The Logitech G502 Hero is the mouse of choice for the average RPS reader, and today it's down to $37.99 on Amazon. That's some $42 off its MSRP and around $10 cheaper than it was just a few weeks ago. That's a great price for a staggeringly popular mouse that sports a dual-mode scroll wheel, 11 programmable buttons and a modern optical sensor.
The slow, stealthy progress of the PC absorbing PlayStation has taken another step this week with the latest Assassin’s Creed Valhalla patch. Players using PlayStation 5 controllers with Ubi’s Viking romp will now feel an extra step when pulling the adaptive triggers while aiming, just before letting an arrow loose. This was a PlayStation 5 feature, but now we have it too. Just like we’ll soon have Uncharted 4.
As we've previously mentioned, X-Wing Alliance Upgrade is an incredible overhaul of the ancient space shooter that makes it look like it was made yesterday, in a galaxy right next door. Everything has been renewed by the modders, bringing 3D cockpits, gorgeous lighting, upgraded ship models, and even VR to the game. That spectacular work has resulted in another remake.
TIE Fighter: Total Conversion is a mod for Star Wars: X-Wing Alliance, perfectly recreating one of the best space games and arguably best ever Star Wars game of all time, Star Wars: TIE Fighter. It once again has me plugging in my headset and dusting off my joystick.
I’m not being pithy for the sake of a headline. Space Punks really does look a lot like Borderlands: it’s a cartoonish, co-op looter shooter. The key differences are that it's top-down (like Borderlands' original inspiration of Diablo), the shooting looks a lot more fun and OTT, and the comedy begins and ends by adding the word ‘space’ to everything.
Sometimes when I'm reading a book or doing the dishes, I need a bit of ambience to carry me through. Lo-fi music often does the trick, so when I spotted that Riot Games Music had released a League Of Legends themed lo-fi compilation, I hesitantly dipped my ear in. And I didn't recoil! In fact, I added it to my saved albums. Now that's a seal of approval.
Crank your gamma up. There’s some new System Shock footage here for you to squint at. The remake of the 1994 classic has taken some twists and turns in its development, even rebooting itself, but it’s now at a place where they’re happy to take you through the Research level of Citadel station. The seven minutes of footage below shows off sneaking, shooting, and some hacking. You need to turn your lights down to see it, though.
Like many, Theme Hospital was a mainstay of my middle childhood. Bullfrog's appreciably wacky approach to a hospital management sim has ensured that, to this day, management sims are one of the only strategy-adjacent sort of strategy games that I really enjoy. And a few years ago, a new stuidio emerged to take up that odd torch, providing us with Two Point Hospital.
Alas, BioWare aren't attending EA play this month, which means no major look at Dragon Age 4 is in the cards. Instead, they've shown off more concept art for another of the series' familiar organisations. It's the stealthy and stylish Antivan Crows this time around—the assassin faction that we've yet to see all that much of in previous games. It's a tiny scrap of information, but hey, I think the Crows are cool as heck and I'm pretty psyched that they could be getting some time at center stage.
In this summer's episode of speedrunners doing the darndest things, I've been gifted yet another absolutely ridiculous feat of level skipping. Wiggling their way out of bounds isn't a new trick for speedrunners by any means, but what's waiting beyond the walls in stealth romp Styx: Shards Of Darkness was not at all what I expected. As part of Summer Games Done Quick earlier today, speedrunner "Tohelot" shows off how he's able to skip through sections of the game by activating secret logic flowcharts that can be found physically hanging around beneath the level.
Razer's bundles are a great way to get PC peripherals at a discounted price, and today a great one with a wireless mouse, wireless headset and case has appeared at Sam's Club in the US. The cost is $49.91, which is great considering the Basilisk X Hyperspeed mouse costs $45 and the Hammerhead True Wireless earbuds cost $55.
Note that if you order this online, you'll need to pay $8 shipping if you're not a Sam's Club Plus member, but you'll still end up well ahead compared to buying these three items separately!
The MSI Optix G273QF gaming monitor has been discounted today to £222.50, which is £26 cheaper than we've ever seen it before - and way below its similarly specced rivals. This 27-in 1440p 165Hz model is actually part of the same breed of Fast IPS gaming monitors like the LG 27GL850 and Dell S2721DGF, both of which are popular choices for the category and retail for north of £300, so this kind of price is really unprecedented!
It's officially official, "Oculus Rift is no longer available" says the Oculus website. After signaling the Rift's retirement last year, Oculus have now ended sales for the headset on their website. New Oculus users will now be looking at the cheaper, more versatile Quest 2 headset. Corpo parent Facebook does require an account to use the Quest 2, but RPS still reckons it's the best low-cost VR headset you can grab right now and a worthy successor to what used to be one of the the best VR headsets.
Another E3 has come and gone without Rockstar Games talking about Grand Theft Auto VI, but that sure hasn't stopped everyone else from chatting about it. Rockstar still haven't actually announced their next crime 'em up in any official capacity, but most folks are operating under the assumption that they must be working on it. They must be, right? There've been all sorts of GTA 6 rumors over the years, though new reports have now cropped up suggesting an eventual 2024 or 2025 launch date for the assumed GTA 6 and a modern Vice City setting. Here's what's being said and who's saying it, in the absence of Rockstar announcing anything themselves.
Extraterrestrial colony sim RimWorld sure does have a spot on several "best of genre" lists [best management games, and best building games, and more] here in RPS territory and—would you look at that—the best only get better. RimWorld has announced its upcoming Ideology expansion which will let you create colonies of "tree-worshipping cannibals who carve skulls into every piece of furniture, or blind tunnelers who shun the light, or transhumanists obsessed with perfecting the human form using exotic technology". Ludeon Studios say they're looking to launch the expansion, and the major 1.3 free update alongside it in "about 2 weeks". Just enough time to plan exactly what kind of oddball ideological mashup you want to saddle your next colony with.
As predicted, this weekend I have mostly been playing Fossil Corner, a game in which you are a retired paleontologist who was going to go on a cruise and then decided they just love fossils too much. So now they have gone back to quietly unpacking and categorising them in their garage.
You get a box of shells (and later, when you get well good, trilobites, those little whiskery arthropods that look like woodlice) and organise them by generation, observing one change per step in the family tree. A pattern might change in one direction, for example, or a shape might flip in another. Maybe a triolobite gets a different number of segements, or some cool little horns. It's very satisfying. And after each box you solve, you get to keep a fossil!
Sundays are for going to the dump to shift all my junk. Before you sling bin bags over your shoulder, let's read this week's best writing about games.
Back when it first launched, Guild Wars 2 was exciting to everyone I knew. If you liked World Of Warcraft, it seemed like a game that intelligently built on some similar ideas; and if you didn't, it seemed like WoW but good.
Several years later, FFXIV seems to have earned that title in the MMO space, but Guild Wars 2 isn't done. While announcing the next expansion End Of Dragons had slipped into next year, ArenaNet also announced several new hires and changes designed to prepare the aged MMO for a long term future.
Speedrun stream bonanza Summer Games Done Quick, or SGDQ, kicks off tomorrow. If you've not watched before, it's a days-long livestream in which different people complete games as rapidly as possible to aid charity. There are always some gems among the runs, as players find ways to complete games that would normally take dozens of hours in just a few dozen minutes.
Elite Dangerous Odyssey added the ability to walk around planets and complete missions on foot to Frontier's vast space sim. It also added lots of bugs, performance issues, and features which felt incomplete. Frontier have been patching the game since, and the latest update is a big one.
The Frog Detective games are short, joy-filled mysteries about a frog with a vacant smile. They're lovely - and now there's going to be a third one. Frog Detective 3: Corruption At Cowboy County is coming later this year, and there's a first trailer below.
Mortal Kombat 11 launched a couple of years ago and players have been kept fed with a steady drip of new DLC and characters. No more, say developers NetherRealm. They're now focusing on their unnamed next project, leaving MK11 behind.
This week has been one of great import, with upheaval and emotion. That's right: Love Island is back on ITV. You don't have to watch it to enjoy the sentence "I'm Chuggs, I'm 23, and I run a bucket hat business in Surrey".
Oh, also we have a new editor-in-chief now (though I feel the fact that there is a human being called Chuggs is a similar tier in terms of big news). Anyway, all hail Katharine. Please, nobody speak to Graham ever again.
In upcoming cybercrimes RPG Gamedec you're a video game detective. As in, a detective in the game but also a detective about games. As you'd expect from a sleuth 'em up, Gamedec's story can twist and change based on your detective's choices, background, and more. Or, as we say in this here world of video games, it has a branching narrative. How many branches? According to Gamedec's new trailer, it has all of the branches. You're bound to hit a few of them on the way down when it launches in September.
Larian Studios recently made clear that their next big RPG Baldur's Gate 3 is "for sure" not leaving early access this year. It is for sure still getting big early access patches though, including their next major one Patch 5. Larian say it's scheduled to go live next week, as is another of their silly big livestreams to show off what's coming.
Mega game mod hosting site Nexus Mods have revealed more information about their upcoming Collections feature which they hope will make installing mods a more approachable experience for users. In anticipation of launching the Collections system, Nexus say that mods can no longer be completely deleted from the site. Instead, mod authors will be able to archive files, though they'll still be downloadable via Collections that include them. It's a big change, and Nexus have written a rather long post (longer than this one) explaining the "how"s, "why"s, and "what now"s of the new system.
Doom Eternal’s post-launch Invasion mode, which would have enabled other players to jump into your single-player campaign as demons, is deader than a Cacodemon’s dating profile. Id announced today that the Covid-19 pandemic’s impact was a major factor in dropping development. Instead of letting other players cosplay as enemies in your game, they’ll turn their attention to a single-player horde mode instead.
The Sims 4's next expansion is the ridiculously idyllic version of British countryside living. Electronic Arts revealed the Cottage Living expansion last month and they've now called up a local llama to give you the details. Why the llama? Well he's more English than I am, so I trust he knows more about the affairs of the new Henford-on-Bagley neighbourhood than I do. Here's Harold in a new trailer to show off livestock, canning, local fairs and more.
The Saturday morning cartoon version of Capcom’s Monster Hunter games, Monster Hunter Stories 2: Wings Of Ruin, is out July 9. That’s close enough for them to whip up the launch trailer below. As we’re approaching the release date, Capcom just released a look at the game’s coop mode, and have announced that there’s going to be a demo for everyone to try on launch day.
Here’s the launch trailer.
Pride month is over now, but you still have a couple more days to grab a massive bundle of games and things from queer developers over on Itch.io. The Queer Games Bundle contains 236 items, from video game RPGs to tabletop RPGs, as well as dating sims, software, zines and more. All money raised from the bundle is split evenly between all the creators involved in it, and at the time of writing they've made over $102,000 (around £74,500).
Now that we're over the E3 hump, Imogen and I thought we'd catch a break on this week's episode of the Ultimate Audio Bang. But no, the online shooters simply do not stop reloading. PUBG dropped a new map on its test servers, Warzone fixed its murder door, and Valorant's new agent sounds very overpowered.
And speaking of agents, our theme this week was, well, agents/heroes/operators/characters, or whatever else you'd call them in an online shooter. We both went down the Overwatch route because my word does that game have some good heroes. I think they're called heroes?
It was Imogen's turn to surprise me with some strange names she's played with this week. Amazingly, two of them weren't Sage players in Valorant. Unbelievable.
Monster Hunter Rise isn't due to arrive on PC until early next year, but I've been playing the Switch version over the last week after getting the game for my birthday - and I actually can't stop. Over the last couple of weeks, I've been slicing up its oversized lizards with my beloved Dual Blades like nobody's business, gutting their scales, pelts, fangs and goodness knows what else to make even stronger pairs of dino pants so I can get back out there and take on ever-larger beasties and make ever more fashionable trousers. It's a familiar rhythm to Monster Hunter games of yore, but there's something about Rise that's kept me hooked far longer than my jaunts in previous MonHan games, including PC mega hit Monster Hunter: World. And I think it's partly down to my new dog friends, the Palamutes.
While BioWare are keeping their lips sealed on Dragon Age and Mass Effect newness for now, they've announced some surprise newness for their 10-year old MMO, Star Wars: The Old Republic. They're launching a new expansion named Legacy Of The Sith, which will add new story, combat styles, areas and more. It's coming out towards the end of this year, and the devs say this is the start of a year-long celebration for the game's 10th anniversary (so even more updates will arrive throughout 2022).
I think I am slightly out of sync with the original fortnightly schedule for this, owing to E3 destroying about a week of our lives, but now I'm back! Or rather, I'm gone - to my mum's house again. This means that my big rig is alone in Brighton, while I am here with my MacBook Air for company.
As such, everything this week is also playable on Mac OS. And blimey, loads of good games are on Mac these days, aren't they? It's a really great distraction from all the spiders in this house, and the fact that the shower osscilates between being freezing cold and boiling, bum-burning hot. The actual realities of cottagecore would shock you people.
A lot of video games have silly names and there's no reason for it. It just confuses the potential player. Why call it Mass Effect when you could instead call it Kiss Kiss Bang Bang? So, for Mystery Steam Reviews this week, we're celebrating those video games that tell it like it is.
If you were just dying to know more about zombie parkour 'em up Dying Light 2, then that's great, because developers Techland showed off a new gameplay trailer in their latest "Dying 2 Know" livestream. First thing to note: there is a lot of parkour. Second: the stealth actually looks quite good. And third: you will recognise many of these zombies.
A Dead Space return has long been rumoured, with everything from a remaster of the first game to a new game being hinted at. It looks like it’ll be somewhere in between, with reports suggesting that EA Motive are working on a remake of the original game, and an expected reveal at July 22’s EA Play Live.
I joined Rock Paper Shotgun in 2013 with the vague mandate from Jim Rossignol to "do whatever needs doing." For the past eight years, it's been a pleasure to do just that.
Now my time has come. The corporate mother has chosen me and today is devouring day. I'm no longer the editor-in-chief of Rock Paper Shotgun, but I'm excited to introduce who is.
Back in April, Humble Bundle removed the sliders that let buyers determine how much money from their purchase went to a publisher, a charity, and Humble themselves, effectively capping the amount you could give to charity at 15%. It wasn't a great look for a charity-based storefront, and following a lot of backlash, they rolled back the change shortly after. Now, however, they've announced a new tweak to the system, making it so the minimum you can allocate to Humble will be between 15% and 30%.
After six months of silence, we’ve finally received a new update on Hytale’s progress. The ambitious, Minecraft-inspired RPG’s previous release date of 2021 has been obliterated, with developers Hypixel Studios saying: “We no longer expect to be ready to launch Hytale before 2023 at the earliest, and it could very well take longer.”
