A few months back I got my hands on an MSI Thin GF63, largely for an overdue look at the RTX 4050 within. Since then, this slimline gaming laptop has elbowed its way into more regular use within the Archer household, particularly when I have portable PC needs that the Steam Deck can’t quite satisfy. Now you too can get one on the cheap, by way of a chunky Prime Day discount – and as if God himself was calling me a loser nerd, it’s the significantly brawnier RTX 4060 model to boot.

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Graphics cards are always worth looking out for on sale events like Prime Day, largely because they’re so hideously expensive otherwise. Take Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 4060, whose positioning in the RTX 40 series hierarchy would suggest an affordable mid-range GPU, yet routinely pushes £300. Here, though, you can nab the Gigabyte GeForce RTX 4060 Windforce OC edition at a 15% discount, bringing it down to a far more agreeable £238. Nice.

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Recent SSD prices have made for miserable reading and even worse shopping, with the costs of last year’s manufacturing woes passed onto innocent punters. At least Prime Day 2024 is, if only temporarily, righting those wrongs – such as with the massive 2TB WD Blue SN580 going for a mere £96. Two whole terabytes of quality NVMe for less than a hundred quid? Nature is healing.

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Apologies for the two handheld-minded deals posts in a row, readers, but I’ve just noticed that the Prime Day 2024 has made the Lenovo Legion Go – a bulky but commendably unique handheld Windows PC – cheaper than it’s ever been in the UK. Provided you’ve got an Amazon Prime account, or at least the free Prime trial, the 512GB model can be yours for £569, a saving of £131. Not bad, for a device with a higher-rez display and more graphical horsepower than the Steam Deck or Steam Deck OLED.

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Amazon Prime Day is once again bearing the PC hardware fruits, with big discounts on one of the absolute best microSD cards for the Steam Deck (and other handhelds). Specifically, it’s the SanDisk Ultra, and not the diddly 64GB model in the picture above but the honking great 1.5TB version. It's dropped below the £100 / $100 mark for the first time and, while Amazon has the lowest overall prices, it’s on sale elsewhere, allowing you to dodge the usual Prime subscription requirement.

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"Honey, I shrunk the first-person puzzler. Twice." This is how I like to imagine the designer of Supraworld explaining the hijinks that unfold in his life. Supraworld, the sequel to toybox explorer Supraland, is going to hit early access this year, say developers Supra Games in an update post on Steam. These are happy words for anyone who enjoyed 2019's dander among the sandcastles and erasers. A lot of games offer a "sandbox" but in Supraland, the entire world really did take place in exactly that - a sandbox out in a garden, full of toys. The sequel's launch into early access "might be in october," says the post. "We'll see."

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Hello reader who is also a reader, and welcome back to Booked For The Week - our regular Sunday chat with a selection of cool industry folks about books! Something magical has happened! And by magical, I mean that I’ve bollocksed it up. Through a web of devious plots and shocking coincidences too labyrinthine to list here, I’ve gone and messed up my schedule. As such, we don’t have a guest this week.

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Sundays are, at least in part, for you reading this column. You cannot disprove this. Tremble before my omniscience. That, or just read this week’s best writing about games (and game related things!)

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There are a lot of video game awards and most of them are simply popularity contests, and therefore also stinky borefests. The one that isn't, in my eyes, is the yearly Independent Games Festival awards - the IGFs.

The IGF Celebration Days Steam sale provides plenty of examples as to why, with discounts from now until July 20th on winners and finalists from throughout the IGF awards' history.

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Ollie has fallen foul of Big Ill once more, so I’ve emerged from my cave, brushed the stalactites from my hair, picked the luminescent beetles from my beard, and put together this week’s column. Would you like a beard beetle, reader? I have many of them. Oh, how they glow! That was a trick question. The beetles are mine and mine alone. You will have to make do with videogames. Here’s what we’re clicking on.

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