Massive SATA SSDs are getting ever more affordable, and this is the best 4TB deal we've ever seen here at RPS. You can get a TeamGroup T-Force Vulcan Z 4TB drive for just $138 at Newegg, down from a previous price of $180.
In fact, this is half the price of a deal we were eagerly posting about just one year ago, which really speaks to the speed at which SSD storage has collapsed in price in 2023.
LG's C2 OLED is my top TV recommendation for PC and console gaming, and the 42-inch and 48-inch versions can even work as PC monitors. Today the 48-inch model has dropped to £824 at Ebay when you use codes BONUS10 and SAVE100OLED, a great price for what is a class-leading 48-inch OLED. For context, this year's basically identical 48-inch C3 OLED costs £1100, so you're saving nearly £300.
A few weeks ago I wrote about Grand Theft Auto players describing the movement of planes in random GTA promotional art as evidence of a forthcoming GTA 6 reveal, timed to intersect with the waning gibbous moon. I thought that the furore might die down after GTA 6 failed to materialise in accordance with the lunar cycle, but it turns out this rabbit hole has no bottom.
Come now, gaze upon the above, just-posted Rockstar promotional image for a new Red Dead Online outfit. To my eye, that picture looks like a weird dude in a mask, gazing at you through piles of skulls. Standard Halloween gamer fare. But it turns out that when you draw lines on it using MS Paint, you end up with the below.
One of the most unnerving things about Geometric Interactive's lush insect puzzler Cocoon is how intuitive it feels. For my money, anyway. The premise is perfectly brain-bending: each world contains or is contained by another world, and you're a beetle who can not only leap between them, but pick one world up and use it as a puzzle prop inside another.
The game doesn't really verbalise any of this: there's no equivalent for Atreus in God Of War: Ragnarok, ostentatiously nudging you towards each solution. And yet somehow, I find myself flowing through Cocoon like I'm being poured out of a bottle, switching scales and putting together the pieces in a way that feels effortful yet graceful, earned yet... eerily frictionless. This is no reflection on my knack for solving puzzles. It's a show of how elegantly the game is made so that while there's difficulty, there's rarely frustration.
Puzzle game Suika, or 'That Watermelon Game', is currently having a bit of a moment online. It's been available on Switch for a couple of years now in Japan, but this week it received an English eShop version, and it's taken off a bit with streamers and Twitch folk. It's also spawned dozens of clones, including an unofficial free web browser version that I've been giving a go over the last couple of lunch times to see what all the fuss is about. It's a neat little time waster. It's a teensy bit different to the proper Switch version, but the basic concept is the same: it's a essentially physics-based fruit Tetris meets Threes, where you're dropping similar-looking fruits on top of one another to combine them into even larger fruits.
The goal is to combine them enough times to get the big watermelon for mega points, but honestly, I'm not sure how much longer I can keep playing this free version of Suika, because so many of the fruits you meet along the way to the watermelon just look so gosh darn sad> that it's breaking my heart a little. Then again, if I was a pear, I'd probably have a pretty sour-looking face, too, if I'm honest.
I like to-do list games. Take Wytchwood, where your to-do list is stuff like 'craft trap to catch lizard to use lizard eyes to craft weapon to defeat ghost to...' and so on. My Little Universe, which is clearly best played in co-op, and would be good to play with kids if you have sourced any of those from somewhere, is like a to-do list game that reduces crafting to the barest minimum. You are basically collecting raw resources and pouring them into a bottomless maw. Despite that description, it's quite charming.
Cities: Skylines 2 is, much like the wonkily roaded, pollution-choked helltown I’ve built within it, a work in progress. Developers Colossal Order upped the citybuilding sequel’s system requirements well in advance of launch, and more recently admitted to have "not achieved the benchmark we targeted" for PC performance. Instead, future improvements are promised, to patch Skylines 2 into better shape.
I wish I could say that this is all just pessimism, born from an overabundance of caution and expectation management. But no, it is just a bit of a mess, one capable of putting freshly mixed concrete shoes on even the fastest graphics cards. I’ve worked out a best settings guide that, compared to the available graphics presets, can better balance performance and visuals – though be warned that this will feel more like urgent repair work than a dream remodel.
I always love spotting deals on budget mechanical keyboards, as they bring what is - in my mind at least - the single biggest keyboard upgrade available to prices that you can't say no to. The LTC Neon75 is far from a big-brand choice, but the keyboard ticks all the boxes for me when it comes to features and design. There are beautiful 'pudding' keycaps, a compact and convenient 75% layout, tri-mode wired/wireless connectivity and hot-swappable key switches. Its US MSRP is a reasonable-sounding $70, but now it's available for a 50% off 'overstock' price on Amazon - that's just $35.
Last week we recommended one of LG's 27-inch Fast IPS monitors at the popular 1440p 144Hz spec point, and now we're back to look at one better: a 1440p 240Hz model that's going for $350 via LG's US web store or Amazon's US storefront if you prefer.
Everybody knows some version of the story around Final Fantasy XIV: it came out, it wasn’t very good, it was remade as A Realm Reborn, and now it’s beloved. Over the decade since A Realm Reborn’s release, its reputation has grown with every single expansion. FFXIV’s producer and director Naoki Yoshida (more commonly known as Yoshi P) is now so synonymous with the game that it’s easy to forget he was only brought onto the project in 2010 - after XIV had been released, to overwhelmingly negative reviews.