If you’re planning on upgrading your graphics card to one of the new [cms-block] RTX 3000 cards over the next couple of months you might find it rather difficult to get hold of one until early next year. According to a new report from Tweaktown, industry sources have said the first wave of RTX 3080, RTX 3090 and RTX 3070 GPUs will be much smaller than Nvidia’s previous launches, and that post-launch “no stock will be available till the end of the year.”

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Good news for anyone who’s had trouble installing Microsoft Flight Simulator: a new patch has fixed a number of bugs which interfered with installation. Bad news if you are one of those people: to benefit from these fixes, it’s recommended that you uninstall MSFS and reinstall from scratch. Oh no.

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What am I thinking? Of course you’ve played Don’t Starve. Some days it feels like the ratio of “people who have played Don’t Starve at least once” to “people on planet Earth” is somehow greater than one. So you can imagine my shock when I found out that no one has written a HYP on Don’t Starve before now.

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Whatever anyone thought of space simulation No Man’s Sky when it launched—or now, several years and updates later—it can be said without question that it shot for the stars. Whole procedural planets can be explored, bases built, ships outfitted, and more. Their next project after the universe-size simulation was a small puzzle adventure called The Last Campfire that just launched last week. As for what comes next, Hello Games founder Sean Murray says that the studio is headed back into the thick of it with another “huge, ambitious game like No Man’s Sky.”

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Crusader Kings 3

sounds absolutely lovely, but the harsh reality I’m currently facing is that I just won’t play it. I still need to finish Yakuza Kiwami 2, start Spiritfarer, and earn a crown in Fall Guys.

I simply cannot fathom fitting medieval strategy onto my list of shame but I am riveted by the stories other folks are telling about their wayward conquering. I just want to funny bits of emergent storytelling without the centuries of campaign preceding them. Fortunate for me, then, that Crusader Kings 3 tales are almost best when stripped of surrounding context. Here, I’ll show you.

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New York ravaged by a pandemic isn’t quite the jaunty thought experiment it was when The Division launched in 2016. If you’re not too wracked with existential dread at the prospect, then there’s a free game in it for you. The Division is free for keeps on Uplay until September 8th if you log in with your Ubisoft account to claim it.

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Intel have officially unveiled their 11th Gen Tiger Lake laptop CPUs with integrated Xe graphics, and they might just be about to change the future of gaming laptops. With up to double the gaming performance compared to Intel’s previous generation of mobile CPUs, Tiger Lake laptops with Xe graphics were shown playing big blockbuster games such as Grid and Gears Tactics at 1080p at close to 60fps during Intel’s online press conference this evening, representing a huge leap in performance for ultraslim laptops compared to their AMD and Nvidia-powered competition.

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Space cowboy trucker simulation Rebel Galaxy Outlaw has been off the radar for a bit but they’ve blipped back into existence. Strap into the cockpit and get ready for some more hauls. Double Damage Games have announced that the game will be launching on Steam and consoles on September 22nd.

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Yesterday, I dived into the magical world of themed Crusader Kings III playthroughs, with this sobering exploration of what a man’s life might look like if he cared for nothing except banging giants. I may return to my nightmare re-imagining of C12th Estonia at some point, but not today. You see, today, there’s science to be done.

CK3 is, emphatically, all about planning for the long game. The fact you play as the successive inheritors of a medieval throne means you’re always thinking centuries ahead. Even within the lives of your individual rulers, you’ll almost always want to ensure a long and healthy reign, as that’ll give you more time to work on goals that benefit both your current king and their descendants. Indeed, even Andyamo the giantshagger cultivated a secondary interest in medicine, so that he could extend his titan-tupping career well into his seventies. But what happens if you play with utter contempt for longevity? Playing as recklessly as possible, I want to find out just how quickly a king can get themselves killed.

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With the new [cms-block] RTX 3000 cards finally out in the open, we can now make some proper decisions about which graphics card deals are going to be worth snapping up over the next few weeks as retailers look to shed their existing stock of Nvidia RTX cards, and which ones you should avoid like the plague because they’re just not going to be as good value compared to what’s on the horizon. On the Nvidia side of things, you probably shouldn’t buy anything from an RTX 2070 upwards from now on, as even really good graphics card deals aren’t going to offer nearly the same kind of performance as the upcoming RTX 3070.

Heck, even the RTX 2060 and RTX 2060 Super are looking a bit dicey at the moment given the latter’s proximity in price to the RTX 3070, and we’re still expecting a proper RTX 3060 successor before the end of the year, too. This also puts AMD’s Radeon RX 5700 and RX 5700 XT cards at risk, and we’ll be monitoring their ongoing prices like a hawk to tell you whether or not you should take the plunge. In the meantime, read on below for the cheapest graphics card deals worth buying at the moment, and which ones you should avoid.

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