As many of you well know, I rather enjoyed cat adventure Stray recently. As an owner of two tortoiseshells myself, it was right up my alley. I do, however, have a confession to make. When I started seeing other real life cats enjoying the game alongside their respective humans, I began to feel sad and a bit left out. You see, my cats Maple and Midna (still!) haven't shown any interest in Stray whatsoever, not even flicking up their ears in response to the cat's in-game meow. I'm not gonna lie, it kinda broke my heart a little bit.
However, I'm beginning to think their (clear and apparent) hatred of video games goes further than simple disinterest. I was playing A Plague Tale for the first time last week, a game famous for its swarms of screeching rats, and STILL nothing. They love> hunting rats and bringing them home to leave as little presents for us on our back door step. Heck, they'll even wig out and go into prowl mode when they hear them scrabbling away underneath our floorboards (yes, we do have a rat problem in our house). But clearly, their ice cold little murder hearts are unmoved by their video game equivalents. Is this what it's like when your children reject your hobbies and go and sulk in their rooms for the rest of the day? Because it sure does feel like it.
"Metroidvania" is a terrible phrase that gets in the way of its own definition and I hate it.
It does, however, still apply to Zapling Bygone. Describing it in less mechanical terms could make it sound creepy. You're a spore of an all-consuming hivemind, dropped on an unfamiliar planet to assimilate it. You move by skittering about on wobbly green tentacles, leaping and climbing and clinging and lashing out at living things with them, then absorbing the green muck that bursts out, and periodically consuming a creature powerful enough to be worth assimilating. And wearing its skull in the centre of your tentacle mass, because why not.
With the Netflix Resident Evil series going down like a blood-filled lead balloon, you may be thinking it's high time you revisited the Resident Evil games to wipe the show from your memory banks. Handily, Humble have a pretty good Resident Evil bundle going on right now, which nets you 10 Resident Evil games - including the excellent Resident Evil 2 Remake and Resident Evil 7 - for a very agreeable £24.70. It runs from now until August 24th, and is raising money in support of charity Direct Relief and their efforts to help the people of Ukraine.
This is a bit different from what we normally cover, but I was going to order this for myself and thought it might be of interest to you, dear reader, as well. Anyway, you can get ten years' worth of AA batteries - 100 in total! - for just £13 at Amazon right now. This normally costs £18, so that's a nice little savings - and of course it's far cheaper per item than buying batteries in smaller packs.
The Crucial X8 is our favourite portable SSD, thanks to its compact protective frame, convenient USB-A or USB-C connection and excellent performance. It's capable of transfer speeds up to 1050MB/s, minimising the time it takes to copy files to and from the drive, and offers low enough access times that you can easily run games from it too. It normally costs around £85, but today it's dropped to a historic low price of £77 - a great value for a portable NVMe SSD offering this level of performance.
Marvel’s Spider-Man Remastered is landing on PC, and it’s pretty good! Co-developers Insomniac Games and Nixxes, who spoke to me this week about the port's development, have also taken the care to festoon this version of the open-world crim-puncher with various Windows-exclusive features. These span enhanced ray traced reflections and ultrawide monitor support to both Nvidia DLSS and (surprisingly, given it wasn’t in the initial PC features trailer) AMD FSR 2.0, adding to a list of visual options that already stretches into the sky like a Manhattan high rise. Let’s take a look, then, at how Marvel’s Spider-Man Remastered performs on PC – as well as the best settings to keep it swingin’ real smooth like.
Welcome once again to The Electronic Wireless Show podcast. As a counterpoint to the episode on the nicest blokes to hang out with in games, we've decided to talk about our most hated NPCs (a bonus prize to anyone who can guess which is the one we all say first). It's an interesting one to discuss, because the line between intentionally annoying and unintentionally annoying can be very thin. Plus everyone tends to find different things annoying. Disclaimer: you are not annoying, any similarities you have to characters we find annoying are coincidental.
How much gaming monitor can you get for £100? Not much, it turns out - but I did spot something unexpected for £10 more: a genuine ultra-wide monitor. Now, it's not a stunner as far as looks go, and it's not got the latest specs either. But what it has got is an expansive 25-inch span, a 2560x1080 resolution and a blistering refresh rate of... 75Hz. OK, so it's far from the best gaming monitor on the planet, but getting an IPS monitor of this size is honestly not bad going - especially as it's been reduced from a UK RRP of £170.
Intel's SSD 670p Series is one of the cheapest ways to add high-speed NVMe storage to your system, and now a 1TB drive has been reduced to just £59 in the UK. That's a big price drop on a drive that normally sells for £90, and is nearly as cheap as the £54 that this drive cost during the last Amazon Prime Day.
Last time, you decided that cameras which actually take pictures are better than running into a wall so fast you hurt yourself. Immersive sims shudder in revulsion from this outcome (but sadly don't take damage from their vibration). Cameras won by only eight votes, so you'd better join in if you feel strongly about this week's face-off. And this one might involve taking a face... off. What's better: nude mods, or going into guts and meat?