Rock, Paper, Shotgun

In the giant jumbled word cloud of all my qualities and traits, I'm willing to bet that "pluviophile" would be one of the biggest words. I adore rain. Whenever it starts, I tend to drop whatever I'm doing - work, dishes, significant other - and I'll be out frolicking in the downpour before they've hit the floor.

Because I love rain so much, I hold games to an almost unfair standard when it comes to the simulation of precipitation. How in the world can a videogame come close to emulating that wonderful, transcendental feeling of being outside in the middle of a thunderstorm? The answer is, it can't. Games have to rely on other things, like textures, sounds, and clever little animations to really sell the idea of being out amongst the H₂s and the Os.

The time has come, fellow pluviophiles. It's time to grade the very best rain that PC gaming has to offer. Below you'll find our eight worthy contenders. Each has been chosen for their spectacular rendition of one of nature's greatest phenomena. Each one shall be marked according to my patented and cutting-edge WIPERS grading system for digital rain. So drop what you're doing. It's time to frolick. No umbrella required.

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A pair of new hidden object games have a pleasingly straightforward name to describe their inception: I Commissioned Some Bees. The developer paid illustrators to draw pictures with bees, and you can find the bees. It's quite fun to find the bees. I got into hidden object games a few years back with the lovely Hidden Folks and the vast 100 Hidden X series, and today have enjoyed poring over colourful and often surreal landscapes to find our striped friends.

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We finally got our first glimpse of Starfield at the Xbox & Bethesda showcase at Summer Geoff Fest, having seen lots of clips of Todd Howard speaking words with devs who nodded across tables. I partly share the same opinion as Alice Bee, who thought the game could've shown us anything and they chose grey rocks again.

What I wasn't expecting was to feel a bit emotional about the game's reveal, though. I mean, I felt this weird swell in my chest of excitement or something. Maybe it was the crushing jet lag, or maybe it was a heady mixture of nostalgia. Let's investigate.

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Blizzard launched pre-orders for World Of Warcraft: Dragonflight this week, and in the small print on the Battle.net store page is a note stating that the MMO's next expansion "will be available on or before December 31, 2022." That simultaneously confirms that Dragonflight's release window is this year, and also threatens Blizzard's staff with the potential for a pretty crappy New Year's Eve.

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Into The Breach was our second favourite game of 2018 and remains the best strategy game ever made. So it's exciting news that Into The Breach: Advanced Edition is coming next month with new mechs, weapons and enemies to shove around in a free update.

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As odd as it might sound, there has long been an urban legend that Michael Jackson was involved in creating part of the soundtrack for Sonic 3. Now Sonic creator and Sonic 3 programmer Yuji Naka has seemed to lend credence to that legend on Twitter, as it relates to the replacement of certain tracks in the recently released remasters in Sonic Origins.

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A Plague Tale: Requiem is a stealth game with several fantastical elements. The first fantasy is that you can consistently remember how to spell "Requiem". The second is 'What would it be like if you had the power of rats?'. The third is, 'What if rats had any power to have?'. As a new extended trailer shows, the answer is: you can sense blood, and use that power to avoid the guards who want to do a big murder on you and your sister.

The trailer is worth watching for its own sake, but also comes with news: Requiem will launch on October 18th, forwarding another fantasy called 'What if a game actually came out in 2022 and wasn't delayed until next year?'.

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There are two reasons to consider playing the new 'Enhanced Edition' of Blade Runner over the version which hit GOG in 2019: 1) it has controller support; 2) it's on consoles. Beyond that, Nightdive's remastering has made Westwood's 1997 adventure game look notably uglier and you'd be better off with GOG's ScummVM version. The Enhanced Edition is out today and I've been flicking back and forth between the two versions, tutting. The Enhanced Edition still looks like a 25-year-old game, only now it looks 25 years old, blurry, and unlike itself.

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I still don't know whether to describe The Heroic Legend Of Eagarlnia as "complicated" or "simple". Before starting a game, it gives an impression of being a complex grand strategy that's something like a fantasy Total War with a D&D alignment system and a distinctly East Asian focus on characters and dialogue.

It's far simpler than that. There was a period of disappointment, even, when it seemed like there wasn't much to it at all. That's partly because it's easy to play it too passively, or get stuck in attritional stand offs, and partly because of the need for a bit too much repetition. But over time its subtler details become more apparent, and your choices start to feel more multifaceted.

And yet, it remains at heart the same throughout. On your first ten turns you're doing the same actions as in your 200th, and its battles in particular are largely hands off. So maybe it's complicated, but simple to actually play? Hmm.

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An ongoing crash in cryptocurrency prices is causing some miners to abandon ship, selling off their racks of graphics cards at discount prices in a bid to recoup some cash. Wccftech spotted that some erstwhile miners across China and South Asia, previously encouraged by low energy costs, are even hosting livestreamed auctions to get rid of their GPU ‘stock’ en masse.

First off: ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. Second, while it’s entertaining to imagine desperate crypto barons hosting a kind of QVC channel for dusty PC components, I wouldn’t necessarily take this as a long-overdue opportunity to upgrade your graphics card on the cheap.

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It's time once again for an episode of The Electronic Wireless Show podcast. This week Nate returns, but Matthew is away - and since he is the real agent of chaos, Nate and I have a remarkably sensible conversation about different weather and seasons in a lot of games. Who'd have thought? Not me. And in fact there is weather in all sorts of places you wouldn't expect to look.

Don't worry, though, because we find time to talk about how our weeks have been, as well as a bit where I tell Nate there's going to be a survival crafting game set in Moria and he gets excited. Also, stay tuned for a Cavern Of Lies where Nate does a lot of cowboy voices. And shout out to John for sending in cheery EWS fan game Aquarium Assault: Dark Day For A Dogfish!

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After a high-end PSU to accompany your new graphics card - or to get ready for the high-power next-gen GPUs rumoured to debut later this year? This is the deals post for you. British retailer and PC builder AWD-IT is offering a Thermaltake Toughpower GF 850W 80+ Gold modular power supply for £60, down from £90. To get this discounted price, use code TT850W at the checkout.

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Valve are kicking off 2022’s Steam Summer Sale today with discounts on AAA and indie games, starting at 6pm BST/7pm CEST/10am PST. It’s being styled as the ‘Steam 3000’ sale even though that year is a long way off according to my calendar. For some reason, Valve have decided they're doing videos to hype this stuff now too. You can watch the trailer below to get some idea of what might be discounted very soon.

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The RTX 3060 is the best value 1080p graphics card, and recently it's gotten significantly cheaper as next-gen Nvidia GPUs have been rumoured. Right now, you can pick up a Gigabyte RTX 3060 Eagle 12GB for just £330 at Scan UK, a £61 reduction over the same card at Amazon UK and some £40 cheaper than the cheapest RTX 3060 we spotted last month. If you're in the market for a new GPU and you've got a 1080p monitor, this is an awesome shout.

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The HP Reverb G2 is surprisingly similar take on the Valve Index VR headset, and now it's going cheap from HP's American web store. The headset, which has a US MSRP of $599, is now going for $399, which according to my abacus is $200 off.

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Hyenas is a sci-fi, team-based shooter that is not at all what I was expecting next from the developers who make the Total War series. Set in that most dodgy of times, the future, Hyenas is about pilfering relics of pop culture such as Pez dispensers, Mega Drives and Sonic The Hedgehog paraphernalia before tech billionaires who’ve colonised Mars can furnish their homes with it all. You can be bemused at your own leisure by watching the trailer below.

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AMD's Ryzen 3600 is one of the best value gaming CPUs, and now it's available for just £170 with a Gigabyte B450M motherboard from AWD-IT. That's a £50 reduction from its normal price, and some £22 cheaper than the CPU and cooler on Amazon. This would make an excellent start to a new system, with the 3600's six cores and twelve threads pairing well with a modern RTX 20-series or Radeon RX 5000-series or later graphics card.

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I don't tend to be biased towards games just because they're new, so I feel it carries some weight when I say that The Sims 4 Werewolves Game Pack has immediately become one of my favourite add-ons for The Sims 4. Having been a fan of the Vampires and Realm Of Magic (a.k.a. wizards, basically) game packs since their respective releases, I can safely say that Werewolves has done an excellent job iterating and expanding on what worked from those previous supernatural outings.

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I was in LA for Summer Geoff Fest and I played a whole bunch of games. No, not lots of blockbusters – mainly because there weren't too many of those about - but lots of indies, instead. In fact, out of all the games I saw or played or glanced at while I dashed between appointments, it was the indies that really stood out.

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Former Ubisoft developer Charles Randall has been spilling the beans about the original Assassin’s Creed on Twitter again. This time, Randall made several of the RPS team spit out their tea when he revealed that the game’s horse model is really a stretched out human skeleton. That’s some genuinely nightmarish imagery to contemplate first thing in the morning.

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When I got a hands off look at Oxenfree II: Lost Signals, my analysis was that it looked a lot like Oxenfree and therefore if you liked Oxenfree you would like this. I have now played through a small bit of the game, a slightly extended version of the area I saw in the hands off preview, and my analysis is... largely the same.

I know that's very boring, but it's also positive, isn't it? Oxenfree was good, and Oxenfree II looks to be doing those same things that made Oxenfree good. A 2D, side-on supernatural thriller with radios. Good thing remains good! In a world where sequels to beloved media seem to only get progressively worse, I'll happily take it (especially since this one is a Netflix-published project now). And although it's directly related to the first game, the characters and happenings in Oxenfree II are distinct enough that it's going to be accessible if you're new to the series. And even if you did play the first game, it's possible that Oxenfree II will be more thrilling and unsettling to you now, five years later.

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Now that all the unusually stressful benchmarking is out the way, let’s talk how mineral-grubbing “quest shooter” The Cycle: Frontier performs on PC. Short version: pretty well! It can make do with older and lower-end hardware at 1080p, and scales nicely all the way up to 4K and ultrawide resolutions, taking full advantage of the best graphics cards or the best gaming monitors with high refresh rates. If your rig is only just scraping past the system requirements, there are also some chunky performance improvements available via the right graphics settings tweaks.

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Last time, you decided that undo is better than invert mouse. For many people, this result will turn the world on its head. And if those otherworldly beings with horrifying ideas about piloting meat puppets take this personally, maybe we can hit undo to save ourselves. This week, it's a question of control. What's better: air control, or an AI-controlled friend just running about helping me fight?

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Team Fortress 2 has been updated by Valve today in response to the player-led #saveTF2 campaign that’s seeking an answer to the classic multiplayer shooter’s bot epidemic. However, the automatically applied update is primarily intended to sort out a variety of daft-sounding exploits. These range from teleporting back to your spawn point by changing loadout or class while touching the other team’s No Entry gate, to Spies disguising themselves and creating an invisible shield at their feet to block incoming fire.

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Today sees the arrival of season one of free-to-play sci-fi looter shooter The Cycle: Frontier with the 1.2.0 patch. The game soft-launched with a pre-season on June 8th, so its transition into the first season seems to consist largely of the launch of its Fortuna battle pass. Here’s a trailer detailing what the pass entails, below.

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Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick was successfully re-elected to the board of directors for another year as a result of the company's annual shareholder meeting yesterday. This was despite efforts by company employees and shareholders to oust Kotick, which began in November. You can read the outcomes of the meeting in full here.

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The Razer Basilisk Ultimate is one of the best wireless mice on the market, offering a comfortably wide design with plenty of buttons and a fancy scroll wheel - a popular recipe that could also describe the Logitech G502. The Basilisk Ultimate normally oscillates between $140 and a sale price of $90, but today it's gone lower - it's $80 at Amazon. That's a pretty solid price for what you're getting!

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Bō: Path Of The Teal Lotus launched on Kickstarter back in February and quickly cleared its funding goal for a Metroidvania based on Japanese folklore. It has gained even more attention in the last day or so, because its creation reunites some of the people who worked on AM2R, the well-liked unofficial Metroid 2 remake that Nintendo DMCA'd out of existence in 2016.

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Ebay is offering 15% off on a range of a products, allowing you to get the AMD Ryzen 9 5900X 12-core processor for a historic low price: £342. To get the discount, use code BIG15 at the checkout.

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I am continually on the lookout for the next management game to obsess me, and Good Company looks like a good candidate. It's a tycoon factory builder about forming a technology company and leading it, from product design through hiring staff and all the way to replacing those staff with robots. It looks cute and, as of its departure from Steam Early Access today, robust.

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The Hunter: Call Of The Wild took Avalanche's technical expertise in creating open worlds, gained by making the Just Cause series, and employed it instead to create an open world hunting sim. Well, now Call Of The Wild: The Angler is intending to do it again, with an open world fishing game in which you walk or drive in search of the perfect spot to cast your line.

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A new patent filing might offer the first look at designs for Valve's next VR headset, a rumoured standalone device codenamed "Deckard". The filing, made last year and published this past week, describes a head-mounted display with a rear housing, and the mechanisms by which that display could be adjusted. It's not thrilling stuff - but it is further confirmation that Valve continue to work on designs for VR hardware.

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I love the name "SpellForce", mid-word capital letter and all. It conjures a mental image of a kid’s TV show where some, possibly sentai-style, superheroes learn about the importance of spelling and grammar. Maybe a little punctuation, as a treat. SpellForce the video game series isn’t that; it’s a trio of RPG-RTS hybrids which, by the time you read this, will have had a new entry announced in the form of SpellForce: Conquest Of Eo. It’s a fresh, turn-based take on the series which casts the player as a wizard attempting to further their mastery of magic.

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Since The Cycle: Frontier is having its second (???) launch tomorrow, June 22nd, I thought I’d knock together a performance and settings guide to mark the occasion. This would involve, as they always do, a bunch of benchmark tests: repeatable runs through a specific area or sequence that would give an accurate indication of how different settings and hardware affect performance. In most games these are either quick and easy or time-consuming and easy, but not The Cycle: Frontier. Oh no.

See, without a dedicated benchmarking tool, running these kinds of tests requires a certain controllable environment, where variables are known and parameters can be reset in a click. This is not the case for The Cycle: Frontier, whose environment is usually trying to fucking kill you, particularly though the unavoidable presence of other players. I’ve never sat down to record some average FPS values only to spend half my time cowering behind a tree, fearful of being shot, robbed and – worst of all – forced to start work over again.

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Yesterday I wrote about eco-strategy game Terra Nil’s demo, which went gangbusters during last week’s Steam Next Fest and shot up into the top 50 most played games on Valve’s storefront. Well, turns out that might be at least partly down to a practice called badge-farming. That’s according to industry pundit Simon Carless’ latest GameDiscoverCo newsletter, anyway.

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So, you went and flubbed a Reservoir Dogs type of deal, and now you’re a dead’un. As if that wasn’t bad enough, it turns out that Heaven is a corrupt bureaucracy that’s absolutely stuffed with shadowy demons and talking cats. Those demons become your problem when god decides to give you a chance to earn your place in Heaven by committing murder - stylish, speedrunning, parkouring demon murder. It’s perdition with extra steps, then, but is it any fun? Dear reader, Neon White kicks ass.

The game opens with an extremely anime narrative sequence and we’re introduced to the lovable (and less so) doofuses we’ll be shooting up paradise with. This is where most folks will stop and squee at the fact that player character Neon White is voiced by the incomparable Steve Blum, perhaps known best for his role as sonorous space cowboy Spike Spiegel in Cowboy Bebop. White is joined by his fellow demon-slaying Neons including Yellow (best boy), Violet (sucks), Red (mysterious), and Green (bad guy).

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Sci-fi 4X strategy Dune: Spice Wars has finally brought multiplayer to the desert planet of Arrakis with its latest update. Players can now jump into the futuristic space shoes of one of the game’s factions in paired matches, or free-for-alls for four against other players or bots. Try not to get sand in your eyes while you watch the trailer below.

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Last time I played Raft, it was a small but solid survival game about hauling rubbish from the ocean to expand your little slab of planks into a roaming home and farm while fending off hungry sharks. That was maybe 2018. Now, Raft has finally launched out of early access and whoa what is this game now? Undersea cities to explore? Utopian biodomes? A whole post-apocalyptic story? Friendly wildlife like whales and turtles? More murderous fish? Have a look at the cooperative survival wonders in the new trailer, below.

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Blizzard have confirmed they’re delaying the launch of gem-wrangling time sink Diablo Immortal in the Asia Pacific region until July 7th, so they can complete “optimization”. The delay was originally announced on Sunday by the game’s regional publisher in China, NetEase, and was picked up on by industry analyst Daniel Ahmad on Twitter. The decision to delay came a few days after Chinese microblogging site Sina Weibo banned the Diablo Immortal account due to unspecified "violation of related laws and regulations".

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Wacky battle royale Fall Guys is going free to play from today, so you no longer have any excuses not to try it other than an inability to decide on an outfit for your bean to wear. I’m partial to the giant foam hand costume myself. However, Fall Guys has also been removed from sale on Steam so it can become an Epic Games Store exclusive. Don’t worry if you already own the game on Steam though, because you’ll still have access through Valve’s launcher. Here’s some bouncy Free For All update gameplay in the trailer below.

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