I've not yet started my spooky celebrations but I am enjoying seeing other people get into the spirit. What else are going to do in a rainy early October? Do tell me if you have good ghoulish plans, reader dear. Oh! And while you're at it, what are you playing this weekend? Here's what we're clicking on!
Graphics cards are getting bigger, hotter and more expensive - and that first one is more of a problem than you might think. With the RTX 4090 and a whole family of oversized GPUs on the way, those tiny PCIe slots on your motherboard are taking on an incredible amount of weight, such that even mid-range cards can sag and bend over time.
The best way to prevent this is with a brace, which pushes up from the bottom of your case to the far end of the graphics card, holding it level and preventing all that force from affecting the card or the PCIe slot. You sometimes get a support brace like this free with your graphics card, but otherwise you can pick one up fairly inexpensively from a range of manufacturers.
It's not every day that you see a top-end gaming laptop for £598 off, especially not when it's a 15-in RTX 3080 model from MSI. This GP66 Leopard is one of the fastest gaming laptops on the market, with a Core i7 processor, 16GB of RAM, 1TB NVMe SSD and a 144Hz screen - not to mention that flagship-grade graphics card.
It normally retails for a cool £1998, but today Laptops Direct has discounted it to £1399.97, making it the cheapest RTX 3080 laptop we can find right now.
I keep forgetting Valkyrie Elysium's PC release date is later than its console one. The action platformer came out on PlayStation late last week, but it's not coming to Steam until November 11th. So far, reviews have been quite middling, which isn't wholly surprising in some sense, but having played the public demo the other week, I'm not ashamed to say that I had a pretty all right time with it! Based on two hours of play time, I'd say it's very much in the same kind of vein as your Bayonettas and Nier: Automatas, and I'm 100% down for that.
It feels odd saying "Overwatch 1", but Overwatch 1 occupies an important place in my personal and professional life. And all things considered, I do not miss it in the slightest. I spent so much time straining against the game's tug-of-war matches that I simply grew tired of trying really hard at it - or perhaps more accurately, trying not to launch my head through the nearest plaster wall.
Clearly, there was a time where I adored Overwatch, though. A time when I'd grind solo-queue most evenings until 3am, in a bid to climb the ranks ever higher. To what end? My own personal satisfaction, I suppose. I'd eventually hit Master (let me brag just once, okay) and then a few months later, I applied for a job at Gamer Network writing guides about Overwatch's intricacies. I moved to Brighton for my first proper job. Now, with Overwatch 2's release, it all feels like it's come full circle.
Archtower is a roguelike and therefore bad, but... hnnnnnnngggh I like it. I might even come to love it, considering it's already so enjoyable even with a few years of early access left (a fact I forgot until I reached a "work in progress" marker several hours in).
You climb a tower and splat monsters and culty magic nerds. You loot, and avoid traps, chug red liquids, and occasionally die and have to start again. But I enjoyed every moment, and never once hit the usual aggravating points that push me out of the genre. It's good stuff all round, frankly.
A new experience: Weird RPG is the first video game to make my lips numb. My character in the action-RPG is wearing magic tousers, see, which launch explosive basketball hoops every time I make noise into my microphone. Turns out, the most DPS-efficient noise is continually blowing to trill my lips like a child pretending to be a car. Weird RPG does have some fun ideas but sadly, it's too mundane an ARPG to be truly weird—or good. Still, I was delighted when I found a helmet whose stats get better the worse your graphics card is.
Scrolling through Twitter, Daniel Griffiths' interest was piqued when he saw a post describing a mysterious phenomenon being shared in the Nier: Automata community: A2 opening a hidden door in The Copied City and strolling into a secret, never-before-seen area. Curious, he decided to pursue more knowledge, and landed in the Nier modding Discord server.
Like him, many other Nier: Automata players who caught wind of the phenomenon sat upright - metaphorically and perhaps literally - and flocked to both Reddit and Discord to check out what exactly was up with the secret area. It was dubbed the "church mystery" or "sadfutago's posts", among other monikers.
Sci-fi thriller The Invincible is one of those games that feels like it's been knocking around for absolutely yonks, and every time there's a new trailer for it, you go, "Oh yeah! That one! The one with the robots and the Soviet Alien dot detector thing!" The most recent trailer for The Invincible arrived during this year's E3 madness, and featured astrobiologist Yasna having a suspenseful encounter with a big spider bot and its anti-matter death ray. It was only a five-minute long clip at the time, but I've now played an expanded version of that particular scene, and yep, I still don't much like the look of that there laser bot.
When the mysterious sci-fi action shooter Scars Above was first unveiled during Geoffcom's Opening Night Live at the end of August, I thought it had big Returnal energy. Based on the reveal trailer, it certainly seemed to be riffing on several of the same themes as Housemarque's challenging PlayStation exclusive - what with its lone female scientist stranded on an alien planet schtick, third-person shooting, and big eerie alien monsters after her etc. - so when I saw it was part of this month's Steam Next Fest demo bonanza, I knew I had to give it a try. And while it certainly captures the same kind of atmosphere as Returnal, I'm sorry to say that's about as far as the comparison goes, as the rest of Scars Above is a much slower, more traditional kind of space action game.