The WD SN850x is one of the very fastest NVMe SSDs in the world, with its PCIe 4.0 connection, super-fast TLC NAND flash memory and high-speed controller offering some frankly astonishing speeds - up to 7300MB/s reads and 6300MB/s writes, not to mention random read and write speeds of 800K IOPS and 1.1M IOPS respectively. This puts it within the top echelon of SSDs - perhaps why we named it the best PCIe 4.0 SSD for gaming!
The JAN10 10% off Ebay code that featured in two of our previous deals posts this week has popped up again, this time offering excellent prices on not one but two top-spec 2TB SSDs. You have the choice of the Crucial P3 at £104 (vs £120 on Amazon) or the faster Kingston KC3000 at £155 (vs £202 at Amazon). Both are great drives for the money, so if you're in the market for a storage upgrade you've just got to decide whether you can benefit from the faster speeds and better components of the KC3000, or whether you prefer the lower price of the P3.
As someone whose only experience with the Persona series lay with Persona 5, I dove into Persona 3 Portable's PC re-release with one expectation: it will be old and therefore quite bad. Looking back, was I naïve? Yes. And was I wrong? I'm delighted to report that I was catastrophically wrong.
From what I've played so far of Persona 3, I reckon it's well worth a whirl if you're a newcomer, or a Persona 5 fan who's concerned that a game from 2009 won't be all that good. Not only does it stand on its own as a fun high school mystery with an alarmingly dark undertone, it almost acts as a fun history lesson too.
According to the definitely legit authority of Dangerousroads(dot)Org (and maybe also the Guinness Book Of Records), the actual longest road on Earth is the Pan-American Highway, measuring 30,000km long, and spanning several different countries as it wends its way from the bottom of South America to top of Alaska. I can't even imagine how long it would take you to do a full journey across it all, but it will definitely take you longer than the two hours you'll spend in the company of Brainwash Gang's loosely connected anthology story game The Longest Road On Earth. But cor, what a lovely, wistful two hours those are all the same.
We had a discussion in our Monday meeting that got louder than things normally do, because The Last Of Us TV show came up, and we found ourselves divided into two camps. Well, three. Camp one was excited for the TV show and camp two posited that there's no point making an adaptation of something if your adaptation is just the same thing. (The third camp was "eh, I might check it out" and watched the other two camps duking it out). I was in camp two. If you're adapting something, adapt! Make changes! Otherwise I might as well just consume the original thing again! The Last Of Us has already been released, what, three times?
This was made funnier by the fact that nobody on staff had seen the TV show, so we were just arguing about tweets we'd seen that describe the show, the worst way to conduct a discussion outside of e.g. scrawling insults on the side of Teslas and self-driving them into each other's front doors. But it got me to thinking about adaptations, because there have been loads of adaptations of things that aren't games into video games. What goes wrong in the other direction?
I've played around four hours of soviet-punk FPS Atomic Heart, which took me from the story's opening moments to plenty of the game's earliest bits. The final hour or so was split into two parts, thanks to a lovely dev who time-skipped me forwards and into the game's open world, before warping me through a gate and into an early boss's lair. There was a lot> to take in, from robo-gloves, to sex-dom vending machines, to grannies with bazookas.
I went in with expectations that it might be a little like BioShock, all steely and serious in its delivery of some vaguely philosophical truth. But I emerged with a totally different impression. Far from polished seriousness, Atomic Heart seems a little disjointed in its ambition, with a main character who almost immediately kills any atmosphere when he opens his mouth.
Mum, get the camera! It's finally happened - a 1TB PCIe 4.0 SSD is selling for less than £50. The winner of this impromptu contest is Kingston's NV2, an expectedly budget drive that still manages to deliver some fairly impressive performance according to independent reviews. To squeak in under the £50 mark, you'll need to use code JAN10 at the checkout at Ebay.
OK, this isn't fair. A week ago, I was genuinely excited that the Ryzen 7 5800X3D was down to £348 at Amazon. Now though, thanks to a rogue 10% off deal at Ebay, you can pick up the same processor from Ebuyer's Ebay store for £306.
£306! That's a tiny price for a CPU that launched last year at an official RRP of £429 and a real-life asking price of £530. To get this reduced price, use code JAN10 at the checkout.
At a time when LucasArts was cheerfully mocking rival developer Sierra's fondness for punishing players with game overs you could trigger at the drop of a hat, Sierra themselves seemed intent to double down. In Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers, not only can the titular protagonist suffer a variety of gruesome fates if you so much as put a foot wrong, but there's a point where you can soft-lock the entire game by failing to pick up an easily missable single snake scale> from a busy crime scene — and you won't even know you did anything wrong for several in-game days. I'm not 100% sure this wasn't an oversight on the part of the developers, but at the same time, that's exactly the sort of shit that Sierra liked to pull.
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 a pleasing assortment of zippy and dramatic movements—hoverboards, airdashes, grappling hooks—but also some cute, weird, interesting, and uh I guess hypothetically erotic indies games. Come have a look!