Category: Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Marvel Rivals Season 1 is about to begin, adding the Fantastic Four to the free-to-play hero shooter’s roster so that they can beat up Dracula, who has swamped the Earth in eternal night. It launches January 10th at 1 am PT / 4 am ET / 9 am GMT, and developers NetEase are paving the way in the traditional manner by rebalancing the character line-up so as to simultaneously win the adoration of certain player groups, while plunging others into apoplectic fury.

Do you like running rampage as Hela, goddess of death? Was that you who shot me full of crows on Klyntar last night? Well, how does 25 points off your base health suit you? Yeah, that’s what I thought. Screw you too.

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Over the Christmas break, I took a brief hiatus from reporting on every time a Total War developer breathes or spills tea on their shirt. The year ended, the world did not, and no Thanquol DLC was announced, but I did miss what I reckon is the strongest hint they’ve yet freely given that strategy game Total War: Warhammer 40,000 is both real and due an announcement very soon. Here’s the skinny.

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Dell has slashed prices on two configurations of its Alienware m16 R2 gaming laptop, offering significant value for those looking to upgrade their gaming setup. The model equipped with an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060 GPU is now available for $1,299.99, while the RTX 4070 variant can be yours for $1,499.99.

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Gears Tactics and Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory developers Splash Damage have cancelled Transformers: Reactivate, the Hasbro action game they announced in 2022. They will also be “scaling down to refocus our efforts on other projects”, and “a number of roles across the studio are now potentially at risk of redundancy”.

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As someone who believes in the ideal of the trim, tidy PC interior, I do applaud the intent behind MSI’s Project Zero X. Currently on show at CES 2025, it’s a prototype desktop build that uses clever geometry and an unconventional motherboard I/O layout to hide practically every single wire in the joint, for a clean design that’s housed for your viewing pleasure within a four-sided glass chamber. It’s the closest PCs have come to the simple Victorian pleasures of a nice terrarium, and honestly, good on it.

The problem is that if Project Zero X’s components ever actually go on sale, there becomes a non-zero percent chance that I will come into possession of that see-through case. And there is a one hundred percent chance I will ruin it.

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The more I tell you about Stimulation Clicker, the less funny it will be, so let’s keep this brief. It’s an idle clicker, obviously, which starts with a single button in the centre of a browser screen. The more “stimulation” you accrue through clicking, the more options become available. It escalates. And escalates. And escalates. I found that my feelings of delight grew roughly in proportion to the toll taken on my computer’s processor. After 30 minutes, I was huffing and hooting like a drunken horse to a soundtrack of disintegrating laptop fans.

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Last year’s annual CPU tug-of-war was cleanly won by AMD, its obscenely fast Ryzen 7 9800X3D almost singlehandedly leaving Intel and their Core Ultra chips in a heap of mud and P.E.-spec rope. Coming soon to press that advantage are the Ryzen 9 9950X3D and Ryzen 9 9900X3D, a pair of even higher-spec processors that headlined AMD’s plethora of CES 2025 hardware announcements.

No pricing (or exact release date) on these yet, but they both up the core and thread counts over the 9800X3D while peaking at higher boost clock speeds. And, of course, they share the same 3D V-Cache design that makes the 9800X3D such a superlative CPU in the first place. If you don’t know what this is and how it helps game performance, imagine how much faster you could eat Wotsits if you had a massive bucket of them on your desk at all times, instead of having to get up and walk to the kitchen to grab individual packs. In this case the Wotsits are data, the bucket is 3D V-Cache, and the hastened ruination of your digestive system is games running faster.

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Yesterday, we reported that the US federal government had placed Chinese video game publisher Tencent – owner of League Of Legends developers Riot Games, Path Of Exile developers Grinding Gear and much more besides – on a list of Chinese military companies. The list in question is part of a strategy of counteracting what the US sees as the close relationship between China’s armed forces and various civilian technology suppliers and research projects.

At the time of publication yesterday, a Tencent spokesperson had commented that the listing was based on a “misunderstanding”. In a statement sent to RPS overnight and also published online, Tencent’s chairman Ma Huateng and executive board have now said that they’re prepared to get legal if the misunderstanding isn’t resolved.

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God-wrecking MOBA Smite 2 is going free-to-play next week after four months of paid early access. The game of omniscient deities scrapping over lanes and minions has been playable since September last year by early bird “founders” willing to pay some bucks (it had plenty of closed alphas since May too) but now it’s finally opening up to the rest of us mere mortals. And it’s throwing in a new “god” too, the genie-toting thief Aladdin.

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Chinese publisher Tencent are the biggest video game company in the world. Their wholly owned subsidiaries including League Of Legends developers Riot Games, Path Of Exile developers Grinding Gear Games, and UK outfit Sumo Group. They own shares in everything from Epic Games through Ubisoft to Silent Hill 2 rebooters Bloober Team. Are you a game developer? Odds are that at least one percent of your body belongs to Tencent. Maybe one of your toes.

And now it turns out that Tencent are some kind of military operator, as well. Or at least, that’s what the US Department of Defence would have us believe: they’ve just somewhat randomly added the firm to an infamous list of Chinese military companies, together with lithium-ion battery maker CATL. This potentially makes it difficult for Tencent to do business in the States, but Tencent say that it’s all based on a “misunderstanding”.

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