Eiyuden Chronicle: Rising is a bit of a weird one. Originally conceived as a Kickstarter stretch goal for Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes, the next JRPG from Suikoden creator Yoshitaka Murayama, this smaller, more action-focused RPG has become both an official prequel to Hundred Heroes and a kind of intermediate stop-gap designed to tide players over until the main event next year. Focusing on the back stories of just a handful of the titular hundred you'll be meeting in Rabbit & Bear Studios' spiritual successor to Suikoden (the first of which memorably had a whopping 108 recruitable party members), Rising has the air of almost required reading for players eager to return to the lavish, retro worlds Murayama built his name on.

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The RTX 3080 12GB is a little-known variant of the RTX 3080 released late last year. As well as coming with the same memory subsystem as the RTX 3080 Ti - 12GB of GDDR6X attached to a 384-bit interface - it's also faster than the vanilla 3080, with more CUDA and RT cores.

That performance normally comes at a steep premium, but today an MSI Ventus 3X RTX 3080 12GB model is going for a low price over at Newegg. They're asking $810 for the graphics card after a $30 rebate, some $450 below the GPU's ludicrously high MSRP. That makes this model actually cheaper than almost all RTX 3080 10GB cards on the market, and a worthy deal for our hallowed deal archives.

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Crucial make some of the highest-performance and best value SSDs on the market, and today in the UK three of their best offerings are discounted at Scan. These are the Crucial X6, a 540MB/s portable SSD in 1TB and 2TB sizes, and the Crucial P5 Plus 2TB, a PC and PS5-compatible PCIe 4.0 internal SSD that offers blistering read speeds of up to 6600MB/s.

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Every weekend, indie devs show off current work on Twitter's #screenshotsaturday tag. And every Monday, I bring you a selection of these snaps and clips. This week, my eye has been caught by undersea dread, a lot of pretty watercolours, big monsters, and an actual real cat.

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I spent much of my childhood hunkered around the family PC using an emulator to run Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Arcade Game. Years have passed since I last played, causing the vague memories to distort into a recollection that’s nothing like reality. In my head, that first arcade game captured the frenetic energy of the TMNT cartoons I’d watch on a Saturday morning. The reality was quite different, with the turtles awkwardly bumbling through Manhattan while occasionally smacking an enemy.

That realisation has never been more apparent than after playing the first two levels of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder’s Revenge, a successor to those early beat ‘em up TMNT arcade games being developed by Tribute Games and published by DotEmu. It captures the aesthetic of those childhood memories and makes them a reality, which is a testament to Tribute Games’ understanding of TMNT as a brand. But it also feels far too familiar, failing to substantially innovate on the original formula.

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Sundays are for training for an off-road 10k that's scarily close. Before you sweat profusely, let's read this week's best writing about games (and game related things).

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While E3 2022 is cancelled, NotE3 2022 is starting to take shape and... oh thank god, so far it's looking clustered around one week. For all E3's faults, two years of NotE3 stretching one week of event content across two months was agonising. Please, NotE3 2022, stick to that early/mid-June cluster of the Xbox show and Geoff Keighley's Level Up Megazone. Please, for your old pal Alice. But enough about the future: what are you playing this weekend?

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Right, this is a bit of a weird one - a potential misprice at Currys sees two Halo Infinite branded peripherals made by Razer going incredibly cheap. Right now, you can pick up a full-size mechanical keyboard with Halo branding for £32 (was £120!) or a high-end gaming mouse with Halo branding for £20 (was £70).

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Today you can get the beginnings of a great mid-range gaming PC at Newegg. The American e-tailer is offering two Asus components for $460 today: an RTX 3060 graphics card and a ROG Strix 750W 80+ Gold PSU. That's a $100 discount compared to buying both components separately, and cheaper than you'll find most RTX 3060 graphics cards on Amazon right now.

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In theory I'm rather partial to slash-em-up crowd fighting games, but I've never got on with the big names in the genre. Your Devil May Cries and your God Of Warses are the obvious reference points for describing Ultra Age, but it doesn't really feel like them, and I don't think it's trying to either.

The basic idea is that you're stranded on a jungle planet full of industrial ruins, and have to fight through robots and huge animals in small groups, switching between several (kinda samey) swords as needed. It's not really doing anything spectacular, but it's enough of its own thing to feel like more than just a budget God Of Cries.

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