Miners, how are we? Good, I hope. Soon you'll be even better, as Deep Rock Galactic Season 2 is set to line the caverns with new materials. And robots! Killer robots that resemble glowing chunks of Toblerone. That's the less good part. Still, survive the mechanical menace and you'll earn plenty of new goodies for your dwarven bod. Trust me, I've checked it out ahead of time and have come back pleased, and scratched... and burned.
Even with PC hardware orthodoxy supporting SSD replacement, I’m convinced that getting one of the best microSD cards for the Steam Deck is the wiser method of expanding its storage. It’s technically possible to swap in a bigger SSD, sure, but compatible M.2 2230 drives are much harder to find than the standard 2280 drives on our best gaming SSDs list – and based on my testing, a good microSD card can be just about as fast as the Deck’s preinstalled SSD.
That’s on top of microSD cards being cheaper, easier to install, easier to remove, and available with much more choice than Steam Deck-compatible SSDs. That’s not to say that any old card will work – Valve’s handheld PC specifically supports UHS-1 microSD cards – but I’ve found and tested a few that will do the job, and do it well.
Back 4 Blood has received its first paid expansion since release. Tunnels Of Terror adds a new level, two new playable characters, and new Legendary weapons. It also arrives alongside a free update which makes umpteen balance changes, adds a new difficulty mode called No Hope - sounds fun - and introduces "unofficial" support for the Steam Deck.
Last week, Epic and Lego announced their intent to build "a space in the metaverse" for children. Today, Sony and KRIKBI - the investment company behind The Lego Group - announced that they'd each invested $1 billion (around £769m) in Epic Games to aid more broadly with "the company's vision to build the metaverse."
As always, all of this is more fun if you replace the word "metaverse" with, for example, "Habbo Hotel."
The XPG S70 Blade is a high-performance PCIe 4.0 SSD that I've had the pleasure of testing while wearing my other hat over at Digital Foundry, so when I spotted that it had been reduced over at Best Buy I dashed to my computer (exaggeration) to let you know. Right now, a roomy 2TB model is going for $220, the lowest price we've ever seen for a drive of this spec.
You don't need me to tell you that graphics cards prices are crazy these days - but things are getting slowly better. I noticed this afternoon that the RTX 3060 and the RX 6600 XT, the two major '1080p performance' GPUs, have now dipped under £400. That's still about £70 to £100 over the base RRP, but it's a big improvement over the situation for the past year where we often saw these cards retailing - and selling - for over £500, £600 and even £700.
I have now received most (but not quite all) of my stuff after moving, so I have a TV and two (2) consoles to play games on. One thing I've been playing recently is Ghostwire: Tokyo, a ghost huntin' action game that's a bit less weird and a bit more "kind of like an Ubisoft game" than I was expecting. But I like Ubisoft games just fine, so I'm having a blast - plus there are still some clutch ghost fights to be hand when I run out of finger-ammo for my magic hands.
I am extra delighted by the animals, though. For whatever reason, they are unaffected by the evil fog that has swept through Tokyo and turned everyone into spirits, so there are a few dogs and cats just sitting around and (and this is the good bit) you can read their thoughts.
The LG 27GL850 was a legendary PC monitor, as it debuted LG Display's Nano IPS panel that combined TN-like motion clarity and IPS-like colours and viewing angles - a true jack-of-all-trades choice for gamers and content creators. LG followed this up with the popular 27GN850 and 27GP850, and now the latter is available in 'used - very good' condition for just £200 after a £50 Ebay discount code.
The Corsair 7000D Airflow hasn't been reviewed here at RPS, but I've brought it up today for two reasons: because it's heavily discounted over at Amazon UK, and because it's a case I've been using to house my main PC for the past six months. I've become a big fan of it in that time - it's spacious, easy to build in, cool and clean - and the only real downside is the price.
The case debuted late last year for a princely £240, expensive even for a large form factor case, but now it's down to £175 - a more reasonable ask given its full tower size and laundry list of features, which I'll tell you about presently.
2D bullet hell game Vampire Survivors is surely one of the most interesting success stories of the year, as what was a simple mobile game became popular almost overnight. Its very minimalistic roguelike style captured players looking for something casual, but still engrossing. You pick one of several characters and move them around the screen as they auto-attack. As enemies are disposed of the player levels up, along with changing weapons and gaining power-ups, with the ultimate goal being to keep the ever growing mob of enemies under control. On death you unlock new weapons and characters by spending coins gained in battle.
While the game currently sits on Steam with an “overwhelmingly popular” based on almost 70k reviews, success is definitely not what solo developer Luca Galante was expecting when he first started working on it.