Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Bandai Namco have slapped a release date on Ilca Inc's Sand Land, which isn't a dodgy themepark created by an over-ambitious building supplies firm, but an action RPG adaptation of the same-named manga by Akira Toriyama, in which a titchy demon searches for the Legendary Spring and goes to war with a king who is hogging all the water.

It's out 26th April 2024, and alternates beat 'em up action with cartoon tank customisation, in a sort of Dragon Ball X Mad Max homage with chunks of Dragon Quest thrown in for good measure.

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Core Engage and Daedalic Entertainment have released a new overview trailer for New Cycle, their post-apocalyptic "dieselpunk" city management game. "New Cycle" is obviously a bit of a self-contradiction, and I suspect that's deliberate - one of the questions the video leaves you with is whether there is "a future beyond survival", or whether we are doomed to just repeat the processes of extraction and gradual building-up, resource overexploitation and encroaching disaster suggested by these 12 jam-packed minutes of in-game footage.

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Choosing the lowest storage capacity Steam Deck or other PC gaming handheld then upgrading to a high-capacity SSD is often cheaper than choosing the highest-tier storage option out of the gate, and can even provide better performance too.

If that makes sense to you, we spotted a 10% discount on the WD SN740, a solid PCIe 4.0 option that works well in the Steam Deck and even better in the ROG Ally, Legion Go and MSI Claw gaming handhelds that support faster PCIe 4.0 speeds. After the discount at Scan in the UK, the SN740 is available for £81 for 1TB.

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Lexar's Play Micro SD cards are some of the most affordable 1TB memory cards you can buy, and now you can pick up one for just £67.85 - within £3 of the cheapest price ever recorded for this model, which was during Black Friday last year.

These cards are rated for up to 150MB/s reads and have both UHS Speed Class 3 (3) and App Performance Class 2 (A2) certifications for minimum speeds, making them a decent choice for Steam Deck, ROG Ally and Lenovo Legion Go owners amongst other use cases in phones, cameras and more.

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VVVVVV was part of the initial wave of indie platformers, which means it was released in 2010 and is now a certified classic. To celebrate its 14th birthday, developer Terry Cavanagh has dropped an update which makes it Steam Deck verified and professionally translates it into 21 new languages.

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The Finals has a new patch and though it's not a big one, it's arguably a substantial set of changes. Specifically, update 1.4.1 addresses various issues with aim assist and zoom snapping - features designed to support those who play with a controller whether on PC or console.

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Momodora: Reverie Under The Moonlight has been on my 'to play' list since a friend mentioned it several years ago. It's been a long enough time that a sequel has emerged. Momodora: Moonlit Farewell is out now and like its predecessor is a 2D action platformer about smashing and dodging enemies.

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It took all of one turn before the insults started flying in our Solium Infernum multiplayer preview session this week. Specifically, they'd been launched straight into the court of League Of Geeks co-founder and studio director Trent Kusters, who was attempting to show us how the game's asynchronous multiplayer mode worked in a six-player match-up - the public playtest for which goes live today, Thursday January 11th, over on Steam. Moments earlier, he'd been walking myself, deputy editor Alice Bee and guides editor Ollie through the basics of this strategy game from hell, telling us about the importance of claiming territory, seeking out places of power to bolster our domain, and how to do battle with our hive-like legion units. But just as we were watching our individual turn orders play out, Kusters announced that Ollie had given him the digital equivalent of a demonic slap in the face, demanding he pay tribute to him, or else…

A new Elden Ring update has patched the game's Easy Anti-Cheat to support a recent SteamOS update, as detailed on publisher Bandai Namco's official site. It's good news for people playing the FromSoftware RPG on Steam Decks, especially those haunted by memories of the game's technical tribulations at launch, some of which were caused by the anti-cheat functionality. It's less great news for the millions hankering for the slightest whisper of new information about Elden Ring's Shadow of the Erdtree DLC. But save your pity, above all, for the dozens of videogame news writers - dozens, I tell you! - who must write about Elden Ring's Shadow of the Erdtree DLC at any opportunity, lest the demigods of traffic eat our souls.

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The Independent Games Festival awards - aka: the only awards that are actually worth paying attention to - have announced the finalists for their 2024 cohort, and wouldn't you know it, there are lots of RPS-endorsed games in there, lemme tell ya. Cooking adventure Venba leads the pack with a total of four nominations, but it's closely followed by Cocoon, A Highland Song, Mediterranea Inferno and 1000xResist, all of which have scooped three noms apiece.

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As Prince Of Persia subtitles go, The Lost Crown is certainly an evocative one. It conjures up images of forgotten pasts being rediscovered, of wrongs being righted, and power being restored to its rightful balance. They're all promises that Ubisoft Montpellier capably deliver on over the course of its neatly plotted story, and often in more ways than one. But after flinging its hero warrior Sargon around the monster-filled streets of its Mount Qaf citadel for the better part of 20 hours, I'd also like to proffer the following alternatives: Pit Of A Thousand Spikes; The Eternal Death Wheels Of Spinning Blades; or maybe just simply Traps: The Game. These are perhaps more accurate descriptions of the challenges you'll face in The Lost Crown, as Mount Qaf is not a place you're allowed to tread lightly. Death stalks every corner, but that's precisely what makes this dextrously designed Metroid-like such a thrilling platformer. Put away your prejudices, because this is easily the equal of both Moon Studios' pair of Ori games, Hollow Knight and its Metroid genre namesakes.

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New year, same us! The Electronic Wireless Show podcast returns and kicks off the new year with a look forward at what 2024 may bring. We chat about our most anticipated video games that may or may not be arriving this year, including some racing, some spac(marine)ing and some book selling. Also some freezing and some despairing (at BioWare and Bloodlines 2, potentially). Plus: Nate and James have an anecdote off, which makes me lose my mind and become a horrible person for about four solid minutes. I have apologised, and me and James are still friends.

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I reached the Elden Ring exhaustion point a couple of years ago… and I still don't think I've climbed out of my slump. Yes, I gave the game a Bestest Best badge that I stand by, but I also think it's one of FromSoftware's most taxing soulslike creations. It's so colossal that, by the end of my adventure, I'd had enough of the umpteenth boss. I wanted rid.

With talk of Elden Ring's Shadow Of The Erdtree DLC spinning up as 2024 begins, I've assessed my feelings and come to the conclusion that I'm not as excited as I would've been had the game and its DLC somehow existed a few years ago. To be honest with you, part of me hopes it just ends up being a roguelike. That way I might actually get into it.

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It’s time for another pull on the velvet rope labelled “too many games”. In fairness, this time the argument is a touch more involved than perennial moaning about backlogs – to whit, “there are too many games and it’s all the pandemic’s fault”. Nacon’s head of publishing Benoit Clerc has argued that the Covid lockdown years have bred too much investment in new games, and that we’re currently reaping the results in the form of an unsustainable glut of releases.

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Indiana Jones And The Great Circle appears to be the title of Bethesda and Lucasfilm's new Indiana Jones game created by Wolfenstein developers MachineGames, if a recent brace of domain registrations are any indication.

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I'm pretty sure I've written about this somewhere already - I may have expressed it to a therapist - but when I was a lad, I had a recurring nightmare about a place called Snake World. It was a fizzing neon labyrinth that was both home to various evil snakes and sort of made of snakes in probably-Freudian ways.

Fortunately, I had a lucid dreaming strategy for escaping from Snake World: relax all my limbs as much as I could, then flail around violently to wake myself up. It doesn't look like this will be an effective gambit in Digested, a bodycam horror game about being stuck on a barren, thinly forested and possibly irradiated island with a giant snake. Your tactical options seem to consist mostly here of running away.

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Minecraft Legends, the real-time strategy spin-off from the blocky survival game, is bringing an end to its post-release content additions with one final update later this month. The endcap to Legends comes nine months after its release.

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Minecraft Legends, the real-time strategy spin-off from the blocky survival game, is bringing an end to its post-release content additions with one final update later this month. The endcap to Legends comes nine months after its release.

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Remember Suika Game? The charming puzzler blew up late last year thanks to its engrossing fruit-merging gameplay and colourful theme (and the help of a load of vtubers to boot). While the original was only on Nintendo Switch - although technically even that was a port of a game included on a projector, of all things - plenty of Suika clones quickly emerged to fill its watermelon-shaped hole on PC. The latest Suika-like is stepping things up another level by taking its chill combo-a-thon to a galactic scale with colliding planets and suns.

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Remember Suika Game? The charming puzzler blew up late last year thanks to its engrossing fruit-merging gameplay and colourful theme (and the help of a load of vtubers to boot). While the original was only on Nintendo Switch - although technically even that was a port of a game included on a projector, of all things - plenty of Suika clones quickly emerged to fill its watermelon-shaped hole on PC. The latest Suika-like is stepping things up another level by taking its chill combo-a-thon to a galactic scale with colliding planets and suns.

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Major actors’ union SAG-AFTRA have raised hackles among a number of voice game performers after striking a deal with a company that wants to create AI replicas of actors’ voices for use in games, among other things. While the union claim that their agreement with Replica will allow for a “fair” and “ethical” approach to creating AI voices, it’s clear that a number of actors with credits in games from Baldur’s Gate 3, Mortal Kombat and Starfield to Apex Legends, World of Warcraft and Genshin Impact don’t agree.

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Major actors’ union SAG-AFTRA have raised hackles among a number of voice game performers after striking a deal with a company that wants to create AI replicas of actors’ voices for use in games, among other things. While the union claim that their agreement with Replica will allow for a “fair” and “ethical” approach to creating AI voices, it’s clear that a number of actors with credits in games from Baldur’s Gate 3, Mortal Kombat and Starfield to Apex Legends, World of Warcraft and Genshin Impact don’t agree.

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If you want a gaming monitor that leaves no doubt that you are a very cool gaming person, look no further than this titanic 45-incher from Lenovo, the R45w-30. It's £100 off today, making the price of admission to the really big monitor show just £699. For about twice the price of a good 1440p 165Hz monitor, you get a monitor the size of two 1440p 165Hz monitors - but, critically, with no gap in the middle.

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If you want a gaming monitor that leaves no doubt that you are a very cool gaming person, look no further than this titanic 45-incher from Lenovo, the R45w-30. It's £100 off today, making the price of admission to the really big monitor show just £699. For about twice the price of a good 1440p 165Hz monitor, you get a monitor the size of two 1440p 165Hz monitors - but, critically, with no gap in the middle.

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SSD prices have risen sharply as of late, as the Black Friday and Christmas sale madness has been replaced with more realistic prices and low supplies for many popular models. However, there are still bargains to be had, including this 2TB Lexar NM790 Heatsink model that's down to £87 at Box's Ebay store using the code JANJOY15.

That code stops working after today, so grab a bargain on a top RPS SSD pick while you still can!

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SSD prices have risen sharply as of late, as the Black Friday and Christmas sale madness has been replaced with more realistic prices and low supplies for many popular models. However, there are still bargains to be had, including this 2TB Lexar NM790 Heatsink model that's down to £87 at Box's Ebay store using the code JANJOY15.

That code stops working after today, so grab a bargain on a top RPS SSD pick while you still can!

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Amazon-owned Twitch have announced that they will lay off "just over 500" people - almost 35% of their workforce - in the course of on-going plans to "rightsize our company", with CEO Dan Clancy conceding that the streaming service has been operating based on "where we optimistically expect our business to be in 3 or more years, not where we're at today."

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Amazon-owned Twitch have announced that they will lay off "just over 500" people - almost 35% of their workforce - in the course of on-going plans to "rightsize our company", with CEO Dan Clancy conceding that the streaming service has been operating based on "where we optimistically expect our business to be in 3 or more years, not where we're at today."

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Earlier this week, I shared a Tweet, or X post or whatever, that was a Twitter Film Guy being like, "It's a burden talking to people about my passion, movies, because I think about them on a fundamentally different level". Like, okay, Scorsese, you can say you didn't really like Murder Mystery 2, the normies won't chase you out of town with pitchforks. You know what actually is a burden? Your passions being watching hours of anti-multi-level marketing (MLM) YouTube videos, which is the content hole I fell down over the Christmas break. Your weird uncles have at least seen a film before, but it's not like I can turn to my mum and ask her if she thinks the weird Monat Christians are worse than the Seint make-up TikTok girlies without explaining almost every word in the sentence.

Anyway. My point is: someone should make an MLM simulation game.

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Earlier this week, I shared a Tweet, or X post or whatever, that was a Twitter Film Guy being like, "It's a burden talking to people about my passion, movies, because I think about them on a fundamentally different level". Like, okay, Scorsese, you can say you didn't really like Murder Mystery 2, the normies won't chase you out of town with pitchforks. You know what actually is a burden? Your passions being watching hours of anti-multi-level marketing (MLM) YouTube videos, which is the content hole I fell down over the Christmas break. Your weird uncles have at least seen a film before, but it's not like I can turn to my mum and ask her if she thinks the weird Monat Christians are worse than the Seint make-up TikTok girlies without explaining almost every word in the sentence.

Anyway. My point is: someone should make an MLM simulation game.

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In the festively grim universe of Warhammer 40,000, space is sometimes racked by Warp storms – terrible cyclones of Chaos energy that have a catastrophic effect on imperial communications. One such storm hits the Koronus Expanse during the events of Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader, erasing starcharts and obliging your character - a newly minted Rogue Trader, aka High Gothic Commander Shepard - to re-discover the systems and planets that make up your predecessor Theodora’s dominions, while gathering an entourage of indecently customisable warriors, and hunting down a series of badniks that include a mysterious Chaos cult.

Warp storms sometimes have relativistic consequences. Voidship crews may be stranded for decades in transit: you will meet characters in this vast, brooding RPG who arrived at their destinations to find the battles they were sent to fight already passed into legend, the people they were sent to meet long since dead or departed. Something similar has happened to this review, which was supposed to be published in early December. Did I dramatically underestimate the amount of playtime involved, despite being told months in advance by developers Owlcat that Rogue Trader is well over 100 hours long? Nonsense. It’s all because of those pesky Chaos disruptions, you see. It’s Chaos that’s to blame.

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In the festively grim universe of Warhammer 40,000, space is sometimes racked by Warp storms – terrible cyclones of Chaos energy that have a catastrophic effect on imperial communications. One such storm hits the Koronus Expanse during the events of Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader, erasing starcharts and obliging your character - a newly minted Rogue Trader, aka High Gothic Commander Shepard - to re-discover the systems and planets that make up your predecessor Theodora’s dominions, while gathering an entourage of indecently customisable warriors, and hunting down a series of badniks that include a mysterious Chaos cult.

Warp storms sometimes have relativistic consequences. Voidship crews may be stranded for decades in transit: you will meet characters in this vast, brooding RPG who arrived at their destinations to find the battles they were sent to fight already passed into legend, the people they were sent to meet long since dead or departed. Something similar has happened to this review, which was supposed to be published in early December. Did I dramatically underestimate the amount of playtime involved, despite being told months in advance by developers Owlcat that Rogue Trader is well over 100 hours long? Nonsense. It’s all because of those pesky Chaos disruptions, you see. It’s Chaos that’s to blame.

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Last time, you decided that Viscera Cleanup Detail's Sniffer tool is better than a fresh new MMO server. This was a close win, 54% vs 46%, but know we now how we're entering the new year: equipped to track down the sources of our problems, rather than running away from them. With that resolved, it's time to get snarky. A real snark-off. So much snark, and so many snarks, and so much potential to be undone by the hubris of miscalculating snark. What's better: Half-Life's Snarks or Planescape: Torment's Litany Of Curses?

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Last time, you decided that Viscera Cleanup Detail's Sniffer tool is better than a fresh new MMO server. This was a close win, 54% vs 46%, but know we now how we're entering the new year: equipped to track down the sources of our problems, rather than running away from them. With that resolved, it's time to get snarky. A real snark-off. So much snark, and so many snarks, and so much potential to be undone by the hubris of miscalculating snark. What's better: Half-Life's Snarks or Planescape: Torment's Litany Of Curses?

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We didn't review Turn 10 and Microsoft's latest Forza Motorsport and well, thank goodness, because I've just taken a look at the Steam page and it's a regular six-mile pile-up in there. The game's user reviews are Mostly Negative, three months after release, with complaints covering a wide gamut: the online being full of cheaters, the single player being boring, and the game being poorly optimised for PC.

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We didn't review Turn 10 and Microsoft's latest Forza Motorsport and well, thank goodness, because I've just taken a look at the Steam page and it's a regular six-mile pile-up in there. The game's user reviews are Mostly Negative, three months after release, with complaints covering a wide gamut: the online being full of cheaters, the single player being boring, and the game being poorly optimised for PC.

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Little-known indie platform holder Valve have announced a new policy for Steam releases that make use of "AI" technology. To boil it down, developers will now have to disclose how they're using AI tools on Steam pages, including what "guardrails" they're putting in place for live-generated stuff that might be illegal or infringe on copyright. Valve are also introducing a new player reporting system for breaches. The company say these adjustments "will enable us to release the vast majority of games that use AI", with the exception of Adult Only Sexual content that is generated live.

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Little-known indie platform holder Valve have announced a new policy for Steam releases that make use of "AI" technology. To boil it down, developers will now have to disclose how they're using AI tools on Steam pages, including what "guardrails" they're putting in place for live-generated stuff that might be illegal or infringe on copyright. Valve are also introducing a new player reporting system for breaches. The company say these adjustments "will enable us to release the vast majority of games that use AI", with the exception of Adult Only Sexual content that is generated live.

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Cult Of The Lamb's Sins Of The Flesh update promised to allow your followers to breed, in a way, by finding an egg that would hatch and produce new potential cult members. Players of the action-RPG/management hybrid on social media quickly did what people on social media do: demanded that they add sex.

Its developers said they would and now we get to see what that means when the update launches on January 16th.

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Cult Of The Lamb's Sins Of The Flesh update promised to allow your followers to breed, in a way, by finding an egg that would hatch and produce new potential cult members. Players of the action-RPG/management hybrid on social media quickly did what people on social media do: demanded that they add sex.

Its developers said they would and now we get to see what that means when the update launches on January 16th.

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