I’ve never seen an episode of Peaky Blinders, the Netflix series about a gang of Birmingham criminals set at the tail end of World War I. Hell, until I looked it up just now I assumed the name was some obscure rhyming slang, but it turns out they were named for their fashionable peaked flat caps. To get to the point, three years ago Peaky Blinders was turned into a top-down heist puzzle game in the vein of Commandos or Shadow Tactics called Peaky Tactics: Mastermind and now you can get it for free.
That’s surprising, because Peaky Blinders: Mastermind was delisted from Steam on December 30 of last year, presumably because the license expired. It’s still not available to buy on PC, though it is also one of the current free games you get with an Amazon Prime subscription as well as being given away by Fanatical. Maybe it’s about to be relisted? The Xbox One version seems to be available to buy again, though the Steam page notes only that it’s “no longer available”.
At any …
One of the glorious things about being a PC owner is the fact that the only limits to what you do with your gaming machine are your imagination and size of your bank balance. Some may desire to turn the simple box into an explosion of light and colour, whereas others may hark for something more refined and understated. One Reddit user is very much in the latter camp and decided to create a wooden tribute to the king of brown, Noctua.
I spotted this Reddit post a couple of days ago and it generated some mixed feelings amongst the team. A user going by the name moto_zima had put together a gaming PC, using a heavily modified Hyte Y60 case. That chassis is normally favoured by fans of RGB lighting, thanks to the way its glass panels ‘wrap’ around the front and side. We’ve described it as a “techy terrarium.”
However, this particular build also involved a lot of Noctua fans in their traditional colour scheme of beige and brown. Even the graphics card matches the the…
Apollo 11 touched down on the moon’s surface on July 20, 1969, an achievement for all humankind that put a full stop on the first iteration of the space race. Neil Armstrong stepped into history as the globe watched and among the millions in awe was 17 year-old schoolboy Jim Storer.
Based in Massachusetts and with a considerable grounding in mathematics, thanks partly to his physicist father, Storer was inspired by the very concept of a moon landing: the precise calculations and control required to safely bring a huge chunk of aluminium to rest on a barren, unfamiliar surface. Storer’s school had a PDP-8, the first commercially successful minicomputer, and the young man set about writing a new program called “Lunar Landing Game”.
Text-based and written in the early programming language FOCAL, Lunar Landing Game would ask the player for instructions on each turn, with the height, velocity, and remaining fuel of the lander calculated over each in-game second o…
By the end of my 50-hour Hogwarts Legacy playthrough, I’d had my fill of solving Merlin Trials and exploding poachers, but one thing I never got tired of was hopping onto my broom and going for a ride. It’s rare to get a sandbox game that lets us so quickly carve off in any direction with no obstacles. It’s an inspiring dose of freedom, which is probably why a dedicated Elden Ring modding team has been quick to bring some of Hogwarts Legacy’s magic to the Lands Between.
The modding team, known as Garden of Eyes, released its Hogwarts Legacy-themed mod pack last week for Patreon supporters (as spotted by Kotaku). The current iteration of the mod is packing seven spells straight out of the game (including a few unforgivable curses), a dopey-looking Harry Potter skin, an Elder Wand weapon, and of course, flying broomsticks.
Judging by the showcase video above, the brooms really work as advertised. It looks like you summon and control the broom like you would usually control…
✅ 14-inch
✅ 16:10 aspect ratio
✅ OLED
✅ 120 Hz
✅ Ada GPU
✅ Zen 4 CPU
✅ 16GB LPDDR5X RAM
✅ 1TB NVMe SSD
That’s a lot of my boxes ticked right there. This is an excellent gaming laptop, with a seriously impressive spec for the money—this Legion Slim 5 OLED is on sale at Best Buy for just $1,000 right now. To be clear, the primary reason why this would be my pick of any gaming laptop deal I’ve seen today is because of its size. The 14-inch form factor is absolutely my go-to size for any mobile machine I would consider buying.
Sure, a 16-inch notebook will give you a load of screen real estate and have the necessary chassis girth to deliver a healthy amount of cooling for your high-performance components, but a 14-inch gaming laptop is the perfect mix of power and genuine portability.
That’s stick-in-the-bag-on-your-way-out-the-door scale, and not something you’re going to…
Itch.io has put together a new bundle of more than 250 games to raise funds in support of Medical Aid for Palestinians, a UK-based charity founded in 1982 that “works in partnership with Palestinian communities to uphold their rights to health and dignity.”
“MAP’s vision is a future where all Palestinians can access an effective, sustainable and locally-led system of healthcare, and the full realisation of their rights to health and dignity,” the MAP website says.
“Through our programmes in the West Bank, Gaza, East Jerusalem, and Lebanon, we work with trusted and experienced local partners to achieve this vision. Our programmes, designed and delivered by Palestinians, provide access to essential health services and build local knowledge and skills to address Palestinian health problems. In times of humanitarian emergency, we are ready to respond rapidly with aid and assistance.”
As with most Itch.io bundles, the Games for Gaze bundle is very indie, which …
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Multiplayer survival game Rust continues to get bigger and deadlier with each passing patch. This month’s update, called Road Renegades, adds new vehicles like motorbikes and bicycles, a traveling vendor in an armored truck, and…
Oh, no. Oh, no no no. The update also adds handcuffs.
Rust players can take each other prisoner now. Excuse me, sorry, I’m just going to have a vivid and traumatic flashback to playing DayZ in 2014.
There I was, having just spawned on the beach with barely enough time to even look around, when three heavily geared players suddenly showed up and surrounded me. Spawn camping was nothing new in DayZ, and I didn’t particularly care if they just shot me because I could respawn without losing anything, but they had more than that in mind. They told me to put my hands up, then had me kneel down. They handcuffed me—neither the first or last time that would happen to me in DayZ—and then one of them used…
Just in case your massive backlog of games isn’t quite massive enough, Steam’s 2024 Lunar New Year Sale is here to help you bulk it up a little bit more.
You might recall that in 2022, Valve announced that it was replacing its annual Lunar New Year Sale with a Spring Sale, giving it a big annual sale for each of the four seasons. But then in 2023 it surprised us all with a Chinese New Year Sale, and now it’s 2024 and—surprise again!—the Lunar New Year event is back in business.
As always, the Steam Lunar New Year Sale features discounts on a range of games, with a focus on studios based in China—in fact, it’s “hosted by Steam China,” according to the sale banner, that being the limited version of Steam that’s legally available to people living in mainland China.
It’s not the biggest of the multitudinous parade of Steam sales that passes our way each year, but here are a few games I think look interesting (and are well-rated by users):
- <…