Or should that be nearly the right chips at slightly the wrong prices? Either way, as I was saying Intel has finally pulled its finger out and given us PC diehards something to be other than apathetic about. No, not ridiculoso $2,000 processors with 18 cores. But new mainstream processors codenamed Coffee Lake that have now taken the leap from solid rumour to retail reality. With more cores across the board, it s Intel’s biggest upgrade for at least five years and undeniably a good thing for gamers.

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Oh no, you’ve tripped the alarm. Now the terrifying RPS podcast, the Electronic Wireless Show, knows you’re here. It’s going to hunt you down and force you to listen to it. Quick! Think of a way out of this, before you hear all about Adam becoming an accidental mass murderer in Dishonored, or John obsessively re-loading his way out of a bad situation. If you don’t escape, I’ll have to tell you about the time I threw a gun at someone’s head in Heat Signature, to absolutely no effect. This week, you see, we’re talking about Things Going Wrong. (more…)

You know the drill. 100 players get dropped from a plane balloon-bus onto an island, where they scavenge for weapons with which to kill each other. A circular wall of death contracts at various intervals to force everyone together, until there s only one person left standing.

Fortnite s Battle Royale mode was released on Tuesday for free via the Epic Games launcher, and I ve taken a break from Plunkbat to find out how it compares. It s not quite a chicken dinner, but it ll do for a starter.

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Here they are then – the best games to play in virtual reality…and those games are “watching football,” “drinking”, “a nice cup of tea”, “fleeting emotional connection to another human being” and all those other everyday activities you believe to be real, as opposed than a simulation you have been experiencing since you first plugged your frail, mollusc-like form into a headset 19 years ago. SPOOKS!

But, should you persist in maintaining this fantasy, let’s go one level deeper and talk about the entertaining, satisfying or otherwise nifty games available for what is the current VR state-of-the-art in your imagined world: the HTC Vive and Oculus Rift. The rival headsets are getting on for a couple of years old now, and in that time there’s been what can feel like a ceaseless storm of new games for them. How to choose, how to choose? Well, start here. These are not the only> good’uns, please understand – but they are our favourite virtual realities right now.

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Howdy, etc. A new trailer for Red Dead Redemption 2 [official site] has been revealed by Rockstar games, showing off a little more of the wild west and introducing protagohero Arthur Morgan. We’re not allowed to get excited about this, because it hasn’t been officially announced for the PC yet. But my gizzards are telling me you want to know anyway, just in case those rustlers up at Rockstar have the grace to indulge a quite massive chunk of potential customer Enough of this! Come see the trailer below, which features the following: guns, men, a train. (more…)

When Total War: Warhammer launched last year, it was a marked departure for the series – though not, perhaps, quite as dramatic as 2005 s Spartan: Total Warrior – and contained no dearth of experiments and new ideas. It was exciting to see all of those changes to the formula, but it wasn t until the addition of key pieces of DLC, introducing new campaigns and mechanics, that it really came into its own. So with Total War: Warhammer 2 [official site] arriving today, you might be wondering if you should hold off. But you shouldn t worry; this sequel is an entirely different animal.

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There s no escaping the dread howl of the free weekend. I don t know if gravity-averse hero shooter LawBreakers [official site] is any good but Sam liked it, calling it a rock solid shooter . If you want to know if he s telling the cold, hard truth or a tepid, soggy lie, you can find out for yourself from 6pm today. It recently added a deathmatch mode and a new map, so it looks like you re going people-shooting at the right time. (more…)

After taking us to a strange train station in the wonderful Off-Peak, Cosmo D will invite us to visit a surreal hotel next week in The Norwood Suite [official site]. He has again composed the soundtrack himself, and again it sounds grand. Here’s the main theme:

Lovely stuff. Cosmo has the full soundtrack on Bandcamp, where you can stream free or buy it for $5. I’m keen to hear how tunes fit into The Norwood Suite when it launches on Monday, October 2nd.

A pack of running dogs are chasing me. The ground is falling away beneath their hind-paws, and beyond them is a void that somehow curves toward a horizon stapled across infinity. The running dogs will never stop; they emerged from the womb with their legs tucked to their chests, and as soon as they uncoiled they were in motion. Their mothers did not miss a stride as they gave birth to them.

So goes one minute of my existence in the overlapping infinities of Hyperrogue [official site].

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We’ve taken our QWOPs and our GIRPs, like all growing youngsters should, but can we really say we are healthy, well-balanced individuals until we have tried to climb a mountain using only a sledgehammer while stuck in a cauldron? That sounds like a rhetorical question, but it is not. Getting Over It [official site] is the next game from Bennett Foddy. And while it does away with the naming convention of his previous 2D stumblers, it still looks like a game that simulates what it feels like for your hands to be drunk while the rest of your body is sober. Here’s a video. (more…)