Half-Life 2 was the first game I ever played in VR. Back in the primordial days of 2013, I was lucky enough to get my ungainly sausage-mitts on an Oculus Developer's Kit – the prototype headset that eventually led to the Oculus Rift. Understandably given the name, there were not games for the developers kit outside of a few incredibly basic demos. But there was Half-Life 2, for which Valve had implemented a hacky VR mode that you could activate with some console tomfoolery.

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I'd argue that Azeroth's unending expansion has taken the shine off a world that used to positively sparkle. Still, no matter what I think about World Of Warcraft today, it still holds a special place in my heart as an important formative experience.

Even the time capsule that's Classic WoW probably couldn't capture the same buzz of the past, mainly because I, as a being of flesh and bone, am not a teenager anymore. But I'd argue there's one place that still captures the essence of WoW more than WoW itself nowadays: YouTube. Or to be more specific, channels which provide hour-long music and ambience from some of the game's most memorable zones.

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Last time, you decided that dakka is better than overwatch (not Overwatch). It wasn't the most overwhelming victory of this scientific process so far, but it certainly was the loudest. More dakka indeed. This week, I ask you to pick between a cool form of human movement and some cool human speech. What's better: mantling or cool swearing?

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The Crucial P5 Plus is the best value 'second-gen' PCIe 4.0 drive, with sequential speeds up to 6600MB/s that make it ideal for anything from mid-range to high-end gaming rigs or the PS5. Its TLC NAND and DRAM cache also mean that performance remains high even in sustained write scenarios, unlike cheaper QLC/no-DRAM drives.

The Crucial P5 Plus normally costs £100+, but today it's down to £92.51 on Amazon UK - one of the best prices we've seen for this model although not quite the best ever.

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The Core i5 12400F is a surprisingly excellent gaming CPU, offering the power of Intel's new Alder Lake architecture in a simple six-core twelve-thread configuration. The CPU supports PCIe 5.0 and DDR5, but it also works with cheaper DDR4- and PCIe 4.0-based hardware.

It's normally £200, but it's down to £167 on AWD-IT which is a pretty decent deal if you want to build a powerful gaming PC on a budget.

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After a £69 discount (nice), the Crucial P3 has become the most affordable 2TB PCIe 3.0 SSD on Amazon. You'll now pay just £105 for this drive, a great deal that works out to just 5.3p per gigabyte.

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The 28-in Gigabyte M28U is one of the most affordable 4K 144Hz HDMI 2.1 monitors, ideal for use with PC, PS5 and Series X alike. Normally it is available for high but understandable-for-its-specs figure of £669, but for Black Friday (and its aftershocks), it's been reduced to £399 which is a rather fetching price.

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Somewhere in the region of 8,000 games have been removed from Steam since its inception, from the mass banning of “fake games”, to publishers removing their own titles due to licensing disputes, pending re-releases, personal disillusionment, server shutdowns and political scandals. Valve even took down one of its own games. Released in 2004 with Steam AppID 92, Codename: Gordon is a Flash-based 2D side-scroller set in the Half-Life universe, developed by Nuclearvision and published by Valve. It was removed due to a hard-coded link to the now-defunct developer’s domain, which Valve regarded as a security risk.

But removed isn’t always the same as gone, and exploring Steam’s deleted items is an adventure through modern gaming history. I spoke to some developers of delisted games to find out more.

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A conversation in the RPS Treehouse the other day reminded me that there is only one game I have ever completed for the first time and then finished again, all within the span of a week. That game was The Walking Dead: The Final Season.

Having played all three previous seasons of Telltale's choose-your-own-zombie-apocalypse tearjerker (plus the 400 Days DLC and the Michonne spin-off), it's no surprise that I was incredibly invested in Clementine's story by The Final Season. I'm not a big kid person, typically, but you'd have to be beyond heartless not to love little Clem, wouldn't you? Even though, by the time TFS rolls around, she's grown into medium-sized Clem, and is a bit bloody scary to boot.

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Card-based strategy games seem to have really found their feet over the last 12 months. Now that we're a few years clear of Slay The Spire's chokehold over the genre, deckbuilders are starting to come thick and fast in a variety of exciting mash-ups. This year alone, I've sunk a hefty number of hours into the deckbuilding tower defence 'em up ORX, got lost in the tabletop plots of Foretales, and later this week we'll see the launch of Marvel's Midnight Suns, the new card-based strategy RPG from XCOM makers Firaxis. It's a good time to be a fan of deckbuilders, is what I'm saying, and early next year the mythological exploits of Mahokenshi will be looking to carry the baton forward into 2023.

Made by the Paris-based Game Source Studio, this turn-based strategy battler sees you take control of four types of samurai as you seek to bring balance to a mystical realm above the clouds. Oni, goblins and other creatures from Japanese myth are your primary antagonists here, but its hexagonal islands are also stuffed full of text-based narrative events, sidequests, and treasure troves to uncover. It's a lot to take in, but the latter in particular are vital to your success. That's because every time you start a new mission in Mahokenshi, you'll be going in with a completely fresh deck - and based on an early preview build I've been playing recently, it's both an ingenious way to keep things feeling fresh, but it can also be a double-edged sword when it comes to trying out new tactics.

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