Every Monday evening, my pal and I get cross with one another for around three quarters of an hour. Things are mostly cordial, light-hearted and fun during The PC Gaming Weekspot (our live, weekly video podcast), but Mystery Steam Reviews just brings out the worst in us.
Still… it’s good craic.
If you’ve been keeping an eye on my [cms-block] hub lately, you’ll know that it’s pretty darn rare to get an RTX 2060 graphics chip on a gaming laptop for less than $1000. There are a couple of them out there, but nearly all of them are right up there on the $1000 line. This makes this Asus TUF Gaming A15 laptop at Best Buy an even rarer bargain, as it’s currently got $200 knocked off its price to bring it down to a very agreeable $800. I’ll take three!
While World Of Warcraft: Shadowlands is delayed, the pre-expansion patch introducing many of its big changes has arrived. Here’s one to start: WoW’s level cap is now 50. It’s come all the way the down from 120 as Blizzard rescale everything. The new starter zone is in too, easing newbies in on a new island. Plus each class gets access to some of the thematically-defining skills usually confined to subclasses, such as a few poisons for Rogues. And new cosmetic character options are in. Who even wants to go to the afterlife when you can play dress-up?
Valya, my sniper and occasional medic, kicks things off. Having chloroformed a sentry, she’s now sat snug in his position, with a great view of the SS officer commanding the checkpoint. Crack> – her rifle (it’s our only decent one) fires, and his head bursts. On the other side of the position, Captain Zorin leaps from a bush preceded by a hurled knife, under the arc of an improvised grenade lobbed by his old mate Fetisov. The knife thuds into a forehead, while the grenade lands squarely at the feet of the man on the heavy machine gun. He has no chance of getting away in time. Neither do the other two troopers impeded by the sandbags of the gun nest.
Two more nazis do manage to leap from the blast, and cluster up with three other bewildered SS. They are just drawing their aim on Zorin, backing into cover, when a woman marches out of a door behind them. She has a stolen luger, and she is very fast. Five bullets go into five backs, and five bodies start to fall. Before they hit the cobbles, Valya fires a second shot at the penultimate survivor, and Zorin drives his spare knife into the last. I send the brigade sprinting for cover, but there’s no need: the fight is over. They’ve just killed 12 heavily armed fascists in five seconds, and I’ve just fallen slightly in love with Partisans 1941.
The Razer Naga Trinity has been my best “do-it-all” gaming mouse recommendation ever since I reviewed it in 2018, and US shoppers can currently get one for 40% off as part of [cms-block], taking this once $100 three-in-one gaming mouse down to just $60.
Sad news, [cms-block] monitor deals hunters. The superb discount on Samsung’s Odyssey G7 monitor is now sold out. It leaves a very large hole in its wake, and sadly there isn’t another 2560×1440 gaming monitor with a 240Hz refresh rate and HDR support to fill in the gap. Indeed, what’s left in Amazon’s Prime Day monitor deals aren’t particularly good, and I’d probably advise waiting until Black Friday to see if we get a better selection. However, if you’re determined to buy a new gaming monitor today, make it the Acer Predator XB271HU, which is down to £480 right now instead of its usual £600.
Though Spleunky 2 is not an easy game nor a kind game, it doesn’t actually hate you – the roguelikelike platformer just wants you to improve and become all you can be. The developers aren’t monsters. In fact, they’re planning to make the first set of levels, in the Dwelling biome, a little friendlier by tweaking the numbers of traps and baddies. Perhaps soon you’ll stop waking up from nightmares stricken with the fear that a mole has burrowed into your bed and is coming to boop you.
Earlier this year, when the pandemic made us shut ourselves away in our homes, there was a hope (and, well, wishful thinking) that it would all wash over in a few months. Evidently that was too optimistic, and is very much not the case. It sucks for many reasons, but one that’s been on my mind over the last few days is that I won’t get to celebrate Halloween in-person with my pals.
But it’s kind of okay, because games like Overwatch with their silly Halloween events almost provide a sense of normality amongst it all.
There have been some great external SSD deals during this year’s [cms-block], but when it comes to value for money, external hard drives still make a lot of sense – especially when you get so many more terabytes per pound. Case in point, whereas a 1TB Samsung T7 will set you back £158 during Amazon Prime Day, you can currently get the 5TB model of the excellent WD Black P10 for just £100 right now, beating last year’s Black Friday price by a couple of quid.
The plan has always been for Baldur’s Gate 3 players to leave behind their old saves when the RPG leaves early access, but it wasn’t meant to happen so soon. Larian Studios released the first official patch-patch last night, following a string of wee hotfix patches, and found it accidentally stopped some players from accessing their save games. So they rolled back the patch, reverted the game to its previous version, and say they’ll launch the update again when it works properly.
Larian also shared some of their data on where players are dying, for those who enjoy looking at heatmaps and finding out “oh thank god it’s not just me hating that spot”.