Mokus Games' 'steamlined RTS' BOID will be hitting Steam Early Access on January 8, publisher TinyBuild Games has announced.

There's also a launch trailer - look!

BOID is a class-based multiplayer RTS, featuring eight classes, three abilities, bases and a few other elements - so it really lives up to that 'steamlined' moniker.

I'm getting a definite Spore vibe from the video - like a mix between the first and later stages of the game's evolution. But I'm also getting a vibe unlike Spore, in that BOID looks like fun.

Even years later, the sick burns won't stop.

BOID already has its Early Access page up, though you'll have to wait until January 8 before slapping your money down.

We like cheap PC components and accessories. But you know what we like even more? Expensive PC components and accessories that are on sale! We ve partnered with the bargainmeisters at TechBargains to bring you a weekly list of the best component, accessory, and software sales for PC gamers.

Some highlights this week: The Steam Holiday Sale is a go and has too many deals to round up here! A very cheap 30-inch monitor! So, so many holiday game sales.

— Amazon is having a huge holiday digital games sale, including Skyrim for $10, Alien: Isolation for $37.50, Middle-Earth: Shadow of Mordor for $37.50, and a lot more.

— GreenManGaming has a set of 24 hour deals including the Valve Pack for $25, Fallout 3 and New Vegas at $2.49, Age of Myth for $10.19, and more for 75% off, and you can take another 20% off with the code: WINTER-SALE20-GROGRE

— GreenManGaming also has a bunch 48 hour deals including Lost Planet 3, Remember Me, D&D Chronicles, and more which you can also get an additional 20% off with the code: WINTER-SALE20-GROGRE

— And, lest we forget, the Steam Holiday Sale is in full force with more deals then we can possibly list here.

— EVGA's GeForce GTX 980 graphics card is $550 on Newegg, which is about the going rate for these cards. But this one comes with a free Ubisoft game. We recommend Far Cry 4.

— The 4GB EVGA GeForce GTX 760 is only $220 on TigerDirect after a heap of savings and rebates. That's a budget price for a still-powerful mid-range graphics card.

— Import Yamakasi monitors were all the rage for awhile, and for good reason: they use the same screens as Apple and Dell without the frills or brand recognition, so they're dirt cheap. Case in point: a $360 30-inch 2560x1600 IPS monitor on Ebay.

— The Corsair Force LS Series 120Gb SSD is on sale for $45 on Newegg after rebate. And that includes a free copy of Batman: Arkham Origins.

— Need a lot of cheap storage? The Seagate STDT3000100 Backup Plus 3TB external hard drive is $90 on Newegg with code EMCWHHA26

— Corsair's HX1050 1050W ATX modular power supply is $120 on Newegg after rebate and code EMCWHHA22

For more tech deals, visit techbargains.com.

A note on affiliates: some of our stories, like this one, include affiliate links to online stores. These online stores share a small amount of revenue with us if you buy something through one of these links, which help support our work evaluating components and games.

Deus Ex: Revision, a visual and aural overhaul of the great Ion Storm RPG/shooter, is slowly but surely approaching release. In the December update, the development team said it hopes to have the game ready for launch within the next ten weeks, which, assuming it isn't turned loose unexpectedly early, pegs it somewhere near the end of February.

The funny thing about Deus Ex is that in spite of the extraordinarily (and well-deserved) high regard in which it's held, it was actually pretty ugly, even when it was new. The Revision project is intended to rectify that weakness with "new level design, aesthetic direction and world-building detail." The update will feature new textures and models, as well as optional support for the Shifter and BioMod mods, and Chris Donhal's Direct3D 9 renderer.

"We re aiming to wrap up production, and ideally, launch sometime within the next ten weeks," the team wrote in the update, posted on December 9. "As before, this is a loose estimate based on current progress and team member availability, and until environment design is finished, it will remain difficult for us to commit to a fixed launch date. In other words, we won t know when we will release until we re nearly ready to do so."

The mod will also come with its own soundtrack, and a link to one of the new songs was posted with the update. It's pretty good, but in a nod to the quality of the original—which was really good—the new music will be optional: Players can choose to listen to either the new or the old soundtrack as they untangle the vast web of conspiracies that has enmeshed the dangerous world of the near future.

Enemy Within Conversation - Mod DB

Most of us are still out of the office this week for the holiday break, so we're doing something a little different this week in Triggernometry. I'm streaming CS:GO for an hour or two on our Twitch channel, and after that I'll continue to stream Team Fortress 2 on our community server. Come play! 

How to join us for TF2 at 1 PM PST:

1. Join the PC Gamer Steam group
2. Look for a server announcement at 1 PM PST
3. Join!

Our server's on the West Coast of the USA, in San Jose, CA, so keep that in mind if you're joining from a faraway land. Hope you're having a nice end of the year.

Killing zombies isn t the thrill of Dead State. It s finding a toothbrush. Or peanut butter. Or seeing your survivor group finish building a well. To Dead State, winning the post-apocalypse doesn t mean being the best killer, it means being the best manager. Among the hojillion of zombie games, it represents one of the few unsensationalized views of the end of the world. There s plenty of turn-based zombie fighting, sure, but you measure your success as a player by how well you re meeting your group s daily food and fuel consumption, addressing morale, resolving disagreements, or how sturdy your exterior fence is.

Yes, Dead State isn t without issues. My review outlined the crashes and bugs I experienced, at least some of which were addressed by a December 19 patch. I expect DoubleBear, the developer, to chip away at the game s problems into 2015. All that considered, I d throw my grandmother off a roof before I let some technical hiccups deter me from playing something so original in its spirit. I d take something flawed but fresh any day over a polished version of something I ve played a dozen times, like Far Cry 4 or Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare.

Some of my praise comes from the fact that Dead State is so uniquely pen-and-paper in its design and storytelling, some of which comes as result of its low budget. It takes some amount of imagination and restraint by the player to invest themselves in the world, considering Dead State doesn t supply fancy cutscenes, voices, or even much character animation to express its characters. If you play RPGs hastily, zipping through dialogue to scrape the bare-minimum information that allows you to advance the plot, Dead State probably won t work for you. Some great dialogue (monologue?) comes out of the radio inside your shelter, as Richard wrote about.

Like a lot of our revered roguelikes and survival games, DoubleBear also does a great job of not holding your hand. The decision to recruit or turn away, to engage or not, to help or backstab is purely yours, and Dead State rarely tips its hand mechanically with any kind of morality points system. As you enter new locations, you can practically hear a dungeon master say something like, You approach the truck stop, tasting the scent of dogs and diesel. Underneath a gas pump, you see five men gathered around a fire pit. What do you do?

It s a wonderfully, restrainedly unsensationalized apocalypse. There are no zombies with extraordinary abilities or unbelievable super-survivors. Your concerns are fairly grounded in the concerns of reality; the odds are just higher. I had to resolve a conflict between a black ex-con and a white cop who knew his history. I had to decide whether someone in my party getting drunk was just them blowing off steam, or a warning sign. I had to decide whether I wanted to help a party member carry out an abortion, and then find a nearby hospital clinic with the necessary medical gear if I elected to.

Maybe moreso than a lot of my moments in BioWare games, I felt like these decisions said something about me and my character. The way Dead State presents and then lets you navigate these grounded, relatable dilemmas makes it memorable. Rough edges or not, this is the open-world survival sandbox that old-school RPG players deserve.

It's Christmas. Would you like a free game? Of course you would! Thanks to our friends at Playfire, you can get a free Steam key right now. Follow the link for full details.

No, that's not a lie - one Pekka V n nen, a Finnish modder, has managed to get the original Quake running on an oscilloscope.

What's an oscilloscope? This:

"An oscilloscope is an electrical testing device used to measure the frequency of an electrical signal over time, and display waveform signals in a graph."

What's Quake? This:

"Quake is a game in which players must find their way through various maze-like, medieval environments while battling a variety of monsters using a wide array of weapons."

You'd be right to wonder just how the hell all of this works, or what it looks like. Luckily for you, you can read about V n nen's trials and tribulations right here, and check it out in video form on this very page:

At the risk of editorialising somewhat: that is so, so cool.

There's good news and bad news for players of The Talos Principle who find themselves stuck in non-functioning elevators. The good news is, it's not a bug. The bad news is also that it's not a bug: It's another example of Croteam's creative DRM.

The presence of the copy protection came to light on Twitter when publisher Devolver Digital retweeted an image of a Steam forum post, since deleted, complaining about stuck elevators. The response noted that the problem was actually Croteam's way of punishing people who pirated the game, and predicted, accurately, that the message "will be all over the internet in about 30 minutes."

The original complaint illustrates the problem with this kind of DRM: It's almost impossible to tell at first glance that it's DRM at all, and once it comes to light, it's usually relatively easy to patch around. Potentially worse, games risk earning a reputation as being buggy, rather than imaginatively protected, which can adversely affect sales.

Even so, this isn't the first time Croteam has indulged in this kind of oddball copy protection. A few years ago, Serious Sam 3 pirates famously suffered the wrath of a lightning-fast, immortal scorpion that rendered the game effectively impossible to play.

There was a time when those naughty pirates were dealt with via aggressive pursuance - it's not so much like that these days, as games like the Talos Principle show.

As complained about on the Steam forums, players using an illegally-obtained version of Talos end up stuck in an elevator until they either break down in tears and turn the game off, or... just turn the game off.

With each elevator leading from the main facility into the game's three hub areas, you have to use them to progress - or backtrack. Meaning being unable to use the elevators both stops you from progressing and retreading old ground.

The discussion may have been deleted now, but you can join in the chuckles over on NeoGaf if you're so inclined, as well as seeing a couple of screengrabs.

This isn't Croteam's first foray into trolling the pirates, but it's certainly a good one. If it's as good as Serious Sam's immortal, ever-pursuing scorpion... well, I'll leave that for you to decide.

And while you're deciding, you can legally acquire a copy of the Talos Principle on Steam by exchanging money for the product. Wahey!

Is it necessary to "eject" a USB flash drive before unplugging it from a computer? — Jasper

On Windows, not usually. Obviously, don't remove a drive while transferring data, as you'll corrupt that data, but that's a no-brainer. The main reason for hitting "eject" or "safely remove hardware" is write caching. With write caching on, even if whatever you're transferring is "done," there still may be data hanging out in the cache, waiting for the cue to finish up. Ejecting it sends that message.

But Microsoft has been aware for some time that we like to pop USB drives out at our leisure, so Windows automatically disables write caching for removable flash drives. In Windows 7, if you right-click on a drive and select "Properties," then find it in the "Hardware" tab, then hit "Properties" again (or get there through the Device Manager in a less roundabout way), and head to the "Policies" tab, you can see that "Quick removal" is the default. That ensures that if it says it's done transferring data, it's actually done, and it's safe to remove the drive.

But be careful. Windows doesn't necessarily disable write caching for external hard drives, so check first—and if there's a lot of important data on it, you may as well be safe and always eject it properly. Even with write caching off, it's possible that data will be tied up with some background process on your PC. On that note, I never recommend working on a file while it's on a removable flash drive—transfer it to your non-removable storage first.

But either way, if I'm ejecting my 1TB external HDD, which I use to backup important stuff I don't want on my main HDD, then yeah, I go through the safe removal process.

The more cautious among us, who would describe frightening stories of damaged cells, will say that you should always, always safely remove any kind of USB drive. My technical advice: Live a little. When it comes to smaller USB drives, I don't bother. It's not like I'm transferring top secret files of which there's only one copy. The worst that might happen is that I corrupt some data and transfer it again, or have to reformat the drive. Not too scary, and if your flash drive ever dies, it probably wasn't because you didn't click "safely remove hardware" every time. Exposure to heat, physical damage, and wear from writing data and plugging/unplugging (USB plugs only last for so long) are far more likely to hurt it. Keep your big external drives safe by safely ejecting them, but there's no need to be nervous about removing a USB stick as long as you've let any transfers complete.

In my rush to push past Error 37 and get into Diablo 3 on launch day, I accidentally called my barbarian Leopord . How long will I have to look at that stupid misspelled name? I wondered as I killed the first zombies of my Diablo 3 career. I can only laugh now, hundreds of hours later. Oh dear.

There was a phase when I was getting bored of earning Leopord ever shinier armour. The auction house turned the endgame into a bidding war, and market forces aren t forces Leopord understands too well. He s a punching man, and can only do what a punching man can. Thank goodness for this year s expansion, Reaper of Souls. This concerted attempt to refocus Diablo 3 on combat and co-op saved the game, and Leopord s prospects. Employment opportunities are scarce for level 60 monster-killers and he s too punchy to retrain, bless him.

The new act, new villains, new class, new skills and adventure mode were just enough to justify the expansion s price point. On paper I paid as much as I did for the original game for fewer features, but for a Diablo 3 fan Reaper of Souls has to be considered alongside the enormous (free) Reaper of Souls patch that threw out the auction house, rebalanced the essential item drop system and introduced a new endgame focused on running exciting randomised dungeons. The game changed overnight and recaptured my initial enthusiasm, with bonus interest.

I glossed over the new act and class there. Act V captured the gothic, gloomy atmosphere many associate with old-school Diablo (though people sometimes forget the bright jungle and desert zones of Diablo 2). It was a little too gloomy for me, but I was only too happy to bring the holy light of the Crusader to every grim corner of the Blood Marsh.

I wielded my knight like a teutonic brick of justice, dropping her on enemies from a great height and sending her crashing into mobs with a vanguard of ghostly paladins. I found myself glaring at the edge of the screen hoping for more mobs, all of the mobs - Falling Sword is up, bring on all the hordes of hell and we ll settle this so hard and quick Deckard Cain s gonna hear it in heaven.

I had fun levelling a new class and squashing RoS many enemies, but I also felt relief. I played the core game so much that I was glad to see that progress rewarded with the systems refresh the audience had been asking for. Persistent online games require a serious time commitment and I m more likely to show loyalty to games with regular high-quality updates. Reaper of Souls is my personal pick this year not just for the expansion itself, but for all the free updates that have come out since, adding new zones, the treasure goblin realm and more. I have the sense I m participating in something that s alive and growing, and it s almost as much fun to watch the community pick over the latest update as it is to actually enjoy the new stuff.

It s quite a comeback, but Diablo 3 s trajectory mirror s Diablo 2 s in many ways. It s easy to forget how essential the Lord of Destruction expansion was. Without that Diablo 2 lacked the assassin, the druid, hundreds of horadric cube recipes, jewels and a tier of sought-after weapons to make re-running acts worthwhile. Hopefully we ll see Diablo 3 s ascent continue next year and beyond, perhaps to the arrival of a second expansion: Cain s Revenge.

It's Christmas. Would you like a free game? Of course you would! Thanks to our friends at Playfire, you can get a free Steam key right now. Follow the link for full details.