Two years ago I asked whether anyone had played retro FPS Chasm: The Rift and admitted that I’d never made it past the first level because I was roughly eight years old at the time, and it terrified me. Twenty years later I’ve returned to its re-release - and beaten the first level! And in the process, I’ve developed a particular appreciation for the old-school boomer shooter and its interesting quirks.
Small form factor cases are very much in vogue, with some great options nowadays from the likes of Cooler Master, NZXT and Ssupd. Normally you're looking at around $50 to $150 for the case itself, with a further $70 to $100 for a matching SFX power supply, but today there's an excellent deal at Amazon US that offers a small form factor case and> a 700W PSU for just $130 - after a sizeable $120 discount.
The case is the HYTE Revolt 3, and it's attracted rave reviews for its easy build qualities, great thermals and beautiful design, making it an easy recommendation at this discounted price.
Like so many games buried deep within my Steam library, I am unsure when I bought Painkiller: Black Edition or my exact reasons for doing so. I expect it was cheap in some kind of daily sale. Perhaps I was hungover, and hoped a small treat would ease my aching head. I vaguely recall booting it up once, perhaps a decade ago, and getting no further than its main menu. Painkiller was destined to rot in a digital purgatory of my own design forever, an unassuming icon that I would scroll past on my way to reinstall Destiny 2 for the 12th time without giving it a single thought. That is, until Valve finally sent me my Steam Deck.
After finishing the full version of Vampire Survivors, my fingers are limbered up for a livelier arcade walk-o-shooter. I've turned to Brotato, a game whose demo I enjoyed in the Steam Next Fest, and which launched into early access in September. I say with great affection: it feels (and looks) like it could have been a Flash game on Newgrounds. Plus it's only £4.
We are witnessing a three-horse race to the death of Twitter. Will Twitter's technical infrastructure collapse after the staff who know how to maintain it are fired, leaving the would-be God Emperor of mankind rotting upon his failing Cobalt Throne? Will Twitter shut down due to financial collapse? Will people simply leave Twitter? All I know is, I'll miss the Twitter bots which go down to collateral damage, the automated machines which tirelessly post art, poetry, jokes, stories, and probably dog photos. Here are some of my favourites!
MSI's RX 6650 XT is a capable graphics card for 1440p gaming, and it's down from £380 to £299.99 at Overclockers after a healthy discount.
It also comes with AMD's Raise the Game Bundle, which includes copies of two upcoming games: Dead Island 2 and The Callisto Protocol (confusingly titled 'The Callisto Project' by a potentially short-sighted Overclockers staffer). This is a pretty solid deal for three hundred of your Great British Pounds, especially as GTX 16-series cards were selling for this much recently and offer far worse performance.
Micro SD cards are getting increasingly affordable, with even high-capacity 512GB models breaching the £50 barrier. Today we've seen one better though, as this 51GB Integral Ultima Pro model has dropped to £42 at Amazon UK.
It takes a very special game to give you so much to learn, so many ways to do everything, that even after 1000 hours of playtime you still feel like a beginner. Factorio is daunting in the extreme, and I remember bouncing off it the first time I tried. Thank goodness I gave it a second chance. Building up a gigantic world-spanning, atmosphere-destroying factory slowly and methodically over dozens of hours is probably my favourite singleplayer experience in games.
Supporter posts mean I can talk about things that aren't PC games - at least that aren't PC games yet> - and this weekend I used a giftcard to get God Of War Ragnarök, the hacktion-dadventure sequel to the God Of War soft reboot. So far I am finding it, you know, fine, by which I mean it is good and fun but also almost exactly the same as 2018 one, right down to the tension between Kratos and his son Atreus. Their dynamic seems to have largely pressed the reset button so they can do a character growth again, with the differences so far being that Atreus is now taller and his voice has broken, Kratos doesn't call him "Boy!", and also he won't shut up under any circumstances.
Nvidia DLSS 3 is arguably the single most interesting thing to emerge from the RTX 4090 and RTX 4080 GPU launches. Even with, I’ll concede, some limits: whereas previous DLSS (Deep Learning Super Sampling) versions have been available to any GeForce RTX graphics card, DLSS 3 is currently only usable on these RTX 40 series models. Or will be, once the RTX 4080 goes on sale on November 16th. Yet having tested it out on the RTX 4090, I’m convinced it could be as big a deal as the cards themselves, especially if you have a high-refresh-rate gaming monitor.