There's an excellent Dell XPS 15 mega deal on right now, discounting the highest-spec model by 520, bringing the total to just under two thousand British pounds. That princely sum gets you a bleeding-edge specification: a 9th-gen Core i9 9980HK octa-core processor and GTX 1650 4GB discrete graphics card, backed with 32GB of RAM and a 1TB NVMe SSD.

The screen is impressive too. It's a 15-inch 4K OLED model, a rarity on a laptop of any price and something of a wonder to behold. The resolution and colour reproduction of the screen make this XPS 15 laptop perfect for content creation tasks like image or video editing, helped by the powerful processor and heaps of RAM under the hood.

Several Digital Founder (and indeed, Gamer Network) staffers rely on XPS laptops as their daily drivers. Those we spoke to loved the excellent screens, big touchpads and the large number of ports available. The only weak point of the design is the keyboard, which isn't bad but lacks the tactility of options from the likes of Asus or Lenovo. Still, the laptop is a clever design, especially with the improved placement of the front-facing camera above the screen (rather than below it) in recent models.

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Most sports games aren't really about playing sports, so much as they're about watching sports. Or more to the point they're about making it so the sport you're watching gets to play out exactly as you'd imagine it, as a fan at home, in your head.

He should have passed to him; she should have made a run there; if only he'd caught that. Playing a FIFA or a Madden is a chance to correct the wrongs of the professional players, not to play as them. You're more manager than player - and more omnipotent every-player in the sky, really, than manager, gradually cycling through control of individual players on a team while the others either remain static or fulfill their roles automatically. There's strategy, sure, and all the decisions and counterfactuals and split concentrations that sports tend to involve. But it's really not anything like the real thing. And that's fine!

In fact it's more than fine, it's great, because it leaves space for other games to fill the gaps. Games like Star Trek: Bridge Crew - a great team sports game. Destiny is a sports game - at least during raids - as are Diablo, World of Warcraft, Overwatch and, of course, League of Legends. That's because team sports, you see, are about everyone doing their damn job, and League of Legends captures this better than anything else.

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There's something going on at Risky Reels. Cars are leaving Fortnite's drive-in theatre, its screen now showing a test card for... something. After the game's enormous black hole reboot in October this year it almost feels quaint. Once again, Fortnite is setting its stage for something new, shuffling parts of its world around like pieces in a chess game, in position for whatever big play comes next.

It's growing harder and harder to remember Fortnite's origins. Not just those early days before its battle royale mode launched when it was another game entirely, but even those early seasons and, as the weeks pass since its previous island setting was slurped into another dimension, bits of that too. Because change is the only constant in Fortnite, a game happy to knock down and rebuild everything it's made out of as quickly as a missile to one of its late-game towers, put up in seconds by players bunkering down for the next shootout.

As I look around at other games which clearly want to be Fortnite - or rather, be as nimble, as experimental, make as much of a cultural impact as Epic's extraordinary live game - it is its breathtaking flexibility and speed of change which stands out. Two and a bit years in and Fortnite has already gone through a full reboot, following a packed 10 seasons which saw its world build up to and absorb an ice age, a volcano, a meteor impact, a kaiju fight, pirates, zombies and a trip to the future - and move on to the next thing just as quickly after.

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Updated as of late Thursday with the latest US and UK Black Friday deals - including legendary headphones, cut-price gaming laptops and much more.

Black Friday week is now in full swing, bringing with it a selection of big deals on a wide range of technology. The Digital Foundry Black Friday hub is right here, with this page offering a run-down of the best Black Friday deals on all sorts of tech, gear and gadgets. We're particularly interested in big ticket items, like laptops, 4K TVs and PC components, as these typically see big discounts on Black Friday - making it the perfect time of year to upgrade your setup. We recommend checking out the pages linked below, as these will always have our best and latest-breaking deals!

Here are links to the best deals by category so far:

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Developer Freebird Games has unveiled Impostor Factory, the third main entry in its well-received To the Moon series. It's described as a "bonkers time-loop tragicomedy murder mystery thriller" and it'll be heading to PC toward the end of next year.

Lo-fi tearjerker To the Moon initially released in 2011 to much acclaim, and it took six year for its first proper sequel, Finding Paradise, to arrive (although Freebird released a number of spin-offs in-between). As with other instalments, Impostor Factory features ties to the rest of the saga, but is designed as a completely standalone adventure, requiring no knowledge of previous games.

"Dr. Rosalene and Dr. Watts have peculiar jobs: They give people another chance to live their lives, all the way from the very beginning. But this isn't their story. Probably," reads Impostor Factory's newly unveiled Steam page, "Instead, it's about Quincy."

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Developer Maschinen-Mensch enormously enjoyable rogue-like exploration adventure, Curious Expedition, might be getting on a bit (it released back in 2016), but it's just received a free multiplayer mode, previously available in browser-based beta, in its latest update.

The gist of Curious Expedition, if you're unfamiliar, is that it's the 19th century and players, cast as daring adventurers, must embark on a race across inhospitable climes to find (ie. steal) exotic treasures in order to secure fame, fortune, and a footnote in the history books.

What that equates to in practice is a compelling blend of board-game-like exploration across a procedurally generated hex-based map, and a text-based choose-your-own-adventure-style yarn. The ultimate goal each game is to score highest against the AI across a set number of expeditions, and to do that you'll need to purchase supplies and prepare a party - whose useful individual perks are usually offset by negative traits such as paranoia, misogyny, or racism, eventually making them something of a liability as things start to go wrong.

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Veteran racing developer Codemasters has announced the acquistion of fellow British racing house Slightly Mad Studios, adding the Project Cars series to its collection of racing brands alongside Dirt, Grid and the official F1 licence.

Codemasters paid $30m in cash and stock, according to GamesIndustry.biz. Slightly Mad CEO Ian Bell will remain head of the studio within Codemasters. Codemasters CEO Frank Sagnier reckoned that "more streaming services coming to market and the next generation of games consoles due in 2020" made this the perfect time for expansion.

Slightly Mad Studios was founded 10 years ago and has specialised in racing games ever since, developing the two Need for Speed Shift games for EA and then its own Project Cars franchise, which has so far yielded two games published by Namco. It is currently working on an "unannounced Hollywood blockbuster title" which is very probably a Fast and Furious game.

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Can you bin a plastic game box and not feel like you've hurt David Attenborough in the process?

Maybe you're having a clear out. Maybe you're downsizing your physical game collection now you've subscribed to Xbox Game Pass. Or maybe you have bought Stadia...

Video games might be moving away from living on plastic discs in plastic boxes, but it's still a worthwhile question to ask. Helpfully, the latest video from People Make Games, presented by some guy named Chris Bratt, asks exactly that.

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We've been asked a lot for prebuilt gaming desktop recommendations for Black Friday, and there are quite a few going. Unfortunately, a lot of the prebuilt options available use older processors or graphics cards, meaning you're leaving a bit of performance on the table compared to someone that was building their PC from scratch using more recent releases. Thankfully, we have found a few great options that are offering completely up-to-date hardware at a good Black Friday discount.

The absolute best Black Friday gaming desktop we've found so far comes from CCL Computers. Their NebulaX gaming desktop boasts a surprisingly strong spec for 893, including the recently released AMD Ryzen 3600X six-core twelve-thread processor and a Nvidia RTX 2060 graphics card. This is backed with 16GB of 3200MHz RAM, a super-fast 256GB NVMe SSD and a slower but very capacious 2TB HDD.

Here's the full breakdown, including manufacturers of each component and their approximate prices online, if you're interested:

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Oh man, Hotline Miami. I can still feel it. What a cutting, embarrassingly necessary parable of violence. What a way to stand on the shoulders of Shadow of the Colossus, by taking that moral throughline and wrapping it, head to toe, in the trappings of its time.

What's weird, though, is I think parables are a bit rubbish. More often than not a parable will do somewhere between most and all of the work for you. You'll finish up - watching, reading, playing, whatever - and you'll know exactly what it is that you just consumed, what the point of it was, and what you need to do next, which is usually nothing.

Hotline Miami, a lot of the time, is at real threat of falling into that trap. You are summoned, via anonymous phone call, into a series of ultra-violent raids on various bad guy hideouts, and you obviously oblige. It's 2012 so naturally, Drive still fresh in the mind, this is set in the late '80s. It's a cult hit because it's indie and violent and has music, and the cult following has nicknamed your character "Jacket", because he has a cool jacket. Everything is neon, but a sort of grim neon, with a dirty, grainy flicker over the top that could be a sort of VHS effect or could be a glaring sign, as it gradually flickers with more vigor and grunge, that what you're seeing here isn't entirely real.

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