Auto Added by WPeMatico
XCOM-y pulp strategy adventure The Lamplighters League has been written off as a ‘disappointing’ flop costing publishers Paradox almost $23 million, a mere week after the game’s launch.
Whenever a friend asks for help in speccing out their upcoming PC build, I almost inevitably go to check if the Cooler Master Hyper 212 Evo V2 is in stock. Because, for lower-end and mid-range builds especially, do you truly need any other CPU cooler? The Hyper 212 Evo V2 near-perfectly balances simplicity, effectiveness, and affordability; it’s like the PC component equivalent of Charles Eames’ museum-beloved leg splint, only less stackable. More to the point, it’s down to £33 in the Amazon Prime Big Deal Days sale, equalling its lowest price of 2023 thus far.
Ara: History Untold‘s headline gimmick is actually a couple of centuries old. In this deceptively Civilization-esque 4X strategy game, all player turns unfold simultaneously, once you’ve decided what to build or research, where to move your units, and so on. As Oxide Games design director Michelle Menard tells me over Zoom, this approach takes inspiration from an ancient military simulator, Kriegsspiel, which was devised by the Prussian army officer George Leopold von Reisswitz, aka the “father of wargaming”, in the mid-1800s.
“It was to train their generals, it was a legit apparatus of war, it was not for funsies,” says Menard. “And they basically created this massive table that had a modular terrain system. At first they used sand, but that was kind of messy, [and so] they developed a system where they had interchangeable tiles, like hills and valleys and plateaus.
“They would build out this table, literally drop a sheet down the middle, and it’d be like, OK, you guys on each side, you can’t see what the other person’s doing. There was an actual game master, who was the referee who you would report your moves to. He would then re-set up the board and basically call people back into the room and be like, tada! It’s the next turn – let’s see what people did. Was it what you expected?”
In terms of usefulness to the average PC owner, sales events like Amazon Prime Big Deal Days aren’t just for knocking hundreds off big-ticket hardware. They can also make already-affordable kit even more of a bargain, as is the case with the Logitech G413 SE mechanical keyboard: a snip at £60.
This has been on our best gaming keyboards list for a while now, specifically for delivering all the satisfying finger-feel (and durability) of a true mechanical board with a pricing that puts it closer to high-end membrane and hybrid switch models. The G413 SE employs the bumpy ‘tactile’ style of mech switches, so it’s good for accurate typing, and it’s easily fast and agile enough for gaming duty as well. I actually ended up using this as my main keyboard for a while, despite having more expensive linear-switch boards piled up in a nearby cupboard, and I’d extra-extra-recommend it at this price.
The consolidation of the games industry threatens to continue apace, as rumours surface that senior Disney staff are urging CEO Bob Iger to acquire a major game company, such as Deluxe Paint and Shaq Fu publisher Electronic Arts (who also publish Battlefield and Apex Legends, if I remember correctly). Apparently, the aforesaid senior executives think Disney are losing out for merely licensing Disney properties to developers, but Iger is said to be “noncommittal”.
Hundreds of thousands of Minecraft players are downing pickaxes and revolting against what they feel to be Microsoft and Mojang’s stingy approach to updating the decade-old sandbox building sim. The trigger is this year’s Minecraft Mob Vote, a community ballot to decide which of three creatures will be added to the game. Many Minecrafters feel the Mob Vote (which has extended to potential new Minecraft biomes in the past) is needlessly parsimonious, and cynically divisive: given Mojang’s current headcount and Microsoft’s resources, why not add all three mobs to the game, rather than asking players to do battle over scraps? And now, those players are trying to shut the whole thing down.
Lexar’s NM790 4TB NVMe SSD thrums at the heart of my most beautiful , functional computer, the Digital Foundry CPU test bed. And now it can thrum at the heart of your PC too, as this capacious drive has dropped in price from $210 to $177 at Amazon US.
LG makes a ton of monitors, so it’s perhaps unsurprising that I wasn’t familiar with their 34WP60C-B ultrawide model. This unassuming choice normally retails for $450, but does offer a higher-than-average 160Hz refresh rate to go along with a 34-inch VA panel and 3440×1440 resolution.
Today though, this monitor crashes into new relevance as it’s been discounted to just $200 at LG’s US store, an incredible price that makes it almost an impulse buy pickup for anyone that wants to try out the majesty of an ultrawide monitor.
One thing that keeps luring me back to Starfield – other than the idea of building space stations out of onions – is a mysterious game within the game. Titled “Symbol Game”, it consists of chunky, etched, sloping pieces and a 4×6 grid mat adorned with stars, dots and lines. You may have pocketed a few sets, during your journeys across the Settled Systems. They’re not hard to find. But as far as I can tell, nobody has discovered the rules, though there are plenty of theories.
Alienware’s AW3423DWF is a fantastic gaming monitor – and the one that I was the most sad to return after my review. This 34-inch QD-OLED ultrawide debuted at $1100 last year, but it’s now available for $300 off at Dell’s US store in a nicely-timed Anti-Amazon deal. That brings it to $800 – still a lot of money for a monitor, but absolutely worth it for a monitor that has become well-loved for users and critics alike.
