EPOS, the company that used to be Sennheiser's gaming headset division, have announced their first USB microphone, the B20. Priced at £179 / $199, the B20 is a broadcast quality USB mic that's been designed primarily with streamers in mind, although you could probably also use it for any budding podcast projects you've got in your backpocket thanks to its four different pick-up patterns.
June is Pride Month, and a new bundle which launched yesterday aims to give you a huge number of games and things from queer developers - and give those indie devs money. The Queer Games Bundle 2021 is a real mix of stuff on Itch.io, everything from RPGs and turn-based tactical action to poetry and dating sims. Plus at least one game about a buff Baywatch babe making seagulls kiss.
Like their upcoming mind flayer baddies, Baldur's Gate 3 developers Larian Studios have snatched some minds for a new studio. Larian have announced that they've snagged the development team from Spanish studio BlitWorks who they've previously worked with on porting their other big RPG Divinity: Original Sin 2 to the Nintendo Switch. Less sinister than the mind flayers though, I imagine. The two apparently got on so well while working on the Switch version of D:OS2 that Larian have lifted the developers from BlitWorks to create their new Barcelona studio.
Microsoft have announced the next handful of games coming to Xbox Game Pass For PC, and one of my absolute faves is on the list. The gloomy turn-based roguelike Darkest Dungeon will be available on the subscription service on June 10th; an excellent chance for players who might've missed it to give it a go before the sequel launches later this year. On June 8th, the raccoon detective game Backbone is hitting the service too.
"I've worked at a bunch of different places over the last 15 years, and pretty much every single game I worked on was about killing things," Robert Tatnell tells me. He's the sole developer behind Hokko Life, the cosy Animal Crossing-eque life sim that launched in early access today. Tatnell has worked on games including Killzone 2, Heavenly Sword and Fable 3. But four years ago, he left those big games behind, "with the goal to make something friendly, cosy, and with a creative side in there as well."
I have discovered that I am quite bad at getting away with murder, which must come as a relief to those closest to me. This revelation has come courtesy of Inkle, the studio behind 80 Days, Heaven's Vault and Pendragon, as they have today simultaneously released and revealed a new puzzle game called Overboard. As ambitious starlet Veronica Villensey who has just shoved husband over the side a luxury transatlantic ship, the aim is to not get arrested for murder.
It's rather fabulous - part Agatha Christie-esque farce, part intricate 2D puzzle game where you spin a lot of plates. To partly correct myself, it's actually quite easy to get away with murder in Overboard. I did that my very first try. But if you want to make off with all the money, you need to actually pin the crime on someone else, and that's way harder.
Amazon have confirmed the dates of this year's Amazon Prime Day sale today, slating the annual deals fest for June 21st-22nd later this month. This puts Amazon Prime Day back in its usual mid-year spot, after last year's event ended up being delayed to October due to Covid-19. With just a few weeks to go before Prime Day kicks off, here's what you can expect to see from this year's Prime Day sale, as well as our top recommendations on what kind of deals you should be looking out for if you want to give your PC some great value upgrades.
Interior design is great fun. It can be expensive and an awful lot of effort to do in real life, however, so I think I'll stick to doing it virtually for now. The latest Sims 4 pack should help with that, because it adds interior decorator as a new in-game career. Out now, the Dream Home Decorator expansion will have you picking out cool furniture for other sims, and prettying up their homes to satisfy their requests.
It's been almost nine months since Nvidia kicked off their RTX 30 series with the RTX 3080, and longer still since anyone has actually been able to buy a graphics card at its normal price. Indeed, as the great graphics card shortage of 2020 rumbles on, the solution doesn't seem to be simply making more of what's already available out in the wild, but introducing newer, more expensive ones to stretch that GPU pool even further. Indeed, despite the RTX 3080 being plenty powerful enough for 60fps 4K gaming on max settings in pretty much every game going (and well into the 100s at 1440p and below), Nvidia now have a new flagship RTX card in town, the RTX 3080 Ti.
To mark Pride Month, Dontnod have made the full three chapters of Tell Me Why free for keepsies for the whole month. If you enjoy their games like Life Is Strange, their latest story 'em up is a good'un. Instead of paying for their game, Dontnod suggest, you might instead support queer and trans people with your money or effort.