If you’ve been trying to buy an RTX 5080, you already know it’s nearly impossible to find. Nvidia’s new GPU has been selling out instantly, with standalone cards unavailable or listed at outrageous resale prices. That’s why this deal from Dell is worth a look. The Alienware Aurora R16 gaming PC includes an RTX 5080 for just $2,399.99 right now.
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! "Nic, you selfless paragon. You champion of the people. You prince among men. I can't believe you put your favourite column on pause for several weeks to let me finish my book!". Please. I'm sure you would have done the same, were you also a dashing genius with a moustache powerful enough to crack the pyramids.
To ring in the resurrection with style, it's The Norwood Suite, Betrayal At Club Low, and Moves Of The Diamond Hand's Cosmo D! Cheers Cosmo! Mind if we have a nose at your bookshelf?
Sundays are for asking for forgiveness, since I missed Sunday Papers entirely last weekend. Alas, I was stricken by a deep malaise, but I return now with renewed vigour and another roundup of links to good writing from across the web. Some of the good writing is even about games this time.
For the LA Review Of Books, Celine Nguyen reviewed Building SimCity, Chaim Gingold's book about the creation of SimCity.
Thank you all for your wonderful soundtrack suggestions earlier this week! I'll be gleefully ploughing my way through them over the coming workdays. But now isn't the time for that! Weekends are for the playing, not the listening of the playing!
Here's what we're all clicking on this weekend.
Last weekend, as Monster Hunter Wilds bore down on us like a stampeding wildebeest, my eye was caught by furtive movements in the leaves underfoot. Behold the creepy extravagance of Microtopia, a strange and engrossing factory builder in which your factories are run by cyborg ants.
Created by Netherlands-based Cordyceps Collective, it gives you landscapes of buglike diodes scuttling about on pin connectors, harvesting bolts and other scrap for a queen who resembles a pregnant clump of capacitors. Insect strategy games are startlingly abundant right now, but Microtopia goes a little further than many both in its eerie Darwinian presentation, and in trying to portray how ant colonies "think" while meeting expectations for management sims.
In hindsight, we probably should have taken Monster Hunter Wilds’ earlier benchmark tool release as more of a warning. The actual game is every bit the graphics card torture device that standalone tool suggested it might be, and while it doesn’t make DLSS 3/FSR 3 frame generation mandatory per se>, it clearly intends to misappropriate these features, forcing them to act as performance crutches they were never designed as.
What makes this particularly headshakey is that Wilds’ PC version is, initially, quite sympathetic to the format: besides a full set of DLSS/FSR/XeSS upscalers, an unlocked framerate option, Nvidia Reflex support and the like, its thirty-odd individual quality options hint at the finest of fine-tuning possibilities. Yet these, too, aren’t really fit for purpose, with only minor differences in how the highest and lowest settings perform.
The dust on the yesterday's horizon has become today's stampede. Monster Hunter Wilds has launched and we are all choking on up-kicked sand. So far the action game has hit a peak of 987,000 players on Steam and all my news feeds are nothing but Rathalos screams. This is what we call a "big 'un".
But what trembling critters are eking out an existence in the disturbed ground beneath Capcom's feet? Other games still exist, and some are just unlucky enough to step out of their bolthole the same moment a much scarier freak is on the prowl. Here are 4 games that just released which may be worth a look if you have no time for big beasties.
I found Phoenix Point difficult to love, despite wanting to. I didn't cover its original 2019 release at all, partly preferring to give something else positive coverage instead, and partly suspecting I'd attached hope to it in a way I seldom do, and was overreacting. Perhaps that was a disservice to you, The Reader. We ponder.
Its final form left me ambivalent, and hoping its new modding support might provide the leg up it still needed. Well. It did. Terror From The Void is a major overhaul that touches on just about all the problems I had, while preserving what worked. And after it consumed me for several months, I'm ready to call it the game that Phoenix Point was trying to be.
Is it wrong to eat a dinosaur that wants to be eaten? What if it asks you to make a little hat out of its gall bladder? What if the gall bladder has different opinions on the matter? Discover the answers to these and more as our merry band of conservation enthusiasts/trophy hunters discuss Monster Hunter Wilds! >Nic: Life, the absolute bastard, has kept me away from the Monst. Let me experience it through you. What's the best Monst so far?
Brendan: I am fond of the squiddy critters that slop about. The Nu Udra is a giant gloopy octopus that feels like a stand-out fight partly because of its many, many arms, but also because of the environment you fight it in. It's horrible (in a fun way) to wade about in the oil of this region, and try to avoid the flames that inevitably start to spread. Another later squid-like beast has some horrible knifey hands at the end of its tentacles, but I'll let the readers discover the rest of that creep's tactics by themselves.
Ollie: I'm partial to the Yian Kut-Ku myself. It was the very first monster I ever fought in any Monster Hunter, back in the days of Monster Hunter Freedom on my PSP. And all these years later, I still recognised all its moves, and it made the whole act of beating up the big fire-breathing chicken even more enjoyable and satisfying than it already was.
I’ve never played 2001’s Gothic, developed by Piranha Bytes, but Sin has an article from 2016 about why it is “more believable than modern RPGs”. In that piece, she paints an absorbing picture of a magically quarantined penal colony, where three factions of prisoners enjoy an uneasy truce. In this crammed ocean vent of a setting, fights generally end in defeat rather than death, reputation isn’t just a points gauge, and the player character’s centrality is an accident. It sounds pretty thrilling.
I am still searching for this RPG in the Steam prologue demo for Alkimia Interactive’s Gothic reboot. There are certainly some intrigues afoot, and I’m quite enjoying the desolate quarry scenery, but I’m distracted by aspects of the presentation, not least the fact that the prologue character looks like a Funko Pop incarnation of Highlander’s Christopher Lambert.