The other week I played a short demo for the upcoming Resident Evil 4 remake. You’d think being lucky enough to actually play the damn thing would have numbed my hyper-fixation about it a touch, but, nope. I’m afraid not. It turns out the guy who owns eight physical copies (and four digital) of the original Resident Evil 4 is still pretty excited to play the remake. Who ever could have predicted this?>

The day my preview went live, Capcom showed off a couple of additional bits as part of a hefty Resident Evil showcase. Alongside a fresh story trailer the company also discussed the various gubbins you’ll receive if you fork out for the game's special edition as well as a short gameplay demonstration. Surprising no one, I’ve watched these clips so many times I now have a load of thoughts that are not only completely useless but are taking up vital brain space I usually reserve for things like pin numbers and dates. If I don’t vent all of this garbage out of my skull there’s a chance I’ll forget my Mam’s birthday again, something that genuinely happened once when I was 17 and I haven’t stopped feeling guilty about it since. I bought her a plant from a Tesco Express three days later thinking that would help. It didn’t. This event haunts me more than any Resident Evil jumpscare ever could.

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Blacktail is a complicated, first-person adventure when you play a lil witch. Well, a witch in training, sort of. A witcheen. Baba Yaga has been forced to live in the forest having been accused> of witchcraft, so it seems like one of those self-fulfilling prophecy deals.

It's a very brightly coloured, fantastical world, this forest you live in, and you're dropped in media res. I thought that hands-on preview I got would be quite a casual gadabout talking to a cute dragon and what have you, but in fact it was difficult, and weird, and very opaque in the best way. The res in question included treasure chests with teeth and talking pine-cone spirits, and exploding fireflies. But you're an archer, too, and I really, really> hate using arrows in first-person, and I don't think that will change.

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It turns out a week is a long time, where the best early Black Friday deals on desktop gaming PCs are concerned. Most of the prebuilt rig offers on the US side have mysteriously (read: annoyingly) vanished, so I’ve found some newer replacements of similar value. You can find all of these below, along with the current crop of desktop deals in the UK.

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Ebay's TAKEIT10 code offers a 10% discount on a wide range of PC components and peripherals, but I was tickled by this deal on an Integral 480GB SSD, which brings this sizeable drive down to just £24.

That's a solid £5 below the price of the same drive on Amazon, and well into bargain buy territory for anyone that wants to cheaply and easily add more storage to their desktop or laptop. If you have any old laptops that are still running on hard drives, for example, then this could be an awesome low-cost upgrade!

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If you're a streamer or a macro fiend, you've probably have heard of Elgato's Stream Deck. This little gadget has a simple premise: fifteen customisable keys, each with a little LCD screen behind it, that can be bound to accomplish a wide range of things from scene switching in OBS and monitoring your computer's vitals to launching programs or muting your microphone. Normally the Stream Deck costs £150, but today it's down to £90 at Amazon UK.

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Compared to many of the latest FPS offerings out there, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive is a fossil. It's such a simplistic looking game, right? A bit bland and archaic, lacking that colour and pop that the likes of Apex Legends and Valorant possess. But to pass it off as dull and basic is to do the game a disservice, as it's more refined than basically any of its competitors.

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I, like many people I know these days, will only watch a YouTube video if it's either less than 5 minutes or more than an hour long. YouTube evolved a while ago into a platform for long-form video essays, and I for one am happy about it. Even better: Jenny Nicholson just released an almost four hour video on an uncompleted attraction in Utah called Evermore. Evermore is a sort of theme park-slash-immersive-theatre that appears to have been beset both by uncontrollable world events and bad management, but I still want to go because it looks pretty fun(ny).

I did think about what games I would like to become immersive experience theme parks in this kind of vein, though, and I gotta say... I'm coming up empty.

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On this week's episode of the Ultimate Audio Bang, we give our verdict on Modern Warfare 2 and its grab bag of a campaign.

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Black Friday can always be relied upon to take the pain out of a new keyboard purchase. I’ve only been keeping track in a very general sense but it does feel like non-sale prices, especially on mechanical keyboards, have been creeping upwards. If you are in the market, you could thefore find, say, a list of the best early Black Friday gaming keyboard deals very useful indeed. Hey, here's one.

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Every weekend, indie devs show off current work on Twitter's #screenshotsaturday tag. And every Monday, I bring you a selection of these snaps and clips. This week, my eye has been caught by tactical mecha action, a spinny shotgun, and honestly a good number of games and things which I don't entirely understand—a mood I'm always here for. Check 'em out!

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