Day 21! This the last actual day of work for RPS this year. That means days 22-24 are already stuffed and waiting, even though the doors won’t open until 1pm on each day. Can you even wait? I bet you can. I bet you don’t even care. I’ve walked right into this.
Certain tastes, scents, and experiences can immediately fill a body with Christmasness. Mince pies, mulled apple juice, playing Skeal, hearing Wham’s Last Christmas down the Tesco… but it doesn’t feel really truly properly Christmas until you’ve danced the Dracula Cha Cha. What could be more festive than everyone’s favourite vampire striding across a world of 1960s pop and pulp culture, collecting presents, using his Dracula karate against snowmen, surfing, and beating Zombie Santa in a dance-off? Nothing. Except for a soundtrack including Jim Lowe’s Green Door and The Trashmen’s Surfin’ Bird. Which Dracula Cha Cha has. Pure Christmas.
Amanita Design have redesigned Chuchel, the eponymous star of their delightful 2018 adventure game, to avoid associations with blackface. Chuchel is a dust mote but with his black face, curly black hair, thick orange lips, and scampish ways, yeah, I can see the comparison. The Czech studio say they didn’t consider this at all when making the game, and they don’t want to be “even remotely associated with racism”, so they’ve given him a new look. Chuchel’s black body is now orange, and his orange hat is now black – a look that will be patched into the game’s various editions across “the upcoming days and weeks.”
This year’s best gaming SSDs saw some mad price drops toward the end of 2018, partly off the back of November’s Black Friday sales bonanza but also because manufacturing costs have been rapidly falling ever since late summer. With prices set to plummet even further in 2019 as well, this is a great time to start thinking about upgrading your PC’s storage capabilities with a nice, new SSD drive.
To that end, I’ve written this handy guide to help you find the best gaming SSD for your PC. Below you’ll find all my top recommendations for the best SSDs for gaming across a range of prices, including your standard 2.5in SATA drives as well as your fancy M.2 NVMe jobs. And just in case none of those words made any sense, I’ve also included some in-depth buying advice on everything you need to know about all the different types of SSD and their various form factors, as well as what size you should go for. Whether it’s for gaming, installing Windows or the fastest speeds money can buy, I’ve got you covered.
Artifact is a fantastic CCG, if you can stomach its serpentine complexity. Today Valve release the second update that’s made it even better, allaying my two main concerns: there’s now a ranking system, and you can earn cards just by playing. Up to 15 packs and event tickets can be nabbed during this ‘season’, which will last a few months and reset players’ ranking at its end. Axe and Drow, two of the scariest heroes in town, have also been toned down.
All of this is pretty damn great.
Dipping into my Itch.io backlog, I found a game released in September that we completely missed – Sagebrush. A walking-sim-cum-puzzle game in which you explore the abandoned site of a cult. Abandoned in the worst possible way. And while this could obviously be a topic rife with issues, it’s handled here remarkably sensitively, without any loss of emotional punch.
I couldn’t tell you if Ingrid’s Back! is any good. Because I’m very old, and things that happened 30 years ago are lost to me like wee down a shower drain. But what I can tell you is it’s the first game I ever played before it was released.
Not going to beat around the bush – Jet Lancer, an upcoming aerial arcade shooter by Vladimir Fedyushkin and Nicolai Danielsen – looks a whole lot like Vlambeer’s Luftrausers, only more>. Big powerful future jetfighters, swirling dogfights, massive robot bosses and if the teaser trailer below is any indication, a thumping soundtrack. This is all fine, and Luftrausers was great and I want more of that, but faster, louder and better. I’ve had half an eye on the development of this one for a while, but only now does it have an official title and trailer, which you really should watch below.
Quake Champions‘s December update is live, and it’s one of the biggest the old-school arena shooter has seen since it entered early access. The much-maligned loot box-based economy of the game is dead, replaced by a linear progression of cosmetic rewards for each character, and extra goodies for those who pick up a Fortnite/Rocket League-styled season pass. They’ve also brought back Capture The Flag mode (my favourite way to play classic twitchy shooters), added a new map and squeezed a little more performance out of the game for those on lower-spec PCs. Check out the full patch notes here.
Not only has Telltale’s The Walking Dead: The Final Season found a new developer in Skybound Games after Telltale’s sudden implosion, but it’s setting up shop on the Epic Games Store. If you already bought the season on Steam or anywhere else, you’ll find the upcoming two episodes there, but for anyone thinking of picking up the series now, it’s exclusive to Epic’s new storefront starting with Episode 3: Broken Toys on January 15th. Below, the voice of Clementine – Melissa Hutchinson – gives us an official FAQ on what’s happening with the rest of the season.