Is a 24-inch 1080p 75Hz monitor count as a gaming> monitor? If so, this is the cheapest gaming monitor I've seen for some time, with a 15% discount on Ebay producing an extremely affordable monitor with a higher-than-average 75Hz refresh rate and FreeSync compatibility. The Iiyama G-Master G2450HS is available for just £68 with code TAKE15 until 6th September.
Sundays are for being in awe of backpacks that pack into themselves. Before you scrunch it into a ball, let's read this week's best writing about games (and game related things).
And while the RPGang are still finishing Baldur's Gate 3, here's Starfield coming to claim another hundred hours of your roleplaying time. That's a whole lot of lives to live on top of an actual life. Starfield is out now for folks who bought the fancy special expensive editions, by the way, then hits Game Pass and all that next week. Anyway! What are you playing this weekend? Here's what we're clicking on!
This week's news that the amazing Shadow Gambit: The Cursed Crew will be Mimimi Games' last hurrah has left me absolutely devastated. As the kids might say, I am shook. Besides being a bestest best in class tactics game with great characters, a witty script and deviously designed stealth puzzles to blast and backstab through, Shadow Gambit did that very rare thing that's seemingly eluded both other types of strategy game I've played recently (*cough*The Lamplighters League*cough*), and even Mimimi's own work in the past - and that's teaching you how to actually have fun with its large cast of murder pirates through its brilliantly-conceived bespoke tutorial missions.
Crusader Kings 3 is somehow three years old, and Paradox’s grand strategy game is celebrating in style - and with a lot of stats - by dropping the news that it’s sold over three million copies in that time.
Normally we see a straight doubling in RAM module sizes. Around the turn of the millenium, 1GB sticks were commonplace, and by doubling that amount over time we've gradually worked our way up to 8GB, 16GB and 32GB sticks of DDR4 and DDR5 being common sizes. Now though, DDR5 manufacturers are also producing an intermediate 24GB size, allowing for 48GB kits of two sticks each.
This new capacity requires a BIOS update for most motherboards, but pricing on it can be quite good - and that's what we're seeing today, with extremely rapid DDR5-6400 CL36 RAM available in a 48GB capacity for $130 after a $18 price drop.
Sometimes I open with "I hate x" because it's funny (and I'm right), but sometimes it's because I'm not sure if that's the source of my mixed feelings about a game. Verne Colon The Shape Of Fantasy is, at least in part, an adventure game, and weaker for it. Taken as 'pure' interactive fiction, it'd be shorter and simpler, but might allow its premise, atmosphere, and intriguing world to shine the way they ought to.
The premise actually takes some explaining. Jules Verne himself takes the place of Aronnax, the protagonist of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Seas, and instead of mere hermitry, his new submarine home/prison is devoted to a guerrilla war against The Nation, a Prussian-ish empire you might be able to stop using a techno-magical gubbins that allows you to edit reality. Intriguing, right?
We've covered Arc A770 deals a few times as of late, as Intel's aggressive pricing makes these 1080p/1440p graphics cards often a better value than alternatives from AMD and Nvidia. So too is it today, where you can pick up an Asrock Arc A770 8GB card for just $240 when you use code SSCV2886 at Newegg. That's a $50 reduction from its normal price and a great value for the level of performance on offer.
Towering system requirements aside, I’ve had a relatively smooth time benchmarking Starfield on PC, enough so that I’ve got a full set of performance results and best settings suggestions to share ahead of schedule. But! Putting together the usual full-length guide (like this one or that one) would take hours, which would mean finishing it on Monday, which is ages away, and... I just have all these figures right now, y'know?
Here’s the abridged version, then: all off the most important technical details and recommended tweaks, just in fewer words than usual.
Having spent around 45 minutes in a three-player Payday 3 sesh at this year's Gamescom, I can confirm it's very… Payday. You slap on some masks, choose your loadout, then get to robbing banks or stealing things from crates. Often, it ends in absolute chaos as you mow through waves of coppers and rush to a getaway van. The number three might not signal a sweeping change to the formula, then, but that's arguably a good thing. It's a better-looking version of its predecessors that doesn't lose sight of the co-op silliness.