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Get the Core i5 13400F for £200.87 w/ code TND-10 (was £243) In terms of the specs, the 13400F is impressive - compared to last year’s 12400F, you get the same six performance cores but four additional efficiency cores, a higher turbo (4.6GHz vs 4.4GHz), more cache (20MB vs 18MB smart cache) and a higher turbo power limit (148W vs 117W). Going to a 6+4 configuration makes a lot of sense, as it ensures your six performance cores can be dedicated to gaming tasks while the four efficiency cores can either help out with the gaming or tackle background tasks like video encoding, web browsing or what-have-you....

Granted, you’re not exactly getting the RTX 3080, the RTX 3070 or anything else from the annals of the best graphics cards. The G5’s affordability cuts both ways, and that means a you get a RTX 3050 Ti: a GPU so modest Nvidia hasn’t even bothered to produce a desktop version. Still, that’s preferable to the absolute bottom-rung RTX 3050, and you’re also getting a capable hexa-core CPU in the Intel Core i5-11400H....

Even when Going Medieval did scuttle into early access at the start of the month, I have to say it seemed a blunt-clawed specimen. It was the same as RimWorld, basically. As in, identical, save for a medieval setting and a ton of missing features. After a moment or two to get used to the UI, I was playing my first game on autopilot, and all it really did for me was make me want to play RimWorld....

Howdy folks! It’s time for the second episode in this series of short films following my adventures through the grim darkness of Red Dead Redemption 2, as I led Matthew and Dave into Cowboy Purgatory during the RPS Christmas livestream. Last time, we went on what was billed as a nature tour, but which rapidly descended into a one-man mass extinction, despite my best intentions going in. This time, we’re headed to the Big City....

Today’s example is this 480GB Kingston A400 SSD, which has been reduced to under £25 versus an original RRP of £63. That’s an astonishing amount of space for the money, and well worth picking up if you have an old machine still running on a HDD. Get the Kingston A400 SSD for £24.98 (UK RRP £62.99) I actually upgraded my brother’s old laptop with this exact drive last year, and it went surprisingly smoothly....

In the test server patch notes, the devs say we’ll be able to dig for treasure in The Crab Sandbox, a big, toasty desert area. If you explore during the day you’ll need to find ways to fend off the heat, though if you’re there at night, you might have to fend off nasty beasties. Next, there’s the new dungeon, The Black Ant Hill. According to Eurogamer, you’ll need to venture into a giant tunnel in the sand to get to it, and once you’re in you can fight some ants, take on a mini-boss, and look for special materials to make new gear....

New Rundowns used to entirely replace GTFO’s levels every few months, but nowadays each new set is here to stay. How nice of the awful mutant zombie horrors to stick around. Infection tasks prisoners with “retrieving a neonate Hydro Stasis Unit (HSU) and bringing it through a mysterious process involving various machines”. You get peeks at the lore, too, with prisoners acquiring “hints of the state of the world outside the nightmarish undergrounds of GTFO”....

As 343 had previously explained, this technical test (a precursor to the tests they usually call “flights”) will be focused on Infinite’s new AI Spartans. Teams of four human players will be getting dropped into Bot Slayer matches against AI players on three different maps. “The Bots still have their quirks, which is why we’re flighting them, but they certainly aren’t pushovers. Be prepared,” 343 say. In the recent Inside Infinite post, creative lead Joseph Staten explains the four bot difficulty levels (Recruit, Marine, ODST and Spartan) and how they’re designed to get smarter and more tactical, not just land shots more often....

Bullet time is what Max Payne (a pun) is most famous for, of course. Other games had done slow motion business before, but this incredibly over-the-top neo-noir gunstravaganza was the first one where you went, “Cor, I’m just like Neo off of The Matrix!” while you did it. Though really, the influence goes back to John Woo’s absolutely fantastic action movies, which you should watch all of right now. In an interview with IGN in 2003, Petri Järvilehto, then Remedy’s lead game designer, said that, “Even in the early prototypes for the game, we were thinking that slow-motion would have to be an integral gameplay element since it was simply so cool to run down a corridor with two berettas firing in slow-mo....

The setting is 1840s France, a time when Paris is on the brink of revolution against the (literal) fat cats. You play as the dapper defence attorney Jayjay Falcon who alongside his witty lackey Sparrowson take on four seemingly unrelated cases. Travelling around Paris, you collect evidence and interview witnesses then present your findings in the courtroom and bring justice to your client. The vibe is high drama meets light-hearted comedy....

When I played Battleblock Theater, I decided to leap from block-to-block with my housemate. Why go it alone when gem-collecting with a pal is so much more fun? Plus, in co-op, you’re able to use your buddy’s head as a platform. Extra blocks! We were having a nice time, flinging one another across gaps. Nothing major. Then we happened upon our first secret area and narrator Will Stamper went from exaggerated talkyman to Scatman John on hallucinogenics....

EYE is one of my favourite games. It’s a mess. There’s so much wrong with it that I could probably slag it off for two full reviews, but I still like it too much. The plot is as mad as anything in Metal Gear Solid, except less desperate to treat women like shit and pretend it’s subversive, or beat you over the head with how smart it thinks it is....

What I needed were new friends and zero actual stakes. Thank you very much, then, to the sadly defunct Telltale Games and their game Poker Night At The Inventory. My new friends were an assortment of formerly-relevant video game characters, and the stakes were fake money and a pair of comically oversized shutter shades. Ever wanted to stare down The Heavy from Team Fortress 2 as he ponders whether to fold when you’ve just gone all in with absolute trash in hand?...

But as Matt put it in a recent post, “really it’s about luring your friends into the wilderness so you can murder them”. Because of course, not all of your group of survivors are goodies. One or two of you, depending on how many are playing, will be secretly designated as gits, and will spend the whole game trying to ruin everyone elses’ chances of rescue. There are many ways to sabotage things, from straight up battering people to death in a blizzard, to poisoning the soup in the cabin so everyone starts getting poorly and crapping themselves....

The entire game is effectively a string of conversations you have with fellow travellers. These take the form of simple games of symbol-matching, and you’ll need to use the cards in your hand correctly to advance the conversation and hopefully get a nice trinket at the end of it to take back to your village shop at the end of your caravan journey. You can very easily go it alone, but there’s also a travelling caravan group your mum used to pal around with, too, that you can follow on your travels as well....

It’s been 14 years (yes, it has. Sorry!), and still Spore’s Creature Creator feels like magic to me. Using simple, intuitive controls, you can mould your creature’s torso like clay into exactly the shape you wish. You can attach features like eyes, ears, mouths, limbs, horns, spines, and more. You can mould each individual piece to change its shape, size, and orientation. My favourite thing though, my absolute favourite thing is that each time you attach a new feature to your creature, you’ll see it testing its new appendage in real-time....

For the benefit of our former Alec (RPS in peace), I’ll note that Mugman voiceman Frank Todaro there has played Starscream in several Transformers series. Cuphead game directors Chad and Jared Moldenhauer are onboard as executive producers, as is Dave Wasson of Mickey Mouse Shorts. The style is looking a little cleaner than Cuphead the game, which amped up the olde style with artifacting. Netflix say The Cuphead Show is about “the unique misadventures of the impulsive Cuphead and his cautious but easily swayed brother Mugman....

Hidden Folks, as per John Walker’s review, is “a calm, calming and pleasingly silly game” about spotting curiosities across bustling hand-drawn setpieces. A more lived-in Where’s Wally picturebook with fewer sweaters. Developer Adriaan De Jonge and co have now expanded those pages with On Tour, a toe-tapping new set of levels to poke and prod at. As you’d guess, On Tour brings a more musical flair to Hidden Folks. The update’s six new areas span from open-air festivals and packed stages to more intimate recording studios - all backed by a musical mouth-sounds belted out by the devs....

At the time of writing, Hitman 3 on Steam has a mere 50% positive reviews. Chief among the issues in negative reviews is the price, which is set at £50/$60 for the standard edition. That’s the same price as when it launched a year ago on the Epic Games Store. Some reviews feel it should be lower given a year has passed, while others feel there should be a launch discount....

I wish I’d known. I was looking for a multiplayer game this weekend to balance out Resident Evil Village (I like to take swap between single and multiplayer games, and Village quickly became a bit boring). Hood’s PvPvE sounds intriguing: two teams of four enter a level and hunt down the same treasure. Both teams are trying to stealthily steal keys, while trying to own the best respawn points, gear, and more....