Category: Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Intel CPUs have disappointed twice this year, first with the why-even-bother Raptor Lake Refresh generation and now with a notable lack of decent Black Friday deals. There’s a small handful of 13th-gen chips at good prices, but nothing on par with the AMD Ryzen 7 5800X or Ryzen 7800X3D that Will highlighted earlier this week.

I have, however, spotted a surprise £20 discount on the Intel Core i7-14700K, which just happens to be the only CPU in the new 14th-gen lineup that actually is worth buying. And so, just as it carried the Raptor Lake Refresh launch, so too must it redeem Intel’s Black Friday showing.

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I was just pondering writing something about Subnautica, inspired by news that there’s a new Subnautica project on the boil, and along comes the decidedly Subnautica-esque Honeycomb: The World Beyond with a new trailer. Developed by Polish team Frozen Way, whose other projects include, erm, Hairdresser Simulator, it casts you as Hennessy, a human xenobiologist who is starting afresh on the alien planet of Sota7.

As in Unknown Worlds’ survival sim, you’ll search various biomes for resources, build solar-powered habitats on stilts with nice, wide windows, and gradually amass a database of local animals and plants. Unlike in Subnautica, you won’t be constantly at risk of suffocation.

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I know this is the second Crucial P5 Plus deal we’ve posted about in two days, but hey, it’s Black Friday week. ‘Tis the season. Besides, this time there’s something for us Britain-dwelling lot as well, as the 2TB P5 Plus’s price has been slashed 60% to £88 on Amazon UK – the lowest it’s ever been.

This is, to be clear, an almost mystifyingly small amount of money for a 2TB NVMe SSD that’s also capable of real high-end transfer speeds and game load times. Maybe not to the standards of its successor, the Crucial T500, but this is still a competitively quick-acting drive with oodles of space for game installations. The same goes for its heatsink-equipped edition, which also happens to be on sale in the US at $88, making it (currently) cheaper than the non-heatsink 2TB model. Good deals all round, then – told you ‘twas the season.

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Made by solo dev Andy Brophy, Knuckle Sandwich is a turn-based RPG that’s about guiding a bloke through an island paradise and eventually uncovering some weird mystery. Its main hook? Turn-based battles are filled with WarioWare-style minigames, many of which are unique to the kooky residents or rats you come up against. Unfortunately, I’d say its main hook is actually its most painful barb, and one you’re barely able to extract by flicking some switches in the settings menu. A shame then, as exploring its strange world and absorbing its bonkers story beats is a wonderful thing marred by dire fights.

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Let’s get this out of the way first: KnifePlayground: Horror Battle Royale is an absolutely terrible name for game. You might as well call Halo “GunMap: Alien Crowd Control”, or Baldur’s Gate 3 “TownDungeon: Party Enhancement Simulator”. But the project beneath the moniker has something to it. Announced just today and created by small Brazilian team MadMozer, it’s a first-person, multiplayer-focussed, Unreal Engine deathgame that traps you in a randomly generated mansion with a bunch of archetypal horror movie munsters – demon clowns, cursed puppets, toothy ghouls and hooded axe-murderers.

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Black Friday week has already yielded some tempting deals on Nvidia’s latest mid-range graphics cards, the RTX 4060 and the RTX 4060 Ti. Up at the top of the GPU pyramid, meanwhile, AMD cards are getting in the act as well. Like, say, this £200-off deal on the MSI Radeon RX 7900 XTX Gaming Trio Classic, bringing it down to £900. Still a lot of money, sure, but the RX 7900 XTX is the absolute crème de la crème of the current Radeon lineup, with native 4K performance on par with that of Nvidia’s RTX 4080.

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Here’s a quick one: you probably need this USB-C to USB-A cable. Everyone needs a good-quality USB-C cable, right? Whether you’re charging off a power bank, topping up your VR controllers, connecting a phone to your laptop or hooking up your TV to a USB drive full of legally obtained video downloads, having a reliable cable that can do it all is incredibly handy. This one from Monoprice doesn’t cost a lot either, as it has been discounted from $10 to just $3 for Black Friday.

It’s a fast option too, sporting 10Gbps data transfers and rapid charging at up to three amps. In fact, it hits the USB 3.1 Gen 2 standard (what a great naming scheme) and it’s a simple, pocketable one metre or 3.3 feet long.

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Wireless headsets are great, but there’s always the risk that you forget to charge them. Imagine sitting down for an evening of gaming with your pals, wrapping the earphones over your skull, and instead of hearing the roar of battle in Call of Duty or the pleasant ambience of Minecraft, you’re left to contend in silence with your own terrifying thoughts. “Fool,” they hiss like the many-headed hydra in the dead earphones of your chargeless headset. “If you’d picked up the HyperX Cloud Alpha Wireless in this year’s Black Friday sale, then with its astonishing battery-life, none of this would be a problem!”

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Steam has introduced a new way to spot which PC games support PlayStation’s DualShock and DualSense controllers, as well as being able to search by specific controllers.

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Modern PC gaming is a constant battle for drive space, what with having to store huge games like Call of Duty: Warzone and similarly massive videos like my fail compilations in Call of Duty: Warzone. Hence, I’m always on the lookout for discounts on storage, and when it comes to reliable SSDs, you’ll struggle to find a better balance of quality and price than WD’s Blue SN570. That goes double when the best NVMe SSD for gaming is on sale, and right now you can get substantial savings on the 1TB SN570 this Black Friday.

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