Of course I was going to insert myself into the recent Tribes 3: Rivals alpha playtest – as a Tribes: Ascend player who’s mourned its demise for years, the reveal of a new, heavily Ascend-inspired ski-shooter was like seeing a long deceased pet rabbit miraculously come back to life. Cured, judging from Rivals’ more palatable monetisation plans, of the myxomatosis that killed it in the first place.

From what I played, Tribes 3 can definitely bring back happy memories of zipping around, nicking flags and copping Spinfuser blasts, and the finished article may well have the chops to create some new ones. At the same time, the playtest build was conspicuously short on much of what makes Tribes really feel> like Tribes.

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You'll need to limber up and do some warm-up stretches before attempting to open today's door on the RPS Advent Calendar, otherwise you'll risk getting an instant KO from the burly brawlers waiting inside.

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The party poppers are out, the finger food is ready and waiting to be served, and the guest list for Doom's 30th birthday party is well and truly set. Well, it would be if Doomguy ever lowered the drawbridge to his flying space castle high above the Earth's orbit. I did try and get a radio signal out earlier, but the grumpy sod never responded. Probably too busy organising his trophy case in his man cave, to be honest. But let's face it. Doomguy wouldn't be much fun at a birthday party anyway. He'd be too busy ripping and tearing into his presents to give anyone the time of day, let alone a polite thank you, and then he'd be working on ripping and tearing apart said presents in a display of strength and machismo.

So Doom's hellspawn have got together to throw their own party for the occasion, and let me tell you, they're having a riotous good time all by themselves. Well, most of them are, anyway, as there are some demons here that wouldn't know how to have fun even if was seared across their skulls with the beam of a BFG9000. Here's every classic Doom enemy ranked on a scale of the most miserable wallflowers to the life and (undead) soul of the party.

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Banishers: Ghosts Of New Eden is a game of twos. It has two protagonists and two broad ways of playing, leading to two broad narrative outcomes, and is created by a company who, as Don’t Nod’s lead narrative designer Elise Galmard explained to me at a preview event, feel like they make games for two different audiences - fans of noodly narrative intrigues on the one hand, and of fantasy combat games on the other. Among the game's challenges, of course, is to blend these halves convincingly.

A spiritual (hah) follow-up of sorts to 2018’s fairly well-received Vampyr, it takes place in the alt-historical realm of New Eden, which is kind of 17th century colonial North America through the lens of Dragon Age: Inquisition with a pinch of Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice. The titular Banishers are a ghost-hunting couple, the Scotsman Red MacRaith and the Cuban Antea Duarte. Antea is killed at the very beginning of the game, during a battle with an especially noxious spook, but she soon returns as a spirit, and your overall story objective is to either resurrect her body or help her "Ascend" to the afterlife.

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AMD's Ryzen 7 7800X3D is the best value gaming CPU by a wide margin, as it manages to overpower the Intel Core i9 14900K regularly while costing nearly half the price. Perhaps it's unsurprising then that a major German PC retailer recorded the 7800X3D as massively outselling any other processor on the market as of late.

As of today, the best prices available in the UK and US are at Overclockers (£330) and Amazon ($358). Both retailers offer the CPU with a free copy of the truly stunning Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora game.

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Dell's Alienware m17 gaming laptop is normally quite a pricey proposition, especially when you want one with an RTX 3070 Ti 8GB graphics card and Ryzen 6800H processor, but today you can get a machine with these specs - and a 17.3-inch 4K 120Hz screen - for just £1069 at Dell UK using the code VOUCHERCODES7, versus the recently-discounted price of £1149.

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In just over a month's time, the entire mainline Ace Attorney series will finally be playable on PC with the arrival of the Apollo Justice Trilogy. Launching on January 25th 2024, this collection bundles together the fourth, fifth and sixth games in Capcom's excellent lawyer 'em up - Apollo Justice, Dual Destinies and Spirit Of Justice - which originally launched on the Nintendo DS and 3DS across a ten year period between 2007 and 2016. It's been funny revisiting the earlier cases of these games after so much time has passed. Apollo's name may be the one on the box, but the series' original cover star Phoenix Wright is never far from the front lines - not only does he get tangled up on the wrong side of the law in Apollo's own debut outing, but he's back as a full-time defence attorney on the (w)right side of the legal bench in the other two.

At the time, poor old Apollo always felt like he got the short end of the stick as Capcom tried to figure out what to do with the series, and to some extent, he still does - for he never quite gets out from under Phoenix's shadow to completely hold court on his own two feet. But now, after 2021's excellent Great Ace Attorney Chronicles proved that neither time, setting or its lead defence need to be set in stone for the series to carry on, the pressure does feel ever so slightly less intense on a second visit. There's no denying Apollo still has a bit of an uphill climb on his hands, but if, like me, you've been waiting for these games to be freed from their Nintendo-bound prison, this is arguably the best glow-up Capcom's done to the series to date.

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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, like many weeks, my head is full of Metal Gear Rising's RULES OF NATURE. But unlike most weeks, it feels relevant. This week I saw an indie game where you slow-mo slice weapons and armour off robots in a forest and oh, that's doubly rules of nature right there. Plenty of other attractive and interesting indie games are about too, come have a look!

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This door to the RPS Advent Calendar is chrome-plated with a bright neon trim around the edges. It was all lovely and pristine looking until yesterday, when someone rudely broke out the graffiti cans and sprayed a big "Corpo 4 LIFE" tag on the front.

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Doom turns 30 this year, and that's a cause for celebration. There are many reasons to commemorate id Software's 1993 jaunt through the demon-infested corridors of Mars, from the fact that you can play it on every device known to man to its undying modding scene that even lets you pet Cacodemons. But I have a personal connection with Doom that's a bit special. It's the first game that made me so sick I wanted to puke.

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