I’m not a fan of the name—if only we lived in a world where corporations dropped their katana obsession and made laptops called things like the Zweihander and the Falchion—but in all other respects this deal on an MSI Katana 15 gaming laptop is very tempting indeed. 

These things normally retail for $1,499, but Newegg has lopped a whole $340 off that price, creating a Prime Day deal that’s actually way cheaper than the one you can currently get on Amazon.

• We’re curating all the best Amazon Prime Day PC gaming deals right here.

The bang-to-buck ratio is pretty solid with this one. Your $1,159 will net you a laptop equipped with an RTX 4070, a serious bit of kit that is—if anything&mdash…

Deceive Inc., the new game from Sweet Bandits Studios and Killing Floor studio Tripwire Interactive, is holding a cross-platform open beta this weekend, giving everyone a chance to see what it’s all about ahead of its full release on March 21.

As we saw at the PC Gaming Show in 2022, Deceive Inc. is an extraction shooter that looks something like a cross between Deathloop and Prop Hunt, with a strong faux-’70s spy thriller vibe. The goal is simple enough—infiltrate a location, steal the objective, and get out—but the process is complicated by the presence of 11 other agents, working solo or in teams of three, all trying to do the same thing.

Each agent in Deceive Inc. has a unique weapon and skillset, along with various abilities and gadgets, like a bulletproof u…

Overwatch 2’s next season, which starts tomorrow, will kick off with not just a new DPS hero, but a two-week-long trial run of its newest game mode, Clash, which feels designed for constant, MOBA-style combat.

The Clash trial will take place on Hanaoka, a map that looks surprisingly similar to Hanamura from the original Overwatch. Hanaoka canonically exists within the Hanamura district in Overwatch 2’s near-future Japan, so Overwatch 1 players will get to play among the same cherry blossom trees and stone walkways that made the original map so iconic. It actually looks like Blizzard built Hanaoka out of the building blocks of Hanamura and I’m all for it.

Clash, however, is a very different mode than the multi-point mode assault (or “2CP”) from Overwatch 1, and season 10’s pa…

Ubisoft’s quietly huge FPS continues to prove it’s not going anywhere. Boosted by a week of free access and a frankly ridiculous discount to $4, Rainbow Six Siege surpassed its all-time Steam concurrents record this weekend with a new high of 201,933.

Not bad for a live service shooter entering its ninth year, but especially surprising considering this is far from the first time Siege has been cheap and momentarily free. Ubisoft has held over a dozen free weekends (and a few whole weeks) on Steam over the years, typically timed around the release of a new season. This time is no different—Year 9 Season 1 began earlier this month with a new operator and balancing tweaks.

So why are more people giving Siege a shot in 2024 than did during a similar free week in 2022? Twit…

Ubisoft’s wild attempt to create a software that can detect and defeat people using a mouse and keyboard on Rainbow Six Siege’s console version seems to have paid off. Makers of the hardware “spoofing” device XIM, which lets you use whatever input you want on your console, are saying that—despite their best efforts otherwise—you’re not using it in Siege any time soon. 

XIM isn’t inherently a cheating device, as it’s really just intended to let you use a mouse and keyboard with macros on your console, but in practice it allows console cheaters to pretend they’re using a controller while gaining the benefits of a mouse and keyboard. 

That can be a big deal for some in competitive games, especially so in console games like Siege that don’t have any form of…

Creative Assembly, the folks that make all those Total War games and once upon a time also made our 2014 GOTY Alien: Isolation, is releasing an extraction shooter sometime this year. It’s called Hyenas, and despite some members of the press and early playtesters getting a good look at it last year, publisher Sega has not publicly shown off the game since its reveal.

That’s why this weekend should be particularly interesting—Creative Assembly is ramping up its playtests between January and April, with the first of four alpha weekends beginning tomorrow, January 20. You can sign up for the playtests on the official Hyenas site. Be aware that you’re not guaranteed access (I’ve yet to be invited myself). Here’s the full alpha schedule:

• Weekend 1: January 20-23…
  

Nvidia’s RTX 3060 Ti was one of the best graphics cards of its generation. Not necessarily the fastest, but it delivered excellent bang for buck at its original price. Not so much in the pandemic/chip shortage years, and now that prices for competing and faster AMD Radeon GPUs have started sliding it’s not a drop-in upgrade GPU we’d recommend. But in a full gaming PC for less than a grand? Yeah, we’ll bite.

We’ve covered this Yeyjian Katana X10 gaming PC late last year, when its price was around the $1,100 mark. Back then that was a decent price, now it’s well below the $1,000 price point it’s even better. 

Stating the bleedin’ obvious, that’s what I do, but an RTX 3060 Ti gaming PC for $949 at Newegg is pretty good.

There’s no artifice to this machine, it’s just …

Skytech’s prebuilt gaming PCs often hit us right where we like them to: in the easy-on-the-wallet market segment for mainstream PC gamers. None of this “spend an extra $500 for more RGB” nonsense. Just solid value budget and mid-range builds.

This RTX 4070 Super Skytech Shadow gaming PC is one such build. It’s currently $1,350 on Newegg, that’s $550 (28%) off. And make no mistake, this machine’s RTX 4070 Super is definitely its primary selling point for this price. 

The RTX 4070 was already a decent graphics card for 1440p and even some 4K gaming, but the RTX 4070 Super solidified its place in the midrange to high-end GPU market. This graphics card had the biggest boost to its CUDA core count out of all the Super cards that launched this year, up from 5,888 to 7,168.&nb…

Andrzej Sapkowski’s got a new Witcher book on the way, which means he’s out and about being his usual scorchingly, wonderfully honest self on the interview circuit. Most recently, he’s been at Vienna Comic Con, where he chatted with Austrian gaming website Cerealkillerz about writing (don’t do it), videogames (he doesn’t play them), and the Netflix Witcher TV series (they didn’t listen to him).

“Maybe I gave them some ideas,” Sapkowski said when asked if he ever gave Netflix feedback on the show, “but they never listened to me.” Emitting what I can only describe as a kind of cackle, Sapkowski repeated “they never listen,” before giving an impression of a Netflix exec irritatedly asking “Who’s this? It’s a writer, it’s nobody,” and dismissing Sapkowski with an airy wave of the hand…