240Hz gaming monitors are all the rage among competitive esports circles at the moment, but I have to admit that I’ve never felt creakier or more decrepit playing games than I have with AOC’s C27G2ZU plonked on my desk. To be clear, I’m not casting shade on the monitor itself. This 27in, 1920×1080 gaming display has an absolutely top quality curved VA panel, and its AMD Freesync Premium support works beautifully with Nvidia and AMD graphics cards alike. It’s not one of Nvidia’s officially certified [cms-block] (yet), but it’s a fantastic gaming monitor nonetheless. I am, however, officially too old to keep up with its blistering 240Hz refresh rate.

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AI bots are technological marvels. To think! We’ve imbued blips and blops with a semblance of sentience, turning code into pseudo-autonomous agents that can chat as they run around a virtual world. Unfortunately, people have been using this power to spew racist bots into Team Fortress 2. Players report seeing these bots enter their games, deploy game-breaking hacks, and spam the chat with racist slurs.

Valve haven’t explicitly acknowledged the problem, but they have introduced some measures that might help.

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Students in Poland could soon play This War Of Mine as part of their education, as developers 11-Bit Studios today announced the grim survival game set in a war-torn city will be on next year’s school reading list. It’ll be recommended for those studying sociology, ethics, philosophy, and history, and will be available free to schools. While schools have used games for years, it’s pretty neat for a game to get so formally recognised – and such a non-edutainment game.

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It’s only June, but we may have to close entries on the “weirdest marketing strapline of the year” awards, because Gigabyte have gone and smashed it, while also scooping up the “oddest freebie” trophy at the same time.

That strapline is “DO WHAT TASTES RIGHT!”. Is this a suggestion that you should eat their Radeon graphics card, or a warning that you should not?

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If your laptop can barely muster up the computational strength to read Rock Paper Shotgun without a whole lot of wheezing and complaining, then it likely struggles with anything but the simplest games. One solution to this is GeForce Now which, for those unaware, lets even the weediest hardware play big releases by streaming them from Nvidia’s own ridiculously powerful servers. It’s like your PC is being possessed by considerably more powerful hardware – in a nice way.

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At the PC Gaming Show last week, lovely woodland survival sandbox Among Trees was revealed to be in early access on the Epic Games Store. Like, right now. I got very excited and have been playing it in my spare moments ever since. My early access review will be along soon, but before that I wanted to highlight one thing in particular that I’m enjoying about the game, and that is its lovely little mushrooms.

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The stylish turn-based tactical action of Othercide is coming on July 28th, publishers Focus Home Interactive have announced. That’s the post-Apocalyptic one about fighting demon-y beasties with an army of ‘Daughters’, female warriors who wear flowing scarves and strike cool poses. Lots of talk about suffering. Bit of blood magic, maybe. And sacrifice, definitely. It’s a hearty slap of mood, though I’ve not yet seen much of how it plays.

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Myself and Matthew are continuing Rock Paper Shotgun’s not-E3 E3 2020 video coverage with some pre- and post-show chat on EA’s EA Play Live 2020 show, starting at 11.40pm BST. We’d love it if you came and watched us talk absolute wallop at an ungodly hour. I will be caning some Nescafé Azera to stay up. Inhaling granules straight from the tin.

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This would have been a pretty ho-hum week for CPU deals, if it weren’t for Currys’ superb “PANORAMA” voucher for its Ebay store. It takes between 10 and 20% off prices, meaning that if you can find a CPU there, it’s likely to be the cheapest by some margin. We’ve searched the store and included them where they’re A) available and B) the best price below, but – SPOILER – you won’t do better than this Intel Core i7-10700K which falls to £342 with said discount code.

As for the rest of the cheapest CPU deals this week, it’s small changes in dollars and pounds in either direction, but we’ve done our best to find all the latest and greatest CPU deals anyway. With the launch of Intel’s 10th Gen Comet Lake CPUs finally underway, it’s a good time to bag yourself a cheap CPU deal at the moment, so we’ve listed the best prices for all of today’s [cms-block]s to help you bag yourself a bargain. We’ve got everything here from the best Intel CPU deals to the best AMD Ryzen CPU deals, so whether you’re upgrading your PC or building a new PC from scratch, these are the cheapest CPU deals around right now.

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Monster Train is a game about chuffing through the hills and vales of Hell while mincing up angels with your demonic fiends, angry plants and waxen gentry folk. As Matt has declared, it’s extremely good, and one of the things that I love about it is the way it escalates>. That train ride you’re on is a wild, careening one into multiplying attack and defence.

The result is a sense of soaring power. And the coal that fuels that engine is the fact you can upgrade your cards, giving them buffs and boosts that often feel like you’re breaking the game. Monster Train’s upgrades are great. (more…)