Oh sure, Dark Souls is a challenging game at the start, but at least your characters begin with enough stats to wear their starter outfit. That's not necessarily the case with the official licensed Dark Souls pen & paper RPG, which seems a touch sloppy. Along with giving one class starter gear it won't have the stats use, it has some spells and items which, going by the rules, seem unhelpful at best. The real Dark Souls starts here.
The downwards march in graphics card prices continues - oh, how I've longed to write those words! After posting a deal that had the Nvidia Founders Edition RTX 3080 Ti at its UK RRP of £1049 last week, third-party cards are now reaching the same levels. Right now, you can pick up a beefy KFA2 OC card for the same price, after a £50 discount at Overclockers.
If you'd prefer the better value RTX 3080, then there's also been movement - after appearing for £860 seven days ago, the cheapest card is now this Zotac Trinity OC model for £810. That's still a hefty chunk of change for a graphics card - and above the original RRP of £650 - but it's a damned sight better than the £1000+ these GPUs have retailed at for months.
Early on in my playthrough of CD Projekt Red’s 7/10 NFT screensaver Cyberpunk 2077, I realised you could climb washing lines.
I’m a real sucker for verticality, so normally I’d be immediately trying to see how high I could get, but after tentatively scaling a few floors I decided to give the urgent main quest the benefit of the doubt. There would probably just be a disappointing invisible wall anyway. I climbed back down and did my best to engage with the expensive cutscenes filled with proper actors. 50 hours of mediocre Strange Days references later, I had most of the game under my belt and was ready to go searching for something more substantial - to try to find some actual cyberpunk in this retrowave moodboard. I set about pushing Cyberpunk 2077 to the vertical limit.
This week's headline free game on the Epic Games Store is a goodie: XCOM 2. You have one week to grab Firaxis's sequel to their alien-busting turn-based tactics game, the streamlined reboot of ye olde X-COM games. XCOM 2 is a good game, well worth grabbing for free! Also free right now is Insurmountable, a roguelikelike mountaineering game.
This week on The Electronic Wireless Show podcast there was some confusion, because I wanted us to do a part 2 best Easter eggs special, and Nate got confused, so here we are just talking about eggs in games. We also discuss real life eggs i.e. what are the best egg formats? Nate and I are both sad because we consider boiled eggs to be inherently funny but neither of us like eating them.
We also learn that Nate has dismantled his aquarium room (for a good reason) and that Matthew witness a car exploding the other night. Blimey! Plus, stick around for a Cavern Of Egg.
Of the four hulking Grey Knights under my command, teleporty sword boy was undoubtedly my favourite. Once every turn he could blink across the map, moving twice as far as he can with a regular action point, plopping him right behind a pesky Cultist’s cone of suppressing fire. It was both effective and efficient, but the real fireworks began whenever I clicked teleport strike, which repositioned him while also savaging several enemies in sequence with his power sword. He was simultaneously my initiator and my (almost) one-man clean up crew, ready to be rallied by a cry from my Justicar whenever his AP tank ran empty. I almost felt sorry for the cultists.
I’ve played a curated, two hour slice of Warhammer 40K: Chaos Gate - Daemonhunters, and I’m keen to play more. As speedy as my sword boy felt in those moments, though, at other times I felt compelled to move forward at a crawl. When I asked creative director Noah Decter-Jackson whether I was just being too cowardly, he hedged his bets.
The excellent ship-dissecting salvage game Hardspace: Shipbreaker will hit version 1.0 and launch out of early access on the 24th of May, the makers announced today. And oooh it'll come to Game Pass the same day. It has been a cracking game even in early access, a satisfying first-person simulation of carefully cutting up junk spaceships with industrial lasers for maximum profit and minimum workplace injury.
FixFox came out a couple of weeks back, and I am in the process of reviewing it. This process is, currently, one in suspended animation, and has been for longer than I anticipated. I moved just before the release and my PC is still somewhere in or about the Irish Sea. Luckily I can link this to FixFox thematically, as a big exciting incident for the story involves waking up a man who was stuck in a cryopod. Around that, you, a fox called Vix, fix things in a post-apocalyptic sci-fi future where your tools are bananas and stamps.
I was several hours into FixFox before I left it, and discovered it was much larger than I expected. It's paradoxically cosy and friendly even as its world is vast and strange. I had some minor annoyances with this - you do a lot of travelling around, and in the early stages of the game there aren't many fast travel options to mitigate this. But now I've been without it for two weeks, I've found myself missing the big spaces and warm welcomes of that world.
Hey, you! Want an absolutely massive SSD? For, you know, keeping all your games installed at once? Or downloading the entire internet, four terabytes at a time? Well, the Crucial MX500, an SSD which received the RPS seal of approval, has reached a new low price on Amazon UK. Having previously retailed for around £310 to £340, it's now been reduced to £284.50, a healthy 10% reduction.
The AMD Ryzen 9 5900X is the company's best gaming CPU*, and today it's going cheap at CCL in the UK. They're asking £345 for the 12-core, 24-thread processor when you use code SAVE20 at the checkout, and tossing in three months of Game Pass Ultimate and free next-day shipping to boot. That's £20 cheaper than the current Amazon price, and a massive drop from the £430+ going rate at the beginning of the year.
*OK, the Ryzen 9 5950X is technically faster, but it costs way more and the difference in gaming performance is miniscule. The Ryzen 7 5800X3D also looks promising, but hasn't yet been released and will likely cost more than this 5900X while packing fewer cores.