I’ve hit the install cap on my storage drive more times than I’ve rage-quit in Apex. At some point, deleting a 90GB game just to download another becomes a sad cycle of SSD suffering. So yeah, when a bunch of top-tier M.2 drives go on sale, I pay attention. Amazon's Spring Sale has been great for PC gaming deals, but it's also the last day of the sale as well, so don't delay on these latest price drops.

Read more

InZoi’s early access release isn’t a particularly good fit for the Steam Deck, primarily because it isn’t a particularly good game. Even before you can dig into its sterile person-pushing, though, trying to run InZoi on Valve’s hanhdheld involves involuntarily headbutting the kinds of compatibility problems and weird workarounds that haven’t been common to the Deck since its early days in 2022.

This is frustrating in itself, and doubly so knowing that despite all those years of maturing, the Steam Deck doesn’t really have a heavyweight life sim that slots in seamlessly to the handheld format. The Sims series, InZoi’s clear inspiration and main rival, can be monkey-wrenched into playability, but even the most recent Sims 4 needs a community-made control modification to function – and that’s more about replicating mouse controls on the trackpads than truly optimising for controller-style inputs. InZoi wants to look> like the very model of a modern life simulator, but its own lack of portable rapport is, at best, a missed opportunity to plug this gap.

Read more

I recently got three hours of hands-on time with Doom: The Dark Ages, which included a ride on dragonback and a fist fight with a massive mech. But one other sequence saw me wrecking demon lads in one of the more expansive, explorey levels this newest FPS is promising. For a lark, I decided to throw all the difficulty sliders up in an effort to hurt myself spiritually and physically. In doing so I discovered there are some interesting options for players who want a brutal challenge. I also recorded it, so you can see how chaotic, silly, and abrupt it can get (and so you can say "I'd do better" than the disgusting journalist).

Read more

I used to think any old headset would do. Plug it in, hear the game, done. Then I bought a half-decent one and immediately heard footsteps I’d been ignoring for years. Now I can’t go back. If you’re still gaming with tinny audio and a mic that makes you sound like a drive-thru cashier in a hurricane, Amazon's Spring Sale is your best chance to escape the audio troubles, and it's also the last day of the sale as well, so don't delay on these top discounts.

Read more

Doom is going medieval. Id Software's next brutish shooter, Doom: The Dark Ages, was revealed with a shield-flinging trailer last summer, and we've since learned more about how it'll actually play. Nic already summed up the new features but I gots something that Nic boy don’t: three hours of hands-on time with the Doomlad, including some dragonback dog-fighting, and a fifty-storey fistfight in a gargantuan mech. Let me tell you what it's like.

Read more

Hello reader who is also a reader, and welcome back to Booked For The Week - our regular Sunday chat with a selection of cool industry folks about books! I woke from a terrible nightmare last night. I'd just released a book and every three or so pages, the publisher had inserted a double page spread trying to sell the reader a wireless mouse with Minecraft movie Jack Black's gormless, gouty grin on it, turning my carefully curated atmosphere to shit! Phew. Thank goodness it was just a nightmare! Just an utter, utter nightmare.

Anyway, never mind all that. The sun is out, and books still exist and are mostly advertisement free! Here to talk about them this week is game maker, Dicey Dungeons writer, Now Play This festival founder, and The Husbands author, Holly Gramazio! Cheers Holly! Mind if we have a nose at your bookshelf?

Read more

Sundays are for nursing a sore throat into nearly its third week of activity. I wish I wasn't such a tiny widdle baby, but I strongly feel that no person has ever suffered as I now suffer. Let's do some links.

Edge Magazine has launched an industry newsletter, called Knowledge. You can signup here. Edge has long been a stealth B2B product, so an explicitly B2B newsletter makes sense. This is also promising because it's being written by Marie Dealessandri, former deputy editor of GI.biz.

Read more

This week RPS has been racked by staff absences due to illness, family affairs, press trips, and a dire force of negation called “holiday”. For a while, on Friday, I thought I might be the only one left. “Is there anyone alive out there?” I howled, guiding my lifeboat among the frozen gobbets of discount gaming keyboard. “Can anyone hear me?” Then, I heard a few, faint voices on the wind. Good news: RPS still has some writers and what’s more, they have plans for the weekend.

Read more

It's click season, and Amazon's Spring Sale has some absolute bangers lined up for your next mouse upgrade. Whether you're grinding out ranked in Valorant or just need something smoother than your office-issued brick, now's the time to strike. Prices are slashed, specs are stacked, and your K/D ratio is crying out for better gear.

Read more

I’ve never trusted anyone who says their keyboard is “just fine.” If your spacebar sounds like a rusty stapler and your RGB barely flickers, it’s time to stop pretending. You deserve better. The Amazon Spring Sale is stacked with gaming keyboards that actually keep up with your reflexes and don’t sound like you're punching a calculator from 1994.

Read more