Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Headcrab botherers Valve have registered a trademark for something called Neon Prime this week, an application filing has revealed. The application was made through the United States Patent And Trademark Office. Neon Prime’s trademark was listed as for “computer game software, electronic game software, video game software, computer game programs downloadable via the internet”. So, not VR or Steam Deck hardware then.

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A new blog post detailing Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare 2’s Ricochet anti-cheat strategy has revealed that only PC players will be asked to register a phone number before they can play the game. This is different from the blanket phone registration requirements that Activision Blizzard implemented for Overwatch 2’s Defense Matrix at that game’s launch at the beginning of this month, before removing them for most players last week. Modern Warfare 2 players on both Battle.net and Steam will need to register a number.

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Minecraft players have been able to vote on a new mob once a year ever since 2017, and this year’s polling begins today. Things are working a little differently for 2022’s mob vote, though. Instead of casting your vote on Twitter, you’ll be able to head into a dedicated carnival-themed Bedrock server, do it in the Minecraft launcher, or on Minecraft.net. Devs Mojang will reveal which mob scored the most votes during the Minecraft Live livestream tomorrow.

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Scorn is a deliberately grim game with a lot of body horror. Best avoid it and this review if you have issues with body horror themes.

I was talking to a friend about Scorn and they asked, "Is there a story?". And yeah, Scorn has a story. At some point there'll be a two hour YouTube video outlining how it has a clear and nuanced plot, or that it's a metaphor for periods and erections, or both. In the immediate, it's about slithering out of a pod, staggering through the desert, and finding yourself in a strange, huge rotting machine made of rock and flesh that's already decades into abandonment and decay, and where most things look a bit penisy or womby. It's about the lizardy parasite latched to your back gradually transforming your body. It's about grim squishy noises and survival.

Scorn doesn't have dialogue, or a map. It doesn't really have a HUD, it doesn't have quest markers, and your character will not, upon seeing a strange new device, say something like "Hmm... seems like a key. Maybe if I find the two missing ones, it'll open up a way forward!" out loud. It won't even pull focus to the corridor you should check next. You just have to look around, experiment, and figure it out. I think I like it. I don't know if I can recommend it.

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Fantastical slice-of-life adventure game A Space For The Unbound has resolved its publishing problems, developers Mojiken Studio have revealed. In a joint statement with UK-based publishers PQube, shared on the game’s Twitter account, Mojiken and the game’s PC publishers Toge Productions said they’ve “reached an agreement to the satisfaction of all parties”. Toge Productions will continue to handle publishing for A Space For The Unbound on PC, while Chorus Worldwide are taking over console publication.

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Have you ever wanted to make your PC hardware boot slower for the sake of a sight gag? Now you can on the Steam Deck, with Valve’s latest Beta client update extending the maximum length of custom startup animations from 10 to 30 seconds.

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The EVGA P6 850W is a great high-capacity power supply, and today it's been discounted by £30 over at Scan, dropping from £120 to £90. That's a good deal on a PSU that meets the steep requirements of the RTX 4090, as well as Nvidia's more sanely-specced RTX 40-series cards like the RTX 4080 16GB and the RTX 4070 4080 12GB.

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The Ryzen 7 5800X was a great gaming CPU when it launched in 2020, and it remains one of the fastest options going despite the recent release of Ryzen 7000 processors late last month. The 5800X also has two major advantages: it works on a wide range of cheap motherboards with DDR4 RAM, and it's way cheaper than the 7700X - especially when it's discounted on Ebay US, as is the case today!

So: let's cut to the chase. The 5800X is down to $229.99 at Ebay, from a list price of $449, meaning it's nearly 50% off. That also makes it $170 cheaper than the equivalent Ryzen 7000 processor, the $400 eight-core Ryzen 7700X. Or, to put it another way, you're paying around 60% of the price for at least 80% of the gaming performance of that newer CPU - not bad, given that you'll also pay way less for a complete Ryzen 5000 system (with AM4 motherboards and DDR4) than a complete Ryzen 7000 one (with AM5 motherboards and DDR5).

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Board games based on Final Fantasy 7 Remake and Final Fantasy spin-off Chocobo's Dungeon are in the works. News of the games was spotted at board game trade convention Essen Spiel last week, though there's no official announcement yet.

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It was announced back in June that Spider-Man: Miles Morales would arrive on PC shortly after Marvel’s Spider-Man Remastered. And so it is. The date is November 18th, and there's a new PC trailer below with the requisite big writing talking about new graphics features.

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I have wanted to play Triangle Strategy since it was first announced for Nintendo Switch, but I realise now that I know next to nothing about it. All I've done is look at its screenshots and salivate at the mixture of 2D sprites, 3D environments, and tilt-shift camera trickery.

Beyond that, I know that it's a strategy RPG, and I know that it's out on PC as of today.

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CD Projekt Red recently updated Cyberpunk 2077 to add items from the new anime series, Cyberpunk: Edgerunners. Their own updates didn't add the show's omnipresent risk of cyberpsychosis, however, so a modder has stepped in to do it for them. The Wannabe Edgerunner mod adds a "humanity" cost to all cyberware implants and certain actions in the open-world shooter, as well as consequences for when your humanity gets too low.

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The developers of Röki are trading Norse mythology for Greek, it seems. Polygon Treehouse have announced that their next game is Mythwrecked: Ambrosia Island, a non-linear adventure about uncovering a mystery, restoring an island paradise, and making friends with Greek gods. They also call it a "friend 'em up", getting in there with the "'em up" description before we can.

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If I’m honest, I’m mainly into the Touhou Project for the bangin’ fanmade choons. But here’s a bangin’ fanmade game, Touhou Luna Nights: what might have been a fairly rote 2D Metroidvania, were it not for both some time-bending tricks and a few key influences from the official Touhou schmups.

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We celebrate all three of us being back on the Electronic Wireless Show podcast, but two thirds of us being be-plagued, by talking about rejuvinating the Earth - truly, the podcast host of us all. Inspired by new eco-friendly farming game Coral Island, which I've been playing this week, we talk about our favourite games that roll with an ecological protection theme. This is hard for Matthew, because he hates the environment (unless his immediate environment contains a can of Rio).

Matthew comes through with an excellent Cavern Of Lies about trees and tree monsters in games, where he attempts to pull the illusive Double Beckford on us. Does he succeed? Listen to find out.

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Detective games are often about filling in the blanks. A terrible crime will sit at the heart of them, yes, but most take place in the days and weeks that follow, where the bulk of your time is spent gathering clues and building a case to work out whodunnit. Rarely do you get to glimpse the immediate aftermath of the crime itself, where all the major suspects are still in play and their pockets are stuffed with incriminating evidence they'll no doubt be disposing of in the coming minutes.

The prime exception to this rule is Lucas Pope's Return Of The Obra Dinn, which gives you a time-travelling pocket watch to revisit the scenes of its many, many murders and work out exactly what happened to its 60-strong passenger list on its titular, ill-fated ship. Frogwares' Sherlock Holmes games and their mind palace visualisation techniques also warrant a mention here, and maybe even Outer Wilds at a push, if you count its 22-minute timeloop as an investigation scene several millennia in the making. But it's Obra Dinn that Color Gray Games emulate most strongly with their impressive debut in The Case Of The Golden Idol, which gives you a series of 12 murders to solve, each of which is presented as a freeze-frame vignette at the moment of death. You're still filling in blanks here, slotting names, objects and eventually verbs in its various scene scrolls to deduce whodunnit and howtheydunit, but this intriguing tale of 18th century high (and a secret) society, betrayals, backstabbing and murder most foul is a mystery game for the ages.

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Galactic strategiser Stellaris is inviting players to muck about with adjustments to the game’s combat this month in an open beta, starting today. The beta is running from now until the end of October to trial planned changes and rummage up some feedback for Stellaris’ next update, 3.6 Orion. Don’t worry if you just fancy playing regular Stellaris; this is an opt-in thing. You can find out more by watching the video below.

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A video that appears to have been sent to playtesters of Ubisoft’s mysterious session-based co-op shooter Project U has been shared on Twitter. It mostly consists of clips of the game’s dev team talking about playtests, but there are a few sections of gameplay and other footage from the game itself interspersed between those. Creative director Damien Kieken appears in the video, saying that the U in Project U “stands for Unite”.

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Fantasy construction sim Dwarf Fortress is, by the admission of its designers, difficult to learn and even harder to master. That’s why the game’s Steam version will have its own tutorial. Co-creator Zach Adams has roped in a novice playtester to try the tutorial out, in the form of his wife Annie. Annie bounced off the original, not-so-visually-appealing version of Dwarf Fortress. Yet, says Adams, the tutorial seems to be working to help Annie ease into the game at last.

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There’s an updated Steam app for phones and tablets, everyone. That’s a sentence I thought I’d never type. Describing it as “completely revamped”, the Android and iOS apps are essentially new and add a way to sign into your account on PC using a QR code, remote downloads from your Library, and customisable tabs. If you really enjoy looking at videos of swiping around on phones then you can watch Valve’s below.

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It’s been months since we’ve heard much from Bethesda’s upcoming sci-fi RPG Starfield, but studio director Todd Howard has been answering some questions about the game in a new video series. You can watch Howard chatting about the make-believe space programme below, where he covers if Starfield is hard sci-fi (not really), the games traits system, and dialogue. It seems that Starfield RPG's are incredibly chatty, with many times more dialogue than Fallout 4 and Skyrim.

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The RTX 4090 sure is expensive, huh? Wouldn't it be a shame if there was a graphics card that cost one eighth as much and offered the same basic technologies? Well, good news chums, EVGA's RTX 2060 SC Gaming model is available for £212 - and despite costing 12.5% the price of the RTX 4090, it delivers at least 25% of the performance - nice. That's like, double the value!

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The Samsung Odyssey G7 is one of the best gaming monitors in the world - or at least, that's what I keep telling myself after buying one last year. This is a 32-inch model, offering a 2560x1440 resolution, a 240Hz refresh rate and a DisplayHDR 600 certification that means it actually delivers impactful HDR - a rarity at this price point. Anyway, it's down to £499 today after a £100 discount, so listen up - here's why I rate this monitor so highly.

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Open-world hoverbike 'n' climbing game Sable is due to leave PC Game Pass on Sunday, and I only started playing today. I will not finish in time. That's fine. Honestly, I haven't finished half the games I've bought, and I've long since stopped thinking about 'The Backlog' as if I ever will. But I might enjoy this one week of exploring a gorgeous desert, climbing and gliding and hoverbiking, and you might too.

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Last time, you decided that utterly rinsing a place is better than an end credits song. This was a pretty close one, with rinsing taking 54% of the vote. Good. Onwards! This week, you must choose between two things which add fleeting novelty and surprise. What's better: temporarily piloting an enemy, or a game within the game just for funsies?

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Friends, let me admit something up top. I am the most tedious of Dead Rising apologists. I love its in-game timer. I adore its linear mission structure that is completely at odds with the expansive semi-open world shopping mall in which it takes place. Hell, I even like its severely stripped down Wii port. I firmly believe that Dead Rising is an all-time great, but also understand why folks have (reasonably) cooled on the game’s particular quirks.

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I've long been excited about the possibilities offered by upcoming tidying things up nicely game A Little To The Left, and back in May this year Alice0 (one of us is RPS's Mirror Universe Alice, but nobody knows which) finally had a crack at it. The way she wanted to organise keys wasn't what the game thought was the right way, and her article examined this frustration; she described the canonical correct solution as being that of a "domestic Joker".

The developers at Max Inferno Studios read this article and decided that, you know what? Alice0 was on to something. They contacted us to let us know that her piece was the inspiration for adding a feature called Let It Be, a skip puzzle function that you can access at any time. Anne Macmillan, who's a co-founder of Max Inferno Studios as well as artist and animator for A Little To The Left, was kind enough to talk to me about it.

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Hello, yes, it’s me, once again banging on about the WD Blue SN570. I just think it’s neat: a highly affordable yet remarkably quick M.2 SSD, with multiple capacities to choose from and regular sales making it even cheaper. Speaking of, today is the last day of the Amazon Prime Early Access Sale, which has the 1TB Blue SN570 down to £65.

That’s not quite its lowest price ever, but it does match its flash sale pricing during Prime Day back in July. And is an utter pittance for a 1TB NVMe SSD, let alone one that’s actually quite speedy. Amazon UK also have the 2TB version on sale for £128, just £1 more than its lowest dip on record (Prime Day 2022 again, as it happens). These prices are only available to Prime members, but the Blue SN570 ranks highly among the best SSDs for gaming, so they're well deserving of your cash if you’re in need of PC storage improvements.

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Games. So many, many games. Each and every week the game pile grows higher, forming the walls of a virtually impenetrable digital structure known only as the ‘backlog’. As the games multiply, thickening the increasingly cell-like walls of our den of entertainment, we can only gaze on and hope it doesn’t one day become our tomb. On that light note, it’s nice to see that SteamDB now has a section showing what games are coming out on Steam every week.

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If there's one thing that brings stability to my life, it's the escapism of reality TV. Below Deck: Mediterranean had me covered last winter (alongside its Sailing Yacht spin-off), as I watched super yacht crew toil to meet the demands of the wealthy and unhinged. Then Love Island stepped up to fill a large portion of my summer with curated chaos. One guy confessed "I licked her tit or whatever," in a shock revelation to his betrothed.

What's on the reality TV menu for winter? Ainori Love Wagon: Asian Journey, baby. It's on Netflix and I'm convinced it shares great parallels with some of my favourite RPGs of all time.

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Defining boomer shooter Doom, like Skyrim, is one of those games that’ll eventually be ported to everything. Microwaves. Checkouts. Voight-Kampff machines maybe, in the years to come. Right dang today though, you can (almost) play Doom in Notepad, or DOOMpad as its creator Samperson calls it. Catch a glimpse of the ripping and tearing in action by watching the video below.

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Cultic has really good headshots. I mean, it also has a lot of other things going for it, but it feels rude not to highlight this right at the very top because I think it’s important. Cultic’s headshots are sensational. Enemy noggins pop with a squelchy crack that tickles a very unnerving part of my brain, the resulting blood fountain spraying so high it causes the ceiling to drip with human juice long after your hopeless adversary has slumped to the floor. It’s gross. But. You know. It’s also kind of great.

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When there’s a Prime Day, Black Friday, or any other big dealspalooza involving games hardware, it never takes long to find a SteelSeries headset with a money-off sticker slapped across an earcup. This time, on the second and final day of Amazon’s Prime Early Access Sale, it’s also one of SteelSeries’ best headsets so far: the Arctis 7 wireless model.

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You probably already knew if you were willing and able to buy the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 after seeing its price announcement, so here’s a short version of the following review: Yes, on pure performance it’s the best graphics card for 4K you can get. Yes, DLSS 3 is the real deal. And no, neither of those make the RTX 4090 good value for money, even if it makes a compelling argument for Nvidia's latest upscaling tech.

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I first made the RPS treehouse aware of Kevin Costner's Waterworld The Game over a week ago, when I dumped this tweet in our work chat. At the time it was swiftly shot down as an obvious joke, and I was shamed, but now the freeware game based on a ten-second joke in a 1997 episode of The Simpsons is out. So who's laughing now, eh? Play it for yourself via creator Macaw45's itch.

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Imagine making all the incredible effort to get a spacecraft to another star system, only to crash it into a wild and unexplored world. That’s the gist of Stranded: Alien Dawn, a futuristic survival sim from the devs behind Surviving Mars that launches into early access today. The game puts you in charge of four survivors who’ll be up against the basic demands of continuing to exist, and facing dangerous alien creatures.

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Call Of Duty fans are getting worked up about whether there’ll be a new game in the military shooter series next year, as a yearly instalment has been tradition since 2005. Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier has waded in to allege that, while there will be some fresh COD in the offing, it’ll be in the form of something like a paid expansion for the upcoming Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 instead of a full game. A Modern Warfare 2.5, if you will.

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The Saints Row reboot sees its first major update next month, but don’t expect any new stuff in Santo Ileso to play around with. Devs Volition insist this one’s just concentrating on hunting down and squashing the game’s many bugs. As we noted when it was released in August, Saints Row has rather a few technical issues. While Volition say this means they’re not at the stage where they can be “talking about roadmaps and expansions”, they are at least releasing a free cosmetic pack this week that includes some boots that look like bananas.

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Gaming monitors don't have to be expensive. Right now you can pick up Dell's excellent G2722HS 27-in 1080p 165Hz monitor for just £129 after a massive £110 discount, courtesy of a HUKD discount code. That code is HUKDG2722HS, so just enter it at the checkout to get this monitor for an unbelievable price.

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New Blood Interactive have made a name with various flavours of retro first-person shooter, including Dusk, Amid Evil and Gloomwood. They're branching out into nostalgic throwbacks for other genres, however. To mark the 25th anniversary of the orignal Fallout, CEO Dave Oshry showed new footage from their unnamed, unannounced CRPG.

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