The benefits of monarchy are few and far between, but you do sometimes get a bonus public holiday to 'celebrate' them clinging onto the cushy job their dad gave them. Here in the UK, the four-day Platinum Jubilee weekend has just begun, meaning we here at RPS will be mostly quiet from Thursday until Monday. What are you playing this long weekend? Here's what we're clicking on!
Seregios can get stuffed. I recently faced off against the massive golden dragon during a hands-on session for Sunbreak, the upcoming expansion pack for Monster Hunter Rise, and it battered me repeatedly for the best part of an hour. It has become the flying white whale to my dual blade wielding Ahab, and I left the preview event determined to chop it to bits when the DLC finally arrives later this month.
Sunbreak’s new master rank quests aren’t messing around, basically. It seems Capcom have taken criticisms that the base version of Monster Hunter Rise didn’t provide challenging enough end-game content to heart, and have loaded the expansion with some truly agonising encounters purpose-built for returning veterans.
Ever have an idea that you regret the instant you commit to realising it? That's how I feel about my decision to rank all of Elden Ring's major locations. It turns out that, not only are there a lot of locations in Elden Ring, but the definition of a distinct location is largely up for debate. The opening area of Limgrave, for example, could be as many as four separate regions (East Limgrave, West Limgrave, Stormhill and Weeping Peninsula) depending on how you interpret it. That's not to mention all of the dungeons, caves, chapels, and other landmarks scattered throughout the Lands Between.
Yet like a newly minted Wretch squaring up to Margit the Fell Omen for the first time, I am prepared to plough on despite the pain that awaits. Below you'll find a comprehensive ranking of Elden Ring's major regions and legacy dungeons, based on the admittedly woolly criteria of how fun and interesting each location is to explore. So grab your map, put on your boots, and update your life insurance policy as we embark upon a grand tour of From Software's magnificent fantasy realm.
The Crucial P5 Plus is one of my favourite SSDs, as you might know from me writing about it last week. . Then, I was happy to announce that this rapid 1TB PCIe 4.0 drive had made it to £100 - a price it's gotten near a few times before but not stayed at with any regularity. You can imagine my surprise, therefore, when I discovered that Crucial are now selling the same drive at their site for £80.69 - a genuine bargain and the lowest price we've ever seen by some margin.
It’s officially summer, although you wouldn’t think it based on the amount of rain we’ve had up here in Newcastle this week. Still, that vague hint of warmth that lingers between the raindrops has got me dreaming of all those lovely things that make summer so appealing. Al fresco dining, excluding that bit where a wasp crawls into your glass of Fanta, which seems to happen to me a lot. Music festivals, minus the part where you queue for half an hour to have a wee. Oh, and obviously spending time on a beach somewhere hot, purposefully ignoring that horrible bit where you try to get your socks back on after taking a dip in the ocean and the sand scrapes against your skin.
OK, so maybe summer isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Why do we even bother leaving the house, when we can stay indoors and play video games on PC instead? June is a little sparse when it comes to new releases (as is so often the case during these warmer seasons) but there’s still plenty on the horizon to keep you occupied.
Intel's 12th-gen motherboards are getting cheaper, which is handy if you're planning a new build around one of Intel's excellent 12100, 12400F or 12600F CPUs for gaming. One of the best deals we've spotted is for the Asus Prime B660M-A WiFi D4, which launched at £197 and is now down to £86 at CCL in the UK.
This motherboard uses better value DDR4 memory, two M.2 PCIe 4.0 slots and WiFi 6 on board, so it ticks a lot of boxes in terms of the essentials. You're missing some things from higher-end Z690 boards - like PCIe 5.0, USB-C ports and 2.5-gig networking - but nothing that affects gaming performance, at least in the here and now.
I used to draw Abe’s Oddysee levels. Then Abe’s Exoddus, when that came out. Also, before them, every other platform game I ever got my hands on. Take a sheet of plain paper, turn it horizontal, draw two long lines across it, dividing it into three strips. That’s a level; that’s a side-scrolling environment. That’s what I’d do, basically all the time, basically every day. You could call me a budding game designer, only I had no knowledge of how to transfer my genius creations into digital form. I’d tried before, with Doom, but the editor was incomprehensible. Sectors? Vectors? Call me a particularly stupid child, but I just wanted to draw two long lines on a piece of paper.
Enter Speedy Eggbert, a budget-priced platform game that scored “the world’s first generous 4% review” in PC Gamer magazine. But I wasn’t aware of that yet. I was, though, aware of its big, shiny box on the shelves of Game, with its gorgeously embossed Eggbert and a reverse emblazoned with screenshots and features, including the most enticing few words I’d ever seen – “MAKE YOUR OWN LEVELS!”
It's a bold play, releasing a Soulslike in the year of Elden Ring. Let me rephrase that, actually. It's a bold play releasing a Soulslike in any> year, let alone the year of Elden Ring. You could snap open any twelve month span like a bulrush and watch many thousands of little Soulslikes disperse into the atmosphere, with only a select few really making an impact.
Steelrising is one of these Soulslike seeds hoping to sink into our screens, sprout, and take root not only in the innards of our Panasonics, but our minds too. From what I've seen, it stands a chance of survival in a saturated land.
After discussing a good deal on an incredibly rapid NVMe SSD, I thought I should let you know about something on the other side of the spectrum: a 500GB NVMe SSD going for just £36. This is the Crucial P2, a drive that's been reviewed warmly here at RPS, and it's a 34% reduction from the drive's UK RRP.
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Samsung's excellent 980 Pro PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD has been reduced on Amazon UK, where a 1TB model with heatsink is down to £120 from £170. This makes it only a touch higher than the cheapest drives in this category, for one of the best performing models.