Of all the reasons not to release a new game during this busy notE3 period, surely the greatest is that I simply do not have time to play Hardspace: Shipbreaker right now. Launched into early access today by Homeworld 3 developers Blackbird Interactive, it’s a first-person sim about carefully cutting up spaceships to sell salvage. Blackbird, do you have any idea how many showcase streams I need to watch for work this week? Outrageous. But you, reader dear, maybe you have the time to blast off.
The RPS Vidbuds are getting involved in all the not-E3 fun this year. After their livestream of pre- and post-PC Gaming Show analysis, they’re upping the ante by playing as many of the Steam Game Festival: Summer Edition demos as possible. See both slices of lovely upcoming games, and Matthew Castle shouting about Toblerones probably. The stream starts at 7pm BST, and you can find the video embed after the jump.
is a physics-based puzzle sandbox in which you build specialised robots to carry out different tasks, like ferrying a washing machine across a busy railway track or rescuing crash test dummies from burning buildings. It’s a kind of Kerbal Everything> Program, powered by a comprehensive suite of easy-to-use creative tools that let you construct pretty much anything you can imagine: spring-loaded catapults, rocket-powered doodads, spinning whizzbangs, a motorised penis that twirls around and around to signal to the world how predictable you are.
Amazon US are having a bit of a sale on jumbo external SSDs and HDDs at the moment, including $15 off the 4TB model of WD’s Black P10 external HDD, which is the lowest price it’s been since the beginning of April, an all-time low of $126 for WD’s 1TB My Passport Go SSD, and a massive $100 off the 2TB model of WD’s Black P50 SSD, making it a great time to snap one up if you regularly take your games with you on the go.
The futuredream of metal legs and a hoverbike come together today with the launch Disintegration. Combining first-person shooter with mild RTS squad control, it’s about a plucky bunch of robotised freedom fighters trying to save the world and that. While I’m always up for futurebikers, our VidBuds recently had a play and didn’t really get on with it.
If their new B550 motherboards going on sale today wasn’t enough, AMD have just announced three brand-new Ryzen CPUs. Going on sale on July 7th, the Ryzen 5 3600XT, Ryzen 7 3800XT and Ryzen 9 3900XT are part of a new XT series of desktop processor that offer higher clock speeds to help get the best possible performance. Here’s everything you need to know.
AMD’s new B550 motherboards for their 3rd Gen Ryzen CPUS finally go on sale in the UK today, with prices starting from £110 (or £135 if you’re Ebuyer) in a range of form factors. The B550 chipset is the long-awaited successor to AMD’s mid-range B450 boards, and is one of the only chipsets guaranteed to offer future built-in support for AMD’s next generation of Zen 3 CPUs (the other being the super expensive X570 boards). Of course, £135 is still pretty steep compared to the cost of older B450 boards, many of which can be had for as little as £55 these days, but the good news is that Asus have just announced a nifty cashback offer to help make the transition a little easier for early upgraders, with up to £100 back in your pocket if you buy a ROG or TUF B550 board with an eligible Ryzen CPU.
This morning, Itch.io’s Bundle For Racial Justice And Equality ended its ten days of fundraising with a whooping $8,175,480.81 (£6.4 million) going to organisations fighting racial injustice in America, smashing the $5 million goal. By the end, the bundle offered 1704 videogames, tabletop RPGs, tools, books, comics, soundtracks, and more for as little as $5. It was a phenomenal bargain helping great causes. If you missed it, you missed out.
We already know there are loads of PlayStation 5 games coming to PC, but now it seems the entire look of Sony’s new space age console box is also borrowing a fair bit from existing PC case designs. Specifically, Zotac’s MEK1 mini PC, as their Italian Facebook page recently asked fans to “spot the difference” between the two machines, and yep, I’m definitely having a hard time telling those two things apart right now.
Like many CCG-curious people, I can’t even think about playing Magic: The Gathering properly. Building a deck from a library of thousands of cards and mechanics makes impossible demands on my time and – frankly – ability. But that’s about to change with Jumpstart, a new format that’s due to launch July 17 on paper in the US and also in Magic: The Gathering Arena, its excellent free-to-play PC-based incarnation.
Look, I’m not the only one. “I still have a hard time confidently knowing how many lands to put in my deck,” Mark Heggen tells me. And he’s Magic’s principal product designer. So Jumpstart sounds interesting to me as an official way to play Magic that sidesteps the whole thing.