Destiny 2 - contact@rockpapershotgun.com (Alice O'Connor)

While some players are griping about Destiny 2‘s weapon balance changes coming next season, Bungie have missed a trick by burying the big news: Fighting Lion, already the game’s best gun, is getting buffed. Is it a huge buff? No. Is it a welcome buff? Absolutely. Alice, is Fighting Lion really Destiny’s strongest gun? Look, I said best, not strongest. Hand on heart, I adore no gun in the MMOFPS more than this scrappy wee grenade launcher.

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Raft - contact@rockpapershotgun.com (Steve Hogarty)

You ll have heard of Raft. It s the best open world survival crafting there is, for the singular reason that rather than having to run around to discover and excavate resources, they re all swept towards you on a never-ending tide of stuff. Plastic, wood, leaves, potatoes. All you have to do is catch the detritus with a hook on a string and then yank it towards you, so that it becomes part of your raft and your raft can grow larger and more elaborate.

Minecraft, for all its supposed complexity, is hamstrung by a rude insistence on making you walk around on foot like an idiot, checking under leaves for magic rocks or whatever the hell that game is about. Raft is a survival crafting game for the brilliant, but chronically lethargic creative mind, who would rather sit and let content wash over them than head out in search of it.

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Rock, Paper, Shotgun - contact@rockpapershotgun.com (Dave Irwin)

The next TFT season is nearly upon us and everything’s going a little science fiction. This isn’t completely new to the League of Legends universe, as it’s well established that many champions have ventured into the depths of space under the “PROJECT” and “Star Guardian” banners. With a new season coming to Teamfight Tactics comes a new gimmick in the form of galaxies. But what are galaxies, how do they affect your TFT games, and what are their effects?

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Half-Life - contact@rockpapershotgun.com (Alice O'Connor)

After fifteen years in development in various forms, Black Mesa will finally launch in full on March 5. Started as a mod, the Valve-sanctioned remake of Half-Life eventually became its own commercial game and entered early access in May 2015. Since then, they’ve been working on remaking the much-maligned final chapter of Xen, overhauling and fixing bits, and generally tweaking. Which they’ve now about finished. A few fixes will follow after that, granted, but the end is oh so close.

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Rock, Paper, Shotgun - contact@rockpapershotgun.com (Katharine Castle)

Last week, you may have noticed that I’ve started rounding up all the best gaming monitor deals of the week in their own dedicated deals page. However, some deals, like today’s offer on the excellent Asus ROG Strix XG32VQR, just don’t last that long, as Amazon US are only offering $113 off this curved 2560×1440, 144Hz HDR monitor for the next 17 hours or so. So don’t delay, as this deal will be gone before you know it.

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Half-Life - contact@rockpapershotgun.com (Graham Smith)

A new Half-Life game is only a few weeks away, but it occurred to me that there was no reason to wait for Half-Life: Alyx if I wanted to experience Vortigaunts in VR. I thus spent some time this weekend fussing around Black Mesa in the Valve Index, using a Half-Life 1 VR mod. It’s impressively feature packed and easy to set up, but it was a simple ladder that sold me.

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Rock, Paper, Shotgun - contact@rockpapershotgun.com (Imogen Beckhelling)

Jeff from the Overwatch team has some wonderful news for you damage players – Blizzard are introducing a 3-2-1 role queue today. It’s part of an Experimental game mode that they’re implementing to have players test some of things the team are still unsure about even after internal testing.

Ah the triple damage meta, you’ll know it well if you played Overwatch before all this role queue business, or if you’ve played Quick Play Classic. Three damage, two support and one tank. It was a nightmare – if you were the tank.

“Don’t freak out,” Jeff Kaplan says.

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Wolcen: Lords of Mayhem - contact@rockpapershotgun.com (Dave Irwin)

Picking up loot is most of what Wolcen is, but using those items effectively can make all the difference between having a useless character and an unstoppable build. There’s a lot to consider, such as what type of armour you should be equipping, which gems you should be putting into gem slots, and whether the hood custom skin you picked up hours ago looks better than the crown helmet you just picked up.

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Rock, Paper, Shotgun - contact@rockpapershotgun.com (Katharine Castle)

Gaming keyboards are faster and more precise than your typical budget keyboard, and having one of the best gaming keyboards on your desk can often make playing your favourite PC games a lot more enjoyable. Every key press is registered in a flash, and you don’t have to worry about it missing a vital input when you mash keys in a panic. But with so many gaming keyboards out there, finding the best gaming keyboard can be difficult.

To help you in your quest to find the perfect keyboard for your gaming PC, I’ve compiled a list of all the best gaming keyboards I’ve tested here at RPS, from the best mechanical keyboards to the best wireless keyboards. I’ve also included my top budget gaming keyboard picks for those of you who just want something cheap and cheerful. Whatever type of gaming keyboard you’re looking for, there’s a best gaming keyboard recommendation for you below.

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Rock, Paper, Shotgun - contact@rockpapershotgun.com (Nate Crowley)

Given that Have You Played posts tend towards reminiscence, I find I often end up talking about the music I listened to while playing the games in question. I rarely intend to do this, mind, but it happens nonetheless. The tunes are bycatch: scavengers of the benthic mind, which get caught up in my net whenever I trawl the depths for recollections. And when I tip an old game s memory, flopping, onto the deck of my consciousness, the music scrabbles out of its mouth, blinks in the sunlight, and clacks a catchy rhythm with its pincer-tips as it scurries back into the sea.

This time, the amusement being dragged from the engrammatic brine is Simcity 2000, and its musical parasite is one that shows my age even more than the game itself. Because thinking all the way back to 1996, I didn t have any CDs, and even 56k internet was still two years off in our household, so my only way of listening to music was via cassette tapes on a sort of portable hifi thing.

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