It can be tricky finding a good gaming laptop for under £1000 / $1000 these days, so to help you find one that can still play games to a reasonable degree, we’ve put together this list of all the best budget gaming laptop deals you can buy right now. Having sifted through as many laptop deals as I can find, the ones we’ve picked out below are what we think represent the best value for money. While most will struggle to play games on max settings, there are still a couple of RTX 2060 laptops to be found in this price range, as well as plenty with high refresh rate displays. So read on for all of this week’s best budget gaming laptop deals happening in the UK and US.

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Freestyle skating and global politics have a lot in common: when you pull off big tricks you feel like king of the world, but muff it and and you can crash hard. It’s only natural, then, that Crusader Kings 3 and Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1 + 2 come together in a new CK3 mod, ‘Tony Hawk’s Pro Crusaders 1 + 2’. In a most radical rewriting of history, it lets your rulers also be skaters and hit the park as hard as the royal court – but will you sk8 or die?

The mod’s creator explains: “My friend Gary couldn’t decide whether to play Tony Hawk or Crusader Kings 3, so I made this mod to help him out.”

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As we prepare for launch of the RTX 3080 on Thursday, here’s one final look to see if there are any last minute graphics card deals worth snapping up. 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, which is launching next month in October.

In truth, 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 Nvidia to release 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, although AMD have their own [cms-block] cards coming soon, too. As a result, 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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Heaven’s Vault

is one of those games that manages to occupy every waking moment of your life as soon as you start playing it. It’s an archaeological linguistics mystery that sees you hop between planets and sail across vast, serene space rivers as you work to uncover the secrets of an ancient civilisation through the power of translation, deciphering age-old hieroglyphics so you can understand more about what the future holds for your home region of space known as the Nebula. I couldn’t stop thinking about it when it came out in the spring of last year, and as we inch closer to the release of Inkle’s next adventure, the Arthurian-based Pendragon, I’ve found it’s wormed its way back inside my brain yet again.

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Screenshot Saturday Sundays! There’s a chill wind in the air this Sunday, readers. Listen real close, and you may even hear it whisper “cor, blimey, there’s some ruddy good screenshots popping round Twitter lately”. This week: Umbrellas caught in the wind, perplexing puzzling, a bloody graphic novel holiday and lovely broken skies.

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Sundays are for going to a socially distanced picnic, as a goodbye to parents and children from nursery before our kids all start school on Monday. What a strange time.

The former staff of Deadspin have formed a new sports and culture website, called Defector. They tell the story of how they got to this point here, from the mass resignation from G/O Media to the reasons why they’re starting something new.

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Quick, I say Remedy, you say… well? If you said Death Rally and not Max Payne or Control, you’re either a massive clever-clogs or you looked at the header of this story. To commemorate the studio’s 25th birthday, the developers are making their very first game free to keep forever. Great news, if you’re into bloody car combat racers from the grindhouse depths of 1996.

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Feeling peckish, halflings? Bay 12 Games are still stirring away at Dwarf Fortress‘ new and improved Steam version, but they’ve popped out of the kitchen a mo to give us a taste of the sprawling mountainfolk sim’s spruced up new interface – turning a simple stone room into a temple to meal deal sandwiches with a streamlined new painting tool.

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Once again, the stress fires of 2020 have knocked another game’s release plans out the window. This time it’s Kena: Bridge Of Spirits, a whimsical adventure debut from the folks at Ember Labs. The developers announced this week that their stylish first steps into the world of videogames will now release in the early months of next year, following a shaky adjustment to the awkwardness of working from home.

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Bad news for sexy demigods who wanted to bring their slaughter to the bus stop, I’m afraid. While Supergiant’ underworld slasher Hades is still set to enter 1.0 this autumn, it’ll no longer arrive with cross-play between PC and the incoming Switch release. That platform-hopping feature has been pushed back beyond Hades’ release, arriving as a free update later this year.

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