Latest Articles
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Deals: Grab NZXT's Kraken 240mm AiO with LCD display for £90 at Scan UK
That's £40 off its normal price.
I've long been a fan of NZXT's AiO liquid coolers - in fact, I'm building a PC with one tomorrow. You might be joining me on that, as today NZXT's Kraken 240mm AiO is down to £90 at Scan UK after a £40 discount. That's an excellent price for an all-in-one liquid cooler that sports an LCD screen for monitoring your temps or showing off your cat.
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Deals: This Intel Arc A770 16GB OC graphics card is down to £266 at Amazon UK versus £320 elsewhere
A great price for a strong graphics card for 1080p gaming.
If you're looking for a great graphics card for 1080p gaming, three GPUs come to mind: the RTX 3060, the RX 6600 and the Arc A770. The latter is the most fascinating, in my opinion, as it's seriously faster than its rivals in many games and comes with a better upscaler than AMD's FSR in XeSS.
Today you can pick up this GPU for just £266 thanks to an Amazon UK Lightning Deal on a graphics card that comes from Amazon US - with no extra import or shipping fees. That compares favourably to the £320 that the next-cheapest A770 GPU costs, especially when you consider this is the better 16GB variant with a factory overclock!
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(the) Gnorp Apologue makes town building into a glorious spectacle
Not "analogue", as you read it just now
I think I might just like games in which lots of particles fly around the screen. That's was a big part of the appeal of To The Core, an incremental game with the spectacle of Vampire Survivors. I think it's now the reason I want to play the oddly named (the) Gnorp Apologue. It's an incremental town builder about... gnorps.
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Starfield will get updates every six weeks beginning in February 2024
Shattered Space expansion coming 2024 also
Starfield will receive updates "roughly every six weeks starting in February" if Bethesda hit their target, according to an end of year wrap-up. "These updates will include everything from quality-of-life improvements to content and feature updates," including previously mentioned city maps, mod support and new methods of travel.
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Steam now lets you mark games as private
For your eyes only
If you've opted in to the Steam client beta, you can now mark games in your Steam library as private so that they're invisible to other users. That means that if you're - as a hypothetical - a games journalist who once had to buy and install some games with questionable names and subject matter for an article you were writing, you can now hide that so it's no longer visible to your friends or - hypothetically - your child.
Hypothetically!
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Steam's 2023 winter sale is now underway
Start your wallets
The Steam winter sale is now underway, with discounts across the digital storefront's catalogue of games from now until January 4th. This also means that voting is now open in the 2023 Steam Awards, with the slightly earlier closing date of January 2nd.
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Warhammer 40,000: Darktide is worth revisiting after a year of updates
It needed more levels and less crafting and, well, it does have more levels
I've recently returned to Warhammer 40,000: Darktide, one year after the grimdark Left 4 Dead 'em up launched and eleven months after I stopped playing. It was always fun to tear through the grubby guts of a Gothic industrial megacity with your chainsword, but it became repetitive and its whole loot-o-crafting mess sucked. A year on, the loot and crafting still suck, but I've really enjoyed the variety added by new levels and weapons and the polish from a year of tweaks and quality-of-life changes. If you played Darktide on Game Pass (or bought it), consider another look.
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Dominions is a series where you can build the Ark Of The Covenant, which blinds everyone on any battlefield it appears on. Games where any soldier can receive a horror mark, which attracts unspeakable phantoms from beyond reality to randomly attack them, and if they survive, they'll probably receive more horror marks. Games where I once deployed my entire military against an evil raven so large and powerful that I lost, leaving behind corpses that it fed on to grow even stronger. Games where a frog could, mathematically, kill god with one blow.
Dominions 6 is due out in January, bringing with it changes so esoteric that I'd be better off talking about Dominions 3 to Dominions 5 instead. So let's do that.
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The Electronic Wireless Show podcast S2 Episode Christmas: the end of year special!
What a year its been
It's the most wonderful time of the year i.e. the last working week for us at the RPS Treehouse, and therefore the last week of the Electronic Wireless Show podcast for 2023. We take a look back at the year that was, in very broad terms - was 2023, in fact, a good year for games? - share our favourite games of 2023, and talk about the games we're playing right now. It appears Nate is quite unfamiliar with time travel films. We also think up some some resolutions for next year, and you've also got our regular recommendations to look forwards to at the end of the show. Plus, Nate does a thrilling end of year quiz with a question for each month. It goes about as well as you'd expect.
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The RPS Advent Calendar 2023, December 21st
Hark! The herald of darkness sings
Before you open this door on the Advent Calendar, make sure you have enough batteries for your mega-powered torch. The environment be damned, throw those spent batts on the floor where you stand and open-palm slam the new ones in, because light is the only way you're getting out of here alive.
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Elden Ring is taking its orchestral soundtrack on tour next spring, including its first UK concert
“Narrative symphonic experience” headed to the Royal Albert Hall
Elden Ring’s very Soulslike OST will be performed live in the UK for the first time next April, as a “Symphonic Adventure” concert based on the game’s score heads to London’s Royal Albert Hall.
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See that mountain? You can rollerblade up it
The reboot of noughties gem Jet Set Radio teased with ruthless efficiency during The Game Awards has had a smidge of new information revealed. For being such a small detail, though, it’s a very intriguing - if perhaps a tad predictable - one indeed.
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Project currently codenamed “R” will see a reveal in 2025
Bloober Team, developers of Layers of Fear, The Medium and the upcoming Silent Hill 2 remake, have added another notable name to their plans for the next few years. The horror-focused studio is working with the creators of zombie comic book-turned-TV show The Walking Dead on a new video game adaptation.
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Will now land a month after Steam
Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League has found time to add one more delay to the game’s multi-year wait on a release. This one is at least a lot shorter than its previous slides, and will only affect a single storefront: the Epic Games Store.
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The Finals holiday update is not very merry reading for Heavy players
Free-to-play FPS gets a much-demanded class rebalance
Embark Studios have released The Finals update 1.4.0, a mixture of balance tweaks, quality-of-life improvements and crash fixes which is going down like the proverbial lead balloon among fans of the free-to-play shooter's Heavy class. I'm definitely here for the crash fixes - I can't get The Finals to run for longer than five minutes, which is a shame, because as Graham tells it, this is the most exciting new multiplayer FPS in years. Specifically, it sounds like a blend of Battlefield and Rainbow Six: Siege with a smashable toytown aesthetic. But enough about me and my computer's refusal to let me have fun. What's going on with those Heavies, then?
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Supporters only: I'm ready to embrace next year's RPG grind, both inside and outside of games
A whole new persona
My Steam Wrapped listed Baldur's Gate 3 and Vampire Survivors as my top two games of 2023. If Epic Games and my Switch were involved, Fortnite and Persona 5 Royal would've absolutely been included in the lineup, too. Motivation has lain mostly in co-op capers with friends, hangs with virtual pals, or in the battle royale-verse. Otherwise, nothing has truly given me the itch.
But I think 2024 could be a big one for me. Not only are a number of upcoming RPGs right up my alley, they align with new and existing motivations: hangs with pals and Japanese language learning. For the first time, I'm excited to embrace the grind both in-game and outside of it.
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Remnant 2 could get a Survival mode, and Gunfire's president already has ideas for "future games"
"Maybe not exactly like Survivor, but something that scratches the same itch."
My Remnant 2 character is dangerously close to joining the vast pantheon of characters I've left in limbo, just after completing the tutorial - a race of outcasts we might call the Abandonians, kicking their heels at campfires and savepoints, while I drift guiltily back to older games I've already completed several times over. It's not that I dislike Gunfire's sci-fantasy co-op shooter - the multiple-dimension premise is pleasantly loopy, and I like the variety of procgen landscapes. There just aren't enough hours in the day, not when I'm replaying Into The Breach for the 14th time. Still, perhaps the introduction of a new mode built for quickfix, story-free sessions could persuade me to give 2023's 24th best game another whirl?
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What's better: giving items to other players or throwing grenades back?
Vote now as we continue deciding the single best thing in games
Last time, in celebration of Doom's 30th birthday, you decided that Doom 2's super shotgun is better than Doom's shotgun (57% vs 43%, statheads). An intellectual brawl between two absolute titans. Whoever won, we'd lose. But whoever won, we won. This week, the calendar also dictates our subject. This being Christmastime, I need to know: what's better, giving items to other players or throwing grenades back?
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The RPS Advent Calendar 2023, December 20th
Cut off their what, sorry?
Interesting. This door on the Advent Calendar has an instruction scrawled on it in blood: TURN THE DOOR KNOB. There's a remote recorder on the floor there, and if you press play a voice, coughing itself to death, says "You have to turn the door knob!". After a few minutes standing there, you think to yourself, "Maybe I should try turning the door knob?"
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If Scorn was a bullet hell game, it'd be Angel At Dusk, which has a frantic demo
"Uncompromisingly skeletal"
I was in two minds about whether to write this up, because it is a teensy bit NSFW, but I take solace in the thought that my ideas of NSFW content aren't so much "tame" as "selectively bred to the point that I can only perceive the colour beige", and besides which, I haven't played an outright body horror-themed bullet hell/danmaku shooter before.
The two genres aren't worlds apart - R-Type's bosses, for example, are very Gigery, but they're nothing like as icky as the creatures you face in Angel At Dusk, in which every projectile appears to be some species of maggot, and your ship is a sort of evolving flesh-moth faerie reminiscent of China Mieville's Perdido Street Station. Perhaps I can interest you in the demo?
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The rough timeline for next year's updates and expansions for WOW and WOW Classic
Blizzard have revealed their approximate update plans for the next year of arthouse oddity World Of Warcraft, which if I remember correctly is a "massively multiple-player" experience of some antiquity that involves Orcs - a kind of always-online Baldur's Gate, if you will, or a strictly fantasy-themed Fortnite with dungeons instead of forts. Seems far-fetched, but let's roll with it.
As a reminder, WOW now comes in two broad flavours: classic and modern. In modern World Of Warcraft, you can expect three more updates for the existing Dragonflight expansion before the release of World Of Warcraft: The War Within later in the year. This introduces a new subterranean playspace, the Ringing Deeps, and is the first in a trilogy of expansions called The Worldsoul Saga.
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Deals: Logitech's superb G Pro X Superlight esports mouse is down to $59.99 refurbished in the US
Compared to buying a new model for $100 at Amazon, this is a steal.
Logitech's best value FPS mouse, the G Pro Superlight, is down to $60 when you buy it refurbished in the US at the company's official store. That's a huge reduction from its launch MSRP of $150 and even the $100 that the refurbished models normally go for.
I love this mouse because it's extremely comfortable, with a smooth and streamlined symmetric shape that sits easily in the hand, with a lightweight 63g design. This makes it extremely agile for fast-paced games, and this is backed up by bulletproof Lightspeed wireless, a top optical sensor and excellent battery life too. That's why I ended up with two of them - one in black and one in pink - and I still use them on the regular for Counter-Strike 2, Valorant and Warzone.
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Deals: This electric standing desk is just £90 at Amazon
A budget price for a small but well-featured computer desk.
Want a standing desk but don't have the budget to get something ultra-premium like Corsair's £1000 Platform:6, Ikea's £475 Bekant or Flexispot's £200 Essential Standing Desk? Well, no worries - there are even cheaper standing desks available online, and today you can pick one up from Marsail for just £80 using a voucher at Amazon UK, saving you £28.
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Deals: Charge your Steam Deck and other USB-C devices with this 100W GaN 4-port charger for £36
That's 10% off an already great value USB wall charger.
Gallium Nitride chargers have taken over from their silicon predecessors thanks to their more efficient designs, allowing even physically small chargers to deliver a huge amount of power. One of the best is Ugreen's Nexode 100W, and now this 4-port USB-C charger is down to £36 at MyMemory in the UK with code 10X25. For context, the same charger cost £42 when it was discounted earlier this year!
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Deals: This £10 USB mic radically outperforms the one built into your headset or laptop
The Neat Bumblebee 2 is one we've featured before and highly recommend.
At the start of the month we highlighted a US deal on the Neat Bumblebee 2, which saw the USB mic tumble from an MSRP of $100 to just $17 at Woot. Today we've found the UK equivalent, as you can now pick up this excellent mic for just £9.99 at Currys - with a further £2.99 for delivery or free collection if you prefer. That's a great deal for the mic that cost around £30 for all of Black Friday and comes with my personal recommendation.
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Brussels sprouts just in time for Christmas in Microsoft Flight Simulator's new city update
Now drag me to The Hague
I haven't checked in on Microsoft Flight Simulator for a while, but the aviation 'em up hasn't missed a beat. Last month it received World Update 15, continuing increase the detail of its global landscape with a visit to Greenland and the Nordics. Now Asobo have released City Update 5: European Cities 1, which brings a similar pass of polish to five "exemplary urban regions".
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Two of the best indie strategy games are now Steam Deck verified
Engrossing games to play this Christmas
It's nearly the holidays, which means some of you might be looking for something to play on your Steam Deck while you're away visiting family. The choice just got a little harder: beautiful early access tactics game Songs Of Conquest and clever fantasy citybuilder Against The Storm are both now Steam Deck verified.
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Warhammer 40,000's movie and TV deal with Amazon now finalised
Streams for the streamer god
Around this time last year it was announced that Games Workshop had reached an "agreement in principle" with Amazon to bring the Warhammer 40,000 universe to the screen. That full agreement has now been finalised, Games Workshop say, meaning "the next stage can begin."
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The Finals technical issue has been preventing "banning cheaters efficiently"
But they're close to a fix
I keeping hopping into The Finals for one quick game before bed, then accidentally playing it until 2am. Perhaps sleep deprivation accounts for why I haven't spotted any cheaters in-game, but apparently they've been more of an issue in recent days. Developers Embark Studios say that's because of a technical issue they've now fixing.
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Get Paradise Killer, Roadwarden, Card Shark and seven other top-drawer narrative games for 83% off
Story-Rich Megabundle live till 21st Dec
I don't tend to write up Steam bundle discounts, but this is a rather good one. As the name suggests, LudoNarraCon and Fellow Traveller's Story-Rich Megabundle nets you 10 well-received narrative-heavy games for around £20, €23 or $25, including three games I'd personally say are among the choicest chunks of digital scribble to ever grace an SSD.