As both a parent and the resident news lad here, I probably spend way more time talking and writing about games than getting hundreds of hours to actually play them. While most of the games I've snuck the odd minutes with – I hesitate to say hours – made it onto our Advent Calendar for Horace’s approval, the three below were a few that made me and my family smile at different points throughout 2022. Roll on 2023 - and even more games.

Possibly my most magical Christmas as a kid was in 1997, aged 12. I got a Saturn and an issue of the UK’s Official Sega Saturn Magazine that had a Christmas NiGHTS Into Dreams disc on the cover. I reckon that it was my favourite, most unabashedly fun time for gaming ever (outside my decades fiddling around on PC, obvs). Indie platformer Lunistice is a blatant love letter to the 32-bit era, and the kind of game that largely skipped the poor old Saturn.

You guide Hana the Tanuki about as she dreams, aiming to get her to the Moon. Hana properly speeds along, bouncing and spinning her tail to thwack enemies with a lovely splat effect. Devs A Grumpy Fox have really nailed the classic 90s platformer vibe, thanks to all the different dreamworlds that Hana gets to careen through. Don’t expect something open-world like Sonic Frontiers, because Lunistice is deliberately meant to be a linear, short experience. Good grief, could we use more of those.

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I didn't play as many games as I wanted to this year - but then I say that every single year and will probably continue to do so until the end of time (I assume at some point my consciousness will be uploaded into an immortal robot that will exist until the heat death of the universe, and that robot will still be doing previews). Like everyone else who has written their selection box, my top picks made it onto the Advent Calendar this year. But some didn't! Here are but a three of them.

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A little known fact is that all of the RPS staff are complex clockwork automata, designed and built by a little gnome with the kind of inch-thick glasses that make your eyes look comically large. We're each powered by a spell that lasts but 12 months, so every Christmas we fall over like sad marionettes. The gnome has to spend a couple of weeks trekking up a mountain to see the fairy who can recast the spells on us. You can help fund his sled dogs and provisions by becoming a member of the RPS supporter program.> While he's away, we've prepared some Christmas Crackers for you.

Time to enjoy your lovely joke!

Q. What goes great with Cult Of The Lamb?

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The Sennheiser HD 599 SE has been one of my favourite pairs of headphones for a long time, with its open-back design, neutral sound signature and comfy velour earpads combining into one of the best affordable headsets for critical listening and gaming in my book. These headphones normally hover around £100 to £180, but today they've dropped to a near-all-time-low: £87 at Amazon UK.

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The Samsung 980 Pro, a 'PCIe 4.0 SSD speed demon' with 'absolutely barnstorming... read and write performance' and a former 'fastest PCIe 4.0 SSD' pick has been reduced over at Amazon UK. There, you can pick up the 1TB model for £98, and it's even the premium version that includes a high-grade heatsink preinstalled.

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It's been a weird year at RPS for me. After eight years as news editor, I started the nebulous new role of associate editor. This brought a broad mandate to cover indie games and PC Game Pass and to do, like, whatever else I think might be fun or good. It has been weird to not clock in and just Do News, and to have responsibility only over myself. This freedom has felt great when I've had ideas, and terrible when I've not. I'm still feeling it out, settling in, and making mistakes, but I'm quite enjoying myself. Hopefully you have enjoyed some of it too. Here are a few of my favourite things I've written this year!

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I confess: I usually did my damndest to rig the RPS Advent Calendar vote. When every year has so many more than 24 good games, I always tried to tactically vote and reshuffle points to wedge in a few wee great games I knew not many people had played. But with a change to voting procedure this year, I simply couldn't get some games on our list. So, here are the games I would've slammed into our advent calendar if I were still allowed to cheat, along with some that simply didn't quite make the cut.

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A little known fact is that all of the RPS staff are complex clockwork automata, designed and built by a little gnome with the kind of inch-thick glasses that make your eyes look comically large. We're each powered by a spell that lasts but 12 months, so every Christmas we fall over like sad marionettes. The gnome has to spend a couple of weeks trekking up a mountain to see the fairy who can recast the spells on us. You can help fund his sled dogs and provisions by becoming a member of the RPS supporter program.> While he's away, we've prepared some Christmas Crackers for you.

Time to enjoy your lovely joke!

Someone stole all the PSU cables out of my PC

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AMD's Ryzen 5600X was a favourite of value-oriented gamers when it debuted in late 2020 - to say nothing of RPS head big honcho Katharine - so unsurprisingly AMD followed it up with an even cheaper model, the 5600, about a year later. This non-X variant performs more or less identically, with a slightly low rated boost clock that translates into one or two percent worse performance in CPU-limited scenarios. Given the fact that the 5600 is £13 cheaper on Amazon right now, we'd recommend it over the X any time.

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Sabrent's Rocket PCIe 4.0 SSD is one of best cheap PCIe 4.0 SSDs that doesn't cut corners in terms of NAND type (it's TLC, rather than the cheaper QLC) and cache (it's got a DRAM cache). This makes it a good performer even in sustained write scenarios, as you might encounter in video editing and the like, while its good random read/write speeds are good for gaming. Sabrent has discounted the drive to £77.99 on Amazon UK, which is a good price for this level of performance.

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