Logitech makes some of the best mainstream racing wheels and pedals on the market, but the cost of entry is still fairly steep: £269 for the PC/PlayStation-compatible G29 and the same for the PC/Xbox G920 variant. Today though, Currys in the UK are offering £80 off on either model when you use code WHEEL80, dropping the price down to £189.
Putting together this list of the best early Black Friday SSD deals has proven trickier than expected, and not because Black Friday is still three weeks away. It’s because so many SSDs are subjected to dirty retailer tricks, mainly raising prices for the sole purpose of dropping them back down and calling it a “deal”. Naw, sir, not falling for that. What you’ll find here, then, are SSD offers with genuine discounts only – and with both lightspeed-fast NVMe SSDs and affordable SATA SSDs on early sales, there's something for all kinds of PC builds.
Management at a hotel that appears in the Amsterdam missions of new Activision Blizzard military shooter Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 have said they regret the hotel's “unwanted involvement” in the game. The Conservatorium Hotel, a five-star gaff that describes itself as the “living room of Amsterdam” on its website, hasn’t taken too kindly to being shot to pieces in digital form. Despite a name change, it’s still recognisably the same establishment.
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's pick is a lot less comprehensive than usual because I'm having some Twitter troubles which I hope are tech issues and not policy changes, but I guess we'll see. Still! My eye was caught by some good and fancy things, including Halloweenie bits like an armed squirrel spooking people and lots of red fluids.
As part of the game’s 1.05 patch, DC bad boy Black Adam finally joins the roster of fighters in Warner Bros. licensed brawler MultiVersus today. Adam is a bruiser and launches with an unlockable skin modelled after his classic comic book look, which nabs players extra candy during the Halloween event running through to the end of Multiversus’s first season on November 15th. Today’s 1.05 update sees an arcade mode added to the game too, along with a new casual Growth Spurt mode.
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The original Butterfly Soup is named for its ending monologue. Its four main characters, Diya, Min-seo, Noelle, and Akarsha, use the liquefaction of a caterpillar inside a cocoon as a metaphor for the awkward teenage growing phase they’re all in. In the sequel, set a few months later, they find a butterfly with a crumpled wing. It’s a victim of a false spring, having emerged from its cocoon too early due to unseasonably warm weather. One of them worries that they are like the injured insect; forever marked by their early life. And it’s this that Butterfly Soup 2 digs into much more deeply than its predecessor.
If you’re not familiar with the original, Butterfly Soup is a visual novel about four Asian girls navigating high school in the late 2000s, playing baseball, and falling in love. On replaying it to get ready for this review, it made me cry at least twice and laugh out loud a bunch more. It’s pay what you want with no minimum price, and takes about 2-3 hours. I’m also going to spoil parts of it, so go play it already.
Boo! Did I startle you? GOOD. I'm currently competing for the title of trickster-in-chief here at RPS, and I'm never going to have a chance of receiving this promotion unless I reach my daily scare quota. If only there was a way I could package together a collection of scary stories as told my colleagues and claim them all as my own.
Aha! I got you again! They don't call me the Merry Trickster Of UK PC Gaming Websites for nothing! You've been Halloween'd, my friends! To celebrate spooky season, I gathered seven members of the RPS treehouse to tell me about one moment from a PC game that scared them the most. The results were exactly as I expected. Some recounted events in classic horror games that shocked them senseless, whereas others told me anecdotes about games that most wouldn't consider scary at all. The result is seven tales of spooks that are sure to chill your bones this All Hallows' Eve.
Sundays are for moving forwards a bit, so your backpack doesn't get trapped as tube doors snap shut. Before you shuffle, let's read this week's best writing about games (and game related things).
The Witcher's third season hasn't yet released on Netflix, but the streaming service today confirmed that the show has been renewed for a fourth season. They also announced that Henry Cavill, who has played protagonist Geralt for the first three season, won't be returning. He's being replaced for season 4 by Liam Hemsworth.
The sequel to 2017 visual novel smash hit Butterfly Soup is out now. It's set a few months after the original game and continues to tell the story of "gay Asian-American teens playing baseball and falling in love". It's also, just like the first game, free to download and play - although you can also name your price and pay $5 for a digital artbook over on Itch.
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Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2's launch hasn't gone according to plan, with players reporting various crash bugs. Infinity Ward have already released a patch to address some of the issues, but at the time of writing the game has only 58% positive reviews on Steam.
Boo! Ha ha, don't worry, reader dear! That was just me, not any sort of goblin, boglin, or nilbog—this time...! I do always enjoy Halloweentime, and not just because I own a litre of movie-grade fake blood. It's nice to enjoy this sort of stuff as the days draw shorter, and after this we get to launch into Christmastime and 24/7 Hallmark Channel movies (pro tip: look for ones with Andrew W Walker or Cameron Mathison, they're usually good). But first, what are you playing this weekend? We do have some offbeat Halloween lists if you need inspiration. And here's what we're clicking on!
Square Enix have given us another look at Forspoken, the open world action RPG slated for release on January 24th 2023. The latest deep dive trailer details the game’s magical parkour abilities that you’ll be using to get across the fantasy realm of Athia. Forspoken’s flashy, stamina-based movement is by far the most distinctive thing about it in my eyes, so let's take a look at Frey's parkour abilities below.
Overwatch 2’s arctic scientist Mei has had a notable bug in her toolkit since launch, but the problem is becoming more persistent for some players. All of Mei’s abilities revolve around ice, whether slowing down enemies with a snowy spray or incubating in a cocoon of ice. However, a compilation on Reddit showcases various problems with her Ice Wall ability, which seems to be in need of some serious TLC.
CEO of Microsoft Gaming Phil Spencer spoke about the possibility of price increases for consoles, games and Game Pass at the Wall Street Journal's annual Tech Live conference (thanks to The Verge for transcribing.) "We've held price on our console, we've held price on games and our subscription. I don't think we'll be able to do that forever," Spencer admits. "I do think at some point we'll have to raise some prices on certain things." He was quick to point out, though, that these changes wouldn't come into effect this holiday season, as Microsoft wants to "maintain the prices that we have."
Bad news for RTX 4090 owners this morning. Reports are coming in that the 16-pin power adapter for Nvidia's flagship RTX 40 series GPU is getting so hot it's actually melting the hardware, which is... err... not something you want happening inside your PC case.
Rain World's wholesome, physicsy slugcat GIFs were breadcrumbs which eventually led to one of this century's most brutal games. Now it's getting DLC. Rain World: Downpour is arriving in January 2023 and will add five new slugcats, hundreds of new rooms to survive, official mod support, and co-op. Check the announcement trailer below.
Around 24 hours ago, Gotham Knights on Steam received its first patch. Among fixes for was various bugs, the game was also updated to remove Denuvo's anti-tamper DRM from the game. Sometimes games remove their DRM after the launch window, but not normally just five days after release, making its removal from Gotham Knights a survival.
Well, now Denuvo has been re-added.
Saturnalia isn't a terribly long game, but it has spent much longer occupying my thoughts. Any time in the past couple of weeks that my friends and colleagues thought they were talking to me, they were in fact talking to an exquisite Italian neon-folk horror game wearing my skin and looking out of the eye-holes in my skull. On at least one occasion I lay in bed at 3am, sweaty and frozen in half-asleep fear, because I thought I'd heard a strange rattling noise...
In fact it was not stillness, but the panic-sprint into darkness that became my main and oft-unsuccessful tactic whenever I heard the creature of Gravoi. Gravoi itself is a small but inconveniently maze-like fictional Sardinian town, host to a yearly folk festival that, every so often, involves the unwary being carried off and killed by a... something. Unfortunately, four very unwary outsiders - rendered outsiders for a variety of reasons, whether they're locals or not - find themselves having to survive the night of this festival, armed with things like matches, firecrackers and a polaroid camera.
What's better than a little city full of mysteries to solve? A mysterious little city trapped in a time loop, where you slowly learn all the secrets but no one remembers what you did last time around. That's The Forgotten City, and if you're on Game Pass, I do recommend having a go before it leaves Microsoft's service next week. It's a great puzzle box running to clockwork, like if Outer Wilds had you meddle with people's lives rather than machinery.
Game Of Thrones author George R. R. Martin has admitted he hasn’t played Elden Ring, despite creating the history and lore for FromSoftware’s RPG. He does have a fairly good reason for it, though. On The Late Show with Stephen Colbert Martin said, “I have not played it because people seem to want this Winds Of Winter book,” the (very) long-awaited sixth chapter in the Game Of Thrones series.
Unknown Worlds Entertainment have announced big changes are coming to their tabletop battling game Moonbreaker. In a blog post, the developers announced they're removing all monetisation from the game, including its in-game currencies and in-game store, in order to "better reflect our early access goals". The changes will come into effect today, alongside the Moonbreaker's first content update, Zax’s Story.
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The last Frog Detective game is here, marking the end of an era for everyone's favourite amphibian-based mystery game series. Our froggy pal has saved a haunted island from the clutches of ghosts, thwarted wizardous party-poopers in Warlock Woods, and now his investigatory prowess has taken him to the wild west. Frog Detective 3: Corruption At Cowboy County may be the last in Worm Club's trio of Frog Detective games, but it's also a certified banger, successfully joining the first and second games in putting a stupid smile on my face for the entire time I played.
The Ryzen 7 5800X3D is one of AMD's fastest gaming CPUs - and the only one of the top contenders that runs on cheap and widely available AM4 motherboards with DDR4 RAM. Earlier this week we covered a deal for the 5800X3D in the US, and now we're back to finish the job with a deal for the UK market.
Right now Ebuyer are taking orders for the 5800X3D at £349, a solid £110 discount from its UK RRP. A lot of folks have already jumped on this deal, using up Ebuyer's existing stock, but you can order now for delivery on October 31st - and get a spooky Halloween upgrade for your PC.
I've done a lot of talking about The Callisto Protocol this year, starting with the game's gore system and spiky walls at Summer Geoff Fest, before finding out its Die Hard and Shaun Of The Dead inspirations at Gamescom. In-between all the talking? Lots of slides and presentations and absolutely no hands anywhere near controllers. But finally, finally, I've played a 90-minute PS5 demo of The Callisto Protocol and can confirm that it felt like a last-gen game in a good way: all photorealistic sweat and blood scrawled on walls, coupled with 360-era exploration and fighting. Refreshingly familiar, I'd say.
Creative Assembly have responded to allegations of abuse within the company regarding a former employee and have vowed to investigate. The Total War developer say they’re working with an "external party" on the investigation and have asked former employees to share their experiences if they “feel able to do so.”
After the past three years, I’d have happily never heard the word "plague" again, let alone in the context of one of my favourite co-op games. Yet after an early play around with Deep Rock Galactic Season 3, I’m already sold that this update – which centers around a corrupting, planet-wide infection – could be its best one yet.
After repelling a robot-spamming rival corp across Seasons 1 and 2, your reward in Season 3 – which launches on November 3rd – is to find your mining operating pelted by a meteorite storm. And they’re carrying a nasty payload: Rockpox, a contagion that quickly infects both the caves of Hoxxes IV and the many, many giant bugs living within them. These sickly Glyphids and contaminated caverns will present you and your fellow space dwarves with some new perils, but also new opportunities to turn a management-pleasing profit. And isn’t providing value to shareholders why we’re all here to begin with?
Nothing frightens me more than not being in control. The fear of an outside force pushing me into the corners of my mind and redecorating however they wish. It’s what should be scary about zombies when they’re not just mindless headshot fodder. This is also the main fear behind Endoparasitic, a top-down horror game released earlier this week. A research facility suffers a parasitic outbreak, leaving you with one arm, surrounded by mutated monsters. Oh, and you’re also infected by one of those deadly parasites I just mentioned. Jolly!
165Hz gaming monitors are getting so cheap these days, that it doesn't make much sense to pick up anything less for gaming if you're buying new. Case in point is this MSI Artymis MAG242C gaming monitor, which offers a 24-in span, 1080p resolution and curved VA panel for £120 after a £30 discount at Currys.
AMD's Ryzen 7000 processors are brilliant, often beating Intel 12th-gen offerings and drawing close with 13th-gen, while offering support for PCIe 5.0 SSDs, DDR5 RAM and a brand new AM5 socket. For content creation, they're by far the best CPUs AMD has ever produced - but for gaming, there is another option: the Ryzen 7 5800X3D. This CPU remains stunningly fast in some games that can take advantage of its uniquely huge L3 cache, and best of all works with a wide range of inexpensive AM4 motherboards with cheap DDR4 RAM.
Pound for pound, it's by far the best AMD CPU for gaming on the market - and now it's been reduced to just $329 at Antonline via Ebay. That's a healthy $120 reduction from its US MSRP of $449, and a great price overall given the level of gaming performance it provides.
It’s been two years since developer Origame Digital released the beloved photography game Umurangi Generation and since then, the team have been relatively quiet. That all changed over the weekend when Umurangi’s composer, ThorHighHeels, posted a YouTube video showcasing three obscure horror games. A short teaser for Origame’s FiveSeven was mysteriously tucked in the middle of it.
Last week I reviewed New Tales From The Borderlands and I really didn't like it. This was upsetting to me; this may come as a surprise, but I try to avoid playing and reviewing games I think I won't like. I don't want to go out of my way to be mean, and I also don't want to spend hours not enjoying myself. I go into almost every game I play actively wanting to enjoy it (the exception being things like Succubus, which I can only assume are trying an avant garde technique to plumb new, unexplored depths of badness on purpose).
As it turned out, a lot of other reviewers did like it. I'm not going to object to that, because it takes all sorts to make a world, and so on. Rather, it made me wonder if I'd sort of hallucinated how much I liked the first Tales From The Borderlands. How fantastic it was, managing to be both the best Telltale game and the best Borderlands game in one, was a big part of why I was so excited for New Tales. It came out a long time ago, and I hadn't played it for a while. Maybe it wasn't how I remembered. Maybe I'd changed, you know?
Praise the sun! Dark Souls II's online features for the Scholar Of The First Sin edition are back up and working after months of being down. Back in January, FromSoftware deactivated online features for the Dark Souls trilogy on PC due to the prominence of hackers and security concerns. Recently, Dark Souls III servers were reactivated (before being deactivated and reactivated again) and now it's Dark Souls II’s turn. The base version of Dark Souls II will have these features “made available at a later date," but for now, Scholar Of The First Sin players can continue to invade the fallen kingdom of Drangleic and scribble down messages for others.
The Activision Blizzard King Workers Alliance have teamed up with the Communications Workers of America (CWA) union to file another charge of unfair labour practices against Activision Blizzard. The filing is in response to a message described as anti-union that was sent by Activision Blizzard’s communications executive, Lulu Meservey, to 18,000 employees last week. The CWA had previously filed a charge of unfair labour practices in September 2021, accusing the company of violating US labour laws and stopping employees from discussing working conditions. Last year’s complaint was closed just a month later.
EA held their first Behind The Sims Summit last week, revealing plenty of Sims updates, including a very early look at the next game in the series, Project Rene. Despite this big news, discussion around the event has focused on EA’s lack of community representation, as they only included one “black simmer” onscreen during a stream full of other content creators. Black content creators have been a significant part of The Sims' online presence for years, creating custom content, mods and more.
The Radeon RX 6950 XT is the fastest AMD graphics card in the world, and will remain so until at least November when AMD is expected to announce a new range of next-gen GPUs. It originally debuted at $1000, undercutting the RTX 3090 Ti at $1500, but third-party models could cost much more - such as this $1200 PowerColor Red Devil. Today though, with that whole 'impending release of better graphics cards' thing, the 6950 XT is down to $800 at Amazon, which is an awesome deal for the level of graphics performance on offer.
The Corsair 5000D is a rather good PC case, but as it's fairly new it's normally quite expensive - like $165 on Amazon expensive. So it brings me good cheer to announce that Woot are doing the case in white or black for just $99.99, the lowest price we've ever recorded for this model.
Horror games are great and all that, but what about games that make you the monster? Yeah. Chew on that for a second.
I'm not just talking about games that belong to the horror genre, either. In fact, spare those asymmetrical multiplayer games that are all the rage with their worryingly young audiences, there are few actual horror games that let you assume the role of the villain. But that doesn't mean there isn't a deluge of titles where you play as a creature so vile, so menacing, that the residents of their worlds undoubtly view the player as evil incarnate. Far from it. The games on this list may not all be spooky in tone, but your character is still the stuff of actual nightmares.
During a 30-minute livestream this weekend, Genshin Impact detailed its upcoming 3.2 update titled ‘Akasha Pulses, the Kalpa Flame Rises,’ set to launch on November 2nd. The 3.2 update will add tons of new stuff to the game, including two playable characters, a conclusion to the Sumeru Archon quest, and much more.
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 extremely athletic handwashing, handpainted art, a cute witch, and more. Come see!
The Cooler Master NR200P is one of the best small form factor PC cases on the market, but it normally costs around £100 - a fair amount of money. Today though, you can pick up the case for nearly half off, as CCL are selling this model for just £54.
For context, the last time we wrote about a big discount to this model, it was down to £76 - so this is the best deal we've ever seen on the NR200P by some margin!
Sundays are for saying, "Yeah, just here's fine mate". Before you get out, let's read this week's best writing about games (and game related things).
After this week in UK politics I, as the kids possibly said seven(?) years ago, can't even. Just. Yep. What a time. A good weekend to get lost in video games and attempt not to encounter any of the chaos which will need to be taken seriously soon but right now brings only despair in its ever-shifting uncertainty. So what are you playing this weekend? Here's what we're clicking on!
In typically British, self-deprecating fashion, I’m happy to admit I’m not very good at Soulslike games, the massively successful Elden Ring included. That’s why I raised an intrigued eyebrow while sipping my seventeenth cup of tea today, after I saw Twitch streamer Luality playing FromSoftware’s latest with just a drawing tablet. Taking on the challenge with admirable confidence, Luality used a virtual keyboard on the tablet’s left side for movement, and bound strokes of the stylus to attack its enormous monsters.
Another day, another handy update for Valve’s Steam Deck handheld PC. This time, it’s a beta update that lets you peek inside your Deck without busting the device open. So if you were thinking of hanging your Steam Deck up like a piñata today and whacking it with a big stick to see what goodies are hiding in there, just grab the client beta update instead. You can opt in by heading to Settings, selecting System, and then the Steam Update Channel.
Today marks the start of Overwatch 2’s first double XP weekend, one of three lined up for the hero shooter before the end of season one. You’ll be able to net your heroes twice the match XP until October 24th, starting at 7pm BST/8pm CEST/11am PDT today and ending the same time on Monday, but the bonus doesn’t apply to daily and weekly challenges. Blizzard have also revealed that Overwatch 2’s first seasonal event, Halloween Terror, begins on October 25th.
Resident Evil Village's Winters' Expansion includes the Shadow Of Rose DLC, a new story in which Ethan Winters' now-teenage daughter returns to Lady Dimitrescu's castle. It also includes a new third-person mode for the base game, and it's this for which there is now a demo.
Hello folks. Sorry to have to start another Letter From The Editor with an apology about how terribly late it is, but honestly, I'm not entirely sure where the time has gone. One minute it was June, and then suddenly... almost November!? I'm sorry everyone, truly. It has, in part, been another period of almost being able to announce some things, but also not quite. We're still working to get our proposed RPS Game Club off the ground, for example, but finding a good quality source of regular game keys for it has proven to be an elusive endeavour, to say the least. I'd imagine this will probably be a project for 2023 now (a delay, how quaint!), given how close we are to the end of the year, but I'll keep you posted as soon as we've got more to share on it.
Things that are happening though, is the return of The RPS 100, which you may have seen us post about earlier in the week. This is our annual countdown of our favourite PC games of all time, as voted for by the RPS Treehouse. This year's list is quite different to the one we did last year - we do, after all, have pretty much a brand-new team in place now - and I'm looking forward to sharing that with you all next week. We even got our art team to make a special fancy header image for it this year and everything! Plus, if you were one of the people put out by our (accidental) glossing over of a certain immersive sim last year, you really won't want to miss it.
Overwatch 2 hero Bastion has been missing-in-action for over a week now, but Blizzard have now set a date for his return, alongside fellow missing hero Torbjorn. In an update on the Overwatch forums, Blizzard confirmed that the missing characters should be returning to the game on October 25th, alongside the Junkertown map, which has also recently been disabled due to graphical performance bugs. Their return coincides with the game’s next planned update.
The Intel Core i5-13600K fills a familiar role in the latest 13th Gen/Raptor Lake series of CPUs. There are chips in this family with many more cores and even higher clock speeds, like the £700 Core i9-13900K, but this is the one most upgrade-seekers will probably look to first: a mid-range champion to take over from the Core i5-12600K.
