Sundays are for leaving your controller on a hard surface while you pop out to do something quickly, but then it vibrates and makes a horrible, terrifying noise. Before you rush back, let's read this week's best writing about games (and game related things).
If we're to have some sort of National Video Game Day in the UK—and I assume industry bodies will one day attempt to make it happen—we should have it on November 5th to run alongside Bonfire Night. Explosions, colours, people going "ooh" and "ahh", teenagers running amok and threatening people, some sort of message that's broadly ignored or forgotten... it's a perfect match. But which video games are you playing to go with the outside explosions? Here's what we're clicking on!
I can't remember now if it was Monster Prom or Dream Daddy that introduced me to the dating sim genre, but Monster Prom was definitely my first dating sim hybrid, a sub-genre I'm now more than a bit obsessed with. Other favourite examples of mine include last year's Boyfriend Dungeon (a dating sim and dungeon crawler), Max Gentlemen: Sexy Business (a dating and business sim), and HuniePop (a dating sim and match-3 puzzle game). Monster Prom is a dating sim and competitive multiplayer party game, where up to four players vie to romance attractive monsters and invite them to the school dance.
The coming release of Dwarf Fortress But For Humans may be making many colony/management sim devs nervous, but Stardeus ought to find some room for itself anyway.
RimWorld is the more direct influence, really. Instead of a planet's surface, your little blobby torso people are stuck on a spaceship, which you need to rebuild around them using a fleet of robots as they gradually wake up from stasis. If you know the genre well, it will be reminiscent of several games, but its balance of survival, management, and creative building makes for a refreshingly forgiving experience at the current default settings.
It's been an interesting exercise playing Triangle Strategy and Tactics Ogre: Reborn in quick succession lately. I've now played both Square Enix strategy RPGs for around six hours apiece now - starting with Tactics Ogre for my preview the other week, and following it up with a Triangle-shaped chaser. I didn't have any history with either game before now, but it's become increasingly apparent that they're effectively cut from the same tile-based cloth. And I mean, exactly the same. They're so similar, in fact, that it's kinda hilarious Square are releasing them so close together on PC, with Tactics Ogre's release on November 11th following little more than a month after Triangle Strategy.
At the same time, though, their approach to story-telling couldn't be more different, and comparing and contrasting them like this one after the other has been both fun and enlightening. Triangle Strategy, for example, is about 80% cutscene, 20% fighting for its first six hours, while Tactics Ogre is pretty much the opposite. And yet… I think I sort of prefer Triangle Strategy? Let me explain.
When Team Ninja's Soulslike action-RPG Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty was announced not long ago, I thought: "Wow, that looks like my sort of jam". A PS5 demo came out and I only got to spend all of five minutes with it before life got in the way. I never got to truly taste the jam, which was quite sad. So, colour me very excited when I got to spend a good couple of hours battling through two short hands-on demos. I got battered by a big pig, prickled to death by a massive porcupine, and aggressively mauled by a large tiger. And I'd say I had a whale of a time. There was no killer whale in the demo, but I wouldn't count it out for the full release.
The Samsung Odyssey G5 is a great value 1440p 144Hz gaming monitor, and today it's even better value than normal thanks to a price drop and discount code at Currys in the UK. This monitor costs £209 at Amazon UK right now, but it's a solid £30 less at Currys when you use code FNDDGAMING at the checkout - neat.
AMD's Ryzen 5 5600X processor is the pick of the litter when it comes to value for money - perhaps excepting the slightly cheaper 5600 - and today it's down to £170, a full £110 off its UK RRP. While Ryzen 7000 offers better performance, it also comes with steeper requirements - like DDR5 RAM, a 600-series motherboard and a much bigger budget. Here's why we rate this particular CPU at this discounted price.
Day Of The Devs is back for round two, with even more indie games for you to wishlist and ogle at. Back in June for Summer Game Fest, 15 games were given the showcase's coveted spotlight, and now a couple of months on Tim Schfer and his crew have given another group of indies the attention they deserve. That’s a lot of games! It’s also the showcase’s 10th anniversary so let's all pop our party poppers and jump right into the indie list.
Rainy Season is a game that speaks to that universal feeling of having your plans scuppered by inclement weather. We've all been there at some point in our lives, painstakingly planning a grand day out only for it to absolutely tip it down on the day in question - and for the boy in Inasa Fujio's hour-long narrative game, it's a trip to the local theme park during his summer holidays that gets rained off.
Unfortunately, his mum (sensibly) decides against taking him and his brother out in the oncoming storm, so now he's got to face a day stuck inside his grandma's house instead. FUN>. Turns out, though, that there are still plenty of memories to be made in this small, cluttered space. All you need is a little imagination.