Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Collectible card game Marvel Snap has been released into early access on Steam as a free to play download. Hailing from some of the devs behind Blizzard’s successful digital CCG Hearthstone, Marvel Snap takes the House Of Ideas’ superheroic formula and runs with the current multiversal obsession of the MCU. The game also mixes in the art and variants you’d expect from Marvel’s comic book output.

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Frog Detective 3: Corruption At Cowboy County hops onto PC on October 27th, a new trailer has revealed. This time around, you’ll be able to ride around a Wild West town pretending to be sheriff, although you seem to own a micro scooter instead of a horse for some reason. You can see more of what’s in store for the green detective by watching the trailer below.

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The PC continues to collect PlayStation mascots like they’re Maccies Monopoly tickets. This time it’s adventuring iron-quiffed quipper Nathan Drake, courtesy of Uncharted: Legacy of Thieves Collection, which is out on Steam on November 19th. And where there’s a Steam game, there’s usually a Steam Deck game, so Liam and I have both busted out the handhelds to see how well this remastered bundle of Uncharted: A Thief’s End and Uncharted: The Lost Legacy takes to more portable hardware. That includes the best settings to use if you want to play it on your own Steam Deck.

You can watch Liam’s video below to see how he got on, along with footage of how Uncharted: Legacy of Thieves Collection runs in situ. After swapping notes we’ve settled on a settings guide that will get you consistently decent performance across both the individual games; if you’d prefer it in text form, read on.

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Guildford in the UK isn’t a place that you’d expect to feature in games. It’s very much your typical British town, replete with shops, restaurants, and many, many double yellow lines. That’s why it’s pretty astonishing to see a section of Guildford recreated on a distant world in sci-fi exploration sim No Man’s Sky. Why Guildford though? Well, it's because devs Hello Games are based there. Their office and the surrounding streets have been constructed in-game by No Man’s Sky player Joan, a.k.a. Rasdar07, and shared in the base building chat on the game’s Discord server.

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I loved Overwatch when it first came out. When the original game was fresh and new, I was experimenting with the characters just like everyone else. I found my niche in support, and got to be a pretty decent player with Mercy and Lúcio (I was particularly proud of the latter, because I flatter myself that he's quite difficult to play well). Then, you know, life happened. I didn't have as much time to play, and I just kind of stopped playing Overwatch.

I appear to have nodded off or something, because there are now 35 heroes on the roster, and Overwatch 2 is out. What. Who allowed this? I wish to speak to someone in charge. Jeff? Jeff From The Overwatch Team? Are you there? Jeff is still in charge right? Wait, wh-

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A few more classics have made their way onto EA’s list of games they’re shutting down online services for, with Mirror’s Edge the most notable casualty for PC players. The shutdown will come into effect from January 19th, 2023, just overshooting the 13th anniversary of the game’s launch on PC. It’ll presumably affect the dystopian parkour game’s online leaderboards, and downloadable Ghosts of other players.

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As has been tradition for many a year now (three), Mayor Bones Proudly Presents: Ghost Town's 1001st Annual Pumpkin Festival is back! I first reported on this free pumpkin carving game from Adamgryu (of A Short Hike fame) way back in 2020, when it was only the 999th festival, and Alice0 took a stroll around it last year, too.

This year the pumpkins are back, and better than ever. Download the Pumpkin Fest for pay-what-you-can on Itch, carve your very own pump with the tools provided, and place it among the efforts of others in a peaceful spooky scene. You can take a walk around and vote for your favourite pumps. But this isn't the only pumpkin game to enjoy! I've found a couple of others, too. It's the reason for the spooky season.

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Respawn have revealed the next legend arriving in their free-to-play battle royale Apex Legends will be the game’s first trans hero, Catalyst. The latest season is called Eclipse, and brings the new map Divided Moon. The update also introduces gifting to Apex Legends, and there’ll be a brand new battle pass. Find out more about Catalyst’s backstory by watching the trailer below.

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In a bizarre turn of events, Bandai Namco will stream a special jazz arrangement featuring select songs and "recognisable melodies" from Elden Ring's soundtrack. The event will be performed by a group of musicians led by award winner Kenny Garrett and upcomer Takuya Kuroda, so it's safe to assume the cats will really be cookin' out there. Although is Elden Ring's music all that memorable?

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It’s officially the spooky season now, so that makes it a highly appropriate juncture for some survival horror. Good job that Capcom have announced they’re streaming a Resident Evil showcase this Thursday, October 20th, then. They’ve even roped in Resident Evil Village’s Merchant to narrate the trailer for it. Watch below for a quick look at what’s coming up in the showcase stream.

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Reading the words "haunted house cleaning simulator," I knew exactly what diddy indie game Late Night Mop would be. And it is what I had thought. And it is what you will have guessed upon reading that too. And yet, I enjoyed my ten minutes binning rubbish and mopping up stains (just stains, don't worry about it). Then I played it again to see another ending, even knowing I am a big scaredy baby. Ugh. I will regret having played this next time I clean my flat at night.

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The RPS 100, our annual countdown of our favourite PC games of all time, is coming back for its second edition later this month - and let me tell you, with practically an all-new team in place since we last cast our votes, this year's RPS 100 is looking to be quite the shake-up compared to last year's list. This time, though, we wanted get you, our fair readers, involved as well. To that end, we're introducing The RPS 100: Reader's Edition, where you can vote for your favourite PC games of all time, to be published as a separate list that will be yours and yours alone forevermore. Want to get involved? Here's how:

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On this week's episode of the Ultimate Audio Bang, we deliver our impressions of Overwatch 2 and discuss whether Overwatch really needed a number "2" slapped on the end of it.

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I refer to Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines as "my favourite video game of all time" with such frequency that it's basically a catchphrase of mine. The thing is, though, I really dislike slogans; they're meant to stir up emotions while bypassing our capacity to think critically. So I thought this retrospective was a good opportunity to remind myself of why I still love this janky, weird ARPG about sad bloodsuckers so much, even 18 years after its release.

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Valorant and League Of Legends developers Riot Games have completed their purchase of Wargaming Sydney, a support studio that’s previously worked on World Of Tanks and World Of Warships. The studio, which has been part of Wargaming since 2012, will be renamed Riot Sydney. They’ll be switching to work on Riot’s live-service games, including Valorant and League Of Legends.

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Is it just me, or did Persona 5 never feel quite at home on the PlayStation 4? Sure, it looked gorgeous on a big TV, its bright colours popping all over your living room, but it always felt bit wrong to me. I think it's all about pacing. Persona 5's blend of turn-based combat and life sim elements hardly moves at a breakneck speed. There's a lot of reading. A lot of listening to your pals chat about their hopes and fears. A lot of pressing one button to progress a line of dialogue onto the next. Shoving that on your 65" 4K TV always seemed a bit overkill.

Basically, I never got into Persona 5 when it first launched on PS4. I played about three hours of it and then binned it off in favour of something else. In 2020, during a moment of first-lockdown madness, I bought Persona 5 Royal for full price, thinking maybe my issue with the original release was that there wasn't enough of it, but surprisingly discovered it still wasn't for me. At this point, I'd invested £100 into my "Do I like Persona 5?" experiment and was quickly realising the result was a pretty firm "No, mate, you don't". So when I sat down with the PC version of the game on the Steam Deck to test it out, I figured I'd play it for a few hours and then never touch it again. I was wrong. I was so very wrong.

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I finished the original Persona 5 roughly four years ago, and it immediately earned my most coveted award: Edders Really Liked This A Lot, Perhaps More Than Anything Else. Since its updated and expanded Royal version dropped on PlayStation some years later, I've been afraid to make my return. You'd think I'd be itching to delve back into what's essentially the definitive version of the Phantom Thieves' adventure, and yet it's precisely because it blew me away the first time that I've been reluctant to go back.

Now? Now I feel silly. After playing the early portions of Persona 5: Royal, which finds itself coming to practically every remaining platform this week, including PC, my goodness me, it's wonderful to be back in Shibuya with the gang. Already it's the Persona 5 I adored, with new cutscenes and pacing adjustments to make it – somehow – even better. Have you never played Persona before? Good! Let me twist your arm. Gi-give, no - give it here!

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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, my eye has been caught by ghosts, Midwest mall goth, immersive sim object-fiddling, and a whole lot of stylish violence.

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The Steam Deck might be able to play modern AAA games on the go, but you should really crack out some classics of yesteryear from time to time too. It’s fun to see that there’s now a way to play old Game Boy Advance cartridges on Valve’s handheld, and they actually make the games look pretty sweet to boot. No, this isn't Valve following up their Switch emulator gaffe. Wave hello to the GB Operator.

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The winner of this year’s Minecraft mob vote has been revealed, and it’s a giant creature called the sniffer. Sniffers are helpful beasties who can search up ancient seeds that grow into plants you can decorate with. The friendly cow-turtle-dog-thing won the vote held to decide Minecraft’s new mob, held for 24 hours between Friday and the start of Minecraft Live on Saturday. Sniffer topped the poll with more than half of the 3.5 million votes cast. You can watch the result being announced in the video below.

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We might finally be getting another Silent Hill game after a decade of mostly, well, silence. Konami have announced that a “Silent Hill Transmission” is set for this Wednesday, October 19th at 10pm BST / 2pm PDT. No details have been shared about whether you’ll be able to tune in on YouTube or Twitch for the stream, but Konami shared a link to a page on their site so you should be able to watch it there.

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In a bizarre twist to Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 40 series GPU rollout, it turns out there will be no 12GB version of the RTX 4080 at all. Nvidia announced an "unlaunch" of the graphics card, which would have sat below the RTX 4080 16GB and the RTX 4090, effectively cancelling it. The 16GB version will still release as planned on November 16th.

"The RTX 4080 12GB is a fantastic graphics card, but it’s not named right", reads Nvidia’s statement. "Having two GPUs with the 4080 designation is confusing. So, we’re pressing the "unlaunch" button on the 4080 12GB."

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Sundays are for popping to the corner shop and buying a Lion bar. Before you tuck in, let's read this week's best writing about games (and game related things).

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OlliOlli World is getting a final piece of DLC. Finding The Flowzone, which will be released this November, features a new bunch of levels to grind across - only these ones are set among the clouds. It'll also include new "Windzones" for catching greater air, as well as harder routes designed for the best players.

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I find I have next to no interest in the coming Gotham Knights, but a blocky recreation of Gotham in Minecraft? Yeah, that's cute. It's part of what's coming in the newly announced Batman DLC for Minecraft, as well as the ability to fight Batman's rogue gallery including the Penguin, Poison Ivy and The Joker.

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Have you ever been playing a game and craved some pizza? Of course you have. If you're like me, you crave pizza literally all the time. Well, a new mod for Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion is here to help. It lets you order a real world pizza delivery from Domino's via an in-game NPC. Magic.

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Warhammer 40K: Darktide's closed beta is underway, which you probably already know if you're one of the people granted access to test the co-op shooter. If you don't have access however, there's still time as you can still apply and more players will be let in over the course of this weekend. You might also enjoy watching some streamers play so you have a better sense of it ahead of its release in November.

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Blocky action RPG Minecraft Dungeons sees the arrival of the mob-packed Fauna Faire, its third seasonal update, on October 19th. Today’s Minecraft Live stream showed more of what to expect from the new season of Minecraft Dungeons, including four-player multiplayer for the Tower, a new merchant who handles enchantments, and a free new jungle biome level. I just like the look of the mob-themed onesies, personally.

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Minecraft’s next major update will swell the survival sandbox’s roster of player characters to nine, in an effort to make the game more diverse and improve representation. Existing default picks Steve and Alex are going to be joined by seven new characters who reflect the wider world, although Mojang wouldn’t reveal any more about them ahead of today's Minecraft Live stream. Not even their names, alas. I was going to suggest Pugh, Pugh, Barney McGrew, Cuthbert, Dibble and Grub, but then realised that leaves one short. Gandalf, maybe?

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Mojang showed more of their upcoming action strategy spin-off Minecraft Legends at Minecraft Live today, including an early look at the game’s four-player co-op. We also found out more about what your hero uses to battle against the piglin invasion, and met some of the game’s key allies. Take a look at the trailer below to get a fresh look at to expect when Legends launches in 2023.

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Halloween is coming and the bats are getting fat. Please put a Tunnock's in the young man's hat. If you haven't got a Tunnock's, a Snickers will do. If you haven't got a Snickers, then gods bless you! So what are you playing this weekend? Here's what we're clicking on!

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You can check out the next game from Beeswing and Dujanah developer Jack King-Spooner with a swish demo launched alongside a crowdfunding campaign. Judero is its name, and a surprisingly action-heavy adventure through the Scottish Borders is its game. Expect folklore, witches, jokes, stop motion, and beasties to battle and mind control.

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It's probably a coincidence that I have a headache, but it seems appropriate for how out of my depth One Many Nobody was starting to make me feel. You've likely seen similar games, but this one mixes the usual 2D pixel puzzle business with some hazardous platforming, and a cloning system that rapidly move beyond the obvious "standing on your own shoulders" uses.

The balancing of all that didn't quite work for me, but I'm generally fairly averse to puzzle games and demanding platformers, so you ought not to count that against it. If you're more the type to take apart a puzzle step by step than to wing it while your subconscious yells from the sidelines, this could even be a real gem.

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Star Trek Online turns you into the captain of your own starship. This MMORPG neatly captures the essence of years of Gene Roddenberry’s hopeful, futuristic space romp, rolling in plotlines from the TV shows and movies to create a bizarrely playable blob of nerdy entertainment. It pits you against the Borg. It lets you visit Deep Space Nine. You can even battle the powerful and scary Crystalline Entity that wiped out Data’s homeworld. As a Trek fan, I enjoy Star Trek Online far, far too much.

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Overwatch 2 won’t be seeing any significant rebalances to its roster of heroes until the free to play shooter enters its second season in early December, Blizzard have confirmed. The game’s developers shared a blog post updating players on how the company are monitoring gameplay, maps, and competitive rankings in the immediate post-launch period. There will, however, be a targeted adjustment to tank Zarya in the next major patch going live on October 25th, Blizzard said.

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Note to self: never eat a packet of Quavers while watching any more Dead Space remake videos ever again. It’s not a good idea for choking reasons. EA and Motive just held a 14th anniversary livestream in honour of the original Dead Space – ivory, if you were wondering – and I can not-so-safely say that the new footage shown was crisp-gaggingly intimidating. You can check it out for yourself by watching the trailer below. Try not to be too long, won't you?

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A thousand apologies, friends, for the gap in your Nate Files timeline. Unfortunately, while on a deep sea dive to retrieve the tapes of episodes 13 and 14 (an expedition funded by supporters; your generosity is always appreciated), my ship was attacked by a large and unusually toothsome whale-like creature. The cursed thing took a huge bite out of the side of our noble vessel, The Squiggled Egg, and we were forced to abandon ship. It was only by the grace of the botswain Hughbert Threads that I'm alive to write this post today, as the man gave his life beating back the foul beast, giving a large part of the rest of the crew time to get away. Alas, in the confusion, I only secured episode 14, and episode 13 is now lost to time. That is definitely what happened, and not that the digital recording got mangled somehow.

Still, episode 14 (which is now episode 13, even though I say 14 in the recording) is now here for you to enjoy. It's all about bad and obsolete palaeontology - the weird ways people in history interpreted fossils, and why.

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We started out today with a £300 SSD that somehow manages to be 'good value' (in some sense of the word, at least!) and we end it with the other side of the spectrum: the lowest price we've ever seen on a 1TB NVMe SSD. Box are asking just £57 for this Integral M-Series model, which supports 2000MB/s reads and 1600MB/s writes. Compare that to £75.99 for the same drive on Amazon, and you've got the makings of a great deal.

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Do you like first-person games where you operate complex machinery by manually typing commands into computers and fiddling with buttons and switches and gadgets? Check out the demo for Voices Of The Void, an upcoming game about running a space radio telescope array. Alone. In the woods. It has a pleasing manual process to find, target, and analyse signals, and a whole complex of servers and machinery to mantain. Plus, y'know, a whole feeling of creeping dread from gazing into space and wondering if anyone is looking back.

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You know what's quite lovely if you can afford it? Having a truly massive hard drive or SSD. Back in the day, I was over the moon when I picked up a 750MB drive for my gaming PC - I could do a full install of Civilization 2! And have room left over for X-Wing Alliance! These days, PC storage offers slightly larger capacities, but the thrill of having a really giant drive remains as strong as ever.

That brings me to the subject of today's deal post: the Crucial P3, a 4TB (!) NVMe drive capable of 3500MB/s sequential reads, is down to £299.99 at Amazon. That's a £90 reduction from its usual price, and an incredible deal for one of the biggest NVMe SSDs on the market.

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