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

Best VR headset 2020

VR has been going from strength to strength in recent months, and with many of us continuing to be stuck at home, we’ve put together this list of our best VR headset recommendations to help you decide which VR headset is right for you. With the recent launch of Half-Life: Alyx and more heading up our [cms-block], there’s never been a better time to jump into the world of VR, so we’ve tested all the major headsets from Oculus, HTC and Valve to find out which is the best VR headset for PC.

Admittedly, the demand for the best VR headsets has been at an all-time high since Half-Life: Alyx came out, and many of them have either been out of stock or suffered from inflated prices. The Oculus Rift S and Oculus Quest have been particularly tricky to get hold of, but when it comes to buying the best VR headset, it really does pay to wait until the right one’s available. After all, VR headsets are a big purchase, so you don’t want to lumber yourself with the wrong one just because your top choice isn’t available.

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Rock, Paper, Shotgun - contact@rockpapershotgun.com (Alan Martin)

Good news, [cms-block] hunters. Prices are dropping on Nvidia’s RTX cards, with big discounts today on the RTX 2060, RTX 2060 Super, RTX 2070 and the RTX 2080 Super on both sides of the Atlantic. It’s almost> as if retailers are trying to clear the decks a bit before the as yet undated launch of this year’s next-gen [cms-block] cards… Sure, graphics card prices may not be quite back down to pre-pandemic levels just yet, but it certainly makes building a ray tracing capable PC that little bit more affordable.

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

Graphics card deals

It’s a good day for graphics card deals hunters this week, especially if you’ve been eyeing up a new Nvidia RTX card, as there are plenty of graphics cards enjoying price cuts in the UK and US this week, including the Palit GeForce RTX 2060 StormX, which is down to £281 from Overclockers UK and the MSI GeForce RTX 2080 Super for $670 from Newegg after rebates and a discount code are taken into account.

Elsewhere, there hasn’t been too much shift in graphics card deal prices this week, but the moves there have been are generally in the right direction (that is, downwards). So to help you keep track of all of the top graphics card deals going on right now, we’ve put together this list of all the best prices for the today’s [cms-block]s so you can see exactly how they compare against one another, and whether they’re a good buy or not. Regardless of whether you’re upgrading your PC or building a new PC from scratch, here are the cheapest graphics card deals on offer this week.

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Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord - contact@rockpapershotgun.com (Matt Bassil)

Mount & Blade 2: Bannerlord has only been around for a few months, but that’s plenty of time for modders to have a good tinker. We’ve already been blessed with a bounty of minor Bannerlord mods: there are hundreds of ways to tweak, alter and optimise your experience, and the option to turn your character into a sword-swinging, death-dealing toddler is not to be sniffed at. But this is just a taste of what’s to come. After all, Mount and Blade is famous not for tweaks but for immense overhaul mods that completely transform the game, transporting us to our favourite fictional worlds and historical periods. There’s every reason to expect great things from its sequel: whereas Warband’s modders had to make do with a system not designed to be altered, Bannerlord is being built from the ground up with modding in mind.

The biggest mods are some way off, however. Modding a game that’s in early access is a bit like trying to ice a cake before its baked, and Bannerlord’s fans don’t even have a spatula – by which, of course, I mean official modding tools – to work with. Without these tools, not due until the game’s full release, there’s no easy way to access Bannerlord’s internal scripting language and make changes. In spite of this, many have decided to roll up their sleeves and just get started – tools be damned.

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

In the endless war of cheat vs. anti-cheat, Valve are considering serious measures to lock down programs hooking into Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. The new measures, currently being put through their paces in an opt-in public beta testing, will not let you join VAC-enabled servers if you launch CS with incompatible files loaded. This is, to be clear, not any sort of kernel driver like Valorant’s controversial Vanguard. The new anti-cheat feature is currently being tested in an opt-in public beta and seems a way away from launching properly, bringing crippling performance problems for some players right now.

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Rock, Paper, Shotgun - contact@rockpapershotgun.com (Alan Martin)

With stock levels and gaming monitor prices steadily returning to normal, pre-pandemic levels, we’re staring to see more and more good [cms-block] crop up. Case in point, Amazon have cut the price of three LG gaming displays today by a seemingly arbitrary 12-13%. Who knows why? The point is that they look like decent displays at reasonable prices, especially if you’re in the market for a cheap ultrawide gaming monitor or a nice 2560×1440 number.

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

How small is too small for a gaming keyboard? Personally, I think my lower limit stops at tenkeyless jobs like the Logitech G915 TKL or my current [cms-block] champion, the Fnatic miniStreak. Losing a keyboard’s number pad has never been an issue for me, but I can’t say the same thing about losing my beloved arrow keys, which is the main thing that gets the chop when you move down to a 60% keyboard like HyperX’s limited edition Ducky One 2 Mini collaboration. That is one step too far in my books, at least if you’re planning on using it as a work keyboard as well as for playing games.

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Duke Nukem's Bulletstorm Tour - contact@rockpapershotgun.com (John Walker)

2011’s Bulletstorm feels like such an oasis of violence and childishness in these current times of nu-puritanism. As someone who was there at the era it harked back to, reviewing games in the late ’90s, early 2000s, it feels odd to now be almost nostalgic for those days of wanton unpleasantness, when being rude had yet to be classified as a war crime under the Geneva Convention. At the time I was so damned sick of it, rolling my eyes at your Soldier Of Fortunes and feeling exhausted by the immature antics of self-declared “troublemakers” like Take-Two. As gaming was mired in that sort of second wave of misogyny, ultra-violence and sweary derring-don’t, we were all desperate for something… nice.

I’m going to make the declaration: games are far too nice> now. I’d like some more offensive games please.

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Hunt: Showdown 1896 - contact@rockpapershotgun.com (Alice O'Connor)

If you wish to hunt monsters in the swamp without being hunted by other players, good news: Hunt: Showdown has launched a singleplayer PvE mode, Trials. This brings a set of challenges to the two maps in Crytek’s monster-hunting FPS, letting your hone skills in sniper trials, parkour trials, and wave survival trials, or just explore the levels without getting murdered. They are very nice levels. Newness has come for multiplayer hunters too, with the new dual wielding feature letting you sling two guns at once.

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

It is a weird circle for a video game based on vintage cartoons to get its own cartoon, but that’s what’s happening with Cuphead. The challenging platformer was last year picked up for a Netflix series, and now we have a teensy video peek at the animated antics and get to meet the voice cast.

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