The 28-in Gigabyte M28U is one of the most affordable 4K 144Hz HDMI 2.1 monitors, ideal for use with PC, PS5 and Series X alike. Normally it is available for high but understandable-for-its-specs figure of £669, but for Black Friday (and its aftershocks), it's been reduced to £399 which is a rather fetching price.
Far Cry continues to take a liberal approach to its expansions with Lost Between Worlds. The DLC for Far Cry 6 takes Dani Rojas, the protagonist from the base game's daft revolutionary narrative, and traps her within a kaleidoscopic and extraterrestrial version of Yara. There you'll need to work with an alien AI to collect crystals and defeat crystal people. It's out on December 6th and you'll find the first trailer below.
Somewhere in the region of 8,000 games have been removed from Steam since its inception, from the mass banning of “fake games”, to publishers removing their own titles due to licensing disputes, pending re-releases, personal disillusionment, server shutdowns and political scandals. Valve even took down one of its own games. Released in 2004 with Steam AppID 92, Codename: Gordon is a Flash-based 2D side-scroller set in the Half-Life universe, developed by Nuclearvision and published by Valve. It was removed due to a hard-coded link to the now-defunct developer’s domain, which Valve regarded as a security risk.
But removed isn’t always the same as gone, and exploring Steam’s deleted items is an adventure through modern gaming history. I spoke to some developers of delisted games to find out more.
It’s Tuesday, and the entire species is about to go to war with a powerful alien race. At least we are in space sim Elite Dangerous anyway, which sees the Thargoids finally invade human systems with the arrival of Update 14 for the game today. Eight massive space anomalies called Maelstroms are on their way towards human worlds, accompanied by massing Thargoid starships.
Deep Silver and Dambuster Studios have scheduled a showcase for upcoming zombie-thwacking action RPG Dead Island 2. You can tune in on YouTube on December 6th at 8pm GMT/9pm CET/1pm PT, for some “action, gore and zombies”, they say. Ahead of that though, we’ve been introduced to another member of the game’s expanding cast of the still-living. New undead slayer Amy has been given her own teaser trailer, which you can watch here.
Portal with RTX now has a release date, so anyone with a) a copy of Portal on Steam and b) a ray tracing-capable graphics card will be able to explore a freshly polished Aperture Science from December 8th.
A conversation in the RPS Treehouse the other day reminded me that there is only one game I have ever completed for the first time and then finished again, all within the span of a week. That game was The Walking Dead: The Final Season.
Having played all three previous seasons of Telltale's choose-your-own-zombie-apocalypse tearjerker (plus the 400 Days DLC and the Michonne spin-off), it's no surprise that I was incredibly invested in Clementine's story by The Final Season. I'm not a big kid person, typically, but you'd have to be beyond heartless not to love little Clem, wouldn't you? Even though, by the time TFS rolls around, she's grown into medium-sized Clem, and is a bit bloody scary to boot.
University sim Two Point Campus is shipping its students off out into the actual universe when the game’s first big expansion arrives on PC on December 6th. Space Academy adds new interplanetary campus locations, including a cheesy asteroid, along with more student archetypes, courses, and classrooms for your college. You can catch a glimpse of what’s ahead in the new term by watching the video below.
Card-based strategy games seem to have really found their feet over the last 12 months. Now that we're a few years clear of Slay The Spire's chokehold over the genre, deckbuilders are starting to come thick and fast in a variety of exciting mash-ups. This year alone, I've sunk a hefty number of hours into the deckbuilding tower defence 'em up ORX, got lost in the tabletop plots of Foretales, and later this week we'll see the launch of Marvel's Midnight Suns, the new card-based strategy RPG from XCOM makers Firaxis. It's a good time to be a fan of deckbuilders, is what I'm saying, and early next year the mythological exploits of Mahokenshi will be looking to carry the baton forward into 2023.
Having returned to World Of Warcraft after many, many years away from Azeroth in our new Inventory Space video series, I'm taken aback by how disjointed the new player experience has become. Blizzard have streamlined the early game, sure, but in doing so they've made it almost impossible to pin down my sense of place in the world. As Blizzard carves out new space for new regions and races with each and every expansion, I wonder: has the game become too big? Or put another way: am I unable to grasp just how vast its become?
Starship Troopers, Paul Verhoeven’s deliberately scene-chewing take on Robert Heinlein’s dubious classic of military sci-fi, has been adapted for PC a fair bit. Games based on the interstellar action of the movie tend to end up veering towards the strategy genre though, such as the recent Terran Command. Well, Offworld Industries have loaded up a dropship with Starship Troopers: Extermination and plonked the licence right where it belongs on Planet Co-op FPS. It’s targeting a 2023 release, and probably the head carapace of a very confused giant alien insectoid, too. You can watch a short teaser for the game below.
Microsoft might consider offering Sony a 10-year licensing deal for Call Of Duty to persuade European Union regulators to approve their Activision Blizzard acquisition. Reuters report that sources familiar with the deal claim an offer could come ahead of the European Commission’s January deadline for their statement of objection, a formal list of the body’s concerns about how the $68.7 billion (£57 billion) buyout deal might affect competition within the games industry. If Microsoft show willingness to offer concessions and ease the EU regulator’s competition concerns, that could potentially speed up the regulator’s decision-making process.
That thing in the sky is neither bird, plane nor Superman: it's the World Of Warcraft: Dragonflight expansion, due to go live at 11pm GMT, 3pm PST, and 12am CET. WoW's latest expansion brings a new region, a new class, more dungeons, and yes, dragons. Lot's of 'em. Fill your boots. Ride them, even. Show them around town. Take them home. Wake up next to them one day and feel like the magic's gone, you know?
When I gave you a sneak peek at 1/1, my cyberpunk novel about teens saving the future with NFTs, I could not possibly have predicted that Elon Musk would become a controversial figure. No one could. But the infobahn baron played a role in my tale's thrilling conclusion, and so my publishers are unthrilled by recent developments. They're holding the novel's launch back so I can address 'the Musk issue' with a sequel released simultaneously. So as a Cyber Monday treat, allow me to top up your thrill levels with excerpts from book two: Original Content, a Non-Fungible Future drop.
Yoshiro Kimura and his studio, Onion Games, are known for being off-beat. They make games that go in hard on their own strange internal worlds, wrapping up a particular sense of passion and energy in earnestly oddball humour. Undertale makes for a handy comparison - which makes sense, because many of the team worked on Moon, one of the games that inspired it.
I'm telling you all this because it might pique your interest in their upcoming sandbox RPG, which we now know will be out at some point next year.
I'm extremely excited to announce Inventory Space! A new video series in which Liam and I spend our precious free time with massive live-service games to see how much they demand from our schedules. Are we able to truly experience everything these games have to offer without sacrificing the bits of our daily routines that keep us from withering away at our monitors? How many hours do you really need to invest in order to fully experience a game? And is it even worth it, in the end?
Inventory Space will – hopefully – give you a better idea of whether mammoth games will slot into your life neatly, or not at all.
Oi, you. Are you looking for a good time? A cosy time? I've got *opens trenchcoat* Townscaper, a no-stress little building toy. You'll see colours for days, mate. Buildings popping up in all manners of shapes and sizes, no objectives or nuffin'. Ahh, you want the new stuff, eh? Well lucky you, I just got some Gourdlets in.
Gourdlets is another city-building sandbox with no purpose beyond placing stuff you think looks nice, only this time little blob dudes will come visit and interact with what you've built. The first taste is free, by which I mean there's an Itch demo you can tinker with while we wait for the Steam version.
It's been a bumpy road, but the new generation of plucky Settlers are at last approaching their destination. Now known as The Settlers: New Allies, Ubisoft's Settlers reboot is due to come out on February 23rd.
Katharine quite liked what she played of the town-building RTS last January, but the devs decided feedback from their closed beta meant the game warranted more time in the oven, and thus a third major postponement since the game's original 2018 announcement. Come watch the trailer below to see what's new.
Gaming monitors are great, but if we're being realistic, they can very easily become one of the priciest building blocks in your entire PC gaming setup. If you are currently screen shopping, then, your best course of action is probably to take advantage of the current Cyber Monday gaming monitor deals.
My curated picks are all below, and as always, I’m only recommending sufficiently good hardware that’s available on a meaningful discount. A couple of our best gaming monitor members are even in here, though it’s a broad church overall, with 1080p, 1440p, and 4K screens making the cut alongside the occasional ultrawide model. We’re looking for gaming credentials specifically, too, so heightened refresh rates and support for variable sync tech (like FreeSync and G-Sync) are important.
After more than six years of making games together, indie development team Sokpop Collective are just about to reach their 100th release in December. Hitting that milestone means the group have decided to change how they operate and adjust their Patreon. They’ll no longer be working to release one game per month. Sokpop are recommitting to releasing another 100 games though, so they’ll still be surprising us with intriguing diversions like village-building card game Stacklands or cutesy RTS King Pins. You can watch a trailer for their recently released 99th game, action RPG Springblades, below.
Unlike with most flavours of PC hardware, the list of good Cyber Monday gaming laptop deals is noticeably smaller than the catalogue of quality, discounted notebooks that Black Friday brought. That’s partly stock running out, and partly retailers just being less willing to extend these sales over the weekend. Killjoys. Still, we’re not out of luck yet, nor out of laptops – as you’ll see below, there’s still a variety of deals to choose from, especially in the UK.
Classic RPG Heroes of Might and Magic III has been transmuted into a board game, with its Kickstarter campaign currently on over 2.6 million pounds. That's 6000% over its £43,000 funding goal. You people want this. Are you sure you want this?
The board game is a hybrid of competitive deckbuilding and exploration, where 1-4 players travel around an overworld collecting cards to play in separate combat encounters. I do dig deckbuilding, but I suspect this might lack a little magic to anyone who isn't after a nostalgia kick.
Mirrorshades cannot be the iconic eyewear of modern-day cyberpunk, I learned during a Microsoft Teams meeting. For decades, cyberpunks, hackers, and internauts have donned a cool pair of shiny shades to strike a cool pose. But mirrorshades are a serious security hazard in this age of video calls: other people can see your screen and desk reflected in the lenses. If you're mirrored up, people can gain access to private data or see if you are, for example, playing Windows Solitaire instead of paying attention to the meeting. So what's a 21st-century cyberpunk to wear? It's not like you can go without cool glasses (or stop playing Solitaire during meetings). I have ideas.
Synced (formerly Synced: Off Planet) is heading into open beta on December 10th, and has quite a few hyphenated terms applied to it. This sci-fi game is both squad-based and match-based, a roguelite hero-shooter, and Tencent's publishing division Level Infinite even go as far as describing it as a rogue-looter, of all things. Whatever you want to call it, though, the main thrust of the game is about finding and taming machine creatures known as Nanos in a techno-apocalypse, mostly so you can battle more Nanos inside a special sealed zone called The Meridian. Come and see what to expect when the beta begins in an exclusive gameplay trailer below.
With Black Friday now demoted to "Last Friday", it’s the turn of Cyber Monday to host the handful of remaining SSD deals. Thought it’s more than a handful, really – multiple big, stretching fistfuls of quality PC storage deals are still running, and should continue to do so until the clock strikes midnight. Or until they run out of stock. Hopefully the former.
For what has felt like my entire life (but was probably only the months of October and November) every ad I was served on YouTube was for a sale on Her Interactive's Nancy Drew games. I remember it not only because the content is burned into my brain, but because they themed it around getting involved in cosplay, and got a bunch of cosplayers - and no disprespect to them, because they did a great job - to dress as characters from the games. And I kept thinking, like... what? Apart from Ms Drew, what characters are worth cosplaying from a series of licensed Nancy Drew puzzle games?
Anyway it clearly didn't matter, because I saw the ads so often that I went and bought the most recent one out of curiosity. You win, Her Interactive! Midnight In Salem is a spooky mystery wherein Nancy Drew must solve an arson case (with the Hardy Boys in tow, no less) that has possible occult tie ins. It came out in 2019, and is Nancy Drew #33. 33 Nancy Drew games! Imagine. Also, I cannot download it and I have spent over two weeks trying.
It was only a few days hence that we spotted a low price on the Ryzen 9 7900X, but for Cyber Monday there's an even better deal on offer at Amazon UK.
The deal price is £456.70, versus a normal price of £600, and is for stock from Amazon US - but that includes shipping, import duty and all other potential fees. There's even the possibility that fees are less than expected, as several US items I've ordered from Amazons overseas have come with small discounts.
Two of the best gaming mice - and indeed, the best ultralight mouse in the RPS guide to gaming mice that are good - are going exceedingly cheap on Amazon UK today. The Pulsefire Haste and Pulsefire Haste Wireless are ideal for competitive and casual gaming alike, with lightweight designs and high-end specs, and now you can pick either for little.
The wired Pulsefire Haste (£20, normally £50) is the cheaper and lighter option, weighing in at 59 grams, while the wireless Pulsefire Haste Wireless (£40, normally £90) offers more freedom but requires recharging every 100 hours. It also weighs a tiny bit more, at 61 grams.
In 2010, the makers of Swiss Army knives introduced a new model for the digital age: the Presentation Master. To help you dominate PowerPoint presentations on the battlefields of corporate warfare, the knife's fold-out tools included a laser pointer, a Bluetooth remote control for changing slides, and a USB thumb drive. I need it. This is an amazing cyberpunk PC peripheral, and a rare product targetted at megacorp middle-managers rather the leather-clad rabble of hackers, scavs, and street samurai. I need it so much.
You know you've walked into a cool space for serious cyberdudes when someone is casually getting tattooed at a filthy table littered with unspooled cable, PCI cards, rollerblades, and crushed energy drink cans. But how will they know that you too can jam with the console cowboys in cyberspace? Because you will establish your cybercred with a flash of your kewl knuckle tattoos. You do have some, don't you? If you're coming up clean-handed, there's no better day to fix this than Cyber Monday. Scroll through this gallery above of 13 kewl ideas for inspiration!
With the exception of a few expired Razer offers – sleep now, Razer Basilisk Ultimate for $60 – I’m pleasantly surprised how many of Cyber Monday’s best gaming mouse deals have stuck to their Black Friday prices. Don’t fret, then, if you missed these the first time round.
It’s Cyber Monday, all you computing peripheral fans, and that means you’ve got one last shot at many of the best gaming keyboard deals to come out of Black Friday. Looking back over this list of discounted wares, which includes several models to have graced our best keyboard rankings, it does seem that most of last week’s highlights are still available.
A remake of Like A Dragon spin-off Ryū Ga Gotoku Kenzan could potentially happen, but devs RGG Studio say they'll only consider it if the series' other upcoming spin-off Ishin is a “a huge hit.” The comments came up in a recent interview by Ungeek with RGG Studio executive producer Masayoshi Yokoyama and chief director Hiroyuki Sakamoto. Although the remake of Ishin was announced during Sony’s September State Of Play stream, Kenzan seems quite far from being picked up for a revamp.
Matthias Linda is feeling tense. Chained Echoes, the retro Japanese-inspired RPG he's been working on as a solo dev for the last seven years, is almost ready to release on Steam, but he tells me there's "still so many little and not so little things to do" before the big day hits on December 8th. "[I] still need to patch the languages into the console versions. Still need to pass one submission," he says over email. "I can’t really think about the release itself, just about the things I need to finish till then."
But he also says he's "happy at the same time". After a successful Kickstarter campaign in 2019, Chained Echoes has been gradually gathering steam ever since - and judging by the 90-minute demo I was able to play recently, it's clear Linda's got something really quite special here. Not only do its 16-bit-style visuals look absolutely stunning, but its turn-based combat's also unlike anything else I've seen. You've still got your classic list of commands to pick from, but as battles progress you'll need to maintain a kind of flow state known as Overdrive to deal the optimum amount of damage. Overextend your party's abilities and you'll leave yourself vulnerable to critical hits from your enemies, but go too slow and you'll need to build your Overdrive bar back up to regain those lost stat buffs. It's a fascinating system, and was borne out of Linda's desire to "build a bridge between the worlds" of considered, turn-based tactical combat and the fast-paced action of real-time.
Grim co-op action game Warhammer 40,000: Darktide is out on PC on Wednesday, and devs Fatshark have taken a load off players’ minds by confirming that progression from the pre-order beta will carry over. Although Fatshark had mentioned in previous Steam updates about the game’s beta that player progression might not be fully guaranteed, they tweeted over the weekend to let players know that progression will be maintained once the game’s released. I do like that they address everyone as “rejects” in their announcements, it makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside.
All of the best Cyber Monday deals on desktop gaming PCs are, quite simply, the same offers that were up for grabs on Black Friday. I suppose you could grumble that they weren’t eighty-sixed in favour of newer, better, Monday-er deals, but if you’ve been weighing up a new prebuilt PC, think of today as another chance to find a deal you missed.
Black Friday 2022 is dead but as long as Cyber Monday is here to shamble around, wearing its skin, you can still take advantage of some of the former’s best PC gaming hardware deals. The vast majority, in fact – I was expecting to spend most of this morning sweeping away expired deals, but most of the hardware that was discounted on Black Friday is still on sale for Cyber Monday at identical prices. Sometimes, even for a few coins less.
PlayStation-exclusive racing sim Gran Turismo 7 might make its way to PC, series lead and creator Kazunori Yamauchi has let slip in an interview. GTPlanet report that Yamauchi made the comments when asked about the possibility of a port, given that more and more PlayStation games are heading in PC’s direction. The 25-year-old racing series has always been a die-hard exclusive for Sony’s consoles up until now.
While Valve have now released their own dock for the Steam Deck, the third-party alternatives which beat them to market are still worth considering. Chief among them is Jsaux's line of Steam Deck compatible docks. If you decide you want something with a lower price than Valve's official hardware, then you can currently find the JSAUX 6-in-1 Steam Deck dock for just $38/£40 as part of this weekend's Black Friday deals.
Sundays are for taking vitamin D tablets because the sun has decided it can't be bothered to hang about. Before you ingest, let's read this week's best writing about games (and game related things).