I've always preferred building a machine piece by piece, but sometimes even I have to admit a good refurb sale is smarter. Woot's MSI event sale, alongside Woot's Spring gaming sale, feels like it was designed for anyone who wants real gaming hardware without paying real gaming hardware prices. Factory reconditioned means everything's tested, backed, and a lot cheaper than pretending brand new is always better.
If you've been waiting to upgrade your Steam Deck storage, now's the time — Amazon just launched the best microSD card deal we've seen in years.
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! This column is likely slightly late today, but that's simply because I know there's at least one of you rapidly thumbing through the last few pages of your current book so you can share your thoughts. Laziness is, in it's own way, the greatest form of charity. When I do it. Everyone else needs to pull their socks up. God.
This week, it's Magic: The Gathering, Vanguard Exiles, and many, many more's Richard Garfield! Cheers Richard! Mind if we have a nose at your bookshelf?
I'm out of milk! Where's the milk! I thought we had milk! How am I supposed to have my favourite Saturday treat (triple milk milk bowl) without milk! There's nothing on this website about milk at all, it's all video games! That's incredibly useless to me, someone who desperately needs to find milk! I have coconut milk but it's separated so it's more like coconut water with a giant puck of coconut cream stuck to one end of the tin! I can't make a triple milk milk bowl with that! Gahhhhhh! Have any of you seen my milk?
The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered is one of those rare games I’ll grind out a performance and settings feature for before continuing to play it – yee gads, what a concept – for fun>. It’s more or less exactly what I’d have asked from a modern take, with refreshed visuals and UX improvements bolted directly onto Oblivion’s original, famously bent chassis.
This hybrid engine approach, similar to that of Ninja Gaiden 2 Black, hands off the graphical rendering gubbins to an Unreal Engine 5 layer while keeping all the game logic to a modified version of what is otherwise just the 2006 backend. Preserving, in the process, that janky daftness that accounts for much of Oblivion’s charm, with qualified support for the original’s mods on the side. Still, the performance impact of Oblivion Remastered’s new look is not to be trifled with. Even with DLSS/FSR upscaling support and frame generation, this is a tough one to run smoothly at its highest settings, especially if you deploy the ray tracing effects that (for once) really do enhance and enliven the scenery.
If you've been eyeing Nvidia’s new RTX 5060 Ti but aren’t thrilled about paying markup prices on the secondary market, you're not alone. The latest Blackwell GPU launched with all the fanfare and none of the stock — unless you’re willing to pay over MSRP. The better move right now? Pick up a prebuilt PC that actually uses the card, like the new Skytech Shadow and Archangel desktops, both available on Amazon starting at $1,249.99.
Secretlab's Easter Sale is live, and it's genuinely one of the best times of the year to upgrade your setup. We're not talking about some light seasonal fluff — this sale cuts deep, with up to $100 off chairs and up to $129 off desks.
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is out today, and after reading Nic Reuben's RockPaperShotgun review, my finger hit buy faster than you can believe. For those on PC and looking to save some coin, Fanatical already has it at 20 percent off on launch day.
As a Steam Deck game, I already prefer The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered to the original Oblivion, and for reasons mirroring why the Deck itself still beats newer, faster handhelds: the performance might be lower but everything, as Toddy H himself would say, just works>. Spend two miserable minutes trying find a custom controller configuration that makes thumbing through OG Oblivion’s menus even remotely comfortable, and you’ll appreciate all the more how the remaster gels with the Steam Deck immediately.
That said, its 2025-ified visuals do present a relatively distinct challenge. Indulge too enthusiastically in their fancy lighting and hyper-detailed Patrick Stewart facial creases, and the Steam Deck’s hardware is quickly overwhelmed. But, drop the graphics settings to their lowest, and Oblivion Remastered simply looks like bum, to the point of undermining the point of the whole 'Remastered' thing. The solution: a healthy, balanced mix of low and medium settings, which you can find further down in case you don’t want to run your own trial-and-error experiments on how Cyrodiilian bush rendering affects framerates.
If you're looking to jump into high-end PC gaming without torching your wallet, the Alienware Aurora Gaming Desktop (Model ACT1250) is an easy pick right now. Dell just knocked $400 off the top-spec build, bringing it down to $2,499.99 from its original $2,899.99. At that price, this is hands-down the most balanced and performance-packed version of the Aurora lineup. It comes loaded with serious firepower that'll keep you gaming, streaming, and multitasking for years without breaking a sweat thanks to the packed in RTX 5080.