Last week, we were amazed to find EVGA's RTX 3080 FTW3 Ultra graphics card going for $999 at Newegg - a $300 reduction from the card's MSRP and a big statement about the burgeoning health of the GPU market. Today, the beefy GPU has appeared for just $889 at Newegg, a healthy $110 reduction. That's a great price for the best high-end graphics card right now, especially for one that's made by the trusted folks at EVGA.
The Crucial P2 is a popular budget NVMe SSD, and today it's decidedly more budget than usual. GameStop are selling the massive 2TB variant of the drive for just $155.99, some $15 less than the cheapest comparable drive anywhere else and way below the $174 that Amazon are charging. That's a great deal for a drive that we wholeheartedly recommend - especially when it's down to crazy-low prices like this.
Starfield continues to dribble out making-of videos, in which its developers at Bethesda sit and chat about the elements of their next mega RPG. The latest video is focused on sound and music, with composer Inon Zur and audio director Mark Lampert talking about building the audioscapes for an interstellar adventure.
Stardock’s turn-based interstellar 4X strategy Galactic Civilizations 4 has launched out of early access exclusively on the Epic Games Store today. It adds far bigger maps than Galactic Civilizations 3, along with the opportunity to bring more worlds into your dastardly empire or benevolent federation than before. All the familiar civilizations are back, except for the mantis-like Thalan, and there are some newbies like the Festron Hunt: crab monsters that eat other races and sound a bit like Neal Asher's Prador. Maps are now broken into discrete chunks called Star Sectors too, linked by subspace streams that have to be discovered and researched so they can be navigated.
Warstride Challenges is an early access FPS that takes the retro shoot 'em up and straps it in a rally car. Each level is a course with straights and corners and demons. You must cross the finish line as fast as you possibly can, but the chequered flag only springs up if you've turned every demon along the way into a red paste.
The game is an FPS for perfectionists and speed junkies who want to look cool. It's quite literally a time attack with a learning curve that's worth investing in. Sure, the littlest mistakes can mean disaster, but when you take time to master a course, it's a payoff you'll remember.
The RTX 3070 Ti is a great mid-range to high-end GPU, with excellent performance in rasterised games plus DLSS and RT support, but it's been hard to find at a good price if you haven't lucked out with a Founders Edition restock. Prices for third-party cards are slowly falling, and now have reached within £100 of the £549 UK RRP - an important milestone for GPUs that cost £1000 or more at the beginning of the year.
The cheapest RTX 3070 Ti model we've found is a Zotac RTX 3070 Ti Trinity at Ebuyer, who are asking £649 with a despatch date of April 26th(tomorrow!). If you want the cheapest model that's in stock right now, then that'll be the Inno3D RTX 3070 Ti X3 at Overclockers for £10 more. Either way, you'll be left with a performant graphics card that requires only a modest 750W PSU, less than Nvidia's higher-end GPUs and much less than the company's next-gen products rumoured to arrive towards the end of this year.
SK Hynix aren't a company that most folks have heard of, but this Korean firm produces a sizeable percentage of the world's flash memory and DRAM chips alongside the likes of Samsung, Kioxia and WD. They've also started making their own tightly integrated consumer SSDs, and today one of them is heavily discounted at Amazon.com. That makes it a great time to upgrade your PC with 1TB of fast storage for a historic low price.
Midnight Ghost Hunt is the latest in a steadily lengthening line of Prop Hunt-inspired party games. There are two teams: the Ghosts, and the Hunters. The Ghosts can possess objects in the world to hide inside, and their job is to survive until midnight. The Hunters must use a variety of high-tech gadgets and weapons to track down and destroy the Ghosts before that time, or else risk being hunted themselves once midnight strikes.
The game is already out on Steam Early Access, and has been for a few weeks now. You’ll probably know already whether you’d be interested in giving it a go: after all, it’s Prop Hunt. But it’s also got a fair few more bells and whistles than other Prop Hunt-likes that I’ve come across. So, a group of us decided to get together one chill winter’s eve (sunny Friday morning actually, but hey, I’m tryna set a spooky tone), and bash each other’s heads with inanimate objects for a few hours. And judging from all the yelps and shouting, I’d say we had a good time.
After a year away, Screenshot Saturday Sundays returns on a new day. Started by Jay Castello in 2019 then continued by Nat Clayton and now me, it's a weekly skim through the pretty, weird, and interesting work-in-progress peeks that indie devs post on Twitter for Screenshot Saturday. This week, we have bodyboarding with actual bodies, a great many doors being kicked, and several good fish.
Part of the modern soundscape is a sing-song synthetic voice telling us about everything from slime recipes and teenage drama to unionisation procedures and scissor-wielding 'fashion hacks' that surely are covert fetish videos. It is TikTok's text-to-speech voice, and it is everywhere. Now it's even in Half-Life, thanks to a mod which replaces the opening tram ride voiceover with a TikTok TTS version. It's a distressing artifact, and I hate that it kinda works. See/hear for yourself in the video below.