Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Don't look now, but we're almost halfway through 2023. How is that even possible? I hear you cry. Well, I'm not entirely sure either. The last time I checked it was freezing cold outside and the sun went down at 3pm, but here we are with long, sunlit evenings and that sticky sheen of an early, muggy summer. Or at least it's been quite clammy in the RPS Treehouse this month, as we've all been sweating over our favourite games of the year so far.

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Yup, it's another DDR4 deal post - but this time, it's for the US market and covers a 64GB dual-channel kit, for all of you video creators, game server operators and high-number-likers out there. Newegg is offering a 64GB kit of Mushkin Enhanced Redline Stiletto DDR4-3200 CL16 for $99.99, a great price considering the same RAM kit cost $169.99 for Black Friday last year.

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When we last checked in on the AMD Ryzen 5 7600X in December last year, it had dropped to £249 in the UK. Now, the same six-core 12-thread Zen 4 processor is down to £208, making a Ryzen 7000 build surprisingly affordable - especially when you take in the drop in AM5 motherboard and DDR5 memory prices.

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I've mentioned SK Hynix before, the flash memory giant that made Intel's SSDs and is now making their own SSDs under the Solidigm brand. The Korean company has pursued an aggressive pricing strategy for these drives, and evidence of that is this latest deal on their flagship P44 Pro 2TB PCIe 4.0 NVMe drive.

The P44 Pro is now down to $117 at Newegg when you use code SSCT2827, a price that also includes a free mousepad - nifty. For context, the 2TB drive was selling for $150, making this a pretty tidy discount.

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Logitech makes some of the nicest peripherals in the business, from the G502 mouse to their G Pro X headset, but their MX Mechanical Mini keyboard is something special - combining low-profile mechanical switches with a compact layout, 2.4GHz wireless/Bluetooth connectivity and Mac/Windows compatibility, it's a keyboard for all seasons - or at least, a lot of different devices.

I've tested the keyboard for PC gaming, and I've found it quite lovely - so I thought I'd let you know that this model is down to £99.99 at Currys, which is £50 less than its usual price and a good deal for high-grade wireless mechanical.

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Player-versus-player-versus-nightmare monstrosity shooter Hunt: Showdown has patched in its latest boss, a flippin’ great big gator called Rotjaw who looks as nasty as she sounds.

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Cyberpunk 2077 was better than reviewers gave it credit for when it first released, but it struggled to overcome a “a critical mass of negativity”, the VP of PR and communications for studio CD Projekt Red has said.

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The developers behind Skullgirls have made a number of changes to the decade-old 2D fighter in order to correct elements they now believe to be in “poor taste”. The outcome? Hundreds of negative reviews on Steam, of course.

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Microsoft’s Game Pass is “unanimously” disliked by publishers, according to the head of PlayStation.

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Developer Runner Duck found success in 2017 with their strategy-management-roguelike hybrid Bomber Crew, a game about moving characters around a mid-flight warship to keep it in tip-top shape. The team’s follow-up Space Crew took the action to outer space, in an FTL-style twist. And now that on-the-fly vehicular mayhem is coming down to the ground in the newly announced Badlands Crew.

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Last time, you decided that snap-to construction is better than fighting a little beastie then meeting the giant adults. I can respect that. It's practical. It's not bullying. Maybe you don't enjoy getting your comeuppance. But the alternative is still pretty funny. Onwards! This week, I ask you to pick between helping people find things in an environment and using part of the environment as a weapon. What's better: Tagging locations for teamies, or door violence?

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This month's pick for our RPS Game Club is the nails sort-of-horror puzzle game The Tartarus Key, and we'll be doing another funtabulous liveblog to chat about it with you next Monday July 3rd at 4pm BST / 8am PDT. Is that a different month to the current one? Yes. But do I make the rules? Also yes. And, like Katharine was last time, I'm travelling right now, so Monday it is.

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Dave The Diver has launched in full today, leaving its early access shell behind. The game is a real platter of genres, mixing flavours of RPG, management sim, visual novel and more to create a unique kind of experience that made a real splash while it was in early access. Dave's quite popular tenure in early access had three chapters to its name, but the full release takes that number up to seven alongside new weapons, areas, and features for the deep-sea-explorathon. Take a look at the new release trailer below.

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Indiescovery is recorded a week before we release it, and never has this small time delay been more apparant than in our latest episode. Last week the temperature in the UK was (pardon my french) bonkers boiling. As we are professionals we recorded this episode with all of our windows closed and our fans turned off in order to avoid any unwanted background noise. Choosing to do this while sat in a British house during a heatwave actually violates several human rights laws, and we've all since been arrested for crimes against ourselves.

Oh, we also talk about our favourite indies from this year's Not-E3, which probably highlights the slight time delay more than the heat thing because in video game industry terms Not-E3 may as well have taken place 30 years ago. But listen, indie games are always relevant, aren't they? Plus I got to do a bit where I pretended to be a games executive in the intro so as far as I'm concerned it all worked out well in the end.

Free-to-play extraction shooter The Cycle: Frontier is shutting down servers and going offline on September 27th, developers Yager have announced. “Despite our best efforts and meaningful improvements brought to the game since launch,” they wrote in a Steam blog post, “the reality is that The Cycle: Frontier is unfortunately not financially viable,” leading to the game’s shutdown twelve months after launch.

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I like to think I'm good at picking passwords. The real secret is to not pick passwords, it's to let software generate passwords for you, but I think I can pick a memorable yet secure password when required to. Well, I thought that until I played The Password Game, a free game you can play in your web browser. You simply need to pick a password which meets its rules, but it keeps introducing more and more which become sillier and sillier. It's a good joke and grows into quite a tricky puzzle game too. Plus it's free!

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Death maze construction shooter Meet Your Maker is now free to play until July 3rd to celebrate the release of its first major content drop. Entitled Sector 1: Dreadshore, the big free update adds a new coastal location that has an appropriately grim lighthouse in it. It also doubles up as a research facility used to experiment on prisoners, which sounds like the perfect place to build hard-to-enter mazes.

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Among Us took the world by storm at the perfect time: when we were all stuck inside and paranoid about Imposters (family members) betraying us (swiping the last bit of edible food out of the fridge). Now, the hit multiplayer game will infiltrate the world of television, as developer Innersloth have teamed up with CBS’ animation crew to work on a new series based on the game.

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Cyberpunk 2077 expansion Phantom Liberty got a new trailer and a release date during this month's Xbox Games Showcase. If you watched Xbox's extended showcase a few days later then you would have seen more of the game and of one of its stars, Keanu Reeves.

Let's assume you didn't watch that, though. Let's assume that you, like me, were by that point too exhausted from 90 second trailers to tune in. Let's instead watch these videos now, since they've just been uploaded as separate videos, to learn more about Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty's new district, Dogtown.

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Project Rene - aka The Sims 5 - seems a long way off, but that isn't stopping Maxis from showing the game in its early, in-development state. The second episode of their community stream, Behind The Sims, continues from the first by showing lots of different prototype features, including glimpses of a new lighting model, new emotive animations, daily routines, hair customisation and more.

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Diablo 4's first major patch, 1.0.3, is out now. It fixes a lot of bugs, but its main goal is to re-balance and buff every class and to "smooth out the leveling experience" by increasing the power of certain skills.

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Earlier this month EA confirmed reports that they were in talks to transfer development of long-running MMO Star Wars: The Old Republic from its creators BioWare to an external studio. Today, BioWare confirmed that Broadsword would be taking over development, and that "not every role" would move with the game.

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Monitor arms are brilliant. I've got three in my office, somehow, where they elevate my screens above my desk so that I can use all of the space below for my keyboard, mouse and other knicknacks without needing to awkwardly position things around the base of a monitor stand. They're a total game-changer that I couldn't go without - and thanks to this deal on Amazon US, soon you won't have to either.

You can currently pick up a dual-monitor stand that accommodates two monitors up to 32 inches in size or 17.6 pounds in weight for just $15 when you use code LHEMYSVN and you're an Amazon Prime member. That's an incredible deal for a dual monitor arm that normally costs $46 and comes with over 15,000 ratings with an average score of 90%.

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Prime Day 2023 is scheduled to kick-off in mid-July, but we're already seeing some awesome deals on speedy Micro SD cards ahead of the big day. One that caught my eye today is the Kingston Canvas Go! Plus, which is available in a 256GB size for just £17.85 - down from an original price of £30!

For context, that's just £1 more than Samsung's Evo Plus SD card of the same size, yet you get maximum read speeds of 170MB/s compared to 130MB/s. That's 30% more, and well worth the extra quid!

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Cinematic space horror Fort Solis is now releasing on August 22nd, publisher Dear Villagers have announced. The game follows engineer Jack Leary, who arrives on an isolated mining station on Mars. All seems to be going smoothly until, of course, some scary stuff happens, which forces Leary to hold out until the morning. Fort Solis is split between four chapters, letting us binge it like a Netflix show or take the spooks piece-by-piece.

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After making their name with Max Payne's joyous gun bonanzas, Remedy Entertainment now seem pretty over guns but can never quite hang up their holsters. I've been playing Quantum Break since it arrived on PC Game Pass, and I'm finding their oft-forgotten time-bending shooter is yet another modern Remedy game full of boring gunfights even as it gives you supernatural powers that could replace guns. Their apparent disinterest in gunfights is especially felt in a game so into telling a story that it ends chapters with TV-length live-action episodes starring actual Lance Reddick. Looking back over their past games, agh, as much as I want spooky investigations, I can't get excited about their next, Alan Wake 2.

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Following phenomenally frightful survival horror game Darkwood, Polish team Acid Wizard Studio are now making... a football game? They've just released a free public alpha for Soccer Kids, inviting everyone to try their turn-based tactical footie game starring schoolkids in 90s Poland. This is extremely not what I expected next from the studio whose debut game made Adam backtrack to kill his own dog "because the world is convincing and I didn't want to leave suffering animals lying around the place if I didn't have to." Come watch the trailer.

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Ever since the makers of Desperados 3 and Shadow Tactics announced their brand new squad tactics game, I've been dying to get my hands on Shadow Gambit: The Cursed Crew. While Mimimi's previous games took place in mostly grounded historical settings, Shadow Gambit is about magical undead pirates hunting for mysterious booty and fighting a persecutive Inquisition. This shift into the supernatural is quite the change for Mimimi, which creative director Dominik Abé tells me was partly to challenge themselves as designers, but also so players could have a bit more fun with how they approached its plentiful stealth encounters.

"One thing we wanted for sure was that we had something that's not grounded in a realistic setting," Abé tells me. "That was a requirement for all the pitches we did internally, and that's because we wanted to improve on the gameplay. We were restricted by realism, so that was a core pillar. It had to be something fantasy, or sci-fi or something non-realistic."

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Scavengers Studio have laid off more than half their staff after photography-biking adventure Season: A Letter To The Future failed to meet commercial expectations. In an email to employees shared with GamesIndustry.biz, CEO Amélie Lamarche said “the game only sold 60,000 copies during its first five months, which falls far short of what the studio needs to survive.” Lamarche notes that discounts, critical praise, and game updates didn’t move the needle, and now only 16 employees are left at the studio after downsizing.

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Alternate history shooter Atomic Heart is getting its first (out of four) DLC pack on August 2nd, developers Mundfish have announced. The Annihilation Instinct DLC picks up right where the base game left off, plopping us into the steely Mendeleev Complex and the surrounding swamp areas to dent some more mechs. Take a look at the new tools on offer below:

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The legal battle between Microsoft and the US Federal Trade Commission continues to plod along as the FTC seeks to stop Microsoft’s proposed acquisition of Activision Blizzard King. Last week’s proceeding gave us some interesting revelations about revenue shares, Starfield development, and Indiana Jones exclusivity, but juicy inside baseball details continue to ooze out.

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Pizza Hut cashier, fashion icon, bestselling toy, game developer, and US Marine Sergeant are some of the accolades that Barbie has accrued over the last six decades (raising serious questions about whether or not she's experienced crunch or the horrors of war.) And now she can add one more to the list, as she’s joining the brilliant Forza Horizon 5. Or more accurately, her beautiful pink car (and Ken's less beautiful grey Hummer) is joining the game.

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It used to be that getting 32GB of fast DDR4 RAM cost triple figures - but nowadays, thanks to the prevalance of DDR5 kits, getting even this amount of RAM in a competitive spec is quite affordable. This 32GB kit of Corsair Vengeance RS RGB RAM, for example, offers 3600MT/s speeds, decent CL18 timings and a price point of £67.99 after a tidy £26 discount at Amazon UK compared to its price last month.

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HDMI 2.1 monitors were the new hotness back when the new generation of games consoles arrived in 2020 and 2021, with these models offering 4K 120Hz HDR gaming without the need for chroma subsampling. Unsurprisingly, these monitors also cost a huge amount of money, with even lower-end options in the £600+ range and higher-end examples in the quadruple figures.

Two or three years on, things have settled down and these HDMI 2.1 monitors are now much more affordable - if not yet exactly cheap. One such example is the Acer Nitro XV282KKV, a 28-inch monitor with a 4K 144Hz refresh rate on PC, that's down to £409.98 plus £5 shipping at Ebuyer. That's nearly £200 off its UK RRP and an awesome deal for a monitor with these specs.

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Like Phasmophobia, Among Us and BattleBit Remastered before it, it’s time for a new indie game to blow up on Twitch and keep thousands enthralled for at least a day or two before something else comes along. This time around, it’s the turn of Only Up, a bizarre game about climbing your way into the sky.

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The much-anticipated reboot of Perfect Dark is still “in the earliest stages” of development and at least two years away from being released, according to a new report.

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If you want to play Metal Gear Solid’s Master Collection - which will bring MGS3: Snake Eater to PC for the first time - when it releases this autumn, you’ll need to have a controller.

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The recent release of the Yakuza series on GOG has been tempered by the notable removal of several developers and even entire studios from the games’ credits.

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Six months ago, MMORPG Temtem introduced a mode that let you jump straight into the game’s 2v2 turn-based battles, ignoring the busywork of quests, creature-catching, and all the other Pokémon-isms. Showdown was the mode's name; something for the animal fight pit lovers in the room, rather than the plain old animal lovers. That mode has now been spun into a free standalone release aptly called Temtem Showdown, out now.

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The team of modders working to remaster The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion in Skyrim’s engine have released a hefty roadmap video, updating us on all the work they have left to do before Skyblivion’s 2025 release window. As well as development updates, the new video (embedded below) contains plenty of glimpses at Skyblivion’s nostalgic landscapes. Come take a look at fancy Cyrodiil down below, which looks exactly how I remember Oblivion looking (until I looked at actual Oblivion again.)

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