New pets, a dastardly PvP faction and fresh ways to earn extra gold and reputation headline the shiny new things waiting for you right now as part of Sea Of Thieves‘ April update. This is a big one folks, I don’t think there’s been an update with this amount of stuff since Tall Tales were introduced for the game’s anniversary last year. There’s none of those to be found in Ships Of Fortune, though. This time around, Rare are giving some life to Sea Of Thieves factions, and letting you earn big by joining up with them.

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Out of all the agents available in Valorant, Raze is perhaps the most rage-inducing to contend against. Her skillset is focused almost entirely on dealing direct damage, setting her well apart from the rest of the agents in Valorant. But while her abilities are fairly easy to get to grips with, there’s an awful lot more to them – and her – than meets the eye. Our Valorant Raze guide will walk you through some top-tier tips and tricks for getting the most out of this bombastic demo expert.

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Last night saw the start of the Guardian Games in Destiny 2, a new three-way competition between Hunters, Titans, and Warlocks to, in Bungie’s words, “test your skills in a series of daily class challenges” and ultimately “prove that your class reigns supreme”. In reality, the competition is just another set of bounties in a game already too focused on bounties. Guardian Games is a bust, and not at all what this disappointing season needs. However! Yesterday’s patch did at least fix some frustrating issues, including putting seasonal mod slots on some old armour and adding more Pinnacle rewards.

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I remember playing a Counter-Strike map in 2001 called fy_iceworld. It was a small simple grey killbox of a map that virtually anyone could’ve made within the first few hours of downloading the editor tools.

fy_iceworld quickly became one of the most popular and divisive CS maps at my school. I was, of course, one of the haters. I tried to convince my friends to vote against fy_iceworld on our local internet cafe’s CS server, but they argued that I was just salty about being bad at it (which was partly true) and they forced the mapchange anyway. Similar conversations played out across countless clan servers, cyber cafes, PC bangs, and LAN parties around the entire world.

To properly gauge fy_iceworld’s influence and legacy, I asked several working level designers for their takes. Should we love it or bury it?

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I enjoyed the BBC’s Peaky Blinders so much that I nearly went to its official festival. They do up Digbeth to look like post-war Birmingham, and recruit bands like Primal Scream. Everyone walks around in tailcoats. I am a fool for not going when I had the chance, but at least I’ll soon get to tour pretend post-war Birmingham in a videogame. Peaky Blinders: Mastermind has been announced for this summer, and it looks like a vaguely Shadow Tactics style sneak ’em up. You choreograph heists by coordinating gangsters on easily-tweaked timelines, getting them to distract guards and slip each other keys through fences.

It’s a genuinely interesting idea, even without the branding.

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The Crucial P1 was one of the best value NVMe SSDs I tested last year, but now Crucial are expanding their P family of NVMe drives with the budget-friendly P2 and high performance P5 – and the good news is that they’re both even faster than the P1.

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Gandhi is one of the most unique figure in history. His adherence to non-violence, his establishment of a full-fledged philosophy behind it and, above all, his success>, are practically without precedent. Kings, empires and leaders can often blur into each other. The locations change, the dates are different and the numbers differ, but the essence remains the same. Gandhi was something completely different, and yet games try to represent him with the same pieces they use for everyone else – and so they always make him something far less than he was.

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The best virtual reality game, probably.

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Industries Of Titan has a refreshing attitude towards dirt and grime. Most city builders prefer to clutch their pearls when it comes to the unpleasant matter of pollution, chastising mayors as they construct the elaborate sewage networks required in order to pump vast quantities of human gunk into whichever unfortunate body of water happens to be farthest from your town hall. Hand-wringing civic advisors wag an accusatory finger as you redraw the boundaries of your landfill site, wider and wider, before delicately placing incinerators on top like it’s a big brown birthday cake.

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Y’know, sometimes I can be difficult to amuse. At other times, I install a mod that reduces everyone’s size in Mount And Blade 2: Bannerlord by a third, and that’s all it takes.

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