There's no component of your PC working harder than the CPU. It's running your operating system and programs as complex as Battlefield 4 and as simple as Notepad. Today's desktop processors can handle just about any game you throw at them, and can even be overclocked to better multitasking performance. You don't have to buy the most expensive processor around to have a great gaming experience. We've researched and tested the best gaming CPUs around, and these are the ones worth putting in your next gaming rig.

Update 2/11/2016: We've revamped our testing and recommendations for the best gaming CPU and best high-end CPU, respectively. Our next update will tackle the best budget CPU for gaming.

The best gaming processor

It takes a lot to improve on a processor. Hundreds of millions of dollars of R&D, in fact. Take the short-lived Broadwell CPU, released just a few months before Skylake: in essence it s a die shrink of the Haswell architecture, but boy did it take Intel some time to get that one nailed. But then shrinking below 22nm is no laughing matter. It was Intel s (and the world s) first-ever consumer 14nm processor. That paved the way for Skylake and the i5-6600K, the new best gaming CPU in town.

Sklyake's new architecture at 14nm provided a much needed 10% improvement on the last generation of processors while also supporting modern advancements with the Z170 chipset. It brought DDR4 support to the masses, improved USB and Thunderbolt support and swapped over from 8 PCIe 2.0 lanes on the chipset to 20 PCIe 3.0 lanes instead, for all of your M.2 storage needs.

Since the launch of Nehalem way back in 2009, the i5 processor lineup has been the absolute cornerstone of dependable gaming processors. And today, not a lot has changed. If you re after one of the best all-rounders, Intel s i5-6600K is definitely up there with the best of them. Much more reasonably priced than the audacious i7-6700K, this quad-core chip runs at a base frequency of 3.5 GHz, ramping up all the way to 3.9 GHz under turbo. Although this i5 has an almost identical spec to our previous favorite CPU, the Core i5-4690K, overall performance for this processor trumps its predecessor by up to 10% in rendering, archiving and other workstation simulated tasks.

That doesn t sound like a lot, but if you ve been coasting on an Intel i5-2500K for a few years, now might be the time to make a jump to a new CPU. You ll be looking at around 30-40% improved performance at the very least. And that s not including the real reason to upgrade: all the new features of the Z170 chipset.

So why not an i7? Well there s two main factors, the first being the cost. If you re lucky you might be able to net yourself one of the nifty i7-6700Ks for just under 300 or $410, but honestly that s a hell of a jump from the i7-4790K more reasonable price. And secondly? The i7's hyper-threading adds very little to overall gaming performance. For the money you d be far better off spending more on your graphics card instead.

If you are interested in the idea of streaming your gameplay footage over Twitch, or rendering YouTube videos for the masses to see, hyper-threading will be more useful, but even then we still wouldn t suggest you grab the i7-6700K (see below). Ultimately it s just not the best value for money. And for the vast majority of us the thoroughbred specs of Intel s i5 lineup will be more than enough to satisfy all of our gaming desires.

Overclocking the 6600K

The next question we re sure you re asking is: why the K series? Overclocking isn t for everyone, but it s all about that longevity. Three of four years from now you might find yourself beginning to struggle with game performance. Whether that s with post-processing effects, CPU-based rendering, or computational tasks, it s eventually going to happen, and when that time comes it certainly won t hurt to have some extra oomph from overclocking.

Throughout the entirety of Intel s processor range the K/X in the model designation indicates that the multiplier has been left unlocked. What this means is that by adding a little extra voltage you can successfully adjust the multiplier to achieve a far higher overall clock frequency than before. Take this i5-6600K. It comes clocked at standard at 3.9 GHz, or 3900 MHz—a multiplier of 39, alongside a base clock frequency of 100. A simple overclock would be to increase the multiplier to 43, this would provide you with an overall frequency of 4.3 GHz and improve your performance in game, as well as in other computational benchmarks.

There s more to it than that, and there s inevitably always going to be some danger when it comes to increasing the amount of voltage going into your CPU. We ll let Asus show you how it s done here (don t worry, though: the basic principles of overclocking haven t changed much since Sandy Bridge).

In our testing we managed to get a maximum 4.8 GHz out of our Intel Core i5-6600K, with 1.4v amping into the VCore. For an everyday overclock we would advise you stick to something more comfortable like 4.4-4.6 GHz. It shouldn t push your CPU too hard, and in some cases you might not even need to adjust the voltage, depending on how lucky you get in the silicon lottery.

Performance versus price

If you have no intention of overclocking, you won t be much worse off immediately by opting for the i5-6600 instead. What matters here is the number of cores, and although there are definitely games out there that can make use of that additional processing power, they re very few and far between. In fact if you re looking to overclock anything, boosting your GPU by 5-10 percent will actually gain you far more frames per second in game than anything you ever do to your CPU.

Conclusion

As far as gaming performance goes, Intel s i5-6600K is a strong contender. In our benchmarks we found this mighty quad-core provided little to no bottleneck in typically simple AAA titles. More CPU intensive games such as Creative Assembly s Total War franchise benefited the most from additional clock frequency, more threads/cores, but it wasn t enough to cause us any major worry, as most of this was down to post-processing, and the colossal number of assets being rendered and thrown around on screen.

Ultimately the i5-6600K s biggest advantage came down to that Z170 chipset. Better support for M.2/U.2 PCIe storage, better USB support, overall lower power consumption, and that 10 percent improvement in computational tasks. In the vast majority of games can match up to either of the two big boys in our testing no sweat. For those reasons alone it s our gaming CPU of choice.

The best budget gaming processor

Note: There are now better low-end CPUs than the G3258, as more games begin to take advantage of quad core CPUs. We'll have an update for this recommendation soon.

One of the oft-cited downsides of gaming on a PC, compared with gaming on a console, is the cost of the hardware. There s certainly some truth to that, since a single high-end component can cost as much as entire console, and in some cases, more. But by carefully choosing components, you can shave hundreds off the price of your gaming PC and still enjoy most up-to-date games in high resolution without having to keep the detail settings on the lowest possible level.

Enter the  Pentium K G3258 processor, a truly affordable chip that can slug it out with the big guns of the processor world. Every so often, Intel brings out an affordable CPU that s trivial to overlock to higher speeds. You might even think they ve done it on purpose, since the G3258 carries Intel s Pentium 20th Anniversary branding.

Both Intel and AMD sells a wide range of other affordable processors, including the Core i3 line and other Pentium chips. But none of these even approach the value for money of the Pentium K G3258, given how well it does in tests.

This dual-core chip runs at 3.2 GHz stock, but can easily overclock towards 4.5 Ghz without needing an exotic cooling system, or even increasing the voltage. It costs  just $70 on Amazon, a bargain by any standard. While it s a no-frills processor, as it s only a dual-core model, and lacks Turbo Mode or hyper-threading, this is still enough to drive the majority of games at playable resolution and detail settings.

The Core i3 processors may be marginally faster, equal, or even slower in some cases, but nearly all of them cost more. Since the G3258 is all about saving cash, it makes little sense to pair it with an expensive modular 1000-watt power supply, water-cooling setup or a deluxe motherboard that costs three times as much as the CPU. This is a perfect budget chip for a budget rig.

The same goes for the GPU. While you could pair an all-singing $349 GeForce GTX 970 with a $68 Pentium K processor, if you re going down that line, it makes more sense to spend just another $150 and get a Core i5 for much better overall performance in a wider range of gaming and non-gaming tasks. If you re trying to save cash and build the best gaming PC you can on a limited budget, a more modest graphics card will save hundreds, and also means you can use a less expensive power supply.

What would we recommend? A Micro-ATX Z97 motherboard such as the Gigabyte Z97M-DSH3 and a nice-looking case such as Corsair s Carbide Air 240. 8GB of memory will be fine, and there are a new breed of affordable SSDs to consider, such as Corsair s MX100, or Samsung s 850 Evo. Buy a 512GB model and you can squeeze in loads of games from a bulging Steam library, leaving a hard disk off the shopping list. As for a graphics card, the Pentium K G3258 is a great partner for  AMD s Radeon R270X, our favorite budget GPU, which can be found online for as little as $170.

So with these affordable prices, you can get a processor, motherboard, memory and graphics card for about $400. Although this doesn t factor in a display, PSU or case, this is the guts of a gaming PC for around the same price as a PS4 or Xbox One.

Budget limitations

As great as the Pentium chip is, it does have some limitations. As we pointed out earlier, it's much slower than the i5-4690k and i7-4790k when it comes to demanding multi-core applications, like video encoding. That's because it's a dual-core CPU. Because many games don't take advantage of every CPU core, it can hold its own even in demanding modern games.

Overclocked, the Pentium G3258 puts up some truly impressive numbers compared to the beefier chips.  As we pointed out in our review, punishing multi-core games are the only ones that give it problems. It's not a great CPU for Battlefield 4.

So how does the Pentium G3258 compare to AMD's budget price chips? Intel's been outperforming AMD in the high performance arena for several years, but still sells some chips at attractive budget prices. The strength of AMD's current APUs is their onboard graphics processing. They still beat Intel there, but that graphics performance is irrelevant if you're going to buy a graphics card. Our budget recommendation has this in mind. You could buy the  $110 AMD FX 6300, or buy the cheaper Pentium and put that $40 you save towards a much more powerful dedicated GPU.

AMD does have some cheaper desktop CPUs under the $100 mark. But they're just not as good for gaming, or don't come close to offering the same bang for your buck. The Tech Report found that the G3258  outperformed AMD's A6 and A10 APUs in Thief. Anandtech found the G3258 outperformed a new AMD APU that cost $80 more in some non-gaming tasks, and Guru3D found that it beat the same AMD A10-7800 in dedicated gaming benchmarks, too. At $70, the G3258 is the best budget CPU.

The best high-end gaming processor

In the last iteration of this buyer s guide we opted for a standard i7 CPU over the more premium Haswell-E, deciding the "extreme" platform was too expensive to recommend for gaming . Since then, as usual, the dynamic PC gaming landscape has changed quite dramatically.

To understand our choice here, you have to understand exactly how the industry and our demographic is changing. Today s 1.2 billion PC gamers stream, they render video, they work on their machines and run all sorts of additional programs in the background. And for that reason we decided to opt for the Intel Core i7-5820K as our best high-end gaming processor.

Why? Well, Intel s Sklake i7-6700K costs 300 or $410 to invest in, and considering the i7-5820K comes in just 20 more in the UK and $25 less in the US, it s just too good an opportunity to miss at this price point. If you do decide to invest in the X99 platform, the i7-5820K will provide you with six cores, clocked at 3.3 GHz and turboing up to 3.6 GHz, 28 PCIe 3.0 lanes supported directly by the CPU, 15 MB of L3 Cache, along with all of the support the X99 chipset can muster.

So is this truly still better than Skylake s cr me de la cr me of processors,the i7-6700K? Yep, absolutely. In computational benchmarks those six cores run rings around it s Skylake cousin. If you do overclock the i7-6700K up to 4.8 GHz you can keep pace with a stock 5820K, but as soon as you touch the multiplier on that monster of a value CPU it rockets well beyond reach once more.

As far as gaming goes there s very negligible difference between the two CPUs. This is mostly down to the fact that the vast majority of graphical rendering is now done on the GPUs of today. Any post-processing effects are so limited in contrast to the power CPUs have available to them, that they really do not become a bottleneck to any great degree. Indeed we ve noticed even with our i7-5820K de-clocked down to 2.7 GHz we still saw absolutely no degradation in overall frame rate for games such as Shadow of Mordor. The biggest advantages we saw were in unoptimised titles such as Batman Arkham Knight and Ark: Survival Evolved, where those six cores battered the i7-6700K into submission by up to 20fps in some cases.

Price of the X99 platform

You can spend a lot of money in the enthusiast section of Intel s arsenal. Admittedly there are motherboards out there topping 400 if you look hard enough, but to be frank, the same can be said for Skylake. Couple that with how the price of DDR4 continues to plummet and you re actually starting to find affordable X99 systems popping up all over the place. DDR4 was another price barrier a year ago; now it's cheaper than DDR3.

If you re from the UK, check out Overclocker s Titan Riptide as a good example.

Performance

As we ve already established, the performance in-game at this point is well beyond any bottlenecks. You re just not going to see much (if any) change in overall frame rates between high-end CPUs. Even if you re running multiple GPUs, with Skylake now supporting those additional PCIe 3.0 lanes through the DMI chipset, and X99 supporting them through the physical CPU, you re just not going to find any problems here.

The big one then is the computational tasks. If you re looking at venturing into the world of Twitch streaming, perhaps starting to create some YouTube videos with your buddies, or even need a system that can compete as both a fully professional workstation and a gaming station, X99 is an incredibly good decision to take, especially with the 5820K.

How we tested processors and others we tested

In our latest round of testing, we focused on Intel's new Skylake CPUs and how those compared to last generation's Devil's Canyon and the still competitive X99 Haswell-E platform. For our next update, we plan to focus on the budget tier and incorporate benchmarks with AMD's latest processors.

How we tested

To bring our CPU testing and buyer s guides in line with the rest of our future reviews, we decided to completely rework our testing protocols for the lot of them. First we have to start with the test beds.

As you can see it s a pretty extensive array of hardware, most of it not cheap. The reason being is that when testing CPUs we want to ensure that there are minimal to zero bottlenecks in other parts of our systems. Samsung s 950 Pro PCIe M.2 drives are phenomenally fast, and provide us with ample storage room to play with. Couple that with the 2TB SSD to house our Steam library and we re set. Sticking with Asus for motherboards meant we shouldn t have any conflicting driver issues. And Nvidia s GeForce GTX 980 is still a powerful GPU, capable of driving games both at 1440p and 1080p with little to no problem. Cool all this with a full 280mm NZXT Kraken X61 and we re good to push the overclocks as hard as we can.

Then it comes down to our testing software suite. We use a fresh install of Windows 10 Technical Preview, alongside the latest chipset, driver and BIOS updates for both boards. For computational rendering benchmarks we decided to use both CineBench (R15) and HWBOT s x265 Benchmark. For synthetic graphics testing we used both 3D Mark Firestrike s standard test, and Heaven 4.0. Then for good measure we threw in AS SSD s Sequential and 4K benchmarks for our second SSD, and also prepared a 5GB archive folder package, just to see what each CPU could do.

Then it s all about them load tests, so for power draw and temperature we powered the system on, closed down any additional programs, waited 5 minutes and took readings from our watt measuring device and the average from the four cores from real temp GT. Then to test load temperatures we coupled Prime 95 s burn test with a standard FurMark 1920x1080 GPU stress test, waited five more minutes and did the same. We did this at both stock and overclocked frequencies, that way we could ensure that we had stable overclocks at the same time.

Then the most important factor came down to the game tests. We used Total War: Attila s in engine benchmark tool, Batman: Arkham Knight s in engine benchmark tool (for an example of an unoptimised game), Call of Duty: Black Ops 3 for your traditional AAA shooter, and of course Project Cars, to try and push the GPUs as hard as we could.

All benchmarks are performed three times, and then an average is taken from the three. All gaming benchmarks, bar the integrated ones are recorded in MSI s Afterburner software, pulled into an excel document and then the average is found from there.

Benchmarks

Competitors

Although Intel has dominated our CPU recommendations, this is due to their current strong position in the CPU market. AMD s competing processors are a fine platform, and won t exactly perform badly in games, but the company remains a step behind Intel, unable to offer the same level of performance at the same price. AMD's new Zen CPU, releasing in 2016, could majorly shake things up, with a huge expected jump in instructions per clock. We're eagerly waiting to see how the next round of competition plays out.

Original reporting by Orestis Bastounis. Updated reporting by Zak Storey.

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

[Update: It was all just a big misunderstanding! As detailed in this NeoGAF post, an agency hired to scrub the Dark Souls debug from the face of the internet mistakenly included DSFix in its claims. It has since contacted Bandai Namco and Dropbox to clear the matter up, and the file may well be back online by the time you read this.]

Original story: Durante's famous Dark Souls fix, which papered over the numerous cracks in the game's 2012 PC port, is on the receiving end of a DMCA complaint filed by Bandai Namco Games Germany. That's according to Durante himself, who has taken to NeoGAF confirming that DSFix 2.3 is being removed or disabled from Dropbox accounts, according to a notification sent by the latter organisation. 

This effectively means that if you have a copy of DSFix 2.3 sitting in your Dropbox then you won't be able to access it. While this is a problem unlikely to affect many people, it does indicate that Bandai Namco appears to object to the application's existence. 

As Durante points out on NeoGAF, the program comprises original code created independently from Dark Souls. In other words, the code is not the property of Bandai Namco. 

It's been speculated that this notification has been sent in error, and that Bandai Namco is more likely after the debug version of Dark Souls which appeared online last week. Whatever the case, we've contacted a Bandai Namco representative and they've informed us that there's "no official statement at this stage".

The newest version of DSFix released earlier this month, and is compatible with the new Steamworks upgrade of Dark Souls. 

Shovel Knight was great, but it lacked the ability to bludgeon passing motorcyclists to their gruesome death. Sensing this gap in the market, Road Redemption devs Dark Seas Games have teamed up with Shovel Knight studio Yacht Club Games to bring the nominal shovel knight into the Road Rash clone. If the pixellated indie platformer was too whimsical for you, then here's something gratuitously violent to make up for it.

Shovel Knight is playable in Road Redemption right now depending  where in the world you are (it launches proper on December 22), and he arrives on his own custom chopper bike. Road Redemption is still in Early Access, but is expected to release properly in Q3 2015.

Experienced players know the importance of fighting quietly in Counter-Strike. You're slower when you walk, but a single footstep or over-cautious reload can give away your position and intentions. I took a moment to talk over a quick eco round where I found success by taking advantage of my opponents' inability to hear over the sound of their own gunfire.

My Sister of the Bear is a massive woman. She wields a bearded axe that's just as big as she is, and right now she's only a turn away from smashing an idol with one health point. My opponent is outnumbered and blocked by numerous weaker minions—I have this. And then the worst happens. The enemy player lays down a scroll that makes a gale sweep throughout the board, damaging all minions equally, and he launches some kind of missile that smacks my hero down with the cold weight of technology. Suddenly, I'm the one who's afraid.

Cue flashback. I'm hunched over a chessboard on the brittle tables of my middle school cafeteria (nerd that I was), frantically trying to figure out how my best friend could have called out "checkmate" when I'd planned everything so well. Scrolls delivers many moments like this precisely because it feels a little like the game of kings; for more modern sensibilities, it's just as well to think of it as a mashup of Magic: The Gathering and Might & Magic.

In the menus and shop, Scrolls looks much like many of the other digital collectible and trading card games that have popped up over the last few months, but in matches, it benefits from a tactical element that has you play the minions represented by your cards (erm, scrolls ) on a hexagonally gridded field with five idols each with 10 hit points on both ends. Knock out three of the idols, and you win. It seems like such a small change, but the resulting need for careful thought elevates it in some regards above the Blizzard's ultra-popular Hearthstone.

Naturally, that means it's a tad tougher to pick up compared to Blizzard's beast. An extensive series of tutorials adequately eases you into the waters, but I readily admit that I spent hours battling the decent AI in skirmishes and trials ( puzzles ) before I felt comfortable jumping in with real people who might mock my placement of a barrier or a Brother of the Wolf. (Happily, the community's not anywhere near as bad as all that.) Scrolls isn't just about which card trumps another; it's also about moving avatars to new lanes after they've destroyed an idol on another. It's about blocking and rushing and buffing. The payoff is that every win feels like it's born of my mind and not my luck.

Scrolls does much to nurture this feeling. It avoids the bummer of running out of cards in a traditional card game by letting you sacrifice a scroll once per round to bump up your mana a tad or to trade it out for two different scrolls from your deck. (Or, you know, play it.) It only supports four decks—Growth, Order, Decay, and Energy—but they all cater to certain playstyles and aesthetic preferences. I tend to play as Growth, but that's mainly because I like the scruffy Viking look of its primitive representatives, each drawn on scrolls with imagery that captures the spirit (if not the detail) of Magic: The Gathering's artwork. If I'm in the right mood, I gravitate toward the Energy deck, full of steampunky "machine priests" and built around a heavy hitting philosophy. I enjoy them all, in fact, with the caveat that they don't play well together in mixed decks. Since each 50-card deck can only draw from its own resources, mixed decks bog down in an awkwardness that doesn't exist in decks of a single type.

That wouldn't be so bad, perhaps, if it didn't exacerbate a preexisting problem. Much like those chess matches in my middle school cafeteria (which I rarely finished before the bell rang), Scrolls suffers from plodding pacing that drags matches out for the better part of an hour. Much of this springs from the need to demolish the three idols, which grows challenging when you're up against a player that knows the slightest thing about slapping down barrier scrolls or tanky minions. Turns in multiplayer matches last for 90 seconds, and many players insist on savoring every last one before clicking the hourglass to end the turn. And sorry, Mojang: I don't think there's any way this tortoise is going to catch up with Blizzard's hare.

But here's the thing—there's little evidence that Mojang cares about the competition, and that's what makes Scrolls appealing in spite of its pacing problems. For months word circulated that it would cost 20 bucks, but now that it's here, it costs a fourth of that—just $5/ 3.

It gets better. The premium "shards" you buy with real cash only purchase customizable avatars, random daily cards, and preconstructed decks, but Mojang lets you buy all scrolls in the game with the gold from your winnings. In contrast to certain other games, the gold piles up quickly. Winning matches against the AI is usually enough to net you enough gold to buy at least one scroll, and buying full packs with scrolls from all four decks doesn't take much longer. All things considered, Scrolls is easily one of the most generous collectible card games on the market, and it even lets you freely buy and sell cards with other players with gold on the "black market."

So, where is everyone? Here's a game that bucks the trend everyone complains about and it's like Washington D.C. in Fallout 3. Matches pop up quickly enough, but once I even played against the same guy twice in a row. It makes for a community that feels like a group of close buddies who play cards together every night, but that means frightening things for Scrolls' future.

Perhaps that pacing really is enough to drive everyone away. Perhaps it's marketing. Whatever the reason, it shouldn't be enough to dissuade you from trying out Mojang's mildly cerebral CCG if you like some tactics in your cardplay. So head on over—the community will wait. At this point, they're used to it.

Electronic Arts says Battlefield Hardline is "the fastest Battlefield ever," and that may well be true. Even so, I don't think I'd necessarily recommend shooting at pursuing police cars from the back of a crotch rocket, especially when the occupants of said cars are packing submachine-guns and an apparent green light to use them at will.

I haven't been paying particularly close attention to Battlefield Hardline, so maybe this is old news to most of you, but what I find especially interesting about this trailer is the idea that the police can actually arrest criminals, rather than simply shooting them repeatedly. Mainly because of the obvious questions that follow: What happens to apprehended suspects—and, for that matter, the officers who arrest them?

Are they out of the game while they're taken down to booking? Do arresting officers have to go AFK while they fill out their R-155s and get them filed before end-of-day? And what's the non-lethal option for the criminals? I'm assuming there has to be one, because if not, wouldn't everyone want to play as a bad guy?

And then there's the part of me that thinks I'm reading too much into this. Perhaps Battlefield Hardline is less "Law and Order" and more B.A.D. Cats. Here, look it up.

Battlefield Hardline comes out on March 20.

Eidos Montreal has released a Deus Ex: Human Revolution prequel novella written by James Swallow, one of the writers on the game and its somewhat less-well-received follow-up, The Fall. Entitled Deus Ex: Fallen Angel, it tells the tale of Faridah Malik in her days before joining Sarif Industries as its chief pilot.

Malik was the VTOL jockey who hustled Adam Jensen all over the planet as he went about Sarif business, and who—spoiler alert, so stop reading here if you haven't played the game but have every intention of doing so over the holidays and don't want to ruin any surprises, because I'm about to do just that, and I'm not kidding around here—may or may not have met an unpleasant end at the hands of Belltower soldiers.

The story is set in Hengsha prior to the events of Human Revolution and, based on some quick poking about (I haven't read it yet), will fill in at least some of the blanks alluded to in the game. During their first trip to the city, Malik requests Jensen's aid in investigating what she believes is the murder of her friend, Evelyn Carmichael; Carmichael features prominently in the novella, although given the time frame I'd guess it has nothing to do with that particular mission.

Even if you're not a die-hard, must-have-it-all fan of Deus Ex, Fallen Angel is free, so why not? A little bit of holiday reading never hurt anyone. Grab it here.

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! The Dell UltraSharp U2412 monitor is down to $320 on Dell's official site and comes with a $100 Dell giftcard. Separate from the Steam sale, GreenManGaming is having a huge amount of sales on a bunch of games, but a lot of them are short lived. And not one to be left out of the party, Amazon is also heavily discounting digital games, including our  Game of the Year, Alien: Isolation for only $25.

— Amazon is having a huge holiday digital games sale, including Command & Conquer Ultimate Collection for $5, Skyrim for $5, Grand Theft Auto 4 for $3, Dead space 3 for $4, Alien: Isolation for $25, and a lot more.

— GreenManGaming has a set of 24 hour deals including Fallout, the Valve Complete Pack, Tropico, 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 DMC, Dead Rising 3, Duke Nukem 3D, and more which you can also get an additional 20% off with the code: WINTER-SALE20-GROGRE

— GreenManGaming, not short on deals, is also having a Deals from the Deep sale on deadly games like Typing of the Dead, Left4Dead, Soul Reaver, Dishonored, and more which you can also get an additional 20% off with the code: WINTER-SALE20-GROGRE

— The entire Mass Effect Trilogy is on $13.50 on Amazon.

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

— The Lenovo Helix Convertible Laptop is down to $949.99 on Lenovo s site with the code USPHLX33U128

— The Corsair Carbide Series 500R ATX Mid Tower computer case is $79.99 on Newegg after a $20 rebate and with the code EMCWHWA35

— The Gigabyte GV-N75TOC-2GI GeForce GTX 750Ti graphics card is $114.99 on Newegg after a $30 rebate, and comes with $50 of in-game currency for Strife, War Thunder, and Infinite Crisis.

— The Corsair RM Series RM650 650W Full Modular Power Supply (80PLUS GOLD) is $79.99 on Newegg after a $20 rebate.

— The Dell UltraSharp U2412 24in 1920x1200 monitor is $319.99 on Dell s site and comes with a $100 Dell gift card. To see the deal, click "click here for pricing" then small business.

— The Dell S2715H 27in LED LCD Monitor is $299.99 on Dell s site and comes with a $100 Dell gift card. To see the deal, click "click here for pricing" then small business.

— The Crucial M550 512GB SSD is $209.99 on Newegg with the code EMCWHHH25

For more tech deals, visit techbargains.com.

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I ve wanted to write a spoilery assessment (warning: you've been warned) of BioShock Infinite: Burial At Sea all year, and now appears to be the perfect time. While I briefly considered nominating this for some kind of best expansion award, talking about this as a personal favourite of the year and being able to discuss the ins and outs of the story makes so much more sense—because if you muddled your way to BioShock Infinite: Burial At Sea Part 2, having completed the previous episode, BioShock Infinite, BioShock 2 and maybe Minerva s Den, this closing of the Irrational era of the series was a huge moment. It was not only a farewell to Rapture and Columbia, but a goodbye note from Irrational as the studio in its post-Infinite form ceased to exist.

I think Burial At Sea works a little too hard to pander to fans. In Part 1 of Burial At Sea, a Rapture-bound Booker DeWitt teams up with a noir-styled Elizabeth to find a lost child called Sally. After a wander in pre-fall Rapture, it veers into more familiar splicer-slaying territory. By the finale, Booker is killed as many of the same themes from Infinite s ending are reprised. Burial At Sea Pt 2, by contrast, puts players in Elizabeth s shoes for the first time. Elizabeth is reluctantly in league with BioShock antagonist Atlas, who leads a rebellion against Ryan that will throw Rapture out of balance. Elizabeth helps set in motion Jack s arrival in Rapture, in a story that is quite clearly intended to be canon for the original BioShock.

To quote my colleague Phil Savage when I discussed this with him, Burial At Sea fills in plot holes that did not need to be filled in. You don t need to know what Kurtz s morning was like before Willard arrived in Apocalypse Now (maybe he had a shower? In the dark, of course). And you really didn t need to know what the Space Jockey in Alien was up to, did you? It was much more fun as a question, not an answer. Clinically debunking the mythology around beloved fiction rarely serves the story.

In pleasing players who were so keen to see those two fictions of Columbia and Rapture collide and to close the loop on any potentially unanswered questions about the two cities, Irrational perhaps picked the safest of all the infinite outcomes to explore. Elizabeth s presence, it turns out, 100% solves the story of Jack s coming to Rapture. But did the story of two BioShocks need solving?

There was an opportunity for a far wilder and weirder turn for that fiction, I think. While it may be the most satisfying way to close out from a fan perspective, critically speaking, did this really serve the story as well as it could ve done? I d argue maybe not. The story of Jack, Andrew Ryan and Fontaine was complete.

However: I say all this knowing that I enjoyed every second of Burial At Sea as a fan. The critic in me knows all of the above but really doesn t mind that much. BioShock was the beginning of the next age of games for me back in 2007, a formative and influential title that challenged older notions of cutscene-driven storytelling (even if a lot of those principles had already been pioneered in System Shock 2, BioShock basically popularised them). To revisit that world was an indulgence, and god damn it, when fan service is made directly for you, there s no shame in loving it.

And I did love Burial At Sea. I got the briefest glimpse of Sander Cohen creating his twisted art, a villain who I hadn t seen in almost seven years but certainly never forgot. I was breathless in the final stretch as Elizabeth slowly maneuvered into certain betrayal at the hands of Atlas, who angrily slipped out of the Irish drawl and into the American twang of Frank Fontaine, his true and barely-hidden identity. I will never, ever forget  this anti-Ryan propaganda video by Atlas that you find later in the story. Burial At Sea was an extravagant finale for BioShock in its current form, filled with moments designed to get an emotional response from players who have the same background with the series that I do.

It s comparable, actually, to Mass Effect 3 s Citadel DLC from last year—a farewell to one era of a series players have lived with for nearly a decade. Irrational s closure makes it more poignant in retrospect. I sensed Ken Levine s love for comic books in the way these universes were thrown together. Elizabeth meeting Andrew Ryan for the first time is Levine s Superman meeting the Joker: it s not what we re used to, but how can you not want to see it?

I think Irrational put pleasing fans ahead of the story—and you know what, given that this is the last Irrational game we ll ever see, though certainly not the last time we ll see its influences or its philosophies, the Boston studio deserved to do that. Burial At Sea is a fond farewell to BioShock and Infinite, one that I almost consider a fourth BioShock game in its own right. 

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Well that didn't take long: The $70 million mega-mansion that Markus "Notch" Persson picked up last week has been recreated in Minecraft.

Built by Dan Bovey, the recreation of Notch's new digs is an impressive piece of work, its accuracy highlighted by a picture-in-picture comparison to the real-life promotional video showing off the property in its pre-purchase state. There's even a glimpse of the famous "Candy Room," although Notch's feet are nowhere to be seen.

Bovey said a downloadable version of the blocky Chez Notch is "coming soon" to his Planet Minecraft page. In the meantime, you can imagine what it's like to live in a billionaire's voxelized mansion with the video above.