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! This week, I’ve been half reading in the garden and half staring in awe at my Kindle’s paperwhite doohickey and it’s ability to stay readable in searing sunbeams. I’m tempted to look up how it works but I don’t want to find out it’s made from the luminous, genetically-engineered husks of the workers that drop dead from dehydration at the fulfilment centers or something. To help distract me with yet more books, it’s Dishonored: Death Of The Outsider writer and Destiny 2 senior narrative designer, Dr. Hazel Monforton! Cheers Hazel! Mind if we have a nose at your bookshelf?

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Sundays are for more Gene Wolfe. I’ve finished Shadow Of The Torturer now, and I think Claw Of The Conciliator might be even better so far? Before I become ever more enamoured with Severian’s self-mythologising antics, let’s read this week’s best writing about games (and game related things!)

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The search for the cheapest and yet best quality supermarket drink-as-you-go coffee continues. I know it's the first time I've made you aware of this project, but it's been going on since I moved to Glasgow. So far, Lidl's own brand remains the clear winner, a solid 8 on the taste meter at just 59p. But while writing this, I'm sipping an "Intenso" Arctic Coffee from Morrisons, which is giving the Lidl frontrunners some stiff competition at last, albeit at 145% the cost. Will one true victor emerge? Find out next week! For now, here's what we're all clicking on this weekend!

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You're a long time undead. 7 Days To Die was shuffling along in early access for 11 years, until version 1.0 finally burst through the windows. In that time, many other survival games have sprouted, blossomed, and gently faded away. I first visited the burnt-out ruins of this zombie-infested world a decade ago and I returned to it this week to find a tree-puncher that, despite bearing the pockmarks of early access, retains much of what made it enjoyable back when the survival genre was still wearing its baby onesie. Instead of a review, I figured I'd scribble together a mini starter guide for new (or returning) players. Partly because the game is a proper time sink and it was taking me so long to get through everything. But mostly because I wanted to use that numberful headline. So, here you go: 7 dos and 7 don'ts in 7 Days To (7) Die.

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I was partial to a scrappy little strategy game even before idiot billionaires doomed the planet, and the UK to brain-steaming heat just when you thought we'd escape it this year. Khaligrad is plenty scrappy. Its edges are rough and you have to figure it out yourself, but it's more intuitive than it appears, and easy to operate once you discern some basics. It's scrappy too in that it's, well. It's Stalingrad. Not really: its world is so fictional it's their 15th century. But the invaders are explicitly fascists and the defenders communists embroiled in a long and brutal semi-guerrilla city war with World War 2 technology. Thankfully, it's stripped of any actual fashy or genocidal play-acting beyond each side doing "hail the empire/union" bits as a sign off.

I think that's why, despite its brutal and difficult setting, it's this year's entry in the long tradition of Low-Intensity Strategy Games For When Hot Why Hot Please Stop You Cannot See My Begging Tears For They Evaporate.

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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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