The Razer Naga Trinity is the RPS MMO mouse of choice, or at least it was the highest-ranking MMO option the last time we did some Reader's Choice polls, so I thought you might like to know that this popular rodent is more than half-off on Amazon at present as part of the firm's Spring Sale. That makes it a great time to pick up a mouse that's like three models in one...
The WD SN850x is something of a favourite around these parts, capturing our 'best PCIe 4.0 SSD for gaming' crown, and today it's also one of the best value SSDs thanks to a heavy discount as part of Amazon's Spring Sale.
Alt.Ctrl.GDC is a regular fixture at the Game Developers Conference, and this year I spotted some properly incredible creations from its largely student-led group of exhibitors. There was a big focus on co-op games and time trial demos in this year's cohort, with nearly every stand having some sort of whiteboard pinned up that was constantly being scrubbed out with new fastest lap times and corresponding visitor names. There was also lots of friendly hooting emanating from them as well, as mates and strangers attempted to co-ordinate their gaggles of limbs to steer various game characters in the right direction.
It was excellent fun, and I sampled a bunch of games that used toasters, intricate pulley systems, papier-mache tree stumps, bike wheels and more in place of your typical controllers and mice and keyboard. There were also plenty more I didn't get to try out, mainly due to time, and you can see the full list over on GDC's website. For now, though, here are some personal highlights of what I saw, including the largest bowler hat I think I've ever seen in my life.
There’s always been something quaintly practical about the name Command & Conquer. Sure, there’s a touch of Julius Caesar’s ‘veni, vidi, vici’ in there. But less romantically, the title evokes Internet Explorer or Acrobat Reader - sitting comfortably alongside the clearly and sensibly labelled Windows software of the mid-90s. It’s a reminder of just how early Westwood happened upon the blueprint for real-time strategy, right as many PC users were buying their first trackball mice.
Back then, the developer was fresh from Dune II, its unlikely David Lynch adaptation and progenitor of the RTS genre as we know it today. Inspired by the house politics and struggle for resources that consumed the desert planet Arrakis, Westwood had come up with an addictive formula for harvesting spice and converting that wealth into military power, which in turn could be used in the battle to secure more spice. The team was, quite frankly, surprised by how much fun that formula had turned out to be.
Waking up in a room you don't recognise with a camera trained on you: the result of a heavy Saturday night, or the opening salvo in an inexplicable kidnapping? In The Tartarus Key, a PS1-style thriller/puzzle/horror game, it's definitely the latter. The free demo is out now, and throws you into the first couple of puzzles for the game as Alex, whose last memory is of being at home in her apartment. Now she finds herself locked in a weird study in a poorly lit mansion, with only a stranger on the end of a walkie-talkie for company. It was enough to staple this game right into the middle of my disorganised Charlie Day conspiracy board of games I'm interested in, I'll tell you that much.
Whoa, these Amazon Spring Sale deals keep rolling in. This one is a cracker though - you can now pick up a 28-inch 4K monitor for just £181, a great choice for anyone that plays slower-paced PC or console games, or wants a high-quality 4K monitor for content creation and consumption. This Lenovo IPS monitor normally costs £260, so to get it for nearly £80 less is quite a scoop.
It's happening again! One of my favourite small form factor PC cases, the phenomenal Cooler Master NR200P, is down to a crazy-low price at Ebay thanks to that now-familiar CATCH20 code.
The Lenovo Legion 5 is a laptop that I've recommended here at RPS on several occasions, as it gets excellent reviews online yet still provides much better specs and build quality than you'd expect for the money.
Today though, the Legion 5 is the best deal I've ever seen on an RTX gaming laptop, with this spec including a Ryzen 5 5600H and RTX 3060 Laptop graphics card for just £730.98 when you use code CATCH20 at CCL's web store on Ebay. That's an exceptional price for a brand new laptop that's still selling for £1100 at Amazon - Spring Sale or no.
One last Amazon Spring Sale highlight from me today, readers, and I’m happy to say it’s a very personal recommendation. I’ve been using the HyperX Cloud Alpha Wireless almost every day since putting them on our best gaming headsets list – that was in June last year, and today, it’s a solid £70 off in the UK.
The Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson claimed that "the mark of a good action is that it appears inevitable in retrospect." Had he not died in 1894, he might’ve said the same thing about the Logitech G502 Hero showing up in Amazon sales events, although maybe it wouldn’t have sounded as profound.
That’s right, the G502 Hero – beloved by RPS readers, a longtime resident in our best gaming mouse list, and precursor to an inferior new model – is once again going cheap. A predictable development, albeit an entirely welcome one. This time it’s in the Amazon Spring Sale, with a better-than-half-price discount bringing it down to £35.