Having spent a good chunk of this morning window-shopping SSDs, I’m prepared to point knowingly at the Samsung 990 and mouth "That one", thus crowning it as the best NVMe drive deal of the Amazon Spring Sale. Especially so, if you’re concerned about the swelling storage footprint of contemporary games, as the sale is focusing on the most cavernous 2TB and 4TB capacities.

The 990 Pro has popped up on RPS a few times, but if you’re unfamiliar, this basically forms a triumvirate with the WD Black SN850x and the Crucial T500 as the three finest examples of game load-time cutting in the mainstream PCIe 4.0 SSD space. Newer PCIe 5.0 drives can just about edge them, but not to the degree that their far higher price is justified, and with some help from the sales that gap gets even wider. All three of these deals, in fact, drop the 990 Pro to its lowest pricing since at least last year’s Black Friday.

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Amazon’s Spring Sale is back, and upon first inspection, it’s not looking like a vintage year. There are some> discounts on quality PC gear, but a deals collapse has left them buried under forty thousand tonnes of overcomplicated toothbrushes and collagen peptide powders. So, so many collage peptide powders. I didn't know there was this much collagen on Earth.

It’s still my job – it is still my job, right? Okay just checking – to dig through the Paltrow-adjacent junk and yank out the good stuff, so let’s start small with a few quid/bucks off one of my favourite Steam Deck docks. The JSAUX 6-in-1 Multifunctional Docking Station may have a clumsy name but it’s a keen bit of accessory design, with the port-adorned central block (which acts as a stand in docked mode) able to detach and pull double duties as a portable USB-C hub. It’s perfect for Steam Deck/Asus ROG Ally/Lenovo Legion Go/Zotac Zone etc. owners who want to keep employing that extra connectivity when taking their handheld away from home, and the Spring Sale has chipped the already-aggressive price down to £38 / $31.

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♫ Stabbing a man. Stabbing a man. Sometimes in Greece. Sometimes in Japan. Stabbing a man. Sometimes in a meadow. Here is our verdict on Assassin's Creed Shadows ♫>

Nic: To kick off this verdict, I have no choice but to ask my most insightful question: how Assassin-y is this Assassin's Creed Game?

Jeremy: This is the first AssCreed game I’ve engaged with since Assassin’s Creed II, which I watched my roommate play through in university. So my opinion is not especially scientific, but from what I’ve seen it is very Assassin-y. The story – which is serviceable if not anything original – revolves around tackling a group of masked bad guys known as the Onryo (that’s Japanese for ghost), who are introduced with cool chanbara-style music. You’ve got to kill all of them, and sometimes you have to kill other folks who are connected with them, and in general there is a whole lot of assassinating going on, either with Naoe (who slices and dices with the standard hidden blade) or Yasuke (who has a ‘brutal’ assassination where he shoves his katana into someone’s face).

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Dell’s tossing out a beast of a deal on the Alienware 27 AW2725DF QD-OLED Gaming Monitor, and it’s no small drop. Originally $899.99, you can grab this epic display for just $599.99 with code AW27300. That’s a $300 discount on one of the fastest and most color-accurate monitors out there. Oh, and it ships with free 2-day delivery if you order before 2 PM CT.

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I want to believe the GPU gods are finally throwing us a bone. MSI RTX 5070 Ti 16G Shadow 3X OC is actually available on Amazon UK right now for £729. That’s not a typo. It’s in stock, sold and shipped by Amazon, and somehow not priced into orbit. When scalpers are still charging north of £1000 for this card, seeing a legit listing for retail price feels like someone left the vault door open and forgot to sound the alarm.

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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! As a reward for sticking with this column for so long, I'm delighted to announce that we'll soon be rolling out the chance for you to write in with a detailed list of all your most subversive ideas and which books inspired you to hold them, and in return I'll send you an email alert if those books ever appear in this column. Cormac McCarthy's The Road is widely considered a classic so I'll just call it 'McCarthyism' for simplicity.

This week, it's the co-founder of Finji - publisher of such luxury games as Tunic, Wilmot's Warehouse, and Night In The Woods - Bekah Saltsman! Cheers Bekah! Mind if we have a nose at your bookshelf?

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In his irregular newsletter, Culture: An Owner's Manual, W. David Marx wrote about the age of the double sell-out. His argument is that, by the end of the 20th century, it was deemed acceptable for artists to sell-out because commercial activities were understood to pay for creative work, but now culture's most successful creators sell-out simply to sell-out further.

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Here, take a look at this very pleasing fossilised instant coffee. Doesn't that just make you want to start your weekend off right? It was presented to me on Tuesday like a ceremonial offering, and since then I've kept it on my window sill and just turn my head to look at it every once in a while. There's something powerful but also mournful about it, like it's holding itself together through sheer force of will, long after its time is due. Puts me in mind of crumbling castle battlements under siege. It's maintaining its shape well so far. I'm excited to see what the next week brings.

So that's my weekend largely sorted; but what are you all up to? Here's what we're clicking on this weekend!

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Who can say what made Ubisoft change their minds on Steam Deck support for Assassin’s Creed Shadows, the pretty good samurai stealther that previously stated an intention to go without. Perhaps a high-ranking executive, visiting family to invite them to a trip on his spare yacht, had his frozen heart melted by the sight of a Naoe-cosplaying granddaughter clutching a Steam Deck OLED in her clearly-too-small-for-it hands. Perhaps.

It works, is the main thing. And works well – remarkably well, actually, considering not just the previous denial and 11th hour U-turn, but the game’s high PC system requirements and at least partially mandatory ray tracing. This does come at the cost of a severely stripped-down quality settings menu, and you’ll still need to sign into a Ubisoft Connect account even if you own Shadows on Steam, but there’s no doubt that its Steam Deck Verified status is deserved.

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I have recently immersed myself in the pleasantly numb Monster Hunter Wilds loop of smashing Arkvelds to bits. They are, as far as I can tell, the most profitable creature to bully, and I now find myself skinny dipping in the gulf of meaning that lies between the regal, resentful, mildly sassy chains hanging from the creature's armour set, and the deeply sad and laboured motions with which it swings its bodily inspiration for those chains.

I get the sense that the series' solution to the uncomfortable implications of its lizard bashing has been, over the last few entries, to evil-fy its creature design to the point where it engenders less easy empathy. There's a lot of ugly, bugly bastards in Wilds, is what I'm saying. Less deep, sad lizard eyes and more chittering chitin and fuck-you dragon stares. The Arkveld's design is so threatening that it invites nothing if not: look mate, if four of us manage to take you down with scissors whittled from Original Recipe Chatacabra marrow, it's your own fault here, ya bish.

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