“This is all just an excuse for me to build a universe, right?” says Daniel Fedor, as I settle in for an evening watching him play Ostranauts. And he’s serious. The sandboxy space sim, which hit early access on September 10th, and which is a sort-of sequel to acclaimed oddball RPG NEO Scavenger, has some properly deep worldbuilding. And I don’t mean deep as in “my D&D setting has a map I did myself, and religions to boot”. I mean deep as in “a spreadsheet just to track the product ranges and distribution networks of fifty-odd manufacturing brands”, which is just one of Fedor’s many design documents.

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Call Of Duty: Warzone

is kicking off season six next week and you’ll want to check the schedule before you hop back into Verdansk. The train schedule, that is. COD’s looty shooty battle royale is getting a working metro system to carry you around the map. The trick is that you’ll have to play nice on board. No fighting back there or this train isn’t leaving the station, squad!

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Featured as part of the Game Devs of Color Expo and its Gradient Convergence showcase on Steam, Onsen Master’s Ghibli aesthetics caught my eye immediately. It’s a “hot spring customer management” game where you ditch the whole ‘service with a smile’ schtick and drag your customers with speed and aggression into hot spring baths you’ve prepared especially for them.

Other duties include making sure they’re cleaned between uses, that you’ve mixed the right ingredients, and you’re keeping spillages to a minimum. It’s a tough gig! And the more I ran my onsen in the demo build, the more I felt a seldom used part of my brain expanding. Is this – am I multitasking?

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Solid Snake, Revolver Ocelot, and all their wacky mates return to PC today with re-releases of the first two Metal Gear Solid games popping up on GOG, after years hiding in boxes. The stealth series was clunky but ahead of its time in a lot of ways (and I’m as alarmed as anyone by how prescient their politics now seem) so I’m quite curious to see how the vintage tactical espionage action actually holds up. It’s not going to be super-great, is it, but I’m game. GOG have dug up the original Metal Gear too.

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This was to be the week Bungie launched Destiny 2: Beyond Light but, like everything else this year, the expansion ended up delayed. This week has at least brought news about installing Beyond Light come November, both good and bad. Good news: thanks to some revamped technoguts, the game should take up less drive space and Bungie should be able to patch any urgent problems faster. Bad news: you’ll need to download the whole game again when Beyond Light arrives. We’ll get a few hours’ head-start to preload, at least.

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Titan Blood is one of the rarest resources you can encounter in Hades, Supergiant Games’s fantastic godlike roguelite. You can gain these droplets of Titan Blood by vanquishing the toughest adversaries in the Underworld, and then you can spend it to upgrade your Titan-slaying weapons. Our Hades Titan Blood guide will walk you through every method of obtaining and using this powerful resource.

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To fully defox the following enlargeable geofoxer, identify all twelve locations plus the theme that links them. (more…)

The world’s first commercial digital wargame turned forty earlier this year. As I’ve written about Computer Bismarck previously on RPS, I won’t do so again. What I will do is mark the anniversary somewhat belatedly by borrowing the pioneer’s theme for the trial run of what I hope will become an annual or biennial event in the Flare Path calendar.

Readers of a creative bent, sharpen your HBs, blow the dust/crumbs/dandruff off your GameMaker installs, and don your brainstorming berets – this column’s inaugural game design contest starts right here, right now. (more…)

For eighteen years, I’ve been unable to escape a stubborn earworm: the smooth jazz of Django Reinhardt’s Cavalerie, from the car radio in Mafia. I had thought that I might be able to shake it loose by returning to the city of Lost Heaven in Mafia: Definitive Edition, the remake which launched this morning, but I’ve now read that song didn’t make it in. If I play Def Ed without first exorcising Cavalerie, will I shut the door and have it stuck in my head forever? A serious concern for the remake of a pretty decent game.

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If you’ve been thinking about upgrading your CPU recently to pave the way for one of those shiny new graphics cards coming out soon, then you’re in luck. There have been several price drops on both Intel and AMD CPUs this week, making it a good time to pick up a good bargain. Below, you’ll find all of the cheapest CPU deals from around the web in both the UK and the US, covering all of our top gaming CPU picks. Whatever type of PC you’re looking to build, here are the best 9th and 10th Gen Intel CPU prices and best AMD Ryzen CPU deals going on this week.

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