AMD’s Rzyen 7 5800X3D drops to £306, a new low price

Ryzen 7 5800X3D was down to £348 at Amazon. Now though, thanks to a rogue 10% off deal at Ebay, you can pick up the same processor from Ebuyer’s Ebay store for £306.

£306! That’s a tiny price for a CPU that launched last year at an official RRP of £429 and a real-life asking price of £530. To get this reduced price, use code JAN10 at the checkout.

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Fresh Lies Of P footage shows off a fight with a lightning gorilla robocop

Lies of P hopes to fix, as revealed in a new gameplay trailer designed to show off how nice it looks on a Radeon RX 7900 XTX. I will likely never own a Radeon RX 7900 XTX, but it’s looking increasingly likely that I will buy Lies of P.

It’s a Soulslike that plonks you into an alternate Victorian London where people got real good at inventing creepy automata. You play as the big P himself, Pinocchio.

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Shang-Chi is apparently the most overrated card in Marvel Snap

Marvel Snap that destroys any and all opposing cards in his lane with a power of 9 or above. He feels great to play, and miserable to play against. He is also, apparently, quite bad – at least according to project lead Ben Brode, who’s consulted his big statistics bank to discover that he appears in more losing decks than anyone else.

Huh. I suppose I can stop agonising over whether he has a place in my latest Patriot deck.

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Howl is a devious tactics game that channels Into The Breach and Inkle’s Pendragon

The Lion’s Song devs Mi’pu’mi Games to be a turn-based tactical folktale, but cor, Howl sure does tick a heck of a lot of boxes for me. Due out later this year, you play a deaf hero in search of a cure to a sinister ‘howling plague’ that’s devastated the land around you and turned all its inhabitants into blood-thirsty beasts – and having played its first chapter last week, its combination of tight planning, grid-based shoving and limited ammo a la Into The Breach is very, very moreish indeed. Definitely one to watch for strategy game fans.

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The EU are slapping Microsoft with an antitrust warning over their Activision-Blizzard buyout

has already committed to blocking Microsoft’s $69 billion Activision-Blizzard buyout, so now it’s the EU’s turn to kick up a fuss. The EU’s antitrust watchdog is nearing the end of a 90-day probe into whether Microsoft’s buyout violates antitrust laws, and they’re reportedly about to serve up a charge sheet that lays out all their beef. As with those of the FTC and other regulators, their objections are likely to centre on the likelihood of Microsoft saddling Call Of Duty with Xbox or Gamepass exclusivity.

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Lost Ark’s latest effort to tackle its bot problem ended up banning lapsed players

Lost Ark got a bit too happy with its banhammer over the weekend, with lapsed players taking to the game’s Steam page to complain that they’d been banned for no reason other than inactivity. Players, or at least former players, of Lost Ark left more than 1300 negative reviews of the game on Saturday, and more than 1000 on Sunday. They claimed they’d received bans that appeared on their Steam profile without actually logging into the game recently.

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Awesome Games Done Quick 2023 raised more than $2.6 million for charity

Twitter after the event concluded, and thanked all the runners and those who’d donated.

A number of speedruns throughout the week-long event smashed world records for their respective games and categories too, including PC runs of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder’s Revenge and my own personal GOTY from 2022, PowerWash Simulator. You can watch the AGDQ 2023’s record-setting No Soap PowerWash Simulator run below, and weep into your coffee at the sheer cleaning ability on display.

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SimCity 4, the greatest citybuilder of all time, was released 20 years ago

SimCity 4 had its problems. Its huge cities would chug on even decent PCs, for one, and its traffic simulation seemed outright broken.

Twenty years later – thanks to faster PCs, the Rush Hour expansion, and a huge modding community – SimCity 4 is the best of all SimCity games. If what you care about is simulation, scale, variety, and the beauty of urban sprawl, it’s also the best citybuilder.

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