Tis the season for online games to get all haunted for a few weeks. Borderlands 3‘s Bloody Harvest is back with more skins to earn and spooks to shoot. It’s on from now until November 5th, so you’ve got some time to check it out alongside all the other in-game events on your schedule.
For those that don’t know, The PC Gaming Weekspot is a live, weekly video podcast that myself and my former VidBud Matthew Castle do every Monday evening over on the Rock Paper Shotgun YouTube channel. It’s a recap of the last seven days in PC gaming, with chat on the latest news, as well as some reviews on the latest games. But there’s one segment we do during The Weekspot that’s grown into a monster. A monster that I think you’d like, which is why I want to share it with you.
Cloud Imperium’s space-em-up MMO, Star Citizen, has got a new alpha build for players to muck around in, with changes that’ll let you do more PvP. The Alpha 3.11 High Impact update is doing away with a load of the game’s safe Armistice Zones, and is adding new spaceships, as well as a Halloween event running throughout October. It doesn’t end there though, because on top of all that they’ve released a little teaser trailer for the upcoming singleplayer story game, Squadron 42, as well.
While Destiny 2 welcomed a whole lot of new players when it went free-to-play last October, it didn’t do much more than open the door and gesture broadly in the direction of a 100-person party raging across every room of the house. New players are dropped in at the deep end, and it’s not fun. So it’s good to hear more of Bungie’s plans for a friendlier new player experience in the zone where Destiny began, the Cosmodrome.
Bungie have (mostly) good news for veteran players too, revealing plans to overhaul armour mod slots to be less of a faffy mess.
The 25 pictures in a cluster foxer are arranged in 5 discretely/discreetly themed clusters. Pictures in a particular cluster must be cardinally contiguous to be valid. For example, a1, b1, c1, d1, d2 is a possible cluster, unlike a2, b2, c2, d2, e3. To fully defox today’s enlargeable puzzle identify the themes and constituent images of all five clusters. (more…)
I wanted to burn the following appetisers onto a CD then sellotape the disc to the front cover of today’s column but Graham said that was “technically impossible” so links and enticing descriptions will have to suffice. Be aware that most of the demos detailed below will self-destruct when the ongoing Steam Game Festival ends next Tuesday, and that the line-up is the result of careful curation not haphazard Googling. Not all of the trials I played this week passed my fussy quality control criteria. (more…)
Sony published a teardown video of their new PlayStation 5 console the other day, revealing an intriguing detail about its expandable storage options. While its internal 825GB SSD is soldered straight onto the PS5’s mainboard, you’ll also find there’s an M.2 slot for additional SSDs underneath the main white cover. The same slot we PC folk currently have on our motherboards for connecting NVMe SSDs to it. Handy!
As you roam the dark crypts and monster-filled plains of Baldur’s Gate 3 you’ll want to keep your party’s HP filled, as well as any spell slots for applicable party members. A great way to do so is by using rests. There are two kinds of rests available: short rests and long rests. Each has its benefits, which we’ll explain below.
It looks like Valorant is getting a new healer that might take some of the pressure off of all you Sage mains this month. Last night, Riot Games gave us our first proper look at the upcoming agent, Skye. Her kit comes with a big old area heal, as well as various animals she can throw at people to blind them, and she’s arriving in the tactical FPS on October 27th.
Best Buy, no. I will not accept that you can start your Black Friday sales on a Tuesday. It simply doesn’t make any sense. Sure, maybe if you’d called your legally distinct [cms-block] event something like, “Black Friday Tuesday Wednesday”, it might have been vaguely acceptable. But just straight up calling your October 13-14th sales event next week the new Black Friday will not stand. I refuse.
Were you lucky enough to grab an RTX 3080 on release? No? Well, at least you’re in good company, because it sounds like the developers of Baldur’s Gate 3 weren’t able to get their hands on one either. Another hotfix for the early access RPG arrived today to fix some technical troubles and multiplayer woes, including some GPU-specific problems that might’ve been avoided if Larian had access to hardware they’re not convinced even exists.
I was worried about being overcautious after yesterday’s terrible run, in which I died on the second level. Spoilers: I was not cautious.
It’s been of my understanding that getting cats under control is an impossible task. And yet, I thought I’d managed it with the help of Cats Organized Neatly. The delightful free demo had me thinking myself a master cat-wrangler right up until this massive dozing kitty slumbered its way into my life. With a free demo for the adorable pet puzzler out now, I am begging your help – where am I supposed to put this absolute unit of a feline?
I’m afraid there’ll be no muscle-bound spacemen down the chimney this year, children. Outriders, the brutal third-person roadie-runner from the folks behind Bulletstorm, has had its plans for a Winter release scuppered by the mess that is 2020. People Can Fly’s RPG shooter is now slated to arrive this February – but at least there’ll be full crossplay when it finally arrives.
If unveiling their next generation of Ryzen 5000 CPUs wasn’t enough this evening, AMD also gave us a sneak peak at their upcoming [cms-block] GPUs during tonight’s Zen 3 event. Not only did they give us our first glimpse of AMD’s upcoming 4K graphics card in the flesh (as opposed to looking at a giant floating model of it in Fortnite), but they also teased some very tantalising-looking 4K benchmark results.
AMD have officially unveiled their next generation of Ryzen 5000 CPUs and their new Zen 3 core architecture. Launching worldwide on November 5th 2020, AMD’s new Ryzen 5000 CPUs will be headlined by the 12-core Ryzen 5 5900X, which promises up to 26% faster gaming performance compared to AMD’s previous flagship CPU, the Ryzen 9 3900XT, and record-breaking single core performance that beats Intel’s Core i9-10900K. Here’s everything you need to know from tonight’s Zen 3 event, including how much the Ryzen 9 5900X, Ryzen 7 5800X and Ryzen 5 5600X are going to cost, and their individual specs.
Having grown tired of ridding the Epic Games Store of frightened rodents over the past year, first-person bird ’em up Falcon Age is expanding its hunting grounds from the Epic Games Store. Part robot-bashing action and part virtual pet, Outerloop’s feathered debut arrives on Steam today, with 25% off for folks who adopt one of their virtual birds-of-prey for the next week.
It’s a law of the universe: any exceptionally good Spelunky daily run must be followed by an exceptionally poor run. Yesterday was execptionally good, and so…
In the late nineties and early noughties, no video game forum was complete without a ‘post your desktop’ thread, and no desktop screenshot was complete without a snazzy Winamp skin displaying your personality and illicit MP3 collection. What a treat it is to scroll through the tens of thousands of skins on the Winamp Skin Museum and see the exciting, strange, colourful, and horny range of old Winamp skins. It’s a simple website showing off a whopping 65,681 skins as you scroll down, down, ever down through ancient digital artefacts. But which will you admit to using?
Come on in, readers. The water’s free. Giant Squid’s chill dive ’em up Abzû is once again opening its waters for free on the Epic Games Store. Someone must’ve thought it pairs well with the horrors of war, mind, because it’s joined this week by Rising Storm 2: Vietnam. Both will be free to download and keep for the next week, at which point they’ll be replaced by pigs and monarchs.
Eddie Van Halen, song writer and lead guitarist of iconic rock band Van Halen, passed away this week. Across the internet, tributes have poured out for the legendary rocker, including a rather surprising one from Sea Of Thieves developer, Rare. They’ve made a pirate shanty cover of the song Jump. It’s a bit weird, but you know what? It’s really sweet, too.
Gather ye longswords and witchy hats, stumble chums. Ye olde bean-basher Fall Guys just got a whole lot more medieval with the arrival of the game’s second season. Charging into wibbly wobbly battle today, Mediatonic have freshened up their fumble royale with a king’s bounty of new stages, costumes, features and more, each flaunting a frightfully feudal flair.
Alice Bee is back from holiday in time for a massive CRPG to enter early access, so this episode is supposedly about our favourite companions in games, but is really mostly about Baldur’s Gate III, Larian’s massive new Dungeons & Dragons-themed, reawakening-a-classic fantasy game. She and Matthew have both played a bit of it (Matthew a lot more than her), but we have a chinwag about it and the characters in it nonetheless.
We do also get to chatting about our actual favourite companions from other games, though. There are mentions for some old reliables that I bet some of you already knew were going to come up, as well as some surprise entries from new up and comers. We like to keep things fresh here at the Electronic Wireless Show. Just don’t hit your head on all the digressions, or in this week’s Cavern Of Lies, which is a lil’ D&D treat.
Western Digital have announced their first PCIe 4.0 SSD, the Black SN850. With sequential read and write speeds reaching a maximum of 7000MB/s and 5300MB/s respectively, the Black SN850 is set to be even faster than the recently released Samsung 980 Pro, which topped out at 7000MB/s read and 5000MB/s write. More importantly, it’s going to be cheaper, too, with the entry-level 500GB non-heatsink model starting at £130 / $130 when it launches at the end of October, just squeaking in under the 980 Pro’s current price of £139 / $150
Growing stronger, tougher, and more murderously deranged with each appearance, John Rambo will continue his ascent to godhood by joining the spine-ripping fights of Mortal Kombat 11. John Rambo, the Vietnam War veteran with PTSD who just wanted to be left alone, will join the war between gods and dimensions as one of the next DLC characters. This new character pack will also be rolled into the newly-announced Mortal Kombat 11 Ultimate edition, with all the other DLC.
Of all the series that I reckon would suit a battle royale-style game, Worms is certainly one of them. Worms Rumble is Team17’s new take on the worm murder simulator, moving away from its turn-based roots, and instead plonking players into a… shooter. 32-player deathmatches and last-man standing modes are what Rumble has to offer. You won’t be waiting much longer to give it a go, either, because it’s getting an open beta test starting November 6th, ahead of its launch in December.
I don’t watch much horror myself, so forgive me. But you know those trailers? The ones where there’s a cabin in the woods and a group of smiling high schoolers descend upon it? They flip up the trunk of their car, eagerly fling their suitcases on the wooden decking, and chortle about how they are going to have a rad time. Tropicana in the morning, red cups and beer pong in the evening. Then someone learns the murderous great grandfather of Tommy used to live here and poor Sarah spots an eyeball through a floorboard.
This is the feeling I got from puzzle adventure game Bugsnax. It is cutesy and whimsical at first glance, but there’s clearly something up, something simmering under the surface. I spent an hour with the game’s opening portion, and throughout my hair follicles were semi-hardened, primed but unsure of whether to fully extend or not.
There’s been a surge of great gaming laptop deals for under £1000 / $1000 in the last week or so, which is good news for anyone looking for a more portable way to play their favourite PC games around the house that doesn’t break the bank. While most laptops in this price range will find it difficult to play games on max settings, there are still a couple of RTX 2060 laptops to be found here, as well as plenty with high refresh rate displays and good specs. So, to help you get the best budget gaming laptop deal, we’ve put together this list of what we think represents the best value for money. Whatever you’re after, these are the best budget gaming laptop deals happening in the UK and US right now.
Larian Studios slapped a wee hotfix on Baldur’s Gate 3 last night, addressing some of the more pressing technical issues. Most notably, it fixed a number of crash bugs in the fantasy RPG. This is only the first patch on another journey through early access for the makers of Divinity: Original Sin 2.
“We never imagined such a huge influx of players in what we had envisioned being a relatively modest party of Early Access players,” Larian said. “But we’re up to the challenge, and we’ve been listening!”
With most games that Electronic Arts publish these days, I tend to just assume that there will be some form of extra content or microtransaction lying in wait for me. I’m pleasantly surprised, however, to discover that’s not the case with Star Wars: Squadrons. The spacey flight sim came out last week, and what we got was the whole package, because EA says they have no plans to add post-launch DLC in the future.
“Never say never, so to speak, but as far as our philosophy goes we’re not trying to treat the game as a live service,” creative director Ian Frazier told UploadVR.
AMD are unveiling their next generation of Ryzen CPUs today, and you can watch it happen right here. Taking place at 9am PT / 12pm ET / 5pm BST today, October 8th, AMD will be giving us a deep dive look at both their new line-up of Ryzen desktop processors, as well as the new Zen 3 architecture that powers them.
Steam’s Game Festival: Autumn Edition is now in full swing, and it’s offering us lucky lot the chance to play hundreds of free game demos until next Tuesday, October 13th. I’ve had a good rummage through the store and plucked out Demon Turf, a stylish 3D platformer with 2D characters where you play as Beebz, a raucous young demon with an attitude. Your main aim? To crush all the demon nasties and become the Demon Queen.
Riot Games have announced Valorant‘s next agent will be arriving a little later than planned, so they can prioritise getting their cold new map ready for the beginning of Act 3. This Act kicks off on October 13th, with the new character joining the tactical FPS a couple weeks later on October 27th. The devs have even given us our first look at her – at least, I’m pretty sure that’s her above. It’d be weird for them to just whack in an image of a rando.
The Crucial MX500 has been my favourite budget SATA SSD for absolutely yonks, and right now you can pick up a 250GB model for an all-time low of just £30 over at Amazon. That’s even lower than it was a couple of weeks ago, and an absolutely stonking SSD deal if ever I saw one. If you’re looking to pick up a SATA SSD on the cheap, it doesn’t get any better than this.
Fleet Battles is the main game mode in Star Wars: Squadrons, and it’s a pretty tricky mode to wrap your head around. There are Capital Ships, there are Flagships, there are AI ships and player ships, there’s Morale and you’re constantly switching between attacking and defending… Our Fleet Battles guide looks to straighten things out once and for all, explaining exactly how Fleet Battles work and also clearly illustrating how to take down Capital Ships with ease.
Ghost hunting simulation Phasmophobia has certainly scared up a rising player base. Despite the somewhat janky quality of its early access version, folks seem to be pretty possessed by the supernatural spooks. It’s been climbing in concurrent Steam players and Twitch viewers this month, leaving even known weenies like me curious enough to consider playing with friends.
If there’s one thing I want more of in this world it’s Halloween games. No, not horror. Halloween—the heavily consumerist version they sling in department stores with plastic pumpkins, green witches, and ghost lawn ornaments. I’ve had my eye on Pumpkin Jack, to that end, and am happy to hear that the 3D platforming spookfest is launching this month. Beyond that, it’s in the current Steam Game Festival: Autumn Edition where you can give its first level a try.
The year of digital festivals continues with yet another Steam Game Festival. For its autumn edition, Steam is once again offering hundred of free game demos for you to play paired with livestreams and developer Q&A’s throughout the week. The festival is on now and will run through next Tuesday, October 13th.
We should have been playing Destiny 2: Beyond Light by now, but while the expansion’s delayed to November we can at least gawp at some of its gear and imagine how cool it might be to use. The answer is: quite cool. Bungie today detailed the new Exotic-quality weapons and armour coming in Beyond Light, and some sound powerful, some sound like they’ll open up new tactics, and some just sound great fun. A sniper rifle summoning lightning? Warlock punches spreading contagious poison? My Hunter’s dodge becoming a blink? I’m game.
Celebrity cameos in games sure can dip into cringe territory but there is nothing, absolutely nothing, cringe-y about Jonathan Frakes narrating another lore teaser for Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds. Regale me with the sordid, unsolved curiosities of Plunkbat, Mr. Frakes. Looks like PUBG Corp’s also planning a whole new website dedicated to lore for the battle royale. What mysteries might it hold?