The next big patch for Dune: Awakening's now out there via Steam testing client, as devs Funcom look to test out its various tweaks before pressing go on full deployment next month. If you've been desperately screaming for the ability to slop out a bunch of blood and/or water at once, or have recently be chased by a swarm of griefy ornithopters, this is the patch for you.

In fact, the devs make clear that they'd really prefer it if you were to dedicate the bulk of your two-week-long patch testing time to those two things in particular. They're also turning off taxes and sandstorms, the latter very much being the tax equivalent of the natural world, for the first week so bases won't be at risk.

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Yesterday, we highlighted a steep deal on one of the best gaming monitors from Alienware, but if you’ve been looking for more screen real estate, you’ll be glad you held off.

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The office seems to be empty save for a grinning little girl who yells "hey mister, wake up!" in what sounds like amateur Simmish, then immediately vanishes around the corner. The building consists of grainy, glass-walled compartments lined with illuminated facades displaying kanji letters, arranged along a central corridor. I think I'm on the ninth floor.

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Very long-in-the-works Elder Scrolls modding project Skywind has hit another milestone in its winding road towards an eventual release. The folks behind the mod, which aims to deliver a version of the series' beloved third entry Morrowind remade in Skyrim's engine, have recruited the final three voice actors they were looking for to fill out the base game's entire roster of characters.

Skywind's still without any kind of release date, meaning it's almost certainly further off than its Oblivion-centric sort of cousin Skyblivion, which is aiming to arrive this year. However, the regular updates we've been getting about it of late are encouraging signs that it will eventually let us into its heart chamber.

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Buried in the fuzz of an otherwise unstartling SSENSE interview with Hideo Kojima, a sudden spike of violence. "People who are making military games, they probably don't know how to dismantle a gun or shoot a gun," said the Metal Gear man, in amongst pictures of himself dressed as various Minecraft skinpacks. "So that's kind of sad." Does Kojima know how to dismantle a gun? "Yes, because I've been doing this training as well, and I learned so many ways to kill people as well."

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If you're the sort of person who likes to take in plenty of trailers when you're hunting for new stuff to play on Steam, Valve have just put out an update that should make doing so a bit more pleasant. The pipe-themed platform operators have casually gone through hundreds of thousands of videos as part of an effort to make Steam's trailer player easier to use and less likely to run into hitches as it shows you the video games.

To put it how Valve do in their news post about the changes, they've improved the player's "interface and streaming to help you browse more quickly". So, much like the Steam store revamp that's currently in beta, Mr Newell and co want you to be able to zip around at the speed of sound.

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While the Nintendo Switch 2 may have done away with microSD cards in favour of the faster (and pricier) Express variants, the standard cards have been pretty affordable for a while now in smaller sizes, which makes them ideal for Steam Deck usage.

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We’re always on the lookout for the best gaming monitors, and while the catchily-titled Alienware AW3225QF might not be on that list, it’s certainly rated very highly if you look around.

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There was a time when I’d be chuffed to bits to be clicking a new entry-level graphics card into its PCIe home. Think back to the GTX 1050 Ti or the Radeon RX 570 – these weren’t just great GPUs because they were accessible, but because you could practically feel the scrappiness bouncing off their circuitry. Like barking little chihuahuas, throwing down against a pack of mastiffs. You can see they’re no match for the bigger boys. But you kind of love them for not caring.

The Nvidia GeForce RTX 5050 is no such card. It is the most affordable of the RTX 50 series, undercutting the RTX 5060 by about £40 / $50, and it does come with a full set of DLSS 4 tools including Multi Frame Generation (MFG) support. Its performance, sadly, leans more slow than scrappy, and it isn’t even really that cheap. Prices start around £220 / $250 and this overclocked Zotac model I’ve tested is £248 / $270, so it’s still going to be by far the priciest component in any budget PC build.

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