Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Building things in Minecraft takes a long time. Even in the vastly quicker Creative mode, you're limited to constructing your grand designs block-by-block. That might change soon, if leaked footage which appears to show a Minecraft Bedrock edition world editor mode is legitimate.

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Extraction shooter Escape From Tarkov has been battling cheaters for years, with seemingly mixed results. Developers Battlestate Games are stepping up their efforts not only to ban cheaters but to show other players that "justice has been served", by releasing the usernames of thousands of players banned for allegedly cheating.

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The developers of breezy stealth 'em ups Aragami 1 and 2 are closing down. Lince Works announced the news earlier today, saying that they would "stop the development of new projects indefinitely, starting this April." Both games will remain available for sale and online co-op will still be accessible.

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Earlier this year we highlighted a deal on the Corsair MP600 Pro LPX 2TB, which dropped to £200 - a fair price for one of the very fastest SSDs on the market. Now though, the same drive is down to £164, a scorching-hot deal for this level of flash-based firepower and one well worth bringing up again!

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The Light Brigade has no direct relation to the British light cavalry unit made famous in the poem by Alfred, Lord Tennyson (which, if you head over to the poem's Wikipedia page, you can hear Tennyson himself read out via a phonograph recording from 1890 – Cool Factz!) But there is one bit of connective tissue, namely that charging into the fray is generally a bad idea. In the case of the game, that's because The Light Brigade is VR roguelike, one that blends Souls-like dark fantasy with World War II-era weaponry, with you playing a spiritually immortal but physically fragile warrior responsible for saving the world.

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March’s first batch of Game Pass additions included JRPGs and remixed versions of history, and the second group is adding… more JRPGs and remixed versions of history. We now know what’s coming to Game Pass through March 21st, and there are some big highlights like Ni No Kuni 2, Civilization 6, and Guilty Gear.

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JBL are well known for their speakers and other audio products, so it's not really a surprise that their Quantum series of gaming headsets tend to offer pretty excellent sound, with an apparent focus on immersion and simulated surround. What is a surprise is that the company's Quantum 600 wireless headset is down to $59.99 on Woot, a nice $90 reduction from its current Amazon price of $149.99.

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Happy birthday, anniversary, launchiversary, or whatever you want to call it to the Steam Deck. Valve’s handheld SteamOS games machine has successfully evaded hardware flop status, currently sitting fourth in Steam’s own top sellers list a full year after it began shipping. That’s well deserved, too: the Steam Deck was a fun little alternative way to play PC games when it released, and through a combination of added features, ongoing improvements to game compatibility, and simply a wider choice of great games, it’s a better device now than it’s ever been.

I was originally going to look back on the Steam Deck’s first 12 months with my eyes only, but what fun is a party of one? Thus I invited Valve designer Lawrence Yang and engineer Pierre-Loup Griffais for their takes on the Deck’s past, present, and future.

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Piratical PvPvE adventure Sea Of Thieves is five years old this month and developer Rare are setting sail on a month-long celebration full of community weekends, a feature-length documentary, and a brand new swashbuckling season. Sea Of Thieves Season 9 starts on March 16th and it’s carrying a boatload of quality-of-life features, new cosmetics, and changes to world events.

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2020’s Mars Horizon was a space flight management game where you were in charge of constructing bases, building rockets, and leading missions into the black abyss. Nate (RPS in peace) liked it quite a bit for its “masterfully crafted strategic dilemmas,” despite his findom relationship with the game. Now Mars Horizon is getting an expanded sequel, taking us to the outer reaches of the Solar System. Mars Horizon 2: The Search For Life is releasing sometime in 2024 on PC.

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I'm the sort of person that likes the idea of a rural, low-tech lifestyle, where you have a lovely little wooden house and know all your neighbours, and all your food is locally sourced from the farm down the road - but I'm self-aware enough to know that I'd hate it in practice. In the case of new town builder Outlanders, I'd have to share a house with five other people, the farmer just died of old age, and my leader wanders around doing nothing while occasionally issuing edicts forcing me to have children. But at least there's a chance of pumpkin pie.

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Paradox pulled a nifty trick when they supplanted EA's urban city builder with their own, and they're now hoping to strike twice with Life By You, a competitor to The Sims, complete with all the top-down interior design and people management you’d expect. We only have a very brief glimpse at Life By You, but developer Paradox Tectonic and former Sims boss Rod Humble are holding an announcement event on March 20th - so, we’ll see more of the life sim later this month.

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Yesterday’s Paradox Announcement Show saw the reveal of some new games, including the turn-based strategy The Lamplighters League, and a sequel to their hit city builder Cities: Skylines 2. But, with a bucketload of ongoing games, Paradox weren’t content with the newbies, and announced a blast of DLC. Flagship historical grand strategies Crusader Kings 3 and Europa Universalis 4, as well as colony builder Surviving The Aftermath, are all getting expansions.

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It was only a few days ago that we reported on a UK sale of the Alienware AW3423DWF ultrawide gaming monitor based around Samsung's incredible 34-in QD-OLED panel, and now its American cousin is also discounted at the official Dell store. This model debuted at $1300, but a $100 price drop and a 10% off coupon code - SAVEMONITORS10 brings the AW3423DW to its lowest US price ever.

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We've seen 2TB PCIe 4.0 SSDs under the £100 mark before, but never have we see one for a clear £5 below - and never this model either. The Adata Legend 800 has been steeply discounted at Ebuyer, where £92 plus £3 shipping gets you this new model capable of 3500MB/s reads and 2800MB/s writes.

Yes, this isn't the best gaming SSD in terms of raw speed, but its PCIe 4.0 design means that it uses less power and fewer lanes than PCIe 3.0 alternatives of the same speed, a nicety for desktop use and a big deal for laptops.

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For a long time, Super Auto Pets used a strange and clever (and cheap!) source of artwork for its attacking animals: emojis, scaled up far larger than they appear in WhatsApp messages from your mum. The super auto-battler did eventually start making custom artwork for its later expansions, but much of the furious fauna was still emojis. That has now changed with today's patch, going back to replace all the old emojis with new animal pictures. Goodbye, old friends.

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Harebrained Schemes - the folks behind BattleTech and Shadowrun - have announced their newest strategy game, but this one’s quite the mouthful. The Lamplighters League And The Tower At The End Of The World is set in an alternate version of the 1930s where “the best of the best are all dead… so you’ll need the best of the worst.” The game launches on PC, next-gen Xboxes, and Game Pass later this year.

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Cities: Skylines turns 8 years old next week, so Paradox are celebrating with a special announcement: a new Cities: Skylines. As part of today’s Paradox Announcement Show, the publisher revealed their urban management sequel Cities: Skylines 2, coming from the studio behind the first game, Colossal Order, is coming later this year.

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As I have complained about mightily in the past, I grew up somwhere that didn't have much in the way of entertainment, so me and my friends had to engage in the time honoured tradition of making our own fun. Once we reached about age 17 this included playing poker with a shared second-hand chip set, and trying to do beer centurions (the progress in the latter affecting our interest in the former). I was never any good at it because, though poker was a fixture for several years, I was never really able to learn the rules. What hand is good? Why has your hand beaten his hand? But the little pictures are the best, I don't understand! It's disappointing because understanding poker is a cool adult thing, plus not understanding it makes certain pivotal scenes in James Bond films quite hard to parse.

Last week we got an email (shout out Aidan) singing the praises of Aces And Adventures, and I do try to check out recommendations from readers, even if I don't have time to reply or to write about the games. In this case I've made a special because Aces And Adventures is a great game that is teaching me winning poker hands through the medium of a dwarven warrior smashing things.

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Last month, city-builder Workers & Resources: Soviet Republic was removed from Steam following a DMCA takedown notice filed by a disgruntled player. The industrial management game is now back on Steam and available for purchase again. “We want to apologize to those who were looking to purchase the game and were unable to,” says the latest developer blog posted to Steam. Studio 3Division continue to say, “We realise that we underestimated the situation, and it quickly escalated to a point that posed a threat to our game.”

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Dragon Ball FighterZ has been a big success in the fighting game scene, and it's probably thought of as the best way to experience the famous anime in game form - complete with an endless barrage of multicoloured punches. But growing up, the Budokai Tenkaichi series were the Dragon Ball fighting games, and 16 years after the last entry Bandai Namco have announced a new Dragon Ball Z: Budokai Tenkaichi title.

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When Skyrim came out I was a student, and I worked in Gamestation (RIP) to help pay for chicken noodles. I remember the hype around it very clearly because Gamestation had a deal where you could buy it for like £22, and I had a sideline going when the stock was low to keep some back for my friends. Apols if you were caught in the crossfire for that, but dragon fever was running high off the back of a still very cool trailer, and shouting Fus Ro Dah was the only cure.

In the years since, Skyrim has been released and re-released many times, on every conceivable platform. "Arrow to the knee" jokes became de rigueur and hacky almost overnight, and at this point might have horse-shoed back around to being funny again. There are many examples of unrelated games or videos that cut to black fading back up into the opening of Skyrim, in a kind of sub-genre of rickroll. Does it hold up now? Kind of. It's a really fun, ambitious RPG, with faults - but if the faults didn't exist maybe it wouldn't have been as popular as it was.

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Every weekend, indie devs show off current work on Twitter's #screenshotsaturday tag. And every Monday, I bring you a selection of these snaps and clips. This week, my eye has been caught by cute townbuilding, decapitating horror, a demon skateboarding through Hell, bouncing logos, handcrafted strategy, an entire movie jammed into an immersive sim, and more. Come admire these interesting indies!

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Rumours of a Counter-Strike 2 have been circulating for so many years that it’s become a recurring meme in the playerbase, almost veering into Half-Life 3 levels of wishful thinking. But rumblings of Counter-Strike 2 have gotten louder over the weekend due to a report from journalist Richard Lewis which states there’s “a new version of Counter-Strike: Global Offensive on its way” being made in the Source 2 engine, and it could release with the working title of Counter-Strike 2.

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Sundays are for booking your Japan Rail Pass and having a trip become a little more real with each passing second. Before you check the cherry blossom forecast, let's read this week's best writing about games (and game related things).

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Like A Dragon: Ishin rewinds the Yakuza/Like A Dragon series, both by returning to real-time brawling and by being set in Edo period Japan. It's great for it - and now a little better, since patch 1.03 fixed some PC-specific bugs.

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I have no problem believing that PowerWash Simulator is as smart and engrossing as people say. That's why I don't play it, lest my actual home fall into a state of muck-slick neglect.

If you're braver than me, you now have new venues to clean: the free Final Fantasy VII crossover is out now, and it lets you clean up Midgar like Cloud never could.

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I had a brief, intense relationship with Vampire Survivors last year, but a steady stream of early access updates and now post-release DLC has kept other players in its thrall for much longer. Those updates have been successful enough that its developer says that they'd only make a sequel if it offered "something radically new."

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Meta are lowering the price of their VR headsets. From tomorrow, you'll be able to pick up the Meta Quest 2 256GB for $430, down from $500, and the recently launched Meta Quest Pro for $1000, down from $1500.

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If you're looking for something to play this weekend, maybe hop on Game Pass to play the stylish rhythmic violence of Hi-Fi Rush. It'll be the focus of the first session of the RPS Game Club, so all the hepcats will be bashing baddies to the beat. But I should ask: what are you playing this weekend? Here's what we're clicking on!

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HyperX's Pudding Keycaps, a popular choice for upgrading mechanical keyboards to blast out the RGB and improve the typing experience at the same time, are heavily discounted at Amazon US today. This full 104-key set normally retails for $25, but today you can pick them up in black for $15 or white for $20.

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Samsung's fast Evo Select Micro SD card has dropped to £40 on Amazon UK, making it a good time to upgrade the storage of your Steam Deck. This card normally retails closer to £50, with a stated UK RRP of £55, but it has dipped as low as £37.99 for a few days over the past year.

Still, this is a very reasonable price for a memory card that's good for up to 130MB/s sequential reads and meets the A2 requirements for random performance.

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Last week, I attended a hands-off preview for The Sims 4's upcoming Growing Together expansion pack and its supporting free base game update. This was obviously a real treat for me as RPS' resident Sims fanatic, but I'll admit I went in with my expectations parked in neutral. After all, the theme of this new-content duo is young families, and that just isn't part of the game I engage with too much these days.

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There’s a minor bombshell tucked into the latest Steam Deck OS preview update, which is mainly about fixing Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty issues. With this update installed, you can enable proper, full-fat ray tracing on the Deck for the first time, specifically in Doom Eternal. Neat!

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Leaks are the bane of every publisher's existence, forcing marketing plans to shift, change, or just get scrapped. But that's partly why I'm enjoying EA's approach for advertising the Skate. reboot. Footage from the open-world skateboarders’ playtest leaked last September, and EA have since responded by releasing their own janky videos. These clips give us a taste of the whacky ragdolling happening right now, and it's probably the most entertaining way of marketing a game while simultaneously sucking the air out of leaks.

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I've recommended a pretty wide variety of genres over the years, but I didn't expect a brick breaking game to surprise me like Destructure Colon Among Debris. It's not that I dislike them. They've just never really made much impression (possibly because I don't see all that many)

Destructure blends in a hint of shooting, resource management, and leans into the sheer fun of destruction, replacing bricks with "structures" that aren't meant to be anything specific, but give the whole feeling an impression of combat, an assault you're carrying out rather than a reacting, abstract geometry game.

Also it feels and sounds great to hit stuff. That's probably the bigger reason.

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I'm going to Japan in a couple of weeks, and I am beyond excited. It's been 15 years since I last visited family in Yokohama, and my last memory is one where I'm miserable and I'm staring out of a cab window going back to the airport. I didn't want to leave. It sounds corny as heck, but I can't wait to sucker punch that memory with a swing that's been building for 5478 days, then jab it full of happy ones. Really, I imagine what will happen is I'll get weirdly emotional as the plane touches down and my mate Simon, who I'm going with, will be like, "Get a hold of yourself you buffoon".

I got LINE recently - a Whatsapp equivalent that's big in Japan - to arrange some meetups with friends and family. Those arrangements have happened, which brings me great joy. But in a surprise plot twist, it meant I got back in touch with a guy called Sam. Now Sam, he's a good bud and we go a long way back. All the way back to the original Gears Of War days. And I think we've arranged, as is custom, to play Gears 6 whenever it arrives. Such is the bizarre way of things.

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In the lead-up to the original Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice, the team at Ninja Theory released 30 development diaries, delving deep into every aspect of the game: the art inspirations, the myths they were remixing, and more. It was an insightful look at the nuts and bolts of game dev, so I’m glad Ninja Theory are returning to the concept for the spooky action sequel Hellblade 2: Senua’s Saga. The first episode takes a look at Iceland - the sequel's setting - and the team's painstaking commitment to recreating it as realistically as possible. The photogrammartry tech on display is seriously impressive, and following the team to Iceland feels like watching a British travel series, without the crude humour.

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This isn't technically a review, because who would review a game mode for Total War: Warhammer 3? What’s next, a title screen review? A lengthy personal essay about an attract mode clip? Can my cat get a review? First off, yes. Captain Waffles is a visceral tour-de-force that no fan of the genre should miss. 10/10. Secondly, you should know that Immortal Empires is, as far as Total War: Warhammer goes, the game mode. More importantly, this ridiculously expansive, years-spanning grand-strategy project exists as tangible proof that sometimes, the limitless hubris of man is actually rad as hell, despite what the ancient Greeks said. Euripides nuts, more like.

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Multiplayer horror Dead By Daylight is apparently coming to Hollywood in the form of a new film adaptation. The two production companies involved are longtime horror fixtures Atomic Monster (who have made The Conjuring, Annabelle, and Malignant) and Blumhouse (the company behind Paranormal Activity, M3GAN, and Get Out.) The film doesn’t have any talent attached right now, but the two companies are currently looking for a director and a screenwriter. Blumhouse says, "it’s imperative we find someone who appreciates and loves the world as much as we do, to help us bring the game to the big screen".

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