The RX 6800 XT is one of the best AMD graphics cards, outperforming the RTX 3070 in rasterised titles by around 10-15% according to my own testing while costing around the same price. Therefore, after we've covered plenty of discounted Nvidia cards, we ought to let you know that an RX 6800 XT is going cheap on Amazon.com right now.
A new collection of indie puzzle games released today aims to give a broad and gentle introduction to many puzzling subgenres. Wrapped up in that idea that they're all pulled from a mysterious alien games console, CosmOS 9 packs nine games that are each meant to take 30-90 minutes. I've played a few and they seemed puzzle game staples, having me drawing paths through blocks, figure out how a mysterious computer interface worked, and such. See the breadth of the cosmic puzzling experience in the trailer below.
The first time a PC seemed magical to me was when it dozed off and colourful lines twisted across its screen. I'd launch Windows 3.1 just to watch screensavers, marvelling at Mystify and staring at Starfield. How wonderful that our computer needed to dream as preventative medicine! I relived this today with a new collection of customisable 3D screensavers, watching shoals of fish, taking a road trip through a museum of global electricity pylons, watching housing estates rise and fall, and seeing so many swirly colours.
After some of the stuff we talked about in last week's episode, I decided to take us further down the giggle chute to talk about funny games in general. What games are funny? Why, and how? Is it easier for games to be funny when they're not trying to be? Should self-described funny games be avoided entirely?
Because of this, we end up talking about Blorko again. We also nearly come to war about the difference between randomly improvising funny stuff and deciding that saying 'egg' a lot of is funny. There is a difference, but you know it when you see it. Matthew's life is like a sitcom, and also we apologise to Henry Cavill for forgetting his birthday. Sorry Henry. Please come on the show.
Skating derby free-to-play Roller Champions enters its ‘kickoff’ season on May 25th, Ubisoft have revealed in a new trailer for the game. Set in 2032, Roller Champions sees two teams of three battle it out in the world of competitive roller-skating. No, I didn’t realise that was a thing either. Check out the trailer below:
Mohawk Games’ classical 4X with added babies and grandads Old World arrives on Steam and GOG today, ending its period of exclusivity to the Epic Games Store. Old World’s first DLC, Heroes Of The Aegean, is out today on all storefronts too. It brings the Hittites into Old World, led by Ḫattušili I. The DLC would usually set you back £9/$10/€10.
If you're into your competitive gaming, then Logitech's G Pro X Superlight wireless mouse should be near the top of your list. It normally retails for an eye-watering $159.99 / £139.99, but today it's available for a slightly more reasonable $109.99 / £108.99 - that's $50 or £30 off, according to my calculator.
Lenovo makes some of the best gaming laptops in the business - we've loved both the Legion 5 and Legion 7i - and now the 2021 Lenovo Legion 7 with an RTX 3080 and Ryzen 9 5900HX processor is heavily discounted at Walmart. It's currently going for $1799, a $601 drop from its MSRP of $2400. That's still a lot of money, but it's a great deal on a flagship-grade gaming laptop.
Last time, you decided that little inconsequential choices are better than controlling a turret. I am pleased that quite a few people did actually pick turrets. But this week, in the name of experimentation, I'm trying an approach that seems frankly inefficient. What if we... picked between two similar things? While I can't imagine many will think this good, let's give it a go, for science. Tell me, what's better: random critical hits, or controlled critical hits?
Time travel stories can have pretty high stakes, because usually you only travel in time when you really need to change something. A killer robot is trying to kill a lady because of something her son will eventually do, that kind of thing. My favourite episodes of Doctor Who, by contrast, were always the ones where the Doctor met a miserable dog-alien thousands of years in the future, and the dog alien is like "Not only is the planet about to blow, but my marriage is in trouble," and then the episode was mostly about the latter issue rather than the former. This is all by way of introduction to Eternal Threads, a puzzle game where you go back in time to stop everyone in a house share dying in a fire.
To save a present that has been rendered apocalyptic by time travel itself, you are part of a team who go back and change tiny things in the past to fix it, in this case 2015. While it is imperative for some reason that the fire does indeed happen, it is just as important that all six occupants live. You can alter small decisions they make in the week running up to the fire, and so save their lives by choosing whether they go to the pub, if they comfort each other in times of need, or what they have arguments about. The beat of a butterfly's wing, indeed.