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4K 144Hz gaming monitors continue to drop in price, with the very cheapest being this incredible MSI MAG274UPF at Best Buy in the US. It costs just $360 right now after a $90 discount, an extremely low price given the high-spec monitor that you get in return.

Meanwhile, in the UK the MSI is also the cheapest 4K 144Hz option from a mainstream brand (though AWD-IT's X= XRGB27UHD is cheaper at £350), so I've linked that below as well at a price point of £399 (was £549).

AMD's Ryzen 7 7800X3D is a phenomenal gaming CPU thanks to its Zen 4 architecture and added 3D V-Cache which boosts gaming performance far beyond standard Ryzen 7000 processors. That performance - and extremely modest power draw and a reasonable price - has caused the 7800X3D to become the best selling CPU by a huge margin according to a German PC part retailer.

Anyway, the Ryzen 7 7800X3D continues to drop in price. Recently we reported on a reduction in the UK, and now it's time for the US to get a turn on the deals train with a new asking price of just $339.99 - a full 40% off its US MSRP. That's a great price for a CPU that even comes with the breathtaking Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora.

The reboot of TimeSplitters started life as a “clone” of Fortnite’s battle royale mode before becoming a remake of TimeSplitters 2, according to a former developer at recently shuttered studio Free Radical Design.

Elden Ring expansion Shadow of the Erdtree might see a release date in February - just in time for the game’s second anniversary - if an accidental retailer leak is to be believed.

Activision Blizzard will pay over $50 million to settle a 2021 lawsuit filed by the state of California alleging that the video games giant discriminated against women by offering them lower pay and fewer promotion opportunities.

Video game actor James McCaffrey, whose roles included the iconic voice of Max Payne and Alex Casey in this year’s Alan Wake 2, has passed away.

Multiplayer shooters have become defined in recent years by the methods they use to withhold power from players, whether that’s a hero shooter's unlocks and battle pass or a survival shooter's vast map of scattered goodies. Even before these systems became du jour, however, shooters often required you to be good at them before you unlocked their real pleasures, whether by perfecting your rocket timing in Quake or memorising level layouts in Counter-Strike.

The Finals' real master stroke, I think, is that it has found a design that lets it be generous with power - even while containing an unlock system, a battle pass, and a not insignificant skill floor. Those things aren’t an obstacle between you and the childish joy of smashing the world to bits.

We've reached another day on our Advent Calendar, shipmates! Yo ho ho and a bottle of stealth!

Every weekend, indie devs show off current work on Twitter's #screenshotsaturday tag. And every Monday, I bring you a selection of these snaps and clips. This week is the end of the year for us here at RPS, so this is the last look I'll bring you until the future arrives. In that spirit, please enjoy this bumper Christmas edition to tide you over until we're back. Don't read it in one go under the covers while guzzling chocolate coins, you little scamp.

It's the last week before the Xmas break, and the grapevine runneth dry. Soon, we will commence the annual Engluttification ceremony, a ritual of banishment in which we feed the Maw our entire Steam wishlists while singing an arcane carol of our own devising, Nth Days of Solstice, in which the famous partridge in the pear tree has Twice-Twenty Wings, and on each Wing I saw an Eye, verily, and a Mouth rejoicing for lo, the Great Catch-Up Period has come. But before that, there is still a little more News to cover.

Some games we're keeping under surveillance before we flee the premises: surreal turn-based RPG Entogious (18th Dec), construction-minded endless runner Project Bridge (18th Dec), 90s-style RPG Prophecy of the Shadow (19th Dec).

Time for day seventeen on the 2023 Advent Calendar! What's Christmas without a bit of nostalgia, eh?

Sundays are for almost pulling the trigger on a silent mechanical keyboard you definitely don't need. Let's read some of the week's best writing about games and game-related things.

Stealth tactics 'em up Shadow Gambit: The Cursed Crew is an "all-time treasure", according to Katharine's review, and it has to be given that developers Mimimi announced their closure almost immediately after its release.

This might help extend its life closer towards eternity: as a "very final parting gift", Mimimi have released a modding tool that lets players create their own missions and stories.

The nominees for the public-voted Steam Awards have been announced and they are, perhaps more than ever before, baffling to me. If I was being uncharitable, I'd say that's because the list is overrun by games with large multiplayer communities that can be encouraged to vote for them - but who would want to be uncharitable? Let's instead say that the list is certainly not boring, even if Starfield gets a nod for "most innovative gameplay".

Infamous crowdfunded disaster Godus and its spin-off Godus Wars have both been removed from sale on Steam. A statement from studio 22cans says that "an upcoming technical change to Amazon Web Services" is to blame. Both games had been in Steam Early Access since first launching in 2013 and 2016 respectively, receiving few updates since and mostly or overwhelmingly negative reviews.

We come to the sixteenth door of the advent calendar, but unfortunately it's quite far up above you. You're going to have to climb.

This week most people are once again awake, but Alice0 has taken the day off, which means I needs must once again ask everyone to tell me what they're playing this weekend. I think last week I might have forgotten to update whatever it was I was playing. I can't remember. It's nearly the end of the year, what do you want from me? To do my job? Pah. Anyway, we're playin' some stuff, alright.

In the market for a new SSD and a new controller? Good news, Ebuyer has got you covered with deal that bundles the excellent Sony DualSense PS5 controller with a fast Crucial T500 2TB SSD, complete with heatsink. Bought separately, these would run you £180, but together you can pick them up for just £140.

This deal is marketed as the 'ideal PS5 upgrade kit', but it's actually just as relevant for PC users looking to pick up one of the best gamepads (alongside the Xbox Elite controller also discounted today) and get more game storage at the same time.

Microsoft's phenomenal Elite Series 2 controller is down to £100 after a £60 discount at Amazon UK. That's a great price for, in my opinion, one of the very best gamepads for PC and Xbox - and well worth picking up for the holidays.

If you want just the core controller without its accessory bag (purchaseable separately), you can get the controller for even less - £78!

If you’ve been holding out hope that Baldur’s Gate 3 might find its way onto PC Game Pass in the future, I’ve got some bad news for you: it’s very unlikely to happen.

The upcoming film adaptation of Norman Reedus Walking Simulator - aka Death Stranding - has signed up arthouse darlings A24.

Ubisoft’s open-world multiplayer driving game The Crew will switch off its servers next spring, just shy of the series’ 10th anniversary. The shutdown will leave the car-based MMO impossible to play, with the game pulled from sale ahead of the move.

A number of staff have been laid off at 3D Realms and Slipgate Ironworks - the developers behind Ghostrunner, Shadow Warrior, Duke Nukem and more - as the game industry devastation wrought by Embracer’s restructuring efforts continues.

I don't look for Christmas games. Partly because they're basically all terrible, and partly because of how tiresome it is when everything is saturated with the same theme wherever you look. But Ebenezer And The Invisible World is about helping Scrooge run around London bashing capitalists and other evil spirits with his cane, and summoning friendly ghosts to prevent Caspar Malthus from genociding the working class. I simply could not find out what the hell was going on there.

Turns out, it's kinda good. But it has too many problems to reach much beyond that.

It's always saddened me that Simogo's brilliant text-based adventure Device 6 has been trapped on iOS-only devices since it first came out... ten years ago? Hell's bells, now I feel old. If you're unfamiliar with it, it's about a girl named Anna who must escape from a mysterious island, but the whole game is presented like you're reading a book - only one that you can click on and prod with your fingers to reveal new puzzles within that text. It's very clever, especially when it occasionally asks you to rotate your device to navigate parts of its game worlds - there's an excellent bit with stairs that I won't spoil, but seriously, if you haven't played Device 6 and you own an iOS device, go and download it now.

Once you've done that, you should also have a look this year's Delete After Reading, which does a very good impression of it for us folks on PC, hiding smart, tactile text puzzles inside its interactive spy thriller.

Naughty Dog have officially stopped development of The Last Of Us Online, a multiplayer game based on their celebrated McCarthyite (no, not that McCarthy - I mean the novelist) post-apocalyptic action-adventure. Announced in the dusty days of 2018 as a multiplayer mode for The Last Of Us: Part 2, it evolved into a standalone experience with new characters and a new setting, but Sony reportedly scaled the project back earlier this year. Naughty Dog have now formally called it quits, stating that supporting a live service project such as this would have “severely impacted” future single-player game projects. Sony never locked down platforms for The Last Of Us Online, but a PC release was surely on the cards, though I would have expected the game to launch first on PlayStation, as with the original Last Of Us and Uncharted 4.

To celebrate Doom's 30th birthday we had a discussion about the (understandably) vaunted FPS's influence, and what games would look like without it. It seems particularly interesting today in light of the recent resurgence of Doom-style shooters, often known as "boomer shooters" because of their deliberately retro style and singular focus on shootin' stuff and bein' cool, much like Doom. And then the obvious solution was to just ask the devs making these games about what they think of Doom and its impact on their work.

I reached out to developers who've worked on Turbo Overkill, Prodeus, Forgive Me Father (and Forgive Me Father 2) and almost the whole stable working at New Blood Interactive to ask them some annoyingly specific questions about Doom in the hope of getting the sort of idiosyncratic answers you get from interesting devs - and they delivered! In fact, they delivered in such quantity and quality that I've elected to just present their answers to you, rather than try to weave them together as if we were all sitting together at dinner exchanging bon mots, both for clarity and to include as much as possible in their own words. It's a fascinating and entertaining collection of thoughts.

Brought to you by the decadent intellects behind Incredibly Fast-Paced And Very Rogue Movement Shooters, Completely Fictional Story About A City Inside A Whale is a gentle, comedic exploration game in which you steer a wind-up boat through the guts of a leviathan. It was announced this week and there's a demo on Steam, which I think will tickle the cockles of Psychonauts 2 players and A Short Hike fans alike, though I do wish developers ln404 and akinat0 had taken their own work just a little more seriously.

Gaze down the sights of today's Advent Calendar window and you'll find time is a tricksy, malleable concept that's all slow-motion power slides and extraordinary grenade explosions. Just mind the gibs on the floor there. Wouldn't want to stain your boots.

There are as many Doom mods as there are stars in the sky: jillions of accursed celestial bodies orbiting the supermassive black hole that is id Software, each infested with its own local flavours of cacodemons and keycards and shotguns. I've played just a handful - certainly, far from enough to pronounce myself any kind of expert - but I do feel like I've played one of the best in the shape of Siren, a Doom II total conversion from Dithered Output, the first episode of which can be downloaded free from Itch.io.

The mod's overall vibe is encapsulated, I think, by the sentient vending machine you meet a short way in, just round the corner from a rec room that contains a disembodied head on tentacles, and down the corridor from a tiered canteen full of ghouls and unsympathetic men with shotguns. You ask the machine if it has any clue what's going on. It tells you that its job is to keep its mouth shut and dispense soda. Can I have a soda, then? "No."