fallen snow.

An Intel Core i5-8400, an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060, 16GB of RAM and 60GB's worth of SSD are all they're asking for the chance to become an amnesiac pirate swordswoman during the age of the Ming dynasty, tasked with murdering a whole lot of bird people before she becomes a bird person herself.

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"When our fathers stood against the Persians," spake Greek statesman and general Pericles, "they had no such resources as we have now". Time, of course, muddies the clear waters of specifics, but I'm basically sure he was talking about the ability for each of his men to keep a thirty foot ladder snuggled safely away in their rectal passage just in case they encountered any massive walls.

Which is probably where Total War got the idea from. Since launch, The Total War: Warhammer series has given each troop, from the lowliest Chaos Chosen to the bravest and most beautiful ratman, the ability to magic a ladder from nowhere during sieges. There's a mod for Total War: Warhammer 3 that removes them, but now the end of arse ladders is getting official support, including tweaks to hopefully teach the AI how to behave without them.

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I hesitate to call Space Warlord Organ Trading Simulator "the best organ trading sim of 2021", because Cruelty Squad also came out in 2021 and I worry about starting a localised flame war. But it means Strange Scaffold's sci-fi stockbroker sim was, at the very least, 2021's second> best organ trading sim. Nice to see it's getting a sequel then, called... oh no. Space Warlord Baby Trading Simulator.

"We aren't monsters. You aren't going to be trading babies," says head of studio, Xalavier Nelson Jr. "You're going to be trading stocks based on babies, which means you can short a baby."

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Put down that cursed bag of frozen curly fries and come here. I've spotted a game you might like. Co-op Kaiju Horror Cooking is essentially the four-player hangout horror of R.E.P.O but instead of ghost hunting you are collecting ingredients to feed a big monster its favourite dish.

"This isn't a place of honour," says studio head of Strange Scaffold, Xalavier Nelson Jr. "You aren't going to be making fancy Overcooked-style dishes. You will be beating a giant rat or a minotaur with a rolling pin, taking an object from their corpse, throwing it onto a grill on a beach, and then firing it into a kaiju's jaws with a catapult or a manganel." Checks out.

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Frostpunk 2 developers 11 Bit are holding a modding competition in collaboration with mod.io, with $10,000 for the one that shows "the best in creativity and overall technical polish", which I assume is code for "If you send us another Thomas The Tank Engine we will come to your house and spit in your fruit bowl". There are also custom GPUs and "goodie packs" for runners-up. The competition is open until August 22nd, with the winner announced September 1st. Cheers, PC Gamer.

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