Upgrade your rig with a massive 420mm AiO for just £79

420mm AiOs are quite rare – not many cases come with space for three 140mm fans in a row – but they’re the biggest size of consumer radiators currently available and offer unmatched cooling potential. Therefore, it may be of interest to you to learn that the Arctic Liquid Freezer II 420 is down to just £79 at Amazon UK, a crazy-low price for a cooler of this size and prowess.

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Riot Games to fire “around 530” people and shut down Riot Forge label in push for “sustainability”

Riot Games have announced that they will shortly fire “about 530” people, or 11 per cent of their global workforce, so as to “create focus and move us towards a more sustainable future”, in the words of CEO Dylan Jadeja. The “biggest impact” will be felt outside of core development, though they’ll affect at least one major internal team – the developers of Legends Of Runeterra. Riot are also binning off the Riot Forge publishing label, under which third-party developers create smaller-scale games based on Riot’s own intellectual properties.

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Stop making “gamer-themed” scented candles and just admit you like nice smells, you nerds

Readers with keen memories may remember that I recently self-described as being in my scented candle girlie era. I’m currently burning one called Starry Night, which is a nice fresh scent but it’s nowhere near as strong as I would like. I can never find fresh scents that are as long-lingering as the fruity or woody ones. Anyway, I have been discussing my new interest (and interrupting work meetings with pretend candle unboxing videos where I tell them to like and subscribe and check out my collab with WickManiac) with the rest of the Treehouse, which prompted us to talk about the idea of gamer candles. They exist! They’re just candles of lies.

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Palworld update fixes blackscreen and controller bugs, but multiplayer issues persist on Game Pass

A new update for the PC Game Pass and Xbox versions of Palworld has fixed some of its many, many known issues today, but those hoping for some fixes to its online multiplayer options will sadly have to wait a little longer. Currently, those playing on Game Pass still don’t have the ability to join or create dedicated servers for up to 32-player multiplayer like their mates on Steam can. Instead, they remain limited to just 2-4-player co-op via the use of friend codes, meaning that Game Pass players aren’t having quite the same experience as their Steam counterparts.

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Games only need fast travel when they make travel “boring”, says Dragon’s Dogma 2 director

Ahhh, fast travel: the opinion generator. Speaking to IGN, Dragon’s Dogma 2 director Hideaki Itsuno threw his own hat into the ring, saying that he’s keen to avoid fast travel in DD2 and would prefer that “players travel normally and experience the world around them”. If you’re someone who argues all games should let you teleport to the objective, then Itsuno thinks you’re wrong. Hey, he doesn’t mess about, and I don’t disagree with him, as long as the game isn’t actually wasting my time.

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Tekken 8 review: the difference is slight but we still like the fight

When I am faced with Death, and that grim skeletal mouth asks me to choose the game we play to decide my fate, I have long believed I will pick Tekken. I’m not confident I will best the reaper in Iron Fist combat. But I cannot pass up the adrenally depraved possibility of successfully performing a ten-button airborne combo on mortality made manifest. It would be rad. It would be absurd and beautiful and I know, for a fact, that Death will play as Panda.

But will we play Tekken 8? Or roll back to Tekken 7? Hmmm. Let’s find out.

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More Avowed details: it’s a classless RPG with easy respeccing and “open zones” comparable to Outer Worlds

Obsidian’s Avowed is a game for the more indecisive or changeable RPG player, with no “enforced” classes and an emphasis on easily respeccing and experimenting with different combinations of weapons and abilities. Or at least, that’s my overall takeaway from a new Xbox podcast interview featuring game director Carrie Patel and gameplay director Gabe Paramo. In the video, the pair delve a little deeper into last week’s Xbox Developer Direct showcase and how the game compares to their previous Pillars of Eternity games, which are set in the same world.

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Nvidia’s cross-game modding tools RTX Remix now in open beta

The Nvidia tools used to create that raytraced Portal mod and other fanciness are now in open beta, inviting all and sundry to jazz up everything from Deus Ex to Garry’s Mod. Nvidia’s RTX Remix tech lets people fancify old games by injecting fancy modern lighting, new models, textures ‘remastered’ by AI, new environmental decoration, and other such fanciness, even if the game doesn’t have mod support. I’ll be curious to see what people make with this, though I am wary of artlessly pumping new tech into old games.

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Does Palworld break Pokémon’s copyright? We asked a lawyer

Pocketpair’s monster-collecting survival game Palworld has rekindled the eternal debate over what exactly constitutes a breach of copyright. While the game’s mechanics are more reminiscent of Ark: Survival Evolved and other tree-punching, template-arranging wilderness sims, its monsters owe obvious debts to Nintendo and Game Freaks’ Pokémon games.

The developers have something of a track record on this front, with their older early access release Craftopia freely stirring in nods to The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. But what separates copyright infringement from a flagrant, but perfectly legal rip-off? Given that a lot of people are making the case for Palworld being copyright theft online, I thought it might be useful to seek insight from (ominous roll of thunder) an actual lawyer.

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