Category: Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Cheap laptops are great. They can run Minecraft servers, download stuff while you’re away, let you practice programming, let your younger sibling play with or against you in retro or indie games. You might already have one lying around, in which case have a think about the possibilities – but if you’d like one and don’t have one in a cupboard somewhere, you can grab a cheap Dell Latitude 7390 off Ebay for £219.99 in ‘good’ and ‘refurbished’ condition. For the money, you get an 8th-gen Core i5 processor with integrated graphics, a compact 13-inch design, 16GB of RAM and a 256GB SSD. All in all, it’s a pretty sweet spec for the asking price!

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The Samsung 990 Pro is a blazing-fast PCIe 4.0 SSD, offering incredible speeds of up to 7450MB/s reads and 6900MB/s writes – right up against the limits of the PCIe 4.0 standard.

Normally this drive retails for about £200 in its massive 2TB incarnation, but now you can pick up this drive for just £152.99 at Ebuyer in the UK – a great deal on a drive that we’ve named as the very fastest PCIe 4.0 SSD for shorter loading times.

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Right from the start, modders tried to make Valve’s virtual reality shooter Half-Life: Alyx work without needing VR glasses. Now another such mod has reached the point of Alyx being fully playable from start to finish on a regular monitor with keyboard and mouse. This new mod looks more polished than some others, and claims it’s the “easiest to use and most flexible” of the lot. I’m not too interested in a VRless Alyx but I’m sure it’s welcome news to some.

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Retro FPS Warhammer 40,000: Boltgun now has a release date of May 23rd, developer Auroch Digital have announced. Revealed last year, Boltgun is an homage to old-school shooters like classic Doom, mimicking those game’s speedy shooting and bloody visuals, and placing it in the Warhammer universe. Its loud, fast, and fun trailers meant Boltgun ripped its way onto RPS’ most anticipated games list, so thank the grim-dark gods for a release date.

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There are few success stories more inspiring than that of Tarn and Zach Adams. After twenty years of development Dwarf Fortress finally made the jump to Steam in December 2021, complete with exciting new features such as “graphics” and “mouse support”. Although the game was already critically lauded, its availability on Steam made it a financial success, with thousands of long-term fans thrilled to provide the brothers with a long-overdue payday.

Following their panel on the highs and lows of procedural generation, the pair had a chat with Rachel about the game’s recent Steam release, upcoming features, their favourite player stories and – most importantly – Zach’s dog.

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As every good munchkin knows, premium supporters of RPS get free game key giveaways, and this week we’re excited to have a blast of first-come, first-served freebies dark fantasy citybuilder Against The Storm. On a somewhat desperate mission to reclaim the wilderness for a kind of demanding queen, Against The Storm charges you with not only building a prosperous settlement, but linking it with multiple others in a vast network of prosperity and civilisation. Read on to find out how and when to get your free key.

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Big big sequel Star Wars Jedi: Survivor is due to release later this month (April 28th), and EA have shared the “final gameplay trailer” in anticipation. The new look debuted at this weekend’s Star Wars Celebration – both well-timed fate and a clever bit of corporate brand synergy. The 2-minute trailer is packed with action shots while returning favourite Cere gives a very sombre speech about the dark times the galaxy is facing. Although, when is the Star Wars universe not in dark times? When are the odds ever in your favour? And what happened to “never tell me the odds?”

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Our commitment to finding cool people and giving them a leg up continues, and this time I’m thrilled to welcome the lovely and talented Zijin Wang as our work experience bestie for the next few weeks. You’ll already have seen a few news articles from Zijin popping up, after her first few days with us, and you’ll see more over the next while. Everyone give a big, warm, RPS welcome!

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Over the weekend, footage leaked online showing what appeared to be a shiny remake of Atlus’ Persona 3 and the next entry in Jet Set Radio, apparently making Sega the latest company to pursue the remake/reboot gold. Late last year, the publisher emphasised plans to “focus on remaking and remastering existing IPs,” although they haven’t confirmed the existence of either project yet.

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The developers of Ark have revised their plans for the release of Ark: Survival Ascended, an Unreal Engine 5 enhanced edition of their dinosaur survival sim. It will now cost $60 rather than the previously planned $50, is no longer bundled together with ARK 2, and will instead include the remasters of Ark: Survival Evolved’s several expansions – although most won’t be available at launch.

Studio Wildcard also went into more detail as to why this upgraded version is no longer a free update, and why they feel it’s necessary to shut down Ark: Survival Evolved’s official servers.

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