Extremely high-speed DDR5 memory is becoming eminently more affordable, with this DDR5-7000 kit costing just $125 for 32GB at Amazon US. That's an awesome deal, especially for a RAM kit with RGB lighting addressable via Corsair's popular iCUE software.
Razer's BlackShark V2 X is an incredible value gaming headset even at its £60 RRP, but today you can pick it up in a fetching white colourway for just £37 at Amazon UK. That's by far the cheapest we've ever seen this model and a pretty much unbeatable bargain for a gaming headset of this quality.
Kujlevka is a strange, clever game about an ageing village bureaucrat already troubled by political upheaval and dreams about death and trauma, suddenly given responsibility for communicating with and controlling access to what appears to be humanity's first contact with an alien intelligence.
All those themes suggest a heavy, self-serious game. But Kujlevka's great strength is its levity. While not particularly funny, its consistent wry humour perfectly counterbalances all the talk of political chaos, existential futility, and petty greed. Its opening should have been a clue, really, considering you hang out with skeletons while drinking and commenting on the food on a train in outer space.
Of the various corporatised fictional universes out there, Star Wars is the one I'm most emotionally invested in. But my affection for George Lucas' brain-baby is less about the stories and characters, and more about the general vibe of the galaxy itself. I love its retro-futurist junkpunk style, the rusty spaceships, dusty planets, and fusty aliens. That's why I've more fondness for games like Dark Forces and KotOR than any of the films or TV shows, as they let me poke around locations like Tatooine and Ord Mantell at my own pace.
Hence, the idea of being properly, immerse in Star Wars, to be physically surrounded by it and able to touch it, is probably my ultimate VR fantasy. Sod the imaginatively inert virtual spaces of Horizon Worlds, if Mark Zuckerberg really wanted to sell the Metaverse to me, he'd build the whole thing out in Mos Eisely chic, and let me run my own virtual cantina selling NFT space-drinks to legless bounty hunters and idiot Web3 prospectors.
I’ve been playing a lot of The Legend Of Zelda: Tears Of The Kingdom this week. It’s good. Really good>. I know you’ve all been waiting for your favourite PC gaming-focused website to offer their take on it so there you go. It’s properly, properly good. The best open-world adventure since Elden Ring, except arguably better because it doesn’t pull your trousers down and point out the colour of your underwear every time you dare to explore a forest or watch a sunset.
As you’ve probably seen, the game’s biggest new draw is “Ultrahand”, which allows Link to pick up loose objects and glue them together. Three logs make a raft. A plank and four wheels make a car. Two stones and a log make a... Ahem>. You get the idea. In addition to this are “Zonai Devices”, components that give life and movement to your doohickeys. A fan pushes your raft across the lake. A steering stick lets you manoeuvre your little car. It’s a marvellous construction system that leverages the pre-existing physics engine seen in the game’s predecessor, Breath Of The Wild, to startling results. Does this all sound familiar?
Update (22nd May): This is the final day to grab this excellent deal on an Ergotron-built monitor arm! Original article continues:
Ergotron make some of the best monitor arms around - reliable, capable and generally brilliant - but they're also pretty pricey. That's probably why Amazon hit up Ergotron to make its Amazon Basics monitor arms, which offer the same excellent quality in unbranded form for considerably less money.
Today though one of these arms is even better value than usual, as there's a ridiculous 40% off voucher available on Amazon's take on the Ergotron LX, dropping this high-end monitor arm from £81 to just £49. That's a brilliant price for an arm that can support monitors up to 11kg in weight with full tilt, swivel, rotation and height adjustability.
The Corsair MP600 Pro LPX is a high-end PCIe 4.0 SSD with TLC flash memory and a DRAM cache, and I'd rank it right behind the (more expensive) Samsung 990 Pro and WD SN850x as the best gaming SSD on the market. Unlike those drives though, the MP600 Pro LPX comes with a heatsink by default and is often priced more aggressively, making it a great value choice that doesn't sacrifice performance. Today this drive has dropped to £74.98 on Amazon UK, a historic low price that makes it easy to justify an SSD upgrade for your PC or PS5.
A sequel to Hawken was certainly not on my 2023 bingo card. Five years after the multiplayer mech FPS shut down on PC, now requiring a fan-made fix even just to play offline against bots, I didn't expect to ever again dash around its cool sci-fi cityscapes as a charmingly scrappy little stomper. So I was excited when publishers 505 Games announced singleplayer follow-up Hawken Reborn on Monday then launched it into early access two days later. Having now played it, oh dear. You know, it's okay for the dead to stay dead.
It’s time for another Humble Games Showcase, and this year the company is celebrating its three-year anniversary as well as spotlighting its newly refreshed publishing roster. This year, we got to see a special behind-the-scenes interview montage of the cast from David Gaider’s musical game Stray Gods as well as six new indie games for us to look forward to. We’ve listed everything that was announced at the show, so feel free to have a leisurely scroll through. Here’s everything you missed from the Humble Games Showcase 2023.
It's difficult not to start out by namedropping Dwarf Fortress. Songs Of Syx will compare to probably every colony sim you've played, in fact, but it feels like a fundamentally different game conceptually.
The usual parts are there. Chop some trees, chip some stones, and chep some crops to get your pioneers' basic needs met, then get to expanding. But Syx isn't interested in testing you or manufacturing drama. It's not about surviving, not about building a happy little colony. It's about how growth changes not just the scale, but the nature of a settlement. Despite similarities with its influences, it defines itself with a different dynamic, a whole different ethos to its peers. And it's one that even playing it my own awkward way hasn't broken.