Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Building a new PC? Newegg have specced out a great high-end combo that bundles a Core i7 12700K processor, MSI Pro Z690-A WiFi DDR4 motherboard and DDR4-3200 RAM for $347 with code BTS343A, a $230 savings over buying the same items individually.

That's a surprisingly awesome deal and would make the perfect beginnings of a high-end rig, with just a GPU, CPU cooler, SSD, PSU and case needed for a complete build - many of which you may want to bring over from your existing PC.

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Rock, Paper, Shotgun

For all the big-budget GeForce graphics cards, it’s the firmly mainstream XX60 models that must surely keep the lights on at Nvidia HQ. A glimpse at the current Steam hardware survey reveals that the RTX 3060, RTX 2060, and GTX 1060 are all within the top four most-used GPUs – with the RTX 3060’s laptop version at number five. These are important cards, and messing up the next one would be a disaster.

The RTX 4060 is not a disaster. Ultimately, it a very capable 1080p graphics card, a technical upgrade on the RTX 3060, and (unlike several other RTX 40 series GPUs) arrives at a reasonable price. But it probably doesn’t deserve the apparent immortality of its predecessors, with only modest gen-on-gen performance gains and a heavy reliance on DLSS (including DLSS 3) to expand that difference.

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Rock, Paper, Shotgun

In the picturesque Regency town of Leamington Spa, a debutante has entered the local high society of AAA game developers. Named Maverick Games, it’s led by the former director of Forza Horizon 5 - a creative risk-taker named Mike Brown. “Games are made in a very certain way that brings with it real security,” Brown told GamesIndustry.biz in January. “We know that if we do these things in a row, we will hit this date and the game will come out. I think there are other ways where you can still hit that date, but also do a load of new things on the way.”

One of the new things Maverick is backing is Jamie Brittain, lead writer on the studio’s unannounced open world game. Brittain has never worked on a videogame before. Yet any millennial who grew up in the UK will undoubtedly be familiar with Skins, the epochal teen drama he co-created with his dad, Bryan Elsley.

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Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Every weekend, indie devs show off current work on Twitter's #screenshotsaturday tag. And every Monday, I bring you a selection of these snaps and clips. This week, I return to oggle cars on alien worlds and cars in big fights, even more immersive sims, and a game described uncertainly as perhaps "Sekiro with a gun?" or "Killer7 souls?" Check out these attractive and interesting indie games!

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Aug 13, 2023
Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Sundays are for going to yet another wedding. Before you reach for the smart clothes, let's read this week's best writing about games (and game related things).

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Rock, Paper, Shotgun

The Anno series has never had official mod support, but that hasn't stopped its community from producing hundreds of mods for Anno 1800 since its release in 2019. Ubisoft have seemingly noticed. They're now partnering with mod.io to add official mod support to the game.

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Rock, Paper, Shotgun

In a turn up for the big embossed fantasy tomes, this week while we're all still sort of kicking about Baldur's Gate 3, we're also starting to return to the real world a bit. And by "the real world" I mean "other video games". Although not many, admittedly. BG3 is very big. I think I'll be the first to break free from its metaphorical chains because I played it for review, but I'm still puttering about trying to take the roads I un-taked the first time. Still, we've got time for some Apelegs and some little demos and some seeeeecrets and whatnot.

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Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Airhead is one of those platformers I really want to like. Freshly announced at tonight's THQ Nordic Showcase, I've been playing an early, hour-long demo build of it this week, and while there are certainly things to admire here, I'm not overly convinced it's going to be one for the ages. Its colourful visuals and contrasting colour palette cast its deep caverns and sun-drenched mountains in a beautiful, but eerie kind of light, and its strange, scuttling creatures put me in the mind of the night horrors from Dredge and Insanely Twisted Shadow Planet. But its central premise of you being a headless body carting round an inflatable head to presumably escape to goodness knows where isn't quite the breath of fresh air I hoped it would be.

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Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Rangers aren't everyone's favourite Dungeons & Dragons class, especially in the current 5th Edition ruleset, which is the one that smash hit RPG Baldur's Gate 3 is based on. I met another player who likes rolling rangers at a D&D table earlier this week, and I actually high-fived her because I was so excited at my one-woman ranger defense squad doubling its membership. Making your character a ranger in BG3 (which has some very slight differences) is even better; you can essentially brew a rogue that is better at taking damage, but can still do most other things you traditionally use a rogue for. Let me explain.

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Rock, Paper, Shotgun

AMD and Bethesda have unveiled a limited-edition Starfield-themed Radeon RX 7900 XTX GPU and Ryzen 7 7800X3D CPU at Quakecon 2023. Both are decorated according to the forthcoming open world space-me-do's "NASApunk" aesthetic, a blend of cool whites, blues and yellows which I will admit to finding rather attractive, as somebody who generally finds gaming hardware aesthetics an absolute turn-off. It's certainly better-looking than Nvidia's lurid Cyberpunk 2077 GPU from 2020, but if you're similarly beguiled, there's an unfortunate catch: only 500 of these GPU/CPU sets are being made, and they're exclusively available as part of a Quakecon giveaway.

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