If you’d prefer the better value RTX 3080, then there’s also been movement - after appearing for £860 seven days ago, the cheapest card is now this Zotac Trinity OC model for £810. That’s still a hefty chunk of change for a graphics card - and above the original RRP of £650 - but it’s a damned sight better than the £1000+ these GPUs have retailed at for months....

Get this Gigabyte RX 6900 XT 16GB OC for £750 (was £1099) It’s a stunning turnaround for AMD’s high-end GPU, which outperforms the already-capable RX 6800 XT by around 10 percent according to my testing - and it now costs the exact same as the cheapest RX 6800 XT at Ebuyer. This doesn’t exactly make it the best value AMD graphics card - the budget and mid-range cards still offer the best bang-for-buck - but it makes the RX 6900 XT a uniquely tempting prospect if you have need of its healthy 16GB allocation of VRAM....

A Firm Handshake has several “levels” which are each just little handshake scenarios. I’m only going to tell you about the first two, because being surprised by each one after that myself was part of the joy. Your first handshake is a practice. Walk towards another business suit person with the indicated keys. As you get closer, your hand automatically reaches out for theirs, and theirs for yours. They slap together with a nice little smack....

In the Elder Scrolls tradition, Dread Delusion starts us as a prisoner. We’re freed to hunt the leader of a band of mercenaries accused of the scandalous crime of aiding god-worshippers, kicking off the main quest, but soon we’re free to explore, do side-quests, chat with townsfolk, join the thieves hanging out in the sewer, and all that open-world RPG stuff. Movement and violence are decidely of the era which inspired the game, which I can’t say I’m super into, but that’s how it goes....

Aran’s Bike Trip invites us to join Koning on a two-day tour from his home in Utrecht, out through countryside, woodlands, and farmland on a big loop of 177 kilometres (110 miles) with an overnight camping stop. It’s told through 100-ish scenes which are low-fi 360° photos you can spin about. Some scenes have tasks to accomplish (click objects in the right order to brew coffee, click on objects to double-check your kit, and such), while most are just snaps of his journey, often with a little chat....

That’s just one detail from a nearly 3 hour-long interview Howard gave on the Lex Fridman podcast, where he also talks scrapping space strandings, and (gasp) why he prefers to play on consoles to PC. The bit about videogame relationships starts around 52:06. It is sweet to hear Howard talk about how invested he’s gotten in chatting up characters from other people’s games, bless him: “Instead of just drifting out of a relation status”, he says, you’ll have to deal with a “temporary ‘I don’t like what you did’ state”....

Take my advice, though - it almost always ends up beige. In case you’re not familiar with Mull’s catalogue of work (and I wasn’t until Alice O dropped this story on my digital desk), you can catch an example under King’s announcement post. It’s important to single out this video, in particular, as it forms the crux of everything King takes into consideration with ColorPick. To see this content please enable targeting cookies....

Out of the two changes, it’s the damage range nerf which is the most important. At launch the MP5 was basically a pocket assault rifle, totally outperforming its beefier siblings at practically all ranges. I’d become one of those “if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em” drones zipping about spraying folks down at close range, then nonchalantly dropping snipers across the map while throwing up a little in my mouth....

“We’re constantly evaluating how to bring our games to different audiences wherever they are, while providing a consistent player ecosystem through Ubisoft Connect,” a spokesperson for the publisher said. It could be that the success of Valve’s Steam Deck has caught Ubisoft’s attention. Back in summer 2021, the company’s CEO Yves Guillemot said they’d consider bringing games to the handheld “if it is big”. Ubisoft are just the most recent big publisher to bring their games back to Steam, following on from Activision launching Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 and Warzone 2....

The video shows lots of recently added features, including new playable antagonists such as space wizards and a sentient blob that can spread and take over the ship. There’s also a blue banana peel that you can stand on which will teleport you to a random location - with the possibility that the location will be outside, in the vacuum of space. As always, it’s the UI updates I’m most interested in, and it looks as if they’ve made several changes that would make the game easier to play....

So. Sick of Apple and Google taking a 30% cut of all sales through their app stores, Epic gave Fortnite a new microtransaction payment option running through their own system on August 13th. This being against store rules, Apple and Google promptly kicked Fortnite out. Epic responded with lawsuits accusing both of “monopolistic” and “anti-competitive” behaviour, plus a daft propaganda video mocking Apple. Then Apple said they’d revoke Epic’s developer accounts, and Epic said whoa hang on let’s not be hasty....

Unto The End is a 2D sword fighting game about a little beardy man trying to find his way back home after getting lost hunting a deer. You’ll guide him through gloomy, cramped caves, climbing and exploring and gathering scraps of leather, bone, and healing herbs. And you’ll fight. Lord, you’ll fight. It’s very much a game about sword fights, but rather than a hack and slash where you cut down monsters by the dozen, 2 Ton Studios emphasise that Unto The End is about fewer, harder fights....

It’s out on Steam now, and you can find a trailer of its pretty voxel world below. Every building you construct in Urbek will consume certain resources, and generate certain others. Electricity, food, coal, educated workers - the resources are many and varied. By placing buildings down strategically, you’re aiming to satisfy the resource criteria of neighbouring buildings such that they upgrade, in turn producing more and consuming less. The ultimate aim is to build an efficient, attractive city, before you run out of natural resources....

The team’s blog post details all the new changes, with spellcasting in general receiving several notable ones. The five schools of magic are becoming more cohesive, with debuffs that benefit from stacking. These debuffs suffer from diminishing returns, though, since the team wants to encourage players to mix and match spells from other specialisations. Every individual spell in V Rising is getting either a minor tweak or a complete rework, all in an attempt to encourage “more unique, focused and intentional builds....

And as ever, the new feature brush is not being applied lightly - there are going to be 4 new mobs added piecemeal in the months leading up to the presumed full release of the update in mid-2021, as well as somewhere in the region of 30-odd new blocks and their derivatives. And that’s all grand. There’s even an axolotl being added - one of my favourite beasts, and the first amphibian in the game....

But our Valorant error codes guide will try to equip you with all the ammo you need to shoot down these error messages and get you back into the game as soon as possible! Valorant timeout error - “something unusual has happened” We’ll look at all the established error codes in a moment, but first: let’s fix the timeout issue that has been plaguing various Valorant players recently: If you’ve received this error and it doesn’t go away after restarting, you’re not alone....

So, first things first: Fracture is quite pretty. It’s no colourful, sunny beach like Breeze, but it does have two distinct biomes (a jungle-y bit and a desert-y bit) that at least make it more interesting to look at than the game’s other maps. The defending team spawns in-between those two biomes, and there’s a spike site in each for them to protect. The map is a H-like shape, and attackers can use underground ziplines during the buy phase to choose which side to attack from....

Valve and a handful of game publishers have landed themselves in hot water with the European Commision for geo-blocking Steam keys in certain regions in Europe. The Steam owners, along with Bandai Namco, Capcom, Focus Home, Koch Media and ZeniMax (Bethesda’s parent company), have been collectively fined €7.8 million (around £6.9 million) for “breaching EU antitrust rules”. “Valve and the publishers restricted cross-border sales of certain PC video games on the basis of the geographical location of users within the European Economic Area (‘EEA’), entering into the so called ‘geo-blocking’ practices,” the European Commission said....

In a Q&A hosted on Reddit today, the Alyx team answered fan questions about the upcoming non-3 sequel. One user asked about the elephant in the room: the fabled “Valve Time” that struck past Half-Life games with delayed releases. It wouldn’t be the first major game since the start of this month to have a setback. CD Projekt RED announced a Cyberpunk 2077 delay until September. Crystal Dynamics delayed Marvel’s Avengers by four months....

Fortunately, Valve seem to have anticipated this, and are putting a number of measures in place to stop pesky resellers from buying up all the new Steam Decks when reservations open later today. Importantly, fresh Steam accounts won’t be allowed to reserve one until 48 hours after pre-orders go live. “We are aware of potential unauthorized resellers, and as an additional safeguard to ensure a fair ordering process, we’ve added a requirement that the reserver has made a purchase on Steam prior to June 2021 for the first 48 hours of reservation availability,” Valve say....