Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Welcome to Chicago in the 1920s; the last known time that fedoras were actually cool. The city is dry, thanks to prohibition, but there’s a rich underworld of gangsters ready to sell you dodgy spirits on the sly. Amid the cigar smoke and whisky-breath, notorious criminals go to war over every street and every establishment.

Speakeasies, casinos, and brothels are the money-makers of the moment. Empire Of Sin lets you take the role of one of 14 criminal masterminds of the time – some real, some fictional – to take control of the city in XCOM-style turn-based combat. I’d do the game an injustice to describe it as gangster XCOM though. Empire Of Sin blends combat with detailed business management, and moonlights as a roleplaying game when your chosen kingpin has a face-to-face sitdown with a rival. You can pay your rival off; intimidate them with some ‘20s tough talk; or pull a gun and wade into their headquarters with a ragtag band of gangsters to take the place by force.

I have some bad news for all you Wraith mains out there. Not only have her abilities been nerfed and her Naruto-style run taken away, now it sounds like Respawn plan on making her even easier to shoot in Season 8. A developer says they want to bring the most popular Apex Legends character “under control” next season, potentially increasing her hitbox. It’s not all doom and gloom, though, because there’s a tiny possibility she could get a buff if it all goes to plan.

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If you’re looking to get some big savings on a new gaming laptop, then today’s Cyber Monday sale is definitely the best time to do it. Whether you want to take your games on the go or simply fancy playing games in a different part of your house, there are hundreds of pounds and dollars to be saved off these Cyber Monday gaming laptop deals, including almost £500 off a Razer Blade 15. Our favourite Lenovo Legion 5 laptops from the end of last week are also still in stock over at Walmart, too, for our friends in the US, too. That’s not all, though. There are lots of new gaming laptop deals to consider this Cyber Monday, so we’ve picked out our top picks below.

If you fancy having a go at Mass Effect‘s daft hacking minigames without loading up BioWare’s big old space RPG, then look no further. Someone has made a virtual museum with recreations of the hacking puzzles from both Mass Effect 1 and Mass Effect 2. It’s inspired by the virtual lock picking museum I reported on a few months back – a post in which I said the exact words: “I’d love to see a hacking museum with all the awful minigames from Mass Effect.”

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The Fnatic miniStreak continues to be one of my all-time favourite tenkeyless gaming keyboards, and the Speed Silver version of their new Kailh-based model is currently £20 off for Cyber Monday. Down to £80 from its usual £100, this sleek, compact gaming keyboard is one of the few miniStreak variants still available these days, as the older Cherry MX models have been slowly going end of life for the last couple of months, making it a great time to snap one up before it disappears for good.

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Though [cms-block] ended on Sunday (???), there’s still a chance to get some deals for Cyber Monday, and one of those is a doozy. The Logitech G502 Hero gaming mouse is still available for an all-time low price of £35 / $35 for both UK and US deals hunters. Last year, the older model of the G502 was officially voted RPS readers’ favourite gaming mouse of all time, and today could well be your last chance this year to snap it up so cheap.

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Black Friday

There’s never been a better time to pick up a new SSD this [cms-block] and Cyber Monday season, and you’ll find all the best storage deals from today’s Cyber Monday sale in our curated hub below. We’ve scoured the web for all the best SATA, NVMe and external SSD deals we can find taking place in the UK and US, and all of them come with the RPS seal of approval. Finally, we’ve got some fresh WD Blue SN550 deals for those shopping in the US, and there are also new deals on WD’s Black SN750, too. You’ll also find Samsung 860 Evo drives for some of their lowest ever prices. So, to help you secure the best savings on today’s best SSDs for gaming, read on for our Cyber Monday SSD deals highlights below.

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[cms-block] might be over, but Cyber Monday has arrived, and we’ve been scouring the web to bring you the very best Cyber Monday graphics card deals in both the UK and the US. It’s not a great time for Nvidia GTX and RTX deals this year, as the continued stock shortages of the RTX 3070 and RTX 3080 haven’t resulted in any of Nvidia’s older RTX cards getting big discounts.

It’s been better over in the AMD Cyber Monday deals camp, but even then it’s still not great. Still, to help you get the best graphics card deal this Cyber Monday, I’ve put together this list of all the cheapest prices we can find right now. I’ll be updating this article as and when new graphics card deals arrive, too, so be sure to pop this page in your bookmarks to help stay ahead of the deals curve.

[cms-block] is done for another year, but today’s Cyber Monday sale has brought us one last round of great gaming monitor deals. A lot of the best Black Friday discounts are now over, including the brilliant Samsung Odyssey G7 deal, but there are still plenty of gaming monitor bargains available across all display types, including G-Sync Compatible monitors, 144Hz and 240Hz screens and ultrawide monitor deals. So, to help you find the best bargains from what’s left, I’ve rounded up all my top picks in this curated list. Whatever you’re after, we’ve got you covered in our RPS-approved Cyber Monday gaming monitor deals round-up.

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There weren’t many good [cms-block] CPU deals this year, but today’s Cyber Monday sale has luckily brought us a few more, including a sizeable discount on Intel’s entry-level 10th Gen Core i3 processor. To help you get the best price on your new Intel or AMD CPU, we’ve rounded up all the best Cyber Monday CPU deals happening in the UK and the US. Most of this year’s Cyber Monday CPU deals are limited to the premium end of the price spectrum, unfortunately, but if you’re looking to pick up one of Intel’s new 10th Gen Comet Lake CPUs this is still a good time to do so.

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I so desperately wanted Star Wars: Squadrons to be a huge success. If I could snap my fingers and change whatever I wanted about the games industry, I would give Star Wars: Squadrons the playerbase of Call Of Duty. It’s an absolutely phenomenal cinematic experience, and it’s also an amazingly deep competitive game that rewards tactics, skill, and keeping calm under high pressure.

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[cms-block] is finally over, but you can still pick up a great gaming headset deal with this year’s Cyber Monday sale. With so many headsets on sale, it can be difficult to know what’s good and what’s not. Thankfully, we’ve done the hard work for you and picked out our top highlights right here in one handy list. Curated and selected by us, you’ll find all the best discounts on today’s best gaming headsets right here in our best Cyber Monday gaming headset deals round-up.

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[cms-block] has passed, but just when you thought it was safe to go back in the deals deals, Cyber Monday is here! Yes, you still have time to grab a great deal on a new gaming mouse and keyboard with today’s Cyber Monday sale. We’ve gathered all of our top picks right here in our curated list below, presenting you with the absolute cream of the deals crop of our favourite bits of hardware. We’ve also removed all the old Black Friday deals that have now passed, and will be adding more Cyber Monday gaming mouse and keyboard deals as they go live throughout the day.

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[cms-block] is done and dusted for another year, but Cyber Monday is here for one last round of last minute RAM deals – and to save you the hassle of searching for them yourself, we’ve rounded up all the best DDR4 RAM deals. You’ll find all kinds of sizes and speeds here, with Cyber Monday RAM deals spanning both the UK and the US. Regardless of whether you’re simply adding more RAM to your existing system or buying a whole new set, every RAM deal you’ll find below has the RPS seal of approval. So let’s get to it!

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Screenshot Saturday Sundays! Your weekly, carefully hand-wrapped delivery of wonderful work-in-progress videogame artworks, slammed haphazardly through the mailbox by a careless postie. This week: Chilled-out reverts, celestial boneyards, crash-landing shenanigans and a rather informal shopkeep.

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Between hidden arcade machines and Ronald Reagan’s war crimes, Call Of Duty: Black Ops Cold War quite badly wants to evoke the 80s. But it doesn’t look like the 80s, so much as it looks like a high-budget videogame made in the late 2010s. Fortunately, you can fix that with an easter egg hidden in the newest iteration of Nuketown, with old-school colour filters hidden inside this year’s synth-coloured remix of Treyarch’s arena fixture.

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The Brotherhood Of Steel brought a lot of metal with them when they arrived in Fallout 76. Power Armour, weapons, you name it. But in a more quietly pleasant addition to the wasteland, it looks like Bethesda also added wheelchairs with last week’s update, following one fan’s request to see their own real-life mobility aid represented in the post-apocalyptic sandbox.

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We finally did it, folks. 2020 is almost over. And while it felt like spring and summer were interminably long, autumn seems to have passed in the blink of an eye. But we can still enjoy the best season a little while longer with Dutch indie boyband Sokpop, who are taking us all out on a cosy trip to Pipo Park‘s tiny sandbox. Wrap up warm, though. It’s rather nippy out.

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You remember Line Rider, right? That Flash game with the wee man on a sled who slides down whatever track you’ve sketched? Great little time-killer, that. Only, it seems one artist has wiled away more than a few hours on the slip ‘n’ slider. Having spent hundreds of hours over the past decade putting it all together, David Lu is finally ready to show us Omniverse 2 – an exhaustive showcase of high-velocity puppetry that turns the web toy into a mind-bending work of art in its own right.

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Alright, here it is, we’re coming up on the most important day of the year: Cyber Monday. As far as I know or care, Cyber Monday is a day to dress in tattered leathers, gather round an open SMTP relay with your IRC kith and kin, drink mulled Jolt Cola, roast AOL CDs on an open fire, and sing Front Line Assembly anthems to celebrate freeing Kevin. Rest well this weekend, reader dear, for on Monday we HACK THE PLANET.

On Tuesday we’ll start opening the RPS Advent Calendar to reveal our favourite games of the year. Do you think you have a handle on what we’ve liked? Join the Advent Calendar Guessing Game on the forums.

What are you playing this weekend? Here’s what we’re clicking on!

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The Fall Guys stooges at Mediatonic this week announced they’ve found a spot for new studio in Leamington Spa, which I suppose means they can go ahead and open one. They initially announced plans for a studio in the English spa town back in February, but they hadn’t created a gaming sensation at that point so, y’know, fewer people were interested in the news. What are Mediatonic working on? While they say they have a few projects on the go, they only name one: Fall Guys, obvs.

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The best time to play a Destiny raid is as soon as it launches. Before the puzzles are solved, the bosses cheesed, the builds optimised, and the surprises spoiled, get in and discover it for yourself. Raids are extra brutal at launch because the first 24 hours are under a special ‘Contest Mode’ making enemies so much tougher while players race for the world’s first completion. So when Destiny 2: Beyond Light opened the Deep Stone Crypt last Saturday, I dove straight in with my fireteam for puzzling and a pummelling. It was: great.

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As you may have noticed, graphics card deals are pretty few and far between this [cms-block], and there simply haven’t been any RTX 3080 cards in stock to even try and buy one at their usual price. At least not on their own, anyway. If you’ve got deep pockets and have been thinking about upgrading your entire PC to, say, play Cyberpunk 2077 with maximum ray tracing settings, then it may be quicker, easier and cheaper to simply buy a whole new PC – and if it’s an RTX 3080 you’re after, Dell are currently shaving 15% off some of their pre-built Alienware Aurora desktops for Black Friday.

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You get a sale! And you get a sale! Everybody gets a sale! Hot on the heels of Steam’s autumn sale, Epic Games have launched their own [cms-block] extravaganza. Now, they don’t have quite so many games on offer as Steam’s big blowout, but there are a few decent deals in there – including some alright discounts on new games like Watch Dogs: Legion and Star Wars: Squadrons.

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Deals deals deals! Just kidding – I interrupt your regularly scheduled Black Friday posts to bring you some delightful Apex Legends japes. Today in “what daft thing has Imogen done in a multiplayer shooter now”, I had a go at replicating a glitch that throws Apex’s new vehicles across the map.

Actually, “launch” is probably a better word to use than “throw”, because pulling off the stunt jetts you off into the sky like Gnome Chompski strapped to a rocket.

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[cms-block] is over half way done for us in the UK, and as I look back over the great sea of discounted PC components I’ve scavenged over the last seven days (weeks? Years?), I have to say that the best deals have definitely been reserved for those after an ultrawide gaming monitor. That’s not to say there also hasn’t been plenty of great, if fleeting, deals on regular 16:9 monitors this year (most notably Samsung’s stupendously good Odyssey G7 and LG’s G-Sync Compatible UltraGear 27GL850-B), but the biggest and best discounts have definitely fallen in the ultrawide camp, which is great, as it’s never been a better time to dive into the wonderful world of ultrawide PC games. If you, too, want to join the ultrawide club, these are the best deals you’ll see all week.

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DEF48750. A magical code which has completely changed the way I play Spelunky 2 after over a hundred hours.

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It’s finally the end of the week, which means it’s [cms-block] for real. Rather than kick off a sale earlier in the week like so many others, GOG are clearly taking the whole event much more seriously, dropping their big Black Friday deals today. I respect it. While they don’t have too many new games on offer, they have got a load of old favourites like Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice and the Batman: Arkham Asylum series for up to 80% off.

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Amazon have chopped $50 off the 2TB model of the excellent Crucial MX500 SSD in one of today’s first US Black Friday lightning deals. Not only does this beat its previous Prime Day price of $184, but it’s also the cheapest it’s ever been – and much better value than almost every other 2TB SATA deal we’ve seen so far.

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The RPS treehouse has been filled with that most festive of activities: arguing. We’ve been selecting games for the RPS Advent Calendar, which means both trying to decide what games we loved most in 2020, and also trying to remember even a single game we played in 2020.

To help with both of these things, I’m asking you: what was your favourite game this year?

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[cms-block] has no cultural relevance for someone who doesn’t celebrate American Thanksgiving, but I’m up for good games going cheap. Itch.io is the latest digital PC games store to launch a big Black Friday sale, and it’s the one that interests me most for all of Itch’s indie goodies. The store mostly sells DRM-free downloads, but plenty do come with keys you can slam into Steam too. I have some recommendations.

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In the past couple of weeks, the internet has been full of Smart Delivery-this and DualSense-that. No one can escape the buzz surrounding the launch of the two new video game boxes.

That’s why this week’s Mystery Steam Reviews — a quiz segment on a weekly video podcast called The PC Gaming Weekspot — revolves around all things PlayStation and Xbox.

If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em!

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I already own three VR headsets and yet I still find myself considering a fourth. That’s because of the standalone Oculus Quest 2, which ditches the heavy cables of the Vive and Index and allows you to roam in VR without fear of getting tangled. I’ve been keeping an eye for deals on the headset over [cms-block] and the best I can find is $299 at Newegg with a $15 gift card.

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[cms-block] hasn’t been particularly kind on the old graphics card and CPU deals front this year, but with just two weeks to go until the launch of CD Projekt Red’s Keanu Reeves RPG Cyberpunk 2077 and not a single fresh sighting of new RTX 3070 or RTX 3080 cards anywhere to be seen, the window for making any necessary PC upgrades is closing pretty fast.

But I’m here to help. While I can’t magic up one of Nvidia’s new RTX 30 GPUs or any of AMD’s hot new Ryzen 5000 chips, I can tell you how to build a PC from today’s crop of Black Friday deals that will still meet Cyberpunk 2077’s ‘High’ PC spec (that’s 1440p Ultra settings) and its minimum ray tracing requirements. And it won’t cost you an absolute fortune to get it all, either, as I’ve picked out components that cost less than £900 / $1000. So let’s jump in and see what my one-stop shopping list has to offer.

The excellent and RPS-approved wireless gaming headset, the Steelseries Arctis 7, is always one of the most hotly sought after items during [cms-block] and finally this year’s deal has arrived. It’s been stuck at a very stubborn £159 for the last six months or so, according to my price tracker, but now it’s finally fallen to a much more agreeable £100. Both the black and white versions are on sale, too, matching their previous Black Friday prices from last year.

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I’ve never really played many dating simulator games. Back when Dream Daddy first came out, I gave it a go, and had a solid time overall. I went on some nice dates with a handsome coffee shop owner and he introduced me to the band PUP, who have a load of absolute angsty bangers.

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The Samsung Odyssey G7 was one of the standout Prime Day deals in the UK last month, but this incredible 2560×1440, 240Hz gaming screen has returned for another round of [cms-block] deals goodness. Now down to just £430 for the 27in model and £500 for its larger 32in sibling, these savings of £120 and £130 apiece aren’t to be missed if you’re after one of the best [cms-block] of the year.

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A fan-made enhanced edition of Daisuke “Pixel” Amaya’s seminal indie platformer Cave Story has been slapped with a DMCA takedown. Publishers Nicalis have accused Cave Story Engine 2 of using code stolen from the original game’s source – code that they, as developers of Cave Story +, own. But while fears that the publisher planned to wipe all free versions of the game off the internet for good seem to have been misplaced, contention remains over whether Nicalis actually owns the rights to code used by the now-shutted fan game.

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Earlier in the week, we highlighted a great [cms-block] here in the UK for the Lenovo Legion 5, which packed an RTX 2060 graphics chip for just £950. Now, we can do the same for our pals in the US, as Walmart have some great discounts on Lenovo’s top notch gaming laptop, beating prices at both Newegg and Best Buy.

Indeed my top pick is a Core i7 and RTX 2060 model that comes with a 1TB HDD and a 256GB SSD for $1099 – a saving of $400 overall. Alternatively, you can get the same model but with a 512GB SSD for a little bit less at $999. Either way, you’re getting $400 off their usual prices, and both are great ways of getting all the best bits of the excellent Legion 7i without breaking the bank.

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