Rock, Paper, Shotgun

The developers of Marvel’s Avengers have removed the game’s design lead Brian Waggoner as a spokesperson after offensive tweets were brought to light. Waggoner had posted a racist comment on the social media platform in 2014, and an ableist one in 2010. Members of the Marvel’s Avengers community have uncovered and shared other examples of Waggoner’s behaviour online from before he joined Crystal Dynamics.

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I’m rounding up Steam Deck-ready microSD sales over in our best early Black Friday SSD deals hub, but thought it worth highlighting the Samsung Pro Plus more directly. This is, of all the ones I’ve tried, the best microSD card for Valve’s handheld PC, and it’s currently enjoying some discounts in both the UK and US.

These focus on the 256GB and 512GB models, the latter being the roomiest capacity that the Pro Plus comes in. Assuming that you do indeed find yourself constrained by your Deck’s own SSD, I’d suggest aiming for 512GB if you can – 256GB will hold a fair few games but might also fill up fast if you’re installing a lot of gigabyte-hogging AAA games. Then again, an extra 256GB might be fine otherwise – many of the best Steam Deck games, like Vampire Survivors, have a tiny installation footprint. Your call.

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How time flies, eh? We were so busy putting together The RPS 100 last month (including the first ever Reader Edition), that we clean ran out of time to do another RPS Time Capsule. But fear not! Our written repository of games we've deemed worthy of saving from the eternal hell bin of the future has returned, and this time it's a good 'un. The year is 2015, folks, and cor, has there ever been a better year for video games? Of course, with only 11 slots to fill in our RPS Time Capsule, it also means we're having to say goodbye to some real gems. Come and see what's transcended to the higher plane of Capsule existence.

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Several Ubisoft games are heading to Steam, signalling a return to Valve’s storefront for the publisher. In a statement to Eurogamer, Ubisoft confirmed that their open-world history ‘em up Assassin’s Creed Valhalla would be arriving on Steam on December 6th. It’ll be followed by other games from the publisher, although only RTS Anno 1800 and free to play skater Roller Champions have been touted so far.

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RPS supporters, who are very generous and probably smell fantastic, might recall a post last week in which I gushed about an Electriq eiQ-32M4K144FS that I’d bought secondhand. What this 4K gaming monitor lacks in brand recognition, it makes up for in smooth performance, despite being absolutely dirt cheap – and you can pick one up for yourself, brand new, in the early Black Friday sales.

This is a UK-only deal, as I can’t find as the eiQ-32M4K144FS on sale at all from a US retailer. But I can’t stress enough what good value this monitor is for £380: that’s 1440p money, usually, but the eiQ-32M4K144FS is a full 3840x2160 display with a generous 32in of screen space. Between the 144Hz refresh rate and AMD FreeSync/Nvidia G-Sync support, it’s also remarkably stacked for gaming features; I’ve seen for myself how well G-Sync, for instance, eliminates screen tearing on the IPS panel.

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Ezio Auditore, the fire of Firenze, pulls the guard close in passionate embrace. It’s an intimacy born not of love but its close cousin, hate. Gripping the man around the neck, Ezio holds him steady so that a nearby thief - hired at a fixed rate of 150 florins for an indefinite period of rooftop troublemaking - can take a free swing at his exposed abdomen. The sword connects, though not with its intended target. Instead it catches Ezio in the shoulder, knocking the assassin off-balance. He teeters backward across the tiles and over the lip of the building, falling three floors into the packed street below. The farce of it all is worth every one of the twelve hitpoints he loses in the process.

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Project Winter is one of the best social deduction games you can play on your PC. You could uncharitably call it the grumpy rules lawer uncle of Among Us, smothering the raw thrill of lies and accusation beneath a blanket of systems and complexities. I had an absolute blast with it a few years ago, though, and for my money the highs absolutely make that blanket worth snuggling under.

I get to tell you about it again because the Power Balance: Vol 2 Update came out last week, adding a couple more roles and new systems that give traitors more strategies to turn to.

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If Twitter does die, I will miss it. Amidst the wailing lie certain gems, like this thread of developers sharing confessions and cheeky tricks from across their careers. We're talking cobbling rat-tunnel ducts together to form a makeshift flare launcher in Dishonored, or using the bottom of a bleach bottle as a stand-in for a light fixture. I've picked out some of my favourites - come and revel in them with me.

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Obligatory ahoy, pirates. Season 8 of Sea Of Thieves goes live tomorrow, bringing on-demand ship combat and a faction system that pits goodly ghost-pirates against evil skeleton-pirates. It's all woven into the existing open world, with your ship plunging beneath the waves when you tell it you want to go a-hunting.

If you want more info, you can watch the devs launch into an appropriately deep dive in their latest update video.

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We're seeing big discounts on AMD's recently released Ryzen 7000 processors for Black Friday, with extremely heavy reductions on the Ryzen 9 7950X flagship and more modest price cuts on the 7900X, 7700X and 7600X. All four are now significantly cheaper than they were on launch, and with similar discounts to DDR5 RAM and AM5 motherboards, it's a great time to build a new Ryzen 7000 PC.

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It turns out there's only one way to improve Bennet Foddy's Getting Over It, and that's to exchange cauldron and mallet for motors and asphalt. A 15-person mapping team has channelled all the grief and rage from Foddy's hit fall 'em up into a 15-story tower that genuinely hurts my eyes to look at.

There's a $500+ prize pool to be shared between the first three people who can complete the damn thing. The map came out five days ago, and as yet nobody has.

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There was a period, during the first UK lockdown in 2020, where myself and a few friends – even some that don’t normally indulge in games – played little else besides Golf With Your Friends. It’s a 12-player crazy golf game that dials up the crazy, and as we soon found back in those pre-vaccine days, one that reaches a whole other level of club-and-ball chaos with a single settings tweak.

See, with ball collision switched off, Golf With Your Friends is pretty fun. The courses are oversized and fantastical, and because everyone’s balls are in play at the same time, you get all the light-hearted competition of a real putting contest without waiting for the person in front to take their turn. All fine and dandy. Turn ball collision on, however, and it becomes outright pandemonium.

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Microsoft's Xbox Series era Wireless Controller is one of the best options for PC gaming, and now it's down to £29.99 at Currys when you use the code FNDDGAMING and choose to collect. These controllers normally retail £54.99, making this a solid £25 discount!

This is one of the best early Black Friday PC deals we've spotted so far, and well worth picking up for games that benefit from controller input, like those in the racing, platformer, action and fighting genres. Of course, it's also an essential pickup if you like playing around with emulators, and of course works on two generations of Xbox consoles as well.

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Battle royales can be very confusing, what with all the running and gunning. What if you could just lie there and let the weapons deal with all that shooting hassle by themselves? One Warzone 2 player happened across exactly that scenario, but it didn’t do them much good. Appearances can be deceiving though, so it’s not entirely clear how a gun can start shooting itself. That sure does seem buggy.

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Until November 30th, we're shaving 25% off the price of our yearly Premium and Standard supporter subscriptions. Why, I hear you ask? It's Black Friday week, of course! And what would a good Black Friday be without us getting in on the deals action, too? All you need to do is head over to our sign up page, and pick the subscription that suits you best.

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Cute and compelling life simulator My Time At Sandrock is bringing back characters from My Time At Portia, along with new areas to explore and quests to give their lives purpose. If you played Portia and bid sad goodbyes to Albert, Mint and Musa, you can look forward to being reunited over an extra 5-10 hours of dungeons, romance and whatnot when the Old Pals update lands on November 24th.

I haven't played either game, but Steve Hogarty described Sandrock as "Stardew Valley with a gun", so I probably should.

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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, we've another big one, as my eye has been caught by a groovy wizard, superfast movement, and some very striking colour pencils. Come see!

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It’s been two years this month since Viking parkour pioneer Eivor sailed their longship into the convoluted waters of Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed series. Assassin's Creed Valhalla's journey comes to an end on December 6th with the arrival of title update 1.6.2 for the historical action RPG, along with the free The Last Chapter DLC. That concludes Eivor’s story, but unfortunately you won’t be able to continue your medieval adventures in New Game Plus. Ubisoft have confirmed that there won’t be any such mode coming to the game.

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Season 2 of Warner Bros. licensed brawler MultiVersus began last week, bringing with it a fresh battle pass for players to dig into. They’ll definitely be digging for a while too, because this season the amount of XP needed to complete the battle pass has nearly doubled. As MultiVersus tweeter and data miner LaisulMV noted, to complete the original Season 1 battle pass you’d need to accrue 47,650 XP to make it from Level 1 to Level 50. Season 2’s battle pass, on the other hand, requires a total of 87,450 XP. Levels 41-50 alone take almost as much effort as the first season’s entire battle pass, weighing in at 46,200 XP.

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Morning everyone. Black Friday 2022 is upon us and we’ll be covering it a bit differently to previous years – better, hopefully, albeit still in a way where an explanation might help. Basically, we’ll still be highlighting good hardware deals through our Black Friday hubs and the occasional standalone post, but this time we’re teaming up with our Gamer Network friends/colleagues/corporate co-underlings at Eurogamer and Digital Foundry to share the load.

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Warzone 2 deployed less than a week ago, and players are already experiencing déjà vu because of an outbreak of invisible players. This isn’t the first time the Warzone series has been affected by glitchy, unseen combatants, but we don’t have any answers yet for why it’s happening again. The invisibility glitch had attention drawn to it over the weekend, when streamer SuperEv shared a video of being taken out by another player who didn’t seem to be there. The Warzone 2.0 Trello board listing known issues with the game doesn’t show any mention of known invisibility bugs yet, so stay frosty.

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Sundays are for getting your radiator fixed because it sounds like a trumpet. Before you make the call, let's read this week's best writing about games (and game related things).

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I was once a regular Counter-Strike player, but that was almost twenty years ago. What's remarkable about Valve's team shooter is how little its fundamentals have changed over those twenty years. The AWP and M4A1? Still pretty much how they were when I was first mishandling them in the Half-Life mod.

Which makes yesterday's Counter-Strike: Global Offensive update pretty remarkable. The AWP's magazine size has been cut in half and the M4A1-S now does less damage at long range.

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At this point, I'd consider the wacky bugs continually introduced to The Sims 4 as more of a feature than a bug. For example, a recent update turned previously placid Sims into moody, argumentative jerks who were constantly scrapping with one another. That sounds great to me, although if you disagree there's bad news. EA Maxis say that their fix, intended to release this past week, has been delayed until early December.

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Next week is Black Friday, the yearly sales event which means everyone will be thrusting air fryers and SD cards towards you. That's fine with me - I need an SD card - but you may also enjoy Steam's unaffiliated Autumn Sale. Valve have announced it'll begin on Tuesday, November 22nd and run for a week until November 29th.

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I recently bought a new hoover, or I suppose a first hoover, the first hoover which I actually own. After decades of whichever crap hoover my landlords dumped in a flat cupboard rather than throw away, here I am, a hoover owner. Did you know: a hoover, when pushed over a floor, will suck up dust? And keep the dust inside? Amazing. Genuinely a joy to be doing a bit of hoovering this week. Plus I bought a Shark, and Shark owners seem to get very excited when they hear someone has bought a Shark, so I guess I'm now part of a(nother) gang. Anyway! What are you playing this weekend?

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I was already a reader of Robert Kirkman’s The Walking Dead comics when I picked up Telltale’s version on Steam in 2012. I came for the game’s resemblance to the art style from the funny books, but stayed because of its similarity to Kirkman’s excellent characterisation and shocking brutality. We are the Walking Dead, indeed. Telltale demonstrated they understood that from the start of this series.

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Anyone who's had to physically stop me from banging on about Black Sails will confirm that I love a bit of piracy. Games mostly don't do it justice at all, either making "piracy" shorthand for "mindless omnicide for no reason" or slapping a parroty theme onto a generic action game.

Buccaneers! isn't primarily a piracy game, but they're one of its four factions. It doesn’t try to be more than a naval combat and light action RPG either, let alone the “real” pirate game I dearly want, but I can’t hold that against it either. If I was being reductive, I'd call it a budget hybrid of Sea Of Thieves and Sid Meier's Pirates By Sid Meier Aged 33 And 3/4. It's probably unfair to set such high expectations, but the core design is compelling and enjoyable enough to merit it.

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Star Wars: Squadrons, an actually decent Star Wars game from recent years, is being given away on the Epic Games Store next week. You can pick up EA Motive’s dogfighting game for precisely zilch for seven standard Earth days starting from November 24th, although it seems to be the only game going for free that week. Until then, you can play with your boomstick in co-op multiplayer schlockfest Evil Dead: The Game, and there's tactical role-player Dark Deity too.

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At some point since I played Marvel's Spider-Man Remastered, a switch has flipped in me; I have gone from having stepped off the MCU train, content to watch it chug off into the distance with its remaining passengers, to actively wishing for its violent derailment. I'm saying this to emphasise that I loathe singiing the praises of anything even tangentially related to Marvel, without also revealing that I have stashed a steel chair and bag of thumbtacks under the ring as a surprise attack against Kevin Feige.

Spider-Man is about as Marvel-related as you can get. I said back when the remaster of Insomniac's first Spider-Man game came to PC that the reason to not buy it was that Miles Morales was coming to PC in a few months. A few months has become now. And I must own that Marvel's Spider-Man: Miles Morales is a good game. It's a big, bold action adventure full of heroics and quips, and it's still the better Spider-Man game. I think a large part of that is because it's shorter.

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I came, I saw, I claimed some free DLC. That’s probably what Julius Caesar would say about being given away for Sid Meier’s Civilization 6, right? Well, whatever his nibs might think about the offer, you’ll be able to pick him up for nowt from November 21st. There’s only one catch, and that’s needing to link your 2K account on Steam or the Epic Games Store. Have a watch of the trailer below to see what ol’ leaf-ears has to offer your Romans.

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For somehow the second time in my life, I recently found myself in deeply urgent need of a 4K gaming monitor. An RTX 4090 review deadline was rapidly approaching, any suitably UHD-specced loaner monitors I could use for testing had been sent back, and my backup – a nasty little 60Hz screen – wasn’t going to cut it. Unwilling to prostrate myself for another loan model and reluctant to burn such a vast hole in RPS’s expenses budget, I elected for the fastest, easiest option of just buying one myself.

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The mid-cycle patch for hero shooter Overwatch 2 has arrived to bring balance adjustments for multiple characters, and free Mei from her downtime at last. In particular, Zarya’s particle barrier duration has been reduced, so you should have an easier team taking her on in future. Blizzard announced there’d be a delay to the balance adjustment update earlier this week, which had been scheduled for November 15th.

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An investigation into suspected insider trading by former Square Enix employees is underway, and Japanese news site Fuji News Network reports that Sonic The Hedgehog’s co-creator Yuji Naka has been arrested in connection. Naka is alleged to have bought around 10,000 shares in Dragon Quest Tact developers Aiming back in 2020 for ¥2.8 million (£16,800). At that point, Naka was still working with Square Enix on Balan Wonderworld.

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If you miss Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell’s three-eyed stealth monger Sam Fisher as much as I do then take a look below at some newly shared concept art from Ubisoft’s upcoming remake of the original game. It’s the first time we’ve got anything close to a glimpse of the remake, still in its early prototyping stage, could look like. The seven slices of concept art were shown as part of Splinter Cell’s 20th anniversary.

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The Razer Basilisk X Hyperspeed is the firm's budget answer to the G502 Wireless gaming mouse, but today it's way cheaper thanks to a big Black Friday discount at Amazon UK. The price has dropped from £60 to £30, making it one of the most affordable wireless gaming mice on the market - and a great deal given its six programmable buttons, 285 hour battery life and options for both reliable Hyperspeed wireless and Bluetooth.

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Golly. The EVGA P6 850W is a top-tier modular power supply, and today it's been discounted by nearly £40 over at Amazon. That drops it £73, a terrific deal on a PSU that can handle anything up to (and including) an RTX 4090. We actually covered this power supply last month, when I was surprised to learn it had dropped to £90 after weeks of costing more than £100 in the crypto-boom era. Now it's even cheaper, and that makes our recommendation stronger than ever.

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The Risk Of Rain intellectual property and both Risk Of Rain and Risk Of Rain 2 are now owned by Gearbox. Gearbox were previously the publisher of Risk Of Rain 2 and say they are "eager to prove ourselves as worthy custodians" of the series. They bought the IP from original developers Hopoo Games, who say they won't be doing any more work on the series.

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This year's Saints Row reboot met financial expectations, according to the interim report of mega-publisher Embracer. The same can't be said of the critical response, however, so developers Volition "will transition to become part of Gearbox."

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At a glance, Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader looks like so many other turn-based games set in the 40K universe. Except, this isn't turn-based strategy, but a proper CRPG from the makers of the recent, well-liked Pathfinder games. Its first gameplay trailer awaits below.

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