Rock, Paper, Shotgun

The next addition to the Sea Of Thieves arsenal is going to be a doozy – they’re introducing chain shot cannonballs to take out your enemies’ masts. These projectiles are pretty self explanatory, they’re basically two cannonballs connected by a chain. When you hit a ship hull with these you aren’t going to do huge amounts of damage, but if you nail the capstan, masts or wheel, your enemies can say goodbye to escaping your attacks.

They also make a brilliant noise as they whizz over your head, which you can hear for yourself in the video below, or when the update drops on March 11th.

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Platinum Games’ PC remaster of their 2013 superhero game, The Wonderful 101, has nabbed itself a May release date. The old Wii U game has you saving the day as a mass of different superheores, all morphed together to form weird and wonderful things to defeat enemies and save civilians. The you can gather even more heroes, and become even stronger Morphs! And it’s hitting Steam on May 19th.

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Dying Light is a zombie game. It does a lot of other things that frustrate or sort of disappoint me, too. But I can’t help loving it in a very reserved sort of way.

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Stardew Valley turns 4 years old today. It’s been sixteen seasons since it arrived on PC, kicking off a wave of similar casual farming games on PC. Developer ConcernedApe is celebrating the anniversary with a casual announcement that the sun is not setting on his continued work planting Stardew’s future. He says that with Stardew Valley’s extremely large 1.4 update now available on all platforms, another free update (1.5, naturally) is already in the works.

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We’ve not heard a heck of a lot about Diablo 4 since it was officially announced at BlizzCon last year. Blizzard have now published a development update—which they’re hoping to do quarterly going forward—responding to feedback from the BlizzCon demo and introducing a nasty family of melee monsters. The update also gives a pretty in-depth look at a few pieces of Diablo 4’s interface.

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The Game Developers Conference website has been updated to assure attendees that the event is “moving forward as planned,” despite new preventative health measures issued by the city of San Francisco related to the novel coronavirus (COVID-19).

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The director of Destiny 2 has dropped another of his sporadic 4000-word thoughtdumps reflecting on the state of the MMOFPS, its successes, and its failures. One big problem Luke Smith acknowledges is that the latest seasons, starting with Season Of The Undying, create a disappointing “feeling of ephemeral private activities and rewards that go away” rather than the exciting “evolving world” they’d wanted. Bungie will try to fix that with the next year, he says, and they have some other big changes planned. It sounds promising but I wish he’d addressed Eververse’s role in FOMO.

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The original Wasteland hails from the 80s—those rose-colored years before RPGs set in the nuclear apocalypse were an entire genre of their own. Wasteland Remastered is almost (almost) an entire do-over with dramatically updated graphics and some ancient bug fixes. InXile proclaim that Wasteland and the remaster are “punishing” as old RPGs are wont to be. The remaster is out as of yesterday, so you can head back to one of the old guard versions of irradiated America.

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Platinum Games have announced a new big monster game in the works led by Hideki Kamiya of Viewtiful Joe and Bayonetta fame. Kamiya has a long history of action games, and this new one looks to have plenty more where that came from—big monsters clashing with giant heroes and all. This next action ’em up is provisionally titled Project G.G.

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Just before Generation Zero released nearly a year ago, things looked great for the game. Its trailers and screenshots promised a dynamic and expansive open-world cooperative shooter, with robots to fight and a beautiful and detailed 1980s Sweden to explore. And it was made by Avalanche Studios, a developer long-known for its open-world action games. Aside from a little controversy when artist Simon Stålenhag pointed out its thematic similarity to his distinctive art, everything seemed in place for a successful launch.

“We felt really good,” product owner Paul Keslin tells me. But that feeling soon changed. The game was beset by crash bugs and complaints of repetitive play, and its Steam review scores tumbled. For its small development team, the reception was a shock – “Immediately, the feeling was not a good one”. The post-launch plan was thrown in the bin, and so began the long job of turning the game around in the eyes of its players.

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We’re not really looked too much at Teamfight Tactics for quite a while, but with the upcoming season change, it only seems fitting to update our item cheat sheet to reflect the game as it currently stands. There’s been a lot of updates, so study that sheet well.

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I played 1997’s weirdly named Theme Hospital a fair amount in my teen years, but despite my love of both management games and very silly things, I never got around to playing 2018’s spiritual sequel, the equally weirdly named Two Point Hospital. With the game coming to consoles this week, however, I thought now would be a fine moment to dive in and see what I’d been missing. The answer is: a management game that’s so silly, it makes me stop worrying about actually managing.

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Harmonix, the creators of rhythm games including Rock Band and Dance Central, have announced their new jam. Fuser is its name, and mixing vocal and instrumental tracks of different songs together into a new song is its game. I think that’s what the kids call “mash-ups.” The tracklist actually does include All Star so you should expect Shrek hell to be spattered across more of pop culture. Fuser is coming this year, will indeed be on PC, and no, it does not require any plastic instruments. Have a peek in the announcement trailer below.

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While your PC’s graphics card does most of the heavy lifting when it comes to playing games, having one of today’s best gaming CPUs inside your system can also make a noticeable improvement to your PC’s performance – particularly if you like playing games at 1920×1080. Having a good CPU is also important if you’re a budding streamer, too, as running and streaming a game simultaneously can often be very CPU intensive. The problem, of course, is deciding which kind of CPU is right for you. After all, it’s not as easy as simply plugging in a new graphics card or SSD, as what type of CPU you can buy is entirely dependent on what type of motherboard you have.

To help you in your quest to find the best gaming CPU, I’ve put together this list of all the best processors I’ve tested here at RPS, including all of the latest Intel Coffee Lake and AMD Ryzen processors. I’ve tested everything from entry-level Core i3 and Ryzen 5 CPUs all the way up to the top brass Core i9s and Ryzen 9s, picking the best CPUs for gaming in each price category. Whatever your budget, there’s a best gaming CPU for you.

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Valve have introduced some new features to improve the Steam store search function. It basically boils down to putting a bunch of fields in so you can better filter what you’re looking for. Now whenever you use the search bar, you’ll have some options down the side so you can narrow your searches by price, genre tag, whether it’s single player or multiplayer, and so on. With the sheer number of games on the platform, it’s strange to think Steam never had this sort of feature in the first place.

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Guardians, it’s time to build your sweatiest, most shameful loadout: Trials Of Osiris is coming to Destiny 2 next season. The 3v3 PvP mode is returning from the first Destiny, once again challenging players to run a gauntlet of increasingly tough matchups to claim loot with serious bragging rights. The announcement came overnight after players finally completed the communal challenge to donate 9,777,777,700 Polarized Fractaline to the Empyrean Foundation effort. While Trials will launch with the Season Of The Unworthy in March, they’ll actually be open to all players, which suggests Bungie still have more to reveal. Watch the Trials announcement below.

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We all want our games to look their best, but having them sound their best is important, too – and one of the best ways to do that is to kit your PC out with one of today’s best gaming headsets. Gaming headsets are a great way to improve your PC’s audio, and they’re also handy for chatting with your mates when you’re playing online as well thanks to their built-in microphones. If you want an easy audio setup that doesn’t involve hundreds of different cables, choosing one of our best gaming headset recommendations is the way to do it.

The problem is finding the best gaming headset for you and your budget. After all, there are loads of headsets to choose from these days, and they’re all at various different price points, too. To help you in your quest, I’ve put together a list of all the very best gaming headsets that I’ve tested here at RPS, helping you sort the symphonic wheat from the aural chaff no matter your budget. Here, you’ll find everything from the best budget gaming headset all the way up to the best wireless gaming headset, and everything in between. No matter what you’re looking for, I’ve got a best gaming headset recommendation for you.

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In the streets of a not so distant future, between the public onanism booth, and the bouncer employed ironically by a nightclub’s post-millennial owners, stands an enormous phone display encased in concrete. Squint into the solar flare brightness of its 20-foot screen, and you can just about make out some of the messages as they scroll by. Local youths are voting on whether Ben and Dan, Lair Of The Clockwork God‘s dual protagonists, should be let into the club: #YE or #NA? “@dan total dinosore – upgrad yur vesties,” advises one. “Nice historhythm gramps,” chides another. “Paleofoot much?” The polls are in, and they’re predicting an emphatic #NA.

Lair Of The Clockwork God is a game about getting older: the bewilderment and comedy of being left behind, of becoming less certain and more rigid. It’s the ageing anthem of designer-writers Ben Ward and Dan Marshall, perhaps the first people to star in their own game since Vin Diesel.

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Everyone’s favourite Pokémon-like MMO is getting some brand new additions this year, including 50 new Temtem and two new islands to catch them on. Temtem developers, Crema, have released a short-term roadmap talking about some highly-requested new features coming to the game’s competitive scene, as well as a few other bits like player housing. Soon there’ll be an infinite plot of land where everyone can build a home for their Tem-friends!

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A few evenings back, I had an absolutely superb match of Apex Legends. I was playing the limited-time duos mode with my brother, and we decided that this time we’d play as aggressively as possible. Every shot fired in the distance was a call to arms, and we would drop everything and gambol towards it with the single-mindedness of a pair of delighted truffle hogs following the fruity whiff of their life’s purpose.

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Valve today launched Dota Underlords in full after eight months in early access. You know, Valve’s version of the mega-popular Dota Auto Chess mod – the same autobattler mod which inspired Riot’s Teamfight Tactics. You know, the team-building battle genre which has little do with which chess. That one. Today’s launch has brought a new campaign-ish mode with challenges and puzzles, the start of a new season, a new battle pass, a new look for the board, and more. See the launcher trailer below.

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While some players are griping about Destiny 2‘s weapon balance changes coming next season, Bungie have missed a trick by burying the big news: Fighting Lion, already the game’s best gun, is getting buffed. Is it a huge buff? No. Is it a welcome buff? Absolutely. Alice, is Fighting Lion really Destiny’s strongest gun? Look, I said best, not strongest. Hand on heart, I adore no gun in the MMOFPS more than this scrappy wee grenade launcher.

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You’ll have heard of Raft. It’s the best open world survival crafting there is, for the singular reason that rather than having to run around to discover and excavate resources, they’re all swept towards you on a never-ending tide of stuff. Plastic, wood, leaves, potatoes. All you have to do is catch the detritus with a hook on a string and then yank it towards you, so that it becomes part of your raft and your raft can grow larger and more elaborate.

Minecraft, for all its supposed complexity, is hamstrung by a rude insistence on making you walk around on foot like an idiot, checking under leaves for magic rocks or whatever the hell that game is about. Raft is a survival crafting game for the brilliant, but chronically lethargic creative mind, who would rather sit and let content wash over them than head out in search of it.

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The next TFT season is nearly upon us and everything’s going a little science fiction. This isn’t completely new to the League of Legends universe, as it’s well established that many champions have ventured into the depths of space under the “PROJECT” and “Star Guardian” banners. With a new season coming to Teamfight Tactics comes a new gimmick in the form of galaxies. But what are galaxies, how do they affect your TFT games, and what are their effects?

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After fifteen years in development in various forms, Black Mesa will finally launch in full on March 5. Started as a mod, the Valve-sanctioned remake of Half-Life eventually became its own commercial game and entered early access in May 2015. Since then, they’ve been working on remaking the much-maligned final chapter of Xen, overhauling and fixing bits, and generally tweaking. Which they’ve now about finished. A few fixes will follow after that, granted, but the end is oh so close.

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Last week, you may have noticed that I’ve started rounding up all the best gaming monitor deals of the week in their own dedicated deals page. However, some deals, like today’s offer on the excellent Asus ROG Strix XG32VQR, just don’t last that long, as Amazon US are only offering $113 off this curved 2560×1440, 144Hz HDR monitor for the next 17 hours or so. So don’t delay, as this deal will be gone before you know it.

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A new Half-Life game is only a few weeks away, but it occurred to me that there was no reason to wait for Half-Life: Alyx if I wanted to experience Vortigaunts in VR. I thus spent some time this weekend fussing around Black Mesa in the Valve Index, using a Half-Life 1 VR mod. It’s impressively feature packed and easy to set up, but it was a simple ladder that sold me.

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Jeff from the Overwatch team has some wonderful news for you damage players – Blizzard are introducing a 3-2-1 role queue today. It’s part of an Experimental game mode that they’re implementing to have players test some of things the team are still unsure about even after internal testing.

Ah the triple damage meta, you’ll know it well if you played Overwatch before all this role queue business, or if you’ve played Quick Play Classic. Three damage, two support and one tank. It was a nightmare – if you were the tank.

“Don’t freak out,” Jeff Kaplan says.

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Picking up loot is most of what Wolcen is, but using those items effectively can make all the difference between having a useless character and an unstoppable build. There’s a lot to consider, such as what type of armour you should be equipping, which gems you should be putting into gem slots, and whether the hood custom skin you picked up hours ago looks better than the crown helmet you just picked up.

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Gaming keyboards are faster and more precise than your typical budget keyboard, and having one of the best gaming keyboards on your desk can often make playing your favourite PC games a lot more enjoyable. Every key press is registered in a flash, and you don’t have to worry about it missing a vital input when you mash keys in a panic. But with so many gaming keyboards out there, finding the best gaming keyboard can be difficult.

To help you in your quest to find the perfect keyboard for your gaming PC, I’ve compiled a list of all the best gaming keyboards I’ve tested here at RPS, from the best mechanical keyboards to the best wireless keyboards. I’ve also included my top budget gaming keyboard picks for those of you who just want something cheap and cheerful. Whatever type of gaming keyboard you’re looking for, there’s a best gaming keyboard recommendation for you below.

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Given that ‘Have You Played’ posts tend towards reminiscence, I find I often end up talking about the music I listened to while playing the games in question. I rarely intend to do this, mind, but it happens nonetheless. The tunes are bycatch: scavengers of the benthic mind, which get caught up in my net whenever I trawl the depths for recollections. And when I tip an old game’s memory, flopping, onto the deck of my consciousness, the music scrabbles out of its mouth, blinks in the sunlight, and clacks a catchy rhythm with its pincer-tips as it scurries back into the sea.

This time, the amusement being dragged from the engrammatic brine is Simcity 2000, and its musical parasite is one that shows my age even more than the game itself. Because thinking all the way back to 1996, I didn’t have any CDs, and even 56k internet was still two years off in our household, so my only way of listening to music was via cassette tapes on a sort of portable hifi thing.

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Deep in a rusting warehouse, in a broken Russian state, I scope around a corner and stumble across the site of a massacre. Four, no, five bodies stretch the length of the hall, slumped and discarded. After reeling from the dead I click into Tarkov mode… Someone in that pile might have a roll of toilet paper!

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Alright folks, Stardew Valley just wasn’t pleasant enough. The animals are cute, the spouses are cute, and even the monsters are cute. But you do have to kill the monsters and that is decidedly not cute. You’ve got to whack them with increasingly edgy swords as you dive deeper into the mines beneath the mountain. Who are you to come into the monsters’ territory and smack them with a Lava Katana, hmm? A Stardew Valley modder is doing away with all the violence beneath pastoral Pelican Town with Pacifist Valley.

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I’ve been quite jazzed about Spiritfarer since it was first announced last year. The cozy crafting and management game has a much different vibe from the last Thunder Lotus game I played. Jotun kicked my rear right through the final moments so I’ll be glad to have a different relationship with this next one. There’s a new trailer out today showing off some of the gathering and crafting you’ll do while piloting your ferry.

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That scrappy Polish studio that developed a computer RPG based on the monster hunting novels by Andrzej Sapkowski is all grown up. CD Projekt, parent company of The Witcher 3 and Cyberpunk 2077 developers, are now valued as the second largest gaming company in Europe, beat only by Ubisoft.

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Blizzard have cancelled a series of Overwatch League matches that were set to take place in South Korea over the next few weeks, “in order to protect the health and safety of players, fans and staff”. This comes just a few weeks after they announced they were cancelling the games scheduled for China amid coronavirus fears. Blizzard have said they’ll be trying to reschedule the matches, so for now it’s a bit of a waiting game to see what happens with the coronavirus outbreak.

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The wild west is a dangerous place. You’d think it’s because of the cougars and grizzly bears and alligators but no, my real nemesis in Red Dead Redemption 2 is riding or running straight off a cliff I wasn’t playing attention to. Inevitably that ends up with me dead at the bottom of a ravine, preserved in a loading screen as death by falling, though it should really claim death by dumb. Some players have found a way around that, though it requires a level of forethought that I apparently don’t have.

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Wolcen has a lot of spells and abilities that you can assign to your character. But just using skills is scratching the surface, as Wolcen allows you to apply modifiers, changing how a skill works. These can be as small as increasing overall damage dealt, or major alterations that transform the skill into something else entirely.

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There’s no shortage of games about the novel coronavirus or COVID-19, which has, over the past few months, created a global miasma of paranoia, racism, and fear. Global Game Jam 2020 was peppered with virus and outbreak-themed games, including a 2D action game named 2019-nCOV Stole My DNA and a Taiwanese game where players must monitor the proper use of face masks.

Thanks to the relentless nature of modern news cycles, creators have had a lot of material to work with – hoarding, mask shaming/policing, misinformation, and a heightened level of self-surveillance that would make Jeremy Bentham proud. And as affected Asian countries prepare to ride out the economic aftermath of COVID-19, the impact will be particularly hard on China’s community of indie developers.

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It’s said that the aerodynamic design of Formula One cars generates so much downforce that you could, theoretically, drive one upside-down. In reality, nobody seems willing to risk vehicle and vertebrae to attempt this stunt. But in GTA Online, we’re mere bytes so of course driving on the ceiling (oh what a feeling!) was one of the first things people tried when the first F1 car arrived last week. It is possible, and it’s great fun. I won one myself and frankly am now more interested in F1 stunting than the F1 races launching this week. Come see.

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