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Mondays are for hoping your new graphics card arrives, seen as your old one got burgled last week. I'm fine! It's fine! Burglar: caught. Videogames: written about. Here's the best writing from the last week.

For UpperCut, Grace Curtis spoiled Life Sim games forever. She's managed to describe the listlessness that crept into my Stardew Valley farm so eloquently that the prospect of ever booting up something similar now fills me with dread. Thanks, Curtis.

Sherlock Holmes. DC/PC. The Cocaine Think Boy. The Big Hat. Whatever you call him, Arthur Conan-Doyle's detective's detective is iconic to this day, inspiring loads of adaptations and remakes and modern updates. Games, as well, are just as susceptible to Holmes' allure. Since the 2000s, developers Frogwares have been putting out an enduringly popular series of Sherlock sleuth'em ups that are getting pretty bloody close to perfecting the gamification of detection.

They recently announced their next step in that endeavour: Sherlock Holmes Chapter One, a new game in the series due in 2021, and serving as a prequel to the rest. Set when Sherlock is 21-ish and exploring a Mediterranean island from his childhood, Chapter One will see tweaks to combat, detecting, and the addition of a more open world format. As a fan of the series and detectives in general, I was intrigued. And like any good gumshoe, I had questions. Frogwares? They had answers. Which Sergey Oganesyan, Producer and Comms Manager, gave me. He was actually very accommodating and shared loads of details, so it wasn't too intense an interrogation.

As bearded strategy game Dwarfheim drills down into its development strata, they’ve sent up some ore to be refined into shiny news. I've been digging around in the bucket for riches and found a nice chunk. The biggest nugget revealed that you will be able to invite friends to play multiplayer with you even if they don’t own the game.

It's been over two weeks since Kojima's mad courier sim sub真正免费的加速器 came out on PC, but during that time I've only just about managed to make it across Lake Knot to the game's second big area.

It didn't help that, once I'd arrived at the big port town and finished showering its first boss monster with a torrent of poop grenades, I decided to go all the way back across its first bit of map to finish up some extra delivery quests. But a big part of why it's taken me so long to get to the other side of Lake Knot is that I can't stop taking pictures with Death Stranding's excellent photo mode.

The 2012 browser game now has a Steam presence in Frog Fractions: Game Of The Decade Edition. It is, I suppose, an arcade game with an educational element - or perhaps more accurately a spoof of games with an educational element. You play as a wee frog who perches on a lilypad, defending your pond from waves of incoming flying insects by lashing out with your tongue.

The main gimmick is the scoring system, which eschews integers, and instead grants points in fractions, decimals, and indices - although it should be noted that you don't have to understand fractions to play the game, and it will not teach you to understand them either. And nothing else ever happens.

A team? Abilities? Economy? Pfft, get rid of it. Valorant's second Act is dropping this week, bringing with it a brand new free-for-all deathmatch game mode in which you'll have to rely on your shooting prowess alone to guide you to Victory. It's coming to Riot Game's guns n' wizards FPS on Wednesday 5th August. The day before that, however, Valorant Act 2 launches, with a new battle pass and some funky cosmetics for you to buy and unlock.

Blightbound is a three-player 2D action RPG about... well it has a plot, but come on. It's about tearing up some monsters and taking their stuff. And it does that pretty well.

The world is blighted by the dying gasp of an apocalyptic monster, and you set out as part of a team of three to fix it by stabbing everything. Rather than a linear campaign, you run at dungeons in a 2.5D style, exploring each small network of interconnected screens and treasure rooms. As you gather resources and rescue NPCs, your base camp will be upgraded with more features, letting you buy and sell weapons, order custom gear, recruit new characters, and unlock new areas. It's all very typical, on the face of it, but there's enough charm coursing through its veins to help it punch above its weight.

First up, I’m going to incept the Halo theme song into your brain: Oohwawawawahwahwawha...

There, that should do it. Now we have the scene properly set, I’m excited to tell you that the Halo: The Master Chief Collection isn’t going to settle on just bringing the Halo series back to the PC. There are plans afoot that will let Xbox One and PC gamers fight together in multiplayer. Everything is connected, people.

Dell's big summer sale may be over, but this weekend saw the start of yet another season of discounts on loads of Alienware and Inspiron gaming laptops and monitors in the UK and US. The UK sale isn't quite as good as it was before, admittedly, but there are still decent savings of around £170 to be had on Dell's range of Inspiron gaming laptops, as well as up to £200 of their Alienware monitor line-up, the best of which I've highlighted below.

Over in the US, meanwhile, there are buckets worth of deals to be had, particularly if you've been eyeing up one of their Alienware m15 or Inspiron G7 15 laptops, which have had between $750 and $1300 shaved off them. So read on for the best UK and US Dell deals you can buy right now.

I wrote about AI Dungeon 2 when it came out last year, but I really should have been keeping up with it. It's essentially a messy yet occasionally flabbergasting chat bot that spins up text adventure games, improvised from your prompts and the stupid-big amount of data it's been trained on. Developers Latitude have updated it loads since I posted about it in December, adding multiplayer and jazzing up its memory.

You can also customise it, so its prompts are all geared around a certain concept and you get more consistency. Creator Nick Walton just released one about giving an AI therapy and it's a little bit surreal.

Feudal fighting simulator Mount & Blade 2: Bannerlord has added a gold tier update that I’m going to immediately abuse. No longer will I need to celebrate a victory by grabbing my cat and hoisting her aloft. Instead, there are new in-game emotes that I can deploy after reducing my foe to a pile of corpses.

There are other additions, including Epic Games Store and Steam party play and an in-game clan creation system. Let’s take a look.

The Logitech G915 Lightspeed Wireless is one of my all-time favourite gaming keyboards, and today Amazon UK have knocked £50 off its usual price of £210 to take it to down its lowest-ever price of £159. Having been out of stock for weeks, this is a deal well worth snapping up if you're on the hunt for the best wireless keyboard around.

So here's how the Predictive Text Game works. Got your phone ready? Good. Type one of the below starting phrases into your phone (I type it into my note-taking app rather than in a message, in case I accidentally send a friend or family member an extremely confusing text). Then, just tap the central predictive text option until you end up with a sentence.

You can choose when to end the sentence, but otherwise you should be completely hands-off. No cheating, or you miss the point of this wonderful and insightful game. You can learn an awful lot about yourself from your phone's predictive text. Don't believe me? Here's what my phone came up with:

Screenshot Saturday Sundays! It's been an absolutely roasting weekend, folks, so let's chill out in the shade and crack open a refreshing can of work-in-progress screenshots, videos and ice-cold gifs. This week: cross-dimensional translation, precarious hangouts, neon zombie raves and (not quite) pong.

Warframe's gone and infested an entire moon with creepy crawlies for its Heart Of Deimos expansion. Shown properly for the first time during today's Waframe fan event livestream, the expansion also includes other cool stuff, like customisable Warframe powers and a huge new open world area. But I'm more interested in the pair of gigantic worms endlessly warring to take control of the moon. At least, that's what I think they're doing. Guess we'll find out when the expansion releases on August 25th.

Every so often, Dutch indie boyband Sokpop find themselves making an MMO. This time, however, they're courting this boutique videogame website by nicking two-thirds of our name. Released earlier this week, Rock Paper Sock is a deconstruction of Old School Runescape that ditches sword and sorcery for three simple weapons - a rock, a sheet of paper, and a handy pair of scissors.

From weary old gorillas to graphical japes, we've all had our fun with Halo Infinite over the last few weeks. But haud on, we've still got the rest of Halo: The Master Chief Collection to get through before finishing that particular fight. This month, 343 will begin closed insider flighting for Halo 3: ODST, Master Chief's moody, jazz-noir cousin that's secretly the best of the bunch.

Fresh off the heels of Tom Clancy goes anime, Ubisoft have announced yet another collaboration with their new pals at Netflix. This time, it's a feature-length adaptation of Beyond Good And Evil from Detective Pikachu director Rob Letterman - and with the long-dormant game sequel still no closer to release, there's a good chance this film may even hit screens first.

Halo: Infinite's campaign might be torn between nostalgic throwback and open-world reinvention, but we've still got no ruddy clue what's going on with the series' multiplayer come November. Well, whatever form it takes, there is one thing for certain - jumping around with your Spartan-II pals won't cost a penny. Following quiet rumblings earlier this week, 343 Industries have confirmed that yes, Halo's multiplayer murderings are going free-to-play.

As I write this it is very, very hot, and I am not dealing with this fact very well. I'm not entirely sure that it is the weekend, actually, because apparently it is now August? I'm sorry, there must be some mistake. It has been March for about ten years now.

Luckily, because time is standing still, we have a lot of time to play all the video games our tiny hearts desire! We have a goodly spread of titles this week, with more than a few being drawn to diddy survival game Grounded. Ants. So hot right now. Like me.

As promised, BioWare are starting to publish updates as they rethink their not-so-well-received online sci-fi shooter Anthem. Today's update specifically talks about their goals for the loot system, which they want to be more reliable and respect a player's time. It doesn't sound like anything is set in stone yet, so this will definitely be a lengthy journey for Anthem as they previously estimated.

Are we ready to fully accept Pokemon-like as a genre now? If so, this one probably takes the crown. Because it's actually called—yeah you get it. For real though, Monster Crown does definitely have the most classic Pokemon vibes of the bunch compared with other recent critter catchers like Temtem or Ooblets. Just like those other two, Monster Crown is starting out in early access as of today.

Red Dead Redemption 2 Online just got a new update earlier this week adding the Naturalist role, but that certainly won't stop folks from digging up secrets planned for future updates. My instinct is to holler "stop peeking at your presents and enjoy the update you just got!" but I'll admit I'm very partial to in-game Halloween events so even I'm distracted by these rumoured leaks. 

In any situation where you can choose to have animals on your team you should definitely pick bears, which is part of what looks lovely about turn-based deck-building game Banners Of Ruin. You assemble a team of six grim-faced animal warriors, presumably meaning that I could pick six bears if I were so inclined—and oh am I ever inclined. Banners Of Ruin is now out in early access, so you can pick your own squad of furry fighters. Obviously I recommend the bears.

A lot of people, quite reasonably, didn't pay much attention to April Fool's Day this year. I certainly didn't, so I only vaguely noticed Mojang announcing a Minecraft update that would give the game infinite, Enter-The-Spiderverse-Style dimensions to explore. It was cute, I figured, but not really the most convincing fake announcement. Alas, though, it turns out I was the April Fool all along: not only was the promised update completely real, but you can still play it, and it's utterly astonishing.

Well look at that, your favorite 90s action amphibians finally have a release date for their return to headliner status, after that 2018 teaser and a couple cameos (in games including Obsidian's recent effort Grounded). Your resident Battletoads Zitz, Rash and Pimple are back at last, whackin' up baddies to their own tune on August 20th.

The Sims 4 seems to be pivoting toward content that is, firstly, tailored specifically to my interests, and, secondly, designed to allow the creation of strange and reclusive weirdos. Whilst EA's attempt at a new reality show about playing The Sims rumbles on in the background, and after the Eco Lifestyle expansion pushed me towards creating a stinky, trash-gobbling Oscar the Grouch, here comes new Stuff Pack Nifty Knitting.

Stuff Packs are sort of mini-expansions, and Nifty Knitting is all about, well, knitting. Somehow - whether by bugs that are not yet smoothed out, or by design - the Nifty Knitting Stuff Pack has perfectly recreated the slide from "oh, knitting is kind of cool", into the creation of wool mailbox covers and jumpers that have scarves built in. I played for a few hours, and in that space of time my Sim evolved naturally into a hunched yarn hermit, rocking incessantly on her new chair and eschewing everything in favour of more knitting. Including food, sleep and conversation. It is the closest The Sims has yet come to allowing me to create myself. And it is too real.

There's a sneaky-sounding new faction joining the fray in Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare and Warzone next week, and they're bringing some new weapons and operators with them. They're called Shadow Company, which is a name you may recognise if you're familiar with Modern Warfare 2. I'm not really sure what the lore implications of that are, but hey, even if there aren't any, they're at least bringing along three new characters for you to play when Season 5 launches on August 5th next week.

Imagine you're having a scuffle in Blizzard's funky little FPS, sub免费网络加速器官网. Most of the enemy team is here, except one of their tanks is definitely missing. That's when you see it - a drop pod hurtling down from the sky. It crushes your teammates upon landing, before the gentle giant mech Orisa emerges from it. According to the Overwatch devs in a recent Q&A, this is what Orisa's ultimate could've looked like in early development.

sub免费网络加速器官网 is a turn-based tactical RPG with a 'modernised retro' vibe.

You play as Peony, a magician who's looking for her mother and perhaps inevitably ends up having to save the world. It has a pretty art style, some promising ideas, and lots of lovely spell and attack effects. It's out later today, and there's a trailer too.