The Game Awards is tonight, and it is bad. It’s a showcase of adverts wrapped in the anxieties of an industry embarrassingly desperate to be taken seriously by mainstream culture. The awards are worthless. However, many of those adverts will announce new games, and they might look cool. Don’t take The Game Awards seriously as an awards show and ah sure, it’s fun enough. It’s like a cross-platform, cross-publisher E3 bonanza but in December. Come on, you can watch the stream here.

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I first encountered Junji Ito’s comics when I was a teen lurking on imageboards. “Storytime!” someone would announce, and we would all gather around the digital campfire to read some badly translated manga scans. Comics lasting only a handful of pages, quick to read and quick to share in those times when the internet was slower and darker.

Perhaps you read some of them too. Remember the one about the mountain filled with human-shaped holes? The giant human heads who float in the sky like balloons? The man whose dreams got longer and longer, a single night lasting a whole century in his mind? Spooky tales that felt like urban legends.

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Red Dead Redemption 2 Online should be getting a nice upgrade after the release of RedM, a framework mod that allows players to run their own modded servers. It’s from the same developers who made Grand Theft Auto V Online’s FiveM mod, the backdoor responsible for those Twitch-ruling GTA streams where people roleplay as cops, criminals, communists, and more. The prospect of expanding Rockstar’s Wild West in a similar fashion is pretty exciting.

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Whatever you do, don’t open door number 12 on the RPS Advent Calendar. You’ll let all the air out. No. What are you doing? Stop! STOP!!

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Gather close, adventurers, and prepare to ceremonially Tweet “I feel old!” en masse. 20 years ago today, the influential and undeniable RPG Planescape: Torment was released. What a strange and wonderful achievement that game was! What impact it has had, even now, literally decades later! You can see PST waving at you from yer big epics like Divinity: Original Sin 2, and yer indie weirdnesses like Disco Elysium.

We felt we couldn’t let Planescape’s birthday go unremarked upon. But we’ve made a lot> of remarks about it over the years, so we weren’t sure if we had anything new to add. So, as a compromise, we’ve decided to round up just a few of the articles RPS has spaffed out about PST, so you can read them with us, and we can all feel old together. Spoilers: a lot of the spaffing was done by Alec (RPS in peace), but you probably knew that already.

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When AMD first announced their new budget graphics card, the Radeon RX 5500, back at the beginning of October, I was expecting review samples to follow swiftly after it. They did not. Turns out, the RX 5500 isn’t actually a graphics card you can buy off the shelf. Instead, the only place you’ll find them is inside a pre-built PC. Why? Who knows. Perhaps it’s so you can feel a teensy bit better about opting for their hot off the press Radeon RX 5500 XT instead, which you can go and buy right now in both 4GB and 8GB GDDR6 memory variants for 160 / $170 and 180 / $200.

Take a closer look at the RX 5500 XT’s specs, however, and you might be wondering where the XT bit comes in. After all, if AMD’s higher-end RX 5700 and RX 5700 XT are anything to go by, the “XT” is effectively AMD’s answer to Nvidia’s “Super” name, signifying a superior version of its non-XT sibling. Yet, the RX 5500 and RX 5500 XT not only share the same number of compute units (22) and the same number of stream processors (1408), but they also have the same ‘game’ clock of 1717MHz, as well as an identical max clock speed of 1845MHz, too (game clock being AMD’s new term for the typical clock speed you’ll see when playing games). It’s all sounds a bit fishy if you ask me, but truth be told, it’s not really that important. What matters is that this card kicks Nvidia’s GTX 1650 in the middle of next week and is pretty much neck and neck with their similarly priced GTX 1660 cards. Here’s wot I think.

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High-octane ballsport Rocket League yesterday reduced cosmetic item prices, having started selling them at high prices with new systems replacing DLC and loot boxes in last week’s Blueprint Update. Our Matt said only yesterday that “Rocket League’s new Blueprints are too expensive, but still better than loot boxes” then a mere six hours later, Psyonix announced the price cuts. This is response to a solid week of complaints from players but the timing does make us look dead influential so yeah, yeah, you’re welcome, everyone.

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Star Vault have announced that their upcoming Mortal Online 2, a sequel to their first-person super sandbox MMO (that is somehow almost a decade old), will enter Steam Early Access in late 2020.

Mortal Online is fiddly but sometimes brilliant, as RPS survivor Brendan Caldwell related during his trouserless explorations. Its main draw is its level-free open world in which players raise skills by using them, craft everything, and try not to get robbed blind by someone taking advantage of its full PvP, looting, and theft. Sometimes people are nice, though.

Details, a trailer, and some secret thoughts from my brain wait below, ready to empty your pockets of hard-earned berries.

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No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences sillier than man’s and yet immortal unlike his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were being eyed up by an idiot with a spaceship. An intellect vast and cool and curious about the functionality of his animal gun , slapdashedly drawing his plans against us.

He hovered over Saint Denis, fingers poised above the Red Dead Redemption 2 Playground mod – a big box of toys and gravity effects, ready to be unleashed on the unsuspecting populace.

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Now you’ve had almost a fortnight to recover from the dealbalst of Black Friday and Steam’s autumn sale, here come GOG with their (premature*) Winter Sale. Thousands of games and bits are discounted on the DRM-free digital games store until Boxing Day and, to entice people in, GOG are offering a freebie. For the next day, you can grab Wasteland 2 for free for keepsies on GOG. This is inXile Entertainment’s 2014 post-apocalyptic RPG, a crowdfunded sequel to the 1988 post-apocalyptic which later inspired Fallout. For free!

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