As you’ll know if you’ve been around RPS for a while, we love the Steam Deck. Valve’s system blends the library and options of a PC with the portability and ease of use of a console, and a big part of that is Steam OS.

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Black Friday is here (apparently), and while we’re fairly certain someone at Dell/Alienware needs a calendar for their birthday, there are some deals to be had in (just checking here), yep, July.

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As a faction, the strength of Total War: Warhammer 3's Bretonnia lies in their knightly calvary. The peasant infantry is basically just there to squishily hold the enemy in place for charges. However, I'm feeling revolutionary today, so we're staging a serf uprising. Let's see how long we last. Pretty simple rules here, then. No knights. No horses. Conquer the entirety of Bretonnia. Defeat every horse I see in one-on-one combat.>

Indeed, the serfs of Carcassonne had suffered too long under feudalism's gussied-up protection racket, and the battle fought for their freedom had been long and bloody. Bretonnia's knightly class were better armed and better trained, their bodies nourished and strong. The bones of the common folk creaked from years of tireless field work. Their frames were frail from a diet of nettles, bruised turnips, and a wide selection of delectable artisanal French pastries which they all refused to eat, French being the language of their oppressors.

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Storage, screens, rigs and chairs, I've found the whole loadout today. There's speedy microSD cards for your Steamdeck and ROG Ally, some slick upgrades for your battlestation, and a few big names slashing prices on premium gear. From a beastly gaming PC to the comfiest chairs in the game, these deals are full in Independence Day deals material. Let's get into

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Y’know what, I think we’ve lived long enough in the post-Steam Deck world that it bears weighing up what the current best handheld PCs are. A few years ago this would have just been a vaguely-ranked list of whatever portables were available, but after Valve demonstrated that the palm-resting format could not just work, but actually be good>, handhelds have arguably become the most interesting and rapidly-changing thing in all of PC hardware. Even Microsoft are having a go, slapping their branding on the upcoming Asus ROG Xbox Ally – though here, I’m sticking strictly to the finest handhelds that I’ve tested and that you can buy.

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Microsoft have reportedly set in motion the wave of layoffs the company were said to be gearing up for last week - the fourth round of major job cuts to hit Xbox in 18 months.

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It’s the Fourth of July this week, and that means there are deals to be had on the other side of the pond.

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Alienware’s Black Friday in July sale just dropped a wave of serious gaming hardware deals. Desktop beasts with RTX 5090s are now hundreds off, and the latest Area-51 and Aurora systems are pushing 4K frame rates with ease. On the portable side, Alienware’s newest 16- and 18-inch laptops are loaded with 4080s and 4090s, making high refresh 1440p gaming look effortless. There are deep M.2 drive discounts too, including a Crucial T500 1TB with heatsink for under $85. And over at Green Man Gaming, the entire Final Fantasy series is up to 70% off, with big cuts on Rebirth, Remake, and classic bundles. Let's get into it:

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I love it when a machine whirrs and clunks and bzzts in just the right way. Kaizen: A Factory Story is the next mechanical puzzler from the people who made Opus Magnum and Exapunks. A demo hit Steam a few weeks ago, but it fell down the wrong side of a conveyor belt here at RPS and we all forgot about it until it jammed up our meticulous assembly line of articles and I had to jimmy it out with a big salad fork. "Ah," I said, "there's yer problem. Nobody has played this excellent developer's new game yet."

Let's solve that problem.

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Playside are pitching Game Of Thrones: War For Westeros as an RTS for Age of Empires lovers, but it may also hook your fancy if you’re into vicious bastard boardgames. Speaking to me shortly after the new strategy project’s announcement at this year’s Summer Game Fest, game director Ryan McMahon explored how the requisite filthy traitor element of this latest George R.R. Martin adaptation will percolate through the project’s main “sandbox” mode, in which four players vie for supremacy over the Seven Kingdoms.

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