Next up in our How to build a PC guide is installing your RAM. As you may well have seen in our Best DDR4 RAM article and buying guide, your PC’s RAM (or random access memory, to give it its full and proper name) is the middle ground between your CPU and your various storage devices, be they SSDs or more traditional HDDs. RAM can access data much, much quicker than SSDs, and so the stuff your PC needs to access quickly – like booting up Windows or loading a game – all gets stuffed in there.

Annoyingly, installing RAM isn’t as simple as just sticking them into any old DIMM slot on your motherboard. There’s always something, isn’t there?

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Congratulations, you’ve passed the halfway mark of our How to build a PC guide. The end is in sight, and it won’t be long now before you can sit back, have a nice hot cuppa and admire your handy work. But first, it’s time to install that graphics card.

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The very nature of ‘battle passes’ in multiplayer games is grinding through challenges to unlock cosmetic shinies, but the one Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds launched last week to celebrate its new map, Sanhok, was taking the Michael a little. Sure, the beachwear it can eventually unlock is quite nice, but getting there is quite a task – especially with stringent restrictions on levelling up the Event Pass. Doubly so because developers PUBG Corp let players pay extra money to buy Pass levels. People were not best pleased. So the devs have rethought and are loosening it up, making those level 30 bikini bottoms a little more attainable. (more…)

Q Entertainment’s 2004 musical puzzler Lumines is back with another one of those block-droppin’ beats as Lumines Remastered, a remake of the original PSP game. It was great then and it’s still basically the same, only now in fancy modern HD-o-vision. Drop coloured blocks onto a grid to form matches and score mega-points, grooving to tunes which also drive the pace of the puzzling: a good time. Oh, and you could hook up a load of controllers and duct tape them to your body to buzz merrily to the beat. (more…)

It’s a hard question that so few cyberpunk games are willing to engage with or even think about; where are the children? In a grim urban hell where life is cheap and bullets are cheaper still, it’s a problem few want to deal with. Not so for Orphan Age, a currently-crowdfunding (and very nearly at its goal) strategy/management game about a band of kids surviving the neon-slaked streets however they can. There’s a playable demo, a trailer, and 12 minutes of developer commentary and gameplay footage within.

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EA are retiring season passes for the Battlefield series starting with Battlefield V, and it seems that they’re gradually making that change retroactive, at least in part. Today, owners of Battlefield 1 and Battlefield 4 who only have the base games can pick up the Turning Tides and Second Assault expansions respectively for the always-reasonable price of free, although you’ll need to grab them via Origin.

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It’s Overwatch patch day, which means that up is down, black is white and dogs and cats are getting along famously, at least for the moment. Today’s update brings the planned (and rather controversial) overhaul to hard-light magician Symmetra, a Looking For Group feature for when you want a slightly more organised team of strangers to play with, and a new system of ‘endorsements’, providing gifts to players regularly favoured by their peers. Plus, there’s the usual bundle of balance patches, including… Oh.

Oh no.>

Those mad bastards. They tripled> the range of McCree’s Ultimate.

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Premature Evaluation is the (usually) weekly column in which we explore the wilds of early access. This week, Fraser’s shooting acrobatic cowboys in Sky Noon, an unconventional FPS full of grappling hooks and aerial antics. >

My stetson and I have spent a great deal of time soaring through big, open skies recently. It s been lovely, though there s always a tinge of frustration and just a bit of disappointment breaking the serenity of my trip through the clouds. That s because I m usually hurtling to my death. Sky Noon can be a tricky FPS to wrap one s head around, and I m not sure I m there yet, judging by my many fatalities. Because I m a glutton for punishment, and because it s shaping up to be a uniquely brilliant cowboy shootout, I ve persisted.

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Perhaps inspired by their recent meteor-dropping event in Fortnite, Epic Games are aiming a megaton weight at one of their former QA contractors. They claim that former QA guy Thomas Hannah leaked the true target of May’s map-changing meteor back in late April, giving hints to someone who then posted about it on Reddit in a now-deleted post. Epic Games claim that they’ve suffered “actual losses” and “irreparable injury” as a result, and filed to sue him for full damages on May 7th.

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With Dead Cells nearing its exit from early access, developers Motion Twin have ticked off a few big boxes on their to-do list for the rad roguelikelike metroidvania. Today brings Mac and Linux versions, “experimental” mod support, and final confirmation that the price will go up by $5 ahead of its August launch. But heck, Dead Cells was our favourite game of 2017 even in its early days on early access, so I’d feel fairly confident buying before it’s done-done mega-‘done’ done – especially as it’s going cheap in the Steam summer sale right now. (more…)