There's a rather fetching deal on the Razer Basilisk Ultimate going at Amazon UK today, where you can pick up a mouse with 11 programmable buttons, high-end components, RGB lighting throughout and a handy charging dock for £84, down from a UK RRP of £170.
A refurbished Lenovo Legion Graphic BoostStation with an RTX 2060 graphics card normally costs £400, but right now you can pick one up on Ebay for £300 with code CROWN20. That's a good deal on the entry-level RTX graphics card, giving your laptop access to hardware-accelerated ray tracing, DLSS to boost frame-rates and a solid card for 1080p AAA gaming.
Joining the scandalously overlooked Blast-Axis and the more recognised Overload in the pantheon of Descentants this week, it's Zerograve. Is this a genre revival now? Three solid contenders (that I'm aware of) must surely bring us close.
It's fully 3D space-ish combat, this time with colourful stylised levels, somewhere between technicolour neon and oddly minimalist. I don't want to start on a downer so let's say that my opinion of it improved the more I played it.
Vampiric survival sandbox V Rising has, according to Steam’s player counts, entranced itself quite a following. That includes RPS’ own Ed, whose otherwise glowing preview mentioned some performance issues on Nvidia GPUs.
I’m duty-bound to investigate any potential hardware hitches, though since V Rising is only in early access, this isn’t going to be the usual appraisal of how it performs on various PC hardware. That can wait until it’s had more of the spit ‘n’ polish treatment that typically comes with the status of actually being finished. That said, I have done a full sweep of V Rising’s graphics settings and their performance impact, so if your FPS count is melting like a Nosferatu on an ill-considered Corfu holiday, have a look below to see if you can make some fruitful tweaks.
I recently got a hands-off look at The Lord Of The Rings: Gollum, Daedalic's upcoming third-person stealth game which sees Mr Precious himself take centre stage. Flanked by devs and squidged between other journos, I saw two short demos, one right at the start of his adventure, and the other much further in. I saw him clamber around Mordor (I think; it was mountainous at the very least) and then stealth around an Elven king's abode. It was... fine. Yes, I saw an early build and things could change, but I left that booth feeling a bit underwhelmed, in all honesty.
Happy Volcano's raucous comedy driving game You Suck At Parking has come a long way since we last saw it in the autumn of 2020. When Imogen (RPS in peace) last sucked at stopping her colourful cartoon car in its devilishly placed parking spots, she did so alone in an alpha demo for its single player campaign mode. Last week, however, James, Liam and myself went hands on with an exclusive build of its new 8-strong multiplayer mode, accompanied by five members of Happy Volcano's development team to test it out - and let me tell you, if the battle modes of recent Mario Karts have left you feeling increasingly cold over the years, this is looking to be just the thing to grease those competitive wheels again.
One-man games industry Geoff Keighley has revealed that third-party publishers won’t be staging as many showcases of their own this summer. Keighley made the comments in a Twitter Spaces cast over the weekend, probably to everyone's great relief. Of course, he immediately followed up by explaining that the publishers with fewer games to show will be rolling their presentations into Keighley’s own Summer Game Fest, as well as first-party shows such as the Xbox and Bethesda Games Showcase.
The AMD Ryzen 7000 family of CPUs is preparing for launch in 2022, two years after the Ryzen 5000 series. AMD have spent a good chunk of that time on its laptop chips, but back in the realm of desktops, Intel’s 12th Gen Alder Lake chips have leveraged major design improvements to beat the Ryzen 5000 series on performance and features. One suspects it would take a considerable rejigging for these Ryzen 7000 chips to get back into the best gaming CPUs conversation – and so far, that’s exactly what seems to be happening.
Now, AMD haven’t revealed all things Ryzen 7000 yet. There are no confirmed prices, for one, though we know roughly when the first batch of CPUs will release. For now, this is where I’ll be gathering all the reliably verified info on these next-gen components, from supported features and the new motherboard chipsets to those overhauled Ryzen 7000 specs.
AMD's RX 6800 XT graphics card offers a stupendous amount of performance for 1440p or 4K gaming, and now it's hit a new low price in the US. B&H Photo is asking $699 for a reference design by Sonnet, and that's been matched by Amazon too. That's $30 cheaper than it was last week, and shows the continued march of graphics cards towards reference design MSRPs.
The Logitech MX Master is an incredibly popular series of office mice, and today the latest MX Master 3 has dropped from its usual price of $100 to just $55 at Office Depot. That's a massive discount, achieved via a combination of an Office Depot price drop to $75, a 25% off code (SELFMADETECH) and> a 30% back rewards code (90893995).
This isn't the best mouse for gaming, but based on my experiences with the original MX Master and its successors, plenty of PC gamers will use something like this for surfing the web, working and playing single-player games, then switch to something lighter if needed for multiplayer gaming.